On Peertube, yes! I’ll post at least three versions of the cartoon, in fact:

• A regular version with closed captions;
• A version with audio description for the blind and visually impaired; and
• A version where the voice tracks are disabled and most of the on-screen text is removed, so that anybody who so desires can dub the cartoon into their own language.

I have done exactly 3½ minutes of animation over the course of the past 24 days. It’s probably the most I’ve drawn since I was a little kid, and I’ve been having a blast with it. I don’t want to oversell the quality of the animation — it is very amateurish, there’s a lot of limited and reused animation, that’s part of the point — but the animation I’ve done still represents maybe on average 2 or 3 hours of work each night, so about 60 hours of work in total (probably well over 100 hours of work when counting the work that went into the prescoring, opening and end credits, and storyboarding).

I’m hoping to have about 9 minutes of animation done by July 15, but at this rate it’s looking more likely that I’ll only get about 5 or 6 minutes done, and I’ll leave the rest as storyboards. But we’ll see.

A lot of it has to do with equality and countering bias. If you’re writing alt text for a photo or doing audio description for a video, then the recommended policy is that you either describe everybody’s race or nobody’s: if you only describe the races of minorities, and leave people to assume white when you don’t describe people’s races, then this plays into the idea that being white is the default and anything else is somehow “exotic” or “other” or whatever. By not describing people’s races you also make it harder for whoever you’re talking to to apply their own biases/prejudices towards the person you’re talking about. Describing people’s races excessively can also make it seem like you’re yourself weirdly fixated on that one aspect of their being, which would be reductive.

This being said, I can only assume that your manager isn’t some great anti-racist activist. They’re really just trying to cover their (company’s) ass, which is why they didn’t explain the rationale very well (they don’t actually understand it) and their behavior isn’t consistent (they don’t actually care). There is also nuance to all of this, too, naturally, since “colorblindness” is not true anti-racism, so there are cases where it’s actually better to mention people’s races/ethnicities than not mention it; and if certain features of appearance weren’t stigmatized/racialized, they’d be just as suitable for a short description as any other feature. The problem is that you cannot easily teach these sorts of nuances to people who haven’t actually experienced racial prejudice: white people will (deliberately) misunderstand the nuances or try to do borderline things. So you end up just getting these blanket bans and taboos on mentioning race that make the frank and actually important discussions about racism difficult.

This is how I understand it, at least. Bear in mind that I’m not racialized myself, but the other commenter — infuziSporg — is.

Edit: Turns out I misunderstood, infuziSporg is white.

Back when I was still an anarchist I had a dream about commandeering a tank and using it to dispel a group of neo-Nazis. I relayed this dream to a liberal^[1] I knew, who called my behavior in the dream “tankie”. I thought but didn’t say, “What, so would you have preferred me to just do nothing and let those neo-Nazis go around chanting hate slogans and intimidating immigrants?”

That interaction was pretty formative for me, I think, because after that I pretty much stopped taking the word “tankie” seriously whenever I heard it; because if an anarchist in a dream, breaking the law and acting in an individual capacity to dispel full-on “blood and soil” neo-Nazis, could be called a “tankie” by someone who isn’t even a revolutionary leftist; then surely anyone can be called a tankie by anyone else for any reason. All that “tankie” really seems to mean is “leftist who Does Stuff” — because leaving a mark on the world means pushing your hand into the clay, applying force, one might even say — gasp! — imposing authority. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a” yadda yadda yadda. I also once heard someone else say “better to do no wrong than do something right” to describe the sort of thinking that leads people to call other people “tankies”: it’s a very Christian sort of mindset, you know, just one of a series of words for “leftist I don’t like”.

Now personally, I call leftists I don’t like “yahoos”, and the truth is that every single leftist on the planet is at least a little yahooish: you’re a yahoo if you support China too much; you’re also a yahoo if you support China too little; and I’m a yahoo for not knowing what the right amount of support for China is, even though I am not and will never be in any sort of position where my opinion on China will even remotely matter to the historical development of our planet; and my actual contribution to The Revolution™ will only ever be a very China-unrelated microscopic drop in the bucket.

As for how I abandoned anarchism, which some might say is when I “truly became a tankie”: it just made an intuitive sort of sense to me that history is a series of forces being metaphorically “persistence-hunted” by other forces. So learning about dialectics and historical materialism and whatnot didn’t really feel like abandoning anarchism so much as it felt like a new understanding of strategy, that anarchism / abolition of the state / communism as a historical force is not yet strong enough to win, but it can become strong enough if the currently stronger forces get to duke it out first and become tired enough for abolition of the state to persistence-hunt. Which means that my goal as an actor however small in the historical process should be to hasten that battle.

I see. As for your goals? Who speaks this language?

Things that stand out:

1. ⟨gn⟩ for /ŋ/ (velar nasal, “eng” sound) — did you mean /ɲ/ (palatal nasal, “nya” sound)? If you did mean /ŋ/ then that’s a creative decision, I think: not a bad decision, just different from the norm.
2. ©cv© would be the syllable structure, not the word order, right?
3. “Jœ Sœy” rather than “J’Sœy” — does this mean that Sœy is an irregular verb? Also, is the capitalization deliberate? Also, how do you pronounce j’- if it’s an awkward consonant cluster? With an epenthetic vowel like /ə/?

Otherwise I don’t think I can comment much without knowing what this project is supposed to be and what your goals are. This lang is very clearly French inspired, “jœ sœy” is supposed to be “je suis”, but the other words are apparently unrelated to their French equivalents.

I think I’d already written a few texts in my conlang when I started compiling the dictionary, so that’s where I started, by collecting the words from all the extant texts. I also turned to older conlangs I’d made and nabbed any words from them that I thought looked good. After that, I wanted the first order of business to be translating the Swadesh 207, translating important specialized terms from my conworld, and developing numerals and kinship terms, and creating some more grammatical particles and affixes.

My plan has been to translate Wikipedia’s Basic English Combined Wordlist, but I’ve found that just going through a list of words and coining translations for them one by one is a bit tedious, so what I’ve ended up doing instead has mostly been to translate texts (song lyrics, PSAs, Wikipedia articles, titles and plot descriptions for movies and TV shows, memes/copypastas, etc) and use this as a more engaging source of inspiration for new words. I do however still plan on eventually translating the entire Basic English Combined Wordlist, and after that the nimi pu/ku of Toki Pona, and then I can say that the first draft of my dictionary is done. After that I plan on writing a second draft that cleans things up and prunes a few words.

Also worth noting that I have an appendix section in my dictionary, which I mainly use for terms that don’t make sense in the conworld but are necessary for translating “real-world” texts, e.g. country names, names of holidays, specialized terms from other fictional works, the likes. Sometimes I don’t add words to my dictionary until I’ve experimented with using them a bit and decide to keep them.

My dictionary is written in LibreOffice Writer. The dictionary’s headwords are in the conlang, written in an ASCII-friendly romanization system. Words starting with A~M are fully alphabetized, and words starting with N~Z are only alphabetized by the first two or three letters, and are otherwise in random order. Each headword is followed by a spaced em dash, and then an abbreviation of the word type in parentheses, sometimes with other information like “vulgar” or “colloquial” or “poetic” or “transitive” or “passive” or “reflexive” etc. After that is basically a list of translations into English, or a full definition in English. For instance:

kopp — (f) medium-to-dark blue; (adj) of such a shade of blue; (m) a bruise; (figurative) a romantic or platonic crush or squish.

koppatt — (v, trans. or intrans.) to bruise; (transitive) to cause [d.obj.] to develop a crush on [subj]; (intransitive) to develop a crush.

Usage notes or other notes such as irregular inflections are preceded by a ※ and placed at the end of a definition. For instance:

eyn — (b) a person, a human, an individual. ※ IRREGULAR: definite follows the long plain pattern rather than short iotating pattern.

I’m also slowly but surely working on a signed conlang, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t really done much lexicography with that lang because it’s very tedious. My best idea thus far has been to import videos of myself signing into a program called Hydrus Client and then tagging the videos with the parameters and glosses, but this ends up being a very time consuming process.

The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they’re even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia’s most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There’s also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site’s founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

Good on Diesen for getting on CGTN! Always neat to see a familiar name.

“French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s” is referring to chapter 9 of A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros, Volume One (text version, audio version). I’m pretty sure that zine was the first work of theory I ever read, and although I don’t see myself as an anarchist anymore, it was still formative for me and I still recommend checking it out.

Apparently I’ve somehow picked up on how to read the phrase “alhamdulillah” in Arabic despite never studying the language. Neat!

I basically recognize “Allah” ﷲ based on the shape of the whole word rather than the individual letters, and I learned to read that word through exposure. In the phrase الْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ alhamdulillah I see there’s no alif at the start of Allah, though.

I think I learned to read ال al- just through repeat exposure since al- is literally the most common prefix in Arabic — it’s even at the start of Allah! — but I also know the letters alif and lam on their own because ا alif is memorable to me as the “simplest letter for the simplest sound”, and ل lam is memorable to me because it looks like (and literally is, in a sense) a backwards L.

After recognizing “al-??? lillah” I was already figuring from context that the text probably said “alhamdulillah”, but I still tried to confirm this by looking at the remaining letters:

• Medial ha ح‍ looked a lot like the initial kha خ‍ in the word khatam (as in خاتم النبيين khatam an-nabiyin, “Seal of the Prophets”), so I figured that the two letters ha/kha had to be variants of each other with similar h-like sounds. Previously, I’d known the letter ha really just from its isolated/final forms ح, just from going down an Arabizi rabbit hole once: ح ha is often written as 7 in Arabizi due to the similarity of the numeral 7 to the isolated shape of the letter ha.
• Medial meem ﻤ looked a lot like the final form of the related Hebrew letter mem ם, which also, very coincidentally, looks like the Korean letter ㅁ mieum, which was derived from the shape of the mouth to represent the fact that you say M with your lips. The origin of the Korean letter is completely unrelated to the Arabic and Hebrew letters but still makes them more memorable to me.
• Dal د is not a letter I had any real chance of recognizing. It’s related to its Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents but is not particularly similar to any of them. But if I got to the point where I could tell that the text said “al-ham?? lillah” then there was really zero chance the unrecognizable last letter could be anything other than dal.

Learning new writing systems is really fun because you get to return to the joy of first learning to read your native language as a little kid. I wonder if I’ll manage to learn the entire Arabic script through passive exposure!

Suicide (fuck algospeak) is unlikely, nor do I think his heart will explode due to rage, nor do I think he’s likely to die in a natural disaster. Trump could “die of old age” (whatever that means in practice), he could die of COVID, or he could slip and fall, or he could be assassinated by any number of people who may want his head whether they say it or not.

I think it is pretty likely Trump will die during this term, if for no other reason than that fascism is one side of the same coin as liberal democracy, and by having a fascist leader who has always been in such remarkably poor health from the moment he took power, at that such a fascist leader who gives people both guns and reasons to shoot him… Well, it basically ensures that fascism will not last very long and liberal democracy will be restored “in due time” once Trump and Trumpism has “expended its purpose”.

If that’s how you want to describe your past self then you have every right to.

Sort of, «мат» is profanity and «мать» is mother, though the former is indeed derived from the latter.

I think I’ll mention “★☆SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl☆★ Ep 1: The Perfect Perfect School Year”. It’s from a few years ago, but I first saw it this year, and that’s all that matters for the purposes of this question, right? I could certainly mention a number of other YT videos I saw this year, that were made this year; but for the most part YouTube just feels like overly short or overly long disposable one-time slop, right? By contrast, Sparkle on Raven and other “fanime” I saw this year are things I’ve actively returned to, shown others, referenced, and reflected on, so their impact on me has lasted for more than just one week.

Some instances are more particular about copyright than others, but there’s no machine scanning your videos for copyrighted material, and it’s fully possible to leave the license section blank when you upload a video.

(Note: this didn’t actually happen)

Try searching the name of that lemmy.world post on lemmy.ml and see if you can find it on lemmy.ml.

There once was a father who told his son, “All swans are white.” One day, he and his son went to Australia on vacation. While there, at a park with a large pond, his son pointed out, “Look, Dad, black swans!”

“No, Son,” the father laughed, “all swans are white!”