a while back, ghostbong bought a very cheap, very used Roomba from craigslist. "so, you’re going to ‘hack’ this, right?“ said the man at the parking lot rendezvous. but we just wanted a vacuum. since then, the addition of the word “robot” to our casual, every-day lexicon is continually jarring, as if even living in the future will give you future-shock.
doing maintenance on the robot. the robot is stuck on a cord. the robot ate a sock. the robot ran out of power before it got back to its charging station. the robot knocked something over. it doesn’t help that the Roomba programmers saw fit to outfit the little thing with a series of Artoo-like MIDI scales and honks, to convey the mood of its message: docking successfully produces a tiny fanfare, and getting its brushes jammed on a foreign object makes it cry out in sad distress. do i verbally reassure the robot when i pull a wad of cat hair and bread bag tabs out of its works and set it back down on the floor? you bet i do.
but the larger point is that it is now possible for me to say (or type) out loud and without irony, sarcasm, or any kind of fictitiousness: “the robot knocked over the kitten’s water dish >:I ”
the future is here, and it is me on my knees on the floor yanking hairballs out of a domestic droid while it softly boops at me
are.. people aware that you dont have to be straight to reproduce????
Can someone explain this to me? As far as I know, kids come from sperm going into an egg. How do you get a kid with only one of the two? (Honest question I am actually confused)
bisexual woman fucks pansexual man. neither of them is straight but they can have a child.
asexual woman fucks an asexual man just because together they decided that they wanted to have a child. neither of them is straight but they still managed to reproduce.
gay trans man fucks a gay cis man. they have a child that is bilogically their own and they are still gay as fuck.
two pansexual nonbinary people fuck and they have a child. no one in this relationship is straight or cis.
If you reproduce you’re no longer asexual.
hello, you are wrong as fuck.
asexuality means lack of sexual attraction. asexuals have still fully functioning genitals and their usage doesnt magically make asexuals feel sexual attraction.
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
ACTUALLY
This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.
Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:
ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff
Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.
In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style.
Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.
A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin.
Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.
theluminouscosmos 