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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • “designed to be sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range.’”
    (1) Oh, give me a clone
    Of my own flesh and bone
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And after it’s grown
    Then my own little clone
    Will be of the opposite sex.
    (Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
    With its Y chromosome changed to X
    And when I’m alone
    With my own little clone
    We will both think of nothing but sex.
    (2) Oh, give me a clone
    Is my sorrowful moan,
    A clone that is wholly my own.
    And if she’s X-X
    And the feminine sex
    Oh, what fun we will have when we’re prone.
    (3) My heart’s not of stone,
    As I’ve frequently shown
    When alone with my own little X
    And after we’ve dined,
    I am sure we will find
    Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
    (4) Why should such sex vex
    Or disturb or perplex
    Or induce a disparaging tone?
    After all, don’t you see
    Since we’re both of us me
    When we’re having sex, I’m alone.
    (5) And after I’m done
    She will still have her fun
    For I’ll clone myself twice ere I die.
    And this time without fail
    They’ll be both of them male
    And they’ll each ravage her by and by.

    Source: autobiography of Isaac Asimov









  • A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
    It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
    Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.



  • I’m surprised only a handful of people have mentioned Ghibli movies. For me it was Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it’s probably one of the first movies I remember watching in general. Still my favorite Ghibli movie and I must have watched it dozens of times as a kid.
    The source material for it is a manga by Miyazaki himself and it’s much longer and deeper (the movie only covers about 1.5 out of 7 volumes, and changes a lot of details). Highly recommended.



  • I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
    Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.





  • People are such perfectionists when it comes to buildings. I love this image; the patchwork aesthetic needs less hate. Yeah it looks silly, but why should it look serious? I wouldn’t be upset if a building built today were to have an awkward attachment added in 500 years that was built to the design standards of that time period.
    Somebody showed me recently the rebuild of the Augusteum building of the University of Leipzig which had a hyper-modern redesign like 180 years after it was first built (look it up, it’s pretty cool). And the building in this post is like a lower-effort, more earnest version of that idea. Is it bad real estate? Sure. But it’s good architecture. “Authenticity” be damned.