Valentines Day is weird. It’s colloquially known as the day of love, but your parents give you valentines, we make kids at school give each other valentines, sometimes work gives you valentines.
And then you feel like an ass if you didn’t have one for them. Plus the added thing that you feel like you’re missing out if you’re single.
Language is fun if you let it be. I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that rhetoric is not much of a useful tool for anything other than being understood. When trying to understand someone, it’s more important to be able to communicate to them what you think they’re trying to say and have them confirm it. The English language has so many subtleties in order to keep people engaged and save time through precision. Ironically, right now I’m waxing poetic.
The point is I learned a new word this morning and it’s the title of this post.
Dysphemism is the opposite of euphemism and even after hearing a linguist on YouTube pronounce it a billion times, I still struggle to say it. Basically, where a euphemism is a softening of a concept through creative language, a dysphemism is a harshening of a concept. I arrived at looking at this by questioning why “shit” was a swear word. It didn’t seem sacrilegious, so it must of been somewhere else.
Shit is a swear word because the polite, clinical term is “defecate.” The euphemism, or softening would be stool (ha ha, stool softening). Another example could be “passed away,” “died,” and “kicked the bucket.”
Soft – Neutral – Harsh
It’s all about tone, in both speaking and writing. Tone is an undervalued concept and a difficult one. This is mostly because people feel tone differently. When talking to an audience, you’re mostly going for what the majority will understand. When talking to an individual you’re trying to tailor it to them. Regardless, when using dysphemism people will make conclusions about you, either as author or speaker.
I’ve been watching The Pitt with my parents. Excellent show and fully deserving of the Best Drama Emmy it received.
Oh my god is it exhausting. That’s the point of the show. It is trying to convey the absolute hell ER doctors go through day-to-day. However, I’m someone who basks in watching sad things on television all the time. Frankly, as someone with aging parents and mental/physical health issues of my own who is constantly navigating the insurance landscape . . . it just hits so close to home.
I get it. That’s why it’s compelling television and that’s what’s special about the show. It’s the point. It’s just not a show I get a plus out of watching with other people. I need to explore it alone, digest it by myself, and then look up things I didn’t understand in solitude.
It’s not a show that benefits from sharing thoughts on in the moment (also people get pissed when you talk during it because it goes a million miles a minute and everyone will inevitably miss something).
I have similar thoughts about Shrinking, a show that covers so many mental health issues it’s inevitably going to hit on yours. That one does benefit from watching it with others because people laugh easier around each other than by themselves.
Who was actually the closest to graduation in Danganronpa?
Spoilers ahead. This is not the post for you if you’re not familiar with Danganronpa.
It’s functionally the most difficult to graduate in THH because Makoto, Byakuya, and Kyoko are all there to sus you out. Hajime and Chiaki are less effective in GD. Nagito could find you but he’s less likely to actually be helpful in exposing you during the trial.
Both Kokichi and Shuichi will work against you in KH. I still think that’s less intimidating than the THH trio.
So who was closest to graduation? I have a hard time believing Sayaka would have gotten away with her frame job on Makoto had she lived through her attack on Leon. Seems like Kyoko would have sussed that one out.
Leon didn’t actually intend to kill Sayaka, so his attempt was mostly just covering up the evidence of his own self defense. Seeing as Sayaka literally wrote his name on the wall, he wasn’t particularly close.
Mondo just squeaks by Leon as a slightly better murderer. Like Leon, he didn’t actually plan on murdering anyone. He did a base level cover up after he kills Chihiro, but he really only gets close because Byakuya decided to be confusing.
It may just be because Kyoko wasn’t involved, but Celeste was pretty damn close. She only made one big mistake by putting her faith in Hifumi.
Teruteru came closer to graduating than you’d think he would. He saw what Nagito was doing and took advantage of it. He really only got done in by Mikan’s unfortunate fall in the dining room.
Peko was trying to get Fuyuhiko graduated, not herself. Seems safe to say that had he gone along with the plan, it would’ve worked (dependent on a ruling from Monokuma). However, based what we know about Fuyuhiko, he was never going to go through with that plan.
I still don’t really understand why Mikan asking about the camera angle of the video gives her away. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask Hajime, the only person who purportedly saw the video. She also had bad luck when Hiyoko interrupted Ibuki’s murder. She was decently close to getting away with it, but no other suspects really ever materialized.
I don’t know why, but I never really entertained the idea that Gundham would ever get away with murdering Nekomaru. Nagito is onto him almost immediately and the plan was just too convoluted to have a serious chance at working.
Nagito’s plan to get Chiaki to graduate was pretty flawless and it’s heavily implied that the only reason she didn’t was because she went against her programming to reveal herself. Hajime does find her notebook and basically says he would have realized that Chiaki was the traitor if he hadn’t been lying to himself, so who knows.
I think Kaede might have to be excluded for being framed. Kirumi would have gotten away with it if Shuichi wasn’t there, but it wasn’t all that clever a plan. I think, if she really reflected on it, she could have done a better murder. Korekiyo wasn’t close. You’re not close if you interrupt your original murder with another unnecessary murder, then go do the original murder anyway.
Gonta would have been close if Kokichi didn’t know everything. Because he did know everything, Gonta was the least close. I don’t even know how to evaluate Kaito because he wasn’t trying to graduate. Top marks? I guess?
This is just me waxing poetic about missing light gun arcade games. Just some of the best fun I’ve had. My family went on a cruise once, but they had Time Crisis in the lobby, so I just spent the entire time playing that.
Anyway, here’s a list of a bunch of old light gun games in case you wanna look into them. It might be tough to find them to play unless you check some local arcades or something like that. It would be sad to lose some of these to obsolescence
It’s a fun little word coined by Tolkien that basically means “I know we all assume the worst possible thing can happen, except every now and then, the best possible thing can happen.” A good example would be from a Tolkien-work itself which is the eagles showing up to save Frodo at the end. Damn, that was lucky.
It’s also interesting to contrast the concept of eucatastrophe with the concept of serendipity. They both sort of mean “good luck.” So is there a difference?
Actually, yes.
The difference is in levels of magnitude. Serendipity is just a moment of good luck. “Found five bucks on the street, that was serendipitous.” You’d never call it eucatastrofus (but let’s be honest, no one has called anything “eucatastrofus”). The difference lies in the insane level of luck required to qualify as eucatastrophe. Finding five bucks on the street doesn’t count. The eagles showing up at the end to save your life does.
It can be bad being so on the same page with someone. If you can predict everything they’re about to say, it gets abrasive. The romance is gone. The mystery is gone. The relationship is boring.
But the problem is it’s not their fault. Bummer . . . you two have run your course. People can’t spend infinity together so they kind of hope they die in their relationships.
Again, bummer.
So how do you get out? What’s the solution?
The unfortunate solution is you get okay with what reality is. Relationships end. Things end. Enjoy the romance while it lasts — and I mean that. Really do.
It’s annoying that the world is a sort of result of echoancholy. Inherent sadness that everything has basically already been discovered that would’ve been reasonable for you to discover. The thought experiments from Rawls for veil of ignorance and original position sort of legitimize it. Still, the idea of novelty is important in things like copyright law. The world needs people producing new stuff.
So how do you square AI being an amazing creative tool with the need for humans to produce analog works to create a better base of resources for generative AI to pull from? I don’t think there’s a good answer.
The original idea of copyright law was to incentivize people to produce new things for the benefit of everyone. The issue you run into is most people, at best, have one good novel in them so you can’t pay them to be career writers . . . except you get the occasional person like Stephen King who has like 50 good novels in him and, well, the world is better off if that guy just keeps nonstop writing.
But the point of this post was novelty. You, as a human creative, will probably never come up with a thought that hasn’t been had by someone before. That’s okay. We put the work in to refine thoughts, communicate them better, and just improve society. It’s a lunch-pail job, but the value of lunch-pail jobs has been too far minimized.
Hey look, the site has a new name that I’m not going to explain. Hey look again, the “about” section has been filled in. Hey look for a final time, the film rankings have expanded to 25 films.
I just finished a rewatch of New Girl for the first time since it ended and it remains a very solid sitcom. Legitimately, some of the one liners in it are the best I’ve seen. That said, it has several bizarre eccentricities worth mentioning.
Let’s begin with the title. The show is so named because Jess is the new roommate in an apartment with three guys. The aptness of this title, by design, dwindles with each subsequent episode and there’s an argument to be made that it doesn’t even apply by episode two because Winston moves in after her.
We should actually talk about Winston, a character that only enters the show because the actor that played Coach, Damon Waynes Jr., had to drop out after the pilot. This is made weirder by the fact that Waynes returns for a season long stint as a cast regular later in the series.
Now we can mention the craziness of the cameos this show was able to pull. Taylor Swift was one thing (her cameo is made funnier by a throw away line later in the series about Jess being afraid for her safety when she is living alone in New York), but somehow Prince liked it so much that he came on and let the writers just make an entire episode about him. For those not in the know, Prince doesn’t act.
It’s interesting seeing how many noteworthy quirks there were in a sitcom that seems to be mostly forgotten by the oeuvre at his point in time. Max Greenfield was the breakout star of the show and he’s been stuck in sitcom purgatory since then (no apologies to fans of The Neighborhood, find yourself some better taste).
