doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc

okay i just wanna share a couple bits... like this bit on how the author was struggling to learn her people's language and her frustrations with it and how it helped her see the world differently

"Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.” Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch ofbeach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.”

“Ridiculous!” I ranted in my head. “There is no reason to make it so complicated. No wonder no one speaks it. A cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that, it’s all wrong. A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.” I was ready to give up. I’d learned a few words, done my duty to the language that was taken from my grandfather. Oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration. “She’s going to surrender,” they said.

And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay —releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us. And the vestiges of boarding schools, the soap-wielding missionary wraiths, hang their heads in defeat."

i didn't even know it was spoken so highly about when i bought it. but right after i bought it i happened across so many different people, both in my day to day life and online who were praising it

i've started the book Braiding Sweetgrass and i totally get why everyone speaks so highly of it

today, on my way to the grocery store, i watched a crow i wasn't familiar with taking mcdonalds french fries and stuffing them in the hole of some construction machinery

i neeeeeeeeeeed my phone to be fixed because i NEED y'all to see my relationship with these crows they are SO beautiful

the game is set up so that star systems are home to a set number of factions and the space stations and planetary settlements in that system can be controlled by any of those factions and the factions can spread to other systems for interstellar faction control.

the devs have also set it up so that you can contact them and they will add a faction that you can name and you get to pick the home-star-system for. mine is named "Prisma Collective" and is of the "Anarchy" government type.

i've been away for so long though that the system we previously had the most influence in has been taken over by a series of Imperial factions. my faction had been pushed to 1% influence.

after a couple of days of work i started a civil war with one of the other, smaller empire-associated factions. they'll be overthrown within the week. and then we're on to the big-game.

okay so i started playing elite dangerous again

because you all convinced yourself you were building The Social Media Of The Future you all pretend to act "principled" while in reality just playing out petty grievances

the best way to use mastodon is to block like 90% of mastodon admins

shout out to M. Gouldhawke for this meme

i started LTV discourse over on twitter lol

also a real quote from the same book

a thousand plateaus is a good book

this video is so bad and i'm heated about it

oh god i've been subjecting myself to a callard lecture and it is PAINFUL

my pack's dog has started panicking at night for the past week or so. she starts a couple hours after the sun goes down and doesn't stop til the sun is back up. we've all been taking turns sleeping so someone can stay up with her.

last night she wouldn't stop panting and drooling from the panic but just going outside with her and letting her be out there seemed to ground her. gonna try that again tonight.

it's actually so revealing about the nature of the discourse on humanity that when people, even children, engage with aspects of the non-human others will turn against them saying "we'll subject you to the conditions we subject non-humans to just so that you clamor for humanity"

hey whoever invented the steamworks in monster hunter can you reveal yourself i just wanna talk