When I saw that this was a school district in upstate New York with a significant Native population and a name that starts with the consonants S-L-M-N, I had to double check that it wasn’t the same school district that was putting disabled Akwesasne Mohawk kids in wooden boxes until as recently as last year.

As it turns out, no, these are two different school districts: Salamanca City Central School District (the one with the sex bot) is in Cattaraugus County; Salmon River Central School District (the one with the wooden boxes) is in Franklin and St. Lawrence Counties. Which is to say the sex bot incident took place on the Allegany Reservation of the Seneca Nation of Indians, and the wooden box incident took place on (or rather just outside of) the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation. These two locations are about 450 km (280 mi) apart.

Both the Seneca and the Mohawk are part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, AKA the Iroquois Confederacy.^[1]

COUSIN, I AM NO LONGER *ASKING* YOU TO GO BOWLING!

What’s wrong with the Masons?! I’m a Mason! Hey, that fella’s talkin’ about me!

And that makes a difference, doesn’t it?

TY MNE ZVONILA, [!!!]

MENYA ISKALA (HELLO~?)

NO YA BYL ZANYAT

KONETS KVARTALA [SYNTH NOISES]

(See it’s funny because I’m quoting Bioconstructor - “Bureaucrat”)

First translation decision: leave 道dào untranslated as Dao, instead of going for a more literal meaning like “way” or “path” or “road” or whatever.

Second translation decision: how to handle 可道kě dào? Literally “can way”, but the meaning is “[that] can [serve as a] way”. A more natural way of phrasing that idea is “that can be followed.”

Third translation decision: how to handle 常cháng? The character doesn’t neatly map onto the word “invariable” or “eternal”, it’s also glossed as (among other things) “normal, general, common, often, frequent, long-lasting, enduring, constant, continuous, unchanging, always” — but the idea is in any case that the way/dao won’t stay the same forever, right? A translation like “invariable” focuses more on the change, while “eternal” focuses more on the time.

Fourth translation decision: inflect for tense and add articles, and that’s how you get “is not” from “not-be” plus the extra the’s.

“The Dao that can be followed is not the eternal Dao” from that rap is the first line of the Dao De Jing, the foundational text written by Laozi (who probably didn’t exist). In modern Standard Chinese, the line is 道dào可kě道dào，非fēi常cháng道dào。

Glossed character by character, the line means something like “way道can可way道, not-be非invariable常way道”. This line, being the very first line of the work and already an example of several poetic devices crunched into just six characters and six syllables, gets cited as an example of why the Dao De Jing is so darn hard to translate.

The aforementioned Dao De Jing (AKA the Laozi) as well as the Zhuangzi. These are the two most central texts of Daoism. I actually have a physical copy of the former — specifically the 1993 translation by Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer, and Jay Ramsay — on my nightstand, but any of these old works you’ll be able to find a bajillion public domain translations of online, and probably some copyrighted translations of on Anna’s Archive (and it is very much the sort of work where you might want to compare different translations). I also think it’s worth mentioning that Mao quoted Laozi a number of times in his own works, like in “Methods of Work of Party Committees” and On The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among The People, so I’ve heard it said that Mao’s interpretation of Marx was informed by the preexisting dialectical tradition in China represented by Daoism, and that you’ll get a better understanding of Mao in turn by better understanding his cultural background.

I would also like to read the Huainanzi at some point — I currently only know the parable of the old man who lost his horse from that book because it’s the basis of a four-character idiom shared across the Sinosphere, 塞翁失马sài wēng shī mǎ / 새옹실마 / 塞翁さいおうが馬うま (“silver lining, blessing in disguise”). Apparently CCTV made a 52 episode children’s cartoon based on the Huainanzi in 2012. Neat!

キンタマ潰つぶし、深月みつきさん。キンタマ潰つぶしとは、なんらかの手段しゅだんを用もちいて日常にちじょうでは起おこりえない強つよい圧力あつりょくを男性だんせいの睾丸こうがんに加くわえることで、男性だんせいに苦痛くつうを与あたえる性行為せいこういをいう。

Alexa play Thugnificent - “Stomp Em In The Nuts”

This is a certified orchiectomy moment

Obligatory link to “A Sámi State of Our Own”

There are a number of places in Orkney and Shetland with “Papa” in the name. I hadn’t heard of Papa Stronsay before, but I had heard of nearby-ish Papa Westray from an old Tom Scott video: that’s where the shortest scheduled passenger flight in the world is, the two-minute flight from Papa Westray to Westray and vice versa, operated by Loganair.

Anyways, the reason why there’s so many places called “Papa” in the Northern Islands of Scotland is because of the monks. More specifically, the hermit monks in the Early Middle Ages known as the Papar. So it literally is called Papa Stronsay because it is (or more importantly was) the place with all the Fathers.

I was recently typing up a write-up that I’m yet to post — assuming I ever do post it — and I found myself falling into this exact trap while writing it. I don’t even follow any “cool kid podcasters” so I must’ve just learned the “be normal” rhetoric through osmosis, maybe a site tagline here? In any case, immediately after I’d typed the words, I thought, “Where did I even learn this line from?! I’M not normal, for chrissake! I’m autistic and go by neopronouns, and somehow I have the audacity to call other people weird?! Guess I’ve got some more internalized prejudice to unlearn…”

…I mean, my write-up’s point about being in touch and loving your fellow human being and all is still valid, but the way I was framing that argument with these loaded terms definitely came from a place of internalized ableism. But hey, at least there’s a lesson about the importance of self-crit to be learned here, right?

she’s ebbin’ on my neezer till i scrooge

For ages I’ve been meaning to watch Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), in which Johnny Depp plays the main character. It’s pretty… interesting…? how Dead Man is considered to be very good in its representation of Indigenous people, especially for a film not directed by an Indigenous person^[1]; and then not even twenty years later, Johnny Depp went on to don redface as Tonto in Disney’s The Lone Ranger (2013), which was, uhh, not as good representation?

I am not Sámi, no. I’m from South Norway, so I learned a fair bit about Sámi people in school, and also in my free time and through activism later in life. The specific inspiration I took from Sámi culture for my cartoon is Narazen’s multitool, and how xe drums on Shield with it:^[1] the resemblance isn’t super strong, but this was inspired by a Sámi drum hammer^[2] and divination drum^[3].

I did a watch party for the premiere, Wednesday before last, but I do worry if many people missed the announcement.

Yup, since the cartoon takes place in my conworld. I was originally going to do the whole script in my conlang, but that ended up being very tedious and time-consuming, so I ended up only doing the intro.

I made a 12½ minute cartoon.

Found the original version of the photo through reverse image search. OP is evidently a much more “cinematic” edited version, probably made using GenAI. I also found a video providing other angles of the event on Reddit, but I’m not sure how to reupload it and it doesn’t seem to work on alternate frontends.

Edit: The woman’s name is Rhiya Ahir. Here’s an interview with her with the video footage.

hell yeah comrade

a guy that is shown as a respecible [sic]

I read this as “a guy that is shown as a receptacle” at first and thought, “Did you have to phrase it like that?”