We have our thesis and our antithesis, now for the synthesis: kanji and hanzi are simultaneously more and less similar than you think

15 minutes to Inventor Maestro!

One hour to Inventor Maestro!

Albert Barillé being Eurocentric?! Unbelievable! Never happened before!

7½ hours to Inventor Maestro. Also, if anybody would like to substitute for me on NYE or help me prepare or decide on the stuff I want to show, more information on that is in the announcement post here.

You know, I had me a nice lookin’ job, and it paid pretty good, you know. And I got myself a swimming pool, a Wide-Track Pontiac, even a snowmobile - one of the [Japanese] makes. But the more I spent, the more I’d end up owing, and I had to work overtime at the goddamn job! Well, I’m in the locker room one night, after the shift, and the janitor comes in, and he says: “Fellow worker, you look mighty unhappy.”

And I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Read this,” and he gives me a book.

So I said, “What’s this?”

And he said, “It’s State and Revolution. It’s by Lenin.”

Well, I’m not a man who reads many books, but I read that book, and now I know: That as long as you sell yourself, you cannot be yourself! And you cannot snowmobile your way down the forest trail to inner peace!

Quoting old union songs aside, GOOD suggestion.

I like to shorten it to tovvie

Wiktionary lists two pronunciations (like mix or like mucks) and treats it as potentially short for Mixter.

Much like a non-binary equivalent to mom/dad, there is no singular answer as there just hasn’t yet been enough pressure for people to collectively land on a singular answer. So there are currently innumerable different proposals used by different people and you can find lists online. Esperanto already has this issue solved so I proposed loaning the word from that language (gesinjoro) and contracting it to ges’njor’^[1]. But this was an idea for an honorific that specifically signals non-binarity, rather than one that’s just generally gender-neutral.

For a generally gender-neutral honorific, I think my proposal would be some variant of doctor. Like maybe ductor or another reduced form to follow the pattern of other terms of address and distinguish ductor (generic term of address) from doctor (as in MD/PhD).

♫ WHITE AND BLACK I DRESS SHAHADA ON MY CHEST GOOD TO BE TALIBANIAN ♫

What if instead of Cardcaptor Sakura it was Cardcaptor Sarkua and she became the dame of the last feudal society in Europe

14 minut do starta! (art by Dimfann)

Just under one hour to Ponies!

8 hours until we kick off the last season of Ponies!

@Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net You might get a kick out of this

Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? I’m just talking about some of my favorite movies and shows from my childhood.

COVID-19? Positive

Legs? Asleep

Pants? Pissed

Yup, it’s cinema time

Oh, I remember that original movie by M Night Shyamalan about the boy with the blue arrow on his forehead that could move air with his mind or whatever — cool movie! It’s the highest grossing movie of all time for a reason, certainly, and just as certainly the highlight of Shyamalan’s career, but I somehow never heard there was a sequel… Of course, as you say, M Night Shyamalan’s Avatar is not to be confused with the Nickelodeon children’s animated series Avatar: The Battle for Pandora created by James Cameron, his only ever foray into children’s TV cartoons, and a damn successful one at that.

You put too much faith in me, but looking up “metal gear node nerd” brought me to a Reddit comment quoting from an interview with the translator.

Finally having an inside source on the matter, I ask about the Nerd/Node piece of dialogue in the game. Looking over the original Japanese file shows that ‘nerd’ was written in Romaji (English letters), while above it, in smaller Katakana-based Furigana (which is usually written in Hiragana and placed above difficult to pronounce Kanji), was the phonetic Japanese word for nerd, and then besides this in brackets were the Japanese equivalents, including the word ‘otaku’. Even as a non-native Japanese speaker, the original set-up for this one line seemed awkward. Agness explained, “Regarding node vs. nerd, I do not remember that particularly. However, I do remember a general pattern of attempts to kick it American-style in the original. I felt it was essentially juvenile name-dropping, whether it was ‘hey, I speak English, look!’ puns like this one, or knowing references to mushers and the NSA. The saddest joke is that Japanese nationals who actually know about this stuff - SDF officers, war journalists, sketchy wanderers - would have been amazing sources for an actual writer.”

So it looks like @KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net was right, @doublepepperoni@hexbear.net.

The Japanese Wikipedia article for ナード does not indicate that it is a common word in Japanese contexts, either, basically explaining that nerd is “equivalent to otaku”. So it really does seem like this joke was just an attempt by the game’s writer to flex English skills / Yankee cultural knowledge.