BillyClark
@BillyClark@piefed.social
- Comment on Is there a culture/country that doesn't have sarcasm in its language? 6 hours ago:
I’ve done a little bit of language studying and one thing I heard about repeatedly is that people tend to mistakenly believe in their own exceptionalism.
Like, their own native language has idioms, and they just assumed that other languages didn’t have idioms.
But we are all humans and languages are all going to exist in support of human communication. Therefore, you should assume that all languages have all major features of expression, including idioms and sarcasm.
Similarly, cultures are made from humans and to facilitate human interaction, so you should expect that things like sarcasm will exist in every culture.
- Comment on No way!.. 2 days ago:
I don’t know about Islamic texts, but the Bible doesn’t really say much about hell. If you want to learn about hell, you have to go to preachers. Fire and brimstone is their bread and butter. The more they talk about hell, the more money they make.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 2 days ago:
maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it.
See? You don’t honestly believe that’s the reason for the previous comment being downvoted. The person I responded to was arguing the other side of that argument. If people were simply tired of the boring discussion, they’d have downvoted the parent, as well. You can use that same service I linked in the previous comment to see exactly how many people voted like that. This is what I’m talking about coming to the discussion in an honest manner.
btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.
I originally came from Reddit and never saw any appeal in Twitter or Twitter clones whenever I tried them out. Regardless, I don’t think the argument makes sense. Either it’s a good idea or it’s not. If it’s a good idea, then there is no reason why it shouldn’t be used on both platforms.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 2 days ago:
I do think downvotes are universally a terrible idea, but for the part about reposting from xitter, which is the only point you made with any small merit, that is only relevant to post downvotes.
If they got rid of comment downvotes and left the post downvotes, you’d still have enough data to sort. People could still vote for comments strategically.
Comment downvotes are a clear case. If you’re making a valid argument, and talking about the topic, then the only people who would downvote you are raging assholes. Here’s the list of people who voted for my previous comment. As you can see, it’s got the full public list of downvoters. Strange. One of those usernames looks familiar. One might look at that and come to the conclusion that certain people here are not coming to this discussion in an honest manner.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 days ago:
The mods were on .world. The accounts were from several different instances.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 days ago:
Do you know what else helps with sorting? Upvotes.
Do you know what else helps with hiding spam? Reports.
If you have upvotes and you have reports, then you already have all of the information you need as a platform. Downvotes are unnecessary.
Plus, speaking of sorting, accounts that use downvotes get double the votes for sorting than accounts do that only use upvotes. Yet, the types of people who downvote a lot are…. well, they’re the assholes. So, you give assholes more control over the platform than good people by having downvotes.
So, downvotes are unnecessary and they give extra power to assholes, making the entire user experience worse.
- Comment on You earned some more dislikes 3 days ago:
I complained about this downvoting behavior in the past (on a different account), pointing out specific accounts, and the admins and mods don’t care. They told me not to complain, instead.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
This is counterintuitive to me, because 303/2800 is .108, which is between 1/9 and 1/10. But 97 out of 400 is less than 1 out of 4, so it shouldn’t be able to interfere more than twice in a 7 year cycle, on average. But your math looks correct. I must be missing something.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
I’m pretty sure I’ve smelled a dead fly before, but not like Lee Mack.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
That can’t be correct, can it?
They would have a rotating 7 year schedule, but it’s messed up by leap years. You have the seven calendars you’re thinking of and 1-2 leap year calendars mixed into those 7 years. It would have to be somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 9, wouldn’t it?
- Comment on Silver linings? 4 days ago:
One of the things that’s generally effective when I feel nausea is to wipe my face with a cool cloth. I imagine that spraying water on your face might do similar.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
I must not be that old because the docs always tell me to alternate heat packs and ice packs.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 5 days ago:
Although I speak some Japanese, I am not an expert in Japanese. I have never heard anybody say nii-kun. It’s a common failing of people in my situation to think that because they personally haven’t heard it, that it doesn’t exist, so I’m not going to say that, but even if it does exist, I don’t think -kun would be used.
“-kun” like you said indicates closeness and familiarity, but it also is commonly used for a business subordinate. Like, if you were at work, your boss might refer to you as “pivot-kun”, even if you weren’t that close. I don’t think Big Brother could ever be seen as a subordinate.
With my limited knowledge, if they wanted to use a Japanese word and not an English loanword, I think they’d use aniki or maybe ani-ue (although I’ve only heard these words in anime, I think people might actually still use aniki? It sounds like a Yakuza sort of word to me). These convey a respect that I think would be necessary for the mental image of Big Brother.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 5 days ago:
The primary reason that I’d put forward is that Japanese people place a lot of importance on social hierarchy, to the point that even between twins, it’s important to know which is the older sibling. Because it’s used in everyday conversation and in referring to one another (although not quite as much with twins, I just brought that up for emphasis).
The point is that the Japanese version of these words are used a lot more and have a lot of extra meaning compared to the English phrase “Big Brother”. So, it’s actually a worse fit. Japanese people use enough English loanwords that they probably understand the English phrase, anyways. So, the meaning gets through without the extra unintended baggage from the translation.
It’s one of the many pitfalls of translation. Often, there are words that mean “the same thing”, but they still aren’t the right words because either the extra connotations in the original language or the extra connotations in the target language can throw off the translation.
I think the Japanese translation is fortunate that, in this case, the Japanese language already has so many English loanwords… although I’m not sure whether that was exactly the same case when the book was first translated. It was published in 1948, I think. My recollection is that the English loanword boom started after WW2, so that would be somewhat contemporary.
- Comment on Taste the flavor 5 days ago:
On second thought, maybe I don’t want tastebuds just inside my asshole.
- Comment on Onii-Chan is watching you 😩 5 days ago:
“-chan” is a diminutive suffix that indicates affection when used. These two factors mean it would never be used in the context of Big Brother.
Even with little knowledge, you should at least come up with alternatives like nii-san, onii-san, onii, nii-sama, etc. Those still wouldn’t work well. I’d think that a lot of people would also think of aniki, which is getting closer. But it’s definitely the best option to just to what they actually did and just use the English “big brother” like a loan word.
- Comment on Top of the world, ma 5 days ago:
There are a lot of vegans and vegetarians who don’t make it their raison d’etre, so I’m sure there have been some who climbed Everest in the past, even if we don’t know about it.
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 5 days ago:
Japan is a shoes-off country, but they often have slippers that they wear indoors. They just change their shoes like Mr. Rogers, but with less singing.
- Comment on 50ohm goes brrrrrr 6 days ago:
They can’t wait anyways because they do not experience the passage of time.
- Comment on Nope, not visiting that 1 week ago:
lame-ass party
Since the time traveler would be from the future, he’d have already known that nobody went to the party.
- Comment on Do it for your country's debt! 1 week ago:
If the government has more income, that just means they have more money to give to corporations and wealthy people.
- Comment on What kind of stupid rule is that? 1 week ago:
“After seeing you enjoy good food as it was intended, I don’t think I want to continue this. Everyone knows food must only be eaten after you upload pictures of it to Instagram and get a certain number of interactions.”
- Comment on Please stop 1 week ago:
I have heard that beached marine mammals are often too sick to swim properly and that rather than pushing them back in, it’s better to call wildlife rescue for advice.
- Comment on Draw! 1 week ago:
It was part of the paperwork requested by the person who arranged my loan and there were no follow up questions.
- Comment on Draw! 1 week ago:
I once had to “explain the gap in my CV” when applying for a loan. And apparently, “I didn’t feel like working for those 6 months,” wasn’t a good enough explanation. Even though I think literally everybody personally understands the concept.
I ended up saying that I spent the time taking care of my parents, since I did spend some of that time taking care of them.
- Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident? 1 week ago:
I’m still surprised that all of the January 6 insurrectionists could just storm the capitol building without being shot. They were breaking into the main building that had all of our lawmakers in it at the time, and only one of those morons was shot. Only the stupidest one. The queen of morons.
And did you notice what happened after that idiot was shot and killed? Nobody else tried to go through that window.
- Comment on They'll tell you 1 week ago:
Exactly. It’s sad, but in America, if you say something to a cop, and the cop, for example, “misremembers” and says that you confessed to a crime, you can be in hot water. If you simply don’t speak to a cop, then it’s more difficult for the cop to “misremember”.
That’s an extreme example, and it’s getting less likely with cops wearing more bodycams, but there’s simply no reason to take the risk of talking to a cop.
- Comment on Victorian Baby Yeet Machine 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t go for this. Even in Victorian times, the catapult was outdated technology.
Now, then, if it were a trebuchet, then you’d really see how far that baby could go.
- Comment on Wrong number... hopefully 1 week ago:
Oh my, I hope he didn’t get rid of my private collection.
- Comment on Wrong number... hopefully 1 week ago:
You can tell from the background that this isn’t my attic.