Best posts made by tonyshowoff

@StrongBad said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

Chinese?

No, hillbilly.

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Drinking:

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Drinking:

@travisdh1 My daughter has the same Mario question box as well as the red and green mushrooms. They were full of disgusting candy.

Yep, same sort of thing. I like the box. The look of the candy was the coins, but I tossed all but the one I actually ate.

I also only had a couple of them, but like many children, even though the candy was terrible my daughter ate it anyway despite me asking "Are you sure you want to eat these?" They'll eat any candy no matter how crappy it is, but the same isn't extended toward vegetables.

Also I can't find the thread where Curtis says the Internet was invented in 1998 and I've googled the hell out of it, ze googles do nussing!

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

how do you keep yourself warm on a day when it's minus 30 with windchill of minus 46?

Fireplace.

Does the electricity shut down/crash/collapse? How do you keep going? that's real survival first type stuff.

Sometimes. Well, I've lived through government collapses before so it ain't no thang.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@siringo I think @JaredBusch is plenty beautiful, I know I had the image he kept posting of his ape-like chest blown up and put over my mantle. Truly not since Adam has perfection been moulded from clay.

Edit: I think this may be the most poetically stupid thing I've said in a while, I'm actually impressed with myself.

ummmm.

Damn, looks like @JaredBusch has a lot of haters.

Crackers, not hackers bro.

Or whatever 1980s, early 90s jargon file stuff people tried to recapture from the media. I am a total green hat, I will be as black or white hat as you pay me to be and I've been paid well to do really mundane shit over the years and sometimes fun stuff.

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

You cant.

I know, I was being ironic, because tips don't count as zakat and even if they did, it's not really giving if you expect praise in return by talking about how giving you are. I do donate money to charity though.

@scottalanmiller Should have been Comic Sans or Papyrus.

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

She got the max - 18-20 years in prison. Parole eligible in 10 license suspended for 15.

Well, it's something, a lot of people get off with no time at all after murdering people with their carelessness.

@WrCombs Watch out for those slippery floors

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Another reason English lacks behind other languages.

I don't think that's a good demonstration of how English "lacks behind" other languages, considering even most other Germanic languages alone the reflexive pronoun(s) tend to be the same word no matter what making certain sentences very ambiguous. I think one of English's neatest things is the possessive pseudo-case of 's, which works a bit easier than genitive case in many languages because you can chain them, but is a hell of a lot more clear than a reverse list of "de", which at least in the case of Indo-European languages is the opposite direction of how speech tends to run.

Plus also the -ing ending is one of the best aspects that almost every other Indo-European language lacks or has to achieve in a complex manner which itself is also potentially vague. One of the problems is that -ing is also the ending for gerunds and some other things.

English's biggest problems are:

1. The spelling system is one of the worst in the entire world, certainly worst in the western world, even beyond French. Funnily a lot of people who speak only English will say "but things are spelled the way they sound." No. At least French has a consistent way to "decode" (read) sounds and know what they are even if they can be hard to "encode" (write). /u/ may be written u, ou, et al but it still is essentially always pronounced /u/. English is broken both with encoding and decoding, though it's rough to write out all the reasons why.
2. The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.

Languages don't tend to lack or gain a whole lot of features, they make up with them with syntax, grammatical forms, stress, all sorts of things. Sort of like how people tend to view AAVE as a simplified or dumbed down version of General American where in fact it may not have some of the same grammatical properties GA has but it gains its own which in turn are sometimes ambiguous to whitey.

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

What you said is a common misconception, a similar one is how some people think "thou" is formal now or at least that it has some sort of reverence when spoken because of its use in the Bible.

That's mostly because of its near exclusive use in seemingly formal settings like the Bible (as you said.) What's funny additionally, of course, is that this changes the tone of the Bible significantly (God talking informally) and that people feel that Shakespeare is somehow formal just because it is old, when in fact it was anything but formal. It was closer to fart jokes of the time.

Haha, yes. I've had to tell people this a lot more than I'd hope to have to especially as someone who is not a native English speaker: God is "thou" in the Bible because you're supposed to have a close relationship with him, and in the reverse God says "thou" in singular to everyone beneath him because, well, everyone is. Same thing with Shakespeare: friends, lovers, people speaking down to those below them, or people speaking down to their enemies he used "thou."

Speaking of Shakespeare farts, I love to point out how A rose by any other name would smell as sweet is almost certainly a poop joke because of the open sewer right outside the Rose Theatre.

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Another reason English lacks behind other languages.

I don't think that's a good demonstration of how English "lacks behind" other languages, considering even most other Germanic languages alone the reflexive pronoun(s) tend to be the same word no matter what making certain sentences very ambiguous. I think one of English's neatest things is the possessive pseudo-case of 's, which works a bit easier than genitive case in many languages because you can chain them, but is a hell of a lot more clear than a reverse list of "de", which at least in the case of Indo-European languages is the opposite direction of how speech tends to run.

Plus also the -ing ending is one of the best aspects that almost every other Indo-European language lacks or has to achieve in a complex manner which itself is also potentially vague. One of the problems is that -ing is also the ending for gerunds and some other things.

English's biggest problems are:

1. The spelling system is one of the worst in the entire world, certainly worst in the western world, even beyond French. Funnily a lot of people who speak only English will say "but things are spelled the way they sound." No. At least French has a consistent way to "decode" (read) sounds and know what they are even if they can be hard to "encode" (write). /u/ may be written u, ou, et al but it still is essentially always pronounced /u/. English is broken both with encoding and decoding, though it's rough to write out all the reasons why.
2. The dropping of singular familiar "thou" leaving only "you" and there's several historical reasons for this, but it's a pain in the ass anyway. Which ironic is that new plurals like "y'all" have been created but they make you sound like a hick or like you're pretending to be endearing and you assume everyone else doesn't see through it. The exception of course is if you speak AAVE (ebonics) and it's apparent, or you speak some version of English from the South East.

Languages don't tend to lack or gain a whole lot of features, they make up with them with syntax, grammatical forms, stress, all sorts of things. Sort of like how people tend to view AAVE as a simplified or dumbed down version of General American where in fact it may not have some of the same grammatical properties GA has but it gains its own which in turn are sometimes ambiguous to whitey.

In Swedish for example, there are specific pronouns for exactly these instances.

For example:
She is drinking her coffee.

(her own coffee)
Hon dricker sitt kaffe.

(another woman's coffee)
Hon dricker hennes kaffe.

Yes the only reflexive pronoun like this you get in English is -self, herself, himself, myself, etc. Though Swedish with sitt (sina, sin) is interesting because it at least follows gender, where as even in some other Germanic languages like, well, German, they don't at all, but people make up for it by using the definite article of the same grammatical gender. It's a language hack I guess.

@LilAng said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

i had a spicy chicken sandwich because i was on a time crunch.

I need no time crunch justification to eat five of those at once.

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@tonyshowoff said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

The point is unregulated languages are vastly worse than regulated ones. English is an example of it when it comes to both grammar and spelling, where you can even have idiotic teachers spit out grammar books in the 50s claiming "no split infinitives" and some people say "of course, that's totally true!"

But English DOES have an academy, and it caused many of those problems because it was the source of many.

No it does not.

It does, the US founded one in the 1700s.

Are you talking about American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres? That hasn't been operational since the late 1700s.

No, Merriam Webster, as an example, produces current works from it.

That's a private company though.

It is now, but it's touted as being the authority on what is and isn't an actual word of the English language.

Eventually twerking may become a proper word in the English language if it makes it into that book.

The only official academy which has ever existed is the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres which hasn't existed since the early 19th century. Any other claims are basically self-appointed, non-government sponsored entities which is something anyone can say. Merriam-Webster never held the position, they just think because they took over after Noah was dead that they have the same authority he had, and he really didn't have much of any because in his lifetime his dictionary wasn't very popular.

That's how America works, "unofficial", but still official, businesses. Same with medical. It's how the government keeps it looking like capitalism when actually being a highly planned economy.

Youtube Video

@scottalanmiller said in I thought I had a lot of gear at home but WTF?!?:

The thing with this network is that it's focused on the gadgets, not the tech. From a tech side, it's pretty weak and the author doesn't really even know the stuff that he has...

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed, there were a few times were I was like "..that's not what that means/does/is"

@RojoLoco He was better as the other half of Dumb and Dumber and/or running from spiders in Arachnophobia.

@scottalanmiller Sarah Connor

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

DD coffee

Double Dutch?

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just got home from SpiceCorps DFW.

I'm reminded:

Uncle Charlie : How was church, Charlie? Did you count the house? Turn anybody away?
Young Charlie : No. Room enough for everyone.
Uncle Charlie : Well, I'm glad to hear that. The show's been running such a long time, I thought maybe attendance might be falling off.