Agent of Chaos

youtubers love to say “i hope i’m pronouncing that correctly” while recording themselves in a video that they upload to the internet, which they have access to

via @glorioustragedykid

Hint: its because the video is not as well researched as its presentation implies

Hint: it’s because sometimes it’s hard to pronounce words especially if you don’t use them very often

Don’t leave this in the tags!! They’re good points! An attempt is better than nothing!

It’s one thing to listen to a correct pronunciation. It’s another to actually have your mouth form the words, especially when you’re using a sound you don’t normally use in your native language.

Maybe they’re not saying “I didn’t look up the actual pronunciation and I’m just winging it.” Maybe it’s “I looked it up and it uses a sound that I don’t use in my day to day speech and I don’t think I did it quite right but I tried.”

And sometimes, there aren’t sufficient resources to teach you the correct pronunciation! Sometimes you’ll get bot-made videos that contradict each other.

This this this this. As someone who struggles to pronounce a couple of words I use fairly often my FIRST LANGUAGE, thanks to those particular sounds just being difficult shapes for me to string together coherently, I am constantly afraid of fucking up words in other languages or even just with roots in other languages.

It’s one thing to not even try, but the “I hope I’m doing this correctly” isn’t always “I’m hoping I can just wing this word with whatever I think it’s supposed to sound like,” a lot of times it “okay so I’ve looked it up and tried it a few times so I’m really hoping its coming out right, but I’m not used enough to the language to really be sure .”

Languages are fucking DIFFICULT for a lot of people. Not just the repeating/speaking part, but also the ability to HEAR and RECOGNIZE the patterns and sounds.

I think it's also important to add... a lot of the researchers for videos or podcasts aren't the hosts. The host themselves may not have had the foreknowledge to look a name pronunciation up or have the ability to do it then and there during recording (time during the schedule, internet access, studio rules, etc etc).

different languages use different sounds, and not only do we struggle to vocalize sounds we aren't used to, it is very common when one language distinguishes between two sounds but the languages a person speaks doesn't that their brains literally can't tell the sounds apart.

When a language make a distinction that, in your sound inventory, are the same sound? Yeah, you're fucked for pronouncing it. There's a reason that people who learn other languages have accents from their primary language which persist for years without intense and specialized training. You can listen to somebody pronounce it but not only do you not know how to physically make the inside of your mouth make the sound, you might not know how to make your brain hear the sound in the first place.

A lot of languages like Russian and Turkish have sounds they make distinctions between that to English speakers is just "k", and the Chinese distinction between what we romanize as Shi and Xi are just the same fucking sound to us. Grow up speaking Japanese? Congrats, the rhotic R and lateral L are both the same liquid consonant and you hear them both as the same thing. Speak Arabic as a first language? Good luck with English's distinction between Sh and Ch!

I know where this comes from, it's tumblr's sympathy with the very real problem that many people with names in foreign languages experience where people don't even try to pronounce their names correctly and refuse to learn even when you try to teach them.

But somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that any mispronunciation is just people not trying hard enough and deliberately being an asshole when like, no, different languages are different in a way that goes beyond grammar and vocabulary, in a way that interacts with a part of our brain which streamlines sounds into meaning in a way that actually obscures the precise specifics of what you are hearing. When you get this far into it, you loop around to treating people shitty for not speaking second languages perfectly and congrats we're back to the very xenophobia we were trying to avoid.

I’m glad folks are expressing this. Whenever we encounter non-English proper nouns on the podcast, I get really anxious about saying them correctly. (“Oh no, I’m one of those horrible ignorant Americans people are always complaining about online, maybe I should just cut this whole section out of the recording to hide my shame…”)

It’s kind of a no-win situation. Just confidently saying the word incorrectly is obviously the wrong approach. Posts like the OP tell me it’s also wrong to acknowledge that you might be mispronouncing it. (And I’ve seen similar posts saying that, if you’re conversing with a native speaker, it’s also wrong to ask them how to pronounce stuff because, like, it implies that these are Strange and Exotic Words for you or something.) So what do you even do when you come across a personal name or place name or etcetera that you don’t know how to say?

The only option remaining is to Already Know and say it right the first time without any qualification or hesitation. So you go to look it up ahead of time, and… surprise! Whatever massive database full of reliable pronunciations people think you can just search through doesn’t exist. More often than not, all you get are those bot-made recordings @syphabelnyades mentions. And even if you were willing to trust the pronunciation of a random Youtube channel (which, why would you be? what are this robot’s qualifications?), they’re obviously untrustworthy because they often contradict each other. (Which you know because you checked more than one, because you know enough about information literacy to not just blindly trust the top Google result, which i kind of suspect is what these people who swear you can just easily Google unfamiliar pronunciations are doing.) Like, we all know that Googling something these days gets you mostly junk that you have to sift through in order to find anything reliable. The same applies here — and in the situation where all of your results are pretty sketchy looking (this website says it’s pronounced such-and-such, but it’s not clear who made this website or where they get their information and it kind of looks like it might just be another bot), what are you meant to trust?

Now, sometimes you can get an actual dictionary entry (extremely rare if you’re looking for a proper noun, though, since dictionaries generally don’t include those), or you’ll luck out & the Wikipedia entry will include the IPA. Then you have to deal with the fact that it’s still an unfamiliar word. People mispronounce words that aren’t from their native language all the time! This is known! This happens even when they’re relatively fluent in that language and have years of education and immersion to lean on! Of course it’s going to be hard if you don’t speak the language at all. Different languages have different phonemes — even if you’re pretty familiar with IPA and know what all the symbols mean (I recommend learning the IPA, incidentally, it is a useful tool and it’s interesting in its own right), your mouth does not have practice making those sounds. You’re going to screw up. And then there’s the whole issue of allophones that @open-sketchbook describes. Or maybe it’s a tonal language or something, and you’re not used to that even being an aspect of pronunciation that carries real lexical weight. There are challenges, is what I’m saying.

At the end of the day, you’re going to have to make peace with the fact that you’re not fully confident in how you’re saying that word. But if you acknowledge this on air, you’re going to get folks like OP up there going “oh, you didn’t even bother to look it up.” Like, no! I tried! I’m doing my best! When I say I might be pronouncing something wrong, I’m just acknowledging that I am a flawed and fallible human who does not speak every language I encounter with perfect ease, and that I want to apologize for any errors I might make. That seems obviously better than just forging ahead, probably saying it wrong, and not admitting it.

Because what is the alternative? Make sure you only ever mention people & places that have English names so that you never have to try and say a word from an unfamiliar language? Seems bad!

(Also, I do want to acknowledge a bit of hypocrisy on my part here in that for French words specifically, I have basically given up on getting them right. Those I do sometimes just sort of wing because I know it’s going to be wrong anyway, and I’m sorry. Other languages I do look stuff up and try my best, but French… look, I know I shouldn’t be throwing stones from the glass house that is English orthography, so I’ll just stop there.)

"I acknowledge I might get this wrong" is never identical to "I did no research on this." Someone who didn't think of researching something is NOT going to acknowledge that it might be wrong, they'll just proceed confidently with their wrongness.

i need to look like a man so i can dress like a woman

this got seven notes in like seven seconds its a hit with the faggots in my phone

when I'm thinking about this kiss I'm thinking more and more about crowley in s2e1 going: "I feel like my exactly and your exactly are different exactlies" and their cross-purposes use of "together" in s2e6. the kiss from crowley was NECESSARY because it was a clarification. they find it so difficult to talk to each other. crowley was wrenching open his heart to say "together" because naming what he wanted properly was still too difficult. crowley's "together" would never be possible in heaven. so when aziraphale repeats it back to say "we can be together" it's an exactly/exactly situation. his together means literally together, as they've tentatively started to live post-apocalypse. side by side [see: the car share discussion]. I think even aziraphale is aware enough to know that they could never have what that kiss meant in heaven.

so the kiss was crowley's attempt at communication. to say TOGETHER in a way that heaven could never accept. to leave no missed nuance or crossed wires. and I think that's why aziraphale was so torn apart by it. it shocked him.

because... I think aziraphale already thought of them as together. I'd say that was what the entire car discussion was about. aziraphale was saying look at us, we're together. what's yours is mine and what's mine is yours. and crowley was standing there going what are you doing? what does this mean? what does together mean to you? and then neither of them ever actually said any of that out loud.

I know this has all been covered, but I've been just turning this over in my head since I saw it trying to get a sense of where they were both coming from.

to add onto that, it was not just clarification but also about handing aziraphale something he cannot misinterpret or talk around.

he's the master of compartmentalisation and cognitive dissonance and so so so many things can be interpreted however he needs them to be.

but that kiss? it's physical, it's solid, there is no argument to be made that it is something it is not. aziraphale lives in a carefully arranged balance of his ideas of "good" and "evil", and that kiss steamrolled through that and forced him to confront just how messy their relationship actually is.

yes or "remind me later" NO LET ME SAY NO I WANT TO SAY NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

every week i get that shitty "Let's finish setting up your computer!" thing when i turn it on and it's SO fucking aggravating because i've been using this thing for years now and i don't need nor WANT to fucking "set it up" (read: use microsoft edge, buy windows office, whatever the fuck else they try to sell me) like i'm very obviously perfectly fine. and i can't just say No because No is a very privileged limited time answer we had in the tech future so now it's always "remind me later" no motherfucker i am adamant in my need to tell you NO. i fucking hate the removal of no from our options and vocabulary. i am expressing a boundary i need you to fucking know i am saying NO

Honestly I think the problems people have with pandas comes down mostly to phrasing and semantics.

What I mean by this is people have run with the flippant and funny "this animal is literally too stupid to breed and they basically have to be coerced!" Instead of the more nuanced "this animal has adapted to a very specific environment that isn't easily replicated in a concrete building and doesn't easily breed in captivity."

Or they go with "haha pandas are so dumb they have to be shown how to mate, it's like they don't even care" instead of "wow, obviously we're missing large pieces of how panda social structures are supposed to work and more research is needed."

Having a very strict diet, needing a certain amount of range and territory, and having very specific parameters for breeding is very common across a LOT of different animals. Passenger pigeons went extinct partially because they wouldn't brood if they didn't feel secure in a large group. Devil's Hole Pupfish spawn when there's a seismic event that triggers it. Salmon have to thrown themselves bodily up a river to breed in a specific spot and will kill themselves doing so. There are species of millipede that die in captivity because they only eat decaying wood from specific plants and nobody is sure what those plants even are yet. There are countless animals whose breeding activities range from oddly specific all the way to actively fatal.

The fact that a panda doesn't easily make babies like a domestic sheep in a captive setting doesn't make them stupid or useless or even really that much of an outlier. We can't even get most species of bats to reliably do well in captivity and nobody is laughing about how stupid and useless bats are.

Yes, the money and politics surrounding the ownership of captive pandas is incredibly stupid and convoluted. But that wasn't exactly the pandas' idea.

I guess I'm a little salty because I get really peeved by this idea that "Haha! We destroyed and fragmented this animal's habitat and then put it in a cage and tried to force it to breed and it's not succeeding, what a stupid useless animal for doing so poorly!"

I’ve had my share of [Crowley voice] you idiot thoughts at both of them over their terrible communication skills and severe chronic inability to say what they mean. But like. I get it.

For 6000 years, they had to talk in code. They had to express themselves in grand gestures and subtext and plausible deniability, out of fear of being found out. And they got really good at it! They developed a whole secret language of ways to say I love you because they couldn’t say it out loud.

But now that they can—and need to—talk about what they are to each other with actual words, they don’t know how.

[ID: 4 arms holding hands. the arms are labeled "Intersex Rights", "Reproductive Rights", "Trans Rights", and "Disability Rights". The hands are labeled "Bodily Autonomy"

anyway something I hate about video games is when they make some assertion about the fictional society not being homophobic and yet the society is still heteronormative like. that’s not how things work

example: skyrim sexual orientation isn’t really talked about at all afaik and every person who can be married can be married with either character gender but like: everything is straight. I haven’t played skyrim in a while but like it’s all straight I feel like also there’s things people say in it that are heteronormative and are in there bc the people creating it didn’t see it as a problem or at odds with their apparent homophobia free society and like how can you create a fictional homophobia free society when you ain’t free of your real life assumptions. Anyway

I’ve noticed this with misogyny too, like when you go to pick your character’s gender in dragon age it says something about how men and women are considered equal and there are equal numbers of men and women in the army and in leadership positions etc.

and then you go to actually play the game and the overwhelming majority of the soldiers are male, soldiers are constantly referred to as “men,” there are characters who will say blatantly misogynistic or sexually aggressive things to you (like, blatant enough that it must be misogynistic on purpose)

and it makes me die

Some of this has to be because the people who made these games are almost exclusively straight white dudes - and while they may have had the intention of being inclusive, they literally cannot imagine what a world without heteronormativity and misogyny would look like. They give us the game mechanics to be a woman warrior or to marry a character of the same gender, but they didn’t extend this train of thought to imagine how a society where this was normal would be different from ours.

In Dragon Age, for example, the major world religion is centered on a woman, lead by women, with all-female priestesses. AND YET in everyday life characters still interact as though men are naturally in charge and express surprise at a woman issuing commands. This is directly contradictory and frankly lazy world building to suggest that people raised in a system lead exclusively by women would still somehow end up expecting male leadership, as though sexism was a sort of natural law that would happen in any society. It’s not. Also, the founding myth of their religion has the original sin as sexual jealousy rather than punishing female sexuality, which would suggest totally different social norms around monogamy, sexual orientation, and the whole idea of promiscuity. Instead they’re… More or less exactly the same as our society, slut-shaming included. This makes no sense!

It’s a complete failure of imagination, not to mention frustrating and sad. And a big part of the reason why inclusion can’t be limited to the characters in a game. We need more developers and writers of all races, genders, and orientations so we can make better worlds and better games.

One common Undertale misconception that really frustrates me is when Sans is portrayed with a strong innate sense for RESETs and alternative timelines. Like, that he remembers the RESET timelines better than the other characters who only have occasional feelings of deja vu or even that he can sense when a timeline is RESET.

And that’s, like, almost the opposite of the actual text of the game. While pretty much every main character can have slightly-different dialogue in a Not-True-RESET, especially if the Player had previously befriended them, based on the idea that they have lingering memories/feelings from before the RESET - 

Sans has no real dialogue changes based on this conceit. All of his changes are based around noticing Frisk has different reactions based on their memories of the precious timelines. 

Other characters do also make observations like that about Frisk, like Mettaton and Toriel. But Sans is distinctive because this is the only way his comments change between RESETs and there are a lot of them from him.

Because that is what really frustrates me about this misconception. People mention it as one more thing that makes Sans cool - but the actual truth is far more badass. Sans is one of the people in the Underground who remembers RESETs the least. I think memory-resistance to RESETs is probably tied to Determination. Flowey, the second-most Determined person in the Underground after Frisk, can remember everything perfectly.

Everyone else has some vague feelings and deja vus. And Sans, he’s the least motivated person in the Underground - both in the sense he’s lazy and in the sense he’s fucking depressed.

That probably means he has very little Determination. Thus, he doesn’t remember anything that happens between RESETs.

And yet, he is still the character most aware of them. Because he has the technological know-how to read and analyze timelines.

And because he has the observation and analytical skill to notice a RESET from other people’s reactions and behavior. Whatever it’s Papyrus thinking he recognizes someone or Frisk’s behavior implying that they know something they shouldn’t have. Sans main RESET-related skill is just being able to identify these moments and come to the correct conclusion about them. And with that he manages to be the most aware character in the entire Underground.

Like, the one point where it might seem like Sans remembers something from a previous Timeline is the Fake Spare scene during his boss battle. 

But it’s all pretend. Unlike the previous lines from other characters that I mentioned, this dialogue plays even if the Murder Route is the first time the player touched the game. Sans isn’t remembering anything in this scene. But he makes an educated guess that the Immoral Time God probably tried using their powers for good at first, so they were likely ‘friends’ in a previous timeline. And in most cases, his guess is right on the money - tricking many players into thinking this is another case of the game actually reacting to their past actions.

And as always, Sans can only tell if his lil’ trick worked or not based on the expression of the Player Character.

Arguably, Sans even uses his lack of Determination and cross-RESET memory to his advantage in his boss battle. After all, the whole point of this fight isn’t to kill the Player - Sans understands this is impossible. This is a war of attrition, trying to get the Player so frustrated and annoyed with the unfair fight that they just ragequit or RESET the Timeline. And this war of the Player’s patience versus Sans’ stamina and will is infinitely easier for him when he doesn’t actually perceive all the Player’s previous attempts against him.

Like, for the Player this might be the billion time they go up against him, they’re aware of some of his patterns and tricks now but they’re probably also frustrated and angry and exhausted. Meanwhile, from Sans’ POV, this is still the first time this is happening. He knows it’s not from the Player’s behavior and Frisk’s expression - but he doesn’t feel it like the Player does. 

He doesn’t feel the frustration and repetition of the endless stalemate. So he’s always as fresh as a daisy no matter how rugged the Player is getting.

And that’s part of why Sans is so cool in the first place, like, in general. He’s technically the weakest person in the Underground, lacking in every standard evaluation of power in the setting - no ATK, no DEF, no HP, no DETERMINATION. But he’s darn clever enough to overcome these weaknesses and even use them in ways that make them into strengths, enough to be one of the most dangerous and most aware guys in this whole setting.

Sans can’t remember anything, and that makes him awesome.

if someone blazes their art or poetry and you think it’s cringe you should probably just leave them alone.

there’s this culture developing that i’m pretty uncomfortable about where people feel okay suicide baiting or mocking folks on their blazed posts, and when we’re not talking about, idk, people using blaze to proselytize or harass people but just folks sharing their maybe ‘cringy’ art/poetry… just leave them alone. why do people want tumblr to have this edgelord 8kun culture so badly

It's fine to want nothing to do with Harry Potter now that JKR is being regularly and publicly terrible (I'm listing that way myself even though I don't want to because the association is just overpoweringly distasteful), but seeing the shift in how people discuss HP on this website to be like, "It seems obvious to me that this franchise was always poorly constructed, derivative drek littered with red flags anybody would notice with a cursory glance - there's absolutely nothing genuinely appealing about it." ...That's just very funny, sorry. Like yes that is unfortunately not how the relationship between a person's moral character and their skills works, but mostly I was alive and had a developed consciousness between 2000 and 2008, so I cannot take this seriously. It wasn't the biggest literature phenomenon of recent times because it had a uniquely strong marketing strategy, guys.

The books are well written with engaging characters, great worldbuilding, and a story that captured people like no other. There is literally no overestimating the phenom the books were. And no the movies did not make it. They were MASSIVE even before the films. Before the films even came out, the NYT made a separate children's bestseller list because a ton of people complained that 'kid's books' were taking up too many sports on the NYT bestsellers lists. It's honestly ridiculous to argue that HP's popularity was made by the movies. Come on.

And the thing about red flags, is that most things that are legitimately problematic in the books are fantasy staples. JKR didn't invent the anti-semitic portrayal of goblins. It's an old as hell trope that's in countless fantasy stories. The house elves were based on Brownie folklore, even down to the tradition of their freedom coming from a piece of clothing being given to them. People were not talking a lot about the casual transphobia in doing things like describing Rita Skeeter's hands as 'mannish' because casual transphobia was so ubiquitous that it was the norm, and that transphobia was often actively violent. I just don't think it crossed many people's minds that 'wow JKR described Rita Skeeter's hands as mannish once in the year 2000, so I think she's probably a T*RF.' And this doesn't make it okay, and it doesn't mean these aspects of the books aren't problematic! But it does mean that like, no it wasn't 'so obvious' even to MANY progressive minded people. And I also don't think it makes her a terrible person. What makes her a terrible person is what she's doing NOW.

The idea that they've 'always been awful' and we 'should have known' is really and actually just... kind of cowardly? Instead of acknowledging that unfortunately yes, bad people can make good things, people are taking the easy way out and going 'well obviously a bad person makes bad art. it's ALWAYS been bad, and my brain is so huge I know this', because god forbid we have a more nuanced view and don't see the world in the most simplistic terms possible. It sucks when bad people make good art, but you're not special for not ever liking Harry Potter.

like i know i’m late to this party but it’s absolutely ludicrous that the ‘gender critical’ crowd are trying to claim terry pratchett would be one of them, presumably because he isn’t around to call them out.

was discworld the perfect representation of trans issues? no, nothing is, but characters like cheery littlebottom (in canon the first dwarf to openly present as female and introduce she/her pronouns to the dwarf language) are a rare representation of characters challenging gender norms in a very transfeminine narrative, which was rare to practically non-existent in fantasy fiction back in 1996. or for a transmasculine narrative, the entirety of monstrous regiment, published in 2003, where like every character is a dfab individual passing as male, some of which might be less female than they thought they were.

but sure, of course the man who wrote these stories is totally gonna be against trans people living their lives.

Yes! And finally someone saying they understand why Sylvie did what she did!

Sometimes tumblr activism is just. So tiring. They’re like “you are personally responsible for every world wide tragedy and need to solve it by guilt tripping on the internet” and I’m like. Y’all. I was sitting on the bench

^^^!!!

this might be an unpopular opinion but sometimesssssss people ruin their own fan experiences by dedicating too much energy to (ultimately harmless) things that bother them pls utilize the mute and filter buttons u will be so much happier

I love this I’m having a great time this is fantastic I love this oh nope I hate it so much now.

“You’re so loud.” I’m yelling over the bees.

“I can’t hear you.” I always was told I was too loud.

I am interrupting you. I don’t mean to. I’m waiting for a pause in the conversation but I’m never sure when you’re finished. I’m interrupting you again, sorry. Silence.... I - I interrupted you again.

Looking past people is an art and eye contact is ow ow ow ow ow.

That overpowering emotion is gone and now I don’t know if I’ll feel anything ever again.

Old hobbies feel more like exes than abandoned interests. I want the honeymoon of my hobbies back.

things you can choose to ignore in canon:

things you probably shouldn't ignore in canon:

other things you probably shouldn’t ignore in canon

^^^