This could be a pretty decent vocaloid song in a style like Twinkle Park’s

“We’ll let it slide this time, Erika, this time…”

This might be more of a /c/chat post sorry

Burde være flere

Yup

Note: one of the lessons was apparently not added to the playlist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8m2uqgfTZc

And two of the lessons (#7, #8) were apparently never posted to this channel, so the last lesson in this playlist it would seem skips ahead a bit.

That’s what I figured, but I remember hearing something about some people objecting to this and insisting that “duct tape” came first after all.

Incidentally, “duck” in this case is cognate with, among other things, Norwegian duk meaning “tablecloth” among other things.

Have etymologists ever conclusively settled on whether the term “duct tape” or “duck tape” came first?

(two years from now) “Zero-point energy field manipulator” seized in Japan

In the development of my own interests and hobbies there was a good mix of…

• deliberately choosing to do things because I thought it would make it easier for me to make friends
• copying things I read in books, or saw in movies or on TV
• inertia from previous interests
• just the straight-up material conditions of my life

Most of my interests over the course of my life can be looked at from several of these angles.

For instance, one of the several factors that eventually culminated in me becoming a conlanger was that I read Captain Underpants when I was about 6 or 7 years old: because I read that book, I decided to try drawing my own little gag comic, in which a kid flushes the toilet in a public restroom, and then the poop comes out of the toilet in the next stall over, and then the kid in that stall flushes the toilet and the poop goes back to the first stall, and then the kids say in unison something like, “Talk about faulty plumbing!” — I drew that comic, and I resolved that I would make copies of it to distribute at the playground, just like George and Harold did, and then all my peers would come to me and beg me to draw more high-layrious comics, and I would make a name for myself and make a bajillion friends lickety split. 'Twas a foolproof plan!

…Well, I didn’t end up making copies of that comic or even showing the original off to anyone, but I refused to let some initial hiccups like that dishearten me from seeing through my foolproof plan to take over the wor— I mean, make friends with my classmates!

And so I drew another comic strip.

And then another.

And then another.

I guess I was hoping I’d eventually make something good enough to distribute, which I never necessarily achieved, but I did go from drawing bad attempts at yonkoma, to drawing something closer to storyboards for bad short films with a recurring cast of characters, namely schoolkids loosely based on myself and some of my classmates. My comics were impressive by the standards with which we’d judge the artwork of little kids.

But yeah, in any case, a few years later I got caught up in the hype around space colonization and stuff, and so I decided to draw a comic where my characters got on a giant rocket ship to reside on an artificial “school planet” — yes, the same kids who were exchanging poop like a hot potato at the start of this comic series, were now astronauts on another planet. So I had in drawing that particular comic about the rocket, shifted the setting of my comic series away from basically just a copy of my own primary school, to a brand new world which I was free to develop in any way I wished. And develop it I did: I thought about how the schoolkids lived and got around, what sorts of zany misadventures and hidden secrets this planet held, what sorts of technology they had access to — and eventually I started drawing maps and flags and I coined names for the different regions of the school planet, because I’d imagined that the school planet setting could be used for a kid-friendly open-world video game (I was totally not jealous of the older kids for getting to play GTA!)

So yeah. That was my first real foray into worldbuilding, and later worldbuilding projects would lead me to start conlanging. There were of course several other factors that led to the interest in worldbuilding sustaining itself and developing further, and other factors that led me to move on from relexes and ciphers to developing actual constructed languages, but just this anecdote is plenty long by itself.

Do you really think it’s the same thing?

Edit: If you’d like to argue that there’s no point to it, go ahead, I’m just saying that it’s not an internationale.

Yeah, this is part of my thinking, too.

Exactly, exactly, well said. This is really a problem in a lot of countries, but it’s maybe most pronounced in the USA.

But anyways, yeah, you were saying that a leftist organization specifically for Americans living outside of the USA, would be good for building an American left in general? I don’t disagree, necessarily, I would just like to confirm that that was what you meant and that there was no miscommunication.

There are a number of different communist or socialist parties in the USA, a lot of them are really pretty cringe, like they’re communist in name only, while a lot of others are decent but might have some faults here and there. Because I’ve never lived in the USA I can’t speak for what organizing with the different parties is like, but if you’re going to join a party, I would recommend asking around for different leftists’ opinions on them. Common advice seems to be to stay away from the CPUSA, the “American Communist Party”, and the “Socialist Workers Party” — These all exemplify the big problem of revisionism and opportunism in the communist/socialist parties in the USA, that there’s a lot of infiltration to turn these parties into “controlled opposition”. So it seems to be a very difficult task to organize in the USA.

The PSL is the most favored party I’ve seen, it’s probably the best communist party in the USA, but I’m still skeptical to it.

To be clear, you aren’t referring to a communist party in the USA, right? Because there’s already things like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who ran Claudia de la Cruz as their candidate in the presidential election — parties like the PSL just don’t have an overseas wing or equivalent, so that’s what I’m asking about.

You’re definitely speaking to a real phenomenon of there being a lot of absolutely insufferable rich expats, but for other overseas Americans, the class contradictions would be more biting, not less. That’s been the case for myself, and I’ve met or heard of a decent number of other overseas Americans who I’d consider to be class-conscious. These could all just be a bunch of one-off “flukes”, but until someone actually tries organizing the American diaspora, there’s no real way to know for sure.

But yeah, even if overseas Americans will on average be harder to reach because on average they’ll be wealthier, shouldn’t there still be people agitating among the “below average”? For that matter, will the fact that it’s generally hard for poor people to leave the USA ever change, unless there’s people trying to change that?

Took you a while

Fuck, I’ll never be able to look at that word the same way again

HELL yeah