The Elaine With Back Pain 🏳️‍⚧️

https://ew.com/avatar-the-last-airbender-live-action-cover-story-what-to-expect-8551028 there is this article going around, in the telephone discourse way of the internet where it's people responding to a tweet summarizing a clickbait headline summarizing an article summarizing an article, and people are jumping on the part of it that mentions that they toned down sokka's sexism, and i was hoping reading the original article would give me a more sympathetic view of what was actually said

instead i got really irritated for a completely different reason, which is this article being insanely condescending about the original being a "mere kid's show" (direct quote) that's elevated and mature for being live action, and the showrunner and crew agreeing! i assume this article only didn't start with "bam whiff pow this isn't your dad's cartoon show anymore!" only because the writer couldn't think of a proper cliche

also very funny is the link "there are entire reddit threads" to a reddit thread with 29 upvotes and 15 comments, to support the idea that sokka was sexist in the original show... which would be the pinnacle of lazy entertainment journalism even if said reddit thread didn't specify "in the first few episodes" in the title.

I wrote a review of The Secret of NIMH, an animated classic I've been wanting to watch for decades and finally watched yesterday with my girlfriend Willow. It's a ridiculously ambitious movie with a plot far too messy to be shouldered by the jawdropping animation, but one that I think ultimately benefits from that more than it's hurt by it.

people have talked about it before but i really do find keysmashes the most fascinating etymological/linguistic phenomenon

it's called a keysmash. by definition it has no consistent spelling and should be reproducible by just hitting any arbitrary keys in any order. but unconsciously you somehow "know" that it starts with an f or a or d and uses nothing but the second row of keyboard letters (usually the first half)

fslfksklsf "sounds" right, mvcxm,nc,z looks like nonsense. there's no logical reason for that, one is as much a keysmash as the other. but we've internalized that a keysmash must be "spelled" with certain rules

i'm not remotely a linguist but it's the same thing to me as the phenomenon of adjective ordering: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. it's something we do largely unconsciously but when it's pointed out to us that it's strange to do it differently, we consciously notice it