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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I always thought motherfucker was a weird exclamation. At least right now, it doesn’t fit with modern concepts of humiliating put downs because things like “I fucked your mum” are commonly understood phrases of contempt and ways to embarrass or domineer someone yet it creates the uncomfortable paradox of the person calling someone a motherfucker inadvertently placing their opponent in a rhetorical position of dominance and power over at least someone whose mother they have fucked, and quite possibly even the mother of the person calling them a mother fucker if they’re happy to turn the tables and make that claim. Whether the term might once not have had those confusing connotations before common tropes around fucking of people’s mothers being a dominance thing someone might take a chauvinistic pride in; within current culture, it definitely does.

    Then you have the fact that statistically, quite a lot of normal people are going to be motherfuckers including everyone’s Dad and especially the father of the person calling someone a motherfucker, so it’s offensive impact is up against the heavily diluting effect of the sheer banality of the status of motherfucker. It’s almost like saying “oxygen breather” and expecting to offend.

    Then it gets so contextually muddied by the fact that the word has become semantically very flexible. I think I’ve even heard it used as a term of endearment before, at the very least it can sometimes be a stand in for just “people”, as in “some motherfuckers like to smoke” wherein such cases it’s fairly neutral in affect or at least only mildly negative. It’s also used just as an exclamation of surprise or anger with a situation, this is actually where I most find myself using it. It’s sometimes used with regard to objects, rather than people with which one is frustrated, a usage that I guess isn’t so far removed from the original offensive intent but still broadens the scope somewhat. This flexibility isn’t necessarily bad, after all “fuck” is extremely flexible and people will infer intent from context pretty effectively but again it does seem to me to sort of dilute it’s antagonistic and offensive qualities by becoming mundane.

    I guess the term works quite well because it’s rather graphic. It doesn’t just require the word itself to be arbitrarily considered offensive like “fuck” does, but instead produces mental imagery that’s shocking and explicit, maybe that’s how it’s managed to hang around so long despite semantic ambiguity and possible rhetorical backfiring but for me, I still think it’s a weird term. It’s so ambiguous, and so tied up with weird ideas around propriety and women that make it feel strange in contexts where someone wants to be threatening and vulgar. It feels like a strangely dandy and out of place anachronism in the sort of ‘street’ context that I think people want to evoke when they use it. Feels like something I might expect people to say right before slapping each other with gloves. Are they upset with the person’s habit of fucking mother’s because it implies they’re a philanderer? Would that be offensive to them? Or is it the mother they’re supposed to have fucked who’s improper? A “slut” for allowing the mother fucker to fuck them? If so, why is the issuer of the term directing their distaste at the mother fucker and not mother whom they fucked? Are they suggesting the person so-called, fucked their own mother? I guess that could make sense, a bit weird but certainly insulting, yet I’ve really never heard that that was the intended idea.



  • This suddenly triggered a memory of one specific art attack but I’ve been scouring YouTube and so far haven’t had much luck finding it. I haven’t seen all that’s available but I’m getting a bit sick of it despite my desire to still see it again. Maybe someone here remembers it.

    • I would have watched it in the 90s I think sometimes between 94-96. But I can’t say for sure it wasn’t a rerun from an earlier period
    • The particular art attack was a night scene of traffic on what I think was a wet road with a truck or lorry, the perspective is of the lorry heading towards the viewer, though a little bit profile, not directly head on
    • I think it was drawn on black paper
    • It may have been done with white and yellow chalk, certainly I remember the colours white and yellow being used
    • It was demonstrating ideas around being able to hint at the impression of objects at night without drawing the full object, only the outline of parts of it that would be illuminated by light sources which were headlights and smaller lights attached to the sides and corners of the lorry
    • It involved doing something kind of like how a little kid would draw a sun with a crude circle and rays but then some quite clever technique was employed to smudge those little suns and their rays in very straight lines used to trace the hint of outlines of traffic
    • It was finally finished off with some kind reflection on the road surface, don’t recall how he did it

    I’ve going through ep after ep, nowhere to be found. The wiki for art attack has only two mentions of “night” and it’s neither of the two mentioned episodes, there’s only one mention of “traffic” and it’s in regards to using traffic cones. There’s a mention of “truck” but that wasn’t it either, I checked. There’s no mention of “lorry”. Couldn’t find anything to do with “wet roads” either. Driving me nuts.







  • Thanks, that’s actually the one I’m using but I mistakenly called it “Android Pass” originally. I’ve edited my post now to reflect this correction. Unfortuantely, at least in the only 2 situations I’ve ever tried to use a wallet which was now twice in days, I was receiving emails from organisations, one with an auto club membership digital card and one with a ticket to an event, on both occasions, I was given a link to add to my google wallet or a link to add my apple wallet and neither link actually leads to a pkpass file or any downloadable file. In the case of one of them at least I saw it links to some unrelated company that I guess they teamed up with for distributing these passes called urban air ship. I assume if you go ahead an sign-in it eventually goes on to give you a pkpass file or something similar that a google wallet app deals with but I obviously wasn’t going to do that. I was wondering if there was any commonly known way to just get the pkpass file from links like those since both seemed to work in much the same way and I assume somewhere at the end of the hoops you jump through you get an actual file.






  • I think I’d be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it’s on my local machine. That’s because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation’s name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn’t actually that word or things like “the email where they mention they’ve had a kid” but I can’t actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example “What’s Dave’s kid’s name again?” and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like “how long has it been since we moved out of that house?” and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.

    Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don’t always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they’d likely be more effort than just asking directly like you’d ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it’s too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it…


  • Yeh, like a whole lot of US politics and a smattering of more global politics and an even smaller smattering of just bad things that have happened recently. When it’s a community not dedicated to that kind of thing it’s a post on something tangentially related to it, or a commentary upon it. Occasionally it’s not even tangentially related to the supposed focus of the community and someone is just attempting to deliberately inject such subject matter in there artificially, a lot of the rest of the time it’s the comments where somebody finds a very tenuous connection to capitalism or Donald Trump or landlords. They’re all interesting or maddening enough topics to keep me scrolling but no amount of passion can resist fatigue and boredom after some time. The only other topic that is reliably separate from those other Lemmy greatest hits are people complaining about Reddit or Linux/FOSS discussions which again, are juuuust interesting enough to kinda make me feel like at least there’s something here but it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. I realise that comments like this one are their own particular genre of lame, complaining about Lemmy itself as if it contributes, but since you ask lol.


  • You know I’m not sure. I sure spend a lot of time here on Lemmy but somehow I’m not sure I even exactly like it. I was going through my feed to see if I could find a kind of quirky counterintuitive answer that I could justify by saying at least it’s not some super depressing news or angry commentary but they’re kinda… all like that.

    I guess I cherish all of them equally as much in that I somehow keep coming back.