Grrl Power #1144 - Just shoot me, me (Patreon)

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The "clothing pressure lines" (I don't know if there's a more succinct term for that) can actually be part of the fun because they make the pictures look a lot more spontaneous, and a lot less like you were hanging out in a terry cloth robe while some lady touches up your makeup and the lighting guy tweaks the position of a few lamps.

Of course, Sydney’s not exactly an expert at nude selfies. She only sent Frix some because he assured her that “all the computers on Earth couldn’t hack his phone.”

I had to look up "Occupied" in French, but there's a masculine and feminine form. I'm not sure how someone occupies a thing in a masculine way, probably it involves a lot of splaying, but for a unisex airplane bathroom, I guessed they probably use the masculine form, because of, you know, the history of the entire human race. But I asked on Twitter, and someone in the know said it's not about the occupier, it's about the gender of the bathroom. Not the intended gender of the people using the bathroom, the gender of the word "bathroom." The gendered aspect of romance languages always seemed silly to me, like, learning languages is already tough, (especially when you do it later in life with no real chance for immersion.) So why tack on this addition, which in a lot of cases is utterly arbitrary, that makes learning that much more difficult? Whoever invented Esperanto and thought it would be a good universal language, but then also made it a romance language was simply not approaching the problem from a practical standpoint IMO.

When the world consisted mostly of spears and swords and bassinets and castles and fresh baked bread and hats, the gendered thing maybe made more sense, but in the age of wi-fi and video game texture tessellation, assigning gender involves flipping a lot of coins. What gender is wi-fi? What gender is the stratosphere, or the ozone layer? Is all air the same gender? I know there are answers to these questions, my point is, as the world becomes increasingly complex and our scientific understanding grows, the question of gendered nouns feels real arbitrary in a lot of cases.

Of course, complaining that something in a language doesn't make sense is silly, because nearly all languages are a mess, as they evolved naturally over 5,000 years, and that's before there was a new meme or fleek yeeting every week. Generally, the people inventing new words aren't structure obsessed linguists. The guy who invented the term "Donkey Show?" Probably not a scholar.

Of course, after all that, someone then told me that airlines pretty much use English for everything because that's just the standard and there are certain industries where you don't want someone fucking up because of confusing labeling, even though I'm hopeful that someone giving a locked airplane bathroom door a jiggle isn't going to knock it from the sky.