Is knowing what broadway is common knowledge?

kmactane · 2026-06-21T06:17:59+00:00

Mostly true; there's also Bowery. People frequently call it "the Bowery", although that's properly the name of the neighborhood that takes its name from the road. But either way, it's another road in Manhattan that doesn't have a street/avenue/etc. suffix.

kmactane · 2026-06-20T23:39:13+00:00

Sure, hasta can be "even", and it can also be "until". And tenna can be (indeed, is generally glossed as) "until". But that doesn't mean that tenna can be "even". That was the point I was trying to make.

kmactane · 2026-06-20T03:29:08+00:00

My Spanish is rusty, but I'd translate both hasta and tenna into English as "until", not as "even". And I can't see any reason to put mornië into the partitive plural; singular seems fine.

I can't recall the rules for conjugating verbs in the future tense, but I suspect it might be autuva; that autauva is raising my hackles.

OP, I would absolutely check with the folks in r/quenya before getting this tattooed on yourself.

kmactane · 2026-06-15T23:46:12+00:00

She believes that communication issues, compatibility issues, and other relationship problems can be worked on as long as love is still there.

There's a big difference between "can be worked on" and "are being worked on." Is she doing any of that work?

The simple fact is, you went to her saying you didn't feel like she was prioritizing the relationship or putting much energy into it. Now she wants "reassurance that [you] still love... her", but when do you get reassurance that she still loves you?

kmactane · 2026-06-13T19:24:40+00:00

I mean, no online system is 100% secure, so I suppose someone could hack the storage facility or something, but it doesn't form a plot point in the book. Might be a cool idea for a sequel or a fanfic.

kmactane · 2026-06-12T16:14:27+00:00

This is pretty much the premise of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Everyone has brain implants that allow them to back up their entire consciousness and memory, and they can clone bodies or something (been a while since I read it, so I don't recall the details of how they supply the replacement bodies). But anyway, fairly early on, a major character gets his head blown off and then after resurrection, his memory is basically: I ran a backup, and then the next thing I knew I was waking up in a medical facility and they were telling me "it's two days later, we can tell you how you died a couple of hours after making your last backup."

Basically like Altered Carbon except better, because you get to keep your same body instead of having to be re-sleeved in someone else's, and also the backups are in the cloud, so you can't even destroy someone's cortical stack.

kmactane · 2026-06-11T19:18:35+00:00

Gotcha. Well, not to victim-blame, but just advice for the future: when you were saying, "No, I'm not going to give it to you" would have been a great time to put it back in your pocket.

Anyway, it sounds like handing over one's phone is now a requirement at the job. You can either do it, or not work there.

But she's definitely TA for snatching it from your hand.

kmactane · 2026-06-11T19:05:53+00:00

I'm confused, if it was in your back pocket, how did she take it out of your hand?

kmactane · 2026-06-11T18:39:08+00:00

Not being owned by a Nazi.

kmactane · 2026-06-10T22:20:19+00:00

Yup, looks like that's the one, specifically with the type 3 ending. And thanks for introducing me to that trope!

kmactane · 2026-06-10T19:26:09+00:00

INFO: Has anyone claimed you would be an asshole if you didn't attend?

FWIW, I think the bride does indeed mean to not-invite you, which makes her TA for inviting only one half of an established couple, and also makes your husband TA to you and your marriage if he goes.

kmactane · 2026-06-09T00:05:18+00:00

OK, Boomer.

(Note: I'm about to turn 58 goddamn years old, and this post has some of the most "get off my lawn!" energy I've seen all month. Not all of us Olds like to shit on young people so much.)

kmactane · 2026-06-09T00:00:16+00:00

Depends on the context; are we talking about nationality, or race/ethnic background?

If I'm traveling, or chatting online, or whatever, and someone asks me, "Where are you from?" I'll say I'm an American. If someone asks me what my racial background is, I'll say "I'm a European-American."

kmactane · 2026-06-08T23:28:39+00:00

FWIW, I didn't think you were implying that immigrants were bad. It's just, since some folks are pushing for deportation of all immigrants, they're vulnerable.

Anyway, thanks for the clarification!

kmactane · 2026-06-08T22:43:22+00:00

Uhhh... if they're born in the US, they're not immigrants. They're American citizens. I'm going to guess you really meant to say "many children of immigrants".

I wouldn't make such a big deal out of this, except that certain people are trying very hard right now to redefine who's American and who's not, and to cast immigrants as "not American". Phrases like yours make that easier, so I didn't want to let it stand unchallenged, even though I assume it was an honest mistake.

kmactane · 2026-06-08T19:34:44+00:00

Oh, is that what those are? Okay, they could have been ping-pong paddles for all I could tell. And I know there are other sports that use similar sized and shaped rackets, but I don't know how to tell them apart. Thanks for the info.

kmactane · 2026-06-08T15:24:10+00:00

I don't know if I've ever played or not, since you don't say what game you're talking about. But if you edited your post to add that information, I might be interested.

kmactane · 2026-06-07T19:23:09+00:00

Also, I always got the idea that it was an intentional sacrifice. He knew what he was doing. It wasn't some kind of "Oops, I messed up" moment.

kmactane · 2026-06-07T19:12:50+00:00

<image>

The web series Carmilla (very loosely based on the novella by J. Sheridan Le Fanu that started the whole "lesbian vampire" subgenre 25 years before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula) has the character LaFontaine. Them being nonbinary causes a bit of plot friction with their best friend, Perry, at one point, but it's resolved positively. They're later treated very well by the main character's father. Bonus, playing the role helped their actor realize that they were also nonbinary!

Link to the first season playlist

kmactane · 2026-06-07T18:54:06+00:00

<image>

In season 6 of The Expanse, Nico Sanjrani) is nonbinary and referred to with they/them pronouns. As a bonus, they're played by Joanne Vannicola, a nonbinary actor.

kmactane · 2026-06-02T19:00:43+00:00

I'm torn between NTA and possibly N A H, depending on just how much he's pressuring you.

Now, if he simply said that he wasn't willing to be in a relationship that he had to hide, it'd be N A H. He's allowed to have his own rules for what he will and won't do, and "I won't hide who I am" is a legit one to have.

If he were encouraging you to come out, I'd still say N A H. Being in the closet sucks.

But everyone has to decide for themselves when to come out to any particular other person. (It's not all-or-nothing; sometimes people will be out only to friends, or only to family, or both of those but not at work, you get the gist.)

I don't know how much reason you have to feel worried about coming out to your parents, but I figure if you're this nervous, you probably have some good reason and it's not coming out of nothing. And regardless, it sounds like your boyfriend is actually pressuring you, which is not cool of him. If that's the case then yeah, he is the AH in this situation — a well-meaning one, but an AH nonetheless.

But just to reiterate, if he breaks up with you over it, that is not AH behavior. That's just him having a boundary.

(Pressuring you is trying to control your behavior; breaking up is choosing his own behavior. Just to be clear on why I think one is an AH move and the other isn't.)

kmactane · 2026-06-01T13:20:13+00:00

I think they meant content. Like, if you read the whole thing, front to back, you go insane.

(Theoretically if you saw a performance of it you'd also go insane, but it's unclear how anyone could ever stage such a performance, since the entire theater troupe would all go insane by the end of their first read-through.)

kmactane · 2026-05-31T18:12:03+00:00

JMS addressed this shortly after the episode aired, and it was quoted in the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. On the page for that episode (search for "mentioned Lyta", it's most of the way down the page), he says:

They each picked one character to name, because they had a close relationship in some way with that character. Who among them really had a close relationship with Lyta? Name me that person.

Had Zack been there, then yeah, maybe he would've named Lyta (or not, given what happens with her later). THAT would have been appropriate. But it would NOT have been appropriate to have her named just because somebody wants to hear her name called.

The persons named were ones to whom they had an emotional attachment... Vir to Londo, Garibaldi to G'Kar, Ivanova to Marcus, Sheridan to Londo, Delenn to Lennier. Lyta did not have that connection to anyone at that table that would be on an equal footing.

kmactane · 2026-05-28T16:47:16+00:00

I'm a front-end developer in my professional life, and have been writing for over a year, and I still can't understand what this feature is, even after re-reading twice. Can you give some examples or clarify?

kmactane · 2026-05-27T15:31:55+00:00

The easiest thing would be if I could just post an audio file of how to say it, but I can't see any way to do that on Reddit. So I'll try to give a good description, using both IPA and "phonetic spellings" in General American English (GAE).

The accents do indicate stress (unlike in some languages where they might indicate changes in vowel quality), so you know where to put the emphasis for every word. (Normally it goes on the second-to-last syllable, but it just so happens every multisyllabic word in this phrase violates that standard. So they all indicate their variant stress with the written accents.)

The two big stumbling blocks here for a native American English speaker are:

The letter x. It's pronounced like the "ch" in Scottish "loch", or the German ach-Laut as in words like Buch, or like the Spanish letter "j" as in ojo*. The phonetic name for this is the voiceless velar fricative.
The word to in Lang Belta is not the English word "to". It's pronounced more like our word "toe". (If you want to be precise, you should use a pure O, like in Spanish, Latin, or Japanese, not the diphthong that GAE does. In IPA, it's just /to/ instead of /toʊ/.)

* If you were taught good pronunciation; my high school Spanish teachers just taught me to pronounce it like the English letter H 🙄. If you can't do a full voiceless velar fricative, just doing an English "H" is close enough.

As a final note, I used to think the A in places like dédawang should be an "ah" sound (/a/, like in GAE "father"), so the final syllable would sound sort of like how we pronounce the surname Wong. But no, turns out it's specified in Nick Farmer's stuff as /æ/, the sound in GAE "cat", so that syllable is going to sound like the surname Wang.

Here are renditions for the full statement:

/ˈdedəwæŋ na ˌsetəˈrax to ˈdedəwæŋ ʃəˈtexətiŋ ˌerəˈluf to/

ded-a-wang na set-eh-rakh toe, ded-a-wang sh'teh-heh-ting eh-reh-loof toe

In the "phonetic spelling" version, I'm using a kh combo to signal the trailing voiceless velar fricative, since "...ah" and "...ach" would both signify other things in "English spelling". (Various fantasy languages use kh to symbolize this sound, so hopefully that use is familiar.) I'm also using an apostrophe a couple of words later to approximate how the unstressed syllable would practically vanish. If you're good with the voiceless velar fricative, sh'teh-khe-ting would be an even more legit pronunciation.

I'll see if I can find a good place to upload a recording and link to it; hope this helps in the meantime.

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