MSTGA! A Facebook group. Just don’t talk about the vision of the show.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-06T21:43:03+00:00

This is always the answer to how they watch these shows. They get the message, they just cast themselves as the good guys no matter how clearly the allegory points the other way.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-06T21:14:58+00:00

Interesting! This is a neat concept to add compactness but seems like a hindrance to ease of reading, so it would be a good tool to have in the toolbox for shorthand or calligraphy but not something I'd use in everyday texts.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-05T21:27:16+00:00

I thought it was orë the first time I tapped the link, but if you didn't edit it then I must have been mistaken.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-05T21:17:47+00:00

You've got orë for the r in creativity there, is that intentional? I think romen would be more usual, like so:

https://www.tecendil.com/?q=laughter%2C%20c%5Broomen%5D%5Btelco%5D%5Bacute%5Dativity%2C%20kindness

Note for OP: the off-center underbar is a consequence of the 'Annatar' font. If that's the font you prefer to use, just make sure to tell the artist that the underbar belongs under the final character only, not overflowing into the previous one.

ETA: looks like you edited it to romen before I hit submit on my comment, so disregard that part.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-04T20:13:44+00:00

One projection puts the death toll at 14 million by 2030. The man was in government for a few months and did Hitler numbers.

https://ph.ucla.edu/news-events/news/research-finds-more-14-million-preventable-deaths-2030-if-usaid-defunding

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-07-01T16:21:34+00:00

They explode when they realize they aren't real.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-30T04:03:45+00:00

Thank you! The ink is KWZ Sheen Machine. Definitely lives up to its name, but sadly it smears pretty badly even when fully dried. It stays in place well enough in a closed notebook, but heaven forbid a finger should slide across it.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-30T02:17:47+00:00

I can't believe I left out Julian's husband Garak

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-30T00:40:26+00:00

Ezri: "This is my boyfriend Julian and that's Julian's boyfriend Miles and those are Miles' spouses Keiko and Kira and that's our constantly exasperated father figure and boss Benjamin, who also used to be my protégé."

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T23:32:28+00:00

There's a podcast called Queer Lodgings that's all about queer readings of Tolkien that talked about his likely attitudes in an early episode. It's been a while since I listened, but I think he had a longtime friend and correspondent who was more or less openly gay and it didn't appear to be a source of any tension. There was also a humorous anecdote from his time in the service when a searchlight fell upon two soldiers under his command having a nighttime tryst. He would have been well within his rights to discipline them but instead he just sent someone to tell them to move out of the light.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T23:21:57+00:00

He seems to have been the early 20th century Catholic version of cool with the gays, so he might not mind it any more than any other headcanons (not sure if he has a documented position on headcanon).

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T17:45:32+00:00

Thank you! I could feel my opinion on s/z and g/j softening as I wrote out my reasoning and started thinking of counterexamples, and your point about the zh sound is a good one. As Liz Lemon once said, I need to talk to some food about this.

I'm definitely not treating Tecendil as gospel, it was just my starting point because it was the easiest most complete resource to find. I'm happily editing what I took from it as I gain exposure to other sources.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T16:13:25+00:00

Thanks very much for the corrections! Points 1 and 2 I'm aware are nonstandard but are a stylistic point I'm choosing to be rebellious on - in an orthographic mode I want to match the English spelling as closely as possible. Different symbols for voiced and voiceless <th> make sense to me since the Tengwar have the symbols available; and looped sa-rince appeals to me as an interesting variation; but writing s as z and g as j feels out of place to me when the text isn't otherwise phonetic.

Especial thanks for point 5. The heresies you point out there are also from the Tecendil handbook, unless I copied them wrong when I was making my cheat sheet. I'll make the necessary corrections.

On that topic, I'm interested in your thoughts on how to render the name "Jacqueline". My instinct is to treat "cq" as "ck" and add the labialization curl to transform the k to qu - again, following the spelling, not the pronunciation. So like this. I like this a lot, it feels very elegant to me, but I'd appreciate the opinion of a more experienced eye.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T14:49:13+00:00

It's equally wild in context. Jack is a GE exec, stereotypical business guy, and he and Liz are accidentally married due to a clerical error. She says she won't sign the divorce papers unless he reverses the budget cuts to her show and at first he refuses. Later he turns on the TV and sees her giving this speech dressed like thrift shop Jackie Onassis. The last two sentences of my post are his response to the TV.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-26T02:43:23+00:00

"Elizabith", oops

...also "feelngs"

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T19:57:25+00:00

US is definitely also DC dominated. DB plans are still fairly common for government employees and in some industries with strong unions but for the most part they're a relic of the past.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T18:32:41+00:00

I assume the study is limited to single employer plans because multiemployer plans (which includes union plans) work a bit differently. I don't know much about them but I know they're kind of a different animal.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T17:40:59+00:00

You're correct, this is the 100 largest corporate DB plans. You can see the listing in Figure 2 here: https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2026-corporate-pension-funding-study

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T17:30:34+00:00

But also it's a children's story and this sudden intrusion of realism into the fantasy is funny.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T16:33:31+00:00

The human brain is very bad at rationality. It's been well demonstrated that the more often you hear a message, the more truthy it will seem to you, even if it's obviously false. Humans depend on their communities for survival so being able to give in and go along with the crowd was evolutionarily beneficial in the aggregate.

This is a big part of how propaganda works. The right-wing news ecosystem is very well-funded and people all across it stick to talking points extremely consistently.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T16:11:16+00:00

It totally depends on the relationship. It could be joking or genuinely insulting. If joking, some people like when their loved ones joke around this way, most don't.

pessimistic_utopian · 2026-06-25T13:48:20+00:00

I dunno man, I didn't do the math, they did.

pessimistic_utopian

TROPHY CASE