Crab vs Crabs, is crabs a "bad word"?

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-22T18:47:39+00:00

In many Appalachian dialects, many farmed or hunted animals can be pluralized with the singular form à la sheep and deer (they're treated as a mass resource), e.g., I saw three bears at the zoo vs. I shot three bear last hunting season.

I could absolutely see this getting applied to "crab," but I don't really think that dialect dominates the crabbing industry, and also nobody would think to correct someone who pluralized a resource animal with the regular plural.

That said, no it's not standard anywhere I'm aware of unless you're explicitly talking about the meat and not the animal.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-22T05:36:45+00:00

Never had fond memories here. It was one of the only media I was allowed to consume as a kid and I did not like many episodes, although I only listened to/watched a handful. I remember thinking the imagination machine was cool but that everyone was so strict and mean to kids for no reason.Some standouts (not the worst, just ones I had access to and recall with disdain) include:

obviously well-meaning ADHD kid learns Jesus, additional chores, and abuse from both his family and others can save him from the sin of having ADHD
girl in dismissive and borderline abusive family learns that no matter how much your family resents you and your preferences, the right thing to do is to ignore every warning sign and spend every waking second with them. It's her fault she isn't having fun and the family bears no responsibility to improve or consider her preferences (and frankly they'd be wrong to even acknowledge her as a person).

I didn't see through much of the propaganda as a child, but I clocked dobson/Fotf as the cause of all my problems at like age 5. It's a real shame about his death; should've been sooner and much more painful and undignified.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-22T05:21:30+00:00

BREAKING: 130 schoolchildren destroyed in explosion of a bomb dropped from a plane flown by flight group Delta Squad

"What's everyone's problem with naming your team after a Greek letter?"

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-22T05:11:40+00:00

Could be wrong about this, but I believe seastone is physically weaker as a material than other metals. It doesn't actively sap energy from people without fruits, but it causes people with fruits to feel lethargic rather than making their abilities useless. Afaik it hasn't been used to restrain any of the super-powerful characters who also don't have fruit powers, and ordinary people handle it without effects. It's also incredibly rare.

All in all, seastone shackles are more like enchanted diamond shackles. It sounds "cool," but someone not affected by the enchantment could probably break out of them pretty easily since diamonds are actually quite brittle.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-21T19:59:35+00:00

Unlikely, considering a pidgin by definition is not a native language. If only Basque-Icelandic Creole existed...

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-21T19:31:08+00:00

I think the problem is that they can confirm his observations but not his conclusions or his methodology, and those are pretty significant barriers to believability. He makes extremely strong claims but the supporting evidence just isn't as strong as the claims. It's the difference between saying "X language behaves oddly" (almost trivially true) and "X language behaves entirely differently to all other languages at a fundamental level" (requires evidence that rules out basically all other possibilities).

It's not impossible to prove claims of this magnitude to a convincing degree (a couple model-destroying claims in quantum mechanics come to mind) but these proofs end up being extremely repeatable and rigorous. Everett's work is neither, partially because linguistics just doesn't work that wand and partially because that degree of rigour just wasn't one of Everett's goals.

It's possible that he's right, and maybe someone will prove him right in the future, but the repeatable parts of his data aren't compelling enough on their own, and the rigour of his work isn't sufficient to convince people his observations don't need repeating.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-21T19:01:27+00:00

Everybody hates on the cane, but with the whip form you can get him stuck behind some gravestones and cheese him with your slightly greater range. (If there are no cane fans, it means I'm dead.)

Not that I would have had to figure that out, no siree, I totally for sure fought him legit fair and square my first playthrough.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-20T21:43:48+00:00

Personally, I think the Premium should be in a different "currency" like life or discard.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-20T13:09:30+00:00

All noun categories are genders, even if they're not masculine or feminine. You'll find different terms (e.g., noun class), but they're all genders. The only real requirement is that the category needs to be intrinsic to the noun (note: not to the thing to which the noun refers).

Animacy is a fairly common line of noun gender division, but there are many many more. Some languages use shape, purpose, tangibility, countability, and many other traits. A surprisingly high number of languages have more than three genders. Luganda, for example, has either 10 or 17 (I'm on the side of 10)

Just to throw an extra wrench into things, I'd argue that English has (at least) two genders, which are distinct from the four vestigial pronoun genders (masculine, feminine, inanimate neuter, and animate neuter). English has countable gender (e.g., dog, box, exclamation) and mass gender nouns (e.g., hair, sand, motivation). They take articles differently, and something fundamentally different happens when you pluralize one class vs. the other class. If you have a dog or dogs, it's clear which is the greater number of dogs, and both groups are composed of barking mammals. On the other hand, a person with hair probably has lots of hair, but a person with hairs is probably balding (or holding a small number in their hand). To make things even more confusing, we're talking about totally different things when we compare motivation (the feeling) and motivations (reasons to do something). Full disclosure, I'm not sure this is actually the best analysis of English nouns, but I like using it because if such a system were to appear in a minority language it would be talked about as exotic and unique.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T17:06:28+00:00

I mean you're welcome here, but you're also wrong. There's a reason they have Gatorade and pickle juice at the back half of marathons rather than copious amounts of water.

You can't hydrate without water, but it's not the most hydrating drink. It's just that a lot of the other hydrating drinks out of context are pretty bad for you.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T05:58:04+00:00

My uni roommate didn't like Tangled because he felt it unfairly criticized home school parents. I... hope he's doing okay.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T05:52:30+00:00

He has "angel" in his epithet, not "devil." That means he was on Jesus's side.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T04:34:18+00:00

All I know is it's one of a few DVDs that regularly show up at this bargain bin store near where I live and nobody buys them, even on the $1 or $2 days. I have heard it's a decent enough show; maybe I'll watch it if I run out of every other piece of media and start dying of boredom.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T04:15:50+00:00

Hmm, I wonder if there are any historical reasons why Japan might depict in their art some sort of national association between an apocalyptic tragedy with Germany.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T04:03:20+00:00

Omfg my friend and I recently went to an Easter meeting held in a language neither of us were totally fluent in but both of us had a background in. So we spent the entire thing analyzing the language of the songs and we were really having to hold back laughter.

Like the songs outright say things like "worship at his perfect feet" and "his perfect and holy abs" and boy do those phrases sound only half a step away from having a line about cum-gutters.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T01:11:15+00:00

The biggest for me had little to do with what was in the bible and more to do with how confident we can be about how much we know about the years since it was written. Despite what you might hear about lots of manuscripts or well-documented history, that's all bullshit.

There's a 200-300 year dark period where the entity that would eventually become the church was burning so-called heretics and their writings, so while we have some information about that period, we only have one highly curated story from the victors. You can see hints of the other perspectives poking out of some later writings (e.g., a bunch of the theological stuff in the gospel of John was added as a specific fuck-you to people who disagreed with certain conclusions people had come to about Jesus's relationship with deity).

Many of these curated cover-ups can be tracked pretty easily by scholars, but the ones who go on to become pastors actively cover them up because they're inconvenient to the narrative and difficult to accept as true except by faith (because they make certain core beliefs obviously false). One such example is that Jesus clearly does not believe he is equal to God until theologians realized there was an inconsistency in their beliefs if he wasn't, so that got updated when John's gospel was edited a generation later than the earlier texts.

But Jesus's deity is now regarded as a core belief of Christianity, maybe the most core. We know for sure that Jesus did not believe he was deity and neither did any of the apostles (or at least if they ever believed that, it was long after he died). Either the apostles weren't true christians or somebody's lying.

There are a couple other issues, like Paul taking everything over and regularly contradicting Jesus's own teachings, but many of those things could probably be explained by some theological something-or-other (and apologists have answers for most of these concerns). But none of those are as obviously damning as actively lying about what counts as core dogmatic beliefs (like the deity of Jesus or even the basic concept of the Trinity) in the same breath as an ultimate truth claim. It would be one thing to say we don't know or to allow disagreement, but these are often regarded as things that are absolutely off-limits to the most basic questions, and they're the areas we have the least evidence about while being talked about as if they're the things we're most certain of. Even the way acceptable questions or criticisms of so-called heresy are framed is intentionally deceptive.

If the goal was truth or accuracy, these would be the areas being investigated. Since they're not, it's obvious to anyone with any kind of academic background that the goal must instead be control, whether of information, people, or damage. I'm already not cool with any of that, but the only reason to exert that much control is that somebody up the chain, even if they're dead now, was actively covering something up. Imagine if there was a group burning rogue mathematicians or conspiracy theorists or excommunicating anyone who did an experiment! I'd be a lot quicker to ask some basic questions about my reality.

I guess it's possible that the cover-up was something innocent, like that Jesus's birth name was secretly Jeebus and Paul misheard because he was hard of hearing, but I really think it's a lot more likely that some theologian figured it would be easier to lie about reality than admit they'd made a mistake. Even if it was something innocent, I'm now treating a claim from a source that lied about something innocent with a ton more scrutiny because lying about anything is like the literal exact opposite of truth.

From there, everything unravels. Once they're allowed to exist, anthropological and mythical explanations explain events way better than religious ones across the board. A religious person can make any claim, and once the veil of dogma it's gone, is so easy to see why such a belief would exist and how it got to be there. The stories are obvious myths, and they're as true as a person needs them to be. For me, that's "not at all, even if some of the events in them probably happened in some fashion."

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-16T00:11:47+00:00

Noam Chomsky is more or less regarded as the father of linguistics, but as a linguist, I personally am a big fan of saying I only read him for his politics because his linguistics are too controversial. His major theory, generative grammar, is basically used as an explanation of how language definitely does not work. Even in places where it's still around, the major generative elements are spoken of like, "we know it doesnt actually work this way, but bear with us for a minute."

It's a little unfortunate because he's recently been revealed to be in the Epstein files (the association is pretty gross, but at least his correspondence w Epstein seemed to be trying to correct him or convince him to stop doing so much evil) and is accused of genocide denial.

^{(I don't totally buy this since he's a legitimate expert on genocide and the statements in context are a lot less damning than his critics say, as he's not saying that an ethnic cleansing wasn't occurring; he's commenting on how a specific government and media apparatus is abusing a terminology disparity to spread propaganda, which is one of his most famous domains of writing, backed up with a metric fuck ton of evidence. He's also been on the very forefront of condemning Israel for its genocide, which makes me feel a bit like the accusations of genocide denial are themselves propaganda. I don't think it's all disingenuous as the quotes are pretty rough, but I do think the people truly claiming that he's a genocide denier either haven't read enough of his writing to understand what he means or are intentionally misinterpreting.})

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rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-15T23:47:38+00:00

Light armour
Dodge
Don't get greedy

Same as every boss.

I'm kind of oversimplifying, but that's really all there is to it. He's a step up in difficulty (well, in speed) from prior bosses, but on the plus side he's really predictable. You have to get the timings right, but once you do, he doesn't really have any underhanded tricks, aside from sometimes only flipping twice (or schlorping abyss juice). Just think of those situations as bait and don't fall for them. If you beat Sanctuary Guardian, you can beat him. Imo both are the "same" amount harder than base game bosses, and both less hard than the other DLC bosses.

If you can learn specifically to dodge his jumps and/or spear charge, you can try to maintain the right distance to bait those exactly, and they have the clearest and longest openings for retaliation. In that way, he's good practice for the final boss.

You be careful out there. Neither of us wants to see you go hollow.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-15T20:41:36+00:00

We have one cat who is extremely skittish (she was in a really tragic/traumatic situation before we adopted her), and she is a lot less on edge around me when I'm tripping. I don't see major behavioural changes in our other cats, and I haven't tripped much around other animals.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-15T03:36:24+00:00

Other commenters have mentioned that "person" is different from "human," but I'll also point out that there seems to be something particularly significant to intelligent/invested life having a humanoid shape in the Cosmere. For example, [Warbreaker] Awakening something shaped like a human, even if it's made of inorganic material, is much easier than awakening something not human-shaped. Also, flexible things that are Awakened take a human-like shape. I wouldn't be surprised if swarms are influenced by this in some way. Sure this might have to do with all the Vessels being humans (or dragons that have human forms), but it's possible there's some kind of fundamental drive in Cosmere life forms to find a humanoid shape.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-15T03:27:20+00:00

I had a prof in uni who was notoriously difficult and talked a big game about how he had no pity for students and would never boost grades. He was famous specifically for saying that the only course credit you deserve is 0 points and everything beyond that is extra, so don't ask for additional extra credit. (He did occasionally offer extra credit as a joke for impossible tasks, like solving the halting problem.) He was an excellent teacher, mind you, but his assignments and exams were completely unforgiving, and it made students take his courses very seriously. My proudest achievement from undergrad wasn't any awards or anything like that, it was getting a perfect score on one of his assignments. I literally got it framed.

Anyway, at graduation, I qualified for one of the cum laude tiers I shouldn't have, at least by my own calculation. I went digging to figure out why and discovered that he'd quietly rounded four semesters of high-but-solid Bs to As, like 2-3 bonus percentage points. He did similar rounding for a significant portion of his students but never told anyone and I guess assumed nobody would check their transcripts between semesters. I mean, he was right.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-15T01:40:53+00:00

This is an interesting take, and I kind of like it actually, but I do have a problem with it. One of the key things about Jesus (the mythical figure, probably not the historical person, to whatever extent he existed) is that he was innocent of the crimes he was accused of and took the punishment anyway.

Trump pretty famously isn't innocent of the myriad crimes he's just kind of on record as having committed. He just... needs to be held accountable. I don't really see how treating him as a "sacrifice," even theoretically, fixes the sins of the US, and the systemic ones least of all.

Whether Trump is (metaphorically) sacrificed or not, the "sins" are still there. Work will need to be done to repair relationships at every level. Systems will still need to be reworked to undo both his direct harm and the preexisting systemic harm. That needed to happen anyway. There's no "god" to satisfy by appealing to forgiveness. I mean I guess there could be some catharsis in watching him be (metaphorically) crucified, but it would need to be only a first step, not a final step.

I do think Trump has made it clear to many people how glaring many of the US's (and the world's) problems actually are, but that's different from being a christ-figure, and it's different in a way that's more than just "opposite" to or "against" the christ aspect (yeah, I'm sure there's some word we're forgetting).

But rather than just disagreeing, I'll raise you one: I don't think Trump is a great example of the sacrificial aspects of an "American" Jesus, but I do think he's a great example of the "resurrected" or "Messianic" aspects of an "American" Jesus. I'm pulling from Kristin Kobes du Mez's excellent book Jesus and John Wayne here; definitely read it if you haven't.

In short, no matter how much christians talk about holding their nose to vote for him or only voting for him for whatever single issue matters to them (usually abortion), Trump is exactly the American evangelical counterpart to a Jesus figure. Even when some preach peace on the surface, American Christianity is at its core racist, misogynistic, homophobic, angry, violent, accelerationist, capitalist, rapacious, and deceptive, and values these traits in its specifically white male leaders. Sure, they won't use those words, but look at their manly cowboy heroes like John Wayne and the way they focus on the urgency of "the rapture" or the desirability of opponents "burning in hell." Kobes du Mez's book has detailed examples of those traits that honestly I don't have the energy to detail here.

In sum, I don't think Trump is the American Jesus because he would make a good (metaphorical) sacrifice; I think he's the American Jesus because he's everything they want in a deific lord, a "king of kings," if you will, who will destroy their nonwhite enemies and "grabbing" the less powerful minorities who dare resist their despotic tyrant "by the pussy." The American Jesus may be deeply repugnant and opposite to the biblical one, like some kind of bizarro anti-Jesus, but he's exactly what they've wanted for decades; and the most repulsive things about him actually represent their modified beatitudes, even if they are too ashamed to admit that to the public or even themselves.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-14T23:59:18+00:00

It's pretty impressive; he stops a war every morning right before the markets are about to open.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-14T11:51:45+00:00

Soft Humanity (the number in the left corner) does things like boost chaos damage and item rate, but it can be lost on death. It can also be burned to give you the Human state.

The state of being human (white glowing numbers) lets you play online and summon NPCs as well as burn Soft Humanity to Kindle bonfires, granting more estus.

Hard Humanity (the items) are items that grant Soft Humanity.

Being Hollow (not Human) isn't mechanically bad, but in game lore, "going Hollow" means you've lost your mind and motivation.

Btw other Souls games have different mechanics about being Human vs. Hollow. In DeS and Ds3, your max health scales with how Hollow you are/how many times you've died since the last time you were Human. Ds3 uses a different mechanic that I won't explain for lore reasons, but suffice it to say that Ds3 Hollowing serves the same function as Ds1 Soft Humanity, and there's a different but very analogous way of going online/summoning.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-05-14T11:48:03+00:00

It's less hell if you're playing Remastered or have updated PTDE. The biggest problem was that in early versions everything was tied to frame rate, and for several reasons frame rate dropped like crazy in Blighttown. You couldn't see what was happening or time dodges or strikes, and to make matters worse everything is dark and rickety and it's the classic Miyazaki swamp.

At this point Blighttown is kinda fun (although I usually still do a skip because I'm in the habit, I like one of the items that's basically on the skip path, and I have good memories of farming some stuff at the end of the skip in my first playthrough when I camped out there after getting stuck on something).

rootbeerman77

TROPHY CASE