The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

"Most of them accepted namelessness with the indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. A faction of yaks protested. They said that “yak” sounded right. They discussed the matter all summer."
- Usula LeGuin, "She Unnames Them"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/01/21/she-unnames-them

@HerraBRE Of course I'm thinking about English - I think it's harder to avoid gender in Icelandic?
(I generally find it easier in person than online because I have visible gender presentation as a guide, but I don't often have to remember if a non-binary person prefers "they" or "xie".)

@HerraBRE And if the real problem is that you're worried about making mistakes... it's better to be visibly trying than not to bother at all, even if you don't always get it right.

@HerraBRE It's only extra "cognitive load" when you're starting to build a new habit. Once the habit is established, its no harder than all the many more complex nuances of language that we use instinctively.

@Yuhllevan You deserve to be happy. Do what you need to feel better.

@thor Blame colonialism for the instability, by and large.

@vfrmedia @masklayer True (I’m in the UK too), but even in the States there’s some of that - look at the trouble they had trying to repeal Obamacare.

@vfrmedia @masklayer On the hopeful side, the orthodoxy back then was centre-left, being overturned from the right. This time, it’s centre-right orthodoxy and the left is getting traction. Though there’s still room for the far-right to make progress, of course.

@masklayer I was a kid during the last phase of this back in in the 1970s, but I do at least have a sense that it’s happened before. Though that’s not a guarantee we’ll come through OK this time, of course.

@meowntaineer Welcome back. Everything here’s more-or-less the same as a month ago, though there was a bit of Discourse over on the French-speaking side of things. How are you doing?

Back to reading Susan Sontag on art and interpretation... which is starting to look like a series of increasingly desperate attempts to depoliticise art by isolating it from context. It’s a view that’s no less curious for being familiar. A work is to be experienced, not interpreted; great art is always unique and never part of a conversation; there’s a linear scale of merit even if we don’t always agree where works belong on it.

@inmysocks It was more for the sake of the image than a practical suggestion, to be fair.

@inmysocks Maybe you could hold it by the hinge and use it like tongs?

@Yuhllevan *applause*

Early crocuses in Gordon Square.
https://witches.town/media/Wgft-nUNgxSsUHM8AxA
https://witches.town/media/ppnqjTiITkfaXxtLTeA

@Kyna I’ll ask Athena to lend you courage and clarity, then. Good wishes and good luck.

@Kyna I’ll ask Athena to help you, if that’s OK with you. She seems like the right goddess for this.

@srol There’s something similar in early Len Deighton along with a vestigial sense, left over from WW2, that Nazis are the Real Enemy.

A useful thing to remember is that content warnings are courtesy, which is to say that they're better treated as a way to define relationships than a set of rules.