Because I’ll never keep it up to date. I’ll be in a hurry or something and just measure it without recording.

Just guessing here, but Christmas has cemented itself in the wider cultural consciousness thanks in part to commercially exploitable traditions like gift-giving. It’s is often celebrated in some way by people who are not even Christian (Japan, for example). There are very specific themes, religious and secular, associated with Christmas that you can write songs about, The birth of Jesus, obviously, but also family gatherings, winter weather (Northern hemisphere bias), the whole Santa mythos and so on.

What Americans associate with Christmas is actually three separate feasts scrunched into one. Saint Nicholas day (December 6th) which is why Saint Nicholas is associated with Christmas, and Epiphany (January 6th) again for the magi, are the traditional gift-giving holidays, but got engulfed by the unstoppable Yule Tide. So you have these three different occasions with their own songs combined together.

New years doesn’t have the same cultural presence.

A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.

Made me laugh.

I’d call it “olive”.

I you’ll permit me a tangent, the linguistics of the senses are something that fascinate me. Color names have been studied a fair bit, and an oft-repeated (not sure how accurate) theory states that languages acquire color names in a particular order, starting with words for dark and light, then red, then green and yellow, and so on. As a student of Latin and to a much lesser extent Greek I was interested to find out that there’s no exact word for “blue” in classical Latin or Greek, hence Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea”.

As a blind person I’m more interested in odor vocabulary. The dominant theory until recently is that language is incapable of describing odors as qualia distinct from the sources of those odors. That is, “green” describes a particular instance of subjective experience independent of grass or bile or any other green thing, but terms for odors all stem from analogies or just the words for their sources. Earth smells “earthy”, flowers smell “floral” and so on.

But some research on minority languages spoken by hunter-gatherers living in Thailand suggest that at least some languages do have “odor colors” as I call them. I desperately want a non-technical breakdown of these studies, or indeed access to the papers at all, but the details are behind pay walls.

Some of my conlangs are meant to have such odor colors based on the valence-arousal model of emotions since their speakers communicate mood through pheromones rather than body language. Their color words in contrast work like human odor words, only being able to describe color by analogy with something so colored.

A good analogy goes a long long way.

I have often thought this myself. Not sure I’d enjoy being a mod, and that’s assuming anyone bothers to join.

Go-Karting with Bowser

IIRC per Miyamoto the characters are actors who are ‘on set’ during the mainline games and hang out after work. Or something like that.

It’s not for lack of personal time. I just have way more things to fill that personal time. Playing with my radios or messing with my homelab or building out grammar and lexica for my conlangs and so on. I think I’ve also discovered my tastes have changed. I don’t want video games to frontload all the complexity anymore. How am I supposed to know what this or that class or race or stat does before even starting the game?

My vision being what it is a lot of games are unplayable now anyway.

didn’t even know childlore had a name or academic interest associated with it. until last year. When I was a kid I always wondered who came up with things like JIngle bells batman smells or those paper fortune teller thingies or the candyman/Bloody Mary or the game Doorknob and so on. I never saw adults doing or saying those things, so I figured some kid somewhere had to have made them up at some point and it just spread from there.

Never played it but I’ve heard good things about Darklands along the lines of what you’re looking for.

I wish I were young enough to enjoy sprawling RPGs again. I bought BG3 but I don’t have the time to devote to it like I used to so it molders in my Steam library.

Attempted is the key word. The characters eventually got too detailed for me to distinguish. As I mentioned in another thread I tried finding braille resources for L2 learners but there don’t seem to be any. Ironically if everything was in Pinyin I could probably do it, but moving to a new writing system when you already have one that you’ve used for millennia is a nearly impossible ask. Plenty of people have tried with English.

While it’s true a language is tightly linked to the culture of its speakers by definition, a language’s speakers aren’t just their leaders. Russian represents centuries of cultural wealth, not just the misadventures of the last hundred or so years. It’s not the language’s fault that Putin invaded Ukraine. If you love learning languages for their own sake, do it. I made the same choice when attempting to learn Mandarin during the Hong Kong protests.

This right here encapsulates exactly what my biggest complaint with this platform is. A news post about a controversial topic in a completely unrelated community. I’m literally on my knees, guys. I just want to talk about drawing fantasy maps and developing conlangs. Worst part is that worldbuilding/conworlding is a perfectly acceptable way to articulate your worldview, and you might even get people to listen to you if you’re creative about it, but nah that’s not blunt enough.

And yeah, it could have been posted in error, but given what I previously described about !mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world, it very well may be on purpose.

deleted by creator

Twitter does have that problem. It’s had that problem for years. That’s why I’m not on Twitter. That doesn’t cancel out the craziness on here though.

I have not. If this is a joke it went over my head.

Left: My current guide dog. Right: his predecessor of happy memory.

But I AM a miserable person, and I want to be LESS miserable by coming on here and having fun, but every blessed thread on here has the word “capitalist” somewhere in it. Guys I don’t even necessarily disagree with y’all I just don’t want to talk about the evils of corporate America in this thread that’s nominally about Super Mario.

Honestly this. Everyone is always “on”. Everything HAS to be about politics, and if one syllable you utter isn’t cursing Donald Trump and his descendants unto the thousandth generation you’re labelled a fascist. I mean for heaven’s sake I don’t like him, I didn’t vote for him, and I’m counting the days until his term is over, but no that’s apparently not enough.

Like, please, guys, I’m begging, just let me look at funny pictures of cats and talk about old video games.

The fediverse can be a confusing concept. It certainly was to me, and I’m in IT. The idea that Lemmy and other federated platforms aren’t a single monolithic site but a group of sites that share content took a bit for me to grasp. I thought it had something to do with single sign on, like you made an account on one instance and any other instance federated to yours could verify your identity with your home instance so you could post on the other instance without making a native account.

People who join the fediverse are also by and large self selecting. That is they’re making a conscious decision to reject the corporate-run social media platforms that the fediverse seeks to replace, so merely having an account on here is making an ideological statement, and I’m including myself here. Anyway, that gives the discourse on the fediverse a more politically charged feel that may turn some people off. When you go to a community like mildlyinteresting expecting to see pics of three-chambered peanuts and yellow stop signs but get things like “French President explains the political consequences of AI” it can be kind of exhausting.