Promiseland

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

Unread post by Fetian »

Okay, so, let's look at the timeline

-When the relay is proposed, it's decided that everyone will get one week to work on their torch for two reasons: 1, so that everyone has the same amount of time to keep it fair, and 2, so that everyone knows what week they will have the torch and can schedule around it
-Person B tells the torch runner, A, that they can't do any week from the 20th to the end of December. A assigns them to the week of the 14th to the 21st anyway, either not noticing or not caring
-The relay progresses, and reaches person C who has been assigned for the 8th to 13th. They receive the torch and then hold onto it for almost two weeks; A is completely silent during this time
--What A should have done per the rules of their own relay is skip C and pass the torch on to B at the end of C's assigned time whether or not C was finished (or, at baseline, communicate with B and ask if it was okay that they get the torch late, though IMO this would only be acceptable up to a day after the deadline)
-On the 17th, while C still has the torch, B reminds A that they can't do the relay from the 20th to the 31st and so won't have time to do it if given it at that point
-What any rational person would see is that these are two problems that solve each other. Call the current week a loss, give the completed torch to D (next person in line) on their already-assigned week, move B to the end of the relay, and let the relay be one week longer than it was
-What A does is move B, move everyone else up a week, and give D two days to do the relay
-(For some reason from the beginning of the relay A has been extremely against the relay going on for any longer than absolutely necessary. They were originally trying to organise a relay that would be completed before Christmas. Brother this is a hobby fucking lighten up)
-D does complete the torch in a single day, which is impressive but do I believe they did a good job with it? No, no I do not.

Anyway this relay has been a shitshow

 
Also shoutout to this dingbat:

It isn't [fair]; But it's certainly doable. It all boils down to two factors:

1) How difficult is the previous language to translate.
2) How developed is your language? How many words or grammatical structures do you still have to coin for the torch?

In my relay history I faced wonderfully crafted, but absurdly complicated polysynthetical languages with many special characters (harder to search for in the dictionary) or even once a language that was written in the Greek alphabet, which I could somewhat read but not type at all. On the other hand, once I received a West Germanic conlang, of which I as a native German speaker could translate like 90% without even looking at grammar or vocabulary. Same with the vocabulary: Preparing my torch in Yélian takes me less than one hour by now, but with other languages it's a lot harder.

To sum up my TED Talk, two days is doable. But not easy.

So we should just bank on the language to translate being similar to a language the translator happens to already speak? Go fuck yourself

I never said it wasn't doable. I said it wasn't fair, and it isn't fair. Why are we making a person crunch for a fucking hobby with zero stakes? Why does everyone else think this is okay and why are people making excuses for letting it happen? 'Oh it's okay because it's possible' I don't care! I don't care that D did actually manage to do it, they shouldn't have had to! What if they weren't able to?? What if the extremely likely scenario that on Sunday they had to say 'Sorry I wasn't actually able to do this in two days, I do not have the torch ready' had happened???

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

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I'm already having a bad pain day so of course Oz picks tonight to pee on my bed

And not just on some of the blankets, she got the entire layer down to the mattress so the whole everything needs to go in the washer

At least she didn't get any of the pillows

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

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Merry shitscram to all who celebrate!

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Re: Promiseland

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It's christmas! As a non-christian who was raised very much in the christian hegemony I have some complicated thoughts about the holiday, but one thing I have done is stop trying to find ways around labelling the holiday I celebrate with family 'christmas' and call the duck the duck. So we did christmas today -- I woke up repeatedly this morning and then at 8 actually got up, and at around 9 I got in the shower which was one of the reasons I wanted to be up early-ish and told the housemates that I'd like to do presents late-ish (around noon). The other is that Oz needs her pills to be given to her at around the same time every day or she seems to suffer negative effects from it, and between that and giving Cael his breakfast at 11 that kind of forces me to schedule specifically around that block of time. But we did end up doing presents at about 11, and it did not take us super long so I was able to pill Oz at the time I needed to

So presents! Erik gave me a break-open geode set (hilariously it includes 15 geodes and 3 display stands which kind of comes across like them admitting that most of the geodes will probably be unimpressive) and a light-up beanie (the light-up part is detachable for charging, and is giving me ideas about other nonsense I might get up to with it). ash got me a backpack that he hand-decorated with a lovely snake motif and some stocking stuffers. My intention for Erik was to get him a subscription to Bespoke Post, which is a monthly box that gets you fancy, high-quality stuff that supports smaller companies, but they don't really have a way to gift a subscription so I got him a gift card with instructions to use it to buy a subscription. The week I did that they were offering a free gift with any purchase, which was a great coincidence because that meant I would have something to give along with the gift card, and excitingly also meant that I wouldn't know what I'd gotten him until he opened it (I didn't quite catch it but I think it turned out to be a power bank?). For ash I got him four cookbooks -- one with a history-of-cooking focus, one with a cooking-methods focus, and two with a focus on specific cultures and stories from those cultures, specifically cultures that I haven't seen him cook from much, and then also House of Leaves because he'd been reading my copy but I felt he would appreciate being able to read from a copy of his own (and also if I had access to my own copy we could continue our read-together without me having to do it from a subpar ebook version). I also went out to the grocery store a couple days ago and got a bunch of quarter machine toys to put in his stocking

After presents, I put on Jacksfilms' Royalty Free Christmas Songs (a beloved holiday tradition) while ash got dinner started, then he, Erik, and I sat down to watch our also traditional christmas movie. This year was Just Like a Christmas Movie (apparently also known as Waking Up to Christmas), which was pretty fun. Everyone in it seemed to be having a blast and were making some amazing acting decisions which I wholly support.

ash and I watched a youtube essay about the historical accuracy of Muppet Christmas Carol (we did not end up managing to actually watch the movie itself this year -- pretty much all movie-related traditions for me did not end up happening, though I did get around to watching Claymation Christmas a week or so ago). Then dinner, and a Worst Cooks (we are not really enjoying the current contestants, but hope that as the number of them dwindles they'll get less ugh) and video games (first Salamander County Public Television, and then Last Term, an anomaly-hunting game with puzzles to solve, and also unfortunately what seems to be a game-ending bug introduced in some recent updates. It was fun aside from that, though)

While we were out in the living room, Oz peed on my bed again but she just got it on one of the present bags so I was able to just throw that away. And since ash went to bed I've been hanging out in my room reading tumblrs. I am super tired so it's probably going to be an early night

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Re: Promiseland

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I don’t bother trying to de-Christian the holiday anymore for myself, though i’ve taken to calling it exclusively Xmas in writing and find it actively difficult to put the “christ” bit in now. this doesn’t mean anything useful but it’s interesting to me.

(and yeah, i know there’s quite a bit of discussion out there about how Xmas is, in fact, a Christian term too.)


.how quick bright things come to confusion.

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

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The battery on my laptop has finally died, apparently. There were already issues with it (it was prone to deseating, so moving the laptop while it was on and unplugged would really often result in suddenly losing power as the battery disconnected) so I pretty much never used it unplugged anyway (probably contributing to shortening the battery's lifespan) but it doesn't charge at all, now. I got the laptop used seven years ago, so I'm coming due for needing to replace it especially given how much I use it, but boy is it a bad time right now to be buying computers, used or new.

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

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Ah. And Oz peed on the bed again. I genuinely just outright do not have the ability to deal with this tonight, so that's great.

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Re: Promiseland

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I CANNOT abide bad puppetry

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Re: Promiseland

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It's always been wild that the Legal Eagle guy is a defence attorney and is so bad at, uh, speaking, but it's even wilder that he's been doing youtube videos for this long and hasn't gotten any better at it

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Fetian
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Re: Promiseland

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"X is a trans/gay icon!"
> x is a cis/het ally

Screenshot 2025-12-29 at 16-11-55.png
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