“The Second to Last Woman I Loved”
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He had a really tough life, so I’m glad George Grosz made himself wonderful birthday invitations.
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Oh, oh, Sad YouTube. Sad. This is really sweet.
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Pick your stance right now on whether joint custody arrangements for dogs is a good or bad or very bad idea.
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I am not equipped to listen to very difficult albums, personally, but here are a whole bunch.
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Well, hey, now. That’s new.
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NO, we should ALL have been talking about Dinesh D’Souza’s fake-tree infomercial, thank you, Elon Green. Am I the only one who missed this?:
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“Pregnant Sims Can No Longer Brawl”
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Eugenie Bouchard. Never let it be said that literally no good ever came out of French Canada. There are, like, five or six things. #trolling #exposfan4lyfe #youcannotdrivethough
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Speaking of, here is a wonderful guide to one of my personal obsessions: how they swear in Quebec.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I’m gonna go ahead and be That Person: that album list is for amateurs, pshhh.
OMG ELLIOTT SMITH REALLY aaahahahahahahha
Actual difficult music: Jandek, The Shaggs
I don’t even think From a Basement on a Hill is his most emotionally devastating album.
let’s all make unpleasant mixtapes for everyone
I’ve actually been meaning to make a mix titled “Songs About Having a Bad Time” for a while now.
I have such a vivid memory of hooking up with my college boyfriend while listening to Tago Mago
I was expecting more of Mike Patton’s weirder stuff on there, but there’s a few people he works with. (I have all those ones because I’d buy recordings of the man reading the phone book.)
they even say it: “It’s not so much difficult as it is immersive and weirdly beautiful”
THEN WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
If your list of difficult music contains several of my favorite albums, your list is not very difficult. Believe me: I am a huge wuss.
HAVE ONE ON ME????? I think it’s by far Joanna Newsom’s most accessible album. It’s beautiful, and also like peaking into the soul of humanity.
Also, the Knife is just good, but mayyyybe a bit difficult on first listen.
I desperately want to turn this into a subthread where we all gush about how much we love Joanna Newsom but this lab report is due in an hour and I shouldn’t even be on the internet right now 🙁
Seriously, call me anytime, I will hop on that thread, and talk about her for dayyyyyyyssss
If they were going to pick The Knife, they should have gone with their opera based on Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, Tomorrow, in a Year. That was a pretty tough listen.
UGH, I hate that list – because (like that tough novels list) it makes the act of enjoying something experimental seem like a macho pissing contest (certainly nothing that would listen to willingly!). And I also hate Tom Hawking/Flavorwire, so there’s that.
Jesus. Poor Genie Bouchard. When I heard that, I thought they should’ve been booing the interviewer for asking such a dumb question. Also, am I overreacting or is that “group” of (male) Australian fans a little creepy?
UGH UGH UGH totally agree. I was watching it live and rolled my eyes so hard at that whole interview. She had just played a lights-out match, first major semifinal ever, and yet the Justin Bieber response will be the quote heard round the world.
Shades of that horrible interview with Marion Bartoli at Wimbledon last year where some old asshole was like “you must’ve had to work harder at your tennis since you’re not blonde and pretty” RAAAAAGE.
Guys, that Roxane Gay piece (1st link) is lovely and sad.
YES. I saw it on Autostraddle yesterday and was hoping it would be linked here.
The link is missing on that Sims article, but I googled it and now I want to play the Sims 2 SO HARD, but my 2012 era computer doesn’t support it anymore. TRAGEDY.
Oooh, post the link? I just came down here to suggest that maybe an editrix wanted to look into the fact that the MOST IMPORTANT story in this post is missing a link
Hahaha, it got eaten by the picture embed, it’s there now. Perhaps the site rejects Kotaku links?
If you google the phrase a bunch of things come up, but here’s one: http://kotaku.com/pregnant-sims-can-no-longer-bra…
Sims glitches are hilarious to me (and everyone, right?) so this is a beautiful little gem.
ABRACADABRA THE LAUNDRY BEAR!
I would also appreciate an essay comparing sims glitch fixes to conservative’s attempts to regulate women’s bodies (my body, my choice to box). Volunteers?
I WOULD DO THIS
My favorites:
– “Become Enemies with Child” wish no longer appears
– Sims can no longer “Try for Baby” with the Grim Reaper.
– Fixed an issue that caused Sims to leave their Toddler inside a bar at closing time.
– Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out.
– Fixed an issue with the underwater cave where the tentacles waved forever, preventing Sims from entering the cave.
God damn it, these weren’t bugs! They were features!
Mermaid teenagers taking showers!!!
I just got a new laptop and I am tempted to buy the Sims, but I’m also tempted to read books and have a social life and sleep without dreaming of Sims being fast forwarded and talking with bubbles coming from their mouths. What to do, what to do.
This game is the life eater. I’ve been Sims-sober for over ten years now, and I’m not about to fall off that wagon!
…Particularly with the Sims 4 coming out this year! Wait, no!
Sharing custody of pets is a world-class Terrible Idea, for insane people who have not worked out their issues or need to see one another again for utterly, utterly selfish reasons.
… I once had a How To Lesbian Guide that had a sub-chapter specifically on pets (I lived in a lot of isolation okay) and it went thusly!
Dogs: Stay with the person they like best, no fighting, there is definitely a person they like best.
Cats: Stay in the house they came with.
Exotics, ie Gila Monster: Goes with the person who got the gila monster, or whomever wants it most and understands its dietary requirements.
Rodents: Flip a coin.
That is brilliant.
Those are damn good rules, honestly.
In this particular situation, to allow your abusive ex to share custody of your dogs with you seems a particularly egregious brand of RIDICULOUS, WHY, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, STOP.
Because that boyfriend is not ready to let go of his abusive ex, and whatever he gets out of that relationship. Sad for him, but there’s nothing the new girl can do.
I had a messed up boyfriend who had shared custody of two cats with his ex, and it was most definitely a way for her to control and manipulate him. And he was not ready to stop being manipulated, nor to even admit that he was being manipulated. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.
Just followed Sad Youtube!!! Thanks so much for posting that link. Stories that people associate with songs like that are one of my favorite things– I always think about how anything around us could have touched someone’s life, and when walking around my city I’m constantly thinking about events in people’s lives that could have taken place in the very spot that I am standing in.
Kind of love that Buzzfeed sometimes has these really polished features and news stories sneaked in with the lists.
Yes! I read a totally gorgeous article about Detroit there the other day. How did that get in there, buzzfeed?
“Sacres are considered stronger than the foul expressions common to standard French which center around sex and excrement (such as merde, “shit”). ”
There is a special joy in living next to a french person and every so often just hearing “shit shit shit PUTAIN DE MERDE SHIT.”
“Most French swear words can be combined into more powerful combinations to express extreme anger or disgust. These intricate uses of French profanities can be pretty hard to master.
Mon tabarnac jva te décalisser la yeule
calice:”Décalisser” means to fuck up something;
“yeule” means mouth in a harsher way.
The whole sentence means “motherfucker I’mma fuck you up as fuck””
four for you wikipedia.
My favourite one is “putain de merde bordel fais chier” which comes out in a frantic burst from many French people I know. Especially hilarious when they do it at work thinking they’re surrounded by anglophones and turn beet red when they see you giggle. Yes, I know what you’re saying, and no, you don’t have to apologize for it – well, not around me, anyway. I’m Irish, we use swearwords as punctuation over here. Plus, I studied linguistics so your exotic curse words intrigue me.
A Romanian friend of mine taught me how to swear in his language years ago, and I used to stealth-swear in Romanian on the regular. Until we started working with our Romanian office and I had to retrain my potty-mouth so I didn’t offend anyone.
Romanian swearing is such quality swearing!
I used to go with british swears until I had british counselors at Girl Scout camp who were horrified that so many of their charges said “bugger.” Since moved on to Schiße (I think that’s how you spell it? Just been to an officially mandated, wine-based social event, so I’m not sure).
You were very close, it’s “Scheiße”. Always makes me smile to hear “bugger”, “bloody” and “wanker” said in an American accent. Seems to happen a lot more now as they’re not really considered as swear words by U.S. TV censor-types so they slide under the radar onto network TV. I’d be even more amused if the Irish versions popped up more often (feckin’/jaysus/bleedin’/gobshite – they need to film more Roddy Doyle books, or start airing Love/Hate. Of course then there might be some unwanted controversy over our slang word for cigarette…
I will take very close!
The best is Americans from the south. Adorable!
Calice! The other best part of swearing in Quebec was hearing how many diphthongs a former separatist who had worked the Florida oil fields as a twentysomething could fit into drawling the word “shit.” (At least seven.)
Just one of the reasons I like Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache books is for the sacres. Especially with the audiobooks – the narrator makes the most of every “tabarnac” and it’s delightful.
Joint custody of pets = TERRIBLE IDEA. I mean, if you’re going out of town and your amicable ex will take in the dog for a few days, fine, but actually sharing them back and forth every week? Hell no. He gets the cat, you get the dog, share the child, end of story.
My ex wanted to incorporate Loveless into his hypothetical wedding ceremony. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. (Or if it was, it was definitely, definitely on me.)
I can’t imagine giving our dog up if my current dude and I split but I can’t imagine keeping the dog all to myself (both dude and dog would be devastated), so I guess the answer is to just not split? RESOLVED.
Tiny moment of delightful German nerdery: on his invitation, Grosz wrote “zänks” for “thanks,” which is such a great approximation of how German speaker say “thanks.” Eee! Also, he wrote “zänks a lot für die wonderful boxes,” oh god I love Denglisch so much.
Also I’m 10000% here for Quebec French profanity. I mean, the other stuff is interesting, too, but let’s be real, LANGUAGE.
I read somewhere that the Catholic church in Quebec tried to reclaim those words but that their campaign of putting up huge billboards saying things like, “CALICE, the cup in which wine is transfigured into the Blood of Christ,” led to an unreasonable number of traffic accidents and had to be canceled.
oh my GOD that is excellent. I’ll just be here, giggling at my desk for the rest of the day. Further proof that people are just going to speak the way they want and you can’t do anything about it. *proudly adjusts jaunty descriptivist hat*
“Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out.”
God, I love this batshit game.
God, patch notes are the best.
I just wish I could see their actual bug reports. Those must be even more entertaining.
My dad is French-Canadian, so that last link is real DADS! to me.
That Kotaku post is so long overdue; I have been using Sims patch notes as their own form of entertainment for years now.
WAIT, did we already talk about this and I missed it?????: http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/best-punctuation-m…
“I was reminded of the existence of this canon last month, while rereading Middlemarch, which contains what might be the most celebrated use of an em-dash in the history of fiction.”
having listened to the audiobook version I was entirely unaware of the em dashes!
Oh man, Quebec swears. My dad always makes a point of demonstrating his French skills as, “Bleh blee bloo bleh bloo tabarnac.” In high school I went on a trip to France and I was doing that impression for my friends and I got in SO MUCH TROUBLE from my French teacher.
Me: But it’s Quebec French! Nobody here knows what it means!
Her: Yes but I know what it means.
And today I learned that there’s a subsection of the Wikipedia entry for the tabernacle entitled Dugong hypothesis.
I can’t tell you how delighted I am to learn that “crimpuff” is used as a swear word in Quebec. I’m grinning like a teton right here.
When our kids were toddlers, I would tell my husband (when he was being super annoying) that in any break up, HE was getting the kids. I would get the dogs. This usually resulted in the desired coparenting cooperation.
I’m so glad there is a place to talk about quebecois slang! My dad’s mother (Memere!) would use all of these sayings when I was little, and I know how to pronounce them and roughly what they mean, but no amount of Googling has turned up the etymology and spelling. (And sadly Memere is no longer around for me to ask)
The one I wonder most about: it’s an expression that roughly means “duh,” or “uh, YEAH,” said out of frustration when someone FINALLY gets an obvious point. The closest spelling I can come up with is like “ouais au don” but I don’t know if that’s at all right. Sound/look familiar to anyone?
It sounds like “voyons donc!” to me!
“Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out.”
Oh, come on. You have to want that diploma!
I played ball hockey with mostly Franco-Ontario girls in university, One of my teammates had an exceptional commands of sacres. In the middle of a play, she would let loose the most amazing, full string of swears I have ever heard (and always wrap up with “calice”). She also told me that, for French Canadians, “fuck” was not really a swear word (since it came from English) and, thus, was best used like conversational pepper. Just to liven things up. Result: I came back from university with a strong command of sacres, an addiction to punctuating my sentences with “fuck” and a new found appreciation for a well-executed cross check. And all of these were useful to me later in life!
My bro Lori wrote a piece for the Red Umbrella Project about her experiences participating in a shoot for Kink.com. You can get it (along with a plethora of other sex worker stories) here http://www.redumbrellaproject.org/product/prose-l…
Right now the download seems to be giving me Prose & Lore 2.5, which is all interviews from the last issue, but when it goes up it’s gonna be good.
My bro Lori wrote a piece for the Red Umbrella Project about her experiences participating in a shoot for Kink.com. You can get it (along with a plethora of other sex worker stories) here http://www.redumbrellaproject.org/product/prose-l…
Right now the download seems to be giving me Prose & Lore 2.5, which is all interviews from the last issue, but when it goes up it's gonna be good.
From the Wikipedia: “Some people in the French-Canadian community consider mixing and matching swear words to be a sort of art.”
…”some people” … “everyone”… 🙂
thank you Toast and thank you Wikipedia for making my work day that much more awesome. brb learning to curse in Canadian French. for art!
Because that boyfriend is not ready to let go of his abusive ex, and whatever he gets out of that relationship. Sad for him, but there's nothing the new girl can do.
I had a messed up boyfriend who had shared custody of two cats with his ex, and it was most definitely a way for her to control and manipulate him. And he was not ready to stop being manipulated, nor to even admit that he was being manipulated. Needless to say, it didn't work out.
When I was a kid my mother told my working-class French Canadian grandfather he wasn’t allowed to swear in front of me, so I was treated to a full compliment of “Caline de bine de tabouaire d’esti, mon criff!” Although “tabarnouche” remains the perennial favourite 🙂
When I was a kid my mother told my working-class French Canadian grandfather he wasn't allowed to swear in front of me, so I was treated to a full compliment of "Caline de bine de tabouaire d'esti, mon criff!" Although "tabarnouche" remains the perennial favourite 🙂
Yes that is what I was going to say! It translates literally to "(let us) see, therefore" but in use it is more like "come on, really"?
Anglo Montrealer here, very please to see all this local slang 🙂
The Montreal Roller Derby B Travel Team is called Les Sexpos and their cheer to pump themselves up before playing is "calisse calisse calisse TABERNACK". Also one of the player names is Tabarnouk (a pun on her real name).