Prefixet “be-“ behövs egentligen inte på svenska, har jag hört. Så istället för bestraffa kan man säga straffa, istället för befria kan man säga fria, istället för benåda kan man säga nåda, istället för betjäna kan man säga tjäna osv osv.

Att klistra på ett be- sådär kommer från en tid då svenska språket, som då hade funnits länge, plötsligt blev mycket påverkat av tyska som var ett riktigt modespråk typ som engelska är i dag.

Men… jag är för det! En del ord som “behöva” blir jättekonstiga utan. “Jag höver frukost!” Och andra typ gripa istället för begripa funkar men har fått ett annat konnotationsbagage. Eller “befalla” mot “falla”.

Ja, jo, man kan kalla dom kvarvarande be:na för fossiler (en “fossil” i språktöntesammanhang betyder ett ord som bara lever vidare i ett idiom och aldrig används utanför det, typ som “ler och långhalm”) men jag tycker vi ska lägga in be- framför ännu fler ord! Bedöda, behjälpa, betämja! Om du ska trash ett kort i dominion kanske det då blir “beträsja”.

I use the word “exacerbate” way too much and unlike some of my other pet phrases (like “a li’l”, “on the cinder”, “the life-changing magic of”, and “probably better known as”) it’s starting to sound weird to me now.

It’s too fancy and weird and specific of a word to be jammed three times into every essay. Normally I try to not put the same word or phrase twice in the same paragraph (I don’t always catch it for first publication but I go back and edit older essays all the time and this is one of the things I’m always on the hunt for) or even in the same essay if it’s something that’s really out there, pet phrase or no.

The reason for this is that I’m Swedish, I think in a weird mixture of Lisp, English, and Swedish, and in Sweden saying something has made something else worse isn’t some strange X-laden Latin word, it’s just common-place words like “förvärra” or “försämra”.

I like to be specific and not say something “caused” something else when I’m not sure whether or not it did. For example, maybe it’s not money’s fault that people actually are evil (although saint Paul wrote that love for money was the root of all evil in his first letter to Timothy), maybe money just rewards and exaggerates and spreads and… exacerbates it.

I actually love fonts! (Which might surprise those who know that I leave my webpage set to the browser default font, but it’s because I love good fonts so much that I think fonts should be a reader decision, not a server decision.) When my desktop went headless after having to move to a way smaller apartment and my Emacs had to live in SSH only, I was sad because I had set up all kinds of weird fonts in Emacs and functions to switch the entire Emacs over along with “only switch this particular buffer over” variants. E.g.

(defun to-june ()
  (interactive)
  (set-frame-font "Junicode-32"))

(defun to-june-b ()
   (interactive)
   (setq buffer-face-mode-face '(:family "Junicode" :height 320))
   (buffer-face-mode))

Along with this to make a changed buffer go back to the frame-wide font:

(defun unbufface ()
  (interactive)
  (buffer-face-mode -1))

And now I have all those fun fonts working again on the Android version of Emacs! ♥︎♥︎♥︎

Hence the huge sizes. I was on 12 for most non-Junicode fonts with a -16 “big” option, while Junicode with its lower x-heights I had at 14 pts. But on “Moria”, I use 28 as the “small” size, 34 as the big size and Junicode gets to be 32.

My default font for coding and general emacsing around was (CW non-free) Futura while I wrote most prose texts with Junicode. Coding in proportional?! A geometric sans with a super ambiguous character set for I1O0? Well, it works great for Lisp for the most part and I had it set up so I could super easily toggle out from it back into Deja Vu Mono, or Fira Code these days.

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "Futura LT-28"))

I set this all of this up pretty soon before having to switch away from it so I only got to enjoy it for a few months so I’m grateful that I have it back albeit not on my big 21″ 4:3 screen. It’s on a more cozy and puny lantern-lit 7″ screen. Last piece of the puzzle is that I’m gonna go find a retro-ish typewritery font. Old Timey Code maybe. I was on “Bohemian Typewriter” but I couldn’t get that to work on since the Android version of Emacs don’t support OTF. And good riddance since the latin-1 coverage was so bad, but also not good riddance since the alternatives I’ve found so far are more consistenly x-spaced instead of nostalgically jittering around like an X-File on uppers.

I really like switching fonts with the same text open. It helps me get fresh eyes on the same text and see different problems or things I can write in a more beautiful or clear way.

Have you ever felt half-full, half-hungry? Some folks for whom hunger is a more binary switch might not relate to that, but then perhaps they can think of something else, like how much you groan when you see that the elevator’s out or how different things can make you differently happy.

From there, it’s not that far of a step to also want to talk of three-fourths hungry or to, over time and with some self-awareness and reflection (or I guess it could just as likely be just wrong-headed, hubristic misguessing) remember and rank all kinds of moods and experiences with some more granularity and express them on a scale of one to a hundred.

Many years ago someone commented that they never knew where people like me got our percentages from. When I say things “I’m 90% sure that…” they’re like whuh how could you even measure that and I didn’t have a good answer for them. I felt caught, I realized that I had only been pulling the numbers out of my hat and I felt like a phony. The topic weren’t the kinds of things where you actually do have percentages like if you poll a bunch of people and do statistics to see what percentage of people eat plants or whatever, the topic was something along the line of “I’m 75% sure”. Of discussing credence in relative terms rather than absolute terms. Their comment only left me speechless for a moment and the next day my mouth was as full of percent signs and scales as it ever was (I feel that people who tell me I’ve got “black-and-white thinking” don’t really know me at all). But only today I figured out a way to actually answer their question; to my own satisfaction at least. I don’t know about them because I don’t remember who it was that said that. Someone on IRC, I think. But it’s like saying you’re half-hungry, except taken to a ridiculous level. That’s my answer.

Studies do show that the black-and-white mode is significantly less addictive but for me that effect wasn’t nearly strong enough and I’ve had to use other methods to try to not be on the tablet all day when I’m at home. The black-and-white mode doesn’t seem to help very much anymore when it comes to actually putting the thing down and getting to work. It did for a while and maybe that explains the studies; it just doesn’t help enough.

But I’ve still kept the black-and-white mode on (I set up a toggle to quickly turn it on and off and I mostly keep it in BW. I especially like the color mode for things that use color sparingly like how some manga are mostly BW but have some color pages or accents) because I found another benefit. It makes the real world slightly more colorful. It makes me slightly more aware of the room around me. The effect is tiny and can’t be relied on. It’ll collapse if put weight upon. But it’s not something I want to give up on.

A drawback is that it makes all the color screens in public to be eye-burning magnets that pull my attention into something that’s painful to look at. But I would’ve hated those screens anyway especially when they blast ads. Maybe a media overload hellscape worse than Transmetropolitan isn’t necessarily the best way to build our cities. I’m so grateful for how the new bus schedule signs seem to be gently frontlit e-ink (as far as I can tell). They give me hope.

Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of yesteryear.

They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth (usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth (usually 29 or 31).

Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and orange clothes.”

Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a dream because in real life I can’t do those things) so I traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and broke plates.

Because yes. Prims and Evans were usually paired up in constellations of one of each. That had actually been the largest political issue of all time just one generation ago; whether two Prims could shack up together, or an Evan with an Evan. And why always groups of two? That’s what you get with dream logic… I found a trove of old newspaper articles that proclaimed the collapse of society if two Evans were to partner up, and to vote for the Traditional Constellation Party that would protect everyone from that (the same party that incidentally also wanted to steal from the poor and give to the rich) or the proverbial sky would fall.

That battle had been lost and in some areas of the land I did meet some Orange+Orange couples and some Yellow+Yellow ones too.

Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert didn’t seem to mind that as much as they were fighting a “new” menace: people who didn’t neatly fit in these two categories.

Actually… talking to them about it was quite confusing in that dream way where things tend to shift and morph, because when I said that the salary/housework thing seemed a little unfair, they said “of course! We fight for the rights of Prims, and these reactionary category straddlers are muddying that issue with their performative housework and parodic chocolate-gobbling. It’s disgusting!” In all my stay in this faraway land I never saw them actually talk about the rights of the Prims; in fact, time and again I saw them side with factions that wanted to constrain Prims even further, even lower salaries for Prims, even more housework. “Don’t you see?” they said angrily. “We’re prioritizing their right to even be a Prim. Isn’t that the most fundamental of all Prim rights? And now all of a sudden it’s under attack after being completely static throughout history.” (I actually saw in museums there that a couple of hundred years ago, everyone was wearing orange regardless of which ice-cream flavor they were eating. I also saw that the vanilla-eaters were all strictly wearing velcro shoes and all the chocolate-eaters were strictly wearing laced shoes, and I saw that when the first chocolate-eaters had dared to put on velcros just a few decades prior, they had been fined and jailed, but these days I saw all kinds of people—including Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert—wearing velcro shoes with completely no reaction from anyone because it was completely normal now. But each younger generation thinks they’re the epitome of punk and each older generation thinks they’re the sentinels of eternity.)

There were three kinds of people that this duo and their clown comic hangers-on hated. The first were those who blurred the lines. A vanilla-eater who loved drama. A comedy watcher clad in orange. This was the worst thing. “No! No! You’ve got to stick to your tooth-given lane!”

The other kind where those who sought (or provided) dental care. Pulling of wisdom teeth, dentures, fixing cavities, repairing crowns. People who had after dental care ended up with a different quantity and/or quality of teeth, and reregistered as such in the National Dentist Registry and applied for a new passport. This was also the worst thing. Whether or not they then sought to associate with the traits associated with their new dental parity group or not. Dental care was called “mutilation” and “grooming” and several laws were on the docket to outlaw it.

So one of the most confusing parts of the dream was how they hated the some of the “cluster transgressors” for being too visible and they’d yell “we can always tell”. They hated others for being too invisible and they’d yell “stop confusing us, put on your orange clothes, you’re being deceitful”. There was no winning with them. You’d think sticking rigidly to a thin line between these two ends would’ve made them happy but those who tried that ended up getting both kinds of hate since those hatreds overlapped by quite a margin.

Looking back through the history of the land had told me that while conflicts between the orange-clad and yellow-draped had been an issue for ten thousand years, this latest batch of category-separation hysteria had started out as quite a minority, an issue only a few people had known about or cared about.
That’s when they came up with their stroke of genius:
Sports.

They brought up how in some sports like championship flossing, the 300-yard brush stroke, and pie eating contests, different teeth were likely to perform differently, and they then generalized that to all sports like long-distance running or Omaha hold’em. And this did become popular! Even the emperor of the land would as a complete non-sequitur bring up how ridiculous he thought the idea was of an Evan participating in the Prim sports category. Of course, this emperor was a strong proponent of the steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich politics that the dental parity traditionalists like Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert had sided with so he saw a chance to make hay while the sun shone.

And what started in sports soon extended to all facets of society. Going to the restaurant, going to the grocery store, even going to the powder room! Leaving your apartment in any way would induce scrutiny and accusations and paranoia, for everyone. All for the greater good of the Olympics!

This sudden sports-mania ushered in a new law: you shall be categorized as Prim or Evan at birth. I know, I know, babies don’t have teeth. And neither do old people. That’s just how crazy this dream was! The doctors (the few remaining doctors, since dental care was under legal attack) would just take their best guess. And that was the parity category you would stick to for the rest of your entire life. Problem solved easily and perfectly.

That created a third kind of people for our diligent duo to hate on. For example, there was a boxer… or maybe it was a runner. The doctors had categorized them as Prim at birth. Which they were happy with. They loved orange. They loved chocolate. They loved drama. All was well. Until they won. Didn’t their mouth look kind of even on TV? Something about the cheeks, the way they moved… an invasive dental counting procedure was promptly ordered and it turned out they had… I forget if they had two teeth (both prime and even) or 27 teeth (neither prime nor even) but out came the hate, long before the mouthcount. That’s how it was in this land. They hate you if you transgress your medically assigned dental parity cluster and they hate you if you stick to it. They hated everyone until there was no-one left and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

You see, they were scientific and rational.

And in their rationality and science-mindedness, they had come up with all manners of slags and mocking names to apply to everyone who didn’t stick to their lane. “Oh, so you’re stick-to-your-laners?” I asked, and they boiled over with anger. “How dare you utter such a slur?!” they screamed, “We’re just normal people!”

After a few years of this, they came up with the term “cluster-critical” for themselves. I thought that didn’t make any sense. Weren’t they the ones who were more strongly than anyone else trying to really enshrine these societal clusters of traits into two immutable granite-carved groups, and erase all outliers and overlappers? How is that being cluster-critical? They slapped me with a splintered ruler and said “You dolt! You clod!” and explained that the whole idea of speaking more generally about the two groups as being mere “clusters of traits” was “propaganda of the cluster movement” which they opposed, which they saw as denying the biological tooth of dental parity, denying how almost everyone has either an even amount of teeth or a prime amount of teeth. How that’s a natural fact. (Question marks on how that 27-denying factoid, even if it had been true, would apply to ice cream flavors, clothes color, or TV genres.)

I asked them if is this what they spent all their time fighting about? What about climate change? It has already killed millions of people. They just looked at me stubbornly, and started to explain, once more, from the top, something about the delicate flavors of vanilla.

You would think that in this land, everything would’ve been teeth-forward. Everything would’ve been all teeth teeth teeth on billboards and t-shirts and mugs. But actually no. Teeth were a very private thing and had been so throughout the ages. Ogling teeth was considered vulgar, and was sometimes done in an exploitative way. You’d see a poster with teeth in a workshop or a pair of rubber dentures hanging off the back of a truck, for shock value, but normally people covered their mouths when they ate. When a movie scene featured bare teeth, usually a “tooth stunt double” subbed in for the actor, or dentures were worn. Asking each other about their teeth was a big taboo.

Under a mossy stone in the deep, dark wood, I found a file showing that before they came up with this teeth-counting business, they had been counting people’s nose hairs. Everything had been all about the nose hairs. Until they discovered that the teeth thing had a three percent stronger correlation with the socially created cluster roles.

So if you’ve ever wondered why some wear yellow and others wear orange, now you know.

I feel like the big difference between the Pluribus hivemind vs either of the two most obvious comparisons—Meta’s social networks and LLM’s like ChatGPT—is that those two are corporate-owned. Pluribus is “imposed” in a lot of the ways they are but not all: if the “psychic glue” description ends up being true that’s a lot more grassrootsy, a lot more like “just a really, really good language”, like the Tower of Babel undone and human communion healed and perfected. And unlike the fantastic Body Snatcher’s trilogy or misguided and un-thought-through “upload” transhumanist fiction, the “that’s fun for my copy, but how about me?” template doesn’t apply either. It’s less getting “scanned and copied” and more “joining up”.

And if those descriptions of “oh it’s so great we’re all still here we’re just swimming around lovingly in each other’s thoughts so happily” are not true, if that’s a rugpull waiting to happen, we’re getting closer to the kind of science fiction I don’t like. We’ve seen the hivemind be duplicitous and work surreptiously and deceptively already so there’s no guarantee that they’re telling te truth, but, if the story is gonna be about whether or not they’re telling the truth, that’s gonna be a so much more boring story than if it’s a “okay here is how it works; we’ve been honest about how it works, would you join and if no why not and if yes why” story which to me is much a more interesting dilemma and situation to explore. And Rhea Seehorn is great. I’m so happy that she gets a new vehicle to really shine in.

I’m not so sure this nyctograph is that good of an idea.

Problem number one is remember which cells you’ve already written in; problem number two is to remember which pages you’ve already written on.

I do a lot of my writing in shorthand which works fine in the dark except for that second problem, how to turn to an unwritten page.

I mean these days, since there are electric lamps, there’s no need to use actual fire to see in the dark which was more of a schlep.

If I’m sure I’m on an unwritten page (maybe by folding corners?) the shorthand solution works great. Perfectly readable the next morning.

That nyctograph also remind me of the Braille template and stylus I use for writing Braille letters and signage. That’s how I discovered problem number one; I haven’t used a nyctograph but the Braille template also has rectangular cells. I’ve messed up when using that Braille writer by accidentally skipping cells which meant accidentally introducing extra spaces in the middle of words. Or it could mean doubling down and overwriting letters but that hasn’t happened yet.

In furniture antique means at least a hundred years old but in the world of phones I’m seeing the word “antique” being used for all pulse dialing phones. Mine is 50 years old, it’s an Ericsson Dialog rotary dial phone.

How? Via Bluetooth to a cellphone.

Is this eco friendly? Nope, it’s another wallwart + the electronics in the Bluetooth box itself.

Is it solarpunk or preppery? No, it’s 100% reliant on the cellphone network working. And the power grid. It adds no redundancy or failsafedness, it’s all serially connected.

Is it better audio quality than talking on the cellphone? I don’t know: The Bluetooth step is only lossy so the antique phone’s speaker and mic would have to be that much better to outweigh that lossiness. Update: Yeah, my cell phone’s mic is prone to clipping and this Bluetooth route avoids that.

Is it better audio quality than I remember talking on the landline being? Sweden’s landline system had an overhaul in the early nineties and this sounds better than before the overhaul but worse than after the overhaul. It also sounds much better than the old cordless home phone my parents had as their last landline. My phone’s 4g which sounds pretty good. 1g and 2g sounded awful and this (even through BT HD) is miles better than that was.

Is it portable? No not yet because it requires electricity but I’m hoping maybe some power bank solution will be possible.

This specific phone was the first phone I ever used, in the eighties, so the nostalgia factor is huge. This is way more out of nostalgia and like coolness points than any actual practical benefits. Although whenever I try too hard to do hipstery or boomery things it’s much more likely that people will just think I’m a dork. But doing things that I think is cool is worth it even if no-one else does. It’s building a life that sparks joy.

Are there even any practical benefits? That’s a stretch but… It can remind me to do more things over the phone than over email? It’s like a more inviting way to use the phone? A habit shaping device? It’s much worse than the cellphone in one regard: I love pacing at home or doing chores or errands while on the cellphone while this one ties me to sitting in my rocking chair. The handset wire is really short. Yeah, it’s easy for me to use either or: talking through the cellphone normally still works, but this still invites me to not walk around as much when talking and that’s bad because of less exercise.

Also phone, any phone, is much worse than meeting up. And the best use of tech is to schedule meeting up. So if this makes be replace real life meetups with phone, that’s bad, but if it helps replace email with phone, that’s good. I guess I could hook it up to Jitsi or Signal instead of the phone net. That would require re-pairing since this model can only pair to one device at a time. (They had another model that could pair to four, but it didn’t have BT HD audio.) But even though it’s not an easy changeover I’m glad I have more than one use for this thing if I change my mind what I want to use it for. Update: Yeah, I’m using it enough. Just in the regular phone mode. I haven’t re-paired to the tablet for shenanigans, I just keep it paired to the dumbphone and use it as a phone. I think a typical week I use it probably twenty times or so.

For people who are on smartphone this would make a lot of sense. Set up a focus profile that only lets calls through and lock your phone in a drawer when you get home. But for dumbphone users it’s a li’l bit hat on a hat.

The rotary dial works, I can dial numbers and it calls them, or I can just dial from the cellphone’s address book, that also works, nd that’s what I usually do. I.e. I pick up the receiver, and with my other hand open the dumb cell phone and select the contact on it. There’s a feature where with a hook flash you can get Siri (or whatever Android’s Siri is called) on the line for voice dialing or scheduling appointments and stuff but, not me because my cellphone doesn’t have anything like that! 🤦🏻‍♀️ That’s another reason for why this would be even more appealing for a smartphone user (with the “put the smartphone in a box” plan); I can’t as easily put my dumbphone away since my dumbphone doesn’t support any voice dialing or speeddialing type stuff.

Most of all this serves as a reaffirmation for me that I hate smartphone. Ludditism as an art form. It wasn’t enough to get a crappy overpriced hipster cellphone (Light, fix the bugs and you’ll get a good review from me. I like the design. I just don’t like the bugs. Update: Light fixed the bugs and I now like my Light Phone), I had to LARP as a landline user at home. And it is a LARP because it only builds on top of cellphone tech, it doesn’t take anything away so it’s not really ludditism or minimalism. Just another gadget. 😔

But sometimes a LARP is the only way to live the dream. 😌

And when my friend calls me, a real mechanical bell rings and all I have to do to answer is to pick it up and I get to sit down with some tea and a real handset for a relaxing chat.

I use mine all the time. Really happy with it. I keep lists of topics to talk to people about.

The calendar emoji is useless and misleading since the example date is so clearly readable 📆 that people don’t understand that it’s an ipsum. Even people who know can misread it. It’s only good if you’re actually talking about literally July 17th (WhatsApp can go to heck).

Setting it to today’s date doesn’t make sense either, because so often I want to say “it’s a date”.

If you could set any number via a ZWJ sequence and the month would be the month of Squiggly Lorem (or also settable if we had 43 designs) that’d be great.

In digital minimalism I’m always like “could people in 1978 do this?” Could they send letters and place calls? Then it’s okay that I use the digital equivalent of that. Were they always reachable? Nope. So then it’s okay that I walk away from internet sometimes. Could they listen to headphones? Maybe not audio books on tape then outside of the home (no walkman yet), but certainly pocket radios. Could they read on the train? Yes, but, slow media like books and comics. No reco algos. Were there discussion forums? Yes, in magazines, you could write in, but a lot of it was hobby clubs or study circles in real life.

I chose 1978 not because it was a good time or people were happy. They weren’t. It was hard times but people were taking that seriously in a way that I appreciate. I chose it because while I was born two years later, in 1980, my mom’s magazine collection (which I have read and reread many times) start in 1978 so it’s the oldest history that I am thoroughly familiar with.

It’s not that bad of a date to choose because it’s before personal computers, before Internet, before the right-wing hegemony, and the death of democratic socialism and of collectivism, enduring the second (1979) oil crisis. The family had one TV (not that anything good was on) and one phone and it was meant to last you for years and years and years.

But I don’t always use that date; I sometimes daydream of how something would be done in the 1800s or in medieval times or late sixties or in the twenties (or even in fantasy books or retro science fiction like Earthsea or Way Station). With less info to go on outside of pop culture or historical depictions.

I’m only talking tech level here, not political values. Respect for human dignity has come a long way since then (and has a long way left to go).

Now, I don’t wanna overstate this “retro” rule of thumb. It’s not my only or even main approach to thinking about this stuff. It’s just one more tool in the minimalist’s mental toolbox. (Like how Francine Jay has her “Lightly” principle which I also try to keep in mind.) And I certainly don’t live up to the principle very well or thoroughly. I’m better at daydreaming about luddite stuff than actually living it out.

It’s just a thought that really appeals to me.

It gets a little complicated because I grew up rurally and then lived in a tiny fully walkable city during the modem era (I got my first modem when I moved) and then moved to a huge city coinciding with buying my first smartphone. So it’s not always just possible to just go back to how I used to do it.

As a child rurally I’d cut class and sit under a tree and sing or draw or read or wander the woods and backlots on bike or on foot.

In the small town I’d just visit my friends spontaneously, doorbell sans phone bell. (They didn’t live that close to me but pretty close to each other so if one wasn’t home another probably would be.) But also sometimes have day long phone convos. I got a huge extension cord for my land line (local calls had recently became unmetered in the early 00s; I wish they had been during the IRC era because that would’ve saved me a lot of money) and sometimes spend twelve hours on the phone hanging out with one person in our separate places. Modems and unmetered phone calls weren’t around in the seventies. In hindsight it probably would’ve just been better to actually meet up and spend the day together but I wasn’t doing this anti tech thing back then. I was late in getting cell phone but I had Walkman and Game Boy. I hated real life and did everything I could to dial up, dial out, zone out.

And then the big city I never got to experience how it was pre tech. It probably would have been an unbearably lonely existance for me (although I remember before getting my own place I’d often spend the entire day in the library). So it’s not just a simple matter of turning back the clock exactly. I guess that’s the difference between retro (which means “looking back from the present”) and the actual past as it was experienced then without hindsight.

I guess that’s why minimalism (as little as possible but no less) rather than digital nothingness which is more appealing but is something I’m nowhere near yet.

And why do this instead of adapting to using tech in a more healthy way? Rewinds don’t work and you can’t uninvent things. Yeah, this isn’t gonna work long-term but it’s a way to clear my mind and thoughts and try to gather inspiration to figure out a new way to tackle the problem. “When you’re in a bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think of how you got started working in a little room.”

I’ve said before that switching to headphones gives five percent of the benefits (attention, awareness, mindfulness) that going fully phoneless would give for one percent of the effort which is a 400% savings that I’ve applied in my own life and I more often than not (but not always) had headphones with a podcast, an audio book, or music.

What I mean by the one percent, five percent thing is this: I feel that switching from screen to headphones is only 1% more boring, but it made me 5% closer to becoming aware and enlightened. I.e. I was disproportionally rewarded and felt like that was a fivefold win.

But.

I see a lot of people with both. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Both headphones on and staring into glowyglowy.

So that’s 195% of the badness of phones. Almost twice as bad. Good job. 😭 Might as well strap on a VR helmet, oven mitts, and a ballgag at that point.

Enh, I realize I’m being judgy rather than constructive or solution oriented. Just so sick of glowyglowy.

Okay before we get into it let’s first acknowledge that 99% of the people using the -misia suffix are well-meaning and good and kind and are only doing it because someone they trust told them to. And the 1% who are the ones actively pushing for it are probably also well-meaning and good and kind and it’s not out of malice that they’re doing it.

So if you see someone write -misia just let it slide and don’t correct them and don’t go after them. They’re good. Let them keep doing it. It’s okay. Do not be a jerk and go after the few people out there who are actively making a hard effort to help make the word better. Absolutely do not make this essay fuel that. Go after the homophobes, not the people who write “homomisia”. But if you see someone writing -phobia here’s why that’s okay and why you shouldn’t go after them, either.

Misia is ableist bull

Out of the arguments I’m gonna present here, this is the real one. Avoiding phobia out of some sorta eggshell notion that people who are afraid of spiders and leaves and the dark and heigths and crowds and confined spaces and other things would get hurt is a cruel caricature of them, or that there is an actual risk of them being read as hateful. “Oh you have a fear of dogs how dare you! You’re just as bad as a homophobe or an islamophobe or a transphobe!” That’s not happening. That assumption is what’s hurtful.

Separate words that have similar-sounding last halves are okay. We can know that a shellfish isn’t a lungfish or featherlight isn’t conflated with starlight. And know that homophobia is fundamentally different from arachnophobia.

Yes, the following is happening, especially in the past: ignorant homophobes trying to be silly or obtuse or know-it-all-y try to use the counter-argument that “I’m not fearful, just hateful”. But first of all, why cede even an inch to them to accommodate that, second of all, okay, so they’re admitting it, third and by far the most importantly the problem with them isn’t the word for them. It’s the hate, not the appellation of the hate, that’s the problem.

Speaking of the hate… Some of the pro “let’s call it -misia” essays I’ve seen have been like “oh those poor arachnophobes they can’t help it but the haters, they are absolutely willful and 100% guilty and completely informed”. That doesn’t seem right with me since I believe a lot of the hateful bigots out there really are ignorant and misinformed and have fallen for very expensive, very effective hate campaigns driven by wedge issue fascists and fossil billionaires.

There actually is a fear component

Not every time. But sometimes there is an aspect of revulsion or anxiety and worry. Or misconceptions and conspiracy theories. Awareness is part of getting over it.

Mangling the language

Out of the four, this one is certainly the least important and more on a pet peeve level, but phobia is actually a Greek word (φόβία is a quality declension of φόβος) and misia is just a new-fangled mangling of μῖσος. Now, long time readers of this web page know that if the purpose is good, I love wordmangling. And I’ve unfortunately taken a vow of descriptivism, not prescriptivism (when I studied linguistics. Worst education ever). If people start calling it -misia then that is what is called and I neither want to or can change that.

We already had alternatives

Lastly, we already had “heterosexism” and “cissexism” and “anti-Islam sentiment”. There were other words already. Not that it matters or that it hurts that we now have a third word for it thanks to the “-misia” pundits. Nouns are an open word class so the more the merrier. I can think it’s an ugly and (pardon the triple entendre) hateful word but I can get over it. Conclusion: let people who say misia say misia and people who say phobia say phobia.

Kan vi inte drastiskt skära ner på reklamen i det offentliga rummet så som dom stora plancherna i busskurer och dom vidriga tevesskärmarna i tunnelbanan nu när dom som vill ha reklam har det sina fickapparater? Snälla 😭 vi kunde bli så lyckliga i en stad som är mer vacker, levande, harmonisk, och inte hela tiden dränkt av köphets och stress och slitochsläng och trender. Dom som tycker om reklamen kan ju få det när dom vill genom att bara stoppa handen i fickan och dra fram den oändliga historien av prylar & stilar & dealar medan vi griniga åttiotalstanter kan dra en lättnadens suck. Klimatkrisen går ändå inte att shoppa bort så låt åtminstone vårt gemensamma blickfält slippa sponsra tillväxtlämmeltågets speedrun mot det slipade svärdet. 💸🗡️

När jag var liten var det olagligt att sända reklam på radion och teven. Att folk kunde stänga av eller kolla på andra kanaler ändrade inte det.

Nu är det istället obligatoriskt att kolla på det. På reklamteveapparaterna vid busshållsplatsen. Apparater som är tre gånger större än den största teven jag nånsin sett. Trots att folk har reklammottagare i fickan. Miniapparater som också är obligatoriska för att få kontakt med sjukvård och bostad och bank.

För vi lever i en sjuk värld. En värld jag inte vill vara i.

På [fulinternet tycker folk att det ska vara mer reklam istället]ftfadsvmri.

Ett mikroekonomiskt perspektiv som inte ser samhällsbyggarskogen för alla transaktionsträd. “Jag skulle vilja sluta rök–” “Nej jag vill ha konstanta cigaretter istället för då skulle jag inte behöva tändare bara kunna tända nästa på förra ciggens fimp!”

Reklam är inte gratis resurser. Tvärt om. Det går åt tid och jobb och resurser att sätta upp och byta ut dom där skyltarna och tavlorna och att producera dom där filmerna och jinglarna. Det är knegare som tvingas göra det (för att få mat och tak). Och dom som blir rika är annonsbolagen och annonsörerna.

Hi, this is Mr. Gimmick!

As you can see he’s pretty small. That’s because he was made in 1992 for a NES game with 240p resolution.

If we wanna play his game on screens with higher resolution, we have two options. Scale him up, or, make our screen emulate a lower-resolution screen.

Scale him up

The fun thing about scaling him up is that there’s all this information in between the pixels that is unknown to us:

There’s lots of options of how to fill in those gaps. Build him out of triangles, or blurry circles, or try to interpolate and recreate an underlying drawing the way a DAC turns audio samples into sound, like ScaleFX does. You might have seen this option: building him out of big squares:

That’s not necessarily the default or only approach. That is one specific algorithm called “nearest neighbor”. Each empty pixel is given the color of the nearest “real” pixel.

Importantly, there’s no single one answer how the artists who made each game would want their work scaled up. Super Mario Bros. 1 was made on graph paper, which Super Mario All-Stars was made to reflect with its assumptions that pixels are square. While Chrono Trigger was made for wide pixels, by artists that knew how the TVs of the time would display that game. But that’s just two games. The creators of those games left clues in the game (by clues I mean the coin logo in All-Stars, and the moon background in Chrono Trigger) on how they were making the art for their games. For most other games we just have no idea.

It’s okay that you, the player, set the game to look in a way that you yourself feel is comfortable to play and lets you enjoy the game.

ScaleFX which is less blocky and more vectory is to me a very relaxing and inviting look for 8bit games, especially new-to-me ones where there’s less need for nostalgia. It just makes me wanna play the games for hours. (I haven’t found a scaler for SNES and Mega Drive I like as much. I do use ScaleFX after an mdapt pass on them first, but it doesn’t as feel as 💯 as it does on say SG-1000 games or Master System.) ScaleFX doesn’t move around or melt or distort any of the real pixel data. It just makes different assumptions on how to fill the gaps between them, by a more detailed interpolation algo than just big blocks.

Emulate a screen

The other approach is to turn your screen into a lower-resolution screen instead, by emulating exactly how that older screen would look through a magnifying glass. NES and SNES famously used a “double-strike” rendering method which made it look like there’s black lines between the scanlines. And pixels weren’t square, they looked like sideways glowing ellipses almost. While on older Game Boy systems you can see a small cell divider between each square in the matrix.

I’m really grateful for this approach because sometimes nothing beats that magic nostalgic feeling of looking at the video game the way it looked back in the day, or if you really do prefer a CRT screen but can’t have one for space reasons this can be a way to make what you have look like what you want.

But I’m really sick of the approach online that this is the only way and that all other approaches is “destroying” the games; it’s 100% fine if you personally treasure the screen emulation approach but the level of vitriol and attacks against the scaling approaches is what’s not as welcome.

In the CRT era and the original DMG-001 era, I loved the games but they were so tiring. I’m grateful can emulate that look for the occasional nostalgia hit but I don’t want to make it my bread and butter. I was so grateful when TFT LCDs came around! I personally liked the GBC and original GBA so much more than gaming on a CRT.

Screen emulation also kind of assumes that the screen that is doing the emulating is some sort of platonic neutral that doesn’t have any traits of its own. I’ve seen expensive high-end FPGA Game Boy clones advertising a 615 PPI resolution vibrant IPS screen… and then it defaults to emulating the blurry old dot matrix green yellow retro screen that so many people hated back in the day! I personally kinda liked the original Game Boy screen unlike CRTs. Not sure I’d be able to go back to it though. It’s funny how many hours I logged on the original DMG Game Boy, then after Game Boy Pocket I couldn’t go back, and then after GBC I couldn’t even go back to the GBP (even though I tried a couple of times because my GBC had a DC hum audio problem, as did my GBA, a problem that my DMG and GBP didn’t have).

Newly made screens can also have all kinds of interesting traits, like they might be RLCD or even memory displays, or someone might be gaming on an actual CRT. Scaling up the game in a way that suits your screen might be the best or only option then.

Preservation vs nostalgia vs play

When we try to preserve classic movies we don’t always try to add extra film grain or lower the framerate to the silent era’s 16 FPS or jam extra chromatic aberration and VHS tracking errors onto it. We just want the movie itself.

Sure, movie players can add that kind of stuff or we see those kinds of effects be valuable for flashback scenes or a retro vibe (just as how in indie games pixel art is often great for low-memory, smaller artist teams etc along with the aforementioned nostalgia hit), but when you just want the movie and just wanna watch the movie for the movie’s sake, no-one is gonna bite your head off saying “you’re destroying the movie”. (Outside of that one HBomb video when he tried to convince everyone to go back to VHS tapes for movies.)

There’s also some value in hybrid approaches. The Sega Mega Drive famously had an issue where transparency effects wouldn’t work on an RGB TV connection, only on composite, at the expense of color fidelity, but with mdapt+RGB you can get some of the best of both worlds. Or, people from the scale-up side of things can have fun with some glowies or other effects originally created for screen emulation.

Point I’m trying to make here is as per ushe that we’re condemned to choose; that we can case-by-case it. You can use one setup on your handheld and your daughter can use another on her TV. Or even different setups for different games or even different moods.

The “endless scroll” debate was after it replaced pages where you’d scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click. That was annoying while still not actually stemming addiction (at least for me). I’d still read through those megathreads on RPG.net, UI annoyances or no. The endless scroll it just took the clicks out of that process which was an improvement. But what I want is instead taking scrolls out of the process! So it’s tap, tap, tap, tap—like an ebook!

Probably going to be just as addictive but I won’t get anxiety from all the scrolling.

Scrolling and panning is fiddly and I never get exactly the right amount of page scrolled it’s like threding a needle repeatedly and most psge down algos are no good either since they’re paging in a text format that’s not designed for pages so you have to read the same couple of lines twice, last on this page and first on the next. So in the future maybe we’ll render HTML as actual pages (after all, epub readers can [sorta] do it). Even less and more on Unix can do it; they show all of one page, then all of the next page separately and so on. The weaksauce nature of page down in GUI apps like Netscape was one of the biggest letdowns when I first started using them in the nineties.

However, the addiction dark pattern has another component; the endless and often junky content which really makes the scroll endless. That part can not stay.

That’s a secondary reason for why I don’t like discover algorithms on Mastodon, the primary reason being how it’s artificial virality.

Sometimes a movie that comes out later in the series takes place before the ones that came earlier. One of the best examples I could find was The Scorpion King 2. It’s got a number in the title, is intended to be watched after The Scorpion King pt 1, only makes sense if you watch it after, but takes place before.

I’m gonna call these kinds of movies “prequels”. Watch after, takes place before. Easy peasy. And there are many, many other examples of prequels without a number in the title. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind. Watch after Raiders of the Lost Ark but takes place before. (Or maybe don’t watch it. I’m maybe not the biggest fan of the two first Indy movies.)

Contrasted with them are “lost episodes”. Made after, or at least published after, but totally makes sense to be seen before. These are rarer.

I’m not going to police anyone else’s usage of these concepts, but please don’t “carrot and cigarette” me either: I am making a distinction between these two types of movies for the purpose of this essay only. “Takes place before but should be seen after” (prequels) vs “Takes place before and can, if you want, be seen before”, or even “should be seen before” (lost episodes). I need two words (and I went with “prequels” vs “lost episodes” here) for two concepts. But I don’t mean to from now on and for all time be the source of a bunch of “well actually” if other people use these words more loosely or even oppositely.

Okay, with definitions sorted, now it’s time for Star Wars talk! Yes, that’s right, as per ushe it’s the 50 year old science fantasy franchise that’s completely out of fashion and keeps losing money and I can’t stop talking about because I love it so much!

When Star Wars came out it had an “opening crawl” akin to the old Flash Gordon serials. “This is what has come before, this is what’s in the episodes you missed”. Then when the sequel came out, it wasn’t called Star Wars two. It was called Star Wars five! Episode V! And the original was rereleased with an “Episode IV” added in!

Then many years later episodes I, II, and III were made. I’m not here to pile on the hate against them. I’m personally not a fan of their look and atmosphere and the space ship designs in them or the milieus and world building but I love the characters. That’s right, I’m a Jar Jar Binks yaysayer! Okay, okay, Hayden sucks in II and III but he was just a kid, the director needs to have some responsibility too. And there are some dumb plot points here and there. Uh, wait, if I’m gonna start listing everything I don’t like about the prequels we’re gonna be here all day. Or if I’m gonna start defending them against totally unfair and exaggerated take downs like Plinkett then we’d also be here all days.

Let’s narrow it down to just “prequel” vs “lost episode” talk.

They suck as lost episodes. Completely do not do the job. In the eigthies, we were daydreaming about things from the past like those “clone wars” mr Obi-Wan was talking about (or was he a clone? His name sounds a li’l OB1-like!). Or I should say in the 90s from me because my first experience with the original Episode IV (outside of getting to hear a few glimpses of the audio book version from the older kids in the eighties—I was born in 1980) was the 1992 Game Boy game. That’s right, I first heard Cantina theme as a chip tune and it’s still caught in my head to this day. And it’s really cool that we got to see all this stuff finally. That scene especially when, uh, sorry, almost spoiled end of Episode III but it’s a scene I had heard about since 80s (yes, since before Game Boy game, in the “playground lore” era of my Star Wars experience).

They don’t work as lost episodes. You’re supposed to watch IV and V before I, II, and III, and given that, the title scheme is indulgent and dumb. Why don’t they work? Because not only do they spoil a couple of key beats of the original prequel, they undermine so many more. It’s really cool when such-and-such first show up but it’s less cool when you’ve seen a way more baller version of them in the preq, or even when it’s a way dorkier version of them as it in some cases!

So, not hating on the preqs, but just saying there’s a reason why IV, V, VI is called the original trilogy and that I, II, and III is called the prequel trilogy. If they had been made as true lost episodes, maybe they would’ve gotten the appellation “original trilogy”. Origin of the story, first three episodes. And then IV, V, and VI would’ve been called the “Luke trilogy” or something. But obviously that didn’t happen because the prequels are not lost episodes in this sense.

Neither is Solo. It’s a prequel. It’s Han Solo’s origin story, it’s a movie I really enjoy, have watched it a bunch of times and look forward to watching it again, but it’s full of in-jokes that’s gonna be way more fun if you’ve seen the original movies first and vice versa it spoils and undermines a couple of beats from them.

Now, how about Andor and Rogue One? They’re lost episodes. Not only do they fill in the gap of what happened in the opening crawl of episode IV, which a prequel could also have done, they really do work as lost episodes. They don’t spoil or undermine a single character. All things that are chilling or amazing when they first show up in the original movies? That’s just built up in Andor and Rogue One, not torn down or deconstructed or outshone. I did find one single counter example and that’s the AT-AT. That’s the sole undermined thing. A vehicle that’s supposed to look cool when you first see it, and you get now that reaction in Rogue One rather than in Empire. Contrasted with the millions of things that’d be spoiled or undermined by watching preqs first, both the quantity and the magnitude of those things. Other things that are in Andor or Rogue One but show up in the original trilogy, they’re only made even more fearsome by their depictions in Andor and Rogue One.

It’s lost-episode-recursion since Rogue One is a lost episode to what was made and published before it (episode IV), and then Andor is a lost episode again, this time to Rogue One. And Andor is a true lost episode (rather than just a prequel) to Rogue One and then the whole package is a true lost episode to Episode IV. You can watch the three (the Andor series as a whole, Rogue One, and then the original 1977 Star Wars later numbered “episode IV”) in any order and they’ll make sense and not ruin anything, and they things you recognize from what you saw before is only going to make what you see after more awesome. If you want chronological order, i.e. Andor first, then Rogue One, then Episode IV? It works. Five out of the six possible permutations (AR4, RA4, 4RA, R4A, to a lesser extent 4AR, and probably not A4R) work as rewarding first-watch-orders. It’s great. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Now, there’s one really good reason to do publication order, and that’s demographic. Star Wars (1977) is a pew pew space opera with wide appeal. Andor is a grown-up John le Carré, Patricia Highsmith, Jean-Paul Sartre slow-moving high-stakes, “gritty” story in the grim darkness of the faraway galaxy where there is only war. It’s too cruel, it’s too scary, it’s too subtle sometimes, it’s too intense other times. I think Andor is the best show ever made and Rogue One is a perfect movie. But I’m not sure they have the same wide appeal as Star Wars did that summer of 1977. I’ve heard Andor called a boring show and it lost a ton of money. Which, while it’s always great to hear about megacorporations losing money, says something about the limited audience for it. Don’t mistake that as “I’m such a special girl for liking hard-to-like things” bragging. I’m not happy about being a weirdo. I never signed up for it.

When Swedish people talk about their currency SEK in English, informally and causally they are more likely to call it crowns as I grew up doing than “krona” which I see native anglophones do.

In Swedish, sure, it’s called derivations of “krona” (most often the plural, “kronor”, we’d only write “krona” when it’s exactly one. 0.9 kronor, 1.1 kronor, 1 krona.); here, I’m musing about what it’s called in English.

I only see krona in US/UK media and it weirds me out so much. Swedes would more formally write “SEK” once they’re too posh and too educated to translate it “crowns”. Writing “krona” in English is like a reverse shibboleth.

Now this doesn’t translate to calling ören “ears” though, that’s just me being playful if you see me doing that. “Ören” has nothing etymologically to do with ears (“öron”), the true origin is unknown but thought to be from the latin for gold.

Unlike krona which really is tied up to the idea of a king’s crown. It’s a polyseme most Swedes wouldn’t even think of as a polyseme, it just feels like one word. Some crowns you can pay with, other crowns you can wear.

Polysemy refresher

When two words are spelled and pronounced the same but they actually started out as the same word, that’s a polyseme.

When they’re spelled and pronounced the same but have completely different origin, that’s a homonym.

And then homophones sound the same but are spelled different, and then vice versa for homographs (which Swedish has a lot of).

So crowns are definitively not just a homonym, I’m not even sure they’re a polyseme—it’s not two different words, it just is the same word still. That’s why translating the name of the currency to “crowns” or “coronas” comes so natural to L1 Swedes when they’re just starting out in English or Spanish.

Inger skickade en krönika av Anders Svensson:

Ordningssinnet var det kanske sisådär med. Men strategisk vaghet behärskade Henrik Landerholm: ”Dokumentet hittades och hämtades av en av mina medarbetare”, skrev han på X när det visat sig att information som rörde Sveriges säkerhet glömts i ett skåp på en kursgård. […]

Innan utredningen hunnit så långt försökte han få allmänheten att dra en lättnadens suck. Han gjorde det med hjälp av passiva verbformer. Det var två saker som skedde – dokumentet hittades och hämtades – och det fanns en – som det heter på språkvetenskapiska – agent i form av en medarbetare som gjorde något. Agenten dök upp sist i meningen och hade åtminstone hämtat dokumentet.

Ja nej nu måste jag på mina lingvistikvantar här för det är ingen “I saw the man in the park with the telescope” ambiguitet här direkt, för att ta ett av dom klassiska exemplen jag dammade av när jag skrev min avhandling.

Skriver man “Dokumentet hittades och hämtades av en av mina medarbetare” betyder det att medarbetaren var den som både hittade och hämtade dokumentet och var det inte så är det en lögn eller klantig felsägning.

Ja, jo, jag vet att det är inte som på lojbanska språket där det verkligen finns olika ord för “och”.

le papri cu terfa'i je selcpa le mi sidju

Betyder “dokumentet [hittades&hämtades] av min assistent”.

le papri cu terfa'i gi'e selcpa le mi sidju

Betyder “Dokumentet hittades. Punkt. Det hämtades också, och det var det min assistent som gjorde.”

(Ordet som skiljer är “je”/”gi’e” där je är en predikatkonjunktion medan gi’e är en predikatsvanskonjunktion.)

Så ja jo på nördespråket finns det ännu pilligare distinktioner men det kan moderaterna inte skylla på eftersom på svenska språket har vi den kooperativa principen.

Jag har haft empati för den här snubben för han verkar vara en riktig ADHD-snurrskalle och det kan jag verkligen sympatisera med. Men mörkläggandet finns det inga såna ursäkter för.

Språklig vaghet är en riktig grej eller “semantisk tvetydighet” som det hette förut men i den meningen det gäller här är det verkligen att dra dom tekniska definitionerna av orden till sin yttersta spets. Det mänskliga örat är inte en trädparser, Chomskys teori om dom “syntaktiska strukturerna” är sedan länge besegrad. Vi har ett mischmasch till språk och då blir dom griceanska maximerna livsviktiga. Att förkasta dom blir att ge upp svenskan helt.

Jag säger inte nej till att det går att felsäga sig och råka säga “hittades och hämtades av…” när man menar “hittades, punkt. Och hämtades, och för hämtningen stod…”

Landerholm har formulerat sig på ett sätt som ger honom “plausible deniability” till att vara en total språklig klantskalle. Om man nu vill kalla det strategiskt…

I’ve noticed different comics publishing houses romanizing the former fashion trend ギャル differently. “Gal”, “flashy gal”, and “gyaru”. “Gal” is the most accurate. It’s what many Japanese brands, magazines, and other writers use.

“Gyaru” is what I see most often in comics translated to English. I do understand that there’s a little bit of value in sticking to Hepburn and a lot of value of having a unique, easily searchable, unadmbiguous word. A lot of comics these days don’t have any kind of note or annotation for words like gyaru or otaku, trusting their readers to if they don’t know what it is, they can look it up.

But I still really bristle at “gyaru” and in general at using Hepburn for English words. Same as I how never call the Ring novel and movie “Ringu”. It feels kind of patronizing to the Japanese language and exaggerates the “Engrish” vibes as if they’re not capable of ordinary loan words and code switching like any other language.

Yes, the syllabary makes it spelled “ギャ”: “gya”, “ル”: “ru” when using katakana. That’s just how katakana works. The way to spell “gal” with katakana is “ギャル”. If you then try to “re-translate” that lossily and interpret it as “gyaru” it’s kind of a… slag? on the roundtrip capabilities of katakana.

That becomes exacerbated when some English speakers then overemphasize those roundtrip artifacts, saying “gyaaaa-RU”, “rin-GU” instead of “gal”, “ring”.

Thankfully this doesn’t extend to every word; I’m glad, for example, that omurice is never spelled “omuraisu” in English.

It might be that this is a losing battle at this point, that “gyaru” is such a stock character already in translated comics. It’s like commedia dell’arte. You have your introverts, your nerds, your flashy gals, your jocks, and you want unambiguous lexical shorthands for them.

Like all linguists I made a vow of descriptivism, not prescriptivism, when I went to school but days like these I really wanna kick myself for taking on that burdensome oath since I want to recommend translators use “gal” or “flashy gal” over “gyaru”. If I were a pure descriptivist, I’d have to say “gyaru” since that’s where the winds seems to be blowing (I haven’t actually done a corpus count, it’s just what I notice more often when reading Japanese comics translated into English). It’s much less accurate to Japanese but more accurate to choices other translators have already made and maybe there’s some value to consistency.

It still warms my heart when I see a publishing house or translator spell it “gal”. “Flashy gal” is a fun compromise, too. It’s not called that in Japanese but it’s a noun phrase that’s distinct enough to be disambiguated from just the English slang word for “girl”. But I think just “gal” is okay. Just like “punk” means both punk (generally) and punk (the 70s fashion trend) in English and care and context can disambiguate them.

Maybe “gal” can coat-tail on the path formed by writing “gyaru”? Like, a critical mass of readers have already encountered “gyaru” and the explanation “a fashion trend based on the English word ‘gal’” enough times for them to the spelling to change to “gal” and it still might work.