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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Unfriendly? Fuck you. We’re wicked nice.

    First time I visited Boston, I was lost somewhere in downtown and walking in circles. Must have passed a postman one too many times because he just briskly walks up to me and, gesturing with a handful of mail, abruptly asks, “whadaya, fuckin lost?”

    He then proceeded to give me very clear and accurate directions to where I was going.


  • Yeah, jive isn’t the offensive part; the appropriation mixed with the racist slur is.

    Jive is a set of slang or cant originating from NY jazz culture, specifically Harlem. Jive was a “cool” way of speaking; we owe the word hipster to jive (hep-cats became hepsters became hipsters).

    Jive-ass is just an adjective meaning useless, worthless, or full of shit. A way less offensive variation is jive-ass turkey i.e. a bullshitter. Probably stems from jive speakers using jive to hustle or exclude outsiders from the conversation.

    I think it would be safe to say that jive is a subset of AAVE, but not an equivalent term. AAVE is recognized as the official dialect but jive is specifically tied to music, region, and time period.

    FWIW, I think the humor of the Airplane! jive scene is twofold: 1) it demonstrates how mainstream both jazz and jive had become by the 70s (to point that old white ladies got it) and, 2) the the implication that jive speakers couldn’t understand regular American English and were in need of translation.



  • I have to use Windows and Teams for work and I’m starting to feel like a computer historian or an operating system archeologist every time I use my work PC.

    Someone called me directly on Teams the other day and the old Skype ringtone played; now I already knew that MS absorbed Skype but it was weird because the actual ringtone is sort of low-fi, like it’s probably the same 20 year old .wav file.

    I’m pretty sure the new W11 file explorer is just Edge which is just Chrome.

    I feel like I’m looking at geological layers whenever I dive into OS settings.

    Some window skins are clearly from Vista.

    Aesthetically it is a nightmare, but it also clearly demonstrates that W11 is six operating systems in a trenchcoat.