Seeing all these people on tiktok having to use digits instead of letters and typing “seggsey” to get past the app’s censors really makes me thing of Bearville.
Like, I’m not sure how many people remember Build-a-Bear Workshop’s MMORPG, but the chat function was a very open free type style (kind of like club penguin) with the exception that the censors were INSANE.
Like at first, people were just kind of substituting words like in tiktok, except you could only use words that the computer recognized as words, so alternate spellings were out of the question. Let’s take “sex” for example. As the middle school kids we were, we just swapped it with a permitted dictionary word.
Sex becomes “sat”. “I heard my parents having sat.”
But THEN the computer or whoever was monitoring an online game directed at kids starting picking up that the word was being used in certain contexts, and shut it down. After this, you couldn’t use “have” before almost any verbs without getting your message blocked as potentially sensitive.
Enter the completely useless invented particle “ds”. I don’t know why this was in the dictionary, maybe because of Nintendo, but we quickly discovered that ds was allowed almost anywhere as a minimally sensitive word. It could be thrown in to break any pattern.
“I heard my parents having sat” becomes “I heard my parents having ds sat.” Ds was a word used as a punctuation mark whose sole function was to throw off an AI’s sentence recognition. And it’s function was spread only by word of mouth from child to child for who knows how long, and accepted into the Bearville vernacular. When I was new, I even asked a few friends what it meant. Their reply:
“Ds means nothing. It’s for computer.”
I really wish I remember more of my middle school exploits on Bearville before they shut it down, or had the time and sense to study and write down some of it, because the natural state of kids when left alone in Lord of the Flies style isn’t to kill each other—it’s to adapt as a group, and to randomly ask other people if they want to be their gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.
So part of me wants to cringe when I see “seggsey”, but the anthropologist in me really wants to watch a generation create another dystopian esoteric dialect to evade our robot overlords.
1) The questions are random dollar store questions about your favorite color and the last food you ate, and the results rip you open and describe every last detail of your soul
2) The questions are deep, thought-provoking scenarios that require careful consideration and take you on an emotional journey, and the results are like. Rickroll and Onceler.
Every time I see posts from writers about small progress or procrastination, I think about this image, and it makes me smile for hours.
KJSKJDKJD okay but that meme.... my guy. my dude. im just saying, brando sando wrote four secret books, because he felt like it. i think the only writing-related research good ol' GRRM has done is how the process of posthumous book series completion works.
thanks myn, this is indeed gonna keep me smiling for at least the rest of the day
For context, leading up to this chapter, the Israelites-previously led by judges, with God as their king-decided that they wanted a human king. Now, in chapter 9, we meet the young man who will become the first human king of Israel: Saul.
The chapter describes him as impressive; "There was no one more impressive among the Israelites than he."
It also describes him as standing "a head taller than anyone else."
So what I'm getting at is, when Samuel was given the responsibility to anoint a king, rather than anointing anyone else in Israel, he anointed the
“Nope” is such an amazing movie! It has a great cast, a fantastic script and some incredible social commentary that’s very reminiscent of our world. However, I’m shocked that nobody has pointed out the very strange writing choice they made in terms of Jean Jacket’s catchphrase. Very surprised no one has talked about it yet anytime JJ showed up on screen and said:
Kinda weird they went with that, but who am I to question the creative process?? Anyways, thought I’d point that out for y’all!