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Yesss, I just Le Guin pilled someone last week. Fingers crossed they read it. They asked me for a general book list and chose one of hers from it.
Same! I snuck up behind and choke-holded them with Wizard until they passed out from Ged overdose, and then I crammed Atuan into each and every orifice before I left them for dead.
I can’t wait to have a new book bestie!
While I recognize the humor, I wish I had a book bestie.
😂
i recently read through the series and now i only have the last short story left– and i don’t want to finish it becuase then it’ll be over :(
so few authors manage to make me sad this way
The ones who walk away from Omelas is one of my favorite stories. Powerful metaphor, that.
God she was an epic baller of a person too. An amazing personal story and she herself was a deep well of insight and compassionate wisdom. It comes through in most everything she wrote or said.
Its currently sitting in my library app, but I’m bracing myself because of how hard the left hand if darkness broke me
I read that story like 20 years ago and I still think about it all the time.
i don’t know if it was intentional, but one of Expedition 33’s endings gave me vibes of that story
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humans sent off some unwanted people, no scientists, to another planet
Telephone sanitizers?
That’s just the “B” ark. Ah. But I forget about the mutant star goat.
Are those people? Are they unwanted?
Idk, someone’s gotta clean those things. I would’ve gone with telemarketers tbh. Those mfs can all be sent to mars for all I care.
Even if they were on Mars, I bet they’d still try to call us.
Only until the entire race contracts a nasty virulent disease from a dirty telephone.
It’s funny, as I got older I became kind of a germaphobe. (Like I’m usually carrying a pack of antibacterial wipes.)
When I was young payphones were still a thing. And I used them frequently. I couldn’t see myself doing that now. I have to wonder if people got weird ear diseases or ear infections from those things. I don’t remember any stories about it. Though it seems like the kind of thing that would become an urban legend.
Ursula
Ursulandia and NoUrsulandia ?
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There is a clear thematic connection here, but when I started reading your comment I thought you were going to say it was because “Ursula” resembled “Ursus.”
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Yeah, it should be translated to Bearable and Unbearable.
Bare and barenaked
Just wait until they realize we named everything in space after milk.
“And your sun system is located in the milky milk?”
Our Sun is a Sun, not THE sun but The Sun
Not everything
… But yeah, a crazy number of things relate to dairy.
Space bird:
Took me too long to remember “Arctic” and “Antarctic” and I kept wondering how “North Pole / South Pole” translated to “Bearlandia / NoBearlandia”
In Chinese (I mean like most dialects), North Pole is just 北极 (“Northern Extreme”), South Pole is 南极 (“Southern Extreme”). Arctic is just 北极 with the extra character 地区 meaning area (“Northern Extreme Area”), Antartica is 南极洲 (“Southern Extreme Continent”).
There’s no weird etymology involving bears lol
Maybe we should let someone from China or Taiwan contact the aliens?
Someone once told me that the Chinese word for penguin translated to “business goose” and I cannot tell you how crestfallen I was when I looked it up and found out it wasn’t true.
I mean “企” character by itself isn’t really a word, but maybe the person thought of 企业 (Enterprise/Bussiness), which I would say technically that person isn’t like lying, just a misunderstanding of language.
But then again, I’ve only attended primary school grade-levels in China, so I’m no word expert either.
Penguins are called 企鵝/企鹅 (qì’é, [tɕʰi˥˩ ɤ˧˥]) in Chinese. It would be better literally translated as standing goose. It just so happens to share the same character 企 with the word for business. Most people don’t know that 企 means standing anymore though.
Read Three Body Problem if you wanna know how that goes
Tbf she was an alien-worshipping cultist (cult wasn’t technically founded at the time, but she had the mindset of a cultist)
She sorta was the cult leader, iirc the aliens didn’t understand humans and trusted her organisation to decide how to get things done (at least until they finally realise how humans actually work and decide to just shut it all down), so the cult was probably her idea
Heh, I understood this obscure sci-fi joke!
I wouldn’t call three body obscure
You’d be surprised. I’ve got some friends who read all the time, including (but not exclusively) sci-fi, and they had never heard of it
Maybe we should let someone from China contact the aliens?
FTFY
That’s what they said
They removed Taiwan…
We should let Taiwan or western Taiwan contact the aliens first.
Occupied mainland Taiwan
Taiwan’s official name, that their government calls itself, is “the republic of china”, “china” covers both places just fine.
Just wait until they hear about Virginland.
Gonna need you to be more specific about that. We have a lot of virginlands in the Americas
Wyoming
Fun fact, Wyoming gets it’s name from the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania, and is a Delaware word for “big plain” in reference ti a river’s flood plain.
They’re actually called penguinland and no-penguinland
…didn’t i just see something about ursus arctos arctos?..
It’s common courtesy to tell others of bear sightings.
BEHIND YOU!!!
A three headed monkey?
Yup. There was a meme about some bear (the european brown bear, maybe?) that was more bear than other bears, because it’s latin name (as you pointed out) is literally bear bear bear.
I don’t know about you, but I learned the Greek part the other day in Dadjokes, something like why don’t penguins worry about polar bears? Because they’re polar opposites!
…snort…
TIL what “Arctic” means.
I love the bear monkeys
Nah, isn’t it more Towardsbearland and Awayfrombearland?
Arktos means bear in Ancient Greek and the name Arctic comes from Arktikos which could be translated as near the bear. One theory is that it was named because of the Ursa constellations (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor). Antarctica just means opposite of the Arctic.
The scientific name for Brown Bears is Ursus Arctos. Ursus means bear in Latin while Arctos means bear in Ancient Greek so their name translated is Bear Bear.
And then there’s the grizzly bear, ursus arctos horribilis, horrible bear bear. My favourite part is that ‘horribilis’ is a mistranslation from English into Latin; ‘grisly’ is synonymous with ‘horrible’, but ‘grizzly’ actually means ‘greyish’
Edit: Ursus arctos griseus or Ursus arctos canescens would be the most likely names of it had been translated correctly (grey bear bear and greying (with age) bear bear, respectively)
If it comes from the constellations, we got pretty fucking lucky
bears and unbears
Yep. It’s Towards-bear-land, and Against-towards-bear-land.
IMO, nobody every made it clear if it’s (against-towards)-bear-land, what would be away-from-bear-land, or against-(towards-bear-land).
This joke would be rather hard to translate to my language because we use the same word for dirt (as in, ‘soil’ - in fact, in certain cases for actual soil, as well) as for Earth. Or ground.
We only have a separate word for the unclean meaning of dirt, or a compound word containing dirt to denote soil.
I can easily imagine this as an actual attempt from a beginner English speaker from home.
But Antarctica doesn’t derive from “not Arctic”, but from ‘opposite of Arctic’. The bear part is right, though.
And wouldn’t you say the opposite of bearlandia is not-bear-landia?
As I said, “opposite of”, not “the opposite of”
A bit disappointed this isn’t about the funny YouTube song about the Dirt Man
ChatGPT or Bing Translate?
Is there a difference?
Copilot is basically just repackaged chat gpt.
