Well, actually, just to the memes that were popular around me while I was in college. Most of these come from songs. I am tired of memeing around my American friends and having them be like “wut???”, so I am educating you all now.
I. [X] does give me me powers
The origin of this meme is the song Phenomenal by Benjai. It come from the line “Soca does gi’ me me powas; ey-ay”. ie: “[Caribbean music genre] makes me powerful; [sound of enthusiasm]”. The specific way this is used varies a lot.
Most commonly, it’ll be a comment on how something has given you the ability to do stupid things faster with more energy. “coffee”, “ganja”, “cocaine”, “manga”, and “pumpum” (ie: vagina) are all things I heard people say gave them powers (it has to be two syllables to fit the song). Alternatively, if your friend has just done something stupid, you can comment on it this way – usually attributing their sudden energy to something silly as a form of ribbing.
Alternatively, you can use it as an image macro, as we often do on WhatsApp (yes, we’re whatsappers). The general format here is a call-and-response macro. The first image is of the thing giving the powers, with the caption “[thing] does give me me powers”. The second image shows someone doing something silly, with either the caption “Ey Ay”/”Eh I” or the caption “See me deh/dey/there”.
Example from WhatsApp:
However, the punning potential is great and terrible
(I’m a horrible person, I know)
And, thus, you have been educated! Which is great, because I am constantly tempted to use this meme, and then have to refrain from it to avoid confusion. But no more! Go forth and meme like a true rudeboy
How does “[X] does give me me powers“ parse syntactically?
Specifically, what is each “me” doing? Do they both mean the same thing, and were just repeated for the meter to work? (Or for emphasis? Does [Redacted]-dialect repeat nouns for emphasis?)
Or are they doing different things? Are they both ~something about the speaker~ (with some grammatical effects), or is one of them totally unrelated?
Yes, there aren’t first person singular pronouns. There is only one. It does the work of English I, me, and my.
So, replacing the ‘me’s with their equivalents, we get “Soca does give me my powers”.
But wait! What’s the “does” doing here?
It puts the sentence in the present tense, because “Soca give me my powers” would be past tense. The unmarked form of a verb in my dialect generally is.
So the sentence parses as “Soca gives me my powers” in standard English.
(The doubled “me” didn’t confuse me, personally: my language-parsing module saw the second one, said “ah, it’s the cockney ‘me’”, and continued on. Apparently I’ve consumed enough British media for “’me’ can be used as a possessive” to be an available thought.)
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On an unrelated note: is it just me*, or does that song–especially the chorus–sound very…itself? Like, a song they would play over a location-establishing shot. “HAVE WE MENTIONED YET THAT WE’RE IN THE CARIBBEAN??”
Not in a bad way, just…intensely Caribbean.
*It might just be me and my lack of experience with the genre.
It is very much a quintessentially Caribbean song! Other songs that feel very strongly Caribbean to me include:
Notably, all of these songs are Trinidadian (the meme song included), because the quintessential Caribbean genres to me are Calypso and Soca. These are both Eastern Caribbean genres specifically (so, not popular in Jamaica), and Trinidad is by far the largest Eastern Caribbean country.
This may be a little provincial to be the “quintessential Caribbean genres”, but I’m from the Eastern Caribbean, and these are the songs I was raised on, so *shrug*
Huh, interesting. None of those feel like a faceful of Caribbean to me the way the meme one does.
When I try to intuitively categorise these songs, I get:
“Sweet Sweet Tnt”: Okay, kind of a faceful of Caribbean on re-listen, but the first thing it reminded me of was being at the community college recently during some kind of diversity fair, and waiting by the Mexico table for my ride to show up.
“Rally Round the West Indies”: circa-1980′s pop with some Caribbean influence.
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I think the lesson here is that the way one intuitively categorises music depends strongly on what music one is already familiar with. I’m tempted to throw some stuff from the Pop/Rock Hits of the Late 20th Century radio playlists at you and see what happens. Have you had enough exposure to that music for categorisation attempts to stop giving weird results?
Tags:
#music #reply via reblog #North Americans are exotic creatures #long post
I watched the first issue (both parts) of Season 12 of the Red Panda Adventures yesterday! I did say something about maybe doing more reaction-blogging, so:
God, I’d forgotten just how bad I am at stories with pictures, especially stories with pictures and words, and especially especially moving pictures. (It could be worse: they could be moving photographs rather than drawings.)
Pictures are so complicated; even if I can take my time, I usually miss a bunch of stuff*, and it only gets worse if it’s time-limited. It probably doesn’t help that I’m used to Red Panda episodes being purely audio: I suspect it strengthens my tendency to treat videos as basically audioplays, just with minor visual enhancement (getting the broad strokes of the imagery and missing all of the details).
(This is one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with any webcomic** more complicated than XKCD, the other reason being that even steady webcomics update so slowly that by the time they reach the end of a plot thread, you’ve forgotten what the beginning was. When you combine these two effects, you tend to end up with climactic moments relying on minor details that I haven’t seen in ten months and also didn’t even notice at the time. I’m sure there must be people webcomics work for, but they really do not mesh well with my brain.)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did have fun. I just had to strike a compromise between “overwhelmed by quantity of sensory input” and “not getting the full effect of the story”, and I’m a bit out of practice at that.
Maybe I should try watching these episodes multiple times, shifting my focus on rewatches. They’re short enough that it wouldn’t take ages: I could probably even do two watches of an issue consecutively without burnout. (Even without soaking in Everything, watching videos gets mentally taxing after a while. One standard-length TV episode (~45 min) is somewhere around my limit.)
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*Fun fact: image descriptions have a curb-cut effect. I’m (effectively) not blind, but I often find I understand an image (especially a comic) a lot better after I’ve read an image description, because the description pointed out important bits that I didn’t notice. (I wonder if I should try described video sometime.)
**I haven’t really tried non-web comics.
Tags:
#Red Panda Adventures #(okay so this was more about my relationship with video-based media in general than about RPA specifically but still) #oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I was researching video conferencing recently for a school assignment #and the supporters praise it for conveying zillions of microexpressions and whatnot #which to me seems like a *downside* #video chats immerse you in so much input that your brain *has* to dump most of it #but you have limited control over which parts get dumped #and your conversational partner doesn’t know what made the cut and what didn’t #ideally you want to prevent people from sending messages you’re not going to receive #so that they *know* you don’t know it #(and if your partner is better at processing large quantities of real-time information than you are) #(they have an advantage over you) #(which they might exploit) #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging
Unpopular opinion: if it’s true, it should always be acceptable to say “I can’t pronounce that; it has phonemes not present in my native language.”
or I have a lisp or other speech impediment or hearing impediment etc. etc.
Tags:
#yes this #fun wif forn fronting #there’s plenty of names from my *own* culture I can’t pronounce let alone other people’s #(sometimes) #(if I think about it for a while) #(it bothers me a little that I’ve never heard my father’s name) #(not the way it’s *meant* to be heard) #(qualia are weird) #(I suppose that means this qualifies for the tag) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #racism cw #ableism cw
I just realized that I’m right-shifted. I have been using only the right shift key for capitalization for an unknown period of time, and deliberately using the left shift key feels awkward and makes me mistype my passwords.
Are you left-handed? I feel like the reason I’m left-shifted is to keep my right index finger closer to the mouse touchpad, but that might be an after-the-fact justification.
There is…a cliche? a conversational pattern?–described in the atheist blogosphere, at least as of the late 00′s/early 10′s.
As the atheists describe it, it goes something like this:
Christian: But clearly you do still believe in God, deep down, because morality comes from God. People do what’s right because God wills it, because they know God will judge them. The fact that you aren’t on a killing spree right now means you know God will judge you, too.
Atheist: …no? My morality stems fro– wait. Are you saying you would go on a killing spree if you thought God wasn’t watching?
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The atheists speak of the chilling realisation of how close someone is to snapping. The realisation that you were actively pushing someone towards snapping. They hope that the Christians who fit into this pattern are merely bad at introspection, that their moralities would still function if God were removed from the equation, but fear that those Christians are portraying themselves accurately.
What no one talks about, at least not in my experience, is that it’s also terrifying from the other side. Oh, maybe some of those Christians are really confident it’s because atheists still have enough belief in God to act morally, but the ones who aren’t so confident?
It is a terrible thing to look at someone and realise that you do not know why they aren’t torturing you right now. You hope they have reasons of their own, but even if they do…because you don’t understand those reasons, you don’t know what would convince them to change their mind about the no-torture thing. You wouldn’t be able to tell in advance that they’re changing their mind, and you have no clue how you’d go about persuading them not to.
(Some parts of you–the part that assumes the worst, the part that was never any good at theory of mind–fear that they have no reasons, that they’re not torturing you only because they’re not in the mood right now, or–worse–because it simply hasn’t occurred to them yet that there’s nothing stopping them. You’re reluctant to ask them too probingly about the underpinnings of their morality, for fear that you will be the thing that causes them to realise they don’t have any.)
Tags:
#last night I was reading a blog #and realised that the blogger’s morality was so foreign to me I couldn’t even tell whether he had one #it was…unnerving #oh look an original post #arguably a follow-up to the previous reserve-the-right-to-delete post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #(I tried to find this post by looking in that tag so I guess that means I should add it)
I’ve been wondering this on and off, and I figured I might as well get around to asking:
Are other people’s imaginations shut down or impaired when they’re sick?
Mine is: I pretty much don’t have visualised fantasies at all when I’m sick, and what fantasies I do have are much fewer in number and much less vivid. I can think of possible explanations that lead to both “this is a very common experience” (maybe it’s part of the cognitive issues that come with the brain’s convalescence mode) and “this is a very rare experience” (maybe it’s my brain’s way of resolving the conflict in the instinctive How to Respond to Illness code between “get lots of rest” and “avoid getting pregnant”, forcing a loss of libido by rendering me incapable of sexual fantasies (and, as a side effect, non-sexual fantasies)).
Anyone know how common imagination impairments are when sick? Failing that, anyone have anecdotal experience about whether this happens to them?
Tags:
#oh look an original post #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(as far as I know I am not currently sick) #(*knocks on wood*)
My hormones are everywhere as usual. I feel nice right now though and crying for a few hours felt nice too. Before I tried spiro or estradiol or progesterone or dhea, I used to become so distressed when I saw girls cry because it would happen fairly often, and among the people who I talked with, people would brag about how much they cried during a given movie or when reading a book or buying dental floss that reminded them of their estranged half sister.
I was really quite concerned because I though they must be experiencing a massive amount of agony every two weeks or so.
It turns out that a lot of crying in E モ—ド were important physical componants of useful emotional processing. Like dumping a river through your head to clean your brain.
I was really quite concerned because I though they must be experiencing a massive amount of agony every two weeks or so.
[not-consciously-endorsed typical minding]
Crying is painful, an unalloyed bad useful only as a form of self-harm. Ideally, crying should occur as rarely as possible. If you’re crying more often than about once a month, keep a close eye on your mental health; if it’s more often than ~weekly, whatever situation is causing it is terrible for your sanity and you need to escape it ASAP.
[/not-consciously-endorsed typical minding]
Asexuality has never made me question my hormonal profile, but people talking about cathartic crying (and specifically estrogen making crying cathartic) does. Either I just have an unusual (non-)reaction to E on the crying front, or something’s out of whack. (my guess would be the former; I’d expect additional symptoms if something was out of whack, and I haven’t noticed anything else)
(some context notes re: my expected hormonal profile: cis woman, early-mid twenties, not on any hormone-affecting drugs)
Personally, if negative!crying is wrong, I don’t want to be right. I mean, I guess cathartically-crying!me would, by definition, not be miserable about it (even if that’s hard to grok), but if nothing else it would remove one of the easiest-to-spot gauges of mental health I have.
Tags:
#I hate when people see me crying and give me that ”let it all out” shit #I hate it when I’m trying to stop crying because they’re trying to talk me out of doing what’s best for me #and I hate it when I’m not trying to stop because it’s a double standard #would you say the same if I were biting myself or clawing or whacking against hard objects? #I’m deliberately making myself miserable because I feel like I deserve it #and if you’re going to respond your response should acknowledge that #self harm cw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #hormones
(having trouble getting the usual reply blockquote to work, so I’ll italicise instead)
I keep wondering if a certain type of verbally-oriented autistic is the only person who actually questions – maybe who CAN actually question – feelings and assumptions that everyone else seems to take as bedrock. :P It’s a discouraging possibility.
(also: emigrant from an overtly hierarchical society here. I can attest you still get told the problem is with you if you don’t fit in, questioning the people who have power is still dangerous, it’s only those OTHER societies (communist russia anyone?) whose different trappings on the same structure make them problematic, and everyone else insists they actually feel the way they’re programmed to. I don’t know. Neurotypicals are weird. :P)
Sorry, I’m babbling. What I’m trying to say is: apart from the specifically anti-authoritarian trappings, this all sounds startlingly familiar given how opposite our cultures are. Like, very specifically familiar in individual details. Does everybody actually live in the same sort of toxic power structure and out-group everyone else so thoroughly they can’t recognize it? I feel like that kind of thinking is awfully… like, “I am special, I see what others can’t”, kind of attitude, but (cont.)
(cont.) but I haven’t got an alternate paradigm that would still fit these parts of the evidence.
I did wonder if “the problem is with you” was too negative a way of putting it, given that the contexts I originally encountered the idea in were autism (generally a positively-connotated trait around here) and asexuality (grey area, but while some people say asexuals have equal status with straights (that is, no status), the people talking about growing up feeling like all allosexuals were lying aren’t those same people). In such cases, it isn’t the trait itself they consider a problem, just that it’s harder to navigate being surrounded by people unlike you if you don’t even know they’re unlike you, let alone how to account for it.
Part of me feels like a society where questioning your superiors is genuinely permitted is too much to hope for, and a more feasible goal is a society that doesn’t pretend questioning is allowed but then punish you if you actually do it. That would be the point of moving to an overtly hierarchical culture: not an attempt to reduce the total number or restrictiveness of rules, but an attempt to increase the number of written rules and correspondingly reduce the number of unwritten ones, and especially instances like questioning, where written and unwritten rules contradict each other. (The opposite of the usual description of hypocrisy: “do as I do, not as I say”.) That you still got everyone insisting they actually felt as they were programmed to is a bad sign for that idea, though.
Re: “I am special, I see what others can’t”, it kind of seems more like missing something, some aspect of morality that would allow for the proper sincerity…but I remember you saying something about how you used to believe you were sociopathic, and that you don’t think that anymore. Was that a similar thing?
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Relatedly, a few months ago @deusvulture (who I’m apparently not allowed to ping) wrote a post speculating on ideological “hobbits”. Like The Authoritarians, the post assumes no members of the group it’s talking about are in the audience; unlike The Authoritarians, it tries not to call its subjects inferior beings who are likely to get us all killed.
The post stayed with me because my reaction to it was “damn, where do I sign up?”. Pay lip service to a given hierarchy, turn up when it’s in need of sheer numbers in ways that don’t require you to put yourself in harm’s way, perhaps use some of its dialect in a non-status-y way when casually chatting with friends, but mostly you and it ignore each other. It sounds too good to be true.
Tags:
#justice turtle #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Wait, do other people have a distinction in dreams between reading a story and experiencing it? “I’m reading this thing” is sometimes used as a framing device, but I still experience it as I would if it were “actually” happening within the dream.
(The thing about Erotic Dream Week is you see some of the non-sexual variety in people’s dreams too. Although I already knew non-prosopagnosics tend to see faces in dreams, so that part didn’t confuse me.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #dreams #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.
Mean Girls confuses me greatly.
It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.
A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.
I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.
Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?
(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)
What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality? Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible? Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.
Both of them are also common tropes in cautionary tales about why you shouldn’t go to public school. Corrupted By Popularity is more disturbing when you’re a kid hearing these stories, but as I’ve gotten older I find High School Is Like A Jungle getting worse because of that…that knowing superiority embedded in it. “Yes,” it says, “we’ve all had times where we looked at a group of public school kids and saw a pack of lesser animals for a moment before they resolved into people. Most, perhaps all, of us have had times where they never resolved into people at all. It’s okay; not only okay, but worth encouraging.” And that’s…not…okay? It’s sure as hell not worth encouraging. Like, yeah I’ve done it, and I don’t feel inclined to beat myself up over it, but these days I try to actually see people as people? Not seeing people as people has a pretty bad track record in general.
“Yeah, I think public schoolers see it and think ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that shit at my school’.
ie: It’s not anti-public-school propaganda any more than people think the average sit-com is anti-family propaganda. It’s a dramatised and exaggerated version of their /actual lives/.”
…huh. I really liked sitcoms as a kid, but I liked them to the extent that they did not remind me of my own life. They were–rather like Mean Girls, actually–glimpses into other ways of being.
I did once hear that Roseanne was so popular because it reminded people of themselves, and that surprised me. I liked Roseanne best because, as an upper-middle-class homeschooled kid, the lives of the Connors were completely alien to me, and I thought that was fascinating. I mean, it’s certainly possible to have a more alien-to-me life than they did–hell, I’m pretty sure you have one yourself, Alison–but people more foreign than them are generally portrayed as foreign, as people who are interestingly strange rather than interestingly identifiable-with. Roseanne portrayed itself as normal, as a story made by and for an alternate universe where people actually lived like that, and that was why it appealed to me.
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It may be worth noting that IME, homeschooled minors generally do not date. Teen relationship drama pings as foreign to me, because…look, one time I heard through the grapevine that some sixteen-year-old in the community was dating someone, and the reason that got passed through the grapevine was because it was unusual for a sixteen-year-old to be dating at all. Another time, we got this one age ~14-15 kid who’d started out in public school and only recently switched to homeschooling. Apparently he flirted with the other kids around his age, most of whom didn’t notice and the remainder were weirded out. I honestly don’t know whether he flirted with me or not; I was in the oblivious majority, and I only know this was happening because I heard the parents talking about it.
Bear in mind, this was all among secular homeschoolers.
Mind you, even with the cautionary tales it’s very common for kids to switch to public school later on, especially at the middle-school/high-school transition, and the kids who do this tend to be more otherwise-normal than the kids who don’t. The weirdness level of homeschooled kids thus becomes more concentrated the older they get; in particular, groups of homeschooled teens are frequently upwards of 50% autistic. There are confounding factors and probably complicated feedback loops when it comes to which differences in homeschooling culture are actually cultural.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool
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