Brinens and Things &#8211; Tumblr Mirror

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass.

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

brin-bellway:

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

I’m not a neurotypical.

I see you completely ignored the second, larger half of the post, in which I frame the first half as an at best semi-endorsed knee-jerk response and give what my views are when looking past my anger.

(I left the first half in to give the reader enough of a glimpse into what’s going on in my head for an idea of just how much anger I’m suppressing later on in the hopes of a decent conversation. The rest of this thread is me trying to be civil, and if I fail, please understand it as “failed attempt to be civil” rather than “open hostility”.)

There is no established term for “non-prosopagnosic”. If you are typical in this particular aspect of your neurology, then my language was merely imprecise (as language in writing marked as knee-jerk anger tends to be) in a way not affecting the point. If you are prosopagnosic, then I am curious why assistive tech for yourself did not occur to you as a possible ethical use of facial-recognition software.

I’d like to be clear here:

I am not arguing that developing facial-recognition tech is a good idea. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not. What I do know is that it is not true that there is “no possible ethical use” for this technology, and that if we do champion the cause of privacy against those who seek to introduce this technology, we should go into it aware of the price we are paying for a more private world, rather than believing there are no downsides to doing the right thing. We can only determine whether the price is worth paying when we know what the price is.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #prosopagnosia #discourse cw

April 12, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass.

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #raw nerves #discourse cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

Image ~ April 5, 2017January 5, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

defectivealtruist:

somervta:

eronthebender:

boomerbuzzard:

notchicken:

I hate the internet. I hate how this poem doesn’t need to be finished but it has 13.9k retweets and 21.1k likes. Everyone knows how this poem ends and I hate it

Violets are Blue

Michael Jackson sang Thriller

😂😂😂😂😂😂

…can someone please explain these to me?

the punchlines are “george bush did 9/11” and “ted cruz is the zodiac killer”

…wait, I thought the first one was something along the lines of “take your dick out for 9/11“. Why mention Harambe otherwise?

(Michael Jackson is probably irrelevant, just an excuse to put “thriller” in, but so many entities could be described as “in heaven” that I figured there must be some reason to choose Harambe specifically.)

—

I actually had to infer that the second picture was of Ted Cruz:

“What rhymes with ‘thriller’? Killer–ah, this is a Zodiac Killer joke, which means that must be Ted Cruz.”

The political news I get is so overwhelmingly text-based that even if I weren’t faceblind, I probably still wouldn’t know Ted Cruz on sight.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #nsfw text? #poetry #me circa early autumn 2016: ”oh so that’s what Donald Trump’s voice sounds like.” #I did recognise Bush though! #politics mention

March 18, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

@sinesalvatorem

The previous thread was getting a bit long and topic-drifty, so I’m putting this here.

—

The band “Shame and Scandal” borrowed some instruments from. (Wikipedia says this is not technically prog rock, but more the stuff that prog rock evolved out of. *shrug* Prog rock’s not my area. I liked Genesis a lot better after they sold out.)

(Naming genres in general is not really my area. I’m used to the kind of mishmash of pop, rock, and maybe occasional dips into electronica like you hear played in the background in grocery stores*, in which the primary thing that distinguishes one type of music from another is age rather than genre. That’s why I included decades in my categorisations.)

(That’s also why it’s possible for a song from the 1980′s to sound late 50′s/early 60′s, or a song from the 2010′s to sound late 70′s/early 80′s. Both of those songs were deliberately trying to sound earlier than they were, and it works.)

—

God, I know I’ve heard songs so much like “Obeah Wedding”, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any. I don’t specifically seek them out, and they aren’t distinctive the way “Light My Fire” is.

Hmm. They mostly phased out 50′s stuff from the radio rotations in the late 00′s**, and since I don’t seek it out, I haven’t heard it much in quite a while.

I’m going to play the opening instrumental of “Obeah Wedding” to my mother and ask her what songs it reminds her of. That might help.

[…]

…well, she said her first associations were cruises and Mexico and Florida, so in other words she’s too close to the mark to be helpful. She did suggest big-band stuff from the 40′s, though, and–once I told her what the song was–pointed out that I would be familiar with this calypso song. That one sounds very different to me, though (and not fitting into any established category in my head, I think).

While I can’t seem to find anything suitable, I can tell you that I think a lot of what my brain is going off of here is “slower-paced song with lots of horns”. Although I suspect there’s some more subtle stuff going on too.

—

“Rally Round the West Indies”: again, I swear I’ve heard similar stuff, but I’m not sure what. Some part of me is insisting “The Same Moon”, but when I put them side-by-side it doesn’t seem right. (They have kind of similar minor background instruments, I think, and that’s probably what that part of me is latching on to.) Another part says “Dance into the Light”***, which is kind of similar in the horns but not quite right overall (and might be cheating, because I suspect he might be trying to sound vaguely tropical in that one).

—

Overall, this was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Recognition-vs-recall issues, maybe. I’ll try to keep an ear out when listening to radio, see if I can spot something suitable.

—

*Well, probably not your grocery stores. But I know you’ve been in Canadian grocery stores, and probably American ones too. That stuff.

**Which is a suspicious timing. It may actually be that America just plays more 50′s stuff than Canada does, and it only seems like late 00′s because that’s when I moved.

*** /sees some of the music video while getting a Youtube version to link/ …god, Phil Collins is such a dork. I love him, but he’s a dork.

These are cool! However, with the exception of Shake Senora (which is actual Calypso), they all read to me as “Old American music of unspecified genre”, and I wouldn’t associate them mentally with any of the Calypso songs I linked. Huh.

Maybe you associate Calypso with rock but don’t have this association with its descendant genre (Soca)? This would be weird to me, because I feel like Calypso is more distinctly itself, while Soca borrows a lot. But IDK how your algorithm works. What do you think of these songs:

“Geelay”: 2010’s (possibly also late 00’s) music-to-dance-to, whatever the proper term for that would be. I have never been in a nightclub, but from what I’ve heard of them I would expect to hear stuff with this sort of sound. I do know from experience that it’s commonly played on radio stations aimed at adolescents; may be heard in grocery stores at times of day/week when students tend to shop, as well as at coffeeshops and fast-food restaurants at any time of day.

Ignoring the lyrics (with their geographical references), I would not have guessed it was from the Caribbean, but I probably would have guessed that black people made it.

Like the 50’s stuff, I vaguely enjoy but don’t seek out this kind of music. They kind of all blend together in my head (doesn’t help that they tend towards mostly-unintelligible lyrics), and I can’t pick out any specific examples of the category. (Except “On the Floor”, which is helped memorability-wise by having so many of its lines end with “on the floor”, but I suspect outside of the radio-playlist context that song doesn’t sound like another piece of the same puzzle.)

Well, the nice thing about still being on the radio a lot is that I can just turn on a radio for a bit and have a decent shot at getting something suitable.

[a few minutes later]

Okay, so I skipped around a couple youth-oriented radio stations, found a song just starting whose beginning sounded promising, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and guess what?

It’s a fucking dancehall song.

…well. I don’t really know what to say, at this point.

(…I’m beginning to wonder how much of the tendency towards unintelligible lyrics is because they’re actually singing in creole.)

—

“Far From Finished”: Same. Maybe a tad more electronic, but still definitely in the category of “things I would hear at Tim Hortons”.

—

“Lip Service”: Verging from the above category into rap, but I’m sure my definition of “rap” is overly broad from growing up in a subculture with a very tense relationship with black-dominated music genres. The definition of “rap” I absorbed was a metonym for the kinds of music you were supposed to dislike in a Definitely Not Racist, I Just Don’t Like Newfangled Stuff, You Can’t Prove Anything way. (I definitely don’t have a grasp of the distinction between rap and hip-hop, for one.)

—

“Find Yuh Way”: for some reason, this specifically evokes “bowling alley” to me rather than “coffeeshop” or “grocery store with lots of younger customers”. I don’t think I’ve been in a bowling alley since this song came out, though, so it’s probably not me subconsciously remembering having heard this song in a bowling alley.

—

“Jammin Sake”: Same as the first two. I’m getting a few “vaguely tropical” vibes, but I suspect that might be priming/[thinking to look for it], and if I heard this song at Tim Hortons it would not seem out of place.

—

Tell you what, here’s an Internet stream of the station I got that dancehall from. You might want to try it and see what you get.

(Folk-influenced rock is also very popular these days, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some of that.)

I could totally see you having accidentally listened to Soca without noticing due to inability to parse the lyrics. Probably way more true of Dancehall, though. Dancehall and Soca have similar relationships to their parent genres (Reggae and Calypso, respectively) in being a dancier, clubbier, pop-infused version. After all, Dancehall is meant to be listened to at the dancehall (ie: dance club).

However, afaik, Calypso songs have only ever been popular in the US/Canada when they were explicitly being enjoyed as ~exotic~, while Reggae was actually somewhat popular there for a while. So I’d expect Reggae’s clubby descendant to also be popular. In fact, it’s infected Japan.

So, if you’ve already been exposed to Caribbean musical styles in typical North American environments, this may be why you don’t think of them as distinctly Caribbean. Or something. IDK.

(I may also be biased on how “obviously Caribbean” these songs sound because I can actually understand what the singers are saying, and they sound home-y to me.)

Anyway, I was unable to play the radio station you linked me to, and I’m not sure why. Maybe they don’t broadcast outside of Canada? But, like, when I pressed play, it showed me an advertisement (about health, using kids on a hockey rink for the backdrop, because so Canada) before cutting off.

It could be geo-locked, but I do find when testing it that I have to press the play button two or three times before it actually starts streaming. (I didn’t get an ad, though.)

I scrolled down, and towards the bottom of the page, to the right of their street address and phone numbers, is a link to a list of recently played songs (which you could probably then hear on Youtube). Does that one work for you?

(I’m not sure if that URL is a permalink or not, so if it doesn’t work, clicking the “Recently Played” link on the main page might be worth a shot.)

Tags:

#music #reply via reblog #long post #racism cw? #(for earlier post in reblog chain)

March 18, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

brin-bellway:

@sinesalvatorem

The previous thread was getting a bit long and topic-drifty, so I’m putting this here.

—

The band “Shame and Scandal” borrowed some instruments from. (Wikipedia says this is not technically prog rock, but more the stuff that prog rock evolved out of. *shrug* Prog rock’s not my area. I liked Genesis a lot better after they sold out.)

(Naming genres in general is not really my area. I’m used to the kind of mishmash of pop, rock, and maybe occasional dips into electronica like you hear played in the background in grocery stores*, in which the primary thing that distinguishes one type of music from another is age rather than genre. That’s why I included decades in my categorisations.)

(That’s also why it’s possible for a song from the 1980′s to sound late 50′s/early 60′s, or a song from the 2010′s to sound late 70′s/early 80′s. Both of those songs were deliberately trying to sound earlier than they were, and it works.)

—

God, I know I’ve heard songs so much like “Obeah Wedding”, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any. I don’t specifically seek them out, and they aren’t distinctive the way “Light My Fire” is.

Hmm. They mostly phased out 50′s stuff from the radio rotations in the late 00′s**, and since I don’t seek it out, I haven’t heard it much in quite a while.

I’m going to play the opening instrumental of “Obeah Wedding” to my mother and ask her what songs it reminds her of. That might help.

[…]

…well, she said her first associations were cruises and Mexico and Florida, so in other words she’s too close to the mark to be helpful. She did suggest big-band stuff from the 40′s, though, and–once I told her what the song was–pointed out that I would be familiar with this calypso song. That one sounds very different to me, though (and not fitting into any established category in my head, I think).

While I can’t seem to find anything suitable, I can tell you that I think a lot of what my brain is going off of here is “slower-paced song with lots of horns”. Although I suspect there’s some more subtle stuff going on too.

—

“Rally Round the West Indies”: again, I swear I’ve heard similar stuff, but I’m not sure what. Some part of me is insisting “The Same Moon”, but when I put them side-by-side it doesn’t seem right. (They have kind of similar minor background instruments, I think, and that’s probably what that part of me is latching on to.) Another part says “Dance into the Light”***, which is kind of similar in the horns but not quite right overall (and might be cheating, because I suspect he might be trying to sound vaguely tropical in that one).

—

Overall, this was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Recognition-vs-recall issues, maybe. I’ll try to keep an ear out when listening to radio, see if I can spot something suitable.

—

*Well, probably not your grocery stores. But I know you’ve been in Canadian grocery stores, and probably American ones too. That stuff.

**Which is a suspicious timing. It may actually be that America just plays more 50′s stuff than Canada does, and it only seems like late 00′s because that’s when I moved.

*** /sees some of the music video while getting a Youtube version to link/ …god, Phil Collins is such a dork. I love him, but he’s a dork.

These are cool! However, with the exception of Shake Senora (which is actual Calypso), they all read to me as “Old American music of unspecified genre”, and I wouldn’t associate them mentally with any of the Calypso songs I linked. Huh.

Maybe you associate Calypso with rock but don’t have this association with its descendant genre (Soca)? This would be weird to me, because I feel like Calypso is more distinctly itself, while Soca borrows a lot. But IDK how your algorithm works. What do you think of these songs:

“Geelay”: 2010’s (possibly also late 00’s) music-to-dance-to, whatever the proper term for that would be. I have never been in a nightclub, but from what I’ve heard of them I would expect to hear stuff with this sort of sound. I do know from experience that it’s commonly played on radio stations aimed at adolescents; may be heard in grocery stores at times of day/week when students tend to shop, as well as at coffeeshops and fast-food restaurants at any time of day.

Ignoring the lyrics (with their geographical references), I would not have guessed it was from the Caribbean, but I probably would have guessed that black people made it.

Like the 50’s stuff, I vaguely enjoy but don’t seek out this kind of music. They kind of all blend together in my head (doesn’t help that they tend towards mostly-unintelligible lyrics), and I can’t pick out any specific examples of the category. (Except “On the Floor”, which is helped memorability-wise by having so many of its lines end with “on the floor”, but I suspect outside of the radio-playlist context that song doesn’t sound like another piece of the same puzzle.)

Well, the nice thing about still being on the radio a lot is that I can just turn on a radio for a bit and have a decent shot at getting something suitable.

[a few minutes later]

Okay, so I skipped around a couple youth-oriented radio stations, found a song just starting whose beginning sounded promising, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and guess what?

It’s a fucking dancehall song.

…well. I don’t really know what to say, at this point.

(…I’m beginning to wonder how much of the tendency towards unintelligible lyrics is because they’re actually singing in creole.)

—

“Far From Finished”: Same. Maybe a tad more electronic, but still definitely in the category of “things I would hear at Tim Hortons”.

—

“Lip Service”: Verging from the above category into rap, but I’m sure my definition of “rap” is overly broad from growing up in a subculture with a very tense relationship with black-dominated music genres. The definition of “rap” I absorbed was a metonym for the kinds of music you were supposed to dislike in a Definitely Not Racist, I Just Don’t Like Newfangled Stuff, You Can’t Prove Anything way. (I definitely don’t have a grasp of the distinction between rap and hip-hop, for one.)

—

“Find Yuh Way”: for some reason, this specifically evokes “bowling alley” to me rather than “coffeeshop” or “grocery store with lots of younger customers”. I don’t think I’ve been in a bowling alley since this song came out, though, so it’s probably not me subconsciously remembering having heard this song in a bowling alley.

—

“Jammin Sake”: Same as the first two. I’m getting a few “vaguely tropical” vibes, but I suspect that might be priming/[thinking to look for it], and if I heard this song at Tim Hortons it would not seem out of place.

—

Tell you what, here’s an Internet stream of the station I got that dancehall from. You might want to try it and see what you get.

(Folk-influenced rock is also very popular these days, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some of that.)

Tags:

#music #North Americans are…less exotic creatures than previously believed? #I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve accidentally been listening to soca for years without noticing #reply via reblog #long post #racism cw?

March 18, 2017October 21, 2019 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

alexanderrm:

serrarawillowfluttershy:

just-shower-thoughts:

If keyboards had braille on them, we all could have subconsciously learned braille by now.

Would that actually work?

Google isn’t any scientific papers studying it, only mismatches or a handful of people assuming it’s doable, but I’m not sure if that’s because all the psychological researchers assume it’s doable or because nobody thought to study it, or if I’m not finding them.
I could easily imagine the human brain being set up such that this didn’t happen; anyone want to get a braille keyboard, try this out, and report the results?

Learning via passive haptic associations works for learning morse code: [ https://m.phys.org/news/2016-10-morse-code.html#jCp ]

Sticker sets to change your normie keyboard into a braille one such as this one* cost 20$ if anyone would like to try this.

*[ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00014VWP2/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489562744&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=braille+keyboard+stickers&dpPl=1&dpID=411SqfyJvrL&ref=plSrch ] (h/t @bunniesravenclawsupernatural for the link to braille keyboard stickers)

FWIW, the related-articles section of that Morse code link has an article about passively learning Braille (through vibrating gloves).

Tags:

#interesting idea #I’m tempted to get a set of Braille keyboard stickers now #that particular listing doesn’t ship to Canada but there’s probably others #reply via reblog

March 17, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

@sinesalvatorem

The previous thread was getting a bit long and topic-drifty, so I’m putting this here.

—

The band “Shame and Scandal” borrowed some instruments from. (Wikipedia says this is not technically prog rock, but more the stuff that prog rock evolved out of. *shrug* Prog rock’s not my area. I liked Genesis a lot better after they sold out.)

(Naming genres in general is not really my area. I’m used to the kind of mishmash of pop, rock, and maybe occasional dips into electronica like you hear played in the background in grocery stores*, in which the primary thing that distinguishes one type of music from another is age rather than genre. That’s why I included decades in my categorisations.)

(That’s also why it’s possible for a song from the 1980′s to sound late 50′s/early 60′s, or a song from the 2010′s to sound late 70′s/early 80′s. Both of those songs were deliberately trying to sound earlier than they were, and it works.)

—

God, I know I’ve heard songs so much like “Obeah Wedding”, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any. I don’t specifically seek them out, and they aren’t distinctive the way “Light My Fire” is.

Hmm. They mostly phased out 50′s stuff from the radio rotations in the late 00′s**, and since I don’t seek it out, I haven’t heard it much in quite a while.

I’m going to play the opening instrumental of “Obeah Wedding” to my mother and ask her what songs it reminds her of. That might help.

[…]

…well, she said her first associations were cruises and Mexico and Florida, so in other words she’s too close to the mark to be helpful. She did suggest big-band stuff from the 40′s, though, and–once I told her what the song was–pointed out that I would be familiar with this calypso song. That one sounds very different to me, though (and not fitting into any established category in my head, I think).

While I can’t seem to find anything suitable, I can tell you that I think a lot of what my brain is going off of here is “slower-paced song with lots of horns”. Although I suspect there’s some more subtle stuff going on too.

—

“Rally Round the West Indies”: again, I swear I’ve heard similar stuff, but I’m not sure what. Some part of me is insisting “The Same Moon”, but when I put them side-by-side it doesn’t seem right. (They have kind of similar minor background instruments, I think, and that’s probably what that part of me is latching on to.) Another part says “Dance into the Light”***, which is kind of similar in the horns but not quite right overall (and might be cheating, because I suspect he might be trying to sound vaguely tropical in that one).

—

Overall, this was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Recognition-vs-recall issues, maybe. I’ll try to keep an ear out when listening to radio, see if I can spot something suitable.

—

*Well, probably not your grocery stores. But I know you’ve been in Canadian grocery stores, and probably American ones too. That stuff.

**Which is a suspicious timing. It may actually be that America just plays more 50′s stuff than Canada does, and it only seems like late 00′s because that’s when I moved.

*** /sees some of the music video while getting a Youtube version to link/ …god, Phil Collins is such a dork. I love him, but he’s a dork.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #(close enough) #this probably could be more coherent than it is #but I’m not sure how to do it #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #music #in which Brin has no musical training

A Guide To Caribbean Memes – Pt 1

March 16, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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

thetransintransgenic:

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?

“me” is the first person singular pronoun.

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.

brin-bellway:

Ah, so that’s what the “does” was for.

(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.)

—

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.