Author Topic: The $%*! frustration thread  (Read 472926 times)

xcalibur

  • Architect of Kajar
  • Chronopolitan (+300)
  • *
  • Posts: 394
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6420 on: December 02, 2011, 12:32:34 pm »
I've also been getting some 503 errors on this site - is that just me?

Ramsus

  • Entity
  • Chronopolitan (+300)
  • *
  • Posts: 313
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6421 on: December 02, 2011, 12:43:52 pm »
I've also been getting some 503 errors on this site - is that just me?

No. It looks like the Bing and Baidu spiders are crawling the site at the same time and hitting up everything, even stuff that's blacklisted in the robots.txt file, and so there's a lot of extra traffic right now. I think they only ignore the contents of directories if you end them with a slash in the robots.txt file, so I modified it and the site seems to be coming back around.

xcalibur

  • Architect of Kajar
  • Chronopolitan (+300)
  • *
  • Posts: 394
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6422 on: December 02, 2011, 01:12:59 pm »
I've also been getting some 503 errors on this site - is that just me?

No. It looks like the Bing and Baidu spiders are crawling the site at the same time and hitting up everything, even stuff that's blacklisted in the robots.txt file, and so there's a lot of extra traffic right now. I think they only ignore the contents of directories if you end them with a slash in the robots.txt file, so I modified it and the site seems to be coming back around.

I see. That makes sense, thanks.

Lord J Esq

  • Moon Stone J
  • Hero of Time (+5000)
  • *
  • Posts: 5463
  • ^_^ "Ayla teach at college level!!"
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6423 on: December 02, 2011, 06:05:28 pm »
Ah, thanks. This had been hitting me for the past few weeks too. I was almost roused enough to actually complain about it!

Radical_Dreamer

  • Entity
  • Zurvan Surfer (+2500)
  • *
  • Posts: 2778
    • View Profile
    • The Chrono Compendium
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6424 on: December 02, 2011, 09:29:34 pm »
Friends who don't talk with you in a time of crisis are not friends, and were never friends to begin with.

I have accepted that, and now it is time to move on.  I am not going to waste any more energy on these people.  They don't deserve my time.  They never did.

You are absolutely correct. This can be a painful process, but it's worth it. There were a number of people who showed their true colors the last time I had a breakup, including some I thought I was very close with. I cut all of them out of my life without remorse, and to the man their absence has enriched my life.

Be confident in knowing that you are acting wisely.

Syna

  • Squaretable Knight (+400)
  • *
  • Posts: 448
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6425 on: December 02, 2011, 11:46:08 pm »
Two of my beloved roommates, who are a couple, have declared their intention to find a house for themselves, thus splitting up our proud cadre of five. We've lived together for as many years, since 2006, and we all placed such stock in each other, such faith in our friendship together and our times together. They are my second family, and this feels like a breakup, if an amicable one.

These friends intend to buy a house in the neighborhood we're living in, so in some ways, it's like a more permanent foundation for our friendship. Wherever I go in the next years, they will, more than likely, be here in the East End for me to visit. But the spontaneous good times are gone-- the random heart-to-hearts, the easy dinners cooked together, the group parties, the endless in-jokes. We will now have a more conventional friendship where we won't see each other unless we visit. And I can't help but feel a little mortified. My friends are no traditional married couple by any reckoning, but this is a step in the direction of becoming more domestic. Settling down is not in my foreseeable future, and I hope that we can have much in common regardless of the fork in our paths. I hope we can remain close. Friends moving away is a reality for our generation, and some of mine I have remained by my side, but others have definitely drifted away. The thought of the latter happening upsets me.

I try to embrace change. Eulogy in greek is eu logia, a "speech of goodness." When you mourn something's passing, you mourn the beauty of what it was, and so part of embracing change is embracing the sadness it brings wholeheartedly. There is much to come, more wonder and beauty than I could possibly imagine, including moments with these friends, but much is being lost. I'll do my best to experience every aspect of what is happening, for its own sake, and for its own terms. 

tushantin

  • CC:DBT Dream Team
  • Hero of Time (+5000)
  • *
  • Posts: 5645
  • Under Your Moonlight, Stealing Your Stars
    • View Profile
    • My Website
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6426 on: December 03, 2011, 03:02:54 am »
I try to embrace change. Eulogy in greek is eu logia, a "speech of goodness." When you mourn something's passing, you mourn the beauty of what it was, and so part of embracing change is embracing the sadness it brings wholeheartedly. There is much to come, more wonder and beauty than I could possibly imagine, including moments with these friends, but much is being lost. I'll do my best to experience every aspect of what is happening, for its own sake, and for its own terms.  
And there's no doubt about it. Jubilation is always short-lived, Syna, but when they come, like the gust they sway you along. Sometimes an eternity can feel like mere moments, sometimes the times we take for granted. But when change finally comes we begin to see how precious those moments were, how much we simply can't let go; that's when the truest of bonds shine, and indeed sorrow amplifies it.

But that doesn't mean such times will never return. Of course, they aren't gone! You are bound by the hearts, something that's incredibly difficult to break, and hence the pain -- it's telling you, "Don't let go!"

If anything, this departure only gives us an excuse to make sure the moments count. Sure, they won't be as close as reaching an arm out, but they'll be close nonetheless. Drop by their house un-announced, call them up when there's something to share, invite them for a party, and have a blast! Party hard! We never know of the uncertainty that awaits in the future, so may as well take the cheer and good-will as a good-luck charms and seek the wonders that are yet to come. Let's cherish the "Now", ride the winds.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2011, 10:06:08 am by tushantin »

ZeaLitY

  • Entity
  • End of Timer (+10000)
  • *
  • Posts: 10795
  • Spring Breeze Dancin'
    • View Profile
    • My Compendium Staff Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6427 on: December 03, 2011, 04:13:04 am »
Trying to passionately learn other languages has given me a new appreciation of English's simplicity. Fucking bullshit declension and gender. Declension is redundant as all fucking hell in most applications at this stage in the game, and where it's not, it could be solved with much, much, MUCH fucking simpler constructs. Who the FUCK cares if it's DER or DEM or DEN or DES?! IT MEANS THE SAME FUCKING THING: "THE"!!!!

And gender? WHY THE FUCK DOES GENDER IN LANGUAGE EVEN FUCKING EXIST? Destroy that shit. English reigns fucking supreme. Fucking gender-neutral language with simple conjugations. It has its weird cases here and there, but I'll be damned if it has anything like this:

http://www.123teachme.com/spanish_verb_conjugation/estar

Holy god, what the fuck?! How many untold painful nights of studying and years of practice would it take to ever achieve that on a natural level? Jesus goddamned fuck, why so much needless ornamentation? Beauty is to be found in the varied synonyms and sounds of a language, not in making it inaccessible as holy mother of shit with complicated, useless fucking rules. For FUCK'S sake, this is totally unnecessary. It's no fucking wonder English became the lingua franca; it's damn easier to pick up than most. Please support your local world federalist chapter so that, even if it's not English, we can finally get one language in this fucking world for common communication, with regional and local languages relegated to traditional, bilingual status. And then I'll build a new Tower of Babel in the shape of a middle finger towards the sky, with "FUCK YOU" in 1000 different languages engraved upon it.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2011, 04:16:23 am by ZeaLitY »

rushingwind

  • Guru of Life Emeritus
  • Squaretable Knight (+400)
  • *
  • Posts: 425
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6428 on: December 03, 2011, 04:17:38 am »
Trying to passionately learn other languages has given me a new appreciation of English's simplicity. Fucking bullshit declension and gender. Declension is redundant as all fucking hell in most applications at this stage in the game, and where it's not, it could be solved with much, much, MUCH fucking simpler constructs. Who the FUCK cares if it's DER or DEM or DEN or DES?! IT MEANS THE SAME FUCKING THING: "THE"!!!!

And gender? WHY THE FUCK DOES GENDER IN LANGUAGE EVEN FUCKING EXIST? Destroy that shit. English reigns fucking supreme. Fucking gender-neutral language with simple conjugations. It has its weird cases here and there, but I'll be damned if it has anything like this:

http://www.123teachme.com/spanish_verb_conjugation/estar

Holy god, what the fuck?! How many untold painful nights of studying and years of practice would it take to ever achieve that on a natural level? Jesus goddamned fuck, why so much needless ornamentation? Beauty is to be found in the varied synonyms and sounds of a language, not in making it inaccessible as holy mother of shit with complicated, useless fucking rules. For FUCK'S sake, this is totally unnecessary. It's no fucking wonder English became the lingua franca; it's damn easier to pick up than most. Please support your local world federalist chapter so that, even if it's not English, we can finally get one language in this fucking world for common communication, with regional and local languages relegated to traditional, bilingual status. And then I'll build a new Tower of Babylon in the shape of a middle finger towards the sky, with "FUCK YOU" in 1000 different languages engraved upon it.

Ahahaha! :) And don't forget! In Spanish, "estar" means "to be." But you also have the verb "ser," which also means "to be." So not only do you have to memorize two different ways of conjugation for verbs that say the same thing, but you must learn all the rules that define which one must be used. Even though they both mean "to be." And then there are all the irregular conjugations to memorize, too!

Sajainta

  • Survivor of the Darkness
  • Radical Dreamer (+2000)
  • *
  • Posts: 2004
  • Reporting live from Purgatory.
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6429 on: December 03, 2011, 05:23:07 am »
It's no fucking wonder English became the lingua franca; it's damn easier to pick up than most.

Um...what.  That's completely untrue.  English is an extremely difficult language to learn for the vast majority of non-English speakers.  I've had friends from all over the world who learned English as a second language, and it was incredibly difficult for them.  It is not phonetic (unlike Cebuano, which is completely phonetic), many verbs have irregular conjugations, there is very little consistency, and even though one of its strengths is its vast vocabulary, that makes it very difficult for a non-English speaker.

English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, along with Arabic, Mandarin, Icelandic, Russian, and Japanese.  Seeing as most of us are native English speakers, we take this for granted.  Most of us don't realize how hard it is to learn English because (obviously), we already know English.

As stated previously, I have friends from all over the world, and as a child I grew up bilingual and around people who didn't speak any English.  English was incredibly difficult for them, for the reasons I have stated above.  If some non-English speakers pick it up quickly, then that's great for them, but they are in the minority.  Most of my friends were highly intelligent, but even an intelligent person can struggle with a difficult language.

/Third culture kid rant.

tushantin

  • CC:DBT Dream Team
  • Hero of Time (+5000)
  • *
  • Posts: 5645
  • Under Your Moonlight, Stealing Your Stars
    • View Profile
    • My Website
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6430 on: December 03, 2011, 06:56:00 am »
And then I'll build a new Tower of Babel in the shape of a middle finger towards the sky, with "FUCK YOU" in 1000 different languages engraved upon it.
Reading that whole post, I literally fell off my chair laughing out loud.

I'm actually with Saj on this: in comparison to English, Japanese and Mandarin (oh GOD, Mandarin!), the writing system back here at home, 'Devanagari', is a cinch and is perfectly efficient to use in any language and is incredibly phonetic so it's amazingly simply to learn (even though I still struggle with it because,... you know), though when it comes to Hindi there's separate categories of implementation. Even then, quite a lot of English speakers effortlessly adapt to the language (although I do abjectly admit their pronunciation is HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL hilarious) without much need to attend any class of what sorts. Basically, in terms of simplicity and efficiency, Devanagari can kick English in the butt.

English on the other hand... well, forget it. Dyslexia bound, I couldn't even properly master it until I was 17 (and that's despite learning it since I was 6), but I think I ought to thank the Compendium for helping me through. Sometimes I get sentimental when people complement on my grasp of English. And even then, I believe there's so much I need to learn.

Ah, as for Gender... Language pretty much manipulates the way people think. Try taking them away from their safe haven they're used to and they complain it's not convenient.  :wink:
« Last Edit: December 03, 2011, 07:03:03 am by tushantin »

alfadorredux

  • Entity
  • Mystical Knight (+700)
  • *
  • Posts: 746
  • Just a purple cat
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6431 on: December 03, 2011, 09:48:10 am »
English substitutes a set of rigid and arbitrary word order constructs for the actively marked German case system (except for the places where we preserve the vestiges of case system markings too—that is, the possessive 's and among the personal pronouns). It's no easier, just different.

As for gender in language, the last time I checked, linguists weren't quite sure what purpose it served, but it pops up often enough that they're pretty sure it has one, and that it has little or nothing to do with real-world gender categories (consider "das Madchen", "die Kartoffel"—the last time I checked, a young woman was female and a potato was not, but German reverses them).

Just because something doesn't match up to your preconceptions doesn't mean that it's "difficult" or "wrong", and someone speaking a language where "ghoti" and "fish" can be pronounced the same way (did you know that it's been calculated that English spelling is 82 times harder than a phonetic system would be?) and "cleave" means both "adhere" and "split" while "flammable" and its apparent negation "inflammable" mean the same thing has no right to comment. ;P

For real fun, check out one of those African languages with twelve different noun classes or anything with an ergative-absolutive case system, and prepare to have your brain stretched. Languages are fascinating.

My frustration of the moment? Snow.  We went from bare lawns to three inches in under 72 hours, and it's bloody cold outside. :(

Truthordeal

  • Dimension Crosser (+1000)
  • *
  • Posts: 1133
  • Dunno what's supposed to go here. Oh now I see.
    • View Profile
    • Youtube Account
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6432 on: December 03, 2011, 12:16:37 pm »
I was debating this in a humorous way with my roommate just last week. His argument was that English was ugly compared to France and Italian, but then I brought up his love of Gilbert and Sullivan, and inefficient, which I brought up the loan words we have and used the basic economics of advantage and trade to prove him wrong. I win arguments often.

From what I've heard and experienced from non-native English speakers, out "th" sound is especially hard. It usually comes out for them as a hard "t" or a "ch" or "sch," and I guess in that way it's similar to the rolling "r" for us. I don't know if any other languages than English have this sound, but if not then we've made something difficult.

But I'll say this: our written language is probably a good deal easier, if only because we use a simple 26 letter Roman alphabet with no accented or umlauted characters, and because we don't decline our verbs or articles, as Z said.

Thought

  • Guru of Time Emeritus
  • God of War (+3000)
  • *
  • Posts: 3426
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6433 on: December 03, 2011, 01:29:07 pm »
Definitely have to agree with Saj. I love English to bits -- it's a wildly fun language -- but easy it ain't. English still has the meanings that are preserved in the declensions of other languages, we have just hidden that meaning in sentence position instead. "Der Mann" tells you that the man is the subject of the sentence (hence, nominative case), always and forever. "The man" could be found in the nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, or ablative case. It thus tells you nothing about what it will mean in a sentence.

TruthOrDeal, the problem with our written language is that we have a lot of unofficial letters. "Ch," "ph," "th," "th" (no, that isn't a repeat), "sh," "kn" and others all used to be a single letter that clearly designated its own unique sound. We got rid of those letters, replaced them with two others, and then moved on to anglimangling the words from other languages. Umlauts and accented letters are strange to me (why not just make a totally new letter instead of modifying a different letter?), but definitely simpler than English's a-doings.

Syna

  • Squaretable Knight (+400)
  • *
  • Posts: 448
    • View Profile
Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« Reply #6434 on: December 03, 2011, 01:46:49 pm »
Seconding Saj, too-- the Spanish you're maligning is, in actuality, one of the easiest languages in the world to learn-- THE easiest, apparently, for English-speakers!-- and vastly easier than English by any rubric.

Americans, for cultural and geographic reasons, don't develop their language-accumulating skills as strongly as people in other countries. I once taught Korean kids ESL. If you think English to Spanish is hard, try Korean to freaking English -- it's insane. Yet they managed it brilliantly and were typically better writers than most English-speakers I've taught-- not only through their insane work ethic, but through early exposure to other languages (and English, through the culture industry).

Language is, furthermore, not a model that merely describes objective reality. It actually actively shapes the reality we see in fascinating ways, as this video about the Himba tribe will show. "Der" and "dem" and "des", within the broader context of the language, become intricacies that can convey great subtlety. A good way of appreciating this is reading Spanish literature in translation, and then the original thing -- that tends to drive home how much is lost. If we merged all languages to one, this fascinating variety wouldn't exist...

That said, the whole gender thing in language totally wigs me out, too. I've been meaning to see if any studies have been done on the romance languages & gender perception but I haven't managed it yet...
« Last Edit: December 03, 2011, 02:44:00 pm by Syna »