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5:30 on workdays, anywhere between 7:30 to 11:00 on weekends.

I’m pretty sure that entire message was provided by degenerative “AI”. It just reeks of the format and language of an LLM chat bot.

Could people who have actual technical skills check something for me? Does this code even work?

“Duration” isn’t one of the “familiar first four dimensions”. That’s the point.

it starts with the familiar first four dimensions (length, width, depth, duration)

Duration?

It starts with that?

Then it starts with a complete and absolute failure to comprehend even the basics of relativity.

When (if) science discovers it, then I’ll think of multiple timelines. Until then it’s an entertaining fiction at best.

I think in terms of reality as can be seen, measured, observed, and inferred from that.

“Timelines” and “parallel dimensions” are not a part of any of that, so no, I don’t think of reality as different timelines. Those are (often very entertaining, I’ll admit) fictions.

I love this one!

Toss-up between autumn and spring.

Spring because that’s when the really good teas start showing up, when most of the flowers start showing (there’s nothing quite as beautiful as a plum tree filled with blossoms and icicles) and the days’ length starts to increase visibly in the race to the equinox.

Autumn because that’s when all the really good crops start hitting the markets, because the horribly humid heat of summer starts to fall, when the moon cakes start showing up (along with the nice delicate rice wines hitting the scene) and the colours start their final run toward their winter forms.

There are some places in the Chinese diaspora where leaving your chopsticks like that will get you soundly rebuked (or smacked if your parents catch you). That’s a superstition that’s taken very seriously in traditional Chinese circles.

Where’s the emoji of Chief pinching the bridge of his nose after 86 speaks when you need it?

Did you not read?

I think that way about the '80s.

The absolute first non-food thing I ever bought in China was a jade “bi” pendant. This is what they look like:

(To be clear, this is not mine for reasons which will become obvious in a moment.)

I was told by the seller that you should never take it off as she strung it on red silk for me, because it’s to “protect your health”.

Since 2001 I’ve taken this off only five times, all but one of which was because the string frayed through and it had to be restrung. I don’t believe in the slightest that it has any impact on my health, but as a minor, neurotic superstition it stays on. (Which is why I couldn’t share a photograph of mine: I’d have to take it off.)

What proportion of Texan’s incarcerated population is forced to labour for next to no salary again? There’s at least one US state—Virginia (312)—whose official title for prisoners is “Slave of the State”. Do you think the other southern states are much more progressive in their attitudes?

Hint: no. Alabama (390), Arkansas (574), Florida (377), Georgia (435), Mississippi (661), South Carolina (302), and Texas (452) also have de facto slavery of their prisoners: defined as mandatory labour for negligible to no wage, with strict penalties for non-participation.

So what are those numbers I’ve put after all the state names? Those are the incarceration rates per 100,000. Compare and contrast these with the US national average (which, remember, includes the high-rate states): 355. Isn’t it mysterious that of the eight states with de facto incarcerated slavery six are over the national average, and three (Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas) have the highest incarceration rates in the country?

Slavery is alive and well in the USA, and Texas is one of its largest users thereof now. So yes, I think the average modern Texan secessionist would be pro-slavery … because they already are.

Don’t take “no” for an answer!

This voice sounds very familiar to me. Very shini.

I find some of the best introduction to the whole jazz ethos is to go old-school with Big Band and '20s jazz in general. You can get people started down the path to radical improvisation by the tighter, more constrained forms of that era and then guide them toward the more … ah … challenging stuff.

I’m in the “little bit of both” camp here.

1. By definition if you’re a malicious manipulator you’re being a bad person. (Disagree? Look up what “malicious” means…) And bad people really should be punished. (But that’s not the end-all, be-all of things: good people should also be rewarded!)

2. On the other hand, you live in a world where bad actors exist. At some level you have to watch out for yourself instead of dumping that burden on literally everybody around you who in some form or another cares about you.

Where things get complicated for me is when the people who are victims of malicious manipulators have been manipulated through their own desire to be, well, malicious. The victims of 419 scams, for example, are sucked in by malicious manipulators through a desire to benefit through what amounts to malicious manipulation. They wanted to be scammers themselves; it just turns out that they were incompetent at it and got scammed instead. Here my feelings are mixed.

There’s layers of hilarity for me.

1. The introduce German vocabulary, like the “Wesen” that are at the heart of the show. It’s the right word, note: it means “creature” or “being” or other such words. But they pronounce it like “VESS-en”, instead of the proper way of saying it which sounds more like “VAY-zen”. Thus they’re pronouncing what is arguably the core word of the show as if it meant “whose” instead of “creature”. This makes me laugh. Constantly.

2. There’s a whole host of comical errors in the “German” words for the “VESS-en”(🤣):

• Blutbad: The name for werewolves, translates to “bloodbath”. So far so good. Perhaps a poetic name to show the deadliness of the creatures. But in plural they call them “Blutbaden” which would mean “bathing in blood”. The word they were actually looking for was “Blutbäder”.

• Jägerbär: This is a werebear and is intended to mean “hunter-bear”. Which is fine. Except when it shows up in writing it’s spelled “Jägerbar” (and it’s pronounced that way about half the time too), meaning “hunter’s bar”. As in the place you get your drinks if you’re a hunter. (It also sometimes shows up as “Jagerbar” which … doesn’t seem to mean anything I can figure out.)

• Ziegevolk: Supposed to mean “goat people” but it should be “Ziegenvolk” (plural: “Ziegenvölker”).

• Fuchsbau: Supposed to mean “foxhole” but this is not a word that has any supernatural connotations in German. It’s literally the word for a fox burrow. (It’s telling that the rarely-seen German dub of the show changes it to Fuchsteufel: literally fox-devil.)

• And a cast of thousands. Most of the “Wesen” names are wrong. They’re what happens when someone comes up with a “cool name” in English and translates it word for word into German with a German-English dictionary, unaware that other languages aren’t just one-for-one mappings with English vocabulary, grammar, and idiom.

3. The real comedy sets in, however, when they started introducing real German speakers (and “real” German speakers) into the story. In the first two seasons or so, the only foreign languages they inserted for any length of time were French and Spanish. (I can’t judge the Spanish except peripherally: it seemed fine, but the French ranged from competent to exquisite.) But in the third season they set some things in Germany and had “native” (and native) German speakers talking. Some of these “German speakers” spoke such a badly-corrupted German it was impossible to work out what they were actually saying; it was somehow worse than the “Chinese” in Firefly(!). But the true comedy gold is when real German speakers had to speak the lines. Because for consistency’s sake they had to mispronounce words and misuse words that were already in canon … and you could SEE in their faces how uncomfortable it all was to say “VESS-en” for “Wesen”. (I suspect there were a lot of reshoots because the actual Germans kept screwing up their lines using correct German pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.)

Now don’t get me wrong here. I like the show. I’m enjoying watching it. I just find the cringeworthy German to be a layer of unintentional comedy gold atop a series that’s pretty entertaining in its own right. It’s just the victim of what commonly comes from unilingual writers in any language (though anglophones have a far higher proportion of unilingualism than most other language groups).

See, this is what happens. The writers come up with a neat turn of the phrase or a cool vocabulary item in their native language. (Fair enough. It’s literally the language they think in.) Then they ask the wrong question:

• How would I say <phrase/word/whatever> in <language>?

And they’ll go to a native speaker and ask that, without context. Or they’ll go to a language dictionary and translate it manually. Or they’ll go to Google Translate. Or these days maybe to ChatGPT. And what comes out is a literal translation (that might even be an accurate literal translation!) … that is nonetheless gibberish in the target language. (Pronunciation is another thing entirely, and I cut some slack there because actors are not going to always be polyglots; indeed rarely are.)

So to illustrate, let’s take a common English expression: “Who gives a shit?” I’ll translate it into three languages literally:

• Qui donne une merde ?
• Wer gibt eine Scheiße?
• 谁给一坨屎？ (Shéi gěi yī tuó shǐ?)

All three of these are 100% accurate translations of the expression. NONE of them have any meaning in their target language. French, German, and Chinese speakers, if they didn’t know the English expression, would blink uncomprehendingly at you trying to figure out if you’ve just had an aneurysm or something. See, the proper, idiomatic translation is more like this:

• On s’en fout. (Literally “we don’t care” but used in the space that “who gives a shit?” is placed.)
• Wen interessiert’s? (Literally “who’s interested?”) / Mir doch egal (“I don’t care anyway”) depending on which way “who gives a shit?” is being used. (Recall what I said about one-to-one mapping…)
• 谁在乎？(Shéi zài hū?) / 我才不在乎呢。(Wǒ cái bù zài hū ne) depending on how dismissive you want to be in Chinese. The first means “who cares?” and the second, far harsher, means “I don’t care at all”.

So for a show to not become an unintentional comedy like Grimm became for me, the writers would either have to stay in their lane and not try to introduce German, or they would have had to actively collaborate with a German native-level speaker to find out how actual GERMANS would say things.