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Posts
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843
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • TL;DR: whisper 'queue'

    Whistling isn't blowing air out a hole in your lips; it comes out there, but it's not what you do.

    Instead, you blow downwards across the hole, like blowing acrosss the neck of a coke bottle, albeit from the inside.

    There's two ways to explain this - different people do better with each.


    The first way is with speech sounds

    First, a raspy cat-hiss consonant somewhere between kkhhhkhkhkhkh and hhshshshshh with the back of your tongue, to aim a stream of air at your lower incisors.

    Second, the tip of your tongue not all the way forwards as you would for yyyyyyy, nor all the way back as for awwwww, just neutral as for uuhhhhh. This sets the pitch: forwards for high notes (making the 'bottle' smaller), and back for low ones (making it bigger).

    Third and least important, the lips. Don't purse them tight for wwwww like you're going to kiss your grandmother; go with a super-casual oooo, like you're muttering 'cool' sarcastically under your breath.

    Put them all together without using your vocal cords, and whisper hhkkhhkhkhkheeeeeeuuuuuooooo, or something like a raspy guttural version of 'queue'.

    You'll want to mess with that consonant to get the airstream angle right; just keep practising and you should get a lick of tone in there. It'll be breathy and you won't be able to hit high notes - but we fix that in part two.


    The second way starts off with shushing, like you're soothing a newborn, or making steam-train noises.

    Just shh-shh-shh up and down a scale.

    No vocal cords, just shaping your mouth to filter the white noise into something lighter as you go up, heavier as you go down.

    Do the shh-shh equivalent of do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do and back down again.

    Keep doing that as you slowly bring your lips together.

    As you do, you'll find the filtering gets more effective, and your notes get notier.

    Don't purse your lips tight, just bring them together enough to blow crumbs off your phone screen (or something idk)

    Practice a bit, and you will be able to make a breathy tone that's more note than hiss. It won't be great, but we fix that next.


    Once you can reliably get a breathy tone straight off, then you can clean it up. Now you purse your lips tighter like you're kissing your grandmother or saying wwwww, and the breathiness will go away, and you'll be able to reach high notes without it falling apart.

    It's harder to find the tone in the first place this way, which is why you started out on easy mode - but once you can find it, it's easy to fix up.

    Beyond that, it's just a matter of practice.

    Remember that if you're straining with any of it, you're doing it wrong. Keep it super relaxed, and until you get to the cleaning-up part, quiet. There's no strain, no pressure.

  • I've saved a few dozen kids from genital mutilation, that I know of.

    That's probably my proudest achievement to date.

    I've also taught a good 50 people to whistle that never could before, and while that's pretty low impact, it still makes me happy.

  • "I had coffee with one of the males at work"

    "There's a male waiting for you downstairs"

    "I need to see a male about a dog"

    All of them would be weird as fuck, and yes, they'd sound demeaning. They don't have the same weird-incel vibe, but that's just an accident of culture.

  • Female as an adjective is perfectly fine.

    A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That's the best way to refer to those.

    What's bad is using 'female' as a noun: "A female. "

    In general, you just don't use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don't call someone "a gay", "a black", or "a Chinese". That is offensive, and "a female" has the same kind of feel.

    (there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone 'an American' or 'A German", but not "A French". I don't understand why - if you can't feel your way, best just avoid it)

    Now, you could get around it by calling someone "a female person" - except that we already have a word for "female person", and that's "woman". And to go out of your way to avoid saying "woman" makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don't want that.

  • If I send someone a text, I don't expect them to read or respond in any given timeframe. I don't get to just demand their full attention on the spot, and I fully appreciate that they may not be in a position to hear or respond to their phone bleeping at them at any given moment.

    EXCEPT

    If someone sends me a text, and I respond to it within seconds, then yes, I expect them to treat it like a conversation.

    I will never understand these people that hit send then immediately throw their phone out the goddamn window so any response no matter how fast stays on delivered for the next hour.

  • Looks like the US is going to get some tough love.

    Turns out you can't just fund, supply and cast UN vetoes in support of the genocide of an entire people and still get unconditional support at the ballot box, whoda thunkit.

    And yes, the consequences are going to be hideous.

    I guess you should have thought of that, what with everyone telling you over and over and over.

    Cabin in the Woods moment, and you brought it on yourselves.

  • "Slaves, obey your masters" is not radically opposing the existing power structure. Nowhere will you find a single instruction to disobey the powerful, or hold them to account.

    Like I say, people-pleasing behaviour is definitely in there; Matthew 5 is all about not having any boundaries. But you'll notice it's not aimed at powers or principalities, nowhere does it suggest that masters should not beat their slaves or that kings should not retaliate to acts of war - and they're certainly not for god himself, who absolutely would not forgive anyone for their ancestors' disobedience without a major blood sacrifice, thus that whole crucifixion thing you might be vaguely aware of (though admittedly it's pretty niche, hidden deep in the lore somewhere). Those instructions are for the little people, to keep them in their lane.

    Which is not, to be extremely clear, to suggest that I'm some kind of randroid fuck who considers altruism to be a weakness; very much the opposite. We could have a much better world if more people would be nicer to each other even when they didn't have to be.

    It's just that one-way altruism imposed in the context of a rigidly-endorsed social hierarchy just ain't it. If the poor have to do all the heavy nice-peopling while a bunch of rich untouchable assholes work them to death and torture them for lulz, that would fit more into your whole late-stage-capitalism kind of bullshit - and christianity does not one fucking thing to combat that, while actively propping it up round the edges.

  • Christianity is not about compassion and peace.

    Forget utilitarian ethics altogether. Think of a twisted version of virtue ethics, where the only virtue is power.

    Narcissism and sociopathy flows downwards from the top, submission and people-pleasing flows upwards from the bottom.

    From the top down, having power makes you virtuous, and exercising power reflects that virtue.

    If you are in a position of privilege and power, if you can kill people and take their stuff and get away with it, that marks you as powerful and to-be-feared, and therefore admirable.

    If you are some kind of peasant, the opposite applies: you must be a submissive people-pleaser or face severe punishment.

    If you're somewhere inbetween, you do both: oppress those below you, and grovel to those above you. This is virtue on both fronts.

    That's conservative morality in a nutshell.

    Christianity endorses this structure wholesale. It pats the peasants on the head and tells them they'll be rewarded (one day, not today) for being good little people-pleasers, and puts a final boss at the very top of the org chart so that the powerful can do some token groveling-upwards, and so the peasants have someone else to grovel to when nobody's around. It fits hand-in-glove with everything conservatives love.

    Compassion-mercy-and-peace is just marketing spin clipped from the instructions for people-pleasing. Go along to get along, be helpful, don't rock the boat.

    You'll notice that the core concept of christianity is earning tolerance from the powerful despite complete degradation. You are utterly worthless garbage and deserve to be tortured with fire forever; only via the sacrifice of an actual god can you can be promoted to salvage - though of course this status remains a completely undeserved gift that you should be overwhelmed with gratitude for.

    Like a cop deciding not to murder you this time round: you are so blessed, now pick up that can.

    Of course they love it.

  • I wasn't suggesting that Biden would destroy democracy, but that Trump would.

    They both stand for awful, horrible things.

    If it is hypocritical and amoral for republicans to stow their conscience and basic decency in order to help their team win, then it is also hypocritical and amoral for democrats to do the same.

    You call one cowardice, but the other pragmatism. And that, in itself, is hypocrisy.

    And if you're suggesting that people should just have faith that Biden will magically 'pivot' to a less-genocidal position after the election, then I present you with the same hollow laughter that I gave Trump supporters who eagerly and futilely expected him to become a decent human being after he won.

    If you hold that democracy is valid, then the voters are right by definition.

    And in that case, a politician who fails to be good enough to attract their vote is entirely to blame for that failure. And if the alternative is disaster and chaos (as I agree is on the cards if Camacho Harkonnen gets in again), that only increases their obligation not to be such a goddamn fuckup.

    Instead of playing chicken with the whole damn world while lining his pockets with sweet, sweet military-industrial-complex money, maybe he could cut his profit margin back just a little, stop bombing children and handily defeat the great orange turd while he was at it. Win fucking win.

    But no, we can't possibly have that, can we?

    And if we can't, why precisely the fuck should we be blackmailed into supporting him anyway?

    Did you ever watch Cabin in the Woods, by any chance?

  • You can't know. There's no possible way to verify what any of it is doing.

    Unless you've built your own hardware out of discrete components and know personally what every byte in the code does, you absolutely cannot know what's actually going on in there.

    And honestly, a large chunk of both consumer harware and networking certainly is spying on people.Every ISP and major datacentre has a TLA room that mere mortals aren't allowed to go into or ask questions about, every phone or motherboard chipset is an absolute rats nest of backdoors and telemetry - and unless you sand the lid off every single chip and go over it with an electron microscope, there's no good reason to assume any component only does what it claims to. But then the data from that will need to be stored on something likely-pwned anyway.

    Various governments all have the ability to count your nose hairs if they wanted to - and if you're sufficiently anomalous, you may as well assume they have.

    to all of which I say meh. It's evil and hideous of course, but so many things are evil and hideous that you just have to triage.