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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
    It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
    Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.



  • I’m surprised only a handful of people have mentioned Ghibli movies. For me it was Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it’s probably one of the first movies I remember watching in general. Still my favorite Ghibli movie and I must have watched it dozens of times as a kid.
    The source material for it is a manga by Miyazaki himself and it’s much longer and deeper (the movie only covers about 1.5 out of 7 volumes, and changes a lot of details). Highly recommended.



  • I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
    Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.





  • Sorry for rant
    There’s a thing in sociology (or social psychology? I don’t really know the difference) called “identity salience” that I think explains gender really well. Basically, people have any number of identities that describe them and they are of varying importance/salience. For example, it can be a big part of somebody’s identity that they are a “father,” but not a big part of their identity that they are a “driver” or “consumer.” Maybe all those words can objectively be applied to this person, but he would likely identify strongly with one over the others. Similarly, right now I’m a “commenter” because I’m leaving a comment. That’s something that objectively describes me, but I don’t consider it to be an important part of my identity at all. Gender is just like any other identity; it’s more or less important to different people. There’s already a distinction between sex and gender, even colloquially to an increasing extent, and gender is widely understood to exist as a spectrum or multiple spectrums. It’s reasonable to believe that people who don’t consider a traditional gender to be an important part of their identity could consider themselves non-binary.
    It’s true that gender stereotypes exist, but there are plenty of positive characteristics that are also associated with gender like “men are confident” or “women are understanding.” If somebody doesn’t identify with any of those characteristics or even stereotypes, then they might just feel like they’re not accurately described by gendered words. Of course, somebody who doesn’t fit the stereotypical idea of a certain gender can still be of that gender; it’s all subjective.
    If you’re interested in simple, objective, binary gender, it’s called sex, not gender. And even sex isn’t simple, objective, or binary when you really get detailed.