It does not.

Ughhh but I just really love eating cake whilst also possessing it for future consumption…

Whoever made that first map forgot to color in a pretty big stretch of land between Mexico and Canada. How embarrassing!

Having sold their souls to capital, they long for the last time they experienced real human connection — thus they retreat into an infantile state of mind, desperately trying to claw back that which they lost.

Or something.

Can we make Fridays “dress-up” days?

Yes, but the only person who’s getting dressed up is going to be the boss, and the workers are the ones who choose the clothes. The boss ends up wearing clown makeup and 50 coats on top of each other, each a size too small.

I don’t think you could really guess that based on such a limited amount of text.

For what it’s worth the most advanced kanji in this text, 値, is taught in sixth grade, the second most advanced is 価 which is taught in fifth grade… However this person could also be younger than a fifth or sixth grader and just learned those characters early due to repeat exposure, or they might be using a few characters that they don’t actually know, just because they still know that that’s the word they were trying to type; or this person could also be older than a sixth grader, but because they didn’t use any words written with more advanced characters in the text, we can’t know.

Aside from those two outliers, the remaining kanji in the text are divided equally between first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade. There’s also a few words in the text that are spelled in hiragana that could’ve been spelled in kanji, but those are all second- or third-grade kanji as well, and those words are colloquially more commonly spelled in hiragana anyways, regardless of age.

But yeah, all in all trying to guess someone’s age based on kanji usage is a lot like trying to guess someone’s age based on vocabulary. With a large enough sample size coupled with really good deductive reasoning and statistical analysis, you could probably do it… But you can also really easily write multiple sentences in a row as a 70 year old, using only words you knew when you were 3.

speech leaf

“Speech leaf” is the Japanese word for “word”. 言こと葉ば kotoba is how you read it. I always thought that “speech leaf” was a really funny way of saying “word”, but really, if you think about it, in English we draw “parse trees” for sentences — so it only makes sense that at the end of a branch on a parse tree you would find a “speech leaf”, i.e. an individual word.

Naturally, 言こと葉ば kotoba is not actually the Japanese word for “word” because of an allusion to parse trees, rather the use of the leaf character is just a phonetic respelling. But it’s still an interesting coincidence!

before

The word you read as “before” is お前まえ omae, which is one of the Japanese words for “you”. That お o- at the start is a hiragana spelling of 御お o-, which is an honorific prefix, so together お前まえ omae means something to the effect of “the honorable presence before me”, so that’s how you get to the meaning of “you” — the person you’re speaking to, who you’re in all likelihood facing.

My impression is that お前まえ omae was originally used to politely refer to a highly respected person of a higher social status, but the connotations have shifted so much that Japanese learners are now warned to just stay away from using お前まえ omae to refer to people, because お前まえ omae can come across as very impolite in many situations — hence why it’s being used in this hate mail.

The exact level of impoliteness, or the general nuance of the word, does vary depending on dialect, formality, social status, speaker’s gender, and things like that, however, so there are some times when you can call people お前まえ omae and it won’t be a particularly big deal.

It isn’t like American elections are in any way real or the government of the United States gives a fuck about the people who live there.

Pfft! Obviously elections in the USA are legitimate. After all, every single US state and electoral district is situated entirely on land that the USA legally annexed, right?

Yim Yum!

My mental MP3 player in response to this image decided to put on “Blumenkranz” from the Kill la Kill soundtrack

I wouldn’t settle for anything less.

Off the top of my head all I can say about Paraguay is 1) Basically everybody speaks an Indigenous language there 2) Their first leader banned white people from marrying each other 3) The flag has a different design on the front and back, and also the national anthem is pretty neat IMO 4) A huge but unknown percentage of the country’s population died when they were invaded by Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the 19th century; when Rutherford B. Hayes arbitrated a boundary dispute in Paraguay’s favor after the war, the country named one of its administrative divisions after him.

Off the top of my head all I can say about Malawi is 1) formerly known as Nyasaland, the country gets its current name from the Chichewa word for “Flames”, because when the sun rises over Lake Malawi, which dominates the country’s eastern border and has some border weirdness, the waters supposedly look red like flames. 2) Malawi’s flag represents this fact, being essentially a stylized representation of a view of Lake Malawi at sunrise from Malawi’s side of the coast, coupled with pan-African symbolism. 3) Malawi was led by Bingu wa Mutharika from 2004 to 2012, and he changed the flag to have a full sun instead of a rising sun, in order to represent the country’s progress since independence. The flag was changed back to the original rising sun version shortly after Mutharika died of a heart attack.

(I should note that Malawi is actually pretty close to the median size of a UN member nation — driving from one end of the country to the other could take you a whole day.)

(Another thing to note, for the heck of it, is that the combined populations of Paraguay, Malawi, and Papua New Guinea is about 39 million people. Just over half of these would live in Malawi, and about two-thirds of the remainder would live in Papua New Guinea.)

I’m curious about why Paraguay, Malawi, and Papua New Guinea voted against.

Sorry, “might”?

So this is a whole Twitter meme?

I once saw someone write

And I’ve never been the same since then.

It’s not wrong

I’ve used it a little. It often loads slowly for me, it seems like it’s inaccurate in some places or lacks detail in some places, but as a whole I like it. I think it’s a good project with a good future.