That was a pretty great-ass fire.

Stream of consciousness really, for the most part tongue in cheek. I think despite it’s verbosity, it’s a good explanation of why the term is awkward once you give it more than a second’s thought. But hey language is gonna language, people will probably take it as it’s meant despite all that.

I always thought motherfucker was a weird exclamation. At least right now, it doesn’t fit with modern concepts of humiliating put downs because things like “I fucked your mum” are commonly understood phrases of contempt and ways to embarrass or domineer someone yet it creates the uncomfortable paradox of the person calling someone a motherfucker inadvertently placing their opponent in a rhetorical position of dominance and power over at least someone whose mother they have fucked, and quite possibly even the mother of the person calling them a mother fucker if they’re happy to turn the tables and make that claim. Whether the term might once not have had those confusing connotations before common tropes around fucking of people’s mothers being a dominance thing someone might take a chauvinistic pride in; within current culture, it definitely does.

Then you have the fact that statistically, quite a lot of normal people are going to be motherfuckers including everyone’s Dad and especially the father of the person calling someone a motherfucker, so it’s offensive impact is up against the heavily diluting effect of the sheer banality of the status of motherfucker. It’s almost like saying “oxygen breather” and expecting to offend.

Then it gets so contextually muddied by the fact that the word has become semantically very flexible. I think I’ve even heard it used as a term of endearment before, at the very least it can sometimes be a stand in for just “people”, as in “some motherfuckers like to smoke” wherein such cases it’s fairly neutral in affect or at least only mildly negative. It’s also used just as an exclamation of surprise or anger with a situation, this is actually where I most find myself using it. It’s sometimes used with regard to objects, rather than people with which one is frustrated, a usage that I guess isn’t so far removed from the original offensive intent but still broadens the scope somewhat. This flexibility isn’t necessarily bad, after all “fuck” is extremely flexible and people will infer intent from context pretty effectively but again it does seem to me to sort of dilute it’s antagonistic and offensive qualities by becoming mundane.

I guess the term works quite well because it’s rather graphic. It doesn’t just require the word itself to be arbitrarily considered offensive like “fuck” does, but instead produces mental imagery that’s shocking and explicit, maybe that’s how it’s managed to hang around so long despite semantic ambiguity and possible rhetorical backfiring but for me, I still think it’s a weird term. It’s so ambiguous, and so tied up with weird ideas around propriety and women that make it feel strange in contexts where someone wants to be threatening and vulgar. It feels like a strangely dandy and out of place anachronism in the sort of ‘street’ context that I think people want to evoke when they use it. Feels like something I might expect people to say right before slapping each other with gloves. Are they upset with the person’s habit of fucking mother’s because it implies they’re a philanderer? Would that be offensive to them? Or is it the mother they’re supposed to have fucked who’s improper? A “slut” for allowing the mother fucker to fuck them? If so, why is the issuer of the term directing their distaste at the mother fucker and not mother whom they fucked? Are they suggesting the person so-called, fucked their own mother? I guess that could make sense, a bit weird but certainly insulting, yet I’ve really never heard that that was the intended idea.

Is that either way or either way?

Ironically, either of them depending on the situation. Sometimes I even express the concept that I am indifferent to the choice between two things or happy with both of them by saying “ee-ther, eye-ther”

Maybe he came back really quite some time ago and died in obscurity trying desperately the whole time to persuade everyone he was a big deal and ever since people are still waiting around wondering "when’s this second coming happening?’ having no idea they missed it and it was pretty lame.

Yeh I think the phrase “shit your pants” definitely implies like the same account of piop that you would have dumped in the toilet in a deliberate manner, except in your pants and most likely accidentally.

I mean if you have any choice in the matter it’s obviously time to go home.

Yeh, like a whole lot of US politics and a smattering of more global politics and an even smaller smattering of just bad things that have happened recently. When it’s a community not dedicated to that kind of thing it’s a post on something tangentially related to it, or a commentary upon it. Occasionally it’s not even tangentially related to the supposed focus of the community and someone is just attempting to deliberately inject such subject matter in there artificially, a lot of the rest of the time it’s the comments where somebody finds a very tenuous connection to capitalism or Donald Trump or landlords. They’re all interesting or maddening enough topics to keep me scrolling but no amount of passion can resist fatigue and boredom after some time. The only other topic that is reliably separate from those other Lemmy greatest hits are people complaining about Reddit or Linux/FOSS discussions which again, are juuuust interesting enough to kinda make me feel like at least there’s something here but it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. I realise that comments like this one are their own particular genre of lame, complaining about Lemmy itself as if it contributes, but since you ask lol.

You know I’m not sure. I sure spend a lot of time here on Lemmy but somehow I’m not sure I even exactly like it. I was going through my feed to see if I could find a kind of quirky counterintuitive answer that I could justify by saying at least it’s not some super depressing news or angry commentary but they’re kinda… all like that.

I guess I cherish all of them equally as much in that I somehow keep coming back.

Ah I knew it’d be something that should have seemed obvious to me only after it’s explained.

What’s com’s?

Is it… people?

Wait soylent is real? It’s it green?

Even better then, your speech would be so memorably bad that people would be even more certain it was you and you couldn’t have been elsewhere.

If he’s you and you want to be free of your life and wish it could be someone else’s problem then your duplicate is just going to run a mile and thank their lucky stars for this break.

I’m pretty nice. I think it’d take some more intense circumstances like in Dark Matter before I or a copy of me wanted to kill anyone. I wonder if I’d be ok with taking turns for time with loved ones.

I never really considered it was because the toilet might be rounder and less oval but I have definitely noticed those toilets because for some reason they’re ALL like that in every workplace and commercial building in this one suburb of my city. I have no idea why just that suburb decided they really enjoyed the idea of everyone having their penis touch the toilet bowl. I work freelance and because of agglomeration, most companies in my industry all set up shop in that particular suburb so I got to experience a wide gamut of different buildings who all made this same bizarre and infuriating choice.

I have this drive if you look at the image you can see that the rear panel has a little semi circular nib of plastic at the bottom. It serves no purpose, but what it does do is make it nearly impossible to plug the DC connector in. You can’t quite tell from the image but it’s perfectly placed so that you can’t fit the requisite number of fingers needed to securely hold the plug and push it in to the cavity where the inputs of the panel are located. It actively encourages the otherwise pretty unlikely scenario of making only partial or near contact with the connector and not quite properly plugging it in. A dangerous possibility from a safety perspective but also a great way to lose a bunch of data by having it lose power or short out during operation. It’s one of the most exquisitely designed inconveniences hell’s engineering department could have possibly developed.

It also doesn’t make any sense why it would be the Christian god if that’s the reasoning because I think rather a lot of different religions would happily take credit for whatever it is they thought made the world “perfect” so why would the Christian claim to this perfection be any stronger than any other?