You an I… We are either going to form an unstoppable super team or… You ate going to end up as my nemesis.

No, not at all. In fact I am pretty good at being able to stay awake for rather long periods of time. I can comfortably go 48 hours without sleep.

If I could donate it I would happily do so.

I can fall asleep, near instantly, at will.

I call it my time machine function.

I’m not sure calling Gorbechev an idiot is right though.

Just because he was a victim of external interests, as you describe. Feels a bit victim-blamey.

“Look what you made the US do to you”.

Yeltsin, maybe though.

Which bit of history does this represent?

At first I thought it might be the break up of the USSR, but that doesn’t really work here. So that leaves me at a loss.

I just can’t see how Gorbachev and Trump, or their actions, are similar.

I can’t imagine my experience wold have been better online. The third year was almost all lab work and practical.

But aside from that, one of the best things about my offline experience was getting to spend time with people from other disciplines and honestly, some 20-odd years later, that has been almost as valuable as my degree in my career as well as my understanding of the world.

So you think it should be a binary decision? Either see only things you’ve actively curated or put up with anime tits.

No one is suggesting it is anyone’s fault for posting stuff, just that if there was a tag system people could choose.

You seem defensive, is everything ok?

Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.

Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.

A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.

Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.

And this isn’t to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.

Actually that’s not that obscure.

Really obscure knowledge would be something like the sign for Ashton Road once had a plastic soldier taped to it for six months by this kid called Richard who once shat himself in primary school and rather than clean himself up spent most of the break trying to get other people to shit themselves like he was starting a new trend. He was unsuccessful.

The word “dinosaur” was coined by a resident of my town.

I will follow you into battle.

I’d still like to throw infinite amounts of money at it to find out.

But yeah. If it was filmable, someone would have had a half-hearted stab by now.

Ian M Banks entire culture series.

Yup. Any of the YouTube culprits… NordVPN, Raycon, that sort of thing. Nope.

Excellent use of language.

I did. Quite a few. Even taught a couple.

Here’s the thing. You aren’t entirely wrong.

Language can be studied and taught in two distinct ways.

There’s prescriptive language, which teaches, “this is how language should be used”.

And there’s descriptive language, which teaches, “this is how language is actually used”.

You are clearly leaning into the latter there, and that is fine. However, it does miss the point that for effective and articulate communication, rules are pretty useful.

Think of it like a programming language where you have to be very specific around syntax to get the exact thing you want.

Obviously, spoken and written English is far more forgiving. In fact we can say something really specific without saying it at all due to cultural and situational inference.

But prescriptive English forms a baseline for effective communication across what should be the broadest scope of a population.

Anyway, “on accident” is an Americanism. Thought to exist because of a conflation of “on purpose”. If anything this conflation is an attempt to enforce a rule, to make language more prescriptive than allowing for the differences in “by” and “on”.

Now, let’s deal with that jibe in your comment that I never took English class.

Class.

You talk about the working class. Then you talk about prescriptive language and being all cool with that. Then you seek to belittle me by undermining my education. You say that the correct way of speaking is for posh people yet you criticise my understanding of language.

That would make you a hypocrite, wouldn’t it?

Nope.