Can Americans please not bring Irish Gaelic names into white names discourse?
Irish is the native language of Irish people. It’s an ancient language that is on the brink of extinction as a direct result of colonialism and cultural and physical genocide.
Names like Saoirse (freedom), Áine (radiant), Aoife (beautiful) etc are traditional Irish names. They’re spelt “funny” because Irish is a different language from English, and has some sounds that aren’t found in the English language.
It’s not the same thing as edgy white Americans naming their kid Kathylyn instead of Kathleen to try to be different
Also it’s not even called Irish Gaelic it’s called Gaeilge (gayl-ga) and is its own language, a beautiful one at that, fully encourage everyone interested in language revival to try learning it because we’re losing it rapidly and there’s not many Gaeilgeoirí (“gayl-gor-ee” ie: fluent speakers) left
Yes—this happens with Hebrew names all the time, too, and it’s really frustrating. No, the name Ariel isn’t just a stupid Disney reference, it’s Hebrew. Toby isn’t “weird for a girl,” it’s common for Jewish girls because it’s Toiba in Yiddish. Asher isn’t a “trendy white name”—the influencer yummy mummy fucking stole it from us (which I hate). Believe me, I absolutely loathe those trendy made-up white people names like Bryzzley and Paedon, but keep in mind that there’s a difference between names you haven’t heard of because they belong to a different culture, and names some Mormon housewife made up by adding a bunch of Ys to a random noun.
This is also relevant with Welsh names. Cymraeg (Welsh) is a language found in Wales that has been severely damaged by English colonialism. Currently the Welsh government have been combating the dying of this language by making Welsh language a compulsory subject in schools up until sixth form, when you can drop it. All the signs have Welsh translations and almost all radio broadcasts, announcements, and phone lines have a Welsh option.
There are villages in Wales that speak only Welsh as well, I grew up in one that was mixed language but pretty much everyone bar a few immigrant parents spoke Welsh.
A few example names are from the Mabinogion which is the Welsh book of fables and includes some of the first stories about King Arthur.
This language is dying, but it’s fighting to stay alive, and a lot of White Americans don’t understand the history and significance of Welsh names.
Tumblr in particular is a very America centric site due to the majority of users being American so it’s understandable that this isn’t common knowledge, but it is still knowledge that exists and is valuable to learn.
Marvel’s Avengers is a premium priced game with microtransactions and battle passes per character that are 10 bucks each, alongside special skins for clients of Verizon and other companies, while the game itself runs terribly in the beta. Square Enix seems to ignore all of this and tries to convince us the monetization system they’ve implemented is “fair”.
Ubisoft’s been ignoring reports of sexual harassment and abuse for YEARS. The culprits were not even fired, but given the chance to resign honorably. Meanwhile they claim their games are not political, while also using BLM imagery in their latest game’s trailer while the movement has been exceptionally present in mainstream media the past few months.
Activision-Blizzard has fired over 200 people after a record breaking year in which their new CFO got a starting bonus of 15 million dollars, their CEO makes more than 40 million dollars a year and its staff gets paid so horribly that they can’t even afford lunch in their own cafeteria.
EA’s been recycling the same sports games with the same bugs, glitches and content each year while charging the same price for it. They’re refusing to acknowledge the ultimate team modes in these games as gambling, while the number of stories this year about how many people have gotten addicted to buying FIFA card packs have only been growing.
EA, Activision and 2K are going to charge for upgrades for next-gen if you buy a current-gen copy while Microsoft has created a system on Xbox Series X specifically so that publishers wouldn’t have to charge extra (CDPR is not charging for a next-gen version of CP2077 for example), even though most of the changes will only include performance upgrades. Basically it’s if like you’re playing on PC and they’re charging you for a higher performance setting.
This is only a summary of what has been happening in the past 8 months. Triple A games are no longer games designed to be games, but money-making machines dressed up as games. Games are designed around monetization, creativity is no longer the standard in this landscape. And honestly, I’m so fucking tired of it.
i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.
he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.
it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.
weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it
The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.
Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.
The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.
They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.
ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.
However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.
Think about that.
The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?
I know more about economics than AOC and my knowledge on economics is on a high school level. Its actually embarassing how little she knows about this shit. But hey, expecting a socialist to know about economics is like expecting a fish to know what a desert is.
Much of the ocean is a desert
You know what? Let’s use the allowance example again to make it even clearer.
Let’s pretend we have an allowance tax bracket with a 70% tax on money received after a certain point. To keep things simple, we’ll make the limit $90.
If a kid does chores and earns $10 in allowance, they get $10. They’re not going to be affected by the 70% tax.
If a kid does chores and earns $50, they get $50. They also aren’t in the 70% tax bracket, even though they make five times as much money as the kid making $10.
If a kid does chores and earns $100 in allowance, then they’re in the allowance tax bracket with the 70% tax.
$100 minus $90 is $10. This is the part that’s going to be taxed 70%.
70% of $10 is $7.
So the kid getting $100 in allowance will have $93 after the 70% tax takes its share.
Now, I’d never impose such a thing on actual kids. All of this is a thought exercise.
But if it were real, the kid making $10 and the kid making $50 would probably be kind of mad if the kid getting $93 was bitching about being short $7.
Also AOC majored in economics (actually one of her two majors) so step the FUCK off my congresswoman tyvm
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
