It is unsurprising that taking any situation to ridiculous extremes makes it ridiculous :P

I think that perhaps a lot of wisdom is taking things away from ridiculous extremes and understanding them in the context of the world that is, rather than the world that is-not. It’s pretty easy to come up with contrived situations where nearly any given thing is absurd.

…but yeah lets do it anyway for fun, because this is the Internet, and what’s even the point if we can’t be weird. Usually the most efficient way to do reduce moral decisions to absurdity is to make it into a trolley-problem. So for example, the puppy ate the disarming codes for an armed nuclear weapon at a puppy farm, and is slowly getting away on it’s cute, stubby legs. So you can either passively allow thousands of puppies to die, or actively stomp one.

The reality of course is couples arguing about trifling things, like minor expenses, housework, small behaviors, or whether to put a toilet seat down. We make our lives miserable for such petty reasons sometimes. I’ve realized I’d rather be wrong and make my partner happy, than be right and make her unhappy – if at all practical. My mind is fairly rigid by nature – it’s just so easy for me to be an idiot-by-default in these matters.

As an aside, we eat dog in my country – although I don’t, it smells weird, it’s expensive, and looks sketchy.

If I married someone who wanted to harm me, I have bigger problems.

Thankfully, I did not :)

Ah yeah, that was me as a kid too. I read whatever I could get ahold of, which was mostly English and French from 50+ years ago (yay, secondhand books and copyrights expiring). So my vocabulary in both languages was (and occasionally remains) antiquated. My pronunciation fixed itself some time after university, but was weird in my youth.

I’ve since de-prioritized human language, for practical reasons. Communicating with machines efficiently is simply much more productive (and lucrative)! My shorthand also is it’s own language, where there is no distinction between letters and numbers, of which there are 16, and they phonetically map to English. Hexadecimal English, or Hexen for short. It’s optimized for writing quickly (every character is precisely 1 stroke).

Quite handy for taking notes around people I don’t want reading them, too.

I once knew a Thai national with a legal name, through some quirk of the system, legally became Mr. Smith.

First name Mr.

Last name Smith.

Getting him through airports was always an… experience. He was a talented guy though!

We live in rented honeycomb-like structures to extract maximum rental value, performing all our work in VR offices managed by social media companies. The concepts of “home” and “alone” no longer exist.

Historians rediscover the original movie Home Alone, and over the course of 16 academic papers, explore these antiquated notions. The first four papers cover the economics by which noncorporate entities have legal rights and may own land. The next four the idea that some places could be different from others, making leisure travel relevant. After that, the idea that physical goods could be owned (and therefore “stolen” by “thieves”), not only leased as a DRM-protected service.

The final four papers are just screaming.

Yup, that makes sense!

I’ve cornered the market on Latin-Vietnamese cross-language humor though. Stay off my turf :P

Ah, that works much better in Italian!

One related word I have mixed feelings about is ‘antediluvian’. On one hand, it’s got a nice ring to it. On the other hand, there are enough floods in my area that it translates to “more than a short time ago”, which feels contrary to it’s intended usage.

Some people might require a flood of biblical proportions. We get those less frequently, but in practice, still too often for the word to be used as intended.

On a semi-related note, I accidentally stumbled on a temple the other day that looked Buddhist, but the symbology had far too many tentacles and various statues had… unusual numbers of limbs. Perhaps the core issue is that I apparently live in R’lyeh. Still… affordable housing on land risen from the deeps, not much pollution or traffic. Google maps can be a bit glitchy. Fresh (if highly unusual) seafood.

Yup, that was the case for me too. I think I only figured it out when I was like 30.

We can also compoundwordly languageweird!

Oh in English – I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).

My wife asked me to stop worrying about whether I was right, and instead focus on being helpful. Changing the way your mind works is quite difficult, but in cases like these, worth doing.

I lived for the better part of a decade in Vietnam thinking “đại lý” was a loan word from English meaning “daily”.

It actually indicates an agent (like a reseller) – e.g. a lottery ticket seller, news stand, and so on. “Daily” just worked in all those contexts by coincidence.

I also mix up “in stock” (in a warehouse) and “available”. So an analogy is I often ask people if they have “a clock in their warehouse” instead of if they “have the time”.

Also probably two dozen equally weird things I’m not even aware of. People are pretty chill about it, mostly because the number of people without Vietnamese heritage that speak the language in any capacity, rounds down to zero.

Verbing weirds language.

One of my professors would regularly use the word antepenultimate, “before before last”.

I don’t know how hard adoption paperwork is here to be honest!

However culturally, I find we have a somewhat of an aversion to getting lawyers or filling out official forms, or waiting. I’m not sure why this is, but it might tie in to old-fashioned ideas about pride, honor, and respect. So a lot of things have ‘no paperwork’, and when it finally needs to be sorted out, tempers flare and you’ve got a blood feud on your hands.

Haha yeah. Supply chains for software are a mess (just like most supply chains), and the product with the worst character support will define the limits of everything else :(

You could verb meme. They memed. She is memeing. He will meme.

Another descriptive candidate could perhaps be ‘echoing’. It evokes a rapid repetition without processing. Other uses work nicely too – e.g. “the notes of the student echo the notes of the teacher, not having passed through the minds of either”. Or “they simply echoed the meme they had received”.

I immigrated to Vietnam. It was… difficult, but I eventually made it work. I am happily married and run a small company.

Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (spoilers for an obscure movie follow)

The Japanese self defence force gets sent back in time to defend the future from the japanese self-defense force sent earlier back in time who is trying to derail history for… no reason really. This is apparently destroying time itself by altering history!

They stop them by blowing up a bunch of stuff and leaving tons of modern tech (including a nuclear weapon, helicopters, tanks, tons of automatic weapons, and an entire oil refinery) in feudal Japan. The movie suddenly ends on a freeze-frame with characters smiling, but none of these issues addressed, which I always understood to mean that they failed and time was destroyed, leaving them forever frozen in that moment.

The movie was unexpectedly hilarious overall. The guy that hosts Iron Chef is in that movie, and is the best character.

Sure. Both parents die, neighbors / other family / friends might take you in. They might do this formally or informally (e.g. legally adopt you, or just raise you without doing the paperwork), to give you a better life than in an orphanage. Or maybe some aunt or uncle can’t have kids, but wanted to. It’s not that uncommon, I’ve met a few people in this category.

Vietnam has had a fairly turbulent history until fairly recently (quite an understatement). I don’t have many stories from those less peaceful times (my ancestors here are through marriage), but my impression is that it’s the sort of situation where adoption would have had to happen pretty often.

Oh one tangential tech story : You know all those scammy blockchain “projects”? Boy, they made a lot of t-shirts in Vietnam. A lot of the leftovers made their way to orphanages (a side effect of the economics of manufacturing is you always have extra, often containing nonsense text), so it was pretty common to see orphans with Bitcoin-whatever t-shirts for a while. So at least one OK thing came out of that technology.