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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
ladyyatexel
petalya

in therapy my therapist and i were talking about my own feelings of self worth in relationships. and she asked me to say qualities about myself that someone else would be attracted to, on a romantic and platonic level. so i named some things like compassionate, empathetic, etc. and she said “you named things that you can give someone. ways you can serve, rather than ways that you are” and y'all..my mind was blown that’s gonna stick with me forever like she then proceed to tell me actual innate qualities about myself that she liked and thought anyone else would like as well and i hadn’t even considered those because like she said i was focused on things i could do outwardly to attract and maintain connections rather than who i was as a person..goddamn!!! thats tea!!!

petalya

With this in mind, this also makes me think of the ways people describe us. When people say the reasons that they love/like you or describe you as a person, are they only naming ways that you serve them? Are they equating your worth with how much you do for them?

ex. “You’re such a good listener. You’re so generous, you’re so compassionate. You’re always there for me. You always hold me down. You’re reliable”

vs.

“You’re so funny! You’re very vibrant. You’re creative, passionate, and intelligent. You’re optimistic. You’re so talented at ____” , etc. I think that’s very telling.

ladyyatexel
ladyyatexel:
“tinsnip:
“ guljerry:
“ HELP they are so freaking cute. I downloaded all of them but holosuite buds are in use rn.
I especially love on the Bashir sitter how you click on him and he writes Go Away on his padd. Rude, Julian. :P
Thanks...
guljerry

HELP they are so freaking cute. I downloaded all of them but holosuite buds are in use rn.

I especially love on the Bashir sitter how you click on him and he writes Go Away on his padd. Rude, Julian. :P

Thanks ladyyatexel and tinsnip <3

tinsnip

OH my god these GUYS i FORGOT

i want them all over again

Lady, do you still have the link?

ladyyatexel

Oldschool pixel mascots are in a link on my sidebar for just this occasion!   Here you are!  

dodgylogic
a6

u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS

anemotionallyunstablecreature

Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…

stanzicapparatireplayers

*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.

So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?

Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.

And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.

For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).

So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.

So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.

So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.

allthingslinguistic

I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).