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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2801 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Two weeks ago, the winners of the 2026 edition of the Lyttle Lytton award were announced.

For those unfamiliar, the Lyttle Lytton award is a competition in which entrants are challenged to write the worst opening line to a novel they can think of, using no more than 200 characters. In addition to the competition itself, there's a "Found" division in which people submit lines from actual published work (not just novels, but also journalism and non-fiction).

Some personal favourites from this year's edition:

  • It was 2016, the summer of Pokémon Go, but I was going nowhere.
  • The year is 1353.  The Black Death has unalived half of Europe.
  • My hands trembled as I watched the emperor form his much steadier hand into the shape of a thumbs down emoji.
  • “Oh Chat!” Vanessa wailed as she gazed upon the throbbing em dash which would soon be thrust into her sopping wet data centre.
  • As she lustfully stared at me, my loins exploded like the Titan submersible, and she, the ocean I wanted to be so deep into.
  • On my first mission I HALO jumped into Muhammad City, but was KIA (Kicked In Ass) by unfriendlies and had to exfil via helo.
  • Joe, having finally bought a plane, could now travel everywhere!  You know what else is everywhere?  Your personal data.  BlockMi can protect you from data brokers online.  More on that later, back to Joe
  • This fanfic was written and uploaded on the traditional homeland of the Anishinabe people.

This fanfic was written and uploaded on the traditional homeland of the Anishinabe people.

How do they determine which people is a specific plot of land the traditional homeland of? Do they use the snapshot of their location in 1492? Or in 1 January 1950?

The guy who runs the competition had the same thought:

The thing that gets me about these land acknowledgments is that they generally only go back so far.  The ones I hear in my neck of the woods acknowledge the Ohlone speak­ers who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish in the eighteenth century, but we never hear about the Hokan speakers those Ohlone speakers displaced when they migrated in from the Central Valley.  Sequent occupancy has a little bit more complexity to it than the “traditional homeland” formulas tend to acknowledge!

I hate land acknowledgements with a passion. I saw the tweet the other day that suggested starting off a meeting in the US with "we acknowledge we are gathered here today on former British land". Come to think of it, one could do the same thing in Ireland.

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