All the teachers were deaf.

Deaf people LOVE when hearing folks try to communicate so they’ll do anything they can to help you out generally.

That is the exact opposite of what I experienced when I was learning ASL.

At one point in my life I had planned to learn ASL/English sign and work as an interpreter. I lived in an area on the west coast with a community college that had a huge deaf community and a very good ASL interpreter training program. I did almost two years (just short of completing) before bailing out.

Our classes were complete immersion from day one. No speaking or writing was allowed. Later classes, fingerspell was to be kept at a minimum. It was pretty cool but at times really frustrating. It’s easy to build your vocabulary of noun and verbs, but more abstract concepts were hard to understand in this setting.

Think of it this way. How does someone explain “abstract concept” with only gestures you don’t understand yet?

Why did I quit?

I’m a hearing person and the deaf community was generally pretty hostile towards hearing people in the program. One deaf woman went so far to say I was exploiting her disability. That’s kind of the vibe I got from many in the community. This was the main reason for leaving. I didn’t want a job where I worked with people who actively hated me for no reason.

The second reason; it was very hard to become fluent. I was getting pretty familiar with the local dialect (a blend of ASL and English). I was getting good at reading sign, but MY signs sucked. I just didn’t have people to “talk” with out of my class and they were all hearing people in the same boat as me.

You can pick up sign languages by watching videos over and over, but your pronunciation is probably going to suck without someone actively correcting you.

Why even lump pedos in the same sentence with the gays

That’s the new MAGA argument. I was getting in front of it.

They’re basically arguing if gay and trans people are born that way, and that’s fine, then pedos are born that way so why isn’t that fine?

It’s a stupid argument because gay and trans people by default exist without victims.

In my opinion there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay, bi, trans, asexual, etc.

I’m Canadian. I support social programs and humanist programs. I support regulation of business so they don’t abuse their positions of power over people and to curb their habit of doing bad things in the name of more profit. I’m for taxing those with hordes of cash and giving the struggling worker a break. I support people to have the freedom to be who they want to be (gay, straight, trans, etc) as long as they aren’t hurting other people (IE pedos don’t get to harm children because they “were born that way” or god said it was cool). I support protecting the land, water and animals. I think Trump is a cunt.

I’m probably pretty left-wing.

All the linux stacks I was involved with over the years always had SELinux disabled as part of the base config. I can’t think of a single server it was enabled on.

I don’t think anything Rober does is out of virtue.

I had assumed Mark Rober was a sponsored member of the alt-right intellectual dark web.

He is.

Maybe it was downvoted because of Mormon weirdo Mark Rober and not the content itself?

“Trans is bad, but I’m also really fat. Does not compute. Bleep-bloop.” - Trump’s brain.

Chefs kiss.

also…

We’re in danger.

I lost interest after the first Iron Man movie.

I’m in PEI Canada. I’m getting eggs from a small local farm for $5 a dozen. I could probably get them cheaper but I like supporting the farm and the eggs are probably fresh enough to hatch.