this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Hand Talk (Plains Indian Sign Language) - New General Megathread for the 6th-8th of June 2025
(hexbear.net)
Map of the various sign languages spoken across Turtle Island, excluding Francosign languages. Plains Sign Language is labelled in red as Hand Talk
Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), also known as Hand Talk, Plains Sign Talk, Plains Sign Language, or First Nation Sign Language, is an endangered sign language common to the majority of Indigenous nations of North America, notably those of the Great Plains, Northeast Woodlands, and the Great Basin. It was, and continues to be, used across what is now central Canada, the central and western United States and northern Mexico. This language was used historically as a lingua franca, notably for international relations, trade, and diplomacy; it is still used for story-telling, oratory, various ceremonies, and by deaf people for ordinary daily use.
In 1885, it was estimated that there were over 110,000 "sign-talking Indians", including Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa, and Arapaho. As a result of the European colonization of the Americas, most notably including American boarding and Canadian residential schools, the number of sign talkers has declined sharply. However, growing interest and preservation work on the language has increased its use and visibility in the 21st century. Historically, some have likened its more formal register, used by men, to Church Latin in function. It is primarily used today by Elders and Deaf citizens of Indigenous nations.
History
Hand Talk's history is intimately associated with both ancient and recent petroglyphs of the continent, however, little is known to academia about Plains Sign Talk's historical antecedents. The earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully-formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans' arrival there. These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541.
Signing may have started in the south of North America, perhaps in northern Mexico or Texas, and only spread into the Plains in recent times, though this suspicion may be an artifact of European observation. It is known that there is a complex of Maya sign languages called Meemul Chʼaabʼal or Meemul Tziij in the Kʼicheʼ language, but it is unknown to what extent Meemul Tziij has affected Hand Talk.
The Northwest is home to Plateau Sign Language, which is either a single language or a family of sign languages spoken by the local nations. It is also unknown how associated Plateau Sign Language is with Hand Talk, but it is probable that they are related. Although it is still spoken, especially by the Ktunaxa, the Plateau nations historically shifted to using Chinook Jargon instead
In recent years, the Oneida Nation has taken steps to revive their sign language. Historically, the nations of the Northeast Woodlands, like the Haudenosaunee, spoke a variant of Hand Talk. The Oneida Sign Language Project officially began in 2016, and more signs are being added to this day.
Geography
Sign language use has been documented across speakers of at least 37 spoken languages in twelve families, spread across an area of over 2.6 million square kilometres (1 million square miles). In recent history, it was highly developed among the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa, among others, and remains strong among the Crow, Cheyenne and Arapaho.
Melanie R. McKay-Cody, a Cherokee Deaf woman and Hand Talk speaker/researcher, motions that "Plains" Sign Language is actually a family of inter-related languages extending beyond the Great Plains. She breaks down the regional languages as: Northeast Hand Talk (including Oneida Sign Language), Plains Sign Language, Great Basin Sign Language (spoken, for example, by the Ute), and Southwest Hand Talk. She also notes a West Coast language spoken by the Chumash, and she advances the idea that Inuit Sign Language has some relation to this complex of manual North American Indigenous languages. Unmentioned is Coast Salish Sign Language. Within each of these languages, she explains that nations will themselves have specific dialects, such as the Blackfoot.
Southwest Hand Talk is spoken by the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Pueblo peoples. However, amongst the Navajo and Keres people, there are two unrelated sign languages also spoken: Keresan Sign Language and, by a Navajo clan with a large number of deaf members, Navajo Family Sign. Likewise, Plateau Sign Language may or may not be related to Hand Talk.
The hidden history of “Hand Talk”
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Tried converting an epub to kepub (epub for kobo ereaders) and it actually makes the reading experience so much better 
Wait fr? I have a kobo and didn't know this
also if you want to export your highlights into a word doc, I think the site is the easiest way to do it: https://mollykannn.github.io/kobo-book-exporter/
edit: it looks like the original website i linked doesnt work anymore but this one looks like the exact same one but came out earlier than the one i was using and doesnt ask for donations 
Edit again: actually this one doesn't have the export option but you can copy paste
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Lyft put a $4 bonus zone over my house for some reason. I have no idea why because my town is pretty small and nobody is ever requesting rideshare up here - my theory is that one person tried and failed to get a ride and that triggered the algorithm to put the zone here.
I logged on and grabbed it of course, but that was over an hour ago and no rides. I'm almost certainly not going to get anything until I choose to go into town later at the normal time I start working, but hey $4 is $4 gimme that money.
I get the same in my small town, but with Uber. Some big incentives, like $50 for 3 rides, or $20 for 1, but whenever I turn it on I get nothing.
I should probably leave it on, but I already have trouble keeping my phone charged during my other gig work. Plus Uber has that stupid overlay that gets in the way.
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Doing my dishes
Like a Mormon pornstar would
Many rounds soaking
Well, in good news the new Andy Serkis Animal Farm movie looks fucking terrible
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Alfiq in UESP library
Kitty! 
so funny how i know guys irl who genuinely need sigma edit videos like this to help them process and understand very simple ideas like "happiness" and stuff
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Having a smoke break at work and the house I'm across has south park on their bigass TV that faces a window and it's the episode where randy and Kyle's dad jerk off together
Lathe: if Zohran pulls off the primary you WILL see lib media like NYT or CNN post articles like
“The progressive case to vote Republican. Just this once.” or some shit.
"here's why obviously good things are actually bad" - the best and brightest minds the liberal media establishment has to offer
Been trying to find Deltarune's secrets without looking them up. Against all odds I found the chapter 3 egg but now I can't for the life of me figure out where to put it. How long will I continue my search before I break and look it up? I've run back and forth clicking on everything probably three or four times.
edit: well I finally looked it up and
it turns out you can't place it anywhere, it just gets automatically added to Temmie's inventory when you find it.
kind of interesting how video games do eternal magical lighting in places that shouldn't have lights for gameplay purposes (some exceptions for treasure-hunter games deliberately imitating films)
but films always have characters create or cause lighting for say, ancient tombs.
and both of these are the easier option in the medium, creating whole systems for lighting/extinguishing sources needed for gameplay is excessive work, yet keeping consistent lighting, esp. when it involves flammables is time sensitive with film, so it makes more sense to incorporate into scenes
Or they shoot day for night
i was talking more interiors, though there are some circumstances you can do that with an interior set
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I’ve grown to love pineapples as of late.
For whatever reason, kid me didn’t like them that much but if I appreciate one thing about adulthood is that foods like pineapples, strawberries, blueberries all appeal to me.
I’m making a bot for my roguelike game and I’m getting a lot of pushback from my friends for using “AI”. I’m making little autonomous bots that use textual embeddings and a sprinkle of local llms to help plan their actions so they can seem real. No ai slop is shown to the user, it’s all behind the scenes for them to plan their actions and navigate the world as I work around the limitations of reinforcement learning. I publish my experiments on a microblog and apparently people were gossiping that “i was doing something bad (with ai)” and I was met with a lot of hostility when I tried to share it with friends. Made me feel really bad but maybe they are right?
Ai is just an advance in production. Its a pattern producing algorithm, and youre applying it to produce patterns. I dont see anything wrong w that
so instead of a state machine or a bunch of conditionals, you're using machine learning?
that sounds really interesting, is there a performance hit for it?
Thats correct. A decision tree is very similar to a classification task on some input state. So we invert the model so we just need to determine what actions are valid, give a negative reward to invalid actions, then let the algorithm figure out the best sequence to take.
Getting a story relevant action sequence is something else. Let’s say you have a goal of “unlock the door”. This is semantically similar to “Get key. Use key on locked door” (when using text embeddings and cosine similarity). I’m using proximal policy optimization / MCTS to find the sequence of events that best fits the goal narrative by simulating the environment. For more complex actions like “leave through the exit”, I’m using an llm to generate intermediate goals in plain english. There are a lot of limitations and it’s very experimental but it works well enough to allow arbitrary goals.
It is less computationally complex than an exhaustive search and it is also ‘online’ so we can use and continue to train it, we just get more optimal actions over time.
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Silly question, but I can't find an answer that isn't targeted at anti-fluoride weirdos online:
I want fluoride in my water to protect my teeth and my family's teeth.
I use a water filter.
Should I be concerned that the filter is removing our fluoride?
(You can't Google this because the responses are all either crazy MAHA stuff or people begging MAHA people not to buy filters specifically to remove fluoride. I'm just using a normal filter.)
If you brush your teeth anyway then you don't need the fluoride
I want to double dip
EDIT: I drink a lot of coffee
i'd look at the specifications and construction of your filter, see what it does and is rated for, then compare the characteristics of fluoride. sorry for an 'it depends' but some kinds of water treatment effect fluoride and some don't.
seems like testing for fluoride specifically is a pain in the ass so you're better off just making an educated guess from the specs.
I found a small lizard in my bathroom. I googled how to catch him but - of course - google was shit and it wasted my time. I ended up using an old tofu container and a dust mop which is very soft.
I felt like the biggest idiot in the world. This is my plan? Yet within 30 seconds I had him. With the mop I somehow gently flipped him into the container. And then with equal care I pinned him to the side of the container. I was worried he'd fall to the floor and get badly hurt. But he didn't move. I got him to the front door, opened it, put the container down, and he scampered away.
I made a mistake and I'm very lucky he didn't fall to the floor. If I do this again - I'll add a book to my toolkit. After put him in the container - I'll use the book as a cover so he can't escape prematurely.
But why don't you want a small lizard in your house? They eat bugs, probably. I know house geckos are good to have around, in regions that they live in.
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books are goated in small-animal-in-house matters. universally applicable.
Very true.
Rant. Damn you, google. Why can't you give me simple advice like a book is— Ah, fuck it. Ranting isn't even fun anymore. I just want the stupid fucking thing to work.
well that's one way to eat cheetos
I may be wrong, but I think a small lizard would be unharmed by any fall unless much higher because of their low mass, like a squirrel can fall out of a tree from 30 feet and bounce off the ground without an injury, at least on grass. Definitely better to be safe with the critter though anyway!
The trick I use for spiders n such is placing a cup or similar clear vessel over them to trap them against the surface they're on, then sliding a firm flat object like cardboard under, covering the opening so it can be lifted up without them escaping.
I may be wrong,
You are completely correct! It is called the Square Cube Law, and states that as the area of an animal increases, its volume and mass increases cubically, that is; very fast. So you could throw a mouse, a human and an elephant off of the 3rd story of a building, the mouse would be unharmed, the human break their legs, and the elephant... poor elephant. So most if not all small animals need not fear heights as much as we do.
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Someone I know has been hired to play D&D with people as a form of therapy. The idea is cool. The DM is one of the therapees (What do you call a person who receives therapy? Patient seems the wrong word considering the intervention is D&D). Does the group also do other forms of group therapy, I wonder (If so it's not my acquaintance who is responsible for that. They play D&D with the group). I should ask them about the mechanics, but I only vaguely know them and it feels weird to contact an acquaintance just to ask about the mechanics of their job.
The Adventures of an Amazon Delivery Driver!
A fortnight ago I was feeling really super stiff and sore all the time so on the occasion of my weekend, I went absolutely ham stretching my hammies, hips and lower back. Well a good idea went bad and shortly after I made a random movement and totally threw out my back/hips. Super pain, zero mobility. Spent A WEEK mostly laying on my back in bed missing work. So a lovely 8 day weekend where I didn't rest, have fun, or study (I still hold onto the fantasy of doing an IT job instead of this shit).
I did one day on-one day off and my hip was still hurting. Yesterday I did another day and it felt okaaaaaay. Today they asked me if I wanted to take ""voluntary time off"" and I just said yes without pushback. I've now lost a whole week's worth of hours.
And to think last month I was worried about my hours getting cut because of trump tariffs.
Here's what everyone does by human nature: Whenever Halloween comes, you all think quite often a lot about listening and watching these R-rated horror flicks. Sometimes, you all think of aliens/extraterrestrials. Sometimes goblins, wizards, or even centaurs.
Got tested for Covid and the flu since I'm coming up on a week of having a stuffy nose and some throat discomfort. Thankfully negative on both and its probably seasonal allergies. But its been a while since I've been hit this hard. Not that I feel terrible or anything, just annoyed.