#APPLY THE KNOWLEDGE

[emotional-piece-of-meat]

Bruce, trying to be a responsible adult, naively believing that it would be easier with his least troublesome children: you cannot drive the batmobile, none of you have a license.

Duke: is it because…

Cass out of the blue: is it because I'm Asian?

Duke, holding tears of pride: that's my sister!

Bruce, sweating in rich white privilege: actually... I changed my mind…

[off-mozzarella]

Please read by opening each image, otherwise it makes no sense lol

This is the most stupid thing I've done all year but I was already too far into it when I started regretting it XD

I don't usually do this kind of thing but the concept had been rotating in my mind for a few weeks and I needed to get it out

I have a few ideas but this was already long enough and it felt like a good spot to cut it off, buut I want to see if people like it so 👉👈 hope you enjoyed it

Sorry if it feels a bit weird, I may be able to draw but not write lol, this is my first actual attempt at making a comic

[justladders]

[scribz-ag24]

treasure town played telephone with the story of how dusknoir joined grovyle's side and it's getting out of hand

[qwantzfeed]

ah, the ocean.  what more is there to say about the ocean?  turns out plenty, but: not by me

[sierrabravoecho]

Why does Ilyn clack when he laughs?

Caveat: I'm a Speech and Language Therapist who doesn't specialise in glossectomy with too much time on my hands

One of Ilyn's defining characteristics is the fact that 14 years before we're introduced to him in AGOT, he was mutilated by Aerys Targaryen:

While the removal of a person's tongue using hot pincers is barbaric, we do have a modern analogue: glossectomy.

A glossectomy is a surgical procedure involving the partial or complete removal of the tongue. It is typically performed to treat tongue cancer, but it may also be necessary in cases of other medical conditions affecting the tongue. Here's an example of a person's speech at different time points post total glossectomy.

As a result of his glossectomy, GRRM doesn't include any verbal output from Ilyn in the text (i.e spoken words).

However, there is one distinct vocal (i.e using voice but not necessarily words, such as humming, singing, or individual sounds) characteristic that we see repeatedly from Ilyn: the clacking sound that tells us that he's amused.

Here's the thing about laughter: unlike speech, where precise tongue movements are needed to form sounds, laughter doesn't require the same level of articulation.

This MRI of spontaneous laughter shows us that the main processes in producing laughter are movement of the velum (soft palate), movement of the pharyngeal walls, and retraction and lowering of the tongue. Given what we know about Ilyn, we can assume the only process that's interrupted here is the retraction and lowering of the tongue.

So why exactly does he clack when he laughs?

First of all, we need to define what is meant by clacking.

The broad dictionary definition is a sharp, repetitive sound made when two hard surfaces quickly strike each other. In the context of vocal sounds, we need to consider a few possibilities:

Speech sounds

Clicks

I'm going to be giving a lot of examples using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) here so if you want some quick resources here's the Wikipedia page, and here's an interactive version of the IPA chart where you can click and hear each sound.

Speech sounds

We're assuming, as Aerys had his "tongue ripped out", there is a significant portion of Ilyn's tongue missing. Because of this, for place of articulation I'm going to be focusing on the portion of the IPA chart from palatal sounds to glottal sounds. Because clacking requires two surfaces striking each other, there are three different manners of articulation which we could consider: plosives, taps/ flaps, and trills. However, when we consider both place and manner of articulation together, there are only a few sounds which Ilyn could produce, all plosive sounds (where articulators fully close, stopping airflow, and then release it with a burst).

Given that the sounds are described as "clacking" rather than "gulping", I'm going to assume that the sounds are voiceless plosives (typically align more with /k/ sounds) rather than voiced plosives (typically align more with /g/ sounds). This gives us three different ideas of what the clacking might sound like (I'm eliminating the glottal stop as this is a complete closure of the vocal cords, e.g the space between the first and second words in uh-oh):

voiceless palatal plosive

voiceless velar plosive

voiceless uvular plosive

2. Clicks

We can also use the IPA to transcribe clicks, which are used in some African languages.

Again, given that we can assume a significant portion of Ilyn's tongue is missing, we can narrow this down to one type of click, as it's the only type of click which does not require the tip of the tongue: an alveolar lateral click.

Yes, but you still haven't explained why he clacks rather than laughs.

There's a reason I still haven't given a clear explanation: it doesn't make much sense.

We've seen in the MRI above that laughter requires lowering and retraction of the tongue, but all the examples of clacking sounds require the raising of the tongue in order for it to strike another articulator to produce the required sound.

There's one exception to producing laughter where the tongue is raised rather than lowered or neutral: giggling.

With giggling, the vowels produced are closer to front closed vowels rather than the neutral schwa or lower, open vowels.

TL;DR: Ilyn clacks when he laughs because he's a giggler.

[uncanny-tranny]

One reason you might not be very "good" about a trans loved one's pronouns or the language you use for them might stem from memorizing what they want, rather than actually changing how you view them.

For instance, my trans friend came out rather late compared to me. However, since internalizing that I wasn't really correct about who she is, because she's a woman and I didn't know that, it was instantaneous to refer to her by her name, to use language that accurately reflects her instead of what I thought she was.

When you actually internalize that a loved one is actually this way instead of what you thought, it makes it so much easier to truly and actually change your perspective on them.

In short, are you memorizing who they are, or are you actually learning who they are?

[ohitslen]

Living together.

The snail video if you are interested :)

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

"Ford is intellectually smart and Stan is emotionally smart" is a statement that makes me want to nose dive into academic studies in order to single-handedly redefine the categories of intelligence because that *cant* be right.

[iizuumi]

Mermay time <3

[clementine-kesh]

the thing about media analysis is that very often it becomes sociopolitical analysis therefore having a good foundation in sociopolitical theory is kind of important if you want to say anything meaningful

[detectivehdbholmes]

I should be financially compensated everytime someone says or implies that Dr. John H. Watson is stupid

[genericpuff]

following tutorials is so hard when the teachers have art styles that make sense u.u

[atthecenterofeverything]

genuinely don't know anything about any topics whatsoever and don't understand much about anything either BUT! am working on remedying that as much as I can

[gorgynei]

cant get over the fungi on ruidus sorry. i have more to say

its implied that the reilorans are able to survive and farm the fungus, theres at least 347 different species of fungus native (?) to ruidus, and theres also slime molds*. evolutionarily (assuming the life evolved independently on ruidus which is a very bold assumption) this would imply that theres also prokaryotic life (bacteria, basically) and likely advanced eukaryotic organisms in the form of animal life, which we do see! its very possible that the reason theres so little plant life on ruidus is because something about the makeup of the planet is aggressively harmful to plants, if i had to guess its the lack of easily available sunlight due to the constant dust storms and the soil is probably unfavorable for growing. this probably means that fungus makes up the majority of the biomass for animals to consume or animals are much more adapted for absorbing nutrients from the soil/other sources.

i do think its interesting that fungus seem to survive and thrive SO well in the deep caverns because most fungus (on earth, and exandria. probably) are decomposers and need organic material to survive off of. they could be decomposing the crystal corpse of predathos though, which is the coolest idea in the world to me, or they could just do so well that they've created an independent ecosystem underground complete with its own n- and c-cycles.

the fungus on ruidus seem to take more after kingdom animalia in general, since theyre motile (for those unawares, fungus are actually MUCH much much more related to animals than they are to plants, so this isnt that out there) which is super cool. the myceits are somehow related to the fungi's sexual reproduction because we see the sterile mycelium on it's own and it doesn't seem to be producing any spores, where the myceits do have spore producing structures (specifically they have hymenophores, since they are most similiar to hymenomycete mushrooms). so i think its likely the myceits are just advanced forms of spore dispersal and will run around till they find somewhere favourable to drop spores (or passively will drop them as they move) and probably they have very short life spans </3 sorry myceits

also myceit = mycete = fungi kingdom. proof of earth-equivalent taxonomy existing in exandria? possibly why the ruidians call them myceits is because theyve seen botanists dream about mushrooms and refer to them as "mycetes" !

*gaz, the source for the # of fungus, seems to consider slime molds a kind of fungus, so its unclear whether all the species are actually true fungi, but i digress because slime molds are closely related to fungus anyway. also 347 is a really low number of species for an entire planet, but whatever.

[son-of-avraham]

Some people at my shul are studying lashon hara so it's very funny to hear them talk and stop themselves by saying, "that's lashon hara 😦" and they'll literally just stop talking 😭😭😭