#Master Guin

[azurezfiction]

@skyland2703, @regaliasonata, @sentinelofstories, @estel-eruantien, and @augment-techs

Lily: *gestures to Master Finn* How are you friends with this guy?!

Master Swoop: *taking a sip of his tea* Making real assumptions there, kid.

Master Phant: We are not friends with him We're co-workers, colleagues at best.

Master Swoop: Trust us. We don't like him anymore than any of you do.

Lily: THEN HELP US GET RID OF HIM!

Master Phant: No need. I think Master Rilla and Master Lope are about to toss him out the window.

Master Swoop: Sounds like Master Guin spin kicked him out of the window instead.

Lily:... *sighs* You know what? Fine. That works for me.

[precious-little-scoundrel]

[david-talks-sw]

UPDATE on that "Twin Suns" Vagabond-style webcomic I'm putting together!

Just the final part left :D

[dragonflylady77]

Ace Harringrove Fics

(a non-exhaustive list collated by me - DM if you have links to add)

Until I Nearly Lost You by @jad3w1ngs

Billy's got Ace Hardware by peterqpan 

Hard to Know Myself (trapped in my own head) by hazel1706

Upside Down Cupcakes by gideongrace

Like catnip by gideongrace

Deeper Than Skin by @neonponders

[Podfic] Lemon lovely by Djapchan 

Omega is King (series) by @neonponders

Ace Prompts (series) by KingsAndSaints 

I love you, I’m sorry by @catharrington

Linear Conversations by ohmybgosh 

To: Steve From: Your Secret Admirer by gideongrace

bite me by gideongrace

like canon but gayer 'verse (series) by gideongrace

About getting it (and NOT getting it ... get it?) by @ihni

[everemore]

seeing Elaine teasing Althur and getting away with it is both hilarious and terrifying

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: August Wrap-Up.

Hey, would you look at that, it's suddenly September! Rude and uncalled for. This month, I did a lot of knitting (two sets of gloves and two hats! gearing up for holiday season), and a LOT of writing (finished the first 16k draft of a scene, who???), and read uh. Some. I didn't finish a ton of books, but I did make it through what felt like a ton of pages.

Two-thirds of this month's reading were post-apocalyptic-community-oriented, on purpose, to feed into my current writing project, and that worked really well--either I'm very good at choosing books that match the vibe I need, or my ADHD brain is good at making connections, OR a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Photos and/or reviews linked below:

GHOST STATION (pages-out stand-in book pictured above, because I checked it out from the library after canceling my paperback pre-order, which was a good call) - ★★ This was very bad. Bad science, stupid incompetent characters, JUST enough neat worldbuilding to make it FRUSTRATING that this missed so hard. I'm bummed because I wanted to read DEAD SILENCE by this author, too, but I don't trust her now :(

ALWAYS COMING HOME - ★★★★½ Loved this!! Dense and chewy, and it required a lot of patience, but it was very rewarding and I'm really glad I read it. My absolute favorite passage was about scrub oaks, but I posted a few other highlights and tagged them as "le guin posting," if you're interested! If you like Le Guin and/or utopias and better futures and/or huge books that push what it means to Be A Novel, check this out for sure.

ARCHANGELS OF FUNK - ★★★½ So. I didn't realize that this was attached to a few other novels she's already written. And I read it cold (oops). Goodreads informed me that it was Book #2 of Cinnamon Jones, and review-diving indicated that REDWOOD AND WILDFIRE is also implicated in its worldbuilding, but that didn't stop me because I can't read. I would like to revisit this one after I've read those other two, I think, but!: The community and vibes and Making Art At The End Of The World were all immaculate, and the character names made me feel vindicated in some of my own naming conventions (seriously: there's an Indigo in this, and a Game-Boy, and Hawk, I can't make this shit up).

Under the Cut: A Note About ~*★Stars★*~

Historically, I have been Very Bad™ about assigning things Star Ratings, because it's so Vibes Heavy for me and therefore Contingent Upon my Whims. I am refining this as I figure out my wrap up posts (epiphany of this month: I don't like that stars are Odd, because that makes three the midpoint and things are rarely so truly mid for me)(I have hacked my way around this with a ½). Here is, generally, how I conceptualize stars:

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I tend to like weird fucked up funny shit, and I don't have many hard readerly NO's). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[bricksxbooks]

LEGO Fun Facts from Comic-Con

LEGO Masters returned to San Diego Comic-Con International (SDCC) in 2024, and I was there! Here are some fun LEGO facts I learned at "LEGO Masters: Back Behind the Brick":

LEGO Masters is now in production in 18 countries.

There's approximately 10 million bricks in the LEGO Masters Brick Pit.

Season 4 winner Christopher (unofficially) has the largest private LEGO set collection in the world.

I say "unofficially" because he is currently in the process of submitting the evidence to Guinness World Records, which requires him to take and submit a picture of every single set... and considering he has OVER 9,000, it is taking him a hot second to finish his application (the current record holder has 6,005 sets).

Christopher wants to turn his enormous collection into a LEGO history museum.

Evil Will wasn't in Season 4 because Villain Christopher defeated him and locked him in his LEGO room.

[this was Christopher's answer when a small child asked where Evil Will went during Q&A].

Go hit the bricks :)

*All included links are for reference and informational purposes only. I am not affiliated with LEGO or LEGO Masters in any way and do not earn any commissions, etc. from my posts.

[ganbaromasuta]

“   The multiple failed assassination attempts against me have helped build both character and self esteem. ” // @everemore & unhinged comedic relief meme

"Hold on, Miss Priestess you're gonna have to explain that one a little more." Are you ok? That doesn't sound ok. "Do I need to have a talk with someone? Because I will."

[taylorswiftscar]

watching the films in release order is crazy because you meet Obi and he’s just the slightest bit more than one-dimensional and then you watch everything else and try to match up Clone War Obi with ANH Obi - like my king didn’t not deserve to live a life of exile

[ferretly]

every time I see an article or reviewer or whatever saying that B*cky Chmbers is the "new Ursula K. Le Guin" I want to fucking scream

[anakinskywalkerdarthvaderstar]

All 4 lightsaber duels between Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Anakin Skywalker/ Darth Vader. From there first duel on Mustafar in “Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith”, to both of there duels from episode 3 & 6 from the “Obi-Wan Kenobi series”, and to there final duel in “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”

[thenineofus]

I hope that the next book you read or reread is one that makes you HEHEHE HOHOHO HERE I GO when you know you are about to open it where you left off.

[phaedraismyusername]

tagged by the lovely @magiciansvoyage ❤️

Recently read - Lure by Tim McGregor a tasty little horror novella about a carnivorous mermaid taking revenge on the village menfolk for their transgressions. Stellar vibes, always fun to root for the monster.

Currently reading - The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov I don't know why I decided now was the time to try and get into the russian classics but I regret everything. The Pontius Pilate chapter really drove home that I was raised a heathen pagan and therefore am extremely uneducated in church stuff BUT there is a cat the size of a pig who pays his tram fares so all is not lost just yet

Coming next - The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin I've read a couple of her standalone Sci-fi's and really just enjoy her brain so I'm looking forward to trying her fantasy series next

I feel like I'm super late in responding to this so I don't know who to tag but just incase I'll chuck in a couple with zero pressure lol @lapinlunairegames @kalorphic @gamingperipety @thenewromancer @metalicats

[triviamastery]

Do you love the Guinness world records? Check out this quiz! https://youtu.be/N9OVcCd4klQ

#guinness#guinnessworldrecords#QuizChallenge#triviachallenge#worldrecord#recordbreaker#goldmedalist#GWRChallenge#iqtest#generalknowledge#generalknowledgequiz

[dduane]

Is there an alphabet or lexicon of the human version of The Speech? And if so, where can I find it?

No, there's not.

(And as I've been asked about this before, I'm just going to paste the answer in here—since though the original post is buried in the depths of Tumblr somewhere, I do have my saved draft.)

Per these, which came in very close to each other:

@melbetweenstars

This is something I’ve always wondered but never realized I could actually ask about until I read through that long meta response. (go me.) How much of the Speech do you have fleshed out? Do you create it as you go on more of a need-to-know basis, or do you have vocabulary and grammar structures ready to go? Basically I’d be really interested to hear any Speech-related meta if you have the chance because fictional languages are hella cool!

and:

@sansa–clegane

I just read your post on dark wizards and field terminologies, and am totally loving the Speech translations you provided! Now I’m wondering, though, how much of the language you actually have mapped out or established? I’m very curious as to what, for example, the standard “I - you - he/she/it/etc. - we - you plural - they” conjugation endings would be– or if there even are any in a language as complex as the Speech. I’M JUST REALLY INTERESTED IN FANTASY LINGUISTICS AAAHH

Linguistics is a big deal for me too, as people who read my stuff will have guessed. And needless to say, the Speech is on my mind a lot (along with other “magical languages” and their history/histories).

So let’s take a moment to first to make it clear what the Speech is not. It’s not what’s sometimes referred to as an Adamic language  (whether you take the meaning that God used it to talk to Adam, or that Adam invented it to name things.) It’s also nothing whatsoever to do with Enochian. It’s not an occultic language, or anything invented by human beings.

The basic concept is that the Speech is the language, or the very large body of descriptors, used to create the universe (and very likely others, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). Such words are also assumed, having been used in the building of the universe, to be able to control the bits they’ve built. Every word, therefore, when used ought ideally to sound as if it contains some tremendous power. 

Writing something like that every time the Speech is used, even for a much better writer than I am, would be very, very hard.

(We need a cut here. Under the cut: Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and others. ...Also a fair number of beetles. And a bear.)

It’s worth mentioning as a matter of information that I met the concept of secret / divine magical languages in Le Guin’s Earthsea long before I ran into it in C. S. Lewis. (I came pretty late to Lewis’s non-Narnian work.) Yet here Lewis, as more than occasionally before, is my master, having been over this ground right back in the mid-1940s.

There’s a point in the final novel of the so-called “Planetary Trilogy”, that big fat (now endlessly problematic but still fun-in-the-right-moods) book That Hideous Strength, where Elwin Ransom—philologist, unwilling visitor to Mars and Venus, unnerved conscript into the wars in Heaven, and Lewis’s take on both the Pendragon and the wounded Fisher King—is instructing his friend and co-linguistics scholar Dimble on how to behave in a meeting with the newly awakened, and potentially quite dangerous, Merlin Ambrosius. (The POV in this passage is that of a lady named Jane who's just recently fallen into company with the group supporting Ransom.)

“You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil [just think “Christ” for the moment: surprise surprise, that’s the parellel Lewis is using here]. Then, if he stands, conjure him.” “What shall I say in the Great Tongue?” “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.” And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room, seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear***, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

Now if that’s not like being hit over the head with a hammer, I don’t know what is.* That moment has been before the eyes-of-my-mind for a long time as I’ve worked with the Speech.

Note, however, that Lewis does a very wise thing here. He doesn’t actually spell out any of the words out for you. Because in the reader’s mind, there’s always the six-year-old saying, “Go on, say the word: see how it sounds, see what happens…!” And when you recite the magic spell, it doesn’t work. The words come out sounding, well, like any others. And maybe not your interior six-year-old, but your interior twelve- or fifteen-year-old—the ego-state that’s about keeping you from getting hurt or looking stupid in front of other people who aren’t privy to or supportive of your dreams—says, “See, it was just another word, just a bunch of nonsense. You got fooled. Dummy!” No wise writer, I think, willingly sets their readership up for such easy and constant disappointment. It's tough enough to weave, and hold in place, the spell that is prose. Handing the audience a potential spellbreaker, over and over again, is folly. 

And by rights the Speech ought to be like Lewis’s example above. If in reality you were to hear the words used to restructure matter or undo gravity, they ought to shake the air in your chest like a Saturn V launch, they should raise the hair on the back of your neck to hear them used; they should freak you out. But a long string of invented syllables isn’t going to do that. I’m stuck with using English to produce even the echo of such a result.

Which means I have to go Lewis’s route… mostly. Here and there I’ll add in a Speech-sourced word or phrase when it supports the narrative or makes it easier for characters to talk about what’s going on—as, when working with wizardry, you do sometimes have to call in precisionist-level language for words that have no casual English cognates: just as you would if you were working in particle physics or organic chemistry at the molecular level. But that’s all I’m going to do… because if you do too much linguistic work in this regard, you constantly run the risk of your readers being distracted from the real business at hand, which is the interactions between/among the characters.

The tech inherent to a work of fantastic fiction is always an issue in this regard. Ideally L. Sprague de Camp’s very useful definition of science fiction, tweaked here for fantasy, ought to be a guideline: “A fantasy story is a human story with a human problem and a human solution that could never have happened without its fantastic content.” Yet inside the definition, there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Too much merely human stuff, and a work of fantasy turns into a soap with some casual magical gimmickry—all too often these days labeled as “magic realism”, when it’s not publisher code for “We’d call this fantasy if we had the nerve and we didn’t think it was going to tag us as ‘genre’ and keep us off the best-seller lists”. Too little human-problem-and-human-solution, and it turns into a modern version of what James Blish (God rest him), when writing as the gently merciless science fiction critic William Atheling Jr., used to call “The 'Greater New York and New Jersey Municipal Zeppelin Gas Works’ school of speculative fiction”, where you tour your readership through the Wonderfulness Of Your Tech (magical or otherwise) until they expire of boredom while waiting for someone to fucking do something.

You have to find a centerline between the extremes—indeed pretty much a tightrope—and walk it with some care. I’d guess that J. K. Rowling ran into the need for this balancing act; while never having read the Potter books, I nonetheless get a sense that you get the occasional Wingardium leviosa without also being burdened with long strings of magical Latin. (Though I confess that the answer to the question “Where does the magic come from? And what’s it for?” as it applies to her universe could be of some interest. I have no idea whether this ever gets explicitly handled.**) 

Anyway, it’d be way too easy for the YW books to become long discourses on the Speech and its use. This aspect of the “tech”, I think, gets more than enough time onstage. Having once established that words are a tool, indeed the tool for a wizard, the ur-Tool, making every spell they build a resonance between what they do and the initial/ongoing work of Creation—my business is to stay focused on the challenge of driving plot forward by interactions between human beings (and all kinds of others) who have conflicting agendas.

…So much for the tl;dr. I do have some very basic grammatical structures tucked away, but they’re not in any fit state for other people to look at. The Speech, I think, is really best treated as an ongoing mystery that unfolds a little at a time, as required, and leaves everybody wanting more.

HTH!

*It also leads into one of numerous affectionate nods in this book toward Tolkien, as philologist, fellow novelist, and Lewis’s good friend. It's no accident that when Ransom meets up with Merlin himself, a little later in the narrative, the question of this language—the proper name of the Great Tongue is “Old Solar"—comes up again. When discussing what language they’ll speak with each other during their upcoming negotiations [they apparently start out in a rather beat-up and denatured medieval Latin], Ransom says to Merlin about the language he’d prefer to be working in, "It has been long since it was heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”

The Stranger gave no start … but he spoke with a new interest. “Your masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?” “The true West,” said Ransom. “Well,” said the other.

Yeah, “well.” Better scholars than I have dealt with the relationship between these two, as scholars and writers and friends, so enough of that for the moment. But it’s very sweet to see Lewis do something in his books that I’ve done with mine.

**It’s always possible, of course, that in the HP universe this issue is a surd: like asking “where physics comes from”. (Well, not a surd precisely, if your spiritual life tends a certain way. Mine tends toward “Whoever or whatever made the universe, that’s who made physics. And they must really like it, because they made a metric shit ton of it!” (This answer also works for beetles, though that's a slightly different issue.) :)

But if there’s a most-fundamental difference between my wizardly universe and Rowling’s, it might be best revealed in the third question that came up for me directly after “What if there was a user’s manual for human beings/the world/the universe?” and “If there was, where would it have come from?”: specifically, “And why?”

***There's a bear in the Pendragon's kitchen. Thoth only knows what initially brought that on for Lewis, but it's a character insertion that pays off later, so (shrug) wtf.