#The McDonalds straw story actually has a personal basis

[caerbannogmochi]

Grammatical gender, and how one letter can completely change a sentence

Recently, I've been trying to make a language (a "Conlang") for the setting of my campaign. This conlang, which I will call Paresha, has 5 grammatical genders, 15 characters, and 2 "E" sounds. To explain how this language works (as of This Moment), I will begin with the following sentence:

Lej eh suv-haru jariey[]s

The approximate English translation is "their car betrayed [them]". Note that 1) this language goes in the SOV (Subject Object Verb) order, and 2)... those brackets are a placeholder for a single letter.

In Paresha, every word has a gender, with the agent (most "important" Thing) controlling how certain sentence bits (namely conjugations) are written/spoken. And, like in other gendered languages, this allows for closely related concepts to be expressed with very similar words. The "jariey-" root indicates betrayals, but the specific variant depends on that last letter, which determines gender.

Jarieyis: A betrayal of your expectations, to suffer misfortune. These are, quite simply, times where you Did Not See That Coming. If you show up wet to a party, you might say "The sky betrayed me" if you were overdramatic. Saying "Lej eh suv-haru jarieyis" might mean that our John Doe thought he'd set the parking brake only to realize that his car had been slowly rolling down the hill while he was eating lunch.

Jarieyés: A betrayal you didn't see coming. This version would be the closest to our english "betrayed", but specifically refers to turncoats, that plot twist where the hero's best friend stabs her in the back, and calling out your friend when they spoiled you on it even though they knew you were still watching that season! Saying "Lej eh suv-haru jarieyés" might mean John Doe's "brand new" car just suddenly stopped working, and when he took it into the shop the mechanic realized the entire bottom was held together with duct tape and prayers.

Jarieyes: A betrayal you knew what going to happen, in part because they were suspicious AF. This is what you would use when that "Nigerian Prince" ghosts your grandpa. Saying "Lej eh suv-haru jarieyes" might mean John Doe's car was sketchy as hell, and the only thing that surprises you is how long it lasted.

Jarieyus: A "heroic" betrayal that is dramatic and liberating.

Haru's declaration that she is not her dad's "subservient puppet" is exactly this word's use case. Jarieyus would also be appropriate for when your friend finally realizes they've hooked up with an abusive asshole, so you sneak by to help them ditch 'em while they're at work. Saying "Lej eh suv-haru jarieyus" might mean that John Doe had stolen that car, and someone finally identified the plates and now he's got a court order because his DNA was found on the straw of his McDonald's sprite.

Finally, Jarieyas: A "false" betrayal. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe there was a lot of miscommunication. Or maybe it wasn't really them, or they were trying to protect you. Jarieyas is for those situations. Saying "Lej eh suv-haru jarieyas" might mean that John's car didn't start, but when he took it to the mechanic he just forgot to reset the killswitch he put in so nobody would steal his 'rari.

So there we have it: A reason for grammatical genders.

[itsjessicaveabctblr]

Creative Studio - Final Project reflection first week

We’ve come along way from where we started with initial ideas. 

Monday 28th May  - Over the weekend we discussed our ideas about our film that we wanted to create. Each on of us were interested in making a film and so that’s what started our group. At the start of this project I initially wanted to create a film that interviews people of all ages asking them what do they think the future will be like. I then asked my group if they were keen on going along with this idea and they were. I was sorted with getting the people to be interviewed and Moana was happy to film them, Andrea was keen on doing an animation which was going to be done on processing that forms and creates the images of what the people are talking about in their vision of the future. We then came up with other ideas like maybe having the interviewed people collect their rubbish for three days then when we go to interview them we’ll collect it and hang it on a wall. We also thought of maybe projecting our video onto the wall with the interviews playing on the laptop screen while the projector will project the animation the interviews. 

However, while talking with Pete today about our idea he told us that maybe not to hang the rubbish on the wall instead think about maybe filming the people with the rubbish as the backdrop. We understood that having the rubbish hanging from the wall wouldn’t look sanitary so we decided to leave that part out and just have the interview of the people with the animation. We also realized that after talking with Pete that our idea wasn’t strong enough. I mean sure, our idea was good in terms of creating an awareness to people telling them that this is what your future is likely going to look like if you don’t start making a positive change towards the environment but the problem was it wasn’t going to make them change. Maybe it would but it wouldn’t have a strong impact on people that during their day to day activities they will stop buying plastic bottles and buy reusable bottles instead. We feared that if someone came and saw our project it would make them think for about 5minutes and then then will carry on with their lives without taking out any learning from our project and using it to change their actions towards the environment. We feared that our project wasn’t going to make much of a change in peoples thoughts and actions. We feared that our project wasn’t going to influence people so we decided it was either we expand on our idea or change it. At this point we couldn’t think of how we could deepen our message so we decided to change our idea.

I knew that I wanted to do something around plastic waste and waste in general and how it’s become something that has really affected the environment. Its caused many oceans and homes become polluted with rubbish. We’ve created and brought things without actually considering the consequences of our rubbish in it’s after life. Referring to a video I saw on 1 News Facebook Page (1) called ‘Welcome to NZ's massive plastic wasteland‘ it talks about how we’ve also relied on selling and shipping our rubbish to china but now they’ve decided “that they will no longer be called the dumping ground”(1). In a way it’s good because now we won’t always rely on shipping our rubbish somewhere else “out of mind, out of sight”(1) rather now it will put more pressure on us to make a change. This was one of the main reasons why I wanted to create an interview of people talking about their dreams and hopes for the future and projecting their interviews onto the their rubbish. This was to symbolize that we may think our future will look like this and that but we don’t realize that we will also be living with the rubbish we’ve created and now we must rethink about our actions and how we can create a positive influence towards the future. I was keen for the interview idea mainly because it focused on plastic waste and waste in general that an average person uses and it also showed normal people talking about their hopes but not actually seeing the affect that our rubbish will have towards our individual visions of the future. But knowing that its a group project I decided to try new ideas instead of just forcing my idea upon our group.  

We then had Liam join our group and we came up with another idea about how much waste takeaway companies consume. We choose to base our project on Mac Donald’s because it is known that “McDonald’s is the largest fast food chain in the world”(2) so this was our best choice because then it would be more relatable to the audience. Our idea was to collect any plastic rubbish from Mac Donald’s(clean things like the straws and lids put out for customers to collect themselves). We were focusing on collecting things like plastic straws and cups and plastic things we can collect from the kids happy meals. We then were going to hang that onto a wall and have a bar code on the rubbish that people can scan which will lead them to an animation the rubbishes creation and its afterlife. This was a chance for us to show people how the rubbish at the fast food shops consume and its afterlife. We agreed that we will go and collect the rubbish as a group and Andrea was still keen on doing the animation for some of them while Moana took actually shots on the camera. The animation and video was going to be about the process of how the plastic utensils are created and then shows its afterlife. However, after talking with Pete we decided not to do an animation because he mentioned that it’s a long process and because we only have 3weeks we didn’t have enough time. So, we decided to try and photos from the internet as well as taking videos of people using the plastic utensils and then what happens after we use it. Still with this idea we felt like we weren’t doing anything different from our first idea. It was still showing people their rubbish and it was really doing anything to influence or change peoples thoughts. By then we’ve had at least two ideas with a lot of ways of how we can show it and we were always coming back to the same issue. 

Below are two images from our planning for our interview film idea. 

Tuesday 29th - We decided to start fresh with our ideas. Liam joined another group because he wanted to use his skills in building and sadly we weren’t doing much around that area. We understood his situation and we were really cool with him joining another group. So then we brainstormed once again. Our brainstorm was based on what we wanted to focus on creating individually instead of using my idea(the interview) and then expanding from their instead we wanted to get an idea that everyone was keen on researching about and creating. So, I told my group what my passions were around and one that interested all of us was animal extinction. So we decided to start with that idea and expand from it. One of our ideas was to have a paper Mache of three animals which are extinct and then have a bar code on them that leads you to either a video on YouTube showing information of their extinction or to a website showing information of the animal. However, we wanted to show a range and not just focus on three animals so we decided of maybe having a program that shows images of all the extinct animals. The animals will be put in different circle sizes depending on how much the animals are endangered of becoming extinct. But we found that with this idea we were going back to the problem we had with our first and second idea. The problem wasn’t that the idea wasn’t good enough to show an awareness it was that we feared that our project wasn’t going to influence people to change. The problem wasn’t the project ideas it was us, the people and how we choose not to make a change after we’ve been asked to and showed why we should. We choose to go about our daily lives without taking into an account of how much we’ve messed us the planet for other species besides our own.

So we decided to base our project on the idea that there are animals becoming extinct but we choose not to change this and so the world keeps spinning and everyone keeps living their day to day lives while the rate of animals becoming extinct increases. “Humans are largely responsible when animals become extinct, endangered or threatened.” (3). Animals are becoming extinct and everyone knows this very well but we choose to do what’s best for us to survive that we don't think about our impact on the animals and their existence. We destroy their homes so we can “build homes, roads and other developments.”(3). We pollute the oceans endangering the aquatic animals homes with ”oil spills, acid rain and water pollution”(3). There are many other reasons why we are the cause of animal extinction and the problem is that although we know this already or if someone advises us to make a positive impact on the environment we are either to busy or uncommitted to and so we wanted to focus on this angle/ perspective of the story. In our project we planned to have a film projected onto a wall which shows all the different animals that are extinct and we will have some images of oil spills in the ocean, construction sites, plastic in the oceans and so on. We also planned to have some images of people doing things they do in their daily life like eating a sandwich, messaging on their phones and so on. Then in the middle we were planning on having a globe that spins around while the videos are being played over the spinning globe. We also planned to have an soundscape playing in the background of sounds that humans make on a day to day basis (e.g eating breakfast, walking, talking, typing on phone or on computer) to show how the world is just living while we have animal sounds that play as well but the human sounds take over the animal sounds. So, I plan to get sound files from a free website because obviously I can’t get sounds of animals so I’ll get it from Sound Bible and give credit to the owners. 

Below is the image of our planning for the first idea we had for our topic on animal extinction.

Below are the images of our planning for the second idea we had for our spinning globe. 

Wednesday 30th - We were working on our individual jobs. Mine was to look up free animal sounds and try and make a soundscape on Audacity while Moana was looking for images online and Andrea was able to make a spinning program for a fan which we would later replace with a globe on top.    

Reference :

1 . https://www.facebook.com/1NEWSNZ/videos/10155410602971218/ 

2 . https://themysteriousworld.com/top-10-largest-fast-food-chains-in-the-world/ (Top 10 Largest Fast Food Chains In The World - Mac Donald’s 1st place)

3 . Article

Fact Monster. © 2000–2017 Sandbox Networks, Inc., publishing as Fact Monster. 16 Jun. 2018 <https://www.factmonster.com/science/animals/why-do-animals-become-endangered/>.