#another one. become plural. /j

[theremustbeabear]

Erm hi. I'm unfamiliar with plurality so I just want to ask a few questions if thats ok... I feel like this is too long for discord.

1. How similar are your introjects (is that the appropriate way to say it? Your introjects? Or this system's introjects?) To the source material? Are they influenced by fanon? If the source material character/person is talked about, do they take it personally? Be it shipping, character crit, etc... OK sorry this is many questions at once.

2. When did altars start popping up, and when did you guys become aware that "oh here theres lots of us around"? Any particular formative events/memories that are associated with the development of your plurality?

3. Are hosts usually the "original" altar? I'm sorry, idk how to say this.

4. This is more for talking on discord and the such but do memories and conversations carry over? Would it be inappropriate to go like "we (me and an altar) talked about xyz" to another altar?

of course, happy to answer any questions anytime! and an obligatory disclaimer that these are own opinions/feelings and that other systems may not see or experience things the same way.

"your introjects" is perfectly fine! "you" is a singular or plural pronoun, so it doesn't matter. our introjects tend to start out quite close to the source material, and then develop naturally from there. we like to think of our source character as a sort of foundation, which we then build our own house on top of—it's important, but it's not the only thing, and the more of the house that's built, the less of the foundation you see. some folks end up changing a lot, over time, and others don't, it just depends on the individual. influenced by fanon also depends, sometimes we are, sometimes we aren't, sometimes our brain decides to go off in a wild uncharted direction and drag us through a hedge and spit out an introject that feels like the source character has been put through a paper shredder and reassembled into some weird half-recognizable paper mache sculpture. as for taking source talk personally, we generally don't experience anything more strongly than what the average person would feel upon seeing talk of their favourite character. we view our source characters quite separately from ourselves, especially once we've taken on a different name, but we do thrive on making jokes. it's very common for us to see character crit, and if it's from a friend, the relevant introject to pop up and go "what did i ever do to you :( why do you hate me :( /j" without actually meaning any of it. it's all in good fun. if we ever do feel too strongly about something, we remove ourselves or the introject in question and handle it privately.

early 2021 was our system discovery (often shortened to syscovery)! late may, i believe? a lot of systems tend to struggle with their discovery, spending a long time doubting and unable to fully interact with their headmates, but that wasn't us. our old host was dragging up unpleasant memories one night, and our brain got sick of it, and decided to make her stop by dumping an entire person directly on her head, which caused her to freak out and flee into the back. lalna, the new person, was utterly clueless, but knew she wasn't the host, and so poked around in the brain until she found johan, who had been there for a month or so previous, and johan took over to sort things out. so, it was a very jarring and sudden transition, because prior to that point, our existing headmates had been trying very hard to keep themselves hidden so as not to make problems for the host. we're still not exactly sure how old our system is, due to the size and construction of our headspace, but the oldest we've found so far is sable, who is at least from 2018, perhaps earlier. we're a traumagenic system--a system formed from trauma, that is--so we'd prefer not to disclose the details of that, but suffice it to say our old host was simply having trouble dealing with life on her own, and so the brain attempted to fix that problem by making it so that she, well, wasn't alone. in all fairness, it did work! three years on, we're much happier now than we were before, and wouldn't return to singularity for a million dollars.

hosts are often the "original" alter (or headmate, as we prefer—the term alter is standard, but also viewed as a little too clinical by a lot of systems. we don't mind it, we just prefer other terms), but not always. the generally-accepted term for an "original" alter is the "core", and our core is not our current host. she used to be, but mike took over about a month after our syscovery, and has held the position ever since. the exact definition of host is fluid between systems, but for the most part, it's simply the "main" headmate that is around most often and is sort of viewed as being "in charge". big shoutout to mike, by the way, he's incredible and a big reason why we're so functional and problem-free these days.

for us, they do! we're an osdd-1b system, so we have very little amnesia between alters, if any at all. the best way to explain it is that the front, where we have to be to interact with the outside world, and the body, have their own memory bank, of sorts, that's accessible by any headmate who is in the front at any time. right now, i can remember what angus was doing when we were playing video games this morning, and the jackbox games night two weeks ago, even though i wasn't entirely present for the first and completely out of front for the second. however, once i leave, i'll have no access to the knowledge of what's happening outside until i return, and the gaps will be filled in. it's a little odd at first, but once you're used to it, it's completely seamless, and is the reason why we often struggle to remember who was fronting for a past activity, and/or simply refer to the past vaguely using i/we without specifying. things are generally a little bit clearer when it was you, specifically, though—for example, i have no idea who started writing the hickgib fic in our drafts, even though i remember writing it, but i know that it wasn't me, particularly. this is because we also have our own personal memories that encapsulate source & things we might get up to in headspace outside of the front. all this to say: no, it's perfectly fine to mention talking to another alter, and honestly, we'd be glad for the reminder, lol, we've probably completely forgotten who was participating in the conversation and might want to drop them a line to jog our memory more clearly.

hope this helps! thanks for asking <3

[racefortheironthrone]

I know this is going to be a big ask, but after Watching across the spiderverse and seeing Ben Reily, what exactly happened in the clone sage and why is he still around in the comics? Also who is Kaine?

If I couldn't understand the Clone Saga when I read it in the 90s as a kid, what makes you think I'm going to understand it thirty years later?

In broad strokes, my understanding is this: back in the day, Gerry Conway decided that his last Spider-Man story would end with a bang. So after killiing off Gwen Stacy, Conway brought her back, only to reveal that she was a clone created by the new villain the Jackal. The Jackal then revealed as his master plan he'd created a clone of Spider-Man (complete with all the memories of the original!) to kill the original Spider-Man because he blamed Spider-Man for the death of Gwen Stacy. The story concludes in a somewhat Twilight Zone fashion, with the Jackal and one of the Spiders-Men dead - but which one died?

Flash-forward to 1994 and the Spider-Office had fallen prey to one of their periodic fits in which they decide that Spider-Man needs to "get back to basics" by erasing his character growth. (I use the plural here, because the writing team on this one included Terry Kavanaugh, Joey Cavalieri, Todd Dezago, J. M. Dematteis, and Tom Defalco, so it's hard to assign individual responsibility/blame here.) So they retcon that the clone hadn't died, he was the new, more extreme Scarlet Spider (aka Ben Reilly)! Then they create another, even more extreme, anti-villain called Kaine who turns out to be Jackal's prototype clone. And on and on.

A whole bunch of action-figure-bashing ensues, and in the process there's a whole bunch of status quo alterations: it's revealed that the Peter Parker fans had been following for nearly thirty years was actually the clone and Ben Reilly was the real Spider-Man! It's revealed that Mary Jane is pregnant! Aunt May and Doc Ock die! Kaine becomes a good guy, because for some reason Marvel were trying to put him over.

If this sounds rather contrived, that's because it was. The whole thing was a pretty naked attempt to write Peter Parker out of the story by having him hand over the mantle to Ben Reilly, and give him a kid so he has a reason to retire. And thus, once again Spider-Man would be a swinging bachelor just like he was in the 70s when the writers were all kids, but with added Nineties marketability.

The fans fucking hated it. Terrified by a tidal wave of hate, the writers then completely undid everything - up to and including Mary Jane's pregnancy - and the whole thing turned out to be a ridiculously circuitous mind-fuck conspiracy masterminded by the Green Goblin. Which was also derided as a pretty naked Author Saving Throw, but at least the fans had the status quo they preferred.

Anyway, that's my understanding. Ben Reilly is still around because he developed a niche fandom of people into sleeveless hoodies and 90s angst - they're all mad now because he became a villain. As for Kaine...DWAI.

[thewriteflame]

This or That tag game

Thank you @silvertalonwritblr and @megarywrites for the tags!

(time for y'all to witness my indecisiveness)

Soft tagging: @blue-kyber @writingamongther0ses @j-1173 @oh-no-another-idea @violets-in-her-arms-writes @emelkae @the-finch-address

Historical or Futuristic

Technically my answer is both (which is why I love Doctor Who and steampunk so much) but I write mostly modern or historical fantasy type setting. I just really like swords and ships with sails and the fashion.

Opening or Closing Chapter

Both, both is good. The opening hooks the reader and the ending or at least I'm hoping most of my endings stay with the reader.

Light/Fluffy or Dark/Gritty

I 100% agree with megarywrites on this. You need both to balance a story and I enjoy writing both but I do lean more towards the fluff.

Animal Companion or Found Family

As much as I love animal companions (which is partially why I created the royal guardian cats in Sete), found family is my jam. I have at least ten novel ideas that utilize the found family trope in some way. There is just something about a group of usually messed up individuals or outcasts finding a place to belong.

Horror or Romance

I'm a squeamish person so I'm not big on certain kinds of horror...... I'm also not a fan of raunchy romance novels but I love stories having even just a little bit of of romance in them so I'm going with romance. (I won't say no to a good novel with gothic elements in it, though.)

Hard or Soft Magic System

I think I'll go with soft. A lot of my favorite fantasy stories have soft and my own fantasy worlds (that's right it's plural) either have no magic or soft.

Stand-alone or Series

I love series so much. You get to spend more time with these characters that have become like close friends. Plus I have no chill so stand-alone books tend to become series.

One WIP at a Time or Always Juggling 2+

I worked on just one for a year and my brain started to go insane while I hit a block on writing so changing it up is nice. Helps the ADHD.

One Award Winner or One Best Seller

I really just want someone other than me to know and care about my ocs. Plus I know many books/writers that I love that are neither best sellers or award winners so it doesn't matter.

Fantasy or Sci-Fi

I tend to get more fantasy ideas for my novels but I really do enjoy both equally.

Character Description or Setting Description

Both are important if you want to really immerse the reader in a story and thankfully I'm alright at doing both.

First Draft or Final Draft

I love final drafts, would love to have one one day (of a novel anyway). But I bet I'd also be very sad to not have that story to work on anymore.

[to-yngewai]

Learning finnish noun cases 2

1. Nominative:  Has no additional ending or change to the base noun. The plural is a “t” at the end.  “Talo” house. “Talot” houses.  “Kissa” cat. “Kissat” cats.   Adjectives agree with the casing. So ‘iso talo’ becomes ‘isot talot.’

The total predicate noun/adjective encompasses the entire aspect of the concept. The whole of the person, place, or thing. That is the nominative noun case.

Using the nominative to say something like “slices of bread” is wrong.

2. Accusative: The noun ends with “n” or has no ending. Plural is “t”. “Talon”. “Talot”.  The accusative case is used when the concept describes the object or target of an action, and the action addresses the entire object.  In nouns, singular accusative case looks usually exactly like the  genitive case, while the plural accusative case looks usually exactly  like the nominative case.   Example: “Maalaan talon. Auta maalaamaan talo.“ “I will paint the house. Help me paint the house.” Don’t confuse this with the partitive, which is used when it applies to part of the object. Accusative is the entire object. In terms of Japanese, “ を  “ marks the accusative case. So I can probably think it’s like that.

Hooray for cross-language knowledge?

3. Genitive: The noun singular ends with “n”. The noun plural is formed by adding to the stem of one of the following endings:

-en (-in) after a short -i or after -j which is preceded by a short vowel. As in äiti to äiten, (the mother’s thing) or äitein (of the mothers.)

And... some others, I’ll come back to that.

isä = father

isän veitsi = father’s knife.

isän veitsit = father’s knives.

So, it‘s where a noun modifies another noun. Google tells me: relating to or denoting a case of nouns and pronouns (and words in grammatical agreement with them) indicating possession or close association.

Wow, that’s both possessive, AND vague! It could be like “my boat” or “dress is blue”? Am I getting it right?

This is amazing.

[gravitascivics]

VIABILITY OF THE LIBERATED FEDERALISM, V

After presenting and describing the application of Eugene Meehan’s criteria for appraising social science theories and models,[1] the last posting addressed the challenge of diversity and how it affects the isomorphism of the liberated federalism model.  For readers who want to read those accounts, they are directed to the online site, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/,[2] and review the last four postings.

          Given the complexity that the last posting reported, it does not complete this account’s comments concerning diversity and isomorphism.  In addition, there is the need to describe how excessive individualism, an ongoing malady of American life, [3] influences the diversity issue and demands yet another type of toleration within the nation’s collective social make-up.

This country is not only a pluralism of groups but also a pluralism of individuals, its regime of toleration is focused, as we have seen on personal choices and lifestyles rather than on common ways of life.  It is perhaps the most individualist society in human history … “we are free to do our own thing.”[4]

But “doing your own thing” takes financial resources which many immigrant groups, in many cases, have in short supply.

          The poorer groups often lead the nation to be the noisiest – in most cases, legitimately so – about maintaining their cultural identity by engaging in political processes.  As the groups establish themselves, they become Americanized because the political processes have their effects.  The debate in the nation is whether to insist on a single, nativist approach (“Make America Great Again”), one in which a hegemony of dominant culture prevails, or one that tolerates or even encourages diverse cultural lifestyles.

Walzer gives one element of this debate a positive spin, he writes:

… [D]emocratic politics itself, where all the members of all the groups are (in principle) equal citizens who have not only to argue with one another but they also somehow, to come to an agreement.  What they learn in the course of the necessary negotiations and compromises is probably more important than anything they might get from studying the canon.  We need to think about how this practical, democratic learning can be advanced.[5]

In the process of learning the lessons, great benefits are gained by immigrants belonging to associations:  “Individuals are stronger, more confident, more savvy, when they are participants in a common life, when they are responsible to and for other people.”[6] 

In so claiming, Walzer agrees with one of the main points of this account, that federating themselves with others, in the long run, benefits these people’s interests by doing so.  That is, communal allegiances in associations and neighborhoods would do much to stem the tide of divorces, single parent homes, child abuse, abandonment, decline in membership in unions, homelessness and increase the future fates of churches, parent-teacher organizations, and philanthropic societies.

A federalist model, then, has a definite correspondence to these segments of reality.  The judgment here is that that demonstrates how granular the model can be and, therefore, demonstrates its isomorphism.  The next posting will address the model’s compatibility.

[1] Namely by reviewing comprehensiveness, power, precision, and reliability.  See Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).

[2] Use the archives feature.  If readers want to read the blog’s presentation of the liberated federalism model, they should start with the posting, “From Natural Rights to Liberated Federalism” (June 2, 2023).

[3] Jean M. Twenge, Generations:  The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York, NY:  Atria Books, 2023).  It should be noted that individualism is not all bad.  It has its positive elements, but here the concern is with excessive individualism.

[4] Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1997), 100.

[5] Ibid., 97.

[6] Ibid., 97.

[attollogame]

could you share more about sysba's language? owo

YES I ABSOLUTELY CAN. I’m a little bit proud of myself for this (slowly crafted) language, so I’m definitely happy to share it with you!!!

So Sysba’s language is called ‘Ioctaxari’; Lovecraftian lore—which the whole eldritch concept is based off of—has a language, but there are no firmly established guidelines for it so I said fuck it, I’ll do my own. Ioctaxari takes from Welsh Gaelic and older Germanic languages in order to make the terms that are often used.

In terms of naming, Elder Gods often own a name of their own choosing and a “true” name, such as the case with Sysba (going by Sysba, Moloch, etc) and their “true” name of ‘Ymnar. True names are often tied in with the Elder God’s abilities, origin, etc. Elder Gods do not possess surnames or 'parental ties', but in the case of Sysba, they jokingly took the second half of their Fathers name (Korath) and applied that as their surname. This is not correct in terms of the structure of the Ioctaxari language—but Sysba doesn’t follow any rules anyway, so are we surprised?

One thing that should be noted regarding Ioctaxari is that concepts of time are non-existent. Therefore, numbers used by this language are ones used exclusively by Sysba, Florence, and Abraxas, created after the exile of Sysba and the departure of Florence and Abraxas. This applies to days of the week and months as well. For Elder Gods, since time doesn’t exist, there’s no need to track it—but for Sysba, Florence, and Abraxas, staying on earth has made them adapt these habits so that, in the few cases they communicate to one another in Ioctaxari, the flow of conversation still works.

Here’s an example of the numbers taken from Ioctaxari:

0—Oen | 1—El | 2—Ta | 3—Den | 4—Fi | 5—Pen | 6—Zech | 7—Rhk | 8—Zhr | 9—Nach | 10—Xi | 11—Ihe | 12—Yath | 13—Xiden | 14—Xifi | 15—Xipen | 16—Xizech | 17—Xirhk | 18—Xizhr | 19—Xinach | 20—Ta-en | 21—Ta-en el | 22—Ta-en ta…| 30—Den-en | 40—Fi-en | 50—Pen-en | 60—Zech-en | 70—Rhk-en | 80—Zhr-en | 90—Nach-en | 100—Xi-thera | 200—Ta-xi-thera | 201—Ta-xi-thera el | 300—Den-xi-thera… etc.

And the Alphabet:

Aa—Ah | Bb—Bah | Cc—Cèh | Chch—Cah | Dd—Di | DdDd— Edd | Ee—Eh |Ff—Ef | Gg—Eg (Gh produces a J sound) | Hh—Aest |Ii—Iy | IhIh—I’ch | Kk—Kah | Ll—Ell | LlLl—Eh | Mm—Em | Nn—En | Ngng—Eng | Oo—Ohr | Pp—Pah | Rr—Aehr | Rhrh—Rhi | Ss—Es | Tt—Ti | Thth—Etha | Uu—Uhr | Vv—Vah | Ww—V | Xx—Ek | Xixi—Ziy | Yy—Zay | Zz—Zeh | Zhzh—Shah

I also have days of the week, months, and seasons:

Days of the week

Sunday—Sol Ddhar | Monday—Luhn Ddhar | Tuesday—Toth Ddhar | Wednesday—Ngyr Ddhar | Thursday—Cihl Ddhar |Friday—Gauth Ddhar | Saturday—Som Ddhar

Months

January—Cri-ehr | February—Llyanehr |March—Gwehndd |April—Glatil | May—Stelnuhr |June—Uhlan | July—Ghaih | August—Rhan | September—Medrendel |October—Bliefendel | November—Sahmendel | December—Noxendel

Seasons

Spring—Glahnys |Summer—Buhys |Winter—Crihys |Fall—Rhaxhys

Note: endings are altered if things go from singular to plural. For example, Brenfih (A loaf of bread) can become Brenfihre (Loaves of bread). Sol Ddhar (Sunday) becomes Sol Ddhara (Sundays).

Here’s a basic sentence:

Mira enew yn Ames. Ihr llyah crihys, ihr hazhal buhys.

My name is Ames. I love winter, I hate summer.

Obviously it’s still a work in progress in regards to grammar rules and other such things, but I’m enjoying picking away at it!!! Thank you for asking!

[arkadiaasks]

Why do you think YGO attracts so many LGBTQ and non-gender conforming fans?

Okay, I really liked this question, and I assume you're asking in good faith, so I decided to get some second opinions from friends (though keep in mind the LGBT community is not a monolith):

A) It's a big franchise that's over 25 years old, it's gonna have something for everyone at this point. There's probably some game, card or show or manga that vibes with you at this point.

B) Takahashi Kazuki was at least center-left at least, and was a pretty, near as we can tell, open minded person, who wanted a better world. His tendency to vibe with underdogs I think gives him a certain Neil Gaiman esque quality of writing in such a way that can be fairly endearing to LGBTQ+ and Non-Gender Conforming Fans looking for rep.

Now from Friends:

C) The series had Yugi be inspired by Edward Scissorhands, a social outsider who for reasons, couldn't quite fit in with 'normal' society. That's definitely going to leave marks and signs.

D) The wide variety of Decks allows people to find a Deck that 'fits' them, something important to a lot of LGBTQ+/NGC fans of media, that they like to latch onto something that lets them express themselves if they're into something casual.

E) Aesthetics wise, the manga and the spinoffs were and are generally good at very attractive guys (and femme masculine characters) and very very gorgeous pretty women.

F) A friend of mine joked "If VRAINS had been brave enough to have Aoi be a feminine boy in RL who plays a big tiddy cute fashionable girl online", do you KNOW how many people would be going "She's just like me fr fr fr"

G) "Plus who else wouldn't love having a steady consistent friend group that is present in many of the shows where you can honestly say "they're all going to form one Functional Adult by the time they hit college"."

H) Yugi is a VERY rare case of positive non-toxic, non-villainous plural representation. Judai + Yubel by show's ending. That's a good thing for people. Plural people tends to be very LGBT+/NGC adjacent or intersectionalize.

I) From another friend:

"Every single Trans girl I know has had a period of looking at Dark Magician Girl and going "God, I wish that were me" without realizing at the time what they were doing."

J) The Punk Subculture vibes with Yugi and Kaiba. Leather. Chains. Gold. Yu-Gi-Oh! has a LOT of spiked/gelled looking hair. Remember, Punk is an anti-establishment subculture originally.

K) Huge phenomenon, a Japanese series that blew up in the west that had a fairly androgynous cast. Marik, Bakura, Pegasus etc. A lot of the popular guys tend to be femme masculine. That sort of aesthetic can be very appealing and comforting to young Queer fans still in the closet.

Bakura's been HUGELY formative on at least two of my friends.

L) It's a large Fujoshi attracting IP, and if you don't think Fujoshi aren't attracted to LGBT material or become LGBT adjacent, boy I think you gotta go and sit down and think for a while.

M) Yugi comes off as very queer energy, Kaiba's incredibly practically homosexual lust for Atem, Mai despite it being a 90s-00s manga and anime was a pretty strong woman, dominating, powerful feeling, while very very CLEARLY feminine, can be fairly endearing?

N) The art style not being mono-coded as Magic the Gathering, allows for much more variety leaning back to points A and D

O) Yubel. Judai and Johan. Yugi. Etc. There's a lot of undercurrents of unintended queer writing.

There's a lot of reasons, but the IP has a LOT going for it that can be attractive. LOTS of Questions of identity. Characters who are social outsiders (especially the main characters). The artistic style favors NGC appearance to some degree.

There's as many reasons as there are people, but the franchise is just very, even if it doesn't directly intend for it, you can draw a LOT of feelings and thoughts and headcanons and vibes from the franchise.

[late-night-bear]

So, a lil update on nouns here since I wanted to distinguish inanimate and animate nouns more, so that they feel different in use and also have the opportunity to evolve in different ways.

So essentially, every word has two forms to it, one with inanimate gender and one with animate gender.  Think of it like every definition has two different words associated to it, but each word interprets the definition in slightly different ways.  An example could be korum (inanimate)/ aduru (animate) which both mean a fire or flame.  korum, being inanimate, can refer to low or slow fires, or fires that are not being tended to; aduru, on the other hand, refers more towards either fires that are being tended to, or fires that are spreading (e.g. wildfires), or flames that seem more active (are flickering more/more violently), depending on the context.  Many words can be like this in Orekanav, though some only have a metaphorical or symbolic difference between them.

One of the key differences between inanimate forms and animate forms is that inanimate forms always begin with a consonant (except j) and typically consist of harder sounds (unvoiced consonants and vowels that are further back, for instance), whereas animate forms always begin with a vowel or j, and usually take on softer or more flow-y sounds.  No matter the form, however, almost all nouns end in a consonant.  As said in the image above, if the noun does end in a vowel, it is typically removed when the suffix is added, though there is an exception for when the final vowel is the same as the first vowel of the suffix, in which case the final vowel is removed, but the first vowel is lengthened (e.g. a -> á, u -> ú, i -> í, e -> é, etc.)

Another thing to mention is that these suffixes only care about gender, not number, so in order to express plurality in a noun:

for an animate noun, one adds the prefix ð- and lengthens the vowels in the first syllable;

for an inanimate noun, one adds the prefix ðe- and the first consonant becomes voiced (k -> g, t -> d, etc.)

It is fairly uncommon, though definitely not unheard of, for inanimate forms to be pluralised, as when the animacy of a group is mixed, people tend to opt for the plural animate form.

The final thing to mention would be that the age article is still quite simple.  After all the above is said and done, to add an ‘Old’ article one adds the suffix -av, and to add a ‘New’ article one adds the suffix -ør.  The meanings of these articles are still quite the same as before!

Final final thing is that pronouns and proper nouns (i.e. names) do not get declined at all. To indicate case, gender and number for proper nouns, the word kídge (inanimate) / øraf (animate) exist to be placed before the proper noun in the sentence and carry all of their declension.

The next stop on the tour of Orekanav is the basics of nouns. I really like the idea of the end of the nouns changing based on the nature of the noun, e.g. älg (moose) vs. älgen (the moose) vs. älgar (meese) vs. älgarna (the meese) in Swedish, or changing based on its role in the sentence, e.g. hún á fisk (she has a fish) vs. fiskur á hana (a fish has her) in Icelandic. I decided to do a simple version of this, where you just add a number of letters on the end of the noun to indicate all that (though if the noun ends in a vowel, that vowel is usually replaced.) I think in the languages that descend from this I will change the rules on this a bit and add some exceptions to the rules just to make it feel more natural.

For those unfamiliar, the nominative and the accusative cases are kind of like the subject and the object of a sentence, the genitive case is like possession (e.g. the cat's paw, or the hills of the South Downs), the instrumental case is like something being used (e.g. he played music with a flute), the dative case (in Orekanav at least) is like an indirect object (e.g. they gave a pen to Alex), and the locative case is like where something is (e.g. Edd lives with Jamie in an apartment).

I have also made a special lil optional article at the end of words which indicates a relative sort of age (Old or New), but culturally when referring to people, it more often refers to some sort of seniority or social rank.

The next fun fact for this language is that its grammatical genders are inanimate and animate, though none of the nouns in Orekanav are set in one gender or the other. Rather, the animacy that a person assigns to a given word forms part of the way the person views that object, and part of the way the person is trying to interpret that object in the given context. For example, someone might describe rivers as animate to evoke a poetic metaphor about its flow, or describe a silent person as inanimate to emphasise their stillness.

[dameronology]

love in a time of p.t.a. meetings {marcus moreno} - 5/5

v summary: you hadn’t expected to find anything at a stupid p.t.a. meeting - but somehow, you found everything {series masterlist} 

warnings: swearing, one very mild innuendo 

there’s a long message at the end but...this is the last official part and i’m very sad about it. with that said, i hope you enjoy❤️

- j

Being a parent was tiring.

So much so that you hadn’t even made it to bed last night.

In fact, none of you had. The entire household was slumped together on the sofa; Marcus was in the middle, with one arm wrapped around Missy on his left side and the other stretched across you and Jack on his right. You’d completely flopped into his chest, with your kid passed out on you in a similar manner. The dogs (plural - but more on that later) were both stretched across the four of you on your laps, snoozing quietly. It had been a long week, clearly; between the school year coming to an end and the hot weather, you were all worn out. It had been a rush of finishing up projects at school, evenings in the pool and ordering take out. Marcus had been working late and your cooking skills were...well, calling them skills was an overstatement in itself. 

You grumbled slightly as you woke - why the fuck did your neck ache so bad? Right, because you’d fallen asleep tilted sideways. You probably would have stayed passed out for hours more if it hadn’t been for the sunlight streaming through the blinds. The TV ahead of you had stopped now, displaying an are you still watching Friends? message. You’d started watching it at what...six o clock the night before? 

Rubbing your bleary eyes, you sat up. Instead of waking up, Jack simply flopped into your lap, clearly not phased by the sudden movement other than letting out a tiny oof! as he fell. The kid had fallen asleep on the log flumes at Coney Island, so really, it wasn’t a surprise. Plus, him waking up would mean having to get up and make breakfast, which you really weren’t ready for just yet. 

‘D’you know what day it is today?’ Marcus quietly muttered. 

‘One year.’ You peered up at him, a sleepy smile spreading across your face.

‘So where the hell do you think you’re going?’ He pulled you back towards him, broad arm wrapping around your shoulders to trap you against his chest. ‘Happy one year, baby.’

‘Happy one year.’ You leant up to a soft kiss to his lips. 

You stayed like that for a minute, head resting against Marcus as you gently ran a hand through Jack’s hair. It was sort of a moment of...reflection. A lot had changed in the last year and yet somehow, it felt like your life had always been like this. The four of you have had gelled together into a slightly chaotic but ever-loving entity and you loved it. With the combined antics of your energetic children, everything was in disarray practically all the time but you wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It had been the thing you’d had all along and the very thing that Marcus had been looking for; you had been the one to bring it into his life and he had been the one to teach you to appreciate it. 

The two dogs had brought a lot of chaos into your lives as well. After weeks of Missy and Jack insisting that the garden was too big for just Optimus Prime, you’d ended up traipsing to the dog shelter late on a Saturday afternoon. Bumblebee had become a valued member of the Moreno family within a matter of hours. 

‘I love you.’ You murmured. You could feel yourself getting sleepy again. 

‘I love you more.’

‘No, you don’t.’ You pressed a kiss to his shoulder.

‘At least that’s the only fight we’ve had over the last year.’ He reasoned. ‘What time d’we have to be at cook out?’

‘Twelve.’ You replied. Glancing at the screen of your dying Apple watch, you squinted at the screen. ‘It’s just gone eight.’

Every year, the PTA threw a cook out on the school field to celebrate the end of the semester. In previous years, you’d avoided it like the plague but this year you were actually excited. The last one had been in the very early stages of your relationship, and you and Marcus weren’t publicly showing affection when you’d been. There had been a lot of lingering glances across the field and knowing looks at one another but this time, you were solid. Everyone knew they were together and like hell where they gonna say things about you when you were with Marcus Moreno. Whether it’s because they’d suddenly got a newfound respect for you or because they were scared into silence by his reputation, you didn’t know, but you weren’t going to complain.

‘Do you want breakfast, hermosa?’ He asked.

‘Yeah, I’ll help-’

Having heard the b-word, Jack suddenly shot up. He was six now (too old, in your book) and just as much of a tiny, evil genius as ever. He’d upgraded from a Chewbacca onesie to an Ewok onesie, so that was something too, and you were proud of him. 

‘- what’s for breakfast?!’ He demanded. ‘I want waffles.’

‘Then waffles we shall have.’ You stood up, sticking your hand out to him. ‘What about you two?’

‘I want waffles.’ Missy sleepily murmured.

Jack followed you through to the kitchen, swiping his iPad off the side as he did. Despite the fact you’d put it in a nuclear bomb proof case, he’d still managed to crack the screen. There had also been at least five occasions where he’d tried to take it in the pool. And this was the same kid who’d insisted he was responsible enough for his own hamster. 

Marcus breezed into the kitchen a few moments later, pressing a kiss to your cheek and ruffling Jack’s hair as he went by. You heard him rustling around behind you for a few minutes whilst you prepared the food; he came up behind you, wrapping his arms around your waist. He placed a terribly wrapped gift on the counter in front of you, head coming to rest on your shoulder. 

‘Happy anniversary, baby.’ He murmured.

‘Hey.’ You dropped the knife you were holding, turning around to face him. ‘You didn’t have to get me anything.’

‘I know we said we wouldn’t do presents but since you got me a present last night and-’

‘- Marcus!’ You clamped a hand over his mouth. ‘There is a child in the room.’

‘He has his headphones in!’ He protested. ‘Just open it, please?’

‘Of course.’ You smiled. 

‘Jack even helped me wrap it.’ He said. ‘And decorate it.’ 

‘That would explain a lot.’ You replied.

Pulling the paper off it, you felt your heart drop in your chest when you saw what it was. 

It was a bright red photo with random doodles in puffy paint; the photo itself was one of you and Jack from when you’d all gone to New York for the weekend a few months previous. You were stood on top of the Rockerfeller Centre, the Empire State in the distance behind you and Jack on your shoulders. You were both grinning despite how windy it was, and his hat had blown off seconds after the photo was taken.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t - ah, dammit.

‘I love it.’ You tried to keep your voice steady, but it wobbled despite your efforts. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’ He flashed you a lopsided grin, pressing another kiss to your forehead. ‘I figured we could hang it up in place of the one he managed to smash last week with the broom stick.’

(He’d recently watched Harry Potter. Don’t ask.) 

‘Of course.’ You gave him one last kiss, before heading over to the empty space on the wall. It fit perfectly in the space, right between the photo of Marcus and Missy, and the sign that said 0 days since Jack’s last incident.

---

Four hours later, and after consuming enough waffles to feed a small army, the four of you finally reached the school. Both of the kids seemed excited to see their friends, but you were a little nervous.  What if people asked questions about you and Marcus? About your divorce? Or Jack’s behaviour, or whether or not-

‘You okay, baby?’ Marcus had suddenly appeared beside you, an arm coming around your waist. You’d been stood on the sidelines of the football field for way longer than you realised. ‘You’ve got eyes like dinner plates.’

‘I don’t know how to interact with these people.’ You murmured back. ‘They’re all...you know.’

‘They’re all what?’

‘Perfect. And shiny.’ You huffed. ‘Look at their cars! There’s not a dent in sight. And their kids aren’t wearing an Ewok onesie to a cook-out in July.’

‘I think Jack is admirable for embracing his unique sense of fashion.’ You could practically hear the smirk in his voice. ‘C’mon! They’re gonna run out of food if you keep longingly staring at their minivans.’

‘You’re right.’ You stumbled slightly as he dragged your hand, pulling you towards the crowd in the middle of the field.

‘I mean if you want a minivan, we can get one.’

‘Moving to the suburbs was already a big deal for me.’ You grumbled. 

Marcus continued to laugh, pulling you closer into his side as you reached the other parents. 

Naturally, he immediately jumped into conversation about one of the other dads with...actually, you weren’t really paying attention. You switched off as soon as you heard the word football. One thing you did notice, however, was his ability to be completely and entirely charming with anyone. You lacked that, normally shying away from talking to strangers. Especially strangers who had previously cast you out for being a single parent and constantly given you the side-eye. The only reason they’d stopped was because you and Marcus were together now.

You tried to remind yourself that it didn’t matter, that their thoughts and feelings weren’t relevant. They shouldn’t have been. You had the best guy in the world by your side and two amazing kids. The people most important to you were the ones whose opinions mattered - and they all thought the world of you. Marcus loved and supported you unconditionally, and Missy thought you were a bad-ass. Jack, though probably a little bias, thought you were the best parent in the world. That was what counted. 

But still, you couldn’t help but feel a little angry. You’d worked your ass off to get where you were, to raise your kid and make him a semi functional human being. You’d single-handedly kept a roof over both of your heads and provided for your family, even when you’d been married to a dead beat husband. 

Things were different now; brighter, happier, filled with more dogs and more love than you could ever have imagined. You didn’t want to linger in the past, not when everything else was moving forward. If anything, being here had just solidified your faith in your relationship. If all you wanted to do was go home and be alone with your partner, then that was a sure sign. 

‘Mum!’ You heard Jack from across the field. ‘Can you get my football out the car?’

‘Duty calls.’ You finally spoke. Marcus had noted how quiet you were, having made a mental note to bring it up later. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’

‘Okay, baby.’ He pressed a kiss to your check. 

The sun beat down on your back as you trudged across the field, Doc Martens kicking up grass around you. Your outfit was cute at least; a pair of denim shorts and an old tank top with one of your boyfriend’s plaid shirts thrown over the top. You hadn’t even realised it was his until the lingering smell of aftershave hit your nostrils when you got in the car. After that, there was no way in hell you were taking it off.

The car park was around the corner from the field -- it was nice to get away for a minute. Even though you’d simply stood beside Marcus like an older man’s sidepiece at a business meeting, just being in the presence of the people and listening to them talk about their kids was exhausting. At least he had been good at pretending to be interested in their sugar free diets and screen time limitations and how their French lessons were going. You, meanwhile, hadn’t even tried to look like it piqued your fancy. You’d been half-tempted to put your sunglasses on so they couldn’t see you roll your eyes. 

Pulling Marcus’ car-keys out your pocket, you opened the boot and began to rifle around. His car was a thousand times more put together than yours, but it still accumulated a bunch of crap. 

You jumped backwards when you heard the gravel crunch behind you. 

Glancing over your shoulder, your eyes fell on Carol. It had been a while since you’d last seen her, but she looked a little worst for wear. What’s more was that she had a cigarette between her lips, despite being the one to run the entire school’s anti-smoking campaign.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’ You commented, catching her attention as you slammed the boot shut. 

‘Oh!’ She jumped, quickly throwing it onto the floor.

‘Hey, I’m not bothered.’ You leant against the back of the car. ‘A lot of people do it.’

‘I don’t normally.’ She stamped on the remains to put it out, dusting off her bright pink work-out jacket. ‘I’ve just been stressed lately.’

‘Are you okay?’ You raised an eyebrow at her.

‘I’m fine.’ 

You tossed the football between your hands, giving her a nod. ‘If you’re sure.’

With that, you locked the car and began to make your way back towards the cook-out. If you could wear Jack out by playing with him all afternoon, then you might be able to catch some peace and quiet that evening. Then, you and Marcus could celebrate your first anniversary by ordering take out and watching Friends.

(Which is ironically, what you’d done for the last four nights).

‘Y’know, I’ve always been jealous of you.’ You froze when Carol called after you.

‘What?!’ You turned around to face her, confusion etched on your features. ‘Are you talking to someone else, or?..’

‘No, I’m talking to you.’ She muttered. 

‘Why me? I thought you hated me?’

‘Because I was jealous of you.’ She said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

‘Carol, you’re the perfect one here. You’re married to your high school sweetheart, you’ve got a big-ass house - with a gate! - and your kids are perfectly well behaved. And you drive a fucking minivan!’

‘Oh, please.’ She groaned, falling back against the nearest car. ‘My husband is married to his job and my kids are more interested in their iPads than me!’ 

‘So’s mine-’

‘- you’ve always provided for yourself.’ She continued, cutting you off. ‘Always put your kid first and just did what was best for you without worrying what anyone else thought. That’s..admirable.’

‘Thanks?’ You furrowed your brow. ‘I never really gave it that much thought.’

‘I never thought I’d wish for your life.’ She muttered. 

You gently approached her, placing a hand on her shoulder. With caution, obviously. You know that she had a tendency to be vicious and bite. Like a chihuahua. 

‘My life isn’t perfect.’ You said softly. ‘There’s a difference between happiness and perfect. And if you keep trying for perfect, you’ll never be happy.’

‘That’s deep.’

‘Actually, it’s a quote that you shared on Facebook.’ You snorted. ‘You just gotta appreciate what’s around you. Your house, your kids, your husband.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’ Carol nodded. ‘You’re a good parent. A good person. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel less than that.’

‘I mean...you were an asshole, I won’t lie. You’re nosey as fuck and you got involved with my kid, but I’d probably be doing the same if I wasn’t satisfied with my life.’ 

Okay, so you didn’t mean for that to sound so rude, but who could blame you? The woman had given you nothing but crap. You’d already felt bad for her, but now you felt worst.

‘C’mon.’ You stuck your hand out to her. ‘You have two lovely daughters and a husband waiting for you back on the field....you family waiting for you back on the field.’

Dragging Carol off of the car, you dusted off her arms and forced a smile. It didn’t make you happy that she was miserable, but at least offered an explanation for her behaviour. The fact she’d envied you this entire time didn’t make up for what she’d done - the rumours the spread, the things she said - but it at least helped soothe you a little bit. 

‘Can we be friends?’ She asked quietly, traipsing beside you. 

‘...maybe in a few years.’ 

---

As it turned out, Jack did not pass out early. Instead, the four of you ended up having another night on the sofa -- this time with an extra large pizza, just to celebrate the special night. 

Your head had been spinning since your conversation with Carol. You were glad you finally had closure on the whole thing, but it had completely fried your circuits. She was the queen of the hive, the perfect mum, the perfect wife. Her kids wore matching outfits to school and they never had a hair out of place. Her Facebook was filled with family photos of their international vacations and outings to all their activities. Was she not the blue print?

It made you take a step back and look at your own life, which was something you hadn’t done in a while. In fact, last time you’d done it, you realised you’d weren’t happy with your ex-husband. 

Now, it was the opposite. You were in love with somebody who was better than you could have ever imagined; he wasn’t perfect - he snored and he never did the dishes and he always forgot to put the bins out - but he was everything to you. You had a kid who, although was undeniably a tiny meddler, you loved with your whole heart. You had Missy, who had welcomed you into her life with open arms and embraced the chaos you brought. You had dogs, and a house with a fucking garden. 

You didn’t blame Carol for being jealous because, even though it was from perfect, you didn’t need it to be. You had everything you ever wanted and heck, you would have been jealous of it too if it wasn’t completely and entirely yours. 

For the first time all day, you finally had a moment to yourself. You were stretched out across the couch, feet propped up on a pile of cushions; Marcus’ shirt was still on, only now you had changed out your shorts for leggings and your boots for socks fluffy enough to be dangerous on the wooden floors. 

‘Hey, baby.’ Marcus quietly greeted you, shutting the living room door behind him. ‘Kids are asleep.’

You gave him a doubtful look. ‘Even Jack?’

‘Okay - Missy is asleep and Jack is on his iPad.’

You opened your arms to him, grinning. ‘I’ll take it.’

Marcus dropped onto the sofa, an equally big smile falling onto his face as you wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him down to kiss you. He wound both of his around your waist, lifting you off of the couch and into his lap. It always reminded you of when you’d kissed on your first date -- it seemed like worlds away now. 

‘Has it really been a year?’ You murmured softly, resting your forehead against his.

‘Yeah.’ He shyly smiled at you. ‘I don’t know how I got so lucky.’

‘We both got lucky.’ You reminded him. ‘I got lucky that Carol guilt-tripped me into that fucking meeting.’

‘And I got lucky that you were the person I chose to victimise with my small talk.’ He chuckled. ‘You know you’re my whole fucking heart, right?’

‘Yeah.’ You slowly nodded. ‘And you’re mine.’

You’d completely changed each other’s lives - blown them apart, and used the tiny pieces to rebuild everything back into one. Neither of you had even been looking and you’d still managed to find one another. You’d been hurt before and he’d been patient. He’d lost a lot before and you helped him find it again. What he lacked, you had. What you lacked, he had. 

Above all, Marcus had embraced what everybody seemed to encourage; he saw value in the things you’d been insecure about and when he fell in love with him, so did you. In return, you brought an energy and light to his life that he didn’t even know he needed.  In one another, you found unconditional love and support, and a feeling of security that you’d both lacked for so long.

This was it. And it was everything . 

--

OKAY i’m actually so sad this story is over -- i’ve written over the course of maybe 2 weeks but when i TELL YOU i have become so attached? u better believe it. if you check out the series masterlist, you’ll see that there’s a few little fics i’m gonna write to fill in the gaps that were in the time skips between chapters, so that’s still something to look forward to!

thank so so so much for all your support on this series; it’s been so much fun to write & your comments are what encouraged me to finish it so quickly. 

- jamie xx 

taglist: taglist: @naivara-duneimith @1-2-3-4-5metalfingers @likeshootingstarsinthenightsky @phoenixhalliwell @crazycookiecrumbles @bitchin-beskar @comphersjost @absurdthirst @mjby @parkjammys @kteague @katdante @vonschweetz @cyarikashakira​ @mrsparknuts​ @starryeyedstories​ 

[grandhotelabyss]

—Gustave Flaubert, Letter to His Mother, February 1850

I don’t know why I had this in an open tab, but I love it. Flaubert’s defense of vocation is an apt rejoinder to that famous utopian vision of communism in Marx (“to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”) that I’ve personally never found very utopian. Rear cattle? I don’t think I will. Marx is superficially close to Emerson’s lines on reification in “The American Scholar”—

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.

—but I think Emerson’s point was not that we should or could reverse the modern drift toward specialization and all become everything again, if indeed we ever were once everything and this is not just a typical 19th-century noble savage romance. I think he meant rather that we should each bring our total humanity into our specialized “ministry” rather than being governed by inhuman codes and systems, that perennial danger of professionalization. We all know now what that danger looks like from our two-and-a-half-year brush with the psychotic-robotic public health sector. As with the best of Romanticism, Emerson wants to ennoble and spiritualize the opportunities afforded by the modern, precisely to avoid its obvious pitfalls. 

Marx, meanwhile, has that misplaced guilt of the intellectuals who think everyone envies them. But in the part-time jobs I had in high school and college I worked alongside working-class people, not to mention that I come from working-class people, and, trust me, they don’t envy intellectuals any more than intellectuals envy them. The modern division of labor is not some alien imposition on the organic and absolute plurality of the individual; people are actually different from one another. Some people love to dirty their hands; I prefer to dirty my mind. A pro-labor politics whether of left or right would, it seems to me, seek to secure a reward for workers commensurate with the social value of their work, not to dissolve the division of labor.

In literary terms, Flaubert is an imperfect example of the Emersonian dream. I’ve always thought his famously monkish devotion to le mot juste created an immobilized prose, modular blocks of dead perfection, not only in Flaubert himself but also in his followers, in Conrad, for example, or Nabokov, and even too often in Joyce—a case James Wood makes well in his oft-neglected essay “Half Against Flaubert.” Flaubert, then, may exemplify reification, just as Lukács charged. But it’s not because he didn’t have a day job; it’s because he wasn’t, as Emerson would say, Man Writing in his ministry. Martyring himself to language, he became written by it, heralding the postmodern acquiescence to our being lived by systems. With that attitude, he might as well have gotten what my own relatives, scolding me, used to call “a real job, a J-O-B”—and no, they weren’t, though they should have been, alluding to the Bible’s exemplary sufferer. My own approach to prose is more intuitive and more emotional, not to mention faster. As I’ve said before, I am with Woolf here: find the right rhythm and you can’t write the wrong word. But finding the right rhythm, too, can take all day, or even a lifetime.

[wugging-out]

wug history

You might be wondering what, exactly, a wug is, and why it is everywhere here. The answer is an adorable made-up bird-like creature which has become the unofficial(?) mascot of all linguists everywhere.

Basically, way back in 1958, a linguist named Jean Berko designed an experiment to find out how children learn how to form plurals in English, i.e. how do they know that the plural of “cat” is “cats” and the plural of “witch” is “witches”, and the plural of “cat” can’t be “catses” and the the plural of “witch” can’t be “witchs”? Also, if you pay attention, you might notice that the plural -s in “cats” sounds different than the -s in “dogs”, i.e. the latter sounds like “dogz”. Do kids memorize every plural individually? Or do they memorize rules that they can apply to any noun?

As it turns out, there’s a generalization for where the different plurals show up. You get -s when the singular noun ends in a voiceless sound (meaning that your larynx isn’t vibrating—say “sss” with your hand on your throat and then say “zzz” and you’ll feel the vibration on the “z” that isn’t there on the “s”), -ez shows up when the noun ends in s, z, ch, sh, or a j sound, and you get -z everywhere else.

If kids just memorize each plural individually, they shouldn’t be able to figure out the plural of a singular noun they’ve never heard before. But if they learn general rules about what the plural should be after certain sounds, they should be able to figure out the right plural form just by hearing the singular form (ignoring irregular plurals like “children”).

So what Berko did was come up with some fake nouns and got a bunch of 5-year-old kids to pluralize them. So a kid would see a picture of a creature, for example a cute little bird-thing, with the caption “This is a wug.” Then there would be a picture with the creature duplicated, with the caption. “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two __” and the kid would have to say the plural out loud to fill in the gap. And this was the example that Berko gave.

If kids just memorize plurals, they shouldn’t be able to fill in this gap, because they’ve never heard the plural of “wug” before. But the kids did fill in the gap, and they were super confident in their answers! And more often than not, their responses agreed with what adults judged the plurals to be. Although they had some trouble figuring out when to use -ez, they were good at knowing when to use -s and when to use -z. Which means that kids start learning the rules involved in forming plurals at a young age.

This was a really important study at the time, and it still gets talked about a lot, especially in intro to linguistics. So since this paper got circulated a lot, a whole lot of linguists saw the wug. And then they latched onto it. And now it is the mascot of linguistics :3

[braveandsnipe]

power rangers dino fury episode seven : stego search

hmmmm... i have thoughts

first time actually watching live ‘n not just waiting for it to come on youtube

i was looking at the photo of that earlier, and that font looks so familiar, but i can’t put my finger on it

F*CK NONONONONONONONONONONO

alright, jane got some flow ngl

oh, the days i used to play the violin (what i’d do to go back to elementary school)

jesus christ, this kids gonna give his father a heart attack one day

i mean, whatever, but the box around javi’s morph is purple but nothing else is...

we love a good rhyme

what is the plural of sporix?

i love that shot of zayto, ollie, and amelia (the angle)

is there only one woods in this town, city, thing.

it’s not like they don’t have a megazord. 

how is it night time when it wasn’t less than 3:00pm two minutes ago?

already, he was made three episodes ago

oh, nevermind

the javi/ollie vibes we strong in that last scene ngl

at least they kept the dumb jane/j-borg sh*t until the end, makes it more tolerable imo

—

still not thrilled with the jane/j-borg stuff. i mean today, it wasn’t unbearable, but definitely still not my cup of tea.

im interested in the garcia family dynamic. i have a couple of theories on how the dynamic came to be, but am having trouble fleshing them out atm. but it’s odd to me the warden is so adversed to music, but not sports. like, in terms of carer prospects, they’re both hard industries to break into (without connections), but once you get that momentum, you can become very successful. maybe it’s a personal thing he takes out on javi? well, this won’t be the last time this dynamic is focused on.

has power rangers ever done a plot where a parent/child are at adversity with each other? i know lightspeed, but that was because of brainwashing. i guess devon in beast morphers it the closest, but this one feels different. idk

i have mixed feelings on the main plot. i like it because i can relate a lot to it, but the climax was weak. 

i finally realized my problem with this episode after reading this tweet : javi never opens up. zayto, ollie, and amelia find out the problem through a video, which kind of negates the point of the episode. we know javi is more quiet and reserved, and (from personal experience), opening up is a struggle (for a variety of reasons, usually situational). the thing is, the flaw of his character was never challenged as he didn’t have to confront his problem, the video did it for him. instead of having the scene of javi after izzy gets hurt, i think it should’ve been him actually opening up instead.

speaking of that scene after izzy got hurt, when i first saw it in the teaser, i was kind of upset because i thought it would take the focus away from javi. i think it actually worked well, but i don’t think it was necessary (at least for this episode). i know they are trying to establish that there is tension between javi and his dad, but i think that has been established enough up to this point, that the scene could’ve been replaced with something more relevant to this episode (like javi actually opening up to zayto, ollie, and amelia). it’s not like it was out of place or anything, but this scene is pretty “generic” in that it could’ve been placed in another episode (where relevant) and still make sense. the only thing that it added was javi pushing away the team, which is important to the plot, but has been established already. 

edit : i think this episode was better at balancing all the characters. of course the episode was javi centric, but the others were still actively present. 

i think that’s it. i think im upset this episode didn’t hit because i was really looking forward to it, and it wasn’t what i expected. that’s kind of my problem, i guess. anyway, i would like to conclude with this tweet i found that isn’t mine

[eynsavalow]

𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙩𝙞𝙘 𝘾𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙩

So let me preface this my pointing out that as far as I’ve been able to gather Celtic culture while holding distinctive characteristics was extremely fluid in terms of cultural practice and politics. I have also taken the liberty of filling in certain gaps in our understanding that strictly speaking we have no way of confirming or understanding the cultural context for. I have listed my primary sources at the bottom of this post and will be reblogging whenever I add new resources or adjustment my headcanons based on new research or sources I find. Our knowledge of the Celts is continually evolving as is my own. 

In regards to terms I’m relying largely on Irish and Welsh as they’re the most relavant to the blog and will try to clarify which specific culture I am referring to within the context of my posts. 

Politics- Celtic politics were extremely fluid. In broad strokes Kings were elected by council though these elections were rarely peaceful with rival factions fighting until one proves victorious. Because of this the Celtic warrior class was extremely powerful with many kings being able to hold power based solely on bribing and offering monetary and other rewards to the warriors in their service. This is explicitly stated to be how Conchobar of Ulster remains in power in the Ulster Cycle. However it should be noted this practice did not guarantee loyalty. It seems to be be that the King was expected to provide for his warriors as well as his people because of social obligation while the Warrior class in particularly was free to leave and give their services to others if they received another offer or came to disprove of their current Ruler’s actions. This fluidity of loyalty seems to have been accepted and to a degree expected. 

Geas/ Geasa and Tynged/ Tynghedau- Perhaps tying into Celtic belief in social obligation a geas/tynged (geasa/ tynghedau are the Irish and Welsh plural forms). In broad strokes it seems to a kind of obligation that one can place on others or themselves as is the case with Cú Chulainn. Irish High Kings could have dozens or more there seems to be a correlation between one’s power/status and one’s number of geasa. I have taken it further by headcanoning that honoring and fulfilling one’s geasa adds to and builds up ones own power as it is frequently shown in Irish lore that violating one’s geasa will result in death or other misfortune. 

The Celtic Pantheon- I have posted about my take on Celtic mythology before >HERE< and >HERE< but suffice to say it is as fluid as Celtic culture and politics. But I want to be very adamant that I am not going to favor one group over the other. There has been a long and frankly very ugly history of dismissing Welsh, Irish and Scottish folk beliefs that I want to avoid perpetuating on this blog. NOTE: In terms of interaction I get the impression one was allowed to talk back to one’s gods and even correct their behavior much as warriors were allowed to do with their Kings.

Religious Practices- This is extremely tricky as most of what we’re given is vague and described by non- Celtic sources so most of what I’m about to describe is strictly headcanon based. All pools and bodies of water are believed to be doors to the Otherworld. It is therefor customary for Celts to provide an offering of some kind to bribe or get a deities attention. (Lancelot himself will use this as a means of communicating with his mother.) Birds are also seen as messengers between the human and Otherworld with sacrifices sometimes made to lure birds to a sites and then carry the prayers offered by the druids and supplicants back to the Gods. 

Heads- While an abundance of writing and other evidence exists that the Celts had some kind of Cult surrounding the head/brain we’re not particularly sure why. I’ve interpreted it that the Celts believed one’s soul/power resided in the head and that by taking and preserving the head or brain one was adding to one’s own as well as keeping your enemy from entering the Otherworld and reincarnating. 

Children- I am admittedly sorry for putting this under the rather graphic bullet point above. But the Celts were not like their neighbors Romans or Greeks and did not view their children as disposable. One was required to look after one’s children, the elderly and disabled. I can think of no better example of this than Amergin mac Eccit from the Ulster cycle who was unable to physically care for himself until his teens with his father Eccit going to extraordinary lengths to protect his son who is later described as a wise poet and warrior despite his disabilities. This is also why Lancelot insists on making Galahad his heir even if he struggles to form a bond with him as it is culturally unacceptable to him to not provide for him on some level. Children were also only considered illegitimate if no one claimed to be their father. 

Relationships/ Sexuality/ Gender Roles- This is likely the most difficult to headcanon and has required the biggest leaps on my part. But it seems to be that the Celts were comfortable and open with queer relationships an taking lovers outside of marriage with the upper classes in particular engaging in seemingly polyamorous unions. All sexes could become Druids or Warriors or even rule in their own right. Boudicca and Medb in the Ulster cycle are excellent examples of this. 

Sources

Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Koch, John T., and John Carey, editors. The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe & Early Ireland & Wales. Celtic Studies Publications, 2003.

Ginnell, Laurence. Brehon Laws: A Legal Handbook (3rd Ed.).

ANWYL, EDWARD. CELTIC RELIGION. BLURB, 1906.

Eickhoff, Randy Lee. The Red Branch Tales. Forge, 2004.

MacCullough, J. A. The Religion of the Ancient Celts. T & T Clark, 1911.

Paxton, Jennifer. “The Celtic World.” The Great Courses. The Celtic World, 2018. 

Andrews, Elizabeth. Ulster Folklore. Norwood Editions, 1975. 

Arnold, Matthew. On the Study of Celtic Literature, and, On Translating Homer. Macmillan, 1902. 

Leahy, Arthur Herbert. Heroic Romances of Ireland. D. Nutt, 1905. 

O'Rahilly, Cecile. Táin bó Cúalnge: From the Book of Leinster. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2004. 

[radramblog]

Rating the letters of the alphabet

I feel like part of my style of comedy is just rambling about shit and making loose connections between things as part of an overall bit. I think. I’m no expert on myself, unfortunately.

The inspiration for the following absolute load of shite is trying to search Tiermaker for nothing. Like, no characters in the search bar. Didn’t come up with anything. Did a search for just a space. No dice. What about just a? Surely that’ll bring up everything with an A in the title. But it didn’t, and I was somewhat disappointed.

Then my head started writing bits about letters and that’s how we got here. This is probably really stupid, but maybe it’ll at least be fun. Wordplay is cool, though maybe not my strong suit? Anyway.

A: A is one of the two letters that’s also just a word, as you’ve just seen, giving it a necessary promotion in rank. Not a lot of things get to double up like that, though with the “an” ligature maybe it’s actually a double or nothing. But because of the confusing common connection crossing contexts for the character, it gets somewhat awkward to talk about the letter in conversation. An A, in my opinion, A does not get. 4/5.

B: B is also just a word letter but unlike A when you write it out you have to stick a few extra letters on to make it work, making it not as good. But B’s association with bees isn’t enough, because in the year of our lord, like, 2019 or something, it would become inextrixably linked with shite memes as the B emoji became king. And I just don’t respect that. It’s otherwise a fine letter, dragged down by its company. 2/5.

C: Oh come on now, the word doesn’t even have a C in it anymore! You can sea the see without any of our tertiary letter’s involvement whatsoever. Not to mention how its two main sounds are just copies from other letters wholesale. C must be confusing to non-english speakers, I’d imagine. C as a grade gets what C as a grade typically entails for many a schoolchild. 3/5.

D: It would be remiss of me not to give a sterling grade to the D. Why, none of us would be here without it. While many a youth may find the D to be quite a humourous subject, I assure you I’m taking it with the gravest of sincerity when I say the D has got to be one of the best letters of all.

And by D I mean deity, of course. Wait, what did you think I meant? 5/5.

E: The absolute absurdity that is the E meme elevates E efficiently enough to excel beyond many another vowel. However, it is also the single most common letter in the English language, going so far as to open the damn name. It’s to the point where someone made a point of writing an entire book without using it, and I think Gadsby is cool but mayhaps avoiding fifth uncial was a bit showy. I can’t help but mark it down for the sake of hipster cred. 3/5.

F: F is for Fuck. I like the word Fuck. F is for paying respects. I think the military-industrial complex has poisoned our cultural landscape to the point that a reference to one of its most prized productions’ awkward moments has become one of the most colloquially used meme letters in existence, And That’s Terrible. 3/5, I’m conflicted.

G: Man literally who the fuck cares about G. What is it even good for. Just an absolute waste of a letter, total shithouse. It’s NATO equivalent is Golf, the Worst Sport, too. Who asked for any of this? Just use a J instead, it’s cooler. 1/5.

H: I’ve seen “Hhh” used enough times in written forms of pornography to not consider it a Horny Letter. That and it, being short for Hentai, is often used to denote adult material in Japan. Basically what im saying is, I think this gets worse the less sex-positive you are. 6/9.

I: I think I’ve said enough about letter words already, but I is another high-tier one because like A I is just it’s own thing. It can also, however, be a bit confusing, looking just like an l a lot of the time, and having to constantly capitalise it is a pain in the ass. I also don’t have a particularly high opinion of myself, so a high opinion of I seems disingenuous. 3/5.

J: Clearly the best letter, hands down. I’m definitely not biased. There are so few letters as underappreciated by J- a fact many a person who’s had to do that “assign yourself an alliterative adjective” icebreaker game has had to reckon with. Because it appears to be a lot more popular with names than with words, and that just kind of sucks. 6/5.

K: K has in some circles managed to bump off its partner to become yet another letter word, though in a very informal abbreviated sense. However, when you’re looking into scientific fields, eventually said partner returns, having lost some weight on the trip down to absolute zero. This all makes complete sense in my head, and I’m sure is a lot less funny to anyone who doesn’t live there. 4/5.

L: I’d argue that L doesn’t cop its namesake. It’s a really useful letter, loads of words use it, especially in pairs, and my ADHD-brain thought it was fun to just say LLLLLLLLLLL for a bit while I was thinking about this so I guess that’s staying in now. Put me down as an L Lobbyist. 4/5.

M: Mmmmmm. M&Ms. But also it’s kind of a pain to write. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. 3/5.

N: I’d like to fight whoever decided we should have two letters that sound so similar right bloody next to each other in the alphabet. Actually, who the fuck even decided the alphabet’s order to begin with? Maybe it should go M to N, that’ll bloody show you. 2/5.

O: Our fourth vowel, and perhaps one of the underappreciated ones. O is similarly a letter word, but a much more common one considering its use as an interjection. It’s also one half of a very powerful letter combo, as we’ll see. 4/5.

P: There’s the other half. Many a joke involves OP as a phrase, whether it mean overpowered or original poster, and the letters’ adjacency is a lovely bit of serendipity. Whenever I say P out loud, on its own, I have to resist the urge to do some incredibly shitty beatboxing, which may or may not be a good sign. 4/5.

Q: I was going to write some very harsh words about Q, and its dependency on U, but then I realised that that is probably hate speech against the disabled. It still sucks, though. 0/5.

R: R is the one I am most struggling to think of things to say about. R is another letter that’s just kinda there. I’m sure the Roberts and Rachels of the world would disagree with me, though. It’s also the name of a program that I know has traumatised a lot of young biologist wannabes, slapping us with a whole pile of maths and statistics when we just wanted to look at cool plants and shit. Or in my case, cool cells and shit. 2/5.

S: The most overrated consonant, but also the thing that makes plurals not a pain in the ass. However I’m going to lean towards giving S a positive rating, if only because it’s associated with snakesssss (and serpentine characters who can talk) and I like those. 3/5.

T: I don’t think T gets enough credit as one of the pillars of the English language. A lot of very common words feature it, and yet it feels like it never gets the same level of credit as big shots like S or half of the vowels. T is like the character actor of the alphabet, is basically what I’m saying. 4/5.

U: Ah, the letter Americans hate for some reason. I think this is actually commentary on the history of American politics. Because throughout history, America has been extremely selfish and self-centered, while attempting to present a positive image that people are finally seeing past. They only entered WWI and WWII when it was convenient for them, they started wars and initiated coups in even their allies for petty ideological reasons, and they’ve gone to war with several countries and funded wars with several others seeming just for shits and giggles. Because apparently if you’re not an American, then you’re not one of them, and that means they hate U. 4/5.

V: I actually think V is underrated. It’s a fun sound. That’s it, no joke here. It’s neat, I like it. 4/5.

W: This may come as a shock to you, but double-u over here is actually two Vs! unless you’re writing in cursive, but fuck cursive. The French actually have it right on this one, naming it double-v (pronounced doobleh-vay). Add in the fact that it’s literally just M upside down, and you’ve got a pretty shite letter. 1/5.

X: There’s a reason literally every “A is for Apple” thing you see made for kids uses Xylophone for X, and that’s because there are no commonly used words that start with it. Seriously, it’s all just scientific terms- I’d argue X-Ray is more common than Xylophone in common parlance, but also, who wants to explain imaging to a kid. It doesn’t even get a second page of words on Dictionary.com. X also has implications as a letter word, that I’d rather avoid at the moment. 2/5.

Y: Ah, Ygreck, everyone’s favourite “what the fuck, France?” moment. Between that and being sorta kinda not really a vowel, Y prompts its own question more often than I’d care to admit. 2/5.

Z: As a (technical) member of the generation associated with this letter- on the one hand, I’m sorry, on the other, y’all have it coming. The final letter of the alphabet, one of the other ones worth 10 in scrabble (and yet X isn’t???), and one we probably got pretty sick of in the early 00s when it was everywhere- ironically, when most of the generation was getting born. 2/5.

And that’s the lot of them. I hope this didn’t alienate any non-English speakers too hard. It’s probably fine.

Join me for more bullshit next time I have another stupid idea. I mean, tomorrow.

[redbeanboi]

How different is Sicilian, Neapolitan and regular Italian? I don’t know much of any dialect so I’m guessing it’s probably the spelling and pronounciation? 🧐

HNNGbdhhs there are so many things..... you are about to unleash the knowledge I have accumulated in the past 22 months for my writing—

Disclaimer: I’m not a native speaker. Just learning! I’m including some notes/charts I’ve made for myself.

All three languages share Latin origins. Standard Italian is readily available to study so I won’t focus on that too much. Neapolitan, on the other hand has Greek, Spanish, and French influences, etc. Sicilian has massive influences of Ancient Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan and French. That being said they are all rather different from one another, not only with pronunciation but grammar too! 

Anyway I could go on and on about the differences for like years. I’ll just point out a few things I’ve noticed and learned as I’ve (sort of) independently studied these languages.

You most likely won’t encounter full-on Sicilian unless you go into the smaller villages or rural areas. Cities generally use Standard Italian at work, etc., though it will definitely be spoken with a Sicilian accent. Same goes for Neapolitan: people won’t really speak it outside of social settings and will not speak it to a tourist/”foreigner.”

Neapolitan 

Word endings are usually cut off (usually a vowel), so you’ll get stuff like omm’ a merd’ (’man of shit,’ if you’ve read BBP Ch. 8) or a phrase like Ssì brutt’ quant’ 'o ddébbit’ (meaning ‘you’re as ugly as debt/you’re ugly’). 

Non-stressed vowels → “uh.” These vowels take on the schwa sound that you see pretty often in English. Capa, or head, is pronounced with this schwa sound, so it sounds less like the “Kah-pah” you’d hear in Standard Italian and more like “Kah-puh.” 

“Gi” → “J.” So giornata becomes jornata, and because j’s sound like “y,” you would pronounce it “Yor-nata.” ( I like to think Don Elio pronounces “Giorno” as “Jorno” instead, just to be extra rude. )

Plural forms are pretty much the same for nouns, regardless of their gender. (’a and ‘o endings → ‘e)

Pronouns are different:

The same goes for conjugations! Very different. I’ll use the present indicative tense for the verb èssere (“to be”)

Some of my favoriteeee Neapolitan phrases/sayings include:

“Stongo chino ‘e suonno” — literally “I’m full of sleep” which I think is cute

“Ttiene ‘a capa ppè spartere ‘e rrecchie“ — literally “he/she [only] has a head to keep his/her ears apart,” i.e. very rude way to call someone stupid. Can be considered a funny way of telling a friend to be careful.

Sicilian

This one’s got a lot of interesting little things I’ve noticed as I’ve (attempted) to learn it.

Same non-stressed vowel rule applies (see above). Stressed “a” will make an “ah” sound and an unstressed “a” will make an “uh” sound.

Sicilian has some consonant sounds that do not occur in Italiano or Napulitano, the most famous example being the double D or “dd.” Generally this occurs when there is a double L in Italiano. One of the many retroflex consonants unique to Siciliano (there’s more in the Phonology section on this page if you’re interested!) 

Example: bello and cavallo → beddu and cavaddu

There are a number of Greek and Arabic influences on specific vocabulary, including: sciàbaca or sciabachèju, (“fishing net”) from sabaka (Arabic). Likewise, the Sicilian word for ram is “crastu,” from the Greek kràstos and cufinu (basket) comes from kophynos. There’s plenty more but if I kept going I wouldn’t be able to stop. Wikipedia actually has an extensive list of Sicilian words by their origin.^^

Again, Pronouns are different from Italiano:

Same goes for conjugations; for the purposes of comparing to both Italiano and Napulitano, I’ll show the conjugations (present tense) for essiri (”to be”):

Some of my favorite Sicilian phrases include:

Chiù nniuri ri mezzannotte nun pò fari — “It can’t get any darker than midnight”

Vidi Palermu e gori, vidi Napuli e poi mori — “See Palermo and enjoy it, see Naples then die” (lol I feel like this is something everyone in the Signora’s family would say before the events of BBP)

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, but I hope this was helpful!! I’m enjoying every second I spend trying to learn these three, and getting to make a little post about it was very fun lol.

There’s actually more where that came from so please dm if you’re looking to sprinkle this into your VA fics and want a study buddy

[gryffindorhealer]

Before I learned that Someone says the plural of her own creation is Animaguses (which feels so odd to me, with a decided Latin root), I wrote my first AU. It’s a silly thing (at least in my concept), in large part because it came from another social networking site as a joke.

The most popular woman in town is besieged by suitors, and becomes tired of this. She finally tells them, “If you can catch this cat (describes cat), then you can date me.” One person thinks this isn’t particularly fair to the cat, and inadvertently sets about enacting the proper way to catch a cat: be nice to the cat. The catch to this proclamation though is this: The woman is a shape-shifter. She is the cat.

That led to Animagii.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18947479