#but then i saw ANOTHER post with a wikipedia link so i looked at that and was like ohhhhhh i see

[softgrungeprophet]

i was today years old when i discovered there is a word for the way i speak lol (cluttering)

[honoura]

Shaaloani: The Land of Enchantment Part One

Hello again! It's another lore-adjacent post from me about a niche special interest of mine. This time it's Shaaloani, the American Southwest/Northern Mexico inspired zone in FFXIV's Dawntrail.

I want to disclose a few things right at the start just to temper people's expectations: I will not be definitively ID'ing any of the indigenous-inspired structures or visuals as inspired by any specific tribe. That's not my lane! I'm going to link to things that they remind me of, for sure. But otherwise my hyperfocus is going to be on the physical environment, some animals, and the ceruleum as petroleum industry. It's what I recognize best! And what I know best, truthfully.

"Hon why are you doing this?" A variety of reasons honestly. After DT dropped I saw a lot of folks who did at least one of the following:

Commented on the Old West theme park aspect

Called it "miqo'te Texas"

Generally just called the whole map "Texas"

And if I'm honest... it bugged me! Not because I thought anyone was being malicious about it (it's mostly pop culture saturation I'd suspect), but to me it stung a bit that this zone, which I grew up on the fringe of, was... kind of flattened by a lot of people?

I don't know, the response to me just felt like people assumed they knew everything about it because they'd seen it already in movies or TV or Red Dead Redemption rather than the same open-mindedness about what was presented in places like Urqopacha.

This zone isn't just Texas -- yes there are some bits and pieces here (because it's pulling from the Chihuahuan Desert and the Sonoran Desert), but so much of it reminds me of New Mexico, Mexico, and Arizona. There's some Colorado, Utah, and Nevada there too! And the background story going on there is something that still happens in a lot of those states, by both the government and corporations alike.

That variety deserves to be celebrated! So come learn with me about the inspiration for Shaaloani!

Shaaloani Geography

Shaaloani has three major regions in the zone -- Eshceyaani Wilds, Pyariyoanaan Plain, and Yawtanane Grasslands. To get this out of the way, I'm going to tell you the one that reminds me most of Texas.

Ready?

Lake Taori of the Pyariyoanaan Plain.

It's river-fed, with canyons on both ends of the Niikwerepi. The trees crowding around it are cypress trees, as you can tell by the little nubby off-shoots called knees. To compare, here is a photo of cypress trees along the Frio River:

This is also reminiscent of places along the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers, two significant water sources in West Texas. I also would not call them bayous! Bayous typically have brackish water, are slow-moving, and are way too far east.

However, it could be partly considered a ciénega -- which according to its wikipedia article:

"Ciénagas are usually associated with seeps or springs, found in canyon headwaters or along margins of streams. Ciénagas often occur because the geomorphology forces water to the surface, over large areas, not merely through a single pool or channel."

As a caveat, ciénegas generally don't have trees around them, but I also know that you can't really drown a cypress and they love sunshine. Regardless -- if you see trees in the desert they are typically growing along a water source. Balmorhea State Park has some cottonwood trees native to the area that are going strong.

Yawtanane Grasslands reads as a mix of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Eastern Plains of Colorado. Both are rather arid and home to a variety of grasses that can thrive in such a climate -- which has historically made both areas home to large cattle industries (whether or not this was ever a good idea is debatable, since cattle are very thirsty animals).

Meanwhile the Eshceyaani Wilds looks similar to the Sonoran Desert -- the red-hued soil and rocks, the abundance of cacti with the scrub brush and some drought-tolerant grasses. Here's a shot of the Sonoran within Saguaro National Park in Arizona:

Saguaros also only grow in Arizona in the States! As well as the organ-pipe cactus, which you see in Tender Valley. And prickly pears grow just about anywhere they can get a chance -- as well as barrel cacti, both of which we see in Tender Valley (along with what could be agave!).

You could probably make a case for it being a piñon-juniper scrubland -- everything's very short compared to those cypress trees, including the juniper trees! Piñon-juniper scrubland's found throughout the Southwest. There are also piñon-juniper savannahs and persistent woodlands intermixed in the same places. The difference lay in what plants you find with the piñon pines and junipers.

Visually, aside from the Sonoran Desert, I can also see a lot of New Mexico, like the Ghost Ranch in Rio Arriba:

It matches up with the mountains you can see, and both Yowekwa Canyon and Tender Valley. And of course, Tender Valley is likely a Grand Canyon reference, going by the sheer height of the cliffs. But you could also make a case for Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

There's a shot from Grand View Point Overlook within the park -- the closeness of the canyon walls and the warm earth tones also evoke Tender Valley!

There's also a lot of these sandstone formations in Utah that better fit Shaaloani -- like here in the Valley of the Gods:

Shaaloani Structures

I also at this point want to call attention to one of the two sites with cliff dwellings & adobe structures. We just saw Tender Valley above, which is confirmed to be old Yok Huy structures. But check out these Tonawawta buildings below.

As I stated before, I don't want to state which tribe these two styles remind me of. But I do want to say this again strikes me as another New Mexico and Arizona callback; both the Gila Cliff Dwellings and the Puye Cliff Dwellings are found in two different areas of New Mexico. And the Gíusewa Pueblo, also in New Mexico! Montezuma Castle is found in Arizona, and is pictured below! Look at that rich reddish earth color.

I also want to call attention to the place of worship for the Tonawawta in Yowekwa Canyon:

When I saw it my kneejerk response was to call it an ofrenda. But that's ultimately an incomplete response -- that was just the vibe I felt after seeing them during my life! What it also reminds me of are pictographs and petroglyphs. You find these all over the Southwest (the climate helps preserve them!), but I'm going to link some really great examples. I won't provide images to all though!

Crow Canyon Petroglyphs:

Piedras Madras Canyon at Petroglyph National Monument (New Mexico) Petroglyph Point Trail at Mesa Verde National Park (Colorado) Petroglyph Panel at Canyon Reef National Park (Utah) Nampaweap at Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument (Arizona) Horseshoe Canyon at Canyonlands National Park (Utah) and the Hueco Tanks State Park (Texas)

In contrast, I don't want to spend a ton of time on the boom town structures in this zone; they are pretty straightforward references to mining towns during the different resource booms (gold, silver, copper, oil).

Similar blocky shapes, built out of wood. One thing I noticed as a neat addition are the decorative patterns painted on it -- again, I don't want to presume if there's a specific tribe tied to this. But I do think it's a neat touch and I want to think that's a design choice to convey the underlying theme that this is a zone at odds with advancing technology and wanting to keep hold of important traditions.

I WILL talk about the ceruleum wells and pumping though. Mostly because I'm impressed that they went with structures that so closely resemble early 20th century oil derricks. Those were also predominately made of wood (including the barrels, yikes!). The pump part of what's called a pumpjack were covered in the old days -- the ones we're most used to seeing now are made of metal and are thus left uncovered.

However, as you can see from this century old rig, even the wheel's made of wood:

I don't think ceruleum gushes the same way oil did -- it seems to behave more like natural gas. However, most natural gas pipelines do burn off excess, which can be seen as a little spout of flame atop.

Oil's occupied an awkward spot in the Southwest, and still does. Aside from the heinous crimes committed in Killers of the Flower Moon (where members of the Osage tribe were murdered for their oil shares in Oklahoma) and the Teapot Dome Scandal, oil is just... well.

Bear with me, I'm about to rag on Koana a moment.

The people who make the most money and have the most power over the average roughneck's life never live in the Southwest. They work in the c-suite and have more money than sense.

I find it very fascinating that DT chose to recreate this dynamic, this uncomfortable push-pull of a region rich in a resource, and it's being harvested at the suggestion and behest of a power that is physically removed from the area. And to some NPCs it's with a certain level of disregard to traditions and practices in place before, with the focus on the nebulous quantifier of 'progress'. Progress how? It depends!

But the folks at the highest seat of power never have to grapple with those questions, because to them it's a fairly cut and dry answer. This is the way to proceed, and if they want to take this nation into the "future", then this is the clear way to do it. It speaks to Koana's fixation on foreign technology to the point he de-values his own (partly due to his childhood trauma, which kind of prepped him to be susceptible to it).

Meanwhile the locals are the ones grappling the most with this change -- how it affects their plants and animals. Sometimes pits open up in the earth and ceruleum burns (which, Santa Rita New Mexico sank multiple times into the earth thanks to copper mining). On the map there's even discolored plants -- and they only occur in the vicinity OF the bulk of the ceruleum pumps.

This is at odds with core beliefs, keeping up with traditional practices. It puts people in the place of 'do I participate in this system, which promises work and the means to take care of my family, even as it pits me against my cultural heritage?'.

Growing up in West Texas, one of the weirdest things to me (to this day) is how many people will claim they love the land. They do! They love the outdoors, they worry over how certain species of animals have become scarcer. But they also work in the single most damaging industry because it pays the most money. It lets them cover bills and give their kids what they never had.

That same push-pull is in Shaaloani narratively; when progress has been thrust upon you, how do you survive it? How do you make sure what's dearest to you comes along with you?

In Conclusion

I want to call it here for Part One -- Part Two after this will cover more observations I had regarding flora and fauna in the Shaaloani zone, and how that also shows the attention to detail given this zone! It's a good time! There will be dinosaurs!

[nya-vivi]

Shikanoin Heizou's character main inspiration (and why it is not Detective Conan).

Before anything, I will like to preface this by saying that I have not seen (or read, for that matter) any Heizou's character inspiration analysis that covered the work I'm about to cover. I could be completely off mark and there could be one, but I'm afraid I have simply not seen it. If there is and someone could be so kind to @/ or link it, I will update this post to add that analysis.

Another thing I will like to say is that I do not deny the obvious inspirations and takes on the popular manga and anime series like Detective Conan (Meitantei Konan) and Bungou Stray Dogs, but to my understanding, those works do take inspirations from other previous works, such as the Sherlock Holmes' saga, the mystery works of Edogawa Ranpo and other very popular detective novels referenced in Heizou's constellation names (you can find a link to that here!), so rather than to say Hoyoverse's inpirations were newer detective media, I would say all those share a common inspiration of older works of the same genre.

The rest of the analysis under the cut, to not clog anyone's dashes. This should be spoiler free for the most part, but there may be allusions to some of Heizou's hangout event endings.

Said all that, allow me to recount the events that led me here, as I feel it is appropiate.

It felt like a miracle came to me one day I was browsing the novel aisle of my favorite manga shop. I was waiting for my friend to decide which Puella Madoka Magica to buy to inflict psychological pain on her psyche when I saw a weird title: Police Detective. So naturally, being the big snooper I am, I took it to snoop around and saw the full title: Police Detective Heizou.

Flabbergasted.

I had been looking into his character for a while and hadn't been able to find anything. Althought, to be completely honest, not very inquisitively, as I got frustrated and thought that another person would be so kind as to do the work I didn't want to do (spoiler: it didn't happen). So really, to say I was shocked wasn't an exageration.

I had always thought that Heizou was a…pretty weird name to name someone based on Japanese culture, even more having more common names in animanga like Ayato, Ayaka, Shinobu, Kokomi… You get me. So I had always the suspicion our dear Heizou was based on something, I just couldn't find what.

And lo and behold there was! I did a small mistake, I didn't get a photo nor did I write down the name of the author, so I didn't have a lead comming home and cried about it. And then I decided it was time to woman up and to search well and wide. And I found a very elusive wikipedia page called Onihei Hankachou.

Onihei Hankachou (鬼平犯科帳), as you can read on wikipedia, was a series of historical novels written by Shoutarou Ikenami from 1967 to 1989, based on a real-life special police officer called Heizou Hasegawa (the wikipedia article is in japanese, my apologies in advance).

I will not be detailing everything in the wikipedia article, as I think It is well explained, but because every analysis needs both evidence and explanation, I will comment on the more important and notable things.

I'm going in the same order as the wikipedia. To not confuse anyone, 'Heizou' will be the genshin character, meanwhile, the novel and historical figure will be named by his surname 'Hasegawa'.

While we don't know fully the home life of Heizou, we know that, like Hasegawa, he was looked down. Not because of illegitimacy, but rather because he didn't want to inherit his father's dojo and wanted to become a detective. Because of that, Heizou ran away from home.

This can be corroborated in Heizou's Vision Character Stories and in the Shikanoin Heizou's Inazuma Commercial Street Bulletin Board message.

In the Vision one it says: But just like every other rebellious child in the world, he only wished to escape having to take up his father's work, even as he was forced to learn martial arts alongside him.

Meanwhile in the Bulletin Board, his older brother discredits him saying 'he names himself a detective'. While it's true that there's no detective position in the Tenryou Commission, the wording feels really condescending.

Then, it says that he led a fast life. This has little to explain, but in a lot of his Character Stories, he is always running off and nobody knows where the hell he'll be next lol.

On the remaining highlighted text, in his hangout route Heizou Talks Fraud we can see how Heizou does reinsert previous minor offenders to act as his eyes and ears in the streets, and in Kuki Shinobu's voiceline titled Shikanoin Heizou, Heizou regularly buys information off of the Arataki gang in exchange of good words whenever Shinobu bails them out.

While Heizou reinserts minor offenders, we can see that his attitude towards what I call assertive criminals (ie.: criminals that knew they were commiting a crime and didn't care nor showed remorse) is pretty strict and even irritated in some cases. After all, he hates the abstract concept of 'Crime' and everything it means, but he is also very cunning and knows how to make use of those assertive criminals.

Meanwhile, like the literary Hasegawa, he is pretty forgiving and merciful towards accidental criminals. In the route of Long-Sealed Mystery, he didn't want to involve Ryuuji with the murder more than he was involved and didn't include it in the final case paperwork; and when the whole debacle with smuggled goods happened in The Missing Thing, Heizou decided to stick around instead of making things difficult for Sangonomiya, but still with a warning to Gorou to not lie to him again.

All in all, I think it is pretty obvious how the novels and the character 'Heizou' relate to one another. Obviously, a lot of details were changed, but the connection is undeniable.

As final message, I have to say that I did not have the pleasure nor the time to read the novels, but I encourage everyone who wishes to know more about the source material to give it a read if they can! This analysis is not really a deep dive into the parallels of the work and the game, mainly a word-vomit on a topic I had been very interested for some time but had not the chance to really look up.

I close this big post with well wishes <3 anyone who wants to share or debate or anything (as long as it is politely!) is very welcome to do so!

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting: Holghras Results

Now for what everyone -- or at least a certain percentage -- has been waiting for: the results for the Holghras! Anyone who found that sentence confusing can catch up by checking this page: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting .

This time around, they should all fit into one post, as the response was a little smaller. I see how it is: everyone wants to draw Spooky Corpse-Eater With Magic, but nobody wants to draw Horny Bird With Problems.

I kid, of course. The Wutugald had some pretty clear visual elements that people could hook onto, but the Holghras entry is mostly about its behavior and doesn't give much information on what it looks like beyond "it's a bird". So it's pretty clear why people might have a harder time drawing artistic inspiration from that one. (And I really and truly appreciate those of you who took a crack at it anyway.) The level of physical description is going to vary a lot entry to entry, I'm afraid -- to some extent I think it's about whether it's an animal the reader is expected to be familiar with, but there are definitely a few detailed visual descriptions of animals most medieval Europeans would have seen because the author wants to do some symbolism. So it's a toss-up. Anyway, here's the link to the description people are working from:

And the results, again roughly in order of appearance. If yours isn't here, let me know -- I saw one post that said something about Tumblr eating their original attempt, presumably out of Bird Homophobia. I'm happy to reblog any that I missed due to Tumblr's functionality.

@bruncikara (link to post here) gives us our first interpretation. I really enjoy the medieval bestiary style, including the use of the Generic Medieval Plant that always reminds me of mutant asparagus. I think the border is designed to evoke the thorns in which the Holghras nests, which I also appreciate. The bird's pose, flat on its back with its neck curved up, is great, and it's shown performing its signature Hide With Dirt move. I think at least some of the inspiration comes from quails here, judging by the head... feather... thing... [Wikipedia break] ... okay, apparently it's just called a "plume", which I should have guessed. This is the first example of the common (and correct!) assumption that the Holghras is a member of the order Galliformes.

@jamiethekeener (link to post here) gives us this one, also posing with its signature dirt clods. I'm reminded of a cardinal, personally. The artist provides a brief comment on their design, noting that they are not a bird expert. I think this is a pretty cute juvenile bird, and the way it holds the dirt comes off as kind of playful.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has produced another very naturalistic drawing, which (in my non-expert opinion) manages to look very much like a real bird without specifically looking like any bird in particular. They apparently do know birds, because they specifically name-drop Galliformes in their description of their design decisions. I like the decision to also include one of the bird's Signature Behaviors, i.e., the mother carrying her chicks.

@pomrania (link to post here) has given their Holghras a selection of striking features, which they explain in their post. There's a lot in that post, actually, and I really enjoyed reading the whole journey of this particular drawing. You should go read it too -- the post linked above also provides a draft version, a link to a series of progress sketches, and a link to an explanation of their design choices that includes rumination on how to make a bird look "slutty". Go check it out, we'll be here when you get back.

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) describes her design choices briefly, indicating that her goal was to pick Bird Attributes that could look unsettling in combination and suggest that the bird depicted has a "terrible sex life". Mission accomplished, I think -- that bird does not look trustworthy. Also now we know that thing on its head is just called a plume, so good for us. I really like the effect the -- watercolor? I think? I don't know art -- provides, and that seagull-esque spot on its beak really is a great touch.

@rautavaara (link to post here) has done another beautifully stylized drawing with a very pleasant color scheme. They provide a brief explanation of their design decisions in the linked post. I'm particularly struck by the fact that this version of the Holghras apparently carries its young in the same way that the folkloric version of the stork carries babies: in some kind of cloth wrapping held in the beak. I also like that the chick's feet are sticking out.

@mobileleprechaun (link to post here) apparently had some trouble posting this, but I'm glad they got it through, because it's delightful. I like the little bird on the right with its feet sticking straight up, and the other one under its mother's wing/arm. When I first saw this, I was briefly puzzled why the drawing contrasted male and female birds, because they looked quite similar -- then I noticed the tailfeathers -- then I looked more closely at the male's tailfeathers and cracked up a little bit. The linked post provides a brief explanation of the design decisions, including why the wings look so much like arms. It also has a couple tags that I find funny.

@karthara (link to post here) provides this excellent image as well as a brief explanation of their design choices. I love the over-the-top tailfeathers on the extremely-sexy purple male Holghrases, and the babies dangling from under the female's wing, and the fact that the clod of dirt being held up by the juvenile is at least as big as the bird holding it. Also, those ridiculous tailfeathers are apparently inspired by the Onagadori rooster, which means we're back with the Galliformes.

@embervoices (link to post here) did this adorable drawing of the juvenile Holghras. I particularly like that she's taken a different route than having it just hold up the dirt: this one apparently has a little hidey-hole like a trapdoor spider. This is just very cute all around, I like it.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) provides this excellent and action-packed depiction, along with a wonderfully detailed explanation of their design decisions. (I love reading those.) From their post, it's clear that they also know more about birds than I do, and also name-check the Galliformes as the most likely category. Apparently the bird-people of Tumblr have this critter's number. Also, that is a masterful depiction of a bird running off with an egg, I have to say.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has done another medieval-styled rendition, which I really enjoy. This is also, I believe, the first appearance of a human in any of these drawings. (Well. Live human, at least.) I enjoy the depiction of the female bird doing her fake limp to lead the human away from her nest while the males engage in their weird drama up in the right. They provide an explanation of their design choices and inspiration in the linked post.

@scarlettbookworm (link to post here) has given us a drawing that showcases several of the odd behaviors described in the entry. The linked post also provides a description of their design process and an explanation of their decisions. I think this is another very cute picture of a bird holding up dirt, and I enjoy the one at the top shouting "HOLGHRAS!" The egg-stealer over in the bottom right is very good also.

@moustawott (link to post here) has drawn this very vulture-like Holghras in what I have to say is a very well-done bushy area. I had to look twice to realize the background was actually cleverly-arranged splashes and blobs of color that strongly suggest that we're in a bush. Very good art, love the style, and that fuzzy baby Holghras is cute as hell. The linked post provides an explanation of the design decisions.

@strixcattus (link to post here) gives us this rendition of the Holghras, which they describe as being inspired by a prairie chicken and a potoo. Prairie chickens are, of course... Galliformes. Another tally mark in that column. I'm particularly delighted by the giant mouth on the chick in the bottom right. As they did last time, the artist has provided a detailed modern-naturalist interpretation of the animal, which is of course in the linked post. I recommend checking that out; maybe it's just because I'm the kind of huge nerd that I am, but I think these are great.

@treesurface (link to post here) gives us a Holghras that they describe as a cross between a bird of prey and a bird of paradise, which I think is a pretty good idea that fits both the aggressive behavior and the mating behavior described in the entry. I enjoy the fact that multiple artists have decided this bird Likes Big Tailfeathers (and it does lie, but about different things).

@ashfly (link to post here) gives us this picture of a juvenile Holghras holding up its clump of dirt. They also indicate that they have an idea of what it is, which I really hope they'll share now that it's posted and the bird's out of the bag, because I was 100% certain nobody would guess this one. The fuzzy bird is cute, of course, and the rainbow legs are really striking. (Pride legs, perhaps?) I also like that it's clearly looking over at the "camera" to see if we're buying it.

And finally, the official medieval depiction:

... hm. Yeah, some absolute bastard apparently cut out a bunch of the miniatures in this manuscript at one point. Luckily, we have the Ashmole Bestiary over at the Bodleian Library, which is extremely similar, so we can get an idea of the image that was here:

And also, this entry in the Aberdeen Bestiary comes with two images. Here's the other one:

I'm going to assume the choice of coloration was up to the individual artist and the missing Aberdeen illustration was also brown, because the Ashmole version of the egg-stealer also has the more colorful pattern:

Anyway, in case you haven't recognized it from these helpful and very accurate images, this is the partridge. Now you know what's going on in those pear trees.

I don't actually have anything else to add about that. I was frankly a little surprised there was even an entry for "partridge".

[doahaesunshine]

Chapter 12

Chapter WC: 2576

Tags

The frog, the frog, the frog.

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July 15

Twenty-eight weeks and two days…

Any sane individual would have given up and moved on by now, but Seungcheol’s sanity was slipping. He would never admit that his determination had bordered on full blown paranoia and it didn’t go unnoticed. 

It started back in January when he refused to attend the funeral. He didn’t see a point in seeing an empty casket get lowered into the ground, even if his family begged him. They meant well – and Seungcheol knew this – but no amount of closure or peace was going to stop him from searching.

After he had confronted his friend’s father about staging a suicide, Seungcheol was filled with endless questions. First of all, why was the father okay with staging the scene? Next, why was there no body? And finally, what the fuck does ‘you don’t understand the forces at play’ mean?

The majority of Seungcheol’s free time was spent scrounging up any information at the town library. He started practical, digging up every missing persons case in town via the library’s digital scanners, but the only person in the local news was Seokmin Lee, the first friend he lost. Another article mentioned an unusual earthquake that nearly wiped out the town, the natural disaster causing the river’s current to shift and strengthen.

Seungcheol turned away from the scanners and moved onto the computers. The public databases would offer more than local news. Missing persons cases were plentiful, but  the added detail of it being on Christmas Eve helped narrow it down greatly. Four years ago in New York, a young man by the name of Vernon Chwe went missing in the city. His little sister said that he went to hang out with some friends and he never came back home. The poor family thought he ran away, he was only 21.

On the other coast there was an incident in Los Angeles, California that took place on Christmas Eve 2014. A married couple were found dead in their estate; they had a son, Joshua Hong, but his body was never found. The police concluded that it was a robbery gone wrong and the family suffered because of it, none of the suspects were found guilty. 

There were a few other missing persons during the month, but reports the day of Christmas Eve only happened every two years. Seungcheol saw a pattern the more he researched, the only problem was what he was going to do with that information. They were all freak accidents or people disappearing into thin air. He had a foolish thought, one that would end up in nothing, but his curiosity had to be satisfied.

Seungcheol opened up a new tab and searched local urban legends. The first link was a forum dedicated to his small town, but everyone had an online tag or was anonymous so none of the names were familiar. 

its.ya.boi.19 : Some people said they’ve seen a woman walking on the bridge alone at night. They said she dresses in all white and lures any men that come across her. I think she drowns them… Hi~Welcome2Chilis : I heard it was a man Dr.Pepe : Sounds like bullshit ur.mom.rated.E.4.everyone : I think its legit. I saw something on the bridge at midnight. But it didn’t look like a person… Dr.Pepe : That’s so stupid. ur.mom.rated.E.4.everyone : No! Think about it! MERMAIDS Hi~Welcome2Chilis : It’s a river… the_G.O.A.T_69 : i mean times are changing. what if they moved to the rivers because of pollution??? Dr.Pepe : Do you proofread your posts? the_G.O.A.T_69 : i don’t need to “proofread” and i believe the guy. you ever hear of sirens?

Mermaids? Sirens? What even was a siren?

Seungcheol returned to the search bar and typed in: What is a siren?

He pulled up the Wikipedia page and read through it.

In Greek Mythology, a Siren is a human-like being with an alluring voice. Old stories tell of Sirens luring sailors to their deaths by attracting them with the Siren’s song. Sailors became enthralled, steering their ships onto rocky shores resulting in a shipwreck and the crew's demise.

A mythological creature? Ghosts were one thing, but fish people who lured humans to their death by singing? Inconceivable.

So here Seungcheol was, walking along the bridge at nearly midnight, waiting to see if anyone would show up. The fairy lights were gone, only the dull yellow street lamps lit the path, making it difficult to see out into the water. A chilled breeze blew past Seungcheol causing a shiver to go down his spine, he should have worn a coat.

He stopped in the middle of the bridge and checked his phone, the time was midnight on the dot. Lifting his head from the device he looked around, scanning the area to see if anyone had appeared. Nobody was here but him, not surprising…

Sighing deeply, he grasped onto the railing of the bridge and looked out into the dark, murky water. He chuckled at his own stupidity.

“God, I’m an idiot… Maybe I really have tipped over the edge.”

He stretched his back and with an exhale, he stood up straight from the railing. A big yawn escaped him, strong enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut and when he opened them, he saw a figure. He blinked his eyes in disbelief, but no matter how many times he closed and reopened his eyes, the figure was still there. Seungcheol was no longer alone on this bridge.

Just as the forum described, a woman, or man, Seungcheol couldn’t tell from this distance, wearing all white. At first he thought the person was wearing a sheer outfit, but as he focused on the figure he saw that their legs faded into nothing. A ghost. Great, this is exactly what he needed right now.

Slowly, Seungcheol approached them, not wanting to scare the spirit. As he approached the figure, more details came into view. Their hair was a dark blue, almost black and their skin was fair with a slight glimmer, but that could be from the fact that this person was see through. Once Seungcheol was within reaching distance, the white cloaked figure gracefully turned their head to him. 

They were beautiful. Long, elegant features were perfectly sculpted, creating a face that anyone would be charmed by. Their eyes were a deep blue, akin to the midnight sky and Seungcheol found himself getting lost for a moment. 

“You can see me?”

The figure’s lips did not move but a calmly, modulated voice eased into Seungcheol’s mind. He flinched as it breached his senses but he stood his ground.

“Am I not supposed to?” Seungcheol asked, not knowing what else to say.

The spirit mildly smiled as a small laugh rang through.

“That means I was successful…”

Seungcheol cocked a brow at the statement. “Successful? What do you mean by that?

“I wished to communicate with this side of things and here I am.”

As amazing as this interaction was, and even though Seungcheol was thoroughly enthralled by this individual, he knew gawking wasn’t going to get him any answers. 

“I want to ask you something…”

There was no response, but the spirit gave Seungcheol their full attention.

“Are you a Siren?”

Another laugh bled its way into Seungcheol’s mind.

“No, I am not a Siren… I am a Diviner.”

“You’re saying that as if I know what you are talking about-”

“All of you humans have such a funny way of speaking. You sound just like the others.”

“Others?” Seungcheol’s interest was piqued, but he was so confused and didn’t have any idea what was going on or why this was happening.

“This river must have some sort of connection to the Arcane. It keeps pulling people in and the Weave led me here.”

“Arcane. Weave. Things I do not know. Please speak in words I understand…”

Another pleasant smile spread across their delicate features. 

“You really do talk just like them…”

Seungcheol huffed out a deep sigh. “Please stop being so cryptic. I came here looking for answers about my friends. If you know so many humans then maybe you know Seokmin or Y/N. Those names ring any bells?”

The spirit’s face softened, their eyes turned solemn and their smile disappeared. Anyone would be able to read that expression, this Diviner knew something.

“If you know something, please tell me. Both of them are my friends, my family .”

“Oh-” The raven haired figure turned their gaze away. “You must be Cheolie…”

Seungcheol’s eyes widened, tears threatening to fall as he furrowed his brow. “How-” His throat started to constrict as the tears started streaming. “How do you know that name- My name?”

The spirit gingerly reached out to Seungcheol, but flinched as something else caught their attention.

“Shit…” They said under their breath. “I have to go now- Return to this spot when the moon is full. I’ll have more time then- I promise.” Their image began to flicker.

“Wait! The next full moon- I don’t even know your name!”

“It’s Minghao…”

After the name was uttered, the image of the white-clad spirit dissipated and Seungcheol was left with hundreds of questions. If he was being honest with himself he didn’t even believe that any of that really happened. A ghost on the bridge? That could not have been real, but the spirit, Minghao, spoke to him. 

Seungcheol looked up at the night sky to gaze upon the moon. It was crescent shaped, but it was only a sliver. He unlocked his phone quickly and went to the browser search bar and typed: When is the next full moon?

The phone screen read August 1st.

On the bright side, he had sixteen days to compile a list of questions. But holy shit sixteen days seemed so long when you had to wait on someone else's behalf.

Morning approached faster than Seungcheol expected, the insomnia stunting his sleep and causing him to stay up countless nights. In total he slept two hours last night and was suffering, but it was nothing coffee couldn’t help. Besides he was on a mission and it started with meeting up with his friend’s father.

There was a local old-fashioned diner that served breakfast, Seungcheol decided that if he was going to bombard his friend’s father with questions, he may as well treat him to good food. Thankfully, the diner was mostly empty, save for a few regulars and the occasional commuter looking for a quick cup of coffee.

Sitting by the window, Seungcheol observed the people passing by on the street while spacing out. The past few interactions with his friend’s father had been strained to say the least. There were so many questions in Seungcheol’s mind already and the added confusion of ‘ You don’t understand the forces at play’ made his head hurt. The last time Seungcheol saw the man he was told to ‘not go looking for trouble’ but Seungcheol was a magnet for trouble. Being the oldest of his former friend group, he was in charge of keeping the others out of trouble but that meant he knew where to find it as well.

“How’s it going, kid?” The usually chipper voice of his friend’s fathers voice was now somber.

“I’m doing fine…” 

A long sigh left the man’s lips. “You don’t have to lie to me, Cheol.”

Silence filled the space between the two men, the only words spoken were their orders and nothing else. When the food was served, the waitress could tell the tension was high so after placing the dishes down she bolted. Eating was easier than talking, especially when the food was good.

“I know you didn’t invite me out for breakfast, Cheol…”

Seungcheol looked up from his plate. “I’m not trying to hide that fact.” He placed his fork down to sip from his coffee. “I just want to know what happened…” Leaning in, he lowered his voice. “I know they didn’t kill themself…”

There was a moment of pause. “Seungcheol…”

“Please just tell me the reason…” Seungcheol’s round eyes welled with tears, but he refused to let them fall.

“I wish I could, I really do.” Even their father’s eyes reddened. “But I can’t.”

Every time Seungcheol asked his friend’s father the same question, he was given various versions of the same answer. It was always a ‘I can’t tell you’ or ‘You don’t want to know’. He was never given a straight answer.

“Please, you’re basically my father and Y/N is like a sibling to me. I need to know-” Seungcheol choked on his words. “Why did you stage a suicide? Why was the casket empty? Why am I seeing apparitions in the middle of the night telling me they saw Y/N?”

“What did you just say?”

“Ghosts, man. I’m seeing fucking ghosts!” Seungcheol raised his voice and a few of the customers turned their heads to spectate his rambling. “I swear I’m fucking losing it-”

“Cheol, stop.” The father that Seungcheol considered his own met his gaze. “Go wait outside, let me pay the bill.”

“But-”

“Just- Go cool off.”

Seungcheol obeyed the older man and walked outside while he wiped his tears away with shaky hands. He inhaled deeply and exhaled the breath after holding it for a moment, his heart was out of control. 

The door opened once more. “C’mon, Cheol- Let’s walk and talk…”

Walking side by side, the two men followed the road to the bridge. It was still morning so the lamps were off and the overall atmosphere was different. Instead of deep, dark water that seemed to have no end, the river was slightly murky with fish visible just below the surface. 

“Is this where you saw him?”

Seungcheol turned his attention away from the water. “Huh-”

“The apparition or ghost - is this where you saw him?”

Answering with a nod, Seungcheol took another moment to breathe. “Yeah- I didn’t just see him though, we talked.”

The older gentleman sighed and massaged the wrinkle out of his knit eyebrows. “I was really hoping to keep you out of this just like I did for my child. I tried hard to be a good father, I really did, but the others kept ruining it.”

“Others? The ghost I spoke to? Or is there more than one?”

“Cheol, he wasn’t a ghost, he was an-” His sentence was halted. “He- Ming-” Blood trickled from his nose as he struggled to speak. “Shit- After all these years…”

Seungcheol held onto the older man’s arm to support him. “Hey- Are you alright?”

“Yeah- There are just somethings I can’t talk about or else this happens.” He pointed to his nose.

“I know who you are talking about. Minghao, right? He called himself a Diviner .” Seungcheol rambled everything he remembered from the previous night.

“I physically can’t answer your questions, Cheol- All I can tell you is that if you want to continue searching, be careful.”

After a quick nod, Seungcheol helped the older man to his car and paid him back for the meal even after arguing. He watched as the older man drove off to ensure he got onto the road safely and once the car was out of sight, he entered on his own.

“Great, more questions…” Seungcheol muttered to himself before putting the keys in the ignition and starting the car.

To join a tag list, please comment on the Fallin' Flower Master List!

@reiofsuns2001 @shinwonderful @starstrawb

[chatterkat]

Okay saw the posts about Oscar’s fairy tale inspiration being The Little Prince and I not being familiar with that fairy tail read the Wikipedia plot. It honestly seems like an interesting story. I can see how it inspired his character, questioning the logic of the adults in their world.

I get why people are excited about it shipwise, but it also seems to end potentially badly for the prince. He lets a snake bite him so he could be with his rose. Like people joke about the Oscar protection squad already, but what if he actually did die? Would be a huge bummer after his life got stolen by Oz. That doesn’t feel like they would do that that, but look what they did with Penny. Brought her back and killed her again. The wiki says “He then met a yellow snake that claimed to have the power to return him to his home, if he ever wished to return.” The yellow snake reminds me of the God of Light’s gold dragon form. Perhaps it’s instead going to be that the God of Light returns Oscar, because he frees him from the curse of Ozma, and that is what allows him to go home?

Speaking of home, if another of Ruby’s allusions is of the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz, there is yet another link to Ruby Rose and Oscar going “home” as the slippers are what give Dorothy the power to go home. I always felt Oscar also had allusions to Dorothy so it might be a secondary one for him. Ruby may give Oscar the power to go home by telling off the gods when they inevitably get summoned. As well as being a reason he wants to go back.

Anyway from the summary it kinda almost seems somewhat reversed the relationship the prince has with the rose. The prince nourishes it, but seems more like it was Ruby who did that in the show. Her showing him the ropes, watching his back in battle. At least for the most part so far. I know he sometimes helped her too in smaller ways. Like when they had that heart to heart about being afraid. Things might be different after the time skip. Also the rose was vain, but maybe it’s more like a hubris thing? Oscar does question Ruby’s choice after all with Ironwood. Ruby ended up repeating the mistakes of Oz. Obviously the story won’t always be 1-1.

Anyway as for time skip, this line like made me think a little. “The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her”. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? So wonder if he will act differently towards her when we see them again. I still wonder if they really will go for it storywise, but it feels like it makes narrative/character sense.

[scarred-serafina-fan]

Willa TV Project – Robert Beatty Books

I was avoiding posting about this until I saw something a little more official but it's a whole page on his official website so I guess that's as official as it gets

But basically they are finally adapting his books to the screen the company that he is teamed up is surprisingly entertainment one not disney who owns the rights also it's just willa that's being adapted not serafina for reasons I'm not very clear on

Anyways this whole thing is just odd even beyond the whole serafina is not being adapted they're straight cutting to book four of the series and disney doesn't seem to have much if anything to do with it

For a little context in the south within a certain vicinity of ashville (like reaching into other states) the serafina series was marketed HARD everyone knew about it and was supporting it this whole tv show deal tho has been very quiet I've only really seen rumblings of it from the far corners of the internet

They also said in that link above filming locations are not determined yet and this is just me speculating but it does not sound like they are planning on filming it in the smoky mountains again odd that whole area is pretty popular for film projects even hunger games filmed in the Appalachian Mountains so I hope they're gonna film there but idk again I haven't heard ANYTHING

But finally I want to talk about the group that's making it Entertainment One with Amy Adam's Bond Group Entertainment

Entertainment One is kinda interesting when I started looking into them they have things like Peppa Pig dungeons and dragons and insidious they apparently started as a music distributing company that made the switch to movie distribution a few years later and in 2016 a British tv broadcaster ITV plc offered to buy them out for $1.3 bill which they rejected because it was "fundamentally undervalued" the whole time they are pretty much acquiring different other smaller companies left and right and they have a large investment in Quibi I guess? But in mid 2019 Hasbro brought announced that they were apparently acquiring Entertainment one for $4 bill (according to Wikipedia) when hasbro obtained them tho it seems they started making plenty of cuts like laying 10% of it's film and television staff (again number is from Wikipedia) and many branches of the company were straight up closed and by 2022 has brought announced they were planning on selling the company to lionsgate but by the time deal closed last December Entertainment one had already closed its distributing branches in most countries including England and lionsgate bought their assets for $500 mill so safe to say is a dying company that probably won't even last long enough for this project to happen (they were also split into three different separate companies)

Amy Adam's Bond Group Entertainment on the other hand is interesting in a different way according to deadline the company will work mostly with best selling book ip yeah "WILL" seems like this company has not done a whole lot yet the company was only even first launched in 2019 deadline also lists off willa of the wood as one of the things they have in development yeah the show that has basically no buzz is named as one of the biggest things they have in development the company has also very obvious been relying on the name of Amy Adam's so far I mean there's a whole paragraph about her specifically in link to Robert beattys website above

Idk just seems like they have these two companies one that's standing on its last leg and another that's just starting and they're starting halfway through the series it's just odd I'm not letting my hopes up yet because honestly I'll just be happy if it ever even comes out I first heard about this thing a WHILE ago and it's been pretty quite so who knows

[mysticsparklewings]

Obscutober 2024 Day 7: Orphrey 🪡

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Orphrey (n.)

elaborate embroidery or a piece of such

an ornamental border or band, especially on church robes

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1. Yay, we survived the 1st full week of October/Inktober 🎉

2. I continue to astound myself with dumb posting mistakes 🤦‍♀️

3. At least the art came out nice—Might be my new favorite! 😇

Click the "Keep Reading" and I'll explain more about those dumb mistakes...and of course my thoughts/process, too ✨

⭐️ Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️

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Once again: Hey, congrats everyone—We've survived 1 full week of Inktober/October/etc! 🎉

And with that: Lucky Obscutober Number 7 comes first with an apology and second with a correction: I, in my infinite wisdom, misspelled "Orphrey" as "Orphey" on the original and Lite prompt lists. 🤦‍♀️ 🙄

I've since fixed it in the places I'm able to (so if you go looking and can't find the mistake, that's why!) and added a comment correction to the ones that I can't...And also made the discovery that I previously somehow accidentally deleted the Instagram post of the prompt lists?? 😦 So that's been restored now too.

I think I'm more bothered by the fact that it took me over a week to notice than I am that the mistake was made, but oh well. [Although—Maybe I did almost catch it and that's what happened to the Instagram post?? I don't know. I just know I thought I was losing my mind when I couldn't find it and I'm so glad Instagram has a "trash"/recently deleted place it went to so I could just restore the post as it was.]

My absent-minded posting mishaps aside, I got a later start on this one than I really wanted to, but this time it's purely my own fault for losing track of time while I was working on something else [the fruits of which will hopefully be revealed closer to November] so I can't say I'm all that upset about it.

I'd be more upset if I'd had more trouble pulling the mandala together, but this one came surprisingly easy. To be fair, I did look up a few references of embroidery and actually "orphrey" pictures before I went to bed last night, so my subconscious got some more time to chew on it. Another big help is that a lot of the orphrey pictures I saw reminded me a lot of mandalas and motifs I've already been using or thinking about.

Believe it or not, that was purely coincidental. I actually didn't look up pictures for any of the words while I was assembling the prompt list. If it didn't happen to come up while I was verifying different sources of the definitions—so usually, a small reference photo on Wikipedia, if that—I haven't seen it, so in that way I'm still often diving into these things about as blind as people who didn't put the list together. 😆 It wasn't a "rule" or anything that I set for myself, I just genuinely didn't think to look up any images at the time.

I noticed while looking at the images that it seems common to do a motif that alternates a more circular emblem and a square one like this example, so I made sure the get that in there. If I'd had more space, I would've filled my circles and squares a little more elaborately both per the definition and the reference photos, but I wanted to leave some room for other things and not spend too long on super-tiny details that would be difficult to see.

Besides, I think the way I did it, while maybe less elaborate overall than is really ideal, does a fairly good job of echoing the more simple stitching we (or at least I ) often think of when I think of more informal, artistic hand-embroidery.

And that simple embroidery stitching is more of what I focused on for the middle round of the mandala, in case it wasn't obvious. I looked up some embroidery stitch references and tried to replicate some I thought would be a little more recognizable as different from my "normal" mandala lines and dots. I kinda wanted to get some more variety in there, but I had enough trouble as it was trying to think of some simple motifs that would show off the "stitches" without feeling "inappropriate" for "church robes," so I just stuck with what I was more confident in.

Oh, also, I probably should've mentioned this sooner: A small disclosure that most official definitions for "orphrey" don't say "church robes," they say "ecclesiastical vestment." To which, upon first reading, I thought: "Thank you, that is no help at all."

There's definitely a hefty dose of irony in an already obscure word using two more arguably even more obscure words in its definition, but there is also a limit to exactly how far this "obscure word" rabbit hole needs to go. So I looked up that 2-word phrase and both of those words separately and determined that "church robes" is a reasonable substitute that most people will actually understand when you say it.

Anyway. When I think of both church-related and embroidered garments, my first thoughts are dark, heavy fabrics with gold or silver thread, which pretty succinctly explains all of the color choices here. The white mandala lines kind of stand in for silver, then spot color with the gold which also works the idea of heavy gold trim on some fabrics like that. And a bonus I didn't even think of until I was done: Since the gold borders are circular, they really echo halos, which is very nicely church-adjacent imagery. 😇

And then I mixed black, burgundy, and a bit of navy together for the rest of the background since those were the robe colors that came to mind the quickest.

I think the background colors are doing more heavy lifting here than I can fully appreciate; Typing it out and knowing how I put the lines together, the final product more feels complex to me than I think it should. That's certainly not a bad thing, though!

If the rest of the Obscutober pieces could come together this smoothly and I be this pleased with them, that would be amazing, but I know better than to expect that. 😅 But a girl can hope, right? At least it was a nice way to polish off the first week!

Now to hope I can get this thing cross-posted decently quickly without any more ridiculous incidents like the spelling mistake that making it technically started with... 🥴

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See the Prompt List

Artwork  © me, MysticSparklewings

Obscutober Concept Inspired by nikolas_tower

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⭐️ Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️

[tempesttz]

unnecessary rant about an

unnecessary (but very odd) debate

i know this is not my usual post but tumblr just suggested me another account (as it does), so i went to check them out. openly endogenic, wonderful. inclusive, check. "if i block you, you're probably not inclusive enough." sure? then i scrolled down a bit more, and... tw: mentions of discourse, nazis, the holocaust, and ai art. i'm also just not very nice, so tw for that too.

".....ai art is still art and arguing otherwise is spreading nazi bullshit regardless of if you personally like it or not...." ....what? at this point i'm thinking okay, op has no clue what a nazi is or something. right? right??? there was a link, so i, an unwitting fool looking for more elaboration on this take, clicked it.

"blocked a long time follower because they were being reactionary. here is your reminder that regardless of your stance on copyright, as soon as you start regurgitating that ai art isn't art, you are spreding the rhetoric authoritarianism. you are being reactionary and conservative. in fact, you are literally spreading nazi shit. read up if you have the spoons for it: link here. the focus should be on mitigating harm to those more directly impacted, not on trying to erase the art now exist.s not on ai arts legitimacy as art." i'm not going to just sit here and say "oh wow weird take, point and laugh guys." that would be weird and frankly no better than places like r/fdc and r/systemscringe. so instead, we're gonna break this down: first off: what is degenerate art? well, let's check their wikipedia link.

"Degenerate art (German: Entartete Kunst) was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art." okay, so op is claiming that dislike of ai art is comparable to the suppressing and banning of large amounts of art in nazi germany. which is a wild take. but why is it wild? 1. ai generators clearly do not experience much suppression or banning in places considering that they are an active threat to artists. 2. the main issue with ai image generation is that it is stealing from actual artists to create their images and putting people who have trained for years to hone their skills at risk of losing their jobs. this diminishes the amount of artists who will actually pursue a career in that field, thereby reducing the amount of actual artists and directly harming the art community. 3. a lot of people will lie about being ai "artists," attempting to claim the work as actual art. 4. the concept of comparing something like this to the holocaust in general is just... wildly insensitive, frankly. this should be common sense, but there seems to be a distinct lack of it here anyways. 5. people are allowed to have opinions? you can think ai art is a valid form of art. i'll think you're weird, but that's a valid opinion. some people don't think certain genres of music are art. some people don't think certain kinds of art should be considered art. for example, those pendulum paintings that were everywhere, and might still be everywhere. i saw a lot of discourse about those. some people did not consider them to be art, or at least not on par with things like large, dedicated paintings. does that make the people who have that opinion nazis? .....no????? there isn't a moral to this post. it probably shouldn't exist. i just saw this and needed to rant, and decided to make you all my unwitting victims, lol. if you agree with op, then... i don't know, have a nice day? maybe stop conflating something like ai art (which is basically inconsequential unless you are in a community it effects or witnessing a downgrade of media quality due to its usage in production) to the holocaust (one of if not the worst historical event to this day in history)? okay wait, i have a moral! you can dislike things or have an opinion without it having to be taken to the total extreme. for anyone who read through this entire thing, thank you for sticking around! have a cookie. 🍪

[hzrnvm]

How does Lojban go about making Words and Sentences quote un quote less Ambiguous and/or More Logical (Compared to other languages, What makes Speaking in Lojban less ambiguous?)

[apologies if this isn’t a clear question or if you’ve been asked this before]

First of all, thank you for the ask. It was a really interesting question, and I enjoyed thinking about it a lot! Now the answer begins.

So, first things first, I should mention that Lojban is actually not necessarily semantically unambiguous in practice! That is to say that while it's capable of being much more unambiguous semantically than other languages — mostly due to cmavo (grammar words) having clear defined meanings, the absence of homonyms, and tone of voice having no effect on meaning — it does allow for semantic ambiguity in communication. If only because humans are not telepathic, and thus complete semantic unambiguity is impossible.

[There were originally two paragraphs here explaining tanru and "zo'e" as examples of semantic ambiguity in Lojban but I realized that is not answering your question so I put it in another post and linked it here]

Now to answer the question you actually asked. Sorry I got a little off-track there. pe'i (lojban evidential indicator meaning "I think") the best way of answering "What makes Lojban syntacticically unambiguous?" is "What makes other languages syntactically ambiguous?". Now we're very lucky here, because Wikipedia has a page with examples of syntactically ambiguous sentences. For example, this one's a classic, "John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope." Now we can show all the ways this can be parsed with brackets [({})]:

[John saw the man] [on the mountain] [with a telescope]

[John saw the man] [on the mountain (with a telescope)]

[John saw (the man on the mountain)] [with a telescope]

[John saw (the man on {the mountain with a telescope})]

[John saw (the man {on the mountain} {with a telescope})]

Reordering these sentences can clarify their meaning:

John, on the mountain and using a telescope, saw the man

John, on the mountain that had a telescope, saw the man

John, using a telescope, saw the man who was on the mountain

John saw the man who was on the mountain that had a telescope

John saw the man who was on the mountain and had a telescope

See, all those meanings are expressed by the sentence! Now let's see how Lojban would say each of those meanings (using the assignable pro-sumti "ko'a" to refer to la .djan., and with links to definitions):

ko'a noi cpana le cmana cu viska le prenu sepi'o lo darvistci

ko'a noi cpana le cmana be setu'i lo darvistci cu viska le prenu

ko'a viska le prenu be tu'i le cmana sepi'o lo darvistci

ko'a viska le prenu be tu'i le cmana be setu'i lo darvistci

ko'a viska le prenu be tu'i le cmana bei sepi'o lo darvistci

Now, if you plug those sentences into the parser (I recommend 'Boxes' mode), you'll see that they all have completely different forms! And if you look for what's in these sentences that clarifies their meaning, you'll find one important thing: Scope. Phrases such as 'noi cpana le cmana' are directly connected to the words before them and are terminated either by a terminator or cu. In sentence 4, "with a telescope" is "be setu'i lo darvistci" (which is a location of a telescope) as it applies to "le cmana" (the mountain) because "be" applies to the preceding sumti. But in sentence 5, it's "bei sepi'o lo darvistci" (which [who] is using a telescope), and it applies to "le prenu" (the person) because "bei" applies to the sumti that the previous "be" applied to.

This might be hard to understand if you haven't read any of the CLL. It probably is, and you probably haven't. A lighter, smaller showcase of how Lojban achieves syntactic unambiguity can be seen in the phrase "little girls' school".

In English, this phrase is [syntactically] ambiguous as to whether it's a "[little girls] school" or a "little [girls' school]" — that is, is it a school for little girls or a little school for girls?. In Lojban, this is clearly defined. Where "cmalu", "nixli", and "ckule" mean "small", "girl", and "school" respectively, "cmalu nixli ckule" means the former, "[little girls] school". This is because in Lojban, tanru (explained in the linked post above and further explained in a later post)) follow the left-grouping rule, meaning they are grouped from the left first. To bypass this rule, you can use "bo", which joins words with the shortest scope possible. This would look like "cmalu nixli bo ckule", which does mean "little [girls' school]". You could also use "ke", which is terminated with "ke'e" and works like parantheses: this would look like "cmalu ke nixli ckule [ke'e]" (with the optional terminator left in brackets), and means the same thing as with "bo".

And yeah, that's unambiguity in Lojban! If you want a tl;dr, it's crafted definitions for semantic umambiguity, and detailed rigid rules for syntactic unambiguity. Thank you again for the ask, I had a lot of fun answering it :)

[fallout-lou-begas]

hey so um, tumblr fucked up and got rid of the inbox, can you send me the links to women's wrestling again? sorry

go to a website called: watchwrestling DOT ai. that's where i look up all the VODs and can usually find livestreams of live shows. if you've been following my insane wrestling posts this week I was watching AEW last night on Wednesday (absolutely garbage booking re: women) and then tonight I caught Ring of Honor (basically a subsidiary of AEW but much better women's booking and also just ruled so hard top to bottom) and for the first time I tuned into Impact live (women's match and promos were a lot of fun but I just didn't care about the men's matches much lmao). definitely check out the feud between Masha Slamovich and Killer Kelly in Impact, they had a dog collar match where they basically earned each other's respect and now they're a tag team and it's very cool. specific show dates are on Masha's wikipedia page and you can cross-reference that with the VODs at the website i mentioned.

for AEW specifically: Kris Statlander is my favorite active women's wrestler there right now but since returning from injury and becoming TBS Champion, she appears on basically all three AEW television shows at random; Leyla Hirsch is another women's wrestler that I love who recently returned from injury and has been wrestling in Ring of Honor instead; Thunder Rosa is another women's wrestler that I love who might be returning from injury soon on AEW Collision (the Saturday show) but there's only been a hint so far; Jamie Hayter is another women's wrestler I love but has been out with injury ever since she lost her championship; are you detecting a pattern yet I swear to god that AEW's women's division is fucking cursed but that's still not an excuse for booking the talent that doesn't get injured so badly. Hikaru Shida gets some decent matches but where are Nyla Rose...Mercedes Martinez...hello...is anybody there...anybody other than britt baker...like i don't really have anything against her personally or as a talent but sometimes when she gets booked it just feels pretty uninspired!)

as always my best advice is to just watch a bunch of shit that sounds cool and get obsessed with a specific wrestler and then just look up all the other shit they've done and watch that and then probably get obsessed with a specific wrestler in the process and repeat. that's what i did. for example tonight on impact i saw a wrestler named Courtney Rush who looked like a roller derby player in a neon color mesh top and leggings so that's my neuron activation for the next ??? days

[bidaubadeadieu]

what a creature! this post sent me down a bird taxonomy rabbit-hole (bird hole) that I feel compelled to share! forewarning that I am not a biologist, this info is just from Wikipedia, which I'm sure is out-of-date relative to the latest genetic research. I won't be using words like "class", "order", and "family" here, because it sounds like those remain contested, and aren't always that useful. Real biologists seem to debate what counts as an infraclass and what's a superorder etc.

So. I saw these birds and wondered who the hell their closest cousins are, since they look like nothing I had ever seen before. "Owls, maybe?" I thought.

Let's start at the top. The two basic groups of birds are "the big flightless ones", (think ostrich, emu, also kiwi) and "everything else". Already interesting that those are their own thing! The next groups to break off from the "everything else" pack are landfowl (turkey, chicken, quail) and waterfowl (ducks, geese... screamers?? what are screamers? we don't have time for this) which are more closely related to one another than they are to all other birds (and conversely, if I understand correctly, all other birds are more closely related to one another than they are to the fowl).

Now left in the "everything else" bucket, things start to split off of the tree rapidly. There's the flamingoes/grebes group. There's the pigeons/doves group. There are a couple genetic one-offs, like the hoatzin, which is the only living member of its order (like the gingko tree), so it doesn't appear to have any cousins closer to it than like, most birds are to it.

We go down a couple levels. There's a vultures/owls/parrots/woodpeckers group. There's a pelicans/penguins/loons (wait, loons aren't ducks??) group.

There is a clade called Strisores. Strisores contains mostly birds I've never heard of, and some you almost certainly have!

Nightjars (pictured above)

Potoos, tropical South and Central America (this one's great)

Oilbird, lives in caves in the Northen Andes and is the only species of its family, like the hoatzin.

Frogmouths, south Asia, Melanesia

Owlet-Nightjars (confusingly, neither owlets nor true nightjars), New Guinea, Australia

and uh...

hummingbirds? You know what a hummingbird looks like. Swifts are also here. Hummingbirds are native to the Americas and swifts are found on all non-Antarctica continents, so you are likely to have seen one. The evidence linking hummingbirds/swifts to their closest living cousins, the owlet-nightjars, is described as "osteological", so I think they have similar skulls. Who'd have thought!

Great eared nightjar

[shellysmediamusings]

I started by searching for the word, “abortion.” Based on my past Google searches as well as Youtube account activity, I was correct in assuming google would skew my results to be more pro choice.

From here, I started doing searches that I thought would make Google think that I feel differently about abortion. 

First, I searched, “why is abortion wrong” and I clicked on the first link and interacted with the page it took me to. 

From here, I googled “is it morally wrong to be pro choice” 

To “cement” this idea and mimic like I was thinking through switching sides, I then googled “why should I be pro life” 

I spent some time (about 5 minutes) on this site to try to make google think I was reading it. 

When I started working on this, I also noticed an echo chamber in my group of friends. A few of us were at the library working when I started doing the searches and when one of them saw my screen covered in ultrasound pictures they were like “why are you googling ‘is abortion wrong’”

I explained the assignment to them as well as the part where it was recommended we choose a “controversial” opinion to use for the activity to which one of them said, “really its not that controversial” which I did agree for my friend group but also for people like my parents who won’t even say abortion i felt it was aptly controversial. 

At the table after this, it sort of became a game to suggest searches. Every 5 or so minutes someone would look up and suggest another search and we would all laugh. While I realize a group of people laughing at “will having an abortion make me go to hell” might seem rude to people that have these concerns, I think as a group of pro choice women in their early 20s we were just venting some of our frustrations at the current political landscape surrounding abortion.

I also wanted to seem like I was starting to believe common pro life talking points. One of which is the “post birth abortion” which is not performed and is often use to justify the “slippery slope” many pro life arguments rely on. Basically the idea is that if you allow abortion at any point of a pregnancy that some women will choose to have an abortion during their birth. Of course this is false as most abortions take place well before 20 weeks (I was going to google this statistic but didn’t want to ruin my bubble busting). 

I clicked on one of the search results, and spent a few minutes scrolling through and expanding certain sections to make it seem like I was using the site. 

I searched “abortion” one more time to see if any changes happened. The results were the same so I decided to wait until the next morning. 

When I searched “abortion” in the morning, instead of starting with just the news stories, it started with a wikipedia entry on abortion and the same group of articles I saw before with some breaking news stories that came out overnight.

Additionally, the search results after the news portion were different. On my first search, I mostly got pro choice organizations. While Planned Parenthood was in both, in the first one its the pink PP logo which is for their political action work. The second is their navy logo which is primarily used for their medical care centers. When I googled to try to verify the different color logos and started with “blue vs pink” the autofill was things like “Blue vs pink pregnancy test accuracy.” I’m starting to think maybe in addition to trying to convince Google that I am against abortion I may have also accidentally made google think I'm pregnant. 

Since I didn't have as much time before work to dedicate to the searching, I quickly googled the following topics: 

When can aborted babies feel pain ? 

When do aborted babies have certain features? 

When is the march for life? 

Where is the march for life? 

When is the anniversary of roe v wade 

March for life groups near me 

I clicked on one link for every search and spent some time on the pages. I decided to wait a few more hours before checking the progress again and doing more searches.

That night, I did the same search of just "abortion" and found that my results hadn't really changed. I think because I have had this google account since I was about 13 years old, so it knows my interests and opinions very well at this point.

[high-theyre-frendough]

Bugs Bunny

Growing up, I watched quite a lot of Bugs Bunny My dad had a lot of old episodes downloaded on iTunes. He also had a collection of old LaserDiscs that I grew up watching with additional Looney Tunes content. Today, I saw someone using a gif of a French cartoon chef, and immediately recognized it as a Bugs Bunny skit called French Rarebit part of which can be seen here on YouTube. The clip is about 4 minutes long, with part of the start and end of the skit cropped. That skit isn’t what this post is about. I watched these Bugs Bunny skits on iTunes as a kid, and on iTunes, there is a collection of old Bugs Bunny skits labeled as “Bugs Bunny Volume 1” where various skits are grouped together with two skits per episode. Along side French Rarebit (1951), the iTunes bundle has the Bugs Bunny skit Gorilla My Dreams (1948). I remembered the two being grouped together as I associated them with each other as a kid. Which makes sense, considering how I originally watched them.

After I saw that gif, I wanted to look up the cartoons so that I could rewatch them now as an adult. I looked for ‘the gorilla episode’ of Bugs Bunny. I remembered that clip being first when you went on YouTube, and I decided to find it first. Various clips popped up. I watched this one which is uploaded by the official WB Kids channel. It is titled as ‘Bugs and the Gorilla Baby.’ The skit shows Bugs Bunny in a barrel being scooped up by a female gorilla who declares herself to be Bug Bunny’s mother. Bugs Bunny agrees to be her baby, and is brought home. The clip is about 2 minutes long, which make sense. Warner Bros isn’t necessarily going to upload full videos to YouTube, but then I started thinking. There was a lot more to this skit than what was shown, and I remember it was one of my least favorite episodes.

Then I looked for another clip, to find more of the episode and found this clip (the title is mislabeled, saying that the episode the clip is from was from 1986 even though it was released 38 years earlier) which takes place immediately after where the official upload is cropped. In this clip (which again, takes place immediately after the clip in the original upload) Bugs is brought home by the ‘mother’ gorilla where he is confronted by the ‘father’ gorilla… who is an extremely aggressive man. I also found this clip which takes place a bit after the previously mentioned clip. This scene depicts the ‘father’ gorilla being extremely violent with Bugs, contrary to what the ‘mother’ gorilla said (treat him like a baby). Finally, there is this clip which shows the opening scene to the video, along with a random one-liner from the end cause whoever uploaded it did that.

Now, as you’ve probably figured out, this skit contains a bit of a racist stereotype. If you’re not sure, maybe go back and watch some of the clips and/or read the Wikipedia summaries linked. For the most part, the designs of the gorillas is similar to other animal designs in classic Looney Tunes. The proportions of the limbs are similar to characters such as Tasmanian Devil oddly enough if you ignore the face and other cosmetic differences (I have never watched any Tasmanian Devil cartoons as far as I remember, but his first appearance was in 1954). I can remember other, more ‘obvious’ depictions of racism in other Looney Tunes cartoons with more exaggerated features. This skit probably would’ve gotten away with having these just be gorilla characters, however the hair and certain visual changes in certain sight gags (using that term loosely here) along with the mannerisms and personalities of the gorillas is where a lot of the racism lies. The mannerisms and violent depiction along with the characters being you know, gorillas, is where the racism lies. I’m not going to go too in-depth on the racism. I think we can all recognize the content for what it is. If any POC wanna reblog with their takes on that aspect, feel free. I don’t want to go in depth on this aspect but wanted to acknowledge it.

Now at this point, I was noticing some things in the search results and in the Wikipedia article as I continued hyperfocusing on this episode. There was another gorilla-themed Bugs Bunny episode. Titled Apes of Wrath, and released in 1959, this episode of Bugs Bunny recycles the plot of Gorilla My Dreams 11 years later. The remake can be found on YouTube split up into part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. After watching these two versions of a recycled plot, I’ve been thinking about and analyzing the differences between the versions. Typically, when a plot is recycled, it is between different media (like a movie being adapted from a book). Sometimes movies in the public domain are remade with different interpretations (like Cinderella). Sometimes animated will be remade as live action. Sometimes there will even be movie adaptations of old movies with a modern twist. However, all that being said, I don’t think it is all that common for a short story like this to be remade in the same format by the same studio. The only example I can think of that is even kind of like this is Fantasia, released by Disney in 1940 (the movie contained a racist caricature and in later releases, the content was censored).

I think that it is really interesting to see two versions of a similar story written in different decades of Warner Bros cartoon history. Sure, you can look at some older episodes, and compare them to newer episodes, but with these two versions, more direct comparisons can be made. I want to analyze these two pieces of media and some of the differences to be found.

First of all, references. Bugs Bunny has always parodied relevant popular media. The original Gorilla of my Dreams skit is a parody of films like Tarzan, and other ‘jungle’ movies which were popular at the time. I’m not going to go too much into this as its not overly important. If you want to know all the little easter eggs, you can check the Wikipedia, which lists it. I’m bringing this up to show the difference in formatting. The original is more of an original story structured as an homage to what was relevant. The remake, Apes of Wrath, takes a lot of aspects to various ‘stock’ storylines which became more common in Looney Tunes stories over time. Apes of Wrath starts out with a drunken stork, a character not present in the original story. The stork loses a baby gorilla he was meant to deliver. He knocks out Bugs Bunny with a baseball bat, and brings Bugs to a pair of gorillas. Similar to the original, but with different set up, the ‘mother’ gorilla immediately accepts Bugs as her baby. Bugs immediately submits, and agrees to the roleplay. Halfway through, the actual baby gorilla is brought to the family. The ‘father’ gorilla, who had been hostile towards Bugs throughout the skit, finally has an excuse to chase him, now that he thinks Bugs decided him by pretending to be a baby.

Before I continue, I want to point out that in both versions, Bugs Bunny ends up dressed in a baby bonnet, and a diaper. In Gorilla of my Dreams, both are pink. In the sequel, the diaper is plain white, while the bonnet is blue. It’s a small change, but I can’t help but think it was deliberate. I can’t find much information on any controversy that would’ve been around at the time of the remake (to be honest, I’m not sure how I would find that) but I find it interesting if this change was on purpose.

The original also introduces Bugs Bunny as reading Esquire (which was considered an Adult magazine at the time) while he sings, sitting in a barrel drifting along in a body of water with a bottle of alcohol at his feet. The remake introduces Bugs as singing the song Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair as a play on the words ‘hair’ and ‘hare.’ So right off the bat when watching these two versions, you can see there are some differences in how controversial they want to be. The depiction of the drunken stork added to the remake isn’t really trying to be controversial, in my opinion. It feels more like an excuse to have a dumb character that talks funny which is a whole other issue. Its less “trying to be edgy” and more “depicting alcoholism as silly.”

The differences between the era are not only shown through the difference between the story structure (original parody vs commonly used formula) but through the comedy as well. While slapstick is more present in both versions, it along with exaggerated cartoon violence takes up more screen time in the original. The remake has less visual gags (such as written puns) than the original, and also includes more dialogue-based humor. This it not to say that one version is wholly without the other, this is just generally what I noticed. The sequel also has this gag, clipped in a 5 second long YouTube upload. I would recommend watching it. It is from Apes of Wrath, and is a funny little gag I did laugh at.

The shift in animation styles from Gorilla of my Dreams to Apes of Wrath is also something I wanna note. The way the characters interact with the background is different due to the changes in animation styles. I haven’t done research on it recently, but hand drawn animation is just fascinating to me. I’m not very good at drawing and techniques confuse me, but I think its cool looking at old animation rigs and stuff.

I realized that I didn’t talk about one of the big differences cause I was getting focused on the smaller stuff. In Gorilla of my Dreams, the ‘mother’ immediately decides that Bugs is her baby, and she insists that the ‘father’ be kind to Bugs. The ‘father’ gorilla has some ‘alone’ time with Bugs where he throws Bugs in the air in an abusive manner, until Bugs retaliates and fighting ensues. (This part of the episode is what I remember scaring me a a child. My father would show me that scene as an example of how I should feel lucky he wasn’t ‘as bad’ as this depiction of a father. Considering my father would toss me around as a kid, and dangle me by my ankles for fun - which was some of the tamest physical abuse from him - idk but that’s kind of fucked up. Anyways back to analyzing this old cartoon and not my childhood.) In Apes of Wrath, Bugs is watched by the ‘mother’ gorilla for most of the episode. Whenever the ‘father’ tries to be violent towards Bugs, who clearly is not a baby gorilla - he is an adult rabbit, the ‘mother’ commits acts of violence towards the ‘father.’ It is not until the actual gorilla baby is brought to the parents by the stork does the ‘mother’ stop protecting Bugs Bunny. Another note is that in the original, Bugs continues to wear the diaper and bonnet for the duration of the chase scene fight with the ‘father’ gorilla at the end of the episode. In the Apes of Wrath remake, he almost immediately ditches the baby clothes. All of this is to say that the main violence of the episode switched from child abuse to more of a domestic violence and ‘betrayal revenge’ scenario.

An additional change I would like to remark on is the change in how the gorillas are portrayed in-universe. In Gorilla of my Dreams, the gorillas are introduced at the start of the episode as extremely humanlike. A group of gorillas are depicted at the start of the episode reading magazines and books with various puns on the covers. The titular gorillas live in a house made of reeds(?) or dried bamboo(?) with appliances. It’s basically a cartoon ‘jungle’ aesthetic that closely resembles a ‘typical’ American household. The gorillas are depicted as mostly humanlike, but with a gorilla twist (for example in the establishing shot of the gorillas sitting outside, they are holding the newspapers they read with their feet). In Apes of Wrath, the gorillas are depicted like cavemen. They have a stereotypical cartoon ‘cavemen’ aesthetic, alongside similar personas. The character design is also slightly different.

All of this is to say idk how to finish this post. I just found this all interesting in a historical sene. I went to watch an old cartoon out of nostalgia, and found a different cartoon which had been remade, and went down a brief rabbithole of comparing content. I’m not sure if I ever watched Apes of Wrath. I don’t remember the stork character, or Daffy Duck’s very brief appearance at the end of the short story. I might have seen it as some time. I don’t really like either video, but I just thought this all was interesting.

The official clip upload on the Warner Bro’s YouTube channel is very clearly from the original Gorilla of my Dreams. It is carefuly cut around any depictions of the hyper aggressive and abusive ‘father’ gorilla, and it makes me wonder what is the point of having a new version? I cannot find a clip of the Apes of Wrath version on that channel. Plus, the clip that was uploaded doesn’t have the episode title. The clip for French Rarebit has the actual title, and it was uploaded to the same, official channel.

I forgot what the point was. Bye

[beauty-and-passion]

Time to talk about the flower shirt

You read the title. Time to talk about this.

This is the infamous flower shirt Thomas put on in his store and, since the fandom is the fandom, everyone started to speculate about those flowers.

At first, I didn’t want to do it. They’re just flowers and other people already talked about them, so what could I possibly add to the conversation?

But while I was writing about Orange, I had to talk a moment about the orange flower. It was supposed to be a small parenthesis, just a couple of words about that.

But then I looked at the other flowers and what other people told/not told about them and how some didn’t find Patton’s flower... so here I am, adding my two cents to this theme.

You needed it? Probably not. Well, I’m writing it anyway.

So let’s take a closer look at those flowers and see each one in detail:

__________________________________

Roman: Red rose

Should I really explain why it’s perfect for Roman? Red roses are the universal symbol of love. Basically in all cultures red roses symbolize passion, true love, romance and desire. Also, according to this website, even the shade has a meaning! In fact, the deeper the red shade is, the stronger is the passion.

And even the number of red roses has a meaning! In this case, we have only one single red rose and that "represents love at first sight, or if it’s coming from a long-term partner, they are saying “you are still the one”.”

You know what that made me think? About Thomas telling Roman “You’re my hero”. A perfect symbol that he was “still the one” for Thomas.

__________________________________

Orange: Lantana camara

This is an incredibly peculiar flower.

Lantana Camara symbolizes severity and rigour. And this alone can be analyzed in all possible ways, but there are other interesting details about this plant I think it's worth mentioning.

Lantana is toxic for livestock, such as cattle, sheep, horses, dogs and goats. According to Wikipedia, previous studies suggested it could be toxic for humans too, especially the green unripe berries. However "other studies have found evidence which suggests that its fruit poses no risk to humans".

Lantana is a freaking invasive plant. In some areas, it's so predominant, to reduce biodiversity, because its presence "can significantly slow down the regeneration of forests, by preventing the growth of new trees". Also, as if this isn't enough, this plant can also produce toxic chemicals which inhibit other plant species.

Lantana has also a great adaptability, that helped it to be so invasive: it can live in a wide range of different environmental conditions, it can survive long periods without water, heck it's even resistant to fire. It's not a plant you can underestimate. Like Orange, I assume.

But Lantana isn't just an invasive plant. Lantana has always been used for medical purposes, because it showed good antimicrobial, fungicidal and insecticidal properties and its extract helps against respiratory infections and ulcers.

Also, since it doesn't have many pests or diseases, lantana became a common ornamental plant. It even attracts butterflies!

In other words: isn't that the perfect plant to symbolize the double nature of a dark side? It can be a threat, change the environment, destroy and even kill. But it can also be a medicine, something useful, something beautiful.

Whoever Orange is, Lantana camara tells us that, whithout a doubt, he’s a dark side.

__________________________________

Janus: Sunflower

Do you think Janus isn't perfect enough as he is? Do you think there's not enough husband material in the snek?

Well, you’re wrong and the sunflower is here to prove it.

Sunflower symbolizes loyalty, adoration, longevity, vitality, worship. Now add this up to the sunflower’s behaviour and how it follows the sun... and you’ll get Janus. Janus literally acts like a sunflower: Thomas is his sun and everything Janus does is for him. His whole existence is centered around Thomas.

But we already knew that, because it's the same message that shone through his playlist. Everything about Janus tells us how much he adores Thomas, from his canonical behavior in the series, to his playlist, to this flower.

Oh, do you need another proof that this is flower is perfect for Janus? Some societies use sunflowers as religious symbols. Ah, some good ol' reference to religion: it’s like being in his playlist all over again.

And, of course, sunflowers are used for a variety of reasons, like cooking oils, skin care and so on. Even the flower says self care.

This man is perfect.

__________________________________

Remus: Green chrysanthemum

Here's another interesting flower.

Chrysanthemum symbolizes death and it’s the typical flower used for funerals. And I thought this was its universal meaning. It was perfect for Remus just like that.

But then I found out that Europeans use chrysanthemums for funerals and to honor the dead. This flower actually has a whole lot of meanings, some completely different from this.

In China, for example, chrysanthemums are associated with wealth, prosperity and long life. Also they're symbols of new life and reincarnations, so they're the perfect gift for old people or newborns.

While in Japan chrysanthemums are symbols of power and royalty. And that's even more fitting for Remus, because he's a Duke, so he is royalty.

But chrysanthemum also symbolizes friendship - and not just "a friendship", but a meaningful one. It's a symbol of loyalty, devotion, romantic/platonic love and, in general, positive energy. It's a flower with an incredibly strong meaning, so it can't be given too lightly.

And this makes it even more perfect for Remus. It's a flower with a huge plurality of meanings, it's both associated with life and death, it's powerful and it's royalty.

Also, you can eat it. Isn't that the perfect Remus flower?

(On a side note: please notice how chrysanthemums and sunflowers are both associated with joy, loyalty and devotion. I would have never considered "joy" a common trait between Janus and Remus while loyalty and devotion... well, they both care about Thomas and his career and they both work for him despite not being accepted, so I can see why those are common traits.)

__________________________________

Patton: Nemophila

Surprise surprise, this flower wasn't easy to find. I’ve never heard of it, so I had to search among endless lists of blue flowers, hoping to find one that would perfectly match the one on the shirt.

And that’s how I found nemophila.

First of all: nemophila is also known as "Baby Blue Eyes" and it's an extremely rare color to find in nature. It’s very famous in Japan, thanks to the Hitachi Seaside Park. Open this link: it’s a literal sea of blue and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Of course, it attracts people every year.

Nemophila represents prosperity, congratulations on success and victory. Not the first things you would associate with Patton, right?

Well, while I was searching more informations about this flower, I found out this website about the essence of Baby Blue Eyes and the passage I quoted down below has the exact same words you can find on that link:

With its pronounced affinity for water, the Baby Blue Eyes flower essences addresses qualities of tender sensitivity, innocence and trust associated one’s early childhood relationship to the father, or other significant masculine figures that are in some way disturbed.

Very often the father was absent, or there was a lack of support or genuine presence. The Baby Blue Eyes type attempts over time to cover this wound of vulnerability with a false “hardening,” such as emotional distancing, mistrust, cynicism or spiritual alienation. It is a flower that can be equally helpful for men or women, although it is especially needed for many men who struggle to become strong, by disowning their pain.

So nemophilia’s essence has qualities associated with childhood, to the father figure and attempts to “repress” and hide emotions.

That’s Patton. That’s him, period. The childhood-related emotions, that are linked to Patton’s longing for “a simpler time”. The mentions of a father figure - who migh be absent or showing lack of support (like, idk, suggesting you should die so your friends live?). And the attempt to “cover the vulnerability” doesn’t remind you anything? Like the Nostalgia episodes?

This flower is Patton.

__________________________________

Logan: Blue petunia

I would like to say, from the bottom of my heart, a huge "FUCK YOU" to this flower, because I spent TWO DAYS searching all the blue flowers in the world and all possible variants, asking myself why this goddamn flower looked so familiar and why it was so hard to find. Blue isn't even a common color in nature, so why couldn't I find it?

I've learned more about blue flowers in these two days than in my entire life. I've searched among flowers I never saw before, like glandora diffusa, leschenaultia and omphalodes verna. I was so desperate to consider this flower a new species, with the petals of a bellflower and the corolla of a morning glory. I even found a goddamn chinese variant of the morning glory that was somehow similar but not that much and why, WHY this was so hard to find?!

And then, after two days and a lot more desperation, I remembered: my dear friend @reptilianwithscallions​ told me about a post they made, regarding this shirt and the flowers. Maybe they had some idea about Logan's flower?

Well, let's all thank my saviour and this post, because otherwise I would've kept searching until the end of my days.

Long story short, Logan's flower is a fucking blue petunia.

And it's a very peculiar choice, because petunias have multiple meanings, several of which can be contradictory.

In general, petunia symbolizes anger and resentment. It reminds someone that you're still angry or disappointed by their actions and you haven’t gotten over the things that caused these feelings.

Oh my, I didn't know we were back in Logan's playlist. It's basically what he kept expressing towards Thomas with his songs: that he was angry at Thomas for his decision, that he doesn't approve that Thomas hasn't "a real job" and so on. Petunia is a flower that screams passive-aggressive, so it's perfect for Logan.

But petunia's meaning deeply changes, depending on the color of the flower. And while petunia in general symbolizes anger, a blue petunia is a symbol of peacefulness, intimacy and deep trust, shared between two or more people. It's so wholesome, because the deep trust reminds me - again - of Logan's playlist and how it ended: no matter what, he and Thomas are always best friends.

Also, petunia flowers have even a secret meaning behind. Since they’re also gifted to new neighbors or to people who have just moved into a new home, they represent a perfect welcome and a way to express affection and kindness to others.

You’re lucky to be so wholesome, you tricky flower.

__________________________________

Virgil: Perennial Geranium

Geranium is a confused flower.

Some of the other flowers have conflicted meanings, but not as much as this flower. These are the most common meanings I found:

Folly or Stupidity

Gentility and kind nature

Clever minds

Ingenuity

Melancholy

Perfect gift for a bride

You can gift it to someone with whom you have planned a meeting 

You can gift it to someone with whom you haven't planned a meeting, just to make them feel welcomed

True Friendship

See? It’s confused.

Aside from jokes, this variety of meanings is due to its great diffusion: since geraniums grow everywhere, every culture gave them a different meaning. And sometimes these meanings depend on the situation too.

Awww, isn't it perfect for Virgil? He can be good and bad at the same time. Anxiety can be bad for Thomas and detrimental for his life, but it can also be the alarm Thomas needs. It depends on the situation.

And, just like geraniums in general symbolize positive emotions, happiness and friendship, so Virgil is in general a good guy. All he does is for Thomas' wellbeing, not against him.

And this is confirmed by the vast use of geranium's essential oil. It's one of the most popular and it has a ton of properties: anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-depressant, decongestant, relaxing and so on. Just like our Virge boy can be incredibly useful under the right circumstances. (Did someone say "Flirting with social Anxiety"?)

Also, geraniums are simple, humble flowers that usually grow outside, but then we take them and make them part of our homes. Once again, it’s Virgil: he's an outsider, he's humble, he talks bad about himself - but Thomas and the others took him and made him part of the famILY anyway.

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Thomas: Cherry blossom

I searched this flower everywhere and the only one that looks like the one on the shirt is the cherry blossom. Why did Thomas make a cherry blossom with eight petals, when they all have five? I have no idea. Is this a different flower, maybe? Maybe, but I’m done: I've looked at enough flowers and I don’t have any strength left.

As you probably already know, cherry blossoms are extremely important in Japan. They're beautiful, they're everywhere and they're meaningful.

Why? Because cherry blossoms are considered the perfect metaphor for human existence. When they blossom it's a pink ocean, a party, people go to admire them - but they’re short lived, because in two weeks, the blossoms start to fall. It's just like human life: a small, rich, glorious parenthesis in the void. Something little and precious that ends soon.

But cherry blossoms also symbolize rebirth, optimism, hopes and dreams. When they bloom, it means springtime is coming and spring has always been associated with renewal.

That’s a very good choice for character Thomas. He’s basically a cherry blossom, the whole series is: something that reminds us how beautiful life is, how multi-faceted, how important. Just like Thomas' single being encompasses seven different sides of himself, so life presents a wide range of choices, of aspects, of flavours. All beautiful, all worthy of appreciation, no matter how different they can be from you and your experience.

And this becomes even more important, in relation to the passage of time and the transience of life. Because life is short and, after that, there won't be any more time to appreciate anything.

In addition to that, I would like to point out how the theme of passage of time is something we already saw in the series. And not just one time, but several. Since the first season, we have episodes all around the concept of growing up, growing old, not being a child anymore, becoming an adult. And the last Aside keeps going in this direction. It's clear this is a big theme and its connection with the cherry blossoms proves it.

But why is the flower so different on the shirt? Because Thomas wanted to mess up with us? Probably. Almost certainly. Once again, thank you Mr. Sanders for making me question everything.

The floor is (figuratively) yours now: if you have any other information, thoughts or opinions, feel free to share them.

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[leveragedlibrarians]

I'd say the Librarians are demigods and the Guardians are Satyrs (traditionally protectors of demigods). That said, I know I saw a post on here once upon a time comparing the characters to the muses that was AMAZING but I sadly cannot remember or find it :(

So I think most obviously Ezekiel would be the child of Hermes. God of thieves, currency, luck, and travelers. I mean, come on.

Cass I could see a few different ones-most notably and obviously comparing her to the oracle cassandra for her visions- but I'm leaning towards a child of Mnemosyne, who is technically not a god but the Titan of memory. This goes great with both her eidetic memory and her hallucinations being linked to memory.

Jake is another one I could see in a few different ways. My first instinct was Apollo, god of music and poetry- but then I thought about Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and passion which goes well with his love of art.

Flynn I got stuck on for a while. The only one I could think of was Athena, but let's be honest she's the goddess of wisdom and that just didn't feel right for Flynn (I like it for judson though). Then I remembered that other pantheons exist and he's literally the child of Thoth. Egyptian god of knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, and.... well just look at what Wikipedia has to say about him:

So Flynn is the child of Thoth now I don't make the rules.

Not to pop up randomly in the year of our lord 2024, but I’ve watched Percy Jackson recently and now I’m curious. If the librarians characters were in this universe, what would they be? Demigods? Satyrs? Centaurs? Monsters? Humans? Let’s get this conversation going for anyone still left in this fandom or any followers that are still around;)