#it feels kind of like if it was standard for some english fonts to have ligatures connecting letters in a cursive-y way

[rubberbandballqueen]

it's unlikely to happen due to globalization, but i think it would be really funny if countries that use the latin alphabet in their writing systems started developing their own slightly different standards of writing each glyph and got obsessively picky about it.

like yeah i know there's like british vs. american standard spelling nitpicks, and that's something, but i'm thinking something more along the lines of "you put a slash through your 7's? that's the british standard but all right i guess" kind of subtle. we need to replicate what taiwan/hong kong/japan (and to an extent mainland china) have going on.

[scribblescreative]

ARCHITECTURE PROMPT DAY THREE

[Image ID: square instagram post with a grey concrete background and green, creeping vines. Text in the middle says: THREE in black font. /.End ID]

[Image text: Barkingside - Girlstown. Philip writes: Girlstown: Cairns House and the Village Green at Barnardo’s Girls Village Home in Barkingside. Inevitably, this is a tale founded on sadness and want. In 1876, Dr Thomas Barnardo opened a cottage homes village for girls, which was intended to provide a more civilised and caring environment than the “barracks” institutions that had preceded it. Barnardo relied on voluntary donations to enable him to open a village for “wayward” girls - typically orphans, or those at risk of abuse. Eventually, 65 cottages were built, each with a “house mother” who gave the girls support and guidance. In addition to the residential buildings, other facilities were provided, including a church, hospital and school. Barnardo died on 1905 and is buried at the site. The girls at Barkingside were prepared either for entry into domestic service, or emigration to Canada and Australia. As well as basic education, the girls were trained in skills such as baking, laundry and dressmaking. The village finally closed in 1991; the cottages around Babies’ Green have been preserved, and the whole site redeveloped for private housing. The Barnardo’s history is still very vivid at a site that mixed heartbreak and hope for 120 years. Acknowledgements for facts and archive pictures to www.childrenshomes.org.uk (where there is much more information, and many pictures) and the Clocktower Collection website. /.End ID]

[Image ID: A selection of five picturesque photographs of Bernardo’s Girls Village in Barkingside on a background of grey concrete. The photographs include brown brick cottages with white fascias and beams. One building includes a clock tower, and one is a standard English church. The final photograph is a black and white aerial shot of the village, including lawns and the clock tower. /.End ID]

[Image text: Writing Prompt - Anchor: On a creative writing workshop hosted by David Annand, a group of us explored how architecture can act as an anchor for the inner lives of our characters. Baker Street, Manderlay, Wuthering Heights, even Hogwarts, are all buildings whose architecture reflects and anchors some aspect of their inhabitants. In this post, Philip shares much of the history of this village and I think you'll have felt the mix of heartbreak and hope as you read. What kind of character could be anchored by these buildings? For this writing prompt, choose a building, any building, perhaps one of the Barnardo's cottages. Now focus on the shape, size, colour, material, light, shadow, height, pattern and purpose of the building, until you feel you know the character of the building. Next, try to put this character into human form. Write a vignette describing your building and your character in a way that shows how the two are tied together. /.End ID]

[Image text: In deep contrast to the buildings of yesterday where the looming shapes were imposing and rigid we are now graced with much more picturesque cottages with extra details designed for aesthetics. The tower certainly feels like it’s come from a fairytale castle, or perhaps it’s trapping someone there? Reading through Philip’s words it’s easy to create an image in our minds of the bustling activity that would have happened there, how the inhabitants would have spent their days. Compose a scene either outdoors or within one of these cottages, think about the original purpose of the cottages, will you make it a beacon of hope for an orphaned child or a vision of a hard life of labour? How does the setting influence the activity? If it’s a bedroom you’re creating think about how the personality of the owner is reflected in the decor. /.End ID]

[solitaire-dreams]

My immediate thoughts on Gen 9:

-It looks like the new region is based off Spain (and potentially Portugal)! Congrats for people hoping for a Spanish/Portuguese region!

-Looks like they’re using the New Pokemon Snap style for gen 9. Gonna get some getting used to, particular since the Pokemon models seem to be in-line with the mainline GF games, but it could be good.

-Listening to the demands of fans and making it open world it seems. Legends Arceus was definitely a step in the right direction, but suffered a bit from empty landscapes and it will be noticeably harder to make Scarlet and Violet open-world if they’re focusing on battling and not catching.

-The male and female protagonist look practically identical this time. I’m ready to see sibling portrayals from the community!

-Fuecoco is honestly growing on me. I don’t know if it’s based on food, but it keeps reminding me of a tomato dish. I like Sprigatito’s design, the name is kind of a meow-thful (sorry. Couldn’t resist) and the name Quaxly is excellent but looks a bit silly with the toupee.

-Why Scarlet and Violet for the names? They aren’t opposites on the colour wheel (either the ones you learn in school or the CMYK one). They’re different levels of colours (scarlet is a shade of red, primary. violet is a shade of purple, secondary), and they’re not linked in any obvious way like Gold and Silver as precious metals. Feel free to correct me if I’m missing something.

EDIT Courtesy of @/dreamlikequality who is more big brain than me:

[Image ID: “ahah but scarlet and violet ARE opposites-- not on the color wheel but on the light spectrum. infrared, ultrviolet!! thats what im thinking!!]

That’s a super great observation, meaning they could be referencing infrared and ultraviolet OR the colours of the rainbow (since red is already taken, they may have chosen a shade of red--scarlet--instead! Especially since it ends in the same way as violet in english)

-But look at the fonts! Yeah, they kind of suck, but Scarlet has a noticeably more historical font with sweeping curves to representing printing; while violet is angular and standardized like you’d expect from a computer. Could? Could this mean we get a region addressing Past vs. Future?? Ohhhhhh, I really hope so!

-2022 release date SUCKS.  I know it fits with the pattern of a new gen releasing every 3 years, but: Legends Arceus just came out and this is going to steal some its thunder, as a manga fan the tighter release schedule has noticeably dropped the quality of the arcs, and we had to deal with a global pandemic! GF already seems to be struggling to create quality in a 3-year development cycle, and that’s on top of lost work hours during the pandemic and development on PLA! I am...nervous...on how the quality of this game will turn out and wish they’d waited at least one more year personally.

My final verdict: I am keeping my exceptions low until I get more news

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

Hee hoo I finally have the energy to be insane about languages coherently again, let's go >:D

General disclaimer tho, i'm not a Proper Linguist. My education in this stuff is tiny - just standard secondary school grammar classes + one uni semester. The rest is all the power of special interest and personal research

I somehow never considered the fact that the Orokin lived for Way Too Fucking Long, holy shit. Yeah, if you consider that + that at least to me the Orokin feel like the kind to regard the "what we are" part of their culture as already perfect while they continuously upgrade and augment the "what we make" part, I'd say the Orokin language was a downright ancient relic of its time. Whatever new words did need to happen bc of new things getting invented and discovered stubbornly refused loanwords (like the French comparison you made)

I love the comparison of the potential Corpus word for CEO to religious leader/prophet bc that's exactly Nef Anyo's whole idiot deal and I would bet he did also yoink some sort of Orokin word to refer to his and only his title in Corpus as well. I think the CEO (or Board Member) word(s) would be leaning more towards "emperor" and such, but Nef Anyo is specifically hoarding the prophet words

I think a lot of the analytical side of Corpus originally came from leaders v methodically tearing the language to pieces, but even with the best intentions you don't get a language from the get go that just Works and won't get altered by its speakers. So I love the thought that the ppl who either joined the Corpus of their own accord or were forcefully assimilated smoothed out a lot of the rough edges of its analytical parts

My personal take is that "simple" and "complex" (or god forbid "easy" and "hard" - that's a wholeass sidetrack rant I am Not going down rn) is v hard to define when it comes to languages? I mean, what do you consider to be more complex: "I am going to" or "I'mma"? The first one bc it has more words and grammar connections, or the second bc it condenses more meaning into a single word, hiding said connections? Ofc there's the whole thing about English as a bastard lingua franca killing other languages, which in itself is a sort of loss of complexity- anyway. I do think there's a general tendency towards simplicity over time but it's over centuries and less a steady decline and more a bumpy ass road bc while, as you said, a language is unlikely to invent things it has already lost, it sure loves inventing other, new things! Just maybe not to the same extent

Compared to the Grineer, the Corpus seem to have a lot more of a culture of putting big bold writing everywhere and using text decoratively, more similar to the Orokin. Idk if they care much for things like calligrahy, but their signature font is decorative. So emulating that with your handwriting, having the practice and spare time to do so? Yeah, that can v much be a status thing!

I think in terms of shorthand there already are dialects. Obviously the flow of information across the system is eased by a whole bunch of fancy technology, but various Corpus-settled planets are still huge communities in and of themselves that function in a relatively self-contained way (mainly pointing at the different planet-unique enemy types here). And shorthand texts specifically isn't something that gets shared cross-communities much, unless someone moves from one planet to another. So it could v much happen that these dialects become more drastically unique over time! Tho due to the easy flow of both information and ppl to and from other Corpus colonies, it'd need a really long time to happen

(In other news, if you asked random Corpus, most would say that the ones on Jupiter speak with the strongest accent and that it sounds horrible)

I also have no goddamn clue how Orokin society worked bc to me it seems like all of them were high class?? Nobles and leaders and scientists and shit. I feel like at the v least by the last days of their society they were all indeed high ranking ppl who had kinda just appointed themselves to rule over humans with their big golden sense of superiority and an utter refusal to have anything in common with them, not even a single loanword from their languages

All five languages in the game are just English slightly to the left, which makes them easy to generate but also just bad to deal with from a worldbuilding standpoint, so I've simply decided that I'm going to ignore that

Which means that everything is free game and I'm having a good time

(This isn't a comprehensive post on anything but! Here are some Thoughts on Orokin and Corpus for starters if anyone is interested in Pure Linguistic Nonsense)

The official source attributes what we know as the Orokin script* to Tenno culture (going as far as calling it Tennobet) but that source is from 2014, before most of the lore of the game was established at all. Also Orokin script now appears outside of Tenno spaces - namely in various void buildings, and on the Zariman insignia, which predates Tenno culture as a whole

*I'm calling it a script, bc it's technically an abugida, not an alphabet, since it treats consonant-vowel pairs as units and writes vowels over consonants akin to diacritics (accents and whatnot) instead of treating them as equal

So! I consider this script to have been the one in use by Orokin, instead of being Tenno-exclusive

Disconnecting the whole thing from English means i can do whatever i want vis a vis morphological typology (sorting languages based on how they form words) and I very excitedly landed on synthetic, occasionally polysynthetic for Orokin. Synthetic means that they glued together their words from a whole bunch of bits that didn't only mean one specific thing (e.g. a suffix didn't just mean "plural", it meant "plural, inanimate, belongs to the speaker" and if you wanted to instead say "plural, animate, belongs to the speaker" you'd need a completely different suffix). Occasionally polysynthetic means they sometimes took this to the level where entire thoughts could be compressed into a single word, and the suffixes used would sometimes affect each other as well

Reason? Some of the (if not the) only Orokin words with exact translations we have are the new names the Entrati family give each other. They all have their poetic meanings expressed as sentences in English and yet end up as only 2-3 syllables, which really fits with a synthetic/polysynthetic language to me

(You could make the argument that these were actually established names and they're all just quoting etymology, but that doesn't sit well with me for multiple reasons)

As for Corpus!

They trace their roots back to the Orokin, but that's, y'know, thousands of years ago, so A Lot Has Changed. Most of the Corpus language has been artificially made analytic (meaning you don't slap affixes onto words most of the time but simply line them up one after the other) for sake of…let's call it ease

But they still retain traces from the old Orokin ways! They have quite a few root words that can still be traced back to their Orokin counterparts. With how obsessed they are with Orokin shit, I imagine Corpus-Orokin Comparative Linguistics is a well-researched field. Interestingly, despite being mostly analytic, Corpus retains some odd bits of polysynthetic behaviour without joining their morphemes together at all! Meaning sometimes you have a word that means "spaceship" and then you add a separate word that means "<- whatever that inanimate thing is is owned by the speaker", and suddenly the "spaceship" word has taken a completely different form! It's a bit of a mess

(I'm aware that this is also a thing that exists. Russian does it, kinda! But I don't know where Russian gets it from, and I'm telling this this way bc I do know where Corpus gets it from)

There's also some words that have held onto their Orokin roots so much that they still behave as synthetic/polysynthetic! Notably, Orokin has affixes entirely unique to specific words denoting high social class (to use them for any other words would've been a grave insult, and to use anything else for these high class words would've been the same. Unless you're high class yourself, then the first instance can be a joke). One such word has evolved into the Corpus word for "CEO" and retains synthetic behaviour with affixes entirely unique to it

The language has been carefully trimmed to become more impersonal. Not entirely of course, but the average Corpus is a lot more sparing with any words and phrases that aren't objective. They also rarely use diminutives and shortenings of any kind

We only have one example of handwritten Corpus (the John Prodman poster), which is such a neat thing to have! But the Corpus alphabet is clanky as hell to handwrite and I refuse to believe that even in an age of holo-tablets and combat-magic humans have abandoned pen and paper entirely

So how is Corpus handwritten? In shorthand! Shorthands are writing systems (not necessarily alphabets) made to be written as fast as speech or thought, and are usually Very simplified and contain many abbreviations (both official and personal) to achieve this. Corpus handwrite pretty much exclusively in shorthand - handwriting their standard, printed alphabet is more akin to trying to mimic a specific font or do calligraphy if you were to do the same in English. While widely used, shorthand text is considered unprofessional and private, and is overall something that a lot of non-Corpus aren't even aware exists (hence the John Prodman signature mimicking the standard alphabet as well. You want that shit to look nice and be legible)

Okay I'm gonna go rest now, thank you for your time

[ivakir]

MUN

Kasei, 21+, she/her; English is not my first language; I also roleplay on discord;

Experience: 5 years on Tumblr; 10 years on different platforms;

Languages I can write and speak: English, Russian, Chinese. 

The blog was created in June 2015. Everything I post here (writing, graphics) belongs to me. Don’t steal, or we will end on a very bad note;

I apologize in advance for being slow with IMs;

I am pretty confident with my writing, so you won’t see here “my writing is shitty” and other whining.

NO:

You constantly take a hiatus / move your blog / drop threads / etc - in general, you barely write. I find stuff like this very demotivating, so I usually unfollow as soon as I start seeing such stuff very often. I believe that you are a good writer, but I don't want to waste my time on a huge reply to the thread which is gonna be dropped.

negativity. Stuff like: “It’s hard to rp here!”, but meanwhile you don’t even try to rp;

your character always leaves the thread without reason;

you don't warn me that you want to drop a thread or you delete your starter without warning. You're generally guided by the "I don't owe you anything" idea. I think this is very rude and does not make us equal partners. If you have troubles with communication, then I am probably not your partner.

you are a fan of "I will unfollow you if you are not active for 2 weeks". I am an adult with a job and other stuff. It doesn’t make us bad writing partners if we don’t discuss our threads every day. If I don’t post every day, it doesn’t make me a bad roleplayer. If you can’t wait and your interest quickly disappears, then I am definitely not the partner for you.

Who I am looking for:

adult roleplayers who can come up with a simple story, who are not ship-centered and who don't get a heart attack when someone tries to plot with them and talk to them. 

I DON’T CARE ABOUT:

face claims, icons, aesthetic;

how long you take to reply (as long as you don’t drop every thread we have);

if your character is from cartoon, anime, game and etc;

if your character is OC or canon;

if you are multimuse or singlemuse.

I CARE ABOUT:

how you write, what you write and how you treat your followers. 

WRITING STYLE:

I don’t do those fancy lists with mains and favorites.

I don’t drop threads, unless they are very short and without some kind of plot. Feel free to remind me about the thread if you think that I forgot about it.

medium / long threads, start from 150-200 words; check out my writing style before following. Deep details + inner monologues + action + plotting. It’s obvious that I don’t write short stuff. 

genre: comedy, horror, adventure, action, drama. Depending on the tone of the threads, I may jump from one genre to another.

standard font, may adjust to the style of my partner (unless it’s something complicated).  I rarely use icons;

Some of my threads are plot-driven. We don’t have to work on every detail, it’s enough to have at least some vague idea. If you don’t like plotted threads / long threads, then don’t ask for them. I also don’t see a point in plotting in IMs if we are not going to use these ideas;

I don't think our styles will work out if your main goal is only exploring relationships in roleplaying.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t write short stuff. To get to know each other, I usually suggest to start from something small.

Don’t like starter calls / plotting calls / inbox calls if you can’t keep interest and you don’t plan to roleplay.

If your blog doesn’t have rp related stuff (threads), I will not rp with you on discord.

CHARACTER:

is not nice;

is not me;

is alcoholic and workaholic. But don’t assume that she is drunk all the time;

FC: Seda Bakan and Freida Pinto. Ivakir’s face was based on how I see her, so the in game fcs and art on the left is the closest to how I see her.  Links: artb,reeder; art; fallout 4

SHIPPING, NSFW AND TRIGGERS:

if you are here to find a new toy to ship with and then drop me two weeks later, because you have lost interest, then it’s a wrong place for you;

I don’t do ship calls. The only way to ship with me is to write threads with me. No threads - no shipping. I can hardly imagine how we are going to write a romantic story without any background.

Ivakir is a very hard character to ship with. I am not here to constantly write how our characters hold hands. One night stands are fine;

Writing smut is okay, but I prefer to keep such threads short-term;

Triggers are always tagged.

I UNFOLLOW IF:

⛔ I’ve tried to interact with you many times, but you ignore everything I send you. I usually unfollow six months later;

⛔ You constantly post negative stuff, especially something like “it’s impossible to rp on tumblr”, but meanwhile you don’t even try to write and keep threads. I am not going to chase you and remind you that we have a thread. If you can’t write, then don’t write.

Verses / AUs I have:

Fandomless:

Fandomless modern AU (poorly developed);

Fantasy witch AU (including modern fantasy and typical medieval fantasy; adaptable to magic-based world) (DEFAULT; highly developed);

Zombie Survival / Apocalypse AU (non-developed);

Horror AU / Evil Forest AU / partly RE8 AU (medium developed)

Fandom-based:

Fallout 4 (medium developed);

Final Fantasy IX (poorly developed);

Mad Max: Fury Road (under const.);

The Witcher (books/games based, show-friendly) (medium developed).

Kas, I want to write with you, what should I do?

check out possible plot ideas:

for witch verse;

for witcher verse;

for fallout 4 verse;

check out open starters (short); they are short, ALMOST for any verse and don’t need plotting;

check out open satrters (long), but send me a message before you do this

[valiantgentle]

HOUSE OF HALLOWEEN. an ashley adams one-shot. slightly au-ish, but technically post-season-one.

─ on halloween, ashley’s seventeenth birthday, she and the rest of the anubis students are dragged into a grave scavenger hunt, and alfie’s life may be at stake.

           Halloween is the best day of the year for three reasons. 1) You get to dress up as anyone you want to be. You want to be a princess? Wear that tiara, spin around in a frilly dress. You want to be a superhero? Remember that with great power comes great responsibility. You want to be a god from any mythology on the planet? …Good luck. 2) You get free sweets. Chocolate, lollipops, and M&Ms, oh my! 3) It’s my birthday. That’s right, 31st October is my birthday, and today, I am seventeen years old.

           Sixteen was an insane year by any standards. Joy went missing, kidnapped by a secret society and her father, and Nina showed up out of nowhere and became one of my closest friends. Then we had that whole Cup of Ankh thing, I saw actual ghosts, and also I started to call Jerome by his first name. Still getting used to that one.

           Anyway. It’s Halloween, it’s my birthday, and it’s the best frickin’ day of the year.

           “Hey, Ash, happy birthday,” Fabian says to me as Nina, Amber, and I sit down for breakfast.

           My roomies had already wished me the same when I woke up—actually, one of them replaced the alarm on my phone to play the birthday song instead of the normal annoying tone. It seeped into my dream and presented in the form of the pharaoh from those museum movies singing it. That was weird.

           Alfie looks up from his orange juice as I thank him, remarking, “It’s your birthday?” I raise my eyebrows, as does everyone else at the table. Even Mara in the kitchen stops and stares at him. Huh. I thought Alfie, of all people, would’ve remembered, what with it being Halloween and all. He said once that we should switch birthdays so he gets the fun one. “That works.”

           “What?” I ask lamely.

           “You forgot her birthday?” Jerome questions.

           Alfie counters, the confused expression replaced with a curious one, “You remembered?”  

           “It’s kind of hard to forget. It’s Halloween.”

           Patricia inquires nonchalantly, “You sure that’s why you remember?”

           Jerome glares as I roll my eyes. They’re really still on this Jashley thing, aren’t they? Just because he and I have decided to be more civil with each other doesn’t mean we’re suddenly into each other. Then again, they’ve been on this pretty much since he and I met, so I’m sure us being actual friends has probably just egged them on even more.

           Alfie downs the rest of his orange juice in a single gulp. “I’m off to school,” he says as he grabs a muffin. “Happy birthday, Ash—but more importantly, happy Halloween.”

           He laughs maniacally as he backs out of the room. The entirety of Anubis House (excluding Victor, who’s locked up in his office like always) follows him with our eyes until we hear the door to the house close. I turn around and question, “Is he acting weird?”

           From the kitchen, Trudy nods. “He was up before me,” she remarks. “And not for a snack.”

           “You know,” Jerome states thoughtfully, “I haven’t seen him with a zombie mask on today. He might be feeling sick.”

           Amber sighs deeply. “I know Alfie.” She’s kind of dating him. Kind of. “He’ll be back to normal after school.”

           Patricia quips, “Is he ever normal?”

           --

           The halls of the school are entirely decked out for Halloween. There’s a plastic mummy poking out of a paper sarcophagus on every corner, spider webs along the walls, and orange and black streamers hanging from every doorway. My own locker is covered with orange and black balloons and a ripped piece of paper that reads in a classic spooky font HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

           I smile as I push the balloons away to open the locker, but something falls out and onto the floor. I bend to pick it up, frowning. It’s a plain white envelope with the number 1 on it. Opening the envelope, I find inside a Halloween greeting card, but the printed message on the inside is covered up with tape. In its place are two messages—one written in English using newspaper clippings, like a ransom note, and the other in French, written in cursive.

           A Halloween Quest for Miss Ashley Adams! To find the rest of your message, locate Nina Martin, Mara Jaffray, and Mick Campbell. Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll get a fright.

           ils disent que les chauves-souris sortent la nuit

           “What the…” I mumble. I close my locker, reading over the messages again. Nina passes by me, smiling as she puts in the combination to her locker. “Hey, do you know what this is?”

           Nina looks at the envelope and shakes her head, just as an identical one with the number 2 instead falls out of her locker. She looks at it, then at me. “I know it’s not a birthday card.” She opens it up, looking over it before turning it around to show me. The French message on hers is different, but the English one is identical, just with mine and Nina’s name swapped around. “Okay, this is weird.”

           “Mick and Mara probably got the same thing,” I say. “We should find them.”

           But we don’t have to go far, because before Nina and I can even get going, the couple comes up to us with matching envelopes. “It’s so strange,” Mara says. “We found these envelopes in our bags during first class.”

           “We found them in our lockers,” Nina responds. “It’s probably Trudy doing some fun Halloween game for us. We’ve all got study hall next, right? Might as well see what it says.”

           “We just passed by the lounge,” Mick says, pointing his thumb that direction. “Hardly anyone’s in there.”

           So the four of us go to the lounge, setting our respective cards and envelopes on the table in the middle of the room. Mara’s the one that notices that each envelope is labeled with a number and organizes them in numerical order.

           “It stands to reason,” she says, switching around Nina and Mick’s envelopes, “that the message goes in order of the numbers. So the one Ashley got is first, Nina’s second, mine third, and Mick’s fourth. It’s a four part message.”

           “So we should each take our own part,” Mick suggests, already reaching for the fourth envelope and card. At the same time, he takes his phone out of his blazer pocket.

           “What are you doing?” Mara asks.

           “I’m looking the translations up online.”

           “But I have a French-to-English dictionary right beside me.”

           “But this is faster.”

           “You two are so weird,” I interrupt. “I vote for Google. I wanna know what it says. Nina?”

           Nina’s eyes are glued on the four cards, and it takes me saying her name twice for her to pay attention. “What? Oh, I—I have to choose the internet. Something’s bothering me about this.”

           My eyebrows furrow. “You mean the unsigned ransom note stuffed into our lockers that warn us not to tell anyone aside from the people we were told to find or we’ll get a fright, which I’m assuming means an extended hospital and/or morgue stay?” Nina blinks at me. Mick and Mara share a concerned glance. “Anyway, we all want to know what the message says. Off to Google Translate.”

           I reach forward and grab my card, already pulling up the search engine on my phone. “You know,” I continue as they hesitantly reach for theirs, “if we’re a team, we need a team name. Team Jackal.”

           “Team Jackal?” Mick questions.

           “The head of Anubis is a jackal,” Mara explains for me, “in Egyptian mythology.”

           “Oh. I get it. We live in Anubis House.”

           “And we need nicknames,” I remark. “I will be The Artist. Nina, you’re The Sleuth. Mick, The Jock. Mara, the Nerd.”

           As I look from my phone to the card, Nina says, “Isn’t it weird that it’s the four of us? I mean, separately, in pairs of two, it makes sense. Me and Ashley, you two,” she gestures across to Mick and Mara. “But the four of us together? It doesn’t make any sense.”

           Mick chuckles lightly. “Makes you wonder what the rest of the house is doing. I’ve got mine done, by the way.”

           “Mine, too,” us girls chorus in unison. Mick looks a little freaked out, while the three of us just laugh. Mara adds, “All right, Ashley, you got the envelope numbered 1. Yours must be first.”

           I nod, reading from my phone as Mara readies her pencil to write it on her notepad. “‘They say bats come out at night.’”

           “Nina?”

           “Uh,” she says, “‘But don’t be overcome with fright.’ Fright, like in the other message.”

           Mara nods. “Mine is, ‘A bat hangs learning somewhere.’ And Mick?”

           Mick finishes, “‘And your next clue is hidden there.’”

           They say bats come out at night, but don’t be overcome with fright. A bat hangs learning somewhere, and your next clue is hidden there.

           “It’s a scavenger hunt,” Mara realizes. I look around the lounge, noticing something odd on the stage. It’s Jerome, Patricia, Fabian, and Amber talking in hushed tones in a circle. That’s weird. I didn’t think any of them willingly spoke to Jerome. “Someone’s sending us on a scavenger hunt.”

           “Not just a scavenger hunt,” I say. “A Halloween-themed scavenger hunt.”

           “Should we…” Mick pauses. “…you know, scavenge?”

           “I think we should,” says Nina, The Sleuth. “I know I’m not going to rest until I get to the bottom of it. The clue says there’s a bat learning somewhere—obviously in the school. We should split up and search, text when we find a bat hanging from the ceiling. Hopefully fake.”

           “Let’s go, then,” I say, standing. I head toward the door first, my card in my hand, and nearly run into Alfie. “Oh, hey, Alfie. How’s it going?”

           Alfie shrugs. “It’s Halloween. Things couldn’t be better! What’s that?” He gestures to the card. “Looks fun and spooky. What’s it say?”

           I glance at the card. “Oh, it’s, uh, a card from my sis. It’s my Hallobirth.”

           “Hallobirth?”

           “It sounded better than Birthoween.”

           “Oh, my God.” Alfie laughs, shaking his head, and holds his glance on the group at the stage. Well, mostly on Amber, I assume. “I’ll see you later, Ash.”

           --

           I take the east side of the school to search; Nina’s north, Mara’s west, and Mick’s south. As I duck into classrooms in search of a hanging plastic bat on the ceiling, I ponder whatever’s happening. Honestly, I’m a little worried this has something to do with our Sibuna stuff. Like… I don’t know, maybe Rufus is back from the dead to taunt us on Halloween. He knew both me and my great-grandmother Lily Henry. Heck, they were technically siblings through adoption! He had to know we share the same birthday, amongst other things.

           But, you know… Rufus is dead. There’s no way he survived those sandflies. But also, what if he had a partner?

           Nope. Ashley, stop it. It’s not Rufus. Rufus Zeno is dead and he’s gonna stay dead.

           As I’m leaving the tenth classroom on the east side of the school, my phone pings with a text message. Mick. He says he found the bat in Mrs. Burton’s art classroom. I stuff my phone back into my pocket, pushing through the crowd in the direction of the art classroom.

           “Hey,” I say, the last one of Team Jackal to arrive, “where is it?”

           “Up there,” Mick says, pointing to the corner. Sure enough, there’s an obviously fake bat hanging from the ceiling, right above a painting I recognize as my own. “Found this paper in its beak. Have no idea what it says.”

           “Another language again?”

           Mick hands it to Mara, who frowns as she looks over it. “They’re hieroglyphs. I don’t have a dictionary for this.”

           “Can we see?” Nina asks, holding her hand out. Mara hands over the paper. There’s quite a few hieroglyphs printed onto it. “We could bring it to Fabian. He could translate it for us.”

           I shake my head. “No. The first message said not to tell anyone. I can translate it.”

           The three of them chorus at the same time, “You can?”

           I frown. I’m not a fan of the doubt in their voices. “Yeah. I can do this. I’ve been taking an online class.”

           Mara raises her eyebrows. “Why?”

           ‘Cause I was forced by my ancestry to participate in Ancient Egyptian mysteries in the place where we live isn’t an acceptable answer, I assume. So I respond, “‘Cause I wanna learn a new language.”

           “You might want to try one that’s being used in the twenty-first century.”

           “What, should I learn Latin, Mara?” I retort, my words coming out sharper and more condescending than I intended. Nina elbows me, and I sigh. “Sorry, Mara. What I mean is, give me a few hours, and I’ll have this translated. Every glyph. Trust me.”

           --

           I spend most of the school day subtly using my phone and the internet to translate the hieroglyphs from the second clue. It was really hard to do that without any of the teachers noticing, but somehow I succeeded in getting away with it. And in translating it. That’s right, Miss Amateur Hieroglyph Translator got thirty-two menacing, creepy as heck words out of those hieroglyphs. The Artist does better with pictures and numbers.

           Also, I’ve seen some of these before with our prior mystery. That helped a lot.

           “You’re sure that’s what it says?” Nina questions warily as Team Jackal crowds around me in Mr. Sweet’s empty classroom just after last bell. “Like, absolutely sure?”

           “One hundred percent,” I answer. “I know. It’s freaking me out a little, too.”

           You found the bat, now find the raven. Corbierre is not who we speak about. There is, in the school, another raven, and if you find it, you might just save him.

           “Save him,” Mara repeats, her voice slightly trembling. “We should tell someone now. Someone’s life may be at stake.”

           “Maybe it’s just one of those Halloween things,” Mick suggests weakly.

           “We’ll never know unless we find the raven it’s talking about,” I state. “We should find it first before we make any decisions to tell authorities. You with me?” Nina nods. So does Mick. Mara does so reluctantly. “All right. So it says the raven’s not Corbierre. That’s good, that means Victor won’t come tear apart the school to find his precious bird.”

           “If there was a real raven in the school,” Mick remarks, “we would’ve heard about it by now.”

           “It’d be all over social media,” Mara adds.

           Nina has her thinking face on. “What if it’s not a real bird? What if it never was? Corbierre’s taxidermy. What if we’re looking for one that was always made of plastic?”

           “What do you mean?” I question, not quite following.

           “The Mysteries of Anubis,” Nina states. Mick and Mara turn pink at the mention of the play (must be thinking about their prolonged-kiss when the curtains fell when the first act ended). But in that play, Fabian played a character inspired by Victor—complete with a prop raven. “The raven.”

           “It’s still backstage with the rest of the props,” I recall. “That has to be it. Great job, Sleuth!”

           “Let’s go!”

           The curtains are drawn when we arrive. There are boxes of props spread across the stage, but none of them have our prop raven on top. Nina orders us to start digging for the raven in such an authoritative, leading tone that not one of us pauses to verbally question why on earth all of these boxes are laid out so nicely for us. These weren’t on the stage when we were in here this morning.

           I throw a feathery scarf around my neck to get it out of the way, digging my hands into the box. “Monocle, flowers—does anyone know why there’s a lion mask in here?”

           Mara pipes up, “The school play the year before you came was The Wizard of Oz.”

           “Cool. Who was the scarecrow without a brain?”

           I’m about to answer my own question with Jerome’s name when Mick calls, a frown very evident in his voice, “Uh… over here.”

           Mara, Nina, and I drop the props in our hands as we crowd around the box Mick’s rifling through. He’s holding the prop raven, the one we used for the play, in his hands, but there’s something taped to it. A photograph of a smiling familiar face.

           “That’s Alfie,” I say slowly, reaching over to take the raven from him. Alfie’s photograph is taped to the raven we were told to find. What does this mean? Does it mean…. “Is Alfie the ‘him’ in ‘you might just save him?’”

           “Okay, we need to tell Mr. Sweet now,” Mara says certainly, sounding freaked out now. More than before. “Whoever sent us on this scavenger hunt has Alfie!”

           “We need to calm down,” Nina instructs. “Take a breath. It looks like there’s something written on the back. Maybe another clue that will lead us to Alfie or whoever’s leaving these.”

           Before I get a chance to rip the photograph off the raven to read the next clue, there’s heavy footsteps from the door. Team Jackal spins around at the same time to see that it’s the group from earlier—Jerome, Patricia, Fabian, and Amber. They’re talking over each other but stop dead in their tracks when they see us staring at them.

           “What are you guys doing here?” Fabian asks.

           “We could ask you the same thing,” Nina responds.

           Patricia’s eyes widen as she points to the prop in my hand. “That’s the raven we’re looking for! What are you doing with it?”

           I counter quickly, “What do you want with it?”

           Jerome steps forward and says bluntly, “Everybody, shut up.” The room falls silent, but he waits a few seconds to continue. In those few seconds, he looks across us. Then he concludes, “You got envelopes, too, didn’t you? Numbered one through four?”

           “Yeah,” Mick confirms. “You’ve been running around school all day, too?”

           Amber nods. “Looking for a clue hidden in mummy gauze. I need a manicure,” she remarks, glancing briefly at her nails (which are as perfect as always). Then she abruptly looks back up, pointing to each of us. “Wait, there are nine people in Anubis House. Where’s Alfie?”

           Alfie Lewis. He’s the only Anubis student missing. He’s the only one who didn’t get an envelope.

           “I haven’t seen him since first class,” Jerome says.

           Patricia closes her eyes. “The last clue. It said something about saving ‘him.’ Alfie must be him!”

           “It told you to find a raven,” I infer, raising the raven with the photograph of our missing friend. “This raven. With Alfie’s picture taped to it.”

           “Nina just said there’s a message on the back of the photo,” Mara reminds us.

           The other four rush to jump onto the stage with us as I rip the photograph off the raven, throwing the prop to Jerome. I turn the photograph over, my blue eyes scanning across the unfamiliar words. “It’s in Latin. Four parts.”

           “We should work on this together,” Nina suggests. “Figure out where Alfie is.”

           There’s four parts to the Latin message, and there’s eight of us. With us splitting into pairs of two and being assigned a part for each pair, it shouldn’t take long at all for us to figure out this message. Especially with the internet and online translation services at our fingertips.

           In the end, the message reads: One clue is at the seat of learning. Another is at the amphitheater of activity. You must split up again, but you will find him.

           “Whoever wrote this knew we’d work on it together,” Fabian remarks. “They have to know us personally.” His comment earns doubtful looks from the rest of the house. “I mean—look, they didn’t even start calling each other by their first names until a few weeks ago.” He gestures between me and Jerome. “And Ashley can still hardly stand him. And Patricia can hardly stand the rest of us. Not to mention them,” now he gestures to Mick and Mara, an odd pairing by anyone’s standards. “Who else would think we would work together to translate this other than someone who knows us well?”

           “That narrows it down to pretty much just Victor and Trudy,” I say. “I don’t see Victor taking the time to draw all this up.”

           “Unless he wanted us out of the house.”

           “He’s out of the house, though,” Amber says. “We just saw him heading into Mr. Sweet’s office. And Trudy’s out handing sweets out to the freshmen.”

           “Stop speculating,” Jerome interrupts, snatching Mara’s notepad with the full translation of this clue. “What does this mean?”

           Mara shrugs. “Seat of learning could be any classroom. I don’t know what amphitheater of activity could be.”

           “Well, think about it,” Fabian states, grabbing the notepad from Jerome. He taps his finger against the paper. “Seat of learning. Where’s all the knowledge in the school?”

           “Definitely not in our brains,” I quip.

           It’s not the answer he’s looking for. I also get a lot of strange looks from them.

           Fabian rolls his eyes. “No, the library! It’s full of books. The seat of learning must be the library.”

           “Great,” Nina comments. She presses her lips together. “Now what’s the amphitheater of activity?”

           It’s silent in the room for a few seconds as we ponder it. The answer comes from the person we least expect. Mick says, “You know, amphitheater is another word for gym.” The looks he’s given could rival the ones just given to me. Then he raises his phone. “I googled it.”

           “There’s a lot of activity in the gym,” Jerome points out.

           Amber jumps up from the couch. “Team Ibis—we’re taking the library. Since our team figured it out.”

           “You’re Team Ibis?” I question, perking up. Two important animals in Egyptian mythology are jackals and ibises. “We’re Team Jackal! I came up with it.”

           “I came up with Team Ibis, too! I also gave us nicknames. Jerk,” she points to Jerome, identifying him as the one with the apropos name, “Nerd,” Fabian, “Goth,” Patricia, “and Jewel!” She points to herself, taking the hem of her skirt and curtsying.

           I laugh. “So did I! I’m the Artist, she’s the Sleuth, he’s the Jock, and she’s the Nerd. Two nerds! Nerd-squared. What are the odds?”

           Nina lightly clears her throat and reminds me, “Didn’t you translate the hieroglyphs singlehandedly? Wouldn’t that make you a nerd, too?”

           “Okay, but I can’t do math.”

           “But you can translate hieroglyphs.”

           “Oh, whatever!” I exclaim, hitting her arm lightly. Nina pulls her arm away and laughs loudly. “Team Jackal—to the gym. Jock, you live there. Lead the way.”

           Mick frowns as he stands. “I’m roommates with Fabian.”

           --

           The gymnasium doesn’t look out of place to me. On this Halloween, it’s being used as a sweets hub, with tables set up inside and adults handing out sweets to younger teenagers dressed in costumes. Trudy’s here, too, dressed as a classic witch.

           “Does anything look different to you, Mick?” Mara asks him. “You were in here yesterday.”

           Mick narrows his eyes as he looks around the gym. Nina and I share a glance as Mara watches him intently. I know Mick probably has the layout of this place memorized, but would he really spot something so minuscule as a random clue in a room full of costumed children and the smell of chocolate wafting through the ai—

           “The footballs,” Mick interrupts my inner doubts. I snap out of it and blink, following his finger point. There’s a stack of sports equipment with gauze-covered footballs. “They weren’t covered with gauze yesterday.”

           “Gauze like mummy gauze?” I question.

           “When you say football,” Nina says, “you mean a soccer ball, right? I mean, for me, the American.”

           “Yes, he means soccer in American. There’s not an American football in the room.”

           “I think an American football wrapped in gauze would be a cool Halloween decoration. Stick some googly eyes on it, make a body out of haystacks. We did that for decorations one year, me and Gran.”

           “Like a Halloween snowman?”

           “Yeah, but made of straw and googly eyes.”

           “Nina, Ashley!” Mara shouts from across the room. She and Mick are already over there by the stack of gauze-covered sports equipment. Nina and I exchange an alarmed glance before running across the floor. She’s holding one in particular. “There’s writing on this gauze.”

           Trudy calls, “Oh, hello!” We turn, waving meekly at her. “What a strange group, you four. Would you like any sweets?”

           “Oh, no, thanks, Trudy,” Nina declines for all of us. “We’re just, uh… walking. Getting in some exercise before partying tonight—double the celebration, you know, with Ash’s birthday and Halloween.”

           I completely forgot it was my birthday until she said that. Oops.

           Trudy gives us a thumbs-up and grins before returning to handing out candy to the lowerclassmen.

           Mara’s carefully unwrapping the gauze from the football. Mick’s holding the other end of the gauze and she hands the football itself off to me once it’s completely unwrapped. I can see the message through the thin gauze—and even with it backwards, I can tell it’s English. Thank God, no more translations.

           “‘This clue you have figured out,’” she reads aloud, “‘beyond a shadow of a doubt. The final is nothing to write home about. Anubis is what it’s all about.’”

           Nina gasps. “The final clue—it’s at Anubis House!”

           --

           Anubis House is decorated for the holiday, too. Well, as decorated as Victor would allow. As in, there’s fake spider webs on the sign outside, and he let us place some fake pumpkins around the place. That’s pretty much the extent he would let us decorate the public areas—our rooms were ours for the taking.

           Team Jackal stumbles into the house, which is exactly the same as we left it.

           “Mick, Mara, you take downstairs,” Nina says. “Look for anything out of the ordinary. Ash and I’ll take upstairs.”

           Before we even get a chance to split up, a commotion from upstairs drifts down to us. It causes us to freeze where we stand before we run toward the stairs, skipping steps and nearly falling more than once. Bursting through the doors to the girls’ rooms, we’re met with the sight of Team Ibis talking over one another again, stood in front of the attic.

           “What are you all doing up here?” I ask loudly, interrupting them. The four part long enough for me to spot a piece of paper taped to the attic door. “What does that say?”

           Find the key and you’ll set him free.

           “The spare key to the attic?” Mara inquires. I try pulling on the doorknob, but it’s locked. “That’s in Victor’s office.”

           “I can pick the office lock—” Nina begins.

           Fabian interrupts, “We already tried that. The spare key is missing.”

           “Well, what about the attic door?”

           “We were just arguing about that—”

           “What’s there to argue about? Mara, do you have a bobby pin?”

           My eyes jump around the door area, looking for anything strange about it. I can see Mara in my peripheral vision pulling a bobby pin out of her hair, but when I turn my head to see that fully, something glimmers from the top of the doorframe. I step forward, biting the inside of my cheek. There’s something on top of the frame.

           “Hey, Mick,” I say without taking my eyes off the spot, “give me a boost.” Mick bends and holds out his hands so I can step onto them. He lifts me up long enough for me to grab the key. It nearly stumbles out of my hands as he sets me back down. “Got the key! Move, Clarke!”

           “Don’t stab me with it,” Jerome says, jumping out of the way.

           I push the key into the lock, turning it. The door unlocks and opens. “Team Jackal goes first,” I say lowly, looking at the dark stairs. “Well, me and Nina do. I have a weird feeling about this.”

           I can hear the rest of them following Nina and I upstairs. She and I are holding onto each other’s arms, the cold key against my skin. We slowly round the corner together before entering the attic fully. There’s someone standing there with their back to us, dressed in a long black cape.

           “Ah,” says the person in the attic, with a Transylvanian accent, “you have figured out my clues.”

           And they turn around. The face throws me and everyone else into a state of confusion and shock.

           “Alfie?!” Anubis House questions in unison.

           Alfie grins at us, showing us his plastic fangs. “Hello, Anubis. Happy Halloween! Welcome to our party.”

           “Alfie,” Jerome says slowly, “do you want to explain what’s going on here?”

           “And why we were led to believe that you were in danger,” I add, “when you look pretty not-in-danger to me?”

           “Oh, I was so tempted to put you two on the same team,” Alfie states happily, “but then I thought: no, putting my two best friends on separate teams was gonna work. Let me explain—I’ve been working on this elaborate scavenger hunt for months. Every detail, every clue, was drawn to perfection. I even tailored them to your interests.”

           Fabian stammers, “Different languages interest?”

           Alfie nods. “Yeah, that’s why I put you and Ashley on separate teams. I’m the one that put the idea of taking hieroglyph classes in her head.” I frown. Yeah, that’s technically correct. He more encouraged me to do it than outright told me to. “Mrs. Andrews helped me with the French clues, and Mr. Sweet with the Latin ones. I gave Team Tweedledee,” he gestures to my team, “the bat in the art room and I assumed you would take the amphitheater of activity because… well…”

           “Oh, because of me!” Mick exclaims.

           “Exactly! And I gave Team Tweedledum the mummies in the halls at school because of Fabian—and I’d hope you’d go to the seat of learning.”

           Amber raises her hand. “I found that one. The one that said to come here. It was in a pretty book on the table.”

           Alfie smiles warmly at her. “I knew you’d do that. And the hieroglyphs I found online. I put on a disguise and watched you all scramble to figure out the clues before coming back here when you figured out the Latin one. It was so much fun, you should’ve seen your faces.”

           “Wait a second,” Patricia says, and there’s a warning in her tone. “You tricked us into going on this scavenger hunt, made us believe you were in danger, and watched us run all about the school for fun?”

           Alfie nods. “Pretty much.”

           “If this is a party, where’s the punch?”

           His eyes widen as he steps back abruptly, bumping into the wall. “No need to pour punch on me or punch me, Trixie! This is a Halloween party. And,” he looks over at me, “it’s Ash’s birthday. I’m gonna be honest with you—I did forget today was your birthday until Fabian said something this morning. But hey, it all worked out!”

           I narrow my eyes, stepping toward him. “You…are so much smarter than I thought you were.”

           “Oh. I thought you were gonna say something about me being stupid.”

           “You are stupid, but this was also fun until we thought you were in danger.”

           “Hey, you guys would’ve pinned this on me the second you realized I was the only one who didn’t get an envelope and in a group. I had to take the suspicion off myself. So who’d you think it was? Victor, Trudy? Oh, was it Mr. Sweet?”

           Alfie doesn’t get an answer as we all stare at him.

           “Okay, so forget that I made you think I was in danger,” Alfie compromises, “and let’s get our party on! Go get costumed up and get back up here, because Trudy and Victor aren’t gonna be back for another two hours! Oh, and get whatever presents you bought Ash!”

           --

           Halloween-themed music and sound effects blast through some speakers set up in the attic as we dance around with each other. Amber’s dressed as (of course) a princess, Nina as Dorothy Gale, and myself as a pirate. Fabian’s recycled his costume from the play earlier this year (sharpie beard and all), Patricia’s a regular witch (no pun intended), Mick and Mara are doing a couples’ thing as Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride of Frankenstein, and Jerome’s a skeleton. Alfie’s Dracula, the same costume we found him in.

           Honestly, him being behind this whole thing was a plot twist I never expected. In hindsight, I should’ve realized it. He was so focused on making this work that he wasn’t very enthusiastic about Halloween in general.

           But good for him. This was fun, figuring out the clues.

           The presents I received for my birthday were perfect. It was mostly art supplies, but Fabian gifted me a book on Egyptian mythology and Amber bought me a bracelet that goes perfectly with my Ankh charm. The only person who didn’t give me anything was Jerome, which, to be honest, I expected. Although, he could’ve at least, like, given me a chocolate bar.

           I sneak out of the attic with my empty cup, planning to go downstairs and fill it up with water from the kitchen. As I turn the sink on, I hear one of the doors in the hallway downstairs open and close. When I switch the sink off, my cup full, someone says, “Leaving the party so soon?”

           Spinning around, I find that it’s Jerome in all his skeleton-glory. “Just getting something to drink. What about you?”

           “Wanted to give you something,” he replies. He steps toward me, holding out a small, Halloween-themed gift bag. “It’s your present. I didn’t give it to you in front of everyone because I didn’t want anyone to make fun of me.”

           “Oh, you poor thing,” I say sarcastically, taking it from him. “I’m definitely gonna make fun of you.”

           “I’m sure.”

           I laugh lightly, reaching into the bag. My fingers wrap around a long box and I set the bag on the counter as I pull it out. It’s a pen box, not one of those writing pens, but one for drawing. I’ve been on the fence about buying this exact pen for months. I didn’t know if I actually needed it.

           “I went to that art shop in town you’re always talking about,” Jerome explains. “They know you by name there, you know that? All I said is I was looking for something for you and they told me about this pen you’ve been looking at forever. Said you never bought it.”

           “So… you bought it for me?” I question slowly. I didn’t expect this.

           “Yeah. I didn’t want to walk around that shop looking for something I have no idea about. This was the easy way out. Happy birthday, Ash.”

           “This is, uh… very sweet of you, Jerome,” I say, blinking several times. “Thank you. Seriously. I didn’t expect this.”

           “Don’t get used to it.”

           “Afraid I’m gonna tell everyone the Tinman has a heart?”

           “Hilarious, truly.”

           I smile, shaking my head. I take his arm and pull him out into the hallway. “Come on. If we’re both gone for too long, they’ll think we’re up to no good. Happy Halloween.”

           “Happy Halloween.”

[chainsalad19-blog]

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Examination Automation With Selenium Webdriver.

Top Tips For Knowing Java Shows.

Produce A Junit Examination Course

Suggestion # 3: Chrome Devtools: Mimicing Network Conditions

Certified Software Test Automation Architect.

We share our knowledge with you via publications, article and video clip's. performance tester are presently trying to find knowledgeable examination professionals in Belgium. An overview of the examination training courses that are prepared for the coming months. Are you trying to find a solution to an examination associated problem? Our examination consultants provide guidance about testing in every context.

To request a customized training for this training course, please call us to arrange. As a Master Creator, Angie is understood for her innovative and out-of-the-box reasoning style which has actually resulted in more than 25 trademarked developments in the US and China. In her leisure, Angie volunteers with Black Ladies Code to teach coding workshops to young girls in an initiative to bring in more ladies and also minorities to tech. This Java shows training course covers a lot of practical suggestions rapidly in a fun way. Apply Cucumber & Selenium knowledge to Construct Automation Tests for Web Applications.

What is Java course?

http://sexneon41.booklikes.com/post/2983403/exactly-how-to-come-to-be-a-software-application-tester in Java is a course that will help students in learning the core programming concepts and equip the students to write programs to solve complex problems.

Automation Testing Resources.

We will certainly constantly treat your information with care and also based on our Personal privacy Notice. You are totally free to withdraw this permission any time.

Experienced test engineers of Polteq can support you in any kind of examination job in your company. Performance testen is a full-time function based in our Glasgow office. Gotten good understanding of JMeter and also exactly how can use this to my work. Łukasz was unbelievably patient despite the restrictions in working from another location as well as additionally after the technological problems we had on the early morning of the first day. I feel that the ambience that was developed despite the obstacles was friendly as well as allowed the varying levels a capability in the space to comply with the product.

IT's a 5 day immersive training course with considerable functional elements. , if you hold the ISEB-ISTQB Structure the sensible following step is the ISTQB Agile Tester Extension. . This is a 2 day option which covers the essentials of Agile and Scrum from a testing viewpoint. Would certainly you like to obtain our newsletter and also various other details on products and services which we assume will certainly be of interest to you by email.

Those desiring to raise their earning prospective as IT business choose to work with Automation testers that are currently learnt Java. Any person seeking project based Java for Automation Testing Online as well as hands-on technique ought to attend this Online Testing Training.

The 'Test Automation with Selenium' training was well arranged. The fitness instructor didn't digress from the core subjects and training materials even if there are much more feasible areas we might discuss.

Can I learn Java in 2 months?

If you plan to pursue computer science/engineering, I would recommend Java first because it helps you understand the inner workings of programming as well. Doing python after Java would help you understand how it makes things easier.

This site also permits you to inspect the testimonials of various other enlisted students.

Codementor has a fantastic collection of tutorial classes, language programs, and some important tips, which helps the beginner to begin discovering any particular course.

Java is amongst the very best shows languages to enhance your value as a professional in the IT world.

In this website, you can likewise find some beneficial blog sites regarding coding in Java and shows inquiries too.

Aspiring programmers or programmers can discover Java shows language cost-free.

Test Automation With Selenium Webdriver.

Cucumber is a testing strategy which sustains Habits Driven Development. It discusses the habits of the application in an easy English message making use of Dill pickle language. There has actually been experienced a standard change in the way test instances are created. Long gone are the days of creating inefficient, tiresome test scenarios. With the introduction of BDD, all teams are empowered currently to chat in very same language, hence enhancing performance and far better product growth.

For preferred certified courses such as PRINCE2 ® and also ITIL ® we deal with over 30 excellent quality companions to bring you the most thorough routine certainly. Focus is not an approved training organisation, yet anywhere suitable your training will certainly be delivered by one of our fully recognized expert companions. Much more skilled Testers will desire the Qualified Agile Tester qualification from iSQI.

Top Tips For Discovering Java Programming.

He wished to teach advanced yet a lot of us were not at that level. The expertise, perseverance and extensive knowledge of the topic in addition to the demo of several ways to resolve a trouble. Marnie was well prepared with test situations as well as pre-work, we got through a lot in our 1 day training. Its streamlined technique and its inept insurance coverage was specifically what I was looking for, I have actually removed a great deal of beneficial info which I plan to use on my current task.

You need to ideally have hands-on functional experience working on Guidebook Testing Projects prior to signing up with Examination Automation Training Online. Most notably, method hands-on and also boost your Java abilities for Automation Testing in a directed way, coding along via each video clip session whilst obtaining your hands-dirty. I hope this gives some value to people as well as helps those who have actually decided to add automation/coding to their belt. All the courses have a roadmap page on them, I've asked people to submit requests on those and also I have actually also included things I mean to include. I'll likely tape-record these classes as videos as well as add them to the Ministry of Testing Dojo.

Tip # 3: Chrome Devtools: Simulating Network Conditions

I think that assisted me to obtain a strong structure on the material researched. The training pace was slow sufficient to be able to refine all the instances as well as details and also do not lag. I would certainly suggest the training and would take one more course if there is an opportunity. I such as that all the product was presented to ensure that it was sensible as well as it was easy to understand. You have the ability to utilize what you learnt in the previous segment in the following.

[techmomma]

Speech Bubble/Word Balloon tips

Before I begin, remember: you are writing a comic! The emphasis is on visual storytelling, not literary storytelling. If you are trying to use your speech bubbles to carry your story, that is going to somewhat defeat the purpose of the comic. As a general rule, you want to keep the amount of text and dialogue on a page to a minimum. Lettering and artwork should complement each other!

Number of words

Standard DC comics typically have a guideline of about 35 words per page. That is:

Thirty five words is going to look like this, plus or minus a few. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but it’s typically enough to get a back-and-forth between two or three characters.

Word balloons with 20-25 words are gonna be a li’l big. For webcomics, honestly, I’d keep the words per page to about what you can get away with in a tweet (280 characters). Exposition can get a little lengthier, but again, emphasis on visual storytelling! Try to incorporate lengthy expositions into the visuals of the comic. Or find other ways to explain whatever you’re trying to explain. Get creative!

Formatting

Word balloons can come in a lot of different forms and you can make them unique to your story! Jagged edges, no edges, airbrushed, hard edges, you name it. But if you’re just starting out and haven’t gotten a feel for word balloons yet, here are some easy guidelines.

Whether working digitally or traditionally, getting your words down first is going to be tremendously helpful. It is much easier to configure the word balloon around the text than the text around the word balloon! 

Remember that, for western readers, we read left to right, then up to down. Arrange your bubbles accordingly! The first one to be read should be left and above the others, then so on and so forth.

Keep bubbles to about two sentences max. 

Your character can only emote once per panel; word bubbles should reflect that! Don’t try to smush two different emotions into one speech bubble.

Format text typically into a diamond shape. (Don’t extend middles too far out!)

But...

Sometimes this really is unavoidable though, so don’t worry if you break the rule. Just do your best!

Ideally, you want about a letter’s width of space between the edge of the font and the edge of the speech bubble (whether you use ellipsoids or squircles, like me).

But wide spaces can convey some neat emotions, like loneliness or sadness or forlorn or characters talking to themselves.

Should the tail go in the “corner” or center of the bubble? Good question! This is debated pretty frequently in webcomics, but typically, so long as you use the center or corner closest to the character and the tail is pointing to their mouth, you should be fine.

But hey, speaking of that tail, how long to make it? About halfway between the bubble and the character’s mouth!

Try not to overlap tails, it usually confuses the readers--but that can be used to effect! Such as say, confusing conversations.

Curved or straight tails? Up to you! It can be a stylistic choice, though if you use both, readers will typically feel straight tails are more direct while curved tails are more casual.

DON’T COVER CHARACTERS WITH WORD BUBBLES OR TAILS. Unless being used to effect, such as say, a word bubble overlapping a character that is being spoken over (probably rudely). Usually overlapping word balloons will get the same effect though.

Thumbnails will help you figure out word balloon placement! Use the two-thirds rule, you will almost always have the space to put word balloons in a pleasing composition.

There is still so much to formatting word balloons. Fuck. But this will help you get started. Try to think of word balloons like musical notation! Big balloons for big beats, small balloons for small beats, little interruptions with interludes, pauses, etc.

Text

TEXT. What fonts do you pick? How large? Italicized? Bold? Holy shit.

Number one, pick a font that is either free-to-use-commercially or that you have bought the license to. If it came pre-installed on your computer, you’re typically fine, as you bought the rights when you bought the OS. But check to make sure! AND DON’T ASSUME IT’S FREE-TO-USE-COMMERCIALLY IF YOU GOT THE FONT FROM DAFONT.COM. This website has been stealing fonts from creators and saying they’re free-to-use for years.

But moreso, what kinds of fonts to use. This will depend on your comic, of course, but typically, whether hand-lettering or using digital font, you want the most basic shit possible. Don’t go for Old English fonts, don’t go for cursive (barely anyone can read it anyway now), try to avoid Fancy fonts even if your character IS fancy (this can be ignored if the character is a one-off and you REALLY WANT TO EMPHASIZE HOW FANCY). 

What sorts of fonts to use? Most often for comics, you want a sans-serif font. That is, fonts without serifs. What are serifs?

The little calligraphic strokes sometimes put at the ends. Sans-serif fonts typically have very uniform line widths that are easy to read. 

If you want to make your comics easier for those who have a hard time reading, such as the visually-impaired or dyslexic, choose fonts similar to those that have been found easier to read, such as  Dyslexie, Open Dyslexic, and Comic Sans! Yes, that comic sans. Other fonts that have been found easier to read are Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic, and Trebuchet. If you hand-draw your own font, try to emulate those.

For your comic, once you pick a font, try to keep it the same size throughout the comic. 

As tempting as it is to choose different fonts for each character, many readers can find this distracting. Try to avoid this, but if you are dead-set on it, pick different fonts that feel similar to each other or won’t interrupt the flow of reading. 

Phew, that’s a lot of shit..

All that said, if you have any questions or want further clarification, please feel free to drop an ask in my inbox! And always, remember that all rules have exceptions! But you gotta learn the rules to know how to break them, first.

[kokoronopikuseru]

Review: Pixelogue

A little late to post this, but I intend to share details and reflect on the editing of Pixelogue, in hope that it will help editors and organizers who need advice. (If you’re not interested in editing info, just skip to the last section)

Details are in Chronological Order -

# Software:

I designed everything from scratch in AE, with all the stock plugins. I had to relearn everything I used to know about AE; I last used it extensively in Pixelophobia years ago and furthermore, I wasn’t really used to the new CC interface. I had to seek tutorials for every simple effect I wanted to execute. It sure was difficult for me. For english speaking editors, this is probably your main tool if you intend to do simple video animations and graphics.

# Planning: Song Choice

I had intended to use a Korean Indie Track as stated in the collab details page. Sadly, the music really didn’t fit the music. I spent about 3 days rearranging the clips in every permutation I knew. I didn't really manage to find an arrangement that suited the clips. The unfortunate reality for editors is that we are usually at the mercy of the submission clips. I finally chose something Tigres’ described as “Shawn Wasabi-like”. It was a major challenge for my editing since I wasn’t exactly used to creating work that is colourful or cheerful rhythm-wise. I had to have major re-planning if I wanted it to work out.

# Editing: Draft

My process for editing clips always starts from arranging the combos. I used Vegas for this since, well, it IS a video editor, and it is pretty fast in processing clips. For learning purposes, here is the link of my very first draft (https://youtu.be/kRDwXTnxXGw). I think it’s necessary to spend a longer time at this stage, so as to visualize how its gonna turn out. And of course, to ensure that this is the flow of the CV you really wanted. By this stage, you should also have planned out the fillers (as denoted by the empty instances in the draft) and roughly how long your intro and outro will be. 

# Editing: Intro

I didn’t really want to make something too kawaii. But yet, I can’t really escape the colourful imagery I imagined the intro to be. I compromised and made something that alternates between some modern TV visuals and old school TV visuals. 

Modern TV; I was greatly inspired by those colour wipes that vloggers used for their youtube channels. It was one of those common and simple transitions that AE users exploit regularly. I found ways to incorporate it in a radial and a rotating wipe. The font animations were all plugins in AE that I found. I wasn’t gonna edit every alphabet like the previous CVs I made.

Old School TV; I took most of my inspiration from the adjustment knobs on analog TV. I found that it goes well with the subtle static noise in the music track. Hence I employed selection circles, and drew an actual knob (not sure if you guys realised that was what it was supposed to be). I also warp bulge the static background as well as the words, to emulate the concave glass distortion present in analog TVs. 

And in the final burst of images, I made the clips alternate between 16:9 and 4:3, just to show the juxtaposition between modern and old school.

I really hope people notice all these small details. I didn't feel it was impactful enough, but I guess these are probably cool facts for those who are interested.

# Editing: Combos

I always render my CV in a 16:9 resolution, simply because it IS more pleasing to the eye now that computer monitors are no longer square. My preferences have yet to change. However, with regards to the clips, I have read enough indirect feedback that the cropping wasn’t something that most people liked. I took this criticism pretty seriously, and thought it was time for me to hop on the bandwagon, to try the new-age style of CV editing.

I had to put in much more effort to retain a 4:3 combo in a 16:9 visual space, with an additional need to create a secondary background layer. But because of this decision, it gives me more freedom to explore options of panning and perspective movements.

I create a blurred and expanded duplicate of every combo as a background. I thought it was great that I could retain the original colours and give the clips a “floaty field”. No one has done something like this before, so it was instantly cool and hip. It also gives more room and potential to play around with the transitions too. Eg, fading the background before the clip (transition from Tigres to popte). Interestingly, all the backgrounds all have different properties, namely position, scale and degree of gaussian blur. The reason was really because some clips were seizure inducing due to their extensive movements. I thought it would be nice to vary all of them, which adds a unique aesthetic touch to all the combos.

I am pretty new to editing in a 3Dimensional Space and camera tracking. I was intending to do something as simple and fluid like Talentica Neue. Well, I learnt it wasn’t as simple as I thought. I had about 5-6 Parameters of camera movements, and frankly till now, don’t really know what each one does. I highly suggest for editors who wanna try 3Dimensional camera tracking, watch more tutorials and try simple practice projects. Learning how to utilize it properly will extensively improve your editing game.

Oh yeah, remember to use the graph editor for EVERYTHING. Acceleration and Decelerations have too much aesthetic value to miss out on.

# Editing: Outro

Because I have spent so much time on all other parts of the CV, it’s only responsible for me to put in some effort on an outro which I am usually way too lazy to make. Yeah guys, it’s important to make outros too guys. I used the same warping and television static effect from the intro to retain a sense of continuity. It's simple and nice, I liked it.

# Combos; (Warning: Difficult to Stomach) 

I’m gonna be a little too frank about this- the quality of combos I received were lower than what I usually work with (I love my UPSB submissions tho). I guess this is the huge downside of organizing sign-up CVs to an international community that is slowly dying and regressing. It was even harder when most didn’t submit on time. I had only 7 clips by the deadline. I wanna admit that I had moments regretting that I was organizing Pixelogue as a majority-signup CV. Some of the filtered combos either didn’t fit the style of CV (really sorry padrace) or was just bad due to the lack of effort. Mostly bad.

But here’s the heart of the matter, this might really reflect the standard of the international community. 

I’m not sure if I am the only one who feels this way, but I feel that most of the current international CVs can be separated into two groups, the JEB invites, and the rest of us. Don’t get me wrong, I do acknowledge the high standards JEB spinners deliver. But I’m not comfortable with the fact that they don’t submit better materials since their combos are guaranteed to be featured, and mainly because the quality of an international CV is often a 50/50 hit or miss (could be lower). Who can blame them really. Even so, their names are usually enough to make the lineup look great. 

> Pixelation was an all JEB sign up CVs. Pixelarium, Pixelophobia, Pixelography, Pixeholic were invites-only CVs, a mix of international and JEB guys. <

Most of my CVs have a JEB last spinner or a JEB dominant lineup towards the end. (coffeelucky 6th is also guilty of this). Clearly, you can see how much we use japanese invites as a way to boost the “quality” and hype of our projects. Yeah, sucks to admit it, but I am sure these are common sentiments shared with many of us international CV editors for a pretty long time.

Well, its not something I’m really contented with. In fact, I don’t like the way this becomes the norm. 

More recently, around the time I released “Express 12.1.18”, I really wanted to believe in us - the international community veterans, the borderline pen spinning retirees, that we can perform. I didn’t wanna believe that the international community was any inferior. I finally felt ready to edit something solely from our pool of people. I can accept that I don’t have to rely on japanese invitations to superficially enhance the CV. We have enough to make something great ourselves. 

I fondly assert that the international community does NEED this kind of confidence. Otherwise, we will always be second rated. Seen as the lesser beings. Y’all JapEn tiering meme-lords know what I’m talking about. I personally  needed this to prove to myself that it will work out for us even when the scene looks pretty shitty now. And yes, I did feel better after this.

# Conclusion

It didn’t really garner much attention especially when there was a flood of CVs being released around the time it was released. But I do love it a lot. It’s made up of familiar spinners that I cherish, good combos that I’m thankful for, and finally, an editing that drained my whole summer holiday away. Yeah, I do love it a lot. Definitely one of my proudest work.

[nihongolike]

How to Start Learning Japanese

Hello everyone! Thank you for 1000 followers. To celebrate, I have put together this post with various resources to start learning Japanese, or continue if you’re stuck! This is a long post, so hold on for the ride.

Step 1: Learning Hiragana and Katakana

You’ll never get anywhere with Japanese if you can’t read it. Reading sentences with romaji can be helpful at the very beginning, but the truth is Japanese is easier to read with kana, and the faster you learn your kana, the better. 

Unfortunately, kana is all about rote practice and memorization. You should be learning kana while working on your most basic grammar skills, such as learning to introduce yourself and greetings. 

Once you’ve got a little bit of practice in, it’s okay to reference your kana charts once in a while. Your memory will learn them as you use them. It took me a week to learn hiragana, and a month to learn katakana, but I still checked my hiragana sheet occasionally until around the time I finished Genki I, and I still check katakana charts sometimes, and I’ve been studying Japanese for two and a half years!

Here are some resources to get you started:

Hiragana and Katakana Printable Practice Sheets

This website supplies blank practice sheets, or sheets with stroke order information for of the kana. Writing is a great way to memorize new symbols, in general!

Hiragana and Katakana Drag n Drop Game

This game from the Genki self study room diversifies the way you’re studying your kana. It’s great to break up the monotonous aspect of learning to write in Japanese!

RealKana

This website was the main one I used to learn to read in Japanese. You can select any group of kana, from either syllabary for each subject, in any combination, and it also has various fonts to help you recognize kana in different type faces. 

Step 2: Get a Textbook

I’ve ripped pdfs of some textbooks to give you access to them. Please let me know if these links go down!

Genki I + Workbook || Genki II + Workbook || Genki Answer Key

While I know not everyone likes Genki, I learned Japanese with Genki and I highly recommend it. Most of the vocabulary in the books is useful, and the grammar lessons provide a mix of casual and formal grammar, both of which you will use if you go to Japan.

An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese + Workbook

While not a direct continuation of Genki, this textbook is continued the spiritual successor of Genki. 

Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese

This textbook is targeted towards high-intermediate learners and has excellent reviews. 

Step 3: Start Learning Kanji

Kanji may be daunting, but if you really want to learn Japanese you need to start learning Kanji as soon as you know your kana. Most textbooks for beginners offer a kanji section of each chapter, but here are resources to learn kanji.

Kanji Look and Learn + Workbook

This kanji textbook is a companion to Genki. Each chapter offers the same kanji that are given with the corresponding Genki I chapter, plus a few more. It also offers good reading exercises and lots of mnemonics. 

The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course

I purchased this kanji textbook in print and try to work with it as much as I can. It is an excellent resource, giving mnemonic and historical information about a kanji to help you remember it. This course is specifically designed for second language Japanese learners in the order in which it introduces kanji. Unfortunately, you have to come up with the tools to learn this kanji yourself. 

Stroke Order Information

This website will identify the strokes of any kanji that you give to it. I find this stroke order information very useful because sometime stroke order information in textbooks is too small.

Step 4: Select a Dictionary

jisho.org

Most people probably consider jisho.org a classic. It is completely free and available online to anyone, as well as having lots of search tools to help you find what you’re looking for.

Shirabe Jisho

If you have an iOS device, I can’t put into words how highly I recommend downloading this app. Unfortunately, this dictionary is not available to Android users. I hope they do come out with an Android version in the future.

This app is absolutely free, and stores all of its information locally on your device. That means if you don’t have wifi or service, you can still use it! This app came in so convenient when I was in Japan, as I did not have a very good phone plan there.

On top of being a standard dictionary, this app also have a LOT of word lists, various kanji lists, and stroke order information for all Japanese characters. If you are learning Japanese and have an iOS device, Shirabe Jisho is a must have!

Step 5: Practice 

Now that you have your references and your curriculum, its time to learn, and learning requires practice. Everyone has different ways to study, but here are some ideas and resources.

StudyBlue and Quizlet

Both of these websites let you make your own custom notecard decks with various ways to study them.

JapaneseClass.jp

This website offers a curricula of kanji and vocabulary to practice. It uses leaderboards and statistics to gameify learning. While I don’t use it everyday, I do log in to practice once in awhile myself.

Duolingo Japanese Course

Duolingo uses various strategies to teach basic grammar and vocabulary that may be effective if you need a more guided approach.

Genki Conjugation Practice

This online resource from Genki grades your conjugations of various grammar forms in Genki I and II. 

JLPT Boot Camp

This website offers various resources to help study for the JLPT, a standardized test that evaluates Japanese proficiency.

Online Japanese Tests

This website offers various online tests (also aimed at JLPT preparation) to evaluate your Japanese.

Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese

While I don’t follow Tae Kim’s course, this website is an amazing resource, and is always useful for a second explanation for a grammar concept you may be struggling with.

NHK Easy News

From NHK, this website offers the news in simple Japanese, with a lot of tools to help you learn. 

Step 6: Speak Japanese

This section might be more aptly titled “Use Japanese”. Once you’ve learned grammar and vocabulary and all the rest, it’s time to start using it in novel sentences. Here are some ideas to help you do that.

HelloTalk (App Store, Google Play)

HelloTalk is a language exchange app that is very popular among Japanese people studying English. It offers voice messaging and recording within the app, and has many ways to connect you with different users. It’s not always easy to make friends there, but getting a reliable language partner is always worth the effort.

lang-8

Lang-8 is a language exchange website centered around writing blog posts in your target language and correcting other user’s posts written in your native language. It’s a great way to get feedback on your written Japanese.

Visit Japanese cultural events in your city

If your city has a Japanese Association, they likely organize different cultural events throughout the year. Attend them! It’s a great way to meet other people who are interested in Japan, or Japanese people. Japanese people are very kind, and if you ask politely will likely speak Japanese with you, even a little bit. 

Find a study buddy

Even if you’re both just beginners, having a friend who is also learning Japanese is super helpful, and there’s lots of people learning Japanese here on Tumblr, just to start! Likely you guys will be able to help each other cover your weaknesses. Even if you’re making mistakes with no one to correct you, just using what you learn helps your brain store information in long term memory and hold on to it. 

I hope these. resources will help you get started if you want to learn Japanese, but are feeling daunted by it. So buckle up and strap in for the ride! 

As always, if you have any additional questions, please feel free to message me!

[birdicode]

Day 43:

I was scheduled to depart after dark, to reduce the chances of being seen. Alex and I drove to the landing site early, and watched the sun set. It was an exciting moment, but also a sad one. This planet has not been kind to me, but the friends I’ve made here have.

We positioned ourselves at the end of the jetty and waited there, car pointed back down the road, the inlet to the bay at our backs. We kept the lights off while we waited, not wanting to draw attention.

The stars, while still wrong, were beautiful. I rested my head against Alex’s shoulder for a while, trying to figure out how to convey feelings I do not have good English words for.

Alex spotted it first -- the distinctive shooting-star glow of a re-entering spacecraft, out over the ocean. Eventually we heard the whine of approaching turbojets, and saw a dark shape against the stars. Alex flashed the car's headlights, and the dark shape flashed a set of navigation lights. That was the signal.

I struck a road flare and Alex lit a second one off it. We dropped both at the end of the road. Then we got in the car and headed toward the other end, dropping one more flare at the curve two miles in. Having reached the entrance, and verified no one else was on the road, Alex turned the car around to point the headlights at the threshold of our makeshift landing strip.

The shadowy, blacked-out ship circled around, lining up behind us for its approach. I could see now that it was a delta wing ship, smaller than mine was, but similar in shape -- there are only so many ways to build a hypersonic aircraft. It was low and slow, flying nose high, its wake pulling streamers of condensation out of the damp air. A part of my brain trained by years of flying started to raise alarm bells about the approach angle. I ducked.

The ship whistled overhead, missing the top of the car by maybe a meter, and its main landing gear touched down close enough that I could see the tire smoke curl in the car’s headlight beams. The pilot clearly hadn’t wanted to waste an inch of runway. A braking 'chute deployed from the tail, and the ship’s engines screamed at full reverse thrust. It finally came to a stop two miles away, just short of the curve in the road, and throttled down. My ears rang in the sudden quiet.

In my excitement I started to run toward it, but Alex pulled up alongside me and gestured for me to get into the car. We drove up to where the ship had stopped and parked the car in a turnout. I walked up to the craft slowly, not sure what to expect.  Its brake discs were still glowing a dull red, and the air was full of the smell of hot metal. The passenger door was open and the boarding stairs were down, but no one came out. “Asterion” was painted in a script font next to the door.

A voice came over the PA, crisp and almost too well-enunciated. “Please board and strap in. Local defense forces are on alert, and I need to leave before I'm intercepted.”

I hugged Alex one last time, then I climbed into the cabin, carrying a backpack with my meager possessions. Inside Asterion was clearly originally a luxury transport, but time had taken a toll and everything was kind of worn around the edges. The door closed automatically behind me. I went forward to the cockpit to speak to the pilot, but it was empty.

The voice came over the speakers again. “I am Asterion. Please have a seat and leave the flying to me.”

I hesitated, then sat in what I figured was the copilot’s seat. I did not want to seem distrustful, but I wanted to see where we were going. I strapped myself in tightly, not sure what to expect.

Asterion held itself in place with the brakes as its turbines began to spool up, something I recognized as standard short-runway procedure. “I apologize in advance for what I am about to do,” it said, cryptically.

Before I could ask, the brakes came off, there was a howl of high-speed pumps from somewhere behind me, and I was shoved savagely back in my seat. We were hurtling down the tiny jetty road, the two red flares approaching at a heart-stopping rate. The landing gear rattled over the patched asphalt, and I could feel myself being shoved left and right as Asterion struggled to stay on the narrow road. Then the nose lifted, rotating into what felt like an almost vertical climb, and the landing gear retracted with a ker-thunk. I imagined the show Alex must be getting -- a silver dart at the tip of a long, white vapor cloud. Probably a once-in-a-lifetime view, for them.

Once we were clear of the atmosphere I went aft to the cabin, and as I write this I'm relaxing for what I'm assured will be an entirely routine flight. Spacecraft AIs aren’t much for conversation, so I'll probably dim the lights and try to get some rest. In microgravity, with the mechanical sounds of a spacecraft around me again, I expect I’ll get the best sleep I’ve had in ages.

Go to: Previous | Next | Chapters: Postscript | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1

[skullamity]

Thank you! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! Also the strange 80s sounding Night Court/possibly porno soundtrack music that bookends the actual alphabet part was so, SO unexpected it felt like being punched in the face, I don't know how to explain my reaction to it.

That font is also really, really neat, and I'm kind of low key sad that you've all moved away from special characters, especially in a day and age where they could very easily be added to press functions on most mobile and tablet keyboard apps that already readily supply Welsh autosuggest, autocorrect and special characters that the standard Canadian English press keys lacked, like ŵ. It would be so easy to make them a long press and swipe on the first "letter" of each diglyph on the base keyboard.

While I have you here, how do you feel about media that uses Welsh as a sort of fantasy flavour? When I started learning, I decided to replay The Witcher 3 and in that replay I kept seeing words like:

-an elf calling Geralt "gwynblaidd" but pronouncing dd as D (also the Duolingo Owl would personally come through my screen and murder me if I put those words in that order lmao)

- a dude with the word Mawr as one of his middle names on a Gwent card (we started referring to that card and also character when he showed up in the live action Netflix show as Big Cahir, I can't even think of him as anything else)

- elves in the background will sometimes mutter in what sounds like Welsh but there are no subtitles so my auditory processing cannot keep up with them

And more recently, Elden Ring came out and has a lot of Welsh voices credited on IMDb. There is also a wolf man in it named Blaidd (which they thankfully pronounce correctly), who we have affectionately been calling Moon-Moon because of how on the nose it is.

Does it feel weirdly costumey to you when companies that are not situated in Wales incorporate those sort of elements into fantasy games? Not even just when they get things wrong (which, let's be real if you have the budget for an AAA game title, you could probably afford to do some proper research?), like word order or pronunciation, but even when they do things kind of right?

Or is it just nice to see it out there, maybe getting people curious about Welsh, or even just talking about it on the official reddits for those games? Or a little of both? Neither?

It's weird seeing it from the position of having played one of these games before starting to learn and just...not even noticing, and just assuming that these were made up words from no real language until I heard them a second time years later with at least some cursory understanding of what was being said that I had previously lacked.

If that's too off topic or just sounds exhausting to answer, no worries, I definitely went off on a tangent there. 😬

As a Canadian, I have been doing a daily Welsh lesson on mobile Duolingo for 250+ days now, which is apparently long enough that Facebook, after spying on my app and keyboard use, has started sending me old video shorts from BBC Sesh while I'm scrolling through cat videos. In the nicest way possible, is your husband the Main Character of Wales? I can't go anywhere on any social media without tripping over him (and also now Ryan Reynolds, but THAT I have an explanation for and is less mysterious overall). Still enjoying muddling my way through learning Welsh since that first ask I sent you in the summer after reading one of your rants got me interested in learning a third language! Diolch yn fawr!

The phrasing of this had me howling, so thank you for that. Uh, yes, though, he's... weirdly a celebrity in Welsh AND YET not in English, which is a blessing, because Welsh speakers are very immune to the concept of celebrity and so don't bother us beyond the odd joke that they'll suddenly throw at him in the street like they know us personally, and otherwise we are left in peace.

Also I am DELIGHTED that I somehow triggered someone to learn Welsh! Are you enjoying it?? I hope so. Is anything confusing? I can try to help! Diolch o'r galon ily

[howlongshouldacollegeessay9-blog]

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[jgeistgraphicdesignhistory-blog]

Journal 5: Chapters 11-12

I’m an enormous Alfons Mucha fan so I was excited to start the chapter on art nouveau. My expectations were not unrewarded, as I got to see many other artists with similar styles that I found just as appealing as Mucha’s classic works. I particularly enjoyed Eugène Grasset’s work, as it reminded me of the illustrations in Andrew Lang’s Fairy Book series. (I have about nine of them, inherited from my grandmother.)

Art Nouveau architecture was only given a passing mention because the textbook is focused on print and graphic design, but I found it enormously interesting when I looked it up, particularly the Casa Batlló in Spain, designed by the famous Antoni Gaudí:

Photo courtesy ChristianSchd on Wikipedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0

If you look at the interior of Casa Batlló, you can see how Gaudí was inspired both by the natural curvatures common to art nouveau and by the geometric forms and blue/white palette common in Mediterranean and Muslim designs. Rounded windowsills and oval archways contrast with stark diamond and square tiles in a way that expresses a profoundly Spanish take on the movement.

In part, Gaudí’s Mediterranean influence in his architectures is a reflection on how regionally separate art nouveau was across Europe, with French poster design splitting in both style and philosophy from the German Jugenstil, for example.

Near the end of the chapter, the author wrote something I found objectionable:

The English art historian Herbert Read once suggested that the life of any art movement is like that of a flower. A budding in the hands of a small number of innovators is followed by full bloom; the process of decay begins as the influence becomes diffused and distorted in the hands of imitators who understand merely the stylistic manifestations of the movement rather than the driving passions that forged it. After the turn of the century, this was the fate of art nouveau. Early art nouveau objects and furniture had been primarily one-of-a-kind or limited-edition items. But as the design of posters and periodicals brought art nouveau to an ever-widening circle, far greater quantities were produced. Some manufacturers focused on the bottom line by turning out vast amounts of merchandise and graphics with lower design standards. (Meggs, 2012, pp. 228-229)

While it’s true that commercialization can often dilute an art style, particularly anti-commercial movements like punk music, the idea that a movement only has value while some dozen people conduct a moral philosophy again conveys the sentiment running through the book that art (or visual design) only belongs to the talented elite. Movements are buoyed through adoption by the masses, and if art nouveau hadn’t caught on with these so-called “imitators�� then it likely wouldn’t have deserved its own chapter in a textbook.

The image that most stood out to me wasn’t from the art nouveau chapter, but rather Behrens’ poster for AEG lamps:

The clean geometry throughout the piece marks it as a member of a new aesthetic movement, but the spinning circles around the lamp retain the curvilinear influences of art nouveau. I was surprised that companies didn’t think about having a proprietary font and style guide until AEG came up with one in the early 20th century. It seems like such an obvious way to distinguish a company’s brand that some font designer could have thought of it earlier.

Behrens and the Deutsche Werkbund feel like the beginning of the design philosophy that now dominates both product and web design in the 21st century, focusing on stark minimalism and function. It’s a good way to make something simple and accessible, but at its worst design minimalism can be cold and boring. I hope the Internet’s Baroque period arrives soon.

Source: Meggs, Philip B, and Alston W Purvis. Meggs' History Of Graphic Design, Fifth Edition. Wiley, 2012