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detailtilted · 11 months ago

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Index of Enhanced Edition Con Videos

I'll maintain this index in a pinned post for easy reference. Click the links to go to the YouTube videos, or click here for a more readable Google Docs table which includes these links plus a tab noting which events I skipped, temporarily or permanently, and why.

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:23:42)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jensen Solo (00:21:55)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:29:44)

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Main Panel (00:38:24)

2008-07-27, San Diego Comic Con - SPN Panel (00:50:52)

2008-11-16, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:26:16)

2008-11-16, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:26:20)

2008-11-16, Chicago - J2 Main Panel (00:35:04)

2008-11-16, Chicago - Jensen Solo (00:34:36)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - J3 Breakfast (00:31:53)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - Jensen Solo (00:27:17)

2009-08-30, Vancouver - J2 Main Panel (00:30:25)

2009-11-15, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:32:24)

2009-11-15, Chicago - J2 Main Panel (01:08:50)

2010-10-10, Chicago - Mishalecki Breakfast (00:32:48)

2010-10-10, Chicago - Misha Solo Panel (00:24:22)

2010-10-10, Chicago - Mishalecki Main Panel (00:29:33)

I'm now working on the J2M panel from the Chicago 2010 convention.

Thank you to everyone who has shown an interest in these videos. The reblogs and likes all made me very happy, and I especially appreciated the kind comments some of you left in your reblog text and tags. I'm unsure of the proper Tumblr way to respond directly to that in a way that won't annoy people, but I've definitely noticed and appreciated it!

An explanation of this project and my tentative plans for it are listed below the break. A lot of it will be familiar if you've read my earlier posts, but it's more detailed -- and excessively long! There's also some info on how you can help, especially if you have any old videos or audio files that you'd be willing to contribute.

Why Do You Call These "Enhanced Editions"?

The videos I'm using are not my own, but I've spent many hours adding enhancements to them. My goal is to make these the most watchable and accessible versions of these older convention panels published to date. Credit and links to the original videos are in the video descriptions. These are the typical enhancements you'll see:

I'm upscaling the videos as best I can. It isn't remotely perfect, but it's a little more watchable than the originals. The videos I'm working with are very low quality by today's standards. and they were also recorded under difficult circumstances. Video taking wasn't permitted at most of the earlier cons, so the people who took them did so at the risk of getting kicked out. They couldn't exactly come waltzing in with a tripod, so the videos are shaky, they don't always have a clear view of the stage, and sometimes they cut off at unfortunate moments. They can be frustrating to watch, but we owe these people a debt of gratitude for capturing this footage because otherwise it would have been lost altogether.

When necessary, I'm correcting colors on the videos to try to make them look more natural and consistent. I'm very inexperienced in this area, and I don't consider it to be one of my strengths, but I'm learning.

The original videos are usually in multiple parts, but I'm editing them together into a single video as cohesively as possible. I may use videos from multiple sources to provide the most complete video possible, and I'll select the ones with the highest video quality and/or the best view of the action available. Sometimes I have to make difficult choices between the video with the best view (meaning a clear view of their actions and/or facial expressions) and the video with the best quality. I usually lean toward the one with the best view in those cases.

I'm adding extra content to help clarify references people make during the panels. The videos I've worked with so far don't take up the full width of a modern video frame, so I've taken advantage of that extra space to display the extra content to the side where it's less obtrusive. There are explanations for obscure references that are way funnier when you understand what they mean, plus episode references to help jog the memory for those of us who haven't rewatched the show a million times. In rare cases where I think it will enhance understanding, I'll insert brief episode clips that highlight what they're talking about.

I'm putting a LOT of time into adding good, color-coded English subtitles that can be turned on and off with YouTube's CC button. These videos can be frustrating to understand because the audience often drowns them out and Jared and Jensen tend to talk at the same time when they're together. I can't always figure everything out, but it's far better than the crazy, auto-generated nonsense that many videos have. YouTube can then translate my English subtitles into other languages, so this may improve accessibility for people who are less comfortable with English. The color-coding helps with telling who's saying what: red for Jared, blue for Jensen, green for the general audience, yellow for the current fan at the microphone, and white for other people such as staff.

If there's missing footage that I can't find anywhere, then if I can find a source that seems to have reliable details about what was discussed, I'll add static images with a brief summary and a link to my source in the video description.

What Conventions Do You Plan to Enhance?

I don't want to make grand promises that I'll enhance videos for every old convention, although I definitely love the idea of doing so. How far I go with this will depend on how much sustained interest there is from other people and how much spare time I have myself. My output speed will probably be erratic depending on what's going on in my life at the time.

My general plan was to start with the oldest conventions and work my way forward. For now, I'm focusing on the panels with Jared and/or Jensen since they're my main interest. I may temporarily skip over conventions that they didn't both attend, but with the intent to go back and fill those in later. If I obtain any mostly-complete videos of Misha's solo panels that upscale well, I may also do his panel if I'm doing panels for Jared and Jensen from the same event.

One big constraint will be whether I can find enough videos to work with for a convention, and just how bad the quality is. I've found that some videos are too poor of a quality to upscale. Since these videos are painful to watch in their raw form, I suspect people will be less interested in watching "enhanced" videos that don't include at least some noticeable improvement in visual quality, but please do let me know if I'm wrong. For that reason, I'll probably skip past cons if I can't upscale the videos, at least for now.

As I work through the old conventions, I'll make a good attempt to upscale the available videos. If I don't have much success, then I'll skip over that convention with the hope that I might be able to get some video files that upscale better. (See the "Can I Help? section.) After I make it through all the low-hanging fruit, I want to come back to those problematic conventions and just create a cohesive edit with color corrections, special content, and subtitles even if I can't upscale the video.

These are just my general thoughts right now but the project is young, so my strategy may change.

Can I Help?

If you have any old convention videos or audio files that you're willing to contribute, please message me! Maybe I can use them, maybe I can't, but the more I have to work with, the better chance I have of creating something more complete. If I do use your material, I'll credit you in whatever manner you prefer.

Even if your videos are on YouTube, I've found that the original files may upscale much better than videos pulled off YouTube. I think the videos were degraded when they were uploaded to YouTube, at least back then. If you send me videos that I'm able to upscale, I'll happily send the upscaled versions back to you for your collection regardless of whether or not I use them. (If you have any videos you don't want me to use for this project, let me know and I'll respect your wishes.)

Even if your video looks terrible, you might just have a missing piece of footage that I couldn't find anywhere else, or your video might upscale more easily than another. If nothing else, I might be able to hear something in the audio that will help me fill in a subtitle I couldn't figure out.

Likewise, audio files can be helpful even without video. If nothing else, they may help me fill in some subtitles. If the audio file is consistently easier to understand than the audio on the videos I'm using, I can also substitute the audio from your file in place of the video's audio. If you have audio of sections of the panels for which no known videos exist, that could also help me fill in those gaps.

If you're watching my enhanced videos with the subtitles turned on, please do let me know if you catch any errors or if you can clearly understand something I marked as [inaudible]. I can't change the videos themselves on YouTube, not without breaking the links and causing confusion, but it's pretty easy to update the subtitles because they're a separate file. It's important to me to try not to put words in their mouths that they might not have said, so I'm trying not to guess purely based on context if I can't tell with confidence that they said what I think they probably said. However, there were times when I felt like I should have been able to understand what they said but I just couldn't manage it, and I'm sure someone with different ears may be able to figure out some of the parts I couldn't.

#enhanced edition con video #j2 #jared padalecki #jensen ackles #sam winchester #dean winchester #supernatural #index

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aashiqeddiediaz · 2 years ago

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gradient text tutorial

This tutorial is for @ladynephthyss but y’all can have it too xD

We’ll be adding text so the final gif looks like this:

This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of gif-making, Photoshop, and coloring. I’ve only described the text tutorial in this.

Tutorial under the cut:

Couple things to note beforehand:

There is a lot of trial and error involved when doing any sort of text, and this is no exception! You might have to play around with the colors and the settings before you find something that looks good and readable!

This tutorial is inspired by the difference text effect in these tutorials: one and two by @anya-chalotra (highly recommend checking those out!), just done a different way.

This text effect works better on big gifs (540px width) that have quite a bit of movement below the text so you get that effect.

Find fonts that have bold shapes or some width to them, so you can see the movement.

This is my starting gif, after sharpening and coloring.

First, I position my text where I want it. (this can be moved around later, I just like to get an idea). Remember what I said about fonts? Try to use ones that are thick for this effect so you can see the gradient/movement underneath the letters. I’m using Intro.

It doesn’t matter what color the text is at this stage, I just do white text so I can see it:

Then, add a gradient map in the color you want your text to be. For this one, I chose black and purple. The more contrast there is in your colors, the better it looks. You’ll be able to change this later though, if you don’t like the way it looks.

This is how it looks with the gradient map:

Now, we’re going to go over into our layers panel, and where we have the white box (the layer box), we’re going to select and delete that...

...so it looks like this:

Then, while pressing Ctrl, we’re going to hover our mouse over the T in our text layer. Your cursor should show a white box with a dotted border. Press the T in the text with the specialized cursor, and you should get a dotted line all around the letters, like so:

(I’m not able to get a screenshot of the cursor for some reason but I hope the instruction made it clear!)

Then, make sure you have your gradient map layer selected, and press the layer mask button (shown by a white arrow in the below image - it looks like a white rectangle with a black circle in the middle.)

This is what it should look like:

Right now, it’ll look like some solid color (which depends on your gradient). This is because we still have the text layer visible. Once we press the eye icon next to the actual text layer to hide it, you can see that this is what it looks like:

(You can also delete the text layer, but I don’t, just because if I decide to put these two words on two lines, or change their spacing or whatever, I don’t want to have to make a new layer. I can just edit that one before re-masking.)

As you play your gif, you’ll see that this is what the whole movement looks like:

You can see that the movement of him lifting the glass to drink his tea shows through the text, too. Almost like a weird color X-ray type thing, where the lighter color shows on darker shades of the gif, and the darker color shows on the lighter part of the gif.

Note: sometimes, depending on the way your gradient is made, you might get text that looks like the picture below. Just hit the reverse button (shown with a white arrow), and you should get the text looking like it does above.

This is the basic way to do it. Now, we can easily edit this, if we feel like there’s too much purple and not enough black. To do that, we go into the gradient, and change the slider positions of the colors. This is purely an aesthetic preference, but I’ll show you how to do it below:

For example, I moved those sliders so there’s more black and less purple, and the gradient feels more like two colors only, instead of all the various hues of dark purple/gray-purple.

This is what the gif looks like:

In the gif before this one, the black was more of a muted gray. In the one directly above, you can see that it looks much more striking. So play around with that until you find something you like.

It still doesn’t look very visible to me, so I’m going to add a drop shadow underneath (again, this is a preference thing). You’d do it just like you would with a regular text layer. Right click the Gradient Map layer and select Blending Options. Add a drop shadow.

This is what mine looks like:

And that’s it! You can keep playing around with the whole thing until you’re happy with it. You can even keep changing the color, and the great thing about that is you’ll be able to preview it as you change it to see what works with your scene. For example, I tried white and black text here:

And that’s it! Feel free to drop me an ask if anything’s confusing! Happy giffing!

#zee's tutorials #tutorials #gif tutorial #typography #gradient text #photoshop tutorial #resources #ps help #dailyresources #completeresources #itsphotoshop #allresources #dailypsd #userisha #userdahlias #alielook

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ladyteelia · 11 months ago

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Still working on this but some alphabets for Mandatory!

Feline or Cats Scratch - is indented, so anyone can read it even without sight as long as they can touch since it's the clawmarks in the parchment that makes it readable, text is on textured rollers or haptic screens for monitors so they can read messages from their supervisors or the council. To become a Median you must have some knowledge of Cat Scratch and Cats Tongue to become verified and be given your handle.

Media's Type is directly related to Cats Scratch, but is designed for the computers and haptics, all Medians must learn this.

Avian or Birds Peck - works similarly and is both pecked and clawed, so there's more openness on interpretation of the letters but it's easier to do with a talon.

Primates Sign is written and signed often, it is the least used in Media but was made for ease of having an alphabet in Deviate. They also have a short-hand which is intensely more complicated but shortens sentences significantly. I may make it in the future or have it cameo in the comic!

Weasel's Claw is a new edition and is done with their finger tips and entire paw print for each letter, a much bigger font for some, not so much for ermines.

Canines Dig is the simplest, but can be the hardest to understand.

Each is referenced or inspired by certain alphabets to keep it mildly educational to myself and it's really fun so far! c:

#strong hearts are mandatory #mandatory #ocs #alphabet #alphabets #fonts #font

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evilliousunderground · 8 months ago

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Detail from "Miniature garden girl" official PV that hasn't been noticed for almost 16 years!

Official PV of "Miniature Garden Girl" was released on July 3, 2008, and has a lot of illustrations, not only Suzunosuke's. And there is this illustration among another ones that appears between 03:03 and 03:19 :

By the way, curiously, Michelle's arms in this art are placed the same way as Eva's in "Moonlit Bear" PV, that was released on the same date as "Miniature Garden Girl" song (but not clip) — June 22, but a year apart.

The fact is that the background of this illustration is text in English. What's it about? Well, it isn't "Lorem ipsum", and that's all able to know. If the illustration will be edited by right way, only some of the letters will be readable, the rest is unreadable not so much because of the quality, but because of the outline of Michelle's profile.

So, these are all words those are able to read:

my thought ... (will?) no (... c_agens?)

(use?) my (eyes?) ... (remember?)

to... words (and want?)

As for any kind of (future?)

(reach?) you (sometimes?)

(...time?) (memory?) (together?) (some...?)

(not come) back (anymore in...?)

that that

(quietly a memory want?)

(and for height?)

quietly a (memory?)

(something _and?)

(stillness?) ... of a (wing?) feeling

(...stars) who (beg?)

millions of (years?)

(us ... impression?)

... (if?)

(not?) stop (we?)

As you see, the text is difficult to index at least because there is nothing to type into Google for getting any result. But does this make sense, what if the text is inserted as decorative feature only? Yes, the probability of this is high, however...

The fact is that the clip was made imitating the about Victorian or Art Nouveau styles, and yes, inserts in the form of text from English-language newspapers of the early 20th century are sometimes used for creation of pre-WW1 epoch. But here the case is a bit different: firstly, the text looks more like a passage of a letter or a novel, and secondly, the font used in the background looks like a font from a simple HTML page, without the serifs mandatory for newspapers of more than a century ago. Yes, the lack of serifs can be explained by resolution, but if they were really there, it would be even more difficult to read with such quality. Another thing to point out is the "that that", which looks like an obvious typo or machine translation error from 2008, which raises two questions: where did the text come from, and, if the text was made up by mothy or the illustration author, where is Japanese original?

However, knowing that the canon of EC was changed a long time ago, this is already of archaeological interest. But it doesn't cancel the fact that no one paid attention to this detail for more than 1,5 decades.

#evillious #evillious chronicles #mothy #akuno-p #悪ノp

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cyclesprefectpress · 7 months ago

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[image description: 8 photos of a letterpress broadside printed from handset type and a linoleum block illustration. the poem is titled The Interview, written by a young poet for the 2024 edition of Words of Courage. the poet answers questions like what musical instrument, or animal, or color would you like to be. they would be an Afuche Cabasa, a tarantula, and the sound of a bird being eaten by a tarantula. printed from lead type, handset in Motto and Neuland; illustrated in pink, red, and blue is a tarantula playing the Afuche Cabasa. there are motion lines embossed out of the sheet for the shaking effect of the percussion. full text under the cut. end description.]

behold my abominable contribution to this year's Words of Courage publication 🎉🎉

WoC is a yearly publication of poetry broadsides written by patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and designed, printed, and bound into portfolios by local letterpress & book artists. this year’s whole edition will be scanned and posted there in a couple weeks & previous years are always there to see!

knew that i wanted this one immediately; this kid is SO cool and funny. personally i am deeply arachnophobic and have been doing some spider illustrations as exposure therapy. so far no discernible effect!! still very afraid of em. don't like to see em. research phase is a horror. but i am getting better at drawing them.

the Neuland for the sound effect was a no-brainer to me, plus i knew i would be varying the size and we have the original hand-cut stuff so each size of the face has little differences in the letter forms that you can spot. that little change in angle on the Cs, i love it so so much.

i didn't want to make the spider a cartoon. this reach for the skies pose is a real thing tarantulas do as a defensive back-off posture, so i was aiming for more of a posterized-from-photograph feel on the linocuts. reduction cut for the pink and red passes, separate block for the blue. the little bit of wobbly registration between the red and blue blocks helps the posterization feel, and some people also said it reminded them of riso, which i thought was very neat.

thought about printing the motion lines from rule as well, but it's a lot of text and i wanted it to stay very readable. so i made an embossing jig out of masking tape and hand-scored each of the lines into the edition instead. easy! well. simple anyway. 100 of em does strain the wrist so i only did a few at a time over a couple days. i finished a little ahead of schedule and this felt less…stressfully complicated than some other projects I've done so I kept looking at it and worrying that it wasn't actually finished?? when i'm not looking at it i still worry about that. but i'm, hmm, when i see it i'm really pretty sure i was correct to stop here.

The Interview Q: Rio, if you could be an animal, what animal would you like to be? A: I’d be a tarantula. They make beautiful webs. Some tarantulas eat birds! Q: If you could be a color, what color appeals to you?

A: I’d be red velvet like the red velvet cupcakes at Cupcake Royale. I’d also be aqua blue, the color of hospital masks. Q: What loud noise would you like to be if you could be one? A: Definitely the sound of a bird screeching while being eaten by a tarantula. Q: Suppose you could be a musical instrument? A: I’d love that! And I’d love to be a Latin Afuche Cabasa. It’s a stick with tiny metal spheres around it. When you rotate it in your hand it makes the sound Chichichichichichichichi. Q: Rio, can you imagine having wheels? A: I can! I’d be a buggy. I ride the hospital buggies every day when I’m here. They make me feel happy and fast! And wanting to go! Go!

#finished works #poetry #letterpress #handset type #linoleum cut #printmaking #broadside

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httpsserene · 1 year ago

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what's good my fellow f1 fiends. thank you for all the love and reblogs on let's go golfing w/ ln4 !!! a lot of people enjoyed the dynamic and my humor, so it made the effort put into it worth it overall. it was lowkey a bitch to make fit in a single tumblr post, since there's a ten photo limit. anyways i say that all to say, i need help deciding on my next next idea!

im working on one request right now that'll probably come out before whatever is decided here just so y'all know :), pls send me more requests

oh! i also plan to do a few kinktober posts! idk how many or when i'll post them, i've also never written smut before so it's a good time to try and get some feedback

so if you want to be added to a kinktober taglist lmk!

but all the possible ideas listed in this poll below are non-kinktober fics, just regular posts that will have a few requests and kinktober fics sprinkled in between!

my singular anon, u know who u are, i promise you this fic will be out by monday! i just gotta finish the ending, and edit it to be readable

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divineerdrick · 2 months ago

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Warhammer 40,000 Balance Update for October 16, 2024 - Munitorum Field Manual and Errata for Xenos Factions

After writing, I decided to split this document up into the super factions for ease of use. I've also changed how I format rules changes. Let me know what you think! Is this more readable, would you prefer a single post, or should I do a post for each faction?

Edit: The color coding for points changes breaks every time I edit it. To fix it, I have to go into the HTML and correct where it's marking things. I just don't have the spoons for manually correcting that much text.

Aeldari

Form their lofty perch, Aeldari have gotten to a point where they could use some love. While their win rate is near spot on, they're having trouble making it to top tables. And the players that are, usually run Ynnari. But will GW give them much of anything or let them ride until their Codex comes out?

Here we run into another issue. The changes are being made directly to the Index. This is good. GW should definitely do this. But do they tell us what's changed anywhere? Answer, they've put it in the document for the Index Cards. It's important they put it somewhere, but I really wish they had it spelled out somewhere where the changes are listed.

So what's changed? The standard Autarch now has the basic Captain ability as detailed in the last Balance Dataslate. That's an important change to have listed finally. For FAQ, we get another common sense answer for Wraith Guard and clarification on how to properly position a jumping Yncarne.

All Corsairs: -2 pts/model Falcon: -10 pts Fire Prism: -10 pts Shining Spears: -10 pts/3 models Warlock Conclave: -5 pts/2 models Warlock Skyrunner Conclave: -5 pts/model Wave Serpent: -10 pts Wraithblades (5 models): -10 pts Wraithguard (5 models): -10 pts Wraithknight: -15 pts

As for the points, it's all good news! GW really is getting much better at understanding what's going on in the game! The important stuff here are the buffs to vehicles and Wraith constructs. I don't know if this brings Wraithknights back to the table, but small groups of Wraithguard might be worth taking again. I'm not sure these changes will convince anyone to bring a Conclave on foot though. All of this is good news for Eldar players!

Drukhari

The article warned that nerfs are incoming. Still I hope they only get a love tap. Their rankings are greatly bolstered by skilled faction specialists. No one is currently running out and buying up Drukhari models because the faction is good. Granted if GW successfully brings down the factions above them, there might be an issue. But I hope they don't go beyond a love tap.

For Errata, the Archon is specified as having its own ability, not Lord of Deceit. I don't think there's anything Drukhari can take to stack with it, so that shouldn't be an issue. My guess is the team is considering changing Lord of Deceit in some way. It is really strong. So this makes sure that change doesn't affect Archons. They also get a couple more clarifications for Pain Parasite, but there's nothing unusual here.

Archon: +10 pts Beastmaster: +15 pts Court of the Archon: +10 pts Drazhar +10 pts Hellions: -2 pts/model Incubi: +2 pts/model Lelith Hesperax: +10 pts Mandrakes (5 models): +5 pts Reavers (3 models): +5 pts

Yeah there's a lot there. I think that's a whole unit gone from many Drukhari lists. We also see that GW is continuing to recognize that some MSU spam is just really good. This really is a good thing, and may be slowly turning me around on purchasing units in bricks. But it sucks when you're already really nerfing an army.

Drukhari could be hurting.

Genestealer Cults

I'm about to say something that might shock some of you. I honestly don't think GSC is doing that badly. They've actually got solid numbers, though this come from the fact they're a niche faction with skilled specialists. But I think that's okay. I think it's okay for some factions to be there for the fans and require a little skill to play. It's very obvious that while GSC can struggle in match ups, you can get results with them. What they mostly need is internal balance, and I think that will come to rules.

For errata and FAQ we get a revision that makes sure you take a GSC model as your Warlord in the Brood Brothers detachment. We get a common play clarification for Tunnel Crawlers, but a very interesting clarification for Brood Brother Kasrkin. Despite not having the Voice of Command Army Rule, Kasrkin can still give themselves orders. That makes them a much more powerful and versatile unit in the Brood Brothers detachment. Still not sure that's enough to make that detachment even close to good, but it's interesting at least.

Abberants (5 models): -15 pts All Acolyte Hybrids: -1 pts/model Acolyte Iconward: -10 pts Atalan Jackals: -2 pts/model Benefictus: -10 pts Jackal Alphus: -5 pts Neophyte Hybrids: -5 pts/10 models Patriarch: -10 pts Primus: -10 pts Outlander Claw: - Serpentine Tactics: -5 pts

Oh boy! Christmas just came early for my cults! Still, I'm actually going to say these aren't the best changes. A lot of these changes benefit Outlander Claw, the Mad Max style detachment. And that is currently the best GSC detachment and my personal favorite. While the other detachments will love these changes too, I'm worried that Outlander is going to become the only way to play GSC. There's already a Wolf Jail like list running around the scene, and no one likes dealing with that list. The only good news is I doubt this is going to bring a huge flood of players to the faction spamming toxic bike lists. So while GSC isn't going to become a problem, it's only going to be a rare problem list that will frustrate players now and then.

Leagues of Votann

The Kin are another force that looks good from win rates but is actually struggling quite a bit. Like Death Guard, the Leagues struggle to secure the points they need at mid boards and up. This will hopefully get better if GW continues to get them new units, as their roster is still quite small. But for now, points aren't really the answer here.

FAQ wise we only get a timing clarification for Grudge tokens. And points don't have much either.

Einhyr Hearthguard (5 models): -10 pts Hernkyn Yaegirs: +10 pts

Okay. Yaegirs probably did need to go up, but I'm not sure this was the time for it. With so many other factions that are performing better getting all buffs, this is bad news for the Kin.

Necrons

After a brief stint as our metal overlords, Necrons have shifted to a pretty good spot. The main thing they need is some internal balance for their Detachments, and I don't think points will do that. Hypercrypt is just such a strong way to play the faction. Nerfing the models in the Hypercrypt builds threatens to drop Necrons too low. I think maybe only the Monolith can take a nerf without too much interference.

For Errata we start out with some Keyword fixes. Obeisance now benefits all Nobles and not just Overlords. And the Silent King is now officially part of the Triarch! However Plasmancers have had their ability to target Lone Operatives removed. So it's not all good news there. The FAQs are just common play clarifications too.

Annihilation Barge: -10 pts Catacomb Command Barge: -10 pts Deathmarks: +1 pts/model Doomsday Arc: -10 pts Lokhust Destroyers (1 model): +5 pts Lokhust Heavy Destroyers: +5 pts/model Monolith: +25 pts Obelisk: -25 pts Tesseract Vault: +25 pts Triarch Praetorians: -4 pts/model Triarch Stalker: -15 pts

That's a lot of shifting things around, and it's going to take me a moment to dissect it. As predicted, they bumped up the Monolith and Tesseract Vault with it, though I don't think many players were taking the latter or that it could be used as substitute. The dropped the cost on the Obelisk, but I don't think anyone's gonna try it out. Points aren't the problem there. My biggest problem here is Destroyers. While Hypercrypt did often take them, so did all the struggling detachments as well. And while faction specialists are going to experiment, I don't think these changes are enough to make Obeisance Phalanx really viable.

Things could be getting bumpy again for the Necrons.

Orks

As was said earlier, Orks are not in a good spot. While the nerfs they took didn't seem all that severe, they turned out to be nerfs to pillars that were holding the faction up. Since then, Orks have fallen hard and are the worst faction that has actual rules or isn't competing for its own players. And they're likely going to need a lot to rise back up.

The first big change is a clarification change to many rules that might help with some timing issues and future proofing. All or most rules active when you call the Waaagh now read they are active while the Waaagh is active for your army. This means if they change the timing on calling the Waaagh, as many Ork players would like, you wouldn't lose these buffs during your opponent's turn if you went second. While this looks like it might be nerf to Bully Boyz, the FAQ specifies that their abilities still work. We also get an FAQ the clarifies that when Snikrot uses Kunnin' Infiltrator, he doesn't count as moving for the purpose of Fire Overwatch. Though, he does still count as being setup on the board when he comes back down for the same stratagem.

Beast Snagga Boyz: -1 pts/model All Big Meks: -10 pts Boyz: -5 pts/10 models Deff Dread: -10 pts Deff Koptas: -10 pts/3 Gorkanaut: -15 pts Hunta Rig: -15 pts Kill Rig: -15 pts Kommandos: -15 pts Meganobz: -5 pts/model Morkanaut: -15 pts Tankbustas: -20 pts

And that is a lot of green, and a lot more green you can put on your table! As expected, Meganobz got some of their nerf rolled back. But a lot of boyz, including the popular Beast Snaggas, got buffs. Also, at some point the Gorkanaut and Morkanaut have to become playable as just a pile of wounds and guns on the table.

This is not going to make Orks into one of the top factions, but it should go a long way to getting them back where they should be.

T'au Empire

Tau are in what I'd call an okay spot. They're not where they need to be, but they're not doing that bad. They're performing just slightly above par, and only one of their detachments is struggling. They're what I would consider a textbook example of an army that shouldn't be receiving any external balance passes, so that they can rise up to where they should be when the meta changes. Internally, Kroot need help. But I'm not sure points can fix that.

The big fix here is to the Puretide Engram, which I think has been broken since the Codex came out? It now does something, letting you get a CP back on 4+ when you target the bearer's unit with a Stratagem. The new FAQs start by clarifiying that Crisis Suits always have a Pivot of 0" regardless of how you model them. Then we get two clarifications that, while they are how the rules work, are doubtless going to feel bad to Kroot players.

Commander Farsight: -10 pts Kroot Carnivores: -1 pts/model All Kroot Shaper: -10 pts/model Kroot Rampagers: -5 pts/model Krootox Rider (1 model): +5 pts Piranhas: +5 pts/model Riptide Battlesuit: +10pts

It looks like they're trying to do some internal balance, and at least help Kroot somewhat. But I don't think this is anything close to enough to make them viable. I don't think the other changes are going to affect Tau much, though we might see Farsight a bit more.

Tyranids

My beloved bugs have really turned it around with the Pariah Nexus changes. Despite losing Spore Mines, the changes to Synapse and Shadow in the Warp means we can actually get some damage now. That means we aren't always on the losing end of trading games. Neurotyrant with Zoanthropes also make for a fun and interesting tech piece. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them take nerfs, as well as the Swarmlord. Unnending Swarm could use some love though.

For errata, Surprise Assault gets some cleanup for timing and targeting. The Swarmlord gets the same treatment as Cypher, the Archon, and Ventris got, meaning it will keep its version of Lord of Deceit. Unseen Lurkers has been updated to the rules changes on Stratagems preventing your units from being targeted. Hunting Grounds, and all rules that trigger when a unit arrives from reserves, are clarified to trigger when a unit didn't go to reserves but was set back up on the battlefield. Rules that say "cannot arrive" on the battlefield during a turn take precedent over units that "must arrive" on that turn. While it doesn't specify, I do believe they can still arrive the next turn under normal Strategic Reserve rules. All the rest I believe are common play, though I was initially confused by the Neurogaunt/Neuroloid answer. But Neurogaunts specifically say that they have to be within range of a friendly model.

Carnifexes: -10 pts/model Lictor: +5 pts Old One Eye: +10 pts Pyrovores (1 model): +5 pts Von Ryan's Leapers: -5 pts/3 models Winged Hive Tyrant: -10 pts

This all seems fair to me. Carnifixes on their own got cheaper while Old One Eye got more expensive. The full unit still dropped in cost though. Pyrovores continues a trend as to how much GW wants you to pay for a single unit. And the Lictor has honestly been under-costed for a while.

I'm happy with this. I think we'll be just fine.

Final Thoughts

And with that, we have our balance changes for October! Space Marine players of all stripes aren't going to be too happy. Even Dark Angels, who initially thought would do well, will hate the base points changes in the Codex. Only Space Wolves . . . you know . . . THE ARMY THAT NEEDED NERFED THE MOST!!! . . . will be fine with these changes. Dedicated Ultramarines players will likely get something to work though, now that their Primarch is back in play. Sisters and Thousand Sons are in for a drop. Sisters probably won't drop too far, but, and I know I said this last time, I'm worried about KSons. Drukhari are really going to be hurting, though I'm sure Archon Skari will still find a way to win. I'm also worried about Leagues of Votann, Necrons, and World Eaters too.

Orks are looking like they'll start to rise again, but I don't think they're a top faction. CSM and GSC might be in a position to fight for the top spot. Wolf Jail is dead! Long live Jackal Jail! I also think Aeldari might have a reversal of fortunes too. The rest of us will only shift by percentage points, which is exactly what you want when the balance is this tight.

#live blogging #liveblogging #live blog #liveblog #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #warhammer #wh40k #games workshop #warhammercommunity #competitive 40k #wh 40k #40k #40k balance dataslate #balance dataslate #warhammer40k

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morrigan-reads · 2 years ago

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Some Freely Available Arthurian Content

in my ongoing endeavour to dive down the rabbit hole that is arthuriana, i've been in pursuit of as much free and easy to access stuff as i can find. (shoutout to @fuckyeaharthuriana's big list, which has made this way easier!)

i haven't necessarily seen links to everything i have managed to put hands on, so i'm going to link a few things here in case they're helpful to anyone else. (plus then i can come back to this post in a few weeks when i've forgotten which things i've already tracked down, i have gone to download jaufry three times in the past month, before realising i already grabbed it. this should help, but probably not.)

Free to Download:

Geraint filius Erbin: [x] no idea the pedigree of this translation, but i think this is the one.

Tristan (Gottfried von Strassburg): Part 1: [x] Part 2: [x] an older prose rendering, but check below for a more modern one.

Jaufre: [x] this has sweet gustave dore art (hence my trying to download it so often.)

Vulgate Cycle: [x] an abridged version of the lancelot, grail, and morte. an unabridged translation of the grail quest is here: [x] unabridged morte below.

La Pulzella Gaia: Part 1: [x] Part 2: [x] a fan translation. very readable tho.

Cantare di Astore e Morgana: [x] another fan translation.

Eachtra an mhadra mhaoi/Eachtra Mhacaoimh-an-iolair: [x] some irish stories!

Layamon's Brut: Part 1: [x] Part 2: [x] Part 3: [x] an older translation, but most of the widely available translations though more modern are only the arthurian portion.

Open Library:

so, these aren't free to download, but if you make a free archive.org account you can check them out digitally for an hour. just be sure not to read this thread on reddit, because it'll tell you how to break the DRM and download them permanently.

there's a tonne more stuff on there, and you can check it out for free! just like a library. i'm a fan. here are just a few bits and pieces.

Erec/Iwein (Hartmann von Aue): [x]

Tristan (Gottfried von Strassburg): [x] includes fragments of the tristan of thomas of england.

Lanzelet: [x]

Vulgate Morte: [x]

Lancelot do Lac: [x] an abridged translation of the non-cyclic lancelot.

Prose Tristan: [x] an abridged translation.

Diu Crône: [x] my fave, not gonna lie.

The Knightly Tales of Sir Gawain: [x] this is a collection of gawain stories (my beloved ladies' knight.) contains the carl of carlisle, the adventures at tarn wadling, golagros and gawain, the avowing of arthur, and dame ragnell - plus some more!

Bonus: Le Morte d'Arthur: Norton Critical: [x] Armstrong: [x] Lumiansky: [x] i know everyone knows how and where to read some version of malory. but these three are my personal faves. the norton critical is, by my understanding, the standard edition of the text. the armstrong and lumiansky are modern english versions, but translations unlike the retellings of most people. i have the lumiansky in print (because it was, like, ten dollars second-hand) and i quite enjoy it, and the dorsey armstrong is also very good (i haven't actually read it cover to cover yet, but i have enjoyed all i have read of it!)

i will come back and add anything new and interesting i find links to! currently trying to find a clearnet link to some dissertations that i have institutional access to through my uni that contain translations, and i'm actually working on some translations of my own that i plan on releasing for free somewhere eventually.

#arthuriana #she speaks #morrigan reads #reference

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chevvy-yates · 8 months ago

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WIP WEDNESDAY

got tagged by @aggravateddurian ! <3

again only writing:

Cyberpunk 2078 — Pandemonium:

Technically I can already start layouting the 2nd chapter as the written part is 100% done, but I am still missing some VP where I have to place Hizumi, Vijay and Ryder in the Afterlife and, ofc I am either too lazy to do that or I just forget about it bc I distract myself with other stuff (that also wants to be done). But as soon as I get to it you can expect the 2nd chapter! At least for those who are interested in it.

New pinned post coming soon:

I am about to make a new pinned post, yes it will be a brand new post but contain more or less the same my current one has. I just wanted to refresh my boys profiles, tweak the formatting a little and make them a bit better readable but they won't differ much from the current ones. I'll exchange the profile pics with given time tho as I'm not satisfied with most pics but have no time to throw each after another into the game just to get the perfect pic for it.

About Blorbos:

I am trying to sort out/clean up my boys' wardrobes. E.g. I noticed Thyjs has too much stuff and from every piece like up to 3 versions. I force myself to get it down to one piece, which doesn't work all the time, but I slowly get there. When he's done I'll have to do the same with the other boys thow Ryder is the most unproblematic of all as there's only one iteam in black for him in the first place of most mods.

I don't want them to wear all the same clothes unless it's basic stuff or shoes. I also try to get rid of most replacers unless it's stuff that hasn't been made as xl yet or need to be kept for color reasons and what not. It takes me so long because I also clean up my folders where I storage their original files as well sorting out those I have taken out. You know each of my boys has their own save file. I am also renaming some files to have a better overview as bru I tell you thjys is close to 300 mod files.

Chrome Chamber Rave concept:

Prepared some posts already but I am hesitating to push the post button bc my brain is stupid telling me shit I shall not listen to.

that's all for now. I promise next wip post will contain some pics or sth cooler than just text! I don't like it either.

tagging:

@astarionhistears, @nervouswizardcycle, @gloryride, @elvenbeard, @heywoodvirgin, @rosapexa, @streetkid-named-desire, @therealnightcity, @wanderingaldecaldo, @koda-shoulda-woulda-but-didnt, @breezypunk, @ouroboros-hideout and anyone who wants to or has to show something. No Pressure and if tblr mentions don't work, I'm not even trying to edit it as I am tired of it not working properly.

#wip wednesday #more like an update post rather than a wip post #but wll I just want u updated for those who are interested to read my brabbling #thoughts

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voiceoutofstars · 7 months ago

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Hi! How are you? I'm Bat ^.^I chanced upon your blog while trying to research some HSR lore, and I really like your data bank readability side project. Is there any chance that this will become another main project? Will this be limited to relics? What would it take for this to happen, for instance better resources, language translaton, or blog interaction, etc? No pressure at all though, I am just curious!

Hi, thanks so much for this ask!

Will this become another main project? Possibly? The primary limitation on the stuff I do for this blog is time and motivation. I really enjoy making both the audio stuff and the readability stuff, so there's no real reason to keep the readability project relegated to the back. Initially, I assumed that nobody on the planet would have any interest in reading what are basically just fan-edited lore of dubious quality. It was absolutely just a 'for me' thing. So, to be honest with you, just seeing interactions like this ask is motivating! I'm a bit bamboozled and heartily honored that anyone read this and enjoyed it. You've made me think "huh, I should be doing this stuff a bit more. There's somebody out there other than me who likes it!" Thank youuuuu~

Will this be limited to relics? I focus on relics because that's a relatively small category of often story-relevant lore that doesn't expand as quickly as other readables. Also, the relics entries tend to have a bit more character to them. Other data bank entries (like the Aeon or Terminology entries) are super interesting but (I think) benefit less from this type of readability revision because they're written in the same sort of encyclopedic format; relics, on the other hand, feel much more varied in their narrative voice. It was this chorus of clearly varied voices that made me want to try a readability revision in the first place. Having said that, if I were to finish readability revisions on the relics, the next thing I'd turn to might be the other in-game readables (or, possibly, the Memory Bubbles from Herta's station). Alternatively, I would be delighted to take suggestions. That's true currently, and wouldn't require waiting out my plodding progress through the relics. If there's a series of letters from Penacony or a missive from Xianzhou that you think has been done a disservice by its in-game text, I would be so, so happy to give you an alternate piece of disservice to enjoy :D

What would it take for [this becoming a main project, or for this to expand beyond relics] to happen? I am pretty restricted by my own limited language skills. So, I could certainly do more of these kinds of posts, but I'm not sure how I could improve the quality further without investing time I don't have. In particular, I absolutely can't guarantee the accuracy of the lore in my readability revisions because of the language barrier. (A thing that would be just the coolest would be...if there are other people doing this stuff? Wouldn't it be an absolute dream to have a compendium of readability revisions made by fans, all with their own voices, linguistic knowledge sets, narrative styles? This is what I'd want most, I think--to contribute to something of that sort. If you are enjoying these posts, then I'd like to ask you in turn--might you want to give such revision a try for yourself?)

In summary, I'd say this:

If you'd like MORE posts of this sort, every interaction helps! It tells me that someone out there is enjoying this stuff, and that makes me want to actually put forth the time to make more of it. If you'd like HIGHER QUALITY or MORE ACCURATE posts of this sort, that's a tougher ask because of my limited skillset--but I'd be happy to hear from Chinese speakers/readers (or from those playing HSR in other languages who notice clear discrepancies in their own data bank) who can point out specific things I've getting wrong or obfuscating further.

#ask #honkai star rail #fan revision #side project ask #hsr #readability project

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dudosha · 11 days ago

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I managed to edit a little, change the font (and even add something) so that the text became readable. I apologize for not noticing the problem right away. Since I was designing it on a tablet, it seemed to me that everything was readable, and then I looked at it from my phone and said, "Oh, it's awful." But I can't enlarge the text anymore, since I broke it in terms of atmosphere and meaning, and there are too many pages.

Please, if you are interested, use a translator. I was very afraid to translate, since I do not have the necessary level of knowledge to do this. Sorry.

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

Time to reason🙏

As for me, the Geto family is structured, even like a model Japanese family, but only from the outside, of course. Father Suguru, as the true head of the house, is at the helm. He appears to be a strict and reserved man. It is fundamentally important to him that everything works like clockwork. No mistakes (and if he made a mistake, then this mistake was made by him). The man raised his son with the same mania for perfectionism.

On the opposite side was Suguru's mother, who was always comforting the child after yet another conversation or strict lesson from his father. To entertain her son, the woman taught him to cook or quietly played with him.

This terribly irritated Suguru's father. How does he raise a man, a worthy successor, if his mother is always coddling him?! Because quarrels in the house were not uncommon. The boy blamed himself for this every time and vowed to one day become big and significant, as his father wanted, but only in order to protect his mother. It is necessary and follows that the sorcerer's self-criticism and tendency to withdraw into himself.

I really like the idea of Suguru's parents being different. Considering how sensitive he grew up. After all, living on "tectonic plates", they learn to adapt and determine by just one rustle. However, do not think that I am exaggerating and painting Suguru's childhood as dark. No, but it is a problem. I would very much like independence to show some codependency between the hot-tempered and melancholic personalities. And between their types, opposite in his emotional spectrum, Suguru was squeezed. It is not that adults did not care about their son's condition after their skirmishes, rather they themselves could not find an emotional balance, and therefore did not attach special significance. "A quarrel and a quarrel. Not the first and not the last. Others have worse." But the most interesting thing was how Suguru saw his parents when he decided to kill them. If they were more caring and thought about the consequences of their thoughts then in the child, this would have been a "stop" lever for the broken Suguru. He could not find anything in the "monkeys" except ignorance. Even in natural parents.

• Father as the embodiment of ignorance. A man's anger and inability to control himself as his "sins", for which the son will judge.

• Mother as a "victim" who will be a victim at the heart of the new world.

It is especially interesting that this concept looks like this in the twentieth year after Suguru put on his monk's robes after all this.

- You always protected me. So do it one last time. Let me protect myself from you

These are how I imagine Suguru's last words to his mother.

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That's all. I don't know what kind of impulse carried me away, but I'm glad that I was finally able to finish this part of my reasoning about the Geto family. In the process of writing my story about how parents learned about the way their son was raised. I'll try to format it and make it READABLE🫂

(Well, what can you expect from me, an ignorant monkey)

#geto suguru #suguru #thoughts #jjk geto #suguru geto #suguru headcanons #СугуруГето

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lingthusiasm · 1 year ago

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Transcript Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about when linguists keep using the same example texts over and over again. But first, have you ever wished that Lingthusiasm could be a little, um, less enthusiastic?

Gretchen: Most of the time, no, but we’ve heard some complaints. Actually, we heard one person once said to us that they tried to listen to Lingthusiasm to fall asleep, and they couldn’t do it because we were too high energy and enthusiastic. Many years later, we have now taken on board this comment and also, just for fun, we have made a [ASMR voice] slowed down, soothing [regular voice] version of Lingthusiasm where we read a bunch of linguistic sample sentences, some of which we mention in this episode, [ASMR voice] in much longer and more relaxed form.

Lauren: [ASMR voice] Get many soothing sentences of linguistics nonsense read to you.

Gretchen: [ASMR voice] By joining us on Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. [Regular voice] Plus, of course, get access to a bunch of other bonus episodes at the usual speed and volume also on Patreon and help us keep the show running.

Lauren: If you’re interested in why we chose the sentences that we read in the bonus, we’ll be talking about that this episode, so keep listening.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, can I tell you a story?

Lauren: Yes, please.

Gretchen: This story is about the north wind and the sun.

Lauren: Hm.

Gretchen: “The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveller take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew, the more closely did the traveller fold his cloak around him. At last, the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shone out warmly, and immediately the traveller took off his cloak. And so, the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two. The end.”

Lauren: A classic Aesop’s Fable. In fact, literally one of Aesop’s Fables there. But I know it specifically as the example text that people record to illustrate the sounds in a given language.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think I actually had an illustrated children’s picture book of this when I was a child.

Lauren: Because of your interest in phonetics across the world’s languages?

Gretchen: Yes, that is definitely why my parents bought me this as a five-year-old. No, I think they just liked the moral, “You can do more with persuasion than you can with force,” which was the last sentence in the illustrated Aesop’s Fable version that I had as a child. But imagine my surprise when, many years later in linguistic school, I encountered this story as a classic example text.

Lauren: This text gets translated into many different languages, and it’s read as the example passage of what it sounds like to tell a story in a language as part of a series called “Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet.”

Gretchen: The Journal of the International Phonetic Association – this is the one, I think, where all of the articles used to actually be written in phonetic transcription rather than in standard orthography, which is fantastic.

Lauren: Now they’ve moved to standard orthography, but what is also fantastic is all these articles that illustrate the way that different languages sound. You can download and listen to the recordings that are made as part of those journal articles, including recordings of a narrative passage, which is usually “The North Wind and the Sun.”

Gretchen: I guess it’s a relatively classic passage. It does involve personifying the elements, but many cultures do allow you to personify the elements. I think some other passages that sometimes get used as comparative linguistic passages are particular stories from the Bible because the Bible has been translated in a bunch of languages. But this is not great because people often use a stylised, formal style of language for Biblical texts that really doesn’t reflect how people talk in everyday life. Much as Aesop’s Fables are a bit culturally specific, the Bible is also very culturally specific.

Lauren: I do also appreciate when they were recording examples of New Zealand English, they did translate it to “The Southerly Wind and the Sun” to make it more geographically appropriate.

Gretchen: Oh, excellent. Yes. They do change out the words sometimes whether you have “the Sun shone” or “the Sun shined,” sort of depends on variation. Sometimes, they have this exact text being read aloud, and sometimes they let people retell it in their own words. Of course, if you’re translating it into lots of different languages, you can localise that translation however you want.

Lauren: You told me a story. I think it’s only fair that I tell you a story.

Gretchen: Oh, yes, please.

Lauren: Are you ready?

Gretchen: Yes.

Lauren: Okay. “Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the stone: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

Gretchen: This is a bit of a different style of story to me than the Aesop’s Fable style. “Small plastic snake” – I don’t think this one was found in Ancient Greece.

Lauren: And perhaps less of a direct moral to this one.

Gretchen: It also is a little bit directive, like, “Oh, it’s my job to call Stella. All right.” This story comes from the speech accent archive, which is a website that has many hundreds, probably a thousand – I wasn’t able to get a precise count of speech samples – of people speaking English who have both a variety of accents of English and also who’s first language is something else, and a variety of non-native accents in English, all reading this same English paragraph, so that if you want to know what Ugandan English sounds like, you can listen to some audio clips of some people from Uganda reading this passage, and you can be like, “All right, here’s what it sounds like.”

Lauren: Everyone’s reading the same thing. We have a nice clear benchmark. It has lots of different sounds, lots of S-y sounds I noticed as I was trying to read this out to you.

Gretchen: It’s got “slabs” and “snake” and “snack” and “store” and “spoons,” so a lot of these S-plus-consonant-clusters and several – “these things into three” – /ð/ /θ/ /θ/. You get a bunch of different sounds and sound sequences. The note on the speech accent archive website says, “This paragraph contains practically all the sounds of English,” which I think is because, depending on your variety of English, exactly which sounds are in it and not can vary, but they’ve made an effort to get at least most of them.

Lauren: The fact that they’ve made this effort to get all the sounds means that perhaps the meaning of the story becomes less important I think it’s fair to say.

Gretchen: It’s a little silly.

Lauren: It gets a little bit silly trying to make something that sounds sufficiently coherent, but you’re really focused on the individual sounds.

Gretchen: “Six spoons of fresh snow peas” – I dunno that I really measure snow peas in spoons, but people can read somewhat nonsensical text, and that’s also okay. This is very English-centric. There’s not an effort to translate this story into other languages because it’s focused around trying to get a specific range of sounds in English.

Lauren: I just know this as “The Stella Passage.”

Gretchen: I would call this one “Please Call Stella.” I think that’s just what I would refer to it as. There’s also some passages – so there’s a longer passage that’s about rainbows, known as “The Rainbow Passage.”

Lauren: “The Rainbow Passage.”

Gretchen: Which I will not read in full because it’s a whole page, but it begins, “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colours.”

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s kinda sweet. “The Rainbow Passage” and another passage called “The Grandfather Passage” are familiar to me from linguistics and came up recently because a friend mentioned that they’re used in people who are doing gender voice training. If you’re trans, you want your voice to be perceived as a different gender, something that some people do is adjust the way they produce certain vowels and consonants so that they sound more characteristic of a particular gender. People often practice on particular reading passages, which are part of speech training. You can record yourself and keep an idea of what your progress is over time. This “Rainbow Passage” and “The Grandfather Passage,” which is another one that’s about your grandfather – this very old school guy who wears a frock coat.

Lauren: He’s eccentric but sound of mind if I recall.

Gretchen: Yes. I think this is a very old school grandfather. I don’t think anyone’s current grandfather wears a frock coat these days unless they’re a historical reenactor or something. But these are some passages that sometimes get used in speech training. There’s a really interesting interview on the Gender Reveal podcast with Renée Yoxon who does trans voice coaching if anyone wants to know more about how that goes.

Lauren: It’s really fascinating the lives that these example texts live as they continue on in the world. Another set of example sentences are the Harvard Sentences, which are around 700+ sentences that are used mostly used in training speech-text synthesis programmes or testing telecommunications systems.

Gretchen: The Harvard Sentences, there’s 720 of them – about 10-word sentences – so there’s tons of them. They’re also designed for their phonetic value. They’re designed to contain English sounds in a range of different contexts. For example, in English, we say the /k/ sound in “keen” slightly differently from how we say the /k/ sound in “cool” or in “stick.” You need to have words that contain it at the beginning of the word, at the end of the word, before several different vowels, so that when you’re trying to put it into words, it sounds a little bit less robotic.

Lauren: This is why they also get their other name, which is the “Harvard Balanced Sentences,” because they have a balance of the most commonly occurring English speech sounds in a balanced range of contexts.

Gretchen: Right. We thought maybe this would make them a little bit extra soothing. Also, there’s 700 of these, so we can’t read them all to you in this episode because that would get a little bit boring and tedious, and you might go to sleep.

Lauren: In fact, that is a perfect application for recording all 720 of them as a soothing ASMR experience.

Gretchen: Wait, can we call this “Lingthusiasmr”?

Lauren: I think we can.

Gretchen: “ASMR,” if you haven’t encountered it, is the “autonomous sensory meridian response,” which is the relaxed chills feeling that people feel down their spine when you listen to certain kinds of slow and relaxing sounds. I’m not entirely sure that our episode will induce ASMR. We’ll have to test that empirically. But I do think it sounds very soothing and will probably help you sleep. Please let us know if it works if you think this is fun.

Lauren: I have to say, from the experience of recording them, they are such boring nonsense that they become kind of surreal.

Gretchen: I really felt like I was zoning out as I was reading them. We read them 10 at a time and took turns, and by the end of the 10 list, I would be sort of like, “Oh, I’m very slow. My heartrate has gone down. I’m relaxed.” I think it’s important to recognise that when people are reading example sentences, that is work, and it takes concentrate to try to read exactly the words on the page in a consistent tone of voice and not stumble over words. We definitely had to re-record some bits and edit them back together to make them sound smooth.

Lauren: Having recorded other people for phonetics experiments, this just once again reminded me of how much respect I have for people and their patience and their willingness to participate in recording sentences like this for analysis.

Gretchen: Thank you to our patrons for letting us do not only the podcast in general but also occasionally fun, weird experiments like this. Let us know if it actually helps you sleep or if this is fun or we should never do it again. All of these are options. Did you notice anything else about the content of the sentences as you were reading all 700, Lauren?

Lauren: I did. We – I have to say – did skip a few sentences because they did not produce the chill, relaxed vibes we were going for, especially the ones about forest fires and cutting off people’s heads.

Gretchen: Yeah, some of the sentences were a bit violent. We thought, you know, if you’re trying to fall asleep, and then you hear “The prince ordered the person’s head to be cut off,” you’re like, “I don’t know if I wanna hear that.” Even though it’s a fairytale setting, it’s still not very cheerful. We didn’t record all 720. We thought we would sacrifice balanced, scientific accuracy for being-able-to-fall-asleep-itude. I noticed that sentences that we kept, which was most of them, had this agricultural vibe.

Lauren: Which is pretty funny given that these are from the 1950s and ’60s.

Gretchen: They’re from the ’60s. They had cars in the 1960s, and yet, there’s one car in all of these sentences, and there’s a lot of horses.

Lauren: There are a lot of horses, indeed.

Gretchen: And wagons and carts. There’s one bus and one train and one car, and there’s all these horses and wagons. It’s just sort of pastoral.

Lauren: I also appreciate the person who wrote them who put all of the examples with “fudge” in there, but that might be just because I was hungry while we were recording.

Gretchen: Delicious. We did consider briefly trying to come up with replacement sentences that would still be phonetically balanced, but it’s a lot of work to come up with sentences that contain certain sounds in particular combinations and also make enough sense that you can read them even if some of them are a little bit silly.

Lauren: In fact, a lot of phonetic elicitation is done by just getting people to say a particular single word, maybe inside a sentence, so that you get it in a more natural environment rather than just listing individual words where you get this [list intonation voice] LIST intoNATION as people READ through the LIST.

Gretchen: If you want people to say, for example, a bunch of colours, you shouldn’t just have them say, “Red, orange, yellow, green.” You could instead do, “I saw the red thing,” “I saw the blue thing,” “I saw the green thing.” And then you can cut out the “red” and “blue” and “green” from the middle of “I saw the whatever thing,” so that it’s in the middle like that. Is that right?

Lauren: Yeah. Sometimes, in phonetics we’re so interested in just the sounds themselves. We don’t even care if the words make sense let alone the sentences. People will come up with nonsense words that they can record to get particular sounds.

Gretchen: I have a fun story about that from when I was an undergrad where we had to come up with a bunch of nonsense words for stimuli, only one of the words that we came up with – I forget what it was. I think all of our words were like consonant-vowel-consonant, so it was something that was like a slang swear word or a word related to some sort of risqué topic, and the prof was like, “Oh, we can use this word, right?” And all the students sort of look at each other and start giggling. We’re like, “Who’s gonna tell him?”

Lauren: Okay, excellent public service announcement. If you are creating nonsense words for a phonetic study, maybe run them by a couple of your students first just to check.

Gretchen: Run them by somebody who has a bit of a dirty mind. Look them up on Urban Dictionary. Ask a few people if you’re not working on a language where you have something like Urban Dictionary just to make sure that they’re not actually a word that’s gonna have your participants giggling.

Lauren: So far, we’ve been discussing sentences and texts for studying the sounds of language, but there’re also some commonly reoccurring texts that people use when they’re looking at sentences or even larger units of language to study.

Gretchen: One of the these is what I know as “The Frog Story,” which is a wordless picture book that has a little boy and a frog in a jar, and the frog escapes, and the boy and the dog have to go after the frog, and then they find the frog on a log. It’s very charming, and there’s no words there, so people just have to look through it once, and then you go through it again and retell that story based on the pictures.

Lauren: I have a copy of this book, and there are five or six in the series. They’re super charming. But every time I pull it off my shelf, I get mildly surprised that it’s not called “Frog Story,” it’s called, “Frog, Where Are You?”

Gretchen: Oh, I always forget this because in linguistics people just call it “The Frog Story.”

Lauren: It’s by Mercer Mayer from 1969.

Gretchen: You can tell when you’re in someone’s talk, and they’re saying, “The boy looked for the frog behind the tree,” and you’re like, “I know how you elicited this sentence.” But the nice thing about it not having written words is that you can use it with children, you can use it with speakers of a bunch of different languages. It does have some relatively culturally-specific concepts like, you know, do you recognise pictures as telling a story in a particular order? Is this cartoon drawing of a frog legible to you as a frog? But it is at least more culturally abstract than just having people directly translate a particular type of story word-by-word.

Lauren: I appreciate it because it leads to some really charming example sentences when people are discussing, say, how the structure of sentences works or maybe how people put together a story in a particular culture.

Gretchen: It’s got that sort of, you know, the frog runs away, and then the frog is found, and it follows that narrative arc of losing something and the finding it, which is I think relatively straightforward to tell in a bunch of languages.

Lauren: A book is very easy to take with you regardless of where you’re doing your analysis. You don’t need to have electricity or anything compared to another really common thing that’s used to get people to tell stories, which is a short video called “The Pear Story.”

Gretchen: “The Pear Story” is so charming. It’s this six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. It has no language in it. There’s sound effects, but no one says anything. You have this story that they showed to a bunch of speakers of languages who are asked to then retell the story from the images.

Lauren: You can tell it’s from 1975 because people have amazing pants and hair from the era.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, there is for sure some flair in those pants. The story is, roughly, having just watched it – this is on YouTube if you want to watch it for yourself – but there’s a man who’s a farmer, I guess, who’s got a kerchief around his neck. He’s climbing a ladder up a tree, picking some pears, and putting them in a basket. He picks a whole basket full of pears and sets it down with the other basket of pears below the tree, and he goes back up the ladder. Then some guy comes by with a goat for no apparent reason.

Lauren: [Laughs] Yes.

Gretchen: As you do. Then a little boy comes by on a bicycle and picks up one of the big baskets of pears and puts it on the front handlebars of the bike and drives off with it. Bum bum bum.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Then the kid on the bike runs into another group of three kids. One of them has a little paddle thing that has an elastic thing with a ball on the end.

Lauren: And they’re bouncing the paddleball thingamajig.

Gretchen: Yeah, that thing. And the kid on the bike runs into a rock and falls off the bike, and the pears fall all over the place. The kid’s okay. But the other kids help him put the pears back in the basket. And he goes off on the bike again except he’s – oh, he’s lost his hat, and the kids give his hat back as well. Then Bike Kid goes off into the sunset, and the other kids go off, and they’ve secretly each got a pear in their pocket that they took as thank you for helping with the basket. Then the farmer comes back down the tree and is like, “Oh my god! Where did my pears go? Where did the whole basket go?” And the three kids who were helping were like, “Oh, I dunno.” That’s the end of the story.

Lauren: One thing your retelling reminds me of is that this is actually really nicely shot. It’s clear that it’s in California, right. It feels like they actually got some film people to shoot a really, really nice film.

Gretchen: Right. And I think they got actors to be the characters because the characters look like they’re the wrong age for grad students.

Lauren: Which is often what happens when people are shooting an elicitation video on no budget.

Gretchen: Right. Like, it’s not just you and five of your friends from grad school. Because the kids are too young to be grad students, and the farmer looks middle aged. There are some middle-aged grad students, but it’s less like, “Okay, you got a bunch of people in their 20s to do this – 20s and 30s to do this.” It’s beautifully shot. It’s got nice lighting and all of this stuff. They got a goat. I dunno where they got the goat.

Lauren: Well, the goat reminds me, but when they put this pear story together – and it is literally called “The Pear Story,” unlike “Frog Story” which has a secret other name – when they put this together, they deliberately had these things they were trying to see whether they would come up or how people would do them in narratives across language. The goat being there that has nothing to do with the story is whether people pay attention to background information. The fact that we start off – you said “a farmer” at the start, and when he comes back, he’s “the farmer.” You’re reidentifying the same person. Even the paddleball little bouncy thingy thing was deliberately something that people might not have a name for immediately so that they would have to do essentially what we did and negotiate what it’s called.

Gretchen: So, you learn the language’s word for “thingamajig” or “toy,” or I don’t – the way you describe something you don’t necessarily have words for because languages do have ways of describing things they don’t have words for. If you put something that the word for which is very obscure, I don’t know what the word is for this in English, then people have to figure out how to describe it. I guess, I dunno, probably all languages don’t have words for pears, but presumably, you might say “fruit” or something like that if you didn’t have a specific word for “pear.”

Lauren: Not getting too bogged down in the detail, but what makes it really powerful is that there was a book about analysing Pear storytellings in the 1980s. People have continued to use “The Pear Story.” So, it starts to become something where you can benchmark experience in storytelling across languages. For example, there’s this really great paper about Meithei, which is a language in the northeast of India where Shobhana Chelliah was working with this language and noticed that when people tell stories there’s not an expectation that you necessarily say who is doing what, but it should be apparent from context. You might not necessarily say “the boys” or the “the farmer” every time they do something. Instead, you focus more on the actions, and it’s through the conversation that people keep track of who’s doing what. It was really hard to know exactly who was doing what in a story that people were telling about what happened in their own village or in their own family last week. She recorded a bunch of people telling “The Pear Story” and could literally count the number of times they said, “the farmer,” “the boy.”

Gretchen: And because the researcher already knows what happens in the video, it gives you this shared common ground. And generally, the task is something like you have people watch a video, and then you have them retell the story of the video to someone who hasn’t seen it, say, “Tell it to this person who hasn’t seen it,” or “Tell it to me,” and you say that you haven’t seen it. It’s a relatively natural-ish context. People often know a story that they’re telling to someone else who hasn’t experienced it. I mean, it’s as natural as you can get for something that’s relatively constrained so that everyone’s doing the same task, whereas “The Frog Story,” you have people flip through page by page and narrate what’s happening on each page, “The Pear Story” tends to be you have people watch the whole thing and then retell the story afterward.

Lauren: Because it’s being recorded in a bunch of other languages, they could literally go back and say, “Yeah, in Meithei, there really are fewer times that people say who is doing what compared to the existing tellings that we have in languages like English.” So, a really neat example of how this kind of task can be really helpful in understanding how different languages do storytelling differently.

Gretchen: Do you have any examples of this from the gesture literature?

Lauren: I do, indeed. Because you can immediately tell when something is situated in the gesture literature because they make people watch a particular Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon from Warner Brothers.

Gretchen: Okay. They didn’t get a bunch of University of California grad students to act it out in the field?

Lauren: They did not. But anytime you see an example of a cat climbing or a cat swinging or something about a bird, you almost always know that it’s taken from a particular cartoon called “Canary Row,” which is where Tweety Bird is in one apartment building, and across the road, Sylvester’s in the other. Sylvester in this eternal quest to get to Tweety Bird – there’s lots of different actions that Sylvester performs. When you get people to retell it, you get really great gestures out of them. I feel when I read a gesture studies paper, and they’ve played this – and it doesn’t require language, so you can play it to speakers of English or Turkish or Japanese. Every time I see example sentences from “Canary Row,” I just feel this, like, “Aww.”

Gretchen: “Aww.”

Lauren: “It’s a gesture paper.”

Gretchen: It’s cute how stories like this can also become part of linguistics as a cultural area where you feel part of gesture studies as a culture by seeing the Sylvester and Tweety one. “The Pear Story” was part of my grad school tradition when we did a field methods class. It was like, “Okay, we’re gonna learn how to use ‘The Pear Story’ when it comes to elicitation.” I took other field methods classes where we didn’t use “The Pear Story,” but in this one, it was part of that enculturation. There’s probably other examples of texts that are canonical sets of examples in other lineages of linguistics, we’re just showing the ones that are available to us in our context.

Lauren: Yeah, I know Frog Story is really popular with people doing language documentation because you can just pack a book in your field kit. It’s also popular with child language acquisition researchers because parent-child interaction around books is a relatively common thing, especially in Western cultures. It becomes fun the more you work in these areas, and you begin to recognise recurring texts from the examples that people produce in talks or in papers.

Gretchen: I think we could really, if we ever wanted to get into publishing a line of children’s books – you know, produce “The North Wind and the Sun,” “Please Call Stella” – you could illustrate that like a children’s book. I guess Mercer Mayer already has the copywrite on “The Frog Story,” but you know, maybe he’d like to produce a special edition just for linguists. You could have a whole line of linguistically relevant children’s books.

Lauren: Exceedingly charming.

Gretchen: Somebody commission this from us.

Lauren: Getting people to produce sentences either by reading passages or reading stories or retelling stories is one way to come up with example sentences to illustrate a feature of a language. But there is also a long tradition in linguistics of people coming up with example sentences.

Gretchen: Right. Because we all know at least one language in some capacity. Sometimes, you study a language by going and finding a speaker or a signer and saying, “Hey, can you say this? Or can you say some stuff for me?”, and I’ll record it, and I’ll analyse it, but you, yourself, are also someone who knows a language. So, if I wanna say, “‘Please call Stella’ is a sentence in English,” I don’t necessarily need to go and ask 20 of my friends to be like, “Yeah, I think that any English speaker would just understand me.” There’s the armchair-inside-your-office method of saying, “Yeah, if I think that ‘The dog chased the cat’ is a grammatical sentence in English.” I don’t necessarily need to go ask 100 people just to confirm this relatively basic thing. Then there’s the slightly expanded version which is, “Okay, I think this is a sentence in English,” and then you do a talk about your paper for a research group or at a conference, and there’s a dozen people in the room, or there’s 20 or 40 people in the room, and if they all speak English or French or whatever the language of your paper is in, and everyone in the room agrees, “Yeah, we think the sentences that you’ve presented in this language are valid,” then it’s like you’ve surveyed those 20 or 40 people. I think sometimes that linguists should give themselves more credit for this. There are really interesting papers trying to replicate these grammaticality judgements and like, what if we tested some of these sentences on 100 and see – like, sometimes there are regional differences, or people will have individual idiolect differences about which things they find work for them as a sentence or not. It is worth testing some of these. But often, if you have actually tested them on everybody in your department, or everybody who was attending this particular conference talk, it is actually running them by 20 people or 40 people, which is a pretty good statistical number.

Lauren: There is also a tradition of creating sentences and getting people to check them when it’s not a language you have strong intuitions about yourself. One of my favourite things to do while doing this is to create sentences that I know people won’t find grammatical just to double check I haven’t missed anything about how things might work in the language.

Gretchen: And to reinforce that you are not expecting them to just say yes for every single sentence.

Lauren: Yeah. Running past, “Ah, can we say, ‘Please Stella call’?”

Gretchen: People are like, “No, what? No.”

Lauren: I do feel sorry for people who I do this to who are just like, “Has she learnt nothing from us?”

Gretchen: It’s also fun when people will have – you know, because sometimes you just need some names. Like, who’s Stella? Why is she in these sentences? You need some names of people to be in your sentences. Sometimes, people will come up with cute, recurring characters from if they’re watching a particular TV show, they’ll start naming characters in their class about things. David Adger’s book, Language Unlimited, he uses his cat and his husband as the example people in these sentences, which is very charming.

Lauren: How did you come up with examples for Because Internet?

Gretchen: I particularly wanted in Because Internet to not have the people in the example sentences seem gendered. Sometimes, you see a lot of Johns and Marys in example sentences, and I just think that’s boring.

Lauren: There’s a lot of Stellas buying snacks for her brother Bob.

Gretchen: Those are very generic Anglo names. And I was like, “Well, this is kind of dull.” And also, that in Because Internet, the book is trying to be fun and interesting for people, I thought if I make silly example person names, that will make it more fun to read, and that’s one of my goals. I deliberately used the “Boaty McBoatface” method of coming up with example sentences.

Lauren: Okay. What does that look like?

Gretchen: Can I read you an example?

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: “You’re more likely to start using a new word from Friendy McNetwork, who shares a lot of mutual friends with you, and less likely to pick it up from Rando McRandomface, who doesn’t share any of your friends even if you and Rando follow each other just like you and Friendy do.”

Lauren: I like that if you had just used “Stella” and “Bob,” by the time we got to “You and Bob would use more words in common” because I can’t remember if Bob is the one you’re friends with.

Gretchen: Exactly. Naming them after the trait that they’re supposed to have – like “Friendy McNetwork” is the one you have a lot of shared friends with and “Rando” is the one that you know them, but you don’t have any friends in common. Then when you get to the second half of the sentence, “even if you and Rando follow each other just like you and Friendy do,” it’s really easy to track which one is which in the earlier part of the sentence. There’s practical considerations, but also, I found it kind of fun, you know, they’re gender neutral. They’re clearly not anyone’s real name. They’re sort of fanciful and a bit fun.

Lauren: I always like a bit of whimsy when it comes to examples. In our recent auxiliaries episode, we really leaned heavily into the farm theme that we created for that episode.

Gretchen: Yes, we did. Because it’s sometimes when you know that you’re gonna need a whole bunch of examples in a text or an episode, it’s fun to theme them so that you’re not just reaching for the same – like I think we used examples like “I like cake” a lot, or like, “I eat ice cream.” A lot of our examples are about ice cream and cake, which is fun. I mean, we do like both of these things, but sometimes, for an episode that’s gonna be really example heavy, using horses and farmyard animals and stuff is a fun way to make it a little more distinct from other episodes.

Lauren: This is where you can really tell the difference between a piece of linguistic work where the examples have come from someone’s intuitions to illustrate something compared to when the focus has been on finding examples from the stories and recordings and conversations that people have that are much more spontaneous where they might not always be so smooth and perfect. You might be missing the person who’s doing the thing in “The Pear Story,” but there’s a really great example of how it has some kind of particular emphasis or spin. Whether you use created examples or found examples can really change the flavour of how you’re doing your analysis.

Gretchen: Right. I think ideally, one wants to have a balance of both. It can be useful to have things that are easier to compare to other languages because they’re more similar, and then also, you really wanna consider the language in and of itself and not be always forcing it in the mould of “Well, let’s be able to compare it.” Also, we wanna see “What are people doing in this language when you don’t have a preconceived idea of what you’re doing with them?” It’s a balance between those two types of things. One’s easier to work with, and one is potentially gonna give you insights that you weren’t looking for.

Lauren: On top of juggling that, it’s also worth paying attention to whether you’re beginning to get a bit of a bias in the examples in terms of the vibes as well as what’s happening linguistically.

Gretchen: A lot of these examples are coming from the ’60s and ’70s, and they present this very bucolic view of what types of things people talk about. I noticed that there’s a lot of male entities in a lot of these sentences, except for our friend Stella, to whom we call.

Lauren: But Stella’s doing a lot of work.

Gretchen: She’s getting all those things for her brother Bob. But “The Pear Story” has a farmer with a moustache in a tree, and it has a boy on a bicycle, and I think it has a girl go by on a bike as well, but there’s a lot more male entities in several of these examples. Same with “The Frog Story,” which has a little boy and a frog. It might be that gender signifiers in different cultures are different, and that some people read these stories and read the characters gender-neutrally or read them as female. And I don’t wanna say that this isn’t a possibility, but from the English perspective of people who were composing these, they’re gender biased in a particular way.

Lauren: For sure. It’s not just vibes. There’s a great paper from 1997 by Macaulay and Brice that looks at just how gender stereotyping happens, especially in syntax examples for sentence structure. They do see not only there’re more examples where they use men or male names, but if they do have women or female names in the examples, they are usually being acted upon or required to chase down snacks for their brothers.

Gretchen: I think that one may be particular to the “Please Call Stella” example. But you’re more likely to have a sentence that’s like, “John saw Mary,” than you are “Mary saw John,” even though both of those are equally valid. For a while – this was wild to me when I learned it – for a while, there were explicit style guide policies that said by default you should prefer male names in the subject position and female names in the object position. I’m like, whoa, that was a policy at some point! Okay.

Lauren: Was it? It’s not even unconscious bias. It’s deliberate choice.

Gretchen: That was a deliberate choice back in the day. That was a style guide thing. Undoing that, now that it’s become this unconscious thing that people are still doing, is more challenging. The fun thing, I guess, about how a lot of example sentences in old school syntax papers use “John” and “Mary” and “Bill” is that there is someone who took a bunch of example sentences from papers since the refer to the same people and stitched them together into a single narrative about the adventures of John and Mary and Bill.

Lauren: Another in our children’s picture book series.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, this is like the See Spot Run of linguistics!

Lauren: It’s not only worth paying attention to who is doing what but the “what” that is happening. There’s this really unfortunate fact that when you want to have a sentence where someone is doing something to someone else, the best – in terms of showing stuff linguistically – thing to have them do is hitting.

Gretchen: Oh no.

Lauren: Because it’s very clear that there’s one animate, active person doing something to another entity, and it’s very distinct and clear and active.

Gretchen: It’s something where you can have an animate person acting on another animate person. For example, if you cut the bread or something, you have an animate acting on an inanimate like “bread” or “cheese” or something, so it’s more clear who’s doing what to who because the cheese isn’t gonna come around and try to cut me – unless I have a very sharp cheddar. Dun dun dun.

Lauren: Ahhhhhh. [Laughs]

Gretchen: Whereas if you have “The girl hit the boy” or something – like little kids sometimes hit each other – that’s the more benign version of that example. It’s true people sometimes hit each other. This is a thing that you can talk about in languages. It’s very often transitive. But also, it can lead to these uncomfortable example sentences where you’re like, “Ah, this seems to be reinforcing certain types of patterns of violence.”

Lauren: Especially when you’re writing, say, an entire book that’s a descriptive grammar of a language, and again and again you just have these men hitting other people and animals, and you’re like, “I do think this adequately represents what’s happening linguistically, but I feel really off about what it’s showing people culturally.” It may not even be about this culture. It’s about what the linguist is trying to do.

Gretchen: Sometimes, people try to replace this with a verb that’s less violent like “kiss.”

Lauren: Also, a bit weird.

Gretchen: But that gets into consent issues. If you just go around kissing people, they might not like that. You’d say, “Well, why not use a verb like ‘see’?” But the thing is, “see” often does extra, additional things in the structure in many languages. Like, some languages you have to use “see” plus a word meaning “at” or “to.” You can’t just “see” someone. You “see at” someone or “see to” someone. If you want a very straightforwardly transitive example, something like “see” is like you have to test it to see whether it works in the language. Yeah, it's very complicated because there aren’t a ton of verbs that involve people directly acting on other people, and sometimes they have meanings that you don’t want to introduce.

Lauren: So, between what you’re trying to do linguistically, what level of language you’re analysing, and then how you wanna present those examples and the language that you’re working with, balancing what’s happening with example sentences is really hard.

Gretchen: Right. In addition to the named entities sometimes having a gender bias, there’s also – when you’re working on a given language, people will often pick a couple common names in that language to use. I think a lot of Japanese examples use the name “Taro,” which is a relatively common name. I’ve learned some common names in various languages when you have someone who’s doing a paper, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, these are the two common names that we’re gonna use.” You know, picking a couple common names in a given language sort of works. But in English where there’re lots of English speakers from lots of different cultures who have lots of different backgrounds, if we leave ourselves with “John” and “Mary,” that also presents this 1960s, old-school, very waspy version of who could be an English speaker.

Lauren: The great this is that you don’t have to do this hard work yourself. There’s been this great project called the Diverse Names Generator where they’ve done the work for you of finding names that skew masculine or skew feminine or are gender neutral and come from a range of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Gretchen: These names on the Diverse Names Generator website, which is very easy to use, have International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions, so if you don’t necessarily know how to pronounce them, you can see them there. You can add contributions yourself if you think, “Oh, there could be some more names.” You could just use a baby names book – and I’m sure people have – but one of the advantages that this has is it lets you filter for certain types of things that might be relevant to linguists. Sometimes, you wanna have the names in your example sentences, you want the first one to have a name that begins with A, and the next one a name that begins with B, and the next one that begins with C or something, just to help keep track of the different names of participants. You can also do things like filter for certain types of lengths or certain types of initial letters to make them balance out for other types of things you might want in your example sentences. I’ve also seen recommendations to just use gender neutral, especially very short, names for all of your sentences, so names like “Lee” or “Alice” or “Pat,” “Sam.” The complication of this is that sometimes gender-neutral names shift depending on the decade. One of these earlier recommendations has “Kim” as a recommended gender-neutral name. I dunno if that name reads as gender-neutral anymore.

Lauren: Hmm, a good reminder that even as we use sample texts that have become traditional in linguistics, it’s also worth revisiting them and thinking about what we want to have present in the examples that we create.

Gretchen: Right. In addition to making things that are in conversation with this linguistic lineage where there may be hundreds or thousands of examples in a given language, thinking, “Okay, what could be the future set of examples that we wanna use or the future set of texts that we wanna use, and what are the gaps that we’re trying to fill in as far as figuring out what we might wanna be able to compare across languages in the future?”

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” stickers, and aesthetic IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include our 2022 listener survey responses, using linguistics in the workplace, and our very special, [ASMR voice] very soothing, Lingthusiasmr episode where we read the Harvard Sentences to you in a calm, soothing voice. [Regular voice] If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm – and maybe Lingthusiasmr? – to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins [and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk]. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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