Astonishment and Dread

in the house of usher

[astonishment-and-dread]

Are you gay?

Have you been gay?

Will you be gay?

When will you be gay???

[creepymutelilbugger]

"i have to water the shitbird wait a minute"

"prosper stupid poultry"

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[frayed-wind]

[questions-within-questions]

I really wonder what the demographic outcome would be of trans people involuntarily getting "the body you'd have if practicality wasn't a concern" like what percentage of the resulting bodies would be obviously nonhuman?

[tparadox]

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a cyborg werewolf with dragonfly wings.

[t00thpasteface]

me before i get my paycheck: i'm so excited to spend this on essentials and save the rest wisely

me as soon as that direct deposit hits: you know i've always wanted to learn the theremin

[micamicster]

They should invent a glasses that you can lay on your side in bed wearing

[deepfrieddeltarunememes]

list of things that foreshadow Susie and Kris exchanging SOULs:

[deepfrieddeltarunememes]

they would surely both be very mature about this arrangement and not screw around at all,

[sovietnam]

[beemovieerotica]

someone on reddit shared texts of her and her husband's exclusive english dialect and it's beautiful

[beemovieerotica]

a linguist is analyzing it

[sepiamestus]

I always forget that Butch is like. A real actual name that people have. Come look at my beautiful children femme and twink

[sepiamestus]

m;y god

[chibanova]

Never forget him

[bestbandname]

Round 3:

Which band name do you like best?

Pet Shop Boys

Massive Attack

Voting ended onMar 7

Note that this is about band names not their music or members.

[bestbandname]

Tie break poll:

Which band name do you like best?

Pet Shop Boys

Massive Attack

Voting ended onMar 27

[bestbandname]

Take 3

Pet Shop Boys

Massive Attack

Voting ended onApr 8

[bestbandname]

I'm going to start getting annoyed soon...

[bluetoad07]

i dreamed last night that chapter 6 was coming out already. toby decided to advertise it exclusively through really zoomed in screenshots of kris in different places, with captions that were all like "you remember having fun here." "you remember being scared." "you remember worrying about your friends." anyways this culminated in toby posting an enteirly black image with a silly looking sprite of kris smiling captioned "you remebry oub." or something similar and the whole community lost it trying to decipher what it could mean

[bluetoad07]

yeah

[cow-inthe-closet]

friend whos always planning everything: hey guys lets do something this week!! when are you all available?

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

friend whos really into genshin impact: does anyone want to play genshin impact

[bogleech]

The bullet hell minigame style battle window in undertale and deltarune occupies a very similar narrative role to the songs in a musical film and would translate very elegantly to such, does anyone understand what I mean

[bogleech]

Yes! They further the narrative and flesh out the characters through sequences of nonliteral imagery, and often these communicate things the literal side of the work could not have expressed as easily, just as a musical character's singing style reveals facets of their personality

If it were an animated musical, the fight against papyrus would be a symbolic sequence of the main character surviving a zany roller coaster obstacle course of bones while he sings about himself.

This can possibly be said of boss battles in various other games, but most of those take place in what represents a more literal environment. Think of when characters like spamton actually mess with the bullet hell window or break its established laws; what would that even represent without that gameplay format? What "real events" could even capture the impact that's meant to have? Well, I think that'd be a lot like a villain suddenly interrupting a musical sequence and using the song itself to attack a hero, for instance, breaking the usual division between what's "real" and "just part of the song."

[ladysalamander]

AAAAAH I wrote my master's thesis on this phenomenon and it makes me SO HAPPY to see people talking about it because (at least of 2018 when I was handed my degree) no one in the academic world is TALKING about this and I think its SO IMPORTANT to recognice mechanic design as important to video game art. The closest is Ian Bogost's theory of Procedural Rhetoric but it always seemed sort of divorced from art and character, and plus I think there are more games now leveraging mechanical design part of the narrative for lack of a better term then when he wrote that theory.

[bogleech]

Yeah these games are an extreme example but there's so much emotion and meaning game mechanics can convey differently from any other medium. The amount of control the player has is important to the story at every moment for example. You can't do that with anything else.

[paratactician]

Anonymous asked: anybeast crossing oh my goddddd

(in reference to this post)

This is how I always imagine Alternian working: heavily synthetic, heavily agglutinative. 

Alternian is like Japanese in having two writing systems: one alphabetic, which is the mirror-Daedric we see in the comic, and one logographic. Mirror-Daedric is used for proper nouns, including personal names and things like ‘Trollian’ and ‘sylladex’, and also by young trolls learning to read and write. The other system is used for everything else. The reason most animal names on Alternia get rendered in English as ‘hoofbeast’, ‘musclebeast’, etc. is because they’re written with two logograms: ‘hoof’/’muscle’ + ‘beast’. So the general class of living creatures other than trolls is indicated by combining the indefinite morpheme, ‘some/any’, with ‘beast’. The Alternian for ‘foal’ is ‘young’ + ‘muscle’ + ‘beast’. It’s an incredibly compact language: ‘look at that dog!’ in Alternian would be written with two sign-units, [look at + imperative suffix] [demonstrative prefix + bark + beast + accusative suffix]. It also means the language’s core pool of vocabulary is relatively small, since most of the lexicon is formed by sticking base units together, which works well for a conqueror species not all that interested in expanding their linguistic horizons.

This explains a bunch of other stuff. Weird periphrases like ‘nutrition plateau’ are literal representations of the Alternian [food/nutrition + flat object]; you could combine the same ‘flat object’ morpheme with the ‘furniture’ morpheme to get ‘table’, or with the ‘mountain’ morpheme to get the actual English plateau. Terezi coins names for her scalemates ([scale + sentient creature you do not want to kill or have sex with], the latter roughly equivalent to English ‘friend’) by combining [berry + breath], [lemon + snout], etc. Karkat’s distinctive speech pattern is actually that, rather like Dave, he loves long agglutinative chains: ‘worthless crotchstained barfpuppet’ would be a single sign-unit in Alternian, [negative prefix + value + groin + stain/smear + vomit + puppet]. It’s not really clear how any of those relate to each other, and you could equally well translate it as ‘worthless puppet whose crotch is stained with vomit’; Karkat just piles words on top of each other for effect.

Terezi thinks Dave is a [troll between the stages of grubhood and full maturity + cool/radical/awesome].

EDIT:

ceruleanvulpine asked: I really like that headcanon, but how would you fit in the more straightforward terms the higher-blood trolls use?

Archaism. Assume that the pool of core meaning-units has actually reduced over time, on the principle that all languages eventually simplify down. Old single morphemes got phased out and replaced with the easier-to-remember compounds. There was once a single dedicated morpheme for ‘large vessel you wash yourself in’, Eng. bath, but it was much easier just to say ‘[washing + container large enough to hold a non-dismembered troll]’, hence ablution trap. As such, using the old single morphemes is a mark of fancy, flowery diction. Think of how in English we actually have special words meaning ‘from where’ and ‘to where’, whence and whither, but using them now makes you sound like you’re in a 19th-century novel because everyone’s switched to the isolate forms.

Please do not ask me about load gaper. It gets kind of biological at that point.

[inklesspen]

putting delicious xenolanguage meta back on my blog

[tonysoprano144p]

god is dead and i killed him

[wakraya]

Homestuck Sizes and Distances

I was procrastinating today and I thought, hey! Why not see just how big the Homestuck Lands actually are? (I was VERY bored).

I started checking John’s house, and assuming his door frames are standard, 6’ 8" ((Or around 2 meters)), I calculated the width of his house at its thickest point. Then I compared it with LOWAS and voilá!

But then I remembered, LOWAS has rivers of tar and clouds! That measurement could have been more than it should. So I took John’s cleaned land from the latest updates and did it again. It was a noticeably much smaller measurement, so to round it a little, as it’s hard to tell sizes when your reference is a 2-7 pixel thick tower, I came up with this.

The Mass and Density of it were taken ASSUMING the Lands and Moons have the same gravity as Earth, because they don’t seem to have it any more easy jumping or anything. Which gives a… Rather small planet, but also I think relatively very heavy and dense?

It makes sense, though, after all the Lands are like Levels of a game. They have things to explore, quests, but they can’t be absolutely massive, and more when each of them is this size. For a single human to explore, and still, full of underground dungeons and with its own landscape? Still a handful! Then…

Skaia’s always seemed a bit bigger than the planets, and it’s quite obvious too since the Battlefield, of the same size as a Land, is inside of it. The measurement was taken from the Double Reacharound pic, assuming the circles that represent the troll planets and Skaia are to scale. Then, Prospit’s size has been calculated from the flash with Infinity Mechanism, the End of Act 6 Intermission 1.

Also, assuming the Gravity in the moons is also like the Earth, as Non-Dream selves have been shown to not float, and Carapacians walk like normal people, this makes the Moons, and the Moons’ Moons VERY heavy, much like the planets. I came out with…

Prospit: 4.193x10^15 kg mass, and 207963.106 g/cm3 density.

Prospit’s Moon: 1.677x10^14 kg mass, and 1039815.53 g/cm3 density.

Which means that nope, Prospit is not literally made out of Gold. Or that you can’t apply real physics to settings like Homestuck.

Once knowing the sizes of the planets, we have the Incipisphere itself. Taking the Double Reacharound picture and this as references, I calculated every planet is 9.7 km away from Skaia, placed at an equal distance from each other in a 57005.69m circumference around it.

Also if you trust that picture, apparently Derse is only 3 and a half km away from the nearest Planet if they are perfectly lined up.

Once I finished this I thought I’d just let it be but I thought- Wait, if I know the sizes and trust this so far, why not go a step further?

So I calculated just how hard the Planets clashed in Game Over.

Aranea spent 2.9 seconds throwing LOLAR towards LOFAF. That’s 1250.91 m/s. It makes me doubt about the Mass of the planets, however, because such an impact would have been EXTREMELY catastrophic. I mean, it was but, 10 thousand million (Or an american billion) times the strength of the most powerful Atomic Bomb ever detonated? That amount also represents the energy from the Sun that arrives to Earth in an entire year. So yeah. That’s a lot. Not sure if I believe that one.

This one’s even more catastrophic. Jane’s planet spent 8.7 seconds moving to LOFAF, and didn’t exactly reach, and Condy flung Dave’s planet, EVEN further away than LOCAH, in just 4.3 seconds. Which means Condy is still badass and much stronger than Aranea, but also, that Dave’s planet was going 4503 km/h towards Jane’s planet. No wonder a chunk came right off it! And that’s not taking into account how Jane’s planet’s speed affected the impact. I’m not too good with Maths, you might have noticed by this point.

I could have left it here but NOPE, since I was doing this I decided to see the strength of Prospit’s moon hitting the Battlefield in [S] Descend.

The result was… Inconclusive. I had two options, either Prospit sped up until it impacted, or it reached some terminal velocity, as it wasn’t being flung, but falling towards the Battlefield.

I checked the time it takes Prospit to hit the Battlefield in the flash, 32 seconds, and if it sped up constantly, it would reach the surface MUCH faster. It also gave the extreme energy released of 2000 Megatons, so I thought that, yeah, maybe a bit too strong.

Its maximum speed would have been around 17 m/s if it had to fall for 32 seconds, so taking that into account…

Yep, 5 Megatons sound like a more believable impact.

I also just noticed I could have calculated the true size of Prospit and Skaia taking how Prospit’s Moon fell right into the Battlefield as seen above. Seeing the size comparison I think either Skaia is bigger or the Lands are smaller… Or Prospite is bigger?

…

Yeah, I’ve been procrastinating to do this. Gods, what am I even doing.