Then I will run and run and run, until the dawn

Lace, 30s, she/her. Knitting patterns? Knitting patterns.

[txttletale]

it does drive me a little crazy just a little how casually usamericans will invoke vietnam war veterans as like, a cultural archetype. On account of knowing what the vietnam war actually entailed and all

[buttons-beads-lace]

Oh I didn't tell tumblr about this yet, did I?

Unexpected perk of traveling abroad: I got to have the reverse of the normal conversation about professional wrestling with a non-fan.

By which I mean, I got to explain to someone that professional wrestling is fake.

[boxheadpaint]

And like who the fuck is this guy [gestures to reflection in mirror alone in bathroom

[animate-mush]

-- Lex Luthor after bodyswapping with the Flash on Justice League Unlimited

[trambrosia]

Also one of my favorite songs

I woke up this mornin didn't recognize the man in the mirror (then I laughed and said "oh silly me, that's just me") then I proceeded to not comb some stranger's hair (never was my style)

but I couldn't tell you what the hell it was supposedta mean, cause it was a monday—no, a tuesday—no a wednesday thursday friday—then Saturday came around and I said, "who's this stupid clown blockin the bathroom sink??" BUT he was sportin all my clothes: I gotta say, pretty pimpin!

[takofukkatsumi]

Reblog this and tell me what was your biggest crying over a piece of fiction. You can be vague if you don't want to spoil.

[living400lbs]

FEED by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire).

[creekfiend]

i like "social ergonomics" bc like yeah. furniture is usually made in a way that's like "we think this is probably what is needed for a human to immediately perform any given task" and often we are wrong about what types of furniture or spaces will have a detrimental long term impact on our bodies. ergonomics ideally looks at the evidence of the impact on bodies and then works backwards from there to come up with design.

social ergonomics should mean looking at social structures and analyzing the outcomes they have re: human welfare, and then taking that information back to the design board and redesigning things to hurt people less.

this should also be a zine. someday. but that would require me being able to sit upright

[swordshapedleaves]

My partner is a game designer. He crafts experiences intended to elicit specific behaviors from thousands of strangers as his full time job. He often looks at social structures from this perspective in his free time and we talk about it a lot. and hoo boy are a lot of our systems not doing what they are officially meant to do.

[creekfiend]

i am thinking about this ALL of the time. maybe I should also be a game designer

[propelledbydisaster]

if you’re genuinely interested in game design you should check out Radiator Yang’s game The Tearoom (NSFW, unless you work at the Sucking Off Dude’s Guns factory).

I realize it’s weird to show up on someone’s post to say “you like game design. Have you played this game about giving head in a bathroom?” but it’s a really thoughtfully made game (see the artist’s statement, which is also NSFW) that is also about the effects of surveillance on communities. when, after about half an hour of play, I realized what mindset the game had deliberately cultivated in me, I had to turn off my computer and stare at the ceiling for ten minutes. and that’s Game Design, to me

[creekfiend]

oh thank you for that link to the artist's statement about this game, that was FASCINATING

[thethirdromana]

Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.

[vampfuneralpyre]

[motsimages]

I'm adding an analysis based on watching US films and series and being Spanish who reads Spanish literature and watches Spanish films and series.

I'm culturally catholic and not religious (not even baptised) but like... a thing I don't see enough of in US media when they want to touch catholicism is the fact that you can sin and then you repent and it's all good. The guilt is what makes you repent.

I don't go to church and don't know all the details of it all but as far as I know, absolution is a big part of the catholic confession and it's the way to take your sins away. You can sin your whole life, repent when you are about to die and be absolved/saved. I know this mainly from jokes, because those of us who grow up in Spain not being Catholic still live in a world where this happens often since the Middle Ages.

In media and stories, there are ways to interpret this that could be very interesting but never are because usually we have protestants who don't bother looking into it. They just mock the Catholic guilt, I guess to feel better about their own ways. If they do something serious, make guilt just a permanent feeling that prevents people from moving on or do something other than praying, when it could actually be the main motor for a story, as it is in our stories.

It can be the way a character chooses to ignore all responsibility because he will always be forgiven (or so he thinks) when he says "I'm sorry". It can be the way a priest manipulates a believer into doing whatever he wants, because the believer is looking for absolution and the priest keeps on giving conditions for it (see: La Regenta, a classic of Spanish literature). It can speak of the frustration of not being able to change or not being able to help someone else.

Also, it goes against the infantilisation that we are seeing more and more. If you are born with the original sin, you are expected to sin and you must feel guilt to be absolved, you are allowed to grow and learn. And that's something both children do and adults do. You don't live in a permanent state of purity where seeing something unholy will taint you (like reading "fuck" instead of "f*ck").

[elodieunderglass]

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but Captain’s compliments and would you like to see something amazingly philosophical?’ cried Babbington, darting in like a ball.

After the dimness of the gun-room the white blaze on deck made it almost impossible to see, but through his narrowed eyelids Stephen could distinguish Old Sponge, the taller Greek, standing naked in a pool of water by the starboard hances, dripping still and holding out a piece of copper sheathing with great complacency. On his right stood Jack, his hands behind him and a look of happy triumph on his face: on his left most of the watch, craning and staring. The Greek held the corroded copper sheet out a little farther and, watching Stephen’s face intently, he turned it slowly over. On the other side there was a small dark fish with a sucker on the back of its head, clinging fast to the metal.

‘A remora!’ cried Stephen with all the amazement and delight the Greek and Jack had counted upon, and more. ‘A bucket, there! Be gentle with the remora, good Sponge, honest Sponge. Oh, what happiness to see the true remora!’

Old Sponge and Young Sponge had been over the side in this flat calm, scraping away the weed that slowed the Sophie’s pace: in the clear water they could be seen creeping along ropes weighed down with nets of shot, holding their breath for two minutes at a time, and sometimes diving right under the keel and coming up the other side from lightness of heart.

But it was only now that Old Sponge’s accustomed eye had detected their sly common enemy hiding under the garboard-strake. The remora was so strong it had certainly torn the sheathing off, they explained to him; but that was nothing – it was so strong it could hold the sloop motionless, or almost motionless, in a brisk gale! But now they had him – there was an end to his capers now, the dog – and now the Sophie would run along like a swan.

For a moment Stephen felt inclined to argue, to appeal to their common sense, to point to the nine-inch fish, to the exiguity of its fins; but he was too wise, and too happy, to yield to this temptation, and he jealously carried the bucket down to his cabin, to commune with the remora in peace.

And he was too much of a philosopher to feel much vexation a little later when a pretty breeze reached them, coming in over the rippling sea just abaft the larboard beam, so that the Sophie (released from the wicked remora) heeled over in a smooth, steady run that carried her along at seven knots until sunset, when the mast-head cried, ‘Land ho! Land on the starboard bow.’

- the bit where they catch a remora for Stephen just because they like him and the whole ship stops to watch him receive it; Master and Commander.

[buttons-beads-lace]

I finished the shirt I was altering, and wore it! But I didn't take any pictures. I'm satisfied with how it fits, though. This does raise an interesting question, can I still say that this is a men's shirt after I put bust darts and (kinda sorta) princess seams in it? I feel like the answer is, not really. But it fits nicely, and now that I know this way of altering a shirt will work okay, maybe I can try it on the fancier shirt I have that's also too big. comments

[buttons-beads-lace]

the day is fast approaching when I will have to explain particle-wave duality and Heisenberg uncertainty to a 13-year-old

[animate-mush]

You need to read Deep Down Things: the Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics by Bruce Schumm! It has the best demonstration of particle wave duality I have ever seen in my life! Also Bruce is the best physics professor I ever had and deserves all the love forever. (His book self bills as "the first comprehensive book on particle physics for a lay audience." And it's purple). But it's not like "here's a cute metaphor" it actually shows you how it works. I actually got it for a hot second.

The cute metaphor version is that "billiard balls" and "the movement of the ocean" are both inadequate metaphors for describing what light is. And the worst version of this is that "wave" and "particle" are mathematically equivalent notational variants of each other, and you use whichever one that makes the math easier. Which lets physicists pull bs like: "okay light can be modeled as waveforms or as particles called photons" okay good with you so far "so given that these are notational variants of each other, we can model sound waves as particles called phonons" *eye twitch* I Guess dot jpg "so for this problem we are going to model the ripples on the surface of a pond as particles called ripplons" *table flip* SCIENCE HAS GONE TOO FAR

The most intuitive understanding of Uncertainty is when Dave Dorfan, the head of our department, was walking by and grabbed one of the students and was like "Uncertainty is this. Imagine Troy [the student] is standing in an ice rink with the lights off and the only way to find out where he is is to throw rocks at him." (Troy: Hey!) The point being that to observe is to interact - not on a philosophical but on a physical level - and to interact is to effect. Every time a rock hits Troy it imparts a bit of energy to him and he moves a little bit on his frictionless surface, so the information you get about his location from this interaction is necessarily going to be slightly wrong. To measure something is to change it.

Mathematically of course it's just linear algebra. Can you teach your 13 year old linear algebra? p and x don't commute. That's it that's the whole Uncertainty Principle. The matrices don't commute. They have different eigenstates. To measure a value you have to be in an eigenstate for that value. You can't be in the eigenstate for position and momentum at the same time, so if you're measuring one you are not measuring the other. Because the matrices don't commute.

(We got to that point in out Quantum class and it was like Oh. Oh that's it isn't it. It was just that the whole time. Well okay then)

Anyway, good luck to you! These are some of my very favorite topics!

[buttons-beads-lace]

I entirely agree that talking about how it actually works is better than cute metaphors, and the way people sensationalize the ~power of observation~ is tiresome when it makes perfect sense as a practical problem.

Overall the approach I've been taking to talking about the history of chemistry is talking about things from the point of view of the scientists who discovered them- what did they already know (or think they knew), what unanswered questions were they trying to understand, what experiments did they do and what conclusions did they draw from the results? There's a bit less of that to talk about with the wave-equation model of the atom, but I talked to the 13-year-old about waves and diffraction and then we watched a video where you can see electrons make a diffraction pattern after going through a barrier.

One kind of nice part, though, is that the people who came up with these ideas re: particle-wave duality also thought they were pretty strange; it was just the only answer that fit the data. Why are the electrons limited to only traveling in certain specific "orbits" even though common sense says they could travel at any speed? I don't know, says Niels Bohr, but the data says that's what they do, so there must be some reason.

I sadly had to get rid of my college notebooks when I moved- I wish I still had them to refer back to, because once upon a time I did actually have to work with wave equations (the "particle in a box" one, that describes just one dimension, a particle moving back and forth along a line). But I told the 13-year-old that we could see what the equations look like, and then I would explain what they tell us, but we wouldn't get into how they actually work mathematically.

[stenchkow]

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

[deepseametro]

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

[theothersarshi]

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

[repinipi]

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

[daylikescookies]

made a fat honse! pattern by makeshiftwings :D

coms open btw :3

[knocking-on-peoples-non-doors]

@elodieunderglass !

[elodieunderglass]

What a lovely shape!

[fravery]

Feeling inspired by the many shades of green in this stunning mosaic forest by artist Joanne Desheil.

[salmonella-warrior]

Joanne Daschel, Cathedral, 2020. stained glass and smalti. https://www.joannedaschel.com/post/into-the-woods

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

When people say they enjoy things, they usually mean one of two things. The first is that these things are fun; that is, they satisfy immediate emotional needs or desires for pleasure. Candy Crush is fun, for people who are into that sort of thing; waterslides are fun, watching TV is fun. Fun, in the way I'm defining it for this post, is the party food of pleasure; immediately and usually temporarily satisfying, and after that, mostly satisfying only as a happy memory (although some of these activities, like watching a TV show, can generate further opportunities for pleasure down the line like daydreaming, discussion, and making fanart). Like party food, this kind of fun is a good thing to have, and someone who doesn't get enough of it is at high risk of stress-related health concerns. Also burnout. A lack of fun is a major contributor to burnout.

The second kind of pleasure that most people talk about is rewarding activity. The lack of rewarding activity in one's life is a major contributor to depression. It creates a sense of purposelessness and worthlessness and generates a low attention span, sapping the ability to feel long-term motivation or pleasure. People usually try to pick themselves up with the first kind of fun, which is a band-aid but not a very sticky one; the lack of rewarding activity grows and festers over time. Rewarding pleasure involves working on something long-term that feels worthwhile. There are usually also spots of fun (or you wouldn't have gotten into the activity enough for it to become rewarding), but there also tends to be long slogs that aren't that fun. Nevertheless, when people report on doing said activity, they will speak about it with great enjoyment and remember it being enjoyable and claim they like it. (I like being a writer. Writing can sometimes be boring as shit.) (Look into Csíkszentmihályi's work on experience sampling and flow states for more info on this, it is FASCINATING.)

In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal sums up what she thinks are the most important contributing factors to rewarding activity. These are not the only factors, but I agree that they're a good baseline of the critical ones. I'm going to paraphrase them using different language. The four big contributors are:

Satisfying work. This is the vaguest one because different people find different things satisfying. Basically, the task itself should feel productive, and you should not feel bad about doing it to the point where it causes you distress. Satisfying work involves clear goals with actionable steps and a clear product, preferably something that you can see, touch or use. A clean house, a new high score, a freshly built table, a happy child.

Mastery. Rewarding pleasure is often something that you can get better at. There are things to learn, practice, improve. Improving your ability to solve tricky code problems, getting better at painting landscapes, figuring out fun new strategies in Magic: The Gathering, being able to build computers better or faster or cheaper. Mastery does not require becoming the best at something (although some people enjoy that specifically also), merely seeing progress in yourself and being able to take pride int he fact that you are better than you were.

Social connection. Rewarding pleasure often involves social or community connection. A long-term social group that discusses fan theories of their favourite show. Your weekly tabletop rpg. Teaching a room full of kids who to make leather belts. Working at a small bookshop and making small talk with all the tourists. Some people find social activity to be fun in the 'immediate pleasure' kind of way, some don't, but it is a critical factor in mental health and in the long-term... rewardingness (?)... of a hobby. Animals can also partially fill this niche, but be warned, they are far, far less effective than people. Your cat might be able to stop you from committing suicide today. You cat alone will not make your life satisfying.

Contribution. Humans are community animals and have a need to be something larger than ourselves or, more specifically to be of service to something larger than ourselves. Looking after kids, cooking big meals for others, creating art or physical products for others. Teaching the next generation how to read. Serving your God. Saving a species of small fish from extinction. Volunteering at your local charity shop or soup kitchen. Being a member of a crowd to reach the Guinness World Record for "most people fit into a storage crate". Making useful tutorial videos, being an entertainer, joining your local queer support group or political organisation. Humans fucking love to be part of something bigger than their own brain and they fucking love to help people.

The world is full of rewarding activities, and not all of them rate high in all four categories. The woman working in the charity shop warehouse and chatting with her coworkers isn't necessarily all that interested in mastery of her job (although I've worked in these places and some people do take pride in learning to be as efficient as possible), the musical hermit training to become the best violinist in the world might not be all that interested in social connection or how the audience actually feels about him. You might have noticed that I've listed hobbies, jobs, and non-employed but important life work (volunteering and childrearing) as possible rewarding activities; you can find rewarding activities everywhere. (In fact the lack of rewarding pleasure in our work lives is a very serious problem that companies keep trying to condescendingly band-aid over. The late David Graeber had a lot to say about this and I highly recommend his work, particularly Bullshit Jobs, which is a book specifically discussing the lack of above points 1 and 4 (satisfying work and sense of contribution) in so many modern workplaces and its distressing psychological ramifications). Rewarding activities are not 'fun' all the time; in fact, Csíkszentmihályi's work found that many of them are quite unfun most of the time. They do, however, create long term pleasure, and are emotionally and psychologically critical.

One final point: research shows that computer stuff counts less. This isn't a 'hurr durr edison was a witch get off your damn computers and get a real job' point; plenty of people do most of their rewarding activity on computers, because the supply cost is so low (most of us already own some kind of computer) and it's so much easier to find an existing community. But it does, psychologically speaking, count less; your brain isn't very good at seeing computers stuff as as 'real', on a primitive sensory level, as things you can touch with your hands or people that are right in front of you. Your massive community of fellow fans on the internet are less effective at filling your social needs than the crochet club at your local library, even if you like the people on the internet much more. It doesn't have to be everything, but ideally you should have at least one physical meatspace social club and at least one physical meatspace hobby, craft, or volunteer job. (They can be the same thing. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen for both.) They don't have to be the most important thing -- I care way more about my writing (electronic) than my crochet (meatspace) and I do the writing a lot more -- but the meatspace thing should exist, if you can manage it.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#wow this did not go where i expected it to go#i thought this was going to be about like. when games make you feel like you've accomplished something so you keep playing#without realising you're not actually having any fun

You're talking about extrinsic vs intrinsic reward systems, which are a different but equally interesting thing! Games (and jobs and schools and other things) will sometimes try to instil motivation by over-relying on extrinsic reward mechanisms without bothering to make the activity itself fun, rewarding or meaningful. This does work in the short term but it does not help your mental health like properly rewarding activities do, and people who don't become "addicted" tend to bounce off them unless there's something else to hold onto them (such as a sunk cost, or a social circle of other gamers they really like, or a lack of alternate activities, or something).

[slightly-gay-pogohammer]

hey gang i got popsicles pick one as pass the box to someone else

mint

lemon

orange

strawberry

cola

pineapple

dark cherry

anise

Voting ended onJul 14

"i cant believe you dont have this or that flavor" listen they had these ones okay

[tchinoquenonai]

an idiosyncrasy of serbian as it is spoken in contemporary belgrade (or, at least, the register that may be tendentiously called “multicultural belgrade serbian”) is a “lazy” pronunciation of /e/ in stressed syllabes: i hear it as a near-open [æ], though i’ve also heard [ɛ̯ɐ], mainly in marked speech that also breaks stressed /o/ into [ɔ̯ɐ]. now. while ppl feigning autochtony to a city inhabited solely by expats since the 1450s may disagree, i personally support contemporary serbian’s endeavour to reinvent western romance

[ukfrislandembassy]

I see the Serbs (like always) are following the Russians in the march towards a vertical vowel system. Clearly it's due to Circassian contact.

/ˈfsʲa ɕəstˈlʲəvəjə sʲəˈmʲa pəˈxʷaʒə ˈdɾʷək nə dɾʷəˈga | ˈkaʒdəjə nʲəɕəstˈlʲəvəjə sʲəˈmʲa nʲəɕəstˈlʲəvə pəsfəjəˈmʷə/

[certified-linguistics-moment]

what's this vertical vowel system you mention :) ?

[ukfrislandembassy]

You mean you don't know?

Here's a relevant section from Colarusso's Kabardian grammar. There's a lot more vowels phonetically but that can pretty much always be derived

Systems with similar limited contrasts are also found among Ndu languages of New Guinea and Arandic languages of Australia; Foley's analysis of Yimas phonology in his grammar comes close to analysing it as a vertical system, while I get the impression that some parts of Chadic (e.g. Margi) also exhibit tendencies in this direction.

More thoughts on vertical vowel system typology will be provided upon prompting.

[certified-linguistics-moment]

oh so a vertical vowel system is one where all the phonemes have the same front-back dimension? is russian really tending towards a vertical vowel system?? is the circassian contact comment just a joke?

i'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on vertical vowel system typology :)

[ukfrislandembassy]

I'm very much joking with the Circassian contact comment, but the question of whether Russian is tending towards a vertical vowel system is an interesting one.

See, the most interesting part of the whole thing is not so much the question of precisely how many vowels a language has (a sizeable proportion of Arandic for instance seems to have and /i/ in addition to /a/ and schwa), but rather the relative proportions of central to front/back vowels and their diachronic derivation.

Because it's pretty clear how you get these systems historically; it's from POA contrasts that formerly occurred on vowels as e.g. [+front] or [+rounded] ending up being more associated with consonants as [+palatal] and/or [+labial] coarticulations respectively. Thus a contrast like *ki vs. *ku becomes something more like /kʲə/ vs. /kʷə/, with maybe some residual colouring of the vowels. The most telling detail would therefore be the same vowels after consonants that don't pick up these additional co-articulations showing a merger of these vowels.

Both Slavic and Goidelic (I have a colleague who reckons modern Irish has a basically vertical vowel system) show this kind of pattern, in that palatality quite readily transfers from vowels to consonants. Additionally, in Slavic you also get a fun corresponding fronting of back vowels after palatalised consonants, resulting even less functional load being held by the front vs. backness of the vowels. Russian specifically even has a recapitulation of this change in unstressed syllables with Proto-Slavic *o after palatal consonants going to /e/, pronounced [ʲɪ] and unstressed /ja/ also merges with it when not in word-final position, hence alternations like /ˈɕastʲə/ 'happiness' but /ɕɪsˈtlʲivɨj/ 'happy'.

Languages will of course vary as to which co-articulation they favour. As the above examples show Indo-European favours palatalisation, but elsewhere, e.g. in Arandic, labialisation might be the preferred co-articulation.

I would also classify some systems as 'partially vertical', in that some parts of their systems have shifted without completely levelling their front-back contrasts. For instance, both Enindhilyangkwa of Australia and some of the Coast Salish languages have 'square' /i e ə a/ with some phonetic /u/ from rounded consonants, which speaks to me of unpacking of labialisation onto adjacent consonants. Similarly, Ethiosemitic generally likes to unpack Proto-Semitic short vowels, resulting in fun palatal and labial suprasegmentals (see especially the southern languages like Chaha), but keep the long vowels in their full qualities, resulting in seven-vowel /i e ɨ ə a u o/ systems.

Do I think Russian will go all the way? No, I suspect in reality it'll end up somewhere in an awkward middle, as I can't see really how the /u/ gets lost like I joked here, not to mention that no Slavic language really ever manages to go whole hog on it despite many of the relevant changes being recurrent through the history of the family. But it's a fun typological thought experiment to ask if it might.

[scribefindegil]

I'm still thinking about the guy who saw me realize my wheelchair wouldn't fit in the elevator because he (also a wheelchair user) was already inside it and immediately quipped, "This elevator ain't accessible enough for the both of us."

[edderkopper]

Today I learned that cuttlefish experience REM sleep, and that it makes their skin flash random colors. This is the cutest thing ever.

[blackbearmagic]

The electric eel at my aquarium has a voltmeter attached to his tank, and whenever he pumps out a burst of electricity–either when he’s navigating his tank or getting fed–the meter lights up and makes noise. Sometimes, I’ll walk past him when he’s snuggled up and totally motionless on his log, and see the voltmeter going crazy.

I am left to assume that he is dreaming, and is sleep-zapping at the things in his dreams.

[arachnospooky]

I am absolutely delighted to learn that electric eels dream of kicking ass.

[targuzzler-deactivated20180224]