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susanoos-wife

kiragecko

The last two days I’ve been playing Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! It’s a librarian simulation “game” which seems designed for me - more activity than game, no timer, no real puzzles, just 3000 books lying on the ground needing to be reshelved.

I highly recommend it if organizing pretty books for hours seems appealing! I’m really enjoying it. But like usual, this review is going to focus on accessibility. And, sadly, Librarian doesn’t do too well when you consider accessibility.

I don’t blame them. This seems to be their first game. There’s almost no info about them online, but it’s quite possible they’re one person doing this in their spare time. The game’s only been out for a month, and it could get an accessibility update at some point in the future. So, lots of grace!

But.

kiragecko

Here in central Canada, my apple tree blossomed yesterday. It's late May. The crops will be harvested sometime in October. A 5 month growing season means that we have NO native fruit. (It's argued that there might have be a native apple of some type pre-Contact, but that's considered unlikely.)

What we do have is berries. Many many berries. 3 types of cranberries. 2 types of blueberries. Chokecherries. Raspberries and their many kin. Multiple types of currants. Strawberries. Things that only exist here, like saskatoons. Buffaloberries, bilberries, things like rose hips that are only sort of berries - we have SO MANY.

Berries are small, grow quick, and are easy to support on a small plant, making them perfect for our short growing season. Many can grow on terrible soil. They were a main flavouring agent for indigenous food. They don't need a huge amount of care.

SO WHY THE HECK ARE THEY SO EXPENSIVE IN THE STORE?!?

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(I know the reasons - many are delicate and transport poorly, and some are labour intensive to harvest. But I want to be able to afford frozen raspberries again!)

apocryphics

lydia davis

snakesonacartesianplane

In the same vein:

"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)

via ThoughtCo

Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

from "English is not normal"

kiragecko

[Image is a paragraph reading,

I value the fact that English has two parallel vocabularies ‒ the Germanic vocabulary and the Latinate vocabulary. For example, we have the word 'undersea', and then we have 'submarine'. Or 'underground' and 'subterranean', 'all-powerful' and 'omnipotent'. So we can shift registers. We can say something in a very plain, blunt, Anglo-Saxon way, like "I will not do that" ‒ all Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Or we can say it in a fancier, more distant, abstract, Latinate way, like "I prefer not to permit myself to approach such a notion." Or, in a passage of plain Anglo-Saxon, you can throw in one Latinate word, unexpectedly, to great effect.

End ID.]

I do love this aspect of language! But, unlike what the title of that last quote states, English is actually very normal! Languages absorbing the prestige language of the area happens ALL THE TIME.

Close to 60% of English vocabulary is Latin and French. That's similar to, or slightly lower than, many languages with a Chinese influence (Japanese is the same, Korean and Vietnamese might have more or less, depending on how you measure. Casual spoken forms of languages often have less borrowings, and obscure technical vocabulary will have more.)

We don't know what the spoken language was like, but Old Nubian writing can have so many Greek loanwords it can be difficult to tell if a text is Greek with a few Nubian words, or Old Nubian but mostly loanwords! Ottoman Turkish borrowed so much Arabic and Persian that it was mostly unintelligible to normal Turkish speakers. Only a 1/3 of Yaghnobi words are actually Eastern Iranian, and it's ancestor, Sogdian, was similar - Persian, Turkic, Russian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Greek - it seems harder to find languages that DIDN'T leave their mark!

And borrowing from Latin, and then French, its descendent, is just as normal. Khmer contains a large number of borrowings from Sanskrit and its descendants, especially Pali. Japanese borrowed from multiple Chinese dynasties, and now some Kanji have several similar pronunciations, each based on a different reborrowing.

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And there are languages that go much farther than us!

25% of English is Germanic, including a (possibly) surprising amount of Old Norse and Dutch. That includes most of the core vocabulary and grammar.

Mixed languages don't have a 'core'. They combine multiple languages in more complex ways.

Michif - which developed in central Canada as Cree and French voyageurs (fur traders) worked together and created their own culture (the Métis) - combines elements of Plains Cree, French, and other languages like Ojibwe, Assiniboine, and English. It developed among people who were fully bilingual, retaining complex elements of both main languages. There's more French words than Cree, but it's impossible to say that they're 'loanwords' or 'host language words'.

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Language is great. Nothing is pure. Delight in the normality!

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

one thing I respect the hell out of is little kids lying down on the floor in public. they have had ENOUGH and are ready to go HOME and are willing to be a HUGE INCONVENIENCE about it. we can learn so much from them

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

still thinking about how much WORSE running errands is for kids. they aren't even your errands! sure it sucks for adults, but kids are 1) forced to tag along, 2) no personal investment in the outcome, 3) get no say on location, duration, timing. a kid stuck in a grocery store aisle while their parent gossips with an acquaintance is a Hostage Situation. at the bare minimum hostages should be allowed to lie down and get some rest

penpaladinjules

My oldest kid was especially intolerant of extra bullshit during errands. He wanted a list of where we were going, and would get irate about new ones being added to the list after we started. He called this rule “No Secret Trips,” with special contempt reserved for the bank.

thegaymertrainer

Ribbon dancing I was not aware of your evolution 🤯

alliezweihander

"if you forgot then it obviously wasn't important to you" is an ableist thing to say and i'm tired of pretending it's not

alliezweihander

I've forgotten *my own birthday* before. There are several years of my life just straight up missing. In the past I've forgotten silly little frivolous things like NAMES OF LOVED ONES or WHERE MY HOUSE IS. But obviously none of that was important. Fucking awful, ableist thing to say.

kiragecko

Do you know what’s absolute GARBAGE?

Trying to help a teenager work through their horror at the idea that their memory being this bad is NOT an emergency that experts will leap into fixing. That they need to accept living like this, for the rest of their life, and that very few people will ever recognize their pain. Or respect it.

I’ve grieved and accepted my own terrible memory, for the most part. But watching a child rage against the injustice brings up every suppressed pain I thought I’d left behind.

(And I also have to reconsider a lot of the joking minimization I’ve been doing. Because that worked when I was trying to convince little kids that what I was doing wasn’t scary or a big deal. But it’s less effective at helping a teenager learn to accept and respect themself.)

dracula61

kiragecko

[Video set to dramatic music, showing a puppeteer standing on cobbles outside. His marionette is a pale artist sitting at a desk with a paint brush and inkwell. It is controlled by two metal paddles that look like all an engineers drafting tools merged, or maybe like alien vise-grips. Small sheets of caricature lay about the ground around the desk.

As we watch, a man drops a coin into a container in front of the desk. The marionette looks him up and down, like it's committing his appearance to memory, then dips its brush and continues an image of a woman with a hat that it is painting. The inkwell appears to contain real ink, and the painting is slow, but done well.

End ID.]

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

Is "Mary Sue" Still a Valid Criticism? (pt. 4)

pt. 1 | pt. 2 | pt. 3 | pt. 5 | pt. 6 | pt. 7

The backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there's a baby in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.

Argument 4: "Mary Sue" is still a valid criticism to the extent the "Mary Sue" character tends to start out good at everything... which can end up giving them nowhere to grow. And character growth is awesome. It makes for some of our all-time favorite heroes: Spike, Anya, Castiel, Zuko. Edmund Pevensie. Taylor Hebert. T-800. So on. Watching a character become talented or ethical or powerful makes for a great story. But if a character starts out talented/ethical/powerful, then the story often ends up in a trap of throwing ever-bigger Godzillas at a character we've already seen defeat Godzilla several times.

Effort and struggle tend to be what make a character interesting or relatable. It's the all-important difference between fearlessness (boring) and courage (relatable).

One example of how doing something badly often looks more impressive than doing it well: Captain America. He got widely derided as "useless" in Avengers (2012), so for Winter Solider (2014) the writers didn't make him more powerful... they added visible effort.

The moment of hesitation before Steve jumps, and the moment after he lands where he has to stop and go "ow" for a few seconds, do so much to sell this moment, vs. the unreal-looking way Steve does almost everything without effort in Avengers movies:

Example of this problem*: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Protagonist Ender has so many abilities so ridiculously beyond what real six-year-olds can do I can't list them all, but the point is that as of his first day of school, he's already curb-stomping kids twice his size and scoring better at training games than any other person ever measured. What problems Ender does have tend to come from being too good at things — hence John Sclazi among others deriding him as insufferably perfect.

Counter-example: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Protagonist Jean Valjean is smart enough to invent a new type of fastener, strong enough to lift a carriage unassisted, moral enough that he's literally meant to be a Catholic saint... and the book gets away with it because when we meet him, he has none of that. He'll become the world's greatest dad, but in his first scene he gets in a shouting match with a small child over a single coin and only realizes too late what an ass he's being. He'll end up running an entire town and its wealthiest business, but first we get a long sequence of him unable to get even a chance to earn enough food to survive because of his criminal record. He can go a long, long way (1500 pages!) and the story can still feel coherent, because he starts out with so little.

Tl;dr: Mary Sue ≠ ultra-talented. BUT if a story has a character start out ultra-talented without showing us how they got there, the character tends to stagnate and the reader may lose interest.

*I constrain my examples to white male protagonists that someone else has called "Mary Sue" first, as part of my argument that it's not all sexism.

kiragecko

I think several of your arguments are really strong. But I think that there's a flaw baked into the term 'Mary Sue' that makes it difficult for me to justify its continued use: it's built on a limited understanding of how varied the goals of fiction can be, and that the speaker will always be able to recognize those goals.

My husband almost exclusively reads power fantasies that allow the hero to solve every problem easily through cleverness and kindness. Every hero is overpowered. There's almost no tension. There being no tension despite the ridiculous stakes is the POINT, because he wants to dream that fixing the world without destroying himself is possible.

I just finished reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger and Dragonsong to my teen. The heroine is universally beloved, except when being bullied or abused, and 1/3 of the second book is scene after scene of people telling her the abusers were wrong, and she is good, and talented, and gets to skip all the work other characters have to do because she's so special, etc. (She is SUCH a Mary Sue! Fails half the arguments you gave!) My teen would get so excited that we'd have to pause so they could rock and squeal, because their self-confidence is through the floor and they DESPERATELY need to watch someone learn to believe in herself again.

20 years ago I used to read whump fic (what's now called hurt/comfort) where the main character's 'personality' was 'is a victim'. (My standards have risen since them, but only slightly ;) There was no tension, no drama, just noble suffering and then someone comforting them. Those guys were definitely Mary Sues, but they were also perfect vessels for me to project my pain and angst onto, so I could get some distance and process it.

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'Mary Sue' started as a way of mocking mostly young, mostly female, authours for writing stories that were 'bad'. But usually they were mocking stories where the arc was 'character triumphs over her insecurity and is taught she is lovable and valuable with the series events as a backdrop' by saying 'this story is so bad because the main character acts like a stupid 13 year old and the battles are afterthoughts that are solved too easily'!

Someone has to understand the goals of a story before they can judge whether the main character works.

I can't judge romance novels because I'm a romance-repulsed aroace, and I do NOT understand why they're doing ANY of what they're doing. I can't judge my husband's isekai protagonists, because solving all the world's problems on my own is a nightmare, not a fantasy, for me.

I CAN judge Menolly, from Dragonsong, and she's PERFECTLY designed to find believing she has value a struggle, despite being a once in a generation musical talent. Which is the exact arc that so many 'Mary Sue's get derided for. (She's also written by a talented authour, and those books are great. They're just written for young teens.)

I can also judge Ender. Ender's Game is about how dehumanizing the enemy breaks something inside those who do it, about whether war crimes can be defendable, about how gifted tracks can isolate and warp kids, and a dozen other really thorny ethical problems. It's a tragedy, and ends pretty much identically to The Lord of The Rings - with Ender too broken to return to society and needing to travel across the waters/space. Ender is perfectly designed to headline that tragedy. He's a gifted kid who cares greatly about other people, but with that slight distance that neurodivergent people often have. Which is taken advantage of to twist him into a mass murderer, while also leaving him able to mourn what he's done. Every victory is HORROR, not a sign of how great Ender is!

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I agree that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can be a meaningful criticism. I've dropped a lot of books because I found them boring for that very reason.

But I don't think "Mary Sue" is the correct term for that concept. Because it has, right from the beginning, been about judging characters by the wrong standard. It's about assuming that 13 years have the same level of self-knowledge as adults, and aren't writing 'perfect' characters that people hate 'for no reason' because they don't understand why people hate THEM. It's about assuming that since I read superhero fanfic, I must care about the fighting and powers. It's about assuming that if a character has no challenges in the areas that the speaker cares about, then they have no meaningful challenges at all.

Which is something you also recognize, obviously - I saw the point about Project Hail Mary! But I don't think it is something that can be worked around - it's foundationally baked into "Mary Sue."

elodieunderglass

Your tags about peppa made me laugh & reminded me of all the disney vhs tapes i watched in dutch as a child. The thing about children's tv and movies is you don't need to speak the language to know what's going on, so all that happens is you see it again 10 years later and say "why is the voice acting different?" or you get confused because everyone else knows knabbel and babbel as chip and dale.

(In reference to my recommendation that people who are forced to tolerate intolerable children’s programming can win some breathing space by insisting it’s only available in a different language.)

There’s a lot to be said for watching children’s TV in other languages – I know a lot of people who move to another country and are recommended to do so to level up their speaking! And I agree that it seems to seamlessly enter the child’s head without pausing for translation. But I was NOT expecting Knabbel and Babbel.

kiragecko

Dora la Exploradora was much less painful than Dora the Explorer, and had the added benefit that my child tired of it much sooner.

I was NOT, however, strong enough to defend against Paw Patrol. I insisted on a certain amount of Max and Ruby and Sarah & Duck to reset my sanity levels, but that theme song became an intrusive thought for YEARS!

greater-than-the-sword

Reacting to a recent Messyges by Blimeycow because I found myself actually having a rare disagreement with Jordan, which surprised me:

Is it normal and okay to demand that a boyfriend move out of his parent's house before you will marry him, or is this controlling and should you accept him as he is?

what do you think

It's an acceptable demand - I'm a man

It's weird and controlling - I'm a man

It's an acceptable demand - I'm a woman

It's weird and controlling - I'm a woman

Nuance/ bald (in tags)

Voting ended onMay 24

greater-than-the-sword

Clarifications: "with roommates" counts and is fine. This is not about where the two of you live after the wedding, but about him having the life experience before marriage of having lived elsewhere than with his parents.

kiragecko

Okay, when a poll asks me if I do something on my 'phone or my laptop' and I'm sitting here with a desktop tower and a tablet, what would be the best way to answer?

How should I answer?

answer 'something else' (what I want to say)

act like 'desktop' = 'laptop' and 'tablet' = 'phone' (current choice)

act like both 'desktop' and 'tablet' = 'laptop' (believable)

act like both 'desktop' and 'tablet' = 'phone' (silliest)

act like 'desktop' = 'phone' and 'tablet' = 'laptop' (almost as silly)

Voting ended onMay 18

I've been in this situation multiple times, and it never gets any easier to figure out. I know desktop computers are continuing to fall in popularity, so people may be forgetting about them entirely. But they're probably grouping tablets with SOMETHING. I group them with phones because they have apps, but they may be more similar to laptops these days, in both size and functionality. It's CONFUSING!

whetstonefires

yeah that's hard, idk...for me the important distinction is whether the device has a full-sized keyboard i can touch-type on or not, but that's not always what's most relevant to the question.

kiragecko

Well ... this one's resonated with people!

Glad we mostly agree, I was fully ready for my little comments on the options to be hilariously off base.

A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about her experience called The Loudest Girl in

99% Invisible episode on Autism accomodation

#neuro-diversity #autism #urban design

kiragecko

Most accessibility options don't actually make things easier for the average person.

"But what if people will pretend to need this accessibility option so they can be lazy! People who don't need it will use it!!" - those people probably aren't using it to be lazy, either.

Most people will take the stairs, because they're shorter than the ramp, and that makes them easier. Most people will screw off the cap themselves, because it's easier than finding the grippy pad that helps. Most people will prefer the shower without a chair, because it's easier to move around with more space.

The curb-cutter effect is real - most accessibility aids will help people they weren't directly designed to help - but that doesn't mean that they make things easier for the majority of abled people. In the spring, curb-cuts are really annoying to me - they let the puddles spread out up the sidewalk and I usually skirt around them to where the curb lets me jump over the water.

Most accessibility devices don't actually help the lazy. They're slower than the normal way, they require special devices you need to keep track of, they get in the way. They have a cost. Even for people needing aid, they sometimes aren't worth it. In university, accessibility services offered me multiple supports, and I had to turn them all down, because all of them had more downsides than benefits for me.

Most kitchen gadgets just make the job harder if you're abled - all those fiddly places to wash afterwards - and the ones that don't? Food processors and electric mixers aren't considered accessibility devices. Because they're helpful to everyone. Is it lazy to not whip your cream, or blend your smoothies, by hand?

If translating someone else's notes is more helpful than making your own, you aren't being lazy if you accept a volunteer note taker. (For most people, the main benefit of note taking is in organizing the thoughts yourself and highlighting the ones that will remind you of the rest.)

If using a cane causes less long-term pain then going without, and seems worth the effort of dragging a cane around all day, you definitely aren't being lazy using one! (Canes cause their own type of strain and soreness, and get heavy after a while.)

It's often incredibly difficult to find the right type and dosage for antidepressants. If you're willing to brave possible hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, feelings of emptiness, allergic reactions, weight gain, and dozens of doctors appointments - you probably really do need that medication.

Even if you're using an accessibility option that isn't actually helpful, and is increasing dependence/degrading skills (what's usually meant by 'laziness') it's almost always because you are trying to deal with an issue that DOES need accommodation. You're just currently using the wrong accommodation. That's NOT LAZINESS!

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tl;dr: Most accessibility devices have a cost that isn't worth paying if you're abled. In fact, they're sometimes not worth the cost even if you ARE struggling in that area! If they're actually worth the cost for you, it isn't laziness to use them.

sunanthrope

"But what if people will pretend to need this accessibility option so they can be lazy! People who don't need it will use it!!" I don't actually care

I dont care if 9/10 of the people who use the wheelchair ramp arent actually in wheelchairs. As long as the 1 person who needs it has access to it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who use the automatic push button on the library door can actually push the door open themselves. As long as the 1 person who the door is too heavy for gets to use it.

I dont care if 9/10 people who buy the can tab opener, or the little guitar clamp that holds the chords for you, or the hand grip that helps you hold chop sticks, don't need any of it and just get it to "be lazy". As long as the one disabled person who needs it gets access to it.

I do not care. Oh my GOD I do not care. As long as there's a disabled person on this planet who the accessibility device will benefit, the accessibility device is necessary.

Also, if you're so worried about people being "lazy" by using accessibility devices, MORE worried than you are about disabled (visibly or not) people not having access to them, you have unchecked ableism you need to work through.

fantasy-anatomy-analyst

What kinds of weapons would be practical for merfolk to use underwater? Tridents are very popular (and are indeed used in spearfishing by fishermen) but they kind of feel cliche. Would projectile weapons also work if there's water resistance? Or perhaps sharp bladed weapons like a polearm?

If they could figure out an elastic material of some kind (maybe a cultivated seaweed or kelp fiber?) they could make something like a spring loaded harpoon maybe! Narrow stabbing weapons would work best underwater, since they would meet less resistance. Anything that requires a big swinging motion or has a wide surface area will be less effective.

So yes, light weight polearms would be a favored weapon style, I think. Nothing too heavy, or it will be very difficult to carry.

kiragecko

Given the vast spaces of the ocean, I can see both hunting and fighting developing in very different ways than they did on land. A lot of weapons on land developed to protect settlements, and/or to ambush prey from camouflage. Most projectile weapons require you to brace yourself to use them, so that you aren’t thrown backwards instead of the projectile going forwards. And many parts of the ocean don’t have enough light for visual-aim based weapons to be particularly effective.

In almost all situations, given the greater density of water of air, and the mobility possibilities, weapons that work where you WERE seem more effective than ones that are aimed ahead of you.

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Do your merfolk HAVE settlements? Because many well known sea creatures don't stay in the same place. Do they have any reason to protect a specific location, or are their weapons more focused on protecting slower members of their pod in the open ocean? Nets, jellyfish lines (the types with deadly tentacles, either trained or dead ones on wires depending on the type of world), billowing fabric shields - things that cover a lot of area, use the buoyancy of water to their advantage, and/or are hard to see in water - seem suited to protecting pods in the sunlight/twilight zones.

Caltrop-like devices that are neutrally buoyant at the depth you're at. Meters-long razor-wire you drag behind you. Thrown knives/darts/etc. that fly through the disturbed water of your wake. Chemical warfare - gases/liquids that spread through the water - could be useful if your side had protective gear, or you were immune. Concussive waves/things that disrupt sonar might be a thing - maybe they have drums, cymbals, or claves that can disorient enemies or prey!

Things like spears/tridents make more sense if they’re in coral reefs, or on the ocean floor, and defending caves/other structures.

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Do they ambush prey from camouflage? There are areas of the ocean where animals do that! Coral reefs, again, and kelp forests, might be similar enough to surface hunting to allow for similar weapons to develop. There’s also more places to brace yourself against, so things like harpoons, or maybe even bows, might work.

If they're in the abyssal zone, active hunting would usually be useless, given the low population density and lack of visibility, so lures and passive traps seem a lot more likely. Poisoned food lures, hypnotic lights surrounded by razor-wire, spiderweb like nets that get regularly checked.

If they're on the abyssal seafloor, they once again have bracing/hiding opportunities, but are unlikely to be using much that requires visual aiming. Traps that can be more actively monitored might be more common, or sensor traps that alert the merfolk to intruders. Concussive weapons seem even more effective here than the open ocean, with their broad area of effect and disorienting effect!

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I’d love to see merfolk who, rather than adapting surface methods to their environment, have developed very different methods that wouldn’t even work on land!

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