licensed poltergeist

25 | they/them *icon created by @exbestfriends* where i follow from

[emmaharwoods]

you can click on this button once daily to help palestine and support other causes in the middle east for free. it takes literally 5 seconds and could help save lives so please take the time to click and share this link.

[grelliam]

#oh it raises money thru ad revenue and ur click confirms the value to advertisers. neat

[kazieka]

was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.

[kazieka]

i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved

[arom-antix]

Why Rocky speaks Like That™

It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.

Break for the Dash™

I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.

This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:

He speaks clearly. It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up. There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even. It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.

He uses words he knows Grace knows. Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know. And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too. His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.

He speaks in English in Eridian. This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me. Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language. Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is". The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that. Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible. Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.

All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.

It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.

SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.

By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).

Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3

[beemovieerotica]

please vote for tylenol to have her face on a beer can $1 for 1 vote and the donation goes to the baltimore animal rescue and care shelter

[leshermes]

Jasmine Vine, lead programmer of Hollow Knight & Silksong just transitioned!! I'm so happy for her!❤️🏳️‍⚧️

[c-rowlesdraws]

her bluesky header & icon are so cute too 🥰

[makingqueerhistory]

Botswana officially erases ban on same-sex intimacy

Dick Bayford, Botswana's attorney general, removed anti-gay language that courts struck down years ago. (Photo courtesy of the Sunday Standa

Local LGBTIQ+ organisation LEGABIBO welcomed the government’s move, describing it as “a necessary and long-overdue step toward restoring dignity and aligning our legal framework with constitutional values of equality and human rights.” The group said the change sends “a clear message that LGBTIQ+ persons are not criminals, and that their lives and relationships deserve protection, not punishment.” LEGABIBO noted that the colonial-era provisions had long cast a shadow over the lives of LGBTIQ+ people in the country.

[kropotkindersurprise]

[nessa007]

Beyoncé, P!nk and Britney Spears appearing in Pepsi's Gladiator inspired commercial (2004)

[ruinedchildhood]

Showing up to The Odyssey in IMAX like

[malibuklaus]

[galadriel1010]

Sometimes you get a brief glimpse into the American worldview and decide that you don't want to know.

[transcyberism]

I cannot stress enough that this meme is entirely literal. there's no reference or subtext you don't know. these are simply the objectively most popular works of art from each denomination.

[mysharona1987]

[a-book-of-creatures]

[valleyhowler]

There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.

[readingtheentrails]

I know this is maybe not the point of the post, but this reminded me of this beautiful poem called When My Wife Is A Werewolf by Rosamund Taylor which I really adore so I thought I would share it.

This is taken from a collection of contemporary queer Irish poetry called Queering the Green, which has some truly wonderful work in it and is available from The Lifeboat Press (currently sold out but hopefully available again soon if you're interested).

[cyberpunkpavlichenko]

After "Political Terrorism" Summit, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups

Rubio report on Cuban subversion names Zohran Mamdani, Amy Goodman, Hasan Piker + orgs like DSA and Amazon Labor Union

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report says.

As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” was released this morning.

[benefitscrounger]

oh so we really are just repackaging the 'judeo-bolshevism' conspiracy but for Latinos and Muslims, awesome

[benefitscrounger]

in all seriousness though this is a terrifying escalation in rhetoric, and frankly, i would call it genocidal language being aimed at Cubans in particular, but Latin America more broadly.

[holly-warbs]

Sketchbook drawing from a moment in Verőce, Hungary.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[germanslav]

Something good finally comes from Ohio.

[thelovingdread]

Smash them thangs

[wizardarchetypes]

was showering at the gym when i heard an elderly woman call out "hello? is there anyone who can help me?" and i called back "hello, yes! do you have time for me to dry off and get dressed real quick or is this a nude-response emergency?" she paused long enough that i was about to just assume it was a nude-response emergency but finally she said, "no, no, it's fine you can get dressed!"

which would have been grand but then i realized i'd pass by her anyway on my way to the locker for my clothes, so it might not have been a nude-response emergency but it remained a nude-response situation nonetheless.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

anti abortion propaganda that tries to like scare you into feeling guilty by reminding you that the fetus has body parts are so funny. "uwu please don't abort me I have eyes at 4 weeks old 🥺" nice try sucker I don't care if you see it coming

[utilitycaster]

It really is extremely funny how the Mighty Nein experienced nominative determinism for their fighting style. Two of them have evasion and maxed out dexterity. Two of them halve fire damage. Three of them are unaffected by difficult terrain. Two add +5 or +6 to literally all saving throws. Two of them have counterspell. The closest they have to a blaster caster is one of the two clerics. Their entire style is "I didn't fail that, you can't hit me, you can't move, I don't have to save against this in the first place, and even if you're immune to stun you're not immune to swords."

[shamebats]

Emos & scene kids got this close to abolishing gender for real. I try not to think about it too much.

[shamebats]

The idea of a popular teenage subculture that has girls & boys pretty much all dressing the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.