no, mother... you should have read my supposed "school field trip" permission slip closer.... i foresaw your betrayal a mile away.... im afraid, mother, it is you who has been sold to one direction
are you a male ski jumper alleged to be pursuing marginal gains that could yield up to a 5-8 metre increase in flight distance or are you just pleased to see me
Insomnia blorbo thought about spiky rude queer blonde women from the Southwestern US with bad mothers, plunged into an allegedly idyllic nightmare world outside their control: what if they met
4am perfec t size for put decisions in to make! 4am very Clear thinking and Comfort no need sleep soundly make decisions at 4am. Put Decision In 4am. no problems ever at 4 am because good Shape and Support for tired brain weak of struggle make sad. Afouram awake yes a place for a thought put action in 4am can trust middle of night for giveing good love to brain. friend 4am
On Connor Storrie’s excellent Russian in HR (from a linguist)
Ok it’s time to put my Russian and linguistics (and Slavic linguistics) degrees to work and tell you why Connor Storrie’s Russian and accent work in this show is so freaking good. (Links added for those who want more info about stuff.) Hey other linguists — I’m playing fast and loose with notation here, ok, we’re not doing phonemes and IPA.
We’re going to go over overall mouth shape, palatalization, lack of aspiration, vowel reduction, and intonation with examples from Ilya’s dialogue! I’m going to talk about this from the perspective of an English speaker learning Russian since that’s what Connor (and I) did. Here we go.
1. Overall mouth shape
Every language has what you could think of as its own neutral or resting mouth position (aka, basis of articulation). One way to think of this is what the “I’m thinking” noise is — in English it’s uhh, in Spanish it’s often ehh. In Russian it’s mmm or ehhh or ahhh. The other thing is that the mouth typically does not open as much vertically when speaking Russian as when speaking English, but rather wider (horizontally).
Connor is doing a good job of maintaining a more Russian resting position (and I have a theory that this is one of the reasons his face looks so different as Ilya).
You can see Connor doing this when he says “ehh no” to Shane about whether this is his first time with a man in episode 1.
Also when he’s yelling at Alexei during the funeral in episode 5, we get to see him head on speaking Russian for an extended time, and you can see he is opening his mouth wider but not taller.
2. Palatalization
Every consonant has a place of articulation in your mouth, aka a place where your tongue touches the inside of your mouth or is positioned so that the air flows or is stopped in such a way as to make the sound. Making sounds is all about changing how air flows through our vocal tracts (throat, mouth, nose).
For example, in English ‘t’ and ‘d’ are both alveolar sounds made by touching the tip of your tongue to the hard palate behind your teeth. In Spanish those same sounds are dental, so you touch the tongue to the teeth to make the sound. In Russian you touch the hard palate and the teeth at once - the sounds are dental and alveolar.
In Russian consonants are sometimes palatalized. This means that there is a regular version — for ‘t’, touching the tip of the tongue to the teeth and hard palate. For regular “l”, touching the tip of the tongue to the hard palate or right behind your teeth and resting the body of the tongue along the bottom of the mouth, etc.
Then some consonants have a palatalized version, which happens before certain vowels. You lift the middle of your tongue and use it as the point of contact with the roof of your mouth instead of the tip. So for palatalized ‘t’, the middle of your tongue touches the ridge of the hard palate, and the tip of your tongue moves down to rest behind your bottom teeth. For ‘l’, the same.
In Russian the distinction is meaning bearing. So mat (regular t) and mat’ (palatalized t)’ are different words (cursing and mother, respectively). Another explanation here. Here’s an IPA chart with animation and videos of sounds being articulated. Try clicking on the ‘t’.
Connor is doing this. He doesn’t hit every single palatalized consonant but I’d say he’s hitting 85-90% of them. It’s wild! He was clearly taught by sound/phonetically which is great. But Americans often have trouble learning palatalization as a meaning bearing sound difference (I know this because I’ve taught Russian many times and there are studies) and he’s knocking it out of the park for someone who doesn’t speak the language.
You can hear it in his very careful pronunciation of I love you to Shane in ep6 - palatalized consonants in this phrase are the t, b, l, and b and l together: я тебя люблю/ ya tebya lyublyu.
Also every time he says the word хрень/ khren’ (shit/fuck) - he says this in episode 1 on the phone with Alexei twice and in the monologue to Shane in episode 5. The kh, r, and n are all palatalized, he nails it.
He even gets it in some tricky spots:
In episode 1 on the phone with Alexei with the baby crying in the background, he says the words для/ dlya (for) and блядь/ blyad’ (fuck). These are both notoriously tricky for English speakers learning Russian because every single consonant is palatalized. He gets both right.
He says the word больше/ bol’she (more) a lot during his monologue to Shane in episode 5 and nails the tricky palatalized ‘l’ in the middle every time.
3. Lack of aspiration
In English we have some aspirated consonants. The means that when we say them we sometimes produce a little puff of air with them: p, t, k. The aren’t aspirated 100% of the time but we don’t use aspiration for meaning like some languages do (ex. In Hindi kal (no aspiration) and khal (aspirated k) are two different words (time, skin)).
In Russian these sounds (p, t, k) are not aspirated. It’s difficult for English soakers to pick up this difference a lot of the time because it’s so subtle and hard to self monitor when you’ve never had to do it before.
You can feel it by putting your hand or a piece of paper in front of your mouth and saying “tik tok” or “cat”, you’ll probably notice the little air puffs.
In Russian similar words have no aspiration-так/ tak (‘so’) and кот/ kot (‘cat’)
Connor is doing this pretty well. He struggles with non-aspirated ‘t’, which is pretty normal. He’s better with p and k.
The times his “okay” sounds really Russian? Not aspirating the k is part of that.
He does a good job not aspirating the k sound in fuck in English, which adds to his accent.
In episode 1 he asks Alexei on the phone (when the baby is crying) как папа/ kak papa (how is dad), and overall does a good job with not aspirating any of those k’s or p’s.
His non-aspiration is pretty good overall in the long monologue with Shane in episode 5.
In my experience as someone who learned Russian as a second language and then has taught it to others, it feels a little bit like swallowing back or speaking from the back of your mouth to avoid aspirating. Or try putting another sound in front of the aspirated letter. (ex. In English, peak vs speak - the p in speak is not aspirated)
4. Correct vowel reduction, mostly
In Russian, word stress affects vowel sounds. In the syllable that is stressed (emphasized), the vowel has its most typical sound. In all of the unstressed syllables around it, the vowel sounds “reduce.”
Ex. the word for milk is молоко/ ‘moloko’ and the last syllable “ko” is stressed/where you will put the emphasis. The other two o’s don’t sound like o’s as a result. Correct pronunciation of this word is more like muh-lah-koh. As you get farther from the stressed syllable in either direction, the vowels get more reduced (o reduces to “ah” and then ə (“uh”) when fully reduced). (Tricky note: in this word the first syllable, muh, isn’t as reduced as it could be because it’s first, so it gets a little boost from that.)
Connor is doing this pretty beautifully throughout. Even when the consonant paltalizarion or the vowel quality is a little off, he’s knocking vowel reduction out of the park, for the most part. I imagine this is because he learned it phonetically.
Every time he says отец/ otets (father), he correctly pronounces the ‘o’ as ‘ah’.
There are many good examples in episode 1, but here’s a couple that stood out to me — when he’s watching Shane speak French, he says просто отлично/ prosto otlichno (just perfect/excellent) and correctly pronounces it “prostuh ahtlichnuh”.
He says the word теперь/ teper’ (now) a couple of times, and correctly pronounces the first e more like i (и).
When he and Sveta are talking about the ASG and votes in episode 4 on the bed, he says голосовали/ golosovali (they voted) and correctly reduces all 3 o’s, since the syllable ‘va’ has the stress: “guhluhsahvali”
5. Intonation of questions, sentences
Something you might know about English is that yes/no questions have rising intonation, aka we contour our pitch/voices up at the end. Like if I asked you “do you know the way to the store?” I would raise my intonation/pitch at the end to indicate it is a question. We also use falling intonation but often differently from Russian.
In many of the situations where we use rising intonation in English (including yes/no questions), Russian uses falling intonation. So the question goes down at the end instead of up.
There’s more to it than this but you can hear Connor do this very clearly when he asks Svetlana questions.
In episode 5, he asks her if Shane is also mediocre when they’re talking about other players on the bed before the ASG. And he uses falling intonation perfectly.
In episode 2 he says “this year?” When Sveta is telling him he could win the cup that year. His intonation falls perfectly again - а этом году? / v etom godu?
He also says a word in ep1 that I don’t think gets translated (the subtitles say “speaking Russian”) and his intonation is just so good - Неужели/ neuzheli (really). (His palatalization here is also great!) He says it to Shane when Shane asked him not to tell anyone in the first hotel room together.
Anyway. Connor, as we know, is hitting it out of the park with his Russian, and here are some of the reasons why. He picked up palatalization, mouth position, non-aspiration, intonation, and vowel reduction!! Like, damn.
They should invent a machine that scans my body and then a little hatch opens and inside is the exact right food with all my needed nutrients and calories for the day.
The Machine gives you food in bricks, like high fibre protein bars, and you can tell it your favoured flavour profiles, temperatures and textures for your bricks. If you ask it to do something that it can't do inside your nutrient requirement parameters (like ask it to make your food really salty when you don't need that much salt), it beeps a warning at you and tells you what parameter you're exceeding, but if you confirm that that's what you want then it will still make it for you. It also has drink options (but will warn you that a healthy diet contains a plenty of solid food). The Machine will also dispense your daily medications so that you remember to take them.
Where's the fun, and creativity in this bleak vision of future food? I want cook, to create new gastronomic experiences, to excite and arouse my senses and the senses of those with whom I share a meal.
I frequently don't have the energy to cook, and would still prefer to simple ready-to-heat meals I turn to at those times than a nutrient brick.
I also believe that cooking is an essential skill that everyone should be learning in every school year. Cooking is uniquely human¹, it is, like many things we do, an art. And like all art it is intrinsically enriching to practice at any skill level. You can sit down to a meal knowing you created this.
You created this, something of you is a part of it. Nothing of you is part of such an aforementioned machine, it gives you nothing but the distilled, and extracted essence of food, but none of its quintessence, its soul if you'll excuse the metaphor.
I lament a humanity that would subsist on such devices.
#i get both perspectives tbh but. op what u are looking for can be found in the form of potato stuffed quiche. assuming u like quiche.#finding food i could eat with enough damn calories was SO hard for like a year but. if nobody got me i know potato quiche got me.#bake. put that thang in the fridge. easy brick of nutrient and protien and most importantly. carbs.
A stuffed potato quiche will scan my body in the morning and give me the exact balance of nutrients and calories that would be best for my specific body on that specific day? Fantastic. None of the other many many convenience foods and meal replacements in our world do that.
I feel like this machine would allow me to enjoy cooking again. There are so many pressures on my time, energy and mental load at the moment that my cooking is largely functional, with none of the joy I used to take in it when I could just spend a whole weekend afternoon cooking something for the hell of it
If the machine handled cooking for me and my family to live as healthily as we wanted, I could have it back as a fun and creative hobby
sidney crosby is gonna be in italy playing in the olympics for the first time since 2014 staring at the guy who played the slutty bottom fictional version of himself carrying the olympic torch as a reward for throwing ass so good on television it hypnotized the entire world
look I'm not gonna pretend I know anything about electronics, but sometimes a plug is so big it blocks another socket, and I'm always like "who the fuck do you think you are"
I do think how you react to 6 7 is a good litmus test over whether you'll be a cranky old person who will continue the stupid cycle of "kids these days". but also we do need to be educating the youth about history and how the two numbers have been in a fear based relationship because 7 8 9
Imagine how it feels to be Sidney Crosby. There are like 10 fictional characters based on you. They’re all calling you autistic and gay. Right now the very popular one is getting fucked within an inch of his life for 40 minutes every week. They’re making fun of your weird diet. They put your fortress of solitude McMansion “cottage” and TV spot about it in the episode. And they used your tax dollars to do it.
a new updated and significantly worse version of The Game (sorry) directed at a specific subset of chronically online people has infact been circling since the mid-2010s. and it is lost when one fumbles while attempting to plug their phone in to charge at night
never lose hope. somewhere, a middle-aged, gender ambiguous person with an advanced degree in an esoteric field and a fiber arts hobby could be crashing out and pinning all their remaining mental health on getting obsessed with your otp. any day now, the most elegantly written 100k fanfic you have ever read is going to hit ao3. it could happen. it has happened.
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