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[allthingslinguistic]

Heaven’s Vault is an interesting-looking symbol-deciphering game that’s apparently “like Guitar Hero for linguistics.” From a review in The Verge:

Initially, the premise for Heaven’s Vault sounds like a typical video game. You play as a young woman named Aliya Elasra, accompanied by her temperamental robot Six, and together you explore a series of moons that were once home to a mysterious ancient civilization. But the ruins aren’t filled with violent aliens to kill or powerful weapons to discover. Instead, what the civilization left behind is words, and it’s your job to figure out what they mean. […]

The first time you see a hieroglyph, you essentially have to guess what it is. The game will show you a pictorial, and then give you a few options for what it might mean. A symbol could mean either “temple” or “garden,” and, initially, all you have to go on is the context of where the symbol is and what it looks like. If you guess wrong, you aren’t punished. In fact, the game lets you carry on thinking that could be the meaning of the word. As you explore, you’ll keep seeing symbols repeatedly and learn new ones that can give you a better idea of what others mean.

Eventually, if you’ve guessed wrong, Aliya will realize that it isn’t right, and the definition will be reset. By that time, you may have worked out what it really means by discovering other hieroglyphs or by learning something new about your location. It’s a system designed specifically to make you feel unsure and thus more like a real archaeologist. The game’s creators want you to fumble around. “We deliberately delay that process a little bit so that it goes on for slightly longer than you might be comfortable with because that feeling of not quite being sure is important,” says Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold.

The language itself has around 1,000 words, and the team describes it as being “logically constructed.” The idea is that the symbols aren’t random; each has a meaning, and that meaning is always the same. […]

While the language itself is real, the team admits that, in order to make it work for the purposes of the game, it’s not exactly the most functional language. “It’s complete in the sense that it’s fully logical, but it’s also not a super useful language,” Humfrey explains. “We have around 1,000 words, which is just enough to be useful for the purposes of the game.” He likens it to Guitar Hero for linguists: it’s enough to make you feel like you’re doing the job, but it cuts out a lot of the more tedious busy work. 

Read the rest of the review.

This game reminds me of the symbol-deciphering puzzles in the Linguistics Olympiad – I hope it leads people into wanting to learn more about linguistics! 

[cassandrapentayaaaaas]

Fic tag: slow burn

Me, cracking my knuckles: not if you read it fast enough

[aliensnipe]

What if there were women’s cleanliness products that were marketed the way Old Spice stuff is? Like they had names like “Lioness” and “Sycamore” and “Wildfire” and “Hunter’s Moon” and they were touted as making you smell like a warrior queen who does not suffer fools and conquers all she beholds

[trixie-ren-deactivated20191028]

HELLO LADIES

have you felt the primal call of the unmerciful sea calling you to strike down those who would defy you? no? well if you stopped using overpriced flower-scented body wash and switched to SEA HAG, you might. 

look down.

back up. where are you? you’re a siren, bare-breasted and shrieking as you lure the unwary to their doom on the rocks below. and you smell amazing. 

what’s in your hand? back at me. it’s a vial of skin-nourishing ingredients, derived from the seaweed you used to strangle a hated foe. it does wonders for your skin tone and resilience, and we all can agree that we will need that resilience in the coming war.

look again: the seaweed is now a formal apology from the last man who unnecessarily tried to explain something to you.

anything is possible when you smell like a vengeful sea witch and embrace your own rage. i’m on a narwhal. 

[goatjinku]

Philosophers And Physicists

A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

Another of Existential Comic’s best strips.

[archaicwonder]

Haunted Meayll Hill Stone Circle, Isle of Man

Meayll Hill (Mull Hill) is not a true stone circle, but a unique group of Neolithic chambered tombs built around 3500 BC. These tombs are characteristic for Neolithic farmers in the British Isles, but the arrangement of 12 of them in ring formation is very unusual and no one knows why they were arranged this way. A group of stone foundations of Neolithic huts can be found nearby to the east with an ancient pathway running between the two sites.

According to local lore, some visitors have had unpleasant paranormal experiences at Meayll Hill, including the feeling of sudden disorientation. Others have seen unexplained moving lights and heard strange sounds, like the cadence of invisible horses trotting or galloping by. One tale says that a phantom army of horsemen has been seen riding along the circle.

The site is located just outside the village of Cregneash at the southern end of the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland.

Click here to aerial video of Meayll Hill.

[goatjinku]

Here we are, at the end of all things.

[archaicwonder]

Hellenistic Gilt Silver Bowl with Complex Ornament, 2nd-1st Century BC

A shallow silver bowl with thickened chamfered rim, concentric gilt bands, one with reserve scrolled vines with bunches of grapes on a textured field; central disc with octofoil and four radiating leaves, coiled tendrils on a pointillé textured field with running wave border. 254 grams, 17.5cm (6 ¾".

Watch it described on youtube

[lotr4everhobbit]

[relar-fela]

The weird thing about Aragorn is that he gets hotter the less groomed he is. Like king Aragorn with his clean hair and everything is like hmm yes ok

but dirty, greasy hair, bloody Aragorn is like aw hell Yeah!

yeeees gimme

[goatjinku]

So I recently read this book Female Chauvanist Pigs which is basically about how our culture only has one idea of ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’ and it’s the one in porn and everything but in reality we all have a different sexy, you know?

[accras]

[discitemori]

Traditional Georgian dancing.

[lionhearrt-deactivated20170920]

date a man who

[wizardshark]

i cannot even imagine how fit these people are they could kick my ass they could kick muhammad ali’s ass

[northeastartist]

Let me show you the Aggression of my people… through dance.

[inthroughthesunroof]

If your dance doesn’t require knee pads and posing en pointe it isn’t worth doing.

[bonehandledknife]

@dadvans I feel like you can do Things with this

[arrghigiveup]

So the last time I reblogged this, someone reblogged from me with a comment along the lines of “wait till you see them with swords”. So I went to search it up, and… guys. GUYS.

There are actual sparks flying holy shit =O

[chirrutbaze]

[goatjinku]

I have never seen this meme before!

[averagefairy]

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

[runawaymarbles]

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

[feynites]

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

[goatjinku]

Oh no cultural relativism strikes again! And mutual misunderstanding all around.

So the problem here is that the mother has applied her formal writing skills to a ‘conversational writing’ situation, and not that the author’s generation has invented an entirely new set of rules for writing in ‘conversational’ situations? Good job on delineating ‘conversational writing’, by the way.

[goatjinku]

Tarot by Sceith-A on DeviantArt

Never forget.

[songs-to-the-siren]

Made a new wreath for my altar.

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus #9 - Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all | Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Official Post from Lingthusiasm: Become a patron to get access to this post and other exclusive content.

We asked our patrons if a burrito was a sandwich, and they said ‘no’. We asked if ravioli was a sandwich and they said ‘heck no’. We asked if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things…started to get a little murky. This isn’t just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!

So wait…does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It’s okay, linguistics has a solution!

To listen to this bonus episode, gain access to all eight previous bonuses, and generally support the show, become a patron on Patreon! We’re getting close to unlocking full-length bonus episodes every month, so now is a great time to join! 

[allthingslinguistic]

I’ve had so many fun arguments about things like whether cereal is soup, whether a lampshade is furniture, and whether pizza is a sandwich, that I’m really excited to take a deep dive into the linguistics behind arguing about categories, why we love to do it, and how words can mean things even when definitions start fraying at the edges.  

[horrorandhalloween]

by Caley Hicks

[allthingslinguistic]

You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for phonemes on the memes. (via)

[goatjinku]

Too clever!

[archaicwonder]

Scythian Acinaces Dagger, 6th-5th Century BC

An iron acinaces dagger with lozenge-section leaf-shaped blade, recurved lower guard, flat-section grip, antenna pommel; mounted on a custom-made stand. 43.5cm including stand (17 ¼")