In honour of Lingthusiasm's 100th episodiversary, we've compiled this list of 101 public-facing places where linguists and linguistics nerds hang out and learn things!
17 podcasts about linguistics
Lingthusiasm — A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!
The Vocal Fries — Language discrimination and how to fight it
The History of English — From Proto-Indo-European to Shakespeare in 180 episodes (and still running!)
A Language I Love Is — Guests (some linguists, some not) talk about languages they love and why
En Clair — Forensic linguistics and literary detection
Because Language — New guests every episode discuss their linguistic interests
The Allusionist — Stories about language and the people who use it
Subtitle — A podcast about languages and the people who speak them
Field Notes — Five seasons on linguistic fieldwork
Tomayto Tomahto — Language meets cog sci, politics, history, law, anthropology, and more
Word of Mouth — A long-running and wide-ranging linguistics program on BBC 4.
Words Unravelled - A new and very well edited etymology podcast with popular creators RobWords and Jess Zafarris
Something Rhymes with Purple — Learn the background behind another word or phrase each episode
Lexitecture — A classic etymology podcast with a huge back catalogue
A Way with Words — A "lively and upbeat" public radio call-in show about language and culture
Språket — A radio program in Swedish answering listener questions about language. We don't speak Swedish, but this was the most-mentioned non-English content in our listener survey!
Living Voices — A podcast in Spanish about endangered languages of the Amazon
12 nonfiction books about linguistics
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch (Amazon; Bookshop) — A linguist shows how the internet is transforming the way we communicate
How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die (Amazon; Bookshop) by David Crystal — A journey through the different subsystems of language
That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships by Deborah Tannen (Amazon; Bookshop) — A pioneering researcher on conversations gives advice on how they can go wrong
Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy (Amazon; Bookshop) — Scientific and personal reflections on nostalgia, forgetting, and language loss
The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building by David J Peterson (Amazon; Bookshop) — an accessible guide to making your own conlang
Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent (Amazon; Bookshop) — The history behind English's many oddities
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell (Amazon; Bookshop) — A well-researched pushback on sexist language ideology
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (Amazon; Bookshop) — A lifelong lexicographer discusses the job and the things she's learned along the way
Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Amazon; Bookshop) — A quick, funny tour of the quirks of 60 European languages
Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New by Felicity Meakins, Gari Tudor-Smith, and Paul Williams (Amazon; Bookshop) — The story of Australian indigenous languages' resistance and survival
Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words by Anne Curzan (Amazon; Bookshop) — A writers' style and grammar guide focused on real usage, not made-up rules
The Language Lover's Puzzle Book: A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles by Alex Bellos (Amazon; Bookshop) — Solve puzzles about writing, grammar, and meaning drawn from real and fictional languages
Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Amazon; Bookshop) — An anthology of poems in endangered languages, with commentary
6 linguistically-inspired novels
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Imagine a world where linguistics was as vital — and as ethically compromised — as engineering is in ours
True Biz by Sara Nović (Amazon; Bookshop) — Love, friendship, and struggle at a residential high school for the Deaf
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by by Mark Dunn (Amazon; Bookshop) — "A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable" full of wordplay and weirdness
Semiosis by Sue Burke (Amazon; Bookshop) — Human space colonists communicate with sentient plants
Translation State by Ann Leckie (Amazon; Bookshop) — What does life look like for a perfectly genetically engineered alien–human translator? (Spoiler: weird, that's what.)
Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Includes the long short story that became Arrival, plus other reflections on humanity and change
13 linguistics youtube channels
Crash Course Linguistics — A whole linguistics course in 16 videos
Tom Scott's Language Files — Pithy language facts explained quickly and clearly
NativLang — Language reconstruction and the history of writing
Geoff Lindsay — Facts (and some scholarly opinions) about regional English pronunciation
The Ling Space — An educational channel all about linguistics
langfocus — A language factoid channel that digs deeper than many
K Klein — Language quirks, spelling reform, and a little conlanging
biblaridion — Teaching about conlanging and worldbuilding, with lots of linguistics along the way
RobWords — "A channel for lovers and learners of English"
Otherwords — "the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted"
LingoLizard — Widely spoken languages and their quirks, comparisons, and history
linguriosa — Spanish linguistics (in Spanish), including learning tips and linguistic history
human1011 — Quick accessible facts about linguistics (and sometimes other things)
Simon Roper — Language evolution and historical English pronunciation
10 shortform video channels about linguistics (tiktok/reels)
etymologynerd — Internet speak, etymologies and more! (reels)
linguisticdiscovery — Writing systems, language families, and more (reels)
jesszafaris — Fun facts about words, etymologies, and more (reels)
cmfvoices — An audiobook director talks about the linguistics of voice acting (eels)
mixedlinguist — A linguistics professor comments on the language of place, identity, politics, technology, and more (reels)
landontalks — Linguistic quirks of the US South (reels)
sunnmcheaux — Language and culture from Harvard's first and only professor of Gullah (reels)
dexter.mp4 — Talks about many branches of science, but loves linguistics enough to have a linguisticsy tattoo (reels)
danniesbrain — Linguistics and psychology from a researcher who studies both (reels)
wordsatwork — Quick facts on languages, families, and linguistic concepts (reels)
the_language — The Ojibwe language — plus food, dancing, and more
In honour of Lingthusiasm's 100th episodiversary, we've compiled this list of 101 public-facing places where linguists and linguistics nerds hang out and learn things!
8 linguistically-inspired videogames and board games
Heaven’s Vault (video game) — Decode a mystery hieroglyphic language as a space archeologist traveling with her trusty robot sidekick
Chants of Sennaar (video game) — puzzle your way through uncoding the language and world of The Tower
Tunic (video game) — You don’t need to decode the writing system to enjoy exploring this video game as an anthropomorphic fox, but some people have enjoyed the additional challenge of cracking the writing system
Cypher & Epigraph (video game) — Test and grow your cryptographic skills with these increasingly feendish puzzles
Wavelength (board game) — A relaxed and silly party game featuring comparatives and scales. Very fun for a flexible-sized group.
Xenolanguage (board game) — An ethereal storytelling game about communicating with aliens featuring a unique ouija-board inspired gameplay mechanic
The Gostak (interactive fiction) — A classic text adventure you need to decipher a secret language to play
IPA Scrabble (board game) — Do-it-yourself instructions for making your own International Phonetic Alphabet Scrabble tiles
7 blogs, newsletters, and magazines about linguistics
Nancy Friedman's substack — A professional name developer (that's a thing!) weighs in on trends
Language Log — One of the longest running linguistics blogs: a few professors discuss their interests
Separated by a Common Language — "Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK"
Sesquiotica — Riffs on etymology and meaning
Language Hat — Another longtime classic, featuring literature, translation, and lexical curiosities
@official-linguistics-post — Sharing posts and conversations of linguistic interest from around Tumblr
Babelzine — A print magazine of language and linguistics, great for school libraries to subscribe to
9 linguistically-inspired movies and tv shows
Atlantis: The Lost Empire — A linguist protagonist meets a conlang plot device
Arrival — The most linguistic fieldwork you'll ever see in a sci-fi blockbuster
Darmok — The Star Trek episode that launched a thousand linguistics memes
CODA — The biggest names in ASL theatre in a multilingual movie
Avatar — The sci-fi epic that gave us Na'vi, one of the best loved conlangs
We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân — A documentary about the Wampanoag scholar who revived her nation's language
My Fair Lady — A classic musical about dialect, social class, and (of course) love
The King's Speech — Based on a true story: a speech-language pathologist helps King George VI overcome his stammer
Talking Black in America — A documentary series on African American English, Black ASL, and more
6 linguistics-related events and physical spaces
Planet Word (Washington, DC, USA) — An immersive language museum
Mundolingua (Paris, France) — A hands-on museum with exhibits on many branches of linguistics
The COSI language pod (Columbus, OH, USA) — Participate in linguistics experiments inside this science museum
The SLIYS summer camp (Columbus, OH, USA) — The Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars introduces high school students to linguistics
Kletskoppen Festival (Nijmegen, Netherlands) — A festival about language and language development for children, and their adults
International Linguistics Olympiad (2025 in Taipei, Taiwan) — An annual puzzle-solving competition for secondary school students, with many national editions in various countries
10 places to get even more
r/linguistics — A subreddit for discussing linguistics; check out their reading list (Note that we singled out this one for being a big, public, high-traffic community — but if you'd prefer a closed Discord server or a Facebook meme group or any other platform-specific thing, ask other linguistics nerds on that platform and you'll probably find one.)
Bluesky linguistics starter pack — Some linguists who post actively about linguistics, several of which have also made starter packs for specific subfields
conlang.org's community list — Pointers to the many places conlangs are discussed
Superlinguo's list of linguistics podcasts — Many more podcasts than we had room for
A very long list of pop linguistics books on All Things Linguistics — Many more books, too…
Linguistic Discovery's list of books — …and even more!
High School Linguistics' books list for teens — Get started early…
Superlinguo's list for kids — …and even earlier!
Mutual Intelligibility's resource directory — Links on a wide range of subjects
linguistics humor tag on All Things Linguistic — Just the funny stuff
We've been doing lingcomm since 2011 and we're astounded by how many more pop linguistics resources have come into existences since we started and how many difficult decisions we had to make to get it down to just 101 places
If you’re more on the lingcomm creator side, check out the lingcomm website — we'd love to hang out with you at the LingComm Conference (it's online!).
Many thanks to the people who filled out the Lingthusiasm survey over the past 3 years for suggesting over 1000 places where you get enthusiastic about linguistics! Please feel free to highlight your favourites from this list or add further suggestions for the benefit of other people reading!
I'm eating a bag of mormon gorp that tastes like gasoline while watching the rain run down the mountain. The taste doesn't even bother me anymore - all homemade gorp tastes like this. It's just a natural consequence of everyone keeping their prepper shit in their garages.
My dad's out in the clearing, wandering around with his GPS. He's got some pieces of wire out on top of it to try and make the effective antennae bigger, but it just makes it look like he's dowsing. Another mormon tradition. I ask him if he's close to find water yet, and he looks up at me, little rivers flowing off him, and says yeah - he can feel it.
I'm sure he can. I settle under my tree and watch the droplets roll down the needles. Awaiting the final judgement of Judge GPS.
A few minutes later, it provides:
Turns out my dad forgot to record the location of the car this morning. The GPS remembers where we parked yesterday, but by luck my dad knows how to get from there to our car. Downside is that it's a nine mile walk just to get to yesterday's position, then another five miles to backtrack. That's fourteen miles total.
I'm only thirteen.
Think you can make it? my dad asks. And it's a kindness that he's worried, but it's not like there's an alternative. What else would I do, sit down in the murk and cross my fingers he finds me again? Ask him to carry me 14 miles?
I'll be pretty jelly legged, I say. But yeah. I'll make it.
Attaboy, he says. He fishes a bag of poptarts out and offers me one as - I think - a peace offering. A, sorry you're gonna have to walk 14 miles in the rain because I goofed kind of gift.
I take a bite and, despite being individually wrapped, it still manages to taste like diesel fumes. We start hiking our incredibly long distance in terrible weather for foolish reasons, and I joke to my dad that the only way to make this day any more mormon would be by pushing handcarts.
He laughs. Neither of us laugh again until 11 pm, when we stumble like drunkards into camp. My grandpa has stayed up late to make sure we weren’t lost, but he only stays up long enough to see us arrive. We try to eat a dinner of sweet potato stew, but after falling asleep in the middle twice, we agree to just go to bed.
I sleep in well past nine and wake up to nobody in camp but my grandpa. My dad left with my sister to keep hunting around 5 am. I know that everyone assumes that their dad is invincible when they're 13, but I'm 28 now and part of me still thinks he's gonna live forever. That God made exactly one perpetual motion machine, and it raised me in the desert.
---
Around noon my grandpa suggests hunting again. If it was my dad, I'd probably tune him out, but I like my grandpa's style of hunting. My dad hikes and hikes and hikes until the elk get tired and just let him shoot them. My grandpa finds the sleepiest, sunniest, coziest field and takes a nap there, figuring if the elk have any decent taste they'll come there at some point.
Man's got a knack for knowing what elk like - he's right more often than not. I think he might've been an elk in a previous life.
I go with him, and much as I hate to admit it, the hike is good for me. I start off walking like a pirate on two peg legs, so stiff I might as well not have knees, but by the end of the mile and a half walk I'm almost normal. We make it to the edge of the clearing, and my grandpa finds a patch of grass taller and softer than the beds inside the trailer, and he curls up to sleep there. I look across the grass and I watch the comings and goings of critters through the field. Sometimes I use the scope to get a magnified view, but I never do so with my hand on the trigger. The thought of accidentally looking a person through that glass is something that sends a chill up my spine.
Some deer wander through the glen, but it'd take a fool to mistake one of them for an elk. A few hours later, my grandpa wakes up and asks if I want to wander around a little. It's a lovely day. Rain comes in bursts in Arizona, and the day after is almost always clear as can be. And for a short while, all the desert browns turn green and lush. Hard mosses turn squishy and cacti swell up like fresh baked muffins and for a while you can get why people settled in these god forsaken wastes.
So I go with him, and we walk on, me with my gun, him just taking in the forest. He looks so peaceful that I get a little jealous, but it's not until my grandpa stops and looks at me that I even notice it myself. Takes a mirror, sometimes, to know yourself.
Being near my grandpa is always a strange thing for me. He's quiet, and he doesn't talk much, and I don't ever get the feeling that he's particularly emotionally intelligent - but it's like he's interacting with a reality more raw and real than mine. Like I'm watching symbols on a screen and he's counting atoms. And sometimes, just being near him gives me access to that raw matter. Just something about how he is breaks the illusions of the world.
He looks at the gun like a foreign object, like he doesn't recognize it, then he looks at me. He speaks and he doesn't mince words.
What would you do if an elk came across the path and you shot it right now? he asks.
Well, I'd start cleaning it, I say, and he waves the words away like cobwebs in his face.
But would you celebrate? he presses.
And I look at him, and I don't actually see any judgement staring back. He knows the answer, and he's at peace with it. He’s asking so I can see it too. He’s being a mirror so I can see my own face.
I think I might actually cry, I admit. And he nods along in agreement before reaching forward to take the gun off my shoulder.
Lets just walk today, he says. No chance of killing anything. No worrying about that.
Right, I say.
He pops the chamber open and tosses me back my bullet. I catch it, and the relief I feel is palpable.
Can I change my mind? I ask, and he shrugs.
Whenever you want. Hunt or don’t. It’s not the hunting that I’m worried about. It’s seeing you ignore your conscience.
And for a moment, I'm there in the real world with him, and my gloves are off, and reality is a metal cube in my hand: Sharp and cold and heavy.
Or maybe that’s just the bullet.
---
We make it back to camp a bit later than my dad. We get there and he’s waiting for us. If he's tired, he doesn't show it.
How'd it go? he asks. My grandpa looks at me, and I don't know how to respond. I don't know how to explain it, and I am scared.
Great, he replies. It's a shame Babs only has a doe tag. We saw a five-point out there. Close enough to hit with a football.
No, my dad says. If his grin was a half inch wider, both ends of his mouth would meet in the back of his head and everything above his tongue would slide off.
Tell him Babs, grandpa says. And, not for the first time, and especially not the last, I try my hand at spinning a yarn.
It's pretty good. But at 13, I still have a lot to learn.
When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
teenage girls in fiction: hes so cute i wanna slow dance with him at prom :3 hehe
real teenage girls: imagine if he got injured and i had to tend to his wounds and i could watch him seize up a bit as i disinfect them and in the haze of fever he sees me as an angel
teenage girls in fiction: hes so cute i wanna slow dance with him at prom :3 hehe
real teenage girls: imagine if he got injured and i had to tend to his wounds and i could watch him seize up a bit as i disinfect them and in the haze of fever he sees me as an angel
lets touch our antennae together. i don’t care anymore. i just wanna feel you. i don’t care that it’s not allowed or it’s weird. fuck the colony. let’s go off into the long grass where no one can find us and touch antennae. just you and me
A lot of people are ragging on the 'cable diverted to avoid Dobby's grave after Harry Potter fans raise a stink' thing and while I also love ragging on Harry Potter fans being weird, in this case it looks like the story was completely made up.
tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.
The story also broke into mainstream via the Daily Mail, who are ... rarely if ever honest or accurate.
”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
don’t make other people’s decisions for them. apply for the job you don’t think you’ll get. let them decide if you have the skills they’re looking for. tell that person you like them even though you think they’re out of your league. let them decide if they like you. stop trying to predict and control everything. bring what you have to the table. let the rest go.
Beautifully-observed & realistic figure of a sleeping Antelope incised on rock up to 10,000 years ago at Tin Taghirt, Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, one of the largest & most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world.
ph: Linus Wolf
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