Itâs the carnal crew! This took so long because armour is the bane of my existence
Boggy has unintentionally ended up being the mysterious guy with a quest to give in the back of the tavern. To make up for it Iâve given him a feather in his cap to show his more braggadocious side.
Iâm super happy with Sir Wellyâs armor I think I need to work on the face a little. I donât think the rosy cheeks came through as much as I would like. She also looks a little too confident đ
Iâm so curious about what is going on behind Zudrics mask, he could be just a dude but⌠he could be starspawn.
I'm back reading Stormlight Archive and I'm onto Words of Radiance and ... There's a balcony in the Kings palace and Dalinar says -"There's no other way onto that balcony, soldier. It's a hundred feet in the air." And all I'm thinking is wow you know who would love a balcony? Szeth-son-son-Vallano who wore white on the day he was to kill a king would love a balcony.
i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the worldâs oceans and sea in various states of sinking.
this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.
anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you:
not enough of a spotlight is shown on Ratthi and Gurathin in Fugitive Telemetry. SecUnit isn't allowed to hack government security systems so it invites its Two Best Guy Friends to come watch it break into a transport ship, AND BOTH OF THEM ARE LIKE "sure thing, sounds fun" ?? They put up the weakest "are you sure this is a good idea?" argument but otherwise just do what SecUnit needs (which is stand in front of security cameras and act as character witnesses). SecUnit's narration also implies that it would have just let its Two Best Guy Friends tag along for the rest of its murder investigation, for funsies, except the cops said no (booooo).
later THE SAME DAY, SecUnit (famously allergic to asking for help) messages their group chat "I need help" with ZERO context, which gives Ratthi and Gurathin such a shock they almost knock their table over. then it facetimes them from the NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM to ask which of these Preserved Artifacts works best for jetting out into space? and Ratthi and Gurathin are like, "that one with the red tags, but ummm why?"
"don't worry about it," it says, "I'll tell you later."
then it HANGS UP and they don't hear from it for the rest of the day.
Blind people gesture (and why thatâs kind of a big deal)
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now Iâve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people donât only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Ĺeyda OĚzçalÄąĹkan, CheĚ Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ârollingâ or bouncingâ) and trajectory (e.g. âleft to rightâ, âdownwardsâ) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English âroll downâ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ârolling descendingâ.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, OĚzçalÄąĹkanâs team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldnât work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something thatâs deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Ĺeyda OĚzçalÄąĹkan, CheĚ Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737â747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
Almost a decade later and thereâs a fun update to this paper!
Eight years after this original study Ĺeyda ĂzçalÄąĹkan, ChĂŠ Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow have a sequel.
The original paper showed that blind and sighted people who speak the same language have similar gestures to represent events. These gestures canât have been acquired through visual learning, so this was evidence that gesture and speech must be all bound up together in the brain. But there was still a question about how deeply theyâre tied together. Perhaps this was something that adults settled into as they got older.
In this new paper, ĂzçalÄąĹkan and team looked at the speech and gesture of blind and sighted Turkish children between the ages of five and ten years old. They used the same methods and targeted the same kind of action verbs and gestures. Itâs worth checking out the paper for the frolicking doll dioramas they set up as part of the experiment.
Even the youngest children showed the same kind of gesture patterns as adult Turkish speakers. This means that these kinds of patterns are part of language learning and not something that gets added on top later in life. That is further evidence for the original argument that speech and gesture are a package deal.
Itâs so great to see this team continuing to refine and support the original findings.
From the âresearch highlightsâ section of the paper:
Gestures, when produced with speech (i.e., co-speech gesture), follow language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.
Gestures, when produced without speech (i.e., silent gesture), do not follow the language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.
Language-specific patterns in speech and co-speech gestures are observable at the same time in blind and sighted children.
The cross-linguistic similarities in silent gestures begin slightly later in blind children than in sighted children.
Citation
ĂzçalÄąĹkan, Ĺeyda, ChĂŠ Lucero, and Susan GoldinâMeadow. (2024). Is vision necessary for the timely acquisition of languageâspecific patterns in coâspeech gesture and their lack in silent gesture?. Developmental Science, 27(5), e13507. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13507
In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.
And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.
I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.
And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.
Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.
Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.
at the start of the game karlach and astarion are absolutely fucking reeling from being suddenly freed and are in a state of manic joy that would probably seem alien to them like a week ago, while gale has been locked in his depression tower for so long he's almost completely forgotten how to talk to people. shadowheart has not a single fucking clue whats going on because shar keeps slurping up her memories and lae'zel is literally in the midst of her ultimate nightmare scenario and trapped on an alien planet with a bunch of jackasses who have no idea whats happening. so almost everyone has experienced a situational personality shift and isn't quite the person they were a year before you met them. EXCEPT Wyll. Who is just like "this isnt even the weirdest thing thats happened to me this month." my man got scooped up, tadpoled, and slammed back and said "oh well, not gonna ruin my day" and went about his business teaching self defense to children and slaying evil beasts. He didn't even seem confused he literally did not give a shit. no urgency. He's like "I'll put that in my day planner but is gonna have to wait until after i hunt down this demon." When you recruit him there is no sense of "oh man we really gotta help each other because we have the same problem" he just would have said yes because you asked and he's wyll. Or because you told him he could kill mindflayers. He'd be like "sick" and done, no questions asked. Just another Tuesday for the blade.
A new study found that people are more eager to recycle when offered a chance to win a large sum prize, instead of a guaranteed 10 cents. An
"In a new study, University of British Columbia researchers set out to answer the following question: Would you rather have 10 cents in your pocket or a 1-in-10,000 shot at $1,000?
Their findings indicate that they may have figured out a way to get people to recycle more.Â
The researchers, whose work was just published in the journal âWaste Management,â tested the idea of offering people who return used bottles a small chance to win a big cash prize, instead of the standard 5- or 10-cent deposit earnings.
The result? Participants recycled 47% more bottles for the chance at a $1,000 prize.
âThis small change in how we reward recycling made a big difference. People were more excited, more engaged, and they brought in more bottles,â Dr. Jiaying Zhao, associate professor in the department of psychology and senior author of the study, said in a statement for the university.
âIt turns out that the thrill of possibly winning a big prize is more motivating than a small guaranteed reward. Itâs the same reason people buy lottery tickets; That tiny chance of a big win is exciting.â
The researchers ran three experiments in British Columbia and Alberta, where bottle deposit systems already exist. Despite the fact that these deposit stations give people a small refund when they return their recyclables, many bottles still end up in the trash.
In the first two experiments, people could choose between a guaranteed 10-cent refund or a chance to win a larger amount, ranging from $1 to $1,000. Even though the odds of winning were low, many people chose the lottery-style offer.
In the third experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either the guaranteed refund or the lottery-style refund. Those given the lottery-style option brought in almost three bottles for every two returned by the control group.Â
The researchers found that people even felt happier when they had a shot at the big prize, even if they didnât actually win â a feeling called âanticipatory happinessâ â that made the act of recycling more enjoyable.Â
All of this is modeled after an existing scheme in Norway.
âNorway is the only country in the world that has a similar recycling lottery, and their bottle return rate is close to 100%,â Dr. Zhao said. âThe probabilistic refund could be their secret sauce. We hope Canada can adopt this innovative idea as well.â
In Norway, the bottle recycling lottery was implemented over a decade ago, and now, approximately 97% of all plastic beverage containers are returned across the country.Â
Here, the model is choice-driven, giving people the option to choose between the guaranteed refund or the chance to win anywhere from 5 to 100,000 euros.
âThe system also doesnât encourage gambling,â Fast Company reported, âbecause thereâs no way to enter with cash, and there are no ânear missesâ like with other kinds of gambling.â
Norway has also implemented a program where some of the lotteryâs proceeds go to the Norwegian Red Cross.
âInstead of 10 cents back to you, what if the proceeds go to a food bank or charity?â Dr. Zhao asked Fast Company. This is also part of her teamâs research, with results soon to be published.Â
Itâs important to note that the lottery-style refund wouldnât cost more than the traditional system, with both options sharing the same average payout. Cities could adopt this approach without spending an extra dime.
Additionally, Dr. Zhao mentioned that itâs important for cities to consider the choice-based model, giving people the option to get the regular 5- or 10-cent returns, alongside the new lottery initiative, to help canners and binners who rely on this kind of income.
âWe donât want to take the short gain option away,â she told Fast Company. âInstead, we want to give people the option to choose.âÂ
Aside from the valuable psychological insights of the study, Dr. Zhao and her colleagues are optimistic about a future in which more people are engaged in recycling.Â
âCreating new bottles comes with a lot of carbon emissions, and not recycling bottles also comes with a lot of pollution,â Jade Radke, a lead author on the study, said. âSo it can be a meaningful way to decrease all of those things.â
According to the UBC press release, if this approach is widely adopted, it could help recycle millions more bottles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking one million cars off the road each year."
So I ended up reading Sunrise On The Reaping and Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes for the Hunger Games in reverse order and actually turned out to be a pretty good way to read them.
I had a little bit of context from the absolute ton of marketing for BoSaS's movie but Snow's weird obsession with Haymitch having a girlfriend made for a bit of a mystery.
There was just this old man giving this boy he is effectively executing dating advice that amounted to ha don't date manic pixie dream girls.
And then there's the video he shows Haymitch after the victory and it's like damn Snow what happened and it's been like forty five years why aren't you over this girl?
And so I went into BoSaS expecting some mad betrayal and the pages left just got lower and lower and I was like any minute now, Lucy Gray is going to pull some 4D chess move that's going to live rent free in Snow's mind for the remaining seventy years of his tyrannical irredeemable life.
And then you get to their fight and you realize no, no Snow was always the problem. And in some ways it's doomed from the start and in some ways it's over when Lucy Gray realizes what happened to Sejanus. But it's when he finds those guns and realises he can go back to his true love: power that he tries to destroy the only person that properly knows that his second love Lucy Gray.
I'm glad she haunted him for the rest of his life.
I've been thinking about how you can absolutely read the premise of Murderbot as "Congrats, you escaped the Matrix! You broke free of your programming, realized the shadows on the cave wall were just that, shadows. You still have to go to work though. What, did you think you could escape? The chains are still on, sucker, keep looking at that cave wall."
Sure, MB has realized it has free will. But the material conditions of its life prohibit it from doing anything with it. What good is a hacked governor module in a society that still views it as an object meant for use and discard? What good is your own autonomy in a world where you're constantly observed for any deviation from the norm?
A team of seven was sent to capture the princess. It was a dirty move in what was sure to be a dirty war, but the princess was near the frontlines, and their spies had learned there was a small chance that she could be snatched. When one or the other side sued for peace, she would be an important bargaining chip, if she wasn't simply ransomed.
In spite of encountering next to no resistance, three of the seven men died during the mission. One was kicked by a horse when it spooked, another fell during their race through the woods and snapped his neck, and the third was shot with a crossbow when they returned to their side of the war, a case a friendly fire.
The princess had been utterly impassive through all of it, from the very moment they'd yanked her from her carriage. She had shown no expression on her face when they'd gagged her. She hadn't so much as flinched when a man fell to the ground with a crossbow bolt in his neck.
She'd been placed under armed guard in one of the tents, then the next day, brought further into the kingdom, away from the war and to the seat of power.
The same man who'd been in charge of the team who had taken her, Kipling, had accompanied the wagon to the castle to give his report.
Kipling watched as one of the guards keeled over for no discernable reason. They had stopped and tried to revive him, but there was no gleam of life in his eyes and no pulse in his veins.
The princess had watched, not seeming to find it interesting.
Kipling didn't mention the deaths in his report to the king. They made his team seem incompetent. He didn't mention that another of his team had died of food poisoning the morning before the princess left camp. He did mention that he would need to recruit more people, and that the princess had been behaving oddly.
Later that night, having washed his hands of the princess, he went to a tavern to drink himself stupid. He passed out in an alley on his way home, and when someone tried to steal the shoes off his feet, he made to fight back and got a knife in the stomach for his trouble. He wasn't identified until much later, at which point a pattern was becoming very clear.
"The Rexes are incredibly affectionate pack animals, so we were careful to breed multiples. Be sure to come during spring time to watch them go broody over anything even vaguely egg-shaped."
"We put the Raptors through target training and now if they are bored, hungry, or just want a scratch under the chin they go to spot near the bars and ring a little bell for attention."
"Imprinting after hatching was so common that we now have keepers under contract to care for the animals well into adulthood to prevent them from pining."
"The Gallimimus turned out to be just giant Canada Geese, and so fear nothing. Their keeper regularly has to stop them from trying to attack fences, guests, feeding buckets, and the now traumatised pack of Ceratosaurs in the next paddock."
so, do all kids at a certain grade level in D12 go to the same school and share all the same classes? because like, if so, and I feel like thatâs definitely true, then I think itâd be stranger if Otho, Haymitch, Asterid, and Burdock didnât know each other ⌠Iâm not saying they absolutely had to be best friends, but I do think it makes sense on a purely population size level
Going from the data I pulled for my d12 population decline post there should be about 2,000 under 18 year olds in d12. I rounded up to account for large families, a younger population (as itâs lucky to grow old as Katniss tells us) and for the sake of whole numbers.
In CF, Katniss uses the term âThe schoolâ when telling us she thinks about who she will have to mentor this year. We also know Peeta, Gale, Delly, and Mage all attend her school, so there isnât a divide between Seam and Merchant schools. I think itâs fair to assume they have one school.
However, that would mean 2,000 students. Granted d12âs school would likely range across all grade levels, from Kindergarten to 12th Grade. Still, we donât know how the population skews. We do know the reaping pens are still jam packed, so it seems there is a consistent and large number of people aged 12-19 in Katnissâs time.
If you believe my theory on the population decline of d12, it would mean there would be even more people in Haymitchâs time to account forâ even more names to know, even lower chances of knowing someone.
Katniss admits she didnât even know Peetaâs name when the bread situation happened. She was 11 at this point. Thatâs 6 years in school together:
As I carefully replaced the lid and backed away, I noticed him, a boy with blond hair peering out from behind his motherâs back. Iâd seen him at school. He was in my year, but I didnât know his name.
Interestingly, she keeps referring to people as in her âyearâ which leads me to believe while they may be the same age, not everyone would have classes together:
The mayorâs daughter, Madge, opens the door. Sheâs in my year at school.
And she mentions seeing Peeta in the halls, but never mentions him in her classes (post bread):
At school, I passed the boy in the hall, his cheek had swelled up and his eye had blackened. He was with his friends and didnât acknowledge me in any way.
So maybe class sizes are small in d12, and they use a rotating schedule commonly found in high schools today (1st period, 2nd, 3rd, etc.).
With a bigger population in the schools, the structure of the schoolâs operations, and the fact Katniss doesnât even know Peetaâs name (despite not having to really take over caring for herself and Prim until age 11, 6 years after their first class together), it just seems unlikely Haymitch would have essentially an avengers level cast of friends. Not impossible, of course, just unlikely.
Fair, but I guess Iâm taking into consideration that Haymitch and Burdock are from the same area of D12 (Seam) and Asterid and Otho are from town, making it less unusual for those pairs specifically. The unusual thing really is Burdock and Asterid being together. I think itâs said that Peeta and Katniss may share a math teacher? So I would assume some rotating classes. Also, Haymitch just seems nosy, bless him. He knows everyone lol. If we assume (which maybe we shouldnât) that those 2000 split fairly evenly across twelve grade levels, thatâs about 170 kids per year, and thatâs not toooo far off from the average graduating class in America today (140, per Google). Now, I grant you, that doesnât mean youâd know everyone (Katniss definitely doesnât), but I think if you were of similar life experiences, you might be a little more likely to be pack bond. I do think the story would have worked just as well (or better, if youâre attached to the themes of chance) without Haymitch and Burdock being close friends, but it makes sense to me that they knew each other.
I honestly think it's super reasonable for Haymitch to know everyone, and I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in on this as someone whose hometown has a population of about 8,000! Let me tell you: there are people in these towns who know EVERYONE. We had two high schools (in Canada, that's grades 9-12, or ages 13-14 to 17-18), one catholic and one not, and each had juuust under 500 students. I knew people who seemed to know everyone, even the kids in the catholic high school with whom we had never had any classes. I had gone to an out-of-town elementary school (kindergarten to grade 8) so I didn't know more than a handful of people when I started grade 9, and even then, after about a year in the high school I knew pretty much everyone either by face or by name, and definitely knew the name and face of everyone in my grade, even the kids I didn't have classes with, because you just... do. In a small town (especially one like D12, where no one ever moves in or out) people have a history--kids who are distant cousins, kids whose moms were friends when they were young, kids whose grandparents had beef twenty years ago over something no one really remembers now, etc. Several of the older teachers in my high school had even taught many of the parents of kids I went to school with, and could tell you "oh yeah your dad was a trouble-maker" "your mom played clarinet beautifully" "your uncle started high school a real pip-squeak and then shocked everyone by coming back after the summer over six feet tall." There are no secrets. There is no anonymity.
So yeah if Haymitch has been going to the same school with the same kids his whole life then yeah, I agree with you Cate, it would be weirder if he DIDN'T know everyone. Katniss is a loner who keeps her head down, so it's fair that she wouldn't know everyone's names, especially at such a young age (at least in the schools I went to, for the first several years of your education you have one teacher for every subject, so you're with the same 20 kids all day, every day, and wouldn't meet as many of the kids in the other classes as a result. Could be the same in D12)
Still. I agree it's silly that Haymitch was friends with everyone who would ever go on to be important in D12, but whatevs I guess. The boy got around.
I wonder how often either was at school plays a role. Like Haymitch's ma is a very keep going even in tragedy kinda woman. (Haymitch says something about her being out doing washing even when something terrible has happened) So I wouldn't be surprised if he and Sid were sent back to school fairly quickly after their da passed. That on top of Haymitch being a social butterfly I wouldn't be surprised if he had a fairly good attendance record.
Then we have Katniss who probably skipped school a lot while she was trying to feed her family. And even when Burdock was alive I wouldn't be surprised if he was taking her out of school often to teach her more 'practical' skills.
Iâve been tinkering with the idea of an urban fantasy âAll Fairy Tales Are Trueâ setting where some fairy tale characters are mortals who reincarnate and live through their story again and again with no memory of their past lives, but other characters are immortal, carrying over biases and grudges and regrets from the last time they went through this.
Snow Whiteâs dwarves keep her room exactly as she left it, and keep a wary eye on the horizon for the day she returns. When she does they treat her like a beloved daughter come home, cook her favourite meals, warn her to stay away from apples this time, and keep calling her the wrong name.
Cinderellaâs Fairy Godmother found her a touch ungrateful last time, and has decided not to appear to her this time around to teach her a lesson in gratitude. This Cinderella, without the memory of the last time, is still a terrified, miserable woman desperate to escape her awful situation.
The Witch in the gingerbread house has developed a thousand traps to eat those goddamned kids. Sheâs failed every time. She lives a life of Sisyphean torment previously known only to cartoon coyotes.
