This blog started as an archive of posts that I feel might come in handy when I write my dissertation, which I never quite finished. Because things change, this is now a mash-up of posts I feel I need to have in a semblance of order, (tags are useful!) unlike my main blog which has become a monster of nonsense in general disarray.
also: Reign (what a king does), and rein (what you control a horse with), and rain (wet stuff from the sky)
So it’s not “She reigned in her temper” (even though it kind of makes sense if you interpret it as “she exerted rule over her temper”) – it’s “she REINED IN her temper” – she pulled it back and got it under control, like you would with a misbehaving horse.
I made a post about the dialogue about the storm in the first episode
I don't presume I'm going to explain truco here, but I think there's something beautiful here.
Truco is a card game where you bluff and attempt to make others believe and raise their stakes, just like in poker. These four men are playing in pairs here.
The man in the blue shirt is Lucas. He's playing with Favalli (el Tano, sitting opposite him), against Juan and Polsky (el Ruso), the other pair.
Finding this frame I thought it was interesting that Omar, the man in the red t-shirt, is there with them but is not part of the game, for now.
Each part of the pair is sitting across one another (if it was six people, the aim is that the companions are never sitting next to one another).
Like in poker, you may or may not have the cards to win, and the idea is to make the other believe your bluff.
In truco, there's two instances: the envido and the truco. You play in rounds, but you can rely on your companion across the table, except you don't know what cards they have. WHICH IS WHY YOU CAN SIGNAL.
There are a set of signals you can use when you have to play with strangers. The joke is signalling to your partner, without the others catching it. Of course there are partners who have their own secret code. These four men have known one another for decades. Only Omar (in the red shirt) is a stranger.
In this scene they play, Juan is rather rude to Omar who chips in the conversation asking if they are playing with Flor (flower, if you wish, is another instance of this game, played before envido, which you may choose not to include). Juan answers with a phrase about how he's an outsider and he should not speak at all.
They have the whole convo about the storm, and the power goes out, and the adventure starts.
Fast forward to the next time they are sitting at a table playing truco.
Spoilers below:
It's episode six. These men have been through A LOT.
Polsky is dead. Omar has been estranged from the group, and has been welcomed back. Lucas was missing for a while after getting drunk, and met the group again on their way to join the military in Campo de Mayo. They are now together killing time before going back after succeeding to send a radio message, and finding a lot of fucking weird stuff about this situation.
What we are about to find out, is that Lucas is not himself anymore. And he's been managing it quite sucessfully until now-
We don't see the beginning of the game. Omar is not where Polsky used to be. Omar is smiling in the middle of the game, and Lucas loses his temper. Juan congratulates his team mate over a good start.
The losing pair are upset. Lucas is about to serve the next round and Favalli asks him to show him what cards Lucas had in the lost game.
And this happens.
"You're not being a good team player," says Favalli. "I get mad, you know me"
Juan tries to remind them that they are there trying to take their minds off other problems, and this is not worth fighting over.
And Lucas goes
This means he had a good hand, he HAD to call envido. And he goes into detail. This is..... something's off here. Favalli is angry that Lucas is playing alone, Lucas is annoyed.
Omar, the only one who's there for the first time, asks are they always like this. Juan explains that he doesn't know what's happeneing, because these two have always been each other's soul mates.
The game goes on with Lucas pushing it, while Favalli looks on annoyed as fuck.
I'd say he's also seeing something that he doesn't quite get.
Omar has 28 points, and Lucas asks Favalli how much he has. Favalli hasn't got anything. Lucas goes, you made the signal.
And the argument explodes. Lucas wants Juan to say Favalli made the signal. Juan of course doesn't say a word. Favalli is upset. Omar laughs because he doesn't see that Lucas is acting very much out of character. By all means, they are still strangers.
Favalli, still talking about the game, pushes Lucas until Lucas snaps and declares he's not playing anymore.
And the moment Omar approaches him, Lucas stabbs Omar with a letter opener.
What happens after this is Lucas runs out of the apartment, Juan runs after him. He finds him on the roof, Favalli joins them, they see some more weird shit in the distance, and Lucas speaks some seemingly nonsense and jumps.
Next thing we find out is apparently the enemy has been taking over some people's minds and will. The suspicion is that Lucas was taken over when he went missing at the mall. And he's been playing along effectively until he was required to use a very intimate code. Since he was not himself anymore, he failed. And that made him snap and stab Omar, and ultimately commit suicide.
I think there's something beautiful here regarding The Eternaut's message that there's no salvation on our own, and that the only salvation is a collective one, that relies on the true bond between individuals.
Or as Strunk and White said in Elements of Style (to the best of my memory), "Feel free to ignore everything in this book rather than write something inelegant."
I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently
The Watson: is present for the event but does not have the same level of perception as protagonist
The Lemony Snicket: isn't present for the event, reconstructs the facts based on later research, can get things wrong or incomplete
The Ted Moseby: is present for the event but has romanticised and embellished their memory of it through nostalgia to an extent that you cannot fully believe it; is also prone to misremembering or outright forgetting details.
The Katniss Everdeen: is present for the event, is the protagonist, but is completely foreign to the world and out of their depth so they don't quite understand a lot of what is going on.
The Rose Quartz: is present for the event, but due to their personal agenda or feelings of shame hides and embellishes what actually happened in favour of a version that paints them in a better light.
The Big Brother: overwrites what actually happened in favour of propaganda.
The Jonathan Harker: is absolutely clueless about what is going on around them and the genre they're in so their perception of events is tinted by their own naivety.
The Goob: the narrator's own emotional bias clouds their judgement of what really happened.
The Tyler Durden: the narrator is suffering from hallucinations and doesn't realise it.
The Pi: the narrator has survived a traumatic experience and copes with it by turning it into a wonderful tale.
OP: In diplomatic and business situations, when we interpreters translate the chinese meaning to non-chinese-speaking guests, we are most terrified of hearing the chinese side say “There is an old Chinese saying ……”
we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up
"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”
And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."
I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.
This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."
I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)
Hamlet. There’s a scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying and debates whether to kill him now or wait (because if Claudius dies praying he will automatically go to heaven). The actor playing Hamlet was genuinely asking the audience the questions in the speech, and when he got to “and should I kill him now?” someone in the audience shouted “YES KILL HIM HE NEEDS TO DIE!” Hamlet took the entire rest of the monologue to that person, enumerating his reservations so persuasively that they started to nod in agreement.
Romeo and Juliet. In this production, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt happens in several rounds, of which Mercutio won the first. Mercutio’s actor made the choice, upon his victory, to run down the audience with his hand out for high-fives. He decided this in rehearsal, so he had time to plan for the three responses people would probably give him: a) a high-five back; b) being stunned and not reacting; and c) the old “oops too slow.” What this Mercutio did not prepare for was the audience member who panicked and deposited their handful of M&Ms into his open palm. The way I heard it, Mercutio was still processing this when Benvolio came up beside him and stole the M&Ms out of his hand to eat them.
King Lear. Edmund has a speech in which he asks whether he should marry “Goneril? Regan? Both? Neither?” Again, the actor was legitimately asking the audience, and again he’d prepared for the audience to respond in favor of any of those choices. What makes it even cooler was that the next line is “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive,” which works as a response to any of those options. One night, though, Edmund got his answer as “KILL THEM BOTH AND TAKE THEIR MONEY!” To which he gleefully agreed, “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive!!”
#Oh I have SO many stories from peak audience moments at the American shakespeare center#I have been to plays there that legit felt more like rock concerts#And I don't even mean the parts of the show where the cast is also a live band and they play#Covers of songs relating to the show#Fair maid of the west with Ginna Hoben#We were all SO on her side we absolutely lost our whole shit any time she even entered or exited#Knight of the burning pestle where Rick would pick a random audience member to be his lady love he was fighting for every night#And one time (I saw it thrice) he picked an older lady#And there's a part of the show where iirc he like gets almost defeated?#And he calls out to his lady love to like inspire him to keep fighting smth like that#And she Got Up Out Of Her Seat and went over to him and kissed him on the cheek#And no one was expecting that least of all Rick#And we all lost our shit whooping and hollering#They did a hamlet where...I forget who was polonius that year but there's a line where he's like 'what was I gonna say again'#And he paused SO long on that line you were legit unsure if he the actor had actually forgotten it#And once someone in the audience called out the next line and he was like 'oh that's right' and carried on#It was scripted though there were other nights no one said anything and we all sat there#In wonderful horrid awkward silence#Until he resumed#Please go if you get a chance#And sit stateside (via @rootingformephistopheles)
I was in a production of Hamlet in a small black box theatre, when a drunk guy came in from from outside, wandered onstage and started singing "We built this city on rock and roll." The guy playing Hamlet just went with it until the stage manager and crew could usher the drunk guy back outside. Then Hamlet continued with his next line, which was (no joke) "Now I am alone." Brought the house down.
#shakespeare#this is the kind of shit that gets me hyper#I love it so much#best production of hamlet I’ve seen to date was in an historic home where the actors guided you through a house built in the gilded era#and the basement was entirely marble for cooling purposes because it was pre-refrigeration obvs#and the way Hanlet’s howling ECHOED#when he realized Ophelia was dead#it was primal#it made people take a step back#and also you had to stand and watch Ophelia drown in a claw foot tub as she reached out to you offering flowers#it was fucking insane#I loved it#I’m giddy just thinking about it @thebibliosphere please please please say more about this!!!
I was actually scrolling my blog to see if I’d talked about it before but I can’t find it, which is shocking because it was truly one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.
I forget what year it was, but the play took place in the historic James J Hill House here in St Paul. Hill was a railway tycoon during the gilded age, with all the disparity of wealth and privilege that implies. He was so successful and obscenely wealthy he became known as The Empire Builder and the grandness of his home reflected that. The walls in the dining room are literally gold. It’s breathtaking. It’s obscene. It’s perfect for the kind of corruption and rot that takes place in Hamlet under a gilded veneer.
The play started in the viewing gallery, with actors walking through the literal gilded halls of the mansion, the leather wallpaper stamped with gold filigree glittering in the gaslamp—the perfect setting for the wedding scene. As the opening progressed the lights were dimmed until only Hamlet was visible illuminated from the upper gallery by harsh modern lights above, just this chillingly beautiful cold light after all the warmth of the gaslamp and gold.
As the play progressed we were led further through the house, witnessing Hamlet talk to the ghost of his father on the grand staircase—the stairs further used to show hierarchy among the characters with Hamlet spiraling ever lower until we were invited to descend into the bowels of the house through the servants quarters, an area just as vast as the rest of the house but infinitely colder and utterly devoid of the opulent grandeur above.
The space is also nearly entirely marble, which leeches the warmth from the air, so even huddled together the audience grew colder and colder the longer we were down there.
It also meant the echo was amazing, and listening to Ophelia sing forlornly as she descends into madness was absolutely bone chilling. Watching her climb into a claw foot tub that had been placed in the center of the long hallway was also hair raising. She just kept singing, strewing flowers around the empty floor as we stood around her in a circle, helpless to stop her as she purposefully slipped under the water, holding her hands above the lip of the tub even as her head slipped under the water and the last echoes of her singing faded.
It made the Queen’s account of how Ophelia died just so… the lie of it. Like we were still standing there, she was still in the tub (head now above the water) and we’d witnessed the truth of it, and there was Gertrude telling any one of us in the circle who would listen how the poor maid “fell.” Anything to absolve themselves of the sin of her suicide.
We were turned around for a bit after that, led to the end of the hallway near the boiler room where the gravediggers leaned on gilded age coal shovels, and Hamlet got to do his bit with Yorick, the echo of the marble hallway dampened by having brought us back toward the stairwell, his voice soft and intimate. Showing his quiet resolve and return to sanity.
Only to pull us back moments later to center as he ran to where Ophelia’s funeral was taking place, and when I tell you, Hamlet’s howl of grief echoed. It reverberated. It was terrifying. It was amazing. People took instinctive steps away from him. It was just raw emotion bouncing off the walls of this cold, dark basement, entire worlds away from where we’d started.
The play ended back in the ballroom, the dead lying strewn amongst the wealth that couldn’t save them with only Horatio illuminated in gold by the lights. When Fortinbrass arrived he looked around the space like it was nothing, like the way we’d looked around the empty void of the basement. The wealth meant nothing to him. It was just another graveyard.
It was brilliant. I keep hoping they’ll host it again. It was such a good way to literally walk us through the story and use the environment to set the atmosphere. It was all I could do not to put billing flier in my mouth and eat it.
once you work out IPA you can experience this feeling with the second, weirder layer of IPA where people try to describe not the sounds people believe they're making but the ones that they "actually" make
#Sorry but I have no sympathy for that fight#let the dead languages be dead#grumping#controversial opinions#because people always get annoyed with me when I say this#but Gaelic (for example) shouldn’t still exist
———–
Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language (English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.
But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
0 languages die “naturally”. A whole river of Romani languages in central europe died because the people were all slaughtered in WW2. Very “natural”. Every tribe that was forcefully ripped from their culture and pushed into english language and white culture in americas, in africa, in south asia, none of them lost their language “naturally” pass me with this.
several sephardi and Mizrahi languages are dying out because the people were ethnically cleansed put of their homes, these languages don’t deserve to die.
Even Latin died, ironically, because of fans of Latin. Latin was a still spoken language, then everyone said it should be Cicero’s Latin, and by trying to turn a living language into what it was 2 millenia ago, they killed it.
If it hadn’t been for a bunch of Cicero fetishists, Latin would be spoken outside of academia and mass.
Breizh, meanwhile, was nearly killed by the French, intentionally. A lot of dialects were killed by ‘proper’ versions of those languages.
Literally writing a dissertation (novel) on why dying and suppressed languages are important and it’s vital to remember:
You can’t just translate the knowledge into English. Even if you lined up every native speaker of a dying language and recorded all the stories and the knowledge and the history, it’s not the same when it’s been translated. You lose nuance. Concepts. Ways of thinking. Context.
Minority languages are important! And there’s a goddamn reason why the first act of an oppressive regime is to take the words from your mouth, as if they have the right to your expression.
Even Scots as a language was seen as something to be stamped out and replaced with “proper” english, because so many people were convinced that Scots was just a dialect of English when it’s a language all of its own, from a similar root but different branch than English.
It’s taken until this decade for lessons to be taught in Scots in schools aside from bashing us over the head with Robert Burns in January for Burns night without ever explaining what he’s writing about.
It’s a widely spread language but because it’s primarily used by the working classes, it’s always been viewed as something more common and uneducated, but now, we’re finally having kids taught in their mither tongue.
please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!
gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.
SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:
diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.
non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.
the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.
now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.
if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.
if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.
this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.
it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.
but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.
actually I want to add one more thing which is that diegetic/non-diegetic kink in fiction isn't synonymous with unproblematic/problematic. you can totally have characters who are aware they're doing bdsm but happen to do it very badly. and maybe this will be an issue that gets resolved and they'll learn but maybe they won't. people do bdsm unsafely and badly all the time. just like some fictional relationships are canonically toxic and bad and maybe that's the crux of the story/a problem to be solved or maybe it's just a thing that tells you something about the characters. stories aren't automatically moral lessons or examples of behavior that should be emulated no matter how you're framing things.
I see the original post going around every so often and it saddens me a little that it's never accompanied by this thread explaining why it's completely understandable how a child would arrive at these spellings in accordance with english phonetics
I'm an rpg writer, not a linguist, but all of these are absolutely valid attempts at transcribing sounds *within the context of what the child knows about letters* as well as within the context of how the people around the child talk.
Chriego for triangle understands that ch makes a sound that's neither c nor h, and the same with ie. That's a great grasp of letters and sounds---just not a correct guess at which language English stole triangle from.
The English language is filled with weird exceptions, top to bottom, and it's easier to learn once you discover that it's following a bunch of contradictory rules because its grammar is all stolen from different languages---but teachers certainly didn't teach that when I was growing up. They taught "It's tri-angle. Can't you hear the sound? Tri-angle."
And like.
The only way to learn under that instruction style is not to try and understand things systematically. It's to get corrected and then memorize the correction, over and over again.
it's more niche, but if anyone's interested, a good addition to orientalism is orientalism and the jews, a collection of essays on orientalism as it applies to jews and inter-jewish relations and its impact on zionism and colonialism in palestine. it's free to read online (via archive.org) as well.
Ok, forget all that fandom nonsense, I was sent the most ridiculous image I've seen in m entire life to the point I couldn't even breathe from how hard I was laughing and my brain has been reset.
so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…
On this, i think its HILARIOUS that English lost the singular/plural you distinction and like, unanimously, almost every dialect re-evolved a plural you pronoun, be it ye, yall, yis, yous
[ID: tags reading #sure I'll hop on this #english doesn't even have 'tu' AND 'jūs' #imagine having only one 'you' which has to be used for one person and for multiple people]
This proves that the native english speaker can't distinguish between permanent and transient states, forever stuck in a flow of existence where all states of being carry the same weight. This cognitive dysfunction explains not only the political but also socioeconomic turmoils in the lands where english speakers are native.
in western eurasia, where english originated, they do not write in characters. they have a fascinating writing system instead called the 'alphabet'. this approximately translates to 'strings of letters that represent sound'.
it is unique among the civilised world's writing systems for many reasons. most notably, it is based entirely on the sound of the language and doesn't reference in any way the meaning! this reflects the european state of mind, where the 'sound' is considered the primary unit of language, rather than the written word. this philosophy is reflected in the continent's long and storied history of small feudal kingdoms, oral transmission, isolated communities, and widespread illiteracy.
the alphabetic system of the european region is fascinating, and deserves our respect: it exemplifies the diversity and flexibility of the human mind, and has numerous implications for its impact on european thought. it is, however, undeniably impractical.
if a person speaks the english dialect and want to know what is written in the closely related german dialect, there is simply no way to communicate. whilst it is common to fail to understand a people's spoken dialect - consider mandarin and cantonese - this system is unique in the following disadvantage: the english speaker cannot understand the written german dialect at all, unless they have expressly learnt the letter strings of the german pronunciation.
this would seem to defeat the entire point of a writing system. its continued (and enthusiastic) usage in the distant european region is, therefore, a matter of much theorising and debate. most scholars of europe agree, however, on the alphabet's ritual, religious and traditional importance to the european mind.
english nouns don't inflect for case, meaning english speakers must rely exclusively on word order to understand a sentence. "the man gives the dog a steak" and "the dog gives the man a steak" are two different sentences to an english speaker, with distinct meanings, despite every single one of those words being written and pronounced exactly the same way.
this is pretty incredible, considering that there is class of words in english that do have case markings - pronouns! the english personal pronouns inflect for case much like in Comanche or Greek. unfortunately, the case markings are mostly irregular in english, and don't have easily recognizable patterns, so they must be memorized.
and yet, even with pronouns that inflect for case, word order is absolutely paramount, and must be strictly followed for an english sentence to make any sense at all. making sure all your words come in the correct order is key to fluency in english.
because they are incapable of fronting a word in order to mark the topic, english speakers must rely on what's called "emphasis" or "intonation" in order to distinguish the topic of a sentence. when a word is emphasized, english speakers will generally say that word more loudly, more slowly, and with more distinction than the other words in the sentence. it can take some practice to hear the difference if you're not used to it, but soon, you'll be spotting emphasized topics in english in no time!
not to sound like a boomer, but I need some people to learn how to write emails in a semi-professional (at the very least) format so you're not cold emailing a business/potential employer/any other stranger about formal matters in the exact same way you'd DM a close friend on instagram
the formality/language can loosen up in the email chain once you've established a rapport and you match the other person if they're being less formal, but please don't have the very first email you send a stranger be written in all lowercase ultra-casual sms slang with no greeting or signature and a billion emojis
It’s polite, for one. Professional doesn’t need to mean elaborate—in fact, most professional emails are aiming to be as clear and concise as possible. (in english at least, I know some other languages have some very complicated and elaborate email etiquette)
Greetings and signatures also don’t need to be elaborate. I feel like lots of people overthink it and assume that professional emails need the whole “dear x, my name is x and I am writing this email to inform you about [topic], sincerely [my name and all my contact info]” shebang, when really it’s as simple as adding a quick greeting/signature and avoiding super informal slang.
Here’s an comparison using art commission inquiry as the topic, written with zero extra fluff:
Hi,
Are you currently open for commissions?
Thanks,
[my name]
If I want to add a little more fluff, maybe I write:
Hi,
I love your art and wanted to ask if you're currently open for commissions. Here are details of what I'm interested in. Thanks for your time!
Thanks/best/etc,
[my name]
Those are very short while also being more polite than an email that just says:
are u open for comms??
with zero greeting/signature and very informal tone.
There’s still a person on the other side reading that email, and just like how being polite with a customer service agent on the phone will get you better results than being rude with them, sending a clear and professional email will have you taken more seriously by whoever is reading it. All 3 emails get the same point across, but the last one leaves a much worse impression. You don’t speak to your close friends the same way you’d speak to strangers, and it’s the same in text form. I get so many emails that are just abrupt questions, with not even a quick "thank you" either in the initial email or as a follow-up after I respond, because they ghost me as if I'm just a chat bot answering questions.
I know complaining about email language sounds like a ~corporate america white-collar bullshit~ kinda thing, and there is indeed significantly more elaborate email etiquette that can vastly differ depending on your job/field that I’m not addressing at all, but just having the very basics goes a long way in how your emails are viewed by other people.
Oh boy, let me tell you, we get emails from students like this all the time at my pay job. Barely any information about what kind of help they need, if any info at all. No names, no student ID, not even using an email known to the school.
It took me ages to figure out they were treating writing emails like they were talking to a chatbot.
Now besides the obvious issues - I cannot help you if I spend the better part of three days trying to pull basic information out of you - these messages look like spam. More importantly, they can come across as a scam, and that makes it even less likely to get the problem fixed.
Taking the time to write a proper email is not only polite, it could be critical to getting somewhere in your education, in your career, and in writing and art. Use templates if you need them, but it is worth the effort to sound like an actual human trying to talk to another human.
Also, please don’t use the subject field for your request. By that I mean:
To: x
From: Y
Subject: review Mr smith room 1
(Can you tell I get multiple of these a week?)
Firstly, it comes across as you not having the respect to take the time to think of a separate subject. It also comes off a bit shouty.
Secondly, it makes it harder for us to search back for it.
Thirdly, people are less likely to write more details if they are doing it in the subject field. I am sitting at my computer, feeling shouted at and disrespected, and I have zero context for why I need to see Mr Smith.
Instead:
To: X
From: Y
Subject: Mr Smith Fall Review 1/2/2024
Hi X,
Mr Smith had a fall overnight. Please review when able.
Thanks,
Y
It probably took you less than one minute extra, and it’s made me a whole lot more likely to attend to your request quickly and cheerfully. It also means that the reply email will make sense to anyone I have to copy in.
I am being serious here: in addition to politeness and not being assumed to be an unserious person who has difficulty writing (which is disqualifying for many jobs!), THIS IS AN ACCESSIBILITY ISSUE!
Lower case is not just a cute stylistic choice. It is making it actively harder for your recipient to read. You may be used to deciphering unpunctuated lapselock screeds as a result of being on Tumblr. You cannot assume the same of the adult reading your email. You also cannot assume English is their first language, they do not have dyslexia, etc.
Capital letters, punctuation, paragraph breaks and so on are not just boomer shit nobody needs. They are context cues many people need in order to take in text fast and smoothly.
Separately, but related, the basic furniture of the commissions examples above (starting with a short greeting, how the question is phrased, etc) are also really important to establish tone. You know, like some kind of thing that... indicates... tone? Also an accessibility issue for people like me. If someone wrote to me like the third example, "are u open for comms??", I would actually read that as threatening! It looks like an anon ask! The double question mask reads as impatience! I might not even reply! And if I do, my anxiety has already skyrocketed, and I'm already wondering if getting the necessary info from you is going to be a problem.
Anyway. I'm not saying I'll have a low opinion of you if you type in all lower case. I am saying I'll have a low opinion of you if you think it's appropriate to send me a professional email in all lower case. Because that says you don't know how to code-switch or you are inconsiderate, and that is a problem when it comes to basic adulting.
They have done studies on email composition. The time you “save” not doing this on outward emails is lost at a much higher rate in the other side. Like, you save a minute dashing off an email without rereading for ambiguity and putting in a proper subject etc, and it takes the recipient an extra 5-10 minutes to decipher it.
