this clip has me cackling for no fucking reason
i really appreciate wayne being so surprised that he fully drops the gordon voice
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Misplaced Lens Cap
Three Goblin Art
Sade Olutola
Stranger Things
Jules of Nature

if i look back, i am lost
Today's Document
Keni
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
$LAYYYTER

pixel skylines
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Kaledo Art

Product Placement
YOU ARE THE REASON
trying on a metaphor
cherry valley forever

#extradirty
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@nalgeneofgatoraade
this clip has me cackling for no fucking reason
i really appreciate wayne being so surprised that he fully drops the gordon voice
I have an ex who was very adamant that I should watch Fight Club with him and I flatly refused because I thought I was just a dumb movie about men beating each other up but he insisted that nono it was actually really deep and would totally change my view of society and that just made me want to watch it even less because judging by the type of movie I thought it was I could imagine what kind of worldview it had.
To this day I still regret I didn’t watch it with him because it doesn’t promote the worldview I thought it did and I’m pretty damn sure my ex didn’t understand it either. Knowing him I’m 100% sure he thought it was promoting the chaotic worldview Tyler goes on about when it’s actually criticizing modern macho culture and suggests that the only way for men to be happy is to accept their emotional side and live in balance and harmony with women. We’re told this at the start of the movie when the only way the narrator can sleep is when he hugs and cries with other men and again at the end when he and Marla stands hand in hand with almost identical silhouettes.
It’s like The Matrix. Stories made by queer people that straight guys then take the entirety wrong message from. I would have loved to turn to my ex when the movie was over and ask “You know it thinks macho culture is bullshit, right?”
the entire kusimayu scene was devastating but to me the worst part was that by Joining she not only lost her individuality but her culture died with her. immediately the hivemind stopped chanting and singing and speaking the quechuan language and rolled up their blankets and packed up their things and walked away. the animals were set free and the goat that kusimayu had been cradling so lovingly just minutes earlier chased after the hivemind wearing kusimayu's body and bleated for attention and love and got none because there is no one left to care specifically enough to give it.
Spec Ops: The Line AU where, instead of Dubai, Walker and his team are sent on a rescue mission to DashCon, and it’s just as tragic and horrifying as the game itself.
I can’t believe I didn’t reblog this on the anniversary of DashCon.
I made this 10 years ago, as that fabled Con was unfolding.
Happy 10 years, DashCon.
gentlemen... welcome to dashcon
Now that I’ve had an afternoon to process the Jacob Geller video - Spec Ops: The Line did better with the option to let Martin Walker quietly move on and live with what he did in spite of the unfixable moral & psychological damage than FNV did with all of that self aggrandizing narratively vindicated mighty whitey bullshit about Joshua Graham put together. Because Martin Walker is also an irredeemable bastard, but unlike Graham, the narrative deals with the ethical weight of his crimes by directly intertwining his nightmarish selfishness & cruelty with the reality of his indomitable humanity. This is why Walker has the option to mercy kill Riggs, to spare him an agonizingly painful death even though he doesn’t necessarily “deserve” it. This is also why Konrad, the manifestation of Walker’s conscience, painted a mural of his/their victims in his final moments of existence. Because what Riggs and Walker and men like them individually “deserve” isn’t the point, and never should’ve been. The Walker we see in the final scene with Konrad is the real Walker, and he isn’t heroic, decent, excusable or redeemable, but neither is he a tooth gnashing monster. Instead, he is scared, desperate and confused, crying “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody!” in a manner so brutally infantile that the ocean of blood on his hands ceases to be impossible to comprehend. Of course, this is the true face of the game’s Bad Guy™, this fractured shell who it would be completely pointless to kill, by his own hand at least. Walker is evil, but he’s still a person, and in that context the full extent of his unspeakable guilt becomes possible to interpret and cope with. To reconcile internally, through understanding, if not externally through justice.
If Walker decides to live, he will walk out of Dubai regretting that he is alive, but he will be alive anyways. All of his convoluted internal justifications came crashing down, and he still had that awful, glorious freedom to just… stop. That was what was wrong with him the whole time, right? He just couldn’t stop killing. But he does stop killing. And he starts where anyone seeking to better their circumstances should always start, with themself. By choosing not to commit suicide, Walker makes use of the autonomy which the game previously chastised him for not using, and sets himself up to do so again. Martin did this, he can’t undo it, but he can still go on. He’s still got the air in his lungs and is entitled to that, by virtue of nothing but his own choice. By surrendering himself to the truth, Martin can rest inside of it. He built a life and tore it apart and the sun kept shining. For a game so notoriously bleak, that’s quite soothing.
this is a solid examination of the idea of deserving as it applies to spec ops! thanks for writing it.
i appreciate that someone else agrees with me on the best ending to the game
If The Chair Company doesn’t actually have a fucking wedding in a haunted house I’m going to be so vaguely annoyed
dw they won't mess it up
wow..
he's just doing a slightly more grown-up version of a heart with w+m in it
wow..
First four of my Disco Elysium inspired Better Call Saul portraits. There’s still a lot of characters to go if anyone likes them! First up my OTPs
“i swear i have the worst pillow in town!!!” lowkey funniest line of the year
"THIS THING IS MADE OF GODDAMN METAL"
I made this in reference to comic/game stuff but I’m glad to see this one’s going over well with all the writers
Reblog to give your followers and mutuals the strength to continue
New TLG chapter soon
GIMME
hm now do i finish my reread first or just read it immediately...
ripley's believe it or else
ripley's you can believe it the easy way or the hard way
ripley's i'm just saying it would be an awful shame if you didn't believe it and something terrible happened...
"somebody call ripley's believe it or not and tell em i don't"
-rex mohs, scott the woz toys to life
My gift to @pretzeldinosaur for a @portal-secret-santa exchange: something of a character study on the topic of "Wheatley vs. GLaDOS vs. the absence of Chell". Hopefully it was worth the wait.
yay! i love it so much! thank you!
Happy holidays, @tinystrawberryshifter! I was your Secret Santa this year for the @portal-secret-santa.
I had a fun time writing this. I hope you have a fun time reading it.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
YEEEAAAAAHH!!! NIGHTMARE POLYCULE MY BELOVED!
Thank you this was v sweet and loved it!
Happy holidays, @tinystrawberryshifter! I was your Secret Santa this year for the @portal-secret-santa.
I had a fun time writing this. I hope you have a fun time reading it.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Valyrian is impressively complicated and difficult to learn, is it so complicated on purpose or did it surprise you with how complicated it turned out?
When it comes to complexity and language, any complexity you add to the morphology is complexity you take away from the syntax, and vice-versa. For example, when you learn all the noun cases of Finnish, it buys you having to remember fewer constructions with adpositions—or fewer verb augmentations, if the language went that way.
Syntactically, Valyrian is usually (MODIFIER) NOMINATIVE-NOUN (MODIFIER) OTHER-CASE-NOUN* (ADVERB) VERB. It's quite simple. There's not a lot you have to remember, and things can move around a little bit, if it feels right. You don't have to remember a ton of auxiliaries with different applications and slightly different usages. For the most part the heavy hitters (the nouns and verbs themselves) take care of things rather nicely. This is what complexity within the words themselves buys you: simplicity elsewhere.
The reason you get this is because all languages are doing the same thing: describing human experience. And humans are the same language to language. The other small tidbit is that when creating a naturalistic language—and it doesn't matter what method you use—you are, unconsciously or not, aiming for the lowest common denominator in terms of grammatical complexity. You don't have to do that, but generally if you're trying to create a language for humans with no other goals, you do. With a language like Ithkuil, John was intentionally pushing away from what is standard in human languages, and so there are needless levels of complexity that push beyond the boundaries of ordinary human language.
Now, when I say "needless", this is what I mean.
In Turkish, if you want to say "The girl is reading a book", you say:
Kız kitap okuyor.
Turkish is a language with noun cases, but you only see the nominative here. Why? Because the girl is reading A book. When the object is indefinite in Turksih you don't need to use the accusative case—in fact, you shouldn't. If you wanted to say "The girl is reading the book", that's when the accusative case pops up:
Kız kitabı okuyor.
Okay, with this in mind, you've introduced—just in the nouns—four possibilities:
Nominative + indefinite
Nominative + definite
Accusative + indefinite
Accusative + definite
In a maximally complex language, all of this would be marked. In Turkish, only one of these is marked. (Well, maybe two, if you were to say Bir kız for nominative + indefinite. Turkish has an indefinite article that pops up sometimes.) Certainly there are languages where all of these have some sort of marking, but then those very same languages will have other situations where maximal marking is possible but not present.
Human languages all have this in common. There are areas in the language where more categories could be marked but are not. It doesn't matter what the language is. This is because humans have limits for how much junk they'll tolerate in the language they're using. It isn't long before something that could be inferred from context is inferred from context. It collapses every so often (i.e. too little is marked and so marking pops up), but the unconscious goal is for the language to have a balance between morphological and syntactic complexity and also explicitness and implicitness.
A language doesn't have to do this, though, and so conlangs can be more or less explicit/implicit. Can they work? Certainly, but they may be more than humans will comfortably tolerate, and so humans may not want to use them.
Take Láadan, for example. Had Láadan been created later it might have had a better shot at being used, but this was 1982 before conlangers had started getting together. Láadan primary flaw is that it's trying to be a deep philosophical experiment while also trying to be a language a lot of people speak. That was never going to work. Suzette Haden Elgin lamented that maybe women didn't want a language of their own to use, and so the experiment was doomed from the start. A simpler explanation is she saw an ocean and built a train to cross it.
In Láadan, every sentence begins with one of six speech act particles (copied from Wikipedia):
Bíi: Indicates a declarative sentence (usually optional)
Báa: ndicates a question
Bó: Indicates a command; very rare, except to small children
Bóo: Indicates a request; this is the usual imperative/"command" form
Bé: Indicates a promise
Bée: Indicates a warning
And then in addition to that, every sentence ends with one of the following (also copied from Wikipedia):
wa: Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally
wi: Known to speaker because self-evident
we: Perceived by speaker in a dream
wáa: Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source
waá: Assumed false by speaker because speaker distrusts source; if evil intent by the source is also assumed, the form is waálh
wo: Imagined or invented by speaker, hypothetical
wóo: Used to indicate that the speaker states a total lack of knowledge as to the validity of the matter
This is too much! Evidential systems in language exist, but they are so much smaller than this, and usually the markers pull double duty—and there's often a null marker.
Again, though, it's about the goals! This is fine for a philosophical language. And if it was simply a philosophical language, then how many people "speak" it is irrelevant. For example, John Quijada doesn't lament that after twenty years there isn't a community of Ithkuil speakers—indeed, he's baffled whenever he hears of someone who wants to try to "speak" Ithkuil. It's not designed for that, and so the metric isn't a fair one. Based on the structure of Láadan, I'd argue the same: the number of speakers/users isn't a fair metric, and shouldn't have been a design goal. Because while a language like High Valyrian looks more complex, with its declension classes and conjugations, Láadan is more complex in that it exceeds the expectations of explicitness a human user expects from a language.
Long answer to the question, but no, High Valyrian ended up as complex as I intended, and I don't think it's more complex than one would expect from either a natural or naturalistic language.
this is a partial explanation of why the statement “[insert language] is so complicated” is false. it’s the part i’ve always had trouble explaining, so it’s nice to have a convenient post to refer to. yay!