Static is My Nemesis

[aq2003]

grabbed all of the ebook versions of the folger shakespeare library's annotated versions of shakespeare's plays (+sonnets and poems) and put them all in one place in case anyone is interested

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[hipstersbleedroses]

might need this book. for nerd reasons.

[justgarb]

yeah me too buddy

[izzythebestever]

took me 8 months and very approx 380m of embroidery floss, and I'm now finished. going to have it framed soon :)

[lonelyroommp3]

and so javert you see it’s true this man bears no more guilt than you. who am i?

[hollenka99]

Friendly reminder this Moon Landing Day that this website exists, where you can drop yourself at any point in the mission where the crew are awake and they'll probably be bantering with Houston.

Apollo 11 in Real Time

A real-time interactive journey through the first landing on the Moon. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.

[theshadiertwin]

I'm actually scheduling this for a week early - the site lets you watch the whole mission if you want to, and the shuttle took off 5 days before they got to the moon!

[boofinator]

Weird chairs

[godisafujoshi]

These are regular chairs to me

[godisafujoshi]

[foone]

A Song Of Mice And Fire

[foone]

What the fuck is redwall

[crazypercheron]

oh yeah, you can definitely see the individual trees more

[crazypercheron]

it is done! Even though the light green is a bit too light for my lighting, it does give it the illusion of a foggy forest.

Now all that's left is to weave in the ends and I'm calling it the day

[thepenguinpress]

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

[lonesomedovepdf]

“[March 21 1951]

Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (’Ulysses’ in this case) he likes to skip ‘passages and pages’ so as ‘to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author’.”

[pomrania]

Finally, someone with worse reading comprehension than tumblr!

[parkchanwoohoo]

I don't fuck w nerds, the moment I can smell lore correction coming I'm like "Oh Neptune" and I gotta call my mom and ask her to pick me up

If I'm like "I really liked the scene where Gandalf learns the truth about the Ring in the first movie" and someone's like "Oh you mean when he was in Minas Tirith, originally known as Minas Anor when it was first built in the Third Age?" I am pulling the nearest fire alarm

[parkchanwoohoo]

Them: Pelargir prospered further under the reign of the the Ship-kings, and Tarannon Falastur, 12th king of Gondor, built a home there, though Berúthiel, his wife, didn't care for it

Me, sweating: D. Did you know that. That Viggo Mortensen really broke his toe. In that one scene

[tricky-pockets]

hey quick question, probably not important - how did you know all that stuff to put in the hypotheticals

[parkchanwoohoo]

[Throws smoke bomb down on the floor] [When the smoke clears I am still in the room with you but lying facedown, possibly dead but more likely unconscious. There is a visible dent in the nearest door.]

[foolfortune]

[astronicht]

I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

[dklementine]

According to some websites i found on google and probably not actually the most reliable, in Gozilla Eminem raps an average of 7.5 words per second. The maths you've done above is per line so i dont know how that would translate.

I guess my question is, could Eminem do it and do we think it's worth persuading him to learn old english?

[astronicht]

Best question possible. (Also I didn't bother to reference it because i thought i was posting into the ether, but the original post is in reference to the invention of the Beowulf speedrun on THIS post).

So Old English poetry has a fairly standard (though not set) number of syllables per line, which would be a better number to use to compare with the fastest known rappers (I checked around after seeing this and inevitably found a Reddit thread debating this question, but Eminem and Twista seem to be at the top).

In 2012 the Chicago Tribune was still reporting Twista as the holder of the world record (set in 1992), and I get the impression Eminem broke it, but I’m not entering the Eminem vs Twista debate here. What I need is a comparable rate, and Twista’s record is counted by syllable, not word, so his is easier to calculate. (Thank you Twista).

I can’t access the Tribune article, but it’s cited on Wikipedia, so I’m hoping the wiki text isn’t bullshitting:

So not looking at his peak burst as this is a marathon, he’s doing uhhh is this math right? He’s doing 10.87 syllables a second, holy shit.

So Old English poetry is structured in such a way where, while a poet didn’t have to count syllables, they did tend to end up with a fairly standard number of syllables per line (and a lot of alliteration). The beginning of Beowulf looks like this, for example:

You can see how the lines are pretty equal (the gaps in the middle of each line are added by editors because half-lines are important, you don’t have to worry about that) (Actually the lines are also decided by editors and no one agrees but that’s not a scop’s problem 💜).

The first line, for example, is 10 syllables : hwæt we Gardena in geardagum

*a lot of Gs are pronounced like y in OE, so that final word is more like yeh-ar-day-um.

The second has 9, the third 11. I should say I’m not sure about syllable counting in some lines, because vowel pronunciation rules vs stressed syllables rules are beyond me, having literally never been relevant to me until I needed to know how fast Twista (or Eminem) could rap Beowulf. Scops would be ashamed to be seen with me.

But for science’s sake let’s say there’s a range of of 9-13 syllables per line. Some paper I just found that I’m not totally sold on as a source but nevertheless seems to have done some math says the average is 9 syllables a line, roughly, though the range is from 6-18 and the most common single number is 10. Let’s go with that for now.

So, Twista can rap 10.87 syllables a second: more than an average line of Beowulf per second. But the copy of Beowulf we have is, as established, 3,182 lines long. Even just assuming an average of 9 syllables a line, that puts you at approximately 28,638 syllables. However, Twista can go at a rate of 652.36 syllables a minute.

Conclusion: if my math is right (please check my math) and if he could keep that pace up, Twista could rap the entirety of Beowulf in 43 minutes and 54 seconds. Presumably Eminem could do similar.

Thanks great question 👍

[astronicht]

Absolutely wild update marathon pace from @lewdhat

Also worth noting further additions and experiments on this branch of the post! Everyone here is using a different approach/art/technique and that’s uh extremely fucking cool.

[particlejaeger]

Don't let the gdq speed runners find this post, otherwise they will inevitably find a glitch in Beowulf where, if you pronounce the name of his sword backwards with an Egyptian accent, you can skip the whole dragon part and save almost 10 minutes over the full epos.

[janeeyreofmanderley]

I found a new game to survive boring lessons with.

I try to imagine all the tragedies, the other way round, so to say all the characters that die in the story live and the other way round. everything happens exactly the same way, up to the moment when the first person dies, and then things happen differently, but not neccessariyl happily.

Here an  example

Romeo and Juliet:

Mercutio needlessly taunts Tybalt, the duel begins, Romeo tires to seperate them, Benvolio tries to help him, suddenly a scream and he collapses, mortally wounded. No one saw and no one knows who accidently hurt him, and he dying calls it an accident, so that no one will get punished for his death. Inpain omeo cries out”My deares cousin killed on my wedding day!” - and a lot of explaining followes. The nurse and friar are promptly banished from Verona. Friar Lawrence dies of a nervous breakdown because of the nurse’s ceasless chatter and she dies of boredom and broken heart for being seperated from Juliet.  Lord Montague is murdered by his wife when he wants to disinherit Romeo and chase him out of the house while Lord Capulet dies of an heart attack learning of Juliet’s wedding. Lady Capulet, enraged about the failed match with Paris and loathing the thought of now, that her husband has died, being looked after by her son in law, a Montague, takes poision. Upon learning that Montague and Capulet are dead and that there now willl be peace in Verona thr prince drops dead from sheer happiness. Paris takes his office, a bit sad at having no Juliet but happily marries Rosaline. Juliet and Romeo move in with Romeo’s mum and live happily ever after.

(better than the original,but I hate to kill Ben)

Any ideas for the other plays Shakespearefandom?

[shakespeareansushi-blog]

The Tragedy of Othello:

Roderigo and Cassio fight; Roderigo miraculously somehow deals Cassio a fatal wound. Bianca comes out and cries over Cassio, and Roderigo’s small heart grows three sizes that day, but Iago kills Bianca so she can’t alert anyone of Cassio’s death. Enraged, Roderigo runs off and tells Desdemona, Othello, and Emilia all about Iago’s shenanigans. Everyone actually communicates with one another. Everyone teams up to kill Iago. Othello brings a pillow as his murder weapon and smothers Iago as Emilia stabs that buttface with his own sword. Desdemona stands in the background and sings “Mmm whatcha say.” Meanwhile, Montano, Gratiano, and Lodovico die of food poisoning from some bad oysters and the Clown dies by laughing too hard at one of his own jokes. Roderigo, in his newfound benevolence, realizes that Desdemona is free to be with whomever she chooses, and decides to donate all of his money to the orphans and widows of Venice. Emilia starts a business selling “Men Doth Suck” T-shirts. Othello and Desdemona sign up for marriage counseling.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Castles - art by Alan Lee (1984)

[softest-punk]

i would like to hear your thoughts on the "You see it's quite simple: if they call the earth Gaia, it's fantasy. If they call it Terra, that's sci-fi" tie into greek and roman mythology please

OKAY SO.

Gaia is the Greek personification of the Earth, right, and Terra comes from Terra Mater (Mother Earth), the Roman version of essentially the same thing.

And I think we tend to view Ancient Greece as a kind of mythical fantasy place (this is fair, much of the culture of Ancient Greece the average person interacts with is fiction) vs. Rome, which is very real to the average imagination. When one thinks of Rome, one thinks of real events that actually happened (the Ides of March, the Great Fire, maybe the big fuckoff wall in England, etc.)

What I think is super interesting about that is that this is an effect of the primary technology of the Roman empire—colonisation—being so blisteringly effective that Roman mythology and their incredibly pervasive religion (and the 5D chess they were playing with it in order to facilitate the colonisation project) is pretty much invisible unless you sit down and look for it. Did you know the Romans had a god-personification of doorways (Forculus)? Now you do. And yet it's ALWAYS Romans In Space because we think of them as a real and serious imperial power vs. like, theatre nerds.

This is a shame for science fiction I think because other options include:

Space Peloponnesian League. Nice planet you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Have you seen our armada. Would you like to contribute to the armada, thus enlarging it, to ensure nothing unfortunate happens to your nice planet?

Space Sparta. Empire run entirely on the dominion of one single other planet with a population of perhaps 100x the legitimate citizen population. Control of said planet maintained by random acts of terrorism enacted by particularly horrible children. Bad at warfare despite putting all their time and attention into it. Deluded into thinking they're good at defence where the fact of the matter is that no one in their right mind would want their barren death planet.

Space Scythians. What home planet? Oh no they live on their ships. Yeah they just raid whatever planets they pass for supplies. They have this whole sector under an iron fist.

Space Persians. Hello new subjects we are religiously mandated to defeat chaos and also we're collecting your plants for our gardens. We have hundreds of vassal states and they're all terrified of us, for excellent reason.

and so on and so forth

Not to suggest these literally never come up in science fiction but the ratio of Romans to other possible imperial structures is way off and imho it's because Romans were such unbelievably successful colonisers that we think of them as real (and therefore reasonable fodder for science fiction) where almost all other ancient civilisations end up being used as blueprints for fantasy even though they were real too.

This isn't necessarily bad but it is an interesting pattern & the fact that it exists says a lot more than we tend to think about re: Western culture and Western cultural product as a whole.

[tabbbbyyyy]

Dude this page is a lifesaver Google is really bad for working out the order to read them in