Soulmate AU where the soulmate thing is in fact totally fake and a conspiracy.
Turns out that there's this ancient society of wizards who perfected the means of telepathically linking up two individuals. While early uses included stuff like espionage and such, early on there was an incident where a wizard accidentally synced the wrong targets up. It just so happened that instead of syncing the crown prince to the intended informant, the mistaken target was a young lady who was a shrewd political match, and both their parents had been looking to arrange the matter (but were struggling with the reluctance of the relevant parties).
With sudden telepathic bonding on the table, the couple took it as a sign from the gods that they were meant to be, and got together of their own accord.
The wizards realized the potential for matchmaking as a means of manipulating the political landscape, and abandoned their prior attempts at subterfuge (a limit of the telepathic bond is that it's two-way, so the target also gains your secrets, which meant a lot of them had to be assassinated after the fact.)
So the wizards converted their lair into an ostensible temple of the Goddess of Love, where people could come to pray to find their soulmates. Wizards were also sent out to arrange matches that would advance the interests of their cult, as well as some random ones just to help cover their tracks. As the influence of the Goddess of Love grew, new branches of the temples sprang up. The cultists were soon divided into two categories: wizards who still knew the truth and pretended to be priests, and actual priests who weren't in on it and genuinely believed they were helping soulmates find one another.
The culture around it goes something like this:
Not everyone has a soulmate, and not all soulmates are destined to be together in every lifetime. But if they are, the Goddess will bless you with the ability to hear one another's inner voice, if it is your fate and/or if you pray hard enough. Some soulmates know each other from their first meeting, but others take time to recognize the bond and open their hearts to the possibility of connection. If you're wondering why it took like eighteen separate meetings with someone before the bond manifested, do some introspection and consider why you might have closed your heart off or whatever. Like it's definitely a you problem, and it's rude to blame the Temple of Love, which is only trying to help people and has no other agendas whatsoever.
Also consider donating more money to the temple next time. Higher donations mean more priests can petition the Goddess on your behalf, and she's a busy lady, sometimes it takes a lot of petitions to get her attention. 👌
How would this factor into a plot?
My thinking is that a pair get setup as soulmates, and they are just absolutely both adamantly convinced that they are not. Like not in an enemies-to-lovers sense or anything, they just get the psychic bond thing and it's like, no. I don't know what's up but the Goddess of Love has definitely made a mistake. So they set out to gain an audience with her, but along the way they uncover the truth about the cult and its manipulation of generations of political marriages and business alliances.
It could be a metaphor for amatonormativity. Like some of the priests argue that even if it's a con, it's one that's been running for so long it's already steeped into the culture. How could the main characters bring themselves to expose it? To tell people who think they've found their soulmates that it's not really the case? Think of all those bonds they'd be threatening!
But then like, wait a minute. That's bullshit. This whole format for relationships has so many problems, and it's all working in service of manipulating and controlling people anyway! Why should they let the cult go on hooking up individuals that suit it? Shouldn't people know that it's possible to CHOOSE to make a telepathic bond with someone they actually want to? Shouldn't they be able to decide to manage their own relationships as they see fit, without some misleading pressure of fate or gods? And what about the ones left feeling excluded and unlovable because they don't "have" a soulmate? It's not like people are going to stop loving one another or finding themselves if they aren't being led around to do it this specific way!
So they upend the whole thing, and upset a lot of people, and then have to deal with the fact that they're still telepathically bonded until one of them dies.
That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.
Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.
Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.
Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.
Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.
The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.
Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.
A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!
And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)
Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.
There's this notion that being able to stream professional theater shows will hurt the industry, because people won't go to the effort to support live theater anymore, and this is based on the anxieties of the film industry, but live theater isn't a film. The better analogy is sports.
Look me dead in the eye and tell me that people being able to sit at home and watch The Game -- the fandom that encourages, the ongoing investment over the years, the memories and traditions of Watching the Game with family and friends -- harms the ticket sales of real live go-to-the-stadium sports. Of course it doesn't. Of course all that *is the reason* that people care so much about sports they'll invest a small fortune on not only tickets but often travel costs to be part of it all in person. And the people who aren't doing that *can't* do that and weren't going to regardless, but their at-home participation and investment still boosts the profile of pro and NCAA sports as cultural institutions.
Maybe it's possible to fall in love with film and be immune to the romance of Going to the Cinema such that you'll just freely choose the same film in the comfort of your living room. It's not possible to fall in love with something that happens live and not want to be there to experience it. The consequences of procasts, for theater just like for sports, can only be A) more people motivated to make live theater part of their worlds, aka more money, when theaters everywhere could desperately use more money, or B) more love. Which is worth arguing for because reasons I assume I don't have to defend.
This is Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise speaking. We’ve entered the orbit of a planet not terribly unlike our own… save that it is exclusively populated by petty old queens.
Im listening to a podcast ep about AI usage and the guest is saying he completely understands why people refuse to use it out of fear because he shares the same fears, and it's just so weird to me that it's never ever acknowledged that some people don't use it not because they're afraid but because it just holds no appeal. There are things I'm sure learning models are very useful for but none of them have anything to do with me. Yes I'm a bit of a ludite but I completely failed to resist the lure of the phone, or social media, I've never used chatgpt because I have just never wanted to. I feel like the entire debate is instantly reframed once you acknowledge that it's not a necessary service that people either work to resist or avoid out of fear. For most people it's just an online tool, and for me and I know for lots of others too it's just not that important.
It's not that interesting or useful to me, it's holds no appeal, I am resisting nothing. I could already do everything I wanted I don't need a new tool. It really is that simple and I would feel this way even if it wasn't worrying and evil in various ways. We HAVE to resist this narrative that AI is everywhere because people want it, because it's necessary, because it's an improvement, because people can't live without it. AI is everywhere because tech CEOs and investors want to make something from their massive investments. It is incredibly resistable to me. Just don't have an interest in it. This needs to be part of the AI conversation if we have any hope of saving ourselves from the data mining clutches of big tech (AI specifics aside)
On Connor Storrie’s excellent Russian in HR (from a linguist)
Ok it’s time to put my Russian and linguistics (and Slavic linguistics) degrees to work and tell you why Connor Storrie’s Russian and accent work in this show is so freaking good. (Links added for those who want more info about stuff.) Hey other linguists — I’m playing fast and loose with notation here, ok, we’re not doing phonemes and IPA.
We’re going to go over overall mouth shape, palatalization, lack of aspiration, vowel reduction, and intonation with examples from Ilya’s dialogue! I’m going to talk about this from the perspective of an English speaker learning Russian since that’s what Connor (and I) did. Here we go.
1. Overall mouth shape
Every language has what you could think of as its own neutral or resting mouth position (aka, basis of articulation). One way to think of this is what the “I’m thinking” noise is — in English it’s uhh, in Spanish it’s often ehh. In Russian it’s mmm or ehhh or ahhh. The other thing is that the mouth typically does not open as much vertically when speaking Russian as when speaking English, but rather wider (horizontally).
Connor is doing a good job of maintaining a more Russian resting position (and I have a theory that this is one of the reasons his face looks so different as Ilya).
You can see Connor doing this when he says “ehh no” to Shane about whether this is his first time with a man in episode 1.
Also when he’s yelling at Alexei during the funeral in episode 5, we get to see him head on speaking Russian for an extended time, and you can see he is opening his mouth wider but not taller.
2. Palatalization
Every consonant has a place of articulation in your mouth, aka a place where your tongue touches the inside of your mouth or is positioned so that the air flows or is stopped in such a way as to make the sound. Making sounds is all about changing how air flows through our vocal tracts (throat, mouth, nose).
For example, in English ‘t’ and ‘d’ are both alveolar sounds made by touching the tip of your tongue to the hard palate behind your teeth. In Spanish those same sounds are dental, so you touch the tongue to the teeth to make the sound. In Russian you touch the hard palate and the teeth at once - the sounds are dental and alveolar.
In Russian consonants are sometimes palatalized. This means that there is a regular version — for ‘t’, touching the tip of the tongue to the teeth and hard palate. For regular “l”, touching the tip of the tongue to the hard palate or right behind your teeth and resting the body of the tongue along the bottom of the mouth, etc.
Then some consonants have a palatalized version, which happens before certain vowels. You lift the middle of your tongue and use it as the point of contact with the roof of your mouth instead of the tip. So for palatalized ‘t’, the middle of your tongue touches the ridge of the hard palate, and the tip of your tongue moves down to rest behind your bottom teeth. For ‘l’, the same.
In Russian the distinction is meaning bearing. So mat (regular t) and mat’ (palatalized t)’ are different words (cursing and mother, respectively). Another explanation here. Here’s an IPA chart with animation and videos of sounds being articulated. Try clicking on the ‘t’.
Connor is doing this. He doesn’t hit every single palatalized consonant but I’d say he’s hitting 85-90% of them. It’s wild! He was clearly taught by sound/phonetically which is great. But Americans often have trouble learning palatalization as a meaning bearing sound difference (I know this because I’ve taught Russian many times and there are studies) and he’s knocking it out of the park for someone who doesn’t speak the language.
You can hear it in his very careful pronunciation of I love you to Shane in ep6 - palatalized consonants in this phrase are the t, b, l, and b and l together: я тебя люблю/ ya tebya lyublyu.
Also every time he says the word хрень/ khren’ (shit/fuck) - he says this in episode 1 on the phone with Alexei twice and in the monologue to Shane in episode 5. The kh, r, and n are all palatalized, he nails it.
He even gets it in some tricky spots:
In episode 1 on the phone with Alexei with the baby crying in the background, he says the words для/ dlya (for) and блядь/ blyad’ (fuck). These are both notoriously tricky for English speakers learning Russian because every single consonant is palatalized. He gets both right.
He says the word больше/ bol’she (more) a lot during his monologue to Shane in episode 5 and nails the tricky palatalized ‘l’ in the middle every time.
3. Lack of aspiration
In English we have some aspirated consonants. The means that when we say them we sometimes produce a little puff of air with them: p, t, k. The aren’t aspirated 100% of the time but we don’t use aspiration for meaning like some languages do (ex. In Hindi kal (no aspiration) and khal (aspirated k) are two different words (time, skin)).
In Russian these sounds (p, t, k) are not aspirated. It’s difficult for English speakers to pick up this difference a lot of the time because it’s so subtle and hard to self monitor when you’ve never had to do it before.
You can feel it by putting your hand or a piece of paper in front of your mouth and saying “tik tok” or “cat”, you’ll probably notice the little air puffs.
In Russian similar words have no aspiration-так/ tak (‘so’) and кот/ kot (‘cat’)
Connor is doing this pretty well. He struggles with non-aspirated ‘t’, which is pretty normal. He’s better with p and k.
The times his “okay” sounds really Russian? Not aspirating the k is part of that.
He does a good job not aspirating the k sound in fuck in English, which adds to his accent.
In episode 1 he asks Alexei on the phone (when the baby is crying) как папа/ kak papa (how is dad), and overall does a good job with not aspirating any of those k’s or p’s.
His non-aspiration is pretty good overall in the long monologue with Shane in episode 5.
In my experience as someone who learned Russian as a second language and then has taught it to others, it feels a little bit like swallowing back or speaking from the back of your mouth to avoid aspirating. Or try putting another sound in front of the aspirated letter. (ex. In English, peak vs speak - the p in speak is not aspirated)
4. Correct vowel reduction, mostly
In Russian, word stress affects vowel sounds. In the syllable that is stressed (emphasized), the vowel has its most typical sound. In all of the unstressed syllables around it, the vowel sounds “reduce.”
Ex. the word for milk is молоко/ ‘moloko’ and the last syllable “ko” is stressed/where you will put the emphasis. The other two o’s don’t sound like o’s as a result. Correct pronunciation of this word is more like muh-lah-koh. As you get farther from the stressed syllable in either direction, the vowels get more reduced (o reduces to “ah” and then ə (“uh”) when fully reduced). (Tricky note: in this word the first syllable, muh, isn’t as reduced as it could be because it’s first, so it gets a little boost from that.)
Connor is doing this pretty beautifully throughout. Even when the consonant palatalization or the vowel quality is a little off, he’s knocking vowel reduction out of the park, for the most part. I imagine this is because he learned it phonetically.
Every time he says отец/ otets (father), he correctly pronounces the ‘o’ as ‘ah’.
There are many good examples in episode 1, but here’s a couple that stood out to me — when he’s watching Shane speak French, he says просто отлично/ prosto otlichno (just perfect/excellent) and correctly pronounces it “prostuh ahtlichnuh”.
He says the word теперь/ teper’ (now) a couple of times, and correctly pronounces the first e more like i (и).
When he and Sveta are talking about the ASG and votes in episode 4 on the bed, he says голосовали/ golosovali (they voted) and correctly reduces all 3 o’s, since the syllable ‘va’ has the stress: “guhluhsahvali”
5. Intonation of questions, sentences
Something you might know about English is that yes/no questions have rising intonation, aka we contour our pitch/voices up at the end. Like if I asked you “do you know the way to the store?” I would raise my intonation/pitch at the end to indicate it is a question. We also use falling intonation but often differently from Russian.
In many of the situations where we use rising intonation in English (including yes/no questions), Russian uses falling intonation. So the question goes down at the end instead of up.
There’s more to it than this but you can hear Connor do this very clearly when he asks Svetlana questions.
In episode 5, he asks her if Shane is also mediocre when they’re talking about other players on the bed before the ASG. And he uses falling intonation perfectly.
In episode 2 he says “this year?” When Sveta is telling him he could win the cup that year. His intonation falls perfectly again - а этом году? / v etom godu?
He also says a word in ep1 that I don’t think gets translated (the subtitles say “speaking Russian”) and his intonation is just so good - Неужели/ neuzheli (really). (His palatalization here is also great!) He says it to Shane when Shane asked him not to tell anyone in the first hotel room together.
Anyway. Connor, as we know, is hitting it out of the park with his Russian, and here are some of the reasons why. He picked up palatalization, mouth position, non-aspiration, intonation, and vowel reduction!! Like, damn.
Not to be "um actually" but Universal Healthcare isn't as universal as you think.
Australia is a major country but Medicare isn't "universal", not by a long shot. A lot of doctors aren't free, not all meds are covered by PBS, dental isn't covered, certain procedures are always going to be out of pocket. And it's getting less and less "universal" by the day.
Also, not everyone resident in Australia gets access to Medicare, DESPITE being "Australian residents for tax purposes". I was one such tax resident from the first day of being an international student but had to get my own health insurance. I didn't get Medicare until I got on a bridging visa (the visa they give you while making a decision on your longer term visa application) and that's NOT guaranteed for all bridging visas. A lot of refugees on bridging visas awaiting asylum status don't get Medicare, or any kind of social support, but are still liable for taxes - taxes that cover things they can't access.
Meanwhile, when I was studying in the US and my student health insurance screwed me over, I was given access to county medical care, which then got folded into Medi-Cal. I told them that I was an international student. They said under Obamacare (this was 2012), that didn't matter - I was under a certain income threshold (as an international student, my employment options would have been restricted anyway) so I qualified. I don't know if it's a San Francisco Bay Area specific thing or what, but for the 3 years I was there, I got 100% free doctors visits, free meds, free dental, even free wisdom teeth removal.
"Universal" healthcare hardly ever considers immigrants or refugees or anyone who isn't fully a citizen as part of the "universe" - even though they're the ones paying for everyone else.
image description: bsky post by @/alexfalcone, reading: It's fun that each finger has a little symbolic job: cool/not cool, that thing there, your driving is poor, I'm not available for dates, and (while drinking tea) I'm so fancy. /end description.
In Emily Rodda’s children’s novel Rowan and the Zebak, a prophecy refers to the five members of the adventuring party as the fingers of fate’s hand, and the jokey class clown character who secretly has low self-esteem cheerfully says that he’s right ring finger because he’s “good for nothing but decoration”.
Girl help the fibercrafters who live in my phone are calling out to me like the sirens of legend, entreating me to dash myself upon the rocks of Having A Yarn Stash
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