#but then reading more detail about being able to connect through people with shared interests or hobbies

[psychelis-new]

pick a pile: "Who are/will be your friends"

take a breath and choose the photo or number that calls you the most to read about how your friends see you and/or how you may be meeting your new friends and what they will think about you/how they will see you. Also no offence for the pics choice, I love sheeps.

don’t take the reading too seriously. only take what resonates with you and leave the rest. if you're not called by any pile, let this reading slid as it may not hold messages for you. if you're called by more than one pile, there may be messages in each of those piles. remember that is a general reading and some things may not resonate with you. energies can change and readings are based on present ones (as you read); you're always in charge of your life.

(photos found on unsplash)

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1 2 3 4

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pile 1

These are people that are pretty similar to you. You may be knowing them for a lot now, for some they may be childhood friends or something. You just need to look at them to be able to read their mind and understand what they think. Huge deep bond. For others, they may be part of your soul family or a past life partner/friend/connection. Okay there are two situations here: 1) you know them so deep down, every small detail about the other, that basically you are the same person and you support each other and care and really talk like 24/7 about any little thing that happens and you are very aware of how the other changed through the years (it could be also for new people: you talk a lot and tell the other everything about your life in a few days); 2) you have been knowing each other for long (or even just met) but you don't really know the other's favorite color, for example. It's a slightly different type of friendship. It's close, it's caring, but it's not as deep as one would imagine. You may even go a few days/weeks without talking and it's fine, when you meet again, it's like nothing happened. The care, the support, the help are there in whatever case. And it works for y'all, so why not. In both cases I think it involves you and another max. 2 people, not more (but it could be just 1). You may be kinda introverted people or just enjoy some time off occasionally, to recharge or do your own things. But you end up being there for the other if they need, no matter what. You may even sleep to each other's place to be able to share your experiences during the evening/night. For many of you I feel it's a same gender friendship for others is a different gender one, and for a few ones this person may turn into your romantic partner.

song: tú | maye

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pile 2

Very protective friends. They kinda shield you. If you meet someone new, maybe even a love interest, they are pretty jealous of you and need to know everything about this person before feeling okay with you going out with them. They may even stalk this person on socials? Masculine/boss energy, but it doesn't have to be a male person ofc (or people... actually I'm getting 3-4 people, so it could even be mixed). You may be knowing them from high school or college/university, for some of you they may be your colleagues. Very grounded, stable energy, I am feeling like those superhero that stand in front of you to protect you from a possible danger. This may turn into something toxic tbh, cause they should trust you and let you leave your life the way you need... it's just that they don't want you to suffer, probably cause you've been suffering a lot through your life. It's very nice and cute of them ofc, but it's also their codependency talking: be aware of this and talk things out with them if they are a bit too controlling and protective of you. They may be needing to work on themselves, on these parts of them, these triggers. The moment they realize all this with your help, things will change for everyone and be more easy to afford. Find a way to compromise, to come together to an healthier point with time and patience. They will change their approach and point of view on life and on you, and accept that you can and need to experience your life as you're an adult and you can take care of you too. And you can even get hurt while living. But you can survive, they'll know. And they'll be there to support you whenever you need. Huge older brother/sister energy. Even crush energy for a few (you are their crush).

song: boyfriend | dove cameron

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pile 3

Huge "squad" energy. You may be all the same gender and like to go out and enjoy all together. If someone is missing for any issue, you feel their absence and find ways to be with them anyway maybe through a phone call. Let's say one person of your team is ill, you may renounce to a night out and go to their place to cheer them up and be with them. You totally do anything together. I think it's about 4-5 people here, including you. You like to go out at night especially, go to parties/pubs and dance together. Maybe you like to make fun of guys/people trying to approach you (if applicable)? But sometimes it's different... I see you, not gonna go there with this reading, sorry. :) I think you may share courses too, maybe college or dancing courses, or play in a sport team (even cheeleaders?)... something like that. You spend a lot of time together also during the day. You like shopping together, eating together... you talk a lot too. There's some kind of sisterhood or brotherhood here. You're there to help each other, your are totally a group, like "bro's before ho's". Together you're stronger, like nothing can hit you and having the others' support is fundamental. But from cards it seems you don't always talk about heavy stuff or past stuff (before you got together), at least not with everyone there. That's probably something you may need to do, to be more open about anything you don't like or how you really feel inside. It's true that y'all enjoy being together but if you feel down, not all of your friends may notice or you (or one friend) may hide that. Your squad is strong, please find ways to talk about your mental health together: you can get out of any personal problem also thanks to your friends, you don't have to hide and push it all down night after night. Take courage and speak up, you will be understood by your friends (or ask your friends to speak if you feel something isn't right with them). None of you is a burden for the others, you should know that.

song: i choose you | mario

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pile 4

Your friends are or will be pretty different from you (etnicity, background, upbringing, culture, ideas, "social class"...). They are very caring of you, very kind and generous and indeed, very different even among them. They see you as very sweet and they kinda feel protective of you but in an healthy way. It feels like y'all complete each other. You learn a lot from each other too. Lot of fun times together, lot of laughs, but also nice talks at night even on heavy topics or sharing your lives' experiences. They may help you heal some parts of you that still need work (maybe some fears or insecurities about yourself and how you can be perceived by others/in relationships of any type), they'll help you be more focused and determined, more you. Very supportive group. They help you also working towards your dreams, finding your true call and desire and create your own dream outcome. They help you know yourself better too. Just by communicating with them, you find ways to reach your inner side more easily. They balance you very well, and help you stay balanced. It may be a spiritual connection too, they may be part (all of them or just a few) of your soul family, and you may be supposed to meet them at a specific time in your life. Some of you may be trying to manifest them in their life atm, it will happen the moment you let go and trust, especially yourself (work on your inner world to decide what you really want out of a friendship). There's no judgment here, it's a pure friendship. For some it may involve a slightly large group (around 5-6 or a few more people but no more than 8), for others it's 3-4 or less.

song: angel of mine | monica

#pac #pick a pile #pick a card tarot #pick a picture #pick a card #pick a photo #pick a pile tarot #pick a pile readings #psychic readings #divination #clairs readings #free tarot reading #tarots #tarot readings #tarot reading #tarot #tarotblr #intuitive readings #intuicion #intuitive #intuition #pac tarot #pac reading

[atinystraynstay]

Our Story Won't End - Lee Felix

Synopsis: "I refuse to give up on us." Pairing: College Student!Lee Felix x fem. reader

Genre: Angst. Established relationships, arguing with one another, fighting for one another with one another.

Word Count: 2.8k

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Felix re-read your text message to him over and over again. How could he be so ignorant? It felt like he had the opportunity of a lifetime, but he had just wasted it.

He had to make things right.

Last night, Felix took you out on a date. A first date, to be exact. Everyone had been waiting for the moment where he finally confessed his feelings to you. I mean, everyone seemed to see there was a connection between the two of you besides the two of you. For him, he just had to build up his own courage to believe you were were interested in him.

The two of you met through Hyunjin, who shared an Art History seminar with you. One day, when Felix was waiting for Hyunjin to get out of class, he saw you emerge from the building. Instantly, Felix had to find out your name.

Just finding out who you were led to this beautiful friendship. But the friendship slowly was beginning to transform to mutual pining. You had always found Felix attractive. The first thing you noticed about him was his freckles, which looked like as if they were kisses from angels across his cheeks. And he noticed your bright smile. You had the ability to light up whatever room you stepped into, capturing everyone's attention.

That sheer observation made it more urgent Felix makes a move before someone decided to come along and sweep you off your feet first. He at least wanted the opportunity to prove his capability of being the man you needed.

Your friends and Felix's had taken it upon themselves to get you two together, one way or another. It had been a struggle for a few weeks, but eventually, Felix got the bravery to finally ask you out.

He had anticipated this date for a week and a half. The only reason why the date was pushed back so far was due to midterms. He completely understood as he had his own papers and projects to turn in. Any amount of time would be worth it to finally get some one-on-one time with you.

He promised to take you out to a nice dinner in town followed by a walk along one of the bridges connecting downtown to another part of the city. It had a breathtaking view of the city. A hopeless romantic, he knew the view wouldn't compare to you though. All he wanted was to bring you somewhere to show you off and wow you. Word had traveled from Hyunjin that you were growing frustrated with dating, the lack of effort people were putting into planning dates.

Felix saw the challenge and wanted to beat it. The ultimate victory would be claiming you as his.

However, the date itself was a recipe for disaster.

First of all, it started raining that afternoon and wasn't forecasted to lighten up until the next day. There was no way that Felix would postpone the day, not when you both had been counting the days. Adding an extra day seemed torturous to the both of you. He promised that he would come up with an alternate plan for the bridge after dinner, something that would keep the night going and keep you both wet and warm.

That part at least was out of his control. Everything else that proceeds unfortunately was caused by him.

Changbin and Minho had came home from an early afternoon gym session, their own way to combat the dreary afternoon. After every gym session resulted in a feast by the two. Mainly by Minho because Changbin most likely would cause a fire. Felix decided to join in and enjoy the meal with his two friends.

He wasn't going to pick you up until 6pm. He would be fine. Besides, if he ate now, he wouldn't overstuff himself at dinner.

A full stomach led to a sleepy Felix. And his bed seemed so tempting. A quick nap wouldn't harm. He would be able to stay out all night, if you wanted.

However, Felix missed a key detail. He never set his alarm or asked any of his housemates to wake him up, so he had ample time to get ready for the date.

5 Missed Texts from y/n 1 Missed Call from y/n

Felix jolted awake from the feeling of vibrations against his bed. He looked down to se you had attempted to call him, and now you were in the process of leaving a voicemail. What is going on? Is she okay?

Seeing the time flash on his phone, his eyes widened and heart dropped. 5:45pm. Fuck.

Quickly, he began to frantically text you.

"Hey sweet girl, I'm sorry. I took a nap 🥲 Let me hop in the shower and I'll be over"

What crushed Felix the most was that you texted back almost instantly. He wouldn't be surprised if you cancelled the date. Not when he treated it like it was nothing by foolishly taking a nap.

"No worries! Just text me when you're heading over"

God, he didn't deserve you.

By the time Felix showered, got dressed, and was ready to go, it was 6:20pm. Probably the fastest shower he's ever taken but still didn't feel fast enough considering you were waiting on him.

"Hey, aren't you supposed to be on your date?" Chan asked him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm going," Felix muttered back.

He had no time in side conversations as he was late as it is. Chan, sensing the irritation of the young man, put his hands up in defense and walked away. Felix hated being short with people, not wanting to be rude or inconsiderate. He was definitely getting inside his own head for being so irresponsible.

"heading over right now" "ok! drive safe and text me when you are here 🩷"

At least you didn't seem too mad at him.

Felix rushed out to his car in lightening speed. It was moments like this when he wished superpowers weren't fictional. If he could, he would snap his fingers and already arrive at your doorstep. Anything to cut down on the time you were waiting for him.

The drive was quite smooth considering how much it was rain. Puddles were already starting to gather on the roads. Of course, Felix wasn't driving recklessly despite the pressure he was facing. He was trying to remain as cool and collected, especially as people tend to drive unpredictable when there were hazardous conditions. The last thing Felix wanted was to cause a bigger mess by letting his frustrations get the best of him.

It was while driving he began to realize just how full he was. Maybe the rushing around to get ready or sleeping on his stomach upset his stomach. What he did know was that he couldn't sit down for a full meal as he promised to you. "Shit," he sighed. You had been so understanding so far. He was sure you'd get it.

The GPS was guiding Felix to your apartment. Every now and then, he would glance to make sure he was heading in the right direction. Once he saw he arrived, he turned it off to begin to hunt down for a parking spot. There were times Felix was grateful for having a car, as it helped him get around easily around the city. Yet, moments like this, when there seems to be no available parking made him wish he didn't drive.

The only available parking spot was about a block and a half away from your apartment. It was still raining, but nothing as crazy as it was when he left his own apartment.

"hey! just arrived" "oh perfect, I'll head down. see you soon!"

His heart fluttered at your text messages. The date had started on a rough start considering he was late, but he was determined to make sure it was still a good date. One that at least would land him a second date where he could really win you over.

Turning off the ignition, he stepped out of the car. However, he was immediately met by a car splashing water on him as they sped by.

"You've got to be kidding me!"

How can this get any worse?

Buzz buzz

He glanced down to see your name flash on the screen. He tried his best to let the anger subside before picking up the phone. Not exactly the best tone to start off the evening.

"Hello?" "Hey! I don't see you."

Felix's eyebrows furrowed together and he frowned. He glanced around his surroundings as he stood on the sidewalk. What? Did he put in the wrong address?

"Are you positive? I'm like across the street from you."

There was a pause. Maybe you were checking your surroundings? Maybe you didn't quite catch him the first time because of the passing traffic?

"Yeah, Lix, I'm positive. Are you on Oakwood?"

Oakwood Avenue? Felix was about to respond but he glanced up at the light post at the corner of the sidewalk. He squinted his eyes to see the green street sign to indicate where he was. Instantly, his confidence flattened.

Gates Street.

"Oh y/n, I'm sorry. I'm on Gates." Felix began to look around to try to figure out which way he should walk, so he could get to you. What an impression he was making, huh?

"Don't worry, Felix! I can start walking in that direction. You're about one block away from me. I'll start walking right now." "Ok."

Felix hung up first before sliding his phone away in the pocket of his rain jacket. The bottom half of him was still soaked from being splashed, including his shoes and socks. This was just a disaster. The only saving grace was that he was finally going to be able to see you.

That was why Felix remained where he was. If it was anyone else, he would have just turned on his heels back to his car and head home. He couldn't do that to you, not when he kept you waiting both for the day of the date but for himself. He had to try to salvage the rest of the evening.

From a distance, Felix saw you approaching him. His eyes widened to see how you were dressed. Even despite the rain, you went above and beyond. For him. You were wearing a black silk skirt with white tennis shoes, a mix of different styles but still spoke true to your personality. You also wore a black ribbed shirt underneath your pink rain jacket. You had your hair down in your natural hair. Felix always loved how your hair looked. He wanted so desperately to drive his fingers through it. He also took note of the gold earrings you wore. You looked heavenly.

And it made him feel like absolute shit. The fact he was dripping wet didn't hide his outfit choice. He wore a simple pair of jeans, a black hoodie, and black sneakers. It was almost as if he just picked whatever clothes he thought were clean.

"Hi Felix," you greeted him, a wide smile on your face. "Hi y/n," he smiled weakly.

Not much was exchanging between the two of you. Felix did open the passenger door for you, to help you in. He quickly jogged around to the driver side before slipping in. One of the things you adored about Felix was his bubbly personality. He was the definition of sunshine. Unfortunately, it seemed like the sunshine was being blocked out by the rain.

"So I was thinking maybe we can go out to eat and just sit by the bridge? I know it's not the same as walking it, but I figured we could still go see it?" "Oh yeah, that sounds great! Are we still doing korean barbecue?"

Felix's stomach churned at the thought of eating that much food. He quickly shook his head as he buckled himself into the seat. You couldn't help bur frown. You had been looking forward to going to the restaurant since he proposed the idea when he asked you out.

"I'm sorry, y/n. My stomach hurts a bit. Why don't we just do drive thru so we can eat in the car and not get wet anymore?"

Trying to be optimistic, you nodded your head. You kept a gentle smile on your face. You were still getting the chance to spend time with Felix. He at least still showed up for the date. It was something better than nothing.

"Yeah, Felix, that sounds good." "McDonalds?"

Maybe you spoke too soon.

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Staring at the text you sent Felix, you let an exasperated sigh. You really wanted things to work out with Felix. He seemed like a genuine guy, someone down to earth and unafraid to express himself. You needed a change from the typical guy you go for. And Hyunjin hyped up what a great guy Felix was.

And it was evident from how much Felix texted you. You had been under the impression that he was into you, especially with how detailed he was about your plans for the first date. You had gotten so excited just for it to burst.

You tried your damn best to be understanding. Things change, and dating in college doesn't always mean you have to have the most romantic first dates. You had just be hyped up to expect more to be left with next to nothing.

Part of you was also upset just that he seemed not to care when he met up with you in person. He seemed to say all the right things to lure you in, and maybe he assumed he didn't need to impress you? That you were already his?

If that's the case, you didn't want to be a part of it. You wanted someone who was going to put in effort, just as you did. Or at least as much as they could. You realized that putting 100% effort is an unrealistic ask, but you at least wanted someone to communicate with you. You just couldn't shake off that Felix seemed to be in such a sour mood throughout most of the date.

Did he really not want to be with you? Did he only go out with you because you knew Hyunjin? It just left you feeling shitty.

Knock knock

You looked up from your phone, which laid on your comforter, to look towards your bedroom door. Your roommate was peaking her head in with a soft smile. You couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and match her smile.

"What did you do?" You playfully asked. "I didn't do anything. All I'm saying is that you might want to come downstairs."

And just like that, she slipped away. Your curiosity was peaked, so you had to go investigate. Slowly, you pushed yourself off the bed to go venture downstairs.

"Hi y/n."

That voice. Your eyes looked down the staircase to see Felix standing at the front of the door. He had an apologetic smile on his face as he stood within the threshold. There was a bouquet of flowers in his hand with a small plastic container of brownies, or at least that's what you believed from the distance.

"Oh, hi Felix. I guess this is why you left me on open," you laughed awkwardly.

He shared in that awkward laughter. You couldn't deny that your heart swelled that he still showed up at the door, but why was he here?

"Y/n, I know I don't deserve a second chance. I really fucked up our first date. Literally has to go down in history as the worst first date of all time."

Well, there is no arguing with that. Yet, you still were willing to hear him out. You made your way down the staircase until you reached the foyer, only a few feet away from him now. Up close, you could see more of the freckles that made you weak in the knees.

"I've been waiting for the chance to take you out, to treat you special and I failed. Of course, getting to see you was amazing. You're even more incredible than Hyunjin described. I owe you a massive apology for wasting your time and treating you poorly. If you could, I would love a chance to make things right."

"Brownies are a good start," you said.

His eyes widened slowly, registering what you just said to him. "Really?" he whispered.

You couldn't help but giggle, genuinely this time. You nodded your head as you stepped closer to him, taking the flowers into your arms. "Come on, we can go to the kitchen. I can make some tea or something. Maybe we can watch a movie and eat these brownies?" You suggested.

This definitely was the second chance Felix prayed for.

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Unfortunately based on a real date I had this past weekend just with an alternative ending that I would've liked. Essentially had to end things with a cute guy for putting in very little effort 😅

Dating in yours 20s is definitely an *experience* let me just say that

#lee felix x y/n #lee felix #stray kids #lee felix x reader #lee felix stray kids #lee felix skz #lee felix yongbok #stray kids felix #felix #skz felix #felix x reader #felix x you #felix x y/n #felix stray kids #felix skz #felix scenarios #stray kids imagine #skz #stray kids imagines #stray kids scenarios #yongbok #lee yongbok #lee yonbok #lee felix fanfic #lee felix fic #lee felix x you #atinystraynstay #kpop #fanfic

[shouldiusemyname]

Ep 4 of WHAT WAS MY AGENDA AGAIN? cos I know I had one when I went into the kitchen and now the boy I like is kissing me. WTH??

First of all I gotta say, this show should be called What's The Agenda? And the answer is Gay. Cos this is all the agenda these people have and we love it for them.

With that out of the way, let's talk about this ep. If I had my doubts before, this ep really shows me that this show is about Zo. This is Zo's journey to knowing himself and allowing himself to exist as himself in this world.

Ep 1-3 were set at the university, which now we see is clearly Joke's territory. It's not that Zo doesn't fit in there, because we know he's doing quite well. It's just that he feels that he should take on a certain persona in order to fit in (which I think will be further explained once we get to see his family dynamics).

This week, when we see Zo in his own territory, it becomes obvious that he is not being true to himself when he is at uni. True - he doesn't hide his goofiness or weird interests, but he does feel slightly like a fish out of water and like it's his responsibility to make everyone happy.

In regards to that, I have to say that I love that he is in the debate club because this boy is the ultimate diplomat. He aims to keep everyone pleased and calm. He is always neutral. He takes it all in, takes responsibility for whatever it is that happens and smiles through it in order to keep everybody happy. This is what he does with Joke's dates on ep 3, and on this ep we can see that he did the same with Nita's date and Pok's situation when he feels that he is the one making people uncomfortable.

So now, when he's in his own territory he feels relaxed, he is able to be himself and speak freely about how he feels. This is evident in every little detail from his clothes, to the way he walks, to his facial expression, to his voice. However, it becomes even more clear when we see how much Joke is out of his element. The tables have flipped and this ep Joke is relying on Zo's guidance.

I love this switch at this point in the story, because we've already seen that Zo is confused about his feelings but we were so preoccupied with Joke's agenda that the focus was all on him and what he was doing to Zo. Now, this change in environment and dynamics is forcing us to see a different side of Zo, pointing our attention towards Zo and his journey.

I also like that Joke is there to tell Zo what he needs to hear. Look, I know we joke a lot about Joke throwing around these rules and advice without following any of them. But this is his role in the story. He is there not for himself, but for Zo, because this is Zo's story. Joke functions as a mirror for Zo. Their connection allows Zo to say whatever he thinks and feels very honestly, and then Joke is there to reflect that back to him and give him perspective. It feels like it's the first time Zo is letting himself be this open and vulnerable and share his self-doubt with someone else.

I think that Dunk did an amazing job this ep. He could have played his typical whiny character and make it all about him in the most annoying way. But no. He has actually managed to give us the mature, self-doubting, I feel like it's all my fault but I realize it's not really about me Zo, without being a drama queen. I really got that Zo is basically confused and trying to make sense of all the changes that he's experiencing. Even with Pok - he's not upset about Pok not telling him, he's really just confused because (like with his attraction to Nita and Joke) he thought he had a clear read on the situation and now he's finding out that he was wrong. So he's really just trying to put the puzzle back together in a way that makes sense again.

And the kiss! I LOVED the buildup to the kiss. I LOVED that Zo was crying while listening to Joke's song because this really cements that Joke gets him. Joke knows Zo and knows what he needs to hear, so he gives him clarity and the safety of knowing that he can be himself and act on his feelings without it being the end of the world. Zo knows that he can test his feelings and try to kiss Joke because Joke has now made it clear that Zo and his feelings are safe with him.

*on a side note - these shows are coming right at me with a surgeon's knife. I swear the people making these shows know me and are doing this to me on purpose. Almost every show I've watched in the past 2 months has me going through my own baggage frantically looking for something I know I lost but can't remember what it was. I can't decide whether I like it or not. I guess I'll just have to wait and see...

So, this turned out a lot longer than I'd intended and I didn't even get to Jeng and Pok...

As usual, if you stuck with my ramblings, I seriously appreciate it 💜

#hidden agenda meta #hidden agenda the series #hidden agenda #if someone knows what i lost please let me know #cos theres too much baggage #my not so hidden agenda

[corporatefrog]

╰┈➤ Welcome Back to the Channel part 29; like and subscribe

✧.* featuring yn setting up for their newest youtube video when a few unexpected guests arrive : ̗̀➛ notes - this is the last chapter! thank you guys so much for joining me during the journey of this story. I haven't finished a fic in years so it feels so good to write that final line. I left it pretty open ended to be ready for extra chapters in the future!! I could say a bunch more about how thankful I am for people reading this story and how much it's help me work through the past month but i'll let the chapter do that :) tags - college au, superhero au, smau

series masterlist previous | next

Okay. Let’s do this. 

“Hey guys! We’ve got a really special video today!” I greeted with a beaming grin, micking a high five with the camera. So far so good. “We’re going to be doing an interview I’ve been waiting to make for a long time…” I paused for effect before moving to the side, revealing today’s special guest. 

“Say hello to Mysterion!” I exclaimed with applause. I’d add some cheering effects while editing but without it, it sounded a bit empty. 

Looking back at Kenny, a laugh burst from my mouth at the expression on his face. He’d twisted his mouth into some semblance of a smirk but with the mask he looked cool and suave and more like he’d just smelled a three day old diaper. 

“Dude, what is that face? You look fucking stupid.” I said between laughs. Kenny frowned, giving me a side eye. 

“I’ve got a reputation to uphold!” He whined, gesturing to the dark hooded costume, “You don’t get it because you just started using your persona-”

“KENNY! Just say my social security number too why don’t you-” The frame shook as I lunged forward to stop the recording before any more secrets were shared on camera.

It had been about a few months since I’d started working with Butters and the guys would not let me forget they had seniority in the hero/villain world. Every chance Clyde had, he reminded me that he was there when they fought Cthulhu. Of course, Kyle was close behind to say that Clyde had done absolutely nothing during that fight. But that was followed by Kyle reminding me that he was sent to hell and was there during the eldritch battle.

I’d been worried when they found out that they’d stop talking to me altogether. I wasn’t quite sure why. They’ve known about Butters being Professor Chaos since they were children and I see him and Kenny hang out more than he hangs out with Kyle and Stan sometimes. He even hangs out with Craig and his group on the weekends. 

The only thing that’s been hurt by my employment at Chaos LLC is my intel source. Wendy stopped giving me insider details about hero movements if they related to Professor Chaos so I haven’t been able to cover as much of his antics but she was still queuing me into other run-ins with minor villains and typical South Park oddities. 

Last week, fucking Slenderman showed up. Like a tall faceless dude in a suit and tie Slenderman. Just standing in the park. He did kidnap Butters which led to an interesting rescue mission. And the video coverage was insane. Marble Hornets could never. 

I didn’t want to trust it at first. I’d spent a month waiting for things to suddenly change. For everyone to turn on me for being a minor inconvenience at best but Craig still asked me to help him with his stats homework at Tweek Bros and Stan still invited me to whatever random board game shop he was visiting that week. The only thing that changed was sometimes we ran around the city in (if I’m being honest) ridiculous costumes and blew off some of the steam that comes with being a college student at Garrison University. 

The entire college almost shut down last month due to Dean Garrison being convicted of tax fraud and publicly attempting to assassinate the President in order to avoid charges. Without anyone to lead the college and the name now permanently connected to an elementary school teacher turned assassin, the only option seemed to be shutting the place down. That was a rough month. The university was literally on the verge of closure and I still had to write a 10 page research paper. What kind of bullshit is that?

Yeah but it was a paper about The Bachelor so was it really work?

Anything that involves citing in APA is work. 

The routine of my new normal set in pretty quickly. Well, as ‘normal’ as things can be when you’re friends with superheroes in South Park. I went to my classes, made videos for my channel, then I’d meet up with Butters and ruin a few people’s day a few times a week. It was scary how easily I fell into the routine. I’d wake up and say good morning to Stan as though he weren’t shooting tranquilizer darts from a nail gun at me a few hours earlier. Certainly not a sentence I ever thought I’d say. 

Looking back on the past two years, I see all the chances I had to end up somewhere else. If I’d gone to a different university and never set foot in South Park or if I’d chosen a different apartment and never ran into Clyde on my first day there I could have led a completely different life. Even in the moments which dragged on my mind, they all led me here. And the feeling of comfort that comes along with that thought makes every struggle worthwhile. 

There’s nowhere I’d rather be and here. Attending a university with an idiot dean, living in an apartment building with my closest friends, and now helping someone I care about get the revenge he’s due. Oh, and making youtube videos about all the stupid shit that happens along the way.

I restarted the recording, giving Kenny a warning glare before saying the intro again. This time, he kept a normal face which made it much easier to not think about how just a few months ago, I was freaking out at the idea of talking to THE Mysterion. 

Granted, now we’ve seen THE Mysterion vomiting in a toilet at 2 am after eating his taco bell too fast so the shimmer has faded. 

“So, Mysterion,” I started, glancing at my list of questions I’d prepared for the interview, “You’ve been the longest running hero in South Park history! How does it feel to be coming up on 10 years as South Park’s Guardian Angel?”

Kenny hummed as he mulled over the question, “It’s not an easy job-” A knock on the door cut off his answer. I looked over at Kenny with a confused expression. He mirrored my confusion but couldn’t offer an idea on who was interrupting our interview for the second time. 

I paused the video before heading over to the door, looking through the peephole. Toolshed’s signature belt gave him away instantly. He shifted from foot to foot as he waited, tapping his hands against his thighs. 

What the fuck?

I opened the door, leaning against the frame while I deadpanned at my neighbor. 

“What’re you doing?” I asked, looking at him from under my eyebrows. 

Stan flashed a sheepish smile, “Well, I heard that you were interviewing Ken-” He paused, glancing down the hall both ways before correcting himself, “Mysterion today and I was thinking I could join? I haven’t gotten an interview yet after all.” 

“You haven’t gotten an interview because all you’ve done the past three fights is stand in the back with a power drill looking lost.” I pulled up my phone and held it up for Stan to see the footage from the past three hero conflicts. While Kenny and Craig dove into the fray, Stan could be seen in the background, searching through his utility belt for the right tool for the battle. By the time he held up his weapon of choice, Craig would be throwing the final punch.

“Okay those videos are rigged. You got those from the Craig fan accounts.” Stan protested. 

“You’re really reaching now bud-” 

“Is there still time for the interview?” A voice shouted from down the hall. Kyle’s door flew open with him rushing out soon after. The kite strapped to his back caught on the door frame, sending him tripping and falling into the wall across the hall from his door. I sighed, rubbing a hand over my face while the sound of Kyle cursing and tripping over his own stupid fucking costume filled the hallway. 

“Dude what are you doing?” Stan asked, crossing his arms as though he were the one being put upon by the appearance of the Human Kite. Kyle righted himself, brushing imaginary dust off his costume. 

“You said you were going to try and get in on the interview and after my last one-” He gave me a pointed look as though I were the one who chose his stupid name in the first place, “turned into me being berated for an hour and a half.” 

“Yeah but you already had one. It’s my turn now.” Stan whined. 

“Actually, it’s my turn right now.” Kenny said, suddenly appearing behind me at the door. I jumped to the side, holding a hand over my chest to keep my heart from jumping out at the shock. 

“Jesus fuck man. I need to put a bell on you.” I muttered to myself before addressing the slowly growing group of complaining superheroes, “None of you guys get to decide whose turn it is to be on my channel. I set up this interview with Kenny a month ago and we’re finally getting to filming so if you want to have ‘your turn’ you need to fill out the form and join the queue like everyone else. I’ve got Craig and Tweek lined up for next month then Tolkien-”

“How the fuck does Tolkien get to go before me-”

“Because he filled out the fucking form Stan? I literally just told you.” 

“Okay, well I just think it would be more interesting to have Toolshed on before Tupperware.” Stan looped his thumbs through his utility belt, kicking a foot at the ground with a frown tugging at his lips. He looked up at me with pouting eyes, blinking rapidly as he tried to change my mind.

No way this 20 year old is pouting in the hallway right now. 

I blew a breath out of the corner of my mouth, averting my eyes from the pouting college student. I better not regret this. 

“Okay, fine.” I started. Stan’s posture immediately improved as he straightened up and began to walk towards the door. Kyle followed suit with a borderline giddy smile of his own. I held up a hand to stop them, “But this is a one time thing, okay? Don’t go telling the others you can just bug me into doing a video with them because I know Clyde can and will be the most annoying motherfucker to ever exist until I do an entire series about him.” 

Kyle and Stan nodded rapidly, heads moving in sync as they agreed to whatever would get them in the video. I was about to move aside and let them in when Kenny sucked in a breath. 

“We weren’t supposed to tell other people about this?” He asked. When I turned to stare at him, he plastered an awkwardly large grin on his face. 

“Who did you tell?” I asked, holding my breath out of fear for what he’d say next. Kenny paused, eyes moving across the ceiling as he thought over the question. That’s never a good sign. Then he began counting on his fingers, mouth moving in silent words as he continued to tick off different unknown names. 

Letting his hands fall with a shrug, he looked back at me with the still incredibly awkward smile, “Only like a few of the guys-” 

“MUAHAHAHA, THIS IS WHERE YOU FALL MYSTERION!” Butters came barreling in through my balcony doors, fists raised to the sky as he posed in the living room. The four of us turned to look at the villain. 

“False alarm, Butters. Apparently this was a lowkey thing.” Kenny said, pointing to me with his thumb as though I were the buzzkill in the situation. My jaw dropped as I turned to Kenny, appalled that he had the audacity to claim I was ruining our private interview I’d spent a month planning. 

Butters’ arms fell back to his sides, tinfoil of his gauntlets scraping slightly against his belt, “Awe geez, and here I was ready for a scuffle.” He said, scuffing the toe of his boot against the floor in a similar pout to Stan’s from moments before. 

Why am I friends with a bunch of toddlers? 

Before I could address Butters’ appearance, my apartment was flooded with the rest of my friends all clad in their hero costumes. Tolkien waddled behind Tweek and Craig, turning sideways to get through the door with Clyde following close behind. Soon my apartment was filled with arguing superheroes and one very boisterous villain, all trying to figure out how to fit themselves into the frame. 

I squeezed myself onto the couch between Kenny and Clyde, feeling like I should at least have the original planned video guest in the middle of the frame. Voices overlapped as Stan tried to shove Kyle over, pushing Tweek and Craig further to the side. The cacophony of sound bounced off the walls and made the air buzz with the rambunctious energy. 

Normally the noise would send me spiraling, overstimulated by the different sounds all pulling me in different directions, but the noise around me calmed the normally racing thoughts in my mind. I’d spent so long sitting in front of this camera, reading off new stories of the people who now shouted my name to grab my attention from opposite ends of the couch I’d gotten off Facebook Marketplace. The once deafening silence which filled the moments between takes was replaced by shouts to move over and accusations of stepping on their kite string. 

It was the best noise I’d ever heard. 

“I’m starting now! Everyone shut up and follow me lead!” I announced, stabilizing the camera before returning to my spot with a smile.

I smiled for the camera. I smiled at the thought of the views a video with all of South Park’s heroes would get. But I also smiled from the overwhelming happiness that came from being surrounded by my closest friends. 

“Hey guys!” I greeted, raising a hand to mimic a high five with the lens,

“Welcome back to the channel!”

taglist [reply to be added]: @sula0kin @lacuna-at-dawn @anglettecolours @cocolena@sukisprettyface @feverish-dove @sweetadonisbutbetter @hand-writxen@mishstuff@sophtophie @triphovia  @lacunaanonymoused @inkedintothepaper @toodeepintofandoms@mmmaackerel @sillybilly-123@n0tangeliccc@sophtophie@inkedintothepaper 

#its done- #please tell me you guys liked it AHHH im so scared to post this #i tried to make it sweet #corporatefrog #south park #south park x reader #welcome back to the channel #sp tfbw #tfbw

[thebrightestlodge]

@nishihii Saw your tags (thank you SO much for the commentary!)

I have ....MANY DISJOINTED THOUGHTS on them ...considering there is absolutely nothing beyond Amelia's cutscene and suggestions based on Henriett's locations. I am going to be nice and put it under a read more so apologies for rambling. I'm the person who made that one flayed BSB in Old Yharnam my own OC at this point.

Thots on "Violently Ill and Tragically Catholic" and "Emotionally Distant Through Distrust of Anyone That's Not Her Person" (this jsut rambles into a chunk and I apologize as I realize this right after sdfgfgdg)

I mean, Amelia has three details, she's a Vicar left behind, she's clutching a pendant in the Grand Cathedral, and she's bowed and praying in front of Laurence's Skull. That's ...about it. So a lot of this is jsut my brain going "This is my interpretation to the point of 'my city now' "

Unknown what sort of special thing Amelia has to her, maybe it's a secret that never spreads to anyone beyond the upper echelons of the church, but she is chosen and groomed to serve as a high ranking member of the church. Sickly and paranoid and seemingly on the edge of a breakdown constantly, thinking gods are judging every move. Her illness came before the church, and people jsut deal with it coldly, but she's used ot it at this point. Not to say she is inept or withheld, she definitely has earned a place, her faith and her intelligence holding her up to the title of Vicar. She comes into the title in her early 20s, I like to imagine after the Halmet, so she knew Laurence before and after the descent to madness. Not any relation but she's being set up to take over whenever Laurence steps down/is indisposed/goes crazy goes stupid, so there's a decent connection. A soft intelligent man who wants to help slowly getting more frenzied and wild discovering what lays beyond blood and fluid, and the part unattached to the church wants her to leave, but her faith shackles her. As Vicars begin to disappear and beasts fill their halls, Amelia is slowly becoming more panicked and paranoid of her eventual hour of beasthood. Constantly check her mirrors and asking others to see if her pupils have started blistering, if her blood is now different, if the smoke is driving her away more than usual. She's never left the Ward so knows nothing of the world beyond who comes to prayers and what Henriett tells her as Amelia settles into another dreamless sleep ...

Henriett has even LESS lore, but a couple things I find interesting. She's the main and ONLY summon for Amelia, but she is an optional boss for Ludwig (and I've heard Laurence but can't get info for this bit). She also wields a Kirkhammer, a known church weapon, a repeating pistol, and torch

With the Ludwig and Kirkhammer, I always imagine Henriett as a former Tomb Prospecter, (the only other prospector we meet is Olek, who also uses the Kirkhammer, repeating pistol, and torch). She for some reason decides to cease descending into the dungeons, even if the great Church Hunter Ludwig insists on invites, seeing her as skilled at what she does. With her being a Church Beast summon, perhaps she's like Djura and discovers the true secrets of the church, and decides not to be involved in their schemes. The Hunters have no secrets, they're jsut former gilded heretics who wander in the honesty of their brutality. Somehow she's formed this very very close connection to the Vicar Amelia. For some reason, she sees it as her task to tend to Amelia, making sure she's comfortable and cared for, and able to handle herself when Henriett is not around. Perhaps her secret knowledge of the blood means she knows why Amelia fears beasthood. She and her friend have their contingency plan. It is spoken of as intimately as one shares a secret to a lover, but no one quite knows their association with one another, no one can tell if this is an inappropriate church connection.

-----------

Amelia is alone when we fight her Henriett only a few blocks away. Perhaps she wants her last human memory to be when she and Henriett were close, and not her seeing claws grow from her finger beds and her friend swinging stone to break her apart. She asks Henriett to leave and only come back when the blood breaks. Henriett thinks much the same. The new Hunter invites her to duel with a beast in the Cathedral, the floors are cold and cruel and Henriett remembers when she used to warn Amelia about walking across them barefoot and catching an illness.

Ludwig is an afterthought. A man she respected, she's here to give him the dignity he deserves. She wants him to see what a church hunter has become, someone who can carry a task for others. She performs it well and even if he sees the Hunter isn't part of them, she is the one to tell him (be it truth or lie) that his dear spartans have always fought for their honour. She doesn't know The Harrowed but she respects him enough to leave him with the beast's head

(if the Laurence summon is true (I've never found her summon)), She's there for her own fury. Her closest confidante, the closest she's ever been to a person. She had to kill her with the kindest mercy one can bestow on a Hunt. Laurence birthed monsters, Laurence made her friend a slave to a cult born from amniotic anguish of an underworld. Henriett's kindness is going to make this murder as cruel as she feels it needs to be. She finds a bed in the Hunter Gaol afterwards and takes the first rest she has in years. When Henriett wakes up, she'll decide to bury Amelia's amulet in the Upper Ward.

#bborne #my writing #vicar amelia #old hunter henriett #do I put this in the main tag? We will see

[webcomic-character-tournament]

Genuine question. Why are comics from online only publishers discouraged? What is the goal behind discouraging paid webcomics?

sorry for taking so long to answer this!

i got really excited about answering this but also am not very good at communicating things clearly, i often get lost in the details in my passion about stuff like this, so i hope this is still interesting to read and intelligible lol!

i dont think there is any one thing that inherently defines what is and isn't a webcomic, it's an amorphous category that i enjoy the ambiguity of. but for me, what first led to my wonder for them as an 11 year old, and what has been a major factor in my passion for them even as an adult, was their low barrier to entry in both making them and accessing them. if you have internet access and time, almost anyone can make a webcomic if they want to! of course, without editors (or often even full story plans) or sensitivity readers or more people on a team to collaborate and contribute to the comic's vision, and the huge effort that it takes to do all the tasks of writing, inks, coloring, lettering, etc. all on ones own often without professional resources to facilitate that, that means that a lot of webcomics are really rough in some way or another. but a lot of people have interesting ideas they want to work with, but don't have the technical skill, desire or ability to market themselves or be beholden to external work deadlines, or connections in some way or another to be able to share those ideas through traditional publishing. regardless of skill or ability, a lot of marginalized people are barred from having their stories accepted by publishers due to bigotry and expectations about what kind of story is profitable.

as a disabled lgbt kid, i definitely read a lot of really bad webcomics i wish i hadn't, but also some of the media i was exposed to that most represented me back then was in the form of webcomics from people a lot like me. and i could read so much of it easily and for free without having to risk much to access it behind my parents' backs!

obviously that isn't the case for every webcomic, but for me and my history with them, them being easily accessible to both publish and read has been really important.

there are absolutely a lot of good points to be made about how publishing free to read webcomics isn't always the most accessible thing for a lot of people, especially for poor and disabled people. making webcomics takes a huge amount of time and effort, and sometimes even if people are passionate about making a comic, they just can't afford to find the time for that around all the other responsibilities of their day to day lives unless it can be a consistent income source. thats why even if paid online comics arent my platonic ideal of webcomics, i absolutely would never exclude them. i want small creators making stories i want to read to get the money they need to survive and keep telling stories without burning out!

it could be argued that online publishers who specifically focus on webcomics don't always present the same barriers to entry as traditional publishers, and many don't restrict the scope of marginalized creators' stories at all or to the same extent as people have struggled in other more mainstream avenues. and from my outside understanding of publishers like hiveworks, i'd absolutely agree with that! i love a lot of hiveworks comics and think its an awesome thing! (of course literally my icon is from a hiveworks comic, tiger tiger!) nonetheless however, part of my goals with this tournament is to highlight lesser known comics, and as publishers like hiveworks help advertise and promote their comics, even if i still want everyone to read all my favorite comics published by them, and certainly there are limits to those advertising resources, they still don't need as much help as other comics without that support. so its not as much 'try not to submit these' and more 'as you submit stuff like this, try to submit stuff with less advertising resources and popularity too!'

going into this tournament i also had a similar sentiment for stuff like webtoons originals. there was an added element to me in how i feel like i know a lot of people nowadays who read webtoons but don't have much awareness of other forms of webcomic, but even if in my love for webcomics i want people to come to appreciate all the breadth of ways they can exist in, thats obviously not something to make a huge priority. it's incredible the amount of forms comics can take (sidenote but reading scott mccloud's "understanding comics" a couple years ago was really formative for me in cementing how much i appreciate that, i'd highly recommend it!!!), and the way infinite scroll comics like webtoon style comics more fully make use of their digital medium, using time scrolling to pace things in place of traditional gutters and panelling, is really really cool. of course they're becoming more popular in a world where more people have smartphones, where webtoon style comics are a lot easier to read than many other forms. i love a lot of webtoons, and id feel regressive to discourage stuff like line webtoon original comics any more than stuff like hiveworks comics, just to go against current trends in what comics people seem to prefer. they have a similar low barrier to entry (through contests) as other online publishers, and it's cool to see creators get the opportunity to get paid for their work and get help from professional editors and stuff

but in the past couple weeks of running this tournament, i ended up reading a lot more about the behind the scenes of what its like to be a line webtoon original creator. line webtoon's expectations for their creators are incredibly unrealistic and exploitative, with grueling deadlines leading to a lot of creators to get repetitive strain injuries, all while working for well below industry standards. obviously a lot of webcomic creators make an inconsistent poverty level income out of it as independent creators, and that shouldn't happen either, but it's absolutely inexcusable for a company to profit off this labor and then manufacture these same conditions. without any organized labor movement surrounding that issue, that of course isn't an argument against reading or promoting these comics on its own, creators are more likely to get more income if their comics get more popular, and despite the promise of popularity by becoming an official comic, they absolutely still aren't all promoted equally. what has made me want to slightly more discourage (but still absolutely not disallow!) stuff like line webtoon official comics has been the combination of that along with learning that much of the editing of webtoons originals carries less of the benefits of having experienced creatives collaborating with creators to elevate their stories to new levels, and very often instead ends up taking the form of 'simplify this plotline and make this character look more attractive and fit this archetype more fully so we can market this better and have readers easily consume each update while they're scrolling their phone without having to think about it too much'. while obviously there are a lot of amazing webtoon official comics in spite of what i've heard anectdotally, hearing that just really went against so much of what i've most valued about my experience with webcomics!

i want creators to be able to tell stories no matter how weird and unmarketable, where they'll never have to worry about pushback for making stories with characters and themes that resonate for them as a member of any oppressed group, and where there's as little pressure as possible pushing them to work harder or faster than they healthily can or want to! so for me, even if i still love a lot of online published comics and want them to be celebrated and want their creators to be able to make a comfortable living out of them, i still just want to highlight stories that had that level of freedom that has created some of my favorite experiences with webcomics just a little bit more.

#sorry this is so long lol i am simultaneously so bad at expressing things and so so passionate about talking about things #also sidenote i feel like i unintentionally sound like i'm making an individualist sort of point of 'individual creator vs people who want #to change their work' here but thats absolutely not my intention. its just coincidentally undre capitalism oftentimes its hard for a lot of #people to have get together and have the resources to make something together without being paid for it #which leads to most more collaborative forms of storytelling being more profit motivated (like movies for example) #but im so incredibly interested in alternate forms of collaboration and cooperative models for storytelling and making art. i get why #its rarer in our current society but i love love love when i've seen webcomics doing that. often the best of both with being able to tell #stories that really need telling that people are passionate about #and with the refinement and texture of all the input and skills of everyone involved #such a tangent though lol. but yeah would love recs for stuff like that! #wctrelated #notwctpoll #anonymous #asks #long post

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Ergativity delights us’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about ergativity. But first, next month, November, is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month. It’s been seven years!

Lauren: For our anniversary month, we ask you to share your favourite episode or just share some lingthusiasm in general. Most people still find podcasts through word-of-mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.

Gretchen: Or in their eyes since all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.

Lauren: The other day, I shared our colour episode with a stylist because we were talking about the strange history of the colour orange. It’s so fun to find that perfect episode to recommend to someone, and we’ve touched on so many different topics over the last seven years.

Gretchen: I’m always sending people to our episode on turn-taking and conversational styles because there’s this comment that keeps coming up on social media about having to hold up the entire conversation by yourselves or not being able to get a word in edgewise. That’s a linguistics thing that’s been described. You can listen to an episode about it.

Lauren: We’ve asked you to do this every year on our anniversary, and we always see it in the stats. Your recommendations really do help more people find the show.

Gretchen: If you share us on social media, you can tag @lingthusiasm on basically all of the social media sites, so we can see it and reply, or like it, or reshare as appropriate. If you share it in private, we won’t necessarily know, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction – or you can tell us about it on social media if you still wanna be thanked.

Lauren: In what is becoming another anniversary tradition, we are doing our second listener survey this year. This is our chance to learn all about your linguistic interests, and we have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to contribute to.

Gretchen: If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again. You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode, and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year.

Lauren: This year, we also wrote an academic article about the process of making Lingthusiasm, which featured some of your answers from the previous survey. You are officially contributing to academic research. Because of this, we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey.

Gretchen: To do the survey, or read more details, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23. That’s all lowercase and with the numbers in their numeric values – not written out as words.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media. Our most recent bonus episode was a recap of Gretchen’s time at the 2023 Linguistics Institute, which is a month-long linguistics summer course. Was I jealous? Yes. Was I delighted to hear about it? Yes. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Our patrons really do let us keep making this podcast, so we really appreciate any level of support.

[Music]

Lauren: You know, Gretchen, in some ways, ergativity is the basis of our LingComm friendship.

Gretchen: You know, you’re right about that that. I think it started in 2014, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I had been getting a higher than usual number of questions about linguistics topics on my blog, AllThingsLinguistic, and I decided, “Look, I don’t have time to answer all of these, but I know that there are other linguists on Tumblr who do sometimes have areas of expertise that I don’t or maybe just have more time,” and so I put this post out saying, “I want to try to be a bit of a connecting point for people who have questions about linguistics topics that aren’t currently very well explained online and then to encourage people who had answers to those to either write a blog post or especially contribute to Wikipedia for those particular topics so that there’d be better information about various linguistics topics on the internet.”

Lauren: I was in grad school at the time, so while my supervisors probably thought I didn’t have the time, I certainly had the enthusiasm.

Gretchen: And someone had specifically asked a question about ergativity and said, “Look, I’ve read the Wikipedia articles about this, but I still feel confused. Can anybody help me understand this phenomenon?”

Lauren: Look, we can definitely say that this was to answer the question that someone had asked, but also, I found it really helpful to write this incredibly long-form, back-to-first-principles blog post about what ergativity is to really help keep it in my mind while I was working on some of my coursework for grad school. It benefitted everyone, and it also allowed me to see where there were some parts of the Wikipedia page that I could contribute to. Those edits are still up there as well.

Gretchen: Amazing. Subsequently, I did some more Wikipedia workshops, and I reached out to you to get involved with those because I saw that you had edited Wikipedia before, and I was like, “Ooo, this person seems responsible and reliable and maybe I can nerd snipe her into doing more things.”

Lauren: “She blogs. She wikipedias.”

Gretchen: Eventually, that led to the podcast.

Lauren: It’s all because I’m a bit of an ergative devotee.

Gretchen: An “ergativity devotee.”

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: I recognise that we are saying the word “ergativity” a lot, and we’re not explaining what it is yet, and I promise we will get to that. I also want to point out that ergativity has a certain level of linguistic cultural cachet.

Lauren: This is true.

Gretchen: It’s a term that’s only used in linguistics. It’s one of those things that you can throw into conversation, and you’ll sound like you know some linguistics if you say it in an appropriate context. We are here to give you the ability to casually toss “ergativity” into conversation. My favourite example of that currently – although, who knows, there could be more examples in the future, I hope there are – is an xkcd comic called “The Tower of Babel.” I think we should narrate it.

Lauren: Okay, a dramatic reading of an xkcd comic. Let’s do this.

Gretchen: First of all, there’s more than two characters in this comic, so we’re just gonna – it’ll be fine.

Lauren: We’ll make it work. One of those characters, though, I should point out, is a curly-haired linguist.

Gretchen: Hmm.

Lauren: Who bears a striking resemblance to you.

Gretchen: I will be playing that character.

Lauren: Yes, Gretchen will be playing Gretchen.

Gretchen: Lauren will be playing all of the other characters.

Lauren: Correct. Okay. We ready?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: “The Tower of Babel is complete!”

Gretchen: “Let’s go meet God!”

Lauren: “Hi, God.” (god voice) “Wow, nice tower! You did a great job! I’m so proud!”

Gretchen: “Thanks!”

Lauren: (god voice) “I’m going to give you a reward. What do you like about the world?”

Gretchen: “Hmm, words are really cool.”

Lauren: “No, wait –” (god voice) “Great! I’m going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment…”

Gretchen: “YESSSSSSS!”

Lauren: “We should not have brought a linguist.”

Gretchen: Technically, the curly-haired linguist character is not named, but I think of her as a kindred spirit. Morphosyntactic alignment is the broader concept that ergativity is an example of. This is gonna be an episode where you can listen to half an hour of explanations so you can understand two words in a comic strip. Are we ready?

Lauren: We are so ready. If you don’t retain every bit of detail about this, don’t worry. I was multiple years into a PhD before ergativity really clicked for me.

Gretchen: The thing to really retain is that sentences have this organising principle that’s different in different languages. If the exact details are something that takes a while to sink in, that’s totally okay.

Lauren: We are going to explore some cool languages doing cool stuff this episode.

Gretchen: All right. Let’s start with English, just to give ourselves a bit of grounding. When you have a sentence – let’s take a very basic sentence, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is a thing that has happened – and, obviously, we need to distinguish that from “Lauren visits Gretchen.”

Lauren: Which, in English, we do by the order that the words come in.

Gretchen: Right. This lets us know who’s going to Australia, who’s going to Canada, otherwise you could end up buying some very confusing airline tickets. We could also do a version of this sentence that doesn’t use names. You could say, “I visit them,” “They visit me.” Here we have both the word order and the form of the words themselves – “I” versus “me,” and “they” versus “them” – that’s telling us who’s doing what to who.

Lauren: Very convenient. Thank you, English pronouns, for helping here. If I visit them, I can say, “I arrive.” We have “I” at the start of each of those sentences. In English, we wouldn’t say, “Me arrive” or “Them arrive.”

Gretchen: But in principle, we could. It would be confusing if we started going around saying, “Me visit they” because then you wouldn’t know which of the clues to follow, but it actually is not confusing to say, “Me arrive,” or “Them arrive,” instead of “I arrive,” and “They arrive,” because there’s only one person or entity doing a thing in each of those sentences. When we have two different people or groups acting on each other, when we have two different roles in the sentence, we need to distinguish between them grammatically either with word order or by changing the shape of the word. When we only have one person or group – one role doing an action – then that solo entity can kind of cluster with either of the forms in the sentence where we have two of them.

Lauren: We should use some kind of visual metaphor here to help show the relationship between these three different roles that you can have in a sentence.

Gretchen: I first learned this relationship between roles by having somebody draw a little triangle on a piece of paper with these three different possible roles and doing a circle around which ones are clustered together in which language.

Lauren: I did that on my blog post. I love using some very nifty colour-coding when I teach this with slides, but we don’t have access to that.

Gretchen: This is an audio podcast. Instead, we thought we would send everybody something in the mail so you can have a visual.

Lauren: Oh, we could launch a massive advertising campaign. Imagine the day where we have morphosyntactic billboards in Times Square!

Gretchen: All of the bus shelters – we could just pay for advertising, so you can see this diagram if you’re listing to this podcast while you’re walking the dog.

Lauren: I think this may be getting out of hand here.

Gretchen: You know, because we have such a massive budget, Lauren.

Lauren: I’m gonna have to break the sad news to you that we’re gonna have to use something that is a little bit closer to home and a little bit more on budget.

Gretchen: Okay, let’s try – if you look at your hand.

Lauren: Or borrow someone else’s.

Gretchen: Borrow someone else’s consensually if you like. We can put these two people with their two roles in the one sentence on two different fingers. If we have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” we can put the doer, the visitor – that’s me – on the index finger, and the visitee – that’s you, Lauren – on the pinky finger.

Lauren: Great. I’ve got a little metal hand gesture here.

Gretchen: You’re sort of doing the horns thing. Then for the one person in the sentence all by itself, like, “I arrive,” the only thing acting, that’s gonna be on the thumb sticking out on its own.

Lauren: I like that because with “I arrive,” there’s only one role happening there. The thumb sticks out on its own.

Gretchen: Right. The thumb is its own solo player. We’re just ignoring the middle and the ring fingers. That’s a more complicated sentence for a future episode.

Lauren: There’re certainly other things you can put in a sentence, and we’re not gonna look at those things-slash-fingers right now.

Gretchen: But the nifty thing about this metaphor – so again, we’ve got the index finger, which is the visitor, the pinky finger, which is the visitee, and the arriving person over here on the thumb.

Lauren: “Arrivee.”

Gretchen: “Arrivee.” The thumb can touch the index finger, like when you’re making an “okay” sign. That represents when you group together “I arrive” and “I visit,” the way English does. Those are patterning together. You have the pinky finger that’s all by itself doing its own thing.

Lauren: That’s me.

Gretchen: You can also have the thumb touch flat against the pinky finger. The represents when the arrivee and the visitee are doing the same thing. That would be “visit me” and “me arrive” in a language that does something like that. Then the index finger is all by itself, and it’s doing its own thing. So, it’s doing, for example, “I.”

Lauren: You know what? It’s a lot more awkward for me to touch my index finger and my pinky finger together.

Gretchen: Right. Those don’t really touch together very well. You can brush the sides a bit, but they don’t touch flat as easily as the thumb does. That represents how you really don’t want to mark the two roles in the same sentence with the exact same marking because then you don’t know who’s visiting who.

Lauren: Defeats the purpose of distinguishing who’s doing what in a sentence.

Gretchen: Right. This is our visual metaphor using something that hopefully everybody has access to. Unfortunately, the Lingthusiasm budget does not stretch to billboards.

Lauren: No, but it does stretch to hoping that people have hands. The other thing that’s nifty about your metaphor, Gretchen, is that “okay” is a meaningful gesture in English in a way that touching the thumb and pinky together is not. You know the way that they line up in English is for the thumb and the index finger to go together – “I arrive” and “I visit Gretchen.”

Gretchen: Ah, because that’s a gesture that we have. I can’t guarantee that all of the cultures that do have the “okay” handshape do have this exact morphosyntactic alignment.

Lauren: It only works if you’re trying to remember things for an exam in English.

Gretchen: The other thing that’s the case, at least for me, is I find it’s a bit easier and more comfortable to tap my thumb to my index finger than to tap my thumb to my pinky. I feel like this represents, as a mnemonic, how this grouping of the visitor and the arrivee together is a bit more common cross-linguistically. The other one is still in a bunch of languages, and we’re gonna talk about that, but it’s a bit more common to have the index and the thumb grouped together.

Lauren: The other thing I really like about this is that putting the pinky and the thumb together is now, like, a cool, new linguist greeting.

Gretchen: Yeah. “Okay” already has a meaning, but the pinky-thumb together, this could be a cool, new linguistic handshape gesture. You could do a little tappity-tap of your thumb against your index and your pinky finger in succession. You could use this as a cool hand gesture to flag down linguists in public.

Lauren: Are you a fan of morphosyntactic alignment?

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s like the “Live long and prosper” gesture for linguistics.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Or if you’re at a bar, and you’re trying to find a discrete way of finding out if someone’s a linguist, and you don’t want to just ask them – I dunno why you wouldn’t just ask them – but you could do this little gesture.

Lauren: No, no, no, if you’re in a bar, and you wanna find all the linguists in a noisy environment is what you’re trying to say there.

Gretchen: Right, exactly, yeah. I hope this catches on. I did just make this up. I can’t guarantee other linguists will recognise it – but maybe! It seems pretty useful.

Lauren: In English, we tend to keep the thumb and the index finger together – “I visit Gretchen,” “I arrive.” In other languages, you can have it as the thumb and the pinky together, and it’s “Gretchen visits me” or “me arrive.” Even though that’s not the way it works in English, that is the way it works in other languages. That is known as “ergative.”

Gretchen: This whole thing is morphosyntactic alignment, and a part of this is ergativity. Specifically, we’re used to doing this default “okay” sign – the index and thumb together. This has a name. It’s called “nominative-accusative alignment” because those are the two different groups. Then the pinky and thumb together is called “ergative-absolutive alignment,” but it often just gets shortened to “ergativity” because that’s the most salient piece of this entire edifice. People tend to name the most exciting bit.

Lauren: Of course. You’ve got to stick with the exciting bits, Gretchen.

Gretchen: When you have the thumb and pinky touching, the person who’s visiting is left doing all of the work of packing their bags and getting on the flight, and the other people are just like, “I’m just here. I’m getting visited. I arrive. Who knows how that happens?” But the visitor has to do all of this stuff. So, the entity that’s doing all the work is called the “ergative.”

Lauren: The etymology of “ergative” – that “erg-” there – is from a Greek root that comes from the form “ergon,” which is “work.”

Gretchen: An “ergonomic” chair is, I guess, a chair that sort of works well for you.

Lauren: Huh, yeah, makes sense.

Gretchen: Or the “erg-” – which is pronounced slightly differently in “SYN-ergy,” “synergy,” /sɪnəɹgi/.

Lauren: /sɪnəɹgi/. I guess it is /sɪnəɹgi/.

Gretchen: Working together.

Lauren: Working together. That’s nice. There’s some real synergy to that etymology.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I think ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root, *werg, meaning “to do,” which is the origin of “erg-” as in “ergative” and “synergy” and also “energy” – “energy” does the work – is also the origin of the English word “work.”

Lauren: Cool. That was a fun little etymological rabbit hole to go down.

Gretchen: The ergative – or to use an Anglish root – the “work-ative.”

Lauren: The “work-ative.” That would be so good.

Gretchen: Why don’t we just call it the “work-ative” now?

Lauren: We already have enough going on here terminologically to not to re-Anglicise it. But it is one of those pieces of terminology that was created in the 20th Century as part of this formalisation of linguistic terminology. That’s why it has this Greek root, and also why it doesn’t show up in other branches of sciences because we didn’t borrow it from physics or biology. It was created within linguistics.

Gretchen: Right. Whereas compared to something like “morphology,” which refers to the shape of words but can also be used in metals and geography – the shapes of other things – “ergative” is specifically used for the grammatical concept and only the grammatical concept, so you really look like you know what you’re talking about if you can use this word.

Lauren: Let’s stop making up fake English ergatives and start looking at ergativity in some languages that actually have it as part of the grammar. I think we’ll just start with one of the poster children languages for ergativity, which is Basque.

Gretchen: Basque is a language that’s spoken in Europe but is not ancestrally related to any of the Indo-European languages. It’s not related to Spanish or Catalan or French or any of the languages that are spoken in that region of Spain and France. It’s also not related to Greek, which has this common ancestor with English, this “work” ergative “erg-” connection. It gets a lot of people very excited because it’s a language that’s convenient for people based in Europe to work on but is not related to the other languages in its neighbourhood, although, of course, it’s done a certain amount of borrowing because of contact later.

Lauren: First cool Basque fact – it’s an isolate. Second cool Basque fact – it has ergative when most other European languages don’t show anything like this.

Gretchen: Third cool Basque fact is, like you might expect for a language that is very different from all of the languages in its neighbourhood, it’s been undergoing language revitalisation movements since the 1970s and 1980s. We’re gonna talk a lot more about that in a very soon upcoming episode, so stay tuned for way more about Basque. But as the poster child for ergativity, let’s talk about what it specifically looks like.

Lauren: For our verb “arrived,” it looks very much like English. If we’re talking about Martin, “Martin etorri da” – “Martin has arrived.” But if we have a verb that has two roles in it – in this example, we have “Martin has seen Diego” – we have, “Martin-ek Diego ikusi du.” Here, we have this “-ek” on “Martin.”

Gretchen: Right. Because you have the “-ek,” which is the ergative marker, on the one solitary, “There’s ‘Martin’ being his index finger all alone,” compared to “Martin” with no marking on the end, and “Diego” with no marking on the end, which are the other form that’s called the “absolutive” – the one that isn’t doing as much of the work – and that’s the one that’s not ergative. Those are the two forms that are linked together – your pinky and your thumb touching each other.

Lauren: We see exactly the same pattern in the language Arrente, which is from Central Australia in the Northern Territory where if a child is sitting, the child is marked as “ampe,” but if a child is chasing a dog, it’s “ampe-le.” Again, there’s a suffix on the role that is doing something to something else. That index finger is marked different from the pinky finger and the thumb.

Gretchen: Again, we see something that’s very common with ergativity – and this makes sense when you think of an efficiency perspective. When you have just one role or one person – “the child,” “the dog,” “Martin” – doing something all by itself, you don’t need to add anything to the end of it to indicate who’s doing what to who. You can just say it, and it’s fine. It’s the case when you have two different entities, you need to mark at least one of them so that you can tell who’s doing what. You pick one to mark. For languages that are ergative, you pick the one that’s doing the action, and you mark that one. The other one is unmarked. Then implicitly for languages that are the other category, that aren’t ergative, you pick the one that’s being acted upon to add the marking to, although in English that’s less clear because we’re using word order and we’re using these relics of markings on the pronouns, so that’s not as clear in this case. But in the poster child ergative languages, it’s very clear that you have this one entity that’s got a suffix on it or, potentially, a prefix or something like that, and then the other one just doesn’t have any marking on it at all.

Lauren: You mentioned earlier that ergativity is not as common as the English style of marking. I thought this was a really good reason to visit our new friend Grambank and see in a big database of languages just how common each of these patterns were.

Gretchen: Before we visit Grambank, let’s just test our cross-linguistic intuitions. Do you think of ergativity as pretty common, not that common – what’s your sense of it just based on the languages you’re familiar with?

Lauren: I think of it as pretty common, but I know I have a bit of an area bias because I work in Nepal where there’re a lot of languages that have ergative marking, then being in Australia, a lot of my colleagues work on Australian languages and languages of Papua New Guinea, and it’s relatively common in those language groups as well. So, I think it’s common, but I think that’s my bias showing.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because my gut feeling about ergativity is it’s not super common. I know it’s in the Mayan languages. We just talked with Pedro Mateo Pedro. The Mayan languages that he works on all have ergativity. And in Basque – which I talked with someone else who we’re gonna have an interview about shortly.

Lauren: Based on Lingthusiasm episodes this year, incredibly strong preference for ergativity.

Gretchen: That might be the reason we decided we needed an ergativity episode. I’m just gonna say. But other than that, I don’t feel like I have a lot of languages I could name off the top of my head that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that one’s super ergative.”

Lauren: Well, let’s have a look at the numbers. There are around 1900 languages in this part of the Grambank database. 150 of those they couldn’t tell from the resources they had. Of the ones that are left, ergative is found in 390, and it’s not found in around 13-, 1400.

Gretchen: So, that’s about 400 with ergativity and 1400 without ergativity. That’s, I would say, quite a lot – not super common, but quite a lot, which is about what we thought between us.

Lauren: The great thing about Grambank is that there is a little interactive map you can zoom in on. When you zoom in, you can see that three real hotbeds of ergativity are the Nepal part of Southeast Asia, Australia, and then various little clusters in Papua New Guinea. I was pretty spot on about my areal bias.

Gretchen: There’s some in Central America, but not a ton, so there’s your Mayan languages.

Lauren: You can certainly see where Basque is in a map of Europe because it is an ergative language in a sea of not ergative languages.

Gretchen: There it is – right on the border of France and Spain. Ergativity – as if we weren’t having enough fun –

Lauren: More fun. More let’s have more fun.

Gretchen: Ergativity is also really neat because we’ve done basic ergativity, but it also shows up in different ways across different languages.

Lauren: It shows up in so many cool and different ways. It’s really one of those things like, if you’ve met one ergative language, you’ve met one ergative language.

Gretchen: The thing with ergativity is, again, it’s that clustering of the pinky finger and the thumb roles in the sentence, but some languages have that clustering in some contexts, and the more cross-linguistically common clustering of the index finger and thumb together in other contexts.

Lauren: These are languages that flip between those two different hand gestures in different contexts.

Gretchen: One of the reasons why the exciting version of the phenomenon that gets talked about is ergativity rather than nominativity, which is the English-y pattern, is that there’re lots of languages like English where you basically just have only these two entities patterning together. But languages that are ergative are often partially ergative, or what they call “split ergative,” so, again, that’s the exciting one. They often have a little bit of the other system in there as well.

Lauren: They can split in different ways, which is why it’s fun to look at ergativity in each individual language because they’re often doing slightly different things.

Gretchen: Do you have some examples of split ergative systems for us?

Lauren: I have so many examples of split ergative systems. I’m very excited to share with you. One that is actually common enough that the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has different maps is that some languages will do ergativity in pronouns but not in common nouns – or the other way around. WALS actually has different maps for whether a language is ergative in nouns or ergative in pronouns.

Gretchen: I guess that sort of makes sense to me because English has – you know, pronouns change their shape depending on whether they’re the subject or the object or something, but our nouns really do not change their shape. You could imagine that but for ergatives.

Lauren: Yeah. Pronouns have their own history and way of being made, and they tend to keep features for a long time, whereas you can add new suffixes to things all the time and change it up. Common nouns and pronouns can go off on their own journeys, with one being ergative and the other one being not. That’s one way that the split can happen.

Gretchen: There’s also splits that are based on meaning, which I really find fascinating.

Lauren: I have one here in a language called “Dani” from Papua New Guinea, which is where you are more likely to get something marked as ergative if it’s an action that is uncommon.

Gretchen: So, if it’s describing something that’s unexpected, then it’s ergative. What would be an example of that?

Lauren: The example that I have from the class that I teach on syntax is that it would be uncommon if you had a sentence like, “The python ate the man,” but would be more common if you had a sentence like, “The man ate the python.” You wouldn’t mark that second one as ergative.

Gretchen: Okay. In this culture, it is common for humans to eat pythons but, mercifully, uncommon for pythons to eat humans.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I feel like I’ve learned some interesting things about Dani culture as well.

Lauren: I really like this one because what counts as uncommon surely varies quite a lot from culture to culture to linguistic context.

Gretchen: I feel like I’m remembering this saying about headlines where if a dog bites a man, that’s not a newspaper headline, but if a man bites a dog, that is a newspaper headline.

Lauren: And you should mark it ergative.

Gretchen: That’s interesting because, in this case, it’s the human biting the animal that’s less common. It’s not just a human/non-human animacy thing, it’s really a “In this culture, humans don’t bite dogs, but they do eat pythons.”

Lauren: Again, it’s the interesting case that gets this ergative marking added to it.

Gretchen: Because the ergative is like the “work-ative,” so it’s when you wanna call attention to something that’s doing a particular job.

Lauren: Another time you see a split across languages is depending on the tense of the verb. You’re more likely to get something that’s split in a way where the ergative is in the past and you have a non-ergative in present or future or however else the language segments up time. Nepali is a language that has ergative in the past.

Gretchen: What does that look like?

Lauren: Because it’s Nepali, I use it as a chance to use “momo” in my examples, which are a delicious dumpling.

Gretchen: Very delicious.

Lauren: If I say “Tomorrow, my sister will eat momos” –

Gretchen: Okay, that’s future.

Lauren: – I would say, “Bhōli didi mōmō khāncha.” “Didi” is “sister” – nothing marked there. But if I were to say, “Yesterday, my sister ate momos,” I would say, “Hijo didi-le momo khāyo.”

Gretchen: Ah, so instead of “didi,” which is just “sister” without a marking, you have “didi-le,” which is “sister” plus ergative. In both cases, “momo” is not marked. I assume maybe it’s that they’re in a certain word order that’s telling you that your sister ate momos, and also that momos are this delicious dumpling that are not animate and can’t go around eating your sister – one hopes.

Lauren: Yes, I guess if my sister was tragically eaten yesterday by a momo, I would still mark it as ergative, but only because it’s in the past and nothing to do with how unusual that situation is.

Gretchen: Okay. You would need to mark “momo” with an ergative because that sure is doing something but not actually because of the surprise factor.

Lauren: No. Because in the past with Nepali – and Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language, so it is part of this larger Indo-European family but on a completely different end of the geographic spectrum to English because it’s in Nepal.

Gretchen: Do we know why Nepali has an ergative even though most of the other Indo-European languages don’t?

Lauren: I don’t know what the exact mechanism is, but there are a whole bunch of features of Nepali that are very similar to languages from other families in the area, including the Tibeto-Burman languages that I work with. It’s possibly some kind of contact influence happening there.

Gretchen: That makes sense. So, we have ergative for nouns and pronouns. We have ergative for unusual events. We have ergative for past. Any more kinds of split ergative systems?

Lauren: Everything we’ve talked about so far is very much “If it’s this form, do this; if it’s this form, do that.” If it’s a pronoun, do this; or if it’s a past tense, do this. There’re ergative systems where it’s not a hard and fast rule of the grammar. It all depends on the context. These are called “optional systems.”

Gretchen: Ooo, this is so exciting.

Lauren: The languages that I work with have these optional systems. You can’t make a grammatical rule that’s like, “In the past, you must use ergative,” or “You must use ergative with pronouns.” Instead, what happens is if you look across a corpus, sometimes you’ll get ergative, sometimes you won’t, and it really depends on a range of different factors.

Gretchen: Do they have to do with trying to emphasise who’s doing the work?

Lauren: Yeah. They touch on some of the things we’ve talked about so far. You are more likely to get an ergative in the past because something has very clearly been done – the work, the active role, has been done. You’re much more likely to get it with something that was intentional or that is unusual. You also get things like you’re more likely to have ergative if it’s not a habitual action – if it’s a slightly unusual or uncommon action that someone’s performing – of if they’re more animate. You’re more likely to get ergative with a human than an animal and more likely with an animal than something like a tree.

Gretchen: Makes sense.

Lauren: But this is not 100% of the time. You need to collect a really large corpus of people talking about all kinds of different contexts to see where you’re more likely to get an ergative or not.

Gretchen: This also sounds like it has potential to be somewhat cultural because what people think of as a habitual action or what people usually do versus less commonly do seems like it would have some relationships with culture.

Lauren: This is also why it’s really important to not just give people a bunch of sentences to read and translate because if I give people a list of sentences to read and translate, they’ll just give the ergative in all the situations where you have someone acting on something else – so where you would expect there to be that index finger role acting on something else. But then you hear a story, and you’re like, “Where did that ergative go?” It’s because it’s being used optionally and strategically, which makes it very cool and fun to try and figure out the patterns.

Gretchen: When I nerd sniped you nine years ago into writing a blog post and updating the Wikipedia article about the ergative, I was really touching into something that was very near and dear to your heart.

Lauren: Indeed. Since then, I’ve also written the entire Yolmo language page in much more detail that also touches on a little bit of this ergative structuring.

Gretchen: Excellent. While we’re talking about ways that you could organise how you know who does what to who, you can group the person who’s by themself in a sentence with only one role with the one side of the verb with two or with the other side of the verb with two, but in principle, you don’t actually need to make it pattern with anything. You could have a system that has all three different roles marked in three different ways. Does that ever happen?

Lauren: It does, indeed. It’s known as a “tripartite” system because there are three parts, each doing their own thing.

Gretchen: Do you have an example of a language that does that?

Lauren: Conveniently, I have one from Wangkumara, which is a language of Queensland in Australia. They have three different pronouns depending on what role is in the sentence.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, very neat.

Lauren: For something like “I arrived,” our thumb form would be “nganyi.” For the “I” in “I visited you,” it would be “ngkatu.” In English, they’re just both “I,” but they’re both different. But then, if it was you visiting me, instead of “me,” it’s “nganha.” It’s three different pronouns for the three different roles.

Gretchen: “Nganyi,” “ngkatu,” “nganha” – three different forms. None of the fingers are touching each other. I think we could do this in pseudo-English if we wanted to. We would just have to invent an extra pronoun form.

Lauren: That makes sense.

Gretchen: We could have, like, “I visit them,” “They visit me,” but then “Mo arrives,” and “Tho arrives.”

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: Those, you’d have like “I,” “me,” and “mo,” “they, “them,” and “tho,” or something like this. That would be your extra form all by itself doing its own thing in the sentence where it’s the only one.

Lauren: I love that if you hold up your thumb, index, and pinky and make sure none of them touch each other, you can make the “I love you” gesture that’s based on the ASL form of the verb “I love you.” It’s like, “I love you, tripartite systems.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] That is really great. I love the tripartite system so much I’m making the “I love you” handshape. While we’re on linguistic phenomena that are a little bit complicated but have really cool names –

Lauren: Okay, are we into the deepest ergative deep cut that we can make?

Gretchen: The deepest ergative deep cut has one of my favourite names of a grammatical phenomenon ever, and we have to talk about it because it just sounds so cool. In English, you can have a sentence like, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is the active sentence, and you can also have a version of that where you put more emphasis on the visitee by having “Lauren is visited by Gretchen.” That’s the passive version of the sentence.

Lauren: We’re moving fingers around on hands here.

Gretchen: We’re moving fingers around on hands here. You can promote that visitee person to a more prominent position for reasons of emphasis.

Lauren: Thankfully, the Lingthusiasm budget does not extend to hand surgery, so you’re just gonna have to imagine the fingers moving around.

Gretchen: This is gonna get a kinda gross, Halloween-y metaphor here. But in ergative languages, because the ways that the subject and object relate are different, instead of having a passive, we have an antipassive. I think there should be more specialised terminology that begins with “anti-” because I feel like it’s like having “antimatter” but for linguistics.

Lauren: See, I always think of antipasto share plates when I hear “antipassive.” They’re delicious, so I have positive feelings towards the antipassive.

Gretchen: The delicious platter with olives and artichokes and cured meats on it.

Lauren: I don’t wanna go straight from cured meats to fingers, but I can explain how the antipassive works if we like.

Gretchen: Okay, just give us the brief antipassive rundown while we’re here because I think it’s such a cool piece of terminology.

Lauren: I’ll do a translated example from Dyirbal, which is a language spoken in Queensland in Australia – because this is the first language the antipassive was described for, so it shows up in a lot of examples. If a man was cutting the tree, we have “man” and “tree,” and it’s an ergative sentence, so the index finger “man” is marked “ergative.” It’s distinct and different.

Gretchen: Gotcha.

Lauren: In the same way with the passive you get rid of focusing on one of the fingers in the sentence, we can get rid of the tree and just have “The man was cutting,” but in Dyirbal, you can’t have “the man” still be ergative because now there’s only one thing that’s in the sentence, and so you have to make “the man” – even though he’s still cutting, and we think of “cutting” as having two things – we now make it look like the non-ergative, so that absolutive, so it looks like a thumb and is, therefore, more focused.

Gretchen: In the same way that in a non-ergative language, like English, you can have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” or “I visit them,” you can change that into the passive by going, “Lauren is visited” – there you are all by yourself in the sentence – or “They are visited” – there you are all by yourself in a sentence. In this case, “The man was cutting the tree,” instead of promoting the tree and going, “The tree was being cut,” which you’d maybe do if it was a passive, you have “The man was cutting,” but now, you have to take the ergative off “the man” because otherwise he has previously being marked with ergative.

Lauren: Yes. In a language like Dyirbal, it’s completely normal-sounding in a way that a passive sounds normal in English even though you’ve gotten rid of one of the roles because you’ve changed the marking. It makes complete sense. It sounds very grammatical. And it just makes “the man” even more of a focus, and what is being cut is less of a focus. In the way that a passive gets rid of the original subject, the antipassive makes the original subject, like, subject++. That’s why it’s “anti-passive.”

Gretchen: If you put a passive and an antipassive in the same sentence, would it cause an explosion? We’ve talked about all of these interesting – ergativity can pop up in various little bits of the grammar in different languages. But what if I were to tell you that there’s actually a little teeny tiny bit of English that is actually ergative?

Lauren: It was here all along.

Gretchen: The ergativity was inside the house all along!

Lauren: Please share.

Gretchen: You know how in English we have a double E ending that goes on certain nouns. You can have things like “retiree” or “escapee” or “employee.”

Lauren: We’ve had “devotee” and “arrivee” in this episode so far.

Gretchen: That’s true. This is a thing that goes on nouns, but they’re all nouns that come from a verb. If you have a verb like “employ,” and you say, “Gretchen employs Lauren,” then “Lauren” is the employee.

Lauren: Employee of the Month I would hope.

Gretchen: I don’t actually employ you, but you are the Employee of the Month in my heart.

Lauren: Aww, thanks.

Gretchen: The same thing is if I visit you, you’re the visitee; if I pay you, you’re the payee; if I nominate you; you’re the nominee, and so on.

Lauren: So, there’re two roles in this sentence.

Gretchen: Right. The one that is acted upon is the one that when you make it into a noun with “-ee,” that’s what it means. But there’s another set of verbs that you can also use “-ee” with. If we decide that we want to retire from making Lingthusiasm, which we have no intention to do, but we would then be “retirees.” We’re the only entity in this action, you know, “Gretchen is a retiree,” “Lauren is a retiree,” “I have retired,” “You have retired.” I’m not retiring you.

Lauren: So, there’s only one role. I’ve got my thumb, and that’s marked with this “-ee.”

Gretchen: Yeah. If you were trying to escape, you could be an “escapee.” It’s not like I escape you. It’s just, “You escape.” Now, you’re an “escapee.” Again, here’s this thumb and here’s this pinky that can both get the “-ee” marking on them.

Lauren: Wait a second, that’s my ergative handshape, Gretchen.

Gretchen: That’s my ergative handshape – that “employee” and “retiree” and “escapee” and “visitee,” “arrivee” all get the “-ee” marking on them, and the one that’s left over that’s the exception is things like “employer” and “visitor” and “nominator” – these ones that do the action, that are the ergative one that’re doing the work – all the work of nominating you – that’s the one that has the “-or” ending, which is the ergative one.

Lauren: There we go! There was a tiny bit of ergativity in English all along.

Gretchen: We should note that not all words that end in “-ee” are examples of this particular phenomenon in English. You have “mentor” and “mentee,” but you don’t have, for example, “chimpanzor” and “chimpanzee.”

Lauren: [Laughs]

Gretchen: “Chickador” and “chickadee.”

Lauren: Okay, that is definitely looking for morphology that is not there.

Gretchen: “Frisbor” and “frisbee” – c’mon!

Lauren: The “frisbor” is the person that throws the frisbee.

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then the “frisbee” is the one that receives it.

Lauren: Right, okay, that is definitely some interesting morphological reanalysis there.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I think it works great. But it doesn’t happen for every instance of the “-ee” ending, but it does happen in a bunch of them. So, here’s this example of a tiny, tiny way in which English has a split ergative system.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts, and you can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch like our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include what I learned at linguist summer camp, how we make the Lingthusiasm transcripts, and doing linguist fieldwork. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – especially this month in honour of our seventh anniversary. The Lingthusiasm survey is open until December 15th, 2023, anywhere on Earth, and it’s available at bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #podcasts #transcripts #episode 85 #ergativity #antipassive #syntax #morphology #typology #grammar #Basque #Arrente

[demoniccaterpillar]

One of my goals for the coming year is to share more of what the spirits teach me, so I've decided to start making regular blog posts. I'm working on a couple in-depth posts related to Divinity work, but for now I'm just answering spirit worker asks from the list I posted before, since I want to start a habit of writing.

38. Are you able to astral travel or journey into spirit worlds?

Yes, though I'm far from an expert on astral travel. I used to be convinced my focus wasn't good enough to astral project, but Azazel told me that was ridiculous and ended up basically yeeting me into the astral without warning to prove it was possible to me, lol. After that, he taught me a visualization to take me into one of his astral realms, and at this point I can access the astral reliably. I still don't know most advanced types of astral work or how to navigate the astral realms by myself, though.

57. Have you ever channeled, or let spirits into your body?

Yes on both. I used to find the idea of letting spirits possess me terrifying, but that's another thing Azazel changed my mind about. He showed me that sharing consciousness with a trusted Divine Spirit is actually a wonderful experience, and also a great way to give them something they value in return for all they give me. It's definitely something you should only do with Divine Spirits you deeply trust, since you may not be able to control them once they're connected, but it's not frightening with the right spirit, and being trained to do this has let Azazel take over and handle a couple of situations I couldn't cope with, which is extremely helpful.

I've also turned out to have a talent for channeling, which is good since basing my practice in unrecorded Dionysian traditions means I have to channel a ton of information for myself. The spirits call the main channeling method I use "liminal channeling" and I do it by going into a flow state, which I learned to do for creative projects a long time ago (and something other spirit workers might want to Google, since there's a lot of information available on flow states and I've found them very useful in spirit work). Once I'm in the flow state, one of the Divinities will share consciousness with me, and from there write through me. Being in a flow state instead of a deeper trance lets the Divine Spirits make use of my English skills and get my input as they're writing, which is much better than having to ask for clarification later. Liminal channeling also has a big advantage over a lot of other methods because it's "energy positive", meaning I receive more energy from the Divinities I'm working with than I expend, so I can do it for a long time and get very detailed messages without feeling drained.

I also can channel by using my natural clairaudience to be a "Divine transcriptionist", and just type whatever I'm hearing. This is an easy way to get short messages, but doesn't tend to work for long ones, because most Divinities mix non-words in with their clairaudience to some degree (telepathic thoughts or feelings or images), and most of them go way too fast to keep up with typing.

36. What words of advice do you have for people interested in getting into spirit work?

Focus on psychic development first and foremost. There's no way you can become an advanced spirit worker unless you can interact with spirits easily, so there's no point in worrying about any of the advanced subjects until you've learned how to communicate easily and reliably with whatever types of spirits you want to work with.

Treat ancient texts and other sources claiming to be authoritative with at least as much scrutiny and doubt as you would a random Reddit or Tumblr post. Always remember that the vast majority of ancient texts have unknown authors, and for all you know you're reading the ramblings of some ancient dude who was high off his ass on mushrooms and thought his donkey was sharing the words of a god with him. Even the best ancient spiritual texts are full of political and cultural influences modern people have no way of fully understanding, and they've also passed through layers of translators, each of whom also had their own agenda and made their own mistakes. So yeah, just because a text is old doesn't mean it's right, nor is it automatically more valuable than UPG shared on Tumblr yesterday.

Ignore anyone telling you they know the One Right Way to do spirit work, or have the ONLY correct method. There's no method that works for everyone and there isn't a single right way to interact with spirits either. Anyone who doesn't know there's more than one right way to be a spirit worker probably doesn't know the first thing about spirit work or mysticism in general.

Never trust mortals to be your main guides in spirit work. Of course it's nice to get help from each other, but you need to have spirits be your primary guides to spirit work. Other mortals can point you in the right direction, but in the end this is a path each of us walks with our own spirits in our own way. If you're not comfortable working alone and relying on your own judgement, you need to think hard about whether advanced spirit work is the best spiritual path for you, because past a certain point you will be working completely alone and having experiences only the spirits can understand and share in.

On a related note, make sure you're clear in your own head about why you're choosing to become a spirit worker. These reasons will end up determining your best path and approach, and if you don't know what you want to get out of spirit work, you're at serious risk of making choices that either block you from reaching your goals or put you somewhere you never wanted to be. For example, when I told Azazel what my goals for spirit work were, he told me I needed to choose an initiatory path because I'd never get certain things I wanted otherwise. If I hadn't been clear about my goals, I could've ended up in a practice that never led where I wanted. On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone to choose an intense mystical practice like mine because they think it's the only way to become a spirit worker. You don't have to be an Occultist seeking mystical initiation to work with spirits, or even demons, so it's important to be clear with yourself and also with the spirits guiding you about your ultimate goals.

Finally, it's okay to have no idea what path is right for you in the beginning, and also okay to change your mind later. I certainly didn't start out as a Dionysian Demonolator, and if you'd told me even ten years ago that I would end up here, I'd have called you crazy (because at that point I was scared of the madness aspect of Dionysus and didn't work with Abrahamic Divinities). It's okay to change your mind and let go of beliefs.

#spirit companion asks #spirit worker asks #spirit work #demon work #deity work #demonolatry #astral projection #astral travel #spirit senses #spirit channeling #daemonolatry #polytheism #spirit work asks

[rainbow-fairylandsystem]

My therapist and I are starting to move in the direction of doing actual trauma work, and I've gotten a lot more interested in the science behind being a system.

We've been talking a lot about left-brain vs. right-brain parts (aka ANPs vs. EPs). Left-brained parts (such as myself, Sicily, and Jez) have access to narrative memory, verbal language, rationalization, and problem solving. Right-brained parts (such as Ghost, Sophie, and Styx) have access to emotional and sensory memory, nonverbal language, survival instincts, and perception of emotions. My therapist says that my corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the left and right brain, is underdeveloped due to trauma. It's apparently common in people who experience 'fragmentation' (aka systems), and causes the left and right brain to largely act independently of each other.

A good example of this is me (Nimm) vs. Styx. My memories come to me as blocks of text rolling across a blank screen. There are very few visuals to them, and I never have any emotional memory (doesn't matter whether the emotions are positive or negative). I can usually relay my memories in an orderly fashion, but I can't tell you how I felt in that moment or any small details.

Styx, on the other hand, is a being of pure instinct. He can't speak and his handwriting is completely illegible (mostly because he writes with his left hand, which my therapist says is tied to his existence in the right brain). Even if he could communicate, he likely wouldn't be able remember the sequence of events that occurred. He only remembers how he felt in that moment and small flashes of memories without context. He's is permanently trapped in the emotions of the past.

What Sicily (our system manager) and I have discovered is that some of our ANPs and EPs come in pairs. The most obvious example of this is Gilly and Ghost. Gilly is an ANP that remembers things narratively, and can relay things in the order that they happened. However, he has no emotional or visual component to these memories; its more like he's just reading a story. Ghost (an EP) has access to the same memories as Gilly, but he can only see and feel them happening in small flashes; there is no narrative context or timeline he can place them on. Together, the two of them paint a relatively full picture of those memories. Ghost and Gilly are best friends, and are our system's primary and secondary co-hosts.

My current project is to try and figure out all of these pairs (I've only found three so far), and it'll be a good starting point for me and my therapist. I think Gilly and Ghost want to potentially work towards fusion, and starting the fusion process with pairs seems like the first logical step in system integration (not final fusion though, that's not really my goal). It might also make it easier for me to access past memories, which I feel is a step towards finally being able to manage my triggers. I can't prepare to face triggers in every day life if I can't remember what they are.

Anyway, if you got through the whole post, feel free to share your thoughts or experiences. I'd love to hear what anyone has to say.

#dissociative identity disorder #actually did #actually dissociative #actuallydissociative #actuallydid

[joshuaalbert]

paramount needs to hire you fr i am Invested in this hypothetical changeling child

tyyyyyy he’s so fun to me and like. I feel like the idea kinda remedies some of the issues in the existing storyline (in addition to the whole biological family thing since he’s adopted and any kind of bond he has with picard relies on a desire to connect with him regardless of whether they share dna).

also this got very long bc i used this as an excuse to start reworking a bunch of plot elements so im gonna put it under a read more hold on

like ok we’re told canon!jack feels isolated but a complaint a lot of people had was that that’s never shown. changeling!jack has the easy shorthand of "if you've spent literally your entire conscious life on the run from starfleet because you may or may not have accidentally committed a crime and they're trying to track you down for it, yeah, you'd be pretty isolated (especially if you and your adopted mom then went on to commit more crime in the name of providing medical care)". i recognize that the line about canon!jack going to school in london was just their cheeky little throwaway to explain the accent and they didn't really care about the implications, but it does imply that he could actually be in the same place for a while so they weren't fully constantly on the run. obviously you can still feel isolated in this situation, but if you're trying to establish that element in a limited time, i think the more you can do to justify the idea the better, and i think them never being able to stay anywhere does amplify it

and like. the isolation can still be a plot point even if we don't bring the borg shit in! there's a readymade counterpart that just didn't come into play in picard! the rogue changelings aren't part of the great link, but i don't think that means they couldn't just set up their own version of it. and we can give jack some conflict in terms of like. he knows their plan is bad and will hurt a lot of people so maybe through the power of (unlike odo bc we don't want it to just be the exact same plotline) actually having a loving—if solitary—childhood he could mostly resist the temptation to be part of them and belong, even if there is some temptation, BUT like. he was raised by beverly crusher who believes in helping people even when it's against the rules and who sometimes has a vaguely insane brand of confidence in that regard, as well as having his own interest in healing, so maybe he thinks if he links with them, he can fix them. picard's ideals and restraint then come into play to try to pull him back from this link that threatens to sublimate him and use some knowledge he has to implement the changelings' plan.

crucially i dont want it to be like a "picard's ideology is right beverly's is wrong it's stupid to try to help people" moment bc that shit sucks but also being blindly confident even for a good cause isn't always the best either so maybe it's like. a partial victory. maybe jack creates a schism in the new link and can't save vadic without sacrificing himself (and even then he might not be successful) but does save some others and is able to impart the potential for human/federation kindness onto them. the values of both produce an outcome where he can do some good but is also able to save himself. idk i dont have the details down but some kind of in between.

in terms of personality you could go in a totally different direction from the wannabe han solo deal, or if you really wanted to keep it, i think it could be more transparently an act—kind of like both his appearance and his personality are mimicked, but there are cracks where something else comes through (genuine enthusiasm for his work! love for his mother and complicated feelings towards the brother he's never met! insecurity!). we could give him a fun little identity crisis after his exposure to other changelings where he feels like he's less of a real person and maybe vadic specifically is like "you're stuck in this human body you imitated to try to be accepted, your personality is all an act, if you join us you could actually be yourself without having to hide" etc to try to get him in on the new link. and then the "pulling him back" moment relies on like. actual observations picard has made about those aspects of his personality when the facade slips and actual bonding moments they've had. he's very much a real person with a real personality despite how he feels, and he is known by someone who made an effort to get to know him.

also just some various thoughts:

another complaint people had was that it was kinda weird that beverly cut off absolutely everyone, but I think it makes more sense if she’s harboring a fugitive. maybe she does even try to keep in touch with her former crewmates at first because she doesn’t think they’d turn on her but it gets harder and harder to communicate with them without it being noticed by starfleet, and maybe they almost get caught once when that happens, so she has to cut everyone off.

I also think it would be fun if he learned about the previous crew from old videos of them and just like. borrowed their personalities a little when he talks to them but that's less of a thematic thing and more just that i think it would be entertaining.

#does this solve the Jack Is Too Important issue? no but it at least makes him more interesting #canon jack is both too important and kind of fucking boring so at least we can fix one of those problems #again as with all posts for this au same disclaimer of working off the same general setup etc instead of starting fresh but #idk! im glad anyone else is invested in this it's fun to me so ty!! #ask #anon #i should just have a tag for this at this point hmm #changeling!jack

[blackgirlcinephiles]

Incoming: Long Post

*Steps on soap box*

*Clears throat*

BEHOLD!

A collection of Black YA romance novels I need TV/Film adaptations for! Right! NEOOOOW!

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of reading a lot Black YA romance. And what makes me so excited about these books is that they didn’t just tell a good story, but also imparted strong messages about what it means to share a healthy love between family, between friends, and between lovers of course.

Today I want to talk about these books (sans too many spoilers, seriously go read them for yourself!) and the love lessons we can learn from them.

Lesson 1: A healthy love prioritizes trust and respects boundaries.

Joya Goffney has quickly become one of my favorite Black YA authors for several reasons. If there’s one thing she can do, it’s tell an entertaining, well-rounded story.

In Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry, she explores themes of racial identity, class tensions within the Black community, and the feelings of shame, guilt, and pressure that come with trying to understand yourself as a Black teen in this world. In Confessions of an Alleged Good Girl, she explores themes of sexual agency and sex positivity, specifically within the context of southern Black Christianity, and how traditional framings of sex and virginity can leave girls in a vulnerable position, without the knowledge needed to assert themselves within romantic/sexual relationships.

Despite being centered around different topics, I found that both of these novels emphasized the importance of being able to trust in your partner. In Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry, when a trust was broken between our leading couple, working to rebuild it through shared vulnerability was an essential apart of the reconciliation process. In romantic relationships, vulnerability is inevitable, but respect for your partner’s timing should come first.

In Confessions of An Alleged Good Girl, the most freeing and affirming romantic relationship was the one where physical limitations and bodily autonomy were acknowledged and respected, no debate. Being in a romantic relationship does not entail entitlement to your partner’s body and the story really drove that home.

These messages are important for people of any age to hear, but especially for young teens having their first experiences of romance. There can be so many instances where you simply go along with things, because you don’t know any better and you assume that its the way things are. Being able to trust your partner with innermost feelings/secrets and your body is a crucial part of healthy relationships.

Lesson 2: Romance is about effort.

Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s kind of insane the amount of similarities these two novels have while still being wholly unique. Both books include a radio show about love advice, a protagonist wounded by a past friendship betrayal, and wonderful supporting characters who make the story more coloful.

But probably the most satisfying way these novels resemble each other is how the romance is built between the protagonists. Despite rocky beginnings for both couples, connections are built through mutual effort to understand each other’s passions/interests and support one another in their endeavors. These novels probably have the cutest, most swoon-worthy first date moments and it’s entirely because we can see how each protagonist took the time to come up with a creative way to get to know their love interest while also connecting with their passions.

More and more, on social media in particular, it seems that people equate effort or “applying pressure” with doing the fanciest, most expensive activity right off the bat. But like with giving gifts, the best present isn’t always the most expensive one. Rather it’s the one that’s the most thoughtful. That shows you’re paying attention and that you remembered the small, silly, weird details that would otherwise be forgotten.

Lesson 3: Love is a choice worth making.

The last book in this collection is Zyla & Kai by Kristina Forest, who is also quickly becoming another favorite author of mine. What I love about this book is the way the author went about building the narrative leading up to the big reveal. The message was so clear: Things between Zyla & Kai have always been quite simple. It’s everyone and everything else that makes it complicated.

Throughout the story there are so many external forces creating obstacles for Zyla and Kai. Their families, their peers, their pasts, and their futures are all pulling them in opposite directions. Yet, despite these challenges, Zyla and Kai always choose each other and make an active decision to make it work. To try again one more time. Their love story illustrated the idea, that while love can be simple, it’s also a choice that you make everyday.

I hope this post sparks some interest in these books if you haven’t heard of them before. And if you have, what did you think of them? Do you have a favorite?

While some of these books would work well as movies, there are others that I would want as a limited series. All of the books novels, so the story begins and ends and probably shouldn’t be drawn out for multiple seasons, but there a few where I would want to spend a bit more time with the characters than a film would afford. What say you?

#YA novels #YA romance #black girl protagonists #black teen couples #Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry #Confessions of An Alleged Good Girl #Joya Goffney #Love Radio #Ebony LaDelle #Honey & Spice #Bolu Babalola #Zyla & Kai #Kristina Forest #black girls in love #black teens in love

[mannatea]

The World Could Be Beautiful, a Tales of Symphonia ‘fic (Chapter 7)

Word Count: 38,113 Summary: After a chance encounter in Izoold, Raine and Regal both get a lot more than they bargained for. (A one-night stand 'fic with consequences.) Chapter Summary: Married life carries on, and Regal and Raine attend the new year party together. Pairing/Characters: Regal/Raine, Genis, George, and assorted OCs as the story requires. Lloyd, Colette, and Zelos all show up later. Warnings: Blanket warnings for the entire fic: pregnancy (and all that comes with it), discussion/mention of abortion, power imbalance, fantasy racism. Rating: Explicit. (This chapter has sex in it. It's not very detailed.) Genre: Romance/angst/friendship vibes.

The title is the link to Ao3 for Chapter 7!

Notes (to be read after the chapter) under a cut:

The intro scene here is just a little glimpse into the kind of moments Regal feels will matter/help their relationship long-term. While I do think he'd be a doting father, I also imagine that he is the kind of person to be very focused on his marriage/partner if there is any affection there, so this is his way of making sure they take time for one another, too.

It is a marriage of convenience, but it doesn't have to be without care.

--

MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC.

A "music rest" is more commonly referred to as a music stand. You know, this:

I feel like Regal and Raine are both the kind of people to know/understand that knowledge is something that cannot be taken from you, à la the 2002 Count of Monte Cristo film adaptation:

Abbe Faria: "Freedom can be taken away, as you well know. I offer you my knowledge."

I'm vaguely obsessed with the idea that music is a language Raine can't read, but can come to understand to some degree through Regal.

The minuet is something like this.

The ballad he plays is something akin to Ballade Pour Adeline (written by Richard Clayderman for his daughter when she was born); the parent/child connection here was very intentional lol.

Music is the only connection Regal has left to his mother; she taught him to play and he loved her very much. If she had lived he imagines they would still be close. (Someday I will write a story in which she is alive as a treat for me.)

--

Pregnancy increases blood flow which can make sex/desire/pleasure uhhh very interesting shall we say. I usually imagine Raine is the kind of person who tends to get easily overwhelmed by physical sensations anyway, but with all this extra "help" it's honestly just kind of funny to think of how quickly this might happen to her. Works well for both of them, though. 🤣

Don't get used to it, Regal. LOL

--

I honestly can't imagine being Genis right now?? He has to be worried to near death over there in Palmacosta, and he can't even ask the real questions because he doesn't want to accidentally expose anything they're trying to keep quiet.

There's also something kind of sad about Raine not being able to share these little pregnancy milestones with the person who has been in her life the longest. She gets the little pregnancy bump and she can't even show it off to her brother, and has nobody to talk to about it except Regal.

Which...Regal is fine, but she needs connections and friends outside and separate from him, too. :(

--

PARTY! PARTY! PARTY!

We get some OCs in this chapter, several of whom will return later. I hope you like Sara and Sofia, because they'll be back. ;)

I could have split the chapter before George says anything rude, but it felt mean to consider it, so I made this a longer chapter to get through the party/afterward scenes.

The real struggle for Regal here isn't even really what George says, though it feels cruel to him. It's more about the fact that George was in a position to do a lot of harm to Regal, to Raine, to the baby, and to the company—and Regal just blindly trusted that George would do right by all of them the whole time.

After what happened to Alicia... Ugh. It's hard not to imagine that if an easy opportunity to hurt Raine presented itself (which is exactly what happened with Alicia) that George might have taken it.

Really, Regal should be grateful for George's quick and easy resignation. It wasn't pretty, but at least he didn't play the long game to hurt anybody.

--

I don't get the chance to really dive into George's relationship to Thaddeus Bryant here, but I really like the idea that George's loyalty was strictly to Thaddeus and to the family line, and to the ideals that Thaddeus held.

I'm more or less going with George as he's presented in the drama cd, here. He acted as the "bad cop" to make Thaddeus look nicer, he did Thad's bidding whenever asked, and he held a lot of the same ideals.

George is also the fourth or worse son of a minor noble in my mind, so working for/with Thaddeus more or less gave his life a purpose he would not otherwise have had—hence his devotion. (I also imagine he loved him.)

--

The Lezareno Company is a company, and the drama cd tracks for Regal imply typical company behavior, so...there is a board and that board elects the officers in the company. Sara is Regal and George's secretary, but Alvin is the company secretary, and Ernest the company treasurer.

Regal is the owner + president of the company.

Sara wouldn't normally be considered for an officer position but if she's telling the truth about doing a lot of George's work, she's capable of handling it. Also, she knows more about the company and how it works than most people there do, and that's valuable to him.

Of course, the final decision is up to the board, not Regal.

Why didn't Sara say anything to Regal about George taking advantage of her work ethic? Well, if all Regal did was talk to him about it, George would know Sara had complained and then she's on his shitlist. No thanks.

--

Raine is flippant about the things George said to avoid upsetting Regal further (also, she's heard it all by this point in her life).

I don't think she's very good at comforting people, but she is trying to make an effort here to be steady for Regal's sake. Her fear of him "snapping" isn't fear of his temper/anger, but rather of how it could affect his standing at work/with his employees.

Anyway, it's not that Raine doesn't feel despair and anger about the things that have happened to her, and continue to happen in the world, but those emotions won't help her or anyone else.

This part of the story was my chance to show that the events of the game changed Raine fundamentally as a person and gave her the courage to try to make a difference in the world, and part of that courage comes from knowing she's not in it alone.

(ARE YOU UNDERSTANDING THE TITLE NOW, MR. KRABBS?!)

Too bad she sucks at taking compliments. LOL.

I don't have anything to say about the end of this chapter except that when I wrote it, I knew I had to end a chapter with it. 🤍

Thanks for reading! As always feedback of any kind is welcome on my works.

#raine sage #regal bryant #regal x raine #tales of symphonia #mannafics

[aresmarked]

I had fun reading this event! There’s a few things outside of the actual event I noticed if that makes sense. I think the developers are cooking Something. It might be big or not but certainly Something because while Mizuki did mention Kanade once in their area conversation with Emu, there was a noticeable lack of Mafuyu, even in the after live. With every passing event, I wonder how and when we’ll see her again. Right now, I’m waiting to see Ichika’s birthday card as mentioned before. Aside from that, I love when Airi’s ad libbing is acknowledged. It helps MMJ, and I feel like it could come into play in emergencies if needed (if Mafuyu’s mom were to cause a scene in school). (1/)

This next thought is more speculation about what might come before anniversary? I noticed this set has no virtual singer which is very 👀 or maybe I’m just overthinking it haha. But what if there’s going to be another virtual singers only event coming? It depends on what’s going to happen in the rest of the arc enders, but I found it very interesting that the MMJ virtual singers mentioned starting a Cafe! It made me of a shared Sekai situation, but that could just be an offhand comment so. I can’t forget to mention how Mizuki and Saki got along easily! (Mizuki has a moment of thinking that they were able to get along with Saki easily. Ah, do you evaluate all your new friends like this?) I liked seeing them work together, especially when their attention to detail was acknowledged. As creators, it was nice to see them being similar that way. I think it’d be neat if they went to see an idol concert together! (2/)

Well lack of mention of non-focused characters is pretty standard; the other thing is pretty much as soon as they give Mafuyu some spotlight they'll have to address her current circumstances, so they're probably aiming to one, give a narrative lull and time to breathe, two, give the other Niigo kids time to pass through (as we see with Mizuki), and three (which is sort of one but more specifically), make sure Mafuyu's story is paced out according to the larger structure.

I'm glad Airi's skills got the highlight. Because she is, as has been emphasised, an excellent idol in many regards but she got pigeonholed, so it was very satisfying to see her recognised.

(It's so funny to me that probably the people who'd be best at 'acting' for Mafumom would also be the most irritated at it later. Imagine the Airi 'nd Ena 'what the hell' convo. We know from Shizuku's unravelled thread event they're pretty similar when they're irate. would be pretty entertaining to see them both 'your vibes ma'am... disgusting'.

But I digress, I also think a VS event might be on the table. We've got a bit of a ways until anni and the lack of VS this event... rare for one to not be part of an event, for sure. There was also that Yggdrasekai that was shown in the connected through cherry blossoms event... it would be very fitting to have that lead into an interconnected sekai for the kids to meet at perhaps... either way I'm really excited for this year's anni event.

Mizuki and Saki is one of the cutest new friendships, I'm so glad they met. The fact they're both little sisters, how they both chase their passions...! Their area convos and general interactions in the event were v cute. Going to a MMJ show together would be perfect fun for them, and honestly would be a great mixed event/MMJ focus sighting.

#project sekai #prsk!anon #war replies #anonymous

[crowfiire]

do i even want to know how far back you had to scroll to find that post

anyway

8,9,20,38,44

Some OC questions

No you do not want to know how far back I scrolled

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!

Formally, only one and she's an ARPG character, Haleakala! Literally a child and I have still forgotten to respond to the thread quite a few months later (sorry to the other two). ARPG characters are likely the only ones that will get any formal roleplay stuff in their lifetimes tbh, I'm fond of solo writing and any beginning bad blood between me and whoever else it is/was would ruin it. That and I'm highly anxious when it comes to letting anyone read my writing and get embarrassed by it easily. Despite writing being a passion and intending to write a book.

In terms of just bouncing ideas and dialogue off someone else to see how their own character would respond, most of them. Shadra (ESPECIALLY), Flearyian, Amara, Scourge, Cemani, Rapier, Branwen, Athena, etc., all of them have something I've bounced around with someone else. It's just fun to develop characters like that. But nothing formal even in nonliterate RP form.

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?

This is a rather odd question to answer? I know a lot of people who are completely fine selling and trading characters to other people, but in terms of me personally I don't know how to respond. I get really attached to my characters and put a lot of myself into several of them, and usually if I stop using them they just fade out of existence and that's that, but recently I have gotten character designs through trades and as gifts, and I guess that if I lost connection with those I would trade off or resell/gift them so someone else could do something with them. A lot of my characters are way too personal and have too much dedication put into them to trade off though, so it's odd to answer.

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?

I don't really think about this too much besides things of "yeah they'd probably sing along to music if they knew the words/liked it" but I can say with utmost confidence that my character that would at least threaten to commit murder if you caught her singing along to some music (Shadra) is able to sing, her voice claim is Emily Blunt to put it simply.

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer?

Armenian and Gouldian are dancers! They're covering for dragons. Meanwhile Lucifer is a theatre kid and showman at heart with a flair for the dramatic, so that's a human to cover those bases too.

44. Something you like about your OCs in general

I can cover all bases and explore all sorts of professions, hobbies, and interests with them! Gives me an excuse to research into the obscure and concerning things that you normally don't expect to need to research, or y'know things that'd probably get you flagged if someone ever had to search through your browsing history. I have all sorts of professions/positions/interests present in my characters and adapted for their species, world, and lore, assassins, dancers, paleontology, geology, species preservation, and so on. I love the research that I can put into them to flesh them out and getting to deep dive into making them who they are.

#asks #beneathascorpionsky #oc stuff #long post

[saey707]

Hi! I've read all of your work and I want to say that what you're doing is very cool and beautiful! Therefore, can I make a request? Viktor x fem!android!reader. Reader was created in a country where technology is many times more advanced and modern than in Piltover and Zaun (in short, she is from a country where the subject is cyberpunk), but this country is not engaged in trade between countries. Reader was once a human, but she died, and eventually her soul was moved into the body of an android. She went to Piltover to help people. Her abilities are like the Vision from the movie "The Avengers." What would her acquaintance with Viktor, their romantic relationship look like, and how would she react to the fact that Viktor became a cyborg and began a Glorious Evolution? Thank you very much, you are our sunshine!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💖💖💖💖💋💋💋💋

✿ Prompt: You remember what it's like to be human with Viktor ✿

♡ champion focus: viktor ♡ tw: light angst ♡ Female reader

Author’s Note: Wowie, hello! I loved all the details you put into this, it really helps me to know exactly what you're looking for! ৻( •̀ ᗜ •́ ৻) I hope you don't mind how long this is because of it. I felt like I had a lot to work off of. Hope you enjoy <3

How You Meet ♡

You weren't human. Despite the copious amounts of synthetic flesh you've tried to penetrate and slice through, you knew you were nothing more than a soul trapped in a hunk of rare, high-quality Roscian, a metal that only existed in your nation. Essentially, it permitted you to become an entity that could never die nor age. An entity that would survive eons and more.

In a way, it also made you all the more qualified to help more people. You were more willing to put yourself in the heart of danger if it means you can save even one life.

But how could you do that when your nation was safe already? It's hard enough as is to help people when you live in a utopia shut off from the rest of the world!

With no connections or people to go home to anymore, you left.

And the day you found yourself in Piltover was the day you intrigued a scientist who wanted nothing more than to study you and your properties. He was a curious, young scientist named Viktor. In fact, you yourself found him to be... intriguing.

Frankly, Viktor was the only human you ever had any interest in educating. You tend to shut down whenever anyone tries to ask questions about your home and your people.

"You're brilliant..." He spoke slowly, holding your hand in both of his, observing the joints as they moved.

It was the synthetic skin attached to the metal that bugged him. How was he to further understand and observe the machinery if he couldn't see the mechanics underneath!

"So was it your mind that was transposed into this vessel?" Viktor asked, jotting down notes as he turned his head up to observe you, taking your chin into his fingers. "The soul." You responded. And when he scoffed, Viktor didn't even bother to write it down.

"Yes, okay... I'm not quite sure I believe that one."

"Magic, spirit, and science can all interconnect from what my nation has learned." You informed him.

"Hm... I like that." He grinned. And for the first time in a long time, you found yourself returning the sentiment.

Your Relationship ♡

Your relationship is all but ordinary with Viktor. If anything, it was exciting being able to learn so much with your partner! You had grown so used to evolving and adapting your mind to work and learn alone. And Viktor had always been the same way. But, the two of your found yourself collaborating more, inventing new ways the both of you can change the world for the better.

In the beginning, the two of you were far from physically affectionate. And it was only because you both were so inexperienced.

With time, the two of you would come around to sharing your first kiss! From there, it would only snowball into Viktor showering you with loads of affection. What can you expect? He is extremely touched-starved.

It's okay though because you are more than willing to smother him with all of your love when you notice him being touchier than usual. Honestly, you perceived Viktor as a cat who occasionally needs all the attention on him at random intervals throughout the day. He can go from being super needy, clingy, and in need of all the kisses and cuddles in the world to entirely focused and locked in on his work in his little cat corner in such a short span of time!

His favorite things you do for him definitely involve you running your fingers through his hair and holding his face in your hands while you pressed your lips to his face. Anything that involved your touch was something that he always cherished!

Your favorite things that he did for you were unconventional in a sense. It was the little things he did that made you feel something beyond your Roscian shell. How he would spend an evening with you to check up and care for kids, finding quick and innovative ways to heal ailments on the spot. How he would always make you a glass of sweet milk in the kitchen, despite your protests and reminders that you wouldn't be able to taste it because of your outdated receptors.

You especially loved the way he would upgrade your framework and program every time he came up with a new idea, even just to test it on you! It made you feel included... Wanted, if not, needed.

You needed Viktor as much as he needed you.

He made you feel human again. In a way, the love and adoration the two of you shared reached beyond your cold and unfeeling body. It touched your soul, filling you with an unfamiliar warmth, comfort- a shelter.

Anything domestic the two of you did together only made you feel more grateful.

Leaving each other encouraging little notes from the academy to your medical center with Viktor had grown to be your favorite part of your relationship with him! "You can do it!" "Be sure to oil your joints if they squeak!" "Meet me outside the observatory at 7 tonight." "You are as gorgeous as the first day I met you." "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

You grew to love every little sentiment, the notes you passed to one another piling up and spilling over at the edge of your desk.

With every new note you received, you only realized more and more how lucky you were to find someone like Viktor. After years of being coupled up in your own bubble and mind, you found your human half once again. Someone who wanted to help people just as much as you. And he may not have wanted to help people in the conventional, moral sort of way, but he still had the same goals you did.

Viktor's Evolution ♡

But all of these amazing things would only draw to their temporary and inevitable end.

Viktor strived for greatness. He obsessed over it in ways that you never really understood.

And you noticed the way he looked at you in awe. Not because he loved you sometimes, but because he wanted to be like you.

He knew the skies themselves weren't even the limit for you. And it made you great. It made you unstoppable, especially when you were able to constantly evolve and change and adapt in ways humans themselves couldn't.

In a way, you knew he found a fascination with your ability to do such from the beginning.

He didn't wish to remain stagnant. He always strived for change, improvement, and... evolution.

So when Viktor decided that one dreary day to push this idea- This... Glorious Evolution... What else could you have done other than support him?

It didn't stop you from voicing your woes though.

"What if I forget what it's like to be human again?" you whispered, eyes closed as he pulled your face before his, "I won't let that happen."

"I'm scared," you spoke. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

"What if you forget me one day?" you asked as he cut into his metal forearms, rewiring his ligaments once more. "I could never even think to do that. How could I ever forget you?"

With each and every upgrade Viktor committed to himself, he himself transformed into a being that was no longer recognizable. No longer human.

Together, the two of you were starting to no longer feel human.

But at the very least, there would be an eternity open for the two of you to share with one another. Where you can both help people and transform humanity and people's lives for the better. Eternity for you to build a Glorious legacy, side by side and hand in hand.

...And perhaps an eternity for you and Viktor to learn how to be human once more.

#saeybaewrites #request #headcanons #tw #viktor lol #lol #viktor league of legends #lol x reader #viktor x reader #viktor lol x reader #viktor league of legends x reader #league of legends x reader #x reader

[rytterdlswatkins]

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You may be inside a bar, in a house party or even in the office or factory showing a humorous or profound story, the fact is constantly exactly the same... people will be captivated by the informing of a wonderful story.

The phrases "tell" and "told" are important when mentioning to how stories are delivered. I actually did not make use of the word read. Anyone can read a story (some better than others) but not really everyone can tell a new great story.

If more info tell a story effectively you must make it your own. A person can add or subtract details through adding texture and uncertainty with your tone of voice, gestures and cosmetic expressions. In small you become the actor in your own drama plus if you actually understand what you're performing you could have the target audience in the hands of your side in almost no time.

Living is filled along with experiences and when we share these kinds of experiences we are telling stories. Once we pay attention to the activities of others we are sharing their stories. Can you imagine life without testimonies? What would we talk about?

To validate further this individuals hunger for tales what you just have to do is usually observe what occurs when you fulfill an old buddy you haven't observed for a while. The initial thing you need to do will be find out exactly what they've been as much as. This is some sort of request to get advised stories.

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