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dedalvs · 10 months

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can you make a translator for firish i want to use it in my rps i have with friends

I've actually gotten this question a couple times, which is great! But this type of thing just isn't possible with a conlang. It has nothing to do with the quality of the conlang or the level of completion (i.e. the amount of vocabulary, how much of the grammar has been recorded, etc.), and I'll tell you specifically why.

First, you may have seen "translators" for various languages online like LingoJam. LingoJam not only has translators for a bunch of different languages, but allows you to make your own translators. The way these work, though, is you write down a word in one language and write its translation into another—something like:

English > Spanish

I > yo

am > soy

to > a

the > el

store > tienda

going > yendo

That is, you put in one to one correspondences, and that's what it has to work with. Once you're done, if you ask for a translation, it looks up the words and sees what's available and it spits back what it has, in order. If we had this very minimal English to Spanish dictionary (which is 100% accurate, by the way! That is, all of these English words can be translated as all of these Spanish words), you could ask LingoJam to translate the following into Spanish...

I am going to the store.

...and you would get...

Yo soy yendo a el tienda.

Now, if you speak Spanish, you'll see all the places this went wrong. (Short version: You don't always need subjects pronouns in Spanish; you use a different helping verb for "to be x'ing" in Spanish; you rarely actually use this "to be x'ing" construction in Spanish; the present tense is sufficient; though el means "the", it's the wrong gender for tienda—analogous to saying "an store" as opposed to "a store" in English.) And you can actually avoid this in LingoJam by adding phrases on top of single words:

English > Spanish

the store > la tienda

I am going > voy

But you can imagine how much work that would be...

The reason why things like LingoJam are so popular, though, is because imagine if you knew nothing about Spanish. Typing in "I am going to the store" and having it instantly spit out "Yo soy yendo a el tienda" is pretty darn satisfying! If you don't know it's wrong but you're happy with it, what's the problem?

Now, a language like Spanish is huge, so it's easier to get accurate Spanish translations online than it is to get accurate Korean translations online—and it's easier to get accurate Korean translations online than accurate Tigrinya translations online, etc. The reason for that takes us to Google Translate.

I think most people know that with LingoJam, you get what you pay for. Google Translate, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated, and much more accurate. It's not 100%, but it's pretty darn good—for widely spoken languages. This is why.

Way back when, Syfy facilitated a chat between me and the folks at Google Translate because they wanted to see if Google and I could work together to create a translator for a couple of my Defiance languages at TED in 2013. After all, we had a full two weeks. We could bang something like that out in two weeks, right? (lol no)

I learned then how Google Translate works. Google Translate doesn't actually know anything about the specific grammar of a language—maybe a couple language specific tweaks, but it's not as if you can go under the hood and find a full grammar of Spanish that tells you when to use the subjunctive, what all the conjugations are, etc. Instead, what Google Translate has is a database (i.e. Google, along with Google Books, Google Scholar, etc.) with tons of, presumably, fluent documents written in the various target languages offered on Google Translate. They also have faithful translations of those documents—not all, but a percentage. Google Translate uses that information to predict what a given sentence in one language will turn into in another.

In order to do this successfully, Google Translate needs BILLIONS of documents to troll. And it has that. It has BILLIONS of articles written in Spanish and translated to English. That's why the English to Spanish translation is as good as it is.

Now, having said that, anyone who's bilingual in English and Spanish knows that Google Translate isn't perfect. Sometimes it's pretty good, but sometimes it produces a lot of clunky, unnatural, or even incorrect translations. This is because there isn't a human back there calling the shots.

But that's its best translator. Now imagine translating between English and Samoan (one of the other languages it offers). There are EXPONENTIALLY more online articles in Spanish than Samoan. Consequently, the translations you get between English and Samoan on Google Translate are absolutely no guarantee.

And bear in mind, there's a kind of minimum threshold they work with before adding a language to Google Translate. If Samoan is on there and not Fijian, it's because there's that much more Samoan online than Fijian.

Now let's go back to conlangs. What Google Translate wants is BILLIONS of articles written online in the target language. Forget how complete the grammar of a conlang is, whether you can find that description online, or how many thousands of words the conlang has. How many fluent articles are there written in that conlang that are online? How many can one person to? How about a team of people? And how many conlangs have that?

This is why Google Translate has Esperanto and nothing else. Esperanto has been around for 136 years, and in that time there have been a good number of people who have learned to speak it fluently, and have written things (poems, articles, books) that are now online. It is as much as Spanish? Certainly not, but it is enough to hit Google Translate's minimum threshold, and so it's available.

Assuming you have a conlang with a full grammar and a good amount of vocab, if it were popular, it might have enough available material for Google Translate to work with 125 years from now. But at the moment, it's not possible. That says nothing about the language: It's about how Google Translate works.

And bear in mind, Google Translate is, at the moment, our best non-human translator.

If predictive-AI gets good enough that it can learn the grammar of a language, then it may be possible to produce a translator for a new conlang. That, though, is not the goal of Google Translate. Maybe ChatGPT and things like it will get there one day, but even that isn't a dedicated language learning AI. We need an AI that doesn't work with billions of fluent articles, but works with two books: a complete grammar and a dictionary. If an AI can one day work with those two tiny (by comparison) resources and actually produce translations that are as good as or better than Google Translate, then we'll be at a "translation-on-demand" place that will be good enough to feed a new conlang to. At that point, it will simply be a matter of producing a grammar and lexicon of sufficient size for the AI to do its thing.

So, no, right now we can't do a Ts'íts'àsh translator. :( We can go over things like the sound system and basic grammar and you can create your own words to work with it... A lot more work, but hey, we don't have to churn our own butter or milk our own cows anymore! We've got time!

#conlang #language #linguistics #translation #google #google translate #ai #elemental #pixar elemental #firish #tsitsash #ts'its'ash #ts'íts'àsh #syfy #defiance #spanish #translator

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clavissionary-position · 22 days

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What Emma Would Do

Ignore me. This is just me working through my own thoughts and feelings on this. Also I'm an idiot.

***BIG EDIT: I misread and misinterpreted. Azel was nearly drugged and SA'd, so his reaction, however cruel, makes complete sense to me. If he was real I couldn't apologize to him enough.

Moving @/caffedrine's billion-dollar comments up here.

My original, misguided post is below the cut if you're interested.

I have to ask myself what Emma would do. Within reason. And only within the scope of this fictional game, because I'm not about to touch this topic as it exists in the real world. That's for people much smarter than me.

But for the game, my dismissing of Azel as a cruel misogynist without seeing his circumstances and worldview shuts down the conversation the same way it does when Azel dismisses a woman as a slut without seeing her circumstances and worldview.

(Did he actually use the word 'slut' or did google just translate 痴女 like that for me... I should double-check... edit: oh my bad, he calls her a "female molester", which... I can't say he's wrong considering she tried to give him an aphrodisiac...? The word also means "stupid woman", so he could very well have meant it that way too, especially for some reasons I get into later in the post.)

Soooo, he didn't actually call her a slut. I'm an idiot 😌 I'm sorry, Azel. Dunno if any of my points below mean anything, but I'll leave it here anyway:

The running theme in Ikepri is to look beyond the beast and see the human inside. To meet them halfway. To see their heart. And that heart is always so very terribly scarred. All these guys have gone through their own traumas and come out the other end behaving in ways designed to be armor, to protect themselves from any further pain.

I can only speculate about Azel this early in his story arc, but being showered with the same adoration and reverence that people only show a god, day in and day out, probably fucks with your mentality a bit if you are still only human at the end of the day. Having women try to seduce you only because you're The Living God, well, we saw what that kind of shallow treatment did to Silvio. Women see you as an object and so women become objects to you. You want to be loved, but you don't want to be hurt.

That might only be scratching the surface with Azel, though. He's also clearly jaded from listening to the same old interpersonal problems people have when in relationships. Love is actual trash to him, not even worth a single penny. It's trash because the very people who follow him prove it to him on a daily basis, I imagine.

Yet that's still not the full picture. I mean, we obviously won't have the full picture until his main route drops, but there's another key factor to consider with Azel.

He quotes Pascal in Licht's sequel. "Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." The full quote goes onto say:

"All our dignity consists, then, in thought. This is the basis on which we must raise ourselves, and not space and time, which we would not know how to fill. Let us make it our task, then, to think well: here is the principle of morality.”

(Did I read the entire context of the quote? HA! What do you take me for? A scholar or something?)

Free will and independent thought is arguably the most important thing to Azel. He has no respect for the sheep who flock to him for direction (though he'll happily take their money and tributes). Even with the dancer who tried to seduce him in the prologue, when he tells her to lick up the food she dropped after he tripped her, he presents it as a choice. Nevermind that the staggeringly unequal power dynamics at play made it so this was nothing short of coercion in the end; there was no way the dancer was in a position to stand up for herself and say no, even if that's exactly what Azel wanted. But from his perspective, defiance would have been welcome. That's why he phrased it as a choice. That she started licking up the food only solidified in Azel's mind that this woman is an unthinking reed without dignity. If you're going to act like trash, he'll treat you like trash... maybe that was part of his thinking.

On a slightly different note, I think another reason he hates the idea of love so much is because love makes people lose their ability to reason, to think. I believe he outright says as much, iirc.

In the end, I don't know from where exactly Azel's fury and cruelty comes from. It could be all of these things, it might be something else entirely. All I can think is, you can't be 'God' everyday and not be scarred by humans.

In conclusion, I can't excuse Azel's behavior. I don't excuse it. But I think Emma would try to understand the why of it, like she does in any other route. The other running theme in Ikepri is that, as a certain someone would put it, the essence of all people is love. It's their environment that twists them. Somewhere in Azel is the purest kind of love. A kind that would make any god look away in shame. That's what I want to believe in, anyhow.

Also, I need stress that I was SO wrong about whether he actually called the dancer a slut or not. Google fucked me over by translating it that way! Ah, Azel, I'm so sorry!

#ikepri jp spoilers #ikepri azel #ikemen prince

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olderthannetfic · 8 months

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The main problem that I have with Youtubers who attempt to approach media analysis and fandom through theory and academia is that the vast majority aren't academics. Just being in undergrad isn't actually enough, contrary to the thoughts of many. Reading a Wikipedia article and reiterating what one may find in some Google, even Google Scholar, searches. Ideally, these would be topics approached by people involved in academia as a profession, people with doctoral degrees, who can discuss complex topics in a way that is easily understood by the masses. "What is the negotiation between gender and sex in BL?" "How does CMBYN articulate/complicate hierarchal roles within the gay novel?" "Could SnK express an alternative reading of the formerly isolated Japan?" These are complicated questions they attempt to answer in their video essays when they seldom ever understand the theories they employ.

Yes, I understand this can sound elitist, but as a Black afab person who is currently in a doctoral program for literature, there aren't "easy" answers to any of the questions they attempt to pose, and many Youtubers who primarily make long-form video essays lack the life experience and expertise to sufficiently discuss anything. They're usually too set in their thoughts to answer or explore the broader implications of their claims. Defending a dissertation forces you to do this. Forming a committee of experts in various fields and convincing them to aid you in the development of your dissertation forces you to do this. Being in academic and cordial communication with your peers from all over the world in your field forces you to do this. It's not easy to constantly intake new information from various eras and nations (depending on your topic), meld this information into a coherent essay, and continually make edits as you learn new information, thus changing your outlook on things. Also: it's really petty of me, but it's also incredibly annoying to grade poorly researched undergrad essays who, after some prompting in office hours, say they got these ideas on books, movies, and shows from breadtubers like Somerton, SZ, FD Signifier, or hbomberguy. Cue: me going to watch their videos and realizing they have no idea what they're talking about 88% of the time in terms of theory and application of said theory. Even the ones who frame themselves on being educators in real life, like Signifier, lack any nuance, depth, or media literacy to make a compelling argument if you know even the slightest bit of information. On the bright side, I now know why I've encountered several students with ideologies that are basically conservatism with a veneer of progressivism, or "conservatism in a queer hat."

This concludes my long-winded way of saying "Don't turn to Youtubers for media analysis. You're better off just reading articles by people who have to actually know what they're talking about. The majority of Youtubers (especially the breadtubers) don't have the bandwidth to discuss anything more complex than an episode of Blue's Clues."

I mostly agree, but I'd point to a slightly different problem. I'm hesitant to say that the PhD itself is the deciding factor, but I do think a lot of video essayists are insufficiently prepared.

I'm a big fan of Folding Ideas who does have some formal schooling in film, but I don't think it's that education per se that makes him great. He sets himself apart from other video essayists by actually doing his research and having an in-depth approach to his subjects. He doesn't resort to clickbait, and—here's the key—he often takes months or even a year to work on something.

Honestly, I think that's a big part of it: the hoops most youtubers who want to make a living at it have to jump through involve a lot of clickbait and pandering and a fast production schedule. They don't involve reputable peer review except by the court of shriek-y public opinion on twitter.

They'd like to present themselves as documentary filmmaking (which is essentially what Folding Ideas' longer videos are), but they don't actually live up to any of the usual standards of that either.

I think it can be elitist to say that someone needs to have certain letters after their name, yes, but what really strikes me about your average youtube media analysis type and the fanbase is that they want shortcuts.

Exploring the whole history of the gay novel so that you have enough background to talk about CMBYN means reading quite a few novels. Even if you decide to throw out all past scholarly opinion on the topic (which you shouldn't), if you're going to have a meaningful personal theory, you need to have read a lot of novels first. How can you hope to be the person providing the neat overview of the whole genre if you haven't familiarized yourself widely with said genre, and not just through a summary by someone else? That amount of reading doesn't happen overnight.

The trite, surface-level media analysis online is often from people who want to be hailed as great intellectuals but who aren't willing to put in the years it takes to do all the background reading and to develop their skills in argumentation, writing, etc.

Grad school is a convenient and probably faster way to go about all that, but I think you could do it outside of a formal framework... But you would need to actually do it.

I think it's driven by a bunch of people who were The Smart One in grade school and never learned how to work hard on long-term projects instead of pushing through in a sprint. They're used to relying on being the smartest to cut corners and do things before they get bored, only they probably aren't the smartest anymore anyway, and they mistake being smart at one thing for being smart at all things.

There's a real lack of respect for the entire concept of expertise.

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familyabolisher · 1 year

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i try not to like subscribe to cultural ideas of what constitutes intellectual value of a sort that makes a work supposedly merit academic-type engagement (aka you can write about whatever you want forever) but some of the topics i get the urge to write on do make me laugh a bit. like why am i searching sims 2 on google scholar right now

#.txt

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carriesthewind · 10 months

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Hey, I love your writeups for the ChatGPT case! There's one thing that's kind of confusing me though. You (and the judge) seem to be saying that the good faith argument makes sense for the March 1st opposition but not the April 25th affidavit. I'm not a lawyer, but the more I think about it the more I feel like the other way around makes more sense.

Regarding not reading the cases: if I was looking for a book, even because someone said it doesn't exist, and I found a book that had the right title, author, and cover, and wasn't obviously a fake book (like, no words on the pages, or something), I think I'd be convinced. If I'm supposed to think it could be a forgery, I don't know how I could tell by reading it. How hard is it to write a fake opinion that looks real? What tells would you look for? And why would anyone write one? It seems to me like the only thing that reading the cases would prove is whether or not it was generated by a bleeding-edge large language model. (This is setting aside all the warnings they had to ignore that ChatGPT specifically isn't a reliable source. And the fact that they didn't even annex the "entire opinions" they were ordered to. And that they didn't even seem to realize that they were being accused of citing bogus cases. And that they should have read the cases anyway, possible fakery or not. And the way they tried to downplay it afterwards. God, there is so much stupid in this case. "The ChatGPT lawyer" really doesn't do it justice.)

The opposition seems less defensible. Schwartz didn't just find and submit documents, he submitted assertions about the contents of cases without reading said contents. Why would you use a "search engine" to write your arguments for you? That's your job. How can you claim in good faith that precedents you didn't read are in favour of your position? Even if ChatGPT really was incapable of making up cases, if they'd found all the cases on Google Scholar and annexed them, they could still be in deep shit, right? They could be sanctioned if they misrepresented the contents, or at least lose the case if the interpretations are dubious. Not to mention the legal argument about state law in a federal case - that's something I would expect a lawyer to know to check for.

Am I missing something? You've anticipated all the judge's points and it's probably me who's wrong here. Just trying to understand.

Hi! Thank you for the question. I think I understand your confusion, and I am going to try to clear it up - let me know if this makes sense.

The difference comes down to the idea that when he submitted the opposition, he was doing very poor work and was not acting reasonably. However, when he submitted the fake cases, he was knowingly lying to the court.

For example: for my job, I use secondary sources that other people have written to explain the current state of the law. Those secondary sources refer to, cite, and summarize various cases. When I use a secondary source, I don't rely on the source - I use it as a jumping off point to look up the cases myself and do additional legal research. But, based on my experience, I expect the summaries of cases in good secondary sources to be more-or-less accurate.

Now, that doesn't mean it is okay for someone to submit a legal brief based solely off the summaries in a secondary source - as you say, you can't know for sure the summaries or correct (and "more-or less" leaves a lot of wiggle room). And there is a lot of potentially relevant information that is left out of the summaries. And even if they are correct, you don't know if they are still good law - they may be out of date.

But "being a bad lawyer" is not sanctionable misconduct. Especially because with sua sponte sanctions, the question isn't whether Schwartz was reasonable (he wasn't), but if he was acting in subjective bad faith, which in this case means essentially that he was knowingly lying to the court.

If he, as he says, genuinely thought the cases he was citing in the opposition were real cases and the bot was accurately summarizing their contents, he was not knowingly lying to the court. He was doing terrible work, but again, being a terrible lawyer is not sanctionable misconduct.

But - and here is where maybe I think the confusion is coming in? - when he submitted the fake opinions, he was making an assertion to the court about the contents of the cases. He was telling the court, "these judges wrote these specific things in these specific cases." (And in terms how hard is it to write a fake opinion that looks real - those cases did not look real. Anyone with any legal training, even just glancing at them, would realize something seemed wrong.)

It was unreasonable for him to cite the cases without reading them in his opposition, but at that point, he can at least try to argue that he had reason to believe the citations and summaries were accurate. Once he was put on notice, continuing to "assume the cases were real" without checking and reading them was no longer plausibly good faith.

And to return to your analogy - he didn't just "find a book" that had the right title and author and so on. He went back to the same source that had given him the titles, and asked it to provide him the full text of the book.

For an analogy: Imagine you are writing a research paper. It would be like if you were emailing a friend looking for a published scientific article to support your research, and they gave you a citation and a summary of the article, and you relied on that article in your paper. That would be unreasonable, but you could honestly say you thought your friend was being honest in providing you information. But now image a bunch of reviewers came back to you and said, "hey this article might be fake, we can't find it." And so you went back to your friend and said, "hey, can you give me that article?" And then they sent you an email back that said, sure! And they sent you about a thousand words in the body of the email. And those thousand words were complete nonsense, where in the beginning it says this was a study on the evolution of bacteria and in the conclusion it was talking about the behavior of the two sample groups of primates. In that case, if you printed out those thousand words and gave it to the reviewers and said, yep, look, the article is totally real, here is the text of the article, the reviewers could reasonable conclude that you were intentionally lying to them.

That was a lot of text, but I hope it helped!

#ask

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sluttylittlewaste · 4 months

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Since the Hbomberguy video has dragged everyone back into talking about academia, I have a rant:

The take, "Academic papers and academia in general tend toward a writing style that is intentionally inaccessible to maintain standards of ableism and academic elitism" (woke) is not the same statement as, "Because I do not understand this thing about this topic I have never researched at this level before, the work is inaccessible and therefore in Bad Faith™️" (not only broke but fucking wild).

Working as an academic advisor in my senior year, my specialty was helping people with writing. That included reviewing essays and helping with research mostly, as both of my degrees are research and writing intensive. Even with the MANDATORY Introduction to College Writing class freshman were forced into - unless, of course, you either tested well in AP English Language or passed the writing assessment that allowed you to skip the course (which most people didn't) - I often found myself explaining that academic papers are written with the understanding that the reader already possesses some meaningful amount of context. Students would come to me with full confidence just to show a paper reliant on paraphrasing and regurgitating the source text, ended with whatever hand-wavey, unresearched thoughts they had while reading and call it /Analysis/. Thus would begin the long, arduous process of teaching them how to actually research and structure an academic essay from scratch, down to identifying reputable sources and deciding how many is too many quotes.

As such, while it saddens me to see people put off of academic writing (and research as a whole) for the reason of inaccessibility, I get it. Disregarding the prevalence of paywalls blocking credible published works from the public, I'd argue that most papers assigned to studentsr weren't actually written for students. The 25 page article in the well established medical journal is going to be laden with esoterica and intracultural references; it was written for peer review by other professionals in their field with a baseline of pre-requisite knowledge. Similarly, if you're doing independent research and just roll into a random a decades old article you found on Google Scholar, it's likely to be confusing if you have no backgound in the topic. The expectation that anyone can just dive into a research paper written by an expert and immediately grasp the information provided completely misses the fact that learning is an active practice requiring critical thinking and access to reliable resources.

Why does that matter? Because the core facet of research is taking that confusing, inaccessible academic journal or data and /making it make sense/. Taking the time to learn terms you don't recognize, to read ALL OF the provided context, to reword and recontextualize the information to be digestible to an audience without expertise on the topic, that's THE POINT. When an assigment asks for ten sources, it's not for the sake of making you work harder. The entire exercise is to have you compare and contrast things like word choice, historical context, and author bias so you can synthesize your own understanding of the topic. Entire categories of the research and essay writing community exist simply for this goal: to make complex academic literature accessible to general audiences. It's what Internet Historian and Illuminaughti (fuck if I spelled that right) were pretending to do!

There are a lot of valid points to be made in the discussion of academia being inherently inaccessible. Unfortunately the Internet, specifically social media, has a way of boiling actual conversations down to the bare bones of "Is hard and I don't like it, therefore is bad."

(Note: This does not apply to professors/educators assigning a bunch of text without doing any actual teaching. Expecting everyone to be able to read something and just get it isn't a "challenge in critical thinking", it's bad teaching and makes things harder for people who may already find a learning challenging or inaccessible. Do better. )

Is academia filled with conventions that make it widely inaccessible to people from all education levels? Yes.

Do some people write with as many big words or as much autofellating fluff as possible purely for the purpose of sounding smart? YES.

But, as an academic writer and reader myself, and as a person with a bevvy of peers I respect deeply in the field of research, a significant amount of these articles are written in good faith by people who are using the vocabulary they have. The use of "big" words, esoteric references, and hyper-specific language isn't based in the desire for exclusion, but rather clarity for a peer group who are comfortable with the language being used is it's intended context.

Sorry about all this. I just actually enjoy academia when it's about the love of learning rather than being a pissing contest/bitchfest. Ignore me 😭

#academia #critical thinking #research #hbomberguy #academic writing #textual analysis #accessibility #accessibility in academia #rant #essays #education #college writing #what if we focused on ensuring students had the necessary skills to consume complex theory???#what if we as a society prioritized critical thinking and media literacy????#what if instead of bullying people who don't even want to pursue higher education to go get degrees we present academia as a fun CHOICE???#also #professors and educators #you know DAMN WELL that college freshman won't get SHIT from a 50 page reading from a 50 year old academic journal #students need support and resources #most of these papers aren't even awful!#just stop throwing people into the deep end and expecting them to just “figure it out”#that's not teaching babes #that's laziness #and it's why so many people fucking hate school #and for my fellow writers #the difference is knowing your audience #and tailoring your work to their knowledge level

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traegorn · 4 months

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I need to stop doing this to myself.

(A Rant Where Trae Has Written Too Many Books This Month)

So since most of you started following me because of Witchcraft or podcast stuff, I realize a lot of you don't know how much fiction writing I do.

Primarily what I've published are comics. The big one is UnCONventional (which ran from December of 2009 to December of 2019), but I also did a steampunk comic called The Chronicles of Crosarth (which I put on hiatus in like 2018 intending to come back to... but I haven't, and I make no guarantee that I will even though over 650 of the 800 planned pages are done). Crosarth is... fine? The art isn't great in either of these, but UnCONventional carries itself with the humor.

But that's all old stuff. You may be like "Trae, what have you been producing for the last four years," and the answer is "not a lot." I got major creative block with the pandemic. Peregrine Lake, the "Northwoods Gothic" comic I was supposed to launch in 2020 (which has some characters from UnCONventional in it) didn't materialize when I said it would. What storytelling energy I had went into Stormwood & Associates and The Meatgrinder (my two actual play podcasts), but that was it.

And then 2023 happened, and the juices started flowing again.

Peregrine Lake is moving forward -- but with me just doing the writing. My urge to draw has not returned, but my urge to write has. A friend of mine, Ethan Flanagan, is drawing it, and I've written the first year of comics. It likely won't launch any time soon (the artist I'm working with is busy as hell so we want to get a shit-ton of the comic done before we launch it -- we have like the first month and a half of the comic ready?). But yeah -- it's happening. I hoping for Spring, but we'll see.

The other thing though is that I've started writing, like, novels. I've always had like twenty ideas in my head, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I decided to start with the idea I cared the least about (in case I fucked it up): A queer urban fantasy story.

In the last month and a half I've written complete drafts of two different novels in this setting, and am halfway through another one... and have another one outlined.

I, uh, had some ideas.

If you're asking yourself "Hey Trae -- what the fuck? That's a lot" you need to know a few things that aren't obvious. At one point in college, in 72 hours, I produced over 40 pages of text between three research papers. All were for 300 level courses, and I may have disassociated while writing them because I frankly don't remember most of it. But, like, they were decent papers.

One of those papers is in Google Scholar.

Anyway, yeah. I haven't been sleeping great because I've been obsessively writing, but you might ask "Why didn't you just write one and get it ready to publish?" That's a great question. Because I wrote a book, and when I was 3/4 of the way through it I realized something very important: This book would make a great sequel to a book I haven't written. I've been writing book two in a series where I haven't written book one yet.

Well fuck.

So I finished that draft, and I went and wrote book one. Now that book? That book I'm getting ready to publish. I expect to have it out in January. Part of my editing process involves setting what I think is a completed, good, revised draft down for a couple of weeks and then returning to it with fresh eyes. We're in that waiting period right now.

But I still had a bunch of energy.

So the first thing I did was a revising draft on book two (the one I wrote first), but I finished that. And had more energy. And more stories in this setting kept popping up.

So I started a third book. And I'm halfway through the first draft of that book. But then I realized yesterday... shit, this isn't book three.

This is book four.

I need stuff to happen before we get to this story.

So now I've outlined the actual book three, and am working on literally both of these books at once (I'll take a break for Christmas and then go do a final edit on Book One).

And... I'm just like... why am I like this?

I need to stop myself for a few days and get more sleep.

#writing

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cressthebest · 3 days

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nobody could decide which stories they wanted me to share. they want me to share all of them 😭😭

i’ll start with jesus and john and why i think they’re gay for each other, supported by biblical evidence provided by Seton Catholic Homeschooling of America.

• i took this course in my tenth grade year. i was only homeschooled for 9th and 10th grade. i was public schooled before then, and later went to boarding school for my last two years of hs. but that’s another post.

this is a long post. buckle in. i’ll have it all below the cut

• i no longer have the textbook title, and only have pictures from this text book that i took in a delusional haze when reading this in my catholic mother’s household, hoping that she wouldn’t look through my phones photos to find these images.

this is all from a catholic standpoint, other forms of christianity are not accounted for. if you do not want to see GAY CONTENT ABOUT JESUS, move along

this post is about to unlock so much of my old hyperfixation on the catholic church that i had before leaving.

first of all, as backstory for those who don’t know john:

• john is one of jesus’ twelve disciples and wrote the Gospel of John (I, II, and III) which is a hella important book in the new testament (the second half of the bible.)

• the books of john tell the story of jesus’ life from birth to death. now, that’s kinda gay to write about another man that much, hmm.

• john has also earned the affectionate title of: “The Beloved Disciple”

• he is also traditionally credited with writing Revelations (also known as Apocalypse, which tells how the world is gonna end. fun right!!), though scholars are unsure if he wrote it, or a different john wrote it.

okay, now onto the gay stuff:

• most people jokingly ship judas and jesus because of the angst of judas’ betrayal to jesus. however, i disagree.

• though, knowing their ages, shipping jesus and john would be quite problematic these days, it was quite an acceptable age gap back then. jesus was around the ages of 30-33 at the time of his death, and john was a young adult, about 18. (yikes)

• my evidence begins with the way john writes about himself and jesus in the Gospel of John. in his gospel, he never calls himself john. you guys know what he calls himself in his gospel?? “the discipline whom jesus loved”

😐

sir. could you be ANY more obvious??

so far, all of this info is directly from my catholic textbook.

WOW! that page unpacks a lot. let me elaborate on the way john leaned up on jesus’ chest. first of all, that’s a real bible quote. let’s go:

John 13:23-25

• “23 One of his disciples, the one Jesus loved, was at the table to the right of Jesus in a place of honor. 24 So Simon Peter gestured to this disciple to ask Jesus who it was he was referring to. 25 Then the disciple whom Jesus loved leaned back against Jesus’ chest”

the passage then goes on to john (the disciple whom jesus loved) asking jesus who’s gonna betray him.

• to FURTHER add to this gay af moment, there are PAINTINGS of it, completed by MULTIPLE artists. i’m going to provide the image in my textbook, and then images found online that i particularly enjoy.

above: lovely image! i cannot remember the artist for the life of me.

above: Jesus and John at the Last Supper by Valentin de Boulonge

above: Last Supper by Plautilla Nelli (portions of the image were cropped)

above: cannot find artist’s name.

• if you are interested in finding hundreds more of images like this, all you need to type into google is “john leaning on jesus”. you’ll get the images you need. trust me

• those were my largest pieces of evidence, but there are smaller ones i’d like to share. the textbook helped “gay it up”. i think the author of this textbook was a closeted homosexual. cause no way did a straight person write this thinking “hmmm that’s totally platonic and not at all queer, cause that’s how i feel about MY best friend.”

here’s direct textbook images:

• hmmm man who was closest to him you say???

• “intimate relationship with God”

• best friend? 🤔 are we sure about that?

• symbol of his greater love?

• AND he was the first to recognize jesus??

• y’all. they’ve got to be shitting me atp. no way were they not In Love

and finally, from my study questions:

y’all. special favors? exceptional love?

this textbook had me GOBSMACKED. jaw DROPPED. WDYM THAT JESUS AND JOHN WERE DEFINITELY IN LOVE???

conclusion:

• i HIGHLY recommend you looking up more pictures of john laying on jesus.

• i think of john/jesus as canon. there’s too much evidence to support my point. including The Bible. judas/jesus is like what fanfics are for. they’re the pair that everyone wishes happened in canon, but the authors sucked, so it didn’t.

• literally, drop any questions in the reblogs and comments. i’ll be HAPPY to answer.

(and jesus/judas shippers, i hope i changed your mind.)

#jesus x john #jesus x judas #anti catholic #anti christianity #(putting those in so catholics can filter this post out)#last supper #valentin de boulogne #ex christian #ex catholic #anti religion #ex religious

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duckprintspress · 2 months

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Round Table Discussion: Grammar Pet Peeves

Today, March 4th, is National Grammar Day! Last year, we celebrated with six of our favorite grammar quirks. This year, we’re going to the other end of the spectrum: we had a conversation with our editors and blog contributors about grammar things we hate. They may be technically correct, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make us crazy. Eighteen people, many anonymous, contributed to this discussion.

Dangling Modifiers

boneturtle: Dangling modifiers, hands down. Even when I can decipher what the writer meant based on context, it viscerally hurts me every time. When I am editing I have to stand up and take a lap around my apartment when I hit a dangling modifier. Remind myself that I am here to help. Learn more about dangling modifiers.

Commas

anonymous: Commas are not difficult! Commas end phrases. Full stop. That’s all they do. Is a phrase necessary to the grammatical coherence of the sentence? if the answer is yes, no commas because that phrase hasn’t ended. If the answer is no, commas! comma hug that bish if it’s the middle of a sentence. The difference between grammatical and informational is whether or not the sentence makes sense without the phrase.

Examples:

The man who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas claims to have a dolphin in his pool.

You need “who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas” because you need to identify which man you’re talking about. The world is full of many men.

The ancient Buick, which Madeleine purchased via Craigslist, belched black smoke whenever she pressed the accelerator.

We don’t need to know how Madeleine purchased the car for the sentence to make sense. You don’t even meed “Madeleine” for the grammar to make sense. Therefore, hug that phrase!

(a comma on each side of the phrase) or give it a dramatic send off with a comma and an end punctuation. (i could go into conjunctions, too, but those are a little more complex, and if you were taught them properly, i understand not getting the comma use 😂 )

Prepositions at the End of Sentences

Tris Lawrence: There was a dictionary (Merriam-Webster? Oxford? idek) that posted recently on social media about how the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition came from English scholars trying to make English line up with Latin, and that it’s totally okay to do it… and I’m just wanting to point to it to yell THIS because uhhh trying to rework sentences to not end in a preposition often creates clunky awkward things (my opinion, I recognize this).

D. V. Morse: Ending sentences/clauses with a preposition. Well, not doing that is supposed to be the rule, but depending on the sentence, it can be a convoluted mess to try and avoid it. Winston Churchill famously told someone off after they “caught” him breaking that rule, saying, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” (Yes, I had to look that up.)

Pronoun Confusion

anonymous: I hate playing the pronoun game when reading. I hate it in life when someone comes up to me and tells me a story involving 2 people of the same pronouns and stops using names halfway through, and I hate it while reading too. Nothing makes me fall out of scene more if I don’t know who just did/said what. Use names. That’s why we have them.

Nina Waters: epithets. If I know the characters name…why? Also, when people use “you” in third person writing. There are times I’ll allow it as an editor/times when I do think it’s at least acceptable but not gonna lie, I absolutely hate it.

anonymous: My pet peeve … I read hundreds of essays in a given month for work, plus a whole lot of fanfic for fun. A rising issue that I have noticed in both places is incomplete sentences (lacking subjects, typically). I think it’s because people rely on Google’s grammar checker to tell them if something is wrong and…Google doesn’t check for that apparently. I’m increasingly convinced that my high schoolers simply weren’t taught sentence structure, because when I ask them to fix it they almost universally say some variant of “I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Therefore, it might be punching down a little to complain about it. I’m not sure. It does drive me nuts though. Lol

“Would Of”

Neo Scarlett: Not quite sure if that falls under grammar, but I hate hate hate when people use “should of” instead of should’ve. Or “would of.” It just makes my toe nails curl up because it may sound right, but it looks wrong and is wrong.

Semi-Colons

Shea Sullivan: I saw a list punctuated by semicolons recently and that made me froth at the mouth a bit.

anonymous: I think any editor who’s worked with me knows that I have a pet peeve about using colons or semi-colons in dialogue. Or really, any punctuation mark that I don’t think people can actually pronounce. Semicolons can live anywhere that I don’t have to imagine a character actually pronouncing them.

English isn’t Dumb!

theirprofoundbond: As a former linguistics student, it bugs me a lot when people say that English is a dumb or stupid language because it has borrowed from so many languages. What people mean when they say this is, “English can be really difficult (even for native speakers).” But I wish people would say that, instead of “it’s dumb/stupid.” Languages are living things. Like other living things, they adapt and evolve. English is basically a beautiful, delightful platypus. Let it be a platypus.

Dei Walker: I remember seeing somewhere that English has four types of rules (I’m trying to find the citation today) and everyone conflates them. And I guess my pet peeve is that everyone treats them equally when they’re NOT. There are rules but not all of them are the same – there’s a difference between “adjectives precede nouns” (big truck, not *truck big) and “don’t split infinitives” (which is arbitrary).

And, because we couldn’t resist, here are some of our favorite things, because when we asked for pet peeves…some people still shared things they loved instead of things they hated.

Oxford Comma

Terra P. Waters: I really really love the Oxford comma.

boneturtle: me: [in kindergarten, using oxford comma]

teacher: no, we don’t add a comma between the last two objects in a list.

me: that’s illogical and incorrect.

anonymous: I will forever appreciate my second grade teacher’s explanation of Oxford comma use: Some sentences are harder to understand if you don’t use it, but no sentence will ever be harder to understand because you do use it. Preach, Mrs. D

anonymous: I am definitely Team Oxford Comma. I even have a bumper sticker which says so

Other Favorites

Shea Sullivan: I adore the emdash, to every editor’s chagrin.

Shadaras: zeugmas! I think they’re super cool!

Shea Sullivan and Hermit: I use sentence fragments a lot. Fragments my beloved.

English Grammar vs. Grammar in Other Languages

anonymous: so in English my favourite thing is the parallel Latin and Saxon registers because of how that affects grammar, but in Japanese my favourite grammatical thing is the use of an actual sound at the end of the sentence to denote a question, as opposed to how in English we use intonation? Also how in Japanese the sentence structure requires reasoning first and action second in terms of clauses. So rather than go “let’s go to the cinema because it’s raining and I’m cold,” you’d go “because it’s raining and I’m cold, let’s go to the cinema.” (My least favourite thing is the lack of spaces between words in the written form but that’s purely because I find that level of continuous letters intimidating to translate.)

I also love how Japanglish in the foreign communities in Japan starts to develop its own grammatical structure as a way of situating yourself in this space between the two languages. It’s used as a call-sign of belonging to that specific community, because in order to make some of the jokes and consciously break the rules of English or Japanese grammar and/or choose to obey one or the other, you’re basically displaying your control over both/knowledge of them. Like, the foreign community in Japan is often a disparate group of people with multiple different native languages who are relying on their knowledge of at least one non-native language but often two to signify their status in the group as Also An Outsider and I think that’s really interesting.

Nina Waters: Chinese and Japanese both drop subjects, and Chinese doesn’t have like… a/the… Japanese doesn’t have a future tense… Chinese kinda sorta doesn’t have tenses at all… (these are not pet peeves, btw, I love how learning a language with such different ways of approaching these things reshapes my brain). Chinese also doesn’t really have yes or no.

There’s a joke somewhere on Tumblr about that, though I actually think it’s about using “a” versus “the,” like, someone was giving a Russian speaker a hard time after they said “get in car” and they were like “only you English speakers are dumb enough to feel this is essential why would I be talking about getting into any random car of course I mean our car wtf.”

anonymous: on the subject of other languages, epithets are also something that happen differently in other languages. In French repeating a word (names included, and sometimes even pronouns) is considered bad writing. As in, way more than in English. Going by how grating the English translation of the Witcher books was to me when the French one was fine, I’d say it’s the same with Polish, at least. It’s also very interesting how brains adapt to writing styles in other languages.

What are some of your favorite and least favorite grammar quirks, in English or in the language of your choice?

#national grammar day #duck prints press #writing advice #grammar #writeblr #writing pet peeves #grammar pet peeves

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spurgie-cousin · 1 month

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Holy cow, the mainstream Mormon church is just as wild as the polygamist sects when you dive deep enough. NewNameNoah on YouTube has hidden camera videos of EVERY ritual (there’s also a transcription floating around somewhere to help you understand when it gets fuzzy). Jordan and McKay (ex-Mormon couple) have reaction videos where they watch the temple videos and provide additional commentary.

There are very active debates about where the events of the BoM took place, because supposedly ancient Israelites sailed to America and became the Native Americans after many generations. Some “scholars” believe the Mayan pyramids are proof the BoM is true because they’re “clearly” Nephite temples. The three pyramids is Teotihuacan supposedly represent the three kingdoms of heaven. There are a disturbing number of tour companies in Mexico that cater to Mormons, providing guided tours of “The Holy Lands” (Chichen Itza and Tulum in Mexico, Lake Atitlan in Guatemala).

Yesterday I was listening to some historian’s presentation on YouTube. He claims the BoM was set in the Midwest, and some of his “proof” (because clearly genetics and the archaeological record ain’t backing him up) is that the names in the BoM end in “-ah” like a lot of Native American words. One of those words he cited? Scotia. Like…my dude. Do you really think Nova Scotia is what the Mi’kmaq called their land? And not Latin for “New Scotland”? Because a cursory google search will corroborate…it’s the latter.

Also, check out Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix if you haven’t already. It’s a wild ride—enjoy!

Murder Among the Mormons is a wild ride lol highly recommend four anyone that likes religious true crime docs.

It is so fascinating to me how mormonism has created such a solid foundation of belief in its relatively short lifetime. it's not the only religion that makes wild claims about its history obviously but I always felt like the major world religions got a lot of their legitimacy just from being so old ya know...... hearing a story from 5k years ago about Jesus doing something magical is like, sounds fake but who knows what was going on back then, the continents were closer the oceans were colder, maybe magic was a thing. But all of Mormonism lore is less than 200 yrs old, maybe 7 or 8 generations ago....... it's like why did God wait so long to reveal all this information lol and why do basically everyone else's stories not line up with yours at all??

But like you mentioned, it's got its claws so deep in the believers they have deep theological discussions about where biblical things happened in North America, something that seems so ridiculously easy to disprove bc we have soooooo much evidence to the contrary (including the actual Christian Bible). It feels like the early isolation of mormons in Utah just really sped up a lot of things that took other religions hundreds of years to achieve, idk it's so interesting.

#if you're really trying to get your cult off the ground take it 500 miles away from any sign of civilization

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werewolf-transgenderism · 25 days

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re your post about it--i'm curious about your thoughts on the global middle ages! i did my bachelors in medieval studies and whenever somebody asks, i talk about how the medieval period refers to a specific historical arc in a specific geographical range where a specific group of cultures were mingling. we don't talk about "medieval australia" in the same way we don't talk about "third intermediate period british isles" or "edo period caribbean," right? my thinking is that that's because the various cultural moments that led us to denote that date range as a specific period didn't happen in every culture, everywhere. the history of other geopolitical regions is periodized in ways that reflect historians' ideas of those regions' own major cultural shifts and such.

now i absolutely have not been keeping up with current discussions in the field, and if it's a whole thing totally feel free to tell me to just google it. but if you do have thoughts about it that you want to share, or literature to point me towards, i'd love to hear!

I think it kind of is A Whole Thing right now, alas, but! I do think the original idea of the global middle ages is important — it helps to gain a broader understanding of the premodern past. while “medieval” or “middle ages” has been used to almost exclusively refer to western europe c. 500-1500, we KNOW that there was trade and travel happening between europe, the SWANA region, and east asia, and that trade/travel certainly influenced culture/literature/etc. if we don’t also look to these regions we’re missing out on vital info about how the medieval world worked in direct contact with the western european regions we typically associate with the middle ages. in addition, thinking globally can also invite collaboration across disciplinary boundaries that are set apart for the reasons you mention — I’m thinking, for instance, of the interesting and important work that scholars like tarren andrews, suzanne conklin akbari, adam miyashiro, brenna duperon, etc., have been doing in collaboration between indigenous studies and medieval studies. nahir otaño-gracia has also been doing some interesting work on caribbean medievalisms and we know from late medieval/early modern documents that medieval understandings of race and monstrosity went hand in hand with the colonial projects of western europe.

one of the issues that’s been going around with global middle ages though is 1) it’s still not really “global” (for the reasons above, the research has mostly been focused on SWANA/east asia) and 2) it often tends to end up in the “I am giving my class one non-western european text (or maybe even just mandeville or marco polo or a crusade chronicle) in our survey class and patting myself on the back for my global syllabus” area OR the “this field is so incredibly not diverse and perhaps some of these people should think about why and how they’re engaging with these regions/cultures” issue re: extractive reading/research practices that don’t engage with the cultures whose history/practices/literature they’re using (tarren andrews’ work does a really good job of laying this out)

I personally would love if there were more collaboration happening across fields to make conversations about the premodern world across geopolitical and historical boundaries because I think it’s really interesting, and I think that how we set up periodization in history/literature creates artificial boundaries that can foreclose on understanding the diverse and interconnected nature of the medieval world. also the post I made was brought on by a public history book I’m reading about medieval women where I was thinking about how much I’d love to know about women in the medieval world outside of just western europe but it’s so much harder to find public history casual reading type stuff about those topics (and like. I can and do read academic books all the fucking time but I would love for some more public-facing stuff that’s a less intensive read)

#like I took a grad seminar on old french in the medieval world that was really interesting because we went all the way to east asia #but my undergrad survey courses? mostly england with a dash of scandinavia and france #anyway hope that makes sense it’s late at night and my brain is mostly done for the day

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mariacallous · 3 months

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The good folks at the Know Your Enemy podcast (Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell) did a recent episode w/ Erik Baker called “Bomb Power,” named after the 2010 book by Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.

As someone who spent the first half of his career doing guns-and-bombs security studies, I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this book before listening to the podcast.

Upon Google-Scholar-ing Bomb Power, I discovered it had 166 citations—very, very modest for an author as well-known as Wills. And scanning through who’s been citing it, I see mostly historians (not international-relations or strategic studies scholars). So I suppose my ignorance about the book is normal within my field.

But their discussion on the episode triggered me in a few ways, leading me to ponder what happened to the conservatives who support peace—that used to be a thing.

A “Don’t Break Things” Conservative

Wills’s politics don’t map well onto our current context.

He had ties to William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd. And his prolific writing often went after liberals, especially Kennedy (though his book Nixon Agonistes was a masterclass and did not spare Nixon of his critical prose).

But Wills recognized that power had a tendency to corrupt. That America itself had been guilty of great evils whose consequences it never repaired. And that if a preference for limited government meant anything at all, it meant a commitment to limiting the power of the national security state—there was no military exemption from the “limited government” mantra.

When I was finishing my PhD at the Catholic University of America (I enrolled there having no idea about its very conservative reputation), I studied under and socialized with conservatives like Wills. They mostly hated the Bush administration, generally thought the Iraq War was insane, and were critical of what had become the imperial presidency. (Before you romanticize them too much, they also hosted Brett Kavanaugh and Newt Gingrich at various times, they largely believed in civilizational (as in clash of civilizations) politics, and some of them seemed to think race science had merit…)

These days, it’s fairly common for people to claim they’re progressive while actually being center-right economic liberals with limited tolerance for anything redistributive. Wills cut in the opposite direction. As the Know Your Enemy guys talk about in the episode, Wills at times took up policy positions that we would think of as progressive, but he identified as a conservative. Why?

Aside from personal affection for the label, I suspect this has to do with his Burkean “don’t break things” sensibility, as well as the sense that 1) the common good is achievable within the nation-state itself, 2) the Founding Fathers had something to teach us and/or were extraordinary, and 3) the Constitution is a holy-adjacent document.

I think that perspective is intellectually unsatisfying and a political dead end. But YMMV.

The important thing is that folks who believe that stuff are folks you can work with sometimes. And if you’re in mortal danger, they’re the kind of American who just might help you out. More importantly, if any part of the right is recruitable into an antifascist coalition, it’s the “don’t break things” conservatives.

An Endangered Species

You can still find conservatives like Wills out there in American society. I know of one or two pundits who would fit this category of principled, preservationist conservatism. And, funnily enough, there are a lot of these types in New Zealand (a country with every type of conservative).

But in Washington, this species of conservative doesn’t exist. Not a single Republican official can claim fidelity to the Willsian template. To a man—and they’re mostly men—the electoral GOP has repudiated everything meaningful in the “don’t break things” tradition.

Talking Like a Peacenik

The remarkable thing about Wills’s Bomb Power is how much it reads like a leftist critical text. It would go too far to call Wills a historical materialist, but his implicit philosophy is not incompatible with it.

His invocation of the national security state—a term with which any Un-Diplomatic reader is by now very familiar—originated with Marcus Raskin, a co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies (the first progressive think tank in Washington). IPS was and remains an expressly antimilitarist presence in Washington, and one of the few institutions there that can claim ties to the peace progressives who constitute what I think are the grassroots of the Democratic Party.

Wills’s reference to permanent war and the economy that supports it owes to Seymour Melman, a left-aligned peace intellectual who popularized (and possibly coined) “permanent war economy” through a series of books and essays that deserve a much wider reading.

And Wills’s claim that nuclear weapons are fundamentally tools of despotism that have permanently disempowered democracy is a pretty common view on the left going back to George Orwell’s classic essay, “You and the Atom Bomb” (which I still teach!).

What all this suggests is that Wills was a conservative who read widely. You might even say he was open-minded.

As such, he made analytical use of the criticisms against the powerful rendered by people with whom he likely disagreed. And he did so, at least partly, in the name of peace. Good luck finding someone like that in the Republican Party today.

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alastairstom · 6 months

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how is thomastair decorating their place in Cornwall gardens? like floor plan and all and decor?

I'm gonna give you more than you bargained for here because I strongly adore this ask. Thank you very much for it.

Floor Plan

I Googled the layout for the Cornwall Gardens houses in London. This is the exterior of the home that Thomas and Alastair would have lived in. I passed by them a lot when I visited London last summer, and can confirm they are very nice.

I have not gone inside the houses as I am a law-abiding citizen who does not engage in breaking and entering that may get me deported from London and sent back to the vastly inferior location that is the United States of Ye Olde America. However, I did manage to find some photos of the interior of this house online. Behold!

Pretty, pretty, pretty, though I do not think that Thomas and Alastair would want to live somewhere so horribly sanitized. Like, do they want to live in an ""aesthetic"" white room with no personality? No.

So I assessed the floor plan, which I found - you guessed it! - online.

This appears to be the standard floor plan for a Cornwall Gardens house.

What do I think Thomas and Alastair did with it? Well!

Decorating

I actually wrote a fic that details Thomas and Alastair moving into and decorating their home. It's called Dreamscapes on the Wall, and you can read it here!

I stand by the descriptions of most of the rooms in that fic. Rich, dark reds and shimmering golds suit their style well, so I imagine red walls in most places and golden trim.

I feel like both of them like classical art and statues, so they have little paintings and busts around the house as decorations. They also seem likely to keep to the theme of a room, so - a music-inspired painting in the piano room, a bust of an old scholar/philosopher in the library, etc. They've arranged their bookshelves neatly and aesthetically because disorderly decor drives Alastair crazy.

I also definitely think that Alastair has his daggers on display somewhere in the house. Probably mostly in the sitting room, but perhaps a few in the parlor. He doesn't keep them in his bedroom anymore. When asked why, he said he no longer needs weapons because he sleeps next to a 6-and-a-half-foot-tall giant with melon-sized muscles, so that's his weapon now.

#alastair carstairs #thomas lightwood #thomastair

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