#i had to look this up. i've been reading english for three decades and i s2g i never saw this word before | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

1shirt2shirtredshirtdeadshirt · 1 year

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I woke up this morning and saw I had a message in my inbox on AO3, presumably about by new fic, and was excited to see the feedback.

When I read what they wrote it was a small comment that said "stop using sudowrite".

Had no idea what that even means, so I had to look it up and found out it's some form of a writing AI.

Absolutely fuming.

I want to make something abundantly clear right now:

I have not been hand writing and editing all of my own stories, hundreds of pages worth of personally hand written or hand typed content for the past 16 years, only to get accused of using any form of lazy ass writing AI now.

This is what I love to do. For fun.

I put in a lot of unpaid time, creativity and energy into my writing and editing. The only thing I ask for in return is participation from the fandoms I love, be it via thoughtful feedback or valid criticisms.

But this is neither of those things. This is just an outright, baseless lie against the art that I have worked so hard to make myself, and I won't be undermined or discredited.

There's anger, and then there's whatever space I am occupying well past it right now.

It's infuriating to pour hours of my love, thought and creativity into original content only to have someone come out of nowhere and try to tell me I've been having an AI do it, especially 16 years deep.

Bitch please.

I also found out that app came out in 2020 . . . As I mentioned, I published my first K/S story in 2008 as Ruby JW on the K/S archives, and my first fanfic on fanfic.net was published in 2007 as luigi_is_stellar.

I invite anyone to peruse my decades-long collection of independent content that I have single-handedly accomplished well before such an app even existed, then come back to me and try to tell me that what I do here isn't authentic.

I don't usually get spicy, but when it comes to the art I spend hours writing and drawing independently with my own blood sweat and tears, yeah. I'm going to get spicy.

I do far too much unpaid work out of passion and love for this fandom to have such a serious accusation flung my way out of nowhere.

It's the first time in my 16 years of writing for this fandom that I've ever been accused of plagiarism, and you best trust and believe that I don't take that accusation lightly. I work too damn hard to let someone discredit the work I do personally in such a baseless manner.

Anyway, that was discouraging AF. I am boggled to learn that AI writing is even a thing, no less someone coming out of the woodwork to try to accuse me of using it 16 years into story publishing when I literally teach academic honesty and writing ethics in my line of paid work as an English professional.

Genuinely: Do you know who you're talking to?

A bit of background on me:

I come from a not-so-wealthy family who could not afford to pay to put me through school -- I paid for that all on my own. I had to earn my University English degree, one of four University degrees I hold on my own work and pay alone, without so much as a tutoring session or handout from home.

Not once would I have jeopardized everything I worked so hard and paid for out of my own pocket as a poor ass uni student working two jobs and doing night classes just to phone it in plagiarizing, not on one ounce of my work.

That was all me.

I've handwritten 3 MLA essays in under three hour exams BACK TO BACK, immediately followed by back-to-back Biology exams & a final lab where I ALSO had to write multiple essays and switch from MLA to APA mode within the span of 6 hours.

Those were all bound in handwritten yellow booklets well before we ever had Google Docs, Grammarly, formatting suggestions, or even regularly brought/had access to laptops in UNI. I did my work by hand.

I earned my degrees in English and Biology AT THE SAME TIME before I even turned 24. I earned a double major handwriting my own work papers like my life depended on it, and you actually think I'm about to phone it in now?

Step to me like that again, young blood. I ain't the one.😂

Anyway, I digress.

Ya girl ain't here to fight BC y'all know I tend to be very easygoing, full of humour, and I love to joke around in the fandom. I'm pretty wide open to opposing opinions or even criticisms. But this is unfounded slander, and I won't be taking that on the chin.

When it comes to my work, I take that very seriously, and I don't play around. My late father once told me that "The work you do and the degrees you earn are yours and yours alone, they can never take that education from you." I live by that sentiment, and have done so by putting forth honest work.

Be it paid or unpaid work, it's my work. Periodt.

It is an unfathomably disheartening and insulting message to receive as someone who writes all their own stuff themselves, draws all their own fanart themselves, does their own photo edits themselves, edits their writing themselves, and has never even used so much as a single outside beta reader/editor for my work. Not once. The art, the writing, the editing -- It's all me.

Bottom line:

Say you do or don't like my work, that's cash money and we good, whether it's your cup of tea or not.

Butt know that it is my work.

I will not put all of this free time, effort and love into my work only to be accused of lazily ripping the content that I have spent hours writing and personally editing from somewhere else.

And on that note, consider my PSA rant ended.

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matan4il · 2 months

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Daily update post:

I have to start this one with the sad news that the hero who saved others by stopping the terrorist yesterday, despite being stabbed in several places (including in the neck), has passed away. His name was Uri Moyal, he was 51 years old, he leaves behind a wife and three kids. Yesterday, the number of wounded was still not fully clear, today it's confirmed that in addition to Uri, the terrorist managed to injure 2 more people. In the pic below you can see Uri holding up a lifetime achievement award. At his funeral today, his daughter Sapir mourned him: "Thank you for being a dad, who was also a teacher for life. There is no one who knew you and didn't fall in love with you."

The German press has reported (so far I've only managed to find this English source) that this week, the antisemitic, genocidal slogan "From the river to the sea" has been found painted in Arabic on the site of the 1972 kidnapping and massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. I'll point out that recently, the grandson of one of the murdered athletes was attacked (he had several bones in his face broken) in Berlin by an Arab anti-Israel activist.

A terrorist attack was prevented from happening, when two Palestinians, carrying a big knife and a sword, were arrested on their way to a Jewish community in the middle of the night. They're currently being questioned.

After Canada and Sweden, now Australia has also announced that it will renew its funding of UNRWA. I may sound like a broken record, but this is morally broken. They KNOW that UN agency is complicit in countless crimes of helping anti-Jewish hate and violence, the IDF evidence uncovered thanks to the war are just the tip of the iceberg when we're actually talking about decades of complicity, and resuming the funding without any changes, without even an investigation into this being completed, means these countries don't even care about looking as if they care about Jewish and Israeli lives. It's beyond ccontemptible. So. Canada, Sweden and now Australia, whenever these countries' heads tell you that they care about human rights, know that this includes, "but not for Jews."

And because I mentioned the long, long complicity of UNRWA (and many in charge of or dealing with it), here's the CEO of the NGO UN Watch explaining it better than most can, because they have been working for years on calling attention to the wrongdoing of UNRWA:

There's this common lie spread by the anti-Israel crowd, that everything was just peachy between Jews and Muslim in the Middle East, until Zionism came along. This is a blatant erasure of repeated discrimination, persecution, forced conversions, expulsions and massacres perpetrated against Jews living in Muslim majority countries for centuries. The ethnic cleansing of the entire Middle East of Jews (other than in Israel) is only the climax of that long history of antisemitism under Muslim rule, exactly like the Holocaust is just the climax of the long history of antisemitism under Christian European rule. And yesterday, I came across another reminder.

I was listening to an interview with Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an American rabbi, about the discrimination he had recently suffered during a trip to Saudi Arabia. I'd read the headlines, but hearing him tell it in his own words (in amazing Hebrew, might I add) really drove it home. He was heading a US delegation meant to inspect the state of religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, when he gets a phone call from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, telling him that the Saudis have laws which must be respected, and which dictate that no one but "the members of our religion" (meaning, Muslims) can walk around publicly displaying signs of their religious identity. In other words, Rabbi Cooper was told to remove his kippah (the head cover religious Jews wear). Rabbi Cooper asked the official on the phone, whether he was sure, and tried arguing against this decision. When the demand was reaffirmed, Rabbi Cooper responded that he wouldn't take off his kippah for the Soviets decades ago, and he wouldn't be taking it off for the Saudis, either. That meant he had to leave, and so the delegation had to end its visit. This isn't a small incident of anti-Jewish discrimination in the 1930's, in an Arab country where no one would even bat an eye at that. This is a Saudi official, speaking to an American Jew, in 2024, during an official visit, meant to check the state of religious freedom in that country, while Saudi Arabia is doing its best to present a more tolerant, modern and progressive image for the world. And this still happened. There is a long tradition of antisemitism in the Middle East, it doesn't simply disappear even when Jews were forced to, and the attempts to deny it with the excuse of "But Zionism!" are antisemitic, too.

This is Hadar Gadol.

He's an Israeli author, a practitioner of alternative medicine, and as a reservist, he serves as a casualty officer (an army official who lets a family know that their loved one was killed in combat, in Israel a casualty officer also continues to work with and support the family after the initial notification, kind of like a social worker appointed by the army). In January, IDF soldier Mark Kononovich was killed. A few weeks ago, as party of taking care of the family, Hadar took Mark's dad Alex on a tour of the last army post where Mark and the friends who died with him had slept. In the middle of that, Hadar got a heart attack. Alex happens to be a doctor, he recognized the signs, administered some first aid, and made sure Hadar would be taken to the hospital to receive the treatment he needed. This is Hadar after being released from the hospital, visiting Alex to thank him (you can also see Mark's younger brother in the pic):

During this visit, Alex told Hadar, "You took our case as very close to you, you felt it like we do, very close to the heart." I have no doubt their bond is gonna be there for years to come. Hadar is actually not the first Israeli casualty officer I've heard of, who collapsed and was in need of hospitalization since Oct 7, just the latest. I think that in a way says something about how acutely Israelis feel the pain of the massacre, whether we personally lost someone or not.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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getvalentined · 24 days

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What’s your opinions of the various ffvii compilation games?

Oh I am a huge proponent of the Compilation as a whole; I know that opinion is rare for someone who's been in the fandom from the beginning, but I'm an insufferable lore gremlin and I just eat up everything the series has to offer. I have three different copies of Advent Children (the original on DVD, ACC on DVD, and ACC on blu-ray) and even still watch Last Order on occasion.

The series itself is really fascinating and staggeringly consistent (I've talked about how the implied timeline of the Jenova Project as presented in-game is so consistent that it matches up with real-world human gestational science), with the exception of the FF7Re series—which I can deal with, since it's canonically on a different timeline and therefore any retcons there are literal in-universe retcons, which is pretty brilliant.

That said, I'mma put ratings for the pieces of the Compilation individually under a cut!

OG FF7: 9/10. would be 10/10 if the English localization were better. Where it all started, still one of my favorite games of all time.

Advent Children (+Complete): 8/10. Not a game, but part of the Compilation! Anyone who says the plot makes no sense doesn't realize that they're watching a sequel that relies very heavily on people understanding the history and characterization of every single character shown.

Last Order: 6.5/10. Also not a game, also part of the Compilation. Love that this is implied to literally be Tseng's coverup of what happened with Zack, presented in anime form. Makes no sense in multiple places as a result, but if you know that's what it is then you can 100% see why it's portrayed that way! Honestly I really enjoyed it and wish more people would appreciate it for what it is.

Dirge of Cerberus: 7/10. The gameplay kinda sucks but honestly the storyline is super good—or it would be, if the entire fucking prologue hadn't been cut from any release outside Japan, thereby leaving the entire issue with DeepGround completely unexplained to all other audiences. Once you know what is going on, the storyline here is fantastic, and I've never really forgiven SE for not releasing the rest of it. I love that Dirge fills in the lore for Vincent that was cut when he was relegated to "optional" in the OG, and that it also helps to clarify why Midgar could have 9 functional mako reactors while every other reactor in the world is either sputtering to nothing or exploding. (It's Omega. Midgar is built over Omega. It's the place where all lines of the Lifestream converge so that Omega can draw it all in and carry it away at the end of the world, and Shinra never discovered that's why the mako well there is so expansive. I love good worldbuilding, and Dirge is a beautiful example of that.)

Before Crisis: N/A. I want this game so bad man where is it give it to meeeee. Honestly tho I've watched playthroughs and read scripts where available, and while I don't think it looks like much fun from a modern gameplay perspective, I have huge respect for it as far as development goes. This is one of the first really mainstream mobile games ever made, it was made for flip phones, and it's super extensive! Also it gave me Veld, who is one half of my favorite ship ever, which means it automatically gets a 7/10 even if I've never played it.

Crisis Core (+Reunion): 9/10. As fun to play as the OG. When I first played this on PSP over a decade ago, it hit me with such an intense feeling of nostalgia that it almost took me off my feet. In spite of the dramatic difference between game mechanics in CC versus the OG, it felt exactly like playing the OG again, and that feeling never really left. Humanized Sephiroth in a beautiful way that pissed off a bunch of fanboys and made me fall in love with him all over again. Also introduced my second favorite FF7 character ever, Genesis, who is one half of one of my core FF7 ships, so A+ on that too!

FF7 Remake (+InterMISSION): 8/10. Had a lot of fun with this one, and it's beautiful, but it doesn't have a lot of replayability in my experience, which is a shame. Would have been 6 or 7/10 if not for InterMISSION, which was a fucking delight.

FF7 First SOLDIER: 6/10. This applies to both the Battle Royale and the title in Ever Crisis. I am not a fan of Glenn & Co. but I love 14 year old Sephiroth and really appreciate that extension of lore and worldbuilding, so it's a decent balance. I love that the opening cutscene for the battle royale literally filled a 20+ year old plot hole in under two minutes.

FF7 Rebirth: 9.5/10. The only things that could make me like this game more would be if Vincent were playable (although I understand why he's not and, in spite of him being my favorite fictional character ever, I agree with this decision), and fewer required minigames. Just cut like one or two. Or fix the controls, maybe. Glide de Chocobo is even more broken now that it's been patched.

#fandom ramble #ff7

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killjoy-prince · 2 months

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Do you have any shoujo manga recommendations? I recently read Sasaki and Miyato and realised that I have been severly missing out!

Sure!! Thanks for asking me!

First, in case you haven't read it yet, Sasaki and Miyano has a spinoff that starts six months before the plot of Sasaki and Miyano called Hirano and Kagiura also by Shou Harusono.

This one focuses on Sasaki's friend, Hirano and his new dormmate, Kagiura. I know Sasaki had extra stories with them but the spinoff gave them an actual story. It currently has about 23 chapters and a light novel with the light novel being the first thing that happens chronologically. No anime for it as far as I know. The back of the first volume has a timeline of where events fit (this came out when Sasaki was up to Volume 5)

Speaking of novels, Sasaki and Miyano has two novels, one focusing on the characters' first year and one on their second year. I haven't read them yet so I'm not sure what exactly happens in them but if you can, check them out!

OK, now for other recs!

Wotakoi: Love Is Hard For Otaku by Fujita

This one is really cute! An office worker and otaku named Narumi Momose got dumped by her boyfriend when she got outed as one. Feeling awkward about running into him at work after the bad breakup, she quit her job and got a new one at a different company. This time, she's determined to keep her secret under wraps as to avoid another incident. However, this may prove to be hard when she finds out her childhood friend and fellow otaku Hirotaka Nifuji works at the company and almost outs her on her first day. She meets up with him after work to catch up and when Narumi tells him about her recent breakup, he asks her why not date an otaku. Specifically him. She rejects it at first but when he says he can help her in life, video games and with her booth at Comiket, she agrees.

There are three couples this series focuses on. The second couple knew each other since high school and have been dating for about a decade and work at the company with Narumi and Hirotaka. The third couple is the younger brother of Hirotaka and a gamer who goes to his college. It's a lighthearted comedy about office worker otakus and navigating their relationships. A lot of references to anime, video games, BL, GL, you name it. Like Sasaki, this was a webcomic posted on pixiv so the pacing and layout feel similar, at least to me. There are 11 volumes (6 volumes if you go by the English translation bc they combined two volumes into one for 5 of them and then the last one is by itself). I mainly got into this one bc Hirotaka was aesthetically my type. I remember seeing the first volume cover at kinokuniya when only the Japanese version was out and being like "I need to find out what this series is bc I need to meet him"

Kimi Ni Todoke by Karuho Shiina

This was a series I read when I was in high school. High school freshman Sawako Kuronuma has been feared and misunderstood by her peers all her life due to her appearance. It was so bad that her classmates call her Sadako since she looks like the character from The Ring. She had resigned to her fate of never making a friend until popular boy Kazehaya starts talking to her. The more time he spends talking to her, the more her world opens up and she starts making friends and experience things she hadn't been able to before this point. As they spend more time together, love blossoms between the two characters.

There are 30 volumes and 38 episodes. I read up to volume 18 and then stopped because that was the most recent volume at the time and I kinda forgot about by the time more volumes came out. But that was my fault not the manga because this series is really really cute!! A term I've coined for myself when I read this was whenever Kazehaya and Sawako were being cute together, I'd exclaimed "THESE ADORABLE LITTLE FUCKS!!" because they are so adorable to each other. The friends Sawako makes are really cool and fun in their own right. If you want some really cute, tooth rotting sweetness, I recommend this series.

Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura

Tsukimi Kurashita is a jellyfish fanatic that lives in Amamizukan, a woman only apartment building that houses other woman with their own fixations. They are considered NEETS and have a strict rule of no men allowed in their living space. Tsukimi's love for jellyfish came from going to a jellyfish aquarium with her mom before she died of an illness when Tsukimi was a kid. She goes to a pet shop regularly to visit a spotted jellyfish she's taken a fancy to that she named Kurara. When she sees that the employees put a moon jellyfish in the same tank, she fears for its life as the moon jellyfish will kill Kurara if not taken care of. However, her fear of talking to normal people lead to a misunderstanding with the employee until a stylish person comes to her rescue and they take Kurara back to Amamizukan. The next morning, Tsukimi finds out the stylish person she brought back to her home is an illegitimate son of a politician and cross-dresser named Kuranosuke Koibuchi.

There are 84 chapters and 11 episodes of this series. I read up to about chapter 74 before stopping for the same reason I did for Kimi Ni Todoke. It's a really fun time. The characters are funny and sweet, the situations are entertaining, it's just a fun o' time. And the art is really pretty!!

Skip and Loafer by Misaki Takamatsu

Mitsumi Iwakura moved from her small town on the outskirt of Ishikawa Prefecture to Tokyo to start high school. However, she gets lost going to school on the first day due to the culture shock and seems at a loss at what to do. That's when she meets Sosuke Shima who was late to school himself and travels with her to school. The series follows Mitsumi as she experiences school life in the city and meets lots of new people and makes friends with Sosuke along for the ride.

There's currently about 59 chapters and 12 episodes of this series. I started reading it when the anime was announced and I had a fun time reading it. I really enjoyed Mitsumi and seeing her learn and broaden her horizons as she goes to school and hang out with Sosuke and everyone else. It's a nice story!

Given by Natsuki Kizu

High school student Uenoyama Ritsuka is a guitarist in a instrumental only band with college students Akihiko Kaji and Haruki Nakayama. When going to his usual hiding spot for lunch, he finds Mafuyu Sato sleeping with a guitar with broken strings in his arms. Uenoyama offers to fix it and when he does and plays a note, Sato begs him to teach him how to play. Uenoyama is reluctant but gives in when Sato persists. After spending some time together, Uenoyama finds out that Sato has a beautiful singing voice and invites him to join his band.

There are 9 volumes, 11 episodes and a movie, with another movie on the way. The series focuses on three relationships. The first is the relationship between Uenoyama and Sato, the second between Akihiko and Haruki and the third between Sato's childhood friends Hiiragi and Shizusumi. The art is really pretty and the characters are so good!! I really enjoyed the story a lot! My favorite character is Hiiragi and I can't wait for the next movie to come out because they're gonna cover his story then and I wanna hear him sing!! (Also his seiyuu is Fumiya Imai AKA seiyuu for Akito Shinonome so double reason why I wanna hear it) Also, Imma use this as an excuse to post a page I really wanna see animated bc I can hear it so clearly in my head.

Bloom Into You by Nakatani Nio

Yuu Koito, lover of shoujo manga, always dreamed of being confessed to and experience that heart pounding feeling she sees happen in her books. However, when she's confessed to by a guy in middle school, she feels nothing and rejects him. Now starting high school, she's left confused on what her lack of feeling means. When she sees the student council president Touko Nanami turn down a boy, she asks her for help with her situation. But when Nanami confesses her love to Koito, will she feel that spark she's being hoping for? There's 8 volumes, 13 episodes and 3 light novels starring a side character. I'm up to volume 6 of this one and I'm really enjoying it!! The story is engaging, the charatcers are interesting. I like that Yuu isn't a pushover, she's a bit snarky and doesn't let Touko push her around. And I like how Touko comes off as a competent student council president but she has a more vulnerable side that she only shows Yuu. They pair nicely with each other.

Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun by Izumi Tsubaki

OK I know you know this one already but this wouldn't be a rec list made by me if I didn't include it. This is my favorite series ever. It's mecore. Me-coded. Me. Second year high schooler Chiyo Sakura finally gets the courage to confess her love to Umetarou Nozaki, a guy in her grade. However, she messes up the confession and says she's his biggest fan instead of "I like you". Nozaki, in response, gives her his autograph and then invites her to his house. She accepts but once they get there, he has her do inking on a manga he makes. Turns out, Nozaki is a manga artist under the pen name Sakiko Yumeno and he's had his eye on Sakura for a while because he wanted to bring her onto his team as an inker. She agrees to join so she can get closer to him.

There's currently 14 volumes, 12 episodes and an OVA split into six 5-mintue parts. This series has me dying of laughter with every chapter. The characters are fun, the story is fun, it's just a fun time! There are three main couples with some side couples and duos that get their own time in the spotlight as well. The main ones are Sakura and Nozaki, Sakura's friend Yuzuki Seo and Nozaki's screentone assistant and first year Hirotaka Wakamatsu, and Nozaki's background artist and third year theater club president Masayuki Hori and "Prince of the Drama Club" Yuu Kashima. Other characters like Mikoto "Mikorin" Mikoshiba, Mayu Nozaki, Yukari Miyako, Ken Miyamae, and Mitsuya Maeno all bring their own brand of fun to the table. This series made me laugh so much I couldn't read it in class to slack off because I'd laugh out loud and disrupt class. I've yet to read another series that made me do that. I cannot recommend this series enough. Please read AND watch it if you have not already. Nozaki is starting to gain awarness. I lose my mind whenever I see it happen. I wanna see it happen. It's been 13 years!

Imma put an honorable mention here because I haven't read or watch it yet but I've heard Horimiya written by HERO and illustrated by Daisuke Hagiwara is really good. I wanted to but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

That's all I have for right now! If you've already read/watched all of these already, lmk and I'll list some more!! Hope you enjoy! ^_^

#prince's ask tag #i might have lost the plot a bit but hopefully this was helpful lolol

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fraddit · 3 months

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Okay, here we go. January’s not over yet, so I can squeeze my 2023 review post in just under the wire. I know it’s not technically necessary to do stuff like this, but it’s something I’ve done at least the last several years, and I do think I get some benefit from the ritual and also perhaps some benefit from forcing myself to type it all out and post it where others can see it (although nobody needs to actually read it. It’s probably gonna get long.)

Last year was the first year of me doing this, I think, where I pulled up all my original posts for the year, and had posted no original works of artistic merit. No photoshop edits, no architectural models of sets, no whatever else I sometimes do. Normally that would make me feel pretty shitty about myself, but I sat with it all for a while, and, yeah, I didn’t post any “stuff of merit”. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything. And as someone recovering from a nasty addiction to horrible self-criticism, I think it’s important to stop and take purposeful notice of accomplishments, even neutrally, although positively is the goal.

And now I know why I put off making this post all month, because I’m already starting to get emotional, just thinking about what the bulk of this post is going to be about.

In a lot of ways 2023 was a really good year for me. I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff that’s been really great. I made an awesome new friend. I started therapy again. I started morning pages journaling. I started bullet journaling. I’m in a really good place right now. Which feels like such a fucking jinx to even think, let alone type out. But at least for the moment, it’s true.

But the thing from 2023 that feels too big to me to even look at really is this:

I don’t remember making that post now, I just found it in my regular review process and it knocked me on my ass. But apparently I made that post at 9:30 pm on December 31, 2022. So, basically the first post I made of 2023. Or at least close enough.

And that little post feels like a big deal to me, because two or three years before that, I’d sworn off writing. I’d decided my relationship to it was just too complicated and fraught and difficult, so I should just give up and put my efforts elsewhere, toward interests and hobbies that weren’t so complicated or fraught or difficult. I had decided that it was time to just be realistic and accept that writing was just not something I was cut out to do and move on with my life.

But here’s the context for that decision, or at least a high level overview that is hopefully succinct and also steers mostly clear of being too trauma dumpy. And it probably reads like a cliched former-gifted-kid humble brag, but it's how my life went so, it's what I've got to work with:

I’ve always been naturally gifted at stringing together words and sentences in a way that’s coherent and organized and readable. Every teacher I’ve ever had, all the way back to elementary school has told me so. All the standardized tests told me I was in the 99th percentile in most subjects, but especially the one’s related to reading and writing. My AP English teacher senior year of high school told me I was the best writer she’d had in any of her classes in her decades long teaching career.

I flunked freshman English and had to retake it over summer in order to move onto the next grade. I got Ds in English for basically all the rest of high school. I know in my heart of hearts that my teacher junior year fudged the math to give me that D, so I didn’t fail. I graduated high school a semester late.

Because, while I may have been good at writing, I’ve never been good at writing. Any natural talent I may have had was utterly paralyzed by my executive function issues (thank you adhd and autism) that generally made it impossible for me to actually put words on the page when it mattered.

Despite all that, I apparently thought it was a good idea to go to college and get a degree in English Creative Writing. I was going write best selling novels. All my professors told me my work was great. When I managed to turn work in that is.

I’ve dropped out of college like two or three times. Last time was idk, 2019 apparently (had to go look it up). I was almost done. Just another semester left or so. But instead I got burned out, had a breakdown in the parking garage before finals because I hadn’t written any of my term papers, and then just drove away and never went back.

And it’s not like I wasn’t trying. Which is probably the most painful part, honestly. I tried meds multiple times. I read self help and how to books. I got an electric typewriter because surely that would fix everything. In my 20s, I did use it to bang out the world’s roughest rough draft for the first "book" (I use that term very loosely here) in a trilogy I concocted. I tried handwriting. I tried voice to text. And there was a beautiful period where I was working on co-writing a much too ambitious fic with a friend where I manage to write several thousand words.

But I have never in my life been able to write On Purpose, with any sort of consistency or longevity or confidence or ease. I had folders of wips and snipets of ideas that all amounted to nothing. I had what all my teachers always told me I had: tons of wasted potential. My only tried and true method that had gotten me most of my results in school was to procrastinate until the night before and use the pressure and adrenaline to puke out a paper just in the nick of time. But even that method eventually failed me (hence the dropping out). And even if it hadn’t, that’s not a sustainable system. That’s not a way to actually get shit done on a regular basis. That’s not a way to enjoy a craft.

So I quit.

I decided, this is too hard. And it makes me feel too horrible every time I fail. It’s too easy to hate myself every day that I don’t write when I think I should. I decided I just wasn’t built for this and gave the fuck up.

That was like three years ago.

So for two years, if I had an idea for a story or a fic, no I didn’t. I’d just ignore it. I did other things. But the ideas were still there. I’d still think about them. Sometimes I even wrote little snippets down. But it was just to get it down. It wasn’t real. I gave up writing. I wasn’t doing that anymore.

And honestly? Maybe that’s what I needed? I have no idea if things could have worked out differently had I made different choices. That’s life after all. But maybe the total lack of pressure from genuinely quitting was good for me? I’ll never know.

But what I do know is that me from a year ago made this post:

And then this post:

And then this:

Then this:

And this is what this past month has looked like for me:

It not part of my system to write on the weekends, so that’s 18 out of 23 days, I managed to show up at my desk and reliably put some effort in. I’ll fucking take it.

And what’s crazy is, it’s felt easy. It’s felt good. I like the process.

I don’t exactly love everything I’ve written. Any natural talent I may or may not have doesn’t make up for lack of practice. But If I can keep this up, I’ll have the practice too. Eventually.

It’s a learning process. I’m having to relearn a lot of skills I’d forgotten or learn new skills for the first time. For example, I’ve basically never seriously edited anything in my life, and with my new approach, I really put the rough in rough draft, so the editing is extremely necessary. But it feels good to be trying. To be gaining ground little by little.

Since I dusted off my ancient install of scrivener back in idk? June?, I’ve written over twenty-five-thousand words, which is A Lot for me. And yeah, it’s across multiple fics. And yeah, I haven’t actually finished any one fic yet and posted it. But I’ll get there. It feels crazy to know that if just keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll get there. And it feels crazy to know that I can keep doing what I’m doing. It feels like I can keep doing it indefinitely, and I’ve never felt like that before. Not in my entire life. At least not about writing.

So yeah, 2023 was a great year for me.

#whoops got pretty personal in here #just look away lol #shut up fraddit

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unhonestlymirror · 8 months

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Broke: Lithuania as America's lackey during WW2

Woke: Since most parents always try to save their children, Lithuania sent his kids to the USA right before WW2 and stayed on his land completely alone. Žemaitija painted his hair brown and introduced himself as a name, which is actually a surname, learned English, he and USA developed Mob&Reigen dynamic. No one questioned why Lithuania is shorter than Mister America, no one questioned why Lithuania always looks so quiet, pinched, and lost.

In the late 1990s, America tells "Lithuania" they're going somewhere "but it's a surprise".

- We have been flying for quite a long time.

- Oh, it's because you promised me something!

- Yeah?

- You NEED to show me your home! :D It's not fair that you've been to mine for so long, but I've never seen yours!"

Žemaitija is horrified because he has never truly forgiven Lithuania for sending him so far away, for so long, for not allowing him to stay. Thus, he never read any letters and never wrote back. To some extent, he is afraid to return home. He also can't tell this to America, otherwise, deceit will be revealed. Žemaitija doesn't know what he wants to see. He heard rumours that his father was sent to Siberia. Although it's morally awful to think that way, he expects to see nothing left from their previous life, not even a grave, just nothing. Žemaitija had enough pain already.

His expectations are not met. Lithuania's house seems a bit abandoned, but you can see that the garden is being taken care of.

- Oh, THAT'S YOUR HOUSE? IT LOOKS SO LOVELY! Exactly what I expected from you! :D

- Mister America, could you please not talk so loudly?

- Sorry, sorry. Will you invite me inside?🥺

-...Okay.

Everything looks exactly the same way it used to be. Except for the small TV on an embroidered napkin and a few modern devices. On the table there is a glass with unfinished kefir, a piece of bread lies.

An enormous man in a bathrobe, with long hair, sleeps on an old sofa, a newspaper on his face. The walls full of glued newspaper clippings: "Lithuania wins basketball 1992", "Lithuania invents...", "Lithuania wins...." - with photos of Žemaitija. Smiling, looking awkward, looking quite ugly in action.

"Jesus, he's so thin. Where are those scars from? That's a lot of them," thinks Žemaitija.

- Oh, is that your housekeeper? He looks quite exhausted - America changes his tone to whisper for some reason.

Suddenly, the housekeeper gets up, like a revived millennium tree, and it is not really clear who creaks: he or the sofa. The newspaper falls on the floor, but the hair is long enough to hide the face. He makes a few giant steps to America and leans to him. Žemaitija suddenly notices how much smaller America - in his wonderful three-piece suit - looks in comparison.

America's face doesn't change the happy expression but slightly hardens, and Žemaitija notices how his fingers reach for where he used to hold a gun. Žemaitija can't blame him.

The housekeeper slowly brings his hands to the face and removes bangs.

All this time, Žemaitija hopelessly tried to hide behind America's back. Words come out against his will:

- How many bodies have you changed??

An incredibly thin, Rūpintojėlis-like, greyish-yellow face that didn't seem to smile in decades, pronounced folds around the lips, wrinkles around the eyes. Only inquisitive fiery eyes, abnormally large for such a face, and a clear, hard look.

America seems to be speechless for a second. But he quickly pulls himself together and, in a practised manner, says:

- GOOD MORNING! :D Sorry for bothering your sleep. Um. LITHUANIA! Would you like to introduce us? - America turns to Žemaitija and raises his eyebrows pleadingly.

- Although I don't know you personally, I think I can do it. Who doesn't know America? It would be nice if you turned your face to me, though, if we're going to follow the full règles d'étiquette.

What a booming, raspy voice, with a bit strange accent but still familiar.

Žemaitija feels so damn miserable.

Why did he even come here? For what? To see enough of the "masterpieces" of soviet constructivism, monuments to victims of repression and signboards on russian language? To open up old wounds? If he gets slapped now, so be it.

Žemaitija closes his eyes because he doesn't want to exist right here right at this moment.

Again, his expectations are not met.

He's just being hugged. Pretty strongly, but still. Lithuania smells like cigarettes and some kind of ancient grief. The bathrobe covers the entire view, but America, apparently, is silent.

- Fourty-two.

- What?

- Forty-two bodies. I made a bet with Poland that I would beat his record, and I did. Pretty good, huh?

It seems like Žemaitija have cried afterwards.

***

- I think it's good that you've never written anything back to him. - America looked unusually thoughtfully. - If what he says is true, then he could have been tortured more if russia knew he had children. Especially in USA.

- Does it make me any better?

- I think it makes you worth your father. - America let out a chuckle. - My own is a complete hypocrite piece of shit: that's where my oratory skills are from. I can't remember times we had good relations, so I even envy you a bit.

- I don't think you should.

- I don't think it's up to you to decide. I have FEELINGS, you know?! And don't think that I've forgiven you for years of forgery! I will never forgive! Maybe I can change my mind if you show me the place with the most delicious zep-pe-li-nai.

#it ended up quite long #hetalia #hws lithuania #aph lithuania #hws america #aph america #single dad au?#Žemaitija

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denimbex1986 · 10 months

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'The day Christopher Nolan called Cillian Murphy about his new film, " Oppenheimer," Murphy hung up the phone in disbelief.

The Irish actor, though a regular presence in Nolan films going back almost two decades, had always been a supporting player. This time Nolan wanted him to lead.

"He's so understated and self-deprecating and, in his very English manner, just said, 'Listen, I've written this script, it's about Oppenheimer. I'd like you to be my Oppenheimer,'" Murphy, 46, told The Associated Press recently. "It was a great day."

For Murphy, it is never not exciting to get a call from Nolan. It's just hard to predict if he's going to. He knows there are some movies he's right for and some movies he isn't.

"I have always said publicly and privately, to Chris, that if I'm available and you want me to be in a movie, I'm there. I don't really care about the size of the part," he said. "But deep down, secretly, I was desperate to play a lead for him."

Murphy first met Nolan in 2003. He was brought in to screen test for Batman —not just the movie, the character. Murphy knew he wasn't right for the Dark Knight, but he wanted to meet the man who'd directed "Insomnia" and "Memento." They hit it off and Murphy got to tap into a sinister intensity to play the corrupt psychiatrist Dr. Crane/Scarecrow, who would go on to appear in all three films. Nolan would also call on Murphy to be the conflicted heir to a business empire in "Inception" and a traumatized soldier in "Dunkirk."

"We have this long-standing understanding and trust and shorthand and respect," Murphy said. "It felt like the right time to take on a bigger responsibility. And it just so happened that it was a (expletive) huge one."

Soon after the phone call, Nolan flew to Dublin to meet Murphy to hand him a physical copy of the script, which he devoured right there in Nolan's hotel room in September 2020. It was, he said, the best he'd ever read.

Then the scale of it started to sink in.

This would be a film about the charismatic and controversial theoretical physicist who helped create the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer and his peers at Los Alamos would test it on July 16, 1945, not knowing what was going to happen. Then several weeks later the United States would drop those bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving many with lifelong injuries.

As Nolan said last week in Las Vegas, "Like it or not J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived."

"Oppenheimer," which opens in theaters on July 21, features a starry cast including Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves Jr., Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman, and many more rounding out the pivotal players in and around this tense moment in history.

"You realize this is a huge responsibility. He was complicated and contradictory and so iconic," Murphy said. "But you know you're with one of the great directors of all time. I felt confident going into it with Chris. He's had a profound impact on my life, creatively and professionally. He's offered me very interesting roles over and I've found all of them really challenging. And I just love being on his sets."

Murphy continued: "Any actor would want to be on a Chris Nolan set, just to see how it works and to witness his command of the language of film and the mechanics of film and how he's able to use that broad canvas within the mainstream studio system to make these very challenging human stories."

Over the years, Murphy has come to appreciate that with Nolan there's always something deeper to discover than what's literally on the page. "Dunkirk," he recalled, was only 70 pages and there wasn't much to his character, not even a name.

"He said, 'Look, let's figure it out together and you and me can find an emotional journey for the character. And we did it. We did it out in the water on that boat. That comes from trust and respect," Murphy said. "I'm really proud of that performance."

As with all Nolan endeavors, secrecy around "Oppenheimer" is vitally important. Murphy loves the "old-fashioned approach" that builds interest and anticipation.

The difference with "Oppenheimer" and other Nolan originals, though, is that this is rooted in historical fact. You can read the book it's based on, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer." You can watch the 1981 documentary "The Day After Trinity" on The Criterion Channel.

And you can try to parse Nolan's words for clues. He's talked about recreating the Trinity Test, the fascinating paradoxes, the twists, turns, and ethical dilemmas, and that the story is cinematic and both dream and nightmare. But ultimately, it's something that just needs to be seen.

"The question will be how Chris presents it," Murphy said. "I think people will be very surprised and wowed by what he does. Anything I say will just seem a bit lame as compared to seeing this in an IMAX theater."

The time for discussions will be after the movie comes out.

"There's an awful lot to talk about when we can talk freely," Murphy said with a smile.

He did offer up that they worked hard to get Oppenheimer's look right, from the silhouette to the pipe to the porkpie hat. The man, he said, "seemed aware of his own potential mythology." But, again, those conversations will have to wait.

"I'm really proud of the movie and I'm really proud of what Chris has achieved. This was, for sure, a special one, certainly because of the history with me and Chris. We were not walking around the set high fiving, but it did feel special." Murphy said. "It's an event every time he releases a film, and rightly so. Whether I'm in them or not, I always go to see his movies."'

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penddraig · 6 months

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lounging on the couch across from chihiro's table, howl lies on his back, his arms in the air. his fingers are out straight as he contemplates his nails. they are a lovely shade of teal today, but he's considering changing them up to match the outfit he's picked out for tomorrow. in case, he absolutely will. aside from his nails, he's been contemplating the process of fabricating stories. he's read a good deal of literature, on account of english being his undergraduate degree, but he can't help but consider … useless things. ❝ do you know, chihiro ? i don't think i've ever heard one tale where the knight didn't eventual vanquish the dragon and rescue the princess from the castle. which, now that i think of it, is terribly dull. it lacks all forethought, and the formula is so overused and predictable that i could read only the first three sentences before i determined what would happen for an ending. ❞

@chiheru. ‘ what would happen if the knight did not arrive to the castle, and the dragon made a den of it and a hoard of its people and prize of its princess ? ’

howl lifts his head from couch, looking alarmed at chihiro. he’s known she has an overactive imagination and a strong intellect when it comes to making up strange scenarios, but he would never have expected this to come out of her mouth : what would happen if the knight lost, and the dragon won ? not that he’s particularly against the notion that she's much, much more curious than one believes at first glance.

once his mind is all but settled, he laughs, making himself comfortable again and stretching his arms over his head and pillowing the back of his head on one of his forearms. ❝ well, if the dragon made a hoard of the castle's people and prize of its princess … then i suppose it would entirely depend on whether or not that dragon was the cruel sort or the kind sort. the cruel sort of dragon would never allow its people to stray from the castle walls, and would feed them only the barest amount, until they were all but starving. and it would breathe fire at anyone who dared cast judgement or question it. but the kind sort … ❞ he hums, lost in thought. the imagination of a child, it seems, is contagious. especially for the likes of him, who has spent over half a decade of his life living what fantasies he had concocted in his mind thanks to all the books he'd read as a child, and in university. ❝ the kind sort of dragon lets its people leave, and helps with everyone's duties. and i suppose it would make the princess happy, too, if she let it. why ? are you planning on going and getting yourself abducted by a kind dragon ? and it must be kind, because i'll be the one going out to find it. ❞

.゜–– of fairytales, folklore and faekind. / 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐.

#chiheru #( ;; h vc: why is my kid like this. < man who is just as bad. )#.゜–– iv . * a fickle heart is the only constant in this world .#.゜–– ic . * answered .

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dontcallmecarrie · 2 years

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In Endgame it seemed like the producers wanted Tony dying to be the only way he could be at peace. Like Pepper literally tells him 'Rest now', as if sacrificing himself to destroy the enemy that's been haunting him since Avengers 1 is the only ending where he can be happy.

"Sorry meant to add this to my ask (about Tony's death in Endgame being portrayed as his only possible happy ending): The whole thing makes me want to cry. And scream. Your opinion on what was being portrayed there?"

Friend, I...think you're more invested in this than I am, at this point. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I have ranted at length about my feelings on everything related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. [Note: those are only some of the highlights. There's plenty more— I'm not even including the whole "in an interview, the writers flat-out said they didn't like the characters" thing, even.]

Beyond that, the main thing you should know about me is the fact that I have very, very limited time and energy, and prefer to focus on things I enjoy over dwelling on things I know I'll hate. Because I've seen this road before, and it never ends well, and life's got enough bs without me piling on even more.

Am I going to be forever bitter about what went down? Yes. Am I never going to let go of the fact that the writers prioritized ticket sales over the age-old art of telling a good story and threw years' worth of effort down the drain in the process? Also yes. But I refuse to let it get to me.

The MCU lived in my head rent-free for a good chunk of my childhood and teenage years, and— yeah, I mourn for the potential it once had, but if I cling to the anger I feel about how the writers butchered everyone's character arcs and consistency for *drama*, I will never know rest.

If I let myself, I know I'm capable of being incandescent with rage over how they fridged the only woman in the original Avengers' Initiative, of the way they somehow managed to make Steve "I don't like bullies, also FUCK Nazis" Rogers into someone completely unrecognizable in the span of three movies, and—

I'm tired.

Look: you probably found this blog because of my most famous fic, The War is Far From Over Now. I started writing it because I needed at least one (1) world where Tony Stark got a happy ending for all the bs the MCU kept throwing at him [and only him], and if that meant making it myself, then so be it.

When I first started, I wasn't old enough to legally drink. Originally, it was supposed to be something short and sweet, something funny— but spite made it longer, and the readers' reception meant more inspiration to go into even more detail, and then it turned into a stress relief valve for all the shit that kept going down in my life.

[I try to keep personal life bs separate from my writing, but.

Shit went down.]

So, long story short: TWiFFON started out a fun thought exercise, but ended up becoming my love letter to what the MCU used to be— and later, a eulogy for the same.

Because over a decade of being invested in the world that turned my casual interest in the comics into something more concrete, only to watch as the audience was robbed of just about every sort of resolution there possibly could have been.

This isn't my first disappointment of this type, sure: Harry Potter was the book series I learned to read English with and I'd once thought the epilogue was as bad as things could get in that regard [...boy was I wrong], and Naruto and Bleach both managed to be incredibly ??? in their finales, but.

Of all of the things that made up so much of my childhood, my favorite character was Tony Stark.

The man who tried so, very hard to do his best, and kept getting beaten down for it time and time again. Who, by all rights, should have been the villain— either as the rich white guy who apparently can do nothing right [see: Iron Man 1 onwards], or simply because it makes no sense for him to be on the same side as the heroes who lied to his face and stabbed him in the neck or back time and time again [see: Iron Man 2 onwards, special mention for Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War].

Who was both the Da Vinci and Cassandra of his generation, because for all his accomplishments, nobody ever took him seriously— and never even got an "I told you so", after shit hit the fan and everyone immediately turned to him for answers [see: Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Infinity War, Endgame and need I go on?]

...I could go on for hours. But I won't.

If the writers won't give it this much thought, I won't either, not anymore.

Same way I refuse to watch another Marvel movie or tv show. I'd only barely been sticking around and gritting my teeth at the writing before Endgame, but that's the movie that made me ragequit the MCU entirely.

I've moved on, trying my hand at other fandoms and hobbies to occupy my brain when I'm not working or studying. At most, I have been poking at old cartoons and comics when I feel up to retreading old ground, but...right now, the main thing I feel when I think about the movies is disappointment.

#thinking aloud #I got an ask!#Naught replies #replies #Naught rants #sorry for the rant

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andswarwrites · 1 year

Text

Day 1

So you want to know what a thousand words looks like and how long it takes to write it? Read on.

I remember hearing the groans when our English teacher in Grade 7 told us he wanted us to write a hundred words. He then wrote out a paragraph on the board and told us: that’s a hundred words. Up until that point I had counted pages, but he taught us to look at the words, because you can change the font size and make it seem like you have a lot of writing with pages, but numbers don’t lie when you’re counting words.

I've had six English teachers in my life. Four of them were awesome, and two of them were not. I have fond memories of English class. I was taught at home from grades one to six, so my first English teacher was my mom. She and my dad would bring me to a library that allowed children an unlimited pile of books, and I would take advantage of that. From the age of three I was an avid reader. I would come to the check out desk with a pile of books over my head, and the librarians would ask me if I really was going to read all of these books?!

To be honest, I would read about four or five of those books on the trip home. If I was misbehaving, my mother would threaten me that if I didn't stop, I wouldn't be allowed to read. There was a series of stories about a community of all sorts of different animals, and it was beautifully illustrated. This series inspired me to create my own books. My dad would bring home large sheets of paper from work, which I would fold in two and staple into a book, and then I would make my own illustrations and spin a tale.

When I was old enough to appreciate Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great by Judy Blume, I got inspired to write my own chapter book. It was thirty-five pages, and I painstakingly colored the pictures. At age twelve I read my first historical romance: it was Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer. My mom had a whole shelf full, along with books by Nevil Shute and D. E. Stevenson. Around that time I fell in love with Anne of Green Gables, as well. Anne was just as talkative as me.

Of course, my love for historical fiction made me want to write a novel of my own, so that was my one hundred page summer project, which I showed to my English teacher. The computer on which I wrote that book has long since perished, and I lost my one printed copy, which is just as well, because I am sure it would make me cringe to re-read it. In my late teens I got an idea for a science fiction novel. I worked on it but never completed it. And by Grade 10 my English teacher was once again my mom, and she gave me a project.

Mom told me that I had to write a novel using the old adage to "write what you know". Up until that point, from the books about animals, to the story of a little sister I wished I'd had, to the romance and the science fiction, my projects had been heavily laced with imagination. I didn't really want to "write what I knew" at first, because I felt like what I knew was pretty boring and uneventful. I did have a friend who lived close by, and she and I would hang out a lot. We had a circle of friends. I used this as a basis to write a story about friendship.

In my early twenties I hit a rut. I wanted an original idea, and every time I sat down to write, nothing came to me. Events were unfolding, however that would lead to my first success with Nanowrimo. It took three attempts. I was at home with my six month old baby, and while she would sleep I would write. Completing that project gave me the confidence I needed to tackle a single sheet of loose leaf I had filled in pencil nearly a decade prior. It was just the intro to a story, but I couldn't think of how to continue for all that time.

Here's the thing about Nanowrimo: once you figure out how to write a 50K novel in thirty days, it's somehow easier and easier each year you attempt it. You figure out your own way of doing it. But in 2021 I decided that in 2022 I would write 365K words in a year: an average of a thousand words a day. They wouldn't have to be all fiction, but I would also try to write a novel. This year, I'm writing a thousand words a day, but I'm keeping the fiction goals down to short stories when I feel like writing them.

I do have another idea for a novel. It seems as though every time I write one, an idea for another takes its place. It's just that I'm waiting for the idea to fully form in my mind. You have to be patient with stories. Sometimes you start one and you have no idea where you are going with it, and you're just along for the ride. Other times, you've got a few pieces of an idea, and you have to wait to get more pieces to really get a clear picture of what the story will be.

I'm also watching my daughter become a writer in her own right. She has tons of ideas for stories, she just has to choose one to stick to and complete. I'm encouraging her to work on one this year, and write it until she reaches the end. I've also got an idea for a story that we can collaborate on. My mother is a writer, so my daughter is a third generation writer too. She's currently reading that novel I wrote in Grade 10, and she likes it. So, this was a thousand words, and it took me about two hours to write, with a lot of pauses to do other things. I can’t think of anything else to say for now, so I'll stop here.

#campnanowrimo #a thousand words a day #writerswriting

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pilferingapples · 3 years

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Hi!! I'm so sorry if this question comes off as stupid or uninformed, but I've always had it since I've read Les Mis... how does Bahorel manage his expenses? He comes from a peasant background and I'm guessing his parents weren't able to endow him with much wealth. Yet, he's been enrolling (though not attending) in law classes for eight years, so he must be paying for each year's tuition. I don't have the book on me, but I think I remember it saying that he had a fair bit of money to spend (or maybe I'm remembering that wrong.) But where does he get all this money from? Does he have a job? Or maybe I'm just stupid and farmers do get paid well? I don't know.

..Ok, you know what, Nonny? Not only are you not at all stupid, attempting to answer this question has rocked the very foundations of my understanding of what's going on here! Herein is a Mystery!! Indeed I cannot give you an answer, but I hope you'll journey with me as I explore some New (to me!) Questions!

So , first off, the Known Facts:

Bahorel's parents are peasants! The narration in 3.4.1 says so:

Il avait des parents paysans (he had peasant parents)

and Bahorel, in 3.4.1 , says so :

Il disait d'eux: Ce sont des paysans, et non des bourgeois; c'est pour cela qu'ils ont de l'intelligence (he said of them: They are peasants, and not bourgeois; that is why they're intelligent)

And peasants are of course kind of famously Not Very Wealthy ,but...

Il mangeait à rien faire une assez grosse pension, quelque chose comme trois mille francs.

and here the plot thickens and i enter the land of Linguistic Mystery!

Hapgood translates that line as :

He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

Donougher says

He consumed quite a considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs a year, doing nothing.

Rose:

He ate up a fairly large allowance, something like three thousand francs, doing nothing.

FMA:

Doing nothing he ate up a rather large allowance, something like three thousand francs.

Now I don't have my Wilbour with me, and I don't care what Denny says, but either way, the trend is clear, right? Every translator says "allowance" . Every translator says "allowance" ! And in modern English (and Rose and Donougher at the least are very definitely trying to be modern English friendly!) "allowance", in this context, would mean money from the family-- the allowance for a young adult in college. Right?

This is what I assumed! This is what everyone I know assumed !

BUT IT MIGHT BE WRONG?!?

look again at the French:

Il mangeait à rien faire une assez grosse pension, quelque chose comme trois mille francs.

The part being translated as "a large allowance" is "une assez gross pension". And that is not the French word for allowance! At least, not in the "money from home" sense.

What IS the word for "allowance" (in the money-from-parents sense)? Well, there are a lot of options. Allocation, indemnité, (those two are the words specifically used in examples about students getting money from home!) argent de poche. But pension doesn't seem to be it!

What does "pension" mean? Well, it can mean the money paid to a school or hotel for upkeep--but that would be money that was paid to the school , not something Bahorel was free to use on "nothing" (and also Paris law school was not a boarding school!); it really really doesn't work in context here, and seems to have been an unusual usage anyway.

Aside from that, and a far more common use, a pension was almost always used to mean...well, a pension ! an amount of money paid regularly by the government or a former employer, or paid out regularly from an individual's personal savings/investments.

So if I'm right about this reading of it (and I might not be!) , I think the question hidden in Bahorel's intro isn't "how can his parents afford to support him" but "how the heck is Bahorel, who is , realistically, all of 29 at most, and has been a student for 11 years, already getting a pension ??"

Most of the options seem iffy-- a job he did well enough at that they felt obligated to give him a pension at 2- years old, but didn't want to stay at?? a careful savings accumulated when he was what, 10?? --but there's certainly room for ideas there! (and yes I have indeed been having a lot of fun batting ridiculous theories around with friends today, but--)

I suspect the easiest answer on this is the one Hugo was probably thinking of-- a pension from the government for some sort of Art. That was the first source of financial stability for Hugo when he was in his 20s, after all-- a small but reliable pension for his first volume of poetry-- and he does frame Bahorel as being a very active Romantic, which sort of implies some sort of artistic output.

(...if that's right, it means Bahorel is fighting passionately to overthrow the government that's paying him a regular stipend. He can't be bought out!XD)

Anyway! I was going to get into theories on how Bahorel's parents could be supporting him, but now I think..honestly...they may not be?? Thank you for this question , you've caused me to reassess a very well-known passage! (sources used: Linguee, Wordreference, the 19C word enteries from this collection of dictionary entries over the decades!)

#Bahorel talk #long post #albeit under the cut #Nonny this has rattled my world thank you #I am very open to kind feedback on this !#sorry if anything's unclear! been researching all night and I am falling asleep

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firecooking · 2 years

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Since I've had some interest let me introduce y'all to my TUGS OC

Zero Marine's #6: Zaffre the Ocean Tug

She's an Ace Butch Lesbian and and uses She/Her pronouns but at the end of the day she honestly could not care what you call her. Her name is pronounced Zaa-free because she likes it more mispronounced than the cough it is in french.

She's my boat daughter basically, I've had her as an oc for years but I don't talk about her as much anymore since I've been in and out of the TUGS fandom. I designed her a few years ago and she lives in my humanoid au mostly, although she does exist as simply a tugboat too

I recently wrote a fic about how she arrived at Zero Marine in my humanoid au, Link to Ao3

Gonna put this under a read more but here is some more in depth info about her!

She was built in Vancouver and previously worked for Vancouver Tug. She can speak Canadian English and Canadian French and has a pronounced BC Canadian accent.

She's an ocean going tug but she's rather new [newer than Zip] and hyper, brash, and hot headed as well as not having much ability to filter out distractions. But while she's young and she can be without focus she's a hard worker and knows when to get serious, you'll never catch her slacking on a job or staring into space during an emergency.

She's very likely to throw hands if you get on her bad side, which despite here normal spacey and excitable personality, is very easy to do if you get her going. Her lip and brow scar are from a scuffle she had with Bluenose in her first week as a Zed Stack. She'll shoot first and then ask questions in most situations when she's upset.

In the humanoid images the other person depicted here is Zorran but he's not to scale with her in those images. She's about 6'3" to his 5'9" and built like, well, a ship. In tug form her and Hercules are roughly the same size but she's slightly more powerful [but not by much] since she's just over a decade newer. Though the two don't really butt heads about that.

Being the only two ocean tugs in the port they happily share the work load [especially since them being in port together isn't an every day occurrence]. Hercules also finds her fun company due to her quick to react attitude and bubbling eagerness and is happy to have someone from home who can be seen out of port occasionally. She also gets along well with Lillie. The three have a happy little friend group.

She is basically impartial to the Stars, she gets along with them on a baseline amicable level but besides Hercules it's a baseline amicability [though she has a soft spot for any switcher and OJ can steal her attention for hours with a "you want to hear a story?"]

Some of her interests are:

fucking with Bluenose [mostly pretending she can't speak English around only him, but occasionally slipping into English when he's not paying attention just to fuck with him, since her fighting him makes everything worse for everyone]

long trips at sea

going to new places and seeing new sights

rain

snow

riding rough oceans when she's not in any inherent danger

collecting random things that are shiny or peak her interest [boat wise it's more towards finding drift wood or old crates. Humanoid wise things like bottle caps and marbles]

sea glass/broken lanterns/plate glass that washes up/floats by

More on the humanoid spectrum but collecting various jars to keep said objects and sea glass in

Also on the humanoid spectrum is making things out of her various found objects, like wearable out of sea glass and bottle caps for example

Her relationship with the other Zed stacks:

Zorran: She really looks up to him, she'd follow him around like a puppy if she could. Zorran is annoyed with everyone anyways so her antics don't even phase him 90% of the time. Her and Zorran have light sibling dynamic, because someone has to make sure she doesn't touch lit candles or sink herself before she finishes coming into her hull. They work fairly well together but she has gotten Zorran to snap a couple times.

Zebedee: Have you ever seen a older sibling who is forced to take care of a younger one so there is a 4 year old with a stuffed rabbit staring at you in hot topic while a older teen is buying eyeliner and barely paying attention to the younger? That's basically it. They get along very well but he just cannot care enough to keep up 90% of the time she's going off. The two work perfectly fine with each other.

Zak: They are both very strong headed and brash, they clash often but that doesn't mean they don't have a soft spot for each other. Zak can get up in his own head about having to work with a female tug, but he doesn't really mean it 90% of the time, he's just an asshole on the outside. They can argue and bicker while working together but that isn't to say they don't work well together, they just need to bitch at each other start to finish to do so. If they start working amicably it's probably going to end in disaster

Zug: Their person relationship is mostly Zug not paying attention to her while she goes off, similar to Zebedee but at the end of the day he and her get along just fine, no more no less. However they work together very well. Zug's put up with Zip for all this time and he's very used to dealing with someone spacey and not quite sure about everything. The advantage he has with Zaffre is that he can't step all over her and because he can't generally cause any problems with his own ego or bad ideas they get work done well and fast.

Zip: They're basically the resident children and the amount of brain cells being used when they get onto something can drop into the negatives. Zaffre has the biggest soft spot of all the switchers for Zip, and Zip's barely intimidated by her so the two genuinely have a nice bond. They work well together but they've never had a coherent thought between them if it wasn't a 'act now its an emergency' situation.

#the fire burns #burnings #art #illistration #this is tugs #Zaffre #z stacks #tugs zorran #zero marine #original character

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luimagines · 3 years

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(Verisimilitude- OKAY thats just redundant let's shorten it to Veri Anon) Honestly I was just super impressed with the fact you even have a schedule up for this and stuff, you're an amazing writer haha! I love the way you make characters seem... Human? Like I said before they sound modern but that also brings up the benefit of easily humanising them, I've never seen someone do it so effectively haha (ESPECIALLY FOUR HOLY SCHMOLY IVE BECOME A HUGE FOUR SIMP HELP HELP) I am super sorry if that English comment upset you in any way though!! I personally really enjoy the language but I'm sorry if you've encountered any bad feelings related to it... If you'd like to speak on it that's okay!! You should be given a space to bring out the feels!! Remember to stay hydrated too !

I just made a bunch of prompts in one day and managed to get a week ahead at first and ... didn't stop for a while.

So I'm pretty ahead now!

And thank you! It's not always easy to make a character relatable, or someone you might meet in real life, but I've been trying my best.

And as for the English comment I was never upset with you, don't take it that.

Like I said there's a story there, so I'll put it under the cut for one else who wants to read it. Truthfully I hadn't thought about it in years so when I read your comment I was thrown back nearly a decade.

I was in a bit of funk for the next few hours.

Story Time.

Ok so context..

I've been bilingual my whole life.

My father is American while my mom is Costa Rican.

She moved up here with him and things happened and she got stuck while my dad moved away back to Costa Rica. He's not in the picture nor is he important to the story.

For a little more context, I don't look my mom. I'm white. My brother and I take after our father, unfortunately.

But anyway, my mother side of the family only speaks Spanish.

So, when we finally get to see them for the first time in ten years. The first time I'm meeting them when I'll be able to remember them and the first time they're meeting my brother in person and vice versa. My brother does not speak Spanish but we've been working on it.

And while we were visiting, apparently some guy who my grandma and aunt loved to have around visited almost everyday.

But my mom doesn't know this guy and neither do we, but since we're just staying there for a while it's like, whatever right? It's their house and we don't have a lot of time here to begin with so we'll bare with it.

He was annoying.

But again, it's whatever right?

Now, one day, my aunt wants to give me highlights in my hair. She was a stylist before she retired and I was wiling because, why not?

They looked great by the way when we were done.

But I'm sitting by the kitchen table while my aunt gets to work and gets everything ready and in comes the guy.

He gets into a conversation with my mom.

Apparently he's traveled around the world or something like that (I don't remember what for or if he just could, he apparently knows like seven languages).

Anyway, I don't know exactly what he was thinking but he starts complaining about the US and Americans in general and who we're all this, that and the other thing. And I guess he went off because he knew we came from the States? Like oh this woman would know what I'm talking about and since we're both Costa Ricans she'll agree or something?

My mom did not agree.

He says he visited.

My mom tells him she's been living there for sixteen years at this point.

And the people here are not what he's describing.

She says she's sorry if he's had a bad experience in the short time he was there but he's still wrong. It's not everyone.

They got back and forth for a bit and my mom is trying to be as respectful as she can because again, she doesn't know him and this is her mother's house and her mother likes him. Gotta play it cool. We're not there to make enemies.

Now, I'm right there.

Like three or four feet away. Barely over a meter of distance away.

It's a small house.

And he's not being really quiet either.

I'm not exactly hidden away either. He even makes eye contact with me a few times, because I'm not trying to hide the fact that I'm listening in.

And I'm already hurt a bit, because I know I'm included in every "every American' generalization he's made.

This guy gets the memo that my mom isn't going to agree any time soon.

So he somewhat changes the topic.

And instead starts talking about the language instead of the people.

English is dull.

English is boring.

English is too simple.

Every word is one syllable.

English, because of this lack of complexity, is barbaric and stupid.

It's a stupid language.

Compared to Greek, French, German, Spanish- why the hell would you choose to speak English?

He's not talking to me though.

He's talking to my mom.

To my mom's credit, she defends what she can and doesn't back down from this guy.

She may not know him, but she's definitely not scared of him.

I bet she speaks better English than him anyway. But-

I'm right there.

I'm twelve years old.

It's not like I chose to be American or that I chose to speak English as my first language.

I'm listening to all of this.

Because I'm getting my hair done only a meter away. I can't move.

I don't remember everything that he said word for word, but I felt horrible.

I remember I had tears run down my face but I was quite and I didn't move so I don't think anyone really noticed.

My aunt is there too, doing my hair, but she also likes this guy and she's only ever visited the states and she doesn't speak English. She has no way to refute his claims.

And what could I say?

What's going to get this grown man to stop?

That day, I guess my mom scared him with how much she wasn't believing him and how much she questioned everything he was saying. Because it was more than just that but I was gone by then.

They talked for a long time.

Debated is a better word than talked I guess.

Whatever the case, he didn't visit everyday after that.

My mom and I felt better after that.

We move on and that's that.

I don't think he knew I could understand him

I suppose he took one look at me and thought I only spoke English- he wouldn't be the first person from there to make that assumption.

Which is fair. I'm white. I don't look my mom. I look like I'm not from there. I look American.

But I could and I did.

I suppose it was something I internalized.

Because English is simple.

It's supposed to be a spoken language.

It only gets complicated when you have to put in paper. Reading and writing it is hard and there are some words that I know I'm never going to spell right on the first try even if I lived for ten thousand years.

I never it considered it beautiful and even less from others who have it as a second or third or forth language. Only that it... just.... exists. And they more less have to learn it with how the system works. Whether it be racism or capitalism or any other isms that have put this on them.

Because why would they do so willingly?

I don't know if I would have considered it to be anything else if you never said anything.

So I wanted to thank you.

Thank you.

#pinky replies #pinky speaks #Another thing that bugs be is how American are always the but of the joke #and I get it #We're not the more intellectual people #we're not that smart #I'm a victim to it as well #I'll laugh along #because it's deserved and I know that's how it is #I don't offended easily either #so like yeah #that's us #we're dumb #wow we're so dumb #But what I see more often than not is when we try to poke back for little things #we're suddenly attacked with things that actually hurt #why can't we get it on the fun?#why is it only funny when it's at our expense?#why do we have to put up with it but others (usually Europeans) get to say something and we lose anywyay #I don't get it #but I'll laugh along #and smile and bare it #because I'm American #I'm not that smart #What would I know?#But don't my inbox telling me anything else #I know #Just venting #this probably shouldn't be on *this* blog #but oh well

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buzzdixonwriter · 3 years

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I've Told You A Million Times To Avoid Cliches Like The Plague

Recently a year old re-print of a 1959 Writer’s Digest article by Donald Westlake started circulating on social media.

First off, if you don’t know who Donald Westlake is, go find out. You like rough edge crime stories, try his Parker books published under his Richard Stark pseudonym; you like funny crime, dig up the Dortmunder series under his own name; you like odd ball history, check out Under An English Heaven “being a true recital of the events leading up to and down from the British invasion of Anguilla on March 19th, 1969 in which no one was killed but many people were embarrassed.”

Second, Westlake was a serious writer in that he took the craft of writing Very Seriously indeed, no matter how light hearted and funny some of his books could be. He wrote a blistering letter (later turned into an essay) in the fanzine Xero (starts on page 97) where he excoriated the sci-fi field of the era as being neither artistically nor commercially viable.*

So who am I to challenge this master’s assertions?

Well, I take the craft of writing Very Seriously indeed myself, and to quote a late, lamented friend: “Fools rush in, and there we are…”

The Writer’s Digest article is a mixed bag, partially a quick off-the-cuff job for a few bucks, partially a valid observation on pitfalls in writing popular fiction in September of 1959.

Bear the date in mind, it’s crucial to this discussion.

This was an era when Americans read a lot. Millions of people subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post or dozens of other slick magazines (not to mention the digests, which are what the form the old genre pulps mutated into), and this meant each week dozens of new short stories or serialized novels were available to them (and that’s not counting non-fiction).

Westlake in 1959 was commenting on an over saturated market, one where too many writers and editors simply replayed old tropes over again and again because they knew a significant portion of their audience felt comfortable with them (this is particularly true in the slicks, more so than the digests).

Westlake divides his 36 plots into three groups: Mysteries, science fiction, and slicks.

My first quibble lays in what Westlake means when he says “plot”.

From the original article:

“A plot is a planned series of connected events, building through conflict to a crisis and ending in a satisfactory conclusion. A formula is a particular plot which has become stale through over-use.

“My own working definition of plot is what I call “5C.” First, a character. Anybody at all, from Hemingway’s old man to Salinger’s teenager. Second, conflict. Something for that character to get upset about, and for the reader to get upset about through the character. Third, complications. If the story runs too smoothly, without any trouble for the character, the reader isn’t going to get awfully interested in what’s going on. Fourth, climax. The opposing forces in conflict are brought together. Like the fissionable material in an H-bomb and there’s an explosion. Fifth, conclusion. The result of the explosion is known, the conflict is over, the character has either won or lost, and there are no questions left unanswered.

“5C: Character. Conflict. Complications. Climax. Conclusion.”

All well and good, but in his article Westlake provides almost no examples of same.

To me, a plot is a quick summary of a story that lays out beginning, middle, and end: G.I. Joe captures a Cobra secret weapon but doesn’t realize what it is. Cobra needs to get the weapon back without alerting the Joes to its potential, and the Joes must figure out what Cobra is after before they can get their hands on it.

(There’s a lot you can do with that plot. It can be a slam-bang action oriented story, a techno thriller, or a slapstick farce depending on your angle of attack.)

What Westlake presents are more along the lines of story springboards: ”What would happen if…”

A lot of the situations Westlake presents are rife with potential: “John Smith is sitting in the park, feeding the other squirrels, when a beautiful girl runs up, kisses him, and whispers, ‘Pretend you know me.’”

Okay, let’s list the possibilities, shall we?

She’s being stalked by a creepy guy and needs protection…

She’s been hired to set Smith up for some reason…

She’s mentally disturbed from trauma in her past…

She’s a flipping psycho intending to kill Smith…

She’s a secret agent slipping a secret code in Smith’s pocket…

She’s a silly college girl doing this on a dare, unaware Smith is a serial killer…

Six stories right off the top of my head, and each one could be played in several different ways, from deadly serious to over the top farce.

That’s a lot of potential in a single trope.

Here’s another: “John Smith, private eye, is sitting at his desk, when Marshall Bigelow, thimble tycoon, trundles in waving thousand-dollar bills and shouting, ‘My daughter has disappeared!’”

Well, d’uh, isn’t that what private eyes do? Find missing people? Or uncover who committed a crime when people don’t want the police involved? Or find out if a spouse is cheating?

Name a private eye story that doesn’t play off some variant of this. From Murder, My Sweet to Harper to Shaft, hiring a private eye to find a missing person is a perfect way to get a story started. “You find my Velma.”

Of the dozen story springboards he offers in his mystery section, none are unworkable, though two remain overly familiar to this day and probably are best avoided unless the writer can provide some incredible new spin.

The science fiction section is more problematic, and here’s where I suspect Westlake was slumming (there ought to be an article on the type of articles one shouldn’t write for Writer’s Digest that includes articles like the one Westlake wrote).

Seven of the eleven clearly reference classics of the genre, and if this wasn’t a deliberate dig at those authors on Westlake’s part, one can only argue that while they may be shopworn now due to retreads by the untalented, these ideas remain strong enough to support a good story.

The other four remain headscratchers. Two -- Adam & Eve and “atoms are tiny solar systems” -- are indeed hoary old ideas, burned off by EC comics earlier in the decade.

I can’t say there weren’t thirteen year old aspiring sci-fi writers who submitted these to publishers and editors back in the day, but they seem more likely to have been found on the pages of fanzines (i.e., what sci-fi geeks had before the Internet) than a professional slush pile.

We know Westlake was active to some degree in sci-fi fandom of that era; could those two tropes have come from seeing those stories in the pages of amateur magazines?

The remaining two ideas represent a ribald attitude I don’t recall seeing in sci-fi digests of that era.

Oh, sex was starting to rear its beautiful head in science fiction, and there were a few cutting edge stories, but these two seem more like set ups for smutty fanfic, not genuine submissions of the time.

Again, something I’d expect to see in a fanzine, not a professional market.

Like I said, I think this tips off that Westlake is having us on, that this whole article came off the top of his head in a matter of minutes instead of being carefully thought out.

On the other hand, his critique of slick magazine fiction seems pretty spot on and devastating.

While he covers several sub-genres, his primary focus seems to be on stories written for a female audience, the type found in McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal. He doesn’t come close to a dozen examples, however, as several (even those labeled as sub-examples) are just the same story springboard in different settings.

Two of his bad examples, however, stand out quite clearly as a dislike (whether personal / professional / aesthetic, I can’t tell) aimed at a specific series of stories found in The Saturday Evening Post, i.e., the Alexander Botts, tractor salesman stories of William Hazlett Upson.

One of Westlake’s verboten plots isn’t even a plot but a literary device: “Any story told in an exchange of letters”. The other one that ties into Upson’s oeuvre is “Joe Doakes, a traveling salesman for a paper clip company, gets involved in some pretty unbelievable adventures in a small town in the Midwest. The other participants are a local belle and a salesman for a rival paper clip company.”

The two combined describe Upson’s Botts stories to a T. The second one is richly ironic since Westlake eventually used the same basic premise for his Dortmunder series (the only change being Dortmunder is a thief, not a salesman; po-tay-to, po-tah-to).

Finally, Westlake left himself a huge out with “If you can take one of the 36 clichés listed above, and give it a brand new twist, so it doesn’t look like the same story any more, you may have a sale on your hands. If you search hard enough in the magazines on the stands today, you’ll find one or more of these variations currently in print.”

Look, I get it. I’ve faced deadline doom before myself, and more than once have fired off a short piece that contained all the depth of a dixie cup.

This isn’t the worst writing advice I’ve seen, but it’s far from the best, and Westlake coulda and shoulda done better.

* He wasn’t alone in his opinion, though ironically the 1960s proved to be one of the most fertile eras for the genre. Yet Westlake and other writers such as John D. MacDonald, Frederic Brown, and John Jakes left sci-fi for other genres because it couldn’t support them either as artists or professionals.

#Donald Westlake #writing #how this writer's mind works #William Hazlett Upson

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bestworstcase · 4 years

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How'd you learn so much about languages, if you don't mind me asking? I've always wanted to try my hand at building a language of my own, but never had even the faintest clue of where to start and how to do it correctly

i never mind questions!!

anyway, i don’t know a lot about languages, really. i know enough to leverage a very powerful conlang-building tool to get a result that feels Real Enough For Fantasy, which is very different from having true expertise in linguistics, which are very complicated and very confusing. i have wikipedia-level knowledge, but as a writer that’s really all you need, though of course genuine expertise or experience is always helpful.

some tips for expanding your general knowledge:

familiarize yourself with IPA notation, phonemes, and basic phonological concepts — vulgarlang actually has a decent basic rundown of this here and an IPA chart with audio here. this is important because the first thing you need to know about a language is what phonemes it uses.

pick a language. look it up on wikipedia. read the whole article, and look up any terms you don’t understand. pay attention not just to the discussions of syntax, morphology, spelling, phonology, but also to any information about the historical and cultural context of the language itself. culture is intrinsically linked to language, and this is something to keep in the back of your mind when you’re building a conlang. repeat this step frequently, with many different languages.

study the grammar of any languages you speak. this is especially important if you are a native english speaker who grew up in the united states in the last couple decades, because that means you probably weren’t taught english grammar in school beyond the absolute basics. a good way to strengthen your understanding of grammar in that case is actually to go looking for ESL resources, like this.

the goal here isn’t to become An Expert but rather to just get yourself a basic grasp of the fundamental building blocks that make up a language, so you can take them apart and put them back together in a naturalistic way.

now as for the actual process of conlanging, that goes basically like this:

#1: decide on phonemes and orthography, ie what the sounds are and how they are spelled. for example, here’s the consonants saporian uses (phonetic IPA on top, spelling on bottom)

k | χ | d | ð | ʝ | x | l | m | n | p | ɾ | s | ɕ | ʃ | t | θ | z | ʑ | ʒ c | ch| d | dh| gh| h | l | m | n | p | r | s | ś | sh| t | th| z | ź | zh

and there’s the broad vowels (same deal):

a | ɑ | ʏ | ɪ | ɔ a | ā | ē | ī | o

and the slender vowels:

æ| ɛ | i | eɪ̯ a | e | i | ae/ay

(*saporian has something called vowel harmony, which is where you have two classes of vowels that must match within a word. so in saporian every word is either broad, with broad vowels, or slender, and all prefixes/suffixes have a broad and slender version, there’s rules for compounding mismatched words etc. etc.)

(**eɪ̯ is a diphthong and it makes the sound “ay” as in “day.” you can find every other character here on an IPA chart if you’re interested in the pronunciation.)

at this stage you also want to decide what, if any, illegal combinations there are: are there sounds that are never allowed to go together in a word? for example, in saporian, you can’t have two fricatives in a row [fricatives being ch, dh, gh, h, s, ś, sh, th, z, ź, zh].

and finally, what kind of sound changes are there? for example in saporian, the phoneme “k” changes into a “χ” (c→ch) at the end of a word and when it occurs in front of a broad vowel other than ɔ (o) or the slender vowels ɛ and i. or as another example, in english the letter “c” turns from a k into an s if it’s before the letter e or i. [i think in general with a conlang, you should apply sound change rules with an eye towards making things easier to pronounce]

this all gives you the basic “sound” of a language. again using saporian as an example—notice how many of the consonants here are fricatives? that makes saporian a very sibilant, somewhat phlegmy language.

#2: decide on word structure. what sounds and combinations of sounds tend to occur at the beginning of words? in the middle? at the end? does your language have a consistent stress pattern and if so what is it (and if not, does stress encode lexical meaning—are there words that are otherwise identical but have different meanings based on where they’re stressed? eg in saporian—cathay (cathAY) is the god of the dead, but cáthay (CATHay) is the number five.)

#3: based on all this, start creating words. [or pop these settings into vulgarlang and let it generate words for you.] if you’re creating words by hand, think about things like shared etymological roots and how a given word can be morphed into other, related words, like this:

Turn a Verb into an Adjective resulting from the Verb to torture → tortured Remove the infinitive ending. Shift the vowels (broad ↔ slender). Turn a Verb into an Adjective causing the Verb to torture → torturous Remove the infinitive ending. Shift the vowels. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɪʃ or -iʃ). Turn a Verb into a Noun that is the act of the Verb to torture → torture Remove the infinitive ending. Turn a Verb into a Noun that is the product of the Verb to torture → trauma Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɑn or -æn). Turn a Verb into a Noun that is doing the Verb to torture → torturer Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-aɾ or -eɪ̯ɾ).

this part is important because it produces a language that feels cohesive and like something that could have developed naturally over time. words that are related to each other should sound similar to each other. if you’re using vulgarlang you can do this part automatically by setting up affixes, which are pretty impressively robust in terms of what you can do with a bit of regex and basic understanding of how if/then/else statements:

VERB.TO.PRODUCT.NOUN = IF (ɪʝ)# THEN (ɪʝ) > ɑn IF (iɾ)# THEN (iɾ) > æn IF (æm)# THEN (æm) > æn IF (eɪ̯)# THEN eɪ̯ >> æn IF (i|ɛ|æ)# THEN V >> æn IF (i|ɛ|æ) THEN -æn IF (a|ɔ|ɪ|ʏ|ɑ)# THEN V >> ɑn IF (a|ɔ|ɪ|ʏ|ɑ) THEN -ɑn "to torture → torture Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɑn or -æn).

#4: at this stage you also want to start thinking about grammar. what is the basic word order—subject-verb-object, like in english? VSO? OSV? SOV?—and what about other parts of speech? do adjectives come before or after the nouns they modify? what about adverbs?

how does your language do adpositions—are they prepositions (like in english) or postpositions, or is that meaning conveyed in other ways (eg through verb conjugation, noun case, or affixes?)

how do you create questions? how do you negate a phrase? how does counting work? how do you encode temporal or spatial meaning?

how does noun declension work in your language, and how many different noun cases are there? what about verb conjugation—do you have just one conjugation for your basic tenses, or does additional information get encoded in a conjugated verb (ie english i ran, you ran, he ran, we ran, you all ran, they ran, vs german ich lief, du liefst, er lief, wir liefen, ihr lieft, sie/Sie liefen). how are plurals created?

does your language have an informal and formal you? and what other pronouns are there? (for example, saporian has four gendered third person pronouns: za (she), śa (he), źa (neuter), and ān (it)—but only one “you,” sā (singular) and dhām (plural), because formality/respect is encoded through different means.)

#5: finally, what are some exceptions to the rules? all real languages have them. are there irregular verbs, and if so how are they conjugated? are there situations in which morphological or phonological rules don’t apply? i would keep this part pretty simple, but do try to work in a small handful of exceptions because it does make a conlang feel a lot more real.

for example:

in saporian, most adverbs begin with the prefix ɕʏ- (śē-) or ɕɛ- (śe-), but a handful [those beginning with any vowel or x (h), unless they are derived from an adjective] do not. so āram (now) and hagh (maybe/perhaps) are adverbs that lack the prefix.

and with most affixes, the prefix or suffix replaces the vowel at the beginning or end of the word being affixed, but the two honorific prefixes [ʒa- (zha-) or ʒæ- (zha-), kɾʏ- (crē-) or kɾɛ- (cre-)] instead lose their vowels if they’re being affixed to a word that begins with a vowel.

and i’ve been kicking around ideas for a handful of irregular verbs that don’t end with the three standard infinitive endings [-ɪʝ (-īgh), iɾ (-ir), or -æm (-am)] and are conjugated differently but i haven’t settled on precisely how yet so For Now those irregular verbs still take the standard conjugation suffixes.

#bitter snow #Anonymous

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