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intuitive-divinations · 10 months

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Hey lovelies💖! This reading is all about what your FS will be like and some places you could meet them💋. Take a few breaths and use your intuition 👁️ . Let's do this!

P.S ~ the confirmations for this pick a card can apply to you and/or your FS. Also, any channeled phrases I put in quotes “” are also phrases that you may have heard or will hear soon.

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✨ Pick ~ A ~ Gif ✨

Pile 1

Channeled song for how they feel:

Awwww pile 1 you’re FS wants you so bad! They’ve been manifesting you for a long a** time. Right now they’re waiting for some cycles to close before the universe can make your paths cross. They’re bubbling with excitement at the thought of your first meeting. I’m seeing that what they “can’t take anymore” of is the waiting and anticipation. Their inner self is telling them that they can persevere. Also, a big lesson they’re learning is to not become desperate for relationships. I think that they might’ve been prone to settling for less than they deserved. Maybe even had some self-esteem / boundary issues. On the positive side I see that they’re making progress through their trial and tribulations. This is a very passionate, intense and devoted FS. I’m seeing that they won’t like to be away from you for long because they’re “losing precious amounts of time they could’ve spent with you”. Their heart aches without you near. As for how you’ll meet them, I feel that you’re going to be brought into their life. So as this person develops more self-awareness/ understanding the universe will make your path cross your FS’s. I’m getting concerts, clubs, hangouts/bars, comedy club, karaoke, downtown, out of town/ travelling as possible places to meet them!

The marvelous mrs Maisel, baking, infinity symbols, artist, sun dial, wand, luggage, suitcase, hiking, thumbs up, gardening, shovels, aprons, headscarves, red jewels, desert, cactus, cheetahs, 777, 3 hands 🖐️🖐️🖐️, sun roof, limousine, feeling wind with your hands, 70’s time period, comedian, late night talk shows

Pile 2

Channeled song for how they feel:

For your FS, pile 2 there’s no other way to say it but your FS is a R O M A N T I C ! How sweet 🍭 ! I’m feeling patience, passion, adoration, and tender affection. Attention is screaming in my head! This group is going to get a lot of attention from your FS. Constant check-ins, consistent healthy communication, words of affirmation, etc. They have all this love available for you because they understand how to refill and keep their own cup abundant! So now they can share their love with others. I’m seeing that you’re going to fall in love with how much they support you / root for you. The encouragement you get from your FS will melt your heart. Your person is the type to write you love letters and give you flowers along with them. Anything just to see you happy. You might not be used to someone supporting you / having your back. You could also have had a lot of responsibility since you were a child. This person will heal your inner child with their generous love. I see you both eventually living in a big house together. Things will start slow with your FS before you get to that point. They value “setting the mood” and perfecting the environment for everything. I’m hearing “there is a time for everything”. “Let’s take our time”. They could love planning parties or hangouts/events. I’m seeing that one of you is very clumsy. But the other will think it’s so cute and charming. A few places you could meet your FS are: museums, public gardens, historical/tourist sites, club, official legal type of building ???, speaking hall, theater, and opera, hobby stores.

Sandcastles, stars, your fs could be French, sunglasses, bell bottoms, someone has a ton of keys on their keychain, sun flowers, pixie cut/short hair, bartender, mixed drinks, grape juice, apple juice, pearl necklace, trident 🔱, arched eyebrows, mole(s) on face, Disney princesses, spilling a drink(s), vineyards, orchards, water pitcher, lanterns, French music

Pile 3

Channeled song for how they feel:

Omg pile 3 your FS is so adorable! Being with your FS is going to feel like a dream. I'm hearing its like "walking on clouds". You both will feel as if you're on "cloud 9". Your FS is going to show you how fun life can be. This is someone you can discover the world with. No matter what your person follows their heart. Their soul is optimistic and hopeful, paired with a "glass half full" mentality. Once they know where their heart stands they make plans to fulfill their desires. You might be suspicious of this relationship because of how "too good to be true" it seems. You might try looking for red flags and ironically get more suspicious when you don't find any. Relax, don't let your worries trouble you! Your relationship is going to be filled with good vibes only. You both will get along very well, seamlessly. Also, you will have a telepathic connection, from finishing each others sentences to dreaming about each other. I wouldn't be surprised if you both dream about each other before you first meet. Potential places I'm getting for your first meeting have active energy. Event centers, adventure parks, recreational parks/centers, amusement park, historical site, in a class learning a skill/sport, while travelling in a new place, outdoor competition, a celebration. I feel that there is going to be some type of element of fun/adventure and learning at the place you will meet. This person will grab your hand and take you on an adventure but you don't mind following them throughout life!

Seeing flags, photography/photographer, artist, fire placements, entrepreneurs, investor/investing, getting a new job, lottery, Calendars, cute/planners, dark hair, flower jewelry, bird baths/ fountain, ropes/nets, attractive hands, animal lover, furry boots, moss, sage, beaded jewelry, tangled headphones and shoelaces, seed bugs, bug landing on you, hourglass, shield, grim reaper, squirrels, rabbits foot

Pile 4

Channeled song for how they feel:

For this group I’m channeling a cute awkward energy! I get a nerdy vibe from this groups FS. This is totally the hot nerdy person x hot cool person trope. You’re the hot cool person. Don’t fret they’re very attractive as well but they don’t realize it for some reason. Your FS’s music taste is pretty lit, it has a lot of bass. Out of all the things to expect you wouldn’t expect them to have their type of music taste. You will feel how nervous they are around you. It’s not a bad nervousness at all, they are just REALLY interested in you. Omg you literally give them “the butterflies”! How cute! They might even stutter a little because of how nervous they are. When you first meet them, I’m hearing that you won’t consider them as a potential FS. You might actually even not notice them. LMFAO but hear me out 👂!! I get the vibe maybe your type currently isn’t nerdy. You might even be scared to break a pattern of toxic relationships because you’re afraid to be vulnerable with someone. Trust me this person will change that. They will make themselves known to you no matter how much they blush and stutter. Your FS is going to prioritize being present for you. This is a very loyal person! Like literally if you looked through their phone you’d see videos of game walkthroughs/tutorials and twitch gamers etc instead of suspicious texts with exes 😭💀. You could already be a gamer or be someone who isn’t that interested in gaming. Regardless i’m hearing you’re going to be playing some types of games together. And working together in your little game worlds. They’d totally buy you a matching console or build/create a custom gaming area beside theirs. You both will enjoy the time you spend playing together! 🥹

Seeing a mad cat, 333, berry plants/bush, whales, orcas, guardians, peace signs ✌🏼 ☮️ , blue cars, mints, purple shirt, heart, camouflage, social drinking, video edits, gamer, sims 4, wicked whims, anime, twitch streamer, call of duty, mary Jane, mirrors, 111

Pile 5

Channeled song for how they feel:

Group 5 you’re going to be your FS’s muse. You’ll be a source of inspiration for them. There’s something about observing you. They love to watch you even if you’re doing the most mundane things. It’s like they discover a new layer to you every time they observe. You’ve got the whole effortless, natural beauty vibe going on. Your person really likes it! I mean REALLY REALLY likes it. I think your beauty is what attracts their eyes and your behavior/personality keeps them interested. You're hypnotic and alluring. Potentially having a siren-like energy. Your FS is very articulate and expressive. With an ability to keep people listening to them. While you're more introverted and prefer to be in your own world. Do you know Barbie and Kens dynamic? Your FS is going to have Ken energy. They just love to be there for you in any way they can. It doesn’t matter if you’re grumpy or excited etc your person will always try to keep you smiling. I’m seeing that your FS is going to hug you and hold you a lot. Channeled meeting places/areas: museum, art/history/english class, cafe, photo shoot, photobooths, theater, coliseum, networking events for creatives, social media. As an occupation, your FS would most likely be in a creative artistic field. I see them using you as inspiration for their photographs. Or your person might be an artist and ask "can I paint you?". You could even have a book dedicated to you from your FS if they happen to be a writer. Either way, one day after admiring you for awhile you'll be asked to have your essence somehow incorporated into their creative passion. They would love to show you the beautiful person they see through their eyes!

Yellow suitcase, firetrucks, “go be it”, car accident, 777, 7777, graffiti, energy balls, reiki healing, 420, born on 4/20, artist, prominent Jupiterian, Venusian and/or Nodal placements, having to pee a lot, butterfly needles, shots/syringes, “the pot calling the kettle block”, “there’s a first time for everything ”, the name Emily, dentist appointment, dragonflies, flying planes, wearing blue, throat chakra, Matt , Lee, writer, podcasts, Hercules, cramps, soap, models

Pile 6

Channeled song for how they feel:

As I was tapping into your FS energy I felt like I was in fog💀. Your FS feels mysterious. They are the strong silent type. How can I put it ? Let’s just say your FS prefers to let their actions speak for themselves. Your FS's personal style is also very quiet in terms of colors. They'll wear slot of greys, blacks, navy blues, etc. You will probably wear more colors than them. They're very adept at managing finances. This person always wants your second opinion. They really value it. Taking your feelings into account comes naturally to them. I’m also really getting a chef vibe for some reason. One of you or both of you are foodies and love trying new yummy food. From walking around downtown and trying new food to having a romantic late night walk. Yes you’re going to be walking a lot in your relationship! A lot of your future favorite moments with your FS will be while you two are holding hands, and strolling at night. I’m seeing you both eventually get a dog together that will go out for walks with you too. How adorable ! During your walks you’ll notice their opinions. To you their opinions will be so interesting and different. Not just that but their opinions have an edge of humor to them. I’m hearing late night chuckles drifting through the night air. This is giving me Roger and Anita from 101 Dalmatians. I feel like their job will include music and/or food. Possible places you’ll meet your FS: at restaurants, wine tastings, farmers market, farm, somewhere you buy plants, garden parks, orchestra performance

Butter pecan ice cream, lollipop, ear problems, protein drinks, untied shoelaces, 101 Dalmatians movie, margarita, band, map, moonlight, hat with flowers on it, meteor shower, shooting stars, explosion, “surprise”, surprise party, initials: a p d b f t j i m, black leaf, your plant dying, Mushrooms, ukulele, things being in a set of 3, "you'll always be my baby", mel, melissa, Malcolm, Adriana, Taurus placements, passing by someone playing an instrument, mountains, crocodiles, alligators, peacocks, unicorn, werewolf, deja vu, orchestra, Tinkerbell

Thanks so much 😽 !!

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heliocharis · 2 years

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Left My Friend’s Body Outside the Mithraeum: One New Zealander’s account of the New Zealand stuff in Nona the Ninth

A few points before we begin:

I’ve quoted everything out of context, but probably don’t read this if you don’t want to be spoiled for the book.

I’m just one person (a Pākehā North Islander millennial, for context), but hopefully I caught most of it. Please tell me if you see anything I missed!

If you see something and think, ‘Tumblr user junozeta, why have you included this piece of information when it is very easily Google-able,’ it’s for the sake of completeness.

Kia ora!

Dramatis personae

Stop It, name assumed, lies under counter at dairy, red colour, big sized, four legs

Dairy: A corner store.

John 20:8

Dilworth. Otago. Auckland. Overseas to Corpus. (She likes the word corpus; it sounds nice and fat.) Then another year abroad, where he got the grant and met the men who would make things happen. Special pleading with the New Zealand government and Asia-Pacific Environmental, at his suggestion, then back to the facility outside Greytown.

Here John is reciting his credentials. Dilworth is a private boys’ boarding school in Auckland. (ETA: Please see this reblog by sixth-light for better context.) Auckland and Otago will be referring to the universities, which are notably the only two in NZ with medical schools. I will add that having studied more in NZ than overseas does not afford you a lot of prestige.

Greytown is a small town (population 2,720 as of 2021) in the lower North Island, near Wellington. (I note here that Trentham, the presumptive namesake of the Second House’s Trentham, is also near Wellington, as is Maymorn, which Tamsyn Muir has said Mercymorn was originally named after.)

Chapter 1

“Is that pikelet mix?” she said.

Pikelet: Like a pancake, but smaller and denser.

Palamedes stood like he was playing a game of Hot Chocolate and the tagger was looking right at him. Hot Chocolate was in fashion with her friends at the moment and Nona wanted to get really good at it.

Putting this here to state for the record that I’m not familiar with Hot Chocolate as a name for a game of that kind. (ETA: An anon was, though, as a different name for Red Light, Green Light. See, not all of NZ is the same.)

I’ve met leaders like Unjust Hope before.

“Unjust Hope” could be from “The Ikons” by James K. Baxter, a famous New Zealand poet.

John 5:20

He said, It was the last one that was getting to me. I knew all those bodies by name. Funny to say, but they were my mates, you know? I’d worked on them for such a long time, and they’d given us so much, and now they were going to get dumped in some concrete skip because after what we’d done to them they couldn’t be cremated or buried safely. I hated that.

Mates: Friends. Classic Kiwi.

Skip: A dumpster.

I didn’t have to worry about the public or the media—we had a pet cop, P—. She’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD.

MoD: Probably self-explanatory, but Ministry of Defence.

We only had the demo cans; the mass-produced ones were made in a Five Eyes factory in Shenzhen.

Five Eyes: A surveillance alliance between NZ, Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. As of 2022, not actively military, nor ostensibly involved with China. Much to think about.

I went around to everyone, talking to my favourites—I know it was weird having favourites, but let’s bloody face it, I’d gone weird—not even saying goodbye, just saying it’ll be fine, hang on for me, kia kaha, kia māia.

Kia kaha, kia māia: Well-known Māori phrase meaning “be strong, be brave”.

John 15:23

You wouldn’t believe how stupid guys get over compliments on our looks, I was vain as.

Vain as: “[adjective] as” is a classic Kiwi way to say that something is extremely [adjective].

P— said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther.

Māori TV: Worth noting here that this is a TV channel, and not a generic reference.

Someone’s Honda. Someone’s Mazda. Someone’s four-wheel drive. Someone’s shed. A Macca’s sign.

Shed: A garage.

Macca’s: McDonald’s.

A— and M— moved in with me, and G— set up outside; he was sleeping in his ute. C— was staying with N—, long days. She left us early in the morning and came back the next day with sausage rolls for breakfast.

Ute: A pickup truck. (Short for “utility vehicle”.)

Sausage rolls: A classic NZ food.

You hear all the cicadas in the grass, you hear the dogs in the next town over barking. You hear the moreporks in the trees and the possums skittering over shed roofs.

Morepork: A native owl (Ninox novaeseelandiae).

Possums: Worth noting that NZ has the Australian kind (Trichosurus vulpecula).

He was the bravest dog I’d ever met. Half Chihuahua, half pug. Nan called him Ulysses S. Grunt.

Maybe worth noting here that “Grant” and “Grunt” are pronounced much more alike in an NZ accent than they would be in a North American one.

Chapter 9

Cam ducked into a bakery and came out with a warm and probably radioactive paper bag of pastries that had been under the bakery light the whole time.

Almost certainly a reference to this iconic cultural moment.

She had already got her towel and the old shirt she used to swim in—much easier to go naked, but the others had all objected to this, and Cam had said it would make her a sniper target—and her jandals, and then after masks were tied and hats put on they walked to the beach in the low dusk.

Jandals: Flip-flops. Classic Kiwi.

“I’d give Palamedes the hiding of his fucking life if he wasn’t renting an ass with you.”

Hiding: A beating.

John 5:18

They were lying head-to-head, their eyes aimed at the right part of the sky to see, or in this case not see, the Southern Cross.

Southern Cross: The constellation on the NZ flag. Known formally as, of course, Crux.

There was so much to figure out. But I’d got a dream team on tap, eh? People who could think. C—’s N—, she was on board. C— was still pretending they weren’t dating—she was an artist, so that was cool. If you have two scientists and an engineer and a detective and a lawyer and an artist you’re pretty much sweet as.

Eh: We tend to end sentences with this quite a lot (though of course it’s not just us).

Sweet as: “all good”. Classic Kiwi.

Back then we thought maybe there was something about the ground, something about our particular patch in the Wairarapas, but if we loaded up the ute with a bunch of bodies and looked out for the cops we could do the same thing anywhere else.

The Wairarapas: The region of NZ where Greytown is located. This is an informal way to refer to it, its proper name being the Wairarapa.

“Is that pikelets, Pyrrha? You’re a legend.”

Calling someone a legend to express approval, while not new, has become deeply entrenched in the local consciousness over the last decade or so, thanks to a recognisable anti-drink driving campaign. (If you’ve heard of the “ghost chips” ad, it’s one of those.)

Chapter 12

Crown Him with Many Crowns Thy Full Gallant Legions He Found It in Him to Forgive

He Found It in Him to Forgive: Lyrics from a classic NZ song, “Dominion Road” by The Mutton Birds.

“Why does Pash hate us so much?”

Worth noting here that “pash” (both a noun and a verb) is slang for making out.

John 8:1

You’ve got a wizard out in the wop-wops who’s now got blanket bans from nearly every video upload site and a whole bunch of people have entered the country because of his YouTube channel, the government isn’t all, Love that small-business entrepreneur spirit.

The wop-wops: The middle of nowhere. Often just “the wops”.

Didn’t mention that I’d only gone to Parachute ’cause of the underage drinking.

Parachute: A Christian music festival that existed from 1992 to 2014.

She’d won medals for competition shooting back north in Hamilton, but we’re not talking Jesse James. We’re talking Hamilton.

Hamilton: A city in the North Island (it’s the next city south of Auckland) which it is nationally popular to disparage, especially if you’re from Auckland (this is mutual).

Chapter 16

Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia

Kiriona: Transliteration of “Gideon” into te reo Māori.

“It can’t be my blood. It must be someone else’s. Maybe it’s tomato sauce.”

Pretty throwaway, this one, but when she says tomato sauce this is the kind I think of.

Chapter 18

“Whew!” said Nona. “Is the classroom munted?”

Munted: Busted, fucked up.

John 5:1

There was a lot of it, but we had a lot of people who needed a feed. We sat there with the window cracked so G— could hear us while he manned the barbie, which in the dark gets unwholesome as hell, and we ate off paper plates, and I told them …

A feed: A meal.

Barbie: I think this one should be easy.

He said, Which just goes to show that only getting to NCEA Level 2 isn’t going to stop you making waves in life, right. You can still eat steak, talk to wizards, and take down the government.

NCEA Level 2: This is the qualification you get in your second-to-last year of high school (typically at age 16, which is the age at which you can leave school), and has historically been the minimum you need for university entrance.

This is fairly easy to infer anyway, but John et al. being young enough to have done NCEA (it was introduced in the early 2000s) and old enough to have gone to Parachute to underage drink tells you pretty soundly that they’re millennials.

John 3:20

He said, So I went to the governments that were still sympathetic, sort of, like ours, and all the Trans-Pacifics, and we threw down our evidence.

Probably referring to the TPP.

Not only that, they looked at us and were like, We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?

Pronounce this as “fullas”, with the U as in “up”.

John 9:22

A bunch of the guys were her old coworkers—guys she’d gone through training with in Porirua, beer buddies.

Porirua: A small city near Wellington.

John 1:20

He said, So here’s us, planning to meet these agents in neutral territory, across the ditch, over in the huddle where the Territory refugees were.

The ditch: The Tasman Sea.

But they weren’t only aggro about G—, they were aggro that a nuke might go off and kill a couple million people. I was like, Guys, it’s fine, they’re Australian.

There’s a rivalry.

John 5:4

Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right?

A very recognisable series of ads.

(End of post! If you have learned anything, I’ll be stoked.)

#this is what i was put on earth for #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #the locked tomb #locked tomb originals

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lingthusiasm · 1 year

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Transcript Episode 77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Woon Fei Ting who’s a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about kids in multilingual environments. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to Dr. Suzy Styles, who heads the BLIP lab at NTU, for hosting me in Singapore! Check out our interview with Suzy about which words sound spiky across languages. See the link in the show notes. But first, some announcements. We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow just a few days after this episode goes up. The liveshow is online at 4:00 p.m. on February the 18th, for me in Montreal, or 8:00 a.m. on the 19th for Lauren in Melbourne, 2023. Follow the link in the show notes fore more time zones. This liveshow is a Q&A about language and gender with returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod. You may remember Kirby from their very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they,” so we’re bringing them back for more informal discussion which you can participate in. You can ask your language and gender-y questions or share your examples and stories in the comments on Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord in advance or bring them along to the liveshow. You can join the Lingthusiasm liveshow by becoming a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher. This is also the tier that has access to our monthly bonus episodes – most recently, a chat between me and Lauren about what’s coming up in the year ahead, including our plans to keep giving you regular episodes while Lauren’s on parental leave. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the liveshow, monthly bonus episodes, and more.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Fei Ting, welcome to the show!

Fei Ting: Hi, thanks for having me. This is the first time I’m doing any kind of interview and the first time being on a podcast.

Gretchen: Amazing! We’re excited to be your very first time. Can we start with the question that we ask all of our guests? How did you get into linguistics?

Fei Ting: My younger sibling was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was maybe around the age of 9 or 10, then she started going for English language classes to help her spell. That was when my older sibling and I started realising that we display a lot of the same quote-unquote “symptoms,” or we have the same struggles. I started doing a little bit of reading and got really interested in this idea of, oh, maybe we’re all dyslexic, but then she got a diagnosis because it was a lot more prominent, or it came out a lot more in her day-to-day schooling. Later on in high school, my high school is right next to a school for children with cerebral palsy. I would go over once a week to be a teaching assistant to help out if the teachers need any help. One of the things that we did was to bring the children to their speech therapy sessions. The speech therapist there at that time was a very nice lady. She was from India. She was teaching some of these children how to pronounce particular consonants or vowel sounds as best as they could. She spoke with a really heavy accent. I thought to myself, “Well, these children are Singaporean children, and they’re receiving speech therapy in an accent that is unfamiliar to them” –

Gretchen: Yeah, is this gonna be any use for them?

Fei Ting: Yeah, and they are – well, a lot of them have a lot of, as you can imagine, modal difficulties, some of them with language development difficulties. When they mimic, they also mimic the accent as well.

Gretchen: So, they’re gonna be mimicking her accent, which is a perfectly fine accent to have but not what the rest of their family and community have.

Fei Ting: Yeah. At that time, I was just thinking about, okay, this is a cool job. I had never come across speech therapy before in my life. I didn’t even know what it was. So, when I first learned about it, I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool!” But at the same time, I also thought, “Maybe this is what I wanna do in the future.” I set out looking at which universities to go to, what do I have to do to become a speech therapist. It led me on to this path of going to university for linguistics, and then I taught for a little bit. I taught for about 4 years.

Gretchen: Teaching what?

Fei Ting: Teaching English after graduation. In between, I did some volunteering work, and I looked at the overall job market for speech therapy in Singapore. The thing about it in Singapore is a lot of our speech therapists don’t really get to do a lot of speech therapy per se.

Gretchen: Oh, that seems like it’s not the thing you came into the job for.

Fei Ting: A lot of them end up doing elderly care, swallowing therapy with patients that might have suffered from a stroke.

Gretchen: But you were excited about working with kids.

Fei Ting: Yeah. I was told by almost every speech therapist that there isn’t that much focus on research right now because they are hoping that a lot of people just graduate with a master’s in speech therapy and then go work in a hospital. Then you will likely not be working with children.

Gretchen: I guess there’s the question of like, what are Singaporean children quote-unquote “expected” to be able to do at a certain age or is there even research on what their typically developing peers would be able to do in this context that would help you devise therapy programmes for kids.

Fei Ting: At that point, no. I think right now as well – this is the current work that we’re doing, right, looking at children growing up in Singapore, which is a really multilingual environment. The documentation of regular kids, we don’t have good documentation of that yet, and therefore, you can think about how, for children that have some sort of language delay or developmental disorders, we don’t have therapy that might be tailored to our variety of English and the other languages that we speak here.

Gretchen: I feel like something that I’ve heard from people in more monolingual or monolingual-ish language environments in Canada/the US is “Oh, well, my sibling got diagnosed with dyslexia or something, and so my parents stopped speaking our heritage language to the kid because they thought it would confuse them, and they did only English.” We know that lots of people are multilingual, and this is fine, but there isn’t a good amount of knowledge about what does it look like to develop in a multilingual environment where this is normal and expected and everyone is doing this. It would cause difficulties to not be able to function in that multilingual space because you can’t talk to your grandparents, or you can’t talk to people in some stores that you go into. That’s also part of what you need for functioning in a language is having access to multiple language spaces.

Fei Ting: That’s exactly right. In Singapore – well, I think this is unfortunate – some of the children who are diagnosed with dyslexia earlier on, they will be given recommendations to not do the – well, we call it here the “mother tongue languages,” which in schools are taught as Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. The recommendation is, well, don’t do your mother tongue language as a subject.

Gretchen: Only do English, and that’s it.

Fei Ting: Only do English, yeah, which as you mentioned, it then becomes difficult for the child to converse with people around them or their family members who might not be using English.

Gretchen: Right. Because the norm of the research that’s been happening on kids with various developmental disabilities has been doing it on monolingual populations, which then makes it seem like you need to be monolingual in order to benefit from the various kinds of therapies that people do.

Fei Ting: The common misconception is, if you’re already struggling in one, and that one language is usually English, then let’s not burden your brain with a second one. But languages are so different. Mandarin Chinese is radically different compared to English both in the way it looks as well as the structure, so processing of Mandarin Chinese is also different. There isn’t enough research right now to support saying that a child who is English-Mandarin bilingual will benefit from not having to do Mandarin as a subject in school.

Gretchen: I mean, the brain is very flexible, very plastic, and so the things you make the brain do, it almost makes me wonder if being exposed to more languages would help because you’re giving the brain more practice in doing language stuff, but I dunno if there’s data on this.

Fei Ting: Well, we don’t know enough.

Gretchen: But you’re not currently a speech therapist.

Fei Ting: No, I’m not.

Gretchen: You work in a language lab. How did that happen, and what are you working on now?

Fei Ting: I did my undergraduate degree in linguistics, which I loved. It was fantastic. I think for the first time when our professors were like, “Let’s do research on the languages that you speak,” it was the first time that I thought, “Oh, you mean I can study Singapore English, like Singlish, in an academic setting? You mean it’s worthy of being studied?” I think that was the first thing. Then later on, after graduation, because I had looked at what speech therapy is and isn’t in Singapore currently, I thought, “Well, maybe I should go and do some work, earn some money, and then think about whether or not I wanna do grad school,” and then I think eventually settled on just my love for research more than being a therapist or going out and practicing in a clinical setting. I decided to pursue my master’s, and then after that, I just stayed with the same lab.

Gretchen: As a day-to-day level, as a lab manager, you’re working with and supervising the various studies that are being run by the professors and students and people in the lab. Yeah, what do you do as a lab manager?

Fei Ting: The number one thing is coordinating the different studies that go on. We have studies that are carried out independently by our PhD students. We also have studies that we run as a group amongst all of our research assistants and our student assistants, and then just making sure that everything is running on schedule. I also do a lot of prep before any study’s been conducted. We write all of our surveys. We make sure that all of the equipment is well set up. Then there is also the administrative side of things, which is the boring and less-glamorous part of research.

Gretchen: This is working on writing grants or filling out paperwork to get permission to work with children. You have to go through the ethics board and tell them, “No, we’re not gonna harm the children. It’s gonna be fine. They’re just gonna look at some pictures and hear some sounds or something.” If you’ve got equipment – like you’ve got an EEG machine, which is the electrode cap that you put on your head, and you can see the brain waves going. I guess that probably needs to be maintained.

Fei Ting: We need to watch that very thoroughly. We need to train our students when they come into the lab on how to use it. We have interns come in every summer, and they do good work with us. I also manage all of our interns and, I think, help our students or our undergrads see what’s the reality behind doing research. I think, very often, they might think about grad school, or they might think about moving into the field of academia after graduation, just seeing the glam side of things, or looking at papers that are being published, or books that are being written.

Gretchen: And papers look very polished, right. Like, “Oh, we did this thing. We had 32 infants. They came in and did this.” It doesn’t tell you like, “This infant started crying, and so we had to exclude them,” or like, “These infants – we tried to call their parents, and they wouldn’t reply to our messages, and so they wouldn’t come in. We actually tried to get 52, but only 32 came.”

Fei Ting: Yes, the day-to-day of it is very mundane. A lot of the work that we are focusing now on is understanding the linguistic landscape for children growing up in Singapore, so we wanna find out what’s going on at home: Who is talking to them, and in what languages, and in what proportion? The best way to do that right now is to send them home with a little recorder.

Gretchen: I’ve seen this recorder. It’s sort of the size of a credit card but thicker. You put it in a shirt that the child wears, and it has a little Velcro pocket, so it doesn’t fall it. Then it runs, and the kid can run around, and you’re not trying to keep them in front of a mic where they have to stay still, which because they’re toddlers, they’re not gonna do that. You can hear anything that the infant says and also anything that someone says, like an adult or an older child, says around them.

Fei Ting: That’s right. That recorder goes on for about 10-16 hours on its own. When we get that recording back, the humans have to go listen to these recordings. We do a lot of transcription work. That is one of the day-to-day mundane things. It’s not exciting. You sit in front of a computer, and you open up a file, and you’re listening, maybe, for an hour before you have to stop because it’s just too much. We do a lot of fine-grained transcription. We’re not only noting down the words that are being said, we are also looking at who’s saying it; we’re counting the number of turns; we’re making it for the different languages. Right now, I’m speaking English, but the day-to-day conversation for a Singaporean household might be English plus a lot of other things that are going on. Maybe it’s different from what we conventionally understand as code-switching or the way that code-switching is being described in textbooks is that you switch very elegantly from one language to the other in a nice, wrapped up sentence.

Gretchen: Right. So, it’s saying like, okay, I’m gonna say this bit in, for me, English, and then French or something, and I’m going back and forth. This implies that these two languages are distinct entities that I’m switching back and forth between them. But if you’ve grown up in a multilingual household your whole life, and your parents have also grown up in a multilingual household, what you’re also doing is producing the whole spectrum in a way that’s like how people have produced it around you but also may be a little bit different.

Fei Ting: It’s not “clean” code switching. It happens within an utterance. People swap out words, and sometimes it’s conscious, sometimes it’s unconscious, sometimes it’s deliberate to make a point. The way that we describe it, or I like to think about it, is if you have a salad bowl of different components – you have your tomatoes; you have your cucumber and onions – as I’m speaking to a different person, I can decide which part of the salad I wanna pick, which ingredient I wanna pick. It’s not a clean switch. For me, it would be English and Mandarin. It's not a clean switch between the two. Then, of course, there’s this very exciting thing called “Singlish.”

Gretchen: This is stuff that’s unique to Singapore. “Singlish” seems to imply that it’s English-y, but there’s stuff from lots of languages involved.

Fei Ting: When I was in university, and when we first looked at it from a very academic setting, it’s often described as a “creoloid.” It’s a little bit like a creole but maybe not. Then people have explained to it say that, oh, the backbone of Singlish is English, and then it’s added with all these vocabulary from non-English languages.

Gretchen: This is gonna be like Chinese but less Mandarin.

Fei Ting: Less Mandarin, for sure. More Hokkien. In some other parts of the world, “Hokkien” is also referred to as “Min Nan.” Then some Cantonese, some Teochew, Hakka, and then some Malay, and some Tamil.

Gretchen: So, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka are all Chinese varieties within that, and then Malay and Tamil are separate from other regions of the world. These are all groups that have been part of Singapore.

Fei Ting: We were colonised by the British for a long time. Before that time, we didn’t really have people living on the island. Well, historically, if you look at it, there were fishermen or fishing villages, but largely this island is uninhabited. Then when the British came, and they decide to develop this place, or this island, as a port, obviously, lots of people came for work opportunities. We saw a lot of migration from modern-day south part of China, so the Guangzhou/Guangdong region. We also saw some migration from modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia and then from the southern part of India. That’s why the Indian language that’s spoken here, predominantly, by people at that time was Tamil instead of Hindi, for example.

Gretchen: These are the big ethnic groups in Singapore’s history. And then when people are coming into contact with them, they get mixed together – people using words from all sorts of sources. This is what kids are exposed to in the home. It’s not just “Oh, here’s Chinese. Here’s Mandarin,” which is the most famous version of Chinese, “but also here are words from Hokkien or Teochew or these other varieties,” and also, I guess, probably depending on the kid’s heritage, whether they’re gonna have more Malay words or more Tamil words or more Chinese words.

Fei Ting: That’s right.

Gretchen: What does this look like when you’re trying to say, “Here are the results that we have. This is what kids are getting exposed to”?

Fei Ting: I think the thing that we didn’t expect was to do so much language documentation as part of this project. Because what we wanna do is find out, you know, what are kids growing up hearing. But then, along the way, because we were collecting all of this data, we are also documenting what is the current state of things for what Singlish sounds like or what we can say what Singlish is in a household right now. If we look at the Singapore census, the last one was taken in 2020, a huge number of the younger population now say that English is the predominant home language. It has crossed the 50% threshold for the younger age groups. That’s a first in our country’s history. You can also imagine that the English here or the Singlish here is changing rapidly compared to my parents’ or my grandparents’ era.

Gretchen: What people are doing is changing. If you say English is a dominant home language, that’s picking one out of probably there are still several languages being spoken in this mixed way.

Fei Ting: Understanding what Singlish is is one thing, and then when we are writing it in our paper, how do we make ourselves well understood for an audience that is unfamiliar with research in a non-standard variety. One of the things that we tried explaining is this term that we use called “red-dot.” We have a current study going on called “Red-dot Baby-talk” where we have a list of words that we come up with based on what we know Singaporean parents use with their children, and we’re asking Singaporeans, “At what age do you think a child would know this word?” and “Would you use this word with a child?”

Gretchen: Just to back up for second. “Red-dot” is a term for Singapore, right, because if you look at a big map of the world, it’s a city state, effectively, it’s about the size of a red dot on a map. So, this is an affectionate way of referring to Singapore-specific words.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm, yeah. One of the words would be “pom pom.” I might say it to a child after they’ve had a long day, and they’re sweaty, and I say, “Okay, now it’s time to pom-pom.”

Gretchen: Is this like “have a bath” or “a shower” or something?

Fei Ting: Yeah! That’s right. We don’t know – at least I have no idea – where that word came from. My guess is it’s from one of these Chinese varieties that we talked about just now, but I’m not 100% certain.

Gretchen: Right. Because it doesn’t have a clear etymology linked to any particular language. It’s just this is a word people use in Singapore with kids.

Fei Ting: Then we have “zut-zut,” which is the thing that you give to a crying child.

Gretchen: Like a candy or something, or a toy?

Fei Ting: Like a pacifier.

Gretchen: “Pacifier,” “binky,” “dummy” – I’ve heard a lot of words for it – “soother.”

Fei Ting: Then we also have the word “sayang.” “sayang” is – well, originated from Malay, but the use of it in Malay, it’s very different from the use of it in Singlish. In Malay, it can be used as a verb to mean, like, “love.” It can also be used as a term of affection. You can call someone your “sayang,” your “darling.” But in Singlish, it’s this action of stroking very gently. If you see a little cat, you might tell your child to “sayang” the cat.

Gretchen: “Make sure you do it gently and don’t pull the cat’s fur and their tail and make them scratch you.”

Fei Ting: If someone in that context is using the word “sayang,” I wouldn’t necessarily say that that person is code switching into Malay.

Gretchen: Right, because it has a different meaning in Malay, and they’re not using it with that meaning.

Fei Ting: And I’m not a Malay speaker, so when I use the word “sayang,” I can’t say that I’m code switching into Malay. I’ve just chosen a token in Singlish.

Gretchen: I can see how they’re used in a child-specific context, but there’re other parts of Singlish that are just part of the everyday vocabulary for adults and stuff as well.

Fei Ting: Yes, yes, yes, that’s right. So, you’ve been here a few days now, and food is a big thing in Singapore, and when food is good or when things are going well, in a good scenario, we can say, “shiok.”

Gretchen: I’ve seen this on some signs. It seems to be – I was walking in one of the streets, and they were saying, “shiok” because they were trying to say, “This food is good,” and it’s good in a Singaporean sort of way. I think the sign said, “Shiok lah,” which was maybe a little bit trying to be really heavy on the Singlish thing because “lah” is this famous word in Singlish that is used as a particle at the end of sentences for a lot of different purposes.

Fei Ting: For a lot of different purposes. We have a lot of these sentence-final, utterance-final particles. Origin of it is from Chinese varieties. We have “lah,” “leh,” “meh,” “hor,” “liao” – maybe lots of other ones that I’m missing right now.

Gretchen: There’s probably a whole list. I mean, we can link to some things about Singlish if people want to get a larger picture of what’s going on. This is not the teach-us-Singlish-in-half-an-hour episode. But yeah, the one that I’ve heard people say a fair bit is “lah” because it seems to be pretty common. It’s like a confirmation or question.

Fei Ting: Confirmation. It’s also sometimes used to make something sound final and definitive. Like if you ask me if I could do something, and I say, “Can lah.”

Gretchen: This gets us to another one that I’ve also heard people use which is “Can” by itself as sort of a response to questions or whether something can happen. I was in a cab, and the cab driver said, “Can?”, as in, “Can you get out okay?”, or “Are you doing this?”, and I guess I probably should’ve responded, “Can,” but I don’t have this naturally yet. Maybe if I’m here a little bit longer.

Fei Ting: You can say, “Can,” or “Can can.” “Can can” is to confirm that you can actually do something, or it can happen.

Gretchen: I think the closest thing that I have to that in my English is “Can do,” which still drops the subject or doesn’t have the subject there, but for some reason I want the “do” to be there – “Can do.” Or like, “I can,” “I think I can,” compared to, I heard someone say, “Think can,” where I would say, “I think I can.”

Fei Ting: Over here “Think can” or “I think can” is very well-formed. “I think I can” is –

Gretchen: Almost too much?

Fei Ting: Yeah, almost too much.

Gretchen: Or you’re being very emphatic about that it’s “I” think I can – may “you” don’t. This is probably Chinese influence, right?

Fei Ting: Yeah. If we think about Chinese as a language that determines the topic of the sentence first, and then you add comments to that topic, that’s why we can go about dropping the subject or dropping a lot of these modal verbs. One of the studies that we did previously was, well, one of our undergrads started this project. We ask people to look at different menus and order the same dish but to imagine themselves in three different settings. The first setting is the menu is printed on really nice, fancy paper, and fancy font, and it’s supposed to mimic a fancy restaurant. The second menu is in casual font, and the setting is a hip café. Then the last one, we didn’t have a menu, but it was just a picture of a hawker centre stall front.

Gretchen: The hawker centres have a whole bunch of little marketplaces but indoors. They have all these food stalls. You go around from each one and you sit – I think of them as cafeteria tables. You sit out at them. You have a tray, and you get food and drinks and desserts and stuff from different places. This is very informal.

Fei Ting: Yeah, very, very informal. We had undergrads come in and order the same dish which is the dish of laksa.

Gretchen: Which I’ve now had. It was very good. It’s kind of a spicy soup.

Fei Ting: Yeah. And then the instruction was that, when they ordered it, they have to ask for more chili, and they should ask to take it away.

Gretchen: Just to give them more things to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. So, when people are imagining themselves in a very fancy restaurant, they might say, “Can I please have a bowl of laksa? Can you add more chili? And I would like to have it taken away.”

Gretchen: These very full sentences and trying to be polite and add this extra ornamentation around that.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm. Then when you do a syntax analysis on it, I mean, we draw grammar trees, you end up with a very complex grammar tree or quite a number of grammar trees just to explain this one scenario. But when they’re given a picture of a hawker stall, and they’re supposed to imagine a very informal setting, they can say something like, “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway.”

Gretchen: “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway,” just saying each of the bits of information without, “Oh, please, if you don’t mind, can I have this.”

Fei Ting: You don’t need the “Can I have…” You don’t need the extra verbs or the extra sentence structure. It’s just the topic – “one laksa,” and then “more chili,” and then “takeaway.”

Gretchen: And this is not rude. This is polite. This is a normal thing you say. And you’ve said “Aunty” because you’re addressing the stall owner as “Aunty” or “Uncle,” based on who they are, which is polite.

Fei Ting: That’s also another thing about – I think you hear it here in Singapore. You also would hear it in Malaysia. This calling everyone “Aunty” and “Uncle” even though they’re not related to you if they are somewhere like the age your parents might be, and then you just – “Aunty,” “Uncle” – everyone is.

Gretchen: You have other words for people who are closer in age to you or younger?

Fei Ting: Not quite.

Gretchen: It’s more about elders.

Fei Ting: It’s more for elders. If I approach, like – or if I’m in a cab – the “Taxi Uncle” might address me as “Xiao Mei,” like “Little Girl” or “Young Girl.” Or if I’m ordering something, and they wanna be nice and polite, they might say, “Mei Nü,” which is “Pretty Girl.” Even though –

Gretchen: They’re not hitting on you. This is just a polite thing to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. But usually you will hear them say “Xiao Mei,” which is “Little Girl,” to a female and then “Xiao Di” to a guy ordering something.

Gretchen: Because you have that age thing. In French, I’m used to people addressing me as “Madame” or “Mademoiselle.” There was a period when I was getting 50/50, and now it’s mostly “Madame,” so clearly people think I’ve gotten older. But there was a period when it depended on what on wore for which one I would get. How strangers address you in public is just –

Fei Ting: If my mom were to go to the market, for example, she might address someone working there as “Aunty,” and then they will also address her as “Aunty.”

Gretchen: We’re both at the right age where we could have nieces and nephews, so we’re both “Aunties” now.

Fei Ting: And that’s perfectly fine.

Gretchen: You’ve also been doing some interesting things with research methodology and how to get this audio data, apart from bringing parents into the lab and having them talk to kids.

Fei Ting: Well, with COVID, everything was interrupted. I think people who are doing research – everyone would commiserate over our lack of ability to reach out to parents with little kids. We did a years-long study on Zoom.

Gretchen: So, you get parents talking to their kids on Zoom. Kids aren’t always very good at interacting with a computer, with the technology.

Fei Ting: We had 8- to 36-month-olds. The task was for their parents to describe to them a wordless picture book on Zoom. Sometimes, like you said, some kids are clearly not interested.

Gretchen: But at least having a picture book to look at gives them something to do on camera and not just like, “C’mon, talk! Talk to the nice research aunty.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. Because the picture book is wordless, it’s up to them in what language they would like to do the task in. Some parents get very excited about describing every single thing on the screen instead of just following along the main storyline. Sometimes, they will break off to “Oh, you remember, we saw an elephant” – because in the book, there is an elephant – and then they might, “the other day” or “the other time, we went to the zoo. We saw an elephant. You remember.” And then they might go on talking about other things, which is a nice thing about wordless picture books, actually.

Gretchen: It just gives them some stimulus to talk about, rather than just being like, “Okay, here we are in front of a computer. All we can talk about is the computer.” Now, you’ve got the elephant as a topic of conversation.

Fei Ting: And I don’t know about kids growing up in this COVID period. Maybe they’ve gotten used to seeing another human onscreen. We didn’t have kids who were like, “Ah, this is so weird. I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

Gretchen: Because they’re already talking to, probably, other friends and family members and things using Zoom because they’re pandemic babies.

Fei Ting: Exactly. We had some funny things that happened. This brings back to the reality of doing research. Sometimes, I would have parents carry the laptop they were talking to me on, on Zoom, and chasing after their kid, or like, “Ah, just come back here. This nice lady is waiting for us to finish the story,” and things like that happened. Or because we’re recording them in their home, sometimes someone walks into the room that they’re in. These sort of unexpected scenarios do pop up from time to time, but we’re really happy with the data that we managed to collect.

Gretchen: Do you have results for that yet?

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out because, as part of the study, we ran it as a micro-longitudinal intervention study.

Gretchen: What does that mean?

Fei Ting: The intervention that we ran was for the parents. We wanted to see if giving parents tips – concrete tips – on what they can do with their child to improve or to add on to the kind of talk they can have with their child, whether or not that would influence or change the way that they would communicate with their kids. The baseline was describing the wordless picture book the first time, and then they would go through an intervention for –

Gretchen: So, they would get text messages every day for 28 days that would say things like, “Have you considered singing songs with your kid?”, or “When you see pictures, talking about what’s in the pictures,” or something like that?

Fei Ting: Every day we gave them a tip. The tips start out really easy like doing some counting, and then the last we tell parents about concepts that might be a bit more advanced, things like mental state verbs – so verbs like “I think” or “I wonder.” There is literature to show that when you use mental state verbs with your child, 1). you’re helping them imagine scenarios they are not in, right, think about it from someone else’s perspective. So, this ties in with this thing called the “theory of mind.” Then when you use these words, especially in English, your sentences get a bit more complex.

Gretchen: Because if you’re saying, “I think this,” and then you have to have another sentence in there, which is not quite the same thing if you’re doing like, “Think can.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. After 28 days, we see them again on Zoom for the same video call picture book description. Then we ran it as an RTT – randomised control trial.

Gretchen: So, they’re randomly in one group that has these 28 tips in between, and then another group that has something less.

Fei Ting: The other group, we only gave them one email a week. There’re no concrete tips. It’s just emphasising on how important it is to talk to their child. But because the way we advertise it, we said, “You can sign up. We’ll give you some tips.”

Gretchen: Ah, so this was important to make parents wanna participate in the study because they think they’re doing something good for their child by getting some tips there. Because there’s lots of reasons people wanna participate in studies. Sometimes, you pay them. Sometimes, the kid gets a toy or something. But also, in this case they wanted to feel like they were getting some help with raising a kid.

Fei Ting: Yeah. After the first 28 days and then after we saw them for a second time point, we swapped both groups of parents around. If you had intervention, now you’re in the non-intervention group, and you only got one email per week. Then the parents who didn’t get the tips previously, they now got a message every day.

Gretchen: So, are you sitting there texting all the parents individually? Or do you have an automatic system?

Fei Ting: No, we don’t. Our research assistant, Shaza, she was doing all the texting. Because it was a rolling sign up programme –

Gretchen: You have some people who are on Day 2, and some people who’re on Day 20, and they each need to get a different message. It’s almost complicated to program.

Fei Ting: It’s difficult. She would text them at 10:00 in the morning and say, “Today’s tip is this.” And then with each tip, we would also give a link to our website where they can read more if they wanted to. In the evening, around 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., she would text them again and say, “Hi Parent, did you try our tip today? How did you find it?” That’s the other unique part of our intervention because a lot of the times when people are in an intervention, they’re left alone for the entirety, and then at the end they might be given a feedback survey.

Gretchen: It’s almost just as much about having the support for talking about what parenting was like and reflecting on using language with their child that they feel like they got some sort of emotional support out of it.

Fei Ting: Yeah. Or any kind of interaction. Because at that time, well, we started collecting data June of 2020.

Gretchen: This is lockdown.

Fei Ting: Lockdown, right. A lot of parents were working from home. People couldn’t see their family members. So, having a researcher to talk to might be nice.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s kind of nice.

Fei Ting: Or a lot of children, if they were going to infant care or day care, all of that had stopped.

Gretchen: Of course.

Fei Ting: I guess for a lot of parents, it was like, “Oh, I’m given some kind of support!”

Gretchen: It would be interesting, I guess, to try to figure out how much of that was pandemic or lockdown specific, especially if the parent is becoming the child’s only or primary source of language input in a way that, if they’re going to child care or preschool or seeing their relatives and stuff like that, they wouldn’t be as much dependent on one or two people for talking with the child all the time as language input, they would have a broader community access.

Fei Ting: That’s right. I think that was one of the things that parents have told us, like, “Oh, yeah, language input has changed.” It’s not something that they actively thought about, but then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my kid’s not getting that much Malay because, well, my mom speaks to them in Malay, but now we can’t visit grandma anymore.”

Gretchen: This changes the way that the language input goes.

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out. We are still transcribing.

Gretchen: Transcribing takes so long.

Fei Ting: It does.

Gretchen: I think the estimate that I learned in grad school was, like, for every one minute of audio, it takes an hour to transcribe.

Fei Ting: That’s the pace that we’re going at. We have been very blessed with lots of great transcribers and student assistants who’ve come in and helped us, so we are almost there. We’re very happy that we have 142 parents and families that stayed with us through all three time points. I think it’s a little rare to see that for a longitudinal study involving children.

Gretchen: They had nothing else to do in lockdown, so they stayed in your study.

Fei Ting: Yeah, I like to think that. And I also like to think that we were nice, and they found it useful.

Gretchen: To have the supportive text messages every day.

Fei Ting: We’re going into the next stage where we will be doing some analysis. We’re counting number of turns taken. We’re counting number of words and the diversity of words being used and whether or not people swapped or changed or code switched in any way.

Gretchen: And then you end up with, also, this linguistic landscape of how people are talking in their homes, at least, when they have a kid around. And you can see which bits there. When you’re talking about code switching, you can say, “Okay, these words are in English. These words are specifically in Hokkien or Mandarin. These words are in Tamil or Malay,” but you also have the Singlish-specific words, the Red-dot words, that are hard to pin down for one particular language.

Fei Ting: We’ve essentially written our own little dictionary, actually.

Gretchen: That’s great!

Fei Ting: Along the way, we were like, ah, there’s this word that’s come up, but because a lot of Singlish hasn’t been codified or documented, there is no one way to spell it.

Gretchen: Of course. Because it’s mostly spoken.

Fei Ting: If we’ve decided to spell it one way, we always have to check with other Singlish speakers around us, and then – we don’t wanna say, “Oh, we’re spelling it this way, and this way must be right.” We’re saying, “We have to come up with something.”

Gretchen: You have to pick one because if you wanna say, “Okay, for every hundred words that this parent says, 30 of them are in Malay, 50 of them are in English, 23 of them are in Singlish/Red-dot words.” It’s hard to pin down exactly which of them are from where, but you need to be able to look through and say, “This one word, ‘shiok,’ is being used this many times in the whole corpus,” not “We spelled it 14 different ways, and so we have no idea how many times it’s being used,” just for your own internal purposes, which isn’t to say that someone else is wrong for using a different spelling.

Fei Ting: That’s right. We wanna be very open about it, so we have a Wiki page that’s open for anyone who wants to come and look at our transcription conventions. Our dictionary is also open access, so people can come in and take a look at that, at how we’ve decided to codify certain things just because we need it for our own, like you mentioned, counts and things like that. The other part of our project is working with speech engineers. I’m sure you’re familiar with Siri and Google, right.

Gretchen: I talk into the – they transcribe me, they understand me. But I notice even when I’m speaking French to them, which I don’t have a native French accent, they’re not very good at transcribing what I’m saying in a language that isn’t like the very Paris French that they’re trained on. I bet this happens with Singlish.

Fei Ting: It’s a challenge. It’s difficult in Singlish. It’s difficult when people switch between or among the languages so rapidly. We had a PhD student from the engineering department that was on this project, and he was looking at how do you do automatic language identification on the recordings that we collected because –

Gretchen: This could save you a lot of time if it works.

Fei Ting: If it works. But it’s also a really challenging problem. One, it’s that it’s not the standard variety and then the other thing is it’s child directed. They don’t have good solutions for child-directed speech yet.

Gretchen: Because people talk differently to children. They maybe use, depending on the language, like a broader range of pitches, or higher pitches, maybe they talk a bit slower, they have child-specific vocabulary, like this word for “pacifier” which has a lot of child-specific words in different languages or different varieties. This is not the kind of thing that language models are trained on. They’re training on journalists talking on the news in this very formal context.

Fei Ting: That’s right. Our PhD student has done really great work. We also work with our speech engineers at Johns Hopkins University. Whenever we have meetings with them, I tell them, “Oh, I’m so sorry for our” – our data set’s really problematic. I know that. I understand that. But they see it as a great challenge.

Gretchen: Right. And if all you’re doing is news stuff, it’s less interesting or relevant. Maybe it’s a problem, but maybe the algorithms that were not accounting for it are the problem.

Fei Ting: Exactly. Our language models are only as good as the data that we train them on. They all come with a certain set of biases.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Fei Ting: Right now, the bias is non-child-directed language.

Gretchen: And non-Singaporean language.

Fei Ting: Non-Singaporean language. It’s been interesting just looking at our data from their point of view as well. There’s gonna be more and more reliance on AI in the future, for sure, not just for our line of work but just part of our day-to-day living. If AI is supposed to accommodate the natural languages of the world, then it should be able to do this.

Gretchen: And it should actually be trained on how people talk in multilingual environments. Fei Ting, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Fei Ting: Thanks for having me.

Gretchen: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Fei Ting: I think it would be that there’s still a lot that we don’t know. I think the brain is a fascinating organ, and a lot of what we do know about what the brain does when it comes to language processing and language acquisition, we know it from a very monolingual English point of view. Most of the people around the world are non-monolingual speakers, and a lot of them don’t speak English, so if we wanna know how this organ that we have works when it comes to language acquisition and language processing, then we need more research on non-monolingual English-speaking populations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” stickers, IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. And our guest, Woon Fei Ting, can be found as @FeitingW on Twitter, and the lab is Facebook.com/bliplabntu. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Fei Ting: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 77 #transcripts #interview #Woon Fei Ting #NTU #nanyang technological university #BLIP lab #lab technician #Singlish #child language acquisition #speech therapist #multilingualism #Malay #Tamil #Mandarin #English

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pers-books · 2 years

Text

Kate Stewart - according to Big Finish

I’ve finally finished re-listening to all of the Kate Stewart audios to date so, without further ado, I present to you the background info on Kate Stewart provided in said audios. Please note, there are one or two which feature extensive references to the Brig, but unless the conversation pertains to Kate’s background, I’ve not quoted it.

They’re listed according to boxset order and I’ve included the writer of the audio as well as the title. What I’ve learned from this is that Matt Fitton wrote a lot of background material for Kate in the early boxsets and Guy Adams in the later boxsets.

What I also found interesting is that Big Finish has pretty much ignored the semi-canonical direct to video Downtime (1995) which first introduced Kate Stewart as the Brigadier’s daughter (then played by Beverly Cressman) insofar as BF’s writers have given Kate a much closer relationship with her father.

Vanguard - Matt Fitton

Kate's described by the internal computer security system as UNIT's Chief Scientific Researcher She "Doesn't do labels" She usually skips past Orbit News TV on the way to the movie channel

Power Cell - Matt Fitton

"My eldest is cooking. If I'm lucky there won't be any leftovers." Kate's reason for working late. "There've always been factions who'd have preferred UNIT to remain under military control. Colonel Shindi knows I haven't had an easy ride."

Ice Station Alpha - Matt Fitton

"You're setting me up as a patsy. It's been hard enough working my way up the ranks the last few years. I bet they didn't take much persuasion."

House of Silents - Matt Fitton

[sounds of gunfire] Kate Stewart: How did I do? Josh Carter: Very good grouping, ma'am. You're a natural at this. Kate Stewart: I have put in the practice before, you know. I just thought I might be getting a little rusty. Josh Carter: Keep up these sessions and I don't think you'll have anything to worry about on that front. Kate Stewart: Good! If we're caught out in a combat situation in the field I don't want to feel like the spare wheel. We were lucky to make it through that scrape with Cerberus. Josh Carter: I thought you didn't believe in luck. Kate Stewart: An ability to shoot straight should help keep the odds in our favour. Josh Carter: Shall I set up the targets for another round? Kate Stewart: No, that's enough for today. Paperwork beckons. Now, let's see if I still remember how to disassemble this. Josh Carter: This interest in military hardware is new. I thought 'Science Leads'? Kate Stewart: Oh, it does, Mr Carter. Science just needs to remember to carry a gun sometimes.

Square One - John Dorney

Kate apologises for wearing her pyjamas - she'd just settled down for an early night. Later: "I have an urgent appointment with a hot water bottle I'm very anxious to keep."

In Memory Alone - Matt Fitton

Kate Stewart: Do you know JM Barrie, Colonel? Vikram Shindi: Peter Pan chap, wasn't he? Kate Stewart: Among other things. He also wrote that "God gave us memories that we might have roses in December." [Source: Rectorial Address at St Andrew's, 3 May 1922, in The Times 4 May 1922]

Call to Arms - Matt Fitton

Kate knows first aid Kate Stewart: I don't know if it was the same in your [Benton's] day, but it's not in my nature to leave a man behind.

Tidal Wave - Guy Adams

Kate speaks Spanish well enough to translate an insult directed at her Kate doesn't do hugs - Jo Jones hugs her! Kate Stewart: I'm a pragmatist not a warmonger, Osgood, you should know that

Retrieval - Guy Adams

Kate Stewart: Fine. A small team can go and take a look Osgood: Who do you suggest? Kate Stewart: If it's a research station, Osgood, I think we need our finest scientific minds on it, don't you? Osgood: Oh. Kate Stewart: Well, don't worry, you're only one of them. Osgood: And the other? Kate Stewart: I'll pretend you didn't ask that.

Kate not wanting to kill the dinosaurs in the Silurian research base

Kate Stewart: There's a reason they let me sit in the biggest office. [Reminding Sam Bishop that she's not there because of nepotism but because she’s actually a scientist.]

United - Matt Fitton

Kate Stewart: I like to think I bring diplomacy to the table, not just a gun.

The Dalek Transaction - Matt Fitton

Kate Stewart: You don't know how hard I am to impress.

Invocation - Roy Gill

Kate stayed at Ealdon House for a week when she was a child. She can translate English-Latin and Latin-English on the fly. She was involved with the university newspaper

Game Theory - Matt Fitton

It's implied that Kate's done an advanced driving course

Code Silver - Guy Adams

Kate's had basic medical training on some of the aliens UNIT had in cold storage

Hosts of the Wirrn - Chris Chapman

Kate refuses to destroy the level of the Well while Osgood and Shana are still inside. She later regrets this when the Wirrn swarms the town of Windermere. [Side note: Shindi forgets himself enough to call Kate by her first name when she reveals she's en route to meet the Wirrn Queen. Normally he says ‘Ma’am’ or ‘Ms Stewart’.]

Breach of Trust - David K Barnes

Osgood: Things do seem to go quiet when Kate's not here. Maybe she should go on dates more often. Josh Carter: She's on a date? Osgood: Oh yes. I wasn't meant to say that. Josh Carter: [scoffing laugh] I don't believe it. Osgood: Well, as far as he's concerned it's a date. But for her it's just professional. I think. Josh Carter: Well, who's he? Osgood: Just somebody she's having a not-quite date with Josh Carter: You don't think she'll - you know? Osgood: What? Josh Carter: Tell him what she does? Osgood: Oh, you mean, 'Hi! I'm in charge of a secret international military organisation that deals exclusively in extra terrestrial activity'? Josh Carter: Yeah Osgood: More of a third date kind of announcement, I'd say Josh Carter: If it is a date Osgood: Which it isn't

Richard can't even remember the name of the Private whom he'd been harassing/having a relationship with. Kate's clearly seething quietly. He talks in demeaning terms about the Private, then immediately makes a pass at Kate.

Richard: Have we finished the bottle? Kate Stewart: We have, yes Richard: Should we order another? Kate Stewart: Well, that could be risky. Richard: How? Kate Stewart: I might smash you over the head with it Richard: Sorry? [beeping of Kate's pager] What's that noise? Kate Stewart: Oh, thank goodness. The Earth's in danger. Richard: Eh? Kate Stewart: Richard, Richard, I'd say I'm sorry I have to go, but I'm not, so I won't Richard: Hey, you can't just leave Kate Stewart: Yes, yes I can. The door's over there Richard: [whiny] Hang on, I thought that you and I might - Kate Stewart: Yes, I know you did. Goodbye Richard. Oh, dinner's on me Richard: [whining more] No, wait a second. [She's already walking away] Kate?

She gets accosted by a drunk soon after leaving the restaurant and is irritated at being told to smile because it's not the end of the world.

Kate refuses to make First Contact in a dress as she likes having pockets. She keeps a spare set of clothes in the cabinet in her office

Osgood: But there's always another way! We just have to find it! Kate Stewart: You know we haven't the time for that! Bleating on about it isn't helping anyone. It's - it's 2 in the morning and I'm about to send a mother and child off to their deaths. Now, you can try to make me feel worse about that than I already do, but I really don't know what on Earth you think you'll achieve by it! Osgood: It's not - Kate Stewart: Fair? Of course it's not fair! Osgood: [runs out] Kate Stewart: Osgood!

[Kate's crying quietly on the roof of the Tower when Osgood turns up, having been told by the Colonel where to find her] Osgood: I'm sorry for disobeying you. And for getting Josh involved. I just - I couldn't face the idea of giving in? Kate Stewart: And you thought I could? Osgood: You were doing what you thought was right Kate Stewart: [bitter laugh] Thank you Osgood: As in fact you always do Kate Stewart: Don't patronise me, Osgood. When I give an order I expect it to be followed because sometimes the needs of the many do actually outweigh those of the few even if that means someone ends up dying. And you know you'll remember their faces. Believe me, you will remember them. Osgood: I'm sorry Kate Stewart: We'll talk about it later

Open the Box - Roy Gill

Kate Stewart: I'm open to new ideas, always, but I refuse to go into anything blind

Kate went to holiday camps as a kid: "They did annoyingly upbeat announcements too."

Kate had a "Classical education" and "an abiding hatred of outdoor sports".

She enjoys custard creams.

She lives with the daily fear of losing her team.

Kate Stewart: Regret doesn't bring people back. Trust me, I know.

This Sleep of Death - Jonathan Morris

Warren Calder: The Geneva Convention outlaws torture and I know how much you care about that

Tempest - Lisa McMullin

Kate Stewart: I hate it when it's Us or Them.

The Power of River Song - Guy Adams

Josh Carter: You know Kate, she won't let emotion get in the way

Kate [to Captain Josh Carter]: I’ve kicked down my fair share of doors in this job. It’s my form of Pilates. Chant: Eugh. Miss Stewart. Kate: Don’t call me Miss Stewart. I’m not a governess in a Victorian novel. Chant: Ms? Kate: I’m here to see the Director. Chant: I’m afraid that’s quite- Kate: Let me explain something to you. One would have thought it obvious but I spend a good deal of my time spelling out the obvious to people who get paid more than me, so - Chant: MS STEWART! Kate: Shush, now. Shush. I’ve been awake for three days. I’m fighting a war of attrition with the coffee machine and I’m currently investigating my own death. It is an effort for me not to staple your tie to your desk. Chant: I understand that you’re under considerable pressure but I simply won’t be talked to like that. Kate: Right. [Sounds of a brief struggle] Chant: Ms Stewart! [Followed by sounds of stapling and somewhat heavy breathing as Kate staples Chant’s tie to his desk.] Kate [not at all breathlessly]: I did warn you. Sorry. Was - was that a very expensive tie? Chant: My mother bought it for me for Christmas. Kate: Merry Christmas. [She literally kicks open the door to the Director’s office.]

The Enemy Beyond - Andrew Smith My father was stationed in Edinburgh when I was a little girl

Fire and Ice - John Dorney

Always do what you're best at, I say.

Kate loves a pun: For now, we're going to have to put your plans on ice (after stopping an Ice Warrior from destroying a large chunk of Australia!)

Eleven's Eleven - Lisa McMullin

Kate Stewart [to the voice activated vault]: Hello. My name is Kate Stewart and I've come to rob your vault. Would you mind opening up, please?

The Curator's Gambit - Andrew Smith

Kate Stewart: Wait, is that new? The Curator: Oh no, not new. I rearrange the exhibits from time to time. Kate Stewart: It's a Turner, isn't it? The style is unmistakable. I thought I knew all of his work. Osgood: That's Hampton Court Palace. Josh Carter: What's that doing here? Is it dangerous? Curator: Ooh hardly. It was a Royal commission. Not for public display. It commemorates the Undergallery's original location beneath Hampton Court. Osgood: I didn't know that. Kate Stewart: Elizabeth founded the Undergallery in 1562. The National Gallery wasn't built until the 1830s.

Kate's aware of the optical illusion in Holbein's ‘The Ambassadors' which looks like a smudge from one angle but is clearly a skull from another.

The Curator calls Kate very astute for knowing he wouldn't leave the Arch unprotected.

Kate mentions she knows the Privy Gardens at Hampton Court Palace because she's visited.

The Man From Gallifrey - Andrew Smith

Kate goes with Josh and his rescue party to get Osgood and Jimmy Tan back. She's always prepared to risk herself for the sake of her people.

The War Factory - Lizzie Hopley

Bamberra: Can you ride a horse and shoot? Kate Stewart: Have you met my father? [In fact Bamberra was talking to him very recently.]

Ten Minutes in Hell - John Dorney

Kate refuses to let Varliss of the Vulpreen break her, despite regular whippings. She refuses to tell him anything about Earth's defences. She urges Worrall to try to escape Varliss, encouraging the Vulpreen whom Varliss has enslaved to rebel. She feels survivor's guilt after Varliss shoots Worrall because Kate refuses to tell him what he wants to know. Kate persists in her defiance because she refuses to give up hope, no matter how hopeless things look.

The Sacrifice of Jo Grant - Guy Adams

Kate gives the impression that she occasionally struggles with Jo's tendency to go off on tangents.

Kate Stewart: A few seconds to get clear. If the Official Secrets Act would ever allow my memoirs, that would be the title.

Osgood: If I can figure out the refractive index, I can probably compensate for it. Then we'd be able to see through to the other side. Kate Stewart: Already done. Someone's working from my calculations right now. You're not the only one with a PhD or two.

Kate Stewart: Why did you jump after me [after Kate's pulled through a pocket of temporal instability]? Jo Jones: I was trying to save you! Kate Stewart: One day, Miss Jones, you'll learn you can't save everybody. Jo Jones: Have you? [ouch!] Kate Stewart: I'm sorry, I - I shouldn't be snapping at you. It's just - well -

Kate carries a Mark 17 [pistol? revolver? Unclear]

Kate muses that she's not sure she can bear to speak to the Brig again (while she's in the past). Later she seriously considers it, but is interrupted before it happens. She finally does call him, after prodding from both Jo and the Third Doctor.

Kate's the one to grab Jo from the Time Vortex thanks to the Doctor's meddling. He brings Osgood 'a gadget' to track Jo through the Time Vortex, but Kate's the one to actually grab her and bring her back into their Time.

[ETA: Can’t believe I forgot there was a UNIT story in the first Eighth of March boxset!]

Narcissus - Sarah Grochala

Kate says she's weak and sees monsters in her bedroom, that she's lost in the woods and her dad can't find her. Which is how she overcomes the alien's psychic hold on her. She allows herself to feel weakness and is able to pull out her gun and shoot the mirrors, destroying the alien's power.

Osgood: I just wanted to say how sorry I am about what happened on the ship. It's not like me. Kate Stewart: It's okay. We all have crises of confidence. Osgood: Do you? Kate Stewart: Sometimes. Osgood: But you always seem so calm and collected. Kate Stewart: [weak laugh] Huh, not always. Not inside. But outside appearances must be maintained for the team. Osgood: That takes a lot of strength. Kate Stewart: You know, when I was inside those mirrors I realised something. Jordan's ship wasn't feeding off anything to do with external beauty, it was feeding off confidence, self-belief. It was never about appearance. How could it be? Physical beauty is subjective, but bravery, strength, intelligence - that's not.

#Kate Stewart #Background Info #Big Finish #UNIT #Audio Drama

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bookwyrminspiration · 2 years

Note

Do you think Keefe will be involved in Stellarlune? After looking at the author’s Instagram account, many of the lines that were deleted from Stellarlune involve Sophie and Ro. I think this shows that Keefe is barely in the novel because there are not any lines between him and Sophie? Do agree or no? I would like Sophie to find him soon but I wonder what will happen in the novel in the meantime. With Keefe’s absence, I am hoping that instead of endless pages dedicated to the love triangle, the author will finally begin to wrap up the countless plot threads that still need to be answered. Do you think she will be able to do this or not?

I think Keefe is too important to the story to not be involved in Stellarlune. Our last cliffhanger was specifically about him and his actions, and throughout the series the cliffhangers have been indicators of what's going to be significant in the next book.

A few recent examples: the Flashback cliffhanger about being unmatchable and the Legacy focus on Sophie's match status and bio parents, the Nightfall cliffhanger about Alvar's memories and the Flashback focus on searching his memories and the Vacker Legacy, the Lodestar cliffhanger about Amy remembering Sophie and the Nightfall focus on her human family, and so on and so forth. I think it stands to reason this trend will continue with Stellarlune, meaning while Keefe doesn't have to be the biggest thing, he will have significance in the book's plot.

I reason that the explanation behind the deleted quotes excluding things to do with Keefe is specifically because so much about him is up in the air. Any quotes talking to him would immediately tell us that there is a scene in the novel where Sophie and Keefe have contact, which is a significant spoiler. The thing about deleted quotes is that they don't really tell us anything at all, yet we still get content! When Stina talks about Sophie earning the Neverseen's respect we don't know anything about that! It tells us very little as to what's happened; it could be referring to burning down the storehouse, it could be referring to something she did we don't know about yet!

But with Keefe there's not a lot of wiggle room there. If Sophie and Keefe talked we'd know where the story was heading and that they had direct contact. We'd very quickly narrow things down significantly, and even if we'd still be a little lost it's still more telling than Shannon probably wants. So I think I'd argue that the lack of Keefe in the deleted quotes isn't actually reflective of his importance in the story.

As for the plot threads, I do think Shannon will be able to wrap them up in the next two books. I think it's actually already begun, even. Keefe's legacy has been discussed for a while and we've gradually been learning more and more about it throughout the books; his new ability is another step towards that. So I think we are making progress towards it all, there's just enough going on simultaneously that it's hard to identify it. Which isn't to say Shannon's doing a bad job writing it, that's just a natural consequence of this kind of story, not a critique.

Additionally, at least in my experience, when things start to really come together it happens quickly. There's a lot of lead up then everything clicks and things progress much faster than the rest of the story. Going into it it may feel like too much to ever all come together, but it's entirely possible that once it all clicks it'll move fast from there and two books will be more than enough to wrap everything up.

A mini comparison would be the plot of Lodestar where throughout the whole book we were leading up to Lumenaria, to Sophie being there. She learned about the treaties, was invited to be at the negotiations, was learning about outward channeling and how it works, etc. But then when it actually all came together and Lumenaria fell it was quick. Most of the work was the set up. You can find things like that in a lot of books! In this case we'd just be applying it to a whole series instead of one isolated book.

So to summarize all of that: I think Keefe will be important in Stellarlune, and I think it's still completely and entirely possible for the series to be wrapped up in the two final books! At least that's how I view things, but I suppose whether or not I'm right remains to be seen. Thanks for the questions though, they're incredibly thought provoking!

#kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #kotlc stellarlune #quil's queries #darklit-sea #I was looking back through shannon's insta for this #and it reminded me that I was thinking about compiling all the keeper summer things she posted into one tumblr post #because I don't know about you all but I do /not/ wanna sit through those videos they made #they just don't click with my brain #so I thought I might adapt them all into one big post!#but idk if anyone else would want that or benefit so I haven't done it yet #long post

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oficmag · 2 years

Text

Contributor Spotlight: Taylor

Now that Issue #1 is live, we at OFIC Mag are excited to shine a light on some of the amazing contributors from our inaugural issue. We hope you all love them as much as we do!

Today’s spotlight is on Taylor | @grilledcowheart, who wrote “the sea monster stays in bed all day listening to Long Division” for Issue #1.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I've been trying to think of how to answer this question for days; my mind completely blanks every time I open up my laptop to stare at it. So I suppose I'll default by just telling you that while putting the finishing touches on my other answers, I was also on Discord encouraging a friend to draw a Pixar character with two penises like a shark.

How did you find fandom?

I first found fandom through the site fanpop.com and the various Powerpuff Girls “fanclubs” that existed there—the site hosted multiple types of fanworks, including fics, and from there I found fanfiction.net, deviantART, and so on. I'd actually been writing fanfic since elementary school—largely crossover fics of the various shows I'd watch on Boomerang (Cartoon Network's "oldies" channel) late at night when I should've been sleeping—but PPG is where I actually developed an awareness of and connection to fandom communities.

What fandom are you in now and what brought you here?

Right now, I'm mostly involved with the fandom for Pixar's Luca. There's a lot I could say about the film and its reception by the queer community, especially in light of everything that's been going on with Disney's support of homophobic politicians and Pixar itself stating that Disney has censored same-sex affection in their films, but we'd honestly be here all day.

Aside from all that, as much as I love the film (and its little sequel short, "Ciao Alberto"), it's yet another story about childhood angst and trauma that leaves just enough room for someone like me to step into and want to push further. Trauma is so abundant in children's media, but obviously there's only so far you can go into it while still being appropriate for children to consume, so fanfiction allows for a more in-depth discussion of these things. There's a good quote by the Biblical scholar David Janzen about trauma theory, wherein he says that the struggle faced by trauma survivors trying to describe their experiences is "situating the trauma within an explanatory narrative so that they can make truth claims about it and explain and make sense of it," and that trauma is "really a gap in narrative rather than narrative itself." I think a lot of my writing—fanfic and ofic—is about trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the narratives I've been given and how I've actually experienced the world.

Also Luca/Alberto is a very cute and gives me serotonin.

What’s your favorite book of all time and what do you love about it?

Naturally, I get asked this and forget every book I've ever read in my life. I think Stephen Mitchell's translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh is definitely up there, though—Gilgamesh is such a fascinating and emotionally resonant story even all these thousands of years later, and Mitchell's poetry helps smooth over some of the inherent awkwardness that comes from translation. Further, because Gilgamesh is obviously situated within a larger mythological context, there are tons of new discoveries, translation nuances, and spin-offs to find, such as the tablets that strongly imply Enkidu and the monster Humbaba knew each other before Gilgamesh went to kill the latter (when I say "daddy," you say "issues!"). One of my earliest attempts at submitting my ofic writing was actually a modern Gilgamesh AU focusing on that connection, which I'd love to come back to and make into a full book one day.

What projects are you working on right now?

Right now, I'm working on revising a fanfic novella, alongside a few other Luca/Alberto short stories and an article on applying creative writing strategies to academic writing. I mostly write short stories, so I tend to cycle through projects very quickly, with a few longer CNF/hybrid projects that gestate in the back of my mind for 1-3 years at a time.

What are your aspirations as a writer, big picture or small?

I had a nearly 400-word response to this typed up initially about how my aspirations for fanfic and ofic differ, how I try to take the crazy things I see going on in the literary fiction and nonfiction spheres and take them back to the Land of Fandom to show others all the cool ways we could be telling our stories—darker, wilder, more “cringe.” A creative writing professor I had in undergrad once said that he assigns dark and experimental fiction because many writers need to see someone else do it first before they can give themselves permission to start letting their fears of “acceptability” go.

Still, it felt like I was gaslighting myself, pretending my work could ever matter.

It reminded me, too, of David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life, which I read largely while volunteering at a homeless shelter as part of one of my undergrad classes. The most notable memory of that whole experience is watching several white teenagers eagerly discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of the then-recent film adaptation of The Hate U Give while I sat eating with two of the shelter’s clients—a black mother and her child. They never looked in our direction, not even once.

Near the end of the book, Shields cites an interview David Foster Wallace gave shortly after the release of Infinite Jest, wherein he states that “We’re existentially alone on the planet. I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling. And the very best [writing] construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness.”

Later, Shields himself says: “Illusion, baby, illusion—whatever the cost.”

If you could give one piece of advice to beginning writers, what would you tell them?

Never let yourself be confined by how a story in your genre is "supposed" to be written. Read outside of your genre! My writing became so much more alive and vibrant after I found creative nonfiction through Amy Fusselman's short but powerful memoir, The Pharmacist's Mate, which is told largely through fragments. Borrow from other genres and forms (mature poets steal, after all). Sure, you might alienate your hypothetical audience, but they might not have liked the more "normal" version, either. The only thing you can guarantee in art-making is that you've honored yourself and the story you want to be telling.

THANK YOU FOR BEING A PART OF THE OFIC FAMILY, TAYLOR! WE’RE SO THRILLED TO SHARE YOUR WORK WITH THE WORLD.

#writeblr #bookblr #issue 1 #spotlight

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lovemesomesurveys · 2 years

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Have you ever read the Hunger Games series? Yes. When was the last time you ran into something? Hm. I don’t recall. Do you enjoy dressing up? Eh, not really. I’m usually just uncomfortable. Do you live in the city or a rural area? City. Would you say you have a sense of style? It’s my sense of style, I like it, so that’s all I care about. It’s casual and comfy.

What's your biggest fear? Right now I just worry about my health and never getting better. I’m being transferred to a rehabilitation center and I have to be there at least a month. That’s a whole fucking other month in a hospital. I worry about it being longer. I worry this trachea tube will end up being a permanent thing. Will I be able to do things again and not be bedridden? Will I ever get to eat and drink again? How much longer until I can go home??? Have you ever been bitten by a wild animal? No. Are you close to any of your cousins? Not anymore, sadly. I used to be. Growing up I spent a ton of time with my cousins and I was really close to a few of them. That was the case up until a few years ago. I play a big part in that, but also as we got older our interests changed and they got busy with their own lives with work, friends, and relationships and I was dealing with my health shit. Have you ever been lost in the woods? No. Where did you last travel? My favorite beachy tourist town back in March. Do you enjoy driving? I don’t drive. What song did you last listen to? I heard Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush while watching Stranger Things, so I have that stuck in my head. If you have a job, how often do you work? I don’t have a job. What time do you normally go to sleep at night? Around 1ish I usually start to doze off. Do you watch a lot of movies? Kinda. I watch more shows. Do you like Tom Petty? I like Free Fallin’. Would you rather have snow or rain? I’d like to have both. It doesn’t snow where I live, though. :/ Do you own a lot of sweaters? I own a lot of sweatshirts. Have you ever tried rock-climbing? No. Ever ridden in a police car? No. Favorite decade of music? I like a variety, but 90s and 2000s are my top faves. Have any of your best friends been your best friend longer than a year? My mom has been my best friend all 33 years of my life. Ever witnessed a murder? No, omg. Do you care what people think of you? Yes, but not quite as much as I used to. I don’t have the energy. Does your room have a ceiling fan? Yes. Have you ever tried blogging? This is it. Favorite television channel? I mainly watch The Hallmark Channel, MTV, UpTV, and TV Land. My TV is mostly background noise, but I do have my shows I watch. Have you ever lied under oath? No. What are your religious views? I’m a Christian. When did you last change your bed sheets? I haven’t been home in almost 3 months, so at least that long. Would you consider yourself a flirt? No. At what age do you plan to be married? I don’t. Do you eat a lot of junk food? Somewhat. I used to be a big foodie, but then my health changed, as well as my appetite. When did you last go on vacation? Back in March. Are you resilient? I don’t feel resilient, I feel very weak and scared. As a kid I was. I had a good amount of struggles then, too, but I handled it better. I was stronger. Child me would be so disappointed in me right now. Current me is, too. Have you ever failed a subject before? I did have to retake a math course in community college. I had a shitty professor the first time and I think that played a big part cause I did much better the second time with a better teacher. If so, what was the class? Math. Do you wear more bright or dull colors? My wardrobe is mainly black. Do you know anyone who has attempted suicide? Yes. What's your favorite quote? I have many. Would you consider yourself mature? Yes, but I can be immature in some ways, too. How many clocks are in your house? Several when you count electronics. Do you play any sports? No. What is your biggest life regret? Not taking care of myself and ignoring/putting off things I shouldn’t have. Have you ever been injured in a car accident? No. If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be? Hawaii, perhaps. Have you ever had highlights in your hair? Yeah, for many years. Favorite fast food restaurant? Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, Carl’s Jr, and Chick-Fil-A. In what country were you born? USA. Are your eyes more than one color? No. Have you ever caught something on fire? Yes. What would you consider your biggest flaw? My stubbornness is definitely one of them. What do you think your best quality is? I’m understanding and open minded. Do you enjoy listening to others' problems? I wouldn’t say I enjoy it, but I was someone who did enjoy helping others and lending an ear or words of advice if I could. I was the one friends came to and said I was easy to talk to and they felt comfortable doing so. Do you keep any plants in your house? No. What is your mother's occupation? She’s a shift lead. Do any of your friends like your musical style? I don’t have any friends, but my family and I do like a lot of the same music. What are you most looking forward to? Whenever I can go home. What was your favorite television show as a child? The stuff from the 90s on Nickelodeon, Disney, PBS, WB Kids, Fox Kids. Are you afraid of insects? YES. Are you cold-natured? No. But I have been kinda cold in some ways and just distant and withdrawn. I just feel so bitter and irritable and miserable. I feel like life has hardened me in some ways and I don’t like this person I’ve become the past few years. How old were you when you got your first pet? Around 3. Did you / do you enjoy high school? I liked some parts of it. The first two years were kinda rough. I liked my senior year. What would you say was your favorite age? My childhood. What annoys you most about social networking? People always wanting to start drama or spread misinformation. Are you the center of attention most of the time? Noo and I don’t want to be. What are you currently reading? A Time to Die by Elle Gray. When did you last go to the library? I went to the one at my UC a few times. I think the last time was back in 2014. Growing up I went to the library all the time. My grandma lived like around the corner from one and my cousins and I went often. I went to my elementary school’s library often as well. Awww, reminds of the Scholastic Book Fair. I miss those. Are you ill at the moment? I have some health issues I’m dealing with. Do people tease you about anything? Playfully, sure. My family and I tease each other. How late did you stay up last night and why? I zonked out sometime around midnight and woke up briefly around 5AM before going back to sleep for a few hours. Have you ever written poetry? I’ve attempted to. Curtains or shades? Curtains. How many people have you spoken to in the last hour? One. Do you tend to text a lot? More so now since being in the hospital, but prior to that not really. Ever lost a great best friend? Yes. What is your favorite kind of flower? I don’t really have one. How tall are you? About 5′4. Do you own any guns? No. What would you say is your favorite book of all-time? I couldn’t possibly choose just one. I’ve read a shit ton of books I’ve really enjoyed. I will say for the past 2/3 years I’ve been really into a few different series from a few authors such as Willow Rose, AJ Rivers, and Elle Gray. Those have been my current favorites. Do you think you're living a good life? No. :/ And I’ve been really, really kicking myself while lying on this hospital bed for almost 3 months and going through all this stuff. I’m so mad and disappointed in myself. I also took so much granted. What's your least favorite part of the day? Nighttime. Are you an over-achiever? No. Have you ever won an award for a speech? No. Do you tend to curse a lot? No, I rarely do. Have you ever played on the Ouija board? No. I don’t mess with that stuff. Do you sleepwalk? No. Have you ever slept on the floor before? Yes. Are you a fan of public displays of affection? I don’t mind little PDAs, but not full on makeout or groping sessions. When did you last attend a yard sale? It’s been several years. I had a family friend and an aunt who used to have them. Do you wish your life were simpler or more interesting? I used to say my life was so routine and I didn’t do much, but I had the things I enjoyed and it worked for me for the most part. I miss that now that’s for sure. I’d take it over this. I like a little shakeup in the routine like going on vacation (would like more of that), going to the movies, going shopping, etc, but I also like being at home, doing my thing. I used to complain, but being in the hospital has made me think a lot and see things differently.

What goals do you wish to accomplish tomorrow? I’m supposed to be going to a new place, so I hope that goes well. When is your birthday? July 28th. Which is worse: going blind or deaf? I mean, neither would be ideal. What was the best part of today? My mom being here and watching Stranger Things. Do you attempt to stay away from drama? Yes. What liquid did you last drink? I think it was Pepsi. It’s been almost 3 months and a lot has happened, so my days are a little muddled. Do you ever prefer to be alone? Yeah, sometimes. I like having some alone time. Have you ever had a deadly animal as a pet? No. Favorite Disney movie? Alice in Wonderland, A Goofy Movie, Toy Story. Have you ever been to the beach? Numerous times. I love the beach. If you have, how many times have you been? ^^^ What was your dream occupation at age ten? I wanted to be a teacher. Are you terrified at the idea of weight-gain? No, I seriously need to gain weight. i’m too underweight and it’s caused a lot of issues. Do you drink a lot of water? No, I only typically drink 3-4 glasses. Does your room have carpet or hard-wood floors? Carpet. Do you take naps daily? No, but often. Who were you named after? No one. Do you plan on traveling this spring or summer? Sadly, no. I’ve been laid up here in the hospital since the end of May and I’ll likely be here another month. I pray it’s less than that, and I really hope it’s not more. Do you know anyone who is colorblind? No. This question comes up in like every survey I take... Have you ever been a teacher's pet? Yeah, you could say that. What is your absolute favorite hobby? I enjoy doing surveys, reading, coloring, scrolling through Tumblr, watching YouTube, and watching my shows. How many times a day do you brush your teeth? At least once. Ever been to a tanning bed before? No. I never will. Are you satisfied with your financial stability? I shouldn’t complain, I’m able to pay my bills first and foremost and I’m able to treat myself a little. I’m very fortunate and grateful that I have a home and food to eat and my family who supports me financially. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish I had more money, but I have the necessities.

Who is your favorite actor / actress? Alexander Skarsgard is definitely one of them. Are your nails painted? No. Do you ever accidentally talk to inanimate objects? Ha, I’ve bumped into inanimate objects and apologized lol. I’ve yelled at them in frustration, too. What's your favorite flavor of ice cream? Strawberry, mint chocolate chip, birthday cake, and various other concoctions from like Baskin Robbins and Cold Stone. Have you ever kissed someone of the same gender? No. Do you receive any hate mail? No. Have you ever sent a letter in the mail? Yeah. If you could, would you have a pen pal? I did in the 3rd grade. What color are the pants you're wearing? I’m not wearing pants, I’m wearing a blue hospital gown. What is your life philosophy? I don’t know. Who last sent you a goodnight text message? My mom. Do you own any clothes that are your favorite color? Yes.

Have you ever been in a hot tub before? I have. What's your favorite comedy movie? I have a few. In which year were you born? 1989.

#personal #text #survey #surveys #long survey

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