#command syntax

[piratesexmachine420]

I was trying to see if I could post a bit of ASCII art I did earlier and I got so fucking fed up with Tumblr/Firefox refusing to let me paste pre-formatted text that I decided to take matters into my own hands. Here's a thrown-together script that uses xdotool and xkbcli to convert a file into keystrokes events. Eat my ass rich text fields.

#!/bin/bash # usage: paste-xdotool.sh [sleep amount] [file name] sleep $1 while IFS= read -rN1 char; do xdotool key $(xkbcli how-to-type $(printf '%d' "'$char") | sed -nE "1s/.*[[:space:]]+(.*)[[:space:]]+.*/\1/p" | sed "s/Linefeed/shift+enter/") done < $2

[despazito]

Kind of felt like a nothingburger video

[daemonhxckergrrl]

"ay :exe '%s/' . '"\zs.*\ze\s\' . @a . '"' . '/\=@+' .

behaviour of the utterly deranged

[unusedcactus]

cool thanks for the quake console commands University of Delaware

[cornbread-but-cringey]

so was anyone gonna tell me that the addion of /ride to java edition was a parity change with bedrock edition?

[shiitake-transcendent]

Realizing that at some point in the last 20 years command line syntax changed and i cant find a repository of what it used to be. Im so fucked

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

I just dipped into Appendix F for an unrelated reason, and I think it’s funny that out of everything Sauron ever did — a master craftsman and teacher, a commander and conqueror, a deceiver and seducer, who achieved so much and, even in defeat, usually came verrrry close and tended just to reappear later all the stronger — one thing he utterly failed at was making Black Speech the common language of all his servants. He made grammar and vocab and syntax, and then the orcs could never figure out how to use his system. They ended up with such a hodge podge of fragmented, bastardized versions of the language that they were often incomprehensible to each other and had to fall back on Westron, the language of their enemies, to be understood even within Mordor.

It feels extremely JRR to me that he would let his Big Bad Villain kill and maim and enslave and despoil the environment, but he simply couldn’t allow Sauron to succeed at…linguistics.

[healthfitness235]

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That’s what The Genie Script is all about. According to their website, the key to getting enough energy, having the right intelligence, and establishing mental clarity is simple and singular. The late Bob Proctor originally described the one thing holding consumers back and it is inside every person. This hidden gem is the key to wealth and can even help consumers establish themselves as overnight millionaire in some cases. read more.. https://geniescript.org/

[dedalvs]

My brother and I absolutely cackled after that Aemond and Aegon Valyrian exchange!

I wanted to ask (and I'm terrible at conlangs, so forgive me) what grammar/syntax Aegon is stumbling over here and how to properly say what he intended to? Any why is he making thise mistakes (simply lacking the vocabulary, or rules of the language he hasn’t grasped)?

Let's take a look at it. This is what he said:

Nyke koston... Bēvilus... Sētegon bīlīvāzmi?

The subtitles say this:

"I can... Have to... Make a war?"

Prior to this Aemond is, essentially, showing off. He knows that Aegon has simply not put any time into studying Valyrian (or studying anything). At this stage, Valyrian is no longer spoken by the family on a day-to-day basis—especially as Alicent probably never learned it at all (or if she did, only in a few scattered lessons here and there; not to actually use). In order for either of the boys to gain any kind of fluency in the language, they have to study constantly and find ways to use it. There's simply no daily need for the language—and plenty of reasons not to use it, as very, very few people they'll encounter on a daily basis speak the language.

Now, if we were talking about two random people in Westeros, this wouldn't mean anything. But these are the children of Viserys Targaryen, himself a descendant of Aegon the Conqueror. They brought their family line and their culture with them to Westeros—and, of course, their language. If someone like Alicent Hightower doesn't speak High Valyrian it means nothing. If a Targaryen doesn't speak High Valyrian, though… See, they're supposed to be able to speak Valyrian. Failing to do so carries with it a sense of shame that isn't present for a random person who doesn't speak Valyrian. Aemond knows this. Aegon is annoying him, so he goes poking at that wound.

Aemond could have fed him a short line with an obvious answer to help Aegon out, but instead he threw a whole mess of Valyrian at him. The longer it goes on, the more lost Aegon gets, desperately trying to catch up and figure out what was just said and thereby missing what is being said at that instant. From the whole speech, Aegon probably only figured out that he was being asked a question, and it was something having to do with planning.

So, back to what he says. The beginning student of a language is quite adept at doing a single verb in a present tense sentence. In a discussion like this, though, you're typically saying things like "I think that" or "We should" or "I suggest" or "Perhaps we might", etc. All that stuff that we need to offer opinions, make suggestions, hedge, etc. Much more than simple narration.

Aegon is attempting to do this without a sufficient command of the language. He knows some vocabulary, he knows some grammar, but he simply did not put in the work to actually speak this language. Thus, he has to overcome a lot of Common Tongue (i.e. English) interference.

There are many differences between Valyrian and English, but the biggest one by far is the major word order. In English, the verbs come before the rest of the junk; in Valyrian, they come at the end. And this is how things get all messed up.

In English, you start the sentence saying things like "I think" or "We should" or "It seems". In Valyrian, those things come at the end. If you start with the Valyrian equivalent of "I think", you will quickly realize (presuming you know enough of the grammar) that you're sunk, because once you've said it, the sentence should be done. Thus you get Aegon's false starts.

Starting at the beginning, Aegon says Nyke koston, which is kind of like saying, "I could". But there's nowhere to go. This is how a sentence ends. For example, if he wanted to say, "I could fly to Harrenhal", he would say Harenhalot sōvegon koston—literally "To Harrenhal fly I could". If you're thinking English-ly, you're essentially thinking backwards, and if you simply translate what you're thinking, you'll immediately have nowhere to go. You'll have to take a pause and think about how to get started again. And that's exactly what happens here.

Now, leaving aside that Valyrian is a pro-drop language and starting it off with nyke "I" is unnecessary and makes you look like a beginner, koston isn't bad (I mean, if used sentence-finally). Once he realizes he can't start there, though, he loses confidence. It's those old High Valyrian lessons all over again, and some maester suggesting he hasn't studied. That self-doubt makes his facility with Valyrian worse. This means his chances of recovery are severely hampered.

But onward he presses, and he decides to say "We have to" or "I have to". Now, the problem here is in Valyrian that requires the verb bēvilagon. This verb isn't used in the usual way. Literally it means "to lie on". If you wanted to say "We must mobilize our dragons", you'd say Īlvī zaldrīzī mazannagon īlo bēvilza. That's literally "Our dragons to mobilize us it lies upon". The one who must do something is placed in the genitive and put directly before the verb. If you start with the verb, well, you missed your chance to say who it is that must be doing something—let alone what they must do. Another false start.

It's also worth noting that he says bēvilus as opposed to bēvilza. Let's ignore that it's the aorist and focus on the fact that it's the subjunctive (just like koston). You use the subjunctive with your main verb when you're hedging—when you're suggesting. Not when you're commanding. Kind of an odd thing to say "We must do this" with the subjunctive. Kind of like saying "Maybe we might considering having to do this".

At this point, his confidence has completely evaporated. Everybody's staring at him like he has no idea what he's talking about; Aemond's eating it up. He knows he's cooked. He's got to say something, though, so he says sētegon which isn't even conjugated. It means "to make" or "to create", which might make sense in English (e.g. "to make war"), but doesn't make sense in Valyrian (a bit like saying "to construct a war" or even "to bake a war") and then tries to pronounce vīlībāzmi "war" (wrong case/number, wrong order) and fails, saying bīlīvāzmi, which means nothing (also he wanted vīlībāzme. Vīlībāzmi is "wars").

Long story short, he doesn't present himself very well—and we didn't even talk about his general pronunciation or intonation. It's kind of a great big mess in only five words. A true disaster.

But if there were no expectation that he should be able to speak Valyrian, none of this would matter! If there were no shame associated with him specifically not being able to speak Valyrian no one would expect it of him, and this challenge would mean as little as someone challenging him to speak the Old Tongue or Asshai'i. It'd be meaningless.

In short, this small portion of this scene is about being a heritage speaker of a language. It's the exact nightmare scenario all heritage speakers fear: To be put on stage and made to perform despite being unequal to the task while simultaneously feeling that they should be equal to it.

It'd be so cool if it was okay to be kind of good with a language—if that level of mastery was acceptable. In the real world, anyway.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

AI continues to be useful, annoying everyone

Okay, look - as much as I've been fairly on the side of "this is actually a pretty incredible technology that does have lots of actual practical uses if used correctly and with knowledge of its shortfalls" throughout the ongoing "AI era", I must admit - I don't use it as a tool too much myself.

I am all too aware of how small errors can slip in here and there, even in output that seems above the level, and, perhaps more importantly, I still have a bit of that personal pride in being able to do things myself! I like the feeling that I have learned a skill, done research on how to do a thing and then deployed that knowledge to get the result I want. It's the bread and butter of working in tech, after all.

But here's the thing, once you move beyond beginner level Python courses and well-documented windows applications. There will often be times when you will want to achieve a very particular thing, which involves working with a specialist application. This will usually be an application written for domain experts of this specialization, and so it will not be user-friendly, and it will certainly not be "outsider-friendly".

So you will download the application. Maybe it's on the command line, has some light scripting involved in a language you've never used, or just has a byzantine shorthand command structure. There is a reference document - thankfully the authors are not that insane - but there are very few examples, and none doing exactly what you want. In order to do the useful thing you want to do, they expect you to understand how the application/platform/scripting language works, to the extent that you can apply it in a novel context.

Which is all fine and well, and normally I would not recommend anybody use a tool at length unless they have taken the time to understand it to the degree at which they know what they are doing. Except I do not wish to use the tool at length, I wish to do one, singular operation, as part of a larger project, and then never touch it again. It is unfortunately not worth my time for me to sink a few hours into learning a technology that you will use once for twenty seconds and then never again.

So you spend time scouring the specialist forums, pulling up a few syntax examples you find randomly of their code and trying to string together the example commands in the docs. If you're lucky, and the syntax has enough in common with something you're familiar with, you should be able to bodge together something that works in 15-20 minutes.

But if you're not lucky, the next step would have been signing up to that forum, or making a post on that subreddit, creating a thread called "Hey, newbie here, needing help with..." and then waiting 24-48 hours to hear back from somebody probably some years-deep veteran looking down on you with scorn for not having put in the effort to learn their Thing, setting aside the fact that you have no reason to normally. It's annoying, disruptive, and takes time.

Now I can ask ChatGPT, and it will have ingested all those docs, all those forums, and it will give you a correct answer in 20 seconds about what you were doing wrong. Because friends, this is where a powerful attention model excels, because you are not asking it to manage a complex system, but to collate complex sources into a simple synthesis. The LLM has already trained in this inference, and it can reproduce it in the blink of an eye, and then deliver information about this inference in the form of a user dialog.

When people say that AI is the future of tutoring, this is what it means. Instead of waiting days to get a reply from a bored human expert, the machine knowledge blender has already got it ready to retrieve via a natural language query, with all the followup Q&A to expand your own knowledge you could desire. And the great thing about applying this to code or scripting syntax is that you can immediately verify whether the output is correct but running it and seeing if it performs as expected, so a lot of the danger is reduced (not that any modern mainstream attention model is likely to make a mistake on something as simple a single line command unless it's something barely documented online, that is).

It's incredibly useful, and it outdoes the capacity of any individual human researcher, as well as the latency of existing human experts. That's something you can't argue we've ever had better before, in any context, and it's something you can actively make use of today. And I will, because it's too good not to - despite my pride.

[baudouinette]

my masterlist (under construction)

Reading sources of interest (Baldwin IV)

Letter from Baudouin and Sibylle

Letter from Baldwin to Constance of France (1177)

(more letters)

Letter of condolences from Saladin to Baldwin IV after his father, King Amaury’s passing. (1174)

A History of deeds done beyond the sea by William of Tyre

The Leper King and his heirs

I also recommend taking a look at his genealogy/family tree!

You can find it and other pertinent trees in the Leper King and his heirs as well.

ONE OF THE FIRST OR THE FIRST FIC OF BALDWIN

I saw in comments and messages, both here and on TikTok, that there’s been some new people joining the community, so I wanted to offer a few of my fav starting places for reading real documents of the time. And others to gain a little perspective of the real side of things.

Add your own sources and resources! I would add more myself, but I don’t have time to look through my 400+ open tabs and remember it all lmaooo but I will update this into a masterlist along the way if u wish :3 (and if you know of better quality alternatives to the ones I’ve linked lmk)

Edit: give me some time and I will sporadically update with my resources. They’re just super scattered and some I just forget about because they’re from ages ago. So I might have to dig.

Seguramente traduciré al español algunos de estos documentos, si están interesados 🤍

In [ ] are some of the things that still need to be linked or redacted (many others are still not even mentioned)

Crusades/Kingdom of Jerusalem resources

•The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem C. R. Conder

•The feudal nobility and the kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174-1277

•Feudal monarchy in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100 to 1291

•Frankish rural settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Crusader Bible

1st, 2nd, 3rd crusades (YT)

Crusader orders (YT)

Order of Saint Lazarus (would like to add my own. Give me time lol)

Templar ≠ Crusader (YT)

Templar armor and weapons (YT)

General medieval resources (gear + clothing, weaponry, etc)

Ewart Oakeshott: Western Sword Typology info: links [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The sword in the age of chivalry

A knight and his weapons

A knight and his armor

A Knight and his horse

[Scimitar typology]

Modern History TV (YT)

Scholagladiatoria

Shadiversity (YT)

Helmets (give Baldwin a helmet, for the Lord’s sake)

Chainmail & gambesons (YT)

Common garments (YT)

12th century women's fashion (YT)

Medieval clothing terms

Medieval medicine (YT)

Hygene (YT) (can't find the video rn)

Old French language resources

Dictionnaire de l’ancien français

Petite syntaxe de l’ancien français

A breakdown of Yvain le chevalier

La chanson de Roland (YT)

The sound of Old French (YT)

Old French playlist

To make my phrases and translations quickly, I use wiktionary :)

Facts to take into consideration:

Castles: Typically, get used to forgetting that bare stone look. This could be true for new/hastily constructed castles and fortifications. But established infrastructure would be lime-washed/plastered. Many times painted. Many times colorful. On the inside, too—n they would be decorated, and full of tapestries. The more important a lordship (and where more often the King would pass through (royal castles)) and the more wealthy an area, the more true this would be. Churches would be colorful too. Painted with many motifs and icons. Mosaics can be included in your descriptions in many places too. Some early Roman—or Greek, some Byzantine, some local.

"Catapults" & trebuchets

[Water supply/distribution/availability] / diseases associated

[General supply of goods to the Kingdom] —ports like Jaffa, Akka, Ascalon, Beirut.

[The city of Jerusalem in contrast to the movie]

Royal Court:

Officers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem:

Constable: (second) in command of the army, judged military legal cases, paid mercenaries. On coronations, he held the King’s horse.

(1152-1179) Onfroi II de Toron

(1179-1194) Aimery de Lusignan

Marshal: next-in-command to constable. In charge of the military horses and mercenaries. He assisted the constable in coronations.

(c. 1179) “John”

(c. 1179) Gérard de Ridefort

Seneschal: managed the finances and royal castles, presided the haute cour in king’s absence. He administered the coronation ceremony.

(c. 1176) “Ralph”

(1176-1190) Josselin III d’Edesse

Chamberlain: in charge of the royal household and chambers, and servants. Had many other honorary or unofficial duties. Had to be of the utmost discretion. He would robe the king on coronation day.

(1175-1178) Amaury de Lusignan

(c. 1179) “John”

(c. 1184) “Raymond”

(1183-1185) Balian d’Ibelin

Butler: In charge of the royal table and vineyards.

(1185-1196) “Miles”

Chancellor: drew up deeds and charters and managed the diplomatic service. Usually clergymen.

(1174-1183) Guillaume de Tyr

(c. 1177) “Lambert”

Bailiff: regent in case of absence or minority of the legitimate ruler.

(1173-1177) Raymond III de Tripoli

(1177) Renaud de Châtillon

(1183-1185) Guy de Lusignan

Viscount and Castellan: Keeping criminality in check and administering justice. Not of high importance. Sometimes both offices were occupied by one person.

Castellan:

Rohard de Jaffa (1165-1177)

Balian de Jaffa (1178)

Peter of Creseto (1178)

Royal physician(s)

My stories:

Heaven Can’t Wait (Baldwin x OC)

Vide Cor Meum (Baldwin x time traveler OC) (assassin’s creed inspired)

REPEL (Baldwin x leper OC) (Greek tragedy style)

Sidi Mansour (Saladin x OC)

ART/Find me on:

My DeviantArt

My Pinterest

My instagram

My Youtube

[youzicha]

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI art turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On its own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[itz-skyline]

Desaix getting assassinated on the command of Bonaparte by his aide-de-camp Savary at the Battle of Marengo

From The Life of Napoleon a Hudibrastic Poem by Doctor Syntax

i was searching for some desaix prints or paintings of him, when i stumbled upon this engraving which left me confused af because last time i checked he got shot in the heart by austrain fire because he was infront of his troops. Upon digging did i realise that this came from a Hudibrastic poem a satiraical poem about the life of napoleon.

This was made by two dudes William Combe the one who wrote the poem and George Cruikshank the artist who made art for this poem book.

I found this extremely funny just because everything about this feels so dumb( ik its a satircal poem but still couldnt atleast give desaix a better outfit like why is he like wearing a surgeon uniform??). i genuinly think this was like big conspiracy between the british or smth or they just had the most biggest imagination ever. I feel like this is more insulting desaixs death then making fun of bonaparte bc wdym you think desaix got assassinated instead of dying a infront of his troops which motivated them to take revenge on their general whom they loved so much.

heres the text that goes along with it:

anywho i just wanted to share my findings since ive been hyperfixated on desaix and wanting to know more about him (even tho theres barely anything about him bc he died so early on)

[megid0nt]

If you're a linux[1] user who deploys multiple devices, I implore you: learn the command `scp`. It will change your life

It lets you copy files over an ssh pipe; if there's an ssh server on that host, you can essentially directly address a known file on that filesystem and say pwease gimme. And it's roughly the same syntax as `cp`, just with a `[user]@[host]:` before *either source or destination*[2].

And the real kicker is that neither source nor destination need be local:

I copied a file from my web server to an icecast source client host by passing it through my phone.

Unreasonably handy tool to have on your toolbelt.

Footnotes under the cut.

[1] Okay, fine, you got me! It's not solely a linux util. SCP is part of the openssh suite, which means that it's available on virtually every OS under the sun... Including being included by default on Windows 10 1709 and later versions of Windows. It's already on your mac, your BSD system, and almost certainly your phone, too. SSH servers and *nix go together like picnics and baskets, though, so I wouldn't exactly pull the *average* windows user aside to recc' `scp`.

[2] What's most interesting to me is that the `[user]@[host]` is used for the SSH client to know where it's authenticating and how, but the actual filesystem location's format is not processed by the SSH client; it's the *server's* format, not the client, that matters for parsing the file location. In some cases this can lead to a mismatch on filenames that you're receiving vs requesting, but the -T flag disables that checking, and then use `qwert@192.168.1.69:D:\\Documents\\testdata.bin` (drive letter indicated and backslashes escaped) to refer to it

[shanastoryteller]

Happy Pride! Jim & Spock? Can be in the Sybokverse or on their own eitherway is perfect!

a continuation of 1 2 3 4 5

“I believe I have the right to face my accuser.”

Jim is going to tear this asshole apart.

There’s muttering throughout the crowd, the auditorium filled to the brim for one cadet’s academic dishonesty disciplinary hearing. These are always open to be attended by the accused’s peers, but usually no one bothers, having far better things to do on a Friday morning. Jim is flattered, honestly.

Admiral Archer nods and everyone turns as one of the instructors stands and walks stiffly to the other podium.

Jim is honestly taken aback. A Vulcan giving him shit over this? He squints, trying to place him, suddenly sure he’s seen him somewhere before. Possibly just in the halls, but the familiarity feels deeper than that. He’s met a lot of Vulcans, to be fair.

“Cadet,” he greets.

“Defend the logic of your accusation,” he says, falling into familiar vernacular and only barely keeping himself from saying it in formal Vulcan. This guy might appreciate it, but Archer won’t, and Chris had told him not to be too much of an asshole.

The Vulcan raises an eyebrow. “The purpose of the test is to assess your response to no win scenarios. Altering the parameters, while admittedly an impressive feat of programming, shows both your lack of understanding and your casual disregard for the institution of Starfleet.”

“I don’t believe in no win scenarios,” he says confidently, flashing a smile to the assembled admirals that, in different circumstances, tends to get him laid.

He stiffens. “Your belief in them does not change their existence. In an impossible situation, you must react to the circumstances given to you. Anything else is entertaining delusions.”

“Bullshit,” Jim says immediately and sees Chris pinch the bridge of his nose. Oops. This is a perfect time to go into the speech that he has prepared, about how if he was actually trying to cheat he would have been more subtle about it, about how cheating was his answer to the question presented by the test, and how that applies to how he would really react as a captain.

But then the Vulcan gives him the bitchiest look he’s seen in – well, about four days, but he’s suddenly so sure where he knows him from.

~

Spock doesn’t understand how someone with so little regard for both etiquette and moral standards has survived this long in the academy. He’s intimately familiar with the doors that having a famous father can open, but surely there must be limits.

James Kirk opens his mouth, presumably to continue his insulting and inappropriate defense of his actions, then his eyes narrow, widen, and he demands, “Spock? S'Chn T'Gai Spock? Son of Amanda Grayson and S'Chn T'Gai Sarek?”

For a moment, all he can do is stare. “Have we met?”

His syntax when first faced with him had made him think that James Kirk was familiar with Vulcan, as unlikely as that seemed, but now he’s sure. Not only because of the correct pronunciation of his family name, but in how he has addressed him. Vulcan society is matriarchal. It is correct to identify him first as his mother’s son, and also appropriate to leave off his father’s title as ambassador when identifying his family origin, as his father’s position is supposed to be secondary to his mother’s. His mother married into his father’s clan, but that doesn’t change formal conventions.

Even on Vulcan, he is rarely identified correctly.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” James Kirk says, then takes out his communicator and starts typing.

What.

“Cadet Kirk!” Admiral Archer barks. “Put that away and comport yourself as your position demands or we’ll be here for more than accusations of your cheating.”

“Apologies, Admiral,” James Kirk says, placing his hands behind his back and looking like he’s taking this seriously for the first time. “If you’ll just allow a couple minutes-”

Spock’s communicator goes off.

“Commander,” Admiral Archer says warningly.

“One moment, please,” he says, his stomach rolling as he takes out the communicator. He’s hoping that this is another of James Kirk’s tricks, because when he’s placed it on silent only his family can contact him, and his mother marks all of her correspondence as non urgent. There is no good reason for his father to contact him.

He opens it up and blinks twice, to be certain of what he’s seeing.

Sybok has sent him a text base message. His elder brother never sends him text based communication, as he believes that Spock will not respond timely or authentically, and so only video calls him. Usually at inopportune times.

stop being mean to jimmy :(

He is a genius. Several things suddenly make sense all at once.

He is of course aware of his older brother’s dear friend who he only refers to as Jimmy. In the tragedy of Tarsus IV, when all should have been lost and the corrupt governor threatened to kill half the colony and did kill a not insignificant amount of them, it was Jimmy and Sybok who worked together to create a sort of resistance and keep people alive long enough to for their jury-rigged signal to make it through.

Receiving that strange message from Sybok after years of silence had let him, and their father, know that something was wrong and alert Starfleet.

Jimmy, who had been a minor at the time, and so his identity had been kept from the public at his request, and who had visited Sybok on Vulcan but Spock had examinations at the time and had not been permitted to travel across planet to meet him.

James Kirk looks at him, a smile hovering around the corners of his lips.

James Kirk. Colloquially known as Jim. Jimmy.

Spock had designed the Kobayashi Maru with his brother’s experience at Tarsus IV in mind. He had been different after, just as prone to arguing with their father, more prone to arguing with everyone else, but he’d been sturdier too. As if that experience had at once confirmed and destroyed all of his worst expectations of people.

James Kirk does not believe in no win scenarios and he has demonstrated that more aptly than any simulation could.

“I rescind my accusation of academic dishonesty towards Cadet Kirk.”

[novlr]

I’m just starting out with writing, and I really want my characters to feel different from each other. How do I make sure they have their own unique voices so my readers can tell them apart?

Experiment with character dialect

Dialect refers to the language people use when they speak: their accent, their slang, their regional or generational vernacular. When we think of “dialect”, we often think of things like “y’all” or “yer man” or “innit” — clichéd indications of place. You can definitely use these in your story, but also challenge yourself to go deeper.

Dialect can be a result of generational trends — you’ll notice that today’s teenagers don’t talk the same way their parents or grandparents do! Words fade in and out of fashion all the time. They can also be tied to a particular industry or subculture. When developing each character’s unique voice, consider what kind of slang or specialised language they might incorporate into the way they speak. 

Vary your characters’ syntax

Syntax has to do with the way we structure our sentences. Some characters will use only short, compact sentences, while others will ramble for miles. Some will always use grammatically correct language, while others will speak in fragments. 

A useful exercise is to write a conversation between two characters who use very different syntax in the way they talk. You can take their different approaches to the comical extreme until you get a sense of their different voices, and then dial it back and incorporate their individual syntaxes with more subtlety.  

Consider your characters’ word choices

There are very few true synonyms in the English language; each word has its own distinct connotation and tone. For example, one character might describe themselves as loquacious, while another describes them as a motormouth. Or, they might describe an authority figure as derisive, while the other character says they’re mean. 

The words a character lands on in any given situation can communicate a lot about how they see the world and themselves. 

Put your characters in moments of conflict

Conflict, tension, and suspense reveal who your characters really are. One character might become loud and aggressive, while another shuts down and speaks only in quiet monosyllables. Sometimes, a character’s voice contrasts the words they’re saying (you can communicate this through dialogue and action tags); for example, if a character says, “I’m not afraid!” in a strained, rattling voice, that belies their fear. 

As an exercise, try writing an argument between two of your characters and explore how the tension changes the way they speak. Then, you can incorporate this into your story.

Don’t neglect body language

On that note, a big part of a character’s distinct voice is the way they behave when they talk. You can convey this through action tags (“She hugged herself tight as she spoke”) or through descriptions surrounding the dialogue. 

Look at how your character holds themself — do they sprawl, taking command of the space, or do they try to make themself disappear? Do they only half-listen to the person talking to them, or do they make them feel like they’re the centre of the world? The way you communicate body language to the reader will inform the way they hear that character’s voice.

Read your work out loud

When you’ve finished the first draft of a story, it’s always a good idea to read your work out loud. This helps you catch any misused words, typos (the age of autocorrect is notorious for this), or inauthentic speech. You don’t have to let anyone hear you while you do this — it’s simply a tool for you as the writer to get a better sense of how your words come across on the page.

When you read, listen to each character’s dialogue and check to make sure it sounds true to that particular character. If you can’t tell the character voices apart, you may need to create a little more distinction through your revision process, using the tools we looked at above. 

Listen to character voices in the wild

A great way to develop your ear for character voices and get inspired along the way is to listen to the way real people talk. Go to a public park, a café, or a marketplace and stealthily absorb the language people use to express themselves. See if you can get a sense of what they’re thinking and feeling underneath their words. Then, you can incorporate elements of these experiences into your characters. 

Remember — human beings are unfathomably complex. Each is the epicentre of their own little universe, with all its dangers and joys. To create characters that readers will follow to the end, ensure that each one has a voice that’s unique and alive.