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thewadapan · 4 days

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TFNation 2024 post-mortem

So I went to the Transformers convention again! If you're following me for non-Transformers reasons, then this blog post will be worthless to you, sorry. If you didn't go the convention, it will probably be worthless to you as well. And if you did go to the convention, then it might even be worthless to you, too! I'd strongly recommend just listening to the podcast Jo and I recorded looking back on the event; it's more fun. I really only write these things as a personal record of the weekend, so it doesn't just fade into memory, because TFNation is one of the most important times of the year for me.

In previous years, I've followed the convention by making an hourlong vlog, recapping the event start-to-finish from my POV, showing off all the toys wot I got. Last year the production of that video was such an albatross that I committed to never doing that again, which turned out to be a good thing, because I don't think I could talk breezily about TFN 2024 to a camera for a couple of hours.

It's not to say that I didn't have a good time at TFN, or even a great time. But where some people seem to have found this to be the best TFN yet, I was definitely struggling a bit at some points in the weekend. In previous years, I've spoken to close friends of mine at or after the event, and they've expressed feelings of having had an off year one way or another, and I guess this year it was my turn! Partly, this blog post is going to be me working out what exactly went wrong, so next year's convention can hopefully go a little smoother for me.

The problems really started weeks before the convention. I had big plans to put together a really special zine, something that would prick people's ears up, something that I thought would genuinely leave a lasting impact. I'm being cagey about it because I hope it might still happen next year. But I couldn't source the material that I needed. Not to worry, I thought, I'd left myself more than enough time that I could brute-force the problem, create the material by myself.

And then I had an unrelated personal crisis, and suddenly it was three weeks later and I had nothing, with maybe a month to go until the convention. And I still made a go of it! But it couldn't be done. Not with what I had. Every approach I tried turned out to have hidden pitfalls and it was all turning out dogshit. I admitted defeat to my collaborators, who I'd inadvertently strung along for most of a year, which was embarrassing and frustrating.

Meanwhile, another deadline had been creeping up: the Refined Robot Co. zine, compiled by my close friend Ben, to which I contribute every year, needed to go to the printers in a few weeks and I had nothing. I'd picked a robot to write about out of a hat a few months ago, hoping that a good angle would occur to me in the intervening time, but it just didn't. I came up with an angle for Kingdom Rattrap, but immediately realised I had far more to say about that toy than could be contained within the margins of a single page.

When I saw the cover for the zine featured Missing Link Optimus Prime, who otherwise didn't have a page in the zine, I asked Ben if I could switch my page to talk about that toy instead. He agreed. However, around this time, I realised that the Transformers: Mosaic archive I've been working on for the last two years would be ending almost exactly coinciding with the convention; with the queued posts almost exhausted, I had no choice but to sit down and blitz through the remainder of the work. I gathered up all the scripts and previews I'd found, and I worked out a format for the posts. I lettered, coloured, and in a couple of cases wrote unfinished material I'd found to bring those strips to a readable state of completion, if possible. I wrote a blogpost reflecting frankly on the difficulties of the project, which would go over like a wet fart when it finally went live.

I started having problems with my eyes. They weren't hurting, not exactly, but they seemed to be producing copious amounts of sleep: viscous strings of yellow gunk accumulating not in the corner of my eye, but around the back, in the eyelashes, everywhere. I got some eye drops which didn't help. I went to the optician and she gave me some different eye drops, which did help. There wasn't any infection or anything. It was obvious what had happened: I'd been staring intently at the screen for days, drawing and redrawing the same gradients over bitcrunched artwork.

By this point—look, honestly, I'm losing track of the timeline here, in which order I did what—I really, really needed to get the RRCo review done. Feeling like I needed to make something worth the wait, I'd given some serious thought to the exact kind of writing I wanted to submit this time around. I wanted something in the vein of my intended Kingdom Rattrap review, but much tighter. An old memory surfaced and I finally had a hook; I wrote the page over the course of a few hours across a couple of days, in the electric kind of fugue state that happens when you're writing something that fucking slaps. Ben really liked it.

The problem, then, was the art: I'm not an artist. I can colour a drawing fine, but I don't even consider myself a colourist. The only way I can draw anything remotely good is through hard work: studying a reference object intently, drawing, erasing, redrawing the same line over and over again until it approximates reality. I was glad that the format of the zine encourages traditional media, because it meant I could force myself not to use the computer for a couple of days. I told Ben I hoped to have the piece ready by the end of Thursday (my day off); it was Saturday by the time I was able to sheepishly slip my rough pencils over the counter—for the robot mode, not even the truck mode! I spent Sunday inking and colouring. I spent Monday drawing the entire truck. Finally, it was done.

(If you haven't already, check out the rest of the zine here!)

There were now less than two weeks to go until the convention. Every year, I like to have something to give out, to give to people I meet as a little souvenir or whatever. It gives me an excuse to talk to people, and has been my #1 life hack for not being socially paralysed at the convention. I still had the Wheelie: Spotlights comic I'd made a year or two back, but I'd finally given up on my shitty old EPSON inkjet printer, which meant I needed to use a local print shop instead, which meant I needed to learn how to set up a PDF with bleed (on a comic that we'd drawn with zero bleed). The cheapest, quickest print shop in town is a forty minute walk away; I can make the round trip maybe twice during opening hours. Originally, I'd designed Wheelie: Spotlights to have a greyscale print on the reverse side as a costcutting measure, but the print shop told me that if I wanted one side in colour, the reverse side would have to be charged as a colour side as well. I decided to redesign the entire page in glorious full colour to take advantage of this fact. I reworked the comic itself to add bleed where necessary. I had to send through the file maybe three times before I'd finally gotten it all in the exact format they wanted.

The thing about Wheelie: Spotlights is that all of my friends already got copies at previous conventions. I wanted to make something else for them, and decided to make an A5 collection of prose and comics. I coloured an old bit of Transformers Animated concept art and designed a cover around it, made layouts for everything, typeset all the stories, wrote brief afterwords, and reeled off an introduction for the collection as a whole. I realised I probably could finish the Rattrap review in time, and did so; four people read it before the zine went to print. The vibe I got from the prereaders was that it's probably the best piece of writing I've ever released—but they're all biased. I sent through the file in the format the printers told me they wanted, only for it to turn out that they wanted it in a slightly different format, but then they managed to print it anyway as a special favour. Honestly, the print shop kind of rules. But what I'm trying to say is that the whole thing was very stressful.

On the way back from one trip to the print shop, I noticed an unread message from an IRL friend. They'd sent through a PDF several days ago. It was a photo of a handwritten letter to me, basically calling me out for being a shit friend and ghosting them for weeks during an important transitory period in their life. I replied with a rambling explanation for my behaviour, and apologised, promising to make things right in a couple of weeks.

But it did upset me! I was very angry at myself. And what made it even worse was that it happened at the peak of my fervour, when I had far too much momentum to simply stop and have it all be for naught. I was also painfully conscious that I'd been basically ignoring my girlfriend for days, in the run-up to this convention where I'd practically be going radio-silent for a long weekend. It all turned out okay, I got the zine done with a couple of days spare, everything was fine. But I had been stressed. I had been staying up late to work on my fake fandom job, and getting up early to work my real bullshit job. And my train was at 06:57 in the morning.

Honestly, that part on its own would have been fine, I wouldn't have it any other way: I usually arrive around noon on Friday, and there's plenty of people around, so it means I get as much out of the day as possible. But I was already tired, and I wound up paying the price.

Friday

I met up with Jalaguy and Daniel right away. Coming from the States, Daniel had brought us each a copy of the abortive Final Faction comic, which never came out in the UK. Meanwhile, I had an old LEGO book and a Transformers PlayStation 2 demo to give to Jalaguy; as always, we were rooming together this year, which made everything a breeze. I quickly gave out a bunch of zines to people. Ben arrived; he was staying at the Moxy, the other hotel in the NEC, and the plan was for us to store the copies of the RRCo zine in mine and Jalaguy's room so he wouldn't have to cart them all back and forth himself all weekend. For some reason I got it in my head that the Moxy is outside the NEC, like the Premier Inn and the Ibis, so I led Jala and Daniel on a wild goose chase out to the train station before finally checking my phone to work out where to go next, and realising that we'd already passed it.

The Moxy is comically different to the Hilton: decked out in plush leather, neon signage, vinyl records. When we got there, the elevator wouldn't work for us; we needed a keycard to operate it. We sat in these luxurious leather swivel chairs that span around frictionlessly. Ben took us up to his room. He was bemused because it looks like a dungeon: dark mood lighting, metal lattice on one wall, everything is strapped to everything else. We split the zines amongst ourselves and carted them over.

Jo and Rabbit rocked up; partners of 9 years, this marked the first time Rabbit has been able to come over from the States, and it was the first time they'd met in person. I think we all decided to give them some space. Nonetheless, we did a quick handoff, because I'd bought Jo's Timelines Transmutate off her. I gave her a copy of the zine, and watched with dawning horror as she flipped to the Kingdom Rattrap review, shotgunned the whole thing, then promptly got up and left without a word.

This was probably the first thing that really threw me. I'd given out maybe a third of the copies already, and was planning to give out the rest, and now I was like... is it bad? Worse—is it upsetting? As it happened, I had completely misread the situation in my sleep-deprived state. Jo hadn't even finished reading the story, she'd just needed to go to a panel! But I didn't get the chance to ask her about it until after the convention, so until then, it preyed on my mind.

While people were taking a look at Transmutate, one of the pegs ended up getting snapped, which also kind of sucked. I had anticipated it would happen, because 2010s toys are fragile, and felt like it was worth it to be able to share in the joy of that figure with other people, instead of just whisking it off to the hotel room. Thankfully it was just a tab for weapon storage, which still works, it's just a bit looser without it. But it's one of those things where you just go—agh! Another stupid little stressor for the pile.

Anyway, although I vaguely dislike Transformers: Prime in terms of the fiction, the toys are all from the period of design that I know and like best, and these particular colourways elevate them so much. Beast Wars: Uprising is amongst my favourite Transformers fiction, and these are the most iconic characters from that universe, so I'm thrilled to finally have them both. God, do I need to get a Lio Convoy now?

I think a high point on Friday was the "pen con" that took place between auto_thots and sixty_cats. I'd seen auto_thots tweeting about it, so I went over with the one pen that I'd happened to bring, a bright orange LAMY fountain pen I'd had since I was a kid. I'd recently been starting to think about changing my signature, because the one I've had all my life is illegible and ugly, and I wanted something nice and distinctive—they gave me some encouragement that I was along the right lines. I've honestly never seen such cool pens, either—sparkly inks, beautiful and functional designs. It was nice to be excited about something that wasn't Transformers.

Speaking of which, there was a lot of love for G.I. Joe this year. In particular, SameAsItEverWoz was going around showing us this one stock photo of Snake Eyes from Rise of Cobra, with his stupid fucking skintight bodysuit and luscious kissable lips sculpted into his helmet. It was kind of like the chicken game, insofar as if your objective was not to look at Snake Eyes, then you were basically fucked. Erica had a notebook with her and people started drawing their own takes on the image. I did a T-posing Snake Eyes (see my reference picture below) in fountain pen. Clearly the whole thing quickly snowballed and people began submitting some genuinely high-effort entries, so later in the weekend I went back and rendered my Snake Eyes out in Sharpie with full muscle definition, chiaroscuro. By the end of the weekend, there were entries from James Roberts, Jack Lawrence, and Nick Roche, which is fucking nuts. I desperately want this to become a real zine.

Anyway, I've gotten ahead of myself. On Friday, I had a handoff arranged with a guy on Facebook for an Armada roleplay Star Saber to give to Jo. It turned out to be far, far smaller than I had imagined it being as a kid, more like a Star Dagger to an adult, but it had a really fun mechanism.

Just like last year, I didn't have a ticket for any of the Friday panels; there was nothing to justify the cost of admission and I usually prefer to hang out anyway. In the bar, the usual big table at the back was covered in toys, all belonging to Rachel; she was having a big collection purge, and had decided that it would all be free to a good home. I was extremely tempted by a Titans Return Hot Rod to put with my various Lost Light characters, but it was missing its guns, so I hesitated, thinking I'd find a cheap complete copy in the dealer hall. I got to try a Fall of Cybertron Ultra Magnus, on which I snapped a tab (see, it's very easily done); I actually really liked the toy, but this year I was planning to cut down on the number of redecos I was picking up. Historically, a lot of my toys have been redecos, often toy-only characters, so I have kind of a weird collection—but increasingly, I find myself wanting to get molds in the colors they were originally intended to wear. That Fall of Cybertron Optimus Prime has always been an iconic design in my eyes, and after handling the mold, I resolved that I'd pick one up if I saw it (alas, I didn't). Meanwhile, Jala had been toying with the idea of starting a Star Seekers collection, after winning a Titan Class Tidal Wave at the Transformers One pre-screening they attended; one of the toys on the table was Prime Thundertron, which they quickly decided he hated, but they seemed pretty set on getting Legacy Thundertron if they could.

Around this point was probably also the most time I spent with Cone, who I know from the TFWiki Discord; it definitely feels like he's been able to come out of his shell a bit more with each convention he attends, which is really nice.

Dinner was Zizzi's, which I don't always get along with; a friend's parents back in uni would often take us there, and I found that I never liked the pizzas, which is my first instinct for Italian food. This time I had some seafood pasta which was much better. Afterwards, we kept things very lowkey; I remember playing Lexicon in the bar with Ben, Daniel, and Jala, getting very tired, and making it back to the room not long after midnight.

Saturday

I'd banked on getting over seven hours sleep that night, but for some fucking reason, the hotel decided to test their fire alarm at 6:40 AM. I was genuinely baffled by this. Hotels exist for one purpose: as a place to sleep. By momentarily blaring the siren, waking me up at such an ungodly hour, the hotel had failed at its one job. I spent the next hour trying to fall back asleep before giving up; it was time to get ready for breakfast anyway. I put on my SPREEM shirt and the matching (read: clashing) garments I brought to go with it. Last year, I had a pair of thrifted three-quarter-length hot pink cargo pants several sizes too big for me, which I held up with a belt; they were constantly falling down and showing my pants, which wasn't great. This year, I was able to get some pink shorts, which were an upgrade in that they'd stay around my waist, but a downgrade in that you'd sometimes be able to see my balls if I sat down in just the wrong position. If you saw my balls this year: I'm sorry, or, you're welcome.

My usual strategy for TFN—because food at the NEC is invariably expensive—is to really load up on the buffet breakfast, snack through the day, and grab a meal with people in the evening. I duly wolfed down an English breakfast, some yoghurt, a croissant, a waffle, and a mini muffin. Unfortunately, the opening ceremony began before I was quite finished, so I ended up cradling a little muffin as I speedwalked across the hotel to the panel room. I couldn't see any easily-accessible seats, so I opted to just stand at the back. I wound up stood right in front of a fire alarm button, with this muffin in my hands, and the audience kept needing to clap for the guests and the announcements, which I couldn't do, because I was holding this stupid fucking muffin and trying not to move a muscle because I kept imagining myself setting off the fire alarm. (At the train station the previous day, I'd accidentally hit an "intercom for assistance" button at the train station with my bag; I heard someone asking me how they could help just as the train pulled in.)

Gherkin appeared and said "Hi Wada," and I said "Hi," back. I couldn't turn to one side without, I imagined, hitting the button. I ate just the top half of the muffin and tried to clap at the appropriate moments; my arms got covered in crumbs. I later saw a message from Gherkin in the group chat: "At the opening ceremony right now waiting for wads to recognise who I am". Aaaagh!

Toy Fu had posted some pictures of their table at the start of the day, and I spotted a Thrilling 30 Swerve & Flanker, which was practically the one thing I'd told myself I'd buy instantly if I saw it this year. Even better, I could just about make out a single-digit price tag; I'd resigned myself to just sort of paying whatever at this point. I fully expected it to have vanished by the time the dealer hall opened, but after we made our way up the monstrous queue, I walked in to find it still sitting on the table unnoticed. I guess the demand for that toy really isn't what it once was! Alas, I am a slave to my memes. I also spotted a GDO Wheelie on the table for next to nothing, and was sorely tempted to buy it just for the sake of having a spare—like, I already have one!—but I resisted, and instead I asked one of the volunteers if I could leave a copy of the Wheelie comic with the toy. He was charmed by the idea; hopefully whoever picked it up enjoyed it!

After that, though, I ended up being weirdly stuck. I found an Armada Knock Out sans missile for a couple of quid, which was perfect, because mine is missing his legs (I didn't lose them, I got him like that). I found a loose hand/foot/gun for Combiner Wars Skydive or Air Raid (they're identical), which was perfect because mine had come with Firefly's hand/foot/gun for some reason. But apart from that, everything seemed too expensive. Was I really going to spend £25 on an Armada Deluxe? Not likely. Except £25 is what all Deluxes cost these days. I don't buy them at that price, but like... it's reasonable, from that perspective! Here I was, at the one time a year where it's possible to find pretty much anything, and the best I could do was pick up some piddly little bits and pieces for toys I already owned.

The longer I walked around, the more I found myself reckoning with the very thing I was trying to work through in the Kingdom Rattrap review: namely, that my relationship to Transformers and to money is completely fucked. Everything seemed more expensive than it had been in previous years, except this made perfect sense, because everything has become more expensive, the econony or whatever is in the shitter. I used to like getting cheap Scouts for a fiver; now I already own most of the Scouts and what the fuck does a fiver buy you anyway? 1.25 meal deals? I'd ask for the price of unlabelled toys, and balk at the answers: "I'll think about it, thanks!" They were usually gone by the time I got back.

Another issue was that, this year, the dealer hall was more crammed than ever. They'd completely rearranged the stalls to give more room in the aisles, which did help, but not nearly enough to cope with the horde that descended upon the place on Saturday. It was too hot, and too loud, and far, far too busy. Many of the dealers were visibly struggling to keep up. Speaking as someone who works in a shop, I shudder to think of the stock loss, the figures manhandled and broken, the accessories lost—hell, maybe even the shit stolen, there have been thieves at TFNation in the past.

I remember at one point during the weekend, at one table, there was this big tub of toys, and while taking a look I absentmindedly put a figure to one side—and someone snapped at me, something like, "Excuse me this is my table!" Turned out it was a separate stall, someone selling handmade stuff. Presumably that person spent the whole weekend doing that, getting progressively more irritated at the careless nerds more interested in toys than in crafts, constantly encroaching on the tablespace. And dealers pay for their tables—right? I totally understand why that person was miffed. But also, personally, being snapped at like that... didn't love it! Actually felt quite bad about it! I felt like the environment put me in that position. For all of Saturday, I flatly did not enjoy going around trying to root through bins. Again, see my review: I felt like a rat.

Still, I had an ace up my sleeve, one that would let me escape the sweaty press of the dealer hall altogether: another pre-arranged purchase from someone on Facebook. After a panel on vintage retailer catalogues—the only panel I attended on Saturday—we eventually found a mutually convenient moment to meet up. His name's Lee, he was a gregarious lad maybe a little older than me. I gave him a full suite of zines by way of thanks.

When showing people what I'd bought from this guy, I'd find myself always doing the same bit, because it felt like the only way to even communicate this insane pickup. I would produce this Commemorative Series Red Alert reissue from my bag, and say, "Yeah, so I got this Red Alert. He's really nice! He was £40, and normally I wouldn't spend £40 on a toy like this. But the thing is..."

And then I'd pull another toy out. "He did come with this Inferno."

And then I'd go back into the bag. "And he also came with this Skids."

"And he also came with this Prowl."

"And he also came with this Jazz."

"And he also came with this Tracks." (Tracks was still safely encased in his backing tray!)

"Oh, and he also came with this entire Menasor."

Ben, the only person I know who has a deep connection with the Commemorative Series (or similar) reissues, gave me the best reaction. "HOW? HOW?" The story goes like this—not that it's much of a story. I was about to leave the house one day. I happened to go on Facebook. There was a post in a sales group, timestamped three minutes ago. Amongst others, he had the above Autobot Cars listed: £5 each or take the lot for £25; along with the Menasor: £15, because Wildrider's arm is broken off and the combiner feet were missing. There were no photos of the Autobots. I messaged the guy to ask if Menasor was still available. He was. I asked if he had photos of the Autobots; he did, they looked fantastic. I said I'd take the lot and PayPal'd him £40.

He explained to me that he'd listed the toys as cheaply as he felt he could, because he wanted them to go to people who wanted them, rather than just the people with the most money. I felt like his logic was wrong: someone who pays a lot of money for something can be guaranteed to want it at least a certain amount. Someone who snaps up something valuable for not very much could just be a grifter. Still, I think what he meant was: he wanted the toys to go to someone who wanted them who would not otherwise be able to afford them, which is exactly who I am. G1 stuff like that has always enthralled me, and I've always kind of assumed I would just never be able to own them. Since last TFN, I've built up a nice little collection of the Retro reissues, by picking them up on deep discount, but I've always assumed the Autobot Cars would just be forever beyond my grasp. And now, thanks to Lee, I have a whole little collection of them!

(Hopefully a lot of other people were also able to benefit from his generosity. I remember he'd listed the reissue Insecticons for... maybe a tenner? Powermaster Optimus Prime and Apex Bomber for £25, a beautiful G1 Sureshot for literally a fiver, Robots in Disguise 2001 Optimus Prime for £40. Absolutely mad stuff.)

These toys went basically straight back to my room; they had too many bits to lose, and I didn't know how any of them worked. After the convention, I was able to get Menasor's feet off eBay, but it's mad to think that I paid about the same for the rest of the combiner as I did for those feet alone! They now have pride of place on my burgeoning G1 shelf.

(Oh, and as you can imagine, this stroke of insane good luck certainly hasn't helped my attitude towards Transformers and money.)

As always, Ben continues to have the best taste when it comes to toys. His sealed Beast Machines Scavenger instantly made me resolve to get a copy of that toy for myself, as I've always liked the look of it. His true star finds though were an X-Dimension Adventure Team—commemorating the opening of his very own comic shop this year—and a Stormtrooper Rage, with its perplexing water squirter and stunning colour scheme. Jalaguy got their own Adventure Team the next day; it's so nice to see people getting into Armada stuff.

The food situation ended up being a bit fucked on Saturday. Some people wanted a light lunch and a big dinner, others the reverse. We ended up doing Nandos mid-afternoon—I had a small chicken burger—and then later we got a Subway. These two small meals weren't far off the cost of a typical main meal at Resort World, so I was quite happy with that, and might suggest something similar on future Saturdays; trying to squeeze in a sit-down meal before, during, or after Club Con is often a nightmare. But I definitely think not everyone got exactly what they wanted in terms of food that day.

Rushing back from Resort World with Ben, I heard someone yell: "Nice shirt!" So I automatically replied, "Thanks!" And then they said something like, "Why does it say SPERM on it?", and I realised they weren't there for the Transformers convention, they were just a bunch of neds loitering by the lake. So I proceeded to ignore them, and they jeered at us as we walked away. I don't usually wear the SPREEM shirt in public, partly because I like it and don't want to ruin it, and partly because it really does look like it says SPERM. As we stopped by my room to pick up my Club Con wristband, I was becoming a thundercloud. Here I was at the Transformers convention, the one weekend a year where I don't have to feel too weird about my interests, and it's like I'm back in fucking high school. I wondered if maybe it's time to retire the shirt altogether. The outfit never quite works for me.

Club Con

Ah, Club Con. This was definitely the low point for me of the whole weekend, which sucks, because usually it's a highlight. I think what I should say is this: it was mostly a me problem. Things had not been going well for me up to this point. I was very, very tired.

So, the cosplay contest was spectacular, as ever. People have such wonderfully creative and well-done costumes, everyone is so buzzed about it. My favourite was definitely the Cosmos with a shiny retrofuturistic UFO-like dress, absolute conceptual slam dunk that deservedly took top prize in the "humanized" category; the cosplayer in question, Mika, turns out to also be a phenomenally talented artist. But there were a lot of really thoughtful outfits this year. I was surprised when the Rosanna/Flip Sides cosplayer (swapping faction onstage!) turned out to be none other than our Umar—though of course, who else? And Erica's sk8r grl take on Flamewar was also brilliant.

I will say, it definitely felt like the dividing line between the "mech" and "humanized" categories was a little blurred—both had the same regularly-dressed-people in helmets—and as is often the case, while the winners were all extremely worthy entrants, I did feel like some people got robbed. Well okay I'll just say it: JLaw is definitely biased towards Lost Light, he always has been, and cosplays based on his comic always do well as a result. There was a stunning—I mean really phenomenal, huge cardboard shoulder pillars visible even from my worst-seat-in-the-house behind a tall guy at the back-left—Armada Megatron cosplayer, appropriately chosen for a convention with David Kaye in attendance, who didn't even place in the top three for the mech category. Outrage!

Last year, you might recall that one cosplayer inadvertently ended up trapped improvising lipsyncing and dancing onstage for three minutes because the AV team didn't fade out the backing track. And while that was spellbinding, clearly the convention organisers have overcorrected, as it felt like the cosplayers were being ushered on and off the stage very briskly. I definitely think some of them should have been allowed to chew the scenery a little more. Particularly, I should say, considering what was to follow later in the evening.

During the changeover, we got to see a preview of the next episode of The Basics—this one featuring the Star Seekers. Honestly, it instantly pilled me on the Star Seekers. They're so fucking cool slash dumb. The Matrix Test was brilliant, as always; McFeely has a real gift for dredging up the obscure and the esoteric. This year, the TFWiki gang split into two teams, hoping to at least give everyone else a chance: I was with Jo, Rabbit, Ben, and newcomer James, carrying forward the torch of the Crack Calibre Laser-Blazer Broadswords, while Gherkin, Viv, Jala, Daniel and Cone formed Feast or Famine (named after the newly-discovered Star Seeker character from the Chinese MMO).

As usual, I mostly served as a voice to say either "yeah that's right" or "I don't know about that" as other team members answered the questions. It's really high time I learned to trust my gut, though—there were two questions, "What connects the characters Scrounge, Crankcase, SOMETHING and Devastar?" and "Is Motomix a Transformer?" where I was completely correct, but second-guessed myself. James totally surprised me by really holding his own, getting a few questions which had the rest of us stumped or uncertain. It later transpired that we had in fact won the quiz, in spite of our effort to handicap ourselves; they never officially announced this result, we had to ask McFeely, who had to ask David. Assuming this wasn't deliberate, which I would understand... kinda weird not to announce that at any point!

I guess I'll take this moment to talk a little more about James, 'cause he was one of the people I met this year and got to hang out with for more than just a single conversation. He honestly just sort of appeared from nowhere with a clear objective of "I am going to become friends with these people", which I massively respect (had he turned out to be a cunt, I would not have respected it, but he wasn't, so!). I was reminded of myself doing something similar towards the start of uni, and at my first solo TFNation not long after that. He seemed cool and was very nice to all of us. I've since chatted with him a little online; apparently the only reason he picked our group out of the crowd was the OSKO Rampage I had sitting on the table. I'd brought that figure along as a conversation starter, so looks like it did its job!

Anyway, so the evening progressed. There was the charity auction, which went crazy, but is also kind of just half an hour of clapping while people with money bid for mildly interesting items. Someone correct me if I'm wrong—that custom Action Master Billy Stripes sold for like a grand, right? I say this only because I remember when the sealed Animated Swindle remarked by the late Derrick J. Wyatt himself went for £650, I thought, wow, that is such a measly sum by comparison.

Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman went up onstage to announce their new podcast. Apparently the first episode went up over a month ago? Well, they have a Patreon, etc, you know the deal. I'm not saying that I won't listen to it, I might at some point, but definitely as an announcement to that crowd of increasingly-younger-skewing fans it went over like a wet fart. I presumed this was the "Like a surprise? Close your eyes..." teaser on the schedule, because podcasts are something you listen to, meaning you can close your eyes. As it turned out, I was very mistaken.

Next up, there was the script reading. As with last year, it wasn't written by, well, a writer, so it kind of sucked, to put it nicely. I guess without mercilessly dissecting the thing for every single joke that fell flat, I'll try and explain what a convention script reading should be like, as someone who's seen a ton of them. You have a handful of huge voice actors with iconic roles in the room. Your story, whatever it is, is nothing more than a means to have them play off each other, cover their full dramatic range, and say as many catchphrases as you can in as short a space of time as possible. You want to avoid in-jokes which the actors themselves—who typically aren't as deep in the sauce as you—are unlikely to get. You want to minimise the role of the narrator or other side-characters. You want to avoid splitting the cast in-story, to allow all the characters to play off one another, while still contriving to avoid having a voice actor swap between multiple characters in the same scene. You want the actors to play the specific versions of characters they actually played, not different versions from other timelines or whatever. You want to give fuckin' David Kaye some actually good material to work with—more Beast Wars, less Armada, dig? You want to pace the jokes so they lead to direct punchlines, so the audience as a whole can laugh and clap before the story progresses, rather than burying punchlines in the middle of individual line-reads or back-and-forths. I'm not a comic writer, but as an audience member I can definitely tell when things aren't working, and I truly wonder why on Earth at a convention with people like Jim Sorenson, James Roberts and Simon Furman in attendance, you wouldn't allocate some portion of your budget to commissioning a good script. As it was—as some of my friends also put it—the moment the narrator said "End of Act 1!", my heart just sank: so is this two acts? Three? Reader, it was three, and none of them were any good.

Honestly, the big thing that had me baffled was that the entire script reading was predicated on the fact that Gregg Berger has, in the past, voiced Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. But the thing is, I always thought it was Peter Cullen who voiced Eeyore! I'd coincidentally had a conversation about that very fact with Daniel earlier in the weekend! Gherkin googled it as the script reading dragged on. Sure enough, it seems that Gregg Berger only filled in the role for a few video games and ancillary media, beginning in 1997. He does a wonderful Eeyore voice, don't get me wrong, but I don't get the impression it's his role, and to place such a focus on "Eeyore from Kingdom Hearts II" for a Transformers convention felt like a misguided choice to me.

At the end of the script reading, there was immediately another bonus round of charity auction, where they flogged a signed copy of the script and an inflatable rubber ducky from Amazon. Up and up the price crept, in increments of £10 at a time. At £280, for some reason I'll never know, David asked us all to clap, as if this was in any way an auspicious figure. We duly obliged. The final bid ended up being for something like £450, or 2/3rds of a sealed Animated Swindle remarked by the late Derrick J. Wyatt.

Overrunning by this point, I thought: this is it, the headline event is starting soon, I'll be able to chill out for an hour watching the old cartoon, and then I can go back to the bar and hang out, hopefully feeling a little rested. But then it was the actual surprise! The Mapes brothers had found a never-before-seen recording from the '80s. What was it? It was the audition tapes for Wheelie. Because I'm still in theory the custodian of Wheelie's TFWiki page, I dutifully got out my phone to record. The performances were demented, delivering nonsensical rhymes in a nonspecifically exotic accent. After each, David would go, "Do you want to hear another?" And the audience yelled back, "Yes..." And I sat there, listening to these unfamiliar voice actors cackling and giggling, thinking how it's been years—literally years—since I started trying to fix Wheelie's wiki page. I haven't touched it in months. And I wondered, will I ever be free of you? Will my work ever be done? As I write this I have been home for less than 24 hours, and somebody has already added a note to the page. It rhymes badly. It's not cited. I'll need to fix it, I guess.

And then, Gregg Berger got up onstage, to read us an extract from his work-in-progress memoir. He told us, it's fine, feel free to leave, none of you are expected to stay, this isn't that kind of thing. But the thing is, I had no idea how long this segment was going to go on for (20 minutes, per the schedule? Everything had overrun!), and I wanted to watch the cartoon, you know, the headline event of the evening, the thing I'd been told was the big thing to be excited about, which most of my friends were staying here for anyway. I snapped. I couldn't take it any more. I got my phone out and started posting in the group chat.

I could not tell you a single thing Berger talked about in the extract from his memoir. I was simply too tired. It described a world utterly alien to mine. A third of the words he was saying seemed to be quotes from other people. And the thing was, the thing that really got to me, aside from all the self-hatred over feeling like a hater, was that I'd brought with me a zine containing some lengthy personal episodes from my real life, and all I could think was: does this sound like that reads? Will my friends read it, and slump in their chairs, and loll their heads, persisting only out of a sense of obligation?

I knew it was over because suddenly people started clapping. By then, it was already too late. I watched the first part of "More than Meets the Eye", a boring cartoon I'd watched mere months prior in the cinemas (and enjoyed, somehow), and it was only when I realised we'd moved into the second part without me even noticing that I decided I was simply too tired to stay any longer, and finally made the wise choice to return to the bar.

Usually, Club Con has been fun and exciting, and I think the problem TFNation is increasingly having with it is that they feel like every year they need to debut something which has never been seen before, something important, over something which sparks joy. Last year was great: Jayhan rocked. This year did not rock. It just rolled on, and on, and on...

And I hate to be a hater about it. The auction raised £6400 for charity, of course that's fucking brilliant. The script reading made me chuckle a couple of times. The Wheelie auditions genuinely shed some light on a character/performance which has always been controversial. Gregg seems to have touched the hearts of a lot of people with his reading. These things were all perfectly fine taken on their own. And of course a huge part of my problem was just the physical reality of it, my own tiredness, the caught-up-in-my-own-head of it all. It was a me problem. But also, also, could they not have saved Gregg 'til last, as they have done with people like Garry Chalk in the past?

Look, something was just cursed this year. Viv got trapped in one of the elevators for ten minutes; another of the elevators was permanently cordoned off with hazard tape. That Saturday night, there were reports of Jim Sorenson being pursued through the corridors by someone from the salsa convention. The salsa convention! In years past, this charming trademark of TFNation, these bizarrely coincident events, background set-dressing, now elevated to plot-relevance, twisted into something adversarial. We heard that one of our volunteers had got in a fight with one of theirs. What the FUCK was going on, that night? There was a new water cooler positioned by the entrance to the dealer hall. Could there have been something in there, turning our vision red, driving us to madness?

I don't really remember what happened after I left the panel room. I hung out in the bar for a bit, and began to enjoy myself again—but I don't think I stayed up much later.

Sunday

That night, I was finally able to get some rest: I wasn't awoken by a stupid fucking fire alarm, or even a deliberately-set phone alarm, but rather by my own body deciding "hey, that's it, you've had enough". I felt good. I decided that Sunday would be a reset for me. I shaved, as I'd planned to, because my beard has developed a sizable bald spot, creeping up my neck onto the right side of my face. It used to be quite small, hidden away under my jawline—but roughly coinciding with that aforementioned personal crisis, more of the hair seems to have disappeared, an ice cap melting. At work, strangers come up to me and whisper the word "alopecia", as though whispering it makes this in any way a remotely polite thing to say to someone.

I'm not really attached to my facial hair—or rather, I guess, it's not really attached to me—but the half-on, half-off look is just kind of stupid. It's distracting. My eyes are up here! So at the moment, I'm having to shave more regularly. Maybe it'll grow back, or maybe it'll all fall off, and I'll probably be fine either way. So on Sunday morning, I took it as an excuse to perform the ritual. Cleave it away! All that shit in my skull, pushing its way out—begone! I gave myself horrendous razor burn; my blade was too blunt. In the evening, returning to my room, I saw there was still a spot of dried blood on the centre of my chin. It had been there all day. Whoops. But in the meantime, it fuckin' worked and all. I felt great. I looked cute, in my Hatsune Miku t-shirt and pink shorts.

On the way down from our room, I was able to prove to Jalaguy just how dogshit my phone camera is. I've had the thing for maybe six years at this point; it was actually my first decent-spec smartphone, but the camera is a dreadful thing that smears out every shape into a blurry haze regardless of the lighting conditions. Apparently it's "AI-enhanced", which to my knowledge just means you have an option to crank up the saturation sometimes; presumably, this software was a vain attempt to cover for the camera modules being cheap pieces of shit even at the time. Still, I was able to get maybe my favourite photo of the weekend.

Sunday was so, so much quieter. There is a kind lie at TFNation that Sunday's dealer hall is just as good, that places like Toy Fu purposefully hold back some stock for the second day, that the big stalls like ID Toys won't run out. It's not fucking true. The Blokees blokes had sold out. The bins were all half-full, the dregs of Revenge of the Fallen Sideswipe redecos, Armada Side Swipe redecos, Siege Sideswipe redecos, accumulated like silt in the wake of the gold rush.

But as a true gamer, I thrive on Sunday. I will find the things that no-one else wanted. I made off like a bandit. At Toy Fu, I found a Generations Junkheap going for a song; nobody gives a fuck about the Reveal the Shield Junkion mold these days, it's hot garbage, Studio Series is where it's at, but I'm still a Classics collector and I think that toy looks sick. I got my Wreck-Gar from Umar a couple of conventions ago, and now he's got a bike to ride on. Or maybe Junkheap is a Star Seeker! The world is his oyster. I also picked up a Combiner Wars Firefly—with his correct hand/foot/gun this time around—to complete my Superion, except the rest of the Aerialbots are in storage back at my parents' house so this is mostly academic.

I finally got a chance to properly look at the stall of my favourite traders, Blue Beetle. I've historically spent tons of money on frankly absurd quantities of cheap shit toys from their stall; this year, it was slimmer pickings for me, their huge bucket of slop by that point consisted mostly of BotBots. As usual, there was also an assortment of Transformers- and Marvel-inspired 3D-printed paraphernalia, custom-designed by one of the pair. The coolest item he had this year was a working clock in the shape of Cybertron; the second hand is the Ark, orbiting around. I don't really have room for that kind of thing in my life, but I was able to admire it from a distance.

Yesterday, I'd been tempted by an incomplete Robots in Disguise Movor and Rollbar to complement my childhood Ro-Tor and Armorhide, but they'd sold by the time I returned. Still, I was able to pick up a cheap Wildrider with dog-eared stickers; I plan to rip out his arm and use it to repair the other one I got. Last year, they also had an absolutely ruined Tentakil in their big bin, so sun-bleached as to be practically a redeco, with painfully stiff joins I dared not to try; I had actually resolved ahead of time that if it was still there this year, I'd pick it up, to go with my knackered Snap Trap. Well, lo and behold, there it was, dredged up from the BotBot pick-and-mix! I picked it up, and the main guy at the stall (I really need to get his name one of these years) waxed poetic about it, in mock outrage. "All weekend, I've seen people pick that little guy up, and I'm just like—come ON, he's £2!!! Yeah, he's a little sunburned, but where are you going to get a G1 guy for £2?" Of course he was absolutely right. As I said to him, it was less a question of whether I wanted to spend £2 on a Tentakil, and more a question of whether I dared to dip into the world of peroxide or whatever. But hey, if there was ever a toy to test the waters with...!

My dream of a Robots in Disguise Ruination wasn't quite dead, however—another stall actually had another Rollbar, this one complete with instructions, for a similar price to the one I'd seen at Blue Beetle. I also grabbed a Classics Megatron (about time!) from the same seller, and he threw in a Universe Ravage for free (my secondhand Hound came without one when I got it, many years ago now, so it was perfect!).

I hesitated for far longer than I should've over a complete Armada Demolishor for literally a tenner at another store. The thing is that I already have a Demolishor, with Blackout, just missing his missiles. But finding the missiles on their own has proven to be far trickier than I'd ever imagined! So really, I'd just be admitting defeat by buying a complete copy and flogging my incomplete one to recoup the cost (I could probably sell the Mini-Con alone for a tenner, if I was patient enough). "Are you having a laugh?" said Ben, when I agonised to him over it, which immediately snapped me out of my indecision. Honestly, it's really funny how much on the same wavelength we can be in that room. At one point I saw a Transmetal Optimus Primal at the Toy Fu table, and was about to buy it on the spot, when Ben pointed out, "It's missing one of its kneecaps. There was another one here earlier which was complete—but I bought it." Unbelievable!

I helped Daniel find a Beast Machines Rattrap I'd spotted earlier in the day, which he in turn only wanted to give to Jo—and I think she in turn planned to give it to Rabbit? This reminded me that I wanted to go home with some Beast Machines stuff myself. There was a Strika and a Tank Drone, which were at the top of my list to go with the dark horse favourite of my haul last year, the Motorcycle Drone. Unfortunately, they were a bit too expensive for me to buy on sight, and they were gone by the time I circled around. I'd also set my sights on some of the other Basic Vehicons, but was torn between the original colorways and the Robots in Disguise redecos, which had starred in a comic strip of mine. In the end, I decided to favour the original Beast Machines versions; partly because as I say, I'm swearing off redecos, and partly because I didn't want to start a whole new collection of "guys who appeared in that one comic wot I did". These worked out to be about a tenner cheaper than the sets of the redecos I'd otherwise seen, so that was nice, especially because at first I was disappointed to discover that I didn't really like them: Scavenger was great, but Mirage and Nightcruz really refused to cooperate while transforming. I was later able to work them out, in the comfort of my own home, and now I like them all, thankfully.

My last purchase was really exciting for me. One stall which was new for this year was Junk Shop U.S.A., being run by a couple of gentlemen who'd apparently come all the way over from Japan, bringing with them a bunch of uncommon and niche exclusives! It's quite typical for me to spot something on Saturday which is in some way special, but not in very high demand, going for more than I could usually justify for a toy of that size—in this case, it was United Rumble and Frenzy, paired up for £40. That's just too much to pay for two Scout Class figures, in my head, but I resolved that if nobody else had bitten by the end of the weekend, I'd make them an offer. Sure enough, they didn't seem to have received much interest, so my waiting paid off. They also seemed to like my fancomic (I'd been giving copies to most of the dealers), so that was really nice. While at the convention, I often like to gather up weird little micro-collections, and I found that this year Rumble and Frenzy paired really well with the Universe Ravage and Classics Megatron. It's all vibes, innit?

Unfortunately, due to my fixation on making the most of my remaining time in the dealer hall, I made the usual mistake of neglecting to visit any of the guests until it was already basically too late. David Kaye had vanished, with only the deserted amusement-park-esque queue barrier snaking towards his table to indicate that he was ever there. Again, I should've just sucked it up and waited for half an hour earlier in the day, but ironically the reason I hadn't was a complication with the thing I'd planned to get him to sign: an Armada Megatron jigsaw puzzle Jo bought for me last year. It wasn't until lunchtime that day that I was able to enlist Ben and Jo to put the damned thing together. And let me tell you, we smashed that children's jigsaw puzzle. I was hoping to mention to Kaye how his performance in Armada was one of the main things I enjoyed about the show, back when we were watching it for Our Worlds are in Danger—but then I had to go and let myself be distracted by toys, and miss my one shot! Argh!

Nick Roche was also permanently swamped. One of the volunteers shook his head at us, saying that Roche was heading off on his lunch; Jo made a valiant effort by saying "We're close personal friends!" (are we? I'm not!). The volunteer just shrugged and said, "man's gotta feed sometime", which I thought was really funny. I managed to briefly accost Roche in the bar later and shove a zine into his hands while he was presumably on the way back to his room, so that was something at least. God knows what he thought of it, assuming he's even read it. Dude was also massively behind on commissions, and ended up staying up late in his room finishing a couple of pieces for Jo—not that you'd know it, they turned out amazing.

I was however able to catch James Roberts at his table. For the last few conventions I've been putting off buying the notebooks, but this time my number was up: I got the set. In exchange (well, apart from money) I also gave him a zine, because I figured if any of the guests would be into my pretentious-ass prose, it'd be him.

Jo and I also briefly spoke to Simon Furman, mostly to let him know that certain parts of his Armada run were the best things he'd written in the early 2000s. He did actually light up at the reminder, and bemoaned the cancellation of Energon/Cybertron, as he always has done. Plus we managed to not completely embarrass ourselves, so I'm calling this one another win.

We finally got the full story from Jim as to what the fuck happened last night. It's really a tale for the ages, and I won't do it justice here, but I'm sure the legend will only grow over the course of conventions to come. Basically, it was like this: somehow, the salsa dancers had arranged things with the hotel to cordon off one of the two corridors leading through the building. This was another reason why the convention felt so unbearably busy. The signs were carefully worded: "to avoid congestion", TFNation attendees were directed to the other corridor.

Now, to hear Jim tell it, he was rushing to the panel room, and at that point, the corridor wasn't cordoned off, or he didn't see the sign, or something. Or maybe he did see the sign—I'm sure he'll never tell. Regardless, he was three-quarters of the way up the corridor when he saw the barrier at the other end. Still, it would have been asinine for him to turn around and go back, so he ploughed ahead.

But then someone called after him! And so he glanced over his shoulder, and offered a "sorry!" in deference. Then suddenly, this person came up alongside him, tried to step in front of him. Jim sort of just carried on going, but no sooner had he passed the man, he felt hands on his shoulders! The dude had physically grabbed him, yoink!

Like a cartoon character, Jim's legs were in motion but going nowhere, and the salsa guy's supervisor or someone was saying "Let him go! Let! Him! Go!" Until finally, the guy let Jim go, and he scurried off to the panel room.

Now, I'm told that around this point, Jo and Rabbit happened to be outside the panel room. So these salsa dancers came up to them and asked, like, "Who is running your convention? The behaviour of your guests is completely unacceptable!" They dutifully pointed into the room, up on stage, where David was busy MCing.

Eventually, the salsa people ended up crossing paths with some of the volunteers. Jim likes to imagine that they made a demand along the lines of, "PRODUCE THE COWBOY!" One thing led to another, and apparently one of the salsa folk—presumably, the same blockhead who'd grabbed Jim—slapped one of the TFNation volunteers on the arm. Not a proper blow or anything, but like—what the fuck!

So finally hotel security stepped in, Jim got called out. The salsa guy began this litany of complaints: according to him, Jim bodychecked him in the corridor! He demanded that the security team check the CCTV tapes. "Yes, PLEASE check the tapes!" Jim agreed, because he knew for a fact that they would show their guy laying hands on him. And of course, he had no intention of pressing charges, but- Of course, that turns the tables. By that point, the other salsa guy was apparently at his wit's end trying to talk down his idiot pal, and finally the guy listened. And that's more or less the end of it, but apparently, hotel security later conferred with TFNation staff to say they had reviewed the tapes, and "Your guy did nothing wrong." Not only that, it turned out that Jim had been chased down the corridor not just by that one guy, but by four salsa dancers! Absolute scenes.

So yeah, that's the story of how Jim became the mortal enemy of salsa dancers. On Saturday night, I'd found the signs of this going on in the background to be kind of alarming, but in the light of day, it was impossible to see the situation as anything other than extremely fucking funny.

We had intended to stop by the "Construct-A-Con" panel, but by the time we arrived, David Kaye was up on stage doing an audience Q&A. It's crazy how much Kaye gives off the impression of being one-of-us, a bona fide fan of the franchise (or at least the parts he's been involved with!). We presume that the convention-organising roundtable had been swapped with Kaye's panel for some reason or another.

Back in the bar, the number of toys floating around had reached a critical mass. I think it was SameAsItEverWoz who had acquired a full set of Kabaya toys for Kenzan, Jinbu, and Ganoh. These came complete with ten-year-old Japanese chewing gum, so Erica, Sixty_Cats and myself all got to try some! I don't know why I'm phrasing that like this was a good thing. The gum was very bad, but we've since updated the TFWiki pages for Kenzan and Jinbu to properly document how it tasted. Ganoh's page has yet to be updated; poke Erica to get on it!

Daniel picked up a Collaborative H.I.S.S. Megatron (the toy I'd originally planned to cover for the RRCo zine)—mostly just for the sake of buying something! It was right before the dealer room was closing, so he got a good price, but a few days later his airline lost his damn luggage (he's since got it back, minus an expensive bottle of whiskey that apparently got stolen by airport staff). Still, we managed to eke what fun we could out of the thing; I was thrilled to find that Rumble and Frenzy could sit in his gun turret. Meanwhile, it turned out Umar had got a Classics Optimus Prime, which immediately made me keen to get my own copy out of storage; it's crazy how good a pair he makes with Megatron.

I'll level with you—at this stage in my journaling, it's been a full week since I arrived at the con, so my memory is hazy. These fragmentary scenes are all that remain aside from vibes. But I got to talk to a bunch of people that night. I had a good bitch sesh with Chris McFeely and PaperPlane off the YouTubes, as we chatted about wronguns in the community and the possibility of a YouTube panel at TFNation in the future (David was not keen). I got to shoot the shit about comics and stuff with Cradok from the TFWiki Discord, who I only ever really get the chance to chat with at TFN, but who's always a pleasure to speak to—he knows so much about so much.

There were a few people who left as Sunday was wrapping up, which always takes me by surprise, even though it shouldn't. Coordinating across the hotel proved to be difficult for me as I kept getting booted off the guest WiFi for some fucking reason, so I'd just randomly stop getting notifications. At one point I checked the group chat and realised that Viv had ollied outie maybe an hour ago—and it was like, welp, I'm probably not gonna see her again until next year!

That's the aspect of the convention which I find is really brutal: I like panels, and I like talking to guests, and I like getting toys, but most of all, I like talking to my pals. And unfortunately, for most of the weekend, all of these activities are in direct competition. There are physically not enough hours in the day. Most of these people, I could happily spend a whole day with them, and it'd pass in the blink of an eye. I'm not talking about the whole crowd—I'm talking about individual people. Even if I was never to step foot outside the bar the entire weekend, I'd still find myself wishing I'd got the chance to talk to all these people just a little longer. But it's only by the existence of this event that we're able to meet. For so much of the year, everyone is so far away.

I'm sick of all the typing. I just want to hang out.

I think it was Sunday night when I briefly lost my phone. My pink shorts were really throwing me off, so I didn't have my usual feeling of whether or not my phone was or wasn't in my pocket. At one point we went off to get tea, and we'd just left the hotel when I realised—shit! I'd left it in the bar. So we rushed back, but at that point it was already gone, handed in to the hotel staff by one of our pals. But the thing was, the hotel staff didn't seem to have a fucking clue about it!

I asked at the bar. They knew nothing about it and told me to check with reception. I asked at reception. The lady there asked me what my phone looked like. Oh dear, I thought. It's a generic off-brand phone. It's black. It's in a very badly yellowed clear case, I guess? "Yellow phone", echoed the receptionist. I shook my head. "No, no, it's a- nevermind. It's just a black phone." It was a moot point because she knew nothing about it. She went over to the concierge desk and tried to call housekeeping. Housekeeping knew nothing about it. She shrugged and told me to check with the bar again. Internally I was like, one of your staff has my phone! Are you not going to try and get the bottom of it? So I went back to the bar and asked one the wait staff. She passed me over to her supervisor. The supervisor went back over to the concierge desk, and finally returned with my phone, which had apparently been there the whole time. What a palaver! Daniel and Jalaguy looked after me during this whole little snafu, which was really great. We had a nice dinner and stayed up 'til late.

Monday

This was easily my best Monday at TFNation yet. I wouldn't dream of leaving on Sunday, but I usually find that the only cheap trains on Monday are late in the afternoon, by which point most people have usually fucked off already. Not so this year! I wasn't the last one standing! I was hanging out with people right up until the end! Ha!

I managed to find the last few people I'd wanted to give zines to, and shoved copies into their hands during the goodbyes. I walked a couple of people up to the train station, as is tradition.

Rachel's stuff from Friday was all out on the tables again; Prime Thundertron and Titans Return Hot Rod still hadn't found a new home, which I was thrilled by, because I hadn't found a complete Hot Rod and I'd really come around on the idea of Thundertron. I had a go of transforming him myself, and immediately decided that Jala was just wrong, it rules. There was also a Netflix Kingdom Rattrap, which I decided I'd like. My Kingdom Rattrap is the retail deco, and he's missing his rifle; this one was complete, and technically different, and it felt fitting considering all the thought I'd been giving to my stupid Rattrap collection. But then I saw Daniel playing with the toy, and I was like... actually, he should have it. I didn't need it, he'd get more out of it! It was really nice to see someone discovering that figure for the first time, a toy that means so much to me. I spent the entire train ride home just flipping Thundertron from one mode to another. Few toys exude such life and personality. Like I say, I'm normally the #1 Prime hater, so it's not a figure I ever would've thought to pick up—if not for Rachel's generosity. So I want to give her a huge thank-you, I'm sure a lot of us ended up leaving the convention with something like that which really excited us, thanks to her.

Also on the table was the original fucking pencil art for Jack Lawrence's cover to Lost Light #10, which auto_thots had bought. Unfortunately, it hadn't brought along anything to transport something like that with, so the damn thing was just out there on the table next to everyone's coffees. After a near-miss, I was like, hold the fuck on, we've got to get this thing off the table. Thankfully, Daniel had mistakenly ended up with a spare copy of issue #184 of the Marvel UK comic, which had a plastic sleeve of about the right size; in went the art, while Ella adopted the comic (we got to hang out a little bit more this year, which was nice!).

Jo, Rabbit and I are all Magic: The Gathering players, and the previous night, Rabbit had revealed that they'd brought along a bunch of Bloomburrow packs, so that we could do our own little tournament. This really thrilled me, because my coworker who I usually go to MTG events with had BETRAYED me for Bloomburrow by going away on prerelease weekend to play in another city, so I'd pretty much resigned myself to never playing the expansion, despite it being the most appealing set in ages. Thanks to Rabbit, I got to actually try some of the cards! On Sunday night, I made a WBR lifedrain deck with a bat/lizard typal theme, and we got the chance to play in the bar on Monday. My deck actually played really well! I won some, I lost some, but most importantly I had fun, and Rabbit was very patient with the fact that I was constantly getting up to say goodbye to people. I felt like I hadn't got to spend much time with either of them over the weekend up to that point, so it was really nice to actually sit down together and do something like that, right up until the time came for me to go and get my train.

Next time

So at TFNation 2025, here are some things which I hope will make me enjoy myself better:

I probably won't be contributing a review for the Refined Robot Co. zine again, assuming Ben decides to extend the trilogy into a quadrilogy. I love doing it, but drawing just takes me too long, and it's just not the same without drawing. Also, look, this isn't me blowing my own horn, but I think it'd be difficult for me to top this year's piece of writing—there were a perfect storm of factors which made this one work, and I simply can't think of a reason I'd ever be able to write a better piece in that specific format.

I have plans already for next year's zine, and if all goes according to plan, I will have the whole thing finished by the end of this year. Which should mean I will have the damn thing printed months in advance. Look, we all know how these things go, but that's my plan.

I might try to collaborate with someone who has a table to give away (sell?) some printed goods. I felt like this year was so busy that I actually struggled to give away nearly as many copies of the Wheelie comic as I'd hoped, for instance, and Ben definitely found the same with the RRCo zine. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like my stuff if they knew it existed.

I will get lots of sleep before going to the convention. No, really.

If circumstances outside my control conspire such that I do not get enough sleep, I will allow myself to resort to the 500ml cans of Monster which the Hilton was selling for £2 each at breakfast for some unfathomable reason. Honestly, I can see why they weren't included in the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet; if they were, we probably would've seen a few heart attacks.

I will probably voice some of my criticisms of this year's Club Con in the annual feedback survey they do, in the hopes that they will take more of a back-to-basics approach. I'll also try to notice if I am not having fun, and try doing something else.

I will try to wear shorts with bigger pockets. (Sorry, Jo, I will not be able to participate in the cosplay show, though I will of course continue to rep the merch.)

I will stop taking items of breakfast food "for the road".

I will suck it up and queue to see guests towards the start of the day.

I will try and change my financial situation to have a stream of income outside of my job—whether by making significant sales from my existing collections, or by having a Patreon for some meaningful creative endeavour—which I will use to properly budget for things like TFNation. I need to allow myself to spend more on specific things that I want, and waste less time scrubbing around Facebook, eBay, and charity shops for random bargains (this year was a fluke). My attitude towards money has always been fucked and it's time to work on that.

In case it's not obvious, though, I did overall really enjoy myself this year, and that was entirely down to my friends, old and new, for being such wonderful people to be around. Even in my most sleep-deprived and highly-strung state, you all made me feel content, comfortable, and included in our little community. I was constantly being surprised by your antics. I hope to see all of you again next year, and I hope that I will see some of you before then!

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tiptapricock · 11 months

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MCU Steven grant and erotic literature? Aka does he read Ice Planet Barbarians or smth

I’m not really familiar w any erotic lit series in particular so this isn’t off of personal experience on that front, but here are some ideas on his dynamic w it more generally! (And also these are getting longer than I mean them to but hEy I’m haVING FUN!!)

———

This was—Steven laughed to himself—this was not really working.

He’d been trying to do something adventurous, to experiment and expand his horizons. He’d had erotica on his shelf for years, a rather sizable collection having grown from his occasional snags of interesting covers or odd summaries, but he hadn’t actually made the time to sit down and read any of it.

Not that he hadn’t been interested, all genres of literature were fascinating and he’d been quite excited by a few of the volumes he’d picked up, there had just always been something else taking up his focus in his free time. Historical texts, translation guides, a fresh local poetry magazine, but…

Well, it had seemed like such a shame to leave them there, perfectly readable and not being read, so he’d decided to finally take a crack at one of the thinner ones.

Its cover and title had promised a supernatural romance, the man posed enticingly on the front cowering beneath the looming shape of a bulky, blue alien. Which had all seemed like good fun, in Steven’s opinion, but about halfway through he’d remembered what these books were often… for.

Well, he wasn’t really sure what the standard… interaction was, he hadn’t exactly gone to any book clubs on the topic, but he could definitely assume, based on how he’d reacted himself.

It had been just a slow, warm, build in his gut as the first more explicit scene got going, an odd thrill at the idea of almost… peeking at someone else’s private life, of something making the fantasy to work through for him. But then he’d started to get hard, and well… what the heck. These were common wank material, weren’t they? And what better way to relax than with a book and a bit of the old hands downstairs?

He’d tried for the most obvious path first (book in one hand, cock in the other) but that had proved an issue when it came to flipping pages. The only two possibilities being to do it one handed and fast (lest he ruin the momentum of the scene), or free up his other hand to flip more normally (which also wasn’t ideal, and made for a rather jerky kind of jerking off).

The next thing he’d tried was to set the book on a table or pillow to allow for easier page turning, but that had just proved to be awkward in situating himself towards it while still sitting up, and had made it harder to read from far away.

Which led to now, with his most recent attempt.

Steven was currently hunched over on his bed, laying mostly on his stomach over two large pillows and propped up by his elbows over the book. His body was pressing the pillows tight to the comforter, his cock slid into the soft, snug space between them, and he was doing his best to hump his way through the the rest of the chapter.

It was, as he was realizing now, really not working.

The friction felt nice enough. A bit rough, perhaps, without real lubrication, but perfectly suitable for him to grind his hips into for the time being. The cloth dragged nicely over his tip, the texture extra sensitive on smooth skin, dotting his breathing with soft gasps when he canted his hips just right and making him want to fuck into something even tighter. The book was nice enough, too. A bit cheesy, maybe, but enjoyably so, and definitely hitting the right beats to get him going.

The issue was just that they didn’t… go together. The book still shook with his thrusts, the words hard to focus on, and his attention was too split between one action and the other, both consuming different aspects of focus. He’d tried so hard to problem solve he didn’t even remember how the story had gotten to—he squinted, rereading the last few sentences—the current monologue on rectal examination.

It just wasn’t worth it.

Steven sighed, cheeks flushed as he laughed again, resigning himself, and leaned back to rest on his heels. He picked the pillows up off himself, tossing them over towards his laundry pile to clean later, and licked his lips as he went to grab the book again. It was sad to keep the thing unread, and he was perfectly happy for that to be his main focus at the moment.

He slipped off the bed and padded to the kitchen, leaning half naked against the counter as he put the kettle on. His dick slowly began to flag as he put his attention elsewhere, pleasure and little waves of arousal still mellowing beneath his skin, but he didn’t let it bother him. Instead, he let himself fall into a world of slick tentacles, and hypnotizing lights, and star crossed creatures that were learning to say I love you.

———

Send me a character, kink, or prompt, and I’ll do a short nsfw story piece!

(Also MacKay!Steven answer to this I did for fun)

#cot n balls #cot n balls writing #moon knight #moon knight 2022 #nsft #steven grant #steven grant smut #I guess?#I’m still figuring out the tags to use #if you DONT want to see this lemme kno

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lingthusiasm · 1 year

Text

Transcript Episode 82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences’. 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.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about when linguists keep using the same example texts over and over again. But first, have you ever wished that Lingthusiasm could be a little, um, less enthusiastic?

Gretchen: Most of the time, no, but we’ve heard some complaints. Actually, we heard one person once said to us that they tried to listen to Lingthusiasm to fall asleep, and they couldn’t do it because we were too high energy and enthusiastic. Many years later, we have now taken on board this comment and also, just for fun, we have made a [ASMR voice] slowed down, soothing [regular voice] version of Lingthusiasm where we read a bunch of linguistic sample sentences, some of which we mention in this episode, [ASMR voice] in much longer and more relaxed form.

Lauren: [ASMR voice] Get many soothing sentences of linguistics nonsense read to you.

Gretchen: [ASMR voice] By joining us on Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. [Regular voice] Plus, of course, get access to a bunch of other bonus episodes at the usual speed and volume also on Patreon and help us keep the show running.

Lauren: If you’re interested in why we chose the sentences that we read in the bonus, we’ll be talking about that this episode, so keep listening.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, can I tell you a story?

Lauren: Yes, please.

Gretchen: This story is about the north wind and the sun.

Lauren: Hm.

Gretchen: “The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveller take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew, the more closely did the traveller fold his cloak around him. At last, the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shone out warmly, and immediately the traveller took off his cloak. And so, the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two. The end.”

Lauren: A classic Aesop’s Fable. In fact, literally one of Aesop’s Fables there. But I know it specifically as the example text that people record to illustrate the sounds in a given language.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think I actually had an illustrated children’s picture book of this when I was a child.

Lauren: Because of your interest in phonetics across the world’s languages?

Gretchen: Yes, that is definitely why my parents bought me this as a five-year-old. No, I think they just liked the moral, “You can do more with persuasion than you can with force,” which was the last sentence in the illustrated Aesop’s Fable version that I had as a child. But imagine my surprise when, many years later in linguistic school, I encountered this story as a classic example text.

Lauren: This text gets translated into many different languages, and it’s read as the example passage of what it sounds like to tell a story in a language as part of a series called “Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet.”

Gretchen: The Journal of the International Phonetic Association – this is the one, I think, where all of the articles used to actually be written in phonetic transcription rather than in standard orthography, which is fantastic.

Lauren: Now they’ve moved to standard orthography, but what is also fantastic is all these articles that illustrate the way that different languages sound. You can download and listen to the recordings that are made as part of those journal articles, including recordings of a narrative passage, which is usually “The North Wind and the Sun.”

Gretchen: I guess it’s a relatively classic passage. It does involve personifying the elements, but many cultures do allow you to personify the elements. I think some other passages that sometimes get used as comparative linguistic passages are particular stories from the Bible because the Bible has been translated in a bunch of languages. But this is not great because people often use a stylised, formal style of language for Biblical texts that really doesn’t reflect how people talk in everyday life. Much as Aesop’s Fables are a bit culturally specific, the Bible is also very culturally specific.

Lauren: I do also appreciate when they were recording examples of New Zealand English, they did translate it to “The Southerly Wind and the Sun” to make it more geographically appropriate.

Gretchen: Oh, excellent. Yes. They do change out the words sometimes whether you have “the Sun shone” or “the Sun shined,” sort of depends on variation. Sometimes, they have this exact text being read aloud, and sometimes they let people retell it in their own words. Of course, if you’re translating it into lots of different languages, you can localise that translation however you want.

Lauren: You told me a story. I think it’s only fair that I tell you a story.

Gretchen: Oh, yes, please.

Lauren: Are you ready?

Gretchen: Yes.

Lauren: Okay. “Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the stone: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

Gretchen: This is a bit of a different style of story to me than the Aesop’s Fable style. “Small plastic snake” – I don’t think this one was found in Ancient Greece.

Lauren: And perhaps less of a direct moral to this one.

Gretchen: It also is a little bit directive, like, “Oh, it’s my job to call Stella. All right.” This story comes from the speech accent archive, which is a website that has many hundreds, probably a thousand – I wasn’t able to get a precise count of speech samples – of people speaking English who have both a variety of accents of English and also who’s first language is something else, and a variety of non-native accents in English, all reading this same English paragraph, so that if you want to know what Ugandan English sounds like, you can listen to some audio clips of some people from Uganda reading this passage, and you can be like, “All right, here’s what it sounds like.”

Lauren: Everyone’s reading the same thing. We have a nice clear benchmark. It has lots of different sounds, lots of S-y sounds I noticed as I was trying to read this out to you.

Gretchen: It’s got “slabs” and “snake” and “snack” and “store” and “spoons,” so a lot of these S-plus-consonant-clusters and several – “these things into three” – /ð/ /θ/ /θ/. You get a bunch of different sounds and sound sequences. The note on the speech accent archive website says, “This paragraph contains practically all the sounds of English,” which I think is because, depending on your variety of English, exactly which sounds are in it and not can vary, but they’ve made an effort to get at least most of them.

Lauren: The fact that they’ve made this effort to get all the sounds means that perhaps the meaning of the story becomes less important I think it’s fair to say.

Gretchen: It’s a little silly.

Lauren: It gets a little bit silly trying to make something that sounds sufficiently coherent, but you’re really focused on the individual sounds.

Gretchen: “Six spoons of fresh snow peas” – I dunno that I really measure snow peas in spoons, but people can read somewhat nonsensical text, and that’s also okay. This is very English-centric. There’s not an effort to translate this story into other languages because it’s focused around trying to get a specific range of sounds in English.

Lauren: I just know this as “The Stella Passage.”

Gretchen: I would call this one “Please Call Stella.” I think that’s just what I would refer to it as. There’s also some passages – so there’s a longer passage that’s about rainbows, known as “The Rainbow Passage.”

Lauren: “The Rainbow Passage.”

Gretchen: Which I will not read in full because it’s a whole page, but it begins, “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colours.”

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s kinda sweet. “The Rainbow Passage” and another passage called “The Grandfather Passage” are familiar to me from linguistics and came up recently because a friend mentioned that they’re used in people who are doing gender voice training. If you’re trans, you want your voice to be perceived as a different gender, something that some people do is adjust the way they produce certain vowels and consonants so that they sound more characteristic of a particular gender. People often practice on particular reading passages, which are part of speech training. You can record yourself and keep an idea of what your progress is over time. This “Rainbow Passage” and “The Grandfather Passage,” which is another one that’s about your grandfather – this very old school guy who wears a frock coat.

Lauren: He’s eccentric but sound of mind if I recall.

Gretchen: Yes. I think this is a very old school grandfather. I don’t think anyone’s current grandfather wears a frock coat these days unless they’re a historical reenactor or something. But these are some passages that sometimes get used in speech training. There’s a really interesting interview on the Gender Reveal podcast with Renée Yoxon who does trans voice coaching if anyone wants to know more about how that goes.

Lauren: It’s really fascinating the lives that these example texts live as they continue on in the world. Another set of example sentences are the Harvard Sentences, which are around 700+ sentences that are used mostly used in training speech-text synthesis programmes or testing telecommunications systems.

Gretchen: The Harvard Sentences, there’s 720 of them – about 10-word sentences – so there’s tons of them. They’re also designed for their phonetic value. They’re designed to contain English sounds in a range of different contexts. For example, in English, we say the /k/ sound in “keen” slightly differently from how we say the /k/ sound in “cool” or in “stick.” You need to have words that contain it at the beginning of the word, at the end of the word, before several different vowels, so that when you’re trying to put it into words, it sounds a little bit less robotic.

Lauren: This is why they also get their other name, which is the “Harvard Balanced Sentences,” because they have a balance of the most commonly occurring English speech sounds in a balanced range of contexts.

Gretchen: Right. We thought maybe this would make them a little bit extra soothing. Also, there’s 700 of these, so we can’t read them all to you in this episode because that would get a little bit boring and tedious, and you might go to sleep.

Lauren: In fact, that is a perfect application for recording all 720 of them as a soothing ASMR experience.

Gretchen: Wait, can we call this “Lingthusiasmr”?

Lauren: I think we can.

Gretchen: “ASMR,” if you haven’t encountered it, is the “autonomous sensory meridian response,” which is the relaxed chills feeling that people feel down their spine when you listen to certain kinds of slow and relaxing sounds. I’m not entirely sure that our episode will induce ASMR. We’ll have to test that empirically. But I do think it sounds very soothing and will probably help you sleep. Please let us know if it works if you think this is fun.

Lauren: I have to say, from the experience of recording them, they are such boring nonsense that they become kind of surreal.

Gretchen: I really felt like I was zoning out as I was reading them. We read them 10 at a time and took turns, and by the end of the 10 list, I would be sort of like, “Oh, I’m very slow. My heartrate has gone down. I’m relaxed.” I think it’s important to recognise that when people are reading example sentences, that is work, and it takes concentrate to try to read exactly the words on the page in a consistent tone of voice and not stumble over words. We definitely had to re-record some bits and edit them back together to make them sound smooth.

Lauren: Having recorded other people for phonetics experiments, this just once again reminded me of how much respect I have for people and their patience and their willingness to participate in recording sentences like this for analysis.

Gretchen: Thank you to our patrons for letting us do not only the podcast in general but also occasionally fun, weird experiments like this. Let us know if it actually helps you sleep or if this is fun or we should never do it again. All of these are options. Did you notice anything else about the content of the sentences as you were reading all 700, Lauren?

Lauren: I did. We – I have to say – did skip a few sentences because they did not produce the chill, relaxed vibes we were going for, especially the ones about forest fires and cutting off people’s heads.

Gretchen: Yeah, some of the sentences were a bit violent. We thought, you know, if you’re trying to fall asleep, and then you hear “The prince ordered the person’s head to be cut off,” you’re like, “I don’t know if I wanna hear that.” Even though it’s a fairytale setting, it’s still not very cheerful. We didn’t record all 720. We thought we would sacrifice balanced, scientific accuracy for being-able-to-fall-asleep-itude. I noticed that sentences that we kept, which was most of them, had this agricultural vibe.

Lauren: Which is pretty funny given that these are from the 1950s and ’60s.

Gretchen: They’re from the ’60s. They had cars in the 1960s, and yet, there’s one car in all of these sentences, and there’s a lot of horses.

Lauren: There are a lot of horses, indeed.

Gretchen: And wagons and carts. There’s one bus and one train and one car, and there’s all these horses and wagons. It’s just sort of pastoral.

Lauren: I also appreciate the person who wrote them who put all of the examples with “fudge” in there, but that might be just because I was hungry while we were recording.

Gretchen: Delicious. We did consider briefly trying to come up with replacement sentences that would still be phonetically balanced, but it’s a lot of work to come up with sentences that contain certain sounds in particular combinations and also make enough sense that you can read them even if some of them are a little bit silly.

Lauren: In fact, a lot of phonetic elicitation is done by just getting people to say a particular single word, maybe inside a sentence, so that you get it in a more natural environment rather than just listing individual words where you get this [list intonation voice] LIST intoNATION as people READ through the LIST.

Gretchen: If you want people to say, for example, a bunch of colours, you shouldn’t just have them say, “Red, orange, yellow, green.” You could instead do, “I saw the red thing,” “I saw the blue thing,” “I saw the green thing.” And then you can cut out the “red” and “blue” and “green” from the middle of “I saw the whatever thing,” so that it’s in the middle like that. Is that right?

Lauren: Yeah. Sometimes, in phonetics we’re so interested in just the sounds themselves. We don’t even care if the words make sense let alone the sentences. People will come up with nonsense words that they can record to get particular sounds.

Gretchen: I have a fun story about that from when I was an undergrad where we had to come up with a bunch of nonsense words for stimuli, only one of the words that we came up with – I forget what it was. I think all of our words were like consonant-vowel-consonant, so it was something that was like a slang swear word or a word related to some sort of risqué topic, and the prof was like, “Oh, we can use this word, right?” And all the students sort of look at each other and start giggling. We’re like, “Who’s gonna tell him?”

Lauren: Okay, excellent public service announcement. If you are creating nonsense words for a phonetic study, maybe run them by a couple of your students first just to check.

Gretchen: Run them by somebody who has a bit of a dirty mind. Look them up on Urban Dictionary. Ask a few people if you’re not working on a language where you have something like Urban Dictionary just to make sure that they’re not actually a word that’s gonna have your participants giggling.

Lauren: So far, we’ve been discussing sentences and texts for studying the sounds of language, but there’re also some commonly reoccurring texts that people use when they’re looking at sentences or even larger units of language to study.

Gretchen: One of the these is what I know as “The Frog Story,” which is a wordless picture book that has a little boy and a frog in a jar, and the frog escapes, and the boy and the dog have to go after the frog, and then they find the frog on a log. It’s very charming, and there’s no words there, so people just have to look through it once, and then you go through it again and retell that story based on the pictures.

Lauren: I have a copy of this book, and there are five or six in the series. They’re super charming. But every time I pull it off my shelf, I get mildly surprised that it’s not called “Frog Story,” it’s called, “Frog, Where Are You?”

Gretchen: Oh, I always forget this because in linguistics people just call it “The Frog Story.”

Lauren: It’s by Mercer Mayer from 1969.

Gretchen: You can tell when you’re in someone’s talk, and they’re saying, “The boy looked for the frog behind the tree,” and you’re like, “I know how you elicited this sentence.” But the nice thing about it not having written words is that you can use it with children, you can use it with speakers of a bunch of different languages. It does have some relatively culturally-specific concepts like, you know, do you recognise pictures as telling a story in a particular order? Is this cartoon drawing of a frog legible to you as a frog? But it is at least more culturally abstract than just having people directly translate a particular type of story word-by-word.

Lauren: I appreciate it because it leads to some really charming example sentences when people are discussing, say, how the structure of sentences works or maybe how people put together a story in a particular culture.

Gretchen: It’s got that sort of, you know, the frog runs away, and then the frog is found, and it follows that narrative arc of losing something and the finding it, which is I think relatively straightforward to tell in a bunch of languages.

Lauren: A book is very easy to take with you regardless of where you’re doing your analysis. You don’t need to have electricity or anything compared to another really common thing that’s used to get people to tell stories, which is a short video called “The Pear Story.”

Gretchen: “The Pear Story” is so charming. It’s this six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. It has no language in it. There’s sound effects, but no one says anything. You have this story that they showed to a bunch of speakers of languages who are asked to then retell the story from the images.

Lauren: You can tell it’s from 1975 because people have amazing pants and hair from the era.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, there is for sure some flair in those pants. The story is, roughly, having just watched it – this is on YouTube if you want to watch it for yourself – but there’s a man who’s a farmer, I guess, who’s got a kerchief around his neck. He’s climbing a ladder up a tree, picking some pears, and putting them in a basket. He picks a whole basket full of pears and sets it down with the other basket of pears below the tree, and he goes back up the ladder. Then some guy comes by with a goat for no apparent reason.

Lauren: [Laughs] Yes.

Gretchen: As you do. Then a little boy comes by on a bicycle and picks up one of the big baskets of pears and puts it on the front handlebars of the bike and drives off with it. Bum bum bum.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Then the kid on the bike runs into another group of three kids. One of them has a little paddle thing that has an elastic thing with a ball on the end.

Lauren: And they’re bouncing the paddleball thingamajig.

Gretchen: Yeah, that thing. And the kid on the bike runs into a rock and falls off the bike, and the pears fall all over the place. The kid’s okay. But the other kids help him put the pears back in the basket. And he goes off on the bike again except he’s – oh, he’s lost his hat, and the kids give his hat back as well. Then Bike Kid goes off into the sunset, and the other kids go off, and they’ve secretly each got a pear in their pocket that they took as thank you for helping with the basket. Then the farmer comes back down the tree and is like, “Oh my god! Where did my pears go? Where did the whole basket go?” And the three kids who were helping were like, “Oh, I dunno.” That’s the end of the story.

Lauren: One thing your retelling reminds me of is that this is actually really nicely shot. It’s clear that it’s in California, right. It feels like they actually got some film people to shoot a really, really nice film.

Gretchen: Right. And I think they got actors to be the characters because the characters look like they’re the wrong age for grad students.

Lauren: Which is often what happens when people are shooting an elicitation video on no budget.

Gretchen: Right. Like, it’s not just you and five of your friends from grad school. Because the kids are too young to be grad students, and the farmer looks middle aged. There are some middle-aged grad students, but it’s less like, “Okay, you got a bunch of people in their 20s to do this – 20s and 30s to do this.” It’s beautifully shot. It’s got nice lighting and all of this stuff. They got a goat. I dunno where they got the goat.

Lauren: Well, the goat reminds me, but when they put this pear story together – and it is literally called “The Pear Story,” unlike “Frog Story” which has a secret other name – when they put this together, they deliberately had these things they were trying to see whether they would come up or how people would do them in narratives across language. The goat being there that has nothing to do with the story is whether people pay attention to background information. The fact that we start off – you said “a farmer” at the start, and when he comes back, he’s “the farmer.” You’re reidentifying the same person. Even the paddleball little bouncy thingy thing was deliberately something that people might not have a name for immediately so that they would have to do essentially what we did and negotiate what it’s called.

Gretchen: So, you learn the language’s word for “thingamajig” or “toy,” or I don’t – the way you describe something you don’t necessarily have words for because languages do have ways of describing things they don’t have words for. If you put something that the word for which is very obscure, I don’t know what the word is for this in English, then people have to figure out how to describe it. I guess, I dunno, probably all languages don’t have words for pears, but presumably, you might say “fruit” or something like that if you didn’t have a specific word for “pear.”

Lauren: Not getting too bogged down in the detail, but what makes it really powerful is that there was a book about analysing Pear storytellings in the 1980s. People have continued to use “The Pear Story.” So, it starts to become something where you can benchmark experience in storytelling across languages. For example, there’s this really great paper about Meithei, which is a language in the northeast of India where Shobhana Chelliah was working with this language and noticed that when people tell stories there’s not an expectation that you necessarily say who is doing what, but it should be apparent from context. You might not necessarily say “the boys” or the “the farmer” every time they do something. Instead, you focus more on the actions, and it’s through the conversation that people keep track of who’s doing what. It was really hard to know exactly who was doing what in a story that people were telling about what happened in their own village or in their own family last week. She recorded a bunch of people telling “The Pear Story” and could literally count the number of times they said, “the farmer,” “the boy.”

Gretchen: And because the researcher already knows what happens in the video, it gives you this shared common ground. And generally, the task is something like you have people watch a video, and then you have them retell the story of the video to someone who hasn’t seen it, say, “Tell it to this person who hasn’t seen it,” or “Tell it to me,” and you say that you haven’t seen it. It’s a relatively natural-ish context. People often know a story that they’re telling to someone else who hasn’t experienced it. I mean, it’s as natural as you can get for something that’s relatively constrained so that everyone’s doing the same task, whereas “The Frog Story,” you have people flip through page by page and narrate what’s happening on each page, “The Pear Story” tends to be you have people watch the whole thing and then retell the story afterward.

Lauren: Because it’s being recorded in a bunch of other languages, they could literally go back and say, “Yeah, in Meithei, there really are fewer times that people say who is doing what compared to the existing tellings that we have in languages like English.” So, a really neat example of how this kind of task can be really helpful in understanding how different languages do storytelling differently.

Gretchen: Do you have any examples of this from the gesture literature?

Lauren: I do, indeed. Because you can immediately tell when something is situated in the gesture literature because they make people watch a particular Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon from Warner Brothers.

Gretchen: Okay. They didn’t get a bunch of University of California grad students to act it out in the field?

Lauren: They did not. But anytime you see an example of a cat climbing or a cat swinging or something about a bird, you almost always know that it’s taken from a particular cartoon called “Canary Row,” which is where Tweety Bird is in one apartment building, and across the road, Sylvester’s in the other. Sylvester in this eternal quest to get to Tweety Bird – there’s lots of different actions that Sylvester performs. When you get people to retell it, you get really great gestures out of them. I feel when I read a gesture studies paper, and they’ve played this – and it doesn’t require language, so you can play it to speakers of English or Turkish or Japanese. Every time I see example sentences from “Canary Row,” I just feel this, like, “Aww.”

Gretchen: “Aww.”

Lauren: “It’s a gesture paper.”

Gretchen: It’s cute how stories like this can also become part of linguistics as a cultural area where you feel part of gesture studies as a culture by seeing the Sylvester and Tweety one. “The Pear Story” was part of my grad school tradition when we did a field methods class. It was like, “Okay, we’re gonna learn how to use ‘The Pear Story’ when it comes to elicitation.” I took other field methods classes where we didn’t use “The Pear Story,” but in this one, it was part of that enculturation. There’s probably other examples of texts that are canonical sets of examples in other lineages of linguistics, we’re just showing the ones that are available to us in our context.

Lauren: Yeah, I know Frog Story is really popular with people doing language documentation because you can just pack a book in your field kit. It’s also popular with child language acquisition researchers because parent-child interaction around books is a relatively common thing, especially in Western cultures. It becomes fun the more you work in these areas, and you begin to recognise recurring texts from the examples that people produce in talks or in papers.

Gretchen: I think we could really, if we ever wanted to get into publishing a line of children’s books – you know, produce “The North Wind and the Sun,” “Please Call Stella” – you could illustrate that like a children’s book. I guess Mercer Mayer already has the copywrite on “The Frog Story,” but you know, maybe he’d like to produce a special edition just for linguists. You could have a whole line of linguistically relevant children’s books.

Lauren: Exceedingly charming.

Gretchen: Somebody commission this from us.

Lauren: Getting people to produce sentences either by reading passages or reading stories or retelling stories is one way to come up with example sentences to illustrate a feature of a language. But there is also a long tradition in linguistics of people coming up with example sentences.

Gretchen: Right. Because we all know at least one language in some capacity. Sometimes, you study a language by going and finding a speaker or a signer and saying, “Hey, can you say this? Or can you say some stuff for me?”, and I’ll record it, and I’ll analyse it, but you, yourself, are also someone who knows a language. So, if I wanna say, “‘Please call Stella’ is a sentence in English,” I don’t necessarily need to go and ask 20 of my friends to be like, “Yeah, I think that any English speaker would just understand me.” There’s the armchair-inside-your-office method of saying, “Yeah, if I think that ‘The dog chased the cat’ is a grammatical sentence in English.” I don’t necessarily need to go ask 100 people just to confirm this relatively basic thing. Then there’s the slightly expanded version which is, “Okay, I think this is a sentence in English,” and then you do a talk about your paper for a research group or at a conference, and there’s a dozen people in the room, or there’s 20 or 40 people in the room, and if they all speak English or French or whatever the language of your paper is in, and everyone in the room agrees, “Yeah, we think the sentences that you’ve presented in this language are valid,” then it’s like you’ve surveyed those 20 or 40 people. I think sometimes that linguists should give themselves more credit for this. There are really interesting papers trying to replicate these grammaticality judgements and like, what if we tested some of these sentences on 100 and see – like, sometimes there are regional differences, or people will have individual idiolect differences about which things they find work for them as a sentence or not. It is worth testing some of these. But often, if you have actually tested them on everybody in your department, or everybody who was attending this particular conference talk, it is actually running them by 20 people or 40 people, which is a pretty good statistical number.

Lauren: There is also a tradition of creating sentences and getting people to check them when it’s not a language you have strong intuitions about yourself. One of my favourite things to do while doing this is to create sentences that I know people won’t find grammatical just to double check I haven’t missed anything about how things might work in the language.

Gretchen: And to reinforce that you are not expecting them to just say yes for every single sentence.

Lauren: Yeah. Running past, “Ah, can we say, ‘Please Stella call’?”

Gretchen: People are like, “No, what? No.”

Lauren: I do feel sorry for people who I do this to who are just like, “Has she learnt nothing from us?”

Gretchen: It’s also fun when people will have – you know, because sometimes you just need some names. Like, who’s Stella? Why is she in these sentences? You need some names of people to be in your sentences. Sometimes, people will come up with cute, recurring characters from if they’re watching a particular TV show, they’ll start naming characters in their class about things. David Adger’s book, Language Unlimited, he uses his cat and his husband as the example people in these sentences, which is very charming.

Lauren: How did you come up with examples for Because Internet?

Gretchen: I particularly wanted in Because Internet to not have the people in the example sentences seem gendered. Sometimes, you see a lot of Johns and Marys in example sentences, and I just think that’s boring.

Lauren: There’s a lot of Stellas buying snacks for her brother Bob.

Gretchen: Those are very generic Anglo names. And I was like, “Well, this is kind of dull.” And also, that in Because Internet, the book is trying to be fun and interesting for people, I thought if I make silly example person names, that will make it more fun to read, and that’s one of my goals. I deliberately used the “Boaty McBoatface” method of coming up with example sentences.

Lauren: Okay. What does that look like?

Gretchen: Can I read you an example?

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: “You’re more likely to start using a new word from Friendy McNetwork, who shares a lot of mutual friends with you, and less likely to pick it up from Rando McRandomface, who doesn’t share any of your friends even if you and Rando follow each other just like you and Friendy do.”

Lauren: I like that if you had just used “Stella” and “Bob,” by the time we got to “You and Bob would use more words in common” because I can’t remember if Bob is the one you’re friends with.

Gretchen: Exactly. Naming them after the trait that they’re supposed to have – like “Friendy McNetwork” is the one you have a lot of shared friends with and “Rando” is the one that you know them, but you don’t have any friends in common. Then when you get to the second half of the sentence, “even if you and Rando follow each other just like you and Friendy do,” it’s really easy to track which one is which in the earlier part of the sentence. There’s practical considerations, but also, I found it kind of fun, you know, they’re gender neutral. They’re clearly not anyone’s real name. They’re sort of fanciful and a bit fun.

Lauren: I always like a bit of whimsy when it comes to examples. In our recent auxiliaries episode, we really leaned heavily into the farm theme that we created for that episode.

Gretchen: Yes, we did. Because it’s sometimes when you know that you’re gonna need a whole bunch of examples in a text or an episode, it’s fun to theme them so that you’re not just reaching for the same – like I think we used examples like “I like cake” a lot, or like, “I eat ice cream.” A lot of our examples are about ice cream and cake, which is fun. I mean, we do like both of these things, but sometimes, for an episode that’s gonna be really example heavy, using horses and farmyard animals and stuff is a fun way to make it a little more distinct from other episodes.

Lauren: This is where you can really tell the difference between a piece of linguistic work where the examples have come from someone’s intuitions to illustrate something compared to when the focus has been on finding examples from the stories and recordings and conversations that people have that are much more spontaneous where they might not always be so smooth and perfect. You might be missing the person who’s doing the thing in “The Pear Story,” but there’s a really great example of how it has some kind of particular emphasis or spin. Whether you use created examples or found examples can really change the flavour of how you’re doing your analysis.

Gretchen: Right. I think ideally, one wants to have a balance of both. It can be useful to have things that are easier to compare to other languages because they’re more similar, and then also, you really wanna consider the language in and of itself and not be always forcing it in the mould of “Well, let’s be able to compare it.” Also, we wanna see “What are people doing in this language when you don’t have a preconceived idea of what you’re doing with them?” It’s a balance between those two types of things. One’s easier to work with, and one is potentially gonna give you insights that you weren’t looking for.

Lauren: On top of juggling that, it’s also worth paying attention to whether you’re beginning to get a bit of a bias in the examples in terms of the vibes as well as what’s happening linguistically.

Gretchen: A lot of these examples are coming from the ’60s and ’70s, and they present this very bucolic view of what types of things people talk about. I noticed that there’s a lot of male entities in a lot of these sentences, except for our friend Stella, to whom we call.

Lauren: But Stella’s doing a lot of work.

Gretchen: She’s getting all those things for her brother Bob. But “The Pear Story” has a farmer with a moustache in a tree, and it has a boy on a bicycle, and I think it has a girl go by on a bike as well, but there’s a lot more male entities in several of these examples. Same with “The Frog Story,” which has a little boy and a frog. It might be that gender signifiers in different cultures are different, and that some people read these stories and read the characters gender-neutrally or read them as female. And I don’t wanna say that this isn’t a possibility, but from the English perspective of people who were composing these, they’re gender biased in a particular way.

Lauren: For sure. It’s not just vibes. There’s a great paper from 1997 by Macaulay and Brice that looks at just how gender stereotyping happens, especially in syntax examples for sentence structure. They do see not only there’re more examples where they use men or male names, but if they do have women or female names in the examples, they are usually being acted upon or required to chase down snacks for their brothers.

Gretchen: I think that one may be particular to the “Please Call Stella” example. But you’re more likely to have a sentence that’s like, “John saw Mary,” than you are “Mary saw John,” even though both of those are equally valid. For a while – this was wild to me when I learned it – for a while, there were explicit style guide policies that said by default you should prefer male names in the subject position and female names in the object position. I’m like, whoa, that was a policy at some point! Okay.

Lauren: Was it? It’s not even unconscious bias. It’s deliberate choice.

Gretchen: That was a deliberate choice back in the day. That was a style guide thing. Undoing that, now that it’s become this unconscious thing that people are still doing, is more challenging. The fun thing, I guess, about how a lot of example sentences in old school syntax papers use “John” and “Mary” and “Bill” is that there is someone who took a bunch of example sentences from papers since the refer to the same people and stitched them together into a single narrative about the adventures of John and Mary and Bill.

Lauren: Another in our children’s picture book series.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, this is like the See Spot Run of linguistics!

Lauren: It’s not only worth paying attention to who is doing what but the “what” that is happening. There’s this really unfortunate fact that when you want to have a sentence where someone is doing something to someone else, the best – in terms of showing stuff linguistically – thing to have them do is hitting.

Gretchen: Oh no.

Lauren: Because it’s very clear that there’s one animate, active person doing something to another entity, and it’s very distinct and clear and active.

Gretchen: It’s something where you can have an animate person acting on another animate person. For example, if you cut the bread or something, you have an animate acting on an inanimate like “bread” or “cheese” or something, so it’s more clear who’s doing what to who because the cheese isn’t gonna come around and try to cut me – unless I have a very sharp cheddar. Dun dun dun.

Lauren: Ahhhhhh. [Laughs]

Gretchen: Whereas if you have “The girl hit the boy” or something – like little kids sometimes hit each other – that’s the more benign version of that example. It’s true people sometimes hit each other. This is a thing that you can talk about in languages. It’s very often transitive. But also, it can lead to these uncomfortable example sentences where you’re like, “Ah, this seems to be reinforcing certain types of patterns of violence.”

Lauren: Especially when you’re writing, say, an entire book that’s a descriptive grammar of a language, and again and again you just have these men hitting other people and animals, and you’re like, “I do think this adequately represents what’s happening linguistically, but I feel really off about what it’s showing people culturally.” It may not even be about this culture. It’s about what the linguist is trying to do.

Gretchen: Sometimes, people try to replace this with a verb that’s less violent like “kiss.”

Lauren: Also, a bit weird.

Gretchen: But that gets into consent issues. If you just go around kissing people, they might not like that. You’d say, “Well, why not use a verb like ‘see’?” But the thing is, “see” often does extra, additional things in the structure in many languages. Like, some languages you have to use “see” plus a word meaning “at” or “to.” You can’t just “see” someone. You “see at” someone or “see to” someone. If you want a very straightforwardly transitive example, something like “see” is like you have to test it to see whether it works in the language. Yeah, it's very complicated because there aren’t a ton of verbs that involve people directly acting on other people, and sometimes they have meanings that you don’t want to introduce.

Lauren: So, between what you’re trying to do linguistically, what level of language you’re analysing, and then how you wanna present those examples and the language that you’re working with, balancing what’s happening with example sentences is really hard.

Gretchen: Right. In addition to the named entities sometimes having a gender bias, there’s also – when you’re working on a given language, people will often pick a couple common names in that language to use. I think a lot of Japanese examples use the name “Taro,” which is a relatively common name. I’ve learned some common names in various languages when you have someone who’s doing a paper, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, these are the two common names that we’re gonna use.” You know, picking a couple common names in a given language sort of works. But in English where there’re lots of English speakers from lots of different cultures who have lots of different backgrounds, if we leave ourselves with “John” and “Mary,” that also presents this 1960s, old-school, very waspy version of who could be an English speaker.

Lauren: The great this is that you don’t have to do this hard work yourself. There’s been this great project called the Diverse Names Generator where they’ve done the work for you of finding names that skew masculine or skew feminine or are gender neutral and come from a range of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Gretchen: These names on the Diverse Names Generator website, which is very easy to use, have International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions, so if you don’t necessarily know how to pronounce them, you can see them there. You can add contributions yourself if you think, “Oh, there could be some more names.” You could just use a baby names book – and I’m sure people have – but one of the advantages that this has is it lets you filter for certain types of things that might be relevant to linguists. Sometimes, you wanna have the names in your example sentences, you want the first one to have a name that begins with A, and the next one a name that begins with B, and the next one that begins with C or something, just to help keep track of the different names of participants. You can also do things like filter for certain types of lengths or certain types of initial letters to make them balance out for other types of things you might want in your example sentences. I’ve also seen recommendations to just use gender neutral, especially very short, names for all of your sentences, so names like “Lee” or “Alice” or “Pat,” “Sam.” The complication of this is that sometimes gender-neutral names shift depending on the decade. One of these earlier recommendations has “Kim” as a recommended gender-neutral name. I dunno if that name reads as gender-neutral anymore.

Lauren: Hmm, a good reminder that even as we use sample texts that have become traditional in linguistics, it’s also worth revisiting them and thinking about what we want to have present in the examples that we create.

Gretchen: Right. In addition to making things that are in conversation with this linguistic lineage where there may be hundreds or thousands of examples in a given language, thinking, “Okay, what could be the future set of examples that we wanna use or the future set of texts that we wanna use, and what are the gaps that we’re trying to fill in as far as figuring out what we might wanna be able to compare across languages in the future?”

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on 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” stickers, and aesthetic IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include our 2022 listener survey responses, using linguistics in the workplace, and our very special, [ASMR voice] very soothing, Lingthusiasmr episode where we read the Harvard Sentences to you in a calm, soothing voice. [Regular voice] If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm – and maybe Lingthusiasmr? – to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: 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 [and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk]. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 82 #transcripts #podcasts #example sentences #field work #phonetics #syntax #the frog story #the pear story #the harvard sentences #the rainbow passage

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vigilskeep · 1 year

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What are Arthur and Minerva’s grimoires like?

minerva’s was originally a simple standard issue circle grimoire, a small leatherbound red book with the gold chantry insignia. i imagine all apprentices receive the same, with the option to upgrade to something more personalised once you’ve passed your harrowing and are worth spending unique resources on, but minerva was recruited so soon after hers that never got the chance. it became increasingly unwieldy to fill with her absurd number of new and generally illegal spells, and it’s a messy contrast of her neat, no-nonsense, increasingly small handwriting and every scrap of parchment that’s been bound into it by a mixture of stitching, magic and force of will

she hates the idea of replacing it, complaining it would be a waste of time to write it all out again, but truly unable to admit what’s most precious to her—irving’s careful notes, jowan’s childish doodles, an encouraging remark from karl, amell’s quick barely legible first floor library tomorrow fourth bell i have a new theory you will despise, a dry disdainful scrawl from morrigan on shapeshifting, anders’ advice on her single heal spell that scribbles a rendering of ser pounce-a-lot over wynne’s sharp cursive, and a few rough sheets of velanna copying out some of her spells to practise writing before she tries recording her dalish stories, offering spiky commentary as she does so. even the pages where minerva first began to work out the battlemage specialisation, which i hc she invented. for all her lauded pragmatism you can pry this old grimoire from her cold dead hands. it does get a shiny new blue and silver grey warden binding when it finally threatens to fall apart though

arthur did make it past apprentice, but even before that he had his grimoire, a white book emblazoned with the trevelyan family crest and motto. it was one of his last birthday gifts from his father. his handwriting is much less neat than minerva’s, an irrepressible fault from a poor mixture of trained cursive and impatience, which plagues him to no end when he tries to help lilith with her studies. the white isn’t the most practical for life as an apostate, he admits, and it does happen to have a smear of mud here and there, not to mention a stab through it from a templar’s blade with a little of his blood to boot, but he can’t throw the poor scuffed thing away just because it saved his life, can he? he’s pretty sure none of it is the blood he used for blood magic. and it’s basically still readable. vivienne despairs of him

#minerva surana #arthur trevelyan

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quacheta · 5 months

Text

So a few months ago, there was at least one (1) person who got permission to, and started, the project of bookbinding AmevelloBlue's The Ghost in the Shell. And when they tried to print it, it was like 700-800 pages. Which is... a lot.

So I figured, since (1) I also love Ghost in the Shell, (2) I do typesetting semi-professionally, and (3) why the heckers not, I could probably get it down to a more reasonable size.

And I did. And then AmevelloBlue gave me permission to share it here, so.

The Drive Folder With All the Files.

File-specific information below. :)

(Please, for the love of Donnie's banana pancakes, read it. I am trying to answer as many technical questions in advance as I can, so people don't get overwhelmed or confused or frustrated.)

(But also it is a LOT of information, so if you need clarification please ask. This is for to be fun! Not scary!)

There are three parts.

GitS.p8: This is the straight PDF export, done in pages and not spreads. That means each page is its own page (a spread has 2+ to a page) and the pages are in order. If you want a pretty PDF to read on a device, this is what you want. If you want to run it through your own imposition software, this is also what you want.

GitS.p8_typeset: This is the imposition. That means the pages have been rearranged into signatures and spreads for bookbinding. There are 16 pages, or 8 spreads, or 4 sheets of paper (printed double-sided) to each signature. Each signature gets stacked, folded into a booklet, and then stacked on top of the next signature for sewing the book block. THIS IS THE WHOLE BOOK. If you want ONE file to send to the printer, in one straight run, this is what you want.

signatures (folder): These are INDIVIDUAL SIGNATURES. That means each signature is a separate file. If you want to do a test print of a single signature, this is what you want. If you want to run different signatures through different printers, this is what you want. If you want to do this piecemeal for any other reason, this is what you want.

(The last three signatures are three sheets of paper, not four. This is for the sake of balancing page count against structural integrity in the bound book.)

Why would you want different printers, you ask?

Because color printing is expensive. And I used color in the typeset.

The entire thing is designed to still be readable (and pretty!) in a regular, black-and-white printer. Because I wanted this to be accessible to everyone, not just people who can afford color printing. But if you want to split it, and send the signatures-with-colored-bits to a color printer, and save money by NOT sending the whole book, these are the signatures with colored bits:

0, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 25, 26, 28, 35

And if that's too many pages still, here are the signatures with the most important colored bits (i.e., the title pages and the illustrations):

0, 7, 35

All of the files are PDFs. All of them, specifically, are PDF/x-1a(2003), which means the color profile is CMYK only and all the fonts are embedded. So nothing should go screwy-whompus when you download it or send it to the printer.

TRIM SIZE: the pages are 5x7.5. This is (1) to allow printing on letter-sized paper more easily, and (2) to also allow for trimming of the book block without screwing over the margins. The imposition and the signature files have trimming / cutting guides (the little lines) for your convenience.

There are 36 signatures total, or 560-something pages (less than 200 sheets of paper, before folding, if printed double-sided). This is still a big book. Big enough that you will need to know about spine swell, and possible rounding and backing, if you decide to do the binding. Please keep that in mind as you plan your project.

EPUB: some people like to convert PDF book files to ePUBs for eBook reading. Due to how I designed the typeset, this is not going to be pretty if you try it with these. I am currently in the final stages of making the eBook for GitS, and will upload the ePUB to the drive folder as soon as it's done. It will not have the pretty background / border illustrations of the print file, but it will be neat and tidy and include the pretty title pages.

I... think that's everything?

#AmevelloBlue #Ghost in the Shell #bookbinding #typesetting #fanfic bookbinding projects #if I forgot tags please tell me I am not young or hip enough to keep up anymore okay

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flowermountainpress · 3 months

Text

Embers & To-do list (progress update)

February 24

(Cross-posted from Patreon)

I folded and am about to awl Embers-- vol 1-- my husband's birthday present for next month. I noticed so many mistakes on the typesetting, which is from May of 2023. The good news? I don't have to go through the painstaking process of changing the word doc, exporting the PDF, imposing it, downloading it, and printing again-- I can just live with the issues!

Mainly a spacing issue in the first chapter, all the new chapter pages having left-aligned page numbers, and a weird issue with the drop cap spacing. All things I can live with.

Unfortunately the margins are fucked. Plenty of top and bottom and even fore edge margin for me to trim, but it's going to be very slightly awkward on the inner margins due to the sewing. Still perfectly readable, though.

I didn't print a test signature BECAUSE I wasn't willing to change anything (long ass process described above) and I'm happy to live with the mistakes *because* this is something that's not leading my house.

I reread a small bit but caught myself... XD Embers has incredible re-readability so it's a great choice to bind.

After I get stabby, I'm gonna press the signatures overnight to reduce swell. Then sew! Typesetting, which used to be easy to me, is recently a pain in my ass. I find that with doing my day job on the computer (temporary work from home situation) and doing college on the computer, I don't wanna fucking touch it for bookbinding. The practical side of things, however, is nice. I wish I was past the typesetting stage on any of my "owed" projects; the two free paperbacks folks won (Domino and Mouse's).

I've included a picture of my silly to do list that let's me visually track progress on these projects. The first free paperback was easy because it was a fic I'd bound before. Only minor adjustments needed. I'm going to think long and hard about doing so many at once, ever again! Haha. It would have been fine if not compounded by the holidays and IRL work issues, actually-- but I've found it's the height of foolishness to make plans based on my *top* speed at completion things. Fall of last year, I was breezing by everything, and getting everything done soso fast!

Hopefully after this hill, and the break I plan on taking that I can see in the distance, I'll be able to be Speedy™️ once again.

As an aside, I can't remember if I mentioned, all the stickers and bookmarks (and tea and earrings) were mailed out earlier in the week, so February prizes are a bit early this month! Enjoy!

Domino project: 2/20

Mouse: 0/20

Embers: 6/20

Technological struggles: I bought affinity publishing last year when it was on sale, but this week when i tried to upgrade to using it instead of Word for typesetting (high learning curve but highlt recommended program for bookbinding), it crashed twice. The "why" is not a mystery. My laptop has been operating at almost maximum disc space, memory, and cpu, so I drug out my older but nicer laptop.

Re-installed a clean copy of the operating system, ordered a new battery, and have been slowly working my way over. It's a more heavy duty machine and despite being older, has better specs. So that's also been slowing me down. Every time I have spoons to do typesetting (or write), I run headfirst into these difficulties, and by the time I've made progress there, the spoons are gone.

However, slow and steady progress IS being made. I've pretty much vowed to keep trucking on with Word until I finish my current roster of projects, then fuck around with Affinity when I get 5 seconds.

Anyway, long post! Many update. Some progress.

#wip #bookbinding #fanbinding #tim speaks #embers

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kynori · 5 months

Text

assignment 11: character design, part 2

tools: ipad, procreate

description: included a bunch of info for this character!!

left: a full body view of mauxe, with a slightly more polished design. notes explain the different elements of her costume, including her floating ability and her high-tech cape.

center: mauxe, in tribal gear, doing her job. she is the bodyguard and protector of osha, the princess/daughter of the tribe leader. since this pose shows mauxe in motion, it illustrates the way her hair moves - similar to anemone underwater.

mauxe & snideon: here, mauxe is standing next to snideon, the main character of this story/world/universe. snideon is only barely above 5' and a bit, whereas mauxe towers at 7+ feet. there are some more notes explaining this interaction.

expressions: at the top are four expressions, taken from the sketch of different expressions. although there is not a huge range for this character, it is in line with her personality - she is very non-expressive and generally has a harsh look about her. more notes describe this.

feedback:

really proud of how this came out! i feel as though it gives a much better view of the character, and i followed the advice i received last week about making the character + reference page speak for itself. as such, i tried to include plenty of notes and a wide variety of stances/interactions to illustrate her character as thoroughly as possible.

however, i struggle to add text like this without it looking busy. i'm not sure if it's entirely legible, and i also don't know if it looking chaotic is okay or not, considering this is concept art. also, in the center pose, it is somewhat unclear that thing mauxe is holding/covering is another person - i tried to make it more readable by not including osha's design and instead just including her theme color, but i think it still confuses people.

#08character #artforclass #snideon #concept art #character design #mauxe #i love mauxe so much hhhhhh

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dollythesheepp · 1 year

Text

Veronica- Chapter 10

Ao3

Dear Westerburg... You may find what I've done shocking ...

Instead of more details about Veronica's fight with her friend Heather, or lovestruck ramblings about JD, all Betty found when she turned the page were scratched out words, written in a different handwriting than the one she had become accustomed; the phrase occupied one line, and there was nothing else written on it. Betty furrowed her brows and turned the page.

Dear world... No one thinks a pretty girl has feelings.

Same thing. The sentences looked like drafts, as if Veronica was writing a letter and she just couldn't find the right words. What did she do that was so shocking?

Expecting another entry like that, Betty turned the page again, this time staring at Veronica's usual welcome in her messy, barely readable handwriting.

September 24th, 1989. Dear diary...

FUCK!

The single word was written in big, block letters, and it took over three whole lines on the page. Betty chuckled, finding that specific entry funny and very teenage like. She stopped chuckling when she got to the next paragraphs.

Dear diary...

I might as well stop sending my applications to ivy league colleges now, as I'm sure the only place I'll be attending next year will be San Quentin.

I can't believe I actually did that. I just killed my best friend (and my worst enemy, but there's a fine line between those two, as I've come to learn.)

It's been three hours, and I still haven't come to terms with it. Because how exactly do you process something like that? I'm sitting in my room, jumping at every noise my parents make downstairs , just waiting for the moment the police will come knocking on my door.

I can't talk to anyone, not Mom and Dad, not the Heathers (the ones that are still standing, anyway), and not even my freaking therapist. You're the only one I trust now.

What the fuck have I done?

Betty only realized her mouth was open when she started to feel her tongue dry; she closed it and blinked rapidly, snapping out of her shock. She adjusted her glasses on her face, and read everything again, to make sure her myopia hadn't somehow distorted Veronica's words and made them seem like something entirely different than what was in fact written.

That had to be a joke, right? Some sort of dare. Or perhaps Veronica was speaking in metaphors and hadn't actually meant killing her friend in the literal way.

Betty turned the page.

September 25th, 1989 Dear diary...

Heather Chandler's death has wreaked havoc throughout Westurburg. The student body is in shambles now that they've lost their queen.

Heather McNamara can't stop crying (in the moments when she isn't sucking face with Kurt Kelly or complaining about how unfair it is that we only got half a day off from school. Everyone grieves in their own way, I suppose..), Heather Duke has suddenly lost her urge to purge now that Chandler isn't here to comment on every calorie she ingests, Peter Dawson is bragging to everyone about how he was one of the last people to go on a date with the recently deceased Heather and Miss Fleming is in some weird sort of power trip, as if Heather's death awakened in her a need to change the world by forcing teenagers to talk about their feelings.

And me...well, I know that I rambled on about wanting to kill Heather, but I did not plan this. It's one thing to wish someone was dead and it's another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of liquid drainer.

Having said that...If I had the chance to go back in time and undo what I did, I'm not sure I would have changed anything .

Betty blinked, her shock preventing her from expressing any other reaction. She closed the diary as she tried to swallow the lump in her throat and went to bed, finding herself unable to keep reading more.

That night, she didn't sleep.

***

Once the first rays of sunshine started to light up the guest room, Betty gave up on trying to sleep, after restless hours of tossing and turning all night. She stayed in bed, clutching her comforter and staring at the ceiling with a hundred thoughts running amok inside her head, and got up a few minutes after Martha arrived at 8:30; JD woke up shortly after, walking down the stairs already dressed for work.

As usual, Betty found herself in the routine she had established during her stay. She had breakfast, alone this time because JD was late for work and left with an empty stomach and a thermos full of coffee, then she went to the office to work. Seating in front of the computer, Betty couldn't keep her eyes off of the window, where she could see Veronica in the backyard with Martha. They were enjoying the sun as they usually did at that time because Betty wasn't the only one with a routine there.

As a matter of fact, most days in the Sawyer-Dean residence felt exactly the same, like they were all characters in a movie that was being played over and over again. JD would leave for work, Martha would take Veronica outside for a couple of hours and would read her a book or talk to her, then she was fed, cleaned, and Martha would put her back in bed and turn on the TV for her until it was time for her to go to sleep. Sometimes JD would take Veronica downstairs, once he got home, and he'd tell her about her day, other times he would go to her room and stay there with her for hours.

Betty couldn't help thinking about how she would feel in Veronica's position. How draining it must feel to be stuck in that repetitive pattern for the rest of her life. With that thought in her head, she got up and closed the curtains; she didn't want to think about Veronica.

She tried to focus on her job, but the words written in Veronica's diary kept coming back to her every time she closed her eyes. Veronica had killed someone. And according to what she wrote, she didn't feel sorry. Shocked maybe, and scared of getting caught and ruining her life, but she showed no signs of selfless remorse for ending the life of a seventeen year old girl who she had once called a friend.

Did JD know about that? Betty couldn't help but think that God certainly did, and that was why Veronica's life had turned out the way it did. Commeupance comes one way or another.

***

Eventually, Betty managed to forget about the diary for a few hours, her desire to finish her job serving as motivation for her to work faster. With the curtains closed, she didn't feel the hours go by, nor the sun go down until JD knocked on her door.

"Hey," he poked his head inside the office. "Just wanted to see how you were doing."

"I'm good, thanks," she smiled. She glanced at the swatch on her wrist. It was 6:15 p.m. "You're home early today."

JD fully entered the room, leaving the door slightly ajar after he passed. He gave a shrug. "Yeah, I managed to finish some things earlier," he said. "Do you like pasta? I know it's early but I'm starving."

"Same," Betty said. She managed to get through the day with three cups of coffee and one cereal bar, completely forgetting about lunch. "And pasta sounds great."

She followed JD to the kitchen, and she settled down on one of the chairs to watch JD cook. As always, he refused to let her help but after some insistence, he conceded and let her make the salad while he took care of the rest.

"Do you know what I realized?" JD spoke up after the two of them had finished eating. They were seated in the living room, a soccer game playing on the TV, while they rested from eating what felt like enough spaghetti to feed all of Italy.

"What?" Betty asked from her spot on the armchair. She had opted to not seat on the couch with JD; she didn't know how she would feel knowing that he was that close to her and she didn't want to find out. The daydreams and the indecent thoughts were enough. IItwasnt even because of Martha, she had left earlier that day, but even so, Betty thought it was best to put some boundaries out of respect for JD.

"I talk so much about myself but I barely know anything about you," JD said. It was true, JD did talk a lot about himself but only because Betty asked a lot of questions, she didn't like being the center of attention and she enjoyed getting to know him, so it was always a win-win.

"There's isn't much to know," she said. "I don't have any interesting stories or anything like that."

"Just tell me anything. Where did you grow up?"

"Cleveland," she said. "And you just did the typical 'Oh, I'm so sorry for you' expression I normally get when I say that."

JD laughed. "There are worse places if that makes you feel better."

Betty knew that Veronica had also been born in Ohio, in a small town called Sherwood but she was glad JD mention that; she didn't want to think about Veronica.

"Maybe a little."

"Good," he chuckled. "Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?"

"No, at first I wanted to be a doctor but I think that was just because every mom wants that for their kid, including mine," she said. "But I'm very squeamish when it comes to blood and all of that, so I changed my mind when I was like 10."

"And how old are you now?"

"Hm," Betty pursed her lips. She looked down at her watch again, the numbers indicating it was 11:45 p.m. She chuckled. "You're not going to believe this..."

"What?" he asked curiously.

"I'm turning 30 in 15 minutes."

JD's eyes widened in surprise. "What?" he said again. "Really?"

"Yep."

"What a crappy way to spend your birthday, with people you don't know and having to work all day," he said, giving her a sympathetic look.

"I've had worst birthdays," she shrugged.

"Stay right here," JD got up from the couch.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to bake you a birthday cake," he said, already raiding the cabinets to get the ingredients.

"You don't have to do that, it's so late..."

"No, I insist. What kind of birthday doesn't have a cake?" he argued. "Just watch some tv, I'll be done before you know it."

"No way, I have to see that," Betty got up to follow him into the kitchen, unable to contain her smile. That was by far one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for her.

50 minutes later JD placed a chocolate cake in front of her. He cut one slice for her and one for himself. The entire kitchen had been invaded by that delicious smell of freshly baked cake.

"This is really good," Betty said, after swallowing another big piece.

"I'll tell you the secret one day," he gave her a playful wink. "There's hm...there's some frosting on your face."

Automatically she placed her fingers on her face. "Here?" she asked.

"No, right here..." he leaned in closer, and gently put his thumb on the corner of her lips. He kept his finger pressed on her mouth for a second too long like he didn't want to let go. He was close, close enough that she could feel his breath on hers and smell his perfume.

Part of Betty was yelling for her to step aside, and get as far away from JD as possible before any of them could get hurt. Betty didn't listen. Instead, she ended the distance between them with a kiss.

He tasted like chocolate. At first, she thought JD would stop her, or pull away but he didn't. Betty was the one to initiate the kiss but JD was the one who took full control. And she allowed him because it felt so good.

It started slowly, but quickly things became intense, desperate. They both wanted it. She felt his hands running wild through her hips, her legs, her hair. Their lips were still touching, his tongue inside her mouth, her heart palpitating inside chest.

His kisses were exactly how Betty had imagined: explosive, ferocious, dangerous. And wrong. So wrong. But at that moment, neither of them seemed to care. It didn't matter that the hand fumbling with her shirt, desperate to yank it off, was the same hand that he wore his wedding ring, or that his wife was on the floor above. None of it mattered because it felt so right. And it felt so good.

She was thankful that Martha wasn't there anymore, otherwise, she would have heard them as they fiercely tried to quench their needs with each other.

Enthralled by it all, Betty didn't plan on stopping with just a kiss. She wanted more. And she probably would have gotten that, if it wasn't for the sound of something shattering on the second floor.

The noise startled the two of them, who broke apart instantly. JD looked at her, panting and his face red, with lipgloss smeared all over his face, and furrowed his brows, confused. A second later he was racing up the stairs in worry, Betty behind him.

He opened the door to Veronica's room and rushed inside, turning on the lights. He was still panting, but something inside Betty made her beloved that it was out of worry for Veronica's wellbeing, and not out of euphoria from the moment they had in the kitchen. And for a second she felt jealous of JD's invalid wife.

Veronica, as expected, was in bed. Her eyes were closed, it looked like she had been none the wiser about the whole commotion. How was it possible that the noise or JD storming inside her room didn't wake her up? Betty supposed she could be groggy from all of the medications she had to take, but still, she thought it was weird.

"Shit," JD's voice snapped her out of her thoughts, and she stopped staring at Veronica to look at him. On the floor, next to the window was a shattered vase, dozens of pieces, small and big, scattered all over the carpet.

"Did it fall on its own? How?" Betty wondered aloud, more to herself than to him.

"The window is open, it must have been the wind," he said. "Martha probably forgot to close it."

He tiptoed on the floor, trying to avoid stepping on the pieces of broken porcelain, and closed the window, making sure that it was locked this time.

Betty glanced at the sleeping figure on the bed. Veronica looked so peaceful, so fragile. She never would have guessed that Veronica had killed someone.

Betty swallowed the lump in her throat. "You're right, it must have been the wind..."

#heathers #heathers the musical #betty finn #veronica sawyer #jason dean #heather mcnamara #heather duke #heather chandler #jdonica

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