#long story short it's not even pronounceable in our languages so many of us feel it's Americanizing to expect us to use the word | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

evanescentjasmine · 4 years

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I’m going to talk about a little pet peeve of mine with regard to portrayal of poc in fic, TMA specifically since that’s what I mostly read and write for.

I suppose I should first start by saying that, of course, poc are not a monolith, and I’m certain there are other poc who have many different views on this issue. And also this post is in no way meant to demonise, shame, or otherwise discourage people from writing poc in fic if they’re doing something differently. This is just a thing I’ve been noodling on for a while and have had several interesting conversations with friends about, and now that I think I’ve figured out why I have this pet peeve, I figured I’d gather my thoughts into a post.

As a result of the fact we have no canonical racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds for our main TMA cast, we’ve ended up with many diverse headcanons, and it’s absolutely lovely to see. I’m all for more diversity and I’m always delighted to see people’s headcanons.

However, what often happens is I’ll be reading a fic and plodding along in a character’s PoV and get mention of their skin colour. And nothing else. I find this, personally, extremely jarring. In a short one-shot it makes sense, because you’re usually touching on one scenario and then dipping out. Likewise if the fic is in a different setting, is cracky, or is told from someone else’s PoV, that’s all fine. But if I’m reading a serious long-fic close in the poc’s head and...nothing? That’s just bizarre to me.

Your heritage, culture, religion, and background, all of those affect how you view the world, and how the world views you in return. How people treat you, how you carry yourself, what you’re conscious of, all of that shifts. And the weird thing is that many writers are aware of this when it comes to characters being ace or trans or neurodivergent—and I’m genuinely pleased by that, don’t get me wrong. Nothing has made my ace self happier than the casual aceness in TMA fics that often resonates so well with my experience. But just as gender, orientation, and neurodivergence change how a character interacts with their world, so do race, ethnicity, and religion.

As a child, I spent a couple of years in England while my mother was getting her degree. Though I started using Arabic less and less, my mother still spoke to me almost exclusively in Arabic at home. We still ate romy cheese and molokhia and the right kind of rice, though we missed out on other things. She managed to get an Egyptian channel on TV somehow, which means I still grew up with different cultural touchstones and make pop-culture references that I can’t share with my non-Arabic-speaking friends. She also became friends with just about every Egyptian in her university, so for those years I had a bevy of unrelated Uncles and Aunties from cities all over Egypt, banding together to go on outings or celebrate our holidays.

As an adult who sometimes travels abroad solo, and as a fair-skinned Arab who’s fluent in English, usually in a Western country the most I’ll get is puzzled people trying to parse my accent and convinced someone in my family came from somewhere. When they hear my name, though, that shifts. I get things like surprise, passive-aggressive digs at my home region, weird questions, insistence I don’t look Egyptian (which, what does that even mean?) or the ever-popular, ever-irritating: Oh, your English is so good!

At airports, with my Egyptian passport, it’s less benign. I am very commonly taken aside for extra security, all of which I expect and am prepared for, and which always confuses foreign friends who insisted beforehand that surely they wouldn’t pull me aside. Unspoken is the fact I, y’know, don’t look like what they imagine a terrorist would. But I’m Arab and that’s how it goes, despite my, er, more “Western” leaning presentation.

This would be an entirely different story if I were hijabi, or had darker skin, or a more pronounced accent. I am aware I’m absolutely awash with privilege. Likewise, it would be different if I had a non-Arab name and passport.

So it’s slightly baffling to me as to why a Jon who is Pakistani or Indian or Arab and/or Black British would go through life the exact same way a white British character would.

Now, I understand that race and ethnicity can be very fraught, and that many writers don’t want to step on toes or get things wrong or feel it isn’t their place to explore these things, and certainly I don’t think it’s a person’s place to explore The Struggles of X Background unless they also share said background. I’m not saying a fic should portray racism and microaggressions either (and if they do, please take care and tag them appropriately), but that past experiences of them would affect a character. A fic doesn’t have to be about the Arab Experience With Racism (™) to mention that, say, an Arab Jon headed to the airport in S3 for his world tour would have been very conscious to be as put together as he could, given the circumstances, and have all his things in order.

And there’s so much more to us besides. What stories did your character grow up with? What language was spoken at home? Do they also speak it? If not, how do they feel about that? What are their comfort foods? Their family traditions? The things they do without thinking? The obscure pop-culture opinions they can’t even begin to explain? (Ask me about the crossover between Egyptian political comedy and cosmic horror sometime…)

I’m not saying you’ll always get it right. Hell, I’m not saying I always get it right either. I’m sure someone can read one of my fics and be like, “nope, this isn’t true to me!” And that’s okay. The important thing, for me, is trying.

Because here’s the thing.

I want you to imagine reading a fic where I, a born and raised Egyptian, wrote white characters in, say, a suburb in the US as though they shared my personal experiences. It’s a multi-generational household, people of the same gender greet with a kiss on each cheek, lunch is the main meal, adults only move out when they get married, every older person they meet is Auntie or Uncle, every bathroom has a bidet, there’s a backdrop of Muslim assumptions and views of morality, and the characters discuss their Eid plans because, well, everyone celebrates Eid, obviously.

Weird, right?

So why is this normal the other way around?

Have you ever stopped to wonder why white (and often, especially American) experiences are considered the default? The universal inoffensive base on which the rest is built?

Yes, I understand that writers are trying to be inoffensive and respectful of other backgrounds. But actually, I find the usual method of having the only difference be their skin colour or features pretty reductive. We’re more than just a paint job or a sprinkle of flavour to add on top of the default. Many of us have fundamentally different life experiences and ignoring this contributes to that assumption of your experience being universal.

Yes, fic is supposed to be for fun and maybe you don’t want to have to think about all this, and I get that completely. I have all the respect in the world for writers who tag their TMA fics as an American AU, or who don’t mention anyone’s races. I get it. But when you have characters without a canonical race and you give them one, you’re making a decision, and I want you to think about it.

Yes, this is a lot of research, but the internet is full of people talking about themselves and their experiences. Read their articles, read their blogs, read their twitter threads, watch their videos, see what they have to say and use it as a jumping-off point. I’m really fond of the Writing With Color blog, so if you’re not sure where to start I’d recommend giving them a look.

Because writers outside of the Anglosphere already do this research in order to write in most fandoms. Writers of colour already put themselves in your shoes to write white characters. And frankly, given the amount of care that many white writers put into researching Britishisms, I don’t see why this can’t extend to other cultural differences as well.

#the magnus archives #tma #poc in fanfic #representation #tw racism #long post

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mybeautifulchristianjourney · 3 years

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Devotional Hours Within the Bible

by J.R. Miller

The Holy Spirit Given (Acts 2:1-13)

This is the story of the beginning of the Christian Church. It was fifty days after the death of Christ. It did not occur at a convention - it was not an earth-born organization that was effected that day - it was heaven - born. When Jesus ascended, He sent His disciples to prayer, continuous prayer. The prayer was for a definite object. A promise had been given to them - but they were to get it by prayer, persevering, believing prayer. Ten days had passed, and here is what is said about the disciples, "They were all together in one place." This was an ideal meeting. For one thing they were all there - the ministers and the women and the men, too. At some prayer meetings there are many women - but very few men.

All the friends of Christ living in Jerusalem, were present at this meeting. None excused themselves, because they had other things to do. The interest was so deep, that nobody thought of remaining away from a single meeting. This is now the tenth day of the meetings - and yet no one had grown weary. What a loss to the person it would have been if anyone had stayed at home the day the Spirit came! People who miss even one meeting, do not know what blessing may come that day which they will lose. Thomas was absent from a meeting one evening, and we know what he missed. Jesus came that night, and for a whole week Thomas was unhappy and lived in doubt. If anyone had been absent on this day of Pentecost, he would have missed a great blessing.

We must notice, too, that these people all came promptly. A long while after the meeting began, Peter said it was only nine in the morning. They must, therefore, have met at daybreak, at the latest - and yet they were all there. That was another good point - promptness and punctuality. They were also there with one accord. They were all of one mind. There was no discord among them. They had one purpose. Their hearts made music, and God heard the music in heaven. There is another thing about their praying - it was importunate. The meetings had continued now ten days - but none of them had wearied. All these points we should treasure up, so that we may pray in the same way.

The breath of God was breathed upon the waiting company. Breath means spirit. The night after the resurrection, in the upper room, Jesus breathed upon His disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." On the day of Pentecost they heard a sound like the wind. It was not a wind - it was the breathing of God. Until the wind of God blows upon our hearts and lives there is no divine blessing for us. Hiss Havergal tells of receiving once from a friend a gift of an Aeolian harp. She did not know how to use the harp to make music on it. She tried picking and thrumming its strings - but there was no music produced by this process. Then she looked over the friend's letter that had come with the harp, and leaned how to use it.

"Raise your window," the instructions ran," and put it under the sash, that the wind may blow over the wires." Then the room was filled with gentle strains. The only way to get the music from these lives of ours, is to have the wind of God blow upon them.

First the wind, then the fire - both symbols of God - and then they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Here we see the blessing of importunity and persistence. If they had ceased praying any time before the tenth day the blessing would not have come. No doubt many of our prayer fail to be answered, because we grow weary and give up too soon.

We talk a great deal about submitting to God's will in praying. That is right - but we may be altogether too submissive. It is God's will offtimes that we should not cease to cry to Him. He wants us to be importunate, to press our request, to pray, and not faint. It was a wonderful answer that came that day - they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. They were filled; not a little measure of the divine blessing was granted - but all they could receive. God will give us all we have room for, of His grace and love. The reason some have more blessing than others, is because they make more room in their hearts than others do for the blessing.

They boy who has his pockets full of nails and marbles, when his mother tells him to take all the cakes his pockets will hold, does not get many cakes. Just so, people whose hearts are full of this world, get but a small measure of the Spirit in their praying. It was the Holy Spirit that was given to these first disciples so richly; it was not mere good feeling - but warm emotion, not fresh enthusiasm, not a good influence - but the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God - it was Himself that God gave them. He came down to live in the, not with them only - but in them. So this was the same blessing we may receive - if we will only ask for it.

We all like to have visits from pleasant friends. Here is a Friend, the most pleasant, the most tender, the most helpful Friend in this world. He will come to visit us if only we ask Him, if we really want Him to come. He will come, not to make a short stay of an hour or a day - but to remain always as our guest; not merely in our house - but in our heart.

The effect of being filled with God was seen at once. "They … began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." It was very important, then that the disciples be able talk to the crowds of foreigners on the streets in their own languages. They were to be missionaries, and they could not tell these strangers about Christ unless they knew their language. This miracle of tongues made them ready at once for their work. When our missionaries go to heathen lands the first thing they must do is to learn the language of those to whom they would tell the story of Christ. This takes a long time. On the day of Pentecost the foreigners from all countries were right there, and there was no time for the disciples to learn the different languages in the ordinary way; so God taught them at once how to preach in different languages. The Spirit does not give this same power to Christians in these days. You will not be able, without any study, to speak German, or Spanish, or French the moment you are converted.

But there is a sense in which the Spirit gives every new convert a new tongue. A Christian has a new speech. The tongue that once spoke lies - speaks truth now. The tongue that once spoke bitter words - utters now only kind, loving words. So we do get new tongues when we receive the Holy Spirit. If a boy or a man swears or lies and speaks bad words, or gets cross and utters angry words - we know that he still has his old tongue and has not yet gotten a new one. But when he has the language of love, of praise, of prayer - we know that he is under a new power, the power of God.

"Every man heard them speaking in his own language." This was a token that the gospel of Christ should be preached in that language. In a certain sense this was fulfilled in a far more glorious sense, for the Bible has been translated into nearly every important language of the world, and is sent to every nation, so that the people of all lands may literally hear the gospel and the wonderful works of God in their own tongue.

That was a wonderful day. No matter from what country a man in the throngs on the streets had come, there was someone to tell him of Jesus Christ and His love, and of the great redemption offered now to all the world. "How is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? … They were all amazed, and were perplexed." No wonder they were amazed. It was really a wonderful thing that had happened. Indeed, everything about redemption is wonderful. The sending of Jesus Christ, God's Son, to be born as a little babe and to live a human life, was wonderful. The dying of Christ on the cross was wonderful. Then the coming of the Holy Spirit was wonderful.

Yet there are many people who find more to interest and amaze them in bits of shells or stones or minerals, or in birds or ants or beetles, than in the gospel. They think the subject of redemption a matter suited only to Sunday-school children, ignorant people, and sick folks; while they find subjects suited to great minds in the fields of the sciences and philosophies. How little earth's wise people know of the wonderful treasures of wisdom hidden in the gospel!

We are told in a later verse that some of the people mocked. There are always some people who will scoff and ridicule every extraordinary manifestation of God's grace. When Jesus performed great miracles, they said He was in league with Beelzebub's power. Festus pronounced Paul mad when he saw his great zeal and earnestness in Christ's service. These scoffing beholders accounted for the wonderful things they saw the disciples doing, by saying that they were drunk. The same kinds of scoffing are heard in modern days when a great work of grace is going on anywhere. There are always some who mock.

#Devotional Hours Within the Bible #J.R. Miller #The Holy Spirit Given #Acts 2:1-13 #September 26 #2021

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estoniacobaltpayne · 4 years

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A Life Day Story

So, I had an idea of a cute Din n Grogu thing, based off the movie A Christmas Story. It's in Grogu's POV.

I hope y'all like it lmao. Be kind, I haven't written fanfiction in like 6 years or more lmaooo

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There it was.

The Holy Grail of all the parts and gadgets and gizmos on the ship.

The chrome-plated ball bearing from the landing gear with the engraved ridge around the center had single handedly consumed my every waking thought this Life Day season, and if I played my cards right, and deployed subtle tactics of persuasion, I knew it wouldn't be long before it was in my grasp.

As I sat in the cockpit contemplating the next move of my meticulous plan, loud grumbling from down below in the engine room could be heard through the vents. Thick puffs of black smoke weren't far behind.

Now, aside from bounty hunting, my father was the most notorious engine compressor wrangler in the parsec. A few kicks, screws, and well-timed curses was all it took to get the thing up and running again.

At least, that's what he claimed.

The woman watching me, a short tempered thing my father always addressed as Dune, scolded my 'subtle' attempt at securing the ball bearing (I made the mistake of pointing at it while looking at her, a rookie mistake). She grumbled out a curt, "no, that is not a toy, kid!"

Agh! No! What she had just said was every adult's secret deflection method against allowing me the toy! Their innate bias that what is functional can in no way be a toy came crashing down on me. I had blown my chance!

Dune watched the vent in horror as another stream of "dank farrik"'s and "damn this thing to hell"'s wafted through it. She quickly ushered me out of the cockpit and down the ladder to the hull in order to spare me the assault of words ill-intended for children.

She said it was time for me to head to the small Nevarro school, anyways.

As we walked the short distance, we met up with our usual walking partner. He was a young boy with dark hair who always had the best snacks packed for him by his mother. The first day I met the boy I stole his blue cookies.

Being locked away for so long kept me from learning the basics of speech and writing, so the only part of his name, Phixlana, that I was able to pronounce, was a short Phix; although it wasn't long before all my other classmates called him that as well.

In class, our teacher assigned us a writing prompt to be handed in the next day. Whoa boy. What a drag! Homework was tiresome and boring at the best of times, but my inability to write in any language made this assignment seem impossible to accomplish.

But wait! Did my large ears deceive me?

No. They did not!

The most glorious of prompts that would bring salvation to my plight!

"Write about what you would like most for Life Day!" proclaimed the droid.

This was my chance! I would use the force to wield the pen as my sword! It surely would do a fine enough job putting my prose to paper! It would be my scribe, and I was sure I would produce the most magnificent paragraph!

"All I want for Life Day is the chrome-plated ball bearing from the landing gear with the engraved ridge around the center! Oh! My! How marvelous!" the droid would read, expressing its satisfaction with a plethora of pluses on my A grade! The entire class would jump up and cheer, as the droid at the front would suddenly grow the ability to emote and dramatically express his overwhelmingly pleased feelings upon reading my assignment!

Oh! Oh no! This couldn't be! My dreams shattered as I opened up my tablet! What was supposed to be an A+++ on my beautifully thought out paragraph prompt, read as a measly C+. How excruciatingly agitating! I supposed I shouldn't tell my father. I'd spare him the disappoint I myself was currently enduring. And just below! How could I have not noticed before! The inscription of, "that is not a toy, kid!" at the bottom! This put a sour on my mood that lasted throughout the remaining duration of the day.

The gloomy cloud only let up slightly when dad took us out with Dune and the man of whom I did not know the name of, but fawned over me regardless whenever my father brought him another bounty. With all of us piled in the small speeder, we set off in search of the finest Life Day tree money could buy.

The trees the shady merchant showed us were dismal and pathetic at best, but my father was a world-class heckler, and never passed up an opportunity to bargain for his buck. After a moment of bickering with the merchant, my father let out a curt, "deal," after the salseman offered to knock back the price and load the large tree into the speeder.

All was well! Dune and who I had heard my dad proclaim as Karga sang tunes for me as my mandalorian father begrudenlingy drove the speeder back home.

Pop! Whap!

"Dank farrik!" drawled my dad. "Piston blew!" he exclaimed from the front seat of the speeder.

We climbed out and dad handed me a pan of bolts to hold as he replaced the piston. He worked quickly. Too quickly, apparently, because as he came back up to grab a bolt, his hand hit the pan, sending it flying straight into the icy blackness that was the busy road in front of us.

Time stood still as I watches the pieces fly out into the night, never to be seen again. Time stood still as I let out some of the only comprehensible words I knew.

"Dank ferret"!

Except I didn't say 'ferret'. I said the mother of all 'f' words. The 'F-----' word.

"What did you just say?" my father asked quietly; and might I add- far too calmly.

All I could do was stare wide-eyed at the mandalorian before me.

He only scuffed and concluded, "that's what I thought you said. Get back in the speeder."

I climbed back in. Whoa boy, was I done for. I was never getting that ball bearing now. It was only moments later that my dad hunched back into the small speeder. He leaned over to Karga and Dune and told them what I said. They both let out gasps of disbelief.

How I loved snacks. I loved eating, and the glorious taste of all the different foods the galaxy had to offer.

But right now, all I wanted was for my underdeveloped taste buds to shrivel up and die.

The bantha scrub Dune had in my mouth was disgusting. I wouldn't be surprised if it impaired me forever in some way.

Dune shifted her weight from one hip to the other, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. "I'm going to ask you one more time, kid. Where did you hear that word?"

I had probably heard my dad use that word twelve times a day, every day that I had known him but instead of saying as such, I panicked. Blanked. All conscious thought had left my brain like it was a house on fire. Instead of the word 'dad,' I blurted out the only other name I knew how to say; "Phix!"

Dune left the room with an understanding "oh" and went to call the boy's mother on the holopad.

Poor, poor Phix.

Surely he was getting his punishment a few kilometers away.

Despite my slip up on the speeder a few nights ago, and the disappointing grade in school, Life Day still came, and how glorious it was! How beautiful the tall tree was, sparkling with lights and the scrap my father and I had collected from around the ship!

But most importantly, how beautiful the gifts under the tree were!

Before I could even pull one into my lap, my Mandalorian father tiredly sauntered down into the hull of the ship. I could feel the excitement rolling off of him through the force. I didn't need to see his face to know he was happy as he plopped a present in front of me.

Karga and Dune soon joined us in the festivities, the latter of whom quickly fell asleep on the floor after all the presents had been opened. Karga asked if I enjoyed the celebratory day, and if I had gotten all the presents I asked for. I groggily looked at my palms. I had gotten many a splendid gifts. But not everything I had asked for.

My father leaned forward and directed his head towards the corner of the room.

"Hey, what's that over there?"

I looked up at his helmet expectingly. Over where? To where was he gesturing?

"Yes, over there. Behind that crate."

I waddled off of his lap, and over to the crate. Alas! A small package wrapped in shiny red paper! It was the perfect size for-

No. Could it be?

I tore off the paper in awe to reveal a box. And oh! What a glorious sight the opened box was! What was resting inside? None other than the chrome-plated ball bearing from the landing gear with the engraved ridge around the center! It was mine! Finally mine!

I excitedly waddled to the door to go outside and play. My dad came to open it, but quickly stopped when he sighted the roasted, imported porgs Karga and Dune had brought over. Now, my father was a notorious porg junkie, and was sorely disappointed at Karga's loud scold for him to stop picking at the feast; that it wasn't ready yet.

As they bickered, I opened the door myself and ran outside to play. How glorious it felt to have that ball firmly in the palm of my small hands! I threw it as far as I could, and wielded the force to bring it back to me. I rolled it down the ramp many a times. Oh what fun! Until-

Oh no!

Just one small slip of fate! With the tiniest of accidents, the ball rolled over the edge of the ramp and fell into a crevice beneath one of the landing feet! I couldn't even see it to force it back into my hands!

I rushed inside to alert my father of the atrocity! But before we could go back out to reclaim the ball bearing, the unthinkable happened.

Rustling could be heard in the back of the hull; the scratching of nails against metal and loud chirps sounded as well. My father picked me up and rushed back to see what was going on. Dune had woken up, and she and Karga went with us to investigate the crime.

Oh no! The horror! A thousand and one meerkats scampered about the floor, breaking crates and most abysmally, eating the beautiful porgs set out for us to feast on. The three adults hearded the scoundrels out of the ship, but it was too late.

The porgs were gone. All gone! Not even a wing!

The heavenly aroma still hung in the air, mocking us. My father dragged himself over and defeatedly kicked at the remains of what was to be a magnificent Life Day feast. However my father, ever the pragmatist, lifted his arms and declared, "everybody up. Get dressed. We're going out to eat."

Not much was open on Life Day; just a small restaurant owned by a family from a planet far away. One that did not celebrate Life Day, something for which we were thankful.

What a turn of events! But one thing was for certain, as I fell asleep that night, clutching my chrome-plated ball bearing from the landing gear with the engraved ridge around the center, I knew it was the best Life Day I had ever had, and the best of all Life Days left to come.

#the mandolorian #the mandolorian s2 #mandalorian #mandalorian fanfic #fanficfion #din djarin #grogu djarin #save grogu #grogu #baby yoda #mando s2 #mando fluff #mando fic #mando fanfiction #star wars #star wars fic #star wars fanfiction

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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I don’t know if this extensive reading has helped but I FEEL like it has helped lol. When I started 小王子 how long was it taking a chapter? Just under 5 minutes per page right?

Well I know I got faster than that. Today my Internet was down so while waiting for things to restart and load and stuff I read like 5 chapters of the book. I read them out loud (just a handful of words I didn’t know how to say out loud). I was reading at slow but steady speaking speed so that’s still faster than 5 minutes a page. Ok I just timed myself to test it and I am taking 2 minutes to read a page, and I would guess 3 minutes if I slowed down to consider a bit more on the sayings/less familiar hanzi. That’s better then the 4.5-5 minutes I started at! So I must’ve picked up some words from this book. So I would say... yes a little extensive reading seems to be helping reading speed. Also! I have 16 pages to go! This story is so short. It is sweet and odd and so human though maybe that is why it’s remained loved like Alice in wonderland. (Fun fact I also read 2 chapters of Alice in wonderland in French this week and it is just as bizarre to me as when I watched the movie as a kid, But I do think in book form if I were 6-9 I would’ve related more since Alice’s POV in the story is pretty relatable... and when I was a kid and watched the movie I just did Not relate aha).

Anyway from 4.5 minutes to 2-3 is great!

What I did with graded readers/extensive reading this month, that I am hoping is why this helped:

Read graded reader (butterfly lovers, Pleco, 500 unique characters) - not hard but very satisfying to finish it and read it quickly when it used to take me 40 minutes to read a few Pleco pages of it). So that was a few thousand words comprehensible extensive reading.

Read another graded reader, chinese short stories. While I think it’s good as a study companion, a lot of very specific words which I tripped on (antique coins, being scammed). Which was fine I just think it was not the funnest reading material? It was mostly graded reader though I had to look up a couple handfuls of words.

Read a little of my 500 character Sinolingua reader (2 stories). Also read through the back of it which has all the words in the book, and the HSK 3 words included in the book - I knew all those words but it was a nice refresher. Mostly it was just nice to see how much easier these stories were to read compared to when I first got the book. (I would recommend these books as readers if you want something for adults and in short segments, the short stories are simplified prose from established authors, and the quality of storytelling can therefore be felt a bit. They feel more meaningful as short stories and therefore enjoyable if a bit basic (since they’ve been simplified). You can tell though compared to the Chinese Short Stories book above, which was probably written by a teacher/language textbook maker and not necessarily a literary writer.

Read mandarin companion journey to the center of the earth. 450 unique characters. Another easy read that felt really nice, compared to when I first read a mandarin companion book.

Started reading 小王子 on paper, so extensive reading with little word look up (I’ve looked up less than 10 words so far when reading on paper - notable words I looked up because it frustrated me I didn’t know them: 悲伤，惊奇，惊讶，匆匆，逐渐，观察，测试 a lot of these because I know I’ve seen these Hanzi before I just never remember specifically like 惊讶惊奇 what the difference is or guan pronunciation 观察 or 测 I tend to forget when it’s not in 测试). I started reading it because it’s supposed to have around 2000 unique words (so not too many), and be pretty easy reading level (so a bit easier than 活着 which is the novel Chinese learners often get recommended). Basically, this was the extensive reading book choice step up from graded readers - it’s got a bit over 1000 unique hanzi, not an overwhelming amount of unique words, but it is not a graded reader so if it goes well I could jump to other stuff of similar or slightly less “ease” while still having it feel this “easy” to read (and hopefully take days to read instead of months).

Started reading 笑猫日记之会唱歌的猫 in Pleco, so clicking words I didn’t know (though this one only had a word or two a page unknown). I saw it recommended on a Chinese learners form as easy reading material after graded readers, and I agree! It’s very easy to read! I could understand it without clicking words but it is nice to understand fully since it’s convenient, and look up the pronunciation etc. I read 8 chapters so far. I also listened to a few chapters after reading, but idk if it helped at all.

15 ish chapters into 小王子 I found it online and reread 4 chapters with a click dictionary for unknown words. It was nice just clarifying the word pronunciations and fuzzy bits, also the online translation was different so seeing the difference on how they decided to word it (mostly just seeing synonyms used instead or different sayings for certain parts). I listened to a couple chapters audio afterwards, idk if it helped.

Unrelated, but I did listen read to 5 chapters of 默读 mainly following the Chinese text so, idk if that would’ve helped my overall reading at all (I want to say no but I did notice in general much more general gist comprehension of lines in MoDu then last time I read a couple months ago - although listening to the audio and being able to glance at the English for unknown words of course also makes things much more comprehensible that’s why listen reading method is the structure it is ahh).

Listened to some audio for 小王子 during work because I happened to find it, for chapters 1-4. Just playing in the background. I looked at the text while listening to one to match pronunciation to some words, since the chapter was like 5 minutes long in listening. Again interesting to see their word choice since It was yet another translation (I think I like my print books translation best).

Back to reading print 小王子 today and I think the audio beforehand did help me with being able to pronounce more of what I’m reading. Read like 4 chapters in one short break, another 3 chapters just now. While I don’t know how well the reading speed will translate to reading harder stuff like guardian (which was oddly also taking me 5 minutes a page? Why is that my default speed?), my reading speed doing extensive reading on “stuff mostly easy” to me has increased noticeably. (Fun fact when I read English technical text like psychology and physics books and educational etc I think my reading speed is it’s like 10-20 pages an hour... I do not read non fiction very fast).

So anyway, my goal with extensive reading easy material this month was to see if I could push UP what my starting base level “easy” material is.

What I used to do is practice with an “easier text” (which was still pretty hard for me tbh) and then once it got bearable (took 30-40 minutes to read instead of an hour), I’d switch to a harder material that took me 1-1.5 hours to read. Then when I’d burn out, I’d go back to that “easier” text until it got easier at 20-30 minutes to read. Then I might pick a harder base reading text (usually what used to be the hard one that would now take 30-40 minutes to read), and find something even harder. Lately that has been 寒舍 as my “easier” text, taking 20-30 minutes a full chapter (2 mini chapters), and 天涯客 as my harder text at 30-40ish minutes a chapter. And yes, at this point I could pick something harder but they’re both hard enough I was just sticking to them. You might notice none of these were actually easy for me though, my actual base easy materials were still graded readers, and manhua. So I want to push that upward until there’s some “easier” material below 寒舍 that I can be built up to and read easily Without a dictionary aid. So I can have a solid base that’s reliable. Hanshe is an “easier” practice material but it’s not necessarily something I can read extensively with ease. But if I keep pushing up the difficulty of what I can extensively read, bit by bit, I will eventually Get it to hanshe (or a little below it realistically but still firmly in regular-webnovel-exist at the reading level). I will not get faster at reading these hard things unless my base level of reading is both higher and already a reasonable speed. (I’m guessing anyway??).

Well happy to say this plan is working. I guess the advice articles I read were right somewhat. I knew graded readers could drag you from 0 beginner to some reading ability, since It’s what I originally did with Chinese (and even French sort of). But I was very quick about it because I’m impatient and easily bored by too-easy things apparently lol. I read 1 mandarin companion graded reader (the 300 word Sherlock Holmes one), a couple chapters of 2 other graded readers, then started on a random webnovel (the bl 他们的故事 which somehow thankfully is on the easier end for novels) and looked a lot of words up to get through. But I did not think to try to “match my reading level and increase gradually” in regular novels, even tho if it works for graded readers it probably works for regular stuff!

And in school in our native languages, that’s why our elementary schools had libraries, and we read books for our age group and the chapter books we read were much easier than what we read as teens or what adults read! I remember bunnicula and cat wings those were not hard but they were chapter stories. Then I remember Dracula and hg wells and mark Twain in high school and how they felt a bit Hard despite me being one of those kids rated at college reading level in 3rd grade. Now as a kid? I had the same tendencies I do now, so I’m not surprised I always jump in the deep end and Try to read hard stuff (and it must help since it’s part of why I got good at reading my native language, and definitely has helped my chinese and french). I would be like 7 and pick up a mitchner novel of My dad’s (is that the author of stuff like Alaska etc?) and I’d read a couple pages and feel drained trying to follow it and give up. Or the huge The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, or HG Wells History of the world, or the biography of benjamin Franklin, I never finished any of these or had any idea what they were about I just got curious and opened up a couple pages every now and then. Yet somehow that must’ve been part of why my reading level so early on was considered “good”? I’m guessing.

But I wasn’t actually good at reading in the sense of doing it often or fast until my dad started reading to me at like age 8-9 I think it was Harry Potter which at the time worked out since the books got harder each time, and also my dad reads out loud slow just like he tutors slow lol so eventually I read myself so he’d stop boring me (I love him and loved the bonding time I’m sure but truly i just apparently always liked jumping in the deep end). Eventually his strategy Im guessing to get me to read slightly harder stuff each time worked, because by books 4-5 I read each in 2 days. He was so impressed because before that I couldn’t read long books and not fast, and that’s when he thought I got good at reading. Looking back lol it’s actually so funny? How much work he had to do to get me to read and how what ended up working I still sort of do now. He started me on Hop on Pop as a kid as my first book cause One Fish Two Fish bored me and I thought jumping on a dad was funny, and he did that just to do something to get me to pick up a book lol. Then he got me that digital book toy they had back then where you had a real book but it was in a digital holder and if you clicked words with the pen it read them out loud. Literally how I learn Chinese now... he really got me digital equivalent to graded readers back then ToT. And just like as a kid I still pick up stuff way beyond my level and just read a couple pages at random. It’s just. Kind of funny to me how much I didn’t really change that much after all ToT

BACK ON THE TOPIC OF APRIL PROGRESS lol ok. I listened to Guardian ep 1 today just in the background so no subs etc and I was Floored by how much I completely understood. I’ve been listening to SpoonFed chinese again (15 audios listened to this month), but I’m floored if it made a difference?! Since I was mostly listening in the background not focusing and missing some stuff. Idk if it made a difference, or listening reading method just that 1.5 hours I did this month or what. Or if my listening skills have been this decent I just don’t test them since I usually watch shows with hard Chinese subs (and read the subs), or watch shows with English subs. So like. Anyway mejo back in what was it august 2019 when I started studying? Would be so happy. Back when I started watching guardian and only knew ni hao and xie xie and zai jian.

Also I can’t even remember now if I did extensive reading guardian (after reading the English translation), this month too or just last month. But I’m sure that helped and I should test general reading sometime of a priest novel. Like.. literally what kicked off the “I should extensive read more” this month is me Desperately wanting to kick up my reading speed after the horrific 25 page guardian chapter I read that took like 1.5 hours.

#rant #april #april progress #reading progress #to be honest tho truly I’m really happy with my chinese progress so far #it has yeah sooooo much farther to go #and communication wise I’m ahhhh not not anywhere much yet #but listening and reading are already significantly further than Japanese was at 2.5 years #and honestly ‘as slow progress as Japanese’ was my assumption and goal when I started #so I figured I would not read this good for 4 years at least #so just under 2 years? I’m pretty amazed

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blog-sliverofjade · 4 years

Text

Hearth Fires 4: From the Mouths of Babes

Pairing: Remi Denier x OFC

Summary: Lorel Maddox just wants to live as a human, run her bakery in peace, and forget. Unfortunately, the alpha of the local leopard pack has very different ideas.

Remi Denier doesn’t know what to make of the female Changeling who wants nothing to do with him or the RainFire pack. He does know that he has a driving need to protect her. Even if it’s from herself.

While they’re embroiled in a battle of wills, there’s a war brewing on the horizon. The outside threat could not only destroy everything they hold dear, but tear apart the fragile new bonds of the Trinity Accord, plunging the world into bloodshed to rival the Territorial Wars of centuries past.

Word count: 2174

Hearth Fires Masterlist

Beta read by the sublime pandabearer

Lorel started to demand to know how much RainFire knew about her past and how they knew, but the sound of a branch cracking overhead had her looking up. Instinct had her on her feet and catching the cub that tumbled out of the tree.

She stared at the small leopard with wide eyes; light green eyes as large as saucers stared back while golden hickory leaves rained down around them. The part of her that was still a scared little girl braced for the inevitable recrimination for the display of inhuman speed and her ocelot readied to fend off an attack for daring to touch one of their cubs.

“Good catch. Jojo here’s still learning what branches can or can’t hold her weight, ” Tien smiled and ruffled the tufts of hair between her daughter’s ears. She had also leapt into action, although she’d been a few feet farther away.

Lorel bit back a snarl, an inborn need to curl protectively up around the cub still gripped her hard, but she forced herself to pass the cub to the other woman. Tiny claws caught in her sweater stopped her. Jojo tried to retract them, and stopped when they threatened to shred the fabric, mewling in what was obviously a plea for help.

Tien nudged them towards a table and together they extricated Jojo from the cardigan. Once freed, she placed her forepaws, sans claws, on Lorel’s chest and headbutted her as she purred in thanks. The warm weight and casual affection of the girl grounded Lorel in her body in a way she hadn’t felt in a very long time. It felt so right she almost stroked the baby soft fur.

As tempting as it was to pet the richly patterned coat, she didn’t feel like losing a hand. She’d heard that predatory Changelings could be violently protective of their offspring. Moreover, she knew that interacting with one, especially in its animal form, was a slippery slope away from what it meant to be human. She could feel her own cat rising to the surface, brushing insistently at the inside of her skin. Soon, she knew it would punish her with claws and teeth for denying it’s needs.

Jojo, however, had different ideas. A fluffy head nudged at her hand, a tiny whiskered nose squirming under her fingers. Lorel gave into the urge and gently worked her nails between the ears that seemed too large for the little head. Jojo purred and arched into the attention, her paws doing a slow dance like she wanted to knead at Lorel’s lap, but was too well-mannered to do so.

A lump formed in her throat. Had she once been this small and trusting? Had she ever been this loved and cared for? Vague but colourful memories, like an impressionist painting, surfaced with the happy echoes of a childhood long past.

She felt the eyes of every adult watching her, either overtly or in darting glances. They would kill her before she could hurt Jojo. That watchfulness was somehow reassuring. They’d embraced their savagery to protect their youngest and that, paradoxically, allowed her to relax. While she would never intentionally harm a child, she wasn’t so certain about her other half; she only knew she shouldn’t trust it.

A sandy-haired man in a blue plaid shirt set a few plates of food on the table and leaned down to press a kiss to Tien’s lips when she tilted her head up in welcome. It was more than a quick peck. When his hand cupped the nape of her neck, Lorel averted her eyes. While the festivities certainly weren’t orgies like in the sordid tales with which she'd been regaled, the open affection was more than she was used to.

Jojo stood with her forepaws on the table, her nose twitching at the scent of the food, and reached out with one claw to snag a cookie.

“Hands for cookies,” Tien said as if it were an oft-repeated admonition.

A shower of multi-coloured sparks burst in Lorel’s lap; she froze for fear of interfering with the shift. An instant later, there was a naked girl sitting on her knee. Lorel shrugged out of her cardigan and helped Jojo into it. The soft yellow hem fell to her knees. Lorel glanced at Tien and her partner. Neither of them appeared as if anything was out of the ordinary, no cutting rebukes or punishment for being nude where others could see. There was a twinge in her heart from memories of a very different childhood.

“This is my mate, Avery.” Tien gestured to the man who had joined them.

Lorel was thrown by the term. “Mate” was such a primal word that it threatened to bring a flush to her cheeks. She didn’t have time to mull it over because Avery offered a hand as he sat next to his… wife.

“Nice to meet you. Please eat.” He smiled and nudged a plate arranged with crispy bread and some sort of creamy dip towards her. Meanwhile, Tien had moved the cookies away from Jojo and pushed the crudite, also arranged to be shared communally, in front of her.

Lorel opened her mouth to politely refuse, but Jojo offered up a stalk of broccoli. She couldn’t say no to that earnest expression. Making “nomnom” noises, Lorel carefully snatched the vegetable with her teeth, making the girl giggle.

Allowing herself to relax, Lorel sat back and took the chance to look around at the people chatting, playing, and laughing. Several of the leopards looked back. No one hid their open curiosity, but they didn’t stare either. At least they didn’t swarm her, although she suspected that if Tien wasn’t there then all bets were off.

They all seemed so... human. No one licked their lips over the grilling meat. Perhaps it was too well-done to salivate over? At least they didn’t have a bloody carcass roasting in a pit. While she was no vegetarian (her physiology couldn’t handle a no-meat diet), she couldn’t have stomached such a barbaric display.

“Not what you expected?” asked Tien.

“Not really,” she admitted. “I know RainFire’s only a few years old, how did you get this many members?”

“Well, Remi met some of us, like Lark and Theo, when he was roaming. Some of the sentinels, and our healer, Finn, came from packs where there weren’t many opportunities for them.” Lorel blinked at the blithe reference to soldiers, as if their occupations were something as prosaic as accountants or teachers. That was the darker side they tried to hide, the violence hidden with a thin veneer of humanity. “Avery and I lived on our own until I got pregnant with Jojo; we wanted her to grow up in a pack like we did. We put our feelers out among our friends and family and heard about RainFire.”

The contentment pouring off the couple made Lorel want to wrinkle her nose. She knew it was all a lie: love, loyalty, family. Scratch the surface and it was all illusion. They were like everyone else, only with a public façade to lure in others. She wasn’t going to fall for that again.

“And how many were press-ganged?” she muttered under her breath.

Being accustomed to humans and Psy, Lorel had forgotten that the leopards had hearing as sharp as her own until she caught the twin glares cast her way.

“He said he didn’t fall, he was attacked by invisible ninja. I asked, ‘Isn’t invisible ninja redundant?’”

Remi was only listening with half an ear to Hugo’s story of how Jasper had broken his arm while his eyes tracked Lorelei’s every move. His leopard was restless at having an outsider in their midst. It hadn’t even reacted this strongly when he’d rescued two half-drowned Psy assassins, unarguably among the most lethal people on the planet. Then again, neither of them were as beautiful as the ocelot.

She was short with curves like a winding back road that he wanted to explore. The cat wanted to memorize what she smelled like without her bakery mixing with it. Underneath the acrid layer of fear, which was lessening now that Tien had gotten her talking, she smelled sweet with a bite of spice.

He had to force himself to back off. The need to shadow the virtual stranger in their midst was riding him hard, no matter that she appeared about as dangerous and as delicious as one of her cupcakes in that mint green dress. Her flats, while practical indoors, sank into the thick carpet of leaves. Nor did she wear anything warmer than a butter yellow cardigan. While she was a Changeling and would be fine, most cats preferred to be warm. He was wearing a forest-green cashmere sweater himself because he liked the texture of it, not because he was cold.

Judging by her clothing, she hadn’t known what to expect, or no one had told her that she was a guest. He cast a sideways glance at Elijah, who gave an unrepentant shrug.

“No bear tactics involved.” The soldier held up his hands as if to ward off a chewing out. “All cat. But Tien might have forgotten to tell her she was invited.” Remi and his cat were amused at their strategy. A pack circle event was meant to reinforce bonds: and thus, were perfect for introducing someone to the benefits of pack life.

“That’s smart, so I know you weren’t the brains behind the operation.”

“Au contraire.” He pronounced it "ow contrary." Remi rolled his eyes. Elijah spoke several languages to varying degrees of fluency, but he liked to butcher French just to yank his alpha’s chain. “I said we should place an order for the party, Tien and Avery took it from there. So really it was all my idea.”

Remi started to formulate a quip, but stopped at the sound of Tien’s voice vibrating with anger that carried under the ambient noise. He shifted towards the dominant maternal to hear her better.

“…here because we want to be.”

Lorelei’s response was a murmur that not even his sharp ears could pick up, but whatever it was, it cooled Tien’s temper.

“We can’t let a predatory Changeling live within our borders,” she explained. A thread of surprise wound through her words, like she hadn’t imagined that someone of their race could be ignorant of their laws, but she was as patient as if she was addressing the juveniles. “There are some who’d assume that meant we can’t hold our territory and would press the issue. We’re not big or strong enough yet for that.”

Pride swelled and ebbed within him. Tien was a damn fine dominant maternal and he’d never regretted allowing her and her family to join the pack. It was the sting of shame that tempered that pride. Most alphas, if they grew up in a functional pack, were carefully guided from a young age. Remi partly blamed that lack of formative education for having waited so long before developing his own pack.

If he’d started building RainFire earlier, then they could have weathered the turbulence that was the fall of Silence and the subsequent restructuring of the world better. And he wouldn’t have had to deliver an ultimatum to a single submissive Changeling whose only mistake was to live on land they needed to claim.

He huffed a laugh that brought him out of the pity party for one. Once, being alpha of his own pack was unthinkable to him. Sometimes he looked around at his people and what they’d built together and felt as bemused as Lorelei looked. Now he was kicking his own ass for not starting sooner. Fate was no doubt having a laugh at him.

“…dominants are driven to protect,” Avery explained. “…sives…” The male was no doubt explaining the hierarchy to her. Really, it should have come as no surprise that she was unfamiliar with the power structure, but he’d assumed that she knew instinctually. Then again, he of all people should know that instincts didn’t always coincide with what experience taught.

Taking a drink of his beer, he turned to catch a glimpse of the small group. Lorelei looked down at Jojo with an abashed expression. She had looped her arms around the girl to ensure she didn’t tumble off, not that the cub was in any danger of that.

With the innocent honesty of small children, Jojo wrinkled her nose and said, “You smell funny.”

Lorelei frowned and made a show of sniffing herself. “I promise I showered today, with soap even.” She feigned confusion and the cub giggled.

Remi’s blood ran cold.

The slashes on Jojo’s face were more than an unusual birthmark. They were the sign of a hunter, someone born with the skills to hunt those of their kind who went rogue, ones who subsumed themselves in their animal half. Once they lost their humanity, they slaughtered without compunction, beginning with their loved ones.

And a hunter’s chief ability was scent.

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emoshishi · 4 years

Text

Bibingka // A Short Story About Celebrating Christmas

Quite Unedited

Word Count: I don't know how to copy everything since it would only let me copy one paragraph and I'm too lazy copy and pasting every thing so I could see the word count so....

a/n: this was supposed to be my entry in the creative writing contest our school held weeks ago before we had our sembreak. i haven't got the chance to join because i was too hesitant and a shy bitch. i wrote this originally in Filipino language and in my wattpad account. this is too late to post since christmas was days ago, but oh well. i hope you enjoy this piece of shit lmao.

Some other notes to take:

Lola - A Filipino word which means "Grandma" in English

Pancit - A Filipino dish

Bibingka is a rice cake that came from Indonesia and Philippines

Apo - A Filipino word which means "Grandchild" in English

Ate - Pronounced as 'a-te', a Filipino word which means "Sister" in English. Ate is like "Eonnie" and "Noona" in Korean language. The difference is anyone can use it, to address older women, usually your older sister.

Noche Buena - Filipino Christmas Eve. When it's December 24, and the clock strikes to 12, it means that it's automatically December 25, families celebrate it with having a feast. We also open presents at that time.

Simbang Gabi - Night Mass or Night Worship in English.

The soft sounds of a Christmas song coming from the radio can be heard through the whole living room. While I was arranging the table, Lola Ising come out from the kitchen with a pot of pancit.

With a wide smile plastered on her face, she walked towards me and helped me set up the table.

"Merry Christmas, apo."

I returned her smile and greetings. My grandma's attitude isn't so unusual at all. She's always so lively and energetic despite her age. There's not a time that you will see her angelic smile turn into a frown.

"I wasn't able to see bibingka at any store earlier. I'm sorry if I was unable to buy one." She apologized.

With a soft laugh, I insisted her that it's fine.

She didn't answer me and just smiled again before returning to the kitchen while I continued to work with the table and dishes. These are already enough for us three-- my grandma and I, and my younger sibling, Pao.

My mom passed away several years ago. My father, an ofw, works abroad just to send us money every month. He left a week after my mother was buried. Since then, I didn't see him anymore.

In all honesty, I never felt any rage at him when he left. I was actually sad at first, but I know that he was doing it for my sibling and I. I know that my mother's death caused him so much pain, and I knew he needed time for himself. I understood that, and I am hoping that Pao would, too.

My thoughts were interrupted when grandma placed her hand on my shoulder, asking me to fetch my brother upstairs.

Like what she said, I called Pao and told him we're going to eat. The clock's hands were pointing at 12 A.M. already, signalling that it's already Noche Buena. He cheered gleefully and as we go down, he quickly run towards Lola Ising, and he was enveloped with her comforting arms.

They spend more time together, if I'm going to be honest. Pao was unable to feel my mother's love and care. She died even before she can see and hold him.

That's why I can see why grandma and him click so much. He was taken care of by my grandma that he never even felt once with my mother. It's a pity that they never saw. each other

I catched up with them and prayed before we eat.

Like what I said, our food is only enough for us three. We are scared that the food might turn into waste if we had leftovers. Other than that, we want to make the feast simple.

While eating, my eyes went to observe what's happening outside. The street was almost empty and I couldn't see anyone passing by. From my position, I could see people in their respective houses.

It's sad that having people around is very impossible to do in celebrating the holiday. However, no one wanted this to happen in the first place. All I wish for is for the pandemic to stop.

We finished eating few moments later and cleaned up the table. I was about to wash the dishes but my grandma insisted that she can do it and that I should spend my time with my brother. I couldn't do anything, knowing that she wouldn't let me help her even if I ask too many times, so I followed what she asked me to do.

I went in the balcony and took a seat beside Pao. There, we sat in silence, until he rushed to go inside. I watched him stumble in the stairs a bit and I laughed at his clumsiness. When he go down, I saw him holding a something that is wrapped with a Christmas-themed gift wrapper.

With amusement, I asked him. "What's this?",

He became silent. I frowned and stare at the gift he lend to me. From the way it was wrapped, I can tell that the object was in a square shape. I couldn't exactly tell what it is, since it could be anything.

I ripped the wrapper slowly, making sure that I was careful enough not to rip it entirely because it can still be used for next year. My eyes widened when I saw the familiar album cover of one of my favorite band's album.

"I would notice you stare at it for too long every time we would stop by at the local music store. I figured that it would be a perfect gift for you this Christmas, so I would keep my extra money and save it to buy that."

I smiled so wide that my lips could rip apart, but I was very happy. I wasn't expecting him to buy me one, knowing that he would always gushed something about a toy. It's embarrassing that I didn't even bought a gift.

I pulled him in a very tight hug as tears brimmed my eyes. "Thank you, sweetheart. I'm sorry that I didn't even bought something for you."

He pats my back as he pulled back and I held back my tears that were threatening to fall. "You're the best gift I could ever ask for, ate."

With that, I began to cry. He reached over and wiped away the tears for me. I feel like dying just by letting my brother seeing me cry, thinking that he would think of me as weak. But now, that doesn't really matter.

We just sat there as I calm myself. Once I finally stopped crying, he stood up and gave me one last hug as he scolded me. "I'll go to sleep now. You too, hm? Don't sleep to late!"

I laughed at him and simply nodded.

With my mask on and a sanitizer on my hand, I walked in the street, trying to breathe fresh air. I carefully observed everything as I walk. The streets that were used to be filled up with little kids running and playing around as the night passes by every Christmas eve now are so empty and sad. Families that would host little games and give away presents and monies were now locked up inside their houses. People who would stay up until morning just to talk to their loved ones, drink with their friends and family, are now fast asleep. It feels like the spirit of Christmas isn't there anymore. But what did really change in all these years? Is it the people? Or Christmas itself?

Without noticing, I was already in front of the church. Only few attended the mass because of the virus' threat, and they were already going outside. I could hear them chatter, but the noise died down immediately. Some looks gloomy, while some stayed cheerful. I guess celebrating this occasion really depends on people's perspective. Some may think that it's not fun, some may think that it still is, but I guess that's fine. Besides, we can't really blame people about how they feel.

I decided to stand still there and look at the church. I was just watching the light decorations flicker into different colors. Erasing my negative thoughts, I decided to smile. Regardless of the uncertainty of it being fake or real, I pulled of one. I closed my eyes and breathe deeply,

Everything will be okay, it will be.

Once I opened my eyes, I immediately heard someone calling my name. I looked around and saw a man. Despite of having a mask on his face, I recognize his features, knowing who's behind it. Waving at me, he slowly showed me a plastic bag, mouthing "Bibingka?"-----

It was my dad.

#christmas #short story #filipino tradition

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diamo-chan · 4 years

Text

A bit of lore and backstory

(snippet of the ninth chapter of my unfinished unpublished fanfic in the classical trope of “let me put as much info as possible compressed into a tiny dialogue”)

not beta-read/ written on a tired mind/ english is not my native language/ my list of excuses goes on and on...

Word count: 1.7k

It was at times like these when Pheebe noticed that she was way too emotional to do her job the way it should be done. Binding her hair back into a loose ponytail she threw an exhausted glare at the blonde aristocrat who barely lifted his eyes from the book he was currently reading. A if they did not just have a war council, as if death itself was not waiting just around the gates.

“Vlad this is serious. If we want to survive this we have to work together, we have to talk like normal people.”

He turned the page, uninterested. ‘What the fuck was so important, he had to read it now?!’

“I will survive this, I’ve been through worse. And you are just food to us. A blood bag to satisfy Ivan’s needs. Why should I treat you, like you are anything special?”

Pheebe wanted to scream and flee the room. Hadn’t Vladimir disagreed to listen to her plan, they would already be all on their way to a safe place. But no, instead he was clinging to this mansion. They had more important things to take care of. And for once, she knew that Beliath would agree.

This is not about me. It is about Mary. About Ethan. Both are on the edge of death and you talk about waiting and planning”

He turns another page. But she saw the hand that held the book upright tighten against the Bordeaux hardcover. He took a deep breath to maintain his poise, before speaking with the certainty of a head of house, no room for discussion: “Ethan will manage, and if your friend doesn’t make it we can still share her blood, drain her before the battle. But we will not run into a confrontation unprepared!”

The last drop broke the barrel. How dares he even suggest using Mary in such a gruesome way? How dares he put organization above life. And at once, the words poured out before she could stop them. “I cannot understand how you can live with yourself, let alone how other people can live with you. You only care about yourself, don’t you? You don’t give a damn about the suffering of others”.

A reaction. He looked up. There was shock in his eyes, as well as a tiny warning of the storm that was rioting in his thoughts. Through tiny slits and gritted teeth he growled at her.

“You have no idea what it’s like to be immortal. Have you ever watched everyone you care about die, with nothing that you could do to stop it? You know nothing of pain and suffering!” His voice became louder and louder until, at the end, he was screaming in rage, at such a volume that Pheebe was sure, even Ivan in his room two floors above them, could hear every single word. She did not fear his anger, and he was powerless to lift his hand against her. At last, she got what she wanted and he was no longer as emotional as a stone. But he would not guilt trip her with a sad back-story or the typical “I-am-a-poor-misunderstood-immortal”-farce. Eyes hard, she brought her face closer to the blond man’s, who backed away in irritation.

“Do you know what it feels like to drive a knife through the heart of the person you love?”

At first he was taken aback by the question. Then a condescending smirk appeared on his face “Oh, yes, go on. Tell me the story of the vampire that fell in love with a hunter and gets staked down in return.”

Patience! She told herself. Think of him as a child that questions the whole world. “He was sick. Do you know what bloodlust does to a vampire?” His discomfort became more and more apparent. His eyes danced over her face on the search for some kind of weakness. She felt the threatening waves that he tried to sent off, but once again she thanked Miss Ginaldi’s team for her training. Not many Vampires have encountered bloodlust and survived it. None of the ones that Pheebe had known, at least. ”Incurable, it turns him into a feral beast, with no recognition of anything but blood.”

“How do you know that it was bloodlust? Maybe He attacked you because he just found out what you are and-“

“Because I was there when he caught it. I was there when he fought it.”, every word was pressed out with anger and frustration about Vlad’s stubbornness. About his way of denying anything he didn’t want to see or hear. “He always hoped that maybe it would go away. And he trusted me to step in if it didn’t. Because he knew who I was from the very beginning, or rather, who I was supposed to be.”

“That’s what vampires get for trusting a hunter.” Voice cold, face empty.

His expression remained calm and neutral, there was not one muscle that gave a sign of consideration, no empathy left for her words and it made her fume. Pheebe had tears brimming on her lashes, so short of falling to his ignorance. But her anger was without cause. Vlad could not have known, there was nothing he knew about her but her name and the fact, that she did not like him.

“I wasn’t a hunter back then. I was just…” she searched for a suitable word, an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, “an employee who wanted to help maintain peace.” But then her emotions dropped as pictures flashed in her memory, vivid as if she was at that place once again. Laughs, smiles, congratulations. Hands ruffling through her hair and telling her that it was time she grew up to the expectations. So much positivity over a lost life. “You cannot imagine how proud my family was when they found us, when they saw what I have done. I don’t even know why I had that dagger with me in the first place. I swore to never touch these damned murder instruments!”

They were both breathing hard with keeping this discussion on a verbal level. The need to shake the pale boy was stagnant in Pheebes chest. Meanwhile Vlad has stood up to put his book back into the shelf, as it was apparent he would not be reading in peace with the hysterical girl in the library. Eyeing her from bottom to top his voice turned almost soothingly intrigued: “A Vampire willingly associated with someone who was connected to the circle?”

The facepalm was only mental. Of cause Vladimir would not know how the circle worked. For most of the vampire population it would remain a secret for all of their drawn-out lifetime. Meanwhile, for others, well…

“There were many vampires who worked with or for us, some voluntarily, some not.“ To sum up the whole picture Pheebe went for both extremes: “some came to council meetings, others were chained up and starving in the basement… With all those doors that my parents opened for me, to proudly present my new future, with that blood on my hands I could no longer play friends with your kind. I started my training so I can bring hope to those who don’t deem themselves worthy of it. I have saved almost fourty vampires, and it was never necessary to shed even a drop of blood for them to cooperate. Maybe they felt that I was a little like them, damned from the depth of my blood. A curse that already shows on my hands.”

Once it was pronounced the black eyes of the vampire scanned her arms to hind her hands unexpectedly bare. There were soft lines that faded on their way towards her elbow, as if drawn up with coal, fingerpainted with ashes of burned purity and hopes.

“Is that why you wear gloves?”

Pheebe nodded. “They are so I can touch my weapons. The vampire blood in my system keeps rejecting contact with the cursed materials. But it is also what keeps me immune to hypnosis and manipulation.” This was what made this discussion so hard for Vlad. She had seen the way he talked to the humen at Nikita’s party, and felt that he instantly surrounds them with his commanding aura to get his points across more easily. But talking to her was like talking to the other house members. Futile, if she was as closed off to his point of view, as he was to her.

“Where did you get blood from our kind?” There was a little bit of disgust in his expression. But who would blame him, for not finding the aspect of being drained of your life essence, so someone else had it easier, appealing. He had never lived on that side of the food chain after all.

Suddenly she felt like a walking tome of hunter knowledge to Vladimir’s eyes. Maybe it was the way he looked at her, with morbid interest. Just how much was he allowed to know? Or rather how long would he survive to pass that knowledge on?: “It was an integral part of my training to regularly get vampire blood and venom injected, so it does not cause turning if I die in battle or cause hallucinations when I am bitten.”

His eyebrow rose. “The effects of vampire blood in the human system are dangerous. You never know what it might cause”

Something rang in her memory as he said that sentence. She must have heard it somewhere. Or read it in a book. There were not many objectively useful tomes about vampire blood, the only ones are lost, stolen from the hunter association’s library, written during experiments and updated regularly. The last ones who were working on the manuscript were Monsieur and Madame Martine-Blanc, or so it was told.

“You know…There were two hunters who are kind of a legend in the circles, scientist, who were obsessed by the idea that the cure to any disease could lie in the blood of the elder vampires. My instructor, Doctor Ginaldi told me about them. One night they just disappeared, and took half of the inventory with them. After searching for their whereabouts for 3 month, they gave up.” And with a tiny laugh that was only encouraged by the uneasiness on the blond vampire face, she added:” And now, twenty years later, I read their names on a doorbell in the middle of fucking nowhere. Crazy, isn’t it?”

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robboyblunder · 5 years

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These are very fast/unclean but I wanted to slap down some refs of a storm trooper OC I made that I adore to pieces

His name is Jul (pronounced like Joel, not that got dang vape brand) and he’s an interesting guy who got nabbed and brought to the rebellion entirely on accident. He kept his armor but modified it (including a sweet jetpack) along with his disguise outfit meant for stealthy or casual outings

If you wanna read his full story, it’s under the read more- but the most important thing you need to know is he’s 100% gay and has caused so many problems from being too handsome

NOTE: my knowledge of star wars is super minimal so like... a lot of his story and other stuff doesn’t mesh with whatever the ‘canon’ even is anymore LOL. I used the first order armor because it looks nicer... he’s pretty much non-affiliated to canon troopers though, i put him in my own universe

(please don’t repost or use these, and leave my description; thanks! reblogs always appreciated!)

Short version: Jul is a trooper who was far too nice/pacifist for the empire which resulted in his eventual indoctrination into the rebellion, but he kept his trooper armor and modified it. He’s extremely capable of fighting, but has lots of physical and mental trauma.

Jul actually used to be a super high ranking trooper who was highly talented in combat to the point he’d caught much higher officers’ eyes- but there was one catch... he refuses outright to kill. All of his combat is non-lethal and specialized only to incapacitate no matter what. He has a passion for ‘doing what’s right’, always being kind regardless of what side they’re on, and helping others.

Now I know blah blah ‘the empire wouldn’t allow that’, but that’s why they tried to use the force to train him into being a deadly efficient soldier/assassin, but even that wasn’t working because he was too strong willed

Regardless, he proved to be a useful asset- he lead, trained, and commanded platoons efficiently which effectively made him deadly regardless, even when he would never kill himself. He was the leader of many successful raids, battles, and other instances that made him popular with others and respected.

Unfortunately, his refusal to kill angered some of the more powerful members of the empire, and his ability to resist use of the force made him dangerous- a potential threat to them. As a result they put in motion a plot to kill him, but it failed; instead, he was badly wounded and scarred with a partially blind eye and large lightsaber burn across his back diagonally that nearly paralyzed him. To cover it up, the Sith pinned blame on the rebellion, claiming it was a Jedi who tried to kill him- resulting in Jul having a deathly fear of Jedi and the force.

This fear let them finally breach his mind, in which they wiped his memories of his rank, importance, and many other things. After, they made him believe he was a normal trooper who was then slapped in a far away unimportant outpost and left to be a potential later weapon once they figured a use for him.

A lot of other things happen involving my BF’s Zeltron OC that leads to him becoming part of the rebellion, but that’s for later; so, here’s trivia time!

-the wound on his spine is a major weak point; if he’s hit too hard on it, it can incapacitate him for hours up to 3 days depending on force. It makes him collapse and be unable to even swallow/keep his mouth closed for 10 minutes before it leaves him mostly stiff/unable to move until recovered. -his right eye (our left) is partially blind, making him somewhat nervous when people approach that side because it’s harder to defend. he’s not self conscious about it, but would rather see what’s coming. -he IS self conscious about his face ironically, and usually always hides it- something he didn’t unlearn from being a trooper. Funny enough his handsomeness caused tons of upper empire officers to try and have affairs with him... annoyed, even higher level officers had his sex drive essentially shut off to ‘cock block’ them away. later of course it’s restored because he likes having autonomy in himself. I know it’s a weird ass detail but the guy just couldn’t feel attraction for a long ass time -he’s ridiculously in love with sweets; being deprived of much good food as a trooper, he goes wild for them. His favorite thing is chocolate cake because it’s the first food gifted to him by Gelson, a Zeltron friend (later boyfriend) he met on accident -he can’t speak droid despite knowing most any other alien language LOL -he’s stupidly fit and always training even when told to relax because he wants to keep himself ready to fight at all times. in other words he’s RIPPED- -he doesn’t like the empire much but tries to see good in fellow troopers, but is almost always disappointed sadly -he’s deathly afraid of the force and Jedi/Sith due to the Sith that attacked him (but he still thinks it was a Jedi) -he was taken and trained from childhood, and is definitely not a clone (why’re the clones all BALD?? they’re ugly from what I saw)

anyways that’s all i can think of right now huzzah

#storm trooper #star wars #fan character #star wars oc #JL-509 #oc #swso #star wars space opera

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lingthusiasm · 5 years

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Transcript Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more. 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 38 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plurals. But first, it’s our anniversary!

Lauren: Every year in November we celebrate another year of enthusiastic linguistics podcasting. This year, we are celebrating by asking you to share your favourite fact about linguistics that you’ve learnt from Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: If there’s a story, or a fact, or an anecdote that you find yourself re-telling people, saying, “Hey, I learned it from this podcast,” tell that to people on social media. We’ve been having so much fun seeing your responses already! Keep doing it until the end of November and help us celebrate our third anniversary. We will reshare them! And you can find other people’s as well to share yourself.

Lauren: Most people still find podcasts from recommendations from trusted friends and acquaintances, so sharing your enthusiasm for linguistics with people is the best way for the show to find new ears. This month’s bonus episode is all about reading fiction like a linguist. A bit like podcasts, I get a lot of my fiction reading suggestions from you, Gretchen. We talk about what it’s like to read fiction through the eyes of a linguist.

Gretchen: All of the linguistically interesting angles and facts and aspects of the fiction we’ve been reading recently in this episode. We also have over 30 bonus episodes. That’s almost half the show! If you’ve been looking for more quality linguistics content in your life, and you’ve listened to all the back episodes of Lingthusiasm, there is more. We have a solution! You don’t have to stop listening. You can get access to these instead.

Lauren: Just go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: And thanks for people who are already supporting us for helping keep the show going and ad-free!

Lauren: Not only can you read linguistics-y fiction, but you can also wear your lingthusiasm with our new merch.

Gretchen: You can wear Lingthusiasm patterns including the International Phonetic Alphabet, the esoteric symbols, and the tree diagrams on your feet with the new Lingthusiasm socks.

Lauren: I mean, you could’ve worn them on your feet with the scarf but that would’ve been strange. The socks fit much better.

Gretchen: Wear the socks on your feet. Don’t wear scarves and ties and mugs on your feet.

Lauren: We also have greeting cards with IPA “Thanks” and “Congratulations” on them but definitely don’t wear them at all.

Gretchen: Yes. Plus, we have t-shirts, baby outfits, and various other kinds of Lingthusiasm merch. If you go to lingthusiasm.com/merch, you can check out photos of all of those and get them for yourself or for a linguist or linguistics enthusiast in your life.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, it’s grammar time.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: What is the difference between these two words? You ready?

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: The first one is “book.” And the second one is “books.”

Gretchen: Oh, I know this one! I know this one. We’re good. Okay. The first one is when you just have one book and the second one, “books,” is when you have more than one book. How did I do?

Lauren: You did great! Congratulations.

Gretchen: Okay, good. Thank you. I am a speaker of English.

Lauren: Your English-speaker intuitions are working as expected.

Gretchen: That’s good to know, seeing as we’re speaking English right now. This is plurals. Sometimes, you have just one of something. You have a singular. Sometimes, you have a plural of something. In English, the kind of classic way that you form a plural is by adding an S or this /s/ sound to the end of a word.

Lauren: We’ve talked about morphology in a previous episode, which is where you add bits to a word to create more meaning. Plurals are just a really nice bit of morphology in English. I’m very fond of them. I like being able to distinguish between whether I have one book or many books.

Gretchen: Hopefully all the books.

Lauren: Yes, ideally more than one book. I think that’s the appeal of plurals.

Gretchen: More than one book. More than one cake. It just makes everything better. But there are also other ways of making plurals – not just by adding an S or a /s/, /z/ sound if you have /dagz/. In English, sometimes you make the plural by – for example, if I have the word “foot” and I have the word “feet,” Lauren, what’s the difference between these?

Lauren: Hmm. I’m just gonna observe that there is no S there. The second word definitely means more than one foot.

Gretchen: It does because English also forms the plural by changing the vowels sometimes, particularly for words that go back to Old English and have this – what’s called the “Germanic Ablaut Pattern” – but of changing the vowels to indicate a different sort of grammatical thing. The fact that some plurals in English form by changing their vowels was actually really helpful to me back when I was studying Arabic in undergrad because in Arabic, sometimes you add an ending to make something plural. But in a lot of cases what you actually do instead is you change all of the vowels, and sometimes even the associations of how many vowels there are or which consonants come together. For example, if you have the Arabic word /kita:b/, which means “book,” there’s also the word /kutub/, which means “books.” So, in this case you’ve changed the /i/-/a:/ vowel pattern – that’s a short /i/ and a long /a:/ – to just two short /u/’s – /kutub/. /kita:b/. /kutub/.

Lauren: Hmm. It’s a little bit like English “foot” and “feet.”

Gretchen: A little bit except that it’s changing two vowels for the price of one. In this case, it’s a bit more complex as a whole system. This is definitely an oversimplification to say that it works the same way as “foot/feet,” but the fact that the vowels change is something that’s kind of neat. One thing that I found particularly interesting about this system is that it can also apply to words that get borrowed into Arabic. Arabic has the word /fals/, which means “money,” and the plural of it is /fulu:s/. You take this F-L-S set of consonants and, instead of just having the single A there, you have /u/ and then a long /u:/, okay?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: That’s fine. Then, Arabic borrowed the word “bank” from English, which is pronounced /bɑnk/.

Lauren: As in a money bank?

Gretchen: Like a money bank, not a riverbank. The plural of /bɑnk/, because it looks kind of like /fals/ – it’s got a consonant and then an A and then two more consonants – so the plural of “bank” in Arabic is /bunu:k/, like /fulu:s/. You put /u/ and then long /u:/ in between the three consonants.

Lauren: How clever.

Gretchen: I always enjoy it so much when languages take a word from another language and then adapt it to the morphology of their language and say, “Okay, we figured out how to plural it. We know how to pluralise words like this. We’re gonna do this the way that our language does it.”

Lauren: In fact, Nepali borrowed the word /kitab/ from Arabic and, instead of using the Arabic form of the plural – in Nepali you have “one /kitab/” but you have “two /kitabhæɾu/.” They also have a suffix at the end of the word, like English does, but they don’t use the Arabic form of the word. If you’re listening to people speak Nepali every day, you can often hear “two /kitab/” and it’s just as grammatical as “two /kitabhæɾu/.”

Gretchen: So, it’s not like in English where the S is obligatory if something is plural. You can just put the /hæɾu/ if you want it or if it’s necessary, but you can also omit it?

Lauren: Yes. Whereas, Hindi, which also borrowed /kita:b/, Hindu has obligatory plurals. So, “one /kita:b/” and “two /kita:bɛ̃/” – closely related languages, you can’t trust them to always have the same obligatoriness or not.

Gretchen: What’s interesting, Arabic was very influential in a lot of different areas because another language that borrowed the word for “book” from Arabic was Kinyarwanda, which is spoken in Rwanda. It slightly adapted the form of the word. Instead of being /kitab/, it borrowed as “igitabo” because Kinyarwanda really likes words to begin and end with vowels. In Kinyarwanda, there’s also a prefix “igi-” which means that something is singular and belongs to a particular class. If you wanna make something that begins with “igi-” plural, you change “igi-” to “ibi-”. So, “igitabo” is “book” and “ibitabo, with the B, is “books” because you always change “igi-” to “ibi-” to make something plural. They just took the same pattern that they had in their language and said, “Yeah, we can do this with this word from this other language.”

Lauren: What an exciting life the word /kita:b/ has had.

Gretchen: It feels very poetic that the word for “book” travelled around a lot. It was a technology the way that a lot of languages have borrowed the English word for computer. A lot of languages borrowed the Arabic word for “book” because they were some early people to have books.

Lauren: So far, we’ve had you can put a suffix on the end of a word. Kinyarwanda has some prefixing at the start of the word, so where the morphology is. Arabic and sometimes English involve some internal changes. You’re not necessarily just adding or removing something from the start or the end. These are some of the strategies for pluralising, but they’re not the only ones.

Gretchen: What else can we do?

Lauren: One thing that I find very satisfying as a plural strategy is where you repeat the word and the repetition is what makes it indicate that it’s a plural.

Gretchen: That’s very economical. It makes a lot of sense. It’s like saying, “book” and “book book” to mean “several books.”

Lauren: Yeah. Indonesian is one of the widely spoken languages that does this. The word for student is /muɾid/ but the word for “students” – plural – is /muɾidmuɾid/ as one option for how to pluralise it.

Gretchen: Huh. Very nice.

Lauren: There’s something very visual about that form of plural that I find very satisfying.

Gretchen: Speaking of languages that form their plural with a prefix, there’s actually an analysis of French. Traditionally speaking, if you learn French in school, you learn French forms a plural by changing the ending the same way that English does. But in actual fact in French, often those S’s at the end are silent pretty much always.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So, there’s another analysis of French whereby it’s actually that the plural is a prefix. This especially shows up in French words that begin with vowels. Children who are learning French before they learn to read and write, they often assume that many words in French that begin with a vowel actually have plural prefixes. If you take, for example, the word “ami,” which means “friend,” in French and the plural of it is also “amis” but with an S at the end, but you can’t hear the S.

Lauren: No, I could not hear that.

Gretchen: It is completely silent. There is nothing to hear. Most of the time when you say a word in French, you put another word in front of it. Especially for a noun, you’re often gonna put an article like “the” or “my” or something in front of it. You would say, “l’ami” – “the friend” – “les amis” – “the friends.” That’s “les,” which is the plural form of “the,” but it has this S that’s silent. Because that silent S is before words that begin with a vowel, you pronounce that S like a /z/.

Lauren: Huh. Yeah.

Gretchen: The same thing with “my friend.” You have “mon ami,” “mes amis.” Again, that A makes the S in “mes,” which is also the plural form of “my,” be pronounced as if it’s actually there.

Lauren: I can totally see how, as a child...

Gretchen: You can see where this is going, right, because you don’t actually speak French and you’re like, “Uh-oh! It really sounds like the singular is ‘ami’ and the plural is...”

Lauren: “Zami.”

Gretchen: Exactly. “Zami.” You get little kids – it’s really cute when they’re learning to write. It’ll be like “Me zami” and they’ll write, like, Z-A- M-I for “friends.”

Lauren: Okay. That is too cute.

Gretchen: I have friends who post this is what their young children are doing on Facebook, like little notes that they’re writing for class, they’re talking about “le zami.” It’s so cute.

Lauren: Kids are just great little paradigm analysers, aren’t they?

Gretchen: Well, this is the way that language change could happen because you could imagine if French wasn’t a written language or if, you know, some sort of catastrophe happened and French people just weren’t writing anymore – you had an area of French where they had stopped writing for a while and they started writing again – you could imagine that people would’ve reanalysed it at this point. This is actually what’s marking plural in the spoken version of French even though the writing is preserving this other thing. If you were to start writing it differently in the modern era – not looking at what it did historically – then it would be very sensible to say that the plural is actually “zami.”

Lauren: I think it’s also worth mentioning that there are plenty of languages that get by just fine without any plural morphology adding onto words at all.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. But I think all languages have some way of expressing whether there’re different amounts of stuff. The question is just do you do this as an intrinsic part of particular words, or do you do this with extra words. You could say in English, “One book. Two book. Many book. A few book.” These words would convey, also, that there’s more than one book as well.

Lauren: This is what a lot of Austronesian and Pacific Island languages do. They get by, obviously, completely fine. For example, Tetun, which is the language of Timor, if they need to mark something as plural, they’ll just use a separate word which is “sira” or “they.” So, again, they’re using the determiners a bit like French children use when they can’t hear the difference between the plural and the single form.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, spoken French just completely uses the determiners to indicate what’s plural. It’s just in the writing.

Lauren: We’ve talked about determiners and how they have a lot of work to do for tiny words. This is just another thing they get to do. Overachieving.

Gretchen: Sometimes, your “the” word can take on that function instead. Or you can use overt number words. Or you can do things like, you know, for English words like “rice” or “bread” you end up using things like “loaves of bread” or “grains of rice,” “cups of rice,” “glasses of water" because saying “rices” or “waters” or “breads” is a different thing and refers to kinds of rices and breads rather than specific bread items.

Lauren: We’ve talked about different strategies different languages use to make plurals. When we look at this across a lot of languages and see what languages do, what we’re doing is typology, Gretchen. I don’t know if you knew that’s what you were doing right now.

Gretchen: We are doing typology, yes. There is a very cool website if you’re interested in linguistic typology which is the World Atlas of Language Structures or WALS. They have all these interesting maps pulling information from all these different grammars of all these different languages and putting it on a map so you can see how many languages have prefixes for their plurals versus suffixes for their plurals versus something else.

Lauren: Because plurals are one of those things that every grammar describes, if a language has plurals, even if it doesn’t, it’s such a common feature across the world’s language, it’s often relatively easy to describe. It means that WALS has – it’s one of the biggest parts of the survey. It has over a thousand languages, which means that one in seven of the world’s languages are included in the survey, which is pretty impressive.

Gretchen: It is pretty good. Not all languages even have grammars written of them or have been converted into WALS, but that’s a pretty high ratio for WALS.

Lauren: What do you think is the most common strategy in the survey of making plurals?

Gretchen: Well, as a very Anglocentric person, I’m gonna say suffixes?

Lauren: You are correct. I don’t know how distributed the survey is. It could just be if you look at the map and where the plural suffixes are, it is really obviously an Indo-European/Europe kind of area phenomenon.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, it’s not quite clear if that’s just Indo-European languages are more likely to be in WALS in the first place, which is definitely true. If we actually just had grammars for the thousand languages of Papua New Guinea, probably this ratio would shift.

Lauren: But plural suffixes are very common. The next two most common are plural words – so not using any kind of morphology – and plural prefixes – so putting something on the start of the word rather than the end. Of course, that’s not the only options that you have.

Gretchen: What are some of these other options?

Lauren: We talked about reduplication already. You can have a change in the tone of a word. There are some African languages that have systems where the tone or the pitch of the word changes depending on whether it’s plural or not, which is obviously very different to something like Mandarin tone, which more people are familiar with, where the tone can change whether it means a particular thing at all. This is used grammatically.

Gretchen: That’s really interesting. I didn’t know people used tone for that. Another one of my favourite less-common types of plurals is when you just have a completely different word that means “the plural thing.”

Lauren: Ah, yeah. That is super great.

Gretchen: It’s a huge pain if you’re trying to learn the language because you’re like, “Okay, great. So, instead of memorising this one list of nouns and then saying, ‘I add this thing to them. Now, they’re plural.’” You’re like, “Now, I have to memorise two lists of nouns and all of their associations with each other.” It’s a bit of a pain. But once you know it, it’s very satisfying to be like, “Oh, yeah. Actually these are what were once historically completely different words and now just one of them is the plural of the other.”

Lauren: It would be a very interesting language to have this feature, Gretchen.

Gretchen: I don’t know if there are any languages that do this for all of their plurals, but I think there’re quite a few languages that do this in a few edge cases. One of them is English. English singular is “person” and the plural is “people.” Those are historically completely different words.

Lauren: This thing happens across languages so often and across different parts of grammar that linguists call it “suppletion” because one form just completely takes over and suppletes the part of the paradigm where the other one would be.

Gretchen: It’s the same thing that happens in things like the English verb “to be,” which is “be, am, is, are, was.” Why do some of them have B's in them and some of them have W's and some of them have neither? It’s because they were once three different verbs.

Lauren: Just crashing into each other.

Gretchen: Yeah. But that’s verbs. We’re not in verbs right now. We’re in nouns.

Lauren: I think “people” and “person” is a really good reminder as well that even though English would just fall into the WALS category of a language that has plural suffixes with the S suffix, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occasionally use these other things like “foot/feet,” which is just a modification internal to the word, or “person” and “people,” which is the suppletion, or “sheep” and “sheep” where there’s no change at all.

Gretchen: There are some words like that in English: sheep/sheep, moose/moose.

Lauren: Emoji/emoji.

Gretchen: “Emoji” is a really interesting one because some people say, “emoji/emoji,” and some people say, “emoji/emojis,” which kind of brings us to the English side of do you adapt the plural for the way that you do it internally in a language? In which case, it would be “emojis.” Or do you make it more similar to what the source language does? In which case, it would be “emoji” because Japanese does not have the English plural strategy of just add an S to it. One of the strategies that it does have, among others, is just keep the word the same. I think the best-known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in English is a certain little creature with eight legs.

Lauren: The octopus.

Gretchen: The octopus.

Lauren: Which I just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis.

Gretchen: I admit that I have also done this. If you were gonna pluralise “octopus” as if it’s English, it would just be “octopuses.” It’s very easy. But there’s a fairly long-standing tradition in English of when a word is borrowed from Latin to make the plural the actual Latin thing. Because, historically, many English speakers did learn Latin, and so you want to show off your education by using the Latin form even though it’s in English. So, if you’re going to pretend that “octopus” is Latin, then you wanna say, “octopi.” However, there is yet a third complication, which is that “octopus,” in fact, is actually Greek – “octo” meaning “eight” and “pus” meaning “feet." So, Greek does not make these plural by adding i to it. In that case, there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious, to be honest, plural.

Lauren: Is there where you say, “octopodes”? (/akta’ˈpodiz/)

Gretchen: Well, this is where I used to say, “octopodes.” But I have recently learned that, apparently, it is, for maximum pretentiousness, /ak’taˈpodiz/.

Lauren: You’ve out-pretentioused my out-pretentiousness.

Gretchen: I know, right? Which just sounds like, I dunno, like “Sophocles” and “Euripides” and like another Greek playwright because, I guess, they are all Greek, to be fair. But “octopodes” really, really sounds like he should be writing some plays.

Lauren: I’m looking forward to your Greek tragedy about octopuses... About those octopus-things.

Gretchen: Sea creatures of all kinds.

Lauren: We’ve been starting to explore the different options that you have for plurals across languages, which is part of why linguists do typological surveys to see other potential things that languages can do. But I find this kind of typology work is not just useful and interesting as a linguist doing linguistic analysis, it’s also a really handy way to think about language if you’re learning a language.

Gretchen: When you’re learning a new language, it’s interesting to be more aware of sort of the space, or what are some things that some languages do, so that things are less of a surprise to you if a language that you’re learning does something slightly differently. One of my favourite things in languages doing things differently is also that some languages don’t have this singular/plural distinction. They make other kinds of distinctions in how many of something there is.

Lauren: Yeah. So, so far, we’ve been looking a lot at the form and where it goes or how it changes the word and if it’s compulsory or not. But there is just more than single and plural. Between one and many, we have some languages that create specific forms as well. We have some languages that mark there’re two of something, which is known as the “dual,” as in the “duo”-type dual rather than the fighting-type duel or, depending on your accent, the glittering one.

Gretchen: I mean, duels are also done with two people, I guess. You fight a duel between two people.

Lauren: Yep. Fair call.

Gretchen: The dual tense is fascinating to me because Old English had a dual.

Lauren: Really? We squandered it?

Gretchen: Yeah, we squandered it. Except, there are still a few words that are relics of the Old English dual that we use all the time in modern English.

Lauren: Really? Is this gonna be one of those, like, now-my-eyes-are-open-I-can’t-un-see-this moments?

Gretchen: Yeah. They’re not even obscure.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Lauren, what’s the different between “both” and “all”?

Lauren: “Both” and “all”? “Both” means “two” and “all” means “everything”?

Gretchen: Yeah! So, if I say, “Both of us went to buy some books” versus “All of us went to buy some books,” “all” means “three or more.” You can’t use it for “two.” “All of us,” you and me, Lauren, “went to buy some books.”

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: No.

Lauren: Ahh…

Gretchen: Another one is “either” versus “any.”

Lauren: Hmm... “either” is a choice between two.

Gretchen: “Either of you can come.”

Lauren: And “any” is a choice between more than two. I can’t force a definition of “any” that includes only two.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. “Any of you two can come.” You just can’t say that.

Lauren: No. Ah, wow! I have this tiny space in my brain that works as a dual and I never even thought about it.

Gretchen: The third one is gonna be really obvious. You also have “neither” versus “none.”

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: So, if “either” does it, “neither” also does it. Some people insist on a plural/dual distinction between “between” and “among.” Whereas, other people don’t have this distinction.

Lauren: That’s what that distinction that they’re trying to get at is.

Gretchen: Yeah. But English doesn’t really have a dual anymore, so do we still need it in these particular words? There is still one in “former” versus “first” and “latter” versus “last.” “I read this book and that book, and the former was really good, but the latter wasn’t very good.” You can’t do that with a list of three.

Lauren: Hmm, yeah.

Gretchen: Again, those are more obscure. “Both” and “all” and “either” and “any” just really blew my mind.

Lauren: Yeah. Because my intuitions are so strong there.

Gretchen: Right! Imagine if we did this everywhere in the grammar. We used to have pronouns – more of the pronouns used to have singular and dual and plural forms in English. “I” and “we two” and “we all.”

Lauren: We sneakily haven’t talked about pronouns at all because, obviously, pronouns don’t just whack an S on the end of things the way that most normal nouns do. English doesn’t even have a grammaticalized distinction anymore between plural and singular in second person – “you” and “you” – which is why people innovate things like “yous” or “ya’ll.” Formal English doesn’t have a distinction.

Gretchen: Yeah, formal English doesn’t. “You guys,” “you folks” – yeah. The pronoun system is different, and we did a whole episode with pronouns earlier. But, yeah, English used to have a dual, like, everywhere.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: In fact, Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of English and most of the other languages spoken in Europe – with the exception of a few, and some of the languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent – it had a dual. There are a few other Indo-European languages that still have it or still have relics of it. One of them was Latin, which had some fossilised forms like “ambo,” which means “both.” If you’re “ambidextrous,” you have both hands are the right hand. Also, had relic forms in Old Irish, Homeric Greek, Old Indo-Iranian, and Old Church Slavonic. There are still a few dual forms in Slovene and Sorbian.

Lauren: If dual forms encode “two,” you’ll never guess what they call it in languages where it encodes “three.”

Gretchen: Some languages have a trial.

Lauren: These include Austronesian languages and Austronesian-influenced creole languages including Bislama and Tok Pisin.

Gretchen: That’s great. They also have a dual, right? You have a singular, a dual, a trial, and then a plural after that?

Lauren: In the pronoun systems, yes.

Gretchen: Just in the pronouns, okay.

Lauren: Pronouns – obviously because they’re counting people. People tend to make a lot more distinctions and keep them in pronouns.

Gretchen: I should say there are other languages besides Indo-European that do have duals. Inuktitut and Yupik have dual forms. Greenlandic doesn’t even though it’s related but it used to. In an entirely different part of the world, Khoekhoegowab and other Khoi languages have duals in some forms. There are duals around the world.

Lauren: There are some trials, but that is the most. No one has ever come across, in natural languages, something like a quadrial, which would be marking for...

Gretchen: Quadrial, quintial, sextial, septial...

Lauren: This is why typology is interesting. When you find there are lots of languages with single and plural. There are some languages with dual. There are even fewer with trial. And we’ve not got languages that mark a specific number of anything more. We do have languages that mark something that means “a few,” so something that’s more than two but less than lots.

Gretchen: I really like this because English kind of does this in our measure words. You can say, “one” of something or a “single” amount of something. You can say a “couple” or a “pair,” which is two – sometimes, occasionally extended to mean more than two. Like “I’ll be there in a couple minutes.” If you’re there in three minutes, meh, I think that’s still in the thing. People will really argue about this one. Then we have things like “a few” or a “handful” or “a bit.” Then we have things like “many” and “several” and “a lot,” which approximate the system as well. Some languages do this in the grammar.

Lauren: Yeah. Some do it in the form of grammar from all over the world. It’s definitely not one of those it crops up a lot in this language family or that language family. It shows up in Hopi in North America, Walpiri in Australia, languages of the Oceanic area, apparently in Arabic for some nouns, and it’s so common that it actually has its own term, which is “paucal.” P-A-U-C-A-L. It’s a very satisfying word to say, “paucal.”

Gretchen: I really like the word “paucal.” You can look at number by a strict sort of counting. You can look at number by “a few” and “a lot” and “many.” Are there any other ways of looking at how many of something there are?

Lauren: I may not have been completely upfront with you when I gave you the Nepali example about books.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: I can point at three books and say /kitabhæɾu/, but I could also point at three books, a couple of notebooks, and some pens and say /kitabhæɾu/, and it would still be technically correct.

Gretchen: So, /kitabhæɾu/ doesn’t just mean “books” – because I can’t use “books” to mean the plural of “pens” also.

Lauren: “Books and associated materials.”

Gretchen: Ah, like “books and stuff.”

Lauren: Yeah. The Nepali plural is not only optional, as I said at the start, but it also has a slightly broader meaning in a lot of contexts. I could say, “Gretchen-/hæɾu/” and it would be like “Gretchen and her family and associated peoples.”

Gretchen: Is this like when you say, “Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year” or something like that?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: “You and yours” is like “you and your family” or kinfolks or people that are associated with you?

Lauren: Yeah. Whatever that semantic meaning you have, that’s kind of what /hæɾu/ is doing in these sentences.

Gretchen: Huh, that’s really interesting.

Lauren: It’s a very elegant way of representing. We know you kind of mean “this generally related content.” One of the really nice things about plurality is that it’s often something that is very easy to see in how it’s marked and how it’s used, so you can use things like Google Translate to play around. You can look at examples in things like children’s books. And you can begin to analyse plurals a bit like a linguist does as you’re learning them and going about understanding a new language. Having a little bit of terminology around what the typological possibilities are with plurals can make it a bit easier to approach them in a new language.

Gretchen: I watched a demonstration of a monolingual fieldwork scenario where you have no language in common with someone – and this was set up as a demo because the people did have a language in common but they set it up as a demo for the audience – and they pretended they had no language in common and tried to figure out some things about the language from the volunteer. It was really interesting because it’s fairly easy to ask somebody, you know, here’s a stick. Here’s two sticks. Here’s three sticks. You can kind of point at them, and people can generally figure out what you’re asking, and they can answer that. It’s one of the easiest areas of a grammar to start approaching, rather than getting into more complicated stuff about hypothetical scenarios and this kind of thing. It’s an easy thing to learn at the beginning when you’re starting out learning a language.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, other Lingthusiasm merch and gifts at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include surnames, linguistics fiction, and a Q&A with Gretchen about her book Because Internet. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. You can share your favourite Lingthusiasm fact with them or you can share it on social media and tag us in.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, and our music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

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softspring · 4 years

Text

Clay Tablets (Sort Of)

This week was weird. We aren’t sure what’s happening and how our classes would be and everything. It ended up moving online the next week though.

In class, we were given an activity. We are to make clay tablets. It’s not real, of course. It was made out of play doh or something similar to that (it’s dark grey-ish coloured). We were told to create something like a greeting with tools.

It’s a really great exercise honestly as we learned how to safe spaces and make it as short but also understandable by others. It was a little messy, yes, but it’s fun. Made me think about how they used to carved out everything back then.

We basically learn about typography and languages. And in the lecture, which had been moved online, we talked (or rather Andy and Karen) about writing around the globe.

This is pretty similar to Aksara Jawa (Javanese Script) and it’s really cool to see a typography (and design?) being combined. And also, you read this outwards. Starting from the letter that looks like an L with a hat then down then out.

This lecture was particularly interesting for me, simply because I have learned:

Arabic in my high school and basically how I have read Qur’an since I was younger, which excites me as they mentioned it! The decorated wall could actually be seen in a lot of mosques in different ways. And if you know how to read it... you can definitely see the word ‘Allah’ easily! And the Qur’an... it had always been beautiful in my opinion... though you have to be careful when interpreting it so you wouldn’t stray. Also I have to say... Arabic have such beautiful letters that could change meaning depending on where you put the lines and how many lines are put.

Korean (Hangul) for fun. I like Korean idols and watching their shows (drama and variety) which made me feel more interested in learning them. The letters are really easy to remember BUT spelling itself? That’s hard. Even Koreans get it wrong sometimes. Like 게 (crab) or 개 (dog) it’s similar and pronounced the same but had different meaning. LOTS of words are like this, WHICH made it easy to made dad jokes and puns.

Greek. I’m interested in living in Greece and have an obsession with learning their mythology which made me spark interest in the language as well. I haven’t gotten far, still trying to remember the letters because honestly... even that is hard. What we see isn’t always how it is!

Japanese. I watch anime a lot and I have two close friends that are really into it and learned the language. Their letterings are really... nice? It’s simple like Hangul. But I gave up along the way because I can never remember which letter I should put together.

Javanese Script. This is only taught in schools in areas that aren’t considered big city, I’d say? Some sort of small towns or village, more likely. And I moved to one. So I learned about it (unwillingly) and of course I had bad score. It’s hard because there are pairs and everything. I mean look at this? They’re basically the same.

Long story short, I enjoy the lecture. And the clay activity!

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graphicdesignvictim · 4 years

Text

journal 1/ chapters 1-4 / the prologue to graphic design

initial thoughts

When I first received the textbook, the 6th edition of Meggs' History of Graphic Design (written by Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis) in the mail, I was immediately stressed out. I was unfortunately gifted the trait of being ultra stressed about a lot of things, but school always won first place in amount of stress. (My freshman year of high school I was so stressed I was getting a lot of gray hairs...so embarrassing!) In general, history has been my least favorite subject, and therefore was the subject I struggled with the most. Although I am passionate about graphic design, I wasn't super psyched to be reading about its history. Sorry Professor!

1 / the invention of writing

These terms! I believe I have only heard of pictographs and hieroglyphics before reading this. To read that there's petroglyphs, ideographs, cuneiform, and rebus writing. Wow.

"The symbol for sun...began to represent ideas such as "day" and "light"." (pg.9, Meggs.): You know, I never considered that. On my essay in quiz 1, I discussed how there were would be too many characters to represent every word, and that is why having an alphabet is more advantageous. Though I agree with my argument, I wonder how many symbols would have dual or more meanings, as that is the case for many words in the modern English language. For example, the word "die" could mean the verb of ceasing to exist, or it could mean the noun of a dot-marked playing cube / singular form of dice. So in cuneiform terms, would the symbol for "die" [noun] represent the idea of death? Probably not, but maybe with crazy English it might.

Whenever quarantine ends, I wonder how hard it would be to make my own cylinder seal. After reading this portion, I found the urge to make one. Obviously with modern technology, making a personalized stamp wouldn't be that hard, and I have seen some DIY artists make their wax seals. I think it would be fantastically ridiculous to have an obnoxious stone seal to go around "marking my territory" on.

Ah papyrus. I feel stupid for admitting this, but I didn't actually know papyrus was a plant. I didn't think it was not a plant, however I just never thought of it that deeply. I'm going to look up what it looks like right now. [...] Oh, okay. I suppose today is the appropriate day to say that it sort of looks like thin marijuana? Anyway, speaking of papyrus, the reason I never gave it much thought to it being a plant is because I have been too focused on everyone's hatred for the Papyrus typeface. Why does everyone hate it? I haven't found myself wanting to use it (yet), but I definitely feel this social pressure that I'm not allowed to use it.

I find superstition fascinating. I think if I could meet anyone from the past I would want to meet the illustrator of the Book of the Dead. That would be a morbidlly cool job to have, just feeling that some random guy named Bob has had enough days lived. AND WITH THE POWER OF THE PEN you kill hi- I mean let him enter the afterlife.

2 / alphabets

The definition of an alphabet is definetly something I have not thought about in depth. This definition makes sense, but I always took it for granted in terms of- well I know English, there's an alphabet. I tried to learn Spanish, there's an alphabet... it's almost the same except they're pronounced differently and there's another n- ñ. I tried to learn Japanese, and there's almost twice as many characters (as English), 2 for each sound.

Fascinating to learn that Hebrew and Arabic writing was the evolution of the Phoenician alphabet. I can very much see the resemblances. But it's crazier that different cultures took it in one direction, and then the Greeks took it in another direction, and the Romans took that alphabet in a completely different direction. It blows my mind to see how far we've come.

Ah yes, serifs. I love the whole argument over whether they originated at cleanup marks or sharpening-the-brush-tip marks. Can't we just be glad they exist? (I want to believe it's the sharpening origin, it sounds more efficient.)

Vellum paper feels amazing; no wonder it has to be made from that smooth baby skin. Yikes.

Scrolls are also an obnoxious thing I'd like to have. For instance, I probably will have my will written in a large scroll to represent how dramatic I am.

As someone who used to be obsessed with Kpop, I think it is absolutely amazing that Hangul is such a technical alphabet. It reminds me of how humans have that disk they threw into outer space teaching aliens how to speak English via the shape of your mouth and lips and what position your tongue should go for certain sounds. Obviously this is the origin and is way more impressive especially at such an early point in our history. It makes me appreciate the language and those that write in it much more.

3 / the asian contribution

I appreciated that this chapter starts off crediting the Chinese with creations forcertain things that I remember throughout middle school and high school, history class always seemed to gloss over. Like where did these Europeans know which way was north and to figure they could kill others by putting some powder in their guns. Paper also always came out of nowhere, but I'm glad I learned its origin sooner than reading this.

I have learned that Chinese calligraphy was more important that painting before, but in a different way. As I'm in a lot of art classes, I was taught that Chinese painters would usually also be calligraphers and viewers could tell that the same person who painted the painting wrote the calligraphy as the style of the strokes would match. Thinking about it more now, it would make sense why it would be more important as calligraphy was something you had to memorize AND learn where as with painting, anyone could technically learn how to visualize.

Referencing my earlier rant about cylinder seals, chops are also something I enjoy and would want to have one of my own. Personally I like cooler colors better, so maybe I would choose to have a blue ink instead... but I know that's not the point. I think this would make more sense to be the origin of printing as it is constructing something once and being able to reproduce it over and over just with the use of ink.

The Chinese also invented playing cards! How interesting that they were called sheet dice and a unique aspect of graphic design that you never realize until you actually think about it.

I agree with the authors, it is odd that languages with thousands of characters would decide to use such a tedious method like movable type. On the bright side, we wouldn't have our lovely lazy Susan's if it weren't for this tedious type!

4 / illuminated manuscripts

As someone who appreciates shiny things (my weakness is holographic) it was exciting to learn about illuminated manuscripts. I'm just imagining the gold leaf making the page glow from a couple meters away. Those kind of things make me like to pretend stuff is magical. And for your title to be an illuminator? Yes please. AND to learn that these were insanely portable for a lazy human like me? Perfection.

Earlier this year I learned about ascenders and descenders in typography, so it was nice to know their origin as well as how lowercase and uppercase letters came from minuscule and majuscule.

I am thankful for the Celtics for deciding to put spaces between words. Reading (especially something I'm not interested in) would be a much more painful task ifeverythinglookedlikethis. No wonder humans were evolving so slowly before this point. Howdoyouknowwhenonewordendsandanotherbegins?

All of these illustrations next to the text on the manuscripts make me wonder if they were still using hieroglyphics, would they even bother to illustrate these giant paintings or would it seem (or at least appear) to look repetitive? I particularly enjoy the page from Ormesby Psalter, a Gothic manuscript on page 61; it's very beautifully done.

While I'm not a religious person, I think the concept of aniconism is very interesting. Also how you could view illustrations of living things, but only inside. Can't deny that their commitment to an intricate and complex design in the Islamic manuscripts were not short of beauty.

The Limbourg brothers' story was interesting to me: how they were all illuminated book designers, how they all died before finishing their most well known project, just short of when the duc de Berry died.

This chapter was the roughest for me. I feel that it was a bit long for my tastes and it gave me a bit of anxiety that with it being so long that the professor told us to focus more on chapter 1 than this chapter. That's my issue though and it was still pretty insightful.

post thoughts

I understand the reviews for this book that I read, about how the writing is something I'm going to have to get used to. It is definitely informative, but oh my it is a lot. Will definetly not be doing this journal so late on Sunday night. Sorry professor...

Source: Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. PurvisJohn Wiley & Sons publishers.

#graphic design

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deniigi · 5 years

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concept developed after reading baby!matt in the sprawl: adventures in spider-babysitting. can you imagine the super/vigilante community/spiderverse gang + co. dealing with spiderman but small. bite-sized. little baby hands as spider-sticky as always. theres a baby on the ceiling. good god

Hi Anon.

Not quite what you asked for, but here’s some baby Pete from Tony’s POV I wrote yesterday to play with this concept. I don’t write Tony very much for many reasons, but I thought that this time, it might be pretty cute.

It cuts off kind of abruptly, but yeah. I didn’t really have the interest to finish it as a complete story. ANYWAYS

Long post under the cut (sorry mobile users!!)

“Tony,” Pepper said calmly, “I know that you want to help.But she is basically his mom.”

Yes, yes, yes.

But.

Consider this.

Small.

Pepper paused in typing and raised an eyebrow.

Tony got up in case she couldn’t see and showed her with hishands.

“Small,” he emphasized.

“Yes, he is very small,” she agreed.

“Very,” Tony told her firmly.

“And he is? Not our child?”

Yes, but again. Please consider: Small.

“So what I think I’m getting here is that you’re feelingpaternal today,” Pepper said during another pause in her typing.

Yes. Very.

“Why don’t we make a new baby robot then?” she offered himlike he was, himself, a child very studiously kicking the back of her seat in amovie theatre.

Because small.

“Tony. Peter is terrified of you right now.”

Yes, yes. But small,honey. So, so small.

“The second you touch him, he will start crying all overagain.”

Life is cruel.

“Have a seat, Tony. We will find you something small to holdin just a minute.”

Pete was always the size of a beansprout, height andwidth-wise, but at the present, he was but a bean. Sometimes, in their line ofwork, these things happen, and mostly they are unavoidable and Bruce and Dr.Cho had pronounced this particular affliction short-term and non-lethal andnone of that did anything to help the klaxons screaming in Tony’s head to gofind. And hold. The baby.

“You know, Tones, I think this might have affected you morethan him,” Bruce said, poking at him in the lab. Probably testing the frequencyat which he was fucking vibrating.

Must hold. The small.

“You stay here, Imma go get Rhodey.”

Yes, whatever, kindly fuck off unless there was a child inneed of holding in your possession.

Rhodey took one look at him and rolled his eyes and fuckedoff because he understood the highly complex workings of Tony’s mind. He cameback with a rabbit from one of the labs and stuffed it into his arms.

It was.

Unsatisfactory.

But closer.

“Tony. Peter is so scared of you right now, man,” Rhodeytold him.

Right. Yes. Logically, he knew this. But his brain would not compute. He could not make itstop fixating.

“He’s more scared of you then Barnes.”

Fucking horrible is what that was. Unfair on scales unknownto man. Peter and his smallness had,once separated from Tony, his apparent nightmare, wrapped tiny fingers aroundBarnes’s metal ones in silent fascination. Barnes was a baby-thief, however,and could not be trusted with children. They all ended up in Rogers’spossession and he was, every time, very confused. As were the police. Sam hadintervened to stop this this last time before it went to far and gave tiny,precious, baby-Pete a little toss which had banished the last of theTony-inspired upset and had resulted in giggling.

Tony had believed that what he had felt right then wasextreme jealously. He now knew this to be fact. He also knew that baby-Pete hadzero self-preservation instincts because preferred even Natasha’s company toTony’s.

It was problematic.

Everyone else got to hold baby-Pete, but not Tony. Tootraumatic.

Why.

May told him that it probably had to do with his facial hairwhich was horrifying. Like. Why. She said that this had always been a thing,but neglected to notice that half of Thor’s face was covered in fur and Sam hada moustache and goatee and there was no crying happening for those two.

“Yes, well. I guess they don’t seem very threatening,” shesaid, letting baby-Pete bury himself in her hair to hide from him.

He was so cute.

The universe was so hurtful.

Rhodey sighed and pet the rabbit while he clutched at it.

The moment of truth came when May brought Peter by for aquick check-up on Day two. Peter was very busy counting the beads on hernecklace. He was a great counter. For a toddler. That is. He was a very poorcounter by any other standard. He kept skipping the prime numbers with stunningaccuracy. No matter how many times May gently said, “One, two, three.” Healmost always started with “Fo’. Sis. Ni’.”

So cute.

So fucking cute.

Tony needed to sit down.

Rhodey told him that he was embarrassing the AvengersInitiative and he said, “I can’t fucking help it.” May got a phone call andasked Bruce if he could take her kid for a second. Bruce did, but notwillingly. Bruce didn’t deal with anything under the age of five. He could not.He didn’t understand their language or codes and he had very strong feelingsaround their breakability. So he handed Peter off to Rhodey as soon as hepossibly could. Rhodey saw Tony’s suffering and sighed.

“He’s just gonna start wailin’ Tones,” he said, bouncing thekid. Peter had become very interested in the seam of his sleeve.

Yes, yes, yes. But! But!

“I’m gonna give him to you, but you cannot, I repeat, cannotbe disappointed when he starts crying, we clear?”

Crystal.

“Alright.” Rhodey detached Peter from his shoulder andhanded him over to Tony’s hands and everything was fine. The klaxons shut offlike a switch had been flicked. Peter chewed on some fingers and looked up athim with big, liquid brown eyes. He did not scream. A good sign. He even dug afew of the fingers of the other hand into Tony’s shoulder. He was warm and softand so, so small.

After a moment, he stopped chewing and looked down to theground and cooed “Waaaay.”

“Oh yeah?” Tony asked him, adjusting him a little bit closerto his chest.

“Mm.”

Fuck.

Goddamnit.

“What’s down there?” Tony asked, looking down to see whatthe kid was staring at. The question brought Pete’s attention right back up tohis face. He blinked at Tony like he’d never seen him before. Tony practicallyfelt Rhodey brace for impact beside him.

But still. No crying.

Thank god.

“Hey, there. Welcome back,” Tony said, bouncing a bit.

Peter hummed at him again and patted gently at his face. Hislittle hands were warm and soft. Tony could die. He could die happy now. Noklaxons. No crying.

“I would kill for you,” he said mournfully. Peter leaned upand pressed their cheeks together. His was almost entirely chubby baby fat.Inconceivably soft. He was really into the rasp Tony’s own cheek made and wentto business giving himself beard burn in his enthusiasm. Tony had to pull himaway before he rubbed his face raw.

“You,” he told the boy seriously, “I would kill for you.”

Peter cocked his head like he hadn’t quite caught that. Tonyrepeated it for his edification. He accepted it with grace and went back tochewing on his fingers.

“Ah, he’s not scared of you today,” May noted when she cameback in from her phone call.

No. Praise be. He handed the child back and felt lessdesperate than before. She laughed at the visible relief on his face.

“He was pretty volatile the other day, don’t take itpersonally,” she said. “You should have seen him with Wade.”

Ahahahaha. Yeah.

Wait.

What?

Peter loved Wilson. He admired the fuck out of the guynormal-sized and was obsessed with him while fun-sized. May explained thatWilson had heard what had happened and had dropped in to make sure all wasright with their tiny family and to offer his services in the case of any bumpsin the road. He evidently had not planned on becoming Peter’s obsession.

“He’s kind of a natural,” May said, “Although, I’m not surehe’s overly comfortable with it.”

Yeah. You don’t say.

“Pete cried for nearly half an hour after he left, it waspretty surprising. He’s not much of a crier.”

You. don’t. Say.

“He’s fine, of course. Wade would never hurt him.”

No, because Tony would kill him if he did.

May took Peter’s tiny hand and had him wave to them all onthe way out, once a clean bill of health had been acquired. Pete didn’t seem tofully appreciate the gesture, but he was into the waving part and smiled widefor it, which was more than enough for Tony.

“I think I might have to murder Wilson,” he admitted toRhodey once they were gone.

“I think you’re being dramatic,” Rhodey said.

No, he was probably right.

He was definitely right.

Tony actually got to see this beautiful friendship when Maycalled him out of the blue and said that someone had bugged their house. She’dfelt a little uncomfortable as of late and so had called Wilson for aprofessional opinion and Wilson had located three bugs in the Parker residence.He was trying to do one last sweep when Tony got there to collect them. Tonysuspected it was SHIELD. He suspected this because Cap had had the same problemthe other day.

He didn’t make it a habit to go to the Parker residence andwas always taken aback by the sheer amount of foliage in the front room. Itlooked like May had pushed some of the more fragile containers to the backs ofshelves or moved them up out of the reach of tiny hands. But she needn’t beconcerned at the moment, because Peter was dead set on ruining Wilson’sbug-sweep.

He definitely thought that Wilson’s time was better used, inthat moment, in playing with him. Wilson, for his part, was just trying to dohis damn job for once. He’d take two steps and nearly trip over the kid andthen grab him and dump him on the couch, which Peter thought was the height ofexcitement. He scrambled off the couch and went to go throw himself back intoWilson’s field of vision as soon as humanly possible.

Wade, bless him, could only deal with this so much.

“Baby boy,” he said, holding Peter at eye level the thirdtime he’d done this, just in the time Tony had been there. “I am trying to do athing. You are being a very, very, verygood disrupter. The best disrupter.”

Peter decided this was high praise. When Wade tried to puthim back down on the couch this time, Peter whined and latched onto his neck.Wade gently extricated him and held his hands at his sides when he sat him downthis time.

“That’s a no,” he said firmly.

Peter made an upset hiccup.

Wade valiantly did not do what Tony would have done whichwas shatter to bits and give the kid anything he wanted.

“You stay here,” Wilson instructed. Then he let go of Pete’shands and stood up and went back to his careful sweeping.

Peter watched him for a few seconds before he got bored ofbeing in one place. He started to off the couch, but Wilson caught him in theact.

“Ah,” he said with a finger. Peter squirmed back into place.

A new game.

And Wilson knew it. He turned very slowly back to his work.Within moments, Pete was at it again.

“AH.”

Back on the cushion.

The kid practically rattled in happiness.

May hid her smile while she handed Tony the found bugs.Yeah. SHIELD grade. He sighed.

“Wilson, last time I ran into this, there was five.”

“Copy that. Here’s four.”

Huh. What do you know? Guy knew what he was doing. Tony tookthe fourth bug and inspected it for insignia. Peter made a noise of triumph.

Tony looked over and they all saw that he was proud ofhimself for having escaped the couch while Wilson had been occupied liberatingthe most recent bug. He’d latched himself to Wilson’s arm.

“Not this again,” Wade moaned.

Again?

“No sticking,” Wade threatened.

“Ya.”

“I said no.”

“Ya!”

“Aigh. If you’re fucking sticking—no, of course, you’resticking. Peter.”

Uh.

“He likes to stick to Wade’s suit,” May said evenly.

“PETER.”

Yeah, he was getting that impression.

“OFF.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Nooo!”

“Oh my god. Child. I am doing work.”

Tony very very rarely saw Wilson any kind of serious, so itwas kind of amazing to see him so put out.

“Way!”

“What?”

“Way!!”

“Volume does not equal clarity, tiny monster. What?”

Peter hunkered in, beyond happy with his work. He did notlet go of Wilson’s arm. He cuddled his forehead into Wilson’s pec and the guylegitimately took a few calming breaths.

“You,” he said slowly to the side of Peter’s head, “Are a lot.”

“Way.”

“Glad you know. Alright, fine. That’s your decision. Up wego.”

Peter, for whatever reason, was chill with latching ontoWade when he was on the ground, but as soon as there was air-time involved,this relationship broke down.

No.

He did not want to be held. Or carried. Or any of that. No.He wanted down. Immediately.

“No, no. We are making decisions today,” Wade said over thewhining. “You made that one, so you gotta live with it.”

Peter huffed and puffed and then hiccupped like he was goingto cry, but Wilson just carried on with his business, one-handed this time. Andsomehow, this ignoring process worked? Peter’s hiccupping settled down withWade’s jerky, searching movements. Peter watched his chin as he felt under ashelve blindly. He grabbed at it..

May smiled again and then turned to Tony and mouthed ‘anatural.’

Yeah, so it would seem.

Wilson found two more bugs and, once Peter had settled infor a nap and could be transferred to May’s arms without incident, completedone good last sweep and declared the home bug-free. He said that he needed totake off, he hadn’t anticipated this taking so much time. He informed May thathe’d be in touch and started to leave, but it was as if Peter had a fuckin’Wilson alert in his head. He woke up instantly. Wilson was half through thedoor when he startled just wailing. The way he had when Tony had tried to holdhim the first time.

Devastated. Devastating.

May shushed him and muffled him by tucking him into herneck. Wilson’s body spoke tons of guilt.

“He’s fine, Wade. Go ahead. Thank you for your help,” Maysaid.

Wilson nodded, hesitant. And then hurried off to whatevercrow’s nest he needed to go perch in.

Tony took the bugs back to the lab.

Peter didn’t want to play later that week, when Bruce wastrying to take his temperature. He scowled at the thermometer and hid in his aunt’sneck.

“Bad day?” Bruce asked once the child had been traumatizedto obtain the temp.

“Very,” May sighed. Tony felt bad for her. She was still asingle mom. She didn’t exactly have a whole lot of extra time or support inthis surprise toddler business. He’d offered to help, but while Pete was happyto be held by him, and by Pepper, he would not tolerate their prolongedpresence without his aunt. That was asking for tears and frustration.

May said that her husband had been a big help back whenPeter had first come to live with them. He hadn’t quite been this little, butBen, as an electrician, had had a little more flexibility in his schedule andso could do a lot of the childcare that May’s job didn’t really allow for.

It was harder without him and harder with a younger,traumatized kid who only had one relative to cling to. She mentioned offhandthat Wilson had babysat for her for a few hours that week, and that had gonefine. But she was thinking that maybe she’d ask Franklin Nelson to do it, sincehe was really good with kids this age.

And like?

Franklin Nelson? Like, the lawyer? The one who worked forHB&C? The guy who took the Jessica Jones and Punisher cases? That FranklinNelson?

“He’s a friend of our family,” May explained.

Huh.

No shit.

“Peter is very fond of his friend Matt.”

What, like. Matt Murdock, Matt? Infamous blind legalbulldog, Matt Murdock?

“That’s the one.”

Like. Okay? That was weird. Would he be alright with them?

“Oh, I’m sure of it.”

Well, if she was sure.

She asked if she could give Tony’s number to the lawyers incase something happened and she couldn’t leave work and she absolutely could dothat.

Tony heard not a peep from the lawyers the next day. Or theone after that. Franklin Nelson, he knew, was a very responsible guy. And if hewas used to little kids, then it made sense that he had the situation undercontrol.

Tony did, however, get a text from May respectfully askingif he could grab the kid and hold him for an hour or so, as her shift had beenunexpectedly prolonged.

Which was how Tony found himself in Hell’s Kitchen, underPepper’s orders to be respectful and not get shot, knocking on the closed upoffice door of Nelson, Murdock & Page.

Page, if he recalled, was the crazy reporter who picked afight with half of the hotshot murderers in the city. The Punisher. WilsonFisk. Union Allied. Gal didn’t know how to quit. He was somewhat surprisedthen, for the door to open to the lady herself with Peter securely settled on herhip.

“Go away, he’s mine,” she said. And closed the door.

Uh.

Awkward.

The door reopened to the tune of Nelson scolding hispartner. He invited Tony into the place with greater politeness. It was a hugechange from the guy’s old office at HB&C. Much tighter. Warmer. Very homey.

Karen Page had settled herself behind the secretary’s deskto bounce Peter in her lap. The kid hummed with the movement and seemed to becomforted by this.

“May said she was working late, but she didn’t have to sendyou around,” Nelson said. He himself had changed into warmer colors with themove it seemed. No more stiff blue suits for this guy. Tony could dig it.“Really, we can watch him until she’s done with work.”

“It’s fine, I’m being selfish, too,” Tony admitted offhandedly.Nelson seemed to understand this. He looked over to where Karen Page hadwrapped Pete up in her arms and was going through the ABCs with him. He mumbledalong, more or less in time.

“Kare, I’m afraid the time has come,” Nelson said withfinality.

“Noooooo.”

“Now is the time, girl. Nothing you can do.”

“Matt! Foggy is abusing me!”

“Thank you, I’ll take that.”

“Kidnapping, Matt! This man is kidnapping my ward!”

Peter went easily into Nelson’s arms and buried his fingersinto his collar. Page took it hard and slumped down in despair. Nelson cluckedat her and rolled his eyes and went to hand Peter over but two things happened.

One, Peter took the opportunity to stick to Nelson’s shirtand jacket and two, Murdock came out of his cave to investigate the aura ofdespair emitting from Page, who was evidently slowing descending to the flooras goo.

“We lose Karen?” Murdock asked in a surprisingly pleasanttone.

“That’s a yes. Peter, let go, honey.”

Ooh. Tricky. How to handle this one without revealing Peteto be Spiderkid. Tony moved forward and began to help Nelson dislodge thefingers. They did not come willingly and as soon as one hand was removed, Petermade an unhappy grunt and dug the other one in deeper.

“C’mon, kiddo,” Tony encouraged. No dice.

Murdock raised an eyebrow their way and then busied himselfcurling over the desk to tap at Page. Possibly to revive her. Who knew?

“Matty, can you come here?” Nelson finally asked when bothhis and Tony’s attempts had run their course. Pete wasn’t budging and he’dhidden his face in Nelson’s neck to prove it. Murdock lifted himself up frombehind the desk as if to say, ‘who? Me?”

“Matt.”

“Alright, alright.”

Wow, so begrudging.

Murdock kept a hand out when he moved forward without astick or anything to help him, and found Nelson’s shoulder without muchtrouble. He then, somewhat playfully, felt around until he was dancing fingersacross Peter’s face. The kid giggled.

“Who’s this?” Murdock asked.

More giggling.

“Well, certainly doesn’t seem like Foggy. Not grumpy enough.”

Nelson gave him a flat look that he couldn’t see, but musthave been able to somehow feel. Murdock had perfectly straight teeth. It waskind of eerie.

He trailed his hand a little further along until he wastickling Peter’s neck and, in his moment of weakness, swept the kid right offof Foggy’s shoulder. Like some kind of ninja. It happened so fast that Tonyalmost missed it entirely. Like.

How the fuck did he do that? Could he figure out wherePeter’s arms were just by sound?

Dude. He needed to look into how blind people experiencedthe world. That shit was incredible.

“Thank you,” Nelson sighed. Murdock tucked the kid into hisown neck. Nelson stiffened. “Matt. Matty. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” He spun around and headed back towards hisoffice.

Oh.

Tony got it now.

“Matthew. Bring him back.”

“What? Can’t see you, Fogs. Can you speak a little louder?”

Nelson’s irritation, which Tony had seen go as high as afour out of ten, ratcheted up to a six in no time at all.

“You two are insufferable,” he said.

“WHAT?”

“WHAT, FOGGY?” Page echoed from the floor.

Nelson very clearly had strong feelings about his partnerswhich he was actively repressing to save face in front of Tony.

“I am so sorry. Give me five minutes,” he said and then leftTony standing in the waiting room while he went into Murdock’s office andclosed the door behind him. Two minutes passed in silence, then Page sniffedand picked herself up off the floor, collected her shit from her own office andheaded out. She resolutely called Tony a pig before she closed the door behindher, which was, in retrospect, understandable.

He didn’t know which part of his being in specific hadoffended her, but he was used to this treatment.

Nelson remerged around the three minute mark with a verygrumpy Peter once again in his arms, although this time, less interested inclinging to him. Apparently, he didn’t want to be separated from Murdock. Thiswas conveyed by the whining and grabby hands over Nelson’s shoulder.

Nelson handed him off to Tony without a struggle this time.Peter huffed up at him and pointedly looked back towards Murdock, now skulkingirritably in his office entrance. Defeated, but only for now.

Right.

Tony wasn’t sticking around for that battle. He thankedNelson and made a hasty retreat.

Peter wailed half of the way back to the tower. Didn’t likethe car seat. Didn’t like the car. Didn’t like Tony at the minute either.

Ah, well. T’was the toddler life, wasn’t it?

#fic #also I eschew basically everything about endgame #i am aware that tony and pepper have a baby #that is fine #in my verses they do not

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alyssabethancourt · 5 years

Text

A Unique Spin on the Fantasy Genre

from the blog It Came From the 20th Century, filmmaker Jonathan R. Skocik:

Okay, strictly speaking, this falls outside the parameters of this blog, since it is not from the 20th century. However, I’m making an exception in this case because I want to help promote an excellent book that deserves to be read.

Elves, castles, magic, kings and queens, swordplay, imaginary languages – yes, we’ve seen all this before, and Alyssa Marie Bethancourt’s debut novel, Mornnovin has them in droves. That is not to say these elements are automatically tired in any way. There’s a reason we keep revisiting them. But in the wrong hands, they can admittedly feel stale or even silly. Fortunately, Ms. Bethancourt knows her genre, and navigates the material with ease. The best fantasy will make you forget that it’s fantasy, allowing you to completely buy in to what you’re reading. Mornnovin is such a novel. Beyond this, however, and perhaps more importantly, it gives us a wholly fresh perspective in that the author is autistic, and her elven characters are also coded as such.

Bethancourt’s elves are emotional basket cases. Their feelings run the gamut, their internal lives raging storms of passion, guilt, and self-recrimination, yet they are expected to maintain a veneer of stoicism that would make Mr. Spock proud, even to the point of making elaborate hand gestures to indicate their feelings rather than allow a genuine emotion to reach their faces. These elves are no Vulcans, though, and their ability to maintain this cool facade is, shall we say, less well-perfected than their sci-fi counterparts. This is, in fact, an amazingly on-point depiction of the autistic experience. People on the spectrum spend most of their lives learning to hide what they’re really feeling, having been told over and over that their expressions of emotion are inappropriate. For this reason, autistics are often viewed as cold, rude, and distant. But this is largely learned behavior, the only reaction that makes any sense when it seems like everything you do is wrong.

That Bethancourt’s autism stand-ins are literally not human reflects the feeling many on the spectrum experience of not really being a part of humanity, of being aliens in their own world. This is further illustrated by the state of isolation in which the elves of Mornnovin have placed themselves. They live in Evlédíen, also called the Valley, hidden away from the rest of the world to protect themselves from the humans who once tried to exterminate them. The Purification, as the humans call it, could be viewed as a parallel for the erasure experienced by autistic people every day. Often, the lives and perspectives of the autistic community are ignored. The clueless and ignorant have even gone as far as to say that autistic people are not even really people, and that those on the spectrum actually have no inner life, no genuine feelings or sense of identity. What is this if not a low-key extermination, if not in fact, at least in spirit?

Onto this stage emerges our heroine, Loralianasa Raia, nicknamed Lorien. Though she’s over a hundred years old, she’s only just on the cusp of adulthood in elf terms. As the crown princess whose parents have long-since been murdered, she now faces the unwelcome responsibility of ruling her people. To make matters worse, this coincides with a global war among the humans as well as a sinister plot that soon drags the elves back onto the world stage. Lorien now faces the almost unthinkable decision to expose the existence of her people to the rest of the world in an effort to save the very people who once brought them to the brink of extinction. This funhouse lens coming-of-age story perfectly illustrates the exaggerated gravity that an autistic person faces upon joining the adult world. In much the same way that Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer used monsters as a metaphor for growing up and learning adult responsibility, so does Bethancourt use her fantasy landscape of imagined cultures in a global war engineered by a vengeful sorcerer.

Of course, no coming-of-age story would be complete without a romance, and Bethancourt does not fail to deliver the goods. The concept of lovers bound by a telepathic link has perhaps been done to death in numerous online fanfics, but this manages to feel fresh, perhaps because of the earnestness with which it is written. It might also have to do with how truly endearing the love interest is. Naoise (pronounced Nee-shuh) Raynesley is the prince of Grenlec, a kingdom at war with their longtime rival, Telrisht. We meet him in the first chapter and there’s instant sparkage with Lorien. He’s bright, kind, open-minded, thoughtful, and witty. Indeed, he borders on being a Mary Sue, though thankfully never quite crosses the line. By the end of their first encounter, Naoise and Lorien are mystically joined, and though separated afterward for a large chunk of the story, their love grows stronger and stronger through the psychic bond they don’t even know they share. Visiting each other in dreams, they become each other’s only solace from the hellscape their world has become – though Naoise arguably has it worse, being that he’s stuck on the front lines of a battle that seems frustratingly unwinnable for reasons that will eventually become ominously clear.

As the story unfolds, we’re introduced to a colorful cast of supporting characters as intriguing and memorable as anything offered up by J.K. Rowling, Marvel, or even Tolkien himself. There’s Lorien’s sister Lyn, who having been raised away from her people has never learned their stoicism and therefore expresses herself with some delightfully creative profanity. We’ve also got Naoise’s womanizing brother, who manages to be charming despite being a total heel; a mercenary named Cole who struggles to outlive his shady past; the brusque elf warrior Sovoqatsu questing to fulfill a sense of purpose; and Sefaro, a good-natured ambassador from a distant country who serves as the moral compass of the group. Aside from the main party, there’s Lorien’s taskmaster guardian, Tomanasil; Naoise’s overbearing father, King Lorn; and a mysterious fairy named Sun.

But the greatest gem, for me at least, is the villain, Kataki Kurome, a sorcerer grieving over the murder of his wife at the hands of the humans. He engineers the war between Grenlec and Telrisht as a way to thin the herd and lessen the task he’s set for himself of annihilating humanity. He easily could have been a thinly-written mustache twirler, but Bethancourt gives him depth, pain, and a cold civility that at once makes him relatable and utterly terrifying. His cold determination, detached sense of purpose, devious craftiness, and sheer power make him seem utterly unbeatable. This, coupled with his age and inflexibility make him the perfect foil for the young and idealistic Lorien, who was already overwhelmed by the adult world even before the shit hit the fan.

No character is ignored, and Bethancourt not only gives depth and individuality to all of her primary characters, but breathes life and personality into even the most minor characters. Such a task naturally requires a lot of breathing room, and Mornnovin is not a short book. But it never overstays its welcome, and indeed the epic scope of the proceedings demands the necessary space to unfold. Beyond that, the pace never wavers, and the novel’s bulk is never daunting. Quite the contrary. This is the kind of expertly-woven story that draws you right in and keeps you anticipating each new development. Mornnovin isn’t just one of the best fantasy stories I’ve ever read. It’s easily one of the best novels I’ve read in recent memory, and I eagerly await the next installment in the series, due out next year.

Mornnovin is printed by Dogwood House press and is available from all major online booksellers.

Full disclosure: I am married to the author. However, this is my honest assessment of the piece.

-- Jonathan R. Skocik

#autism #autistic #elves #epic #fantasy #novel #magic #sorcerer #sorcery #review #book review

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