I'm a fan of being a fan because fandom rocks.

this field. is giving me. a headache.

@yuekitara hey get back here that was funny

I think my favorite thing in Marie Kondo's work is the section in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up where she talks about branding and labels contributing to visual clutter.

She explains that if you go through the whole tidying process and still feel cluttered and anxious in your own home, one thing that might help is looking around to see how much visible text and logos there are in your home. It can make you feel like you're constantly being advertised to, which makes you less comfortable in your living space, because you're basically in a showroom.

She suggests taking labels off of packages, storing items in different containers if you can, and making sure you take every purchase out of its packaging when you bring it home.

I think about that advice a lot when capitalism starts to get to me and I feel like I'm never gonna escape. Taking all the branding and advertising off of things has genuinely helped make my home feel more like my home. Peeling labels off candles, storing envelopes neatly on a shelf in a plain box, putting flour and sugar in canisters instead of leaving them in the bags, creatively covering logos on my tech...it all helps so much. Like, goddamn, it really made me realize just how much we are constantly being advertised to even when we think we're not.

I hate to be that guy, but I don't love the idea of buying more stuff to put your stuff in from a sustainability standpoint. Sure it looks nice, but it's just more plastic shit in your house. I think just taking the labels off will be enough in most cases

Well, if you read Marie Kondo's work, she heavily advocates for NOT buying storage gadgets, and instead gives tips for what kinds of things can be recycled into storage. She frequently recommends shipping boxes or shoeboxes, which can be easily painted or papered over to get rid of brand labels.

I also already gave a couple examples that don't even require you to find new storage. Even if you don't have alternate storage options for things like flour and spices, you can still peel off unnecessary labels and cover logos.

At no point did this post say to run out and buy brand new storage containers. You came up with that idea yourself.

“hi, i’m an author and this is my american character, chair lightbulb.  in american, ‘chair’ means to be in a position of leadership, while ‘lightbulb’ means intelligence.  yeah it’s kind of an unusual name in american. she’s always been distant from her  american heritage, but her parents wanted her name to honor the american language, while still being unique.  don’t worry, she’s very embarrassed about her heritage and it will hardly ever come up.”

“she lives with her cousin, george washington backstreet boys oreo® dq blizzard® creme.  he also doesn’t know a lot about his american culture.  this is symbolic of how i also don’t know a lot about american culture.

now i dont condone cheating but u have to admit the historical importance adultery had on good music

it actually makes me so sad there are some people who havent seen fireflies irl like. come with me. let me show you. lets go out in the yard at 8 in the evening and catch fireflies together

us

ten years of fighting and when shit hits the fan tumblr instantly has reddit's back. the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

you understand

Harrowhark Nonagesimus Heir to the House of The Ninth, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh

i just woke up from a dream where i was being interrogated by a bunch of people asking me if “furbies are kosher” firstly…. im not jewish. secondly……..what the fuck

please stop sending me asks pertaining to the kosher status of furbies. i really do not know. this was just a manifestation of my subconscious. im assuming that they are not kosher because furbies aren’t even food. but who knows! ask a rabbi, if you must. 

Jew here! Furbies are actually worse than unkosher–they are not permissible as food, even for gentiles. This is because the Torah teaches that it is forbidden for any human to eat the meat of an animal that is still alive, and the Furby cannot die.

hi this is the most ominous description of a furby i have ever heard

THE SIMS (2000)

i know it's been said many times before but i will never get over how jacob anderson, a british man with a british accent, not only nailed a louisiana creole accent but also developed a studiously (almost eerily) generic accent that louis uses in the present AND showed the first accent bleeding into the second accent at key moments as a way of aurally externalizing his character's inner journey. what did god put in this man when she created him.

@dedalvs anything to add about jacob anderson's accent/valyrian pronunciation work?

Pardon me, but is someone praising Jacob Anderson without letting me praise him first?!

Backing up. It's October 2009, and my Dothraki is chosen as the official version for HBO's Game of Thrones. Absolutely the job of a lifetime. Conlangers were never hired to create languages for big budget productions, and language was central to A Song of Ice and Fire. The fact that this was on HBO guaranteed that it was going to be huge, and now I was going to get to be on the set of a TV show, work with actors, go to Hollywood parties, and create a language that would be as popular as Klingon.

June 2011, only one of those four things had happened, and of all things, it was going to a Hollywood party—the season 1 premiere event for Game of Thrones. It was very cool! None of the cast attended, but it was cool! But as for the rest, the idea that I would ever actually talk to any of the actors or be on the actual set was, apparently, laughable. And as for Dothraki, it had a very loyal following of about 6 or 7 people, all of whom I came to know personally. Dothraki was discussed in the press, sure, but nobody was going to learn it; there were never going to be any Dothraki conventions. It wasn't the next Klingon.

June 2012, and by this point I'd gotten used to seeing my work on screen—and by that I mean I'd gotten used to seeing it performed…so-so. Every so often it was really good, but for the most part, I got used to hearing jumbled consonants, dropped syllables, missed words… I've always been a perfectionist, so this was difficult, but I didn't have much choice. I had absolutely no control over it. I never got to work with any of the actors, so all they had were my recordings, and a series of dialect coaches who had absolutely no idea what they were doing with my stuff. (And, as I would learn later, just because an actor nails 9 out of 10 takes doesn't mean the editor won't like the one take they screwed up. Sometimes that's the take that makes it to the screen.) Basically, if someone has an English line on a TV show that goes "It looks like the mechanism got screwed up somehow", and what they say is "It locks like a manism got scroot up someho", they're going to reshoot the scene until the actor says it right. If that happens with a conlang, no one will notice or care. This was now my life.

July 2012, I get the opportunity to create High Valyrian (yay!), and then a "dialect" of High Valyrian to be spoken in Slaver's Bay. Knowing the history from GRRM's books, I knew this "dialect" was actually a full daughter language with lexical/phonological material from an extinct language (Ghiscari) that I wasn't being asked to create, so I was going to have to create two languages at once, and at least have an idea for a third one—and, in fact, there was going to be a lot of dialogue in this new daughter language. Consequently my focus was split. I can honestly barely remember creating Astapori Valyrian, because I wanted to be sure that High Valyrian was right (I knew book fans didn't care about Dothraki, but did care about HV). Despite the lack of attention, I did realize that Astapori Valyrian had a cool sound and a great flow (it really does!). I wish I'd had more time to appreciate creating it as a daughter language (I wish High Valyrian had been as complete as Dothraki was at that point), but I was pleased with the result. I was curious to see how the actors would handle it.

April 21, 2013. I am absolutely over the moon. I'd just for the first time saw a scene that I loved in the books because, for once, I predicted what was going to happen (as a reader, I'm sitting here thinking, "How do you trade your entire army to someone and not wonder if they're going to use it on you after they get it?!"), and it actually plays better in the show than the books, and it all hinges on a language I created. I still get chills watching that scene: Episode 304, Daenerys revealing she speaks Valyrian. To this day that's still the best thing I've done. The same issues I mentioned above were present, as always (watching thinking, "Did she say mebatas instead of memēbātās…?"), but they're minor. The scene is outstanding. I realized that whatever was going to happen after this, I would always have this scene. That was a good night.

April 28, 2013. After last week's episode, I wasn't really waiting for anything. In episode 305 there's only one scene with any conlang work in it—nothing really major. Introducing Grey Worm, characterization, etc. Everything in this episode is about what's going on in Westeros. At this point I'd heard a fair amount of Astapori Valyrian in Slaver's Bay. It was good! Definitely good enough. Did the trick. The prosody wasn't quite what I did with it, but it was good. I was somewhat interested in this introduction in 305. Grey Worm only speaks Astapori Valyrian at this point, so this actor wouldn't have had had any other speaking lines, and aside from one short line and saying his name at the beginning, his next line is a huuuuuge speech, comparatively speaking. I was curious to see how he would do.

Critters and gentlefolk, that night I witnessed a miracle.

NEVER had I heard ANYONE speak one of my languages better than me until that night.

Every word, every syllable, EVERY SOUND OF EVERY CLAUSE Jacob "You Heard My Name" Anderson uttered was ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS.

I was stunned. My mouth literally hung open—probably for the rest of the damn episode, at which point I went back and watched that scene—again, and again, and again.

And so you don't have to go searching, this is Grey Worm's line (not the first two short ones—the big one [note: j is [ʒ], except in Daenery's High Valyrian name, where it's [dʒ], dh is [ð], q is [q], r is [ɾ] and y is [y], in IPA]):

That was my translation of this English line:

That is a LOOOOOOOOOONG ass line. And go watch that scene. There is nothing on the screen but his face. It's a closeup the entire time. Any slight deviation would be visible as well as audible. Take a look:

This...KING just casually dropped the greatest performance I have ever witnessed on screen at a time when I had already given up on ever seeing a truly great conlang performance on screen.

And then he proceeded to do it again and again and again and again and again for the rest of the entire show. I don't think it's a coincidence that the very last conlang line of Game of Thrones is his. They knew how much I loved him—I told them. I told anyone who would listen and twelve people who wouldn't, along with their next of kin. He didn't take my language and make it his own—no, no. He is graciously allowing me to claim that I created his native tongue—the one he's been speaking since birth. THAT'S how good he is.

So yeah, accent work? In English? I guess I'm not surprised he's pretty good at that. Something like that to this…adonis, this living, breathing Master Class™ in perfection is like yawning to an ordinary human. Jacob Anderson can walk into my house in the dead of night, take anything out of my refrigerator, and then leave the door to the fridge and the house open when he leaves. He has earned no less.

To sum up:

labs that are also churches. to me

(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

What they said.

reblog to give warm bread to your mutuals

(chuckle) That’s not old. Just sort of vaguely middle-aged.

(I’ve still got one Samsung mini-notebook that runs XP, so that I can run older versions of Corel Photo-Paint on it.)

Babies, I’m not even 40, I do not consider myself middle-aged regardless of how much silver the last seven years have put into my hair, and I started out with Apple IIe. Then I got Win95. This is like, high school.

You’re not old if you didn’t have to use 5" floppy disks to load the OS before you could start using the computer.

I started with tape drives. Disks came later. An OS that was built into the computer and just worked when you started it up? Much, much later.

(There are people who learned with punch cards. They are older. I don’t think many of them are active on Tumblr.)

Picture this, it's 1991 and 20 5 year old kids are clustered around the ONE computer in the school library and the teacher puts a huge wobbly chunk of black plastic into it and we all sit there for the next hour enraptured as she guides us through the Oregon Trail game.

And then I go home and my dad has unearthed his Commodore 64 in the basement and says "hey wanna see some computer games? :D" And we'd spend a pleasant night with Pitfall and Jumpman.

god media giants like google and twitter putting in inactive account deletion policies is just. horrific. it'd be one thing if it was just inactive empty accounts. but any inactive account being at risk of deletion fills me with dread. we all pass away one day, and so do our surviving relatives, until one day our online legacy gets wiped out because nobody was around to occasionally check our emails, i guess?

google's statement says that its because older accounts are at more risk of being hacked and repurposed into phishing accounts. but theres no reason they couldnt put in a mechanic of, say, locking inactive accounts from use while still keeping the content up. its not like they cant afford the server space. we've been forced away from physical media only for the internet to continue spiralling its way into a digital dark age. its depressing, man.

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Some people have been wondering about the raccoon. Listen. Listennn. Don't ask about the raccoon.

But does the racoon survive the Uruk-Hai? Does he curl up on Aragorn's head, or does he go straight to Faramir? Does he bite Denethor?

My friend. My colleague. My brother my captain my king. I too have been pondering this question, and in my mind there can be only one ultimate outcome.

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Epilogue: It ADORES Faramir.

I’m going to wear this on my head like a raccoon and show everyone

If u want to write a story about a character that's just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who's gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

What if someone barges in, points at said character and scream, “Mary Sue!”

Tell them to come back with a warrant

This post came across my dash again and now I am having an absolute blast with self insert hotter me that gets the girls and guys everywhere.

This is the Way

Reblogging because I am very pro-writing whatever the hell you want, even ”bad” things, and also because “tell them to come back with a warrant” BROKE ME