i'll find a new place to be from

Some monsters from greek myth

Scrap paper zine / sketchbook thing - flip-through video here !

Donna Tartt at Bennington College, mid-80s :,)

From https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27434009/bennington-college-oral-history-bret-easton-ellis/, “The Secret History isn’t so much a work of fiction. It’s a work of thinly veiled reality—a roman à clef. When it came out, Claude and Matt and I got endless calls. Everybody was saying, “Oh, did you know Donna just wrote a book about Claude and you all? And Claude is Julian and Matt is Bunny and you’re Henry.”

“Bunny”:

“Henry”:

Found another idiotic accounting mistake from my predecessor that I have to fix and I was like "WILL THE SPECTER OF THAT MAN'S INCOMPETENCE EVER CEASE TO HAUNT ME" and my coworker was like "Why do you talk like that"

Period Dramas + Hands Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.

The Piano (1993), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Anna Karenina (2012), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Carol (2015), Titanic (1997), In the Mood For Love (2000), The Handmaiden (2016), The Age of Innocence (1993), Maurice (1987)

Echos 2019

Johann Besse

i hope all humans randomly develop bug exoskeletons in the following year so tiktok skincare girlies can stop worrying about every single smallest line on their faces and just focus on how shiny and strong their chitinous armor is

Apparently there's an evolutionary theory that the reason why Africa has so much wild big-ass megafauna while the big-ass megafauna on all the other continents went extinct is because they evolved right beside humans, and knew us well enough to not get hunted into extinction.

So while everything from giant koalas to giant sloths barely had the time to think "what the fuck is that" before getting pierced by a spear and getting their bone marrow gently fed to babies and the toothless elderly, Africa had elephants who had all the time in the world to learn to tell apart human languages and teach the next generations of their herd which human sounds mean that this tribe won't hurt you, but humans who make this kind of sounds are a danger. And hippos learned to conclude "I think I'll fuck up this two-legged weird shit on sight."

That’s true about African Elephants being able to distinguish between human languages, BTW.

The original study they did on this is really cool, and it showed that not only can elephants distinguish languages, they respond differently depending on the general age and gender of the person spekaing. The researchers played recordings of different people speaking either Maasai or Kamba. All the speakers were saying the same thing, "Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming."

What they found is that when presented with voices speaking Kamba, the elephants were supremely unbothered. The Kamba are mostly farmers, many work for the park services, and they rarely present a danger to elephants.

When presented with the voices of adult men speaking Maasai, the elephants drew close to each other and started investigating. The Maasai are largely cattle herders, and they sometimes come into conflict with elephants over water and grazing lands.

However, the elephants did not seem nervous when presented with the voices of women or young boys speaking Maasai. They were aware that only humans with deep voices were a threat to them.

They also seem to recognize that if humans are talking, they aren't necessarily a threat. Humans pursuing large game like elephants are stealth hunters. If you can hear them coming, they're probably not trying to hurt you.

Anyway, elephants are amazing and one of the creatures high up on my list of "non-humans who are probably people."

Reblogging for those fabulous details.

rinasonline the hold the girl: reloaded tour kicks off at @massmoca in 2 days 🦾🤠 new visuals.. new set list.. new stage.. I am so excited to share it all with you !

Foothills, Seth Armstrong

im like an absent father in my own life I'm uninvolved af

Get on the Bus, Zhang Jia Wu

My cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books

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: