The-antihero-of-the-story - 「ᴀɴᴛɪʜᴇʀø」

you know what fuck it, I love you historical spelling. I love you weird fossilised preservations of obsolete alphabets, grasping for something that exists now like mist, like liquid, its true pronunciation lost to time but not quite forgotten, not yet. a ghost remains, a friendly one, comfortable in this old house. I love you repurposed letters for phonemes that neither the old language nor the variety they were borrowed into has any need for anymore. I love you sensible vowel pairings that have grown - improbably - centuries later, into unwieldy diphthongs, quietly thriving in an ever-shifting environment like weeds nestled cosily beneath the shade of grander plants that have long since turned to mulch. I love the word 'diphthong' (the little thicket of consonants in the middle of it, sprouting up from nowhere to trouble tongue and penmanship alike). I love how Phoenician fingerprints remain in a Norman revision of an Anglo-Saxon reworking of a Roman borrowing of a Greek repurposing, all these shapes and signs moulded again and again like clay, like mud, spun like flax to carry all those lovely glides and nasals and obstruents which come and go and come and go over time as the sounds mutate and grow apart, and the people grow and age and die, leaving behind nothing except (sometimes) a page. a poem. a piece of themselves, their voice, rendered in imperfect beautiful scratchings whose contours match the ceaseless flow of time, heavy with all that history and somehow also light with the sheer urgency of being written. look at it, isn't it wonderful? this moment in time that holds within it yet other moments? other echoes calling down through the centuries? this is how we spoke, this is what we sounded like, once. this is how we thought our ancestors would have said it. I love the inconvenience. English is so hard to learn. the spelling is so illogical. so cumbersome. it's frustrating. it makes no sense. it's inconvenient. yes and yes and yes, and yet you too are inconvenient, you too are inchoate and too much and you fail to resolve into a neat and comprehensible order. but look at you. how lovely you are. I treasure you. why should the words you speak be any less lovely.

Thanks for the wisdom, sir. I actually needed this right now.

Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.

tone tags are such an interesting phenomenon linguistically. bc they're of course intended to add clarity to text communication, in a way that's more explicit than nonverbal signals, but they're also more removed from the message than verbal signals are -- arguably more removed than nonverbal signals are too, bc they're so constructed.

and that distance gets in the way of efficacy, from my perspective -- like there's a reason we spontaneously developed emoticons extremely early on in the internet days (and eventually latched onto emojis so hard), and ~*~wAyS tO eVOkE tOnE~*~, and the ones that caught on are the iconic [in the linguistic sense, ie resembling the concepts they evoke] ones bc they can be guessed.

and i think there's also a reason that when speaking out loud we don't just say what we want to say and then add "genuine" or "not mean" at the end as if speaking it makes it so -- we use full sentences like "I'm really not trying to be mean here." that's the part that really interests me, the abstraction of concepts that have never been just about tone, have always needed carefully chosen words to be expressed at least sometimes. that's where i think tone tags are distinctly less effective than just writing out the sentence for someone to read as part of the message and not as an abstracted layer on top of the message. (whereas with stuff like /lh for lighthearted i kinda get it -- i still find a well-chosen emoticon or emoji does a much better job at making me read a message in a lighthearted tone, but i get the desire to be explicit.)

ik this reads like a critique even though i started out saying it was just interesting, and idk it's both. i think the desire to implement a completely explicit tone layer on top of messages is fascinating, and i think its failure states are also fascinating, and im not about to grump at people for using an imperfect tool bc they're all imperfect.

The current situation with climate change and how liberals talk about it is like if you had early stages of cancer, where it was still very much treatable, and instead of giving you any treatment all the doctors were talking to you about accepting death, and giving you pamphlets for the terminally ill, and explaining to your loved ones how to put everything in order for when you die. And when you said it was treatable everyone would either act like you were in denial, or explained to you how impractical any treatment was (chemo therapy, don't you know radiation is deadly). And when they talked about the future they'd talk about one where you were dead, despite the fact that it's still 100% treatable, and every day you don't get treatment it gets worse. And eventually when you tell them "fuck you I want to live" they act like you've broken some unspoken rule.

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.

Was originally going to draw a tennis ball... that ended up becoming a tennis ball in space... then it turned into a tennis ball in space that has water on it in such a way that it might harbor life. The creative process is something else I guess...

Just started creating pixel art a few days ago (maybe 4-5 I forgot). I thought that I'll start posting my pixel progress every time I create something. Maybe I'll post some of my pixel art from the past few days.

ALSO I accept all forms of advice to improving my pixel art because it will probably be helpful for me since I just started.

To start, I'm not too happy with how this turned out (especially that grass, and the colour of that cloud thing). Advice and constructive criticism will be very much appreciated.

Also, it's kind of blurry because this was from a screenshot I took of my art. I currently am using the aseprite trial version because I want to use it and see if pixel art is for me. So maybe sometime in the future I'll buy it, but for now, I'll use the trial version. Sorry for the blurriness, but it might stay that way for some time.