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i am going to kiss wikipedia
Wikipedia is a bunch of servers in like a basement
boobs touching, sloppy style, with tongue, etc ..
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It’s finally Smaugust and I’ve got some new wallpapers for ya! Enjoy.
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i love bisexuality and being bisexual and loving people bisexually and my bisexuality having an effect on my gender and also being bisexual. i love it
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noo don’t cry about july ending and the time passing, just remember the july poem :)
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brooo it was so fucked up at the club last night bro the dj was playing straight bangers like “babbling brook ft. deep woods” and “mourning dove remix” and everyone on the dance floor stood still completely at peace with and within themselves, all still trees in the envelope of the world. at some point in the night i sat and contemplated the beauty of all things it was sick as hell man
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the thing about the black sails finale is that dead/alive is a false dichotomy, which is why there lingers this need to vote for a secret third thing. it has roots in the same false dichotomy of victim/perpetrator that silver cannot get himself out of, that eleanor cannot get herself out of, that silver tries to put madi into, that max understands and weaponizes, that vane crawls out of at his very end. the answer is that james escapes the narrative, or rather the narrative can no longer contain him. the question of james flint or james mcgraw is a false dichotomy that can no longer contain him. he becomes the secret third thing, or is becoming it, in season four. he is unmade because he is removed. as far as the story is concerned, he is dead, because the storyteller can no longer conceive of what he has become.
the thing about schrodinger’s flint is that if the storyteller could look at him, he’d be dead or alive. silver refuses to look. silver, who refuses to allow himself to be seen. whereas the other characters were drawn to the empire’s first tool, violence, silver chose its second, erasure. he has erased his past so that empire could not touch him, is it any surprise that his instinct is to erase his present/future in madi/flint as well?
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i will ALWAYS clap my hands excitedly and lean forward in my seat when someone tells a character to “keep your dog on a leash” only for it to turn out they’re referring to another person
the way it reframes the entire relationship dynamic between the two people being addressed. the way wilful loyalty becomes hopeless devotion. the way aggression and violence goes from honorable and rational to bestial and instinctual. the ways faith and trust intersect with codependency and reliance. the questions about power and who wields it in the relationship it opens up. the way it functions as both an insult and an expression of intimidation, of fearful submission.
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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
Ah, forever and ever one of the greatest bits ever put to film.
Needs the first part! It was where I, as a wee lad of 16, first heard the words “Anarchosyndicalist Commune”
I once titled a uni history paper “Come and see the Violence inherent in the system. Help, help! I’m being repressed”
My prof gave me a bonus mark for including that quote in the title.
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Boring people the second they see something a little creative,silly,experimental,or even just a little confussing: UHMM…⁉️ WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST WATCH 😂 WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂🤣😂😭🤣😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂🤣😂😭😭🤣😂😭😂
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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]):
“Torgo Nudho” hokas bezy. Sa me broji beri. Ji broji ez bezo sene stas qimbroto. Kuny iles ji broji meles esko mazedhas derari va buzdar. Y Torgo Nudho sa ji broji ez bezy eji tovi Daenerys Jelmazmo ji teptas ji derve.
That was my translation of this English line:
“Grey Worm” gives this one pride. It is a lucky name. The name this one was born with was cursed. That was the name he had when he was taken as a slave. But Grey Worm is the name this one had the day Daenerys Stormborn set him free.
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:
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When Finneas O’Connell said “I lost a friend like keys in a sofa” and when Ocean Vuong said “I miss you more than I remember you” and when Richard Siken said “this is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” And when Maggie Nelson said “haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?” And when Hannah Hassler said “I make my ramen the way a friend taught me in eleventh grade…I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever loved” and when Stephen Chbosky said “things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop…” and when I said “Last week I left my necklace on a bus in Riverside and I wonder if you’ll find it when I leave you in the place where all the lost things go.”
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sorry for not answering messages for three thousand years i have. Stew. in place of a brain. you know how it is
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One thing I feel people miss about lord of the rings is that it’s sort of……….post-apocalyptic?
Like– the world already ended, a long time ago, and the characters are surrounded by the ruins of dead countries. They spend most of their time journeying through places that are either abandoned (Moria) soon to be abandoned (Rivendell/Lorien) or half-destroyed and falling into decay (Rohan/Gondor.) The villains are creatures that Used to be Human; I feel like Lotr’s orcs/ringwraiths have more in common with zombies than they do with DnD-style orcs, because they’re a state that “normal” people enter when they’re corrupted by a supernatural force.
Even the Shire is surrounded by ruins– the ruins of watchtowers, the ruins of the old Northern Kingdom, the ruined city near the Grey Havens. The people around there have an idiom “when the king comes back” that means the same thing as an idiom like “when pigs fly”– “when a completely ridiculous improbable thing happens.” They’re so used to the disintegrated state of the world that the idea of a central government is fairy-tale-like and bizarre. They have their little mayors and thains; they don’t need anything else.
So yeah! I see people try to “modern-real-world- au” versions of Hobbiton by making it “a peaceful suburb” but to me, a modern au version of Hobbiton would be more like…….
You are a hobbit.
You don’t know much history, but you understand that there were Wars a long time ago that destroyed a great amount of life on earth.
You live in a little hole in the ground. You don’t know that long ago these holes used to be called “bunkers;” you decorate them with flowers.
When you want to say that something won’t happen, you’ll sarcastically say things “lol yeah SURE that will happen! And tomorrow pigs will fly, Parliament will come back into session, there will be a president in the White House, there will be a prime minister making speeches, and diplomats will intercede between all of them! ha! XD”
If you journey even a little outside of your home, you’ll find the ruins of old cities and skyscrapers. There are messages in the ruins that are written in languages you don’t speak. Human beings used to live here; they don’t anymore.
And you’re not supposed to leave the Shire because sometimes you’ll meet the things that used to be human, but aren’t anymore.
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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)








