#OP walked right into that one #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
#Young Wizards #fanfic #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick #(so I’ve been organising my bookmarks today and found this buried in a to-be-read) #(turns out it’s actually very short) #(also hilarious)
2/2 But Brad probably asks a lot of questions initially to try to get to know Alfred, like: “How do you stay in shape? You’re pretty spry for an old dude.” Let’s assume Alfred is ex military in this version, so that’s his explanation, and Brad accepts it. Until Brad sees a misplaced batarang or tool from a fight he completely missed, and all the pieces fall into place. He can’t stay quiet. “Guys, don’t freak out, but… I think Alfred might be Batman.” Bruce nearly chokes on his coffee.
Oh I LOVE the idea that Brad is suspicious of Alfred.
Concept: one of the inspirations for Batman is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1920 play The Bat. It features a masked bat-themed criminal. Her work has remained popular in Gotham because it fits the noir aesthetic. Her novel The Door is also the origin of the “the butler did it” trope.
Maybe Brad has never met an actual honest-to-god butler before and his only exposure to them has been through pop culture, so he just kind of assumes Alfred is quietly scheming and hiding a dark secret.
That’s way smarter than my Brad & Alfred headcanon:
Alfred calls Brad ‘Master Bradley’. Brad keeps trying to get him to stop, as much because he’s literally got “Brad” on his birth certificate as because of discomfort with the form of address; but Alfred cannot bring himself to address a living human being as Brad.
Tags:
#Batman #fanfic #headcanons #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update
my best OC is Brad Wayne, Bruce’s illegitimate biological child via a totally normal woman he had a fling with when he was younger and didn’t stay in touch with
Brad grew up a totally normal kid, went to college, joined a frat, and decided to get in touch with Bruce, who now has an awkward situation on his hands
now the other Batkids have to deal with fucking Brad Wayne, whose normalacy is absolutely insufferable… he tells Dick to try yoga and suggests that Tim will sleep better if he gets more exercise… Bruce goes out of town and Brad decides it’s time to throw a house party with his frat friends
All of Brad’s Bat-siblings are absolutely unprepared to deal with him. They can’t handle it. They can’t even hate him properly, even Damien, because he’s just… he’s not even… he’s just Some Guy™️!
They’re all braced for the inevitable reveal that he’s a villain, an imposter, or an interloper there to usurp the Wayne fortune or spy on Batman. They have all sorts of plans to foil his schemes and the only thing they’re not able to prepare for is the fact that he’s just. Brad. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s not a saint, either—his problems are just so mundane, so ordinary.
They TRY to understand what his life is like, but how are they supposed to relate to someone who doesn’t text back because he’s hungover or his phone died, not because he’s tied up in a death trap somewhere being menaced by someone in a Halloween costume?
No one’s ever tried to ritually sacrifice him before and it shows.
Oh he has no idea. Brad didn’t grow up in Gotham and isn’t really familiar with its culture, so he thinks it’s an ordinary city with ordinary problems (presumably there’s still a concept of ‘ordinary’ in the DCU).
When someone tries to tell him he laughs it off. Maybe one of his friends asks him about the popular rumor that Bruce Wayne is Batman, but he’s never even contemplated the possibility. Later he’s trying to coax Dick into playing beer pong and loudly tells the story to party guests as a funny anecdote. He thinks the whole concept of Batman is hilarious. Maybe he makes up stories about seeing Batman to impress his family and make himself sound cool.
Eventually though some bad guy who wants a huge ransom is going to kidnap Brad. What happens then? Does Batman call in a favor to one of the other members of the Justice League or does Damien go out and rescue his brother and tell him he’s the most useless of all his brothers because he’s so ordinary? Because you know if anyone is going to blab it’s going to be Damien.
Brad gets kidnapped and Steph and/or Cass rescue him in costume.
Later, in Wayne Manor, he tells his family all about how the Batgirls were totally flirting with him and how he managed to take out a few of the bad guys all by himself.
Brad Wayne: “Hey, do you guys think Batman fucks? Like, you think he has ever gotten laid?”
Dick, stiffly: “Um. Yes. I think so.”
Brad: “Really? Guy sounds like a turbo-virgin to me. I mean, he fights crime in a fursuit! Come on!”
Tim: “I have it on reasonable authority that Batman fucks. Unfortunately.”
Steph: “Hey, Damian. Penny for your thoughts?”
Tags:
#Batman #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #kidnapping cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick?
The Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human EXperimentation (or “BRUHEX”) was founded in late 20XX in response to a crisis. Medical discovery had hit something of a brick wall, and everyone knew it.
The human body was just too much of a mess to map. Evolution had been working for millennia upon millennia to obfuscate its source code- after all, for all those years, anything trying to force changes to the human body was reliably not the sort of thing that had the human body’s best interests at heart. Advanced machine learning algorithms made a few discoveries here and there, but those “discoveries” were themselves too opaque for humans to understand except as black boxes. The field was stagnating.
One major reason for this was that medicine was unlike engineering. You could take apart a machine, hypothesize about how it worked, and put it back together again, no problem. If you broke the machine by testing your hypotheses, you could always get a new one. Couldn’t do that with people- breaking a person was a very serious problem that you couldn’t risk. It severely limited what would-be human engineers could do to investigate the workings of their subjects.
You couldn’t really justify it. There was no way you could put a positive spin on it. If you wanted to get anything done, you couldn’t be the good guy. So, acknowledging this, they named themselves the Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human Experimentation.
No one knows exactly how BRUHEX started. If we did, they’d have been easier to stamp out. But this underground organization appeared, and began kidnapping the homeless and mentally ill and experimenting on them, and of course world governments did their best to bring these criminals to justice.
They proved to be like cockroaches.
It’s often hypothesized they had some kind of official backing, or a technological head start- anything to explain how difficult they were to wipe out. A BRUHEX cell would be wiped out, all the signs would point to them having been the ringleaders, and then a week later they’d surface again. It started with police raids, then army response, then bombings, then finally an incident with a nuclear strike which marked the end of that phase of history.
After ten years of escalating warfare that took a substantial civilian toll, governments found being tough-on-BRUHEX to be decreasingly popular. The public was split- both because of the destruction caused by the crackdowns, and because of the life-saving medical advances released to the public by BRUHEX operatives.
It wasn’t the sort of controversy a politician could use to rile up their base. It cut across party lines. Surely, it was for the greater good, right? But they called themselves the Bureau of Ridiculously Unethical Human Experimentation! So clearly they had to know the ends weren’t justifying the means! But was it worth it to shut them down? Clearly not, because it hadn’t worked! But clearly it must be, because of the horrors they perpetrated! And shouldn’t their discoveries be banned, suppressed, removing their incentive to make them? Or would that be condemning poor little Sally McRaredisease to a painful death that could’ve been avoided?
Politicians learned to avoid discussing the subject.
Governments would still fund occasional rescue missions (small things, organized by volunteers, cheap enough to put in the budget without raising hackles), because it was generally agreed that Something Should Be Done, but no one was going to risk their career Doing Something, not after how disastrously it’d gone for everyone else who’d tried Doing Something.
So you’re a good citizen, of course. Your [family member] has been kidnapped off the streets by men in black lab coats, naturally. You have a small endowment to by supplies to rescue her, and a few friends willing to help. BRUHEX isn’t going to miss one measly test subject, so they’re not going to do anything too drastic to stop you- but y’know, you’ll need to get past a few enhanced supersoldiers and biohazard traps and locked doors and the like.
What? No, yeah, this was totally a setup for a cyberpunk dungeon crawl; I don’t know where else you thought I was going with this.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #murder cw #torture cw #medical cw #kidnapping cw #(I *think* the thing the last sentence is getting at is that it *seems* as if this post is leading up to a pun?) #(writing this as one long excuse for a pun is the sort of thing Benedict would do) #(but this is good too!)
i was totally about to reblog this gushing about how gorgeous and then i saw that you tagged me!
there is (afaics on mobile) a teeeeensy bit too much green in the blue to be Actually Me but otherwise very acceptable, 9/10 for accuracy but 12.65/10 for Just Plain Gorgeous. like seriously those markings are The Latest Chic and if they’re not then you me and the Fasiion Industry have got some Talkems to’do
honestly on further examination I like the head shape Rather A Lot and the transition from turquoise into yellow around the jawline is A+. i have always liked that kind of colour pattern (upper body and upper jaw one colour/belly and lower jaw another colour) but wouldn’t have thought of this colour combo, it’s actually unexpectedly aesthetic.
also he is a very nice example of nature doing a sparkledog well. lots of busy complex patterns but it never looks like too much.
love the idea that infernal is a language tieflings don’t have to learn, they just have it built in from birth, and they quickly discover that they can say anything they want out loud in infernal, since almost nobody else understands any of it.
thieves have thieves’ cant, tieflings have the secret language of satan
Yes, good post, I love this. In my head it’s kind of a subconscious language at first. Babies might babble some words in infernal, but as they learn their parents’ language, that’s gonna be what they use to communicate. Kids might shout in infernal during emotional outbursts without quite knowing what they said or where they learned it. As a young tief grows up they will grasp and truly understand the language they have inside them more and more, along with learning to control and understand their inherent magic.
hmm i need to digest this before i buy it and inevitably start conlanging it. a system of language with much, much stronger and more specific universals is a really interesting concept. imagine the breadth of individual variation
(until now i’ve treated tieflings who know infernal as, like, people who learned a heritage language. which really resonated with me as a first gen immigrant)
Okay, so. It’s not done digesting yet, but I’ve developed a couple notes on one possible way to do this:
Vocabulary emerges from the kiki-boba effect turned up to eleven. Instead of associating a bunch of characteristics with one sound like we do (e.g. /k/ is hard, cold, metallic, and spiky, while /b/ is soft, warm, organic, and round), they associate a single concept with a sequence of sounds. Which, well, is how vocabulary works anyway when you’ve learned a language, but in Infernal language acquisition the associations are fuzzy and lead to…
Polysemy and autantonyms. Consider the word “dust” in English. It’s a noun, but it’s also a verb, and the verb can mean to add dust, or to remove dust. Infernal vocabulary items all have a whole bunch of meanings they can acquire, but they only acquire a subset of them for any given speaker. So one speaker might have “dust” just mean the noun, but another speaker might have it also mean “to add dust to”, while another speaker has just “to remove dust from”. So two Infernal speakers might have the same words as antonyms of each other! And unlike in English, this effect applies to every single vocabulary item. A linguist studying Infernal can make a list of, let’s say 600-odd word roots and all the different meanings they tend to acquire. Any particular Infernal speaker’s idiolect has the territory of meaning partitioned and parceled out between these roots in a unique way, but not unique enough for Infernal speakers to not understand each other.
Since the kiki-boba effect isn’t strong at all in case marking for human languages but word order effects are pretty strong, I think, if we’re imitating human language acquisition, it makes the most sense to have Infernal as a strongly isolating, analytic language. Combined with the word class flexibility described above, this makes it grammatically similar to Classical Chinese or Yoruba. Because I am unoriginal and have studied too many Papuan languages (and just love this feature anyway), I’m gonna say that serial verb constructions are a universal feature of Infernal. This can get a little hairy if many words can be both verbs and nouns, but that’s part of the fun.
Since SVO is the most common word order, I’m gonna go with SVO(VO…) for the word order.
Since language acquisition otherwise works like human language acquisition just with universals that are several orders of magnitude stronger, Infernal still develops dialects and regional variation. Areas more densely populated with Infernal speakers will be more linguistically homogeneous, while more sparsely populated areas will have more unique idiolects. That scenario that @koolkevk wrote about where two Infernal speakers who are siblings grow up together thinking it’s their secret made-up language is totally possible and in fact probably very common among tiefling siblings (but probably not extremely common, because there are probably tiefling siblings who are part of tiefling communities with their own dialects).
This has also more broadly inspired me to think about alternate ways languages could arise in a fantasy world, rather than just the usual way of getting cooked up through people’s language lazily drifting across the vast world of possible languages over the course of millennia and millennia. What other ways can you have? Well…
Everyone knows Arcane is just an inexplicable programming language embedded into the universe that you have to replicate if you want magic to happen when you say things. Its phonology is luckily lax enough to be able to be picked up by all sorts of races with a wide variety of phonological capabilities. I quite like Sam Hughes’s take on it in his online novel Ra.
Primordial is actually just thermal noise, the only thing all elementals share. They put absolutely no effort into communicating using it; they exert a passive effect where the noise somehow “learns” the information that one elemental wants to share, and assembles itself into a pattern that is personally meaningful to another elemental and gets that information across. To “learn” Primordial, you need to have a permanent enchantment cast on you that allows you to passively influence thermal noise in this way.
Celestial is an Ithkuil-like conlang that was designed by a large committee of gods. Its source text is bound in a holy book in a sanctum somewhere in the Celestial planes. If you alter the source text, all Celestial speakers will have to alter their language accordingly. (Many will do so automagically, because they are enchanted to speak in whatever language the book says.) Breaking into the sanctum to make an important change could be a fun adventure. For example, imagine that you need to change the ruling of a Celestial court to be semantically ambiguous, because it’s imprisoned one of your party members or something. (What language is this book written in? Well, Celestial, obviously. Good luck.)
Abyssal is not actually a language. It’s whatever grunts, screams, and body language you can use to convey your message to a demon. Its linguistic universals are the same linguistic universals that mammals have when communicating with each other. Do you know how to communicate with your cat/dog? Great, you can figure out Abyssal, too.
Dark Speech is a telepathic language, or more precisely an empathic language. The only way to evoke the correct telepathic signals to “speak” it is to voice aloud your most credible insecurities, fears, and intentions of self-destruction in a way where you know someone will understand you. It doesn’t matter what language you use for that; you point is that you have to authentically claim darker and yet darker thoughts out loud. The telepathic flavor of your pain is what communicates the information. Because everyone’s pain is different, everybody can only speak a small subset of Dark Speech. The pairs of people who can communicate the best using it are people who share similar kinds of pain, and the individual people who communicate the best using it are people who have experienced many differenty kinds of pain. The psychological toll of speaking it destroys all speakers eventually, except for fiends. Unlike other entries in this list, Dark Speech could actually be subject to significant variation and language change if it had enough speakers, and should arguably be classified as a whole language type rather than just one language or even just one primary language family. In practice, however, its speaking community is so small that there is only one Dark Speech worth learning. (It is, nevertheless, constantly evolving, like human languages.) (I don’t really need to say this because people naturally avoid this sort of thing, but do not try conlanging this IRL. It is meant to be psychologically destructive to speak; designing it would be exponentially more so. It would require you to consider all possible traumas that people can undergo and assign semantics and grammar to them. If you have conlanged it and not caused yourself significant psychological harm, either you’ve done it wrong or you’re incapable of… something. Regardless, this could be an actual language, for people who are capable of discerning complex emotions from speech. I guess you could consider it if you’re running a death cult or something.)
I also have half-baked ideas about languages that are actually the genetic code of living, symbiotic entities that connect people (and “speech” is these entities having sex), languages that arise when a certain astronomically- or meteorologically-obsessed species sees a pattern in the stars or sunspots or pulsar waves or clouds or wind or whatever and bases its communication around it, languages that elven children acquire first in their written form from patterns in tree bark and are later taught pronunciation rules for, and are transmitted by people carving the patterns they want their kids to see in the tree bark, oligosynthetic languages that arise from ephemeral gatherings of a particularly linguistically intelligent species, where they construct a new language for each gathering based on just a couple linguistic universals they all share but also based on geographically local traits…
Tags:
#language #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
I had the weirdest dream last night where it was about a next big meme trend, and it was basically another this vs that meme but it was “Lock screen vs Home screen” whereas the lock screen was depicted as something formal and relatively uninteresting like a businessman sitting at a desk while the home screen was always something chaotic and insane like gorillas fighting alligators and it. People would take sides online on which person they were more like, home screen or lock screen and it made absolutely no sense and I
Reality: The lock screen is full of high-contrast detail (currently a picture of me and the gf), the home screen is the lowest-contrast default background (currently a space pic) I can find so I can read app names.
I did not know until just now that it was possible to have the lock screen and home screen be different images, and I intend to change nothing about my phone now that I know.
(rolling waves on a body of water too large to see the edges, just as it has been for nearly five years [link])
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #high context jokes #effective altruism #dreams #reply via reblog #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #the more you know
A fun sciencey set up for an AU I’ve been kicking around for a while. It’s basically just a Gravity Falls/Invader Zim crossover.
I’m calling it Camp Mystery, or Camp Mystery AU.
Tags:
#crossovers #nsfw text? #Gravity Falls #Invader Zim #comic #art #fanart #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”unless…it doesn’t”)
Brinens and Things 