#I have not managed to track down a copy of that conscience-qualia post #but in the process I *did* come across *this* #AO3 #juxtaposition #music #my past self has good taste #(I am aware that this post will be a pain to archive but I think it’s worth it)
Higgledy-piggledy
unparliamentary
green parrots quarrel
outside in the trees
Squawking out epithets
uncomplimentary
Squads of unmannerly
Oversized peas.
i loved this poem so much that i memorized it and to this day i sometimes mutter it under my breath to keep my welding tempo even
Tags:
#this isn’t quite a that-one-post-with-the-thing but it *is* a surprised-I-haven’t-already-reblogged-this #poetry #birds #my past self has good taste #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Tags:
#Middle Earth #language #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #my past self has good taste #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
I hate the pivot to video I hate listening to some morons obnoxious voice and watching their stupid face to receive a message that could have been conveyed in 45s and 1kb in 3min and 150mb instead I hate being thrall to the tyranny of linear viewing rather than glancing around the file I hate not being able to copypaste and I hate ppl playing this withering vampiric drain on my finite quantities of attention and patience and capacity for analysis as some heroic blow for the rights of the disabled as though they are not equally being victimised by it
I hate the tacit assumption that I’m supposed to form some sort of parasocial relationship with a goddamned software troubleshooting guide because apparently that’s what conventional wisdom in marketing says brings in the dollars these days
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #but also #yes this #that excuse for communication called speech #my past self has good taste
Nagas. Who knew they’d be so fun to draw? Especially with their colors. Also I really like doing the henna designs.
This is so cute and the pose is so deeply relatable that I immediately said, out loud, “They’re NOT FOR YOU, they’re for the PTA meeting!” and my husband nodded sagely and said “That stands for People That are Anacondas” and now I can’t stop laughing.
Tags:
#…huh‚ apparently I’ve never actually reblogged this #snakes #nagas #art #adorable #my past self has good taste
[footage of the inside of an ordinary Eastern-European home, taken with a handheld phone camera, the man filming is walking from the living room to the back door of the house]
man, narrating in russian: Every fucking year, this time of the year, the pond at my backyard gets infested. What do ponds get infested with? Frogs? Poisonous weeds? Geese? No. Not my pond.
[The man opens the back door, stepping out into a garden. Three or four nude, human-like figures dash from the borders of a pond back into the water.]
man: Rusalki! I don’t know where they come from or how they get here, and I can’t afford to hire an exterminator every year. I can’t let my cat outside anymore. Last year a rusalka managed to drown a whole deer in my pond, the stench was unbearable.
[He walks as he speaks, approaching the pond. There are several eerily beautiful female beings peering at him from under the surface, their long hair floating in the murky water. Their eyes are gleaming in an unhuman way. The man holding the camera stops to film them.]
man, calm and deadpan: What the fuck are all of you staring at. Get jobs or something.
[One of the rusalki, smaller than the others and clearly not a fully matured adult, slowly reaches out of the water with her white, thin hand, grasping his ankle. He appears unconcerned.]
man: You can’t drown me, you little idiot. You’re too small. Shoo!
[A loud thud startles the rusalki, making them scatter. A second thud makes it clear these are the approaching footsteps of something massive. The man turns around and points the camera at what appears to be a house, walking past above the treeline with chicken-like legs]
man, now yelling: IF YOUR HOUSE SHITS ON MY YARD AGAIN I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD-
basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body. that’s basically fine.
if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out.
unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.
Tags:
#a classic work of surrealism that I have apparently never actually reblogged before #fixing that #blood #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
#language #Homestuck #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #my past self has good taste #(I don’t think all of these have the right number of x’s though) #(having three straight vowels in ”inclusionist” could be explained by having guessed that word wrong) #(but what could ”bxcxxxsx” be in that context but ”because”?)
Brinens and Things 