#lexical earth

[scribe-of-stories]

Smith of Masks: An Old Friend

[Urban Fantasy/Nior-esq/690 words] @flashfictionfridayofficial

Ashley was on vacation, a sudden windfall of canceled family plans left her free and halfway across the world. So it fell on me to man the office. Or maybe the term was 'to wyrd' the office? Haunt? Yeah, it fell on me to haunt the office. Not that I minded it. She deserved the break, and the community knew that I could use one as well.

My office building was an unassuming place, but it had grown stranger since I became aware. Used to be my office neighbors were lawyers and office workers. These days they were petty mages and alchemists. Though there was still a lawyer kicking around, but she had stopped hiding her horns. I had thought to share a lunch with her, if the day was slow enough.

Sadly that didn't end up being the case.

Smith and Byrne Investigation Agency was scrawled across the fogged class of my office door. The locks were simple, the wards more complex. Which made the fact that someone was already standing inside all the more worrying.

Unnervingly perfect in one too many ways. Red hair and an amount of Irish descent now mixed with the intoxicating delight of Fae physiology. It failed to compel me now just as it had back when we first met.

“Smith, a pleasure to see you again,”

Annabelle’s tone was disarming, words an enticement. I wondered which part of me she was referring to: the Smith as it is written on my door, or the Smith of Masks. I doubted she even knew there was a difference. Some nights I might agree.

I closed the door behind me, made my way to a bookshelf, and chose one at random. The pages had words this time, but it didn't relieve me any.

The faeling chuckled with a lifted hand to her mouth. A measured set of movements. “Ah, you remember our first meeting.”

“Hard to forget your first encounter with the supernatural,” I brought the book with me to my desk and relaxed into it. Technically it wasn't my first, but no need for her to know that. “You can cut the court act.”

Her soft features and mannerisms melted away ever so slightly to something more natural. The amused smile turned coy and a touch smug. Fucking courteers.

“Ashley's on vacation, why are you here?”

The amusement in her eyes deepend, “You're the investigator, read the narrative.”

Fucking hate Faes. Acting like they were in control all the time, holding all the cards. It was even more annoying that they often were.

We shared a moment of annoyed silence while I stared at her. I wanted to see if she would hand over the information if I didn't answer; but I was also taking the time to put the pieces together. She held her tongue, and my own thoughts were fighting to leave my skull.

“Your family ends up canceling their plans for a get together in their homeland, but Ashley's calendar was already cleared and her tickets paid for by then. She texts me this morning that she landed safely, and shortly after you show up at our office.

“I'm guessing there was no planned family vacation, just you pulling strings to get Ashley away from here or to somewhere you've already made safe. I'm reading that you have a job for me, and it's something you wanted to keep your dear sister away from.”

“And I've come to the best paranormal investigator this side of the Mississippi for help,” Annabelle took a seat across from me and folded herself up into a proper, courtly, posture.

I got out my notepad, ripped the pages from the last investigation off of it, and settled in for another job. “First things first, the fees. Though half of this office's investigators are gone I'll be asking for our usual price, considering the circumstances.”

Her false softness returned and she put on a sad tone like a clown puts on makeup. “Oh? No favors for an old friend?”

#lexical earth #Flash Fiction Friday #Flash Fiction #writeblr #writers on tumblr #samuel smith #Smith of Masks #So happy to finally bring myself to participate in this again #And very satisfied with how this scene came out #My mind is tempted to write more parts to this to finish up the narrative #But I can't let myself be distracted just yet #Annabelle Byrne is a terrible friend to have but a great sister

[cheshiire-warper]

Image id: Two lexegender flags, both have 7 even horizontal stripes. The first is colored, from top to bottom, tangerine, strawberry pink, pink, white, pink, strawberry pink, and tangerine. In the middle is a black arrow pointing up. The second is colored, from top to bottom, aquamarine, electric blue, dark blue, black, dark blue, electric blue, and aquamarine. In the middle is a white arrow pointing down. /end id

Dopelexic [left]

Gender related to, or best described by, the word "Dope"!

Nopelexic [right]

Gender relatef to, or best described by, the word "Nope"!

〰

Color Meanings

Both are based on the Dope or Nope channel logo

Entomology

Dope + -lexic

Nope + -lexic

〰

@lexegender-archival

Image id: Lavender banner with black text saying "Read pinned for BYF. Anti-endo/tulpa or MAP/Pedo DNI. Do not purposefully recoin/reclaim. Our terms can be used by anyone." /end id

#𝄡 — coining #extra clever earth bound spirit ;; queued #mogai friendly #mogai coining #mogai flag #liom coining #gender coining #liom gender #liom #lexicgender #lexic #lexegender #dopelexic #nopelexic

[max1461]

I have a lot of thoughts about epistemology and the nature of procedural knowledge. Studying linguistics really impresses upon you just the sheer amount of human knowledge that is procedural and implicit. Languages are these huge, ridiculously complex systems, and even when it comes to the most thoroughly documented language in human history (English), you can still make an entire career documenting as-yet-unknown minutiae of some corner of a corner of the system. It's very difficult to impress upon non-linguists just how big and ill-understood languages are.

There is no book which explains the whole of English grammar. No one on earth knows the complete rule-set of English grammar. Not even for one dialect, not even for one single speaker. No one on earth could write a comprehensive treatise on English pronunciation. We do not know how English works. We do not know how any language works.

And yet, these systems are, in their entirety, already stored in the mind of every native speaker.

When it comes to synchronic information, I literally already know everything there is to know about my dialect of English. I know the timing of every articulation, the exact rules for verb and auxiliary and quantifier placement, the phonology, semantics, syntax, the lexical variation, the registers, all of it. I can deploy it effortlessly while I am thinking about something else. I can form reams of perfectly grammatical English sentences without a second thought. I can deploy the most arcane rules of wh-movement and quantifier raising and whatever else. With no effort at all.

Tens of thousands of people having been making careers trying to document these things, not for my exact dialect but for varieties essentially the same as mine, for 60 years in earnest. And they aren't close to done. And I already know it all. And so do they! They already know it too! The hard part is accessing it, putting it down on paper. That requires experimentation, systematic empirical investigation—science.

So what this has really impressed on me is how much of human knowledge is procedural. How much of it is known only in the doing. I'd wager that's the significant majority of what we know.

This is related to two thoughts that I have.

The first is about the value of unbroken lines of cultural inheritance. With language, the difference between native speakers and second language learners is stark. I think it's safe to say, per current research, that someone who learns a language in adulthood will simply never have the same command of it as someone who learned it in childhood. There are a variety of tests which consistently distinguish native from non-native speakers. You can get very good at a language as an adult learner, good enough for basically all practical needs (except being a spy), but there's a bar your brain just cannot meet.

The unfortunate fact about language is this: if the line of native-speaker-to-child transmission is ever broken, that language is lost. You can try to revive... something, if you want. Like was done with Hebrew in Israel. But it will not be the same language. And not just in the sense that, by the passing of time, all languages inherently change. In a much stronger sense than that. No matter how big a text corpus you have, no matter how well documented the language is, there is an immense body of implicit, undocumented, procedural knowledge that dies when the last native speaker does. And you cannot ever get it back.

I think, often, about the fact that so much human knowledge is procedural, is used and understood and passed on in illegible, difficult to codify ways. I think about the effect that a rapidly changing world has on this body of knowledge. Is it going to be essential for human prosperity? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that losing it will harmless. Certainly I expect much of it to be missed.

The second thought is about an epistemic distinction that I've had in my head for a long time, a distinction I'd like to refer to as that between a science and an art.

An art is any endeavor for which there is an established methodology, an established set of procedures and rules. These rules can be explicit and codified, like the rules of a game, or implicit, like the grammar of a language. They can be absolute or they can be mere guidelines. But in essence, an art is anything you can get good at. Math is quintessentially an art. Football is an art. Ballet is an art. Painting is an art. An art is any endeavor in which procedural knowledge is acquired and channeled and refined and passed on.

Art contrasts with science. A science is any endeavor in which one is shooting blind. Science is the domain of guesswork and trial-and-error. Sciences are those domains that do not lend themself to practice, because... what would you practice at? You cannot get better at science, because science is not about skill. Science is about exploration. It necessarily involves forging your own path, working with odd and faulty tools and odd and faulty ideas, trying to get them to work. Science only exists at the frontiers; when a path is well-tread enough that a body of procedure becomes known and practiced, that path is now art and no longer science.

This distinction is not a taxonomy. Everything we do involves a little bit of art and a little bit of science. Everything involves both a refinement of known skills and an exploration of new avenues. Of course there's a little bit of science in painting, there's quite a lot of science in painting. Every modern and contemporary art museum is full of it! And there's science in math, every once in a while. And there's art in biology and chemistry. Art and science are two modes of engagement, and different endeavors demand them of you in different ways.

Perhaps science is like a glider (you know, from Conway's game of life?), traveling ever outward, and with enough passes over the same area leaving art in its wake. And I think in some sense that all real human knowledge exists as art, that all endeavors capable of producing true insight are either arts or sciences buttressed by a great many supporting arts. Although maybe I'm wrong about this.

I think history is mostly science, and in large part history as a field seems to be on quite solid epistemic footing. So I don't want to convey the idea that science is inherently dubious; clearly from the above description that can't be my position. Nor is art inherently trustworthy—for instance I think jurisprudence is primarily an art, including religious jurisprudence, which of course I don't place any stock in. But I do think I'm getting at something with the idea that there are a range of epistemic benefits to working within an art that one lacks access to in a totally unconstrained science. This is also closely related to my ideas about abstraction and concretization schemes.

Language is an art, one of the oldest arts, but modern linguistics is more or less a science. Like any good science, linguistics has certain arts unique to itself—fieldwork and the comparative method come to mind—but the most vibrant parts of the field at present are science through-and-through. It's a science whose objects of study are arts, and I think maybe that's part of why I've become so aware of this distinction. Or, language is the ur-example of an art, the art from which (if I were to conjecture wildly) I think the cognitive machinery for very many other arts has been borrowed. But I don't really know.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

#navel gazing #linguistics #math

[jasperjv]

Hey. So 2 years ago Connor Lavery's aka khonjin's psychological torture of me reached fever pitch in my psyche and I was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in a severe psychotic breakdown that lasted almost 3 months. Now I'm indexed in his long story of his supposed inexplicable persecution. He thinks me, in my psychotic state, demanding monetary compensation for his gaslighting and harassment, was some kind of attempt at "cancellation" and me throwing a tantrum instead of communicating like an adult. However I deleted my entire social media presence after getting back from the hospital and haven't bothered him since. But he still thinks I did something to him.

The man is dangerous. He believes that the worst sin of mankind is the ego, so he makes it his mission to bully the fuck out of everyone until they have no self-esteem, boundaries of their own, or healthy sense of self whatsoever. The elimination of the ego however is what psychosis is, also unable to suppress the flow of the unconscious, identical to a waking dream. But when that happened to me after 2 years of mind games, he retreated into himself and framed it in the most disgusting way possible. Which you will see.

Embedded here is the first video I made myself specifically on this topic. You will see more details in a more recent video, and follow the trail I put in that video's description to get my full story. For the podcast in particular I would give a content warning for assault, sexual assault, ableism ("saneism"?) and general torture and terror.

There's nothing on God's green earth I could do or say to force him to take me seriously. I have probably half of you people blocked because just seeing anything to do with him would make my blood pressure spike. And it's high enough as-is just due to genetics. Maybe the rest of you might be able to be reached.

I'm so sick of fucking self-centered freaks trying to hold me accountable for actual psychosis because they're so desperate to blame anyone or anything but themselves for their part in tragedy. I really get gaslit about my own psychosis, and forced to prove a negative repeatedly (which we know is a lexical impossibility). I'm handed a blatant double-standard about mental health awareness and basic human decency, when in many cases I desperately need it more than most. Schizophrenia sufferers are 1% of the population. We're dwarfed by most, if not all, other mental illnesses. In this I continue to be thrown alone to the wolves. Sometimes even while being laughed at, it truly feels like. So I feel like I have to do all in my power to help make sure that this happens to fewer people than it would otherwise.

The callouts in 2018, the types of points of persuasion they were trying didn't make sense to me. Maybe this, though, could strike others. I'm more specific about how exactly he destroys people from the inside out. Stay the fuck away from him.

He's scared of losing his financial support from Patreon and ad revenue or whatever. I really, truly felt for that for a long time. But now I know that none of us are obligated to keep his ass afloat. It would be nobody's fault but his own if he didn't even try to heal his fucked up mindset and was just a raging misanthrope nobody wants to deal with. When you get to be my age, you become aware of all the ways to make a living. He could get disability. He could get a factory job, for instance. And that paid me an absurd amount of money. He needs to make up his mind about if he wants to be around people or not. Because he can't keep treating them the way that he does.

Oh, and if you're reading this and you happen to have any social connections with him whatsoever, for the love of God, do not let him put you on the defensive. About anything. Over and over again. It chips away at you. He doesn't have the answers. He doesn't have any objective taste like he desperately wants to think. He doesn't know any wisdoms that you couldn't get from someone who won't talk down to you.

Took me quite a while to convince him of the truth that he is only older than me by only a few months. I needed my hope in humanity and the future in order to not go and end it all. He did not give a fuck. He kept accusing me of lying about not being a naïve teenager. Just for that. Ask any well-adjusted and experienced adult and they will tell you to stay far away from people like that. The motivations that drive them to that behavior and opinion are bad, bad news.

He is intelligent, in the scariest ways. Intelligence of that type allows dysfunctional people like him to fabricate lines of logic that justify and enable the abuse they already sought to do. Literally anything can be justified with just the right kind of logic. Trust your gut. Guard your mind. It's the only one you've got.

He leads an excessively stressful life, creates his own dysfunctional world both inside and around him. I truly believe that this causes him many health problems. I've been having nightmares because of him. And as this built up and weighed heavy on my mind I got a fucking hemorrhoid. It went away very quickly after I made this video.

I'm feeling anxious as I type this. But I have to tell myself that anyone who would continue harassment of me over all the truth I've spoken is not worth my time or space. This isn't for them. It's for me, and it's for people who still have basic respect and empathy left in them.

Yours truly,

"slug"

#khonjin house #supermental #Youtube

[sag-dab-sar]

🌊 Goddess Tiāmat 🌊

🔷 Tiāmat information on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc)

🔷 From A Handbook of Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Near East by Frayne & Stuckey:

Ti'amat, Tâmtum (page 345)

Primeval goddess, personification of the sea, in the Enuma eliš. Attested as early as the Ur III period in a theophoric name of one of the wives of Šu-Sîn. The goddess's name means "Sea" ti'amtu(m). At first, according to the Enuma eliš, Ti'amat's salt waters were co-mingled with those of her husband Apsû, the fresh waters, and together they engendered various deities, including the sky god Anu. Eventually, Ea, Anu's son, slew Apsû. Then, in a heroic battle, Ea's son, Marduk, slew Ti'amat, splitting her body in half. Marduk made one part into the vault of the heavens and the other into the surface of the earth. He made the clouds from her spittle, the mountains from her head, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from her tears. She had bestowed the Tablet of Destiny on Qingu, but when Marduk defeated Qingu, he gave the tablet to Anu. There was a "seat" of Ti'amat in the temple of Marduk in Babylon, and Marduk's "seat" there was named Ti'a mat An Ugaritic lexical text equates Ti'amatu to the Mesopotamian goddess Antu(m). She occurs in an Ugaritic god list as Tihāmātu / Tamatu.

🔷 From Gods Demons & Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamian by Black & Green:

Tiāmat (page 177)

In the unique version of the creation of the gods preserved in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, after the separation of heaven and earth the only entities in existence were Apsû [...] and Tiamat. Apsû personified the fresh subterranean waters and Tiāmat the salt waters: the name is a form of the word tiamtum, 'sea'. Apsû and Tiāmat were envisaged as a male-female pair, although it is said that 'their waters mingled together'. They engendered a line of gods including Anu (An), Anu's son Ea (Enki) and (apparently) other deities, whose activities so disturbed Apsû that he planned to exterminate them (despite Tiāmat's protests). When Ea slew Apsû, Tiāmat determined to be avenged and created eleven monsters [...] with, as her champion, the god Qingu, described as her 'lover'. Eventually, after a heroic contest, Marduk, champion of the younger gods (in the Assyrian version his name is substituted with that of Aššur), defeated the monsters and Qingu and destroyed Tiāmat by splitting her skull with his mace, while standing on her 'lower parts'. He broke her in two 'like a dried fish', using one half to roof the heavens and the other to surface the earth: her breasts formed mountains, Tigris and Euphrates flowed from her eyes, her spittle formed clouds. While in some respects Tiāmat, like other deities, is described in anthropomorphic terms, it is difficult to form a precise picture of how the author of the Epic envisaged her. In other passages it seems to be implied that the salt sea waters were inside her.

Tiāmat's Creatures (pages 177-178)

In the Babylonian Epic of Creation, in order to avenge herself on the younger gods, Tiāmat gives birth to eleven monsters, or groups of monsters (bearing some resemblance to the Slain Heroes defeated by Ningirsu or Ninurta in a story of earlier origin). The eleven are:

the mušmahhu, ušumgallu and bašmu (three types of horned snake)

the mushuššu (a snake-dragon)

the lahamu (possibly identical to Lahmu, the long-haired ‘hero' figure)

the ugallu ('great storm-beast', the lion-demon)

the uridimmu ('raging lion', the lion humanoid)

the girtablullû ('scorpion-man': see scorpion-people)

ūmu dabrūtu ('fierce storms')

kulullû ('fish-man': see merman and mermaid)

kusarikku (a mythical beast probably derived from the bison: see bull man).

All of these are defeated by Marduk (in the Assyrian edition, Aššur) in a great battle. Images of them were placed by Marduk in the apsû (abzu) as a monument to the victory. The creatures of Tiāmat were sometimes invoked in magical incantations [...], and figurines of some of them were among those used in Neo-Assyrian protective magic, as a consequence of which their distinctive iconography can in most cases be determined.

🔷Potential Imagery of Tiāmat

These are academically debated as to whether or not they are Tiāmat but they are possibilities so I've included them. I have increased the contrast in both photos for visibility.

Faience, now cream probably originally glazed, cylinder seal; a standing archer (Marduk?) aims an arrow at a serpent (Tiamat?) with a crested head which rises before him. The figure wears a horizontally-striated robe and lines above his shoulder indicate arrows in a quiver. There are groups of wedges between the figures and above the serpent's coiled tail. Line border at top and bottom. — British Museum Asset Number 159745001

Black or dark brown and pale brown serpentinite cylinder seal in the linear style; a snout-nosed, horned reptile (Tiamat as a dragon?) faces left; the upper third of it's long, cross-hatched body rises vertically from two front paws or hands, one of which is raised; the remainder of the body runs around the bottom of the seal and supports three figures; there are no hind legs. A bearded god (Ninurta?) runs along the reptile's body towards the left; he wears a feather-topped head-dress and a vertically-striated, tiered and fringed open robe over a fringed kilt and has crossed, wedge-tipped quivers on his back. His arms are stretched out on either side, and in his right hand he holds a six-pronged thunderbolt below which is a rhomb, while in his left he holds two arrows. Behind the god, and advancing towards the left, is a smaller bearded god in a horned (?) head-dress with a long, tasselled streamer or necklace counterweight hanging down behind; he wears an open robe similar to that of the running god and holds a spear before him in both hands. On the tail of the reptile, with her back to the smaller god, stands an even smaller goddess, who wears a feather-topped, horned head-dress with a short tassel or necklace counterweight hanging behind, and a belted, vertically striated, tiered robe; she holds her arms open to seize the snout of the reptile. To the left of her head is a small globe-with-rays and to the right, a crescent. Line borders at top and bottom broken by the running god's head-dress. The seal may illustrate a scene from the epic of creation in which the forces of chaos, led by Tiamat, are defeated by a god representing cosmic order, probably Ninurta. Shiny, some chipping and weathering; note that there is a chip by the smaller god's shoulder and the tassel of his streamer may mask damage. — British Museum Asset Number 159863001

🔷Enūma Eliš

The myth she appears in. It was a very political myth used to justify Marduk as chief deity and therefore the government.

Read it:

L W King Translation from 1902

Translation on Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives (ETANA)

Compiled translation primarily based on E.A Speiser

E.A Speiser's translation is available in The Ancient Near East an Anthology of Texts and Pictures by James Pritchard page 28. Available on Internet Archive Library (accounts are completely free and you can borrow books for an hour at a time)

Interesting analysis of how it represented the creation of government

Analysis from Treasures of Darkness by Thorkild Jacobsen also available on Internet Archive Library

🔷Please Avoid

Due to such little info being available people often turn to other sources, as you try to research yourself I ask you to keep these in mind as warning signs.

⚠️The book "Grimoire of Tiāmat" is bullshit, and from a Mesopotamian religious point of view completely dangerous

Anything that uses her with dragon magick & neo-pagan/witch sources in general

Feminist & Jungian sources, they twist Goddesses' stories for their, usually westernized, agenda, and preconceived archetypes

-not audio proof read sorry-

#polytheism #paganism #tiamat #dragon #goddess #levpag #tiāmat #im putting that tag because shes just slapped with that label #landof2rivers #deity resource

[rockislandadultreads]

Book Recommendations: More Geology Picks

In anticipation of our upcoming 150th anniversary rock dedication, check out these books about geology! The unveiling of our engraved rock will be held next Monday, November 14th, at 10am at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 17th Street. This was the location of the Rock Island Public Library in 1872, which was also the first public library to open in Illinois! Everyone is welcome to join us for this special event.

Geopedia by Marcia Bjornerud

This volume is a trove of geologic wonders and the evocative terms that humans have devised to describe them. Featuring dozens of entries, this illustrated compendium is brimming with lapidary and lexical insights that will delight rockhounds and word lovers alike. With whimsical illustrations by Haley Hagerman, it is a mix of engaging and entertaining facts about how the earth works, how it has coevolved with life over billions of years, and how our understanding of the planet has deepened over time.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane 

This volume delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time - from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come - Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

World of Geology by Tony Waltham

So many of the world's great natural attractions are features of their geology, with landforms that range from awe-inspiring to simply beautiful.  Within these pages, photographs and their accompanying texts offer just a taste of the visual delights within the world of geology.

Rock, Bone, and Ruin by Adrian Currie

The "historical sciences" - geology, paleontology, and archaeology - have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In this volume, Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science.

#geology #science #natural science #nonfiction #library books #reading recommendations #reading recs #book recommendations #book recs #TBR pile #tbr #to read #booklr #book tumblr

[c0rpseductor]

have spent 14 hours doing conlang shit. kept trying to take breaks but they’d only last for a few minutes bc i’d keep thinking about conlanging. i’m still thinking about it.

let this set the stage for you. i’ve been awash in phonemes and syntax and lexical bullshit all damn night, okay. i’m no linguist, but i’m doing what i can here. for fourteen hours — Four Teen Earth Hours — i work on developing an alphabet representing a distinct set of phonemes, how loan words are altered to fit that linguistic schema, how loan words taken out of the language are frequently mangled, a set of TWENTY ONE!!! pronouns that indicate social standing and how they’re additionally used as modifiers, i am bragging a little but mostly i want you to understand i barely know the terminology for what i’m doing here and i’m working my ass off to get down something interesting.

such is the work i have been doing on zygerrian. nobody cares about zygerria; it’s a bit planet in clone wars and all the worldbuilding sucks. i’ve done a bunch of shit with it from the ground up purely to honor my catboy OC and give some texture to his backstory.

i think, man, thrawn has a lot going on, right? certainly more people are interested in the chiss. it’s a shame there’s just not any significant cheunh in canon. what if i did a conlang of cheunh as well? While I’m Taking A Break From 14 Hours Of Zygerrian, Why Don’t I See If Anyone Else Has Done Some Work On Cheunh? (i think i may need to get tested for adhd)

so i google cheunh. first real result is from wattpad. sigh. ok. open it up.

it’s a poorly constructed cipher of english with no underlying logic

#honestly i wish i would’ve just done a poorly constructed cipher of english with no underlying logic. Jesus. #(says that as if i’m not having fun with baby’s first foray into conlanging) #nothing is inherently WRONG with ciphers either. it’s just like. such whiplash

[soul--forge]

🌙 Ontological Minorities

Disclaimer: This is not a mandatory label, nor is it a replacement for pre-existing terms. It is simply meant to fill a lexical gap. This term is also subject to change if something more suitable is found at any point.

"Ontological Minority"

(OM for short) a term to refer to "anyone with a self-determined identity on any axis of alternative* ontology."

(*alternative to hegemonic ontological ideology that is dominant within the soceity they live in/are affected by.)

Explanation: it is a dominant ideology on (this) Earth that anyone born to human-identifying parents must also identify as human, 100%.

So, someone born to human-identifying parents who self-identifies as non-human to some degree would have an alternative/different ontology to the dominant hegemony of (this) Earth.

But it is up to them if they wish to include themselves under this umbrella.

This term is inclusive of: Alterhumans, Otherkin, Endels, Clinical Nonhumans, Physical Nonhumans, Fictionkin, Factkin, Therians, Objectkin, Plantkin, Conceptkin, Polymorphs, Shapeshifters, Divines, Plurals; Otherhearts, Synpathics, Copinglinkers, Funlinkers, Otherlinkers & any other related communities which we didn't specifically name.

What this term does NOT include: Bigotry, TERFS, Trans Medicalism, Baeddelism, Alt-Right, High Control Groups, or any other forms of piss-flavored ideologies.

[sleepydross]

I don't want to be angry on here a lot, but sometimes I have a lot of heavy thoughts and want to talk about them so... like, white, cisgender, heterosexual, allosexual, endosex people, please sincerely... shut the fuck up.

Like idk, I'm not even gonna be specific, cause no one in good faith is going to seek any lexical hole to widen or something, so it doesn't matter, but cishets, please.

Shut. The fuck. Up.

No, I don't want to hear your opinions. Nope, not interested in your activist work, I've done and have my own thank you. No, I don't have any interest in what makes you an 'ally' and find your desperation to pin that on your chest beyond distasteful and weird. No, I don't want to hear what you think about being trans, queer, gay, bi, your definitions, your opinions, your wah wah wah shit? I am not interested. I really... I'm not. I'm sorry. You've had control of the Earth for however long and this is what you've made of it. Sit the fuck down. Your opinions mean nothing to me, and your voice is of negative use. Be silent, and listen to the people who your entire life's privilege pile is built on.

Like, all of you exist inside of this deeply fucked system of privilege where you're treated as the 'default' and you act accordingly. You've got fucking main character syndrome. You think you're fucking even more annoying Batman, no killing, no violence, no force. Its uncouth, it's wrong, it's...

But this isn't a comic book and youre not a member of the fucking justice league, and we're not fighting a colorful gallery of rogues with no meaningful longterm consequences we're fighting FUCKING NAZIS, and FUCKING FASCISTS, and FUCKING ZEALOTS. You know why you think violence bad?

Because you know the violence is against YOU. You will suffer the glorious retribution of BEING LESS PRIVILEGED if you actually support marginalized people, and you KNOW that privilege makes your life easier. I've seen it, I've heard it.

"Lucky I'm straight, whew, lot of bigotry out there"

Literally had that sentence said to my face. To my credit I didn't bust the guy's nose. That day. He earned that later for a far more awful casual bigotry, alongside some dental work.

I can see it, we can all see it. In the back of your head.

The fear. The FEAR. You're the default, aren't you? What happens to you if you're not the default anymore? This is how things have always been! This is how-

Until you cishet whatever the fuck freaks get it through your goddamn head that the fear, that fear, is a poison that makes you an enemy, you're... an enemy. Duh. Every piece of software still plugged into the system is potentially a foe.

So please.

Shut the fuck up. You're incapable of helping if you speak, if you do *anything* but listen.

Shut. The Fuck. Up.

#cisgender #trans liberation #queer liberation #queer #discourse #please #cishets #i beg you #shit your fucking head holes #no one wants to hear your godawful forty thousand page opinion on how much of a dickshit you personally are #and goddamnit #if you mention OH I LOVE DRAG race to me #im going to put you #in a shallow #grave

[scribe-of-stories]

Happy spoopy season STS! Which of your OC's is the Final Girl and how do they survive the horror movie?

Hmmmmm

As per a previous ask I've noticed that I tend to write characters that are "horror movie protags that fight back", which to my knowledge lines up with the trop of Final Girls. That said, I'm now imagining Sam or Lars in crop-tops and short-shorts having to run away from a classic horror villain and this brings me joy.

The most appropriate answer here would be to nominate Joshua (of Broken Whole). He's a mundane human who's greatest "power" is being the moral/emotional foundation of supernatural people. As such he'd absolutely be a camp-counselor desperately trying to save the other characters from a classic horror monster, till it was only him left (and surviving). Which kind of lines up with the multiple layers of survivors guilt he has ICly anyways.

#Scribe answers #writeblr #writers on tumblr #lexical earth #STS #Sam at-least is a umbraling #and Lars is The Lawman #Joshua literally has nothing going for him save for the fact he cares about people and can express it genuinely #Also tbf the main antagonist of Broken Whole is Catholic Slenderman #So it's not like being a horror protag is outside of his cannon self

[potentiallypolyglot]

The world is so big and so small.

Sometimes I get down thinking that the whole world has been discovered. There aren’t billions other planets and places that we can visit and cultures that we can experience like in Doctor Who or Marvel movies (terrible point of reference I know). I was foolishly worrying the other day that once I “master” Chinese I’ll get bored because there won’t be more that I’m excited to learn. (Ridiculous bc I haven’t even scratched the surface as it is and there will be no end to learning, especially with a language so beautiful and with so much history).

For a bit, I lost interest in other languages I used to love and worried I’d never fall in love with another language. I used to want to learn so many and suddenly felt I couldn’t be bothered.

I’d look at Chinese dramas and think these people are so similar to me, what’s the point of another culture if it’s not that different? (Ridiculous, I know) But this is just another part of the big/small earth dichotomy. Of course it’s different! Cultures can be different and still be made of people who are are fundamentally the same at their core. That’s the point!!!

Anyway, I found myself perusing a language development tree and saw Frisian, which is the closest modern language to English. I’d never heard of it! I looked it up and Google ‘helpfully’ told me that it is spoken in Friesland, which I’d also never heard of. It’s a region of the Netherlands, and there are six (6) branches of the Frisian language. And despite being 80% lexically similar, it is not mutually intelligible with English. Nor is it mutually intelligible with Dutch (official language of the Netherlands).

It is such a delight to discover that there is more to the world than the things I already know or am aware can be learned. I know all of this is obvious and some is the product of irrational/limited thinking. But I think that’s sometimes the beauty of it. Being a little blind and finding new light.

So I looked into how to learn Frisian and found this great (and adorable?) resource . It’s a website with a free program to learn Frisian, including audio files and exercises. With their premium program, you can even interact with native speakers via WhatsApp or Telegram.

There are about 500,000 modern speakers of Fresian. And you can learn their language!! There’s probably not much commercial value to learning it and you aren’t likely to encounter a speaker randomly, but it’s theirs! And you can learn it too!

So my search for novelty lead me to the language most similar to my own. And even now I feel somewhat bad that apparently is biggest claim to fame is that it is similar to English (can’t it be amazing in its own right? It shouldn’t have to live in a shadow!!) But it’s comforting to know that when you think there’s nothing to be discovered, you can find something new so close to home.

I know this post probably comes across as naive and narrow minded. And I know I haven’t written eloquently and the ideas expressed are much more profound in my head. But I was delighted so I wanted to share as best I can.

ALSO!!! The first words I’ve seen so far in Frisian are:

Hello - ‘goeie’

Goodbye - 'oan't sjen' or 'sjoddy'

🤯🤯🤯

I know it’s novelty (that’s the point) but those words seem so much more foreign to me now than 你好 and 再见, despite apparently being so similar to English. I’m so glad I have so much to learn. 😁

I’m still focused on and delighted by Chinese and so excited to visit China soon (hopefully) and study there next year (if everything goes amazingly well). But I might just dabble a little in Frisian for fun. At least enough to figure out what makes it similar to English. (The words I’ve seen so far don’t look similar - is the grammar the same?? I have to know!!)

Thanks for letting me be silly.

#chinese #langblr #resources #Frisian #Frisian langblr #personal #outlook #it’s a small world #and a big world #novelty #thanks for letting me be silly #languages #linguistics

[sumerianlanguage]

Hello there! Quite into sumerion mythology for a long time but it is hard for me to find lexical meanings. Could you help me to how to write and prounounce "earth with lightning" please?

Sure thing! “Earth” in Sumerian is ki 𒆠, and “lightning” is nimngir 𒉏𒄈, so “earth with lightning” (using the comitative -da “with”) would be ki nimngirda, written 𒆠 𒉏𒄈𒁕 in cuneiform.

#replies #sumerian vocabulary

[dustedmagazine]

Reeking Aura — Blood and Bonemeal (Profound Lore)

Blood And Bonemeal by REEKING AURA

It would risk risibility to call Reeking Aura’s new LP Blood and Bonemeal “meat-and-potatoes death metal.” The record includes songs titled “Grublust” and “A Vegetative Mush That Melts among the Shelves Lined with Meats of Indeterminate Origin” (only in death metal…). All that verbal info likely communicates the band’s prevailing interest in sodden, organic spew; if not, here are a couple representative snatches of lyrics: “A swamp of swirling fumes that turns within my stomach / Like the halls of open rooms / The fluids flood and rummage” and, “It smells like a wet dog / Or is that just my breath?” Gorges tremble, and “meat-and-potatoes” is off the lexical menu. But the phrase is also ill-suited to capturing what’s appealingly idiosyncratic about the record. Reeking Aura provides plenty of claustrophobic riffs and gruff, gastric growls, but the band’s musical sensibility is also oddly interested in more mellifluous melody and something akin to — dare one say it — beauty.

The record’s title track does the boil-and-churn, musical gross-out we’re all now used to — we even like it. Reeking Aura’s three guitarists (Ryan Lipynsky, also a longtime member of the excellent Unearthly Trance, and Terrell Grannum and Rick Habeeb, both of the sublimely named Buckshot Facelift) rage with roustabout energy, and there’s some fairly acrobatic soloing. Then, after three-and-a-half minutes of bile and blast, the song suddenly quiets. A gently strummed guitar starts to intone, lugubriously, over fluttering, keening atmospherics. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but it’s well done, a sudden shift in musical mood that has some stomachy impact. 

The strange thing is how often Reeking Aura pulls off that maneuver — or rather, what’s strange is the frequency with which they do it, and the persistence of its success. It should be repetitive, too predictable: loud, then quiet; awful, then mournfully lovely. But it continues to occur, as a sort of cadence on the record’s sequencing and macro-structure, and it makes Blood and Bonemeal into a curious, frequently compelling experience. Eventually the band even seems to poke fun at its own penchant: the whole second half of “Pyramid-Shaped Plow / The Caretaker” is dominated by gentle string-work, briefly opening to the sort of spandex-clad antics that dance close to 1990s’ hair-metal heroics. It should be cloying or stale. Perversely, it’s good. 

Reeking Aura has style, for miles and miles, a lot of them marked by peculiar pathways. Check out the cover art for Blood and Bonemeal: when’s the last time you saw a death metal record featuring watercolors? The surreal flow and wash of earth tones and pastels, suggesting a scene both sylvan and nightmarishly grotesque, captures the record’s stimulating, agreeably skewed environment. Rotting rat’s guts, liquidating fleshy fare, the squelch of warm, feculent mud up through holes in your boots — they’re all there. So is a pretty sunrise. That’s life. And death metal, apparently. 

Jonathan Shaw

#reeking aura #blood and bonemeal #profound lore #jonathan shaw #album review #dusted magazine #metal #death metal

[wateryourgender]

PetrichorLexic

A lexic gender related to the word Petrichor! Petrichor is a word for the smell of the earth after rain.

Coined for Day 2 of the coining event!

#admin ellie #ecolovelycoins #petrichorlexic #lexic gender #new gender #gender coining #gender identity #mogai gender #xenogender blog #xenogender coining #xenogender #xenoidentity #coining blog #flag coining #mogai coining #lgbtq blog #mogai blog #endos do not interact #endos dni #requests open #requests #reqs open #requests are open #open asks #coining post #gender stuff #gender hoard #label coining #read byf #read dni

[gad-dunap]

Sub-Commander's Log | Twelfth of T'keKhuti, 8972

 In the early days of Vulcan, there was no need for spoken words. Records gleaned from the clouded depths of Vulcan’s history are unanimous: society formed without the need for spoken language, as all proto-Vulcans could convey flashes of imagery via their innate telepathy, and what we now know as fu-fe-yontau-Vulkhansu was introduced only later when a proto-Vulcan encountered an a’kweth, one of our planet’s native sand-worms. The creature in question made sounds in conjunction with its own telepathic projection in an attempt to communicate, and as the humans say, the rest is history. Language, for the early Vulcans, captured the emotional or unclear aspects of phenomena more precisely than telepathy would allow. It also created a consistency not otherwise achievable when a concept is being passed from mind to mind.

I have always found it difficult to imagine language developing independent of telepathy, though it is by all accounts the more common phenomenon. However, it seems likely that the lack of any secondary form of confirmation is the source of the unmistakable lack of precision found in most widely known galactic languages. Fu-fe-yontau-Vulkhansu was a language intended explicitly for precision, while early Human languages formed from the struggle to communicate any image at all. I can only postulate this is the origin of such perplexing words as “thingamabob”and “doohickey”. (I have consulted several humans to confirm the spelling. It is not in error.

Naturally, Earth philosophy has spent no shortage of time puzzling over the creation of words and their meaning.  What are words? I would argue that the question is unimportant, as all of Vulcan has a shared, un-wordable mental understanding of what a word is that I’m sure could be transferred to a human quite easily if any scholars of lexical semantics merely requested it. Much in the way you cannot make flour out of kreyla, one cannot create a definition of words out of words. Only thought suffices.

Nonetheless, to Plato (no surname), they are the essence of a thing, which the Epicureans largely concurred with, albeit with more specificity. Cratylus further postulated that words were naturally ‘right’ in that they naturally flowed from one another, though gave no basis for the first word ever formed. The Stoics divided words into words corresponding to natural objects and lekta, the unsayable, which correspond to parts of speech unrelated to an object. I am told the study of how words change over time, The Epicureans and Stoics both, rightfully, believed words were a sort of border between the readily apparent and the non-apparent. It is admirable, perhaps, that these two schools came to so correct a conclusion so early, even if an incomplete one, but later study appears to have complicated the idea somewhat. Later philosophers like Augustine separated signs into more and more categories: apparent, non-apparent, temporarily non-apparent, temporarily apparent, and so on. He concluded that words were an essential method of transmitting something from one mind to another, but his interpretation took on an air of divinity and leaned into magical applications of words.

I find myself once again concluding that while humans are able to approach the use of logic in examining the world, they fail to meet it entirely. This has yet to be a useful pursuit.

Sub-commander Sozhik Vulcan Expeditionary Group Xenophilosophy Division

#vulcan #fiction #sozhik #star trek #officer's log

[almaqead]

"The Months." From Surah At Tawbah, The Repentance.

You know it don't go easy...Donald Trump still lives, as do his Republican Party and his faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and their criminal cohorts, the anti-human Family Research Council and Heritage Foundation.

Ukraine still does not have the aid it needs, and the Russians are advancing. The floods are flooding, the volcanoes are erupting, the clamshells are clamping but still Joe Biden will not obey federal and international laws and defend life on this planet. He has God on his side and the wind at his back but as of today evil is still winning.

So, no repentance today.

But Allah, the Magnificent, the Most Wise and the Most High told Muhammad His Prophet:

9:35-40:

The Day ˹will come˺ when their treasure will be heated up in the Fire of Hell, and their foreheads, sides, and backs branded with it. ˹It will be said to them,˺ “This is the treasure you hoarded for yourselves. Now taste what you hoarded!”

Indeed, the number of months ordained by Allah is twelve—in Allah’s Record1 since the day He created the heavens and the earth—of which four are sacred. That is the Right Way. So do not wrong one another during these months. And fight the polytheists together as they fight together against you. And know that Allah is with those mindful ˹of Him˺.

Reallocating the sanctity of ˹these˺ months1 is an increase in disbelief, by which the disbelievers are led ˹far˺ astray. They adjust the sanctity one year and uphold it in another, only to maintain the number of months sanctified by Allah, violating the very months Allah has made sacred. Their evil deeds have been made appealing to them. And Allah does not guide the disbelieving people.

O believers! What is the matter with you that when you are asked to march forth in the cause of Allah, you cling firmly to ˹your˺ land?1 Do you prefer the life of this world over the Hereafter? The enjoyment of this worldly life is insignificant compared to that of the Hereafter.

If you do not march forth, He will afflict you with a painful torment and replace you with other people. You are not harming Him in the least. And Allah is Most Capable of everything.

˹It does not matter˺ if you ˹believers˺ do not support him, for Allah did in fact support him when the disbelievers drove him out ˹of Mecca˺ and he was only one of two. While they both were in the cave, he reassured his companion,1 “Do not worry; Allah is certainly with us.” So Allah sent down His serenity upon the Prophet, supported him with forces you ˹believers˺ did not see, and made the word of the disbelievers lowest, while the Word of Allah is supreme. And Allah is Almighty, All-Wise.

Commentary:

The life to come happens after the end of the Quran and God hears the final prayer of Muhammad for what is called Masjid, a global messianic phenomenon.

The Prophet said this is preceded by Four Sacred Months:

The four sacred months of the Hijri calendar are Rajab, Dhu al-Qadah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram. These months are considered to be of great importance in Islamic tradition and culture, and have a special importance in comparison to the other months. The Four Saced months are always taking place in preparation for the onset of Masjid, global law, order, and peace:

Rajab= ajab (Arabic: رَجَب) is the seventh month of the Islamic calendar. The lexical definition of the classical Arabic verb rajaba is "to respect".

Dhu al-Qadah= Dhu al-Qa'dah, also spelled Dhu al-Qi'dah or Zu al-Qa'dah, is the eleventh month in the Islamic calendar. It could possibly mean "possessor or owner of the sitting and seating place" - the space occupied while sitting or the manner of the sitting, pose or posture. 

Dhu al-Hijjah=Dhu al-Hijjah is the twelfth and final month in the Islamic calendar. Being one of the four sacred months during which war is forbidden, it is the month in which the Ḥajj takes place as well as Eid al-Adha, the “Festival of the Sacrifice.”

Muharram=According to traditional customs, Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar and considered to be highly religious, only coming next to Ramadan. Muharram, in itself, means "forbidden" and since it is considered to be holy, many Muslims use it as a period of prayer and reflection.

The objective of the observation of the Four Months is to heighten the practices of the Pillars and the noble virtues of the religion and to be more adverse than usual to transgression in order to avoid being punished.

As the verses above say we the righteous are being called to treat this very day as if one were practicing the Four Months all at once and proceed on Jihad against the polytheists, the men of America who think they are gods and give and partake of the bounty of this world at a whim without paying heed to the Laws of God or man.

The world is spiralling out of control because believers are not in control. Allah told Muhammad the kind of control that is needed, the right kind through practice and belief is learned through the Four Months.

When the world's faith in the Verses is greater than the freed of the American polytheists, then as the Quran says, "serenity shall descend, and the Words of Allah shall be placed above the rest."

The Republicans and all they stand for and the dog president have to go. Joe Biden has to dispose of them and he has to do so at once. They have attacked American soil and the saced soil of Israel and their power is unmatched and unchecked. This is not correct or proper. Those who believe must insist the White House do what has to be done, otherwise peace on earth will remain the subject of prayers and fantasy and this is not enough.

Masjid must be established all around the world and like the Four Months, its victory must be happen this very day.