Time is racing

Aug. 18th, 2025 09:48 pm
cornerofmadness: a sad anime character (depressed)
[personal profile] cornerofmadness
I can't believe I'm leaving in 2 days. Faculty meeting Friday, class on monday. I have a ton of students this semester and almost a full year's worth of credit hours which is SO much work.

But that racing time spun my head today. I was talking about retirement a few days ago and people asked me when? If I wanted to go early, 4 years (I wouldn't) If I wanted to go at 67, nine years. But the reality is I probably can't retire until my 70s if at all.

So today I saw someone I went to med school with posting her retirement party and it brought up all that grief again, because grief is tidal. Today was a tsunami. Most of my medical school friends are retiring. Comfortably. Me, because of the bad bounce my life took, am saddled by more than half a million dollars in student debt (still), have not nearly enough for retirement, could barely afford rent let alone a house. Then you look who you graduated with having everything I should have had and it gets hard. Sigh.

But in happier veins, it's music Monday. Feel free to share with us. We're doing the alphabet and we're up to U and V, since they're hard letters. I'm only sharing the last 5 years but you can share whatever U and V songs you'd like.

I do however have some )

Weekly Fandom/Hobby Roundup

Aug. 18th, 2025 09:00 pm
kalloway: (FE3H Marianne 1)
[personal profile] kalloway
This morning, it was cool. Cool enough I could open up all the windows and get a cross-breeze... There are a couple of warmer days later in the week, but they'll be survivable. And then, possibly, that'll be it for the too-hot of the year? I can hope.

I started playing Fire Emblem Heroes again because after eight-and-a-half-years they finally kinda put in a unit for one of the original cast. Turns out the game is taking care of a lizard-brain need to click things that had been unfulfilled lately, and sure, I'll go with this. I don't care about the story so I can just skip through, level folks, and whatever happens?

Finished up a non-Gundam kit over the weekend. I've just been calling him Red Dude, but technically he's a Sword Shadow. There's also a green one, who is also a Sword Shadow despite having guns instead? Since they're red and green, [personal profile] taichara pointed out they can be Cain and Abel from the first Fire Emblem game and now I'll need to get the green one.

Working on the ExCreR that I got a month or so ago. It's a SD-styled kit even though there's art in the manual of a non-SD version... It's a bit of a brick, and the places in the manual where it says 'cut the pins if tight' - just cut the pins in advance, self. I broke almost every pin in the waist and had to glue it. ^^;; (Not a huge deal. Glue happens, especially on non-Bandai kits.)

Also finished the first two seasons of Natsume's Book of Friends. I had read a good chunk of the series through the library and should get back to that...

Thank you to folks who've sent postcards and whatnot lately! (Several have vanished into my work bag, which needs a good clean.)

第四年第二百二十二天

Aug. 18th, 2025 08:56 pm
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] guardian_learning
部首
口 part 9
吓, to scare/startle; 吗, question particle; 吞, to swallow pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=30

语法
跟 vs 也 (why are these two in the same article? 跟 vs 和 I could understand...)
https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/gen1-ye3-difference/

词汇
烟, smoke (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-3-word-list/

Guardian:
我不是被夜尊给吞了吗, wasn't I swallowed by Ye Zun?
我猜这回应该跟他没什么关系吧, my guess is this time has nothing to do with him.
刚开始戒烟嘴里非得叼一点什么, I just quit smoking and I've got to have something in my mouth

Me:
吓我一跳!
你少点抽烟吧,对嗓子不好。

Book review: "Welcome to Night Vale"

Aug. 18th, 2025 04:10 pm
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] booknook
Title: Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
Authors: Jeffrey Cranor, Joseph Fink
Genre: Fantasy, surrealist/absurdist

Now that I don’t have a commute, I really had to create time to finish my latest audiobook, but it was worth it. Today I finished Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, the first book put out by the team behind the Welcome to Night Vale fiction podcast and set in the same universe (as is likely apparent by the title). This book was written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink.

First, I don’t believe you need familiarity with the podcast to enjoy the novel. Nor do you need to read the novel if you’re a podcast listener; it builds on what listeners may know, but also centers incredibly peripheral characters from the show (local PTA mom Diane Crayton and pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro), so if you’re a podcast only fan, you’re not missing any crucial story information by forgoing the book. If you’re not a listener of the podcast, I think as long as you go in understanding that the core of Night Vale is the absurd and the surreal, you’ll be okay.

This was a fun book! I was curious to see how the Night Vale Presents team would manage a longform story in the world of Night Vale (podcast episodes are about 25 minutes and almost always self-contained), and I think they did a solid job! The book can be a bit slow, especially in the beginning; the drip of information it feeds you about the mysteries at the center of the story is indeed a drip. But it wasn’t so slow I found it tiresome, and the typical Night Vale weirdness and eccentricity kept me listening even where I wasn’t sure where this story was going (if anywhere).
 

Read more... )

 


"Focus" in Spanish?

Aug. 18th, 2025 09:21 pm
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Mark Liberman

In a comment on "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century", Rachel Churchill asked

Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?

I've sometimes noticed non-native English speakers – even those whose pronunciation and accent are pretty good – failing to use it. For example, they might say "This one is fifty GRAMS, but the other one is twenty GRAMS", where a native speaker would emphasise the "fifty" and "twenty" rather than the "grams". I'm guessing it's because their native language doesn't use contrastive emphasis and maybe they've never been taught the concept, but I don't know this for sure.

I responded:

See Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE ICASSP, 2015. The abstract:

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

See also "Victor Hugo, hélas", 4/13/2024, "LÀ encore…", 4/14/2024, and "Intonational focus", 4/21/2011.

Roger C. continued the discussion:

In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order; syntax is more flexible than in English.

And I responded:

I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.

In "Victor Hugo, hélas", I discussed the extreme ambiguity of the term "focus", the false prejudice that French doesn't allow prosodic focus, and a series of experiments that showing that "corrective focus" works in French essentially as it does in English, although there are languages (like Korean) where this is not true.

It would be easy enough for a native speaker of Spanish to perform a quick check of the same question: what happens when you correct someone's misunderstanding of a digit string, e.g.

No es "tres cinco seis", es "tres nueve seis".

(Sorry if that's not an idiomatic correction…)

Meanwhile, I thought I'd try looking for a different kind of focus in Spanish, as I did for French in "Victor Hugo, hélas":

[T]his encouraged me to finally look for "focus" in some samples of actual French talk. Or at least at one sample — I went to LibriVox, and randomly picked a reading of Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.

I noticed a relevant example in the second sentence of the preface — but a couple of paragraphs later, there's a sentence with a whole bunch of them:

Il le déclare donc, et il le répète, il occupe, au nom de tous les accusés possibles, innocents ou coupables, devant toutes les cours, tous les prétoires, tous les jurys, toutes les justices.

So for a comparison to Spanish, I randomly picked a Librivox reading of the first chapter of El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo by Benito Pérez Galdós.

And I was pleased to find a comparable passage early in the chapter, in a passage describing the narrator's reactions to work as a typesetter (starting at 3:32.844 of the recording, emphasis added):

Poníalos yo en movimiento, y de aquellos pedazos de plomo surgían sílabas, voces, ideas, juicios, frases, oraciones, períodos, párrafos, capítulos, discursos, la palabra humana en toda su majestad; y después, cuando el molde había hecho su papel mecánico, mis dedos lo descomponían, distribuyendo las letras: cada cual se iba a su casilla, como los simples que el químico guarda después de separados; los caracteres perdían su sentido, es decir, su alma, y tornando a ser plomo puro, caían mudos e insignificantes en la caja.

¡Aquellos pensamientos y este mecanismo todas las horas, todos los días, semana tras semana, mes tras mes! Verdad es que las alegrías, el inefable gozo de los domingos compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días. ¡Ah!, permitid a mi ancianidad que se extasíe con tales recuerdos; permitid a esta negra nube que se alboroce y se ilumine traspasada por un rayo de sol.

I set them in motion, and from those pieces of lead emerged syllables, voices, ideas, judgments, phrases, sentences, periods, paragraphs, chapters, speeches, the human word in all its majesty; and then, when the mold had played its mechanical role, my fingers decomposed it, distributing the letters: each one went to its place, like the simples that the chemist keeps after they have been separated; the characters lost their meaning, that is, their soul, and, returning to pure lead, fell mute and insignificant into the box.

Those thoughts and this mechanism every hour, every day, week after week, month after month! It is true that the joys, the ineffable joy of Sundays compensated for all the sadness and anguished musings of the other days. Ah! Allow my old age to be enraptured by such memories; allow this black cloud to rejoice and be illuminated, pierced by a ray of sunlight.

Here's the sentence where todas/todos are "focused", ithe speaker referencing all rather than some of the hours and days:

¡Aquellos pensamientos y este mecanismo todas las horas, todos los días, semana tras semana, mes tras mes!

And zeroing in:

In addition to higher pitch and greater vocal effort, the stressed syllables of "todas" and "todos" are lengthened — see below for a comparison with an unfocused version.

The very next sentence has another use of todas, this one naming all the sadnesses and anguished musings, without (much of?) an implied contrast to some of them:

Verdad es que las alegrías, el inefable gozo de los domingos compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días.

Zeroing in a bit:

compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días

…And a bit further:

todas las tristezas

In this case, the pitch of "tristezas" is essentially the same as that of "todas".

And a comparison of syllable and word durations underlines the difference:

Phrase First Syllable Whole Word
todas (las horas) 280 ms 503 ms
todos (los días) 242 ms 438 ms
todas las tristezas 144 ms 329 ms

 

local food shopping

Aug. 18th, 2025 05:29 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
The weather is delightful right now--sunny and about 22 C/72 F--so I went to Central Square after lunch, for the Monday farmers' market and to buy ice cream.

At the farmers market, I bought Zestar apples--an early apple all three of us like--blackberries, peaches, and a loaf of Hi Rise bakery's "Concord" bread. I then walked over to Toscanini's, but noticed New City Microcreamery en route, and went in. I asked for a taste of the key lime pie ice cream, and was pleased that it tastes like key lime pie and works as ice cream, so I got a scoop and took it outside to eat at a nearby table.

Then to Tosci's, where the board said they had raspberry and sweet cream (among other flavors). I asked for a pint of each, and discovered they were out of raspberry. I asked to taste the mango sticky rice ice cream, which I didn't like. So I just got sweet cream, then walked back to New City for a pint of key lime pie ice cream.

I now have dairy ice cream from four different local ice cream places in my freezer, the other two being Lizzy's (chocolate orgy and black raspberry) and JP Licks (peach). Boston is a good city for ice cream.

tada for the week

Aug. 18th, 2025 10:09 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

tada )

How *am* I doing, anyway?

Aug. 18th, 2025 09:37 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Counseling after work today was about how I'm doing well in some ways -- I said I'm finally getting that much-needed holiday, we'll be away for nine days; she asked me how long it's been since I had that long a vacation; I said I didn't know if I ever had. (Turns out I probably have, but the fact that I legitimately couldn't think of any of those occasions is indicative (and that's partly because they're trips back to Minnesota and visiting family isn't really time off).)

So I talked about how fortunate I feel that I have the stability to do that: this is the first time I've had the money and the ability to have time off; before I either had time or money but never both at the same time.

But I also talked about how badly I spiraled on Saturday when some gloomy news about the Twins of all things. (tl;dr: billionaires ruin everything. The hope that things would improve when the team sold to different billionaires has been snatched away; the current ones are keeping the team and it's very clear they're going to starve it of funds -- bad teams make more money than good teams and this family believes they need money right now. They don't share the view that beat writers and podcasters and fans of the team have which is that a sportsball team is a civic institution; for them it's just a way to make money. Like Gleeman started his article the other day, "It's hope that hurts the most." Or as I learned it from English pals: "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.") I was like I don't have a dog any more, awful things are happening in the country I'm from, I couldn't go back for my grandma's funeral or my family, work has been so stressful all year, I can't even manage to organize a hookup...and now I can't even have baseball as a little fun escapist thing??

So am I doing pretty good or pretty bad?? I feel bad about feeling bad, being aware that my bad-feelings are floating on a sea of basic-okayness and worrying that I'm being insufficiently grateful for it. But my counselor said that it's not like one is true and one is false; both can be valid.

I guess it's part of leveling up Maslow's hierarchy: once you get the basic shit sorted out you do start caring more about that higher-level shit. I didn't expect that to happen automatically; indeed against my will but it seems to have. I don't want to lose track of the fulfilment I do have. But also basic stuff isn't taking up all my time/mental capacity any more so I have to figure out what else to do with my adult life.

sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
According to the checkout card tucked into its back cover, the black-boarded, jacketless first edition of Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) which I just collected this afternoon through interlibrary loan came originally from the Hatfield branch of the now-dissolved Western Massachusetts Regional Library System, whose bookmobile [personal profile] spatch remembers vividly because it was not the library across the street from one of his childhood homes but the one about a mile up the road. The dates on the card are well within the span of his family's residency. It would be nice to imagine that one of his parents took it out, or at least browsed through it, sometime. The punch line of discovering Lampell as an author is that while I did not in the least recognize his name, I would recognize his voice because along with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers. It was only later in his career as a screenwriter that he was blacklisted.

The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens

Aug. 18th, 2025 01:08 pm
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.

Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...

...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?

Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.

Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.

But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.

The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!

The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.

The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.

Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.

And another Bundle - Tiny D6

Aug. 18th, 2025 08:32 pm
ffutures: (Default)
[personal profile] ffutures
This is a repeat of a big bundle of material for the TinyD6 system from Gallant Knight Games:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2025TinyMega

  

This covers a lot of genres with a minimalist rules set. Last time I said (edited slightly) "This is an interesting offer because it covers such a wide range of genres, but it isn't especially cheap and whether you actually need all of them may be another matter. If you're already using this system and don't need to buy a lot of it, or already have systems you like for some of the genres and don't want to change, it may be a better idea to cherry-pick and just buy the bits you need....  ...a lot of this material was in two bundles offered in September 2020 - Tiny Dungeon, itself a repeat, and TinyD6 Worlds, and if you've already bought either or both you may find a lot of this offer redundant. Again, the best advice I can give is to cherry-pick!
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


An assortment of tabletop roleplaying games from Gallant Knight Games that use the streamlined, minimalist TinyD6 rules.

Bundle of Holding: Tiny Dungeon MEGA (from 2023)

(no subject)

Aug. 18th, 2025 01:32 pm
skygiants: Mary Lennox from the Secret Garden opening the garden door (garden)
[personal profile] skygiants
Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience. [personal profile] rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, [personal profile] genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of [personal profile] genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

November 2024

S M T W T F S
     12
3 456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 19th, 2025 07:33 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios