early_riser
@early_riser@lemmy.world
- Comment on surely your hobby can't be that expensive 2 days ago:
Conlanging is a very cheap hobby. Quoth Tolkien:
It is incidentally one of the attractions of this hobby that it needs so little apparatus!
- Comment on Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones? 2 days ago:
Just guessing here, but Christmas has cemented itself in the wider cultural consciousness thanks in part to commercially exploitable traditions like gift-giving. It’s is often celebrated in some way by people who are not even Christian (Japan, for example). There are very specific themes, religious and secular, associated with Christmas that you can write songs about, The birth of Jesus, obviously, but also family gatherings, winter weather (Northern hemisphere bias), the whole Santa mythos and so on.
What Americans associate with Christmas is actually three separate feasts scrunched into one. Saint Nicholas day (December 6th) which is why Saint Nicholas is associated with Christmas, and Epiphany (January 6th) again for the magi, are the traditional gift-giving holidays, but got engulfed by the unstoppable Yule Tide. So you have these three different occasions with their own songs combined together.
New years doesn’t have the same cultural presence.
- Comment on What is the moral jurisdiction behind not wishing who're rich and in executive positions to die? 2 days ago:
Forgive my unsolicited advice. Perhaps you know this already but if you want the blockquote to be unbroken you have to put a
>on the blank lines as well.> This is a paragraph. > > And this is another paragraph.
This is a paragraph.
And this is another paragraph.
The markdown parser also treats a hyphen plus space at the start of the line as a bullet. If you want an en dash you use two hyphens. Three gets you an em dash.
--Some famous quotable guy–Some famous quotable guy
I'm not a robot---I’m not a robot—
- Comment on What is this colour? 2 days ago:
A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
Made me laugh.
- Comment on What is this colour? 2 days ago:
I’d call it “olive”.
I you’ll permit me a tangent, the linguistics of the senses are something that fascinate me. Color names have been studied a fair bit, and an oft-repeated (not sure how accurate) theory states that languages acquire color names in a particular order, starting with words for dark and light, then red, then green and yellow, and so on. As a student of Latin and to a much lesser extent Greek I was interested to find out that there’s no exact word for “blue” in classical Latin or Greek, hence Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea”.
As a blind person I’m more interested in odor vocabulary. The dominant theory until recently is that language is incapable of describing odors as qualia distinct from the sources of those odors. That is, “green” describes a particular instance of subjective experience independent of grass or bile or any other green thing, but terms for odors all stem from analogies or just the words for their sources. Earth smells “earthy”, flowers smell “floral” and so on.
But some research on minority languages spoken by hunter-gatherers living in Thailand suggest that at least some languages do have “odor colors” as I call them. I desperately want a non-technical breakdown of these studies, or indeed access to the papers at all, but the details are behind pay walls.
Some of my conlangs are meant to have such odor colors based on the valence-arousal model of emotions since their speakers communicate mood through pheromones rather than body language. Their color words in contrast work like human odor words, only being able to describe color by analogy with something so colored.
- Comment on Why do some website logins have the username and password entry on different pages? 2 days ago:
A good analogy goes a long long way.
- Comment on Is it really worth starting a lemmy community? 2 days ago:
I have often thought this myself. Not sure I’d enjoy being a mod, and that’s assuming anyone bothers to join.
- Comment on If Browser and Wario are Mario's mortal ennemies, why did he invited them for a kart race? 2 days ago:
IIRC per Miyamoto the characters are actors who are ‘on set’ during the mainline games and hang out after work. Or something like that.
- Comment on What is the moral jurisdiction behind not wishing who're rich and in executive positions to die? 2 days ago:
I don’t wish anyone to die as a rule.
Now at any rate [Gollum] is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’ ‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.
- Comment on I'm gonna need a walk-in shower soon enough 3 days ago:
*floats away\*
- Comment on This is why we can't have nice things 4 days ago:
BeanOS
- Comment on This is why we can't have nice things 4 days ago:
I’m not saying it’s not important, I’m saying could you please not post about it in a completely unrelated community. I swear Lenny’s motto should be “sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
- Comment on This is why we can't have nice things 4 days ago:
Oh that parachute!
I too miss being a kid. I miss when my biggest worry was whether I’d get to play Nintendo when I got home.
- Comment on I'm gonna need a walk-in shower soon enough 4 days ago:
The most common is a tub with shower head
- Comment on I'm gonna need a walk-in shower soon enough 4 days ago:
I don’t believe in gravity
- Comment on This is why we can't have nice things 4 days ago:
When people say to stop being political on here, it’s not necessarily that they don’t think politics is important and should never be discussed, it’s that you should turn “off” once and a while and talk about literally anything else. Even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes, and her life was under threat by actual Nazis so I don’t buy the “Everything’s on fire so we should never shut up ever” argument. I’m not even asking you to change your mind, just to change the subject once in a while.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
This is a common worldbuilding scenario I play with, a virgin continent appears suddenly, usually in the South Pacific.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Ah yes, Don Bluth, the man that introduced 90s kids to the concept of mortality. Poor Littlefoot’s mom :(
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Does that make the Americas Valinor?
- Comment on 5 days ago:
You’ve seen Titan A.E. I gather.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
No too far to the northwest. 0,0 is somewhere near the Gulf of Guinea.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Duh that’s Atlantis, obviously.
- Comment on What's the longest, hardest fantasy rpg out there? 5 days ago:
It’s not for lack of personal time. I just have way more things to fill that personal time. Playing with my radios or messing with my homelab or building out grammar and lexica for my conlangs and so on. I think I’ve also discovered my tastes have changed. I don’t want video games to frontload all the complexity anymore. How am I supposed to know what this or that class or race or stat does before even starting the game?
My vision being what it is a lot of games are unplayable now anyway.
- Comment on Lebron James is popping up in Chinese videos shouting "What can I say?" - Is this a Chinese meme? 5 days ago:
didn’t even know childlore had a name or academic interest associated with it. until last year. When I was a kid I always wondered who came up with things like JIngle bells batman smells or those paper fortune teller thingies or the candyman/Bloody Mary or the game Safety and so on. I never saw adults doing or saying those things, so I figured some kid somewhere had to have made them up at some point and it just spread from there.
- Comment on What's the longest, hardest fantasy rpg out there? 5 days ago:
Never played it but I’ve heard good things about Darklands along the lines of what you’re looking for.
I wish I were young enough to enjoy sprawling RPGs again. I bought BG3 but I don’t have the time to devote to it like I used to so it molders in my Steam library.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 6 days ago:
Attempted is the key word. The characters eventually got too detailed for me to distinguish. As I mentioned in another thread I tried finding braille resources for L2 learners but there don’t seem to be any. Ironically if everything was in Pinyin I could probably do it, but moving to a new writing system when you already have one that you’ve used for millennia is a nearly impossible ask. Plenty of people have tried with English.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 6 days ago:
It’s not the language’s fault that Putin invaded Ukraine. If you love learning languages for their own sake, do it. I made the same choice when attempting to learn Mandarin during the Hong Kong protests.
- Comment on calcium and potassium 1 week ago:
thanks I hate it
- Comment on Transliterated country names into Chinese Language use pre-existing characters that already has its own meaning, therefore native Chinese speakers have a subconcious impression based on country names. 1 week ago:
I attempted to learn Mandarin in 2019, at first with Duolingo with an aim to find more robust resources along the way. I had to stop because I couldn’t distinguish among the characters. I’ve looked for resources for learning Mandarin in braille but can’t find any.
I really enjoyed what I did learn though. It’s such a laconic language, and I’ve nabbed some grammar here and there for one of my conlangs.
- Comment on There are first person shooters and third person shooters, but what about second person shooters? 1 week ago:
A bot I am not
flesh and blood I have got.
A repost this may be
but not one by me.