The lows are low, but the highs are home

This is post #200, and I thought I should do something good with it. So I’m finally writing this post. Except now I know I don’t need to write as much as I planned. But that’s the end of this whole thing, so let me start at the beginning.

        I finally finished Persona 4 this summer, and I started over and played through the beginning a bit. I was really inspired to write an amazing essay for Destructoid about the game, the journey of the main player, and just the themes of the game in general. If I were to do that, though, I’d have to replay the game and get quotes and refresh my memory on things to talk about, so I lost the will for it. But I’ll write a little bit and introduce the game. I don’t remember how much this stuff featured in Persona 3, and I have no idea how much (if at all) it’s featured in Persona 1 and Persona 2.

        Everyone in the Persona games has a basic alignment with one of the Tarot deck Arcana, and the main character is always aligned with The Fool. Igor, the master of the Velvet Room who opens your powers to you and guides you on your journey, describes The Fool as “zero,” “empty yet full of infinite potential,” one who could become anything at the end of their journey through life. What this means is that you can be whoever, and whatever, you want to be throughout the game - taking whatever personality you need at the moment to help other people out. As the infinite potential goes, your character is the only one with the ability to “change” Arcana in such a way - everyone else is restricted to their innate Arcana, but your main character simply starts as the Fool and can change Arcana like one changes a mask.

        Everyone also has an innate Persona that represents their inner strength, which is aligned with their Arcana. Some people go blindly through their lives, never coming to terms with the strength they have inside. Perhaps they’re carried along by negative emotions, and never able to overcome them. Maybe they’re too apathetic to reach their own potential. Throughout the game, you change masks as you need in order to help other people reach that potential. It’s just a part of your journey through life. You don’t take any credit, you don’t make a big fuss about it, you just stand aside and support them so they can do what they need to do. With your general social links, you just help people along and at Rank 10 things are more or less resolved.

        It gets a lot better with your party members, because they also unlock the powers of their Personas. Igor describes the power of Persona as (something like) a mask worn to face the hardships of life. Persona 3 had a different system for unlocking Personas, but in Persona 4 everyone had to face a dark, mutated version of their Persona in order to unlock their inner strength. This dark Persona represents the big conflict in their life, something they need to overcome in order to get on with their lives. A weak person might give in, but to accept their problems and acknowledge that this darkness is a part of who they are represents true strength. After facing this part of themselves, they unlock the power of their Persona, and join your party. It might not be perfect, but now they have the strength to face their problems - the strength of heart to face themselves.

        So I thought to myself that I ought to write about a problem in my life that I might not have otherwise faced, and challenge everyone to find the strength of heart to face themselves - if they haven’t already. At first I wanted to write about the breakdown of my relationship with Britt, then the end of my relationship with her (which didn’t end up happening - we’re all fine now), then about my general status with girls. Then I thought about it some more last night, and I thought about the problems the characters in Persona 4 had, and I realized that to claim I needed to face myself would be stupid. I’ve already done that. My big challenge, the jump I needed to make, was the initial overcoming of my depression and associated problems. I’ve already done that. Sure, I’m not perfect yet, but neither were your party members in Persona 4. They still had growing to do, and so do I. That’s just how it is.

        I’ll need a few more level-ups before I’m as good as I’ll get. Maybe at Rank 10 (maxed social link in Persona ¾) I’ll get a shiny evolution. But I’ve already reached Rank 1 (just after facing themselves), and I’m working my way up. So yes, I’ve found the strength of heart to face myself. Have you?

It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.

        A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.

        Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.

        I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.

        Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.

        When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.

        Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.

        However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.

It’s like the Sunday Something, but slightly in advance. Yay! I just can’t contain my excitement for you to be excited about these things that are exciting. Plus I hate a cluttered bookmarks toolbar. that’s why Read It Later is perfect for me, because I never have to remind myself of the things I’m not doing.

        Extra Credits via Escapist Magazine - Brilliant, absolutely brilliant series of videos. They’re about six minutes in length each, and if you watch three in a row every day or something you should plow through them in no time. They are all worth watching, because each examines a worthwhile issue in an enlightening way. Let me backtrack - basically a couple of people with experience in different parts of the industry make a brief video each week talking about some aspect or another of video games. Some highlights include God of War 1 as a Greek tragedy, the psychological basis of any proper survival horror game, and the term “gamer.”

        I planned on only watching a few today, and ended up watching every single one. There’s only 15 actual episodes, with a few PAX 2010 videos you should probably watch and a few you may not bother to watch. They’re as good as any podcast or essay you might find on a gaming blog, but a fraction of the length.

        Winter Voices: Avalanche - An episodic strategy RPG, the first episode of which is currently available on Steam for $5. Further episodes are supposed to released every week, but it looks like they have a vague definition of “week.” At any rate, RPS tells you a lot of what you need to know about the game, and why you may or may not want to spend $5 on it. In terms of gameplay, the battles are metaphorical representations of you taking on your inner demons, your skills are coping mechanisms like Denial or Imaginary Friend. The game has some horrible flaws, but for $5? You’re not risking much.

        I have bought it, but I have yet to play it. I want to enjoy the games that I play, and I don’t want to waste my time with a bad game - hence why I tend to avoid flash games these days. I hope, though, that the premise and everything else can overcome the poor gameplay, and more than that I hope the gameplay gets better in later instalments. If it does, and you’re not convinced on this one, believe me - you’ll find out, and then you can buy Episode 4 and it’ll be great.

        “Another clever aspect of the combat is your character’s Memory statistic. When you’re allocating stat points after you’ve levelled up, you can increase your memory to boost the rate at which you gain experience (because you learn more from each talk and encounter), but it also causes the demons you wrestle with to grow in strength (your sad memories gain clarity).

        All it amounts to is a completely seamless dynamic difficulty slider. Want more skills and more complex battles? Crank up your memory. Or is your character breaking down as she runs out of energy during every single fight? If so, you leave your memory well alone. You try and forget.”

        God, this game deserves its own post. If that last paragraph isn’t some amazing game design, I don’t know what is.

        Touch screen material to run out by 2020 - That article contains a link to a much, much longer gizmodo article which I wouldn’t recommend unless you really like rocks and stuff, but the single sentence “modern touch screens are made with a rare material, which will only last until 2020 if we’re lucky” is all you really need to know. It’s a great reminder of how we treat our planet, though. How long have we really been getting into this touch screen stuff? I doubt the DS uses this particular material, but I’m sure the iPhone and your Droid phones and all that stuff uses it. So, at best a few years. And we’re tearing through this incredibly limited resource like there’s no tomorrow. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world of your choice is ushered in by the demise of the amazing touch screen.

        You enjoying that iPhone? I really hope so. There’s only a billion of them in existence. Very rare. Rare enough to kill for.

(is that a bad joke about post-partum depression, I hope not)

        Alright so back from class, here’s how my weekend went after the party. This is some reaction to it, and some funny stories about Halloween.

        I slept in a bit on saturday, got up feeling like I sincerely did NOT want to be in my room. I figured I should sit in my room and study, but it was just not going to happen. My laptop was in the living room, by the couch, so I sat down there and booted it up. All well and good, then my mom gets up and is on her laptop and turns on the TV. Oh no. Television. Much as I hate it, it is there, and I end up getting distracted by it constantly. I spend a few hours doing stuff on the internet and talking to Britt about how busy I am and how I’m not keeping my promises to her and stuff like that. Savin’ it for another post. Wait for it. Anyway, eventually around maybe 1:45 pm or something? I got off my butt and went over to my dad’s so I could be alone.

        By 3 pm, I had showered and gotten my stuff organized, but no matter what I did I couldn’t really sit down and do any homework. My dad’s house just doesn’t have any place for me to work - I have no desk, the table is covered in crap, etc. I ended up accomplishing stuff by setting my laptop aside and using the piles of wood my dad had ordered as a desk. I knew, of course, that I could spend the weekend relaxing - but I needed to do work to keep myself busy while I was secluding myself, so I ended up taking notes on the fifth chapter of my linguistics textbook, doing the homework questions for it, and my french homework.

        Sunday, Halloween, I… hmm… I didn’t do much for most of the day. The most notable thing is, of course, trick or treating children. My dad bought candy - two boxes of 94 chocolate bars (two to each child) and two boxes of 24 bags of cheesies (do real people say that, cheetos seems like such an awkward thing to say - anyway, one per child) - so that’s enough candy for 130 children. We had 12 trick or treaters. Four children, eight teenage girls. One teenage girl said she liked my Born of Osiris hoodie and I said “eh, they’re alright” because alright is the best word to describe them. Other than that people just seemed to walk around in costumes without going to any houses. So now we have a disgusting amount of candy and I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it.

        My mom had at least 50 trick or treaters, when I last checked in with her, but according to my dad that was because she lives near a bunch of low-rent apartments - most of which are along the bus route that comes to Carleton. Huh. Well, kids. Around my dad’s it’s just old people and people with older kids. Does that mean he lives more in the suburbs than my mom? Ah well.

        Oh, and sweet story about the Halloween party:

        Near the end of the conversation with my coach and the two guys from Ottawa U, our hostess dropped by and flaunted her numerous assets for our benefit. But we would not be swayed from our riveting fencing discussion. After a brief lull later, one of the guys from Ottawa U remarked that we deserved a Darwin Award for spectacular failure to procreate.

        “Given the choice of finding an attractive female to talk to, or talking to a couple of dudes about fencing, we’re like ‘oh man you could try this, or try that’ and there’s hot women like right there! Right there! And we’re like 'fencing, awesome!’”

        edit: Oh and I watched The Trotsky (Canadian film) and the first three episodes of The World God Only Knows (subbed anime via Crunchyroll) while waiting for non-existent trick or treaters, and liked them both a fair bit. The Trotsky isn’t a must-watch, but I enjoyed it. You might enjoy it a tiny bit less if you don’t know french. The World God Only Knows is about a guy who’s pro at dating sims but has never even held hands with a girl, and he accidentally signs a contract with the devil to collect souls that are living in the hearts of girls by - of course - kissing them. If that premise sounds awesome, you should watch it. Otherwise I have nothing to say to you.

Alright, so now that I’m done recuperating, I shall post about the Halloween party I went to on friday - the first real party I’ve ever been to, to tell you the truth. It was the Halloween party for Carleton’s fencing club, and members from the Ottawa U fencing club were invited as well. I’ll try to run through the night in a relatively linear fashion or at least an interesting way.

        This was the first time I’d been surrounded by so many people for so much time in a while, the last being my going away party in July. That was 8-10 people, and this was 16-20 people I think. The going away party was at a friend’s house, on a farm, so it was pretty spacious. This party was in a four-room apartment. There was a bedroom, a kitchen (drinks), a living room? (candy), and a side room that might have been a bedroom or a living room or… something (dance floor). A friend of a friend volunteered to DJ, so there was plenty of loud music to be had.

        When I got there, around 8:40 pm or so, there were only a handful of people there. One of our coaches, the hostess, another beginner, a dude I didn’t recognize, and a girl I didn’t recognize. People trickled in as the night went on, and I introduced myself/was introduced to everyone by name and by weapon of choice. The only new people I remember are the ones who introduced themselves after we had been talking for a bit, which consists of the two people who were there when I first arrived. Other than that, I remember no names. I think I should feel bad about that, but at the same time, can you blame me when someone says “hey I’m x, I fence with y, see you later man” and then doesn’t speak to me again? I know the faces I saw, but the names just disappeared.

        I spent most of the night talking to people I knew and the girl (Emily) who was there when I arrived, mostly because they saw me doing nothing I think. I was getting pretty bored around 10 pm or something and considering leaving, then got into a deep fencing conversation with the coach and a couple of guys from the Ottawa U fencing club, and that lasted for like 1.5-2 hours or something. So that was cool. Then our coach left, and “left me in charge” because I was one of the few sober people. A little bit after that I was asked to drive a couple home (they drove me home after fencing on thursday) and it took until sometime after 1 am to get the drunk boyfriend out of the party. Every time we’d try to leave, he’d get in the middle of a ten minute goodbye, and then wander off to do the same to someone else. But that was some good bonding time and anyhow I left sometime after 1 am.

        So I was there for… about four hours, and I ate way more candy and chips than was absolutely necessary. Oh, and I was dressed up as Jack Skellington, from Nightmare Before Christmas! Man, that was an important detail. I’ll get some pictures up in a bit. However, getting my face painted and everything made my room kind of a wreck. When I got home in the morning I really didn’t want to clean it up, and I was really pissed off about it when I woke up.

        That’s an important detail because I was pissed about everything when I woke up. I slept in a bit, but even that didn’t help. Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the overload of junk food, but I don’t think it was either of those things - because this is exactly how I felt the next morning after my going away party, and exactly how I felt every time I had people stay the weekend at my place in junior high. True, any time those kinds of gatherings happened (I don’t think they really qualify as parties) I ate too much junk food and stayed up late, but I just think it’s too much time around too many people that really got to me.

        Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that I consistently forget how introverted I am because it’s socially expected of me to do these things and then it destroys me for days. It’s like an emotional hangover, or whiplash. Or something? Insert your own good metaphor. The moral of the story is I don’t feel any better until I stop talking to people and seclude myself and generally I have a hard time doing work, which means a party on friday eliminates my productivity for most of a weekend.

        I think vael has expressed a similar effect before, or maybe that was me. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this anyway. I’m just not sure if it was my idea or not. At any rate, it’s draining for me to spend time around people. I don’t know whether I’ll try to explain that or not when the fencing club inevitably asks me how I enjoyed the party.

        I think this post contains everything I wanted to say, though perhaps with less explanation than I planned, but I need to go to class now so that’s how my friday way. I’ll post more things later I think. I just don’t want to have one humongous mega-post.

So my Hardcore character on Dragon Tavern (permadeath) just upgraded his equipment enough to stop adventuring cautiously. Today, he died.

Sad, sad day. Sad day.

I just got the title for spending 300 day’s worth of AP as well.

Sad day.

edit: For those of you that know the game, I took 31 hits from a single boss. I didn’t bother to check what my success chance was. It was my first adventure after returning from the tavern >.>

Also it’s like Echo Bazaar is just looking for excuses to throw nightmares at me. Not finding someone (Watchful challenge), thus not getting paid, gives me nightmares? Really? Explain that one to me, please.

I’m stuck on my ambition until I get Watchful 45/Dangerous 37, and I’m stuck on the Absconding Devil until I get Bohemian 3 again, so basically I guess I’m going to go be Dangerous because it’s the least dangerous thing I can do.

Derp.

Once, I posted an e-mail from Kingdom of Loathing. Now, I post a letter from Fantasy University.

Imagine if KoL were made by the Facebook-generation.

Ready?

“Congratulations!

        Your application to Fantasy University has been accepted!

        We are looking forward to having yet another bright young mind take advantage of the unending knowledge of the country’s finest and foremost Adventuring College (that we know of)!

        We hope you are looking forward to the challenges presented by a Class-A Adventuring Education, and hope that you will meet any and all challenges with the same kind of fervor and optimism we exhibited in preparing this form letter!

        Before you are actually accepted, there is one formality that will be taken care of by this magical letter. It contains a disclaimer form that must be accepted before enrollment becomes final.

        Agreement: I, Demi Victus, do solemnly swear that I will do my best to uphold the traditions and integrity of Fantasy University and will always remember that I become the property of Fantasy University and that any accidents or punishments that may befall me up to and including death, dismemberment, depression, apathy, illness, decapitation (real or imagined), fraud, theft, delusions, nightmares, food poisoning, Rapture, stolen organs, borrowed organs, hallucinations, leg trauma, lupus, being burned alive, water torture, tickle torture, plain old torture, spasms, night sweats, day sweats, pant sweats, restless leg syndrome, restless elbow syndrome, poverty, canings, heat stroke, heat exhaustion, plain stroke, extortion, blackmail (which is technically different from extortion), blindness, deafness, loss of an ear, loss of one or more shoes, dew crotch, being forced to watch bad comedians (you know, the really bad ones where half of you wants to feel sorry for them, but the other half can’t stop laughing at how awful they are), and jury duty are all considered perks of the University and must be enjoyed as such. Furthermore, it remains the right of the University to… Geez, does anyone even read this crap? I spend 24 hours a day down here in this well, shackled to this printing press, writing up legal documents for you people BY HAND, and for what? A few half-hearted chuckles? My humor is all I have to give, and I try so hard, but what’s it all amount to? You’re never going read this anyway, and that’s okay. My wife will probably run off with some romance novelist, who she’ll fall in love with after he writes her into every single one of his best sellers. That’s cool, I’ll chill down here, with the rats, and the constant trickle of dank sewer water. No really guys, it’s fine. I’ll just keep making you laugh throughout this entire game, as you never once question where such brilliant humor stems from. You’ll never realize that every joke you read is really told by one lonely guy trapped in the bottom of a well, and that’s a fate I’m willing to accept. Bye forever.”

So from what I can tell Echo Bazaar is user-created. There’s a button you click on the storylets you see that tells you who made them, which could just be all developers, or it might not be.

        I like the system of the stats, the storylets you unlock and the opportunity cards… However, what I’m most interested in is seeing what they have to make me coerce my grandmother into playing. Not every game is Demon’s Souls, where the gameplay itself is enough to sell copies. More on that when I get to my lodgings and see what kind of activities my friends can engage in there. Or something.

        Well, ok. Standard procedure, I said a thing on facebook and I got more action points. More on this as it develops. This is a game on the level of The Ruins Of, where I practically love it just for existing. However it’s too damn polished for automatic love and its status as a social game as opposed to a simple browser-based game (these are developed very differently - compare Echo Bazaar to The Ruins Of and you’ll get the idea) makes me want proof of its excellence.

        I will be back to declare a judgement on its excellence later. If it is excellent, I expect you to be my neighbours so we can perform various activities at each other’s lodgings. Or whatever.

So that Vanquish demo. It’s pretty nuts. Something tells me the final levels resemble a three-dimensional bullet hell game.

        I died five times during the demo. Short jog through a base, fight against a four-legged mech (legs are weak points, knock one out, shoot the core - if you’re lucky you’ll take it out after two, if not, three is fine), which then TRANSFORMS into a two legged version with electro-whip arms. Checkpoint is at the first part of the fight so dying against the second means starting it all over. Your health regenerates and all, so it’s not like you’re weaker by the time the second half comes along, but still. One thing that made me feel less like a failure is that your weapons upgrade themselves as you either pick up upgrade chips (probably dropped from specific enemies during missions) or as you pick up the same gun (if an enemy drops an assault rifle, you pick it up and gain ammo, and some work towards a gun upgrade). When you die, you restart with the current state of your weapons, so it’s like a short term new game+.

        So the game itself. You have an uber nanotech suit thing, titanium neuroskeletal technomagic armour stuff. It has a booster pack that for some reason requires you to power slide to use. So you press L2 and you power slide until your suit overheats. Then you can also do a dodge roll, and if you press L2 while doing that, time pretty much stops and you get to fire away until your suit overheats. When you do a melee attack, which are as effective as an EMP blast/titanium fist to the face should be, your suit will also overheat for a bit. You lose a third of your movement speed while your suit is overheating, so it comes at a cost. But I did a flying knee to the face and killed a guy instantly. That was cool.

        So this game is like style and then substance. First you do cool shit, and then they try to justify it. For example, you don’t actually carry any guns - your suit morphs into guns by replicating any guns you find. It can store three in its memory at a time, but it’s suggested during the tutorial that you can upgrade that.

        Did I mention there’s a turbo power slide button?

        Oh, and you get the slow motion effect automatically when your health gets low, and that’s really cool. An explosive barrel blew up beside me, and the physical barrel or whatever put me at critical damage, and then I outran the explosion and survived.

        If I can finish the demo without dying, I’ll buy the game. If not, I have no chance to survive. Make my time.

I’m sure you were totally interested in my schedule (I know you weren’t) but I’m interested in my progress and it makes me feel good to remember I’ve accomplished something. So, for that selfish reason, here’s the homework I did over the weekend!

ALDS: I did my readings. Nothing crucial here, so nothing exciting to really report. However, my experiment did not lead to any interesting paper subjects. Oh well.

FREN: Watch my movie, read Voltaire, listen to music - and then write about all of those for my cultural journal. This was what I spent most of saturday doing. That’s four hours of stuff without the writing, which is kinda silly because I’d ALREADY DONE four hours for this project, but I decided they weren’t good enough so I started over. But hey it’s good now.

LING: Take notes on chapter 3.

Well damnit. That… looks like a lot less than it felt like. I know where and how I ended up spending time not working, but excuses are pretty useless. I know I’m not in trouble, I mean the next thing I have due is on thursday, and I could probably do it the day-of and print it off at school.

I do wish I had magically finished all of my work this weekend, but I was probably a little bit too optimistic on thursday. I’ve got psych and applied linguistics tomorrow, and since I won’t be starting on that paper just yet, I should get some solid work done on psychology notes. I’ve got from the end of my computers lab (11-11:30 at the latest) until 1 pm, then 2:30 until 4 pm, so that gives me three hours (minus eating lunch and time spent in transit and etc. etc.) to work. I’ll get at least one chapter done for psychology, and likely some of the second. Then that night I’ll do my linguistics assignment and check out my next computers assignment.

Riveting excitement here, folks. Don’t miss a minute.

And actually more applicable than I might even think when reading the textbook. Diagrams of how you breathe when you make sounds?! That’s so forgettable and not at all interesting to people who don’t have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, namely, the people taking intro to linguistics.

        First, something I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days: the schwa. Basically, it’s a mid-central laxly produced vowel - and it’s all over the place in tons of languages, though very few include it in their alphabet. North American english actually deletes it a lot (how do you pronounce chocolate - with or without an o? that letter o is actually a schwa), and that’s another neat thing about language - we’re optimizing for speed, so we throw away useless sounds and don’t pronounce things properly. Back to what mid-central laxly produced vowel means, it’s pretty much the very middle of your mouth. I’m assuming that would be the natural resting position for your tongue. So at any give time, if you were to just open you lips (no tongue movement allowed) and make a noise, it would likely be a schwa!

        So the schwa is in tons of words because it makes them easier to pronounce, and a great example is foxes. Try to pronounce fox, and add a -zzz at the end for the s, WITHOUT any sound in between. Very difficult to produce, harder for the hearer to understand that you mean multiple foxes - so a schwa goes right in between those sounds as a transition and to make them more pronounceable.

        I thought that was neat so if I explained it poorly just pretend it’s really cool.

        Next thing is I’m going to write a paper about how communication on the internet is still communication. It’s a little bit rough because linguistics has proved that writing, whether it’s a letter or an “instant message” is not equivalent to pure language use, but I’ll just have to pick my thesis carefully. The reason I say “pure language use” as opposed to “speech” is because sign language is equivalent to spoken word, and actually ten times more amazing in certain ways. But suffice to say that sign language uses the language centric parts of your brain (a couple places in the left hemisphere) exactly like spoken language, AND it develops an extra part on the right hemisphere dedicated solely to understanding the spacial dimension of signed language. So, as far as your brain is concerned, speaking with your hands and speaking with your mouth are just as good.

        What I want to somehow work into this paper is that communication over the internet is similarly equivalent to communication face to face - that’s not to say I don’t think there’s any point to meeting someone in person to discuss something with them, just that internet friends are as valid as friends who sit beside you in class.

        Take vael’s post about a support system - who says a “support system” is restricted to people physically close to you? You want to see an internet support system, go to deviantArt or Gaia Online and see all the little peoples complimenting eachother and generally just making everybody feel good about being average. It’s as easy as that to prove. I don’t have the equipment to do brain scans and crap like that, but I’m willing to bet there’d be a lot of similarities between a kind word from an internet friend and a kind word from a friend in the same room. Maybe we internet kids (and don’t doubt that people who grew up on computers have differently developed brains from those who didn’t - look at 3D artists, a field requiring spatial knowledge that could never have existed before, and imagine trying to teach such a program to an older artist) connect avatars with our concepts of “others,” the vague sense that in fact someone does exist, as easily as other people connect faces.

        This is what I’ve been learning at university.

        This is optional reading, consider the post done, but what I meant by ‘concepts of “others”’ is by contrast to the concept of self. Turns out, concepts and exercises that relate back to your sense of self use distinct areas of your brain from ones that don’t. Which is to say that science is working on determining where in your brain YOU, as a person and an idea, exist. Based on that, I’d definitely say it’s possible there are similar areas in the brain related to other people, as concepts and as people with feelings and thoughts of their own, that I can guarantee would relate back to the monkeysphere.

        The easiest way to test that would be to lesion someone’s brain and see if they stop understanding that other people exist just like they do. Easy way to figure out where I should try that would be to test people with severe autism. Now, I don’t necessarily need to cut/burn anyone’s brain for this (electromagnets and drugs can actually turn your brain off temporarily - god I love science - and see what would happen if we theoretically destroyed a part of your brain) but where would the fun be in that?

        Line-up for electrodes in the brain starts to my right, folks. Don’t be shy, we’ve got enough for everyone!

Just got done checking out my syllabi (this is the plural of syllabus, which is the thing where your teacher tells you what they expect you to do and you say “like hell am I doing that”) and making my schedule for the next couple of weeks. Thought it might be relevant, so I’m going to show it to you! It’s a sheet of plain, lined looseleaf folder to a quarter of the original size. Nothing fancy here. For your benefit, bonus information will be added such as due dates and course names. Oh, and one side note, any time I say “read” I mean “read and highlight important information.” It takes a lot longer to read and pay enough attention to highlight things.


        Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies (ALDS): Do readings before class (usually a couple of pages in length), write paper for the 18th of October (3-4 pages in length, and that is NOTHING - I expect to slap this together in very little time. It can be on anything relevant to our subject material, and the name should tell you that’s an extremely broad category. I’ve got a few ideas and I just need to find a few good citations and put it all together. This isn’t something I need to research for a week, I just have to write about a thing. My biggest concern with it is proper terminology - should I use L1 and L2 instead of typing “first/native language” and “second language”? I know that’s the norm, but I am an ENGLISH STUDENT and I DO THESE THINGS THE RIGHT WAY. Even if it takes six times as long to type!)


        French (FREN): Watch J'ai tué ma mère (french indie film from Quebec, heard good stuff about it, I just need to spend time on french culture), write my cultural journal (due October 5th) about the movie (basic summary, personal evaluation, what did I learn or like about it), write my cultural journal about the Voltaire passage I read (some random thing of his that hardly anyone remembers, but it happens to be only a hundred pages or two and that’s far more palatable than Candide), read Cyrano de Bergerac (I did this during my public transit time today, which is great - just had to read the first act, and I’m in love with the language), do research on Gilles Vigneault (group presentation near the end of October, 10-12 minutes in length, and I’m researching his political life - it will be very easy to get behind on this, because I have a vague due date and nobody to report to. Will have to get some group organization going on so we can practice and stuff), write résumé (this is a summary of an article about “une phoque moine” which is a sea lion or whatever and it has to be 150 words long lol)


        Computer Science (COMP): Assignment #2 (due October 13th, and we have yet to learn the stuff it requires, so while I could teach myself, why waste my time? I’ll check it out next friday probably)


        Linguistics (LING): Finish reading Chapter 3 (Phonology), take notes on Chapter 3 (in OneNote, so this is my “studying” and will also make it easier to study for my midterm), do assignment #3 (due October 7th), study for midterm on October 14th (chapters 1-3, not sure just how much studying I’ll do - review the assignment questions for sure, read the notes I took on the chapters and lectures, but I don’t know if I’ll read the chapters themselves again… it takes a loooong time)


        Psychology (PSYC): Read chapter 3 (accomplished this morning before class, the last few pages after class - this is what we’re covering next week), takes notes on chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3 (this is for studying purposes, and will likely take a long time - but it’s important, because I have to…), study for midterm on October 13th (chapters 1-3, all multiple choice, worth 20% of final grade - will read review sections in book, personal applications (practice questions I think?), some stuff about how to pwn multiple choice exams, and check out past exams at the library)


        I have no class on friday, but I am going to the University of Ottawa for a study comparing my first (english) and second (french) languages. Should be cool, actually! I’ll get a 1% credit for my final mark in PSYC 1001, and if it’s neat, I may write my first ALDS paper about it, or something related to bilingualism. I’ll spend the morning and early afternoon (my appointment is for 3:40 PM) working on stuff for french, because it’ll be nice to cross that stuff off. If I have extra time, I’ll keep reading chapter 3 for linguistics. Third LING assignment if I have time.


        Saturday, I’ll probably take notes like a madman, and that’ll feel great because I like all of the things I’ll be reviewing and I like to have a fat block of text to look back at. If I wind up with extra time at the end of the night, I’ll pretty up my old notes and upload them!


        Sunday, I’ll do whatever didn’t get done the last two days. Taking notes, ALDS reading, french projects, whatever. I know I won’t finish this all in one weekend despite my obvious optimism, so the goal is to make sure I have things for the following week done. Namely, the cultural journal for french, my LING assignment, and the reading for ALDS. So that’s not really a lot of work. The rest is all working ahead and that’s a very smart thing for me to do.

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        Wrote that last night and tumblr died forever but someone revived it so we’re ok now. However two addenda (plural of addendum): one, I need to check out my lecture slides and copy stuff into my notes that I didn’t have time to copy, and two, I need to check out my french textbook so I can learn french grammar blah.

        Also, it’s funny to learn linguistics and realize that bullshit grammatical rules have no value and then go to a class and have to force bullshit grammatical rules onto myself. “It’s just the way french is,” “It’s just what we do,” “It’s a direct complement so it does this duh,” like none of this makes any sense so don’t pretend like it does lol. At any rate science is working to improve language teaching courses so the future should be great for other people.