Polling Place threads: vital source of Muserly information, time-wasting distraction, both, other, or what? (We pick “what?!”)
Continued from v. 2011.2
Patience, Please
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OK, I’m going to start this off with another Homestuck poll. If you were playing Sburb, what would your class and aspect be?
Maid of Heart.
Dunno… Mage of Mind probably.
Rogue of Space!
Page of Time!
Hm, I took a quiz thing that seems to be the standard for people who want to take a class/aspect quiz, and I got Voice of Space. (It included a few non-canon aspects such as blaze and zen. Voice is apparently the female version of Bard, since bard is strictly male.)
Voice of Space seems to fit me pretty well, looking at the descriptions.
Here’s another Homestuck poll: If you were playing Sburb, would you be a Prospit or Derse dreamer?
((aww apparently I killed this thread with my incessant Homestuck refferences. SFTDP.))
I think the Derse/Prospit question didn’t get responses because (a) there are only two possible answers and (b) we know next to nothing about the in-comic criteria for dreamself assignment, so it’d be guesswork anyway.
I think I’d be Derse. Not sure about god tier yet.
(I’d be Prospit going by temperament, but Derse going by color scheme.)
Yeah. I base all of that stuff off of quizzes I’ve found online (and a lot of people say they use that source) so, I dunno, I keep forgetting it’s guesswork for most people. (I’m a Prospit dreamer, by the way.)
1. You gain the ability to teleport yourself at will. The catch is that you can only do so to three locations you select, and once you pick them you won’t be able to change them for the rest of your life.
Which places would you choose?
2a. What was the last book you read?
2b. The last poem?
3. What was the worst nightmare you’ve ever had? (A literal bad dream, not a hypothetical scenario)
1. Probably Paris or London (i.e. Europe), somewhere in New England/southern Canada and secluded island in the Bahamas just for the heck of it.
2a. The last new book was Garth Nix’s Superior Sunday, I think. Then I re-read some other book of which the title currently escapes me.
2b. Probably Invictus.
3. I’ve had a host of bad ones, so I’ll just go with the last one:
I was taking the linear algebra exam and right before we were handed the test, my analysis professor came in. He explained that he was supervising and he’d read the test questions and found them all completely trivial, so he changed them.
I looked at the first question, which was on the last topic we’d covered in lin alg (solving non homogeneous linear equations), except that you had to somehow relate it to the fundamental theorem of algebra (which had to be proven for real and complex numbers as well) and then calculate the solution with some sort of formula derived from it (we’d just “covered” the theorem, i.e. proven it in 30 mins that morning in analysis and I didn’t understand it). I decided to not let myself be deterred and solve the equation at the very least (and so I did).
Then the professor came over, read what I was writing and told me that my calculation was wrong and I wasn’t answering the question properly. He recommended that I step down from the exam, since he knew me and knew I had no chance of ever passing it. I told him I at least wanted to try, so he asked me to prove him wrong by telling him how I would solve any of the other nine questions.
I couldn’t even understand those questions, so I couldn’t say anything. The prof gently took me aside and explained that he’d seen my confused expression in lectures . He said some people just don’t have what it takes to study math. Even if I should by some miracle pass lin alg, I would never be capable of understanding or passing his class (analysis), so I should just accept the inevitable, quit Mathematics and find a less challenging subject to study.
1) the us treasury vault, my secret underground safe (which I will have my mansion over), and my soon to be new private island. lol
2a) I am currently reading Game of Thrones.
2b) That would a poem translated to English from Russian by someone whose name I cannot recall. But it was called May. Said poem influenced Tchaikovsky to write the piano piece that I going to perform in concert this Sunday and am slightly/extremely nervous about.
3) I was a baby seal in the middle of a football field. I was surrounded by sharks, all of which had the faces of my friends. They were talking about how they were going to eat me.
1. I’d save them for now. I’m too young to be making huge choices, I’d end up putting them somewhere which wouldn’t be relevant in ten years.
I think my ultimate plan would be to find some isolated lake or pond or something, away from civilization. Build myself a simple house, and set the first location there.
The second point would be in a city, where I’d work and buy groceries and such.
If that point was close to my family, I’d keep saving the third until I had a better idea. Otherwise, it’d go hereish.
2a. For school, Walden, by Thoreau. If plays count, An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde. Otherwise, The Emerald Atlas by John Stevens. I’ll endorse the first two, the third was disappointing.
2b. If, by Rudyard Kipling.
3. Um… Hm. I guess one of those typical dreams where you wake up and you’ve missed something slightly important.
I don’t really have nightmares.
1. One of the places I’d pick to teleport to would definitely be my family’s place in Jordan. It would make everything so much easier–no need for expensive plane tickets and super-long rides, and visiting my relatives over there would become something I could do every week, instead of once every five to ten years. I don’t really have any preference for the other places…I agree with bookgirl_me and everyone else that I secluded island or place away from everyone else would be pretty cool. My last pick…hmm. I want to travel the world, but I hate long plane rides, so if I picked someplace that was far away but relatively connected to a bunch of other places I could cut down on potential travel time a lot. Or, no, wait, I’d still need to be able to teleport back home again. So I guess I’d pick home for my final location.
2a. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Still haven’t finished it yet, it’s on my list of things to do during this spring break.
2b. I think it was something by Nizar Qabbani. …Or it was fan poetry. I am terrible at remembering these, sorry.
3. I really don’t like actually talking about my bad dreams, so I’ll just leave this empty.
1) Taupo, New Zealand; Singapore (good central location); and Ankara, Turkey (likewise).
2a) I’m in the middle of Hamlet right now (I LOVE IT); before that, Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (in terms of biographies, not the best, but I love all biographies and also Molly Ivins).
2b) “Prufrock”: everyone should read that immediately, good lord.
3) They all involve being rejected from every college ever and resigning to a life in which I’m stuck in one place and no one respects me and they kind of make me cry.
Astonishing! We just read “Prufrock” in my English class. I agree with you.
1. Three underground bunkers in remote locations across the world. These bunkers would be stocked with supplies and extremely secure.
2a. The 13 and 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear. It’s awesome and you should all go read it.
2b. Erm, do Florence+the Machine song lyrics count? I don’t know. I don’t read a lot of poetry.
3. I had an awful nightmare that I was forgetting my school books and gym clothes and such. It was really stressful and awful. (This is what most of my nightmares consist of.) Eventually, I woke up and a bunch of counselors and therapists were trying to help me recover from the horrible nightmare I had just had… then I woke up and it was all a dream.
…I should know by now not to ask MuseBlog about its nightmares.
Hugs for everyone.
1. Somewhere a short trip from my likely home, somewhere near many of my foreign friends and other interesting people and things, somewhere on the other side of the world and a short trip from many different places, somewhere scenic and relaxing, and somewhere secure. Let’s make that central Sydney, NYC or somewhere else on the US east coast, and some tiny unimportant island in the middle of nowhere.
2a. The Hours. I read it for English class, but actually enjoyed it on its own merits.
2b. I can’t remember.
3. I can’t remember, and probably didn’t want to at the time. Generally they involve either horrible embarrassment or imminent death, but with added weirdness.
Have you ever been to a Disney theme park, and if so, which one(s) and how many times?
I’ve been to Disney World twice, once at Christmas 2002 for about a week, when we went to the four major parks there (Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom), and again in February 2011 for one day (my 18th birthday) at EPCOT park.
I’ve been to Disneyland four times.
First when I was six and just before California Adventure finished being built.
Second was in seventh grade when floods in Kauai forced my parents to cancel the trip there.
Third was in eighth grade with my choir.
Fourth was in tenth grade with my cousins.
Pokemon or Doctor Who?
Pokemon.
The games or the series? If the former, the games are more consistently great than DW, but if the later, DW wins easily.
Doctor Who, by simple virtue of the fact that I have never played Pokemon.
Do you have a favorite Supreme Court case?
I think my favorite Supreme Court case is Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. While I can acknowledge the effect that landmark cases such as Marbury vs. Madison, Roe vs. Wade, or Brown vs. Board of Education have had in the US, AMP vs. Myriad is the one I bring up all the time. I like talking about it and its implications. Especially since it’s such a new case–only made last summer. So a lot of things, like my Human Genetics textbook, haven’t yet taken it into account, which means I get to tell my entire class about it.
Yay!
Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure v. Massachusetts. Purely because of the name.
Florida Department of State vs. Treasure Salvors, Inc. Because it’s relevant to the field of maritime archaeology (albeit in a negative way), and because the write-up begins: “After respondents had located the wreck of a 17th-century Spanish galleon off the Florida coast…”
West Coast Hotel Company vs. Parrish, because I had to do a reading on it recently for history, also it’s historically important, also Elsie Parrish was clearly quite wonderful.
Shared traits of most of your favorite characters?
Mine tend to be either sarcastic nerdy side characters or Affably Evil villains. Hm.
I like that question a lot, but it’s a bit hard for me to answer… I definitely like characters I can relate to, which in practice means I always love (and feel protective of) nonhuman characters who haven’t been around humans but suddenly have to work with them all the time and are hopelessly confused. Or humans who are just bad at socializing. My favorite character right now is Anthy Himemiya, though, so I can definitely appreciate characters who are absolutely nothing like me if they act like real people and they grow a lot.
I’m also fond of villains who are unambiguously evil, but the narrative manages to get you to feel sorry for them without erasing the awful things they’ve done.
I don’t know if it counts as a trait, but oddly being in unrequited love seems to contribute to a character’s appeal in my mind. Snape is the obvious example, but also Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones.
Snape is one of my favourite characters of all time, and I think there’s some merit in what Bibliophile said above, about being able to feel sorry for them despite all the awful things they’ve done. The only time I cried reading the Harry Potter series was the chapter in Book 7 where Harry’s looking at Snape’s memories in the Pensieve.
Otherwise, intelligence, almost to the point of arrogance – Sherlock (BBC), Dr House (sarcasm applies to both of these too); Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Minister, nearly anyone on The West Wing, Frank Underwood (the sinister character of the latter is also quite fascinating).
Oh hey, I never answered this… Let me get back to you, I wrote a draft of a response…
I know I wrote something about this a while back, let me see if I can find it…
Yes, from “You Know You’re Addicted to X When You Y, v. 2009.2”, the specific attributes I listed were:
– Smart (self-explanatory)
– Foreign (by which I meant associated with a country or region other than the one the story is taking place in– for instance, I think a lot of Marvel’s international heroes are really cool, like the Winter Guard/Soviet Super Soldiers, and I wish they would show up more. And seeing the perspective of an outsider is always just cool in general.)
– Mysterious (because who can resist a mysterious backstory?)
– Young (in this case I meant young characters among older people who still pull their weight, I think because I relate to being the youngest person in a group of adults and hope that I can contribute productively and impress them. But on the flip side, I also like older mentor/teacher figures who are the oldest person in the group and contribute in their way.)
– Willing to sacrifice a lot (determination and endurance for a good cause are traits I respect immensely.)
– Non-powered helping powered people, where “powered†can also mean physically strong, having authority, royalty, a time traveler, or a chosen one.
– Some combination of the above.
I think the common denominators are being heroic, being somehow different from the majority of the group one is with because I relate to this, being an ordinary or relatively-ordinary person who still manages to make a difference (despite lacking plot armor!), and being determined and focused. I like characters who show me that anyone can be a hero.
The traits that my favorite characters share make me really nervous about myself, in case it says something about me.
Because one of my absolute favorite characters is when an unapologetically evil villain is working alongside the heroes.
Or someone who’s so totally dedicated to one particular thing that they’ll sacrifice anything and anyone else.
Clever, competent people in general. Bonus points for ruthlessness.
Examples: Rumplestiltskin from Once Upon a Time, Javert from Les Miserables.
My favorites in characters seem to lean toward morbidly funny evil villains whom are sarcastic, dramatic, and have little or no compassion towards anybody or anything.
Like, the witch from The Emerald Atlas.
Or, Kahn; for those who don’t know that book.
My favorites tend to be characters with really strong moral cores, especially the ones who manage to live by their morals basically through sheer bloodyminded self-control (Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, Jean Valjean, sometimes Toby Ziegler). And in f/sf stories, I like female characters who are strong and heroic without having to be violent or good in combat, because they have other kinds of strength (fair Janet from the Tam Lin story, Sophie Hatter, Meg Murry, Evelyn Smythe from the Doctor Who audios, all the women in Connie Willis’ Oxford Historians books).
The strong, silent, genius one, definitely. Relatedly, in all the Star Trek I’ve watched, the science officer is in the top few. (Although I also like Kira, and I prefer Hoshi to T’Pol. I have no idea, except the genders seem suspicious). (Dax doesn’t actually fit, but whatever.) I also love the intelligent, arrogant, usually socially awkward characters.
I also like characters who are cheery and somewhat sarcastic. If you’ve seen The L Word, then even though I’m most similar to Bette, Alice is by far my favourite. So I ship Simon/Kaylee and see myself in both of them, (and also find both attractive), and similarly for Legolas/Gimli.
I have a weakness for the idealistic villains who kind of have a point. Legend of Korra Book 3. Jeanine as portrayed in the first two Divergent books. (After the big reveal in Allegiant, my admiration was replaced by the urge to yell about being a Traitor To Science. But I think it still stands.) This can get awkward when the conflict is mostly ideological and I agree with the side we’re not supposed to. (Or think they’re both wrong, but one is substantially less wrong so I effectively agree.)
Checked on MB briefly, saw this, decided to answer. I actually realized recently that in books I like [usually female] characters who are unusually perceptive about the world. They either value knowledge highly or happen to have a lot of it; examples would be Tiffany Aching of Discworld, Hermione, Lyra of His Dark Materials, Meg Murry of A Wrinkle in Time, Bartimaeus of the Bartimaeus Trilogy — HIGHLY recommend — etc. I think this is because books were fundamental in my formative years, so I took them more personally and so admired characters whom I wanted to be more like.
In TV my favorite characters take more a sarcastic, witty lean, like House and Archer, but there are also various (somewhat) intellectual characters I like, such as Abed, Zoidberg, and Simon Tam. And in movies: Tony Stark.
There are also just the generally awesome characters, like Arya and Tyrion from ASoIaF (though honestly, Sansa is kicking serious butt, and Jaime is far more sympathetic in the books than what I’ve heard about him in the TV show). Also Indiana Jones and James Bond (save the rampant alcoholism and misogyny, you can’t say he’s not competent).
So I guess the theme of this is perceptive, highly competent people (the males of this group are usually quite rude… hm), but also Zoidberg and Archer, so I suppose humor plays a role too. I identify with book characters more than with TV and movie characters, probably because it’s easier for me to put myself in their shoes when the visuals are left to the imagination.
Female characters who have anger issues/violent tendencies, seek out physical/mental prowess, and aren’t good with dealing with their emotions. Especially when these characters take on roles as protectors and sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others/a cause.
Examples: Rachel from Animorphs, Kestral Hath from The Wind Singer trilogy
(almost the opposite of ZNZ’s fav female characters I guess!)
the above revelation about my favorite darlings brought to you by a conversation with POSOC where he pointed out I keep gushing about the same type of person
A bit broader, “protector” characters in general–other favorites are Keladry from the Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce, Ender Wiggin from Ender’s Game. But many of these end up main characters, and don’t end up dying in the end, which really is what cements my love into weepy adoration
Also, any female characters who love dragons!!! Princess Cimmorine from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, my ultimate hero, my darling fierce no-nonsense lady
BELATED POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING FOR ABOVE POSTS?????? I GUESS, JUST DON”T THINK TOO HARD ABOUT IT IF YOU WANT TO READ ANY SERIES I MENTION, MOVE ALONG MOVE ALONG
They all tend to share traits with me. Either that or be extremely endearing.
The two are not mutually exclusive!
What’s this “either” nonsense?
Without the context of any particular work of fiction, legend, or pseudoscience, what do you initially imagine ghosts as looking like if told to think of them?
I think of transparent people with glowing eyes, which is how I always imagined them when writing my Stephanie Stone stories and later related works, although I don’t know which sources exactly caused me to settle on that appearance. (The glowing eyes may have been influenced by Danny Phantom, but I know I liked them as a general sign of magic powers in shows and books I watched and read before that, so it probably goes back farther.)
I don’t think this was necessarily influenced by Harry Potter, I think this is the conception I had even before those books/films, but that’s probably the closest description. Normal-looking people, but white/translucent and floating around.
Regular people, maybe slightly transparent, but with the injuries they died of, Beetlejuice style. They can make themselves visible to humans if they want, and some kinds of deaths (choking, organ failure) can pull off the pretending-to-be-alive thing easier than others, but the gruesome ones can get great jobs as hired haunters.
If someone says “ghost”, I imagine a sheet with two black circles for eyes. If there’s a bump in the night and someone says “ghost”, I think an invisible presence that, well, makes things bump in the night. For some reason I don’t imagine them as people or being people-like.
If someone says “ghost” I think of a transparent apparition without a face. If I hear a bump in the night and someone says “ghost”, I think of a thin, broken, decaying demon with long fingernails and blood pouring from it’s eyes.
Where were most of the maps you saw growing up centered on?
I grew up seeing mostly maps centered on the Prime (Greenwich) Meridian, but some other American people I know online grew up with maps centered on the Americas.
I always saw the (I thought) standard which breaks at the linke between Kathmandu and Alaska, or maybe in the middle of Kathmandu?
Are those the ones that are centered in Prime Meridian? I never considered that. I always assumed that it was just a convinient break point between continents.
Kathmandu is in Nepal, did you mean Kamchatka (the peninsula-y part of Russia north of Japan that’s close to the Bering Straight)? The Prime-Meridian-Centered maps I was thinking of do break at the Bering Straight and I do think it’s convenient.
That’s the one.
I never would have made that mistake before I studied geography. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well, can’t get less now, I should set about getting more.
I probably asked this question before, but have forgotten it if I have; or if I haven’t asked, I should:
What is Bibliophile’s gravatar?
A tardigrade!
Do you feel like your personality is most similar to those of others in your field of study and chosen career path, assuming you have a clear enough preference?
Nope. I think my fellow math-majors and I have a lot of superficial things in common (sense of dress, affectations, “quirkiness”), but everyone’s core personalities seem to be pretty distinct. Perhaps it’s being in a culture that puts less hype on the whole “you have one passion/calling in life” thing.
Personally, I think I’m a more emotional person than the average math student stereotype. Though honestly, we’re much too heterogeneous as a group to tell.
No; software developers at startups are generally known to be some of the most obliviously entitled men on Earth, and I try to be very aware of my own privilege/sometimes lack thereof.
Jazz musician: in my experience the jazz world is overwhelmingly masculine. I’m a girl and often find myself a minority.
Internet musician/chiptune producer: usually people who make video game soundtracks have some sort of obsession with video games. I’m very impartial to videogames, I just enjoy the pixel-and-NES-tracker aesthetic.
Also this field generally contains a lot of guys.
I don’t think I have as much of an ego as a lot of classical musicians seem to. I hope.
I’m going to study English — I think I conform to a lot of the English major stereotypes. Like, I’m deeply introverted and emotional, I drink too much tea, I identified with Jo March at a very young age, I have no idea what I want to do after college. But I don’t conform to a lot of the others — I don’t correct people’s grammar, for example, and I try not to be elitist about literature. Also, Mr. Darcy does nothing for me.
What are your favorite types of tea?
Recently I’ve been really liking a vanilla rooibos blend from a tea/chocolate shop about an hour from home. (They also make ideal hot cocoa… sigh.) I also like green tea, sencha usually, and cinnamon black tea.
I’ve been unpacking my stuff and I’ve discovered that I have something like thirteen boxes or packs of tea in my room. So, from among the ones I can see in front of me: apple and cinnamon, lemon and ginger, black tea citrus, camomile/camomile and honey, and English breakfast. I am open to recommendations.
Constant Comment tastes like Christmas. I drink a lot of chamomile (actually a weird chamomile blend with lemongrass and mint I think). Lots of Earl Grey, English / Irish Breakfast, PG Tips. I don’t drink very adventurous teas.
red rose (it’s a black, english-breakfast type tea)
black tea no sugar no milk just a Lipton teabag with hot water and then I gulp it until my mouth scalds
you can tell I take tea very seriously, as an art form.
there was a tea shop in galway that had two fruit teas I was in love with: ‘Rainforest’ (when steeped for >15min) and ‘Blood Orange’ (when steeped for however long but especially as it went longer.
When making it myself: two teabags of fruit tea in a mug, steep until water is almost completely room temp, microwave water back to hot, add some juice
I’m an abomination and everyone here/in ireland is scandalized
(like okay giving up caffeine (except for the trace amounts that reside in chocolate) has really limited me tea-wise so don’t judge TOO hard)
I am pretty sure that rooibos doesn’t have caffeine, if you want an experience more like black tea! Not sure you can add juice, though.
Well. You CAN add juice, but SHOULD you??
Yorkshire. I’ll drink PG Tips, Tetley or Ty Phoo if pressed, but Yorkshire is the king of teas.
I know most of you live across the pond, so it’s not directly relevant, but since it’s very much like Texas voting to leave the USA, maybe views should be aired –
Should Scotland leave the UK and become independent? What do you reckon?
No.
I guess they should be able to if the majority wants it, but I don’t really know enough about the subject.
I’m super American, so: I don’t mind either way just so long as you don’t start a war over it.
Is this relevant in the immediate future? Is there a vote happening about this? I don’t think I know enough about the relevant issues.
The vote is on the 18th.
Ah. I still don’t think I know enough about the issues. Could you give us a summary of both sides, Paul?
This is a pretty big deal, oxlin: the possible end of the United Kingdom, happening this week. The Internet is abuzz with information and opinions about it.
Yeah. Now that I know there is a vote, I do agree it is relevant! I thought Paul was asking a hypothetical question before I knew there was a vote. I don’t really get newspapers anymore, so I miss stuff sometimes.
But Wales and England and Northern Ireland would still form a United Kingdom? Or would this result in more votes?
Still not sure how I feel about the vote. I did some reading on the internet about it. It looks like it might be a bit tricky to get everything set up for Scotland as an independent country. I don’t think it is a hundred percent bad idea as there is historical precedent and it did used to be independent, but I don’t have a strong feeling either way. It seems like it’d be overall easier to stick with the status quo but if separating is the correct thing for Scotland, then the trouble is worth it.
A summary of all the arguments would take up several pages, but basically – Scotland is part of the Union, but it has its own parliament, so it’s semi-independent. The Scottish National Party won a convincing majority in 2011. They promised the people of Scotland a referendum on full independence, and they’ve now delivered. The vote is on a knife-edge. The polls are prediciting a huge turnout (which is good for democracy, at least). If more than 50% vote yes on Thursday, Scotland leaves the union. There woudl be LOTS of issues to sort out, and they’re being argued about exhaustively, of course.
There would indeed be lots of issues to sort out, and I think everyone (including/especially the Scots) would be worse off for it.
This week’s Economist has an interesting leader on this issue. I recommend you all read it.
There are arguments for and against, but I’m glad it’s not being regarded as a purely economic argument. There’s also the big question of identity. I know many Scottish people don’t feel particularly British. They regard the Union as something that was imposed on Scotland in 1707. However economically useful the Union may be, they see Westminster as remote and irrelevant to their interests. Whether they’re right, of course, remains to be seen.
A novelist I follow, Charles Stross, seems to be very pro-independence, but then again he’s written a near-future book taking place in about five years where Scotland was already independent… (Halting State. I read it on the plane home from London last summer and immediately regretted being so close to Scotland and not visiting it once. Even though I was only in London for about five days.)
I did almost the opposite. During my one trip to Britain I spent nearly all of the time in Scotland, except for one night in Brighton because I got lost. I only saw London because I missed my scheduled flight home.
Getting lost in Scotland and ending up in Brighton is pretty impressive.
Not as impressive as it sounds. I started at Gatwick (because of deal with rental car), then it seemed that all the signs for the places I intended to go disappeared at random, leaving me stranded. The only signs that consistently remained in sight pointed to Brighton, so I thought, hey, why I don’t I go to Brighton? It had the additional attraction that I’d recently watched Quadrophenia with a Who-obsessed friend. Besides, I figured I could always follow the coastline with less of chance of losing my way. It ended up being a brilliant decision, however accidental. Had a whole week’s worth of adventures within 24 hours.
I know that feeling.
I’ve read a few of his arguments too — like a lot of left-leaning British people, he’s pro-independence in principle, but is worried that the Conservative Party will have a solid majority in England for the foreseeable future (Scotland is a Labour Party stronghold, and that voting bloc will be lost if it declares independence).
I don’t know enough about the details to form my own opinion yet. Maybe I’ll follow Selenium’s advice — the Economist has its own political leanings, but it’s usually got a detailed analysis of the issues which is more than a lot of periodicals do.
I am torn between hating some of the negative stuff they have written about space exploration (both government and private) and appreciating just how dang good their obituary for Tim Samaras was.
the classical music tabloid I follow seems pretty anti-independence because it would mean the end of BBC scotland orchestra, but that seems kind of a weak reason for opposing it..
It’s stronger than “they would have to change the maps” at least, because maps have to be changed pretty frequently as-is…
Hey, if anyone still wants to know more about this issue, Guardian editor Matt Wells did a Reddit AMA on Scottish independence about a day ago.
At this point, I think I’m pro-independence, if only because it’ll be an anticlimax otherwise. I recognize this is a weak reason and I’m glad I don’t have to vote based on it.
Also: The Union Jack is made up of elements from the flags of England, Scotland and Ireland, right? Does that mean that if Scotland does secede, the UK has to change their flag?
That is an interesting point. On principle, they probably should, if Scotland secedes. But given that the Union Jack has been around for over 200 years, I don’t know if they’ll want to change it.
I’m not so sure. If Scotland does secede, “good riddance” sentiment in the rest of Britain could run fairly high. The other countries might not want St. Andrew’s cross in their banner.
I can’t really see how we could retain the Union Jack in its present form. When I have a brain, I’ll draw up the flag minus the Scottish saltire and see what it looks like.
You should add the Welsh dragon. Because Dragons are cool.
It’s time the Welsh dragon appeared on the Union Jack. Wales isn’t represented at all.
I don’t really feel entitled to have an opinion (I am one of those ‘Mericans), but I keep seeing English (in the main) people saying things like “well, we don’t want the nuclear weapons currently stored in Scotland hanging ’round us“, which is making me pull the same face I get when a friend of mine is dating someone who ain’t good enough. So. I kinda just want to throw my arm around Scotland and talk sweetly to en while giving the ex dagger eyes and walking away towards ice cream.
But I know it’s a complicated undertaking, and share ZNZ’s comment. If everyone plays nice about whichever decision, I’ll be chill.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone analyze international relations in exactly that way.
*Fast-forward thirty years* *I’ve just won the Nobel Peace Prize for my eye-opening essay, “C’mon, Nations of the World, Let’s Try That New Pizza Place.”* *I’m thanking the GAPAs and MBers, a single tear glinting against my cheekbone* *Most of the assembled reporters and dignitaries pretend to know what I’m talking about* *And then* *The others quietly give a Kokopelli handshake* *A thousand conspiracy theories are born*
(Incidentally, I think the pirate filter poured additional funny sauce over that post.)
Well, they decided against, by a narrow but comfortable margin. It’s at least avoided a lot of upheaval. And they’re rightly congratulating themselves on the passionate but civil way both campaigns were conducted. This was a decision which had major consequences – far more significant than a general election. It was a stark yes/no vote involving nationalism, which is about the most effective recipe for dividing people into entrenched camps. There were a few isolated incidents of graffiti on polling stations, and a few eggs were thrown, but overall, it was a remarkably peaceful event. I’m rather proud of the people of Scotland.
there are riots in glasgow right now (apparently unionists attacking “yes” voters) and at least 1 teenage girl has been stabbed
If I were facetious, I’d say that was a typical Saturday night in Glasgow. But you’re right. The aftermath does seem to have produced more aggression, alas.
A possibly more important question than Scottish independence – the Royal Mint is running a competition to design a motif which will appear on the new pound coin. It’s supposed to celebrate Britishness and Britain’s contributions to the world. Suggestions?
Shakespeare?
A quill pen.
The TARDIS. There you go. Competition solved.
I would suggest a teapot. But I usually suggest a teapot.
I suggest a kettle.
Eddie Hunter!!
Britain’s best achievement!
Well, he’s done a lot for the people of Lochaber, and he was a pretty good representative for Caol and Mallaig, but I wouldn’t call him a national figure.
The Scotland debate! People here have been chatting about it for weeks now. My rough and not super thought out opinions:
If they do leave, it would throw a lot into turmoil–the banks, for one thing, they’d need to establish a new currency and probably their economy would be super shaky and unstable for a while. This would also impact a lot of their public services. Not to mention then they’d switch to self-governing and all the mire that ensues from that.
On the other hand: listening to English people talk about it, I can’t help but kind of root for independence in a way??? Like, I joke that as the resident American, I have to take the side of ~*~FREEDOM~*~ in this, but. So many of the opinions i hear are “well if they leave, they’ll be left in a mess and we don’t owe them anything! why should we have to help them out of it?” and “I can’t believe they’re not letting people who live in england (who formerly lived in scotland) vote on this” and “they can’t survive without us” and more. And in a way it’s like… well. No WONDER so many want to leave. I didn’t expect this sort of imperialistic sentiment to still be such a big thing here but I don’t know how else to explain the sense of… entitlement? is not quite the right word. it’s like, “Well if they want out then they can’t come crying back to us” and I have in-person heard NO ONE say “Well, you know, there is kind of a history of scotland wanting independence from england but various monarchies throwing them back together so maybe it makes sense that now that there is a democratic way for the actual populace to decide what they want, that they might take it”.
But at the same time, I worry that a lot of people who are voting for independence aren’t thinking at all about all the changes that would come with it–they won’t be the ones having to deal with the upheaval, after all.
IDK. I’m very intrigued to see what happens though.
Question: If you were creating a fantasy world for a fantasy book or movie or something, what would you include? Universities? Magic? Interesting family structures? What would you like to see in your world? This isn’t a world you’d be living in, but just one you’ve invented.
Being an inventor of many a fantasy universe, I notice that I always include these things:
An all-new race (be it humanoid or animal)
A land (complete with history)
Dragons. Because dragons are awesome. Period.
Magic of some kind.
And special attributes or restrictions for that one race.
And, of course, I am referring to two of my fantasy worlds: Fantazm (Which I dumped, considering that the names I chose for the lands were all too similar to other already-made names) and the newest, NaDraSha (which is a realm, set in the country of Arthruu-Mal, on the continent of Estrunburghe, on the vast planet of Ulholm, which is the center “star” in the belt of Orion, by the way).
What kind of things do you add to the land? What parts of the history? I’m mostly curious about the societies people make. How does the magic work? How do the politics work? What is the family structure? Stuff like that.
What are some of the features of your all-new races?
Oxlin: To the land, I almost always include some kind of forest. I don’t know why, I just love forests. And, I always make up some new species of plant to go with it.
For the history of Fantazm, it’s basically a legend about four goddesses creating the Earth, and the planet Fantazm. For the history of NaDraSha; it’s incredibly long and may have to be put in a different thread; but, it includes a ship sailing from an old land to a new one, how the crew of the ship “made” the land, and discovered the Nedreshians already living there.
For the other questions, the answers would make this a monster post, so I may have to just stop here, do some research on my world myself, and then post like, on the writing thread or something.
Robert: Oh, yes. One must never forget armadillos.
Cool! I’d love to hear more, especially about the people. Forests are indeed lovely!
I could post the description of the race here:
Nedreshians’ appearance: The most easilly-spotted feature of Nedreshians is the short black fur that covers their entire body. Another distinctive mark is the three colored stripes on each cheek; the colors differentiate with the Nedreshian.
And, of course, their ears. Long, fluffy, doglike ears that stick out where a human’s ears would be. All Nedreshians also have horns; from deer’s horns, to goat’s horns, to a gazelle’s.
Then, their wings. Any and all types of wings. Batlike to feathery to feathered batlike. Unfortunately, no normal Nedreshian can fly with their wings: they’re mostly used as a means of defense anymore.
Cool! I love hearing about everyone’s worlds.
Armadillos.
Did someone say armadillos? By strange coincidence, here’s what I happen to be working on today. (Painting on silk. Unfortunately, it’s situated in a bad spot for photos, and I can’t move it yet.)
Aww, Rebecca, those are cute.
Thanks, Catwings! The armadillo who inspired the sketches lives at our local science center. Most times I stop by, she’s sleeping, but one day I finally timed the visit to see her at play. She had the most fun with a burlap bag of any critter I ever saw.
I like to put a lot of thought into the geography and the layout of the land and draw maps. I also like making up written scripts– I don’t know enough about languages to make up new languages, but I do make up scripts that are usually simple substitution codes for the Roman alphabet.
I love creating maps! They’re only in Paint, but they’re basic layout. As for languages, my First Language from NaDraSha isn’t really a full language with it’s own dictionary, but there are words from it mentioned in the story. Like the ship that “discovered” my land; Druuth Mravvy, which means “To the New.”
Religion of some kind, because I’m religious myself but even more because religion’s something lots of fantasy authors forget. (Still bitter about how nobody in Harry Potter ever prays to anything.) Fairytales and folklore that exist even when they’re not relevant to the plot. (Still bitter about how it took Ron and Harry literally six years of being best friends to realize they’d grown up with different fairytales.)
Also, yes to both universities and magic. But, actually: magic universities.
Have you read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss?
(It includes everything on your list to varying degrees)
In response to Jade’s unmoderated comment: it’s only the best thing ever!
Diverse and distinct nations with their own complex history, culture, and spirituality. No Fantasy Counterpart Cultures — ersatz-English, ersatz-Vikings, ersatz-Mongols have started to annoy me. I prefer combining interesting influences from multiple real-world sources into new things. This history may be relevant to the story (it’s good for the plot & characters to be rooted in the setting and make sense in their context) or it may not be (background details in asides make the setting feel real and leave the reader wanting more).
These days I don’t tend to put intelligent nonhumans in my fantasy unless they’re thoroughly inscrutable and otherworldly — dwarves and elves no, spirits and angels yes.
I’m more interested in people transcending or abandoning humanity. Immortals. Costly and flawed ways of attaining immortality, or approaching it. Costly, mysterious, and frightening magic in general.
Pack mammoths. Steam trains. Ships at sea and sky. The occasional troll.
What’s a pack mammoth?–it almost doesn’t matter, they sound so delightful. I think I’d like a herd.
Like a pack mule, only a woolly pachyderm.
Great suggestion. When I get my mammoth, I’ll think about getting it to carry things.
That’s a lot of food and brushing.
No kidding. They’re super high-maintenance, even more so than elephants. Your investment really only pays off if you need to cross miles of trackless taiga in winter.
Well, unless you have enough to open a Pleistocene Park and charge people to come see them.
Recently I tend to do more small-scale creations, just one city or so. I’ve only ever done one world with a map, I think. Usually with unusual geography of some sort, like a city connected to the land only by a sandbar or a magical academy built in a mountain made of magical rock.
I apparently really like answering the question “where does food come from?”, because I can tell you in almost every case, especially if it’s not obvious straight off. In fact, one of my recent worlds came into being because of that.
Very few nonhumans running around my worlds. I cannot remember a single instance of one, actually. Huh, I knew I usually didn’t use them, but I didn’t realize it went that far.
I like taking interesting concepts from history and putting them in, too. Like the idea of Confucianism or the Ancient Greeks, where you put philosophy almost in the place of religion, in some ways. Or an ancient city in Turkey, where the houses all ran together and the rooftops were the roads.
Magic often included, but not always. Usually it’s more along the lines of musical talent than inborn gifts.
I also like filling the sky with multiple moons.
Ooh! Tell me more about where the food comes from! That is a really good question. Tell me more about some of your cities?
What other concepts from history have you used?
I’m really enjoying everyone’s answers to these questions. Worldbuilding nom nom.
My favorite situation for “where the cake do they get their food, anyway?” is fantasy dwarves. And elves, really, but it’s easier to imagine elves carefully designing an enviromentally-conscious symbiotic orchard with a careful mixing of native species than it is to imagine any sort of dwarven farm. Especially since if I wrote about dwarves, I’m pretty sure they would be agoraphobic.
They probably eat mushrooms pretty willingly, though, and I saw an idea once that they ferment it to make ale. I also gave them greenhouses with roofs made of maybe a semi-opaque crystal or metal beaten out thinly enough to let light through. And then they have the herds of giant fruit bats, which are about chicken-sized and can probably fly even worse than chickens. (This is the second world I’ve made which has included abnormally large bats. Why? No clue.)
The other city I’ve answered the food question for is the one on that’s basically an island. The city covers pretty much all of the decently solid ground, so they don’t have space for large-scale farming. The sandbar isthmus that connects them to the mainland isn’t good soil, but it does grow tall grasses which they can feed to livestock. So they keep goats and rabbits and chickens and so forth, and they do a lot of fishing. They’re also the trade metropolis of their world, so they import a lot of food as well.
Other fun cities: The one built on the back of a giant, clockwork turtle, inhabited by gypsies who refused to lie and a secret society of people trying to prevent change at all costs. The city of mages, who magically leveled a mountain top, then put up an illusion so they could build their city up there without being found. A city built half-underground by the survivors of a dragon apocalypse, who value order and structure.
Other historical concepts: Most of the other ones I’ve adopted are more standard fantasy fare, like guild systems.
Aaand that was probably way more than you wanted to know. But hey, you asked!
My answer for the “where do dwarves get food?” question is usually terrace farms on mountainsides, modeled after the Tawantinsuyu (more popularly known as Incas).
Probably. In some worlds, there’s enough trade established that I assume they just buy food, but that’s a good answer for the rest of the time.
(Not that I’m giving up my square-cube-law-violating giant bats.)
WOOOORRRLLD BUILDINGGGGGGG
MY FAVORITE! No, really, it’s actually a bit of a problem. I spend a ton of time worldbuilding and never get around to the story itself.
Okay, I have two that I’m mainly working on right now. One is actually for a story I want to write, the other is more of a thought experiment I’ve been working on for a few years.
SO: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ONE:
Not technically fantasy actually, more sci fi I guess. But my process here was I wanted to see how unlike humans I could make an intelligent alien race–since i’m always disappointed with how LIKE humans/earth animals most movies & books portray alien races. Which probably had VERY DIFFERENT evolutionary patterns!! So here were the key points I came up with for how they might differ, although I did follow trends of other animals in earth evolution but picked the opposite side of the spectrum from apes, since I am limited and don’t think I could design a plausible whole new evolutionary pathway with no resemblance to earth life.
– the setting: well we want this to be unlike humans, so, let’s stick ’em underwater. Removes gravity as biological factor mostly and lets us do fun things with the setting that way.
– radial symmetry instead of bilateral. I like the idea of spherical symmetry over flat circular, so a roundish sort of creature. Let’s have each radial segment have tentacle coming out of it because let’s be honest if I’m gonna make underwater aliens I’m gonna give them some cephalopod characteristics because that is where my heart lies. So roundish betentacled blobs so far. But unlike cephalopods, they won’t have suckers on them. Maybe there’s differential expression in some for different purposes–some might end in a split of 3 “fingers” for dexterity, others have poisonous barbs, others bioluminesce? Not really set on that side myself yet. but it brings me to:
– instead of communicating via sound and navigating the world based on light/seeing, let’s flip it! Underwater there’s not guarantee of consistent light sources, so they echolocate to understand their surroundings. Probably a constant sort of hum&pinging from some internal organ/s, so they always have a limited sense of what is around them and can focus on specific parts for more information.
– so: communication based on light. Bioluminescence. Lots of earth deep sea creatures do this anyway. Light producing organs on the tentacles could allow for different colors and the movement of different light signals to contribute to the language. For written/reading language (I did say an intelligent species, and I want to see how I could have them progress technologically), specific colors could represent different symbols/words/what have you, and fading them from one to the other could make an “alphabet”/syllabet/etc of sorts. I feel like a screen that fades between colors rapidly would be a good expression of this, but I haven’t worked on the development of their language w/ technology up to that point yet. But a spherical ball that changes colors at the “current point” I’m setting this race in. Variations in hue, intensity, and saturation could add emotion or naunce to communication like different vocal tones& pitches shape ours.
– community based instead of family based civilizations. More like a hive species, like bees, where they all live/work/etc in one unit rather than smaller groups within a big one. Each “city” is it’s own group of related individuals, probably in contact with but separate from other cities of individuals. To lessen the sense of “family groups” without necessarily having a “queen bee” individual needed in the species, they could be:
– r-selected species instead k-selected; aka, the species instead of having one or a few young the spend a lot of time/effort caring for, they have a ton of offspring at once but very few survive into adulthood and little to no effort is used to provide for them. This would mean a species that places very little value/emphasis on mating/care, so, the young are probably barely regarded as individuals or worth noticing until they pass a certain point. which leads to:
– metamorphosis! A metamorphosis period in their lives, giving a clear boundary for when an individual might be regarded as part of the group or not. Drawing from other sea life knowledge, I imagine the species has external fertilization of sorts in some breeding ground not far from the main city, but let’s have it be right next to a current. When eggs hatch, small polyp type things may or may not find their way into the current, which takes them towards another area w/ rocky sort of substrate (like coral, but… not coral because this isn’t earth) where they attach & anchor themselves, and filter feed from the current as they grow. Once they reach some size/growth they detach from the rock (possibly losing some of their tentacles in the process–so one side of them has longer ones but the other side is bare/has shorter as they regrow, so not entirely spherically symmetrical from this point onwards, but as a product of behavior versus biology). Then fight their way upcurrent towards the civilization& are regarded as ‘people’. I’m not sure if I want there to be an education system from this point on or not, I haven’t gotten that far yet with thinking about how they learn & know things. But this sort of evolutionary procedure gives a separation of the young & adults that would make it easy not to care about offspring/their survival beyond gross numbers per breeding cycle. Also removes knowing & caring which offspring is technically related to you or not, further making it more a city than family group.
– feeding: filter feeding + more maybe?? not decided. but deffintiely don’t have the mouth->internal digestive cavity->excrete waste system.
– sleep: I’m gonna just remove sleep from this world. We still don’t know why it’s such a big thing for earth (well, we know it helps the brain reinforce connectins & remove old etc, but we don’t know WHY this developed this way afaik) so I’ll just replace it with something else for them.
– archetecture: I’m still working on this bc it’s surprisingly difficult. Underwater gravity isnt’ as important when you can swim upwards, so, maybe ‘buildings’ with a large central cavity & branching rooms/halls leading off it in all directions. I like the idea of carving cities/rooms/etc out of materials already there rather than building them. Or maybe a rock/coral-like thing where they actually grow things into shape? Like I said still working on this aspect.
Anyway there’s lots more but I’ve already typed a lot whoops. I came up with this world building exercise during some low-level bio course as a way to keep myself awake, & have been coming back to it for 2-3 years. I don’t think I plan to ever set a story here because it’d be so difficult to explain everything, not to mention the main species doesn’t communicate the way we do, so. But it’s been a lot of fun & I change things with it regularly.
I’ll post my other current world later–it’s much more typical fantasy setting.
Woah! I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d like to see this species in a story, sometime.
With my NDS, I have it mostly planned for a webcomic, but I have no digital art skill, nor do I know anyone who does. So, it remains a basic map on my desktop, and images of members of the race.
thanks! I don’t know how i’d ever write about them, except either as or accompanied by a textbook on their biology & history. But they’re one of the worlds I think about when I’m bored, a very pleasing passtime.
Truly alien aliens are hard to write about because humans are best at empathizing with other human characters! One author whom I think did it well is Vernor Vinge (in fact his alien characters are more interesting than his human ones, in my opinion).
I’ve always liked the Knnn, a spacefaring species in C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books. They’re so weird that none of the other intelligent species can understand anything they do.
From Wikipedia: “They trade by snatching whatever they want and leaving whatever they deem sufficient as payment behind; it is an improvement over their prior habit of just taking trader ships apart.”
Dang. I should read more Cherryh. I’ve read Foreigner and Cyteen — enjoyed Cyteen greatly, Foreigner I found difficult to follow (although perhaps that was the point, what with it being all about language barriers and alien mindsets).
So I’ve been reading the MIT Admissions blogs for fun (they give a great slice of life view) and one of the questions MIT folks ask celebrities (or anyone) is, if you were a unit, what would it represent? Still trying to figure out what 1 oxlin is, also.
Absurdity of excuses for not writing today is measured on a scale of 0 to 30 POSOCs.
I must score pretty highly on that scale…
I will keep this in mind.
1 oxlin = the clearance under a doorway sufficient to enable 1 hand to attract 1 cat.
Heh, nah. I think it is actually the likelihood that any one person will begin dancing on a scale from one to ten.
1 Dodecahedron is the maximum unit for excitement about computing. All people other than me are measured relative eg Oxlin is .9 Dodecs or so. Most people use percentages though for ease of understanding.
They would ask that, given their invention of the Smoot…
(In 1958, an MIT fraternity decided to measure the length of the Mass Ave Bridge in units of the height of freshman Oliver Smoot. They picked him up and laid him down 364 times, marking where his feet and head were every time, all the way down the bridge. It is 364.4 Smoots long, +/- one ear. The students repaint the markings on the bridge every year. Mr. Smoot, appropriately enough, went on to work on weights and measures standardization for the federal government.)
Yup. I kinda figured it had to do with Smoots.
1 bookgirl is the relative increase in productivity following the consumption of one (regular-sized) mug of tea or roughly Pi spoons of nutella.
(provided the tea is hot)
1 Catwings (Cw.) = (On a scale of one to ten) a rating of how one would feel directly after reading back a story they’ve just written.
My current rating: 1/10 for good self-experience.
Hummingbirds are on a scale of ten to one hundred, by increments of ten and measure the amount of anxiety created by thinking about things that aren’t a cause for concern at all.
1 AL is a unit of measure equal to the amount of creative endeavors it is wise to take on in order to maintain good grades and a steady sleep schedule. I’m currently juggling about 2.5 AL.
Incidentally, 6 1/2 AL is a standard size of trombone mouthpiece.
1 Bunniful would seem to be the shortest amount of time it takes me to lose an item without moving from the spot where I just had it a few minutes ago.
The Ur-ATA scale is used to determine how likely a person is to correct inconsequential errors during everyday conversation. Also known as the Doryphore Scale.
1 ML… wait. 1 mL…
1 Ml is the number of words of fanfic read per assignment question remaining.
I’m about 148 Ml. then
One milliliter of fanfiction… two liters of fanfiction… one hundred and fifty thousand kiloliters of liquefied fanfiction, stored in industrial tanks on a top secret government facility…
Important question: feelings regarding plaid button shirts, particularly of the flannel variety?
Warm and comfy, and great for lying around when you’re under the weather.
The flannel ones are also exceptionally good at attracting cats.
True story: One time my guinea pig Floyd stole my flannel shirt.
My feelings are: yes.
Yes. Always yes. See also: vests and boots and jeans
(I wear button ups pretty much all the time always, they’re the best. INSTANT CLASS. INSTANT COZY.)
Quick, don’t look it up– how many continents’ highest mountain can you name? (Europe and Australia are tricky, so either of the two most common answers will be accepted.)
mt. everest and mt. kilimanjaro? no clue if those actually are or any of the others
I second Lizzie, and I guess Mont Blanc for Europe, Mt. McKinley for North America, and I think the South American one is part of the southern Andes.
Very good!
North America- Mount McKinley/Mount Denali
Africa- Kilimanjaro
Asia- Mount Everest
Europe- Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps, but if you include European Russia, Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus is higher
South America- Aconcagua (which is indeed in the Andes)
Australia/Oceania- Mount Kosciuszko in Australia proper, Puncak Jaya/Carstensz Pyramid if you include New Guinea.
Antarctica- Mount Vinson
Mt Everest? For the Americas, I can’t decide if it’d be that mountain in Alaska or something in the Andes. For Europe, the alps? Uh. I don’t know the other ones.
Do you count the Americas as one continent? I’ve found that South Americans tend to, while North Americans don’t.
That’s how I learned it in Geography, so yeah. I’ve also had other classes where they are two continents, but the one continent version has stuck in my head.
Without looking it up, can you name the countries of South America? Their Capitals?
I don’t know about the capitals, but here goes nothing…
Argentina
Brazil, Brasilia
Bolivia
Chile, Santiago
Ecuador, Quito
Falkland Islands (disputed between UK and Argentina)
Peru (is it still Cuzco?)
Uruguay
Paraguay
Colombia, Bogota
Guyana
French Guyana
*Checks*
Dang it, I forgot Venezuela and Suriname!
Time to spend a pleasant afternoon in atlas refamiliarization…
Peru is Lima, Paraguay is Asunción. (I have family in Paraguay.)
Doy! It is Lima! I guess the fact that most of what I’ve read about Peru lately is archaeological is showing…
Eh, most of what I know about Peru is from Paddington Bear, so you still win.
Argentina, Buenos Aires
Bolivia, Sucre
Peru, Lima
Uruguay, Montevideo
Venezuela, Caracas
How about Central American and North American countries and capitals?
What Myers-Briggs personality types are everyone? INTP here.
I’m pretty consistently IN_J but flip between T and F.
_NFP. Am I introverted or extroverted? Who knows? I’m kind of both.
INTJ, but I think the N/S part flips sometimes? Maybe 80-20 or 70-30.
Relatable Characters Round 2: Internet Quiz Edition. What fictional characters does Charactour’s personality quiz say you’re most like? Here are some of mine above 75%:
81% Neville Longbottom
79% Luna Lovegood
78% Abed Nadir, Tracy Turnblad
77% Ron Weasley, Flint Lockwood, Peeta Mellark
76% Rapunzel, Wall-E, Nymphadora Tonks
75% Groot, the Baker from Into the Woods
(Link gnome, please let me know if that’s too much of an off-blog site reference.)
I didn’t know who a lot of the people were, but here are some of my >75% matches:
85% Pi (Life of Pi)
82% Twilight Sparkle (…)
81% Dana Scully!!! (X-Files)
80% Michael Bluth (Arrested Development), Four (Divergent), Oscar (The Office), Ann Perkins! (Parks & Rec)
79% Molly Weasley, Spengler (Ghostbusters), George Michael Bluth (Arrested Development)
78% Cuddy (House), Ben Wyatt (Parks & Rec), Slartibartfast, Captain James T. Kirk, Lupin, Catelyn Stark (Game of Thrones), Liz Lemon (30 Rock), Stanz (Ghostbusters)
77% Jo March!!! (Little Women), Death (The Book Thief)
76% Hermione!!!, Two-Face, Lisa Simpson, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Rapunzel, Chase (House), Gus (TFiOS)
75% Mulder! (X-Files), Zoe (Firefly), Stephen Hawking (…ok), Sirius, WALL-E, Fiona (Shrek), Woody (Toy Story)
Scully, Jo March, and Hermione are my favorites. Definitely pleased.
Hm. I’m Mr. Knightley (Emma), Toula Portokalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), James Brennan (Adventureland), Richie Cunningham (Happy Days — well, I knew I wasn’t the Fonz), Wanderer (The Host), Kate Hazeltine (Valentine’s Day), Tobias “Four” Eaton (Divergent), King George VI (The King’s Speech), Hannah Weaver (Crazy, Stupid Love), Mako Mori (Pacific Rim), Prue Halliwell (Charmed), and Remus Lupin — all 83% and up.
I’m unfamiliar with some of those characters, but the ones I know all seem plausible enough. Lupin, eh?
Mako is AWESOME. She has pretty much equal screentime and story arc to the official protagonist Raleigh, becomes a robot pilot despite her childhood trauma and overprotective adoptive father’s wishes, and cuts a kaiju in half with a giant sword.
I totally see you as Lupin too: rational, sympathetic, helpful, mentor figure to a bunch of odd teenagers.
I guess you could consider MuseBlog a Defense Against the Dark Arts class.
First Page:
86% Remy from Ratatouille.
85% DJ Tanner from Full House and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch (Holy cake where did they get that idea? I am nowhere near as assertive as Lilo.)
84.4% Benji Applebaum from Pitch Perfect (I… actually don’t know who this is), Hallie Parker and Annie James from The Parent Trap, and Hushpuppy from Beasts of the Southern Wild (Haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard good things.)
83% Winnie the Pooh (I certainly liked him enough as a kid), Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service (Aw yeah!) and Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds (Who?)
87% julia braver-man graham
86.4 pi patel
86.3 andrea zuckerman
85.6 twilight sparkle
85.0 lester freamon
84.6 norman dale
84.3 abby whelan
84.2 dan humphrey
84.2 lisa cuddy
84.1 aaron hotchner
aaaand I’ve never heard of any of them
I can help you on some of those — Pi Patel is the main character in Life of Pi, which is a great book that you should definitely read! Twilight Sparkle is a pony from My Little Pony. (yeah…) Lisa Cuddy is the dean of medicine in the TV show House. She’s pretty cool and I got her too, at 78%.
Aaron Hotchner is the lead character on Criminal Minds. Abby Whelan is the White House Press Secretary on Scandal. Norman Dale is a basketball coach played by Gene Hackman in the movie Hoosiers.
Besides Life of Pi (which I was put off from reading because it was one of the choices for English class but I should probably try it), would you guys recommend any of the other series / movies? I don’t do well with watching suspense or violence (when I watch competition shows I have to look up who gets kicked off and who wins in each episode or else I can’t handle it).
I liked House a lot! A lot of people say they like the drama but I honestly liked the medical jargon the most. It’s just fun to see (a very dramatized version of) the diagnostic process. House was what first got me interested in biology/medicine, and even though I’ve veered away from medicine I still find it really interesting.
I’m so relieved that Twilight Sparkle does not refer to vampires.
Hmmm, since I believe the show started after the books had been out for a while, do you think the character was named to steal Google results from the book as an insult?
Twilight has been a pony for a pretty long time, the addition of “Sparkle” though, could be…
I love living in a world where My Little Ponies get more respect than superstrong undead people-eaters.
(Addendum: Though I guess if you look at it another way, Twilight is a genius political leader and head of a 100% successful national defense team, who after years of study is capable of flight, telekinesis, teleportation, time travel, and converting the abstract concept of friendship into physical energy beams. Edward is a guy that uses his immortality, mind reading, and super strength to hang out at high school and date a girl decades younger than him.)
Now one-eyed, one-horned flying ones, on the other hand…
Well, Twilight Sparkle is one-horned, flying, and purple, so…
Now I’m imagining people-eating Twilight Sparkle. Now I need brain bleach.
And now I’m imagining people eating (no hyphen) Twilight Sparkle.
The Flying Purple People Eater is called that because it eats purple people, not because it is necessarily purple itself. (The song doesn’t describe what color it is, but most artwork inspired by the song shows it as purple because of the ambiguity. But it COULD be blue or green like so many other aliens from the 1950s…)
Quote:
“I said Mr Purple People Eater, what’s your line?
He said eating purple people, and it sure is fine”
Unquote.
83.9% Remus Lupin
83.5% Pi Patel
83.3% James Brennan
83.0% Neo
83.0 Eragon
83.0 Bruce Banner
82.6% Angel
82.5% Chin Ho Kelly
82.2% Captain Phillips
82.2% Nick Twisp
I know all but the third and the last three…
What would be your intro verse in an MB-wide rap battle?
I don’t know, but I wrote an Epic Rap Battles of History parody that I can post if you want. (Ernest Shackleton vs. Robert Scott.)
Are you right-handed or left-handed? (Surprisingly, nobody seems to have asked this question before.)
I’m right-, like 90 percent of the population. It will be interesting to see whether the proportions are different on MB.
Left (pie for right, squid for left?)
Right. I wish I were ambidextrous, though.
Everybody wants to be ambidextrous, synesthetic, telepathic, psychokinetic, and immortal. Perfect pitch, perfect teeth, and an eidetic memory would come in handy, too. But alas.
Perfect pitch is really not that helpful in most situations and it can confuse things.
That’s what I’ve heard. One of my choral directors had perfect pitch and found it to be mostly inconvenient. I imagine that’s true for many of the superpowers on that list. I can certainly vouch for the drawbacks of being ambidextrous — not knowing the difference between right and left being one of them — though it does confer some benefits as well.
Hm, I’m a strong right-hander and most of the time I can’t tell the difference between right and left unless I stop to think about it very carefully. (And when I do eventually figure it out it’s got nothing to do with my writing hand, it’s always remembering that English text reads left-to-right.)
I think I’ve always had trouble remembering right and left because I think of the left side of my body as the “right” – proper, correct – side.
When I was singing in a madrigal ensemble perfect pitch was awful – for one thing, we’d transpose a lot of pieces to make them fit better for the group and so the director would give the starting pitch (say, a written C) and it would be an E-flat. I’d have to just read it in a different clef most of the time. Also the group tended to go flat and it really confuses me when the pitch gets microtonal. Lately I’ve been having weird “blanks” in my perfect pitch – moments where I’m in orchestra and suddenly can’t hear the note I’m supposed to be playing or don’t know what note I’m on, which I think is also due to pitch migration across the group.
I’ve decided that if I had only one wish, it would be the ability to teleport. I don’t really care about all the other stuff, I just don’t want to keep wasting my time going from point A to point B.
I don’t wish I was synesthetic. One of my friends is, and it seems like it comes with a lot of inconveniences. (She hates it when I crack my knuckles because it looks ugly, and she can’t study while listening to music because the colors make it difficult to read.)
Agree with the rest of your list, though.
So, POSOC, are you right- or left-handed?
Right.
Right-handed.
Right.
Right
I claim left-handed because that’s the hand I settled on for writing when I started school, though mostly I’m ambidextrous. I can still use either hand for just about anything except eating with chopsticks.
The tally so far:
LEFT (3): Lizzie, Rebecca, Agent Lightning
RIGHT (16): Robert, Noah, ZNZ, Selenium, TMFA, Rainbow*Storm, Rosanne, Kokonilly, oxlin, Groundhog, KaiYves, POSOC, Jadestone, YYS12, CPM/Kyra, Ròs
IT’S COMPLICATED (2): Rebecca, JadestoneI’m right-handed, though I can write passably (if slowly) with my left hand since I’ve practiced a lot. Interestingly, Tangerine and Hibiscus are genetically identical but have different writing hands.
I also tried really hard to be synesthetic after reading A Mango-Shaped Space in middle school, but ultimately I had to accept that intentionally making up colors for words and sounds wasn’t the same as being born with the condition.
R*S: Mirror-image twins? Are their hearts on opposite sides?
This just in by email from Rosanne:
>> I’m right-handed except I usually mouse with my left these days.
>> I’d write this on the blog but I have no easy way to do that at the moment. Greetings to you and all MuseBloggers from Germany
I mouse with my right and use the Wacom pen with my left.
Right-handed here, but I play pool left-handed because my left-handed dad taught me how. I didn’t even know pool had different handednesses until I got to college and people asked me why I was playing it differently.
I knew a woman who played the guitar lefthanded because she taught herself from a book and read the chord charts wrong.
I’m right handed. I can do a couple things with my left hand. I should practice, though.
I use my right hand for most things. But I can use my left hand very well, as long as I’m not thinking too hard about the fact that I’m using my left hand. If I think about it too much, then suddenly my left hand becomes useless.
Right-handed. Boring old me.
Right-handed for most things, like writing, throwing, and eating. But I play ice hockey left handed, golf left handed, and I batted for softball both directions. I played tennis right. When catching I just use whichever hand is closer.
I’m right handed, even though my left hand is my lucky buzzer holding hand in QB.
This was the first polling place question ever asked. It was also asked by Robert.
Really? Yikes, I’m stuck in a time loop.
Right-handed! My parents are both left-handed and were hoping I would be too but I disappointed them.
Very, very right-handed – my left-hand writing is atrocious (though my right-handed writing certainly leaves much to be desired as well). I also have a really hard time with left and right – I often have to do the make-an-L thing with my hands to remind myself.
When I learned about the make-an-L technique I told one of my brothers (alll three of us are lefties, though our other brother seems to have monopolized our entire share of directional ability). He promptly tried it out — with palms up. *sigh* There went that mnemonic.
Left! It seems improbable, but my two sisters and I are both left handed, despite the fact that only one of our parents expresses the gene. If you work it out with Punnett squares, though, it’s perfectly probable (assuming my right-handed mom has one left handed and one right handed allele)
Neither of my parents are lefties; neither were any of their parents, so far as we know, yet somehow we three siblings ended up left-handed. Supposedly a distant ancestral family was known for its southpaws but that’s the only familial connection I’ve found. My cousins are all strictly right-handed, as is my niece. From what I’ve read, the genetics are not very straight-forward. Prenatal environmental factors may play a key role. Your probability of being left-handed increases if your mother is older — might be a factor in my family as Mom didn’t start having children till she was 30.
What is one itty bitty (or 5 billion of Em) thing that would make your life wonderfuler. As in, a test on the fall of the Roman Empire involved lots of Roman mythology…
Or, you’re cat didn’t sleep on your back pack…
Is having no allergies too big?
Probably depends on the types of allergies you have. For me (allergies to dust, pollen, shellfish, cats, dogs, etc.), it would probably be too big…
I would say having firm plans for winter break.
Anything that doesn’t involve futuristic technology or it raining iPhones or stuff crazy like that is fine by me.
I don’t struggle with allergies, but have awful post nasal drip. It gives me bad breath, makes me talk odd, and feel cruddy all around. Also, the only way to really “end” PNS is tonsil removal, but I don’t really wanna do that…
What’s your VARK learning style? (there’s a questionnaire that comes up as the first result when you Google VARK)
Mine’s Kinesthetic/Visual/Read-Write multimodal (15 points Kinesthetic, 9 Visual, 7 Read-Write, 2 Aural).
I learned a couple things from this:
– If I were planning a vacation with friends, I would be seriously type-A about it and make an itinerary, custom map, email/GroupMe thread, and highlight reel.
– Visual 6, aural 3, read/write 11, kinesthetic 5 but honestly I think I learn best by doing. Most of my true answers would have been “skip any form of instructions and tinker with it until it works (or I break it)”.
What are some funny questions you’ve been asked?
A guy in a chatroom once asked me if there had been a space program during the Jefferson Administration. It was understandable, because he was from Europe and had never studied US history, and all I’d said was that I had been doing an assignment about “the Jefferson Administration”, not THOMAS Jefferson’s administration, so he probably thought there might have been some 20th-century president with that name he’d just never heard of. But the mental image of a space program in the 1800s made me giggle.
“Captain Lewis, Lieutenant Clark, your country requires your services for one more mission.”
This might be a better comic than “Manifest Destiny”, and that’s saying something.
So what do you all think about boys with long fingernails? I have mine grown (exceedingly) long for playing the guitar, but I can tell that it’s kind of grossing people out. I’m playing this weekend for a charity thing at our town’s aquarium, and maybe again after that (our Farmer’s Market moves indoors for the winter, and I kind of want to try playing there at least once), but I’m practically counting down the days until I bring out the clippers. It’s gotten to the point where I’m embarrassed to raise my hand in class, and that’s probably not good. What makes it even worse is that people -including my own guitar teacher – don’t really think that they need to be as long as they are, but it really helps! Have any of you other instrument-players been through something similar (i.e that helps you play but makes you seem kind of weird/gross etc.), and have any of you non-instrument players seen things like this that you found to be unnerving?
Long fingernails on anyone gross me out hardcore. The classical guitarists at my school (which I think is good for classical guitar – Jason Vieaux was the instructor) only really had their nails a couple millimeters longer than the ends of their fingers, so you could probably try it shorter for a while and see how it feels. Also do people use false nails sometimes?
The closest thing string players probably get is our instrument hickey but mine’s never been that bad. My boyfriend’s, though, has gotten infected several times and abscessed once, where he had to make an ER visit.
Oh thank god, someone said it first — I find long fingernails to be repulsive. I keep mine really short.
I don’t have any gender specific thoughts on it–never really thought too much specifically about the length of nails on boys/men.
While in highschool/undergrad, I personally liked my nails longer, typically grew them out to whatever max length they would obtain before getting too brittle and breaking. I’d guesstimate maybe 6-7 mm of white nail beyond the quick? I never thought they were gross at that stage (although my sister who played violin and kept her fingernails cut back so short it looked painful, thought they were disgusting)
But starting end of 2nd year of veterinary school, my opinions definitely changed drastically regarding nail length, when we started surgery. It was forcibly drilled into our heads that fingernails should not extend past the end of one’s finger, because long nails harbor bacteria/dirt/etc underneath them, which is a big no-no for performing surgery (as, incidentally, is nail polish–chipped nail polish is also a huge bacteria harboring problem, apparently), and also there is the concern of puncturing fragile organs with a fingernail. So since then, I’ve found longer nails to be a huge yuck factor. I mean, a little past the ends of the fingers, fine, but not long. I wish I could keep my nails just a little longer than I have to, maybe a smidge past the ends of my fingers, but I have to trim them back weekly now so as to keep them an appropriate length for my Monday/Friday surgery mornings.
tl;dr: Didn’t use to have a problem with longer nails, now it kind of really bugs me.
Funny, I think long nails are really cool. But perhaps that’s just me. Maybe because I’ve never been able to grow mine out- I have very brittle nails.
I don’t have any thoughts about anybody else’s nails (y’all do y’all, y’all), but I keep my own nails very short and get super uncomfortable with them when they’re even a little longer than I like.
I have stubby thumbs. Someone told me I have “celloists thumbs” I can bend them unnaturally in BOTH of my thumbs. My fingernails are… weird. I keep them short though.
Personally (though as a non-string-player) I would say that having your playing style be dependent on your fingernail length isn’t a great plan – what if a nail breaks off? It would probably throw your playing all out of whack.
Also I personally am not a fan of overly long fingernails – this has nothing to do with gender and a lot to do with accidental scratching and hygiene. (My nails are super short because there was dirt under them and I got squicked out and couldn’t get all the dirt cleaned out from under them so I cut them down almost to the quick, also it helps keep me from picking my skin)
Have you ever had a stupid belief (Peru is a country in Africa!) that was corrected in an odd way? (I did a report in 5th grade GT about the locations of animated Disney movies. I found out good and well that Peru is NOT in Africa).
I thought Haiti was in Africa until middle school because I knew they spoke French there and France used to have African colonies.
I thought that Jackson Pollock had died when I was a child or maybe a few years before I was born (so, in the 1990s or 80s) because all of my mom’s artist friends talked about him so much. Last summer, I saw a play set in the late 50s where the characters talked about him being dead and was really surprised. He actually died in 1956, my mom’s friends just talked about him so much because they were artists and because we lived in the area he had.
I thought of an even dumber one, especially in light of my current interests– the very first time I went to the National Air and Space Museum, when I was 11, I remember reading a plaque describing the survival gear the Apollo 11 astronauts had carried and how it included fishing line and fish hooks. Of course, this was in the event of a crash landing on Earth, but my first thought was, “Did they really know so little about the moon when they first sent people there that they thought there was a chance you could catch fish there?”
Fortunately I realized what was wrong with that thought pretty quickly.
I thought “gross” was spelled G-R-O-S-E for years. I learned better from Calvin & Hobbes.
I think about Calvin’s club GROSS (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS) every time I see a really contrived acronym.
When I was little, I had a book about the human blood system which I would read often, and on one page there was an illustration of how a bleeding cut healed over time. In the illustration, however, it showed the injured vein as it healed, and the vein disappeared in each panel for some reason. Because of that, I firmly believed that every time I got cut, the surrounding veins would disappear and so I got really scared every time I got cut because I thought that eventually there wouldn’t be enough veins in my body for the blood to circulate. That was corrected later when I got cut in the same place twice and realized the veins were still there.
Until high school, I was unaware that you could boil rice in a pot. I thought rice cookers were completely necessary.
When I was very young, I had a skewed perception of time and history in general. whenever my mom read me bible stories, I thought that they had taken place within my parents’ lifetimes. for example in the bit where Adam and Eve named all the creatures, I imagined them ringing our doorbell and my parents answering it and them holding up a lion and saying “this one’s called a lion.”
As a child I had a STRONG desire to picnic on this island I always saw on the way to preschool. My parents told me we would need a boat to get there, so I suggested we ask Noah (the old testament biblical figure) to teach us how to build one.
Inspired by a conversation I had with some international students from my dorm today, which continent were you taught that the following countries are on (or would you consider them to be on based on how you learned geography)?
– Armenia
– Israel
– Indonesia
– Papua New Guinea
– New Zealand
My thoughts:
– Asia or both Europe and Asia
– Asia
– Asia or both Asia and Oceania/Australia
– Oceania/Australia
– Oceania/Australia
I’ve always wondered about the distinction between Europe and Asia. What is it good for? What’s the point? Any thoughts?
I’ve heard that the only reason Europe and Asia are separate continents is an ethnic one; that people separate them based solely on the peoples who live there. I’d personally love to hear more opinions on this.
I always thought it was the Caucasus and Ural mountains. Ethnic separation seems unlikely to me – eastern Russia, western China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc are all very ethnically mixed and primarily people who look like me – mixture of caucasian and asian features, ethnically ambiguous.
I thought the same thing. Although the continents DO have very ethnically different people (eg. China vs Belgium) isn’t that because they never had a chance to mix because there was a huge freaking mountain range in the way? And when Marco Polo did his thing, wasn’t it important because he was one of the first people to actually travel all the way over there? Of course, by now it doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal because we can, you know, fly over those puny mountains in our awesome airplanes. But way back when, it was almost impossible to get across. Then again, since we DON’T have the same trouble with that issue it kind of HAS become more about the ethnic differences in modern times…. but the reason it’s like that in the first place is because of geography. Right?
It’s really freaking arbitrary and annoying like that. We should probably just teach that they’re both Eurasia and that there are six continents.
*Atlantis rises from the depths*
Now there are seven again! Yay!
I learned that there were six continents but they were: Antarctica, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia
also, to answer the question:
-Europe
-Asia (subspecies arabian peninsula)
-asia
-oceania
-oceania