jthijsen

sallymn

Posted via LiveJournal app for Nokia E7

dorktowerfeed

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dorktower/comic/~3/tXbvdxyrRiM/

http://dorktower.kovalic.com/?p=8354

sallymn

... which I put up here.

From lost_spook, ( Top 5 character names. (As in existing ones, not names you would like to use for characters.)Collapse )

From entropy_house, ( Your top five bad guys/villains/unlikable characters who you like anyway.Collapse )

From watervole, ( models (not the female kind, the kind you buy or make)...Collapse )

From kernel1, ( Top five plot points in canon that you've rewritten in your head or lost sleep over...Collapse )

From florastuart, ( Top five episodes (from any shows)?Collapse )

sallymn

... which is here.

One thing I should mention is I quite like re-reading about half-to-two-thirds of my own stories; not when I see the faults and mistakes, of course (and I still catch the odd one years later) but let's face it, they may not be brilliant, but they were written with my own particular tastes in mind and therefore obviously cater to what I like to read :) And because my output is so small... I don't get sick of the sound of my virtual voice that often.

I'm by no means one of my favourite writers, but - being honest - I'm by no means one of my least either.

Except when finding those mistakes. Anyway, here we go ( with the 'who's trumpeter's dead now?' stuff...Collapse )

sallymn

lost_spook

Mrs Darcy bowed her head in cool greeting, looked at her mother's latest bosom friend, and smiled: that sweet, seemingly unaffected smile that said as clearly as if she had spoken aloud, "Thank you, I believe you are the neighbour I have made sufficient sport of today." ( Read more...Collapse )

winterbadger

French far-right historian, former OAS member, shoots himself in Notre Dame

Because nothing says "I decry my country's declining morals!" like committing a mortal sin. On consecrated ground.

scatmania_blog

http://www.scatmania.org/2013/05/21/orange/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=orange

http://www.scatmania.org/?p=5702

Which came first, orange or orange?

Let me try that again: which came first, the colour or the fruit?

Oranges

Still not quite right – one more try: which came first, orange, the English name of the colour, or orange, the English name of the fruit? What I really want to know is: is the fruit named after the colour or the colour after the fruit? (I find it hard to believe that the two share a name and colour simply by coincidence)

Oranges

It turns out that the fruit came first. Prior to the introduction of oranges to Western Europe in around the 16th or 17th century by Portugese merchants, English-speaking countries referred to the colour by the name ġeolurēad. Say that Old English word out loud and you’ll hear its roots: it’s a combination of the historical versions of the words “yellow” and “red”. Alternatively, people substituted words like “gold” or “amber”:  also both words for naturally-occurring substances whose identity is confirmed by their colouration.

Green oranges. These oranges are what are now known as ‘bitter oranges’, the only variety to grow naturally: the ‘sweet oranges’ you’re used to eating are entirely a domesticated species.

There wasn’t much need for a dedicated word in English to describe the colour, before the introduction of the fruit, because there wasn’t much around of that colour. The colour orange isn’t common in nature: a few fruits, copper-rich soils and rocks, a small number of tropical fish, a handful of flowers… and of course autumn leaves during that brief period before they go brown and are washed away by Britain’s encroaching winter weather.

The names for the parts of the visible spectrum are reasonably arbitrary, but primary colours tend to cover a broader “space” than secondary ones; presumably because its easier for humans to distinguish between colours that trigger multiple types of receptors in the eye.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay theorise that the evolution of a language tends towards the introduction of words for particular colours in a strict order: so words to distinguish between green and blue (famously absent in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai) are introduced before brown is added, which in term appears before the distinction of pink, orange, and grey. At a basic level, this seems to fit: looking at a variety of languages and their words for different colours, you’ll note that the ‘orange’ column is filled far less-often than the ‘brown’ column, which in turn is filled less-often than the ‘green’ column.

Of course, from a non-anthropocentric perspective, the “visible spectrum” is just a tiny part of the range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that we, and other animals, make use of.

This is a rather crude analogy, of course, because some languages go further than others in their refinement of a particular area of the spectrum. Greek, for example, breaks down what we would call “blue” into τυρκουάζ (turquoise) and κυανό (azure), and arguably βιολέ (violet), although a Greek-speaker would probably put the latter down as a shade of purple, rather than of blue. It makes sense, I suppose, that languages are expected to develop a name for the colour “red” no later than they do for other colours (other than to differentiate between darkness and lightness) – a lot of important distinctions in biology, food, and safety depend on our ability to communicate about red things! But it seems to me that we’ve still got a way to go, working on our linguistic models of colour.

Factor in the ability of the human eye to distinguish between different colours, and you get a far more-complex picture that a simple linear spectrum.

If we’d evolved on Mars (and were still a sighted, communicative, pack creature, but – for some reason – still had a comparable range and resolution of colour vision), our languages would probably contain an enormous variety of words for colours in the 650-750 nanometre wavelengths (the colours that English speakers universally call “red”). Being able to navigate the red planet based on the different ratios of hematites in the rocks, plains, soils and dusts would doubtless mean that the ability to linguistically distinguish between a dark-red feature and a medium-red feature could be of great value!

Mars. It’s pretty damn red.

The names we have for colours represent a part of our history, and our environment. From an anthropological and linguistic perspective, that’s incredibly interesting.

All six colours of the rainbow. No, wait… nine? Three? A hundred? It’s all about how you name them.

If it weren’t for the ubiquity of, say, violets and lavender in the Northern hemisphere, perhaps the English language wouldn’t have been for a word for that particular colour, and the rainbow would have six colours instead of seven. And if I’d say, “Richard Of York Gave Battle In…”, nobody would know how to finish the sentence.

In other news, I recently switched phone network, and I’m now on Orange (after many years on Vodafone). There is no connection between this fact and this blog post; I just thought I’d share.

sallymn

Borrowed from frith_in_thorns and florastuart...

The Top 5 Meme: Ask me my top five fannish anything and I'll tell you.

sallymn

Borrowed from kayim and quite a few others...

I currently have 200 (yes, really!!!! Mind you, most of them are short and some of them are VERY short) works posted on AO3 - 200 being the earliest posted, 1 being the most recent. Choose a random number - no peeking! - between 1 and 200 inclusive, and I will tell you three things I currently like about that story.

(If you pick a drabble or similarly tiny thing, I'll tell you and you can pick another number if you like...)

alex_beecroft

THE WITCH’S BOY

ALEX BEECROFT

Blurb

 Are the sins of the fathers really visited upon the sons? And is there no way of breaking that cycle? Is evil doomed always to repeat itself, ruining everything good through its tainted seed?

These are not the questions young Oswy is asking himself when he is sold to the witch-Lord Sulien FitzGuimar. He’s too busy wondering ‘why me?!’ They are, however, the questions which plague Sulien himself. Locked in a struggle for freedom, sanity, the very survival of his soul, Sulien must daily battle not only angels and demons, but the core of evil in his own heart.

When the King’s sorcerer stages a coup, dragging ancient magic, the elves, and the royal court into his Empire-building plans, the woman he has set his sights on as a bride – timid, aspiring nun, Adela – sets out to find someone to oppose him. It’s just unfortunate that the only candidates are cowardly Oswy, Adela herself and Sulien – who, deep in his heart, just wants to surrender and join him.

When the hope of redemption is balanced against the lure of revenge, which will prove stronger, flawed good or perfect evil?

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

sallymn

The word 'girt', and the fact that Australians are the only people who all use the word regularly, and some of us even the sort of know what it means... just makes me happy every time I hear our anthem.

(Which is usually when earnest sportspeople are mangling and mumbling it because the only line they know is the the one about us being girt...)