Conversations In My House Can Be WILD.

Conversations in my house can be WILD.

There are four of us. Me, my husband, and our two kids - an older daughter and a younger son. They're... let's be vague and say 3rd-7th grade. Of all of us, the only one who MIGHT be neurotypical (and I don't give it good odds) is my son. My husband and I have been bookworms since we were very small, we met in a library as middle schoolers. And both kids are very bright and love to acquire new information, although like me they have trouble finishing assignments. Since they're still comparatively young, they haven't yet acquired a lot of niche information if it doesn't relate to their special interests. So conversations often involve a lot of infodumping - from them, if it IS a special interest, or to them, if they're curious.

When I say our discussions can go anywhere, I mean it. A couple days ago we went out for dinner, and our discussions in the car, at the restaurant, and heading home involved some fairly random subjects.

Summaries of five of our topics under the cut, if I've correctly guessed the workings of this button I found. I've never figured out how to make a long post look shorter before!

(1) Why it is PERFECTLY OKAY to pronounce GIF with either a hard or soft "G" sound, even though it abbreviates a word with a hard "G" sound. My daughter's initial reasoning was fairly sound, but unnecessarily prescriptive; we pointed out that English does not require that abbreviations follow the pronunciations of their source words, for example "Laser" is generally pronounced "lay-zer" not "lah-seer," and therefore you shouldn't yell at people that they are wrong just because they use a different pronunciation than you, which would be rude even if they were wrong.

(2) The International Phonetic Alphabet, what a schwa (ə) is and how it sounds (which is kind of like "uh"), how any vowel can make this sound in English (balloon, camel, pencil, carrot, bug), a quick bit of research to discover that this can include "Y" when it's used as a vowel (vinyl), the fact that schwa is the most common sound in the English language, and then that "E" is the most common letter in the English language, which led to both kids counting how many "E"s are in each of our full names, how many vowels, and how many total letters.

(3) How backwards aging would work - this one in itself deserves a whole post, I wrote it up yesterday but it vanished into the void. I'll rewrite it maybe tomorrow.

(4) Who was in town when the kids were born and a VERY brief discussion of the events of both days - not the how-it-works bit, but "waking your dad up at 4am" and "calling the babysitter to watch Daughter when Son was coming" and "Grandma was scheduled to arrive the next day to help, you couldn't have stayed put another 36 hours, you little Early Bird?" kinds of things. The kids were vastly amused by the fact they both started the proceedings at 4am but that my son took twelve hours less to be born than my daughter, which I summarized as "my body got better at it the second time." We were mostly focused on the fact that babies are rarely born on their actual due dates, because that's just an estimate by the doctor; if someone were to somehow show an unborn baby a calendar and say "See here, you're expected to put in an appearance on April 23rd," (why does this person have a posh British accent in my head?) the baby wouldn't know or care what April was. So out-of-town family can't exactly pre-schedule a visit for the day after the birth (especially if the visiting family would need to fly). This came up because we were discussing when their uncle gave my son the nickname that said uncle still uses; it wasn't "when he first saw you," because Uncle wasn't in town that week, it was "when he heard what we named you, the day after you were born."

(5) Why English-speakers call cow meat "beef" but chicken meat "chicken;" the answer involves the Norman conquest, loan words, and classism.

If you're curious about topics 1, 2, or 5, let me know. 3 will be expanded on soon.

Signal boost

Oh look, it seems like there's a Republican-led movement to purge voter rolls in the lead-up to the election! It's almost as if your vote matters and they don't want you to vote! Anyway, I whipped up a quick map (based on this) that shows when the voter registration deadline is in each state. There are a few deadlines coming up in the next week or so.

If you live in a state that regularly purges voter rolls for infrequent voters (the orange ones in the first map), or if you moved recently, it's good to check if you're still registered to vote.

Vote.org makes it super easy to check your registration: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Just put in your address and DOB and they'll tell you whether you're registered. (And they give you a quick link to register online if it turns out that you're not! Only the 9 states in white on my map don't have online registration, and for those they provide instructions on how to do it via mail or in person.)

So yeah, give yourself peace of mind -- do a quick check. :)

So I was wandering around on the internet recently and found this article from 2016.

https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/five-tropes-fanfic-readers-love-and-one-they-hate

The authors compiled a list of 144 fanfic tags that were not fandom-specific (so, things like "Mutual Pining" rather than "_____'s A+ Parenting") and asked people to give their opinion of each of them. The possible responses were "Yay!" "Nay" "Meh" and "IDK," indicating that the respondant liked this trope, disliked this trope, had no strong feelings about this trope, or was unfamiliar with this trope.

Now, of course, a writer or other fan content creator COULD use this data like an algorithm to make their work have the broadest appeal, by utilizing tropes that have the highest approval rating.

But that would be boring. (to me)

More interesting, to me as someone who would like to be a writer, but struggles to create plot, are the tags with the highest incidence of "IDK" votes. The top ten tags in this category are:

- Rigid Format

- Hard Gen

- Virtual Seasons

- Whump

- Metatextuality

- Woobification

- Imagines

- Epistolary Fic

- Casefic

- AnthropomorFic

Explanations of all of these are in the article, but the thing is, most of them would force unusual limits onto a fic, which can in some ways stimulate the imagination.

Epistolary stories, for example (which is not just a fanfic thing) require that the entire story be written as a series of letters. One of my favorite non-fanfic examples of this is the book "Sorcery and Cecelia; or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot" by Patricia C Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. There are two main characters, Kate and Cecelia. They are cousins in a Jane-Austen-plus-magic setting, and also close friends. One of them goes to London for the Season, and the other doesn't, and the book is composed of the letters between them. The authors kicked the difficulty up a notch by having one author write all of Cecelia's letters and the other author write all of Kate's, and never discussing what was GOING TO happen, but that's advanced difficulty and requires two players. The thing about an epistolary fic is that you have to come up with a reason that the characters cannot ever meet up, but they are very important to each other (best friends, dating, working on a project together, rivals with a common goal?) and therefore need to stay in touch by writing letters.

Or say you decide to write Hard Gen, meaning the focus is not on romantic relationships. Given that most canons have at least one of the main characters at least crushing on another character, it can be a challenge to find a plot that does not involve romance as one of the central points. One way to do this is to put all your characters in mortal peril, so they have no time to think about relationships. However, it seems to be a bit of a human thing to think about what we might lose the chance for when we are in mortal peril, so this can backfire on you. Use caution if you choose this path. Another option, however, is to write a story about your characters as children. Setting things pre-puberty virtually eliminates the chance of a romantic relationship, and can allow you to explore interesting questions about the characters' history.

Or you can pick one that's often done (in your own opinion) badly and take it as a challenge - how can I do this WELL? Woobification, in my own opinion, can be very difficult. If you take a tough, independent character who has some trauma in their past but is managing, and suddenly make them break down and require protection, you're going to get pushback. Even giving them serious injuries so that they can't physically take care of themselves isn't going to change a person's inherent character; at most, you'll get something like "I concede that I require assistance for the time being, and I trust you." More likely to be successful (although you will have to come up with the HOW) is de-aging them. Reverting an adult to their child self could be much more promising, if this is your goal and you're willing to include some form of magic. (That latter difficulty means that this strategy is much less likely to work on, say, Sherlock, than it is on, for example, something set in Hogwarts.)

Another interesting topic the article brings up is the concept of intertextuality, works which cannot be separated from the canon they were inspired by. With some stories, for example a cute little cliche coffeeshop meet-cute AU, you could give your characters new names and physical descriptions and suddenly you'd have a legally-publishable story (marketable may be another question).

However, other stories are inherently tied to their original inspiration. Fix-it fic, canon divergence stories, and so on absolutely require that they be read in relation to their canon.

And to me, that goes back to one of the coolest things of all about fanfic - the diversity of perspective. To put it in musical terms, while a soloist can produce a truly amazing aria, the music from an entire orchestra is far more complex and engaging.

We absolutely need the soloists and the great composers, people who can come up with a whole new world or an engaging and complex character. But the world is that much richer when other people show us what they see in that original idea and give us their "What if?"s.

Toshinori is, canonically, brilliant. In future versions of the final exam, perhaps rather than a walking natural disaster, his villain version can be more like Evil Nedzu. I can really see that in this picture. Beautiful work!

I'm really into villain all might, whether actual villain or just being a part of a UA hero course practical lesson. I did modify his villain outfit because i got anxious the shoulder pads would fall off.

Also Thank you! For the 600 (+2) followers! You've blown me away! 🌺 I will now go die in a hole for that awful pun.

In the middle of a migraine, this made me laugh so hard my head hurt more and I was happy anyway

It warms my heart that Robert Irwin is the same goofball his father was

It's October 3rd again 😀

Ok so maybe you already know but I rewatched FMAB this year, and once more I realized that it is and it will always be one of my favorite shows of all time. And I can’t begin to explain how much Arakawa’s creation means to me. Like I really can’t, but I’ll try

It’s filled by amazing, diverse and complex and lovable characters, and I love each one of them (yes Kimblee, you too); it has an excelent and well-carried plot, it made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me feel intrigued and all sort of things. But in the end, the thing that clicked for me was its core message, one that speaks about connection. The people we meet along the way and the true reason of our existence on this world, the things that really matter

I think that when Ed and Al burned their house, that October the 3rd, they were beginning a journey that, ironically, would lead them back to where they started: home, family, friends. Connection. 

Like Josh Ritter says in one of my favorite songs: “Only a full house’s gonna make a home“

I think of that song and that line in particular when I think of FMA

I tried to portrait that connection in this piece, I hope that gets through~

Happy October 3rd, everyone 😊💖

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This is avaliable as a print on Redbubble 🖼