twincityhacker

Home from Bloomington. Feeling like I've been gutted with a rusty spoon, but home. There was a little bit of snow in Indiana, but the rest of the trip was snow free. There wasn't even a lot of accumulation of snow on the ground until we got to the other side of St. Louis.

After my final, I went to the library to pick up some Welsh dictionaries and grammars for a Secret Project. It took a lot longer that I thought it was going to, as I had failed to take into account the age of the library books.

So, the majority of the grammars were about Literary Welsh. Which is related to Welsh the same was as the text of the King's James Bible is related to English. Except with more made up words, as the writers had some really, really wrong etymological theories. Most of these words had been thrown out of Literary Welsh, but the wacky ideas about pronouns said, so I wanted to stay away from them.

With the remaining grammars, half of those were Living Welsh. Living Welsh is the bastard child of Literary Welsh and Colloquial Welsh.

I took all this time narrowing down grammars, and the only Colloquial Welsh grammar was the one I had used before in my projects involving Welsh. I also ended up with a grammar I was unsure the exact style it covers, but since I'm familiar with the author I checked it out anyway.

Then came the fun task of finding a book that was written in Welsh. At first I thought this would be an easy task as I saw a book intended for beginners in Welsh. It was checked out. All the other novels on the shelves were translated from Welsh, which left me with poetry. Lots and lots of poetry, in medieval, Renaissance, and modern flavors. I was almost swayed by a book of Old Welsh erotic poetry, but I saw sense and picked up a book of Modern poetry.

Okay, technically there were other prose books, but it mostly consisted of reprints of medieval Welsh texts.

Since I was there, sorting though the entire Welsh section ( it's about the size of a household bookcase ) I picked up two other books. The first is about Celtic Christianity, and the other is about how Latin and Greek languages influenced the Welsh language and culture.

Oh, and I also got the most recent dictionary they had as to get the most new words possible. Such as noticeboard ( hysbysfwrdd ) and roundabout ( trogylch ). The most recent dictionary there was 1971. I'm sure that there is an even more recent one, but it's in the Reference Room. Happily, it is the revised edition of another dictionary I had checked out before, and still includes the sections that list place names, animals, plants, and food.

Which language(s) do you currently speak? If you could learn only one other language, what would you choose, and why?

The only language I'm fluent in is American English. I can muddle though in Mexican Spanish. I've studied standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Southern Welsh. I also like to think I have a good grasp of British English, but I'm open to disagreement. = P

If I could only learn one other language, I would learn Welsh. All three dialects, obviously, as the differences between North, South, and Patagonian Welsh are really interesting and a good case study on how languages and their populations interact. Southern Welsh has borrowed some English phonemes that Northern Welsh hasn't. Patagonian Welsh is being heavily influenced by Argentinian Spanish. But! They are still comprehensible to one another.

This is baring time travel. If I could learn any language EVER, I'd learn the First Human Language. After poking around and seeing if there was a monogensis of language or not, obviously.

I am currently AFK from my brain.

1. Where do you get good screen caps of Doctor Who series one? I've making a few different JB manips, and I want to see if I can make a decent OT3 manip.

2. How long should I wait before contacting the author I won in the September Support Stacy auction? I haven't heard from her since early October.

3. I can now watch UK television live. Those internet pixes are amazing.

I still cannot speak about Children of Earth for more than five minutes without breaking out into CAPLOCKS OF RAGE four months after the series aired.

Sometime in the future juliet316 will produce a post on Gwen's Heroine's Journey. I was thinking about that myself the other night, and was fairly pleased with it until I got to the "final task" portion. I was thinking that her test was keeping the kids safe, and if it was, then she failed her task. And, then, got all the traditional rewards of suceding in her task.

I'm not saying that Gwen did not deserve having her family alive at the end of the series, nor her being given the task of rebuilding Torchwood. I blame RTD. I blame him HARD. I mean, when you manage to fuck up one of the basic units of storytelling, you need to seriously examine what the fuck you're writing.

On the bright side? RTD is still better than Frank Miller. If you have never heard of Frank Miller, one of the things he's written is Batman kidnapping Dick Grayson ( Age 12 ), keeping him in the Bat Cave, and made him catch rats for food until he earned the privilege of being fed human food. For a slightly more humorous take, Linkara reviewed the first two books of All Star Batman and Robin here. Yesterday I dared myself to read series set in that universe, and I chickened out around chapter five. It was one of the more horrifying stories I've ever read.

12! 12 ladybugs banging against my light. That's not counting the corpses inside the light, which are many, nor the ones that I find all over my room.

Especially when I pull a blanket up to my face, and greeted by the Perfume of Dead Ladybug.

Writer Catherynne M. Valente ( yuki_onna ) is currently stranded in a tight spot. More specifically, she's strandaded in Frankfort, Germany after receving some very, very bad advice from Expedia. When she booked her flight online, she was told she didn't need a visa to fly into Russia. She even called the agency, and was told that they did not need visas to fly into Russia.

You need a visa to fly into Russia.

So, she and her brand new husband ( did I mention that they are on their honeymoon? ) have managed to secure visas, and can pick them up tomorrow. Only they still won't get to St. Petersburg until Thursday night, which leaves them only three days to enjoy the city.

Expedia has been extremely unhelpful in this matter. They wouldn't send a note to the Russian consulate to get Valente an exception to the visa rules, forcing her to spend more time trying to find a company that would. Expedia also booked them into a wildly overpriced hotel, and then only paid a third of the price. Nor did Expedia cough up the cash for the re-scheduling penalty.

Currently, Valente is writing an online novel called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. The table of contents is here. It's a book with-in a book from her novel Palimpsest ( which has a rec from Warren Ellis btw ). She posts a chapter every Monday, even doing so while in Airport Hell. It's price structure is that you donate what you think the novel is worth. The author has also been posting audiobook versions of each chapter.

She also a has another project called The Omikuji Project. This is a short story subscription service. You can sign up for each month's story individually, or a year's membership. But the interesting part is that you can either receive that month's story as an emailed .pdf, or as a small book printed on archival-quality paper, autographed, and stamped with a wax seal.

The kiddies never came. They skipped my building completely, and no one said so until 4:20. I don't even have the solace of good candy. At least my room is clean?