But not like Jeff Winger loves Jeff Winger. "I'd rather look at myself naked than the women I sleep with."
Happy Valentine’s Day, dear reader!
(Actually this wasn’t the ”longer” comic I had in mind for today, that one will have to wait for another year. This one still took me ages to do anyway, hah.)
I think I'm an orc. I'm not sure what that means in terms of my relationship with American politics, though. Maybe I'm an Ent. I'll just wait it out, nice and slow.
Probably I'm half-Gandalf, although I would probably never score Gandalf anything on any scientific internet quiz. Even if it weren't an actual option, I'd still get orc or goblin. Probably goblin. They're weaker and smaller than orcs.
Tag yourself with whichever best represents your relationship with American politics.
Gandalf: The choices that we make will determine the course of the world, for good or ill.
Denethor: We will never win. Rather than watch all that I hold sacred violated, all that I loved destroyed, I will set myself on fire.
Saruman: We will never win. The only way that I can survive is total surrender.
Boromir: We can win, if we use the tactics of our enemies!
Elrond: I’m not immediately in danger and neither is anyone I personally love, so I’m just going to sit at home and bemoan the fact that my “allies” are worthless
Frodo: Only I can save the world, and no one can help me.
Sam: I don’t understand politics. I just want to keep my best friend safe.
Tom Bombadil: I’m sorry, I don’t follow politics, let’s go to a party and have some fun :D
Eowyn: I don’t care if we win, I just want to fight.
Source, the delightful Mark Smith in The Herald, who kindly included a large photo so you know him if you ever see him in real life. With thanks also to Prester for his succinct rebuttal.
2) I hope it's not the let-down that so many movies are.
3) I hope it's not rated-R.
4) It's a bear. Get it, Abinadi? Get it? A bear?
During the Cold War, an organization called “Patriot” created a super-hero squad, which includes members of multiple soviet republics. For years, the heroes had to hide their identities, but in hard times they must show themselves again.
Guardians will hit the big screen in Russia on February 23, 2017. It will also be released in the US later this year, but the official release date hasn’t been revealed yet.
This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it.
I don’t get it
Please explain ;_;
There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” - cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” - failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" - signifying a gift.
OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.
The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.
Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.
If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.
Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary.
I also just want more. ^_^
Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).
It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected.
And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).
Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.
And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.
Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” ;)
Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on.
It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making.
These might not actually be real statements on how astronauts feel like when they’re in space, but they’re funny nonetheless, especially the last one by Barry Wilmore. Check ’em all out below!
