it's the season of the sticks

❌ Does this ship make any sense whatsoever by any reasonable metric

Yes, she mocks rape victims. She threatens litigation against the mildest criticism against her. She has created an LGB group to make it so very clear that trans people are not welcome where she gives money. She is the funding behind Scotland saying trans women aren't legally women. The list goes on.

But. I promise you, 99% of the people around you don't know she's done any of this because they aren't following her social media or stories about her. To them, she is just the author of those fun wizard books. You gotta talk about how she's SO WEIRD and ISN'T IT SAD.

You need to tell the normies how she uses the funds from all her payout agreements for ALL Harry Potter licensing, including the re-release of these movies.

"It's so fucking weird. It's so fucking off-putting. It's so fucking sad." Say that over and over. Don't try to tie it into larger ideas. This is not how people will listen. "Isn't it just fucking sad she has all this money that could go to literacy or scholarships, and she's using it to attack people who are just living their lives? What a weird fucking choice."

We need to out-Morbius Morbius in terms of this tanking, and the way you do that is talk to normies about how fucking WEIRD and RUDE she is. How ODD that the second Fantastic Beasts movie gave a "actually, fascism isn't too bad" vibe all the way through and especially at the end. How she has complained that the child actors from those movies particularly don't agree with her views on trans people and that she's publicly said that's why she wanted a new show.

What a WEIRD thing to say about child actors you worked with over a decade ago. It's so WEIRD she would care that those child actors have different opinions than her. It's really SAD she apparently has no hobbies except posting on social media about how she hates trans people. A beloved author who could be using her name to raise money for animal rescues and homeless people and all sorts of really great causes that could improve people's lives, and she's out here doing THIS? It just bums me out. I just can't support someone who uses their money to harass and harm other people like this. I don't know WHY she acts like this or WHY she's chosen to make it her whole personality, but it just makes it really hard for me to want to support any Harry Potter stuff, even when I loved it so much. Knowing any money made from that franchise goes into her pocket to just pour out onto orgs and laws that tell adults they can't just live their lives and be left alone is WEIRD.

And then say what you're gonna be doing instead. You know, I'm going to go and find some new fantasy books at the library. I'm going to boardgame day down at the game store. I'm going to a stitching group. I'm going to host a 1980s fantasy fest at my place; do you have any favorites you recommend? We should have a film fest where we watch all the movies that scared the shit out of us as kids.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

So Old English poetry has a fairly standard (though not set) number of syllables per line, which would be a better number to use to compare with the fastest known rappers (I checked around after seeing this and inevitably found a Reddit thread debating this question, but Eminem and Twista seem to be at the top).

In 2012 the Chicago Tribune was still reporting Twista as the holder of the world record (set in 1992), and I get the impression Eminem broke it, but I’m not entering the Eminem vs Twista debate here. What I need is a comparable rate, and Twista’s record is counted by syllable, not word, so his is easier to calculate. (Thank you Twista).

I can’t access the Tribune article, but it’s cited on Wikipedia, so I’m hoping the wiki text isn’t bullshitting:

So not looking at his peak burst as this is a marathon, he’s doing uhhh is this math right? He’s doing 10.87 syllables a second, holy shit.

So Old English poetry is structured in such a way where, while a poet didn’t have to count syllables, they did tend to end up with a fairly standard number of syllables per line (and a lot of alliteration). The beginning of Beowulf looks like this, for example:

You can see how the lines are pretty equal (the gaps in the middle of each line are added by editors because half-lines are important, you don’t have to worry about that) (Actually the lines are also decided by editors and no one agrees but that’s not a scop’s problem 💜).

The first line, for example, is 10 syllables : hwæt we Gardena in geardagum

*a lot of Gs are pronounced like y in OE, so that final word is more like yeh-ar-day-um.

The second has 9, the third 11. I should say I’m not sure about syllable counting in some lines, because vowel pronunciation rules vs stressed syllables rules are beyond me, having literally never been relevant to me until I needed to know how fast Twista (or Eminem) could rap Beowulf. Scops would be ashamed to be seen with me.

But for science’s sake let’s say there’s a range of of 9-13 syllables per line. Some paper I just found that I’m not totally sold on as a source but nevertheless seems to have done some math says the average is 9 syllables a line, roughly, though the range is from 6-18 and the most common single number is 10. Let’s go with that for now.

So, Twista can rap 10.87 syllables a second: more than an average line of Beowulf per second. But the copy of Beowulf we have is, as established, 3,182 lines long. Even just assuming an average of 9 syllables a line, that puts you at approximately 28,638 syllables. However, Twista can go at a rate of 652.36 syllables a minute.

Conclusion: if my math is right (please check my math) and if he could keep that pace up, Twista could rap the entirety of Beowulf in 43 minutes and 54 seconds. Presumably Eminem could do similar.

and that censorship did not start from the government down