Full Of Yearning

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

Back when I worked at the hospital, I had to take MRI training and it was my favorite thing every time. It was only like 10 minutes long and went a little something like this:

Hey. The MRI is basically a really big magnet and by basically I mean it is and we literally never turn it off. It's like really big. Really really big and powerful and The Magnet is always on. We don't turn it off Ever, for any reason. We mean it bro, The Magnet is literally always on. It's crazy strong and will definitely kill you. So don't bring any metal into the MRI room, man. You will fuck up the machine (because The Magnet is always on) and then you will die (again, because The Magnet is always on). Here's some fun questions for you to test your understanding!

1) The ______ is always on.

2) The Magnet is ______ on.

3) How often is The Magnet on?

4) The Magnet is always __.

5) The Magnet is always on. T/F

6) The Magnet is usually on but we know to turn it off for you because you're a very special boy :) T/F

7) My weak fleshy body can survive the wrath of The Magnet. T/F

8) Look at this 500 lbs steel hospital bed, which The Magnet has crumpled into an origami crane. Imagine if that was you.

9) Is The Magnet ever off?

10) Sometimes we turn The Magnet off. T/F

Thank you for taking MRI training. We hope you learned that The Magnet is always on, because it is. It's on Right Now and it will be on every time you come to the MRI. Have fun and remember: The Magnet is always on!

So the official term for this, when a kanji is read one way in some contexts and a different way in others, is usually a case of onyomi vs kunyomi. -yomi, "reading" (from yomu "to read") basically categorizes words into whether you read them with the chinese pronunciation or the japanese pronunciation.

There are a lot of complicated factors that go into this but the easiest way for english speakers to wrap their heads around it is that the Japanese language ended up with multiple sets of vocabulary in the same way that the English language did with the Germanic language/Romance language split; you have one set of vocabulary for common, everyday use that derives from germanic vocab, and then another set of vocabulary for fancy, formal use that derives from Latinate vocab. The classic example is using swine to describe the animal, which the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxon farmers and handlers would tend to, and porc to describe the meat, which the French-speaking Normans would eat. But pretty much every word in the English language has some degree of casual-formal duplication of this kind.

Much like European scholars did with Latin, a bunch of vocabulary got imported by the literati of Japan starting around about the 5th century in order to have a different and more formal register to talk about certain topics. This was imported alongside the Chinese writing system at the same time, which then over the next few centuries was shifted into a simpler, non-logographic, syllabic script that became hiragana (the wavy one.)

But that means that a bunch of imported Chinese vocabulary was conventionally written in their original-or-close-to-it hanzi form, and spoken with their original-or-close-to-it Chinese pronunciation. Words of this type have a much higher incidence of long vowels, left over from the Chinese where each character would represent a single complex syllable varied by vowel intonation, compared to native Japanese words which are polysyllabic and hit more consonants.

So, the system has evolved in various directions over time, and now there are a lot of ways that a single character can be read depending on positioning and context, but the broad strokes are: if the kanji is mostly on its own, surrounded by hiragana, it will take the Japanese reading (kunyomi) and if it's part of a compound word, paired with other kanji, it will take the Chinese reading (onyomi.) The more formal the text -- especially notable with medical, scientific, or governmental texts -- the more dense and compacted it will get, with a much higher ratio of kanji compounds to hiragana, and a correspondingly higher dose of onyomi readings.

To leave off with one example: the video above highlights (手), which is 'hand.' When it appears by itself surrounded by simple words like participles, it takes the kunyomi te, like in the sentence 'take my hand' (手を握って, te o nigitte.) But if you are using it as part of a more abstraction concept, like in 手動 -- done by hand, or manual, see how the english term underwent the exact same shift into latinate when it gains a level of abstraction? -- then it becomes part of a compound word with another kanji. Now it takes the onyomi shu, to become part of the compound word shudou. Catch that long vowel! If it weren't part of a compound word, that 動 by itself would take the kunyomi hataraki, for motion or action.

'Troupe', 'troop', and 'thorp'. Loaned from French twice, as well as the homegrown term for a small village/group of houses.

'Pack', and 'bailey'. Native word and French loan.

"Sir', 'sire', 'seigneur' and 'Monsieur'. All from French at slightly different times and in different contexts.

Same with 'dame', 'dam', 'madam', and 'ma'am'.

'Mister', 'master', 'magister' and 'maître d'. All from Latin and French.

To 'spout' and 'spit'. First is from Dutch, second is native English.

To 'wake', 'watch' and 'wait'. First two are native English, third is from French.

To 'ward' versus 'guard'. Same word, but the second one was borrowed into Latin and then back into English from French.

Archeologists can't tell for sure whether someone was assigned male or female when alive from bone structure, but they can tell whether someone was an archer. Longbow archer, anyway. The way their arms and shoulders were strongly muscled in a very asymmetrical way is pretty much unmistakable, and they were muscled enough that it's visible in their bones. If someone's seen what archers look like, they can tell whether a stranger they've never seen before can shoot a bow or not.

"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."