Trying things, probably

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.

Shane Hollander is what they call an ambassador for the sport. The best one in decades, they keep telling him, while crowded around tiny tables in in hotel ballrooms eating plates of room temperature shrimp cocktail and drinking watery beer. What that means, in practice, is he's contractually obligated to show up to every bullshit event the league puts on in hopes of getting more people to give a shit about hockey. For better or worse, he's not the only one.

~~

Shane and Ilya are both tapped as league ambassadors at the 2015 Asian Showcase, held in Seoul. As the only two North American players in Korea, the league assumed they'd want to room together, obviously. Back home, the race for the cup is in full swing, but here, half a world away, there's only familiar comfort of a skyline blanketed in snow and the unfamiliar comfort of anonymity.

____

Thanks for the prompt! For the CNC part idk just imagine that Shane takes advantage of their circumstances to play with a little free use kink

Here’s the general art style Chinese mountains are drawn in:

And here’s how some of them actually look:

I am anti-genAI, especially in creative fandom spaces, but I'm even bigger against witch hunts and harassment. Because that's all what this "exposed authors" document list (and future lists) is going to do. It doesn't matter if there's a big disclaimer about NOT attacking the people listed. The internet will do what the internet does nowadays and backstab anyone they deem unworthy, especially toward ones that they've been given the greenlight to attack. The obsession and paranoia about wanting to make sure that every single fandom creation is not made with AI is, quite frankly, getting out of fucking hand. No, I don't want to read AI works. But I don't have enough time in the day or much less the ability to care about checking. If I suspect something is amiss, I'll just do the fandom of old: Don't Like, Don't Read. Don't Like? Don't Engage. Hit the back button.

No one owes anything to anyone. No photo proof. No video proof. No screenshots or anything else.

There are people out there using grammarly to edit their work because English might not be their first language, or they don’t know enough people to find a beta, or they’re dyslexic, or god knows how many other reasons.

There are people out there who are on the spectrum and their written work reads like ChatGPT because that’s how their brain works. There are people out there who are so goddamn skilled at what they do, others struggle to believe it’s real.

Do you know who else was like that? Michelangelo. Do you know *how many people* have stood in front of the statue of David and thought *how the fuck did any human create that?*

There are soo many telented people out there who are infinitely better than you, be it written word or drawn image, or hell, even a photoshopped picture. Just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do.

Stop adding to the witch hunts. Stop trying to cancel people loudly.

If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

It's impossible to detect whether text was created by AI because the patterns AI writing follows come from human writers

The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.

The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

:| :| :|

The α-males are large and dominant, and maintain a harem of females to mate with inside the cavity of a sea sponge.

The β-males mimic the female form, tricking the α-males into letting them "join" their harem, sometimes to the point of allowing the α-male to mate with them. Then the β-male can mate with the females whenever they feel like while the α-male guards the entrance to the sea sponge.

And the γ-males are small, fast, and have relatively humongous testicles. While the α-male guarding the entrance to the sea sponge is distracted mating with a β-male, the γ-male dashes inside and ejaculates everywhere as fast as he can before he gets caught.

Here's how that works:

say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.

Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.

Get in touch with them using that information.

So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.

If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.

If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.

This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.

If it's not scam they'll be like sure, here's the reference number. Then you follow the instructions above, call the separate number you find yourself on a reputable website and give that person the reference number. And they'll help you resolve the issue.