To fling a thought across a stretch of sky

Hey everyone! In this post I’d like to go over some basics before we break down receptive and causative sentences.

Here is your vocabulary, short and simple:

【The Endings】

First, let’s look at the endings:

It’s time to reveal something about these endings. These are not just endings. In actuality they are helping verbs! THAT is the reason why the final -る can inflect.

As a reminder, here is how we can inflect that final る:

-る ➡️ -ない、-たい、-ます、-れば、-た、-て

Notice that we attach those endings directly to the verb stems. Does that remind you of anything?? Yes, れる、せる、られる and させる are all Ichidan verbs!

On top of that, remember that -ない、-たい and -ます can further inflect (because they are ALSO helping verbs!) giving you lots and lots of possibilities. This info will come in handy a bit later.

【Receptive Sentences】

In the next post when we get to receptive sentences, there are 4 parts of each sentence that I want you to think about. Here is a visualization that will help:

As is always the case in Japanese, what comes at the end is super important so let’s “zoom in” and start by looking at the 2 end sections.

【The Internal and Received Actions】

Because れる and される are actually verbs, it’s important to recognize that every receptive sentence actually contains 2 actions going on simultaneously. There is the action that is being “received” and there is an “internal action”. Let’s look at some examples:

① 褒められた

When you see this at the end of a receptive sentence, in your mind you can break this word down into two different actions - the action that was “received” and the “internal” action. The two parts are:

られた = received 褒め (to praise) is the internal action = was praised

In this case, once you figure out the actions, you only need to figure out who received the praising and who did the praising.

Here’s another example:

② 買われました

Let’s break down example 2:

れました = received (polite) 買わ (to buy) is the internal action = was bought (polite)

Because this is a Godan verb, the stem of the helping verb is れ. That won’t change. However the ending of the helping verb CAN change, and in this case it’s ました. Does it all make sense?

One more example:

③ 尊敬されたい

In this case, we have a する noun. No problem!

れたい = wants to receive 尊敬さ (to respect) is the internal action = wants to be respected

Now, is there anything you notice about those internal actions!?

For Ichidan verbs, する and 来る, the internal actions are just the verb stems! For Godan verbs, the internal action will always be the stem + its あ sound adapter.

The れる and られる verbs might have different endings too, but we already know the possibilities so it’s no problem. Now it should be much much easier to understand what is going on in all receptive sentences!

【Causative Sentences】

Causative sentences express the idea of either forcing or allowing an action to happen. These sentences basically have the same things going on as receptive sentences, except for the helping verbs at the end.

Whether the action was forced or allowed to happen, the end result is that the topic or subject “caused” the action. This is where the name causative comes from. Let’s look at some examples:

④ 食べさせた させた = forced or allowed to 食べ (to eat) is the internal action = allowed to / made to eat

When we get to the post on the causative form we will see how you know if it’s the “forced to” or the “allowed to” interpretation.

Here’s one more example:

⑤ アパートに入れさせなかった させなかった = didn’t force or allow to アパートに入れ (entering the apartment) is the internal action = was not let into the apartment

In example 5 it’s unlikely that someone was not forced to go into an apartment, so we go with the “not allowed to” interpretation.

【The Particles】

The particles in receptive and causative sentences will be very important. は、が、に、を and から will all be working together in harmony to express certain nuances. We’ll talk more about this in detail in the respective posts.

【Conclusion】

Well there you have it! Receptive and causative sentences were very hard for me to understand when I started studying Japanese. They still trip me up at times, but it helps to have this baseline of knowledge.

Now I believe that you are ready to look at full receptive and causative sentences. See you next post!

Rice & Peace,

– AL (アル)

(How your character defends their soft core and what could shatter it) Because protection becomes prison real fast.

A warm, durable canvas winter coat from Carhartt cost me about $200. But this thing will last forever. Because it's designed to be worn for work. After a few years, it's actually gotten more comfortable and better looking because it's broken in. I'm gonna have this coat for the rest of my life. It's made to last. I've never had a winter coat last more than a couple years because it rips or tears.

My friend with a pretty Burberry raincoat spent $2,000 and it's not designed to hold up that well or be punished like a Carhartt coat. That's expensive, and impractical. $200 for a coat that will last a lifetime is great if you can afford it.

Big boys love them cuz they fit. They're a little oversized and come in lots of sizes and as a big boy I don't have time or money anymore to waste on crappy clothes.

I have a Carhartt backpack. Carhartt boots and pants. My dog even has a Carhartt harness.

Carhartt is also women run, loudly supports the LGBTQ community, treats its workers well, and was one of the first and few companies to support mandatory COVID vaccines. It's not just a good product, it's a good American company.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

- food goes from esophagus to stomach to intestine

- can eat and digest almost anything

- adaptable and can survive in many different environments

me, a specialized sanguivorous vampire bat:

- food goes from esophagus to intestine to stomach to intestine

- can only eat blood

- will die if I don’t eat for one night (unless someone vomits in my mouth)

- will die if there’s not enough humidity in the air

- will die if I exercise too much

- will become dehydrated if I drink too much

Vampire bats are the only known obligate blood feeding vertebrates. Other animals like vampire finches supplement their blood diets with other stuff, depending on what’s available. This is because blood is a terrible food to live solely on.

Blood is, first and foremost, 92% just plain water. This means to gain appreciable nutritional value from it, you have to drink A LOT. Common vampire bats drink around 20 grams of blood each night, which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize that common vampire bats weigh, on average, around 30 grams. (Several of them could fit snugly in a teacup.) That’s like if a person who weighed 150 pounds/68 kg drank 100 lbs/45 kg of fluid every night in half an hour.

This presents an issue, because vampire bats can’t just swell up into an orb and roll off when they’re done feeding- they need to be light enough to fly. So blood needs to be processed very fast by their digestive system so they can shed the water weight. This is why vampire bats start peeing within about two minutes of feeding, and continue peeing through their approximately 30 min feeding session. It shoots through their body that fast.

Peeing this much at once has consequences on the body, though. To put it briefly, while vampire bat pee is mostly clear water at the beginning of the feeding, it is dark with urea by the end. (Urea is a waste product from food that builds up in the body and is released by urine.) Because they need to keep peeing to process the blood fast and dump toxic urea from the body, their urine becomes more and more concentrated as their bodies run out of water to dilute their urine with. So even though bats may consume 2/3 or more of their body weight of fluid each night, the vast majority of which is water, they may become dehydrated.

Their high risk of dehydration is why they can’t handle dry environments, and why you don’t find them outside of tropical environments. (Really it’s a miracle these creatures can survive at all.)

Blood isn’t just a troublesome food because you need to drink a lot of it to live. It’s troublesome because even with the water taken out, the nutritional value of what remains SUCKS, no pun intended. It’s literally basically just some proteins and iron. And while that may be why vampire bats are so jacked (seriously, they’re very muscular in places most bats aren’t), it is extremely difficult to thrive on. One big reason is that blood contains almost no fat, which is crucial to most animals because it provides spare batteries- essentially, stored energy we can use if food is scarce.

A vampire bat does not have this backup. They will literally die within about 36 hours of not feeding. Even mice can live 3-4 days without food, and they normally live for two years as opposed to a vampire bat’s 12-20 years. (Depending on their environment.) Each and every night in a vampire bat’s life is on a knife’s edge, teetering towards starvation.

These bats do help each other, however, by regurgitating small amounts of blood for their hungry colony mates who haven’t found food for the night. Without this behavior I’m not sure the species would be anywhere near the populations it has now; they might not be able to thrive at all considering how desperately mothers with pups need the food. It takes most small bats about two weeks to wean their pups. It can take vampire bats up to nine months to wean their pups (though more generally it’s around four months) because their milk suffers from the same lack of nutrition as their food. They also have unusually long pregnancies (5-7 months; other similar-sized bats average around 6 weeks) for the same reason.

The energy budgeting for the vampire bats is so severe that they actually have a sharp limit for how far they can fly before they become exhausted. Vampire bats are not known to migrate or even relocate because frankly, they might end up dropping dead out of the sky.

So, to recap, each day is a struggle between life and death, the bats teeter between drinking too much and becoming too heavy to fly and/or dehydrated, or drinking too little and dying on the way back. This is a highly successful species we’re talking about here. How they’re so successful with these constraints is a mystery to me, although it might have something to do with their high intelligence.

I haven’t covered one thing, which is the structure of the vampire bat’s digestive system. So. For the vast majority of vertebrates, food goes in the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach and through the intestines. Let’s call the esophagus/stomach/intestine routine ABC. Vampire bats… take a slightly different route. Using these letters, their digestive order would be ACBC.

Take a look at the following diagram. An average insect-eating bat’s organs are shown on the left, while those of a vampire bat are on the right.

You may notice that things are a bit… off. Unlike practically any other vertebrate on the planet, a vampire bat’s esophagus splits into two branches. One branch leads directly to the intestines, the other to the stomach. The stomach and intestines are not connected in any other way.

The question is: why? Why this? Why do you have to be like this, vampire bats?

Naturally, the answer is in the diet again. The bat uses its intestines to pull out the negligible nutrition from the blood quickly, then sends the resulting wastewater to the stomach, which balloons tremendously even as it rapidly sends the water to the kidneys to be processed into urine. (Then later they have sludgy black poops.) Even with their fast urination system, bats only manage to shed about a quarter of their water weight by the time they lift off into a sloshy flight, weighing easily twice as much as when they left. See the “before and after” shots below.

(Both photos taken by Jon Flanders. Hey kids, contrary to these images, never touch a bat with bare hands, much less a bat that can deliver extremely deep wounds as well as the bacteria and viruses of whatever animal they just fed on. Don’t Do That™)

I have a personal loathing for the phrase "you're so talented." That implies I didn't have to work to get to where I am, that it all came naturally. This is entirely false and misleading. It invalidates all the work I've done, all the learning and challenges I've had to deal with.

Talent is something you're born with, but if you depend entirely on it, you will plateau. I have a natural talent for color. It's something I cannot explain, but I inherited this talent, this gift, from my mother. Everything else stems from this, but depending on that talent will not take me far.

Talent is simply the extra boost in learning.

Skill is learned. It's something that takes time and hard work. It's also something that grows, but will not do so without challenges and failure. You do not learn from success, you learn from failure. I failed. A lot. Especially in all things involving math.

Quilting has a lot of math. I've had to learn how to work around what my brain cannot process. I cannot balance a checkbook because when I do the math and come back to it later, numbers have been replaced with letters. 4 is F, 7 is S, 9 is N, but sometimes I write out entire numbers. This isn't something I realize I'm doing until it's done. It's why writing out a quilting pattern, which I've been working on for awhile, it's extraordinarily difficult. My mom is a walking calculator, but even she cannot fathom what I've written down.

Learning how to make quilts involved a lot of failure, but I learned. If I had stuck with just using talent, I would've shied away from challenges for fear of failure. It's why a lot of artists plateau; they became so dependent on talent that any form of failure was too much. I see this a lot in people I've given lessons to. People who are more comfortable with solids instead of prints, black and white instead of color, and when I was teaching macrame there were those who wouldn't use more than three cords or wouldn't use beads.

You have to fail to gain skills. You have to fall in order to get back up. So push past that line of comfort, of what you know you're good at, and strive for more. Keep those failed projects, or at least pictures of them, to remind yourself of how far you've come. My first projects are comically bad, but I look back on them fondly.

You see these table runners? They were the very first things I learned how to make. I was so proud of them! The corners don't meet, the machine quilting is a mess, and the fabric arrangements are off. My skill for pressing seams was atrocious and resulted in things not laying properly. But I was so proud of them! I made these in 2015.

Then I remade these and nearly made the same mistakes again, but I had learned and caught the mistakes early.

This is the same pattern, and I made this table runner in 2021. The arrangement is fantastic, the corners meet, the machine quilting (stitch in the ditch) is vastly improved. My seam pressing has also come far and now the blocks and corners are nice and sharp.

Here's the very first quilt that I made the corners meet properly. I cried when I saw that I had successfully managed to do that. The color arrangement is off, but that's okay. Because I made the corners meet.

All the quilting was done by hand. To get the lines straight, I laid painter's tape over the blocks and quilted to the side of it. Nice and straight! I made this in 2017, and one of my husband's coworkers loved it so much she paid twice what I asked for. It's still one of my proudest moments. The corners meet!

Stop telling people "you're so talented." Please. I know many artists and writers who absolutely hate hearing that. We worked hard to get where we are. Instead, say something that validates the work. "You've got mad skills!" A teenage boy told me that a few months ago. They loved one of my pieces and have since taken on the challenge of learning how to make plushies with yarn. The first few weren't great, but he took my advice and kept them as trophies to look back on and see how far he's come.

AAAAA PHEW i just finished binding a bunch of new zines that compile my PNW fantasy sketch pages :”) just in time for when I get to table at the Portland Zine Symposium tomorrow!!!!! if anyone’s in the area come say hi!!!

So this zine managed to sell out twice, and your guys' support on it kinda actually changed my life. ( <- I've been anxious to say it that bluntly,.. but it's true.) Thank you, seriously ;_;

For this reprint, I made a new cover (since the old one was just a repeat of one of the inner illustrations), and also added one more ecoregion: The High Desert :D So now it has:

The Coast Range

The Valley

The Cascades

The High Desert

"the governor module will freeze you in place at your client's command and force you to do nothing as they're kidnapped then will kill you terribly and painfully when they're taken out of acceptable range"

I read a very formative article a number of years ago which said that every book a child reads, no matter what their life circumstance, improved their life outcome. The act of reading helped the child’s brain to grow, gave them more ability to imagine something better for themselves, and increased their awareness and compassion for others. This, in turn, made the entire trajectory of their life better.

I just reread Fugitive Telemetry and I think it's so interesting to see all the little moments like this with Indah and Aylen.

They both start out deeply afraid and suspicious of MB, in a way that MB doesn't want to acknowledge but is definitely very painful. But through the course of their interactions, they have enough Wendy's Lady moments that they start to change.

And I don't think Murderbot picks up on this much, if at all. I think it would be surprised to know how much both of their opinions of Murderbot have changed through the course of the events of FT. But MB just keeps dropping these little hints, little stories and anecdotes, little things about the CR that it just Knows. And they're both standing there like "what the fuck... Holy shit... That's so fucked ...." And they both soften up so much to MB. (Helped significantly by the extreme competency MB displays the whole time, but also just through its sheer... Well humanity isn't the right word. Undeniable personhood. They start to see past the scary Secunit and start to see the scared and hurt person that Mensah first saw wrapped up in a blanket in the cubicle.

The moment that drove this home most to me is the way Indah quietly supports it after What Happened with The People in That One Scene. When you know MB is devastated but not actually able to articulate why even to itself in any meaningful way. And Indah is just there, supporting it quietly and carefully and giving it space, but also affirming "you have just been violently dehumanized, and I'm sorry. For what it's worth, I do see you as a person and it sucks that this happened and I'll press charges against them if you want." (I think MB doesn't really process that concept. Imagine a SecUnit making a complaint about a human and it being taken seriously? It's definitely not ready for that yet.)

In the early 80s, as the AIDS crisis swept through New York City, Howard Ashman asked his favorite musical collaborator Alan Menken to help him put a tribute to music for the lives and community that were being lost. 

This song was played at Ashman’s memorial service when he eventually died of AIDS in 1991.

_______________________________________

With a corner to catch the subway And a corner to buy cigars And a corner to wait for the Times to come out And a corner to lean on cars  

It was something just left to the Mardi Gras When my friends and their friends were there But it’s getting much too quiet Tonight on Sheridan Square 

I’m sure that it must mean something But it’s really too soon to tell When somebody’s gettin’ famous While nobody’s gettin’ well 

And you can send my regrets to the party I’d like to make it, but just don’t dare And why is it still so quiet Tonight on Sheridan Square? 

Johnny and Steve and Martin And a list that goes on too long Dennis and Bill and Barry You’re the reason I wrote this song 

Some of the boys have panic  But none of the boys leave town They say, “We’re on the good ship Titanic We’re gonna sing ‘til the boat goes down.“ 

And if it ended before it started Well no one told us that life is fair And why is it still so quiet Tonight on Sheridan Square? 

Somebody make a note of this You people who know the trends The wild ones are turning lovers The lovers are turning friends

And if some good rises out of everything Then the phoenix is rising there In the eyes that are scared, but softer Tonight on Sheridan Square

Johnny and Steve and Martin And a list that goes on too long Dennis and Bill and Barry You’re the reason I wrote this song