zeroanaphora

link, link

(also, I’ve heard ppl say that it’s a lazy way to make a character not white but still not a person of color so)

“This Rubik’s Cube is Driving Me Crazy!”

I’m gonna peel off all the stickers cuz I’m too stupid and lazy!

“This Rubik’s Cube is Driving Me Crazy!”

I’m gonna peel off all the stickers cuz I’m too stupid and lazy!

~ “Progress”,  1915 editorial cartoon

Society despairs of the Modern Woman, 1915 style

This is an illustration from the 1600s. First picture shows the good old days, when people carried around lances to stab people with and we actually read literature and wore spurred boots. The second picture is THE DEGENERATE PRESENT, where all these 1600s millennials wear RIBBONS and play DICE and SMOKE and DRINK STUFF FROM SNAKE FLAGONS. Damn 1600s hipsters. It was better when I was your age. 

Early 20th century British conservative cartoonist WK Haselden ran a whole series like this in 1920, where “Maud of the Eighties” (1880s, that is; sturdy, Victorian times) was faced with modern mores generally or “Gladys of Today” specifically:

I’m sure this was a hilarious, cutting insight at the time:

By the way, Haselden himself was all of eight years old in 1880. “Born in the wrong time,” I suppose they say.

It’s hard to say how much outright disapproval Haselden was expressing when you read, for example, the below – but as I have pointed out before, things like this that read to us today as awesome were usually intended to be read as unseemly and absurd at the time.

This is a more overt example of the same sentiment:

And before giving him too much credit, I hasten to add he was a staunch anti-suffragist:

Haselden did at least seem to recognize the ironies implicit in “good ol’ days” talk:

Whatever his level of self-awareness, he seems to have reached the conclusion that the chattering class will always be thus:

Indeed, in 1921 he anticipated this entire post!

A Linguist Tweets Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer 

LOOK !!!!!

AWHHHH 

First off you don’t read them front to back or left to right or anything like that, you read them in paired columns. It’s a little like reading a PDF where you have two pages next to each other- you read the first two left to right, like in English, but then you read down the column, going down left to right.  

Another cute thing is that the reason it took so long to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics (a couple hundred years!) was because the scribes liked to play around with how they wrote. The Mayan system had two different ways to write - they had logograms, which are like Chinese characters; and they had phonetic signs, which stood for a syllable of spoken speech- kind of like hiragana or katakana. 

Sometimes the scribes picked one or the other to make the sentences make sense- when you’re writing with a lot of syllables sometimes you need to specify whether you’re talking about a stone or a turkey, or which word for “jaguar” you’re using. 

But a lot of the time they’d just pick the one they thought looked prettiest. So you had people playing with words all over the place!

Another cute thing about Mayan hieroglyphics: the Mayan gods of scribes were twin brothers called the Monkey-Man scribes!

This is a statue of one of the Monkey-man scribes.  

All those glyphs mean “shield” pronounced pakal in classical mayan, but all of them are writen using different methods :

The first one is just the logogram PAKAL

The second is the phonetic decomposition of the word using syllabic glyphs : pa-ka-la. The last voyel is usually not pronounced in such a position. 

The last one makes use of both the logogram PAKAL and the syllabic glyph la. It is the most common spread orthography, as the mayan liked to make sure that no ambiguity was possible.

The real complexity of the system comes from the fact that one glyph could be written in many different ways, according to its position in the block (on top, on the side..) and the skill of the carver or scribe. Contrary to the chinese characters, a glyph had no fixed form : as long as its main attributes were presents, the scribe could draw or carve the glyph the way he wanted. Add to this the fact that most of the logograms had at least an anthropomorphic form and a more abstract one, and you get a pretty complex system.  As an example, all those glyphs mean “sun” and are pronounced k’in :

Here are a few useful links to learn more :

The FAMSI website, where you can use a dictionnary to find glyphs and also read this great study guide.

The Corpus of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, where you can admire the beauty of the script when carved of rock .

Mayavase.com, if you want to take a look at mayan calligraphy on ceramics.

Maya decipherment, the best research blog on the subject.

i got a video of one of the new songs!