i love how the crash itself was kept out of frame and only the collateral chaos was shown to imply what happened off-frame. beautiful cinematography, oscar-worthy.
If I have any Aussie & New Zealandish readers who are interested in tallship sailing, the Jubilee Sailing Trust currently has some heavily discounted voyages in your neck of the world.
I have not sailed with the JST myself, but I have been aboard and been impressed, and many of my sailing friends sail/have sailed with them – they come highly recommended
Job opening: Time traveler, must provide own temporal locomotive device.
Request: Return to the Library of Alexandria an hour before the destruction began and secure every book, scroll, and other media.
Paradox prevention: All items will be secured in forbidden and eldritch libraries to allow study but not interference with the flow of time.
Compensation: Name it.
Apply: Before this post was made and after you have completed your task.
Dearest Atticus,
Mission accomplished!
Utilizing a proprietary temporal-tunneling ritual, I and a couple of helpful interns returned to the Musaeum and associated Library circa 40 BCE. Well-glamoured disguises, scrying charms, and paradox-canceling talismans were employed to prevent discovery and subsequent damage to the established timeline.
We hit the indices first to get a proper idea of what we’d be looking for. The language was no barrier, thanks to a good deal of studying, and in a week’s time, we had a healthy checklist, prepared sets of instructions, and several archivists bribed to carry out said instructions over the course of the following five years. (Attached please find an expense slip for ten [10] amphora of wine and associated shipping costs.)
Working within existing Library policies, we successfully installed agents who will, under the auspice of cataloguing and correlating scholarly research, disseminate copies of all existing non-duplicated media to libraries and archives in other locations. The more widespread, the better.
While we cannot vouch for either the longevity of the papyrus or the safety of the duplicate documents once they reach their destinations, we feel that our efforts will at the very least preserve a portion of what the former timeline once called “lost.” The Library of Alexandria lives on…if you know where to look.
In your inbox is a listing of the documents catalogued and their associated locations. With any luck, the duplicates should still exist in the new present day. I have included some steathily-obtained photos as proof of our little venture. I think you will especially enjoy the group selfie with the head archivist.
Aside from the pittance for the wine bribe, which is calculated without accounting for inflation, we ask no compensation for this mission. As a student of history and a lifelong lover of books, I consider it a service to posterity.
What started off as a small lie, but snowballed into “this is my life now”?
My freshman year of college I was walking around campus when a very friendly looking girl waved at me. I’m awkward, so of course I waved back. The next week, the same thing.
This began the weirdest saga of my life.
For the next two years, we greeted each other as old friends every time we came across the other. She knew my name (somehow?), I never could figure hers out and it was WAY too late to ask. I just pretended I knew who she was and why she knew me.
Finally, I joined the honors program and entered my classes for my thesis. Who should be in this class but mystery girl! I was horrified. I wouldn’t be able to pass it off anymore.
First day of class we are all sitting there chatting and she greets me by name, again. I had finally learned her name from attendance, thank God. Someone asks, finally, “oh, so do you two know each other? Where’d you meet?”
Silence.
I stare at her. She stares at me. Finally she breaks down wailing. “I don’t know! I don’t know, okay, we’ve just been waving at each other for two years and it was too late to ask!”
Shes standing in my wedding next spring as one of my bridesmaids and very best friends.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
Toeing out of one’s shoes may be a fanfic trend, but toeing them off is in the Oxford English Dictionary:
[Image description: A screencap of the Oxford Dictionary’s web page for the word “toe.” The first definition for the verb “to toe” is [with object and usually with adverbial] push, touch, or kick with one’s toe: ‘he toed off his shoes and flexed his feet.’ ]
How it mutated from common usage “toed off” to fanfic usage “toed out” is a mystery that has been lost to time, but I felt like pointing out that it’s not something fanficcers invented out of whole cloth.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower This seems like the sort of discourse you’d be happy to jump in on…thoughts?
Well…the internet has sped up the evolution of language and word definitions and useage at a pace where linguists are basically screaming “WAIT WAIT WE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THIS SHIT WHAT THE HELL GUYYYYYSSSSSSS–”
Take yes and yeah.
Yea. Yeh. Yas. Yis. Those last two? Those are very, very new, and yet they are EVERYWHERE. Before global communication, new terminology didn’t spread that fast.
Steel Phoenix Studios 