u/TeacatWrites

I listened to the second and third hours while sitting outside under the full moon. Perfect environment to enjoy Richard interviewing some kook who says he's a "living vampire". Very little politics on-air, and then transitioning into a specific theme for open lines based around the Mandela Effect, and always Richard demonstrating his unique style of seeming both genuinely knowledgeable about the subject matter but also genuinely curious about what other people have to say about that subject matter.

I also appreciate that this night, on which I randomly decided to tune in for the first time in weeks, is apparently the first night Richard was hosting from the "classic" *Coast* studios. If that's true, he was able to interact with other studio members while hosting, and I don't entirely believe he was there in the studio, but it's fun to believe that for me. "Synchronicity", as some once used to say...this was a great show to tune back into, and I don't regret it at all.

I'm still recontextualizing experiences from my life. Probably, I shouldn't be posting with this account, but I'm trying to make a note of open and honest transparency about my experiences and especially of my now-years-long quest to figure out "what's going on" with me. I thought for so long that there was just something wrong with me, because my family seemed so normal, right?

So why do people from families who actually are normal come off so weird to me, and end up calling me out when I start repeating patterns of behavior I thought were normal but were only ever exclusive to the way the people in my family behave? Why were my therapists never able to find a single thing wrong with me when I was talking with them one on one other than a potential for "persistent depressive disorder", because I was able to talk to them personally and was away from the environment that was causing so much difficulty for me but still under the impression my family was "normal" just because it was all I knew then, and I used to be so proud of my parents and so defensive of them before their acid started poisoning me the way it has all these past several years?

I hesitate to call it a cult. The way they are breeds this behavior of exaggerating things and using anything they can get their hands on in order to get more social attention. I think some part of me has always known it's weird, but I honestly didn't mind it until they allowed their behavior to turn on me, and cast me as their enemy for my attempts to be "normal" and belief that "we" were normal, and that's when everything fell apart. The funny thing is, if they had just done nothing (as they've so often tried to make it seem like they were doing anyway, despite how obvious it is and has been that that was never the case), then I would never have suspected a thing and they would never have lost my trust in them at all.

But the mysteries add up. The questions, the weird happenstances, the "coincidental" disappointments that never seem to happen in anyone else's families...

And things that were innocent and joyful get turned into weaponized objects of war against my entire personality, to the point that, once I start really noticing it, all I can see is abuses of power from a sad, desperate group of people pathetically relying on my own inability to see that the trees in their forest were plaster and paint the entire time.

I guess I always knew, and hoped to touch real wood in those trees, and figured, if I touched them enough with my eyes closed tightly, then eventually I'd be able to imagine it was real wood instead of anything else they put up in my way instead.

I don't even know where I'm going with this. I saw a comment and post on here before that people like me often get weird and imaginatively descriptive about physical sensations and philosophical thoughts as grounding mechanisms and side effects of that isolationist, socially-cut-off mindset they end up as part of, and that's where everything starts to feel the fakest.

I thought everything was normal. I built my entire "career" on what I thought was normal. I've always had this dissociative malaise, this unrepentant sadness that's never gone away; I've dedicated decades of my life to studying the spiritual and psychological conditions, hoping to realize that it was me the entire time and I'd be able to just magic away my sadness by just changing myself enough times to not be sad anymore.

I built an entire paracosm (a fantasy world I'm still proud of, but we'll get to that) based on the lifestyle of the ones who were supposed to have raised me. A cozy world, an escapist getaway, a sandbox to play in, and started writing a deep and introspective tale about sorrow, grief, and mourning in a fictional world which was designed to reflect my own. But it's based on a lie.

It's all just based on the foundational belief and hope that I was safe and that every weird thing I experienced and couldn't explain was just "stuff that happens" in families, that the terrible numbness I've burdened my entire life was just "some weird thing going on with me that I can't figure out", that every time someone complained about the way I was behaving was because "they just didn't get it", that I was silently justifying to myself why what happened to me was actually nothing I ever needed to be concerned about, because "if I pretend it didn't happen, then it'll never happen again, right?"

Every part of the writing work I've ever done just feels like simulacra now. It's the imagined idea of a world I hoped I actually lived in. There never was a safe place by the fire to sit and read my books, there was just a rotten grove in the woods where the snakes had already bitten me, and I was never the writer I wanted to hope I was, I was always just the product of a factory that tried to control me.

Sorrows Of Blackwood was never supposed to exist. My entire idea of myself that I am, or could have been, a writer was never supposed to exist. It only stems from the trauma of having been raised in a cult which was designed to make me feel bad about me from the start. I think some part of me has always known that, because I've been complaining about "being broken" for so long (well over two decades at this point), but never doing anything about it because I like to simultaneously imagine that it's in part environmental in a way they would just give up on after a while.

Well, I'm 20 years older than I was 20 years ago but they're all exactly the same and the only difference is in how much clarity I can see their lies with now than I was able to before. And...it just makes things feel fake. It's like eating the airport food from the yesterday-port in The Langoliers. Everything that most other people take for granted and don't question feels stale to me, and rotten, because so much of it has been used as part of their ploys at normalcy; everything feels staged and rehearsed, like it's the idea of something that could have been but was obviously never going to be and I've just been hoping what I saw was real dragons and not just cardboard cutouts being paraded around on the stage by random people who hoped I'd never notice.

I have a rough estimate of what I'd like to do from here, but somehow I worry that feeling of fakeness will never go away. It's like I was hoping they were innocent so I could be innocent, but once the pieces add up enough, I've realized they never were and it's my job to figure out what "innocence" even means in a world where people who have hurt and tormented you for as long as they have were just, like, allowed and at some points even enabled to do so and have somehow completely gotten away with it with no accountability or anything to answer for whatsoever.

Old, elderly people who have lived out decades of experience bent on the sole nature of oppressing whoever they can get their hands on, and suppressing the uniqueness and beauty and individuality of those should've-been-innocents like me just because it made them feel bigger about themselves and they thought those should've-been-innocents would never be talented enough or self-aware enough to truly question what was happening (let alone even make actionable steps toward addressing or fixing it).

I feel sick. Like anything I touch might crumble to dust in my fingertips. I know there's hope in the world, and I've seen it play out in those who are allowed to be the kind of innocent that I should have been, and I'm just so busy grabbing for air that all I can do is hope what innocence is left in the world can be preserved for as long as it can be.

In this episode, the Master concocts a plan to build a device which uses timey-wimey things to transfer his genetic matrix to every human on planet Earth. "I'm everyone!" he concludes, because the plan works, and for a brief several moments, the Master has become every single person on Earth (and they've all become him).

It doesn't affect the Vinvocci or the fellow Gallifreyan Time Lord we know as the Doctor. However, the Silurians and the Sea Devils (although neither had been reintroduced to the new series at the time of production) are commonly considered to be species in the Homo genus, making them essentially reptilian hominids (and there are numerous populations still living in the ocean and beneath the ground level at this point in the timeline, albeit mostly dormant and in hibernation in most cases). How that works, I'm not sure, but at least one variant of Sea Devil has recently been called Homo aqua, so there's that.

If they're closely enough related to humans that they could be considered a genetic match, at least for classification purposes, what's the likelihood that they would've been converted by the Vinvocci device? They would very likely have all been dormant at the time, what survivors were left at that point in the timeline, so all hibernating beneath the surface more than likely, but could it have still affected them? For a brief moment, were all the Sea Devils and Silurians part of the Master Race too, along with all the humans?

This is my crowfolk language for the Qu'kon and Ooptaw tribes of crowfolk peoples, and I've been wanting to actually get it going for a while. Yesterday morning, I had a burst of random decision to use the phonology I've had kicking around for a while and get it started.

It's...just fine, really. It's one of my "hypothetical experiments", where I start in with a specific goal in mind which gives a good set of guidelines toward the result, and especially toward word and morpheme generation, so it's actually a very simple language at the foundation of it. I haven't found it terribly complicated and it's, in-universe, an isolated language so there aren't really any loanwords and it only covers maybe 400000 speakers if that so the culture and its communicative needs are really low anyway. Not too needlessly complex, like Dragorean, and not too reliant on pre-existing real-world languages, like Frithanic.

It's agglutinative, SVO, so it's easier to comprehend than Belovoltian as well, which is nice because Belovoltian is...some kind of monster all on its own. Simple phonology, with seven consonants and seven vowels (at present):

• /ʌ/ = written with <A/a>
• /iː/ = written with <I/i>
• /ɪ/ = written with <I/i>
• /ɑː/ = written with both <O/o> and <A/a>
• /oʊ/ = written with <O/o>
• /ʊ/ = written with <Oo/oo>
• /uː/ = written with <U/u>

Consonants:

• /b/ = <B/b>
• /k/ = <K/k>
• /p/ = <P/p>
• /c̟/ = <Q/q>
• /ʃ/ = <Sh/sh>
• /t/ = <T/t>
• /w/ = <W/w>

I just added the I vowels and SH recently because I liked the sounds. It's supposed to be based on crow phonology in corvid vocalizations, which obviously is rather limited, and I don't think crows really make I or SH sounds, but they're crowfolk so some variance is acceptable.

The story is, they're "discovered" as an indigenous race from an alien planet they know as Uptun by the people of Inglenook (where Dragorean and Frithanic are also, in part, spoken) through a timeslip connecting Inglenook to Uptun; Inglenook knows the world as Carillon because the timeslip was located in Carillon Canyon, and calls their race corvics (kind of an offensive term, especially after a misunderstood war breaks out with a force that's infecting them, but it balances with "human", I guess). In any case, I'm thinking if they have a written language it would be just carved runes into rocks and trees using their beak, a little like Dragorean did with dragon claws and Mezhon runes, but for right now, the Inglish people just use their own standardized alphabet to transcribe their speech.

Syllables in Takunakupa can be CV, VC, CVC, or VCV, so word formation is pretty standard and the list of available syllables is small unless I add in more phonemes, but I want to do the most and still keep it simple here. Mostly, vocabulary-wise, I just have a few nouns and verbs so far, enough for some basic sentences; verbs are conjugated:

• for simple past indicative with infix -wu- between the first and second syllables (and most words are two-syllables long);
• for simple future indicative with infix -top- between the first and second syllables;
• for present continuous indicative with infix -kowak- between the first and second syllables;
• for simple present indicative by not changing or modifying the stem whatsoever;
• for imperative with the suffix -u;
• for infinitive with the suffix -a;
• for negation with the infix -nosh- between the first and second syllables.

They have no real concept of future or past continuous, as they consider both to be things which have already happened, thus are never actively happening so it can never be continuous unless it's happening right now.

Reduplication of nouns intensifies the noun and usually changes its implication from referring to a fairly static, inanimate noun to a more active one, as in the noun tuqan, where tuqan refers to a plain, still, static, clear blue sky while tuqan-tuqan is an active sky, full of birds, clouds, a storm, war machines, other crowfolk, or anything like that.

Almost everything else is a prefix or a suffix for the moment. Plural suffix is -itu, while there is a definite article in the prefix taw-; however, if it's not given, the noun is considered to be indefinite by default and doesn't need additional marking.

Atu- and uti- act as somewhere between "that" and "which" pronouns and something I'm calling identifying and interrogative articles; atu- marks the noun you are specifically referring to, usually while gesturing to it, while uti- asks which noun you're referring to.

EG:

> C1 (while pointing at a tree): Atu-kanat. Qup upkowaktun a'atu-kanat. > > C2 (quirking its head): Uti-kanat? > > C1 (pointing more fervently, feathers flying): Atu-kanat! Qup upkowaktun a'atu-kanat!

Or:

> C1: "That-tree. I speaking of'that-tree." > > C2: "Which-tree?" > > C1: "That-tree! I speaking of'that-tree!"

I'm not sure if there's auxiliary "to be" verbs yet. With the simplicity of this language, I'm not sure it's needed. But maybe. I don't know.

That's the alpha version for Takunakupa, anyway. Finally in progress after about a year with the barest bones of a half-concept for it.

It's nowhere near finished, but lots of information. I'd been trying to be focused on central documents for everything but using personal pages to do it and none of them ever got it quite right. Scraps everywhere and few of it even canon anymore. In any case, Linguifex saves the day and FrathWiki comes through for it too.

Here's the FrathWiki page. They both have their own [IPA](https://linguifex.com/wiki/Dragorean/IPA for Dragorean) [subpages](https://frathwiki.com/Dragorean/IPA for Dragorean) as well, which also display the Dragorean alphabetical letters associated with the phonological phonemes, and I'm working on polishing up some Mezhon rune ideas to go alongside that.

Just nice to have a single, proper document for everything when one needs a document on hand for such thing. Notes are nice but can't be linked to as easily as a lovely wiki article!

I've recently been updating the sense of mood and tenses for verbs in my dragon language, Dragorean, as I come to terms with the fact that (fortunately for linguistic efficiency) auxiliary verbs as used in English fully actually aren't necessary in Dragorean the way I'd been using them as an aid while educating myself more about them, which in short means I've been way more able to translate random pop culture phrases into Dragorean in order to test verb moods and tenses. Here's two with which you might be familiar, just for funsies.

---

"Do, or do not..."

> Kamiasi yth kamiugarasi. Ndai-bhago yo-zenugarak.

> /ˈk’ɑm.i.ɑː.siː jθ ˈk’ɑm.i.uː.ɡɑ.rɑː.siː/ - /nd.ˈaɪ-ˈβ̞ɑ.ɡoʊ joʊ-'zɛn.uː.ɡɑ.ræk/

> "Do or do not. To try exists not."

> "(do, imperative form) or (do, negative mood, imperative form). (To, in reference to verbs in the infinitive form)-(try, infinitive form) (present tense verb marker)-(exist, negative mood, present simple tense, indicative form)."

---

"Have you worn wigs?"

> Yodtai-hothruz weidra-al-paruka-ma yod?

> /'yoʊ.t̺aɪ-ˈxɑθ.ruːz ˈweɪ.dɹʌ-ɑl‐pɑː.ˈruː.kʌ-mɑː joʊd/

> "Have hidden with wigs you?"

> "(past tense verb marker)-(hide, past simple tense) with-(noun marker)-wig-(plural suffix) (second person singular personal pronoun, object)?"

---

> Yodta-hothrul weidra-al-paruka-ma yod?

> /'yoʊ.t̺ɑː-ˈxɑθ.ruːl ˈweɪ.dɹʌ-ɑl‐pɑː.ˈruː.kʌ-mɑː joʊd/

> "Will hide with wigs you?"

> "(future tense verb marker)-(hide, future simple tense) with-(noun marker)-wig-(plural suffix) (second person singular personal pronoun, object)?"

---

> Ebu-yodta-hothrul weidra-al-paruka-ma yod?

> /ɛ.ˈbuː-ˈyoʊ.t̺ɑː-ˈxɑθ.ruːl ˈweɪ.dɹʌ-ɑl‐pɑː.ˈruː.kʌ-mɑː joʊd/

>"When will hide with wigs you?"

> "(interrogative prefix in regards to time)-(future tense verb marker)-(hide, future simple tense) with-(noun marker)-wig-(plural suffix) (second person singular personal pronoun, object)?"

---

Conclusion

Currently, there aren't really words relating to clothes in Dragorean. Maybe in Frithanic, my Old English-derived dwarven language, where they wear clothes all the time, but dragons (being eldritch abominations) usually parse clothes as armor they only need in battle so, instead of "wearing clothes", they consider that one is "hiding with" an article of clothing.

The verb ndai-hothrago is analogous to having the meaning of covering up with a warm blanket at night, blocking everything else out, and hiding from the world at large — that was originally the purpose I defined that verb for, as a stepping-stone toward describing blankets, veils, and then a magical veil which in-universe was supposed to cloak one world from the world outside of it.

Until such a point as I do a self-DLC word-building special on clothing words and define how they might say "wearing clothes" rather than "hiding with" clothes, this rather unfortunately changes the implications of the meme toward something with a slightly darker jab, almost implying it's insulting for the actors to have worn or thought about wearing wigs because they're hiding the true natures of who they are beneath the wigs in doing so.

Not actually a viewpoint I believe in, incidentally, but I think it's an interesting example how these little differences in specific word meanings from potential culture to potential culture (and initial lack of more-directly-equivalent words for the original meanings) can so drastically change the implications of a given phrase from translation to translation.

Adulthood is realizing Frankie Foster and Mister Herriman were in love with each other the whole time.

Watching Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends on Tubi right now (while they have it to watch) is just, like, every episode slaps you RIGHT in the face with this ship. Herriman bosses Frankie around, Frankie does it, Herriman seems to love that he can boss Frankie around, Frankie keeps doing what Herriman tells her...but they constantly fight and bicker and debate about everything.

Supposedly, Mac and Bloo were the stars of this show, and I remember that being the case when it was first airing, but watching it now just seems like every episode is "the one where Frankie and Herriman have an old married couple debate again"...and one is a glorified babysitter while the other is an imaginary friend?!

And AO3 doesn't have any fics for these two as a ship at all?! How has this untapped well been undrilled for so long in fandom history? Am I the only one?