What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Ares Land]

Just finished the last episode of Dark. That was a terrific time travel story, though I'm not sure I understand it completely... (It's got a cast of impossible-to-distinguish characters on par with War and Peace.)

If you haven't seen, sign up for the Netflix free trial and go binge watch it.

[Man in Space]

Cloudkicker – “The Discovery”

[Yalensky]

Just finished the last episode of Dark. That was a terrific time travel story, though I'm not sure I understand it completely... (It's got a cast of impossible-to-distinguish characters on par with War and Peace.)

If you haven't seen, sign up for the Netflix free trial and go binge watch it.

I thought the individual characters were okay to distinguish (but I've never been particularly bothered by the profusion of names in long Russian novels), but at times I really had to stop and retrace how a single character's various iterations over time can interact. Especially with all the Marthas, Jesus Christ.

Finding a spoiler-free family tree really helped.

I agree with the feeling that I didn't completely get everything, but I blame my own attention span rather than the writers. I have too much faith in the German stereotype for attentiveness to precise details.

[Ares Land]

I agree with the feeling that I didn't completely get everything, but I blame my own attention span rather than the writers. I have too much faith in the German stereotype for attentiveness to precise details.

"Attentiveness to detail" is an understatement here... I don't think I spotted a single plothole, and events from the first seasons suddenly made sense.

Spoilers below.

More: show

A few things I didn't understand, or maybe would have liked developped in further detail: how did Ursprung H.G Tannhaus attempts to build a time machine create the time loop and the parallel universes? Also, I kind of grew attached to harelip dude and I wish we'd seen more of his life. Why doesn't he have a name? Martha/Eva is willing to mass murder and implement a complex plan over her entire lifetime, two centuries, and two parallel universes for his sake, you'd think she'd have taken five minutes to give him a name. Is there any reason for him to bring his younger and older selves when he goes around killing people or does he just do it because it looks cool? None of this prevented me from enjoying the show though!

[Birdlang]

Music production for FL Studio videos.
Also some Indonesian and various other foreign songs.

[Jonlang]

I've just finished re-reading The Mabinogion for the umpteenth time. I will soon be taking up Stephen Fry's Mythos on top of the various language / conlang stuff I am continuously reading online, of course.

Last night I finished watching the Daniel Craig Bond films and am currently half way through the 2015 BBC drama series Dickensian (if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it!) and will be scouring the various online TV services later for something new... I may begin Altered Carbon.

Music-wise I've been listening to Pink Floyd's recent re-release of their Delicate Sound of Thunder live album with songs not on the original 1988 release.

[Linguoboy]

I've just finished re-reading The Mabinogion for the umpteenth time.

Which version?

[Jonlang]

I've just finished re-reading The Mabinogion for the umpteenth time.

Which version?

Sioned Davies' version, this time.

[alice]

I'm reading this ancient but really awesome book called The Lord of the Rings. You should check it out - it has some interesting conlanging in it.

[Jonlang]

I'm reading this ancient but really awesome book called The Lord of the Rings. You should check it out - it has some interesting conlanging in it.

The Lord of the Rings is the first book I read, by myself, because I wanted to read it. Before this I only read as a chore because I had to for school. My parents tried to encourage me but I had no interest, preferring my Sega MegaDrive. So I owe this book a debt for igniting my love of books and reading which I have now had since I was 12!

[sasasha]

Binged The Rain on Netflix over the last two days, a season a night.

My favourite part was the Danish. My god, why haven't I looked at Danish before? I love the phonology. And I was surprised at how intelligible a lot of it was. I don't speak any Germanic language other than English well (I've studied Old Norse, but not speaking and listening, obvs), but after a bit of time developing a switching code, occasionally I would catch a whole sentence without needing the subtitles. I found it more aurally permeable than any other Germanic language I've heard. It felt at times like it could have been a really, really wierd dialect of English.

This got me thinking about a debate that was going when I was an undergrad, as to how mutually intelligible Old Norse and Old English were in the eighth to eleventh centuries. The debate had a big bearing on theories about the transmission of mythos and cultural/literary tropes between the languages in Anglo-Norse contact situations. If I can feel like that about Danish after two seasons of a Netflix series in the 21st century, I would be damned surprised if Old English speakers wouldn't have been able to understand, e.g. Vo̡lundarkvíða in the ninth.

My second favourite part was that it was, like, a good show. At least the first season anyway (started to nosedive pretty hard in season 2 if you ask me).

Still, I will be watching the final season when it airs on August 8th. Probably entirely and only on August 8th, I imagine.

[Man in Space]

Blue Öyster Cult – “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”

[Ares Land]

I'm reading Against the Grain. So far, it's interesting but hm, a little infuriating.

What's bothering me?

• Scott tells us, as an article of faith that the state is a protection racket. That's the classic libertarian line (or anarchist, for that matter), but you know, Scott isn't particularly more convincing than Friedman on this. He acts baffled by the utter mystery of state formation, but doesn't stop to consider that maybe people needed actual protection.
• Grumble. Now he mentions state-on-state raids and pastoralist raids on agriculturalists, and still fails to see what the point of the state was.
• Apparently the chief villain is going to be the tax collector. This is beginning to read like an Heinlein novel.
• He goes on at lenght on how his main thesis is unprecedented and entirely novel. But we've known for quite some time now that there were sendentary hunter-gatherers. As for the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than early agriculturalist, this has been the standard line for, oh, twenty years.
• And the main sin, I think: he focuses on China and Mesopotamia, and completely ignores other civilization that disprove his thesis. There are no states in mountains area? You can't support a state with tubers? Tax is necessarily in grain? Dude, have you ever heard about that little-known, tiny polity called the Inca Empire?

As I said, the mainstream opinion in anthropology these days seems to be that hunter-gatherers had it pretty good, and that it some ways agriculture was a step backwards. I won't disagree with that, but I think it paints an idyllic picture of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and ignores the way in which life could suck. I hope someone has a good look at it, as I think it could be immensely enlightening in explaining how states are formed.

We need only read testimonies of real hunter gatherers to get an idea of how they led happy, fulfilling lives. But still. We have evidence that Neandertal and Cro-Magnon typically had a short life esperancy, and often suffered from debilitating injuries.
Farmers have more children than hunter-gatherers. But how come?
Scott suggests contraceptive effect of breastfeeding, which does exist, but isn't that effective. He also hints at abortion, infanticide, and menarche happening later in life due to 'better' nutrition. OK, but:
Menarche happening later in life is actually due to malnutrition. Abortion is a potential deadly wager in pre-modern times. Scott comments on the high rate of infant mortality among agriculturalist, but hunter gatherers practice infanticide, or infant neglect, which is hardly better.
Is this actually a higher standard of living?



After rereading this, it reads a lot harsher than I mean to! The book still kept me up quite late at night and I guess I just feel a little contrarian.

[Travis B.]

I should note that anarchists (aka libertarian socialists, libertarians in the small-l sense, etc.) don't really want to get rid of the state at the end of the day - they just want to make it directly democratic, and to rename it (as workers' councils); likewise, they don't really want to get rid of the military and the police - they just want to make them democratic, and to rename them (as militias). The anarchists I have spoken with in the past freely admit that oversight from above is needed. Likewise, they see their militias as being necessary to defend anarchism against its enemies, external and internal.

Of course, Libertarians in the big-L sense are not all that different, while at the same time desiring almost the complete opposite. They just want to exchange the authority of the state for the authority of the capitalist. They want to leave a rump state whose sole purpose is to use force to defend capital. While the anarchists may have a penchant for renaming things, they genuinely seek a more democratic society - the Libertarians OTOH shamelessly seek to force capitalist authority down the people's throats, while stripping everything away from the state which does not serve this purpose.

[Ares Land]

Oh, Scott isn't advocating the abolishment of the State, either, and some of his insights are very valuable. I just think he lays it on a bit thick.

It seems to me that libertarians (of the capitalist kind, I mean) are mostly a front for white supremacists these days.

[Raphael]

I wonder if zompist has any comments on Ars Lande's comments.

[MacAnDàil]

I wonder if infanticide is universal among hunter-gatherers? It certainly is not exclusive to them. Another factor is space: one advantage in the sedentary agricultural lifestyle is that you can have more people living in the same space, which allows for more children.

Reading: many books for the thesis, like Nicolas Tournadre's Le prisme des langues
Watching: Kevin Bridges
Listening: Slayer's Reign in Blood

[Ares Land]

I wonder if infanticide is universal among hunter-gatherers? It certainly is not exclusive to them. Another factor is space: one advantage in the sedentary agricultural lifestyle is that you can have more people living in the same space, which allows for more children.

Infanticide is found among many societies, and indeed it's not restricted to hunter-gatherers.
You're right, space is a factor too, as is not having to move regularly with small children in tow.

What I'm wondering is how hunter-gatherer manage to space their children so... It's often treated as a 'natural' consequence of the lifestyle but it doesn't seem that obvious to me..

[Yalensky]

I'm reading this ancient but really awesome book called The Lord of the Rings. You should check it out - it has some interesting conlanging in it.

I'm also reading LotR, having recently finished The Hobbit. I'm only a few chapters in, though. What surprises me (since my memory of reading it in childhood has been completely eroded) is how early elves appear, and how familiar they treat the hobbits, which I have trouble syncing with the supercilious image of elves I must've gotten from the film trilogy.

[alice]

What surprised me, especially given the number of times I've read it, is how much new stuff I kept finding,