Zompist Bboard Again

The offering is happily accepted!

The reviews of Cats are hilarious. Every year, it seems there's one inexplicably awful movie that all the critics decide to pour their creativity into reading to filth and this year it's the singing/dancing CGI furryfest.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2019 10:39 am The reviews of Cats are hilarious. Every year, it seems there's one inexplicably awful movie that all the critics decide to pour their creativity into reading to filth and this year it's the singing/dancing CGI furryfest.

Even the ads for it venture into cannot unsee territory.

Pffft. You're just unable to appreciate the magic of Theatre, people.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2019 10:53 am

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2019 10:39 am The reviews of Cats are hilarious. Every year, it seems there's one inexplicably awful movie that all the critics decide to pour their creativity into reading to filth and this year it's the singing/dancing CGI furryfest.

Even the ads for it venture into cannot unsee territory.

I saw the preview while on the plane. Needless to say, it made what was already an awful flight a lot worse.

I'm going to move to Taiwan in a little over a month to start teaching English there.

That's awesome!

Maybe there'll be a ZBB Taiwan meetup someday after all

I found a last-minute train ticket to back home that cost me less than a third than what I would have paid for a Deutsche Bahn ICE train. I'm not much of a Christmas person, and going to my hometown usually means choosing in between paying a fortune or being on a 12-hour hellride all over the country and I like to avoid it alltogether. Now I'm looking forward to it, I haven't seen my old friends and family in a while.

As a sidenote, it's blowing my mind how just taking an airplane from Berlin to Frankfurt would cost me significantly less than the train.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2019 2:57 am That's awesome!

Maybe there'll be a ZBB Taiwan meetup someday after all

Why, are you in Taiwan?

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2019 11:36 am Why, are you in Taiwan?

Yeah, Taipei.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2019 11:44 am

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2019 11:36 am Why, are you in Taiwan?

Yeah, Taipei.

Oh, nice! I'll be in Taipei for about two weeks(?) for training starting on February 9 (training starts the next day) at least until I have to move to start teaching.

This is a bit belated, but it was great watching my daughter program the robot I got her for Christmas to drive all over the house, without my even having to help her one bit.

I tried translating a story in an Indo-Aryan language I've never seen or heard before, and the person who posted the story said my translation was almost correct.

That's awesome! Shows how good you are at translation and how well you know Indian languages. Presumably research and/or extrapolation as well.

Thanks! Honestly, though, most Indo-Aryan languages are pretty closely related, and the person who posted the story pointed out that native speakers of Hindi* could understand it just fine but not second-language speakers.

In India, there are a lot of Indo-Aryan language varieties that the government classifies as "Hindi"; this story was in one of them (in this case, Magahi). FWIU people in favor of Hindi being a required subject in all Indian schools portray Hindi as the language of most of the population, whereas people against it point out that the "Hindi" that most of the population speaks is really various languages that aren't necessarily mutually intelligible and simply haven't been given official recognition. People in favor also sometimes use the argument that you can communicate with "most of India" if you learn Hindi, but things like this lend doubt to that.

*In this case, the "native speakers of Hindi" seemed to mostly be people who spoke either Magahi itself or another "Hindi" variety that's spoken in close proximity to it (e.g. Awadhi), if not closely related (e.g. Bhojpuri).

In some rare good news for me, I have made significant progress on a font for one of my conscripts. The main problem (apart from whether I feel satisfied with the script itself) is spacing. The font is monospace but making the space and punctuation equally wide as the characters makes words feel too widely separated.

Since the font places the characters in the private use area, I wrote a simple program to transcribe my conlang from Roman orthography to these private use code points, which surprisingly enough worked on my first attempt.

Congrats! I've actually thought what you've shown of your conscripts so far had a lot of potential so I'm excited to see what you end up with.

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 10:56 amThe main problem (apart from whether I feel satisfied with the script itself) is spacing. The font is monospace but making the space and punctuation equally wide as the characters makes words feel too widely separated.

This is in fact the main problem with a lot of conscripts, including many of mine, and indeed with many typefaces for terrestrial alphabets, so don't panic. I'd be interested to see what you have so far.

alice wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:53 pm

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 10:56 amThe main problem (apart from whether I feel satisfied with the script itself) is spacing. The font is monospace but making the space and punctuation equally wide as the characters makes words feel too widely separated.

This is in fact the main problem with a lot of conscripts, including many of mine, and indeed with many typefaces for terrestrial alphabets, so don't panic. I'd be interested to see what you have so far.

As would I.

I've finally managed to transfer my SMS archive from the old phone to the new one.