Author: Goldpanner

sarellasand:

i started using habitrpg back when it was first getting off the ground and a few posts about it circulated then but it is BIGGER and BETTER and BALLER

IF YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT HABITRPG ALREADY,

it is an adorable and easy site that rewards you for good habits and penalizes you for bad habits through the basic workings of an rpg – experience rewarded for good habits, health points penalized for bad habits. you can categorize them by habit (things that have no particular timeframe), dailies (duh) and to-do (one-time tasks)

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when you accomplish anything, you also gain gold and have a chance of picking up drops, which could be animal eggs or hatching potions!

SO WHAT’S NEW?

1. avatar customization changed to be more inclusive/get away from binary Dude/Lady options! you independently change body type and hairstyle as well as skin color, hair color, clothing & more!

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2. checklists let you further organize habits, dailies and todos!

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3. the rpg aspect has been souped up, from picking classes and developing appropriate attributes to turning your pets into mounts with food drops to going on quests via tasks, it is so much more interactive and imo that makes it much more motivating as well!

i used this site to get me through my last semester of college and now i am using it again to develop good habits as an adult just starting out in the workforce. join me! it is free, but donations are always accepted and gems (which cost $) get you extra perks. there’s also an active community of coders behind the scenes constantly working to improve the site that seems very welcoming!

Parseltongue

allthingslinguistic:

linguismstics:

I went to a talk given by the man who developed Parseltongue for the Harry Potter films, Prof Francis Nolan. Just a few ‘facts’ about the language with some of the ‘explanations’ given:

Phonology

It’s got no rounded vowels or labial consonants (because snake lips aren’t very flexible)

It’s got pharyngeal consonants (because some snakes like to constrict things)

It’s got a large number of fricatives, which also exhibit a length contrast (because…snakes)

Syntax

It’s got basic VSO order

It’s got postpositions (typologically highly unusual for a VSO language)

It’s ergative

Borrowings

The word ‘muggle’ has been borrowed into English from Parseltongue ‘ŋaʔalas’ – obviously!

For more information, check out this guide to learning Parseltongue, this grammar, this Parseltongue-inspired grammar, or this translator, although I’m not sure how authoritative they are. 

Why Marketers Fear The Female Geek

howtonotsuckatgamedesign:

antonyjohnston:

Here is the reasoning, that drive execs and marketers to pro-actively exclude women from their audiences and to pro-actively encourage a culture in which women do not feel welcome. This is why we can’t have nice things… or can we?

This is an excellent piece, by someone inside the industry, outlining quite clearly how and why so many games all but refuse to acknowledge women gamers even exist.

And it really is tough sometimes, in games. Perfectly good, reasonable people just succumb to the prevailing wisdom, feeling helpless. I’ve written female characters in games with attitude and agency, then been required to tone it down for fear of offending male players.

In one (unreleased) game, I was told to change a cut scene because “the woman NPC can’t try to save herself, the male PC must save her.” And the number of times I’ve had to remove snarky comebacks from a female NPC (“the player won’t be attracted to her”), I can’t even count.

And these were not horrible, raging sexists. But they were following market wisdom, doing what they knew publishers would require of them.

(I should add that these are all AAA games I’m talking about. The indie/mobile space I’ve worked in is so, so much more progressive.)

(Also saddening: almost exactly the same reasoning applies to the comic market’s obsession with superheroes.)

Anyway. Great article, well worth a read.

Hey, Antony. 

Thanks for the kind share. 🙂

Why Marketers Fear The Female Geek

allthingslinguistic:

hyperboreanhapocanthosaurus:

gifmethat:

So you know what I don’t get? Why people repeat words. (x)

Grammar time: it’s called “contrastive reduplication,” and it’s a form of intensification that is relatively common. Finnish does a very similar thing, and others use near-reduplication (rhyme-based) to intensify, like Hungarian (pici ‘tiny’, ici-pici ‘very tiny’).

Even the typologically-distant group of Bantu languages utilize reduplication in a strikingly similar fashion with nouns: Kinande oku-gulu ‘leg’, oku-gulu-gulu ‘a REAL leg’ (Downing 2001, includes more with verbal reduplication as well).

I suppose the difficult aspect of English reduplication is not through this particular type, but the fact that it utilizes many other types of reduplication: baby talk (choo-choo, no-no), rhyming (teeny-weeny, super-duper), and the ever-famous “shm” reduplication: fancy-schmancy (a way of denying the claim that something is fancy).

screams my professor was trying to find an example of reduplication so the next class he came back and said “I FOUND REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH” and then he said “Milk milk” and everyone was just “what?” and he said “you know when you go to a coffee shop and they ask if you want soy milk and you say ‘no i want milk milk’” and everyone just had this collective sigh of understanding.

Another name for this particular construction is contrastive focus reduplication, and there’s a famous linguistics paper about it which is commonly known as the Salad Salad Paper. You know, because if you want to make it clear that you’re not talking about pasta salad or potato salad, you might call it “salad salad”. The repetition indicates that you’re intending the most prototypical meaning of the word, like green salad or cow’s milk, even though other things can be considered types of salad or milk.