This tardiest explorer

All of this was migrated from LiveJournal on March 11, 2022. I am pre-dating this entry so it shows up on top. I have left almost everything as it was before.

Spring of 2022 was a time when LiveJournal's servers were in Russia (and had been for several years), Russia had just invaded Ukraine for no particularly good reason (maybe it will make sense at the time you read this), and sanctions and the threat of a new iron curtain scared many people into backing up their LiveJournals.

I am not going to make new posts to this journal, although if it is ever easy to fix photo links, I might try to do that. This was a very photo-heavy journal.

Also, the user "ratatosk" on DW is not me. I am happy for them to keep that name. For various reasons I wanted to start fresh on a new journal.

I look back on over 20 years of posts and am kind of awed.

Some people read a lot into whether someone friends them on livejournal. In the interests of not having people feel bad, here's a vague description of what I do.

( Cut for length, since this shows up at the top of my recent entries )

I have set up an account over at Dreamwidth. I'm using a new username, since someone else has Ratatosk over there. I am thinking I will migrate the LJ ratatosk journal over to a separate account, to give myself a fresh start. I don't think I will crosspost, since I don't think anyone else is left over here.

Am I mistaken about that, or should I turn off the light and shut the door on my way out?

[Apologies for the phone photos.]

This is a picture of the capybara at the Stone Zoo, standing in its water dish:




When wispfox and I saw this, we thought "Oh! How sad! The poor capybara hasn't been given any water!"


Surely, I thought, they would have given it at least a kiddie pool or something. And, in fact, they had:





Possibly the kiddie pool had excessively high sides. Possibly it wanted to annoy the llama with which it shares an enclosure. For whatever reason, it preferred its water dish.

I will be at NEFFA this weekend — you should say hi if you see me. I usually split my time between singing and dancing, and don't go to any of the performances. I expect to be in the contra hall all Friday evening, and at most of the shape note events, but beyond that I might have to make choices.

It usually depends on which parts of me are getting sore at what rate. :P

I will be at Arisia from this evening to at least Sunday afternoon. I plan to do as much dancing as possible, and in general try to pick participatory things over passive ones. A million of you are on panels, so there is no way I can make it to more of a tiny fraction of those. Good luck, though!

A question arose in comments to a previous (friends-locked) post. I'm going to paraphrase it as asking which of these is standard Lolcat:

a. I R SRS [NP1], THIS R SRS [NP2]
b. I IZ SRS [NP1], THIS IZ SRS [NP2]

My instinct was to go for a., and diatom was going for b. I realized this was empirically testable, because we have access to a massive Lolcat dataset (aka "Google"). Wondering is not a virtue in this situation! Here's what I found:

I R SRS	9550
I IZ SRS	6460
THIS R SRS	62100
THIS IZ SRS	9820

That's an R/IZ ration of 1.48 for the first pair, and 6.32 for the second.

At first glance, it looks like the 'R' variant is somewhat more common. However, the full Google search might not be a good test, since Google's advanced search doesn't let you restrict results to Lolcat. So some of these hits are probably English speakers borrowing what they think is a catchy Lolcat phrase, regardless of whether an actual L1 Lolcat speaker would ever utter it.

So I decided to not only deliberately restrict it to Lolcat, but to break it out by register. I think we can agree that cheezburger.com is a good source for Standard Lolcat — the written equivalent to the kind you'd hear on TV.

Here are the results after adding site:cheezburger.com to the search:

I R SRS	68
I IZ SRS	13
THIS R SRS	16
THIS IZ SRS	14

Those are dramatic results. Now we see an R/IZ value of 5.23 for the first pair and 1.14 for the second. Given the low N and small ratio, the "THIS" phrases seem like a statistical tie, and the first pair has the lopsided ratio here. The high ratio of "I R" to "THIS R" might suggest that the original example a. is a colloquial catchphrase or just isn't idiomatic in Standard Lolcat. I'm not sure how to analyze that — it would be nice to have a larger corpus here.

So, that's standard Lolcat. However, we also have a very nice corpus of Literary Lolcat in the form of the Lolcat Bible. If we restrict the search to lolcatbible.com, however, we get one instance only, in the sentence "i r srs huzband." from 1 Samuel 1:8.

Well, maybe this is unfair, since lot of the Bible is in the past tense. So if we search for the word "srs", do we get any other instances at all of the form "[Pronoun] [DO+TNS] SRS [NP]"? I would only judge Acts 25:7 to count ("Paul came n Joos from Jooroosulum were srs cat and charged Paul n sed he wuz bad."). Literary Lolcat seems to have much more varied syntax than Standard, and consequently it's harder to find multiple instances of any given n-gram in there. I think we'd need a larger corpus to draw any conclusions about Literary Lolcat.


Anyway, to repeat my disclaimer: THIS R NOT SRS BLOG. THIS R NOT SRS RESIRCH.

I am still looking for two housemates, so I'm reposting this. The only change is that my outgoing housemate had his fiance move in for a little while, so not finding anyone for September was fine since it gave her a place to stay. They will be moving once renovations are done at their new place (any time now, maybe, hopefully), but there is some flexibility about move-in dates. I think realistically we can have one room available November or earlier, and the other by December, maybe earlier. If there were a housemate candidate I really liked and time was an issue, we could do something. Anyway, the rest is the same:

I would like help finding people! Here's an unlocked post you can link to! I have a much more detailed version in email that I can send to anyone who's interested.

I'll post separately to Facebook -- please don't link my LJ to Facebook or vice versa. This is the LJ version, so I'm not going to bother saying much about myself, since nothing I could write would be as useful as actually stalking me via my public posts.


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It turns out that I am looking for two housemates come September (there is some flexibility about dates). I would like help finding people! Here's an unlocked post you can link to! I have a much more detailed version in email that I can send to anyone who's interested.

I'll post separately to Facebook -- please don't link my LJ to Facebook or vice versa. This is the LJ version, so I'm not going to bother saying much about myself, since nothing I could write would be as useful as actually stalking me via my public posts.


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Specifically, this is "things I have learned about polyamory from a 'things I have learned about polyamory' article", which was a sort of review of Showtime's "Polyamory: Married and Dating". The article is in the form of a bulleted list, most of which are uninteresting. But these caught my eye:

- If you find yourself in any kind of group that refers to itself as a "pod" and isn't made up of whales, you might find yourself suddenly drawn to the "namaste" section at Pier 1 Imports. Don't fight it, and while you're there, we're running low on pillar candles and useless shit to tack to the walls.

- While engaging in coitus with your "pod" among your pillar candles and exotic sheets and useless wall shit, be sure to frequently verbally reaffirm the sexiness of the situation, lest the audience at home (understandably) get confused.

So, poly people who use the word "pod" also tend to shop at Pier 1. I feel like there is some sort of cool sociological discovery lurking in there, but I'm not sure how to get at it.

For maximum points, your comment should include the phrase "Tchotchke-Industrial Complex".