Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

I'm trying to remember the lyrics to YMCA, but thanks to DJ Cummerbund I only get Edwin Starr's War.

 

As an experiment, I should just buy a big cardboard box, cover the bottom with a blanket and sit in it for a while. Just to find out.

 

A character I came up with when I was like 15 or so:

Rail is very skinny and very, very fast. When she tries to move and talk at normal speeds she's somewhat clumsy, the way normal people are when they try to walk or talk too slowly. There's a middle-ground where she manages to go at a normal walking pace, but she looks like she's catwalking with the framerate up too high and she can't maintain it for long.
The secret is that she's actually mildly telekinetic, but it only seems to be able to make herself faster. She could probably fly, but instead just supports herself on telekinetic limbs, with her legs mostly just to tell her how high up she should be, and when she 'runs' she really just tosses herself forward at what she thinks is the right speed. Similarly, her arms mostly just tell her how far away she should be able to grab things; oddly, it doesn't really occur to her to simulate strength.
Her neurons are overclocked as well, although this definitely does not translate to more intelligence; she thinks faster, not better, and only manages to appear smart by quickly getting all the dumb ideas out of the way.
As a result of doing so much by telekinesis, her limbs are somewhat atrophied since those muscles aren't really strained ever. Also she eats like she's got a stomach worm and is constantly running a low fever; she always sounds like she's dehydrated.

In the high-school AU she teaches math, and her students appreciate that she always uses slides since they know they wouldn't be able to follow a blackboard lecture from her. She doesn't do blackboard lectures since chalk has a tendency to explode in her hands when she tries. Also she doesn't do timed exams because she can't calibrate how difficult they should be.
She's banned from the gym and from coaching any sports, and watching her swim is really confusing so she's also banned from the pool. She's fine with this since the only sport she actually likes is longsword dueling, which the school doesn't support for some reason. She's also banned from the history classrooms, because her husband hangs out there and he also really likes longsword dueling, and honestly no one should have let them get married but now it's too late.

 

When you misinterpret part of a meme so that it looks like the horse is talking and think to yourself that if the horse had talked in the original movie people would have mentioned it more?
Only it turns out that there was another person in the picture who was probably the one who actually said the line and the horse just has his mouth open because he's having a bad time.

In other news, I've never seen Road to El Dorado.

 

Listening to the new Babymetal track, in which Su-metal raps most of the lyrics. Other than a few bits where she does some deliberate octave jumps it's mostly flat uniform monotone.
Which, you might point out, is not unusual for rap. Except it kind of is, at least for English rap.

English is not an inherently tonal language, but that doesn't mean we don't get anything out of pitch information. English actually has a lot of melody to it just in normal speech. Rappers often combine pitch and stress to emphasize certain words, syllables, or beats. This allows rappers to create rhythmic patterns that aren't tied to the rhyme scheme. Notably, it is tonal, in that the emphasized portions happens at a different pitch than the connecting lyrics, and some rappers even manage several different emphasis pitches for different groupings.

And certainly there is stress; English has some mild stress (cf, for instance, the verb "respect" versus the noun "respect" and similar), but of course rappers really push it (cf. the Beastie Boys), again to pull certain syllables to the front and create rhythm.

Of course, that's not all there is to flow; there's also what one might call "swing"; if we slap down a time grid, you'll find that most rappers don't hit the beats exactly, and this can be deliberate (cf. Snoop Dogg). This can make its way into rap, because otherwise it can sound weird; English definitely has some swing built into it. At 3:50 Patrick Bartley illustrates this fact:

And then he explains that Japanese doesn't have dipthongs the way English does, and just doesn't have as much built-in deviation from metronome.
Certainly there are rap tracks in English that don't swing much, especially at speed when swing gets kind of eaten by the sheer need to get syllables out. But if you listen to, say, Rap God, when he is going at speed Eminem makes up for it with pitch and stress so that it's not just a flat spew.

So, going back to the original impetus for this post, consider BxMxC by Babymetal.

Listen to how Su-metal delivers the lyrics starting at 1:53; other than the octave jumps, it's monotone, stress-less and right on top of the machine-gunning kickdrum. I think it works because it hits exactly with the kickdrum; any deviation from that would definitely sound too sloppy. But it's not what English rappers look for in terms of "flow".

 

That one time in fifth grade when I wrote a character comparing a thing to a blancmange because he didn't know what a circus tent was. I don't remember if I spelled "blancmange" correctly, but my teacher was impressed that I knew what it was. I only knew because of a Monty Python sketch about aliens that looked like blancmanges; I don't think I'd ever seen a picture of an actual blancmange at that point.

 

I was going to make a math joke about the "only one bed" trope, but it turns out that in that context, the phrase "pigeonhole principle" suddenly acquires new connotations. Who would have guessed.

 

It really says something about a song when the entire band is singing the lyrics even though only two of them have mics. Well, the flute player probably isn't singing along, but he has an excuse.
Also that shamisen really cuts through well. Such sharp transients compared to the electric guitar.

 

POV: The person who last week you would have called your best friend explains his new theory about the Muppets being reactionary propaganda.

 

Man, that Babymetal rap is fascinating! I’ve always wondered what rap would sound like in a mora timed language, with a mora being kind of like a syllable but for a language that doesn’t quite have that as a basic concept because they have their own. I only knew one Shakkazombie song and didn’t know if it was representative, and if so, in what ways. Turns out it probably is, in the ways you described. It sounds like there are several rappers involved, and while their styles vary, they have a lot in common.



The lyrical elements in this song that sound like rhythmic variations or stressed syllables to an English speaker are.. not. They’re things like more than one vowel, which means more than one mora, consonants with a stop in the middle which makes them take longer, or an “n” that stands alone, sometimes written as “nn” for reasons of clarity (or because that’s how you would type it using a non-Japanese keyboard), rather than being part of a consonant-vowel mora. It takes exactly as long as any other mora.

3:29 gives you several repetitions of:
Ha nn da nn, de ki na i, shi ta ku na i

It sounds like much, much more rhythmic variation than there is. It has a lot to do with how long each of those things takes to say. It’s easy as an English speaker to not hear an “i” on the end of words as its own thing instead of part of a diphthong, and to dismiss the “nn” as merely wrapping up the sound that came before. So it sounds rhythmic, and it is, but it’s mora timed, so the morae being approximately the same length is fundamental to the language’s rhythm.

Meanwhile in our lovely stress-timed English language, I discovered the other day that Spacehog’s song Mungo City, a dystopian glam rock song where the singer uses rather elaborate phrasing, is actually very damn deliberate about linguistic timing. What sounded like confident but mostly decorative rhythmic choices to me are not actually arbitrary at all. If you track the first and third beats of a measure, so half time, that is what decides how the syllables are arranged. The stressed syllables fall on those beats even if they have to be delayed or pulled out to get there. Other syllables may end just right there or start just after. This is, in retrospect, probably relevant to how a song with a syncopated main guitar line and a singer who makes all kinds of decisions regarding when words are going to happen and how long they will last can sound like, good? instead of like a horrible pandemonium disaster.

 

I used to really like Gundam designs. Like, spiky robots with big swords. But maybe it's because the designs have just gotten more and more ridiculous over time, but I just look at the new ones and think "wow, that looks top-heavy. Can it stand on its own?"

 

At some point I'm just going to start using the phrase "fish hatchery" to mean anything I can't translate or don't want to explain, but then I'm going to have to explain that I'm using the phrase that way.

 

I love how every time we try to figure out how Congress and the White House work one of my coworkers immediately brings up the West Wing, and then one of my other coworkers responds with School House Rock. And I'm so very tempted to just interject with "yes, but those were written by sane people".

 

Making fun of someone for not knowing a specific thing is mean and bad, but the angry gazebo story is still hilarious.

 

I'm disappointed that I have so far not encountered one "Gritty realism" joke in regards to Philadelphia ostensibly winning the election for Biden.

 

Kind of want some honey-roasted crickets right now. I've never had them, but they sound really good, especially with a bit of chili flakes.

 

One thing about not going back home for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year is that I'm not going to have the usual stupid argument with my dad about how to cook things. I'm actually a little worried, because my brother is too passive to yell at dad when he tries to improvise, and mom has gotten too lazy to actually monitor my dad and make sure that he is following instructions.

 

I mean, I know that "real-time battle-royale" is not the combat style that people look for in Pokemon, but

 

The reminder that Grey Goo apocalypse isn't necessarily a subtype of AI apocalypse, in that we've had a Grey Goo apocalypse on this planet already and intelligence as we recognize it only arose hundreds of millions of years later.

 

I have a habit of attempting to eat all the food in front of me, regardless of how much there is. This was okay when I was 20, eating the swill they served in the college cafeteria, and even better when I was 23, living on a grad student budget, but now that I'm in my 30s, I'm finally learning to put stuff in the fridge.