What Can I Say? I Love Me A Good Complex Light Side/dark Side Ship With Hope For Redemption.

Me, far out of my Whovian depths, scrolling through Killjoy stuff: Hey this artist’s style reminds me of Johannesviii.

*Sees whose art it is* 

WAiT a SeCoND! 

*whispers: they’re e v e r y w h e r e *

Anyways I am glad they are having a nice, restful nap. They definitely needed it.

The Killjoys can have a little nap… as a treat

(yeah I know they have a car in the music videos, not bikes)

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I recognize that it is most likely no longer his 41st birthday, but I do quite like this gifset.

*Googles his birthday* Ah, I see that it is in fact shortly after his 42nd birthday! I didn’t realize it was so close to mine. Heeey he turned 42 on the 24th--happy inverse golden birthday, John! 

Anyways I think I’ve been slowly becoming a Nerdfighter. I don’t know if I fully qualify as one yet but I’m getting close. It’s an awesome fandom name, by the way :)

Happy 41st birthday, John Green!

Thank you for being awesome!

Picton Castle also has a ship cat! I got to meet her at the Green Bay Tall Ships Fest this summer. Her name is Fiji and when I found her she was chilling at the pet booth in the ‘Maritime Marketplace’–the lady working at the booth said Fiji just waltzed right up and started nuzzling in her catnip toys, haha. 

Very friendly, very smart, allowed me to pet her–10/10 would run away to sea for her :)

Hi! I have a bunch of sailing questions if you don't mind. What's the usual minimum time commitment for someone with no experience? What if you get a job on a ship but can't take it? You recommended the sail training international website - was that to find a paid job or just to take part in the training voyages? I'd swear I've seen someone on tumblr talk about working on cargo tall ships, but I can't for the life of me remember who, do you have any info? Also, are ships cats a thing? Thanks!!

Hi!

Usually the minimum is two or three months - just the maintenance period, or summer break while in university, or because you’re working on a boat that has a three-month contract, or because you’re only free the first half of the season, discussed it in advance, and the company is willing to half you for just half.

It’s not uncommon for at least one crew member to head out unexpectedly over the course of the seasom. Sometimes it’s because sailing’s not their jam after all; sometimes it’s disputes within the other crew, or because something in their personal lives demands immediate attendance. My first season only myself and the first mate made it through the entire season; conversely this year out of about 16 crew only two people quit that I can remember. Obviously if you’re able to give the captain some warning to find a new deckhand that’s best, but people do leave. (Also why it’s worth checking in with captains even in the summer - someone might have a position just opened up).

If I remember right, I mentioned sail training international mostly as a list of ships that operate internationally, and a resource for finding the names and whereabouts of more tall ships, since I’m best informed on New England and only shakily beyond that. At least some of the ships on there will offer paid positions, so it’s worth contacting interesting vessels to ask (might be limited to crew who already have experience/certain certifications/nationality of the vessel, but I couldn’t say for certain).

I’m afraid I have no idea about cargo tall ships; I know of Tres Hombres, which is frankly The Dream (at least one shipmate of mine would kill to work on her!) but off the top of my head, no others.

Ship’s cats are a thing! I believe it’s the Adventuress out west that has one, and I know the Mary Day had one for several years before she passed away of old age. Not as common as I personally wish, but they’re around!

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :) 

This looks like it belongs in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and I very much want to pet it and find out how soft it is... Also, I’m quite curious what sort of sound it makes.

Also I just looked them up and these pretty babies are endangered. Good on you, mysterious person’s hands taking care of this precious polka dotted baby :) 

Baby Eastern Quoll, Bruny Island. Tasmania, Australia

I was thinking about how a lot of people who are into the Vampire Diaries are also into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how there are some obvious parallels between the shows and between the relationships of Angel & Buffy and Stefan & Elena and then Spike & Buffy and Damon & Elena, but obviously they aren't exactly the same ships or characters, and it's made me curious. Fans of both, is there a correlation in what you ship?

I’ve been using this as a phone background for a few months now and it still makes me so happy whenever I look at it :) Os and Ed are just so sweet and happy and adorable in it, plus it’s such a lovely purple. I have a deep fondness for purple, in case you hadn’t noticed ;) 

(It occurs to me that that last bit might not make sense if you aren’t looking at this on my actual blog, but it’s 99% purple, like most things in my life. It’s very convenient for me that my favorite Gotham character has the same favorite color as me.)

♥ lovebirds ♥

[please don’t repost anywhere]

Jonathan looking through Dracula's library, listing books he has: "and—it somehow gladdened my heart to see it—the Law List."

Jonathan, you're such a nerd. I love you.

I just remembered that I submitted things to this page years ago, long before I had a tumblr, and a couple of them got published. Now that I do have a tumblr I thought I might as well share a thing to which I contributed :) 

I should note that I did write this one back before I saw the 50th anniversary special, though that was still not quite aaaall the epic Time War drama I was hoping for. Also, someone in the notes has pointed out that the Big Finish audios go more into it, and I have really been wanting to get into those more for a while. I should put them on my Christmas list. 

Actually, now I’d say it’s not specifically that I want more about the Time War anymore. I just want more Gallifrey in general. Like, I know the Doctor left because he found it stuffy and boring and whatnot (or because he was afraid, according to 12, but I imagine it was some combination thereof), but I want more backstory on his childhood and his school days, and more emotional drama with his family (who are apparently no longer disapparated from existence, so he should have to deal with them) and old friends (especially the Master, but other ones, too). There’s just so much emotional tension for the Doctor to deal with on Gallifrey! 

I should really go back to those Doctor’s childhood fics I was writing. I even came up with my own longform version of the Doctor’s original Gallifreyan name--his real one, not his school nickname. Remind me to tell you about it some time; I was starting to write it here but then I realized this post was long enough and my naming of the Doctor is going to take a whole long post of its own to explain. 

Season’s greetings! :) What adorable kitties <3

by Ryan Conners