Ref Recs For Whump Writers

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is "almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

Love Like Breathing.

Collage for Mary from Our Flag Means Death.

It's phone background sized, feel free to use it if you like!

I had a funeral on April Fools once, too (and someone had a seizure midway though which looked like a bad prank at first

This was made all the better because my birthday is March 31st, which was the wake.

Anyways, I plan on dying April 1st for this exact reason

somewhere, i hope there is a pregnant person preparing to do a pregnancy reveal on the objectively funniest day of the year to do that

Reblog if you too would like to pick out 1,000 pieces of gravel from a man's leg

Something thats always bugged me about dnd and pathfinder’s gods is that… they are basically monotheism in polytheism wrapping AND there is no actual religion present. The lore is so obsessed with these beings as people with their extensive histories and active presence in the setting that they completely forgot to actually create religions surrounding them.

What does casual worship look like for any of these gods? Could you tell me? What does prayer actually look like? Is there specific times of the day in which you must pray for certain gods? Is there certain attire you must wear to show your faith? Are there certain foods you cannot eat? Are there certain foods that are elevated above the rest for your faith? What kind of offerings are expected everyday? Do they expect offerings everyday or on a certain day of the week? Do they expect physical offerings at all? Do they ask for sacrifices of material goods, animals, people? Why? Why do you worship this deity? How does that actually affect ur daily life? How is worship different for a cleric, paladin, priest, or casual believer? What kinds of swears, curses, exclamations, etc are associated with this religion? Are there certain activities that are banned within your religion? How strictly does the religion police its worshiper’s actions? What kind of philosophies do they preach or disavow?

These and many more are the elements that form real world religions and are absent in most fantasy “religions” including popular ttrpgs. I cant even call these faiths religions because they really arent. One god in these settings should have 20 different religions built around them that all disagree on how the god’s domain, history, and personality should be interpreted. Maybe 2 or 4 of them would be main stream but there should be more than just one monolithic faith surrounding a god. And stop calling it polytheism. Please for the love of everything. Polytheism is a type of religion that worships multiple gods at once. Faith in dnd and pathfinder is largely monotheistic because the players choose one god they like and ignore all the rest.

I am not trying to put the responsibility of creating all these religions on gms - im pointing out that the creators of these ttrpgs did all of us a huge disservice. Religion is such an expansive and fascinating and diverse concept in the real world that it infuriates me to see it reduced to choosing a god you like and thats it. And im agnostic irl!

I was talking to my cowriter about this for the lore in my ttrpg and it got me really rilled up XD Religion can be beautiful or terrible or a mixture of both. It can save people from the world’s darkness or bring out their own inner darkness. It deserves more than a cliff-notes table of deities to choose from and half baked lore about the gods without examining the actual faith they inspire in others :/

I think older newspapers just had the right idea.

Good Morning (by the Daily Mirror), England, May 20, 1943

Being a fanfic author is spending two hours fact checking every detail of a real life assassination that happened 80 years ago for a Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel chapter that you know damn well absolutely no one will care about.