All posts by Niamh

Cleveland-born, Purdue-trained, Detroit-toughened trans woman, engineer, and author. I like football and when Detroit wins stuff. I swear a lot, I write a lot, and I drink coffee a lot.
Conlanging, Writing

NaNoWriMo and Lexember

Not that I posted about it at all or anything, but I partook in NaNoWriMo. I say “partook” because I finished back on 24. November. I’ve written on and off since, with Thanksgiving being my only full day off, but none of my days have been much more than 600 words.

NaNo, for me, is both a great month and a terrible month. Often times my competitive and obsessive natures take over and turn the month into a long, dark, maddening thirty days that constantly threaten to force me into the hateful arms of depression. It can be very damaging to my social life and to my self-esteem.

But I get a LOT of fucking work done. A lot. 50,000 words isn’t enough for anything I’m writing but it essentially meant I doubled the length of the Sun-King sequel in 24 days. That means it is about 2/3rds the way through.

Is it worth it?

That’s where I’m not so sure.

The last time I did NaNo was back in 2012, the year we moved to Detroit. Since then, while I try to write a lot all year round, I never gave any special attention to November. 2014’s November was mostly a dead month waiting on first readers to get back to me with their feedback.

This is quite possibly the last time I do NaNo. It will certainly be a while before I consider doing it again.

It’s a big reason why I wasn’t here much. I didn’t even open the page between October and a few nights ago (when I was scrambling to make sure my email servers were working – they are thankfully).

So, on top of NaNoWriMo, I will also be attempting to do LEXEMBER. I’m sure you’re all extremely excited.

Lexember, for the uninitiated (i.e. everyone), is a month-long challenge for conlangers to invent and then post a new word for their conlang.

Since scrapping my work on Hadysh earlier this year, I’ve started anew. You can find me talking on /r/conlangs in the 5 minute challenges. Hadysh has new life, an “official” transcription, and a lot more. I’ve really enjoyed bringing it back to life so hopefully for the linguistically-minded of all you out there, you’ll also enjoy a month of vocab and some chatting about how and why languages are so fantastically strange.

Hrol, everyone!

Opinion

Anarcho-Linguist

I have a soft spot for dialects and minority languages, languages that might be on the brink of forever falling out of us. Not sure what drives me to this, why I feel a kinship of sorts with people I’ve never met and who’d probably not like me much if we did because I’d be asking them stupid questions about their language.

Recently I’ve seen an increase in posts about “good grammar”. What makes writing effective and there seems to recently be a huge focus on minute details and spelling, as if there is a standardized form of English, which there is not, actually. There isn’t a standard dialect of English written or spoken.

And that’s a cool thing.

When you read about France French being “correct” and Quebec French being “wrong” it comes from this standardization. France controls French and therefore is able to classify the Quebecois as essentially outside the Francophonie.

But we can’t do that in English… usually. There are exceptions to this, one of which I actually plan to share some thoughts on (knowingly as a well-off white boy).

I saw a post the other day that said “I don’t judge people on their age, nationality, or race… I judge them on their grammar.”

News flash… that means you judge people on their age, race, nationality, region, and class.

When we make fun of southerners for their dialect, we are making fun of them for being the other and oftentimes for being uneducated. We are usually making fun of them for being poor. Or for being “belles” who are haughty and above us, shallow or back-stabbing. How many times after the Kim Davis bullshit did you see a comic with her speaking in a stereotypical southern dialect? How many? Because I can nearly guarantee 100% of the time it was to make her seem simple and uneducated. Beneath us.

Where we are born, what language we learn first, and the dialects that we pick up around us govern to a large degree how we speak English. It could take years to pick up Scots or Ulster-Scots. I don’t use the word “treelawn” because I chose to. I don’t end sentences with prepositions because I want to. And I certainly don’t pronounce “water” as “wader” like every other American because it sounds prettier.

I speak the dialect of English I grew up with.

And here’s where the problem begins to arise: We don’t chose our dialects, but we are judged by them. And no dialect of English is judge more than AAVE (African American Vernacular English), sometimes poorly referred to as “Ebonics”, a word which will ne’er again appear in this post.

The lack of understanding of AAVE, what it is, how it works, and exactly how prevalent and self-consistent it is leads to people making very rash, very harsh judgement on its speaker for nothing but their language. All of this is very touchy, and honestly it is often impossible to have this discussion and walk away with any friends left.

AAVE is a self-consistent dialect/creole/language prevalent in the African-American community. It is the result of many pressures ranging from economic, racial, to historical. It is mutually intelligible with English but sits on a fence with dialects like Scots on whether or not it is a language and calling it a language has repercussions to it. Calling it a language might legitimize it. Calling it a language would shed light on the difficulty that kids growing up speaking exclusively AAVE have transitioning to a setting where only AmE is acceptable.

But it also would act to further isolate its speakers from work and opportunity. The way I see it is this: the second we call AAVE a language hoping to achieve progress someone will use it as an excuse not to hire someone based off language aptitude but deep down it is because of race. The second AAVE becomes a minority language things change and it isn’t predictable.

We’ve long equated adherence to a non-existent set of rules to education and mobility. Whether consciously or subconsciously the effects are real and it impacts people day in and day out.

Watch a video of a British comedian making fun of an American accent. Now imagine the the punch line was, “So that’s why I didn’t hire him.”

Good thing you learned the right dialect, I hope.

 

 

Anyway, I had a point but in writing this I started to get pissed. So I’ll end it there. Stop judging people on their grammar. It makes you a twat.

Detroit City FC, Soccer

Kit Nerd Day?

2 Comments

Apparently some people had some suggestions for the home kit. While I stick by mine with the rouge/rouge combo, you can’t argue that these aren’t damn fucking sexy as well.

Like last time, I don’t own the rights to any of this nor did I get permission. I am an amateur/fan with basic access to a kit customizer so don’t think that these are real. They are intended only as possibilities of what future kits can look like. For more info/reasoning check the post from earlier today.

The Other Home Kit – Because Hoops and Because Rouge AND Gold

Hoops_16_front

So here is the Rouge AND Gold kit for the bhoys.

I certainly can’t complain. These are some damn sexy kits. Are they my first choice? That’s… uh… hard to say. There are definitely a lot of pluses to these. First, the hoops are more apparent. Second, we finally have gold in the Rouge and Gold. Third they are an older Adidas model and are therefore cheaper. Fourth – holy shit do they look good.

I have to admit those are some strong reasons to say that this kit is the better.  As I write this I think less and less of my original design and more and more of this one. So there you have it, I guess? The new Detroit City home kit for 2016.

Other views:

Hoops_16_shirt_front Hoops_16_shirt_side Hoops_16_back

So here’s the line up (with an alternate away so we don’t out-do the collar):

Hoops_16_shirt_front Away_16_shirt_front_alt Alt_16_shirt_front

Detroit City FC, Soccer

Early Renders

Aside

These are some earlier ideas for the home kit, before I went straight rouge and rouge.

These two have some white accenting on the socks and on the kit itself. I ended up thinking that it was a bit like last years: just too much. So I simplified them a bit.

 

Home_16_front Home_16_back

While this one only retains the white on the Adidas logo. Even this felt so of… weird. So I set the logo to be rouge too, it helped the sponsor stand out and just made it nice and clean.

 

 

home_16_shirt_front

Detroit City FC, Soccer

The “Kit” Post – 2016

1 Comment

Did you know I was a kit nerd?

Really?

No?!

Come on.

Seriously.

Okay, before we get started some usual disclaimers – I’ve used images without permission (sorry DCFC and Flagstar), I haven’t edited anything other than transparencies (and in one case made the Flagstar logo white as to stand out on a rouge kit). Hope you guys don’t mind. This is done completely on my own. To potential sponsors this is in no way an official thing, this is one fan’s ideas of the best looking kits.

Also this is going to become a “thing”. Each year, perhaps far enough ahead to actually influence decisions I will post the annual Kit Nerd  (tagged “Kit Nerd” for search-ability) post, detailing my biased and subjective opinions on DCFC kits and what I personally want to see in the coming year. I will do my best to always back-up my arguments but realize that kits are subjective and since I am an admitted kit nerd/buyer that my opinions might not always be popular. I.e. – I would want to buy these kits, not just think they look good. These are the kind of kits I WANT in my closet costs be damned.

The other “thing” is that I’ve been keeping the kits up-to-date on the wikipage.

Next – some thoughts on last year’s designs with several months of hindsight.  Last year’s designs were very over done. I was having a ton of fun with the cit customizer so I went ahead and just puked color over everything with the exception of the gold alternate kits. They look, in short, pretty bad. 90s bad. Actually, not that bad – but you know what I mean. They sort of remind me of training kits, which tend to be a bit more… busy.

Third order of business – thoughts on the actual kits from the 2015 season – I liked them. We stuck with Nike and some patterns have been emerging which I am going to work with here in the three new designs. First – we seem to have colors starting to lock down. Home – rouge, Away – white, Alt – black. That’s cool. I will note that there is a serious lack of gold in any of this, but I’m actually okay with that for the most part. Rouge, white, black is a great combination and one I am more than happy to work with.

Specifics regarding the kits: the home one was my least favorite – the white stripes didn’t “do it” for me, they just broke up the nice rougeyness of it all. I’m going to focus on bringing that back. The away kit was great, loved the decision to add the collar and despite being plain, they were classy as shit. The alternates were great as well. Simple black with white shorts.

 

Brand – Adidas (pron: AH-dee-dahs, not uh-DEE-dus)

Like last year I’m going to push for Adidas, which is my favorite kit-maker and has the best kit customizer by far. Seriously Nike, how hard is it to fucking get a kit customizer to work? Don’t make enough selling $5 sweat-shop shoes for $150? Pay someone to fix it.

I know this is unlikely. DCFC has used Nike every year thus far and it sounds like Detroit is getting its own Nike store, making purchasing all the easier. But I’m going to hold my ground – get Adidas and get the girl… or trophy… I don’t know just go with Adidas.

Kit Names – YES

Again, this is me spitting into hurricane force winds but I’d like to see kit names. The owners were very kind to explain why they didn’t have kit names: Nike essentially sends a box with a variety of sizes and numbers and that’s all the team gets for their own use. Some players do seem to have their own number (e.g. Edwardson with 18, Rogers with 6) but in general these need to be fluid to dress whoever is available.

Still, I’d love to see names so names are included in my kits. I am looking forward to a time when we can do this.

Sponsor – Flagstar

Last year I didn’t add a sponsor and gave some wishy-washy reasons as to why. Not this year. This year I’m buckling down and having an opinion. In 2015 DCFC had two main sponsors: our kit sponsor (Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers) and our soul sponsor (Flagstar). Both local, both big deals, but I honestly feel only one came to the table and that was Flagstar. From day one Flagstar seemed very interested in engaging DCFC and the Northern Guard. Yes I can be a cynic and say “of course that’s what a sponsor would do” but look at Metro Chevy – they didn’t seem to do anything but hand out tickets for the soccer camps, something Flagstar can easily do as well.

I felt that Flagstar REALLY wanted to be the kit sponsor but lost out in a bidding war or something. They made handkerchief, they helped bus kids in from the city to watch games, they engaged with the NGS and fans on twitter, the company seemed to really want to be there so I’m going to give them the kit spot for my 2016 kits. Good luck Flagstar, this Ford employee wishes you all the luck in the world.

The Home Kit – Rouge ’til I Die

 

Home_16_front

The hoops WILL return, dammit. They will. It will happen and I will be super stoked.

Working off the issues I had with my designs last year, I’ve simplified the color scheme on this (and all) the kits. I’ve limited myself to two main colors on all the kits, with a third for accents – burgundy and red dominate with white for the Flagstar logo and numbering to stand out.

When I design these I both think about what will look good and if we were to move up what would not be stealing or competing with another team. For example, red and gold is out because A) DCFC hasn’t been emphasizing the gold aspect much and B) I don’t really want to compete with the Strikers and other Red/Gold primary teams.

Yes, most combinations have been taken. Black/Red is Atlanta and though those look great, I’m going to try to avoid it all and stick to Rouge. So everything is some variation of our beloved color except for the Flagstar logo, giving it great visibility while keeping the kit simple and clean.

I’ve definitely been obsessing over the details here, tweaking everything over and over, just to see little variations – mostly with the highlites, and using white for the Adidas logos and such. Perhaps I’ll post failed versions later, but there is little to look at.

Of course, here are some more views.

Home_16_shirt_front Home_16_shirt_side Home_16_back

 

 

The Away Kit – The Collar Means Business

Away_16_front

The brilliant white + collar returns. Again, trying to keep it nice and clear. I’m not a huge fan of plain white kits, but for some reason add the collar and suddenly it works! Add a DCFC logo and a a little bit of rouge and it is just WOW.

Last year I talked about a running element – something that would exist in all three kits – and that was the rouge/gold socks. Obviously here you can see that was abandoned. Socks are tailored to match the kit and here it is two colors – white and rouge.

As I said above, white seems to dominate our second kits, so instead of fighting that let’s embrace it. I’ve started to think of DCFC’s colors mostly as rouge and gold in name only, our logo shows one thing but the field shows another. While I don’t advocate changing the logo at all, I do think gold doesn’t work as well and can be harder to add to the kits. Do we use old gold or a darker yellow? Most companies are pretty limited here usually offering old gold, yellow, and something that belongs on a construction site – as compared to red where you usually have three real options or more (Red, maroon, burgundy, bright red &c).

In 2015 I believe the white kits used black numbering, I went with rouge here. I guess that is my theme this year – two colors a kit.

The other views:

Away_16_shirt_front Away_16_shirt_side Away_16_back

 

The Alternative Kit – The Stealth Kit

Alt_16_front

I teased this on twitter before starting to write this as this was the first kit that really came together quickly.

Third kits are a chance to have fun, really do something different. Some teams do it well, some teams don’t. While I’ve always enjoyed the DCFC third kits I’ve had two main issues in the last two years. First, let’s wear them a bit more. Playoff games, friendlies are all good times to use the third. I get that we auction off the thirds during the selected charity match but… ugh… I want to see them more! Secondly, we’ve always used the white shorts with them, probably as a cost saver.

So with my design I’ve made two big departures from DCFC’s usual methods. First – instead of pairing black with white, I’ve paired it with rouge. I assume their use of white means they can grab shirts from the bargain bin at the Nike outlet by my house, but this is my blog so we get my kits. Second – the shorts are black too. Deal with it.

I’ve been calling this the “Stealth Kit”. It looks mean. It looks like a team that doesn’t fuck around. If this kit was released I’d probably end up divorced and the only thing I’d ask for is the fifty or sixty of these I bought stay with me.

Black has slowly been working its way into the DCFC phenotype. It is one of the main colors of the Northern Guard and so it is not surprising just as DCFC shapes us, we also shape DCFC. This sharing is epitomized right here in rouge and black.

The other views:

Alt_16_shirt_front Alt_16_shirt_side Alt_16_back

 

So there it is! Kit post 2016, hopefully early enough to turn some heads and maybe even affect some decisions.

Any and all comments and criticisms are welcome; twitter, reddit, or even here are all great places to hit me up with your own ideas. Here’s to a short off-season!

Writing

Slartibartfast

I would want nothing more in life to win an award for drawing coastlines. Like most fans of strange, rugged terrain – I am always in awe of the fjords of Norway, though I am ashamed to admit my favorite piece of geography will always be Newfoundland. Not just for its historical context, but also because I feel like if I had to pick a great piece of Earth to plagiarize for a test – it would be Newfoundland. It has it all: gentle coasts, rugged coasts, finger lakes, rivers, ocean, thin isthmuses, and deep forests.

Luckily I write fantasy so it is almost mandatory that I make lots of maps. Lots and lots of maps. I posted previously about adding some level of detail to my maps and now I sort of want to go over my process as an alternative to literally jerking off in front of you all. So sit back and marvel at my genius.

MARVEL DAMMIT.

Anyway, recently I added a great deal to my map partially out of boredom, partially to keep my mind on my writing even when not writing, and partially to just flush out the rest of the world I’ve been writing in. This post will only focus on geography because I tend to actually finish my geography but will fiddle with cultural and political stuff endlessly.

So how can one go about making a map? There are numerous ways, I prefer hand drawn because I can think about the world as I draw and come up with ideas. Some people prefer to use tools or filters to create randomized maps and then place things as they make sense. I feel like world builders prefer the randomness while writers prefer the control but that is an opinion with no meat behind it. I’m a writer and I prefer hand drawn just so my bias is crystal clear.

Starting is a matter of coming up with ideas, or at least a goal in mind. Generally size is a big question. I use engineering paper so I think in terms of how many sheets I want to use. Six to eight seems to be the sweet spot for continents, but obviously continents are not all similarly sized so that might need to change depending. So the first hour or two of work might be done in the car, at work, or eating dinner. Basically I come up with ideas for what the terrain should look like, what kind of features are needed to support ideas for cities, nations, or cultures.

And that is the key – I usually decide what kind of places and people I need before I start drawing. If I need highlanders, I will draw mountains. If I want an oceanic civilization, I will draw safe harbors – only rarely the other way around and then usually as secondary thoughts or filler. Some world builders might gasp, but maybe not. I’m not terribly involved in their world (haw hee haw hee haw).

So I fill up engineering paper and eventually a sheet looks like this.

1

It’s hard to explain how I draw the lines because I just draw them. I assume it is not hard. Just draw lots and lots of squiggles. It probably sounds patronizing or self-aggrandizing but I’m not really sure what to say. Draw something, decide if you like it, if not erase it and redraw it. Simple as that. Only show what you like.

To do edges I have a top secret technique of counting boxes and then marking the point the line cross the dark green as best I can on the second page. And if they don’t match exactly that is okay, there are steps to hide that.

I usually also keep a sheet that has the layout so I can number the map sheets and rearrange them later. Counting boxes and some hand math makes for pretty accurate mapping if needed, so I can’t recommend getting a stack of engineering paper highly enough. Plus who doesn’t love engineering paper?

Eventually they all get smashed back together.

Capture

I do this in CS2 and this file is generally pretty huge. I scan them in at 200dpi. Why 200? Because I accidentally did that for the first several sheets a few years ago and everything has needed to match since. So 200 it is.

In CS I have a number of layers I’ll use with different stuff like rivers, water, boarders, and then eventually meta-stuff like political regions, linguistic, and even religious areas. This makes it easy to flip through data and keep boundaries consistent in the case of needing changes. E.g. if People A only worship God A, if I change where people A live, I better also change where God A is worshipped.

Anyway, getting ahead of myself.

Second step is tracing.  This usually doesn’t take too long and can be relaxing as well as a good time to fix any near misses. I think the furthest I was off with this map was an eight of an inch, which is pretty good given that it was eight sheets some portrait and others landscape and three not aligned to the given edges.

Borders are done on their own layer so I can play with them later.

Tracing 1

That lake and inlet are by far some of my favorite geography to date. Very proud of it.

Once everything is outlined, I copy the border and merge one into a white sheet, run a threshold, then run a filter that creates flattened, trippy maps based on black lines.

Flattened

 

This allows me to quickly and easily color water blue and land white. Which I need for making rivers, which is step four.

Rivers

Rivers are part traced from the original yellow sheets and part free-hand. Getting them to look right is a pain in the ass. Rivers are essentially fractals. They are curvy no matter how far you zoom in or out.

There is a science that is pretty easy to understand about how the curves in rivers form and they are actually pretty regular – when a river is allowed to run unimpeded down a flat plain. The Nile and Mississippi are good-ish examples of large rivers allowed to run their course, while the Ohio and Colorado are good examples where things like mountains and gorges might have some say.

Yes I know the Grand Canyon was formed by the Colorado River, but sometimes one digs their own grave.

Have I mentioned I am not a geographer? If not – I AM NOT A GEOGRAPHER DO NOT LISTEN TO ME I WRITE FANTASY NOVELS AND MAKE FANTASY MAPS.

After I get rivers set I start doing terrain and biomes.  I usually sketch a rough idea of where mountains go on my maps, but nothing else. I then decide as I draw where things go. Unfortunately, while I have a basic understanding of geography, I’m also not a climatologist so I have to sort of guess where things like rain shadows go.

The other problem is my drawing style has been changing over the last few years. It’s pretty solid, but I’m better with small details. Mountain ranges aren’t many hundreds of kilometers thick anymore – they have a bit of variance. Of course this means that my northern continent and southern continent are slightly different visually. Hopefully it is not too noticeable.

Each terrain feature gets a layer and I usually do them one at a time starting with mountains and ending with “rare” terrains like large fens/marshes.

Layers

Eventually all those layers start stacking up to something that looks nice!

Colors

Something that comes much later, and only if needed, is adding map icons for terrain. I usually add cities as part of the “politics and sociology” part, so I’m not covering it in much detail here. Though, as an overview, humans like water and cities should congregate near water or abundant resources.  Important cities should be in important places: straights, major river fords – never buried deep in the mountains (though that might be good for major fortresses).

So I dig out the Tolkienesque map brushes and get to work (switching to the Northern continent).

last of trees

slow and steady

Then intent is it should eventually look good in black/white.

Tree tree tree

I also do a fine detail version (shown above) and a coarse detail version (more cut out for printing).

Hadyrland w Cities

For Book copy v4

Unfortunately wordpress cuts into the detail.

But to give you an idea, here are a couple of finished black/whites of my northern continent (where Sun-King takes place).

Hadyrland with Cities

The Whole Damn Thing

Cheers guys! Perhaps conlanging next time?

Uncategorized

Upcoming Plans!

Hey guys!

The waiting  is nearly at an end, my busy summer is coming to a close and I’ll be able to devote more time to writing and posting here as well as devoting more time to my book again.

If you haven’t guessed I mostly took July off from writing to focus on Detroit City’s season. We’ve had a hell of a run so far and we are primed to bring back some silverware this weekend. I also managed to drag Brigid to Germany and we toured the Fransconian region of Bavaria drinking plenty of wine and beer as we went. I always have time to go back to Germany.

Up coming plans for posts:

  • Map making post, I posted some stuff on twitter I plan to elaborate a bit on this in a longer update

  • Conlanging, I have returned to square one with my Hadysh conlanging and I will be sharing some of my processes/insights again

  • Detroit City FC wrap-up, not that I posted much in the middle but I want to share my thoughts after an amazing season

  • General notes about writing and where my writing is and is going

So all-in-all expect more of the same, just not silence.

Sláinte everyone.

Writing

Writing, Conlanging, World Building

Haven’t updated in a long while. Sorry.

Fairly certain not many people are too worried or were desperately missing it, but it isn’t professional so here we are.

My writing has continued to move forward. Currently between 60,000 and 61,000 words and hoping to break through that line today.

Also, just got back from Germany. Pretty sweet.

Sent out Sun-King to some agents in a push to get published. No word back so far, but then again its only been a few weeks so no rush either.

Been working on the map too. Expanding it to include more of the world – spoiler alert – for future books. Map-drawing is often one of my favorite things to do, strange to be doing it with business purposes in mind. Really like what I have done this far but I have a lot of world left to go. Hopefully it doesn’t all suck balls.

Lastly been thinking about restarting my work on Hadysh, essentially flushing most of my work down the drain. If I do that expect some posts here about it. I have some new ideas and want to rid myself of some bad ones that had crept into the language. So. Who knows?

Anyway, this is about as much time as I am willing to spend here.

Sláinte!

Detroit City FC, Opinion, Soccer

Bitching and Moaning

4 Comments

Okay let’s do some bitching and moaning because it is about time. Everything below is my uneducated and rambly opinion. You are free to disagree, but some of these are problems that are not new to this season.

Refs in the NPSL

Refs in the NPSL are usually somewhere between complete shit and utter shit. There are exceptions, Donovan, the ref from the May 29th game against Twin Stars is generally a good, fair ref and a decent person. Who ever was on the field today was a fucking idiot. His calls were so bad Lansing was calling him out!

The two biggest were the ignored penalty we should have gotten for a literal tackle against WMB and Lansing’s third goal which was wildly offside. That would have evened the score to 2-2 which was about what we had earned. Lansing got two legit goals, DCFC got its one.

But things like strikers getting shoved to the ground and then being called the ones to have committed the foul is 90% of the shit calls from NPSL refs.

They fucking suck and honestly it is the #1 reason I want out of the NPSL.

Lansing United

When you score – go celebrate with your fans you fucking pricks. Don’t come taunt us. Don’t taunt us for two reasons – first, your fans paid to be there and support you; recognize that and go celebrate with them for fuck’s sake. Second, NGS does what it can to make sure we stay under control, but it only takes one asshole to make the poor life choice to stick a bottle in your eye socket. For the love of Thor’s salty balls, don’t taunt opposing fans. That’s just a universal truth.

That single Sons of Ransom Cunt

Stay on your fucking side of the goddamned bleachers you thick-skulled moron. What the fuck were you thinking?

Detroit City Football Club

I’m pulling out the full name here because like my mum starting a sentence with “Nicholas” I need a chill to run down your spines. This is season four. Honeymoon is over. We, I, love Detroit City to death but the era of you can do no wrong is over. Time to take this shit seriously. I know you do, but it is time for all of us to take this shit seriously and that means getting feed back in more ways than smoke and cheers.

Offense – For the most part the offense looks good, but I personally feel that we hold onto the ball too long. We lose it a lot in the last third and it can be a pain. I feel like a lot of student players are still in the collegiate and academic sports mindset of “beautiful” soccer. That they have to pass and be team players. Every now and then just shoot it. Shoooot it. If you want we can get Sarge shouting it into a megaphone again.

Middle – For fuck’s sake can we please string together more than two passes in the middle without losing it? Seriously. I feel like fully 40% to 60% of our passes in the middle land at the feet of a player not wearing our colors. Along these lines, stop with the long pass forward. Even Brigid was getting irritated by this and she doesn’t understand soccer or even really care about sports. It seems like every single pass in the air has about 25% too much power. They go over our guy’s head and into the feet of an opponent. This has been our weakness time and time again. We are constantly losing it in the midfield and we are constantly losing it to long passes.

Wings – Alex the Great is getting a new/second nickname (as per Moz’s suggestion): 7-11 because that kid is always open and he’s a fucking beast (not sure what that has to do with 7-11 but work with me here) I feel like we always have one winger completely open and the defense and mid never seem to notice. Eyes up from the grass and lets position ourselves. Get the balls wide. Not every field is as narrow as Cass and we might not even be at Cass for much longer.

Defense – Communicate. If NGS is too loud, learn sign language. Deaf people been getting along just fine. But the constant miscommunication in the back is hurting and it is hurting hard.  On top of that I counted no less than four times in the first half of the Lansing game that the Lansing #10 was not only unmarked out on the wing, but onside. That’s fucking unacceptable. We’re lucky he was shit and was only good at shooting balls 30′ over the goal. Eyes up. Eyes FUCKING UP.

Goal – I’ll keep this short and it is going to hurt. There is a reason why we call Bret Mollon the brick wall and no one else.

 

Anyway, let’s end on a happy note – aye? This has been depressing. Here are my three standouts for the game.

Dave FUCKING Edwardson with a goddamned rocket from out of the box for his first ever Detroit City goal! Holy fuck. I can watch that all day.

That honestly made the whole day worth it. But as always, our beloved Geordie put up a good fight disrupting Lansing plays and taking control of the ball for the good guys.

Alex Isaevski is a mother fucking beast. That kid runs for days. He’s a winger. He’s a defender. He’s a fucking striker. There’s nothing Alex the Great can’t do. Fucking MotM, Fucking MotYear right there. Watching him is always, always a pleasure.

The WMB, the one and only Flash once again made his presence known, out dribbling hordes of defenders. He’s skills are honed to a razor’s edge. Let’s get some people up there to help him, there’s only one Messi guys.

Opinion

English is Dead, Long Live English

1 Comment

The English language has died.

Time of death? Probably sometime in the 1100s.

Cause? Sudden Influx of Normans Syndrome (SINS).

Next of kin? English.

Wait. What?

I’ve decided, rather willingly to become irate about pedants bitching about the “devolution”, “worsening”, and nearly literal “death” of our wonderful, beautiful, resilient language because people say “literally” to mean “figuratively”, “irregardless” instead of “regardless”, and “who” instead of “whom.”

Madness!

Anarchy!

Fucking teenagers and their 133t-sp34k and their iPhone9s and their having of the pre-marital sex!

Blasphemy!

Simple and true, our language has died and it was slain by… pedants who insist on made-up rules drawn from Latin, long-winded explanations of how to use what should be simple words, and a need to correct people on when to use specific spellings or “well” vs “good.”

Language, I will and have argued, are not owned by editors, pedants, professors, or teachers. They are not owned by dictionaries or websites. Languages are owned by their speakers going so far to say that there is no correct way to truly speak a language.

English is a prime example of this because it has so many speakers both native and those who rely on it as a lingua franca. It also has a very high percentage of speakers who are well educated and productive members of the so-called first or developed world. It means we have a lot of free-time to bitch about how English is used and spelled.

Only rarely though are the pedants, though, discussing grammar. Often “Grammar Nazis” are really “Writing Nazis”. They’re focus is not the correct use of are language, rather the adherence to spelling and the proper use of commas, and apostrophe’s. Only really rarely do they try to dig any deeper then that and the two big times its they whom are wrong.

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“Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.” Okay, that is some real grammar. Why? “Uhh… because it is a rule.” No it’s not. “Yes it is.” No it’s not, it comes from Latin. Do we speak Latin? “No…” Fine, then it isn’t a rule for English.

“Well, as long as you don’t split the infinitive.” There, another grammar point. Why? “Hey, don’t start with me, pal.” No. Why? Why can’t I split the infinitive? It’s two words: to go. To play. To read. To snore. Again, it is a fake rule ripped from other languages. The infinitive in Latin (and in most languages) is one word. Gehen. Spielen. Lesen. Schnarchen. I can’t split the German infinitive because the infinitive is one word.

Well, technically I could it is called infixing. But we don’t have infixing in English which is fan-fucking-tastic.

O. SNAP!

When people often talk about the “death” of English it is either the so-called misuse of common words or people spelling things strangely, often more phonetically. Neither of those is hugely indicative of the health of our language. Vocab is to a language what wall paper is to a house.  Replacing words only yields an encryption, not a new language, unless enough people replace all the same words the same way… and then you get a dialect. Unless those people have an army, then you have a language.

Languages are deep. They have winding, unique histories and they are forever changing. Vocab is the easiest to change because the spoken-word is so very prevalent. Languages are primarily spoken, thought, shared. Even writing like this is more of a conversation, it is more spoken than written – because I don’t edit it, I don’t follow stupid conventions, I literally literally write as I think and that yields a very natural flow of the language rather than some APA approved bullshit.

Vocab changes all the time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes it makes sense. “Knight” and “Knave” share the same etymological root, but are in many ways opposites. “Faggot” and “Fascist” are similarly linked (they both come from “a bundle of sticks”). “Boy” meant “servant” and “girl” meant “child” regardless of gender. “Hot” can mean temperature hot, it can also mean “sexually attractive”. German has an example of the opposite, geil means “horny” but young people often say it to mean “cool”.

The word “fuck” comes from the Proto-Indo-European word that meant “to strike”. The Latin word for “fist” pugnus shares that root as well. The word “poke” does too, (probably).

So that basically comes to the crux of my problem. Pedants never seem to want to turn back the clock farther than when they were in High School. There is no pedant on the internet seriously arguing that English was best in 988 or that we should really be speaking Proto-Indo-European because that was when language was “best”.

None of them argue to bring back grammatical gender to English, which English had two (Masculine and Neuter).

None of them argue to bring back all of our missing cases. We all know the subject, the direct object… the indirect object. What about the instrumentitive case (which was already dying by the times the Normans showed up)? The genitive? What if I told you that English completely lacks declination. Do we want to bring back fucking declination? Or more complicated conjugation?

No.

No one in their right fucking minds wants to bring back any of that. Because it is complicated and insane.

What English needs, what English has direly called out for these last two centuries has been spelling reform. Our spelling is no longer phonetic. Sure it isn’t as bad as Irish, but our language is hanging onto spelling rules and functions from the 1300s and 1400s because of pedants who cling to the glorious past (and realists who don’t want to replace a billion street signs). All those extra Es on shit? All those extra letters were probably pronounced – because we had no formal spelling rules (remember dictionaries are a modern invention) so people wrote words like they sounded.

Shakespeare wasn’t adding that “e” on the back of his name out of boredom. It was probably literally literally pronounced “Shaykes-peereh”.

So you want to know what? I don’t fucking care that teenagers misspell words. Let them. Maybe they’ll be open to the idea of finally instituting an English spelling reform.

So the next time you see someone chatting in slang or simplifying the spelling of words remember it is they, not you, who is ensuring that English reaches the next generation of users. And hopefully the find it stronger and more useful than ever.

The English language has died and it was killed by pedants.

Long live the English Language.