Jun. 12th, 2012

fajrdrako: ([Iron Man])


I wasn't paying much attention. I thought it was just me, having connection difficulties with Archive of our Own, when I went there looking for Avengers fic.

Turns out - [personal profile] isagel says it, so I believe it - we broke the site with strenuous overuse. I'm not sure whether to be ashamed or proud about it. Info about it can befound here.

Such a nice site, and we ask so much of it. I feel I should send it a care package of blankets and cookies.

While I'm here, let me recomment [personal profile] resonant's Avengers fic at AO3. I was griping to [profile] lunacy_gal about how I was finding too much bad Avengers fic - and she steered me in the right direction. I especially loved her Steve/Tony slash story, Steven Likes Tony. Not only does it have exactly what I like in a fic, not only does it make good use of Steve Rogers' situation, it has spot-on characterization for both of them.

One of the things I've been noticing in the random Avengers fic I've been reading is that in a lot of the stories, the Avengers aren't Avengers. They're scientists who spend their time in the lab doing science, or S.H.I.E.L.D. aagents working for Nick Fury, doing whatever they do at home - "home" being Tony Stark's tower, usually, or his mansion. And, yes, they do that in the comic too, but in the comic (and for something like forty years of my lifetime of reading), they've always got a crisis going on, always have a supervillain attacking somewhere, or they're off somewhere in the Quinjet because the world needs them.... Not so much sitting at home eating toast and reading the newspaper.

Now, I see why people familiar with the Avengers from the movie alone would see this as the status quo and as the viable scenario they want to deal with. And that's okay. But I'd like a little more external action, myself.

Tempts me to write Avengers fic, it really does....

And if any other of you have recs - thanks to [personal profile] isagel for including a few today - if any of you have any more, do pass them on, okay? I'm a starving woman here.

fajrdrako: ([Black Widow])


Somehow I didn't notice this comic when it came out; a Marvel miniseries called Battle Scars. [personal profile] fairestcat brought it to my attention, and told me what it is.

I might have skipped it, if she hadn't said anything. A comic about an American soldier... Okay, the inclusion of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the storyline and Nick Fury as a character might have made me pick it up, had I known.

I just finished reading it. Whoo. I knew Phil Coulson had been put into the Marvel comics universe, but I didn't know how or where. Now I know. The rest of my comments will go under a tag, for Expandhuge spoilers... )
fajrdrako: (Default)


[personal profile] random, [livejournal.com profile] auraiaphalia and [personal profile] deakat came over, and we watched Stephen Fry's Planet Word, episode 2, "Identity", about how language shapes identity. Languages discussed included Irish, French, Basque, Occitan, North African French, Hebrew, Yiddish. and the various accents and dialects of England. One African language was featured; no Asian ones. I wondered what the criterion was for choice and decided it was simply Stephen Fry's whim and interests.

We noticed that when the Basque restauranteur was talking (to be translated by his daughter), he kept switching between Spanish, French, and Basque. We could identify the Basque because it was the bits we didn't understand.

Part of the show talked about linguistic genocide, a term that tends to confuse me. Cultural destruction loss is a terrible thing, yes. But things change all the time. How can languages be stopped from dying? Populations disperse, cultures change, and we are always driven by political, social and economic forces. You can't stop a language from dying. A thousand years ago no one spoke English because the language didn't exist, though many words still in use were around. In another thousands years we'll have a new set of languages. I'm sure the Etruscans wanted to keep their language and culture alive; and the Harappans; and an unknown number of languages born and lost before the dawn of history. The value of langauge is complex; ephemeral; tied to identity, but also to practical and utilitarian uses. Where does a dialect end and a language begin?

I find all these questions fascinating.

So then we talked about languages we know, and languages we want to know better, and artificial languages (like Elvish and Dothraki). [personal profile] random actually speaks more languages than I do, and better - though possibly his Russian and my Italian are analogues, somewhat forgotten but we think we could relearn them if necessary. We both like to dabble in languages, but he has real skill in speaking - while I dabble more like a watchmaker might poke at different kinds of clocks to see how they tick. I don't don't really have linguistic skills - just a fascination for languages.

We played the game of asking, "If you could learn one more language, what would it be?" Something that isn't Indo-European would be interesting, but what? Basque, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Finnish? Cree or Algonkian? The possibilities feel endless... but of course they aren't: limited to something like 7,000.

Oh, to have the skills and fluency of Francis Crawford.

Which I don't, and never could have, but the next best things is having friends who are willing to talk about languages with me.

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fajrdrako

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