The Sixth Conversation Thread

[Knox Adjacent]

The one I'm working on making

[Man in Space]

Seroquel is a helluva drug.

[eldin raigmore]

Seroquel is a helluva drug.

Please elaborate!

[Man in Space]

Seroquel is a helluva drug.

Please elaborate!

The worst manic episode I have EVER suffered…and it was like running headlong into Mjölnir. There was absolutely ZERO question that the mania was cancelled.

[elemtilas]

I wasn't here in March, so happy Year of the Orichalc Cypher everyone!

[Khemehekis]

I wasn't here in March, so happy Year of the Orichalc Cypher everyone!

So orichalcum finally shows up in Yeola's calendar . . .

I made a Kankonian word for it (gyatisti) in April of this year.

[elemtilas]

Such an underrated word!

[sangi39]

After a little over nine years of living with my mum and my brother (after marriage ended, neither of us could afford the rent on the flat on our own, so we both had to move back in with family), I can finally (I think!) move out on my own

I've got two houses to go view on Wednesday and I'm excited and nervous. It'll be the first time ever (having just turned 34) that I'll be living on my own. It's a lot further away from work (33 miles instead of 12, but I can cut that down by stopping off and getting a lift in with my brother for that last 12 miles), and obviously will mean for paying for everything on my own, which right now, with the cost of literally everything going up like crazy, is a little bit terrifying, but I've tried to be sensible about the decision

As long as I stick to my budget (I've budgetted hard!) I should be okay and hopefully can eat up at least some price/rent/bill increases, but is very, very nerve-racking

[Arayaz]

After a little over nine years of living with my mum and my brother (after marriage ended, neither of us could afford the rent on the flat on our own, so we both had to move back in with family), I can finally (I think!) move out on my own

I've got two houses to go view on Wednesday and I'm excited and nervous. It'll be the first time ever (having just turned 34) that I'll be living on my own. It's a lot further away from work (33 miles instead of 12, but I can cut that down by stopping off and getting a lift in with my brother for that last 12 miles), and obviously will mean for paying for everything on my own, which right now, with the cost of literally everything going up like crazy, is a little bit terrifying, but I've tried to be sensible about the decision

As long as I stick to my budget (I've budgetted hard!) I should be okay and hopefully can eat up at least some price/rent/bill increases, but is very, very nerve-racking

Gwane jatye royos osakot!
May it cause happiness!

[Arayaz]

Soon the CBB will have its 230,000th post! What shall we do for this momentous occasion?

[Khemehekis]

Soon the CBB will have its 230,000th post! What shall we do for this momentous occasion?

Word #23,000 in Kankonian, which is one tenth of 230,000, was kobaphasham, a Shaleyan borrowing meaning "protectionism". Any ideas of what we can do with that word?

[eldin raigmore]

Soon the CBB will have its 230,000th post! What shall we do for this momentous occasion?

Word #23,000 in Kankonian, which is one tenth of 230,000, was kobaphasham, a Shaleyan borrowing meaning "protectionism". Any ideas of what we can do with that word?

Declare a copyright strike against someone who’s used it?

[Arayaz]

230,000!

[Salmoneus]

Thinking about metrics recently (sorry Panini, I'll reply in that threat in a bit! Not a long reply, don't worry...). And was reminded, indepenently, of a poem from The Lord of the Rings.

So anyway, I thought I'd check on the metrics of a few of the most famous LOTR poems, the ones we all probably remember...

-------------

A! Elbereth Gilthoniel!
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath,
Gilthoniel, A! Elbereth!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees
The starlight on the Western Seas.

Assuming an English-speaker's acccentuation of the Quenya (which iirc isn't far out?), this is simple: eight syllables per line, and more specifically four iambs. Iambic tetrameter, in English reckoning, or iambic dimeter according to the Greeks. Iambic tetrameter is of course very common in English folk poetry, and is part of why the poem is so catchy. Although I'm a little surprised that this isn't in hymnal metre (trochaic tetrameter, with every second line catalectic).
One interesting but potentially coincidental thing is the position of word breaks, which tend to break each line into half: the lines are broken 4-4, 5-3, 5-3, 4-4 (ie nested), and then the three English lines are 5-3, 4-4, 3-5. I think the early break in the final line helps give the sense of finality, despite the surprising fact there's only 7 lines (8 would be a lot more common in English).

------------

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three,
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.

(using ^ for stress and - for non-stress)

^^-^^
^^^
-^-^-^-^
^--^-^
^-^-^-^
-^^^

This is interesting. Assuming that we do take 'times' and 'white' as strong, we seem to be dealing with three long lines divided into hemistichs, each line having seven stresses - four in the first hemistich and three in the second.

The alternation of a four-stress hemistich (or line, depending on definitions) with a three-stress hemistich is absurdly common in English folk poetry (it's the metre of ballads and nursery rhymes), but it's normally in the form of iambic heptameter: -^-^-^-^ | -^-^-^
The second couplet here could be interpreted that way, with anaclasis in the fifth foot (inversion of the two syllables).
But it's striking that NONE of the three couplets are actually iambic heptameter, an the first couplet is the most deviant.

So I think Tolkien is ignoring feet and only counting stresses (i.e. a fixed number of stresses in each line with the number of unstressed syllables left completely variable) - which is of course how Anglo-Saxon poetry, in which he was an expert, works. But Anglo-Saxon poetry usually has matching hemistiches (3 stresses in each).

I wonder whether this is an intentional attempt to marry Saxon sprung rhythm with English ballad metre!?


--------------------------------------

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

^^--^-^ | ^--^ | syllables: 6+4 = 10 | stresses: 4+2 = 6?
^---^^ | --^-^ | 6+5 = 11 | 3+2 = 5?
^-^-^ |^-^ 5+3 = 8 | 3+2 = 5?
^--^^ | ^-^^ 5+4 = 9 | 3+3 = 6?
--^-^^ | --^-^ 6+5 = 11 | 3+2 = 5?
^^-^-^ | ^^-^- 6+5 = 11 | 4+3 = 7?
^^-^-^ | -^-^-^- 6+7 = 13 | 4+3 = 7?
--^-^^ | --^-^6+5 = 11 | 3+2=5 ?

So, this feels like a metrical poem, but at first glance it's hard to see how. But if we focus on the stresses, I have a theory: if we DON'T stress "three" in the first line, and DON'T stress one (but not both) of "on" and "dark", and DO stress both syllables of "Mordor", then we have two kinds of line here:

a) a line with two hemistichs, the first with three stresses and the second with two, with each hemistich ending on a stressed syllable
b) a line with two hemistiches, the first with four stresses and the second with three, with the first ending on a stressed syllable but the second on an unstressed syllable.

...with an overall order of aaaa, abba. That seems like it could be an intentional pattern? The basic rule, "even hemistichs have one stress fewer than odd hemistichs" would be shared with the "seven stones" poem. Since both poems are meant to be ancient lore-poems, mnemonics handed down by posterity in the same culture, this similarity of style would make sense.

We can also maybe look at the cadences. At the end of the lines, if we assume that it's "dark" that's not stressed, we have choriambs (^--^, "C"), cretics (^-^, "I"), and trochees (^-^-, "T"), in the pattern CIIC ITTI. Which seems... intentional? And at the caesurae, we cretics and spondees (^^, "S"), in the pattern CSCS SCCS. Also perhaps intentional? If it seems odd that the first set of hemistichs has alternating rather than nested/bridging cadences, bear two things in mind: first, that it's not uncommon for metres to become more uniform at the ends of lines and poems; and second, that that's what he does with the rhyme scheme too: abab acca.


I.... think this is all intentional? It can be hard, when dealing with a non-standard poetic form and a small sample size, to distinguish plan from happy coincidence, but I think this is maybe too much to be a coincidence?


----------------


And finally the one that inspired me to do this:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

This seems like a very regular metre at first: it's anapaestic. Except it's not really, and the number of syllables per line varies, and it's hard to break the lines into an equal number of feet.

What it actually is a line built on the hemiepes: ^--^--^
Except that there can be unstressed syllables on either side of it.

The number of unstressed syllables (0 or 1) following it is regulated by the metre, with an alternation between final stress and penultimate stress.

But the number of unstressed syllables (0, 1 or 2) preceding it is probably free (0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1). [although maybe it's not a coincidence that it's the first line of each half-stanza that has the variation?]

It's a simple way to have a poem that feels quite regular and familiar but isn't actually a normal English metre.

----------------

Anyway, maybe I'm imagining things and thinking too much about it. It just struck me that tolkien uses quite unusual metres.

some might say this is because he was a terrible poet. But when he wants to he can certainly use normal metres. In the nonsense poem "The Mewlips", for instance, the eight verses are split into two halves, and each half consists of three verses in perfect ballad metre, followed by one verse that's a bit weird, I'm not quite sure what the rules are. So clearly he could write in a strict, conventional metre when he wanted, and he also sometimes wanted not to.

And we should bear in mind that he knew a LOT of poetry - he was an expert on Anglo-Saxon and translated Beowulf, and he also loved Greek, Roman, Celtic and Finnish poetry. So I don't think we should expect that he was just fumbling around without having considered the question of metre!

Which means his metres are probably intentional... which makes their oddity interesting...

[Creyeditor]

[Something very detailed and interesting on Tolkien's poetry]
And we should bear in mind that he knew a LOT of poetry

Did you mean
...
a LOTR?
Sorry, for the bad pun.

[Salmoneus]

Ah, the Last Night... the evening once a year where right-wing nationalists boast about how they're going to turn on and sing along to "Rule Britannia" to own the libs... and then explode in anger and confusion when they realise that it's being sung by a Norwegian woman, the orchestra's conducted by an American woman, and the audience are all waving European Union flags...


[the iconography of classical music has been heavy embraced by far-right Brexiteers... but the people who actually make it, listen to it and attend the concerts are overwhelmingly left-wing Remainers...]

[Salmoneus]

I know this is a longshot, but I don't suppose anyone here knows about vitreous enamaling on metalic substrates, do they?

Because I have a question: what's the point of cloisonne? Or, what's the problem with painted enamels?

So, my understanding is:

- originally, this all began with gem-settings: gems were placed in little wire baskets
- gems were expensive, so people made the same things but with glass paste
- then they realised that firing at a higher temperature created enamel, which looked nicer
- thus we get cloisonne: you have a metal base (ideally shiny), and you divide up the surface with a network of thin metal wires or ribbons to create little cells, and then you fill the cells with frit and fire it to create enamel (and then usually polish it to some extent, and/or add a transparent glaze on top)
- people did this for several thousand years, until suddenly one day someone said "why don't we just not have the wire and paint directly onto the metal!?", and then they all did that for hundreds of years, and basically that was now the thing except when occasionally people were intentionally imitating mediaeval or ancient effects.
- meanwhile, shortly before people had the "why not just not bother?" moment in Europe, the Chinese learned about cloisonne and started doing it
- and then after around four hundred years of watching the Chinese do cloissonne the Japanese suddenly became insanely obsessed with cloisonne for a few decades

But here's the thing: all the time that people were doing this intricate cloisonne work on metal substrates, they were just painting enamel directly onto ceramics and onto glass all the time. Why did nobody realise they could just do the same thing on metal?

And likewise: when cloisonne was introduced to China, and then to Japan, the Chinese and Japanese already had sophisticated ceramics industries that had been painting enamel onto ceramics for hundreds if not thousands of years. Why did they never have the idea of painting onto metal? And when they got the idea of putting enamel on metal via cloisonne, why didn't they then realise it would be simpler to just paint?

And then why did they spend hundreds of years doing cloisonne while watching the Europeans, who had decided cloisonne was obsolete and just painted everything?

-----------

Two types of answers obviously suggest themselves: either there's something that makes painted enamels much harder, both harder than cloisonne and harder than painting on ceramics or glass...

...or there's something specifically good about the effects produced by cloisonne.

Now, a cursory read of the internet reveals people explaining that the problem with painted enamels is that it's time-consuming, because you need to fire each colour one at a time before adding the next one, to prevent them mixing. That seems like a good reason to avoid that method...

...except that cloisonne ALSO involves many firings. The enamel apparent contracts on firing, so it doesn't fill the cell, so it takes several firings to fill it. And - and I've only seen this said of Japanese cloisonne but I assume it's true worldwide - different frits/enamels (providing different colours) need to be fired at different temperatures, again requiring many firings for the completed piece.

So then we might think: oh, it's just aesthetic, people like that delineated look you get with cloisonne (blocks of colour have lines around them, like in a comic). And early on it was intentionally imitating gem setting.

Except... you can get a similar effect to the casual observed just by painting enamel and then gilding.

And, more to the point, a lot of Japanese cloisonne seems to be about not looking like cloisonne. They used hundreds, thousands, of super-thin wires that you need a magnifying glass to see, so that it looked like painting. They used some basse-taille methods (engraving underneath the enamel, so that the depth of the enamel varies, giving different colours and lustres), to produce a more limited version of the effect you can get just by painting thin coats of enamel over one another. And most insanely, they even invented a method of managing to extract the wires and fill up the gaps with more enamel: that is, they went through the entire painstaking cloisonne process just to produce what's effectively painted enamel with more steps.

-------

WHY!?

Given that two methods were available, and Method A (painting) was more intuitive, and what everyone was already doing all the time on every medium other than metal, and Method B (cloisonne) was more complex and used only in this one context, and people clearly at least much of the time considered the appearance produced by Method B to be inferior and put a LOT of effort into attempting to make it look more like Method A...

...why did MULTIPLE cultures, for hundreds or thousands of years, choose Method B?

What am I missing? What's so hellish about painting enamel on metal that everyone went to these lengths to avoid it (especially given than Europe then spent centuries happily doing it with no problem)? Or, what's so amazing about cloisonne that everyone went to these lengths to keep doing it (except, after a certain point, in Europe)?

What's going on here!?

----

...and this has been your scheduled weekly rant about cloisonné...

[sangi39]

After a little over nine years of living with my mum and my brother (after marriage ended, neither of us could afford the rent on the flat on our own, so we both had to move back in with family), I can finally (I think!) move out on my own

I've got two houses to go view on Wednesday and I'm excited and nervous. It'll be the first time ever (having just turned 34) that I'll be living on my own. It's a lot further away from work (33 miles instead of 12, but I can cut that down by stopping off and getting a lift in with my brother for that last 12 miles), and obviously will mean for paying for everything on my own, which right now, with the cost of literally everything going up like crazy, is a little bit terrifying, but I've tried to be sensible about the decision

As long as I stick to my budget (I've budgetted hard!) I should be okay and hopefully can eat up at least some price/rent/bill increases, but is very, very nerve-racking

So, looking to rent somewhere has just turned into "made an offer on a house to buy" somewhat suddenly Started out as a joke from my brother about "gentrifying the place" that turned into "wait, actually though, can I afford a mortgage?"

Turns out the place I was looking, i.e. Darlington in County Durham (I'm sure some users on here know the town. Sal might, and I think Frislander or Decem, while not active on here now, might have been from around there)... yeah, it's doable. Is it the nicest place to live? Eh, but I also live in a village right now that's got like 1000 times fewer people and 25% the population density, so there's bound to be more people, more traffic, more crime (at the very least in absolute terms), more noise, etc. but the house prices there are like 40%-50% what they are around here with much better access to things like shops, doctors' surgeries, public transport (bus and train), and it moves me closer to a bigger chunk of my friends (although it does massively up my travel costs for work)

And renting would work out markedly more expensive than paying back a mortgage, even though it shifts the burden of maintenance and repairs onto me, as opposed to a landlord (but it also means I have more choice about how those repairs and maintenance works get done, and balance that against cost on my own terms). Also means that, for example, I can't be given two months' notice before being kicked out because landlord decided they want to sell the house (sad part, the place I've made an offer on is a former rental property, so I can only imagine someone was asked to move out...)


So, that's a development. Waiting to see if the offer is accepted, then need to see if I can get the mortgage I was after, then contracts, then move I guess. Very excited, but super nervous

[Arayaz]

A good Yom Kippur to all observing!

[Khemehekis]

A good Yom Kippur to all observing!

Yom Kippur tov!

(Ani Yehudi.)