Melissa Walshe

Also, I made this Tumblr to start rounding up positive, free, helpful stuff for getting through #socialdistancing. Accepting submissions if anyone has stuff to share. distanttogether.tumblr.com

I wrote a raw and rough essay on anxiety and hope. It helped me to write it. Making it public in "as is" condition with hopes it might help a few other people too. #covid19 melissawalshe.com/2020/03/20/be-…

My grandmother passed away. Her funerals were today, but here I'd like to talk about the most important thing I couldn't spend too much time on in her eulogy: her love for Dungeons & Dragons. #DnD

The #audiobook of Junction is out today! adbl.co/2CfXShH Thank you @voiceofjoey and @TantorAudio.

Happy birthday, Junction!! I loved beta-reading this one for @Evil0Dan--can't wait for my pre-ordered copy to show up. :) thekingdomsofevil.com/?page_id=4680

Time travel, dinosaurs, cross-cultural romance....and free during #worldcon2018? Don't miss it.

This is the sort of delightful nonsense that keeps me getting out of bed every day. @UkeTeacher and Peter Brooke Turner playing the Star Trek theme on ukes. youtube.com/watch?v=JK_KHz…

@careyndunn @Evil0Dan It's possible that Earth wasn't considered special when they set up the weapon, but that Rose Quartz figured out some historical connection with humans that gems have to experience to fully appreciate.

Should I make a language this week? If so, which cartoon should I base it on?

@Evil0Dan @careyndunn I'll buy that. It would also explain his issues connecting with others...their smells are chaotic and incomprehensible. But what about the gibberish language he shares with Yellowtail?

@careyndunn @melissaipsa Now, the allioid language is smell-based, which is why Onion is incomprehensible to most humans.

@Evil0Dan @careyndunn True, but Onion's weirdness seems to come more from Yellowtail than Vidalia. Vidalia is a pretty human allioid.

@careyndunn @melissaipsa Yeah but he has a mother who looks like him. There must be a whole race of allioids living on Earth.

@Evil0Dan @careyndunn That's a thought, but it doesn't explain why gems look human.

@melissaipsa @careyndunn I think he's the great-something-grandchild of an onion-person created by Rose. Like how Steven created watermelon people.

@Evil0Dan Whoops! Knew I should have checked that one...I was rifling through my very tiny knowledge of Japanese for "kanji."

@melissaipsa Kata?

@Evil0Dan Rubies could have a Ruby kata mostly relating to fighting and piloting, for example, and the Pearl kata might be about butlery sorts of things.

@melissaipsa Maybe I can get around the problem by designing a purely written language. Unpronouncible ideograms (composed of smaller subunits??)

@Evil0Dan Ideograms make sense for the kind of rigorously class-oriented system we see of the gems in their own world. Only the ruling class and scholarly elites would read everything, and then everyone else knows ideograms in their field.

@Evil0Dan Totally boring. Also: why do gems look human in the first place? That bothers me.

@melissaipsa Or maybe they do speak with air like humans (implying their original creators were ancient humans??). But that's boring.

@Evil0Dan But you could also reasonably imagine musical tones as a basis for communication, I think. Crystal harmonics or what have you.

@melissaipsa Do gems really communicate with each other by projecting human-like lips and tongues and squeezing air through them? Their real language is probably coded pulses of light.

@Evil0Dan That's roughly what I was imagining. What would natural language look like if the morphemes were more like what machines can make use of? I suppose there would be a lot of timing in the grammar.

....that is a very different challenge. twitter.com/Evil0Dan/statu…