Been feeling really bad but then I thought about Mabel until I felt better

last draw of the year

make him cozy

REBLOG THIS TO GIVE THE PERSON YOU REBLOGGED THIS FROM A GOLD STAR BECAUSE THEY’VE BEEN STELLAR TODAY AND THEY DESERVE IT ⭐️

some traditional stans

i never know whats going on with my artstyle man

also that says "the term is conARTIST, thank you very much!" if my handwriting is that bad

this is what it looks like when i kiss my little cat's head

lmao on the edinburgh zoo site it says “there is a daily penguin parade at 14:15 but it may be cancelled last minute as it is a voulntary parade, we do not coax the penguins with food, and they may not want to go out” lmao anarchopenguinism

this is the cutest goddamn thing i’ve ever heard

I saw the penguin parade. It was a very slow parade, because the pingüinos take their sweet time and aren’t very fast walkers to begin with.

can I volunteer to be a penguin

I feel like the world needs to know the context of the edinburgh zoo penguin parade, becausr I’ve been going there my entire life and I only found out about this the other year.

So a while back (I can’t remember exactly when but I think it was some time around the 40s/50s), a bunch of penguins escaped. A keeper left the gate open so a bunch of penguins just… followed them. And the people loved it. Look at these adorable birds outside their cage just following that guy around! So they get all the penguins back inside and realise that none of them really ran off, they just followed the keeper and went back inside and crowd thought it was amazing, so why not make it a regular thing? Get enough people there that if one of them goes to make a run for it (which at least one has in the past), they can’t get past the people, and let the ones who want outside have a little wander. So every day, they get a crowd, they open the gate, and whatever penguins want to get out can go, waddle about, squawk at people, and then hop back inside.

Also, one of those penguins is Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III, Colonel-in-cheif of the Norwegian King’s Guard. This isn’t really related to the parade at all, I just love the fact that there’s a penguin in the Norwegian army

Reblogging with Brigadier Sir Nils Olaf III inspecting his troops.

Carry on …

I love everything about this post.

A GOOD POST

A lovely older friend of mine lived in Edinburgh when she was a small child, and regularly attended the penguin parade – as a penguin. That is, she was a small toddler and thus about the right height and speed, and she just waddled along with everyone else who was about 2’ high.

So the answer to ‘can I volunteer to be a penguin’ is at least occasionally ‘yes.’

Everything flows and nothing stays.

I loves her

I had to draw this odd, disconcerted sack of elbows

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Pangur threw a fit because she didn’t get any treats this evening (I ran out), and after screaming in my ear and head butting my elbow for forty minutes she’s flung herself down into corpse mode. so that I can see what I’ve done to her

I then proceeded to binge read the BillSteve comic (PEAK, we need more Steve content in the world) and also your BillStan comic (PEAK and I don’t even ship those two, that’s how good it is) after sending the ask. Your stuff is just 👌😩

I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

According to some websites i found on google and probably not actually the most reliable, in Gozilla Eminem raps an average of 7.5 words per second. The maths you've done above is per line so i dont know how that would translate.

I guess my question is, could Eminem do it and do we think it's worth persuading him to learn old english?

Best question possible. (Also I didn't bother to reference it because i thought i was posting into the ether, but the original post is in reference to the invention of the Beowulf speedrun on THIS post).

So Old English poetry has a fairly standard (though not set) number of syllables per line, which would be a better number to use to compare with the fastest known rappers (I checked around after seeing this and inevitably found a Reddit thread debating this question, but Eminem and Twista seem to be at the top).

In 2012 the Chicago Tribune was still reporting Twista as the holder of the world record (set in 1992), and I get the impression Eminem broke it, but I’m not entering the Eminem vs Twista debate here. What I need is a comparable rate, and Twista’s record is counted by syllable, not word, so his is easier to calculate. (Thank you Twista).

I can’t access the Tribune article, but it’s cited on Wikipedia, so I’m hoping the wiki text isn’t bullshitting:

So not looking at his peak burst as this is a marathon, he’s doing uhhh is this math right? He’s doing 10.87 syllables a second, holy shit.

So Old English poetry is structured in such a way where, while a poet didn’t have to count syllables, they did tend to end up with a fairly standard number of syllables per line (and a lot of alliteration). The beginning of Beowulf looks like this, for example:

You can see how the lines are pretty equal (the gaps in the middle of each line are added by editors because half-lines are important, you don’t have to worry about that) (Actually the lines are also decided by editors and no one agrees but that’s not a scop’s problem 💜).

The first line, for example, is 10 syllables : hwæt we Gardena in geardagum

*a lot of Gs are pronounced like y in OE, so that final word is more like yeh-ar-day-um.

The second has 9, the third 11. I should say I’m not sure about syllable counting in some lines, because vowel pronunciation rules vs stressed syllables rules are beyond me, having literally never been relevant to me until I needed to know how fast Twista (or Eminem) could rap Beowulf. Scops would be ashamed to be seen with me.

But for science’s sake let’s say there’s a range of of 9-13 syllables per line. Some paper I just found that I’m not totally sold on as a source but nevertheless seems to have done some math says the average is 9 syllables a line, roughly, though the range is from 6-18 and the most common single number is 10. Let’s go with that for now.

So, Twista can rap 10.87 syllables a second: more than an average line of Beowulf per second. But the copy of Beowulf we have is, as established, 3,182 lines long. Even just assuming an average of 9 syllables a line, that puts you at approximately 28,638 syllables. However, Twista can go at a rate of 652.36 syllables a minute.

Conclusion: if my math is right (please check my math) and if he could keep that pace up, Twista could rap the entirety of Beowulf in 43 minutes and 54 seconds. Presumably Eminem could do similar.

Thanks great question 👍

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