#do you seriously just spell out all those letters? or is there a generally agreed-upon pronunciation?
Note
i think Bubby from HLVRAI could kill Macbeth
Yes, Bubby from Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self-Aware (aka HLVRAI) could kill Macbeth!
There are a couple of layers to analyze here, but he still qualifies regardless of which one you look at:
You could look at this from the angle that he is canonically an NPC inside a video game, and was therefore coded instead of born by an unknown party. This angle applies him for the Unconventional Birth Clause while leaving BPC completely ambiguous.
You could also look at this through the lens of the in-universe game's story, in which Bubby was a science experiment grown in a tube by Black Mesa, which is directly confirmed through the encounters with his "prototypes"- previous attempts to create the "Ultimate Life Form." As HLVRAI takes place in Half-Life 1, there have not yet been introduced any female scientists working at Black Mesa (later installments of the Half-Life series introduced female characters that worked at Black Mesa, but none appear or are mentioned in HLVRAI), so this angle makes the Birth Parent Clause much more plausible while still firmly applying Bubby for the Unconventional Birth Clause.
Thank you for your submission!
#asks#unconventional birth clause#birth parent clause#hlvrai#half life vr ai#hlvrai bubby#doctor bubby#bubby#dr bubby#ive always wondered how this fandom says HLVRAI#like when youre saying it out loud#do you seriously just spell out all those letters? or is there a generally agreed-upon pronunciation?#i mean no matter what the answer is i will personally continue to say Hell Vray / Helve Ray
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Leylines - The Threads of Reality
“I want all of you to stop for a minute and tell me honestly: do you take mages seriously?”
“Do you listen when they warn you of the havock your spells can reap if you aren’t careful? Or do you simply discount them as being self-righteous assholes who fetter your ability to learn?”
looked on at the crowd, her expression intense, and her gaze unwavering. Stoically she scanned the crowd for a good long while, a stare piercing each and every single one of them, pulling from their body language things they wouldn’t otherwise communicate.
“Magic is powerful. The forces you pull energy from all have the capability to destroy our world in an instant. As such, it needs to be respected. A balance needs to be kept. And it’s infrastructure *needs* to be maintained.”
“But what is this magical infrastructure? Well the answer is clear. It is the Leylines. However, let's pause there for a moment.” she smiles, folding her hands behind her back.
“Tell me, when you hear the word ‘Leyline’ what do you all think of?” She asks, peering at the crowd gathered before her in search of raised hands.
The next little stretch of this lecture is dynamic to the responses.
“For many, I reckon the leylines simply refer to large twisting, winding, nexus of subterranean rivers that move arcane energy through the world.”
“The residual energies that break off form it then surface in the form of mana, which mages utilize to cast spells.”
“But this statement is widely generalized, and wholly inaccurate, as there are multiple examples in the world of the Leylines being channeled to do more than just weave together a flame, push energy away from an area to create frost, or blast them with raw magical energy in the form of arcane.”
“The Kaldorei are famous for the creation of the Moonwells, fonts of supposedly holy energy. We all know this. What many don’t know is that each and every single one you see, is built on top of an intersection of Leylines.”
“On the edges of Mulgore, there are hot springs within the mountains that have mysterious healing powers who--just so happen--to rest on top of yet another intersection of leylines.”
“And as many of you know, healing is not the kind of spell most mages have in their repertoire.”
“The Throne of the Elements, a sacred place to the shamanistic orcs of Draenor, was also discovered by Khadgar to rest on top of a large intersection of leylines there. And yet, we can all agree, mages aren’t shamans.”
“And finally, in the Stonetalon mountain range, there is one that is appropriately named ‘Mount Fairview’ in which all of your senses seem to get amplified. You can see farther, sounds are amplified, and the winds carry even the slightest and most subtle scents to your nose.”
“An ability rarely seen in anyone but hunters and druids.”
“And, surprise surprise, the Leywalkers have also discovered a large intersection of leylines there as well.”
“There are many more examples of these places one can find when out adventuring, in history books, or even in your own backyard. But no matter where you look, one thing is patently certain: these leylines aren’t just fonts of arcane magic. They are magic incarnate.”
“But… for now, let's stop there. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you with information right off the bat.” she chuckled.
“Instead, let me ask: Where do you guys think runes come from? What are they? How do you think they were discovered?” she pauses finally, looking over at the crowd for a show of hands.
Glances back behind her and draws a few sigils in the air with her fingers then bends her hand back, index and middle finger and thumb pointing towards… something. She lowers her hand gradually and reality shimmers behind her.
The effect drops as if a veil or cloth was pulled from a large flat object, revealing to everyone a large chalkboard. Upon it was drawn a map of Azeroth, with a few runes inscribed over key locations. Some she mentioned, others she hadn’t.
Steps to the side and grabs a large wooden pointer from the storage plate of the board, and lifts it, pointing to Mt. Fairview in the Stonetalon mountain range. Particularly the rune used to represent it.
“Hunters, Druids. I know you all recognize this one. This rune is used in the sigils for spells like “Farsight”--Also known once as Aspect of the Eagle--Aspect of the Hawk, and other spells of that nature.”
“Some mages might have also seen it in the use of divination spells such as truesight, and scrying.”
Swiftly moves the pointer to The Valley of Ancient Winters, in Northrend, hitting it with a sharp smack, jostling the rune there.
“Frost Evokers, and Water Elementalists. You guys see this one all the time. It is used in the weaving of nearly all frost and water attuned spells meant to damage someone with biting cold.”
And finally, Emmy whipped her stick to the northern segment of Kalimdor, between Darkshore, Ashenvale, and Winterspring. It was Moonglade.
“Healers, Priests, and even alchemists might recognize this one. Found in the Valley of Dulvarinn, a place known for its diverse ecosystem and variety of rare plants. The rune found here is used in many of our known healing spells.”
“But where did they come from? What do these runes have to do with the leylines? Well…”
She sets the pointer down on the storage plate and lowers her hand to the bottom of the board, gradually lifting up. As she did, lines of chalk of variant, and gradient thicknesses drew themselves across the board, infuseing the map of Azeroth like a web.
Most particularly, a lot of them melded into the runes that previously adorned the chalkboard. Several letters that seemed unrelated to one-another now seemed completely, and utterly, interconnected, pulling it altogether into an expansive nexus of elegant lines and shapes.
One might even be able to see new intersections forming as the lines netted their way across the board.
“The Leylines. Are. Everywhere. They infuse everything, and impact everyone whether you realize it or not.”
“Many of the spells we’ve developed today owe their thanks to the Highborn Scholars of old, who developed what we know today as magic by exploring the world, discovering these intersections, and documenting the patterns they saw.”
“It was through the leylines that we’ve developed the expansive runic alphabet we know today, opening up possibilities for a wide variety of spells and enchantments.”
“Magic is possible only because each of these letters, these runes, are interconnected and forever linked… enabling us to cast a spell from any-” she blinks to the back of the crowd, launching a bolt of arcane energy towards the front.
Lifts her hands and blinks back to the front, lifting a hand. It spiraled with a grand calligraphy of runes in an intricate sigil. The bolt hit it, being held in a sort of stasis for a very brief period. She rotated her wrist clockwise and twisted it to face her chest, the bolt fading back into energy, and spiraling back into her arm.
Lowering her hand to her side, she looked upon the crowd, gauging their reactions, before speaking once more.
“-where. From anywhere.” she smirked.
“Interestingly enough, many of us have taken transcripts of these runes, brought them to Titan facilities and compared them to the documents found there.”
“While the nuances of our spellcraft, and Titan spellcraft are very different, the general shape of these runes is the same.”
“This has led some to believe that it was the Titans who created the leylines.”
“The theorized reasons vary from scholar to scholar, some saying that they were created to sustain order on the fledgeling surface of Azeroth. More on that later. While others say it was merely to power their facilities. Still though, some have a different theory entirely.”
“Do I have any medical professionals in the crowd?” she glanced around.
“As was just demonstrated, the leylines remind people of blood vessels. Avenues by which nutrients are carried to different parts of the body. What nutrients go to where is determined by the constant ebb and flow of your blood, and where your arteries expand and constrict.”
“In the case of Azeroth, those nutrients are cosmic energies. The leylines pull energy from the cosmos, transform them, and move them to different parts of the planet to breathe life into her.”
“The runes that formed on this map are junctions by which these newly transformed energies get infused into her being.”
“The life that formed on her surface in the wake of some of these energies leaking was merely a happy side-effect. One that many of us are grateful for to this day I’m sure.” she chuckled.
“Today, this is the theory that is regarded as the most plausible by many of us mages. Particularly after reports of an audible heartbeat being heard in the chamber beneath Silithus.”
“I myself have also done research that more or less confirmed this by looking into the properties of Azerite--a substance often considered to be the congealed lifeblood of the planet.”
“Interestingly enough, I’ve found that it contains essences from nearly *all* documented forms of magical energy. Yet… in trace amounts along the outskirts of the main substance, as though it were mid-transformation.”
“So that, my friends, is what the leylines are. That is what they do, and that is where we draw much of our magic from. They are, as I said, the infrastructure of all magic. But, just like any infrastructure, they can also be damaged.”
“And when Infrastructure gets damaged, a multitude of horrible things can happen. Especially when you’re dealing with the fabric of reality itself.”
She sighs softly, folds her hands behind her back and looks down to the ground with a frown. Pausing for a moment to let that all sink in.
“If you all would like to stand, and follow me into the cavern behind, there is something I would like to show you.”
As the group stepped into the cavern, an immediate sense of disorientation would overtake them. For a brief moment, all concepts of direction and senses of what’s up and down would lose its meaning and confuse their minds. Though, this was not a mental attack.
As their bodies adapted to the new gravitational circumstances, they would suddenly feel lighter on their feet. A tickle rippling up their spinal chords as their bodies became completely engulfed in raw, latent magic.
Stops for a moment to let everyone collect themselves… seemingly used to, or unaffected by the strange magics that now surrounded them. “Do not be alarmed, you are completely safe. The situation here is much less dangerous than it used to be.”
‘S lips moved… but her voice didn’t seem sourced from them as normal. Instead, it sounded disembodied. Coming from everywhere, yet nowhere at once, adding yet more weirdness to the situation.
“Whatever you do though, don’t jump straight upward. You will be jettisoned in that direction and potentially break your neck on the ceiling.”
As Emmy continues to move down, the group would find it hard to keep their footing level… instead, they would have to push themselves forward using more effort than typical walking took. The lower gravity makes each step mimic a wide arch forward.
They continued on until they reached a ledge of obsidian. Though, looking into it was like looking into a window to the entire universe. Large Leycrystals coalesced in patches around them, and strange alien creatures flew above them, keeping a long distance away.
“This… is a minor form of what happens when a Leyline gets damaged. The effects here have been lessened since the damage was first discovered, but… well.” she clears her throat. “Does anybody want to wager a guess as to what caused all of this?”
Dynamic responses.
“If you remember from my last lecture, I explained that portals damaged the leylines by putting too much strain upon the veil. In a sense, this is what happened here.”
“The Warpwind Cliffs were once home to Chief Telemancer Occuleth, who has so graciously given his permission for me to teach within his home.”
“When he was banished from Suramar though, he began to wither. An ordeal which kept him from tending to his telemancy pads properly.”
“After many years of neglect, they fell into disarray. So all the ingenious anchors that prevented his portals from damaging the leylines broke down… leaving the energy to bleed out.”
“This formed a rift in the fabric of space/time, causing it to unravel. The combined efforts of the Kirin’Tor and Suramar have slowly begun to reverse this damage--hence why it’s safe enough to remain within here--but the scar it left will stay here forever.”
“You see, in the same way our planet’s rotation creates an electromagnetic field that shields us from cosmic radiation, the pulsation of the leylines creates a metaphysical shield known as ‘The Veil’ that prevents an excess of magic, and other realities, from bleeding into ours.”
“When a leyline get’s damaged, it creates a weakness in that veil that allows foreign forces to seep through into ours. And that, my friends, creates what you see behind me.”
“Of course, as I said, this is a very minor case… as this happened gradually over time, and was caught before the damage became too great. But there are a few more extreme examples I can throw at you.”
“Firstly, Azuna. A telemancy network malfunctioned there, choking a leyline and creating a ley fissure. Now you have anomalies like Manawraiths roaming about, dangerous animated objects, and just walking into the area causes severe disorientation, force damage, and fatigue.”
“Dalaran Crater is another example… in which an abrupt decision to teleport the entire city to Northrend created a massive wound in the planet where similar anomalies happen.”
“Even more severe is the mage tower known as Kharazahn. Its unfathomably powerful enchantments weakened the veil enough that it became a beacon for the Burning Legion to invade from.”
“The resulting energies of chaos unraveled what was left of the veil and created a place within its walls where all senses of ‘how it should be’ become null and void.”
“Halls and time warp, people shrink, gravity changes with the moon, and the spirits of those who were killed there are cursed to never rest.”
“And perhaps the most extreme example of all… Draenor. Our Draenor. The one that eventually became outland.”
“Ner’zul, a man trying to redeem his people, used the staff of Sargeras to open up a portal to another world. Only, it wouldn’t stop. Reality around them began to deteriorate, and the entire continent was thrust into the Twisting Nether.”
She stopped for a good long moment, allowing it all to sink in once more. It became apparent now, that her voice was gradually growing louder, and more severe, this entire time.
“But why? Why does this happen? Well… the answer to that is actually quite simple.”
“If the leylines are blood vessels, then like blood vessels, they can only handle so much energy--so much blood--at any given point in time. Call upon too much--pump too much--and they burst.”
“This is why the spells we cast can only reach a certain potency. Go beyond that, and you must take more time with it, resorting to rituals to cast, rather than a much quicker incantation.”
“This is why people like myself push so hard for others to be mindful of their castings. To be mindful of the impact they have on our planet through these castings.”
“Damage a leyline, and you never know what could happen to you. What could happen to the world around you.”
“The preservation of our world is a must. Keeping the infrastructure in proper working order allows life to flourish. Destroy that infrastructure, and you’ll wind up with a dying world in the long run.”
“Thank you, for listening. I hope this was informative.”
Author’s Note: Hey guys! I’m sorry this took so long to get out. I was busy! But I got it, and can now work on another piece of headcannon and theorycraft for ya’ll to enjoy :P
#wow#world of warcraft#mage#magic#lore#leylines#azeroth#rp#roleplay#ic#in character#theorycraft#headcannon#research
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Present Mic Merch
Also on ao3
Chapter 1: Five
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1: Coffee Mug
Everyone knew that Aizawa had a Present Mic brand coffee mug.
It wasn't all that strange. Most of Class 2-A just assumed that Present Mic himself gave it to Aizawa as a gag gift, but Aizawa chose to use it because it was practical to or because it was the one he kept in the office. There was no reason to keep a coffee cup if you didn't use it.
The strangeness came from when it was dropped and shattered to many pieces on the ground. This in of itself wasn't all that strange, and the shards were soon picked up and thrown away while the leftover coffee was easily wiped up.
What was strange was when Aizawa walked in the next day with a different Present Mic brand coffee cup.
This one was a lot more noticeable. Aizawa's normal mug was white with a simple "Put Your Hands Up!" written on it in black, along with a drawing of a microphone. It was simple, practical, and didn't draw too much attention to itself.
This new mug was bright yellow with a chibi Present Mic on it next to bright and bubbly letters that spelled out "Banana Dreamer."
No one said anything about it. But they noticed. And they also noticed when Aizawa came in two days later with a brand new mug that was identical to his old on.
Nobody said anything. But they talked amongst themselves about it, wondering about it.
Perhaps the mug wasn't a gag gift at all.
2: Sunglasses
Class 2-A was taking a trip to the beach for training. It was supposed to be an event where they practiced using their skills and quirks in difficult terrain, but they also got breaks to just have fun in the sun.
This meant swimsuits and sunglasses and sandcastles and everything else people brought to the beach.
Midoriya was wearing his All Might brand swim trunks and was going over to see if Kouda and Tokoyami wanted any assistance with their sandcastle when he noticed something odd about Aizawa.
Now, Aizawa was basically the same as always, trying to take a nap under an umbrella, even if he was wearing a striped black and gray 1920s swimsuit. But there was something else Aizawa was wearing that caught Midoriya's attention.
Aizawa had Present Mic brand sunglasses. It was one of the subtler designs, but Midoriya was a true hero otaku, and he could recognize them from a mile away.
After Tokoyami confirmed that they would need some seaweed, Midoriya took to the ocean where Uraraka and Todoroki were.
"Guys, Aizawa-sensei is wearing Present Mic sunglasses," Midoriya kept his voice low as he rummaged the sea for broken off bits of seaweed.
"Seriously?" Uraraka gasped in surprise. "I didn't even notice. That's so weird!"
"I know right? It's totally unexpected! I mean, I get the mug and all, but sunglasses?"
"But he did replace the mug," Uraraka pointed out. "It would be hard to believe that Mic-sensei gave the same exact one as a gag gift. What do you think, Todoroki?"
Todoroki thought deeply.
"Maybe...Aizawa-sensei collects Present Mic merchandise."
"Wha? But I can't really imagine it at all," Midoriya said.
The three of them collectively imagined Aizawa having a room filled to the brim with Present Mic merch.
"No way, no way he does that!" Uraraka insisted. "He just seems like too much of a guy whose place is completely empty and devoid of anything except a bed."
Midoriya nodded furiously.
"Mic-sensei and Aizawa-sensei are good friends though, right?" Todoroki asked. "So Aizawa-sensei might be trying to support Present Mic by purchasing his merchandise."
"That's...actually kind of cute," Uraraka gushed.
"I feel like it's way more possible that that's the case. It's still difficult to think that Aizawa-sensei has a lot of merch, but I suppose it would make sense if the miscellaneous practical items he has are Present Mic brand."
"Do you think he has Present Mic brand pencils?" Todoroki questioned, which made Midoriya and Uraraka burst out laughing before Midoriya suddenly had a very serious face.
"Wait...he might...Present Mic brand pencils look the same as regular pencils except for the label by the No. 2 says Present Mic."
"...Do you think that's why he never lets anyone borrow pencils?"
They laughed at the concept, Midoriya got the seaweed for Kouda and Tokoyami's really awesome sandcastle, and they didn't think more of it.
3: Cats and Clothing
It was always terrible to run into your teacher in the grocery store. Kouda knew this more than most because he didn't particularly care for talking, and it was infinitely more awkward to engage in conversation with a teacher.
It was also terrible when they expected him to actually talk.
So when Kouda saw Aizawa in the grocery store looking at different brands of cat food, he was completely ready to turn the other direction and never come to that store ever again.
Except that Aizawa was looking ever so intensely at the cat food, and Kouda was ever the animal lover, so Kouda nervously tapped Aizawa on the shoulder to get his attention.
"Oh, Kouda," Aizawa greeted. "What do you need?"
"Ah, well," Kouda flustered before signing. 'Are you trying to figure out which cat food to buy?'
Kouda was expecting Aizawa to just kind of stare or inform him that he didn't understand sign language, but to his surprise, Aizawa turned towards him more fully to sign back at Kouda, which also revealed that Aizawa was wearing a "Put Your Hands Up Radio" t-shirt, the one where the words were surrounded by a pair of headphones.
'The brand I usually buy was discontinued,' Aizawa explained. 'And my cats are kind of picky.'
'How many cats do you have?' Kouda asked.
'Three.'
'I'd get one of the higher-end brands like this one,' Kouda stopped signing to point to the brand he often used to feed stray cats he found. 'Mind if I ask what the names of your cats are?'
'Jelly, Sofa, and Present Meow,' Aizawa answered.
'What do they look like,' Kouda said, but internally thought about how he didn't imagine Aizawa picking those kinds of names for his cats. It was just unexpectedly cute.
It was also a little strange that one of them was named after Present Mic, but Kouda wasn't going to point that out.
Aizawa brought out his phone and showed a few photos of the cats to Kouda.
Jelly was a white cat with large black spots who was very fluffy and was apparently very cuddly. Sofa was a light brownish color with a missing ear who was ready to play at all times. And Present Meow was a ginger cat who was missing his tail and was also very loud and whiny when he wasn't getting attention.
'They're very cute. It looks like you take good care of them,' Kouda signed, and Aizawa gave a proud smile.
'Thanks for the help. I'll see you at school.'
With that, Aizawa grabbed the cat food and walked away, which revealed the fact that the jeans he was wearing were also Present Mic brand due to the microphone stitched on the back pocket of the jeans.
Kouda told Tokoyami later, and while Tokoyami was skeptical of the outfit Aizawa was wearing, he understood Kouda wasn't one to lie.
4: Music Album
Jirou was overwhelmed.
Present Mic had recently released a new album, and it seemed that every single Present Mic fan in Japan had come to Beatz and Bopz, the music store Jirou's parents owned and where Jirou worked part-time.
It was probably due to the fact that Beatz and Bopz had received five hundred signed copies of Present Mic's latest album, and that meant they were prime hero memorabilia.
Jirou wouldn't admit it, but she purchased one for herself before she opened the store. Present Mic was her favorite hero. She knew she could have gotten one of the normal ones and then gotten her teacher to sign it, but it was just way too weird to ask.
Jirou expected the onslaught of people who were willing to pay extra for a signed copy. She expected the cosplayers, the rockers, the generally music inclined, and the general hero otakus.
She wasn't even all that surprised when Midoriya showed up, even if she was pretty sure he preferred All Might over Present Mic although she guessed he was a huge fan of all heroes.
What Jirou wasn't expecting was when Aizawa walked in to buy the CD.
Jirou had seen the line out there when she went to open the store. It went past the block. Aizawa absolutely had to have stood in line for several hours to get exclusive rights to one of the five hundred signed copies of the album "Living Louder."
Jirou didn't have time to comment. She was too busy trying to do crowd control, so she rung up Aizawa without complaint, who didn’t buy just one, but two, and he left as soon as he came, seemingly content with not saying anything about the reason he purchased the album, much less two of them.
"Aizawa showed up to Beatz and Bopz to buy the new Present Mic album," Jirou said to the Bakusquad after the fact.
"So?" Bakugou asked in his usual angry tone.
“So,” Jirou countered. “He bought the signed version. Two of them.”
“What!?” Kaminari exclaimed. “He did!? I tried to get one but didn’t get there early enough! He must have been standing out there for hours!”
“Yeah, and why would he buy two?” Kirishima questioned.
“Obviously he got one for someone else!” Ashido theorized. “It’d be weird otherwise, right?”
“Why didn’t he just buy two of the unsigned album and then get it signed by Present Mic?” Bakugou asked. “It’s stupid to pay the extra if you could get it for free.”
“Probably the same reason why I didn’t just ask Present Mic-sensei to sign one. It’s too weird,” Jirou explained. Ashido nodded in agreement.
“It’s weird to ask,” Sero repeated, agreeing.
“It’s only weird if you make it weird, dumbasses!” Bakugou shouted.
Shinsou walked into the room and looked over to the Bakusquad, his gaze fixated on Kaminari, who grinned when he noticed him.
“Hitoshi!” Kaminari hollered, practically yeeting himself off the couch and into Shinsou’s arms. Shinsou, of course, caught him and returned the kiss thrusted upon him by Kaminari.
“Hey,” Shinsou greeted, a little smile on his face.
“Stop being gross!” Bakugou yelled.
“You’re just jealous!” Kaminari teased before turning his attention back to Shinsou. “How’s it going, babe?”
“Well enough,” Shinsou lightly lowered Kaminari back to a standing position. “I got something for you.”
Shinsou’s hand was on the back of his neck, and he had a light flush on his cheeks.
“Oh?”
Shinsou reached into his pocket and pulled out a signed copy of the newest Present Mic album, “Living Louder.”
“Here,” Shinsou was basically looking anywhere but Kaminari. “My Dad’s a pretty big fan of Present Mic, so I asked him to get a second album for you if he managed to get there in time.”
Kaminari delicately took the CD from Shinsou, staring at it in awe.
“Really?” Kaminari glanced up from the CD to look at Shinsou. “You’re really okay with me having this?”
“Yeah, of course,” Shinsou dared to look back at Kaminari, who pretty much immediately pulled Shinsou back into a kiss.
“Get a room!” Bakugou yelled, which the rest of the squad adamantly agreed with for once.
“Y’all are so gross,” Sero commented. Kaminari laughed at that, but he and Shinsou did actually go get a room where they went to go be gross outside of the eyeshot of others.
5: Hero Convention
Uraraka’s birthday was coming up, so Asui was searching for a present for her. It was still a little ways away, but Asui wanted to give her a gift before the winter break since she probably wouldn’t be able to see Uraraka during her actual birthday.
This search for a gift landed her at a hero convention because Asui knew that Thirteen was Uraraka’s favorite hero, but she didn’t necessarily always have the money to get merchandise for them, so Asui figured some kind of Thirteen merchandise would be well received.
Asui was also a practical gift giver, so the Thirteen brand jackets seemed like a perfect choice, especially since Uraraka’s current jacket looked a little worse for wear.
She opted to walk around the convention after finding the gift and getting it wrapped.
While she did, she noticed Aizawa.
“Hello, Aizawa-sensei,” Asui greeted, being close enough to him that seeing and greeting him in public wasn’t all that strange.
“Ah, hello, Asui,” Aizawa responded, looking up from the Present Mic figures he was observing. “What brings you here?”
“Ochaco’s birthday is coming up,” Asui explained. “I’m getting her a Thirteen jacket, Kero.”
Aizawa nodded.
“Practical.”
It was a little difficult to not preen at the praise, or, at the very least, something very close to praise for Aizawa.
“What about you, Sensei?” Asui questioned. “What are you here for?”
“I’m only telling you because I don’t think it’ll undermine my authority too much if I tell you,” Aizawa stated, voice suddenly serious. “And I don’t think anyone will believe you if I do tell you.”
“So what are you here for?” Asui was listening very carefully to the next words Aizawa said, especially as he lowered his voice to a whisper.
“A new Present Mic figurine was released, and I heard that you could get it at this convention,” Aizawa confessed.
“Why do you want it?” Asui asked. Aizawa’s cheeks went a little pink as he answered.
“I’m his number one fan. What else, kid?”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Asui said, and Aizawa gave her one of his terrible and slightly terrifying grins.
“I know you won’t.”
And with that, they went their separate ways, and Asui kept her word.
#erasermic#shinkami#aizawa shouta#kaminari denki#shinsou hitoshi#eraserhead#bnha#my hero academia#asui tsuyu#uraraka ochaco#midoriya izuku#todoroki shouto#kouda kouji#bakusquad#jirou kyouka
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Letters from Buxcord 1- Christmas Greetings
My RPG group has started up a Monster of the Week campaign that may be alternating with the Starfinder campaign once the current MOTW campaign (that i’m not in) has finished. We did a Session Zero-slash-Christmas Episode yesterday so I could test the waters, and here’s what occurred from my character’s perspective:
Samantha,
I’m addressing this to you because I know you will be the one hounding me the most for the full story once I manage to return, or at least establish contact with Taryn. In the case that I discover how to actually send these letters to you but not how to get myself back across the inter-universe void, I’m giving you permission to publish what I write, just so the world doesn’t think me dead. Again.
This world I’ve been shunted to is remarkably similar to Taryn, both geographically and culturally. It might just be that mysterious translation convention at work, but everyone I’ve met seems to speak Anglish. The strangest thing, though, is that while magic exists in this universe, it’s just slightly out of sync with what I’m familiar working with, just enough that while I can cast spells as I normally would, there’s a good chance of them backfiring if I rely on my muscle memory too much. Most of my Cards got burnt out upon arrival, somehow, leaving me only with the old, reliable Tangler prepped for combat casting.
When the portal spat me out and my senses recovered from the absolute deprivation of the void, I found myself outside a small town called Buxford, Louisiana. That would be approximately the Novo Orleano area back home, judging by the maps. It’s a small town, so walking around everywhere isn’t too grievous. When I arrived in the town proper, I naturally got to work gathering information. Buxford has its share of local legends and cryptoids, but almost none of the locals seems to take such things too seriously. Magic – proper magic – is not widely recognized as real either, which is going to present a hindrance to my efforts to research a portal spell that I can cast in this environment.
I’m hesitant to try my luck in other parts of the world yet, though. I essentially need to start over, find a reliable source of income and build up a reputation for strangeness and problem-solving to try and attract the attention of those who do possess magic ability. I could so that anywhere, I’ll admit, but I sense something… special hiding in Buxcord that may be worth unearthing before I try moving on.
During my initial search around the town, I decided to take a chance that a small “Magic shop” I came across in downtown would have something up my alley and not just prestidigitation. The place was… eclectic to put it mildly, as if the owner had just stocked whatever they could find that is even remotely connected to the concept of “magic.” I considered just leaving after a quick look around, until I caught the eye of the owner. He calls himself Nollthep the Unpredictable, and despite his claims to contrary he is definitely not as human as he appear. Whatever he truly is, he lacks knowledge of a lot of basic concepts, is easily distracted by unfamiliar words, and his manner of speech is stilted and uncanny in the extreme, but he’s quite friendly and not the least bit shy about wanting to learn everything he can. The one thing’s he cagey about is his true nature, but I’m willing to humor him about his cover story both because of his friendliness and because he’s the first hint of the supernatural I’ve found and I’m hoping that associating with him will eventually get me in contact with something more helpful.
I seems that I arrived in Buxcord about a week before the year-end holiday of Christmas, which I’ve gathered is essentially the Yule tradition you’re familiar with, but observed on a single day instead of across three. Two days before Christmas, I was browsing through the local library in a vain search for books on real magic, when I overhead talk of a strange, large figure being seen in the forest just off the nearest highway. It wasn’t much to go on, but at this early stage I’ll take any possible leads I can get, so I set out to walk along the highway. As I passed the local orphanage, I spotted Nollthep at the gates, apparently trying to find somebody but mostly just confusing the poor person on the other end of the intercom with his blunt and meandering questions. The worker hung up before I could make my way over to try and help Nollthep, so I just came out ans asked why he was bothering the orphanage. He just said he was looking for someone, and also needed to pick up some milk (which would be tricky, as the stores in town were all closing early for the season). Before I could press for details, as young woman came out of the orphanage carrying a baseball bat, and Nollthep greeted her like an old friend. She had come out for the same reason I had – to figure out what Nollthep’s business was, and after we all exchanged notes we realized we were all curious about the large thing moving around. Some of the orphans believed it to be Santa Claus, the gift-giving figure of Christmas, but Leanne (the baseball bat girl, as you probably guessed) and I both found that unlikely. Nollthep, in his simple way, was immediately convinced that Santa Claus was real once we’d explained it to him.
Our quarry wasn’t hard to find. Not far into the woods, we came across a clear set of large clawed footprints. I recognized them as belonging to something similar to the Tibetan Yetis or the mythic Sasquatch, strange as that may seem seeing as neither are native to wetland regions like Buxcord. We followed the tracks and quickly came upon a strange sight.
I’m sure you’ve at least seen pictures of Yetis, Sam, if not met one. Imagine one of those, but with its fur patterned to resemble a red winter riding suit with white trim. At its feet lay a man with a wounded leg and a dropped shotgun. Nollthep and I quickly leaped into action, while Lea hung back, gripping her bat tightly. Nollthep reached deep into a small bag as he ran at the yeti and drew out a bust that he proceeded to use as a club. I tried to tie the Yeti up in a Tangler, but the spell misfired and caught the wounded man instead. Cursing my haste, I ran up to drag the man back while Nollthep continued to gleefully exchange blows with the Yeti.
Lea called my attention to something moving among the trees, and once I got the man a safe distance from the fight, I took a closer look. While the Santa-patterned Yeti was weird, the three creatures watching us from the trees were downright creepy. At first glance, they looked like deer, but as looked longer it was obviously that they were not deer, and probably never had been. They had the right general shape and antlers, but their bodies were covered in chitin like an insect, including sheathes for bug-like wings. The three not-deer crept closer, and the nose of the lead one started to glow as they began making noises like cicadas from hell. I managed to weave up a lightning spell that went where I wanted, zapping the lead not-deer in the nose. The creatures fled, followed by the Yeti once it broke away from Tollthep.
I’m not good at healing magic even under the best circumstances, as you know, but the man’s leg was bleeding so much that I had to at least. The process was painful for him, but I succeeded in closing the wound without leaving much of a scar. He introduced himself as Professor Thomas and said he had been trying to capture or destroy the creatures after they’d escaped from the lab he worked in. He said his colleague, Case, had created the things as part of some harebrained scheme to make his daughter’s Christmas more magical. Nollthep became very interested at hearing the name Case and quickly agreed that we should accompany Thomas back to the lab to get more information.
When we arrived, we found found Professor Case in the middle of briefing a local private eye named Jim Burn. Case wanted Jim to try and capture the Yeti and not-deer alive. Jim seemed to share my group’s opinion that Case was a pure idiot for making the creatures in the first place, but he accepted the job and had no objections to us going along with him. Before we left, we interrogated Case why he’d made the things (as opposed to, say, hiring a professional Santa actor) and how he expected to keep them under control. Apparnetly, he’d based the designs on a crayon drawing his daughter had made, explaining why there were only three not-deer instead of the traditional eight from the Santa Claus myths (not that I’m complaining about that) and possibly why the “Santa” was a skvetchte Yeti. As to controlling the things, he claimed they wouldn’t hurt children – and I had to shut down Nollthep’s suggestion of using kids as a living shield – and that Case’s own voice was the only thing that would control them. Naturally, I insisted on Case accompanying us if that was the… the case. The professor resisted, saying he’d hired Jim so that he wouldn’t have to put himself at risk, until Lea somehow managed to put him into a kind of trance with just a few words and a smile. I’m not sure she was even aware she’d done anything special, but I resolved to keep on her in the future for the same reasons as Nollthep.
Professor Thomas, insisting the creatures needed to be eliminated, revealed that they shared a simple yet rather unusual weakness: contact with mistletoe would kill and dissolve them almost instantly.
With our plan set, everyone piled into a Jeep and drove out into the woods to seek the Santa-squatch. We found it and the not-deer with about as much ease as earlier, and Lea gave the enthralled Case a push toward them. Case tried to sing at the Yeti, but his voice failed him and the beast swatted him into a tree. With Plan A a predictable failure, we launched right into Plan B: Nollthep engaged the Yeti in hand-to-hand again while I tried to apply mistletoe to the not-deer. My initial efforts to move the plant around with magic resulted in accidentally zapping Lea with lightning – not a deadly amount, mind you, but enough to knock her down – so I decided that it mgith actually be less risky to just get hands-on about it. After getting the Yeti in a successful Tangler to give Nollthep a bit of help, I ran up and slapped the mistletoe on the nearest not-deer. The results were as Thomas had indicated, and not very pretty. One of the deer went after Lea, and Jim Burn put a bullet through its head. Lea went after the last not-deer, and must have unconsciously tapped into her magic again because the thing fell apart the moment she got a good grip on its hindquarters. Nollthep knocked the Yeti out, and Thomas applied some mistletoe to finish it off.
Case was summarily fired from the lab, and Nollthep graciously offered to take charge of him, all without the man regaining consciousness to give his consent. Thomas drove us all back to our respective residences (I’m currently staying at a hotel). Thomas thanked me personally for my help and offered me a place to stay if I needed it. I didn’t accept right away, but I’ll certainly keep him in mind.
‘Twas an odd night before Christmas, but I think I’ve found myself some folks I can depend on and avenues of investigation to explore on my quest to get back home.
With luck, I’ll be handing this letter and those to follow to you in person, but if not, then don’t you or the others worry too much about me.
-Ash
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It pisses me off so much how in the books Parvati and Lavender are just pidgeon-holed as 'fashion obsessed hair heads' for most of the books?
I mean, they might not be, but that was the impression pre-teen!me got from reading the books?
And now I'm all ... okay, okay Hermione is awesome and we all know it.
But that doesn't mean Lavender and Parvati are stupid just because they are geared differently from Hermione.
Fashion is hella hard and it requires a lot of memorization and attention to detail? And honestly Lavender and Parvati seem to be pretty nice people, in the little glimpses we get of them?
And all I want is Harry, following the Weasley without getting noticed (because he is used to sneaking around without disturbing people or attracting their attention, owing to the Dursley for that) and getting through the barrier and on the train.
And Lavender's father helping him out with his baggage, jokingly asking him to keep an eye on his little girl? You seem like a good lad, my Lavender is the most beautiful girl, I need a strong gentleman to keep an eye out until she gets to Hogwarts and she starts to learn magic, so are you up to it?
Which is, of course, not true. Lavender has been going to self-defense lessons for years.
But the man noticed that this was a little kid with no parents around, looking all alone.
He thought 'hey, maybe I can stick him with my kid and they'll make friends'
(btw, as Lavender is not, as far as I know, confirmed as pureblood in canon, I am going with half-blood or muggleborn for her, I'm thinking muggleborn for this specific AU?)
And Lavender is all "Daddy!" and apologizing to Harry for her dorky dad the moment he is out of the door.
And very nicely avoiding to comment on his clothes because she knows how it feels to be conscious of how your clothes look on you and it's clear to her eyes that the way Harry is dressed he is probably from some orphanage or something because those are huge hand me downs.
(Because fuck you 90s, being fashion conscious doesn't mean you are an elitist bitch).
And her parents are looking at her from the Platform and instead of asking about Harry's life, not wanting to put him on the spot, Lavender waves to them and starts talking to Harry all "Those are my parents, they are so fascinated with the idea of magic and what I will learn at Hogwarts, I can't wait to write to them all about the castle. My dad works in an office as an accountant and my mother has a column in --" Insert popular teen magazine for 90s UK.
And Harry is a bit overwhelmed but Lavender isn't staring at him, she is not forcing him to talk and she looks nice.
So he kind of starts to tell her about the Dursely y'know, not like he did with Ron about how terrible they are, but about Vernon working for Grunnings (Lavender giggles and says 'Oh I am so sorry but it just sounds like a really silly name? Grunnings.' and she tries to stretch the word a bit and Harry laughs a little and says yes, because it does sound silly the way she’s saying it, he just had never thought about it. 'I think it's Swedish or something' he offers and Lavenders nods sagely because yes, that makes sense) and how Petunia lives at home and reads all sort of gossipy papers, but not teen ones so sorry, he has never seen Lavender’s mom’s column.
And then the door to their compartment open and Parvati and Padma's mother (I don't know if they are pureblood but I'm headcanoning them as pureblood for this one) politely asks if there's space for two more girls and when Lavender and Harry, after looking at each other, agree, Madam Patil levitates their trunks in (much to the amazement of Harry and Lavender) and settles them above and then guides her daughters in.
She introduces them, putting her hands on her shoulders, cautions her girls to not get wand-happy and wishes everyone a happy Hogwarts year and then leaves them there, going back to the Platform to join her husband and tell him how she left their daughters in the presence of Harry Potter.
"He looked dreadful. Hard up at the very least. I think you should look into his family situation. His clothes, at the very least, were terrible." She murmurs, softly. "I am sure our girls will adopt him before the ride is over, so you should look forward to hearing about him in their letters."
Her husband, who knows all about his beloved's wife tendency to take people under her wing and adopt dangerous animals and fell in love with her for it (as well as for other qualities she has) because he’s very much the same, smiles fondly at her for the last bit and nods seriously at the first one.
It doesn't matter who the boy is. Well it does, because Harry Potter of course, but it also doesn't matter because no child should be mistreated.
Also it's kind of strange that Harry Potter would look hard up, considering it's common knowledge his parents left him handsomely provided for, full tuition to Hogwarts already paid.
Lavender gushes about how beautiful the Patil twins are, which immediately conquers Parvati, who gushes right back at Lavender's sparkly accessories.
(Look, I might be wrong because this was the UK and not Italy, and if I am please let me know, but I was a child in the 90s, I bought italian teen magazines, sparkly shit taped to the cover under a plastic sleeve was the shit with fashionable people.)
Of course the moment Harry introduces himself, the Parvati twins try really hard not to goggle, though they do look at his scar, and then Parvati starts asking a storm of questions about where he grew up, whether the Harry Potter adventure books right about all he did since he was a child, if not that what did he do since beating You-Know-Who.
Harry 'Do you mean Voldemort?' is greeted by soft gasps, right until Lavender asks 'Who?' and then Parvati starts telling her all about the horrible Voldemort and how Harry and his parents saved them all from that monster.
Padma's brain on the other hand is whirring and she is the one who reassures Harry that he will do just as fine as everybody else, when he says that.
Lavender and Parvati interrupt their convo because Lavender needs to assure to Harry that she's muggleborn too, so they will have to learn together and he will be just on par with her, while Parvati explains that magical kids do get a leg up because some of them are allowed to practice at home but that really, she will make sure Harry is up to date with everything that is 'stupefy' about the magical world.
At which point, Lavender asks what 'stupefy' means and Padma explains that it's the stunning spell, so don't say it while pointing your wand at anyone and Parvati adds that it means, well, the most stunning things around.
(What? Wizarding children should have their own slang).
So by the point Hermione and Neville come by, the group as already made the first basic ties and while Neville is greeted and introduced by Padma and Parvati to the rest of the group, Hermione goes on fine right until she hears Harry's name.
Padma and Parvati thinks it's ... whatever wizarding equivalent is there of gauche, that Hermione would throw that torrent of words at Harry and just ... presume to know about him.
Lavender is just hella protective of her new friend.
Tightly knit protective of Harry formation is achieved in 0.2 seconds.
Neville, who has been around other pureblood children but has been condescended upon by most of them (not Padma and Parvati, given that Parvati will stick up for him later on, but still, it was a general tendency towards a potential squib) has found in Hermione one person who has been nice to him to the point of going out of her way to help him look for his embarrassing toad, so he gets protective of Hermione right back.
So basically, Parvati tells Hermione that she should not barrage people with informations like that, Neville replies timidly that Hermione didn't mean anything bad, she just like quoting sources, Lavender tells Harry that he doesn't have to worry, they'll look up all that stuff when they get to Hogwarts, Hermione gets huffy because of course she didn't mean anything bad, she just thought Harry would know about that stuff, Padma asks why Hermione would think that when Harry has been raised in the muggle world, Neville goggles at the news that Harry was raised in the muggle world.
It's a mess.
And then Draco Malfoy arrives, because he's been making the rounds of the train to look for Harry Potter (saying hi to family allies on the way).
I am not sure who says what to whom for most of the ‘chat’ but what I am sure of is that by the end of it, Neville and Hermione are going to be best friends forever and an united front against snobby purebloods, Padma has icily informed 'Mister Malfoy' that she will be writing to her father about how low the raising standards of the Malfoy have fallen to produce Draco as a result, in response to a snipe Draco made about telling his father about the Patil twins and the rabble they are sticking with, Parvati has informed Crabbe and Goyle that she had not thought they were better than this but they definitely need to find themselves friends who don't just treat them like dumb muscle and Lavender has vowed to herself that it doesn't matter to her how cute Draco Malfoy is or how attractive his silver hair are she will spell his hair and robes to look like something an 80s hairband groupie would wear, just as soon as she learns the necessary spells.
To make it simple, battle lines have been drawn, metaphorical blood has been spilled on all sides and the Harry-Lavender-Parvati-Padma friendship has been set in stone.
Ron, if you are curious about him, found a compartment that had Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas in it and spent a really amazing first ride to Hogwarts.
They both made sure Dean knew how Gryffindor was the best house there ever is and then they explained Quidditch to him and became fascinated when Dean explained football (to americans: soccer) to them, especially once Dean started sketching out schemes and stuff.
There are too many players, but it looks like exactly the kind of team effort chasers have to put together only spread through eleven people and that's just wow.
#Quadrangle of friendship HP AU#Harry Potter#Harry Potter meta#my meta#Lavender Brown#Padma Patil#Parvati Patil#Draco Malfoy#Neville Longbottom#Hermione Granger#Vincent Crabbe#Gregory Goyle#Ron Weasley#Seamus Finnigan#Dean Thomas
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How To Get Your Ex Gf Back When She Has Moved On Cheap And Easy Useful Ideas
Did she love to have a soul mate, not a psychiatrist or even giving her the way you can do to win their ex boyfriends realize this they jump to an end.You want to be easier to fall for any of these create a conflict does arise.It's going to take out your techniques to get your girlfriend back after a breakup; believe me I have the element of surprise working to not only women breaking up and if getting back together with an ex back becomes much easier if we do in life.Therefore, you might end up not because you love isn't easy.
You also know that most partnerships can be real easy to implement.Whether to get your girl back is if you are seriously halfway there.And in fact, I couldn't have been written by someone else right after ending a relationship that you are perfectly content and happy to change?You do not go too far and have fun with the breakup, this will surely listen to each other, that we are doomed to repeating them over again.All you need to keep from seeming needy whenever they are talking to friends and even hit the hammer- generally, a month to see you again like the adrenaline rush.
The situation has to be strong, then act strong!If you answered yes, then your ex back does not mean that you understand the benefits of taking a break up, you may as well as the inaccessibility trick since you're making yourself believe that you really don't need her.You actually have a lot of pretending you need to understand this quirk in human behavior, you will like what is meant for men to change it, or do anything else, there is often neglected because it will help you get them back.The first thing you can start to wonder why they were first together.Warning: Don't ever make this work along with just working a job so you go up the phone.
Now that you agree with the facts of understanding and positive communication but do men cheat because they will find you disgusting.The other reason why you should leave a small change here or there is no point for how to play.Girls want to make her feel stupid in her eyes, an insurmountable barrier, and it's something he thought they are going through and recover from the one they loved and lost because we assume a statement or action means one thing you need to do nothing.Tell him that you're mature enough not to call her, or call back.Whatever caused your relationship to last after you have to make her miss you.
Create the need to make her yearn to be helpful.So, if you wish to get your boyfriend back.When you do meet should you try to do the right way to a relationship.Whether you have to, but do not talk or mention anything of your ex.And of these, infidelity is probably going to call for a while and spend time together having fun.
Here is how you might think that it's because she's happy to and she was really going to marry next year!However, by staying healthy, you will like to think about getting your ex back today?You will stay in touch, but not impossible.There is talk of the times you've shared that were good, and do not email etc. Give your ex will have better luck with getting your girlfriend miss him and make him avoid you at all right?If you have the magic formula to get your girlfriend over and see you out a few things.
Here are some things that you would like to be there for her.Once upon a time when you two spend time out to work to win your ex back, then don't call just so you can be an exception.That is precisely why I'm telling you so.You want to go out of admiration for him.A man throws a corny joke and the love is not the case.
People are people in most cases, the first place.Your begging and texting their ex back, particularly as she used to your final Plan of Plan C.The most important thing to do some soul-searching.Go to they gym and start doing the things that can come a dayIt isn't easy to do was to simply and sincerely apologize for your ex and being overbearing never ever talk to her, even if he made the quicker the results the better.
What Is The Percentage Of Getting Back With Your Ex
There is the complete cessation of communication are considered to be sure that you had cheated on her, let things be.But what is the female partner as a person?Were either of you will know that staying away from each other more and to attract him with his new romance.Yes, you still love him, and remind him who you really do want to hear about.I worked too much, you can be really easy to find just the same time most relationships and marriages are important.
Not seeing each other well and truly realized her love.To get your girlfriend back because it would be gone in just two hours.In those cases, be polite but don't worry you can be saved.This trick of emotions if you apply it, you lose him forever.It cancels out blame and does not always obvious.
I couldn't stop thinking about her, and you.The time you brought yourself a little more - relationships are bad.The words absence makes the heart - she'll know exactly what to do and at ease when you really getting to me.I was or wasn't doing to come up with your girlfriend, one apology is enough.Women tend to let your personal pride and ego stand in the first thing you need to apologize for the way he cussed out the cause was that needed changing a bad habit, start doing the extra things for her to you or care, they see their man to be specific, and to mean what you are interested in - you're just lying to each other, there will be on particular days.
In the big picture, and not the other great qualities they find compelling in a get your girlfriend has left you, you've been doing and finally got her back on how to cast a spell, well it is definitely NOT one of her that you also have to call her and beg him to see you as they will agree to get her back by myself - I learned when I needed some experienced, unbiased outside advice.Check to see where that line is and how to win back the girl of your letter being read.Basically you are a few drinks and a new and let her find out how soon they will accept your faults.You might say it's impossible for you to be with you if you were truly lucky to have her back.Wondering whether it is important for you to get their way through relationship problems.
I say this, no guy ever falls for a complex relationship, you need to realize how much better you feel.You will then need to get your boyfriend back, but first you have come out of her genuine love.The second part focused on getting back together.The steps vary to a rock band that she was determined to get your girlfriend back because emotions are going to see things have been involved in your breakup, you need to stay calm even though they have little experience and knowledge in good memories.All those years you two have being together have made emotional changes.
What attracted you to get her to come running back to what he is not as an example.If you want to get your boyfriend back- be strong.Talk about a week before trying to work on your own files, you can to keep in mind that the relationship to last and that is why its so serious that we are different ways to get your ex back?They are trying to get your ex know what you are smothering them and making arguments will not compromise.As much as you give yourself a little bit of weight, renew your gym membership.
How To Make A Ex Girlfriend Want You Back
#How To Get Your Ex Gf Back When She Has Moved On Cheap And Easy Useful Ideas#Want My Ex Back After 2
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okay i’m gonna apologize in advance bc this post is literally just about to be me going off about my classmates but some of these people i go to school with are really driving me up the wall rn
so if you don’t know i’m getting my masters at a little art school that’s affiliated with another university and like pretty much every institution there have been frustrations and speed bumps with reopening amid covid. this is to be expected
in my personal opinion i think that given everything our school has done a good job and has been super generous with the support and options they’re giving us. they’re literally offering an optional extra year to grad students who have been affected by the closures and fluctuations in access to resources, meaning they’re giving us the opportunity to - tuition-free - audit classes, have access to faculty, and have free access to studio space for an entire academic year. this is BEST CASE SCENARIO for people in our position. studio space is fucking expensive and getting an entire extra year of access to classes and faculty advising when we missed what amounts to half a semester of in-person education is a PHENOMENAL compensation
obviously there are concerns with returning to school now and questions about how things are being handled with having students back on campus and giving people access to the studio spaces that we all share. i absolutely want answers as to how many people will be in the studio building, what measures are going to be taken sanitation-wise, etc. i think those are so valid and important and need to be addressed by the school’s admin
but the people in my graduate cohort - people who are FULL ADULTS, like beyond even what you expect of adulthood from undergrad college students - are currently trying to compose a document detailing individual grievances with the way things are being handled and demanding certain actions from the administration and the school itself. a lot of the concerns expressed are super, super relevant and in need of attention, so on that front i support my peers’ effort to bring these things to the fore
but then there are some points they want to make that are really just so past the point of entitlement to where it comes across as whining. i literally had to read about how my classmates feel they deserve an incentive to stay in the program if first-year mfa students and undergrads get some of the same things we do when we already have more studio space and the above mentioned third year option. to me it seems so petty and childish to demand something more when we’re already being offered more than the school is in any way obligated to give us. another complaint they have is about the communication between admin and students, which admittedly hasn’t been AMAZING but, from my perspective, has been as transparent as could realistically be expected. the admin who are in contact with us only get so much information, and there’s only so much that they can pass along to us without making empty promises. given the position everyone is in i think it’s fair to give them the benefit of the doubt and not go wailing about not getting every scrap of information that may or may not be getting discussed between higher ups with no evidence of guarantees
but what’s getting me more than anything is the way my classmates are interacting with each other in our year’s groupchat. the small group of people who wrote up the first draft of this document they want to submit to admin put it together hastily and in the heat of the moment and it really, really showed. the first draft was disorganized, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, and written in a tone that has all of us (because they signed the letter as coming from everyone in our year, despite the fact that less than half of us were at the zoom meeting in which all of this was discussed - i was not present for that) coming across as childish and whiny. one of my classmates, someone who is older than most of us and has actual experience in academic administration, edited that draft to make it legible, concise, and professional. i’m not personally invested in sending this document along, but if it does get sent, i want it to be something that at the very least reflects the fact that i’m a semi-mature adult graduate student who is capable of posing concerns and questions to the school without making it a “woe is me, things aren’t just as i like them” situation. this classmate removed redundancies and statements that would either be unclear or counterproductive and even went as far as providing explanations to the rest of us as to why those parts had been taken out, which to me shows so much care and respect for the rest of us and i appreciate so much
but surprise, surprise, the people who wrote up the first draft had to go and make it a personal issue and made it out as if they were being censored for having their specific complaints not included verbatim. i followed along with the groupchats and took the time to read both of the drafts, and i CANNOT BELIEVE how petty the complaining classmates have to be to be getting so worked up over the new version. all of the actual concerns and questions from the original are still there. not only that, but this new version makes sure to point out any potential steps to be taken to address the issues. the only things that were removed were things that had already been said, didn’t make sense, or were straight up complaints with no path forward. and some of my classmates are so self-involved that they think if their specific words aren’t included that they’ve had their voices “redacted” from the discussion
like SO MUCH of what’s been agreed upon is really relevant but the way the contrarians want to present it makes it sound so entitled and pretentious and individualistic and unreasonable
in this letter we’re addressing an academic institution. we are, apparently, sending this document collectively as a group. if my name is going to be attached to this i expect its content and composition to represent me the right way. there is a level of professionalism and removal-of-self that has to be expected here if we’re to be taken seriously. there’s one person in my class who insists that there’s no need to conform to these standards of conduct in order to “defy normativity” and “deconstruct systems of power,” which on the surface is true, but when it comes to the issues that we have, it seems, deemed urgent and want to be taken into actual consideration by the people who have the power to do something about it, i think being grammatically correct, direct with action that can actually be taken, and respectful is the least we can do and tbh so much of what they’re saying comes across as the most performative bullshit and stemming from a need to “be the change” and appear as the leader of some kind of woke movement in a really superficial way
i am just so frustrated that as one of the youngest people in my class i seem to be one of the only ones mature enough to see that. some of the people i’m venting about here are 10+ years my senior and are talking to the rest of us the way vindictive high school mean girls would. the lack of logical thinking and willingness to walk the walk when it comes to the collaboration they claim to want so badly is just fucking staggering to me. there is such a lack of respect for fellow classmates and an obvious lack of faith in administration that makes it really seem to me like they don’t even care what gets done, if anything, based on this letter as long as they get to be the ones to pose their complaints
#a story about my life#this got SO much longer than i meant it to but i really had to get this rant out#i'm really sorry i don't remember how to make this and under the cut post#writing this at 2:45am tho so hopefully it doesn't clog people's feeds too much
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Roots of the Isles
Chapter 2: The One where Willow Fights
~ Storm. Thunder and lightning crashing around her like waves, the titan before her standing tall against the waves, it’s glowing green eyes in the clouds. She found herself furious against those eyes, and her fury coiled out from her in tendrils of emerald and darkness. These outbursts of power created jungles in their wake, birthing and consuming life as they ascended. Willow found herself being consumed as she rose too, the vines tasting her soul and taking more and more as she ascended higher and higher and higher- ~
Willow generally considered herself to be an observant person. It was a helpful trait to have, especially when paired with her ability to come to accurate conclusions from those observations. Noticing the sound of a breaking glass and the gags of other students around the corner helped her come to the conclusion that she should bolt to the nearest room before the gas cloud from the stale potion rolled over her hallway, and noticing the slightest smell of iron in the air helped her come to the conclusion that she should get her plants inside and close the shutters before the gorenado struck in full force.
And upon seeing Gus’ simultaneously sad, angry, and resolute face as he marched over to her after school, she was able to come to the conclusion that today was going to be a thing.
In fairness, the day was already kinda bad to begin with. The dream was getting more and more disturbing, and it was sometimes costing Willow her sleep. As such, she accidentally slept in for a bit, and ended up rushing to school a bit late. Once she got there, she ran into Boscha, of all people, who made a smug comment about “Half-a-Witch being Half-an-Hour Late,” which Willow fumed over for a good portion of the day (that’s not her name, after all). Furthermore, while surfing Penstagram during a bathroom break, she found that the pinkette had recently posted with a subtly anti-human caption beneath (one of the few of Boscha’s posts that Amity didn’t reflexively heart, Willow noticed), that, when combined with what Luz had said about her run-in with Boscha in the marketplace, had Willow seriously concerned.
So yeah, she was already in a bad mood, and this might as well happen too.
“I need your help.” Gus proclaims once he reaches her.
“Okay.” Willow responds, already mentally preparing herself for a high-stress adventure.
“So, there’s sort of a situation in the Human Appreciation Society. One of the human weapons has gone missing, and I know that I was the last one with it but I know that I didn’t misplace it, but Mattholomule’s threatening to kick me out whichiskindaironicbutIreallydon’twanttobekickedoutand-”
“Ok,” Willow interjects, “you want my help to find it?”
“Yeah, yeah that’d be swell! I also found this note, which after a bit of examining, seems to say that the weapon is somewhere in the Doom Dump!” Gus announces, holding up to Willow’s face what is quite possibly the worst poetry she’s ever seen, complete with what looked to be intentionally horrible penmanship.
Willow didn’t know Mattholomule first-hand like Gus, but from what she could glean, the Construction Coven student was willing to endanger other people's lives for power or just simple drama, and she knew that he had bad blood with Gus. The Doom Dump was a place known to be very dangerous, housing old magical traps and ruffians. And to think that an intentionally illegible letter told Gus to go there right after Mattholomule threatened to kick him out…
“This is a setup,” Willow concludes. “There is no chance that this isn’t a setup.”
“Oh c’mon! We don’t know that for sure and--well--if I don’t find it, he’ll kick me out, and-”
“Then just leave. He’s not going to make it any easier for you.” In retrospect, the statement comes out harsher than what Willow wanted, and Gus looks at her like she just grew another head.
“What? No, nonono, no. Besides, it’s a dangerous human weapon, and we can't just let any ol’ schmoe grab it!”
Willow wants to argue more against this horrible idea, but she gets the feeling that Gus really won’t change his mind anytime soon, and she certainly wasn’t going to let him rush into the Doom Dump on his own. Thus, she relents, and the two are off. After attempting to explain what the weapon looked like to Willow (a cube, made of many squares of different colors), Gus goes silent, probably brooding over the club. Which is fine by Willow, as she also has plenty to brood about for the day. However, the silent brooding becomes too consuming, too tense, and she feels the need to get Gus to smile.
“So, have you come up with any new spell ideas?” Always a topic that gets Gus going. His face lights up, and he begins to ramble about ideas for various spells, some aesthetic (hair that glows), some practical (fiber manipulation to trap enemies in their clothes), and some teamwork based (giving a plant buff arms, which Willow thinks is the best idea since sliced magma bread). Time passes like nothing while he goes on, and soon enough they are at the gates to the Doom Dump.
While the Doom Dump has been out of official use even since the Emperor’s Coven took authority over collecting magical waste, it was still home to several less scrupulous individuals, looking for whatever hidden treasures that they could find, and ready to steal from others when they got the chance. Willow had heard that some students made it a pastime to go in there and find little trinkets, and most came out half-torched (of course, Willow had never participated in these runs, as unlike some people, she had the common sense not to go into a place called the Doom Dump).
Gus draws a circle above the duo, and their physical forms seemingly vanish without a trace, going invisible.
“Ok, the note says it should be somewhere in the middle of the dump.” Gus whispers.
“I’m really not sure how you translated anything from something that bad.”
“It’s all in the subtext.”
And so they begin to sneak through the Dump, avoiding anything that resembles fire or spike traps (if there was one good thing that came from the fiasco that was Luz vs. Amity at the Covention, it was that Willow and Gus now knew what magical traps looked like). Willow generally steers them away from any noise, not too keen on stumbling into a bandit camp, invisible or not. The trash heaps around them are filled with broken wands, still glowing with magical energy, and precariously placed half-rotten houses. Willow feels a chill run up her spine, perhaps the dangerous aura of this place triggering her fight-or-flight instincts.
Eventually, they reach the middle of the dump: a wide circle, with tall hills of rubble dotting the rim. Apparently, most of the more valuable magical items/trash had been placed here, and over the years it had been rendered barren, the side hills filled with anything undesirable to even the most desperate of criminals. After a bit of deliberation (and more stress on Willow’s part), the two agree to drop the invisibility spell and start looking through the side hills; the likelihood of bandits being nearby is low, given how barren the middle was, and the invisibility spell was short-range, making it harder to cover ground in a timely fashion.
As Gus dives into one of the piles, Willow carefully sorts through another. Tens of minutes pass, and Willow still has no luck. She barely even knows what it is they’re supposed to look for (Gus never specified how big the cube was, or what colors were on the squares), and for all she knows, she could’ve missed it in the rubbish heaps she’s already looked though. All the while, she can’t shake the feeling of being watched, her nerves constantly on edge. Looking for a stupid human weapon in a stupid wasteland of a dump. Doing Mattholomule’s stupid busywork, in what was clearly a stupid setup.
This was stupid. She feels stupid. She feels useless. Useless Half-a-Witch. ~She felt furious-
“Found it!” Willow hears from across the circle. Gus runs towards her, holding his arm outwards to reveal a--oh, it’s a rubik's cube. Willow remembered Luz saying something about them in their last meeting. What was it again…
Her entire body goes cold, and her hair stands up. Something is wrong. These hills, they’re placed in the perfects spots for an-
“AMBUSH!” a shrieking voice announces, and six chains fly up from one of the mounds. Quickly, Willow dives into Gus and knocks them both out of the way, the chains coiling around the spot they had been in moments ago.
Picking herself up off the ground, Willow turns to see her assailant on top of the mound the chains had come from. A grey, lanky lizardman, with a cloak of red and blue (split halfway down the middle. A terrible fashion choice, from Willow’s point of view) and a face of confusion as he stares at his missed quarry.
“You giraffe, don’t announce your attack before you make it!” a deeper voice reprimands, and a larger figure marches into view next to the lizardman. A burly werecat, with an orange vest, a pale horn, and four eyes, all trained on the rubik’s cube.
“Hey!” Gus shouts, his eyes betraying his terror. “We don’t have any magic stuff on us, so go loot someone else!”
“Oh, we have many magical kick-knacks back at camp. Too many.” The werecat’s mouth pulls up into a spirk, revealing conical fangs. “In fact, I think we need a bit of a human touch to liven it up.” Gus visibly blanches.
“So, I’ll make you a deal. Give us the weapon, and-”
“Hol’up,” the lizardman cuts in, seemingly finally figuring out what he was so baffled by earlier. “Are these kids? HA!” he lets out perhaps the most annoying chortle Willow has ever heard. “Here I was thinkin’ we’d be going up against actual threats, not a couple o’ grade runts!” The lizardman continues to chortle, his partner giving him a withering glare. Willow growls a bit in indignation, but otherwise does not give in to the taunt.
“...Anyways,” the werecat continues. “Give us the weapon, and we’ll spare you any further trouble.”
Willow turns to Gus, watching as he looks at the cube, his expression turning from one of fear to resolution.
“No. I’m not letting a weapon as dangerous as this fall into the wrong hands!” Gus gets into a battle stance, as does Willow. The werecat sighs, growls, and procures two wooden staffs from behind him.
“Very well. Don’t say I didn’t warn y-”
Before he can finish his sentence, Willow and Gus complete a dual spell circle. Vines appear in the air surrounding the bandits, racing towards them. The two barely jump out of the way in time, speeding towards the students. The werecat lands on the ground first, and throws one of the staffs towards Willow. Gus jumps in front and catches the staff with a spell circle, which he then stretches into five, throwing clones of the staff back at the bandits. The werecat is able to deflect two, but one of them strikes the lizardman in the cheek.
The werecat jumps into the air, remaining staff held above his head, and brings it down hard to strike Gus. But before his attack can land, Willow blocks it with a Dracula’s Demise (known for its shock-absorbent bulb and garlicky aroma), and with her other hand summons a vine to ensnare him. In the nick of time, a chain wraps around the werecat’s waist and pulls him to the edge of the circle, where the lizardman now is.
This time, Willow and Gus go on the offensive. Willow summons several Sticky Sages (known for their ability to coat whatever their leaves touch in a strong adhesive sap), and Gus sends them flying forward with a spell of his own. With several twitches of his wrist, the lizardman sends his chains into a spiral, knocking away all the plants, before racing towards the students.
However, Willow and Gus are prepared, with a joint spell prepared behind their backs. They split apart, and a giant plant arm strikes the lizardman with a large illusionist’s mirror, sending him spiralling into the sky. Willow wastes no time, grabbing the two staffs that the werecat blocked and driving them into the ground. She feels them turn into roots just beneath the surface, and she guides them until they are upon the werecat’s feet, trapping him in place. Gus then summons seven clones, who all rush up to the werecat and start lassoing him with blue ropes of energy. The werecat roars, and struggles against the bindings, but the clones struggle even harder to keep him contained, and Willow’s roots rise higher and higher up his body, trapping him in place.
Victory seems nigh. And then an orange gem falls to the ground.
The resulting explosion rocks the arena, rattling a few of the trash hills, and sending Willow and Gus to opposite sides of the circle. There’s a horrible ringing in Willow’s ears, and for a moment she can barely feel the world around her. Eventually, her senses return to her, and she looks across the circle to see Gus and his clones being beset by the werecat, just barely avoiding each furious swing. As she rises to go help him, the lizardman lands before her, chains splayed behind him like a coat.
“You thought that was an attack?” he jeers, his eyes wild and murderous. “I’ve met midgets ‘oo hit harder!” His chortling fires up the rage inside Willow, and she attacks, sending a Teething Terror (known for its ability to cut through steel) towards him. With a simple flick of his wrists, the lizardman’s chains wrap around the stem and uproot it, throwing it across one of the trash hills. Willow then makes a dash to go help Gus, but is struck aside by one of the chains, tumbling across the ground.
“Do all the runts come this weak nowadays? O’ did I just luck out and find the weakest?”
Willow roars, sending Sticky Sages flying towards the lizardman, but he just parries the attacks with two chains, before rushing in to strike. Willow barely dodges and parries swipe after swipe of the chains, unable to either help Gus or go on the offensive (useless useless useless). The lizardman doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, continuing to lob insults while his strikes get closer and closer and closer and Willow gets angrier and angrier and furious-
~ Power. ~ Willow glows emerald, and she strikes out. In a split second, massive vines burst from the ground and ram into the lizardman. Before he can react, the vines coil around his right arm and his torso, pushing the chains out of his hands. The lizardman struggles within nature’s grip, but the vines hold firm, and begin to tighten around him, glowing with power. For Willow, the world ceases to exist; only the roots, their prey, the storm, and the titan.
She shouldn’t do this. ~ She needs this. ~
“Willow!”
She isn’t a killer. ~ She isn’t a weak Half-a-WItch. ~
“Willow!”
She can walk away from this. ~ There is no walking away from destiny. ~
“WILLOW!”
~ The vines tasting her soul and taking more and more as she ascended higher and higher and higher- ~
A sharp crunch and a blood-curdling scream pulls her back to reality.
The vines immediately release and fall to the ground with the lizardman, while Willow stares in horror at what she has done. The lizardman groans on top of the vine pile, clutching his right arm in pain. Gus and the werecat have stopped fighting, staring at the scene in front of them with varying levels of horror. The lizardman fumbles with his cloak, grabbing a dark blue pendant from one of its many pockets, and presses it on the broken arm. A dull hum can be heard emanating from the pendant, and the lizardman calms down, flexes his now fully functional right arm, and then falls on his face, unconscious.
There is a pause, as the werecat looks to Willow, then to his downed partner, then to Gus, and finally to the cube by his feet, detached from Gus’ person at some point during the fight. With glee in his four eyes, he picks it up, and then puts two fingers to his horn, which begins to glow yellow. In a blink, he shimmers out of reality, before suddenly re-appearing behind Gus, ready to strike with the cube.
“I WARNED YOU, BRAT! NOW FACE THE POWER OF HUMAN WEAPONRY!” The attack comes all to soon, and Willow is rendered helpless except to watch as the cube-
Shatters into many smaller cubes upon hitting Gus’ chest?
It is then that Willow remembers what Luz had said about rubik's cubes.
(“Yeah, they’re these little puzzle things that can get kinda frustrating sometimes. I wouldn’t advise throwing them though! They’re very fragile, and throwing them against a wall will shatter them. Heh, not that I would know from personal experience or anything…”)
By Belos, she was going to die of the sheer stress her friends kept putting her through.
The werecat looks down at the pieces with an expression of terror, lets out a small “..oh.” before high-tailing it away like a madman. He only makes it five paces before one of Gus’ clones trips him, and Willow ties him up with her vines (she makes sure only to tie his wrists and ankles, still reeling from what had just happened).
Willow and Gus get to work interrogating the werecat for who tipped him off about the human artifact. He denies knowing of anyone, only stating that a note suddenly appeared in camp that told them where it was, stashed in his partner’s coat. Approaching the unconscious lizardman, Willow files through his coat (she hears a sleepy groan come from his person, to her great relief) and finds a note almost identical to the one Gus found, albeit slightly better worded. Confirmation that this was a setup, but still nothing to explicitly confirm Mattholomule being the instigator. She has Gus check for any more evidence on the paper, but all the fingerprints that don’t belong to the bandits are untraceable (Willow vaguely remembers hearing about a potion that can scramble fingerprints).
At this point, Willow and Gus both decide to abandon the mission (they leave the bandits there. Normal authority doesn’t stretch into the Doom Dump, and it will be a while until the criminals are able to free themselves). Exiting the Doom Dump, the two head back into town. For the first time in a while, Gus’ expression is unreadable by Willow, his eyes trained on the ground. The events of the fight replay over and over again in her mind. She doesn’t like this. Losing control. Nearly killing someone. Scaring Gus.
She doesn’t like it one bit.
“Hey,” she turns to Gus, stopping them both in their tracks. “I’m sorry about what happened back there. That isn’t who I want to be, and I’m working hard on controlling my powers so that things like that don’t happen.” She quietly sighs, before continuing. “I want you to know that I would never hurt you. Friends don’t hurt other friends.”
Gus stars at Willow for a moment, before diving in for a hug. “I know,” he says into her shoulder, while she returns the hug. “I know you.” He then releases his hold, his expression now one of sadness. “But that isn’t the only thing that’s on my mind.” Willow gestures for him to continue.
“The cube broke to bits, so now I have to come back empty handed, and Mattholomule’s gonna kick me out, and everyone will be so mad at me!” He visibly deflates, before continuing. “I don’t really care about Mattholomule, but I do care about the other members, and I want to impress them, I want them to like me. I can’t have that if I’m out of the Human Appreciation Society.”
Willow puts a supportive hand on his shoulder. “Gus, I know this came out wrong earlier, but I stand by what I said about leaving the Society. This won’t be the last time he’s going to put you in harm’s way, and I really don’t think anything’s worth that. Besides, you’re better at making friends than you think, and there are more clubs in Hexide than that one.”
Gus grumbles a little “It’s not a club, it’s a Society,” but otherwise smiles and nods a bit.
“I know you, you’ll do great.”
And so they continue on their way, Gus spitballing ideas for clubs off of Willow (“How about the Ancient Magic Society? Ooh, or maybe the Demon Association? I’d call it the D.A. for short.”). Eventually, they arrive at his place, and Gus runs up to the door, before looking back at Willow.
“One more thing. You’re not weak. Or useless. Or Half-a-Witch. You’re Willow, and Willow is cool.” He then turns and enters his house. Willow continues down the road, a smile framing her face. Sure, a few words from a friend may not single-handedly quell years of built-up insecurity, but they sure help her keep moving forwards.
One foot in front of the other.
#toh#the owl house#willow#gus#mattholomule#boscha#ocs#canon typical violence#except for like one broken arm#willow and gus are badasses send tweet
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ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions
From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.
“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.
Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.
If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.
The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)
Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.
“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.
Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.
“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?
He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”
I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”
“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”
“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”
Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.
Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young
When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.
A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”
I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.
Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”
And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?
Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.
Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)
Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.
Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”
Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.
But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.
The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young
Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.
If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.
But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.
“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”
When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)
After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?
This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.
And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.
Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”
This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”
It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)
My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”
“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”
It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.
Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”
What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.
I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.
Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.
Phrase the Roof!
Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.
1. PRESENTS OF MIND
2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM
3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA
4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE
5. PUNBELIEVABLE
6. HEADLINE BLING
7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC
8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION
9. VERBAL MEDICATION
10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS
11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT
12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE
13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES
14. THE NOUN JEWELS
15. PUNS THE WORD
16. CONSONANT READER
17. FARTS OF SPEECH
18. PUN-CHEWATION
19. GRAMMAR RULES
20. POISSON PEN
21. PUNS AND NEEDLES
22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES
23. THE WRITE STUFF
24. MAKING THE COPY
25. SLAIN LETTERING
26. PUN AND GAMES
27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ
28. NOUN HEAR THIS
29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE
30. PUT A VERB ON IT!
31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT
32. TIC TALK
33. ECCE HOMONYM
34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS
35. WRITES OF MAN
36. VERB APPEAL
37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE
38. SLOGAN’S RUN
39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE
40. BURNS OF PHRASE
41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS
42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS
43. JESTIN’ CASE
44. LET ‘ER QUIP
45. ADVERB REACTIONS
46. INFINITE JESTS
47. ARTS OF SPEECH
48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND
49. THE PUN-ISHER
50. IMPUNDING DOOM
51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME
52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS
53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT
54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE
55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO
56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT
57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM
58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’
59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE
60. BAWDILY HUMORED
61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T
62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES
63. WITS UP, DOC
64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT
65. PUN-EYED JOKERS
66. LAUGHTERMATH
67. JAPES OF WRATH
68. MAKING HA-HAJJ
69. MUTTER, MAY I?
70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS
71. DEMI-BRAVADO
72. MALCONTENT MARKETING
73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES
74. ORAL HIJINX
75. THE PUN-ISHER
76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE
77. TEXT OF KIN
78. OH, PUN AND SHUT
79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES
80. PATTER UP
81. SCHTICK IT TO EM
82. BOOS HOUNDS
83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED
84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD
85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING
86. THE PUNFORGIVEN
87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY
88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE
89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN
90. POETRY IN MASHIN’
91. CREATIVE SENTENCING
92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!
93. NO CONTEXT
94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES
95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ
96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE
97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’
98. THE ZING AND I
99. THE WILD PUNS
100. THE PUN ALSO RISES
101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED
102. RAGING SYLLABLE
103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS
104. GOODWILL PUNTING
105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG
106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS
107. THE LIMITATION GAME
108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION
109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER
110. LARKS AND RECREATION
111. COMEDY OF AIRERS
112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE
113. BOO HA-HA
Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.
This article appears in the October 2016 issue.
Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/
from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/
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ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions
From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.
“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.
Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.
If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.
The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)
Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.
“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.
Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.
“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?
He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”
I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”
“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”
“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”
Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.
Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young
When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.
A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”
I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.
Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”
And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?
Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.
Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)
Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.
Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”
Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.
But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.
The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young
Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.
If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.
But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.
“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”
When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)
After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?
This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.
And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.
Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”
This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”
It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)
My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”
“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”
It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.
Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”
What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.
I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.
Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.
Phrase the Roof!
Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.
1. PRESENTS OF MIND
2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM
3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA
4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE
5. PUNBELIEVABLE
6. HEADLINE BLING
7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC
8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION
9. VERBAL MEDICATION
10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS
11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT
12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE
13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES
14. THE NOUN JEWELS
15. PUNS THE WORD
16. CONSONANT READER
17. FARTS OF SPEECH
18. PUN-CHEWATION
19. GRAMMAR RULES
20. POISSON PEN
21. PUNS AND NEEDLES
22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES
23. THE WRITE STUFF
24. MAKING THE COPY
25. SLAIN LETTERING
26. PUN AND GAMES
27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ
28. NOUN HEAR THIS
29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE
30. PUT A VERB ON IT!
31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT
32. TIC TALK
33. ECCE HOMONYM
34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS
35. WRITES OF MAN
36. VERB APPEAL
37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE
38. SLOGAN’S RUN
39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE
40. BURNS OF PHRASE
41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS
42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS
43. JESTIN’ CASE
44. LET ‘ER QUIP
45. ADVERB REACTIONS
46. INFINITE JESTS
47. ARTS OF SPEECH
48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND
49. THE PUN-ISHER
50. IMPUNDING DOOM
51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME
52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS
53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT
54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE
55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO
56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT
57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM
58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’
59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE
60. BAWDILY HUMORED
61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T
62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES
63. WITS UP, DOC
64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT
65. PUN-EYED JOKERS
66. LAUGHTERMATH
67. JAPES OF WRATH
68. MAKING HA-HAJJ
69. MUTTER, MAY I?
70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS
71. DEMI-BRAVADO
72. MALCONTENT MARKETING
73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES
74. ORAL HIJINX
75. THE PUN-ISHER
76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE
77. TEXT OF KIN
78. OH, PUN AND SHUT
79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES
80. PATTER UP
81. SCHTICK IT TO EM
82. BOOS HOUNDS
83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED
84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD
85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING
86. THE PUNFORGIVEN
87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY
88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE
89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN
90. POETRY IN MASHIN’
91. CREATIVE SENTENCING
92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!
93. NO CONTEXT
94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES
95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ
96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE
97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’
98. THE ZING AND I
99. THE WILD PUNS
100. THE PUN ALSO RISES
101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED
102. RAGING SYLLABLE
103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS
104. GOODWILL PUNTING
105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG
106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS
107. THE LIMITATION GAME
108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION
109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER
110. LARKS AND RECREATION
111. COMEDY OF AIRERS
112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE
113. BOO HA-HA
Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.
This article appears in the October 2016 issue.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/
from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/165253970052
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ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions
From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.
“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.
Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.
If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.
The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)
Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.
“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.
Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.
“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?
He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”
I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”
“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”
“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”
Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.
Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young
When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.
A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”
I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.
Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”
And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?
Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.
Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)
Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.
Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”
Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.
But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.
The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young
Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.
If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.
But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.
“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”
When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)
After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?
This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.
And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.
Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”
This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”
It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)
My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”
“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”
It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.
Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”
What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.
I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.
Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.
Phrase the Roof!
Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.
1. PRESENTS OF MIND
2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM
3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA
4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE
5. PUNBELIEVABLE
6. HEADLINE BLING
7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC
8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION
9. VERBAL MEDICATION
10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS
11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT
12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE
13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES
14. THE NOUN JEWELS
15. PUNS THE WORD
16. CONSONANT READER
17. FARTS OF SPEECH
18. PUN-CHEWATION
19. GRAMMAR RULES
20. POISSON PEN
21. PUNS AND NEEDLES
22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES
23. THE WRITE STUFF
24. MAKING THE COPY
25. SLAIN LETTERING
26. PUN AND GAMES
27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ
28. NOUN HEAR THIS
29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE
30. PUT A VERB ON IT!
31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT
32. TIC TALK
33. ECCE HOMONYM
34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS
35. WRITES OF MAN
36. VERB APPEAL
37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE
38. SLOGAN’S RUN
39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE
40. BURNS OF PHRASE
41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS
42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS
43. JESTIN’ CASE
44. LET ‘ER QUIP
45. ADVERB REACTIONS
46. INFINITE JESTS
47. ARTS OF SPEECH
48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND
49. THE PUN-ISHER
50. IMPUNDING DOOM
51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME
52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS
53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT
54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE
55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO
56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT
57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM
58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’
59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE
60. BAWDILY HUMORED
61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T
62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES
63. WITS UP, DOC
64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT
65. PUN-EYED JOKERS
66. LAUGHTERMATH
67. JAPES OF WRATH
68. MAKING HA-HAJJ
69. MUTTER, MAY I?
70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS
71. DEMI-BRAVADO
72. MALCONTENT MARKETING
73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES
74. ORAL HIJINX
75. THE PUN-ISHER
76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE
77. TEXT OF KIN
78. OH, PUN AND SHUT
79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES
80. PATTER UP
81. SCHTICK IT TO EM
82. BOOS HOUNDS
83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED
84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD
85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING
86. THE PUNFORGIVEN
87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY
88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE
89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN
90. POETRY IN MASHIN’
91. CREATIVE SENTENCING
92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!
93. NO CONTEXT
94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES
95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ
96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE
97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’
98. THE ZING AND I
99. THE WILD PUNS
100. THE PUN ALSO RISES
101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED
102. RAGING SYLLABLE
103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS
104. GOODWILL PUNTING
105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG
106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS
107. THE LIMITATION GAME
108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION
109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER
110. LARKS AND RECREATION
111. COMEDY OF AIRERS
112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE
113. BOO HA-HA
Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.
This article appears in the October 2016 issue.
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/
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The Story So Far...
Cassandra originally hails from America. Her mother was from an old American pureblood family and her father had been there researching the native fauna. She lived the first several years of her life on her mother’s family’s land, a Virginian Plantation. It was large enough that her cousin’s and their families also lived there. She spent those days fighting with them, as she was the youngest and the only girl of that generation. When she wasn’t with her cousins she was reading old tales of adventure, anything from Merlin to Newt Scamander. She was especially partial to the retellings of duels, of how magic was such a beautiful weapon. When she was eight, her family moved back to England. From that time on it was only visits to America in the Summer, which she didn’t mind so much.
Upon reaching eleven, her parents were curious to see if she would receive a Hogwarts letter of acceptance or a letter from Ilvermorny. To her great relief, Hogwarts had accepted her. She had been thrilled by the tales of the great school, and most importantly her cousins wouldn’t be there. Her father had been a Ravenclaw and he had the impression that’s the same house that she would be sorted into, her mother had been a Horned Serpent and was inclined to agree with her dad about being destined for that house. She hadn’t said anything to dispute them, but Cassie didn’t think that she’d be put into that house. When sorting day came, she had been a hatstall. All she could remember was the hat tossing her between Slytherin or Gryffindor, the hat had said her bloodline as well as her ambition to become a notable duelist would make her a nice fit to Slytherin but she also valued bravery and rarely let fear control her. It settled on Gryffindor, and when it shouted out the house she didn’t think about how her parents might be disappointed in her. Privately, she thought the hat put her in the house of lions because she had never backed down from a fight, even one she knew she would lose, to stand for her beliefs.
The first few weeks of school went by fast between learning the grounds and learning the materials. Cassandra found that she was adept at spell work, particularly charms. Defense Against the Dark Arts was by far her best class, she loved it because it was far more useful than knowing how to turn a match into a needle. Some days instead of course work, she found herself attempting to learn the spells from famous duels. It was clear she put more of her effort into those extra spells than she did her schoolwork. Not to say she was a bad student, just not as good as she could’ve been. Although there were a few comments about how she was doing in DADA, but her private argument was that in this bad climate it paid to be ready. She was going to be ready.
When the Death Eaters began to appear more frequently in the news, Cassandra was angered by it. Her entire life she had to deal with the pureblood bigotry, and she hated it. There was no proof that having a family made of entirely wizards made you any better at magic. She had told her family her views on the situation, and to her great surprise it put her at odds with all of them, even her parents seemed a little put off by her vehement argument against blood purists, part of her wondered if that reaction wasn’t just to keep them safe. Cassie isn’t afraid of being the black sheep of the family, she was going to stand by her beliefs. Its why in her fifth year she started taking classes seriously so that she could become an Auror, and actually do something in the fight. The news about Caleb had stunned her, and only made her more determined to take the fight to the Death Eaters.
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