Subject: Arr, she be a good ship.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-09-20 07:58:41 UTC
On every timber ye can see the names of them who crewed her in years gone by, but there be still plenty of room for a young landlubber to carve her mark and make her fortune. We got our cutlasses, our parrots (or lobsters), the wind in our sails - and a horizon out there to tell our tales beyond.
Yo ho!
hS
I don't be remembering the exact day I boarded the good ship PPC, but the first event I recall aBoard was the scurrilous celebration of International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Five years ago, I adopted that as me official boardiversary, and penned a story for the occasion.
This year be markin' 20 years of my time in the PPC. Which is crazy as a parrot with a hook for a wing. I've spend more than half me life on this here Board. There be children out there whose parents weren't born when I joined!
In honour of the entirely unreasonable passage of time, me story this year be a commemoration of me shipmates from those most ancient of days. Most of them be long gone now, but they still sail in me heart.
Yo ho!
Cap'n hS
I've barely met any of the Olden Dayes people listed here, but I think they'd be glad to know how fondly they're remembered. <3
And so the ancientest of ancientbies pass another milestone; twenty years before the badfic mast. It's been a long and amazing twenty years, shipmate, and I'm looking forward to even more.
-Delta
That is a lot of years. Can't really read through properly right now, but I'll get there in time - and meanwhile, happy boardiversary!!
~Z, noting to self to at some point take a closer look at her book of LotR languages and, if it's interesting enough, send you a photo of the cover and ask if you've encountered it before
I feel like my maths must be off, because that would be more than half my life?? And I'm not old enough to have lived two halves of my life???
The book sounds interesting! I almost certainly haven't met it, my Tolkien linguistics is almost entirely online.
hS
I'm liking agent!hS's confusion about the whole pirate thing.
And congrats on 20 years!
Seriously tho, talking like a pirate is so hard. It's a West Country accent for no obvious reason, with incomprehensible naval slang peppered through it, and sometimes people rattle off whole speeches about loving weddings or being disinclined to acquiesce to your request, and isn't piracy a crime anyway? Why are we acting like these people?
Thankfully he doesn't use a Universal Translator, or I imagine it would be even worse. "Greetings-greetings, land animal who has not had sufficient vitamin C! Tie some ropes together and clean the floors, mischievous domestic canine!"
hS
Here's to ye, the... second Boarder I met in person! I would've said first, and then I remembered meeting firemagic when they visited my uni...
(Though, since I met you and Kaitlyn at the same time, it's debatable whether you're the 2nd or the 3rd. You two can duke that one out on your own :D)
Anyway, getting a very nostalgic feeling just reading that story and recognising the names, even if I never actually talked to most of them. Thanks for being such a stalwart pillar of this community, hS.
~Lily, who would very much like to visit the UK again and just needs to find a proper excuse...
(No longer Talking Like A Pirate, as we're well past the date now.)
That was a fun Gathering, and I'm sad that the report got blipped; I still have all the photos but I'm not up to rewriting the tale of it.
I do hope to make stories like this fun even if you don't know any of the names, but of course namechecking everyone is a huge bonus. ^_^
hS
Oh my gosh, this is so nice! Even though I missed out on meeting most of these lovely folks myself, the vibe of a “family reunion” is strong here! It made for a pleasant read, “seeing” everybody together in the same little space. And the Baster Special definitely rose to the forefront of my mind as I read, so I was indeed well and properly faked out by the guest at the end . . .
So Vemi is going by “Lady Faeminth” now? Can we get an etymology on that? A quick search tells me “fae” is spirit, but “minth” is showing as old Gnomish . . . ?
Some minor technical errors:
“The Flowers will get grouchy if they know I'm here.”
An extra space after “get.”
On plunderingvoyage long without a word…
Ah, that’s where the extra space snuck away from!
“I know it's been years, but if there was ever an opportune moment…
Kaitlyn was filled with so much anticipation, she never closed off her quotation marks!
—doctorlit wishes Huinesoron a very excellent Boardiversary!
I'm delighted that the fakeout worked on at least one person. :D
Veminta Fincaran's Quenya name is Fëamintë Fioncarnë ("Small-soul Red-hawk"), but that's not really suitable for the Third Age. Faeminth is the translation into Sindarin of the first name: fae == fea, as you say. Minte is difficult, though - the Quenya word is somewhat obscure, and doesn't have a direct Sindarin counterpart. I worked through a few similar words and settled on minth as the most likely Sindarin form. Which... I then forgot to soft mutate; she should be *Faevinth, or maybe something like *Faevinn or *Faevid. All of which suggests she translated her own name and isn't actually very good at Sindarin. ^_^
Thank you for the technical catches; I will note that TW's poem is not an error, but a way of saying that she's cramming the words together to fit the meter. ("pirateship" and "piratecove" got the same treatment, but read naturally enough that it's not obvious.)
hS
Wait, that's the wrong accent; I think this Rhum is dodgy too...
hS
ahem
That was wonderful. It was so nice to see a bunch of old PPC faces - well, usernames - that I've heard of or read works by. Of course, I've actually had the chance to meet and interact with a few of them--and they're all quite lovely people.
I don't have much else to say other than that.
-Ls is sad to realize that he is a bit of a semi-lurker.
At least compared to the Elder Days. Check out this archived Board page from 2004, where the whole Front Page spanned 4 days.
In fact... let's do a graph. Length of the front page every month, in days (ie, high peaks = less posting):
The graph breaks down into three sections:
2002-2006 + 2015: lots of posting. The front page goes by in under a week, sometimes significantly under.
2007-2014 + 2016: moderate posting. The front page goes by in a couple of weeks, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less.
2017-present: not a lot of posting. The front page takes 2 weeks to go by even in busy times, 3-4 weeks for large chunks of the year. There's a strong seasonal dropoff in Autumn and Winter. In this period, 2019 and 2022 were "good years", without any more-than-a-month front pages.
This year has been very slow: our Spring and Summer look more like the 2020-21 Autumn slowdown, and these last two months have been our quietest ever. I think it would feel like less of a shock had 2022 not been a good year; we've all got whiplash. :)
It might be interesting to go back and see if there was anything obvious that made 2015 and 2022 "good years" - was there a particular type of thread people were enjoying? Was there something happening in fandom? Both of those years are on the Board, so it would be easy to look up, hint hint. ^_^
hS
But I wonder--is at least some of the reason 2022 was a good year me? If I recall, I was the top poster of the month at least at one point, and I know I was generally super active. Of course, looking back, I do cringe at a lot of what I said, but what can you do?
I do wonder, though, if this year would look a little more active if you counted how often new posts were made, rather than threads. Doc and Lily seem to have been making up the majority of Board activity recently.
-Ls, attempting to pontificate but probably failing
Posting begets posting: when someone is very active, other people can't help but respond in kind. (Or, conversely: it's really hard to be super active if nobody responds to you.) So yes, it's possible. Equally, I was running PPC+20 for most of '22, so that boosted us up a bit.
To your other point... incredibly rough measurement time: copying the front page into Notepad right now gives 124 lines. Going back to archive page 9 (Oct-Nov '22) gives 332, archive page 12 (Jul-Aug '22) gives 287, archive page 25 (Sep-Nov '21) has 183. Assuming every line is a post (NOT thread), that means we have 1.75 posts per day on the front page right now, compared to 3.8 in Nov '21, 11.5 in Aug '22, and 13.8 in Nov '22.
Since the front page is always 25 threads*, another way of saying that is that in Nov '21 we averaged 7.3 posts per thread; in Aug '22 11.5, in Nov '22 13.3, and right now 5.0 posts per thread.
*Until 2007 we had 20 threads on the front page; I've silently multiplied the figures in the graph by 1.25.
I'm not saying it was always true, but for the last couple of years, number of threads and length of threads seem to be closely correlated.
hS
I guess for every long thread we usually have a shorter thread too.
And how did I not remember the PPC +20?!? Seriously, that must have been a large factor. Though, looking at the number of posts I've made, of the 88 pages worth, 75ish were from 2022, which is interesting.
-Ls
I will say, the Ekwy of the story is better at pirate words than I am! (I'm there in spirit, but the vocabulary tends to be a challenge to me.)
I love love love the Swedish in this. It's very Pippi Longstocking. She is very dear to me and I even used to RP as her, so it warmed my heart. =) And you got the phonetic spelling right! Five stars for hS, you go hS!
All in all a very fun story with so many familiar names to me... It felt like having tea with very old friends. (Twenty years though... Did you double check that? Are we sure this is how time works? Seems sus, but okay.)
Minor correction on my Boardness, I am pretty sure I wasn't fully gone until like 2007... It felt like the PPC was part of my life longer the first time around? Honestly, I might be wrong though. What I do know for sure is that I didn't return until 2021, and that one is easier to check. XD May 7th, 2021 is when I wrote my "It's been 84 years" post that spiralled out of control a bit.
/Ekwy, feeling nostalgic
I confess to cheating outrageously with the Swedish - the song happens to have a Swedish Wikipedia article, though sadly it looks like I used the non-Pippi version. [Sneakily changes it, along with the dates]
(For any of ye scurvy English-speakers wondering: "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!")
I'm having real trouble with the "twenty years" myself. Like... how? That's ridiculous! But then I think on all the things that have happened since I was sitting in my parents' dining room way too late and wondering how to introduce myself on an Internet forum, and... yeah, actually.
hS
....That was the correct phonetic spelling! It's not a different version, it's just three different ways of writing the word "och" ("and") and sung exactly the same either way. The word is pronounced like the 'ock' in 'sock', if you want to be specific, but nobody has time for that when you say it and especially not in a pirate song. Like you're more likely to write "bottle o' rum" and not "bottle of rum".
This is Pippi's version translated, and a recording of her singing it. (It has some imagery of skeletons and spooky horror pirates, if one prefers a heads-up on that sort of thing.)
"I'm gonna be a pirate when I grow up! Are you?"
Fifteen ghosts on dead man's chest
Heave and ho and a bottle of rum
Fifteen sandwiches in my stomach (She's rhyming "kista" with itself but she means two different things, the word "kista" is also slang for stomach)
I need to have for my belly's empty
Fifteen pirates and fifteen ghosts
Heave and ho on the storming sea!
Fifteen pirates and fifteen ghosts
Heave and ho on a dead man's grave!
/Ekwy, hyperfocusing on Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraimsdotter Longstocking
I think the wildest thing about this is that the English "fifteen men" have become Swedish "fifteen ghosts". I always thought they were living men raiding the chest, but apparently in Sweden they're dead too!
And apparently hungry for sandwiches. (I know, I know... ^_^)
hS
PS: I should note, given that you mentioned Agent Ekwy's pirate idiom, that she mostly speaks nonsense. "Avast the scurvy mainbrace, ye grog-lubbers!" makes about as much sense as "Splice the ahoy, ho-ho!", and for pretty much the same reason.
hS
We say "skattkista" (treasure chest) for well, the kind that you put treasure in. But just a kista? Well.
That's "coffin".
Honestly, this just struck me as a very relevant detail, because it literally hit me that OBVIOUSLY in the English version it's a treasure chest and I just didn't put two and two together. XD But yeah! This probably plays into how they're ghosts in the Swedish version... It's also a particular kind of ghost. A gast is often used in connection to drowned sailors that were never buried, unlike the more generic spöke that is more commonly used. ("Spook" in English, of course, there's a lot of overlap in the etymology here. Words are fun!)
ANYWAY. Yes, I enjoyed Ekwy's pirate talk! It's totally fine that it's nonsense. She's a little confused, but she's got the spirit! Which... samesies. XD
Okay, so, "Dead Man's Chest" was originally a scrap of poetry written by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel Treasure Island, but he was inspired by a list of island names he'd found in a book. The island in question is likely the one known today as Dead Chest Island, but in the book it was called Dead Man's Chest. Possibly because the island somewhat resembles a coffin.
Like Linstar, I wondered if the song meant a human torso (ew) or a treasure chest. Neither of those really work for me. It makes way more sense if it's about fifteen men (or ghosts!) who are stuck on an island that happens to be coffin-shaped. {X D
~Neshomeh
Makes me want to reread Treasure Island.
-Ls
I seriously thought it was about people dancing on the chest of a literal corpse, which... yeah. That's so, so obvious.
-Ls is actually younger than the PPC.
as a youngin who joined this here ship 6 sailings ago, i am happy to be part of yer crew
(you’ve been on this ship longer than i have been alive XD)
On every timber ye can see the names of them who crewed her in years gone by, but there be still plenty of room for a young landlubber to carve her mark and make her fortune. We got our cutlasses, our parrots (or lobsters), the wind in our sails - and a horizon out there to tell our tales beyond.
Yo ho!
hS
It may be that ye'll not recognize many of the hoary dogs herein, but be hearty! The PPC is a fine old ship, and it be well to honor them as crewed her ere ye set foot upon her salty decks.
Also it's a fun read, savvy? ^_^
And—oh dear, I'm out of Rhum. So much for the "pirate"-speak. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for this, Cap'n. I love the tea club. My only complaint is I'm not old, you're old, shurrup. >.>
^_~ <3
~Neshomarrrrr
I should note that Archivist Neshomeh's bootleg Rhum came about because I tried to do a different version of the pirate accent but it completely failed. I considered sending her full Cockney, but instead left it ambiguous.
hS