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

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

(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

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

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

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

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 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