Vids and whatnot

[dhampyresa]

DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY RECENTLY FOUND MORE OF THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH? Now you do. What an amazing find.


Did you know, and I kid you not, that's there's an entire ~90mns musical based on Andrew Wiles' solving of Fermat's Last Theorem? It's called Fermat's Last Tango and you can watch it on youtube. It's surprisingly catchy as well as entertaining and moving. I'm quite impressed by the fact that there are only 7 actors for the whole play. I appreciated the attention paid to the maths -- because that could have made or broken the musical and it made it. I just really like that it's basically all about how maths is awesome. (And I find the references to Évariste Galois, really a propos, for several reasons.) Also, it's funny: "How did you get in my attic? Not to mention, this century?" Look, there's an entire musical number on the beauty of numbers, okay, I am weak in front of this sort of thing.


Speaking of being weak in the face of SCIENCE! Can I introduce you to Ambition, a SF short film made by the European Space Agency (ESA)? It's fucking gorgeous and science-y and hopeful and amazing and wonderful and awesome in the purest sense of those terms: that creates wonder, that causes awe. It's about an Apprentice and her Master and the Rosetta mission. If you've read Mike Carey's Lucifer comic, you'll know what I mean when I say it reminded me of issue 58 (The Yahweh Dance). If you haven't, it's about... Actually, it's lasts about 5mns, excluding credits, so there's no point in spoiling it. Here you go!

"Ambition the film" (Watch on YouTube)

Yeah, I've been browsing the yuletide fandom promotion post. It's also brought me Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom (2003) - Short Film, an adorable short film about Yu Ming who learns Irish to move to Ireland and escape his dreary life in China. You may notice a slight flaw in this plan. Happy ending, though!


While I was browsing the yuletide fandom promotion post, I also found this lovely little music video. It's very cute.


I keep thinking about all the things I didn't think to mention in that one Arthuriana post...

Comments

[yhlee]

Galois!

Okay, I have decided to take Galois' Dream (English trans. of Garoa no Yume) for my airplane reading today--it's on Galois groups of differential equations IIRC. It's been like 15 years since I studied it in college. :p

[dhampyresa]

Galois! You'll have to tell me how the book is.

[isis]

Eee, did someone nominate Ambition? (And you forgot to mention that it's got Aiden Gillen in it, who plays Littlefinger in the Game of Thrones TV series! You must not be a GoT fan!)

I posted about it back when Rosetta and Philae did their thing, and I said: "Anyway, I'm sure that if the timing had been different, this would have been at least one if not several Yuletide fandoms. I expect that by next year I will have forgotten all about it, and have new bright shinies. But, yay Rosetta! Yay Philae!"

And sure enough, I forgot about it. But now, rereading my post, I wish I had remembered to request Rosetta and Philae as characters in Space Vehicles - Anthropomorphic....

[dhampyresa]

Apparently so! And I really hope someone requests it, because I really want to write for it.

I do watch GoT, but I wouldn't call myself a fan. I'm not in the fandom. I'm not good with faces, but that's why his voice sounded familiar!

You can request it this year, then.

[alasse_irena]

YES I'VE HEARD ABOUT THE EXTRA GILGAMESH! SO EXCITING!

[dhampyresa]

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WAITING FOR YOUR GILGAMESH/ENKIDU FIX

[alasse_irena]

LIKE AT LEAST A FEW MILLENIA.

[hokuton_punch]

I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT MORE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. NEW SHINY LONGER EDITION, PLZ GET IN MY BOOKCASE. *_*

[dhampyresa]

NO MINE FIRST

[st_aurafina]

DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY RECENTLY FOUND MORE OF THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH?

!!!! SO EXCITING!

[dhampyresa]

I KNOW!

[yuuago]

I was so gleeful when I heard about that Gilgamesh update, lemme' tell you.

[dhampyresa]

I know, right? And people complain when comics get pushed back a week.

[dolorosa_12]

Ahahaha, I can't believe someone nominated Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom. I watched it a million times in various Irish classes, because I had so many different teachers and they all showed it at one point or another. It's adorable and kind of heartbreaking at points, all in five or ten minutes.

What awesome news about Gilgamesh!

[dhampyresa]

Ngl, watching it made me miss Ireland so fucking hard. It's a great short film! (How well do you speak Irish?)

It is indeed! Sometimes life is kind.

[dolorosa_12]

How long were you in Ireland?

How well do you speak Irish?

Tá cúpla focal agam (I have a few words). I can read the medieval forms of the language quite well, but my spoken Modern Irish is terrible. It didn't help that just as I was starting to learn it, I went to Germany as a visiting scholar and spent a year doing immersive, intensive German language classes. Now, when I try to speak or think in Irish, German gets in the way.

[dhampyresa]

I was there for four months. I sadly don't speak any Irish. I wish I did. On the other hand, there's a part of me that thinks that if I should learn a Celtic language, it should damn well be breton, but that's complicated, for various reasons. Nevertheless, just hearing the accents and the language was a nostalgia rush.

How many languages do you speak?

[dolorosa_12]

I have some knowledge of the politics complicating the learning and speaking of Breton in Brittany, so I think I understand why that may be difficult for you.

How many languages do you speak?

It depends how you define 'speak'.

I learnt Japanese in secondary school, but it doesn't seem to have stuck. As I say, I speak Irish, badly. I have a good passive knowledge of German - when I lived there, my spoken ability was a lot better, as I spoke only German with my friends, classmates and housemates, but I now seem to have lapsed into a situation where I can understand about 75 per cent of any conversation, but speak so slowly myself that it makes more sense to answer in English. I will speak it in situations where it's necessary, but when I speak to my partner's family, they speak to me in German and I answer in English.

I studied medieval literature at undergraduate and postgraduate level and have a PhD in medieval Irish literature, and at one point or another could read the following languages (with the help of a dictionary and/or grammar):

Old Irish
Middle Irish
Middle Welsh
Medieval Cornish
Medieval Breton
Medieval Latin

I could muddle along with Middle High German, but I had to read all the words aloud until they sounded like modern German words to work out what the text would be saying.

I'm pretty rusty at all of these now that I'm not in academia any more, but I think I could pick any one up quickly if I had to do a translation, except possibly Latin.

[dhampyresa]

Old Irish
Middle Irish
Middle Welsh
Medieval Cornish
Medieval Breton
Medieval Latin

I sense A Theme. (It's a good Theme.)

That's super cool, thanks for answering!

[dolorosa_12]

Well, my postgrad degrees were in medieval Irish literature, under the auspices of a department concerned with the languages, literatures, history and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, so it was kind of inevitable that I ended up attempting to learn all the medieval Celtic languages on offer. (They don't teach Manx or Gàidhlig.) It was fun - I got to read some really awesome texts in the original languages.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_profiterole_/]

Oh, Ambition ! Je l'avais vu il y a à peu près un an, mais pour le coup, j'en ai profité pour le revoir et apprécier la belle voix d'Aidan Gillen. <3

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

C'est vraiment un super film! Puis bien dans mes cordes en plus.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

More Gilgamesh! :D That's fantastic! Thank you for the link, I hadn't heard about it before.

Also, "Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom" is SO cute, and I love the "Girls Like Girls" music video.

Make another Arthuriana post! I'd be interested in more.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

They're very cute vids indeed.

Problem being that I think of things I forgot, then promptly forgot them again; I've started a text file to write things down, we'll see what happens.