as a long-time figure skating fan, i’ve been really looking forward to yuri on ice, and i wanted to talk a little bit about the skating in episode 1. i worry that maybe people who aren’t as into skating don’t understand how RIDICULOUS that program viktor did was.
this is not in any way a complaint. the program was completely unrealistic, but not because anyone involved with the show neglected to do their research. it was clear they actually put a ton of research & work in, and then intentionally designed something that was the skating equivalent of your power level being over 9000. viktor (and yuri) went out there and threw down the skating version of a level 100 mewtwo. it was DELIGHTFUL.
so first of all:
four quads is… not technically IMPOSSIBLE, but right at the very edge of what is currently possible in men’s figure skating. a quad (jump with four revolutions) is REALLY DIFFICULT. as recently as 2010, the olympic champion in men’s skating didn’t even have ONE quad in his program; i remember as recently as five years ago scott hamilton saying TWO quads was “superhuman.” the highest score EVER received in men’s skating was yuzuru hanyu at the grand prix final in 2015, where he performed three quads. the second highest score ever received was javier fernandez at worlds last year, where he also performed three quads. skating fans can correct me if i’m wrong but the only skater i can think of who has EVER performed four quads in one program is boyang jin, who is tiny and has made jump rotation his whole life. to have a seasoned 27-year-old skater performing four quads is completely delightful nonsense.
his first jump is a quad lutz. for some context, the rough ranking of skating jumps from easiest to most difficult is something like: toe loop, salchow, loop, flip, lutz, axel. you might notice a lutz is the SECOND MOST DIFFICULT JUMP POSSIBLE, and actually more difficult than the axel for some skaters. accordingly, MOST quads are toe loops or salchows. since a quad axel has literally never been performed, a quad lutz is the SINGLE MOST DIFFICULT jump ever landed in skating competition, EVER. although people have been trying to do quad lutz since the early 2000s, you can probably count the number of skaters who have landed it successfully on one hand. this jump is nearly ALWAYS underrotated or even downgraded to a triple. in my lifetime as a skating fan i can only think of a couple times i’ve seen this jump landed as cleanly as viktor does it here.
if that wasn’t enough, the lutz usually has a very specific set-up where the skater glides backward on one foot for a couple seconds before turning their skate blade onto the outside edge. that’s how the technique for the lutz jump is TAUGHT. it’s extremely impressive for someone to be able to throw a lutz out there without this setup. viktor does it and gets four full rotations.
then he follows it up with:
the first quad flip IN HISTORY was landed for the first time LAST APRIL. APRIL 2016. i also remember people trying this one back in 2010-2011, but it wasn’t successfully landed until THIS YEAR. and it’s viktor’s SIGNATURE MOVE!!! and he does it immediately after landing the other most difficult jump in skating!!!!!! he just pulled out two jumps most skaters can only dream of ever landing maybe once in their entire careers, BACK TO BACK.
again, the HIGHEST SCORE EVER AWARDED IN MEN’S FIGURE SKATING, EVER, was given to a program with one quad salchow and two quad toe loops. jumps SIGNIFICANTLY easier (but still extremely difficult) than viktor’s two opening jumps. and he’s just fucking getting started.
he does a flawless triple axel and then some footwork and spins. then he throws out something maybe a touch less superhuman:
for any real life skater, this would already be one of the greatest performances of their career. but viktor isn’t done yet.
he does a long (gorgeous) footwork sequence, triple lutz, triple flip, and:
i already mentioned how ridiculous four quads is, but this is even better. skaters will typically put their most difficult jumps near the beginning of the program, because they’re easier to land before your legs get tired. recognizing this, the scoring system gives you an extra 10% bonus on the jump’s value if it’s in the second half of the program. viktor pulls out a quad-triple combo, still one of the most difficult jumps in figure skating, as his LAST JUMP. HIS LAST JUMP. a free skate program lasts four and a half minutes. after four and a half minutes of grueling, exhausting activity, viktor soars into a quad-triple so beautiful it could be used to teach the combination to other skaters.
AND YURI KEEPS UP WITH ALL OF THIS. YURI, WHO CAME IN LAST AT THE GPF. YURI CAN DO THIS TOO. this program is significantly more difficult than anything that has ever been competed irl, and this show has TWO SKATERS DOING IT SIMULTANEOUSLY. WHAT A GREAT SHOW???
for any skating nerds out there, here is my breakdown of the jumps in viktor’s program:
4Lz – 13.60 4F – 12.30 3A – 8.50 4S – 10.50 3A+3Lo+2Lo – 15.40 3Lz x – 6.60 3F x – 5.83 4T+3T x – 16.06
to explain what this means. the world record score in men’s figure skating was given to yuzuru hanyu in 2015. for that program, the base value for the jumps alone (so not even taking execution into consideration, just the sheer value yuzuru got for completing the jumps he did) was 79.87 points.
the total base value of the jumps viktor (and yuri) performed in this program was 88.79.
this program would have handily crushed the world record. and yuri throws it out there in his home rink when he’s out of shape during the off-season.
Y’all: “YOI is so realistic unlike T H O S E other sports animes!”
OP:
OP, a year and a half ago: “holy shit the jump composition in Stammi Vicino is insane and barely possible and probably not something we’re going to see regularly in figure skating for years”
oh, it’s a tragedy, of course it’s a tragedy, how can it be
anything else?
but i think the tragedy is not in his actions, not in the
father he killed nor the mother he wed nor the children he sired. no, it’s not
in what he did, it’s in who he was, the tragedy here is that oedipus was a good man and a good king and unlike so many mythical figures, he did not reap what
he sowed
the tragedy here is not that he was human and erred and suffered
due to his errors.
it’s that he did not err, and suffered, it’s that the sins
of our fathers are our sins too and we cannot escape them
the oracle of delphi gave a prophecy that foretold that any son
of king laius would kill his father and marry his mother. so when his wife and
queen jocasta bore him a son, he had the baby’s ankles nailed together and
ordered him to be left to die.
laius erred. laius planned to kill his son of blood, who had committed no crime, who was in perfect health, who had done nothing but be born. it is laius
who committed the sin of infanticide, and through this sin all other such
events transpired
a shepherd spirits the infant away instead of leaving him to
die, and he is eventually brought to the house of king polybus and queen merope, where
he is adopted. laius and jocasta have no more children, even though this leaves
laius heirless. since we know jocasta will later bear four more children, we
know it is not her whom is the issue here. after laius commits this grievous
crime, he is left sterile, and this, here, is where i believe the curse truly
begins.
the curse over thebes does not begin with oedipus’s rule,
with his supposed transgressions. it begins with his father’s sin.
oedipus grows up a devoted and loving son. he eventually hears
rumors about his strange birth and consults the same oracle his birth father
had, and is told the same prophecy. not knowing he’s adopted, he think the
prophecy refers to polybus and merope, and he flees his home, horrified at the
thought that he could ever harm his beloved parents in such a way.
he’s traveling, and upon a crossroads he meets his birth
father, laius. they do not know or recognize eachother. they quarrel about who may precede
first. it’s important to note that laius is the one who attacks first, who’s so
offended that this unknown man will not move for a king that he tries to kill
him, unknowingly attempting to murder his son a second time.
oedipus kills laius, not knowing he’s a king or his father, rather
than let himself be killed, and fulfills the first part of the prophecy. once
again, it is laius’s actions that are the incendiary actions here. if he had not
attempted to kill oedipus, perhaps he wouldn’t have died. if he hadn’t thrown
his son away, oedipus never would have killed him, since he was so aghast at
the possibility of harming his adopted parents that he ran from his home and
his life rather than risk it.
oedipus acts in self defense. even if he hadn’t, laius had
already tried to kill him once, although neither of them had been aware of it.
a trial by combat would be the least of what oedipus would be owed. he breaks
no laws, does not act in hate or malice or fear. oedipus kills laius, kills his
father, but no great sin is committed. patricide is a sin, but defending
yourself is not, refusing to die is not a sin.
so he travels, and lands upon thebes, where a sphinx has
taken residence, eating anyone who attempts to enter the city and cannot answer
it’s riddle, effectively cutting off all trade to thebes and trapping all its
residents inside, lest they leave and never be able to return. was the sphinx
here when laius left? we do not know. it doesn’t say.
but if it was – did laius leave his city to die? was this
sphinx just another piece of the curse laius had brought down upon thebes by
attempting kill his freshly born son?
oedipus, a cleverer man than any who have yet tried to enter
thebes, answers the sphinx’s riddle, and the creature leaves, having been
defeated by this man’s intellect.
oedipus is a man who has shown himself to be strong enough
to kill a king, and clever enough to defeat a sphinx. he has not harmed any who
did not first try to harm him, was so against committing harm against those he
cared about that he simply left them behind. oedipus so far has shown no fatal
flaw, no poor judgement, nothing damning or ruinous.
jocasta’s brother, creon, had said any man who could rid
thebes of the sphinx would be named king, and given his sister’s hand in marriage.
oedipus had not known about this before arriving. he had not come to thebes
with the intention of becoming king.
but king he becomes.
he is given jocasta’s hand in marriage, and the final
portion of the prophecy is complete. he weds and bed and fathers children with
his birth mother.
notice, however, that this only happens in the first place
because of how honorable and kind oedipus is to begin with.
jocasta is in her forties, at least. she may be a beautiful
woman, but she’s not a young woman. yet there are no accounts of oedipus being
unfaithful, or cruel. jocasta bears him four children, two sons and two
daughters, when during those long years after oedipus she had not had another
child with laius. if oedipus had rejected this widowed queen, said her age made
her unsuitable, had taken mistresses, had kept her as a wife in name only –
then perhaps so much pain could have been spared.
but he didn’t do that. oedipus took a wife twice his age, at
best, took a woman who was not a virgin, who had been the wife of this land’s
former king, and he dedicates himself to her. he is faithful and attentive, and
she must be fond of him, because she later tries to shield him from the truth
when she uncovers it.
which part of his actions can we take account with? yes,
jocasta was his mother, and it is incest – but he didn’t know that. he didn’t
want that. to do otherwise than what he did, to cast aside his gifted bride,
could only be considered cruelty. and oedipus was not cruel.
many years after this marriage, a plague strikes thebes. why
is not clear, because if it were truly due to oedipus’s actions, to the gods
taking offense at this incestuous union between mother and father-killer,
surely it would not have taken years to come to fruition?
but a plague comes, and the oracle says that the only way to
lift it is to see that laius’s killer is brought to justice.
(is it laius, yet again, bringing sorrow upon his city? is
it his restless spirit which curses all of thebes? it is a strange coincidence
that the infertility which he was cursed with after trying to kill his infant
son is the same plight that now faces all of thebes.)
and of course, of
course, honorable and kind oedipus vows to bring the killer to justice,
says that this killer will be exiled for his crime of murdering the king.
exiled, not killed, what a peculiar punishment, what a merciful punishment for a king killer,
what a merciful judgement from a merciful man.
but things unravel, as they do. he tells creon to bring him
the blind prophet tiresias, who tells oedipus that he must stop digging into
this matter. but the good of his city is at stake, so he can’t, of course he can’t,
and tiresias calls him false for not knowing his true parentage. he and creon
quarrel, and slowly, oh so slowly, the truth comes out.
a messenger comes, saying that his adopted father has died,
and oedipus is relieved. not for any malicious reasons, but because it means he
won’t fulfill his prophecy of murdering him. he refuses to go home because
merope is still there, refuses to take up the title of king that is surely his
by right, because he fears harming his mother. when the messenger says that
oedipus is adopted, and there’s no reasons for him not to go home, jocasta finally
realizes that oedipus is her son. she begs him to stop his search for laius’s killer, desperate to
keep the truth from him.
jocasta knows, and tries to protect oedipus. she must
believe he’s worthy of being on the throne, he must have showed her kindness and
affection if she’s so desperate to protect him from the truth, even at the
expense of the well being of thebes.
but oedipus does not listen. he leaves, and finds the shepherd
who gave him to his adopted parents so long ago, and discovers the truth.
he is the son of lauis and jocasta. lauis is the man he
killed at the crossroads. he has killed his fathe and married his mother, all
them each unaware of each other.
after this, there are differing accounts of what happened
next.
sophocles’s account is most popular. he returns to find his
wife and mother jocasta has killed herself, and he takes the pins from her
broach and blinds himself, unable to stand the sight of her. he is then exiled,
as he said laius’s killer would be, and his daughter antigone guides him until
he dies soon after.
in euripides’s version, jocasta does not kill herself.
oedipus is blinded by a servant of laius, and so justice is still served to laius’s
killer, and he continues to rule thebes. i like to think jocasta rules with
him, alive and well, because she no more deserved death than oedipus deserved
blindness.
the tragedy here is not in oedipus. it is in lauis, the
clear villain of this story, the one who damned and hurt and cursed all around
him. he who caused so much strife, and then left it all for his son to fix, for
his son to struggle with.
but he did fix it.
oedipus was a fair and just ruler of thebes, a kind husband
to jocasta, a good father to his children, from all accounts, since antigone was
so devoted to him, and he was disappointed in his sons for their selfishness because that’s not how he raised them.
perhaps oedipus is a story of how our fathers, our
predecessors, those who come before us will curse us and damn us and leave us
more problems than solutions can be found
perhaps oedipus is a cautionary tale, and our tragic figure
is not oedipuis, but laius, who made his own ruin, who’s spiteful hands left
scars on all they touched.
oedipus is a tragedy, but only because it reminds us that
our own undoing, our own unhappy endings, aren’t necessarily within our
control. our own tragedies may not be our fault, may not be due to our
mistakes, maybe we didn’t earn our unhappiness.
it’s not fair.
it’s not fair, and that’s the true tragedy of oedipus. that
good, kind, clever, merciful people can do their absolute best, can show
kindness and sacrifice and love, and in the end it won’t be able to save them
from the mistakes other people have made.
oedipus was a good man, and a good king, and it may not have
saved him – but it saved all those in thebes.
yes, oedipus was blinded. yes, jocasta died.
but the spinx was gone, their line continued, and thebes
thrived.
the tragedy of oedipus is the idea that we’re not in control
of our own destiny.
the triumph of oedipus is the idea that we need not control
it in order to have a destiny worth remembering.
Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot: Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.
Child says, “I can’t do this.”
Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.
Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.
Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.
The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.
The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:
-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.
-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.
-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.
-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.
I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.
But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.
There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits. Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges.
A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.
Well shit this explains so much about me
This is why I want to scream when NT professionals try to insist that forcing ADD people into “the zone” is the best treatment for ADD. Forced focus is exhausting because it’s fueled by adrenaline. We have reams of medical data that frequent adrenaline rushes in young people are horribly bad for their development and causes a laundry list of problems later in life, both physical and mental.
Literally NT professionals: I know you can accomplish this task if I push you into a state of artificial panic every time I want you to do it.
Me: Or you could, idk, help break the task into smaller, less scary bits, use a reward structure at each stage to reinforce positive association, or even turn it into a game because ADD people are kind of hardwired to love game-like structures and anything that has a whiff of fun to it.
NT professionals: That requires imagination, time, and mental energy that I, a NT person who is not struggling with overwhelming self-doubt and mental block at this moment, simply cannot be bothered to spare.
Me: Oh right, of course. Carry on with terrorizing small children, then.
did some au character designs that don’t make sense! pls dont take them seriously It’s really fun (the only rule was that they had to take most after their dad)
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
Reblogged just for Medea
when i was little my family went to denmark on holiday and since norwegian and danish are very similar we would just use norwegian but one morning my mom went to a bakery next to our room and asked if they had buns in norwegian only the word for bun in norwegian means fucked in danish so she asked the girl behind the counter if she had fucked
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