(no subject)

[garran]

The Batgirl thing makes me happy. I think that it's a genuine meme, at least as far as I understand the term - someone put up their drawing of the character, at which a few of their friends were inspired to design and draw variant Batgirls, and then some more of their friends thought, "Wow, everyone is drawing Batgirl! I think that I'll draw one, too," and then...

I looked through the whole list on Friday night (I think that this one might be my favourite), and every once in a while I would see someone speaking as though this were a more conventionally premeditated thing - using the word 'contest', or complimenting himynameisjamie on the idea, just as though this had begun with his sitting down to figure out how to convince everyone on the internet to draw Batgirl. I think that to talk about it this way is really to undervalue how cool a phenomenon it is: it happened organically, and it happened by accident.

I have not drawn as many hiragana as I should have this weekend so far. I need to telephone some people, and then I suppose that I will get to remedying that.

Comments

[feedbacksolo.livejournal.com]

What are hiragana? Can I see one/some?

[garran.livejournal.com]

Hiragana is one of the two Japanese kana, or syllabaries; it's the one that is actually used to write Japanese words. (The other one, katakana, is used for words or names of foreign origin.) Where an alphabet has symbols that correspond to the simplest units of sound, like 'k' or 't', a syllabary has symbols corresponding to whole syllables, like 'ka', or 'ta', etc.

Hiragana are pretty. There is (unsurprisingly) a good table of them here, but it requires one to have Japanese language support. If that doesn't work, I could write some for you the next time we see one another in person.


-Andy H.

[masamage.livejournal.com]

One of the neatest things is how they even feel pretty to write.

[bubbleteagirl.livejournal.com]

yay. draw. how about for today? i guess i will find out in half an hour! i'm all done mine. i did quite well with "gi". i like "ki" and "gi" the bestest. ^^