GCSA RED Mountain

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Waking Up

The night before, lost in the middle of nowhere, Tim made a harmless comment. Maybe we could go to the mountain later, noonish. I lost it: I had been sitting in the car by then for 48 hours and I wanted to snowboard. Not drive, not sleep, not explore, but snowboard.

We woke up at an unreasonable time after an unreasonably short sleep and headed to town. Trail is a small place on both sides of the Columbia, dominated by an enormous hilltop factory that looks like a medieval castle, if the architect/stonemason had decided to make it as scary as possible. The factory does gases of some kind and seems harmless, but it certainly harshes the otherwise very touristable buzz of the town.

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GCSA Schweitzer

[previous] Alright, so the first resort was technically not in Canada, and was a last second idea. I had read there was a resort on IKON right around Spokane, where I had to be, anyway. So I decided to try it out if I felt like it.

I woke up in the morning in Coeur d’Alene, checked my mojo after the mandatory six shots of espresso, and decided I was not going to spend all day moping around until I could pick up Tim at the airport. I was going snowboarding!

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The Great Canada Snowboarding Adventure

The pandemic came in 2020 and ground all traveling to a halt. I had bought both IKON and EPIC passes that season, but by the beginning of March things started looking iffy. By mid-March the resorts all closed and travel, especially the international kind, had stopped. And for three years, all attempts at getting a trip together failed among successive waves of COVID-19.

Then, at the end of 2022, it looked good. There seemed to be a window of opportunity, with the world mostly immunized against the disease and quiet settling in for the moment. The war in Ukraine was going on, but that wouldn’t prevent us from traveling between the USA and Canada. Inflation was high, but that was no different up North. So I sat down with the trusted Tim and we hashed out a plan.

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How I Became the World's Best Wordle Player

Wordle 233 1/6

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The world is gripped by a new game: Wordle, which is an odd and addictive combination of a word guessing game with MasterMind, a game involving color created in 1970. You have six tries to guess a five letter word, and for each guess you get in reply which letters of your word are correct, which ones would be correct in a different location, and which ones are plain wrong.

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Nova Stilo: 1. The Alphabet

Nova, the new style for Esperanto, starts out with a change in the way the language is written. As many know, Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet with a set of diacritics (marks on regular letters). Of the 26 ASCII / English letters, Esperanto uses A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V Z, but not Q W X Y. The letters C G H J S come with a diacritic variant, a circumflex or hat : Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŝ. In addition, the letter U comes with a variant that has a breve: Ŭ. Continue reading

Nova Stilo: 10. Reflexives

A feature that Esperanto inherited from European languages is the reflexive. If an action is performed on the actor him/her/itself, a special pronoun is used. In English, that pronoun is the personal pronoun plus the ending “-self,” in Esperanto it’s the regular pronoun. The exception in Esperanto is with the third person singular, in which case a special pronoun is used, “si”. Some languages, instead, use a mode of the verb to indicate reflexive use, most notably Latin. In this case, the verb itself indicates the action affects the actor.

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Nova Stilo: 11. Simplification

Esperanto has accumulated some cruft over the years, and Nova wants to make things simpler. While the remainder of the changes is systematic, some of them are piecemeal and require simplification word by word.

There are four main areas in which this simplification occurs:

Simplification of grammatical structures that come from a specific language. For instance, the form "ju pli... des pli..." from German "je mehr... desto mehr..." is simplified. In Nova, you can use either "yu" or "des" in both cases, or leave them both out entirely. "Ju pli mi pensas des pli mi ploras" ("the more I think the more I cry") could be any of "yu pli mi pensas yu pli mi ploras," "des pli mi pensas des pli mi ploras," or even just "pli mi pensas pli mi ploras" in Nova.

Creation of true synonyms of existing words or parts of their meaning, allowing for independent use of new forms with the same range of meaning as old forms (or a subset). An example we already saw is the word "ez," which is a true synonym of "kivoye." A partial synonym is the adjective "maha" in the sense of "great," which is currently covered by "granda" (big).

Simplification of the vocabulary by replacing roots that are not international in nature with word combinations, where possible.

Simplification of sounds that are overly complex, like "monstro" for monster.

Dum jarcento Esperanto amasis kelkajn komplikaĵojn, kiujn Nova volas plisimpligi. La ŝanĝoj viditaj ĝis nun estas sistemaj, sed tiuj ĉi estas disaj kaj bezonas pokazan rigardon.

Temas pri qefe kvar areoy da simpligo:

    Simpligo de gramatikaj strukturoj el un lingo. Ekzemple la formo "ju pli... des pli...", kiu estas germandevena, simpliĝas al "yu pli... yu pli..." au "des pli... des pli...". Se oni preferas, oni eĉ povas ellasi tiujn markilojn entute: "Ju pli mi pensas des pli mi ploras" povus iĝi iun ayn el "yu pli mi pensas yu pli mi ploras," "des pli mi pensas des pli mi ploras," or eĉ nur "pli mi pensas pli mi ploras" en Nova.

    Kreado de veraj sinonimoj por signifo tuta aŭ parta de vorto. Tio povas okazi kaj por belsoneco, kaj por internaciigo, kaj por precizigo. Ekzemplo de unua estas "ez," kion ni jam vidis kiel perfekta, sed pli mallonga sinonimo de "kivoye". Dua estas aldono de signifo "pilko" al la vorto "balo." Oni povas fari tion, ĉar en Nova oni kutime diras "dancosmo" por la malnova signifo de balo. Ekzemplo de tria estas la nova adjektivo "maha" el sanskrito, kiu precizigas la signifon "moŝta" de "granda". (Ekzemple en maha reĝo, maharaĝo.)

    Simpligo de la vortaro per anstataŭigo de radikoj ne internaciaj per vortfarado.

    Simpligo de sonoj tro malfacilaj aŭ kompleksaj, ekz. ĥ aŭ moNSTRo

Dum yarcento Esperanto amasis kelka komplikajoy, kiu Nova volas plisimpligi. Xandjoy vidita djis nun estas sistema, sed hiuy estas disa y bezonas pokaza rigardo.

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Nova Stilo: 12. Uppercase

Does anyone really need capital letters? Of course not, language is readable with or without. Still, it’s odd how alien a language looks like just because it capitalizes differently. Lojban, the logical language, decided to entirely do without capitals and that just looks odd.

At the same time, there are languages like German that make correct capitalization a cornerstone of their grammar. School children all over the world despair at figuring out which of the many conflicting capitalization rules applies.

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Nova Stilo: 2. The Accusative

To distinguish subject and object in a sentence, Esperanto uses the accusative case. The accusative is marked by adding the ending -n to a word (noun, adjective, adverb). Since the word itself indicates its function in a sentence, word order is free. The sentences “mi amas vin,” “vin mi amas,” “mi vin amas,” “amas mi vin,” all mean “I love you.” In fact, stringing the three words “mi,” “vin,” and “amas” in any order always creates a valid sentence that always means “I love you.”

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Nova Stilo: 3. The Article

In the beginning, Esperanto had two articles. The definite article ’la’, which is still with us, and the indefinite article, for which Esperanto borrowed the word for ‘one,’ ‘unu.’ After a while, people started dropping the indefinite article entirely. When it was felt necessary or useful, one would use the word ‘iu,’ which means ‘some.’

That the definite article stayed has good reasons, because it helps identify something as specific instead of generic. Sadly, every language thinks of things that need to be identified slightly differently and we are left with an article whose use is, in practice, relatively random.

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