Have you finished high school? If not, chances are you won’t be able to read this blog.
Yes, it’s yet another ridiculous online test. I’m a sucker for these, and I can’t help myself whenever there’s a nice button saying “test yourself;” this time I didn’t have to fill in anything other than my blog’s URL, though. Here you can see a speculation that the algorithm is a variant of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula, and given the little I know of Flesch-Kincaid (NOTHING!) I’m inclined to agree. It’s your usual run-of-the-mill combination of sentence length and syllables and whatnot to generate an estimated lowest necessary level of education to understand the text; apparently I’m lucid enough for all post high school people.
“High school? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I thought this was a blog about technical issues for nerds and geeks and weirdos, but even wee high schoolers can read it!”
Well… I was a bit miffed at first until I tested a number of other sites:
- www.penny-arcade.com - Elementary School
- www.abc.com - Elementary School
- www.crankygeeks.com - Junior High
- www.tomshardware.com - Junior High
- www.gamespot.com - Junior High
- www.imdb.com - Junior High
- www.xkcd.com - Junior High
- www.gameproducer.net - Junior High
- anders-ivarsson.blogspot.com - Junior High
(Did you know that my Indian name is Can’t be Arsed to Make Proper Links?)
Of course, I also found a bunch of sites that also got the High School grade. I can honestly say that some of these surprised me. Quite a bit.
- www.gamefaqs.com
- www.gamasutra.com
- www.gamedev.net
- www.tigsource.com
- www.slashdot.org
- www.engadget.com
GameFAQs? What the hell? Anyway, in my search I did find a couple of sites that received a rating above High School. They’re hard to find, but here are two:
- www.microsoft.com
- www.gamepolitics.com
Can you find any others?
English grammar contains many tricky pitfalls. Should we say “the media are” or “the media is?” Is “majority” plural or singular? (The answer is of course: it depends. Media is per definition the plural form of medium, but there are countless examples of ”the media is.” If enough people choose to interpret media as singular, that’s what it’ll be. And majority can be either plural or singular depending on the situation.)
However, some things shouldn’t be hard.
Lately I’ve seen many examples of people writing “alot.” I think this has turned into my new pet peeve.
“This matters alot to me.”
“He did alot of damage.”
“Her rectum has seen alot of penises.”
I won’t give you any links to the offending sites since I don’t want to be an anal bastard. (Yes, I’m terribly proud of this pun, coming right after the last example above. I’m giggling right now, in fact.) But I really don’t see how hard it is to make that non-existing word into two separate - correct - words. And I also don’t see how people reason when they write alot. Are they confusing it with allot? That’s a verb, for Bog’s sake!
Now, there might be some mitigating circumstances. For one thing, as a non-native English speaker I might have missed something; maybe this error comes from how one learns the language as a kid, or maybe it’s caused by schools offering strange grammatical rules to apply in strange places. Since I learned English after my native tongue I might be immune to those particular traps. Who knows! But it still irritates me. As this page notes: “just remind yourself that just as you wouldn’t write ‘alittle’ you shouldn’t write ‘alot.’”
Speaking of that site (Common Errors in English) there are other cool mistakes listed there. “Awe, shucks,” “full of pith and vinegar” and similarly mutilated idiomatic expressions seem to be very common - and I find that quite interesting since I haven’t seen many of these errors. Again, this is probably due to my non-native-ness: I mostly read English literature, watch English shows, read semi-litterate English articles and so on. I’m probably protected from everyday English, in other words. Even if one can complain alot (ah-hah) about the linguistic quality in books, TV, movies or articles, they probably have much better grammatical correctness compared to speaking to Bob the janitor while you’re waiting in line for the bathroom.
To all people who get the urge to enlighten me about how hypocritical I am since I complain about other people’s grammar but make mistakes myself: please send your complaints to shut_the_fuck_up@karjasoft.com
I saw this blog post with text analyses of various articles by different authors - very fascinating stuff with lots of cool linguistic statistics. However, I felt that the pieces compared were…a bit similar. It makes sense to compare oneself with one’s peers; it’s what we all do instinctively and intuitively. Still, I wanted to get a broader spectrum of comparisons, so I got statistics on a blog entry of my own, a DDJ article, two CNN texts and one linguistic article. Oh yeah. Let’s bring on the stats. For completeness’ sake I’ll include the four examples from the original blog as well.
First: this is the text statistics tool; go analyze some other articles if you want to - it’s great fun!
Anyway, here are the results:
Wi-Fi Protected Setup: this is my latest blog post, and deals with a new Wi-Fi configuration standard. Technical mumbo jumbo with WLAN jargon and so on.
Total Word Count: 913
Total Unique Words: 391
Number of Sentences: 48
Average Words per Sentence: 19.04
Hard Words: 71 (7.78%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 42.83% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 10.72 (what’s this?)
Agile Testing Strategies: more technical mumbo jumbo, but this time from DDJ.
Total Word Count: 1513
Total Unique Words: 539
Number of Sentences: 83
Average Words per Sentence: 18.24
Hard Words: 154 (10.18%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 35.62% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 11.36 (what’s this?)
Doctor denies saying that Castro in serious condition: the first CNN article on their page.
Total Word Count: 304
Total Unique Words: 148
Number of Sentences: 19
Average Words per Sentence: 16.04
Hard Words: 27 (8.88%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 48.68% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 9.95 (what’s this?)
Another CNN article; I took another one because of the low Fog Index on the first one. I wanted to have more data to be sure.
Total Word Count: 707
Total Unique Words: 312
Number of Sentences: 37
Average Words per Sentence: 19.14
Hard Words: 54 (7.64%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 44.13% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 10.70 (what’s this?)
Finally, a linguistic arcticle as well, for comparison.
Total Word Count: 649
Total Unique Words: 307
Number of Sentences: 22
Average Words per Sentence: 29.54
Hard Words: 62 (9.55%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 47.30% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 15.62 (what’s this?)
And here are the results of the four different articles analyzed in the original post:
raph:
Total Word Count: 1575
Total Unique Words: 637
Number of Sentences: 71
Average Words per Sentence: 22.24
Hard Words: 122 (7.75%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 40.44% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 11.97 (what€™s this?)
tycho:
Total Word Count: 657
Total Unique Words: 360
Number of Sentences: 34
Average Words per Sentence: 19.34
Hard Words: 51 (7.76%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 54.79% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 10.83 (what€™s this?)
m3mnoch:
Total Word Count: 983
Total Unique Words: 409
Number of Sentences: 117
Average Words per Sentence: 8.43
Hard Words: 82 (8.34%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 41.61% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 6.70 (what€™s this?)
peckham:
Total Word Count: 737
Total Unique Words: 399
Number of Sentences: 26
Average Words per Sentence: 28.34
Hard Words: 66 (8.96%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 54.14% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 14.92 (what€™s this?)
Now, I’m sure you’re speculating what all these terms mean. I sure did at least. And likewise did m3mnoch in the original blog entry. So here’s a link to a definition of lexical density, and here’s a link that explains the term Fog Index. (Oh, I’m such an anal bastard… Directly after I wrote that I felt like correcting myself. “No, the link does not explain the term at all - it just points to a webpage that explains the term.” In my own particular idiom I’ll leave my mistake here for all the world to see.)
Essentially, the lexical index shows how varied your text is, and the Fog Index is the hypothetical reading level (measured in years of required education) that the reader has to be at in order to understand the text.
For reference, the New York Times has an average Fog Index of 11-12, Time magazine about 11. Typically, technical documentation has a Fog Index between 10 and 15, and professional prose almost never exceeds 18.
Looking at the results above, I note a few things:
- The percentage of unique words in an article varies quite a bit, but it rarely deviates extremely. Depending on what your definition of extreme is, of course. I won’t try to make any more comments on this since the sample set isn’t big enough (and the articles aren’t long enough) to say anything conclusive.
- The average words per sentence also differs by quite a bit; for example, the linguistic article and peckham’s piece both have long sentences at close to 30 words per sentence, while one author had the average length of 8 words per sentence. The most common length seems to be around 19 though. This is probably just a choice of writing style, but I think it’s an indication that ~20 seems to be about average for common people while ~30 and above points at either a deeper understanding of the language (which leads to more complex sentences), a more complicated text (which demands more complexity)…or pretentiousness.
- The percentage of hard words is high in the DDJ article and in the linguistic article, but remains within the span 7% - 9% in the other ones. A few - such as the last results above - have closer to 9%. I will hazard a guess that the amount of hard words is closely linked with the author’s vocabulary and the jargon of the genre; however, it’s impossible to say for sure since an article deals with a specific topic. If your article discusses an anthology, you will repeat the word a few times. (Of course, this also applies to the amount of unique words in a text.)
- Then we have the lexical density and the Fog Index. First of all, they are not linked at all. I would really have suspected that a more varied text would also feature a higher Fog Index, but that - and the opposite - is apparently not the case. Again, there’s too little data to say anything for sure, but I’ll point out the high Fog Index on the linguistic article and the last blog post.
What I wanted to see was a clear difference between technical writing, news articles and linguistic articles. However, it’s really not that obvious: nothing seems to be totally out of place, and judging from the definitions, the Fog Index is fairly normal in all texts. Normal, but there is still a bias toward complexity in a few cases - the linguistic text and peckham’s blog entry. I have to admit that I haven’t looked at that one yet; maybe it will turn out to be a brilliant review of Ulysses or something. Either way, if I must draw any conclusion I think that the conformity in the articles arrives from necessity; this level of writing is essentially what’s required to not appear too retarded but still appeal to the general public.
I’m pretty pleased with my results: they’re not that bad for a non-native English speaker. Thank Bob that the tool doesn’t measure how well-written a text is, as well.
Today I browsed through a language column of a Swedish newspaper, and to my surprise I found not only one, but two articles that might be worth mentioning.
The first one dealt with words. The amount of words in languages in fact, and in Swedish first and foremost. The title of the article was (very loosely translated) “Sometimes English is Less Rich in Words than Swedish.” The word literacy was brought up as an example: in English it’s a very useful and multi-facetted word that can be used in many different ways. For instance, it can be used to describe the ability to read or write, or it can concern literature. Or many other aspects.
In Swedish we don’t have that luxury. We don’t have a word to describe the ability to read and write. We call it - again loosely translated - ”the ability to read and write.” Quite pragmatic; quite Swedish. Likewise, we have various ways of expressing the different meanings of literacy. The article’s main point was that we should utilize and be happy for our language’s many terms and expressions, but I can’t help but feel that this is a special case; an isolated event that the author attempts to use to imbue the idea that Swedish isn’t a language with few words. Sometimes in the title of the article is a useless word: it’s like saying “sometimes it’s better to be poor than rich;” it’s a special case that will not hold true for the vast - the extremely vast - majority of cases. It’s not worth making a big deal of.
But then I started writing this post, and was struck by how I couldn’t find a good translation for the article’s title. “Sometimes English is Poorer in Words than Swedish” might have sounded better than the one I chose, but the Swedish title used a word that positively reflected that a language has many usable words. I wanted to show the negation of that, so I went for “less rich” instead. What I really wanted was a translation for the Swedish word, but I couldn’t think of one. Verbose was the best I could come up with, but to my understanding that would have implied that English was a language that required more words to describe things - the complete opposite of what I meant. And “less verbose” really wouldnt’ have fit the bill at all. This might be my poor English vocabulary rearing its ugly head, but it might also be the case of a deficiency in expressing this particular thing in English.
Which brings me to the second article; one which describes the difference between the Swedish words kontamination and katakres. The first one is pretty straight-forward: contamination. In linguistics this refers to a mix-up of common, neutral words, and even if contamination isn’t the correct English word it fits rather well despite that. The second word is more problematic. I can’t seem to find an English counterpart to it at all.
In fact, when I tried to look up a translation online it automatically gave me the suggestion “were you looking for catarrh?” Nooo… That’s not really what I wanted.
The word katakres comes from the Greek word for misuse, and in Swedish it means a specific mix-up: when proverbs or idioms get mixed up. An example would be:
You can’t see the forest for all the birds in the hand.
Yeah, I know. I suck. If I knew more English proverbs I might have come up with something decent.
Again, katakres might have have a perfectly good English translation, but that’s beside the point. The point is that (to my knowledge) Swedish possesses a word for a concept that the English doesn’t. If I were prone to state the obvious, I would mention that languages aren’t one-to-one mapped, and that they are more like Venn diagrams. And that would inevitably lead to a conclusion where I stated that speaking of a word-rich or word-poor language is pretty irrelevant since they can be used in different ways, with focus on different concepts and ideas.
It’s a good thing that I don’t state obvious things, though. And it’s also a good thing that I found the katakres article, ’cause I’ve learned a new word today. I hope someone else found it as fascinating as I did.
In vocal communication I tend to use rough and coarse language; that makes it rather fascinating that I’m anal about my written language. Except for prepositions. I don’t give a crap about ‘em. And spelling. I never use spell checkers; if I don’t know how to spell a word, I’m prepared to live with the shame. In general, I suppose that I’m not really anal about my written language per se - I’m anal about my grammar.
One thing that constantly fascinates me is the grammar splice errors that pop up everywhere. Literally everywhere: newspapers, literature, web pages, reports… I’ve seen it in a web comic just now. I saw it in a Pratchett book yesterday. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in Swedish or English or German - people seem to have a fetish for abusing the poor old comma in strange and horrible ways. It’s like people have collectively decided that comma is the weird fat kid who should get beaten up every recess. You know, that kid who spends all his time at the library; people are stupid and mean and he doesn’t understand them, but books are kind and helpful and comforting. Oh, the horrors poor comma-boy has seen! He has seen the hearts of children, and they are black as the night.
Anyway, I mentioned the term comma splice, but I didn’t know about it until five minutes ago. I had planned to write a post about this horrible comma misuse, and decided to check the comma Wikipedia page before I embarked on this glorious task; that’s where I found that some kind soul had placed a link to the aforementioned comma splice definition page. Okay, I think I’ve mentioned comma splice about as many times as I can without explaining what it is: comma splice is when two independent clauses are joined without a binding word in between them.
Here’s an example:
John was tired, he wanted to go home.
I assume that you immediately see what the problem is with the sentence above, but just in case I’d better elaborate a bit. “John was tired” is an independent clause. It’s a perfectly correct sentence on its own; it has a subject, a predicate and an adverb as well. “He wanted to go home” is also an independent clause; it can stand on its own. These two can never be joined by just a comma! All that’s needed to correct this is to add a single conjunction:
John was tired and he wanted to go home.
Even a semicolon would make things better:
John was tired; he wanted to go home.
I get so frustrated when people make this mistake. I really don’t see why. Spelling mistakes I can understand. Not knowing the difference between an adverb and an adjective is fine. Not caring the least about grammar is also fine. But this jumps out at you (well, at me at least): it’s so fundamentally incorrect! It’s not even colloquial - it’s just plain wrong. In every language known to man. And by man I mean me. Which means just a measly few languages. But still.
For the observant: yes, I just wrote an incomplete sentence. See, I’m not a grammar nazi - it’s just this comma splice that annoys me to no end.
An Irish friend of mine is constantly giving me a hard time about my English prepositions; and she’s quite correct: choosing between on and at and in is something I do rather haphazardly most of the time. I can’t even blame it on the fact that I speak American English (a weird mix of West Coast and New England pronounciations with some Swedish/Finnish intonations here and there) and try to write British English - my prepositions aren’t correct in either version.
Speaking of prepositions, I just read an article about Swedish prepositions, in conjunction with the election we’re about to have soon. The article in question notes that we vote “on” a party but vote “for” a specific issue or an inclination. This is, it is argued, because voting “on” something indicates a longer time period and a deeper commitment; a firmer conviction that will have deeper repercussions. This makes perfect sense (although it sounds like an after-construction), but it would be impossible to reason one’s way to using the correct preposition if one hadn’t lived here and had heard the different versions in action. Just like on a plane but in a bus in English makes no sense to me.
Using prepositions correctly is quite possibly the most difficult aspect of a new language. Different tenses? No problem. Different genders? Paah, piece of cake. But prepositions are weird. One reason for my inability to grasp prepositions could be that there are no simple rules for them. Grammar comes naturally to me, but prepositions are just a bunch of exceptions stacked onto each other.
Another issue I have with foreign languages is vocabulary. Sure, it’s easy enough to read books to correct this, but it takes time; learning a grammatical system is pretty fast in comparison. This Irish friend of mine has taken upon herself to speed me along to a broader English vocabulary - she sent me a set of excellent books: The Superior Person’s Book of Words one to three. I’ve only browsed the first book a bit so far, but it rocks (like a big stone)! Soon I’ll have learned magnificent words like parisology (”The deliberate pursuit of ambiguity in one’s language”) and other obscure terms, all intended to give oneself a sense of superiority in discussions.
Of course, it’s quite tongue-in-cheek and not indended seriously at all. Something that a certain “therealdoctordee” who left a comment on Amazon seems to have missed. Just take a look at this comment he left:
How can one take seriously a book which suggests that ‘Infrastrucuture’ has “no discernable useful meaning”, and that the word ‘paradigm’ is “pretentious and unnecessary”? I full expected this book to be both fascinating and entertaining. In reality it is neither, even to a dedicated philologist. The Superior Person’s Book of Words fails to give consistently derivations, didactic tid-bits or guides to pronunciation.
The book rails against perfectly good modern words while dredging up hideously anachronistic ones, which have fallen into desuetude for perfectly good reason.
Equally, the author feels the need to identify and define words as commonplace as ‘amiable’, ‘impeccable’ and ‘pragmatism’, which even the most ineloquent of potential readers will already have in their lexica.
Meanwhile, the writing exudes the dissmissive attitude of the ineffable bore. The usage examples attempt to be witty, yet while failing to be so they also fail to illustrate well the correct context of the word at hand. Despite this, the book claims to give “practical guidance on how best to use these words in real-life”. It does this by prepending the phrase “Herr Doktor” to a number of ostensibly meaningless sentences, apparently in an attempt to render them humorous or, at least, sardonic.
To assimilate the words in this book (and its companion volume) into one’s vocabulary would be a lucubration resulting in incomprehensibility.
This book is not without any merit - dedicated word-lovers will find something of interest here. But those looking to achieve lexical superiority and grammatical excellence would be far better advised (and far greater entertained) to seek out Bill Bryson’s “Troublesome Words”.
Oh my. I may agree that everyone ought to know what amiable, impeccable and pragmatism mean, but this guy seems to have gotten a cactus shoved up where no man has gone before. Can you spell pretentious and humourless asshole? And this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle nigrous: I have some humour at least.
Sweden has a long tradition of being ruled by left-wing parties, except for a few conservative outbursts now and then. (For the non-Swedes: we are technically a monarchy, but we’re ruled by a government. Our king has other noble tasks keeping him busy - like giving unimpressive speeches, and hiding whenever the question whether or not we need a king arises.) This fall we’re looking at an interesting election: to my layman eyes it appears that the socialist party will have to work pretty hard to remain in majority; siding with the leftish liberals will probably not be enough.
Oh, and just in case some Americans are reading and are wondering what kind of country has socialists and liberals in ruling positions, I have to unnerve them a bit more: US Democrats are about as right-wing as any of our parties. When we talk about socialist and liberal parties, it’s not just in comparison with ultra-right conservatives.
Either way, as interesting as this may or may not be, I have another point to all of this: today I read an article in which <em>Folkpartiet</em> (<em>The People’s Party</em>; yeah, I’m serious) , a rather conservative party here, discusses new demands for immigrants coming to Sweden. The main point seems to be that foreigners above the age of 16 and below the age of 55 are required to attend at least 300 hours of Swedish language education, if they are to remain in Sweden.
This is a very interesting proposition. Spontaneously I am inclined to support it; language is a vital key to fitting in in a society, and essential if immigrants are to become a part of the country itself instead of a segregated minority. But on the other hand there are way too many elements as it is in Sweden that are hostile to foreigners, and enforcing rules like this might give them involuntary support. After all, this might just be the beginning. If there are demands for attending classes, why not enforce language tests as well before they’re allowed in here? And why not cultural tests as well? And why not Swedish history? And why not demand that they all live in red cottages, have a Volvo and behave like good little secular Christians, just like everyone else? And why not demand that they all have fair hair and a whitish complexion?
The idea is ludicrous, of course: they only wish the best for the immigrants, and want them to integrate better. No ulterior motives exist, and it’s doubtful that any demands for cultural knowledge would ever be suggested or enforced. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find a serious fault with the idea.
Except for the fact that I almost unconditionally support diversity, and this is yet another step toward quenching the free spirit. I wish I knew what the immigrants themselves feel.
I guess I could ask my mother.
In the article, there were a few opposing comments; too bad that the people who offered them appear to be complete morons. Freely translated:
“I believe that Lars Leijonborg received his citizenship without being able to speak a single word Swedish - as a newborn. It was assumed that he would learn Swedish.”
Rhetoric bull-excrement from the Minister of Integration. He might have overlooked the fact that children pick up languages like horny teenagers pick up chlamydia, and the fact that this skill disappears in later years. It would be practically impossible for a small child to grow up without learning the language spoken in his surroundings. At the same time, it takes a deliberate effort for a grown person to learn a new language - it’s much easier to give up and decide that it’s not worth the effort.
On my way to work today I was listening to Stephen King’s third book in the Dark Tower series. As I strolled alongside the rolling hills, accompanied by the raspings of the monotonous voice actor, a sentence suddenly struck me: “Eddie picked Susannah up.” Okay, I admit that the sentence might have been “Roland picked Susannah up,” but Eddie was carrying her later. I didn’t pay close attention. The structure seemed very strange to my ears, either way.
At first I thought that I had encountered a split infinitive; I blame that on my five hours of sleep. Of course it wasn’t - it was a phrasal verb. When I got to work, I had to look up a list of phrasal verbs, to check whether or not it was separable. Indeed it was. And the only reference I could find regarding object placement was that long objects sound better after the particle, and that pronouns must be placed between the verb and the particle.
Susannah is definitely not a long object, so nothing indicates that “X picked Y up” is wrong in this case. Still, it felt intuitively erroneous when I heard it. What to do? Ignore this? Humbly admit that English isn’t my native tongue, so I have no right to comment on what sounds right and wrong? Ha!
Time to bring out the ultimate statistical tool: Google. Languages are fluid and ever-changing, and a good way to find a large set of statistical data is to search for various constructs and compare the results. (I’ve had teachers in Linguistics as well as English grammar who used this method when controversies arose. So I guess it has to have some scientific relevance.)
Here are some interesting results:
- “picked up the knife” = 24 400 hits
- “picked the knife up” = 177 hits
- “picked up John” = 12 500 hits
- “picked John up” = 199 hits
- “picked up Mary” = 488 hits
- “picked Mary up” = 91 hits
- “picked up Susannah” = 1 hit
- “picked Susannah up” = 4 hits
I know that the last result is too small to say anything at all, but I find it ironic that the exact phrase I was questioning is the only one where the “false” example is more popular than the “correct” one. Either way, I guess the general consensus is that objects more often than not ought to be placed after the phrasal verb.
I wonder why Stephen King chose to place it before the particle. As a non-native speaker I can’t say if it brings an emotional change to the sentence. Maybe putting more emphasis on Susannah makes her the center of the action? Or maybe it’s the preferred style for small sentences without following adverbs and whatnot?
Or maybe he just wanted to avoid the idiomatic interpretation that Eddie was picking her up, as in hitting it off with her. Silly bugger. They just killed a guardian! Eddie was covered in dead white worms! Not the most romantic setting, eh? And besides: they were a couple already.
If anyone is interested in a quick summary of natural language parsing, you can take a look at this little thesis I wrote. It is not particularly impressive, but I think it does a decent job at explaining some basic concepts involved in parsing.
A Practical Parser for a Subset of English
Basically, it sums up different grammars and some available parsers, and describes the algorithms and data structures of a parser designed for use with a Lexical-Functional Grammar. The main concepts are still valid, but the described data structures are in much need of a re-design; I started that work, but only got half-way through before I got bored found myself too busy.
I do have some plans for continuing this, though; I would like to make a Master’s thesis where I combine case-based reasoning with parsing to make a swift li’l parser. But then again, I would also like to have time to write a novel or travel to Tibet.
If only I weren’t a lazy bastard.
