Okay, So, Today On Deeply Nerdy Things I'm Working On (and Also Looking For Advice On; Vote At The End

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :) 

Speaking of sharpie tattoos, the way Gerard and Lyn Z used them to write messages back and forth to each other on tour is adorable <3 I had heard that the lyrics to Summertime came out of this exchange, but it’s super cool to actually see pictures of it.

I wonder if there’s a story behind the unicorn shirts or if they were just being funky.

Gerard Way Sharpie Writing - Part 7 of 7 (the rest)

Gerard/Lynz co-ordinating words:

I *heart* U // MORE TODAY (Projekt Revolution 08/17/07, Cleveland OH)

4 EVER // AND EVER (Projekt Revolution 09/03/07, Denver CO) - on their wedding day, complete with matching unicorn shirts!

RUN AWAY WITH ME // ANYTIME YOU WANT (Project Revolution 08/24/07, Mansfield MA)

IN LOVE // 100% (Projekt Revolution 08/15/07, Jones Beach NY)

KISS // TELL

Gerard is just... a fascinating human. This is somehow both surreal and strange and yet surprisingly relatable? I had never thought of the images a book created in my mind as happening behind my head rather than in it, but his explanation of that is intriguing. Also the thing about climbing into your own head? Deeply relatable. 

Also I appreciate the Barbara cameo :) At least, when I see squirrels in something Gerard-related, I now assume that they are his tame squirrel friends. 

(read top to right, then bottom to right)

Back in February, Gerard contributed to a comic/prose anthology, along with several other artists/authors, called The Secret Loves of Geeks. He wrote a short 4-page comic on the subject of love. It’s very Gerard. Anyway, here are pictures from my copy. I haven’t spotted any chatter about this in the tags yet, so enjoy! Also, the full book can be purchased here– and it’s well worth it, because all these stories talk about love in all kinds of forms, all sorts of genders and sexualities, etc. Really a great thing that he participated in! 

So I’ve been working on transcripts of these farmers’ memories at my job and one of them mentioned his old Jet Star tractor... Turns out the “Minneapolis-Moline ‘Jet Star’” was a model of tractor in the late 50′s and early 60′s. 

So, for anyone in the Killjoys fandom looking for a potential origin story for Jet Star’s moniker, consider this: he grew up on a farm, and when BLI took over and everyone started picking fancy names, he took the name of one of his family’s old tractors. Maybe he felt nostalgic for his youth on the farm, or maybe he just thought it sounded cool; perhaps it’s a bit of both. 

Absolutely the cutest of all vampires <3 

I found it here for non-spotify folks, too :) The whole thing is really a pretty fascinating listen, but they start talking about the catering and its massive barbecue around 16:25 and then about barbecue bands, including MCR, at 18:35.

Anyways I am now sad for a music festival that ended 2 years ago without me knowing about it, but oh well. At least MCR is back :)

Screenshot IDs: “serendysm: Early on it was more for baby bands to do it, it wasn't meant to be mean and BBQ bands were mostly happy to cook for fellow band mates. It might have changed later to more of a rotation thing. At least for MCR it was right as Three Cheers was released and they were not popular quite yet as they were also the breakout band that year.

serendysm: But yeah for sources on specifically MCR the radio episode can be found on Spotify under "The Ongoing History of New Music" episode name is 24 Years of Warped TourActions”

I love the fact that MCR was such a small baby band that they were the 2004 Warped Tour official BBQ Band™ whose job was to cook barbecue for all the other bands in order to be allowed to play, like imagine these punks making you a hot dog before going on stage to play I’m Not OK, 2004 was a wild time y’all