Team Octopus

It started off as a joke. The team that I was in was small, and I had the most rounded set of skills to help pull things together. Then it became somewhat emblematic, and I discovered just how cute they can get. And now, having my small army of them, I find the motif super endearing, and am seriously considering how I can incorporate it into my emblem. It is also rather coincidental that one of the comfy vibe HoloEN girls has that as her theme.

I am talking about octopodes of course.

Let's first get the pluralisation out of the way. I like switching up between ``octopuses'' and ``octopodes'', and have used ``octopi'' erroneously in the past. It is at times like this that knowing the etymology of a word becomes rather useful. With the rise of portmanteau creation thanks to both the mainstream media and the meme-infested social media, word origins have deviated largely from their Anglo/French/Greek/Latin/Roman roots and have ventured into uncharted mongrel territory. It is to the point that even the native speakers of English face the conundrum of having to decide which ``native'' form of English to refer to.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (and its current electronic version) remains the most authoritative, but its historical and descriptive nature has made it less useful in prescribing correct usage. There are versions of the OED that are a small subset of it with different editorial intent, but these days hardly anyone uses these dictionaries any more, preferring to use either the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary for modern Internet slang, or whatever auto-definitions that the preferred search engine throws up from the use of ``${word} definition'' queries.

Argh, big digression! Back to octopodes.

I love octopodes. There's something strange about them that makes them endearing as well as terrifying. Their tiniest forms look adorable, while their biggest forms (think about a 3 m diameter disc) can look a tad scary. And they are squishy-looking no matter the size. There's an otherworldly aspect of them that makes them so interesting (no legs, no tail, just arms), and scientifically, they are also quite fun (highest brain-mass-to-body-mass ratio, sneaky escape artist, tool user). In cartooned versions of them, they fit roughly into the shape of a ball, and are just cute.

They are also tasty when prepared in some ways (sashimi of an octopus arm, commonly mistermed as a ``tentacle''), and terrifying when prepared in others (boiled into a soup).

I have a lovely giant octopus plushie, and a small takoyarnie army that Chara had put crotcheted together for me. There's also a small motley crew of adorabilis of crotcheted critters as well, and looking at them never fails to put a smile on my face.

They are currently waiting patiently in storage till the day comes where I would like to start work again, preferably with some kind of office space, be it a room or a cubicle. Working from home for me is just painful, no thanks to the constant reconstruction work outside, and the hot and humid environment itself. Besides, I don't really like subsidising the company for power and communication without an associated compensation.

It's a banal post for sure, but not every blog entry has to be an angry rant about some social fault. If that was all that I could see of the world, I'd better off be dead sooner rather than later---it would be darker than any darkness I could lay out for myself.

That's all for now. Till the next update.