Hi, I’m Wynter, I’m Deaf and fluent in ASL (American Sign Language). I get a lot of people telling me they want to learn to sign, but not knowing exactly where to start. So, I am here to provide that!
Let’s start off with some basics, though. ASL does NOT follow English grammar (Signed Exact English/SEE does, but it is not ASL), it only uses English words and a lot of the communication with singing is done via facial expression and body language. Basically, it goes in the order of time > topic > comment. For example, “ I am going to pet dogs next week” would be “next week dogs me pet”, but there are quite a few variants and every person who signs will have a different way of doing this. Sort of how people who speak English in different parts of America have an accent and different ways to sign things. The most important thing to note about ASL is that *American* Sign Language is not universal. Most languages have their own form of SL and a lot of the word signs/alphabets are not at all the same. Another note, learning SEE may seem easier at first, but it can actually make the transition to ASL grammar that much more difficult. An example of differing signs is BSL (British Sign Language) vs ASL.
This is the BSL finger alphabet:
And this is the American one:
So while there is a small bit of crossover, it is very, very different! Don’t get me wrong, a lot of times signers will understand each other at least a little bit, but it does need to be noted that signs can differ by language, country, region, and sometimes person.
If you want a safe place to learn sign language (including ASL), I have created a Discord called Sign Language Learners! Come join and learn with other learners, Deaf/HoH people, and those curious kids who just want to know how the Deaf communicate.
I remember thinking, in the earliest days of Warframe, how distinctly inhuman the Corpus crewmen sounded. Their voices were not merely garbled and speaking a foreign language. They were beastly. There were howls and growls and sounds that resembled the robotic shrieks of the Moa more than any human noise.
And I would think, in those days, how appropriate that was.
The Corpus, as a culture, seem to have a distinctly capitalist obsession with mechanization as a means of control. But I don’t just mean that they employ robots to do their labour. They do, but they clearly use humans as well. I mean that they emphatically try to make those very humans as machine-like as possible. The boxy helmets, the identical suits, the strictly controlled and surveilled environment, the garbled, electronic voices… all these things point to a sustained effort to take the humanity out of the humans, to reduce them to cogs in a profit-making machine.
The Solaris seem to me like the perfect illustration of the failure of that effort. Here we have a population of Corpus-indebted slave workers, toiling away in a mine deep under an inhospitable planet, trying to change it for the better even knowing that they probably won’t live to see the end result of their efforts. The Solaris are augmented to a disturbing degree: human arms and legs controlled by robotic heads, as if there was an attempt to enslave their minds for compliance rather than strengthen their bodies for labour.
They ought to be the culmination of the Corpus doctrine of turning humans into machines.
And yet the halls of Fortuna echo with music. Their heads may have been torn off and replaced with robotics, but their human hearts sing.
Time's Vengeance 