learnnavi.org is the bomb

The guy who made learnnavi.org is a 20 or 22-year-old undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. I’m really impressed with him, because he saw the movie, went home, and created a website and forums, and now there are 4082 members from all over the world talking about this fake language we all love. He bought a screenprinting machine just to mass-produce custom learnnavi.org tshirts (machine here, piles of tshirts here, and here’s the store http://www.learnnavi.org/store/ ). It’s really impressive that he’s actually screenprinting tshirts as a fundraising method so he can pay for the hosting service to keep the site and forums up, and I’m amazed at one person’s truly astonishing amount of follow-through. Here I am, not the founder of anything but just a small peon in a store, and I can’t keep tabs on the events that go on and feeling overwhelmed at the sheer competency of http://www.starcitygames.com/ (look at their many writers who write many blog posts, and there’s so much to keep up on), and here is this college kid, buying screenprinting machines for his love of Na’vi, and making piles and piles of tshirts, and mailing them out to people that order them all over the world. It’s just incredible.

The response from Paul Frommer has been truly amazing, as well. He formally asked us, the community, to come up with a list of words that we need the most, as well as questions for JAmes Cameron about Na’vi culture and customs. So the community is being really formal about it too, and there’s this huge whirlwind of discussion about how grateful we are that Paul Frommer loves us for loving his art, and linguistics, and what words we should ask for and why. I’m not a participant, but I am watching from time to time. I’m not studying the vocab anymore, either, but I still wish I was. All I’ve done is this recording of the chorus for a whole new world: http://talknavi.com/audio/86/%28draft%29-mipa-kifkey-chorus-only

hahahhahah