✨🪐🐎2026 PINNED POST 🐎🪐✨
📜 my writing blog: @cenedi
🎭 my ao3
🎨 b5 art challenge: @b5-minvember
📚 2026 reading list:
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Origami Around

pixel skylines
Xuebing Du

if i look back, i am lost
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
RMH
KIROKAZE
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Three Goblin Art

oozey mess
trying on a metaphor
NASA
occasionally subtle

titsay
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
AnasAbdin

#extradirty

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@branmer
✨🪐🐎2026 PINNED POST 🐎🪐✨
📜 my writing blog: @cenedi
🎭 my ao3
🎨 b5 art challenge: @b5-minvember
📚 2026 reading list:
it is weird to feel happy about life and be riding this consistently good mood even while my life is still a big mess and the world is an even bigger and more worrying mess.
Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.
although personally I'd write it 'jaist' and lose the awhile
One hot and cool writing tip that I wish more people knew is... you don't have to write out people's accents phonetically. You just don't. You are not Dickens. You are (hopefully) not Rowling. There are so many other ways you can make someone's speech feel authentic to their background, or just make it clear that they're speaking in a certain accent, not limited to:
literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.
learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."
ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.
The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:
quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.
it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?
which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.
This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting, for example, wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.
To wit, less of this shite:
There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (Peter Wimsey, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be Scottish)
and more of this:
"Are we straight so?" "Aye, we're straight," said Jim. "Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)
*objective determination made via a sample size of one: me, in an elaborate hat.
Pride (2014)
pride (2014); dir. matthew warchus
“there’s a lodge banner, down in the welfare. over a hundred years old. bring it out for special occasions, y’know. i’ll show it to you one day. it’s a symbol, like this. two hands. that’s what the labour movement means - should mean. you support me, i support you, whoever you are, wherever you come from, shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand.”
still makes me laugh thinking about when I was in hospital and they gave me information leaflets about being immune suppressed and one of the bits of advice was basically 'your family members should make sure they are fully vaccinated and get vaccinated if not' and I was just like... lol well. that ain't happening :)
Do you ever think about how so much of the deadly anti-science rhetoric that fills America today and is killing countless vulnerable people can be directly traced back to one fucking guy who decided to just straight-up lie about vaccines causing autism because it would make him a profit? Do you ever think about that? Because I think about it a lot.
the crew of u.s. outpost #31: gee i sure am excited to enjoy a normal winter in antarctica with the boys
the thing:
in happier pride news i actually found this deeply heartwarming
that's solidarity baybeeee
Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
— Holes, Eileen Myles, from ‘I Must Be Living Twice, New & Selected Poems 1975-2014’
my godddd I'm hungry
hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?
Couldn’t find it so I made another because you’re right that it’s a crime and it’s definitely my duty to remedy it
Salmon Cycle
July’s print for print club!
I realised you can basically do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting someone so I brought a flask of tea to life drawing