where do we go now?

Just here to be an example of love and kindness. Sure, I've got my head in the clouds but I'm liking the view. 💐

[stability]

put your DJ name in the tags

[cowbeing]

okay i have to reblog again bc the tags are amazing

[zelldas]

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (via larmoyante)

[rylee-m]

I just need a porch with a hammock where I can spend my mornings drinking coffee, and evenings watching the sun go down.

[skypekisses]

And a good book

[wiltedxrosez]

do u ever lay in bed and get really sad about ur favorite person because theyre not in the bed with u

[skypekisses]

The worst

[fullheartsuggestions-goodbye]

i want to be the person you feel safe with. your favorite voice, favorite scent, favorite touch. i want to be the prettiest person in the entire world to you.

[sad--gal]

[post--grad]

know your englishes

i was just talking to a friend about how we have to have this conversation every single quarter that we teach, so i pass it on to you. shakespeare is not old english! chaucer is not old english!! 

old english

also called anglo-saxon

in use from around 400 to around 1066 (the norman conquest) in england and parts of scotland during the early middle ages.

most popular example: beowulf (see it written)

looks the least like modern english:

“Hwaet, we gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!”

if it looks like it could be the name of a field or military group in Rohan, it’s probably OE

middle english

in use from 1066 to the early 1500s (along with french & latin) during the late middle ages. 

most popular example: chaucer’s canterbury tales (see it written)

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, That fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrie, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie…”

will have recognizable words. read it out loud if you’re struggling.

still no standardized spelling. or dictionaries. soz. we’re getting there.

just straight-up regular english

in use from the 1500s until now.

that means shakespeare and james joyce and jk rowling are all grouped under the same language umbrella

reread that. shakespeare is tough and uses english differently than we’re used to, but he is not old english! he is, for the purposes of labelling, modern english. 

if you are feeling super picky you can label his work as “early modern english” (”early modern” being the period between 1500 and 1700ish) but tbh that’s a fairly arbitrary distinction.

[backpacksandblazers]

Identifying texts from around 1500-1700 as early modern is fairly standard within academic circles. This is because, despite Shakespeare’s English more closely resembling our own, there was still a great deal of variety in the ways in which words were spelled. Shakespeare, of course, is so popular, that his works are widely available in modern English and with modern punctuation (though it’s worth noting that punctuating Shakespeare is still an ongoing critical debate.) For example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, the famous couplet from Claudius—"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.“—appears as, “My wordes fly vp, my sinnes remaine below. / No King on earth is safe, if Gods his foe.” This example highlights the spelling and editorial revisions which have since gone into making Shakespeare sensible to “modern” audiences. Moreover, early modern texts are also contemporaneous with what is commonly referred to as the “great vowel shift"—the period in which the pronunciation of English vowels changed drastically. What this means is that, whereas you might recognise Shakespeare’s English more easily than, say, Chaucer’s, you wouldn’t understand Shakespeare’s English if you were to hear it out loud. The Globe Theatre periodically does OP (original pronunciation) productions and they’re worth checking out if you’re curious.

[post--grad]

yes!! this is such a great addition, thank you! yall, reading in the original is so, so important - and it’s easier with early modern texts than with medieval ones. if you have database access most things are centrally available on EEBO, and both the folger and the bodelian have digitized versions of shakespeare’s first folio that are worth checking out. don’t settle for reading the results of late editorial decisions you didn’t make!  

[aelfscinu-deactivated20161008]

also on the distinction between old and middle english– there are, of course, gradations, as one would expect when trying to periodize a thousand years into two neat linguistic partitions. as time passes, our notion of middleness shifts inevitably to the right, for better or for worse. with old and middle english the distinction is almost neat, as the norman conquest created some very deep and abiding changes in the language (the change from “cyning” to “king,” as evinced in the later sections of the anglo-saxon chronicle, is a notable example), but there are still marked shifts over time– though old english is the form of english that least resembles our modern language, there are sections of the a-s chronicle that can be read much like modern English thanks to case collapse and syntax shift. old english comes with a different alphabet which includes ð, þ, and æ; different syntax; a case system; vastly different vocabulary– as well as so many words that are just a letter or two away from their modern derivatives–; dialects and variation; and pronunciations that feel simultaneously foreign and so familiar. and all this nuance is of course lost with the words “old english? what, like shakespeare?”

[post--grad]

100%, all of the above. also i edited the original post (a few minutes after it took off, unfortunately) to add that middle english looks & sounds very different depending on where it’s written/spoken – gawain and the green knight, for example, looks very different from the canterbury tales, in large part because the gawain author is from the north and chaucer wrote from london. 

ALSO a Very Important Medieval Fact is that “ye,” as in “Ye Olde Shoppe,” is NOT A THING. not a thing, folks!! the letter thorn (þ) was pronounced “th” and often looked very similar to the letter “y” - some scribes didn’t even distinguish between them. when the press happened, “the” was mostly written with a “th,” but sometimes rendered as “þ” with a superscript “e”; eventually thorn phased out and got replaced by “y” (probably because that was one less piece of type for printers to deal with). so “ye olde shoppe” is actually just “the olde shoppe.” now you know~~

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

Just adding to the early modern English thing: let me introduce you to a wonderful little thing called secretary hand. Basically it’s an early form of what we all know as ‘cursive’ or ‘joined up’ writing–it was used to write efficiently and legibly. But there was still a load of variation and some of the letter forms are absolutely unrecognizable today, so it can be really confusing to read. In our first secretary hand workshop this year we had to basically re-learn the alphabet and it took us literally two hours to decipher a marmalade recipe. Here’s why:

Here’s the trickiest part: minims. Minims are little teeny dashes used to indicate small letters like m, n, u, v, w, etc. Problem is, when you get a bunch in a row it can be really hard to work out how many letters are actually there and what they are. The word “minimum,” for example, would b a nightmare. Here’s another example of the secretary hand alphabet from the Folger Shakespeare library. If you look in the middle of the fourth row you’ll see the minims, in between the big fancy Ls and Ms: 

So that’s an extra little tidbit about early modern English.

[gentle-reminder]

gentle reminder

tomorrow it might rain, and there will be that gentle pattering noise against your window, or if its a clear day, the sun will turn the leaves golden when it shines through them, and the stars will be out; you can make a wish on those stars -there’s something beautiful and nurturing in every day

[viralfrog]

Elizabeth Olsen wraps her scarf around Aubrey Plaza

[evelynns-sugar-bby]

I’m too gay for this

[peggybby-deactivated20201218]

This made me gayer tbh

[viralfrog]

Elizabeth Olsen wraps her scarf around Aubrey Plaza

[evelynns-sugar-bby]

I’m too gay for this

[peggybby-deactivated20201218]

This made me gayer tbh

[bubblegum-flix-deactivated20181]

reminder: you can start over at anytime. your day is not ruined. your world is not over. take a deep breath. start over.

[steveyzermans]

#ripvine

[57circlesofhell-deactivated2015]

I once tried to explain depression to someone as like if one day you gradually started to lose both your sense of taste and your ability to feel full. And you don’t know why, but now everything you eat tastes like mashed potatoes and nothing you eat is satisfying. You keep eating because you must eat to live, but the effort that it takes to prepare food is taxing and there is no pay off. You just know it will taste like mashed potatoes. You just know you will still be hungry. So you stop bothering with seasonings. Then you stop bothering to use ingredients you used to like. Then you start to wonder what the point of eating is because there is no payoff. You still feel hungry and you’re sick of the taste and you don’t know if you will ever enjoy food again and you don’t know why this is happening.

If someone comes up to you in this scenario and says, “Well have you tried spicing your food? Using different ingredients? Eating foods you used to love?” It isn’t necessarily helpful because the reason you stopped doing all that in the first place is that everything…tasted…like mashed…potatoes.

[ladyjanelly]

This. Completely this.

[inkskinned]

i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.

someone once told me - actually, many people have - that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”

at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.

someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.

i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me. 

how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex - sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.

i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that! 

but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think - but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.

i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” - feels naughty, illicit. not for children.

the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.

oh.

lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution. 

i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults. 

i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.

fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.

[rockythebird]

[steamandsequins-deactivated2020]

ice water is so fucking good

[steamandsequins-deactivated2020]

not only is it refreshing but once you’re finished you can either chew on the ice or let it melt and then you have more water… choose your own adventure

[raptorific]

I’m fairly certain that the people who make the “batman could make himself obsolete by using his money to solve the economic strain that drives many people to crime” posts are only familiar with Batman through Will Arnett’s spoof performance in the Lego movie, since that’s the only version of Batman I know where he isn’t hiring so many ex-convicts at his company so they have a legitimate source of income and using so much money to fund social programs that all the other bigwigs at Wayne Enterprises hate him and want him gone

Literally every version of his origin story I can remember involves him realizing that he can’t just treat the symptoms as Batman, he has to treat the root cause as Bruce Wayne. A huge part of the plot of “The Dark Knight Rises” is that his company is on the verge of bankruptcy because Bruce keeps spending all their profits on things like “clean energy” and “food and shelter for orphans.”

The opening of “Arkham City” shows him campaigning against mass incarceration because the majority of the inmates in Arkham City are not public menaces like the Joker, they’re desperate people with no other options, and Gotham should be providing them with legitimate means of stability rather than punishing them for having none.

Especially since the majority of his villains are independently wealthy people (doctors, lawyers, business executives) who are exploiting people’s desperation in order to get themselves henchmen, and the henchmen almost always have jobs with a living wage waiting for them on the other side of their sentence, and Bruce has a standing offer to pay out-of-pocket for the therapy of any of his villains whose crimes are the result of a mental illness (which Bruce is sympathetic to since he is mentally ill himself)

But what’s really damning about these posts is that a lot of them suggest Bruce should use his money to give the police the resources they need to deal with crime on their own, which makes it clear they’ve never actually consumed a piece of Batman media, since the issue with the Gotham Police is not that they’re underfunded. They have a bloated budget, they’re almost militant, and they’re so corrupt that they actually encourage crime, both violent and economic, because they’re on the payroll of the richest criminals. 

Also, some of them refer to Batman as a “old rich white man’s wet dream” and I really disagree here. A story that says the only rich dude in the world who’s not a criminal drain on society is the one who spends the majority of his hefty inheritance and all his corporate profits trying to correct the imbalance that allowed him his wealth in the first place, whose staunch belief is that the best crime control policy is building a world where no one feels crime is necessary, as well as refusing to support mass incarceration or police corruption, systems which stand to benefit him financially? Batman is an old rich white man’s worst nightmare.