holy randomness

Warning: if encouraged this user WILL yap about literary analysis for hours on end bio: australian, she/her you can call me Reese (not my actual name lol) berrisexual (bi microlabel) and girlflux uhh idk what else to include feel free to send me asks, dm me, and interect with me in any other way you might wish to! you dont have to like ask beforehand or anything i dont bite! no dni, i block freely but rarely

[heartlessdreams18]

self portrait

[nicoswcat]

I lied. I love her

[finalgirldigital]

People love natives in such a superficial way. People wanna stand with natives when we’re talking about the trees, and the land. People wanna stand with natives when we talk about philosophies of love and togetherness. But as soon as it’s time to talk about political side of being native. About dismantling a system built on the genocide of our people. About how we need a new system that isn’t built upon capital gain and benefitting white bodies. About putting up a fight. About how the colonial state we reside in is a disgusting imperial plague on this land. Suddenly y’all don’t wanna talk native.

[neechees]

"They spent hundreds of years trying to assimilate my ancestors, trying to create indians like me, who could blend in, but now they don’t want me either. They can’t make up their minds.

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

But they don’t want me." -Shelby Lisk

[heartlessdreams18]

Hey, you just sent me an ask saying I have minors DNI and you're a minor (so you know who I am lol). It's more there so minors don't DM me but I'm chill with following minors for their blogs/them sending asks as long as it stays appropriate!! If you aren't comfortable with me following, let me know and I will unfollow :)

oh okay yeah thats fine then, i was js making sure you knew cause ive had people get really mad that i didnt tell them in the past and i wanted to avoid that lol

[heartlessdreams18]

What's your all time favorite book

ajsjdosjfkdkdjdjd thats an insanely difficult question that will inevitably result in me overexplaining myself to the point of boring you, so i will try my best to keep it short?

okay so i love The Yellow Wallpaper, Giovanni’s Room, ummm We Have Always Lived in the Castle I loved too, i also loved Lolita for the writing style and unreliable narrator type thing— it really made me think, which was super cool! (verrrryyyy confronting tho…), uhhh I used to love Lord Of The Flies but its been about a year since ive read it and i think of it as more of a school thing anyway, recently read de profundis by oscar wilde that was pretty cool not an all time fav tho, ahhhh i just know im forgetting something painfully obvious but i will have to be okay with this response for now sadly, uh maurice by em forster i loved too but not a huge fan of his writing style in general (nothing against it- it just doesnt really speak to me.)

as for when i was younger (you didnt ask but i decided to tell anyway) i used to love like sappy queer romance so i loved Red White and Royal Blue, Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, Not My Problem, things like that. they’re not really my thing anymore but they have their merits as easy enjoyable reads yk

[segamascott]

[b0nkcreat]

My fucking pringles just blew away in the wind

[b0nkcreat]

if my favorite pringle got swept into the sky never to be seen again i would not be posting about it on tumblr i would be an active suicide risk

[segamascott]

[990000]

simongerman600

[brunhiddensmusings]

i was going to say ‘i have no idea what to do with this information’ but then i realized its a handy guide to generate fake words that sound english

[holdup-andrememberthetime]

“What to do with this information”: kick ass at hangman

[dragonanarchist1155]

Also useful for simple codebreaking and decoding an unhashed simple letter cypher.

[cannibalcaprine]

the rocky wastes…

[whitepeopletwitter]

[blanketfortarchitect]

[rebloggingistheenemy]

[inviernodel95]

Thank you. I hope everybody thinks this

[lostangelofthestars]

rechecking all my posts to make sure I didn’t accidentally call my favorite mutuals slurs or say that I decided that I wanted to kill a minority group

[batsonmyboxers]

Ok so awhile back I did a poll on making lotf merch and I’m still thinking of doing that, so…

What form would you like lotf merch in?

Keychains

Pins

Stickers

Other (please specify in comics)

Remaining time: 5 days 4 minutes

[wtf-jax]

MIDDLE FINGERS UP IF YOU DON’T GIVE A *whispers quietly so my parents can’t hear me* frick

[siacherry]

*POLICE SIRENS*

[mutecrows]

*HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING*

[saltyhealer-deactivated20170126]

[gavin screaming]

[piginapoke]

who the fuck is Gavin

[lovely-blue-galaxy]

Idk but he sounds pretty upset

[curlicuecal]

Buckle up, they're dropping new gender binaries

[copperbooms]

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

[rodimuss]

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

[prismatic-bell]

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[willowgrovecreates]

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

[sanerontheinside]

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

[obaewankenope]

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

[adora-korra]

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

[elenorasweet]

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

[solitarelee]

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

[prismatic-bell]

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

[lostangelofthestars]

@heartlessdreams18 I think this is in the same ballpark as your interests

[heartlessdreams18]

yooo I finished the Iliad btw . it was good

also hru?

oh dang you finsihed it? good job!!!!! i fear i may never join you in that endeavour, but maybe one day ill pick it up again💔

im alright! had a kind of weird day today at my school where we got to go talk to lots of different teachers about hsc subjects for the next two years, and i kind of spiralled about a hundred times and cried a bit but im okay now! how about you?

[00000066]