"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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Claire Keane
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@heelgripper
Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.
My favorite part is the sink.
itâs sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.
i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mineâan N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.
so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said âdamn. never known a woman to chooseâŠpracticality over looks.â
And I just said, âoh. you can go, youâre not getting a drink.â And he said, âwhat???â
I said, âsir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.â
And he was so astonished he didnât even argue he just turned around and left đđđ» it was like he suddenly became self aware
One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, sheâs the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, âWell, IâM not walking six miles, Michael! Iâll meet you back at the car!â and sits right back down!!!!
The expression on his face when he was told that he couldnât get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationshipâŠâŠ.
i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and heâs like âhey. you know what this isâ i was like ânah sorryâ (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some randoâs pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with âheh. you must not read many booksâ
i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: âheh. you must not want this beer.â thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm âplease please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorryâ believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed
gotta love people immediately backpedaling when they realise that there are Consequences To Being Mean
I genuinely believe that part of why it has become so normalized to be openly callous and evil in politics is that customer service culture has trained affluent people that they can treat everyone they consider beneath them however they want and still be treated kindly.
Basically what I'm getting from the present "giving 100% at work" Tumblr discourse is that a lot of people have fairly narrow notions of what blue-collar versus white-collar jobs actually entail. There are in fact manual labour jobs where a significant chunk of your average work day consists of Fucking Around, and conversely, there are desk jobs where you crunch eighty-hour weeks for years on end until you suddenly drop dead from heart failure at age 32. It's absolutely true that you're more likely to end up in a No Fucking Around Allowed situation in a blue-collar occupation, but you can't tell whether or not someone is in that position based purely on whether or not they work in an office. Shit, call centre workers are white collar on paper, and the kind of fuckery a lot of call centre workers are subjected to involves genuine human rights violations.
One time I came home from uni very upset and my younger siblings asked what's wrong. I said that mutated flies in our lab escaped because someone broke their jar. I didn't even realise how scary it sounded to them until I saw their faces lmao. I was upset because we were short on said flies (they don't reproduce very well) and my siblings thought that some crazy radioactive fly monsters escaped and we are all fucked now. Love being a mad scientist in their eyes lowkey
my daily affirmation as an author
[Image ID: AO3 Notes section reading: this may be shit, but at least i didnât use ai /End ID]
Look at my birthday cake...
reblogged a post with a correction about spray sunscreens (they work way less well than you think) but then decided the very small number of people who might see my reblog wasn't worth the likelihood that people would read it as me discouraging sunscreen use and come to yell at me so i deleted it.
but FYI, here in my own post:
spray sunscreens don't work very well
neither do (most) sunscreen sticks
in general, michelle wong (a.k.a. lab muffin beauty science), a chemistry PhD who is very passionate about sunscreen and spends a lot of time debunking sunscreen misinformation, is a useful resource for learning about sunscreen! both the above links go to videos she made. here is another: many many sunscreen questions answered
and yes, use sunscreen!!!
the phrase really should be "eat your cake and have it too" im with the unabomber on this one
"And I know you know all of this and it's okay if you come and cry about Nick all day. But I'm terrified all the time and I just really need my best friends with me to march at pride, okay?"
this scene wrecked me
i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict đ
I remember walking down the street and seeing a sign protesting George W. Bushâs war on Iraq, so I think that.
I don't know about a news story, but my first "political" memory was something about the torture memos
my first political memory is photographs from abu ghraib
The Jon Benet investigation. Or maybe the OJ trials. Toss up.
I vaguely remember the Broncos winning the superbowl when I was in kindergarten. This would've been 1997
Knowing Bill Clinton had done Something, but being unclear on what, exactly.
quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog
mutual who i'm still clearly mutuals with who i'm seeing on my dashboard: i had to block a mutual for doing [horrible thing i would never do]
me, immediately: oh my god what if it was me
You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is âI seriously hate women and minorities.â and youâll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light
Holy fuck
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 (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) 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:
Thereâs mony a slip, anâ Iâm no losinâ sight oâ any oâ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)
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.
Canadian English speakers use contractions in a consistently different way from British English users> where the contractions change regionally
vocab differences like pavement and pants MATTER alot.
code switching
formal vs. informal
speech vs. writing
NFLD dialect grammar> origins in welsh?
speech mannerisms matter a lot> patterns, habits, tics, idioms, style
patois, creole, dialect, accent, in group, out group, state enforced.
Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:
This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.
Shout-out to @ms-demeanor for putting these on my dash again, Iâd like to add this exceptional interview question âanswer guideâ that explains traps and âthe bestâ way to answer over 64 common questions. I donât know who to attribute it to, but here it is: PDF from tri valley one-stop career center.
Hey some of these answer templates helped J get an offer letter from her dream job; strongly recommend you read them if youâre job hunting
in honour of wolvie returning to the big screen here's a fond childhood memory
