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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
wallacepolsom
dirt enthusiast
AnasAbdin
Acquired Stardust
YOU ARE THE REASON
Keni
One Nice Bug Per Day
Not today Justin
art blog(derogatory)
roma★
PR's Tumblrdome
Cosimo Galluzzi
styofa doing anything
we're not kids anymore.
Stranger Things
Sade Olutola
$LAYYYTER
Kiana Khansmith
seen from Brazil
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@impernaway
okay so I've been playing a bunch of No Man's Sky, a game whose main unique feature is its mind-bogglingly huge universe of procedurally generated planets, most of which have still never been encountered by human players. when you make first contact with an undiscovered planet, it starts out with a random name. just today I've discovered Snesfin, Inkiew, and Roranbu-Anuki. but a minute ago I landed on a planet with, and I must stress this again, the randomly-generated name of:
its 3 am and im tire d and someone posted this strategy board in ffxiv and im crying
Wait so is the mandate of heaven and the divine right of kings the same kind of concept, or have I massively misunderstood one or the other?
divine right of kings: you can do whatever you want forever because you're god's specialest little boy!
mandate of heaven: do a good job ruling or god's gonna start sending hitmen
Ah, yeah, I see it now. This is the exact level of detail I needed of the key details of how to distinguish the two. Thank you.
crossy paws
there will never be anything as funny as the mutual disbelief between long form and short form fic writers about each other's style.
short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.
meanwhile long form writers look at people writing 1000 word one shots like god I would cut off my left nipple to be able to say anything concisely. i would love to play with multiple ideas. free me from the shackles of this child I have birthed. i love them but I now must take them to t-ball and doctor's appointments and they're going to destroy everything I own.
Every time I remake the same post about how the people typically portrayed as being "poor" in pop histories of the georgian and regency periods are really just lower level gentry and it's insulting to the lower classes of the era and also just not true to describe them as relatively "badly off" I get ninety billion people saying that actually wealthy white english women in 1810 did have it bad as though it's a trump card, so I would just like to ask everyone to join me in a group exercise where we all put our heads together and see if we can think of a group of people to which "poor" and "woman" could possibly both apply
It was often miserable to be poor in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: true ✅
It was often miserable to be a woman in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: true ✅
It was often miserable to be a poor woman in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: thankfully this one is not true as women only existed in the upper classes and therefore the heights of oppression for women were such horrors as "arranged marriage" or "only had one servant" and not "arm torn off in a factory machine; no recourse of any kind as women aren't actually legally allowed to be working at that factory and early workers rights movements were male exclusive" or "indefinitely imprisoned in a lock hospital by the government as a prostitute, the evidence being that she was living on the streets because she couldn't afford rent." learned this one today from my tumblr notes
if i was a popular minecraft youtuber id just tweet "hey guys stop drawing shipping fanart of me and my friends/coworkers, i only fucked one of them and seeing me paired with anyone else is kinda weird and crosses my boundaries" and then i'd turn my phone off
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:
There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ 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.
I love characters who would die for each other but will not, under any circumstances, communicate a single honest feeling.
got a good thing going where these bandits give me a half share of whatever loot they pull from adventurers i send their way & the best part is i don't even need to lie or anything since every hero is born with the unshakeable belief in their ability to win a fight against ten guys at once. just gotta say "we've got bandit trouble in the west, let me mark it on your map" and a week later i get $15 from Wulfric the Hound on cashapp
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.”
I loooove ominously giggling when I'm getting my friends into smth new. They ask me a spoilery question and I get to do this
Apparently someone got their car stuck on the light rail tracks at Mt. Baker. For those unfamiliar this is 35 feet up in the air
As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.
There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.
We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.
May we never become so obsessed with representation that we forget the sanctity of privacy.
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
that’s not the whole flag, now is it
hey staff what the fuck
hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose
HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE
THE GOLDEN GIRLS 2.05 — Isn't It Romantic? — 08.11.86 Betty White as Rose Nylund Lois Nettleton as Jean
1986!!
Golden Girls was so incredibly progressive for its time and not even slightly afraid to be loud about it. They talked about queer people, about race, about ableism, and they made it central and overt. They talked about things that mattered, and they never punched down, and they were allies off the stage too.
Reblogging this again to add some context for anyone who may not know. In the 80's, being outed as gay could get you blacklisted in Hollywood. It ruined people's careers.
Bea Arthur and Betty White both suffered damage to their careers for standing up against racism and homophobia. Back in the 50s Betty White hosted a variety show that was canceled because she featured a black dancer and doubled down when they told her to stop.
(To the tune of Rasputin): BLEH BLEH DRACULA, KING OF TRANSYLVANIA, HE IS A BAT AND ALSO A MAN
