man with excellent self restraint dismayed to realize that not wanting anything is more likely a depression symptom than a carefully honed skill that atones for other aspects of his character
how dare you
Jules of Nature
AnasAbdin

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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
Three Goblin Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
todays bird
Cosimo Galluzzi
Monterey Bay Aquarium

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Today's Document
art blog(derogatory)
d e v o n
i don't do bad sauce passes
noise dept.

Product Placement
Peter Solarz
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@nishka-jan
man with excellent self restraint dismayed to realize that not wanting anything is more likely a depression symptom than a carefully honed skill that atones for other aspects of his character
how dare you
lydia davis
In the same vein:
"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)
via ThoughtCo
Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:
But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.
from "English is not normal"
Margaret Owen (@what-eats-owls) uses this quite cleverly (in my opinion) to great effect in her wonderful Merciful Crow Duology, to give the Crows—the lowest caste in the setting’s caste system—a different dialect (they primarily use words that come from Anglo-Saxon, unlike the higher castes, which use primarily Latinate words) that marks them as distinct but isn’t a real dialect, and thus doesn’t come with any real-world implications or the risk of making the Crows the equivalent of any real-world oppressed group.
In retrospect, I also think this hamstrung the book a bit as a debut in a time where being swiftly dismissive of books garnered clout. Readers were confused or outright hostile about the lack of academia-coded language in the narration and assumed I simply didn’t know how to write pretty. Their loss, I suppose!
Damn but that does sound like a really interesting approach to writing a distinctive dialect. It captures a certain level of formality and potentially implies social class without roi'in' sum 'orrible funne'ick aksen' with all the attached issues that has.
But it reminds me of something I saw on reddit a while back, about contractions, colloquialisms and the use of dialectal terms in writing. Someone was explaining that writing in a more colloquial way looked wrong when writing the dialogue of someone "like a university professor"; that it would sound jarring and weird, that it was unbelievable that they would talk like that.
Which kinda threw me for a loop because I know a lot of academics. And they don't talk like secondary school English teachers from 60 years ago, they talk and write like normal* human beings. Some of them even have (gasp) regional accents and non-standard dialectal features!
And it really made me realise that, while writing all academic characters to speak in Perfect Formal Register RP English sounds unrealistic to me, that isn't actually the case for a lot of people. That me writing the real words that I and my friends say would come across as unrealistic to a bunch of readers. The trope "Reality is Unrealistic" in action I guess.
*well, they're academics, so I'm stretching the word "normal" to breaking point here but you get what I mean.
Weren't most of the English aristocracy basically French for a significant chunk of feudal history and all? So Latin for church and later academy, French for those with French ancestry (and also resources and leisure for stuff like war and poetry, and either moving about on horses increasingly cosplaying weird human-horse hybrid tanks with pointy long bits when in groups or wearing too much expensive-ass clothes to move about properly no matter the season), and your actual English for everyone providing those at the top with said resources and leisure.
Not exclusively, obviously, but that roughly tracks (also, nobody was aware the Roman Empire was actually over and done with for centuries upon centuries after the fact, so for a really, really, ridiculously long time French wasn't thought of as French, but more like "the common/bastard/vulgar Latin kinda" people spoke in the area... pretty sure same went for your Spanish(s), Italian(s) and so on). Food for thought on writing your languages/dialects history, for sure.
Always a reblog. These are all women!
All women drumming troupe called “Batala Samba” they are based out of New York.
This post is from 2019 in Mexico City for the Day Of the Dead
growth isn’t always constant. relapses happen. it doesn’t erase all your success.
#my brain knows that good luck making it believe it tho
I want to start running...any tips?
I WAS BORN TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION. Thank you so much for asking! Unfortunately, I am a nerd about my hobbies so this got quite long.
Keep it simple ✨
Running is easy to get into; our bodies are built for it. Don’t stress over technicalities and just do what feels natural to you. My local races are full of 70-something white-haired pensioners who are kicking ass at it. Don’t let anyone tell you that running is meant to feel like dying, that’ll harm your knees, or that you absolutely need to have that specific smartwatch model to get into it. All you need is a solid pair of shoes, everything else is optional.
Look in all seriousness you can't redeem a character without showing them being pathetic, deep loser energy. There are no cool redemption arcs. They have to be in the trenches. They have to hate themselves for the mistakes they made. They have to apologize and take whatever is given be it forgiveness or a punch to the jaw. ONLY then will the redemption arc be actually good because it will be cathartic. And then they get to see the good things, they get to be touched gently and held while they sleep.
These things can overlap, even into a circle but without the pathetic loser boy saga your redemption arc will feel hollow.
Why does this feels like a challenge...
The ease of nudity in Finland is something I'm super jealous of, I think it also promotes people being comfortable in their own body, if body's aren't so sexualized and taboo. The only bodies i really saw were in movies, and indeed kids changing on the beach or baby's in diapers. I'm not even from the USA, the Netherlands, so close yet so different!
I think you're right - while I have of course met Finns who are deeply uncomfortable in their own bodies and unhappy about being seen, the absolutely constant, default, "this is considered healthy actually" cultural background radiation of "nudity is always a precursor to sex! nudity is always a precursor to sex!" in many other places does really do a special kind of damage to people's psyche.
I always think of one of my co-workers at a husky farm near Inari, who told me apropos of nothing while we were clearing out dog shit together that he thought the reason Americans are "like that" ("like what, Veikka" got the response "you know what I mean") is because "they never see their grandma's tits." His logic was that "in Finland, you go to the sauna with your grandma from when you're a baby, and you see her naked, and this is years and years before you ever see any porn, so you know before you see any of it that it's temporary and fake. And when you get a girlfriend later, you know it's only a matter of time before her tits look like that too, you accept this. And Americans don't know that! They don't! They look at porn, and then they get a wife, and then they're surprised and bitter when she gets old - it's true!"
Like, to be clear, I think Veikka's analysis might have been missing more than a bit of nuance, this is the same guy whose motto was "Driving 600km south to Rovaniemi to get therapy is expensive, chopping wood till you don't care about it anymore is free", but I do occasionally still look at some British or American take online and think to myself, in his voice, "they've never seen their grandma's tits"
quick question op is Veikka single
Some of you have never seen your grandma’s tits and it shows
pining is 100000% the most important aspect of pre-relationship fic for me. good-natured whole-hearted pining filled with lovelorn gazing and chest aching and fluttering touches, that’s my top priority. i was put on this earth to watch characters suffer over the profundity of their love for another person. unrequited love is why god made me. characters finding out that their feelings are reciprocated after long months/years of suffering is why the universe was assembled from nothingness. amen.
I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.
J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.
You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.
You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.
On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.
Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.
I've roblogged this already way back, and will probably do again.
“Fish Pond mosaic by Gary Drostle. It’s made of vitreous ceramic tesserae using a ‘reverse technique’ and measures 2 meters in diameter. Made for a small public garden in Croydon, Surrey, UK, it won several art awards.“ (via Archaeohistories at Twitter)
staying close w people long distance really is about the mundane stuff. i get texts like "made quesadillas" "spilled mop water all over the floor :(" "lady on the bus has not one not two but three tiny dogs in her purse" andits like wow. i love you more than words can express
the worst thing in the world is doing things. the second worst thing in the world is not doing things. how has no one ever come up with a solution for this
Does "Eh, what can you do" shrug counts
Adam Clague, Cara Cara Core, 2022, Oil on board
If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.
Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.
They are called "Lip-Ribbon" or "Commentator's" microphones.
They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.
They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.
First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.
That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.
Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence "lip-ribbon") in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.
That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.
There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.
But my favorite trick... a labyrinthian internal baffle system.
(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you'll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)
Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.
That is a very sciency way of saying... make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.
So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice's energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.
These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.
And even more amazing... this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.
Isn't that neat?
I think it is neat.
Oh, and there is a "nostril grille" on top so you can exhale through your nose!
SO NEAT.
...I've always wondered what the story was with these things. :)
westley in the princess bride was so funny for being like ‘talk about this dead guy you loved lol’ and getting the tea about himself
oh he was ur true love? you thought he was hot n strong? rate him 1-10 and why
and then she hit him with “poor and perfect, with eyes like the sea after a storm” and the look on his face is like “holy shit I didn’t think she’d go that hard”
Hey btw, to new writers who want to write angst: Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights.
If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small.
Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go “my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life” isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go “yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it”, and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.
Now, having someone casually think or say shit like “I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time”, and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.