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river-gale

some of my faves from playing with my etymology mapping program!

river-gale

"but wait," you say, "does it work with words in languages other than english?"

yes it does :D

river-gale

"i want to try this but my computer can't run python!"

good news! it's a google colab notebook now, so you can run it anywhere without having to download anything! you might have to run the first cell twice.

anyways: more

microsff

"You have improved," the swordmaster said.

"Thanks to my new sword," said the student.

The swordmaster studied the blade and frowned. "This is enchanted?"

"You know about cursed swords that whisper that you should kill?"

"Yes?"

"This tells me I'm loved and valid."

"Ah. Well. It's not wrong."

thecollectibles

Singing Holidays by Rosanna Tasker

elierlick

Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.

1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.

The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.

Tamara wasn't the first famous trans woman of the 1950s, nor was she the best known. However, she had a unique opportunity to share her own story. You can read Tamara's 1955 autobiography, Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition from Male to Female, at transreads.org/reborn

autistobrat

scientists are experimenting on cross-breeding a crab and a cheetah; things could go sideways real fast

teamhawkeye

We put glow collars on the dogs when we walk them at night, and it is Extremely™️ effective on Boswell

#an angel

allthingseurope

Gdansk, Poland

berlynn-wohl

a marriage of humankind's two greatest design achievements: the illuminated manuscript and the cool S

pesti-devota-futurae

lacuna mutata

[... ] a wonderful phrase

lacuna mutata

aint no [... ] craze

it means textual emendations

for the rest of your days

it's a source [...] free

ambiguity

lac[... ]

always-rolling-my-eyes

Just so y’all know, this is what I picture whenever any of you are talking about whatever the hell Tomodachi is

#forgot tomodachi life existed and this read like someone bilingually saying a tamagotchi was their only friend

dykeluver

crochet tapestry of a panel from alison bechdel's fun home (made by me!, 2025)

aemperatrix

ANDY LOVELL Swirls & Eddies, North Devon / North Cornish Coast / Swans, Incoming Tide silkscreen prints

not-so-blue

WITCH HAT ATELIER (2026)

1.02 The School of the Grassland | 1.05 The Dragon's Labyrinth

teashoesandhair

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.