I Got A Temper Set For Tender

I'm Libby, 24 (she/her). I will beat you in a staring contest.

[lesbianshepard]

Odysseus' ship is a Viking longship. Telemachus is wearing a shirt and pants. Agamemnon is beardless and has MF DOOM's helmet. The Trojans used brutalist architecture. There is no color to be found in any costume or on any set. Christopher Nolan deserves to be gored and trampled by a large mammal.

[lesbianshepard]

someone needs to take those fuckass broom helmets and shove one up his ass

[heedra]

really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core

[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.

[maplebunie]

having a popular post in 2016: lots of annoying people in notes, occasional anon hate

having a popular post in 2026: 50/50 chance you won't have a blog tomorrow

[catball]

this post is less than a week old and op is already deleted. you can’t make this shit up

[ouroborosorder]

I’m sorry I support all jokes but cave johnson would not be supportive of trans women

[ouroborosorder]

Due to a recent accident in the labs, the boys downstairs have found a way to turn men into women. Amazing breakthrough, and we wish you all luck on your transition. And your job hunt. You’re all fired. Sorry boys, nothing against you. We just don’t need women around here trying to clean up the lab while the men are trying to do real work. Cave out.

[notkatniss]

[lesserknownwaifus]

Cylinda Oyl from Popeye

[thecrumbez]

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

[wizardshark]

99% of queer discourse stops right before they define the true difference between bisexual and pansexual!

[saspitite]

FOR THE LAST FUCKING TIME

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

PANSEXUALS GROW FROM THE CEILING

[myfootyrthroat]

I thought bisexuals were cooked with ambient heat and pansexuals were cooked with direct heat?

[titleknown]

Dollar General Claims It’s A Discount Store. It’s Not.

We investigated how they charge more for less.

So, we now know on a direct statistical level that Dollar General is literally making the Vimes Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness into a part of its core business model.

Sweet jesus…

[ejacutastic]

True, the chain pays its workers industry-low wages in under-staffed stores that can be magnets for armed burglary. And yes, Dollar Store management targets economically struggling communities, focusing on customers who make less than $40,000 a year and visit the store multiple times a week. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” CEO Todd Vasos said in 2018.

But to those working class consumers, Dollar General promises to deliver “everyday low prices.” 

In reality, without knowing it, customers are often paying Whole Foods prices for dollar store groceries. 

A More Perfect Union investigation reveals that Dollar General charges premium prices across a range of staple goods—52% more per pound for chicken breasts than its cheapest competitor, for instance—but masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.

In other words, Dollar General often charges more for less. It offers low absolute prices for national brands, but in smaller pack sizes than other stores, in order to push per-unit costs higher.

[toskarin]

smash bros is just kind of a funny concept for a game in general. you've got all kinds of game mechanics and characters flying at each other, and they've all gotta collide and Do Something

what's steve minecraft doing against captain falcon? they had to ask how a falcon punch would interact with minecraft blocks. what if the persona 5 protag fought solid snake? they had to answer what would happen if joker could beat box

[kurhanchyk]

do all moms treat fictional characters like real life celebrities or what

[kurhanchyk]

my mom asked me to show her dune 3 trailer and one of her only comments was "oh he cut his hair"

[midnightssea]

Voice of the people

[segamascott]

such a good listener hard to find those sometimes

[mattpresents]

How do you know you're not Asexual? Maybe you just haven't met the right nobody.

[aroaceenjolras]

This "allosexuality" thing is just a phase. You just need to have really bad sex, and then maybe you'll change your mind.

[bruneburg]

“Listen I can’t make any sense of this either.”

[bruneburg]

[peerieweirdo]

[red-mercer]

Someone wanna provide context for the non-SDV people?

[lastoneout]

Saw this in the notes and figured I'd step in!

So, for non-SDV players, in most farming sims you can get married to certain characters and have children with them, however this is typically a permanent choice that can't be undone, so if you want to marry someone else or not have kids you would have to start over with a fresh save.

But SDV is different. The game has a witch's hut you can eventually unlock that lets you use...black magic, basically, to soft-reset marriage/children choices without starting over. There's a divorce option so you can ditch your spouse, but that's the only normal one. It also adds an option to turn your children into doves to get rid of them, hence OP saying they "birded" their kids. You're not...technically killing them...but only barely.

(It also adds an option to mind-wipe your previous spouse so they don't remember being married to you and thus don't hate you, and you can even remarry them then if you want, but I don't think that was needed for this, just figured it was sinister enough to warrant a mention.)

All that to say, the reddit OP married a character, progressed to the point that they had a child with them, and then used black magic to "kill" the child and divorce their spouse before moving on to the next marriage candidate and doing the same, over and over until they had gone through all twelve marriage candidates, resulting in a collection of twelve "dead" children.

Which, I must agree, is some uniquely unhinged behavior indeed.

[the-haiku-bot]

Which, I must agree,

is some uniquely unhinged

behavior indeed.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[suinicide]

Okay, but who is joja

[stupidbeecandle]

Joja is essentially Walmart. You can either try to revitalize the town by going the community route and help local businesses and people thrive or you can sell the town to Jojacorp who will put the locals out of business and sell you way cheaper and shittier stuff

[kindigo]

“I may use black magic to be a serial child murderer, but at least I’m not a capitalist”