if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.

a lot of people in the tags saying they live in places where they hear people mock accents & dialects a lot & it upsets them. just want to remind you that it’s up to you to challenge that in the moment. when someone makes a shitty joke at the expense of someone else, someone else has to tell them it’s not funny & why. we don’t learn in a vacuum. maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. still gotta try.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

it’s not enough to learn your own lesson and move on. you have to pass the lesson along.

All of the following is IMO, so YMMV.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

*****

Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

And here are a couple of bits of "Dagenham Dialogues": One and Two.

I was really enjoying Peter's analysis and then suddenly I was reading about my story. He's spot on, on every point.

Paraglider and black vulture chilling

(via)

I NEVER get tired of this video. It would be fantastic if the bird was just flying near him, but the fact it feels safe and comfortable enough to land ON his paraglider, isn't startled when he pets it, and is NIBBLING HIS SHOES... blessed moment, absolutely fabulous, 10/10 gold stars.

Okay but the bird isn't just nibbling

Note that it doesn't start nibbling until he starts smoothing its feathers.

They're grooming each other.

This is called parahawking! That vulture is tame -- it’s wearing jesses (a leather tie around the leg that a falconer will use to hold a bird when it’s on the glove). In fact that vulture is employed. Parahawking birds seek out thermals the same way they would naturally, allowing paragliders to follow them in the process.

Vultures are often used for parahawking both because of their attraction to thermals, and because vultures, as scavengers, are comparatively gentler and more sociable than birds of prey!

Source

"Isn't it exhausting being someone you're not?"

"No! Isn't it exhausting being the same?"

See also: "Isn't it exhausting being someone your not?" / "Yes it was. That's why I finally transitioned."

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

I use LibreOffice. It's wonderful.

them not so subtly exposing the actual length of their relationship is my favorite genre ɷ◡ɷ

hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.

works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.

for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:

COBALT MENTIONED OUTSIDE OF TWITTER???

^ (one of the lead devs that made cobalt)

thank you for your thingy, it's real useful 🙏

The most important lesson you’ll eventually learn 🎓

I would be the worst spy of all time because on one hand I overshare like hell, but on the other hand I also have THE shittiest memory so it’s really a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved.

guy interrogating me: What’s the passcode?

me: Ah fuck. I think it might be 792.....4?

me: Actually no I think it starts with a 2.

me:

me: Yeah I usually just rely on muscle memory for it. Do you think you could get a keypad in here? That might be faster.

guy interrogating me: who do you work for?!

me: Okay, so this is super embarrassing. I know he told me his name when we first met but I forgot and at this point it would be weird if I asked him for his name again, right? So I just kind of go with “sir” whenever I have to talk to him. It might be David though. He looks like a David.

me, after being extracted: bad news guys, I totally blew Dave’s cover.

my boss: Wait, what?

me: Yeah, like they had knives and shit and it was kind of stressful so I just told them that my contact’s name was David Johnson. Really sorry about that.

boss: We don’t have a David Johnson working for us. Are you thinking of James?

me: 

me: Good news, guys, I did not blow James’ cover!

Enemy 1: So, how did the interrogation go?

Enemy 2: We got nothing. All they did was ramble on about their childhood trauma for two hours.

Enemy 1: Hmm. maybe lower the dose of the truth serum next time.

Enemy 2: We didn’t use truth serum.

a real blorbo is someone you can both write a lengthy and serious/sad analysis on yet also constantly and i mean constantly make stupid jokes about

oh and also there’s gotta be at least one thing they should be locked up for

genuinely the funniest thing ive seen on reddit

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

12 and bill would’ve killed that thing with hammers I can tell you that much

#they would yeah#and 11 would've kissed it w tongue#so i think we still dodged a bullet (via @yesokayiknow)

this couldn’t be said any better

Foggy’s gotten pretty decent at naming which red-themed vigilante is coming through his window in the middle of the night without even opening his eyes: Matt tries to be quiet so he doesn’t wake him up, Deadpool is talking before he even gets the window open and Peter knocks like a goddamn decent human being.

“Come in!” he yells, deciding that he won’t get out of bed until he knows if there’s an emergency or Peter just wants to raid his first aid kit and fridge.

“Sorry, Mr. Nelson,” Peter says, climbing inside and dropping lightly to the floor. “I know it’s late but I had a question.”

“Shoot, Spiderboy,” Foggy says, sitting up to see Peter lingering awkwardly close by in full Spiderman gear and oversized hoodie, backpack slung over one shoulder.

“It’s just that Mr. Murdock said that you might be willing to look over one of my essays,” Peter says, “but I kind of got distracted doing, y’know--” Peter makes a vague punching motion with a soft pow sound. “--and it’s kind of due tomorrow morning.”

“Oh my god,” Foggy says, sighing and pushing aside his sheets to get out of bed. “This is actually the least stressful thing one of you weirdos has ever asked me to do. What’s your essay about?”

“Macbeth.”

“Y’know, Matt was an English major,” Foggy says, huffing out a laugh and finding a sweatshirt to pull on before he turns on the lights. “You should probably be offended that he passed you off on me.”

“What was your major?” Peter asks.

“Business,” Foggy says. “Did I ever tell you about how my mom wanted me to be a butcher?”

“You have,” Peter says, dutifully, sitting his backpack on the floor and digging through it, “but you can tell me again, if you want.”

“You’re a good kid,” Foggy says, taking the essay when Peter finds it and hands it to him. “There’s leftovers in the fridge. Go eat while I check this bad boy out.”

"You're my hero," Peter says, fervently.

Foggy's never been called that before.

He doesn't hate it.

Wait for it

Que weno

is anyone going to tell the people in the notes who are calling the driver an idiot that they did not, in fact, wait for it?

(or that the driver that other people so clearly see is, in fact, not)

ok fuck that got me