— Unknown

~Robert Brault

Late Victorian brooch with a man in the moon cameo carved from transparent moonstone, set in white and rose gold with a border of diamonds and rubies.

André Édouard Marty (A. É. Marty), Le Pouf, Robe du Soir by Paul Poiret, La Gazette du Bon Ton, 1924.

ever.

Dang. Idk if anyone has ever laid out Donald Trump’s entanglement with Russia sO clearly.

If you’ve had enough of watching the Trump clowns defending Trump & white supremacy, the Sutori link is definitely worth reading. It is a very enlightening, detailed and comprehensive timeline that puts Trump’s very very long history with Russian mobsters into sharp perspective.

👉🏿 https://www.sutori.com/story/timeline-you-might-be-interested-in--pTTyLH39r7FsRtF51JZi4BVt

👉🏿 https://forensicnews.net/trump-deutsche-bank-loans-underwritten-by-russian-state-owned-bank-whistleblower-told-fbi/

(ID in alt)

Hello Tumblr! I am posting this on behalf of the Queer Liberation Library, who don't yet have a Tumblr, but have promised me they're working on it. Some of you may remember them from the Twitter Poll I was involved in a few months ago where Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites beat multiple award-winning, trad-pub queer authors with a hefty 69% (nice).

For those of you unaware, the Queer Liberation Library, or QLL, is an organization fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community.

And today, June 12th, 2023, they launched their fundraiser to try and reach 15k so that they can start purchasing digital licensing for queer media and hopefully open their digital doors to library patrons across the US in 2023 with as many queer and trans books as possible.

You can check out their newly redesigned website here:

(If you are in an unsafe space and need to exit the webpage quickly, there is a quick exit bar at the top that redirects to a weather page. When I spoke to them about their web design they were also open to accessibility suggestions and are potentially working on a dark mode for those of us who need it.)

If you know me, you know I am unequivocally pro-library, both as a reader and a queer writer. But with the current rise of homophobia, transphobia, and the proposed ban on books taking hold in certain States, the importance of having protected access queer books cannot be over-emphasized enough.

The QLL aims to protect that access, aiming to provide FREE access to queer and trans media (ebook and audio) to patrons regardless of location within the United States.

They are funded entirely through regular donations from their supporters and their now annual Pride fundraiser, where they hope to afford the cost of not just library books but also maintaining their web presence and staff.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this project is a labor of love for everyone involved and its importance.

And just to clarify, I am not involved in any way beyond raising awareness. When QLL reached out and asked me to retweet their fundraiser tweets, I readily agreed and offered to post about it on Tumblr because I believe in their mission and the world they are trying to build.

One where queer and trans books can't be banned or taken off of shelves because of bigotry and hatred.

If you would like to donate to the cause, you can do so here:

They've already surpassed their first 2k, and it'd be absolutely wonderful if we could help them reach their next milestone. And if you can't give, please consider signal boosting this post.

You can also follow QLL at:

Hi,

It’s you friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

Thank you for your attention.

What the FUCK?!

So instead of giving feedback to writers so they’ll continue to write you guys decide to feed our work into some AI program to get what you want? Guess all my fics are going on lockdown now. Y’all brought this on yourselves smh. I am so beyond being nice about this anymore.

Also, some people from the replies all authors should block immediately because obviously they don’t care about people’s work.

You don’t own it either dipshit.

We wouldn’t publish fics of their work? Authors respect other authors. Please show me an author who’s forbidden someone to write fanfic of their stuff anyway. Bet you’ll say Anne rice won’t you? That toxic meatloaf doesn’t get respect from anyone because of how she handled things. She could have done it a lot better,

Maybe this is a sign you should delete yourself from the internet. You don’t know if the author is going to finish it or not dumbass. You just decided they didn’t because it hadn’t been updated in a year, you know what that means? That means the author hasn’t gotten any interest in their fic. Show interest and the fic will be updated. Amazing how that works moron. Let’s see you put hours and hours into something you’re passionate about only to get no attention and then have people steal it to finish it because they decided you weren’t going to. Fuck off.

There are all kinds of reasons why a fic may be unfinished, not just that the story didn't get any interest. That's like the LEAST important thing in the list of reasons, for me. REGARDLESS OF THAT: no one is entitled to mess around with my work, finished or unfinished. Full stop.

↖ REBLOG IF YOU LOVE THE PERSON IN YOUR ICON

i think it’s really funny that there is no letter k in the Klingon language

there are, however, two qs and a tlh.

The very best decision that Marc Okrand did is to decide that all the canon names are really bad Anglicizations of the original Klingon.

Klingon? It’s thlIngan because Federation types couldn’t pronounce  [t͡ɬ].

Kronos? No, dude, it was originally Qo’noS with that freaking uvular affricate at the front. Not sure why the retroflex became an [s], but maybe the Federation came on an odd dialect to start with.

Seriously, man. Sure, it’s much better to do the conlang early to get all the names consistent. But if you’re ever hired for a conlanging job with a bunch of established names that won’t work together or just don’t fit your aesthetic, just throw it out and say, “Hey, whoever wrote this down for English speakers did a really bad job.” It’s not like it’s unprecedented in the real world.

Oh. Oh I like this.

This is especially common when one language has a single phoneme for a group of sounds that another has multiple phonemes for. For instance, in English there’s a difference we hear between the sound /th/ in “theories” (thee-rees, assuming your accent uses only two syllables for that word), and the /s/ in “series.” To a native German speaker, those words sound like homophones.

Throw in a different alphabet and you end up with a real mess. The Japanese kana writing systems don’t have any symbols for just consonants, because it’s a syllabic writing system, and the only consonant that gets to be a syllable all by itself is /n/. So, Spock goes to Japan, and someone wants to write his name down. They don’t have the right symbols for most of the sounds, closest they can get is スポック. Which isn’t that far off, but it is a different set of sounds.

And then people who haven’t heard it spoken read what they wrote down and try to pronounce it based on how they interpret the symbols the first person used….

Especially if you have limited cultural contact, which the Klingons and the Federation did for a long time, things are going to get further and further off-base.

And I don’t even know what the Universal Translators do to all this. They’re supposed to work by just… making you hear the right things when someone else talks. Maybe the Klingons think everyone in the Federation is pronouncing stuff the right way, because the translators account for badly pronounced native words?

I did not know all of this and it’s really interesting! I love checking the notes on a post and learning things.

I feel like the “bad Anglicizations” explanation is really good. It’s obvious that it was the easier route but I don’t think it was lazy or unwise. Because yeah, it’s not exactly unprecedented.

To build on the Japanese example, wasn’t the name “Japan” itself the screwed-up end result of several layers of linguistic telephone?

I like that the Klingon writing system doesn’t work well with our letters; it adds a layer of realism to it. I like the decision to make the structure of Klingon sentences so different to English ones. Learning it so far has felt like learning something alien, rearranging sentences and teaching my brain to configure meaning in a totally foreign way

(to be fair though I only know English and a bit of Spanish and a few ASL signs, so maybe it’s a matter of limited perspective)

Either way, I do think it’s pretty funny that there’s no K in Klingon but I also like the decision to not have everything about the Klingon language be simple, easy and straightforward.

So I found a very interesting video where Mark Okrand explains the pronunciation of Klingon letters and it answered some of my questions.

First of all, the language was made with the actors in mind. So all of the weird-ass capital letters are to indicate when a letter is pronounced differently from that same sound in English.

Secondly, the reason there is no K is because Mark Okrand thought it was stupid that there are so many sci-fi bad guys with names that start with K, and didn’t want to do something basic like that so he decided there would be no Klingon equivalent.

Also, watched Jan Misali’s conlang critic episode on Klingon. I think the observations are fair but a lot of the issues of Klingon make more sense in context, and frankly I think Mark Okrand deserves a bit more credit for doing as well as he did given what he was provided with.

i hear tumblr is bad with links so hopefully this works, here’s the video

yIlaD - read!

One of the neat things that I thought the first two seasons of Discovery did when utilizing Klingonese was how Ash Tyler would always use more forceful pronunciations of the words (particularly when he invoked Kahless). It REALLY gave the feeling that when we have heard Klingonese before, it’s been the “automatically generated by the Universal Translator” kind of dialogue, or that it’s been humans slurring the words, and, in effect, showing in even the way humans speak exactly what T'Kuvma started the war for, because it’s humanity diluting meaning of non-human cultures without even realizing what they’re doing.

Shamelessly poaching someone elses idea, social media poll but the options arent solely geared 2wards 15 year olds

Reblog 4 a bigger sample size dadada you know how it is w polls

i’m starting a movement to stop calling this shit “artificial intelligence” cause it’s fucking not. it’s not intelligent, and the things it produces are not informed by logical choices. it doesn’t know how to research sources for you. it doesn’t compose art thoughtfully or meaningfully.

call it machine-generated, text generator, chat bot, but it’s not intelligent.

"But helping poor people should be voluntary."

And even when it is, people still have a problem with it.

I went back and did some digging, because it occured to me that I didn't know the date reference of this story and, sadly, there are way too many stories about school lunch debt that they're easy to mix up.

This particular story was from July 2019 (I reblogged it Sept 2022).

There was a relevant update within a week of the scandal: public outrage was swift, the embarrassed school board redacted the outrageous allusions to indebted students ending up in foster care, and it accepted the CEO's $20k donation.

It doesnt change the fact that the very concept of "school lunch debt" is disturbing and inhumane (and there are still stories about children...with lunch debt...). And clearly, the district changed it's tone because it didn't like the bad PR. But figured it was helpful to have more info and context.

Here are some of the relevant sources; each offer bits of info unique to each specific source:

1) "Pennsylvania school district turns down local businessman’s offer to pay off student lunch debts"

2) "Pennsylvania district sorry it warned that lunch debt could lead to foster care, accepts $22K donation"

3) "Pa. School District Reverses Course And Will Now Accept Donations To Cover Lunch Debt"

4) "Pennsylvania school lunch debt furor ends with an apology and an announcement: free lunch for all"

Remember: Public outrage can and does solve problems.

fanfiction is like. here's a piece of my soul! here's the parts of me i didn't know what else to do with! i wrapped them up in something i love in an attempt to understand my own feelings and morals and maybe the whole world. hope you like it.

The Carbide & Carbon Building was designated a Chicago Landmark on May 9, 1996.

< chris richard . danilo ricci >

pure queer joy

ah! Everything in this! the switch leading! the hand on the back of his neck! the grace!

Is it too soon to reblog this? Oh, wait: I don’t care. Here it is again.

idk if I’ve reblogged this before, but every time it comes across my dash it makes me giggle because they are SO darn cute, so here ya go friends. :D

tonight’s wish is that we never stop being able to show this much queer joy in public

I’ve reblogged this before but I don’t care. Love and happiness should be shared always.

Saints and Sinners (Espanola, NM)

Eastwind Drive-In (Cascade Locks, OR)

sign photography by MerchMotel

Carol Peletier in ‘Isolation’