they turned mickbell into a girl in the latin spanish dub so... congrats mickbell???

i was not aware of that and that makes it a thousand times better to me

WE’RE GETTING THE SHIRTS

(I'm so called free thinkers)

Who wants to see my cat totally brave and not at all scared at the vet

Excellent. Here she is, being super brave:

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm

[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']

Holy fucking shit this is one of the most incredible things I have ever read. I am dead serious. I PROMISE you that you want to read this, and you're going to immediately send it to all your weird friends who you also know will love it.

The original link is down -- you can read it at

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.

Also: Why would anyone in "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" be speaking in a New England accent, good or bad, when the story's set in regular old Old England? In a Lovecraftian town, perhaps, but not a New England one.

Help! Am I responsible for teaching my children how to act in public??????

Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 12 April 2024:

Dear Anonymous —

This is a generational thing and there's nothing you as a parent can do to improve your children's behavior now, nor was there anything you ever could have done to shape the way they act in the world, their understanding of social norms, their expectations, or how they treat other people.

Kids turn out the way they are because of the generation they were born into, which doesn't have anything to do with the people who raised them or who created the society they live in.

Take heart: you're one of many millions of parents of Gen Z-ers whose offspring are just really into drinking out of dirty glasses. We'll never know why. It's one of the great mysteries of our time, but the good news is that this isn't your problem. There's absolutely no way to teach this particular generation of young people how to order food at restaurants, and even if there were, it wouldn't be on you as their parent to do it. Kids these days just love filthy dishware.

December 17, 1974.

The film critic from the Patterson, New Jersey News trashed Young Frankenstein.

1974.

New Jersey critics had it out for Mel Brooks.

like you guys have no idea. i need to thank her for her service

im obsessed please tell me theres more

Just opened my fic document and found this

Thanks, past me. Incredibly helpful.

lord the peasants are so loud today

pheasants. PHeasants. The birds

Don't you mean classist Typo, as in discriminating against poor people, and not classicist, the type of academic who studies antiquity in southern Europe?

Marc Pouyet

You can control white people by giving them cheese

cheese is so good tho

I got one