petermorwood reblogged
I have just been out on a walk and spotted this , whoever you are you made my day 😂❤️
petermorwood reblogged
Thinking about how when my oldest brother took Japanese classes his professor was like your pronunciation is really good 😊 but you need to watch movies that aren't about the Yakuza because you sound like a criminal
somewhere in this beautiful world there is a man who sounds like Paulie Walnuts because he learned English by watching the Sopranos
Really in love with some of the notes on this post
official linguistics post
Useful writer information.
A character pretending to be from X needs more than just the X vocabulary, they'll need a convincing X accent as well.
If X has a lot of regional accents it's a rabbit-hole with snares at every turn, and then there's regional dialect, a rabbit-hole with even more snares which can vary from a few unusual words scattered through standard speech to an entire secondary language.
*****
The "Inglourious Basterds" German Accent scene is the best-known current example of how sounding wrong can raise suspicions and claiming wrong can make them worse.
In that scene Michael Fassbinder's character Hickox, a British commando, is disguised in Waffen-SS uniform and speaking German.
The first time I watched it, when Gestapo officer Hellstrom asks about his "where do YOU come from?" accent and he says...
"I was born in a village that lies in the shadow of Piz Palü. In that village we all speak like this."
...I expected Hellstrom to nail him immediately, because though his accent sounds unusual, it's not unusual enough for that.
Pretending to have the accent of some obscure German village is one thing, but Piz Palü is in Canton Graubünden of southern Switzerland.
@dduane and I went to various places there while she researched "The Wind from the South", and the accent, even the speech-rhythms, are nothing like the Hochdeutsch - High or Standard German - Hickox is speaking. And that's if 1930s Graubünden villagers spoke German at all, because then as now their first language might well be Rumantsch.
It's like a Londoner saying his accent is from Llangollen. "In Brixton we all speak like this..."
*****
There's a lot of on-line discussion about how well or badly Michael Fassbinder (Irish-German) speaks his lines compared to the German actors sharing the scene with him. Are his slight mistakes deliberate for the role? Is his Irish creeping into his German? Is THAT deliberate for the role? And so on.
But I've never seen anyone ask why - except maybe because a film about the place ("The White Hell of Piz Palü") was mentioned earlier and Hickox is an in-film movie buff - he picked that specific part of Switzerland to come from.
Nor have I seen anyone wonder why he wasn't instantly accused of sounding not just odd, but utterly wrong for his claim.
Or why so punctilious a writer-director as Quentin Tarantino put such a detail into his script then went nowhere with it.
Or maybe I was just nettled after wandering down the wrong garden path... :->
*****
Finally Hellstrom's suspicions do get confirmed, not by accent at all, but by Hickox's fake German ordering three drinks with a British hand gesture.
Oops...
Whereupon things go rapidly downhill in a characteristic Tarantino gunfight of many shots and few survivors.
*****
It's a scene worth bearing in mind when writing about characters speaking a foreign language.
Even if they're not doing it to deceive, there are many subtle details that mean "being fluent" - at least in the "indistinguishable from a native speaker" meaning usual to fiction - is a more complicated process than those two words suggest.
petermorwood reblogged
Tintin meeting other adventure icons.
By Adam Murphy
I absolutely love this. And if you click the link he’s done a ton more. Tintin in black and white with famous monsters. Tintin with famous sleuths like Jessica Fletcher and Columbo and Poirot.
The first set of pix captures something I've occasionally thought.
That diesel- / petrolpunk-fiction set in the 1920s-30s was so chock-full of action-adventure that their various heroes had to file some sort of flight plan or risk being in the background of each other's exploits... :->
(To maintain that theme I'd have chosen Rick ("The Mummy") O'Connell over Popeye, but never mind...)
petermorwood reblogged
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
- "We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
- "If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.
- "Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
- "If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
- "We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
- "If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
- "Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
- "We'll deny that you ever worked here" not actually possible unless they haven't been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they're guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there's nothing they can do about that.
Reblogging for US followers.
petermorwood reblogged
I was inspired
petermorwood reblogged
That depends on the Bishop.
Some exercise right of weight...
...while others are so bent that diagonal might as well be straight.
petermorwood reblogged
The Rosetta Stone on the Deep Space Nine Promenade, written in English, Klingon, Vulcan, Ferengi, Bajoran and Cardassian
I'm losing my fucking mind at some of these businesses
Tom Servo's Used Robots. Spacely Sprockets.
Fucking. Milliways and the Sirius Cybernetics Corp.
motherfucking Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems
Also Del Floria's Tailor Shop ("The Man from Uncle") and Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club ("The Right Stuff"). :->
petermorwood reblogged
IG : @emperorofmischief
No instances of rat rage so far.
petermorwood reblogged
vampireapologist-archive-deacti
This review for a dog life jacket is sending me
petermorwood reblogged
petermorwood reblogged
Status report, Digital Art division....
When you abort a perfectly good render halfway through because in your head you can't shut off the sound of your spouse ranting about trigger discipline.
... :)
I am amused - also pleased that notice was taken, because Trigger Discipline and gun safety MATTERS.
It also, IMO, sends an instant message on covers and posters that someone's done their homework.
*****
And when they haven't.
petermorwood reblogged
I had to find a picture of this 2017 article again because it's just so iconic.
Last time I saw that post, this post happened.
I designed a weapon for my OC to use, and I've decided to call it the Fishing Line. It's like a rope dart, but with the inclusion of a reel and a claw grabber. The reel is to control rope length and for additional versatility, while the claw grabber is for having an extra edge while manipulating the rope. I imagine that it would be needed because of how unpredictable a retracting string can be! I called it the Fishing Line because it can be twirled and thrown like one. What do you think of it?
This sounds a bit like a real Chinese device called "Flying Claw", which is like a rope dart except, surprise, with a claw. Since that already exists, your design is pretty sound.
I'm less sure about the reel. It reads like an unnecessary extra complication which, unless really big and sturdy (thus inconvenient) has a risk of breaking or jamming at a crucial moment.
Of course the advantage of fictional weapons is that they can be 100% reliable unless plot demands otherwise. :->
HTH
petermorwood reblogged
Tonight, we remember one who lent his enormous talent to telling the story we have all come to love. Hail, the victorious dead!
May the Simbelmynë cover his tomb as it did the tomb of the one he so accurately portrayed.
Bernard Hill Dec 17, 1944 - May 5, 2024
petermorwood reblogged
Wasn’t sure if this was cat or squirrel
Ferret, I think.
Source: instagram.com
petermorwood reblogged
[ID: A digital drawing of the front of a bakery, a small dragon sits outside on the front steps staring up into the window. Outside it’s dark and raining, the light from the bakery is warm orange, the window full of shelves of bread. The bakery is called “Indigo’s”, and on the window reads “bakery cafe”. /End ID]
[Image description: The same dragon now lays on a pile of bread with some chunks torn out of them, fast asleep in the backroom of the bakery, near some sort of fire with the racks of different kinds of bread all around the storage area. They are safe and full. Description on post reads, “He got his bread.” End ID]
