reminder that coming up with some fake little dudes and creating intricate storylines in your head is a completely free and fun way to pass the time and the government can't stop you

looking for fellow vanilla ffxiv enjoyers just because i feel lame about my preference to not mod the game at all. i know this applies to console players by default, but i more specifically mean you're on pc and could, but have zero interest. you're just cool with how the game is by default.

Guest comments back on!

Guest comments have now been turned back on! We'll continue to keep an eye out for any spam issues and make further adjustments as needed. (22:08 UTC April 23, 2024)

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.

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared

This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times

@xbazattackx

some of my favourite sign fails <3

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

isn't it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators...

schizophrenic person: makes a post trying to raise awareness about the disproportionate abuse and harmful stereotypes schizophrenic people face

yall: "yeah im not gonna reblog this they used the word ins*ne which is so problematic ://"

What the fuck happens that changes these stats to such a massive degree?

1) schizophrenia hardly ever causes people to be violent so schizophrenic people aren’t more likely to be violent than anyone else

2) schizophrenic people’s autonomy is often taken away from them because of their schizophrenia. because the authorities and mental healthcare providers often automatically assume schizophrenic people to be violent, they’re more likely to immediately react to schizophrenic people's symptoms with violence, without even knowing for sure said schizophrenic person was going to be violent. all of this causes schizophrenic people to be more likely of being victims of violence and abuse. schizophrenic people also have a harder time getting out of abusive households because of the risk of their autonomy being taken away. if a schizophrenic person’s relative or partner is abusive, often the schizophrenic person has no way out of the situation, both because our disconnect from reality can result in us being easier to manipulate, and because the system is built in a way that it takes away our autonomy because of our condition.

also schizophrenic people and psychotic people in general, please do a lot of research before picking a provider for your own sake, and if they try to treat your psychosis in a way that you think is harmful then don’t hesitate to switch providers. your safety and wellbeing should be a priority over everything else.

can y'all please reblog this version instead

One of the questions I always ask a therapist is "how do you handle suicidal ideation that is not an immediate threat."

I will sometimes have suicidal ideation. Not an urge to suicide, but just uncontrollable mental images of horrible things. They can be very disturbing, and I sometimes am unable to stop them.

Some shrinks will react badly to this. It falls under the category of "suicidal ideation", but I'm not suicidal... just my brain is out of control. I need help with *that*, and taking me away from my family, stressing us all out even more, isn't going to help the problems.

Remember: your shrink works for you. If they're not good for you, fire them.

Remember: your shrink

works for you. If they’re not good

for you, fire them.

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

Hello schizophrenic here. the number of times I've had people shrink away from me when finding out my diagnosis is sadly greater than 0. the number of times people have told me "if you're too sick to work here then you shouldn't work here" is also, sadly, greater than 0 when I ask for accommodations to assist me in doing my job.

also the number of people who've joked "hey should you be walking/running with that?" when someone sees me with a knife (plastic or otherwise) is unfortunately higher than 0 and if I do a snappy comeback about stabbing them, well, you can guess the reaction.

meanwhile I have never been violent in my life since my diagnosis at the age of 16. I'm paranoid af but I have yet to actually hurt anyone. I have audio hallucinations, I'm weird af but if given proper therapy and medication I manage ok in the really real world. I just need some help sometimes.

and the number of people who've used my diagnosis against me and abused me, well... sadly also greater than 0.

axxx @mrparadisecity i need your help :(

withhh?

i’m stuck! in the closet in duff’s spare room! and he’s not here pleaseeee i locked myself in and it’s so dark and scary :((

...why are you in his spare room...? 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

ummm i was getting something out of the closet!

uh huh..

i was! c’mon, i’m freaking out in here can you just come get me :(

Duff has locked me in the basement. Idk what to tell you man

@duffffff-mckagan WHY DID YOU CHANGE THE PLAN????

YOU WERE TAKING TOO LONG

NOW WE’RE TOTALLY SCREWED CAUSE I KINDA AM LOCKED IN THE CLOSET 😭

it's like keystone cops and the three stooges combined

DRAGOON ARMOUR - Final Fantasy XIV Opening Cinematic.