Anid Harker

So this is a love song to life, right. Except the original songwriter Violeta Parra took her own life the year after recording the song if I understand correctly, so it has been interpreted also as a bit of a suicide note.

The version in the movie is a cover by Mercedes Sosa, so that's neither here nor there.

The part that's eating my brain right now, regardless of my thoughts on the above information, is that on the line "perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco" ("I perfectly distinguish the black from the white"), the movie edits the memory of the takedown perfectly matching the words black and white to Carl and Grace.

(Now, to be clear, I don't think this choice has anything to do with any racist reason. The next line in the song references stars. I interpret this from the movie editing as "look, Carl was right there, we can matchy the lyrics teehee")

But like, listen. We as humans have eyeballs that see light and colour and do distinguish human skin colours, BUT.

Eridians don't.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me two eyes, which, when I open them,

can perfectly distinguish between black and white.

Which can see the stars in the depths of the heavens.

Which can find, out of all the multitudes, the one I love.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me hearing, that in all its range

captures, night and day, crickets and canaries,

hammers, turbines, barking dogs, rain.

And the tender voice of the one I love.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me voice and language,

words with which I can think, and say,

    “mother”, “friend”, “brother”.

These illuminate the path to the soul of the one I love.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me the use of my tired feet.

They have led me through cities and hamlets,

beaches and deserts, mountains and plains,

to your home, your street, and your front door.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me a heart that thrills

when I see the creations of the human mind.

When I see the good, so much greater than the bad.

When I gaze into the depths of your beautiful eyes.

-

Thank you, Life, for giving me so much.

For giving me laughter, and for giving me tears.

This is how I distinguish between joy and grief,

the two materials that form my song.

And your song, which is the same song.

And the world’s song, which is my song.

-

Thank you, Life

-

British actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ted Lasso, Merlin and Little Britain, has died at the age of 72. Head found international fame as Rupert Giles in hit supernatural teen show Buffy in the late 1990s. He went on to have a recurring role in sketch show Little Britain, play king Uther Pendragon in the BBC's Merlin, and appear as former football club owner Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso. "He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family," his daughters Emily and Daisy said. His daughters' statement said "it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father". They added: "It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many." They also said they knew "how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues and fans of the show he was in", adding that he "loved his job very much" and "always considered himself incredibly lucky". His family acknowledged that "his legacy will live on" and said they considered themselves "lucky" to have watched him doing what he loved throughout his career. Head's other credits included The Iron Lady, Persuasion, The Inbetweeners and Manchild.

Thinking about book!Stratt and her impassioned attempt to make Grace understand when he says no, and thinking of Sandra Hüller's amazing acting during the chase scene and how she shows her sense of disappointment and betrayal in these beautiful, minute expressions. Thinking of the ways in which Grace betrayed her in so many ways despite the ways in which Grace had time and space to comprehend his unique skills and integrality to the running of the whole project. Thinking of the ways in which Grace's cowardice includes the refusal to face facts and think through not just what came next, but what came After the launch-- thinking through how badly Grace betrayed Eva Stratt, and not the reverse;

literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.

learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."

ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.

The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:

quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.

it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?

which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.

This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting, for example, wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.

To wit, less of this shite:

There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (Peter Wimsey, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be Scottish)

and more of this:

"Are we straight so?" "Aye, we're straight," said Jim. "Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)

This movie is so colorful and it's like a breath of fresh air in today's "blockbuster" movie era where everything is dull, washed out, too dark, desaturated, or blue. The space scenes especially are full of warm colors and hues. Planet Adrian? fucking gorgeous. The STARS even have color, which is actually astronomically accurate thank you very much, stars are not all white, they range from red to orange to yellow to white to blue!! And you can SEE than in the space scenes!

Speaking of seeing, you can see every scene in this movie because it's actually well-lit because they're not trying to hide bad CGI. So much of the movie is actual real models and puppets and line work and practical effects! They don't want to hide it, they want you to see it!