IT COULD BE BUNNIES

"researching kink is forbidden. talking about kink is forbidden. slapping your partner and choking them is normal because I saw it in porn and my buddies say they do it. don't go to seminars on how to manage the risk of those activities or you're a sex-obsessed freak. I'm the normal one, the one whose partner chokes me with their belt and doesn't know what aftercare is. I'm a bottom."

The Surface-Level Problem: It’s distracting at best, illegible at worst. 

The following passage from Sons and Lovers has never made a whit of sense to me:

“I ham, Walter, my lad,’ ’e says; ‘ta’e which on ’em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I took one, an’ thanked ’im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ’is eyes, but ’e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un. An’ so, yer see, I knowed it was.’”

There’s almost certainly a point to that dialogue — plot, character, theme — but I could not figure out what the words were meant to be, and gave up on the book.  At a lesser extreme, most of Quincey’s lines from Dracula (“I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes”) cause American readers to sputter into laughter, which isn’t ideal for a character who is supposed to be sweet and tragic.  Accents-written-out draw attention to mechanical qualities of the text.

Solution #1: Use indicators outside of the quote marks to describe how a character talks.  An Atlanta accent can be “drawling” and a London one “clipped”; a Princeton one can sound “stiff” and a Newark one “relaxed.”  Do they exaggerate their vowels more (North America) or their consonants more (U.K., north Africa)?  Do they sound happy, melodious, frustrated?

The Deeper Problem: It’s ignorant at best, and classist/racist/xenophobic at worst.

You pretty much never see authors writing out their own accents — to the person who has the accent, the words just sound like words.  It’s only when the accent is somehow “other” to the author that it gets written out.

And the accents that we consider “other” and “wrong” (even if no one ever uses those words, the decision to deliberately misspell words still conveys it) are pretty much never the ones from wealthy and educated parts of the country.  Instead, the accents with misspelled words and awkward inflection are those from other countries, from other social classes, from other ethnicities.  If your Maine characters speak normally and your Florida characters have grammatical errors, then you have conveyed what you consider to be correct and normal speech.  We know what J.K. Rowling thinks of French-accented English, because it’s dripping off of Fleur Delacour’s every line.

At the bizarre extreme, we see inappropriate application of North U.K. and South U.S.-isms to every uneducated and/or poor character ever to appear in fan fic.  When wanting to get across that Steve Rogers is a simple Brooklyn boy, MCU fans have him slip into “mustn’t” and “we is.”  When conveying that Robin 2.0 is raised poor in Newark, he uses “ain’t” and “y’all” and “din.”  Never mind that Iron Man is from Manhattan, or that Robin 3.0 is raised wealthy in Newark; neither of them ever gets a written-out accent.

Solution #2: A little word choice can go a long way, and a little research can go even further.  Listen carefully to the way people talk — on the bus, in a café, on unscripted YouTube — and write down their exact word choice.  “We good” literally means the same thing as “no thank you,” but one’s a lot more formal than the other.  “Ain’t” is a perfectly good synonym for “am not,” but not everyone will use it.

The Obscure Problem: It’s not even how people talk.

Look at how auto-transcription software messes up speaking styles, and it’s obvious that no one pronounces every spoken sound in every word that comes out of their mouth.  Consider how Americans say “you all right?”; 99% of us actually say something like “yait?”, using tone and head tilt to convey meaning.  Politicians speak very formally; friends at bars speak very informally.

An example: I’m from Baltimore, Maryland.  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Texas, in which case I’m from “Baltmore, Marlind.”  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Pennsylvania, in which case I’m from “Balmore, Marlin.”  If I’m speaking to a fellow Marylander, I’m of course from “Bamor.”  (If I’m speaking to a non-American, I’m of course from “Washington D.C.”)  Trying to capture every phoneme of change from moment to moment and setting to setting would be ridiculous; better just to say I inflect more when talking to people from outside my region.

When you write out an accent, you insert yourself, the writer, as an implied listener.  You inflict your value judgments and your linguistic ear on the reader, and you take away from the story.

Back then the father of said violent candidate was riling people up against the “tree people”. Fred, Barney, and other soldiers fought what they believed to be a defensive measure against the tree people. Turns out, it was actually an invasion, in order to kill off the tree people and take over their forest to build Bedrock.

That’s what Fred means when he says he and Barney participated in a genocide. They literally did.

http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/The-Flintstones

no limbits does pants designed for limb differences and access, as well as pants designed for wheelchair users! (more on the expensive side, around $70usd for pants)

jcpenny actually has an accessible section which i didnt know about! definitely on the more affordable side ($15-70usd)

Tommy Adaptive clothes aren’t cheap but you can often find them for less on Ebay/Poshmark/etc. and they do have sales. There’s a pair of jeans with a magnetic closure and zip legs on sale right now for $24.

Analysis of data from dozens of foraging societies around the world shows that women hunt in at least 79% of these societies, opposing the widespread belief that men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather. Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University, US, and colleagues presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 28, 2023. A common belief holds that, among foraging populations, men have typically hunted animals while women gathered plant products for food. However, mounting archaeological evidence from across human history and prehistory is challenging this paradigm; for instance, women in many societies have been found buried alongside big-game hunting tools. Some researchers have suggested that women's role as hunters was confined to the past, with more recent foraging societies following the paradigm of men as hunters and women as gatherers. To investigate that possibility, Anderson and colleagues analyzed data from the past 100 years on 63 foraging societies around the world, including societies in North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Oceanic region. They found that women hunt in 79% of the analyzed societies, regardless of their status as mothers. More than 70% of female hunting appears to be intentional—as opposed to opportunistic killing of animals encountered while performing other activities, and intentional hunting by women appears to target game of all sizes, most often large game. The analysis also revealed that women are actively involved in teaching hunting practices and that they often employ a greater variety of weapon choice and hunting strategies than men.

Yemen is one of the world’s oldest centers of civilization. Nestled in a corner of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, many of its towns were already thriving and trading for spices and frankincense when the Greek geographer Ptolemy depicted them on maps 2,000 years ago. The land was called Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia, for its fertile land and adequate rainfall.

I’ve traveled in more than 160 countries, and Yemen is my favorite. Sanaa is the country’s jewel. According to tradition, this ancient city was founded by Shem, the son of Noah of the Biblical ark. The entirety of Sanaa’s old town, cram-filled with six- to eight-story “tower houses” made of mud bricks, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Many of these venerable old houses are now tilting with age, leaning toward each other like elderly couples reaching for support. Their sand-colored exterior walls are fancifully decorated with artistic designs on the plasterwork and enlivened by colorful geometrically shaped stained-glass windows that are highly effective to draw in light. Sanaa has thousands of these houses, which have been called the world’s first skyscrapers.

Although I’ve only lived there for 4-5 years, they were the best years of my life. Everything about Yemen was beautiful and enchanting, whether it was the culture, cuisine, nature, climate, history, or the people and their kindness and hospitality. 

I’ve lived in many places in the diaspora after fleeing Palestine, and Yemen was the only place that felt closest to home. While living there, not for a second I felt as a stranger, people over there treated me as if I was one of them. 

I remember I would walk down the streets of Sana’a, where the weather was spectacular and random people who I walked past would greet me and whenever I walked by street restaurants or street vendors people would invite me to eat with them and whenever I did, they would refuse to take my money and would be insulted if I ever tried to pay them. And I remember whenever I took a cab to get somewhere and the cab driver knew I wasn’t from around, he too would also refuse to take my money and would tell me “till next time” (although I would never see him again) or “you’re a guest in our country, you’re not supposed to pay.” 

And wherever you went in Yemen, the nature over there was just breathtaking, My favorite thing in Yemen was going on road trips, where you would get to drive on high and narrow mountain roads that would literally let you drive into clouds. 

FAVORITE MCU MOVIES:

1. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)