unhinged and flinging myself at mach speeds into the sun

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.

If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.

There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.

A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.

Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.

A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.

Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.

Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.

Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

There is the problem, the end, and the means, and those are all things that can be disagreed with in different ways.

Let’s take a very basic scenario. Two people live together. There is a bookshelf full of books and there are books all over the floor.

Disagreement on the problem:

Person 1 thinks there are too many books on the floor. Person 2 likes having books on the floor because it makes the house feel lived-in.

Disagreement on the end:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that there are too many books on the floor. Person 1 thinks the ideal end is that the house has exactly one bookshelf worth of books in it. Person 2 thinks the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house but simply being somewhere that is not the floor.

Disagreement on the means:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house and being on a bookshelf. Person 1 thinks they should buy more bookshelves to fit every book. Person 2 thinks they should double- or triple-stack their shelves rather than spend money on new bookshelves.

Yeah, accents are how we pronounce words, and yes, it's not the best term for the phenomenon referenced by OP. And I'm not going to argue with an expert's definition of idiolect, however, I am going to point something out about your definition of "small."

Tumblr's user base is small only in comparison to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok. According to SQ Magazine, in 2025 there were 12 million daily active users from the U.S. alone. It we assume that say, only a tenth of those users find themselves referencing the plinko horse in casual conversation, that's 1.2 million people. For reference, the "Hoi Toider" family of dialects from the Outer Banks of North Carolina is spoken by maybe less than a couple thousand people? (I've seen the number 150 floated, but I'm pretty sure that's just from one island - geographically the accent is spread out over several islands of the Outer Banks and some limited areas of the mainland.) Personally, I think once we've gone over a thousand people, we're out of the "small" category anyway.

Plus, the examples given by your professor (school, company, family) generally include elements of direct proximity or some sort of specific geographic anchor point. They all are going to be made up of people who live in close proximity to one another and/or who return to a centralized location more often than not. There's also a centralized hierarchy of authority figures that form the nucleus of the unit, whether that's a school administration, executives and managers in a company, or parents/elders in a family.

And I was actually thinking about this already, but arguably, Tumblr's particular vernacular may just extend to pronunciation/enunciation even though it's not actually an accent! Our ludicrous speech patterns are shaped by the fact that Tumblr is heavily text-based. Text really is the preferred mode of communication, with lots of visual modifiers and enduring meme references that indicate tone and subtext.

That's where subvocalization comes in. Subvocalization is where your larynx (voice box) and other muscles involved in speech actually move as if forming words while you read. You generally cannot feel it, but subvocalization can be detected by specialized machines.

You know how people learning to read usually have to start out reading out loud before they can read silently? Reading is actually a VERY complicated cognitive skill, in no small part because rendering spoken language into symbols adds a lot of cognitive load to your brain, especially to your working memory. It's thought that subvocalization helps lighten the load because you may not realize it, but your throat is silently creating the sounds of the words you're reading. You get physical feedback that might act as a memory aid.

Now what does that have to do with the Hellsite Vernacular?

Read the following examples to yourself out loud:

I think I have covid.

2. I think I hauve covid

3. ithinkihavecovid

4. I tHiNk I hAvE cOvId

5. I think ☝️ I have covid.

6. I 👏think 👏I 👏have 👏covid.

Yes, you could read all of these statements completely flat, ignoring the visual shenanigans and formatting, but, more than likely, you ended up preserving the gags in your verbalization because each one is communicating different information! In example 2, you probably preserved the misspelling as a diphthong because that's part of the joke. Number 3 you might read as basically one word because there's no spaces. Number 4 might have some variation in interpretation, but I usually read it in a jerky cadence with my pitch going up on capital letters and lower on lower case letters. Other people might get louder on capitals and softer on lowers or use the capitalization pattern to determine stress patterns. You might have interpreted the emojis as punctuation marks, or used them as theatrical directions.

And even if you didn't say those phrases out loud - you still used subvocalization to help map what they should sound like.

For visual gags like emojis, formatting, and spellings, you're going to tend to say them out loud the way you silently read them because you're already basically practicing them via subvocalization. When I perform the ole Random Capitalization gag out loud, I emphasize the capitalized words because that's how I read them silently. When I verbalize the clap-emoji joke, I either punctuate each word or actually clap. For memes based on short videos or performances like "the sacred texts!" or "okay, noun-boy" the tendency is probably to preserve the original cadence and tone of the source meme.

Now yeah, specific enunciation choices can differ person to person, but if spoken aloud, we're still trying to preserve the information that each differing format would communicate to another Tumblrina. Speaking Tumblrish will have you using enunciation and pronunciation outside of your typical accent. And all of that is on top of the syntax gags and verbiage that's more classically associated with Cringe Unhinged Microblogging English.

But no, I do agree that in technical terms, "accent" isn't the most accurate description of what's going on, however, I do argue that we're not just a bunch of individuals or small groups - Tumblr is a community. We have a shared culture, history, and lingua franca even when we might hold wildly different opinions on like say, trans women and their rights to not have all their posts marked mature or have their accounts deactivated on a whim. (Yes, @staff, I'm staring right at you, you've been doing okay on not fuckin up the UI lately but we all know you can do better.) And this community is in reality, pretty large, geographically spread out with no central anchor or authority figures, has multiple sub-cultures, and in practice, speaks with multiple distinct accents even when we might sometimes share enunciation and pronunciation references.

Idiolect is too narrow, accent doesn't actually encompass what's going on - in my opinion, we should call it a dialect or vernacular.

But! ☝️This is also Tumblr, where the humor is in the text gags. In the gaining net zero information on posts, the Vanilla Extract, the rent lowering shots, the color of the sky, and the Goncherovs. Our cultural pastimes are posting a photo with a blatant lies attached a la Bitch, That's The Tubby Custard Machine and That's Not Were-Ralph That's Adam Driver, creating wacky bracket challenges like deciding a Tumblr Sexyman or Tumblr's Most Breedable Man, celebrating holidays from the joyously adorable to the laughably absurd such as Neil Banging Out the Tunes and the Ides of March, and we still tend to communicate important news to one another via Jensen Ackles's emotionally constipated face.

"Hellsite Vernacular" or "Cringe Unhinged Microblogging English (CUME)" might be more accurate, but insisting on an inaccurate name that communicates incorrect information is very On Brand for us.

M | 178.1 k words (in progress) | gen, action/adventure | Murderbot is a Force-sensitive in a world that has forgotten about the Force and the Jedi

“You’re a space wizard, Murderbot. You’ll hate it. It’ll be great.” - The Force, probably If Murderbot ever proves the Force is sentient, it will plot to murder the shit out of the Force.

Now you might be thinking that ART would never agree to leave me but

Okay, you know what, I’m done with my little episode of being realistic and acknowledging it. I have better shit to do. Returning to deluding myself about my chances of going home now. [Delete]

So I’m trying to decide what to talk about from New Catonca and how I’m gonna talk about it because unfortunately I do want the quality of writing for this thing to at least pass for mediocre, and I have a headache. And because it’s my stupid fucking head, I can’t control the stupid fucking pain sensors. Why can SecUnits get tension migraines. Who the fuck let that happen. They need to die.

I dunno when or how the people in charge at New Catonca got suspicious of us since I deleted those memories. In retrospect, it’d be helpful right now if I hadn’t wiped so much of my archival data related to New Catonca in favor of nabbing more of their media. (You might be thinking: But Murderbot, what about all that storage space ART gave you? And. Yes. Right. That storage space. The storage space I definitely hadn’t managed to fill up.)

(Look, having so much storage space made me greedy, and I got alarmingly bad at being smart about curation and remembering to transfer files to external storage. What was I supposed to do? Delete all my newest acquisitions that I hadn’t had the chance to go through yet?? No.)

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

I am a freak and that is ok

Anyone who hates on me for my writing has never picked up a pencil in their life

I should be more self indulgent

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*