Shadow Isles Death Train

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 (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) 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. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)

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)

Like without seeing the girl in the pic here, just by reading the dialogue you can tell she’s got a southern sort of accent without having to expressly state it in the narration.

Back on topic though, I’d locked in on your first bullet point and…not took issue with, but more a light disagreement with the phonetic argument in that doing away totally with phonetic accents in writing is an option, but also that it really depends on the quality of the writer. As you so keenly pointed out from the cringe 3D fap bait of a (fake) screenshot, peppering in things that would allude to a regional accent could/would work, though I would argue that while effective, it’s not AS effective for giving the reader an idea of how a character sounds. You could have a character talk about sweet tea and such, as you pointed out, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to a southern accent. Writing out a phonetic accent could help push that, especially if the character in question is the odd one out—for example, someone from the south living up in, say, New York where their accent would noticeably stand out.

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 (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) 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. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)

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)

Like without seeing the girl in the pic here, just by reading the dialogue you can tell she’s got a southern sort of accent without having to expressly state it in the narration.

Anyhow, a thought experiment can be (a) used to try to force someone to take a socially disadvantageous position, or (b) reapplied to some other domain to get leverage based on the answer, where explaining why it doesn't apply isn't trivial.

[The Complete Monument Mythos]

I rewatched M4NTICOR3's The Monument Mythos S1-2, The Nixonverse, Season 3, and The Modern Day recently. I was struck with the idea of remaking my favorite bits as comic panels. This took me only 2 weeks to put together. If you'd like a better look at these please look at my previous posts, as these are just collages of what I made.

Thanks to everyone for liking, and thanks to M4NTICOR3 for creating such a fascinating world. Now it's time to get back to work on other things!

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

Example questions:

-What native people are affected?

-What to do if there is historical overlap of territory/land (ex: Two groups of native people have historical claim to the area, who gets it?)

-What to be reasonably done about the people already living on the land being given back?

—If they are to move, where to? Who will be paying for them to uproot and move somewhere else? If no compensation is offered, how will the decision be enforced and who will be in charge of said enforcement?

-What of post-colonial infrastructure on returned territory (buildings, roads, electric and gas, etc.)? Is that ceded to the native population regaining the land or does it belong to the people that constructed said infrastructure? If it is to be ceded, how will compensation be offered and by who?

This is indie survival horror game, Silver Pines, a love letter to classic survival horror, with a Twin Peaks-esque small town America setting!

Demo out now on Steam!

50 min gameplay video

Government corruption can effectively be used to shut down any argument—and I understand why—but mentioning it just to dismiss policies would get us nowhere. No change would be made to anything for the most part. Instead of letting other important parts of our world erode because of unethical practices, we need to use our awareness of malfeasance to do something about it without letting it whittle down our willpower to improve other conditions.

Evening party 🥂 Also recorded the timelapse for this one, under the cut :3

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