slow and steady

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

2026, week 23 (june 1st - june 7th)

accomplishments this week:

went through some more training at work. I'm slowly becoming more confident that I know what I'm doing in this new role!

finished ch. 5 of Malware Data Science

started a programming project to practice on some of the data from the book + get back into Rust. I have been humbled by the compiler errors haha

highlights this week:

bought cherries at the farmer's market :D

the new game changer episode was so much fun to watch

hung out with my partner on the weekend & fixed up + homebrewed a wii we got a while back!

I played quite a bit of persona 5 royal

june days of productivity, day 5 (first week at the new job: survived! ✅️)

unlocking more coworker lore bc they're warming up to me. graduation to work on the ground level floor (we're speeding up my onboarding bc I'm That Good, so far). strawberries make the late shift sweet, sharing makes them sweeter. morning iced coffee and cat cuddles in the reading nook my beloved.

activities of today:

cat chores

kitchen chores

work

read ~20 pages

small tasks for both festival & market booth prep for league recruitment committee

currently reading: ich komme nicht zurück - rasha kayat, 4☆ so far (do you wanna be friends on storygraph?)

Book haul, very nice pins and one of the many books I have not bought (yet).

23|05|2026

june days of productivity, day 3

strawberries at work & strawberry delivery. certified clever guy. sunshine during lunch break.

activities of today:

started the redo of the time reality map

small tasks & communication for recruitment committee

cat chores

unloading the dishwasher

prepped my sauce for dinner

work

the keychains we get at work make me feel very cool and dyke-y >:)

plan for the evening: dinner, then book in the reading nook (& no phone!)

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

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)

june days of productivity, day 3

strawberries at work & strawberry delivery. certified clever guy. sunshine during lunch break.

activities of today:

started the redo of the time reality map

small tasks & communication for recruitment committee

cat chores

unloading the dishwasher

prepped my sauce for dinner

work

the keychains we get at work make me feel very cool and dyke-y >:)

plan for the evening: dinner, then book in the reading nook (& no phone!)