#my blathering
re: eshusplayground’s vampire post, living off the grid, etc.
i bet a lot of vampires would rather just live up north and like kill a moose and live off that for a season rather than constantly have to blend in with humans. i mean like a deer is like twice as big and no one files a missing persons report about a deer. and it’s awful hard to hibernate for months in an apartment or a trailer without someone eventually knocking on your door to check if you’re still alive. best to avoid humans. even though they are so delicious.
but like suppose they found, like, oil, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and wanted to run a pipeline through someone’s land, and suddenly there’s a road blockade and protests and the military gets called in and
the vamps avoid the rez because preying on established communities is a non-starter. but now there’s all these strangers, cops, soldiers, journos, i bet even peter mansbridge, helicopters, oil people, trying to “resolve the situation”
these northern vamps are not terribly smart. they’ve been able to avoid humans so long, they don’t really know how humans work. they see all these delicious newcomers, the type who never stay long, the type you can drain of blood and dump in the muskeg for the searchers who assume it was just another boating accident
they don’t know about the canadian government’s rapacious thirst for resources to sell off
they don’t think about who suspicion is going to fall on when non-natives start going missing
they are just so very hungry
and they can’t wait for long
y/n?
oh my god, guys
I move in political circles that are nearly completely white. And these (white) people are perfectly content keeping it that way. They don’t notice, much less care, that their scene is homogeneous. They live in a white bubble where they don’t have to think about anything else. Fine, whatever.
But recent events have brought race to the forefront and everyone’s talking about problems facing racialized communities and now these people I know in real life are talking about race
and they’re like “once I was the only white person in the club and it was AWFUL, racism affects everyone” and “when I was in Japan kids called me a gaijin, what do you mean POC can’t be racist against white people” and “how will I learn if you don’t educate me” and I’m like
OH GOD SHUT UP SHUT UP JUST STOP TALKING.
like it’s great if there are other people willing to take the time and explain things like you’re five, but I am done with this, it’s fine if we’re not on the same page but we’re not even in the same BOOK because you’re reading The Help or some shit.
I am not going to hold hands and sing kumbaya if you can’t recognize that racism is systemic, white people run shit, and that one time someone said mean words is not on the same level as people bombing or murdering or jailing or deporting or experimenting on people who look like you for centuries. Major papers will never run op-eds or political cartoons suggesting that gun violence is a white problem, or that white people are taking over, or that misogyny is especially dangerous when white people do it.
When I say these things to the people I know in everyday life I sound like an irrational, angry, unforgiving bitch. I probably am. I don’t fucking care any more. I’m tired of compartmentalizing my life and overlooking how white certain spaces are. I’m tired of white feminism. I don’t want to be patient. What, you’re 30 and you just started learning about racism? Maybe it’s because you live in a goddamn bubble and you never cared enough to change that. I am tired of being patient.
My ex says, “You should give people the benefit of the doubt.” They’re probably right.
The difference between—like if I say these things here people will probably think I’m making sense. But other places, oh my god I have gone beyond the pale what’s wrong with me. The radical opposition of these two worlds is driving me insane. As in I’m actually questioning my sanity because I am having trouble distinguishing what is real and what is not. Maybe I just imagined things.
*grinds teeth down to powder*
Why am I alienating my friends? (Well, white friends, I guess; it remains to be seen what everyone else thinks of me. Maybe they think I overstepped my bounds, too.)
Why can’t I control myself?
Am I insane?
Should I just shut up and go away?
tranqualizer:
the fact that queer and trans* people of color have visceral responses, strong physiological responses to being in spaces exclusively for qtpoc speaks volumes to how fucked this world is - how one can be queer &/or trans* and still struggle to find communities that are interested in the well being of all facets of our identities.
like damn.
and just purely on the basis of having POC exclusive spaces and the strong emotional responses produced by that speaks volumes to how whiteness infiltrates your day to day.
being in the presence of other people like you /does/ matter because following behind every systemic oppression of POC are those subtle, insidious trauma inducing experiences of isolation, alienation, and just emotional fuckery.
the first time I was in a space for queer APIs exclusively, yo I wanted to bawl my fucking eyes out. I could not talk to these people - I wanted to CRY because FINALLY I was in the presence of people /like me/ and it mattered because for my entire life, growing up in the south, queer asians who identified with me did not exist. I wanted to thank these people just for being alive but I just wanted to cry and hug everyone.
so many feels
It’s so hard expressing cogently and concisely what it feels like going from there to here where I can’t say shit without people jumping down my throat because I didn’t acknowledge that they’re not like those straight white people or because it is simply out of the pale to suggest that certain people who have constant access to resources and opportunities actually take a step back.
The QTPOC meetup was life giving. It felt so good to be with you all. It made me feel, in a small way, more fully human. I hope other people felt the same way.
Holy shitballs
I’ve had this Tumblr for over two freaking years.
You are all the most knowledgeable and attractive people ever, you have ruined me for OKCupid.
I have become a million times more jaded about
- social justice
- feminism
- white people
- and yes I’m half white
- that includes myself
- self-loathing is basically my MO
- allies
- community
Nerd scenes and fandoms are still brimming with unaddressed racism.
People still promote bunches of women sf authors that are all white.
Neckbeards, neckbeards everywhere.
But in the past few years a lot of amazing WOC authors have entered the scene. Media-making of every kind is getting more accessible than ever. I have gotten tangled up with this AMC thing. I TOTALLY MET PEOPLE LIKE MMM AND DORIAN AND JAYMEE IRL!
It’s kind of amazing how much more awesome your life gets when you start learning not to be ashamed of what you are.
ilu all. in conclusion,
The snowy inlet where I’m planning my next build: a whole Minecraft town!
Still working out a backstory, architecture styles, and whatnot. There are hardly any trees, so I’m thinking the traditional lifestyle centred around fishing and hunting. No seasons in this game world, so a more settled way of life. People probably lived in the caves when they first arrived in the area, but there aren’t very many, so as the population grew they built houses (probably snow and ice, with sparing use of stone and glass).
Then the industrial mining companies arrived and set up a short distance away, building refineries and extensive mines. They also made a sort of company town, where more of the fisher people lived and worked. The noise and smoke drove away the herds of wild aurochs and boars, who were now too few for the people to subsist on, and the factories’ effluent thinned out the squid, so the company men introduced farm animals.
At least, that’s what the player character figures, because the entire place is deserted for no apparent reason. There are rumours that, in their greed, the miners dug too deep, became maddened by glimpses of the Void at the bottom of the world, and unleashed ancient monsters of the night. But the fisher people also speak of another world, a hellish skyless nether region of shrieking ghosts and beast-men, lit only by magma, ever-burning nether rock, and “glowstone”, a crystal that glows brighter than torches. Is it possible that the miners attempted to find a way through to this world, hoping to profit from its unearthly materials? Did their hubris become their downfall?
Liek, grad school is a great option to have, but not everyone has that option. You need a particular kind of smarts, the willingness to acquire additional mental illnesses, and the wherewithal to move to another city or country.
So I go into SUPER BITTER ANGRY BITCH MODE when so many people I know are doing grad school like it’s no big thing. “Oh, just go to grad school.” lol no.
One last thing
If English is just about the worst written language from a design standpoint, what’s the best?
Obviously everyone will have a different opinion, but my money is on the Korean script, Hangul. Not only is it like totally phonetic, even the shape of the fucking letters corresponds to the sound they make. It’s basically a real-life, extremely widely used, and equally elegant version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish script tengwar. Yup.
#language porn
ouyangdan:
deliciouspineapple:
jeffreydahmers-cookbook:
algrenion:
nogalina:
osidius-el-enfatico:
generation-dead:
pikachuly:
oh-my-godstiel:
jmonsterbbycakes:
well shit.
phonemes & allophones, si no fuera por uds podría haber tenido mejor nota en fonética xd
jshdfgahjfhjagsf MORÍ.
OH MY GOD
waaa
XD
LOL. This is why I try to remain as patient as possible when people have difficulty learning English as a second language. It’s really difficult, and I know how difficult it is to learn a language where the rules are had and fast.
You knew it had to happen. Eventually this would cross the dash of someone raised by a teacher. Someone raised by a teacher who believed very strongly in phonics and taught them to read when they were 4 years old with custom-made flash cards. Someone who went on to become a pedantic history nerd. Someone who is awake at 5:30 in the morning for no goddamn good reason and feels a little prolix today. May God have mercy on your souls.
In Which I’m Awake At 5 AM and Rant About the Problem With “Ghoti”
We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
—James Nicoll
English is basically the Frankenstein of languages. It’s a big ugly shambling beast patched together from creatures all over the world, many of them extinct, many just ripped from whatever country it just lumbered through. It doesn’t make any sense at first glance, but if you look at the individual bits and the creatures they came from, order begins to emerge. It also has vestigial organs of a sort—features that don’t really serve a purpose anymore and just kind of dangle there uselessly.
In more concrete language, while it may look like English has more exceptions than rules, often what seems to be an exception is just going according to another, conflicting, rule. A spelling may not look phonetic, but…well…let’s use a real-world example, shall we?
Let’s take “enough”. The -ough spelling is one of the weirdest in English—it can also be pronounced “ow” (bough), “oh” (though), “ew” (through), “aw” (thought) and so on. What the fuck is up with that?
In Yiddish, a cousin of English (related through Old High German), “enough” is גענוג, or “genoog”. They look kind of similar, spelling wise, don’t they? They share a basic e-n-u-g structure. So how the hell did they come to be pronounced so differently? Well, let’s take a look at another language with close ties to English, West Frisian. “Enough” in West Frisian is gênoch. What’s that? A wild “ch” has appeared and taken the place of “gh”!
Now, this “ch” is not pronounced “tch” like English “cheese” or “sh” like “machine”. It’s the sound represented as x in IPA (a very precise but counterintuitive-looking phonetic code). It’s that guttural sound like chutzpah in Yiddish, baruch in Hebrew and loch in Scots. I used foreign languages because English doesn’t have that sound anymore! Many native English speakers (who weren’t raised knowing other languages with that sound in them) therefore have a hard time pronouncing it and use “h” or “k” sounds instead…or just uncertainly drop the sound and trail off.
And that’s exactly what happened when it comes to “enough”. It used to be pronounced more like “enouch”. But “ch” started falling out of use, and new pronunciations started appearing, different from place to place. All this time the English spelling system was crystallizing, and so we’ve preserved -ough, a thing corresponding to no particular sound, a sort of useless leftover thing like your appendix.
That said, you really shouldn’t have to skim a thousand years of linguistic history to understand why a word is spelled a certain way. There are plenty of languages with perfectly phonetic systems where, if you know how a word is pronounced, you know how it’s spelled. English is not one of them. One reason is that we don’t have a central body in charge of the language and how things are spelled and whatnot, like YIVO for Yiddish or the Académie française for French. There’s never been anyone nudging English back into line whenever it goes haring off after a wild vowel. As a result, we’ve racked up millions of man-hours of suffering on the part of ESL and even native English speakers. (The non-phonetic way English is often taught to native speakers doesn’t help either.)
I’m always surprised and humbled by how goddamned good ESL speakers are. English is such a difficult language, and yet thanks to cultural imperialism there are like a gazillion times more non-native speakers who are better at English than English speakers are at, say, Spanish or Cantonese. The least we can do, I figure, is try to even up the score a little by learning more about the other languages that surround us, and stamp out “English only” nonsense when we see it.
tl:dr; According to the applicable English rules, it’s pronounced “goatee”. Deal with it.
Heather Massey rounds up nerd blogs run by and aimed at women, and requests recs from commenters. Clearly I’m out of touch because I’ve only heard of a few of the sites (Pink Raygun, The Mary Sue) and don’t follow any! Worth a look if you need more blogs to follow and/or places to nerd out about A Game of Thrones/self-publishing/Spaaace!.
(About half pass my lazy sniff-test of “is there a creator or character of colour somewhere on the front page?” but I’m thinking I should raise the bar a bit. Too tired to check but as far as I can tell most are run by white women. I feel really ambivalent about the whole “geek girl” thing because in my mind and certainly in media it’s associated with white/straight/cis and “girl” is kind of infantilizing. Like, it’s fine as long as you think of yourself as a woman first…but who gets to do that all the time? Which is why it feels like this isn’t my territory, you know? Like, all this should be the concern of people less ambivalent about their gender.)
Anyway, blather back if you want, I’d love to hear how other people relate to “geek girl culture” wrt race/sexual orientation/gender/whatever.
ETA: Goddamit for some reason the question thing didn’t enable, but hey, my askbox is always open.
