comicgeekscomicgeek:

A British writer? 

PTERRY THE BRITISH WRITER?!

(via spudking)

josilverdragon:

I guffawed out loud because THIS

(via swanofstorie)

fioras-resolve asked:

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

janmisali:

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don’t hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn’t the most intuitive thing (“does /s mean sarcastic or serious?”) but it’s not too difficult to explain what they mean. I’ve had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I’m supposed to interpret something, so I already know what “read this in a sarcastic voice” and “read this as a joke” are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I’ve already needed to develop. it doesn’t come naturally for me, but it’s something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don’t work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don’t correspond to specific tones of voice. I don’t have a “I’m making a reference” voice or a “I’m not talking about a person who’s here” voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they’re purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that’s fine, right? like, it’s theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it’s up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I’m supposed to interpret what something means.

it’s, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I’m expected to learn separately from the set that I’ve already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you’re supposed to wait before it’s your turn to speak, but they’re also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they’re currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the “comprehensive lists” are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you’re sarcastic online there’s no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just… expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it’s good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn’t exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there’s something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means “I don’t mean this as an insult, don’t worry” to be spelled the same way as an acronym that’s an insult

metamorphesque:

ALT

— Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories (translated by Katrina Dodson)

(via iguessweallcrazyithinktho)

fittingoutjane:

enkiduofvideogames:

nicodiangeloisliterallymefr:

spitblaze:

‘the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes’ what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so

also the exploding appendix

there’s an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:

-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don’t run behind them but rather in front of them. It’s like putting the power cables *over* a camera’s lens

-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn’t a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.

the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.

Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.

Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.

And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.

(via seananmcguire)

writergeekrhw:

dykebeckett:

realized that probably most people haven’t read the daniel martinico ds9 letter. this is classic literature me

I not only read this, I kept it on the cork board in my office for the entire time I was on staff.

(via seananmcguire)

n1ghtm4r3-p01s0n:

shittysawtraps:

Just a button labeled “do not press” hooked to a speaker, and if you press the button it boos you.

… That’s just the Stanley Parable.

chrisdornerfanclub:

chrisdornerfanclub:

I don’t think you can fully understand transmisogyny without understanding how it’s weaponized against cis Black women.

When you find a transmisogynist you’ve found a racist who will use their ideals of the “normative female body” to demean and denigrate Black women. For years it was a popular right wing rumor/conspiracy/dick move to refer to Michelle Obama as a “tranny” and more recently sports organizations have repeatedly excluded cis Black women for not having “normative” hormone levels. Transmisogyny and antiblackness go hand in hand.

(via sandstonesunspear)

kaity–did:

kaity–did:

I think something very scary that is happening for the newer generation is that the invisible audience no longer exists. They’re not invisible, they’re right there, in their pocket all the time, and that is so physiologically damaging.

“he he ho ho elder millennial thinks technology is evil and Edison was a witch”

fucking no but don’t you remember in middle school when you were like “I’m horrible and everyone hates me” but you literally never had any evidence to back that up so you eventually grew out of it? Now imagine you had a little light box that people from all over the world could tell you that actually yeah they did hate you , and they could do it anonymously. Why do you think teens today are so fucking obsessed with cringe? Why do you think you haven’t seen a gen z horse girl? Like the audience isn’t invisible anymore and the kids have to perform form the second their born.

(via fan-art-ic)

womenintheirwebs:

this is so succinct and so perfect.

(via fan-art-ic)

sunny-rants:

(via genyalinaa)

greelin:

greelin:

anyone want to give me a small cool five million $$$ so i can have a car. and house. And various little treats

and not suffer the agonies every single day. Of course

(via hopeful-lad)