some type of adult girl

bepeu:

you: why are you drinking an entire bottle of wine ??
me:
me:
me:
me: wine not …

(via sailorplvto-deactivated20210128)

bubblepopmod:

Bouncy tiny ponies!

(via mavdpie-remade)

justice4mikebrown:

Mike Brown was murdered 100 days ago.

Darren Wilson still hasn’t been arrested, is still on paid administrative leave, and can return to duty if he is not indicted. 

1,000 police officers have trained for 5,000 hours to respond to Ferguson protesters. The National Guard is on standby. Homeland Security vehicles have been spotted in STL.

The KKK has called Ferguson protesters “terrorists” and has threatened to use “lethal force” against them.

There have been 0 attempts at justice.

(via errorschacha)

eldest-oyster:

velartrill:

There’s a very distinct pattern in what one might, if one were being… incautious, name “Internet horror-speak,” a particular patois that’s arisen in the latest years of this very era, a peculiar dialect lashed together from the flesh of Lovecraft and the sinew of internet culture and the bones of… something bony. Okay so I’m probably not going to be able to keep that gag up. It’s the language of Dread Singles

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, TRAVELING THE SUNKEN WAYS, DRINKING FROM THE LIPS OF THE LOW ONES, WISHING THEY’D WORN MORE SENSIBLE SHOES

and Welcome to Night Vale

Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have. A heart not having what it needs to throb. The fences in the caves. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. The fences in the caves. The fences in the caves.

to which I refer.

What interests me though is that’s there’s a very distinct pattern and sort of grammar to how this Internet Horror-Speak (hereafter IHS) works, one I’ve been trying to work out for a while now. There are some very obvious patterns, as well as some subtle ones I’m not sure how to put into words. These are the rules I’ve sussed out, though:

One of the most important rules, and I think the one that might be the most surprising to a lot of people, is to use simple, mundane language. Empurpling the narrative with gratuitous polysyllabisms and grandiose prose is actually wholly deleterious to the desired effect. This actually makes a lot of sense. Purple prose has a serious abstracting effect, in that it draws the audience away from the action and makes it sound more like they’re listening to a story. So using purple prose to describe your indescribable horrors can make them feel less real, where using everyday language helps connect the audience and make them feel more like there’s some grotesque violation of normalcy going on

Use fewer ‘s-constructions. Say “the blood of the fallen,” not “the fallen’s blood;” “the intestines of dawn” not “dawn’s intestines.” This is a less solid rule, and it’s still possible to have a powerfully creepy effect with the ‘s-construction, particularly if the construction comes sentence-finally: “They beat them with sticks around which were wrapped dawn’s intestines,” but “They wrapped the intestines of dawn around thick oaken sticks.”

Use older words. “For” instead of “because,” “kin” for “family,” etc. If this makes them shorter than their modern counterparts, all the more effective.

Don’t use commas with conjunctions, just string conjunctions together. So “They laughed and writhed and screamed and died in the gaze of a smiling god,” but not *”They laughed, writhed, screamed, and died in the gaze of a smiling god.” This one’s variable, but I see the former more than the latter and to me it feels like it has more impact and is more visceral. The latter sounds more planned out, more official, more normal.

Use old-fashioned constructions. “The”+[adjective] constructions are a favorite, as are “the [adjective] one(s).” “The laughing ones steal away the dreams of the hopeful and feast on the teeth of the indolent,” “There are no innocent in this place, for to gaze on the Ancient Ones is to know that innocence is a lie, that blood and fear and corruption are the engines of all that breathes.”

Break word associations. If I start a sentence with “The toaster,” you’re probably going to expect something like, “the toasted fell off the counter,” or “the toasted exploded,” not “the toasted laughed” or “the toaster bled.” There are words we associate with animate things and words we associate with inanimate things, and mixing them up can lead to weird mental reactions. It’s why things like “SPANK HAIR — LICK EYES — WHISPER INTO ASS” are so funny. They make us build associations that we didn’t have previously. A toaster isn’t a thing that bleeds, and hair isn’t something you spank, so putting those words together tends to slightly mess with people and throw off our reading. Welcome to Night Vale does this SO MUCH.

Cecil Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error

Cecil Here’s something odd: there is a cat hovering in the men’s bathroom at the radio station here

Cecil Alert! The sheriff’s secret police are searching for a fugitive named Hiram McDaniels, who escaped custody last night following a 9 PM arrest. McDaniels is described as a five-headed dragon

Last but not least, be vague. Let your words imply terrible and alien machinations at play, let them hint at vast supernatural tableaux of incomprehensible splendor and horror hanging just out of sight waiting to be glimpsed, but don’t ever explicitly tell anybody what’s going on. I put this one last because even though it’s the most important, it’s the most obvious, and I think everybody already knows this about horror. But it’s worth noting that IHS generally dials this up way higher, to the point where it’s hard or impossible to tell what parts are literal or metaphorical. Take this sub-par example:

Moving through the ashen ways of eons past, realms of fire and smoke and emptiness rising up and twisting around its path the beast walked on, burning all it perceived.

One on level, it’s possible that we’re talking about a minotaur arsonist who’s taking to the backroads during a forest fire to avoid the cops. On the other, we could be talking about some incomprehensible eldritch abomination warping its way through infernal dimensions outside space and time, ravaging worlds at its passing. Or anything between. I think this is probably the single most salient feature of IHS: its utter vagueness, and lack of proper context to distinguish the metaphorical from the literal.

But anyway. This is a fascinating memetic phenomenon and one I’d love to see some proper research done on this, beyond the idle musings of a lazy linguist with too much on her hands to spend time analyzing hard data.

Rhythm! The subtle things and the things that you ‘feel’ that you’re having trouble articulating? It’s rhythm. Rhythm is one reason why the last example is ‘sub-par’, and it’s absolutely key to (for instance) Welcome to Night Vale. There’s a pulse going through the prose that organises and structures how it’s read. English tends towards an alternation of strong and weak stresses; if you organise your words so that they start to reinforce that stress pattern, then congratulations, you’ve just invented the basics of English poetry. Part of what makes this particular brand of horror-speak so effective is a heightened control over the stress patterns of the language—not as much as in metrical verse, but still more than is usual for prose. Here’s the Mayor Winchell example from above, but with the stresses marked:

Mayor Pamela Winchell The fences in the caves. A heart throbbing for what it cannot have. A heart not having what it needs to throb. The fences in the caves. Heat from below and above, but all is cold betwixt. The fences in the caves. The fences in the caves.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes there are two or three syllables between stresses, sometimes only one—that’s normal, for English, because we speed up or slow down our reading depending on the rhythm we are unconsciously picking up from the words. Sometimes the stresses are unvoiced, in the form of pauses like rests in music. But you can see how underlying a lot of what Winchell is saying is a rhythmic pulsing that when read gives the effect of a kind of gnomic chanting that alters the atmosphere of the statement considerably. When you pronounce this aloud, it gives that characteristic Welcome to Night Vale effect; on the page, its power is lessened, but the rhythm is still strong enough that you can detect it, even if you don’t know that you’re doing so.

Most importantly, the presence of exaggerated rhythm is a conventional signal to your brain that it’s now reading poetry, and that puts you into a different mindset—a mindset where you are expecting the ambiguous, the non-literal and the metaphorical. It’s the mindset you get into when reading poetry, where your interpretative mind engages with a text that works on both a metaphorical and a literal level at the same time—exactly the ‘vagueness’ described by velartrill above.

What I’m saying, in essence, is that a (conscious or not) awareness of rhythm is key to being able to write sentences in this style. The choice between ‘s constructions (“dawn’s intestines”) and old-fashioned x of y constructions (“intestines of dawn”) is down to which will best work with the rhythm of your sentence; the effect of the [adjective] ones construction can also be judged based on its rhythmic potential. Almost every effect of IHS, apart from its predisposition towards short, familiar words (which I think is more of a general horror thing; effective horror writers tend to use the vocabulary of their audience), has its roots in its essentially rhythmic nature: its constructions, its rhetorical figures, its ability to waver between metaphorical and literal without committing itself to either.

Tl;dr, IHS is basically prose poetry with a horror angle and a deliberately Anglo-Saxon focus to its words. More of an English literature approach than a purely linguistic one, I suppose, but that is my field, after all.

(via blessphemy)

killbenedictcumberbatch:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

killbenedictcumberbatch:

Hey yall so remember last week when I told you about my friend Aki who was in need of some money for her baby and was basically out on her own? Well things got a little more real in the last couple days. Her BF, who is the father of her child, is now attempting to seek custody of the baby, even though he’s barely done anything to help. Not only that, but she needs more money for her child because he has some lung issues and she needs to buy medicine for him which is literally 60 dollars EVERY 2 WEEKS. She’s having a really tough time right now and if you could give her some money to at least keep herself afloat while all this shit goes down it would be really good of you. Her paypal is agriimony@live.com and she’s accepting donations. Please boost this and give whatever you can, this is really a dire situation and she needs all the help she can get. There are children involved, please try to give something. 

She needs money for food and diapers and medicine, please don’t stop donating/spreading this

please keep this going please please she needs more money for medicine she’s already close to running out bc the cold weather is making her son sick. The situation is actually a lot worse than i originally anticipated but I’ll share that information at Aki’s discretion. But you guys, please.

She needs 60 for medicine this week, 20-25 bucks for some fast-acting meds bc her son is getting worse as the weather changes, 12 dollars for wipes that will last her a few weeks, 360 for a hospital bill from last week, and her mom wants 150 dollars for letting her stay with her. So, around $600 bucks, give or take. Her fiance isn’t a responsible enough guy to spend his money on things that matter and it’s part of the reason why she left. You guys shouldn’t have a problem with raising this much in a short amount of time, now that you know how much she needs

PLS HELP GIVE FOOD AND MEDICINE TO THIS ADORABLE BABBY

Ok so I was sort of waiting for permission to tell this story but since things have only gotten worse I think it’s finally time to disclose the full situation. The reason why Aki left her house and why she’s staying away from her ex is that he’s doing hardcore drugs like coke, and using that money which could be used to help feed and care for the baby, for drugs. She’s felt unsafe and has really no way of getting any money at all. In the two weeks I’ve had this and other posts up she hasn’t gotten any more than 200 dollars, and I’ve literally seen dogs get more money than that in less time. I and others have given but that’s still not enough, her son literally stopped breathing yesterday and had to be rushed to the emergency room for the 3rd time in a week. He cannot under any circumstances be outside or else it could trigger another attack and the medicine he takes will not work. She can’t even run her normal errands because she has no one to watch him while she goes, so she’s forced to take him with her everywhere. And her insurance has not come through yet because her mother lied about the amount of people in her home in order to get more assistance and put the baby under her own to get more coverage when she wasn’t ever taking care of him. So now because of this, Aki could now be fucked up because of this. I don’t mean to guilt you or anything but this is serious, the life of a child and mother are at stake and I know that you guys are capable of raising ridiculous amounts of money for absolutely pointless shit, please put your cash towards something meaningful. I’ve never been more serious than I am right now, Aki has so many bill piling up from this and she really desperately needs your help. I’m not making this shit up, I’m not putting together some bullshit sob story, this is real fucking life and I need for you to help me help her. I’m literally begging you

(via 3dbabyfromallymcbeal)