#and April will be so much worse

[superbattrash]

I start my morning out with discovering that my car insurance is double in size in April - the month where I can’t afford to buy food at all in the first place because of other bills and insurances and I just

2023 was supposed to be good. It was supposed to save me, not show me what I want and then take it all away

No job contract, no HRT and now no money for food. Great. I’m gonna be curled up on the couch if y’all need me

[turtleblogatlast]

I love Raph and haven’t said that enough so to be more specific I love that Raph is a soft boy who loves bear plushies, a gross boy who eats an assortment of things that are definitely better left alone, a smart boy who is more than capable of taking down villains through planning and fortitude alike, a strong boy who is dedicated to training his muscles and fighting prowess, a teenage boy who loves his brothers but is more than happy to tease and roughhouse with them, an angry boy who sometimes lets his anger take a hold of him to cover the fear, a gentle boy who is generous with hugs and affirmations to those he loves, a capable boy who takes on more than should ever be expected of a teenager, a good boy who just wants to be a hero and slowly comes to realize the cost of that duty, a good boy who has no reservations about putting himself in the way of harm coming to his family, a good boy who’s a great brother and son and person and deserves only the best the world has to offer.

[captain-space-kin]

”Skybound ruined Jaya for me” Skill issue.

[qoldenskies]

what's your separated au about? :0

WHERE WE WENT WRONG ASK SPOTTED [LOCKS IN]

okay essentially without going into spoiler territory (it all seems kind of typical but there's a lot of twists and turns i have planned!!! trust me)

VERY basic premise, with leo/donnie with draxum and raph/mikey with splinter. i'm going to keep leo and donnie's names as they are for simplicity's sake and say that at one point they just decided to use the names their bio father gave them when they asked draxum for like... Actual names, they were probably just numbered before. they both have kind of messy complicated relationships with him

^^^ draxum is a pretty shit parent but im not going to make him super abusive (its fine when people do, im just going for the more nuanced approach!!). he's very goal-oriented and for a long time he's struggled to see the weapons he created as people, although he never outright Abused them. he was pretty emotionally neglectful and hard on them when it came to training/pushing them into their roles, and over the course of the story he's going to grapple both with humanizing them and also descending into a spiral of paranoia as things go on (all im gonna say about what's going on with him right now)

personality alterations are more subtle in some places and more obvious in others. raph is a lot more serious and overprotective, mikey's very similar to his canon characterization but he's a lot more rebellious and determined to prove his own independence, and donnie's actually very blunt and deadpan to counteract leo being UHHHHHHHHHH. hmmmmm. an insane person!! (lmao raph/mikey are dog-coded in the way that mikey is an excitable puppy and raph is an old sad sheepdog, and leo/donnie are cat-coded in the way that donnie is a cat that stays in high up places and glares at you, and leo is the type of cat that rolls on its back and looks cute and then ATTACKS when you try to pet it. thats the best way i can summarize them)

donnie was very much the family stickler on his side of the equation and leo was unruly and untameable, but that kind of... switches after some things happen. leo becomes complacent out of fear (he is so complicated and fucked up god bless) and donnie changes his priorities after he meets mikey.

because essentially the core of the story is that donnie and mikey being the youngest of their families, with overprotective older brothers who are actually kind of more reliant on them than the other way around, want to connect and actually be a family (as well as stop the conflict going on) but raph and leo REALLY DO NOT WANT THEM TO.

and i mean REALLY. really really. raph distrusts donnie and hates leo and leo DESPISES both raph and mikey (disaster twins are really codependent and its gonna shine through), so there's really just opposition on every side of the equation. things turn out alright in the end, but it's.... a long, long process. there's a point in the story where they have to do the unlocking ninpo thing and it takes so much longer and it is so much worse and its such a fucking mess LMAO

wow i love my sep au (one man's junk but with more crying and blood in it)

if things go according to plan it'll start after i finish canary continuity, i already have it all outlined. its just beginning stories that is kind of a struggle for me so the first few chapters are gonna be hard. even though i KNOW what im doing bleckgh.

[outfoxt]

Another Käärijä Research Project

aka: käärijä style-shifting project

as a preface, here are my (non) qualifications for this project and the circumstances under which it happened:

I am a linguistics student, and this past semester I took a course on sociolinguistics. the goal of this project was to become familiar with the concept of and analyze style-shifting (it's more commonly known as code-switching online but theres a difference and this is style-shifting), specifically by analyzing the speech of one person. We had the option to study oprah or to have someone else approved by my prof, so you know I had to ask my prof if I could study jere. This project is solely my intellectual property; even though I had a tutor help me a lot, everything written in this paper and on this post was my work alone.

now, on to the actual findings! the full paper and transcripts will be linked at the end :D

the actual variables (words or sounds) that I studied were the pronunciation of r, and use of the word "the".

to make things a lot easier from the get-go, i'm going to introduce you all to one of my favorite websites, ipachart.com (the international phonetic alphabet [ipa] chart is a big chart with an entry for every sound that exists in a language. this handy dandy website has an audio recording for each one of those sounds).

go to this website, and then scroll down to the table. go to the column labeled "post alveolar" and then click on ɾ and ɹ. those are the sounds i studied in this paper! ɾ is the finnish r and ɹ is the american r :)

so basically what i did to find instances of my variable was i just looked up a bunch of esc interviews and listened out for use of the different r sounds. i also transcribed the entire dinner date live because i love torture apparently :) the specific interviews and lives/stories are in the bibliography of the paper :p

after i transcribed all the interviews and lives/stories i went through and highlighted every instance of the r sound. then i calculated the ratios of ɾ to ɹ based on the context they were spoken in. the two contexts i looked for were formal contexts (sit-down interviews) and informal contexts (literally anything else).

i found that jere uses ɹ WAY more often in formal contexts than he does in informal contexts, and the same in reverse with ɾ.

i then went back to the transcripts and looked for all instances of the word "the". i also looked for instances where i thought it should be present, but was omitted. i calculated the ratio of present vs omitted "the"s in formal vs informal contexts and made some charts.

the graph with the smaller black section is "use of 'the' in formal settings" and the one with the smaller green section is "use of 'the' in informal settings" (the images are transparent, sorry)

i found that jere uses "the" WAY more often when in formal settings! there were also some instances where he added a "the" where it was unnecessary, which is studied at length in this wonderful paper by @alien-girl-21

something i also noticed that i elected not to study because this paper took enough energy on its own was that in formal contexts, whenever the "or" sound came in the middle or at the end of a word, jere wouldn't pronounce the r. it stuck out to me mostly because i heard words like "performance" turning into "perfomance", which i thought was an interesting quirk.

unfortunately i was somewhat limited by both my brainpower and capacity to do more work on this paper in the relatively short timeframe i was given (2 weeks) and the fact that i was given a 5 page MAX for this paper (not including a bibliography). i had a lot of fun doing this though and am definitely planning on studying jere for for academic credit again in the future if given the chance!

also i would like it to be known that i spent an hour searching for that 5 second clip of the urheilucast where jere said that he used to sell kitchens and understands english better than he can speak it.

link to a google drive folder with the actual paper i wrote and the transcripts of the interviews with notation:

please feel free to send me asks and dms with questions or comments about this paper! i absolutely love rambling about linguistics :3!!

[sysig]

Coming in to play! (Patreon)

[why-the-heck-not]

Starting to almost wish I could just go do this fucking presentation today solely bc I’m getting mad and tired of the anxiety, how is it physically possible to be this anxious for so many days straight. There has to be a limit how long u can be on the verge of an anxiety attack like ????

[ohio-thestate]

I have an unending hatred for those microwave dinners like why are the bbq ones the only ones that taste like anything

"spaghetti and meatballs" oh you mean starch noodles with tomato water and flavorless pieces of meat?

[pianokantzart]

Guys I warned you that I'd be completely unmanageable once we got some information on The Knuckles Show I warned you

[pallanophblargh]

I think part of me expected this burnout would last a long time, but it’s drawing close to a year now. I have a strong reason to suspect medications are prolonging it. Granted: I have no intention of stopping medication, but I suspect I may need to make some changes. It’s been nice not to feel burning rage/crippling despair/panic most of the time, but I also miss being able to actually... act on things! Start things! Feel some semblance of motivation, as fleeting as it is. Mostly my reaction to prompts of any kind are “nah, don’t wanna” or “so what?” which isn’t terribly conducive to anything more than day to day life. (Y’all, I can’t even reliably plan my vacation and that’s pretty terrible.)

I’m saying this in part as a sort of explanation as to why I’ve been so slow to respond to anything, or post any art, or even re-open commissions this past year. I just... generally can’t make myself do anything that isn’t a part of my daily maintenance routine. Knowing that making art (even personal art) takes 3x times as long to complete is a standout reason I’ve been refusing to reopen commissions especially, since I’d be unwilling to make clients wait more than a few months for even something as simple as a sketch. People were patient enough with “Old Me,” I don’t think most would hold out for “New Me.”

Thankfully I’m speaking to my doctor tomorrow regarding my experiences on the current medication, and maybe I can find something that works a little better. I feel like I’ve been pretty fortunate so far, all things considered, and my side effects have been fairly mild. (Though I have suspicions it’s also thinning out my hair something fierce... probably time for supplements for that issue!)

Hopefully I’ll figure it out sooner rather than later? Either way, I’m learning to accept things as they are these days. 

[psychoticwillgraham]

love my left forearm trying to go numb while i'm trying to write :))) (edit: left shoulder now too)

[machinavocis]

tucson summer survival experiment ~1.5 month report:

Dry Hot Arizona = ok.

Dry Very Hot Arizona = tbh also surprisingly ok.

Wet Arizona = DO NOT LIKE.

[crossbackpoke-check]

a junkyard dog ain't always pretty but you always love that toothless smile

[orcelito]

Despite all odds, I have arrived home safely👍

Turns out that the earlier goop was the better goop. The adderall goop. The adderall has worn off now though. So I am. Very incredibly out of it.

But I am home. And I will take my quick shower. And then I will climb into bed.

I do need to eat. But... later...

[xomoosexo]

i'd say most good commentary content youtubers have specific niches. fashion, politics, comedy, and so on. bad commentary youtubers are pervasive because they dont have the skill to say anything worthwhile, so they dedicate their energy to drama and bashing other people

agreed. I guess it depends on what "commentary youtuber" means I watch a ton of sit down talky content about fashion, doll collecting, cartoons, interior design, geography, etc but Ive basically stopped watching anything drama related except for mogul mail

[aprillikesthings]

In 2002 I kept a hand-written daily diary for most of that year, and I never once reread it that I know of and I lost it YEARS ago, and this is the first time I can think of that I wish I still had it.

For fic writing reasons. Pffft.

Because I was in the middle/late days of a relationship that was an absolute fucking disaster and every other entry was like "we had an argument and then we had sex," but in far more detail. I remember filling up PAGES with this.

To this day I'm kinda shocked we managed to keep up having sex two or three times a week considering he lived with his parents (I shared an apartment with a friend) and neither of us drove a car??? I also worked a really weird-ass schedule at a retail job??? This was all in the suburbs, no less; where the buses all have weird-ass routes and run like once an hour on the weekends.

But also there's no getting around it: every toxic/enemies-to-lovers ship or fic I've read or written in the past twenty years has been inspired in part by that relationship, because there is pretty much nothing like the rush of falling into bed with someone after you've been furious with each other--but holy shit is it much nicer to experience it via fiction. But of course, the whole reason I crave it is because I did it in real life. For two and a half years, lol.

I've seen people describe that sort of relationship as addictive, and they're not wrong.

It's still bizarre to think about: our physical chemistry was off the charts and the sex was great, but we were both immature as fuck and bad at relationships and in every other way just godawful for each other. Pretty much the only thing we had in common (other than difficult relationships with our families pfft) was that we liked having sex with each other.

Well, okay. We liked watching Adult Swim on the weekends.

And he's the one who introduced me to Radiohead (past the song Creep), by giving me a burned copy of Kid A.