#edit: not okay's instrumentals are so fun!

[leatherbookmark]

omg days sounds like an ending theme of a late 2000s anime... so cute

[lovvecherrymotion]

help

omfg this is such a funny ask to get😭 idk what it says about me that i'm being asked for jan info

okay so. this is actually a very difficult thing to answer. i have no idea where to start. i have no idea what exactly you'd like to know about jan because there's just so much random stuff to talk about.

he's a mathematician, has a cat (igor), plays multiple instruments, enjoys cooking (AND HE'S GOOD AT IT IDC WHAT ANYONE SAYS), was a stock model for a while, has very strong opinions on insects and the praying mantis is his favorite. likes metal and britney like any fun person should. is a night owl. likes ananas lonkero and nace's mashed potatoes. enjoys making silly photoshop edits and is very funny and witty. used to be late for things but not so much anymore

he might be a bit reserved but he's a very sweet, kind person too. he's insanely talented and charismatic and i love how much he enjoys music and being on stage. he just gets completely lost in his own little world sometimes (but there's always a nace to bring him back).

i feel like every single time i talk about jan it turns into a love letter so if there's anything specific and actually more useful you'd like to know just... ask away. and I KNOW the art will turn out amazing

[somewhereincairparavel]

HOO if they were in a band/orchestra - boys edition pt 1 (Percy, Jason and Leo)

Percy Jackson- Guitarist

i honestly don't know if I'm being cliche or something, but percy seems like someone who just picks up the guitar and strums it a little before leaving. Like the guitar is a light hearted instrument that you can self learn fairly well, we all know percy HATES tutors of any kind (unless it's annabeth) and would probably like figuring things out himself, so he'd just strum it until he somehow got the tunes he'd want and would probably look up YouTube tutorials lmfao. I feel like sally would like listening to the beatles, and percy would listen along aswell and get inspired to play and perform like that for his mom one day?? A green flag mama's boy till the very end lol. He would eventually start to play guitar of most kinds (bass, electric, acoustic) he'd start with an acoustic first, because it's less intimidating but he'd grow to LOVE electric tbh. So he'd definitely be the sub guitarist of the band. I think his favourite genre would be jazz or rock.

Jason Grace- Violinist

Okay the violin is literally HIS kind of instrument. I feel like he'd really enjoy listening to classical music like vivaldi- the seasons, Mozart's violin Concerto No.5 in A Major, Dmitri Shostakovich's waltz no. 2, etc. especially because if we hc camp jupiter as having something even remotely fun like camp orchestra (camp half blood can be the band bc we KNOW camp jupiter is too uptight and proper for having rock, metal or jazz bands freely, they seem more of the orchestra type) then I KNOW jason would be the lead Violinist tbh. He probably picked that up as a toddler and ended up loving it, it helps him ease into his stress from harsh practice. Also, if he does join a band in camp half blood at the same time, he'd be a lead vocalist tbh. I feel like NOBODY expected jason to be a good singer because people are used to his 'rough' and gruff voice, but it's actually really sweet and melodious, he just roughens it up for his duty as a war leader. He'd have a silky melancholic edge to his voice that's super unique and perfect for singing heartbreaking ballads, also since he's a latin speaker, I feel like his pronunciation of certain words would be very eloquent and he'd have a slight accent that everyone is really intrigued by.

Leo Valdez- drummer

ahh okay so we know how much leo loves tapping and fidgeting right? I feel like drums would be his DREAM instrument because they relieve his stress and nervousness. He'd just tap his drums in his free time. I feel like piper would be the one who would tell him to audition as the drummer in the band, seeing how well he actually drums. He'd genuinely enjoy the drumming. OH OH OH he'd love to use the crash cymbal on his drums (yknow like the steel plate looking things) in the end of each performance for the IT factor of the performance ahh he'd smile the whole time looking so badass. I feel like his position as the drummer would give him immense confidence because everyone compliments him sm.

tagging people who asked me to :) @lizzzzzzzzzzzzzz---lol @boldofyoutoassumeicanspell @themythecho

[foreverdolly]

𝐈 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐄 pt 2 | 80's mechanic!austin x best friend!reader

summary: it's starting to look like he might never make it out of the friend zone. austin has been in love with you for as long as he can remember, and he's terrified that you'll never see him as anything more than a best friend and protector. with the fear of you one day outgrowing him fresh on his mind, he's now hell bent on getting you to view him in a different light. madly in love and terrified to lose you, austin butler is playing for keeps.

pairings: 80s mechanic! austin x childhood best friend!reader

word count: 3.8k

notes/warnings: SMUT! in part three, virgin!austin. . . need i say more?, i love pining and this fic is testament to that, shaky/hurried hands, who doesn't love a good best friends to lovers fic, he has a deep southern accent, austin is the small town's metalhead and he's swelteringly hot without even trying. (this is going to have to be three parts because it turned out too long after editing. the smut alone is like. . . five pages on google docs.)

Austin could tell that you were fighting off the urge to plug your ears as the band continued to pound away at their instruments. It wasn’t that you weren’t a fan of metal music- he was pleased to know that you enjoyed a lot of the bands that he loved- but while this might be metal, Austin wasn’t sure it could really be categorized as music. The drummer, Mark, was okay at best. He couldn’t say the same for the other member’s. Dave had picked up a guitar and decided that he wanted to start a band just a year ago. It was more of a “this sounds like a fun thing to do with my time” and less of a “this is my passion in life” sort of thing. 

The wavy haired blonde tried to show support where he could, like tonight for example. He had dragged you all the way out here just to add to the small crowd. You were sweet enough not to complain though. 

“Do ya want another drink?” Austin called down to you, pointing to the empty can of beer in your hand. 

You squint your eyes up at him, trying to read his lips. He repeated himself, smiling fondly when you nodded your head. You were kind enough to let him drag you an hour out of town to see this show, so the least he could do was make sure you were taken care of. Not only that, but it was something that he enjoyed immensely. Austin knew just how strong you were, but it felt nice to know that he was needed. Taking care of you made him feel like a necessary part of your life. It made it easier for him to delude himself into thinking that you couldn’t be without him. 

“I’m not drunk enough for this.” You called back to him, motioning towards the stage. 

He heard your sly little comment and laughed all the way back up to the bar, maneuvering his tall body this way and that so that he wouldn’t bump into anyone in the packed crowd. Austin was surprised that so many people showed up to the bar tonight, the turnout usually being much smaller. 

He finally made it over to the bar, the toes of his sneakers swiping one of the bar stools. He grimaced, mumbling a quick apology to the man who had been jostled around by Austin’s uncharacteristic clumsiness. He was just about to try and grab the bartender’s attention when he felt a sudden pressure on his elbow.

 Samuel’s familiar face grinned back at him, his mousy brown hair cropped short. Austin gaped when he noticed the new hairstyle, eyebrows pinching together in confusion. He didn’t have to vocalize the question, Sam already pointing at his head with a comically dramatic frown.

“Work,” The other man stated simply, shrugging his shoulders with a “what can you do” attitude. “I’ll get another beer.” He reached around Austin so that he could hand the empty beer bottle to the bartender and then pointed towards the blonde. “And then put whatever he orders for him and his lady on my tab too.” 

The blonde whirled, quickly shaking his head. He wasn’t the type of person to take handouts. Ever. Even if they are as a gesture of kindness. Austin hated the feeling of owing people anything. He’d learned from a young age that most people, even the ones that seemed to have the purest intentions, expected favors in return for nice gestures. Maybe it was due to growing up on “the wrong side of the tracks”, but good deeds always meant that someone wanted something from you. 

“Nah, man. Ya don’t have to do that.” He tried, but the beers were already being placed down in front of him. 

Sam smiled at the bartender, giving her a flirtatious wink before clapping his old friend on the back. “You’re the one that got me my current gig. Two beers is nowhere near enough to pay you back for that.” 

The regional manager of the local electric company had all of their work trucks maintained at the shop where Austin worked. All the mechanic did was tell the head honcho that he knew a guy that was going to school to become an electrician. Thanks to Austin’s meddling, Sam had a job the second he got his certificates. Even though Austin was the one that set up the interview, it was the brunette’s skill and personable attitude that landed him the job in the first place. He didn’t want to take credit for the other boy’s undeniable skill. Instead of pushing the subject and denying the other man’s kindness, Austin- although slightly begrudgingly- took the beers with a small smile, nudging his elbow into Sam’s side. 

“Well thank ya for that. It’s weird seein’ your hair short though. Ya look good.” Austin took a sip of his beer, then stared down at yours, raising that can to his lips so that he could give it a taste. 

“You’re lucky that you get to keep your long hair. I mean- it gets more and more majestic by the day, Butler.” Sam teased, reaching a hand over to rustle his wavy blonde hair. It was past his shoulders now, and though you often teased him about getting a haircut, he knew that you’d be upset if he chopped it all off. He’d had long hair since high school, only trimming it when it became too much of a bother to maintain. 

Austin could see the way Sam’s eyes slowly searched the crowd, his smile slow and wide once he found exactly who he was looking for: you. The blonde knew that the questions were sure to come, and so he was quick to change the subject. 

“I’m glad ya came all the way out here to support Dave. I didn’t know ya were still close with him.” The dark dive bar’s doors opened, more metalheads pouring in through the front door. Austin steered them away from the bar, making more room for others who were waiting behind them for a drink.

“I love Davie- but Mark is my new roommate.” Mark was the aforementioned drummer. . . and the wildest of the band. Just two months ago at a bonfire the twenty four year old had set his hair on fire- hence the fact that he was newly bald.

You had been there with the group when it had happened, and thankfully were sober enough to pour your drink over his head to extinguish the flames. Only after you knew that he was safe did you double over with laughter. Austin hadn’t been so kind. He had nearly pissed himself the second that the idiot tried to jump over the giant flames. 

“That must be. . . fun.” Austin chose his words carefully, but Sam was quick to laugh. 

“It’s never dull, that’s for sure.” He agreed, lifting his beer up to take a swig.

The song that the band was playing ended, Dave walking up to the mic so that he could loudly thank the crowd and call out the shitty title of their next terrible song. The amp's feedback was piercing, causing the entire bar to wince and cry out in pain. 

Austin started to walk off in your direction, hoping that he’d been successful in steering clear of any questioning- but a grip on his shoulder stopped him. Every single one of his friends had given him “the talk” at one time or another. It was always awkward and hard to stomach. Nobody in their right mind would pine after a girl for even a fraction of the time that Austin had with you. None of his friends could ever begin to understand exactly what he could lose in the process of vocalizing his feelings though.

“So is this a date. . . or?” Sam asked under his breath, motioning as subtly over towards you as he could. 

You had looked over in Austin’s direction a few times, wondering where he was and what might be taking him so long. You’d stopped searching for him after seeing who he was talking to though, not wanting to interrupt. Sam was the only one in Austin’s male friend group that actually had a “real” job, and you knew that the two of them had more in common than the rest of the boys because of it. You turned back to the stage, giving Dave a quick thumbs up as a form of encouragement to pump him up after the amp malfunction. The blonde clenched his teeth for a couple of seconds, knowing that he shouldn’t lie (but wishing that he could), before turning to face Sam again. 

“No- not a date. She’s friends with the group. . . and Davie wanted her to be here tonight.” 

Sam’s face hardened as he looked up at the stage, glaring after the guitarist. Austin was quick to shake his head, backpedaling. 

“It’s not like that. Just as friends. He knows that I-” Am in love with her. 

Of course he didn’t need to finish the sentence. Anyone with eyes knew how he felt about you. Thankfully, none of his friends had ever even tried their hand at flirting with you, because they understood Austin’s feelings. It wasn’t a childhood yearning or an adult ache that plagued him. It was more complex than that. It was the sort of love that often destroyed adult’s lives. The kind of love that didn’t go away, no matter how much you wished that they would. He’d been in love with you before he could even add two plus two or write his full name in cursive. That love was just as much a part of him as his own soul was. 

Which was why it always bothered Austin when people looked at him with eyes filled with pity. Just like Sam was doing now. 

“Do you think. . . do you think she knows? Maybe she doesn’t want to turn you down because she doesn’t want to lose you.” Sam was trying to help. Austin knew that. He was just sick and tired of people constantly putting their two cents in. 

These sort of comments just added to the self doubt that crippled him. The years of anxiety over his unrequited feelings kept him awake at night, and he didn’t need tonight to be ruined. Despite the shitty music, the two of you had been having fun. Wake up calls like the one Sam was currently tried to give him often put him in a rotten mood, and you’d pick up on that immediately.

“She doesn’t know. Ya know how she is- she’s sweet, trustin’, and a lil’ bit naive. We’ve always been this close, so in her mind this is all we are.” And all that we’re going to be most likely. He took a swig of his beer, wishing that he could get drunk off of his ass. He hadn’t made any sleeping arrangements with his friends though, and the last thing he wanted was for you to be sleeping on some random guys floor because he got too drunk to drive home. 

Austin cleared his throat, gave Sam one last pat on the shoulder, and started to make his way through the thrashing crowd. Behind Austin, Sam opened his mouth to say something. The shift in mood was obvious, and he needed to apologize for bringing it up, but it was too late now. Austin was gone and in a solemn mood. 

The melancholy that threatened to eat away at him for the rest of his night was swiftly replaced with rage. 

There was a man standing beside you that he hadn’t ever seen before. He wasn’t a friend. . . or even a friend of a friend, for that matter. Austin watched as the male moved his hands excitedly as he spoke, dark brown bangs hanging into his eyes, his hair almost as long as Austin’s. 

Your childhood friend stood back and watched the interaction for as long as he could stomach, wondering what the two of you were talking about to have the male in such high spirits. Were you making him feel like he stood a chance with you? Had he been too late walking back to the bar, the two of you having already exchanged contact information? He was attractive enough- though as he smiled Austin noticed that his bottom row of teeth was rather crooked. Knowing you, you’d probably find the imperfection “cute”, which further enraged the blonde. 

Austin hated getting angry over things like this. Watching you talk to other boys had been something he hadn’t had to deal with in almost two years, which he had considered to be a godsend. It was just as painful every time. It was unfair of him to feel this way, and he knew that. He should have hung back and let you talk to the guy. If he was a real friend he would have done just that. 

Except Austin had staked his claim on you far before you’d been able to fully comprehend what dating really was.

 No matter how nice of a guy Austin was, he was territorial and easily made jealous. He had his faults. He was selfish with you, and he’d willingly admit that to whoever questioned him. So he swiftly walked up beside you, sliding your beer into your hand with a smile that was too sweet. 

“Sorry that took so long. Sam wanted to show me his new haircut.” That wasn’t a complete lie. Just a little ‘half truth’. 

You smiled widely up at him, then gestured to your “new friend”. The boy straightened his back, having noticed how large Austin was in comparison to his own gangly frame. He towered above almost everybody else in the room, his shoulders broad and muscular. The blonde smiled at the boy, making sure to show off his perfect, white smile. He was being petty. He was being rude and horrible and. . . and he didn’t care. Not really, anyway. Austin could feel bad about his behavior later, but for now he had to make sure nothing happened between the two of you. 

“Austin, this is Robin. He works at the local record store.” You introduced, motioning between the two men. 

Bless your sweet little soul. You probably thought that the two of them, having similar taste in style and music, would be fast friends. Maybe Austin would have liked the guy if he wasn’t trying to steal his girl. Maybe being the keyword. 

The stage lights flashed dully beside your little group, the thick clouds of cigarette smoke drowning out most of the light. You let out a pleased hum as Austin took Robin’s hand into his own, watching him shake it firmly. 

“Nice to meet ya, man.” Though it wasn’t very nice at all. “Robin. . . that’s an interestin’ name for a guy.” That was a childish jab, but Austin wasn’t above laying the guy out right here and now. That is, if you weren’t standing between them. 

You tensed beside your best friend, giving his arm a quick swat, as if reminding the giant to play nice. 

Austin barely felt it, your tiny hands doing nothing to deter him. Instead he placed a large hand on the top of your head, dragging you into his side and tucking you in tightly. Robin was about to say something- a rude remark to fire back at Austin’s insult- but froze as he took in the sight before him. Understanding flickered into his eyes, his mouth parting slightly. 

“Oh,” He whispered softly, then held his hands up in defense. “Oh, I had no idea. Really. No harm done at all. We were just talking about music. Strictly casual.” 

You were standing as still as a statue, muscles taught as you tried your hardest to feel out the situation. Was Austin pretending to be your boyfriend because he thought Robin looked suspicious? You chewed on the inside of your cheek, fighting off the urge to shrug his arm off of you. You’d hate yourself later for embarrassing him in public, and you were positive that your best friend’s intentions were good. Still, it annoyed you that he still treated you like a child. Sure, you could be a bit too optimistic at times, but you were fully capable of protecting yourself. 

The hatred in Austin’s chest fizzled out, and suddenly he felt like the biggest douche on the planet. You might be blinded by your sense of innocence, but you were often a good judge of character. Robin was a nice enough guy, and he had just been an asshole for no reason. Austin’s shoulders slumped and he quickly shook his head. 

“No- you’re fine. I’m just protective over her, especially in places like this. Ya can never be too careful… There’s a lot’a creeps out there.” Austin offered as an excuse, moving a tad closer to him so that he could shake his hand- anything to alleviate some of the awkward tension. Robin started to shuffle back, obviously scared of a potential fight, but Austin shook his head. 

He’d traumatized the poor guy. 

“So ya work at a record store? Do ya have a good thrash collection?” Something. Austin needed to think of something that might change the direction of this conversation. He could feel how antsy you were getting at his side. He didn’t have to look down to know that you were disappointed in him for his reaction. Knowing that he had upset you absolutely gutted him. He’d let his jealousy get the best of him, and because of that he’d acted like. . . well, like a complete dick to someone that didn’t deserve it. 

Robin’s grim expression softened, brown eyes pinching at the corners as he smiled- albeit a bit nervously. 

“Yeah, at the record store down the street,” Robin yelled over the music, pointing off in the direction. 

You and Austin had dropped by the place a few times, but it was usually for record signings. It was the largest store in the entire area, so any time there were any “obscure” new releases the male would have to drive an hour out just to pick it up. It was a pain in the ass, but the store owner was pretty nice and knew a handful of influential people in the music industry. 

Back when you and Austin were in highschool you had all but begged on your hands and knees to skip school so that you could get one of your “The Police” cassette signed. Much to his absolute horror you had insisted on blasting it the entire way home. Of course he put up with it. Why? Because you looked cute screaming the lyrics. 

“Ya must have just gotten the job. I was up there about two months ago and didn’t see ya.” Austin offered Robin another smile, and that was all it took for the guy to warm up to the blonde. 

Just as you thought, Robin and Austin hit it off. The two ended up talking for the rest of the night, even earning a few glares from other people in the crowd whenever their laughter got too boisterous to be considered polite. After closing out your tabs Robin parted ways with the two of you, quickly slipping his home phone number into Austin’s palm, which had been scribbled on the back of his receipt. 

You had wanted to congratulate the boys for putting on a good show, but everyone had jumped off the stage and headed straight to the overcrowded bar for drinks after their set. Everyone aside from Davie, who was busying himself with a group of cute girls that had been eying him all night. 

“Come on. It’s gettin’ late. . . let’s get ya home.” 

Austin was acting weirder than usual tonight. Sure, this particular bar wasn’t the safest place to frequent, but his earlier treatment of Robin was an overreaction. Your best friend had a bad habit of babying you far too often. He made excuses for it- telling you that the world was a rotten place and that he didn’t mind looking out for you. It had been something that you appreciated through high school, but now that you were an adult it made you feel. . . a bit too spoiled. It also blurred certain boundaries, which further confused your already suffering heart. If only Austin knew how you felt towards him, then maybe he’d start acting a bit differently with you. 

Yet here he was, opening up the door to his van for you with a broad smile that made your heart do somersaults. You wanted to blame the heat that was pooling in the pit of your stomach on the five beers you’d drank that night. You wanted so badly to blame all of this on your recent drought in romance. . . but it’s Austin. 

No one has ever treated you as gently as he has.

Men, your father included, had always acted like your wants and needs were an inconvenience. You were too “high maintenance” because you enjoyed spending quality time with your partners. Relationships have always been short lived for you. Austin had set an impossible standard for how you wanted to be treated. Even now he was chatting your head off, one hand on the wheel and the other hand mindlessly checking to see if your seatbelt was buckled, his fingers brushing against your hip as he gave it a testing tug. 

Being around him right now was dangerous. You weren’t drunk enough to make a fool of yourself, but tipsy to the point of possibly ruining everything. Because he looked beautiful in the dim lighting of the car's display. His jawline was even more defined due to the shadows, and his blonde hair looked even lighter in comparison than usual. It was longer than you’d ever seen it, falling in slight waves because of the spring humidity. 

And you really wanted to kiss him. 

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[fannishstuff]

FIDDLEFORD PSA!!!!!!

OKAY, THIS HAS BEEN DRIVING ME ABSOLUTELY BONKERS FOR A WHILE NOW.

Dear Fiddleford McGucket fanartists:

First of all: draw how you want. The following is not intended to be judgmental, just educational. <3

On to business:

Here is how you fingerpick a banjo.

This is three-finger. There are more styles, but this is how I play. (I did not include fingerpicks because Fidds doesn't use them in the show and they're a pain to draw; you can also play just fine without them, although they are useful.)

Fingerpicking is usually done on a five-string banjo. Old Man McGucket's theme sounds like it's fingerpicked to me. Please note that your pinky and ring finger are planted on the banjo itself, next to the strings.

The first two images are to show posture, the third image is what it would look like to draw:

When I'm just holding my banjo and not playing it, my pinky and ring finger just naturally rest this way because it's comfy.

Here is how you play clawhammer style.

This is just an approximation; I almost never play clawhammer. The big thing is that your fingers curl in in a "claw" and you pick with your thumb.

Here are the tuning pegs on a five-string banjo.

In the show, Fiddleford has a four-string banjo, not five-string. (We see two banjos; they are both four-string.) Honestly, that surprised me. I'm not sure what the folk scene looked like in the 80s, but most players you see today have five-strings, so I think they were just streamlining the design.

EDIT: I was wrong! His banjo has a disappearing and reappearing fifth nut!

A four-string banjo has four tuning pegs at the top, like any other instrument. The fifth tuning peg is about a third of the way down the neck.

BONUS: Nobody gets into this much detail, but clever eyes will notice that the string widths look funny. If you have played a bass or guitar, you're used to the top string being lowest and thickest, the bottom string - which is the "first" string - being highest and thinnest. A four string banjo is tuned like this, but with a five-string banjo, the fifth string is the same diameter as the first.

Anyway, there are plenty of great banjo video and image tutorials on the internet if you want to get into the weeds, but I got the impression that a lot of you have literally never seen a banjo being played often enough to even realize how different it is from a guitar. Some people absolutely do strum banjos like guitars - in fact, I think that's more common with four-strings - but the McGucket music we hear is very obviously not being strummed.

There! Now you may freely choose to draw his hand however you want to, and it won't be from a place of ignorance. <3

(Oh, one last thing: that round thing that comprises the body of the banjo is literally just a drum. Drumming it is fun. You can and should draw Fiddleford tapping his banjo with the tips of his fingers like I do.)

[latoyalestrange]

stay

seb. sallow x f!reader

“you know that i hate this place, but if you wanna stay, i do too

we’ll let the night turn to day, but i’m down either way

cause i’m so down for you”

summary: how could you possibly help attending a party celebrating your incredible win in quidditch? sebastian isn’t one for parties, but he can’t seem to leave you…

words: 1.3k

warnings: fluff, pining, aged up seb and mc, jealousy, suggestiveness, not edited

sebastian didn’t know what it felt like for someone to be proud of him. all his uncle solomon told him was how disappointed he was in him and how foolish he was. he did know, however, what it felt like to be proud of someone else. that was the best way to describe how he felt about you. prideful.

having you on his arm made him puff out his chest and hold his head a bit higher. the brilliant, stunning new witch that single handedly saved hogwarts, and, most importantly…the only person in this world that had ever truly understood him.

so who could blame him for physically being unable to say no to you? seeing you beg…did things to him. the way you drawled out his name in a melodic voice send bumps across his skin.

“sebastiaaan…please? for me?”

god...what was a man to do?

"sure, just for a few minutes, okay?" your sounds of excitement forced the corners of his mouth to turn upward brightly at you.

"this is gonna be so fun!" for a moment, perhaps you had him convinced. seeing you this elated was making his heart flutter in his chest and he suddenly would do anything to keep you happy.

"can't believe you got him to say yes," ominis commented shortly as he watched you practically drag him towards the slytherin common room.

"we won tonight, how can we not celebrate?" you asked innocently, halting in front of the blonde-haired boy.

"you mean you won," ominis corrected her. the slytherin's couldn't deny it, you had taken well in your role as a beater, practically wiping the competition in that night's game.

"someone has to be the humble slytherin," you joked back.

"speaking of humble," garret appeared next to the trio that was still stalling outside of the party, snaking through them to enter the door. sebastian instantly tensed up. "how about a toast to the mvp of the night!" you peered over the stone railing to see a sea of students cheering for garreth's words. you scanned the crowd to see enchanted instruments in one corner, an established table for drinks.

you smiled as you gazed down at them, feeling bashful. sebastian sighed behind you.

"lets go!" you instantly started down the stairs, careful to weave in between your classmates and leaving sebastian in your dust. he watched you find your way to the middle of the room, running into poppy and amit, who were nursing drinks of their own, casually swaying to the music and socializing. a few paces to the right, a couple had claimed one of the couches, ravaging each other as if no one were around.

at first, it displeased him. then, reminding himself of why he was still there, he thought of what it would feel like to mark you like that in front of everyone. nevermind. i can't be here.

"y/n! wait!" you could hardly hear him over the music and loud drone of conversations going on around you. sebastian was less careful trying to chase after you, bumping into a few people along the way. it took him a while, but when he caught up to you, garreth had found you in the crowd again, and this time he was holding a vial of what he instantly recognized as fire whiskey. sebastian pushed forward to meet your side just as you had accepted the vial. his arm instinctively clung to your waist.

"hey, i'm leaving. i prefer sleep over drunk people--" as if a switch had gone off, your face fell into disappointment.

"already? don't you want to have a drink? maybe we can dance!" your giddiness made it impossible. you were looking forward to touching him. once again your pleas cast a spell on him, and he was unable to deny you of everything you wanted.

"yeah, i can stay a while, i guess. i-if you want me to stay, i'll stay." stay smooth, sallow. you giggled, followed by a shy hiccup. he couldn't help but chuckle along with you. he found his eyes lingering on yours for a little too long. you didn't avert your gaze or your smile, despite it.

"I would really like it if you would stay, sebastian." the corner of her lip found itself in between her teeth in an inviting bite.

"it's settled then--"

"y/n! one, two, three!" garreth and a few of his friends gestured for you to take your elixir along with them. you quickly looked to sebastian, whose expression was blank. you thought of your victory, your reputation, your personal bucket list. you succumbed to peer pressure and downed the fiery liquid in one go. it felt like your entire throat was burning as your eyes squeezed shut to dull the disgust. a few people turned into almost the entire gathering as they erupted in excitement.

sebastian shook his head, his smile unfading. floating instruments coming into his view snapped his eyes away from you as they stayed to circle the room in the air. when he looked back down at you, two other quidditch captains were ushering a chair beneath you and hoisting you in the air. they jostled you to the beat. you regained eye contact with him to shrug.

sebastian had suspected he would regret his decision in staying, but he wasn't anticipating it to come this fast. it wasn't that he was angry that you were getting recognition for you efforts, not at all. it was the false, parasitic companionship that he hated. he saw right through people like garreth, imelda, and various others. they couldn't have cared less when they were teasing you as you were first arriving. but as soon as you had gained notoriety, they came flocking to you. he wanted to protect you from being used. more importantly, though, he wanted to protect you from being taken from him. that, he absolutely could not bare.

tonight, though, he would push aside his feelings. you deserved to be celebrated to the nth degree. watching you be carried away, glanced around for his second favorite person. he spotted the slytherin boy leaning on the wall near the grand windows. sebastian made his way through the crowd to finally join him.

"she has you wrapped around her finger, sebastian," he teased, earning an annoyed scoff from his friend.

"impossible," he argued, still eyeing you from a distance. he saw as they clumsily set you down. you eventually made it to the floor in one piece and he could no longer see you in the masses.

"you'd think she'd casted imperio on you. i've never seen you so--"

"okay, alright, fine..." sebatian stammered. "i'm pretty sure we're made for each other or something but that does not mean i'm wrapped around her finger."

"if that comforts you, so be it." sebastian rolled his eyes and tried searching the common room for you again. the music coincidentally changed to a more romantic, sultry tune. his eyes, almost as if they knew, finally fell on you. you swayed to the beat alone, eyes only on him. almost as if you were luring him out to sea, he was pulled to you, quickly meeting you half-way through the people.

"dance with me." your voice almost echoed around him, ghosting his ears like an enchantment. he nodded slowly, absentmindedly, but fully aware of his decision. he had been waiting. this was exactly what he was holding out for. his palm raised to flatten against yours, fingers intertwining slowly, as if he were savoring it. sliftly, he pulled you in with his other hand by your waist, closing the gap between you. twirling around, he showed you off, ensuring everyone knew you were there with him.

sebastian changed his mind as quickly as he had made it up. it was the perfect night, and a moment worth waiting for.

[chetchad]

🄱🅁🄾🄺🄴🄽 🄶🅄🄸🅃🄰🅁 🅂🅃🅁🄸🄽🄶🅂

MDNI 18+

(Trent Lane x FEM!reader)

KINKTOBER DAY 2; (student/teacher, mutual masterbation, break up)

WC; 1.3k

CWs; (teacher/student relationship, guitar lessons, mutual masterbation, fingering, slight squirting(?), porn without plot, loosely edited, mentioned trent/monique, light praise)

You were seated on the bed, watching your instructor's skilled fingers strum a simple note. His rings were a nice contrast to the wood of the guitar.

“Okay. You try, yeah?” Trent hummed softly, holding his tuned instrument out to you.

God. This guy was a fucking babe. How were you supposed to concentrate with him around you?

“Alright…” your tone was soft and unsure, not positive you could pull off the very basic and simple G chord.

It had been like this for a couple weeks now. You came over every Wednesday, or whenever Trent would call and ask if you wanted to come over that day for more practice.

His prices weren't horrible.

25 a lesson. (It was coming from daddy's bank account anyway)

Plus, he was fun to be around. Laid back and soft spoken. He wasn't loud and obnoxious like some of the other 21 year old boys you've met in your short 19 years.

With nimble fingers pressed against the strings, you looked up at Trent for validation about your finger placement. Trent's half lidded eyes met yours, reaching forward and shifting your hand a little.

“There. Now, just, strum. Gently.” Trent instructed, giving you a small reassuring nod.

With a small amount of hesitance, you softly strummed the chords, smiling a little when the right note vibrated back to your ears. Trent gave a tiny nod of approval, his eyes dancing across your pretty features.

“Good girl.” He praised softly, giving you a little grin.

Fuck. That made your pussy weep into the gusset of your panties. Making the white fabric almost translucent and cling to your cunt.

“Hm, we can be done with this lesson. I've got rehearsal at five.” Trent sighed, stretching a little.

You furrowed your brow, looking down at the watch around your wrist, “... it's seven-thirty?”

“Damn it.” Trent huffed, before shrugging with an indifferent expression, “...next time.”

God. You never got the term “the bee's knees”, but Trent was definitely the bee's knees…whatever the fuck it meant.

The next lesson the following week, Trent was more tired than his usual sleepy self. So, like the good little girl you were, you asked what was wrong.

“What's going on? You seem a little upset.” Your words were casual while you sat on his bed and raked his body up and down while he laid on the comforter, staring up at the ceiling. His raven hair was messy, even more so than his everyday spikes.

“Me and Monique broke up last night.” Trent answered, sitting up and rubbing his red eyes from lack of sleep(or a high. Hell if you could tell)

“Again?”

You covered your mouth, realizing it was pretty damn rude to out him like that. But he didn't seem upset and just smiled with a little chuckle that ended with a cough into his fist.

“Yeah. Not very surprising?” He coughed out, looking up at you with a small grin.

You leaned over to grab his guitar, the short skirt exposing those cute little pink panties of yours. Trent could see everything. The chubbiness of your pussy, the little wet patch from your swollen inner lips.

Damnit. Trent crossed his legs, hiding the semi in his jeans.

Honestly, you didn't expect your lesson to turn out like this. But here you were, gently palming the twitchy and leaky bulge in Trent's jeans, listening to him sigh softly in pleasure. His noises were absolutely the best thing you've heard from him. Sure, his little humming while he played a simple tune was cute, but you didn't know he was a whiner.

Trent's lips lightly danced over the soft skin of your neck, kissing and nipping at you. He almost convulsed when you undid his belt and fly. A soft little, teasing suck at your neck was what you were met with when you slipped your hand in his boxers.

Oh wow. He felt nice, pretty damn throbby and weepy. Tugging down his boxers, you set them under his nutsack, making the two chubby balls seem larger at the base of his cock.

You subconsciously spread your legs like a whore when his hand slithered under your skirt, teasing the sopping gusset of your little boyshorts.

Skilled boy, yeah? He knew exactly where that sweet little nubbin was, hiding in those folds and fat of your pretty inner lips.

Pushing your skirt up, Trent tugged your panties to the side, eyeing the soaked heat appreciatively. With quick fingers, Trent spread those pretty lips, almost groaning at the velvety insides of your cunt.

You hummed softly, watching his cock with half lidded eyes while you pumped the hot length. A sweet muffled cuss left your lips when he circled your entrance with his middle finger.

“Tight?” Trent's smooth voice rang in your ears.

“... probably.” Your answer was definitely biased due to it being your own cunt.

“Nice.” He nodded approvingly, slipping a digit in your tight heat, grunting when your channel squeezed his intruding finger.

“A-ah…!” You gasped, stilling your hand, before pumping him with great vigor.

The room was hot and stuffy, the sounds of skin on skin, wet squelches, and soft noises of pleasure filled Trent's room that was usually full of music. Well, this was the music of the devil's tango or Satan's mamba. Whichever it is.

“You're such a good girl.” Trent praised cooly in your ear, thrusting his finger in and out of your pussy, his palm hitting your clit with every push. Your cunt had a great suction on it, swallowing and squeezing him greedily. A second finger slipped in while he curled them up to tease your sensitive g-spot.

You whined in response, rubbing your thumb over the drooling slit on the tip of is cock. A soft grin pulled at your lips when Trent gasped, hips stuttering nicely when you went over it a few times. It was agonizing for him. He was so close to finishing, but he didn't even know if you were close to an orgasm.

“‘M close…” Trent warned, dark eyes searching your eyes for any sort of recognition that you were at the edge.

“Me too…” your voice was soft and breathy, your other hand pulling your sweater up and tugging the cups of your bra down, freeing the mounds of fat chub.

Trent let out a low moan, his eyes zeroing in on those bouncing hemispheres and pert nipples that were begging for his attention. It took everything in him not to wrap his lips around one of your cute nips and go to town on it.

Your thighs were trembling, the cool metal of his rings were almost too hot from the heat of your sweet cunt. You knew you were close, the knot in the pit of your stomach was knotted so tight that it hurt, just begging for it to snap.

God. If Trent knew that this is what just touching and feeling was like with you, he would have already gone all the way during that first lesson.

The knot finally snapped when Trent used his other hand to pinch and flick one of your hardened buds. You accidentally grabbed onto his messy hair to keep yourself grounded while you came with a soft cry of his name, your hand desperately trying to keep pumping him while you gushed around his fingers.

Trent's eyes widened, gasping and thrusting up into your fist while he finished. Spurts of pure white dribbling over your knuckles, your hand and wrist limp while you panted in his ear, almost building condensation on the piercings with your hot breath.

After a few moments of gathering your bearings, you pulled back a little, your noses touching while Trent's lips grazed yours.

Trent gripped the back of your head, fisting your hair and clashing your lips against his. You giggled against his lips, his soul patch tickling your chin.

You pulled away after about a long minute of hot kisses, a bit breathless, “Do you do that with all your students?”

“The cute ones, yeah.” Trent replied, watching your heated form with a smug grin.

[iliveforyouilongforyouvesuvia]

Mini hc request bc I've been watching a hella ton of ghost hunting videos lately and this brainworm won't leave

How would the M6 do on a ghost hunt? (I guess technically they'd all be believers bc I think they've all witnessed ghost-goat Lucio at least once) who's skeptical, who's scared out of their mind, who's getting groovy with the equipment, etc.

The Arcana Mini-HCs: M6 go ghost hunting

~ I think I remember @nabesima making some hilarious edits on youtube about this XD ~

Julian: the most skeptical. keeps trying to come up with alternate explanations for the phenomena (it's the gravity. gravity is weird here) and starts hiding behind you when he can't deny it any more

Asra: just vibing. completely unbothered. their skin is moisturized, the full moon is doing glorious things for their hair, they found some blood on the wall and now he's finger painting with a specter

Nadia: takes it almost too seriously. she's fully aware of all the activity and she isn't here to play. she is going to question these ghosts, find out what she needs to find out, and solve whatever needs solving

Muriel: more scared than he is going to admit. the only way you can tell is because he keeps checking on whether or not you're scared and letting you know that if you want to leave it's totally okay

Portia: having way too much fun with all the equipment. keeps trying to use each instrument the wrong way, somehow ends up catching the most ghost activity of everyone else involved because of it

Lucio: he would be scared if he wasn't so excited to get in on some supernatural action. and if he wasn't convinced that every strange thing that happens is actually his own magical powers awakening

[changingplumbob]

Nicolas Caldwell

Trying @cawthorntales bachelor challenge to woo Mr Bloom

Download from SFS (only cc are his lashes. He was made with the Waterdrop eyes so I'm not sure if his eye colour is custom but it should be whatever swatch looks grey and blue). For him to have all his outfits you'll need: Werewolves, Cats & Dogs, Romantic Garden and Cottage Living.

Forget that I often make self assured and confident sims because Nicolas is anything but...

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Oh shoot I should have figured that would be a question. Umm, I'm Nicolas, which I mean you probably know from the application. Ah, I'm what's called a military brat. My parents are both in the military and did a whole bunch of postings as I was growing up so we were never in one place for very long. It's made me kind of shy I guess, I'm not great at relating to others. I have one sister, Teresa, she's a decade younger than me but we get along.

And why have you applied?

Funny story. Well not really. Ah my younger sister Teresa actually applied for me. I consider myself pansexual but I've only ever been romantically attracted to guys. That was not a fun conversation with my father. But he's fine abut it now. What was I saying? Oh yeah, Teresa. She keeps telling me I need a boyfriend so I don't turn in to a hermit, I've had to shut down several fake dating profiles she's made on my behalf. I told her I'm shy, and the idea of being on camera all day scares me, and having to compete... But I don't want to let her down, she was so excited my application got accepted.

Tell us about some of your likes and dislikes

I'm a bit animal mad, it's what made me become vegetarian. As much as I like being outside hiking, gardening, bird watching... I cannot stand fishing. I just feel so bad for the poor fish, like what a terrible way to die. And even if you throw them back they're probably freaking out thinking they were abducted, and they are definitely still injured from the hook! Sorry... I don't mean to lecture I just... I like animals okay. You can fish all you like just don't expect me to join.

I'm a little bit musical. I mean I don't perform for anyone but myself and occasionally Teresa. Mum tried to get me in to violin but it was so boring. Guitar is my instrument. Well, musical instrument not... you know. Ah... I did a programming course after high school that was not for me, and I'm rather useless at fixing or making things. Except baking! I do like baking. I've definitely got a sweet tooth.

What are you dreading?

People. You'd probably think with having to introduce myself new places so many times it wouldn't worry me but it does. I'm pretty quiet so people can think I'm being a snob when really I just have no idea what to say. Is there a gender neutral or masculine term for resting bitch face? And I don't know if I can take my guitar. Playing it is what calms me down. Well that and cloudgazing. So hopefully the weather is good and I can get outside between challenges. I've really no idea how this show works. Also worried about losing my contacts but that's an everyday worry.

What are you looking forward to?

I mean.. Teresa showed me the picture of Daisy and yeah he's good looking. Those eyes, I just completely missed what she told me right after because I was dreaming. She also said he wasn't actually organizing it so I really really hope he can understand this all being a surprise for me because it's one for him to. And she said he has farm animals! I want to meet them. Hopefully they'll like me and that can convince him I'm a keeper.

Do you have a message for Mr Bloom?

Oh, ah, sure! Umm... hey there good looking. Give me a chance to show you I'm certified boyfriend material. Well not certified because I've never had a boyfriend. *BLEEP* I didn't mean to say that, I don't want the other contestants knowing. Can I start the message again?

EDIT: Turns out he should have green hair... the save file is his brunette look but on the show he will look more like...

[brights-place]

Riff & Barbs Dating Headcannons

Pairings: Riff X Reader X Barb (POLY RELATIONSHIP)

Warnings: Swearing, Fluff

A/N: I love them so much… They are so cute LIKE OML THEY ARE MY FAVOURITES EBAHVUSNAHRIBUSHJVAO😭 - I love these two idiots that it's so unhealthy! OKAY! I love Barb and riff so here we go - Barb and Riff care for you so much together and would always have fun around you - Riff's more energetic yet is chill around you letting his hands wrap around your waist while Barb would be rocking out or laying down onto your chest sighing - When you three cuddle your always in the middle with Barbs leg over you and riffs body arms around your chest as Riffs arms where around your waist face nuzzled into your neck - Both of them are your hype man and woman cheering you on - They invite you to all their shows excited to see you in the mosh pit or back stage staring at them both lovingly - Barb and riff both know that you love them both deeply and would always compromise on what you three would do if RIff wants you for a day he will when barbs wants you she gets you and when you three want to be together you three will be together! - They both love jamming out with you together as they both enjoy seeing that wicked smile on your face as you do the rock n roll sign at the end of every song cheering about how good it was to be able to rock out with riff and barb - Dating the queen and right hand man would be shocking to most people you could be mid conversation and barb would walk over placing her arm over your shoulder and eyeing the person your talking to - Riff would also come by and would show you something cool or tell you about something he found out about randomly - Only YOU! can wear his beanie and take it off of his face when your alone he enjoys it and would kiss you - Barb lets you wear her cuffs and chains enjoying to see you in rock n roll attire - If your not a rock troll they still love you so much and try to get you to vibe out with them and try listen to your music genre too - They both always encourage you to practice a instrument! and helps you with music theory and techniques - They enjoy being with you no matter what - As your partners they both love and are devoted for you and love you with their whole heart

reblogs + comments are appreciated ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

©brights-place 2023 — do not repost on another platform, copy, translate or edit my works! if you fit my DNI list please don't interact

[17panicattacksinatrenchcoat]

Mona and the Angel of Death

I was having trouble writing today so I decided to edit an excerpt from a (very old) short story that I abandoned as a warm up exercise I thought it would post it on here. I don't write in second person a whole lot but it's a fun POV to experiment with

i hate the end of this excerpt but whatever lol. let me know if you want me to post the full story on here

Summary: An amateur journalist (Mona) travels to the home of an acclaimed chef who she thinks might be a serial killer ('The Angel of Death') for an interview

content warnings: serial killing (nothing graphic appears in this excerpt). can't think of anything else. just some ~spooky vibes~ I guess.

Mona and the Angel of Death

Being the creature of spontaneity that you are, you amass all your vacation time and start the drive at six in the evening. You lock the door of your shitty ranch house not knowing when you'll be back and not really caring. Your body vibrates with the sustenance of three energy drinks, and you whip over lonely country highways at ninety miles an hour like a fucking maniac. At three in the morning, you bail and pull into the shoulder for a nap. You rest your forehead against the wheel until day breaks. When you sit up to gain to your bearings, a man's face appears in your side mirror and you scream your throat raw, but it's only a mustachioed cop who's come to ask you if you're okay. "Just a long drive," you say. "I'm fine." Her house is a long way outside of the cities. You drive into the mountains, and ivy-eaten homes slash by your windows. You tear through gravel roads and watch the evergreens roar past you on all sides. The wind cuts through the car's open windows and stings your eyes. It's late in the afternoon, but it is summer --lush, glorious summer!-- so the sun's light filters through the trees and illuminates the debris in the air, the dust driven up by your tires. You reach the end of the road and pull into her dirt driveway. Hop out of your car and sink your feet into the spongy ground. The world stinks of petrichor, that after-rain smell, even though you don't remember it raining during the drive. Revved with adrenaline and deprived of sleep, you are missing things. You swig another monster --your wrists shaking as you do-- and change your clothes in the cramped backseat of your car. Sweatpants and hoodie to business casual: a white button down, your one nice pair of dress pants, loafers. You flatten your hair and redo your makeup with the assistance of the rearview mirror. Compose your face into something resembling sanity. Your eyes look bruised even with the makeup. The path before you zigzags to a fairy-tale cottage from the storybooks of your youth; some piper might reside there to lure you away from the known world. You walk up to the house, scale the three red brick steps and knock to announce your presence. You stand on her doorstep and think about cooking, about knives, about walls studded with the heads of decapitated stags and metal instruments of harm: the house of a hunter. An urge to flee to your car and slam its gear hard into reverse trickles up your spine. You want to run away from the door as fast as possible like you did as a kid, playing ding-dong-ditch. You stand and hold your breath, listening to the flutter of your heart. Your organs slosh inside your body as you shift your weight from one foot to the other. Soon, the day will oscillate into night. You didn't tell anyone what you were doing, only that you were going. They wouldn't know where to look if you disappeared. She swings the door open and appears in its frame. You start. She matches the picture from her social media profile; you don't know what else you were expecting. She is short and slight, and has dark hair pulled back from her head in a practical, messy bun. Her skin is the color of watered-down milk: so translucent that you can see cataracts of veins swooping through her wrists and neck. The first thing she says to you: "I take it that you're the journalist. Mona, right?"

"The one and only."

"I would tell you that you look like the painting, but I'm sure you've heard that one enough times to want to drive an icepick through your own forehead. So I'll shut up." You laugh in spite of yourself. She inclines her head to you, a challenge. "Well," she says. "Come in. I don't bite." You step past her. You'll see about that.

[kyouka-supremacy]

Hii Kyotag how Is your day/night going?

Here to ask you about your top 5 artists and songs this year yay!

Hiiiii Lazu I'm good!!! Thank you for the ask 💞💞💞

Top 5 artists:

1. Neru I just adore Neru! Neru my beloved. I know they haven't been very active recently, but that doesn't mean I've been listening to their songs any less. Their music feels so raw and genuine, like they woul never sugarcoat the cruelty of reality. Their dark lyrics are very cathartic, and I feel like they always leave open space to be okay despite, you know? And I love the rock aspect of their music! This was also the year I found out Neru has been suffering severe problems to their health, and their Twitter messages really touched me, I hope they get better soon, I wish them all the best! Their music really touches me and helps me get through the day :)

2. PinocchioP PinocchioP my beloved! Really love the unique way they tune Miku, you can immediately recognize their tuning. And their music is great! Been listening to their META album this year. God-ish is lots of fun, but I especially love Common World Domination, it's the kind of song that whenever it comes around in shuffle I have to relisten ten times before being able to move on (≧▽≦)

3. Iroha Well, they've made my favourite song ever Meltdown, so they can't not make it to the list, you know. Rin is far from being my favourite voicebank (despite probably being my favourite Vocaloid character), but I love how Iroha tunes their voicebank. Moon is another great song with wonderful tuning.

4. Ryo I feel like I've listened to them a little less than the past years, but still incredibly solid music. From Melt to Odds&Ends, banger after banger after banger, there's not a single song of their discography I don't like.

5. Cö shu Nie Well, to be fair I don't listen about them *that* much (in all honesty, I've just been going through the same 1229 songs long vocaloid playlist in the last six months or so), but they've been my favourite band in the past years, so I feel like they deserve to be mentioned. I love their t/pn and p/p endings with everything I've got. Lamp is another morning alarm I have and, now that I think about it, the background music on this blog's desktop theme, too.

Top 5 songs: (I already did top 5 songs I've listened to this year, so let's see just current top 5 songs overall)

1. Meltdown by Iroha ft. Kagamine Rin Remember when someone asked my favourite song was and I spent 2k words talking about this song? Lol. Still first place. Found out a nice Rose cover this year, and got a bit more acquainted with the Divela remix (the cosMo Hard-R.K.mix is still my favourite tho).

2. Melt by Ryo ft. Hatsune Miku This song is just <3 Makes me happy. Life is beautiful. It's so spontaneous and cute! I love this Meiko cover too.

3. Bitter Choco Decoration by syudou ft. Hatsune Miku Append (Soft) Hhhhhhhh this song is so good. The eerie vibes are addicting. Seriously threatening to climb higher.

3. Patchwork Staccato by Toa ft. Hatsune Miku Append (Soft) Tied with Bitter Choco. I love this song so much it's so melancholic... I love me a song that is a little cruel. I really like the sewing synbolism and unrequited love themes, reminds me of Akutagawa. Super nice music and interesting instrumentals. Miku appends are fun to play with!

5. I can't pick............ There's so much more vocaloid music I could talk about......... Let's say a symbolic How To World Domination by Neru ft. Kagamine Rin Append (Power), Kagamine Len Append (Power) that goes to represent Neru's whole discography. But please don't forget Tokyo Teddy Bear (and specifically the live edition from this Project Diva collection) and Lost One's Weeping and Abstract Nonsense (again, just go listen to their World Domination album).

Ask me about music?

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plotting vowels. But first, we have a fun, new activity that lets you discover what episode of Lingthusiasm you are. Our new quiz will recommend an episode for you based on a series of questions.

Gretchen: This is like a personality quiz. If you’ve always wondered which episode of Lingthusiasm matches your personality the most, or if you are wondering where to start with the back catalogue and aren’t sure which episode to start with, if you’re trying to share Lingthusiasm with a friend or decide which episode to re-listen to, the quiz can help you with this.

Lauren: This quiz is definitely more whimsical than scientific and, unlike our listener survey, is absolutely not intended to be used for research purposes.

Gretchen: Not intended to be used for research purposes. Definitely intended to be used for amusement purposes. Available as a link in the show notes. Please tell us what results you get! We’re very curious to see if there’re some episodes that turn out to be super popular because of this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots that we discuss in this episode.

Gretchen: This is a behind-the-scenes episode where we talked with Bethany about how they made the vowel charts that we’ve discussed, how you could make them yourself if you’re interested in it, or if you just wanna follow along in a making-of-process style, you can listen to us talk with them.

Lauren: For that, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: As well as so many more bonus episodes that let us help keep making the show for you.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, we’ve talked about vowels before on Lingthusiasm. At the time, we said that your vocal tract is basically like a giant meat clarinet.

Lauren: Yeah, because the reeds are like the vibration of your vocal cords – and then you can manipulate that sound in that clarinets can play different notes and voices can make many different speech sounds. They’re both long and tubular.

Gretchen: We had some people write in that said, “We appreciate the meat clarinet – the cursed meat clarinet – but we think the vocal tract is a little bit more like a meat oboe or a meat bassoon because both of these instruments have two reeds, and we have two vocal cords. So, you want to use something that has a double vocal cord.”

Lauren: I admit I maybe got the oboe and the bassoon confused. I thought that the oboe was a giant instrument. Turns out, the oboe is about the size of a clarinet. Turns out, I don’t know a lot about woodwind instruments.

Gretchen: I think that one of the reasons we did pick a clarinet at the time is because we thought, even if it’s not exactly the same, probably more people have encountered a clarinet and have a vague sense of what it looks like than an oboe, which you didn’t really know what it was. I had to look up how a bassoon works. We thought this metaphor might be a little bit clearer.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: However.

Lauren: Okay, there’s an update.

Gretchen: I have now been doing some further research on both the vocal tract and musical instruments, and I’m very pleased to report that we, in fact, have an update. Your vocal tract is not just a meat clarinet, not just a meat bassoon, it is, in fact, most similar to a meat bagpipe.

Lauren: Oh, Gretchen, you found something more disgusting. Thank you?

Gretchen: I’m sorry. It’s even worse.

Lauren: Right. I guess the big bag – a bagpipe is made of a bag and pipes – the bag acts like your lungs. The lungs send air up through your vocal folds as they vibrate to make the sound. You do have a bag of air, just like in the human speech apparatus.

Gretchen: That’s a good start. What I didn’t know until I was doing some research about bagpipes – because the lengths that I will go to for this podcast have no bound – is that a bagpipe actually has reeds inside several of the pipes that extrude from the bag.

Lauren: Because there’s multiple sticking out in different spots.

Gretchen: There’s the one that you blow into, which doesn’t have a reed, but then the other ones, there’s the one with the little holes on it that you twiddle your fingers on and make the different notes, and then there’s also some other pipes up at the top. They also have reeds in them. Those reeds are just tuned from the length to a specific level. You know when you hear someone start playing the bagpipes and there’s this drone? [Imitates bagpipe sound] The sort of single note? That’s because of the note those reeds are tuned to in the other pipes that don’t have the holes in them.

Lauren: Ah, they’re not just decorative.

Gretchen: Right. They have this function of giving this harmony to the melody that’s being played on the little pipe with the holes in it, which is technically known as the “chanter,” but this is not a bagpipe podcast despite appearances to the contrary. We will link to some people on YouTube telling you more than you ever wanted to know about how bagpipes work if you want to go down that rabbit hole. But if you had an extra pair of hands or two, or a couple people helping you sort of reaching around your shoulders – this metaphor’s getting weirder by the minute – and you cut a bunch of little holes in the other sticking-up-the-top pipes –

Lauren: You would have less droning, and you could play multiple melodies or multiple notes at the same time. Hm.

Gretchen: At the same time. With this, you could make a bagpipe play something very close to vowels.

Lauren: Ah, cool!

Gretchen: This is so cursed.

Lauren: I mean, yes. Before we even talk about making it out of meat – it’s deeply, deeply cursed – it kind of reminds me of this instrument from the early 20th Century called the “voder.”

Gretchen: Would I pronounce that “vo-DUH” or “vo-DER”?

Lauren: With the R at the end.

Gretchen: Okay, “voder.”

Lauren: Thank you, convenient rhotic speaker here.

Gretchen: I’m glad to be of service.

Lauren: It kind of looked like something between a little stenographer’s keyboard and a piano, and with a whole bunch of finger keys and foot pedals you could manipulate it to make something that sounds like human speech.

Gretchen: Ah, wow. And this is pretty old?

Lauren: It’s from like the 1930s. There’s a little, short video snippet in one of the links in the show notes.

Gretchen: You could play these chords, and also have some consonants somehow, and end up with something that sounds like a synthetic human voice.

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the early computer speech synthesis, as well, was actually quite good at making things that sounded like vowels. It turns out a lot of the consonant things are a little bit harder to do, but the very basic sound of vowels, as you say, you could play it with just a few bagpipes very carefully re-engineered.

Gretchen: I guess if you’re looking at instruments that can play multiple notes at the same time, we could also say that the human is like a meat piano.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Or at least you could make vowels on a piano by doing a sufficiently complicated sequence of weird chords, like notes at the same time.

Lauren: I mean, we also have an instrument that’s known as the human voice. Humans are very good at singing. We possibly don’t have to engineer all these cursed things to get to that.

Gretchen: Okay. Let’s talk about the human voice as itself. We start with the vocal cords or folds. The tenseness or looseness of the vocal folds is what produces pitch. Then they go through the throat, which we can think of as one tube. Then they go through the mouth cavity, which we can think of as a second tube. Each of these tubes bounces around the sound in different ways to add two additional notes – one from the throat, one from the mouth – onto the sound that’s coming out, which is what makes it sound like a vowel to us.

Lauren: You can map the physics of air moving through the throat space and the mouth space as it comes out to pay attention to the differences between different sounds.

Gretchen: If you’re taking a physics diagram or a diagram of the acoustic signal and saying, “Which pitches are coming out of the mouth, which frequencies are coming out of the mouth that are being produced by these two chambers?” then you can see what those are, and you can do stuff with those diagrams once you’ve made them.

Lauren: The seeing bit is spectrograms, which we looked at in an earlier episode and played around with making different sounds and how they look in this way of visualising it where you have all these bands of strength and information that you can see vary depending on the different sounds that you made. That’s because of those different ways that we manipulate and play around with the air as its coming out of our mouth.

Gretchen: The first band that comes out is just the pitch of the voice itself. The lowest one is what we hear as the pitch of the sound, but I can make /aaaa/ and I can make /iiii/. Those are the same set of pitches but on different vowels.

Lauren: There’s something more than pitch happening there.

Gretchen: There’s something more than pitch happening. There’s two more notes – sounds – that come out at the same time. If the throat chamber is large because the tongue is fairly high and far forward, then this sound that’s the next one after the pitch, which was call “F1,” is low. Then if the mouth is quite open, and the lips are spread, the mouth chamber is quite small, so that sound is quite high, so the next sound, “F2,” is high pitched. If you put your tongue far forward, and your lips spread, you get /i/. The first of these dark bands is low; the second of them is high. That produces the sound that we hear as /i/. Whereas, by comparison, if we make the sound /u/, the throat chamber is still large because the tongue is quite high, but now, the mouth chamber is big because we have the lips rounding that make it big – /u/. Now, F1 is low, and F2 is also low, and we’re hearing the sound /u/.

Lauren: We have a very clear way of telling from those signals in the spectrogram, if we look at it, the difference between an /i/ and an /u/, even if we can’t hear it, we can see it on the spectrogram. This is where you begin to read spectrograms.

Gretchen: Or if we want to start measuring spectrograms very precisely, we can start doing this. We can also start seeing, okay, is /i/ when I make it the same as the /i/ when you make it?

Lauren: They’re similar enough that we recognise it as the same sound. If we both say, “fleece.”

Gretchen: “Fleece.”

Lauren: You say, /flis/. I say, /flis/.

Gretchen: /pətɛɪtoʊ pətatoʊ/. I think they sound pretty similar.

Lauren: Mine is maybe a little bit higher. I really pushed my tongue forward and up. It’s a very Australian thing to do.

Gretchen: We can actually record some people making all of the vowels and compare their measurements for these two different bands of frequency and see how similar two people’s vowels are to each other.

Lauren: Depending on the quality of your recording, you can see a lot more happening there as well. There’re all the properties that mean that we can tell your voice from my voice, or my voice from someone who has exactly the same accent because we have all these other features. It’s very different to if you record, say, a whistle or one of those tuning forks that people use to tune instruments because they are giving a clean single note.

Gretchen: A pure tone that’s just one frequency, one pitch, not several pitches all at the same time that we then have to smoosh together and interpret as a vowel sound.

Lauren: That’s what gives the human voice its richness. If a human voice sings the same note as a clarinet and an oboe, which are definitely two completely different woodwind instruments, there’s all these extra bits and things in the spectrogram that you can pick up the difference in the quality or just use your ears – also another possibility.

Gretchen: Yeah. If you wanna do detailed acoustic analysis on it – which is kind of fun and can tell us more precise things about the differences between how different people speak, which is neat – then you have this very precise way of measuring it by converting it into a visual graph/chart thing or a vowel plot rather than just listening to someone and being like, “Uh, these sound pretty similar. I dunno. I guess they’re a bit different. How are they different? Hmm.” Sometimes, being able to do it with numbers is easier.

Lauren: In the era before we had computers to create spectrograms and take these measurements, people did use their ear. The best phoneticians had this amazing ability to tell the difference between really, really subtly-similar-but-slightly-different sounds.

Gretchen: And they’re so well trained in being able to hear the difference between “Oh, you’re saying this, and your tongue is a little bit further forward than this other person who’s saying this with their tongue a little bit further back,” but if you’re not very good at hearing tongue position out of sounds, you can also produce some stuff and make the machines tell you some numbers about it, which can be easier with a different type of training.

Lauren: When we talk about the position of the tongue and how open the mouth is, we can use a plot to map where in the mouth these things are happening. That’s called the “vowel space.” We made a lot of silly sounds when we talked about that many episodes ago.

Gretchen: The vowel space goes from /i-ɛ-a/ on one side.

Lauren: That’s all up the front of your mouth, and it’s just going from being more close to more open.

Gretchen: /i/ to /ɛ/ to /a/, but you can through all these subtle gradations between them, and through /u-ɔ-ɑ/ at the back.

Lauren: That’s from all the way up the top at the back to open at the back.

Gretchen: You can draw a diagram of this which is shaped like square that’s been a bit skewed. It’s wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s known as the “vowel trapezoid” because the mouth is not perfectly shaped like a square. The jaw can hinge open.

Lauren: Only so far.

Gretchen: Only so far.

Lauren: Because this represents how you say or articulate these sounds, this is known as “articulatory phonetics.”

Gretchen: But then because you’re articulating a thing that goes into a sound that we can also analyse as the sound itself, these ways that you can articulate things map onto things that show up in the sound itself. Analysing that is called “acoustic phonetics.”

Lauren: Because you’re paying attention to the acoustic properties – the sound properties.

Gretchen: The really nifty thing is that this vowel chart that we’ve made from over 100 years ago, linguists, before they had computers, were like, “Here’s what I think the articulatory properties of the vowels are based on my mouth and my ear and some other people’s mouths and ears.” You can actually map very precisely this acoustic thing. Once we had computers, you can make them correspond to each other in this way that – you hope it works because, obviously, people do understand the vowels, but it actually does work when you start measuring things as well.

Lauren: I had always wondered whether it was just a coincidence that the articulation – where you put your mouth – and the acoustic information about the F1 and F2 with the spectrogram, but explaining it in terms of F1 and F2 are the way you change the shape of your throat and your mouth that leads to these changes in the acoustic signal, you can see how the articulation and the acoustics come together, and you get a similar type of information across both of them.

Gretchen: Absolutely. I think it’s really neat that there’s this relatively straightforward correspondence. There’s also, you know, an F3 that also does other stuff because there’s other more squishy bits of your mouth, and we’re not getting into them.

Lauren: There’s also a bunch of flip-flopping of X- and Y-axes that you need to do that Bethany kindly walked us through in the bonus episode.

Gretchen: Because these diagrams were created in an era before they were doing the computer acoustics. Sometimes, I think about the alternate version of what phonetics would look like if we’d started doing it with computers right away, and how there’s all this analogue stuff that’s residual based on human impressions, and how our vowel charts might be completely rotated if we had just started doing it with computers the whole time.

Lauren: But then we’d have to imagine ourselves standing on our heads to say anything, so I’m glad they are the way they are.

Gretchen: That’s true. When you’re talking about vowels, it’s an interesting challenge with English because there’s lots of different dialects of English, varieties of English, ways of speaking English, and, generally speaking, we’re pretty good at understanding other accents. One of the big factors that accents vary on, though, is the vowels.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: If you’re getting people to record a word list to do some vowel analysis on, what you might wanna do is have them record a bunch of words that all begin and end with the same consonant insofar as possible.

Lauren: Because vowels are very sweet and easily influenced. They’re very easily influenced by the consonants that are next to them. You have to make sure that they’re all kept in line and not influenced by what’s happening around them by giving them all the same context.

Gretchen: They’re very susceptible to peer pressure. You can have people say something like, “beat,” “bet,” “bit,” “bought,” “boot,” all of this stuff between B and T.

Lauren: I learnt to record between H and D: “hid,” “had,” “hoo’d,” “hawed.” Some of those words are less, uh, common – frequent – than others, but again, a really consistent environment.

Gretchen: But this also, obviously, causes problems for when you want to talk about the particular vowels in a given accent or in a given variety because if you go around saying, “Oh, well, the /hoɪd/ vowel” or something like this, how do you know if that’s a Cockney person saying, “hide,” or it’s me saying “hoyed,” or something else because all your consonants are the exact same, and there’s nothing to let you figure out what the original word is.

Lauren: Someone did come up with a solution for this. That person’s name is John Wells.

Gretchen: John Wells is this British phonetician who I’ve never actually met in person, but I feel like I know him because I used to read his blog back when he posted more actively.

Lauren: He used to write his blog in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which means that if you read the IPA, you would be reading it in John Wells’s voice.

Gretchen: You absolutely would be. This was a challenge that I used to set to myself. Sometimes, he also wrote in Standard English orthography, to be fair, but sometimes he would just write a whole blog post in IPA, and you’d be like, “Cool, I guess I’m reading this out loud to myself and hearing John Wells’s accent and speaking it like him,” which was really neat. In the 1980s, John Wells was like, “Hey, it’d be really useful if we had a way to refer to sound changes that happen in different English varieties,” which often happen to – like, all of the times you say the /ɪ/ vowel are a little bit more like this or like that, depending on the accent.

Lauren: I think it was very personally motivated because he was writing a book called “Accents in English.” It gets very difficult in a book, especially, but even in an audio recording, to be like, “the /ɪ/ vowel,” “the /u/ vowel.”

Gretchen: Right. You could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to refer to the specific vowel that people are making. But if you want to say, “People in this area realise this vowel as that, and people in this other area realise the same vowel as something else,” how do you refer to that thing that’s the macro-category of vowel that people would consider themselves to be saying the same word, but the specific way they’re realising it is different? He came up with what he called “the standard lexical sets,” which are now also called, “Wells Lexical Sets,” possibly John Wells’s greatest legacy, which is a bunch of words that are, crucially, easy to distinguish from each other based on the surrounding consonants that you can say when you’re giving a talk – like you can say, “the ‘kit’ vowel,” or “the ‘goose’ vowel,” or “the ‘fleece’ vowel,” and people know that the “kit” vowel refers to the specific sound because there’s no other “keet” word in English that it could be confused with.

Lauren: John Wells was somewhat self-deprecating when he was talking about this, and he was like, “I just kind of came up with it in a week where I had to write this bit of the book, and it’s weird to think that they’re still in use now,” but it was based on years of insight into the different ways different varieties of English realise different vowels and the balance he was trying to strike.

Gretchen: He has this charming blog post from 2010 where he’s like, “Anybody’s welcome to use them. I don’t claim any copyright. Maybe this is my legacy now, I guess.” He does actually put quite a bit of thought into the sets because they’re words that can’t be easily confused for each other. Sometimes, that means the words are a little bit rare. You have “fleece.” You might think, “Well, why not use ‘sheep’ because surely that’s more common. People say that.”

Lauren: But “ship” and “sheep” are very hard to distinguish in some varieties of English.

Gretchen: Right. If you had “sheep,” it could be confused with “ship,” whereas if you have “fleece” and “kit,” there’s no “flice” or “keet” for them to be confused with.

Lauren: Good nonce words to add to your collection.

Gretchen: Thank you. Similarly, for people like me where I make the vowels in “caught,” as in the past tense of “catch,” and “cot,” as in a small bed, the same. If I talk about /cɑt/ and /cɑt/, people are like, “I dunno which one you’re talking about because you say them both the same.” And I’m like, “Great, neither do I.”

Lauren: You mean when you’re talking about /cɑt/ and /cɔt/.

Gretchen: Hmm. Yes, see, you don’t have that “caught/cot merger.”

Lauren: Very easy for me, but it’s much easier to be able to say /θɔt/ and /lɑt/ – much more distinct for me to perceive with you because they don’t have merged equivalents.

Gretchen: “Thought” and “lot” are much more distinct because the consonants are different. You don’t need to be relying only on the vowels. Some of these words are just super fun. Can we read the whole Wells Lexical Sets? There’re not very many of them.

Lauren: Sure. Let’s take turns in going through each of the words.

Gretchen: All right.

Lauren: So, you can hear the differences in the way we pronounce each of these vowels.

Gretchen: /kit/.

Lauren: /kit/.

Gretchen: / dɹɛs/.

Lauren: / dɹɛs/.

Gretchen: / tɹæp/.

Lauren: /tɹæp/.

Gretchen: /lɑt/.

Lauren: /lɑt/.

Gretchen: /stɹʌt/.

Lauren: /stɹʌt/.

Gretchen: /fʊt/.

Lauren: /fʊt/.

Gretchen: /bæθ/.

Lauren: /bɑθ/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different.

Lauren: We’ll come back to that one.

Gretchen: /klɑθ/.

Lauren: /klɑθ/.

Gretchen: /nɛɹs/.

Lauren: My Australian English speaker in me is already immediately prepared for /nɛːs/.

Gretchen: So, non-rhotic. Very good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: /flis/.

Lauren: /flis/.

Gretchen: /fɛɪs/.

Lauren: /fɛɪs/.

Gretchen: /pɑm/.

Lauren: /pæm/.

Gretchen: Ooo, very different. /θɑt/.

Lauren: /θɔt/.

Gretchen: Also, very different. We’ll come back to this. /goʊt/.

Lauren: /gəut/.

Gretchen: Bit different. /gus/.

Lauren: /gus/.

Gretchen: /pɹəɪs/.

Lauren: /pɹæɪs/.

Gretchen: Bit different. I have Canadian raising there. We’ll get back to that. /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Lauren: /t͡ʃoɪs/.

Gretchen: /moʊθ/.

Lauren: /mæʊθ/.

Gretchen: Also, we’ll get back to that. /niɹ/.

Lauren: /nɪɑ/.

Gretchen: /skwɛɹ/.

Lauren: /skwɛɑ/.

Gretchen: /stɑɹt/.

Lauren: /stɑːt/.

Gretchen: /nɔɹθ/.

Lauren: /nɔːθ/.

Gretchen: /fɔɹs/.

Lauren: /fɔːs/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/. I’m only slightly hamming up my Australian English diphthongs there.

Gretchen: That whole set with the Rs where I’m like, “These are just the same sounds, but now there’s an R,” you’re like, “No, these are really different diphthongs.”

Lauren: /kjʊɑ/.

Gretchen: /kjʊɑ/. /kjʊɹ/.

Lauren: Taking you on a journey of my whole mouth.

Gretchen: One thing you could do if you’re trying to compare mine and Lauren’s vowels is you could listen to us saying them and being like, “Yeah, those sound kind of different in some places.” But another thing we could do, is we could draw some diagrams.

Lauren: That’s what we did.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: We were very grateful that Dr. Bethany Gardner – who is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the USA – took the time to work with us to take recordings of us saying words and plotting the vowels onto a vowel plot.

Gretchen: Now, we can look at our vowel plots and compare our vowels to each other. We have a whole bonus episode with Bethany about how we made these graphs with them. For the moment, let’s just look at them and compare them with each other and say some things about the results.

Lauren: We sent Bethany recordings of us reading the Wells Lexical Sets, much the way we did just then.

Gretchen: Less giggling though.

Lauren: We did record them a little bit more professionally, but they also used some processes to scrape data of equivalent word recordings from episodes of Lingthusiasm using our transcripts – turns out, another use of our transcripts!

Gretchen: Get people to analyse your vowels for you. It’s so cool!

Lauren: You can see the difference between clearly spoken vowels where we’re really focusing on them and then that really compelling influence that other sounds have on vowels that drag them all over the space.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m looking at the first set of graphs for each of us, which are the Wells Lexical Sets, and my vowels are a lot more consistent in them. When I make /i/ and /ɪ/ and /u/, all the points are quite clustered in one spot – because we said everything several times – but I seem to be hitting quite a consistent target there. Whereas when I look at Bethany’s vowel plot of me from the Lingthusiasm episodes, there’s way more stuff there, and I’m way more spread out. My vowels are less consistent with each other because I’m producing them in several words. They tested several different words. I’m just producing them in running speech where things merge into each other a lot more rather than this very clear word list style.

Lauren: And human ears and brains are so good at disambiguating things that might be very close to each other in the plot, but in a running sentence, we can hear them quite clearly for the words that they are.

Gretchen: Right. My “goose” vowel and my “foot” vowel – /gus/ and /fʊt/ – are almost totally distinct from each other when I’m reading a word list. There’s very little overlap in terms of how I’m saying them. But when I’m saying them in running speech, apparently there’s a lot of overlap because I’m probably saying something like, “Oh, go get the goose,” /gʊs/, rather than /gus/ with that really clear /u/.

Lauren: There’s no other word I’m gonna confuse “goose” with, or even if I did, in context, I’d know what thing you’re expecting me to go get.

Gretchen: Right. Even if I’m saying something like, “dude,” you’re not gonna confuse that for “dud.” I’d be saying them in different contexts.

Lauren: The nice thing is you can see, especially from our clearly spoken word lists, that we are speaking a language where the vowels are in a similar place, but there are some slight differences. You can actually start to get the hang of the differences in the way different varieties of English tend to use the vowel space from this information.

Gretchen: One of the things I noticed about your vowel plot, Lauren – and this is a feature of Australian English – is that your “kit” vowel and your “fleece” vowel are very close to each other, especially in episode speech rather than word list speech.

Lauren: Yeah, “kit” and “fleece,” for me, are both really far forward. You’re using other features like length or tenseness to really disambiguate them. People struggle to do it.

Gretchen: Or just in context. I noticed when I was visiting Australia that people would say things like /bɪːg/, and I’d be like, “Oh, okay, I would say that as /bɪg/.”

Lauren: It’s a pretty classic feature of Australian English. It does remind me of one of the most embarrassing times someone misheard me when I was living in the UK. I was talking about how I used to be on a team with my friends for social netball. This person was not listening that well, and it was a noisy environment, and they thought that I had said, “nipple.”

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: /nɪpl̩/ and /nɛtbɑl/.

Gretchen: /nɛtbɑl/, /nɛtbɑl/, whereas I think my /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels, my “kit” and “dress” vowels, are pretty distinct from each other. They don’t really overlap.

Lauren: Whereas all of Australian English is really far forward. It tends to be quite high. The British English speaker – I don’t know what sport they thought we play in Australia, but there was a moment of deep confusion.

Gretchen: These are the types of things that you can find out when you get your vowels done the way sometimes people – I think there’s a trend on Instagram right now to get your colours done, you know, find out whether you’re a “winter” or a “soft spring” or something like this.

Lauren: I’m an Australian English “kit”-fronting.

Gretchen: Yeah. What are your vowels? What does this say about where you’re from? Is there anything you noticed about mine?

Lauren: I think, for you, definitely what becomes clear is that “caught/cot merger,” or, as I like to think about it, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Gretchen: Ah, the “Gawne/gone merger.”

Lauren: I can tell if people have it if my name and the word “gone” sound the same.

Gretchen: The past participle of “go.”

Lauren: It’s very salient for me. The cot/caught merger is so famous, people don’t use the Wells Set terms for it. They just refer to it as “caught/cot.”

Gretchen: But you could also call it the “thought/lot merger” or the “lot/thought merger.” I never know which one goes first because I literally just think of these as being said the same.

Lauren: You can see evidence. We’re not imagining that you’re merging them. You are physically merging them in the vowel space.

Gretchen: I’m literally saying them as the same thing. I was always confused about the “thought” vowel when I was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet because I was like, “I can’t figure out how to make a sound that is somewhere in between this sound in ‘lot’ and ‘thought’ but doesn’t go all the way up to the /oʊ/ in ‘goat’.” It doesn’t feel like there’s anything between them for me. That’s true. The vast majority of Canadians have “thought” and “lot” merged. But unlike at least some Americans, we don’t have them merged low; we have them merged high. I have “thought” and “caught,” and in order to produce the other vowel, I had to actually produce something lower in my throat – like /θɑt/ /cat/ which sounds very American to me – I had to produce this lower sound because there was no space between “thought” and “goat.” They’re very close to each other. In fact, the thing that I wasn’t producing was /ɑ/, the really low one, that sort of dentist sound.

Lauren: Yeah. Movements and mergers can happen in all kinds of different directions. The merging of “cot” and “caught” also explains why it took me a very long time to understand that “podcast” is a pun because it’s meant to be a pun with “broadcast,” and /pɑd/ and /bɹɔːd/.

Gretchen: /pɑdkæst/ and /bɹɑdkæst/. It’s the same vowel for me.

Lauren: Whereas it works as a pun for you. That was very satisfying to learn that’s why that’s meant to be a pun.

Gretchen: The pun that I didn’t get based on my accent – and this is to do with the “price” and “mouth” vowels – I didn’t realise that “I scream for ice cream” was supposed to be a pun.

Lauren: Oh, because the raising that you have in Canada means that it doesn’t work that way, whereas /ɑɪ skɹim fə ɑɪ skɹim/.

Gretchen: Right, you have the same vowel in those – or the same diphthong – but for me, “I scream for ice cream,” those are very different. In “choice” and “price,” I have different vowels than I would have in “choys” and “prize” – if “choys” was a word.

Lauren: “Bok choys” – multiple.

Gretchen: “Bok choys” – yeah, several of them. And “prize.”

Lauren: Returning to “podcast” but moving to the other end of the word, /kɑst // kæst/ as a distinction is so famous in mapping varieties of British English that people talk about /bɑθ // tɹæp/ distinctions all the time.

Gretchen: I hear of it as called the “bath/trap split,” but as you can hear, the “/bæθ // tɹæp/ split,” I just say them both the same.

Lauren: Whereas in Australia, Victorians traditionally would say /kæsl̩/ like “trap,” and people further north and in the rest of the country could say, /kɑsl̩/ –

Gretchen: Like “bath.”

Lauren: So, whether you’re a /kɑsl̩/ or a /kæsl̩/ shows this “bath/trap split” as well, to the point where, in New South Wales, you get the city of “New /kɑsl̩/,” but in Victoria, you have the town of “/kæsl̩/ Main.”

Gretchen: Ooo, this “castle” distinction from the “trap/bath split” – I think sometimes when I’m trying to do a fake British accent, I will just make all of my “traps” and “baths” into /tɹɑps/ and /bɑθs/.

Lauren: Right, okay. You know there’s something happening there, and you haven’t quite landed – because it does vary.

Gretchen: Well, then they’re not different categories for me because it’s all one category, and I push them all forward rather than moving half of them because I don’t know which half to move.

Lauren: I find it very satisfying listening to “No Such Thing as a Fish,” because they talk about the /pɑdkɑst/ or the /pɑdkæst/, and their guests do, depending on whether they’re from Southern England or more in the midlands and north where they tend to say /kæst/ instead of /kɑst/.

Gretchen: I have literally never noticed this distinction. I’ve also listened to many episodes of “No Such Thing as a Fish” because you made me start listening to them back in the day, and I’ve never noticed that they say anything different because it’s just not something I pay attention to.

Lauren: It’s so salient for me as a Victorian English speaker, but I notice it all the time. There would be a really fun mapping variation activity to do listening through to Fish – turns out I just listen to it and don’t get distracted by that too much.

Gretchen: Well, if you want to commission Bethany to make graphs of their vowels, I’m sure that’s an option.

Lauren: I love how Wells’ lexical set has just entered – in many ways, the “bath/trap split,” it means you get all these other terms like “goose fronting,” which is just great as a term.

Gretchen: I love how vivid these words are. Things like “fleece” and “goose” and “goat,” they’re very common animal nouns that are quite vivid.

Lauren: And there’re definitely linguists who have dressed up as Wells Lexical Set items for Halloween. It makes a great group Halloween costume.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, my favourite one of these was from North Carolina State University. They got the whole department, and they each dressed up as one member of the Wells Lexical Set. Someone was a “kit.” They dressed like a cat. Someone dressed like a goose, and someone dressed like a cloth or a fleece. Then they stood in the positions to create the vowel diagram. They posted a photo on the internet. You can see it. We will link to it. It’s really great.

Lauren: Magic. You and I also once had a project where we plotted the Wells Lexical Set using emoji.

Gretchen: That was your project.

Lauren: I did the making the joke. You did the graphic design. It was a good team project.

Gretchen: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair. I feel like I remember you being the instigator of this.

Lauren: Shenanigans were shenaniganed.

Gretchen: You can get a goose emoji and a goat emoji, and you can map the vowels in there as well.

Lauren: And “Goose fronting” – because we’re talking about moving the tongue further forward or back or up and down in the vowel space – I have quite fronted vowels as an Australian English speaker for my front vowels. So, “goose” – I’ve already got it quite far forward compared to you. You can see that in the diagrams.

Gretchen: I think my “goose” – my goose is also cooked – my “goose” is also fronted. Because I think Canadian English is also undergoing goose fronting. There’s a lot of different regions that are all simultaneously fronting their geese – no, not their “geese,” fronting their “gooses.”

Lauren: Fronting their “gooses.” I feel like the really stereotypical example is from California, particularly in the lexical item “dude.”

Gretchen: “Dude” – sort of like a surfer pronunciation of “duuude.”

Lauren: “/du̟d/ you’re a fronted /gu̟s/.”

Gretchen: If you compare that with like /dud/, which would be less fronted, /dud/ sounds like you’re more of a fuddy duddy, and /du̟d/ sounds like you’re “so /ku̟l/.”

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, there’re other things happening there as well because I found a paper while researching this where someone looked at 70 years of Received Pronunciation, which is that incredibly stuffy, British, old-fashioned newsreader voice. Apparently, goose fronting is happening in that variety as well.

Gretchen: Oh, so if the Queen was still alive, she’d be fronting her “goose” as well?

Lauren: Quite possibly. Gooses are being fronted all over the place.

Gretchen: All over the English-speaking world. One of the things that can happen if you’re getting your vowel tea leaves read is you can say things about region. Another thing that looking at a vowel plot can do – because vowels just contribute so much to our sense of accent – is it can say things about gender. One of the cool studies that I came across about this is there’re studies of kids. People often assess someone’s gender based on their voice. If someone’s on the phone, you may have an idea about their gender. You may also have an idea of their age. Part of this is based on vocal tract size. Kids’ voices are high pitched because kids’ heads and throats and larynxes are smaller than adults.

Lauren: The cool thing is there’s no gender difference in that until puberty. People who go through a testosterone-heavy puberty tend to grow larger vocal tracts and tend to have deeper pitches. I mean, not in the scheme of things where they’re so completely different. There’s so much overlap. But we’re really tuned into these subtle differences. But before that age, anything that kids are doing different, it’s nothing to do with what’s happening with the meat pipe and everything to do with what’s happening with the social performance of gender, which is to do with your culture.

Gretchen: Even at age 4, when there’s really no physiological difference, age 8 when there’s really no physiological difference, you can see that kids are producing their vowels somewhat differently in a difference that increases with age based on their gender because they’re culturally acquiring “This is what it means to feel like a boy,” “This is what it means to feel like a girl,” and they’re doing gender with their voices even when they don’t have the vocal tract changes reinforcing that yet.

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: Yeah. You can see that there are differences at age 4 that increase with age and increase up to age 8 and 12 and 16 and get more distinct from each other. The other thing is, once people get a bit older in teenage-hood and in adulthood, there are gender differences in vocal tract. The general finding with gender differences in vowel plot size – so we’ve been talking about having some vowels be more front or some vowels be more similar to each other, but the overall finding when it comes to gender is roughly that, at least in English-speaking environments, men tend to have all of their vowels more similar to each other, more towards the centre of the space/ Specifically, cis straight men tend to have vowels that are all more towards the centre of the vowel space. Everybody else – so cis, straight women, gay men, lesbians, trans people of all genders, nonbinary people – use way more of the vowel space.

Lauren: Straight men, you’re missing out.

Gretchen: Like, cis straight men are doing this one very specific thing with buying into hegemonic masculinity of vowels where they’re not wearing interesting colours, and they’re not doing interesting vowels.

Lauren: Hmm.

Gretchen: There was one quote from one of the studies that I read where they had one cis straight man who was an anomaly in the list of not doing this very centralised vowel thing, and he was like, “Yeah, sometimes people hear me, and they think I’m gay, which I’m not. I’m just a nerd. I don’t really do that macho stuff.”

Lauren: Aww, it’s nice they asked him.

Gretchen: Yeah. “People just perceive my vowels as whatever. I don’t really care. I’m not trying to do that thing with my vowels.”

Lauren: Fascinating that the social discourse was enough that he had been made aware of it.

Gretchen: Yeah, and that doing anything out of that little man box of the very small set of vowels was enough to get him thinking, “Oh, yeah, well, it’s because I don’t buy into this particularly narrow view of masculinity.”

Lauren: Fascinating. I should say, you flagged English there, but that’s because we have more of this work in English. We need more of this work across the world’s languages. There’s so much to be done about the social dimensions of vowels.

Gretchen: Right. A lot of the early work in, especially, gender and vowels has this very essentialist framework of like, “We found the male vocal tract; we found the female vocal tract.” There’s a recent study by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart which I got to see at the Linguistic Society of America last year where they were looking at “What are the vowel differences between genders, and can we actually characterise these more precisely?” They found that the biggest thing that affected vowel spaces was actually related to height. Taller people have more space in their vowels – deeper voices.

Lauren: Makes sense. They’ve got more space for their bigger meat pipe. That’s more of a bassoon than an oboe, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Taller people have a bigger meat pipe. In fact, the relationship between height of your whole body and size of your meat pipe is very linear and doesn’t have a categorical distinction for gender. Of course, if you collapse this into two different buckets labelled “men” and “women,” you’ll find, on average, that men are taller than women on average, but of course, there’re lots of individual people who are exceptions to that, and it’s much more of a variant thing. Similarly, with some of the research on sexuality, some of the early stuff is like, “Oh, do gay men or do lesbians have different-shaped vowel tracts from a physiological perspective?” The answer is “No, this is cultural.”

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: But the finding keeps being reported in terms of like, “Oh, well, gay men have more extreme vowels in various places,” especially with “trap” being produced further away from the centre of the mouth. Lesbian women tend to have further-back sounds for “palm” and for “goose,” or sometimes they’re intermediate between male and female targets. But again, this seems to very much be cultural. The bi women – some studies found they patterned with the lesbian women. Some studies found they pattern with the straight women. No one knows what to do with us. The one study I found on bi men found they patterned with the gay men, but again, maybe other studies would find something different. There’s a paper by Lal Zimman about trans men’s voices being perceived as quote-unquote “gay” after they go on testosterone. He finds that it’s not quite the exact same as the cis gay men, but it’s also because it seems to not be in that narrow man box. People are just parsing it as gay.

Lauren: So many cultural attitudes coming to bear on vowel spaces.

Gretchen: Studies on trans women’s vowel spaces is often fairly dominated by the speech pathology literature, which is about, specifically, vocal training and trans women really trying to make their voices sound different, but it still finds that they’re not doing exactly the same thing as either cis women or cis men.

Lauren: Right. Again, lots of cultural practice at play there. Anything about our nonbinary pals?

Gretchen: There is a recent dissertation by Jacq Jones, and they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like.

Lauren: I love it.

Gretchen: Which is, again, not exactly the same as anybody else and not necessarily the same as each other either. They could just keep doing whatever they want. But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on gender and sexuality, especially in terms of dispersion of the vowel space and regional stuff in terms of specific things being closer or further from each other.

Lauren: There’s so much happening in vowels in terms of plotting them all in this space in the mouth, but also so much happening in terms of plotting them in the social space. This is what makes vowels so rich and so interesting.

Gretchen: I feel like when we’re talking about vowel plotting, there’s this aspect of “Mwahaha, I am putting my fingers together and plotting,” which is maybe the fact that vowels do convey so much social information about who you are or where you’re from that you can make plots about people when you know what their vowels are. If we were going to make a meat clarinet or a meat bassoon or even a meat bagpipe –

Lauren: Oh, dear.

Gretchen: I’m so sorry. We would not only want it to be able to convey the basic vowel chart. One of the reasons why I think these synthetic versions of the human voice often sound so weird is that they don’t have all of this additional demographic information, regional information, gender and sexuality information that’s also so important to our experience of vowels.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – including visualisations of our very own vowel plots – go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Our most recent bonus topic was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots we discussed in this episode. We talked to Bethany about how to do vowel charts and how you can plot your own vowels, or you can just learn about how they did it for us. Think of it like a little behind-the-scenes episode on the making of this episode. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[sylvyspritii]

Oh I didn't realise it had to be a question question, sorry!

I do have a question then: you're a music creator right? And you did some work for SiIvaGunner? There's some ideas I have often for doing some instrumentation swapping in music I hear, making one song have the instruments/sound font from another. However, I'm really not experienced at all in music production and it can feel a bit daunting trying to understand it, I'm not sure where to start.

What are some resources you'd recommend to someone trying to start music work like that? Both the editing software itself (is GarageBand still a thing? Does it cost money?) and also how to go through songs and figure out stuff like what instruments they're using to repurpose them?

No worries! I just prefer actual questions over random meme pictures, i have no idea what i can add to those or how i could respond besides "ok" Yes, i'm part of SiIva, but i was more active in the earlier years I'm mostly busy with original compositions for games nowadays If you want to make melody/soundfont/MIDIswaps, the first thing you will need is a DAW, Garageband will work fine (i think?), but i can't say for sure, i use FL Studio myself, so i'll answer with my knowledge based on using FL Studio primarily For the sake of this tutorial, we will focus on games that used sequenced music, which usually means MIDI files and soundbanks/soundfonts (for more advanced non-sequenced/MIDI recreations, you will usually have to recreate songs from scratch, or invest in expensive hardware in the case of Touhou music for example) There is an FL Studio demo available, it's pretty good, but personally i just reccomend obtaining it legally since it's pretty cheap (and if that is not an option, then, well, yarr harr, you know (note to cover my ass from a legal perspective: i am a professional and i do not use pirated software)) Download VGMTrans (and the ROM of the game you wanna fuck around with, legally of course (wink wink)), it's software that can extract MIDI (the notes) and .dls (the instruments) files (you can also extract .sf2 files, which are the more traditional "soundfont" format, but .dls is easier for editing existing songs from games since the MIDI data and the .dls can get imported together to be more accurate, more on that later (basically, export .dls for accuracy, export .sf2 for fucking around if you just want 1 instrument from a game)) Okay, so now you have a DAW (we use FL Studio in this example), the MIDI file, and the .dls file So, now, open FL Studio, drag the MIDI file in a new project, and then it will ask you what you want to import it as (do not use FLEX, use MIDI OUT with LSD) (fuck FLEX all my buddies hate FLEX) Then you will see this thing

Okay so click the little folder icon on the top left, and then select the correct .dls file you exported for that MIDI file with VGMTrans Then, if you did everything correctly, you will hear the MIDI file WITH the correct instruments from the game, and it will sound (mostly) like how the original game sounds From there, you can start, then, you can edit the little bits, change the instruments easily, change the notes, and add funny fleentstones if you want So, tl;dr quick version: 1. Download FL Studio 2. Download VGMTrans 3. Throw ROM file in VGMtrans 4. Export the MIDI and .dls data from a song from the ROM 5. Throw MIDI in FL Studio, choose "MIDI OUT with DLS" 6. Choose .dls soundbank file with the little folder icon 7. The song will now sound like how it is in the game (or at least, close enough), so now you can go crazy and replace instruments and/or melodies and have fun

[insane-weasel]

Me, with the objectively worst opinion: Oh...I liked the idea of a QPR Lila x Five.

I'm only halfway through S4, but I like it over S3. (Victor's son caused me to mentally block out like 90% of S3)

Review so far:

Luther's plot: 3/10. I'd love for him to stop being the butt of the joke.

Diego: 0/10. Horrible. You're going to make him a dad and tell me he is not like a super loving and caring father and show me any of that????? Why???? Is he always treated so bad by the plot. Stop making fun of him ffs. Oh, he's barely even chubby, but make fun of his weight. Oh, he's kind of concerned his wife doesn't love him...when she doesn't....make him seem paranoid and in the wrong when...like??? What? WTF is Diego's character.

Allison: 6/10 Thank you for not sticking with Allison is the bad guy...though why throwing any character progression...uh what's with her and Claire??? Are they gonna expand on the last 6 years??? Why 6 years??? Hello??? Anyway, her plot is passable so far. Not best, but....not S3 which is a win

Victor: Only solid 7/10 because he's really hitting me-core. Only characterization I'm kinda on board with. Actually, yeah, have Victor living a really moderate life at a bar. I think he should take you another instrument that isn't the violim. Though not a fan of how they're depicting his powers. I liked the more ethereal powers. Though no on Victor having failed relationships. He needs an awkward cute romance like Sissy? WTF was with that whole beginning? Like...anyway.

Five: 2/10 I don't hate it. But it is the worst five plot thus far IMO.

Ben: 5/10. Actually, I do think Sparrow Ben would be arrogant enough to be in Crypto. I don't like Sparrow Ben, but his depiction tracks. Still wish we could...have OG Ben........Second thought, hate Sparrow Ben. Though whatever, love interest, okay.

Lila: ...1?/10 I feel like the one person who didn't like Diego x Lila, and didn't think she'd settle down. I like a QPR with her and Five. However--How they're handling this? Awful. Also, her powers????? No more mimic. Boooooooooooo.

Klaus: 2/10 I wanted them to go angst with Klaus' immortality, but...ughh. Compulsive cleanliness and over anxiety about common fears is a legitimate way paranoia can develop...as a person with those kinda issues, but they do not depict them in any. Like I'm going to be honest, when you do have those fears to that level...you aren't sober or if you are...you're not looking well. But forget all that crap, why couldn't we have whatever story was Klaus bonding with Allison and helping raise Claire. Why was that the plot we had to be told about rather than shown????$

Other thoughts:

-Gene and Jean are like...10/10. Solid villains. Love em. Costume, actors, quirks--great.

-OH. My. God. Can Reginald stoooooop being a character.

-Music and set designs are a 10/10, costumes this season and apparel is a 2/10. What are some of these looks????

-Uh...The plot is kinda...feels like a fanfic that the author continues after 6 years, half-assed and wings, and has no love for the source material. Some parts seem so lazy. The stakes feel weak. There's traces of a great story...buried in there.

Overall, my theory for what happened: Umbrella Academy leaned into its comic book elements in the worst way possible. For that to have worked, a cohesive and fully fleshed out plot would need to be in place first then followed by a style of editing, composition and mise-en-scene, and then characters can play into cartoon styles.

The editing and filming have not changed between seasons. There's no style. Actually, they've gotten worse. The camera angles are painfully standard. If you wanted comic book, that camera needs to be at some different angles, but no, 3/4, eye level, always capturing same length. Whoever directed this? For shame. You don't use the foreground. You don't use the background. Everything happens on the same level and has the same amount of presence on screen. It screams "no time for flare, let's just get this done!"

So many of the BTS/production elements feel...rushed. If that wasn't the case, if this didn't have a painfully short filming timeline and they didn't have severe restraints compared to the last seasons...than...no one had any love for the series anymore.

[nerdieforpedro]

Weekend Update - 12/31/2023 - New Year’s Eve

Hey Nerdie! Looking forward to the New Year?

Hello! And yes I am, new beginning can be scary but fun. I’m looking forward it.

You have any lessons that you’re going to carry into the new year?

*Is shocked that she is being asked for advice*

Er…Not sure if you should ask a Hornado Hooligan for life advice, but I’ll do my best.

Skip number four if mentions of mental health, depression and/or suicidal ideation are triggering for you.

1. If you love something, keep doing it. Writing, singing, dancing, reading, walking, edits, watching TV and movies of a certain man with excellent hair, large hands and a prominent nose, painting, playing an instrument, whatever gives you peace and joy.

2. Write the things you want to write, all fanfics are self-indulgent. It’s encouraged, we all want to read all the things. Lord knows all my fanfics are and I would not have them any other way.

3. Find a lovely group of people to nerd out with, chat with, cry with, and have plenty of belly laughs with. The Hornado Watch (to which I am the resident hooligan who inspires many a giggle) has been saving grace for me this year with their support and care in just these last few months. 🥰

The following does contain mentions of mental health and suicidal ideation.

4. On that same note if you don’t feel quite right, mentally or physically, you should tell someone you trust and seek out help. My personal battle with mental health has been ongoing for roughly half my life, it’s hard to remember a time I didn’t feel depressed. I had been managing with medications and drowning myself in work but that will only stave the dark edges off for so long.

It was earlier this year, about August and September when I re-joined tumblr after one of my younger patients who saw my water bottle all Pedro’s characters’s stickers all over it and asked if I read any of the Fanfiction about him because that patient read Loki fics on there. I hadn’t and was surprised to note that my Tumblr log-in infor still worked. I was going through the motions of life and felt hollow to the point where for the first time since high school I had thoughts of “if I wasn’t here, would everything feel okay? Would it stop? If I don’t wake up, and everything stayed black it would be fine.” Then came the insomnia where I just wanted to sleep maybe forever and my body wouldn’t allow me as a special kind a torture. At least that’s how I thought of it at the time.

Oddly enough my first fics were posted between September and October so I was trying to work out the feelings I had which helped some but wasn’t enough so thankfully I was able to find a doctor who’s listen to me when I said my meds aren’t keeping me even keeled any more and started me on a new medication which has been working well for me.

Since then, I’ve enjoyed writing up a storm on all sorts of subjects that I’ve thought about, wanted to explore and just thought, “don’t see that anywhere, let’s do it.”

I’ll keep writing as it really does help keep me sane and interacting with all you lovely peeps 🐥 as it’s often a highlight of my day. 🫂

Especially my Hornado Watch group, I’m your resident hooligan and weather report expert. I predict more flooding and downpours of thots with some support mixed in there. A high chance of fluffy feelings and rainbows in the clouds ⛅️❤️

Stay warm, safe and see you in 2024! 💚

Love Nerdie ❤️