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writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

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Since The Horse Ranch pack is out today I am begging non-indigenous people to do research and proper representation of native people. You do not want to be that person who unintentionally creates a native sim that is based off stereotypes. PLEASE DO PROPER RESEARCH ON NAMES ETC.

This pack obviously focuses more on native Americans so do proper research on native people of America, but this also applies if you intend on making any other native person.

Please don’t be that person 😭🫶🏼

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Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

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Can you recommend some essays about speech or language?

Here are a few essays and articles about language use (off the top of my head). I hope that you enjoy them as much as I do!

How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

Of Strangeness That Wakes Us by Ilya Kaminsky

The Meanings of a Word by Gloria Naylor

Mother Tongue by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Borrowing a Simile by Walt Whitman

Word Order by Lewis H. Lapham

Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin

Nature: Chapter IV Language by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Strange Persistence of First Languages by Julie Sedivy

What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language? by Joshua Fishman

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The smell of vanilla extract is not entirely unlike a sirens song

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I love you angry characters I love you revenge arcs I love you protagonists who kill people and don’t feel bad about it I love you manipulative heroes I love you gray morals I love you terrifying protagonists I love you characters who hold boiling grudges I love you characters who reveal that their perceived harmlessness was just patience the whole time I love you stories about atonement and rage and vengeance that don’t end in forgiveness or guilt I love you stories that explore the healing power of incandescent rage

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after HOURS of organisation, i present to you, my google drive library

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btw. one of my professors showed us this website that’s put together syllabi on a range of topics (e.g imperialism, the novel, pandemic/disease theory), in case anyone’s interested ! i think you have to source the texts in question yourselves, but it’s arranged pretty well imo

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obsessed with stories where the message is that you can’t bring someone back from the dead even if you can bring someone back from the dead

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Ever since I took a class on material culture and the significance of things and objects in our lives, I’ve started taking note of relevant readings I come across. For those interested, below is a partial list:

Objects of Despair: Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Fake Meat | Mirrors | Mars | Drones | The 10,000-Year Clock

Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth (more on The Guardian’s “Concrete Week”)

The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke

AirPods Are a Tragedy

Thinging the Real: On Bill Brown’s “Other Things”

Sum Effects: “Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions.”

A janitor rescued migrants’ possessions from a border facility’s trash. Now they’re art.

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. by Sherry Turkle

Friendly Floatees

Great Pacific garbage patch

Plastic: an autobiography by Allison Cobb

Curating the Anthropocene: “Imagine a future archeologist on a dig in what was once downtown Los Angeles, excavating, exposing layers of history, like the paleontologists at the La Brea Tar Pits are doing today, finding bones of saber-toothed cats, mammoth, and dire wolves. What does the archeologist of the future find?”

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Crutches poses

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short stories i love + the best times to read them. links or PDFs provided where i was able to find them 💞

cannibal lover by alisa nutting

Best read when you desperately want to be in love with someone who keeps saying you're too good for them

the man on the stairs by miranda july

Best read when you're lying awake at night unable to sleep and you think you hear something on the stairs

pinky finger by ha seong-nan

Best read when your uber is taking a little too long to arrive

you're ugly, too by lorrie moore

Best read when you're realizing you might be the black sheep of the family/friend group/social circle

boys go to jupiter by danielle evans

Best read when the white girl you know is doing some dumbass shit

ant colony by alisa nutting

Best read when you want a weird body horror story that will make you stare blankly out the window after you finish

attack helicopter by isabel fall

Best read when you're thinking, 'there's no way rainbow capitalism could get any worse'

what dinah knew by yah yah scholfield

Best read when a family member is acting a little funny

the frolic by thomas ligotti

Best read when you're beginning to dread that you've made a big mistake

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“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”

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Aster and goldenrod season.

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You can knock me out but rest assured I’ll get back up. cassandrajean s6

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Tatiana Blass, Penelope, wife of Odysseus