#i don't think i quite noticed before how many letters are in my username

[roys-our-boy]

Tagged by @tea-of-destiny, thank you so much! Finally home from work and caught up on the dash so it's time to sit down and do this lol

The goal here is to spell out your URL with song titles and then tag as many people as there are letters. Never have I regretted my username as much as in this moment lmao too many vowels 😭 had to dig into my pre-covid highschool playlist for this lol

R - Ruins by Ledger. A song by Skillet's drummer, I've always loved Skillet and she's got such an amazing voice, I've always loved this song especially

O - OP.19 No.3 by Taku Iwasaki. Despite the name sounding like classical music it's very much Not lmao. It's the theme song for the Hunting Dogs in bsd and it's just so fun. Never was able to find the lyrics but I made my own probably wrong but whatever

Y - You Don't Even Know Me (Stripped) by Faouzia. Haven't heard this one in a while lol. I've always found her vocal range impressive, and her songs are fun to listen to, especially the trills in this one

S - Sleep Walking Orchestra by Bump of Chicken. The first OP from Dungeon Meshi. It's a fun little song and I've noticed I've tended to like Bump of Chicken OPs (mostly since their name and voice stood out to me lol)

O - Odd Future by UVERworld. OP 4 from MHA. Honestly this was the only other O on any of my playlists what am I going to do for the last one lmao. I might see if there's any vocaloid songs I've forgotten about that start with O

U - Unbreakable by Fireflight. A high school favourite. Also listening to it again reminded me how much I love the sound of this style of music, need to listen to it more

R - Rakuen by Fujifabric. The second season OP of Dr Stone. I've always thought the song was neat, but it's also the first time you see Ukyo so it always gave me a burst of serotonin to hear it, especially the part where you see him lmao

B - Bling-Bang-Bang-Born by Creepy Nuts. Another anime OP, and a more well known one I think. From Mashle season 2, it's just so much fun, and hard not to sing along well not to the rap I can't quite do that lol. Also I hadn't seen the music video until now and it was so fun lol

O - ODDS&ENDS by ryo. Never actually heard this song before today but again, I ran out of O songs 😭 so I found this and honestly might add it to a playlist, I'm loving it a lot. Thank you Hatsune Miku

Y - Young and Menace by Fall Out Boy. Now this brings me back lol. I think I originally added this song more for OC daydream fuel more than actually being one of my favourite songs but it's still pretty good. Not my favourite by them tho

Anyway it's getting late and I'm tired from work so I probably won't tag people this time, but if you see this, consider yourself tagged lol

[meichenxi]

I hope you don't mind me asking, feel free to ignore this, but you mentioned you have synesthesia. I'm curious, how does this work for you? From my understanding (which is limited) everyone experience a bit differently. It just sounds really interesting, so I hope I'm not overstepping 😅

No not at all!! It’s a really interesting topic :D (and I’ll answer your other ask in a bit if you don’t mind once I’ve got some good resources together!)

This is going to be long, because I think it’s really fascinating! So I apologise in advance. It’s also going to get quite linguistics-y, because that’s what I’m here for always. 

So my synesthesia presents itself in a number of ways. Most obviously, I have the ‘normal’ bog-standard colour-grapheme synesthesia, whereby every letter or word is strongly associated with a certain colour and sort of...feel. So for example <k> is a sly orange, sharp and mischievous. Not all letters have very strong impressions; <I> and <i> for instance are both just sort of wishy-washy and pale cloudy lemonade colour. 

Also! I have evidence for the psychological reality of the syllable and the phonological word. Often word- or syllable-initial consonants ‘colour’ the rest of the word, especially with ‘light’ vowels like <e> or <I> or <y>. So for example, even though I’m not sure whether your username is a name or a word or what exactly, it’s ‘split’ into two halves: <karo> with an orange undertone, whilst still being able to see the ‘colour’ of the other letters, and <lincki> which is a pale yellow, despite the presence of the <k>. 

One other interesting thing is that these associations seem to come from quite well-founded generalisations based on place and manner of articulation. We’ve all heard of the Boba-Kiki affect (if not, look it up) where ‘kiki’ is the sharp, pointy object and ‘boba’ is the flat, blobby one, despite them both being non-words. This holds with my synesthesia too, so there are seemingly articulatorily-founded patterns!! For instance, many of my plosives are middle to dark blue; almost all of my voiceless/voiced pairs match up with the voiced version being darker than the voiceless version (except /k/ and /g/, and that’s because of the ‘orange’ pressure from palatals and ‘green’ pressure from velars, I think); many of my palatals are on a spectrum from pale yellow-white to orange, etc. My back vowels are dark, warm, deep colours, and my front vowels are lighter. I’d be interested in knowing if this holds with other people with synesthesia: I can only do so many experiments on myself lmao (and trust me I’ve done a lot).

Each letter also occupies a certain ‘space’ in the air, like the spikes in a line graph. This is how I read quickly; I memorise the ‘shape’ of the word (which doesn’t always map on to the physical shape) and use that. 

One weird thing which happens is that phonemes and graphemes don’t always have the same colour!! Which leads to very interesting results. For instance, <u> is a sort of terracotta brown, so I hate this letter in most words (I have very strong opinions about a lot of this. I hate <p> and <b> with all of my heart). But the sound /u/ is a deep, crystal midnight green! So if I hear the word ‘Undomiel’ (thank you Tolkien), it’s incredibly beautiful. Writing it down, though, I can’t stand it, especially clashing with the pink of <m>.

This is why I dislike some languages so irrationally for no reason I think. 1) I don’t like their colour palette. If it’s all over the place or a mess or a horrible sludge-green, sorry, I’m probably not going to learn it. 2) The colour palette of what I’m hearing and what I’m reading don’t match. This could in theory happen with English, but doesn’t, because I’m so used to it I think. But this is why I dislike French so much (sorry everyone!!), because what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing literally clash in front of my eyes and it’s gross.

Where it gets really interesting is in foreign language acquisition. What happens with tone? Non-Latinate writing systems? 

I don’t have as strong associations for sounds which have no representation in the Latin alphabet (so, say, the distinction between Hindi aspirated and non-aspirated stops), because a lot of it is still based on graphemes, but that representation is still there. Sometimes it’s a modified version of the representation of a phoneme I’m familiar with (for example, the heavily aspirated Irish /t/ is a lighter blue than my /t/, and the non-aspirated Hindi /t/ is a darker version), but sometimes it’s a murky new colour based, occasionally, on place of articulation. For example, whilst <ch> should be orange and then terracotta brown in terms of graphemes, the German ach-Laut is a completely different colour to the German ich-Laut!! The ach-Laut <ch> is a dark green (which makes sense, since my velars and uvulars are usually dark green), but the ich-Laut is an orange - because, again, palatals are orange!!! Isn’t that cool? 

Features have psychological reality guys!

Another interesting thing is that I often acquire a colour-based distinction long before I consciously notice a difference even if it’s not phonemic. This is nuts!! So for instance the standard Mandarin /t/ is pronounced slightly differently to the English /t/ (both have aspiration, but slightly different places of articulation); and correspondingly, way before I learnt this or could hear the difference consciously, I noticed the colour of the Chinese /t/ was a different shade of blue!! Similarly, when I was in a Hindi-speaking environment in India I noticed that I was remembering whether words had one of (many) t-like phonemes based on colour alone; I couldn’t tell you if it was aspirated, retroflex or anything, but I could tell you, if I thought to ask, what colour it was, and so produced the correct sound appropriately - because it’s a dark blue word, right? Importantly, I wasn’t making a conscious link between those features and the colour, so if you asked me what it ‘being a dark blue word’ actually meant phonetically, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you until I sat down and worked it out myself after looking at Hindi phonology. It’s just ‘dark blue’, so you pronounce it in a ‘dark blue’ way.

I mean ultimately this is just another way of distinguishing sounds so it’s not actually that exciting, it’s just conceptualised in a different way, and still takes a long time to develop, so it’s only happened with languages where I’ve been immersed for a couple of months or more, rather than say, French or Spanish. But it’s still kind of cool. 

As for tone, tone contours also colour the word!! I don’t know if this is influenced by anything in particular (common words with those tones, maybe?) but it’s fun. The first tone is a sort of yellow; the second tone is a steely blue; the third tone is like /w/ which is a deep green; the fourth tone is a red. 

One exciting thing is also that, the more I read Chinese, the more I ‘see’ the colour of a word. This isn’t just me knowing the pronunciation; if I know the pinyin but it isn't a familiar word, I don’t see any colour. Only if I’m very familiar with that phonetic component (because guess what!! That has an affect), a similar word, or the word itself do I see the colour. Which is just wild. So, can confirm that my brain is processing phonetic components via analogy on a similar level to ‘letters’, which is really interesting. Usually the character is just the colour of the initial, sometimes coloured by the final; it’s not as detailed as the representation in the Latinate alphabet. 

In other non-Latinate writing systems, the more I’m familiar with the system, the more I see the colours. These are usually colours of the phonemes not graphemes where they differ; so for hiragana, for example, /u/ is its phonemic dark green, and not its graphemic rusty brown. 

This colour palette is really useful in conlanging btw: I don’t have to actually think up a phonological system, I just have to think ‘autumnal’, and I get words that look similar. 

Numbers are also highly coloured for me, as well as being gendered (really brain??) in a very predictable way - all even numbers are female and all male numbers are male. This is probably the strongest of all my synesthesia: I genuinely mentioned this to someone when I was about eighteen and just assumed that the rest of the world knew this too, it was so obvious. What this means is that I remember things in ‘colour palettes’ and I have quite a good visual memory because of that - I just remember the ‘shape’ and ‘colour’ of the numbers and then can reconstruct it in my head. Some numbers are also ‘higher’ than others, like if you imagine a graph, so I can map out a sequence of numbers using the ‘peaks’ and ‘dips’ in space. I was doing a psychology test looking into people with synesthesia once actually where you are flashed a sequence of numbers, and then have to type them backwards. I was able to type about 12/13 numbers backwards in after being flashed for one second, compared to an average of 4 or 5. I couldn’t remember the actual numbers; but I knew that there were purple edges, then a yellow spike and a green blob etc, and so could look at the ‘picture’ and work it out from there because the representations were so stable. 

It’s actually really helpful sometimes! I remember numbers/words in these ‘colour palettes’, and once forgot the last two digits of my PIN when in China (6 digits, not 4, which I was not used to). But because I had chosen the number myself and the other digits were a sort of gloomy heather-purple/black/grey, I knew that the last two digits had to match that palette and ‘shape’ (how high a number rests in space). So I was able to guess them both within three tries!

Other things: people’s personalities and events sometimes are associated with colours, as well as music and sounds to a limited degree, but I don’t know enough about music theory to know if what is ‘purple’ or ‘lush green’ actually has any impact. It’s not individual notes alas - that would be so useful/cool. 

The personality thing is a bit annoying - I am often terrible at remembering people’s names if they don’t match with their personality in some way. I have two friends called Liam and Adam, and to this day (despite being friends with them for years and years) I still have to stop myself calling Adam ‘Liam’. I think everybody knows the phenomenon of ‘but he just looks like a Liam!’. It’s like that, but so strong I have to correct myself basically every time. I also get names that have the same ‘colour palette’ but nothing alike mixed up: for example Henry and Carl or Mary-Anne and Belinda. 

One other thing that is difficult is that if the orthography and phonology are particularly mismatched, or use letters in ways I’m not used to, this really hinders learning. I learnt some Medieval Welsh a few years ago as part of my degree and couldn’t remember anything because it was all just green. Or I kept writing /b/ instead of, say, /t/ or a dental fricative, because I knew it was a ‘blue’ sound, but couldn’t remember exactly which one. It sometimes leads me to make mistakes that are really stupid and probably don’t make sense to anyone else - /k/ doesn’t sound anything like /j/ but because they’re both orange-coloured, I’ll often mix them up especially if /k/ is next to a high vowel. 

So, that was very long!! Thank you for the ask :D But I hope it was interesting to any fellow linguists or language-lovers out there, and if there are any psycholinguists in the room, I have made a chart of all of this and mapped it out so hmu if you want some data lmao

Do you experience synesthesia too? What’s your experience like?

[nocherryblood]

PLEASE REBLOG FOR AWARENESS- S*X BOTS:

So, only recently, in the past week I've been getting a lot (and a lot, for my blogs, is six) of random followers, and it was making me a little suspicious, so in the end I just decided to check everything out and see what was going on.

I mean, did a post of mine do really well or something? Did someone tag me a bunch of times? Did someone reblog something?

NO.

I checked who had followed me recently, and, low and behold, it was: bots! How great.

But what was even worse, was that these were s*x bots (I'm censoring some words to keep my blog somewhat safe). S*x bots.

So since I've seen a lot of these over the past few weeks, I've decided to put together a little of what I've found. It's nothing new- and it's pretty much common knowledge- but hopefully it might help a few people out (especially since I'm one of many people who try to keep their blog safe from harmful, or 18+ content) and maybe even help keep some people a little safer here on Tumblr

So, here we go:

PROFILE PICTURES AND USERNAMES:

First of all, check the pfps and usernames. Sometimes they'll be something like "d3rtyg1rl", but not always. Other times it'll be something like "sangdori" or "jpi011" (those are two real accounts that followed me, I've just changed one or two of the letters in them)- so something that sounds like a regular Tumblr account to tebe average user. So if the username checks out as 'normal', the next thing to look at, is the profile picture.

These, similar to the usernames, and all the other things I'm going to mention, may seem normal at first. Some of them may be fluffy kittens (a lot of them are "generic"), others may be a seemingly innocent selfie, a few of them are just blank Tumblr and some are just... straight-up 18+ photos. So be aware that not all of them are going to be easy to spot right away.

LIKES, FOLLOWS AND UPLOADS:

Right, so now we've come to the part where you've checked out the usernames and profile pics, and they both show no signs of anything sinister. Good- now, if you're still suspicious, it's time to check the actual account itself.

The first thing you might want to take a look at, is the content they've uploaded, or in some cases haven't uploaded, onto their blog. This is where things can get deceiving. Many of these accounts have just one "generic" post- such as slime, kittens, glitter, etc (usually these are eye-catching things, which means it can draw people, especially children, in)- immediately followed by some sort of sexual content underneath that, usually in the form of a nude photo or p*rn (some are obscured, though most aren't), which catches you off-guard, to say the least.

Now, as I said before, not all of these bot accounts are the same. Some don't have any uploaded content at all- this is where checking their Likes page comes in.

(And I'm aware that this may sound like we're stalking someone's account at this point, but trust me, we're not. We're just trying to keep ourselves safe- and these are not people, remember, they're bots. Bots don't care, bots don't have feelings. Bots don't care if we block them). So, back to the point, the next thing we check is the Likes pages.

Now, some of these pages will be purely 18+ content, as you would expect. Just straight-up p*rn links, or nude photos. But others, however, seem innocent at first... that is, until you scroll down the page. Usually, it's just liked photos of (again, the generic, and eye-catching stuff) some cute animals, a GIF of slime, or a popular meme, but if you scroll down a little further underneath that, you'll see that same innapropriate content all over again.

Though again, as with all the other things I've mentioned, some of these liked pages seem fine upon inspection, which is where we move onto the final thing to check if what you're seeing is a bot account: the following page.

To be quite simple... this is where you'll need to look at a bunch of accounts all over again... hooray! If you find that some of the accounts seem suspicious from just looking at the pfps and usernames, then great, that usually means you know that the account you were originally looking at is a bot account, and you can block them and be done with it (and even if you're not entirely sure, blocking them will keep you safe, and besides, it doesn't hurt anyone- believe me, your safety takes 100% priority over having that one extra follower).

But, if you can't tell just by looking at them, and you're still suspicious, and you don't want to just block the original account you were looking at... then this would be the time do all of the above again (checking likes, following pages, and content) just to make sure.

If you don't find anything else suspicious, then congratulations, it's probably not a bot account, and you don't have to worry about it. But again, if you ARE worried, then PLEASE do just block and/or report, the account. It's better to have one less follower, than be unsafe, or have to feel uncomfortable.

SO, I THINK IT'S A BOT ACCOUNT, NOW WHAT?

Now, if you've been through all of the above, and/or you're pretty sure that what you've seen is a bot account, then it's time to either block it, or report it.

To block an account, simply tap on the little 'human/person' icon in the top right of that specific account, and tap 'block' (note: this will only report them from one of your blogs. If you want to block them from another, or all of your blogs, you'll have to add them to the block list for taht specific blog). To report someone instead, just tap 'report'.

So, you might be wondering: what's the difference between reporting someone and blocking them?

Well, I'll tell you as best as I can. Blocking someone means:

They won’t be able to follow your blog, or send you fan mails or asks to your blog, and they won't be able to see your blog’s posts in their Dashboard. In addition to that, neither will they be able to like, reblog, or reply to your posts, and your blog won’t show up in their search results. It's a really good option.

They'll still be able to read your posts if they somehow come across them, but they can't interact/reblog them- at all. The only way people would even know you've blocked them is if they find that they get denied permission to interact with your blog- but remember, the chances of the finding out that youve blocked them is VERY slim, if it even happens at all (though remember we're talking about bots here though, not actual people, I just thought it would be useful information to include anyway).

Alright, so now onto reporting someone. Reporting someone means that:

The account will receive an email stating that they've posted banned content and must take it down. Tumblr will then still automatically take it down, and the account either gets suspended or deleted.

I would say that reporting the s*x bots would be the best thing you can do in this situation (you can still block them afterwards), seeing as the account will hopefully then be taken down (instead of just blocked on your blog) after being reviewed, which could help keep Tumblr at least a little safer once it does.

And just in case you were wondering: no-one will know if you've reported their account. The only way they'll know they've been reported (and they won't know who reported them) is if their content gets taken down or if their account is deleted- so don't worry about people accusing you of reporting them, as Tumblr keeps it anonymous anyway.

(Again, I've only added that part as useful information, seeing as s*x bots aren't real people and therefore won't care if they've been blocked or reported.)

There's more information about reporting and blocking people, along with Tumblr's policies and guidelines here, if you need it:

https://iheartmob.org/resources/safety_guides/tumblr_guide

Right... so I think that just about covers everything I wanted to say. If there's anything I've gotten wrong, or you think you could add on to, just drop a note or reblog this to help. After all, I don't know everything about these s*x bots, and just writing from my experience and what I've noticed about them. So help and/or additional information would be greatly appreciated.

I'm just fed up of seeing them everywhere and them making me think I've got a new follower who's actually interested in the blogs I make, when it's actually just a not trying to take me to some random p*rn website. It's wrong. So I just decided to write about my frustrations.

Now, Tumblr, if you could please sort your shit out, that'd be great, thank you very much, and we can all get on with our day.

If you've read this far, thank you very much for your time, and I hope I've managed to help you at least somewhat when it comes to dealing with these types of things in the future, or maybe just given you a little more awareness about how to stay safe on Tumblr, and other similar sites.

Anyway, I hope y'all have a wonderful day, and that you stay safe. Happy new year, too! 💛💙

[paravails]

tagged by @kokoruu​ to spell out my username with song titles

D: Deathwish - Red Sun Rising A: Anchor - Birdeatsbaby S: Scrape - Blue Stahli T: Talk About Bones - The Seeming A: Another Way To Die - Disturbed R: Raining Stars - Lord of the Lost D: Dark Star - Hypnogaja L: Let ‘Em Burn - Nothing More Y: You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid - The Offspring M: My Name Is Ruin - Gary Numan O: Oleander - Mother Mother N: Necromancin Dancin - Bear Ghost O: Our Solemn Hour - Within Temptation C: Cirice - Ghost L: Lost At Sea - In This Moment E: Eater of Worlds - Everyone Loves A Villain