#you need to understand that this specific vision i had of edward is my ideal boyfriend like he's my dream guy fr

[verifiedaccount]

25 more movies (and one miniseries) you can watch on youtube

I posted 11 movies that are on youtube yesterday (Part 1) but since things are really starting to get shut down here’s more worthwhile movies and a miniseries you can watch for free on youtube right now

Leave Her To Heaven (1945): Gene Tierney is Ellen, a woman whose only crime is “loving too much,” and also all the other crimes she commits to make sure there are no competitors for husband Cornel Wilde’s affections in John M. Stahl’s incredibly lurid and entertaining technicolor melodrama.

M (1931): Fritz Lang’s masterpiece is the basis for every subsequent movie about hunting a serial killer and it’s still the best one.

The Naked Kiss (1964): Here’s the jacket copy from Criterion: “The setup is pure pulp: A former prostitute (a crackerjack Constance Towers) relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit in with mainstream society. But in the strange, hallucinatory territory of writer-director-producer Samuel Fuller, perverse secrets simmer beneath the wholesome surface. Featuring radical visual touches, full-throttle performances, brilliant cinematography by Stanley Cortez, and one bizarrely beautiful musical number, The Naked Kiss is among Fuller’s greatest, boldest entertainments.”

Underworld USA (1961): Dave Kehr on the film: “Sam Fuller's harsh, obsessional 1960 crime drama is narrated in the style of a comic book gone berserk. Cliff Robertson is the neurotic hero, bent on avenging his father's death by infiltrating and destroying a crime syndicate that operates under the redolent name “National Projects.” Corruption is all-pervasive in this vision of America, and Fuller disturbingly suggests that only a madman can make a difference. One image from Underworld—of a heavy striking straight at the camera—prompted Jean-Luc Godard to describe Fuller's films as “cinema-fist.” There is no more apt phrase.”

Pickup on South Street (1953): Another Sam Fuller. Here’s Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo on the film: “Richard Widmark manages to portray himself as twisted, conniving, pathological, sleazy, tragic, vulnerable, and handsome all at once in most of the movies I’ve seen him in, and never more exquisitely than in this, one of my favorite film noirs.“

Journey to Italy (1954): Richard Brody on the film: “One of the most quietly revolutionary works in the history of cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s third feature starring Ingrid Bergman (his wife at the time), from 1953, turns romantic melodrama into intellectual adventure. [...] From Rossellini’s example, the young French New Wave critics learned to fuse studio style with documentary methods, and to make high-relief drama on a low budget.” 

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973): A satirical thriller based on the Sam Greenlee novel about the CIA recruiting a token black agent who quickly realizes they have no intention of letting him advance to a meaningful position and decides to head back to Chicago to teach the black revolutionaries all the latest guerrilla warfare tactics. Despite playing to packed houses the film was quickly pulled from theaters with little explanation and remained out of circulation until a DVD was issued in 2004.  

The Big Combo (1955): Dave Kehr’s capsule: “This 1955 film noir borders on total abstraction for most of its length and then achieves it in an astonishing final scene—a shoot-out in the fog that suggests an armed and dangerous Michelangelo Antonioni. Where the usual noir takes place in a nightmare world, this one seems to inhabit a dream: there's no longer fear in the images, but rather a distanced, idealized beauty. With Cornel Wilde, Jean Wallace, Brian Donlevy, and Richard Conte; the director is Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy).”

The Stranger (1946): Orson Welles’s film concerns an FBI agent (Edward G. Robinson) tracking Nazi war criminals whose search takes him to a small Connecticut town where the local schoolteacher (Orson Welles) is not what he seems. It’s the most conventional Welles film, reportedly intended to prove he could turn in a movie on time and on budget, but it’s still plenty entertaining.

F For Fake (1973): Orson Welles documentary/essay/whatsit about forgers and frauds, specifically Elmyr de Hory, who became famous as an art forger because instead of forging existing paintings he painted new ones in the style of famous artists, and Clifford Irving, who wrote a best-selling book on Elmyr and then was busted for a fraud of his own, the fake Howard Hughes autobiography. A wildly enjoyable, incredibly edited, one of a kind mindbender.

Citizen Kane (1941): It’s Citizen Kane. You just have to put up with hardcoded Korean subs.

Detour (1945): Roger Ebert on the film: “Detour is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school. This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.”

A Woman Under The Influence (1974): Dave Kehr: “John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen.”

Opening Night (1977): Another Cassavetes masterpiece, again starring the great Gena Rowlands, with Gena as an actress mentally disintegrating as she tries to prepare for an upcoming play. Easier to start with this one than A Woman Under The Influence. Richard Brody on the film: “Though there isn’t a movie camera anywhere to be seen—and Cassavetes, with his tightly sculpted, uninhibitedly intimate images, is a master of the camera—Opening Night captures with astonishment and boundless admiration the uninhibited ferocity of the art that brings life onto the screen. (In fact, Cassavetes had originally planned to take the role of the play’s director.) It’s one of the greatest tributes ever paid by a director to an actress.“

Magnificent Obsession (1954): It’s not necessarily Douglas Sirk’s best technicolor melodrama but this adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas’s ridiculous bestseller is the most melodramatic one. From Cine-File: “Produced in the wake of Henry Koster's CinemaScope adaptation of Douglas' THE ROBE, Sirk's 1954 remake of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is, by any standard, an absolutely batshit movie. (It's the kind of film where a lecture about the radical power of kindness compares the crucifixion of Christ to the act of turning on a light bulb.)  It's not so much an adaptation of Douglas as a third-hand amplification of his aura. "Ross Hunter gave me the book," Sirk recalled, "and I tried to read it, but I just couldn't. It is the most confused book you can imagine.” As Geoffrey O'Brien asserts in his essay for the film's Criterion release, Sirk earnestly examines that which he admits to finding absurd, forcing such questions as, "What if this weren't crazy? What if it were real? What sort of a world would that be, and how different would it be from the one we inhabit?" Therein lies the genius of Sirk's glorious melodrama, one certainly worth seeing in all its Technicolor magnificence.

All That Heaven Allows (1955): Geoff Andrew on the film: “On the surface a glossy tearjerker about the problems besetting a love affair between an attractive middle class widow and her younger, 'bohemian' gardener, Sirk's film is in fact a scathing attack on all those facets of the American Dream widely held dear. Wealth produces snobbery and intolerance; family togetherness creates xenophobia and the cult of the dead; cosy kindness can be stultifyingly patronising; and materialism results in alienation from natural feelings. Beneath the stunningly lovely visuals - all expressionist colours, reflections, and frames-within-frames, used to produce a precise symbolism - lies a kernel of terrifying despair created by lives dedicated to respectability and security, given its most harrowing expression when Wyman, having given up her affair with Hudson in order to protect her children from gossip, is presented with a television set as a replacement companion. Hardly surprising that Fassbinder chose to remake the film as Fear Eats the Soul.“

Written on the Wind (1956): Dave Kehr:  “One of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk's 1957 masterpiece turns a lurid, melodramatic script into a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life. Sirk's highly imaginative use of color—to accent, undermine, and sometimes even nullify the drama—remains years ahead of contemporary technique. The degree of stylization is high and impeccable: one is made to understand the characters as icons as well as psychologically complex creations.“

His Girl Friday (1940): Geoff Andrew’s capsule: “Charles Lederer’s frantic script needs to be heard at least a dozen times for all the gags to be caught; Russell’s Hildy more than equals Burns in cunning and speed; and Hawks transcends the piece’s stage origins effortlessly, framing with brilliance, conducting numerous conversations simultaneously, and even allowing the film’s political and emotional thrust to remain upfront alongside the laughs. Quite simply a masterpiece.“

Bringing Up Baby (1938): Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on the film: “Possessed by an overwhelming sense of comic energy, Howard Hawks’ screwball masterpiece heaps on misunderstandings, misadventures, perfectly timed jokes, and patter to the point that it’s easy to overlook how rich and fluid it is a piece of filmmaking, effortlessly transitioning from one thing into the next.”

Underworld (1927): Dave Kehr: “The first full-fledged gangster movie and still an effective mood piece, this 1927 milestone was directed by the master of delirious melodrama, Josef von Sternberg. George Bancroft is the hard-boiled hero, granted tragic status in his final sacrifice. Ben Hecht wrote the script, and many of the same ideas turn up, in a very different moral context, in his screenplay for Howard Hawks's 1932 masterpiece, Scarface.“

Q - The Winged Serpent (1982): In Larry Cohen’s cheapo classic, Quetzelcoatl terrorizes New York. Michael Moriarty plays a bumbling, unlucky small time crook (the robbery he participates in goes hilariously wrong; losing the keys to the getaway car is just the start) who accidentally discovers the monster’s nest and realizes he’s stumbled into the opportunity of a lifetime. He’s willing to help the authorities, including cops played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, but they’re gonna have to pay for it. Very goofy and very fun.

Stalag 17 (1953): Billy Wilder’s classic mixes POW drama with comedy as a group of prisoners in a German POW camp try to figure out who in their barracks is a rat while they plan their escape.

Hellzapoppin (1941): Ignatiy Vishnevetsky:  “The opening reel may be the most manic stretch of go-for-broke gonzo comedy to come out of studio-era Hollywood, with the zoot-suited duo of Olsen and Johnson introduced tumbling out of a New York taxi into the bowels of hell (“That’s the first taxi driver that ever went straight where I told him to!”) in the midst of a musical number about how “Anything can happen / And it probably will.” Dozens of throwaway gags—including the first Citizen Kane reference in film history—and an argument with the projectionist (once and future Stooge Shemp Howard) follow, before the movie snaps into something vaguely resembling sanity. From there, Hellzapoppin’ finds Olsen and Johnson wandering in and out of a musical comedy that’s seems to be on the verge of falling apart and tussling with such comedy ringers as Martha Raye and Mischa Auer, the latter cast as a real Russian nobleman who’s trying to pass as a fake Russian nobleman. It’s like a Marx Brothers movie playing at triple speed; it eludes easy summary—it’s a real “you have to see it to believe it” kind of movie—and often stretches the limits of the Production Code. True to its absurdist sensibility, Hellzapoppin’ ended up getting nominated for an Oscar by mistake, for a song that doesn’t appear in the movie.” 

Outrage (1950): Directed and cowritten by Ida Lupino, this was one of the first Hollywood movies after the implementation of the production code to deal with rape and one of the first to tackle its psychological aftermath (the censor office actually made them take the word “rape” out of the script so it’s never uttered in the film). Richard Broday on the film: “Outrage is a special artistic achievement. Lupino approaches the subject of rape with a wide view of the societal tributaries that it involves. She integrates an inward, deeply compassionate depiction of a woman who is the victim of rape with an incisive view of the many societal failures that contribute to the crime, including legal failure to face the prevalence of rape, and the over-all prudishness and sexual censoriousness that make the crime unspeakable in the literal sense and end up shaming the victim. Above all, she reveals a profound understanding of the widespread and unquestioned male aggression that women face in ordinary and ostensibly non-violent and consensual courtship.“

The Hitch-Hiker (1953): Another Ida Lupino joint, this one a lean and mean film noir. J. Hoberman on the film: “The “Hitch-Hiker” script, written (uncredited) by the socially conscious journalist Daniel Mainwaring, was inspired by an actual case: Two buddies (Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O’Brien) pick up a murderous psychopath (William Talman) who forces them to drive him to Mexico. It’s a brutal story handled by Ms. Lupino, one of Hollywood’s very few female directors, with the same steely determination and emotional sensitivity found in her strongest performances.”

And the miniseries:

The Singing Detective (1986): Here’s the entry from the BBC’s list of the top 100 British television programs, where it placed number 20: “For many Potter's masterpiece, this extended six-part filmed drama series mixes flashback and fantasy to create a psychological profile of a writer of detective fiction hospitalised by a crippling skin disease. Though not, the writer stressed, autobiographical, the drama features many elements from both Potter's own life (the disease, the childhood setting) and his body of work (particularly the use of popular music from the war years). As usual with Potter, it also caused controversy at the time for the frankness of its sex scenes, though its position as one of the most challenging and inventive of all TV dramas is secure.“

[goldeneyedgirl]

2019 Fic Meme

My end of year fic meme, compiled from some old Livejournal fic memes that I do when I write stuff. I do this for fun, because I like looking back at what I have and haven’t written, and what keeps popping up again.

It’s meant to be silly fun, and if anyone else wants to do it, PLEASE DO. I don’t want to tag anyone and put pressure on you in case you don’t want to/don’t think you have enough fic/hate memes. 

Twilight

12 Days of Fic-Mas (Twilight, WIP) Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, bonus.  Twelve days of fic extracts, previews, and drabbles focusing on Alice Cullen. Encompasses Folie A Deux, The Only Girl in the World, JessaminexAlice, Omens, Asylum, The Long Way Around, The Dark and the Unknown, Hybrid, Runaway, All These Broken Things, & The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon 

Shadow to Light  (WIP) (Alice/Jasper, AU Angst, PG) In 1918, Jasper lures the newborn known as Mary-Alice back to Monterrey. He is lost to her before it even begins.

Total number of completed stories: Lol.

Total word count: 33,304 words were posted. 

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?  Look, I just... 2019 was a wash in so many ways. I played a lot of Fortnite really badly. I would have loved to be able to say Shadow to Light was finished, or that I was posting Hybrid regularly or something, but I can’t. I wish, wish, wish I had posted more but alas. 

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? Outside of Twilight, I dabbled with some reader/Ben in the Umbrella Academy, and I was messing around with some Janet/Wanda in my personal MCU canon. As for Twilight, I think my stuff got a lot darker? Like, we’re down the rabbit hole here, and somehow Alice ended up being the most feared vampire in the Americas? Yeah. 

And there’s the Avengers/Twilight fic that is simultaneously three fics and one fic because I cannot make Executive Decisions and I can’t decide if I like 1. Alice knowing Bucky from Before Jasper; 2. Alice knowing Hawkeye from when he was a kid in the circus and being how Natasha and Clint got out of Budapest, or 3. the Volturi hooking up with Hydra and ... yeah, I think this one is legit the most second-most one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever written. (I’ve been filing today, and boy howdy have I written some actual shit.)

What’s your own favourite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest? That’s like making me pick a favourite child. I’m always so, so proud of Shadow to Light, and I love The Dark and the Unknown ‘verse, and Hybrid is just hanging out there, chilling and ugh. My babies <3 

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?  TwilightFicMas was a huge risk! I wasn’t sure anyone cared unless I was posting more Shadow to Light, and people were SO nice and enthusiastic. So I guess the lesson is shut up and share more fic? Get out of your own head and spend time in the community because fandom isn’t meant to be lonely?

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?  I’m starting a graphic design business AND my masters in design in 2020, so I figure fic is going to be my downtime next year. Ideally, I would love to get STL finished, Memento Vivere’s sequel going, and have a few of my shorter pieces posted. I would really love to get some of my original stuff ready for publication, but I’d be happy studying, running my business, and doing the fic thing for 2020.  

My best story of this year: That’s up to the readers, I guess. Everyone seemed obscenely enthusiastic about The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon, though, and I was not expecting that at all - I was actually upset that I left the ‘dud’ fic for the last day of FicMas. 

My most popular story: Shadow to Light. Everyone is so nice and enthusiastic and polite about that one. I’m not used to it! Fandom for me is usually me sitting in a corner, doin’ my obscure thing, and maybe one or two people will read what I’m working on.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:  I think everyone was super enthusiastic and nice about everything I posted this year. Maybe Folie A Deux? But like, that reflects more on me and the excerpts that I chose to post rather than the fic or the audience itself. 

Most fun story to write:  The Unexpected Second Life of Mary Alice Brandon because that Alice is so happy; I have this playlist for it that is super upbeat and funky. 

Hybrid is fun because that Alice likes to torment Jasper. He understands Edward on a molecular level once Alice arrives. 

Most Sexy Story: The Dark and the Unknown is the front-runner for that, because most of the sexy goings-on in Shadow to Light is very much focused on the psychological and emotional aspects rather than the physical.

Story with the single sexiest moment:  The Dark and the Unknown. I am still deeply uncomfortable writing sex scenes, so this may be the only one I ever do. The implication of a blow job in Shadow to Light nearly kill me tbh.

The forest behind the school is silent; just her breathing, and the slight wind. No birds or wildlife, none of the hum of the traffic or of the school.

They don’t undress more than necessary, her skirt slid to her hips, and he takes her roughly against a tree, flakes of bark falling into the dirt. She is hot and slick, and silent as he fucks her, his fingers digging into her hips, a growl rising in his chest. She is every bit his fantasy; the smell of damp flowers, the sweetness of her flesh, her willing supplication. His fingers tear through the lace of her tights as he grips her thighs, and the heels of her shoes must be bending, she’s digging them into the backs of his legs so hard.

Most “holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:  The Long Way Around makes Jasper and Alice’s relationship pretty fucked up, and tbh I look back at it and really struggle with how dark it is and how dark Jasper’s character becomes. There’s a reason that Shadow to Light is the ‘official’ version - it’s a better balance, and I actually think Maria is a lot more interesting in Shadow to Light as a villain with complex relationships with both Jasper and Alice to the point where none of them really want to have to kill each other, but there is a lot of hate on both sides. 

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:  That’s a hard question. Shadow to Light definitely did that because I had to consider what happened when you took Alice out of the picture, and how that changed what happened, and considered the inter-family relationships. So much of canon relies on Alice’s visions that things can’t just happen the same way. 

Hardest story to write: Shadow to Light isn’t easy because I have such a specific idea of how it plays out, how it ‘looks’ in my head, and because Alice is so fundamentally different to canon. More innocent when it comes to normal interactions, and so controlled because it meant life or death - but she’s still got to be Alice in a way that people can recognize. It also has to sound right? If I can’t get the right turn of phrase for one scene, it has to be put aside until I can work it out. 

 All These Broken Things is hard because I started it back in, like, 2014ish and my writing and understanding of the characters and canon has changed so much - plus there are a few sections that came to me quite early in the writing, and now sound really out of place, but are such a strong linchpin for the story that I have to rework them in. It’s a good kind of hard, though, because I’ve improved so much, my ideas and goals are more refined. 

Most disappointing:  Omens is a little bitch, honestly. I started it for a fic contest and kept going to explore Alice’s human life, and it doesn’t quite feel like my writing? It needs reworking, and be a little less obvious because I think the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ is a good theme for a Human!Alice fic. 

Easiest story to write: Depends on my mood; Hybrid is great when I’m in kind of a ‘girls kicking ass’ mood and boot up my action girls playlist.

Biggest surprise:  Hybrid started as a love story that was basically ‘yeah, let’s make this shit super dramatic and overwrought’, and turned into this actual story with a huge focus on family and relationships. I can’t remember why I decided Alice’s father had a husband except that I was thinking about small town ‘otherness’, and LGBT+ people can and are still considered ‘other’ in these spaces. 

Then you add in Alice and Cynthia who are basically in the same boat but have been separated for their entire lives. Alice has knowledge in her corner, whilst having to fight through foster care, abuse, and hospital; whilst Cynthia has lived a very normal but privileged life as the daughter of a mixed-race same-sex couple in a very small town. I went full-hog with this, and added in an extended family, because I really hated how canon went balls-to-the-wall to isolate Bella from everyone, including Charlie. 

Like, this thing is a monster, and whilst I plan to sit down and rewrite the outline (which dates back to 2016, and I hate the ending of), I stopped outlining at 65 freaking chapters. 

Most unintentionally telling story:  I think this question that still confuses me finally gets a decent answer in The Dark and the Unknown - Jasper is seeing most of it from his perspective, and there isn’t a ton of dialogue. I’ve tried to avoid an info-dump, but it’s meant to be quite supernatural in tone, and focusing on vampire senses and gifts enhances that. 

Story I’d like to revise:  All These Broken Things wins that one. Due to the age of the piece, there are some pacing and tone issues in later chapters that are the reason I haven’t formally posted it. 

Story I didn’t write but will at some point, I swear: Oh man, I really want to finish A Thousand Years of Solitude, which is a Tanya fic. I’m really happy with what I’ve got so far, but it sounds smarter and more layered than it really is, so I’m kind of stuck. 

Mad World because Romani!Alice is super sassy and taking 0% of Swan or Cullen bullshit - I think 90% of my fic is just me going, “yeah, that’s not how normal people react.” And I’m a sucker for gothic horror. 

What else? Aww, Against A Wall which is AU Human Jasper coming from the shittiest home, and Alice finding him. It’s meant to be short, and another one I have a really clear idea of how it needs to work. 

And the one where Alice’s gift is a sentient power that pushes her to follow it; that Bad Things happen if she doesn’t; that Renesmee was always Endgame for Something, and Alice was a key piece to get that result. Or the one where Aro takes Alice as a ‘guest’ for a period because of Edward and Bella, and Alice’s gift is basically broken. 

Good times. I have like 5 years of fic on this computer, we could be here for awhile. 

#my fic #twilight fic #meme #my writing

[mytileneve]

10 Questions Tag

Thanks @highladyofdreamcourt @rhaesgar and @azuremirwae for tagging me

1. What are your top slash and femslash ships? Wolfstar, Malec, Rowcan, Haline, Ginny x Luna, Mesta  2. If you had to be stuck in a 90′s or 80′s horror movie, which would you pick? Do you think you’d be a final girl? I don’t watch horror films cause I get really scared because I’m a weak bitch. I think I’d either die within the first ten minutes or I’d last until the end because at the first sign of something weird I’d just nope the hell out of there and won’t go into any creepy places 3. What are your favourite activities to do during the holidays?  Baking Christmas treats is one of my favourite things, reading in front of the fireplace at my parents’ house, decorating the house and the Christmas tree, writing the cards, singing Christmas songs all day, every day.  4. What’s your middle name? Maria.  5. Hang gliding, wind surfing or parasailing?  I’d definitely go parasailing cause it’s really easy and really safe. I low key really want to sky dive though... 6. JURASSIC PARK APOCALYPSE IS UPON US!!! What is your game plan to survive the dinosaurs? Cover myself in something that disguises my scent, make as little noise as possible, climb trees and stay out of the water 7. If you could dye your hair an unnatural colour, what would you pick? Technically my hair is an unnatural colour right now so silver I guess. If not, I had purple hair before and I quite liked it so I’d go back to that.  8. List the top 3 meals you have never tried but you would really love to I’d try more types of sushi cause I’ve only ever had the classic salmon sushi rolls, tacos and lobster 9. Are there any books/shows/movies/characters that everyone else seems to love but you just cannot? I don’t really know off the top of my head. The Red Queen series. Eleanor and Park. Doctor Who. The Notebook and Frozen are two I like but I think they’re terribly overrated.  10. What would your ideal night home alone be like? Face mask, wine, a good book, burning a nice candle, some instrumental music, fuzzy socks and a fluffy blanket. 😊💕💕💕

1. Team Edward or Team Jacob?  Team Leah Clearwater was the only sane character who was utterly done with everyone’s bullshit and she deserved better 2. Christmas or Halloween?  Christmas 3. Did you have an emo phase in middle school? Yeah. Dark times.  4. Do you highlight/sticky tab your books? Depends on the book. If it’s a book I’ll want to review or if it’s something that’s part of a series I really love and I’ll want to theoriese about what happens in the next book, I’ll take notes on a notebook. For any other type of book, I use sticky tabs. I never highlight anything, my books have to be in pristine condition 😂 5. Tabby cats or calico cats Calico cats! But I used to have one so I might be biased. 6. Least favourite colour? Any shade that’s a mix of yellow, green and brown 7. Sate fair or renaissance fair food? Idk what any type of fair food is like.  8. How often do you go to the theatre to see new films? Overall, not often at all. But I have phases where I go see a new film every week. 9. If you were a queen what would your ideal crown look like Either a permanent flower crown where I change the flowers based on the time of year or one of those dainty crowns that elves wear.... kinda like the ones Galadriel, Eowyn or Arwen wear in LOTR 10. Do you get your nails done at the salon or paint them yourself? I don’t paint my nails very often but when I do, I paint them myself.  

1. Which would yo choose to do: go to a cafe alone with a book and music, or sit on a bench in the woods with music and a book. A cafe. I’d get too hot or too cold in the woods or insects would bug me. I go to cafes to work or read all the time, it’s one of my favourite past times.  2. What is your favourite colour and why? I don’t really have one, I like most of them. 3. When, during the day, is it most likely for you to feel sleepy tired? Apart from at night, I usually get sleepy sometime between 2-4 pm 4. When upset, which method usually helps you feel better: talking about it with someone or dealing with it alone? Definitely talking to someone but I almost never do that because I feel like I’m annoying the person or making them worry and I always feel like I should be able to deal with everything alone  5. Do you have a specific vision of how you want your life to be in the future If so, what is it like?  I really don’t. I used to because I like having everything planned out well in advance but life doesn’t work that way and I feel like planning your life out can only be limiting. Almost all my life-plans so far have been completely changed around and not in a bad way so I’ve learned to go with the flow and I’m trying to adopt that attitude even more. 6. What are some of the things/causes you’re very passionate about? There are literally so many but the two I’m personally most passionate about are feminism (but a completely inclusive feminism that doesn’t only focus on the issues white women experience and acknowledges that WOC experience way worse sexism) and disabilities (any kind, any type. Educating people on what they are and how to better help disabled people integrate into society, have access to the healthcare they need, have jobs with the same wages as everyone else and making people understand that it is the job of able-bodied people to make the world an inclusive place for disabled people instead of letting them work it out for themselves and try and adapt to the way everyone else functions). I’ve written many articles and done work for both topics and could honestly talk about this for hours. 7. Given no one would object to it or judge you for it or that there won’t be any trouble, and you’d have the materials for it, how would you like to dress everyday? What would be your aesthetic?  I have an aesthetic blog so I’ll just link that instead of trying to describe it: @ineffableamour  8. What is your favourite aspect of nature?  Umm... I like thunderstorms and I have a soft spot for cold windy beaches like the ones in the UK/Ireland 9. Which one is your favourite: forests, mountains or the sea? Omg I can’t choose. I lived right next to a forest when I was little for a few years and I loved it and now my parents live right next to the beach and the sea and I love the mountains too so I just love all of them

My questions:

1. What’s one language you wish you could speak? 2. If you could go back in time to any period but without all the social issues and simply for the #aesthetic, what would you choose? 3. Do you have a favourite poem? 4. What’s a random act of kindness you did or someone did for you? 5. What’s a goal you have at the moment (long term or short term)? 6. If you could live anywhere else in the world for some time where would you want to live and why? 7. What’s your favourite piece of advice you’ve ever received? 8. What book release are you really anticipating? 9. What do you do to make yourself feel better if you’re sad/angry/frustrated? 10. Tell me a random fact about yourself.

I tag: @nessiansmut @cassiancalore @towerofdawn @runesandfaes @peregrynn @highlady-casandra @paperbacktrash @rowan-buzzard-whitethorn @feysandsmut @modernbookfae @fiery-feyre

#tag

[djgblogger-blog]

Languages don't all have the same number of terms for colors – scientists have a new theory why

http://bit.ly/2ylqLFC

Everyone sees them all, but we don't all give them the same distinct names. lazyllama/Shutterstock.com

People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. That’s what we have in American English.

Maybe if you’re an artist or an interior designer, you know specific meanings for as many as 50 or 100 different words for colors – like turquoise, amber, indigo or taupe. But this is still a tiny fraction of the colors that we can distinguish.

Interestingly, the ways that languages categorize color vary widely. Nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures. So while English has 11 words that everyone knows, the Papua-New Guinean language Berinmo has only five, and the Bolivian Amazonian language Tsimane’ has only three words that everyone knows, corresponding to black, white and red.

The goal of our project was to understand why cultures vary so much in their color word usage.

Is it about which colors stand out the most?

The most widely accepted explanation for the differences goes back to two linguists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. In their early work in the 1960s, they gathered color-naming data from 20 languages. They observed some commonalities among sets of color terms across languages: If a language had only two terms, they were always black and white; if there was a third, it was red; the fourth and fifth were always green and yellow (in either order); the sixth was blue; the seventh was brown; and so on.

Based on this order, Berlin and Kay argued that certain colors were more salient. They suggested that cultures start by naming the most salient colors, bringing in new terms one at a time, in order. So black and white are the most salient, then red, and so on.

While this approach seemed promising, there are several problems with this innate vision-based theory.

Berlin, Kay and their colleagues went on to gather a much larger data set, from 110 nonindustrialized languages. Their original generalization isn’t as clear in this larger data set: there are many exceptions, which Kay and his colleagues have tried to explain in a more complicated vision-based theory.

What’s more, this nativist theory doesn’t address why industrialization, which introduced reliable, stable and standardized colors on a large scale, causes more color words to be introduced. The visual systems of people across cultures are the same: in this model, industrialization should make no difference on color categorization, which was clearly not the case.

How do you describe this color?

Our research groups therefore explored a completely different idea: Perhaps color words are developed for efficient communication. Consider the task of simply naming a color chip from some set of colors. In our study, we used 80 color chips, selected from Munsell colors to be evenly spaced across the color grid. Each pair of neighboring colors is the same distance apart in terms of how different they appear. The speaker’s task is to simply label the color with a word (“red,” “blue” and so on).

Participants had to communicate one of the 80 color chip choices from across the color grid. Richard Futrell and Edward Gibson, CC BY

To evaluate the communication-based idea, we need to think of color-naming in simple communication terms, which can be formalized by information theory. Suppose the color I select at random is N4. I choose a word to label the color that I picked. Maybe the word I choose is “blue.” If I had picked A3, I would have never said “blue.” And if I had picked M3, maybe I would have said “blue,” maybe “green” or something else.

Now in this thought experiment, you as a listener are trying to guess which physical color I meant. You can choose a whole set of color chips that you think corresponds to my color “blue.” Maybe you pick a set of 12 color chips corresponding to all those in columns M, N and O. I say yes, because my chip is in fact one of those. Then you split your set in half and guess again.

The number of guesses it takes the ideal listener to zero in on my color chip based on the color word I used is a simple score for the chip. We can calculate this score – the number of guesses or “bits” – using some simple math from the way in which many people label the colors in a simple color-labeling task. Using these scores, we can now rank the colors across the grid, in any language.

In English, it turns out that people can convey the warm colors – reds, oranges and yellows – more efficiently (with fewer guesses) than the cool colors – blues and greens. You can see this in the color grid: There are fewer competitors for what might be labeled “red,” “orange” or “yellow” than there are colors that would be labeled “blue” or “green.” This is true in spite of the fact that the grid itself is perceptually more or less uniform: The colors were selected to completely cover the most saturated colors of the Munsell color space, and each pair of neighboring colors looks equally close, no matter where they are on the grid.

We found that this generalization is true in every language in the entire World Color Survey (110 languages) and in three more that we did detailed experiments on: English, Spanish and Tsimane’.

Each row orders the color chips for one language: Colors farther left are easier to communicate, those farther to the right are harder to communicate. Richard Futrell, CC BY

It’s clear in a visual representation, where each row is an ordering of the color chips for a particular language. The left-to-right ordering is from easiest to communicate (fewest guesses needed to get the right color) to hardest to communicate.

The diagram shows that all languages have roughly the same order, with the warm colors on the left (easy to communicate) and the cool ones on the right (harder to communicate). This generalization occurs in spite of the fact that languages near the bottom of the figure have few terms that people use consistently, while languages near the top (like English and Spanish) have many terms that most people use consistently.

We name the colors of things we want to talk about

In addition to discovering this remarkable universal across languages, we also wanted to find out what causes it. Recall that our idea is that maybe we introduce words into a language when there is something that we want to talk about. So perhaps this effect arises because objects – the things we want to talk about – tend to be warm-colored.

We evaluated this hypothesis in a database of 20,000 photographs of objects that people at Microsoft had decided contained objects, as distinct from backgrounds. (This data set is available to train and test computer vision systems that are trying to learn to identify objects.) Our colleagues then determined the specific boundaries of the object in each image and where the background was.

We mapped the colors in the images onto our set of 80 colors across the color space. It turned out that indeed objects are more likely to be warm-colored, while backgrounds are cool-colored. If an image’s pixel fell within an object, it was more likely to correspond to a color that was easier to communicate. Objects’ colors tended to fall further to the left on our ranked ordering of communicative efficiency.

When you think about it, this doesn’t seem so surprising after all. Backgrounds are sky, water, grass, trees: all cool-colored. The objects that we want to talk about are warm-colored: people, animals, berries, fruits and so on.

Our hypothesis also easily explains why more color terms come into a language with industrialization. With increases in technology come improved ways of purifying pigments and making new ones, as well as new color displays. So we can make objects that differ based only on color – for instance, the new iPhone comes in “rose gold” and “gold” – which makes color-naming even more useful.

So contrary to the earlier nativist visual salience hypothesis, the communication hypothesis helped identify a true cross-linguistic universal – warm colors are easier to communicate than cool ones – and it easily explains the cross-cultural differences in color terms. It also explains why color words often come into a language not as color words but as object or substance labels. For instance, “orange” comes from the fruit; “red” comes from Sanskrit for blood. In short, we label things that we want to talk about.

Ted Gibson receives funding from the linguistics program at the National Science Foundation, Award 1534318.

[email protected] receives funding from the intramural research program of the National Eye Institute