Hi, I'm Maddie. This is my blog. Sorry about the mess. Please make yourself at home. If theres anything you need just let me know... I mean that literally. Come talk to me.
u guys know sexuality gender and the way u feel attraction can change right. u know you can put labels on and off right. nothing is solid swim a little if you like etc
normalize saying “it was a phase, mom”. in a way that doesn’t take away that it was real.
this should go without saying but this is also especially true if you identified as ace and then suddenly you’re head over heels in sexy romantic love. or if you were bi and then are suddenly feeling hetero feelings only. there’s nothing shameful about that. maybe it was real, maybe you we’re figuring things out - that’s for you to know only.
when a british actor does an american accent everyone’s like “i didn’t even know they were british until they were on colbert.” but when americans do a british accent everyone’s like “they’re supposed to be from east cocksford but their glottal e’s are north dicksford. shameful.”
Saw an interesting interview with Hugh Laurie talking about this (on playing House and ‘getting away with’ doing an American accent):
“…. because they’re much less interested…they don’t have that 'Professor Higgins’ ear for…. class and background and geography and the way the British are much more attuned to wait a second where are you from and what trick are you trying to pull on me by… with that particular choice of words. I think partly again because it’s such a big country nobody really…. it doesn’t bother people so much where you’re from or why you sound the way you sound. America’s a country that’s too big to know itself. Someone living in Florida’s go no idea how people behave or what they eat or how they dress in Oregon, it’s just so far away - whereas we know, of course, we know absolutely everything about… every British drama we watch, we’re like, well that’s High Wycombe, that could never happen because it’s a one way system there! whereas America’s so mythically grand, it’s too big to know it'self, and that actually has an affect with things like accent. ”
i know it’s been said many times before but i will never get over how jacob anderson, a british man with a british accent, not only nailed a louisiana creole accent but also developed a studiously (almost eerily) generic accent that louis uses in the present AND showed the first accent bleeding into the second accent at key moments as a way of aurally externalizing his character’s inner journey. what did god put in this man when she created him.
@dedalvs anything to add about jacob anderson’s accent/valyrian pronunciation work?
Pardon me, but is someone praising Jacob Anderson without letting me praise him first?!
Backing up. It’s October 2009, and my Dothraki is chosen as the official version for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Absolutely the job of a lifetime. Conlangers were never hired to create languages for big budget productions, and language was central to A Song of Ice and Fire. The fact that this was on HBO guaranteed that it was going to be huge, and now I was going to get to be on the set of a TV show, work with actors, go to Hollywood parties, and create a language that would be as popular as Klingon.
June 2011, only one of those four things had happened, and of all things, it was going to a Hollywood party—the season 1 premiere event for Game of Thrones. It was very cool! None of the cast attended, but it was cool! But as for the rest, the idea that I would ever actually talk to any of the actors or be on the actual set was, apparently, laughable. And as for Dothraki, it had a very loyal following of about 6 or 7 people, all of whom I came to know personally. Dothraki was discussed in the press, sure, but nobody was going to learn it; there were never going to be any Dothraki conventions. It wasn’t the next Klingon.
June 2012, and by this point I’d gotten used to seeing my work on screen—and by that I mean I’d gotten used to seeing it performed…so-so. Every so often it was really good, but for the most part, I got used to hearing jumbled consonants, dropped syllables, missed words… I’ve always been a perfectionist, so this was difficult, but I didn’t have much choice. I had absolutely no control over it. I never got to work with any of the actors, so all they had were my recordings, and a series of dialect coaches who had absolutely no idea what they were doing with my stuff. (And, as I would learn later, just because an actor nails 9 out of 10 takes doesn’t mean the editor won’t like the one take they screwed up. Sometimes that’s the take that makes it to the screen.) Basically, if someone has an English line on a TV show that goes “It looks like the mechanism got screwed up somehow”, and what they say is “It locks like a manism got scroot up someho”, they’re going to reshoot the scene until the actor says it right. If that happens with a conlang, no one will notice or care. This was now my life.
July 2012, I get the opportunity to create High Valyrian (yay!), and then a “dialect” of High Valyrian to be spoken in Slaver’s Bay. Knowing the history from GRRM’s books, I knew this “dialect” was actually a full daughter language with lexical/phonological material from an extinct language (Ghiscari) that I wasn’t being asked to create, so I was going to have to create two languages at once, and at least have an idea for a third one—and, in fact, there was going to be a lot of dialogue in this new daughter language. Consequently my focus was split. I can honestly barely remember creating Astapori Valyrian, because I wanted to be sure that High Valyrian was right (I knew book fans didn’t care about Dothraki, but did care about HV). Despite the lack of attention, I did realize that Astapori Valyrian had a cool sound and a great flow (it really does!). I wish I’d had more time to appreciate creating it as a daughter language (I wish High Valyrian had been as complete as Dothraki was at that point), but I was pleased with the result. I was curious to see how the actors would handle it.
April 21, 2013. I am absolutely over the moon. I’d just for the first time saw a scene that I loved in the books because, for once, I predicted what was going to happen (as a reader, I’m sitting here thinking, “How do you trade your entire army to someone and not wonder if they’re going to use it on you after they get it?!”), and it actually plays better in the show than the books, and it all hinges on a language I created. I still get chills watching that scene: Episode 304, Daenerys revealing she speaks Valyrian. To this day that’s still the best thing I’ve done. The same issues I mentioned above were present, as always (watching thinking, “Did she say mebatas instead of memēbātās…?”), but they’re minor. The scene is outstanding. I realized that whatever was going to happen after this, I would always have this scene. That was a good night.
April 28, 2013. After last week’s episode, I wasn’t really waiting for anything. In episode 305 there’s only one scene with any conlang work in it—nothing really major. Introducing Grey Worm, characterization, etc. Everything in this episode is about what’s going on in Westeros. At this point I’d heard a fair amount of Astapori Valyrian in Slaver’s Bay. It was good! Definitely good enough. Did the trick. The prosody wasn’t quite what I did with it, but it was good. I was somewhat interested in this introduction in 305. Grey Worm only speaks Astapori Valyrian at this point, so this actor wouldn’t have had had any other speaking lines, and aside from one short line and saying his name at the beginning, his next line is a huuuuuge speech, comparatively speaking. I was curious to see how he would do.
Critters and gentlefolk, that night I witnessed a miracle.
NEVER had I heard ANYONE speak one of my languages better than me until that night.
Every word, every syllable, EVERY SOUND OF EVERY CLAUSE Jacob “You Heard My Name” Anderson uttered was ABSOLUTELYFLAWLESS.
I was stunned. My mouth literally hung open—probably for the rest of the damn episode, at which point I went back and watched that scene—again, and again, and again.
And so you don’t have to go searching, this is Grey Worm’s line (not the first two short ones—the big one [note: j is [ʒ], except in Daenery’s High Valyrian name, where it’s [dʒ], dh is [ð], q is [q], r is [ɾ] and y is [y], in IPA]):
“Torgo Nudho” hokas bezy. Sa me broji beri. Ji broji ez bezo sene stas qimbroto. Kuny iles ji broji meles esko mazedhas derari va buzdar. Y Torgo Nudho sa ji broji ez bezy eji tovi Daenerys Jelmazmo ji teptas ji derve.
That was my translation of this English line:
“Grey Worm” gives this one pride. It is a lucky name. The name this one was born with was cursed. That was the name he had when he was taken as a slave. But Grey Worm is the name this one had the day Daenerys Stormborn set him free.
That is a LOOOOOOOOOONG ass line. And go watch that scene. There is nothing on the screen but his face. It’s a closeup the entire time. Any slight deviation would be visible as well as audible. Take a look:
This…KING just casually dropped the greatest performance I have ever witnessed on screen at a time when I had already given up on ever seeing a truly great conlang performance on screen.
And then he proceeded to do it again and again and again and again and again for the rest of the entire show. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the very last conlang line of Game of Thrones is his. They knew how much I loved him—I told them. I told anyone who would listen and twelve people who wouldn’t, along with their next of kin. He didn’t take my language and make it his own—no, no. He is graciously allowing me to claim that I created his native tongue—the one he’s been speaking since birth. THAT’S how good he is.
So yeah, accent work? In English? I guess I’m not surprised he’s pretty good at that. Something like that to this…adonis, this living, breathing Master Class™ in perfection is like yawning to an ordinary human. Jacob Anderson can walk into my house in the dead of night, take anything out of my refrigerator, and then leave the door to the fridge and the house open when he leaves. He has earned no less.
i know it’s been said many times before but i will never get over how jacob anderson, a british man with a british accent, not only nailed a louisiana creole accent but also developed a studiously (almost eerily) generic accent that louis uses in the present AND showed the first accent bleeding into the second accent at key moments as a way of aurally externalizing his character’s inner journey. what did god put in this man when she created him.
@dedalvs anything to add about jacob anderson’s accent/valyrian pronunciation work?
Pardon me, but is someone praising Jacob Anderson without letting me praise him first?!
Backing up. It’s October 2009, and my Dothraki is chosen as the official version for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Absolutely the job of a lifetime. Conlangers were never hired to create languages for big budget productions, and language was central to A Song of Ice and Fire. The fact that this was on HBO guaranteed that it was going to be huge, and now I was going to get to be on the set of a TV show, work with actors, go to Hollywood parties, and create a language that would be as popular as Klingon.
June 2011, only one of those four things had happened, and of all things, it was going to a Hollywood party—the season 1 premiere event for Game of Thrones. It was very cool! None of the cast attended, but it was cool! But as for the rest, the idea that I would ever actually talk to any of the actors or be on the actual set was, apparently, laughable. And as for Dothraki, it had a very loyal following of about 6 or 7 people, all of whom I came to know personally. Dothraki was discussed in the press, sure, but nobody was going to learn it; there were never going to be any Dothraki conventions. It wasn’t the next Klingon.
June 2012, and by this point I’d gotten used to seeing my work on screen—and by that I mean I’d gotten used to seeing it performed…so-so. Every so often it was really good, but for the most part, I got used to hearing jumbled consonants, dropped syllables, missed words… I’ve always been a perfectionist, so this was difficult, but I didn’t have much choice. I had absolutely no control over it. I never got to work with any of the actors, so all they had were my recordings, and a series of dialect coaches who had absolutely no idea what they were doing with my stuff. (And, as I would learn later, just because an actor nails 9 out of 10 takes doesn’t mean the editor won’t like the one take they screwed up. Sometimes that’s the take that makes it to the screen.) Basically, if someone has an English line on a TV show that goes “It looks like the mechanism got screwed up somehow”, and what they say is “It locks like a manism got scroot up someho”, they’re going to reshoot the scene until the actor says it right. If that happens with a conlang, no one will notice or care. This was now my life.
July 2012, I get the opportunity to create High Valyrian (yay!), and then a “dialect” of High Valyrian to be spoken in Slaver’s Bay. Knowing the history from GRRM’s books, I knew this “dialect” was actually a full daughter language with lexical/phonological material from an extinct language (Ghiscari) that I wasn’t being asked to create, so I was going to have to create two languages at once, and at least have an idea for a third one—and, in fact, there was going to be a lot of dialogue in this new daughter language. Consequently my focus was split. I can honestly barely remember creating Astapori Valyrian, because I wanted to be sure that High Valyrian was right (I knew book fans didn’t care about Dothraki, but did care about HV). Despite the lack of attention, I did realize that Astapori Valyrian had a cool sound and a great flow (it really does!). I wish I’d had more time to appreciate creating it as a daughter language (I wish High Valyrian had been as complete as Dothraki was at that point), but I was pleased with the result. I was curious to see how the actors would handle it.
April 21, 2013. I am absolutely over the moon. I’d just for the first time saw a scene that I loved in the books because, for once, I predicted what was going to happen (as a reader, I’m sitting here thinking, “How do you trade your entire army to someone and not wonder if they’re going to use it on you after they get it?!”), and it actually plays better in the show than the books, and it all hinges on a language I created. I still get chills watching that scene: Episode 304, Daenerys revealing she speaks Valyrian. To this day that’s still the best thing I’ve done. The same issues I mentioned above were present, as always (watching thinking, “Did she say mebatas instead of memēbātās…?”), but they’re minor. The scene is outstanding. I realized that whatever was going to happen after this, I would always have this scene. That was a good night.
April 28, 2013. After last week’s episode, I wasn’t really waiting for anything. In episode 305 there’s only one scene with any conlang work in it—nothing really major. Introducing Grey Worm, characterization, etc. Everything in this episode is about what’s going on in Westeros. At this point I’d heard a fair amount of Astapori Valyrian in Slaver’s Bay. It was good! Definitely good enough. Did the trick. The prosody wasn’t quite what I did with it, but it was good. I was somewhat interested in this introduction in 305. Grey Worm only speaks Astapori Valyrian at this point, so this actor wouldn’t have had had any other speaking lines, and aside from one short line and saying his name at the beginning, his next line is a huuuuuge speech, comparatively speaking. I was curious to see how he would do.
Critters and gentlefolk, that night I witnessed a miracle.
NEVER had I heard ANYONE speak one of my languages better than me until that night.
Every word, every syllable, EVERY SOUND OF EVERY CLAUSE Jacob “You Heard My Name” Anderson uttered was ABSOLUTELYFLAWLESS.
I was stunned. My mouth literally hung open—probably for the rest of the damn episode, at which point I went back and watched that scene—again, and again, and again.
And so you don’t have to go searching, this is Grey Worm’s line (not the first two short ones—the big one [note: j is [ʒ], except in Daenery’s High Valyrian name, where it’s [dʒ], dh is [ð], q is [q], r is [ɾ] and y is [y], in IPA]):
“Torgo Nudho” hokas bezy. Sa me broji beri. Ji broji ez bezo sene stas qimbroto. Kuny iles ji broji meles esko mazedhas derari va buzdar. Y Torgo Nudho sa ji broji ez bezy eji tovi Daenerys Jelmazmo ji teptas ji derve.
That was my translation of this English line:
“Grey Worm” gives this one pride. It is a lucky name. The name this one was born with was cursed. That was the name he had when he was taken as a slave. But Grey Worm is the name this one had the day Daenerys Stormborn set him free.
That is a LOOOOOOOOOONG ass line. And go watch that scene. There is nothing on the screen but his face. It’s a closeup the entire time. Any slight deviation would be visible as well as audible. Take a look:
This…KING just casually dropped the greatest performance I have ever witnessed on screen at a time when I had already given up on ever seeing a truly great conlang performance on screen.
And then he proceeded to do it again and again and again and again and again for the rest of the entire show. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the very last conlang line of Game of Thrones is his. They knew how much I loved him—I told them. I told anyone who would listen and twelve people who wouldn’t, along with their next of kin. He didn’t take my language and make it his own—no, no. He is graciously allowing me to claim that I created his native tongue—the one he’s been speaking since birth. THAT’S how good he is.
So yeah, accent work? In English? I guess I’m not surprised he’s pretty good at that. Something like that to this…adonis, this living, breathing Master Class™ in perfection is like yawning to an ordinary human. Jacob Anderson can walk into my house in the dead of night, take anything out of my refrigerator, and then leave the door to the fridge and the house open when he leaves. He has earned no less.
I have a friend who’s really into cheese, but was always complaining about how quickly it molds, and it turns out the problem was that they weren’t washing their cheese-knife between meals, so by the next time they used it, the cheese residue from the previous meal had been sitting in the open air for several hours at room temperature, and they were transferring all that schmutz onto the block of cheese when they cut it. Like, forget about mold culture – at that point that knife is developing mold religion. It’s sending mold missionaries at the behest of the Mold Pope to convert the indigenous bacterial cultures.
In case anyone actually cares about this issue, some good news: 227 migrants were rescued off the Canary Islands and 294 migrants were rescued off the coast of Italy yesterday/today.
One of the worst parts of current internet culture is that it makes good old fashioned complaining so difficult. I don’t wanna cancel anyone or bully anyone, I’m not trying to form a hate mob I’m not calling anyone out, i just wanna bitch about something. Because complaining is fun, good for you, even. Is that too much to ask? Where is the room for shooting the shit?
when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest
ALT
