David and Ben Crystal, a linguist father/actor son team in Britain, analyzed everything Shakespeare wrote for "okay this is clearly supposed to rhyme" and such and then reverse-engineered an "Original Pronunciation" dialect from there; it sounds suuuper mish-moshy Irish-Appalachian-Pirate-American-British and not like any one thing at all. What I love about it though is that they're always really clear that they definitely do NOT claim that OP is what everyone in Elizabethan London actually sounded like; it's just what they figured out is the best accent to perform this particular canon in for maximum original punnage/rhyming/dick jokes. I got to meet Ben a couple years ago and he said if they had picked a different playwright from the same period (unlikely, since Ben at least is the single most passionately single-minded adorable darling Shakespeare theater nerd ever) but if they had, they would probably have ended up with a different sound. WE CANNOT TRULY KNOW THE PAST *woowoo spirit arms*

I have a persistent mental image of the "Creative Community" as a tribe of Early Humans all huddled together on a windswept tundra, selflessly opening our own veins and feeding each other with our life's blood as we all slowly turn into frozen husks. We gotta make some spears and figure out how to use our wonderful sisterly bond to take down one of them Megatheria, you guys!

Oh man, this is so sad. My beloved theatre company that i founded in 2012 is taking a "hiatus" after our current show for very similar reasons to Mallory and Nicole's for stopping doing The Toast-- we're all burned out from working way too hard for not enough money doing everything ourselves, one of us is leaving for Life Reasons, and we just... don't have the energy to take on her work ourselves, and can't imagine persuading the five or six other people it would take to make things run in a humane way for any of us to sign up for this kind of insanity. Our world is just not set up with infrastructure that supports these kinds of endeavors, and it breaks my heart. You take a leap and create something that is amazing and people love it, but if it requires a lot more work to maintain than the revenue it generates, sooner or later you can't keep sustaining it on caffeine and passion alone-- everyone has to eat, for one thing, so you've got your other jobs, but the real problem is that eventually you need your caffeine and passion for something else, like your family, or grad school, or your novel, and as soon as you take that away the thing dies, because that's all it has to eat since you can't afford to feed it actual money and labor. Ugh, it's so sad.

My mom was not big into the forbidding thing (she saw me reading Clan of the Cave-- no, it was Island of the Horses, I found it at the cabin we stayed at one summer-- anyway, she went "Doesn't that have sex in it?" and when I widened my eight-year-old eyes and said "I just skip those parts," she said "Huh ok" and let me get on with it) but she did forbid me, in middle school, to read The Mists of Avalon, not because of the sex but because it was "too sad." So I kept her copy under my pillow in my room, and the school library copy in my desk at school, and managed to slog through the whole damn thing in secret because I had a decoy book to read in the car. Apparently "this book was personally triggering for me for some reason" is more of a reason to censor your child's reading than "this book is at least 40% actual porn and my child has literally not turned nine yet."

A-fucking-greed. The pro- or anti-romper question is and will always will be utterly academic for me, since there will never, ever exist a romper that would not be ALL up in my coochie-snorcher.

"Alexander is quoted as observing, from what he had seen underwater, that "...the world is damned and lost." " Bahahahaha damn right, stay out of the ocean if you want to sleep at night Alex