entering my alcoholic era next week
Did you know that AO3 allows fics with homicide in them? There’s a whole tag for Major Character Death and even more tags so you can find exactly what kind of character death you want to read.
Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people.
Anyone can read the stories on AO3! Kids can read them! They’re getting exposed to stabbing, poisoning, even guns! And they’re writing the heroes doing the killing, too! That’s basically telling kids it’s okay to go out and murder their families. It’s promoting violence and encouraging homicide and if we don’t do something about it soon, you’ll be murdered next!
The devil came to my house and tried to burn it down, which is why this post exists in the first place.
I saw Goody OP writing darkfic with the devil.
For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I'm seeing more people saying "on accident" instead of "by accident." I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of "on accident" being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of "on accident" is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of "by accident." I like to call this prepositional shift.
Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt "strongly" or "very strongly" that "on accident" was wrong in all cases, and that "by accident" was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling "ambivalent" or "less strongly" about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.
When presented with options for the definitions of "by" and "on," we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas "on" has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either "by accident" or "on accident" is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as "sounding correct."
The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition "on purpose." While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of "on accident," they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase "by purpose." So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition "on."
Whether this means that the particular usage of "by" is becoming archaic or the definition of "on" is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of "on accident" versus "by accident" to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.
So now I'm curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):
How do you feel about the use of "on accident"?
It's grammatically wrong, and possibly also cursed. I will die on this hill.
It might be right sometimes. I'd have to hear it.
Meh. Why do we care about this?
It's fine. ON accident, BY accident. Both are okay!
...what is this BY accident thing? You don't do things BY purpose!
what do y'all exclude when searching for your dsmp blorbo on ao3 because i have to exclude like so many different things just to make the tag tolerable to navigate
to make the connoreatspants tag actually browsable i have to exclude dnf, tommy-centric, sbi-centric, dsmp ensemble-centric, vigilantism, age regression, dream is connor's parent. and then exclude rpf by searching in results for '"dream smp" OR "smplive"'
which is ridiculous and also is still a pain to navigate it's just 10 times less awful than it was before
their pronouns are she/her!
I’ve been catching up with qsmp lore lately. Some of my thoughts so far
Remember when Phil shot fireworks on Techno's birthday on the dsmp and Techno couldn't see any of it because he forgot he had particles turned off but he still awkwardly cheered along with Niki 🤣 why is he such a mood
that was literally one of my favorite techno moments ever. he just always wanted to make his friends feel appreciated and welcomed and heard! phil set off fireworks for his birthday and he didn’t want phil to feel bad so he just went along with it.
and i loved that he turned the whole forgetting to turn on particles into ‘my character forgot his glasses’. techno was always so good at taking anything off the cuff or bloopers and turning it into a fun bit of canon and lore for his character.
that’s why he was genuinely one of the best content creators and one of the best role-players on the server, probably the best.










lifeamongtheamazons




