May Sarton, "Of Grief", Selected Poems

One of my favorite D&D gags that I ever came up with is part of a oneshot I've run a few times where the party is hired by a young wizard to help clear out a few active security measures in a tower that the wizard inherited from her old teacher.

The first obstacle to be cleared is the re-animated skeletons that the old wizard was using for gardening help. It's a pretty straightforward fight, but during the encounter, players may notice one particular raised bed of herbs that is set back in a corner of the garden by itself.

Upon further investigation, this one raised bed is absolutely shining with magical protections. There are runes carved into the wood of the bed, gemstones inlaid in the top of it, this bed is absolutely protected out the ass... and an arcana check shows that the protections are all pointed inward, attempting to keep what's in there from getting out.

What's growing in that raised bed, you may ask? What is so dangerous that the old wizard felt the need to place all these protections?

Mint.

In this house, we don’t say “sorry”. We say, “have you eaten yet?” We say, “here, I brought you an orange; a mango; a bowl of lychees”.

Instead of, “I forgive you, I know you meant well,” we accept the fruit with soft eyes; compliment its sweetness, exclaim - “you always pick the best watermelon – how do you just know?” As though there really existed a secret knock you could rat against a rind; to hear its hollowness; to determine the composition of a perfect cantaloupe.

But, when the fruit is gone, or the treason too irresolvable, we apologise for each other: “you know he didn’t mean it.” Then, it is the flitting of remorseful eyes at the dinner table, from the guilty party, which provides non-verbal confirmation of the fact.

The walls of our pride are built so stubbornly high, sometimes I think it would take a homicide to climb them.

In this house, love is subtle not overt. That does not mean it is ever absent. From a young age, I learn to read between the lines. On balance, I think that is a good thing.

Now I know that not everybody communicates it in the same way.

I know that sometimes, love sounds like “I am proud of you”; like “I trust you to know what is right”; that it feels like a space to grow; a sandbox to practice falling over in. Other times, it sounds like chemistry lessons at the dining table; like giving up cigarettes; like a drive to the airport at 3am; or working, some nights, until dawn - to pay for your education, then getting up the following morning to make a packed lunch.

Sometimes love does not sound like “sorry” or “I love you”, when those things are too difficult to say.

Sometimes love is just silence and soft eyes. 

Sometimes love is a bowl of fruit.

 Sue Zhao // Bowl of Fruit

The excerpt paragraph made me look up and stare at my wife for three solid minutes waiting for them to return to the couch. I couldn’t move on with my life. I had to read it aloud to them to their audible disgust and then they read all the comments with unbridled delight.

Now we keep repeating “Like Zorro.”

you happen upon an ex-tumblr power poster who now lives on twitter. he is 30 (or nearing so), stripped of the eccentricities which illuminated his net presence when he was 19 but none of the grievances. he speaks of his hobbies, which remain unchanged from the previous decade, but with only dim enthusiasm- "was this series always this janky, or am I just noticing it now?" and so on. his vent tweets about work, relationships, friends and money punctuate his timeline in place of what would have been a joke or keen observation a decade ago. the world is confusing and frustrating to him now. things didn't work out like he thought they would. his way of living is calcifying and he worries he's losing the ability to see beyond himself. he comes close to reminiscing sometimes, about his youth, about old internet, about tumblr, before recoiling with embarrassment and disgust. and yet, with similar machinations to that of jungian enantiodromia, by attempting to live the inverse of his past, he becomes testament to it. a 30 year old man who navigates life as a 19 year old boy. he feels old, and seeing him makes you almost feel old too. but you know better. you can live forever. you can live forever if you keep posting on tumblr.

i loveeeeeee nonlinear storytelling. show me where we are. now show me how we got here. the end before the beginning. show me how it was inevitable or how many chances we had to change things(nothing was ever going to change). let's meet in the middle as all the puzzle pieces slide into place hell yeah that's the good shit.

Folding Napkins

I wash and fold about 12 napkins a week. Some of them are batik from Indonesia. My friends and I use them every Saturday when we get together for coffee and conversations. Folding these little scarlet and mocha-colored napkins lets me reminisce about my companions and look forward to next Saturday’s gathering. 

The other napkins I fold are faded and a little frayed, like me. I don’t mind. Over decades these soft squares of cotton have witnessed contentment, anxiety, fear, irritation, and love as they’ve pressed against our lips. 

So much in our world view demands excellence. One can be the best architect, the fastest swimmer, the most renowned surgeon. But folding linen is not on anyone’s 10 best list.

Anne Lamott writes, “Mother Teresa said no one can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love, and that is all we can do.”

One napkin at a time.

even if a girl putting up her long hair didn't also carry the Implication it's still one of the most crazyinsane fucking hot mundane little actions in the world watching her gather her hair back in her hands with a hair tie hanging out of her mouth and a few wispy little babyhairs clinging to her forehead and the sweat on the nape of her neck and her arms up and back with the pits showing and the gesture lifts her shirt up so you can see a little bit of her tummy and her fingers back there sightlessly pulling her ponytail together. i should get taken to the vet and put down

Women can write m/m. Men can write f/f. Asexuals can write filthy smut. Lesbians and gay men can write m/f. It's all arbitrary anyway. Who give a shit.

"Oh but they don't have an experience of-" I don't have any experience committing or solving murders either but that's still mostly what I read and write about.

An observation:

In Swansea, when you get on a bus, the driver will literally sit at that bus stop and block the traffic if need be to watch you, hawk-like, on the bus cameras as you make your way to a seat. This is normal service. We must all be seated before the bus takes off. Very occasionally they might start driving while you're still standing in front of your seat, having reached it but not quite sat down, and the sudden inertia makes you instantly hinge 90 degrees at the hips and collapse into the chair like a doll in Toy Story when a human enters. We all have a good laugh. "Quick off the mark, isn't he?" an old lady will say. "Not even sitting, you weren't!" she will cackle. This is high entertainment. Her week is made. Your forced seating is a rare treat, a moment of human connection. You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.

In Edinburgh, the bus drivers have never heard of the very concept of waiting until the passengers are seated. Half a picosecond after your card is tapped the bus driver punches a nitro injection button and stamps on the accelerator. You are instantly hurled to the back of the bus, where you are thinly laminated to the back window. Time unspools into the traffic behind you. A local tuts at you, because you should have known to hold the handrail. After several seconds you manage to unpeel yourself, only for the driver to slam on the brakes for the next stop, flinging you at speed through the windscreen and onto the road in front of the bus. Ashamed, you get up and re-board. It costs nothing extra, because Scottish public transport is cheap and convenient. The driver actually pauses, because a woman with a cane has boarded. You seize your chance. You try to run up the stairs to a seat before she sits and the bus moves again. You are out of luck - at the top step the driver spins out into oncoming traffic at 87 miles an hour from a standstill, and you tumble like a house of cards impacted by a bowling ball, thrown down from the Olympus of the upper deck that you, in your hubris, thought you could reach. You rattle around in the aisle like a discarded can. The woman with the cane laughs at you. Some children kick you towards the back. You lodge under a seat, and cling on until your stop like a terrestrial limpet.

You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.

I am of course in Edinburgh again at the minute and lads you'll never guess the experience I had today

So it looks like NaNoWriMo are happy to have AI as part of their community. Miss me with that bullshit. Generative artificial intelligence is an active threat to creativity and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in creative fields.

Please signal boost this so writers can make an informed choice about whether to continue to take part in such a community.

Here's the link to the article for those who wish to see it on their own browser
https://nanowrimo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI

As a former ML, it's worth noting that in the last few months, many regions have broken off and gone independent due to the amount of bullshit going on behind the scenes.

We've been fighting against the current management for a long time, and we've been ignored, shut down, and shut out. Even those who chose to stay on in the hope they could affect some kind of positive influence have been ghosted.

The latest effects of that was NaNo HQ deleting all the community messages which many of us had left our regions, in which we explained what was going on and left trails for people to follow to new communities.

So, if you still want to participate in a November Novelling challenge, please do look up your local region and see if they still exist under a new name! I know so many MLs who are going it alone, but there's a reason it all happened during the off-season, and it was so that HQ could intentionally ensure that they had time to get rid of us while no one was watching.

Even if your local region really has closed for good, there are many others who have opened their doors to the wider world. The name of NaNo might be over, but its spirit very much lives on, and we'd love to keep supporting you with your novelling adventures!

Very disappointed in this new bullshit AI news coming out of Nanowrimo. I didn’t know much about their previous forum drama and this has prompted me to go back and review it. While I do wish there was more evidence of that particular problem mod’s behavior (at least, I couldn’t find anything except other people summarizing the accusations), regardless Nanowrimo’s handling of it was terrible.

And now there’s the AI shit.

I have participated in Nano for a long, long time. It’s the only event I give money to yearly. Some years November is the only time I feel motivated to write at all because, well, I have to do Nano. It’s one of the only traditions I enjoy. But my feelings about AI have only grown stronger and the irony that a company pushing generative text is a sponsor for this event is not lost on me. The likely fact that their money is probably why Nano is so willing to embrace AI is beyond disappointing.

What is the point of Nanowrimo anymore? If you could generate a 50k word novel with AI, there is no challenge at all. It spits in the face of anyone passionate enough to participate earnestly in this challenge.

Nanowrimo was always based on the honor system, I get it. But I’d get annoyed when other writers at write-ins around me bent and sometimes broke the few rules of the challenge… I’d always think, what’s the point in participating in this if you’re just going to do that? And I look at this official statement about AI from Nano itself and I wonder again, why? What’s the point anymore? It’s no longer a challenge if it’s okay to generate a 50k word novel based on stolen work. Not only that, if you’re editing a “novel” you generated using AI, that doesn’t even qualify for the Nanowrimo event anymore. It’s writing, not editing.

I’m going to pull my info from previous years off the site so I can document it myself, and I’m deleting my account. There isn’t much more I can do to protest this. If I don’t lose my desire to write this November then I’ll keep doing my own thing, but I’ll be fucking damned if I do it while promoting this shitstain organization.

It's fun reading writers who clearly grew up in suburban/urban environments as someone who grew up on a farm because they're always like "oh it was so creepy, woods at night, eerily breathtaking, something was living in there..." and it's like yeah that'll be the deer.

EXACTLY

Same can be said about city streets. Random "gunshot" and "explosion" noises? That's the road construction crew behind the corner. Mysterious howling and barking out of nowhere echoing through the street? That's someone's dumb dog that locked itself out on the balcony on the 3rd floor above you and buildings just happen to have the shape where certain areas just vibrate with echoes from all sides at once. Screeching of car tires and agressive shouting? Fucking teens are at it again.

But the city is the creepiest when it's silent because if there are no cars and no chitchat and no humm of an A/C unit, then where is everybody?

Meanwhile in a rural area if you hear a gunshot that's actually a gunshot

It's nothing to worry about though, unless you hear a long, screaming NYOOM accompanying it. The Looney Tunes sound effect for flying bullets is legitimately almost what bullets flying past your head actually sounds like.

do you think my existing gut bacteria and the yoghurt bacteria are friends or do you think they wage a war with billions of casualties on each side until the total population number returns to roughly what it was prior to the yoghurt bacteria's introduction and then a gut bacterium and a yoghurt bacterium on the front lines fall in love and through the power of their love stop the war and then all the yoghurt bacteria marry into gut bacteria families but forget their heritage as yoghurt bacteria and start thinking of themselves as gut bacteria and forget the horrors of the war and then it happens all over again when i eat another yoghurt

hello! due to the fact that the main species of bacteria used to ferment milk into yoghurt are not the same as the ones most commonly found in the human gut microbiome and nutrition/resources are limited even in the human gastrointestinal tract, bacterial war will most likely occur, although it's possible that in cases where additional/unusual species have been used to ferment the milk, a species from the yoghurt may already be present in your gut or may be able to survive in a previously unoccupied niche in your gut microbiome.

ALT

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”

The whole piece is short and worth a read.

I'm starting a collection

and another

maybe a cliche, but the single best thing i ever did for my writing was realize i could give myself permission to write a terrible first draft. the first draft's job is not to be good; it is to exist. that is all it has to do. once it exists, you will probably need to try to make it good, but that is very much step two or three.

i used to literally message a friend and ask permission to just write something shitty. they would say "yeah sure" and then i would fill a few pages with the wrong words, read them, try to analyze why they were the wrong words, and attempt to replace them with the right words. i would do this until i was comfortable showing it to another person, and then i would ask them to point out the places where it was still shitty, and fix it again. the only part of my process that's changed is that now i just give myself the permission instead.

i don't often give writing advice because there is almost no aspect of it that i really feel like i've mastered. i've gotten basically everything wrong at some point, and frankly, odds are real good that i'll do it again. writing for me is a constant cycle of trying stuff, failing, sometimes failing badly, and then working on a fix. if you've ever liked something i've written, what you're enjoying is probably several layers of revision removed from my initial attempt, which was almost certainly much worse.

"write it badly" changed my life.

speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

YOU GET IT

@deepfriedanon me, after reading your tags:

Originally posted by mynameispainn

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.

ALT

But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me

romantic lover

Middle-aged magical girl.

She's been defending the Earth since the early 90s and she's very tired.

My name is Tominaga Haruka. I was chosen by a magical talking animal, and for the last 29 years I've been Earth's one and only... Wonder-Sparkle Princess.

she's been fighting the same villains for three decades and they are also tired of it. Most of them aren't giving it their all.
Half of them are in a groupchat they've added her to where they schedule their evil plans to make sure they don't interfere with each other, or more importantly, with *her*

Xalkrax the space demon from outer space decided to attack the city when she was taking her vacation time once, and now he's dead, because even the power of friendship and redemption can't save you if you interrupt her rare vacations

Demon Queen Eluria: Gonna fill the city people's hearts with hatred on thursday to cause mayhem and discord.

Wonder-Sparkle Princess: Can't, got a PTA meeting.

Demon Queen Eluria: Friday?

Wonder-Sparkle Princess: A birthday party.

Demon Queen Eluria: Damn. How about I fill just the mayor's heart with hatred then?

Wonder-Sparkle Princess: That'd be redundant, lol. Maybe fill his heart with a desire to fix the fucking potholes?!

Demon Queen Eluria: LMFAO love you, bitch. Stay strong.

Wonder-Sparkle Princess: You too, gurl. How's the husband? Still dead?

Demon Queen Eluria: Yep. Thanks for that, btw.

Wonder-Sparkle Princess: Don't mess with my time off :p

Why are people tagging this '#wonder sparkle princess' like that's a thing and not a name I made up exclusively for this post?

Congratulations on inventing a new tumblr deity!!

She isn't 29 years old. She's been a magical girl for 29 years. If she started at 14 (typical magical girl protagonist age) then she'd be 43.

I think it'd be funny to have a character who keeps trying to break the fourth wall and failing

Dude's like "we can't do that, we don't have the budget this episode" but he's in a novel

Something stupid happens and he tries to stare directly into camera but he's fully looking the wrong way

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

it is well established canon that my response to nearly any outlandish behavior that has impacted my day is to write the perpetrator a polite but firm letter

the letter i composed today and am about to drop off is perhaps less polite than I am typically capable of

reporting in to announce it worked

(tweet 1) (tweet 2) (article)

slapping modeling clay around blindly without thought or purpose, i look down and find a perfectly sculpted replica of myself seated at a table with a lump of modeling clay before me, similarly shaped into a still smaller instance of the same scene. and i am afraid to look up

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

• Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.
• You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.
• When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.
• A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)
• Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)
• The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.
• Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.
• Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.

As someone who spent over a decade catering luxury events, let me add some back of house info:

• These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.
• If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.
• There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.
• A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.
• Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.
• A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.
• Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.
• Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.
• Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.
• These are very long and physically demanding nights for anyone working them. The staff all get to know each other, and will absolutely notice someone trying to sneak in wearing a borrowed uniform. They are not being paid enough to care.

the year was Two Thousand and twenty-four. I took a puff of my Electronic-Cigarette, inhaling the vapours. my mobile terminal buzzed in my pocket, a flat slab of microchips and glossy touchscreen. I ignored it....... probably another Electronic-Mail

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

Also you have a job now and the never-ending bullshit that is laundry and dishes and feeding yourself.

big believer that writing doesn't always have to be writing. sometimes writing is going for a walk. sometimes writing is rehearsing your characters' dialogue in the shower. sometimes writing is putting a song on loop and staring at the carpet. sometimes you need to hang out with your story instead of writing it

the ache of nostalgia

media: the very serious brooding asshole character is actually super deep and complex

me: ok

media: the dumb joke character is actually super deep and complex

me: ghhogoohhh. ohhhh oh mygod. oh m. oh. are you kidding me. oh i am going to throw the fuck up over this

"Listen," one guard said, "I know we have only just met-"

"No," the other guard said, "we've worked together for years!"

"-but you can trust me when I say-"

"I can't, you have the curse that's opposite from mine!"

"I don't care for you at all."

"Well, I… oh… I love you too."

New superhero: Crime Man.

He stops crimes exclusively by comitting crimes. He out-crimes the criminals.

The Punisher does this and the crime is murder

The Punisher doesn’t stop crime, he punishes criminals. Big difference. Crime Man is more proactive than that.

So what you really mean is like. A totalitarian government that profiles people and arrests them before they commit crimes (which is a crime)

No, it’s more like stopping a credit fraud from happening by comitting arson.

*A mugger threatening me with a knife* Give me your money!

*Crimeman appearing from the darkness with a bigger knife* NO CRIMINAL! You give me YOUR money!

I love the efforts to get deeply analytical and political but op just shuts them down with no crime man does CRIME

BUT BETTER

He finds out someone’s planning to rob the bank so he robs it first so there isn’t any money left when they get there. 

Armed robbery? Hold their family hostage until they deliver their guns in an unmarked bag behind a gas station

• shirt and pants with horizontal black and white stripes
  
• A black domino mask
  
• A dark grey wool hat
  
• a big sack with a dollar sign on it where he stores his gadgets
  
• a yellow sash reading “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS”

I drew fanart

did I get it right?

Now that’s a hero if I’ve ever seen one.

Check out this amazing Crime Man comic by @micaxiii

You do the crime, you get the crime.

The plan is working!

HE LOOKS LIKE THE QUOTE ‘Be Gay Do Crimes”

He is gay, and does crimes.

Crime Man strikes again

I like Crime man

And Crime Man likes you too

¿ what are his Powers?

Resourcefulness, audacity, and a sense of humor.

Crime Man is up on AO3!

Updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Don’t forget to leave a Kudos and a helpful comment!

The first three chapters are now up, and with them the first arc of Crime Man’s and Christine’s story. 

Thank you so much to everyone who read and left a comment, it means so much to me, you don’t even know. It’s been my dream to be a creator and inspire a fandom around my work for over 10 years now, I dreamed of being a writer for even longer. And thanks to all of you, it’s finally happening.

Like I said, there’ll be updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday for as long as I can keep up with them. For now all of the chapters will be uploaded to AO3, but sometime in the future I might move them to my personal website. I’ll let you all know when that happens.

And once again, thank you :)

hold on a second man…

@insect-p0sitivity tags peer approved

Cops vs. Poets

I dont reblog generally but wanted to draw attention to what a fabulously original blog oldshowbiz is.

If you are into this sort of thing, you won't see things you've seen before

Write a horror story in the format of an Internet search history

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I’m so sorry but in the nicest way possible do yall actually read books or just read words??? Cause I’ve been seeing that trend of people not understanding how “snarled” and “eyes darkened” and “eyes softened” etc. was used in a book and like…

Genuinely, do yall just not have imagination?? Or not understand figurative language??? Also eyes do literally darken and soften have you not lived a life??? How do you read with no imagination? Is this how you get through so many books in one month - you simply don’t take the time the understand the words as they are read?

I have been so confused by this discourse. I gobbled up the 90s fantasy doorstoppers and these sorts of expressions were such mainstays that they've never tripped me up.

I remember a reader was annoyed by my use of the phrase "the column of her throat" once and I suddenly realised not everyone reads copious amounts of fanfic or historical romance growing up, either. I always loved that phrase: "column of [her/his/their] throat." It makes you imagine marble smoothness. Annoying if overused, sure, but a well-placed one is evocative.

They're simply shorthand for various creative expressions or nice images. Darkened: dangerous or horny. Softened: fondness, vulnerability. Snarled: animalistic anger (v. useful if you're writing a dragon character in human form). Writers need to have physical reactions and emotional beats for rhythm, pace, and flow, no? If you say the emotions too straightforwardly, the writer gets dinged for "telling, not showing."

Maybe a higher percentage of the population than I thought has aphantasia? Or have reading tastes really changed that much in the last few years?

I love, love, LOVE animalistic verbs for speech, because it conveys so much in such a short space. "Purr" is soothing, confident, sensual. "Bleat" is pleading and pathetic. "Bark" is sharp and direct. "Roar," "snarl," and "hiss" all convey anger and danger, but with very different overtones. They're succinct but tell us so much about tone and mood.

If you want your prose to read like a government report, with unalloyed recitations of facts, you do you. But playing in the sandbox of idiomatic language is so much more fun.

ALT

After coming down with a mysterious illness, Gary is at the end of his rope. His brain is fried and he can barely function, but after a conversation with his doctor, Gary learns the terrible truth: it’s just not healthy to stay up for ten days scrolling through social media posts on your phone.

Gary’s doctor orders him to get some sleep, but it appears this action plan is easier said than done. Now, Gary is in a bedtime standoff with Kogan, the physical manifestation of his obsessive scrolling, and the results of this conflict could be life or death.

Fortunately, these two find a positive way to work out their differences… with a hardcore gay encounter!

----

please enjoy new tingler POUNDED BY MY OBSESSIVE NEED TO ENDLESSLY SCROLL THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS BEFORE BED INSTEAD OF GETTING A HEALTHY AMOUNT OF SLEEP out now on amazon or true buckaroo tier patreon

when you feel called out by the latest tingler

suddenly remembered this poem as i was making breakfast this morning & frantically googled “poem remembered to buy eggs?????????” & somehow managed to find it & it utterly knocked the wind out of me just as much as when i first read it

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

This is a friendly reminder to never, ever publish your book with a publishing company that charges you to publish with them. That is a vanity press, which makes money by preying on authors. They charge you for editing, formatting, cover art, and more. With most of these companies, you will never seen a cent of any royalties made from sale of your book. A legitimate publishing company only makes money when you make money, they will never charge you to publish with them. If a company approaches you and says "Hey, we'll publish your book, just pay us X amount of money," tell them to go fuck themself and block them.

Remember, kids: money should only ever flow FROM your publisher TO you.

Here's a very well-maintained resource by the SFWA (Science-Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association) that lists contests/editors/small presses/etc. with predatory behaviours:

Go forth and publish safely!

@selenite0 has a full presentation about shady publishing contracts, this might be something to add to that

This.

It's been a little while since I pointed this out.

tbt the time they had to remove our telephone pole and it ascended to heaven