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Stuff I find entertaining

@blahonbroadway

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thestarminstrel

people in fanfiction are so good at identifying v specific smells. I literally struggle to identify vanilla when I’m sniffing a candle labelled “VANILLA” how are these kids getting woodsmoke, rain, mint, and a whiff of byronic despair from a fuckin tshirt

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archwrites

Once I read a fic where they were like “he tasted like” and I’m expecting the typical formula (1 cooking ingredient + 1 natural phenomenon + “something uniquely [character name]”) but instead they said “he tasted like mouth” and it was one of the greatest fic moments of my life

click and drag to find out what your shitty fanfiction kiss tastes like

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nerdgul

*if ur on moble screenshot it

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driftingglass

This. Is. The funniest thing. I’ve seen. In days. Always reblog. Always reblog. Oh my gooood.

Oh and I got Cherries, Thunder and Ambition from screenshotting this.

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venn364

Coffee, a hurricane and warmth…

So somewhere in the tropics I guess

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mandosmistress
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buttercup--bee
blahonbroadway
owl-fruit
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cipheramnesia

I bet if a mushroom could lap water out of your hand with a tongue that a gently drinking mushroom tongue on your hand would be the softest and gentlest thing.

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saint-batrick

jesus christ, i experienced brief but severe grief over not actually being able to experience this.

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cipheramnesia

I think it would feel like a lizard tongue but I've never had a lizard drink out of my hand either, and thus the whole thing remains conceptually elusive.

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leneueee

this put such a vivid image in my head i needed to make it real as soon as i got home

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cipheramnesia

This makes me indescribably overjoyed.

blahonbroadway
pseudophan
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pseudophan

someone on r/norge just said "the most memorable part of loreen's song was the panini press she performed it in" and im crying thats so real

blahonbroadway
litners-lending-library
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headspace-hotel

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

  • basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
  • like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
  • here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
  • TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
  • Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
  • all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
  • I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
  • But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
  • In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
  • On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
  • like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
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headspace-hotel

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

blahonbroadway
that-house

collecting kpop tweets that make me fucking cry

blahonbroadway
applesandbannas747
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randomgooberness

Whole-heartedly BEGGING writers to unlearn everything schools taught you about how long a paragraph is. If theres a new subject, INCLUDING ACTIONS, theres a new paragraph. A paragraph can be a single word too btw stop making things unreadable

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randomgooberness

Ok So I’m getting more notes than I thought quicker than I expected! So I’m gonna elaborate bc I want to. 

I get it, when you’re someone who writes a lot and talks a lot, it’s hard to keep things readable, but it’s not as much about cutting out the fat(that can be a problem) so much as a formatting issue. 

You are also actively NERFING yourself by not formatting it correctly, it can make impactful scenes feel so, so much better. Compare this, 

To THIS. 

Easier to read, and hits harder. 

No more over-saturated paragraphs. Space things out.

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randomgooberness

@s1ld3n4f1l​ WAIT WAIT WAIT SO TRUE LITERALLY LITERALLY 

blahonbroadway
thestarminstrel
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meladoodle

my friend angella was doing a comedy gig, and as soon as she came out a guy shouted ‘can i give you my number?’ and all the crowd groaned cause it was so inappropriate but angella was like ‘yeah sure’. the guy started shouting out his number and she started entering it into her phone. the whole crowd was like woaaah. she got the whole number and then dialled it and it rang. everyone lost their shit. finally the guy answered and angella just said “hello? shut the fuck up” and it was the most incredible thing i’ve ever seen 

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alexalexalexalex

So some of these details are probably wrong, it happened a long time ago so I don’t remember the specifics leading up, but it was incredible. A friend of mine who does stand up was doing his bit at open mic one night, and a guy was heckling him. Just being a total asshole, and then his phone rang and he started talking loudly on his phone about how he’s at open mic and this guy isn’t funny, etc. Now the weird thing about hecklers is that they just want to be a part of something most of the time, so my friend said, “hey man, what’s your name? Can I see your phone for a second?”

The guy actually handed over his phone, and my friend hung up, and scrolled through his contact list until he found the person he was looking for. He hit dial, and starts.

“Hello? Is this [Name’s] mom? Great! It’s very nice to talk to you. I’m a comedian in the middle of my standup routine, and your son is being very rude, [lists off some of the things her son said]…. hold on, can I get you to repeat that?”

He takes the phone away, puts it in speakerphone and holds it up to the mic.

“I said, I’m sorry my son is being such an asshole.”

Everyone lost it. Fuckin’ destroyed by his own mother. My friend said it was one of his proudest moments ever.