Writer Issues

Writers Corner for more writing memes.

A popular thing that’s been out forever: *exists*

Me entering the fandom 5 years late:

Oh my God my vandalism has escaped containment

Achievement Unlocked:

American Flandal

Sweet, sweet mischief

i must not afternoon nap. afternoon nap is the mind-killer. afternoon nap is the little death that brings total obliteration. i will face my afternoon sleepy tired and permit it to pass over and through me. and when it has gone i will turn the inner eye to see its path. where the afternoon sleepy tired has gone there will be nothing. only i will remain

I MUST NOT AFTERNOON NAP. AFTERNOON NAP IS THE MIND KILLER

This doesn’t include the best bit of the whole thing - she found the Twitter thread!

good lord

YEAH I GOT NOTHING

i don’t understand a single sentence in this and i’m ok with that

I haven’t stopped saying “it’s called quantum jumping, babe”

I would genuinely like to know who to blame for making these children so disconnected from the concept of imagination that they think the simpler explanation for what they’re doing is that they’re projecting their consciousness into one of infinite realities where fictional characters are real.

topical :/

WHY IS IT TOPICAL

Me shouting at my rash ointment

great post everyone

He's here...

Happy 1st birthday George.....

Sweet Adeline-singing motherfucker

What the fuck happened to the rest of his barbershop quartet

presumably the killer whales got to them

My stage career began when I was a little under two months old, when I took the spotlight as Baby Jesus in a Christmas pageant. I’m told that I did a wonderful job and slept calmly through the whole thing, which can only speak to my talents as an actress, because I was 1. the wrong gender 2. a colicky screaming demon of a baby and 3. about as far from divine as it’s possible for an allegedly-human child to be. 

I continued to be actively involved in theater as a kid (and frequently played roles of various small animals, because I was tiny for my age). Around the age of ten, I was cast as the lead character in a musical about cowboys that I no longer remember the name of. It was my first real lead role, and I took it very, very seriously. And because I am myself, that means I maaaaybe went…a little overboard.

My character’s introduction was early in the play, accompanied by the crack of a bullwhip. This was more-or-less pre internet (or, at least, our director was not tech-savvy enough to find sound effects online) and we didn’t have a sound effect track for that noise. There were plans to acquire the appropriate sound effect before opening night, but I rapidly tired of making my entrance during rehearsals to the sound of someone yelling “BULLWHIP NOISE!”

This, I thought to myself, is a problem I can solve.

I learned early in life that it’s good to be friends with people who have skills; they always come in handy eventually.  After rehearsals one day, I put on my cowboy boots and biked a couple miles over to my friend Grace’s house. I went down to their basement and knocked on her older brother’s door.

“Hello,” I said. “I need to learn how to use a bullwhip.”

“….Okay,” he said. It did not seem to occur to him that he might ask further questions about why I, a tiny horrible munchkin composed exclusively of rage and pointy elbows, needed to be weaponized any further. Clearly, I had come to the right person.

My friend’s older brother would have been an SCA nerd, if SCA was a thing where we were. Instead, he was one of those unsupervised 4H kids with weird hobbies, largely oriented around ancient forms of combat. He was somewhere in his late teens at this time, and he liked to make stuff. It was an urge I, even at age ten, could sympathize with. His name was Aron. 

Aron got out his bullwhip (which I had noticed hanging on his wall on a prior visit, and had filed away mentally under a for future use tab) and we went to the backyard. 

“Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron began, “Swinging the bullwhip.” 

We rapidly discovered that since I was god’s tiniest, angriest creation, a full-size bullwhip was way too long for me to use. Aron’s shins suffered for my attempt. 

“…Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron said, “Making a bullwhip.”

So we went back inside, found a tanned cowhide (that he just…had? I don’t remember if there was a reason for this.) and some razor blades, and I learned how to cut and braid a bullwhip. It took a few tries, and I wound up coming back for a while, because I kept getting frustrated with the bullwhip-braiding process and Aron kept distracting me with bait like: “Hey kid, wanna learn to make some chainmail?” and “Hey kid, wanna fletch some arrows?” and “Hey kid, wanna try doing horseback archery?”

Obviously the answer to these questions was “BOY, WOULD I EVER!” Some delays are necessary to the artistic process.

(At one point my mom asked me “Hellen, what are you doing over at Grace’s house all the time?” And I, perfectly innocent, said, “Making weapons!” and my mother, who never understood why I was like this, but accepted that a girl has needs and those needs occasionally involve stocking a personal armory, said “Okay! Have fun!”)

Soon, the bullwhip, size extra small, was finished. The lessons on actual bullwhip use commenced. 

It should be noted that Aron was self-taught, and really had no idea what to do, so this was mostly an exercise in the two of us standing twenty feet apart and flailing wildly with our respective whips until snapping noises happened. And then we figured out what we’d done to make the snapping noises. And then we kept doing that. Extremely vigorously. So vigorously that at one point one of the bullwhips launched into the air and caught on a tree branch and we hand to drag the trampoline over so Aron could bounce me high enough to grab it. But we persisted!

Eventually we reached a point where we could line up pop cans on a fence rail and hit them off three times out of five.

Feeling extremely accomplished and like I finally understood method acting, I packed my bullwhip into my backpack for the next play rehearsal. Soon enough, it was time for me to make my entrance. 

I leaped on stage in my cowboy boots and cracked the bullwhip as hard as I could, immediately launching into the song despite the fact that the sound of five feet of braided leather breaking sound barrier had startled the accompanist so badly she’d keysmashed on the piano.

The director shouted something she probably shouldn’t have shouted in a room full of small children, and then demanded, “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT!”

“I made it!” I declared proudly. “I’m a cowgirl! I can make my own bullwhip noise!”

“You…made it?” 

“Yes! Because we needed a bullwhip sound effect. And bullwhips are where bullwhip sound effects come from!”

This was, of course, impeccable logic.

It is apparently difficult to argue with a gleeful ten year old who happens to be armed with a bullwhip longer than she is tall. After some negotiation, the director agreed that I could use my bullwhip for my opening song, provided that I didn’t pop it while anyone was anywhere near me on stage and I didn’t let anyone else play with it. These terms were acceptable to me. 

Somehow, no one was injured and the play went off without a hitch. We can only chalk up these things to the magic of the theatre. 

Nearly a decade later, an unsuspecting college classmate asked me, “Hellen, wanna take a class on bullwhip combat with me?”

And obviously I answered, “BOY, WOULD I EVER!”

I don’t get the current standing in fandom where only character’s who’ve had numerous amounts of interactions in canon can be shipped together.

Have you people never looked at two character’s who’ve never interacted and thought “man I wish they’d interact because I bet they would have an interesting dynamic and be entertaining together” and then gone off and written an entire 25 chapter fanfic about that?

Why do you people not know the joy of throwing two characters together in a situation and seeing what happens?

I just think your tags are too important to be lost

For those of you that are wondering, please have one of the fiest pieces of radio comedy ever:

the first time i watched this i laughed so hard i nearly puked

THIRD BASE

Since I was 8 and found out about this for the first time my family has always followed up on someone saying “I don’t know,” with shouting “THIRD BASE”

Wow there’s some fucking bullshit going on in the replies here. Moderate your fucking spaces on the internet, kick racists and other bad actors to the kerb or you risk losing everyone else. This guy has the right of it (scroll up to top).

Quit thinking you need to be fair to unfair voices

For anyone who can’t/won’t read that twitter thread, it’s by Michael B. Tager (@IamRageSparkle) and it says: 

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.” And i was like, ohok and he continues.

“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.” And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

[ID: Screenshot of a tweet from @/AmazonChique that reads ‘Pathfinder FB fan group banned all racist members. The next week, they saw a drop in harassing & threatening posts of ALL kinds. From the mod: “I encourage every community to quit thinking you need to be fair to unfair voices. Get the rot out and you’ll have a healthier community” End ID]

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty And peace treaties are not unilateral. They have obligations running in both directions.

You are not bound to tolerate people who have a stated intent to not tolerate you. Nor should you tolerate people who have a stated intent to not tolerate people who are tolerating you.

Thank you for sharing this everyone, for image IDing and all of it, thank you.

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty

the gimmick blogs are like tumblr’s rogue gallery. yes we’ve got some heroes, yes we’ve got some villains, but more importantly if you look over here you will see some freak who devotes all their time to counting the number of “t’s” in a post

T Count: 15

Letter Count: 198

Your T Percentage: 7.58%

Average T Percentage: 6.95%

You used the letter T 1.09 times as much as average!

YOU EXIST???

Sometimes you create a guy and it turns out they already exist

Sometimes that guy has skills beyond your comprehension @identifying-cars-in-posts

1993-1997 Mazda 626

Everyone seemed to really need/appreciate this last time I did it so I'm doing it again:

this is a post about being right about capitalism. would that, if it were true, make him not right about capitalism

but also uh.

The "Marx hated Jews" thing comes from the fact that he wrote an essay titled "On The Jewish Question."

That phrasing raises alarm bells because we associate the term "The Jewish Question" with Nazis, but it was just the way issues like this were phrased within these philosophical circles. And honestly even beyond that it's more of a translation convention than anything else. You could just as easily have translated that title as "Regarding the Matter of Jews."

The essay is actually a response to another philosopher named Bauer, who claimed that Jews would only be liberated if they stopped being Jewish, because true emancipation requires secularism. The essays Marx is responding to are blatantly antisemitic, even by late-19th century standards. Bauer was arguing that Jews who wanted liberation from oppression were basically asking for "special privileges," (in an argument that bears some similarity to modern concepts of "reverse racism") and implying that Jews aren't even oppressed because they control the economy.

Marx's "On The Jewish Question" is basically him saying Bauer is dumb and wrong and antisemitic, and he's being deeply sarcastic for most of the essay.

He does so by throwing Bauer's antisemitism back in his face, by using a series of antisemitic arguments about how the real religion of the Jew is money and huckstering, and so if you want to abolish Judaism, you'd have to abolish economic exploitation. He's responding directly to Bauer's use of antisemitic tropes about how Jews control the economy. He's using Bauer's own antisemitic framework to prove Bauer wrong.

This also goes back to the conflict between Marx and the rest of the Young Hegelians (which Bauer was). He was constantly criticizing them for being too idealistic and abstract, rather than focusing on material realities. His argument here was "You're framing 'the Jewish Question' as if it's a theological problem, but it's not. It's a political and economic one." Because he was Karl Marx and that was his whole thing.

I really don't understand how anyone reads this essay as anything but sarcasm. I get that some of it is probably lost in translation, but the context makes it really clear that Marx is making fun of Bauer. The idea of Jews giving up their religion would have been deeply personal to Marx. He would have understood exactly what it meant for Jews to give up their religion, and how that was an act of oppression rather than liberation from it. Also, Marx and Bauer had already split by the time this essay was written, and they kind of hated each other. Marx wrote a lot of responses to/criticisms of Bauer, and he called Bauer a "right wing fanatic" multiple times.

Like, what's actually more likely here?

Option 1: Karl Marx, a Jewish man, wrote one essay that is totally at odds with all his other analysis on the nature of oppression to be rabidly antisemitic and then basically never discussed the subject again?

Option 2: Karl Marx, a Jewish man and a well-known lover of pettiness and drama, wrote an incredibly sarcastic essay making fun of a raging antisemite that he already he didn't like?

I like this addition. Funny how capitalism, antisemitism and right to exist just hasn’t changed in the last 200 years since this German economist’s time.

i dont understand this at all and america scares the fuck out of me

This is the america they don’t want you to see

i love america

This is what you call Waffle House at 2 am when the bars close and everyone is drunk and hungry

*group of people having fun* this site: wtf this is so scary

People having safe fun at a waffle house is scary for most Tumblr bloggers, reports say.

Some context for those not familiar with Waffle House Culture: 

We’re not even gonna mention FEMA’s Waffle House Index where they determine how bad a natural disaster is by calling the local Waffle House to see if they’re open?

that last bit isn’t a joke

secret identities are safe because everyone in gotham/bludhaven is dr doof levels of face blind

what th

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO find this again for THREE YEARS but once Free! came out I couldn’t google ANIME SWIMMING CLIP ANYMORE

This is such a god damn amazing piece of animation

the hilarious pettiness this implies. ganon is personally putting dirty dishes into YOUR sink

In Bed, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893

get that intellectual shit outta here this is DONALD AND DOG (2019)

Donald and Dog, me, 2019