Title: NETLine!
Genre:
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Virtual, Action, Young Adult
Setting:
actually my main man solomon is correct — the point of life is to be kind and curious and creative and discerning and weird above all to love god + love people.
can you hear me weeping in the corner
WARM AS THE JOY THAT SHIPWRECKED SAILORS FEEL WHEN THEY CATCH SIGHT OF LAND
nobody gets me like they get me
What I know, 7x7=49 is Yellow, 5x5=25 is blue, 6x6=36 is orange/green
"Tumblr isn't like other social media websites" That's because it's a blogging platform. We used to have lots of those.
I've made a home for myself on Tumblr because Tumblr feels like a last fading echo of back when the Internet used to be good
So I just started my short story writing class! These are dialogue tips
reference later
These are good tips.
Notice they are not labeled “rules.” For instance, I would have to take issue with #3 if it was a “rule.” There are times, especially in media like film or podcast, where dialogue is the best way to slip a morsel of exposition in and still feel authentic. Instead of a paragraph long explanation of something, sometimes a character may just ask “Why?” and another answer “Because reasons.” Voila, a little exposition in an easy to swallow capsule. Just don’t do it often.
Likewise, #5 sounds too strict until you get to #6. There is a definite time and a place for adverbs and modifiers, but 5 & 6 are there to help you balance show vs tell. “Said” tells us a character spoke. “Using an action” shows us how that character felt while speaking. Both are necessary. Adverbs and modifiers are the quickest shortcut between the two, but in a good narrative readers don’t want shortcuts we want immersion and character building. So keep your shortcuts handy, but don’t cut corners on storytelling.
i just saw a tiktok (<- cursed cursed site) that started out good, talking about how "show don't tell" is something you should keep in mind. It used the example of "instead of saying 'she opened the door', try 'her shaking hand twisted the doorknob, letting out a loud creak'".
And, yeah, if you're trying to convey the hesitance, fear, and eventual sucking-it-up that seems to be going on in the scene, that's great.
But.
The tiktok ended with, "see? Showing is ALWAYS better." And I just...
Friends & enemies, that's how you end up with that insufferable always-showing always-active YA writing style that does not know when to just shut up and say "she opened the door".
Because, yeah, I'll say it. Sometimes "she opened the door" IS better. Sometimes, the act of opening the door is literally just announcing a setting change, and you don't need to focus on it.
Show don't tell is about conveying important or relevant information, not about literally everything you're writing. You're allowed to say "she opened the door" & similar, and in fact, I encourage it in many scenarios.
showing is how you anchor an event more firmly in your reader’s mind, to make them slow down and focus when you’re presenting something significant
if you do it all the time, it doesn’t work! the flip side of recognizing the need to show important things in detail is recognizing the need to identify which things aren’t important and just tell them
does that example even count as telling instead of showing? i was always told that advice is for like, what’s going on inside a character’s head, not describing the literal plot. ie, the “tell” version would be something like “she was afraid.” because that can often come across as kind of cheap or even incongruous with the pov if the audience can’t see any indication of her mood beyond the author just straight-up telling us.
but by this definition, i think any sort of narration at all is “telling,” which is a wild thing to say.
𝙰𝚞𝚐𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝟷𝟶, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟸 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶 -𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹
[ID: August 10. Wrote nothing. END ID]
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
A summer-themed OC ask game about how 🌶🌶🌶 your OC is.
I often struggle with creating distinct characters, so I came up with some questions about your OCs that I haven't seen in any other lists.
I recommend answering these for each character once you've already spent some time with them on the page.
The saying "writing is a lonely hobby" is a saying for a reason. You come up with the concepts alone. You create it alone (unless you have writing partners).
My biggest advice for people that don't want to feel alone when writing is to find another writer that you trust and either A. start roleplaying/writing with them or B. become writer pals and just have conversations about each other's WIPs.
It can make such a huge difference on feeling alone when writing when you have someone you know will be excited to hear about what you're working on. When you have writer friends that you know are excited to hear about your works. :) look for those people, because they're the kind of people every writer needs.
🤍 H
Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books that I try to update regularly
**UPDATE**
I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some
Please let me know any further suggestions
….holy shit. You found the holy grail.
….. is this a DIFFERENT person keeping gigabytes worth of language books on google drive? Holy crap.
This. This here. Is why I love Tumblr.❤️❤️❤️
Update from OP:
UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w
Holy shit. OP you are a wonderful human being.
O.O Linguistic Holy Grail…
If you love ads, then this post is not for you. If you love Tumblr but hate ads and want the one to continue without having to endure the other, then this post is literally for you. Hello, you.
As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.
Some caveats:
How do you opt in?
Easy! Just go to your Account Settings on desktop and hit "Go Ad-Free." From there, you can choose to pay monthly or yearly:
And that’s it! You’ll be able to enjoy your favorite blogs and posts without any pesky ads getting in the way.
That’s all for now, Tumblr. Back to your blorbos.
This isn't funny, this isn't me doing a meme, this is me putting on a very temporary Serious Hat.
Tumblr is dying.
The recent attempts by staff to make the site profitable are the desperate gasps and grasping arms of a site that is well past the point of no return.
Tumblr was never going to survive very long in our current world. It's not profitable. It was never going to be very profitable. It's vitally important to the history and culture of the social internet (and, really, the world in general, to some extent), but it's been mismanaged, haphazardly-run, and just a general design train wreck for years.
Because here's the important thing to remember about Tumblr:
I know what you may be thinking -- "but it's better than [Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok], so it can't be that bad!" And that's incorrect. Tumblr is, by any standard measure, much much worse at being a social media site than any of those four sites. And there's one crucial reason for that that people keep overlooking:
See, people think of social media as being about connecting with people, or community, or social blah blah blah whatever and I need you to understand that all of that, all of it, is bullshit. That's not what social media is, and that's never what social media has been.
Social media is about selling your information, mostly to advertisers -- which, on the internet, mostly means to Google. Meta doesn't want you to find art on Instagram or talk to friends on Facebook. Meta wants you to spend time looking at your feed and putting in information. For all Meta cares, if it kept you on the site, you could kill all of your friends and only follow Instagram accounts that posted blank white frames. None of the "content", none of the "community", none of that bullshit is important to them. They just want you on the site so they can get your information -- via ads, trackers, cookies, harvesting your posts and comments, whatever -- and sell it.
I can't be any clearer about this next point:
Instagram DMs are only there to keep you on the site.
Your TikTok FYP is very carefully curated to keep you on the app.
Twitter shows you exactly the trends it needs to in order to keep you browsing.
Ever wonder why social media makes people so angry? It's because anger keeps you engaged. It's 100% intentional.
All of the most addictive and engaging emotional states -- anger, fear, smugness -- are all really bad for your mental (and often physical) health when taken in large doses, and are also the only thing social media wants from you.
Now we come back to Tumblr.
Why is Tumblr better than, say, Twitter? And it really is -- we don't talk about this enough, but Tumblr is absolutely a better experience than Twitter. Or Facebook, or TikTok, or Instagram, or Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Imgur, or any other successful social media site. But why?
All of the stuff we like about Tumblr -- the crazy, shittily designed, chaotic reblog system? the fact that your dash is basically only chronological? the fact that the tag system is so fundamentally broken that the ways that it's broken have been culturally rebuilt as a part of the way we communicate on the site? the way that reblogs distribute content creation? the culture of crazy fandom people? that one werewolf fucker? the memes? the fact that, by and large, you don't get spoonfed stuff from around the site by an algorithm? mutuals? the lack of censorship, and, in turn, the fact that said lack of censorship drives away advertisers? the weird culture that keeps "normies" from tiktok away? -- all of that is absolutely counterintuitive to being a successful social media site.
TikTok is a goddamn masterpiece of social media design. If you install TikTok on your phone and give it even the tiniest amount of engagement, it'll nail your interests and dopamine triggers in under a week. Give it a month and it'll have its hooks in your brain. The algorithm is so finely tuned, all the systems are so carefully designed, the goddamn interface is hardwired to trick your brain into scrolling.
Stitches? Duets? Likes? Even cultural things, like trends and sounds going viral? Hell, the idea of TikTok sounds at all? All these are built to drive engagement.
Funny video? Duet your reaction. Someone asked a question? Stitch your answer. Someone singing? Duet for a literal duet! Sound going viral? You can do a TikTok of that sound, easy! Interesting conversation in your comment section? Reply to comments with quick videos!
And vitally, did you miss the last trend? No worries! The next one's coming along! If you joined TikTok today you wouldn't even know about the sea shanty thing. The culture moves at the speed of light.
The camcorder-like nature of recording on TikTok makes making the actual content a snap. The boost given to new accounts tricks you into thinking it's easy, and even in the long run, the distribution algorithms make it much easier than, say, YouTube to get the numbers to go up. Content is easy to make and distribute, trends are so quick that they're easy to follow, and the FYP algorithm gives the illusion of community -- and easy-to-make content and well-designed algorithms makes the numbers go up, and to our monkey brains, numbers = approval = success = dopamine.
Instead of stitches, duets, or sounds, we have reblogs -- with a post editor that barely works, a following that's 80% porn bots, and a frankly baffling 15-year-old online culture that moves at (for the internet) glacial speeds and has hundreds if not thousands of in-jokes, none of which ever die? Have fun building a following with that, fucker! Numbers? You think we do numbers here? We suffer, and we like it!
Oh, and good luck playing into trends. I wasn't kidding about the glacial speeds and in-jokes. Sure, we have new shit happening -- Tumblr's take on the "your dick cold eeby deeby" meme is new, as is There Are Many Benifits To Being A Marine Biologist, and my Shakespearification posts -- but Colour of the Sky is, I'm pretty sure, older than 50% of TikTok users, and we're still making goddamn Onceler memes, and, for Christ's sake, even the new stuff is blending with the old stuff -- I just did a Shakespeareification of Colour Theory.
There is no algorithm beyond occasional "people you follow liked this". On TikTok, the only two feeds are "random shit you might like" and "random shit you might like from people you follow". On Tumblr, the only feed is "everything from everyone you follow at all times", and the site does not care about whether you want to see it or not.
Because of all this, Tumblr is not, and will never be, profitable.
Which means that, because we live in capitalism, Tumblr will die.
And due to the rise of competent social media sites, the competition is eating away at Tumblr's audience.
Staff is cringe, obviously. But they're also desperate. They're trying to keep this place alive.
And they're failing.
The end is coming.
It's terrible, it's beautiful, it's chaotic, and it's ephemeral.
And we're never going to have anything like it ever again.
tl;dr if you want tumblr to survive we need the dash to start being algorithm-driven instead of chronological and we have to start saying "unalive" on here instead of "kill"
but also I would rather fucking kill myself than do either of those things
@violinsandtea I'd like to clarify: I'm not saying Tumblr is dead. Tumblr is definitely extremely alive. I'm saying Tumblr is dying.
Tumblr isn't dead, but it's been dying since before the famous 2018 ban.
Which, once again, is why I think its a good idea to give them your pocket change. $5 a month? According to google, Tumblr has 3 hundred million visitors every year (if we keep 2019's traffic as our average). If they're making just $5 off of every single person every single year, they would make 1 billion dollars every year. That is for the low price of $5 yearly. That is for 1 single month of them not running ads. If you pay that $5 every month for a year, and everyone else does the same? Tumblr would run indefinitely, and you would have $60 less by the end of the year.
Now obviously this isn't how its gonna work out. half of that 300 million is probably bots. Half of you aren't even interested in paying, another quarter can't pay even if you are interested, those two groups have overlap but some of you won't pay out of principle, and obviously there's the issue of Tumblr being so full of bugs that when I went to try to support the site the god damn payment page broke and I couldn't pay the $5. But just think. We could actually save tumblr ourselves, and all it costs is $60 each. We could outlive Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, META. We already outlived Myspace. If you can, help keep this hell alive. Lets be the last standing anti-social media on the internet. We'll ride this bitch to eeby deeby.
psa: continue creating even if you think its corny or unworthy. i promise you its not. we all start from somewhere, and you can only grow if you keep trying
Hey so I just found your blog and I want to say how much help you have been!! I am a semi-new writer and all this advice is helping me so much. So I do have a question to ask and I am not sure if you have already answered it or even if you answer questions like this (I did read the guidelines). Anyway here goes nothing: How do I increase my requests?
Thanks so much! I'm glad that I've been able to help you :)
I'm not really a fanfiction blog that engages in fandom, so I'm not the best person to ask this question to, but I do have several thoughts.
The TL;DR to your question is a very blunt: You really can't do anything that will guarantee to increase the requests that you receive.
One of the really harsh truths of Tumblr, social media, and everything in life is that you can't control other people. No matter what you do, you'll never be able to make someone do something like send in a request, reblog your works, etc. The sooner that you can realize and accept this harsh reality, it becomes easier to not be so affected by a lack of engagement — which you will more than likely experience at various points during your time on Tumblr. There's no magic solution where you do this one thing and all of a sudden everyone is sending you requests. It's a very slow process of networking and carving out your own following. For a lot of people, it can be really frustrating and tedious, and it's very likely that you won't see results immediately.
That being said, there are several things that you can do to make yourself more accessible to requests, and ways to incorporate yourself into your chosen online community to get to where you want to be.
People send in requests to writers that they know they like. If you don't have any writing on your blog, how are they going to know that they'll enjoy your writing enough to send in a request?
The best and most important thing that you can do write now, is post your writing a lot. It doesn't matter if people don't request it, all that matters is putting yourself out there, and showcasing examples of what you do.
Every single big fanfiction blog that gets tons of requests all started with no followers. They just posted their own writing, even when no one was reading it. They did that over and over and over again until people took notice.
So don't wait for requests. Start writing, and start posting.
Tagging is an incredibly important way to get your writing on people's radar, even if they don't follow you yet.
I created this tagging guide for the Writeblr community. Since you're asking about requests, you're probably going to be interacting more with the Fandom side of tumblr, rather than Writeblr. (I talk more about why that is on this post). So the actual specific tags that I included in the tagging guide won't apply to you as much, but it still has a lot of really important information about how tags work on Tumblr that will be helpful.
The next thing you should do is find a popular fanfiction blog that you really like, and study what tags they use when posting their fics. I'm not part of the fandom side of tumblr, so they would definitely have a much better understanding of what tags work. Use them, try different combinations, and see what works for you.
Like I said earlier, you are never going to be able to do anything that guarantees other people will interact with you. You know what you do have control over though? Yourself!
Go on anon and send yourself your own requests! Is it a bit sneaky? Yes. Is it wrong? Not really! People don't have to know that it's you. Just the act of fulfilling/accepting a requests and following through on writing it out can be a huge indicator to people that this is something that you are happy to do.
Another option is if you have some friends that are willing to support you and help out, ask them and see if they are willing to send in a request for you to respond to.
In order for people to know that you even exist, you have to put yourself out there! This in my opinion, is one of the most important things to do.
Find some people you like in your fanfiction community and introduce yourself to them. Send them asks to chat, reblog their works and comment, DM them and talk about your favorite characters with them, send them requests, participate in their events. People tend to engage more with blogs that they are friendly with, and networking is really important!
A friend or two visiting each other's inboxes and talking and having fun and coming up with headcanons together can be really powerful. Not only are you uplifting yourselves and supporting each other by talking, reblogging and sending each other requests, it can also be really valuable for people looking at your blog, wondering whether you're someone they want to engage and interact with.
I firmly believe that engagement starts with ourselves. Find your community by being brave and interacting with others, and you'll be able to give and receive support with a group of people that you like.
I absolutely notice a huge difference in engagement when I'm actively posting everyday, and when I'm not posting as regularly. Putting yourself on people's dashboards as often as you can by reblogging or posting your own thing is a crucial aspect if you're hoping to help your blog grow.
If this is something that you're hoping to do, I would highly recommend queueing posts so that your blog will be posting on the days that you're not actively on Tumblr. It takes some of the pressure off you, but helps to make sure that people are still seeing your blog on their dash even when you're busy.
Everything else is mostly just a combination of persistence, staying postive and some luck. Chances are, it's going to take time for you to become the blog that you're hoping to be and to get the requests that you're hoping for. Every popular blog started with zero followers, and it took a lot of time, patience and effort for them to get as big and famous as they did.
So be kind and forgiving to yourself. Recognize that notes, followers, and number of requests have no bearing on who you are as a person or your writing skills. Take care of yourself by taking breaks when you need it, and not beating yourself up when things aren't going the way you want them to. Celebrate your victories, and give yourself a lot of positive reinforcement.
You can do it. Good luck.
Remember, all advice is subjective! So don’t take this too seriously. This is just one person’s opinion.
If you’d like to ask me for advice on writing or running a writeblr, please check out my Ask Guidelines and FAQ first.
Thinking about how the Russian word for “comrade” isn’t actually nearly as stilted and formal-sounding in the language itself and would be more accurately translated as companion/fellow/pal/partner (the whole point of it is that it’s a gender-neutral informal form of address that makes no distinction by gender or social class or profession), and how much that simple mistranslation turned viral has done to shape the perception of people living in Soviet times as these fanatical overly stilted communist caricatures
anyway, language and propaganda and all that
Whoop. There it is in one line.
you have nothing to lose but your chains, bestie
“You will be sent to die in one of the Gulag camps.
-Your Pal, Stalin”
Товарищ USED to be a very informal very personal thing to call someone until the Soviets deliberately forced its use to replace other forms of address as part of forging a unified Soviet identity.
Literally no one uses it now because the word has such a heavy ideological association here.
Think of a cult where everyone calls each other “dear friend” and you know there’s nothing behind these words.
Just like the word comrade, in fact, meaning the translation is in fact very well chosen.
Commies out there ruining perfectly good words. Just like nazis ruined perfectly good symbols.
So basically, The Soviet messed up a term that is equivalent to "Bro"?
