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local beautiful disaster

@theroseempress

on which I write, draw, or spout nonsense.

Greetings, denizens of Tumblr, men, women, and potplants!

I randomly decided this blog needed an introductory post, so here we are.

Any of my writing/art can be found at the #my writing and #my art tags respectively. My current WIP, The Golden City, can be found at #the golden city or #tgc if I'm lazy. I have any number of background projects, which can all be found at #backburner wips.

Random details about me include; I'm a writer/artist in training, self-taught for both, and a professional bullshitter. I also like cats better than dogs, drink a lot of hot cocoa and coffee, and recently discovered I might be intolerant to milk, which I am VERY salty over. I'm also a professional procrastinator, and am actually procrastinating from something by writing this very post.

I come in several different flavours of neurodivergent!

I am also a coloured pencil. No, I will not elaborate.

You can call me any variation of my blog name, R, or Rose, whichever you like.

Media I like includes; Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (I'm planning to watch the 03 one at some point but haven't gotten around to it) Avatar; The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, the Reckoners series, Redwall, The Queen's Thief series, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics, the Agents of SHIELD tv show, and pretty much all of the older Barbie movies. (most specifically Princess and the Pauper) I'm also pretty involved in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, somehow, despite not having watched most of it.

Favorite characters of mine include; Edward Elric, Roy Mustang, Azula, Kuvira, Sokka, Zuko, Fitz, Adrien Agreste, Félix Graham De Vanily, Kagami Tsurugi, Varrick, Zhu Li, Eugenides/Gen, Basil Stag Hare, Gonff, Ling Yao, Preminger, and Azul.

I'm not much of a shipper, but I do have a soft spot for Royai, the Love Square and Feligami from Miraculous Ladybug, and whatever Zhu Li/Varrick is called.

Anyway, here's the plot as of yet of my main WIP in newspaper-headline style because I saw someone else do it and I liked the idea.

Local Thief Gets Arrested And Then Takes Advantage of Loophole; Winds Up Going On Treasure Hunt. (Chaos Ensues)

Here's a runup of the main characters;

Felix Rose- professional bullshitter/actor/ridiculously good at being charming. Very cocky, actually has enough skills to (occasionally) warrant it. Owns four cats. Does not want to go to jail, thank you. Noble who part-times as a thief, as one does.

Shannon Rose- professional Felix's Twin Brother. At first glance seems significantly less mischevious than Felix, but we must remind you that Felix is significantly more anything than anyone. Studying to be a scholar. Would also prefer it if Felix did not got to jail, would like to prevent that.

Valentin Fleet- professional Cinnamon Roll. Wants to do the Right Thing, unsure what that actually means. Is capital-C Conflicted. Somehow managed to go from the resident Tough Person to the resident Cinnamon Roll over the story's creation. The reason Felix is in jail, would prefer it if he stayed there, please.

I also have a website, (carolinaauthor.wordpress.com) where I'll be posting my WIP when it gets to production stage, and an Etsy store (it's called CoffeeCatDesigns, I'll find a link later sorry) where you can buy stuff from me. Oh, and I started writing fanfic recently! I'm The Rose Empress on ao3 if you're interested!

If you want to ask me questions about any of my WIPs or tag me in stuff I will be more than happy to answer :D

Mmmmmmmmkay that's it thank you for reading, I'm gonna go do that thing I was procrastinating from now.

-R

always bothers me when "improvements" to unhealthy diets are all about taking tasty things away rather than ADDING new things. like. add new tastes and new flavours and MORE NUTRIENTS and vitamins

there was some awful show on for encouraging middle class mothers to take their eating disorders out on their children and it was like "oh well, this snack doesn't taste as good as my usual one, but it's healthier"

so get one that??? actually tastes as good?

like this thing of. you know this food that you like and enjoy eating? why don't you toss all that out and eat stuff you don't enjoy as much or want to eat?

that's unhinged to me.

like i just think the process of discovering newer, healthier foods should be ADDITIVE, where you're exploring new tastes alongside your usual ones, slowly broadening your palate and your preferences, rather than punishing yourself for "unhealthy" food

(CW eating disorders)

god i feel so strongly about this bc i could not figure out how to strike a balance between “eating foods that make me feel good” and “not relapsing back into disordered eating habits” until i switched my mindset from “i need to remove unhealthy foods from my diet” to “i need to figure out which foods makes me feel good and add them to my diet”

examples:

moving from “i want a snack. chips sound really good, but i can’t eat chips because they’re unhealthy, so i guess i just won’t eat anything” to “i want a snack. chips sound really good, so i’m gonna eat some, but because i haven’t had any fruits or veggies today, i’m gonna eat some grapes with them”

moving from “i’m craving a burger and fries from mcdonald’s, but that’s unhealthy, so i’m just gonna eat some plain brown rice and grilled chicken even though those don’t sound good” to “im craving mcdonald’s, but last time i ate that it upset my stomach, so i don’t think eating it would make me feel good. but i think what my craving is telling me is that i need carbs and protein, so how about i make some steak and mashed potatoes for dinner?”

moving from “i’m in too much pain to cook tonight, but frozen food is unhealthy, so i just won’t eat anything” to “im in too much pain to cook tonight, so im gonna eat a frozen meal, but im gonna add some pre-cooked chicken and frozen spinach to it because i think the protein and veggies will make my body feel good”

and honestly this has been so much better for me and i feel so much better both physically and mentally than when i was just focused on “i can’t eat anything that’s Unhealthy”

I've also found that if I'm DESPERATELY craving sugar or want to eat ALL THE CARBS RIGHT NOW, it's almost always because I haven't eaten enough that day, or haven't eaten recently enough, and my body is trying to get me to pay attention to the fact I need some energy ASAP.

So it can be useful for me to go "well, I just realized I haven't eaten in six hours, so how about I make a sandwich and see how I feel, and then I can ALSO have some cookies if I still want some" instead of just having the cookies and feeling bad and headachey later because I didn't have any protein or anything with it. Sometimes I still want a cookie, and sometime I don't, but I don't get that gross sugar bonk feeling.

it's.....

yeah I eventually want to publish but what I think a lot of non-writers don't understand is that Being An Author is not the point.

The story is the point. I write because my wip concepts interest me. I want to take the fine threads of this story in my head and weave them into something real. And part of that is making it into something shareable, something that someone else could read. The goal of someday publishing/sharing your work in some form makes the whole process more driven, the same way that volleyball is just more fun when you keep score.

So yes I write and yes I'd like to publish but that doesn't mean publishing is all there is. It's not about winning, it's about playing to win. And that's a crucial difference to me.

So it's actually not encouraging when people are like oh stop being a perfectionist! don't you just want to get something out there? Don't you just want to get your name out into the world?

No! I'm not writing books just so I can put "published author" in my LinkedIn bio! I'm not here just for some soundbite indicator of success. I'm going to publish my book when it's good and ready, even if it takes years and years more to simmer. And if it's a success, that's great! But it's also a success right now, because I'm having fun! I'm engaging in a fulfilling hobby! I'm experiencing an entirely unique lens of living! I'm working with a purpose!

So if you want to talk to me about my writing career, you could at least, you know, ask what the book is about, thank you very much.

It is exactly this experience for me.

I could say though, for a fantasy world, there is nothing wrong in creating new animals for your world by just… changing animals from our world around.

Like, I created a type of bird in my story called the piebald swift. Swifts do not come in a piebald pattern, but they can in a fantasy world.

Never feel like you have to reinvent the wheel.

This is such good advice for my dumb brain that always had difficulty making new animals and creatures for things.

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This is pretty much what I do. I take anatomical parts of animals (in my head, not literally, ew) and put them together in different configurations. Giant cat with antlers? Kay, why not?

But also, consider: Taking microscopic organisms and making them large - like, lion-sized large, or elephant-sized large. Terrifying. Awesome.

g75bxcjh

STUPID LADYBUG AU

In which Sabine is a famous designer (severe af with sunglasses and a pixie cut and a suit) and Marinette is her prize daughter with a completely bossy Ladybuggish attitude who is really pushed by her mother to succeed

Adrien Agreste is a really goofy flirty loudmouth who ended up the class clown and no one takes him seriously (especially not Marinette who he is CRUSHING ON HORRIBLY).

BUT AS LADYBUG AND CHAT NOIR,  Adrien puts on a cool and suave front and loves that people will actually listen to what he says (because he has good stuff to say), while Marinette lets loose and is the awkward blushing teen she’s never allowed to be in public (and has fallen hard for her polite and straightforward partner or something yeahhh)

this au is important because we have Sabine and Marinette sitting together sipping coffee and judging your awful fashion sense from behind their sunglass

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caprette

im weak

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

i love you well crafted narratives i love you clever callbacks i love you seemingly nonsensical plot lines that begin to make perfect sense when they converge i love you sneaky little easter eggs you only notice on your second watch i love you consistent but not overdone motifs i love you deeply satisfying series finales i love you gratifying and tangible character development

Millipedes are the cleanup crew/groundskeepers! They eat fungi, decaying vegetable matter, and occasional carrion and so help recycle nutrients back into the soil. They are not able to bite humans (that would be centipedes) and are totally harmless and helpful. The extra legs are for extra hugs

Once again the humble role of custodian is forgotten 😔

The garbage man is important

okay so maybe i'm not RIGHT but i'm not WRONG either

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today is my birthday! i’m 33 today and i have done an ungodly amount of stupid shit in my life that honestly probably should have gotten me killed. so here are 33 hard-won things i’ve learned that i wish someone had told me sooner.

  1. whenever you buy an object, you are going to own that object for your entire life unless you make the conscious decision to throw it away or give it a new home. maybe other people don’t struggle with this as much as i do, but i’ve grown to become a little exhausted by finding a thing and realizing i don’t want it anymore, but i don’t have the energy or motivation to do anything with it. signed, a woman with a packed 10x10 storage unit who is now extremely hesitant to buy new things.
  2. food, and by that i mean good food (and by that i don’t necessarily mean healthy food, but food of good quality that you love), is necessary to live, and buying it, preparing it, and eating it is not a chore. the sooner you accept this and make food a priority in your life, the healthier you’ll be. 
  3. speaking of food, not everything you buy should be the cheapest version of it. personally i’ve found it’s always worth it to splurge on good olive oil, butter, and canned tomatoes. for years i thought i was an awful cook because i was cooking with cheap, disgusting olive oil that made my food taste like shit.
  4. speaking of food part 2, i can’t BELIEVE how long this took me to figure out, but mise en place is the real real. get your shit out and organized and prepped *before* you start cooking, even if it makes things take longer. and yes, it is always worth it to do the dishes as you go, which pisses me off.
  5. when i was teaching myself how to cook and feeling daunted about it, the best advice i ever got was to aim to learn 15 recipes and then put them in rotation.
  6. this is the most horrific and awful truth i have forced myself to accept: there may come a day you can no longer digest your favorite foods, and you will either have to stop eating them, or remain very close to a toilet. i’m sorry.
  7. other people are always going to misperceive you and misunderstand you, sometimes willfully. other people’s opinions of you don’t actually have anything to do with you. they’re not your business, and you don’t have to worry about it or change yourself.
  8. when innocuous or neutral things make you irrationally angry or upset, step back, realize you’re having a big reaction, and then when you’re ready, pay very close attention to the thing that upset you, because you’re about to learn something important about yourself.
  9. a pill sorter can save your life. i don’t know how i managed my meds without one.
  10. sometimes college is about learning stuff, and not about becoming something.
  11. no matter how many perfectionist tendencies you have, it’s worth it to remind yourself that no matter how much of a mess you actually are, you deserve to be loved.
  12. if you’re always forgetting to do important but tedious things, set an alarm and set aside one hour of each week, not to do the important tedious things, but to assess what needs to be done, and *schedule* the important tedious things for the following week. this literally changed my life.
  13. during that hour, make a meal plan too. the point of doing this is condense the time in which you’re making decisions (what to do, what to eat, etc) so you don’t have to burden yourself with them throughout the week. decision fatigue is real. any way you can alleviate that is a good thing.
  14. learn the difference between aggressive, passive, passive-aggressive, and assertive behavior. recognize when you’re being one of the first three, re-assess and aim for being assertive, even if it’s hard.
  15. you can tell you’ve processed trauma, not when the traumatic thing stops upsetting you to think about, but when the traumatic thing takes up the same size in your brain as all your other memories.
  16. if you’re one of those people who never seems to finish projects or follow through with things, there’s a chance you may just grow out of it naturally. until then, follow your interests and don’t feel bad about putting down a hobby to pick up another.
  17. if you love stickers but have sticker anxiety, buy vinyl stickers. you can re-stick them.
  18. there are only a few careers i can think of that you have to commit to early in life because getting the undergraduate credentials is a pain in the ass (teachers, doctors, and engineers, from my research). nearly everything else you can switch to later, which takes a LOT of pressure off having to figure out what you want to do with your life.
  19. people say there’s no money in becoming an artist, writer, musician, etc. actually there’s a ton of money in all of those things, it’s just in the stuff other people want you to make and never what you want to make. it’s still worth it to develop the creative skill and not force yourself into business school because it’s more “practical” or whatever. 
  20. sleep when you’re tired. SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE TIRED. don’t beat yourself up about it, don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t be tired or that you’ve already slept too much, just take a fucking nap. you would never say “hm i’ve already had enough water today, therefore i should not be thirsty” so don’t treat sleep the same way.
  21. when you build a piece of furniture from target or ikea or whatever, the first thing you should do is count all the little screws and things to make sure everything’s there that should be. it sucks to get halfway into putting something together only to find there’s a piece missing and you have to go buy it.
  22. learn to travel by yourself, go out to eat by yourself, see a movie by yourself. in my early 20s i was scared to do these things, but i do them so often now i don’t even think about it. it’s the most fulfilling skill i’ve ever learned.
  23. adding to the above, if you’re a people-pleaser, being alone is especially important, because you’ve probably developed the habit of making the people you’re with more comfortable and happy than yourself, and you’re missing a lot of the beautiful and interesting things around you. when you’re by yourself, you can focus on what *you* want without guilt. 
  24. sometimes you’ll want to break things off with a friend for reasons that are no one’s fault, and you don’t want it to be volatile or make a big thing of it, in which case the goal is to simply fade out of their life. it is okay to let people go.
  25. shame is useless. get rid of it.
  26. no matter how much of yourself you put into your art (or writing, or music, or whatever), when people criticize it, they are not criticizing you. they are having a reaction colored by their own tastes and perspectives. their opinion of your work has nothing to do with you. you don’t have to take everyone’s feedback. in fact you don’t have to take anyone’s feedback. the other side to this coin unfortunately is that compliments don’t have anything to do with you either. it’s good to accept this because it means you’ll stop seeking validation from other people and won’t let anyone else’s perspectives impact your work. anything nice anyone says about your work is merely a bonus to an already good thing.
  27. if you’re an artist of any kind, take one day a year to look up opportunities like grants, funding, residencies, workshops, whatever. put the due dates of all of them on a calendar for the year following and get into the habit of applying for stuff. getting rejected sucks, application fees suck, but in all the years i’ve been doing this, it has always, always been worth it. these things give you a chance not only to help fund and support what you’re passionate about, but they force you to take your own work seriously, and that is something that’s absolutely necessary in order to be successful.
  28. you must become your own greatest advocate. in all respects–in health, in love, in happiness, in freedom, you must. no one will ever fight as hard for you as you will. this in turn will give you the strength and motivation to help others fight for themselves too. the only way the world will ever get better is if every person on this planet learns to see themselves as equals to everyone around them.
  29. brag about yourself as often as you can. for one, people develop their perceptions of you based on how you treat yourself and speak about yourself. but for two, it’s the fastest way to figure out which people to keep in your life, because they’re the ones who are going “oh hell yeah, you’re awesome.” 
  30. be the person other people want to brag to.
  31. at some point in your life, someone is going to hurt you, and it’s going to be willful and intentional. it is not worth it to waste brain space figuring out why they did it or why you think you deserved it. all you have to do is let yourself feel that pain, acknowledge it, and try to move on.
  32. no matter how bad off you think you are, recovery is possible. the first and hardest step is to learn you’re worth the time and effort it takes to recover from the awful things that have happened to you.
  33. developing an expertise does not mean you’re getting objectively better at something. becoming an expert is only the process of seeing your mistakes and having the patience to sit in the discomfort of not knowing how to fix them.    

macbeth is shakespeare’s funniest tragedy and mr. macbeth is the funniest character in macbeth. he listens to these creepy old women tell him he’s gonna be king and IMMEDIATELY decides the only thing he can POSSIBLY do is kill a guy and then he waffles about it for a full act and finally comes to the conclusion that it’s morally wrong and then HE DOES IT ANYWAY and his entire fucking life falls apart with an inevitability that is genuinely hilarious

the other exceedingly funny thing is that he doesn’t even cover his ass that well like??? sure the morning right after the murder he gets away with it but even then he almost straight fucks it by killing the guys he framed. and then within a few months everyone in scotland independently comes to the conclusion that he did it ANYWAY because like. WHO else would it have been

funniest moments in macbeth:

  • “o? by whom?” (a classic)
  • “what, you egg” (also a classic)
  • “twas a rough night”
  • macduff telling lady macbeth he can’t say what happened because she’s a woman and then spinning around and IMMEDIATELY telling banquo within FULL earshot of ladymac
  • “that i did… kill them… 👉👈”
  • macbeth giving the whole “blood will have blood” speech and then going “…….what time is it”
  • the witches, whom we’ve just seen making a potion of baby parts, saying “something wicked” about macbeth. your king steps onto the scene and these literal actual witches go “oh, bitch? a bitch?”
  • malcolm’s I Fuck Too Much Speech
  • and then. when he takes it back. he says “why are you silent?” which implies macduff is just. sitting there.
  • “take thy face hence”
  • macbeth absolutely wrecking young siward’s shit and then just going “thou wast born of woman” to his corpse

in honor of this post getting an absurd and terrifying amount of notes here are my favorite tags

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also, for those of you asking to see macbeth as a dark comedy: i haven’t seen a production specifically billed as such but definitely the funniest macbeth i’ve seen is the folger 2008 one which, by the way, is free on youtube! it definitely leans into the horror aspect but it also is just. laugh-out-loud funny sometimes like these actors know how to punctuate their lines to get at that absurd humor! and i’ve watched it twice in like two months

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national-shitpost-registry

was anyone gonna tell me Macbeth was a comedy or was i supposed to read that here myself?

Okay, look. There’s something modern readers don’t understand, because definitions have changed.

To us, a comedy is a funny play and a tragedy is a cathartic one.

In Shakespeare’s time, a comedy was a play with a happy ending.

A tragedy was a play with a sad ending.

That is it.

Shakespeare was a comedic writer. All of his plays are funny to some degree and I suspect the man couldn’t write seriously if he tried.

A lot of the time modern troupes miss this and play the tragedies straight. They aren’t supposed to be. They are supposed to be darkly, ironically funny.

Because after all, these plays were written to be performed in inn yards where everyone was drunk. That did not necessarily exclude the actors.

A performance of Macbeth that makes you laugh is an authentic, correct performance. One that understands the basic fact that Shakespeare is more like Taika Waititi than Quentin Tarantino.

All of this is correct! The production I was in last year purposefully went for laughs on all of those lines. The other two major sources of comedic gold in the play are:

-Lady Macbeth’s deeply extra “Woe, alas! What? In our house???” when she’s trying to play it cool after Duncan’s death. (Honestly, playing Lady Macbeth as Moira Rose for the entirety of 2.4 would be INSPIRED.)

-The Murderers that Macbeth hires both being total dunces and Macbeth just dissing them constantly.

-THE ENTIRE BANQUET SCENE IS STRAIGHT OUT OF A SITCOM. Yes, even the “it will have blood, they say” is darkly hilarious if you time it right. The thanes are all sitting there awkwardly while their king screams at the air and has a deeply Surburban White Couple argument with his wife, and neither he nor she will let them acknowledge that it’s weird, and it’s GREAT.

I remember being told in high school that Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s darkest texts because the Porter is the only comic relief. The Porter scene is the only bit of clowning (which is why I detest the Porter as an audience member no matter how well he’s played—the Clown characters bore me!), but I love situational dark humor, and the text of Macbeth is rife with it.

And that makes the tragedy of it hit much harder! When we see Macbeth be a himbo who is Trying His Best, and Ross and Lennox exchanging Pointed Looks, and Macduff get emails every day, and Lady Macbeth snark at her husband… then it hurts much, much more when Macbeth’ is forsaken in his vulnerability again and again, and Ross and Lennox bring news of atrocities they’re powerless to stop, and Macduff grieves, and Lady Macbeth unravels. Grimdark productions fall flat for me because they deny the characters the humanity the text enables.

The comparison of Shakespeare with Taika Waititi is spot-on, especially for the tragedies and histories. I’ve railed plenty of times about how The Hollow Crown tries so hard to be Dramatic™ that it sucks all the fun and humanity out of the history plays, which in turn sucks out all the pathos because we have literally no reason to care about anybody. Shakespeare’s a delight for actors and directors who bother to put in the work because he gives you a lot to play around with, without the constraint of the lengthy descriptions you find in screenplays and modern stage plays. Macbeth and Richard III are both bloodbaths that will make you upset for the character. They are also morbidly hilarious. Embrace it!