Encouragment for writers that I know seems discouraging at first but I promise it’s motivational-

• Those emotioal scenes you’ve planned will never be as good on page as they are in your head. To YOU. Your audience, however, is eating it up. Just because you can’t articulate the emotion of a scene to your satisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not impacting the reader. 

• Sometimes a sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole scene will not be salvagable. Either it wasn’t necessary to the story to begin with, or you can put it to the side and re-write it later, but for now it’s gotta go. It doesn’t make you a bad writer to have to trim, it makes you a good writer to know to trim.

• There are several stories just like yours. And that’s okay, there’s no story in existence of completely original concepts. What makes your story “original” is that it’s yours. No one else can write your story the way you can.

• You have writing weaknesses. Everyone does. But don’t accept your writing weaknesses as unchanging facts about yourself. Don’t be content with being crap at description, dialogue, world building, etc. Writers that are comfortable being crap at things won’t improve, and that’s not you. It’s going to burn, but work that muscle. I promise you’ll like the outcome.

Chimps

Since no one has said it already:

Corpses. It's corpses.

What is a more sensible indicator of danger than a dead guy?

People who respond to this take with "neanderthals/denisovans/other human species" are cringe for implying that violent xenophobia ensures our/others survival

What we have actual evidence of, is lots and lots of human-neanderthal sex (to the point that the neanderthal "extinction" may have just been neanderthals merging with us, if I remember right?)

(via)

*wakes you up because it needs to go outside and pee*

We need those "Bruh I hate living in Detroit" memes but for the citizens of Hyrule cos like. They are probably feeling that mood.

By the way the reason you should care about AAA games being horridly broken and unstable isn't just because you're being ripped off, but because it's the most common sign of horrific workplace practices like crunch that are absolutely abusive management and which both lead to shittier games and more importantly, the ruined health or even deaths of the actual game developers.

Classic sea shanties like:

"I fucking hate this ship and I cannot wait to get off."

"I got off the ship on the dock but I know I'm going to get back on the ship when my leave is up. Fuck."

"Storm."

"Big storm."

"Is it just me or does this ship have like. Really clean lines. Like damn. Okay. Not saying I'm feeling attracted to the ship, per se, but. Damn."

"Sometimes you see weird shit that you cannot explain and you just kinda have to shrug and go. Welp."

Not to forget crowd favorites like:

"Pull harder or we are all going to die."

"Bad working conditions."

"Fucking pay me my wages, you asshole."

And the perennial favourites:

"God I Need A Drink"

"I Am Drunk And Cannot Find My Clothing"

"Listen To This Cautionary Tale Of: Don't Fall Overboard"

"My Sweetheart Has Left Me, Guess I'll Go Be Miserable At Sea"

"Whale. Big Fish."

"The Food Sucks. So Do The Wages. And The Mate Is A Bastard."

"Spent All My Money, Oops."

"Our Ship Can Kick Your Ship's Stern."

"Shipwreck."

"Nautical Gibberish That Was Probably Once Actual Words, Maybe."

"Hey, Remember That Guy? He's Dead."

"I Have Not Seen A Woman In Six Months."

"Mapquest Directions, But Rhyming."

"Whatever You Do, Don't Go To Sea. Goodbye, I'm Off To Sea."

[id: text, some of it highlighted, reading: my father died while i was writing this book, but the book isn’t about him. there’s a condescending tone i hear when people say “writing is so therapeutic! how wonderful that you could take your pain and make something out of it!” but writing isnt therapy. painting isn’t therapy. music isn’t therapy. (highlighted in yellow) living well is therapy. (highlighted in blue) we’ve taken the arts out of living, and now we only leak them back when people tell us we’re sick. (highlighted in yellow) it’s almost impossible to convince anyone that you can make something when you’re healthy, or just because you want to.]

There are not enough words in the English language to convey how much I hate that TVTropes has gotten dragged into this awful CinemaSins gotcha-"critique" mindset

In short:

TVTropes is not a fucking "gotcha" "sin" listing and never fucking has been!!

TVTropes is a community website for talking about the building blocks of stories - motifs, recurring patterns, "stock" stories and arcs that we can retell again and again in different forms and interwoven with other "stock" stories and arcs and humanity will never tire of them as long as they're told well, that kind of thing.

TVTropes tells you, time and time again, that tropes are not inherently bad, nor are they inherently good; that "trope" is not a synonym for "cliche", they're just Recurring Ideas That Build Stories; that a story can be loaded with a million tropes and this is not inherently bad, and that inversely, a story can have nearly no trope that it doesn't subvert and that doesn't make it inherently good. That a story without tropes is like a meal without ingredients - it doesn't exist.

TVTropes is a GOOD media analysis wiki. Not always the deepest one, not always the most serious one, it doesn't usually delve into super subjective things like you'd get in a college class obviously, but it can, if approached properly, be a really fun way to improve your understanding of the mechanics of storytelling, prompt you to compare and contrast the way the same stock concept is used in different pieces of media (sometimes very, VERY different pieces of media, which imo is a lot of fun), all kinds of good stuff! It's not the be-all and end-all of media analysis, obviously, but for the specific, mechanical, "what makes this story tick?" approach it takes, it's a good resource - and especially valuable for a lot of neurodivergent people who might otherwise fall into "what the fuck are 'parallels' the curtains are just fucking blue fuck English class I hate this," especially if they're in one of the crappy high school classes that only wants to teach you WHAT the answers on a standardized test are and don't give a shit about HOW you remember those answers - ...speaking from experience...

The point is, TVTropes is NOT CinemaSins. Not even close. Not even remotely. The only thing they really have in common is lists.

As for CinemaSins, on the other hand - to be honest, I don't think CinemaSins itself is even entirely responsible for what we call the CinemaSins mindset, but considering the fact that they deliberately leave their own "sins" in to get people yelling their own "gotcha"s in the comments I don't feel particularly bad about conflating the two.

CinemaSins is, allegedly, a fun, quippy outlet that you watch to step back from a piece of media you enjoy and lightheartedly roast it, because stories have contrivances and characters make decisions that may seem really stupid to the audience especially once removed from The Moment and yeah, most movies have genuine goofs that are fun to giggle at. You list all of those, you have a laugh, it's fun, right?

...allegedly.

Unfortunately a lot of people have decided, in the wake of its popularity, that this is what "critique" means - you take a piece of media and you go over it with a fine-toothed comb, engaging with as much hostility as possible, to get the most comprehensive list of "flaws" you can. The more flaws you find, the smarter you are! Literary analysis isn't about finding themes and pulling deeper meaning (that may or may not have ever been intended) from a work; it's about going over the work with your red pen; this is a competition and you're trying to beat the creator at their own game!

Again, I don't think CinemaSins is entirely responsible for this; it also has a lot to do with how things get passed around on social media, how people tend to boost easily-digestible things with a lot of emotional impact (whether because they love it or because they're angry about it, traffic is traffic), Nuance Doesn't Earn Clicks, and so forth, but they do play into it a lot so I really don't feel bad about "blaming" them. Even down to the name - these little things we're counting and giggling over aren't goofs, they aren't contrivances, they aren't little oddities that become funny out of context, they're sins (for which the creator must repent).

TVTropes has...absolutely nothing to do with this. At all. A trope listing is not a "gotcha"; it's a generally value-neutral statement that this story contains an element that has existed in other stories before and probably will exist in other stories again - and if you think "well you're accusing it of being unoriginal and bad for THAT, then", it shows a very limited understanding of how broad human literary tradition is.

Humans love stories. Our oldest known stock stories, our oldest known motifs, our oldest known tropes, date back to when we were writing on clay tablets. You cannot write a story without ANY elements that have ever been used before and have it remain believable or even comprehensible.

In other words, if you think "this story contains this trope" is necessarily an accusation of unoriginality (derogatory), you're already in something like that CinemaSins mindset, looking for something to be angry about, looking for a statement to read as an attack. A flaw. A sin.

Are there people who approach TVTropes from a CinemaSins mindset? Absolutely, and it's annoying as hell. "Oh, I don't want to read anything too tropey," or this drive to be "brutally subversive" that's less about the subversion and more about the brutality, sneering at anyone who dared to like stories featuring the targeted trope written straight, are a major annoyance in both fan AND creator spaces.

But does that mean the whole website is part of the problem? No.

tl;dr: CinemaSins and its inspired mindset are for nitpicking; TVTropes is just about pattern recognition

.

I really hope this impacts the devices we’ll have access to in the US.

Every argument for embedded batteries is a facade for charging customers more for the most common phone repair. All other reasoning is dishonest.

Fuck yes please.

Even aside from the repairability, do you know how hard it is to make sure a device without a removable battery is actually off? And not just dark with all the sensors active?

I miss being able to yank the battery out if the entire phone was unresponsive, as opposed to waiting 20 minutes poking it in the hopes it will respond (when the usual manual options aren’t working)

I feel like people don't talk enough about how insane the ending of Kung Fu Panda is.

There's an almost-universal truism in kids' movies that the hero can't kill anyone. Not even the Big Bad, no matter how warranted it is in the moment or how much the audience wants it. You simply can't do that. Heroes don't kill.

There are exceptions, but this truism is especially universal in the studio that's practically synonymous with kids' films: Disney.

That's why so many Disney villains end up accidentally killing themselves. Usually by falling off of something:

I can only think of four heroes in the entire Disney catalog that deliberately, intentionally choose to kill a sapient, intelligent villain, and all of them were self-defensive and in the heat of the moment, where sparing the villain wasn't an option:

(Note: I have seen most Disney movies, but not all of them)

....and then Dreamworks came along, said "fuck that," and had their goofy, lovable Jack Black character ice a motherfucker just 'cause.

Po has already completely won the fight. The day has been saved. He has Tai Lung at his mercy. Tai Lung is terrified:

And Po's not even reluctant about it. There's no burden of responsibility. He doesn't even give his thoroughly beaten opponent a chance to surrender or be banished or something. They didn't just have Po kill, they had him enjoy it because his method of murder is so wicked cool.

Po is a hero in a kids' movie who not only kills his villain, but fucking executes him. All with that signature Dreamworks smirk on his face:

I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss said "skadoosh."

That ought to be a tag.

Stars in Tarantula Nebula (x)

circling back around to the issue of writers being expected to do all their own goddamn marketing via social media these days, because it completely nixes the possibility of writers being weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, or misanthropes. 80% of the literary canon was written by weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, and misanthropes. if you weed out everyone who’s the wrong kind of insane to maintain a twitter presence, who on earth is left

Yes, exactly this. I know it's common to want to be known, to want a huge following, to want constant engagement, but I just want to write and have my stories be read. No, I don't want to make a Twitter, no, I don't want to be known, or have to be known in order to advertise my work.

I'm a writer for a reason, I'm weird. Let me be.

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

Ways I show romantic feelings between characters (before the confession!)

I'm not big on writing romance, but when I do, I love to show the events and feelings leading up to the big emotional release. Here are a few of the ways I hint at those feelings!