This is my main Tumblr and my cdrama watch blog.
Current cdrama watch list & wuxia/danmei reading list under the cut:

@theartofmadeline

No title available
No title available
occasionally subtle
i don't do bad sauce passes

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Mike Driver
One Nice Bug Per Day
tumblr dot com

shark vs the universe
Jules of Nature

Kaledo Art

PR's Tumblrdome
Claire Keane
cherry valley forever

oozey mess
KIROKAZE

ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

JVL
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye

seen from Philippines

seen from Italy
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Belgium

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Belgium

seen from Singapore
seen from United States
@ann-jujimi
This is my main Tumblr and my cdrama watch blog.
Current cdrama watch list & wuxia/danmei reading list under the cut:
I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.
It was not until well into my adulthood that I realized most people do not have complicated feelings about movies where people have to kill a scary alien monster, nor is that necessarily meant to be part of the narrative (unless it very obviously is). They just want the scary thing to die because it’s scary. I don’t have a real conclusion to this I just started thinking about it for some reason.
i hope they never stop using floppy disk icons to indicate saving your file. doesn't matter how obsolete they are it's like honouring someone with a portrait on your currency
The older I get, the more I come to realize my biggest fear is just living a mediocre life where I am a slave to my anxiety and self doubt. It is so paralyzing and I know it is only I, that can give myself the opportunity to experience more. Nothing matters more than the chances you can give yourself every day to try again.
you really have to wonder why is ai so widely accessible when all our lives we’ve been told nothing in life is free
disabled people have to live below the poverty line to have access to things that give them independence, but ai is largely free and marketed as a tool to make life easier for everyone, it’s a therapist, it’s a partner, it’s an ‘art’ tool it’s getting people degrees in school… and then you read the studies where they’re proving ai is causing severe cognitive decline and it all makes sense, that’s exactly the type of people that can be controlled en masse, people that cannot think without being spoon fed information
we are seeing this in every day life, “it’s not that deep” no because you are incapable of thinking about it that deep because chatgpt can spit out anything for you In seconds, media literacy is at an all time low, tv shows are made with a formula that assumes you’ll be doing another task while you have it on, and this is all on purpose, why do you think short form content is pushed on every platform when it’s also been proven that it fucks with the way our brain works, we’re being trained to not to think, to not resist
This is conspiratorial thinking. AI is free because the companies are currently living off investor money with the promise to turn it into a profitable enterprise somehow. As other people already commented, it's a typical tech business model to start a service off free and then start charging for it and/or running ads when people have become used to it. And also because they are selling your data.
This is bad and im not defending AI companies or whatever, but "They™️ want to make the masses stupid so they can control them" is textbook conspiracy. To assume that there is some kind of unified, orchestrated purpose to all of these things implies that there are people intentionally pulling the strings in the background. Who would these people be? How would many different actors from completely different, non-allied countries all act in concert to achieve a goal together?
The obvious explanation is that companies are pushing AI because they think they will make money with it down the line. Companies are pushing short form video because it makes them the most money. Companies are making easy-to-watch TV shows because they get more views and therefore make more money. We don't need to invent some secret cabal that intentionally wants to destroy our attention spans to explain these things, they're a profitable byproduct of our technological market economy.
do people seriously think both cannot be true at the same time? These aren't mutually exclusive. A fascist nation invests capital in making its citizens less literate. It makes them money because it was designed that way. It degrades attention spans and critical thinking skills because it was designed that way. It's a psy op AND a ponzi scheme. You really think the dollar-following has no other intention behind it? Get real.
Taking a loooonnnggg break from tumblr was necessary for real life reasons but it means I wasn't around to block the bots.
Maybe it will happen today.
this kinda changed my brain chemistry. just a little bit
New year, New me
*proceed to become my worst ver. of myself*
Chapters: 44/44 Fandom: The Hobbit - All Media Types Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Bard the Bowman/Thranduil Characters: Thranduil (Tolkien), Bard the Bowman, Thranduil’s Wife, Bard the Bowman’s Children, Legolas Greenleaf, Tauriel, Sigrid (Hobbit Movies), Bain of Dale, Tilda (Hobbit Movies), Elrond Peredhel, Celebrían (Tolkien), Arwen Undómiel, Dís (Tolkien), Kíli (Tolkien), Fíli (Tolkien), Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, Gandalf (Tolkien), Sauron (Tolkien) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, set in 1977, Historical References, Slow Burn, I’m not joking about the slowness of this slow burn, emergency room physician Thranduil, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, caretaker Bard (in several senses of the term), ELF (extremely long fic), this house may or may not be haunted, Non-Explicit Sex, all the standard tropes you would expect in a haunted house story Summary:
In the year 1977, following a tragedy that upends his life, former emergency-room physician Thranduil Oropherion purchases a sprawling, centuries-old estate in northern New Hampshire, planning to ship his children off to boarding school and waste away without ever being seen again. His plans go awry immediately thanks to Bard Bowman, the caretaker of the estate, and as an unlikely friendship blooms between them, Thranduil finds himself slowly coming back to life.
His house does the same.
It’s a good story, Rirosseth says. You’d tell it if you weren’t the hero.
hey sorry i acted weird the other day i was trying so hard to act normal that it backfired
If anyone is curious, 6 is the kind of setup you'd use if you are working in a tech field and are in a position where you're monitoring telemetry, like in an operations center or the like.
Either that or you're writing some of the best fantasy-satire novels of the 20th and 22st century.
V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains
source post: X
This is really good advice.
It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.
First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.
Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.
And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.
This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.
This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.
But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.
It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.
-- Ted Chiang, from "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art"
“how to recognize AI in fanfic” — hey so this is another not-gentle reminder that AI stole from us. it’s using OUR words and OUR sentences and OUR styles.
writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.
using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.
long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.
“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.
italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.
stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.
because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.
anyway. fuck ai.
They've taken so much from us already, including privacy, and now we can't use em dashes, or semicolons, or write complex sentences with nuance or decent vocabulary without being accused of using a slop machine? I struggle enough with posting *anything* due to anxiety and I'm sure I'm not alone, and now there's this extra shit going on? Great.
What I really don't understand is why anyone would use ai to write fic, which is not for profit *and* is done for the love of it. I know not everyone feels this way, but giving up the process of writing would defeat the purpose for me, which is that the act itself relieves a lot of my stress and anxiety. It makes no sense. And yeah it's gross.
Also the people pointing out that complex writing is a sign of ai maybe aren't readers or writers, are maybe locked into consumption of content (like tiktoks) that they can absorb quickly without having to think much about it. In other words, if it seems like it took more effort to produce than the average tweet or tiktok or other dopamine hit, they find it suspicious. Which is even more depressing.
Anyway. Fuck them. I hope no one changes the way they write based on this idiocy. I don't plan to, but just hearing about this shit alongside all the worry about ai scraping sites and posted content isn't going to make me feel better about posting. Won't stop writing fics with long sentences 🤣 and fucking punctuation though.