Untitled

[papayajuan2019]

must feel so good to be soil absorbing rain

[arsenicconfetti]

Me in fifth grade depriving my hands of lotion till they're dry and cracked and on the verge of bleeding, and then lather on a thick layer of lotion and feel the tingling and borderline pain while seeing the skin absorb the lotion in real time

[arsenicconfetti]

How thick would you have to make instant coffee for it to have a net zero effect on hydration?

[arsenicconfetti]

On one hand I understand why Pluto is no longer a planet, but on the other hand Mizar and Acrux are still stars

[calciferiguess]

some technos !!! and a tommy

first is for @/eepyharu’s 1k dtiys lovely royal au💞 second and third are just doodles i did to try and subside art block lol

[staff]

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

[nuffnotsaid]

World's most dysfunctional polycule

[haruki-stars]

them

[dvandom]

(For those not familiar with it, the middle logo is for DownDetector.)

[afellowgoodsir]

Which almost useless power will you accept?

Always knowing exactly what time it is

Being able to precisely date memories

Automatically knowing the legal first name of everyone you see

Perfect balance

Able to remember all of your dreams

Control of your body temperature

Slightly, noticeably bioluminescent

Voting ended onApr 4

if it pleases thee, reblog for greater sample size

[viktor-sbor]

A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.

[e-102]

damn that shit is light lmfao

[telltaletypist]

[vienna1954]

Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!

Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.

Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful

[ben-the-hyena]

I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons

[macleod]

In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”

Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.

Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society

[sashaforthewin]

Ah to be a sailor in 1890 who has to turn to his fellow men and ask "is it just me or are the lighthouses flashing faster?"

[asteroidtroglodyte]

They had been slowly getting faster for decades.

It mattered for optics reasons.

Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.

The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.

This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.

What’s a little Madness, in the face of Progress?

[myth-myth-yeth]

mods are asleep, post the fresnel lens

[relevant-wikipedia-articles]

History of lighthouses - Wikipedia

[arsenicconfetti]

Sigh. DICOM is like MOGAI except people die if you let the confusion confuse you

[arsenicconfetti]

It's good they named it labradoodle, because if they named it labrapoodle I'd have thought it was a mix between a poodle and a lab rat

[tumblr]

Reblogs in a chain now get their own notes

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!

[changes]

It’s very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special.

As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.

Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.

If you’d like to talk directly beyond the comments, leave a reply and we’ll follow up with as many of you as we can. We want to work with you to make Tumblr better.

[icannotgetoverbirds]

hey folks do we like this. reblog without commentary for reach

do we want this?

yes

no

Voting ended onMar 23

[loverscross]

How do people write to such a high word count, I max out at 700-1500 before giving up. I would love to learn but every resource I find assumes I have entry-level knowledge ( I don't. )

[official-impravidus]

word count tips from a guy who has over 2 million words on ao3

- first of all, you’re doing great. 700-1,500 words is a lot more than you are giving yourself credit for. i can write 1,500 in an hour and a half on a good day. that’s a lot of time!! especially for someone who has other priorities in life other than fanfic.

- writing stamina is real and is an actual “muscle” that does grow and strengthen with repetition as time. it’s something you can expand and build with practice.

- don’t get too wrapped up in perfection. get words on the page and don’t get in your head about if they’re the right ones. you can fix garbage but you can’t fix nothing.

- write what excites you. i know nonlinear writing is sacrilege to some people so this may not work for you, but for me personally if i get stuck, i just jump to something i want to write. sometimes that means writing out only dialogue that i add to later. sometimes it means several paragraphs of world building. you’ll be surprised about how much you end up writing if you don’t adhere to the structure rules and add stuff later.

- don’t feel pressured to write it all at once. most of the greatest novels were written over the course of months, even years. sure, there are authors that can crank out 10k in a day (i’ve done it - it’s killer and i was exhausted after) but having realistic goals can help.

- to add to that, setting achievable goals is also important. don’t shoot for the stars just yet or else you may find yourself feeling disappointed. give yourself small checkpoints that you can have mini rewards for.

- when it comes to brainstorming and outlining, i find making a list of plot points and character beats with no specific order that i then organize later into a sequential outline is helpful. outlines are another way to have a tangible proof of your progress

- don’t burn yourself out on one project. breaks are important and so is nourishing your mind

its 1am so thats all from me for now! hope this helped

[striving-artist]

Some stuff I know might count as entry level knowledge!

First though, as a victim of 14k chapters even after taking out knives and trying to hack it down, I am jealous of people who can be concise.

Now then. The above comment is right about all the things they listed. Absolute intro level stuff, to me, includes exercises to expand specific skills, and I know some.

oh crap this got long, i'm adding a read more

All of these come down to: Choose a very small moment, and don't leave it, just keep digging on it. Instead of one line about an event, spend 750-1500 words on it.

A favorite version of it: give your character a task to do during dialogue, and focus on the task. (i love angst so) Their partner is talking about how maybe they should end this, your character is having big emotions. Instead of writing the panic/sad/avoidant emotions, write about the activity. Wash the carrots, peel the carrots, chop the carrots, wait they're not lined up evenly, okay now chop them, some of them aren't even, go back, very precisely hold the round up vertically and cut it in half, but be careful of your fingers. 10 sentences of dialogue becomes a thousand words of emotion. Also applicable to horny moments if that's your preference.

My personal sin as a writer is that I full stop forget to give visual descriptions. I have hyperphantasia. It exists in my head. I forget other people don't have access to what I can see. One of the things I force myself to do is write the long excessive descriptions as practice.

Intro level is to look across the room where you're sitting and describe in detail what you see. Ideally not a list of possessions. If you're describing visuals in a story, there's a reason and a perspective. Is the top of the dresser messy, chaotic, the only flat surface available, irritatingly untidy? Is it like that bc the character left it like that and doesn't care? is depressed? a messy person? If the pov is someone else, how do they feel about it? Higher difficulty is to describe a room you're imagining from scratch.

You can do that with a meal/banquet. Put them on a hammock and talk about the light through the tree and the smell of plants. Or give someone insomnia and write every single detail of the room as they're looping between frustrated and bored. This kind of exercise stretches the muscles for writing more words, and simultaneously lets you work on perspective and tone.

As a very general rule, the more tone and interiority of your narrative, the more words you end up with. If you're 3rd person omnipotent, you can more easily skip speculation and confusion from a character and just say exactly who/what this is. When you're in a limited pov, your guy can't always look up and know that's Becky from Accounting. That's the woman they've seen around the office, who always seems uncomfortable in large groups, but wears the loudest, brightest patterns in her clothes. She's on her way over, and your guy has no clue why, and they can speculate -- and reveal the guy's perspective and opinions -- while she does. And then, she gets there, and his knowledge and opinion shifts.

A very helpful thing you get from staying interior to your character is that you can tell the audience about who they are without stating it outright. Are they a person (in general or in this moment) who notices every article of clothing and can specify that its a tailored deep navy wool suit with french cuffs, slightly out of fashion, probably purchased a few years ago. Or, are they the type to say that its a suit, and its some sort of blue, but talk about the wine, the architecture, the music, instead? Do you pause for 200 words for them to think about where that accent came from? You can show the tension, the pacing, and the priorities with that.

Eg. if they're being chased by chainsaw wielding werewolves, the narrative probably shouldn't slow down to talk about the color of the wallpaper and dirty linoleum floor. but! when they duck into a corner to hide, the adrenaline has them frantically noticing everything. The pause builds tension, the rapid, almost flattened description of actions increases the pace.

If you struggle with action sequences -- fair, lots of people do -- do a quasi inversion of the chopping carrots example. Hyperfocus on a small thing, then blow past six others, and drop into focus on a new piece. High intensity action is rarely compelling if you're trying to detail it as 'and then he parries low, and then she turns and strikes from the upper right, so he ducks one and half steps to the left, and she advances on a pivot and he--' for 1500 words. But choose one strike and parry, stay in that bc it almost ended the fight, hold onto the tension and hope, let it fail, go back to faster description, and if its your vibe, you stop and talk for 300 words about the killing blow, and the sound/smell/feel of blood.

Now, having said that, for pure practice, and if you want to write a character dissociating (not hiding) from emotions, write a high detail scene of exercise. Tai Chi, yoga, weight lifting, ballet. Anything repetitive or intentional. they didn't 'do three sun salutations' in this version. They bring their hands to their chest and inhale deeply, raising their arms overhead, then bend slowly forward into a fold on a long exhale. Their hip pinches as they walk their hands forward into a plank, so they hold that longer before continuing. When you get to the next one, you drop the baseline details, and write what's changed. They're pleased that their hip didn't protest the second one, but they realize their shoulders are too tight. You can do that as pure practice to find words for physical actions, or you can weave in an emotional state that changes along with the action.

Purple Prose gets a bad rep. Put that argument to the side, and go nuts. Get decadent. It's an exercise not a test. Choose a metaphor and just keep going until you've exhausted the thing.

If your dialogue feels too short, a fun practice is writing intoxicated characters. They'll wander, they'll double back to a topic from a minute ago. They also tend to wildly swing between emotions, actions, and tone.

If you're the type of person to have an entire conversation with your microwave as you daydream; try writing it down. The full one. With the uh, um, and pauses. With the repeat of a sentence because it wasn't clear enough the first time. Include the interruptions, and the seven traded lines as they overlap or trip on each other's words. Then go back, read the dialogue aloud, and when you find yourself pausing differently, adding asides, etc... put those in too.

jesus fuck this is getting long. Can you tell I love talking about writing, and also use too many words for everything??

Abbreviated version: Placemaking. Interiority. Perspective and Opinion. Wallow in emotions. Rambling conversations. Metaphors.

Shortest version: Let yourself fall in love with your own story.

My ask box and dms are open btw, and clearly, clearly, I'm down to talk about the subject. 💜💜💜

[loverscross]

How do people write to such a high word count, I max out at 700-1500 before giving up. I would love to learn but every resource I find assumes I have entry-level knowledge ( I don't. )

[official-impravidus]

word count tips from a guy who has over 2 million words on ao3

- first of all, you’re doing great. 700-1,500 words is a lot more than you are giving yourself credit for. i can write 1,500 in an hour and a half on a good day. that’s a lot of time!! especially for someone who has other priorities in life other than fanfic.

- writing stamina is real and is an actual “muscle” that does grow and strengthen with repetition as time. it’s something you can expand and build with practice.

- don’t get too wrapped up in perfection. get words on the page and don’t get in your head about if they’re the right ones. you can fix garbage but you can’t fix nothing.

- write what excites you. i know nonlinear writing is sacrilege to some people so this may not work for you, but for me personally if i get stuck, i just jump to something i want to write. sometimes that means writing out only dialogue that i add to later. sometimes it means several paragraphs of world building. you’ll be surprised about how much you end up writing if you don’t adhere to the structure rules and add stuff later.

- don’t feel pressured to write it all at once. most of the greatest novels were written over the course of months, even years. sure, there are authors that can crank out 10k in a day (i’ve done it - it’s killer and i was exhausted after) but having realistic goals can help.

- to add to that, setting achievable goals is also important. don’t shoot for the stars just yet or else you may find yourself feeling disappointed. give yourself small checkpoints that you can have mini rewards for.

- when it comes to brainstorming and outlining, i find making a list of plot points and character beats with no specific order that i then organize later into a sequential outline is helpful. outlines are another way to have a tangible proof of your progress

- don’t burn yourself out on one project. breaks are important and so is nourishing your mind

its 1am so thats all from me for now! hope this helped

[striving-artist]

Some stuff I know might count as entry level knowledge!

First though, as a victim of 14k chapters even after taking out knives and trying to hack it down, I am jealous of people who can be concise.

Now then. The above comment is right about all the things they listed. Absolute intro level stuff, to me, includes exercises to expand specific skills, and I know some.

oh crap this got long, i'm adding a read more

All of these come down to: Choose a very small moment, and don't leave it, just keep digging on it. Instead of one line about an event, spend 750-1500 words on it.

A favorite version of it: give your character a task to do during dialogue, and focus on the task. (i love angst so) Their partner is talking about how maybe they should end this, your character is having big emotions. Instead of writing the panic/sad/avoidant emotions, write about the activity. Wash the carrots, peel the carrots, chop the carrots, wait they're not lined up evenly, okay now chop them, some of them aren't even, go back, very precisely hold the round up vertically and cut it in half, but be careful of your fingers. 10 sentences of dialogue becomes a thousand words of emotion. Also applicable to horny moments if that's your preference.

My personal sin as a writer is that I full stop forget to give visual descriptions. I have hyperphantasia. It exists in my head. I forget other people don't have access to what I can see. One of the things I force myself to do is write the long excessive descriptions as practice.

Intro level is to look across the room where you're sitting and describe in detail what you see. Ideally not a list of possessions. If you're describing visuals in a story, there's a reason and a perspective. Is the top of the dresser messy, chaotic, the only flat surface available, irritatingly untidy? Is it like that bc the character left it like that and doesn't care? is depressed? a messy person? If the pov is someone else, how do they feel about it? Higher difficulty is to describe a room you're imagining from scratch.

You can do that with a meal/banquet. Put them on a hammock and talk about the light through the tree and the smell of plants. Or give someone insomnia and write every single detail of the room as they're looping between frustrated and bored. This kind of exercise stretches the muscles for writing more words, and simultaneously lets you work on perspective and tone.

As a very general rule, the more tone and interiority of your narrative, the more words you end up with. If you're 3rd person omnipotent, you can more easily skip speculation and confusion from a character and just say exactly who/what this is. When you're in a limited pov, your guy can't always look up and know that's Becky from Accounting. That's the woman they've seen around the office, who always seems uncomfortable in large groups, but wears the loudest, brightest patterns in her clothes. She's on her way over, and your guy has no clue why, and they can speculate -- and reveal the guy's perspective and opinions -- while she does. And then, she gets there, and his knowledge and opinion shifts.

A very helpful thing you get from staying interior to your character is that you can tell the audience about who they are without stating it outright. Are they a person (in general or in this moment) who notices every article of clothing and can specify that its a tailored deep navy wool suit with french cuffs, slightly out of fashion, probably purchased a few years ago. Or, are they the type to say that its a suit, and its some sort of blue, but talk about the wine, the architecture, the music, instead? Do you pause for 200 words for them to think about where that accent came from? You can show the tension, the pacing, and the priorities with that.

Eg. if they're being chased by chainsaw wielding werewolves, the narrative probably shouldn't slow down to talk about the color of the wallpaper and dirty linoleum floor. but! when they duck into a corner to hide, the adrenaline has them frantically noticing everything. The pause builds tension, the rapid, almost flattened description of actions increases the pace.

If you struggle with action sequences -- fair, lots of people do -- do a quasi inversion of the chopping carrots example. Hyperfocus on a small thing, then blow past six others, and drop into focus on a new piece. High intensity action is rarely compelling if you're trying to detail it as 'and then he parries low, and then she turns and strikes from the upper right, so he ducks one and half steps to the left, and she advances on a pivot and he--' for 1500 words. But choose one strike and parry, stay in that bc it almost ended the fight, hold onto the tension and hope, let it fail, go back to faster description, and if its your vibe, you stop and talk for 300 words about the killing blow, and the sound/smell/feel of blood.

Now, having said that, for pure practice, and if you want to write a character dissociating (not hiding) from emotions, write a high detail scene of exercise. Tai Chi, yoga, weight lifting, ballet. Anything repetitive or intentional. they didn't 'do three sun salutations' in this version. They bring their hands to their chest and inhale deeply, raising their arms overhead, then bend slowly forward into a fold on a long exhale. Their hip pinches as they walk their hands forward into a plank, so they hold that longer before continuing. When you get to the next one, you drop the baseline details, and write what's changed. They're pleased that their hip didn't protest the second one, but they realize their shoulders are too tight. You can do that as pure practice to find words for physical actions, or you can weave in an emotional state that changes along with the action.

Purple Prose gets a bad rep. Put that argument to the side, and go nuts. Get decadent. It's an exercise not a test. Choose a metaphor and just keep going until you've exhausted the thing.

If your dialogue feels too short, a fun practice is writing intoxicated characters. They'll wander, they'll double back to a topic from a minute ago. They also tend to wildly swing between emotions, actions, and tone.

If you're the type of person to have an entire conversation with your microwave as you daydream; try writing it down. The full one. With the uh, um, and pauses. With the repeat of a sentence because it wasn't clear enough the first time. Include the interruptions, and the seven traded lines as they overlap or trip on each other's words. Then go back, read the dialogue aloud, and when you find yourself pausing differently, adding asides, etc... put those in too.

jesus fuck this is getting long. Can you tell I love talking about writing, and also use too many words for everything??

Abbreviated version: Placemaking. Interiority. Perspective and Opinion. Wallow in emotions. Rambling conversations. Metaphors.

Shortest version: Let yourself fall in love with your own story.

My ask box and dms are open btw, and clearly, clearly, I'm down to talk about the subject. 💜💜💜

[arsenicconfetti]

My ear feels wrong. It’s like someone put it into blender, tugged on it just sliiiightly, and then put it back. Don’t like it

[arsenicconfetti]

When more normal people go to wine tastings, they drink the wine, but since professional wine tasters taste so many wines they spit it out after each taste to not get too poisoned.

And, technically, that has got to work with other poisons as well.

Imagine tasting some arsenic liquid, swirling it around your mouth, smacking it between your lips.I think that'd be way more interesting that anything resembling a wine

[aokozaki]

Intertextuality enjoyers when a text refers to another text

[crabussy]

I would love to make one post about aotearoa without people bringing up hobbits on it to be so honest with you guys

[crabussy]

listen I understand. they're amazing movies and I do think it's awesome that they were filmed here!!!!! but holy shit! it's the only thing anyone seems to be able to talk about when there is ANY discussion of these islands!! I would super love to be able to discuss our ecology, politics, culture, landscapes, and people without needing to hear about hobbiton every single time

[crabussy]

I don't knowwww. it shouldn't be a huge deal but at the same time, the image an overwhelming amount of people have of aotearoa comes from those movies. our struggling ecosystems get overshadowed by fields and grassy hills and other non-native biomes that were explicitly chosen to depict the england-inspired fantasy land of middle earth. these same biomes only exist here because english settlers historically slashed and burned massive swaths of forest to create them, and now they're framed as famous and beautiful. mass deforestation of precious native forests. I don't know man. it annoys me juuuuust a little when every other post I make about this place gets a lotr joke plastered on it.

[myth-myth-yeth]

hey, do you have any cool facts about aotearoa i can pivot to when people bring it up in conversation

[crabussy]

there are 53 volcanoes in the most populated city in the country

the largest eagle to ever exist (pouākai) was endemic to aotearoa

same with the tallest bird to ever exist (moa)

tuatara is only remaining species in the order sphenodontia and only exists here (for context- the other three extant reptile orders are snakes+lizards, turtles+tortoises, and crocodiles+alligators+caimans)

only two native land mammals and they're both tiny bats

kea is the only alpine parrot on earth

wētāpunga is the heaviest insect on earth

hard to condense into a quick "fun fact" but matariki is an incredibly celebration that has a lot of fascinating history and tradition behind it, totally worth researching!!

less of a fact more of a "check this out" but showing people photos of rotorua's geothermal areas is a favourite of mine

we were the first nation to give women the right to vote in 1893, almost a decade before any other country on earth!

we have the most colourful fungi out of anywhere on the planet!! this is due to our massive abundance of native birds. the fungi mimics the bright colours of fruit, causing birds to eat them!!