42

woman (she/her). european. white. cis. bisexual. wnb feminist. depressed.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

i NEED people to realise foreshadowing is. in fact. a literary device. and not a Bad Thing. the audience picking up on your hints is a Good Thing. because. it makes the story and it’s conclusion make sense. and some people will not see those but enjoy seeing them on a second read through. red herrings are one thing but if your novel consists of nothing but red herrings it’s not a coherent story it’s just a collection of paragraphs that don’t actually plausibly link to one another. you're not fighting with the audience you don’t look clever you look like you don’t know how basic fiction works. be vulnerable for once in your goddamn life and don't treat writing like a game to be won where the audience losing is a good thing.

[ineffectualdemon]

Getting to the end of a story and going "THE CLUES WERE THERE THE WHOLE TIME!" is always joyous for me whether or not I picked up on the clues leading up

If I saw the clues and caught the hints then yes! I am clever and me and the author/creator/artist etc were in on it together the whole time!

If I didn't notice the clues or got fooled but can clearly see them in hindsight then "Ha! You won this time storyteller! I am delighted by this game we play!' and then I enjoy putting the pieces together afterwards and enjoying how clever it was. I feel like the creator respects me as an audience

If there is a "twist" that comes with 0 clues or foreshadowing at all I'm annoyed. I'm pissed off. I feel like I'm being condescended to and patronised. It's not clever or interesting and makes me annoyed I ended up caring about characters and plot points that ended up meaningless.

Because it's not that these stories don't have foreshadowing or plot clues. They just abandon it for a "surprising twist"

A story that pays off the clues is letting me into the fun and makes a participant in the story

A story that just gives me a "shock" but no pay off is telling me not to engage or get attached or care. So why would I watch?

[s-n-arly]

OMG! THIS!

Random plot twists that don't connect to anything in the story are not clever. If we don't see it coming because the writer didn't provide any clues, they aren't clever and it's totally unsatisfying (and I will NEVER read this writer again). These clues need not be lit up in neon with a parade of elephants and showgirls. But they need to be present

I'm a writer and am rarely surprised. Often, if I am surprised it's because the writer was a dumbass and included a "twist" that makes no sense (and therefore isn't really a twist, it's just random bullshit). If a writer genuinely surprises me, without being an absolute dumbass, I am FUCKING DELIGHTED! I will tell everyone I know to read the book/see the movie/watch the show.

[ardentmystacina]

Foreshadowing is the reward for paying attention. It's the story letting you in on the secret like a co-conspirator because you're the clever little audience member who has been picking up on the clues the writer has been setting up.

It even makes watching/reading again more worthwhile because if you didn't notice the foreshadowing the first time you have the joy of being able to notice the things you missed!

[pointnclick]

I don't trust anyone. I'm a bad ass lone wolf *eats food someone else grew* *crosses bridge someone else designed and trusts it not to fall* *crosses street in front of 70000lb vehicle cuz there's white lines on the ground telling it to yield*

[redstonedust]

its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"

[whatthekoi-deactivated20260510]

“can’t believe women fought to work!! i don’t wanna work!!” women have Been Working they fought to get Paid you know that right ?

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[tzikeh]

[justalurkr]

Xitter ate the tweet this is from, but Tim Bender posted it

On what the male loneliness epidemic is really about. Given actual alternatives, women are opting tf OUT of "traditional roles".

Edited to add found the tweet

[unspeakablearchives]

(Source: Sen the donkey)

[eagle-writes]

Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning.

Ink: Waterman Inspired Blue

[luulapants]

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

[nestofstraightlines]

There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”

[throckmortons-thrussy]

[stivaktis]

An oldie, but a favourite.

Happy Glorious 25th of May.

[flower-crow]

[id: a drawing of lilacs and an egg, and text that reads "truth! justice! freedom! reasonably priced love! and a hard-boiled egg!" end id]

[terraswallows]

I’m not afraid to admit that girls with big biceps affect me the same way a laser pointer affects a cat.

[shock]

accepting that you’re objectively weird & owning it is infinitely better than being constantly desperate to appear normal to people who don’t even matter to you

[jvlianbashir]

my friend's discord server has a "proof of touch grass" channel where they post pics of them doing regular activities outdoors/in public. i think many online spaces could benefit from such a thing

[weaselle]

when i was super depressed - like struggling to eat anything barely able to get out of bed to pee depressed - my good friend asked me every day to send her a picture of me holding a leaf and a picture of a meal i was eating and it helped me significantly

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

which is to say, i agree proof of touch grass is a good idea for online spaces

[yadelah]

This kinda required my brain a bit

[womanguy]

you should get a second evening for reading fan fiction. And you should get an extra day in the week to do arts and crafts.

[mxjackparker]

Decriminalizing sex work isn't a fix-all. It's not intended to be. What decrim does is protect sex workers from the harms of criminalization specifically. Poverty and violent clients won't disappear because of decrim, and their continued existence doesn't mean decrim fails.

[mxjackparker]

When you tell me there are still young teens getting into sex work in countries like New Zealand that have full decriminalization, that's not an argument that decriminalization is bad! Those teens would be selling sex under the Nordic Model too!

What teens in these circumstances need is typically money, because poverty is the major driving force behind prostitution among youth. In other cases they need information about where to report abuse from their schooling. No legal model around sex work will put an end to poverty or targeted sexual abuse for profit, because this is a much larger issue.

What full decriminalization can do is reduce harm against sex workers whilst we work on ending poverty and patriarchy.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]