D&D 5e Dungeon Master and to no one's surprise diagnosed with ADHD. Current obsession: Obsidian.md. she/her 🔹 Super Junior and Kyuhyun ultimate biased. Also in love with Linkin Park. Worshipping Tolkien and his works. 🔹 Shipper of various characters. Mood-based (fanfiction) writer. Fantasy and angst.
Yesterday I continued my HTML journey on FreeCodeCamp. I learned a few new things.
I also started working on a test website to continue learning Git. After my first two "official" commits (that did not just include testing with txt files), I had an amazing person tell me about conventional commits. So I learned how to rewrite history (even though I don't fully get it yet). After deleting one of the commits but also managing to get the commit back, I can say: Yay, still proud of myself for continuing to learn. (I am aware it's not good practice to rewrite history but I figured, I now somewhat know how to do it at least and I have conventional commits for the first "mini" commits. I even learned how to change the initial commit message.)
Next steps: Understand branching and merging more so I can create the development branch. And continue the HTML part of the course.
I am considering using Tumblr more again to share my random thoughts with the world.
I have started using Linux Fedora and I'm very happy with the distro. So I am adventuring into learning the terminal (I feel so professional whenever I do something with it), Git (same story here) and then also continue the plan to learn programming (so I can stop being bothered by a lot of useful apps being very capitalistic lately).
Oh, and I also want to learn how to set up a virtual machine so I can try CachyOS and so that I know how to set up a virtual machine.
(Someone take the colours away from me, they make me want to colour words.)
Still learning the letter placement but learning about different keyboard layouts (after deep diving into a keyboard rabbit hole) and working on teaching myself Colemak-DH—god, does it feel nice to type with so far. Let me write more words that include io(n), ie, (n)ei and st as letter combinations because it just feels soooo good and my wrists don't hate it!
Let's hope I get used to it somewhat soon because I'd like to have my ~70WPM back for writing. ^^
It's the time of the year again where I end up diving DEEP into my guilty pleasure that is Twilight. But not to obsess over the main pairing, no, no, that wouldn't be fun. Bella x Jasper is where my heart will always lie (since my brain decided that's a thing it wants to obsess over a few years ago).
Also read this fanfiction by @bludazey that I spent a whole dizzy 14 hours of yesterday binging through, thank you.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
(⚠️: Mature, and dark, also check AO3 tags to see if you're comfortable with actually reading it.)
🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented:
→ Three types of ceremonial jewelry
→ A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
→ A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
─────── ✦ ───────
🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
→ Who’s in charge, and why?
→ Who has land? Who doesn’t?
→ What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
─────── ✦ ───────
2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
→ What was destroyed and mythologized?
→ What do the survivors still whisper about?
→ What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
─────── ✦ ───────
3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
→ Death?
→ Love?
→ Time?
→ The natural world?
→ Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.
You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
─────── ✦ ───────
4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
→ What people apologize for
→ What insults cut deepest
→ What people are embarrassed about
→ What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately
For instance:
→ A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?”
→ A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
─────── ✦ ───────
5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
→ Breakfast routines?
→ How people greet each other on the street?
→ Who cooks, and who eats first?
→ What’s considered “clean” or “proper”?
→ How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.
─────── ✦ ───────
6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isn’t a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
→ Rebel
→ Question
→ Break rules
→ Misinterpret laws
→ Mock sacred things
→ Act hypocritically
→ Weaponize or resist what’s expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.
─────── ✦ ───────
7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
→ The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure
→ The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric”
→ Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
→ Let ugly things be beloved.
→ Let beautiful things be corrupt.
→ Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
─────── ✦ ───────
📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy):
→ Culture is not food and jewelry.
→ Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
→ Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
→ Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
—rin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
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🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror
Also how do people manage their time in regards to hobbies?
I have a DnD world to build, the next session to prep, I should also definitely start to paint the terrain rocks I made and continue with other terrain, figure out Foundry for the short time I will run DnD online, my head decided to recently want to write fanfiction again, we also ignore that there is an unfinished own fantasy story in the works for me since 2009, I am reading a book again, I need to study Swedish, I planned on teaching myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and oh, I also need to study in general. And then 70% of the time I'm doomscrolling instead of doing any of that.
I'd like more hours in a day, please. And maybe less phone addiction. 😅
the one thing i want to be able to do as a writer is make people come back to something ive written. i want that piece of text to haunt them, i want their thoughts to be briefly consumed by this. i want this to be something they remember long after its time. thats the one thing i want to do
The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.
Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.
The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.
It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.
By all means, write your story as you want to write it in the first draft, and don't worry about this principle too much. This is an editing tool, not a first draft tool. But one of the first things you should do when retroactively begin preparing your story to be read by others is going step by step through each event and confirming that a previous event leads to it and that subsequent events are impacted by it on the page.
When your character is standing knee-deep in literal or metaphorical shit with a weapon in one hand and their last hope of surviving evaporating around them, and they’re wondering how their simple smuggling job/adulthood ritual/simple morning in an ordinary village led to ALL OF THIS, both they and the reader need to be able to backtrack through every single choice, mishap, attempt at fixing earlier problems and panicky flight or fib led them unerringly to this moment. That chain cannot have breaks in it, or you lose the whole impact.
Also how do people manage their time in regards to hobbies?
I have a DnD world to build, the next session to prep, I should also definitely start to paint the terrain rocks I made and continue with other terrain, figure out Foundry for the short time I will run DnD online, my head decided to recently want to write fanfiction again, we also ignore that there is an unfinished own fantasy story in the works for me since 2009, I am reading a book again, I need to study Swedish, I planned on teaching myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and oh, I also need to study in general. And then 70% of the time I'm doomscrolling instead of doing any of that.
I'd like more hours in a day, please. And maybe less phone addiction. 😅
1. High inspiration, low motivation. You have so many ideas to write, but you just don’t have the motivation to actually get them down, and even if you can make yourself start writing it you’ll often find yourself getting distracted or disengaged in favour of imagining everything playing out
Try just bullet pointing the ideas you have instead of writing them properly, especially if you won’t remember it afterwards if you don’t. At least you’ll have the ideas ready to use when you have the motivation later on
2. Low inspiration, high motivation. You’re all prepared, you’re so pumped to write, you open your document aaaaand… three hours later, that cursor is still blinking at the top of a blank page
RIP pantsers but this is where plotting wins out; refer back to your plans and figure out where to go from here. You can also use your bullet points from the last point if this is applicable
3. No inspiration, no motivation. You don’t have any ideas, you don’t feel like writing, all in all everything is just sucky when you think about it
Make a deal with yourself; usually when I’m feeling this way I can tell myself “Okay, just write anyway for ten minutes and after that, if you really want to stop, you can stop” and then once my ten minutes is up I’ve often found my flow. Just remember that, if you still don’t want to keep writing after your ten minutes is up, don’t keep writing anyway and break your deal - it’ll be harder to make deals with yourself in future if your brain knows you don’t honour them
4. Can’t bridge the gap. When you’re stuck on this one sentence/paragraph that you just don’t know how to progress through. Until you figure it out, productivity has slowed to a halt
Mark it up, bullet point what you want to happen here, then move on. A lot of people don’t know how to keep writing after skipping a part because they don’t know exactly what happened to lead up to this moment - but you have a general idea just like you do for everything else you’re writing, and that’s enough. Just keep it generic and know you can go back to edit later, at the same time as when you’re filling in the blank. It’ll give editing you a clear purpose, if nothing else
5. Perfectionism and self-doubt. You don’t think your writing is perfect first time, so you struggle to accept that it’s anything better than a total failure. Whether or not you’re aware of the fact that this is an unrealistic standard makes no difference
Perfection is stagnant. If you write the perfect story, which would require you to turn a good story into something objective rather than subjective, then after that you’d never write again, because nothing will ever meet that standard again. That or you would only ever write the same kind of stories over and over, never growing or developing as a writer. If you’re looking back on your writing and saying “This is so bad, I hate it”, that’s generally a good thing; it means you’ve grown and improved. Maybe your current writing isn’t bad, if just matched your skill level at the time, and since then you’re able to maintain a higher standard since you’ve learned more about your craft as time went on
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