~ TinCanTelephone/CameraLux/ConYamArtist on AO3 ~ 30's – mostly cats, memes, fanfiction, and the occasional soapbox rant Fandoms: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lockwood and Co, Six of Crows, Rogue One Follow the "cats" part on instagram @arwenstarwen [Tumblr Archive]
Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.
And a character charged with adrenaline will notice more details than normal, because that's your brain grabbing everything that might save you. This also changes their perception of time, because their brain is processing more things. (People with ADHD don't turn this off.)
Although yes obviously it’s cheaper to make meals at home and always has been I do think that the response to increasing food prices (and prepared food in particular) from a certain group being “well just make all your food at home, every meal, with cheap ingredients bought in bulk!” fits very nicely into the agenda of regressive “complementarian” politics. Who is making all these meals? Who is spending hours every week planning balanced menus and going shopping and prepping ingredients and cooking and plating and storing?
If prices rise to the point of pressuring consumers to spend their time instead of their money, whose time ends up getting spent? What happens when your time to do this work, in addition to all the other labor you’re already doing for the home, becomes more valuable than the money you’d be making at a job? :/
Hi my name is Ozy'mandias, King of Kings and I have two vast and trunkless legs of stone and a frown and wrinkled lip and a lot of people tell me I look like the Younger Memnon (a/n if you don't know who he is get da hell out of here!). I'm a statue but my visage is shattered and lies half sunk on the sand. I’m also a colossal wreck, and I stand in the desert of an antique land where I’ve been for a really long time (I’m ancient). I’m a lifeless thing (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly the passions the sculptor read and stamped on me, which yet survive. I love sculptors and I get all my expressions from there. For example today I was wearing a sneer of cold command and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was standing in the desert. The lone and level sands were boundless and bare, which I was very happy about. A lot of mighty looked upon my works and despaired. I put my middle finger up at them.
inspired by a rant i was going on elsewhere bc someone tweeted something very stupid and uninformed about hamlet and it got my back up as someone who took two single-text-focus english literature courses in college and they were on wuthering heights and hamlet, i now put it to all of you on here:
what's "your" shakespeare play?
hamlet
macbeth
the tempest
merchant of venice
midsummer night's dream
twelfth night
richard iii
othello
julius caesar
king lear
another not listed (specify in tags) (i really just put my own top 10 here nbd)
i have no particular feelings about any shakespeare play/results tag
this recent trend of teenagers using genAI chatbots to talk to fictional characters is fucking grim. what you should be doing is roleplaying on private messages with your friends until the lines between you & the characters begin to blur & you develop some very complex & confusing feelings for each other that culminate in a massive fallout you dont have the tools to process nor understand
Your dialogue is stiff because everyone is being too honest
Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people
dodge questions
answer indirectly
lie (badly)
change the subject
crack jokes to avoid serious answers
lie (convincingly)
say half of what they mean
tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying
If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.
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I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.
