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@cinder229
in the age of repression and purity culture, getting more perverted is the only morally correct course of action
#(thousand-yard sex-disinterested aroace stare) cool opinion. love seeing this same sentiment 10000 times a day on this website
im also aroace. being disinterested in sex and romance is still sexual perversion in the eyes of the state. get more perverted in whichever direction fills you with the most joy!!!!!!
Podfic is the ultimate portmanteau btw
re my "read books that make you feel stupid" post: reading books you don't fully understand is probably the safest way to push yourself outside your comfort zone. you don't have to embarrass yourself in front of anyone. you can do it from your cozy bed. you can easily get help from book clubs or literary analysis online. you can go as slowly as you want. there's literally no risk.
coloured pencil sketch for cinderrain on FR
i hear the wind across the plain a sound so strong, that calls my name
“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
sorry to hear about your twine, but as you’ve seen, every time we try and catch him he just E-scapes
05.28 - Nebula
Just wanted to say that I recently came across The Property of Hate and it kept me sane throughout one of the most stressful periods in my life. It is one of the best modern works of fiction I have had the pleasure of finding and reading, and have managed to finish all 600+ published pages in less than half a week, if that, due to how much I enjoyed reading it. I'm an engineering student and have very little free time, but frankly I put everything aside just so I could read TPoH and enjoy it to the fullest extent. Your work, your art, your narrative, your vision - they are beyond excellent. These have all kept me sane throughout one of the most insane and exhausting periods of my life. I hope you will live a happy life, and I just wanted to say thank you for existing as a person and putting your wonderful artistic work out there for others to find. You may bring more joy into this world than you realize at this present moment, but you are a truly wonderful artist with a sincerely wonderful mind. I will aim to subscribe to your Patreon when money allows (you know how broke university students are....) and although it is not an obligation, I wish to support you and your work and whatever else you may find worthwhile in your life. Money makes the world go around, unfortunately, so I hope you aren't too stressed about it. Keep creating, but make sure to enjoy the creation process too without feeling like you must deliver even if you are unhappy or too stressed to do so. Your work, your mind, your presence make the world a much better place in all senses of the phrase. I wish you all the best, sincerely.
after 2 years working outdoors all day i finally got stung by an onion for the first time yesterday and i wasnt even doing anything there wasnt even a nest nearby
a wasp. i was looking at a onion just now sorry
is it a hot take to say that i think you need to understand why something is bad, not just that it simply is?
this is a part of the problem
you need to be able to explain why you shouldnt use ai rather than “oh well its obviously bad and you shouldnt use it or else youre a bad person” because that isn’t logic. “ai generates child porn based off of real children and whether or not it does is entirely up to how it is built and if pedophiles are able to find ways around those safeguards, because ai cannot in itself discern right from wrong” is a genuine criticism. “amazon tried to build a data center the size of tuson outside of tuson just to power their ai that would’ve increased the inability to stay alive outside in parts of arizona” is a genuine criticism. even “using generative ai teaches you not to learn how to do things yourself even when they’re difficult, devaluing necessary skills out of practice” is a genuine criticism when you look at the amount of people who think they are able of doing a difficult major when they couldnt write their own papers in high school.
but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!
you need to know why reading someone’s diary is wrong if you want to learn about privacy and respect. you need to know why child sexual assault is wrong if you want to be able to help children form healthy age appropriate relationships. you need to know why capitalism is bad if you want to replace it with something else. you need actual concrete ideas and ideologies rather than “you should agree with me because i have the right vibe”
Had been thinking about this post (which is a fake excerpt from an imaginary narrative written to mock 'tumblr prose'), and how most "no actually this is good" comments are highlighting how the construction of individual sentences is interesting, how some of the language is evocative, how it Goes Hard. Because that post is written badly in a very thoughtful manner that focuses on core structural issues rather than going for low hanging fruit of poor technical proficiency with the written word, it is not bad in the most "obvious" of ways. So I think this is a legit learning opportunity, but also I don't want to dunk on anyone so instead I will just preach to the choir of My Followers.
But yeah like to be more constructive than just going "lol tumblr prose bad", really the issue in Large part that characterizes "tumblr prose" (which to be clear I don't think is a discrete thing and at most is a combination of several writing tendencies influenced by the medium of Online) comes down to the lack of real contrast in Any aspect of narrative construction, and an obsession with being quotable and constantly being at 100% of Going Hard (which go hand in hand).
In that post, the character voice is indistinct from that of the narration, and the characters quote one-liners that look Meaningful as excerpts and are borderline nonsensical as dialogue. There is no more than the faintest, most generic hints of characterization; these people exist as vague concepts to say deep words for the reader. The sentence length has little variation from its staccato beat, and so it is awkward to read and fails to complement the action or accomplish anything with the pacing (save for the slight slowdown when the torturer feels all that damp animal electricity). The timing is awkward and exaggeratedly dramatic. The description is a flowery kind of tryhard visceral and seems avoidant of describing anything too directly ("something dark and arterial" where there's nothing being accomplished by conveying uncertainty about what is currently gushing out of the injured character and the simple use of "blood splashed across the stones" would actually be 10x more effective), in a way that does disservice to what is supposed to be a torture scene, and leaves it weightless and ungrounded. In fairness to the people saying "this is good", that is MUCH easier to say when reading this fake excerpt as the standalone piece it actually is, but this kind of writing Cannot function in an actual narrative and is not what an excerpt from well constructed narrative fiction is going to look like basically ever.
It reflects a lot of very typical amateur writing issues that just about everyone has to grow out of (the minimal diversity in sentence length, simulated non-attention to scene pacing and timing), and issues common to fanfiction-influenced writing on social media (allergy to paragraph lengths of more than two sentences, little to no description of the characters or setting because, in fanfiction, the reader already knows their physical characteristics and mannerisms and it doesn't need to be lingered upon, Unlike In Original Fiction). But this particularly hits on an issue I think is semi-unique to narrative writing in the social media milieu, which is a focus on being quotable. This may not even be a conscious impulse at all But It's There. This kinda apparent terror of any moment not being as beautiful and hard hitting as possible (or for comedy, any moment not being A Joke). Everything "Goes Hard", so nothing actually does. A lot of "tumblr prose" type writing is less a narrative, more a string of quotes loosely assembled into narrative that vaguely gestures at things like Plot and Character. It substitutes depth for Suggestions of depth by utilizing stock symbolism without building it into the narrative, and by gesturing at weighty contexts without actually engaging with them. There can be little contrast or effective use of tone, pace, description when your story is a series of Hard Hitting Quotes.
I'm reading Watership Down right now and I think it's a great novel overall and can work as an example of how important it is to utilize contrast in your writing.
This segment is the lengthy first description of the titular down, which the rabbits are now encountering for the first time:
Adams is slowing the pace here to introduce us to the setting of the next segment of the book. The average sentence length is very long and keeps us lingering in the sensory detail, while still varied and thus smoothly readable. This new place is introduced by simultaneously conveying its physical description in vivid detail and conveying its feeling and character, and getting the most out of every described feature to do so. The thorn trees are "wind stunted". The air is "scented". The language takes on a very flowery character and heavily utilizes simile and metaphor. Woodland is "tumultuous with evening", sunlight filters through grass "like a wind" to the small creatures below, in contrast to laying "like a gold rind" on the hill when seen from a distance. This grandiose description is heavily functional and conveys both exhaustive physical detail and a feeling that this place is beautiful, awe inspiring to something like a rabbit, and full of life, though not without quiet hints of danger. It hits because Not Everything In The Book Is Described This Way. It means something that we're lingering like this and stopping to get a sense of this place on every possible level, and moving away from more direct, simple prose to convey the feeling of the place in depth.
This segment describes the rabbit Bigwig being found caught in a snare:
The prose here here has the opposite approach of the first excerpt. The language is concise, direct, and brutal. It only veers slightly away from the literal to describe Bigwig's voice as 'bubbling out' from his mouth, both conveying that the saliva and blood in his mouth is literally bubbling as he speaks, and implying the unsettling way his voice sounds as he's being strangled. The sentences are much shorter on the whole, as fit for the pacing of a tense and rapidly changing scene, and the pace closely complements the action - "There was a pause" not only conveys That There Was A Pause but interrupts the rhythm of this segment; the moment of uneasy stillness is echoed in the act of reading itself.
The scene this is excerpted from is extremely effective and does in fact Go Hard, it's well constructed in of itself but its effectiveness mostly lies in its place in the narrative. It's the culmination of a long, tense buildup as the reader becomes more aware that something is deeply Wrong about the place the rabbits are in, and the payoff is effective in being blunt and visceral, which hits because Not Everything In The Book Is Described This Way. Nothing about these excerpts are particularly quotable because that is actually not what good narrative writing is about.
a dragon for a friend
let's ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+c something else inconsequential so you don't accidentally paste the embarrasing thing,
utility pole paintings for april / may / june !
When You Look at Dr. Grace
part 1/2 (part 2)
When You Look at Dr. Grace
(part 1) part 2/2