Dai Rogo

Royai. Also other FMA, general writing talk and other vagaries.

[eisenkrahe]

Yes!

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

oh wait just realized i can edit my own posts.

like you can't edit reblogs anymore but you can still edit your own post even after it has a thousand notes or whatever.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

i have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

[teaboot]

My mom likes to tell me about how when I was a little kid riding public transport with her I'd always smile and giggle and chat with weird old ladies who smelled like cat pee and homeless folks and strangers dressed in bizarre outfits but any time a tidy and respectable businessman in a suit and tie waved at me I'd immediately clam up, and she takes a great deal of pride in my supposed inherentability to clock personalities but the truth is I do vaguely remember those bus rides, and it was never about the clothes or the hair or the smell, but more because everyone "strange" asked interesting questions and listened to what I had to say and seemed to think about what I said while the neat and tidy and rigid folks only ever acted like they were going through the motions, which was boring as hell and also pretty annoying

[teaboot]

Well-to-do finance manager with tidy shoes: "Why hello, sweetheart. Can you say 'hi'? Aren't you cute. Are you on a trip with your mom?"

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

4 year old me, suddenly paying attention: Finally, A Person Of Intellect

[052-jy]

☀️ wiwa

[draconisxmalfoy]

Dear, sweet, Littlefoot, do you remember the way to the Great Valley?  I guess so. But why do I have to know if you’re going to be with me? I’ll be with you. Even if you can’t see me. What do you mean I can’t see you? I can always see you.

The Land Before Time(1988) dir. Don Bluth

[floating-in-the-blue]

#Children’s media used to be about making you feel the entire depth and breadth of the human emotional spectrum#All while your 7 y/o brain struggled to make sense of if all. But it was like an emotional vaccine#Comprehending loss at that age didn’t make it any easier to bear with age. But atleast it was familiar (conserving these tags by @jonairadreaming because yes)

[xiaq]

One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Hey! I haven't seen this question on the FAQs, but if you have answered it before and I haven't seen it, I apologize. I wanted to ask about your writing process: do you plan your stories before you publish them in great detail or just in general? Do you outline? I'm curious about how other people go about this.

Thank you for your time!

I consider it a viable story idea once I have: - the main themes and setting (doesn't have to be a detailed setting, surface details related to the premise and plot are enough)

- the narrator's personality and voice

- How the climax will go and what the ending will be (can be rough; I don't need to know specifically what characters will be there are the end, just what the overall mood and conclusion will be)

Usually, by the time I start writing (because writing is a very slow process), I have more than this, but these are the elements that I consider critical before starting. I do not need to know every side character and subplot. I do not need to know every detail of worldbuilding, so long as I know enough to carry the central themes so I won't write myself into a plot hole. I started TTOU knowing who Aspen was and with a vague idea of exploring a bit about Arboreans, the Public Universal Friends, and a prison colony. I knew the basic layout of the ship and the chronostasis system, and I knew in *very broad terms* what they would find at Hylara (I won't spoil it here in case people haven't read it, but I had like, one sentence of knowledge about the place). I knew essentially what the first and last chapters were going to be. Everything else, including building the non-Aspen characters, came after I started writing.

I don't outline a lot at the start of a story, but once I pass about the two thirds mark I make a list at the end of my openoffice document of what I still need to cover and the order the events will probably go in. This is to help stick the landing without missing anything important; sticking the landing is massively important. Because I start writing without a lot of detail, I can't outline at that level of detail until fairly late in the process. Until then I just keep in mind the plot beats I need to hit for whatever I'm writing, which is an ever-changing list through the first two thirds.

Although I start with a pretty vague idea, I do have one rule, which is to *never introduce something that I do not have an acceptable solution for*. This doesn't have to be the solution I go with (sometimes a better one develops later), but it usually is. Never ask a question until you have an answer for it; don't bank on the ability to come up with an answer later. Don't be afraid to switch to a better answer, if you do come up with one, but you should never put yourself in a position where you have to do that. Don't introduce a corpse until you know how they died. Don't introduce a character personality or position change until you know what prompted the change. Don't introduce a conspiracy until you have a passable motivation for it and believable actions for the conspirators. When Aspen wakes up alone, I have a reason why the crew is dead. When Aspen can't get through a locked ring, I have a reason why the ring is locked. So while I do consider a story viable fairly early in the process, I do start having to answer more detailed questions very early on.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#this might be some of the best writing advice I've ever seen out there#or at least a system that i think matches up with my preferences#bc both outlining and discovery writing get me stuck but at different points and these tips seem like a solid middle ground#like discovery writing with guard rails

If it's helpful to you, I find it more useful to frame outlining vs. discovery writing not as strategies but as expressions of different skillsets, that I call inductive vs deductive plotting, and that I explain here.

[leebrontide]

Was talking to my wife about my child offering other children to have me fix their toys and me having no idea what prompted her to do that.

My wife said that she just has an unshakable faith in our ability to fix things. And I guess we do often fix stuff and she has limited understanding of the variety of skillsets needed for that. So that makes sense.

I think probably it’s a common tho not universal image for young kids to have of their caregivers.

Anyways I think this should be used a lot more in stories about necromancy. Because if she brought me a dead pet or whatever and asked me to fix it and had just so much faith that I could do it, and I thought there was any chance I could do it it’d be “ok honey let’s go see if we can find some forbidden books at the library. Maybe we can get doughnuts after”

Cause like what else is a parent gonna do, when they look at you that way?

[apolladay]

Before you are two magic buttons. Button A: you will never have to clean your kitchen again (dishes are automatically done; floor swept and mopped; etc). Button B: you will never have to clean your bathroom again (toilet & sink & tub/shower cleaned and sanitized; etc) Which button do you push?

A

B

Voting ended onJun 3

[heliophile-oxon]

So many comments, many of them wise and all of them heartfelt, and yet nobody has thought to add ...

the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. Not only are there dishes every day, not only are there food preparation surfaces of various kinds every day, not only are there crumbs and odds and ends that fall on the floor every day ... but the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. The oven is in the kitchen, the food cupboards are in the kitchen, and above all THE KITCHEN BIN IS IN THE KITCHEN.

I mean, it's not like the bathroom is all sweetness and light, but seriously! Who in their right mind is choosing the bathroom?!?!?!?

Ils sont fous, ces Romains tumblrains.

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[eebie]

The apple they fed to snow white wasnt poision at all it was just a red delicious

[theseventhcrow55]

i get so emotional every time i think about fanfic culture. it's just so beautiful that people are writing and anonymously posting these thousand-word stories about characters we all love and not even getting any money or public fame from it. it's literally just for the love of the game.

shout out to everyone who participates in fanfic culture, be it reading or writing fanfics. you are contributing to such a lovely thing <3

[stjohnstarling]

Good drama is about creating a desire in the reader and then teasing them with alternately fulfilling or denying that desire. In this way, it is a lot like a strip tease.

[stjohnstarling]

You have to find a way to make the reader want something and then play with whether you’re going to actually give it to them.

[stjohnstarling]

They love it btw. It makes them beg for more.

[galileosballs]

Something that gets really lost in a lot of discourse is that what we would now call 'going low-contact' or 'going no-contact' with your family used to be so completely within the normal range of familial contact that there wasn't even a term for it. Sure, in the pre-IM pre-social media days some people were calling their parents daily, but I'd wager the vast majority of people were not. Long distance calling used to be quite expensive, after all. If your kid went to the big city to seek their fortune you might hear from them every few weeks, or every month, or once a year, and that wasn't particularly odd. This was even more the case before telephones were common, of course - people would send letters, but definitely not more than once a week and probably a lot less. It was just a normal, accepted fact that you'd hear from some family members who lived nearby often, and some who lived farther away very rarely.

The minimum amount of contact with family that is expected of people in the groupchat-facetime-instagram era is so much higher than at any previous point in history. The ceiling is about the same, since then and now multiple generations often live under the same roof, but the floor is higher by orders of magnitude.

How many adult children who are 'no-contact' or 'low-contact' now would also have been the ones who moved to the city and sent a letter every three months then? Is family estrangement an actual current problem, or is it just an illusion caused by smartphones?

[hyperlexichypatia]

When I complain about increased surveillance, control, and infantilization of older kids and young adults, it's often a level of surveillance and control that wouldn't have been possible, or at least practical, in previous generations. At minimum, it would've been escapable.

[penny-anna]

what if on Taskmaster one of the contestants died in the middle of filming a task but after doing enough of the task for it to be deemed complete so since there was nothing in the rules to say you had to be alive throughout they allowed it. & then all the other contestants bombed so badly that the dead person won the task and in the studio Greg was there like 'wow you all managed to do worse than Christine and she was dead for most of it'

[penny-anna]

they don't sub in a replacement contestant for the studio shows so one of the chairs is just empty and sometimes when contestants are arguing their case on something they're like 'I think if Christine was still with us she'd take my side' and Greg would be like 'for fuck's sake stop bringing up Christine'

[penny-anna]

also everyone (Greg included) would dunk on Alex for 'killing Christine' with the task and Alex would keep nervously laughing it off and be like 'legally speaking we weren't responsible for what happened to Christine'

[penny-anna]

the interstitials for the season occasionally feature randomly inserted shots of Christine's lifeless body lying on the ground

[penny-anna]

obviously it would already have been announced that Christine died filming Taskmaster but during the show they wouldn't say which task it happened in so every time there's a Christine segment it'd be like is this the one where she died 🤔 let's watch and find out

[heedra]

so far one theme of the 30s for me has been realizing that literally every human being on earth who appears completely cool and collected and together with it at first glance has some threshold past which enough known information about them will shatter that mystique completely. i don't even say this negatively or pessimistically it's just been helpful to keep in mind that we're all like that.

[we-are-knight]

Training the Squire.

She took a certain swordtok channel talking about dual daggers as a bad weapon choice as a challenge.

This was a clip from her first time fencing using two daggers against me with my greatsword.

Somehow, after multiple attempts, she got the angle of the parry just right, and parried my sword, while stabbing me in the armpit.

Later, she managed this...

And a few other plays in which she hooked my sword with her off-hand dagger, before stabbing me.

She's got a lot more to work on, but she's determined to make "dual dagger combat" viable for the girlies.

[yuukisjourney]

I hope she succeeds, rooting for her

[we-are-knight]

She's only just started with this, so she's really carving her own path on it. So far, she has a few moments of brilliance amidst failures, but that's what we both expected for her 1st/2nd time ever trying it.

Give her a year or two, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was able to do this the way Booktok girlies imagine their heroines.

[we-are-knight]

I'm gonna be honest, there's a reason I don't talk about Sellsword Arts, and it's mainly because I just don't like them as I find them obnoxious. That's not a condemnation of people watching them, I just don't enjoy them.

The other reason is that they know just enough to give an opinion that is entrenched in absolutist HEMA ideology with no room for experimentation or nuance, or in stage combat. I can't fault the latter, I don't do stage combat, so it's not something I can comment upon. But the rigidity of HEMA can bother me increasingly as it stifles development and informed speculation where we lack information, or takes the written word as gospel in a way that is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the reality of practise.

This means that I try to avoid their content, as it often starts with a position which is fairly well researched by people in HEMA, and devolves into David making blanket statements without any nuance. And that's when he's talking about well researched content. His video on axes being generally bad weapons was outright incorrect in almost all aspects, to the point a member of the group I'm in (who is something of an expert on axes, having recognised the lack of info and put years of study into actually learning how to make them work) addressed the topic.

Similarly, my squire is a dagger enthusiast, and she knows she's going to be at a disadvantage for it. She still manages to win more often than most people in the same position, and actually fighting her with a dagger against dagger especially is a losing battle. So of course, she heard "dual daggers doesn't work", and we decided we'd test it.

Right off the bat, we have some issues with how David approached the topic. First, in his video, he mostly spends time running blindly in, not parrying or binding, then claims it won't work. Compare with the clips of Squire Jess entering with a parry, and using the second dagger to attack into the opening underneath...

We've concluded that dual daggers (so far) is certainly not an ideal selection for combat, but also that (1) it is possible and can definitely be used to fight other lightly armoured opponents. And that (2) given practise, dual daggers can make an effective response to other larger weapons. It's also worth pointing out that from my perspective, dual daggers is up there with giant sword: not always the most practical choice, but it is a power fantasy for the target audience, and certainly feasible within a proper context. That's not even mentioning the use of dual short blades in, say, Kali.

So I hope Squire Jess and I can help support the Booktok and fantasy girlies that want to imagine their fighting style working, because Squire Jess is a 5ft-nuthin' girl half my weight and size, who regularly stabs me and throws me to the floor. Which I take as a point of pride—after all, I taught her!

[phyrexian-mama]

I've done a lot of stage combat, and especially in writing and performances I'll admit that while I think a healthy dose of realism is good to ground things, power fantasies are fun to explore for a reason.

I also wholeheartedly agree with the stance that being too rigid in foundational points kills the ability to explore and grow. Foundations should always be a starting point to build on - and yeah, maybe not everything you explore ends up being good, but you never know what discoveries there are to make along the way. And that's part of the joy and art of things like this.

Obviously it makes sense that dual daggers is going to be at a disadvantage in a lot of situations. But the power fantasy of it is exactly - being at a disadvantage, and being able to find ways to use it anyway. To find the advantages others might overlook. I think the comparison to great weapons is perfect in that regard.

All of that is to say - I love seeing people approach something that is cool and fantastical from the stance of 'Is it possible, how can we make it more reliable, what can make this work, what can we learn from it?' as opposed to a stance of condemnation.

[we-are-knight]

An absolutely valid and based take, thank you for adding your input to this! :)