Hey writers. I hate to break it to you, but sometimes the thing holding you back from writing isn't some profound piece of advice you have yet to hear. Sometimes the thing holding you back is you. Give yourself freedom to rest when you need it, but if you want to be a writer, you have to write. That means getting rid of the distractions, letting yourself get a little bored, and doing the actual writing.
There is a certain level of discipline required. I'm not saying the goal yourself 500 words a day, but I'm saying that if you want to write, you have to write, and you have to make an effort to write. You may have to carve out time to write and then be disciplined about using that time for writing.
remember like an actual decade ago, there was a post giving advice for what to do if The Heterosexuals asked for your celebrity crush, and the advice was to just say "chris" and let them guess which chris and then just agree
and as your local ace i understand why such advice is appealing because i have been 13 and feeling a rising panic that i would answer "wrong" and bad things would happen. however as an adult i now understand that most people asking this are just asking you a question on par with asking what movies/music/whatever you like. they're not testing you, and if you give a fake answer, you're going to end up fielding follow-up questions or being sent memes or whatever, because they're trying to engage with your answers. just say a celebrity that you actually like (regardless of if you find them attractive or have a "crush"), or if you don't have one, say you don't pay attention to celebrities
anyway, i went out to drinks with people i didn't know that well, got asked that question, and said i wanted to study robert pattinson like a bug. now i get sent weird photos of him
i have a lot of thoughts on the matter but i will say that fandom moving from semi-private blogs and communities to extremely public and algorithm-driven social media was a huge mistake that has changed fandom culture for the worse
William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Gary Dourdan, George Eads, Paul Guilfoyle, Jorja Fox, Eric Szmanda, Robert David Hall, Louise Lombard, Wallace Langham, Lauren Lee Smith, Laurence Fishburne, Liz Vassey, David Berman, Ted Danson, Elisabeth Harnois, Elisabeth Shue, and Jon Wellner in CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION (2000–2015).
↳ First + last appearances in main credits, in order of first appearance.
@csiat25: September 27–October 6, 2025: An event in celebration of 25 years of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (as well as 10 years of its conclusion).
has anyone watched the magnificent century in a language other than turkish? i speak and understand arabic, so i started by watching the syrian arabic dub, but i quickly found some characters to be more whiny/annoying compared with the turkish (hürrem lol) so now ive just been watching the turkish with english subs (and also bc my mom doesn’t speak arabic and she’s been watching with me)
curious to know if anyone’s experienced the show in more than one way by watching it dubbed vs. subtitled
musings about the magnificent century bc I got kinda high and thought too much about it lol:
okay, I'm going to channel some of my frustration at not being able to write bc my family won't stfu in the background into channeling forth (?) some but def not all of my inner thoughts about the magnificent century. many of which have been circling around my brain for over a month, all of which I'll keep being anxious about forgetting if I don't put them into writing right tf now.
but let me just start by saying that turkish series are bangers. seriously. I don't know what the fuck they're putting in the water in turkey, but no one is doing it like the turks re: television, and I'm so serious about that. the feeling has come close with me re: certain egyptian series, but if I had to pick a favorite between the two it wouldn't even be a question.
turkish series are deeply nostalgic for me in that i grew up watching them (i don’t speak turkish, but they were subtitled in greek) w my aunt in athens in the summers i'd visit family; some of my best memories involve getting addicted to whatever she was watching at the time, which is how I'd caught snippets of MC over the years/seasons but never watched the whole thing. and also yabancı damat, but I can't for the life of me find a subtitled version in english or greek or arabic, can someone help
anyway, u can find a series of random disjointed thoughts about the show under the following cut, feel free to hit me up about any and/or all of them (or about my favorite character nigar kalfa <3333) bc absolutely everyone I know in my life who I’ve found out has seen this show since I've started my proper watch back in May likes it only casually and I'm like….. obsessed with it…. so:
*and also I'm only on bölüm 26 ok ik i have a long long way to go but the info contained herein is only from what's canon up to 26 aka no spoilers pls!
oof I love love love the parallels this show makes both with its storytelling and its dialogue. the ones that come to mind now involve slash mostly center around one of my favorite aspects of the show: hürrem and nigar's friendship/relationship/found familyship (bc I saw someone on here say that they're such found sisters and I do think this is true).
in the beginning of the show, after she’s become a favorite, hürrem tells gülnihal she'll eventually become a sultan too, possibly even the valide sultan (I don't remember the exact phrasing, she might have said one or both but she said at least one of those for sure) and that gülnihal will be her daye hatun, assuming the role of her closest confidant. later, many episodes later -- after hürrem and gülnihal's friendship has fallen apart a little a lot, mostly shifting to a dynamic in which gülnihal serves hürrem and cares for/basically nannies her children, and after hürrem and nigar have grown exponentially closer than they were before -- hürrem is in her room with nigar and gülnihal when she calls nigar "my daye hatun" (a moment I did personally love as a sweet one for the two of them, though #rip gülnihal). the camera doesn't linger on gülnihal's face too much, but it's an interesting callback to earlier dialogue.
much of how hürrem and nigar relate to each other feels more familial in nature than it does in what’s simply a friendship. this, I think, relates to a broader theme of their relationship paralleling with süleyman and Ibrahim's in different and interesting ways. as hürrem's star has risen in the harem, for ex, nigar's relationship to hürrem at its core has evolved in turn to become more deferential, submissive -- I hesitate to call it a traditional master/slave dynamic only because at this point in the show, hürrem is still a slave as well (and also bc the slave system of the ottoman empire specifically is too big of a topic for me to get into here).
but hürrem does hierarchically outrank nigar in the harem, if not starting from when she became a favorite then definitely after she had mehmet; similarly, while it is canonically (and historically) true that süleyman and ibrahim have been best friends/spiritually brothers since childhood, ibrahim is still a converted slave from parga who, at the end of the day, has to bow before his sultan. who has to see to his sultan’s every whim. who has to follow the orders he’s given, or else it’s his head on the chopping block. what I'm trying to say is: there are limits to how far nigar and ibrahim can each go with hürrem and süleyman respectively, and while both of them can push the envelope more than anyone else save for close family members (a privilege they do make use of when or as they see fit), that inequality persists.
episodes 25 and 26 see the first serious fracture(s) appear in two relationships (and others, but I'm focusing on these two here), and further underscore the similarities between them in the process: hürrem and nigar's, and süleyman and Ibrahim's. hürrem and nigar’s because hürrem is feeling betrayed over nigar's unwitting involvement in leo's death (though I'm really on nigar's side for this one, not bc I love her though I do but bc girl he's literally a pasha who's threatened nigar’s life multiple times including fucking choking her out twice like what do you expect her to do) (also hürrem said “i trusted you” to nigar but she didn’t bc she could have told nigar about leo and so nigar could have been more comfortable coming to her with what ibrahim said/they could have schemed together), süleyman and ibrahim’s because süleyman is suspicious of what ibrahim was doing with hürrem at his palace that day.
also, I do love the scene in episode 25 when nigar begs for hürrem's forgiveness (and she deserves it! she was loyal!! up to episode 26, which is all i can speak for, she has protected hürrem's secrets at every turn w ibrahim and mahidevran!!). I'm sure it's much more beautiful in the turkish dialogue because the english subs sort of suck for that bit in that you can tell they're not faithfully translating everything, but you don't even need words bc of how accomplished filiz is at acting with just her eyes, jesus fucking christ.
three little details I think are really fucking interesting but that reveal a lot characterization-wise: ibrahim only made a move in the garden to touch nigar's face in episode 17ish after he'd already secured a marriage to hatice -- as in, they were getting married that episode, emboldening ibrahim to do something that he knew was socially inappropriate and couldn’t be passed off as conveying anything other than romantic interest. maybe it's something he'd always wanted to do, maybe not and it just occurred to him in that moment, but in the context of the society they live in and in the context of palace dynamics too there is no other (read: non-romantic) way to interpret his actions. that he waited to do so until after his position was secured is... telling.
ibrahim thanks matrakçı (and leo too??) for "protecting his harem" during the janissary revolt while he was away governing egypt. that is the wording he uses, he calls it his harem, but hatice tells the Venetian doge’s widowed daughter episodes later, when she asks if they have a harem in their palace, that they "absolutely do not, it is forbidden". we know that ibrahim wanted to become a sultan, began to see himself as equal to or greater than sultan süleyman which contributed to his demise, but that is one very very specific tension point that reveals itself when you compare his dialogue to hatice's where you can see that his true desires are already being reflected in how he speaks of himself.
revising this to add in a further piece of evidence for the above point after finishing episode 26: that it's only when hürrem makes reference to ibrahim having a harem (when she encourages hatice to take some concubines home to replace her staff post-the whole sadıka debacle, something something "ibrahim can find joy in his harem") that hatice freaks out on/yells at hürrem for the first time. I don't think it was accidental that hürrem's harem comment triggered that outburst.
lastly, and then I'll stfu for now, but ibrahim only calls hürrem "sultanım" for the first time in the opening scenes of episode 26, after he's run out to the garden to deal with the aftermath of sadıka's assassination attempt of süleyman. when ibrahim finds that hürrem has lived and not leo (after the former comes out to join them on the grass with nigar running behind her), and when she starts to publicly freak out but most importantly freak out in front of süleyman about sadıka's treachery being Ibrahim's doing -- in other words, when ibrahim realizes how fucked he is if he doesn't play his cards right; that he can't expose hürrem and leo's past now or ever because of how much the sadıka situation compromises his own position -- ibrahim defaults to showing hürrem some deference for the very first time. he's all too happy to threaten her in private, to lord things over her and threaten her sons’ lives when it’s just the two of them, but here he instructs nigar to bring hürrem “a glass of water for sultanım”. as far as I'm aware, ibrahim has never used that word to refer to hürrem, not up until that point at least, and it's such a genius moment storytelling-wise to include that detail as happening for the first time & in that specific instance.
Tumblr users will say "queer history" and mean "midcentury archival records from a specific US-American city that I have extrapolated into a universal mythos" and not even blink
Maybe your queer elders fictional or otherwise were also influenced by the biases and contradictions of their own circumstances, time and place, and I am no more beholden to their ideas and ways of doing things than I am to any other form of tradition trying to constrain me.
Perhaps history is a conversation and not an edict.
especially because when queer americans on this app (and lets be honest all of social media) talk about "learning queer history" its almost always a young white queer person who is really only referring to white queer history in america
which has so many issues of its own, the most grievous in my opinion being the blatant disregard of black and brown queer history, and how BIPOC queer people (especially queer women) were the basis of the US's gay rights movement at large
to have a holistic and balanced understanding of queer history, one must study, discuss, and honor the contributions and experiences of black and brown queer folk. not just from their own home country, but from all over the world. its rather unfortunate that the people referred to in op's post not only fail to do this, but fail to even recognize this aspect of queer history/world history. they do themselves and the community a disservice
one day you wake up and with exceeding clarity, deep in your bones, you suddenly understand why that frenchman might have looked at History - said nah - and let's do Geneology or Archeology instead.
slowburn or love at first sight // fake dating or secret dating // enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers (but actually: enemies to best friends to lovers lol) // there’s only one bed or long-distance correspondence // hurt/comfort or amnesia // fantasy au or modern au // mutual pining or domestic bliss // smut or fluff // canon-compliant or fix-it // reincarnation or character death // one-shot or multi-chapter // kid fic or road trip fic // arranged marriage or accidental marriage // high-school romance or middle-age romance // time travel or isolated together // neighbours or roommates // sci-fi au or magic au // body swap or genderbent // angst or crack // apocalyptic or mundane
tagging @oddly-romantic, @blackseablacksky, @localgaysian, @mistydear, and anyone else who might see this and wants to do it!
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
andulkaphoto
2087
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
