... and then again I think: no.

I am too old to merely play, too young to be without desire. - Goethe, Faust

[titsay]

[clientsfromhell]

I have a client who communicates exclusively via Microsoft Word.

If she has something to tell me, I’ll receive an email with nothing in the body, but a Word doc attached. That’s where she writes her message.

Whenever she wants to email me a photo, she does so via an empty Word doc with said photo set as its background.

But my favorite thing was the first time I witnessed her visiting a website. She had me spell the URL (“W… W… W… dot…”) and with my own two eyes I watched her type it into Word, made it a hyperlink, and Ctrl click it to go there.

I was so fascinated I didn’t even say anything.

[captoring]

a different microsoft world

[wheretheriverends]

relevant xkcd

[fictionalred]

was gonna reblog this into our microsoft hate club community. but true to windows/tumblr form it erred

[bootycap]

ao3 mcu a:aou abo bdsm ot3 hs au pwp

[bootycap]

the fact that this is completely understandable and rather descriptive makes me rethink what i’ve done with my life

[prewars-deleted]

#i understand it perfectly but you couldn’t fucking pay me to read it

[bootycap]

this post has ended up in at least 2 masters theses and 1 presentation and im not sure how i feel about that

[captainlordauditor]

but is it m/m/m, f/f/f, f/m/m or f/f/m

[boytranscending]

Dont be silly, a:aou doesnt have three whole women in it

[sam-writes]

This post is just multiple punches to the face

[dogpuppy]

[squirrelly-13]

they got married btw

[visit-me-here-in-wonderland]

oh you’re not kidding

[seymour-butz-stuff]

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[macmanx]

[iwannarunawayandbeapirate]

got curious because idk how well-known this is internationally so:

Are you familiar with twist bread/Stockbrot?

Yes; I'm German

No; I'm German

Yes; I'm not German

No; I'm not German

Nuance button

Remaining time: 5 days 16 hours

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[czech-hunter-reject]

Teeheehee, off to do my little schemes 😜

[czech-hunter-reject]

Teeheehee, on my way back home from doing my little schemes 🤪

[monster-at-the-end-of-this-book]

How were the schemes Were the schemes successful

[czech-hunter-reject]

Oh- hehehejehe huhuhuhu hæhæhæ, my little schemes were an astounding success!! 😝 they never saw it coming teeheehee

[a-very-lost-lily]

“The man of business gave a short laugh — laughter which was clearly directed at Mr Honeyfoot, yet Mr Norrell did not reprimand him either by look or word, and Mr Segundus wondered what sort of business it could be that Mr Norrell entrusted to this person. With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs Radcliffe.” -Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

As you can see I was not quite done, though this is more of a glorified sketch I’m happy with it.

I’ve been drawing horses so often I really did apply for a job at my local stables. Here’s to hoping. Also can you tell I love John Bauer.

Need I say more.

[herpsandbirds]

I'm resting at a solid 7 today.

[xenosaurus]

it’s a shame more vampire media doesn’t pull from vampire bat behavior because they’re such sweeties. they can only survive their incredibly specialized diet because bats will share blood with colony members that didn’t find a meal! there’s evidence that suggests the donors sometimes initiate this behavior themselves by approaching hungry bats! the colonies are mostly harems of females with a few males but they’ve been observed letting unrelated males in when it gets cold so they can all stay warm! cute little social critters!

[xenosaurus]

@yupekosi your tags have created such a beautiful world

[moishe-pipick]

No

[ytpforyouandme]

[dummerhummer]

"Wow! It's Greyed: Milk" by Dathings

[unpretty]

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

[unpretty]

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

[thegunlady]

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

[oneheadtoanother]

idk anything about this but I love it

[lynati]

If any competition needed to be on Tumblr, it's this one.