Evil Mermaids Inc.

Lau, Dutch, she/her/they/them. I've been on here too long to find a succinct way to justify this clusterfuck of a blog. My inbox is always open :)

[animentality]

[achievement-hunter]

[textandimageenjoyer]

[toskarin]

the average person with bad taste can be into some extremely banal garbage but when you get close enough to someone with otherwise good taste that they start a recommendation by going off on a preamble about how they don't necessarily recommend it you know you're seconds away from hearing about some real torturously wretched dogshit

[toskarin]

friend from work will have you watch a two hour movie where you can feel every second as it passes by, but enemployed movie mutual will put you on the kind of shit that feels like crawling on cobblestone until emaciated

[toskarin]

people are reading this as the latter friend recommending dry, pretentious cinema. that's not the case. not that kind of situation. you're getting no enrichment out of this. I need you to understand they're making you watch Gooby because "it's kinda good"

[weepingchoir]

[teaboot]

Not to insert myself here but as someone who owns Ghost Rider 1 and 2 on DVD I do actually need everyone to watch it right now because in the second one a kid asks Nick Cage as Ghost Rider how he pees and Nick Cage says “it’s like a flamethrower” and then they hard cut to a CGI skeleton in full black moto leather pissing a jet of fire and then it does a shoulder check at the camera and nods like “hell yeah brother”

[teaboot]

Fully derailing this post because I found a gif

[cutecipher]

it really is annoying as hell how someone will talk about how poor people can't avoid ethically dubious products because of how being poor works and then someone with a two story house in the suburbs will take that to mean they can order harry potter books through a drone delivery from amazon and if you criticize that you're a bigot

[gunsandfireandshit]

PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE

[gothcostco]

From another article i read today 😭

[hustlerose]

alt link

[rincewindthecheese]

he wasn’t even there to be a contestant he joined the crew as a CHINESE TEACHER but the directors noticed his good looks and begged him to compete. poor guy made it to the finals and if he had been one of the winners he would have been contractually forced to be in a boy band whether he wanted to or not

[lastvalyrian]

this is the closest any human being has ever come to actually being sold to One Direction

[parkchanwoohoo]

The facial expressions of everyone trying not to lose it are killing me

[gunsandfireandshit]

This is painfully American

[dirtbaby2016]

Americans be like it is totally normal for an entire stadium (including military members) to stand at attention while a fast food clown mascot sings the national anthem

[softwaring]

[thegirlwiththemooglehat]

[thecryptkeeper]

i know the way people talk about their pets now is probably how we’ve been doing it for all of history. a cat owner in ancient rome saw their cat lounging on the dining pillows and commented “he thinks himself to be the senator claudius 🤣”

[library-seraph]

The first attested cat in Japan was given to a young 9th century emperor and his diary about it includes such gems as 'I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.", "The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink.", "When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk." and "I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.” Basically posting about how his void is the best little void and so good at getting really round

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

[teaboot]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[teaboot]

(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy

[teaboot]

One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable

[teaboot]

To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit

[teaboot]

"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."

[sindri42]

I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.

[roach-works]

everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing

[teaboot]

Local Metropolis Reporter Publically Recognized For Contributions To The City; Awarded Medal Of Distinction

[championofdnd]

They tried to get superman to present the medal but he was offended at being called "overrated" in comparison to Clark so he declined

[teaboot]

Counter offer: Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman

[teaboot]

beating this dead horse with memes

[everythingismadeofchaos]

Hey this was a real fun little read. It's so great to find these treasures on this site

[teaboot]

We’re happy to have you!

[hanleialuke]

5 things your character can't do while speaking

Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.

Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.

Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.

Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.

Sneer. I’m not even going to bother explaining this one. “SNEER” ISN’T EVEN A SOUND.

[phrux]

Choked is not meant to be taken literally, an obstruction in the throat. It means they’re having difficultly speaking, they’re forcing the words out with difficulty. Often used when the character is convulsed in tears or laughter.

Hiss is a low, threatening whisper. Raw, guttural, vicious. It is NOT a literal hiss like an animal, it is a tone of voice that serves the same function. Someone will hiss that they’re going to cut your throat- a message from one person to the other.

Snarl is the same kind of thing. Not literal, it’s a tone of voice that serves the same function. It’s raw and gutteral like a hiss, but more savage than vicious. It’s loud, it’s showy, it’s intimidating. It’s very alpha male, big man, look at how fucking dangerous I am. I’ll take ALL of you on. Even if they’re snarling at one person in particular, nobody better back them up or they’re gonna get fucked up too.

Shriek. Come on, seriously? We’ve all heard people shriek either in fear or outrage. High pitched, loud, out of control, feminine. Men can shriek, but it’s funny and emasculating. Think angry italian women throwing pots and pans or ladies on tables who just saw a mouse.

Sneering is contempt whether it’s a facial expression or a tone of voice or both. There are a hundred different ways to sneer with your voice, but it all adds up to the same thing.

[carnivoredeer]

How descriptive words work 101

[susspirria]

Op radiating cinema sins energy with that list lol

[neopet-euthanization]

OP tagging this as “reasons they stop reading a book in ch 1” yet not grasping like the most basic form of figurative language is… something

[flipocrite]

[maswartz]

[fractally]

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

[mariacallous]

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

I recently learned that back in the 90s when Tulsi Gabbard was a teen her dad did an anti-same sex marriage ad with her where he went “look, just because people want to get married to someone isn’t a reason to grant them that right—I mean, I can’t marry my daughter, right?” Which has implications that yes, she had a VERY weird childhood

[radiofreederry]

Lol

[cavegirlpoems]

I cannot stop laughing at the idea that socialism ignores humanity’s highest spiritual ideal: owning yachts.

[playwrongs]

I think strange horrible things should stop befalling my friends

[catastrophespouse]

I think strange wonderful things should start befalling my friends

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[myboyrozanovv]

Also it has stopped catching extremely easy to catch mistakes. That it used to catch. Or only corrects them sometimes in the same document.

[rneliflua]

"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist

[rneliflua]

blorbofication to me is when you love a character in such a laser focus way that you somewhat detach them from the narrative from which they are inserted and treat them in a way roughly similar to how you'd treat an oc for which you still have no story and just like to put them in situations just for fun. which there's nothing wrong with btw, it's just that it can easily lead to people forgetting the character engine in a narrative and not just a barbie doll

[fishandshesmygills]

love the word lackluster. well it sucks because it’s not shiny

[zzoupz]

[throathole]

Oh thanks but what the fuck does any of that mean

[anariel-the-elrond-apologist]

I’ve seen quite a few of these in my time, but this one takes the cake.

[throathole]

This is fucking killing me

Golp: a roundel purpure.

Repeat this to yourself until it begins to have meaning

[a-book-of-creatures]

Okay then since some of you need to be reminded of this:

Roundels are circles in heraldry. They are named according to their color, which also has its own lingo. Let’s meet them!

Bezant: roundel or (gold) 🟡

Plate: roundel argent (silver) ⚪️

Torteau: roundel gules (red) 🔴

Pomme: roundel vert (green) 🟢

Hurt: roundel azure (blue) 🔵

Golp: roundel purpure (purple) 🟣

Pellet: roundel sable (black) ⚫️

If your field is strewn with roundels, you can describe it appropriately as being bezanty, hurty, golpy, and so on.

[cognitohazardous]