mhubble

|| Writer of fantasy || Lover of media || D&D dice goblin || Seeker of adventure ||

[pronouncingitwang]

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

[yokowan]

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

[le-jardin-inculte]

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

[shithowdy]

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

[whitachi]

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

[araceil]

At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.

[josilverdragon]

"The horrors persist but so do libraries, books, iced coffee, sunsets, trees, the word 'fuck', the moon and the sea."

[musashi]

Hey can you guys reblog Cheeseburger so he can take a sunbeam nap on lots of blogs. No other reason I just want you guys to see him.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Step-by-step guide to wield a ‘Golden Cudgel’ like the Monkey King Sun Wukong by 襄阳梅子

[casual-darkness]

[zetrystan]

Technically true.

[zetrystan]

He got the job.

[zetrystan]

He takes his job seriously.

[zetrystan]

Prof Rad over on youtube dubbed the Wolf Hunter comic (click here)! 

Go check it out and give them some support! :) (also the end killed me haha) ₍ᐢ•ﻌ•ᐢ₎

[zetrystan]

The farmer sheared the sheep, and it was used to make a gift for Wolf Hunter, so…

[zetrystan]

Wolf Hunter goes to the village markets.

[zetrystan]

Wolf Hunter and his conga line of sheep.

[zetrystan]

Wolf Hunter was looking for them for a while.

[99fish]

hi heres the entire twilight movie as a stamp

[lolawashere-deactivated20240904]

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

Brain farts, a thread

[petermorwood]

Reblogging this once again because, once again, it made me laugh.

[the-literary-lesbian]

writing mood™️

[gaycism]

[rockpapertheodore]

[claypigeonpottery]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

and here’s the other side lol

[poetrylesbian]

just remembered this old clickhole video i used to be obsessed with

[onlytiktoks]

[shinyhappygoth]

Time to FROLIC!

[bobomcfoe-art]

Videos i like so much i painted them

[mythicalheartbeat]

Ships with height differences. Reblog if you agree

[kaninchen-reblogs]

[myjetpack]

My cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books

[ampervadasz]

Sneak 100

[heroineimages]

I mean, the little bugger's basically invisible until like ten feet away...

[prof-grace-aspen]

Watching owls fly out in the wild is actually a crazy experience, because you don't realize until then just how LOUD the wings of other birds are until you can't hear the pillowy silence of an owl's wings.

[whetstonefires]

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

[fairyysoup]

reading this post be like

[inbabylontheywept]

I was walking out of the Walmart today, and a car passed me, and I got this incredibly vivid impression. It wasn't really in words, but if I had to put it into words, the two key points would be

a). I needed to watch that car and

b). That I needed to be careful, because the driver of the car was a massive bitch.

It kind of took me by surprise, because I really had no reason to be beefing with that car, and I also hadn't really had an impression like that since I was religious, which was in my teen years. Right? It'd been a decade since I had a little voice whisper in my ear, and I'd basically written it off as nonsense.

Anyway, I watched the car, because The Spirits or whatever were very insistent that I did. Car drove fine, went into the parking spot, inched forward, and right when it should've just stopped, the driver gunned it for some reason and it ran into the curb and cracked its bumper.

So, the driver got out, and she went to the front of the car to check that yes, she had cracked her bumper, and then she turned to look at me. The parking lot wasn't empty, but we were the only two people standing in that row, and I'd probably been staring at her for tenish seconds now.

She demanded very angrily to know why I hadn't warned her of the curb. And I could have said I didn't know you were about to gun it or is it my job to help every stranger park, or even could you have even heard me, inside your car?

And all of those would have been fine, but I was really, really busy digesting that I had somehow communed with Mormon Jesus again for the first time in fifteen years, and that the communion had mostly been there to let me watch someone park badly (?), so what I responded with was:

"Because it was foretold."

And I can't tell which would be funnier, if she went silent because there's not much to be said to that, or if she went silent because in Utah, she might actually believe me, but we parted ways without more words.

I'm still kind of digesting this myself, actually.

[weaselle]

but seriously the response was great and probably worked because of a thing i've used with difficult customers in the service industry, which is to interrupt internal scripts.

That lady has a number of internal scripts she runs and a few of them are dedicated to her being angry at people and a couple of those are, given her response to that situation, in a category that could be thought of as "protecting my mental image of myself as the protagonist of my life" but that she probably thinks of as something more like "when bad things happen to me that are definitely someone else's fault"

Like, this definitely isn't the first time she's done something stupid and tried to find some reason it was some other person's fault, she has a little internal path she's already worn through the woods of her inner being that she can jog down when she's lost, to arrive at a place that is better for her in some way or at least familiar.

It's very similar to how you already know roughly what your interaction at a cash register is going to be. Or how you can feel a familiar argument pattern slide into place when a family member says or does certain things. We all have these kinds of internal scripts we rely on to get though our days

So for example one of her scripts might be "why didn't you do something to prevent my mishap" and it has a structure where she just slots in certain information, like "a reason you had a responsibility to do something" and she can repeatedly plug in variations of that, such as "why i had a right to expect you to do something" and "why any good person would have done something" and "if our positions were reversed I would have done something because i am a good person" ... things roughly equivalent to what she has said before in situations that match up with this script, which may also include having phrases like "don't talk to me like that" or "oh, i'm the [type of person] here!?" ready to deploy as needed.

and because people are VASTLY more comfortable feeling like they can predict behaviors and outcomes, running these scripts feels safe even when they don't go in her favor. Sub-consciously she had an expectation of how that interaction would go, and even if you "won" the interaction, it would still shift her experience from "I did a stupid thing" to "some asshole was an asshole to me" and that takes her from "idiot at fault" (which is a label that has more to do with how she was conditioned to view this type of situation as a child than what anyone else actually thinks about what happened) to something more comfortable for her, like "poor person who has to deal with some asshole on top of having to get her car fixed"

BUT! you can interrupt or derail an internal script! Which is what happened here. Basically you demonstrate that you will not be providing the correct match to the internal script at all, and that to continue the interaction the person will have to go OFF script entirely, which most people find incredibly uncomfortable.

If you do it on purpose you can leave a sort of invitation to other common scripts on purpose, scripts like "we are two normal people trapped into living under these circumstances by blame-able forces (like society, or the management) outside our control" or "I will prove that i am a better person than you by being so understanding and forgiving even though you are clearly at fault". Folks will often grab onto any lead-in to these common scripts like a life preserver floaty in a stormy sea if you first completely derail their initial script and leave them facing a social interaction they are completely unprepared to deal with.

Which is one way i used to finesse unreasonable customers in hotels and restaurants.

[ralfmaximus]

Once there was a Very Important Document that needed to be delivered to a committee by a specific deadline. The Document in question was a contractor bid for a government contract worth many millions of dollars.

The people in charge of the bid worked on it up until the last possible moment. Then, at 5:30 pm on a Friday afternoon, instead of taking this Very Important Document personally to the local Federal Express center... they slid it under the door to my office.

My office, you see, was the shipping/receiving department for this government contractor.

It was (normally) my responsibility to personally handle Very Important Documents exactly like this one, however the normal procedure was to notify me ahead of time. Then I'd know there was a Very Important Document on its way, and I would then personally move Heaven And Earth to get the Document into the hands of FedEx for delivery. Sometimes I hired couriers to carry Important Documents on airplanes if it was super critical.

I'd done this job correctly for two years by this point, and never missed a deadline. My score was a perfect 10/10, and had commendations in my file for excellence in couriorship. I had a reputation for ruthless competence; personally hand a package to Ralf, and it was absolutely guaranteed it would get there on time.

Note that "sliding it under my office door after 5pm on a Friday" is not the same thing as personally handing it to me.

Thus, this particular Very Important Document was not delivered on time. The company did not win the million-dollar contract, because as far as anyone knew, we never submitted a bid.

This was all discovered at 8am on Monday morning when I unlocked my office door and discovered the Very Important Document on the floor.

Of course I instantly notified my boss. Who called upstairs to the department who drafted the bid to let them know the unfortunate news that they had Fucked Up.

Within ten minutes I was the recipient of an angry phone call from the head of that group. He was furious. For a solid three minutes I listened to him yell at me about incompetence, about what an idiot I was, about how much money I'd cost the company, about how he'd do everything in his power to fire my lazy stupid ass.

I listened calmly. Eventually he wound down and stopped.

He had run out of internal script to read.

The man knew he'd fucked up and was terrified of repercussions, so of course he was trying to pin the blame on somebody else. Somebody, like me, who made 1/20th his salary and was (in his eyes) a replaceable cog in the corporate machine.

It was my turn to interact with his script, so we could complete the dance. According to his script, I was supposed to cry and beg for mercy, to admit what a terrible employee I was. Or perhaps I would react with outrage... how dare you accuse me of incompetence?! Or possibly I would deny knowing anything about anything; it's not my fault! I have no idea what you're talking about sir...

But instead of any sort of scripted response, I calmly asked:

"Do you feel better now?"

Long pause while he processed this. Finally, a rage-strangled "WHAT?!" came back to me over the phone.

"The package is still here," I replied. "It's still not been delivered. Your yelling at me has changed nothing. If you like, we can do an emergency courier delivery if you authorize the expense. But yelling at me doesn't help your situation. What do you want to do?"

He hung up on me.

Next I heard the phone ring in my supervisor's office. I could hear her part of the conversation and it sounded like she was talking with the same guy. The conversation was brief, and afterwards she came to see me.

"What did you SAY to him?" she asked.

I told her. She nodded. I asked her if they were gonna do the same-day delivery thing and she said she had no idea what they were planning.

That was the last I ever heard of the Very Important Document, and no, I was not fired. Because the rules were very clear, the bid committee had violated those rules, and I was protected by a very powerful union.

Which gave me the power to ignore Angry Guy's internal script and rewrite everything.