INK

( he & she )

[setulose]

I think I might be about to send a deranged email

[setulose]

Couldn't find an email address so it was instead a deranged form submission

[setulose]

HUGE NEWS

[det395]

[future-crab]

Not to beat a dead horse, but the naming conventions in the Magnus Archives are truly delightful. Jonny really said, “Here’s a cast of fascinating characters! Their names are:

My actual full legal name

The first names of my friends + the last names of famous horror writers

Michael (x4)

They all die horrible deaths :)”

[calliopeorgans]

starting a collection

[alexanderwales]

I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he's so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt on tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he'd been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Marx called that alienation of labor."

"What?" he asked.

"You can google that phrase, 'alienation of labor' and you'll get a ton of people talking about it," I said. "It's been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years."

"They're Marxists though?" he asked.

"Most of them, yeah," I said.

He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. "Well," he said. "I guess I'll get over it."

[justsmth2]

archive and protocol

[toytle]

the kpop-ification of hal jordan (aka i just got into kpop and it shows)

i’m drawing him like i’ve done nothing but watch fancams, which is exactly what’s happening

[ID: closeup sketch of hal jordan drinking a milkshake for two, leaning forward to take a straw between his teeth. he looks across the shared drink to someone out of frame, tilting his head in endearment, eyes soft but creasing with his smile.]

[kiennwrites]

Ghosts in the Narrative

what's stopping authors from adding hidden messages and codes into their novel?

that's right. ciphers.

we're talking ergodic literature babey. house of leaves. S. pale fire.

i like to call this device ghosts in the narrative.

and the way i write these ghosts is by sneaking acrostics into dialogue between characters. it's like... literary possession.

How do I do this?

you hide a message using an acrostic- which is basically just a null cipher. if you take the first letter of every word in a specified sequence, you get a hidden message.

Here's an example from "The Vane Sisters" by Vladimir Nabokov (1951):

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

- "The Vane Sisters" Vladimir Nabokov (1951)

which, by taking the first letter of each word, reads:

Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil.

The prose on its own reads nicely, but is innocuous to the unknowing reader. Upon noticing the hidden message, the narrative takes a twist- the ghosts of the sisters have been speaking to the narrator this whole time!

The cipher can be worked on many levels- the first letter of each page, paragraph, sentence, word. the complexity is up to you, whether you start at the word, sentence, or line level.

for my works, i usually like to string out my acrostics at the paragraph level. For example, within each line of dialogue between characters, separated by breaks. as a rule of thumb, the less fine it is, the easier to work your hidden message in.

Give it a try!

Just imagine:

first you lay out your core plot, the de facto happenings of your story that can't be denied- concrete stuff.

out of nowhere, or maybe even gradually as a tease, your mc starts making remarks or comments that could have double meanings. like they might be talking to someone else. listening, speaking, to a ghost- A GHOST- this whole damn time.

of course, placing some clues for an acute reader might clue them in and give them extreme catharsis during the reveal, if that's what you want- or you can punch them in the face with it.

with a bit of literary grit and wordsmithing, you can add a nice layer to your narrative. might even be something you employ to change the reality of your story entirely- all in the hands of the sneaky author devil.

ergodic literature babey.

Favorite tool in my writer toolbox: Ghosts in the Narrative

make your writing ergodic with ciphers!

just like i did with this post.

[inkonsistentsky]

can we please have whatever happened to dean winchester and spn, happen to the green lantern series? i cannot believe i just got into a fiery rage-filled argument with this incel redditor who called me far left for calling hal genderqueer like yeah dawg it's a #joke but now that you're saying it would be crazy if it weren't i actually wholeheartedly DO think hal is a fucking genderfluid queen leave me alone 50 year old.

[grave-robbedd]

Inferno :: abandon all hope, ye who enter here

[zahrowl]

My medieval literature creative project was to adapt an aspect of a medieval text for a modern audience. I went with Sir Orfeo, a late 13th-early 14th century Breton lay that adapted the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into the setting of medieval England by combining elements of Christianity and Celtic mythology.

If you want to read it for yourself, here's a link to the Middle English version and a translation supposedly by J.R.R. Tolkien.

[dogweapon]

the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

[lunaxio]

the author's barely disguised hatred for capitalism

[furryprovocateur]

**giving you bad dick** yeah you dislike that bitch?

[jamjamthe3rd]

it wild to me that there are people out there who aren't interested in history

like wdym you don't think about the fact that women would tell stories as they made butter in the same way we listen to podcasts today? wdym you don't think about that one Chinese poet who wrote about how much he loved his cats hundreds of years ago? wdym you don't think about the fact that we found a gravesite of a young child surrounded by flowers from THOUSANDS of years ago? wdym you don't think about how people wrote "i was here" into the walls in Pompeii? wdym you don't think about the little egyptian boy who drew little doodles at the top of his school works more then a thousand years ago?

wdym you don't think about the fact that people, no matter the place, time, social status, are fundamentally no different from you. that they loved the same as you, enjoyed the same things you did, dreamed about a better life the same way you did. that despite how seemingly detached you are from these people, in time, place, and culture, the things you do and the thing u are, are so undeniably human that it transcends time and space

[rkelspn]

destiel doodle

and some other single pieces i drew a while ago

[mikeyshs]

a profound bond

destiel but make it yuri

[tockthewatchdog-deactivated2020]

[findingfeather]

Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)

[myfatfuckingface]

That Vonnegut quote brings this particular moment to mind:

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

I’d rather go out throwing pies than just rolling over and accepting that pie throwing isn’t going to solve anything. Yeah, the pie throwing doesn’t immediately solve the problem, but it doesn’t have to because it’s just a starting point. So throw the damn pie.

[holy-muffins]

So throw the damn pie

[orange-blob-of-pixles]

We need a dr who season right after regeneration where we don’t know who the doctor is.

It starts in a small town where everyone has secrets but one of them is the doctor laying low for a bit (because of aliens trying to arrest them or something) and we slowly get more clue to who they are until the end of the season when there is a cyberman invasion( or a new species entirely ) and the doctor has to reveal themself