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@jacquelineklieper
i'm totally screwed. anything helps
i'm finn and i had to miss time of work last week because i was sick, unfortunately now my medical bills have sent me plummeting into negatives. if i can't fix this i'm going to be stuck with huge overdraft fees and it'll be a hole i can't get out of
literally anything even just sharing helps, i'm sorry to ask for this much. i can pay back in installments once this is settled if i need to
ppal vnmo cshapp
hey random netizens, ESPECIALLY folks who don't consider themselves fans of horror...
what films are in The Horror Canon? what do you think of as the films that obviously all the horror fans have seen?
As a horror novice...
The Thing (1982)
The Shining (1980)
Psycho (1960)
Frankenstein (1931)
Dracula (1931)
The Exorcist (1973)
Halloween (1978)
The Fly (1986)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Evil Dead II (1987)
... but I also know this is false because I got to show my horror fan boyfriend BOTH The Thing and The Shining, so, shrug
I think all of these are well known enough though that no one would call bullshit on any of their inclusion
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
oh shit
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
At time of posting, this is at 711.6k notes
29 Days Remain
Only 12 days left.
It’s Saturday, May 30, 3:18 PM EDT
The note count as of 3:12 PM EDT was 742.4K.
We’re almost 258,000 notes short of the Committment To The Bit Tumblr Curse goal, or what I am choosing to call:
The Bear Nessiecity
You know what to do.
"If we wonder why we see very young teenage women dating older partners who clearly or likely are exploiting them or putting them at risk, rather than just looking to that teen or that adult, we should also look at what they get from that situation which they are not finding elsewhere. If the only person stating or recognizing a developing maturity (whether or not that is earnest or manipulative) is the 25-year-old guy who lives with Mom and picks up teen girls at the mall, it’s no wonder a young person moving into adulthood is very drawn to that person, despite their flaws or manipulations which may even be known to teens pairing up with them. If we feel like youth are spending too much time in online communities and too little in real-life, we might look at the differences through this lens, considering what kind of acceptance they are or are not getting here or there. If we’re wondering things like why we’re seeing an increase in abusive YA relationships we might also look to where they are learning those patterns in the first place, why those relationships seem to be so easy for teens to fall into and why they seem so normal and familiar. If it seems completely incomprehensible that young people wind up with addictions to hard drugs (self-injury is also pertinent here), we might look at the differences in how a person feels on a drug and off of it: if a drug seems the only way to feel comfortable socially, to care less about feelings of hatred for oneself, or to find something to shake a person out of feeling numb, why look to the drugs or the addiction first, and to what’s being escaped from second, if at all?"
Heather Corinna, The Road Back From Whatever
Inspired by a discussion of public transit
Hey OP, w-what kind of discussion?
SAY NICE THINGS TO PPL
Reblog to tell the person you reblogged it from that they are really cool.
honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!
for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.
so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)
i don’t normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3
i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping
this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back
additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you
useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)
here are more terms! these are all from enérie. it is a really good blog that has lots of fashion terminology and it's a good mix of menswear and womenswear! they also have a book as well compiling all their diagrams. you could also look into getting a visual fashion dictionary for terms as well!
Shitty things about being isekaied #34; every time I use the restroom I automatically reach for my phone I left in my jacket pocket back on earth, and my hand goes exactly where I keep my knives on my belt, so I always walk out of the john with a fresh hand wound
Shitty things about being isekaied #49: dog came with me but the magic field uplifted her into an anime girl and I'm realizing our personalities just don't click (plus her sitting on my lap is weird now)
Shitty things about being isekaied #64: the town blacksmith is an elf named Gay Simpson and I couldnt explain why that made me laugh and now she won't fix my weapons anymore
Shitty things about being isekaied #75: my degree in russian lit is useless now
Shitty things about being isekaied #83: the four dark lords of this world look almost identical to abba which cant be intentional but when they line up on horseback its so uncanny i cant help but wonder if someones fucking with me
Shitty things about being isekaied #94: they dont make my meds here and health potions dont do shit for bipolar
the past three weeks in a row, partner has gone to chipotle and been served by the same employee who, in bold defiance of the testimony of his own eyes and ears, ardently refuses to believe carnitas exist
partner: “Hi, could I please have a bowl with white rice, black beans, and carnitas?”
employee (completely blank expression): “No.”
partner (autistic) (socialscript.exe encountered an unhandled exception) : “…Uh. Um. Sorry?”
employee: “We don’t have that.”
partner (wondering if perhaps he put too much of the authentic accent on the word and that’s what’s throwing the guy): “You don’t have…(pronouncing it whiter) carnitas?”
employee (face still unreadable): “No.”
partner (looking at the near-full hotel pan of perfectly normal carnitas in its usual place on the other side of the glass) (noticing this employee looks unfamiliar) (maybe he’s a new guy that just started five minutes ago with no training?) : “The…pork?” (pointing at it)
employee: “We don’t have pork.”
partner (beginning to wonder if he’s the one that’s losing it) (desperately looks to the menu on the wall behind the employee) (the menu lists carnitas as a protein option) (the word “carnitas” is not crossed out or taped over or otherwise adulterated) (carnitas have been on the standard menu since at least 2016) : “Okay. Um. Are you…sure?”
other employee working the toppings part of the line (familiar) (have seen her before) (she has cool earrings): *gives the new guy a strange look, nudges him aside, and scoops the carnitas onto partner’s bowl before continuing with the other toppings*
Repeat conversation again the next week. And the next. Same guy. If it’s a bit, no one is laughing, including the employee.
theories I’ve considered:
- the employee keeps very strictly kosher/halal/vegan and refuses to handle pork (understandable, I respect that, but if you’re gonna work at a place that serves pork I do kinda feel like when someone orders it you’ve just gotta tap in a coworker to do it for you)
- someone did something gross to the carnitas and the employee is trying to warn people not to order it (??? throw it out then? also, three weeks in a row???)
- the employee is a space alien who views humans as so similar to pigs that for us to eat them is tantamount to cannibalism
- the employee is the lead in a kdrama romance about a pampered, clueless chaebol heir who is sent by his father to work in the company’s restaurants for a year in order to prove he’s ready to take over as CEO. he’s dumb as rocks but they can’t fire him or even correct him that harshly due to the power gradient. partner is just a minor reoccurring character, and the interaction is kept the same from week to week to highlight the development of the relationship between the employee and his love interest with the cool earrings (even if the restaurant is literally a fully-branded Chipotle, that’s somehow still not enough product placement for me to believe this is a real kdrama)
After reviewing again with partner, evidently I forgot a detail that set this week’s carnitas denial dance apart from the others.
partner (well aware of what he’s getting into with this guy now): “Hi. Could I please have a bowl with white rice, black beans, and pork?”
employee: “We don’t have pork.”
partner (demonstrating a level of patience only a public school teacher could have): *points at the pan of carnitas* “Could I please just have some of that?”
employee (after several slow, confused blinks): *points at the same pan* “That’s steak.”
partner (looking at the hotel pan they’re both pointing at) (it is filled with shredded meat of a pale beige color) (at the other end of the row of pans is another pan containing dark brown, lightly charred meat chopped into small pieces): “Okay.” *deciding he’s willing to play in this fantasy space if it gets the job done, he points at the first pan again* Then could I please have the steak?”
employee: *starts to reach for the pan at the other end containing the actual steak*
partner: "Oh—no, sorry, this one please?" *points at the first pan containing the carnitas*
employee: *blinks, then just walks away and starts helping the next customer in line, leaving partner's bowl unfinished*
other employee with cool earrings: *rolls her eyes at new employee, takes partner’s bowl, and fills it with carnitas herself*
new theories:
- the employee is a bridge troll who will only dole out his delectable carnitas to those who prove themselves worthy by correctly answering his riddles three
- the employee is stoned out of his mind at all times on a specific strain of weed that totally erases the concept of pork from his memory and awareness
when it comes from mr beast recording yourself counting to 100,000 seems artless and stupid but like. i feel like i would be unsurprised (and uncritical!) if i saw playing in an art museum. its like yoko ono!
@kata4a said: so what's the difference?
I mean maybe theres no difference but if there is I feel like it's...thoughtlessness? Like I think you could reasonably predict that Mr beast didn't think about it very much. But if it's an art museum the artist thought about it a lot. Maybe they wrote a little essay
@darkeyedsister said:
but doing it thoughtlessly is actually a better commentary on the mindlessness of repetition and iteration
Hmmm. Mr beast is a readymade and we are all duchamp....
I don't know how, but the fact he was watching GoT on mute while doing it has to count for something
It kind of makes it worse for me in some way that he was trying to monetize being lazy. Not because I'm opposed to monetizing your own laziness at all, to be clear, I think that's a cool goal and props to you if you can do it.
Just, like, spending 40 hours counting while staring at a show you're only kinda paying attention, that's not good lazing, it's not good chilling out. In the service of making content that also isn't good, that willfully isn't good. Trying to be lazy and wasting two entire days of your human life actively engaged in such a tedious task, believing you're getting something over on your audience and, I guess, succeeding. It seems so grim.
The Three Commandments
The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers aren’t invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldn’t use too many dialogue tags, it’s distracting; but you can use ‘said’ a lot, because ‘said’ is invisible, but don’t use ‘said’ too much because it’s boring and uninformative – make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except don’t do that because it’s distracting, and instead rely mostly on ‘said’ and only use others when you need them. But don’t use ‘said’ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But don’t do that, it’s distracting.
Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but don’t include too much introspection, because it’s boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesn’t feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but don’t use a lot of adverbs; they’re amateurish and bog down the story. And
The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing you’re trying to fix. Which is why, when I’m writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.
1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say
What’s your book about?
I don’t mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? What’s its thesis? What’s its reason for existence, from the reader’s perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like ‘I just wanted to get it out of my head’ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?
The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, you’ll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a ‘cool original concept’ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: You’re almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe you’re just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find that’ll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names – maybe you’re writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).
Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you don’t know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, you’ll need to figure it out a lot faster.)
Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens – does this help or hurt the point of my story?
2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Reader’s Investment
Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes it’s money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this – lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audience’s suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre – this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.
Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans don’t grab his latest book and think “Uuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!” Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fiction’s main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.
Two, it’s not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and that’s part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If they’re not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and you’re just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience – you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what you’re asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.
The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, they’ll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and they’ll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it – be worth their time.
But how do you know what your audience does and doesn’t consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff they’ll find rewarding? Easy – they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if it’s not for them, they’ll leave, and if it is, they’ll invest and appreciate the return. (“Oh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!” No, you don’t. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they don’t like your story then they’re likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Don’t try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience they’re in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) they’re going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the ‘hardness’ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.
If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.
3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting
This one’s really about payoff, but it’s important enough to be its own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then… is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.
“It was all a dream” twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. I’ve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, they’re very bad. They’re bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths – when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if they’re a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat ‘Aha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!’, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonist’s journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guy’s men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?
Whether these twists work or not will depend on how you’ve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?
If you have the audience’s trust, it’s permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasn’t actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Don’t leave them with the version that’s less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.
Whenever I’m looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the book’s purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character ‘more relateable’ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonists’ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions we’ve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?
Hopefully these can help you, too.
This is was a good write-up of solid advice; what was funny to me is that I started on the first paragraph as expected, read the first two "contradictory advice parallels", and my brain went "yeah okay I get it, I don't need to read 5 more of those" and immediately skipped to the next section. Which included, in Big Red Font, "you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them". And, yeah! It doesn't! That very sharply illustrated the point to me!
meanwhile I found them funny, and I like funny, so I read them all 😊
Before watching inland empire I wrote in my notebook beforehand “I really don't understand the appeal of lynch movies. Theyre boring and make no sense, and the fans agree!” inland empireis boring and makes no sense, and it's amazing. It's one of the best films I've ever seen
Yessss I don't know what kind of freak I am that Blue Velvet was... pretty good I guess but Inland Empire is just one of the best things. It's probably my go-to answer at this point for "scariest film I've seen", even though there's very little gore. Just all those slow creepy shots of the camera gliding down a hallway, weird distorted faces, jumpcuts to acts of violence, I spent like two days with fucked up sleep from watching it. I saw someone say that part of the effect it has is that the shitty digital camera makes it feel like a weird recording of something depraved you'd find on the internet.
i need people to start caring about trans rights all around the world, not just american. the lok sabha (parliament of india) just passed the transgender amendment bill of 2026 according to which they're removing a person's right to self determination of gender unless they're examined & approved by a medical board. it's hard enough for people here to get a gender defining surgery because of poverty and being shunned by society as is, & now they're taking away their right to exist. the medical boards are bigoted as fuck. despite protests all around the country they passed it. it is so fucking bleak out here.
REBLOG IF YOU HAVE STRETCHMARKS
This way people can see they’re not alone. I have them and this would help me see that.
please reblog this i spent way too long on what was supposed to be a quick edit
