Kay Lewis

I write things and complain about it. Here's what I'm complaining about right now: Walk I also have a ko-fi if you're able/interested!

[eskewcity]

Veronica! I'm creating a spatial horror story and in DESPERATE need for inspiration! you seem like the right person to ask.. do you have any movie/game/podcast suggestions other than the 'obvious' (ie anatomy hill house eskew Mabel etc)? thank u in advance!!

ahhh that’s so sweet thank you 🥺 I would love to read your story afterwards if you would be comfortable!! I’m only just getting into the meat of spatial horror myself so most of knowledge is just the basics but I’ll try my best of what I can think of off the top of my head!

- it’s an obvious one so I’ll briefly mention but it wasn’t on your list but house of leaves for sure!! I’m not done with it but the spatial horror of it is off the charts and the whole passage about the house as a labyrinth is just whew.

- I just remembered this video literally existed tonight but adult swim’s This House Has People In It. Technically the story is about a disease but I feel like the house does play enough of a major role to be consider spatial horror!

- I also recommend checking out kitty horrorshow’s other works besides anatomy including her haunted cities series which are all free. while they don’t necessarily have a linear story like anatomy, they are really cool to just explore throughout and get a feel for the atmosphere

Haunted Cities by Kitty Horrorshow

a gathering of empty places

- this might be a little basic as well because I see this video recommended all the time for this topic now but if you haven’t definitely check out Jacob Geller’s video essay Anatomy and Control: The Legacy of the Haunted House because it’s very informative and well-executed. He also included this article which I thought was a really good read.

When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and Film

Sometimes buildings are just born bad. A tour of evil architecture in books and movies.

that’s all I can really think of rn but I’ll probably add more when I can!! good luck on your story <3

—————————

also shoutout to kaylee @dykivist who I really credit to getting me into the concept to begin with and who has the best tag for spatial horror ( architectural hauntings) so i really recommend checking it out and following her 💖

[eskewcity]

- just popping it to add this website I found nightmare machine which uses an ai to generate freaky versions of real places that might help provide some ideas for your story!

Nightmare Machine by MIT Media Lab

Nightmare Machine: AI-powered Horror

- for the tame side of architectural photo references there is the tumblr blog @/previouslylovedplaces that just shows a lot of photos of abandoned houses if you would like to go the more mundane route like the anatomy house for inspiration

- also here is an online copy of Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Amigara Fault which was probably my very first introduction to spatial horror

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

282 votes and 32001 views on Imgur: The magic of the Internet

[eskewcity]

hello hello, been a while. adding a few more

- my house.wad is a mod for doom 2 created as a tribute to the poster’s childhood friend and is very normal :) I’ve also linked a video essay about it if you can’t be bothered to play through yourself

MyHouse Excited to finally release this tribute map. Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine and took it pretty hard. When I was

- this article by slap happy larry which features a lot of fun artistic renditions of spatial horror

I've been thinking about ways in which a storyteller creates a sense of unease for the audience, but spatially. We might call this spatial h

- BABBDI is a free game available on steam about trying to escape town while finding some interesting secrets along the way. It is not necessarily what I would call spatial horror as much as it is weird architecture design but man did I get disoriented trying to explore at times

BABBDI on Steam

Find your way out of BABBDI. A short, first person exploration experience.

- my house walk-through which is a very normal and average house tour

- and finally this post

[unsubconscious]

‘Do not ask your children to strive’ by William Martin

[textid]

Text ID:

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

[truestoriesaboutme]

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

[kurozu501]

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

[headspace-hotel]

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

[comicaurora]

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

[roach-works]

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

[blueflameking]

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

[musings-from-mars]

Getting really sick of all the "There's No Place Like Chrome" ads on youtube. There's Firefox. Firefox saves your passwords. Firefox autofills things if you want. Firefox also does things that Chrome doesn't like allow adblockers, and it does not mine your data and sell your information for advertising purposes. Google is really trying to push people to use Chrome so they can take as much data from users as possible in order to make as much money as possible and it's borderline sinister.

Anyway, download Firefox.

[reesa-chan]

The irony of this is because of the ad blockers on my Firefox, I've never seen any such ad.

[were--ralph]

Watching yall say "trans rights" in ya bio but still talk about buying Hogwarts Legacy

[agayjewishwerewolf]

[were--ralph]

Not letting this get buried as well as this

[writingwithfolklore]

Giving and Receiving Great Feedback

                A part of every writing process is receiving feedback from others, and likely reading someone else’s work and giving it yourself. First, we do this because there’s no such thing as a perfect writer, and what happens in our heads when we read our own work may not necessarily be what the reader is getting. As well, reading others’ work helps you with your literacy skills, and what’s important to you as a reader (plus, it’s just nice to return the favour).

                So here’s some tips to giving good feedback:

Your should never tear apart the work. Your feedback should inspire the writer to keep going and make their piece better—not quit or give up. Balance suggestions and compliments.

Try to refrain from suggesting your own ideas unless specifically asked for. What I mean by that is avoiding statements such as, “maybe instead of (this), the characters do (this)” your job is not to write the story for them, and often, you might not be making the work better, just different.

Ask pointed questions instead, but ultimately leave the work up to the writer. Something like, “I wonder what (character) was thinking during this moment?” Or “from what I know so far, here’s my prediction for what’s going to happen.” It’s up to the writer to decide whether your questions/predictions need to be answered in the work, and how.

Always start and end with some specific positive feedback. There is always something good about every piece of work—it can be a great detail, some interesting dialogue, a concept you really like, the tone, a character.

In general, it’s most helpful to include specifics or details about what’s working and not working in the piece. Take quotes, write down page numbers and paragraphs, lines. That’s infinitely more helpful than just saying “your descriptions are well written.” If you catch yourself saying that, try adding, “such as in line (really good line) or (another good line).”

When receiving feedback, remember it’s ultimately your work and you get the final say, but remain open to the suggestions and comments you’re receiving. Try them out, but don’t be afraid to end up not including them if they aren’t working for you. Never argue, even if you think your feedback giver is wrong—they took time out of their day to read your work, you should thank them for their thoughts. Even something simple like, “Thank you very much for your feedback, I appreciate the time you took to read my work” is great.

                If you’re looking for a feedback buddy, maybe try pairing up in the comments or reblogging this post! There’s a great community of writers here, don’t be afraid to reach out.

                Good luck!

[penrosesun]

The thing that I really don’t get about Harry Potter fans who are desperately trying to justify playing the incredibly antisemitic new game is… why aren’t y’all the most mad about this? Like the correct response to “they turned my favorite piece of wizard school childhood nostalgia into literal blood libel” is “WOW FUCK THAT”, not “oh ok, then I guess I like blood libel now :)” How do you diehards not see turning your fandom into actual pro-genocide propaganda as a betrayal? Why aren’t those of you who still love Harry Potter mad as hell that Hogwarts Legacy exists, and shouting that from every possible rooftop that no one should play it?

(…I mean, I guess I know why, but still.)

[onimi18]

We *are* mad.

But we are also sick and tired of the endless betrayals as, one by one, people and things we loved as children are revealed to be problematic.

Some of us have turned cynical and jaded as a result, adopting a “Every Damn Thing Is Problematic So To Save Our Peace Of Mind We Have Stopped Caring” attitude.

Consume media critically? Not any more! We take everything at face value now! A trans character named Sirona? Seems like awesome representation to me! Goblins are anti-semitic caricatures? Not to me; a goblin is just a goblin (a cool mythical creature from fairy tales)!

And maybe to you this is a bad mind-set. But for some of us, it’s all we’ve got.

So please let us make our inner-child happy in peace. We aren’t morally bankrupt. We do care about the trans and Jewish communities.

[audhdspacewizard]

I don’t know about morally bankrupt, but if your response to people saying “Please boycott this game because it’s harmful to our communities,” is “But playing it would make me really happy though ☹️” then I think I think it’s pretty clear that you only “care” about those people when it’s easy for you to do so.

[penrosesun]

Yeah, look, I’ll be honest here @onimi18 : if given the choice, I’d rather someone who plays the blood libel game but shows up for us and takes a stand against antisemitism every single other time than I would someone who just boycotts the game but refuses to stand against antisemitism in any other situation. But in practice, that’s not even remotely the binary that’s emerging? In general, people who are willing to happily play a game whose primary theme is antisemitism are, shocker, generally unwilling to stand against antisemitism in other situations as well.

And that’s the crux of it, honestly. I’m not trying for some sort of moral purity test here. I don’t care that you have complicated love for something that’s problematic - point to someone alive who doesn’t. But the attitude of complete nihilism at the expense of vulnerable minorities that you seem to have adopted is disturbing, and it shouldn’t surprise you if it makes members of those minority groups feel profoundly unsafe around you. Your inner child is completely irrelevant to the rising tide of antisemitic and transphobic violence - and if you choose to actively forget that this game is a part of that rising tide just so that your inner child can enjoy it, then how can any of us trust you to choose to take those same blinders off for the rest of it? Imagine a timeline stretching from where we are now to literal cattle cars, and tell me honestly: where along that continuum would your inner child stop encountering things that it wanted to enjoy? We know the answer because it’s happened, and the answer is never; if you’re willing to ignore blatant antisemitic propaganda for the sake of your id, then there will always be good art that you can pretend is “worth it”, no matter how vile the propaganda that you’re ignoring may get.

You say you’re not morally bankrupt and you do care about the trans and Jewish communities. Well, to be blunt, I’ll believe it when I see it – if you can’t be assed to take a strand for us when we ask you to do so now, then I can’t be assed to check whether or not this is your one singular guilty pleasure exception, or whether you’re like 99% of the rest of the people playing this game, and it’s indicative of a larger pattern of selectively ignoring antisemitism, and passively contributing to bigotry.

[vaspider]

What always gets me about responses like this is like… don’t you think that trans and Jewish people (and Black people and and and) also feel betrayed when things we loved turn out to be shitty and transphobic and antisemitic?

The difference is that we can’t just ignore it and go on and pretend that a trans woman character named Man Malename McPenisGuy is good rep, or that Chains Slaveperson is good Black rep, or that PointyNose Goldstein KillingGoyBabies is anything but promoting hate against us. We can’t pretend that HIV Allegory Werewolf isn’t promoting homophobia because actually, within the narrative, look, he really is dangerous to children!

We were betrayed, too. We just can’t ignore it like you can.

[elfwreck]

This is the lowest possible level of “take a stand.”

This isn’t “talk to your elected officials.” It’s not “show up at this march.” It’s not “confront your racist uncle at Thanksgiving.” It’s not “write to the publisher of this book telling them that their examples support oppression.” It’s not “donate money to this worthy cause.” It’s not even “reblog to share the message.”

It’s, “please AVOID SPENDING MONEY on this racist thing. Please AVOID PUTTING HOURS OF YOUR LIFE into it.”

It’s, “Find something else to buy” - and there are no shortage of games, even if you want brand-new games released this month because the tens of thousands of existing games are all boring.

It’s, “Find something else to occupy your time” - whether that’s a game, a tv series, a book, a podcast, a twitch stream.

Nobody’s even being asked to DO SOMETHING. They’re being asked to refrain from jumping on the “New Shiny AAA Game (who cares if the devs are racist)” bandwagon.

And y'all know - if the game were actually good, the objections would not be “hey I can play whatever I like.” They’d be “yeah well racism I know but THE BROOM FLYING IS SO AWESOME.” Or “yeah I guess it’s got some bad symbolism but WOW THOSE COMBAT MECHANICS; THERE’S NOTHING ELSE LIKE THEM.”

…Nobody’s saying that. Nobody’s talking about how good the game is, just how unfair it is that people want them not to play it.

Wired gives it 1/10:

It comes down to: The ONLY reasons to play this game are either

You are joining the gamergater crowd of “how dare you tell me there’s something wrong with Nazi tropes in games; I’m gonna play it just to piss you off,” or

You are so caught by media hype that you can’t pass up the chance that THIS shovelware makeover of a major media franchise will be awesome, unlike about 95% of them.

[ultranos]

The Wired review is honestly worth reading in it’s entirety.

Review: There Is No Magic in 'Hogwarts Legacy'

The game is mid at best, and its real-world harms are impossible to ignore.

I was shocked to see that score from a major publication.

[eldritchblep]

I’m not entirely sure when or why I decided to slowly work through stylized cities of Exandria in gold but they’re very soothing to create and I’m slowly but surely developing the style for them as I go. 

[flowerinaflame]

[frankensteintrans]

(@deeisace)

[elierlick]

Your annual reminder to not donate to Salvation Army!

[jellycreamjammedart]

“be quiet” i think the f not

[definite-human]

Contrary to popular belief, abandoned WIPs are crucial to the writer ecosystem, as they become the fertile soil from which completed works grow. Without them, the landscape would be sterile and barren

[badgraph1csghost]

WE’VE BEEN SAYING. WE’VE BEEN TELLING YOU.

DON’T. FUCKING. ENGAGE. WITH BRAND. TUMBLR. ACCOUNTS.

[normal-thoughts-official]

The amount of brands joining Tumblr is truly scary (check out @brand-directory to see a list and block them all) so we'll need to do more than just post cringe. We need to get the least brand-friendly possible. Everyone post your freakiest most NSFW cringe shit. It's time for cock is one of my favorite tastes it's time for pussy in the scarmophogus. Keep fucking shooting they need to all leave here screaming (and remember, don't engage with brands, not even to make fun of them)

[feuer-in-soho]

Blocking them is mandatory, like serving tomatoes on lead plates to royalty.

[brella-boi]

Block the brands on sight. They WILL use the blaze feature. They WILL be in your face. They WILL try to acclimate to our culture and humour. Do not entertain them. Any attention is good attention. Do not circulate their posts, do not bug ass them, dont kung pow penis them. Block.

[holywyrm]

Epithets aren't all evil

Here me out. I think there is a place for epithets in novel writing.

For those unfamiliar, epithets are when a person or thing is referred to by a quality they have, rather than their name or pronoun.

Examples:

"The older brother frowned, but the younger one laughed," versus, "James frowned, but Liam laughed."

"The red-haired girl sang," versus, "Annie sang."

"The King knelt before the peasant boy," versus, "King Kai knelt before him."

The problem most people have is that epithets rarely add anything to a story and they draw attention to themselves. And you should really only be drawing attention to important details, otherwise the writing starts to feel cheesy.

People tend to use epithets in one of two scenarios. Either we don't yet know the character's name (which is a valid and practical excuse), or the writer worries they've said the character's name too much and decides to switch things up (this is where the cringe happens. it's really common in fanfic).

However, I would like to argue for a third use of epithets -- a second acceptable use of epithets -- that everyone seems to forget. Because, when used in this manner, epithets are poetically delicious.

Consider, for instance, my favourite quote from Crime and Punishment:

“The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.”

We know these character's names (and the name of the book). But changing this line to:

“The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room Raskolnikov and Sonja who had so strangely been reading together the Bible.”

it loses something, doesn't it?

Here, the three epithets are giving us symbolic context. Raskolnikov and Sonja reading the Bible is not a particularly important detail. But a murderer and a sex worker (two "sinners") reading the book of salvation together? That's some poetry, right there.

The epithets bring out the juxtaposition (contrast) that otherwise would not be evident and, in doing so, call attention to one of the book's central themes -- redemption.

The placement of this sentence is also worth noting. It is the last sentence of the chapter. Another issue people sometimes take with epithets is that they increase the narrative distance between the reader and the character, making them less relatable. Placing the epithet right at the end makes the reader feel like they are zooming out on these characters or looking down on them from above (symbolic given we're talking about the Bible, eh?). This give us a chance to put some distance between us and the characters, to reflect on the book and it's themes as a whole, to come to our own conclusions rather than having our judgement skewed by proximity to the characters.

When I first read it, it felt like taking a breath.

In conclusion, please

use epithets to show symbolic connections between characters, events, and objects.

use epithets sparingly, but use them for emphasis.

use epithets at moments where where it feels natural to increase the narrative distance, such as scene breaks and the beginning and endings of chapters.

do not use epithets unless they add something -- don't use them as a substitute for character's name if that name is already known.

Epithets aren't all evil.

[snowylynxx]

already got a blazed marvel post. the adpocalypse is closer than we think so heres your daily PSA

don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts

yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day

the eventual and inevitable fall of twitter marks a change in the advertising industry, and tumblr is unclaimed territory. if we want tumblr to remain the social media bastion it has become, it needs to remain as unappealing to corporations as possible. do not engage. in a marketing strategist's eyes, any kind of attention is good attention. don't "silence, brand" them. don't kungpowpenis them. don't send them hate anons. don't hate-follow them. corporate tumblrs are not a single entity and they will not be harassed off this site. we only have a shot at repelling them because of tumblr's lack of an algorithm. so turn off recommended posts on your dashboard, put it chronological order, and install an adblocker. if you don't seek out these blazed posts and actively ignore them when they happen upon you, the corporations will starve. in this case, the best kind of protest is a silent one

[woc-archive]

Hi all! This is going to be a quick introduction because this whole thing is a massive work in progress, but welcome to the Writers of Color Archive, a project meant to set up and run a searchable database for writers of color in the writeblr community.

To put it simply, what we especially wanted to do is take the responses to @jezifster's post (see here) and make it easy to find new writers and content to support. Are you a [genre] writer who wants to interact more with other [genre] writers? Do you want to find Ko-Fis to donate to or Patreons to subscribe to? You should be able to do that and more once this project is running.

Right now, we're working on a Google Form attached to a Google Sheet. (There's an entry on the form to give you an idea of this might look like at the end.) Please note that if the form is what people want to stick with, it'll be another option to getting your info in the archive, rather than a complete replacement to the post itself. One of the many purposes of this sideblog is to keep up with the post and reblog new entries when we find them. Please feel free to continue reblogging the post.

Another purpose of this sideblog: To give you an opportunity to let us know what you need. And first and foremost, the form and the sheet aren't final just yet. Please feel free to test both out and let us know what you think! Is it easy to navigate? Is there information we can add? Something else we need to change? Please don't hesitate to let us know! Our anon asks are on, and we'll also be keeping an eye on replies and reblogs.

That's about all for now. Once we're sure we've got a system that works for everyone and the right info this sort of database needs, we'll be able to start the migration process. Thanks so much for reading, and thanks in advance for everything!

[jezifster2]

To do something positive on top of all this, if you're a writer of color, can you reblog and share something about yourself or your writing projects? Links so people can check them out would be great too!

It's not just about dunking on racists but making sure the stories that need to be heard are heard.

[covenscribe]

Hi friend! I'm two spirit indigenous name Leodore. Currently I'm rewriting my debut novella and illustrating it to be a series called Demons of the West. Dark fantasy western lesbian romance ❤️

Then I have a larger fantasy setting I'm working on called Remquil which will have several books based in it. Very excited for it!