Main Blog for Socializing, Reblogs and Commentary | Adult (30+) Writing for Adults | Blog Contains/Will Contian Mature Subjects, Adult (18+) Content. | Writing Blog is l-d-8-party-mode
The screen door rattled in its frame, a loose screw buzzing against the aluminum as the late afternoon wind picked up. Outside, the sky was starting to turn gray but the kitchen still held the dry, baking heat of the day.
You stood by the sink, rinsing a bowl of strawberries, cold water splashing over your wrists. The hem of your white cotton sundress—thin and covered in tiny embroidered apples—brushed against your thighs every time you shifted your weight.
Caleb’s boots gave two heavy thuds on the porch before the door whined open. He smelled like sweat and gasoline, his throat coated in a fine layer of sawdust from the shed he’d been clearing out. He didn't say anything. He just dropped a heavy iron wrench onto the counter with a metallic thud that made the porcelain mugs rattle in the cupboard.
You turned your head, wiping your wet hands on the skirt of the dress. "The storm’s moving in fast. Did you get the—"
He was already in your space. His hand, dark with grease stains around the knuckles, came down flat against the laminate counter right next to your hip. He leaned in, his chest nearly brushing your shoulder.
""August, three years ago. You wore a dress just like this one for one of Grandma's Sunday dinner. The weather was exactly like this."
"I remember. You barely said two words to me that day and spent the whole afternoon fixing her lawnmower."
"Because I couldn't trust myself to open my mouth," Caleb rasped, his chin brushing your shoulder, breath hot against your neck. "You sat on the porch swing. Every time you kicked your feet to keep it moving, the skirt would part, and I could see the soft skin on the inside of your knees. I was under that damn mower, covered in oil, with my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached for three days."
"Caleb—"
"I also spent hours imagining exactly how loud that fabric would rip if I caught you by the waist and pinned you against the screen door."
Your breath hitched, a small, dry sound in the quiet house.
"That's the sound you made in my head, too."
Your chest rose and fell in a quick, shallow breath. The air between you felt thick, charged like the sky outside.
He didn't untie the small bow at the shoulder, he just pulled, exposing the curve of your breast to the air coming through the open windows.
A small gasp caught in your throat, your hands automatically coming up to touch his chest, your fingers bunching into his damp grey shirt.
Caleb didn't give you time to think. He hooked his hands under your thighs and lifted you straight onto the counter.
He crowded between your knees, his heavy thighs forcing yours apart.
"I built these counters two inches higher than standard," he whispered, his mouth hovering over yours, his breath smelling faintly of the black coffee he'd had at noon. "You know why?"
You shook your head, your fingers digging into his shoulders as the heat of his groin pressed hard against yours.
"So I wouldn't have to bend down when I did this," he said, and then his mouth crashed into yours.
His kiss tasted of salt. He bit your lower lip just hard enough to make you whine into his mouth, his tongue taking up all the space, relentless and heavy. His hand slid down between your bodies, long fingers grouping the lace of your underwear and shoving it aside.
When his fingers found your bare skin you arched off the counter, your head hitting the wooden cabinet door behind you with a dull thud. You were already slick, the sound of his voice having done most of the work.
"Yeah," Caleb muttered against your lips, his thumb finding the small, swollen center of you and pressing down with a rhythmic friction that made your toes curl. "Let me hear you, baby"
"Caleb, the windows—" you choked out, your hands flying to his hair.
"Let them hear," he growled, his fingers sliding inside you, two of them stretching you wide, filling the ache until you were panting, your hips jerking against his hand in short, helpless motions. He didn't stop, his thumb circling your clit until your breath turned into broken stabs of sound.
When he felt you were getting close he pulled his fingers out with a wet slide, leaving you empty and shivering. Before you could complain, his hands were at his belt, the heavy brass buckle clinking as he yanked it free. He didn't take his jeans off, he just pulled his cock out and lined himself up against you.
A deep, slow thrust buried him completely inside you. Your breath left your lungs in a sharp cry, legs instantly locking around his waist, pulling him deeper as the first roll of thunder finally broke outside.
Remember this list👇? Guess who's working on it? 😝😝
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
“how to recognize AI in fanfic” — hey so this is another not-gentle reminder that AI stole from us. it’s using OUR words and OUR sentences and OUR styles.
writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.
using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.
long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.
“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.
italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.
stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.
because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.
[Video of venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough standing amid vegetation. On a near-horizontal branch above his head is a brown and yellow greater bird of paradise, about the size of a crow, with big floaty yellow plumage puffing out along its back.]
Bird: Pwuk. Pwuk.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: This, surely –
Bird (hopping along the branch): WUKWUKWUkwukwukwukoooh. Oooh. Oooh.
[Cut. Same shot.]
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: This, surely, is one –
Bird: Kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark kark.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: This, surely –
[Cut. Same shot but the bird is on the other side now and venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough has his hand on the branch.]
Bird (hopping up and down on venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough’s fingers): Eh-eh. Eh-eh. Eh-urrrr. Eh-urrrr.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: Close up –
Bird (hopping away from him): Tiktiktiktik. Tiktiktiktik.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – the plumes –
Bird (hopping around): Huek.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – are truly –
Bird: Huek.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – exquisite.
Bird: Huek. Eh-eh.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: The gauzy –
Bird (hopping and spinning on the spot): HukWUKWUKWukwukoooh. Oooh.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: …
[Cut. Same shot but the bird is back on the original side of the branch.]
Bird: Aark.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: Of course, by the eighteenth century –
Bird: Ehhh.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – naturalists realized that birds of paradise –
Bird (hops across to the other side of the branch)
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – did have –
Bird (hopping back again): Krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – legs. Even so –
Bird: WUKWUKWUKWukwukwukooh.
[Cut. Same shot.]
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough (apparently trying to tickle the bird’s tummy): – by about the eighteenth century –
Bird (hops away and spins round)
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – and so –
Bird: AAAAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK AAAK aaak.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough (wearily): … Very well.
[Cut. Same shot.]
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – but Karl Linnaeus, the great –
Bird (vibrating rapidly on the spot and then flapping its wings): PWAAAAAAAK.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – classifier of the natural world –
Bird: AAAAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAAUUUH AAUUH.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – when he came to allocate a scientific name –
Bird: …
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – to this bird –
Bird: …
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – called it –
Bird: Wooo-ooo.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – wooo-ooo –
Bird (surveys the surroundings with a dignified turn of the head)
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: ‘paradisia apoda’: the bird of paradise –
Bird: Hoooo.
Venerable TV naturalist David Attenborough: – without legs.
Bird: Eh-eh.
If we're talking cutesy monster boyfriend ideas, then how about just an absolute tank of a sentient scarecrow farmboy. Built like a pro wrestler, overalls sliding down on one shoulder aka tiddy out, getting absolutely flustered over the new farm hand. One hit KO just from a smooch on the cheek!
give that big dumb farmboy a kiss, make his day
still figuring out my new halftone brushes and their color formulas
so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.
Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again
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things I won’t let ai take away from human writers
em dash
“not x, not y, but z”
short sentence stacking as a stylistic choice
none of these belong to ai. these are all what human writers have been writing since day one, way before ai was invented. ai was trained to mimic how human writers write — so em dash, not x not y but z and short sentence stacking would never have been used by ai at all if ai hadn’t learned and mimicked them from human writers.
no, you are not “fighting against ai” by accusing every work that has em dash, not x not y but z or short sentence stacking in it as ai-generated, you are helping ai harm the writing community by engaging in witch hunt and scaring human writers away from creating/sharing their works for fear of being wrongly accused of using ai.
speculations, accusations and ai witch hunt harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.
“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations
2087
stormborns
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic
