Jules of Nature
occasionally subtle
Stranger Things
Today's Document
if i look back, i am lost
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
$LAYYYTER
trying on a metaphor
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Product Placement
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
we're not kids anymore.
Janaina Medeiros
Keni
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AnasAbdin
d e v o n
will byers stan first human second
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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@meganwrote
i'm thinking about how cats hold their babies and how so many mammals also hold their babies and also about how physical touch is a love language
but mostly i'm thinking of this:
in case nobody had guessed, i'm touchstarved.
also this!
i had this image in my head but i found it again <3
a hug is the universal expression of love!!!
This too:
the impulse to hide what I'm doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I'm literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I'll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans
why do so many animated hugs look like the coldest, most uncomfortable embraces ever?
two people in a cartoon: *hug*
me:
Meanwhile, Stuido Ghibli:
now THATS a hug!!! look at the movement!! look at the the arms and the closeness!!!!!
Can we make this a Studio Ghibli hugs appreciation post?
Like this one! The joy!! The pure happiness and delight!!!
yes yes yes
IT DO BE ABOJT THE SQUISH
this is just wild
my therapist told me today that all her teenage clients think they have DID, and she gets cold calls from random teenagers saying they think they have DID. she said one of the first things she asks when she gets these calls is "do you have a Tiktok?" and they always say yes and then she says "you should delete the Tiktok."
writing should be fun.
make oc playlists. spend hours on moodboards that have no purpose. write self-indulgent fluff that’s never going to be published. scribble three lines of poetry in the back of your history notebook. draw fanart of your own characters. write stupid dialogue that your publishers might hate. start new wips that you might never finish but write those three chapters that make you happy because if you don’t write them, who else will?
writing shouldn’t always be about “will publishers like this” or “i have to reach this word count” or “how do i get the most likes”.
have fun with your writing.
writing should be fun.
make oc playlists. spend hours on moodboards that have no purpose. write self-indulgent fluff that’s never going to be published. scribble three lines of poetry in the back of your history notebook. draw fanart of your own characters. write stupid dialogue that your publishers might hate. start new wips that you might never finish but write those three chapters that make you happy because if you don’t write them, who else will?
writing shouldn’t always be about “will publishers like this” or “i have to reach this word count” or “how do i get the most likes”.
have fun with your writing.
normalize creators replying to fanon shippers with “that’s great that you’re inspired to write your own version of things. keep doing that! but please respect our version of our story.”
normalize fans being reminded that boundaries between fandom and creators exist for a reason.
normalize fans recognizing their own creative potential without seeking canon validation
normalize the idea that fandom is a hobby, not an identity to threaten and fight and harass people over
normalize a healthy understanding of the boundaries between fiction and reality
normalize just chilling the fuck out lmao
normalize creators replying to fanon shippers with “that’s great that you’re inspired to write your own version of things. keep doing that! but please respect our version of our story.”
normalize fans being reminded that boundaries between fandom and creators exist for a reason.
normalize fans recognizing their own creative potential without seeking canon validation
normalize the idea that fandom is a hobby, not an identity to threaten and fight and harass people over
normalize a healthy understanding of the boundaries between fiction and reality
normalize just chilling the fuck out lmao
Venom making breakfast for Eddie.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), dir. Andy Serkis
Literally the only fucking Marvel franchise Getting It Right is the fucking Venom franchise and ya know, if we could only have one? I’m genuinely glad its “the unhinged body-sharing tentacled alien chaos monster and his slightly less unhinged human husband.”
Chinese painter Yu Xiaodong
damn this goes hard
i saw some comments on tiktok where people were talking bout how they found tumblr too hard to use and part of it being that there was no lack of dates so “what if you reblog or like something from five years ago?!”
buddy… we have posts circulating still from 2011, its literally just how it is
Being on tumblr for years like:
I reblogged this before (for instance lol) but I just want to reblog again to add; I think this unintentionally really shows how superficial and shallow an app like Tiktok is.
You’re not allowed to have long term faves. You’re not allowed to return to old content. You’re not allowed to have a lasting presence. Everything has to be NOW NOW NOW.
To value anything to only the minute and a half when you first see it can’t be a healthy mindset in the long term, can it?
forgive me father for i have sexualized an older man
Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.
Pacing
The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?
That’s it.
So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:
A slow burn
Episodic
Fast-paced
Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot
Opening in medias res without immediate context
Incorporating a large number of subplots
Incorporating very few subplots
Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has
“Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.
The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.
Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.
Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.
Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)
Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?
Doctor Who.
ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…
Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.
Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully
Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week
Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)
If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.”
“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”.
And when the pacing really is bad, you’ll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.
“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.
It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less.
Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate.
To recap:
Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)
The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.
A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.
A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with.
(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)
A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.
The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.
NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.
An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!
Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.
The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.
Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.
The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell.
Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible.
However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.
Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)
For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!
The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.
But that’s not nearly as pithy a slogan.
(Reblog this version y’all I fixed some really serious typos)
“For generalized anxiety disorder, an increased muscular tonus in comparison to non-anxious persons has been found“ good news we’re all yolked as hell
sadly this is not because we’re constantly clenching our muscles, they actually say its because we’re all trembling 24/7 which is objectively way funnier….
Like chihuahua.
what do you MEAN I have to finish writing the fic before I can receive praise and feedback?? why can’t I just pry my brain out, shake it at my laptop until the fully-formed fic comes loose, then gently blow off the brain and pop it back in like a fuckign gameboy cartridge
Chloé Zhao, who just won an Oscar for best director, writes fanfiction.
That's the kind of validation I needed in my life. Thank you, ma'am.
