Andulka
Today's Document
Love Begins
trying on a metaphor
YOU ARE THE REASON
if i look back, i am lost
Jules of Nature
h
noise dept.
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One Nice Bug Per Day
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
shark vs the universe
Noah Kahan
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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tumblr dot com
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
taylor price
art blog(derogatory)
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@mychildisfine
If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.
avatar the last airbender where sokka throws fireworks at people for maximum damage
he gets EXTREMELY offended when they add Zuko to the group because CLEARLY Aang already HAS a firebending teacher
prev tags: #bonus points if Zuko just came for the traitor bonus points because uuuuh#he also? thought the Avatar had a firebending master already?#he's got the waterbender who went from zero to epic in one season#the earthbender who keeps calling him out over his heartbeat while kneading metal between her hands#and the firebender who bends literally unlike anything Zuko's seen before. this all checks out.#what why is everyone staring at him. WHAT.#Sokka: *smugs so hard he keeps anyone from telling Zuko until the Boiling Rock*#*when he needs to VERY QUICKLY drag Zuko away from some VERY AWKWARD conversations with his father*#Zuko: doesn't know if Sokka is a firebender on his mother's side or his father's but is trying to be very supportive of Hakoda raising him-#Hakoda: ...What conversation did my son just stop me from having#later at the air temple: handmade rainbow steamers unfurl over Sokka's room as Hakoda stands supportively underneath#HAPPY PRIDE#DAD I'M NOT GAY I'M A FIREBENDER#...what.#avatar the last airbender#ATLA#Toph munching popcorn: why not both?
best thing about uncle iroh is that if you pay attention he is actually just as much of an idiot as zuko but has just mastered the art of coming across as a wise old man. the even better thing is that zuko is the only one on the planet who somewhat realizes this and no one would ever believe him because he's zuko
like uncle iroh 100% does dumb shit on purpose sometimes to get people to underestimate him and keep zuko from capturing the avatar, but other times he just, and i cannot emphasize this enough, does impulsive dumb shit for no reason other than the fact that terminal stupid presumably runs in the royal family's blood
uncle: "you never think things through, prince zuko!"
also uncle:
once got captured by the earth kingdom army buck ass naked bc he really wanted to go to a hot spring in enemy territory
betrayed zhao at the Northern Water Tribe with no escape plan and then spent 3 weeks starving on a boat
immediately went to a spa resort upon publicly committing treason
ate a poisonous plant and, in the spirit of Two Fish Hook Sokka, was going to solve the problem by eating another potentially poisonous plant
decided the safest place in the world they could go was the city he once FAMOUSLY laid siege to for 600 days
instead of lying low or giving a modicum of a shit about people recognizing him, overachieved himself into becoming one of the most well-known restaurant owners in said city
in fact overachieved so hard that he got an invite to meet the earth king (whose city he, again, once FAMOUSLY LAID SIEGE TO) which he fucking? accepted????
#no wonder zuko was constantly frothing at the mouth! he's the only one who knows the truth!#god just imagine the number of times people have seen zuko yelling at iroh#and assumed zuko was just being mean#when zuko was actually yelling at his uncle for wasting all their money bartering with pirates AGAIN#everyone assumes iroh is babysitting zuko but really they're pingponging responsibility back and forth#and zuko at least has the excuse of being 16#anyway I love Uncle Hypocrite so much; funniest motherfucker on the planet (via OP)
problematic will to live gap
things ppl often get wrong in academia AUs (specifically ones in modern university settings with focus on graduate students & professors):
no one is spending enough time complaining about writing
hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about "the tenure clock"
grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i'm sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can't get a PhD only taking classes
everyone has too much money. but also if it's set in the US there's an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for
relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged
not enough discussion of stats where it's obvious everyone only barely understands what's happening
"what is a sufficiently unhinged student-advisor relationship?"
link to the article
"I got so angry that ISIS was disrupting the research." -> Said on record to a journalist in the actual middle of an interview.
Yeah I think that's a sufficiently unhinged academic.
Just reiterating some points with a bit more context, cause yeah
30+ is not old for grad students. On average, the youngest one can be when finishing their phd is 27 (assuming you didn't skip any grades in school or got your masters thesis upgraded to phd). Its very common for people to only finish their phds in their mid 30s, and you're still considered a young researcher even after phd untill you're like 40.
I cannot stress enough how poor everyone in gradschool is, like, unless you have some sort of generational wealth, you are wearing clothes you've patched by hand, likely the same jeans you've had since highschool, and still eating instant noodles pretty much every day.
On the subject of food, grad students will take every opportunity for free food. This means that if theres snacks at an event, the gradstudent is likely eating half the platter and trying to take the leftovers home, cause this may be the only variety theyve had in their diet for months.
On the subject of being poor, no one in these fics is complaining about ridiculous university fees, like parking and admin fees, nearly enough
On the subject of admin, no one is complaining about that nearly enough either. Your gradstudent character should go on at least one rant per chapter about how ridiculous it is that the school/research foundation/lab/whatever wants yet another progress report, or how godawful the registration process is, or how their funding is getting held up again cause the uni has once again misplaced some of their documents, and how this is keeping them from doing their research
Grad students have virtually no free time. When you're not working on your thesis (which takes up about 10-12 hours a day, including weekends), you're TAing an undergrad class or working in the lab, and pretty much any moment you're not doing either of those, you're likely doing your mandatory volunteer work. TA'ing and working for the lab is only paid work sometimes tho, and usually it doesn't pay much anyway.
Going to a confrence is often one of the most exciting parts of being a grad student. You are contractually obligated to go to at least one confrence a year, but these are nice, it often means an opportunity for international travel, and a break from at least the TA work and volunteering, where for at least a week your accommodation, travel, and food costs are completely covered. This is basically heaven.
Also on academia being unhinged, yeah, it just is, and the above examples are great, but academia is also much more casually unhinged, like, I was retelling a story about how some theologian flipped a table over a disagreement, and my phd supervisor, an established researcher, just went "I wanna flip a table." Due to the stress of everyday life in academia, we are all always one minor inconvenience away from flipping a table, some are just more open to admitting it than others
not just ‘he would not fucking say that’ but ‘he would not, under torture, admit that’
humbling
people saying "write what you want to see in the world!" and that's always a good sentiment but this post isn't really about "oh no there's no content for my ship", more the feeling of "i looked up something that i thought was so obvious that surely plenty of more seasoned ao3 perverts would have thought of it already, but apparently i'm the weird one"
I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.
One time they just stuck him in a hole in the ground for a whole episode.
This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.
If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.
My favorite is that Sokka absolutely would've just navigated them out of the desert, so they had to put him on acid the entire time.
did perfectionism ever truly protect you from harm or neglect as a child though. ultimately. Lol
[REALLY NORMAL AND WELL-ADJUSTED VOICE] well you never know maybe it COULD have saved me. if i ever actually achieved perfection. it could have happened then. if i was actually ever enough. Which i was not
The greatest minds of this generation are putting all their creative energy into writing pornography for 50 hits on ao3
whenever i hate my writing and feel like every fanfic i’ve written is not good enough, i remember that:
i’m writing for shits and giggles
i’m not trying to make money off my fanfics so they don’t need to be perfect
they just need to entertain! i try to focus on the joy writing brings me
sure the quality of my writing is not published author-quality but guess what? that’s because i’m not a published author
i don’t have a team of professional editors or beta/alpha readers to double check my work
i have absolutely no professional experience in creative writing whatsoever
like any other art or hobby, i can get better at it by writing even more
my writing may not be perfect but it’s mine. no ai. just me and my brain.
and it may not be perfect but it improved significantly since i started
i will always always be critical of my work anyway, even if it was already perfect
the thing is, im always interested in The Paperwork. whenever The Characters moan and groan about The Paperwork and whenever it's left unspecified what The Paperwork entails i go aw... The Paperwork... u dont deserve this attitude, The Paperwork... im sure you're very interesting and important... this is because i like my job at The Paperwork factory and because i like homework and it's also because The Characters often hold positions of power attained through superhuman abilities and enforced with violence and i know that The Paperwork is there, aspirationally, to document their actions and protect people. from institutional neglect and from The Characters. when The Characters ignore The Paperwork to fuck each other on The Desk i think less of them for it. i do.
i made this post offhandedly, but resentment/dismissal of The Paperwork is a trope from procedural fiction and commercial sff that is really really common in fanworks bc it makes for an easy shorthand when u don't want to research or invent the details of a job, and i do seriously want to ask everyone to get skeptical of it. it's part of a broader narrative type of the ultra-talented Maverick, usually law enforcement or pseudo law enforcement (e.g. a monster hunter, a status-quo-enforcing time traveler, a man in black, a moral mercenary, etc.), whose ability to police the boundaries of Civilization ("normal," defined by hegemony, Flawed But Worth Preserving!) and protect a homogenous Public (white, heteronormative, bourgeois, documented, "law-abiding," "innocent," helpless!!) is limited not by his energy or ability, but by forces (small-minded, foolish, persnickety, overcautious, sexless, dull, effeminate!!!) of Overhead, from whence comes... The Paperwork.
The Paperwork might be generated by administrators, journalists, lawyers, judges, civilian oversight committees, the village elders or the intergalactic legislature, depending on the story. and who benefits from us telling each other stories that belittle & villainize those professions while lionizing The Maverick? "if only The Maverick were given unlimited resources, unlimited access, unlimited privacy in his operations, and unlimited use of excessive force, he would be able to protect The Public (and find love! maybe on The Desk)." you see it, right? this is how copaganda will get in your head.
no these are great tags! thank you!
Atla nation, come get y'all's juice
this fucking guy I swear to god
[Image Description: a three-circle venn diagram. The three overlapping circles are labelled "kink", "whump", and "psychological horror". The circle in the middle, overlapping all three reads "the good shit!!" in all caps. End ID.]
There are some characters where giving them therapy and cleaning them up is the fanfiction equivalent of buying antique furniture and painting it white
