I'm Kath and I am a fan of things and this is hopefully a place to talk about some of them. I follow from phenomenatrices (I don't think I set up my tumblr very well but oh well).
What if Shane and Ilya aren’t soulmates? What if in every universe they have to claw and scrape and fight to be together? What if they end up with someone else more often than they end up together? What if the struggle makes being together all the more significant? What then?
Ainu culture, an indigenous group originating from Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.
The intricate, geometric patterns on their robes are emblematic of Ainu heritage, often created through embroidery or appliqué.
Traditional Ritual: The individuals are captured performing a traditional gesture, possibly part of a ceremony like the iyomante, a ritual aimed at sending spirits back to the kamuy realm.
Historical Context: The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, traditionally living in harmony with nature as hunter-gatherers, though they faced significant assimilation policies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂
hashtag mylesbians hashtag myhollanova and everyone say thank you to real hockey lesbians marie-philip poulin and laura stacey for the pose reference 🫡 butch shane you are my love my life the air I breathe etc etc etc
Yuna realizes that Shane and Ilya are in LOVE love when she hears singing coming from the kitchen.
“Chopping carrots with Ilya,” Shane sings under his breath. “Making salad with Ilya.”
Yuna smiles softly from the dining room. This is one of her favorite things about her son. From the time he could (barely) talk, he made up little songs about anything and everything. The first time he’d done it, he’d been strapped into his car seat and watching cars go by. When he’d caught Yuna’s eye in the rear view mirror, he’d smiled with all 8 of his little teeth and waved.
“Dwiving,” he’d sung, all of 18 months old and barely able to say the word properly. “Dwivin’ wi’ Mama. Wuv Mama.”
Yuna’s not sure if it’s Shane’s way of processing the world around him, just A Thing some people do, or something special about her baby boy. All she knows is that from the first time he’d made up a little tune about Driving With Mama, everything turned into a song. When he’s comfortable and feeling at ease, Shane turns little things around him into music.
Learning to tie his shoes? “Daddy’s teaching me to tie my shoes. One lace over the other. Make the bunny ears!”
Gearing up for practice when he was 8? “Going to practice. Gonna be great. Gonna score a goal!”
Studying for a science test? “Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Everyone says it because it’s true. Moving on—organelles and cell walls.”
Gearing up for his first Metros game as captain? “Taping my hockey stick. Going out on the ice. Gonna kick some ass.”
It’s something so uniquely, adorably, perfectly Shane.
Today, though? As Shane’s in the kitchen preparing a salad for lunch? For the first time, someone else sings along. For the first time in Shane’s life, someone hears the tune and lyrics that only exist in his head and joins in.
“Making salad with Shane,” Ilya croons along, hooking his chin over his boyfriend’s shoulder and wrapping strong arms around his waist. “Preparing lunch with my love.”
Shane smiles and sings back as Ilya nuzzles his neck. “Being domestic with my boyfriend. Thinking of boring things we can do together.”
Ilya laughs and kisses his ear before finishing the song. “I love to be boring with yooouuuu.”
…okay, that’s a lie. It’s a tie for the best song Yuna’s ever heard. Maybe. It’s definitely at the top of the list.
Shane pauses on the other line, breath catching as he holds back overwhelming emotion.
“Mom,” he croaks. “I…fuck.”
Yuna stays calm. She mentally takes stock of the situation. Ilya’s fine—he just texted her, a few seconds before Shane called, to warn her of the incoming storm. David’s fine—he’s sitting right next to her, confused and alarmed as their son has some manner of episode on the phone. She’s fine. So what’s—
“—wi’ Dada!”
…oh. Oh.
It’s soft at first, but picking up in volume. Tiny pit-pats in the background accompany the most beautiful little voice Yuna’s heard since Shane made up his first song, Driving With Mama, from his car seat all those years ago.
“Eating,” the little voice sings in the background. It’s garbled by what Yuna assumes are half-chewed remnants of an afternoon snack; probably organic peanut butter on apple slices. “Eating wi’ Dada. Eating wi’ Papa. Dada on phone! Who on phone, Dada?”
There’s wet laughter in the background, further from the phone. “Oh God, Shane. It’s genetic. She’s a little you!”
More tearful laughter, this time from Shane. “That’s not—she’s adopted, Ilya.”
“I don’t care what the papers say. She is you. Listen to her, she is perfect. She must be part you, sweetheart.”
Driving With Mama. Making Salad With Ilya. Top three songs for sure, as far as Yuna’s concerned. But this one? Eating With Dada and Papa, written and performed by her granddaughter for a live audience? A platinum hit. Give this baby a Grammy.
how to spot stolen/uncredited gifs + how to work the search function
there's been a lot of talk about not stealing gifs and not supporting people who do, but it might not be easy to spot shady posts for everyone. so i made this little guide with things i personally look out for.
at the end there's also a guide on how to work the search function.
i hope this will help out there on the wild tumblrmachine!
the gif has a watermark that doesn't match the poster and there's no "gif by @[username]" under the gif. please note that a lot of people don't watermark their gifs at all, but this is one of the biggest give aways to a gif being stolen and reuploaded.
the gif doesn't stretch across the entire post. very seldom does a gif maker go through the entire process of making a gif and not making it cover the entire post space. in the example below, the gif was most likely a part of a set, as a second gif would fit perfectly right next to the one posted.
"theme posts" with gifs of different sizes and/or quality. in the examples below, "mickey smiling" has gifs of different sizes and no "gif by" credit under either of them. "theme posts" can still be made with proper credit to the gif maker, like "road trip" to the right.
new posters and no "my gifs" tag. if you're unsure if the gif is stolen or not, click the top of the post and go the blog and look at the tags attached to the post. if someone made the gif themselves, there's usually a "my gifs" or a similiar tag under the post. this might be a good thing to do if someone is new to the space has started posting gifs. this is not 100% foolproof method, but it can help you give an idea if the gif is stolen or not.
so how do i work the search function? how do i get the gifs i want?
good question! in the example of "mickey smiling", try searching for just that - "mickey milkovich smile" and you should get some good results.
in the case of grabbing a specific gif from a specific post, i'll try to make a guide down below. if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!
first, find a post you want to use a gif from. we're gonna use this set from @heymacy.
open the post you wanna use and copy the url to it. then make a new post and hit the gif search button. paste the url and it should find you the first gif of the set. click the gif and tumblr brings you back to your post with the gif and the "gif by heymacy" at the bottom.
but say you want the last image in the set. we're gonna use a tiny bit of html but don't fret.
first, do the previous step i just explained above.
click the cog wheel at the top right corner, scroll down and choose "text editor - html". go back to your post and it should be a whole bunch of text instead of an image.
search the text for "img scr" and then delete everything between the two quotation marks following that, it starts with https and ends with gifv.
go back to the post with the gif set and right click the gif you want (in this case the last one of the set), and choose "copy image link" and paste it between the quotation marks where you deleted stuff before. make sure not to delete any quotation marks and that your new link placed between them!
please note: you might get an error message from tumblr that the post contains unsupported html, just ignore that.
then click the cog wheel again, and change the editor back to "rich text". you're new image should be there, with proper credit!
bam, you're done! i'm also including a video below of me doing these steps so you can follow along. sorry my os is in swedish, but the thing i right click on is just "copy image link" as stated above.
here's a more in depth guide to this method, but it can be a little confusing if you're not used to working in html.
as you add more images and text to your post, the amount of text after you change to the html editor will increase. it might be hard to find the exact gif you want to change, but play around with it and try it out. the more you use the method, it'll be easier to work with.
thank you for coming to my ted talk, i hope this helps! 🫂
im evangelizing this on every platform i have access to right now: last night i started (and finished this morning) "type help", a browser based mystery game inspired by obra dinn. you must recover the investigative files regarding 12 dead bodies found in a home.
it is a text parser game styled like you are using an old DOS system of sorts. engaging and very, very clever. if you get an error while loading the page, enable cookies (for saving your game) for itch.io. there are no sounds or jumpscares or any weird shit. just you and the documents. please enjoy
Writing question: what’s your fave technical storytelling detail that no one ever talks about ? I am on a hunt forever for the concrete and specific…for example it’s really helpful when people lay out the ways heated rivalry does endless explaining and not enough experiencing…
okay so i have been Ruminating on this for like... a month now... because i truly do believe most craft conversations have already occurred they just might not always be like a hit post right. but salad passed me this post a few months back and i think it really encapsulates a lot of what i like to touch on: this post by andthepeople.
most specifically:
if the scene is in a bathroom you don't have to tell me there's a toilet. i assume there's a toilet. if there's NOT a toilet in the bathroom, this is strange and you must tell me.
and it is a little funny i am using their post to make a Writing Tip Post (but this isn't really that... i feel... or am i a hypocrite? very possible. many such cases.) but we move on. i think all of this comes back to my very ardent love for close third person point of view. whenever i write i am always thinking: would the character whose POV i am writing in notice this? and if the answer is no, they wouldn't think about it unless they are actively interacting with (object/character/weather/whatever) then the way i will include it is by staging that interaction. this is how i try to ground the world in a very close third perspective, on top of sort of forgoing more standard "character has a thought" formatting. (thought in italic or thought ended with he thinks. et cetera.)
instead of writing a paragraph about what ilya's room looks like, i am a lot more likely to write him moving through it while trying to hit the specific beats i need to: like, is he picking up laundry off the floor with an offhand comment about the terrible schedule he's been on, is he wiping a lipstick stain off the en-suite bathroom mirror, does he think maybe it's time to buy blackout curtains because his head throbs and he wakes too easily. i like inserting these details by having my characters actually relate to the world around. i would be less inclined to write five sentences about ilya's room this way: it was messy, laundry strewn about, curtains doing a shoddy job at keeping it dark at night which was making it hard for him to sleep, and he needed sleep badly right now. though that kind of writing also has time and place. again, it's about balance.
this is why my dialogue is, for better or worse, usually riddled with characters drinking something or touching each other or themselves or fiddling with something and wandering about the space. i am always always thinking about how characters exist physically in the world and how i can use that to convey personality and desire and other things necessary for # my narratives. shane is probably not going to describe the metros locker room to great extent in my fic because he has spent so much time there and as humans we tend to get hung up on what's new, not what we're used to, but if there's suddenly a new paper on the wall, well, he would notice! and i can use that.
to maybe extrapolate further. in salad's words: "what a character does or does not notice says something about them. how observant they are is a characterization choice." i think this is helpful to keep in mind and also plays into what i've been harping about above. i like unreliable narrators and by being in really close third person, by really committing to not telling the reader everything, by forcing both myself and a reader to have to make do with only what my character can reasonably observe and provide, i think i can create a lot of tension and "aha!!" moments, which is what i love experiencing personally.
sunday blue relies entirely on obscuring what shane knows. shane can't know how that scene will unfold because as the writer i have taken away everything but the crucial information. shane can only tell the reader what he knows about the world based on previous scenes (as in kink scenes) with ilya. that's why in the bathroom scene he doesn't say "ilya is offering me his jacket because this is a point where i can choose to end the scene or use a safe word" he just calls ilya's action "a white flag" and you, the reader, have to make assumptions about what shane means by that because he's not going to go into a long tangent about how their safe word system works. he doesn't need to. he knows how it works. basically, the internal narration is not acting as a vehicle of information. it's there to immerse you in a singular character's lived experience. (again—balance. you will need to give information to your reader! but there's tons of ways to do that which doesn't involve 3 paragraphs of exposition.)
Shane’s jacket hangs over Ilya’s arm. A white flag.
(...)
Ilya doesn’t ask if Shane’s fine: instead he holds his jacket out. The corner of his mouth twitches. Shane shakes his head. He’s not there yet, is barely drunk, barely—his chest lurches. He spits in the sink.
i'm always writing stories HOPING that they will be read a second time around. i love leaving little bread crumbs for someone to pick up on a second read and go oh!! that's why there's that one sentence two chapters from now that i didn't one-hundred percent get the first time around. that to me is part of the fun.
i'm not sure this is a very helpful tip but it is something i AM very conscious of in my writing. so you know. i hope this maybe sparks some thoughts in people whether this is something you vibe with or not in writing.
ending this by linking a very appropriate post/excerpt by octavia butler: "build a world with select detail." say more with less, so on.
I think the only person I've met in real life with 100% career satisfaction was this gal I knew who was a presenter at a children's science museum and delivered every line like she was running a WWE match. Every time you passed the room where she was giving a presentation, you'd hear something like "WHO'S READY FOR CEPHALOPODS?!?" and the kids would go absolutely nuts cheering.
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