animated non sequitur

A blog where I reblog random stuff I find on the internet. Basically, a mix of art, animal gifs, fandom reblogs, with a healthy dose of memes and snarky comments. 10 years and counting on this hellsite.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

I will regret this and shouldn't make wheels at 2am but

This tumblr sexyman is your son!

Are you proud of him

yes!

somewhat

I shouldn't be but yes

No

NO.

I'm disowning him

I am scared of him

Results

Remaining time: 4 days 23 hours

(sorry if your favourite is not in this poll, I went mostly off the contenders from this year's poll and the classics)

[voldemo]

My friend really changed once she became a vegetarian 

[voldemo]

its like ive never seen herbivore

[ezekestiel]

i sighed so loud my mom asked me if i was okay and she’s two rooms away

[boltgsr]

IMAX UPLOADED THE MUMMY TRAILER WITH HALF THE AUDIO CHANNELS MISSING AND CREATED 40 SECONDS OF UNDILUTED COMEDIC PERFECTION

[newhologram]

Shit like this is why I could not stop laughing in film editing school. I would have to leave class because I was in tears whenever I had to do sound.

[esamastation]

Behold esama's rules for writing dialogue*

These are rules I generally adhere to in my own writing, they aren't gospel or meant to be the end all be all of writing. Also it should be noted that like all rules, these too are made to be broken when and where it serves the text. This is not about grammar or Correct Use of King's English™, this is just a list of personal style choices.

Anyway.

1. Indicate who's speaking as quickly as possible.

See difference between:

"Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser? I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine. Though if you steal it, I will kill you." "Nice. I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

And:

"Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser?" Melanie asks. "I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine," Jan says. "Though if you steal it, I will kill you." "Nice," Melanie says. "I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Annie says, "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

But this looks like talking heads in a blank void talking to each other, so, give the characters bodies and physicality, which brings us to rule 2.

2. no talking heads in void.

Though people do just sit around talking without doing anything else, it's not that interesting to read and also, gotta remember that readers can't see what you see in your head while writing. You gotta actually give them something to latch a mental image onto, so. Characters should move and emote. 

"Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser?" Melanie asks, rummaging through her bag. "I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine," Jan says, nudging his own eraser over. It's in the shape of an old fashioned motorcycle. "Though if you steal it, I will kill you." "Nice," Melanie says and snatches it up to do quick edits on her character sheet. "I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Annie gives her a flat look. "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

Now you can sorta tell what they're talking about. Just don't go overboard - dialogue has a momentum and a rhythm, and too much description can overwhelm it.

3. Character Action and Character Dialogue go on the same paragraph.

See difference between this:

Melanie rummaged through her backpack.  "Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser? I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine." Jackson nudged his own eraser over. It was the shape of a motorcycle. "Though if you steal it, I will kill you." "Nice." Melanie snatches it up to do quick edits on her character sheet. "I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Annie gives her a flat look. "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

And this:

Melanie rummaged through her backpack. "Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser? I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine." Jackson nudged his own eraser over. It was the shape of a motorcycle. "Though if you steal it, I will kill you." "Nice." Melanie snatches it up to do quick edits on her character sheet. "I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Annie gives her a flat look. "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

Not only does it make the text way more cohesive and snappy but, once again, it's much more clear who is saying what - but even then, I prefer to use dialogue indicators. Text like this to me looks like maybe there's a voiceover going on or something.

4. No mixing and matching characters. One character per paragraph.

This is one of my most broken rules, but in general it's character per paragraph.

So, none of this:

Melanie rummaged through her backpack while Annie set up the DM screen. "Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser? I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine." Jackson nudged his eraser over and Melanie snatched it up "Though if you steal it, I will kill you." Melanie begun making quick edits. "Nice. I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Beside her, Annie gave her a flat look. "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory."

Mixing and matching who's doing what like this makes it hard to see who's saying what, it makes the dialogue messy. However, this is fine.

While Annie set up the DM screen, Melanie rummaged through her backpack "Wait, does anyone have an extra eraser?" she asked. "I could swear I brought one, but I can't find it." "You can use mine." Jackson nudged his eraser over and Melanie snatched it up. "Though if you steal it, I will kill you," he added. "Nice. I'm changing my brother's name to Gerry, is that okay?" Melanie ask, grinning at the look Annie gave her. "You had two weeks to come up with your backstory," Annie says flatly.

Note that in mixing and matching like this, it's all the more important to point out who is saying what. In general though, I tend to minimise this sort of stuff.

5 is kinda rule 1 rehashed, but, again, indicate who is speaking upfront. Especially when there's a larger piece of dialogue.

Sometimes, people aren't actually reading - sometimes for various reasons they're using text to speech, or maybe someone does a podfic or something. Even in visual reading, when there's a big block of dialogue without indicators it can be hard to follow.

So instead of:

"If Melanie can change her background, can I add a cool uncle to mine? I want a cool uncle - like, a gunslinger or something. Or a wizard - oo, a wizard uncle! He can be creepy and vague and give me problematic spells!" Jackson says eagerly. 

I'd rather do:

Jackson puts his hand up. "If Melanie can change her background, can I add a cool uncle to mine?" he asks eagerly. "I want to give Kaiser a cool uncle - like, a gunslinger or something. Or a wizard - oh, a wizard uncle! He can be creepy and vague and give me problematic spells!"

Especially so when there's multiple characters talking and maybe one character hasn't been talking as much as the others - if they jump back into the discussion, it should be noted.

6. Limit your bits.

But as said before, every rule is made to be broken, and I break my own rules all the time. When I do it, though, it's generally for the bit, to make the text more interesting. Stuff like bits of dialogue without any indicators who is saying what to show that there's a faceless crowd speaking all at once, or two characters going back and forth, stuff like that.

"Jackson's dude has Main Character Energy," Melanie says solemnly. "Kaiser is the anime protagonist," Jan agrees. "We're just NPCs in his world." "The cheerleaders of his adventurers." "Founding members of his harem." They nod in perfect understanding and agreement.

For a couple of lines, exchanges like this can be fun - if the back and forth goes on for 12 lines, though, it will get tiresome.

There are other bits I do, and again, I break my own dialogue writing rules a lot for stylistic reasons to make the text more interesting or to give it better rhythm, or whatever. Sometimes, there's no dialogue at all, sometimes there's no indicators. There's no actual rules in writing, even grammar is all made up. These are more guidelines than anything.

But I hope the effort makes the dialogue more readable.

[esamastation]

I promise you can use "said" and "asked" so much more in your writing than your realise. People won't think your writing is bad. I swear. The words are basically invisible. You can use them. It's okay.

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[bluef00t]

Tobey Maguire Spider-Man "it's a hard knock life" fancam hours

[boastmalone]

How does it feel to have conceptualized the perfect Spider-Man trailer op

[oracleocelot]

[apolladay]

Do you and your sibling(s) have a matching set of first names?

yes, there is a distinct logic in how our parents named us

not specifically but our names have similar vibes

no, our names sound very different

multiple siblings with multiple cases

nuance / only child / see results

Voting ended onJun 17

By that I mean if you and your sibling(s) are all named after the same fictional story or group of people, have alliterating names, named in alphabetical order—anything that intentionally indicates you are from the same family. I see it with fictional siblings all the time, but barely know anyone like this in real life.

[jenroses]

Our main commonality is a first name that is incredibly basic and a familial middle name. My kids all ended up with familial middle names but have a fair bit of variety in first names.

To give you an idea of my parents' naming style, we had a dog that was a Brittany spaniel and when I wanted to call him Princess, they refused and called him Brit.

[elibunnn]

why do people not like the 2003 ending its literal the same ending 😔

based on my favorite manga panel:

[farawaydoe]

Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 : episode 19

[calangkoh]

new favorite youtube comment

[calangkoh]

oh my god?

OH MY GOD????

god really took his dick

[cowania]

w hat

[timelord-alex]

OMFG I NEVER NOTICE

[paleo-punk]

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST IS SO FUCKED UP

[dvk4231]

OMFG

[phantomrose96]

Personally? I would never deny Hiromu Arakawa her right to a short bratty braided blond character in a kickass red coat

[phantomrose96]

Invent a look this iconic and I think you should get to use it in every series.

[phantomrose96]

[kaban-bang]

It was actually her assistants conspiring lmao

[shantechni]

The funniest part to me is the way that she doesn't even believe her assistants are responsible for this. She 100% blames Edward "fictional character who can't directly affect the real world unless made to do so" Elric.

[quarterette]

So I was today years old when I found out the script writer for FMA 03 also was behind the anime script for Juuni Kokuki.

Can def see the overlap between CoS movie and the early arc of JK. Like, the idea of being stranded in a different world is crucial to both.

Looks like the most recent credit was Concrete Revolutio which was made ~2016.

Guy just really likes the idea of multiverse huh. And a healthy dose of melancholy.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

kind of a side thought from a couple of my posts about writing but I think it deserves its own post, so here goes:

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

tl;dr: setting up the conflict as one over premise and then having all the action be a fight over methods undermines your story; at best it’s just confusing, at worst it turns your characters into hypocrites.

[elumish]

I would add a third piece to this (or really split out “solution” into two pieces):

There is the problem, the end, and the means, and those are all things that can be disagreed with in different ways.

Let’s take a very basic scenario. Two people live together. There is a bookshelf full of books and there are books all over the floor.

Disagreement on the problem:

Person 1 thinks there are too many books on the floor. Person 2 likes having books on the floor because it makes the house feel lived-in.

Disagreement on the end:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that there are too many books on the floor. Person 1 thinks the ideal end is that the house has exactly one bookshelf worth of books in it. Person 2 thinks the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house but simply being somewhere that is not the floor.

Disagreement on the means:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house and being on a bookshelf. Person 1 thinks they should buy more bookshelves to fit every book. Person 2 thinks they should double- or triple-stack their shelves rather than spend money on new bookshelves.

This is obviously a very light example, but I think it’s not just problem/solution but “do we agree what problem we are solving, do we agree what the solution should be, do we agree on how to get there.”

[afloweroutofstone]

My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)

[afloweroutofstone]

This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

[riliphins]