Quordle

Find me on AO3 as Quordle. She/her. I take photographs and write things.

[quordleona03]

Unsighted poem

Last week I went to a new creative writing group. It's free, but the community centre funding pays for someone to lead the group, which I've decided works for me better than a group which is run by osmosis. The timing of the group meant I had to use the break in the middle where we had tea and biscuits to go put my glaucoma drops in, which I'd mentioned at the start.

We'd read together a poem called "Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris, which I really liked, and "Best Drink of the Day", by Judy Brown, which was interesting and very Scottish.

What I hadn't thought through was that when I came back with my eyes appropriately medicated, wearing the dark glasses I need after I put my drops in, I wouldn't be able to see what I was writing.

The prompt for the second part of the evening, the theme being "cafes" was "things you cling to". I think we were meant to write about routines and cafes and habits. In the first half, I'd written a poem about my favourite local cafe. It didn't rhyme, but it scanned decently and I was quite pleased with it.

But I couldn't see the paper. I couldn't see the words I wrote on the paper. The whole mind-eye-hand coordination with which I write was cracked.

So, angrily, I wrote:

I hold onto words

and time

and sight

I love the written word

And hold to it

Even when I cannot see it

Hold words with time

Hold words for time

Share words in time.

[ninetimesbluedemo]

MASH + Epitaphs of the War by Rudyard Kipling

[freegiftjones]

one time i was making potato soup and i needed broth for it but i was out of broth. but in my dog food cabinet there was a carton of chicken broth that i had bought for my dog. now the box did say HUMAN GRADE and the ingredients were just bog standard chicken broth. it did say something about joint health for dogs on there. but the ingredients were normal. i even compared the ingredients list to some normal person broth and they were the same. so i did put dog broth in that soup and it did taste completely normal. but i did use the dog broth.

[andloawhatsit]

Excerpt from The Kansas City Times (26 February 1983)

[vivarocksteady]

Love all these takes, and love that in 1983 people apparently wrote to the newspaper about their fanfic ideas.

[quordleona03]

In 1983 many people didn't know fanfic existed.

I turned my first Blake's 7 fanfic into an episode script and sent it to the BBC because I had no idea what else to do with an idea for a B7 story.

[carefulpearful]

[j-b-honeydew]

Just had a vision of Hawkeye deciding to go by Benjamin again when he gets back to Crabapple Cove cos hearing that nickname brings back too many painful memories.

[4-0-doublenatural]

If you like Hawcahy at all you should check out the fantastic Sins and Virtues series by Quordle. One of the details I love is Hawkeye only lets people who knew him as a kid/people from the 4077th call him Hawkeye and he's strict about it and it creates some good tension when he asks the Hunnicutt children not to call him Uncle Hawkeye in All We Know.

Everyone in the series is written incredibly well. I especially adore the post war stuff.

Also very juicy missed connection stuff with Traphawk and complex and layered BJ and his jealousy and love and friendship and envy. Margaret gets the husband she deserves who both looks out for her emotionally but also respects her, Charles gets to be a Dad (rather than a father), and everything Peg Hunnicutt. It's a very rich series and that's not even touching on all the incredible Mulcahy stuff and his struggles with the church and the school he teaches at and Hawkeye becoming a rising star in the medical world and writing a book about trauma surgery in Korea.

[banjo-k-514]

Mash fans can really post the most random things and somehow the same ten people come running to like/reblog.

Oh and 7 times out of 10, it has something to do with father Francis Mulcahy and his relationship with Hawkeye.

#ilovemyfandom

[4-0-doublenatural]

Hawkeye and Margaret's mutual competency kink about each other.

[chalupaswanswarm]

Never not thinking about how Hawkeye looks at Mulcahy... HIS STUFFING IS ACHING TO BE HUGGED BY THAT PRIEST‼️

[nat-20s]

gotta be honest I think a REAL juicy dynamic is when someone has a True Love and a Soulmate and they are two different people

[nat-20s]

see this person is the love of my life I would follow them anywhere every day is brighter for having them in it. and THIS bastard shares a soul with me we'll find each other in every universe and understand each other in ways no other living being could. neither of us are particularly thrilled about this

[thememedaddy]

[prokopetz]

"It doesn't help your credibility to exaggerate, most employers wouldn't literally work you to death" like, I used to work in distribution. If booking a truck driver for back to back shifts until they fall asleep at the wheel, crash, and die counts as being worked to death, I have personally met employers who've worked employees to death and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. It may not be universal, but it's a hell of a lot more common than a lot of us would prefer to think.

[simplysnaps]

Death by spreadsheet is an acceptable degree of separation for most in middle management. They can sleep at night without guilt for what they've done, because the system charitably setup twelve degrees of separation between their choices and the real-world harm. But do not be fooled, their choices set that harm into motion. Without their reckless disregard for human life, the harm would not be done.

I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.

Yes, managers work you to death. That's their job.

[aspiringsorceress]

Every single labor protection is written in the blood of those who were literally worked to death, and business owners and profiteers would claw those protections back with glee if they could. They will squeeze every red cent from your body if they are allowed, and write off your death for an insurance payout that they'll try to pocket for themselves while hiring your replacement for half the pay they gave to you.

[olderthannetfic]

Question for the front porch, what's the best way to handle frequent POV switches?

I'm planning a fic where two characters, A and B are forced to have sex by a third, C. It's in third person limited but keeps switching back and forth between A and B's perspectives. The problem is B is a clone of A, and both think they're the real A and the other is the fake. So I'm trying to figure out how to make it clear to the audience when the switches happen, since it won't always be obvious from the narration which one is which.

--

Oh boy...

How quick are we talking? Like within the same scene quick?

That's more of an experimental style that's tricky to pull off. There isn't some clear standard because basic-ass writing advice will tell you not to do this in the first place.

Standard style is to switch at a chapter break. Some people will switch at a scene break with the typical formatting that accompanies a scene break. I think it's almost always a mistake, even in an experimental style, to switch within a single paragraph, but most other choices could work in the right context.

If you're planning to switch constantly within a single scene, I might sacrifice smoothness in favor of clarity. Put some heading like "[A POV]" before those bits. That's not a graceful solution, but if you're doing something this confusing and don't already have an instinct for how to write it, intrusive headers are probably your best bet.

If you're at least switching at scene breaks, I would handle it the same way you handle establishing POV at a chapter break. Yes, these two characters sound very much the same and have the same name and each think they're the original, but there must be something that's different. Establish some quirk for each of them and reference it in the first sentence of their section.

--

Basically, if you have to sacrifice one aspect of your writing in favor of another, make sure clarity wins.

[skicio-zeezee]

Have just realised there is a train of thought that Michael Odell didn’t actually die - that instead Laurie’s mother’s family just told him that so he wouldn’t try and look him up - and I’m OBSESSED. The possibilities!

[burntlikethesun]

if you're just joining us, george takei is having to educate jk rowling on holocaust denial

[rhube]

This is of no surprise if you know JKR has been hanging around with literal Nazis for years, while George Takei is a gay man who spent some of his childhood in an American internment camp.

I'm glad to see more of the disguise slip from JKR, but can only hope more people listen to George than to her.

[Edited to expand on this because a lot of people in the notes seem not to realise:] she is not being ignorant. She is not a benighted fool who didn't take her own advice and check the sources. THIS IS DELIBERATE.

This is a Nazi talking point. This is a technique for conversion and indoctrination designed to shame YOU into not checking your sources. After all, a famous person in a position of authority (whether we like that or not) is shaming the very idea that Nazis persecuted trans people, or that trans people have a history that goes back more than a few decades.

If you haven't watched Shaun's JK Rowling's New Friends and think talk of her hanging around with Nazis is hyperbole, this video is for you:

She is in deep. She is literally friends with known Nazis. She will have been told that the people saying Nazis burned books have unreliable sources. That is why she's saying this.

You'll note that George doesn't @ her. Apart from the fact that literally starting beef with her is likely not something he needs, he knows she is a lost cause. She is primed to dismiss the actual sources. He is sharing the true information, with sources, because her statements mean that other people will now be wondering about this and he's offering those people an alternative famous person authority AS WELL AS the facts.

[4-0-doublenatural]

Today on explaining the old joke...

In Cowboy we not only get the Double Dear John John, but Hawkeye, Trapper, and Radar hesitate to say Cowboy's letter's return address is Reno. This is because whereas it could take months or years to get a divorce which involved usually proving infidelity or cruelty, Nevada had no fault divorce and it would only take six weeks even back in the 1950s. So going to Reno (the biggest city in Nevada at the time) became a bit of a trope.

The letter coming from Reno might be viewed as very bad news if he's worried his wife is leaving him.

Basically, Cowboy gets a dear John from Divorce city. Luckily, his name is John and he just happens to live in Reno.

[t00thpasteface]

just some guys doing a bit from mash, in some nonspecific region of space, resolving some nonspecific space-related crisis