Writing & Art Things

This is a side blog for me to keep track of interesting writing tips or prompts that I find. May also include art references. Feel free to follow if you want.

[johannestevans]

horniest battle moments:

- taking your ally's weapon out of their scabard to use yourself

- using someone else's shoulder as a rifle stand

- nudging someone's chin up with the tip of your weapon

- freezing with your blades against one another's throats, breathing into each other's mouths

[veliseraptor]

the weird schrödinger's emotion that is "that character death was narratively satisfying and emotionally impactful and ultimately the best way to handle their character arc" simultaneously with "noooo but I wanted them to live :( :( :("

[shoomlah]

80’s Muscle Man life drawing session from last night with Ready/Sketch/Go, featuring the lovely Brandon Ryan!

Gettin’ in some real good practice drawing impressive deltoids and Nike high tops 💪🏼✏️

[duckbunny]

fun fact about character development by the way. you can make them develop worse.

[duckbunny]

like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.

they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.

[whumplent]

i understand wanting to coddle your guy after the horrors or whatever but. there is something sooooo compelling about strangers and even friends flinching away from the Character in the aftermath. something’s not the same as it was, and maybe no one can put their finger on it—what draws their focus that never did before, the intensity of their attention, the way they set their jaw, now, and never quite fully relax their body. but it’s unsettling. even if you can’t name it, there’s the suspicion that something in them broke into a sharp edge, and people can sense the threat.

[unheardoracle]

Your dialogue is stiff because everyone is being too honest

Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people

dodge questions

answer indirectly

lie (badly)

change the subject

crack jokes to avoid serious answers

lie (convincingly)

say half of what they mean

tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying

If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.

Subtext is where tension lives.

[random-bits-of-info]

Testing formatting

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[3liza]

how did they not fucking account for this. sorry but this is really really stupid

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

this is so funny.

[syn4k]

burning text gif maker

heart locket gif maker

minecraft advancement maker

minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags

windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)

FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)

image to 3d effect gif

vaporwave image generator

microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)

you're welcome

[mmelete]

[carby]

[voidsentprinces]

[autism-official]

[autism-official]

obligatory reblog of this after I forgot to bookmark them (again)

[perplexingly]

I once had a plan to read at least one classic novel from (almost) every country, I keep forgetting about it but I really should do it, I usually end up enjoying them

Anyone has any non-western recommendations?

[perplexingly]

This was getting a bit out of hand with people sending asks instead of commenting, so I compiled everything that was sent to me under the cut. The rest of the recommendations are in the comments as usual. Thank you all for the recs!

shabby-alonso asked: for classic novels, i would recommend Dream of Red Chamber, i think it might align with your tastes well!

Anonymous asked: have you read notes of a crocodile by qiu miaojin? its a taiwanese classic

shmuel-ben-sarah-kcd2 asked: Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by I. B. Singer More queer Yiddish literature, I do love the movie too but the movie doesn’t fully convey the utter transness of Anshel.

Anonymous asked: For Argentinian classics I'd recommend Jorge Luis Borges! I recently finished one of his most well known collection "Ficciones" and enjoyed it :)

Anonymous asked: have you gotten to read brazilian classic lit yet? The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis is one that defined our literature. i recommend The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa as well.

jarenka asked: I recommend My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola for Nigerian lit. Utterly bizarre prose, 12/10.

kotitontunmanaaja asked: Sonewhat western book rec depending on your definition, but 'My Cat Yugoslavia' is definitely a modern Finnish classic by Finnish Kosovan author Pajtim Statovci - queer themes, some nice surreal imagery with and a nice layered structure of dual timelines in one family, questions about belonging, intergenerational trauma and refugee life and such. One of the books that got me reading again after a long time!

fatalwa asked: For book recs - I will double the author and the name in the original Ukrainian so you would have better chances of finding them: • The Yellow Prince (Жовтий князь) by Vasyl Barka (Василь Барка) • Do oxen low when mangers are full? (Чи ревуть воли як ясла повні?) by Ivan Bilyk and Panas Myrnyi (Іван Білик, Панас Мирний) • Clouds (Хмари) by Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi (Іван Нечуй-Левицький) • Я (Романтика) / I (Romantic) by Mykola Khvylovyi (Микола Хвильовий) • Enchanted Desna (Зачарована Десна) by Oleksandr Dovzhenko (Олександр Довженко) I don't really know what kind of literature you prefer so I decided to give 5 different recommendations for you to choose from.

Anonymous asked: Since you like Hesse, I'd definitely recommend Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (Hungarian classic)

Anonymous asked: Since someone already mentioned Machado de Assis, i'll recommend then Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, i have never read it fully but it is sure considered a brazilian classic

inferubim asked: Check out "Blindness", by Portuguese author José Saramago!

Anonymous asked: Brazilian here! About reading a classic from every country, I'd heavily recommend Alexandre e Outros Heróis by Graciliano Ramos! It's one of his lesser known books but it is excellent. He is one of the best writers in the history of my country. It's also, in my opinion, his best book!

the devils by dostoesvky — INSANE characters with homoerotic subtext and crazy plot; the idiot (also by him) — the gentlest character in the entirety of russian lit, the book kinda reads as "what if i put christ in modern world and made him fall for a tortured fantastic woman" (and she's one of the most fascinating female characters in RL) + you might be more interested in it because there's very strong visual imagery (eg dostoesvky was obsessed with the "dead christ" by holbein and it manifests in the text); judas iscariot by leonid andreev — ALSO homoerotic subtext + such an interesting and fresh portrayal of jesus; god it's so good!! the portrait by gogol — kinda wilde's the picture of dorian gray before dorian gray. genuinely reads as if gogol PAINTS the text (he was also a painter himself). the story of an artist, insanity and art. a fascinating read! (via @hellamorte)

[perplexingly]

Ok, inspired by @toadlett, I started compiling these in a google doc

WORLD LITERATURE LIST

WORLD LITERATURE LIST Asia Afghanistan: Armenia: Azerbaijan: Bahrain: Bangladesh: Bhutan: Brunei: Cambodia: China: Dream of Red Cha

And I saw that there are many lists online of a similar kind, but as I'm mostly interested in classical literature rather than modern, and also as I'd like to prioritize the books that have been recommended to me rather than ones I find online, I'll continue to curate this list. Thank you again! ☺️

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[poofroom]

Heya, love your artwork! Can't help but be absolutely obsessed with the way you shade & colour. Do you happen to have some tips or a showcase of your process? Would love to see and learn from it 🙏

Hello there! Here is my proccess of coloring from one of my previous art :3 Hope you find it useful!

[orientalld]

remember how young and scared we were?

[lady-sapphyre]

[feyspeaker]

eclipse prints | patreon (this month's print club is Gale themed!)

[madbalalaika]

Buy me a Ko-fi ☕💗

[arczism]

Too caught up to find the wits to bail