Ravenclaw Library

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, If you’ve a ready mind, Where those of wit and learning, Will always find their kind.

[ravenclawlibrary]

You might consider changing your tumblr handle

I'm sorry, why?

This blog is for all my book-related posts. A library for Ravenclaws (aka fellow nerds). Doesn't have to be for Harry Potter, if that's what you mean. 🤷🏻‍♀

[lostamber]

May 3rd

[pearls-gone-wild]

Some very important facts in my life right now:

I'm currently visiting NYC with my kidlets, aged 8 and 10.

We are staying about three blocks away from the Empire State Building.

There is currently a giant inflatable dragon wrapped around the Empire State Building.

Kidlets are delighted by the dragon.

Kidlets are rather more delighted by the dragon than might be expected.

Yes, you might say, it's a dragon wrapped around a famous skyscraper, where's the surprise in that?

No surprise.

It's just that they're extremely excited.

They're reading Terry Pratchett 's Guards! Guards!

A book that features a giant dragon swooping off the tallest tower in the great city of Anhk Morpork.

They are quoting the book constantly

"The shape that looked like a large pair of wings unfurling was, in fact, a large pair of wings unfurling."

All the time

"Dragons don’t have friends! The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive!"

Little girls, wandering through the tourist attractions of midtown Manhattan, like

"A people united can never be ignited!"

With such enthusiasm

"This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon! One man, one stab!

I love them so much, I'm so proud, I picked the right partner, we made the best possible kids

(It's a promo for HBO's Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon)

[dimity-lawn]

Parenting done right.

[thod-thod]

@discworld-heritage-posts

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[immediatebreakfast]

Happy "Van Helsing calls Seward bitchless in front of Lucy" day to everyone! 🌹🌹🌹

[bugslaststraw]

So in honor of there maybe being someone out there who cares now, wherever you are, here's the drawing I did right after rereading like 80% of The Truth and then stopping right before the sad bit lmao but anyway yayyy

[seanofbeankeep]

The one Discworld thing that lives rent free in my brain is how military generals would observe which military uniform Nobby Nobbs was wearing throughout the battle to determine who was winning

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[rubysapphrald]

the trick to a good insult is sort of talking around it and making them think so that it hits harder when they realize what you’re talking about

[rubysapphrald]

“you look like the minotaur” -> whatever

“you look like you have a bull’s head” -> slightly funnier

“you look like you should be imprisoned in an underground labyrinth for the safety of crete” -> there we go

[thoughtsfromb4]

Blake's Fire

Fire, fire, burning bright, weaving shadows from the night, how did mortal man learn to unlock the secrets within you? 

From what darker, distant past did we emerge, free at last, once we'd learned to tame then free thy flaming volatility? 

For the magic of your light gave us ways to fend off night, steal back daylight, and explore lands unseen by man before. 

Fire, with your powers near, we outshone our darkest fears so that, in caves, we could start making works of timeless art.

What hand or eye or mind was first moved to quench deeper, inner thirsts; to–with pigment, coal, or chalk– imbue their Self upon the rock? So, with these powers over dark, one last thought was left to spark, as we, through art, learned to see our true immortality.

-- @thoughtsfromb4

[lesbianjimmymcgill]

"I know your school didn't teach you how to write fanfic-" I know this is something said in response to Americans whining about their education system in response to racism, but my school English class actually did have us write an epilogue to a book we were reading as an assignment, so in a way my school did teach me how to write fanfic. I have no point to make with this point and I don't care to i just wanted to share a tidbit about my life

[dsudis]

We had to do this with Jane Eyre. For extra nerdiness I did mine as a CS Lewis fusion/crossover and produced “The Janetape Letters” written by a demon trying and failing to tempt Jane to betray herself and despair.

(I had already been writing and reading actual fanfic for a few years by then, so I felt like I was getting away with something rather than having my eyes opened to new possibilities.)

[leveragehunters]

In grade 8, we had to rewrite the end of Lord of the Flies, and it was awesome. I can't remember the exact details, but I went with murder/suicide. One of the things the teacher talked about was trying to match the writing style, characters, and themes of the book. So yes, school did teach me to write fanfic!

[ms-demeanor]

I had a 400-level shakespeare professor give us an assignment to write a canon compliant missing soliloquy in Hamlet and then write a paper justifying why we thought it was possible for the speech to be an unspoken part of the story. My soliloquy was Hamlet explaining that he didn't kill Claudius while he was praying because he knew that if he waited any amount of time Claudius's pride would guide him to committing another mortal sin and he wanted Claudius damned, not dead. My justification for this was literally every scene including Claudius has him committing a sin within the logic of the fictional universe *if* you grant that it takes place in a catholic universe (and whether the story takes place in a catholic or protestant universe is pretty important to interpreting the play and is very much up for debate).

He gave extra points for accuracy in EME usage and appropriate switching between iambic pentameter and prose.

As it turns out "can you inhabit the perspective of the characters in a story" and "can you identify stylistic choices that are used to create emphasis and set a scene" are questions that are pertinent both for writing fanfic and for reading comprehension.

[firthbetterorfirthworse]

wait, no?

she's saying no?

huh

I didn't know that was an option

[albertcamuesli]

no writing workshop can help you improve your writing as much as this screenshot can

[what-even-is-thiss]

“Said is a utility word,” he said.

“Though if it’s obvious who’s talking and you’re tired of using that word you can go without it for a line or two.”

“You should keep in mind though that this sort of format can get confusing if overused. You want to make sure your readers know for sure who’s talking.”

“It might also be a good idea from time to time to bring up the characters’ names again so your audience can keep track of what’s going on,” Roman added to the public conversation they were having with themself.

“On that note, lengthy descriptions added onto the said can be meaningful flavor and humor added to the scene but if used more than a few times it had better be a purposeful stylistic choice,” he said, knowing full well that he personally is occasionally guilty of overusing this type of thing and the classic he said she said format is a perfectly acceptable way to format a conversation.

[quekerahkerah]

Me recommending Discworld books: So there's this guy called Moist von Lipwig, and he—yeah. Yeah, that's his real—yeah, no, I'm serious. So anyway, he—yes, L-I-P-W-I-G, that's right—no, shut up, listen, ok, it's actually really clever and thematic—

[nixcraft]

A boy can dream, can't he?

[artsekey]

Hey, so if you have Windows 11 installed and have been losing your mind over the fact that you can't find your own files because Windows is now prioritizing internet search results first, you can fix it by following this guide:

How to Disable Windows Web Search and Speed Up Your PC

Stop the OS from pulling up web results when you just want files and apps.

As someone with over 900 GB of intentionally and properly named files on her computer (I do a lot of digital art and digital media work that requires high-volume files that function off of dependencies), this feature was making me furious. I followed the above instructions and can confirm that the method outlined solves the problem.

[banrionceallach]

I have just tried this, it works and the explanation how to do it was so user friendly and clearly laid out.

[berylian]

10 and 11 are also kinda secretly adding Windows Copilot to your computer when you're not looking. Even without software updates. You can follow this guide to disable Copilot

How to disable Copilot in Windows 11

Completely disable Copilot in Windows 11 in just a few simple steps.

The guide uses a program called gpedit (group policy editor), if you can't find it on your computer, follow this guide to install/enable it, and remember to always run as administrator:

Run these commands in command prompt.

Win + Q

Search: command prompt

Right-click > Run as admin

Copy, paste, and enter these commands:

FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~*.mum") DO ( DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F" )

FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~*.mum") DO ( DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F" )

Test it by opening Win + R

Type: gpedit.msc

See if it opens

[kira-serialfaggot]

Highly recommend doing this. Becomes significantly more tolerable without all the crap tacked on

[meatball-headache]

i had windows copilot in gpedit and i have win 10 and i do my damnedest to keep it from ever updating so :/

[memeuplift]

[cessreads]

I want to be granny weatherwax when I grow up!

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[headspace-hotel]

Shitty "craft" books telling writers how to Optimize Your Book For Making Big Bucks have been doing uncalled-for violence to descriptive and evocative styles for years so i'm glad somebody is finally saying it

"Purple prose" is not the worst thing in the world god forbid someone write in a way that risks not landing with any particular reader. Better eliminate all uniqueness