If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
Fuck this job man, I sentenced this guy called Theseus to life in prison for murder and then I get a call from the prison that he has systematically replaced every organ in his body including his brain and is now claiming he is not the same person who committed the crime. They are letting him go free, fuck this. Worst of all is he also then took all of the parts that he discarded and made a second Theseus who is also claiming he did not commit the crime and they are also being let free. Now there's two of them out there and you just KNOW they are murdering people and then having gay sex. I fucking quit man...
One of the funniest things about enemies-to-lovers ships is how they’re almost always obsessed with each other. Like if a character actively chooses to interact with another character over and over again instead of simply ignoring them? Throw darts at it all you want, but you still printed out a picture of them to hang on your wall
have you ever felt fear crawl up your throat and felt it start to clog up every entryway of air, felt it settle deep in your stomach and make you sick and have you ever felt it move through your body like a devastating wave and thrash against the shores of your mind and heart, wreck you body and soul until all that is left is an empty shell of who you used to be.
but have you ever wondered what it would be like to have someone pick up that shell and call it a true thing of beauty. to decorate their home with what you have become. to love you for who you are and not who you used to be or what you could be.
just who you are, broken and bruised, an empty husk but still surviving and willing to hold on a little longer just for them and them alone.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time
Oh, love that story, adding it to the list:
20. Princess Talia
and adding a few more contenders
21. Thyme
22. The Monster under the Bed
23. A Meaningful Death
24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t
25. The Monster under the Fridge
26. Antler Guy
27. Cleric slamming healing spells
Adding a few more I remembered:
28. The Frog and the Scorpion
29. HSTHETE
30. The First Witch in the World
31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests
32. A Faerie taking a Name
33. The Dragon on the Farm
34. Synovus & Menace
35. Raising the Anti-Christ
36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)
37. Doctors without Borders…in Space!
38. The Villain-Wrangler
39. The Last Contact
40. The 100 Parent-Point Children
41. And the Heavens Wept
42. The Night Gentleman
43. The Serpent God and their Priestess
I can hardly take any credit for these stories! But I love sharing them. Unfortunately I cannot read all the prompt responses so please tag me if you want me to reblog a story that resonated with you so I can give it a little boost :)
The trees, always in full bloom. Thousands of flowers, still unknown to mankind, in countless colours, yet to be discovered, swaying in a gentle breeze that never seems to stop. Water gushing over a small cliff, foaming at the bottom as it collides with the lake. Moss grows on slick stones and glowing crystals at the bottom of the lake, painting it in green, blue, yellow hues. Tree stumps being used as seats as the fairies and pixies talked about anything and everything under the sun.
That is what it usually looks like not anymore. Now the trees were on fire, the flowers trample by the army of soldiers on the front of the attack. The little waterfall now a shade of wine and characteristics floating on the lake. The fairies now fighting to protect their little cove from the invading forces seeking to destroy the home. A garden no more, it had turned into a battlefield.
And they were failing. Thier numbers to depleting too quickly. Even with their magic they couldn't compete with the human-made canons and catapults. The ambush was well planned and no one saw any hope to overturn the battle.
Leading the counter attack was none other than Queen Crysalis. A noble and just leader. A skilled and courageous warrior. But she refused to show this hopelessness to her soldiers. Her comrades in arms. And as long she remained, strong, so did her army. She knew eventually, she will need to make a choice. Either lay down her weapons and accept defeat and surrender or keep fighting until her last breadth, but that would mean the death, or rather execution, of her people. She knew what she had to do, if not for herself then to save her people and ensure them another day. But then she saw them. Her people.
Past the blood and carnage, she looked around, through a crimson haze. Her people fighting just as resilently as her, she realised that they would die for this magical land of theirs then ever give it up to these savages looking to loot & ravage their home. She realised that these fairies were not fighting for her but rather for themselves and the ones they love. For the soil that gave them life and the streams they spent their days sitting next to.
Then she knew that nothing could make them stop fighting and protecting their homeland. So, she kept on leading the charge and fight till her last breadth, she did.
Because that is what they do. They never stop fighting for what matters most.
(sorry if this feels incomplete, this is the first semblance of a complete story I've ever written and I will keep editing it) <3
@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!
I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.
If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.
Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)
A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.
But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!
By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.
These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.
This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.
For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.
We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.
The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!
Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.
Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.
By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.
By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!
These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.
The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.
For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.
Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.
Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.
A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.
Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.
Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.
By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.
An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.
We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!
In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.
You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.
The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.
Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.
For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.
With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.
Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.
Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!
I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.
This is known as the fear of change. The fear of the unknown. The fear of not knowing what is next. The fear of not knowing whether or not you will be able to survive the unknown all on your own.
How does one just up and leave the place they’ve been in forever? How can they just leave and never look back? Leave what they’ve called their home for almost their entire life. How does one say goodbye without dying a little inside? Without leaving a piece of their heart in that home of theirs.
How does one who has longed to leave for so long just actually leave? Leave their small coastal town for a big city.
Not long ago I would've jumped at the opportunity to leave this place and I'm still incredibly happy that I'm finally leaving. But I can't help but miss this house already. I grew up here. I learned how to ride my bicycle, I made many friends and lost them through the years. Said my fair share of hello’s and goodbye’s.
I guess now this will be my last goodbye here and a brand new hello somewhere far, far away from "home".
