Such an incredibly cool way to write something collaboratively I am dying to do this with someone
trying on a metaphor

Kiana Khansmith

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

#extradirty
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Jules of Nature

⁂
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

ellievsbear
almost home
dirt enthusiast
$LAYYYTER
Three Goblin Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Discoholic 🪩
Misplaced Lens Cap
Mike Driver
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ojovivo
KIROKAZE
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@storiansmane
Such an incredibly cool way to write something collaboratively I am dying to do this with someone
Credit to u/ILiekBook on r/AO3
noncon romance. is this anything.
Confessions on the brink of death a character accepts out of kindness because it won’t matter soon anyway, but then the other person doesn’t die, the other person expects them to carry through on their promise to love them and gets angry when they try to back out. Blackmail held over someone’s head just to force them to flirt and make romantic advances on another person, so it looks like they wanted this relationship. Talks about marriage and happily ever afters together as a threat. “I love you, I love you, I love you” as a violation that you’re expected to smile at and be grateful for, because you’re supposed to want to be loved. noncon romance.
adding to this: feeling love against your will. love forced on you by some power beyond you. love that you know you wouldn’t feel if you weren’t blessed (cursed) by it. love that you don’t want and is ruining you and that everyone keeps praising you for feeling. love that everyone around you gets mad at you for rejecting anyway. love that’s made so overpowering that it wipes out any semblance of “you” that there is to make way for a thing that will love someone back.
This Post Is Now About Incest. Big Incest™️ Is Forcing You To Think About The Ways In Which Love Can Ruin You. Big Incest™️ Is Forcing You To Consider That Not Being Able To Escape Someone’s Attention Is A Common Factor In Incestuous Abuse. Big-
oh sorry, had it in megaphone mode. anyway. come on now. you can’t come onto my post and be a clown like this. nut up or shut up; the horrors of love being forced on you can cross and blur the lines of platonic, familial, and romantic in ways that should make you uncomfortable to contemplate, not reject the idea wholecloth because it’s suddenly a little too icky for you.
Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:
Fiction is not reality.
You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.
No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.
No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.
You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.
Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.
The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.
Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.
Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.
You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.
if you work in a creative field...or if you do creative hobbies like writing or drawing...you need to make friends with people who don't do those things. you need to befriend normie Steve who has never written a story in his life. and this is because when you are in a creative job or hobby and spend all your time doing that thing, surrounded by very capable people, who you inevitably compare your own progress and skills to, you forget what the baseline human skill at that thing is. and it's usually zero. normie Steve has not written a story since the 3rd grade when his teacher made him do it. he's very good at other things that are not storytelling - but if you tell normie Steve that you wrote a full 300-page book from start to finish, he will think you're some kind of savant. he does not know ANYONE else who has done this. you need this perspective. because when you're constantly on Let's Write Stories dot Com then everyone on Let's Write Stories dot Com will inevitably be like "oh of course everyone on earth has written a book or several at this point!" and you canNOT let yourself think that. that is not even close to the average human experience. you are in a bubble. do not put yourself down. do not give up.
when kafka said "all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding" and when richard siken said “if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
A fun thing about fiction with large casts of characters is that sometimes you'll have a Spicy Bananas moment where every single character has an identical yet wildly atypical experience of some very mundane thing, and slowly you realise that the author isn't Making A Point, they just think that's normal.
i was deprived of all language input due to being raised by an incomprehensibly babbling people known as The English
"why did you write that"
my fetish
my friend's fetish
not my fetish but it fits in the story so i threw it in there as a treat. you're welcome.
Bro, we are cooked. The knight that dogs the prince's shadow like a dark and silent wraith just knelt to press his forehead to the prince's hand. Yeah, now he's uttering a prayer whose recipient is ostensibly God but in reality is the deified version of the prince that exists only in his mind. Aaand the prince just caressed his cheek to preemptively grant him absolution. I gotta... I gotta get out of here.
Eggtober 2025 Retrospective, Masterpost, and Poem
Calcifying
I scratch my name on interior walls, white paint snow flakes and muted sun melt through my eyelids.
I peck across the keyboard, picking through haystacks in my mind for words that fell out.
Preening, I find myself obsessing over unbaked cake and spilled milk, trying to find a way out of the endless pale.
My body has grown hour by hour, and inch by inch, until my bones slid through my skin like dough, until there's no room left to grow. And I try to decide, as I force myself through the cracks, if I'm a chicken or a butterfly. I keep waiting for signs hidden in summer rains and wondering when I will hatch.
A bit esoteric. But I think it captures the mood. I find myself improving at things. I'm sure my younger self from 10 and certainly 20 years ago would be amazed at some of the progress I've made. But also disheartened. I feel like I work really hard just to be even a shadow of what other people are and achieve just a fraction of what other's have.
Comparison is the thief of joy. I'm not trying to do that. I'm happy with what I've done and can do. But I'm always stuck with this feeling that no matter how much I improve, it's not going to amount to anything. It's just going to be a bunch of hard work that achieves nothing in the end but some pretty words and pretty pictures that people suck down like candy and then forget just as quickly.
I feel like I'm waiting for some... moment. Some sign that I should move forward, take the leap. Or maybe a sign to just give up. Do something else.
And I know it's just because it feels like everyone else is moving forward in life, and I don't feel confident or powerful the way I think I should feel. The way movies make Adult Life seem. I know everyone else is also in a constant state of growth and there is no end state. Life would be pretty miserable if we just reached some final form at age 30 or something and then just had to wait out the clock on life. And I know people have "hatched" later in life than me. People who started writing or painting well after 40, 50, 60, and still made things people remember, or at least things people at the time enjoyed.
I've done things this year that surprised me, things that have proven I can do things. That I am an adult and can trust myself. But knowing a fact and feeling a certain way have very little to do with each other. I keep waiting to feel like an adult. Even though I know for the most part there isn't some hard line that you cross and just start feeling that way.
And I keep trying to tell myself that it's not going to happen. I'm never going to look at my own art and think to myself "Finally, that's good enough, that's the bottom, the beginning, you can start calling yourself a real artist. You can start selling. You can start showing off. You can start advertising." Because if that ever did happen, it would mean I'd stopped growing and learning.
But that doesn't make trying to rationalize with that feeling any easier. I can tell myself all the concrete things I've learned. "You are good. You figured out how to do stuff you couldn't before, and you've survived all the worst days life has thrown at you. You CAN do it. You just have to be brave enough." But at the end of every day, I feel like an egg. And I'm watching everyone else who seems to be fully evolved, fully metamorphosed, hatched and dried and flying free and wondering "When is it my turn?" And the little voice that's screaming "It always was. It still is. Just do it. Take it!" Gets drowned out by my stupid brain chemistry and the loud liar that just keeps bellowing "You're no good. You don't deserve it." I'm getting louder than the liar. Bit by bit. My self talk surprises me sometimes. "Just a bit more. You're doing great. You handled that well." instead of "I don't want to, it's too hard." "You can fix that, you know how to turn this around." instead of "you're failing, you're fucking up and everyone's going to know." But my god, it's supposed to get easier isn't it?
I don't mean to be a downer. I'm satisfied, proud, happy with what I've accomplished. I've torn myself out of writer's block, been making friends, maintaining existing friendships, handling my life and health better, recovered from an awful end to 2024, clearly gotten better at art and gotten better at taking time to actually make art. I've finished a bunch of projects this year, even if most of them aren't the main one I wanted to get done. I know I'm doing well. I know I am. And I know an older me is screaming from the future that I did so much and it's worth it and everything is as it should be. I'm becoming the person I want. But I just feel that sour kind of way. And I'm just hoping that's not all there is. I'm hoping I can learn to actually feel and absorb and sit with that happiness and focus on the good. Not enough that it stops me from growing. But enough that I'll stop feeling like I'm an egg forever.
Anyway, thank you all for enjoying my eggs, for posting spectacular works of your own, for reblogging and liking and looking and sharing in Eggtober. Even if I do get sort of screwy about it and burrow inside my own head, Eggtober is still my favorite part of the year. And I want to keep participating for as long as I'm able and as long as I have the inspiration. Because even if I still feel like an egg... Eggtober at least helps me see there are cracks in that eggshell. I'm not stuck here. I AM growing. And I hope we all keep growing, even if stuff sucks sometimes. It's worth it.
Masterpost under the cut for the individual pieces.
I love you all. I'll hopefully do a bit more this year, but, come what may, I'll see you all for the next Eggtober! May we all come to realize that we have hatched, even if it's a temporary feeling.
writer brain is like “what if this story was a metaphor for grief”
no babes what if this story was finished first
What if the real grief was the writing we didn't do along the way
Does anybody have that image of what cyberpunk dialogue is like. "to crack a cyber lemon this nasty" or whatever
That's the bitch
If you want an idea what more authentic oldschool hacking language sounds like, there is an absolutely ANCIENT webpage called the Jargon File (seems to have been updated from the early 80s up through 2004), aka the New Hacker’s Dictionary, that kept a record. It’s not far from Gibson’s idea but if anything it sounds even dorkier, peppered with coding terms and prehistoric memes
Indispensable dictionary of hacker slang
official linguistics post
“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.
(via @sinni-ok-sessi )
@astronicht 's tags are art
Wait something beautiful is being invented here (via @phneltwrites )
(AU: Jack and Maddie are there for Danny's accident)
"Can I take this off?" Her son groaned, "I don't really have to walk around with this, do I?"
She sighed with a gentle chuckle.
"Sure, sweetie. Just as long as you keep the jumpsuit on. Safety rules."
With a sigh of great relief, Danny ripped the patch of Jack's face off his chest.
...she really hoped it wouldn't upset Jack that much.
As much as she loved her husband's antics, she knew things like this didn't sit well with her youngest.
She had no reason not to let this slide.
Jack, meanwhile, sat at the control panel—tinkering away with the buttons and checking the settings and power attachments.
"Can I go take a look?" Danny asked.
"Sure thing, kiddo!" Jack beamed. Maddie elbowed him quickly in the side.
"Jack!"
He shrugged.
"What? It's all off right now, everything's fine!"
Maddie sighed with light exasperation at her husband, and made her way over to the control panel.
"Any idea what's wrong with it?" She asked. He shook his head, sadly.
"Nope. We have everything calibrated exactly according to the blueprints. We should have it working this time. It just...isn't."
...screams exploded into the air behind them.
The couple froze dead.
There was barely time to react—they whipped around.
In an entire second, Jack and Maddie's lives flipped completely upside down.
The portal frame, once empty, set alight with a blinding green like fire, and the silhouette of their son inside arched backwards, one hand planted firmly onto the inner wall.
Maddie's heart leapt up her throat, her mind desperately pleading for it not to be real.
"JACK! TURN IT OFF!" she screamed.
He jammed the power button on the panel futilely.
"I CAN'T! IT'S ALREADY OFF!"
The screams echoed...
Wild, guttural, agonising, feral...
Heartbreaking screams.
Jack, in hard desperation, finally launched forward to the cord on the floor, ripped out the plug, but the blinding assault asserted its own due time—its right, bought by hundreds of brutal volts, to start and end as it pleased.
...finally, after a painful eternity, the light faded without a sound. Maddie's scream was guttural.
"DANNY!"
The blinding shimmering faded...but the greenness did not. The portal was no longer empty—now swirling with an inhuman vortex...
The lab fell into stillness, silent save for the gentle humming of the portal.
Seconds passed, agonisingly.
...
In the silence, in the emptiness, a small figure stumbled out of the portal.
A glowing figure, dressed in black, with a shock of white hair.
The white fringe steered upwards, and a deep horror welled in Maddie's throat.
That hair should've been black.
She could see it—the lithe body, the now-black jumpsuit that should've been white, the young boyish features an unmistakeable mix of her and her husband's.
"...mum?" The voice hissed, less like a true reverberation from a voice box and more like a whistle on a wind.
Maddie's hands dart to her mouth in horror. Unshed tears pricked the corners of her eyes.
Green eyes—acid-green, ectoplasmic-green—flicked upwards and caught hers with a magnetic pull.
The form glowed with an unearthly aura, slumped on the laboratory floor.
Slowly, that gaze drifted down to his hands—to the sight of glowing white gloves...
...the clueless daze escalated into panic.
"...w-what...what's going on...?! What happened to me...?!"
The ghost's eyes flickered to Maddie.
"...mum...? No...please don't cry! ...please...!"
The figure stumbled to its feet. Its steps barely rang about the lab, traitorously silent as if pulled by something weightless, and it crooned out with a shaking hand.
Years of rational theory-crafting and research in the back of her head rattled on, in a voice cold and clinical.
This was a ghost...
A real, completely undeniable ghost.
"Mads—" Jack warned, his own his eyes wide in horror, but she didn't hear him. She stumbled forward.
But the part of her warning of hollow echoes of consciousness and shallow tricks faded out under the pain wrenching in her chest.
...she was a mother.
"Danny?"
The spectre's face stiffened with recognition at the name. Got up on two feet and shakily stumbled.
In a brief, but sickening, flash...Maddie was thirteen years younger, and her infant son was toddling up on his feet for the first time. She held her arms out in eager excitement.
But then the cruel reality flashed into the present. The form that shook before her was glowing and ethereal, see-through like the smoke of a dying fire.
This was not a birth...but a death.
The spectre made it several steps, but after a short few seconds he collapsed to his knees—right as her arms opened.
...rather than her hands catching him as he stumbled, he fell right through her arms, leaving faint ectoplasmic whisps on her gloves.
(Jack followed suit—approached them hesitantly, wrapped an arm around her and huddles over the prone form that had just slipped through her fingers).
They barely had a second to speak, to mourn, to pull back with a deep breath and piece the scattered fragments of order in their head back together—
A strange halo of light burst into existence at the ghost's waist. It split into two, travelling in both directions over the glowing shape...
...the glow receded. The jumpsuit became white, the hair black, the skin pale and cold but human—
Blue eyes blinked rapidly. Her baby took deep staggering breaths, hands reaching out for her, shaking.
Her mind broke.
Time slowed down. Confusion crawled out of her stomach and up her throat, and for once, Maddie couldn't breathe.
What...?
What just happened?
The traitorous terror dissolved into the ambivolous presence of bemused relief.
"...Danny?" She asked quietly.
Her son squeezed his eyes shut beneath her. She grabbed for his wrist, hauled off the glove with a desperate fervour to feel the vein beneath.
...it thrummed with life underneath the skin.
A wave of confusion washed over Maddie. Her mind froze in its tracks. Her head so light she felt like she could faint.
"Am I...a ghost?" Danny finally croaked, "Am I dead?"
Slowly, befuddled, Maddie shook her head.
"I...I don't know—"
It should've been obvious. It should've been impossible.
And yet, in this moment, it was a question without an answer.
what will it be, boss? the comfort of misery or the pain of change?
if I were an English teacher I would print this out and put it onto the wall next to a "reading is poggers" poster
Since you guys are so interested in the fic I’ve been vagueposting art about, and no chapters have been posted (largely due to me still having to write them, art brain has almost completely eclipsed writing brain lately), here is a sneak peak of a scene I wrote while trying to find the character voices of our beloved main trio. posting it bc it doesn’t really have any spoilers for the fic itself aside from my current working title and maybe some lore set up..
“Just a few little idiosyncrasies here and there.” She says,
“Don’t cuss at me.” Danny complains. He whips his phone out of his pocket and opens the web browser app.
Sam pins him with a look, one dark eyebrow raised so high it seems like it’s taking a stab at the sun.
“I know for a fact that failing English is a thing of the past for you.” She says. “Not just because I tutored you—“
“Almost solely because you tutored him.” Tucker mutters, not looking up from his device.
“— but I personally saw the smiley face sticker Mr. Lancer put on your essay last week.” Sam reaches out to take a swipe at Tucker for interrupting, but he ducks, somehow, and she misses him. Somehow.
“Just because I’m passing English now doesn’t mean I know every single word that ever existed.” Danny mutters. “In my heart, I am still that young lad habitually failing English. You can’t change me.”
He finishes typing his keyword and hits enter. The search engine stalls momentarily before the results blink up at him from the humble screen of his phone.
He casts Sam a narrow squint. “I am not some form of government body.”
“That’s an idiocracy.” Sam groans. “Please learn how to spell—“
She pauses.
Danny starts to cringe away from her when an unholy light begins to flicker in her eyes. Sensing something amiss, Tucker tilts his head in their direction and has the audacity to snort at him.
Sam pokes a finger into his chest, sly grin curling her mouth.
“I mean…” She says lowly. “You technically are, though?”
“I’m what?”
“A form of government.”
Danny blinks slowly at her, processing the strange collection of words she just tried to pass at him.
Finally, it clicks, and he scowls, shoving her arm away.
“No.”
Tucker, his one true bro, breaks brotherhood instantly by joining her side against him. This world is a cruel and unforgiving dystopia.
“You actually are.”
“Shut up, I’m not.”
“A river in Egypt does not negate right of conquest.” Sam sings out evilly. “And if you’re the government then, yeah. I would say that makes it an idiocracy.”
Danny can feel the oncoming sneer that would twist his mouth in a really ugly way, so he directs his energy toward suppressing all expression. Not a twitch of his facial features, no sir. He is a blank slate. The embodiment of nothing.
Instead, he lifts his phone up to his face and backspaces in the search bar, typing it out one letter at a time.
“Idio… sink… crazies….”
Sam, standing on her tiptoes in order to peer over his shoulder like the awful sister-coded best friend she is, groans out loud and reaches around him to pluck his phone from his hands.
Wow. “The audacity.” Danny comments. He doesn’t move to stop her, though.
“I could just tell you.” She says snidely.
Even as she speaks, she casually types the word in for him like a preschool teacher helps a toddler write their name for the first time.
The Cain Instinct is strong, today.
Danny wrinkles his nose when his own goddamn phone is nearly shoved into it, damn, what if it broke? That was dangerous, Sam. Not that it wouldn’t heal within the day, given Danny’s somewhat cool and occasionally helpful undead abilities, but he digresses. He squints at the screen.
After reading it, he casts he a deadpan look.
“You could have just said ‘quirk’ like a normal person.”
“Can’t use that one anymore.” Tucker takes another brief interlude from his hacking project to comment. “Copywrite infringement.”
“Yeah.” Sam agrees, nodding sagely. “That word belongs to anime now.”
“Damn.” Danny sighs.
He shoves his hands into his pocket — along with his phone, after yoinking it from Sam’s hand with a quick movement learned straight from the undead gladiator ring. Finding a daily new reason to say thank you to Pandora is just what Danny’s life is, now.
“Hey!” She hisses.
But there’s a smile there, so Danny knows he’ll survive to live another day.
Or, well. Half a day.
Ha.