#screed

[misterlemonzlime]

03-26-26 | misterlemonzlime.tumblr.com/archive

[mysteriesunfoldthemselves]

angry screeching.

ffs? why? how did this pass through? does no one care any more? are we reaching rock bottom? should I just cut me own neck and be done with it?

( and other unprintables)

Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books

Reading list in advertorial supplement contains 66% made up books with real author names.

[dreams-in-blk]

Stop calling my ancestors "slaves!"

They were enslaved. They themselves were not slaves. Degenerate (dare I say morally corrupt and perhaps evil) members of their own species brutally robbed them of their basic freedoms generation after generation in the most heinous.. see I start losing it...just stop! Stop this rhetorical Three-Card-Monte called "Hide The Perpetrator!" And while you're at it, turn the gaslight off too. I can see just fine without it.

The slavers who inflicted this nearly incomprehensible crime upon my ancestors generation after generation must no longer be allowed to hide behind this linguistic sleight of hand.

Look. I don't even know what I would like to really hear coming out of y'all mouth when you dare even speak about my Ancestors (Blessed Be They) and their passage through The Long Dark Night of American Enslavement. But sho as hell y'all need to stop calling them "slaves." Better yet why don't you just keep them out your mouth altogether.

- rp

-----

[cassandraclare]

Jessa/Wessa ship wars

teenagefunbouquet said:Isn't it enough Tessa&Jem got a wedding comic, two kids (and you say more), a lifetime as the only mates for each other and your most explicitly written sex scene After the Bridge? Wessa are the most popular and we get nothing, every wessa moment is shared with Jem while Jessa get to be alone, Wessa fans got no "anticipation" like jessa fans are getting now everyday you give them a book in jem's pov or a short story or a new kid. it feels like wessa is dead.

I’ll be interested in people’s thoughts on this. (I left the username as is since it’s a blank account, probably created to ask this question, so no one’s really getting hurt in this minor drama.) Most of my long and somewhat crabbish post is under the read more.

First, let me reply with the obvious, which is the Jessa rebuttal: “Isn’t it enough that Will gets to be Tessa’s first love and Jem only gets to be her second? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa had sex when they thought Jem was dead? Isn’t it enough that there’s a whole series about Will and Tessa’s kids but we only find out that Jem and Tessa had a kid in a short story? Isn’t enough that Jem and Tessa have spent half their relationship looking for a kid who’s related to Will, not either of them? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa got two biological kids they got to spend eighteen years raising and Jem and Tessa only get like two years with Kit? Jessa are the most popular, but half the stories in Ghosts of the Shadow Market happened while Will was still alive! And now Wessa fans are getting content every day and have two more books of Wessa being married and doing cute stuff to look forward to. Every day they’re getting a special edition of a book with a whole short story about their wedding. It feels like Jessa is dead.”

Not that I believe any of that either: I think both complaints are equally silly and selfish. But they are complaints rooted in the same logic, which is “My ship is the best and most popular, and every time I see something that in my mind supports the ship I hate I feel angry and diminished, and rather than perhaps examining those feelings I’d like to vent them on other fans and the creator.”

So. My feeling about this is: I am sad to see there is still some kind of a ship war here. As far as I am concerned...

the Wessa/Jessa ship war ended in 2012 when we found out Tessa loved both boys equally and would spend a lifetime with both of them. The end. Quibbling about irrelevant details like how many kids each couple has subsequently or examining closely the explicitness of their sex scenes seem bizarre and pointless. It has nothing to do with how books and stories are made, or how they work, or what functions they serve. At this point it’s like you decided your favorite football team could definitely beat another team, and you spend all your time obsessing about it even though they will never play against the other team because the other team is a hockey team.

When I see people say that “Wessa got” something or “Jessa got” something, it makes me cringe. It reduces stories that are about other things, often friendship, to being about a ship war I am not a part of. (Not every story or book in which a couple appears is a story about that ship. Sometimes they’re just grouting their shower or fighting a demon.) Wessa and Jessa are not dueling pop stars fighting over who gets to perform on the Tonight Show. In fact, they are not fighting at all, which is part of the underlying problem. People are used to love triangles where two guys are fighting over a girl and are jealous of each other. Will and Jem are not jealous of each other. They are not fighting over Tessa. To believe that it lessens Will and Tessa’s relationship that Jem is around and alive, or that it makes Jem and Tessa’s relationship better that Will is dead, is a fundamental misunderstanding of these characters and the story they are in. You are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it will cause you endless misery and frustration.

For instance, claiming that “every Wessa moment is spent with Jem.” Well, that’s ridiculous. Obviously, Will and Tessa spent an enormous amount of quality time alone together in TID. (Otherwise, you would have no investment in this relationship in the first place. There’s a reason you’re attached to it.) Jem did not attend their wedding. He is around in Chain of Gold mostly in his role as a Silent Brother: tending the sick, helping James, bringing news. He is not around during the scene where Will and Tessa make love, or when they kiss and cuddle in the drawing room, grossing out their kids. (I had to fight very very hard to retain even one scene of Will and Tessa alone: in a normal YA book, you would never see a sex scene between the parents, from their point of view.)

The problem is not that there is no “Wessa content” to “anticipate.” The majority of Wessa fans are happy to enjoy stuff like the wedding story or the Wessa moments in TLH. The problem is that the person asking this question will only accept a TLH book in which Jem isn’t mentioned at all as “Wessa content,” and since that would be a fundamental and appalling betrayal of the story and characters — something I would never write and never consider — they will forever feel they are not getting what they deserve.

Asker: if you think that it’s somehow better for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, that they “get” something that Will and Tessa don’t by having had something awful happen to them, then I do not even know how to begin to speak to you. What has always been meaningful to me about Will, Jem and Tessa is that they all loved each other equally. If that is not the case, then they are not people I am interested in writing about. If that being the case makes you not want to read about them, then you are free to stop — please do — but the story is not going to become something other than it is because you feel your ship is the “most popular.” (Which it is not in my experience, the ships are about equal, and I don’t know why it would matter if it was.)

In After the Bridge, which is not an explicit sex scene but rather a short story that contains sex (they exist!) Will is mentioned thirty-two times. Here’s an example:

“Jem swallowed, running his fingers up and down the blade. “He had only just died,” he said. She didn’t need to ask who he was. There was really only one He when it was the two of them speaking. “I was afraid. I saw what happened to the other Silent Brothers. I saw how they hardened over time, lost the people they had been. How as the people who loved them and who they loved died, they became less human. I was afraid that I would lose my ability to care. To know what this knife meant to Will and what Will meant to me.”

If you think Will isn’t present in Jem and Tessa’s relationship just because he’s dead, you’re wrong. He’s mentioned constantly. (And if someone thought that made it not Jessa content, I would have the same discussion with them: If Jem and Tessa didn’t care about Will, I wouldn't care about them.)

As long as there has been fandom, there have been ship wars. Social media has added a new dimension to that, which is what you’re doing here: the ability to run to the creator and complain, hoping they’ll side with you or give you what you want.

Here’s the problem: it’s really really toxic to have been involved in a clearly vicious ship battle for years. It will destroy utterly your ability to read or enjoy the canon you’re arguing about. I’ve been there, I’ve had friends be there. If you think it’s a point for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, if you went into Last Hours thinking Jem wouldn’t be in it, that is a sign of a profound detachment from the actual reality of the canon books. You are not interacting with what I am writing or the characters as they are. You are interacting with the fight you are having. That is why your discourse has spun so far off from the books it no longer resembles what is actually happening in them, and demands such extreme gestures to be appeased — like leaving Jem out of Lost Book when he’s actually from the city the characters are visiting, or cutting him from Last Hours even though it would be unrealistic, cruel, and a disappointment to the vast majority of readers.

Dismissing every single moment Will and Tessa have together in TLH because Jem is alive somewhere and it’s bothering you is a recipe for you to be miserable. Clearly you didn’t enjoy the Wessa wedding, or the Will and Tessa love scenes in Chain of Gold. Clearly you consider Jem and Tessa having children not to be a reason for happiness but rather bitter rage even though it is totally irrelevant to Will and Tessa’s past relationship. The only thing that would be satisfactory would be a rewrite of Clockwork Princess in which Jem was run over by a tank and Will and Tessa didn’t care and were happy and got married and we never had to hear about Jem again. But because that would require time travel and a rewrite of Will and Tessa as vile assholes, that is not a thing you are going to get. If you are determined to always be miserable about the reality of what this story is, than the only result of that is that you will always be miserable.

There is never going to be a winner of this love triangle. It isn’t that story. No amount of anything I do is ever going to change that: no short stories I write, or content I produce, or books or sex scenes or longform poems about either couple will change the fact that both Will and Jem ended up with Tessa and she loves them equally. If you want a “somebody wins” kind of love triangle, there are other books that will provide that for you. These will never be those books.

So why did you write this long screed, Cassie, the rest of you might be wondering, and fairly. Three reasons. One is that there are other questions that are carbon copies of this one (as in, written by the same person/small group of people) cluttering up my inbox, and I want to put a stop to the idea that this kind of thing is going to be acknowledged as a valid comment or complaint. It’s not. Second, we have all been driven bananas by quarantine and I am no exception. The third is that this is the last time I am going to address this kind of ship-fight-disguised-as-question. Any further demands for me to favor one Tessa ship over another will be responded to with a link to this post. In the end I’m hoping this will be a time saver once we’re all allowed outside again.

[marvelman901]

Doctor Strange vol 3 78 (1995) . The Sensual World . Written by David Quinn and Evan Skolnick Penciled by Marie Severin Inked by Peter Gross Colors by Heroic Age Studios Lettered by Pat Brosseau Edited by Marie Javins Cover by Mark Buckingham . Doctor Strange encountered a robotic species known as the Screed... . #MarvelComics #drstrange #doctorstrange #marieseverin #90s #screed #magic #strange #clea (på/i New York City, N.Y.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfS80PNqh0S/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dulce-base]

moodboard 52

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Naming Conventions

For certain fantasy creatures, I’ve found it helpful to establish patterns in the things I call them. Using a random name generator is fun, but it’s also nice to give clues or enrich the game setting sometimes. One example is that for goblins, I always give them a one syllable name unless they’re a respected individual, in which case they get two. Also, goblin men have names that end with a hard consonant (Screed is my fave paladin), women’s names end with an S or Z sound (Rix and Wobs, sisters and NPCs who are up to something) and names for non-binary or other goblins end with a vowel. Maybe the goblin language doesn’t have pronouns, just conjugations for all their words like that? I’m not sure but it’s interesting to consider.

Another example is my process for getting dragon names. I like to think about the role of the dragon in the world, or their history and goals, and use the Draconic Word Roots chart in the book Draconomicon to put together something that fits. This is useful because every dragon in my game has a title that gets more impressive with their accomplishments: Achuakurik, the Emerald Slaughter Thadarshvir, the Greed Below Iricosalur, the Eternal Voyager

[ggungabyfish]

screed: Word of the day for September 1, 2020

screed , v : (transitive, chiefly Northern England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, dated) To rend, to shred, to tear. (transitive, Scotland, also figurative, dated) To read or repeat from memory fluently or glibly; to reel off. (transitive, construction, masonry) To use a screed to produce a smooth, flat surface of concrete, plaster, or similar material; also (generally) to put down a layer of concrete, plaster, etc. (intransitive, Scotland) To become rent or torn. [...] (Northern Ireland, Scotland) (intransitive, chiefly humorous) To play bagpipes, a fiddle, or a pipe. (intransitive) To make a discordant or harsh scratching or tearing sound. (transitive, chiefly humorous, obsolete) To play (a sound or tune) on bagpipes, a fiddle, or a pipe.