My Favourite Musings

Queer, She/Her, DC fandom. On AO3 under TeleportationMagic.

[orteil42]

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

[taraxippos]

There is definitely a phenomena where people try SO hard to avoid anthropomorphism they end up looping around into this quasi-religious stance that humans have some essential non-biological quality that sets us apart from other animals. Like being so cautious about how you describe emotion experienced by a nonhuman animal that you go "that animal is not 'happy' it's just demonstrating a response to positive stimuli and receiving chemical reward signals" as if that's not also what human emotion is at the fundamental level.

[chimaerakitten]

Sometimes you can tell when a fandom has been starved for new input for too long because you can make an objectively mid text post like “hey guys, I like a scene in this show” and it gets 600 notes.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Hey! I haven't seen this question on the FAQs, but if you have answered it before and I haven't seen it, I apologize. I wanted to ask about your writing process: do you plan your stories before you publish them in great detail or just in general? Do you outline? I'm curious about how other people go about this.

Thank you for your time!

I consider it a viable story idea once I have: - the main themes and setting (doesn't have to be a detailed setting, surface details related to the premise and plot are enough)

- the narrator's personality and voice

- How the climax will go and what the ending will be (can be rough; I don't need to know specifically what characters will be there are the end, just what the overall mood and conclusion will be)

Usually, by the time I start writing (because writing is a very slow process), I have more than this, but these are the elements that I consider critical before starting. I do not need to know every side character and subplot. I do not need to know every detail of worldbuilding, so long as I know enough to carry the central themes so I won't write myself into a plot hole. I started TTOU knowing who Aspen was and with a vague idea of exploring a bit about Arboreans, the Public Universal Friends, and a prison colony. I knew the basic layout of the ship and the chronostasis system, and I knew in *very broad terms* what they would find at Hylara (I won't spoil it here in case people haven't read it, but I had like, one sentence of knowledge about the place). I knew essentially what the first and last chapters were going to be. Everything else, including building the non-Aspen characters, came after I started writing.

I don't outline a lot at the start of a story, but once I pass about the two thirds mark I make a list at the end of my openoffice document of what I still need to cover and the order the events will probably go in. This is to help stick the landing without missing anything important; sticking the landing is massively important. Because I start writing without a lot of detail, I can't outline at that level of detail until fairly late in the process. Until then I just keep in mind the plot beats I need to hit for whatever I'm writing, which is an ever-changing list through the first two thirds.

Although I start with a pretty vague idea, I do have one rule, which is to *never introduce something that I do not have an acceptable solution for*. This doesn't have to be the solution I go with (sometimes a better one develops later), but it usually is. Never ask a question until you have an answer for it; don't bank on the ability to come up with an answer later. Don't be afraid to switch to a better answer, if you do come up with one, but you should never put yourself in a position where you have to do that. Don't introduce a corpse until you know how they died. Don't introduce a character personality or position change until you know what prompted the change. Don't introduce a conspiracy until you have a passable motivation for it and believable actions for the conspirators. When Aspen wakes up alone, I have a reason why the crew is dead. When Aspen can't get through a locked ring, I have a reason why the ring is locked. So while I do consider a story viable fairly early in the process, I do start having to answer more detailed questions very early on.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#this might be some of the best writing advice I've ever seen out there#or at least a system that i think matches up with my preferences#bc both outlining and discovery writing get me stuck but at different points and these tips seem like a solid middle ground#like discovery writing with guard rails

If it's helpful to you, I find it more useful to frame outlining vs. discovery writing not as strategies but as expressions of different skillsets, that I call inductive vs deductive plotting, and that I explain here.

[calliopeprelude]

can’t stop thinking about this

[nookisms]

Person in my gas station talking to someone on the phone: ...We're in Ohio...

Me, knowing we're in Utah: ????

[nookisms]

[paddysnuffles]

Thank you for the map for context. It makes this 1,000 times funnier and intriguing.

[notaplaceofhonour]

sometimes Ohio is a state of mind

[skellyjingles]

dumb comic that i took too long to finish so it's not really all that funny anymore

[sorascribbless]

My guy busted that door down like they lived together my god

[jburneko]

I’m not going to reblog the source because I don’t want to bring negative attention to someone but I just read that “the most important skill of a GM is pretending what happens is what you were planning all along.”

Absolutely not. This pressure to “be in control”, “‘maintain the illusion” and “be a magician” style advice is precisely why people are terrified to GM.

You have one job as a GM at the table. ONE. Play your NPCs and other situation elements with the same earnestness as the players play their PCs. That’s it.

The “plot” is what happens when your toys and their toys meet and uncertainties between them are resolved via the game at hand.

You are not responsible for anyone’s fun.

You are not responsible for anyone’s entertainment.

You are not there to stroke the players egos or service their fantasies or “story beats” or whatever self-insert wish fulfillment BS they have projected onto their characters.

Stop making GMing harder than it needs to be. Just play the damn game.

[agentnoun]

Also, purely anecdotally, my players really get a kick out of it if they can tell I didn't expect something. That's a bonus for them (and, frankly, the unexpected is a bonus for me, too).

[fairycosmos]

fucked that you can’t fix other people especially when you really care about them. Oh so im just supposed to be there for you while you suffer. like a useless cunt gargoyle

[ladyloveandjustice]

It's funny how they rolled every misogynist stereotype about a woman who gets pregnant but doesn't want to be a mother/ "a bad mother" into Sheila Haywood- the not-so-subtle implication she did a botched abortion on a teenager and it killed them and the Joker blackmailing her about it is SO comically on the nose, do you guys see, she does ABORTIONS, she hates BABIES, she's EVIL, worst mom EVER, how dare she give a pregnant teenage girl who was probably desperate not to have her life ruined a way out... (you gotta wonder why Sheila didn't just didn't get an abortion herself if that's the case but whatever),... she's meant to be a career woman, she's embezzling from the needy, not immediately having a motherly bond with a kid you gave up the second he shows up is then conflated with being willing to sell out your kid to a murderer and stand by as he's beaten to death...she smokes...(yes the ultimate arson murder and jaywalking but bad moms in media tend to smoke, it's "unfeminine" and also second hand smoke ig)

but there is still something so compelling about the whole thing, mostly how Jason refuses to hold any of it against her and how she recognizes what a truly good kid he is with her last words (when meanwhile his family largely proceeds to do the opposite in the years following his death).

Her regret is way too little too late, but could she have become a better person if she lived? Would it have been a genuine turnaround or would she have gone back to her old ways?

Older fanfic I notice just tends to dismiss that Jason forgave her--or rather didn't even seem to be mad-- probably because fans themselves are mad at her, which I get, she sucks, what she did WAS unforgiveable (but Jason forgave it anyway!)-- but I've been seeing more meta talking about it, and I'm glad we're looking at it on a more objective level now, because there's interesting stuff there.

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

settlers are always so enthusiastic about ''foraging'' and then you'll start talking to them about indigenous horticulture & sustainable harvesting practices and they quickly reveal that they're more interested in the aesthetic of being a Crunchy Woodland Creature than like reducing their reliance on exploitative industrial agriculture or rebuilding their local foodshed

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

This is not true and it is in fact neither very simple nor very plain to forage sustainably. This kind of flippant "it's such an easy hobby" attitude when it comes to harvesting is exactly *why* there are so many problems with once-abundant traditional foods being depleted. Every plant is different, has different needs, and can support a different intensity of gathering. Foraging isn't just some fun hobby, and shouldn't be treated like one. It is a method of intentionally working land to gather resources meant to sustain oneself, whether those resources be food, medicine, or something else. It requires conscious maintenance of the land you are working, and active monitoring of not just your own gathering, but the gathering of your entire community. It requires experiential, often generational knowledge. You cannot boil a resource-gathering operation down to a simple truism and expect others to be able to do it respectfully and sustainably.

[sailermoon]

this is how new yorkers @ mamdani

[sailermoon]

[gotinterest]

Gonna be honest a lot of people deep down view cheating as worse than abuse which is why so many people view downright controlling and manipulative behavior in a relationship as 100% permissible so long as that behavior is centered around either preventing or discovering cheating.

[ashoss]

#BringBackNuancedDavidCain2k26

[prokopetz]

The funniest thing in super comics is not, in fact, when an outgoing writer on a title decides to break their toys by killing off the lead, and the next writer has to figure out how to bring them back.

The actual funniest thing in superhero comics is when a new writer decides to kill off the lead's entire supporting cast because they wanted to "go in a different direction", and the writer after that has to resurrect like half a dozen random people because that new direction sucked.

[akikarts]

Good intentions don't always end in good outcomes.....

[katanahime]

By the way, the questions of "Who is the biggest Tim glazer, Bruce or Dick?" and "Who is the biggest Dick glazer, Bruce or Tim?" are both rather close, like we are talking President and Vice President of the respective fanclubs.

But the question of who is the biggest Bruce glazer is Dick. And it's not close. Not remotely. He's the biggest Bruce glazer alive. And Tim doesn't even really glaze Bruce. But Tim is conversely the biggest Bruce excuser, which is like the opposite while maintaining positive feelings. So basically if Bruce actually fucks up, Tim ends up like "well what did you expect?" and Dick is like "BETTER OF HIM" which is why Dick is the one that gets angry.