Inane Ramblings

Fandoms: Stargate SG-1, Sherlock, LOTR, X-Files, Star Wars, Narnia, Star Trek, Marching Band and anything else I find amusing.

[therandomwatcher]

It's me?

Hi!

[writing-prompt-s]

You were a god of textiles; respected, but generally considered a minor deity. But everything changed when mortals started regularly describing spacetime and reality as a 'fabric'.

[therandomwatcher]

Ooohhh....

[usernamessuk]

AO3 IS DOWN I REPEAT AO3 IS DOWN

[therandomwatcher]

"I'm going to eat a small burrito and then should we...to glory? (Play Valheim)," my husband asked.

"Yes."

(beat)

"To glory!"

We both give each other Growron eyes.

"You know it's true love when you give each other Gowron eyes," I tell him laughing.

He's laughing so hard he's on the floor behind the kitchen island. "All I'm picturing, right? Is 'lovey dovey eyes', 'bedroom eyes', and 'Gowron eyes'."

"Glory to you and your spouse!"

He raises a hand above the counter and flips me off.

[pusheen]

[vangoghcore]

by gsatkowiak

[therandomwatcher]

Snoqualmie Valley always delivers

[therandomwatcher]

Simpsons S23 Ep6 The Book Job aged like a fine wine.

[therandomwatcher]

I played Animal Crossing New Leaf for the first time in four years this evening. Oh my weeds!

[maxkirin]

So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.

It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?

I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.

((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))

Want more writerly content? Follow maxkirin.tumblr.com!

[writing-prompt-s]

Assassins

“Below are selected prices that are paid to professional assassins by criminal organizations and drug cartels for a contract hit.

In Australia, the median price to hire a hit man is $13,610 (9,800 Euros), with the price going up to $83,000 (60,000 Euros) based on the task.

In Mexico, the cost for a low level assassin is $208 (150 Euros), and up to $20,832 (15,000 Euros) for a higher profile target like a police chief.

The prices paid in Argentina are between $3,749 (2,700 Euros) to $5,555 (4,000 Euros) per hit.

Government statistics in Spain state that 40 assassinations take place each year, with prices for the hit ranging between $27 (20 Euros) to $69,000 (50,000 Euros).”

So cheap! I always thought things like this would cost more than $1 million…

[writer-wannabe-needs-inspiration]

This is super useful to know!

[writing-prompt-s]

and not just for writing!!

[ladybugseatppl]

@katherine-rose

[katherine-rose]

HOLY FUCK

HOW MANY HOURS HAVE I WASTED TRYING TO FIND HEROIN PRICES ON THE INTERNET WHAT A GREAT DATABASE

[midnight-spectrum-again]

I needed this

[rheevalka]

Actually useful. Sometimes incognito isn’t enough.

[tommyparkerr]

and suddenly my life just became much easier

[galaxy-of-stories]

I’ve heard of this before but the GIFs made it better 

[therandomwatcher]

Redd from Animal Crossing wrote this.

[therandomwatcher]

Gamer-corn!

[iblamethenubbins]

Shit Carter says

[maddieimhot]

KAWOOSH!

[therandomwatcher]

I can't remember which one the top middle one comes from or the middle left one... dang.

[mirkwoodest]

Obsessed with the fact that this really happened😳

[wan-shailu]

When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…

I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

– Diana Wynne Jones

[elodieunderglass]

I think about this a lot, often in the context of "the remarkable amount of resources that Tolkien was able to funnel into LotR" but often because I just really like Diana Wynne Jones

[alianoralacanta]

Then I wonder why this great mind could not have simply condensed his official material into a few weeks (Diane could probably have read them that fast) and spent the rest of term swearing Diane to secrecy and then spent the rest of term working on the book in lectures (”no peeking, and see me when you’ve written a page on why a confession works for setting a quest narrative in the Pardoner’s Tale”).

[autie-j]

[therandomwatcher]

I fully support people being able to curate their own online experience, and blocking anyone they feel they need to.

That being said, the occasional times I've gone to like/comment on Pinterest and can't because I've been blocked have always been a bit baffling. I don't get into debates on Pinterest and the majority of my interactions are positive types, sharing a joke, telling someone good job, or occasionally correcting misinformation in a dull sort of way.

It's extra baffling when I double check the users boards and it's a bunch of fairly benign and inane stuff like comics, funny tumbrl quotes, fandom, art, memes... The same stuff I tend to gravitate towards incidentally. Not exactly highly divisive stuff. (Side note: I don't get into ship wars).

I always wonder, did they misinterpret something I said? Easy enough to happen online and my brain damage post-Covid definitely doesn't help. But of course there's no chance to apologize or correct what I was trying to say.

I'm sure some of them are just plain disagreements. Which okay, sure, if you gotta protect your sanity you do what you gotta do.

Course that leads to the last thing which always makes me feel a bit sad. The number of times I've gone to tell someone they have a good point, or their joke made me laugh, or to offer encouragement about something.

They never get to see those either.

I dunno, I guess I just wish there was some kind of less nuclear option sometimes, or at least a way to tell what it was that set them off. Maybe I've got a turn of phrase that isn't taken the way I expect. Be nice to be able to have the option to change something if I need to.

But I'll never know.

[therandomwatcher]

"And as a veteran and former government employee of 11 years, I have learned to build a healthy dose of skepticism toward the government. But we know of these awful projects because of evidence, not suspicion, alone. It is one thing to be skeptical of figures in political or economic power. It is another to jump to wild conclusions prematurely." -Scully (X-Files deleted scene) Okay, no. This quote actually came from Sgt Scholar on Facebook earlier today regarding the conspiracy theories around the attempted assassination attempt of former President Trump on July 14, 2024. However, the line itself was so reminiscent of Scully that I had to post it here with an appropriate pic. Since the Facebook post this was pulled from will eventually fade into the background, and I don't have a good way to link to the actual post without the entire thing showing up here (and who the hell wants Facebook on Tumblr?) Here's a link to his original blog post some years back regarding The Appeal to Conspiracy Theory.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I get mail

I, a total stranger, was thinking of befriending your kid, but before I did, I thought I'd ask you, are they a boring, selfish jerk?

It's fine if they are, I'm just really trying to find quality people to be friends with, so I thought I'd ask you, is your kid a dick?

Wait, don't get offended! How are people supposed to know whether to hang out with your kid if you can't answer a simple question?!

I, a total stranger, was thinking of inviting myself over to your house for dinner.

But before I do, I wanted to ask, is your cooking insipid, greasy and terrible?

Honestly, it's not problem if it is, I'm just trying to focus on eating food that isn't shit.

Oh, come on, don't be so touchy! How is anyone supposed to know whether to eat the food you cook if you won't tell them whether it sucks?

[macwantspeace]

Never bring a knife to a gun fight.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[teainspace]

I don't think TVTropes makes people stupider. I DO think it puts easy-to-use descriptions in front of fools who then just warily search for such tropes as they go and decry any media in which they find them as unoriginal - after all, they've already seen these five tropes have been done before!

Novelty is something humans like, but A) the more and more volume of media humanity generates, the harder it is to find even increasingly specific sub-components of a narrative that haven't been written before at least once and everyone needs to accept that, and B) treating novelty as being a mark of quality rather than just that a sign that you've not personally encountered something before is foolish.

Beware - future media you enjoy will have aspects and takes and twists, tropes, that you've enjoyed before.

Rejoice - future media you enjoy will have aspects and takes and twists, tropes, that you've enjoyed before.

[kirkfanatic]

Ironically, there is a TV Tropes page specifically about this. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesAreTools

[theothin]

tvtropes: "here's some interesting story elements and ways to find others that share them!"

people who read tvtropes without understanding it: "ew, this story has elements in it!"

[whispy-witch]

TV Tropes can be a fascinating tool, because it discusses tropes bottom-up: here's a trope, here's stories that do that. You can see examples of that trope done well and done badly. Here's a brief history/context of that trope. It's something completely different from how I was taught to examine tropes at school or even during uni years, when you usually do it top-down: here's a story, what kind of tropes does it use?

Except that now, between this and Cinema Sins, people are starting to complain that stories have tropes in them, which is exactly like complaining that your paper is made of plant matter, or your coffee was made using coffee beans.

[neil-gaiman]

They also complain -- and I can say this as an Old Person -- about you as a writer using tropes on stories you wrote decades ago where you were the first person to tell that story and the first person to use that trope. If Tolkien was still alive they'd be writing to him huffily about every element of Lord of the Rings and explaining why it was No Longer Original.

[dduane]

(via @neil-gaiman)

[therandomwatcher]

"Oh I'm well aware there are elements pulled from other stories. You set the reader up with a 'moving forest' and then use a bunch of guys with branches, that lacks courage. Plot elements from the Volsung saga have been improved, flowing properly from one story element to another, and now actually reach the epic heights promised in the text. You're welcome." Tolkien, probably.

[cryptotheism]

I'm fascinated by how the formatting of different social media sites affect how text is read.

For instance, a line break on Tumblr indicates a new idea.

[cryptotheism]

But a reblog break indicates that time has passed.

[cryptotheism]

[neosatsuma]