contained in words, but not words.

Hi I'm Thought. Canadian, queer, agender (they/them), crying nine-to-five in the social services sector, probably under-caffeinated. If you'd like me to tag something please just let me know. my ao3 fic that is too short to post to ao3 lives on tumblr! Icon credit to the fabulous Stoppit-Keepout the poem

[badjokesbyjeff]

New York is the exact opposite of Minnesota. New York is where the Big Apple is and Minnesota is where Minneapolis

[mckenzie-t-canis-lupus]

JEFF WE TALKED ABOUT THIS.

[whaile]

late summer / early fall thoughts

[havingapoemwithyou]

from let July be July by Morgan Harper Nichols

[jakeperalta]

not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!

[bloodyhandprint]

sorry to anyone who followed me for anything. you're not getting that

[havingapoemwithyou]

On Wednesday They Came on the News by Robert Lynn Wood

[thesunnahthebetter]

they should normalize saying "I'm thinking of you fondly but don't have much to say and frankly I don't even really want to talk rn but you have appeared in my thoughts and it's nice"

[butchdogs-md]

you need to understand that i have two sets of headcanons. there's the set of realistic headcanons based on my genuine reading of the show, and then there's me playing pretend with my dolls.

[meatdiaz]

do you ever think about how sometimes it just... takes one random message? and suddenly you find yourself with a best friend or in constant conversation with someone who lives on the other side of the world but is just as much of a freak as you are or maybe you find yourself in love with someone without a last name but with so much kindness and affection in their words and presence. crazy how life and love and friendship just happen

[starlightxraven]

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

[appalachian-werewolf]

"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."

It fucking better.

[mrsjdavis]

Like to charge, reblog to cast?

[thought-42]

I just remembered The Flash 2014 is a show that exists and I am still disappointed that for all the Len/Barry 'hardened criminal with a soft spot and/or moral compass, a brilliant mind, and a wildly fucked up concept of family/affection/self worth seduces/is seduced by younger geeky middle class scientist with superpowers' fics out there nobody seemed all that interested in giving that treatment to Lisa/Cisco. Please... both Snart siblings deserve to cause ethical delemmas and be terrifyingly hot and be absolute fucking embarrassments about their crushes.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.

This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens.  Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression.  This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.”  Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives.  Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.

Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic.  On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead.  On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.”  If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene.  If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.

Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.

To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes.  They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb.  The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.

This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives.  If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy.  If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds.  A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention.  A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot.  If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.

A demonstration:

1

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.

2

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher.  “What?”

3

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher.  “What?”

4

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher.  “What?”

5

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.

See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes?  And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.

The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting.  If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue.  But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.

And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story.  So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.”  Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed.  That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns.  You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.

Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends.  They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic.  The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.

[porcupine-girl]

I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.

And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.

[adubioussoul]

We learned this in my comic mfa program as well. Comics are a showing over telling medium but sometimes you have to do a “talking heads” section where it is just characters talking at length and having your characters doing an activity makes the panels you draw more engaging. It gives you more options for framing things as well.

[thought-42]

Hate when my brain just decides it's time to feel bad and anxious and I can't make it stop. Hate that even when my manager says 'you didn't do anything wrong' it still feels like everything she says is a veiled criticism. Hate that I'm stuck on when she said offhand "the assignment was very late" when I literally have emails that show it was not. Hate being told that if I don't start using AI there will be consequences and that not using it makes my work look unprofessional and will make me fall behind in my career. Hate that I was up until 2:00 AM last night able to sleep because I couldn't format a word document correctly and it made my work look sloppy. Hate that I've been doing this job for seven and a half years and this year it feels like maybe everybody was just lying when they said I was good at it. Hate that everything is now about internal optics. Hate that my manager says all the time that nothing will come of any of our work and it's pointless but in the same breath basically says a typo or running out of water bottles at a meeting is career suicide and the worst thing that can happen to us. Hate that everything I feel good about my manager thinks turned out terribly. I feel fucking insane. I feel like everyone is suddenly opperating from a different set of rules that I don't know, and that my manager who is younger than me, has been in this position for less than a year, and was at my level before that, can make me feel like a lazy and stupid child, even when she is never unkind or mean. And how am I even supposed to apply for other jobs if actually it turns out nobody has trusted me to do the kind of work that I'm supposed to be doing at my level? I can't even format a fucking briefing note right because mainstream technology is getting more and more inaccessible and people care less and less about accessibility. Most of all I hate that I know from the outside this all is the most petty stupid office job bullshit and it absolutely does not matter in the real world and yet even when I try to distract myself I just have a non-descript pit in my stomach that I wouldn't even know how to address.

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[imkeepinit]

Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

[directactionforhope]

Feels like a good time to remind certain people that this is coming from Judith Butler, who is not just a leading feminist philosopher, but also THE COFOUNDER OF QUEER THEORY

The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.

The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.

Trans people belong here. We always have, and we always will.

[lukeishope]

I really miss the AOS gang so here are some silly goofy text posts of my best friends 🫶

[therealjambery]

Not platonic, not romantic, but a secret third thing (real fucking weird about each other).