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@undeaddonkey
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.
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.
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.
Why do we always get angry men with repressed gay desires. What about angry women with repressed gay desires huh. We need more faith lehanes in this world 😌
rip king, truly nobody was doing it for weird sci-fi and fantasy obsessed nerds like you 💔
sleeping with a cat
in absolute tears about the pride module at my work
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...
Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).
happy first day of pride everyone
RUPERT GILES & BUFFY SUMMERS
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - 5x05
I really feel like Xena: Warrior Princess should be even bigger on here than it is. Like, there's a fantasy-action-adventure-comedy show based around Greek (and, increasingly, other) mythology, and the main character is a former warlord who's only just woken up to the error of her ways. Her name is Xena and her favourite things in the world are fighting, fishing, horses, and booze flamethrowers. And then she meets this woman Gabrielle, who is all the things that Xena isn't: sheltered, optimistic, excited about the concept of experiencing the world, and above all a deeply good person. And they start traveling together, so now Xena's favourite things are fighting, fishing, horses, booze flamethrowers, and Gabrielle, not in that order.
They go on adventures, encountering monsters and greek gods and people Xena knew ten years ago. And also sometimes pirates, vampires, and various incarnations of Jesus. In the meantime, Xena struggles with what it means to try and redeem herself after doing incredible harm, Gabrielle grapples with what place violence has in her life and her identity, and the two of them (at least, implicitly) fall in love. Also, the show experiments wildly with both form and content, doing things like a mockumentary episode, a modern timeline where Xena and Gabrielle are historical figures, and various musical episodes, bodyswaps, clip shows, and alternate timelines. The only thing that's always consistent is that Xena and Gabrielle are soulmates. It's goofy, awesome, and basically tailor-made for tumblr's userbase, and you should watch it if you haven't.
"Implicitly"
my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.
i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.
point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.
i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.
i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.
i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.
(i think i was...six?)
anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.
(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)
so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?
so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.
the compost pile was full of worms.
she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.
at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.
and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.
but because she loved me.
Very much this, fuck that shit
googling shit like "why do i feel bad after hanging out with my friends" and all of the answers are either "you need better friends" (i don't; my friends are wonderful) or "your social battery is drained, you need to rest and regain your energy levels" (i don't; i've got tons of energy, it's just manifesting as over-the-top neurotic mania). why is this even happening. it's like some stupid toll i have to pay as a punishment for enjoying myself too much
I actually, genuinely think social event aftercare would fix me. I need someone to put me to bed and say "you were fun today and no one hated you"
#theres a thing called 'larp drop' thats essentially this#esp since when having a great time you might be more inclined to disregard your limits and ignore discomfort#(and forget to eat/drink if its larp whoops)#and then once you have a moment to yourself it all comes crashing in#source: once forgot to eat at larp and had a sobbing fit in my car that ended the instant i bit into a chicken nugget - @queerfarmgremlin
this is also true of festivals, conventions, pride parades, concerts, and any situation where you have a lot of fun with other people!
A supervisor of mine was talking to me about this. They recalled how they'd given up certain activities because of the huge dopamine rush they would get, which led to really bad crashes afterward. When they explained it to me, I got blasted back immediately to all the random bouts of anxiousness and even guilt (because I didn't know what to call it at the time) I would come down with, usually after hitting streaks of things going really well for me and having a really great time. I said, "THAT'S WHAT THAT IS??" They told me when they discussed it with their therapist, the therapist called it a "dopamine crash" and says it's actually super common in people who have ADHD.
my pronouns are she/her bc I'll never be him (anthony head playing on his pink ds in full costume on the set of merlin)
RIP King
lie to me
A stalwart of British acting, with an incredibly varied talent, from the hilarious Hercules Shipwright in Cabin Pressure, to long suffering Giles in Buffy, even Frank N Furter in Rocky Horror on stage, Anthony Head, you shall be missed.
weird take about fiction: sometimes, actions that would be abusive in real life, hit different in a story. and sometimes i see people react very very strongly to those actions, and i totally get it, because like, that can be extremely triggering and ymmv on whether its handled well or not, but it always makes me a bit. hm.
like, i think the most obvious one is slapping/hitting. in real life, there is basically no situation where that is acceptable, unless you're actively defending yourself/someone else. but fiction is inherently larger than life, its about how it feels, subjectively, over what actually happens, literally. sometimes a character who has never before been violent will hit someone, and it's intended as like, an indicator of how fucked up everything is. that shit is going down. or, a character will trash a room, throwing things and destroying everything in their path. and then its never mentioned again, everything just continues as if they HADNT destroyed their own and other people's property in a frankly terrifying display, because it was just a cathartic moment to represent the storm of emotions the person was feeling. and when i see people like 'this character is an abuser, the story needs to address this,' i think maybe its actually okay for fictional characters to do shitty things and not have it framed as shitty, by the story itself or even on any sort of meta level, with the intended audience reaction. sometimes the point is just to resonate with your emotions, not to dissect the literal sequence of events.
like obviously ive been on the 'you can portray whatever you want in fiction, its all a pretend game' train forever. but i think the important thing to me here is that, you can also defend bad things in fiction. not just 'they did everything wrong and i love that,' but even 'they were 100% justified when they did [thing that would be extremely bad irl].' cause its like, ok, they did do that, but like it was the only way to tell the story well. dont worry about it.