Writing inspiration

Inspiration for stories, imaginings, and d&d

[worldscoolest]

Just received a very small batch of ‘Every Pill I Took: 2000 – 2001’ by Michael Lorenzini.

[chantssecrets]

John Singer Sargent - Study for Judgment, c. 1903

[kilosink]

A sea serpent?

In this climate?

Impossible!!!

(He’s on holiday and may have gotten a little lost)

[pmamtraveller]

[stilldreamingstillstuck]

fashion goals

[kittyoperas]

no rest for the wicked.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

oh! the space needle is a cute mascot base for seattle’s MLB team! i wonder how they managed to communicate that in a big foam costume?

oh

oh

[nothorses]

you do kind of have to actively shape how you feel a little bit. you can't just like, passively wait for the world to impress and inspire you. you have to choose to look for it & you have to choose to find it.

[batbetbitbotbut]

take your feelings out for regular exercise to build their strength and endurance

[crabussy]

small tips for Enjoying Being Alive from someone who went from wanting to die to genuinely loving life. these won't fix your life but they'll make it a lot easier to want to live day by day. I promise.

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

diet deficiencies can make you properly miserable. your physical health impacts your mental health more than you'd think. get some vitamins, some omega-3s and so on. whether from food or supplements. they can make quite a difference! your brain is responsible for a LOT of the way you feel, and giving it the fatty acids it needs to function at its best can go a long way.

[crabussy]

I know these all sound like stupid junk people who have never wanted to die tell you. I know they sound like dumb "self-help" tips written by people who have suffered mild anxiety at worst.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.

you truly don't have to follow any of this advice. but just read through. store it in the back of your mind. come back to it when you want. best of luck. [:

[nedzira]

These are genuinely great! If I can add a small comment it would be to try to change scenery every now and then, take a different route home and go for walks. And make appointments to meet your friends!

[crabussy]

ABSOLUTELY. anytime I feel myself descending into a slump where everything feels wrong and bad and gross and hard, I go on a Weird Walk. I choose a familiar destination (the dairy, the beach, a specific hill) and intentionally choose a route I've never tried before. it's crazy but it makes me feel better almost instantly, even if the new walk is worse than my usual route. your brain CRAVES new stimulation! you are a member of a species with one of the most active brains in the animal kingdom. please try not to live like a hamster.

[iyzlime]

alty & malik

[yesornopolls]

magnetar stars?

YES.

no thank you.

tl;dr (results)

Voting ended onJun 6

a magnetar is a type of neutron star that we still know very little about, except that they exist. Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of stars that are about ~8x the mass of our sun or more after they've gone supernova - they're so tightly condensed that if they collapsed any more they'd be a black hole. They can range in size from 10-20km (6-13mi) miles across, but despite being so small they still retain nearly 1.5x the mass of the Sun, so one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh like. One million tons on earth. Like, 900x the weight of the great pyramid of Giza or smth similarly nuts.

The gravity of these things alone is insane, but magnetars have another layer of weirdness to them that you can probably guess from the name - their magnetic fields are INSANELY powerful. Like. Remember, these things are roughly the size of Brooklyn, NY, but if you stuck a magnetar halfway between the earth and the moon - and you'd have to line the earth up about 30 times over to reach the moon btw, she's far away - the magnetic field would wipe every credit card on earth. If you were plopped down within as many as 600 miles (~966km) of a magnetar, the magnetic forces would be enough to immediately disintegrate every single atom in your body. (For context, that's about the length of the coastline of Great Britain from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the southernmost tip of England.) They also spin so fast they complete one full rotation about every two to ten seconds, which, believe it or not, is SLOW for a neutron star.

We know they exist because we've found about 30 of them total now, but we don't know much about how/why they form or how long they stay magnetars for because, well...we've only found about 30 of them so far. (By comparison we've found about a couple thousand other neutron stars.)

Anyways. Thanks if you actually read all that - I just remembered the other day that magnetars exist and I got excited. Neutron stars are fricken weird, man. Don't even get me started on the pulsars that spin 700+ times per second...

[hylltonart]

Finally finished painting this water nymph

timelapse + WIP images

[neon-ufo]

✦ Falin ✦

[annabelle--cane]

love when an absolute nightmare of a character is introduced and all you can think is "jesus christ buddy what the hell is your problem" and the narrative gives you a hot minute to stew before explaining Exactly what is Their Problem. and you just sorta sit back in your metaphorical rocking chair and think "huh. yeah okay fair. that would do this to a person, yes."

[apolladay]

do you consider ‘the weather’ to be (mainly) a topic of small talk?

yes

no

weather is bald / results

context: I’m from Oklahoma in the US (we get a LOT of wacky, wild weather) and, culturally, I’ve always thought of talking about the weather to be a genuine conversation topic and not just a silence filler or passing comment.

do you consider ‘the weather’ to be (mainly) a topic of small talk?

yes

no

weather is bald / results

Remaining time: 2 days 10 hours

context: I’m from Oklahoma in the US (we get a LOT of wacky, wild weather) and, culturally, I’ve always thought of talking about the weather to be a genuine conversation topic and not just a silence filler or passing comment.

[argumate]

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

[argumate]

fuck!

[fiyeli]

Girls in swamp

insta: _fiyeli

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[jayalaw]

What’s the solution then? Or if there’s no solution, should we make things even queerer and more diverse?