Hype Person™

Crimetober 1-9

Because birds are criminals.

Crimetober 10-21

When will they be held accountable

Crimetober 22-31

Justice will never be served.

I think it's actually essential to children's moral development to be exposed to short stories moderately beyond their reading level where a bunch of fucked up shit happens and then instead of offering a moral lesson or any sort of emotional or narrative resolution it just ends.

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Actual answer: the sheep know the dogs are not sheep, and they also know the dog is protecting them and take their cues from the dog about whether they need to run for the barn or can just ignore anything scary that approaches.

However, a friend once had an extremely premature orphan lamb born in December who had to live in the house for a couple of months with leg braces and all that, who due to spending her lambhood with dogs instead of sheep came out of the whole experience convinced she was a livestock guardian dog! She would patrol the perimeter of the fields every evening with the actual dog, stand watch in the barn door at night like the dog, and was more than willing to throw down if she saw something scary coming towards the flock the way the guard dog did. Tragically orphaned lamb did a convincing job at being a guard dog without actually having any of the biological advantages a dog has over a sheep.

Which I suppose made her Sheep Batman.

The most annoying thing about making cities in the United States car-centric is that it also makes them miserable places to drive a car. You can’t make them car-friendly because they inevitably become actively hostile to cars. They are still car-centric, just unfriendly. Like dogfighting. That’s not friendly to the dogs but it’s pretty dog-centric. It’s also illegal. Something to consider.

bitework with my miniature american pitbull terrier

Kelly Link said she tells her students to list two things before they start writing:

- what are the books that would make you the happiest to be compared to

- what are the story elements that keep you reading even when the book straight up isn’t good

Because you’re aiming for the first one. But during the process you will be writing something that isn’t great, probably. So what elements would it need to keep you going even if it isn’t great.

I like that a lot. I was like I’m gonna make a list now. But in my head the list was just like

1) when there’s a character who is gavroche

2)

— Hitherby Dragons

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

the author reached out to ryan gosling about producing and starring in a movie adaptation BEFORE THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED?? sorry sir i don’t believe the name similarity is a coincidence i think you wrote this entire novel as an excuse to hang out with ryan gosling

hmm

Might I have one scoop of baby?

Also I latched onto the terms racialized/misogynized/etc with immediate gratification. Fuck yes let’s cut away the obfuscating layers of hegemonic thought in our language and construct new ways of thinking that will bring us closer to the center of things, so we can have a better handhold as we upwrench it. They are not what we ARE they are things that are DONE to us. YES. GOOD. What are we cutting closer to NEXT

if i ever interacted with you and it was awkward just know im sorry and painfully aware that sometimes i come off like a person who is having the first conversation of their life

Cultivate your ability to see the world through stoner eyes even while sober

if i was a different person with a different personality and a different life things would be kinda different i think

Source details and larger version.

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.

ok there’s been enough reblogs from enough people on enough various posts of mine that now i need to stand up for the bitches who don’t fuck of the world. people aren’t writing bad smut because of a lack of having sex. they are writing it because a lot of people have very poor visualization skills and forget halfway through what position characters are supposed to be in, or don’t understand what makes a word a good or bad choice, or can’t create compelling dynamics. i promise that even the sexually inactive, by virtue of also existing within the human form, would know that if you’re behind someone you can’t lick their nipple. and i promise that the frequently sexually active are equally prone to using the word “mewled.” i can pretty much guarantee that having a lot of sex and writing good sex scenes are unrelated. do you think your favorite horror authors are cutting people up in their basements. do you think your favorite food critics are michelin chefs. do you think the people blocking cool combat scenes in movies are routinely getting into cage fights. no they just understand how to utilize tone, pacing, momentum, and the tools of film direction, while keeping action tied to character. like believe it or not this is simply a skill like everything else. idk i always think that that point of view shows a lack of understanding of what makes a sex scene work. it removes the craft of it in a way i find short-sighted. i think people are confused about the reason teenagers are writing bad sex scenes. it’s not because they’re not fucking, it’s because they are young and haven’t had the years to hone their writing craft the way someone older has.

a wise and true post that reminded me of my favorite interview moment of all time