imma be level with you, the way fandom talks about “angst” reeks of the contentification of media. reducing a rich panoply of emotional dynamics down to one ‘feels bad man’ label :/

“here’s some <character> angst.” “gimme <ship> angst.”

let me out of here

• don’t even get me started about whump
• not a vague post btw
• this has been on my mind for a while

i’ve really got to get back to working on corrupt combustion. if yall thought the sandbox executions we’ve seen so far are cool, wait till you see ⸢Collector of the Ineffable and Forgotten⸥

or the Nori‍-​Yeva sandbox fusion. aka i win forever

• heartbreaking: this makes it just like rain world
• but i have played rain world
• just not enough of it

there’s this one song where for years i had a corrupted mp3 of it and even years later, every time i get to the once‍-​corrupted section, i expect that muted, distorted skip back into the chorus. it’s lasered into my understanding of the song

purrple‍-​bat asked:

Part of me think the company wouldn’t pay for Microsoft 365 so J would have to pay out of her own ‘money’ to get it.

And I could see Uzi being able to find a way to get all the functionalities for free without issues and getting it to J as a gift (or as a bargaining chip). Avatar

Anonymous asked:

YOU (Insert that one image of the cat here)

I NEED A PART 2 / AFTERCARE / SOMETHING FOR ARTIFICIAL INSTINCTS IM GOING CRAZYYYY IM FOAMING AT THE MOUTHHH

(SLASH POS SLASH NF IM NOT TRYING TO BE RUDE I SWEAR JUST GOING A LITTLE INSANE AFTER READING IT)

not me coming up with a couple of DD OCs for J’s squad to kill and getting super invested and attached to them already

oh no. oh nooo.

was briefly struck by the thought of cynessa looking down on j, seeing how pathetic she looks, realizing she could do anything to j‍ ‍‍—‍ she has nothing else left‍ ‍‍—‍ and finding endless amusement in that desperation, that reversal of position

• i cant ship this
• begone demons
• BEGONE

Flesha is a lot like Sukuna in that i lost all respect for them once they lost. they’re just annoying to me now. their appeal was their menace, their unstoppable presence. but they got clowned on in the end. like get out of here little bitch lol

a thread ranting about character.ai and telling them to roleplay instead

not to defend c.ai (llm slop has never interested me), but this kind of misunderstands what c.ai is. it’s a toy. the use case, the appeal, is that you can type whatever you want into it, it’s unfiltered fucking around

this is not what roleplay is. when you rp with someone, it’s a social interaction. you need to be mindful of their boundaries and interests, you need to care and think

telling people to stop using c.ai and roleplay is like seeing someone shooting up random civilians in GTA and saying “go outside”. going outside is good! but um. they should be going outside for different reasons, i think?

c.ai is something there isn’t really an equivalent to. it’s consequence‍-​free, there’s no timezone constraints or interruptions or waiting for someone to think and compose.

and it’s awful. it’s fast food content, and i can see how it’d be almost addictive. worse than fast food, it doesn’t have a business model that’ll last decades.

don’t talk to someone’s unethically trained, loss leader llm‍ ‍‍—‍ not least of all because you shouldn’t get used to something that won’t stick around

TADC is finally good

three episode rule is written into the fabric of the universe, huh

writing more of that thing nobody asked for from two weeks back

(it’s dragon yuri(?? maybe). and im realizing to my great chagrin it also probably counts as found family)

sorry but if i dont write about Lyn and Piscez soon im gonna nighttime radio broadcast

mutual returns right after i finish scrolling the past eight hours of posts. i pass the baton

realizing this self care shit’s p difficult when your reaction to noticing you feel bad and could probably do something about it is “eh who gives a shit if i feel bad or not. we move” tho we aint movin lmao

• too tired to tag headmates
• probably val maybe haven

watching line get appended to a log file. reading the electricity flowing back and forth down wires to servos not in use. listening to your robot’s heartbeat

every time i crack open the internals of my site i feel like i’m stepping into inverted containment to witness the horrors that always surrounded me. i aint cut out for this async research shit

• there is no antimemetics division
• you’re only as good at antimemetics on your first day as you ever are
• and chat i would be COOKED

i love because i’m a hater who hates acting like a hater

i spent all day adding a feature to my site nobody will notice 🥳

anyway hi what did i miss

ladydaybreaker posted:

AYYYYYY WE DID IT! PINGS ARE CANONIZED IN AO3 TAG SORTING!!

• i may be stupid but what does this tag entail (curious)

it’s a shared headcanon. banyanas is Nosferatank, and you can see subtle glimpses of it in action in their fics like Fourth Law or the new one, Sense of Home.

but the chief vector for the spread of the idea has been through authors chatting with each other‍ ‍‍—‍ notable early uses of this being the OP of this thread, LadyDaybreaker, as well as her close associates like SilverTails, TheCaretaker, and doodlingNutjob

the core premise with Pings is a semi‍-​bestial interpretation of disassembly and solver drones‍ ‍‍—‍ the “pings” it endows them with are essentially animal calls used to communicate when hunting

unfortunately, probably the best use of‍ ‍‍—‍ and clearest introduction to to‍ ‍‍—‍ the concept is in the fic sileNce, where it’s not just a part of the fic, but serves to profound underscore its themes and impact.

(i say unfortunate in this case, because that fic relies in an especially abusive interpretation of J and N’s relationship‍ ‍‍—‍ the sort of characterization that gets dozens of people unanimously cheering for her death in the comment section. suffice it to say, i’d recommend the fic to many, but probably not to you)

if you want to see it in action, here’s some random excerpts below the cut

Through the Looking Glass (SilverTails):

Sorry! Hurts. Sorry! Friend! Here! B warbled as he shrank into his shoulders and hugged himself, listening to his noise quietly bouncing along the walls around him as his optics tracked the nearest trail of oil down one of the hallways and got him to start following it.

There was no whistle or call in reply from D.

sileNce (doodlingNutjob):

It was just in [N’s] nature to fill the silence with joyful noise! It made being out here a lot more pleasant. When he was alone and between hunts he really liked to warble and chirp to the sky, calling to squadmates he couldn’t see.

Hello! Where are you? Friends! I found food!

Often, he would be met with no response…or when he did get a response, he would be hit with a hiss or a growl or a squawk that said Quiet or Bring it here or Go away.

Retrospect (TheCaretaker):

[N] could probably think of something to do tomorrow, whenever that was. Then his intake jackknifed and rammed a needle through his core.

Pain! he keened, hands flying to his abdomen. Hungry! Hurt! Empty!

His vocal synthesizer strained under the weight of infrasound vocalization, pinging to a broken squad that wasn’t present in the spire.

What Friends are For (LadyDaybreaker):

“…Hurt me?” she whispered, “What…you…why?” 

Scared…scared hurts pain! Warbled unbidden from her as she took another step back, holding her hands up around her core to protect it. She needed to get out of here. She needed to run. Needed to flee. If she stayed she die…

“Uzi…no! Nononono!” N pleaded, “It’s nothing! It’s going to be ok! Promise!” Safe! Here! Safe! He tried to sooth her, reaching for her again.

Scared! Scared! Scared! THREAT! THREAT! THREAT! Her hand came up again and golden sparks flared from her fingers as they twisted into an unfamiliar configuration…one she had no memory of consciously making.

[Null]

and of course, here’s two from the originator themself, both Fourth Law (Nosferatank):

V, who had been uncharacteristically quiet thus far, was the final trigger. Her infrasound‍-​dipped ping called the rest of the squad’s attention to threat‍-​threat‍-​threat like a metronome. Weak threats, but they were outnumbered, with a downed and fear‍-​flightless squadmate‍-​

Just as Tessa guessed, there was a mantis‍-​poised figure planted at the front door, tall enough that she had to bend down to use the intercom connected to the front door. Familiar white pigtails almost glowed with the reflected yellow hue of her rapidly‍-​flicking stinger, but after everything that happened, N still couldn’t be sure that really was J…

Without thought, N parted his fangs and pinged at her‍-​ a ‘who?’, ‘where?’, and ‘here’, all in one subaudible vocalization, just like when he was calling for Tessa in the ballroom.

which sort of illustrates what i mean when i said they’re the most subtle with it. there, it’s always semi‍-​described or alluded to; i’m not sure i’ve ever seen them quote pings like dialogue, the way everyone else does

and if you check the tag, you’ll find that i’ve tagged Hostile Takeover with it as well. it’s a consequence of the changes that happened during the rewrite. i don’t consider my work to be a true instance of the concept‍ ‍‍—‍ while i take undeniable influence from it, it’s more of a reaction to or reconstruction of the concept than a faithful execution of it.

i don’t find the headcanon fits with the way i approach disassembly drones‍ ‍‍—‍ i don’t buy sound as a reasonable medium for propagating these signals, and i think animal psychology evoked through means of a limited vocabulary requires special care to be made compelling. i don’t think there’s any escaping that to me, disassembly drones are robots first, where others find it more appealing to focus on their predatory traits

so in Hostile Takeover, disassembly drones instinctively communicate via radio signals

«Yo,» V broadcast over shortwave, «are we flying in circles or do you actually know where we’re going?»

V liked to keep it casual over shortwave. Conversational. This body wanted every note to be growled or screeched like animal calls. J wanted it to be a protocol, all terse information‍‍-​​packets.

But it was all the same wiggles as sound in air. Nothing special about it.

«Sorry! Prey soon? Promise.» Except when N said it, it wasn’t animalistic or efficient. Just… simple. Like the transmissions let him bare intent without anything getting in the way. «I know it’s around here… somewhere.»

«‘It’ being…»

There was a thoughtful, acknowledgement‍‍-​​rumble in response, N chewing on how to explain. «J talked about factories, right? Saying prey was… multiplying? It reminded me of something I saw on patrol. If we took one of them down, I think she’d like that.» Then, with it all laid out, N finally found a concise transmission. «Target: nest!» He laughed.

but when there’s lines like

A roar of jamming shortwave static purred from their transceivers, an instinct‍‍-​​refrain of «Prey spotted! Let’s hunt! Devour them!»

i think all the attempts to distinguish it melt away‍ ‍‍—‍ if someone wants more Ping Communication, i don’t think they’re going to crack open HT and be disappointed my take on it is a little different.

especially not when i’m doing shit like what you see in chapter 3[3: [Error 36:48.58/Connection Lost]]

WAIT

i’d prolly look unhinged rereblogging this to go off on a tangent but when i tagged a mutual’s post about HDG there was something i knew i forgot

my biggest complaint about the setting by far is that if it keeps getting more popular and if i ever get around to writing Aurora Moonrise or anything else in the cometverse, people are gonna think nature spirits are affini expies. fuck my baka life

the fact that i have to remember to delete the 1GB+ of tumblr site data every few weeks is one of the most unhinged parts of this site by far. frontend webdevs created a fucking digital lint trap. why.

sometimes a merely okay post crosses your dash a few times and each time you proudly refuse to like it and you get to feel like a discerning tastemaker. haha, this post was not a hit with the me audience‍ ‍‍—‍ what a blunder

werecoyotl asked:

• what are some of your favorites ?? #Id love to hearr

…having the question turned back around makes me realize how difficult it is.

Mechina gets top billing, i think. i don’t think i’m allowed to listen a band’s ten album (main) discography innumerable times for years till i know it by and heart and not call them my favorite. i think there was a period back in i believe 2020 when i listened to nothing but Mechina and podcasts. i think “When Virtue Meets Steel” might be literally be responsible for getting me to start imitating harsh vocals

and if i’m going by the standard of “regularly binge their entire discography”, i think Krallice of all things has shot up to the next spot. it’s hard to explain, their music is complex and doesnt click with a lot of people (i was quite familiar with them for almost a decade without considering them more than a curiosity), but inexplicably, something changed the past month that made their music sound amazingly cathartic to me, and it’s now one of my favorites to put on while writing.

(as much as i care for instrumentation over lyrics, when it comes to my favorites lyrics play a huge role‍ ‍‍—‍ Krallice is unique, then, for getting to this spot purely on the strength of their composition. i have no idea what the guy is screaming about) and the last spot… would probably have to be Gojira, just because From Mars to Sirius is flat out my favorite album of all time, and i love The Way of All Flesh so much that the current arc of my Murder Drones fanfic has been stealing chapter titles from the song list.

(if i can cheat and name honorable mentions, it’d go to Alkaloid (first metal band i ever listened to, still love em), Cattle Decapitation (Death Atlas is my other all‍-​time fav), and Schammasch (big aesthetic touchstone for Black Nerve))

sorry for the yap >.>

Gnostic Last Thursdayism: we live in a false world crafted by the demiurge, but they were a bit late to the party so for most of human history we actually did get to experience mystic divinity. you’re born too late for that now tho

Apocalyptic Pre‍-​gnostism: we haven’t actually even experienced the horrors of the false material world but the demiurge is working on it. soon™

Gnostic Accelerationism: we should help the demiurge craft the false world to create the conditions for humanity’s greater enlightenment

• this post is actually about black nerve

sapphofinch posted

does anyone else have like. a writing Enemy that they just hate doing. mine is room descriptions

• btw sorry for all the notif spam and blog stalking i was looking for the link to “i want you to be here” to reblog

entitiy‍-​r replied:

Technically Uzi has both Cyn & Doll in her after episode 8 (once again you predicted the future) so there’s that maybe?

hot take tbh, but my feelings on this have only gotten clearer as the dust has settled: i aggressively don’t care for this headcanon

i dont actually think slapping three people in the same head makes for a compelling plural character. there’s no intimacy, no kindred origin, no chemistry.

cyn nor doll have an interesting relationship with uzi established on screen, they might as well be strangers. why should i care about them sharing a head? they don’t even not get along in an entertaining way.

(who is doll, now that her attempts at vengeance and salvation have failed? who is cyn, now that her plans to control and consume are utterly thwarted? i dont think there are characters left, just aesthetic tendencies)

either way, they don’t share an identity, and i can’t really relate to that

whenever i see a fic tagged “plural uzi doorman” i get so excited, and then the tags clarify that it’s just cyn and doll in her head and i’m left so disappointed.

i’ve really got to publish An Opaque Heart

working on a setting for five years will drive you crazy. i’ll pull up black nerve docs from 2022 and i’m there confidently whipping out just‍-​made‍-​up terminology and even i dont know what it means. the hell is an umbracog’s “antumbra”? the need for a glossary is DIRE at this point dude

they say tumblr is a fate‍-​driven website but you can master the art of manipulating the strands of fate (asking your mutuals if they remember a post.)

• n is in The Device

entitiy‍-​4 asked:

I was reading Artificial Instincts again (bc of course I am it’s gonna sit in my tab bar for weeks) and my brain went “Uzi would probably enjoy doing something like what happens in Goth Girl Anime Lover and Wholesome Killer Boy with J, wouldn’t she” Avatar

unexpected way to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning: don’t have tumblr on my phone, schedule a post to go up tomorrow, forget about it, wake up needing to unschedule it

• the hard part is remembering this when you get to the computer

i swear every day this week it’s been “alright the burnout’s done, we can get back to work now”

and then i blink and i’m just

AU where Uzi eats J’s core singularity in episode two and they have to share a head for the rest of the show

or maybe Uzi doesn’t even realize anything’s different till she loses control in episode four

pigtails tail

• stealing purrple‍-​bat’s idea

you’ve seen authors bemoaning how often people hide discussions of their fics in private discords where they can’t see, but this might take the cake for how odd it is

a while back someone got caught up on my fic, and we got to talk about other fics, i mentioned one that inspired me, they mentioned some that i’d already read. but point is, they wanted to know what my favorites were

so i named a few of course, and leave it at that

a few weeks later, they come back and tell me how much they liked those fics

which, great! glad they liked em!

but i got curious what their full thoughts were so i checked the comment section on those other fics, and‍ ‍‍—‍ nothing! no new comments!

“i have to personally thank you,” they say‍ ‍‍—‍ really? i’m the one you should be thanking?

better to remain on hiatus and be thought to have peaked than to finally update and remove all doubt

another feature of all time in this webbed site is that the animation of a heart ascending when you click like must be achieved by animating the element itself‍ ‍‍—‍ this means if you click the animation, you interact with the heart again.

because the like button is positioned below the three dot menu, this mean a workflow where you like post then go to copy the link introduces a failure state where you instead unlike the post in the process!

web design!

there’s something that breaks deep in your spirit when you realize quietly accepting minor bullshit gets you better results than trying to correct or communicate anything

honestly oneshots are so ass. you have to name them? fuck off

never understood people who complain about naming fics but it’s so much easier with longfics. this is purgatory

today on “hold on wait, what the fuck is black nerve”, i forgot that i took the hyperauthoritarian half‍-​bat god‍-​empress of mantiskind and gave her a a failgirl side hoe so down bad she created a whole fashy proto‍-​nationalist revivalist movement to worship her mistress

(her plan involved ovipositing a brood of half‍-​mantis half‍-​spider children with the messiah‍-​priestess leading the species‍-​wide spider cult the through the power of interspecies monster yuri. it was an effective plan.)

anyway this lead to numerous genocides so uh. we do not stan unfortunately

• past self what the FUCK were you cooking with this

the tricolon needs to be studied. no, not studied, put that thing on a surgery bed and vivisect it. what is it about that exact number‍ ‍‍—‍ to what to we owe the unreasonable effectiveness of listing off three things in row. why does it turn every sentence magical. it hits harder than a drug.

The beautiful thing about dialogue, I think, is that every character is a story, a great conflict churning beneath their façade; and yet from those untold depths only a few words can emerge, like jets of steam venting from a geyser under great pressure‍ ‍‍—‍ their words are selected by some intention, which doubly endows them with meaning, a specular highlight of eyes that shine from out an inner star.

diamantis gf who marks you with her mantibles, drawing blood and running keenly‍-​tasting palps along it like paint‍-​brushes upon her own canvas. she pins you, raptorial forelegs gripping you, vice‍-​spines piercing you like a prey item. stridulating palps rasp out orders and insinuations and you’re eager to accept.
you can tell by the shadows in her eyes when she’s in a hunting mood or a dancing mood. sometimes she flares out her wing’s eyespots and fluffs her antennae‍-​setae when she just wants to display dominance, but sometimes her feelers curl into tight balls and she lunges, staring you down like you’re nothing but an object or game to her.
and you swoon and submit, and that recognition is what she hunts. she runs a raptorial through your hair like a comb, and protects you like treasure.

chorus roach gf who squeaks and hisses whenever she sees you, bouncing on those little spiked legs. she wears dresses cut to show off the colorful patterns on her chitin, and they flutters when she scurries toward you, rubbing her head against your leg like a cat, antennae as long as her body curling and caressing, smell‍-​touching all of you.
she cooks you four meals a day, even if she ends up eating most of them. the weight goes to her abdomen and hindlegs, thick and round beneath her soft exoskeleton. she lays on you a lot when you sit down, and weighs enough that it’s hard to get up. but why would you disturb her? you can see how the pigment drains from her eyes, even her ever‍-​twitching antennae relaxing.
she doesn’t purr, she sings, the air whistling through her spiracles, as her abdomen rises and falls. she loves to sing‍ ‍‍—‍ on your anniversary, she surprised you with a song composed just for the two of you. it was a duet and she bounced so excitedly when you gave your parts a try, as embarrassed as you were of your efforts.

euvespid wf who tried to kill you, running zer stinger like a knife into your flesh, the venom pouring in a river of barbs until a nausea‍-​headache whited your vision moments later, blanking your thoughts. the wound never heals, and the black venom discolors your flesh and still aches of zer.
it’s not the last time ze tries to kill you, though there’s something off about the attempts. ze carefully sets traps that misfire and leave barely able to escape‍ ‍‍—‍ and you find messages written upon zer own chewed paper, zer heartful letter triumphant monologue relishing your defeat. ze duels you, and is always eager to grab and grapple you‍ ‍‍—‍ a nuzzle if ze wasn’t snarling, a hug if ze wasn’t so forceful.
ze’s always watching you, stalking you like prey, because the sting that never heals still has zer venom. ze still feels it, feels you, always‍ ‍‍—‍ like the one that got away. that’s why she never lets go.
when ze signs the paperwork to officially court you, ze loudly clarifies that ze’s only doing this for the sake of zer queen, to study and exploit you for the good of the hive.
(you find folded papers left in zer study, hastily hidden‍ ‍‍—‍ portraits of you drawn in zer own venom‍-​ink)

therid gf who crafts tight bonds of silk to suspend you in her web, every limb restrained, the soft rope cradling and comforting you. she likes to chew up her prey, and then kiss you, pedipalps rubbing your cheeks as she feeds you a meal digested with her own enzymes. it flows smoothly into you and tastes like her.
she can’t hear you, if you say anything. she doesn’t need a gag, though you might like one anyway. she only feels the vibrations on her web as you wiggle and tremble. with eight legs to hold you, she’s attentive to everything your body is saying, and she gives you everything you ask for.
she draws new webs as you hang there, sometimes contorting your body, sometimes framing it with beautiful woven patterns. she likes to twist around her massive abdomen, the rear end pressing against you as her spinnerets work, depositing sticky new silk directly against your flesh.
when you walk through her colony the next day, you see other skeinlings waving at you with grin‍-​curled pedipalps, and a few gesture congratulations or envy. that’s how you find out that your therid gf wrote about everything the two of you did, weaving it into the public web.

everyone’s all like “make your own personal website” but they don’t tell you that web design brain will have friends link you an article on someone’s personal site then you spend fifteen minutes stealing their css instead of reading the article

you know, reading a story whose protagonist is autistic with very little social awareness is expectedly painful‍ ‍‍—‍ there are passages borderline unreadable from social anxiety, where it takes me minutes to endure sentences

but, as someone who couldn’t mask harder if i didn’t have a face, there’s something weirdly satisfying about watching a character just scream at people when the inconsiderate overstimulation and social bullshit gets to be too much

i think it would be comfy to go lie down in bed rn but it’s so close to bed time that i may as well brush my stuff and shut everything down and suddenly the prospect of lying down that way seems a lot less comfy

the problem with getting good at programming is you lose the ability to look at a hard problem go “well how hard could it be lol?” and get right to work. but that’s one of the strongest tools u have

i raged the gods above for their silence and cruelty, and i took up my sword with shouted cries of defiance and revolution. every prayer a failure, every temple a slaughterhouse of dignity! let us storm through heavens’ gates and place tender hearts and tearful eyes upon that highest mantle of the world‍ ‍‍—‍ for love! for justice! and my legs grew weary with each step i climbed nearer the firmament, and a lonely chill gripped my soul. i look down below, and i see no rally nor great cheer; precious few dare share nor endorse my ambition. this endeavor taxes my body till each action must be selected with miserly efficiency, and the coldness feels foreign no longer. when i draw upon the last reserve of my strength to cast down the doors of the great hall, i gaze now upon a mirror, and that wearied visage does not even have the courtesy to look surprised nor enlightened at this my fate: for the defiant mortal heart, only enantiodromia

i sit upon my throne with all the weathered benevolence of stone

you ever think about the existence of wikis. so much information about so much media existing for no reason other than the power of autism and general fixation.

i wonder how far we are from a world where it’s not something you could take for granted‍ ‍‍—‍ how lucky did we get?

you can’t post for the audience you want. you have to post for the audience you have so hard you buffer overflow into success

we posters have to believe there’s an afterlife for flop posts. even the posts only a mutual could like must get a warrior’s burial

“how much mana does this spell require to cast” if you have to ask you can’t afford it

crashing from overwork then getting anxious over whether i’m relaxing correctly

a skill issue with neopronouns is the prosody of them. when you’re unfamiliar, it’s easy to put stress on them as if they were a significant word, but a key feature of pronouns is that they aren’t stressed. i imagine fluency rids oneself of this

there is a poem in the fact that spending enough time reading on my screen burns the afterimage of white text on black background into my eyes, such that when i look away and witness the world around me, the lines of a page are superimposed upon my vision, framing every sight

“how autistic are you about typography” i notice when authors use en dashes instead of em dashes.

honestly? worst of both worlds. i don’t like it when they use hyphens, but at least i can understand simply using what your keyboard gives you; there’s a compelling elegance

but if you’re going out of your way‍—or simply have the software support‍—to insert unicode symbols, why are you using the wrong one

2025‍-​02‍-​13

this is hell for real. i always notice. not all authors appreciate typo reports, and i feel it’s got to be doubly unhinged to slide into a comment section like “your dashes are a few pixels shorter than they should be, please fix”, but it’s genuinely distracting. get me out of here

2025‍-​06‍-​18

dawg i just spotted this in a peer‍-​reviewed academic paper. what has the world come to. save us

2025‍-​10‍-​10

i’ve had arguments with a writer who uses en dashes on purpose‍—they don’t like how long they are‍—but they also put spaces around their dashes so it’s kind of a problem they created. still, i guess people who use en dashes also put spaces around them, so in a way it’s kind of equivalent to the people who use the ascii hyphen‍-​minus but nope, today i am reading a fic that uses unspaced en dashes are writers looking at the text? how do you catch typos and misplaced commas but not notice the words dashed too close together?

• “except the jellyfishes” i mutter

• it’s been years and the people i started doing it for arent even around anymore
• but idk

you’re in for a good time when you scroll down and see a mutual going “ok i’m done now” or “last one sorry”

there’s a fantasy trope that’s bothered me for a long time. it shows up in all sorts of stories (and fanfics of stories) with advanced magics systems.

the breadth of magic system is always a told‍-​not‍-​shown informed attribute. one distinct pet peeve i have is whenever characters need to have a confidential conversations, they always cast various privacy spells or activate privacy wards or whatever, and it’s never spelled out (heh) what privacy they actually, specifically afford you do, their differences and strengths, the utility of layering them

worse, there’s frequently a beat where the strength and/or number and/or rarity of the privacy effects that a characters applies is a marker of how seriously they’re taking the situation

and this is entirely informed! we’re given no tools to actually understand or appreciate anything about the privacy spells, besides the reassurance that they’re really powerful, trust me

and just once, i want to see an author get autistic about it. hell, make a challenge of it‍ ‍‍—‍ make every spell cast on the page named (if not exhaustively spelled out). in the appendices if you have to.

i’m probably going to try to do this with a black nerve story, someday

and like, obviously this is going to lead to writing issues. there’s a very popular superhero story available online that intends to portray a superhero origin story in all its gory details. no timeskips or montages, no skills they picked up in the backstory‍ ‍‍—‍ and people have already cited pacing problems with this story

but there’s a better analogue. i have similar frustrations with counting bullets or mana pool percentages‍ ‍‍—‍ i’m disappointed stories are always so vague about resource management, and leads the stakes and resolution of the fight to feel like they come down to author fiat.

and yet, if you try actually writing like this, you quickly understand exactly why almost as a rule authors approach the way they do

(uncharitably, privacy wards are the author signalling “don’t worry about people overhearing, it doesn’t matter, shut up”)

still, i want it, just as a indulgence, for bragging rights or as a cautionary tale.

todays walk had some big breakthroughs in diamantis psychology worldbuilding. gonna try for a more detailed write up shortly but the funny version is

me (cautiously): mantes… fight a lot?
audience: (understanding nod)
me (gauging reaction): in fact, mantes… don’t have a concept of friendship, just rivalry and allyship, which creates friction with more social and agreeable species, like roaches
audience: (approving chuckle)
intrusive thoughts grabbing the mic: MANTIS BITCHES FUCK ROACHES BECAUSE THEY’RE ALL DOMMES AND ONLY ROACHES ARE GOOD LITTLE BOYS
audience: (raucous, terrifying applause)

think i’m gonna start outlining a new project‍—working title is With Gnawed Wings Defending‍—a (hopefully!) novel‍-​length Black Nerve piece exploring the life of a street level ninja‍-​mantis mercenary gang

is there anyone who’d be interested in helping me workshop this?

i think it would be funny to write scriberpunk. shadowcouriers doing secret quests for the megaguilds. upgrading their plateware, but carefully lest they go metal‍-​mad

people are always like “how are you”. there’s no good answer to that question. “doing well?” embarrassing. “doing ok”? boring. “doing bad?” i’m sorry for killing the mood.

i’m not even paying enough attention to tell which is which half the time

i often wish to invoke the cadence of “what fool you are. divine skeleton death blast”‍—but few affront me enough to warrant that level of wrath. instead, i’ve taken to invoking “skeleton blast” cantrips to punctuate my disregard

if you look up the word “ophiophily” you can find a bunch of study aid and definition type sites that assert it’s the term for pollination by snakes (no academic source lists it), and occasionally the Santalum genus (sandalwood trees) is fingered as the plants in question, and if you broaden your search a little, you can find some dubious sources suggesting a close association between snakes and sandalwood trees‍ ‍‍—‍ though generally based on scent or microclimate rather than proposed anthophagy

at no point can you find papers or even reputable‍-​feeling sources picking up on these fun facts. the idea of plants pollinated by snakes is fascinating, and yet this closest i can find in the world of trustworthy facts is lizard pollination (e.g., the wikipedia page on zoogamy)

what this all feels like, remarkably, is an instance of citogenesis that somehow doesn’t involve wikipedia

how cooked is my brain that i didnt understand the appeal of puppygirl stuff until i imagined a mantis and her roach gf

• workaholic demons still frown at me tho

living in a society is writing a story about bugs and enduring everyone you tell about it saying “hollow knight vibes”

mantis girl interlocking the spines of her forelegs with the spines and grooves of another mantis

if you’ve ever lived with a cat, it never fully goes away. i turn to see a pile of clothes in a dimly like room, and startle expecting the beast to startle too. i pull open a device and the whine of the hinges is a meowo

had an interesting realization last night‍—my teeth are still there

ok that needs some elaboration. i’ve been having a recurring nightmare (more of a dream spook, really), where my teeth crack and fall apart and i have a handful of teeth shards. and i remember it happening. at least in some persistent dream cache, so every time it happens i’m like what the fuck, this isn’t good, at this rate i won’t have any teeth left and i can NOT afford a dentist. wait, why aren’t i in pain? is this normal? i thought if like, half a teeth fell off there’d be some exposed nerve or something. oh well, i’m not gonna question my luck.

last night was the first time i woke up soon enough after that to realize it was a dream, rather than just drifting into the next dream‍—meaning it’s the first time i realized it was always a dream, and i don’t have a running problem of my teeth cracking to pieces and falling a bloody pile in my palm

honestly the most unsettling part of that dream is the sensation‍—of teeth tearing lose, of tension released into cracks‍—felt good

concept: the MtG color pie, but the central metaphor is musical

1. Bass is red (forceful, primal, felt in the bones)
2. Harmony is Green (do i even need to explain this one?)
3. Melody is blue (clear motifs and figures, novel expressions, perfect climaxes)

White and Black could be conductors and drummers, respectively? both ways of keeping time, but drumming I associate more immediately associated with improvisation

Hm, blue could be lyrics instead?

but probably the best way to approach this is to ditch a 1:1 match with the color piece and do something distinctly different

• game dont wait
• it’s time to grind motherfucker cant be late

an embarrassing amount of my writing time tonight has been spent wikiwalking learning about endorheic basins and soda lakes

and through this, a reasonable series of worldbuilding decisions has lead me to the conclusion that the slums of this gritty, blood‍-​soaked, crime‍-​scourched biopunk city …might be filled with flocks of flamingos

and i don’t know if i should commit to the bit or not

chinerpeton replied:

Watch where you step or the flamingo mafia will get ya

did you think the flamingo mafia was a small deal?

also no lie the more i thought of it, i realizes it would be neat to add a clan of vesperbanes whose bloodline mutation gives them flamingo traits

• i really need to stop coming up with new lore or this is going to stop being a novel and turn into another series

sometimes you wake up in a weird mood and you gotta put on the suicide soda of music, jumping back and forth between three or four albums because none hits quite right

“this author has no idea what pacing is” or maaaybe you need to unshackle yourself from the prison of conventional linear time?? ever thought of that???? anyway this next chapter is 22k words and covers less than an hour,,

recommending a story when you’ve only read the first four chapters is always a bit risky, but the writing here is polished to a literary and shine and the concept is just so intoxicatingly intriguing that i have to let more people know about it

mind bending scifi and psycho‍-​cyberpunk

https://mirrorsea.xyz/

formatting songs as Title ‍-​ Artist is the work of the devil. just so you know

i talked to your psychologist and got the all clear for us to engage toxic yuri situationship. yeah as enrichment

i talked to your head researcher and she said your species has some pretty freaky bonding behaviors. it’s not even a sex thing. wanna try. y’know for enrichment

no you’re staying in containment. i’m not freeing you. cuz. this is gonna be toxic remember.. so are you gonna do the carapace thing or what

bug forcefem. pills taken orally that taste like royal jelly. a transition of molting chitin. abdomen swelling fat, and wings piping loud with new cries and pleading demands, and mandibles turning scissor‍-​sharp and fragrant with blossoming pheromone‍-​musk. turning a productive worker into a queen to be pampered and bred

sometimes someone doesn’t align with you on something small, arbitrary, yet quietly significant to you.

when this happens i give no outward response, but internally i think yes, of course this would never work out, they will never understand me where it counts, i am forever destined to walk this road alone, and i yearn and i ache

two bugs cuddling squishing abdomens together

everyone wants a centipede girl to wrap them in segmented legs from head to tail and squeeze and squeeze and squee

you know, if i had a nickel for every black nerve species that rejects our intuitive, embodied understanding of personhood, i’d have four nickels

mantlespinners aren’t ants, that’s as weird as saying a painting is a canvas

gestaltees aren’t bees, that’s as weird as saying people are organs

skeinwalkers aren’t spiders, that’s as weird as saying wood is a fire

the ambrosia‍-​kin aren’t weevils, that’s as weird as saying a house is whatever piece of paper proclaims ownership

what’s cute is that if you wore and acted out a role‍-​mantle, or coordinated with a gestalte, or entangled yourself in the loreskein, or partook of a foundress’s entheogen, you would be recognizably of their kind‍ ‍‍—‍ that you happen to be a different species is a detail. now, you probably wouldn’t succeed fluently enough for this to work, but hey, skill issue, not biology issue (not directly, at least)

• don’t uh
• don’t ask me to explain what’s up with the vespers’ sense of identity

if coil had adhd do you think whenever he works he’d need to put on second timeline media

finally got actual coffee filters again instead of using ⸢ghetto art: paper towel filter⸥ or ⸢forbidden ghetto art: toilet paper filter⸥ or even ⸢formless working: coffee of the cowboy⸥

and it’s wild to actually enjoy the taste of coffee again

few understand this but “stop after current song” is one of the most important features a music player program can have

whenever you’re in the middle of an album, someone links you something or you need to get up but you go “after one more song” you ain’t gonna remember that‍—unless your music player got your back

• mini squiggles
• shitpost inspired my thinking about my dragon OC again

it is remarkable how much of headache it’s been trying to maintain my site’s suite of full text pages (a la ao3 ‘view entire work’ option)

pretty funny when as far as i know no one’s actually looked at them

but i guess i ctrl+f them sometimes so i’ll keep them around for that

>encounter bug in old codebase
>look around for source
>find a line with the lone comment of >“?”
>delete it
>bug disappears
i love programming

>friend offers me a fortune cookie
>swoon with horny thoughts

oh i am ruined arent i

• i’m not explaining this one
• ifykyk

what if you found a beautiful font to use for your text editor but it doesn’t have an italics face

• mini squiggle
• this post brought to you by me almost saying “mecha handler/pilot dynamic is reddit” before pulling back and going wtf are you saying
• is it time to bite down on the cynanide capsule in my false tooth?

sometimes you unmute a video to hear animal noises but there are no noises just music :c

people always say “rawdogging it” like it’s a bad thing. but tbh if you aren’t rawdogging it then you’re cooked

honouredsnakeprincess posted:

I can’t say I rightly get the rhetoric around people being ‘burdens’ on each other, nor do I much like the associated reassurance. (continue reading)

i think you’re subtly misunderstanding what not being a burden means. it’s not about expense, it’s about deficit.

carrying a big rock around would be a burden, and yet pushing a kick scooter isn’t. a kick scooter has comparable weight and you need to apply force to move it, force you wouldn’t need to exert otherwise‍ ‍‍—‍ and yet that it has wheels means that on a flat surface, bringing the scooter with you makes you go faster

when someone tells you that you aren’t a burden, they aren’t telling you that there’s no cost to keeping you in their life, they’re telling you that the benefits they gain outweight that‍ ‍‍—‍ they’re better off

• the definition of girlboss queenfailure
• unfortunately she’s straight

yunisverse posted:

i am on my knees tears running down my face knuckles raw and bleeding and BEGGING people to learn the difference between sentient and sapient

All animals are already sentient. Sentience is base level consciousness and ability to perceive.

Sapient is human‍-​level intelligence. Any cartoon animals or whatever that talk are sapient. Describing them as sentient may not be wrong but it doesn’t MEAN anything because animals ALREADY ARE sentient you mean they are SAPIENT PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU

this is a stupid distinction tbh

in practice i carefully, meticulously honor it, of course, but the fact that people constantly trip over it is a symptom of the fact that sentience just isnt a very useful concept

language gets so tiresome when you have prescriptivists in your ear telling you “um sorry don’t use that word that sounds better and gets your point across clearly, it’s actually reserved for a pointlessly broad, unspecific quality you’ve never had the need to even refer to outside of incorrecting people”

im‍-​the‍-​antonymph‍-​of‍-​your‍-​mom reblogged:

wtf no

“Lobsters are sentient” was an important scientific announcement at one point. In a recent year, I think. Because the myth that they don’t experience pain was finally largely disproven.

The difference between sentience and sapience mattered less when more people were convincing themselves that non‍-​human animals are purely driven by instinct.

unhinged idea: a conlang with sentences as hard to parse as english words are to spell

instead of loanwords, it has loan syntax

maybe it had relatively free word order but limited vocubulary, surrounded by neighbors with more rigid grammars? instead of inflecting loanwords to denote case, it became fashionable to use the fancier foreign words unchanged and simply arrange the native words to parse under both grammars

overtime it adopted words from increasingly diverse and disparate languages, until the grammatical placement of subjects and modifiers is entirely depending on the specific word in question

giving girls neopronouns just to make writing a story filled with lesbian women easier

starting to think it’s actually a bad thing that i can endure loneliness longer than anyone can retain the patience needed to divine how to talk to me & get me to open up

st‍-​just posted

Much as I’m complaining I’m still listening to the S2 soundtrack and it’s inspiring genuine emotional reactions in me. Which is more than can be said for the overwhelming majority of big budget genre fic. So like, fair play ‍-​ a mess and a failure compared to season 1, still far above the average here.

• or worse maybe i’m just contrarian

magicalgirlmindcrank posted

You can post about it all you want you won’t trick me into thinking arcane is good

• something something critically lucky

entityart posted:

Listen I know Tagging fics is incredibly important but also I’m so bad at ittttt why

because it’s poorly designed. this isn’t a rare complaint. when someone is bad at tagging, it’s their problem, when everyone’s bad at tagging, it’s the site’s problem. almost everything worth categorizing about a fic gets squashed down to an amorphous block of Additional Tags, and you’re given no prompt or guidance for what tags should be added and what tags are worth adding.

notes about the themes and structure and central focus of the fic are placed side by side with minor, incidental features and author chatter. why are relationships given their own category, but not genre? ironically this is something fanfiction.net did better.

i think paradoxically, sites with worse tagging systems often have better tagging. when you create a new work on royalroad, this is all you get:

and don’t you think fics wind up more comprehensively tagged when you can simply go down an exhaustive list and ask yourself “ok, is this a tragedy? does this story have magic?”

you could even keep freeform tags, but it would be a massive improvement if there was a menu of common general tags, and perhaps a generated list of ‘tags common in this fandom’ so you know, for instance, Uzi is a Gremlin is something people search for

sometimes remembering black nerve lore is so funny

“why is does the military have an officially recognized War Crimes Division which explicitly has no accountability or allegiance to the democratic administration”

specific historical reasons largely, most of which no longer apply, but for some reason every politician that opposes the Assassination Corps disappears…

even funnier to amend this with the correction that no, there isn’t “a” War Crimes Division, because the military as a unified bloc was dissolved, so now the map is essentially split into the fiefs of various legally recognized gangs, most of which have their own private War Crimes Division

but hey, it means that the implausibly numerous ranks of absurdly well‍-​trained black ops drones mostly conduct their war crimes on each other. for enrichment

giving a character any/all pronouns because i can’t keep them consistent

I PROMISE THIS ISN’T A HORNY THOUGHT

but
hear me out

it’d probably make sense for bug people if it was common, if not expected and enforced, for males to wear chastity cages

insects have genitalia on the tips of their abdomen, so even if you wore something to cover it, it’d be pretty difficult to hide a dude tenting his terminalia‍-​cloth

so like. if you wanted to remain modest there is a clear solution here…

“Tonight” is probably my least favorite song on CLPPNG and i havent even listened to the album recently but for the past ten minutes i’ve just been echoing

she prolly used to ballers and ballin you may not be
but this spot is bout to close and you still aint pulled you a freak? heh

bedlam‍-​moon reblogged:

because i already filled the series of tubes with goodium, forcing you into this role!

nya‍-​ha‍-​haaa

consider: a wand but instead of casting spells with gay waving motions you wiggle your fingers up and down the length like it’s a flute

• this is actually about
• black nerve
• but i wont explain tonight
• also this genuinely wasn’t supposed to be innuendo but i’m not rephrasing it now lol

one of my friends pointed it out and now i can’t unthink it. mewla black nerve is literally specialina from the romantasy eugenics post. how the fuck do i live this down

When your neurotic headmate loses fronting privileges but now you’re in the front seat dodging all of the shitty thought processes that are wired into the brain

Annoying af

Real ones know the thrill of ambushin your friends when they show the slightest sign of activity on discord

probably the most annoying part of black nerve is the whole child soldier bit means you have to do sudoku on the timeline and plot if you want to get horny with it without involving literal nymphs. why did i even include that part of the genre

naively, you might think child soldiers aren’t actually a good thing, but if you become a mutant bug ninja at six instars you have time to learn puberty blocking no jutsu before you molt teneral, so it’s impossible to say if it’s a bad thing or not really

checking their #i’m always saying this tag and it’s just stuff they’ve said once, if at all

remember chat. to beat the allegations you dont need a good defense, you just need a better defense than the sussiest baka on your squad. keep posting.

how today’s afternoon went: was trying to focus on coding while relistening to Monarch of Monsters and crying

genuinely impossible to pin today’s mental state on a linear scale

“how are you feeling?” i am

• forgot to post this earlier
• might’ve been edging an emotional breakdown tbh
• but we move

• i should come up with a tag for game design stuff
• there’s some other game mechanics i’ve thought of over the years
• but i don’t know where i put them

thinking about the bedroom black metal musician who spent twenty years making music on the theme of hatred for humanity, isolation, & the misery of existence, etc.

recently they were like so turns out i’m autistic and non‍-​binary,

i have nearly a day of dash to scroll. chat pray for me

• maybe i’ll just go back into my programming cave

“lifeform” is a sleeper word tbh

a thread urging people to reblog more often

i’d agree with this post if the two options we had were like or reblog, but that’s just not true.

in my experience the outcome of an artist telling me “reblog, dont just like” is that i don’t do either. i want to show my appreciation, that doesn’t mean everything i appreciate seeing is something i want on my blog. (i already worry i reblog too much stuff, and can’t follow people i’m interested in because i compulsive look at everything that crosses my my dash)

fundamentally i think a world where posters get radio silence because people are reluctant to leave likes without annoying people is just worse

“likes don’t do anything but make artists upset” no fuck off, please like my stuff.

it’s also just, not true? tumblr shows people posts based on their likes, and i’m pretty sure the best‍-​first algorithm is weighted based on notes (i don’t use it)

it’s also a false dichotomy. reblogs aren’t the only way posts spread around. you don’t know that the person who liked your post isn’t sharing it in dms (tumblr has this as an integrated feature! i get posts dm’d to me all the time!) you don’t know that the person who liked your post isn’t linking it on discord, or anywhere else

people should reblog more, but people should still like and reblogging isn’t the only way to support.

i’d certainly love it everyone did everything to make me popular, but we’re just not going to get that

i’ve been drinking pour over coffee for month now and every time, without fail, i think of tokyo ghoul

when an electronic musician has a couple of samples they use all the time, now that’s the good shit

alexanderwales posted:

I should probably change some setting on tumblr, but occasionally it shows me stuff not from people I follow, but “Based on your likes!” And these are, almost invariably, some of the worst, most braindead posts I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.

needed the oomph of calling something a hood classic but i did not want to convey endearment

so i called it a suburb classic

drill sergeant domme x contentious objector brat could this be anything at all

on 2022‍-​09‍-​20 joyousgard posted:

“ao3 should have an algorithm” ao3 should continue only giving me exactly what I ask for which happens because I know how to use the search, sort, and filter functions

algorithms are good actually; they offer a legitimate feature. the problem, of course, is sites obscure that what a recommendation algorithm really is: a search engine. of course it’d suck to have a search engine where you can’t control the query or the sorting criteria.

but if you could? who wouldn’t functionality in the vein of “users who recommend this also recommend this”, if transparent and can be turned on or off?

there is a fanfiction site with recommendations: fimfiction, and it’s wonderful for discovering new fics

it feels like there’s an uncanny valley of understanding social cues and dynamics where if you don’t get it at all, you can do whatever you want and if you get it intuitively, you can do whatever you want, but if you understand them theoretically then social interaction becomes an ever‍-​exhausting optimization problem because you know if you think a little harder you can come off a little better

if i ever get a beta reader or editor you best believe i’m not gonna be on some “any remaining mistakes are my own” shit. if i fuck up im gonna be like get their ass

werecoyotl asked for music recommmendations

have you listened to Vylet Pony ‍-​ Monarch of Monster’s yet? can’t stop spinning that one and tearing up.

Cattle Decapitation ‍-​ Death Atlas is a technical death metal opus that almost ranks as my favorite album of all time (Gojira’s From Mars to Sirius is what beats it‍ ‍‍—‍ funny how they’re both albums about climate change). admittedly i think CD’s new album from last year is better, but DA is the one that left a place smoldering and eviscerated in my heart

Die Sektor ‍-​ To Be Fed Upon is some industrial aggrotech, and it’s one of the things i put on whenever i’m writing Murder Drones fanfiction. desolate melodies, raw screams, and gnawing sense of dystopic alienation. this is one of their early albums (Death My Darling is newer, better, and my favorite, but TBFU was my introduction, and i think it’s more accessible to boot)

i try not to flood people whenever they ask for recs, but i’d be doing a disservice to my favorite band if i didn’t put them on the list

Mechina ‍-​ Venator is one entry is a long, sprawling saga of a discography of cyber metal. Xenon might be a better introduction for metalheads, given its grinding dissonance and abundance of growls, and i think Telesterion and its moments of ephemeral beauty might be my favorite. hell, it’s hard not to nominate their newest, Cenotaph, for its cohesive cinematic quality, or Siege for its focus and narrative intimacy, and judging by the single’s, next year’s album is going to be at once a return to form and a thrilling redefinition. every one of their albums has its draw and unique strength, but i still reach for Venator as my recommendation.

from the striking and poignant opening of “Suffer”, to the almost ambient soundscapes of “Sacrifice Zone” and “Totemic”, from all the inspiring melodies on the tracks between between to the barking growls of “The Embers of Old Earth” and the iconic returning guest vocals of Anna Hel that fill me with villainous lesbian submission‍ ‍‍—‍ i think it’s a great showcase of Mechina’s range, while being more modern than their “middle trilogy” of (though admittedly, Acheron/Progenitor/As Embers Turn to Dust are still anchored in my head as “classic”/“golden age” Mechina

first of all, i’d like to mention the existence of the Death’s‍-​head hawkmoth, is which capable of inhaling air through its mouth into its accordion‍-​like epipharynx and exhaling to produce a warning chirp. i have no idea of the sucking capacity of other insects, but this isn’t a fantastical adaptation, i think. (the hawkmoths seemed to evolved this as from honey‍-​sucking behavior)

i do think you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on airflow when it comes to produces sounds via the mouth, however. consider instruments like the violin, or better yet, the güiro, which involves a pick scraping notches in a way i found very reminiscent of stridulation in my research.

hollow, resonant cavities can be useful for amplifying sounds without supposing air is actively cycled through them, is my point.

that said, i definitely support all of your suggestions

in my own insect worldbuilding, i couldn’t decide. my roaches, of course, produce of a chorus of voices from their hissing spiracles, while my mantids have stridulating maxillae designed to convey and resonate sound in the prothorax and mouth. my wasps are too large to fly, so the main use their wings is making sound, though i haven’t yet decided if wing‍-​stridulation is their primarily medium (old docs have them with mantis‍-​like mouthpart scratching, but maybe it’s more interesting if it’s different). my moths squeak and chirp, of course, and my spiders don’t make sounds at all, preferring communication through gestures or web vibrations – but they’re crafty, and have created instruments that mimick the stridulation and singing of other species. (…and not just as lures…)

btw chat Whitepine is actual kinography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqZRB4WtqZI

the atmosphere. it’s so pretty and comfy and feels so emotionally authetic. the subtlety and implication‍-​laden writing makes everything feel so weighty. the austere spectacle, the lingering intimacy. and yet every episode knows how to pique my interesting and pull the story forward

i want to give ivory a hug…

flop posts actually serve a crucial function in the tumblr meta. you get used to posts going nowhere, and it lulls you into a sense of invulnerability. nobody will pay attention to me, i can say anything!

that’s how random careless shitpost with 1k notes devil gets you

i started writing a tumblr post and now it’s thousands of words long and my evening is gone

• it’s not even that good

imagine spending a week going ugh i miss writing, then out of nowhere on a day of sleep deprivation laying useless in bed i get an idea for a tumblr post and start writing and don’t stop writing and wind up with over 4k words. then i start editing it to finally post it, and it’s starting to push 5k words and i’m not even done

except i had to go to sleep and now today i’m just.

i can’t finish editing because of how cringe it is

i wouldn’t mind the quality if this was just a quickish shitpost, or even a longish shitpost, but this is short story length and it’s written like slop

remember when i could say fuck it and write 10k words of murder drones nonsense in a day? i really aint built like i was six months ago

being contrarian and combative, but also anxious and submissive really is the disposition from hell

“you have to tell me exactly what you want and what i’m supposed to do. of course, i may decide i don’t care and ignore you‍ ‍‍—‍ but you have to tell me”

what do people think they’re accomplishing when they reply like “oh?”

i get that you want to move the conversation along but i said what i said, if i was gonna say more i would have. give me something to work with i can’t yes and a fucking “oh?”

are you contrarian, or do you just think agreement is vulnerability? is it really that complicated and nuanced, or are you just afraid of being understood? just keep fighting and feigning and dissembling‍—if you’re exerting agency then you’re in control and that’s the same thing as security, i’m sure

i do not “fumble”. i do not “miss signals”. your flirting simply lacked a hook and logline so i left it in the slush pile

don’t even get me started on the formatting

don’t give up, though! i’m sure you can make it in self‍-​publishing!

assuming, of course, that you can afford a bottle of lotion

i dont write essays. i write posts that conclude “in this essay i will”

15depressedducks asked:

So in hostile takeover, when Uzi dies and goes to the manor like place, would it be okay if I took some inspiration from that (with setting and a few characters) and made it into a fic? It would have a different plotline, be post cannon, and some other things.

[If I need to rewrite/explain better, I will, I’m just a really nervous shimp rn (⁠๑⁠•⁠﹏⁠•⁠) ] Avatar

• “can i take inspiration from the worst part of hostile takeover” is a heck of an ask tbh
• sure knock yourself out champ

prokopetz posted:

Inadvisable narrative frames #137: second person omniscient viewpoint. Every character is “you”, simultaneously and without differentiation; oblige the reader to rely purely on context cues to determine which “you” they currently are.

serious‍-​tabaxi reblogged:

you think your idea is horrendous, and tell yourself so. you agree, and remind yourself the blog is not designed for sane ideas, especially not from you all. you agree, but are disheartened by your implementation of your idea.

sometimes you follow someone and diligently like all their reblogs and reblog their posts and you’re hoping you grind enough points in the follower mines to get scouted and promoted to mutual

and sometimes it’s like please never follow me back, i am your loyal minion

sometimes i type out a joke and it’s too obvious and hackneyed so i delete it and try again and the new joke is funnier but with particular way it’s in reaction to the unspoken first joke renders it a non sequitur if you can’t follow my thought process

so i wonder if it just seems like i say random stuff sometimes that’d be really funny if you have context no one has

i likewise use this sort of css on my site for my stories and essays. i usually rely ems rather than pixels when setting margins‍ ‍‍—‍ instead of counting pixels, you can hit the recommended text width by setting width: 50em, regardless of font or font size. tho i personally tend to get more aggressive, since i like large fonts and thinner margins, so i usually go down to 40em

by a similar to token, you might be able to hit that three x‍-​height tall line target by setting line‍-​height: 3ex

there are other, nicher typographic niceties i’ve won from thought and research (i use :after selectors and content rules to render my <hr>s as three asterisks; i use small‍-​caps to display <em>s nested inside other <em>s, because i’m not a fan of the convention where emphasis inside already italicized text is re‍-​romanized, that always looked ugly to me)

regarding justification, it is possible to get knuth‍-​plass justified text on the web via javascript, in fact there’s one solution in form of a bookmarklet that you can use to apply the justification to any page, provided they put the relevant text inside <p> elements

what you’ll discover if you try this trick on a page formatted with the above advice, though, is that this code somehow ignorant of text indent! so it’s another dead end unless you want to go back to double spaced paragraphs, or dig into the code to figure out how to fix this

there’s hope on the horizon, i guess – there’s css proposals like text-wrap: pretty that aren’t supported by many browsers, but maybe in a few years someone will add knuth‍-​plass justification to browsers

personally, i used to just create pdfs with latex and send them to people. i stopped doing that, but maybe i should go back to it…

one day i need to come up with a trans character concept other than “repressed guy becomes an evil woman who does whatever she wants” or i’m gonna get into trouble

• that’s kind of not what’s going on with adelphyne
• but

sometimes i use two tabs to scroll through my dash‍—my ⸢blogger style: vision of twin timelines⸥ technique. one is for the long arduous trek through new posts and one for catching all of the new posts that roll in as i’m doing the main scroll

really fucking sucks to get them confused and losing your place in the hours of backlog. but no great technique is without the potential for miscasting‍—it must be mastered

concept: lasers & feelings‍-​style one stat kobold rpg. your one stat is yip vs yap

werecoyotl posted:

Maybe I should look into making music , it’s been something that’s been on my mind for ages but never know where to start or look tbh

i woke up and wrote toxic yuri before i even got out of bed, that’s how you know i’m on that grind

i have another fav from the monster manual, this one a bit more of a hear me out

the tsochari though

each individual is a colony of parasites that slither in your body and puppet it from within with telepathy and torture 🥺

they only care about pursuing arcane secrets and view humans as nothing but tools 🥺 but they themselves were created as tools to bring populaces to compliance in preparation for their masters’ conquest

also i’m not even projecting with this, one of the clues of tsochar possession is a swollen belly. imagine walking around in public, filled with squirming parasites, and someone looks you up and down, then says “congratulations” but you can’t correct them because you have no mouth and cannot scream

Worms in the Dirt

not many ways for a creature to be sexier than by speaking with first person plural pronouns‍—due to genuinely being a collective, or perhaps simply a regal affect. but this only gets hotter if this tic derives from a psychic, subsumptive, even conceptual nature, meaning it’s unclear if that plural pronoun is meant to includes you.

and to be clear, it doesn’t, not at first, until one day, without you noticing, it does‍—but by that time, we have no protests

there are stories that haven’t updated in long enough it’s not even a hiatus anymore. at this point it’s waned to more of a lowatus

i wonder if there’s a timeline out there where i wrote that pmd fic, featuring a froslass (who woke up years ago as a snorunt with altered memories), and now by day trains at a prestigious shounen battle school for rescue teams alongside her bayleef minion partner, while by night she secretly schemes to seize control of the city’s criminal underworld and engages in death note type deduction spirals with an absol detective determined to take down this anonymous mastermind – with a quiet, sneaking suspicion that this could be key to cracking an old, tragic cold case, the death of a beloved gardevoir

something i didn’t touch on in my first post about the tsochar was this detail

They are religious and devote themselves to the powers of Xoriat, the realm of madness, seeing themselves as superior to other aberrations, particularly mind flayers, with whom they share a rivalry.

can you imagine imagine the tension between a tsochar girl who wants to wear you like a glove and a illithid girl who wants to psychically enslave and then eat you

calling your friends irl mutuals

just a heads up, if a girl breaks up with me be prepared when i switch to a pit fighter vi avatar because it WILL happen

honestly only got a eight hundred and thirty nine yard stare but i’m working on it!

why am i only just now learning about vraska

my queen ;~;

was looking into the daelkyr (the chaos elves that created the tsochar), and discovered this gem in the feats for the daelkyr half‍-​blood character option

Personal Symbiont (Ex): All half‍-​bloods begin play with one personal symbiont that they can pick from the following list: breed leech, crawling gauntlet, or throwing scarab. If a personal symbiont is lost, a daelkyr half‍-​blood can grow a replacement from his own flesh over a period of 2d4 days.

YOU CAN LITERALLY GET “whatever. go my scarab” AS A INNATE ABILITY

huh kelp is a kind of algae

the seething envy that grips my heart when i see someone get something i almost had and didn’t even want

i have a new theory shitpost idea

• Strong men (Slay the Spire) create good times (game of the decade contender)
• Good times create weak men (endless ocean of imitators)
• Weak men create hard times (audiences fatigued of roguelike deckbuilders)
• Hard times create strong men (Slay the Spire 2)

there’s something strange and ephemeral about the first draft for my first album cover i stumbled across

sometimes you see a tumblr post and you’re just like. ok. now try that again with paragraph breaks.

since the year is ending i sat down and collected some stats for Things I Did This Year

1. published about 350k words to my site across 69 posts
2. about 133k words of that was chapters, mostly hostile takeover
3. another 84k words of that was shorts, including self‍-​contained write‍-​ups that summarize a story loosely but at length
4. another 80k words of that is loreposts and write‍-​ups that focus on a small part of a larger, incomplete plot (e.g. the corrupt combustion and cometverse yaps)
5. finally, about 38k words of that was essays and blogposts and other misc. stuff
6. (as far as non writing projects go, my two published game demos, Pushro and Flickerseal are now sitting at 4.9k sloc and 2.9k sloc respectively, and my new site generator’s close to a thousand lines)

there’s admittedly some weirdness with this categorization scheme. for instance, An Opaque Heart (35k words) is counted among the shorts, meanwhile Even in Debt‍ ‍‍—‍ Dreams (16k words) is counted among the chapters, which kinda makes this a function of site (dis)organization than anything else

this is up about 50k words from last year, where i didn’t quite reach 300k words, and only 150k words of that was published (aurora moonrise remains some real dark matter)

but also last year i composed two hours of music and dozens of digital sketches/paintings, while this year i did fuck and all outside of writing and coding, so who knows how really measures up