Today’s project was to create the exact opposite of a Rickroll. I think I’ve succeeded.

this is the funniest fucking tag this post could’ve gotten

Gosh I wonder who it could've been

Wizard Tip of the Day: Color code your outfit, but use a color NOT associated with your main elemental domain to confuse your enemies. No one expect a rock in the face from a dude in blue robes

Same mood as naming your Pokémon after a totally different one for online matches

never forget arceus steel

JAJAKDJFXJKWKAK&&3&;992lekda+{}{+\=\==2858/9/9/&38;9/&:;&:&/&:.

Maybe it’s not Daddy issues, but you got some issues if you’ve willing put the mark of Cain on yourself!

What other people put on their body is generally no one else’s business, and they do not have “issues” for doing something that has meaning to them. Don’t reblig shit to sound condescending about people you don’t know, regardless of what personal meaning that symbol has to you. Let people be people jesus christ

What @redwing said

who cares about supernatural can we talk about the way his tits bounce

Date of origin: Apr 4, 2021

EVISCERATED

For those that don’t know, Brock’s mom and dad both bailed on their kids to go dreamchasing for a bit and he had to look after NINE siblings on his own

In other words,

SHOTS FIRED

Brock also just kind of left those same 9 siblings so he could travel the world with a 12 year old and his electric rat

Brock literally hung tight until his dad came home, gave said dad a stern shit-talking about how much of a worthless deadbeat he was to his face, refused to set one foot out of Pewter City until he was sure the dude would stay and take care of his damn kids, and then left to follow the dreams he was never allowed to follow because he was too busy cleaning up his parents goddamn mistakes.

But, like, go off, I guess.

If the one in the first pic is his mom, why does she look younger than him?

Because she’s not the one who had to raise 9 kids.

world heritage post

Big Men / Tiny Men ?

No bitches

I would dearly love for more people to be capable of differentiating between public risk and personal risk.

Examples: drinking is a personal risk. Drinking and driving is a public risk. Going scuba diving is a personal risk. Running a scuba shop with faulty equipment is a public risk. Riding a bicycle without a helmet is a personal risk. Not maintaining public transport safety standards is a public risk. Foraging for mushrooms is a personal risk. Advertising a mushroom identification app that uses shoddy AI is a public risk. Elective surgery is a personal risk. Not wearing a mask in a doctor's waiting room when you are sick with a contagious illness is a public risk.

I could go on just about forever here. But it's a really important distinction and it drives me nuts when they get conflated, and it's so common.

"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"

[image description: a group of Care Bears standing in a line, doing the care bear stare. White text reads: “feeding and housing the poor will do more to reduce crime than any amount of punishment ever will”. End ID]

no writing workshop can help you improve your writing as much as this screenshot can

Oh gods. (hides eyes)

…I’ve been coughing my lungs up for the last three days now and am sick and tired of it, and seriously weary, but THIS makes me want to sit up and start ragetyping.

(reaches down into drafts folder, rummages around to grab hold of the screed I wrote in, dear sweet Thoth on his ebike, January) and then decided not to post in the heat of the moment)

(oh, and prev tags, which were good)

#this screenshot punched me in the face#war flashbacks#my immortal#writing#don't be afraid to use 'said'#the brain just skips over filler words like that#it can't skip over whatever nonsense 'he whimpered ... I roared' is#also words convey specific things such as emotions and how loud someone is speaking and you can't just use them at random#don't just use a random word from a list of 'alternatives for said' you found online#use words intentionally

Right. (pauses to cough) Now then—

Something trundled by on my dash some days back. And I got all ready to write a post about it, and then Peter had his accident in the kitchen and it got jarred out of my head for days. Until now, in fact..

Anyway. The "something" was a beautifully made chart of "dialogue tags". Someone had gone to a lot of trouble over it, clearly with the intention of helping other people. And after I spent a while admiring the design (and the ingenuity of it), I nonetheless started having, yet again, the same set of annoyed and frustrated misgivings I get every time one of these word lists of "suggested dialogue tags" crosses my path.

These lists aren’t a new phenomenon by any means. In the last century you could buy whole books of them. They were called "saidbooks", which is kind of ironic, since "said" was about the only word they didn't include. (Look, hello-delicious-tea over here knows about them too.) But their purpose was to provide people who were nervous about repeating themselves—and thought they'd be mistaken for bad writers when they did—with lots of other words to use.

(sigh) Plainly this misapprehension is still with us.

Am I about to get prescriptive? Depends on your definition of the term. (Though it's also true that in New York state, where I was licensed, properly trained nurses can prescribe. And in this paradigm, after nearly fifty years of doing this work, and various bestseller lists, blah blah blah, maybe I can be considered properly trained.) Anyway:

Using lists like this is not a good idea.

Your job as a writer is not to be concerned about whether you find the tags boring. Assuming you're writing something you intend to have other people read, the important question is: is your reader bored by them?

Because, ideally, they shouldn’t notice them at all.

The presence of constantly-changing dialogue tags, though, will inevitably distract your reader from the flow of your narrative and from the dialogue itself… which should be the very, very last thing you want to do.

The business of dialogue is to express as exactly as possible—and in the right tone and rhythm and with the best possible words—what the character thinks and feels at that moment.

The tone, phrasing and word choices of the dialogue itself should make plain how it’s being uttered—thereby (ideally...) rendering tags unnecessary. If it’s not doing so, the dialogue needs to be rewritten until it does. And if that sounds like it might be a lot of work...? Yeah, sometimes it is! But eventually it's what makes good writing stand out from the merely okay, or the "meh".

Now, sometimes the rhythm of handling the dialogue—in terms of how it connects to the lines before it and the lines that will come after—requires you to add a tag or similar qualifier to make things flow correctly. And this is what “said” is for.

"Said" is the invisible word. 98% of readers don't see it. (The remaining 2% are not who you need to be concerned about. No writing will ever please everybody. Don’t get yourself stuck trying.) And—rather magically—the more you use “said”, the less your reader will see it—assuming you're using it correctly, in ways framed to keep it from drawing attention to itself. "Said" stays out of the way while the message gets across. (I can't now recall which very senior writer said this to me once: "'Said' is a gentleman. It holds the door open for the line of dialogue to finish passing through the doorway of comprehension in the reader's head." …Antiquated imagery, but correct in essence.)

So back to my thesis: Using lists like this as a writing resource can hinder you in developing your own, inside-your-head resources, and (most importantly) your own unique voice, as part of the normal flow of acquiring words and style over time through reading and lived experience. …Come to think of it, one could make a case that saidbook lists are in their way a prehistoric version of ChatGPT: merely suggesting words that have sometimes worked in similar situations for other people, but won’t necessarily work correctly in yours. Picking “close-enough-for-jazz" words off a list and slotting them into an empty spot in your writing will gradually deprive you of a vital source of exercise for the writing muscles, and make you a less resourceful writer. You need to think consciously about your dialogue, and always be trying to make it work better. It’s an essential part of your job. And this part of your job is far more complex than can ever be solved by some list of hopeful adverbs.

Something else to warn you about, too: if you're heading (however casually) toward a career selling your writing, when your first editor sees your first manuscript, one of the first things you're going to hear out of them is "All these saidbookisms? They make your writing look lazy and sloppy and they’ll jar your reader out of the narrative flow. See if you can lose most of these." (And your first copyeditor is likely to get even more emphatic about it.) So save yourself some time and start learning better habits now.

And if you want to tell me "I don't care about getting published, I'm writing to please myself!", then... okay, fine! I’ve been there and know just how that is. But even way back then I’d go out of my way to at least try things that seemed likely to make me a better writer than I then was. (And mysteriously, I still do… because that’s work that won’t be over until I stop breathing.)

…Right. So—speaking of breathing—I will now get up, have a shower, get dressed, and go out into this pretty spring day to buy antihistamines and cough medicine. :/ …And then get back to the writing I’ve been working on… while letting “said” hold the door open for all those other words. 😏

aw i found the sequel!! ;U;

A actual fucking hero dude

I’m tempted to say, “Not all heroes wear capes,” but I get the impression this Fine Fellow probably owns more than one.

*Scrolls past*

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

*rebogs*

Obligatory blue beetle post I NEED a horror comic about him now

btw it is sexy and cool to uplift and admire people who have skills you wish you had without using their ability as a stick to beat yourself with. even and especially if you are jealous of them.

fun fact: Gotham is, in fact, canonically cursed. Between the literal portal to hell in Arkham's basement, the magical resurrection swamp on the outskirts, the evil warlock sleeping underground for 40,000 years and cursing the land, and the demonic Bat God locked in the city center, it never stood a chance. City's so cursed it even had its own magical X-Files unit for a few years.

I was told to also put this on tumblr. Below the read more is research on each of the reasons why Gotham is so so very cursed.

i like working at plant store. sometimes you ring up someone and there's a slug on their plant and so you're like "Oh haha you've got a friend there let me get that for you" and you put the slug on your hand for safekeeping but then its really busy and you dont have time to take the slug outside before the next customer in line so you just have a slug chilling on your hand for 15 minutes. really makes you feel at peace with nature. also it means sometimes i get to say my favorite line which is "would you like this free slug with your purchase"

@holyknuckled you get it. lterally what are we here on earth for if not to occasionally impose gastropods upon unsuspecting customers. this story is delightful

@holyknuckled like that?

oh? my god???

yeah, Exactly like that