argusthecat

[argusthecat]

If you ever don’t know what to write next, I recommend defenestration for your protagonist. How (or if!) they survive, how they react, it’s a great way to show a lot of dynamic pieces of a story at play. Also you have to justify them being near a plate glass window, which forces creativity!

The best part is, there is no limit to this. If you ever need to do it again, readers will go “huh, that’s a disturbing coincidence”, and by the third time, your protagonist has earned the title of Defenestratable. No one questions it! You can keep throwing the same guy, sometimes through the same window!

[argusthecat]

RoyalRoad commenters, take notes. I know it’s hard, I know you want to support the authors, but please, stop giving the most mid things ever 5 star ratings to be nice. Make them earn the 3-star-spicy.

I came up with this three-way table to help me (and now you, if you want) to rate things out of 5 stars. I was thinking of books and films when I made it, but you can probably use it for other stuff.

The idea is that you rate the thing on how much stuff you loved and how much stuff you hated, and those things weight against each other. There's only one way to get 5 stars or 1 star, so those should end up as the rarest ratings, wtih 3 stars being the most common.

'Spicy' means that the thing inspires emotion, whether positive or negative, while 'bland' means it doesn't affect you much either way.

An example of a 3-star (spicy) - for me personally - would be the Twilight series, because there's plenty of garbage in there but also some things that are like crack to me. I can't think of an example of a 3 star (bland) because by nature they don't stick in the mind.

(This also assumes giving 0 stars isn't allowed. That'd throw it out of whack...)

[argusthecat]

I hate that this boils down to “leftists would be more successful if they just lied about things”, but I also hate that you’re probably correct.

[argusthecat]

surprised this hadn't been made yet

[argusthecat]

My favorite form of fantasy worldbuilding is when you can see how someone thought a thing was a good idea a few hundred years ago, but now the blessed crown that infuses the knowledge of ancient rulers into the mind of the current king is really getting out of hand and causing a lot more dissociative episodes than you’d like for an unelected monarch to have, and everyone just keeps talking about how it’s either an unbreakable curse (they can’t verify this true) or tradition (correct but stupid) and now you’ve destroyed the nation’s relic-coronet and also founded a representative democracy, but hey, what if there were a way to save all this useful experience for future generations, maybe in some kind of hat…

[argusthecat]

happy anniversary to Dot throwing 115 pitches in a row to a frog

[argusthecat]

Hi, you wrote Kitty Cat Kill Sat? I’m suing for emotional damages. I’m getting that oath tattooed on my brain. Rocketed to the top of my list of favourite books and I barely have anyone to talk to about it. Going to pressure all my friends into reading it too just so I can scream

Hi, I did! If you’d like to sue, please direct all complaints to my lawyer, an irate and sentient orbital laser cannon.

[argusthecat]

There's a thing in older cartoons where you can tell what objects are gonna be interacted with because they stand out from the painted background. This is the same principle that lets me know when a character is actually going to die in an episode of Stargate.

[argusthecat]

If the reboot goes ahead, and SMG plays an older, wiser Buffy who shows up a few times to give advice and encouragement to the new Buffy (named after her, of course), I hope they keep her romantic life as vague as possible. The original Buffy didn't want to know too much (if anything) about Giles' dating history, or her own mother's, and why should the new one?

I hope the most we get about the last twenty years of our Buffy's life are some scattered hints that she's in a long-term relationship with somebody who used to be a vampire -- "a vampire with a soul?" the show's new Buffy can scoff -- but who became human again "decades ago" after fulfilling the terms of an ancient prophecy. I hope they have the original Buffy let slip that she met her partner when she was a high school student, but it took her a while to realize that they were the one. That they used to be evil but have since reformed and help her fight against evil and save the world. That they're the most important person in her life after her sister and her nieces. I hope the Bangel and Spuffy fans spend hours refighting old wars about which character Buffy is "meant to be with", both convinced that the show is building up a cameo by their preferred (now older and in-universe human) leading man.

I hope that, in the last episode of the first season of the new show, our Buffy's phone rings during a key bit of exposition -- in the library, ideally, because it won't be Buffy without one of those -- and she apologizes, saying that she has to take it because "that's my wife". I hope as she walks out of shot, phone in hand, we see her smile and we hear her say "hey, Harmony". And I hope the show never, ever expands on any of that again.

[argusthecat]

oooooo what a cool post my mutual just reblogged ! I think I will reblog it as well !!! oooooh who did they reblog it from ? That username seems familiar,,, hohoho it's me ! from an hour ago !

[argusthecat]

[argusthecat]

[argusthecat]

when will polygon hire me

[argusthecat]

I have realized that the perfect form of media must have a delicate balance between absolutely heart wrenching pure emotional devastation and the most ridiculous nonsense you have ever seen in your whole life

[argusthecat]

I’m realizing one of my favorite small scenes to write is a character asking, completely honestly, if their friends or allies have the capability to do something absurd. What do you mean you don’t have some kind of pyrokinesis? What are you talking about we can’t just hack the bank’s servers? Since when do we not have the ability to get into orbit?

It’s a failing of trust, but in the reverse of the normal direction. Someone has trusted their closest friends, for years, to be able to throw lightning if they really needed to. And now they are finding out they maybe should have trusted a little less, and asked a little earlier.

[argusthecat]

At the start of Dan Olson’s video on diagetics, he asks the question “how do you kill a vampire?” That question hangs open for a while, before the obvious answer is provided. Vampires aren’t real.

In exploring a lot of different blogs on here about writing in general and fantasy worldbuilding in particular, I keep finding people who seem to think that fictional things have concrete definitions. Charts explaining the differences between witches and wizards, comparison diagrams showing what the size and leg formats of different types of dragon-esque things are, descriptions of fantasy creatures provided with not just an authoritative voice, but the insistence that this is the only correct version.

It’s really kinda weird to me? Wizards aren’t real. You know what defines a wizard? Whatever the author says does. I’m not even gonna say that wizards have to use magic; there’s gotta be at least one cyberpunk setting out there where ‘wizard’ means ‘hacker’, you know?

It bothers me that there’s this proscriptive attitude toward fiction. When people start talking about things as if they’ve derived the true nature of dragons from reading a variety of different books and myths that had dragons in them, it starts to come across like the person speaking has entirely lost their grip on reality.

I guess my point is that your dragons can have as many legs as they want.

[argusthecat]

Source: Witch Hat Atelier Tongari Boushi no Atelier とんがり帽子のアトリエ

by Shirahama Kamome