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[jenetikitty]

cricket finds compliments very alarming

[jenetikitty]

I had a dream that the king and the queen of a small country had a daughter. They needed a son, a first-born son, so in secret, without telling anyone of their child’s gender, they travelled to the nearby woods that were rumoured to house a witch.

They made a deal with that witch. They wanted a son, and they got one. A son, one made out of clay and wood, flexible enough to grow but sturdy enough to withstand its destined path, enchanted to look like a human child. The witch asked for only one thing, and that was for their daughter.

They left the girl readily.

The witch raised her as her own, and called her Thyme. The princess grew up unknowing of her heritage, grew up calling the witch Mama, and the witch did her very best to earn that title.

She was taught magic, and how to forage in the woods, how to build sturdy wooden structures and how to make the most delicious stews. The girl had a good life, and the witch was pleased.

The girl grew into a woman, and learned more and more powerful magics, grew stronger from hauling wood and stones and animals to cook, grew smarter as the witch taught her more.

She learned to deal with the people in the villages nearby, learned how to brew remedies and medicines and how to treat illness and injury, and learned how to tell when someone was lying. 

Every time the pair went into town, the people would remark at just how similar Thyme was to her mother. 

(Thyme does not know who and what she is. She does not know that she was born a princess, that she was sold. She only knows that one night after her mother read her a story about princesses and dragons, her mother had asked her if she ever wanted to be a princess.)

((Thyme only knows that she very quickly answered no. She likes being a witch, thank you very much, she likes the power that comes with it and the way that she can look at things and know their true nature.))

The witch starts preparing the ritual early, starts collecting the necessities in the winter so they can be ready by the fall equinox. Her daughter helps, and does not ask what this is for, just knows that it is important.

The witch looks at Thyme, both their hands raised into the air over a complicated array of plants, tended carefully to grow into a circle, and says, sorry.

Keep reading

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[jenetikitty]

i had so much faux fur left over from project slipperpaws that I made Toddler Niece a baby bear from the extra fabric

and when I gave it to her, obviously, she grabbed it and hugged it and squealed “BABY BA!!!!” with a level of sheer delight I wish I could still attain as a tired and jaded adult

and then, all at once, the joy vanished from her face, replaced by a look of deep concern, and she looked me dead in the eyes and whispered “...Mama??? Ba?????”

And I looked back at her and patiently explained that with work and my many responsibilities I simply did not have the time or energy to make yet another stuffed animal for her but that baby bear would be fine without a mommy and that sometimes if real baby bears were old enough and strong enough and lucky enough they might manage to survive the cruelties of an uncaring planet without their mommies and

I’m totally kidding I obviously immediately made her a mama bear and i don’t give a shit about how tired and jaded you are, you would have done the same

[jenetikitty]

Theory that neurotypicals are the ones with "communication issues" actually. You're the one who can't communicate with ME, buckaroo

[jenetikitty]

(via)

[jenetikitty]

[jenetikitty]

this kid is 14 oh my god is no one teaching children to protect themselves online anymore…

[jenetikitty]

My little sister is a nurse in a hospital that specifically caters to heart/lung things. I talked with her today a bit about the covid vaccine and how I felt guilty signing up for it when I’m absurdly low risk and she didn’t even hesitate when telling me to GET IT.

Apparently they’re seeing a lot of high risk people not getting the vaccine because of microchips or what the fuck ever the conspiracy theory of the week is. By getting the vaccine, even if you’re low risk, you’re protecting those who are gullible enough to reject it because FacebookDotEagleDotTrump said it’s BAD (and those who might have a legitimate medical reason not to.)

Anyways. Get the vaccine. Protect dumb boomers & MAGAs whether they like it or not. My little sister is tired of watching grandmas die because Quanon said the gubernment was gonna track their casseroles.

[jenetikitty]

The four named Tolkien dragons: Ancalagon, Smaug, Glaurung, and Scatha

(technically there’s a fifth, Gostir, but it only appears in The Lost Road and nobody knows anything about it so who cares)

[jenetikitty]

kitty paws

[jenetikitty]

201224 by exellero

[jenetikitty]

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

[jenetikitty]

I watched a few seasons of a show about fish and game folks. Honestly loved (part) of it. The whole focus is on preventing poaching, safe hunting practices, and the occasional detective work stuff. Honestly great stuff. Show was popular enough to get a few spin offs. The one that took place in new england? Loved it. Very friendly, "this is our way of life" people. The one that took place in texas... *sharp breath* ...they had a LOT more cop going on, and a lot more "we're gonna nail them" instead of "look I'm gonna let you off with a warning today, BUT..."

This came up in the group chat again today and–

You know what the really obvious answer is to the problem of police procedurals? In the sense that people clearly enjoy the tropes, the varyingly high stakes, the feel of a competent highly-trained organized team doing good together, the variety of storylines you can get, the operational style, etc, but are sick of copaganda?

SAR procedurals.

Why do we have seventeen thousand police procedurals when we could have this instead???

Search and rescue procedurals would solve all the problems actually.

Like, you get that well-oiled machine thing. You get the radio protocols. You get the sense of organization, of rank, of a command structure, but without them being cops. Hell–in an SAR group you can even have the much-maligned plotline of “someone goes off the book on a hunch and ends up being right” and still have consequences attached to that but not, like, an intrinsic argument for routine violation of human rights.

You get the case-of-the-week and the variety; I feel like this is why firefighter shows don’t get nearly as popular, because there’s only so much variety you can get out of “there is a fire” compared to all the things that can go wrong in a police procedural (or an SAR show, especially if you were clever about where you set the story.)

You get the recurring diverse cast and their interpersonal relationship developments, and pretty much every cop show archetype slots gorgeously into an SAR group as well.

You get the wide variety of possible stakes; SAR teams sometimes have intense heart-pounding time-sensitive missions, sometimes they have lost hikers who are almost certainly fine, sometimes there’s suspicion of foul play…Christmas episode about returning a lost kid to his family against all odds, anyone? Sometimes there’s a search that’s been going for weeks and someone has to call it and be the bad guy…you could get GREAT drama over two team organizers butting heads about how no, dammit, we’re not calling in the cadaver dogs yet, we’re not giving up like that–

(Oh yeah also you can have some great canine recurring characters.)

Instead of “internal affairs is the bad guy because cops being held accountable for their actions is evil” you can get, like….tension between the rookies and the human remains detection teams, because if you’re new to the SAR culture you may not understand or appreciate the work that HRD dogs and their handlers do, see above re: the sense of giving up. You get the opportunity to engage with real-world issues and social justice but like, without them being cops. The world is your fucking oyster.

OR, YOU KNOW, WE CAN MAKE ELEVEN MORE SHOWS ABOUT COPS, I GUESS–

[jenetikitty]

Concept: You walk outside one night and notice that there are two full moons. A few hours go by and they don’t seem to move.

You stare up at them.

They blink.

[jenetikitty]

Fuck, that last post so much.  I know someone who can’t hear certain franchise names without mentioning that they doesn’t like them and it just kills me.  Like, I told you that I went and saw my beloved franchise’s new media.  Why must you mention that you don’t like it?  I know you don’t like it.  You’ve mentioned it *every time* I’ve ever mentioned the franchise.  I know you don’t like it.  That’s fine.  But you asked what movie I saw, so I have no choice but to lie or tell you the words that will make you tell me how much you don’t care for my happy place.

All this does is make me not want to talk to you about things I like.

Even new things I liked because somehow you always seem to find something wrong with them.  The last time I saw a movie I really thought you’d like, you told me you didn’t even want to watch it because that genre was usually done badly.  And I was so fucking floored because I had literally just said that they did it well.  Everyone said that it was done well, literally.  But you wouldn’t watch it.

I don’t even know why it surprised me.  I’ve been recommending things for you to watch for a decade and you never do.  I’m still so sad about the anime with the fantastic twists that you didn’t watch because it wasn’t dubbed yet, and now, 10 years later, the surprise tropes are old hat, and I know for a fact that you’ve had the whole thing spoiled for you and you don’t even know it, because you won’t listen to me.  

Sorry, I am Very Feelingful today, and am realizing how shitty some of my friendships are.

ok not to be adhd on main but if you even JOKINGLY make fun of me for my interests thats it. i wont ever be able to trust you again because im positive youre constantly judging me and making fun of me behind my back. thats just the way it is!!

[jenetikitty]

Lackadaisy but...Warrior Cats....

I meant to post these after the warriors lackachat but other stuff distracted me so yea sorry- ;;