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Coruscant's still decent, actually.

What absolutely grates on my nerves when it comes to Star Wars naming is the careless inconsistency. Specifically, the way it sets up a pattern and then breaks it. You get Nala Se and Lama Su, and then you get Senator Halle Burtoni. I understand you love naming characters after Real Life people (and, apparently, in this case, companies) in your insider clique, but I would love to be able to tell the character is Kaminoan and not confuse her with the human Separatist Senator from Onderon also beginning with B and ending with I when I see her name, thank you very much.

I wish Star Wars had the same naming complexities that Lord of the Rings has.

In lotr all the names of characters, regions and kingdoms have a meaning and story. There are whole essays on the meaning of the names of characters like Galadriel and Celeborn. In unfinished tales there's a section that discusses the name of the river Gwathló and why it was named like that; Gwath means darkness or shadow, as the river was once covered by tall trees that casted their shadow over its waters, and ló means swamp or marshland, as the Numenoreans who explored the river reached Swanfleet, a marshland from which the river originated. Later the Numenoreans used the forests around the river for timber and deforested the whole region, making the name of the river be outdated due the change on the landscape. And you have to consider that this river had next to zero importance whatsoever, but it still had a whole backstory.

And in star wars we have Coruscant, the jewel of the core world, the biggest metropolis of the entire galaxy, populated by trillions, the center of galactic culture for over a thousand years and we don't even know what its name means. It's just Coruscant, that's it, no background, no ethimology.

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I don't, and also I think the post in question thankfully passed me by, but I know from painful personal experience that it definitely isn't. And by "painful personal experience" I mean "forgetting to take note of my sources in my enthusiasm and then being very unhappy with myself months later when I need to find them again".

I am glad that some of you have the emotional fortitude to refute that awful "sufficient enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor" take (and the guilty party's smug rebuttal) because every time I so much as think about it I am filled with incandescent rage.

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Strongly prefer hymns. I think there might be one or two worship songs I kinda like...

.... hmm. Honestly I'm not even entirely sure what counts as a modern worship song. I think the ones I had in mind were actually Taizé songs. Does that even fall into the same category?! It maybe doesn't.

Anyway, modern worship songs are incredibly same-ish and flat and tend to make me actively hate them after several repetitions. Also the lyrics tend to be boring, and same-ish. I think my church in particular has a very broad range of songs in its repertoire in terms of time of creation and musical style*), and when done well (and we have an incredible main church cantor who does do things well, when you have a chance to work with him!**), there's no way you can be bored with the music.

*) Including modern-ish things to be sung with guitar that aren't hymns but also aren't modern worship songs. Might be my strongest argument for the boringness of the latter; they pick one narrow lane and there is SO MUCH MORE to being a Christian that you CAN put in a song. ***)

**) For example, on one occasion he told us one song's melody was brought over by theology students studying in Hungary, and played it as a csárdás. Modern worship songs have a lot to catch up on!

***) But also one of the biggest guitar bangers at youth events I attended in my youth was always a song from the 17th century, so.

P.S. Well, now I think about it, the existence of Taizé songs is also maybe proof that the "modern worship songs" strand is BORING and NARROW.

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'Interior Scene with a Cat seated beside a Window' by Frank Moss Bennett , 1923

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This kind of made my day.

I love themmmm

this would actually get me to watch BFQOTY again

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Blue Tit/blåmes. The fledglings will gradually develop their adult plumage in late summer and autumn. Värmland, Sweden (June 23, 2019).

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Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (June 23, 2019).

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Black Woodpecker/spillkråka. Värmland, Sweden (June 23, 2024).

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hello! enjoyed watching your projects for a while, and wanted to ask: do you have any advice for how to do the work of sewing without busting your hand/wrist? or at least how you minimize it?

Hello! I actually haven't gotten much hand pain from sewing. When it happens it's almost always from too much drawing and/or video editing.

When I do get it from sewing it's typically my left hand (I'm right handed), because if I'm hand sewing then my left hand is often holding things still, and if it clamps on tightly for an extended period of time then ouch. It's especially bad if I'm making small thread covered buttons, but holding onto an embroidery hoop does it too.

For the drawing & video editing table height in relation to chair height is SUPER important, you've gotta make sure the work surface is no higher than your elbows are when sitting. I've been fine in that regard ever since I took the legs off my big old desk. (Also, drawing from the shoulder is good advice, both for wrist preservation and for making nice big lines! I try to remember to do it when sketching! You do need to do shoulder stretches though because then your shoulder gets all tight. Anyways, sewing!)

Really the best thing to do is vary up the tasks. It can be very frustrating when something's coming along super well and you don't want to stop, but it's better to stop for a shortish time upon getting a tiny bit of hand pain than to be forced to stop for a longer time because of a lot of it. I don't like having to put down an interesting project, but I extra extra did not like the time I had to stop drawing for a week because I did too much at once.

I actually don't often end up doing one task for a very long stretch of time, since there are so many different projects and chores to do, but if I notice an ache then I'll go switch to a different task on purpose. A few days ago I spent at least 5 or 6 cumulative hours cutting stencils with an xacto knife, and it was getting crampy after a while, so I stopped several times to go read a reference book.

Also stretches are good, and I really do not remember to do them anywhere near often enough.

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Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (June 22, 2018).

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Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (June 22, 2018).

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Snufkin and the Woodies for dearest @taryndraws (^._.^)ﾉ

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Fic idea I was struck with the other day and keep thinking about: a Vulcan adopts a cat.

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6) Humour is an excellent way to deal with things. Saying this not as someone who's studied authoritarianism, but as a Czech who's "studied authoritarianism" just by dint of studying recent local history. Humour gives you perspective. Humour reminds you things are absurd. Humour means you're not taking them seriously, and that's the last thing they want. Do things just because they're funny. JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE FUNNY. Not to make a point. JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE FUNNY. That doesn't fit into their worldview, and so they can never win.

I mean, satire is also important; but satire still means you're dedicating mental space to them. Do humour for yourself. Do things because they make you and your friends / family laugh.

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Thanks! That makes a lot of sense, seeing as I'm primarily a Gen writer so that sort of thing rather passes me by, especially when an insider POV is required!

I'm not entirely formally taught in creative writing, but I learned my basics from reading books, fics came later. So in many cases I do retain an outsider POV.

Also, all this. 💛 Yes, exactly that about it also just being a fascinating language development!

I wonder if this is a thing about fanfiction writing as a world unto itself someone else has noticed / raised before...

You see, one writing trick I didn't learn from books that I see a lot of fanfiction writers doing is referring to characters by their hair colour when their name is known. Just as their default ID inside the text.

I don't do it, and I'd love some insight as to the whys if you do.

It's something that always rubs me the wrong way in a fic, when it suddenly decides to say e.g. "the blond" instead of "Luke", especially if currently basically in his POV. Logical POV is kind of a big thing for me, and I think it rubs me the wrong way because when you do that you're quite often basically using two competing POVs in one sentence - describing what a character is feeling and seeing but then referring to them by a very external descriptor. I certainly would not refer to myself by my hair colour anytime soon, not even when writing about myself in 3rd person. I don't think about people I know that way, either. Based on my own attitude, I assume it's not something you do with a known person, so I'm very puzzled as to why fanfic writers do it with characters they know very well. It most often gets applied to the main / important canon characters. I just don't understand!

(P.S. And, just to clarify the intention of this post - it rubs me the wrong way, but I'm not necessarily dissing it outright. I also find it fascinating as an aspect of fanfic writing as a world unto itself, as prefaced, which is why I went and wrote this. It's like, a specific fanfic vernacular.)

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I completely forgot with the windows example that, actually, mentally I break down the "wash windows" step even further, into:

wash cleaner inside side of windows with water & detergent

dry with a clean rag

wash dirtier outside side of windows with water & detergent

dry with my clean rag

wash window frames and windowsill

dry with my clean rag

spritz window cleaner on top of windows and shine them up with the scrapy thing and potentially another clean rag, then dealing with any lingering stains

- which may not be the only way to do it, but it works for me, and is a pretty logical order of things (get rid of worst dirt first, in order of cleanest to dirtiest - the frames are absolute dirt collectors; prevent water stains before they form; deal with inevitably still appearing stains and add desired shine) so once you get used to it it becomes automatic. Which is why I forgot to break it down in the original post. 🙂

I owe this logical method of window cleaning to a friend. She spelled out to me how and why to do cleaning tasks in a certain order and taught me a lot; I think our brains are more compatible that way than mine and my mother's. 😅

And if you're not up to the whole big task of cleaning windows right now, you can always e.g. do the inside one day, do the outside another, do the frames and windowsill last. If you don't wait too long between the steps so that your windows collect whole new dirt, you still end up with nice clean windows!

trying to clean your room can be really daunting and stressful, but you don't have to clean the whole room all in one go.

If you pick up just one thing off the floor, wipe away a little bit of dust, take any dishes to the sink, or anything of the sort, then you have successfully cleaned a bit of your room! It doesn't have to be done all in one burst and every little dent you make will result in a slightly cleaner room

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Thanks a lot for chiming in!

Species is an interesting flavour it didn't even occur to me to consider, despite the fact the most direct inspiration for this was Star Wars fic and the first time I started noticing it was in Narnia fic. 🤣

It also occurs to me it does sometimes happen in the sort of books I know when the hair colour is in some ways considered a defining feature... meaning it most often happens to redheads. 🤔 So now I also wonder if this might, to an extent, be a cultural thing.

And writing for yourself goes a loooong way towards explaining it! I have rather exacting standards myself, and it's very much "writing the fic you most want to read" for me, so writing for myself includes doing my best because otherwise I just feel lukewarm about it. But fanfic, as a rule, doesn't have to be that way; other writers will have other "writing for yourself" preferences, of course. And I sort of keep forgetting that.

Upon further reflection, I did realise "avoid repetition" was probably part of it. I think what puzzles me in fics and what feels like a specific fanfic vernacular is when the hair colour itself becomes a repetitive character ID - I forgot to stress / did not realise the importance of that in my original post.

Trying to figure out how the writers I love deal with the problem of repetition, I come to the conclusion that teachers often overstress that as a rule with a simple substitution as a solution, at the expense of restructuring the whole sentence as a solution. I think? I think the reason a lot of classic published writing (and the sort of writing I personally try to draw inspiration from) doesn't feel repetitive despite literally being so with things like character IDs and actually using "said" much more often than teachers like, is that the sentence structure itself isn't repetitive. The repetition feels less repetitive when it doesn't keep happening in the same position is a sentence, kind of thing. And in things like character IDs, repetition is actually a good thing because... character IDs help the reader make sense of what's happening. They're literally there to identify the actors in the events. If you have to keep stretching your brain just to figure out who's being referred to, the text can become too dense to be an enjoyable read you become engrossed in; you have to keep stepping out of its flow to consciously puzzle it out.

It's not like you can blame the teachers for not advocating sentence restructuring, it's sort of an advanced case-by-case-basis technique that's hard to put into a rule, but... well, I do rather blame them for sitting on "repetition!' like hawks. Once they've made "don't repeat youself" into a rule, I suspect at least some of them often are on a lookout for it even when it doesn't harm the text at all and a forced variation does. See above about certain kinds of repetition actually giving the story something to grab the reader's mind with. It also depends a lot on what kind of text exactly it is - if you're aiming for something poetic, you probably have more room for that kind of exploration of language than with, say, an adventure story where you need the action to flow smoothly.

It did give me a big lightbulb as to why I may be more naturally inclined the sentence restructuring way myself:

This insight is brought to you by language learning and translation being a NOT 1:1 process that often requires restructuring a whole sentence... It's the level you reach once you stop relying on a dictionary and start thinking in the foreign language. And it also happens when you need to say something in a foreign language and can't for the life of you remember the word you need, or it's missing from your vocabulary to begin with... I'm a native speaker of a small language using English online, including in my fic writing. I still vividly remember an instance years ago when I literally couldn't find an adjective I had in mind in English because it doesn't exist in English and I had to rework "Subject-to be-adjective" into a verb-based sentence, "Subject did a thing that shows something about them". Which is, of course, on the whole a less lazy way to put things (even if in that particular case it was extremely annoying because the to be-adjective phrase was actually being used in direct speech to praise someone so it made perfect sense there).

I think all this trained me into automatically thinking of "how do I say this differently" a bit more often as "how do I put this sentence differently" than just "what different word can I use here". And when I say automatically, I do mean at this point it's not even a fully conscious process.

Obviously synonym searching still happens a lot, I think that's a writerly constant everywhere. 😆

P.S. Oh! And obviously you can also keep using pronouns in a long string of sentences if you keep referring to the same person / keep alternating between characters with different pronouns. Again, that's literally what pronouns are for.

I wonder if this is a thing about fanfiction writing as a world unto itself someone else has noticed / raised before...

You see, one writing trick I didn't learn from books that I see a lot of fanfiction writers doing is referring to characters by their hair colour when their name is known. Just as their default ID inside the text.

I don't do it, and I'd love some insight as to the whys if you do.

It's something that always rubs me the wrong way in a fic, when it suddenly decides to say e.g. "the blond" instead of "Luke", especially if currently basically in his POV. Logical POV is kind of a big thing for me, and I think it rubs me the wrong way because when you do that you're quite often basically using two competing POVs in one sentence - describing what a character is feeling and seeing but then referring to them by a very external descriptor. I certainly would not refer to myself by my hair colour anytime soon, not even when writing about myself in 3rd person. I don't think about people I know that way, either. Based on my own attitude, I assume it's not something you do with a known person, so I'm very puzzled as to why fanfic writers do it with characters they know very well. It most often gets applied to the main / important canon characters. I just don't understand!

(P.S. And, just to clarify the intention of this post - it rubs me the wrong way, but I'm not necessarily dissing it outright. I also find it fascinating as an aspect of fanfic writing as a world unto itself, as prefaced, which is why I went and wrote this. It's like, a specific fanfic vernacular.)