orchidwrites

[orchidwrites]

Google Ambient Chaos if you ever need background noises for writing! It's a customizable soundscape website.

Anon, when I first saw this ask, I thought it was going to be one of those mixers of nice, traditional sounds, like rain or a coffeeshop. And it is! And there's lofi hiphop, my favorite sound to write to! Which means this is legitimately an excellent tool for writers, and I love you for introducing it to me.

But I also want to say. There are some choices here. That I need to point out. Because they're either fantastic or questionable, and I can't decide.

Things like . . .

Couple arguing.

Medieval battle.

Beehive, where you can write to a fuckton of bees.

Crime scene.

And actually the perfect soundscape for NaNoWriMo.

(It's here, for those curious.)

[orchidwrites]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[orchidwrites]

Please do things to strengthen your attention span. It stresses me out so much when people just accept their small attention spans and cater to them without any acknowledgment that they are making it worse by doing that.

There is a reason attention spans are worse now and it didn’t just happen by chance. Media and the internet designed it that way and we went with it because it was easier.

Some of us with ADHD and brain fog need to meet ourselves where we’re at and lengthen our exercise span by watching a two minute video instead of a one minute video. Some of us need to sit down and read a novel with our phones turned off.

Wherever you’re at, just realize that not doing things that feel hard will keep making your attention span worse.

[orchidwrites]

if you ever find yourself thinking “wow I scraped the bottom of the barrel with my energy with that and came out okay!” that’s the devil talking. you did not come out okay. you borrowed energy from the future. you will repay it if you don’t rest and replenish the borrowed energy first.

[orchidwrites]

for all of you guys that are writing fantasy and getting into fantasy cartography, i highly, highly recommend that you sit through artifexian’s youtube series on building realistic fantasy maps

he basically breaks down stuff like how to realistically place climate zones on a map, what they look like, how ocean currents work, how they affect things (like where your world’s fishing hubs and climates are going to be placed), where mountain ranges should go and how they affect climate, where your world’s metals (i.e. resource wealth) are going to be found, and on and on and on. it’s SUPER incredibly fucking helpful and really fleshes your world out in a whole new way

[orchidwrites]

once you start noticing how many of the Sexy Thicc Anime Babez hornyposted across the net with fat tits and fat asses overflowing out of their micro-bikinis still have 24" waists and rail-thin arms and pencil necks you never stop noticing it

[orchidwrites]

blowjob? more like nojob! #unemployed

[orchidwrites]

the scariest thing about the generative AI thing is how quickly people have accepted it as an indefinite, irrevocable part of their reality. people have genuinely convinced themselves that ChatGPT is the only solution to most tasks - tasks they did with their own brain without any large effort two years ago. like you know damn well all of us used to write emails ourselves why are we pretending like this is an impossible task to do with your own two hands. what's with the fucking. AI revisionism. i feel like i am going insane.

[orchidwrites]

[orchidwrites]

baby dragons whose scales are much more shiny and iridescent in order to hide in their parents' hoards

[orchidwrites]

[orchidwrites]

“As I pondered a pronoun change, I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape. Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.” ― Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir (Affiliate link)

[orchidwrites]

[orchidwrites]

starry eyed

[orchidwrites]

There is a photographer in our town that works for a local news feed just for our town (which I'm 90% sure is volunteer run) and I see him sometimes at things. He usually covers the town halls, school board meetings, he was taking photos at Juneteenth last year. Basically he's everywhere and I'm also everywhere, so we cross paths often.

But he also does a thing called 'My Final Photo,' which is just random day to day stuff happening in town that he thinks is cool enough to snap a photo of. Like... ongoing construction of the new buildings, when the crocuses come out, a bird landing on a lamppost. Stuff like that. He's a really talented photographer.

The Final Photo for yesterday was kind of awesome but I don't think he knows how much the caption contributed:

Because that is both

a. sick as hell

b. perfect encapsulation of the childhood experience.

[orchidwrites]

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

[orchidwrites]

it’s so painful to watch yourself grow cold, bitter, and resentful, even toward small, irrelevant things, when all you’ve ever wanted was just to be warm, gentle, kind, and loving.