rerwby

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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You know. Reading is important. Because I'm like always trying to make every line I write this groundbreaking mindfucking art but like. A book is 90% just saying what happened. "I hugged him around the waist." "The chair was brown and overstuffed." "I woke up alone." Etc etc. Like normal ass lines. I just keep comparing my boring, necessary to set a scene lines, with famous authors' absolute best lines and like.... every line doesn't have to shatter the earth. Sometimes someone just sits in a chair and the lines that wreck you come later, one at a time, here and there. It's alright.

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I don't mean this in any jokey or disrespectful way; is there any truth to the alchemy in say, the Full Metal Alchemist anime? The symbols or transmutation circles?

Actually the author of FMA did a ton of research into historical western alchemy. The whole law of equivalent exchange is a real alchemical concept from hermetica, and one that sir Issac Newton expounded into the law of thermodynamics.

The elrics dad, Van Hoenhiem, is based on a real alchemist named Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hoenhiem. At one point Pride even references the real alchemists name.

Basically everything about alchemy in FMA is taken from primary sources, down to the symbology of transmutation circles to the color scheme of Edwards design.

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I can write a decent hook when the occasion calls

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Worldbuilding stuff:

If your story has an idle nobility class, their culture shouldn't just be different from the general population, it should be an over-the-top caricature of the common folks' culture. Whatever the population generally agrees is ideal, fair, admirable, or good, the nobility will take into stupid extremes.

Contrary to the beliefs of many, people are actually not at all happy when they're idle - a person with no assigned task or duty will go out of their way to come up with one. And all around the world, whenever there's been an upper class with nothing to do, they've started to compete with each other over stupid shit, but always stupid shit that the culture they live in considers positive qualities.

From the noblemen in Europe challenging each other to a possibly lethal duel over insulting someone's hat, to a Chinese noblewoman being moved to tears by the beauty of someone's calligraphy, bored elites everywhere have always wanted to outdo each other in their expressions of possessing all the noble traits that this culture in particular holds in value.

You can, and should, use this as a way to highlight what the actual values of this society is. In a setting where being religious is held as an admirable trait, there is nobility coming up with new ways to one-up each other in their expressions of worship. Society that values art and music will have them competing over who hires the most artists, and who employs the most talented musicians. Aggressive, war-like people will have fuels to the fucking death over a stupid hat.

Literally anything can be competed in, and bored people with far too much time and money in their hands will become competitive over the most ridiculous things. This isn't just an useful tool in worldbuilding, but also a fun one.

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Hey btw, if you're doing worldbuilding on something, and you're scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it'll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don't want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.

When you're just making things up, you don't need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won't bother to dig around for a 3rd question.

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Some more eye drawing notes/mini tutorial

I often get comments on how I draw eyes and expressions. A lot of expression can be shown in eyes alone, even without eyebrows or other facial features.

Of course, the full range of expressions comes from combining all the components that go into an expression (eyes, eyebrows, mouth, face angle, body language), which makes an infinite number of combinations

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Vieux-Nice, France

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never not thinking about giant cisterns. THATS immanentizing the eschaton. when we get to heaven and its a bunch of giant wet concrete tunnels with vast columns holding up the ceiling, then you will see...

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Why do you hate RWBY?

it really doesn't occupy a space in my mind anymore

why did it once? idk, i enjoyed it to a degree, saw it be shitty, was critical about it and probably way too loudly for my own good, and then got over it. still don't think it's particular good but now i'm just causally critical of rooster teeth in general.

this is mostly a place i reblog writing-related stuff to now. kept the url for branding. probably should change it.

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yoooo

okay so my “”rewrite”” only went as far as to parallel volume 4 idk and obviously i don’t keep up with this show anymore but i wanted to run through this with the ideas i had in my head

- Never touched this but I fucked with Aura ideas

- I don’t think it was a power fantasy

- Hell no

- Hellllll no

- I guess it was the same amount of time at Beacon but the advantage of writing meant it felt more fleshed-out and as if more was happening in that amount of time.

- Yeah I did Neo stuff because I like Neo. It was more peripheral, like her existence was justified by stuff happening in other parts of the story, but it absolutely served to have her do shit. Roman Idr.

- Absolutely not

- Maybe? I had a theme about how the fucked up Hunter culture incentivized capable people to be cowardly or greedy but I very much framed altruism as a good and heroic thing.

- I genuinely just never got this far. But Adam is fucked and I wasn’t about to undo that.

- Relics yes but Maidens I fucked with. I think they’re neat. Might have combined them with the silver eyes.

- Deliberately avoided bumping up any male characters

- lmao no

- I couldn’t care less.

- Gross and also I don’t care

- I thought a lot about how to make sure that wasn’t a thing. I don’t think it was? I mean by conceit a rewrite is an AU isn’t it? Maybe this is in regards to genre.

- I don’t remember. I know I had an idea to make Jaune the new Ozpin to have him actually be relevant and do some themes and character arcs but it’s hazy. Also remember I stopped thinking about this in V5 so Oscar was far less important at the time.

- I didn’t think about this much, it was just a forgone thing but I never got around to planning anything.

- Is this a theme in the show? The show where Monty had them invent Aura because he wanted “boss battles” where he could be flashy but wouldn’t have characters murder each other immediately? Uhh. I don’t recall any character arcs being about the morality of murder no.

- I did not get far enough for Ironwood to be a factor or my version of him was really far removed from canon since, again, I stopped planning this around V5.

- no honestly this one sounds fake who the hell is doing this thanks v*c

- it’s blake’s responsibility to murder adam

- Nah give that girl her growth and arcs. Ofc she starts out idealistic but the point is to learn to keep that outlook while not being reckless and throwing your life away.

- nope

- may or may not have done this in my shitty written version as a throwaway line but it was dumb and held no bearing on the rest

- I’m pretty sure I replaced Salem’s entire crew with characters who weren’t lame. It was the one example where I went the OC route and I don’t regret it.

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the actual reason I consume mediocre media is because I have bad taste. the deeper secret pretentious reason is because I think there’s something very revealing about bad media that you don’t get with good media. when you watch a poorly executed plot point unfold, you see the machinery behind it. you see the gap between what’s actually on screen and the true goal the author is striving for. if it’s particularly awful, you can even measure just how poorly mismatched the author’s skills are with the story they’re trying to tell you. watching a poorly executed narrative play out feels like you’re discovering something, because you see all the wiring and guts underneath that better authors hide from you, in the same way that movies hide boom mics and books make you forget you’re turning the pages. if a story is good and executed well you just see the story. but I want to see the guts and wires!

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The worst part about writing fantasy is being keenly aware that you’re writing fantasy, which means that you always have to straddle a thin three-way line between anachronism, cliche, and clunk.

Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.

So you think about the world you’ve built and its needs and its history to come up with some unique and relevant terms. But if your terms are too unique and relevant you wind up writing “yarr, you’ll be ransomed for a hundred Trade League Silver Gyrblonks” and realize your worldbuilding is now getting in the way of basic readability.

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fantasy characters: “Geez”

me: who the fuck spread Christianity there

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Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

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fucking losing it over this thumbnail