sunlit-gully - Tumblr blog

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the thing about adulthood is when someone says something extremely rude to you, you can either turn the other cheek or calmly & firmly correct them. The third option is to tell them “say that again, I’ll bite you” & everyone sort of nervously laughs and tries to move on from your little joke. Which is why I think it’s very important that when they do say it again you follow through. Nobody actually expects you to bite them. We should be biting more. Also if you’re with the county health department do not read thi s post

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Was wishing there was a positivity post for original fiction writers since I see so many about how fanfic writers are doing so much for their communities even when they're not actively writing, and then I thought:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

So this is a positivity post for the writers out here who are working very hard on stories with no established community. Who can't talk about their blorbos and plot lines and brainstorming to anyone and expect them to know what any of it means. Who don't have much to share publicly, but are hoping they will one day.

You're doing a lot of hard work, and I recognize and appreciate what you're putting into the world, even when you're resting.

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thanks for the tag @talesofsorrowandofruin! it's been some time since i actually did anything remotely writeblr on my so-called writeblr blog lmao

Rules: take the previous person's excerpt and rewrite it in your own style!

Your excerpt:

Leo scowled at the line. Out of morbid curiosity he’d sat down to reread the play, and somehow it was worse than he remembered. Who on God’s green earth called their wife ‘beloved angel’ — spelt 'beloved angle’, because Philpott clearly hadn’t paid attention in English class — in this day and age?

My rewrite:

Leo's eyes were now squinted tight shut as his face scrunched up, which was not entirely unwelcome - what was unwelcome proved to be the sickening, sappy abomination that was their old play. Has it always been this chock full of drivel? he asked himself, fully knowing (and loathing) the answer. Spelling mistakes, awkward turns of phrases, they stuck out like sore thumbs; no, they sprouted before his very eyes like mushrooms after rain. A case in point - Philpott, in his neverending genius, waxed poetic on some 'beloved angle' of a wife. An insult to angels and angles alike, Leo mused. And a nasty punt in the falling teeth of our old English teacher. Poor, poor Mr Jones.

tagging @somniphobicfox @toribookworm22 @mjparkerwriting @silverslipstream @sunset-a-story @saltwaterbells @sergeantnarwhalwrites hope your eyes weren't assaulted by my purple prose

My excerpt:

The platform's a place to say goodbye, always has been. The harried crowd around me, how many of them are saying their final farewells? Children, women; those who leave are overwhelmingly women and children. Right next to me a grandpa bids farewell to his daughter and grandchildren, and as the wheels rolled off he hobbled back to the walls with teary eyes. The passengers carry with them the last pieces of home in threadbare backpacks, patchy fur coats, and soulless stares.

Rewrite Tag

Thanks for tagging me, @on-noon! :D

Rules: take the previous person's excerpt and rewrite it in your own style!

Your excerpt:

She left the freshly dug graves to the isle of ash and shut herself into her box of a time machine. The sides pressed against Adreif's shoulders and vibrated as the box traveled perpendicular to time and space.

My rewrite:

Adreif left the freshly-dug graves to the isle of ash and returned to her time machine. It was so small that its sides pressed against her shoulders once she was inside. The whole box shuddered as it travelled through time and space.

Tagging @ashen-crest, @kjscottwrites, @sunlit-gully, and anyone else who wants to do this! :D

My excerpt:

Leo scowled at the line. Out of morbid curiosity he’d sat down to reread the play, and somehow it was worse than he remembered. Who on God’s green earth called their wife ‘beloved angel’ — spelt 'beloved angle’, because Philpott clearly hadn’t paid attention in English class — in this day and age?

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Happy whatever

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Writer's Guide: Guns

I'm not the biggest fan of guns but I need them in my new WIP. Guns are probably one of the most used tools within most medias, besides being one of the most misused tools. So how can we write them? (my other post on guns focuses on the damage guns can do to a body so go there if that's what your looking for)

Part of a Gun

Action: The action is the brain of the gun. It is the part where you load, fire and eject the casings.

Stock: The stock is the handle of the gun. It is made up of the butt and the fore-end.

Barrel: The Barrel is the nose of the gun, the point where the bullets are fired from. Once a bullet is fired, it travels through the barrel and out the muzzle.

Muzzle: the muzzle is the hole the bullet exit from.

Bore: The bore is the inside of the barrel

Cylinder: The Cylinder holds the rounds in a revolver. It rotates as the gun is fired, pumping bullets into the chamber.

Grip: The Grip is where you hold gun.

Hammer: The Hammer on a revolver is a pin like instrument that strikes the primer which fires the bullet from the gun.

Clip: An clip stores the rounds of ammunition on a single line-like device that can be placed into magazine.

Magazine: The Magazine is a container that is spring activated, which can be detachable of fixed. It holds cartridges for a repeating firearm.

Trigger: The Trigger is what you pull yo fire the gun

Trigger Guard: The trigger guard is the loop that fits in front of the trigger to shield it from accidental firing.

Ammunition

Bullet: is the projectile that exits the gun.

Cartridges/Shell: This is the case, primer, propellant and projectile (bullet). The bullet sits in the cartridge case.

Shotshell: Are rounds of shotgun ammunition, containing pellets rather than a bullet.

Gun Safety

1. Keep the muzzle pointed downwards (not near your feet or others) when not using the gun.

2. Unload gun when not in use

3. Always check the safety.

4. Be sure of your aim. Don't fire blindly because you'll end up wasting bullets and you might hurt somebody

5. If the gun is jammed, don't look down the barrel to see why it's blocked. Point it away from you, open the action and remove the blockage safely.

6. Keep your barrel clean. Any excess cleaning fluid even dirt can mess up your shot or even cause blockages that can burst the barrel

7. Don't alter your gun in any way on your own. Even if you're a self proclaimed expert, don't touch the gun. You can fuck up the intergrity of the weapon.

How to Hold a Handgun

1. Your dominant hand should grip the gun, high along the back strap (back of grip). This will give you better leverage and handle the recoil better.

2. Place your other hand against the other side of the grip. Four fingers should sit snugly under the trigger, while your index finger should rest against the trigger itself.

How to Hande a Rifle/Long barrelled Gun

Hold the rifle with two hands, hold the grip of the rifle with your dominant hand. Your fingers should wrap about the base of the rifle, under the trigger guard.

Your non-dominant hand should be wrapped firmly around the base of the grip. Holding the gun right will help reduce recoil and ensure better control.

How to fire a Gun

Align your sights. Your gun has a sight at the front and at the rear. Aim and align your sights through these points. There should be equal space between the sights.

Set your sight. When you’re aiming a gun, you’re you are looking through the front sight, the rear sight, and your target. When you're aiming at the target, it will look blurry. The sights should but clear.

Press rather than pull the trigger. You should squeeze it, applying constant pressure until the weapon fires.

Things every Writer should know about Guns

Hollow Point Bullets are not more deadly than full metal jacket bullets. Though a hollow point will cause damage, full metal bullets are actually more likely to over-penetrate and move when with the flesh, causing a more devastating wound.

Guns are really loud. How loud exactly? Most heavy duty guns could cause hearing loss. It simply isn't possible for two characters to have a lovely chat while firing weapons.

Rifles with scopes make it easier to shoot but they won't make a beginner a sudden genius marksman. Scopes help but they don't perform miracles.

Shotguns shoot shells not bullets.

Your character should not tuck a just fired handgun into their waistband or else they will get a nasty burn.

Silencers or better yet, suppressors do not silence your shots. They actually lower the sound by a few decibels.

Don't have your character fire gun sideways. They will fuck up their wrist and look stupid while doing it.

Most rifles and shotguns aren't pump action

If you drop your gun, if won't fire itself.

The clip and magazine are two different things. They can't be used as synonyms.

When somebody is shot, they don't go flying back. They crumple on the spot.

The exit wound of a bullet is larger than the entry point.

Most beginners will have trouble with recoil. Bloody noses and black eyes are common is one doesn't know what their doing.

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someone recommend me some good fantasy books that aren’t centred on a war, please, my crops are dying

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first the holocaust was turned into the project of a sole madman who had an entire country under a spell, which suddenly vanished at the stroke of a pen when peace was signed, rather than being a continuation of centuries of scapegoating and antisemitism, enabled by western capital, direct funding to the Nazi party in some cases like the British aristocracy's, with the purpose of creating a massive slave workforce and to boost the German economy via looting, expropiation and a reduction in the worker population, an economy that had been reeling since WWI and propped up by directing all jobless people to work in the arms industry.

then, the (incomplete) victory over european fascism (don't look at Spain and Portugal and Greece) was methodically distanced from the true victors, the soviet people. They suffered an invasion and destruction of the majority of their industrial base, save for the industry relocated to the east, more than 20 million dead soviet workers who pushed the fascists from Moscow to Berlin, ending in an artillery barrage the magnitudes of which had never been seen, the symbolic raising of the red banner over the Reichstag and an enveloping of the city that forced many nazi officials to commit suicide. It was also forgotten how the Yugoslavs liberated themselves, managing to keep fascist forces constantly tied up during the war, how the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hung him in public, the many uprisings throughout Europe and the concentration camps before the frontline reached them, the exiled brigadiers and republicans who first fought fascism in Spain and was later forced to fight fascism again, unable to return to their homes and under threat of being imprisoned. The indigenous resistance against colonialism in east and north Africa and southwest Asia, and the tens of millions Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Malaysians, Indonesians, Papuans, Thais, Bengalese, Indians, Filipinos, etc, who suffered both Japanese and western occupation. All of these struggles forgotten and erased, reduced to the USamerican, British, and sometimes French armies. Armies who advanced to witness a fraction of the suffering enabled and financed by their own states barely a decade prior. Even minor members of the western allies, such as Brazil, are often forgotten.

After the Holocaust was reduced to an unexpected and unprecedented event with no connection to reality, and after the struggle against fascism was reduced to the involvement of two or three countries, barely any fascists were punished. Anyone who wasn't a top official could claim to be simply following orders, even someone as important like Speer used this defence, he was allowed to live free and publish an autobiography in which he paints himself as the good Nazi, the mere architect caught up in a madman's rise. As if he ignored the plans for a future Berlin would be built by slave labor from the concentration camps, as if the minister of armaments from 1942 to the end did not know about the reliance companies like Krupp or Volkswagen had on slave labor. As if he didn't listen to Goebbels' speeches about total war and extermination and did not understand his armaments would be used. Some fascists were even integrated into the scientific and military spheres of the western allies, others given citizenship and a cushy home in places like Canada. Japanese fascists who had experimented on and tortured countless Chinese and Korean civilians and POWs to research chemical warfare were offered amnesty in exchange for the knowledge they gained doing these experiments. After German reunification, more eastern queer people were imprisoned than fascists were incarcerated or executed at the Nürnberg trials.

After fascists were exonerated and shamelessly integrated into the western states, and after some time passed, the war was turned into a cultural product. Countless war movies were produced, almost always showing usamerican soldiers in the European or Pacific front fighting a mindless horde with hakenkrauzs on their armbands all lead by a single man, or group of men, ontologically evil. It was too complex to examine the actual reasons for the war. Hitler was simply a charismatic devil who had duped Germany into following him (crucially, he was only charismatic for germans. No true American patriot fell for his tricks). Gradually, the figure of Hitler was transformed into a devil in human form who had appeared in München in 1932 to cause evil and fight freedom.

As a result, German fascism and the Holocaust are nothing more but a historical fact you look at with morbid curiosity, to feel disgust, maybe anger, and sigh in relief that it would never happen again. There is no reflection on how it was allowed to happen, how antisemitism was used, like it had commonly been used throughout history, to blame for economic downturn and how the expropriation of jewish property, the enslavement of other minorities alongside them (Slavs, non-jewish poles, homosexuals, roma, communists...) and the rapid stimulation of a military industry was used to save an recessing economy. No examination of how the Nazi party appealed to the German petit-bourgeoisie and monopolies like the aforementioned Krupp, Volkswagen, or IG Farben, by attacking communists and trade unionists, who were beginning to organize at a bigger scale and actually threaten german capitalists. Instead, some even try to paint the nazis as communists or as similar to them, through terms like totalitarianism, which was popularized by Hannah Arendt, a fascist sympathiser who also saw fit to label decolonial struggles as totalitarian.

Even more insidious than this is how Hitler has been mutated into a shorthand for evil, an entity beyond a single man who personifies the collective hatred of minorities by Europeans, a condensation of centuries of hatred and exploitation into an angry man between 1932 and 1945. By doing this we can rest easy knowing there will never be another Hitler because we are so civil now. It was Hitler's speeches that guided every SS member's hand to execute tens of thousands. It was Goebbels' propaganda that clouded the judgment of the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers who looted and massacred their way through Europe. It was Himmler's threat that coerced countless germans to spy and tattle on their neighbors. It was Göring who convinced the Luftwaffe pilots to bomb and terrorize civilians. It was Dönitz who made the Kriegsmarine target civilian ships and ruthlessly pursue trade convoys. And it was ultimately Hitler who controlled these men, and no German had free will or political conviction between 1932 and 1945.

The peak of this attitude I see most in the internet: Do you want to learn about Hitler's Bunker? Hitler's enormous artillery pieces? Hitler's train? Hitler's plans? Hitler's wife? Hitler's army? Hitler's rise through the party? Hitler's veganism? Hitler's dog? Hitler's car? Hitler's Germania? Hitler's camps? Hitler's possible escape? Hitler's military career? Hitler's architecture? Hitler's political maneuvering in the interwar? Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Nobody wants to deal with the fact that Hitler was not omnipotent or omnipresent. He and his party was supported by German and western capital to oppose worker organization and to give an outlet to social tension around the inflating currency and failing economy. Just like in Italy and just like in Spain. Hitler is a cultural product sold to liberals so they can be reassured that they would never become evil. No liberal democracy has ever put an entire minority into concentration camps, no liberal democracy has ever used Zyklon B on dispossessed people, no liberal democracy has ever looted a conquered nation, no liberal democracy has ever killed workers for unionizing, no liberal democracy has ever used nationalism and supremacism to rally popular support, and a long etcetera.

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School domino effect with cereal's boxes

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Listen Up Columbia! — Portraits from a campus in crisis Photographed by Gabriella Gregor Splaver

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Schools have become shelters for surviving, not for education.

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Monday May 1.

May Day.

Today is a day that requires little introduction. It is #may day, otherwise known as #international workers day or Labour Day. Celebrated every year on May 1, or the first Monday of May, it marks a day of celebration and solidarity between laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement. It is a national public holiday in many countries across the world and has a fascinating, inspiring history. The Marxist International Socialist Congress met in Paris in 1889, where they established the Second International as a successor to the International Workingmen's Association. It was here they established a resolution for a "great international demonstration" to support demands for an eight-hour working day from the working classes. Today's date, May 1, was selected by the American Federation of Labor to mark a general strike in the United States. This strike began on this date in 1886, and subsequently became an annual event. In 1904, the Sixth Conference of the Second International called for "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace". But it is not just consigned to history, by any means, because #may day continues to this day.

There are strikes, marches, rallies, and protests across the world today marking May Day. The struggle continues, but today is also the celebration. Wherever you are across the world, and however you're spending International Worker's Day 2023, we wish you love, light, and solidarity in the fight for better. 

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Advice nobody ever asks for but every time I tell someone they find it extremely useful:

If you want to get rid of ants in your house mix a cup of icing sugar and a cup of potato starch 50/50 (dry, no water) and spread it near the holes where the ants get into your house. They won’t be able to separate the sugar and starch and will feed their larvae with the mixture. The starch will kill the larvae. So you won’t see results right away but if you keep it up you’ll get rid of them over a few weeks. I make a batch every summer to combat ants in my kitchen.

Because the mixture is non-toxic to humans and other mammals it’s perfect if you have children or pets. God knows my dogs eat anything on the floor and this way my only worry is they might get cavities if they get into my pest control powder.

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