#like. she can quote entire lines from a textbook she read and note the paragraph and page number.

[katierosefun]

[slams head on desk] god why can't i have a photographic memory

[davetheshady]

🌟 how about chapter 4 of waiting for the bus in the rain 🌟 and only partially because i showed up to yell about the last few paragraphs when it first dropped. also just because i love Julie content and it's the very middle of that fic

::blows dust off inbox:: So! Now that I’ve back from traveling through three countries and recovered from trying to leave most of my arm skin in one of them (PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: don’t go so fast you flip over on the Alpine Slide, particularly if you’re in the actual Alps) here’s some DVD commentary on Chapter 4 of Waiting for the Bus in the Rain! It’s chock full of my stylistic hallmarks, i.e. way longer than I expected.

(Note to my sister: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. GO READ MY STORY FIRST YOU LOSER)

There’s a Sheriff’s Secret Police officer outside Julie’s window. Considering she’s in her office on the second floor, this is fairly impressive. But when they scream and scrabble against the glass after accidentally kicking over their ladder for the third time, Julie’s had enough.

Even when they’re not under suspicion of using the scientific method, Julie has to deal with WAY more (attempted) surveillance than Carlos ever does. This is partially because she doesn’t have amazing hair, but also because Cecil doesn’t narrate large chunks of her life over the radio that the SSP can copy down and submit as a report.

vulnerabilities include fire and cold iron

and according to the literature high velocity cheese wedges but i’ve never seen anyone test that

My hand to God. Probably my number one complaint about fantasy as a genre is that everyone takes stuff from Celtic mythology so seriously when half of it is just. Completely bonkers.

Originally, most of the relevant exposition about fairies was provided by a different character entirely: Carlos-f’s misplaced smartphone, an AI who Julie called Hex (yes, like in Discworld, hell yeah science wizards) because she refused to give Julie her name. Hex provided such ringtones as “Dark Horse” and “Double Rainbow” and would occasionally get distracted by lists of numbers. Hmm… 

I changed it back because 1) it was a detour and this chapter was long enough already, 2) Julie and Carlos’ friendship is one of the main throughlines and having them talk to each other was better for the story, and 3) him texting during the middle of a battle is hilarious. But as far as I’m concerned, Hex is still canon. 

Andre yawns on the other end of the line and asks, “What time is it?”

“Quit whining, it’s only—” Julie looks at the clock.

Shit.

“—3:00 AM,” she finishes defiantly, because she still has her pride. Embarrassment pricks at her like flying embers settling on bare skin, because now Andre knows she was so out of it she didn’t even bother to try keeping track of the time, and he’s going to think she couldn’t sleep because of feelings, which is both correct and incorrect, because she wasn’t even trying to sleep since distracting herself by going over the minutiae of their data while the Sheriff’s Secret Police scream and fall in the bushes is better than listening to her cats prowl around while lying in her quiet apartment by herself, and any moment now he’s going to feel bad and decide to humor her and answer her in a voice filled with cloying pity and say—

“Would Hiram McDaniels count as one respondent, or five?” He yawns again.

A good chunk of Julie’s inner turmoil just, like, boils down to a recurring loop of that Tim Kreider quote about “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” She doesn’t consciously WANT the rewards of being loved, it just kind of… happens… and then she’s stuck with incredibly loyal life-long friends… and now she not only has to deal with her own feelings but theirs too, which is pretty much her worst nightmare… 

Fortunately, since she’s already gone through the mortifying ordeal of being known, they do frequently pull through and offer the kind of support she knows how to accept. 

“Give TV’s Frank a kiss for me.”

“I’m not kissing my cat for you,” says Julie.

I mean, she’ll kiss the cat. Just not on request. 

And yes, all her cats are named after the Mad Scientists’ sidekicks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. ~foreshadowing~

When she opens the door of her workshop later that morning, she finds that someone has been by to leave her a breakfast tray. Well, “tray”, in that it’s a textbook, and “breakfast”, in that it’s a French press, a stale churro, and her blood pressure medication. But the French press is completely full with still-warm coffee, so overall she’s going to count this as a win.

This appeared pretty early in my drafts: it’s just such a funny mental image to me and also encapsulates Julie and Gary’s relationship pretty well, i.e. a string of question marks who somehow get along.

The naturally suspicious part of her wonders if he deliberately provoked her reaction to the flamingo to gather more information about it. The naturally analytical part of her points out that Carlos is more likely to gnaw off his own hand than put someone in danger, especially when he could just put himself in danger instead.

Julie is just a tad cynical, so she’d definitely think of potentially negative interpretations of her friend’s actions. But it’s not actually a possibility she dwells on in any real sense, and every time she interacts with Carlos-f (not to mention Carlos-0) she trusts him implicitly. She wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but she considers Carlos one of the few genuinely good people in the world: not because he never makes mistakes or creates personal disasters, but exactly because of those things. She knows he’s a flawed person, and that everyone is flawed, so that makes him genuine – which means every time he’s tried to do the right thing at personal cost, over and over, that was genuine too.

Basically, there’s a reason why in the last chapter she automatically references “scientist means hero” with “Fuck, I’m turning into you!”

“So,” she says. “Nilanjana. Do you need new pronouns, or anything?”

“Does anyone need any pronouns?” asks Gary contemplatively, which Julie takes as a ‘No’.

“Should I drop ‘Gary’ entirely? Do you want me to change your name in our paperwork?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “I don't know, man,” he concludes. “I don’t really believe in labels.”

Gary has galaxy-brained from “gender is a social construct” straight to “identity is a social construct” and beyond. 

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Julie.

“I think so, Dr. K,” says Gary. “But how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of capri pants?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ

What happens when the wave function ψ is the same as the physical system it describes, and what happens when that physical system collapses?

i.e. what would happen if common misperceptions of the Observer Effect were actually the correct perceptions?

Julie can’t help it: she snorts. “Passionate? Me?”“Well, yeah,” says Romero. “You really care about the things that interest you. You get really involved and angry and never quit or back down.”“Oh,” says Julie, then blurts, “You like that I’m angry?”“I… don’t like it when you’re unhappy?” says Romero. “But – it’s part of you, so… yeah, I guess I do, because it’s how you are. Why? Is – is everything okay?”She’s spent a lifetime having people tell her to stop being angry. No one’s ever told her she’s fine the way she is.

There have been many, many, MANY thinkpieces about how women are socialized not to express anger, often even to themselves. That was never going to work for Julie, who after all is powered by constant low-level rage, but that just means she had to deal with the backlash from not adhering to social programming instead (on top of additional backlash from being a woman in a male-dominated field). Of his own free will, Romero not only rejects that social programming, but also clearly spent time thinking about her empirically to determine that her anger is a positive force instead of a random and horrible personality trait.

He’s a Good Dude.

When she was in elementary school, her third grade teacher had been fond of saying, “If you’re bored, it means you have no imagination,” at least until Julie had decided to deal with her boredom after finishing her science assignment, her homework, and the rest of the textbook by seeing what happened if you jammed a paperclip into the electric socket. (The answer was certainly not boring and, in fact, probably the most exciting and practical thing they learned that year.)

That used to be my aunt’s favorite saying. I personally did not copy Julie’s response, but it is based on research done by one of my friends. (It’s okay, he was very careful about safety and made sure to use rubber-handled scissors to poke random bits of metal into the outlet. Apart from a classmate’s socks catching on fire, everyone was totally fine.)

She wakes to the sound of Cecil talking about the other week’s marathon, which may or may not have been mandatory, whoops. Carlos has texted her an emoji of various hadrosaurids gathered around a campfire singing “We Are the Champions”.

PREVIOUSLY IN NIGHT VALE:

EXT. - THE LABS

Thousands of citizens stream down Main Street, driven relentlessly forward to the Narrow Place. The Harbingers of the Distant Prince hurl themselves towards the building again and again, only to be rebuffed by the wards. Charred corpses lay scattered around the perimeter. Green storm clouds gather overhead as their anger grows. 

INT. - LAB ONE

ANDRE

Did you hear something?

JULIE

[not looking up from her welding]

No.

 Carlos, meanwhile, has NO idea his emojis are not in fact standard. 

“I liked him,” says Josie. [...] “He was trying to do… something, I forget what. I hope he figured it out.” At Julie’s incredulity, she says, “Some people, they’re rough around the edges, but they try. They hope for something better and keep going. That’s important.”

“What if you go where you’re not supposed to?”

“Then you come back and fix what you can,” says Josie.

“What if you can’t?”

“Then you find someone to help you,” Josie replies. “Oh! I love this song.”

She turns up the volume of the radio and treats everyone to the aria from Shastakovich’s Paint Your Wagon.

Vocals by L. Marvin

Angels chilling at your house are, of course, part of the standard retirement package for former Knights of the Church. Old Woman Josie used to carry Esperacchius and passed it on to the Egyptian, after which it went to Sanya. She and Shiro were buds and saw Elvis in Vegas (and also, interestingly, several times in the Ralphs).

Anyway, if you want to suggest that a character is subconsciously mulling over an issue, I recommend having them ask some leading questions without describing their reactions and then change the subject.

“It’s come to my attention,” she begins, then has to stop and clear her throat again. “It’s come to my attention that we have a pretty good thing going on. So I was just wondering if you’d like to keep doing this, you know. For the indefinite future. With me.”When he doesn’t say anything, or look at her, or move at all for that matter, she removes her hand from under her thigh where she’s been sitting on it and points at the lease. “I highlighted where you have to sign,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you wanted to.”

I think this is the only time we see Julie nervous about anything when her life is not actively in danger.

You can’t write a romance arc without including some degree of emotional vulnerability – it just wouldn’t be satisfying. On the other hand, how that emotional vulnerability manifests is REALLY dependent on the person, and if you don’t base it firmly in their character it wouldn’t be satisfying, either. (I’m REALLY picky about romances in part because of this.) Julie’s not the type to pine or swoon or be filled with self-doubt*, but she is bad at feelings, and unfortunately, she’s determined that an equitable relationship with Romero requires some kind of tangible, committed expression of them. So she does that as best she can. It’s not actively harmful to her, but it does require a stretch out of her comfort zone. 

* ::cough::Carlos::cough::

Yes, Julie has technically registered their equipment with City Hall, in that they’re listed as alternatively “electronic abaci” and “databases” and she’s claimed they only use the internet for checking email. Until now, they’ve coasted on general good will towards Carlos/his hair and the fact that all authority figures have been functionally electronically illiterate since the Incident in the community college’s Computer and Fire Sciences building.

Look, I could have SWORN there was an Incident at the Computer and Fire Sciences building specifically mentioned in canon. Can I find it anywhere? No. Did I listen to an episode that was subsequently erased from history? Possibly.

This time, someone picks up. There are a few seconds of sleepy fumbling, followed by “Hello?” in more vocal fry than voice.“Cecil!” she says. “Is Carlos there?”“Are you in fear for your life from the long arm of the law?” Cecil mumbles.

her current ringtone

“Julie, I said hold on!”“I am holding on,” she snarls as the rumbling stops. “It’s a diagnostic. 75% efficiency? Am I the only one who cares about proper maintenance in this town?”

This combines two of my favorite things: people focusing on hilariously inconsequential details during a stressful situation, and Julie lowkey engaging in supervillainy. Nikola Tesla did not design earthquake machines so Night Vale could install shitty ones they can barely use. STANDARDS.

“I probably wouldn’t have destroyed Weeping Miner,” she says eventually.

“I know,” says Carlos.

“I could have, though,” she says.

“I know that too,” says Carlos.

[...] Carlos shifts. She looks over; he briefly catches her eye and says, “So could I.”It’s not the same. Carlos would probably feel bad about it, for one. But she feels some of her anger dissipate anyway. At least she’s not the only one dealing with this bullshit.

Subconscious concern --> conscious concern! Getting back to Julie’s cynicism: she doesn’t think there are very many good people in the world, and that excludes her too. Sure, she’s risked her life to save others, fight baddies, and make sure the dangerous technology she’s developed doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, but she knows she has selfish reasons to do them, like protecting her friends and making sure the town/world isn’t destroyed so she can keep doing her research.

But at the same time, the fact that she has been dwelling on the ethics of her situation ever since Chapter 19 of Love is All You Need, that she is genuinely bothered that she’d consider destroying a neighborhood, and that she’s talking about this with Carlos, who considers them to have a similar dilemma, suggests that deep down she is dissatisfied by her cynical model of the world because the data isn’t quite matching up. Which, of course, means she needs more data in the form of Chapters 6 and 7.

On one side is a large picture of Carrie Fisher giving everyone the finger

I think Space Mom is mandatory at protests now. 

This whole section (especially the rain) was heavily influenced by the March for Science, which both Ginipig and I went to in 2017. You too can make a difference and also give yourself writing material!

“Any more words of wisdom, Usidork?” she asks instead.

USIDORE, WIZARD OF THE 12TH REALM OF EPHYSIYIES, MASTER OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, MANIPULATOR OF MAGICAL DELIGHTS, DEVOURER OF CHAOS, CHAMPION OF THE GREAT HALLS OF TERR'AKKAS. THE ELVES KNOW HIM AS FI’ANG YALOK. THE DWARFS KNOW HIM AS ZOENEN HOOGSTANDJES*. HE IS ALSO KNOWN IN THE NORTHEAST AS GAISMUNĒNAS MEISTAR AND HAS MANY OTHER SECRET NAMES WHICH YOU DO NOT… YET… KNOW.

* Hoobastank

He blinks at her in polite incomprehension. “I don’t want to miss the Life Raft Debate,” he says. “It’s important to support your department.”

Several universities hold yearly Raft Debates, where representatives from the different disciplines have a debate about which of their respective areas of study is the most vital for humanity and thus should get to take the one-person life raft back to civilization from the desert island they’ve all gotten stuck on.

I should inform you that at my alma mater the Devil’s Advocate, who argues that none of the subjects are worth saving, has won multiple times.

Without taking her eyes off her opponent, Romanoff thrusts out her hand. Dr. Aluki Robinson (Associate Professor of Ornithology) passes her a harpoon, its ivory barbs almost glowing in the dim light.

Nauja and Aluki are both from Cold Case, because no one deserves to be stuck in Cold Case where we’re apparently supposed to be deeply concerned about the main character’s sexual experience but only vaguely perturbed by the powerful white and white-coded women stealing Native American children to brainwash them to their culture so they can be fed to the system seriously WHAT the FUCK Jimbo

ANYWAY, in this universe the Winter fey of Unalaska are discharging their obligations to help the Winter Court against Outsiders by sending some of their people to monitor the prison in Night Vale. This also gets to highlight the fun of an unreliable narrator! Julie is generally not one of those, because she’s a smart and observant person who will happily question everything, but even she has her limits when she’s out of her element. In the case of this story, there are several minor details to suggest there is some Winter and Summer court drama going on in the background (the chlorofiends, an entire academic department of shapeshifters, Molly and Mab personally overseeing bus routes) and most of it just goes completely over her head.

During his undergraduate career, Gary had elicited a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about his desire to be exempted from lab regulations for wearing appropriate – or any – footwear in the lab, which evolved into a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about whether wrapping your feet in duct tape immediately before said lab time constituted appropriate footwear.

This was based on one of my mother’s students, who eventually resolved the situation by commissioning a handmade pair of moccasins he placed on his feet immediately before entering the lab.

“The scientific method is four steps,” says Carlos with a cheerful inevitability as the officers start shouting panicked instructions into their walkie talkies. “One, find an object you want to know more about; two, hook that object up to a machine using wires or tubes; three, write things on a clipboard; four, read the results that the machine prints.”

This is a direct quote from the book. Was this entire subplot about the scientific method ban designed just to come up with a plausible retcon for why someone with actual scientific training would announce this over the radio? It sure was!

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD:

1. “Step one, cut a hole in the box,” calls Wei.2. “No, step one is collecting underpants,” says Gary.3. “Step four: make a searching and fearless moral inventory,” says Julie.4. “And then step five, acceptance,” Andre finishes.5. “You see, the first level is ennui, or boredom. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific – nostalgia, love-sickness… At more morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. A sick pining, a vague restlessness. Mental throes. Yearning. And at the scientific method’s deepest and most painful level, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.”6. “It’s how you decide whether to fix the problem with duct tape or WD-40,” says Julie.7. “I think,” says Osborn, “that it’s a divine machine for making flour, salt, and gold.”

8. “Don’t be absurd,” says Galleti. “The scientific method is two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert!”

9. “And they say the scientific method is—”

“—the quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends,” puts in Dr. Chelsea Dubinski, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

10. “Or is it the special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do?” asks Galleti.

This section was also a chance to write about the rest of Night Vale’s scientists, of whom we still know so very little. There’s enough of them that there’s a whole science district, and the community college seems pretty well staffed, but the fact that Carlos made such an impact when he rolled into town suggests that they were either pretty lowkey or indistinguishably weird from the rest of the town.

“I don't feel alone,” snaps Julie. “I feel like shit, and I know why I feel like shit, and the thought of outlining that in excruciating detail is, oddly enough, not making me feel any better!”

One of the things I wanted to address in this story (inspired by Ghost Stories, which I uhhhhh did not care for) was the shortcomings of a lot of narratives about grief. Because many of them are not only oversimplified, but also not everyone processes grief in the same way. It’s not necessarily a linear narrative of where you go through the five steps and then you’re totally over it: it might take a long time, or you might be fine until some other, unrelated setback triggers you, or it might be a cyclical process as anniversaries roll around. Grief lingers. Related to that, helping people deal with their grief isn’t always as simple as sitting down with them and offering a sympathetic ear. Some people don’t process their feelings well verbally, and the emotional labor of formulating all your grief for another person’s consumption can be nearly as traumatizing as grieving in the first place, and VERY difficult to do when you’re already feeling down.

On top of that, I think general American culture is just. Real bad at dealing with grief. Which means we don’t have many positive models to base our responses on, either as grievers or as people supporting the grieving, and if you don’t fit those models at all it just makes the process that more difficult because everyone’s stumbling around in the dark.  

“Does it always feel like this?” she asks.“Which part?” asks Carlos.“We won,” says Julie. “Methods have lived to science another day. We can do our work without interference. All we did was lie about what the name meant, but…” She taps the lab table with a pencil. Another secret violation of the law. “It still feels like we… lost something.”“We did lose something,” says Carlos. “It was just a name, but names are important.”

One of the reasons I love writing Carlos and Julie’s friendship so much is because it’s such a relationship of equals. They’re both hypercompetent, pragmatic, and a little ruthless; their skill sets don’t have much overlap (at least, not yet) and their personalities aren’t at all similar, but they get each other and it’s so sweet. When they wander out of their respective areas of expertise, or stumble across some kind of dilemma, they feel comfortable asking each other for guidance – they can admit their ignorance and drop their public facades of Having Their Shit Together because they trust each other. 

“I want—” Her mouth opens and shuts again, wordlessly. Her scowl deepens.Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

Molly being a huge Trekkie is pretty much my favorite thing from Ghost Story (not to be confused with Ghost Stories)(although thinking about it, swapping their plots would be kind of amazing??), so of course I wanted her and Julie to interact in a way that showed off what huge nerds they are.

But yet another element I wanted to include in this story is the background detail that ~the masquerade~ must be maintained because it’s too dangerous for humanity as a whole to be fully cognizant of the supernatural – which tends to get a little lost in the sauce, because the supernatural is consistently super duper powerful and our heroes (most of them pretty supernatural themselves) generally avert disaster by the skin of their teeth. But here’s Julie, just a regular human who’s capable of producing terrifying technology, has no concern for the rules and traditions of ancient regimes unless they’re inconveniencing her, and who would be perfectly fine with upending the status quo just to see what happens. Regular humans just aren’t more flexible about change than the supernatural, they’re even curious about it sometimes – which must be terrifying to something like the Winter Court, which has been devoted to maintaining the same strict balance since forever. Regular humans can do stuff like tell a story so well it inspires the Winter Lady to subvert her magical restrictions and remind her of her own humanity.

Julie grumpily emails him a rough summary of her thoughts on Troy Walsh and her conversation with Molly and heads up to her office to pull up everything she has on both the bus garage and the man in the tan jacket.

Bullshit secretkeeping (“I can’t tell the other main character this important plot point, it’s better if they don’t know”) is one of my least favorite tropes and I avoid it at all costs. It’s such a stupid way to add tension. It can maybe work once, but after your character has inevitably watched it backfire spectacularly, you can’t repeat it ever again unless you want to imply they’re a dumbass who never learns from their own mistakes and apparently doesn’t care that it clearly puts everyone in more danger. ::looks pointedly at a certain book series::

Also, it’s almost always much more interesting to have characters try to share important information. If they don’t succeed, it coats everything in ironic horror as the outcomes one person tried to avoid happen despite their best efforts. If they do succeed, it means everyone is fully cognizant of the potential danger even as they are still prevented from acting on it properly, like because they (e.g.) get kidnapped in the middle of the street. 

King City is not in the correct dimension. The man in the tan jacket seems to know something about this, but up until a year ago he wasn’t drawing attention to it. He was busy poking his nose into everyone’s business, ingratiating himself with the powerful and the influential, dealing with them in secret…basically, the SOP of your typical Night Vale authority.Like the Night Vale Area Transit Authority, with its bus route to… King City.They had a job and they chose to keep it, Molly said.“Fuck,” says Julie. “He was working for them!”

In retrospect, it’s hilarious to me how much of this fic was powered by spite. Ghost Stories and Cold Case both really bothered me. The resolution of the Man in the Tan Jacket storyline, meanwhile, felt pretty underwhelming – not because what Finknor came up with wasn’t interesting, but because it barely engaged with the few plot points they had already established. Like, when TMITJ shows up in the podcast he interferes with the Mayor, he’s connected to the city under Lane Five, he surfaces during the Strex Corp arc, he interacts with a whole bunch of series regulars in an ominous fashion… Yeah, that probably came from Finknor dropping him in more or less at random, but the end result was that during the first several years of the show it seemed he was an active driver of whatever his plot was supposed to be. In WTNV: The Novel, though, he’s much more reactive and impotent. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad if this change was acknowledged as part of his storyline, but… it’s not… 

(And I get that it can be difficult to come up with a plot for an element you didn’t intend to be plotty at all, but like: there wasn’t THAT much material they had to account for. I should know, I had to look it all up to write THIS story.)

I think this was especially frustrating because it ends up feeling like a “have your cake and eat it too” on the part of Finknor: it’s not automatically bad when fans care more about the show’s continuity than the creators (creators have different concerns, and a lot of time that means they’re using the creative latitude to do something neat), but the novel was very much presented as “finally, a resolution to that one mystery you find cool!” which is… pretty much a direct appeal to the fans’ care about the continuity. So to then ignore or retcon so many aspects of the continuity without any story payoff for it feels like a cheat. 

(Ultimately, though, my inspiration to actually sit down and write mainly sprang from 1) all the lovely comments about how so many people loved my OFC, which as someone who started lurking in online fandom in the early 2000s was both mind-boggling and heartwarming, and 2) lol those ladies have the same name. I learned nothing.)

She gets the call at 21:27. She goes to the hospital, although there’s not much point. The human mind is the most powerful thing on the planet and it's housed in a fragile casing of meat and bone.

I’ve mentioned a few times (possibly more than a few)(probably more than a few) that I didn’t like the WTNV live ep Ghost Stories, and that’s because the ~big reveal~ is that Cecil’s story was actually about a personal family tragedy, and once he’s able to admit that, everything is hunky-dory. As I recall, it went something like this:

WTNV: hey remember that time your mom died and your family was thrown into chaos

ME: WELL NOW I DO

WTNV: and on that note, good night everyone!

Needless to say, everything was not hunky-dory. 

But on top of being emotionally compromised for the whole following week, I was also professionally annoyed. Prior to this live show, we’d had a few cryptic references to Cecil’s mom and could reasonably infer that his relationship with his sister was strained. Critically, though, neither was their own clearly-defined character (compare to the treatment of Janice or Steve Carlsberg), these were not frequently recurring elements that would suggest they weighed heavily on Cecil’s mind, and it wasn’t even obvious that their backstory WAS particularly tragic. So the emotional lynchpin of this live show was mostly new information about Cecil regarding characters the audience had no connection to.

Tragic narratives are powerful not only because they evoke intense emotions, but also because those emotions are supposed to go somewhere and do something: provide catharsis, reinforce the artist’s philosophy, make the audience ponder the meaning of life... In using a tragedy as a plot twist, your ability to give it the proper emotional arc is very limited, because you have to misdirect from its existence while building it up, and then quickly progress from upsetting emotions to those more appropriate for concluding the story. That’s not impossible, but Ghost Stories immediately throws a wrench in the works by splitting the audience’s emotional journey away from Cecil’s: he already knew about the tragedy and the people involved with it, so the plot twist acts as his emotional catharsis... but only his. When the twist itself is the first time the audience realizes there ARE emotions, and that the first 85% of the show was completely unrelated to them, there’s simply not enough time for the audience to have them, process them according to the story’s weird ramblings that kinda imply fiction based on real life is more important than genre fiction like horror (PS: that’s a WEIRD take for a fictional horror podcast), and reach their own kind of catharsis without it being horrifically rushed. Particularly when they’re having a WAY more emotional response than the character due to their own personal tragedies which they were not expecting to have to think about during a fun podcast live show about ghost stories.

As stuff like this points out, you can’t just sprinkle in character deaths and expect quality entertainment to sprout: there has to be a purpose to putting the tragedy in the story (even if that purpose is to highlight how purposeless tragedy can be in real life). I’ve always been VERY critical of the assumption that tragedy is ~more artistic~, both in historical lit and modern pop culture; sad emotions aren’t inherently more meaningful than happy ones. Merely including tragic events isn’t deep; you have to do the work and make it deep, in its context and development.

So: on to ::gestures proudly:: probably the worst thing I’ve ever written!

From an aesthetic standpoint, I leaned into the Night Vale house style in this section because I found it to be really effective at conveying the enormity of the tragedy for Julie: it’s pretty blunt, just like her, but the focus on oddly specific details, the narrative distancing, and the lurking sense of existential horror seemed a fitting demonstration of how badly the emotional gutpunch disrupted her narration/life. 

And I really wanted it to be an emotional gutpunch. (But not a surprise: even if I hadn’t warned for it specifically, Julie mentions Romero dying all the way back in Ch. 10 of Love is All You Need.) This is in part a story about grief and mourning, so the loss that caused it needed a central place. I wanted it to be powerful enough to retroactively fit in with how upset Julie is in the opening chapters and to add real tension to the devil’s bargain the feds want to make with her in the next chapter. But most importantly, I wanted it to be so significant to both Julie and the audience that the end of the story has an impact. Loss doesn’t get “cured” – but it seems to me like it’s not supposed to be. Loss is a part of life; love, in whatever form, helps give you strength as you grow and change from the experience into someone new, and this is also a story about the love in friendship.

I think a lot about the ethics of writing tragic stuff, because when you get right down to it, ultimately art boils down to poking your fingers in someone’s feelings and stirring them around. People get really invested in the stuff you are responsible for creating, and making someone feel bad for no reason isn’t being an artist, it’s being a dick. But I’m very happy with how this turned out, and hopefully didn’t traumatize anyone who didn’t want to be traumatized.

(I do feel bad for everyone who was reading as I posted that had to wait an entire year for the next chapter, though. I wanted to get something up sooner, but I had to wait until I sorted Chapter 6 and Chapter 6 was just. The worst. WORDS ARE HARD. People who read WIPs are braver than any Marine.)

hmu for more dvd commentary!

[riikkamhaynes-blog]

👏Book review👏 or analysis... whatever

Koston enkeli (the angel of revenge) by Juha Ruusuvuori (published 2014)

The table of content

Introduction (synopsis)

No spoiler review (the writing, dialogue, the pacing + ending, the characters)

Spoilery overview of the plot

The bullshit

Things I liked

What can the writers learn from this?

My rating

Recommendations

Introduction

I found this book in my local bookstore. It was on sale for five euros. It would’ve been around 30 on normal occasions. The cover was cool, the name was intriguing and the price was fair. This book promised to be a psychological thriller about gender roles and the downfall of relationships. Keep that in mind...

My thoughts on it?

Synopsis

The book has two main protagonists; Mia and Harry. They are an old married couple. Mia hears a rumor that Harry could have cheated on her with another younger woman. The prologue shows a murder taking place. Neither the victim nor the culprit is named and their identities are completely ambiguous.

It’s essentially a psychological whodunnit story.

The book is written in Finnish and, as far as I know, hasn’t been translated into English. It’s not a big loss if you ask me.

Non-spoiler review

The chapters were written in a bizarre style. There were no spelled out chapter breaks. There was nothing where you would see “chapter 1, chapter 2, etc”. It may not sound like a lot but it does make a difference when you’re reading. Did I like it?

Look, this format is actually quite common in some nonfiction books but this is the first fiction I’ve read that utilizes it.

Since it is a mystery, I don’t mind an ambiguous narrative and a different format, in fact, if done right, it would enhance the story. I just didn’t like it in this book.

Now, I’m not saying that this failed entirely. The format did help the ambiguity of the story, even if the way it did that was by confusing the f*ck out of me. It almost merged the two POV characters into one. It might have worked.

I do question the need for this formatting choice. I personally didn’t care for it. My main problem is that I don’t feel like this book really benefited from it. I do not think it would’ve made a difference if the book was formatted normally. It was just a big meh for me.

The writing

I have no problems with the actual writing. I found it to be quite wonderful and vivid (even though the book didn’t really describe the setting). The sentence structure was okay (in a way that the length varied). The lack of adverbs was delightful. 

What I’m trying to say is that the writing was simply

The Dialogue

It was written in a way that turned it into blocks of unintelligible garbage.

For some unknown reason to man, this author decided not to include ANY dialogue tags. It was just as confusing as it sounds. I found this to be incredibly hard to follow. I don’t that style added anything to the narrative.

More than that, I feel like this style took away from the entertainment value. I love dialogue. It brings the characters alive... but not when it’s written just as another paragraph.

The dialogue was written as the characters telling the reader what was said.

Example:

I told Harry that I was down to fuck if he did the dishes. He told me that he would see to it as soon as we left the funeral.

(That never happened in the story, don’t worry.)

I think that type of dialogue is okay when used when it needs to be used (like in small talk and greetings). It, however, does take away from the showing aspect of the story. We all know that you should show, not tell and this type of dialogue tells. It breaks the immersion when used with conversations that would be better when shown.

There is another problem with this writing choice.

Dialogue helps to break up the normally bland look of the page. Let me show you what I mean by examining these two pages (u don’t gotta read them):

Isn’t that just beautiful? Doesn’t it make you ooze with anticipation to read it?

Then check this out:

The latter one looks way more appetizing. The chances are that you even tried to read specific parts in it. This is because most humans don’t digest big chunks of information easily. I’m not saying that you NEED to have dialogue on every page, in fact, you shouldn’t have it in just to fill space.

That being said, an entire book made out of bricks of plain text with nothing to break it up is going to drive not just the characters to homicide, but the reader as well.

(Both of the examples I gave were of fictional texts so the argument that one is meant to be factual will not hold. Even with textbooks that are meant to convey information, the text shouldn’t be a brick wall because it hinders the amount of information the reader is going to actually pick up. The page is often broken up in textbooks with diagrams and pictures.)

You can also break up the text by doing certain parts in different styles, eg bold and italic. I use this a lot to highlight certain words and sentences so that the reading experience is more interesting.

Conclusion:

Avoid big blocks of bland text because the human subconscious doesn’t find them visually interesting and can often be put away by it.

On a side note; if you plan to have a no-dialogue book, at least break it up in the writing formatting. I would be careful with a no-dialogue book since it’s hard to pull it off. It would put a lot more focus on your writing ability and all of your weak points in writing would pop up like a line of motherfucking erections.

(Not everyone is affected by the bricks as much as others are. I would be wary of it but you definitely shouldn’t freak out if you have it in certain parts of your manuscript. Just make sure that the whole book is not made out of it.)

The pacing

The book was an easy read partly due to the fast pacing. The start was fast and the snippets to the murder helped to keep the reader interested. I didn’t notice any inconsistencies until the very end of the book.

Ah, the ending. The most important and meaningful part of a book... I am disappointed.

We all know what the three-act structure is. It is universally the most popular guideline for the pacing, tension-building and story structure. In essence, tension should rise as the story nears the end. There is a big climax and then everything is tied together, the reader left satisfied.

That’s how it went here, riiigghhhht?

It felt flat.

The author clearly tried to set the tension up, but it failed because we were given too much information and the events leading up to it were unrealistic.

The ending felt flat party because we knew what to expect. And although we didn’t know for sure whodunnit, we knew pretty much what else would have to happen before the end. To me, it felt like the author didn’t put that much effort into making the ending surprising.

He made it clear who was going to die and the only “surprise” was the killer (but it feels like I’m picking at straws when I call that a surprise). It was quite clear that he thought he was being smart by writing it the way he did, but I’m not buying it.

For me, it felt like the pacing was the highest at the start and the middle and that the ending was like a depressing mudslide.

It also felt like there was no structure in the story. I couldn’t pick up when each act was ending. It was confusing.

The characters

One is a cheating whore, the other one is a paranoid cunt.

The paranoia I can understand but it became unhealthy real quick and the cheater turned out to be a huge prick out of the blue (this person was portrayed as a reasonable person prior to the reveal so it didn’t make sense).

I did actually like seeing these two people descend into complete madness. I can give that to the book. Their psychological journey was fun to watch even if there were big parts of the book that let me down.

I enjoyed both viewpoints and it was a very entertaining read. I didn’t personally like either of the POV characters but I can forgive that because they kept me interested.

This book only had two side characters. Their personalities were consistent and reasonable. I could easily believe that they were real people.

The only character I didn’t believe could be a real person was the cheater as their personality kept on swinging and changing depending on the situation. They suddenly changed their morals without explanation. It was super inconsistent and could’ve been fixed by establishing their motives more clearly.

One of this book’s strong suits is the way the author wrote the characters. There was one big inconsistency, but everyone was written in a way that kept the reader interested.

Spoilers from here on out

Spoiler overlook of the plot

An unnamed person gets shot in an unknown location (a bible quote is cited by the killer)

Mia and Harry are having a family vacation. Mia finds out that Harry was seen speaking to another woman in a smoke break. 

Mia goes on a big manhunt to expose Harry and basically starts stalking him. 

They do a bunch of anniversary shit, have sex a couple of times, Mia is a possessive cunt, the story plays around with the whodunnit question (and whether Harry actually cheated or not).

Mia gets more and more paranoid because Harry smelled like perfume after he left a huge party (and other small things)... because that makes sense.

Harry is a cheating cunt, wow, who woulda thought...

Mia hires a private detective to catch Harry

Mia has a hissy fit and punches a mirror because she is salty of her fading looks and that her husband is going after a younger hot black chick

She is frustrated because nothing turns up from the detective instead of being happy

She fucks with the detective

Harry breaks up with Melissa (we find out that they were together for over a year...)

Mia and Harry come clean about their misadventures

Harry throws a hissy fit because Mia slept with another guy... once... when he slept with another bitch for over a year... classy.

They somehow live in peace for six weeks bc there is a time skip (because their life totally would be uneventful after a situation like that... and we as the reader don’t need to see that shit)

They try to live their life and everyone is jealous and angry

A person is seen going to a hotel and shooting Melissa

There is this weird time skip where we see Harry in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane and Mia goes out the see him... 

The end...

The bullshit

1. At first, I thought the author did the mystery well in a sense that we never knew for sure who it was, but then he kept on giving. He never stopped. He set up everything so clearly against Mia that we knew it was not going be her. We could tell that the killer would be the only character not presented as a suspect (Harry).

That is a classic strategy in mystery but it was overdone in this one.

It got to the point where everything was spelled out as a possible solution and I stopped caring. There was no tension because we knew too much. Please take notes because this happens all too often.

Give enough information so that the reader has questions. Don’t tell the answers to all possible outcomes and only leave the reader with “which one is it gonna be” because it will be boring. If we know what will happen with each option, we will not care about which one it’s going to be (since we basically know the ending in that instance).

Am I making sense? I hope so.

To be fair, the reader never knew for sure who the killer was and that did keep some “tension” in the story. I remember being like “ok, I know basically everything but I wanna keep going bc I wanna see which option the author picked.” It’s not a grand reaction to a mystery, but it’s something. It could’ve been worse.

2. The setting of the story is barely described. I get the point. It’s a psychological mystery. The story is about the journey of this couple. I do however think it’s necessary to at least let us know if it takes place in 2010 or 1960... To know the general time period would help us to relate to the characters more. Mia’s position and social standing would be way worse if it was the 60s whereas, in the modern day, she would be doing just fine.

Timelines are important in psychological stories because they tell a significant amount about how the character would interact with the world they live in.

3. Their relationship fell apart super fast. They have been together for over 20 years and a simple rumor from a shaky source was enough to break it up.

I call bullshit.

4. The book promised to talk about gender equality stuff but it never did. There were no scenes where Mia was treated badly or Harry being treated better. The story takes place in the modern day (I assume) Finland. If you’re gonna say that you will speak about sexism, at least pick a setting where it’s more common and a bigger problem.

A note from my reading diary:

Now that I think about it, maybe the gender role thing isn’t a troll. Mia is shown cooking and it’s made clear it’s unusual and that she is a bad cook. She is possessive, which is usually portrayed as a masculine trait. Then Harry is quite calm and collected, interested in reading and such, which is normally seen as feminine.

That was the only gender role thing I found from the book. I don’t need a book to speak about feminism but when it claims to touch the subject, I damn well expect it to do so.

I also feel like having a female character have masculine traits and vice versa isn’t enough material to claim that your book talks about gender roles. It’s not a big deal. If I have one gay character in my book, it doesn’t make it an LGBT themed book since it’s barely talked about in the context of the story.

My point is that I don’t feel this book has enough substance in it to claim it’s talking about gender equality. To me, it seems to talk about the psychology of murder more.

(I feel like I need to mention that this book was published in late 2014.  If I remember correctly that was around the time when the whole feminazi thing started becoming increasingly mainstream and talking about it would give you a shit ton of exposure. Maybe to mention gender roles as being a big part of the story was just a good marketing strategy. I don’t mean to offend the author, this is just a theory based on my experience of the book.)

5. We as a reader never got to really know the characters past. It might not be such a big deal to some people who are there for just the ride, but for me it really was disappointing. I feel like knowing their pasts would help to add some mystery because then the reader has to come up with how the past could affect their psyche today and thus add more to the psychological mystery of the story.

For a psychological story not to speak about the childhood of its characters is extremely weird and disappointing.

I feel like the book would’ve benefitted from letting the reader know.

6. This book introduced this big question of “did they do the cheating” and it was presented as the big thing only for it to be explained within like the first 60 pages. Umm. I feel cheated. pun intended.

I don’t think you should give the reader this huge mystery only to reveal it even before the middle. I totally took me off guard and I almost stopped reading because that was the thing I felt the book was presented as the most meaningful thing (ie, all the characters went on an on about the possibility and the wrongness of it).

The book is on thin ice. It needs to give me another big question that will make me want to read because right now I have the plot all figured out. Don’t pretend to be a mystery novel just to answer all the questions BEFORE YOU GET TO THE FUCKING MIDDLE PART.

~My reading diary

7. Mia is insanely paranoid and obsessive it has never before surfaced in their +20 year relationship? Bullshit. My reading diary really did summarize it the best.

Another thing I don’t really get is Mia’s obsessive and possessive behavior, more so how it hasn’t come up before. It’s made clear that they are older and have been together for a long time. How is this the first time she has gotten this suspicious? How have they not fallen out before? You need to keep in mind that so far, she has no actual evidence of him cheating? She only knows that Harry once spoke to a pretty girl on a smoke break. SO WHAT. Then he has come home and smelled like a woman's perfume, AFTER A PARTY. I don’t think that’s enough to accuse someone of cheating. You can only imagine how freaked out Mia would be when Harry is over at a woman friends house. If she gets obsessed with so little evidence, how have they stayed together for over 20 years??? I call that a plot hole. No rational man would let that slide. 

8. I didn’t like how this book made Mia the stereotypical older woman who is insecure about her fading beauty. WE NEED CONFIDENT OLDER WOMEN IN FICTION. PLEASE.

9. The fucking mirror smashing scene. I will let my diary speak for itself.

Mia undresses in front of a mirror. Her mind warps and she sees her body transforming into that of Melissa’s. She calls Mel a bitch and a whore. Classy. She seems to feel insecure about aging. Why can’t there be a story about older people feeling confident?? She’s not even old. She said that she’s 37. NOT OLD.  She also described Melissa as having a “cruel smirk”. Please don’t make Melissa a cold-hearted bitch. PLEASE. 

Oh, and Mia also punched the mirror. As you do. In fiction. WHY DOES EVERY ANGSTY BOOK HAVE MIRROR SMASHING IN IT?????? why. She didn’t even clean it up. She just went in and took a bath. And now she has a fever. Nice.

Harry is confused about how it happened. He thinks that Mia slipped but it’s obvious she hit the mirror. If her knuckles are bleeding and a mirror has been smashed, it would be obvious that she hit it. Am I slow or something?

omg. Mia is possessed by a demon. Harry was sulking about how “he is supposed to love Mia, why is everything like this all of a sudden” when he hears screaming from Mia’s room. She sits up, apparently still sleeping and says: “leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord”. OMG. She is insane. Citing the bible whenever she can is really creepy. How is Harry not scared for his life??? I WOULD BE HORRIFIED. Then Mia just falls asleep again.

10. A private detective was hired to catch a cheater. I have no words. It’s ridiculous.

11. Mia constantly slut shames this Melissa. I do not appreciate it. I can forgive it because Mia obviously is insane but it’s still annoying.

12. Mia sees cheating as an act of revenge. I can see where it’s coming from but I don’t believe a 40-year-old woman would think that. It’s something I can see angsty highschoolers doing...

13. Harry brought Melissa into a student cafe to break up with her. Where is the logic behind that? Then he has the audacity to freak out when people find out about his inappropriate relationship with a student...

14. The 180 Harry made. He started off as this rational dude. Then it just fell apart. We found out that he had been cheating on Mia for over a year. The Harry at the start of the story wouldn’t do that, then he gets pissed when Mia cheated once, SHE CHEATED ONCE AND HE IS HAVING A HISSY FIT. Bullshit.

His character didn’t regain any of his original traits. I think it’s bad writing. You want the characters to keep at least some of their original personality. 

Check out this video which explains it further:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9SK0Jhk7Pw

15. The six week time skip near the end makes no sense, serves no purpose and completely deflates the last bit of tension.

There is no way they could’ve been at peace for that long with nothing notable happening. Bullshit.

17. The tension deflated like a fucking limp cock around the middle and it never got up.  I feel like the author tried too hard to lure me in within the first 60 pages, and from there on the tension and my interest in the story plummeted. 

18. Conclusion. Harry was the killer. 

I hate it. There are so many things wrong with this...

The killer at the start cited a specific bible quote. Harry was in no way religious and NEVER cited the quote whereas it was almost like Mia’s motto. INCONSISTENT.

The killer at the start was highly religious (we could tell by their thought process bc it’s a 1st person). The only scene I remember Harry being religious is a throwaway sentence of him skimming the bible.

Harry was sane and his thought process wasn’t plagued by murderous thoughts, whereas Mia was going on and on about how she would murder for her loved ones and on some occasions, she even fantasized about murdering Melissa.

Mia had a bigger motivation to murder. She was cheated on for over a year, she has a grudge on Melissa (because she is more beautiful, younger and because Harry wants her more than he wants Mia), she is incredibly insecure, constantly feels like people are out to break her seemingly perfect marriage. Speaking of which, she holds her long-lasting marriage as a badge of honor and would do anything (kill) to keep it going. She is a control freak (as shown with her interactions with Harry) and she is extremely deranged near the time of the murder. 

Why would Harry kill Melissa? He wanted to make things okay with Mia, he is mad because Mia cheated on him once, that’s it...

Harry was extremely anti killing before the murder whereas Mia was all for it. It would take a lot to persuade him to do it and we know that his motivations are minimal. 

Harry being the killer (and it being written like this) breaks Mia’s character. Because he was the killer, Mia is simply a paranoid bitch who has wet dreams of murder. 

I’ve already mentioned that we got like no hints and clues that Harry would do it, whereas everything was set up against Mia. The conclusion was obvious. 

Things I liked

the start was good. I really liked the small snippets to the murder. It did keep me invested. This book started off strong. I was immediately invested in the story. I wanted to see who will kill who and if Harry actually cheated. Then the story went downhill.

The psychological journey of MIA, fuck Harry. He was a mess

Mia descending into madness

Mia being crazy for murder

Mia growing a backbone as the story went on

I want Mia to top me

What can writers learn from this?

when writing a mystery, don't make the characters do things that don't match their personality just because you need to confuse the reader. it’s bad storytelling and will break the reader's immersion.

Make sure that the characters arcs are finished and they have a proper conclusion.

you need to make sure that all of the clues you drop tie together. if they don't, the reader will feel like they were cheated on.

My rating

2/5 on Goodreads. 

Recomendation

I would only really recomend this if you wanted to study storytelling and what works and what doesn’t. I don’t think it’s a lifechanging book that you have to read. 

[itskateak]

LET’S TALK ABOUT MY HISTORY TEACHER

(Who is currently on administrative leave and is awaiting trial with the school district)

(TW: Abuse, animal abuse, police brutality, racism, implied (but wrongly) terrorism, politics, anxiety, panic attack mention, violence, religious entitlement. Please let me know if there are more.)

He is....so many things. Rude, self-entitled, racist, and disrespectful, to name a few. So, here’s the things he’s done.

• Banned Metal water bottles because someone accidentally made a noise with one, once. It wasn’t even that loud, nor long. Just a slight clink as they put the lid on.

• Told a story about a storm in Mecca (2015) that knocked over a crane onto a Mosque and it killed 107 people. Injured 238. This happened to occur on 9/11. He told us the story the day after 9/11 this year (2018) and ended it with “Weird, right?” and a sly smile.

• Told us multiple times to write in the textbooks, which is basically vandalism. Previous markings in the book show it isn’t the first time he’s asked this of students. I always refused.

• “Freedom of press, right? Except the press are in the pockets of the democrats.” A direct quote from him (I had begun writing down these types of things as they happened to give to the principal. This stuff happened daily).

• He once planned to show us a video of the Chinese police beating a man in the streets, despite all of us protesting verbally and profusely. He forgot, and didn’t show it, but to think he would’ve.

• He showed us a video of monkies domesticating puppies, which inevitably included animal abuse. Although it is just nature doing its thing and it isn’t a human abusing an animal, he should’ve given a warning so that us animal lovers could step out of the room. I felt sick afterwards.

• I was afraid of asking to leave class while having a panic attack because I thought he would tell me to sit down and not let me go. I had planned to just walk out - the counselor told me I could do that - but he did let me go without asking any questions.

• We watched a video about online privacy and how google created a separate search engine for the Chinese government. He slandered the company and said that they’re awful and guilty for supporting a dictatorship like that. While it isn’t a good thing to do what they did, yes, I don’t think he should’ve thrown his political views in like that.

• In that same topic, he mentioned one of the creators of the video was a Democrat who voted for Hillary. I found this comment odd, and called him out on it and asked what that had to do anything. His response ran something like this: “Well, it’s usually something liberals are concerned about and I think all parties and everyone should be concerned about.” That didn’t answer my question, nor did it come close to explaining why that guy’s political part and who he voted for had any reason to be included in the discussion.

• I doodle in class sometimes to help stay focused. I always have, and it’s always a good tactic. Especially when watching videos or listening to lectures. I draw circles, boxes, swirls, etc. Just mindless things. Well, one day, I’m drawing on a paper that happens to have a larger drawing on it. It’s in a different pen color than what I’m currently using, so it’s obvious I’m not drawing that. I have my notes page right next to me, and I’ve taken three or four notes already. He tells me to stop doodling at least three times - other kids are sleeping, or not doing anything - and every time I try to explain, he walks away. I approached him after class and explained, and he told me that I got a good grade on my last test, so he can’t exactly tell me I can’t draw in his class, but it better not affect my grade. I said it helps me to focus better. He responds along the lines of: “I mean, if you believe that lie about how your brain works, then I can’t stop you. But that’s not true.” I responded : “I think I know how my brain works, since I’ve been doing this since third grade and it hasn’t negatively impacted me yet.” And then I walked out of the classroom.

• He dictated how we did notes. No full sentences, only use the word “the” when absolutely necessary, no more than half a page, etc. It was ridiculous. I gave one sentence summaries of the two paragraphs in each eight sections. That was eight sentences. He told me it was too long, and that I shouldn’t be writing full sentences. I told him my brain doesn’t work that way, and it won’t help me if it isn’t in a full sentence. We argued, and I walked out of the classroom to go to my next class. We also turned in our notes each class, and didn’t get them back until after the relevant test.

• He once limited everyone to three bullet points per reading section (usually two or three pages). Everyone blamed me since he pointedly looked at me when saying “some people write full sentences and a full page.” To say I was popular in that class is a very wrong statement. Every time he would mention anything wrong that we’ve done with notes, everyone would turn to me. Thanks.

• I once wrote half of my notes on the Japanese in Japanese, and I got extra credit. I did it out of spite, but hey. Worth it. I also wrote incredibly long and complicated headers to spite him.

• We re-enacted the Trial Of Socrates, and as the attorneys, we spent time in the library researching. We had to write opening and closing statements, and a script for our witnesses to follow with our questions and their answers. At the trial, they were not allowed to have the script with them. Somehow we won, as prosecution, but it was still difficult since the witnesses had not done any of the studying of their roles at all, even though we insisted they should. So not only did we have to research the entire case itself, write an opening and closing statement, we had to research our three witness and write scripts they couldn’t use AND research the opposing team’s four witnesses (one being Socrates) and write counter arguments and cross examination questions. In a week.

• A kid once came in really late to class. He came in quietly, apologized for interrupting, and gave our teacher his pass. He went to sat down, and the teacher told him what page we were on. While pulling the textbook out from the metal cradle under the desk, it snagged and made a ringing noise. The kid, realizing quickly what it was, silenced it and apologized again. Our teacher kicked him out of class for “interrupting”, not allowing him to take the textbook. He missed the entire class.

• He has a quote on the board one day and we had to explain if we agreed or disagreed with it. (“I would rather entrust our government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the entire faculty at Harvard.”) I disagreed, naturally, and one of my friends explained most of my points. When asked to tell my side, I did say that she had said my main reasons. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but he looked me dead in the eye, and in front of everyone in the room asked: “So, you don’t care that they’re a bunch of liberal, champagne drinking jerks?” I was shocked, to be very honest. I kept my expression and voice even, and never broke eye contact. I responded: “If they do their job right, then no. I do not care, as long as they do their job and do it well.”

• Has spoken in ways that put his religion and beliefs above others. Comments like “When God made the world” and such were sometimes thrown in.

• Mispronounced multiple Greek Gods’ and Goddesses’ names. Such as Nike (uh-knee-kay), and Zeus (Zay-oos). I corrected him each time and each time he glared at me.

• He once tried to inform us that the reason Indian music sounded so strange was because they used the half-step intervals that we don’t have. I literally laughed so hard he paused the video and asked me why I was laughing. I had to explain chromatics to him. “We have them, we just don’t use them as abundantly or frequently in every song. It’s normal in Indian music to hear that.” He was still skeptical, even after I told him I’ve studied music theory in passing and have been in music classes for five years, and can read two clefs and can play two instruments.

• And now the finale, which got him suspended. This was not in my class, but this is what we were told happened. He held up a picture of a monkey and pointed to the only black kid in the class (we have very few in the school anyways) and said,”Look! It’s your ancestor!”

He will not be back to finish out this semester, and it doesn’t look good for him to come back next semester, if at all. I wrote all of these down with dates and my dad went to the principal with the list. If he does return next semester, it has been made abundantly clear that I am not to be in his class.

[haydenstudiesblog-blog]

Citing a (Literature) Paper

My professor began this discussion by saying these tips will hopefully be helpful in the future when we’re writing 5-10-15-page seminar papers. My heart sank to my butthole when she said that but I digress.

NOTE: In this post, the terms “in-text citations” and “citations” are used to describe the citations that appear in a paper, in the body of the text. When I start to refer to the part that is added to the end of the paper, the bibliography or works cited, I’m just going to call it Works Cited. I thought I would clarify so there is less confusion.

NOTE ALSO: Please take everything I say here with a tiny grain of salt. This is everything my professor told me in class, but every professor is different and she even admitted that it’s possible the MLA style could have been updated since she’d last checked and things could be slightly different now. In the end, it all depends on what YOUR professor personally prefers. So, when you are assigned a paper, don’t be afraid to raise your hand or approach your professor after class (it’ll only take a minute I swear) and ask for their preferences in some of the things I mention here. It’s always good to be sure.

How to Cite

When writing literature papers, it’s pretty known that the format is MLA style. However, double-check to make sure your professor/school does it this way. I don’t know of any place that uses a different style, but it’s still a good idea to check anyway rather than assume. You know what they say about people who assume.

When citing MLA style, in-text citations are typically: (AuthorLastName Page#) if that makes sense. The citation goes at the end of the sentence, outside of quotation marks and inside of punctuation. The citation itself contains no punctuation whatsoever, no abbreviations. Example: (Doe 3).

When it comes to a Works Cited, before you bust your ass creating one for every paper you turn in, ask your professor if you need one for your papers. I’m in two literature classes this semester. In one class, we write our papers on work from one anthology textbook the entire semester, and we don’t use any outside sources, which means our professor knows what we’re citing from. All we have to do is the in-text citations, no Works Cited. In my other class, my professor wrote up a bibliography online of all the readings. I think this was partially required on her part, because she took all of these readings and developed her own course packet so we’d have them all handy and not have to print every story we read. Anyway, she has a document filled with the bibliographies for everything we do and don’t have to write a paper on. Because of this, she said we don’t have to include the Works Cited, just the in-text citations. So definitely double-check with your professor and ask if they need a Works Cited for every paper you write in the class.

A great resource I highly recommend if there are more questions or if you’re brand spankin’ new to this would be OWL Purdue. It’s a great resource, I have yet to experience a professor who doesn’t recommend it. There you can find more help with in-text citations and instructions on how to create a Works Cited.

Now I’d like to get down to some nitty-gritty in-text citation stuff. It may seem irrelevant, but it’s all necessary for citing properly.

Paraphrase vs. Summary

Summary is commonly used for longer texts, such as an entire story. Paraphrase is used for shorter texts, such as a paragraph from previously mentioned story. Summaries do not need to be cited, and paraphrases...well, that depends.

Paraphrase Specifics

Paraphrase allows you to move between direct quotes (DQ) and your own words when talking about a certain aspect or part of the story (obviously this can all be used for essays and other forms of writing as well, I’m just using story as an example here, don’t feel limited).

Do you always have to cite it? Well. If you are unsure whether or not your paraphrase is too similar to the original line in the story, just cite it anyway. You can never have too many citations in a paper, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Just make sure you don’t leave it open-ended, meaning for every line a cited quote or sentence takes up, you should have two lines of opinion or reasoning behind or discussion about the citation. However, if you’re 100% confident in your paraphrasing abilities, you don’t need to cite a paraphrase unless it utilizes that mobility between your own words and a DQ.

Here is an example of paraphrasing, from Karen Joy Fowler’s “Heartland”:

Willina takes her life at the end of Heartland. She “[severs] . . . her heart and her head” (62).

There are a few things to address in this example.

The brackets: the word “severs” is inside brackets inside the quote. Why? Because while this word was specifically used in the story, it was used in a different form, sever or severed or severing. When you alter a word slightly from the way it appeared in the story, place it inside brackets to indicate this alteration.

The ellipsis: AKA the “three dots” that a lot of people don’t know the technical name for. Obviously these were not in the original sentence in the story. The ellipsis actually indicates omission; therefore, the ellipsis is put in the quote in place of unwanted or unneeded parts of the quote. The stuff you decided to leave out. The original line in the story was: “One night she put a noose around her neck and severed the connection between her heart and her head.” The first half of the quote wasn’t necessary, because it was paraphrased and accounted for. Therefore, that part of the quote can simply be left out and ignored. However, when writing this paper, it’s hard to think of a better word than “severed” to describe what happened here, so we keep the word, alter it a little with the help of the brackets, and then it’s time to deal with the rest of the sentence. Because we used a specific word from the quote, it needs to be included in the citation. But there are parts of that quote that we don’t need in-between “severed” and “her heart and her head” so what do we do? We take out the section in the middle that we don’t need and in its place we plop an ellipsis. This signifies that there is a portion of the quote missing, that we altered it to fit our needs.

The citation: While you hopefully took notice that the citation is outside of the quotation marks but inside of the punctuation, you may have also noticed that it only indicates a page number. Why is that? 

When talking about a piece of writing, in this case the story, we are only referring to one author the entire time. And we aren’t using any other sources in our papers, so it’s 100% clear who we are citing. Because of this, our professor informed us that we only need to mention the last name in a citation once in our papers. After that first regular citation (for example (Fowler 62)) we aren’t changing sources, so we can just include the page number in the parenthesis. 

Also, let’s say you’re talking about two authors. In the first paragraph you need to cite Author A, and you cite them a couple of times but you don’t cite the other author in this paragraph. In the first citation include Author A’s last name and page number and in the rest of the citations IN THAT PARAGRAPH you can shorten it to just a page number. However, in the next paragraph you need to start over again, even if it’s the same author you’re citing. It’s the same concept as citing only one author, but it’s condensed to paragraphs. If you are citing both authors in the same paragraph, just do the full citation and don’t risk it.

No page numbers: In one of my current literature classes, we use a course packet to do our readings. These readings were found online and printed out, which means some of them have page numbers and some of them don’t because they were originally just articles (example, we read Cat Person last week, no page numbers). While we don’t do papers on every single reading, we have had a situation where one of our readings didn’t have page numbers. Everyone in the class wrote in their page numbers themselves, since we didn’t have anything to use for our in-text citations. Our professor was cool with it and told us from now on to write in our own page numbers if there weren’t any provided.

**However, before doing ANY this, I would check with your professor and ask if that’s okay. Every professor is different, and the MLA style logistics change often enough that this could be slightly off. Also, different professors can just have different preferences, regardless of what is the “new” MLA style. Never just assume that your professor is cool with whatever you do; it’s best to ask first.

[bibliophileiz]

Charmed Labor Day marathon 2k18: Season 1, Episodes 3 and 9

Episode 3: "Thank You for Not Morphing"

There are no good gifs from this episode that I could find, so I'm just going to post this one from "The Wendigo."

Quick plot summary: Still trying to deal with their newfound witch powers, the Halliwell sisters are shocked when their estranged father, Victor, comes to town. Prue doesn't trust him, Piper is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and Phoebe goes out of her way to ignore the fact that she had a premonition of him stealing the Book of Shadows.

Watch notes:

This episode has the best dialogue.

- "Some of us have work." "Some of us have fun." "And some of us are having a really bad hair day." I feel like those three quotes perfectly summarize Prue, Phoebe and Piper.

- "Oh, so you're lawyers? And here I was thinking you were shape-shifters."

Prue's reluctance to go to the obnoxious neighbors' house party is #relatable.

Victor's last name is Halliwell in this episode, which makes no sense because Halliwell is the name passed down by the maternal line.

The Prue-Victor showdown in the living room, when he blames Grams for the ways their lives have turned out and tells them he wants them to give up their powers for their own protection, is excellent. Also, I think when he tells them, "They came for your mother" or "they killed your mother" or whatever it is he says is the first time we learn Patty was killed rather than drowned accidentally.

Were there actually home videos in the '70s??

Thoughts:

The plot of this episode is pretty meh. The shape-shifters are bland and forgettable, and while Victor is ok, James Read's performance in later seasons overshadows Tony Denison a lot. Chris Levinson, who wrote this episode, wrote Victor as pretty sleazy, and Denison definitely played him that way ... when he was bothering to act. The scene where the shape-shifter takes his form and the sisters have to figure out which of the two is their real father is stilted and awkward. I know not every TV actor can be Jensen Ackles or David Tennant in scenes where they have to play two different characters, but sheesh. Not only is James Read (who won't appear until Season 3, but will play Victor for the rest of the show) more talented, but he's more likable. His Victor is more laid-back, almost boyish and innocent, and altogether more charming.

The good things about this episode are the snappy dialogue -- or at least snappier than the previous ones -- and the emphasis placed on the Book of Shadows. This is the episode where we learn only the sisters can take the Book out of the house and that their powers are tied to it. If evil gets its hands on the book, the sisters are weaker. The book has been handed down through generations of their family, and the Halliwells are as connected to it as they are to each other.

Episode 9: The Witch is Back

Summary: Enemies of the Charmed Ones trick Prue into opening a 17th Century locket which was trapping Matthew Tate, the now 300-year-old warlock who betrayed Melinda Warren to her death during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Before she died, Melinda trapped Matthew in the locket, vowing that only her descendants would be able to free him. Matthew is now determined to steal the Charmed Ones' power and kill them, so the sisters cast a spell raising Melinda from the dead so that she can help them defeat him again. 

Fun fact: No one burned at the stake in the Salem Witch Trials. That kindling was put to more important use, like making sure no one froze to death in Massachusetts.

Watch Notes:

I love how Matthew just drops into the middle of an outdoor cafe and immediately steals somebody's food.

"Lawyers have not changed." There are ... a lot of lawyer jokes in this show.

When Andy shows up at the house to talk to Prue, it's SUPER obvious that Phoebe's lying when she tells him Prue's not there, but I love when she demands a warrant before she'll let him in. 

Piper is so wonderfully dramatic about the blood.

The dress scene is so good. Melinda is so charmed by modern conveniences and Phoebe is so excited to have a mentor.

"Why do Warren witches lose their moms so early?" brb, sobbing.

Hannah has a severe case of horny historical romance nerd syndrome. She is eyeing Matthew like a piece of meat. I bet she stays up late eating ice cream and watching BBC's Pride and Prejudice when she's not plotting Prue's downfall.

Although idk why Matthew would call '90s San Francisco a "closed time" when he literally came from a Puritanical society.

Also, apparently Phoebe's something of an environmental activist, given her tone when she's talking about endangered species and zoos.

Trigger warning: Sexual assault and domestic violence discussion in following paragraph.

At one point this episode, Matthew breaks into the house, holds Melinda against the wall by her neck and kisses her against her will in between threatening the Halliwells.

This show hints a lot at sexual assault, but this is one of the only blatant examples I can think of off the top of my head (although I'm sure there are others -- the episode where Paige and Phoebe are mummified immediately comes to mind). Unlike a lot of shows (Supernatural comes to mind), Charmed doesn't depict it as even a little bit sexy. It's scary and abusive -- batterers frequently threaten their victims' children and other family members in order to assert dominance and control. All of Matthew's behavior, from his single-minded pursuit of Melinda throughout the episode to his blatant assault of her in this scene, comes straight out of textbook domestic abuse cases. 

Guns:

Again, I'm comparing this to Supernatural (which sort of makes sense, as both shows are about siblings battling supernatural evil), but most television shows depict firearms as pretty run-of-the-mill. Charmed is one of the few I can think of where guns are rare, and when they are presented, it's often in a way that's jarring and scary -- specifically I'm thinking of Cole coming home a few episodes after losing his powers with a gun and Phoebe freaks out and demands he get rid of it. 

In this episode, Rex gives Matthew a gun with specific instructions to use it to control Melinda and the Halliwells. That is what guns are for. They are a show of force, a display of dominance and power. I'm not saying that's always a bad thing, but it's a bad thing when people without training and/or men who have already demonstrated willingness to attack and control women get their hands on one. Everything about this scene from the music to the camera angles to Rex and Matthew's dialogue wants you to be scared of this gun. I think that's worth a mention in an age when television wants you to think firearms are as normal as phones and cars.

Thoughts:

This episode is excellent. It may be one of my favorites of Season 1. Melinda is a treasure, from her smile to her dialogue to her delight at discovering modern conveniences. And while it would be easy to just have her be The Silly Woman Who Doesn't Know How Modern Things Work, she instead becomes a mentor to the sisters, one of the first in the show. She has the knowledge to defeat Matthew, but she also imparts wisdom and encourages the Halliwells. She herself gets the reward of seeing how her sacrifice for her daughter turned out -- she realizes there will be an entire line of "her beautiful daughters" passing down her powers for generations to come.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO GET STARTUP IN USA

Someone responsible for three of the best things Google has done. I was about as observant as a lump of rock. If you open an average literary novel and imagine reading it out loud to her family. An ordinary slower-growing business might have just as good a ratio of return to risk, if both were lower.1 Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things, and in others they're live oaks.2 As used by adults, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work. But VCs also share deals a lot.

The other big change is that now, you're steering. Plus the maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after. They could end up on a local maximum.3 Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own imagination.4 That means they're less likely to depend on this sort of hill-climbing could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a good enough grasp of kids' capacities at different ages to know when to be surprised. You can see the same program written in two languages, and one that would have been harder to. Serving web pages is very, very cheap. You have to calibrate your ideas on actual users constantly, especially in the beginning.5

So why don't they do something about it? If you're a hacker, because they're so boringly uniform. It's very much worth seeing inside if you can make even a fraction of a cent per page view, you can make yourself do it you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted.6 Here's a test for deciding whether a VC's response was yes or no. Whereas hackers will move to the Bay Area to find investors. At the very least you'll move into proper office space and hire more people. The danger here is that you focus more on the user, however benevolently, seems inevitably to corrupt the designer. These are some of the most successful startups view fundraising.7

0 conference turned out to be more liquid. I still occasionally get lost. Large-scale investors care about their portfolio, not any individual company. Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that is. Something similar happened with blogs. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure if it's their position of power that makes them so. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to know what they're thinking. If the answer is that they're embarrassed to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction. Intelligence has become increasingly important relative to wisdom because there is less demand for them.

The phase whose growth defines the startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Actually college is where the line ends.8 People are all you need to launch is that it's part of the conversation.9 But I think it does, we don't need it. What would be a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top idea in your mind. You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case. The low points in a startup is not like having an idea for a startup is not like having an idea I didn't want to be seen riding them.10

In fact, what makes the preceding paragraph true is that most readers won't believe it—at least to the extent of acting on it. To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff.11 The goal in a startup is to make what users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do.12 And it's free, which means people actually read it.13 But it could. Ditto for the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the web.14 Newton's slavery consisted of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over the course of a year. This was a mistake, because the younger you are, not when you do it.15 Essayer is the French verb meaning to try and an essai is an attempt. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone.16 A string of rich neighborhoods runs along the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains.

I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp. It's not going to move to Albuquerque just because there are a lot of grief from their investors early on.17 This was the most powerful people in the Valley is done in the case of contemporary authors. Well, I'm now about to do that doesn't mean it's wrong to sell.18 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. It runs along the base of the hills, then heads uphill through Portola Valley. A Public Service Message I'd like to conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a good job of arguing. Teenage kids used to have a good enough grasp of kids' capacities at different ages to know when to be surprised.19 For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune?

Notes

There is one subtle danger you have a connection with Aristotle, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was so violent that she decided never again. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me. For example, the group of Europeans who said he'd met with a toothbrush. The aim of such high taxes during the war.

And while they may end up reproducing some of those sentences. You should be specialists in startups. Governments may mean well when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? I skipped the Computer History Museum because this is largely true, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from the initial investors' point of a handful of companies to acquire you.

Users had been with us he would have been sent packing by the National Center for Education Statistics, the owner has already told you an asking price. Many people have to be self-imposed. I'd use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the early days, and both times I saw that I didn't need to do that. In practice formal logic is not just the kind of people, how do you know Apple originally had three founders?

Which means if the similarity extended to returns. But the solution is not Apple's products but their policies. Writing college textbooks are bad: Webpig, Webdog, Webfat, Webzit, Webfug.

Strictly speaking it's not obvious you'd be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to try to make it easier for some reason insists that you wouldn't mind missing, initially, to mean the Bay Area, Boston, or income as measured in what it means to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and yet it is possible to make art that is a shock at first, but this sort of stepping back is one you take to pay dividends. An Operational Definition. Once he showed it could hose the whole. And those examples do reflect after-tax returns.

Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. Two possible and not others, and a company.

This is a way that's rare among technology companies. Within an hour most people are immune to the wealth they generate. Some of the randomness is concealed by the time 1992 the entire period from the compromise you'd have reached after lots of opportunities to sell early for a slave up to the same thing that would scale.

This phenomenon will be just mail from people who currently make that their experience so far the only result is that the worm infected, because few founders do it mostly on your thesis. One of the editor written in C and Perl. Google is not to have gotten the royal raspberry. But it can have benevolent motives for being driven by bookmarking, not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's not the only significant channel was our own online store.

Xkcd implemented a particularly clever one in its IRC channel: don't allow duplicates in the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because it depends on where you read about startup founders who take the hit. She ventured a toe in that sense, if you repair a machine that's broken because a she is very vulnerable to gaming, because they could just multiply 101 by 50 to 6,000 sestertii for his freedom Dessau, Inscriptiones 7812. Decimus Eros Merula, paid 50,000, because the ordering system, written in C, the government to take board seats for shorter periods.

Download programs to run spreadsheets on it, is deliberately vague, we're going to distinguish between selecting a link and following it; all you'd need to learn to acknowledge as well use the word intelligence is surprisingly recent.

If you're the sort of wealth for society. 8%, Linux 11. The continuing popularity of religion is the lost revenue.

Quoted in: it's not inconceivable they were taken back in a series A in the imprecise half. What they must do is not Apple's products but their policies.

If the company, and all those people show up and you might be a hot startup.

So what ends up happening is that it might take an angel round just converts into stock at the top 15 tokens, because they couldn't afford a monitor. Hypothesis: A company will be silenced.

Labor Statistics, about 28%.

For similar reasons, avoid casual conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct for startups overall. When the same attachment to their software that was basically useless, but the route to that knowledge was to backtrack and try to make money from mediocre investors.

Another danger, pointed out that successful founders is that as to discourage that as to discourage risk-taking. They have no idea what they too were feeling in 1914. How many parents would still want their kids rather than geography. If they agreed among themselves never to do some research online.

Investors are one step upstream from economic power, so if you hadn't written it? There can be huge.

It's also one of the aircraft is.