#reading this is a favor to me

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[msdanvers]

» SUPERCORP FANFICTION SERIES (14/?) ↳ the body swap episode by teaRexis for the @supercorpbb (read it here)

[queenlucythevaliant]

Just to clarify my thoughts (since I've had a number of people ask me about it) re: Job and cursing God. There's a big difference between cursing God as used in Scripture and how we generally would think of cursing at God today.

Cursing someone, in the Bible, has a lot of depth to it. It's not just saying "screw you " in anger, it's got a sense of forsakenness to it. It's the opposite of a blessing, a removal of blessing. If the blessing is presence, your face shining on the person you're blessing, then a curse is absence. In some translations, Job's wife tells him to "renounce God and die," which I honestly think makes a lot more sense to modern ears.

Job says a lot of unpleasant things to and about God in his anger and grief. So do the Psalmists. A number of the Prophets. So can we. God can take it if we come to him with honest expressions of our emotion, including those not-so-nice ones directed at him. I don't think there's anything wrong with getting mad at God and saying, "How dare you, you bastard" when you suffer unjustly. You can say much worse, I think, without sinning, though I don't feel particularly inclined to give examples. But as long as it's an honest expression of your heart, I think you're doing exactly what prayer is for. You're presenting him your heart with an open hand. He can use that. Opposite of love is not hate but indifference, etc.

Job doesn't renounce God. Neither should we. But I think when you're truly suffering, you're gonna have those feelings toward God either way. He'd rather you address them with him directly than try to avoid them. Cursing at God in the modern sense is actually a great way to keep the relationship strong and not end up cursing/renouncing him in the Biblical sense.

[canisalbus]

had the thought of machete with sopping wet neck fluff that wouldn't leave my head

HAH oh no, the sopping wet dog lad. In a bubble bath. In a dusty rose pink bathtub no less ;_;

The expression is so good, he's just zoned out. Is he having a tiny existential crisis or just relaxing? Who can say.

I'm loving the soft dusk/dawn lighting, it looks so warm and atmospheric. And the way it passes through his ears and makes them glow is just *chef's kiss*.

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my favorite parts of phase 2 (and indeed one of the few moments I resonated with IDW Prowl) was when the neutrals were coming back to Cybertron and Prowl said that he refused to let Autobots be pushed aside and overruled after they were the ones who fought for freedom for 4 million years (the exact wording escapes me atm).

And I mean, that resentment still holds true even once the colonists come on bc like. As much as it's true that Cybertron's culture is fucked up, and as funny as it can be to paint Cybertronians as a bunch of weirdos who consider trying to kill someone as a common greeting not important enough to hold a grudge over.... The colonists POV kind of pissed me off a lot of times, as did the narrative tone/implications that Cybertronians are forever warlike and doomed to die by their own hands bc it just strikes me as an extremely judgemental and unsympathetic way to deal with a huge group of people with massive war PTSD and political/social tensions that were rampant even before the war?

Like, imagine living in a society rife with bigotry and discrimination where you get locked into certain occupations and social strata based on how you were born. The political tension is so bad there's a string of assassinations of politicians and leaders. The whole planet erupts into an outright war that leads (even unintentionally) to famine and chemical/biological warfare that destroys your planet. Both sides of the war are so entrenched in their pre-war sides and resentment for each other that this war lasts 4 million years and you don't even have a home planet any more. Then your home planet gets restored and a bunch of sheltered fucks come home and go "ewww why are you so violent?? You're a bunch of freaks just go live in the wilderness so that our home can belong to The Pure People Who Weren't Stupid And Evil Enough To Be Trapped In War" and then a bunch of colonists from places that know nothing about your history go "lol you people are so weird?? 🤣🤣 I don't get why y'all are fighting can't you just like, stop??? Oh okay you people are just fucked up and evil and stupid then" ((their planets are based on colonialism where their Primes wiped out the native populations btw whereas the Autobots and OP in particular fought to save organics. But that never gets brought up as a point in their favor)) as if the damage of a lifetime of war and a society that was broken even before the war can just magically go away now that the war is over.

Prowl fucking sucks but he was basically the only person that pointed out the injustice of that.

And then from then on out most of the characters from other colonies like Caminus and wherever else are going "i fucking hate you and your conflicts" w/ people like literal-nobody Slide and various Camiens getting to just sit there lecturing Optimus about how Cybertronians are too violent for their own good and how their conflicts are stupid, with only brief sympathetic moments where the Cybertronians get to be recognized as their own ppl who deserve sympathy before going right back to being lambasted.

Like I literally struggled to enjoy the story at multiple points because there was only so much I could take of the characters I knew and loved being raked over coals constantly while barely getting to defend themselves or be defended by the narrative so like. It was just fucking depressing and a little infuriating to read exRID/OP

[lazuliquetzal]

I keep on telling people you're the only one who knows how to plot. Can you teach all of us how to plot, please? I love you.

I AM SUMMONED? PLOT BRAIN SUMMONED?

I love plotting. It's my favorite part of the writing process. Plot is "things that happen" and the best part of writing is imagining things that happen. I'm going to assume that whoever may be reading this knows how to imagine The Happenings, so I'm gonna be talking more about structure, but in like, a kinda abstract sense.

A good plot is a little bit more than a string of events. Plot is like music: there's variation in rhythm and sound and melody, but ultimately there's cohesion, because it's all one song. You can have a bunch of wild things happening, but no matter how strange, there should be something that links them all together, because you're telling one story.

Plot structures are patterns in stories. I'm pretty sure most of them were developed as analysis tools (as in, story already exists > look! it follows this pattern) rather than as writing tools, but people use them as writing tools because it's a neat little way to organize the chaos that is "shit happens." Stories follow patterns for the same reasons music follows patterns: we enjoy the certainty of hitting certain beats. But we also like being surprised. A good pop song doesn't sound like a random collection of sounds, but it also doesn't sound like the middle slider of other songs.

There is this shared concept in both music and writing: the idea of tension and release. Basically, you're playing with reader expectation: there's an imbalance in the experience (tension), and we want to see that imbalance resolved (release). All the common plot structures deal with this basic pattern:

You set an expectation

There are complications to the expectation

You meet the expectation

And this rhythm is happening on multiple levels in writing. Scenes follow this structure (we're gonna get past that door, we're gonna find the murder weapon, we're gonna collaborate and come up with a plan) and all those scenes feed into the overarching expectation (we're gonna solve this murder!). I usually think of chapters as their own mini-story, part of the larger whole. And I think of scenes as their own mini-story, part of the larger chapter. I have engineer brain. I see the gears spinning in the clock. That's why all my chapters have at least One Important Thing happening, because that's that particular chapter's Step #3.

And One Last Important Thing:

In music, a delayed resolution is almost always more interesting than the standard resolution. In writing, that means you wanna drag out Step #2 for as long as you can. That's where the bulk of the story is happening, that's how you build tension, that's how you get people to turn the page.

So when you write a fake dating fic, those bitches better not get together until the very end. I came here for fake dating, not for real dating, damn it. If you resolve that expectation early on, you better replace it with a different expectation that's just as engaging.

But also don't drag it out for too long. Sorry. The hard part of writing is learning the difference between too short and too long. Writing is unfortunately a nuanced skill which is why my advice is like "do this but not too much teehee." But tension and resolution is just rhythm, you can build a sense for it if you engage with enough stories.

[badolmen]

Saw a post making fun of Asexuals in the year of our Good Vibes 2022 so a reminder:

The A stands for the Asexual community and spectrum (it also represents the Aromantic and Agender communities but I’m Asexual so I’ll be talking about that specifically in this post)

Celibacy is a choice to abstain from sex. Asexuality is a sexuality defined by a lack of sexual attraction to anyone, not by the choice to abstain from sex.

Every asexual person has different feelings on sex (an activity, not an attraction) - some are sex repulsed, some are sex neutral, and some are sex favorable. A physically pleasurable experience is not equal to an attraction to parties involved.

The Asexual community has been around since the dawn of the Queer liberation movement, and Asexual individuals have always existed.

Aphobia is real and has done tangible harm to Asexual people. Listen to and learn from their experiences.

If you make fun of Asexuals and their community jokes (dragons/cakes/cards) you are Aphobic. If you’re Asexual and you make fun of these aspects of your own community or consider them ‘cringe’ you have internalized Aphobia.

Sometimes teenagers and young people will identify as Asexual and change their label later in life. This does not mean that all young people who identify as Asexual will change their minds, nor does it mean that all people who identify as Asexual are young.

Seriously what do you people have against the dragons and cake jokes those are classic and hilarious please deconstruct why you have so much rage for harmless jokes that’s not a healthy response to silliness.

Anyways reblog this post if you’re Asexual, support Asexuals, or really want a dragon.

[finemealprompt]

DP x DC Prompt #66

There’s a thief in Gotham, City Boy, who’s been here for a while. It’s already been tricky to catch him, but he’s got a new white haired friend. Bruce can already feel the ensuing headache forming.

[iero]

Reading smutty parts of a fic while keeping a straight face around family/in public should automatically grant you an Academy Award.

[nat-without-a-g]

Haha, thinking about why Lark hates Henry again

[ottosuwuen]

You know what's the funniest thing about arc 7-8 to me?

It's revealed that Vincent has never bedded a woman nor had children.

When the rumors of Vincent's illegitimate son spread, Chisha, Vincent's closest servant since their teenage years, who spent quite a lot of time with him, refuses to believe them, and acts defensive when Berstetz suggests that there may be things about Vincent that Chisha doesn't know. After all, Vincent always made sure to never even share a bedroom with a woman so that no one could create such rumors. There's no way Vincent could have had children without Chisha knowing.

Serena, who has unsuccessfully tried seducing Vincent before, explicitly mentions the possibility of his being gay to his face, even though she already knows the reason is something else. Vincent doesn't deny that (nor react to it in any way for that matter), by the way.

Only 3-4 chapters after that conversation with Serena happens, we're shown Chisha's backstory and motives. Surprise, what we thought was betrayal at first is actually part of a secret, elaborate plan to save Vincent from his prophesied death. They face each other "at a distance so close their eyelashes could touch" right before Chisha sacrifices himself while gazing one last time at his beloved liege with a "decadent smile" on his lips.

"Why?" Vincent asks the corpse more than once, well aware that it won't reply. This is Vincent, the man who'd rather keep his mouth shut if he has nothing useful to say. And what's more useless than directing a question to a corpse?

Later, Vincent, on the verge of a breakdown, asks Subaru, whom he suspects to be a Stargazer, why he let Chisha die instead of him. Vincent had accepted his death. But that's not what Chisha wanted. "He was angry that fate intended to kill you, and also angry at you for surrendering to fate." Now it's Vincent's turn to stand up to fate. That's what Chisha would've loved to see.

Then Tappei introduces an arranged marriage plot between Vincent and Medium (who, by the way, is already interested in another man) to pretend he didn't just write the gayest thing in Re:Zero.

[swervesbar]

Uh oh... Better clean up your act, Inferno. 🧼🦖💢🐜💦

I was paired with the delightful @ivycorp for tf big bang 2023! Please go shower them with love, their writing is SOOOO good 💖

[lucigirl]

“M—Mic?” His blood stains his hand, his robe. “Michael, you—you—” He can’t even say it.

thinking soooo hard abt @hylialeia 's heavenly family drama before the fall ... i had to sketch it out of my system

[my-name-is-apollo]

No one:

Me in my bed at 1:30 AM: why is Alcestis' love for Admetus considered to be greater than Apollo's love for Admetus when Alcestis sacrificing her life for her husband actively brings her honor and glory and saves her from living a miserable life of a widow and that's a big reason she agrees to give away her life while what Apollo did to save Admetus' life brings him only dishonor and scorn possibly for the rest of his immortal life and yet he chose to take the risk because he loves Admetus so much-

[mxtxfanatic]

Random Thought #33: Idk how to say this without sounding like I’m tryna diminish Jin Zixuan’s one moment of unambiguous good, but I don’t think Jin Zixuan defending Mianmian would ever have happened if he had to do something more proactive than just…ignoring the words of a man he had been building a simmering hatred for over the course of a few weeks.

Jin Zixuan is shown (and explicitly said) to side with people he considers “his people.” While they are all hostages of the Wen during the indoctrination camp, outside of that shared victimhood, Mianmian is simply a stranger to Jin Zixuan, while his “defense” of her is simply refusing to move out of the way when Wen Chao—the man who had been targeting him for harassment every day for weeks on end—ordered him to. This is a very passive resistance. And not to say that this wasn’t a good deed or any less of a powerful moment, but if Wen Chao hadn’t singled out Jin Zixuan for bullying, would he have still ignored the former’s words to move out of the way? If Jin Zixuan hadn’t happened to be standing by Lan Wangji and Mianmian hid behind only the Lan, instead, would he have said anything in her defense? Would he have even physically moved to shield her? Is any of that in-character with the behavior we are shown of his throughout any of the rest of the novel?

[puppyeared]

ive made myself more wet and pathetic