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Yellow-thighed Finch (Pselliophorus tibialis), family Passerellidae, Costa Rica

photograph by Carlos Bolaños

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brain either is in the pear jiggler & needs to come out, or it needs to be placed in the pear jiggler for an hour or two. unclear.

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kensyouen_Y

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Call me a huge hater for this but I genuinely don't think those like "imagine your character in THIS situation! what would they do?" like, list of asks or prompts ranging from 'their order comes back wrong when they're out for dinner' to 'someone estranged from their past texts them to apologize' are at all useful for developing a conception of a character. This approach actively frames characters as shallow, single-dimensional black boxes in a way that contributes to less effective whole-story writing. Doing that stuff to build up the character you rotate in your mind is like drinking a snifter of kerosine at dinner for your heart health.

I say that because 'what a character is' is extremely different from 'a part of a narrative that contains, reacts to, and emerges from that character'. The knowledge that your character, in an isolated context, would eat a rare burger even though she's a vegetarian to avoid even the illusion of inconveniencing a service worker is not a narrative observation, it's a character observation. The more you reify these observations as interesting unto themselves, the less you put yourself to the task of either examining or subverting them.

As a writer, your art is beyond the description of character - just as it requires more than a detailed description of 'lore' for a setting to play a role in a story. The fact that your setting has a cult of matriarchal worship-leaders who've vowed silence under pain of death may be present in a story, but it has no implications until you apply it back to the trajectory of the narrative. One of those silent-matriarchs witnesses something she can't put words to. The silent-matriarchs' object of worship demands that they sing to prove their loyalty. A silent-matriarch is taken captive by a rival sect prone to the use of torture to force the revelation of secrets. It isn't the character, or the 'setting idea', or the lore itself that makes a narrative. It's how you reintegrate it into the story to make meaning through examination or subversion.

When you instead examine your (typically yet unwritten) work from the perspective of the audience or fan, the group traditionally given to identifying and observing characters as analysis, you've already put yourself in a backseat to your own creative process. Sure, this character would let the waitress serve her shrimp and die of an allergic reaction rather than complain. This meta-thinking about a component of your own work, before you've allowed it to come into itself as a narrative, preventing you from transforming, questioning, and reapplying what you write and know from beat to beat, moment to moment, is a noose around your neck. Can you feel the weight on your larynx? What would it take to make her fight back? What horrors would she swallow as the audience clawed at the screen, wishing they didn't know exactly what was going to happen next?

Don't answer that like I sent it to you as a friendly anon. Go write five hundred words of prose.

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today i took diced green peppers, seasoned them with salt and fresh black pepper and baked it at 8000 degrees for 22 hours. i make this whenever i want pile of smoldering ash.

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sometimes adults will interact with kids in a way that betrays the fact that they do not remember what it felt like to be a kid at all

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Hanif Abdurraqib on his IG today

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having a cat is great. there's a small little animal wandering around. effervescent

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A male and female Chinese monal (Lophophorus lhuysii) cross the street on Balang Mountain, Sichuan, China

by Tim Melling

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The character arcs on medical job training videos hit different

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they're gonna violate food safety standards we've never even heard of

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they're gonna violate food safety standards we've never even heard of

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you very frequently talk about not seeking out happiness and generally being unhappy and I guess the question I have there is what (as someone who feels like they're struggling) what is the difference between unhappiness and depression? i would also call myself an unhappy person but being in that emotional state of unhappiness causes me literal physical pain so thus i don't think it's tenable to make not seeking a way out of unhappiness a personal goal. (i guess i'm just curious about the language use here and if i'm missing something)

I've always been taken with the Freudian term "ordinary unhappiness." If you really meet and listen to people you notice how sad most of them are, or unfulfilled. To me, it is a bit of a comfort.

But if just living is painful, I'd say that is an issue. Those have been the times I have made some dramatic change or sought help.

I think there's a beauty to being unsatisfied. It keeps a person moving. I find happiness a bit depressing really; it always makes me acutely aware that things are going to end. Ordinary unhappiness, in contrast, feels like an acceptance and a sturdiness that can weather many changes.

I think chasing pleasure or happiness is likely not to be the route out for most depressed people, though finding small things to enjoy or look forward to can be very sustaining. I think though that some people make their own unhappiness worse by expecting that they ever could be happy for a long period, when their life history provides no evidence of that. I probably will always be a bit unhappy, because I always have been. That's fine. I like a lot about my life. I can handle this shit.

That is very different from hating being awake every moment, though, which is usually when I know something is dangerously out of wack and must be addressed. and from the sound of it, that is where you are at the moment. That probably signals something needs to change.

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Cary Grant as C.K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story (1940), dir. George Cukor Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart

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a mere sliver of knowledge of how it is with spaghetti would drive mortal men to madness

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Emmanuel Littlejohn has been waiting for months to find out whether he will die on Thursday or get to live. It's been "the hardest thing I ever did."

Littlejohn, 52, is set to be executed for the shooting death of a convenience store owner during a robbery in Oklahoma City in 1992. If Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt declines to grant him clemency, Littlejohn will be the third inmate executed by the state this year and the 17th in the nation. He's also one of five men the U.S. is executing in a six-day period, and he's set to die just about eight hours before Alabama is expected to execute Alan Eugene Miller using nitrogen gas.

"I would say to the governor: Do what you think is the right thing," Littlejohn told USA TODAY in a recent interview.

Littlejohn has admitted to his role in the robbery but has maintained that his accomplice was the one to pull the trigger, not him.

"I accept responsibility for what I did but not what they want me to accept responsibility for," Littlejohn previously told USA TODAY. "They want me to accept that I killed somebody, but I haven't killed somebody."

In a rare move, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 to recommend clemency for Littlejohn, whose legal team argued that the evidence in the case was unclear, especially who the triggerman was.

Still, Republican Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said afterward that his office would still be arguing against clemency to the governor, calling Littlejohn a "violent and manipulative killer."

If you’re outraged over Missouri murdering Marcellus Williams, then you should know Oklahoma is planning on carrying out an execution of Emmanuel Littlejohn this Thurs. at 10am.

Littlejohn was pardoned by the PPB. There’s still time to call the Governor: 405-521-2342.

I was able to leave a voicemail by pressing 1 then 4 then 0. After what happened in Missouri, there's an overwhelming sense of hopelessness that the care about public comments but I hope Emmanuel is able to avoid Khaliifah's fate.

Hi, the best thing to do is to call the Governor’s office directly and press 0 to be connected to a staff person. Ask that the governor respect the wishes of the pardon and parole board and grant clemency to Emmanuel Littlejohn. 405-521-2342