bestofbroken

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I don't need someone to match my freak; I need someone to complement my freak. Accentuate and accent my freak. Plus, we gotta diversify our freak portfolio here -- combine our efforts to cover the greatest amount of freakage instead of seeking freak redundancy.

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“my favourite character only acts like an asshole because he’s deflecting/covering up his insecurities 🥺🥺🥺” you are so boring. he acts like that because he sucks. worst motherfucker on earth (affectionate). stop making excuses for him

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BAI LING as Myca THE CROW dir. Alex Proyas, 1994

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they say you snooze you lose, and well. heh. i snost and lost

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I just reada really good fic but halfway through I realized "oh shit this is really familiar.... didn't I write something like this once?" And as I kept reading I kept predicting what happened next and the further I went the more convinced I was that they'd ripped off my story-

like, copied the ENTIRE plot and re-written it, just better than I had? The characters were more fleshed-out than mine were, and the POV was more interesting, and the pace made more sense- but it was MY STORY?

So close to the end I was like "holy shit.. do I message them? Ask if my story inspired theirs? Should I be angry? Flattered?" Cause their tags and description didn't mention me AT ALL, which, sure, it's fanfiction to begin with, but if you're using my work than at least credit me as inspo, right? Just to be courteous?

But I get to the end of the final chapter, and it's not finished, and I'm kind of disappointed cause I never finished my story and I was really immersed in their version now and had been looking forwards to seeing how they tied up my loose ends- so I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and.

It's MY URL.

IT WAS MY STORY THE WHOLE TIME.

THE ONE *I WROTE*.

In *2013*.

And FORGOT ABOUT

BECAUSE I WAS SO INSECURE ABOUT MY SLOPPY, SHALLOW, AMETEUR WRITING

And I'm just sitting here now staring into space thinking about every shitty story I've ever written now like

IT WAS ALL GOOD?

IT WAS GOOD THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME??

I'M A GOOD WRITER?????

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garfield could probably understand the mechanics of driving a car but his legs are too short and stubby to reach the petals. this is also known as "Yoda's Quandry"

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my favorite video of all time ever

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Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

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Fascinates me that I just saw a post with hundreds of notes featuring someone on tiktok hysterically explaining how everyone needs to archive their fanfiction because when trump bans porn the first thing they'll come for is ao3... well I just don't think that the "deport all immigrants and impose tariffs" party cares, like, at all, about your destiel fics lads I really don't

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Time to feed unprofessional managers what they’ve been dishing out for far too long.

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anyway sound off. at what stage do ppl think Han figured out the Force was real. the boring answer is after seeing Obi-wan vanish but i think he could rationalise that away as his eyes playing tricks on him. what do we think.

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everyone shut the fuck up and look at this snake named barcode

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foreman. babe. we’re at the bottom end of season 8. you have worked here for almost a decade. why are you still surprised there's medical malpractice going on at the medical malpractice department that you, personally, used to do medical malpractice at