donkeyduckk

[donkeyduckk]

I (M 54) told my sons how their mother really died and now my eldest son (24) is acting out. AITA?

My first wife (we’ll call her E) died when my eldest son (A) was 12. He and his mother were very close and I think he takes after her a great deal. For years he and his brother thought that their mother was assassinated by political rivals, but that’s not true. Truth is, I accidentally burned her to death when I was committing genocide on the political rivals we were supposed to make fall in line.

I felt so guilty about what happened that I moved my kids out of their childhood home and moved into my brother’s palace to get away from my wife’s memory. I also developed a habit of abusing alcohol, and didn’t really pay that much attention to my kids as they grew up. Eventually I went to the Nightwatcher and she erased all memories of my wife. After that I was finally able to become a better person.

Well recently I got all my memories back of E, and it helped me stand up to this evil god, and now I’m writing a book about my war crimes and how badly I treated my first wife. Before I released some of the early drafts, I had someone read my sons the account of how E died. They were understandably upset. My younger son ® has been reasonable, and understands that I was under the influence of an evil god when I killed E. A has been acting like a spoiled teenager.

He no longer follows the codes of war and keeps buying ridiculous clothes (he bought GOLD trimmed boots!) and ignores my criticisms. He doesn’t seem to want to be around me and values his wife’s opinions more. A seems to now resent me for the high expectations I have always had for him, and doesn’t think much about my views on morality.

I also don’t really like his wife because I think she’s a bad influence on him and I think he might know that. (She talks back to authority figures and is mentally ill.) A is even mad that I left his wedding early to go work on my war crime book.

A doesn’t seem to care that he has also let me down. Not only did he kill a political rival who has tried to kill me and him many times (and killed thousands of our soldiers), but he’s still not a Knight Radiant. I think we’ve both done wrong here, but he refuses to see my side, or have any kind of real conversation with me. I feel really bad about E, but that’s in the past, I’m a better man now, and am finally married to the only woman I ever truly loved (A’s aunt). I just want to move past this and be a family again, but A is being stubborn. So AITA?

[donkeyduckk]

Random, but a really handy way to make things seem creepy or wrong in horror is to make them incongruously neat or clean:

In the middle of a horrific battlefield, you find one corpse laid aside neatly, straightened and arranged, its arms crossed neatly across its chest

As you walk through the garden, you gradually realise that the oddness you’ve been noticing about the trees is that they are all perfectly symmetrical

As you move through the abandoned house, you realise that suddenly that there’s no dust in this room, no dirt or cobwebs

You hear hideous noises coming from behind a locked door, screams and pleas, and visceral sounds of violence. When you manage to break down the door, there is no one there, and the room is perfectly spotless

In the middle of a horrific battlefield, a hollow full of churned mud and blood, you find five corpses cleanly dismembered, each set of limbs or parts neatly laid out in their own little row

You witness a murder, a brutal, grisly killing that carpets the area in blood. When you return in a blind panic with the authorities, the scene is completely clean, and no amount of examination can find even a drop of blood

You run through the night and the woods with a comrade, pulling each other through leaves and twigs and mud as you scramble desperately towards freedom. When you finally emerge from the forest, in the grey light of dawn, you turn to your companion in relief, and notice that their clothes are somehow perfectly clean

You hand a glass of water to your suspect, talking casually the whole while, and watch with satisfaction as they take it in their bare hand and take a drink. There’ll be a decent set of prints to run from that later. Except there isn’t. There are no prints at all. As if nothing ever touched the glass

You browse idly through your host’s catalogue, and stop, and pay much more attention, when you realise that several items on a dry list of acquisitions are ones you’ve seen before, and it slowly dawns on you that each neat little object and number in this neat little book are things that belong (belonged?) to people you know

Neatness, particularly incongruous neatness, neatness where you expect violence or imperfection or abandonment, or neatness that you belatedly realise was hiding violence, or neatness that is imposed over violence, is incredibly scary. Because neatness is not a natural thing. Neatness requires some active force to have come through and made it so. Neatness implies that the world around you is being arranged, maybe to hide things, to disguise things, to make you doubt your senses, or else simply according to something else’s desires. Neatness is active and artificial. Neatness puts things, maybe even people, into neat little boxes according to something else’s ideals, and that’s terrifying as well. Being objectified. Being asked to fit categories that you’re not sure you can fit, and wondering what will happen to the bits of you that don’t.

Neatness, essentially, says that something else is here. Neatness where there should be chaos says that either something came and changed things, or that what you’re seeing now or what you saw then is not real. Neatness alongside violence says that something came through here for whom violence did not mean the same thing as it does to you.

Neatness, in the right context, in the right place, can be very, very scary

And fun

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yeah i have impostor syndrome *kills you in electrical*

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wait people sleep with their doors closed????

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EXCUSE ME BRANDON??? YOU CAN'T DROP A BOMB LIKE THAT AND NOT TELL US MORE!!!!!

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I’ve always been bothered by how sloppy the original version of this is and so I made a less sloppy version for my own satisfaction.

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I firmly believe what ever you’re obsessed with at 11/12 years old becomes a core part of who you are, regardless if you lose interest in it or not. Maybe some of you were lucky and were obsessed with warrior cats or smth, and if you’re real unlucky it was probably twilight.

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gancho (derogatory)

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were you in an artist’s top 0.5% of listeners or are you normal

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The context:  Crabs and crab-like body plans have evolved independently (convergently) at least 5 times in earth’s history.  This is called carcinisation.

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Words of Radiance by lindsaynh1

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reblog if you’re ready for Renarin Kholin to beat the shit out of someone in Oathbringer

reblog if you’re ready for Renarin Kholin to beat the shit out of even more people in Rhythm of War

[donkeyduckk]

2010 Brandon Sanderson about the Way of Kings

17th Shard: What’s it feel like to finally have your baby released to the public? It’s probably a very different feeling from any of your other book launches.

Brandon Sanderson: I’m more nervous than normal. It has been my baby for a long time, and I got Tor to invest so much into it, what with the cover, the interior art, the end pages, the really nice printing, and the sheer length of it. Tor would really rather not publish books of this length. 

The rest of the series will be shorter, and I promised that to them. 

I do want to warn readers that the 400,000 word length is not going to be the standard for the series. 

They’re probably going to be more like 300,000 words, which is what this one should have been, but I just couldn’t get it down. It was right for the book for it to be this length.

(source)                     

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Ok but consider this: Kaladin in a suit

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it’s Halloween so please accept this Spooky gif