#Nuts and bolts

[retrogamingblog2]

[merethessc]

Without your love I am a broken mess

[titleknown]

Banjo-Kazooie Headcanon: Kazooie sincerely believes that the reason Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom succeeded where Nuts and Bolts failed is because Nuts and Bolts didn't let you crucify Jinjos.

[dropoutconfessions]

generally not a huge pc shipper but the one exception is sundry sidney and big barry syx. part of it is that it's emily and murph but also i just think the nuts and bolts dynamic is cute and fun.

-

[trooperst-3v3]

Hux got mad at me for removing the thermal detonator from my uniform.

He was like, "How are you supposed to dispatch multiple enemies at once if the need arises?"

First of all, we haven't been in battle in ages. I think I'll be okay without carrying around spare weaponry.

Second, I'm a handyman, not a soldier. I wouldn't even be sent into battle in the first place.

And if I did have to take out a bunch of enemies, I'd just do it in a handyman way. I don't need weapons when I can cause massive destruction by strategically loosening a few bolts on the hull of an enemy ship.

And if that fails, I'll just whack them with the wrench. Whichever works.

[katherinecrighton]

Nuts and Bolts: Some Writing Advice

(Reposting a 2013 post from the Anna Katherine co-tumblr)

A friend of mine awhile back asked the aether for some practical, straightforward writing advice, which I assumed meant nuts and bolts stuff.

This is what I ended up writing to her.

(Caveat emptor: 1. The reason advice looks contradictory is because it literally is different for everyone — shit that works for one person won’t work for someone else. Just stick it in your toolbox and move along. 2. I will say obvious shit that you already know. Because it’s possible somebody else doesn’t. 3. You may totally disagree with anything/everything I say, oh my god, that’s fine.)

1. Use the word “said.” Throw in a “she declaimed” every once in a while if you like, but don’t do it all the time. Feel free to put in no dialogue tags at all, if it’s clear who’s speaking. But “said” is free and generally invisible to the reader (and the goal is to not remind the reader that they’re reading).

2. Writing advice for short fiction and writing advice for novels are and writing advice for one genre versus another are all going to tell you slightly (or wildly) different things. So, you know, watch out for that. I suggest switching mediums entirely, and try reading up on screenplays or three-panel comics.

3. Stick your finished draft into a Kindle or some other robot reader, and have a mechanical voice read the story to you. It’s a step removed, and you’ll hear where it clunks. Make notes as it goes.

4. If you don’t have a robot reader, read it out loud to yourself. Actually out loud. Put check marks wherever you cringe. It’s where the reader will likely cringe too.

5. Start your story at the point of change. It’s more interesting. Backfill with exposition a couple of paragraphs later.

6. Sometimes, if I’m writing a one-off, I pick a motif and stick with it as a lodestone for all my descriptions. It’s a way of creating a sort of subliminal mood and atmosphere for the reader, while at the same time maintaining a nice sense of continuity.

7. The English language likes to hear things in threes. Three bears, three nights, three wishes, and what with one thing and another, three years passed. English also likes iambic pentameter and any other rhyme or rhythm scheme it can get its hands on. Readers want language to both have a pretty meaning (three brothers seek their fortune) and a pretty sound (now is the winter of our discontent). The fastest way to do this, and not have it be totally obvious, is to combine the two. Have three lines of description, three examples of something, three jokes — and do it semi-regularly. It creates a rhythm in your work, like a heartbeat. Study other people’s stories and see if you can find where they’re doing the same or similar things. Count stuff.

8. Then, later, fuck with your readers by breaking the rhythm. Stop the heartbeat. Miss the step. The reader will get nervous and uncomfortable and have no idea why. Makes for good tension.

9. Other things that make readers uncomfortable: Set dressing. We’re used to visual mediums. If you want to set up a really uncomfortable scene, describe key things around it going in, and make it clear that it’s Not Okay. A pair of scissors that have been left half open. A door that is not entirely shut. A radio caught between two stations, the garden hose still left running. Nothing overt, nothing obvious – just stuff that feels uncomfortable to read. Do enough of those in a row, as you head toward a confrontation, and the reader will be a ball of avidly reading tension by the end of it. 

10. Graphic sex scenes are equal to action scenes. In both instances, know where everybody is, and what everybody’s doing. Describe with more physical action than you think is necessary. If the reader doesn’t know where everybody’s limbs are and what tools are being used, then they’ll get confused and bored. You can always edit later.

[melodytaylorauthor]

Valancing and specificity

I'm gonna geek out about The Story Grid here again, because I have ADHD and specific and granular instructions make my brain go, and The Story Grid is especially good at that and avoiding all the woo-woo "you just have to feel it" bullshit. Okay? Okay.

All right. The latest Story Grid focus has been on descriptions. The book itself is more about plotting and editing, one of the classes they offer now is focused on scene writing, but lately language and description has been on their radar in their emails and Youtube. I dig.

So thing number one has been what they call "valanced language." This is simple. Squeeze descriptors into your nouns and verbs. If the right verb doesn't exist, use an adverb. Don't be scared, they have their place.

For example: "The woman ran down the hall."

Let's start with the first noun. Who was the woman? A secretary? A superhero? A dog groomer? See how each of those examples fills your brain with a distinct idea about why she might be running down a hall? You just fill in all sort of blanks on your own; how she's dressed, what it sounds like as she runs, what she might have in her hands, her expression.

Nice, how about "ran?" How is this woman running, exactly? Is she in a hurry? Is she worried? Is she angry? Does she scurry, or clatter, or jog, or race? If it's a secretary clattering down the hall, that's quite different from a superhero jogging down a hall, or a dog groomer racing down a hall. There are all sorts of implications that come with each, and your brain just fills them all in when the different words are used.

Okay, last, the hall. What kind of hall is it? Is it in a school, a business, a convent, a government building? A secretary clattering down a high school hall has a very different vibe than a hall of the White House. The same with a superhero, or a dog groomer. (Is it just me, or does "The dog groomer raced down the White House hall" scream rom-com? No?)

None of this is to say you have to say "the superhero" every time you refer to your superhero character; if it's established that she's a superhero, you can call her "the woman" or "Agnes." This exercise is to point out what Mark Twain has said: "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug." It's so much easier to see it with this concrete example.

Now, number two, besides valanced language, the latest Story Grid emails and Youtube vids have been talking a lot about description. About how too much will kill your story, and not like, "You killed it!" but like, "It's dead." They point out that every time you pause the action to describe something, you take a chance that the reader won't put the book down. Readers read for action. They want to know what happens next, not what that tree looks like.

The solution? A few things. Use valanced language; fold your descriptions into the action, don't pause to describe something, note it while you're having the character doing something; and last and most deliciously, use specificity instead of vagueness.

I say "most deliciously" because to me, it is delicious. I love Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History, it's such a good braingasm. On one episode I listened to last year, he talked about how country music differs from rock in its ability to pull at people's heartstrings. The main point he gave was specificity -- the lyricist uses very particular imagery to put the listener in the shoes of the singer. I remember thinking that was really interesting, even though I don't like country music myself.

Then Tim Grahl brought up specificity in storytelling. He used this example: "I wanted to show an apartment in disarray, so I was picturing dirty dishes piled in the sink. But rather than just say there were dirty dishes piled in the sink, I have my character wanting to make coffee and finding the French press still caked with yesterday's grounds." That's just beautiful to my mind. It calls up everything you need to see about a place that hasn't been tidied in a while, it gets brought up while the character is doing something, and it has a vibe attached to it. Perfect.

So when you are writing a description, dial down into something particular about the thing you're describing. Traffic sounds? What about a car alarm going off that no one's paying attention to? A crowded cat room at a rescue? What about a calico kitten careening off the other cats after a stuffed mouse? Or cats tucking their paws in to avoid the careening kitten with a stuffed mouse? A boring day at work? How about if the co-worker is flicking paper clips into an empty cup at his desk?

I love stealing from my own life for this kind of thing. It lends some authenticity, I feel. Notice things around you in your life, then when you're writing, think of how to invoke the mood by pulling up one small, particular detail. Then weave that into the narrative, don't stop the action to deliver the picture. Keep the character moving and on-screen, have the description baked into the action somehow. And if it just won't bake in, cut it. Trust your reader to see your world through your character moving through it. Always trust your reader! If they're too dense to get it, you probably don't want them reading your book in the first place.

Anyhow, I am re-editing my first novel (because I want to, and I'm indie so I can), as well as editing my latest novel, and I just cut a couple paragraphs of description from each. In both cases, I dug down and got one particular detail about the descriptions, wove them into the action, and cut the rest. I can definitely see that that scenes are stronger for it, and the visualization of the setting is actually better with fewer but more specific words.

I fucking love what I do.

[lemonsandwisdom]

Rwby doodles… specifically nuts and bolts…

[legendaryvermin]

God damn, item fusion in Tears of the Kingdom is such a brilliant response to critics of Breath of the Wild's weapon degradation. It keeps the play loop of the original game intact, constantly giving you reasons to go find new places and things to experiment with, but gives you an expanded toolkit to address the same kinds of encounters.

The thing that weapon deg haters couldn't always articulate about why the system rubbed them the wrong way is still there, I think; this is a game about lateral thinking and exploration, and those modes of play won't necessarily satisfy longtime fans. This game now has more in common with the criminally overlooked Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts than it does with the rest of Zelda canon. To me, that's neat. BK:NB broke ground so ahead of it's time that it's taken a decade and a half for other major studios to try it's premise again, and I'm hopeful that other developers can take something from these new tools Nintendo is trying out.

Because it's a phenomenally whacky idea. Like, whoever proposed that had to have the backing of _tons_ of dedicated people to make it possible, because the original game already had dozens of interactive objects. Someone saying "it would be neat if everything could be glued together" is a pipe dream at most studios, and they fuckin did it!

I hope we haven't seen the last of more traditional Zelda style games, but gosh, this new frontier sure is neat.

[childishcrimson]

Protectors of each other's what we'll be

You saw my soul through the nuts and bolts

You're the friend I can trust , helped me see I'm not just a machine

And is this what " all the feels " means ?

- Friend by Jeff Williams | Volume 8 Original Soundtrack

[francesderwent]

psa: my queue is due to run out on Saturday. I know I’ve said this before and I’ve always somehow turned it around and gotten the thing filled again without interruption. but I don’t think it’s gonna happen this time.

[stoicmike]

Okay, the damn "colendar" is a "colander." Further proof that my brain is spaghetti spilled on the carpet. -- Michael Lipsey

[kandoros]

Nuts and Bolts, by Roma Agrawal

Finished the first book of the new year!

There was a list of simple machines cataloged in the Renaissance: lever, wheel & axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. Now, even one of my elementary lies-to-children science textbooks pointed out a problem with this list: much George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On TV, there's a bit of redundancy here.

A wedge is just an inclined plane that gets shoved under something. And a screw is just a wedge that wrapped around a central shaft.

Roma Agrawal comes up with probably better and certainly more updated list here: nails (which are the alpha form of screws on the other list), the wheel, springs, lenses, magnets, and pumps. It's not quite a list of 'simple' machines, but it's a good list of basic devices that are included in most modern tech.

I'm sitting in my office right now looking around trying to think of what stuff here doesn't involve of the items on her list. Anything with electricity is right out - magnets are used to generate the stuff. But even without that, the dials on the toaster oven are a wheel, as are the bearings in the ceiling fan. The books have string in the spines holding the pages in. Some of the catalogs have those coils for spines, which while they are not compressed are still springs.

There's an old stove top coffee maker; I think that might be the only thing that doesn't include one of them.

She also points out something neat that I'd never considered before: "Don't reinvent the wheel" is possibly one of the stupidest saying ever From it's start as a pottery wheel, to being turned on its side to help move carts, to covering those wheels with an iron band so they don't break as easily, to the spokes on bicycle wheels, to car tires, to the video everyone has seen about figuring out how to make train wheels go around curves without derailments - the march of progress has been a long process of people finding ways that current wheels don't work and coming up with a new version that fit what they needed.

A pretty decent read, recommended for anyone interested in tech history.

Next up on the list: Martha Wells All Systems Red, about a Murderbot (it's name for itself, it's a security robot / maybe cyborg and it hasn't murdered anyone yet) that managed to hack itself free of the control of its owners and wants nothing more than to binge TV. Along with Travis Baldree's Bookshops and Bonedust, which I know nothing about yet except that I really liked his last book Legends & Lattes, about an adventurer that quits the life and opens up a coffeehouse, finding a family along the way.

[talos-stims]

3d printed fidget bolt | source

[hyperioncorps]

eli vance stimboard for both myself and @burger-laboratories!

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