#calendar mark

[fumiko-matsubara]

July 03, 2014 ー 16:04

As he walked down the mountain path, Chiba turned to look behind him; thankfully, not a single person was in sight. He also turned back to look at what was before him once again. He could recognise Hara and Fuwa from a distance, but they were too far from hearing range.

Seeing that the coast was clear, he leaned down slightly and cleared his throat. “Hey, Kurahashi.”

From his right, Kurahashi, who had been strangely quiet the whole time, perked up at her name. “Yeah?”

Chiba shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t say anything earlier…” He dug his hands into his pockets. “Mostly to not ruin the mood, but…”

Slowly, he turned to look at her and was nearly taken aback by the solemn expression Kurahashi was wearing. But he shouldn’t be really surprised. Today hadn’t been a very good day for the usually bubbly girl, after all.

Chiba decided that there was no need for him to hold back.

“But when Okajima told us earlier that training with Takaoka-sensei might actually be fun because he’s super friendly and all that stuff- unlike Karasuma-sensei, apparently.” He rolled his eyes sarcastically at the last remark. “That actually compelled me to trust him even less, for some reason.”

He let out a scoff. “Not that I trust him in the first place. Just something about the new teacher puts me off. Maybe it’s the obnoxiously jolly attitude he had going on. Who knows?”

Chiba looked around as he talked, making sure that there was still nobody nearby.

“Whatever it is, I just can’t find myself easing up to him anytime soon- at least, that’s just how I feel.” He quickly added the end bit, not wanting to give off the wrong impression that he was being hateful for no reason.

“Me too, actually.” Kurahashi finally spoke up, looking at Chiba with unease visible all over her face. “I also didn’t say anything earlier, though I honestly want to…” 

She lightly fiddled with the straps of her bookbag, kicking a small stray pebble away. “But I was kinda hurt when Oka-chin began saying those… things about Karasuma-sensei, all to basically prove that Takaoka-sensei is the better teacher for us just because he’s friendlier.”

“Which is a stupid thing to say, to be completely honest.” Chiba crossed his arms with a frown. “Forgive the lack of filter, by the way. But as distant and serious as he is, when Karasuma-sensei praises us for doing well in training and tests, he says it as it is. And when he sees that someone isn’t doing well, he’ll call it out just like that. He might sound harsh sometimes, but I like that he’s being blatantly honest with us.”

“Right!” Kurahashi nodded at him furiously. “His praises felt more well-earned because he’s typically distant. And I like that he takes us seriously, even if it’s just for training. Not many people do…”

Chiba hummed softly with a smile. “Do you think he’ll start leaving critiques on our next aptitude test results?” He grinned when saw Kurahashi’s eyes practically twinkling in delight.

“Oh, I hope so!” Kurahashi bounced in her steps. “Cause it means he’d point out the things he noticed from us, right?”

“Yeah! And you’ll know to what extent he’s paying attention to you.” Chiba added. “Like, yeah sure, I’m the top scorer in the shooting department. But will he then also point out the things I take into account to get that good at what I’m doing?”

His soft smile widened as he leaned down slightly.

“...Do you think he’ll also point out things I didn’t know I had in me all along?”

Kurahashi giggled, playfully hitting him on the shoulder. “It’s starting to sound like to me you’re just wanting to get Karasuma-sensei’s attention. Back off, Chiba-chan. I call dibs on him first and I don’t share~~”

“Alright, alright. I’m backing off…” Chiba huffed out a laugh, rubbing his shoulder. Playful as she supposedly was, Kurahashi went a bit… too strong with the slap. It kind of hurts. Not that he’d admit that out loud, though. “Anyways, don’t pay attention to what Okajima said earlier, Kurahashi. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Karasuma-sensei is a great teacher. The only reason Takaoka-sensei is taking over our PE class is that he’s gotten extremely busy.”

“Right! He said it himself!” Kurahashi agreed with a huff. “I think the cake just won Oka-chin over and that’s why he’s being biased earlier!”

Chiba nodded with an amused smile. “Speaking of cake, wanna head down to the cafe near the school campus? I saw that you also didn’t touch any of the sweets Takaoka-sensei brought with him.”

“Ah, yeah..” Kurahashi slightly faltered. “I kinda lost my appetite the second he said he spent all his money on those…”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Chiba frowned at the reminder. “Cause if I’m gifting people things they like out of the goodness of my heart, I wouldn’t tell them how much money I spent since that will definitely make them feel bad about it.”

He turned to look around them once again to make sure nobody was within hearing range and was pleasantly surprised to find that even Hara and Fuwa disappeared from his sight. Maybe he and Kurahashi took their time walking down the mountain path, it seemed.

“I know he said it wasn’t the case, but do you think Takaoka-sensei was really bribing us with the sweets?” Kurahashi hesitantly asked as she peered at him, her voice low and whispery.

Chiba bit off a scoff. “If he has to clarify that when he doesn’t even need to, then he’s definitely bribing us for sure.”

Kurahashi looked away, her head low, seemingly contemplating his answer. 

They walked in silence for a bit. Not wanting his restless brain to overthink from the silence, Chiba decided he found the afternoon glow of their surroundings rather interesting. He could hear some distant chirps and leaves rustling, likely from the wind he found a bit too warm for his liking. Tea and cake inside a cosy, air-conditioned cafe are starting to sound like bliss to him. He kind of doesn’t want to go there alone, so he was hoping Kurahashi would take his offer.

“I don’t like Takaoka-sensei.” Kurahashi solidly declared, instantly pulling Chiba away from his thoughts.

He looked at her, eyes wide open, pleasantly surprised at the blatant honesty.

“I’m with you there. I don’t like him either.” Chiba replied with a frown. “Whatever his deal is, he better not suck at his job, at the very least. What is even the point of getting along with your students if you can’t teach them anything?”

Kurahashi nodded repeatedly at him with a hum.

“So,” Chiba gave her a soft smile, “cafe near the school?” He offered once again.

“Your treat?” Kurahashi smiled back, her eyes twinkling rather cheekily at him.

Chiba breathed out a laugh in pure amusement. “Fine! I guess your company is a good enough exchange itself…” He trailed off teasingly.

“Ehh~ It’s gonna be my treat next time we go out, don’t worry!” Kurahashi playfully elbowed him on the chest and… ouch.

It’s a shame that the afterschool tea plan with the rest of their classmates had to be cancelled. Kurahashi herself looked to be the most excited about it. So, Chiba hoped this would be a good alternative in the meantime. 

Maybe Karasuma will join them the next time they plan an afterschool outing together.

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I wrote this whole thing because of this page:

I personally find it extremely interesting that Chiba and Kurahashi were literally nowhere to be found the whole time Takaoka was getting along well with their classmates, both the first and second time. Like, not even a single background cameo in any of the panels, even though both tend to have a lot of background appearances in the manga.

And the only time we've ever seen them after Takaoka's introduction was them being visibly unsure about having Takaoka as their new PE teacher... which was then brushed off.

Considering that Kurahashi and Chiba were still not shown in any panel while Takaoka was getting along with their classmates the next day... until he showed his true colours, that is, it's safe to assume that their feelings about him still hasn't changed, even if their concerns were intially brushed off by their classmates.

[suntails]

✨ Once upon a time ✨

[b0tster]

🗓️ ITS FUKCING YEAG DAY 🗓️

💯✨🗣️HAPPY YEAG DAY 🗣️✨💯

[azamansource]

EMMY FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

the loumand argument in full

[paulthebukkit]

Huge shout-out to Animal Crossing City Folk who is still distributing new items in 2024 🎉

[paracosmicessence]

guys i think maria wrote the very first sonadow fic ever

[hballegro]

HAPPY PILOT ANNIVERSARY

[beif0ngs]

Can you hear it...? The drums of liberation!!

GEAR 5 LUFFY PREMIERING ON AUGUST 6TH, 2023!!!

[dedalvs]

When will humankind learn the lesson of its hubris and begin to heal itself? Also can you recommend any undergraduate or graduate level resources (textbooks etc.) for learning about fiction? I already read Writing Fiction by Burroway. Thanks in advance

January 14, 3182. Make a note of the date and return to this post when it comes.

To your second question, I've never read anything on writing fiction, only writing in general. I've found something valuable in every book on writing, even if there were things in the book I found less valuable. For example, I read Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, and while there was much of it I didn't care for, there are some passags that have stuck with me 22 years later. When it comes to writing guides, I think the best thing to do is read what interests you while understand that what you are really doing is building your own writing guide inside you. You're absorbing what you find personally meaningful and using it to create your own personal styleguide that, like it or not, you'll be following for the rest of your life. Rather than rejecting that, and trying to decide which text will be the text that tells you how to write, embrace it, realize that you are going to do what you're going to do, and then try to work within that framework. That is, if that's what's happening, how will you approach a styleguide? What will it mean to you to read a very didactic text (i.e. "All serious writers must do x; no serious writer every does y") vs. a loosey-goosey one (e.g. "Dance naked in the garden of your creativity and allow your flowers to bloom!")? What are you looking for in these texts and what will you do with information or strategies that you find valuable?

Returning to Writing Down the Bones, I have to say I found the book to be mostly woo. It was more a kind of self-help/empowerment book than a book on writing, in my opinion. But there is something in there that I'm sure I'd heard before but which finally resonated with me. Specifically, it was the way she articulated that it really, truly doesn't matter what you put on the page when you're drafting. Drafting is not the time to reject. Even some idea comes to you that you find absurd, illogical, thematically inappropriate—whatever. It's not the time to push it away. Indeed, it's wasted effort. Editing and revising is the time to question. If you're writing, you shouldn't let anything stop you—even your own brain.

Why it took till then for this idea to take root, I don't know. It could be how she worded it. It could be that it came at the right time. Perhaps I was more open to new ideas when I was reading this book. It may also have something to do with a transition that had taken place for me in writing. After all, when I started high school, I was not regularly using a computer (we'd only just gotten a computer that stayed at home). When I started writing, I wrote by hand—on paper. It's a much, much different thing to edit and revise when you're writing on paper than it is on when you're working on a computer! I mean, digital real estate is cheap. When you're writing by hand, it can literally hurt to write seven or eight pages—and then to discard them in editing! Right now I'm working on a novel draft where I've decided an entire section needs to come out. If I'd written that by hand?! I can't even imagine.

I guess the tl;dr of it is I don't have a specific text to recommend. Rather, I encourage you to look around and grab anything that interests you. In doing so, though, I encourage you to approach it differently, focusing on what in it you find valuable, without either wholly rejecting it or feeling you have to follow it to the letter like an Ikea manual. I even found something valuable in C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which I honestly can't believe I read.

If you'd like some fiction advice that may be generally useful no matter what you're writing, this is what I can offer:

A valuable skill to hone is being able to read your work as if you have no other knowledge of it. In other words, you need to be able to read your work like a reader. One of the most difficult things to do with fiction is to cut. You usually have a lot more characterization, a lot more plot points, a lot more detail, etc. than end up on the page. The important question is if you cut something, will the reader notice? Will it actually feel like something's miss it, or will a reader never notice? Mind, I'm not saying that as a writer you can't tell if something is superfluous, or that anything you cut will be superfluous. I'm saying sometimes even if you cut something important a reader will still get the impression that what they are reading is whole and unedited. That isn't a good thing or a bad thing: it's a neutral thing. The question you'll have to answer is what is this whole that the reader is getting, and is that whole something you're satisfied with?

Get multiple rounds of feedback from many different readers. I say this not because it's vital, because beta readers are important, because you have to have multiple perspectives on your work, etc. None of that. Getting feedback from many different readers is a form of self-care on the part of the writer. I was deathly afraid of feedback as a young writer. I welcomed praise, sure, but anything else felt too painful to bear. This changed when I took a short fiction class at Berkeley. Suddenly a short story of mine wasn't getting one round of feedback: it was getting fourteen. And not just from the professor, but from fellow students. This was a minor revolution for me in terms of accepting feedback. If I were to take, say, one round of feedback, certainly there would be some praise, but there would also be notes like "awkward phrasing", "why did x character do y?", "this is unclear", "too much description", etc. These things would burn me. I would seethe reading them, and it would hurt so deeply. But! Imagine that one of them circles a paragraph and writes "too much description" and then the other thirteen readers say absolutely nothing at all about that paragraph—maybe one even puts a smiley face next to it. THAT puts the criticism in its proper context. Maybe your writing isn't too bad! Maybe there isn't too much description. Maybe that particular reader just wasn't vibing with it, and maybe that's okay. And then let's look at it from the other perspective. Say thirteen out of fourteen papers have a sentence marked and all of them say things like "huh?", "what's this mean?", "confusing", etc. Guess what? The sentence is probably confusing. And for some reason if everyone's saying the same thing it hurts a lot less. It means, yeah, you probably made a little mistake, and that's okay. It's not one person singling you out, and it's not the case that they don't know what they're talking about. I can't emphasize enough how freeing it is to look at reviews of your work if you have a handful or more to draw from rather than just a single good friend.

It's okay to write the fun part first. You may have a plot device you're really excited about, but to get there, you have to introduce your characters, have them get together, have them go to a place, meet someone else, etc. And it may take time and energy to write all that. You may feel pressured to get through that before you get to the part you really want to write. You certainly can, but you do not have to. I don't know if younger writers can appreciate exactly what it means to have a computer. You can write a little bit now and literally copy and paste it into some other document later. Try doing that with a typewriter! You can write something like "Insert paragraphs later of characters traveling to x location". You can even drop a variable in there so it's easy to find with the search function later (e.g. "ZZZZZ insert scene description here"—now you just need to search for "ZZZZZ"). You can put it in a different color on the screen so it's easy to find when scrolling. You can paste a freaking photo into your document! It's extraordinary what you can do with a computer that you couldn't do in years past. You've got a ton of options. But most importanly, when your work is done, no one will know what order you wrote it in.

In fiction, nothing has to happen. Villains don't have to be punished; heroes don't have to win; characters don't have to have a specific arc that comes to some conclusion. Honestly, one of the tropes (if you can even call it a trope) that I find most frustrating in sequels for movie franchises is after the characters are introduced, they take a few character and assign to them the major story conflict, and then for the rest, they give them a mini arc. It's like, "Mondo 2: Exploding the Mondoverse sees our hero Larjo Biggins take on new villain the Krunge as the very core of the Mondoverse is threatened with destruction! Also, Siddles Nuli learns its okay to be left out sometimes and she shouldn't get her feelings hurt, and Old Mucko learns that even though technology is advancing, sometimes good old fashioned common sense is just what the doctor ordered!" If you get to the end of your story, and you feel it's done, you don't have to panic if you suddenly realize we don't know whether Hupsi ever made it to Bumbus 7. It's okay if Story A is resolved but Story B is not.

I don't care if you used Trope A in your new story even though you used Trope A in your past seven stories and neither should you. Seriously, you think anyone was complaining when Agatha Christie put out another mystery novel? "Oh. Mystery again, huh? Gee, we were all hoping you'd write a book about the struggles traditional fishing villages are facing in the wake of industrial modernization." No we fucking weren't!

I hope you find some of this useful. Whether you did or not, though, be sure you enjoy what you're doing. If you are, you're doing the right thing.

[viktuuri-week]

Mark your calendars, Viktuuri Week is returning in three months!

In celebration of the eighth anniversary of the release of the Yuri on Ice anime, we bring you the second #viktuuri-week! So mark your calendars, and get ready to bring the ice and the fire for our two favorite skaters. They were born to make history ♥️

If you would like to see last year's prompts, you can find them here

Creations of all types are welcome, and will be celebrated! And please spread this far and wide, so that anyone else who adore Victor and Yuuri can take part!

Victuuri Week October 7-13, 2024

Monday, Oct 7 -- Practice Tuesday, Oct 8 -- Gold Wednesday, Oct 9 -- Rivals Thursday, Oct 10 -- Ice Friday, Oct 11 -- Risks Saturday, Oct 12 -- Happiness Sunday, Oct 13 -- Commitment

Please follow this blog for further updates as the event gets closer, and we can't wait for you to celebrate with us!

[dead-in-a-damn-ditch]

oh my god. holy shit. thank you the crane wives i love you the crane wives. i have been waiting for this for months holy shit

[botanicalsword]

Relationship • Marriage? long-term connection? Composite & Davison Chart

✧

>> Relationship • compatibility ♡ Crack the code✧

Public image - Aspects to consider whether the public perceives both as suitable for marriage

1. Juno - Marriage asteroid 2. Ascendant - Rising sign 3. 7th House Ruler ✧

Taurus - Cancer - Capricorn  If these signs are predominantly Taurus, Cancer, or Capricorn, the public may see the two of you as a suitable or excellent choice for marriage. But the perception from the public does not necessarily reflect your true connection. 

Aspects to consider for both genuinely suitable for marriage: 1. Sun sign 2. Moon sign ✧

In the Davison chart, it is recommended to have the following signs:

Sun sign - Aries / Cancer / Leo / Libra / Pisces

Houses of Sun - 4th / 5th / 7th / 8th houses

Harmonious aspects between Sun-Moon / Sun-Venus / Sun-Saturn / Sun-Neptune

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Gemini - Sagittarius - Aquarius If these signs are in Gemini, Sagittarius, or Aquarius, it may indicate that you are not naturally suited for marriage.

✧

From the perspective of compatibility charts, the simplest understanding is as follows:

Composite Chart vs Davison ChartThe Composite Chart represents how others perceive "you as a couple," while the Davison Chart represents how you perceive "your relationship" in the later stage.

Understand that how others see "you as a couple" may differ from your feelings

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These two charts also are heavily influenced by transits.

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Observation on the following scenarios:

Composite Chart - the public image that will be affected by external factors; Davison Chart - development in a later stage depends on the effort they put in

The Davison chart may not be favorable, but the aspects in transits are positive/harmonious, keeping the couple continuously involved and unable to break apart.

The Composite Chart may be favorable, making the couple appear as a "perfect match" in the eyes of the outside world, with the support of family and friends, making marriage easier.

The Composite Chart may have unfavorable aspects in transits, but the transits in the Davison chart are postive. Although there may be external resistance, both parties are satisfied internally and unwilling to separate. Whether they can get married or not depends on how much effort they are willing to put into the relationship.

The Composite Chart has favorable transits, but the transits in the Davison Chart are unfavorable. Despite the personal dissatisfaction, various external factors and conflicts make it difficult for the couple to break up.

✧

Exclusive content -

>> Relationship ☽ Observations on Composite Chart / Davison Chart >> Relationship • Dynamics and challenges ♡ Composite Chart >> Relationship • Challenges in the connection • Davison Chart >> Relationship • How the connection affects the way they behave • Marks Chart

>> Back to Masterlist ✧ Explicit Content

Quick Access to : ❥ Astro / Asteroid Indicators ❥ Synastry / Composite Chart Observations ❥ House Stellium Observations ❥ Astro basic info / Brief reads ❥ Asteroid database ❥ Personal studies ✧ spiritual journal

Exclusive access : Patreon

/ instagram : @le.sinex / @botanicalsword

[pinktaeyeon]

CHANYEOL Digital Single '그래도 돼 (Good Enough)' MV Teaser

[kingmakerpod]

A postcard from Zurich.

[kindgreenape]

i want to get one of those face cakes for my birthday and tell the people at costco this is my uncle

[viggos-mortensen]

#and what if i told you that this actually happened on april fools day in the film's timeline