#everyday skills

[calcedon79]

Hello everyone, I need your swarm knowledge, so to speak:

Next year I have half an hour every day to discuss things with the students in my class (14/15 year olds) that could be useful to them later in life. Things from understanding subscriptions and contracts correctly, household math, making professional phone calls to complaining appropriately somewhere. In other words, everyday skills.

(Yes, I know that the parents should actually be responsible for this, but just assume that the parents aren't interested or can't get their own lives together)

Do you have any more ideas? Not manual skills (there are relevant courses for that) but other things that you wish someone had taught you?

Let's hear it.

[elumish]

One way to build your writing skills--a way that I would argue is necessary if you ever want to write original fiction for publication--is to write from the point of view of, and with the focus on, a wide range of different characters.

it's really easy to fall into a rut when writing the same character or characters all the time, or even the same type of character all the time, where characterization tends to become muscle memory as much as anything else. You know what that character will do, so you know what characters of that type will do, so you know what characters will do, so that's what your characters do.

And when you don't have to think about it, you don't build--and can start to atrophy--those muscles required to do detailed, specific, engaging character building. What does it mean for this character, in this time, to do or experience this thing. What are the myriad of things that have built your character up to being who they are, and how do those things (individually and in aggregate) impact the choices that they make, the actions that they take, the reactions that they have, and the people that they engage with.

What can end up happening--and I see this all the time in published fiction--is that authors end up only being able to write 2-3 character types of each gender, and it all feels a bit samey.

Without opening a book by so many authors I have read, I can predict with a fair amount of accuracy what most of their characters will act like, because it's kind of the same across the board. Even when they start distinct, they end up drifting towards the same personality/character types like carcinization.

Writing from the point of view of/focusing on a range of characters (especially if they are different genders, of different backgrounds, with different wants and fears and habits and interests and personalities) forces you to actually be specific in your writing, if you want it to be any good.

Your 15-year-old B-student who really wants to spend their time playing rugby shouldn't sound like your 45-year-old businessman with a penchant for collecting Star Trek action figures who is trying to plan the perfect anniversary for his wife and neither of them should sound like the 23-year-old who spends their time going out at nightclubs and showing up a little bit hungover at work and worrying about finding a job that will let them move out of the apartment they're sharing with three other people.

Practice, and then practice some part, and then keep practicing. Write different characters, ask yourself if you're writing a character a certain way because you think they would be that way or because it's just habit, and be specific.

[ablankboredtoinsanity]

Spock trying to meditate but it's Touch His Tit Tuesday

a humble offering for @self-made-purgatories

[atalienart]

✧*:･ﾟArt summary 2024

2014-2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021

[pikhachu]

girls when their issues get dismissed as anxiety for the millionth time

[vanilla-poisons]

No matter how funny you think you are you will never be funnier than Jamil doing a whole fucking ballroom dance routine on accident and then falling over in despair while mentally saying “without thinking…MY DANCING SOUL!!”

[baklavagyna]

trying to get my art pussy back in working order so here’s a little rolan moment

[louismygf]

some louis tomlinsons i never posted ^_^

[idolbound]

I think the fandom's hate for DA2 often forgets that the devs were forced into a like, 15 month development cycle by EA. It was pretty clear in how the game's levels were designed and reused, and it couldn't be polished into something more. But, what we got was a micro-level scale story with macro-scale consequences to the overall story of the series; it was a personal journey of an everyday person and all of their friends living in a shitty city, enduring the impossible stories of grief and change, all while dealing with the overarching consequences of the conflicts caused by a religious-political institution in real time.

Also, DA2 gave us Meredith, who is, by and large, not a god or supernatural entity, but just a woman, who was allowed far too much power that went entirely unchecked during her reign. It's a reflection of real world politicians and military leaders, which therefore makes her the most realistic type of villain in the series (and that's long before they gave her the red lyrium idol to turn her into a Boss Fight™).

Ultimately the other aspects of the games in this series - the level design, the combat, music, etc. - are all going to be subjective, especially when in comparison to the other games / your own personal preferences, but to say that it's just "objectively bad" when the story in and of itself is a departure from the other games where you get put into the role of Designated Hero™, whereas Hawke, for the most part, is Just Some Guy (gender neutral) (and this is also why I enjoy Rook in a similar-ish kind of way, where you accidentally become important at work), is really missing the point of what they were trying to do. I fully stand by the point that if Kirkwall got the DAV environment treatment today, it would be way more popular than it is.

[mccallhero]

killian jones + the instincts of a survivor

[haliaiii]

Al haitham stuff

[showrunnerihardlyknowher]

because you should be

[hidekomoon]

can somebody edit the ankles video to make it seem like princess lucy just had a wild night out line dancing with the people from the sugar in the tank video

[crzakioo]

WE DON'T HAVE ASSIGNMENTS TODAY SO..

(have tired Kinito, he hasn't slept for days.)

chat do we fw with this Kinito design... 😍

Best work yet, won't lie!!

[kangals]

Kep did a demo run of the CGC test yesterday, he did really well and only failed on 1 step (1.5, kind of), which was the distance stay. that was actually where I expected he’d fail, he struggles a lot with stays (combo of poor impulse control + FOMO). and he half-failed the “greet a stranger” part because he did try and jump up at first, and then the person we were using was like “oh I just ate a bag of chips” and used her other hand to pet and he stayed sitting, so we’re not sure if he was jumping bc rude or bc he smelled snacks.

he gets a final run opportunity next week, so we’ll try and work on practicing his stays more and see if we can make enough progress to get it done. if he still can’t do it I’m not too pressed, I think at that point it’s just a matter of letting him grow up a bit and regain some brains. he did really well on everything else (no barking! what an experience) so I’m still pleased overall!