#first date questions

[620migs]

who is the greatest TE of all time

[occudo]

Hear Me Out So- there is this Podcast musical called 36 Questions... I only did some of the first song, but do you see the vision??

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[dekariosclan]

I think everyone is aware Patch 7 fixed Gale’s ‘last name’ dialogue so that it activates in the game now, but equally as important is that it also fixed his expressions, too. Previous datamined clips showing this dialogue had him looking very ���flat’ while he spoke, so you couldn’t really read into his emotions:

Gale: You like so many things about me I’d have sooner discarded…Your generosity is quite wonderful. Gale Dekarios likes you too. Very, very much.

Now, after watching the updated animation, it struck me how he says “Gale Dekarios likes you too” with a serious, sincere look on his face—but then he pauses, and his whole expression shifts into a loving smile as he emphasizes “Very, very much”…

Look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t him thinking about how he’s going to propose to Tav 🥹

[king-of-colors]

that moment when detectives refer to each other as their partner and you're not sure if it's in the romantic sense or not-

[pheyphem]

ignoring the obvious. is anyone else really fucking intrigued/confused by this room

it is so STARKLY different from the rest of the phouse like it has fuzzy padded brown walls?? like they have a reason for every design choice in the phouse so why did they go with fuzzy brown walls in here and here only (it seems)??/?

drop your ideas below

[prince-liest]

A little bit of celebratory light in the current political climate: I'm working with a local endocrinologist who is versed in gender-affirming care as well as my local LGBTQ+ resource organization to start a quarterly pride clinic that I'm going to run with and staff with the aforementioned endocrinologist. I don't know yet how successful it will be, but we're in a really under-served area and a lot of the local federally qualified health centers are pulling back their gender affirming care offerings due to the recent federal policies so that they can retain their funding, which after speaking to my residency program directer he seems to believe is unlikely to affect us. So I'm going to be working with our program attendings and this endocrinologist to help refer more queer and especially trans patients to myself and one of my seniors who is also really involved in LGBTQ+ health goals for gender-affirming care.

The clinic itself is only going to be quarterly at this time (hopefully monthly in the future) due to the limitations of patient panel sizes and also residency scheduling, but we're hoping that we can also follow these patients in our actual primary clinic, since it will all be in the same building and part of the same system, and the endocrinologist has said she is willing to co-precept these patients (aka. have us forward her the notes and look over them to make sure the care plans are copacetic, as well as get curbsided by us when needed) when we work on hormone therapy in the primary care clinic. I think the main challenge is going to be 1) making sure we have the resources and access to a good multidisciplinary team (main points are mental health resources (gonna ask one of the psych program attendings, he is both openly queer and invested) and infectious disease specialist options that aren't going to result in bad experiences for the patients that we refer that way) and 2) making sure we have appropriate follow-up for patients, which I think on my end is just going to mean me telling our clinic coordinator, "Hey, if it's for this patient panel specifically, you can book me an extra patient per half-day for continuity."

We're also going to be doing internal-ish referral advertising through the LGBTQ+ org, as well as training through the organization and also just through research done by myself and my senior for our co-residents for things like cancer screening guidelines adjusted for risk factors we see in queer people (anal paps, three-site testing, when to screen for breast cancer in trans women, etc, etc). Waiting on my program director to talk to our clinic coordinator to see if there's any way for people to self-refer straight to the pride clinic (probably insurance-dependent) but otherwise it's just...happening.

I think my main wish is that I had more days to directly work with this endocrinology attending to pick her brain. She said she's game for any [redacted weekday] for the clinic once we get things going and I'm on my endocrinology rotation, but I'm mostly working with another endo and only see her twice this month due to her work schedule. She's a great teacher and next time I see her this month I'm going to see if she has time to give me a crash-course on HRT management that will help me synthesize the gender dysphoria treatment clinical practice guidelines I'm reading through from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. My PD actually specifically referred a trans patient to us to see that day because he knows I really want more experience with this (and, y'know, she's a great endo doc) so that will be the perfect opportunity.

Anyway! It's a great time to be working on offering more medical resources to LGBTQ patients.

[bildads-shoes]

nooo don't turn out to be an aziraphale hater you're so sexy aha

[t4t-dazai]

your honor, they're nb4nb

[angry-glasses]

i know a lot of people like to take Kokichi's flirting with Shuichi seriously, but consider the much funnier alternative:

he was shipbaiting the audience

[icewindandboringhorror]

indeed my exact process once every 8 months or so

[damn-iwantedtobecalledmystique]

college au where alex and sean are roommates and only do laundry at 3 am bc of the cute nerdy guy they always run into

[wannabemylover]

rewatching the first episode of Hannibal and holy shit I forgot how good this is but it's actually insane that Brian fuller set up the ep like this, he introduces will and Hannibal by first briefly showing them at their core, at the darkest, most vile part of them---we get a glimpse behind the curtain---and then its gone, the curtain is snapped shut and we see their masks, their human suits.

Will empathizes with killers because he likes it, and he wants to kill but he refuses to give into the urge because he knows how much he'll like it and he won't be able to stop. So he lives vicariously through other killers, satisfying his own dark urge by feeding it little morsels of secondhand blood lust. Every crime scene he works gives the urge something that satisfies it, not enough for it to grow, but enough for it be sate. Enough that he can ignore it for long enough that he can walk around and be Professor Will Graham who is Weird, Brash, and Non-sociable.

And Hannibal is a cannibal at night and a psychiatrist by morning.

[theygender]

Going to college as a nontraditional student with an office job is kinda funny bc now when a professor messes things up in a way that fucks me over instead of being like "omg this authority figure is so unfair 😭" I'm approaching it more with the vibe of like "if Karen from Accounting doesn't fix this mistake that's hindering my work after my third passive aggressive email I'm going to CC her boss"

[lazuliquetzal]

I keep on telling people you're the only one who knows how to plot. Can you teach all of us how to plot, please? I love you.

I AM SUMMONED? PLOT BRAIN SUMMONED?

I love plotting. It's my favorite part of the writing process. Plot is "things that happen" and the best part of writing is imagining things that happen. I'm going to assume that whoever may be reading this knows how to imagine The Happenings, so I'm gonna be talking more about structure, but in like, a kinda abstract sense.

A good plot is a little bit more than a string of events. Plot is like music: there's variation in rhythm and sound and melody, but ultimately there's cohesion, because it's all one song. You can have a bunch of wild things happening, but no matter how strange, there should be something that links them all together, because you're telling one story.

Plot structures are patterns in stories. I'm pretty sure most of them were developed as analysis tools (as in, story already exists > look! it follows this pattern) rather than as writing tools, but people use them as writing tools because it's a neat little way to organize the chaos that is "shit happens." Stories follow patterns for the same reasons music follows patterns: we enjoy the certainty of hitting certain beats. But we also like being surprised. A good pop song doesn't sound like a random collection of sounds, but it also doesn't sound like the middle slider of other songs.

There is this shared concept in both music and writing: the idea of tension and release. Basically, you're playing with reader expectation: there's an imbalance in the experience (tension), and we want to see that imbalance resolved (release). All the common plot structures deal with this basic pattern:

You set an expectation

There are complications to the expectation

You meet the expectation

And this rhythm is happening on multiple levels in writing. Scenes follow this structure (we're gonna get past that door, we're gonna find the murder weapon, we're gonna collaborate and come up with a plan) and all those scenes feed into the overarching expectation (we're gonna solve this murder!). I usually think of chapters as their own mini-story, part of the larger whole. And I think of scenes as their own mini-story, part of the larger chapter. I have engineer brain. I see the gears spinning in the clock. That's why all my chapters have at least One Important Thing happening, because that's that particular chapter's Step #3.

And One Last Important Thing:

In music, a delayed resolution is almost always more interesting than the standard resolution. In writing, that means you wanna drag out Step #2 for as long as you can. That's where the bulk of the story is happening, that's how you build tension, that's how you get people to turn the page.

So when you write a fake dating fic, those bitches better not get together until the very end. I came here for fake dating, not for real dating, damn it. If you resolve that expectation early on, you better replace it with a different expectation that's just as engaging.

But also don't drag it out for too long. Sorry. The hard part of writing is learning the difference between too short and too long. Writing is unfortunately a nuanced skill which is why my advice is like "do this but not too much teehee." But tension and resolution is just rhythm, you can build a sense for it if you engage with enough stories.

[velvetwyrme]

me while in the middle of writing like 4 other things: what if. soundwave/reader/jazz fic. what then.