#meant for twitter

[skiplo-wave]

Like to charge reblog to cast

Count your fucking days Devil

[clevercrumbish]

Terfism is targeted at radicalising older-middle-aged women in order to sever the otherwise naturally-forming bond that makes trans women and older-middle-aged cis women the strongest of comrades via our shared interests and experiences.

[museaway]

✍️ more fic writer asks!

reblog & your followers can send asks with the questions they’d like you to answer!

the last sentence you wrote

a character whose POV you’re currently exploring

how you feel about your current WIP

a story idea you haven’t written yet

first sentence of the fifth paragraph of an unpublished WIP

the word that appears the most in your current draft (wordcounter.net can tell you)

your preferred writing fonts

if you had to write a sequel to a fic, you’d write one for…

start to finish, how long did it take you to write the last fic you posted?

what is the longest amount of time you’ve let a draft rest before you finished it?

a WIP you’d like to finish someday

a trope you’re really into right now

a fandom you’re thinking about writing for

where do you get your inspiration?

favorite weather for writing

favorite place to write

talk about your writing and editing process

if you keep them, share a deleted sentence or paragraph from a published fic

the most interesting topic you’ve researched for a fic

in what year did you publish your first fic?

when did you publish your most recent fic?

do you ever worry about public reaction to what you’re writing? how do you get past that?

pick three keywords that describe your writing

how do you recharge when you’re not feeling creative?

besides writing, what are your other hobbies?

are you able to write with other people around?

your favorite part of the writing process

your least favorite part of the writing process

how easy is it for you to come up with titles?

share a fic you’re especially proud of

[soapyakships]

missing from the real world

[felixfeliccis]

I love getting infantilized on the internet it's so fun ^^ (irl too) (<- all of this is /s btw)

[victorian-nymph]

Something something a story in four parts

[shinotail]

its you and your family!

[pigeonxp]

bro ur telling me some ppl saw the shooting scene, saw buck scream and crawl under a ladder truck and drag eddie out from under it, and thought "they arent meant to be together". ur telling me ppl saw the LIGHTNING STRIKE scene, where eddie climbs up the ladder screaming for buck, tries to DEFY GRAVITY and LIFT BUCK UP, and ends up PUSHING BOBBY OUT OF THE WAY to get to buck, told the doctors to do more than their best, and then counted and remembered exactly how much time, to the second, that he had to live in a world without buck, and they THINK THAT BUCK AND EDDIE DONT BELONG TOGETHER. LITERALLY YOUVE GOT TO BE WATCHING SELECTIVELY

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[suntails]

it was a nightmare

comm for my friend dove's fic!! u can find it here, DEF worth a read!!

[thepersonperson]

I got my pics of the northern lights from my camera finally! (Captions have locations.)

But I have to yap about the experience I had holy balls.

I fall in love with any location that isn’t scorching hellhole of misery, but I am seriously considering changing my career path slightly so I can move to Alaska.

You see… I’m to become an environmental Professional Engineer (PE) by next year. But! California, Hawaii, and Alaska are the only states that don’t recognize environmental PEs. They do recognize civil PEs, which have a lot of discipline overlap with environmental ones. (I just have to know more biology and chemistry than road stuff.)

So I might take the test to get a civil PE and therefore have the ability to work in Alaska as a PE. (You’re allowed to have multiple PE licenses. You just have to pass 2 tests and then work under any PE for 3–5 years depending on your degree.)

Anyways, it’s not like the Freak4Freak isn’t good in my state, it’s just that my particular brand of it has never been matched to this degree irl, ever.

My entire experience was running into strange people that would ramble about their hobbies unprompted or to help me specifically.

For example, was wearing pants with mushrooms on them and this lady working at a bookstore saw them and started going off about mushrooms. This activated some of the niche knowledge I gained on this trip.

The trail I hiked had partially burnt down several years ago. All the dead birch trees had attracted mushroom growth. (Also there was weeaboo graffiti in the midway shelter cabin thing. Do you know the kind of brain damage a received seeing Hatsune Miku in a shed full of saws and an axe???)

I learned this from the guy I hitchhiked with back to my car at the trailhead. He also told me the birds I saw on the trail were grouse and that they were good eating. I told him they were really dumb and not fearful me. He told me that’s why as a kid he ran up to them and snapped their necks for easy dinner. (He was raised on a homestead.)

Big mushrooms don’t really grow where I live so I was ecstatic and collected some for later IDing so I wouldn’t poison myself to death. Turns out some of the ones I passed up were the rare Black Chanterelles… So! I told the mushroom lady you have to go out there and get them. She was so fudging happy to hear this.

She then ranted bout how some of the mushrooms are good for dyes and that it’s been really helpful for her new yarn hobby. This then activated my niche knowledge I acquired when trying to dye some animal bones. I got to lecture her on the vast color palette that can be taken from madder root. (The shade you get depends on even the temperature of the water you use it in!) Told her to use it for her yarn dyes. I showed her my dyed bones as an example.

She said they were amazing. She said the color was as if I had just ripped them out of the animal and my heart fluttered.

11/10. My new favorite state. Never thought I'd find a place populated by the cross between outdoorsmen and weebs like this. When I had to leave, the northern lights followed me all the way back to my state. It's a sign.

I’m posting this from the woods I am in. Anyone else up for tonight’s northern lights? (Someone please entertain me while I wait in the pitch black darkness for the lightshow.)

[chimaerakitten]

Temeraire modern AU concepts don’t usually keep the treason even if they keep the dragons and an implied war and tbh that’s kind of a shame because “Laurence vs. the Twitter account Jane Roland forces him to use regularly to rehabilitate his image and tell his side of the story” would be a source of absolutely endless comedy methinks

[motobug]

A redraw/update of a reference I did back in 2021! This was for my oc Vice and their shapeshifting abilities.

Although Vice can perfectly emulate their target's voice and even their intonations, the 'dead' look in their eyes make everything they do Slightly Off. Especially if they are trying to fool someone close to their target, it will only be a matter of time before they are sus'd out.

[mangywayway]

The piece I did for the @harringrovezine "Kings of Nowhere" !

It has been so much fun, I still can't believe that I could contribute to this project. I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that one year already has gone by, gosh (◕▿◕✿)

[strange-aeons]

What's ur take on staff actively ruining the site???

I was trying to stay positive about the changes but things are looking bleak, tumblrinas