#super senses

[mimzy-writing-online]

hello!! I don't know if this blog is still active or not but you're the first resource I found when looking up things about writing blind characters so here i am. I have a character who's a fantasy race that naturally has a better sense of smell & hearing. This character also happens to be blind. Their blindness is not inherently why they have these advantages, but I still want to avoid coming off as cliche. Is there any way I should make this clear/anything i should alter? thx for reading !

Hi, the blog is active. If it's been a while since the last post, it's just because life hasn't given me much time to work on the blog but it has not been abandoned.

As for your question:

-Establish which race your character is early on during their introduction. You can work some world building in piece by piece and explain that they have stronger senses of hearing and smell than humans.

-In your planning/world-building you should consider how heavily that race relies on those senses for environmental awareness. Once you work out what's possible/impossible for your character to smell and hear, then you go through what you need your character to notice for the story.

Those two above should be enough to avoid cliche territory but if you have a moment where the character's ability to focus on a sense seems too special or plot-convenient, just work through whether or not it's possible for the character to identify this sound/smell and break down what the thought process was.

I have a lot of people in my life who treat my senses of sound/touch/taste/smell/etc as super human because I notice details they've never had to pay attention to before. A lot of times I respond to their awe by explaining my thought process and how I came to certain conclusions. It's mostly pattern recognition and detective work.

For example, I can smell a burger joint from two blocks away, but I have friends who won't smell it until we're walking past the door.

My friends don't need to think about the smells and what they mean because their environmental awareness begins with visual input and everything that comes after is just extra context. They'll see a sign from two blocks away, identify the logo/name/branding. If they're hungry they might focus on that sign long enough to remember the food sold there and maybe even the smells they remember. If they're not hungry, they'll move onto the next visual cue they notice.

I am getting a lot less visual info with a much shorter "warning" time, so I'll probably catch the smell of food on the wind long before I ever see a sign. For my brain, the thought process becomes: I smell food. Someone is cooking meat. Beef? There's notes of fried oil in the air. It's probably a burger place. Then I work with what I know about the area and if I remember any major restaurants.

Another example is that I used laundry room as markers for corners and apartment buildings in my neighborhood. I can connect that random rumbling sound with the smell of fresh laundry.

For most people it's just an unknown rumbling sound. For my bestie, it's a mechanical sound of a home appliance but not a refrigerator or a heating unit or something he specifically worked with in the past. For me, the process is- It's a mechanical sound but not one belonging to a car. It's also stationary and the sound is steady and repetitive, looping ever 3 seconds or less. I connect the sound with the smell of fresh laundry and I know that it's coming from a dryer. Which was actually very helpful in my old apartment building because I could tell if the washer and dryer were in use from outside the building, so I knew if it was pointless to get my laundry ready right away.

So if you have a moment that seems too super powered, just work through the thought process and adjust details until it feels right.

[wilt3d-r0zes]

Fic Name (and link): Lobotomize Me Series: Lab Rats Characters: Chase Davenport Pairings: N/A Trigger Warnings: Talk of waking up in surgery, lobotomies, gore, extreme detail of pain via noise, brief mention of laughing at someone who’s in pain, ear bleeding Important Tags: N/A bc all the warnings are above

Fic Summary:  "It's like someone is driving a toothpick into his eardrum, like he's getting a lobotomy- it's like he's in the middle of ear surgery and he's woken up from the anesthetic but can't say or do anything to stop the pain." or, I wanted to write sensory overload Chase angst and this came out. Me making the scene with the school bell So Much More Horrifying from Chase's perspective. (fic under the cut!)

The level of white-hot pain drilling into his ears is unbearable. The screaming overlapped with the ringing, burying deep into his skull and burning everything in its path. It's like someone is driving a toothpick into his eardrum, like he's getting a lobotomy- it's like he's in the middle of ear surgery and he's woken up from the anesthetic but can't say or do anything to stop the pain.

It's horrifying. It's not painful, it's so much worse- it's excruciatingly mind-meltingly loud, and he thinks he might be dying as the noise rattling his very being seems to go on for an eternity. 

He knows he's fallen, collapsed completely in the loss of his spatial orientation while his bionics and brain attempt to handle the sudden agony and noise, transporting all the materials it can to keep him from passing out or dying to this perceived threat. 

His shoulder and arm and hip are all throbbing like he's been thrown by Adam across the basement and into the rock wall when in actuality he's fallen maybe five feet to the tile below. 

It feels like his brain is pouring out of his ears. It feels like there is no chance he isn't pouring blood all over the white tiling in Mission Creek High's entrance room, staining it red. It feels like his eardrums themselves have been liquified and slowly dripped out in an ever-increasing flow of agony.

And then all at once the ear-piercing ringing stops, and he stops screaming. He's scrambling to the nearest solid object without the brain power to process what it is, bionic information unit letting him know his senses are still coming back online. 

His ears are still ringing when he blinks back into awareness, feeling the texture of Adam's jeans and hearing the snickering of his siblings like he didn't just go through complete and total evisceration via noise.

Maybe he should've stayed in the basement.

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[chloesimaginationthings]

New Patreon tier art now FNAF themed,,

[thistlecrimes]

Things I've learned from getting covid for the first time in 2023

I wear an N95 in public spaces and I've managed to dodge it for a long time, but I finally got covid for the first time (to my knowledge) in mid-late November 2023. It was a weird experience especially because I feel like it used to be something everyone was talking about and sharing info on, so getting it for the first time now (when people generally seem averse to talking about covid) I found I needed to seek out a lot of info because I wasn't sure what to do. I put so much effort into prevention, I knew less about what to do when you have it. I'm experiencing a rebound right now so I'm currently isolating. So, I'm making a post in the hopes that if you get covid (it's pretty goddamn hard to avoid right now) this info will be helpful for you. It's a couple things I already knew and several things I learned. One part of it is based on my experience in Minnesota but some other states may have similar programs.

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The World Health Organization states you should isolate for 10 days from first having symptoms plus 3 days after the end of symptoms.

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At the time of my writing this post, in Minnesota, we have a test to treat program where you can call, report the result of your rapid test (no photo necessary) and be prescribed paxlovid over the phone to pick up from your pharmacy or have delivered to you. It is free and you do not need to have insurance. I found it by googling "Minnesota Test to Treat Covid"

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Paxlovid decreases the risk of hospitalization and death, but it's also been shown to decrease the risk of Long Covid. Long Covid can occur even from mild or asymptomatic infections.

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Covid rebound commonly occurs 2-8 days after apparent recovery. While many people associate Paxlovid with covid rebound, researchers say there is no strong evidence that Paxlovid causes covid rebound, and rebounds occur in infections that were not treated with Paxlovid as well. I knew rebounds could happen but did not know it could take 8 days. I had mine on day 7 and was completely surprised by it.

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If you start experiencing new symptoms or test positive again, the CDC states that you should start your isolation period again at day zero. Covid rebound is still contagious. Personally I'd suggest wearing a high quality respirator around folks for an additional 8-9 days after you start to test negative in case of a rebound.

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Positive results on a rapid test can be very faint, but even a very faint line is positive result. Make sure to look at your rapid test result under strong lighting. Also, false negatives are not uncommon. If you have symptoms but test negative taking multiple tests and trying different brands if you have them are not bad ideas. My ihealth tests picked up my covid, my binax now tests did not.

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EDIT: I'd highly suggest spending time with friends online if you can, I previously had a link to the NAMI warmline directory in this post but I've since been informed that NAMI is very much funded by pharmaceutical companies and lobbies for policies that take autonomy away from disabled folks, so I've taken that off of here! Sorry, I had no idea, the People's CDC listed them as a resource so I just assumed they were legit! Feel free to reply/reblog this with other warmlines/support resources if you know of them! And please reblog this version!

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I know that there is so much we can't control as individuals right now, and that's frightening. All we can do is try our best to reduce harm and to care for each other. I hope this info will be able to help folks.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Infinity Knights have a special part of their brains

that allows them to identify when (but not necessarily where) they are.

[lgbtlunaverse]

One thing i've run up against when dealing with fandom and characters making less than ideal choices is that people seem to treat a character's decision being sympathetic, the decision being understandable, the decision being reasonable, and it being objectively the best solution for the situation, as synonymous. When those are 4 very different things.

[yujateaandpi]

Dandadan sketch dump of the codependent duo ever. Quiet boy who loves yapping and loud girl who loves listening, my beloved.

idiots idiots

[ionomycin]

wild strawberries

[shepscapades]

[Pt 1] [Pt 2] [Pt 3] [Pt 4] [Pt 5] [Pt 6] [PART 7] [Don’t Let it Reach the Heart]

Nobody Anymore Nobody Anymore

[This comic is part of my dbhc au, following the chaos and panic that ensues after Doc and Xisuma try to get Etho back online at the start of s9 after a very rough s8 finale that leaves him a little. broken. It's set to the vibes of Joywave's Destruction. This part concludes this comic, but this moment doesn't end here: Don't Let it Reach the Heart will be the title of the fic that will follow the end of Destruction!]

[hajihiko]

💕

[turnips-dont-grow-on-trees]

Go forth and write all the Jack-cocking-his-head-to-one-side-to-listen trope as you want, and let no one say otherwise!

Thinking about how characters with super-hearing cocking their heads to one side to ‘listen intently’ actually makes scientific sense, at least if they’re trying to determine where the sound is coming from (sound localization). Because the speed of sound is actually kind of slow, relatively speaking, sound waves travelling through the air will reach one ear before the other, and our brains interpret this difference to determine whether the sound came from our left or right.

Owls tend to have asymmetrical ears - that is to say, one ear higher than the other - in order to hear more precisely where their prey is; in addition to hearing on a left-right axis, they can also hear on an up-down axis to determine exactly where in space a mouse is. So Matt Murdock or Clark Kent or Dolores Madrigal or whoever else tipping their head to one side as they listen, thus elevating one ear above the other and introducing a new axis to hear by? Makes perfect sense.

[egophiliac]

buckle up lads we're going BACK INTO THE BOOK

[chloesimaginationthings]

Abby meets Cassie’s favorite FNAF animatronic Roxy!

[choccy-milky]

(ominis is already on his family's plan but he's there to annoy seb anyway)