#we need to expand with this you guys

[vampirevatican]

hobie x bimbo this. hobie x soft that. how about hobie x weirdo?? hobie x goblin/gremlin?? or hobie x looks like a cinnamon roll but could kill you, hm?

picture it with me

weirdo reader: gimme ya arm

hobie, confused but lifts his arm:

weirdo r., grabs his arm, shoves their nose in it: SNIIIIFFF SNIFF SNIFF

hobie, even more confused but amused: what i smell like?

weirdo r.: sweat and coco butter (⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠)

goblin reader: and these are all my knickknacks

hobie, looking at a shelf filled with random shit: where did you get all of this?

goblin r.: stolen ouo, well... not really, kinda? the paper doilies were from school, the stakes were from a railroad walk, cool sticks and rocks i like, the bricks were loose on campus so i just... plucked them up

hobie, holding a jar with teeth in it: and this?

goblin r.: oh! those are my baby teeth!!

hobie: whatcha listenin' to?

seemingly cute reader, hands him an earbud:

hobie, takes it then slowly looks back at reader:

reader: *the most adorable grin though the music is literally death metal, piercing screams, intense guitar and drums*

[zuzu-romeave]

“this episode could’ve been an email” WHY DO YOU HATE STORYTELLING SO MUCH!!! WHY DO YOU HATE WORLD BUILDING AND GETTING ANSWERS AND EXPLORING CHARACTERS!!!!

[here-there-be-drag0ns]

i was terrified thinking my riptide hyperfix was dying

turns out i just needed to relisten to the black rose pirates oneshot

[unlimitedhorsepower]

anyway heres garak

julian is hosting free cardassian dewclaw inspections in the infirmary

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

I'm in hell

[snobgoblin]

we need more boy fairies :(

[masculinity-is-open-source]

i realised i didn't post this

it's from a bit ago but im proud of it and thought i should share

i made it when I was thinking about doing "rp" gaming streams on twitch where our fictives can just be ourselves and then people will be like rp!!! and join in and we get to fuck around and not mask.

- shadow

[thedevotionaltour]

i havent even read enough gl to justify the feelings and emotions i have about kyle i just have the lovers heart and also something wrong with me. and my projection. in my mind he's just like me. and he would have loved college vending machine frozen cheeseburger and heating it up in the microwave at 1 in the morning because he was bored and didn't want to work on a drawing assignment on 20" x 30" paper that was due tomorrow in his freshman year. he would have loved going to the club to push off finals work that's creating the worst stress known to man in his brain. and he would love to annoy the fuck out of his roommate when high and avoiding homework on a saturday.

[bmpmp3]

some fashion dreamer adventures from playing too much in the past two days :) (MY USER ID IS LGXwM6wQk5 FEEL FREE TO request stuff or whatever u do in this game i forgor) :

(ignore shocked shane this aint about him) made my OC dave as my first muse so i am kinda playing hard mode with the type b body situation but im like. determined now. im gonna make the flashiest and cutest and over the top outfits i can muster with the scraps theyve given the the type b (jk jk its not TOO bad its the best we've gotten so far but I do wish i could wear shorter shorts and crop tops and some of those type a socks are so cute i saw some that were like bandage thigh highs. dave should be allowed to wear thigh highs. dave should be allowed to wear thigh highs)

still having a lot of fun tho! sometime i should get around to making a type a muse but most people i meet are type a so i never run out of people to dress either way LOL

like most people i have things i hope they add in the future (like i said before, the lack of zoom is DIRE) and right now some of the currencies and levelling systems feel a little unbalanced (i have so many of the star things and bingo things and a decent amount of gacha things but the photo prop coins are my most coveted thing rn i have like 1 single one JKDLSJFDS) but im enjoying myself a lot like i knew i would

was trying to take a pic of this other player's muse that had this really neat witch situation but i accidentally made dave dab and got really scared <3

in the end we must all go to the photo egg. in the end we all go into the photo egg. the universality of the photo egg.

kinda wacky from daylight savings time changes i always get wacky i dont know what year or time it is. i spent twenty minutes scouring the ACT cocoon for the showroom stream 'cause i couldnt find it until i accidentally went into this like. basement alley. its in the basement alley <3 <3 <3

i guess we dont just go into the egg. we also. go into the. cocoons. the cocoons. in eve? cocoons in eve have. eggs in them

anyway i just unlocked cocoon FUN and its so awesome and scary and so so scary look at this bear

free this bear somebody please free this bear ignore dave posing free this bear cocoon fun has bears behind bars and gazebos that raise you into heaven its so scary and awesome

going back to the photo props my favourites so far are the flowers theyre so cute

i dont do the vertical photos that often because theyre kinda hard to do (u have to like. turn ur head or the switch to the side..... im nearly exclusively a tabletop switch player so i cant imagine what its like for docked player LOL) but this ones cute!

but yeah very fun and extremely addicting i need to go to bed. i need to go to bed. i have assignments and i need to go to bed. but i want. to make outfits..........i must.....make outfits......graaaaahhh........GRAAAAAHHHHHH (turns into a zombie before your eyes)

[masked-and-doomed]

Fucked up that most people's first time seeing the Conclave (in Sign rather than Vastedge) they're there. For some time. And then fucking die. Like yeah you're relevant to the whole fucking world of guilty gear. Skill issue tho, should've planned this better after nearly 200 years. Bye bye. Now let's move on !

At least Chronus has that one moment in Rev where he broke out Asuka... He did play a good background support role. Claps for Chronus. 👏

I wonder if Libraria would have done the same thing if she followed Chronus' words and took the Conclave's dream on her shoulders, being the one to live through it....

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[osakanone]

Engineer moment.

They're talking about how it renders text, how it feels to scroll its back/forward and rendering behavior, not how it looks. Things which are harder to describe and more ephemeral to the user-experience.

A big part of this is websites being optimized for chromium, but not for gecko.

Many users will never encounter slowness per-say, because either their system is fast enough or their configuration is light and appropriate enough for their system -- but the clunkiness is unavoidable.

Scrolling genuinely "doesn't feel right". Text doesn't look right. Websites don't look right.

I have a pretty decent system, with more RAM than firefox will ever need and to this day I only ever use it for video to do multiple picture in picture if a major political event is being streamed from multiple sources like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I need 30+ video feeds on six monitors -- because it handles video really, really well and multi-PIP is the most efficient screenuse.

Outside of that, I've genuinely found no use for Firefox since I often have three or four windows open, each with maybe 30 tabs each.

Firefox just doesn't cut it for my usecase.

A major problem Firefox has culturally is people who just really like the software and cannot imagine anybody feeling any different about it.

Maybe out of preference, maybe because they like open source, but a lot of people using Firefox and developing Firefox don't accept that Firefox can be meaningfully improved -- and so, Firefox is not improved.

This fact is why I don't use Firefox anymore.

I don't see a future for it as anything other than the symbolic competition kept alive by Google's money so that Google isn't swallowed alive by anti-trust laws.

I don't see it getting better. Problems I have posted years ago have gone unaddressed, because "things are fine as they are".

My problem overall with open source is it claims to be a vision of what computers could be and instead chooses to be a flanderization of many of the worst tendencies of software development.

Its an incredibly beautiful promise but it is very rarely kept.

Maybe it excels on some technical level but is painful to use. Maybe its pretty, but its incredibly fragile. Maybe its robust and pretty and good to use, but it runs like dog-snot.

There just always seems to be some sort of weird monkeys paw deal with a lot of projects, some sort of suck that you just have to accept.

On the bright side, open source projects are immortal. They mean no matter what happens, something will live on forever, and that is something I do appreciate.

"Firefox sucks" "firefox is clunky" "firefox doesn't work" with all due respect what the fuck are you talking about

[archaeren]

How I learned to write smarter, not harder

(aka, how to write when you're hella ADHD lol)

A reader commented on my current long fic asking how I write so well. I replied with an essay of my honestly pretty non-standard writing advice (that they probably didn't actually want lol) Now I'm gonna share it with you guys and hopefully there's a few of you out there who will benefit from my past mistakes and find some useful advice in here. XD Since I started doing this stuff, which are all pretty easy changes to absorb into your process if you want to try them, I now almost never get writer's block.

The text of the original reply is indented, and I've added some additional commentary to expand upon and clarify some of the concepts.

As for writing well, I usually attribute it to the fact that I spent roughly four years in my late teens/early 20s writing text roleplay with a friend for hours every single day. Aside from the constant practice that provided, having a live audience immediately reacting to everything I wrote made me think a lot about how to make as many sentences as possible have maximum impact so that I could get that kind of fun reaction. (Which is another reason why comments like yours are so valuable to fanfic writers! <3) The other factors that have improved my writing are thus: 1. Writing nonlinearly. I used to write a whole story in order, from the first sentence onward. If there was a part I was excited to write, I slogged through everything to get there, thinking that it would be my reward once I finished everything that led up to that. It never worked. XD It was miserable. By the time I got to the part I wanted to write, I had beaten the scene to death in my head imagining all the ways I could write it, and it a) no longer interested me and b) could not live up to my expectations because I couldn't remember all my ideas I'd had for writing it. The scene came out mediocre and so did everything leading up to it. Since then, I learned through working on VN writing (I co-own a game studio and we have some visual novels that I write for) that I don't have to write linearly. If I'm inspired to write a scene, I just write it immediately. It usually comes out pretty good even in a first draft! But then I also have it for if I get more ideas for that scene later, and I can just edit them in. The scenes come out MUCH stronger because of this. And you know what else I discovered? Those scenes I slogged through before weren't scenes I had no inspiration for, I just didn't have any inspiration for them in that moment! I can't tell you how many times there was a scene I had no interest in writing, and then a week later I'd get struck by the perfect inspiration for it! Those are scenes I would have done a very mediocre job on, and now they can be some of the most powerful scenes because I gave them time to marinate. Inspiration isn't always linear, so writing doesn't have to be either!

Some people are the type that joyfully write linearly. I have a friend like this--she picks up the characters and just continues playing out the next scene. Her story progresses through the entire day-by-day lives of the characters; it never timeskips more than a few hours. She started writing and posting just eight months ago, she's about an eighth of the way through her planned fic timeline, and the content she has so far posted to AO3 for it is already 450,000 words long. But most of us are normal humans. We're not, for the most part, wired to create linearly. We consume linearly, we experience linearly, so we assume we must also create linearly. But actually, a lot of us really suffer from trying to force ourselves to create this way, and we might not even realize it. If you're the kind of person who thinks you need to carrot-on-a-stick yourself into writing by saving the fun part for when you finally write everything that happens before it: Stop. You're probably not a linear writer. You're making yourself suffer for no reason and your writing is probably suffering for it. At least give nonlinear writing a try before you assume you can't write if you're not baiting or forcing yourself into it!! Remember: Writing is fun. You do this because it's fun, because it's your hobby. If you're miserable 80% of the time you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong!

2. Rereading my own work. I used to hate reading my own work. I wouldn't even edit it usually. I would write it and slap it online and try not to look at it again. XD Writing nonlinearly forced me to start rereading because I needed to make sure scenes connected together naturally and it also made it easier to get into the headspace of the story to keep writing and fill in the blanks and get new inspiration. Doing this built the editing process into my writing process--I would read a scene to get back in the headspace, dislike what I had written, and just clean it up on the fly. I still never ever sit down to 'edit' my work. I just reread it to prep for writing and it ends up editing itself. Many many scenes in this fic I have read probably a dozen times or more! (And now, I can actually reread my own work for enjoyment!) Another thing I found from doing this that it became easy to see patterns and themes in my work and strengthen them. Foreshadowing became easy. Setting up for jokes or plot points became easy. I didn't have to plan out my story in advance or write an outline, because the scenes themselves because a sort of living outline on their own. (Yes, despite all the foreshadowing and recurring thematic elements and secret hidden meanings sprinkled throughout this story, it actually never had an outline or a plan for any of that. It's all a natural byproduct of writing nonlinearly and rereading.)

Unpopular writing opinion time: You don't need to make a detailed outline.

Some people thrive on having an outline and planning out every detail before they sit down to write. But I know for a lot of us, we don't know how to write an outline or how to use it once we've written it. The idea of making one is daunting, and the advice that it's the only way to write or beat writer's block is demoralizing. So let me explain how I approach "outlining" which isn't really outlining at all.

I write in a Notion table, where every scene is a separate table entry and the scene is written in the page inside that entry. I do this because it makes writing nonlinearly VASTLY more intuitive and straightforward than writing in a single document. (If you're familiar with Notion, this probably makes perfect sense to you. If you're not, imagine something a little like a more contained Google Sheets, but every row has a title cell that opens into a unique Google Doc when you click on it. And it's not as slow and clunky as the Google suite lol) (Edit from the future: I answered an ask with more explanation on how I use Notion for non-linear writing here.) When I sit down to begin a new fic idea, I make a quick entry in the table for every scene I already know I'll want or need, with the entries titled with a couple words or a sentence that describes what will be in that scene so I'll remember it later. Basically, it's the most absolute bare-bones skeleton of what I vaguely know will probably happen in the story.

Then I start writing, wherever I want in the list. As I write, ideas for new scenes and new connections and themes will emerge over time, and I'll just slot them in between the original entries wherever they naturally fit, rearranging as necessary, so that I won't forget about them later when I'm ready to write them. As an example, my current long fic started with a list of roughly 35 scenes that I knew I wanted or needed, for a fic that will probably be around 100k words (which I didn't know at the time haha). As of this writing, it has expanded to 129 scenes. And since I write them directly in the page entries for the table, the fic is actually its own outline, without any additional effort on my part. As I said in the comment reply--a living outline!

This also made it easier to let go of the notion that I had to write something exactly right the first time. (People always say you should do this, but how many of us do? It's harder than it sounds! I didn't want to commit to editing later! I didn't want to reread my work! XD) I know I'm going to edit it naturally anyway, so I can feel okay giving myself permission to just write it approximately right and I can fix it later. And what I found from that was that sometimes what I believed was kind of meh when I wrote it was actually totally fine when I read it later! Sometimes the internal critic is actually wrong. 3. Marinating in the headspace of the story. For the first two months I worked on [fic], I did not consume any media other than [fandom the fic is in]. I didn't watch, read, or play anything else. Not even mobile games. (And there wasn't really much fan content for [fandom] to consume either. Still isn't, really. XD) This basically forced me to treat writing my story as my only source of entertainment, and kept me from getting distracted or inspired to write other ideas and abandon this one.

As an aside, I don't think this is a necessary step for writing, but if you really want to be productive in a short burst, I do highly recommend going on a media consumption hiatus. Not forever, obviously! Consuming media is a valuable tool for new inspiration, and reading other's work (both good and bad, as long as you think critically to identify the differences!) is an invaluable resource for improving your writing.

When I write, I usually lay down, close my eyes, and play the scene I'm interested in writing in my head. I even take a ten-minute nap now and then during this process. (I find being in a state of partial drowsiness, but not outright sleepiness, makes writing easier and better. Sleep helps the brain process and make connections!) Then I roll over to the laptop next to me and type up whatever I felt like worked for the scene. This may mean I write half a sentence at a time between intervals of closed-eye-time XD

People always say if you're stuck, you need to outline.

What they actually mean by that (whether they realize it or not) is that if you're stuck, you need to brainstorm. You need to marinate. You don't need to plan what you're doing, you just need to give yourself time to think about it!

What's another framing for brainstorming for your fic? Fantasizing about it! Planning is work, but fantasizing isn't.

You're already fantasizing about it, right? That's why you're writing it. Just direct that effort toward the scenes you're trying to write next! Close your eyes, lay back, and fantasize what the characters do and how they react.

And then quickly note down your inspirations so you don't forget, haha.

And if a scene is so boring to you that even fantasizing about it sucks--it's probably a bad scene.

If it's boring to write, it's going to be boring to read. Ask yourself why you wanted that scene. Is it even necessary? Can you cut it? Can you replace it with a different scene that serves the same purpose but approaches the problem from a different angle? If you can't remove the troublesome scene, what can you change about it that would make it interesting or exciting for you to write?

And I can't write sitting up to save my damn life. It's like my brain just stops working if I have to sit in a chair and stare at a computer screen. I need to be able to lie down, even if I don't use it! Talking walks and swinging in a hammock are also fantastic places to get scene ideas worked out, because the rhythmic motion also helps our brain process. It's just a little harder to work on a laptop in those scenarios. XD

In conclusion: Writing nonlinearly is an amazing tool for kicking writer's block to the curb. There's almost always some scene you'll want to write. If there isn't, you need to re-read or marinate.

Or you need to use the bathroom, eat something, or sleep. XD Seriously, if you're that stuck, assess your current physical condition. You might just be unable to focus because you're uncomfortable and you haven't realized it yet.

Anyway! I hope that was helpful, or at least interesting! XD Sorry again for the text wall. (I think this is the longest comment reply I've ever written!)

And same to you guys on tumblr--I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. XD Reblogs appreciated if so! (Maybe it'll help someone else!)

[endead-art]

I love Ourple Guy FNF

[faggotcitosis]

the absolute mental gymnastics to justify missionary work is always so funny. they genuinely believe it's better than xtians because uhhh i said so. lets ask persians what they think of islamic conversion and what it did to their country, culture and lives and then we can circle back to "without destroying the local community" lol

all missionary work is evil. period. regardless of who is doing it.

missionary bs is specially annoying to me cause 1) there's still uncontacted tribes in latam and they better be left like that 2) afro religions are constantly at the end of this crap 3) brazils religious syncretism is fucking crazy

[spacebugarts]

Y'know I never really made a lot of self-inserts as a kid, most of my ocs just kinda existed in their own universe, but lately I've been making them for pretty much every new hyperfixation I get and tbh I Get It now. I'm making silly little guys and I'm putting them in Situations