a reasonable number of library books

Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”

You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.

Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice. 

For more neat tricks (aka figures of rhetoric) like epizeuxis and anaphora, read THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. It’s both educational and delightful, not to mention overflowing with wry wit. Great book. 

Read the first pages of some Discworld books to see even more direct ways in which cinematic openings can be done in print.

Your demolition crew (top: Pumpernickel, Ciabatta & Babka. bottom: Crouton & Pita) is ready to help you get that home renovation done!

Call me Dracula with the way I gotta do everything around this fucking house

This precious baby angel enjoys face massages 😻

my lord i fear i must inform you that you have reblogged a post made by the general whose forces encircle my fortress. please delete it posthaste

I'm getting close to 35k which I feel is a lot, but I've also been here since the dawn of time...but I also know people on here who seem to post every five minutes so I'm legitimately curious

The cryptids love being brushed, and they've discovered that if they catch me at the sink in the morning, combing my hair, I'll give them a quick comb as well. For several months now I've emerged from the shower every day to two impatient cats yelling for their morning salon styling. I got them a smaller, finer-toothed comb than mine, and they know which one is theirs and get excited when I pick it up.

Polk has also been suffering from dry skin, so I bought a bottle of spray moisturizer for cats, and every morning I spray their comb with moisturizer and then give them a brushing. It does make their coats very soft and Polk is less itchy all the time. But what I've realized is that aside from the shower, combing my hair is really the only morning toilette I do. I don't use product, but my cats do.

Which means, functionally, that my cats now have a more extensive morning beauty routine than I do.

[ID: Two photos; the first shows Dearborn the tortie, lying on the sofa amid heaps of pillows, lit by the sun and looking a little wild. The second shows just the face of Polk the tabby as she crouches on the duvet, peering out from under a pair of grey striped pajamas she has nestled into. They both look like they have very soft, sleek fur, because they do.]

first of all: YOU CAN MAKE CATS EVEN SOMFTER??!!

Second: someone post the @shitpostsampler 'morning beauté routine' pattern

You can! Or at least it worked on mine. It's a Burt's Bees spray. Deebs and Dot don't mind being sprayed with it but they don't love it either, so I just spritz it onto the comb and then groom them with the damp comb.

Here is madam Dearborn awaiting her daily grooming.

"Dad, pick up the comb. Pick up the comb, dad."

[ID: A photograph of Dearborn the tortie, standing on the bathroom sink; she is looking up past the camera, waiting impatiently for her morning comb. The comb itself and the bottle of anti-dander moisturizing spray are visible, out of focus, in the background.]

Tyla's "sands of time" look is absolutely stunning and likely to make Anakin Skywalker to go into a murderous rage so those dead kids are on you, girl.

ZENDAYA Met Gala (May 6, 2024)

man. the star wars sequel trilogy could have been so good if they hadn't fucked it up

all the pieces were there. compelling main characters. unsubtle social satire. the main characters from the OT being jaded and frustrated by the way things turned out. funny ball robot.

it's a shame that the plot of the first one was a rehash and disney decided that it was a really good idea to repeatedly switch directors and writing teams

me watching the force awakens in 2015 like "wow! john boyega is CRAZY good in this. I'm excited to see where his character goes, especially with the obvious hints that he's force sensitive"

and then over the next several years seeing naught but flaming wreckage on the horizon

@triviallytrue

Lily Gladstone at the Met Gala 2024, wearing gown by Gabriela Hearst, and jewellery by Kiowa jeweler Keri Ataumbi.

At first, it seems a rather muted look for the Met Gala, but every detail has significance. Read the story in Vogue.

The gown and cape are embroidered with constellations of recycled silver stars.

“Our ancestors are in the constellations - we're star people.” Keri Ataumbi.

The very fact that every TOS reboot is afraid to depict the closeness between Kirk and Spock in the same way it was depicted originally is a devastating reinforcement of how gay that shit was

not to make everything about lord of the rings but everything is actually about lord of the rings thank you good evening

What do you mean by "good evening"?

The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't be directly observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

I gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all; if there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.

@elodieunderglass has a really good post on this!

It’s very kind of you to remember this! I didn’t! That now reads as an extremely 2012 piece of writing; you’ll forgive me because it was fashionable at the time (and demonstrates the tone of a decade.) And I was 24. Thank you so much for remembering this and bringing it up; I truly appreciate it.

@qthewhatever this is amazing thank u

Also. Hello. This essay is 12 years old. It is a historical document now. It’s old enough to beat you at Fortnite. HELP.