she has a willatine for you ☺️

in honor of my mom inexplicably calling peppermint patty “the first nonbinary character”

op ur mom is a genius

found you a new hat.

thinking abt this tweet again

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

urgently seeking more images of this nature

We finally did it, y’all! We’re married 💍

JUSTGIRLYTHINGS LESBIAN MARRIED!!!!

WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2024

Finally

The girliest thing

hi guys

i never posted this on tumblr but this art was specifically inspired by the first image:

bought a big black umbrella recently and now every time i use it i think about "thought the cunt was turning into a bat"

i bet being a fish whips ass. smooth and wet as fuck. well except for the bears

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO SAVE AS A DRAFT.

The current state of pop girlies is so funny like

Ariana Grande: getting dragged for homewrecking with the guy who played SpongeBob in the SpongeBob musical

Taylor Swift: dropping her worst album in years about how deeply obsessed she is with Matty Healy

Billie Eilish, for some reason:

Context for those who are curious

casting these before getting out of bed like buff spells before a raid boss

the other day I had a thought about worldbuilding that was like…okay, so, cars. obviously important and essential part of life.

And yet most of the time when we talk about going to places we don’t even bother mentioning how we got there.

you could potentially write an entire contemporary novel and not mention the word “car” and the reader might not even notice something was out of place.

imagine, someone reading a book set in our world when they know nothing about our technology. imagine a character saying something like “yeah, when I went down to Florida last week…” and the reader just being boggled because isn’t Florida like…300 miles from where the story is set

“I’ll go by the store on the way home” “oh I need to pick up my brother while I’m out” “I’m going to travel up to my aunt’s house for the weekend” it’s breaking my brain.

to people in a world where magic is commonplace, it would be like this. they wouldn’t think to say that the lights in the house or the locks on doors or the carriage on the street work by magic.

of course, in a story we take liberties because the reader needs things pointed out. But think of the kinds of wild things you could do with worldbuilding if you just didn’t go out of your way to explain. Idk.

Whoa

I never thought about it this way but yeah it makes total sense

And like, the followup to “Yeah, when I went down to Florida last week” could be “Did you drive or fly?”

“Huh? Drove, it was only like six hours each way.”

“Holy crap. How many speeding tickets did you get?”

And the reader’s head explodes because in just a couple lines of dialogue:

* It’s possibly to go from [location] to Florida pretty casually in this setting.

* Flight exists as a mode of transport in this setting.

* Flight exists as a mode of transport in this setting but someone would choose not to use it, and yet still not only go to Florida and back in a week, but make the journey one way in under a day.

* What the hell is a “speeding ticket?”

This is really cool, can we have a name for it like “negative space worldbuilding” or something where stuff about the setting is implied by the stuff happening around it?

"Negative space worldbuilding" is a great term for it. For instance:

"Did you drive or fly?"

"Gated. It was an emergency."

"Yow, you can afford that?"

"It's not TOO bad, if you agree to go during off-peak hours. I had to be up at midnight to make the gate hub by 3 AM. Went through perched on a shipping crate full of stuffed animals. At least it's fast."

Yes yes exactly, but think of just HOW ambiguous you can be like this.

Imagine two characters having this exchange:

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I was on the road!”

“I was just worried, no need to get grumpy. Are you headed out tomorrow?”

“Yeah. This is my first time flying.”

“Oh. Are you nervous?”

This scene could continue for a long time without revealing to the reader that we are in a fantasy world that runs on magic and uses scrying stones, carriages and dragons.

In a fantasy novel, we’d write something like this: “She took out her scrying stone. It was a round, polished piece of clear quartz the size of her palm, carved with a specific set of glyphs imbued with magic that allowed her to communicate with other people who possessed similar stones within range.”

But like, imagine it’s not a scrying stone, it’s a smartphone.

A few things:

The key is, you only need to introduce an ability in detail if it's going to be solving a problem that's important to the plot, or introducing a major worldbuilding idea. If it's handwaving an inconvenience out of the way so that you can get to the problem that's actually important to the plot, you can name-drop it and move on.

If the smartphone's flashlight is just being used to explain why the heroine is willing to go into the spooky basement at night and find the dead body, then "it was dark, so Jane turned on her cell phone's flashlight" is perfectly fine. The reader will be like "Yeah, whatever, it's got all sorts of electrical magic, it can probably make a light."

If you've established that darkness is a serious problem for your characters, and if your flashlight goes out you'll get lost in the dark forest with the axe murderer, then you need to establish it in advance. Maybe have an early scene where Jane shows off how her new phone has a better camera with a flash, and then later when she loses her flashlight she realizes actually, she has another light in her cell phone, and the reader is like "Wow, what a clever use of her magic item."

And of course, you do the same thing with magic items in a fantasy setting. If you just need an easy way to let your adventurers explore a dark cave without tracking how many torches they're carrying, then "it was dark, so Jane the Witch tapped her staff on the ground and summoned a small ball of light" is no big deal. If darkness is a big obstacle because you need to, like, send a beacon to the Rohirrim or something, then you might have Jane have an early scene talking about how scrying magic is built on the aspects of Connection and Light, and then later when she needs a light source she can be like "Wait, my scrying stone has Light Mana in it!" And the reader will be like "Wow, what a clever use of the magic system."

Depending on your writing style and genre expectations, this is a balance between showing and telling!!

Both of which are valuable tools in your toolbelt that will be utilized in your story!

Something fun to play around with is operating under the assumption that you can show first, tell later. Show me the most relevant function(s) you want me to know it can do first, as part of a scene earlier on (remembering that scenes accomplish multiple things!). Then as the reader, my brain is learning information and asking questions, and I feel like an active participant in the world. Think of it like travelling to a super different culture or moving somewhere new by yourself - you have to figure out how things work by being there and doing shit, and most often in life, you get the context or ask for the context later

And then that context is more interesting to me because I'm interested. I'm invested. I care more, because now it feels relevant to me as a participant in the world.

Genre expectations play into this too - so ask, how do my favorite books in this genre explain their world building concepts? What's the balance of showing vs. telling that they use, and how can I use those expectations you my advantage? How can I have fun with it?