I'm not sure I can express this sentiment strongly enough, but I'm going to try via the medium of large bolded text.

Write what the fuck you want.

Write what makes you happy. Write what makes your soul sing. Write what fucks you up and makes you cry. Write what comforts you. Write what distracts you. Write what you want to read. Write what you want to watch.

Write what you want to dream about tonight.

Write what you can't get enough of. Write what you're completely obsessed with. Write what wakes you up at 4am and drags you out of bed because you can't stop thinking about what your characters are going to do next.

Write what turns you on, if that's your vibe. Write characters you're in love with and characters who inspire you and characters you want to be friends with and characters you fucking hate but oh my god they're so much fun.

Write about things you would sell your soul to do in real life and things you would never do in real life. Write about things that are happening right now and things that happened a thousand years ago and things that might happen in the future and things you wish could happen.

Write to get a publishing deal or to sell your books yourself or not to sell your books at all. Write for your friends or for strangers or for the people who reblog your posts on Tumblr and send you songs that remind them of your characters.

Write for yourself.

Fuck any system that tells you there's only one right way to create or one valid way to share your writing. Your story, the way you tell it, has so much value. Make people smile or piss people off or do both of those things because art is divisive and fascinating and beautiful.

Start writing. Keep writing. And write what the fuck you want.

We still see this language in the modern world where it's full-scale bullshit. In a period or pseudo-period context it's doing some of that but typically reflects the (deliberately disenfranchising) legal norm that he owns the farm or the inn or whatever it is, and she doesn't and can't because property rights are gendered; maybe as a widow she could own it or maybe she couldn't, but she's a wife, and that's her actual legal status.

if you avoid that language without altering that underlying structure of the scenario, you aren't necessarily doing anything but sanitizing and erasing it. applied carelessly, labeling this kind of language as 'bad' and solving it by 'getting rid of it' is worse than useless; you just get worse art and vaguer history.

so ideally we check in with ourselves like, in this specific sentence, is it useful or desirable to perpetuate and/or invoke that paradigm by using this language, or not?

my grandma listed her vocation as "pastor's wife" because that was/is a goddamn full time job. and also distinct from the job of pastor. shit's complicated.

All three of these takes are subtly different and true.

Okay but Lan Wangji is harboring this extremely sketchy weirdo and protecting him even when he commits crimes, but whenever anyone questions it, someone else steps in to say, "Don't you know? That's his babygirl" and everyone else is like "Oh okay that's his babygirl"

Werewolf Be Upon Ye

Do not cite the deep magic to me, I was there when it was written.

Do not cite the deep

magic to me, I was there

when it was written.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

what's a werewolf

when you believe things, it's -brained. when i believe things, it's -pilled. just so we are clear.

absolutely pillbrained opinion

brainbrained comment. get pillpilled.

They're right and they should say it!!

i distinctly remember this image existing far before "big chungus" was fat bugs bunny. this absolute specimen may be a progenitor

when it comes to subtext-only couples (romantic couples in TV/film that are not explicitly canon), there many reasons that these ships can very appealing to watch and can be compelling & fulfillingly romantic for the viewer, despite no overt sexual contact and no out-loud declaration of a relationship....

but one of the biggest draws for me is all of the effort put into communicating what cannot be said. all of the work put into saying without words or an on screen kiss, we are in love! You as the viewer need to be made to FEEL that love. There are no shortcuts or easy way out. They can't just tell without showing.

When a writer, an actor believes in that unspoken love and build it into their performance, when people work together to create a subtext ship, when they put thought into it and pay attention to all the details.... 👌👌👌👌

This can apply to many ships that aren't permitted explicit canon expression (including het ships that aren't Approved™ but the actors and script writer believe in)... but of course what comes most to my mind lately are the censored chinese gay dramas and how the creative team is putting their whole pussy into it like SIR. WOW. THE DEDICATION TO ROMANCEEEE

The Spirealm is the latest example where I keep thinking holy shit, the devil works hard but these actors are working harder. They are so fucking good at portraying a love story without saying it's a love story. It's like The Untamed for me all over again.

It's how everyone is working together: the writer included those beats & that allusion, the actor used that microexpression & body language, the director used that blocking and created the space for it, the editor included all the right shots and pauses on the actor's attraction/affection/love so it isn't lost in the shuffle of the plot. It's a symphony of a ship that's performed in concert.

This is something every quality romantic drama needs to include, but when you're working with subtext it's 50x harder and takes so much more care & consideration.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

It's actually even wilder than the above description suggests: They didn't just avoid the bad chip, they can't. It's too important and it's not like they can go resolder the computer now.

They instead mapped out which parts of the memory chip are bad (about 3% of it), and rewrote all the code using that chip to avoid those sections. The probe is still using the bad chip! it's just only using the parts that haven't failed yet.

It's like having a car that was in an accident and can't turn right anymore, so instead of repairing it you just map out a new route to work that involves only left turns.

It's frankly amazing that they were able to do this, especially since all their diagnostics they ran to figure out which parts of the chip were bad HAD TO RUN ON THAT EXACT SAME CHIP.

the lan disciples simply saw hanguang-jun, the epitome of righteousness and the king of blank expressions, pick a random gay demonic cultivator one day and let him tag along on his adventures only for them to get married later because, yeah, that’s the yiling patriarch, in fact, why nobody told me my idol had a situationship with the biggest badass villain in history??

why is this twink ordering me around?? and then they follow wei wuxian’s orders like fools anyway. what do you mean THE hanguang-jun loves THE yiling patriarch? it must be like discovering an aloof prince had an affair with an infamous big rockstar back in the day, idk. that’s crazy funny for me, to be honest i’d go insane

two sheep. standing still

you can't just leave this in the tags

every autistic person watching this episode of dungeon meshi:

interesting fact i have titanium in my spine

Fun Fact!

Titanium not only is crazy durable, but it noo magnet! Thas wy Dock chok jjiun spi; surgyr ad pater noster, qui es in cœlis; sanctificetur nomen tuum: Adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cœlo, et in terra. Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie: Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris: et ne nos inducas in tentationem: sed libera nos a malo.

dude got hit with the ol’ Lorum Ipsem beam😞

Fun fact! Titanium is often used for medical implants because it's *dodges lorem ipsum beam* because it's strong, nontoxic, won't corrode inside the body, and best of all, *dodges* bone will directly grow onto it! This is called "osseointegration" and it means that your titanium artificial hip, dental implant, or whatever will have greater *dodges* greater mechanical stability and will ARRRGGH! aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit!

"Old Town Square at Night" by Józef Pankiewicz (1892) vs the same place on November 28th 2023 (Warsaw)

right???! i need to talk about this for a moment because. it's so magical to me. like usually when you see old paintings of warsaw you can't recognize anything - it's been bombed to hell in the 40s, and especially in the city centre everything had to be rebuilt basically from scratch (sorry to all the other cities that had to give their bricks away. btw. i know its a sore spot.)

and yet the old town is basically identical as it has been before the war, to the point that when i first saw that painting i was like "oh fuck, i know exactly where this is and how to get there"

idk this painting is like. so special to me. i went there on tuesday because i had a lot of spare time and i realized it was getting dark and it struck me that i could take this photo and it's not exactly aligned because i saw the biker and had to be quick so i could catch him in the same spot as the carriage in the painting but it's just so. idk. it's incredible to me that i can compare which windows were lit on that evening 131 years ago... that even the ornament remains the same... that the painting feels like a cloudy memory and not just a scene

In situations and headcanons and such where Bruce doesn't tell the justice league his identity, I feel like one of the most often cited reasons is that they'd then immediately connect all of his many waves of increasingly smaller vigilantes back to him.

But I'd like to think it doesn't happen like that.

Like, at some point, Nightwing has been on the team for years, and somehow, no one that didn't already know him as Robin has connected him back to Batman, but of course both Bruce and Dick think they know, because they have to, right?

But then Bruce's identity gets revealed while Dick's off world or something, but he gets filled in, so he assumes that his identity is blown too, right? Of course, once you know Batman is Bruce Wayne, it'd be easy to put together that Dick Grayson is Nightwing.

So then Bruce and Dick have to rush to the watchtower from some sort of Wayne family event one day, but there's no real need to put on their costumes yet, because the league already knows their identities.

Until...

Green Lantern, watching a young man that he's only ever seen through gossip magazines fiddle around in the watchtower: Hey, Bru-Batman, I know we found out your identity and all, but do you really think it's a good idea to bring your children into this? I mean, what if he gets hurt?

Dick, incredulous: You... you do know who I am, right?

GL: It's hard to not know who you are. I saw you on a magazine cover just the other day.

-long pause-

Dick: Bruce, when you used to complain that you work with idiots, I thought you were exaggerating.

-general sounds of outrage from the JL-

Actually watching Supernatural after being on tumblr for 12 years is wild because you realize that the Destiel girlies were not exaggerating at all. Like. I fully thought Destiel was Jonlock-flavored queerbaiting where like sure it's there but honestly most of the moments are crumbs at best but no Destiel really is just that gay at all times and then the CW turns around and personally punches you in the face every time you start to catch on. Every minute of this show I understand why you guys are Like That just a little more

Poppies taking over a field in Poland - June 2013 by Kacper Kowalski, Panos Pictures