Every Word That Starts With An N Should Have A Silent G In Front. Gnorway. Gnuclear. Gnervous System.

Making a DnD character with no weaknesses is not nearly as fun as creating a DnD character with one or two insane, game-breaking strengths who is failcringe at literally everything else.

what if there was a show where every character was gay and you had the token straight guy character who acted really stereotypical and was into cars beers and women and everyone was like OH STRAIGHT LARRY YOU’RE SO FUNNY AND STRAIGHT

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

My favorite detail about Jurassic Park is that it has a baked-in justification for any and all retcons it might need to make due to paleontology advancing forwards.

Because there is not a single dinosaur that has ever appeared in Jurassic Park.

Not one. Not in the books. Not in the movies. Not ever.

"Now what John Hammond and InGen did at Jurassic Park was to create genetically engineered theme park monsters." ~Alan Grant

Grant says that in a moment of cynicism. It's part of his arc for the film. But it's not inaccurate. What Jurassic Park has, what it's always had since the very first novel, are "Mostly Dinosaurs".

"And since the DNA is so old, it's full of holes! Now, that's where our geneticists take over!" ~Mr. DNA

It's impossible to recover a fully intact gene sequence from an ancient amber mosquito. Cloning a pure dinosaur would have been completely impossible, and so the park filled in the gene sequence with whatever works. Frog. Lizard. Bird. Whatever they need to get the result they are trying to get.

Every single dinosaur is a chimeric beast made up of mostly dinosaur and a bunch of other stuff that some scientists thought would achieve the appropriate dinosaur-like result.

"Nothing in Jurassic World is natural! We have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different." ~Dr. Henry Wu

Which, from a writing perspective, is fucking genius. Because now you have a preset excuse for each and every plot hole your movie has.

Like. Why don't the raptors have feathers? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why do dilophosaurs spit venom? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why do T-Rexes have movement based vision? Oh, they don't. But Rexy does. Because of her chimera DNA.

Why is the Spinosaurus so fucking big? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why are the velociraptors mislabeled? Because Hammond's a dipshit.

Like. I've always marveled at the way Jurassic Park started out by giving itself a blanket excuse to be wrong about every single thing it ever said about the central attraction of its franchise. It's honestly beautiful, and allows the series a degree of immortality well into the era where we know better about its animals.

tf is up with crowley’s pockets

HIS HANDS DON’T FIT IN THEM JKDFHSDJKFHS

Hearing them get so excited over the whale fall is so fun I love hearing people who are passionate about their work

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Dear everyone who is currently working on a Thing, whatever that Thing may be,

Good luck with the Thing. You can do the Thing. You will do the Thing. You just have to do the Thing.

Best wishes,

Someone who is also doing a Thing