Thanks For Piercing The Temporal Veil Of My Past And Reminding Me Of That Which I Had Forgotten!

Let’s not forget the ending:

He watches his beloved dog die on a pile of shit and then goes and FUCKS EVERYONE UP!

You think Odysseus was Homer's favorite blorbo because of the amount of details he put in his descriptors. I think Odysseus was Homer's favorite blorbo because of the absolute hell he put him through. You cannot convince me that The Odyssey wasn't just someone going buck wild with their favorite oc—because that's exactly what it was.

Precision.

It’s easy to ignore information I don’t need. Near impossible to manifest information I don’t have.

European recipes make me feel like Walter white

American recipes: [3 page story about how their mamaw used to make this for them during the depression] so you’re gonna smack a stick of butter in there and then put a cup or two of flour until you feel like it’s dry enough. Be generous with the sugar. You’ll know when. Get a healthy amount of molasses and an egg in there and then mix up with your hands until it’s nice and crumbly. If you’re feeling fruity you can add vanilla extract here if you’re tough like they are where I come from cornmeal will do. Add water to taste and texture. If you’ve struck big it can be milk. Put in cast iron skillet blow it a kiss and bake until golden brown. Let cool until you get tired of smacking a bunch of little hands away from having a taste.

European recipe for essentially the same thing: You. Worm. Get out your little scale. You need 147 grams of flour. no more no less. 133 milliliters of fresh milk. 27 grams of white granulated sugar. If an extra granule ends up in the mixing bowl someone from Brussels will be by to administer the proper regulatory fee in 48 hours. Whisk together for 139 seconds exactly and titrate 3ml extrait de vanille into the bowl using an eye dropper before baking at 231 Celsius for 26 minutes. If you deviate from this in any way the food will be inedible and your fine will double. 

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

Me doing anything

"do it afraid" is just me doing regular tasks on a regular day

“Shouldn’t we compromise with them? They have money after all”

- every liberal slime

Got it?

#ModernPolitics

Dynamite Cop asks the question:

what if Moses was a cyborg samurai?

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remembering that time i met someone who attended high school in west bend, wisconsin and they told me how their school district works. to them it was completely normal while i was wondering if they were messing with me.

their schools are conjoined twins???

You call us fleshies to other balls of light

meal prep is so gross to me i dont want to eat the same thing wvery day and also i dont want to eat anything at all i want to shed my body and live as a floating ball of light that doesnt need to eat or sleep or pay rent