It’s Uncanny How Similar Trump Is Acting Like Hitler. People Are Now Doing The Nazi Salute. They’re

okay sorry, one other thing annoyed me about that writing class. one of the students is this super clean-cut doctor who works at an HIV clinic, and he asked the prof "do you ever get distracted while reading books, because you find yourself analyzing the craft of them instead of sinking into the story?"

and she said "no," and turned away. and the whole class laughed awkwardly, bc it was a pretty abrupt and dismissive answer. so then she turned back to him and said "you wouldn't ask a musician if they get distracted listening to songs. they just enjoy the music."

but I dunno, I'm a newbie writer with only one (scheduled-to-be-published) book under my belt, but I get distracted sometimes when I'm reading. if I find I'm not sinking into a block of text, I'll squint at it and be like "okay, they're using too much passive voice, that's why my brain isn't grabbing on to it." so I'm sorry Mr. HIV doctor, I thought your question was reasonable!

“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.” And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”

— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via pornosophical)

here are some interesting surnames I have seen on old graves:

*they’re not inherently “weird” or “rare”, they’re just names I noted for possible future use in my writing

Dear friend, if you are a writer — particularly a young writer — who is reading this right now, I want you to promise me something. Are you ready? l want you to promise me that you will stay away from epithets when you are talking about characters who know one another’s names.

You do not need to say, “the blond man.” You do not need to say “the older man,” or “the taller man,” or “the smaller man.” You definitely do not need to transform adjectives into nouns and say things like, “the older,” “the younger,” or lord forbid, “the other.” (Unless you are writing the kind of academic paper that cites Lacan or bell hooks, in which using the other/Other is allowed, and also important). 

I know it might seem repetitive, but using names and pronouns is enough. They are the kinds of words that fade into the rhythm of your writing, and they will never stand out to your reader. They are the words that make sense.

When you look at your friends, you’re not thinking of them as “the red-headed woman,” or “the shorter person.” You’re probably thinking something like, “Natasha’s hair is getting so long,” or, “she looks beautiful today,” or “Jamie’s got a great shirt.” You think of people’s pronouns. You think of their names. And that is what your character does, too.

the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

Diesel thinks the only reaS;AJSSDR

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

I think we should take gothic horror away from people until they earn it back

rudolph the red nosed reindeer