@open-sketchbook / open-sketchbook.tumblr.com
Rereading the Lesbian Robot Sharpe Analogue Story after a while and as someone who was far too fixated on that whole era growing up I can’t help but shriek at the British/Prussian robot slapfight
“Even as angry as I was…”
(courtesy once again to @open-sketchbook who first penned this here and has a cool new version now)
this scene was so much fun to write
i made a guardsman
Breaking Trust with my toxic squadron member by printing and distributing a callout pamphlet
believer type behaviour
Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good upon.
Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for sustenance and shelter.
Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice.
For more neat tricks (aka figures of rhetoric) like epizeuxis and anaphora, read THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. It’s both educational and delightful, not to mention overflowing with wry wit. Great book.
Read the first pages of some Discworld books to see even more direct ways in which cinematic openings can be done in print.
Theo Van Den Boogaard (1985)
so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation. the goal, for them, was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.
i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.
i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.
and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.
so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-deprivation that so many of us learned to rely on.
and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to
hey thanks for this. i really needed it
under my regime every single citizen will be assigned a military-style rank and a unit and commanding officer. this is purely and exclusively for sexual purposes
They are cooking alright
they're putting anti sex beds in the Paris Olympic Village. they are trying to take the only cool thing about the Olympics away. these games force homeless populations out of cities and cost billions in taxes and leave nearly every nation that hosts them in tremendous debt and the only cool part is all of the 20 somethings in the world who have conditioned their bodies to the limit of human possibility gets to meet up and one place and have the most crazy sex they can and they are trying to take it away.
It’s also insane to think that the most fit athletes in the world will see that their beds are weak and not just proceed to fuck on any and every other vertical and horizontal surface instead. The clean and jerk record is nearly 400 lbs. do you think that guys not just pinning an archer to the wall with one hand?
fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence, Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.
on a similar note, a traditional Ojibwe greeting is “Nanaboozhoo” so when the French first landed in southern Canada they thought that they were saying “Bonjour!” Which is fucking wild to think about. Imagine crossing the ocean and the first people you meet in months somehow speak French.
The thing about ADHD is that the "lack of reward chemicals in your brain" doesn't just mean that you don't want to do any tasks that don't feel particularly yummy :(, it means that your brain will look at chores and tasks that need to be done like "doing this would be painful and tedious for absolutely nothing to gain from it, Do Not Do That." The same thing that your brain tells you about everything else that would feel really bad and hurt the entire time that you're dying. The part of your brain that stops you from doing the thing is the same part that keeps you from shoving your arm into a wood chipper.
With unmedicated, unmanaged ADHD, "I have to do this assignment or I fail and my life will be ruined and I die" feels like a SAW trap, every single time.
a loved one of mine went on medication that completely destroyed her serotonin-dopamine cycle, and the sudden, extreme example finally made what the fuck is going on in my brain when im *off* my meds make sense
it was the horrifying yet liberating realization that there is no such thing as willpower; we just trick the reward system of our brain into giving us happy chemicals for doing things that normally wouldn't release happy chemicals. every part of your personality, passions, bad habits, and motivations are just prompts to make Chemical Happens
if we don't get the chemicals, we just don't do it, because there's nothing beyond the chemical loop to make it happen. there is no magical source of Doing Stuff outside the cycle. the cycle is all there is.
when you conceptualize executive dysfunction, you need to stop thinking of yourself as a person and start thinking of yourself as nothing but a self-sustaining chemical reaction in a feedback loop. all the 'person' bits are just a complex series of triggers for the feedback loop that turns serotonin into dopamine into serotonin which tells it to do that stuff when things happen.
no cycle? nothing happens. the person part is fuelled by the chemicals. it cannot replace the chemicals. if the chemical release system isn't working for some reason, nothing in the person part will make it start again cold. you need Outside Chemicals.
