hidden injury is great, but a subversion that gives me so many whumperflies is when Whumpee is injured, it’s a bad injury, and the team knows this. but they can’t stop. they’ve got a mission to complete, they have to keep moving, they can’t be spotted, et cetera. the brawn supports whumpee’s weight, the medic is tracking their vitals with quick glances and questions, the leader is forging onward to get to safety as soon as possible. all while Whumpee doesn’t hide the pain, but takes it with grim determination. they have to keep going. they have to. they will.
i hate when a piece of kids media is so well made that people start saying “clearly this was made FOR adults not for silly little babies. we are the true target demographic” like cmon man. you don’t have to pretend it’s something it isn’t. sometimes things that are made for 12 year olds are good.
it is so funny to me how i started learning english on my own age 10 because the manga i was reading was turning so so so bad i went to fan content to cope with how shit it was. and 15 years later this pays off as my boss tells me i’m an essential asset in the team as the only fluent english-speaker.
people in my class always act so surprised when i’m able to skim the pubmed pages and pick out suitable articles at a glance for our project. im the go-to person when you can’t find an article for your essay and time is running out. they all think im super smart and research savvy.
in reality, i’ve been on ao3 for a decade and have perfected the art of skimming tags and summaries to find the perfect yaoi bedtime story.
This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.
They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.
And for eighty years, Americans’ favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.
If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.
Servicing them is like disarming a bomb – their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.
A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.
Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.
Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said “Made me feel nauseous”
So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.
No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.
Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up
The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it…
Omg no one’s even talking about the smell of the screen
This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic
I liked to turn the back of my hand to the screen, right after it was turned off, and pet the static with the little hairs on the backs of my fingers. It felt soft and fluffy.
one of the reasons CRTs are such a hotbed of glitch videography is that unlike modern monitors that block irregular signals, CRTs don’t have an opinion about the signal you feed into them. they will display anything. and if you’ve ever done glitch work with a video modulator or such, you know what it’s like negotiating with a living beast. the images you can get are often unpredictable and impossible to reproduce even with the same settings on your hardware, because it’s just electricity. there is something magical and strange about the cathode ray tube and when you play with them enough you really remember why The Ring fucked people up so bad. samara climbing out of an HD flat screen is a laughable image; but her climbing out of an old school boob tube? yeah man, i believe it. there’s fucking demons in that thing
I attended a campfire presentation by a park ranger who described Osprey as “both the pickiest and least picky eaters of all time.”
They’re the pickiest because they only eat things they can catch by plunging into at least six feet of water feet-first and are as close to their maximum carrying capacity as possible, to maximize calories-per-trip.
They’re the Least Picky because so long as something fits those parameters, Osprey will go for it.
The ranger then showed us an extensive slide show of the local osprey in flight with their catches, which included: trout, carp, snakes, bass, eels, small sharks, ducks, surprisingly large catfish, a nerf football, muskrats, a summer sausage that fell off a boat, sneakers, a fish previously thought to be extinct in the area, a Barbie Doll, and another osprey.
If you’ve got a friend that you know can’t remember shit, and you feel like it’d be rude to remind them about something that’s coming up beforehand just in case they did remember something they signed up for and now you feel bad for implying that you don’t trust their memory, and you know that there’s a 90% chance that they won’t remember the thing unless you remind them, here’s a tip from someone with a Can’t Remember Shit Disease:
Instead of simply reminding them about the event, just ask them about a specific detail involved in it instead. If you know that The Thing is on next week’s friday, and the last moment you need confirmation whether they’re coming or not is this thursday, instead of texting
“Hey you remember we have the thing on next week’s friday, right?”
you can text some specific question - regardless of whether the info itself is important to you or not - that clarifies when the event is, like
“Hey are you going to be driving to the thing next week’s friday, or is someone giving you a ride? We’ll need to plan parking beforehand.”
Because in case they did remember the thing, they can just answer you for the question you asked. And if they didn’t remember and go “OH SHIT IT’S NEXT WEEK I COMPLETELY FORGOT”, you still gave them the reminder they needed just the same.
I don’t personally get insulted when people gently remind me that they know that I can’t remember shit, and most self-aware memory problem people don’t either, but if you’re worried that it would feel rude to remind people about things you’re worried they might’ve forgotten, this is a good way to circumvent that.
The setting that prevents your work being used to train AI models is turned off by default! I had no idea about this until now! Artists, go to your settings, click “visibility”, and turn on this setting! Protect your work!
《Made a visual guide of how to get there, because it’s under a weird tab.
Go to your blog (you have to do this for each individual blog) and the visibility tab
Can I offer a reframe of the common “write the shitty first draft” advice? I like that advice a lot but I think the way it’s often presented bounces off a lot of people and activates shit that does not help writing happen.
I think of the first draft as an armature.
If I was making a beautiful bronze statue, I would need to make a clay model first. And, depending on the shape, before I even got out my clay I would need to get some good thick wire and create a basic shape for the clay to adhere to, so it doesn’t all fall down. Once I have this essential 3D wire frame, I can start building and subtracting and refining.
But if I try to refine on just clay, it won’t have enough of a core to hold it up. I’ll sculpt a beautiful hand only to have the whole arm fall off and go smush.
The armature isn’t the sculpture. It is the frame you build the sculpture around.
The first draft isn’t the novel, it’s a sort-of-novel-shaped thing that will hold up everything you build and beautify later.
Write the armature draft. Try to make it a good armature, instead of trying to make it a good novel before it’s ready.
Nothing slapped my shit back into place like someone pointing out that the “genius gifted child with so much potential who got burnout and mental illness” is just the nerd equivalent to the jock “could have been a pro at sportsball if it wasn’t for the injury”.
Yeah, and in both cases it’s generally caused by people who should know better pushing them past what their body/brain can safely do.
No, maybe you wouldn’t have been a genius, or a professional athlete or whatever, but the fact is, without that external pressure, you certainly wouldn’t be 30 and in chronic pain from a torn ligament that never-healed-right, either.
Utah Phillips to children at the Washington State Young Writers’ Conference:
“You are about to be told one more time that you are America’s most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river?
"Don’t ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They’re going to strip mine your soul. They’re going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!”
Well, there was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments—mine. I was borne to the door screaming epithets over my shoulder. Something to the effect of, “Make a break for it, kids! Flee into the wilderness! The one inside, if you can find it.”
