the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

as a reminder to literally anyone and everyone who even so much as considers this: AO3 has NO autosave ability when you're making drafts, so PLEASE do not use it instead of a writing program.

If their server goes down, if you hit a wrong button and refresh the page or go back to the previous page, if you accidentally close the browser, if your browser or device crashes, etc etc etc you are shit out of luck. Your work is gone forever, it didn't backup to anywhere and there is NO recovery option. Even TUMBLR's drafting ability is supposed to autosave and often does.

If you want to avoid gdocs that's fine- there's other text editors with simple autosave options, like Online Notepad or Digital Scholar's notepad, or there's still local-drive writing programs that are free and open source, like LibreOffice. PLEASE do not use AO3 to write your stories into directly. It has NOTHING.

tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

In one misfortunate year I ended up getting into several car accidents. It cemented my general fear and anxiety in cars, because in each case I was either in the car but not driving or driving safely when suddenly something hit me.

One was my ex driving in an unfamiliar city and cutting someone off on accident that resulted in a sideswipe. Another was getting rear ended when I came to a required stop.

The last was when I had a green arrow at an intersection. I turned and was smashed into by someone running a red light, T-boning my little car.

Dazed and in shock I tottered out of the car to behold a crusty older man eating a donut step out of the offending vehicle. A fire truck arrived to block us off from traffic since my car could no longer move under its own power.

“Were you on your way home from work?” The firemen asked me.

I shook my head, struggling to focus on them, “No,” I said vaguely, “I was on my way home from volunteering at the animal shelter.”

In an instant they were closing ranks around me, glaring at the ambivalent donut man who would dare to hit a tiny frail angel who volunteered at the animal shelter. They asked if I needed to get anything out of my car. I did.

“It’s… uh. It’s a little weird though.”

They gestured for me to proceed. I grabbed a bag with snacks and books and filled it with things I couldn’t just leave in my car. Last out I pulled my cutlass.

“Is that a sword?!”

It was. They were instantly like giant puppy dogs, excited and delighted but trying to mind their manners. The bravest said, “Can we…?” I held out the sword. They whooped with delight, unsheathing and marveling at it.

“Why do you have that in your car?”

“I honestly don’t remember, it’s just a fun thing to have at a party now.”

“Is your wrist okay?”

My shock was wearing off and I realized I was cradling my wrist to my chest. “Oh.” I rummaged into my bag and pulled out a wrist brace.

“Wh….why do you already have that?” I was starting to confuse the firemen. I volunteered with cats, had a sword offhand, and kept a wrist brace in my car bag.

“Sometimes I try to hold books in a way that sprains my wrist? So I have this in my car just in case.”

They stared at me. Maybe, like my wife, they assumed it was for masturbation induced injuries. They handed my sword back as the tow truck arrived and thanked me for letting them play with it. They gave donut man one last glare and drove their big truck away.

Senshi is probably the most fandomized character in Dungeon Meshi, and while I don't exactly mind it, I do think he has more depth than that. I find all his little quirks and idiosyncrasies to be fascinating; he's very stubborn and set in his ways about things that seemingly don't matter, he thinks about things that other people don't, he has a deeply set value system that informs everything he does. He cares A Lot, like, this man cares So Much. That's the kind of person you have to be to drop everything to help a random group of adventurers save one woman. But because he feels so strongly about things, he can also be surprisingly immature at times (although he's also the character most likely to admit he was wrong about something). I think part of that is because he's lived in the dungeon on his own so long that he's not used to working with other people. He will extend empathy and friendship to almost anyone, but he does things his own way, and he doesn’t always feel the need to explain his way of thinking because again, he's usually on his own. He's both incredibly wise and kind of childish in ways that seem contradictory at first, but make more and more sense the more we learn about him. Major kudos to Ryoko Kui's writing and pacing to make that transition so seamless and have all those details from his backstory click into place perfectly. And on a wider thematic level, Senshi is kind of a perfect counterpart to characters like Thistle (or any other dungeon lord). Senshi understands the dungeon in ways that even its creator doesn't. Although everyone is scrambling to take control of the dungeon, Senshi is the one who actually takes care of it. He's the one who thinks about things like nutrition and proper sleep and the ecosystem, all those things that it's easy to ignore when you get swept up by the grandeur of it all. He's the most important character to have present in a story that explores life and death and hunger. His constant, invisible presence holds everything together.

'It was late spring, the first time all year that the sunshine had any real strength behind it. Satoru was wittering on about something inane as always — Tentomon or something equally ridiculous.

There was nothing special about the moment. Not really. Except for the fact that Satoru had shrugged off his jacket in the heat. It was draped around his shoulders just so, exposing the long column of his throat, pale after a long winter. Really, there was nothing special about the moment. But when Suguru looked at the boy silhouetted against the spring sky, bright and blue and boundless and beautiful — just like his eyes, Suguru thought — his heart skipped a beat all the same. With all the sight afforded to him, Satoru never missed a thing. So it was risky, what Suguru did. Later, when he was looking at his new phone wallpaper under the cover of darkness, grinning like an idiot, he'd wonder how he ever got away with it. Yet, if Suguru's yearning to capture that perfectly ordinary moment forever was stronger than all reason, perhaps it was stronger than the Six Eyes, too. After all, not even Satoru could stop time.' - by my beloved @fushiglow ♥

(( also glo says: FUN FACT! Tentomon is voiced by Suguru's VA — ergo it's Satoru's favourite Digimon, obviously )) ---------------------------------------------------------

freshly added headcanons: • gojo at some point randomly barged into sugurus room and put glowy stickers all over his ceiling • suguru has gojo as his phone wallpaper, but keeps it a secret • suguru is a hamasaki ayumi fan • the cinnamoroll phone charm is from gojo who spent almost an eternity getting that out of a gatcha machine for him • they were happy

most annoying breed of author is actually someone who doesn’t respect a genre and sets out to subvert it.

I really do think that it’s good for the soul to be unironically pretentious about something. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way but in a “yes, it really is that deep and I would love to enthusiastically and passionately explain why” kind of way.

The finale of a never-ending masquerade.

AQ 4.2 spoilers.

around a year ago I had an incredibly realistic dream where I was hiking and stumbled off a cliff. I managed to grab into a ledge, but I was hyper aware that eventually I would lose hold of it and fall to my death. I just sat there holding the ledge for a while thinking about everything I was never able to do, the conversations I never had, and how badly I wanted to live. Eventually I came to terms with my untimely death and accepted that there was nothing I could change, and it wasn't really okay, but it would have to be okay, and I'd had a good life. If nothing else, I was glad for the life I had been able to have. I wanted my last thoughts to be peaceful. I was about ready to let go when my family came along and rescued me. Some other stuff happened after that. Then I woke up and let me tell you I had a Bad Day. How are you even supposed to act normal after that.

Repeat after me:

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

Remember, the second and third can't happen if you don't have something to work with. Your first draft will always be shit compared to your third, but at least it exists. The worst first draft is an unfinished one. The best first draft is a just completed one.

You read books/stories not in their first draft form-- only in their finished form (third, fourth, sometimes fifteenth draft). So stop comparing your first draft with a final one.

So, just write--you can make it better later. Perfectionism is the greatest weight a creator can carry.

enough stories about how someone learns to truely be happy through love. i want a story where someone is desperately seeking out love thinking it's the only way to be happy only for them to learn by the end that happiness is what they make of it and they don't need love at all to make it.

The more "empowered" Disney tries to write their heroines as, the less interesting and charismatic they become, ironically.