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All the reports coming from Rafah from the early hours of April 29 are literally identical: "Israel targeted the house of [family name]"

The same title, over and over again.

All within a couple of hours last night, three family homes in Rafah have been struck, killing at least 20, the majority of whom are women and children.

We now know about Project Lavender and we know about Israel's constant surveillance of Gaza so when I tell you that Israel had targeted civilian homes last night in Rafah, you know that there is absolutely no room for questioning Israel's intent here and always.

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Reblog to hug prev poster (they need a hug)

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Teafication

YT link

#dunmeshi

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When writing both original fiction and fanfiction, it's my personal preference and style to remind people who characters are in the narration when I feel it might be needed. It's especially handy when bringing OCs into a fanfiction. Example: "The person calling out to them was [Character's Name Here], the baker they had met earlier that morning." This quirk of narration often reads to me as the POV character internally reminding themselves who someone is.

Sometimes, a character is quite bad with names or wasn't given one, which is where it's handy to refer to this other character by a fixed epithet. Example: "The person calling out to them was the square-faced man from yesterday, who had given them those bad directions." OR: "The person calling out to them was the mayor's daughter." This reads to me as though the POV character is distinguishing people by a particular feature or remembers them by their relationship to someone else, which is a common way to remember people, until their own name becomes more fixed in your mind.

I also think it's important to keep an epithet / title the same across a scene. Epithets are best used, in my opinion, when that particular feature or quality is actually relevant. It's a little weird for a POV character to suddenly think of their own husband as "the tall man" unless his height is suddenly important in some way, and it might confuse the audience into thinking another person is in the room. If a character doesn't have a name, then "the square-faced man" or "the mayor's daughter" effectively becomes their name, and it's confusing to have a character's name change too much with every other paragraph. (It would be fine to also refer to "the mayor's daughter" as "the girl" or "the young woman" as long as there aren't any other nameless girls speaking in the scene.) Keeping the same title allows it to blend in in the same way that the word "said" does, rather than break up the flow of a scene.

Not every person or character is bad with names and remembering people, of course, or is inclined to give them funny little internal titles. There are people who are very good at names. There are tricks to use to get yourself to memorize names as you're introduced to someone. Narrative styles are going to be different by author and by the current POV character. (Sometimes, you might want the audience to be confused and disoriented!)

In fact, thinking about how different characters think about each other is one of my favorite starting places for crafting a perspective voice. A single character might be referred to in the narration as "His Majesty" by one character, "my husband" by another character, "the king" by a third character, "the usurper" by a fourth character, and "Dad" by a fifth. The name that a character calls someone else by will often say a lot about their relationship and their opinion of that other person. If the prince appears to think of his father as "the king" rather than "Father", that implies something about their relationship.

But back to introducing character names, you as an author, in my experience as a writer and reader, generally can't rely on the audience to easily recall very minor character names unless they're very distinct or the character was introduced in a particularly memorable way. Like, if you introduce a character as the protagonist's best friend, Mary, and immediately start refering to her as Mary because it's followed by a conversation between the protagonist and Mary, that's fair! It's reasonable to expect the audience to just learn Mary's name here! But then if Mary disappears after Chapter 1 and doesn't show up again until Chapter 10, I think it's reasonable to subtly reintroduce her to the audience again. Example: "It was Mary smiling at me from the doorway, and I jumped up to hug my best friend immediately."

Like, there's no one way that you have to refer to characters and introduce them and reintroduce them, of course. Characters have different levels of importance and sometimes we don't really need to know who they are. Sometimes, an author wants an audience to feel grounded, to recognize people, and sometimes they want their audience to feel lost and scared. It's all situational. Style is a thing.

But because it's all situational, this is something I like thinking about and I think it's something worth studying when you're reading original fiction. It's interesting to pay attention to how characters enter and exit scenes in different forms of media, and how the narrator introduces them and how other characters greet them aloud. (Shakespeare comes to mind as a neat thing to look at, to see how theatre does it. Comic books and films and visual media will do it differently to a text-only story.) The audience doesn't have the background that you, the author, carry around in your head all of the time, and you often need to give them a helping hand in keeping your cast of characters straight. Even in fanfiction, without including OCs, not everyone in the audience has the whole canonical cast perfectively memorized, and not every character in any given cast actually knows every other character! It's not just OCs who need introductions, whether those introductions happen subtly or a character enters the story with a bang.

Kind of another side note:

One of my favorite character introductions comes from the book "The Princess Bride", in which Princess Buttercup is kidnapped by three men who are referred to only as "the Spaniard", "the Turk", and "the Sicilian". You don't know their names for quite some time. Buttercup doesn't know these people.

You only learn the Spaniard's name when the Sicilian leaves him at the top of a cliff, tasking him the Spaniard fighting and killing "the Man in Black" who is pursuing their kidnapping. When the Spaniard is about to fight someone to the death, the book pauses to tell you that his name is Inigo Montoya, and then there is an ENTIRE CHAPTER dedicated to Inigo Montoya's long and tragic backstory, in which you learn about his decades-long quest to find the six-fingered man who murdered his father. And then the book abruptly dumps you the audience back out onto that cliff, where Inigo (no longer just "the Spaniard" and no longer just some random kidnapping thug) is about to fight for his life.

I think it's a terribly fun piece of whiplash that suits the comedic style of the book really well. (The book is a little different to the movie and there are things about it that I don't like, the movie gets across a level of a sincerity and love through the acting that the book misses in places, but there are lots of really funny elements to the book that the movie sadly couldn't cover.) The transformation from "the Spaniard" into "Inigo Montoya" is really neat to me.

#writing

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speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.

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"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

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Honestly everyone give it up for repulsed aces/aros. Yall get so much shit for having boundaries and its frustrating to watch. You're all getting sent complimentary gift baskets

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Scientists are very serious.

This is a post about science. And soup.

Dr. Elinne Becket, a microbiologist from Cal State University, is in the middle of one of those Fridge Experiments that happens to us all - except in this case, she is uniquely placed to unravel the science down to the microbial level.

While cleaning out her fridge, Dr. Becket found that a tub of family-recipe beef vegetable soup had turned bright blue. “Ok I’m outing myself here,” she tweeted, “but there was forgotten beef soup in our fridge we just cleaned it out and it was BLUE?!?!? Wtf contam would make it blue??? Like BRIGHT blue!!  Even w/ all my years in micro I’m not handling this well.“

Read on for a breathless and ongoing saga of Soup and Science, and the wonderful international community that is Academic Twitter.

Keep reading

#science #good

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I know this isn't ninjago guys but I finished this 17 hour painting for my art class and I was proud of it so...enjoy.

I love Egypt fun fact about me. :)

#art #ITS A PAINTING

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COTL fanart!

Started this as a simple way to get rid of my art block and ended up with 8 fully rendered drawings somehow, i wasnt even planning on drawing backgrounds lol

also sorry for the long post (it will be even longer next time)

All the references ↓

#cotl #art

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"Hm, I've already established that this nation in my story has a lot of sunflowers as a background detail, I should take five minutes real quick to see what those can be used for."

🎶You can eat the stalks! You can eat the leaves! You can eat the petals! You can eat the seeds! You can eat the tubers! Turn 'em into booze! Go and plant some sunflowers! If you don't you lose! 🎶

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we need more representation in media for people who are just dogshit at improvising snappy one liners. too many characters these days can come up with the smartest funniest thing to say in any given situation with zero rehearsal or hesitation and it's just not realistic. we need more guys who say shit like "yeah, well, um, how about you, uh, suck my dick?"

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Sometimes I get wild dreams. One time a zombie girl was threatening to eat my uterus and I, straightfaced, shot back, "you know, if you wanted to eat my pussy there's an easier way to do that". In response zombie girl instantly killed me and I woke up

#just things #i think i talked about this before but i cannot shut up about this #how come my dream self is so fucking funny

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Had a dream that I was throwing a student party at college, and a stranger knocked on the door. Tall stature, rough appearance, but his demeanor was both entertained and freezing cold. He claimed that he was acquainted with my father and that he had been contacted to provide a service. I welcomed him, but rather than me allowing him in, it felt more like him forcing his way inside. I was nervous about his presence, so I accompanied him as he walked through the hallways.

(You know how sometimes in dreams a scenario unfolds, but then your dream twists around and you end up "time travelling" back to the beginning of the scenario? This happens here.)

In the first round I tried to stay in control and to make him do his job as quickly as possible, so that he would leave. I ended up isolating him away from the others, and the man shot me in my bedroom. Nothing I did in the way of persuasion could stop him from killing me.

In the second round, I let him in and didn't follow. I was desperately searching for a way to survive and escape the apartment. I heard screams and commotion and knew that the stranger had started massacring the students. I disguised myself as a nanny— somehow I understood that his priority wasn't household staff or employees— and left through the front door. But something went wrong. He caught a glimpse of me and followed after me, recognising me by the grace of dream logic. (When you're afraid of something, it will happen.) He was going to kill me one way or another.

That's the gist of it tbh. The entire thing was extremely vivid and well-woven, basically watertight. I enjoy these kinds of high pressure problem-solving dreams, and I hope I'll get more of them.

#dream journal #haha what if i kissed him #who said that

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Modern day library of alexandria

#ao3

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A/B/O as in not alpha beta omega but A type B type O type blood