#Writing Structure

[avelera]

The Three Act Structure as Foreshadowing in Across the Spiderverse

I re-watched Across the Spiderverse yesterday, as its a perennial favorite in our household, and once again found the crafting of the story so rich that there's always something new to discover. In this case, whether or not we've left Miles in a good place or a bad place at the end of the film is left ambiguous, and this ambiguity is built into the very structure of the film.

In a Shakespearean comedy or tragedy, one easy way to chart which one the story takes place in is whether it begins in a good place or a bad place. If the story opens with happiness and triumph, bad news, you're in a tragedy. And vice versa, if something bad happens at the beginning, good news, you're in a comedy.

For example, Othello begins with Othello's triumphant return to the city after a successful military campaign, honored and adored by the city, and ends in the destruction of everything and everyone he loves. Whereas in Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice's best friend Hero is falsely accused of infidelity, creating the dramatic action of the story (gross simplification) and unlike poor Desdemona in Othello, by the end her name is cleared and all the happy couples can get married.

Right, so back to Across the Spiderverse, Act 1 opens with Gwen and Miles, our co-protagonists, in a bad place. Their secrecy around their Spider-Person identities are leaving their family lives in shambles, with Gwen estranged from her father and Miles feeling alienated from his parents. However, Act 1 ends on a happy, hopeful note in the form of the Spiderverse HQ. Miles finally got his wish to reunite with his Spider-family, and the future (literally, 2099) seems bright.

But watch out. Because Spider-verse brilliantly uses story hooks to pull you from one Act to the next. Act 1 really follows its own plot structure, with The Spot as action, A-plot villain being battled throughout. The emotional, B-plot story is around family trust and loneliness. By the end, Mumbhattan is saved, though the Spot got away, tugging us along through the story, and Miles and Gwen's loneliness is at least temporarily solved with all the new and old Spider-friends they meet.

However, this means we go into Act 2 in triumph. Which means we've got tragedy on the horizon. Act 2 has Miguel as our villain, they don't make much secret of it, and the encounter with him as Miles eventually flees the Spiderverse HQ is the action climax of Act 2. Our themes of belonging reemerge and echo Into the Spiderverse, (sometimes with direct visual call-backs, flashes of the younger Miles while he flickers between universes, as well as with the return of Peter B.).

Now, this is where the structure gets interesting. Because I argue that Act 2 ends with Miles escaping Spiderverse HQ and Gwen being forcibly kicked out. Act 3 is a shorter Act, but not as short as it seems, from when Miles ends up in Universe 42 to the end credits is actually a pretty long sequence. In that sequence, we close out other important beats in the story, like the dangling thread of Gwen and her father's estrangement.

So, Gwen's story in Act 3 begins with a tragedy: she's been kicked out of Spiderverse HQ against her will. This consequence she's feared since the beginning, that she'll be forced to return to her home universe, is finally realized. However, note that structure again, because she starts in a bad place, we can fully expect her to end in a good place. And she does! She reconciles with her father, defeats the bad guys like 90's Spider-Man (Ben Reilly) and gets the band back together. She has finally resolved her emotional story, which began in tragedy and thus moved towards comedy/happiness. She is full-actualized with her allies by her side and her father back in her corner.

Miles though? Miles story gets really interesting in Act 3.

Because at first glance, his story would be the opposite of Gwen's. She was kicked out of HQ, but Miles fled which means his arrival should be a triumph. That would mean he's set up for tragedy, and that is what it appears to be at first. He ends up imprisoned by the Universe 42 Miles Morales and Uncle Aaron, apparently getting ready for a fight for his life and for the life of his father.

However, it's actually a bit ambiguous if he opens tragically or comedically. Because Miles doesn't know where he is. So arguably, you could flip the truth of the opening of Act 3 - Miles begins tragically, because he tried to go home but he's actually far from it, in another universe.

But here the flipping gets even more interesting and complex, because I'm not convinced Miles is the good guy in Universe 42. His speech to Universe 42 Rio about how he "beat them all" in terms of his former Spider-friends sure sounds a lot like a villain speech. Miles also dives in by making a lot of assumptions when he arrives there, like that Uncle Aaron is a bad guy here too, that he's the Prowler, and that this means he's a supervillain. When he learns that Universe 42 Miles has assumed the mantle of the Prowler, he continues to try to talk them into joining, "the good side" all based on almost zero information. They laugh at him. But why are they laughing?

All we know about Universe 42 is that they never had a Spider-man. That Miles was supposed to be the Spider-man of this universe, but the collider transported the radioactive spider so it bit our Miles instead. Miles knows nothing about what this unprotected universe suffered as a result but at first glance, it's clearly bad. Indeed, on that point alone as Miguel pointed out, our Miles is a villain in this universe because his becoming Spider-man robbed them of their Miles Spider-man.

And actually, knowing that Miles is Miles, that he's a good kid at heart, there's just as much evidence that in this universe, Miles is already a good guy, that Uncle Aaron is his mentor (after all Uncle Aaron was always a bit on the fence about evil and in a world that's gone to evil, it's easy to imagine that he leans good). Thus, 42-Miles and 42-Aaron's anger and dark amusement at Original Miles speech about good vs. evil could be because they're offended to be labeled as villains by this privileged kid who never lost anything, who indeed comes from a privileged universe where his father never died.

So going back to the Act 3 structure, from the Miles perspective, which is subjective and not objective, the Act begins with a triumphant escape, and therefore must be headed towards a tragic defeat - capture by his evil alternate universe self. But Miles didn't know at first that he was tragically in the wrong universe. Which means that he could actually be in a structural comedy: beginning the Act with something bad happening, a transport accident gone wrong, and ending it exactly where he needs to be: surrounded by heroes who can help him, his own alternate universe self who is a good guy in this universe, along with Uncle Aaron. All of the darkness is in Miles's head, because he just came from a place where he was betrayed by supposed allies, but actually it's much more complicated than that, ending in ambiguity.

#writing #across the spiderverse #into the spiderverse #spider-man #miles morales #maggie rambles #writing structure

[chuplayswithfire]

An Argument Against Stede Dissociating In Episode 9

personally i dislike the idea that Stede returned to Barbados and the Bonnet estate in a dissociative haze because i think it subtracts from the narrative in a way that allowing instead for 'stede made his decision consciously, while seriously impacted by being retraumatized' does not. i say that for two reasons:

stede's narrative arc gets wonky, lacking proper parallel to let him confront his decisions and their impact

if we take episode 9 from a place of, stede, having been retraumatized not only in the form of witnessing a man die (this time, truly independent of stede's actions because i would argue that stede did in fact murder nigel, even if in a second degree sense, but chauncey being drunk and tripping into shooting himself is genuinely stede *actually* just being nearby when he died which - these writers! this writing! aaaargh!!!) but also in having all of his worst fears and insecurities struck with pinpoint accuracy RIGHT before, chooses to return home and leave ed behind because he thinks it will be better for him -

what we get from that is stede *making his great mistake again*. stede leaving ed becomes true and proper parallels to stede leaving mary and the children, becomes stede running from his family to run towards a family, all over again, it becomes an actual cycle that stede has to break, rather than a one and done event.

if stede is in a full dissociative episode when he goes back to the Bonnet Estate, then he doesn't make a conscious choice, he doesn't choose to go back to his old place and his old life and consign himself (and his family) to the misery of an angry man in your house, he's just a victim of chauncey badminton and all the people like him who hurt stede.

and that makes the narrative bad.

because what the narrative does with stede by having him make this choice is it forces him to confront possibly his greatest flaw - the selfishness inherent to that kind of deep self-loathing, where you completely dismiss the feelings and thoughts of other people because you are so convinced that you and you alone properly know what those other people need and want and that you can make decisions on their behalf because you are so uniquely specially different that no one else can understand you and if they think otherwise they are wrong and lying and foolish - by making him repeat his abandonment.

by making us sit in ed's anguish at being abandoned, we are forced to imagine *mary and the children's* anguish at being abandoned. at having stede uproot their lives without so much as a word of warning. it invites us to see that what stede did might have been good for him and necessary for him to achieve happiness, but the hows of what he did made it cowardly and corrosive.

when stede is actively making a choice, even one influenced heavily by trauma and self-loathing, the narrative is telling us - through the action and the fallout - that ghosting people fucking sucks. that running away from your problems will only bring them right back to you, worse than they were originally.

that the only way out is through.

that wherever you go, there you are, still stuck with yourself.

and i like that narrative, actually.

2. it makes stede a passive participant in this break up with ed, which makes the whole thing unbalanced

the other reason i dislike the whole, stede just dissociated all the way home thing is that, it makes the whole thing unbalanced. like i mentioned earlier, it means that stede is essentially just a victim in this situation, without agency as a character. it means him going home is just one more thing chauncey badminton did to stede, and it makes it so that him thrusting himself back into his family's lives is as much something violent that's happened to HIM as it is something violent that's happened to THEM.

and i really don't think that's what the narrative is going for.

stede going home forces his family, who have already dealt with the harm of his abandonment, the emotional violence of his careless disregard for their feelings and his place in their lives (do you ever think about how stede wrote to mary, but not his children. how mary felt about having to deliver all of the news to her two small children, that their father had abandoned them to pursue his own happiness, because he could not be happy as a part of their lives?), the social violence of being associated with a known criminal, to live through it again.

to have the wound torn open. to have him once again disregard their wants and feelings in favor of once again pursuing emotional satisfaction - this time, the emotional satisfaction of hurt, because make no mistake, stede is not trying to be happy when he returns home. he is not trying to find peace. he is hurting himself, and he graduates to hurting mary, being passive aggressive and pointed in and snide, because he is miserable with his choice and wants her to be miserable.

(i will never stop thinking about how he says if he can give up the sea, surely she can give up 'dishonest' title - surely if he can give up his beloved life, she should have to give up hers.)

the narrative is making a point that stede makes these unilateral decisions and they have direct impacts on other people's lives and it uses the hurt that stede's abandonment causes ed - the grief, the misery, the drowning - to once again show that stede's actions have consequences. his choices have consequences.

if the narrative were instead writing that stede *didn't* make a choice, he *didn't* leave ed, he was a victim of circumstance and trauma and never ever wanted or intended to leave ed -

then he's really just set dressing, and it will put ed in a position where, unlike mary, he can't even have the full emotional satisfaction of confronting stede, because stede's response will be, i was a victim, i didn't mean to, i hurt you but it was an accident -

and that fucking sucks. that would fucking suck. it happens in real life, it's true, but i think it would weaken the narrative substantially if we see that ed is held to account for the people he hurt, which he should be, but stede is off the hook for it, really, because he just had no choice, he was a passive participant in his own life. stede actively making these choices means that when stede actively undos them, when he completes the fuckery and goes back to sea,

if stede made his choice, even under partial duress of trauma, then the narrative is taking strong, decisive turns, and showing a coherent narrative - that stede's life has had this pattern, his behavior has had this pattern, and he is finally breaking the pattern. he succumbed to his worst self and worst habits, but overcame.

his dissociating adds nothing to the narrative beyond making stede a victim who didn't get to actively participate in the decision that blew up his life.

#stede bonnet #ofmd #ofmd meta #our flag means death #writing structure #narratives

[catt-nuevenor]

Time-skips in Chapters

Quick query for you all:

#opinion poll #writing structure

[jodyroyer]

🌟 Unlock the secrets of storytelling! Learn the 12 steps of the Hero's Journey in my latest blog post. Perfect for aspiring writers! 

#jody royer #author #jody royer writer #fiction writer #writing tips #book reviewer #writer #book reviews #the hero's journey #writing structure #storytelling

[ancientroyalblood]

Exploring Non-Linear Narratives: Writing Out of Sequence

In the realm of storytelling, the traditional sequence is but one path to follow, a well-trodden road where events unfurl one after another, much like dominos carefully aligned, ready to fall. Yet, in the shadows, there exists another path, a web of narratives intertwined, where each word, each sentence, is a piece of a puzzle not yet complete. This exploration seeks to dissect the notions of…

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#Character Development #Creative Storytelling #Literary Experimentation #Literary Innovation #Literary Technique #Multiple Timelines #Narrative Challenge #Narrative Puzzle #Non-Linear Fiction #Non-Linear Narratives #Non-Linear Writing Style #Non-Traditional Narrative #Plot Weaving #Reader Engagement #Storytelling Complexity #Temporal Manipulation #Unconventional Storytelling #Writing Craft #Writing Structure

[quecksilvereyes]

since im on a roll about tragedies:

i am sick to death of fourth wall breaks that are funny. i want fourth wall breaks that make me want to cry.

give me hamlet looking up during his monologue to see the audience and plead with them for help. give me orpheus, on the road back up from the underworld begging us to make sure eurydice is there, to tell him she is safe. give me orpheus turning when the audience stays silent.

give me someone, bloody and full of tears monologuing to the camera when the narrative has wound itself so tight that they can't escape it anymore.

"youre just watching me. help me. im dying and im rotting and im losing myself and you wont do a thing."

i want the tragedy to be the performance. i want the tragedy to be, truly, in the eyes of the beholder.

#tragedy #writing #writerblr #narrative structure #4th wall break #i just. why must a 4th wall break be funny #is it not enough to sob about being unable to change a thing #is it not enough to have a character wail at you because if you didnt watch they wouldnt be in pain

[agentravensong]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.

#undertale #alphys #true lab #this inspired by a mutual's alphys posting #and a discord convo i had a couple weeks back about ut's stance on ''punishing'' the player vs the monsters for their actions #and thoughts i've had generally post a certain fangame with a color in its name about just how well ut is structured as a narrative #everyone rightfully praises toby fox's character writing but stuff like this i think flies under the radar a bit by comparison #and it deserves to be appreciated #there's obvious Lore reasons why the true lab is only visited in a pacifist run (what's revealed about chara and flowey) #but this is the other half of it: the message of alphys's story hits hardest on a paci route post neutral runs #toby fox is a good writer more often than not

[commodorez]

Zoomer here, and I do indeed have questions about computers- how do filesystems work, and why should we care (I know we should, but I'm not exactly sure why)?

So why should we care?

You need to know where your own files are.

I've got a file on a flash drive that's been handed to me, or an archival data CD/DVD/Bluray, or maybe it's a big heavy USB external hard drive and I need to make a copy of it on my local machine.

Do I know how to navigate to that portable media device within a file browser?

Where will I put that data on my permanent media (e.i. my laptop's hard drive)?

How will I be able to reliably find it again?

We'll cover more of the Why and How, but this will take some time, and a few addendum posts because I'm actively hitting the character limit and I've rewritten this like 3 times.

Let's start with file structure

Files live on drives: big heavy spinning rust hard drives, solid state m.2 drives, USB flash drives, network drives, etc. Think of a drive like a filing cabinet in an office.

You open the drawer, it's full of folders. Maybe some folders have other folders inside of them. The folders have a little tab with a name on it showing what's supposed to be in them. You look inside the folders, there are files. Pieces of paper. Documents you wrote. Photographs. Copies of pages from a book. Maybe even the instruction booklet that came with your dishwasher.

We have all of that here, but virtualized! Here's a helpful tree structure that Windows provides to navigate through all of that. In the case of Windows, it's called Explorer. On OSX MacOS, the equivalent is called Finder.

I don't have to know where exactly everything is, but I have a good idea where thing *should* based on how I organize them. Even things that don't always expose the file structure to you have one (like my cellphone on the right). I regularly manually copy my files off of my cellphone by going to the Camera folder so I can sift through them on a much bigger screen and find the best ones to share. There are other reasons I prefer to do it that way, but we won't go into that here. Some people prefer to drag and drop, but that doesn't always work the same between operating systems. I prefer cut and paste.

Standby for Part 2!

#file structure #seriously this took awhile to write #windows #windows explorer

[recurring-polynya]

Me, writing the parts of my fanfic I want to write: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me, trying to string those parts together into something that resembles a narrative: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

#writing #i have just spend an entire ten minutes thinking about the plot/structure of my fanfic and i am in agony #(possibly. it's also possible it was only 3) #usually i just write a bunch of scenes and then force them to go together like a chimp doing a jigsaw puzzle #you'd be surprised at how successful i have been at this #anyway for reasons i can't do that this time plz pray for me

[mobydyke]

maybe if I keep telling the story, it will never have to end. that way I can keep you alive. If the story lasts forever, so will you. yes, you die in the end. yes I am the only one who remembers. yes I am the only one who knows. But if I never say it aloud, maybe you won't die. maybe this time orpheus won't turn around. maybe peter won't deny him. maybe when I reach the end, you will have had time to come up with a clever solution and escape. maybe this time we survive it together. and the next time, you can tell this story with me. maybe everyone survives and we don't have to tell the story at all. maybe they don't. if I never finish, I'll never have to know. let me speak for a little bit longer. let me live in a world that you are also in for just a moment more. sometimes your memory feels like a noose. I'm sorry. I'm not ready for you to die

#words #i REALLY tried to write some izzy meta tonight and instead? i got ishmael #brain said 'lonely sailor with an I name? yeah i got u covered' #moby dick #ace txt #anyway it's about the DOOMED NARRATIVES #my askbox is ALWAYS open to talk about the narrative structure of moby dick it makes me want to chew thru drywall #my thoughts my words

[too-fond-to-be-fearful]

Been thinking recently about the goings-on with Duolingo & AI, and I do want to throw my two cents in, actually.

There are ways in which computers can help us with languages, certainly. They absolutely should not be the be-all and end-all, and particularly for any sort of professional work I am wholly in favour of actually employing qualified translators & interpreters, because there's a lot of important nuances to language and translation (e.g. context, ambiguity, implied meaning, authorial intent, target audience, etc.) that a computer generally does not handle well. But translation software has made casual communication across language barriers accessible to the average person, and that's something that is incredibly valuable to have, I think.

Duolingo, however, is not translation software. Duolingo's purpose is to teach languages. And I do not think you can be effectively taught a language by something that does not understand it itself; or rather, that does not go about comprehending and producing language in the way that a person would.

Whilst a language model might be able to use probability & statistics to put together an output that is grammatically correct and contextually appropriate, it lacks an understanding of why, beyond "statistically speaking, this element is likely to come next". There is no communicative intent behind the output it produces; its only goal is mimicking the input it has been trained on. And whilst that can produce some very natural-seeming output, it does not capture the reality of language use in the real world.

Because language is not just a set of probabilities - there are an infinite array of other factors at play. And we do not set out only to mimic what we have seen or heard; we intend to communicate with the wider world, using the tools we have available, and that might require deviating from the realm of the expected.

Often, the most probable output is not actually what you're likely to encounter in practice. Ungrammatical or contextually inappropriate utterances can be used for dramatic or humorous effect, for example; or nonstandard linguistic styles may be used to indicate one's relationship to the community those styles are associated with. Social and cultural context might be needed to understand a reference, or a linguistic feature might seem extraneous or confusing when removed from its original environment.

To put it briefly, even without knowing exactly how the human brain processes and produces language (which we certainly don't), it's readily apparent that boiling it down to a statistical model is entirely misrepresentative of the reality of language.

And thus a statistical model is unlikely to be able to comprehend and assist with many of the difficulties of learning a language.

A statistical model might identify that a learner misuses some vocabulary more often than others; what it may not notice is that the vocabulary in question are similar in form, or in their meaning in translation. It might register that you consistently struggle with a particular grammar form; but not identify that the root cause of the struggle is that a comparable grammatical structure in your native language is either radically different or nonexistent. It might note that you have trouble recalling a common saying, but not that you lack the cultural background needed to understand why it has that meaning. And so it can identify points of weakness; but it is incapable of addressing them effectively, because it does not understand how people think.

This is all without considering the consequences of only having a singular source of very formal, very rigid input to learn from, unable to account for linguistic variation due to social factors. Without considering the errors still apparent in the output of most language models, and the biases they are prone to reproducing. Without considering the source of their data, and the ethical considerations regarding where and how such a substantial sample was collected.

I understand that Duolingo wants to introduce more interactivity and adaptability to their courses (and, I suspect, to improve their bottom line). But I genuinely think that going about it in this way is more likely to hinder than to help, and wrongfully prioritises the convenience of AI over the quality and expertise that their existing translators and course designers bring.

#alright getting off my soapbox now #apologies if this is not particularly coherent - i was very much working through my thoughts as I was writing #but yeah tl;dr i am not huge on LLMs especially for language education and am deeply disappointed by the way things are trending #anyways if anyone knows any learning tools that are similarly structured i'd appreciate the recommendation #being able to easily do a little bit of study on a regular basis helped me a lot and i've yet to find anything similar #duolingo #language #language learning

[psalmsofpsychosis]

#literally dont ask me what happened here yes this is a fucking meta #i just wake up and have to rebel against sane traditional writing structures or i'll die #anyway the idea of Joker saying this was a last minute joke thrown in my face by my last remaining very drunk muse #before we were all thrown out of the bar #Batman #batjokes #batjokes meta

[qbebou]

tubbo is SO cute and sweet with the eggs they all loved him immediately and ramon thinks he’s SO cool and he calls them little squirts and sweetie and kiddos and his little poultry princes princesses kings and queens and he talks to them like they’re kids but not like they’re KIDS idk if that makes any sense??? he’s building a giant speed smelting thing just to make a metric fuck ton of baked potatoes for chayanne and he tried to fix the stuff he had to take from ramon after cucuruchos quest and he’s done chayannes quests even though he says he’s not so good at this whole babysitting thing and it’s so nice seeing chayanne and tallulah playing TOGETHER!!! chay doesn’t get out much but the last few days he’s been hanging with tubbo pretty late at night and he’s so comfortable with him idk i think i wasn’t rlly sure of how tubbo would be with the eggs when he first joined but they all welcomed him into their family with open arms and i think it’s incredibly precious

#sorry idk if this makes any sense i’m trying to write it while also watching the stream and my thoughts just come out without any #punctuation or good sentence structure SORRY #qsmp #lex.liveblogging #tubbo #I JUST THINK ITS SWEET

[donnyclaws]

THEY CALLED IT GODLAND

A1 posters for school, using my spec bio setting idea as the backbone. Only had 6 weeks to make everything you see here, truly and honestly drug me through the mud in a My chronic pain is much worse now kind of way. Happy with the work, bitter about how hostile university is ect. I'll post more development stuff from my backlog later, and it's something I want to keep working on. For now enjoy my penguins and open this in a new tab to read 🦭

▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀▄  SITE   Kofi   Zines   Patreon  

#they called it godland #art tag #sorry 4 no img id but i will be re writing this all on my site when i get to it so there will be a neat text ver on them #anyway this whole sem was like 2 projects where I designed it to either talk about disability or designed it to accomodate myself and then #still got crushed like a gay little bug by harsh structuring that no one can really function in #anyway my birds. my birds they're ugly

[onleurafaitcroire]

thinking about carmy dating a phd student

her life is so different from his but they can still relate to each other on such a base level – maybe their home lives were similarly tough growing up, maybe she worked in restaurants to pay her way through undergrad so she gets him on that level, maybe she lost a sibling too – that they have an intense connection that leaves everyone around them scratching their heads.

on nights when she stays late in her office grading papers or working on research, he brings her a meal from the restaurant and coaxes her into his car and back to his apartment so he can make sure she sleeps. on nights when he’s stressed about the restaurant and is stuck there until one in the morning, she’ll come by, make sure he eats something, and stay with him until he’s satisfied that everything is spotless and ready to come home.

once, he came to one of her classes to drop off a coffee and a kiss before he had to go to the restaurant for prep, and her nosy ass freshmen still ask her all the time about the cute guy she’s dating.

when they finally move in together, carmy clears out the guest room of the apartment and makes her a cute little home office from scratch on his one day off – gets her a standing desk and some ikea bookshelves and brings in a fluffy armchair for the corner – and she cries when he shows it to her. he likes to sit in the armchair and scribble down recipe ideas while he flips through a new cookbook and she does her own work, if they both happen to be home; he just loves being around her, even if they’re doing their own things.

#now THIS is self-indulgence #i just want a carmy to bring me food in my shitty grad office idk #anyway maybe i'll write more of this in a more structured manner at some point #carmen berzatto x reader #carmy x reader #carmen berzatto #carmy berzatto #the bear fx #the bear #my writing

[bleue-flora]

Ok, I recently wrote an essay [here] talking about the definition and duties of civil engineering as well as the ethics because of the brain rot @swordfright gave me with calling Dream Sam’s ultimate engineering project. So, because I actually am a civil engineer I took it upon myself to design the title and summary of quantities sheets just like I do at work for roads but with Dream as the project instead. And in honor of angst day sponsored by @sixteenth-day-event, I figured I’d share it because I feel like it kinda works for the prison of the mind prompt.

“Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” he deemed too damaged like a bumpy road or crumbling building that wasn’t worthy of patching and filling in the cracks or reinforcing, that’s too eroded to be fixed and preserved. So, Sam strived to tear him down to the bedrock so he could remake, remold, and reengineer Dream according to his design for the common safety, public health and well-fair.”

{These are very similar to the actual sheets I make day to day, which I shall not share for the sake of doxing my location, but yea pretty much everything has a significance. Some of it doesn’t necessarily make sense but that was because I was more so taking inventory of what we see in lore (so you know I counted ;) lol)}

#sixteenthdayevent #AAANNNNNGGST #Ah and now you see why I’ve been digging up all the prison lore and inventories ;D…. my brain rot is too powerful #still never got wardens torment enchants though :( did for the shovel and how which I’ll now have to write torture scenes for… #so ummm stay tuned for that in Misery Loves An Idiot… Dream going to have lots of fun I’m sure >:) #c!dream #dsmp #dreblr #dream smp #dsmp dream #dsmp analysis #dsmpblr #prison arc #dsmp art #pandora’s vault has a singular purpose #pandora’s vault #c!dream fanart #blue does art apparently #ah Sam… such a good engineer… if only he realized Dream was a person not a condemned structure oof #if y’all are curious enough I might share a irl work example with different numbers and stuff but didn’t want to bore you XD #happy angst day :)… wait isn’t that everyday? lol #can we talk about how I’ve done all of these prompts as descriptions of metaphors and stuff kinda funny #civil engineering