Pictures of Perfection

So Tierney mentioned in an interview that he didn't expect Hudson Williams to go big and dramatic with Shane's freakout after the dad caught Shane and Ilya together at the cottage. Tierney expected it to be more contained. He thought it was way too much at first, and that he'd have to edit most of it out, and it was only later, in the editing room, that he decided it worked.

The thing is that Shane does have a much more quiet, contained freakout later in the episode, in front of his parents — the kind of freakout that was probably closer to what Tierney was originally expecting, where he shrinks in on himself and hides his face and goes quiet and small.

The contrast between these two freakouts is so telling.

It's says so much about Hudson Williams' understanding of Shane, and his understanding of Shane's relationship with Ilya that he chose to go big and dramatic for Shane's initial freakout when he's alone with Ilya, and chose to shrink it down in front of Shane's parents.

It tells the audience that Shane doesn't feel like he needs to contain himself in front of Ilya. Shane feels like he's allowed to have the big dramatic meltdown in front of Ilya, without being afraid of what Ilya will think of him or wondering whether it will change the way Ilya sees him. Shane lets loose in front of Ilya in a way he would never allow himself to let loose in front of any of his other friends or loved ones. He allows himself to lean on Ilya.

And I think this, more than anything is what gives Ilya the confidence to invite himself to Shane's parents place and come out with him.

This vulnerabilty Shane shows Ilya when they're alone is what gives Ilya the confidence to stand beside Shane in front of Shane's parents in a Boston t-shirt and say that he and Shane are lovers, that his name is Ilya, not Rozanov, that he would love some more pasta and some more good Russian vodka, thanks. This is the reason Ilya can sit in the Hollanders' dining room like he belongs there, like the extra seat at the table exists specifically for him to fill.

Shane gave him this big, dramatic demonstration of complete, perfect, unconditional trust, to let himself lean on Ilya, so show Ilya this panicky, dramatic, uncontained side of Shane that no one else has ever been allowed to see.

And it's easy, after that, for Ilya to give Shane his complete, perfect, unconditional support in return.

Ilya doesn't have to question whether he's wanted by Shane, whether he's needed by Shane, whether he's a burden to Shane, whether he deserves Shane, or whether he's good for Shane. He knows.

Ilya doesn't just start jerking off in the shower either. Shane looks at him first and gets hard. Ilya sees that he's hard, exchanges glances with Shane, and then starts touching himself.

Also, Ilya recognizes Miles as being in the X-Squad cast at the club, realizes Rose might be there too, which means Shane might be with her, and looks for him. Shane sees Marlow, and realizes other Boston players might also be at the club, and looks for Ilya.

start wanting rice. (or, if you are traditional, simply recognize your constant desire for rice.)

measure out two cups of rice. then one more. then two more. then another. this seems fine. you love rice. there is no way that this will backfire on you.

remember that your great-great-uncle’s recipe says it should be soaked overnight.

become consumed with despair.

decide to soak it for half an hour instead, acknowledging that the final product will be inferior and anger your ancestors but will still satisfy your now almost-overwhelming need for rice to be inside your body much faster.

remember that you should have set the water to boil when you soaked the rice. goddammit. 

once the water boils, put the rice in until it is half-cooked. the eyeballing or intuitive method is less effective than a timer but that’s how your aunt does it so you feel compelled to meet her standards.

now that the rice has fluffed up, realize how much rice six dry cups really is. holy shit. you’ve fucked up immeasurably. 

take a minute to dwell upon your failings.

grease a baking dish with butter. this will never be as elegant as you want it to and your fingers will get greasy, but the slightly shameful, self-indulgent joy of licking your fingers afterwards will make up for it.

pour the rice into the dish. wonder immediately if you actually buttered the dish beforehand and if you’ve just fucked up. 

melt approximately one thousand pounds of butter in the microwave and pour it over the rice, pondering your imminent death from rapid-onset arterial clogging. put a small pat of butter on the top to properly gild the lily.

put your pan into the oven, which you have absolutely preheated after your previous lack of foresight. shake the rice once or twice while it bakes to make sure the butter is well distributed. resist the impulse to climb into the oven with the rice. for the last ten minutes, sit next to the oven and count the seconds until it’s done.

remove the dish from the oven. shed a tear or two at the perfection laid before you. if you are dining with others, this is the time to serve the rice while making passive-aggressive statements about how oh no, you don’t need any help, you just made dinner all by yourself, you can serve everyone as well. (this is still fun if done alone, but optional.)

CONSUME THE RICE.

realize that you have eaten half of the dish in one sitting. no matter how much rice you made, this will always happen. 

put the leftovers away, if there are any, and enjoy a cup of chai while marveling at the amount of food you have just eaten. if possible, fall asleep in an armchair, sitting up, head tilted slightly back, like a grandpa.

1lb / approx. 2 ⅓ cups basmati rice (any long-grain rice will do)

3 tbsp salt

8 tbsp / 1 stick butter (you can reduce this if you don’t want to have a heart attack)

Put the rice in a pot and cover it in cold water and salt. Let it soak overnight. (If you don’t have the time to soak it, rinse the rice with cold water until it runs clear.)

Edit: The reason you want to soak basmati and other aromatic rice before cooking is to preserve more acetylpyrroline, the compound that gives aromatic rice its characteristic scent and flavor. Soaking rice allows the grains to absorb water, which reduces the cooking time, which means less time for the acetylpyrroline to cook off. It’ll still taste pretty good if you can’t do this, but you don’t want “pretty good”, you want mind-blowing, so for that perfect flavor you’ll want to soak your rice overnight. The soaking process also washes away the layer of starch on the outside of the rice, which allows the grains to separate rather than sticking together; this is why you want to rinse your rice thoroughly if you don’t have time to soak it.

Preheat your oven to 325°.

Boil three quarts of water in a separate pot. Once it’s at a fast boil, drain the rice and add it to the water. Boil for 5-7min or until one grain tastes half-cooked, but not soft. Pour the rice into a colander and rinse with cold water.

Edit: This step also helps get rid of any remaining starch on your grains, for perfectly separated rice. If your colander or strainer has large holes, you can put a paper towel/cheesecloth/clean dishcloth on the inside in order to drain your rice. Pour carefully if you’re using a paper towel, though, and put a bowl underneath your colander; I once lost a heartbreaking amount of rice when my paper towel got oversaturated and tore open.

Liberally grease the bottom of your baking pan with some of your butter. Pour the rice on top. Melt the rest of the butter in the microwave and pour on top of the rice.

Bake for 45min. (If you like, cover the rice for part or all of the baking time, but I find it gets less crispy on top if you do this.) Shake the pan a couple times during baking to ensure that the butter distributes throughout the entire dish.

Eat.

Serves four. Can easily be scaled up if needed (or down, but why would you do that?). Best enjoyed with a nice cup of chai.

How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard. 

the Four Simple Tools Which Have Most Improved My AO3 Experience (on the computer, at least):

FIRST, for writers: the AO3 posting script google doc.

if you take nothing else from this post, let it be this. let the blessed light of the ao3 posting doc shine upon you.

okay so you know how if you copy your doc into the rich text editor on AO3, it will fuck up your formatting? just a little. like, if a word is italicized at the end of a sentence, but the full stop isn't italicized, there'll be a space between them and it looks weird? or it'll insert extra line breaks between paragraphs?

that's because the rich text editor takes what's copied into it and converts it to HTML, and I guess weird stuff can happen in that process, e.g. the rich text editor interpreting every line break as a new paragraph, including blank ones, thus the weird extra line breaks.

thankfully, there's a way to convert your doc directly to HTML that doesn't run into all those problems! it's the AO3 posting script. you make a copy of that google doc for yourself, so you have editing privileges. then you copy your fic into it, hit "post to AO3" -> "prepare for pasting into HTML editor" and boom, it will do the damn thing for you. it has saved me so much time and energy and annoyance. lots of people know about this, but every time I bring it up I find someone I know has not yet heard the good news, so: now you know!

okay, for the rest of these you need a userscript manager for your browser, like greasemonkey or tampermonkey. a userscript manager is a browser extension that lets you run a userscript (a little program, usually written in JavaScript) to modify particular webpages. I use firefox, so I use the greasemonkey browser extension linked above, but there are others out there! they should have their own installation instructions.

SECOND, for readers: the floating comment box.

wish you could write up comments while you read instead of waiting until you get to the end of the fic/chapter? this script creates a way a, well, floating comment box that you can access while you read! you access it by clicking this little "O" button in the upper left-hand corner of the brower.

when you do that, a floating box pops up, into which you can type your thoughts in as you read! you can also highlight text and click "insert selection," and that text will show up in the box, italicized, for you to tell the author what your favorite lines were!

hitting "add to comment box" will make the contents of the comment box at the bottom of the page match the contents of the floating box.

THIRD, for readers: ao3 savior and ao3 savior config.

is there shit you just never want to see again? say, for instance, you'd love to never see a harry potter fanfiction again. ao3 savior can help!

the way this one works is that you install the 'ao3 savior' script and the 'ao3 savior config' script separately. then when you want to add something to your blocklist, you go to your userscript manager extension (e.g. greasemonkey), go to the ao3 savior config script, and hit edit.

there are some default/example tags included to show the various ways to blacklist or whitelist works, but, for instance, here I've added "Harry Potter*" to the list of tags to exclude. (the * is a wildcard, so it will include "Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling" AND "Harry Potter - Fandom" AND any other tags that start with "Harry Potter".)

now, if I'm looking through fics and there's a Harry Potter crossover in the list, it will be hidden, and I'll be able to see why! and if I look at the tag itself...

ah! what bliss.

and FOURTH, for readers: ao3 tweak formatting.

finally: say there's a fic posted by someone who has not yet seen the blessed light of the ao3 posting script doc, and you want to read it, but the extra paragraph breaks really annoy you. or they learned to type in 1931 and so they double-space between sentences. or... various other common typing quirks! this script creates a handly little dropdown that will remove those quirks, just after the notes, after the beginning notes and before the chapter title.

click on "remove line breaks" or whatever, and poof! the extra line breaks are gone.

it's like magic.

I know installing scripts might seem a little daunting if you've never done it before! but it's actually really easy and handy. I know there are other, more in-depth tutorials for installing/using these scripts out there, too, if this is confusing. and probably there are other great tools out there that I don't even know about! I'm just writing this up quickly while I was thinking about it, so I can go to dinner.

the writers REALLY liked my artist resource post, so I thought i'd give y'all my dragon hoard of things i use for writing

Reverse Dictionary, you type in the meaning of a word, and it gives you a bunch of words that mean that. (MY MOST IMPORTANT OFFERING IN THIS LIST)

Slang Dictionary, what it says on the tin.

Anglish Translator, Anglish is if English evolved without borrowing from other languages and it really itches my brain

Incorrect Quotes Generator, Put character names in, and incorrect quotes come out. Really fun way to goof around with your characters' dynamics.

Handspeak, an ASL dictionary

Library of Babel, Odds are, the finished version of your wip is in here somewhere

The best fantasy map maker i have ever used

Glitch Text Generator is one I use A Lot, does ť̷̨̢͓̤͔̤̤̝̺̯̄̔̄̌̄͗͒͋͂͋͝ḩ̵̼̜͍͚͕̏̓͊̈̉̆̄͐́͗͒̈̃̊̚͜i̵̻̐̇̎̏̀̋̌̃̇̿͘̚s̴̮̔̂̇͒͑͝͝ͅ to your text

Totally not bootleg microsoft office

Emotions Thesaurus a guide for writing emotions and their associated body language

Mythcreants, has a whole bunch of stuff you can read to learn more about the technical aspects of writing

A decent article talking about what to think about when creating a language

Trope Talks, particularly good for beginner and younger writers or people who have a hard time reading. Honestly this whole channel is a fantastic format to get information into my adhd rattled brain.

FOR MY AO3 BESTIES! Postimages will host your image forever so you can embed it into your work

Ambient Chaos, sometimes the only thing in the world that can kick your brain into writing mode is nuclear sirens and lofi beats

Radioooooo, play a station from any place and year. Particularly helpful for period pieces.

Has anyone on here posted about the 2026 Wāhine Toa Firefighter Calendar full of buff firefighter women where all profits from sales go towards Breast Cancer Cure yet because, like, look at it

Initial stock has sold out but they're doing preorders for a second run that goes until November 10th (2025): https://www.breastcancercure.org.nz/calendar/wahine-toa-firefighter-calendar-2026

The owner of the bookstore was this grand old dame of 76 who had been in the business for 40 years. She'd had three kids with a husband who was extremely gay, and as soon as those were old enough, they split up. She read on an epic scale, was an avid follower of the opera, sang in several choirs, and scheduled arts programming for a private club. She had gentleman callers (so they styled themselves) at the store continuously the entire fifteen years I worked there--yah, into her NINETIES. She never took up seriously with any of them, because they couldn't keep up. She was impeccably dressed and put together every single day of her life, drank regularly, and said they would pry her estrogen supplements out of her cold, dead hands. She had a gang of elderly single lady friends, though, and they went out every night of the week. They knew everything and everyone, collectively. She got her first smart phone in her mid-80s and became extremely Online. I bet she's on Tumblr now. She is 96.

This blew my mind. Life didn't have to be over...ever.

We worship youth in our culture. Only the young have futures, and the aged exist to enable the lives of the young. We act as if by the time you hit forty, you've had your chance. You are now expected to step aside and scede life to others.

FUCK THAT. I have a lot of life ahead of me. I have places to go and books to read and people to fuck and food to eat and music to dance to and emotions to feel and nazis to punch and stories to tell and hearts to break and ventures to capitalize and empires to conquer. I am going to be doing this for the next fifty years, minimum.

Taxian Jun and his Chu Fei

So, many months ago I stumbled upon a photo of deers and...they were so Taxian Jun and Chu Fei that this art HAD to be done.

The character says that there’s no white pencil.  But you don’t need a white pencil to draw a white egg.  We already know the egg is white.  What we need to draw is the luminance of the yellow lamp and the reflection of the blue cloth and the shadows and the shading.

We know a broken bone hurts.  We know a knife wound hurts.  We know grief hurts.  Show us what else it does.

You don’t need to describe the character in pain.  You need to describe how the pain affects the character - how they’re unable to move, how they’re sweating, how they’re cold, how their muscles ache and their fingers tremble and their eyes prickle.

Back in... I want to say May? for Reasons I ended up watching all of Nirvana in Fire twice in two weeks. I regret nothing, all my choices were excellent, but then I was left with a lot of feelings about how I wanted to see Jingyan with his hair down. I am sometimes a simple soul. Also, it had been long enough since the last time I drew a full background that I forgot that they're terrible.

Writing books often exhort you to “write a shitty first draft,” but I always resisted this advice. After all,

I was already writing shitty drafts, even when I tried to write good ones. Why go out of my way to make them shittier?

A shitty first draft just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, I’d have to write a good draft—why put it off?

If I wrote without judging what I wrote, how would I make any creative choices at all?

That first draft inevitably obscured my original vision, so I wanted it to be at least slightly good.

Writing something shitty meant I was shitty.

So for years, I kept writing careful, cramped, painstaking first drafts—when I managed to write at all. At last, writing became so joyless, so draining, so agonizing for me that I got desperate: I either needed to quit writing altogether or give the shitty-first-draft thing a try.

Turns out everything I believed about drafting was wrong.

For the last six months, I’ve written all my first drafts in full-on don’t-give-a-fuck mode. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

“Shitty first draft” is a misnomer

A rough draft isn’t just a shitty story, any more than a painter’s preparatory sketch is just a shitty painting. Like a sketch, a draft is its own kind of thing: not a lesser version of the finished story, but a guide for making the finished story.

Once I started thinking of my rough drafts as preparatory sketches, I stopped fretting over how “bad” they were. Is a sketch “bad”? And actually, a rough draft can be beautiful the same way a sketch is beautiful: it has its own messy energy.

Don’t try to do everything at once

People who make complex things need to solve one kind of problem before they can solve others. A painter might need to work out where the big shapes go before they can paint the details. A writer might need to decide what two people are saying to each other before they can describe the light in the room or what those people are doing with their hands.

I’d always embraced this principle up to a point. In the early stages, I’d speculate and daydream and make messy notes. But that freedom would end as soon as I started drafting. When you write a scene, I thought, you have to start with the first word and write the rest in order. Then it dawned on me: nobody would ever see this! I could write the dialogue first and the action later; or the action first and the dialogue later; or some dialogue and action first and then interior monologue later; or I could write the whole thing like I was explaining the plot to my friend over the phone. The draft was just one very long, very detailed note to myself. Not a story, but a preparatory sketch for a story. Why not do it in whatever weird order made sense to me?

Get all your thoughts onto the page

Here’s how I used to write: I’d sit there staring at the screen and I’d think of something—then judge it, reject it, and reach for something else, which I’d most likely reject as well—all without ever fully knowing what those things were. And once you start rejecting thoughts, it’s hard to stop. If you don’t write down the first one, or the second, or the third, eventually your thought-generating mechanism jams up. You become convinced you have no thoughts at all.

When I compare my old drafts with my new ones, the old ones look coherent enough. They’re presentable as stories. But they suck as drafts, because I can’t see myself thinking in them. I have no idea what I wanted that story to be. These drafts are opaque and airless, inscrutable even to me, because a good 90% of what I was thinking while I wrote them never made it onto the page.

These days, most of my thoughts go onto the page, in one form or another. I don’t waste time figuring out how to say something, I just ask, “what are you trying to say here?” and write that down. Because this isn’t a story, it’s a plan for a story, so I just need the words to be clear, not beautiful. The drafts I write now are full of placeholders and weird meta notes, but when I read them, I can see where my mind is going. I can see what I’m trying to do. Consequently, I no longer feel like my drafts obscure my original vision. In fact, their whole purpose is to describe that vision.

Drafts are memos to future-you

To draft effectively, you need a personal drafting style or “language” to communicate with your future self (who is, of course, the author of your second draft). This language needs to record your ideas quickly so it can keep up with the pace of your imagination, but it needs to do so in a form that will make sense to you later. That’s why everyone’s drafts look different: your drafting style has to fit the way your mind works.

I’m still working mine out. Honestly, it might take a while. But recently, I started writing in fragments. That’s just how my mind works: I get pieces of sentences before I understand how to fit them together. Wrestling with syntax was slowing me down, so now I just generate the pieces and save their logical relationships for later. Drafting effectively means learning these things about yourself. And to do that, you can’t get all judgmental. You can’t fret over how you should be writing, you just gotta get it done.

Messy drafts are easier to revise

I find that drafting quickly and messily keeps the story from prematurely “hardening” into a mute, opaque object I’m afraid to change. I no longer do that thing, for instance, where I endlessly polish the first few paragraphs of a draft without moving on. Because how do you polish a bunch of fragments taped together with dashes? A draft that looks patently “unfinished” stays malleable, makes me want to dig my hands in and move stuff around.

You already have ideas

Sitting down to write a story, I used to feel this awful responsibility to create something good. Now I treat drafting simply as documenting ideas I already have—not as creation at all, but as observation and description. I don’t wait around for good words or good ideas. I just skim off whatever’s floating on the surface and write it down. It’s that which allows other, potentially better ideas to surface.

As a younger writer, my misery and frustration perpetuated themselves: suppressing so many thoughts made my writing cramped and inhibited, which convinced me I had no ideas, which made me even more afraid to write lest I discover how empty inside I really was. That was my fear, I guess: if I looked squarely at my innocent, unvetted, unvarnished ideas, I’d see how bad they truly were, and then I’d have to—what, pack up and go home? Never write again? I don’t know. But when I stopped rejecting ideas and started dumping them onto the page, the worst didn’t happen. In fact, it was a huge relief.

Next post: the practice of shitty first drafts