Everything's funny to me

Admin Note: This post is a rebloggable copy of our page on fight scenes. The page is being phased out, so from now on all updates will be made on this post and not on the page. 

Among the typically difficult scenes writers face in their stories, the fight scene definitely ranks high on the list. Below you will find several resources with tips for writing a good fight scene.

Action with a Side of Zombies: One of our articles focused specifically on writing action scenes. Bonus:  the examples all include zombies.

ArchetypesAndAllusions: An article on the three main types of fighters and their various approaches to kickin’ ass (or not).

TheCreativePenn.com: Alan Baxter, speculative fiction author, gives some great advice on characterization, setting, martial style, and cliches. 

StoryHack.com: A PDF that takes you through writing a fight scene step by step by Randy Ingermanson, compiled by Bryce Beattie.

MarilynnByerly.com: An extremely good guide to writing fight scenes. This guide includes tips on character viewpoint, mapping the fight, and tricks for writing each type of fight. 

Shelfari.com: This site is an interview with famed fantasy author R.A. Salvatore on how to write great fight scenes.

TheBusinessOfWriting: C. Patrick Schulze gives some good, solid advice on identifying and writing your fight scene.

EzineArticles.com: Marq McAlister explains how to make a fight scene pack some serious punch. This article is good for fine-tuning.

Martin Turner: Focusing specifically on sword-fighting scenes, Martin Turner writes in great detail on every conceivable detail of this type of time-honored fight scene. 

SeriousPixie.com: Susan tells you about the three types of fight scene writers and explains how to fix the problems that arise for each type.

David Alan Lucus: This multi-part guide gives advice in exhaustive detail on how to write an awesome fight scene.

NightFoot: This Tumblr post offers some great tips for writing fight scenes.

Film Crit Hulk: A shoe-in for screenwriters, the Hulk and special guest Tom Townend talk shop on how to write a great movie action scene.

Harry Edmundson-Cornell: Harry writes a series on the fight scene geared toward writers of Superhero comics.

How To Fight Write: The knowledgeable and thorough admins of this exceptional Tumblr blog will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about fight scenes and weaponry—even if they have to beat it into you.

Scholagladiatoria: A YouTuber with lots of weapons teaches you how they were/are properly used to their greatest advantage.

These links provide advice specifically for writing battle scenes:

Gerri Blanc: eHow’s article on battle scenes is a basic step-by-step list for you. It’s a good introduction to writing battle scenes.

StormTheCastle.com: This article takes you through an in-depth guide on how to write battle scenes for fantasy stories.

Rhonda Leigh Jones: Jones lists some dos and don’ts of writing battle scenes.

Other resources:

List of Martial Arts: Looking for a fighting style? Find it here!

List of Weapons: Every type of weapon you can think of is listed here.

List of Military Tactics: From troop movements to siege warfare, this list has got you covered.

Asylum.com: A few examples of awesome battle tactics from history.

BadassOfTheWeek.com: Get some inspiration for awesome fight scenes and fighting characters from this compendium of badassitude.

Thearmedgentleman: Austin has offered to share his knowledge on weaponry with any writers who have questions. Thanks, Austin! 

Don’t see what you’re looking for here? You can find every post we’ve ever made or reblogged about fight scenes in our “fight” tag. You might also find our “action scene” tag useful. 

Been playing We Love Katamari Reroll (amazing game btw) and realized Ganondorf and KOAC have similar fits not gonna lie.

Two entitled, giga chad kings who KNOW how to work a silk robe.

The tl;dr: A guy is selling subscriptions to an AI-based software tool to "help you write better novels." And to train it, he's used tens of thousands of novels from authors you know, without those authors giving him permission.

...Sometimes things seem to blow up with unusual speed. This particular shit seems to have hit the fan yesterday, primarily on Twitter, when various authors discovered the guy's website, prosecraft.io. This site featured "clippings" of writing from the authors he'd stolen from... and the revelation that he had scraped their entire books, not just excerpts, to train his AI. ("2,470,720,986 words," his website bragged, "from 27,668 books, by 15,622 authors." The only authors who were off limits, apparently, were people using [or paying for] his software.) Though the guy hastily took prosecraft.io down when the online explosions began, if you take a look at this Google search you can see the covers of just some of the books the entire contents of which he exploited for AI training.

This usage goes well beyond the "fair use" defense that he belatedly (and ineffectively) attempted to employ on Twitter. It's straightforward copyright infringement, on a massive scale: good old-fashioned theft.

Gizmodo has a goodish breakdown of the broad situation here.

The only upside to this sorry situation is that, at the legal end of things, this guy is certainly about to get nuked from orbit… because all those authors’ full-text works will still be in the guts of the guy’s AI. (Among the authors he made the gross tactical error of stealing from: Stephen King, James Patterson, the Pratchett Estate, and Nora Roberts. This... is not going to go well for him.)

Leverage's John Rogers sums it up succinctly:

Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir software (I'm not adding the URL here) that he trained using stolen goods. So—until someone stops him—you might like to reblog this info for the attention of others here who prefer their writing to stay human-made as well as -fueled, and not to support the seriously ethically-challenged.

I’m sorry but these are exceptionally poor analysis and criticisms of the game and it’s cut scenes." As the anon who wrote the ask who started this, I'll just say... nah. Also, pro-tip, don’t be angry, eat a banany. 🍌 You say that all the elements give a lot of insight into Zelda, her relationship, and all that… and then just explain it in the most barebones accusatory way possible, instead of just giving a polite counter and constructively explaining WHY you disagree. Since you apparently just wanna be angy that someone doesn’t like what you likes, and explains why they criticise it, I don’t think there really is a point to argue.   Honestly, my best tip is: Eat nanner, shhhhhhh, touch grass, go sleep. Move on. Ps: Banana’s are the worst.

Also, lemme add, add some spice to your salt: “It reveals Zelda’s feelings for Link which have clearly significantly changed since Breath of the Wild.” I did not feel like they changed much at all, Zelda still feels like she’s simping for Link hard, it's just a few years later now. 😜 Extra bonus: Yeah we know why Zelda got turned back into a Hylian with no repercussions. Bc it had to happen, bc reasons-McGuffin.

Hey!

Yeah, sorry this thing escalated on your ask anon. It got significantly worse after that, so I did block the person because at some point it becomes clear they were having an argument with someone who was simply not in this virtual room and might probably not exist at all anywhere, so there was no point in engaging with a brick wall who was hurling insults based on half a paragraph taken out of context. Pretty sad way to use your free time or deploy love for the media you enjoy, but! To each their own I suppose.

But yeah, I did look it over to see if I missed something, because somebody's tone being inacceptable doesn't mean their arguments also are, but. Yeah. Zelda had her arc of going from being cold and angry with Link to learning to rely on him in Breath of the Wild already, and then literally holds the fort for a hundred years just holding on to the desperate trust that he will arise and become a hero and be capable of defeating the scourge if only she can buy him as much time as she can, which is *crazy* devotion-wise (and also active! in TotK she mostly talks about how much she trusts Link --I guess she turns into a dragon to restore the Master Sword for him, but again I don't believe she really has any other choice and it's not a struggle she must maintain over a hundred years always relying on her own resolve all the way through, so it doesn't translate as hard in my opinion). It's literally her affection for Link and her urge to protect him that awakens her powers! This arc worked great in Breath of the Wild! But TotK loves nothing more than to rethread every character's arc, except again, but less compelling and complicated and without emotional rises or character changes.

Also: a kind tumblr user out there who did not play any game but TotK, believing the marketing that you could basically jump in blind, pointed out to me that there is *no way* to catch onto any of that complexity of their relationship if you haven't played BotW (not that I think it particularly helps). Same deal with the parental thing: they did not bring up the relationship between Zelda and her dad at any point, which makes it a non-information for newcomers. While it is fine to lose some degree of nuance and be a little confused if you jump in a second videogame after the first videogame, you still need to provide something for people to hang onto, and, as I feared, the refusals to expand on BotW backstory didn't seem to help the newcomers familiarize themselves with Hyrule particularly well. Even in extremely well known IPs, it is important to re-establish the bases: jedis are sensitive with the Force, the Ring corrupts its bearer, etc etc. And this was not particularly well done here (for example: it is never explained that Ganondorf is a sorcerer on top of being a Huge Guy that will break your spine with a punch, which makes the appearance of Puppet Zelda *before* he grabs the stone extremely confusing --this relies on pre-assumptions about Ganondorf and a familiarity with the series and its tropes to make any sense, and this is yet another example of what I mean by: this game is awfully self-referential while not really standing on its own two feet).

As for the argument that Zelda was returned to a hylian because of Rauru's arm, Rauru again but ghost (??? hello again?) and Sonia (??? WHY are you here) are actually using recall on the Secret Stone? It's a cool headcanon, and honestly that would have been great and made sense (I mean, a little empty thematically again but at least a cool setup and payoff), but I see nothing that supports that in practice beyond that the power deployed is the color of gold, which, yes, is the color of Recall, buuuut it's also the color of Light and good things and the Triforce and divinity and a billion other things.

If this was what we were meant to take away, then: 1) the actual particles and sound effect of Recall should have been used instead of a vague halo of magical sparkles and 2) the Secret Stone should have hovered and glowed above her chest Laputa-style (thinking of Sheeta from Castle in the Sky, which I'm 99,9% sure was the visual inspiration anyway).

Music

Gnoosic is your place go for new music recommendations. It asks for three of your favourite bands, and based on them, spits out an artist that you might like. You can also “like”, “dislike”, or mark it as something you aren’t familiar with – which further refines the results.

NoCopyrightSounds is a copyright free / stream safe record label, providing free to use music to the content creator community. NCS Music is free to use for independent Creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch - always remember to credit the Artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload.

Radio Garden take a trip 'round the world's airwaves! Just pick a city — literally any city — and Radio Garden will play you whatever its local radio station is broadcasting.

Radiooooo Radio Garden walked so Radiooooo could run. This site adds a timeline function so you can listen to radio from not just anywhere, but anywhen. Get down to those 1910s Germany bops!

Art

Krita free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS

29a.ch interactive site that lets you color what looks to be a map of the cosmos, but I'm honestly not sure. Whatever it is, it's mesmerizing.

Games

Patatap is an interactive website that responds to the keys on your keyboard with a sound and a brief animation. Now imagine hammering in entire sentences – and you got an explosion of sounds, colors, and movement! Once you start typing in random paragraphs, it becomes almost hypnotic, in a way.

Drench a very simple browser game, Drench gives you a board with different colored tiles, and you use the buttons to flip the colors around. Do this until your board is full of tiles of a single color only.

River Styx an interactive point-and-click game that takes you through the river Styx and the Underworld. You will meet many Greek Gods and Goddesses here, and you will also be learning a lot about their myths and legends.

2048 this website lets you play a game called 2048, which is kinda like Tetris but with addition. Use your arrow keys to try to combine numbers until you reach 2048, or go ~beyond~ and try to reach 4096.

Little Alchemy 2 fun little time killer. As its name suggests, the website deals with the process of transformation you achieve when you start mixing different things. You start with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. The goal is to create as many different materials or objects as possible. For example, earth and air will form dust. There are no rules just mix and match your creations to create new ones. You will not even know where your time went.

Akinator website is magic or rather feels like one. You can think of any character in this entire world and through a series of question, it will deduce the name. Don’t believe me, go try for yourself.

Find the Invisible Cow You’re going to want to make sure your sound is on in this fun finding game! Find the invisible cow in this laugh out loud version of hot and cold.

CookieClicker How fast can you click for cookies? Level up and become a cookie pro with this fun time-wasting website!

Knowledge

Zooniverse A really neat website that brings people together to create one of the largest platforms for people-powered research. Volunteers come together to assist professional researchers. There is no need for a specialised background or training; all you have to do is to answer simple questions.

Cool Hunting is a really cool publication platform that uncovers the latest in design, technology, style, travel, art and culture. If you are into art, architecture, and culture, then this website is perfect for you.

OCEARCH Shark Tracker This one looks right on the money for the folks who can’t get enough of sharks! With OCEARCH Shark Tracker, you can keep a track of tagged sharks as they are busy swimming around the deep ocean. Moreover, the website also lets you zoom in on a particular location to check where sharks have been swimming for the past year.

Ad Astra-app An essential tool for every astronomer. The star atlas and skyguide that makes it really easy to pick the best objects, make your own observation list and use it when you are outside

100,000 Stars is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the web. It shows a representation of galaxy with stars inside it. You can take a tour which starts from the Sun and takes you to the outer edges of the galaxy while teaching you valuable insights in between.

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. For example: How to make ginger ale, How change a lock or How to survive an encounter with an ostrich.

Cooking

Cooking for Engineers is a godsend for those who love to cook. This website has it all, from recipes, to kitchen gear, to cooking tests, down to a handy dictionary. The best part about this website is its classic 90’s layout, which makes accessing the recipes and files intuitive and easier.

My Fridge Food at this point, your fridge probs has, like, three random items in it, and you're starting to panic about meal options. Enter My Fridge Food, which inputs everything you have in your kitchen and outputs a recipe. Bless.

Work, or relax

Da Font Tired of your basic Times New Roman? You can spend hours downloading new fonts from typography artists to spice up your new document!

A Soft Murmur If you’re looking to create your own ambient background music to listen to while you work or read, A Soft Murmur is the fun website for you! Create your own mix of white noise and other natural sounds to relax and waste some time.

Rainy Mood Get all the benefits of rain without getting caught in it with Rainy Mood! This is perfect for setting a relaxed and chilled out mood.

I Waste So Much Time The website is designed to literally allow you to waste your time. There are no long articles, just funny pictures with embedded texts. A very good time waster for short breaks.

This Is My Website Now The website truly kills your time. It is just a collection of small games which you can play on your browser. Effective for less than 10 minutes of usage, it’s good for a short break.

Instructables If you’ve always wanted to learn how to DIY but didn’t know where to start, try Instructables. They have community posts with step-by-step instructions to help you become a DIY master in no time.

OBS Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers. only downside to it is that you have a power director watermark in the corner of your video, but its not very large.

Sleepytime is your sleeping schedule out of whack? This fun website calculates exactly when you need to go to sleep and wake up in order to get a good night’s sleep.

Boredom

MapCrunch Go on an adventure without leaving your home — because you can't! This site plops you down in a random location on the globe, and all that's left to do is explore.

List of Conspiracy Theories Get sucked down the dark rabbit hole of the internet that will have you denying history and wearing tinfoil hats. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories will have you scrolling for ages!

This Person Does Not Exist If AI and deep-fakes fascinate you, this is a website that will either make you very excited, or give you nightmares about whether ‘The Matrix’ is real, and if you, at some point in your life, took the blue pill instead of the red one. Either way, the website generates fake people using GAN (or generative adversarial networks), and displays them to you. You can refresh the page to see a different face. Also, if this interests you, you might also like:

This Cat Does Not Exist. You know, because why stare at human faces when you can look at cats instead.

The Useless Web Want to see what the Internet truly has to offer? Take a peek at The Useless Web to see what truly is out there.

Not Always Right Had a bad day at work? Did that one annoying, pesky customer or client who just wouldn’t shut up tried to give you a hard time, and succeeded? Then this website is just perfect for you! It’s a collection of stories about customers who just don’t know when to shut up.

Zoom Quilt If you're looking to be hypnotized, then check out this site, which is basically a picture that infinitely zooms in to reveal new pictures.

Just for fun

Tickld is your go-to spot for anything humorous and funny, for anything that’s really cool and interesting, or stuff that’s just plain WTF.

Paper Toilet Just because stores are sold out of toilet paper doesn't mean you have to live without. This site features some interactive TP that you can roll up or down.

The Passive-Aggressive Password Machine Type a password (real or fake) into this site and it'll shade you for how much it sucks.

CoolThings is a collection of cool things. From entertainment, to gadgets, to even toys and inventions, there is bound to be something here that will interest you.

This Is Why I Am Broke This is a great website for discovering new gift ideas which are distinct. The products range from a few dollars to a few thousand. There’s something for everyone here.

PostSecret is a very interesting website. Visitors are encouraged to send in anonymous postcards on which they write their secrets. There are all sorts of secrets on all kinds of postcards, and the variations make this a really interesting project. However, be warned – these secrets are very real… and very heavy.

NOIYS – Post, read, forget is a place to post an anonymous note to be viewed by many people, only to be deleted within 24 hours. It’s the perfect website for venting anonymously and not worry about the consequences, as it will be deleted within a day. The best part (or maybe worst) is that strangers can reply to your note, too. That way, you can have a running conversation with a complete stranger.

Scream Into the Void Take your outrage about our current situation (or any problem in your life) and throw it into the void. Just type out your feels and then click the "Scream" button, which does exactly what you think it does.

And lastly...

Dildo Generator Welcome, good citizens of the web, to my favorite site of all time. It's right in the name: You can generate a custom dildo by length, width, base, contours, and so many more variables. Things get wild pretty fast.

Eyebleach Did you see something on the internet that was just too scary? Or just need to get it out of your head? Click on Eyebleach to be fed adorable pictures of puppies, kitties, or babies!

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

Abuse isn't just done by one demographic, or in one specific way. Most abusers justify their actions to themselves and do not think of what is happening as abuse.

It's dangerous to just assume that you don't have the ability to abuse someone due to your Pureness of Heart or oppressed status. Thinking this way can make you more likely to harm someone.

I have known people who talk a lot about abuse, have read a lot about it, and have been abused themselves, who become abusers and don't notice because they see their victim status as overriding any concern they should have about how they treat others. It seems impossible to them that abuse could come FROM them rather than always automatically only happening TO them.

You can abuse people. I can abuse people. Abusers are human beings who choose to exert control over others. Not storybook monsters you have nothing in common with.

I grew up soaking in that attitude, and I know I've internalized it a great deal. I'm working on recognizing it, but I still catch myself thinking that way all too often.

I'm reading Why Be Jewish? by Edgar Bronfman, and he takes a different view. Complaint is a Jewish pastime, he says, with biblical roots, and he points out that it's both natural and necessary: "...complaint arises from a sense of deep dissatisfaction. Without complaint, there is no criticism, there is no vision of the way things can be. Complaint is the beginning of the vision of a better world. It rejects complacency and it rejects the status quo."

and then, as much as i like his design, hes again just an already very old evil guy that appeared out of nowhere for all we know that needs to be stopped by some kids/really young people and all the crumbs of personality or well ... not even crumbs but pure idea of a backstory we have to interpret into it all from things like manner of speech, animation and design elements bc all he does is some evil monologing that doesnt even serve well for interpretation

like, he was already so old when we first see him, what did he do all his life?? like even if he only turned aggressive once rauru founded this version of hyrule he had to have lived idk 50 years before that, was he just a regular leader of his people before that?? was he just .. some dude?? all we actually know is ... old evil guy shows up and attacks the perfect and good kingdom (tm) dont we? maybe some vague, arbitrary you denied me *generic villain thing like power, rule etc* line but thats it?