no

I still pay my dads phone bill cus I don't want anyone else to have his number

I have my dad's wallet where he has $37 and 3 years later, no matter how broke I am, I have not touched that money.

My grandpa asked for a KitKat the day before he passed, I got it for him but he never got to eat it. It's been in my fridge ever since.

When my daughter died, she had a carton of ice cream in the freezer. I would open it to look at the spoon tracks raked across the surface. It was comforting... like she was still there.

Mt brother was murdered in 2012. I still have a pair of his clothes in case it was all a mistake and he needs something to wear when he finds his way back to us.

My husbands phone line is still active after 2 years. His body wash, toothbrush, shampoo are all still in the same place he left them. Makes me feel like he will be back to use them again.

Before my mom passed she put a chocolate Christmas's tree in the fridge and said "no one eat this please it's mine!". When we moved it moved with us and will be in my fridge forever.

I still buy my dad something every year for Fathers Day. It's been fifty years. (Rose emoji)

I still have a body powder that he gave me when I was 6. I applied a little bit in my wedding day at 19.

I have the last meal my little sister cooked in the freezer. I miss her so much

The whiteboard in our house that my dad would write things on still has his handwriting on it from the last thing he wrote (three two hearts emojis) he's been gone almost 10 years, I miss him (smiling face with halo emoji)

My dad left me his car in 2019 when he passed. The trunk is full of beach towels and coats and hats. He was always prepared for any weather. Now I am too.

My dad passed away 22 years ago and I still have a jar of the last batch of jam he ever made in my fridge.

We emptied out the container of my moms coffee creamer and filled it with water and it's been in the fridge for nine years

my sister's still in my favorite contacts. she's been gone since 2016 & i've gotten at least 4 new phones...

Here’s a quick cheat-sheet to how you can make your manuscript look professional even during your first draft when you’re simply writing for yourself. This only takes a few minutes to set up, and it helps improve readability and clarity of your manuscript! For me it’s so important that my manuscript documents aren’t a mess and that they visually help keep me inspired to write.

Want to make your manuscript looks good, even in google docs? Follow these simple tips →

*This isn’t a professional formatting guide for book prints, but for the first drafts. If self-publishing you should use a professional formatting method to get a book ready for print.

Pick a serif font

Use a font like Garamond, Georgia or Baskerville.

Up your spacing

If you double-space your writing, it should roughly equal the amount of pages your book would be when printed! I would recommend spacing between lines of at least 1.5, but I typically use 2 for readability!

Align it

Set the alignment of your manuscript to ‘justify’. This tidies up your text on both sides of the page.

Use indents

Set up the ruler in your word editor so that every first line of a paragraph is intended by 0.50

This way you don’t need to leave spaces between paragraphs unless you have a scene break.

Chapter titles

You can make your chapter titles stand out by centering them, boldening them, and increasing the size of the font.

Space and page breaks

Most text editors allow you to insert a page break — you should do this before every new chapter to assure they all start the same way.

If you write several scene within a chapter, you can use dividers to separate them, and leave an extra blank row above and under the divider.

The divider itself can be a classic cluster of asterisks (***) or something more creative!

Do you need help getting your WIP organized?

Pick up my 3 extensive workbooks for writers, with dozens of fully-customisable templates. These are my first ever original E-books and templates available outside of my coaching programs!

The Writer’s ToolBoox contains: The Character Bible, The Plotter’s Almanac, and The World-Builder’s Chronicle

Grab it through the [link here] or below!

A haiku for you my dear.

All hail haiku bot.

all RIGHT:

Why You're Writing Medieval (and Medieval-Coded) Women Wrong: A RANT

(Or, For the Love of God, People, Stop Pretending Victorian Style Gender Roles Applied to All of History)

This is a problem I see alllll over the place - I'll be reading a medieval-coded book and the women will be told they aren't allowed to fight or learn or work, that they are only supposed to get married, keep house and have babies, &c &c.

If I point this out ppl will be like "yes but there was misogyny back then! women were treated terribly!" and OK. Stop right there.

By & large, what we as a culture think of as misogyny & patriarchy is the expression prevalent in Victorian times - not medieval. (And NO, this is not me blaming Victorians for their theme park version of "medieval history". This is me blaming 21st century people for being ignorant & refusing to do their homework).

Yes, there was misogyny in medieval times, but 1) in many ways it was actually markedly less severe than Victorian misogyny, tyvm - and 2) it was of a quite different type. (Disclaimer: I am speaking specifically of Frankish, Western European medieval women rather than those in other parts of the world. This applies to a lesser extent in Byzantium and I am still learning about women in the medieval Islamic world.)

So, here are the 2 vital things to remember about women when writing medieval or medieval-coded societies

FIRST. Where in Victorian times the primary axes of prejudice were gender and race - so that a male labourer had more rights than a female of the higher classes, and a middle class white man would be treated with more respect than an African or Indian dignitary - In medieval times, the primary axis of prejudice was, overwhelmingly, class. Thus, Frankish crusader knights arguably felt more solidarity with their Muslim opponents of knightly status, than they did their own peasants. Faith and age were also medieval axes of prejudice - children and young people were exploited ruthlessly, sent into war or marriage at 15 (boys) or 12 (girls). Gender was less important.

What this meant was that a medieval woman could expect - indeed demand - to be treated more or less the same way the men of her class were. Where no ancient legal obstacle existed, such as Salic law, a king's daughter could and did expect to rule, even after marriage.

Women of the knightly class could & did arm & fight - something that required a MASSIVE outlay of money, which was obviously at their discretion & disposal. See: Sichelgaita, Isabel de Conches, the unnamed women fighting in armour as knights during the Third Crusade, as recorded by Muslim chroniclers.

Tolkien's Eowyn is a great example of this medieval attitude to class trumping race: complaining that she's being told not to fight, she stresses her class: "I am of the house of Eorl & not a serving woman". She claims her rights, not as a woman, but as a member of the warrior class and the ruling family. Similarly in Renaissance Venice a doge protested the practice which saw 80% of noble women locked into convents for life: if these had been men they would have been "born to command & govern the world". Their class ought to have exempted them from discrimination on the basis of sex.

So, tip #1 for writing medieval women: remember that their class always outweighed their gender. They might be subordinate to the men within their own class, but not to those below.

SECOND. Whereas Victorians saw women's highest calling as marriage & children - the "angel in the house" ennobling & improving their men on a spiritual but rarely practical level - Medievals by contrast prized virginity/celibacy above marriage, seeing it as a way for women to transcend their sex. Often as nuns, saints, mystics; sometimes as warriors, queens, & ladies; always as businesswomen & merchants, women could & did forge their own paths in life

When Elizabeth I claimed to have "the heart & stomach of a king" & adopted the persona of the virgin queen, this was the norm she appealed to. Women could do things; they just had to prove they were Not Like Other Girls. By Elizabeth's time things were already changing: it was the Reformation that switched the ideal to marriage, & the Enlightenment that divorced femininity from reason, aggression & public life.

For more on this topic, read Katherine Hager's article "Endowed With Manly Courage: Medieval Perceptions of Women in Combat" on women who transcended gender to occupy a liminal space as warrior/virgin/saint.

So, tip #2: remember that for medieval women, wife and mother wasn't the ideal, virgin saint was the ideal. By proving yourself "not like other girls" you could gain significant autonomy & freedom.

Finally a bonus tip: if writing about medieval women, be sure to read writing on women's issues from the time so as to understand the terms in which these women spoke about & defended their ambitions. Start with Christine de Pisan.

How bodies decompose

Wilderness survival skills

Mob mentality

Other cultures

What it takes for a human to die in a given situation

Common tropes in your genre

How bodies decompose

Wilderness survival skills

Mob mentality

Other cultures

What it takes for a human to die in a given situation

Common tropes for your genre

First, figure out what you want as a cursor. I'm going to be changing mine to a Skyrim mouse.

So first you get a picture of whatever you want, as clean as possible:

Open your favorite art program and clean it up, then save as a png:

Then go here and convert it to a .cur file. Make sure there's no gap between the corner of the arrow and the corner of the png.

Next you go to Control Panel:

Select Mouse from the list:

Then go to the Pointers tab and pick whichever mouse cursor you want to replace.

Click "Browse..." and find the .cur file you made earlier:

And voila! I now have a Skyrim cursor.

You may have to tinker with the size a bit to get the point to be accurate. If that happens, just resize your png and convert to .cur again.

Install uBlock Origin

If you use Chrome, Firefox has a feature to import your bookmarks, passwords, and other data when you switch.

Privacy Possum is an anti-tracking extension that not only blocks commercial trackers, it also fucks with them by generating nonsense data.

Forget Me Not is a cookie management tool that lets you choose whether/how sites can store cookies on your computer on a site-by-site basis.

Bypass Paywalls Clean does exactly what it says: allows you to bypass paywalls on news sites and the like.

SponsorBlock uses crowd-sourced data to block sponsored segments on YouTube videos. Now you never have to hear about NordVPN or Raycon ever again!

hellooo I come back with a fic😇 Nothing fancy, just a smutty lesbian adventure in the wilderness lol accompanied by my art!

Please be reminded that this is an explicit, 18+ fic with mature language and explicit/nsfw drawings!! Do review the warnings and don’t read if it’s not for you!

Once Upon a Time in South Siberia on AO3

Summary: When a simple Auror mission goes ridiculously wrong, Hermione and Pansy find themselves lost together wandless in the middle of nowhere.

Pairing: Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson Rating: Explicit Word Count: ~33k (3 chapters + 13 illustrations) Warnings/Content: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Femslash, Post-War, EWE, POV Alternating, Happy Ending, Trapped, Co-workers, Auror Hermione Granger, Auror Pansy Parkinson, Enemies to Lovers, Bickering, Sharing a Bed, Explicit Sexual Content, Flirting, Teasing, Smut, Sex, Switching, Vaginal Fingering, Oral Sex, Explicit Language, Explicit Pictures, Swearing, Blood, Action/Adventure, Body Image, Digital Art, some Russian language, Age: 21

Chapter 1 is published now and the other two will be posted throughout the rest of the week, I will post updates!

They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.

Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.

The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.

google, the company responsible for webp, is now trying to inflict a new incompatible image format on the collective users of the internet. they have dropped support in chrome for the most promising new image format, a backwards-compatible updated version of jpeg, known as jpeg xl.

instead, they are trying to push their own worse format, avif, on everybody. the reason they prefer avif is because it is based on their previous video format, av1, and this would make it slightly cheaper for them to create scrolling previews on youtube videos.

A great Twitter thread on character-driven stories, character arcs, and agency by Naomi Hughes

A great Twitter thread on character-driven stories, character arcs, and agency by Naomi Hughes

Okay, so, you know the blue and gold celestial aesthetic that was everywhere in the 90s and early 2000s? That maximalist Victorian gothic vibe meets 90’s pop color?

Think if the Practical Magic house and Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s bedroom had a baby.

That.

If it was a person it’d be this:

It’s coming back into fashion at the moment, which is great news for me because I never got rid of any of my things 😂