DK Takes 12

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humidity

oh alas, you say. oh papa, whatever shall i do, it is ever so hotte and drye in california. the very air hath been sucked of all its moisturey droplets and whatnot.* one hundredy and tennith desiccated degrees!

*(yo, drought is serious. i am pretty obviously not making fun of that.)

alright. let’s check it out. here’s a random california city, right about now:

thirty-two percent. and here’s a random mid-atlantic city located somewhere in the wet fleshy crease behind a demon’s knee*:

*(confession: i do not live in dc, but several years ago i spent three weeks steaming like a tinned ham in arlington in august. none of the pants i took with me could ever keep a crease again.)

huh! funny thing! “see, dc’s actually seven degrees COOLER,” you say, because you’ve obviously never gone outside and taken a deep lungful of wet sock trash air in your life. and now for added bliss, here’s what early wednesday morning’s gonna be like for these poor clowns:

that’s right! eighty-two percent humidity! the point at which showers no longer matter, because you’re all caught in God’s grease trap! just stressed human eels miserably slip slidin’ their way through a damp melty bathwater-flavored hellscape that feels like it’s actively sous viding their top layer of skin! a hundred thousand people packed into public transit breathing air that feels like deepthroating swamp thing! and you wanna talk to me about fuckin california!

[cue science voice]: human bodies cool through evaporation, a process by which the body sweats and sweet invisible angels towel us off, whisking away our unwanted moisture into the air and literally chilling us out. (it’s also why air conditioned air feels so fucking deliciously refreshing: it’s not just being cooled, it’s being conditioned, aka, dehumidified. it’s cool dry air.) but. if the air is already made out of fucking chowder and can’t absorb shit then guess what the fuck our bodies can’t do.

A professor can be addressed as “professor” or another title, though you might feel like Harry Potter. Some people like “mix” but I don’t know anyone who actively uses it.

This will be…Nyx no.15 in my folder.

infodumps are boring and they suck. the key to worldbuilding is subtlety - throw in an offhand comment here, another mention there. your readers will gradually make a clearer picture of your world. 

do:

casually mention something a few times, adding more and more description each time

use short, basic descriptions of concepts and use the situations your character is in to flesh them out more

use the character’s emotions toward this thing to help describe it

apply the subtlety rule to things such as culture, language, races, genders, or other groups of diversity

use similies/metaphors

don’t 

casually mention basic settings. these should be established from the beginning - your reader should not find out it’s raining and cloudy halfway through the chapter. broader things, like a whole country, can use the basic description trick (ie. a school may be described in three words, but the classroom is given a few paragraphs)

use synonyms excessively! nothing is more annoying than hearing something being described the same way five thousand times with increasingly more weird adjectives that all mean the same thing

casually describe people. they are important and you should know the the things that stand out about them immediately. other things, such as the smell of their hair or the slope of their nose should be saved for later - they aren’t the things you notice first. no one cares about your eye color in the first ten seconds of meeting you unless you have unusually light eyes or heterochromia

Random Transparent; 20/??