Pointing my phone out the window at 5am
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Andulka
trying on a metaphor
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Janaina Medeiros
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Cosmic Funnies
Show & Tell

@theartofmadeline

let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

Discoholic 🪩

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
noise dept.
Not today Justin
DEAR READER
wallacepolsom

#extradirty
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@powersandplanetaries
Pointing my phone out the window at 5am

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According to Andy Weir's Eridian biology document, Eridians are better multitaskers than humans will ever be, but the trade off is they're physically incapable of locking in. SO funny to me. Yes this species can build a diorama while simultaneously blitzing through mathematics equations and also partaking in intense gossiping, but they cannot do any of those things for longer than, like, half an hour without going crazy. Species of supercomputers cursed with the TikTok attention span.
Rocky mocks Grace when he says that Rocky is distracting him by starting complex conversations while he's Trying To Do Science. "Human brain have to stop activity just because talking question? Useless! One track mind!"
Then Grace is on hour six of his "trying to recreate skittles" hyperfocus and Rocky is like What The Fuck. Statement.
Yeah human brains can only do a single very consuming task at a time but it can do it for a very long time. The one track in our one track minds spans multiple countries. Persistence predators, babey.
Do you have any tips on getting better at writing? I’m always amazed on how real your stories feel, both in atmosphere setting and realism (within reason) and also in how you write feelings in a way that feels like getting punched in the gut lmao
This is the best advice anybody can give you, but it's not fun and it's shitty to execute: the only way to get better at writing is to write a lot.
I'm not going to say that there aren't people who have a better intuitive capability at writing than others, but no matter how much innate talent someone may have, nothing will ever take the place of the journeyman grind of writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. From the first story I ever wrote to the last one I churned out, the difference is immense -- and while yes, I've grown in experience, vocabulary, literary reference and maturity, the only way I was able to deploy those new tools and refinements was by continuously throwing myself bloody against the brick wall of writing yet another story.
The best way to be a good writer is to be a bad writer for a very long time, in essence, and to be able to grit your teeth through that process. That last part, the endurance sport of it, that's the thing a lot of people can't do; even once you're a quote-unquote good writer, writing doesn't get much easier, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and chipping blood out of the rock of your frontal lobe so your story can have a climax is the same agonizing process it's ever been -- regardless of how you avoid thesaurus abuse these days.
Re: the realism and atmosphere, I regret to send you to Elon Musk's twitter, but I wrote a long thread about my process there years ago, which now I'm thinking I should probably transcribe into Tumblr at some point.
Good luck! Happy (or not) writing!
hmm
[ID: Project Hail Mary fanart. Grace is shown smiling and waving, labeled as Ryland Grace. Then we see "Ryland as perceived by Rocky": a giant jellyfish with flowing tentacles, labeled as follows:
Tall and elongated
Flabby
Weak brain
Soft, spongy exterior
Random bits that stick out
Limited sensory capacity
Collapses under regular atmospheric pressure
Frighteningly permeable
Lacks vocal range
Contraction-based movement (weird)
As moist as can be. End ID]

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Your apology is acknowledged but we will need time to forgive you.
all apologies should involve practical action. I propose we see Sam using an Australian accent taught by an dialect coach
One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.
Grace flipping his shit, statement.
Bonus:
Martha Wells is pretty cool.
I like how she encourages people to just keep on creating. Doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, what your goal is, what you’re writing. Just write.
Don’t let them take the joy away.
Don’t stop.
Not proud of what I turn into when several mangos are put in front of me. The lack of self restraint is shameful. I would compare it to how fiction describes werewolves, or newly turned vampires. Everyone who has had a good mango understands, though.
last time I got a bunch of mangos I went into a sort of mango induced bacchanal madness, ended up eating the skin too because it was so thin, and the next day I ended up with my face swollen to hell because it turns out that mango skin has the same chemical as poison ivy, and eating that is bad. I did an interview on a reckless amount of antihistamines, got the job, and ate the last two mangos.

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extremely funny when students get really into some harmless "vintage" activity to the point of absurdity. right now it's hacky sack, which is not something i ever thought i would see my students playing en masse. and yet here they are organizing competitive hacky sack teams. taking over any space they can to kick a hacky sack around. i had to chase a group to morning assembly today because they were busy playing hacky sack. just saw one of my students sending an email that said "stop adding randos to our team they're the worst sackers." 2026 year of the hacky sack ig
apparently stores are running out of hacky sacks. their voracity for hacky sack is outpacing the supply chain. beautiful hacky sack world
I don't think dust needs to exist personally
I really love this website and the people on it a lot
Why must I be awake.
#another victim of the woke agenda
@natalieironside what's it like being one of the funniest mother fuckers on the planet?
I wish it paid more
Honestly? Valid.
Every so often I catch a glimpse of the book drama going on over on the Insta/Threads sphere of the Internet, and it makes me so glad I’m considered too Tumblrina to sit at their tables.
What do you mean an author is railing against people using libraries/the Libby app because it’s “free” (it’s not. you as the author get money from the library purchasing the digital lending license) and meanwhile their book is on Amazon for free to try and get readers??? Hello????
“But if people read it for free they might like it want to buy the rest of my work!”
You mean like how people read books at libraries, and end up buying them if they like them?
“That’s not the same 😡”
Correct! Because again, libraries pay us. You putting your books up on Amazon for free means you get nothing.
I am staring directly into the camera like I’m on the Office in Librarian. Libraries are literally an author’s best friend. We get books to people they never would have known about otherwise, & create Fans out of disinterested bystanders. And! Libraries are often paying MORE for a book than the average user, at least for digital editions, because it is expected that the library will lend it to more people, so theoretically we need to pay more to compensate the authors! (This is not I think how it works in practice, it more often just benefits the digital lending company instead of the actual author but. Greed is ever thus). Also, in some countries (sadly not the US, boo hiss) authors get paid for every checkout of a book. So, you can literally get royalties on those “free” books. (Also, they’re not free, they’re paid for with tax dollars for the good of everyone). How some fool can think temporary freeness on Amazon Kindle is superior to libraries I cannot fathom. Like, how does this person even manage to function in the real world?
Anyway. Authors. Love your librarians. We love you and seek only to help you get more readers so you can write more books. We have a symbiotic relationship, each needs the other.
#I thought if you were self pubed#you basically couldn't get into the library#sounds like being mad at a club#that won't let them in
Just saw this in my notes and thought I'd reply. You can't get into libraries if you only use Amazon, but platforms like Draft2Digital, Ingram and Kobo Writing Life make it possible for self-pub authors to have their work made available to libraries across the global network.
You're sometimes more likely to get picked up by libraries if you list yourself as having a publisher, but as a self-pub author you can do that by registering as an LLC (which for me was $250 back in 2020, I don't know what it is now) and then listing the name you used as the publisher. But even that's becoming an unnecessary step with how prominent self-pub has become.
Really at this stage, this person is shooting themselves in the foot by opting to remain an Amazon exclusive author and being a twit about it on main, but that's their hill. They can die on it.
Naomi Kritzer’s “Obstetrix”
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/09/deliver-us/#kritzer
Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423375/obstetrix/
Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on the CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/
Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us:
https://reactormag.com/didnt-i-write-this-story-already-when-your-fictional-pandemic-becomes-reality/
In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent
Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer.
Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time.
Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold.

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It should be illegal to catch up on a story that is so so good and have to wait for the next installment.
People tagging this with my own story: it's different when I'm doing it.