Word Nerd

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.

it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.

The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.

There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.

I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, it’s very clear that even if there are “good guys“ and “bad guys“ in war, there’s also just a lot of waste. That doesn’t make for a very sexy narrative, but it’s the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But that’s also excepted as the way things are done.

At the end of the day, I’m just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.

thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.

this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.

i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.

Artillery barrage beforehand to try and kill as many people/machine gun nests as possible on the enemy side, followed by an infantry push that you know is going to take ruinous casualties if it works at all.

Tanks. Armored vehicles capable of driving over a battlefield with thick enough armor that the machine gun isn't a problem.

And they didn't have tanks! They were trying to develop them, but the technology level wasn't there yet. They couldn't move over broken terrain, and they kept breaking down even on smooth terrain. If you're going to have a war at that technology level where you have lots of machine guns but no tanks yet ... then WWI is about the best you're going to do.

For this Witch Hat Monday I drew Coco in a Starry Night Dress! It's a continuation of the Starry Night Hat I painted a while back :)

Time lapse below, the full hours long art videos, PSD file and HD image will be DMed on Patreon the 5th of each month :)

But even with that aside, there’s just an ironic lack of thought and effort that goes into dismissing anything you dislike (or even anything that’s just kind of … middling quality?) with a single-syllable buzzword, and over-saturating comment sections and online spaces with “slop slop slop” all the time.

“Slop” is also slop. There’s just no “Them” feeding it to you. You are swallowing regurgitated antisemitic memes, and devaluing everything around you, of your own volition.

Keep in ming that this is not me shaming you, I know you have your reasons, folks. This is just a guy who enjoys clean spaces asking that you start learning now.

Here’s what I suggest as an adult who has lived with other adults who didn’t have housekeeping skills:

First and foremost, learn about all the places in your house that need to be cleaned and understand how often they should be cleaned. the American Cleaning Institute (I guess that’s a thing) has a good article about basic cleaning info. Plus this video on cleaning tips is great!

Learn how to do your dishes. HOT water is the only way to clean your dishes.

Learn how to clean your shower head, especially if you live in a place with hard water. Same goes for your sinks.

Learn how to do your laundry correctly. Even without the whole “separating whites and colors” thing, there are things you need to learn about washing your clothes. Learn what the tags mean, too.

Also, you don’t have to use fabric softener and you shouldn’t use it on towels or any fabric meant to absorb. (Learn about laundromats) And please learn how to clean out your dryer vent, it’s a safety hazard!

Get a disinfecting cleaner for your high-touch areas, especially the gross ones like the bathroom. Just because it doesn’t look dirty, doesn’t mean it’s clean!

Learn how to sweep, mop, and vacuum effectively.

You’ll also want to make sure to change out your home’s air filters.

TL;DR, here are some cleaning videos.

How to Clean Everything in Your Bathroom

How to Clean Everything in Your Kitchen

Livingroom Cleaning Routine

How to Clean Everything in Your Bedroom

Favorite Cleaning Book: it helps you work through the emotional side of cleaning (and other care tasks)

Current Favorite Decluttering Method/Concept: it helps you know how much is too much to keep and how to get started when you’re overwhelmed. (having too much stuff makes it incredibly hard to clean/organize.)

Basic Cleaning Skills: this channel is amazing! this man has a special interest in cleaning and cleans people’s spaces who deal nurodivergence that make it hard to clean. he does this for free (or at a deficit because he pays for supplies and dumpsters and transport and such) and does it all with empathy and kindness working With the people as much as people can handle instead of just coming in to “fix” an issue. these videos are a bit different from his usual ones, (the last one’s most like his usual videos) but i find having the sped up cleaning videos with a voiceover can help fill in for body doubling when im too ashamed to bring people into my messy spaces.