Pleonasm

(via bsky)

Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.

Someone shows up one day and says "I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star."

And it's a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven't seen this exact size of laser much since that's not really standard, but that's a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn't call it new -

"HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!" The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.

Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. "Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!"

More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.

Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a "Death Star innovation", it is just that they made a bigger laser.

Ford's next truck comes out and it has "Death Star integrated headlights", where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.

An electric toothbrush is now "Powered by Death Stars" and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you're being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.

Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.

The lamp business gets in on it. "Here's a Death Star powered lamp!" These guys haven't even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They've just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven't ruined their lamp about it.

Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world's problems. If it's not working, you should stick a laser in it! That'll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it's even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like "Death Star powered washing machines". What the fuck does that even mean?

Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone's blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.

You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.

You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they're causing a lot of harm, so you don't like them much.

"Oh, but they're still such new tech!" they reply. "They'll figure out how to make Death Stars that don't burn your eyes out soon, and then it won't be an issue anymore!"

Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.

But by this point they have replaced roads with "Death Star Powered Pathways", which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.

And you think you are going mad.

And they are still just FUCKING LASERS.

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Yes, as many hours as I work now, even if I didn’t get paid

Yes, less hours than I work now (more than 50%), even if I didn’t get paid

Yes, less hours than I work now (less than 50%), even if I didn’t get paid

Yes, as much as I work now, but only if I still get paid

Yes, less than I work now (more than 50%), but only if I still get paid

Yes, less than I work now (less than 50%), but only if I still get paid

No, but I would work a different job (that’s socially mostly considered a ‘real’ job)

No, but I would work a different job (that’s socially mostly considered ‘not a real job’)

No, but I would contribute to society/the community in some other way

No, and I would not contribute to society/the community (even though I can do so comfortably)

No, and I would not contribute to society/the community (because I can’t do so comfortably)

I don’t have a job/results

This Doonesbury abortion cartoon was originally written by Gary Trudeau in 2012, in response to a Texas law requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. It was banned from many major newspapers, and they ran syndicated cartoons in its place.

Now seems like an appropriate time to bring these cartoons back, with the passing of Texas’ new law requiring the burial or cremation of miscarried or aborted fetal remains. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Trudeau decides to write the sequel.

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Something that I've seen in a large number of criticisms of Good Omens S3 is that Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written it that way because it's "too dark", and that Terry was lighthearted and funny, and clearly all the humour in the novel came from him and all the dark bits came from Gaiman.

This is an old misconception which has been around since the publication of the novel, and I think the people saying that possibly aren't very familiar with Terry Pratchett's work, or at least only surface level familiar. At times it can be easy to miss because of the humour, but Terry did dark better than almost any author I've ever read.

The first time I read this passage in Nation it was like being hit in the face with a brick.

Nation is a book that I've seen negative reviews of because it isn't funny, and they're correct, how could a novel which opens with almost all the inhabitants of an island being killed be funny? But it's also one of his best novels. It feels very much like a novel he wrote to house all the rage he felt after his Alzheimers diagnosis, a rage which is palpable in that quote above.

But to go back to his more humour driven works, read the section in Reaper Man where Death can't muffle the sound of the sand in his Lifetimer running out. Read Night Watch where Vimes is going through the torture chamber at Cable Street (actually the whole of Night Watch is pretty damn dark). The opening of I Shall Wear Midnight (which I won't go into because TW, but some of what happens is so horrific in a very real-world sense that I couldn't quite believe I was reading it, especially in what was intended as a series for children). The part in Thud where The Summoning Dark meets The Guarding Dark, Vimes' inner Watchman, who is there not to keep darkness out, but to keep Vimes own darkness inside. Many other instances.

Make no mistake, I still don't like how Good Omens ended. I think it highly unlikely it would have ended that way if Terry were to have had anything to do with it because he was a far better writer than that (though of course none of us know that for sure, and even if he had written it that exact way it would still be bad and absolutely gut the message of the novel/S1).

More info from GLAAD:

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My issue is that I can’t figure out a good equivalent to that kind of practice with writing ? Like idk. Do I do a bunch of object descriptions ? Do I do a scene with a restricted vocab ?? I don’t knowwwww

Grinding would be word sprints. NaNoWriMo was killer for this before their whole operation went to shit, but the good thing about that is that they never had copyright over the concept of writing fast. The numbers you go for can be a little arbitrary at first as you figure out what specifically works for you, but 15 minutes is usually the average from what I've seen? Maybe you can get 500 words in 15 minutes. Maybe you can only get 200. Either way, you're exercising the muscles that get ideas from your brain out onto paper.

Here's some other ideas I came up with for more specific exercises:

Wordsketching for Settings

Go outside (or stay inside?), practically anywhere. Sit down and angle yourself in a way that lets you get a good view of where you're at, and then pick the first things that jump out to you about the place you're in and describe them in 2-3 sentences. Then, figure out what you're drawn to next and write sentences about that. Make sure you add what you feel in that moment (Is the atmosphere uncomfortable? Is the place hot or cold? Humid?), what the place sounds like (People talking, or cars, or animal noises...), so on and so forth. This is very similar to the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, so you can even work off of that structure if you'd like, but this is specifically to help you get better at describing settings.

As far as fanfic is concerned, I think the genre as a whole skimps on atmosphere and setting a SHIT TON. If you want to elevate yourself, let the pacing of your work slow down for a second and dedicate some time to really orienting your blorbos in a specific space. It does a lot for the tone of the work, and... if you want to play ball with the big boys you need to start thinking about things like tone and atmosphere when writing.

Transcription for Dialogue

This can entail you writing down what your family says at the dinner table like a creepy weirdo, or transcribing movie dialogue or anything of that nature. The purpose would be to get used to how conversation naturally flows between two or more people (turn-taking, interruption etc.), and furthermore getting a sense of how human beings naturally talk to each other. I've written down things I've heard people say in public before for no better reason than thinking "Oh! I could totally see [X Character] saying that!". Whatever hangups you may have over this sick linguivouyeristic perversion are much less important than the tragedy of filling your work with Incorrect Quotes -style unreadable garbage. It's like eating your vegetables.

Wiktionary Challenges for Word Choice

Just spamming the "random word" button on Wiktionary will give you instances in every language Wiktionary has in its database, so this one requires a little more work to be helpful, but in lieu of that you can look through stuff like Categories or Thesaurus Entries!

Let's gather a few fun words to demonstrate.

Okay, this should be more than enough for some sentences describing a setting out in nature! Blunket is making me think this takes place at twilight... And I like alliterating, so let's mash it to make the semi-redundant phrase "blunket-blue" just for some flair.

The copse laid still. On the bank of the meandering creek, the rabbit flattened herself out against the soft grass, her luculent eyes darting back and forth over her surroundings. What she could see of the copse looked mostly the same: Twisting shrubs the color of ash, blunket-blue grasses, an invisible wind brushing over all that stillness and pressing flat everything it could. Her nose twitched. Until the last blushes of rose drained from the evening sky, the rabbit would keep herself fixed in that spot on the riverbank and wait.

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