Writing Advice From My Uni Teachers:

i love how garnet and pearl are just continuing to use the name of their infamous guerilla military organization while their current jobs are fighting lv4 rpg monsters and giving each other basket weaving seminars. and steven has no context for this and just thinks of "The Crystal Gems" as basically the name for his mom's side of the family. so he walks up to lapis and says "you should hang out with me and my treehouse friends, the Viet Cong!"

Hi,

I hope this message finds you well. My friend's @bilalhammadsblog family in Gaza is facing an incredibly difficult time, having lost everything due to the ongoing conflict. They are in urgent need of basic necessities

We've set up a GoFundMe to support them, and it would mean the world to me if you could help by sharing this link with your friends and family

Thank you so much for your support.

https://gofund.me/491b6f98

Bilal’s gofundme is legit. They are at €32,909/€70,000 donations so far

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Evacuate My Family from Gaza to Safety, organized by Bilal salah

Hi everyone, I am Bilal, 22 years old, from Gaza, Palestine. I am reaching… Bilal salah needs your support for Help Evacuate My Family f

This election was never about anything more to you than your moral purity, was it?

All y'all fuckers when you say you ain't gonna vote

"you're the writer, you control how the story goes" no not really. i wrote the first sentence and then my characters said "WE WILL TAKE IT FROM HERE" and promptly swerved into an electrical fence.

" The key " Milky Way. Rocca Calascio Castle. Abruzzo , Italy .

The 6 main elements plus Void and Light I think

I know you've posted about this before but it's really impressive how you've been able to make all 8 elements visually distinct enough that you can always tell at a glance which one is being used and how. lots of magic systems just kinda devolve into DragonBall beam attacks after a while

Color coded for your convenience!

altered.substack.com

People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people)

How charisma feels

This is a fascinating read that does not tell you what you should make of the author's observations:

Interactions with [charismatic people] come with the least number of strings attached. It feels like they are just having fun, lightly playing with possibilities. They are not holding love hostage when you don't act in accordance with their desires. They respect your autonomy and intuition. They approach your presence with gratitude, but don't demand you stay forever. There is no hint of scarcity. They live in the realm of what is possible and abundant. There is little tension in their attentional field. Because they are in a fluid and spacious yet highly receptive and responsive state, they can meet you exactly where you are and entertain whatever comes up. They can flirt, joke around, dream, and love without restraint. They are not afraid of what happens, because no matter what happens, they know it will be fundamentally okay. I've noticed they don't leave what feels like a sticky "trace" after they are gone. I certainly remember them more vividly and am more deeply touched by them than others, but it lacks the feeling of molasses. This impression of sticky traces is very personal so I should probably illustrate what I mean with examples: I get the sticky traces when people guilt me, are passive aggressive, pedestalize me, ask things of me I don't believe are what they truly want and if I gave it to them anyway it's like feeding a hungry ghost. Every interaction with them feels like they are saying, "please love me" or "please make me feel okay" or "please give me a chance" or "I need you." This makes engaging with them complicated, not because I don't care about them, but because engaging with them is a bit of a foolish game where it won't really get you what you want and will also hurt me in the process, and this keeps me from wanting to get close. I can tell they have a series of tough knots, and they are haunted by them, but I cannot unknot it for them. I can only watch compassionately and try to point them to how they can unknot themselves, and also be present to the stickiness, because it is there. The stickiness accumulates like gunk that I then have to meditate, journal about, or otherwise process. It solidifies and reifies experience, convincing us the set of infinite possibilities is anything but infinite and boundless. It suffocates. Charismatic people are like empty vessels. They receive and pass on sensations without resistance. They are usually the one with the most regulated nervous system in the room, which allows them to encounter other people's ego/attentional structures and dance with them no matter what the exact configuration is, which is why charismatic people are charismatic to a wide variety of people—they literally fit better together with people in general! Contrast this with someone who has very rigid expectations or ideas of what kind of experience they *should* be having and fighting off what is arising if it conflicts with what they want. If a person with a very particular and rigid structure encounters a wide swath of people, the percentage of people their shape "fits" well with is a lot slimmer.

First thing you see after you zoom in is how you die

How you dying 👀