Illustrations Commissioned By @leapness For @jerichos_kitchen

Rafael Alberti, tr. by Ben Belitt, from An Anthology of Spanish Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Present Day, Including Both Spain and Spanish America; "Paradise Lost"

[Text ID: “Across centuries / and the void of a world, / sleepless, I seek you.”]

i want to coin a phrase that's the opposite of writer's block. call it the muse's fire hydrant. thirty thousand story ideas are being beamed directly into your brain and if you don't write them all at once you will die.

Feeding the Worms

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds all over the delicate pink string of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots. I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar–though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

Bonfire Opera - Danusha Laméris

i always wanted someone to make blackout poetry of one of my posts but so far i have only had one blacked out to say egg. i guess you if you can't write the poem yourself you can't choose the poem

You really need to make non-tragic past for your characters, significant people and events that impacted their lives, non-dramatic mundane moments that shaped them, happy memories, bitter memories, embarrassing memories.

Like yes the space princess lost her whole civilization, but did she have friends before that? Favorite place? Does she miss the sound of her favorite music she use to listen to?

Start

This google docs template (created by rukidut) allows you to create wikipedia-inspired biographies for your characters. you need to be logged in to edit it, but all you need to do is go to file > make a copy and you'll have your own version to do whatever you like with.

I've given it some minimal testing and found that the formatting doesn't transfer over to microsoft word, but that it can be saved as PDF with minimal issues.

Click here to try it out.

kind of obsessed with the idea of the rest of the gaang leaving Toph and Zuko to watch over some cooking food and when they come back its burned and Katara starts fuming but Toph and Zuko are like “we’ve never stepped inside a kitchen in our lives and only have one eye between us, if anything it’s your fault”

Some Things To Consider When Writing Weapons Training

Your character will hurt. Even if they don't get hit, it can be exhausting training, especially if they're just starting. It can be a weird set of muscles to use, and things like their shoulders will hurt if they do what a lot of people do and tense up while holding the weapon.

They will drop the weapon. There are a lot of reasons why people drop weapons--because the weapon is awkward to hold or the person isn't used to holding them, because it gets hit out of the person's hand, because their own hand gets hit, etc--but it happens.

People get hit by accident all the time--including the person holding the weapon. When I've done jō practice, I consider it a success if I don't hit myself with it while I'm practicing. And even when doing controlled sparring or paired katas, people still end up hitting each other, especially on places like the hand.

Practice weapons still hurt. Depending on what you're doing, they're usually made of either wood or rubber rather than metal, but just because they're not metal, it doesn't mean they don't hurt. Bruises are really standard, especially if you're practicing something like knife fighting where you're doing a lot of hand-to-hand blocking.

The goal of training is not to hurt your opponent. People who (intentionally or through carelessness) hurt their sparring partners are bad at training and will probably be kicked out of it or at least get a very strong talking to. Good training will also teach them how to train without getting hurt and strongly discourage doing things in a dangerous way.

What they wear will differ widely depending on the discipline. HEMA and fencing tend to have a fair amount of protective gear (helmet, etc.), as does kendo, while disciplines like aikidō, iaidō, and jūjutsu are more likely to have people wearing a gi or hakama. This will impact how they feel about hitting opponents--it's always riskier to hit someone in a place with no protective gear.

Some weapons' training is primarily defensive, and some is primarily offensive, and some is both. Some training (knife defense, gun defense) is primarily about disarming someone with one of those weapons, where the actual use of the weapon is just as a training tool. In those cases, the specifics of the attack are usually emphasized less than the specifics of the defense. HEMA and fencing are much more offense-focused, with the goal being more about landing a hit. In forms like that (or in a similar fictional form), you'll see the mentality that the best defense is a good offense, as opposed to the mentality that the best defense is a good defense (or the best defense is running away).

Knowing one form of weapons training is (often) helpful in learning another. Even while they differ a fair amount, different weapons styles can often use similar patterns in terms of strikes, blocks, and steps. Part of this is that there are only so many useful places to hit a person and only so many ways to step. There are other things that are fairly universal as well, like awareness of your blade and your opponent's blade, awareness of your body, and awareness of relative distance.