I Cast Summon Kidney Stone

I haven’t been on this website since June I think. What’s changed? And what the hell is Post+?

since the old version of this post was flagged for 'adult content'...

reblog this post if your account is a trans safe space or owned by a trans person!

along with that, reblog if your account is a trans non-binary spectrum safe space or owned by someone on the trans enby spectrum!

The song this tumblr is named after. It was written by Jerry Gray (music) and Carl Sigman (lyrics) in 1940. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra recorded it as a Bluebird 78 rpm single on April 28th of the same year, and it was released in June.

The name of the song comes from PEnnsylvania 6-5000, or 736-5000, the phone number of Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra was one of several jazz bands that frequently performed at the hotel’s main restaurant, the Cafe Rouge, which feautured a ballroom to dance in. Sadly, the Cafe Rouge no longer operates, with the space being converted into a venue for megacorps and sport events.

The phone number still works: after adding the area code 212, you will hear the song in the background as the hotel’s automated message plays.

Saxophones: Hal McIntyre, Tex Beneke, Wilbur Schwartz, Ernie Caceres, Al Klink Trumpets: John Best, R. D. McMickle, Clyde Hurley, Legh Knowles Trombones: Glenn Miller, Jimmy Priddy, Paul Tanner, Frank D'Annolfo Piano: Chummy MacGregor String bass: Herman "Trigger" Alpert Guitar: Jack Lathrop Drums: Moe Purtill

Chicago Business District, 1898.

@ayeleshia

Been lately getting in the feed a bunch of nsfw content I'd like to like or reblog but don't want that stuff public. Perhaps I should make a second account?

The Late Rodentocene: 20 million years post-establishment

Riffing the Reefs: Marine Life of the Late Rodentocene

HP-02017 is easily thought of as a planet of hamsters, but other life also thrives. The ecosystem's accessory organisms released onto the planet have since formed ecosystems of their own, equally players in the game of life as the hamsters are, and nowhere is this more evident than the shallow seas of the Late Rodentocene.

At first glance, the reefs that grow in the sunlit shallows of the planet's seas look incredibly like those of our own. Forests of algae and kelp grow in the rocks close to shore, as well as corals of all shapes and sizes that sprout in great masses, forming reefs that serve as a shelter for small, colorful sea creatures that thrive in abundance. Yet despite its initial familiarity, the marine biomes of HP-02017 are anything but: its similarities are superficial, and its creatures are something else entirely.

Only a choice few organisms were seeded into the seas: small mollusks such as sea snails and bivalves, as well as sponges and corals, which at first were from but a small collection that have since diversified into a dazzling array. But with so few creatures, and so many empty niches, it didn't take long for the choice few colonists to explode into a diversity rivalling that of Earth's oceans.

Corals, which reproduced via free-swimming planktonic larvae, have filled the empty spaces of their relatives the cnidarians, with some forms becoming tentacled stinging sessile hunters akin to sea anemones, while other drifting larvae become neotenic, remaining in their mobile forms into adulthood and become the transparent, drifting mock jellies.

The humble sea snail has also seen an extreme explosion of diversity in the past 20 million years, spawning thousands of species that came to fill nearly every marine invertebrate niche imaginable. Some lost their shells, coming to resemble sea slugs, and many of which would develop bright body colors for display or as warning coloration, converging heavily on nudibranches present in Earth's oceans. Other snails, developing flattened bodies and a unique vascular system in their belly-foot, become heavily convergent on echinoderms, with some being long-bodied bottom feeders like sea cucumbers, others developing venomous spines akin to urchins, and one strange lineage, developing vaguely-arm-like protrusions on their foot and a radula adapted for feeding on bivalves, becoming a bizarre analogue of a starfish. Others become tentacled swimmers resembling shelled cephalopods: the notiluses.

But by far the most diverse and successful invertebrate clade in the planet's oceans are descendants of planktonic krill, which, in the absence of fish, exploded in diversity to fill as many aquatic niches as they can. Known as shrish, these peculiar crustaceans first emerge as shrimp-like swimmers that propelled themselves through the water with a paddling array of feathery swimming legs.

As they evolved even further, however, they began taking on peculiar niches as time went on. Bottom feeders such as the trilobug became broad and flat, filling roles akin to flatfish or crabs, and some of these bottom-dwellers secondarily re-evolved to become active swimmers, such as the filter-feeding shringray that defends itself with venomous barbs on its tail. Others became elongated, flexible centipede-like predators that hunted other shrish, lurking in caverns in coral much like moray eels in wait to ambush their prey, known as the shreels.

Some shreels would eventually develop a shorter and more streamlined body, and give rise to active swimmers that propelled themselves with undulating waves of their abdomen and tail. Becoming a more efficient means of propulsion with larger or faster species, these paddletailed shrish would eventually modify their rearmost swimming legs along with their tail fan into a caudal fluke of sorts, while their thoracic limbs became used for catching food or filtering particles from water. This lineage of paddletailed shrish would eventually bring about the biggest top predators of the Late Rodentocene seas, the shrarks. Using their barbed rostrums and spiked forelimbs as three grabbing "jaws", the shrarks reach lengths of almost a meter: rivalling the largest marine arthropods of Earth's history, the eurypterids of the Devonian era.

The reefs of the Late Rodentocene are a vast and diverse ecosystem that flourishes in strange new ways independently of the world of rodents above. Life in the ocean takes on unusual new forms in a biome not yet invaded by the hamsters -- at least for the time being.

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Hey, help me please. How do you write description in your novels? Not a character one, surrounding ones. How do you describe from 3 POV , the background of the novel?

5 Tips for Writing Great Descriptions

Hi there! Thanks for writing. I talk at length about this in my book The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (See Chapter 4 / “Building Your Story World,” Chapter 16 / Setting the Scene, and Chapter 21 / “Choosing the Right Details” for the majority of the discussion about description, but it’s peppered throughout), so I’ll just give a brief rundown here. :)

Tip #1: Use concrete, sensory details

That means describing, with precision, a detail you can see/hear/touch/taste/smell. Avoid using vague words that are hard to visualize or sense, like “the house was ugly” or “the weather was bad.” Instead, choose a sensory detail (or two) for your descriptions, for example “the house was a wretched shade of salmon pink” or “the wind was blowing I could taste dust in my mouth.”

Tip #2: Try not to over- or under-use descriptions

It’s common for beginning writers to either use no description, or go completely overboard. I give examples of both in my book. While there’s no hard rule about how much description is too little or too much (it depends a lot on the particular story, genre, and the writer’s style), I personally like to include around 4-5 sensory details per page.

The idea is to give the reader a solid sense of where they are without going on and on, making them want to skim over as you carry on for paragraphs about the smell and texture of a doily.

Tip #3: Use more description during important parts of the story

Description draws your readers attention to what you’re describing. Use that to your advantage. If that doily contains a blood stain that’s a pivotal clue in your murder mystery, by all means spend three sentences describing the particular color red of the blood or the weird smell it emits. Where you linger, the reader will linger.

Tip #4: Use description to set the scene

Use more description at the beginning of a new scene, or anytime the location of your story changes. I talk about this in the section on transitions in my book. Summary gets a bad reputation in fiction, but these transitional paragraphs are the perfect time to paint the scene with sensory details about your character’s surroundings.

Tip #5: Pay attention to “camera movement”

One common thing I see in writer’s manuscripts is what I call “jerky camera movement.” Here’s an example:

Jesse pulled into the driveway of the suspect’s mansion around noon. A white, floppy dog barked ferociously in the window. It was a warm, sweltering day. Jesse looked down and realized her shoe was untied. The house had three large columns in front, each wrapped with a gawdy red bow. 

In this example, the “camera” moves from the driveway, to the dog in the window, to the “day,” to Jesse’s shoe, to the outside of the house. If that was your head, looking around the scene, you’d get dizzy pretty fast. Here’s a smoother movement, starting wide and focusing in on Jesse’s untied shoe.

It was a warm, sweltering day. Jesse pulled into the driveway of the suspect’s mansion around noon. The house had three large columns in front, each wrapped with a gawdy red bow. In the window, a white, floppy dog barked ferociously. As Jesse approached the door, she looked down and realized her shoe was untied.

These aren’t perfect examples because I’ve dashed them off just now, but you get the idea :) Try not to make your reader seasick by making them look all over the scene (unless you’re trying to achieve that effect, for example, in a scene where your protagonist is drunk or discombobulated).

Hope this helps!