Ohhhh God Something Something Story Uhhhhh.....

I'll be crafting the most beautiful prose in the shower or the car, like stuff that even Shakespeare can't touch, or the most gut-wrenching, spine-chilling horror scene, but the moment I have a free second to write, the best I can do is "SUDDENLY there was a Very Loud Noise and everyone was very scared. AND THEN the monster appeared and went BOO!"

My brain the second I sit down to write:

It wasn't until high school that I began seeing the world as a story to be written. It was a survival tactic, I think, for covid. That and a general habit created by my near-constant writing.

To that extent, it wasn't until post-lockdown that I realized how fucking cool fog is. And since it's foggy today, I'm going to talk about it.

I think that fog is only cool as a visual medium. Book descriptions don't do it justice. "A bank of fog rolls in" "tendrils of fog reach through the trees" yeah but what does that LOOK like?

It looks like a digital artist was drawing clouds behind a mountain and misplaced a layer. It looks like a cloud bisecting the landscape. The tops of the trees look like an island rising out of a flat calm, gray sea while the bottom half of it, the bushes and the houses and the roads, looks like an unfinished painting. If two people were to stand down the road and hold a flashlight, it would be a damn good impression of a car.

And I think a lot of authors forget to describe how fucking damp everything is. There's always this impending sense of rain. Nothing is dry except maybe your clothes, and odds are they're not gonna stay dry for long. Your socks and shoes are toast the moment you stray from a paved road. Hope you like wet socks.

Fog doesn't work like the poison mist in the hunger games. You don't walk into a wall of fog unless some outside force has confined the fog to a specific area. It's a gradual claustrophobia, a slow loss of sight.

It's also usually still when the fog is thick. Otherwise, the wind would blow it away, right? But unless a monsoon is following the fog, there's not quite that eerie "calm before the storm" stillness. It has a different vibe to it.

But you can't say all that without interrupting the flow of the story, so people tend to stick to the simpler descriptions.

I, personally, have fallen for BOTH "huh. That was a weird noise..... Let me go check it out!!" AND "huh. That was a weird noise. Let me stand still and stare in that direction for a while so I can figure out what it is." on multiple occasions.

My biggest horror movie sin is not minding my damn business.

The first time I ever saw a centipede was at my previous job. They like cardboard (apparently) and I was cleaning the shoe area...full of cardboard shoe boxes. I screamed so loudly I nearly gave a poor elderly customer a heart attack and drew my manager out of the back office. Don't think I've fully recovered since.

WHO the fuck was going to tell me that the stadium of the KANSAS CITY CHIEFS is in fucking MISSOURI???

It's finals season, which means I've blocked shorts on youtube and also the entire instagram explore page using an app that blocks social media for me because I'm irresponsible and addicted to my phone.

Thank god it doesn't see tumblr as a real social media site and therefore doesn't block anything from it, or else I'd have no way to procrastinate my work.

just as a general reminder

learn how to fact-check for yourself, cause soon enough, most online sources won't be reliable

The TLT brainrot is real because I saw this image:

And immediately thought of making it into a HTN shitpost. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Sadly, I am in the trenches with homework and therefore unable to be funny enough to follow through on this idea.