John Gaius Shortly Before Eating The Solar System To Kill Some Useless Bastard Billionaires, Creating

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.

Knives! Get your Knives here for no particular reason!

🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪

Get em while they're cold, get em while they're sharp!

Special discount if your name is Brutus for no reason in particular!

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.

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.

Me, personally, I think they'd have a sort of begrudging, quiet bond called "I'm surrounded by people who are trying to befriend me and am deeply horrified by that thought"

just as a general reminder

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

I need the 10 or so people who follow me to look at this stupid ass whimsical little dog

He is actually a deer

Guys I need to stop having ideas that I don't have the time or artistic skills for. I'm sitting at work thinking about how cool (and undoubtedly heartbreaking) it would be if there was a tlt animatic to Vulture by Bear Ghost and I'm like 5 seconds from going insane because of it.

Like this song has made me a little feral since it came out last year (I think. Time is an illusion) but I just listened to it for the first time in a few weeks and oh my god. I might come back to this post later and write an essay about it because the locked tomb has consumed my life even more so than it did when I was actually reading the series.

"Every writer"

Writers don't use ai.

Those who use ai are not writers.

They are prompt generators for the prompt generators, producing soulless fucking slop that takes the "writing" out of writing.

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on