my babysitter's a vampire + villains (insp) as in characters with naturally evil tendencies and actions, not just creatures/people made evil by mistake (usually benny's) or created by someone for a specific purpose
During a business trip not long before Christmas event planner Kayley and sports agent Brett find themselves unable to fly when all flights are cancelled due to a snowstorm. Determined to get back to NYC for Christmas Eve they decide to team up in an attempt to get home.
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Ohhh maybe this was obvious but I just realized that the things Free Trader Beowulf are trying to do line up directly with stuff going on in the Brakebills storyline: curing depression, curing cancer, turning back time, and bringing someone back from the dead.
This is like... Major Mendings, I guess. And I can't help thinking of it in context of Eliot's line last episode, "Thinking you can change anything is such an act of monumental ego." Very interesting that they think a god will even want to fix their problems (or give them the power), even if they manage to summon one!
Well, we know how that's going to turn out for them. But that doesn't make Eliot right either, I mean trying to fix things does require some ego, but not always in the unrealistic/bad way that he's implying. Quentin was pretty unrealistically egotistical when he tried to cure cancer during his first semester. But he was also wrong when he said they can't fix anything that matters!
It really sucks most of FTB don't get to live long enough to grapple further with any of this, it would have been really interesting to see where they would go next.
one of the reasons i love this version of wesker so much (pretty much any time he’s wearing this suit)
the tapping of his fingers in annoyance when he finds that ada hasn’t killed leon yet but also expertly hiding his emotions in order to seem calm and collected.
which is why i love that he immediately found a way to work around it he doesn’t stay upset for long and doesn’t let those emotions get in the way of his plans. he adapts and overcomes. a true mastermind in my eyes
we are winning at levels never before thought possible it seems, after making the wrong choice of becoming an ada wong fan & having to subsist off the crumbs of characterization given to me in in-game files, supplemental material & scant lines of dialog it seems capcom is truly going to give me everything i have ever wanted :
probably giving ada the best DLC in the franchise, a meaningful relationship with a character that isn't leon that seems to take precedent in her story over her few chance encounters with leon in RE4R ( i have a feeling her & luis' history gives their dynamic far more meaning than his little rollercoaster ride with leon ), cool sci-fi contacts replacing the glasses she never really used in the original, integrating her grapple hook in her combat when it was sadly only ever used for traversal, actual content specifically designed for her campaign & not just reused arenas from the main game ( some of these are from the original carried over to ada but i think her performing the coolest thing leon does in the original, dodging the lasers, is sick ), finally positioning wesker as an antagonist in ada's story directly rather than him hanging over her like a school headmaster trying to play mindgames .
it's honestly so personally rewarding to see capcom go to such lengths for a character they have otherwise neglected, even in a game like re6 where she carries the emotional core of the story ( in specific her developing relationship with carla as she learns she is more than just some lab-made doppelganger, which was sadly undercooked - like most of the game, despite the explosions )
when gansey kind of wanted to live. when gansey who had devoted his entire life to this one purpose and stuck to it even when everyone thought he was weird and superstitious and he had hallucinated the whole thing, gansey who chased glendower all over the world, realized that it was not a goal compatible with his life because glendower was dead. there would be no waking of mythical kings, no favors, and yet. he let glendower go. he still wanted to keep living. because during the hunt for glendower he found good, close friends for the first time in his life, and he became his own person. and now. glendower was dead, and gansey kind of wanted to live.
"you have to fight your fear. you're stronger than you think. you can win." - my babysitter's a vampire, the date to end all dates - part 2 (october 5th, 2012)
The best piece of practical advice I know is a classic from Hemingway (qtd. here):
The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.
Also, especially if you're young, you should read more than you write. If you're serious about writing, you'll want to write more than you read when you get old; you need, then, to lay the important books as your foundation early. I like this passage from Samuel R. Delany's "Some Advice for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student" (collected in both Shorter Views and About Writing):
You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncherov, Gogol, Bely, Khlebnikov, and Flaubert; you need to read Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Dahlberg, John Steinbeck, Jean Rhys, Glenway Wescott, John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, Angus Wilson, Patrick White, Alexander Trocchi, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Vladimir Nabokov; you need to read Nella Larsen, Knut Hamsun, Edwin Demby, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, John Barth, Philip Roth, Coleman Dowell, William Gaddis, William Gass, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, Paul West, Bertha Harris, Melvin Dixon, Daryll Pinckney, Darryl Ponicsan, and John Keene, Jr.; you need to read Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Richard Powers, Carroll Maso, Edmund White, Jayne Ann Phillips, Robert Gluck, and Julian Barnes—you need to read them and a whole lot more; you need to read them not so that you will know what they have written about, but so that you can begin to absorb some of the more ambitious models for what the novel can be.
Note: I haven't read every single writer on that list; there are even three I've literally never heard of; I can think of others I'd recommend in place of some he's cited; but still, his general point—that you need to read the major and minor classics—is correct.
The best piece of general advice I know, and not only about writing, comes from Dr. Johnson, The Rambler #63:
The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of day-light in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.
I've known too many young writers over the years who sabotaged themselves by overthinking and therefore never finishing or sharing their projects; this stems, I assume, from a lack of self-trust or, more grandly, trust in the universe (the Muses, God, etc.). But what professors always tell Ph.D. students about dissertations is also true of novels, stories, poems, plays, comic books, screenplays, etc: There are only two kinds of dissertations—finished and unfinished. Relatedly, this is the age of online—an age when 20th-century institutions are collapsing, and 21st-century ones have not yet been invented. Unless you have serious connections in New York or Iowa, publish your work yourself and don't bother with the gatekeepers.
Other than the above, I find most writing advice useless because over-generalized or else stemming from arbitrary culture-specific or field-specific biases, e.g., Orwell's extremely English and extremely journalistic strictures, not necessarily germane to the non-English or non-journalistic writer. "Don't use adverbs," they always say. Why the hell shouldn't I? It's absurd. "Show, don't tell," they insist. Fine for the aforementioned Orwell and Hemingway, but irrelevant to Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann. Freytag's Pyramid? Spare me. Every new book is a leap in the dark. Your project may be singular; you may need to make your own map as your traverse the unexplored territory.
Hard truths? There's one. I know it's a hard truth because I hesitate even to type it. It will insult our faith in egalitarianism and the rewards of earnest labor. And yet, I suspect the hard truth is this: ineffables like inspiration and genius count for a lot. If they didn't, if application were all it took, then everybody would write works of genius all day long. But even the greatest geniuses usually only got the gift of one or two all-time great work. This doesn't have to be a counsel of despair, though: you can always try to place yourself wherever you think lightning is likeliest to strike. That's what I do, anyway. Good luck!
perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid
miles johnson // richard siken // francesco hayez // mitski // @anouri // roderic o’conner // john william waterhouse // evelyn waugh // egon schiele // franz kafka
Ocean Vuong: Night Sky with Exit Wounds (the one he is carrying under his arm, I'm assuming that's his and not for the display?)
has read:
Ritch C. Savin-Williams: Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth
Emily Henry: Book Lovers
episode 4:
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Nina LaCour: We Are Okay (again)
episode 5:
Albert Camus: The Outsider
episode 6:
Martin Handford: Where's Wally? The Great Picture Hunt
Meredith Russo: Birthday
Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days
Sara Pennypacker: Pax
Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, Sophie Mas: How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are
?
?
?
Damian Dibben: The Color Storm
Alice Oseman: Loveless
Susan Stokes-Chapman: Pandora
Katy Hessel: The Story of Art Without Men
?
Evelyn Waugh: Rossetti
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles
A.O. Scott: Better Living Through Criticism
?: Then We Came to an End (?)
Ruth Millington: Muse
Dr. Jaqui Lewis: Fierce Love
Charlotte Van Den Broek: Bold Ventures - Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy
?
Richard Siken: Crush
episode 7:
Garrard Conley: Boy Erased
George Matthew Johnson: All Boys Aren't Blue
Samra Habib: We Have Always Been Here
episode 8:
Akemi Dawn Bowman: Summer Bird Blue
Angela Chen: Ace
bonus:
Truham school library pride display (seen in ep. 3 and 8):
top to bottom, left to right:
Angela Chen: Ace
Andrew Holleran: The Kingdom of Sand
Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan: 100 Queer Poems
Scott Stuart: My Shadow Is Pink
Lotte Jeffs: My Magic Family
Tucker Shaw: When You Call My Name
Ritch C. Savin-Williams: Bi - Pansexual, Fluid, Nonbinary and Fluid Youth
Alok Vaid-Menon: Beyond the Gender Binary
George M. Johnson: All Boys Aren’t Blue
Mason Deaver: I Wish You All the Best
Alex Gino: George Melissa
on top of shelves (left to right):
Kevin Van Whye: Nate Plus One
Xixi Tian: This Place is Still Beautiful
Becky Albertalli: Leah on the Offbeat
Mya-Rose Craig: Birdgirl
Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other
Connie Glynn: Princess Ever After
Saundra Mitchell: The Prom
Charlie's choice at Shakespeare and Co (ep. 6):
Allan Hollinghurst: The Swimming Pool Library
That's it for now.
Sorry about the ones i couldn't identify and sorry if i missed any! Might try and do some of the ones in Isaac's room later but that'll take a minute