Rex Magnē Vivet

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[writing-prompt-s]

Rumors say that the dowager queen is cursed, but by marrying her you will rule the most powerful kingdom in the land. It’s the wedding day and before the ceremony starts you hear the servants gossip that you’re the 5th person, all the previous kings had died exactly five days after marriage.

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[millenniumlesbian]

You, a fool, when characters state different or contradictory things about backstory events or how the world works: This is a plot hole!

Me, wise, enlightened: Not so, neophyte. Have you considered all the exhaustive possibilities in which one of these characters simply has no idea what they are talking about, or better yet, is a fucking liar?

[andwewerebothgirls]

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[prokopetz]

A big part of cultivating creative discipline is accepting that you can't just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike and learning how to write without it, but the other half is learning never to let inspiration go to waste when it does strike.

If you've got an idea for something that you'll never be able to show to anyone else – maybe it's too personal, maybe it's too pornographic, maybe it just doesn't fit your idiom – you should absolutely go ahead and write it anyway.

This isn't a "write for yourself" thing (and there's no shame in being uninterested in writing for yourself – art is about communication!): it's a "building your portfolio" thing. Self-plagiarism is one of the most fundamental skills of any artist, and you never know what random scribble is going to turn up exactly what's needed for some seemingly unrelated project later on.

Like, it's not likely that that grotesquely self-indulgent character piece where your fandom crush inexplicably has three dicks will randomly prove to contain the missing ingredient for that novel you've been procrastinating on writing, but it can never entirely be ruled out!

[prokopetz]

@bossarmadimon replied:

Tell us about the triple dick, prokopetz.

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[homunculus-argument]

Worldbuilding stuff:

If your story has an idle nobility class, their culture shouldn't just be different from the general population, it should be an over-the-top caricature of the common folks' culture. Whatever the population generally agrees is ideal, fair, admirable, or good, the nobility will take into stupid extremes.

Contrary to the beliefs of many, people are actually not at all happy when they're idle - a person with no assigned task or duty will go out of their way to come up with one. And all around the world, whenever there's been an upper class with nothing to do, they've started to compete with each other over stupid shit, but always stupid shit that the culture they live in considers positive qualities.

From the noblemen in Europe challenging each other to a possibly lethal duel over insulting someone's hat, to a Chinese noblewoman being moved to tears by the beauty of someone's calligraphy, bored elites everywhere have always wanted to outdo each other in their expressions of possessing all the noble traits that this culture in particular holds in value.

You can, and should, use this as a way to highlight what the actual values of this society is. In a setting where being religious is held as an admirable trait, there is nobility coming up with new ways to one-up each other in their expressions of worship. Society that values art and music will have them competing over who hires the most artists, and who employs the most talented musicians. Aggressive, war-like people will have fuels to the fucking death over a stupid hat.

Literally anything can be competed in, and bored people with far too much time and money in their hands will become competitive over the most ridiculous things. This isn't just an useful tool in worldbuilding, but also a fun one.

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[yeehawpim]

a comic about my weird irreverence for canon

go write a bad ending AU! ship your self-insert oc with your favourite villain!! the world's your oyster!!!

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[pluralthey]

last tutorial from september: the comic shots tutorial.
when i was a younger more impressionable artist, my favorite comic author said to draw comic panels like frames of a storyboard or a movie. now that i’m older and have my own thoughts, i understand why someone would say something that i feel is frequently so wrong.

originally, i had a big comics tutorial planned, but i’ve decided to break it down into smaller tutorials.
comics are all about efficiency because they are so time-consuming. anything that saves the artist time is a relief, so this is simply a reference for quickly determining what kind of basic shot to use and why a basic shot might look “weird” until you give it a simple fix by cropping it differently. in art, rules beg to be broken, so don’t take it as advice you can’t go against.
shot choice is very complex, but i’ll save thoughts on that for a later tutorial.

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[hogwartsaheadcanon]

as soon as i figure out whether there’s any practical difference between ‘that’ and ‘which’ in a sentence, you’re all finished

[lytefoot]

“That” is if the clause specifies which one, “which” is if you’re giving extra information.

“She took the bag that contains the loot” means that she took one of several bags, in particular, the one that happens to contain the loot.

“She took the bag, which contains the loot” means that there’s only one bag you might be referring to, and that the fact that she took it is important because it contains the loot.

Also, there’s a comma before “which” but not before “that.”

[hogwartsaheadcanon]

you’re all finished

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[copperbadge]

A horror trope that I very much enjoy is the "haunted book" -- a book that affects the reader in some way, like the Necronomicon driving people mad, or Dr. Mabuse's book that hypnotizes its reader into doing his bidding. It recently had a nice moment in the Magnus Archives, with the Leitner subplot, and there's even a hint of it in Frankenstein, when Victor reads the work of a scientist that his professors dismiss as nonsense and becomes obsessively deranged studying the subject matter.

So it's not that I think it's time for a revival and lord knows the word "reboot" has begun to stink of soulless profit (I think we're one, maybe two flops from a reboot of the MCU). I'm not the most current on horror media in any case so maybe it's been done, but if not I do think we oughta start considering the idea of a haunted phone app.

Apps are already designed for this, anyway. In our current era, a lot of retail "apps" are just reskinned browsers that load an optimized version of the company's website, and the goal of most apps and websites is to keep you in the app/website. (Which is why the google mail and tumblr apps both have internal web browsers.) A lot of phone games are designed to keep you in the game and continually redirect you towards microtransactions, and even apps that aren't games often gamify use; "gamification" has come to be a polite euphemism for "creating addictive circumstances".

Alongside this, a lot of recent cults and cultlike organizations have determined that straight religion is not the best way in anymore, and are coming in sidelong through MLMs (Nexium), wellness and dietary orthodoxies (Bikram Yoga, a number of insta/tiktok orthorexia gurus), or political movements (Qanon). So you get a cult, set up like a business, with an app you use for your business -- or even a cult with a "wellness" app that monitors your sleep, eating, location (wait, that's just FitBit) -- and slowly it gamifies you right into attempting to raise a Great Old One using the power of your downstream or a nice big helping of olive oil coffee.

Although I hate those thinkpieces/art pieces that are all about "you're so busy on your phone you can't appreciate the world around you, remember when we read real paper books" so I would require that the protagonist defeat the evil also using a phone app, or at the very least blind the evil using the flashlight function. Locking the book away in a library app and then putting the phone on airplane mode is a nice resolution, followed perhaps by it lighting up even though it's offline with a message "someone is attempting to locate this phone" as the post-credits stinger for the sequel.

This thought brought to you by Duolingo, which recently fed me, in succession, the task of translating from Italian the phrases

1. Who do you see in the mirror?
2. We open the curtains and see the light.
3. The pillows and blankets are red.

[Rex Magnē Vivet]

[hoofpeet]

Punk Ingo and Emmet painstakingly sowing dozens of safety sign patches to their coats