Last Few Posts (including This One) Aren’t Gator-related So They Feel A Little Weird To Reblog But

Huh, this looks interesting enough. If anyone wants to ask me one of these, go ahead. It’ll most likely be Paranatural-related, as a heads-up.

20 Fandom Asks Memes

if you could hit any character without repercussions, who would it be?

what fandoms were apart of that you aren’t any longer?

characters you would marry in an instant?

are you likely to blush when a sex scene comes up or can you read/watch it with a straight face?

what is your favorite overused trope?

do you read fanfiction? If so, do you have any favorite authors or fics?

name a character you wouldn’t mind naming someone after.

do you prefer happy, bittersweet, or sad endings?

do you like prequels?

characters that deserved worse? >:]

do you mind sex scenes or do you skip over them?

if you could change one ending to a book/show/game/etc, what would you change about it?

do you mind sequels that are completely different with a new plot and new characters or do you prefer they stay with the same story and characters?

name a fandom, ship, or character that you love that others would send you hate mail for liking.

does it bother you if a character shares the same name of someone you know well?

do you block people who like fandoms/characters/ships that you dont?

are there any tropes you wished were used less often?

characters you want to wrap in a blanket and tell them they’re going to be okay?

if you could be a part of any story, which story would you want to tag along in?

name a song that reminds you heavily of a specific fandom or character.

Bonus+ Create your own question.

Who? What? Clearing up Ambiguity in Your Story

Most of the confusing or ambiguous parts of your plot should get cleared up during the story- and scene-level edit of your book. But ambiguity sneaks into stories on the sentence-level, too.

In your sentence-level edit, you’ll want to check for ambiguous words, pronouns, language, and/or phrasing—anything that creates unintentional confusion for your reader.

Ambiguous Pronouns

Anytime you use it, its, this, that, he, she, him, her, his, hers, they, theirs, etc. make sure it’s crystal clear who or what you’re referring to.

Karen took the garlic, carrots, and lemon juice out of the fridge, but according to the recipe it wasn’t enough.

What wasn’t enough? The garlic? Carrots? Lemon juice? All three? To clarify, keep in mind that a pronoun refers to the last named person (for he, she, they) or object (for it, this, that). So in the sentence:

Karen and Diane unpacked her groceries into the fridge.

“Her” would refer to Diane, the last named female person. If those are Karen’s groceries, you’d need to write:

Karen and Diane unpacked Karen’s groceries into the fridge.

It may seem like a minor concern, but ambiguous pronouns can cause serious confusion for the reader, especially if you’re trying to show an important event.

Before: Lars threw the vase at the window, and it broke.

After: The vase broke when Lars threw it at the window.

In the first example, we can’t tell what broke. Was it the vase? The window? The revision, though not exactly poetic, is more clear.

Keep in mind that you can rewrite or reorganize whole passages to remove ambiguity, reworking the problem area until it adheres to your unique style and purposes. These are just examples to guide you, not instructions on how exactly to reword your sentences.

Common Ambiguous Pronouns:

• It • Its • This • That • Those • These • He • She • Him • Her • His • Hers • They • Theirs

Ambiguous Words

Unless the character is truly uncertain, or you want the reader to be uncertain what you’re referring to, avoid using ambiguous words like “something,” “somewhere,” “thing,” “stuff,” etc.

Before: There was something about him she despised.

After: She despised his beached-blonde hair, and his arrogance.

Be specific! If your character really doesn’t know what she hates about this person, “something” could work. But make sure you’re not being vague out of habit or laziness. 

Before: She picked up her stuff from the dry cleaners.

After: She picked up her suit from the dry cleaners.

“Suit” is a better choice here because it’s specific, concrete, and visualize-able. We can’t really get a mental picture of “stuff.”

Common Ambiguous Words:

• Thing • Something • Anything • Somewhere • Stuff • Nothing

When Ambiguity Works

Ambiguity has its place if your character is truly uncertain or if you want the reader to be uncertain.

In Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, the main character is never named or gendered. This was an intentional choice by the writer, who wanted the reader to be unclear about the narrator’s gender and sexual identity.

Similarly, writers of horror, mystery, or magical realism who are trying to create a mysterious mood will use words like “might,” “could,” and “possibly” to intentionally invoke ambiguity:

The fog drifted through the trees, almost corporeal in its movements. Could it be ghost? An apparition?

In this dream sequence from Little Kingdoms, Steven Millhauser uses ambiguous language to emphasize the main character’s uncanny experience:

“You see,” he said to Max, who for some reason had climbed the desk and then onto the top of the door frame, where he sat crouched like a gnome as dark wings grew from his shoulders; and opening his eyes Franklin could not understand the bright dawn light pouring through the window in his bedroom, while somewhere far away a cup was rattling on a dish.  

When used intentionally, ambiguity can enhance mood, raise questions, and contribute to suspense. Just make sure you’re doing it on purpose!

10 Ways to Avoid Writing Insecurity

by Sean Platt

Face it. There are few things as intimidating as the blinding white of a blank page.

It makes no difference if it’s an empty sheet lying on our desk, or a blank screen, aiming between our eyes. Defeating “nothing” by subjecting it to “something” with our words is what gives a writer breath.

Whether to pay our bills or please our muse, eventually words must spill. Here are ten tips to help plow past writing insecurity.

1. Appreciate your unique perspective.

No one sees the world exactly like you, and no one can articulate it in quite the same way. The oldest stories are told and then retold, not because they invent new things to say, but because inside a timeless message, each storyteller may weave a million individual moments.

2. Writing is conversation.

The more we speak, the more we understand the fundamentals. Writing is no different. Most of the time, our brains operate on the surface, doing only what must be done. We may adopt the push and pull of conversation to push our voice further. Writing, much like a good discussion, can help us dig a little deeper.

3. Allow your influences to shape your voice, not drown it.

Creativity is borrowed. None of us formed our thoughts in a vacuum, and all of us were subject to a myriad of different models. Inspiration lives inside us, and our subconscious never forgets. We need not copy our heroes, their hand is always there to guide us.

4. Believe.

You can do it! Fear is a set of handcuffs, keeping our fingers from flight. If you don’t believe in yourself, then no one else will either.

5. Ignore the rules.

Rules can be intimidating; intimidation a shortcut to insecurity. You may not know precisely when to use a comma and when to use parentheses, but that decision will never equal the importance of a good idea. We first need broad strokes to lend foundation. We wash our world in red, blue, yellow, and green. Chartreuse and vermillion come later.

6. Write for someone specific.

Nothing will crystallize your voice, like scribbling for a single set of eyes. It doesn’t matter who it is, and it doesn’t have to be the same person twice. Write as though you are speaking to them. Design your jokes to make them smile, your words to feel them near.

7. Write without pause, return later.

Alone with our thoughts, it is easy to think the worst, but we should never allow them to slow us down. When our inner whisper begins to shout, we must lower our nose and keep on going. Once drained, leave. Return later, and you’ll likely be surprised at what you’ve written.

8. Take pride.

Our words are simply a more permanent version of our thought. Be proud of who you are, and know that what you write is a reflection of you.

9. Even Stephen King writes with his door closed.

No one gets it right the first time through. Just start. Even if the world will be watching once you are finished, no one is watching you now. Close the door, breathe the silence, and let what’s inside you come out to play.

10. Dip your toe, then jump… the water’s fine.

The first keystroke is always the hardest, but begetting something from nothing is what separates us from the lower species (well, that and opposable thumbs). Pushing past our fear and into uncertainty, is when we’re most likely to find ourselves.

#pretty sweet #snakes #gliding snakes #look at em go

Here’s how flying snakes stay aloft

High-speed cameras show that paradise tree snakes keep from tumbling as they glide through the sky by undulating their bodies.

The movie Snakes on a Plane had it wrong. That’s not how snakes fly.

Certain species of tree snakes can glide through the air, undulating their bodies as they soar from tree to tree. That wriggling isn’t an attempt to replicate how the reptiles slither across land or swim through water. The contortions are essential for stable gliding, mechanical engineer Isaac Yeaton and colleagues report June 29 in Nature Physics.

“They have evolved this ability to glide, and it’s pretty spectacular,” says Yeaton, of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. Paradise tree snakes (Chrysopelea paradisi) fling themselves from branches, leaping distances of 10 meters or more (SN: 8/7/02). To record the snakes’ twists and turns, Yeaton, then at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and colleagues affixed reflective tape on the snakes’ backs and used high-speed cameras to capture the motion.

Physicists had previously discovered that the tree snakes flatten their bodies as they leap, generating lift (SN: 1/29/14). The new experiment reveals that the snakes also exert a complex combination of movements as they soar. Gliding snakes undulate their bodies both side to side and up and down, the researchers found, and move their tails above and below the level of their heads.

Scientists captured the undulating motion of paradise tree snakes as they glide through the sky. A computer simulation based on high-speed video shows that the undulation is necessary for stable flight.

Once the researchers had mapped out the snakes’ acrobatics, they created a computer simulation of gliding snakes. In the simulation, snakes that undulated flew similarly to the real-life snakes. But those that didn’t wriggle failed spectacularly, rotating to the side or falling head over tail, rather than maintaining a graceful, stable glide.

If confined to a single plane instead of wriggling in three dimensions, the snakes would tumble. So snakes on a plane won’t fly.

gotta love some HLVRAI artwork.

soda!

This is fun!

Who wants a Paranatural Tool random generator?

(I’m posting the link to it in the reblog to this because I think Tumblr is being weird about links rn)

Ohhhhh, well I will be picking this up to give to krok so he can have his actionmaster partner

nytimes.com

Opinion | I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate.

No paywall version here.

"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...

In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.

Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.

But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.

I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.

In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.

For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.

And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.

[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]

And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.

The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.

The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.

Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.

I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."

-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.

These are really neat lizards!

FIVE BANDED GLIDING LIZARD Draco quinquefasciatus

Draco is a genus of agamid lizards that are also known as flying lizards, flying dragons or gliding lizards. These lizards are capable of gliding flight; their ribs and their connecting membrane may be extended to create “wings” (patagia- similar to flying squirrels), the hindlimbs are flattened and wing-like in cross-section, and a flap on the neck (the gular flag) serves as a horizontal stabilizer (the flag is sometimes used in warning to others).

Draco are arboreal insectivores.

While not capable of powered flight they often obtain lift in the course of their gliding flights. Glides as long as 60 m (200 ft) have been recorded, over which the animal loses only 10 m (33 ft) in height, which is quite some distance, considering that these lizards are only around 20 cm (7.9 in) in total length (tail included).

They are found in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and are fairly common in forests, gardens, teak plantations and shrub jungle.

Below showing wings and gular flag. ©A.S.Kono Sulawesi Lined Gliding Lizard Draco spilonotus

Arboreal or Mexican Alligator Lizard, Abronia graminea

Photos by Matthieu Berroneau on Flickr

This photographer on Instagram // Facebook

These photos have been posted with permission; do not remove credit or repost!

The Mexican alligator lizard is an endangered species of arboreal lizard native to the states of Veracruz and adjacent Puebla, Mexico. They grow to around 12 inches in length, are mainly insectivorous, and give birth to live young.

The species is threatened by illegal collection for the pet trade, deforestation, and degradation of habitat, largely through the conversion of land to agricultural use.