Those who do not learn history are doomed to pre-heat it.
Quoting yourself has come to be known in our industry as ‘laying down orange koans’ because, like roadwork, the result is rarely desirable, and everyone in proximity is left with the vague feeling that we are indirectly financing the inconvenience.
Me (via kholinar)
I’m going to extend this one to self-reblogging. :p
Koyomi – “You—-what kind of person are you?”
Oshino – “Me? Sometimes a mysterious child of the wind, sometimes a mysterious traveler, sometimes a mysterious drifter, sometimes a mysterious bard, sometimes a mysterious high-class vagrant.”
All mysteries.
“Sometimes a female voice’s lowest range.”
“……Sometimes an alto?”
“Sometime I am, sometimes I’m not.”
Nostrils! Who ever talks about nostrils?! If you get the angle of a nostril wrong it will completely screw up a face and even if you have no idea how to hold a pencil, you’ll see a nostril at the wrong angle and it will subconsciously drive you mad.
But George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women. The fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside… (and) it always seemed to me as if he were describing the reality, apart from the appearance, of the incident. The novels as novels are uneven, but as fairy-tales they are extraordinarily consistent. He never for a moment loses his own inner thread that runs through the patchwork, and it is the thread that the fairy great-grandmother put into the hands of Curdie to guide him out of the mazes of the goblins.
In wintertime we burn them,” he said, pointing to a round metal stove. “This one has eaten many pianos.
For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump – NYTimes.com
via Olga Nunes
Love this quote. Sounds like something from a creepy children’s book…
To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.
Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.
Laden Autumn here I stand
Worn of heart, and weak of hand:
Nought but rest seems good to me,
Speak the word that sets me free.
Many pro authors say you should try a dumb trick if your writing is moving frustratingly slowly: just banish a certain part of your A to Z for a bit. This paragraph can’t contain any “A”s. Try it. You find that your brain has to slow down and focus on that arbitrary limit. It distracts you, making you pick all of your words with caution.
Okay, that was just one paragraph without using the letter “E” and it took me about three hours to assemble. It’s a great writing trick because all too often, you get trapped by your own writing style. Water carves grooves in rock after a number of years, you see. When that happens, that’s becomes the only path the water wants to take. An arbitrary but ironclad rule forces your writing to flow into new directions.
The Wheel Of Fortune Comment Moderation System – Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA)
A great post on website comments that introduced me to a new idea.
Answer syndrome is the affliction of the hyper-educated, the detail-oriented, the obsessive, and the internet-saturated. It plagues people whose highly technical and specialized knowledge means that they often spend their days explaining things to people who have no idea what they are talking about. That computer scientist at MIT, for example, could have told you things you never even knew you wanted ask about PGP encryption. People with answer syndrome get used to having all the answers. And then … they don’t know when to stop.
Feste's Lute 