When the author describes a character’s appearance way too late and you have to quickly redesign the image you already have for them in your head:
This is why if you want people to know your character has long raven-black hair with red streaks and eyes like limpid tears, you need to make sure you say so in your first paragraph. Christ. Imagine someone thinking your character’s a prep.
Holy shit I’m dying.
That. That literally explains the opening paragraph of My Immortal I was making a joke but this person came out here with receipts holy hell
NEVER forget the wild ride that is the first page of The Vampire Lestat.
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
“The measure of [Christopher Plummer’s] performance didn’t lie in the sarcastic putdowns so nicely timed to undercut the sweetness. Rather, it could be glimpsed in his quiet moments; gently declaring his love for Maria with a murmured ’Oh,mylove.’ In those three short syllables he managed to evoke an entire world of pent up emotion.” — Tom Santopietro, THE SOUND OF MUSIC STORY
Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews in THESOUNDOFMUSIC (1965) dir. Robert Wise
okay here’s the random question of the day. what specific word or phrase in your vocabulary is a dead giveaway for the local or regional dialect from where you grew up? like for me it’s saying “chonies” instead of underpants. that’s just very southern san joaquin valley/maybe southern california in general, but like, VERY southern valley
