So Google Does Math For You??

Sometimes I draw comics where the characters are just nice to each other.

Toothless Roaming on the street. FYI it’s not CGI. It’s a real cosplay.

I needed this.

I've seen this before, but it's been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn't need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.

These 3D-printed prosthetics for children are given to them free of charge. (via @techthatmatters)⠀

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Meet @teamunlimbited, a non-profit from the UK that’s on a mission to change the lives of children with missing limbs by helping them get custom 3D-printed prosthetics, free of charge.⠀

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The innovative 3D-printed arm devices are designed to empower and inspire children to improve their confidence and courage. Each innovative 3D printed arm device is made by volunteers and gives a helping hand to remove the long-standing stigma around discussing disability.⠀

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The prosthetics are cost-effective and easy to produce. They are fully parametric, thermo-formed 3D printed limbs that are light-weight, highly customizable and colourful. The average production cost is £30 (around $40) per arm. It’s a simple act of kindness that won’t get unnoticed.⠀

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Team UnLimbited designs are attractive alternatives to the current, clunky and expensive, prosthetic options available. The designs are open source and freely available to anyone in the world with a 3D printer. On average, an arm takes 24 hours to complete.

full credit:tectthatmatters

The single most important piece of writing advice I would give to a lot of amateur writers is to write less beautifully - or at least to write beautifully less.

I rarely find a piece of writing I can't read because it's too simple, or too concise and to-the-point - not memorable, perhaps, but also not a headache on a page. On the other hand, I see loads of pieces which are effectively unreadable because they're far too rich to swallow, and badly in need of watering down a bit.

The absolute worst culprit is the dialogue tags and stage directions. I'm a big fan of letting people write in their own style, but I would love it if a lot of writers could please cool it with letting me know every time a character blinks or licks their lips. I don't need to know that, especially if it happens every time they speak.

So many dialogue excerpts look like this:

"So this is how we talk?" he queried quietly, his eyebrows furrowed into knots. "Apparently," she replied with a puzzled grin, bouncing on the balls of her feet with restless energy. "Isn't that... exhausting?" he questioned, a lop-sided smile snaking its way across his lips. "The bouncing?" she asked shyly, her eyelids fluttering in shame. "No, of course not," he told her, his lean arms reached out to pull her closer. He buried his face into the mess of her hair, taking a deep breath of her perfume. "I just feel a little nauseated by all of these actions." "I don't know what you mean," she giggled, brushing the hair back out of her eyes as her cheeks flushed red. "Don't worry," he sighed, rolling his eyes up towards the ceiling.

I'm assuming this is a convention that comes from somewhere, given its ubiquity - perhaps somewhere in the world of fanfiction, where there will be short, intimate pieces entirely focused on the ways in which characters interact with each other. But to me, in an original work, it's so exhausting that I can't make it down the rest of the page.

Dialogue may be the worst, or most obvious offender, but the same principle extends pretty much everywhere else. Each line doesn't have to be some great quote you can hang on your wall, and it's hard to read a whole story written like that.

There's been some recent backlash on here against modern films where every line of dialogue is a quip, at the expense of building an authentic conversation, but that's how a lot of people start out writing - thinking that each sentence should be made as flowery as possible, when too many flowers in the same pot will crowd each other out.

You need to leave some gaps to let the sunlight in, and illuminate the beauty of the occasional flourish you do include. Think of it like vanilla extract, to make a reference that was topical when I started writing this post: you need to add a little for flavour, without which the writing will be too dull, but tip the bottle and I will actually be sick. Write beautifully less. Learn to embrace the prosaic.

Imagine a happier MCU au where Peter goes to MIT via Tony's letter of recommendation and is shocked to find out that everyone there only refers to Tony as some variation of "Iron Dude" or "iron guy" but he eventually gets used to it and gets in the habit himself and then super stuff comes up and Peter has to go help and he accidentally calls Tony Iron Dude to his face and then immediately dies inside and cap is there and he never lets Tony live it down and...

Just holding onto this

I found these HERE

This gif contains what is probably my favorite background detail of Megamind. Megamind has just ordered Metroman’s death after trapping him in the copper dome. Of course, since it’s Megamind, it doesn’t work, and Metroman just stares at him. We learn later that Metroman faked his death, and used his super speed to wander around the town while having an existential crisis.

He first visits Megamind, having found his real hideout:

and then goes to the park, the library, a diner, etc, and finally, the Metroman museum:

before returning to the dome and faking his death.

Now, what’s really fun about the first gif is that, if you look closely, you can see Metroman fade slightly for two frames right after he rolls his eyes. If you look even more closely, you can see him in one frame standing behind Megamind, and in one frame on the upper deck of the museum. Look at it again. See the flicker?

I’ve slowed it down here to make them more obvious (though at the resolution it’s difficult to see him on the deck):

Screenshots, zoomed in a bit:

There is a bit of a continuity error, though. In the first gif, Metroman uses his superspeed while everyone is waiting for the death ray to work. But in Metroman’s retelling, he leaves while Megamind is yelling “FIRE!” to Minion. You can hear Megamind yell in this video:

So the fun of this detail is a little bit broken by the continuity error. But I think it’s an intentional continuity error, made at the points of drama in both scenes. I mean, look at this dynamic face that Megamind is making here. Pretty cool looking:

Anyway, there’s a fun fact about Megamind!

Yayyyy... Killer hamsters. Watch some terrible disease come from this. JK... Hopefully.

New York Post

Gene-editing experiment turns cute hamsters into ‘aggressive’ beasts

Once gene-spliced, the hamsters exhibited “high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals,” the professor said, regardless of

...oh no