spritelysprites

[spritelysprites]

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

[spritelysprites]

The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.

[spritelysprites]

I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship

#ao3

[spritelysprites]

Kazuo Ishiguro - “Dream Techniques”

1. Unwarranted Emotion 2. Unwarranted Relationship 3. Delayed realization (ENTER/EXIT) 4. Odd postures—figurative postures + escaped metaphors 5. Placing 6. Weird Venues 7. Extended, tangential monologues 8. Distorted time frame 9. Unwarranted recognition of place 10. Private enclaves 11. Unwarranted familiarity with situation (or person or place) 12. Characters from foreign contexts 13. Characters continuing under different surfaces 14. Distorted Logistics 15. Transmuting Narrator 16. Partial invisibility (And odd witnessing) 17. Backward projection of Intentions 18. Bleeding with Memory 19. BACKWARD projection of Judgment 20. Restricted Witnessing 21. Tunnel Memory 22. The Dim Torch Narrative Mode 23. Crowds—Unwarranted Uniformity 24. Robert Altman [illegible] 25. (“More than I expected”) Unwarranted Expectation 26. MIXED PERSONALITY

#writing

[spritelysprites]

[spritelysprites]

site that you can type in the definition of a word and get the word

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

site that gives you synonyms and antonyms

[spritelysprites]

you’ll have one joke post complaining abt old misogynistic scifi blow up and years later you’ll still get people reblogging it with tags like “why i don’t touch scifi.” hey. im at your door with a pile of scifi in my hands. i’ll lovingly read ursula k le guin or octavia butler to you aloud myself. let me in let me in please please please please hello

#book recs

[spritelysprites]

family lore- my maternal grandmother’s godmother is Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter. Maria is like 90-something, still kicking, and probably healthier than my grandmother. She taught my grandmother how to make Marlene’s special scrambled eggs, and that’s still how we make them today. I told my mom that I voted for her in the poll, and I’m excited to tell my grandmother, because she’ll be pleased <3

(there is more family lore, should there be interest)

the interest is through the roof and I'm wondering how I can politely beg for the scrambled egg recipe

#yay!! #recipe links

[spritelysprites]

YALL

[spritelysprites]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[spritelysprites]

Donald Sutherland on Snow's relationship with Katniss (audio on obvs)

Donald Sutherland discusses Snow's relationship with Katniss extensively in interviews but these aren't very well known, so I ripped the relevant audio and set it to clips from the films, as well as using some pieces from the DVD extras. I cleaned up the audio the best I could but these are from a diverse range of sources so forgive the unevenness.

I didn't intend this to come out so... erotic(???) but Sutherland just talks Like That

#hunger games #coriolanus snow

[spritelysprites]

these are my thotz as someone who has been directly exposed to 2022 and 1966 batman within less than a month: there's a sweet spot between silly/gloomy ways to write bruce wayne, there's unpleasant extremes, and then there's the real extremes that are such weird little freaks that they make perfect sense

[spritelysprites]

TWIGGY & WOODY ALLEN My Generation (2017) dir. David Batty

[spritelysprites]

The funniest sword fight scene in the history of cinema. 

[spritelysprites]

So. Today in class we assigned Macbeth roles to students to read. When I asked the class who wants to be Lady Macbeth, a young man raised his hand. I kind of stared at him like “Lady Macbeth,” and he nodded like “I know what I’m about ma’am.” So then the student who ended up as Macbeth raised his hand and said “HE’S THE ONE, HE’S MY WIFE!” So I said “yeah sure why not,” and the entire class period they were blowing kisses to each other and winking at each other, and every now and then Macbeth would say “I’m the luckiest man on Earth” and Lady Macbeth would put a hand to his chest, and be like “BABE!”.

I just stared at them, knowing that they CLEARLY have never read ‘Macbeth’ before, so… all this lovey dovey… I don’t know if I have the heart to tell them the truth.

[spritelysprites]

I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.

I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.

So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.

Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".

Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.

[spritelysprites]

she let me hit because i am devastatingly sincere

#arjun from my wip