Horatio if you’re reading this we miss you

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
gallusrostromegalus
stickthisbig

I do not want to be in writing training

I am thinking about making a passionate defense of the passive voice just to cause trouble on purpose

Look once you learn how to use the passive voice it will become clear to you why I spend half my time deliberately writing in it

stickthisbig

Fuck it, let's talk about it

Warning: Passive voice can be used for evil! Do not do it! Do not write sentences like "The man was shot by police." No! Do not hide state violence in sentence structure!

You should use active voice when:

1. You introduce new information

2. You take or assign responsibility

Active voice is key for clarity when the sentence doesn't have anything to refer back to. If you have to put "by (person, organization)" at the end of the sentence, it should have been active voice. Ex:

Our company fucked up the project and we're sorry

NOT

Regrettably, the project was fucked up by us/on our watch/by one of our teams

But here's why passive voice is great: because it collapses who did a thing and centers the fact that it happened. When you are referring back to something the parties already agree upon, it puts the result up front.

All project review will be completed by 18 Never 2029.

NOT

Kyle | Mark | us Arch | itects, Jim's Construction, the Statesonia Department of Endangered Hummingbirds, the Federal Bureau of Staying the Fuck Out of It and like twelve other people will complete their reviews by 18 Never 2029.

No! Bad! The completion of the action matters, not the parties involved. And no, "The parties will complete their reviews" is absolutely not clearer, because it requires the same knowledge.

In fiction, passive vs active refocuses a sentence towards what you want the reader to pay attention to. Active:

A fog covered the city

Passive:

The city was covered by fog

Nothing wrong with either of them. It's just what you want the reader to think about. Bonus round: the sentence feels more natural if you put the bulk of the description in the second half, so you can add more without making it impossible to follow. Active:

A fog covered the quiet, unsuspecting city as it slept

Passive:

The city was covered by a terrible, choking fog that crept through the silent streets

These are different sentences, but nothing's wrong with either of them.

Passive voice gets a bad rap largely because even the dumbest professional development expert can ID it fairly regularly. It's bad when it makes a sentence less clear; it's good when it makes a sentence clearer. That's it.

sazandorable

AND it can have immense humoristic potential, for the exact same reason you outlined, because passive voice reads as an attempt to dodge responsibility and misplace blame.

"The man was shot (by police)" and "The project was fucked up by us" are bad in serious contexts and actual writing.

But you can have a lot of fun with things like:

"My boss has been described in impolite terms."

"Alice's boss has been described in impolite terms by someone who wishes to remain anonymous."

"I have been vilified, demonised, slandered, calumnied, scapegoated, lied about, written horrid pamphlets about, unlistened to, and reputationally walked all over."

"The priceless crown jewels known as The Fanciest Rock Ever, insured for 100,000,000 billions and entrusted in our care by HRM the Queen of Fancyland, were found to have been misplaced this morning and have not been located at this time."

"He was separated from his head."

"He found himself divorced from."

Useful friends in such cases: euphemisms, unexpected verbs, grammatically questionable sentence constructions, and obfuscation of the responsible party when it is glaringly obvious to the audience that there should be one or even who it is, etc., etc.

writing ref this is so true
sparrow-reblog-nest
tiny--cryptid

OK this question has been bugging me all morning so y'all please let me know

did your childhood vomit bowl also double as a popcorn bowl?

Yes

No

Vomit bowl??? (see results)

bc ours did nd I never thought much of it as a kid but know I'm thinking about it and it feels kinda gross? so pls tell me if this experience was universal or not it will haunt me forever otherwise

sang-the-sun-in-flight

what do you MEAN 40% of you fuckers didnt have a vomit bowl did you just obliterate your carpet when your stomach flu having ass woke up suddenly at 3am and needed to hurl IMMEDIATELY? did y'all just never ever get stomach bugs growing up??

no we use tupperware for popcorn the vomit bowl is a mixing bowl we also use for cooking
havendance
thatmgslikerguy

Hey guys I just bought this cool cylinder from some guy in the flea market parking lot, not sure how it works but when you take the lid off it makes your camera all grainy, super cool!

shemetalonmygeartilitsrising

Hey guys, I have an update, and there's a few lies going around in the notes so I figured I'd clear those up while I was here:

First of all, no, I did not "confirm it was was fake" on Twitter, I originally posted this video to a private but fairly big discord, someone there took it and put in on Twitter and later told everyone it was a joke because they were getting quite tweeted too much. That person is not me, I don't even have a Twitter

Second. Apparently this is something called cesium, it's super radioactive and that's why the container is so heavy and thick. I ended up having a really bad burn on my hand after I messed with it for a few more days, they ended up having to take some of the muscle off of it and a ways up my wrist to try and save my arm, this is what it looks like when I unwrap the bandages (I'm not going to show the hand because it looks WAY worse🤢 and I don't want to make yall puke)

image

Anyway, be careful what you buy from strange guys at flea markets! They might just be trying to kill you!

r4cs0

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coyotegirl-writer-s-block

image

guy discovered demons are real and then the demons took him. damn.


Kids, don't play with this kind of shit.

gunsandfireandshit

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silly-jellyghoty

I don't know if this whole thing in the original post is real or not but i had the same initial reaction as @therealchickensoup in notes.

image

As an explanation of the mentioned incident:

Tl;dr version of the video - apparently, there have been these cases where empty capsules from old medical machines have been "misplaced" or outright just left behind like this in various places all around the world (usually in abandoned war zones or when there wasn't enough money to pay a specialized cleaning crew so the stuff just got abandoned and forgotten) and every now and then they get rediscovered by random people, causing death or serious life long consequences to hundreds of people before they are contained.

As for why it does that weird stuff on camera, it's most likely because of SEE - single event error - an effect radiation has on electronics where, if a particle hits a sensor (like camera's photo chip), RAM memory unit, or processing core with enough energy, it disrupts normal function of the device temporarily, in this case by creating that visual snow. Other example that comes to mind is this short video from Rosetta space craft landing at the surface of the comet. It's camera was created specifically to withstand the radiation of the open Space and yet it still filmed tons of "snow" aka heavy particles flying all over the place.

image

My theory about why the cilinder vid looks different from this is that unlike the comet with particles going every direction from all possible sources in the whole universe, hitting the camera mostly at an angle, the cilinder is the only source of the radiation around and instead of messing up with pixels in line as those nuclei fly through, they hit the thing sqare on and only ever disrupt a singular pixel at the time. But like tens of thousands of them every second by the look of it. Which is a lot.

So yeah, the original post seems legit (in which case RIP) but even if it wasn't, the message it conveys is a serious one. That cilinder is not an object of honor. It does not contain anything valued. Don't buy random unexpectedly heavy metallic items of unknown origin from strangers. If something suspicious like this seems to be glowing in dark or is warm to touch without an abvious reason or if it upsets your phone's camera or causes a discoloration of white paper when you set it on, GET AWAY FROM IT, DON'T MOVE IT, DON'T THROW IT TO SOME OTHER RANDOM PLACE, DEFINITELY DON'T SELL IT ON A FLEA MARKET, CALL 112 OR 911 OR FIREFIGHTERS AND TELL THEM THAT YOU HAVE A SUSPICION THAT YOU MAY BE IN A POSESSION OF SOME RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL AMD YOU NEED HELP ASAP, THEN CALL YOURSELF AN AMBULANCE AND TELL THEM THE SAME THING

Hopefully no one following me or reading this post has to ever do any of those things, but in case you do... I hope that i was clear about how dangerous this shit is.

historyofmemes

News, everyone! It's been made into a video by the same guy who did the one on the Goiânia incident

Tl;dr It's fake, the original video was first posted on twitter by a rubber pony fetish account because op was bored. However, PLEASE watch the video in full, it's an entire rollercoaster

havendance

@horatiocomehome

DANG
mysticorset
greentrickster

Daughter of fantasy villains decides to rebel against her parents by actually going through with her arranged marriage to a local golden retriever of a prince instead of running off with some local villain-to-be or conquering said golden retriever’s kingdom and ruling it solo like her parents expect her to. Plus, sue her, she’s into the clean-cut earnest look.

At the same time, local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane, he would never have guessed a spiderweb pattern could look so fetching on a ball gown…?

Meanwhile, two pairs of parents in a tizzy because they both expected their offspring to whole-heartedly reject this union and give them an excuse to conquer their goody-two-shoes/evil neighbours, they’re not supposed to actually like each other-!

chucktaylorupset

respective friend groups undergoing culture clash like all of prince charming’s knights are like what vile spell has been used to ensorcel our prince.  we must be on our guard for surely this is but a ruse for an assassination attempt

meanwhile the villain bride’s friends are all like clearly he loves you not, why do you persist in a manner that will ensure your own heart break, i mean if he was taking this seriously there would be at least three assassination attempts by now.  it’s like he doesn’t even notice that you have massive amounts of dark power to covet for his own

smashcut to

fully armored knight, clanging through the hallways in attempts at stealth, blades drawn: i’m just saying, i took an oath of protection.  this feels wrong.

prince charming: it’s not wrong, it’s celebrating cross cultural traditions for my beloved bride

knight: it’s attempted murder

prince charming: it’s a loving attempted murder

greentrickster

@chucktaylorupset  Meanwhile the bride has a bouquet of roses, cornflowers, and wheat sheaves on her desk in her room, and she’s not coming out until she’s written a beautiful and moving poem about how they favourably compare to her groom. It’s been three days. She’s gone through an entire raven’s worth of quills (unethically sourced). The ‘toads who used to be my friends’ list has gone up by one. But she’s bent dark forces and eldritch spirits to her will and, by the powers obscene, this will not be the thing that breaks her.

Sorceress friend: Please, just get him an amulet that will double his power at the cost of his soul, no one’s worth this.

Rebellious villainess: (nearly in tears) No, he brought his best knights to the castle and tried to kill me last week, at midnight, I can’t ignore something like that! He even kicked Cathulhu!

Sorceress friend: He nudged it with his foot. And then he apologized to it. In tears.

Rebellious villainess: (actually in tears now, for reasons of feels instead of poetic torment) He’s trying so hard!!!

thebibliosphere
cryptotheism

Your reaction to chatGPT instantly lets me know how easy it would be to trick you into thinking that you are haunted

cryptotheism

"omg it's literally alive!" Two beers, 45 minutes, deck of tarot cards, and I'm charging you 350$ for an exorcism.

cryptotheism

"I read an article that it's showing simple self-awareness" two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage

cryptotheism

"I just spoke to an AI and I'm... rattled to say the least, come with me on this dark journey" twenty minutes. I've got to science it up for you, but I can get you to come back every week to "disentangle the psychological imprint" for 125$

sparrow-reblog-nest
sisterofiris

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

yay855

I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.

rox-and-prose

“Slutantions” has me crying laughing

hydro-punk

i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.

“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry

love,

blue”

the subject line was “OW”

xakumi

THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”

themodernsouthernpolytheist

As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.

asortoflight

On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”

whisky-gerblin

Reblogging for the last addition

badgraph1csghost

Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.

Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.

badgraph1csghost

Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.

IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.

image

It’s even worse than i remember it

omnicat

I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.

bucketbunny

Once emailed a professor from my hospital bed high on painkillers after a really bad car crash which my heart actually stopped the email “Dead cant class sory”

luz-in-a-otter-suit
secondbeatsongs

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

monkeychewtoy

Instagram and TikTok have successfully created the Torment Nexus from Jim Carrey's iconic work, "Don't put people in the Torment Nexus"