Finally Got My Hands On The English Wotakoi Volume 4 The Other Day

things to update after a legal name change!

Social security card

Driver’s license

Passport

Birth certificate

Employer HR

Bank account

Credit card company

Car insurance

Health insurance

Utilities

Cell phone account

Voter registration

Your school

Professional organizations (for nursing, bar, teaching, etc.)

Doctor’s office & other health specialists

TV & internet

Paypal

*Please add to this list if you can think of anything else!!!

Time Out’s 50 greatest animated films:

Whisper of the Heart (1995)

Directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

You could sit through ‘Whisper of the Heart’, one of Studio Ghibli’s lesser-known masterworks, and ponder: did this really need to be an animated movie? Eschewing the expressionist flights of fancy most associated with the medium, Kondo’s film is more of a muted family drama that takes place in a very basic and very real Japanese neighbourhood while adopting as its focus the growing pains of sprightly teenage heroine, Shizuku. It traces her persistent attempts to become an author, mainly of pop song lyrics, but takes a sweetly-realised romantic detour when she develops a crush on a fellow student who yearns to be a violin maker in Italy. A lavish dream sequence involving a statue of a Germanic cat in tails and a top hat is the only time we depart from reality, but here is a film that uses the gifts of the animated form to magnify the tiny magical minutiae of everyday life. Things like an ornamental grandfather clock that tells a story when it chimes, or a cat that jumps on a train and leads Shizuku to an antique shop… The realist backdrop in turn makes these small moments feel all the more pertinent, especially as the film works hard to convey the uplifting notion that inspiration can take many weird and wonderful forms – it’s just waiting for you to find it. How else could an ad-hoc chamber music rendition of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ bring a big, salty tear to your eye? A beautiful film. (x)

Literally cannot emphasize enough that my #1 writing advice is to stop being afraid. Stop being afraid of sounding too cringe, or too stupid, or too horrifying, or too horny, or too weird, or too much, or too little, or too you. You need to put your entire pussy into your art. Sure, it won't be to everyone's tastes, but if you keep yourself to the blandest tamest safest roads possible you will be of no one's tastes, not even yours.

super simple low-effort ao3 summary methods that are 1000% better and 1000% less annoying than just saying you suck at summaries:

copypaste the first few lines of the fic. u already wrote ‘em. let ‘em be their own damn hook

if ur feeling fancy & don’t mind showing ur hand a bit, copypaste the first few lines of the fic that u feel are esp. Important or Interesting - the ones where u first start getting into the real meat of things

state the main tropes! theyre probably already in ur tags - just say them again - maybe as a full sentence if ur feelin fancy. or with a joke if ur feelin Extra fancy

ask a question. pose a hypothetical. eg what happens if u take [character] and put them in [situation]?

make an equation. [character] + [thing] = [outcome]

just write like a one-sentence summary of what the fuck is going down. just one (1) sentence. doesnt matter if it doesn’t cover every important aspect. or if it sounds bland. any summary sentence is gonna be miles better than “idk i suck at summaries”

just…explain the fic like u would to a friend? it doesnt have to be a polished back of the book blurb. it can just be “[pairing] coffee shop au, but like, still with murder, and also i made everyone trans. enjoy”

just stick a meme in there

honestly who cares

just put literally anything but a self deprecating comment in there & ur golden

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.

STUDIO GHIBLI + LANDSCAPES

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Pom Poko (1994) The Wind Rises (2013) Princess Mononoke (1997) Porco Rosso (1992) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Only Yesterday (1991) The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Tales from Earthsea (2006)

part 1 | part 2

—  Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)