Rian: 31, T1 medical student (TUSOM). Truly excessive number of degrees. Sometimes I write stuff also (ao3 Vespasiana). Some variety of queer, some kinda ace, mostly cis; she/her. This blog is obnoxiously full of Supernatural shit right now, fair warning. icon by bisexualrowena, header by lordwhat
So You Want To Know What’s Up With That Gay Angel - Masterpost
Well, congrats! You’ve found your way to the SPN “speed” watch masterpost, which is written by someone who hadn’t seen a single episode of this show until 2018. This is important, because it means I’ve watched this whole show in very recent memory, and also don’t have any baggage left over from the 2012-13 SPN heyday, because somehow I managed to remain blissfully unaware of the peak cringe fandom days while they were happening.
The overwhelming dominance of free verse poetry in English sucks actually. It’s not a bad form but it IS bad that it’s the main form of english language poetry being published
I know everyone is conditioned to think rhyme, rhythm and meter is for either maudlin, sing-songy and childish poetry or excessively formal, pretentious poetry, but these things are just what makes phrases and lines memorable and punchy.
English naturally has rhythm and all poetry uses this stuff a little bit, it’s legitimately just What Make Word Sound Good
more importantly, rhyme, rhythm and meter are very connected to memory. there’s a reason why little songs and chants are our most enduring and effective memory tools
It occurs to me that most people don’t know how these things work so here:
How Poetic Rhythm, Meter, and Rhyme Actually Work!
People seem to only learn about rhyme in grade school, and they don’t appear to learn that rhymes other than perfect rhymes (rhymes where the ending ‘sound(s)’ perfectly match) exist.
When I first got into writing my own poetry, I repeatedly heard “don’t use rhymes like ‘true’ and ‘blue’,” but for some reason it’s hard to find an explanation of this.
So here it is. “True” and “blue” are perfect rhymes because the ending sounds are identical.
Most pairs considered ‘rhymes’ in poetry do not perfectly match like that. I’m sorry grade school and colloquial usage lied to you. Rhymes are sounds at the ends of lines (or even inside lines!) that echo each other. That’s it.
Here’s a set of rhymes that are at least close to perfect, from the song “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC:
She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean/She was the best damn woman that I ever seen
However, imperfect rhymes are REALLY, REALLY COMMON and they often sound better. Here’s a couple rhyming lyrics from the song “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison:
Every rose has its thorn/Just like every night has its dawn
This still rhymes. It’s just not perfect.
Here’s the thing. Rhyme is supposed to make Poem Sound Good On Brain, and it is only about 20% of what makes poetry Sound Good On Brain.
To talk about meter, we have to talk about stress. Stress is, like rhyme, inexact, but it arguably messes stuff up a lot more if you don’t understand it.
To explain what stress is, imagine this scenario: You are seen walking hastily away from the zoo in a ski mask, carrying a large cage covered with a sheet that occasionally emits strange sounds. (I promise this will make sense in a second.)
Before you can leave the parking lot, though, you are stopped by an angry zookeeper. “Did you steal the capybara from its cage?” the zookeeper asks.
You make one of the following excuses (please read these aloud, it’ll help):
I didn’t steal the capybara from its cage.
I didn’t steal the capybara from its cage.
I didn’t steal the capybara from its cage.
What are you doing to the bolded word that makes the meaning of your excuse different? You’re putting emphasis, or stress, on it.
All English speech naturally has places that are stressed. Without stress, it sounds like a robot in a 1970′s cartoon is talking. Specifically, almost all multisyllabic English words have specific syllables that are always stressed. (There are some regional variations.) You can figure it out by simply reading the word aloud with the stress on different syllables until you find the one that sounds normal and not evil:
Walrus vs. Walrus
Giraffe vs. Giraffe
Tiger vs. Tiger
Baboonvs. Baboon
Ostrich vs. Ostrich
Raccoon vs. Raccoon
Penguin vs. Penguin
Gazelle vs. Gazelle
Gecko vs. Gecko
Vulture vs. Vulture
Okay, let’s leave the zoo. Try it with these words:
Divine
Shower
Convince
Pebble
Sidewalk
Carpet
Smoothie
Attract
Relax
Darkness
Garden
Surpass
Object
Wait, what’s that last one? That’s right, some English words are indistinguishable except for which syllable is stressed. “I object!” you might say at a wedding you don’t approve of. “It’s an unidentified flying object,” you might say if you glimpse an alien spaceship in a blurry picture.
Now try it with some three syllable words:
Immortal
Magenta
Poetry
Carnivore
Tomorrow
Entity
I feel like “entity” is a noun and “entity” would have to be a verb, if you catch my drift.
(You will notice that two-syllable English words typically have stress on the first syllable, and that three-syllable English words usually have stress on the second syllable or maybe the first.)
Single-syllable words have fuzzier rules. A single word can be stressed or unstressed depending on context. In general, content-heavy words are stressed, whereas connecting words that don’t have much meaning can kinda do what they want depending on the words around them.
English likes to periodically pick up stress, like a curious hiker periodically picking up rocks. You can barely say more than three syllables in a row without naturally emphasizing something.
This is convenient, because when stresses occur in a rhythmic pattern, ambiguous words will be swept along with the pattern.
Here’s another thing to read aloud. See which of the following couplets “sounds” better to you:
Both couplets have the same number of syllables (ten in each line), but only the first line is metered. You might recognize it–it’s iambic pentameter! This is a form of accentual-syllabic verse.
You will notice that “pent” means five, but there’s ten syllables. Fear not– “pentameter” refers to the number of feet in the line. In this case, it’s the number of iambs.
An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Giraffe is an iamb. Divine is an iamb. Any two syllables with that pattern can be.
There are three other main options for “feet” in English accentual-syllabic verse: trochees (stressed-unstressed), dactyls (stressed-unstressed-unstressed), and anapests (unstressed-unstressed-stressed). There is also the spondee (two stressed syllables) and pyrrhus (two unstressed syllables) but you can’t really write an entire poem with those (okay you TECHNICALLY can with the spondee, but there are only a few examples). Not all English meter is based on “feet,” but this is a good starting point.
When people think poetry, they think rhyme. Never meter. When people who haven’t studied poetry try to write poetry, they make it rhyme, but they don’t utilize meter.
This is not good, because in my opinion, rhyme, especially perfect rhyme, typically needs to be accompanied by some kind of rhythm to not sound like shit.
You know who can pull off perfect rhymes in poetry? Robert Frost. I’m going to put an entire poem here.
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
This doesn’t have that cringy sing-songy effect that a lot of perfect rhyme creates, and I believe that this is BECAUSE the rhythm of the syllables is so formal and strict.
Imagine if it was like this:
These woods belong to someone I know. He lives in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods, all covered in snow.
This is so bad.
You can do really cool things with the combination of rhyme and meter. Here’s one of my favorite examples, with stresses bolded:
Now I’m falling asleep and she’s calling a cab While he’s having a smoke and she’s taking a drag Now they’re going to bed, and my stomach is sick And it’s all in my head, but she’s touching his
What’s the pattern? Unstressed, unstressed, stressed. How many of these per line? Four. Anapestic tetrameter, my friends. Except, of course, for the last line, which we expectto rhyme with “sick.”
The pattern is so powerful that when you listen to the song, your brain fills in…a word rhyming with “sick,” and it really turns you upside down when the pattern isn’t finished as you expect.
“Mr. Brightside” isn’t the usual example of a song that is “poetic,” but there is a lot of very competent usage of poetic techniques in these lines. Pay attention to how rhyme is used here. “Cab” and “drag” are not perfect rhymes, but they echo. “Falling” and “calling” are perfect rhymes within one line. “Bed” and “head” are perfect rhymes in the middle of two consecutive lines. The words that end in “-ing” create echoes.
Rhyme is used, but it’s never used in the exact same pattern twice. The different rhyme patterns interweave with each other and create a lot of variety while still having continuity.
I don’t have a conclusion here. I just think it’s sad that this isn’t common knowledge, since we absolutely do have an intuitive understanding of when something scans and when it doesn't—we know when something “sounds right.”
It disappears when we’re trying to write a poem on purpose, but it’s there when we’re parodying a song or slogan, or sharing variations of the “roses are red, violets are blue” meme.
because some of yall seemed interested so I thought I’d share the main avenues by which I pick up on new paleontology information
PBS Eons – probably the most wide-ranging and easily accessible of any of these. High-budget production with some great hosts and a very followable narrative approach to their subjects. If the mere ghost of the Green brothers gives you hives, it’s a Complexly co-production.
Dr. Polaris – talking polar bear in a hat covers an incredibly broad range of extinct animal groups, including but not limited to dinosaurs, non-dinosaur triassic reptiles, ice age megafauna, and the prehistoric ancestors and relatives of modern animals. Also has his own speculative evolution project and has in the past covered, with extreme saltiness, issues of racism and Christian evangelizing in cryptozoology.
The Budget Museum – A slightly lighter take on a lot of natural history topics, including paleontology. Really fun and never too jargon-y, which can sometimes come up in a few of these..
E.D.G.E. –contains multitudes. This channel’s delivery style might not be for everyone but he gets my respect as the youtube paleo community’s premium supplier of memes, and also as a tireless organizer of community events and theme weeks who constantly works to bring attention to new and underappreciated channels and artists. Actually employs several artists including animators for many of his videos. Somehow always manages to have a comprehensive deep dive into whatever the new hot discovery is within days as well as his usual content. Is trying really hard to bring back those absurd animations from Animal Planet’s The Most Extreme and so I must stan.
CHimerasuchus –one of the heroes who pops up in the paleo community who is absolutely dedicated to covering an underappreciated non-dinosaur group. In this case the many, many strange prehistoric relatives of crocodiles are the main focus of the channel but they dip into other groups as well.
Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong –in-depth talks on dinosaur anatomy using toys as a jumping-off point. When I say in-depth I mean crazy in-depth. Great visuals that show a transformation from the inaccurate pop-culture version to the more scientifically understood version as the episode progresses. (Used to be hosted on a different shared channel but there’s a playlist available of the old episodes.)
Ben G Thomas –one of my favorites! They do larger paleo videos and some great stuff on living animals but IMO the real gem is their 7 Days of Science videos, weekly bite-sized chunks of current news that is usually at least 50% paleontology, as that’s the focus of one of the hosts. Please don’t ask me to explain what’s up with Doug, none of us understand what his long game is.
Henry the PaleoGuy – most of the dinosaurs he covers are via his New Zealand Bird of the Week series, but extinct fauna of all kinds are also a regular part of the channel (and also the drama of the weekly bird votes is fun. it took us SO LONG but team black-fronted dotterel finally achieved our victory)
Animal Origins – focuses on mammalian evolution after the dinosaurs up to recently extinct animals, along with a bit of modern day biology.
Moth Light Media – generally broad coverage of prehistoric life, including the evolutionary paths of modern-day animal groups. Sometimes even covers paleobotany, which literally nobody does.
Raptor Chatter – monthly paleontology news-in-review videos and assorted other videos from paleontology fieldworker and student Ezekiel O’Callahan. Sometimes also interviews other field workers and paleontologists.
TierZoo – not really a paleo channel per se but too good to leave off. This is a general ecology/biology channel with the gimmick that he talks as if he’s giving advice on the meta for playing an MMORPG called “Outside.” Different animals are player builds and classes. The dinosaurs got nerfed in the Cenozoic update.
Prehistoric Australia –what it sounds like! This is a pretty new channel but Australian paleontology can be sorely neglected sometimes and I was glad to find a channel focusing on it entirely.
Enchiridion –ridiculously in-depth mini-documentaries (and sometimes full documentary length videos) on a wide variety of paleofauna. This was mainly a project for the creator during lockdown and so uploads have slowed but it’s not dead by any means. Somewhat more focused on facts and figures.
Nature’s Compendium – beautifully illustrated videos mostly focusing on prehistoric sea life. Also an alpha tester for the upcoming Prehistoric Kingdom game who sometimes streams gameplay of new features and of his builds.
I want to summarize what I’ve been reading about in the library. hhhhhh how do I do that
I’ve been reading (and have read) a lot about trauma and anxiety, and also literature, literary theory, literary criticism, things like that. I feel like I’m comprehending something vast about human nature and my own nature that makes me want to vibrate at the speed of light.
It’s something to do with picking up a book in the literature section that was a survey of woundedness, or scars and wounds as motifs in classic literature, and picking up a book in the psych section about feeling safe and healing from fear, and realizing the books’ prefaces talked about essentially the same things in essentially the same language
sufficiently advanced psychology, that is, compassionate and human centered, is indistinguishable from literary studies
This book is about coping with real life horror, but it also is just one fantastic insight after another on how to write about horror, probably more so than anything I’ve read actually for the purpose of showing how to write horror.
I literally cannot stop returning to these lines in my head, especially “And only two processes are strong enough to reduce and contain fear. Those two processes are: knowing and loving.”
Does this writer know what a searing artistic insight they have happened upon? That a horror story, a story that delves in fear, must also be a love story, not in the sense of a story about falling in love or that centers the feeling of love, but in the sense that wherever love and understanding is absent, there true horror is, and whatever loves or is loved or must be loved, whatever understands or is understood or demands to be understood, that is what lets us fight back.
Like there are all these thinkpieces on what the core of the horror story is, what is the fundamental human fear that drives it, and I think this is it. It’s right here
Okay. i have gotten SO many messages asking me to identify the book since i posted this and for the LONGEST time I could not find the book. Like. I searched the library for it multiple times and it seemed to have vanished.
BUT i finally came across it again recently!
The book is Feeling Safe: Making Space for the Self by Stephen Shapiro and Hilary Ryglewicz
I would also like to add The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry to a list of essential books for horror writers that are not related to literature or writing.
The Body in Pain is a book about torture, and specifically the psychology, power dynamics, and construction of reality involved in torture.
It was talking about how torture makes the victim’s body “complicit” in their own suffering, how the pain is like a really intense, intimate form of betrayal of the sufferer by their own body. That was what made me think of how the book could be applied to writing horror. It also gives a really complete survey and analysis of how humans talk about and conceptualize pain, and just really delves deeply into the psychology of pain, the ways in which suffering is dehumanizing and how suffering is related to power.
So i thought: honestly anyone trying to write horror needs to read this. It’s not only a fantastic source of vocabulary on that which is horrifying, it is super enlightening on the THEORY of horror. If you want to dive deep into the core of what makes things Horrible, this book has you covered.
