The Late 2000s To Mid 2010s Had At Least These Achievements:

One can hope...

I'm glad the sheriff's department got told off. I hope the fair staff get told off too

I admire people who can keep a tub of Ben and Jerry's ice-cream in the freezer for a week.

The celebrity Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors being some of the best ones is like the retail equivalent of having to go to a restaurant and order a rootin tootin yeehaw cowboy burger or something

I want to always be like the guy who joined in on the joke. how delightful all around.

i found a baby picture of my cat please please look at him i'm begging you

"Ready to"

When you think of yourself as a living tool that's just there to perform a function, but then you realize there are people out there who see you as a living being and they'd be upset if you died, and you're like, oh, now I guess I'm literally going to have to fight death haha

Wow, mad skills

“First season of LEVERAGE - so he's 21 years old - he shows me his watch designs. I'm expecting, y' know, celebrity strap branding or faces. No, it's engineering schematics of GEARS and shit. Pages of them. Even then, there were none so cool.” - John Rogers

That's so cool

FISH DELOUSING LASER????

I wrote this piece on a whim a few years ago. I really like how it came out.

Talks with my dog

When the aliens came they spoke with everything; insects, marine animals, birds, wild animals, our farmstock and our pets! Some of us were worried about what the animals would say about us, some were excited about the possibility of animal to human translation. Some said they even spoke to the micro-organisms in the soil.

We thought they'd talk with us next. These beings who could communicate with every thing else on our planet. We sent them invitations to summits. We tried to have conversations with them when we saw them.

They didn't even look at us.

Some idiot with a gun got angry at being ignored and shot one. The response was violent and definitive, the whole town died within seconds. The state retaliated, as did the country. As far as we know there are no humans left alive over there now.

We might have all gone to war, except that our pets, the insects and the very birds attacked anyone who approached weaponry and missile storage locations. Anyone who got past them was violently ill. Those who persisted died of ruptured bowels, blood toxicity.

They left, never talking with us.

I'm making progress in talks with my dog.

It's also okay to describe what the active character is looking at. For example, "I saw her eyes starting to water, and as the first tears fell, I reached across the table and cupped her face in my hand. She looked down and leaned her face into my pain. I wiped her tears away with my thumb, across the ridges and valleys of her crows feet.

Or

Uncomfortable at her tears, Adrian reacted across and held her face in his hand. Her tears ran over her face, highlighting the wrinkles exacerbated by the upset tension in her face.

In writing, epithets ("the taller man"/"the blonde"/etc) are inherently dehumanizing, in that they remove a character's name and identity, and instead focus on this other quality.

Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!

They can work very well for characters whose names the narrator doesn't know yet (especially to differentiate between two or more). How specific the epithet is can signal to the reader how important the character is going to be later on, and whether they should dedicate bandwidth to remembering them for later ("the bearded man" is much less likely to show up again than "the man with the angel tattoo")

They can indicate when characters stop being as an individual and instead embody their Role, like a detective choosing to think of their lover simply as The Thief when arresting them, or a royal character being referred to as The Queen when she's acting on behalf of the state

They can reveal the narrator's biases by repeatedly drawing attention to a particular quality that singles them out in the narrator's mind

But these only work if the epithet used is how the narrator primarily identifies that character. Which is why it's so jarring to see a lot of common epithets in intimate moments-- because it conveys that the main character is primarily thinking of their lover/best friend/etc in terms of their height or age or hair color.