“How’s your WIP going?”

"Have you made any progress?”

“How close are you to being done?”

Tess is very very determined and nothing is going to stop her from doing what she wants.

Escape attempt foiled by own desire to nom

happy new year! reminder that as of January 1st, 2025, the 1929 animated Disney short "The Skeleton Dance" is now public domain!

I'd like to say "this will find its audience" but the truth is I just didn't know how to tag this

so either it'll find its audience or it'll get like 0 notes

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.

This needs to be reblogged today.

Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut

Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.

You walnut.

This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3

if someone puts a sign on the road to the water hole that says “there are sharks in the water hole,” and you read it and go

hmm nah still wanna go in the hole

and then someone puts a bunch of signs around the water hole being like “there are sharks here” “do not swim” “swim at your own peril” “they are man-eating sharks” “they were trained by evil villains to crave the flesh of humans” “sincerely don’t go in the water hole”

and you still read it and go

hmm nah but I wanna go in the hole

at that point you forfeit the right to get upset with the hole owner that you went into the hole and now you’re getting chewed on

the hole was properly tagged

that you are now getting gnawed on is your own doing

I really hate when people mystify intelligence as some innate or supernatural ability rather than the willingness to read books and consider different perspectives. Anyone with enough time, training, and preparation could become a professor. Stop seeing knowledge as arcane rather than as a skill anyone can develop.

"The first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult."

-Frank Herbert (Dune, 1965)

Here’s to 2023, a year of as many little courageous kindnesses as possible. ♥️

To a year of kindness in 2024

Bringing this back for 2025

watching bridgerton and obviously there were a lot of things wrong with the way socializing has worked in the past, but honestly the idea of a "calling hour" is so appealing. office hours for friendship. you can show up unannounced at my home between 1 and 3pm. you must leave by 3pm. I may give you a pastry. lets bring that back

this was actually a real thing, for the record. I know with That Show it's 50/50 what they made up and what's legit history

additionally, in some times and places, visitors would have to go through your servant. as in, they'd turn up and the servant would "go see if you were at home." and if you just didn't want to see them, you could simply. lie. and the servant would be like "oh sorry you JUST missed her :( anyway byeeeee"

(obviously there would be repercussions for the relationship if the person found out that you were only Not At Home to them, specifically. but it was still an option)

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

who was it who once said he’d know racism was over when he saw a Black criminal in a home security system commercial? it may have been a Black comedian. either way, as a gay woman, Mood

Well put. (Source: Writing About Writing Facebook page)

as a lawyer who’s been practicing for six years now I can say with certainty that this 100% applies to lawyers

thinking again about vampirism as disability

what if you slept all day and woke at night, lonely and frustrated. what if you couldn't go to social events, or even mundane public spaces like stores. what if you couldn't see the sun. what if you couldn't go to the pool, or the beach, or the creek. what if you couldn't eat what everyone else is eating. what if you couldn't eat at all. what if your basic needs came at the cost of your loved ones' quality of life. what if you became agitated, confused, maybe even violent if your needs weren't met. what if people blamed your behavior on demons, or worse, your own inherent evil. what if people saw you as a threat to your own community. what if the default response to your suffering was either indifference or violence. what if people thought you were better off dead, that you no longer count as human, that they're doing you a favor by letting you disappear. what if people assumed you must somehow deserve all of this. what about that.

Telephone Sheep by Jean Luc Cornec

Oh these are the electric sheep the androids dream about

ohhh “cable knit” i get it now

Happy anniversary to my favourite ship

On This Day In History

March 23rd, 2021: A container ship runs aground and obstructs the Suez Canal for six days.

Happy anniversary to [tumblr]'s beloved Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal.

My baby is having a birthday!

I’m literally on thr verge of tears