So as we all know, NaNo will be shutting down sometime soon, taking with it a lot of valuable resources and memories. I took the liberty of going through its pep talk archive (both the main and the young writers one) and archiving what I could. Feel free to peruse and copy what you need, and let me know if I missed anything!
Seeing shows that are only 10-15 years old get rebooted is like watching a 30-something get a senior discount. What are you doing. It is too soon. They have not earned this.
The whole idea of a reboot is to take something that’s outdated and bring it into the modern age, to update it and make it current. If it’s less than 20 years old, it basically is current or pretty close to it, so what are you even updating?
That site’s days are numbered, and no one knows how long it will stay up. If there is anything on there that you care about preserving, whether it’s a pep talk from your favorite author or a private message from a buddy or a winner’s certificate or your stats, go and get it now.
With how quickly things have spiraled, it may not be long at all before the site is taken down. If any technical issues arise, it’s unlikely they’ll be fixed. Once it’s gone, you almost certainly won’t have any way to get that stuff back. Preserve it while you can.
There’s a lot of hope stemming from the fact that MAGA voters are beginning to realize that his actions (or lack thereof) will hurt them too. And as much as I’d like to feel that hope, I’m not sure I can. Because they realized it last time too, and in the end, it didn’t matter. A lot of conservative federal workers went without pay for a long time during the 2019 shutdown and yet that fucker is back in office anyway.
Because no matter how much they hate what Trump is doing to them, they will always hate migrants more.
The hatred for immigrants or any kind of outsider runs dangerously deep. Not just in the US and not just in White people, but everywhere. A high number of Latinos voted for him and had a real disdain for immigrants even when they were immigrants themselves. Europe has had a far-right resurgence of their own in the wake of the refugee crisis. And I’ve heard plenty of stories about how Japan treats foreigners. This is an ancient fear that’s as old as humanity itself. You even see it in folklore, the common trope of a stepparent or some other kind of outsider invading the family/community and stealing/corrupting your children or otherwise ruining everything. Some of that may be rooted in real and reasonable fears like colonization, but a lot of it is just plain contempt and fear of difference and change.
MAGA folks might sour on him now, but when we get close to the next election, propaganda outlets will start pushing a dozen stories a day on migrant crime and caravans and border crises and suddenly all of those same folks will either forget that he screwed them over or just not care because they think it’ll be worth it to get rid of migrants, and they’ll vote for him again. Because for a scary amount of them, no issue is more important than immigration, and no price will ever be too high if it means getting rid of the “invaders.” And I don’t know how you campaign against that. Or if you even can.
I truly believe that if you gave some of these people the option of “All migrants will disappear forever, but in exchange, you must surrender your home, job, car, business, money, health, education, freedom, privacy, family, friends, and hobbies,” they’d do it. Hell, you could give them the option of “All migrants will disappear forever but in exchange, you must spend the rest of your life in an 8 x 10 solitary confinement cell that you can never leave,” and they’d do it. Not all of them, of course. Maybe not even most of them. But I’d bet anything that the number of people who would take those deals would not be zero. And they’d convince themselves they were patriotic to do it.
I think about that LBJ quote all the time. The one that says:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
What’s interesting about this quote is that it’s divided into two parts. At first, the White man doesn’t know he’s being robbed. He’s distracted and blissfully ignorant. But then, in the second part, he does know. And not only is he okay with that, he helps it happen. Because he hates Black people more than he loves his money. And that is how MAGA is about immigrants. They will happily let their savior fuck them over again and again and again if it means they will have someone to feel superior to.
We’re in the first part of the quote now, just like we were in 2016. But give it time, and I’ll bet you anything that we will soon enter the second part if we haven’t already. It’s certainly happened before.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race has me thinking about this again today.
There’s often bafflement about how Democrats can sometimes do so well in state and local races yet so poorly in federal ones, and I think immigration might be the answer. Immigration enforcement isn’t nearly as much of a thing at the state and local level, so it doesn’t factor into the race, which makes winning those races much more doable for Democrats.
If you give people the choice of “Keep your rights or give them up and migrants won’t be affected one way or the other,” then they’ll vote to keep their rights. But if you give them the choice of “Keep your rights and give migrants the slightest bit of breathing room or forfeit your rights and migrants will be sadistically and cruelly punished,” they’ll throw out their rights in a minute and not even have to think that hard about it.
a lot of stories treat romance like it makes the relationship between two characters self explanatory and to be honest it doesn’t
story: they're in love :)
me: why?
story: what do you mean? they're in love :)
me: what do they bring to each other's lives? what do they admire about one another? what draws them to each other?
story: love :) :)
me: ok... so what is that going to look like now?
story: like love :) :) :)
me: are their personalities going to clash at all? are they going to have arguments? learn to compromise for each other? will they need to adapt to sharing their life with another person? is it going to be smooth perfect harmony from day one? are they going to be always together? see each other sometimes as their occupations allow? how does this relationship affect their lifes.
story: they're in love :) :) :)
Okay so this is funny and all but it actually made me realize part of why Kaiba hates Joey and is so determined to be better than him.
Kaiba’s deck is skillful, calculated, and precise. Each card is handpicked, each strategy is run through an algorithm or simulation, etc. Everything about Kaiba’s deck and dueling style is intelligent.
Meanwhile Joey just kinda coasts by on luck. There’s not much theme to his deck other than that; he just picks whatever monsters he thinks are cool.
And Kaiba HATES that. He HATES that Joey does so well on luck because he needs to believe that skill is more powerful than luck. Luck (or lack thereof) was what landed him in an orphanage. Skill was what got him out of it. He needs to believe that everyone controls their own destiny because it lets him believe you can always control or get out of a bad situation if only you’re skilled enough. The idea that luck could take that control out of your hands is terrifying for him. So he demands that the luck-based deck lose.
Yugi’s deck isn’t as precise as Kaiba’s, but it’s still mostly based on strategy and clever combos. It may be a different type of skill that isn’t Kaiba’s style, but it’s still a skill.
He can (begrudgingly) handle losing to Yugi. But losing to Joey might actually break him.
Bro absolutely COOKED with this.
the thing we really need to understand though is that these people do not believe they are cruel and this is not why they do this.They believe they are smarter. They believe they worked harder. They believe they deserve the life that they have and that if other people want what that have then they need to earn it. In short, they believe in the root cause of fascism: hierarchy.
Hierarchal thinking includes beliefs like “society only works when there are people at the top and people at the bottom.” So when you say everyone is equal and should be treated the same, people who believe in hierarchy hear that you want to take away their place. You want to downgrade them. This is why they can’t abide any talk like this. There needs to be a ladder because otherwise why have they been working so hard to climb it? If no one needs charity, then who are they going to be charitable to? If they are the same as someone they look down on, then how can they define their worth as a human being?
When these people flex their power, they are doing it to remind everyone of their place within the hierarchy. They do not do this out of malice; they do this to try to teach a lesson about hierarchy and earning your place. They do it because they see people beneath them as worker ants whose purpose is to prop up, learn from, and aspire to be like their betters.
Once you start to check for hierarchal beliefs, it’s amazing how much better you’ll be able to understand some people’s actions.
And this is not exclusive to right wing people either! Much of modern liberalism is based on liberals believing they are “smarter” than right wing “idiots” who are susceptible to propaganda (which ironically makes liberals more susceptible to propaganda because they believe they are immune). You’ll see many liberals who believe that they “know better,” “take the high road,” are “kinder/empathetic,” or, most terrifyingly, are “more human” than their political opponents.
Whenever you let hierarchal thinking take hold, you’re feeding the little fascist inside you. Everyone has one, but some people feed theirs and some people starve theirs. You get to pick every day (and often multiple times a day) what you do with yours.
TL;DR We need to understand how hierarchal thinking influences various worldviews if we’re ever going to effectively combat fascism.
Also the Taliban’s cruelty is definitely not out of necessity. There is no reason they NEED to beat women for not wearing burqas or never let them go to school. That’s not a survival thing; it’s motivated by cruelty in the same way as the people OP described.
I know the US government is a flaming dumpster fire of shit, but you can point that out without giving other shitheads in other parts of the world a pass or acting like their cruelty is “necessary.” It isn’t.
As much as I love the idea of a Shadow miniseries, it’s hard to be hopeful or excited for one based on how the Knuckles show and Shadow’s recent appearances have gone.
If we get that miniseries, Shadow will show up for the first episode, get hit by an ice cream truck, spend the next four episodes in a coma while a less interesting and less expensive human character hogs all the screen time, and then wake up just in time for the last episode so he can do one cool thing for SEGA to point to as justification for slapping his face on all the merchandise.
I guess I’ll take it, but man would it be disappointing.
Here’s a couple actual links to concrete things you can do to help, as determined by the American Library Association, who already stopped this maniac from doing this once. There are many smart & experienced people fighting for libraries & museums, but they need your help too.
This link allows you to send your personal library story directly to Congress: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577
And this is a straightforward petition you can sign in about a minute: https://action.everylibrary.org/eoimls2025
And if you want an easy way to contact your Congresscritters directly, text 50409 or search for ResistBot on Telegram to email, call or fax you Congresscritters. Libraries support democracy & are the last free reliably available 3rd Space in America. This is absolutely an emergency as serious as any of the other major institutional destructions so far this year.
This affects museums too!!! I'm a museum professional. We rely on federal grants and IMLS grants to be operational and to make vital improvements to education and public programming, exhibits, facilities, research and more. Federal funding is vital to museums surviving. The IMLS is responsible for a lot of funding that helps low income families specifically.
One program we have at the museum has allowed us to bring residents from local cities in to visit the museum completely for free every weekend. These are cities that are impoverished and whose residents would never otherwise visit the museum due to cost. We've seen a major uptick in attendance from these cities since we got the grant and I have heard personally from people who visit how grateful they are to now be able to visit this museum. One person had lived in this area for 40 years and has never been able to visit because he can't afford it and this was his first time visiting and he told me he learned so much and was so happy for this program.
One of the biggest IMLS funded program is the Museum For All program. This national program allows those with SNAP/EBT cards to visit museums for anywhere between FREE or $5 (my museum only charges $1 for those with the SNAP/EBT card). This allows low income families to visit museums. It is SUCH an important program that might now be shut down because of this attack on the IMLS!
Other IMLS grants have allowed us to rehouse and digitize collections, begin new education programs for low-income cities, design and create interactive exhibitions, and more.
The IMLS is so important!!! Museums and libraries are important!!!!! The government has spent the last few months systemically erasing black history and women's history from museum exhibits and websites under their anti DEI initiatives and now they're cutting funding? Something needs to be done.
So the above lists how to help libraries which is AMAZING!! Here is how to help museums:
The American Alliance of Museum has listed several things you can do on their website (https://www.aam-us.org/2025/03/17/urgent-act-now-to-save-imls/) so I'm going to just quote from them:
The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.
Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.
Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.
Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577
Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.
The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:
But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.
IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.
call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.
@ everyone in the notes talking about physical performance: if that were the case, then sports would be divided by physical performance. that’s a thing you can measure. that’s a thing that varies by individual. a weak man and a strong man would be an unfair fight in boxing/wrestling/MMA, which is why they divide those sports up into weight groups based on physical performance. but they also further segregate them based on gender. chess is segregated by gender for no reason but sexism. if it’s actually about skill and physical ability, then measure those and separate people by those metrics. don’t do some bullshit gender segregation and pretend like men and women are inherently on different levels no matter their individual abilities.
Remember that time a teenage girl struck out Babe Ruth? That’s fucking why. Men are afraid of being beaten by women.
Remember that time male swimmers were pulled out of training because Kate Ledecky was leaving them ‘broken’ by swimming better than them? Remember how she didn’t even notice, because she was busy actually training?
Shooting is a sport that has no reliance on strength and so any allowance for gender variation is irrelevant. The last time there was a mixed competition (1992) a chinese woman named Zhang Shan won it.
It’s often presented as for the benefit of women. After all, they’ll be heartbroken when they‘re hurt or bested by men.
Projection is a hell of a drug.
this is why they drug test Serena like crazy. the believe no woman should be that good. let alone a black woman. and black women have always been considered “manly” and less feminine.
also can we talk about how surfing is segregated as well? like how the dude who won this years international surfing cup or whatever was given $30,000 worth of prize money, while the woman who won the women’s comp was only awarded like $16,000 of prize money???? or whatever it was. but I know it was either half or less than half of what the man won. like why can’t they get the same prize money and when they’re competing internationally in the same competition? they surely have the same level of skill and talent.
the pay gap in sports between men and women is fucking insane.
The pay gaps, not to mention lack of sponsorships for women athletes who don’t look like models is insane. If you weigh over 250 pounds, no one will sponsor you. It’s why most female Olympic-class weightlifters live in poverty/out of their cars.
Reminder that in international (and usually national too) womens athletics anybody with 5m/mol of natural testosterone or higher is disqualified. (See legal case of Dutee Chand vs IAAF.)
Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.
Francine Niyonsaba
Caster Semenya
Dutee Chand
Margaret Wambui
And more
-
Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.
Racism and intersexism(discrimination against intersex people) in sports is abject evil. Desegregate sports.
All of this.
Oh, this some good stuff. I share to others
ABSOTUTAFUCKINGLUTELY. I AM SO INCREDIBLY SICK OF EVERYONE REGARDING WOMEN AS INHERENTLY LESS THAN MEN. “THERE IS NO SEXISM IN BA SING SE” MY ASS
Yup to all of this, especially the racism highlight
"this is an inaccurate adaptation" okay but is it good "this didn't happen in the book" does it make sense in the context of the new work though "they totally changed the plot" and is the new one good or bad "it's completely different" not what I asked "they changed all the stuff I like" then I get why you wouldn't be into it but I'm asking about its own artistic merits "this character is meant to be blonde" I couldn't give less of a fuck
When a story changes mediums things about that story HAVE TO CHANGE if they don't it won't work. Books can do things movies can't, movies can do things books can't, TV can do things neither can do, podcast fiction and graphic novels have strengths the other doesn't you have to adapt to the medium I I going to bite out a chunk of someone's flesh
Whenever someone portrays librarians as cranky old ladies who are constantly glaring at and shushing people, I assume that:
1. They’re misogynist.
2. They haven’t set foot in a library since kindergarten or possibly ever in their lives.
This post has escaped containment and somehow found its way into TERF/transphobe circles, soooo
It's ironic how a major part of Lord of the Rings is that storytellers always overlook hobbits in their legends because their simple lives are "less important" than the lives of Great Royals & Grand Warriors--- since that's ultimately been reflected in the current state of the Tolkien franchise itself!
After the LOTR films, big-budget Tolkien franchise installments (and copycats) overwhelmingly focus on their Aragorn analogues, with hobbit-like characters shoved to the sidelines.
The Lord of the Rings films may be flawed, but they succeeded because they had a strong central story-- the relationship between Frodo and Sam, and the fairytale-themes about small overlooked people who save the day while the villains are distracted by Great Heroes from Noble Bloodlines, are what give the story the deep lasting emotional impact that it has.
But the franchise(tm) quickly decided that the royal warrior elves/men were the far more exciting marketable characters, and their battle skills could allow for more flashy spectacle. The Hobbit films gradually focused more heavily on the warrior characters, with Bilbo being a glorified extra by the last movie; The Amazon LOTR show focuses on a noble warrior elf of royal blood as its main character and political intrigue among the royalty of different kingdoms as its main plot; the recent animated film focuses on a noble hero of royal blood involved in epic battles.
I've mentioned before that it's fascinating how all the new "Tolkien franchise" installments (as well as media inspired by LOTR) continue to center their stories on the Aragorn archetype-- a Destined Noble Hero/Warrior from a Royal Bloodline etc etc. The entire premise of Lord of the Rings is that Aragorn represents the hero of a typical generic fantasy epic, while the ordinary Hobbits are the heroes of this one. Aragorn is interesting not in spite of the fact that he is a side character, but because of it. If he were the central character of the story, Lord of the Rings would be very bland and generic.
"Let's do a new version of Lord of the Rings but focus on powerful grand royal hero characters instead" is a lot like saying "let's do a retelling of Wicked from Dorothy's point of view." It's like, "congrats! you've successfully reinvented the exact type of story the original writer was commenting on and subverting." XD
