@ivyblossom / ivyblossom.tumblr.com
Don't fall for the tolerance and respect for everyone's opinion if they aren't tolerant and respectful of your EXISTENCE.
Tolerance is not ethics; it's a survival strategy. If people aren't agreeing to cooperate with the mutual survival terms, they're not subject to its benefits.
The Library of Congress is changing the subject heading "Gulf of Mexico" to "Gulf of America". They are also rolling back hard-won changes to Indigenous place names. Because of the nature of cataloguing consortial agreements, almost all academic libraries in North America will be expected to follow suit.
Canadians in universities: ask your librarian if this change is going to be implemented at your library.
In honor of the Ides of March, my favorite Tiktok
"Oh, not you as well, Brutus!" in that voice is the best translation of 'Et tu, Brute?' I've ever heard.
I revised. I really did it, like, I made several significant structural adjustments to a draft. I'm even ready to make more as soon as I figure out what those should be. LOOK AT ME GO!
I know this isn't a big deal really, but it's a big deal for ME. Why is this such a big deal to me? I don't know! I guess I never really understood how a story worked, so I couldn't change something big at the beginning without feeling like it just trashes the whole thing and I'm on an entirely different fork of the story now now, the rest has to be rewritten.
But I did it! More than once! I shall get cake.
I see there's a push to be extra nice and sympathetic to people who voted for a fascist regime and end up getting hurt by it. I don't think that's a great idea.
The recommendation to hide your actual feelings and embrace these people is based on the hope that acting as if you forgive them and empathize with them will make them better, less fascist people. It's actually just a way for them to be forgiven in every meaningful way and ensure that they never feel any accountability for their actions. It's also a way to shut you up. Who does that serve? Your side? Or theirs?
I mean, for starters, it's a lie. No one actually feels any sympathy for those people. The fascists certainly don't, and the people who cried when the fascists got elected mostly don't sympathize with fascist voters getting what they voted for.
There is a narrative that if you're gentle and kind with fascists in their moments of distress, they will become less fascist because of how amazingly supportive and welcoming you are. Is there any evidence that that's true? Because it sounds like what the fascists want you to do: never make them uncomfortable, always embrace and support them, always accept them, no matter what atrocities they commit against you. Stay quiet about it, pretend it never happened. Show them how generous and forgiving you are, that'll teach'em!
Buried inside there is the idea that those people are fascists because someone like you wasn't kind enough to them, and pretending to forgive them now will somehow undo that earlier mistake and make them see the light. If you're honest about your anger and the harm they've caused, you'll just alienate them!
Who does this victim-blaming serve?
The idea that lying about reality to protect fascists' feelings will somehow reduce fascism is just absorbed censorship. It's a neurotic, perfectionist mind trap. It's a control fantasy.
I don't think it's respectful or kind to lie to people. I don't think lying to people in the hopes of manipulating them is particularly winsome for your side, especially once they learn the truth (that you were furious with them and not at all sympathetic). Unless the idea is that they never learn that truth. In which case, you're not manipulating them. You're bowing down to them.
Me and my murder of crows continue to be good friends. I think I frighten people sometimes when I'm walking down the road and suddenly 40 crows appear out of nowhere all headed towards me. I used to think people were getting annoyed at me for befriending so many crows, but now I realize they might wondering if this is a Hitchcock The Birds situation and worrying about my safety. I am perfectly safe! These birbs are family.
I am fully embracing the weird bird lady reputation I am probably building.
I talked to my crows. You have to talk to creatures. All creatures. It's disrespectful not to. It's silly to assume all creatures are dumber than us and wouldn't understand. Crows can see colours I can't even imagine and don't know exist. Crows can probably see forces in the world that we can't. They might understand quantum mechanics, you don't know that they don't, I say. So: talk to animals. It's rude not to.
I met one crow the other day who didn't react like all the other ones do when I throw peanuts. I assume that was a new guy from a different area, and we must not have met yet. So I picked up the peanuts and delivered them in a different spot, and welcomed him to the neighbourhood.
I think in the video game played by crows, I am a loot crate. I'm okay with that.
I understand that the answer is probably no, and I completely respect that.
Is anyone who knows me willing to look at a draft of an original story? It's been pretty heavily revised already, so it's not raw, or anything, and I'm open to further revision. It would help to get another perspective on that. Upper middle grade speculative fiction, 72K.
I have been trying to apply all the advice I've been given and gleaned over the years on how to build original stories well, and I learned a lot writing this one. It's definitely the best original story I've written, but whether I actually figured out how to do it well yet or not is an open question.
effectively killing two of your protagonists who are actually the same protagonist by forcing them to develop into a kind of mutual twin-absorbed-in-the-womb type chimeric synthesis of each other thereby introducing a third new protagonist who is actually both and neither of them. and at the end of season two episode three no less.
The Tuvix manoeuvre.
A child looks at a screen, ecstatic: "It's an interactive CD-rom!"
That is an incredibly stupid film and this detail couldn't matter any less, but it is still bothering me that this kid is a) this excited about a CD-rom, but also, b) somehow intuiting that this program could not possibly be running on the built-in drive, but had to be running off a CD drive. Like, why?
There was no CD slot on the machine. It was a kiosk screen built into a land rover running this dumb touchscreen map program and she just randomly decided couldn't be running off a hard drive. She is meant to be a "computer nerd" though she prefers the term "hacker". The hacker can hear the whiz of the CD drive through that plastic housing and distinguish it from the whiz of a hard disk spinning up, I guess?
Imagine the logistics, though: why on earth wouldn't you just put your built-in program on the hard drive? In 1993, even that would have been fragile, given that it was still moving parts, but at least it's not running off a device more sensitive than balls. CD drives, the things that are notoriously averse to any kind of movement, and were never very good at being portable, why would you put one of those in your land-rover-mounted kiosk in a dinosaur park?
That's why I never bothered to buy a discman, they were so finicky and sensitive people had to try to walk with them upright to get them to work. It was such a downgrade from the walkman. Tapes don't give a shit what direction they're facing, CDs need the vibes and the temperature to be just so, and even the slightly nudge causes them to catastrophically fail.
But sure, put a spinning, fragile, removable disc in your dinosaur park land rover kiosk for all the sticky-fingered kids to enjoy. Why?
Is this why the land rovers in Jurassic Park (1993) are on tracks? To keep the movement smooth for the interactive CD-rom?
I mean that guess that tracks, these are also the people who put poisonous plants, apex predators, and dinosaurs spitting acid into their family-friendly amusement park, so sure. These people are made of bad decisions.
Maybe the cd-rom in the land rover is Jurassic Park (1993) in a nutshell, really.
The perennial complaint from fanfic writers that they put so much effort into a story, therefore they are owed fannish engagement, and there ought to be some sort of return on investment for their fannish labour: I am perplexed. I'm not sure where these folks got the message that readers have the option to rank and sort fics by author effort. I must have glossed over that AO3 field all these years. Is it a Likert scale?
Julia Howarth, editor for The Communicator (a Star Trek fanzine/newsletter), 1975.
"There is a new baby in the family. His name is Randy. He is grey, with green teeth and a great carriage. He typed the entire COMMUNICATOR. He is my typewriter, which I up and bought with $20 that should have gone to the electric bill!" "[The Communicator] was assembled by literally cutting and pasting. Articles were cut out and glued on the pages. Artwork was also cut out and glued to the page. The titles and page numbers were hand written or calligraphed. Sources of artwork were fannish artists, prints of Star Trek film clips, TV Guides and newspapers, and photocopies of pictures from professional magazines. We then took the masters to one of the few copy shops available in the 1970s to print the pages. The magazine was hand folded and collated, then stapled with a tiny Swingline Cub stapler. This magazine was a very amateur labor of love."
Summary: Moments from the life of Rosie Watson-Holmes and the bees of 221B Baker Street. Music, memories, love and loss.
Summary: Three times John went on holiday; three different tenses of the verb ‘to love.’ A love story, over and over.
Summary: When Sherlock takes on the case of Henry Knight he is unprepared for what he will find at Baskerville. Behind the facade of doped up monkeys, glowing rabbits, and the ever-present alien joke Sherlock suspects there's a darker trial being run. One without full govt authority that involves a very human subject.
Summary: Sherlock Holmes returns from two years away, after acquiring a slight cocaine addiction and dismantling Moriarty's network, with all of the hope in the world that he will be able to re-claim his life, his flat, and the love of his live, his best friend John Watson. Sherlock's hopes are dashed when he returns to find John has moved on and is practically engaged to be married.
I've been on a journey with planning and outlining for a long time now, but as a former pantser, it still feels very fresh to me, and everything about it is surprising.
None of this comes naturally to me at all. Once again: when I say "lessons", I mean the lessons I have learned, not lessons of value to anyone else, you're probably better at this than I am. I'm very open to feedback and ideas on planning, this is foreign territory for me.
My biggest revelation about planning and outlining is that, after years of hating and dreading anything even remotely structured, it turns out that I really enjoy this part. It's ridiculous and fun.
My paradigm shift was going from thinking of it as some (ugh!) structured version of writing to it being an entirely different activity. I seems closer to daydreaming than to writing. It doesn't take from the experience of writing, it's adding a new, fun version of composing story that's just as creative and immersive and fun, and even more self-indulgent, it's just from a slightly different vantage point and is less gruelling. It's also easier to do when I'm tired, so I can even see it as something I can do when I don't feel like writing, so it's not even overlapping time-wise.
It's taken me a while to figure how to do this in a way that makes sense and feels good. This is what I've managed so far.
It's blathering. It has no order and no structure, and I'm not sure I even understand what's happening in this process. Maybe one day I will. It comes out as a mess of random thoughts and ideas. It is documented daydreaming.
There have been times when I would just keep all that in my head and have it fuel whatever I did, but that isn't a very reliable or predictable way to function, and it means I'm not making choices between options. So what I'm doing now is to just write it all down, which helps me see it and think about it some more. Once I write it down, it change. Is that weird?
The blather has no rules. It's total free-associating. I write down whatever I'm thinking about related to this story, anything that grabs my attention about it. Things that don't work or things I don't know, things I'm obsessed with, anything. And none of it is artful.
Every time I pick the document up again, I start at the top. I don't reread it. I just blather. I repeat myself. At first it's just bits and pieces of things and me droning on about characters and what I think they're worrying about and wanting, etc. etc. Blather is functional, I don't know why. It helps me make decisions and work through ideas. The ideas get bigger and deeper as I blather about them, and problems emerge and get solved.
At a certain point, the blather starts to coalesce into scenes or pieces of them. And then I start telling myself the story as I know it. Over and over. Eventually I can't tell myself the whole story, I get stuck on some part and spend days circling around it. Sometimes I start telling myself the story from the middle, or work backwards, or whatever appeals to me. But there starts to be a sense of order and linked events, and ideas arrive, spend time in the story, stick around or get kicked out. New day, I start again at the top and tell myself the story again. This is kind of weird and obsessive, but it feels like what I want to be doing, it's like a fidget toy or something.
When I do this enough, eventually I want to start lining up the stuff I know about what happens in the order it happens. I can do that in the document for a bit, but then it starts to get out of hand. Then I start wanting a specific tool that lets me put this in order without putting it in order. Every time I reach this point I try different tools, and none of them work the way I want them to. That might be because I want to do something but not do it at the same time. But that's the point where I want to lay it out in a more structured way, but the thing doesn't have a structure.
At some point, and I don't know what triggers this, but the thing untangles in a way that even though it's not complete yet, it becomes linear. I can line up scenes and it makes perfect sense, I don't need a weird tool. That's the point when I'm ready for a proper outline. I can't say I completely understand what's going on here, but this is what it looks like.
The blathering is so fun I keep doing it even once I've started a formal, structured outline.
That's blather. Maybe there's as better word for it. Maybe there's a better way to do it. I have no idea! But this is what I've settled on. At least it's fun! I'm really glad it's fun, because I only willingly do things that are fun. As I've said, maturity is not my strong suit.
