"Do you have a shadow, Peter?
Someone only you can see. He's someone you considered a friend. He made you feel you weren't alone. Until you saw what he really is, and it made you even lonelier."
Obsessed with the idea of Will as Hannibal's shadow in S3.
y’all ever lie awake at night thinking about how if Supernatural ended on the season five finale like it was supposed to it would’ve been. like. THE cult classic. people would still be writing occasional meta posts about how Supernatural was their introduction to paranormal fiction. there’d be rewatch parties. and buzzfeed’s annoying nostalgia posts. there possibly would’ve been spinoffs that everyone ignored and discourse about the misogyny and the homophobia and the racism. but it also would be this wide moment of cultural nostalgia that we all talked about as being So Much Fun™️ and I just think that’s really sad
I would follow Kevin into Hell if he asked me to 🔥
SQUEAKY BABEY
You know what thats awesome! Thats the scream of a man who died like 3000 years ago
That’s actually a wise move that many people do practice. Don’t have enough job experience, but need it to get the job? Put yourself down as having had experience in a position in a company that is no longer in business, especially if it closed years ago. They literally have no way of verifying this (do not do this for chains wherein only the store closed, but not the chain). It’s a good way to fluff up your resume, just make sure you put down a position wherein you used skills you already have.
For instance, you can say you were a Personal Assistant – typing, data entry, responding to emails, taking phone calls.
Or you were an entry level cashier/customer service worker. Retraining is simple at that point.
Need brief training on that, so that you can say you literally were trained?
All for free, just sign up with Alison. Takes 2 seconds to login with your google account, and then you can take some open courseware. Open University is another good place to go for good business acumen courses.
Seriously, Alison is amazing. Most courses are only around an hour or so long, and you can say you have some knowledge or some experience in these things… because you do.
I’ve been using Alison and it’s really rad! super recommend it
Hi! Your friendly neighborhood background check verifications researcher here! It’s literally my job to complete background checks, meaning, I have to call to verify whether the information you enter into your application is correct, like whether you actually worked for the length of time and in the position at the company you say you did.
Just a heads up that a lot of big chain companies actually use outside verification service agencies in order to verify their employee’s terms of employment. What does this mean? It means that all of their employee data is housed off site so we don’t have to call the Walmart corporate headquarters directly to access your information. Our company just has to pay a fee in order to download that information from an outside system that Walmart contracts to hold those records; that way they’re not constantly bombarded with calls.
Now what does this mean for the average person? Probably nothing. I cannot speak for applications submitted for positions at places like convenience stores or places like that. Maybe they check up on your previous employers, maybe they don’t. Here’s the tip I’m here to impart to you all today:
If you’re applying for a job in a federal position (within the US), like a postal worker or anything at all that involves you working for the government, DO NOT LIE ON YOUR BACKGROUND CHECK. THEY LEGALLY HAVE TO VERIFY THE PREVIOUS EMPLOYER AND EDUCATION INFORMATION THAT YOU PROVIDE!
I feel like this should be obvious, but you’d be surprised.
Oh, also, the thing that prompted this: despite being closed, Toys R Us is in fact one of those big companies that uses an outside service to house their employee records so if your potential employer wanted to try and verify your term of employment, they potentially could.
Just so ya know! (:
little feetsies
I made a custom Warlock patron for The Magnus Archives entities with the help of some of my D&D players. If you ever wanted to play an avatar of fear in your D&D campaign, now you can!
There are a few spells in the list that come from sources other than the PHB, and I have absolutely not tested this for balance in any way.
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:
This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.
TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)
Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue
Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.
The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.
Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.
You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.
“Sorry, what the fuck?”
What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like.
Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:
We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.
Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”
That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.
So how does magenta factor into this?
Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.
What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?
Fucking green.
Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.
So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green.
And so it made up magenta.
So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”
No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:
Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.
Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.
The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.
So I googled Stygian Blue and…
Yall.
HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS
Softly: what the fuck
Holyyyyyy fuckkkkkkkkkkkkkk
wait... okay... wait... but the funeral thing? Okay but... for real? That’s an ADHD THING?!?!?!
It’s not that I didn’t believe people when they said Jonny Sims go absolutely feral in The Mechs, it’s just that I severely underestimated how fucking feral a single man can become
So whenever fandom tries to address the question “Why aren’t there more works featuring characters of color?” there are a myriad of (predictable) responses. One of which is appearing with increasing frequency: “Because we (usually: white creators of transformative works) are afraid of getting it wrong.”
And like. I’ve already addressed how ‘thinking you’ll get it wrong’ is a failure of both imagination and of craft/skill (and a symptom of the racial empathy gap, which I forgot had a proper name when I wrote that post). Meanwhile, @stitchmediamix absolutely accurately pointed out that the ‘fear’ being discussed is fear of being called racist, not necessarily fear of failure.
Now, we could go into the whole absurdity of white fragility here, but google is a thing and “white fragility” is discussed all over the place and I trust ya’ll to do the work if you actually give a shit about this subject… which I assume you do, if you’re reading this – but if you’re just here to find a way to dismiss the issue at hand, I’m gonna save you some time and recommend you scroll past.
Writers can also be fragile, especially in transformative works communities, where “if you don’t have anything nice to say, hit the back button and keep your mouth shut” is the primary expectation wrt feedback, and anything that deviates from that is considered a mortal insult (do you vageublog about my fic, sir?). But if we’re willing to deploy an array of tools to make our writing not-My-Immortal-bad, from spellcheck to wikipedia to in-depth historical research to betas and britpickers and so on, then we should be willing to employ equivalent tools to avoid writing racist stories.
Incidentally, writing stories that erase/ignore extant characters of color, especially if they’re prominent in the source text? is racist. So avoiding writing characters of color altogether is not the solution to making your writing not-racist.
And, okay. I feel it’s important to acknowledge here, as I have before, that the Fear of Fucking Up is a very real fear that genuinely does affect people’s enthusiasm for / likelihood to write, regardless of the validity or fairness of that Fear’s origins, and I’m going to be generous enough to assume that there are some people who are acting in good faith when they say “I want to, but I’m scared.”
So. This is for those who are acting in good faith, from the perspective of a white fan who has written fic about characters of color in several fandoms and never gotten pilloried for it, even when I know for a fact (in retrospect) that I’ve fucked up details.
(oh, side note: I know this is mostly tackling things from a writing perspective, but a lot of this can apply to creating transformative works overall with a few tweaks.)
First: realize that the likelihood of getting called out is actually pretty low. And fans of color aren’t as Mean and Angry and Unfairly Sensitive as some people want us to believe. (Do you vagueblog about That Dumpster Fire Meta, sir? / No, sir, I do not vagueblog about That Meta sir; but I do vagueblog, sir.)
This is not to say that there aren’t people out there who’re more than willing to make a (justified) stink about egregiously racist writing. But it’s actually very rare to get targeted, especially publicly by a large number of unhappy fans. Because you know what? most fans, including fans of color, want to just have fun in fandom as much as anyone else.
It’s just, y’know, a little harder for fans of color to ‘just have fun’ when us white fans are showing our asses with stories involving “Dragon Lady” Elektra or “Angry Black Woman” Sally Donovan or “Spicy Latin Lover” Poe Dameron. And sometimes us white fans only listen to what fans of color are saying when they make a Big Deal out of it.
That’s not a failure of their ability to stay calm. That’s our failure to listen before they get loud and organized. Because I’m willing to bet that people who get called out publicly? got a few polite, private messages about their screwup first, and they doubled down instead of listening.
Also: there is a thing where, no matter how politely they word their critique, fans of color, especially black fans, are more likely to be unjustly perceived as ‘mean’ and ‘angry’ by white fans. Again, that’s our failure, not theirs. Plus, even if they are angry, that doesn’t automatically mean they’re wrong (see: Tone Argument).
Step Two is: pay attention to discussions about racist tropes in fiction. Yes, even when it’s crit of our favorite shows/movies/characters/etc. If you understand the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and why it’s harmful, or you understand the Bechdel-Wallace test, or you can have a meaningful discussion about Mary Sues, or you can (justifiably) rail about how Bury Your Gays sucks, then you can develop a similar appreciation for racial biases and stereotypes. And then you can find ways to avoid them.
No, no one’s expecting you to memorize bell hooks so you can write a drabble about Iris West, or demanding you write a dissertation on media stereotypes wrt the simultaneous fetishization and desexualization of Asian women (who aren’t a monolith, either, but Hollywood doesn’t seem to know that) before you’re ‘allowed’ to write Melinda May in a story, but like. Pay attention when people, especially fans of color, are talking about common tropes so that you don’t unthinkingly replicate or perpetuate them in your fic.
Yes, racist writing can involve more than just thoughtless parroting of harmful tropes, but my best guess is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, fanwork getting ‘called out’ in fandom involves those tropes. So avoiding them takes your chances of getting criticized from ‘low’ to ‘almost nonexistent.’ Less to fear, see?
Step Three is: more research – basically, at least as much as you’d be willing to invest in any equivalent white character. @writingwithcolor is a great blog, and has links to additional resources; . If you’re the type to get a beta or a britpicker, find a sensitivity reader or a beta of the appropriate background. Not all fans of color are willing to do this kind of unpaid labor, just as not all fans are willing to britpick/beta, but they’re out there. Approach them respectfully, and listen to them if they say that something in your story looks off.
It’s worth noting here that writing about characters of color doesn’t need to involve - and in fact, some advice recommends avoiding - telling Special Stories About Racism. Stories about characters of color don’t need to be about slavery or civil rights or the constant parade of microaggressions they have to deal with daily in order to be realistic or compelling (or angsty, for those who love writing angst, as I do). Research can turn up useful information that can inform our choices as writers, but if we don’t share the oppression our characters face, it’s not our job to tell stories specifically about that oppression.
Step Four is: before posting, anticipate the worst. What will you do if someone says you fucked up? If your answer is “argue with them and talk over their concerns,” stop. Remember that you’re not a victim of a ‘mean fan of color,’ but that you’ve probably written something that they consider harmful. Being told that you wrote something racist isn’t an attack on your moral fiber. You’re not an irredeemable monster if you fuck up, but your response to being told you fucked up is far more telling. Acknowledge their concerns, fix the issue if you can, learn from your mistake, and fail better next time.
You cannot improve if you don’t try in the first place. Failure to try is failure, so try your best, and improve incrementally – just as you already do as a writer with any story.
In conclusion: The 4 Steps to Getting Over Yourself as a White Fanfic Writer: (1) recognize that the likelihood of getting called out is pretty low; (2) educate yourself about the most common racist writing issues, so that likelihood will be even lower; (3) do your due diligence when writing; (4) in case of the worst: apologize, fix the issue, learn from the experience, fail better in the future.
(And again, google is your friend – there are a lot of people who’ve written about this subject, like Kayla Ancrum, Morgan Jenkins, the mods at Writing with Color, Thao Le, and Monica Zepeda, among many, many, others. I’m merely sharing my own perspective from what I’ve learned from listening to a lot of smart people, in case it might help some of you – if it doesn’t, keep looking, a ton of great resources are out there.)
Bringing this back because it seems to be an evergreen post (if my notifications are any indication) and people seem to be waking up to the fact that all of us talking about fandom racism/antiblackness? Had a point!
So if your next step is “now I want to create not-racist fanworks / fanworks with characters of color BUT I’M SCARED” - here ya go.
We’re all having “hard conversations” about racism, police brutality, and #BlackLivesMatter I hope.
You’ve probably noticed that detractors often use the same “racist talking points” in response. Here’s a researched and sourced guide to help you answer, for the times you may get stuck.
Feel free to save these images and share them!
