Silly Brained

this is a silly cartoon fandom blog. 30. Ao3 @hotslimybitch

[bidonica]

a funny thing about having a Problematic Blorbo is that you'll periodically come across a post along the lines of "um let's not forget that [Blorbo] is a bad person..." listing their various crimes, and if you have a modicum of intellectual honesty you find yourself nodding along and saying yeah it's true... but it's the greyness of their character that makes them so compelling... At the same time though you have a little Saul Goodman in your ear going "your honor in their defense: who cares like omfgggg who caresssssss like come onnnnnn"

[depsidase]

[itsdappleagain]

[itsdappleagain]

people in my replies arguing for their fav white guy???

[itsdappleagain]

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS:

1. Do you think a post pointing out an issue with fandom racism and misogyny is an appropriate place to bring up your favorite white male character? Why or why not?

2. Did this post call you racist for relating to a white male character? If you thought or think so, consider why you got defensive.

3. Think about the disproportionate amount of art and writing about white male characters in fandom spaces. Do you think this is, across all boards, due to them being written better or more relatably than the POC protagonist?

a. If so, consider why you notice the writing of white male characters more often. Are white male characters written "better" than the POC protagonist, or do you have an internalized fear of relating to non-white characters that you need to work through?

b. If not, consider what ingrained biases might lead to this phenomenon in fandom spaces.

c. If you read a. and thought that white male characters literally just are usually or always written better than the POC and/or female protagonist, accept you are wrong and consider some self reflection.

4. Have you researched how to write and draw characters that are non-white and/or non-male? If not, does this limitation lead you to gravitate towards characters you feel "qualified" to make content about, therefore inflating the issue?

5. If people are telling you to reconsider your point of view in my replies section, did you stop to consider what they said apart from your human instinct to be defensive? Have you considered that arguing against those trying to educate you about fandom racism and misogyny, which can be difficult to see in yourself, in the notes of a post talking about fandom racism and misogyny, might be short-sighted and counterproductive?

6. If you are inclined to defend your favorite white male character, pause. Are all of your other favorite characters also majority white? Are they majority male? Are they either of these and NOT the main character of the show, movie, or game they originate from?

a. If not, this comic is not for you. Please move on and give it a reblog if you're feeling generous.

b. If so, consider this pattern. If you want to break it, ask someone for a reccomendation for characters or media similar to your favorites. Expand your horizons, and engage with your community rather than fighting against them.

[derrickwildsun-deactivated20250]

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[sci-fantasy]

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)

[transhuman-priestess]

Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

This is true of all censorship.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.

This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens.  Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression.  This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.”  Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives.  Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.

Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic.  On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead.  On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.”  If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene.  If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.

Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.

To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes.  They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb.  The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.

This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives.  If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy.  If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds.  A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention.  A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot.  If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.

A demonstration:

1

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.

2

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher.  “What?”

3

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher.  “What?”

4

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher.  “What?”

5

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.

“What?”  Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.

See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes?  And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.

The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting.  If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue.  But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.

And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story.  So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.”  Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed.  That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns.  You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.

Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends.  They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic.  The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.

[porcupine-girl]

I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.

And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.

[kuromi-hoemie]

hey um. so sorry to tell you this, but op of that post plays toys kinda weird. yeah you should just block them, that's not how normal people play with toys

[kuromi-hoemie]

this is what shipping discourse sounds like to me

[fluoresensitives]

(smoking a cigarette) the average american is afraid of what is new and what is foreign, and especially of what is adult. they are trapped forever in daycares of their own design, reading books and watching shows made for children. And while there are interesting things made for children, by and large, they tend to stick to inoffensive, intensely juvenile things that won't challenge them much. And worst of all, if you suggest to your Average American that they should try to step outside of their narrow box, especially if they're trying to become artists, animators, film makers, novelists, etc, everyone acts as if you've just bombed the daycare. Wow.

[randalltier-deactivated20230711]

[dumpy-dump]

[sunflowersand-bees]

people don’t enjoy shipping anymore. the point of shipping isn’t the catharsis of watching them kiss onscreen, it’s grabbing the characters and mashing their faces together like you’re five years old playing Barbie in your room again. it’s to take one moment of eye contact in canon and read that over and over and over again with twenty different writers’ interpretations of the characters internal monologues if they were in love. it’s to see the characters interact and cheer because you know that’s another moment to add to your list of canon compliant fic ideas. you’re stressing yourself out, this is supposed to be fun!

[humunanunga]

[helenvaughans]

[itsmistybitch-deactivated202605]

These posts are sisters

[lierdumoa]

[snowglobe9891]

sobbing

[berlynn-wohl]

plot 150 words bed-sharing 200 words smut 800 words projecting my fears, insecurities, and anxieties onto a fictional character 9,356 words fluff 150 words someone who is good at fan fiction please help me budget my WIP, my family is dying

[sunken-standard]

150 words of plot seems excessive.

[berlynn-wohl]

thank you for the reasonable advice

[a-tangled-mermaid]

Sigh. At least I have this.

[autistichalsin]

Bad writing is great!!!!

Bad writing means you took the time to write something, you, a real human being. It means you created something! And you have the awareness to see that there's room for improvement, too!!!

Bad writing is wonderful!!! Bad writing is a platform from which you can build your masterpiece! Bad writing is the backbone of good writing!

Give yourself permission to write badly. No, actually- give yourself permission to write something TERRIBLE. Give yourself permission to write such drivel that you can barely read it.

Nothing comes out a masterpiece the first time!! You think Isaac Asimov never wrote a total stinker he had to rebuild from the ground up? You think Jules Verne never wrote utter slop for a first draft?

WRITE SOMETHING AWFUL!!! Write something so bad you cringe about it years later!!! And then when that's done, write some more!!!!!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

[bigmann-mclargehuge]

Share the knowledge

[dragon-in-a-fez]

Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!

[nctinmotion]

Source: This

[brindlefern-deactivated20210619]

[xcziel]

[mephistopheles]

yall i swear to god if a bitch says her pronouns are she/her then her pronouns are she/her

[mephistopheles]

my close friend from uni was a cis girl who had the audacity to wear pants and cut her hair short and like nobody at this school, a place OBSESSED with ‘respecting everyone’s gender identities,’ would call her ‘she.’ after MONTHS of this she started wearing a fucking pronoun pin to work and i dont even think that fixed it. me, im sorta androgynous; i have shaggy self-cut hair and go by a neutral name, but i always say my pronouns are she/her, and people ive worked with for months and have introduced myself in front of fifty times will STILL reflexively say ‘they’ for me. i respect the progressive circles i run in, but this IS evidence of misogyny. people’s definition of “woman” or “girl” is so narrow and high-maintenance that even the tiniest deviation from the norm gets you forcibly defeminized. but it’s a compliment, right? like who would wanna be a girl anyway?

[mephistopheles]

replacing an inescapable gender binary with an equally-inescapable gender trinary is stupid 🩷