"The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself..."

izzy's playlists!
sheepfilms
cherry valley forever
Three Goblin Art
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Stranger Things

pixel skylines

JVL

#extradirty
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

Andulka

ellievsbear

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
will byers stan first human second

tannertan36
i don't do bad sauce passes
seen from United States

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@nevertobeships
"The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself..."
the work printer cries out, "no stop, that's too much! youre gonna make me jam!" as i load a full ream into her tray, but it's too late. "see, you can take it. you're doing such a good job for me." i coo into her feeding tray as i begin printing the morning reports. her warning lights turn red as she moans in i assume ecstacy
People talk a lot about how reading is necessary for writing, but when you really want to improve your writing, it’s important to go beyond just simple reading. Here are some things to do when reading:
Note how they begin and end the story. There are a ton of rather contradictory pieces of advice about starting stories, so see how they do it in the stories you enjoy. Don’t only look at the most popular stories, but look at your more obscure favorites.
See what strikes you. Is it fast or complicated scenes with a lot of emotions? Is it stark lines? Pithy dialogue? What do you remember the next day?
Pay attention to different styles. It’s not just whether they use past or present tense, first or third person. It’s whether the writing is more neutral or deeper inside character’s heads. Do they use italics? Parentheses? Other interesting stylistic choices? Take the ones you like and try them out in your own writing. See what works and what doesn’t.
Keep track of how they deal with other characters. Do we see a lot of secondary character each for very brief periods of time or are there a couple that show up a lot? How much information do we get about secondary characters? Do they have their own plots or do their plots revolve entirely around the main characters?
Count how many plots there are. Is there just one main plot or are there multiple subplots? Are the storylines mostly plot-based or character-based?
Pay attention to what you don’t like. If you don’t like what’s going on in a book or even just a scene, note what it is. Does the dialogue feel awkward? Are the characters inconsistent? Does the plot feel too convenient or cobbled together? Does the wording just feel off? See if you can spot those issues in your own writing, especially when reading a completed draft or beginning a later draft.
(Great advice! I wanted to tack on other things I look for when reading)
Pay attention to how they introduce characters. Very rarely will it be all at once, and I guarantee the author went over the intro of each major character again and again while editing, so I always like paying extra close attention! Did the intro endear you to the character? Make you dislike them? How did the author impart that emotion?
Note instances of worldbuilding/info dumps, especially parts that don’t seem like worldbuilding/info dumps. Maybe the character mentions something offhand about a location you’ll see five chapters later. Maybe the internal dialogue makes a comparison to the character’s childhood. Was the information effective or did it leave you wanting more? Make note of anything that made you go, “ooh, neat!”
After you finish the story, try to find foreshadowing that you missed the first time through! It can be as simple as skimming and looking for phrases you know are important after finishing the story. Most authors add foreshadowing in the editing stage, so I tend to ponder how the story would read before they added it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the story seems more magical for it and it’s just nice to appreciate.
What plot structures could the story fit into? We all know about the three arc stories, hero’s journey, etc. Sometimes stories can fit into more than one category. During the read and after, keep it in the back of your mind. Can you predict where the climax of the story will hit? Is it man v man or man v nature? Does the predictability (or lack thereof) add to or take away from the story?
I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:
Fictional characters are objects.
They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.
An equal and opposite truth:
The actors, directors, writers, etc that create this characters are people.
They are real. They exist independent of the characters and your opinions. You have no right to them, their opinions, or their relationships. They have no responsibility to you. You cannot force them to follow your fantasy.
THIS is a good addition.
The Challenge: Comment on every fanfic you read and enjoy in the month of January.
Every chapter. Every one shot. Every drabble. Every ficlet. Whether it’s on a personal website, a blog, or an archive. Whether you’ve read it a hundred times before or you’re reading it for the first time. Whether the fic was posted years ago or minutes ago. Whether you sign your name or leave your thoughts anonymously. Whether your comment is paragraphs in length or a few short words. Comment on every fanfic you read and enjoy in the month of January.
The Philosophy: Comments are what keep a fandom thriving and growing.
We don’t see comments as a transaction. They’re not a price paid for reading a fic. We see comments as an interaction, a way of building relationships. Comments are a courtesy, not a currency. [x]
Fandom is a relationship between dozens,hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of fans, and the only way for the greater fandom relationship to function, is for those fans to interact. One way to interact is by writing and reading fanfic. A writer prompts an interaction by posting their work; it is up to the reader to then acknowledge (or not acknowledge).
As one of our favorite blogs, @ao3commentoftheday, said: [x]
“Comment if you can, but don’t be bullied or pressured into it. A comment should be written in the same spirit as the fic itself: wanting to reach out to other people who love the same fandom as you do. It’s not easy to do that, I know, and I don’t hold it against you at all if you can’t.”
The Only Rule: Be kind.
Be kind to your fandoms’ writers.
Please note that this challenge is to “comment on every fanfic you read and enjoy in the month of January.” As our fandom forebears were fond of saying, “Don’t like, don’t read.” For FaFiCoWriMo, we have taken that one step further by saying, “Don’t like, don’t comment.”
No matter how well-intentioned, critique is useless unless it comes from a place of trust. Unless you know an author personally and they have specifically asked for your critique, please keep it to yourself.
It costs zero of your currency and zero of your time to not be a jerk.
Be kind to yourself.
If you do find yourself unable to comment on every fic (for whatever reason), remember this: we forgive you, zero judgement. [x]
2023 Bucket
This is a bucket. Anything you don't want to take with you into 2024, feel free to drop it in the bucket. I will be burning the contents (with Hellfire) at exactly 11:59pm on New Year's Eve.
You don't have to type anything, at all. Just reblog the bucket and your intentions will be known by the universe. Or the bucket. Or whatever you like.
every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one
From The Little Girl from the 1981 Lego Ad Is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something To Say.
“Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”
HOLLA!!!!
A lot of people don’t realize, but the Friends and Elves themes are actually LEGO trying to fix the massive mistake they made with gendered marketing in the ‘90s.
LEGO panicked in the ‘90s. They were losing money hand over fist as video games and movies occupied more of kids’ time. In response, like a lot of toy manufacturing at the time, they took a sharp right turn into highly gendered marketing. They made sure that all the new parents of the Reagan/Bush era knew that LEGO was safe and not challenging for their little boys’ masculinity. ALL of their advertising went to promoting LEGO as a “boys toy”, and they invested in “action” themes and cartoons for boys, like Clutch Powers and Bionicle. Even plain, non-themed bricks were advertised exclusively by and for boys. They even reduced the number of different colors and the vibrancy of those colors to make sure the bricks seemed masculine enough.
This came back to bite them, as naturally it should. They, along with the other toy companies in the ‘90s, pressed so hard with the gendered marketing, that there was literally no crossover market in most areas anymore. They had alienated half of their customer base. Those Reagan/Bush parents they were so worried about bought into the gendered marketing hook, line, and sinker. Many of these parents (especially the conservative ones with more money to spend on toys) wouldn’t even consider allowing their little girls to shop anywhere but the “pink aisle”. I know many women who grew up in the ‘90s have stories about that, of parents and other adults telling them they couldn’t shop anywhere else. There are parents all over, but especially in conservative markets like the Bible Belt, that will still not buy a toy for their girl unless the box is pink.
Because LEGO had remade itself as a “boy’s toy,” it had now been purged from the market of girls’ toys entirely. They tried to get back into the “pink aisle” with the Belville line, but Belville was shit, because they were made to appeal to the conservative parents rather than the kids. They were mostly about big, awkward dolls with almost DUPLO simplicity to the build aspect, most pieces were incompatible with regular LEGO system bricks, and they were just not fun.
Then, in the late ‘00s, someone at LEGO had the brilliant idea to actually ask little girls. They spent 5 years and millions of dollars doing hundreds of focus groups with girls with their parents not in the room to influence what they were saying. The resounding response? The girls wanted the exact same brick their male siblings had, but with more color variation, detail work, and also could we have people that look like people instead of blocks with arms?
LEGO Friends is the result of this feedback. Released in 2012, it has been the best way for LEGO to sneak past conservative parents and into little girls’ hands again. Friends is all LEGO brick, but as the little girls requested, it comes in more, brighter colors, has more small, storytelling-themed details, and features characters that look more like people. The sets were a bit tentative that first year, not a particular challenge to build, but have since gained complexity rapidly as the line took off. If you look closely and actually build the sets, you will notice that while the boxes are pink, the builds are usually another color. Still generally “cute”, but rarely exclusively pink. The pink is mostly the box to get it past the parents who see nothing but the box.
LEGO Friends is the third most popular LEGO theme of all time, after Star Wars at #1 and LEGO City at #2 (mostly because City has been there forever). Think about that. Five years, and it has beaten the sales numbers of most other LEGO lines in the last 80 years since the company was founded. Additionally, the LEGO Friends theme has entirely shifted LEGO’s statistics. In 2010, surveys indicated that the gender breakdown of end-users of LEGO products across all themes was 90% boys, 10% girls. In 2013, one year after Friends was released, it had shifted to 60% boys, 40% girls. That’s across all themes. Some quick market research discovered that little girls would get a Friends set or two, and then expand into other themes. Because obviously my town with a juice bar and a cupcake shop has to have a police station or a pirate fortress too, mom.
And LEGO added the Elves theme last year, specifically because older girls wanted to tell more complex and fantasy-themed stories with their LEGO builds. Elves is targeted at a slightly higher age group than Friends, and the complexity of the Elves constructions rivals any Star Wars set of similar size. Every single development with “girl” LEGO in the last 5 years has been at the express feedback of actual girls.
LEGO still has a long way to go to fix the mistakes of the ‘90s. There are still marketing people in the company who don’t fucking get it, and think that they’re just shilling “girl LEGO.” There are still a lot of old white men in very high positions in the company who don’t understand what’s going on, they’re mostly just coasting on what market research and focus groups are telling them. And some themes, like Ninjago, are still very clearly marketed for boys while Friends and Elves are marketed for girls. They have a long way to go to fix what they broke.
At the same time, if you’re unwilling to allow a pink building toy to be a gateway to other building toys just because it’s pink, the problem is not the pink building toy.
LEGO Friends I’m sorry for all that I said about you
cannot emphasize enough how a good piece of media can reset a creative slump. stop putting off consuming that media because you "should be writing instead" and then not write either
A lot of really good writers note that good writers read a lot.
Doesn't necessarily have to be reading - it could be watching a film or playing a game or any number of things - but learning stuff and seeing what other artists have to say and how they say it helps you find your own voice, your own priorities.
Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.
The Continental From the World of John Wick
New Photos of Katie McGrath as the Adjudicator
What he took is very important to a lot of very dangerous people.
Katie McGrath as The Adjudicator
If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
Lena Luthor | Red-Black outfit
Idk who needs to hear this but a queer couple breaking up does not count as queerbaiting
Sometimes we do, in fact, break up with our partners. And we are still queer.
@apeacebone media: depicts queer people doing actual real-life things that actual real-life people, both queer and straight, do all the time people: ummm having people behave as anything other than my flawless fantasy is problematic, actually
― Jamie Anderson