➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.
➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.
➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.
➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.
➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.
➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. 'May contain peanuts!'
➡️ Writers are allowed to use 'Creator chose not to warn' for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.
➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is not the same thing as 'no archive warnings apply'.
➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you're reading that upsets you.
➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.
there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll - step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
[image description: the epic handshake meme. one arm is labelled gay people and the other is labelled lesbians. in the middle it says "fuck yeah bro". end id]
hey guys, quick reminder! this post is about uplifting other people!!! tags like 'ugh, but men are gross lol' or 'op has never met a man' are not welcome and will recieve an insta block! men are cool! women are cool! thank you for coming to my fucking ted talk! :-)
On Saturday I said to my partner, as I have said for months, "A ten thousand dollar a year raise would solve so many of my problems."
As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.
As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.
May all of you get the $10K raise your soul has yearned for. And whatever level of sex you can be satisfied with for $200.
I've made it my mission to be known by everyone on Tumblr. And I mean EVERYONE. No account will go without this post, I want to make it to the dead poets society fandom all the way to the ninjago fandom. Everyone will reblog this, and if they don't I will die a failure.
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
I guess it needs to be said specifically, but it feels like people don’t get what ‘can’t say anything bad about jiang cheng’ meant or means even now, and the wider impact of the bullying to only ‘allow’ net positive fandom discussions of JC, most of which never happened and don’t stand up to actual canon events or motivations.
Jiang Cheng’s actions aren’t in some sort of void. Which means it’s impossible to talk about other characters or write meaningful metas without talking about his impact because surprise!
Jiang Cheng is an important character.
So, if someone wants to write a character meta on Jin Ling, but they cannot do that without discussing the overall impact of JC’s physical and verbal abuse on JL and what effect it has; that the person who loves and protects you is also the one who harms you. But if the only discussion allowed is ‘how JC hugged and cooed over JL who was the most loved child ever’, then the fact that JL doesn’t remember being hugged until Wei Wuxian or the fact he was hit at all is buried and you get fanfiction instead of character discussions.
Do you want to explore the power structures? Classism? Patriarchy? Do you want to write about mob behavior? How the Great Sects are set up and how society revolves around them? Overt and subtle homophobia vs acceptance? The mottos of each individual clan and how the founders made it vs current state? Just discuss the events and how they played out in MDZS and why?
You need to refer to the actual text.
Which means you need to talk about JC as he is written and not what he ‘secretly’ could be. Not what you wished he could be. And certainly not rewriting his clearly stated intentions into well meaning fluff about how you think a person would react in the same situation.
But when all text discussions are viciously shut down, you get fanon that doesn’t fit with the actual events of the book. So trying to discuss the basic plot of how WWX died, because he didn’t conform to society and how propaganda can turn a good man into a monster by the powerful, can’t happen. Because that means talking about people in the society like JC. And if JC is rewritten as someone who ‘meant well’ and would never harm anyone deliberately, then as the man who lead the siege to kill WWX, things stop making sense. His actions are not in a void like I said before. And to keep making sense, now all the main characters involved have their intentions and actions rewritten to support the JC fanon.
MDZS stops making sense. The themes stop making sense.
Jiang Cheng is an integral part of MDZS and when canon discussions about his intent and actions are shut down and continue to be shut down or rewritten, the plot of MDZS unravels.
And as people who love MDZS and thrive on such discussions, whether it is about the themes or the characters, people who love to explore MDZS as it is, having a tag which uses the word ‘canon’ wasn’t the end of the world and certainly isn’t the ‘bullying’ that toxic stans or so called ‘neutral’ groups continue to claim it to be.
But since the actual tag made for canon discussions has been destroyed by campaigned and targeted harassment by stans, there can be nothing done and everything will be posted in the main tag anyway.
If you want to be angry, be angry at the ones who for a year straight and more have spammed the tag and flooded the platform with bots to harass anyone who says anything about Jiang Cheng.
