considering going back to being a Phan blog @thedeathofaghost - Tumblr Blog

I think a lot of writers might benefit from giving themselves permission to get weird with format.

Use second person, drop classic rising action and climax format, write backwards, just sit in a moment, tell all you want and refuse to show, make an entire book that’s just one run on sentence, reject tropes, use all tropes, cliche yourself to death, produce something that’s completely gibberish. Break all the rules of marketability. Become ungovernable.

what-even-is-thiss

Write a story that just takes place inside one pathetic little person’s head. Do it. It’s enrichment in your enclosure.

what-even-is-thiss

Do the writer’s equivalent of playing with finger paints. Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it

what-even-is-thiss

It’s the middle of the night and I should be sleeping but listen. Listen. Just get weird with it. Open your soul up a little bit. Like actually don’t worry about it being palatable. I’m serious. Get weirder. Get weirder right now. I’m demanding that you get weirder right now. It’s not your responsibility to make your reader feel good. It’s your job to make art, goddamnit. Make art. Make weird art. Open up your third eye and eat an entire cheesecake.

feaftlikeabeaft

I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”

the-uncanny-dag

Sister post to The Vitamin

rainbow-femme

They move in together full time and Ilya notices that Anya acts differently with Shane than she does with him, more quiet and less playful, and he worries that means she doesn’t like Shane or is jealous, so he hires a dog trainer to come over and see if there’s anything they need to do to help

After a while of talking about how Anya acts the trainer says there’s nothing to worry about, Anya likes Shane just fine, it’s just that she sees him as the boss and is acting accordingly

And Ilya is like. But. I’m the one who adopted her? And raised her before Shane got here?? And the trainer is just like yeah well she sees you more like an equal. And Ilya is like WAIT she thinks Shane is in charge of both of us?? And the trainer is just like well do you interact in a way that would make her think that?

Ilya’s life flashes before his eyes as he thinks of all the times Shane has come over with a snack for Ilya and a treat for Anya, or all the times Shane has announced they’re all going for an after dinner walk, or pets Ilya’s hair and tells him he did a good job at practice, or the fact that he uses the same warning tone with Anya when she misbehaves as he does with Ilya when he’s causing problems on purpose

Shane comes home to Ilya with his face in his hands going oh god I’m not Anya’s dad I’m her brother and she thinks we’re both your pets. And Shane just goes. What.

wholeheartedsuggestions

june, please be kinder

hungry-skeleton

Asexuals were always part of pride and it really fucking shows when people think it's a recent term.

hungry-skeleton

Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing

hungry-skeleton

This image is so so fucking important to me

hungry-skeleton

Reblog this, cowards

blumineck

Archery x flower arranging

This was actually really fun!

Anyway, don’t forget I’m still raising money to test a bunch of things in a suit of armour:

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

luxiomahariel

shoutout to fat nonbinary people

everyone say thank you to fat nonbinary people

bunabi

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

umbrellahat07

Also, a lot of the so called harmless examples used for peaceful protests were specifically supposed to be disruptive as all hell. Like, take sit-ins, for example. What you were probably told is that black people just refused to leave white only establishments to make a point.

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.

Even what was framed as "quiet peaceful protest" was actually very disruptive both socially and economically.

beatrice-otter

Does this look quiet, peaceful, nondisruptive?

And the struggle didn't stop after formal integration, once the Civil Rights act had passed. Because even when they are legally required to serve you, they can make you really fucking uncomfortable and threaten you and the cops probably will take their side.

For one example, there was a cafe that would serve Black people, but would then publicly break the dishes so that no white customer would ever have to eat off a dish a Black person had eaten off of. This was done publicly, right as the Black diner was done eating. The waitress takes the plate and smashes it. This is a signal both to the white diners "see, we hate them just as much as you do, you're safe here" and also a threat of violence to the Black diners. "If you're not careful we'll smash you just like we did this plate."

But at the same time, if Black people go there and eat every day ... how long before the cafe can't afford to do that? How long before they have broken so many dishes that it's eating into their profits? How long before the white diners start getting used to eating alongside Black people and simply don't care as much any longer, or start getting annoyed at the noise and fuss and mess?

Black people eating in white establishments was loud, inconvenient, and disruptive. Because that's the nature of challenging the status quo.

sionnualanicheallachain

All of this, plus a couple of additional thoughts:

1. Folks in these movements trained. They were disruptive and they were strategic about it and they trained so that they could stay calm in terrifying situations and create the targeted disruptions they wanted to create and not get goaded into deviating from that. Absolutely badass.

2. Not at all a criticism of OP because I think their description of people thinking it was "quiet self-sacrificial non-disruptive christ-like activism" is dead on, but I think that description itself speaks to the same kind of revisionism re: the Christ of the Gospels and how disruptive he was and why, and it's important to remember that, especially in this era of renewed christofascism. Rev. Dr. King was a prophet and you will never convince me otherwise.

pixie-likethecut

As I told my students a few weeks ago:

Nonviolence is not a goal, it is a strategy. A deliberate strategy at a calculated time in response to violence of the oppressor, which can be effective if it shames the perpetrators. See: why Selma or Montgomery was chosen by the SCLC (they had the most racist unhinged sheriffs who would deploy maximum force, which got shown on nationwide broadcasts and finally moved the public).

Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t carry weapons if necessary, as many organizers in Selma did. Nonviolence doesn’t mean that you accept that people will throw bombs into your family’s home, as they did to MLK.

And yes, the absurd simplification and bastardization of this strategy is deliberate. It went from being a tool for fighting for liberation to being a justification for more violence and oppression used against future generations of protestors who didn’t meet the standard of perfectly obedient nonviolent non disruptive protestors. Which of course there is no such thing.

And it’s all a lie. Know that people in the movement, at the time, were called criminals, because they knowingly and deliberately broke laws with the idea that they’d get arrested. Know that most of the country hated King at the time of his death. Know that no movement demanding change from the system will ever be loved by those in power.

elljayvee

once again I feel I must mention Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan's "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict".

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns ofnonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as theirviolent counterparts

bobthebenevolentpirate

For most of America’s history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting.

And there’s a book that came out of it:

A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

kaiasky

its terrible for any number of reasons, but i think if we invent immortality there should be an extreme sport called civilizational speedrunning where teams of 20 go into the wilderness somewhere and try and be the fastest build the first internal combustion engine. i bet you could get it down to like 3 years tops

biggestzam

The real trick is to eat seed heavy food before the speedrun starts so your first poops are halfway to agriculture already

kaiasky

i want you on my team holy shit

finnglas

when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.

finnglas

I love how every June this one gets dug up and passed around again, lmao.

finnglas

oh no is this what we’re doing now