I roll and I roll till I change my luck

Daphne, 26. Greek, queer, fangirl, gamer, feminist, cat lady, crafter, caffeine addict. Sometimes I talk about boybands.

[zestydoesthings]

Week 1 of #MerMary using my #Creature_Feature prompt list! I’m having a lot of fun with these! 

[yggithedivinewitch]

got a fine tip nail art brush a few days ago and i finally used it to paint sigils on my nails

left for defense, right (and dominant) for offense, classifying defense as passive magic (works like a shield) and offense as active magic (works like a weapon)

on both hands, the middle three bear the brunt of the work and a tied theme, while the pinkies and thumbs have their own and secondary theme. on the left, the middle three work outward and the outer two work inward; on the right, the middle three work as power bases and the outer two work as aggressive tactics

[a-witch-named-lyd]

This is amazing

[hollowedskin]

NEAT!

[phoukanamedpookie]

Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health

Studies show it helps patients with an increasingly long list of medical problems.

[sourcedumal]

And notice the tone the scientists researching this.

“What do you mean the fatties live longer? This CANNOT BE RIGHT DO THE STUDIES 15 MORE TIMES!”

And when they can’t figure it out, they simply say “it’s not worth reading” to keep anything POSITIVE about fat bodies from getting out into the public eye.

Because then folks might not but into the billion dollar industry for diet fads and weight loss scams that all of these obesity doctors line their pockets with.

Because then theyd actually have to start treating their fat patients like PEOPLE.

[everydayechos]

“Willett’s complaints are starting to look less credible, however, because no one has been able to make the paradox go away. One of the most popular explanations is that fat people get more aggressive treatment than thin people, because their weight raises red flags at the doctor’s office. This seems questionable: studies show that overweight and obese people tend to avoid doctors, get fewer preventive screenings, and receive worse treatment because they’re often misdiagnosed as “fat” rather than with a specific medical condition” 

Emphasis mine

[sourcedumal]

Also, notice the phrasing.

“No one has been able to make the paradox go away”

They wanna get rid of that shit SO BAD. Because if fat people aren’t as OMG OBESITY CRISIS as folks love to scream, that means their fad diet scams and weight loss surgeries can’t make them millions anymore!

Fuck these obesity doctors. They outchea selling snake oil.

[imathers]

“People are furiously looking for some way to make this not the case,” says Deb Burgard, a clinical psychologist in Los Altos, California who treats eating disorders. “And I think that bears some comment. Theoretically we should be very happy to find out that people aren’t dying the way we thought they were going to, that there’s not going to be this terrible outcome. That people at higher weights are going to be OK.”

[jabberwockypie]

“One of the most popular explanations is that fat people get more aggressive treatment than thin people, because their weight raises red flags at the doctor’s office.”

*points and laughs*

I’m sorry, I’m just stuck on this part. That’s hilarious. An incomplete list of things where the suggested solution was “You should lose weight”: My badly broken ankle hurting, a severe bacterial sinus infection, panic attacks stemming from Complex PTSD …

[sonneillonv-deactivated20220218]

Oh, wow this study has a pretty reputable source and a really big sample size.  Y’all could actually show this to the haters.

[50pointstoravenclaw]

There are so many studies that show that ‘overweight’ people live longer, that fat people receive atrocious healthcare, that the ‘health risks’ of ‘obesity’ are WEIRDLY the exact same as those of yoyo dieting HMM I WONDER WHY THAT COULD BE, that longterm weight loss is impossible for all but 2-5% of people and those people sustain it by developing pervasive disordered food and exercise behaviours that would be correctly interpreted as mental illness is any context except Fatties Trying Appropriately Devoutly To Be Thin.

The evidence is THERE and it has BEEN THERE for decades now. People do not care. They want to smugly judge fat people and/or rake in 10s of billions of dollars a year convincing people to try not to be one of Those Bad Fat People. They do want to hear that being fat is just a body shape, with no moral value for good or ill. They do not want to hear that weight is as heritable as height. People get reeeeeaally super defensive when you ask them not talk about their endless dieting and attempts at weight loss around you, a fat person, whose body they are going to all this effort not to resemble.

Anyway join your local fat pos movement and fuck fatphobia forever.

[numinousnumbat]

“There’s an increasingly popular narrative that our reboot culture is just fanfiction with another name. Steven Moffat alternates his time between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who fic. The Marvel Cinematic Universe does the same thing that Marvel fanfic writers have done since the dawn of comics. J J Abrams is writing in a new fandom now — and the trailer for his first Star Wars fic looks awesome! I appreciate these comparisons — but they frustrate me all the same. Big-budget reworkings of beloved stories are almost universally helmed by men; no-budget fanfiction universes are overwhelmingly helmed by women. And these female-authored texts partly exist to shift the text away from that default perspective, the one that usually pens and directs the source material, populated largely by men (and by straight, white men in particular). I regularly see someone arguing that Steven Moffat is writing Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and I can’t agree: he is writing an adaptation for television, with all the cultural limits and benefits that that affords. He is playing the same game as millions of fanfiction writers, but he’s in a different stadium.”

—

Elizabeth Minkel from Fansplaining podcast, quoted in this Medium article ‘Harry Potter and the Sanctioned Follow-On Work (or, Fanfiction vs. The Patriarchy’) (Aug. 2016)

Saving these tags because they’re spot on:

#from the vault #why the Hugo people were cool with Fuzzy Nation winning #but not AO3 #professional respectable white guys doing real work for money #vs #this monstrous regiment of women #trading our craftsy trifles #like they have value #like we have value

(via drst)

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

In this respect, fanfic works like – practically everything? Cook food? Sew dresses? Work with sick people? Teach? If you’re a man it can be your highly lucrative, male-dominated Profession, but if you’re a woman, expect to do it for free or at the lowest available salary tier.

[kamasitra]

[thisisnotmyhomeplanet]

I love this, he’s going places.

[clatterbane]

Motion by Bryan Randa

[1foodporn]

Apple crumble cheesecake

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trump won't stop tearing up official papers so the White House archives employ a staff to tape them back together for the National Archives

Trump is notorious for his “filing system”: when he is finished with a piece of paper, he tears it into tiny pieces and throws it away, which is fine if you’re a CEO (maybe), but is radioactively illegal under the Presidential Records Act, because the President works for the public, and is required by law to archive their official papers and save them for public scrutiny.

White House staffers gave up on trying to explain this to Trump, who just kept on tearing up everything, from official letters from Senators to letters from constituents to notes and other paperwork.

The staffers – paid nearly $70,000 year – ended up with full-time jobs retrieving scraps of paper from Trump’s trash-can and piecing them back together with clear tape so they can be filed in the National Archives. Some of these staffers were eventually fired; they’ve spoken to Politico about their year in the Trump administration as paper-tapers.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/presidential-records-act.html

[randomthingsthatilike1]

i thought this was satire considering the topic and the site is called boing boing but no Politico also covered this. this is real.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164

[teratomatastic]

[mistakrista-deactivated20241104]

IMAGINE IMPEACHING A PRESIDENT BECAUSE HE CANT STOP DOING SOMETHING I TRAINED MY PUPPY TO STOP IN 2 WEEKS.

[kathereal]

Woooooow

[rabbitindisguise]

Okay but the paper tapers are heros and I want a spy movie about them

[colubrina]

[lynati]

I don’t think there’s an applause gif big enough to properly convey my reaction to this. Also, I love that if anyone tries to say that you’re just “another hack fic writer with no ideas of her own who is jealous of the “real” writers out there”, they could quite literally be crushed under your catalog of award-winning original writing as a response. They can’t dismiss your stance on this topic the way they do to so many unpublished / fanfic writers because you’ve already met all of the standards that they insist someone has before they’ll accept their opinion as worth listening to.

[seananmcguire]

Right?

“Well, fanfic authors never win awards, so–” “WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOLD MY HUGO.” “That’s basically, it’s, you know, the People’s Choice, so–” “LOOK AT MY NEBULA.” “That’s a science fiction award, it doesn’t really–” “LOOK I’VE WON THE ALEX.” “…” “IT’S GIVEN BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO GIVE THE NEWBURY.” “…” “I’M THE FIRST PERSON TO WIN IT TWICE IN A ROW.” “…well you wrote porn.” “GOSH I SURE DID.”

[dduane]

More attention to this, please. :) From yet another of the I Wrote Fanfic First And I Decline To Feel Shame About It brigade.

(And I also wrote for My Little Pony, which means I may have inadvertently contributed something to Seanan’s state of being. [Which I will file under the “Quiet Unholy Glee” heading.])

:)))

[quinfirefrorefiddle-deactivated]

Damn I love the internet.

[cluegrrl]

Fanfic is the Folk Process of the Literary world, and we who create it are the travelling bards taking our own spin from place to place so that the stories, survive, albeit in many forms, for millennia. Fanfic is the inevitable, guerrilla reaction of storytellers when Story is throttled by Profit and Propriety. Fanfic will NEVER DIE!!!

[charlesoberonn]

The myth of Achilles, but instead of holding him by the heel, Thetis sumberges him fully so that Achilles is completely invulnerable and Thetis has one invulnerable hand.

[charlesoberonn]

She only needs one oven mitt when taking cookies out of the oven.

[aphony-cree]

But there would still be two small parts of him that are vulnerable because they were covered by her fingertips at the time, stopping the water from touching them. Which means those fingertips are also vulnerable on her hand 

Achilles *putting those little round band-aids on two parts of his ankle before battle*

Thetis *knitting fingertip oven mitts for her thumb and forefinger*

This is a Greek comedy I could get behind 

[obaewankenope]

What if she put him in a sack and dunked him in? The water would saturate the sack and soak him and so long as she pulled him out quick, he wouldn't drown. Then they'd have a sack that's invulnerable too and can be used as the most unexpected shield ever.

Imagine Achilles storming Troy with one (1) invulnerable sack for a shield

[adspexi]

thetis just sticks him in one of these bad boys

and swirls him around like a batch of chicken nuggets until he’s invulnerable all over. 

[neoptelemus-moved-deactivated20]

talking about the inlaws huh?

[fashion-runways]

ETERE SHOP 2019 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

[afaerytalelife]

[catgirlmitaka]

[razputinapuato]

THE ULTIMATE FUCKING POST

[visitingfan]

oh how far you’ve come, Satan post

oh how far you’ve come

[jackie-gremlin-ghost]

IT’S BACK

[zhe-lazy-fox]

OH MY GOD IT HAS RETURNED AND IT’S LONGER THAN BEFORE!

[ameliaglitter]

I saw this and thought of @fleamontpotter.

[justicewitch]

OP HOW CAN YOU NOT ADD THE BEST PART OF THIS TWEET THREAD

[indirispeaks]

[yocalio]

Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell, The Mummy (1999) Dir. Stephen Sommers

[ohmybuck]

– the beauty of all life? 

– yeah!

[fozmeadows]

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

[earlgreytea68]

So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t. 

And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre. 

So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused. 

It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me. 

Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about. 

And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.” 

When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that. 

Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. 

[nianeyna]

“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”

yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why - it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”

[earlgreytea68]

Yes! Exactly! This!!!

This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments. 

[shatterpath]

Whoa… This just clarified DECADES of writing fan fic.. WOW

[kindlles]