Hello Please Look At Our Daughter

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

EVERY FUCKING TIME

it hasn’t even been a week and already some wretched soul is using that idiotic man vs bear meme to justify Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians

remember that anti-refugee meme about poisoned skittles that was identical to a “feminist” one about poisoned m&ms?

these ~feminist thought experiments about how evil and dangerous Men are and how sadly that means individual men are guilty until proven innocent always end up like this. it’s inherently dehumanizing even when it doesn’t also straight up promote misconceptions about the sources of violence (for instance, the bear thing involves randos but as we all are supposed to know by now, you’re more likely to be harmed by someone you already know)

oh and here’s a bonus “analogy” from the same women’s safety uwu modus tollens motherfucker

@ferventfox @loving-n0t-heyting get a load of this shit

I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!

Daily reminder to please PLEASE don’t just read headlines, even if you think the headline tells you everything you need to know, there’s always more to learn about a situation then what can be conveyed in a single catchy sentence.

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

Source

Source

Fullmetal alchemist is so funny to me bc this fucking kid who dresses like the worst emo 2008 hot topic cringecore is literally the smartest person in the entire country. He MET GOD yet exudes annoying atheist “my katana can cut through the Bible” energy. Mustang (his fucking boss) is very plainly is covering for the fact that he committed an unforgivable crime and yet he hates mustang so much it’s on fucking sight. The only time he talks to his crush is when he gets his ass kicked so bad he has to trudge home with his tail between his legs all “winry my arm no workee you can’t ask me why”

So she’s essentially just spellcarving like Falst does but with lightning

Heyy, sorry if I'm missing something very obvious but I don't fully understand what Tess is doing on page 4.18. Is she carving a stone spell into the ceiling with her lightning to get VoidErin to fall to the ground? Because in that case I thought she'd have to use a stone lacrima. Or is she just carving a lightning spell and using it to magnetize Erin to the ground, and the sound effect's color being a blend of lightning and stone is because both magics are at play simultaneously?

The breakdown is as follows:

Step 1: Shape lightning into runes for a Sealing spell.

Step 2: shoot that shit at the ceiling

Void Dragon has already started releasing his hold on Erin at this point, convinced by Tess's argument that he needs her to stop Erin's uncontrolled magic and she won't do it if he doesn't bail. The magic isn't knocking Erin over, he's falling because the Dragon isn't holding him up anymore.

Step 3: Spell brands itself into the rock. No stone magic is required for this, although it would have made things easier for Tess - she's essentially using the lightning to break the rock in extremely precise patterns to spell the runes.

Sealing spells repel all forms of elemental energy, so this breaks the loop on Erin's uncontrolled channeling.

In the law, there's this idea called the "last clear chance" doctrine.

If you are in an accident, and you had the last clear chance to avoid the accident, then you are, at least in some portion, responsible for the accident.

For instance, if you are driving and a car pulls out in front of you, and you could've slammed on the brake but do not, you're responsible for that, even if the turn the other car made was illegal. Moreover, you might be held partially responsible for the other person's injuries, depending on how things work in your location.

This is even true if you can merely mitigate the damage. If you have a chance to limit the damage -- again, let's say you don't brake and the result is a collision at 40MPH instead of 10MPH -- the additional damage you cause could be considered your fault.

To me, this seems very applicable to voting.

The two parties in the US are going to put a couple of candidates up in the next few months. Both of them might be dangerous. But in the end, everyone who can vote is going to have one last, clear chance to avoid, or at least mitigate, damage.

It sucks that both parties are out there driving like maniacs.

But the fact of the matter is, they've put us in this position. And if you don't put on the brakes -- that is, at least mitigate damage -- you are responsible for the additional damage caused.

In the national elections, a choice not to vote for Biden is a choice not to brake when some jerk pulls into your lane. And if there's an accident and a lot of damage -- to voting rights in general, to reproductive rights, to the health and safety and life of trans and other queer people, to education, to the environment -- then you are responsible for not attempting mitigation.

You have the last clear chance to minimize danger and damage. And while you can yell until you're blue in the face that the Democratic party put you in that position in the first place by not running another candidate, you are still responsible even if you try to abdicate that responsibility.