if you’ve put a side character in a scene and now you’re not sure what to do with them, have them slow dissolve out like that one Microsoft PowerPoint™ transition
remember that everything you write has to be perfect first time, and if it isn’t, you’re a terrible remember that everything you write has to be perfect first time, and if it isn’t, you’re a terrible writer 💖writer 💖
yes i did accidentally paste this tip inside itself and decided it’s better this way. i am not taking questions at this time
if you include a flashback to your protagonist’s childhood, make sure you timestamp it AND have the narration clearly state they are a child AND have the character say, “i am a child in this part because it is set before the rest of the story”, otherwise your readers will be so confused they will throw up
you should write regularly.yeah, regularly, why are you - oh. i mean, yeah, i guess once a decade IS regularly if you’re doing it on the same day each time. hm. well, you got me there
just saw a post that accused someone of using generative ai to write an essay because ‘no one uses — instead of commas or semicolons’ and i’ve never been more offended in my life
ALT
i’m not as offended as i was when i read the ai thing, but i Am offended
if ANY romantic relationship is mentioned, it’s a romance novel. sure your protagonist may have no interest in romance, but oh look, you’ve mentioned their parents, who are MARRIED. tough luck bud you’re writing a romance novel now
not everyone will “get” your novel, and that’s fine. you need to focus on the true enemy: readers who finish your book and immediately search “(novel) ending explained”
you show me the pictures of your baby on your phone. i take out my phone and show you dozens of pictures of my OCs. i start to tell you all about them. you try to make an excuse to leave, but i keep going. you try to leave but the door is locked
I approve of powerscaling discourse only in utterly senseless contexts. I don’t give a shit about which shōnen protagonists could beat up which other shōnen protagonists, but I will 100% read your five thousand word essay exploring the subtle nuances of establishing a tiered ranking of the Smurfs.
“Could Batman beat Captain America” trite, tedious, bullshit. “Could Deadpool beat Roger Rabbit” now you have my attention.
im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says ‘this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"
You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.
Adding to this:
This is why it is not assimilationist for gay/queer people to want to enshrine marriage rights in their country/region
Similarly, this is why polyamorous people are fighting for the right to have their relationships recognised by their states through marriage and/or similar agreements
Oh, and because on top of those aforementioned financial and medical protections, these laws also help you maintain connection to any kids you have and/or raise together!
I would go further and say, this is why we really should be looking to expand some of these rights so that marriage is NOT the only way they should be enshrined. (e.g. Why could I get married tonight to a guy I met this morning, and get him on my health insurance, but I cannot do the same for a sibling?)
Remember the fight for same sex marriage was never “we feel left out”, it was “we’re sick and not allowed to see each other. We’re dying and not allowed at the funeral. Someone who kicked me out at 14 just showed up for the first time 24 years later to tell the doctor to pull the plug, and they did.”
Marriage is a legal documentation of rights. Fully agree with prev that those rights should be divested from the concept of monogamy entirely, but for now we have to at least understand what they are
I need the tumblr kiddos to understand that when my wife and I got married in 2013 we had to plan our vacations to ensure we only visited states where our marriage was legal, because otherwise if my wife got sick (not unlikely, she has multiple chronic conditions) I might not even be allowed to visit her in the hospital.
Every older queer you know who is in a longterm relationship will have similar stories of how we planned our whole lives to protect what would have been granted nigh automatically if we were heterosexual.
Marriage is a legal status that confers certain protections and rights, and until societies introduce other ways to get those protections and rights, we need it even if we hate it as an institution.
There’s a fantastic book about platonic partnerships by Rhaina Cohen called The Other Significant Others, and it has a really interesting chapter about marriage. There is a truly mind-boggling number of legal rights and protections attached to marriage, and Cohen examines how attaching all these rights to a single legal relationship really fails large swaths of people.
I can’t remember many of the details because it’s been a bit since I read it, but I’d highly recommend requesting this book from your local libraries if you can.
I have one hell of an irl story in relation to this: My wife and I are both trans. Currently, I’m legally recognized as F and her as M on our documents, which is probably why we could get married so easily. The issue is I look like a cis guy with F on my documents and soon she’s gonna look like a cis woman with M on her documents. The problem is, she’s from Brazil and I’m from Canada. That’s fine in theory, but in legal practice, it’s an obstacle. We want to travel between Brazil and Canada to see our families and friends ofc, but first of all, the US is in the way and potentially landing there for any reason is so scary to us as trans people. Second, we wanted to wait to marry, or maybe even not marry at all and just live together, but in order for us to not be separated, we had to marry.
instagram folk complaining about how a dresser they thrifted was painted white for that bougie minimalist look everyone hates now and they have to strip the paint and fix it and then they show the dresser and it’s the same Ikea dresser i’ve had since i was 8 that comes in white from the factory
I lost weight when I went on my medication initially because it made me very sick and when I told people that was why, more than a couple would say stuff like “I wish I could get some of that” like you want a weird disorder that is awful and to be violently ill? just to be skinnier?
“After I got the biopsies, they did another mammogram. And I had to have my shirt off. And I was standing there at the machine. And the technician said, oh my gosh, you have such a flat stomach. What is your secret? And I was like, oh, I’m dying.“
-Tig Notaro
More proof that the ideal of thinness never had anything to do with health.
You don’t have to represent the entire ace/aro community. You’re still allowed to talk about your experiences, even if they’re not typical of most other aces/aros.
especially if they’re not typical
feels important to put this here. this is meant to be a silly way to encourage people to feel comfortable calling their experiences aromantic experiences, not a checklist or representation of every a-spec group.
For as popular as the idea of a “hivemind” is we never talk about how it doesn’t exist in nature. There’s no animal colony that connects and controls all its members through a psychic connection. Even bees, the eponimous hivemind, communicate by pheremones and, more importantly, interpretive dance. My point is when are we going to get a movie about an intensely organized alien race that mainly communicates via sick dance moves, why are we sleeping on this.
I’m referring to the way a lot of people seem to treat “unconditional hatred for Generative AI” as a signifier by which someone reaffirms their belonging or allegiance to the category of Artist (imagined as a special category of people wholly separate from the category of Non-Artist) based on the conception that the only reason why someone might not hate GenAI (or might hate it but think some criticisms of it are unprincipled) is because they 1) aren’t an Artist themselves, and thus 2) they either don’t understand what being an Artist is like or they categorically hate and oppose Artists.
To name a concrete example:
Just a couple weeks ago I got an anon message pretty much along the lines of “I get it, you don’t have a creative bone in your body and have to pretend that art theft is fine because you’re incapable of creating art yourself” (despite pretty clear evidence of me being an Artist™, such as the fact that at the moment that anon was sent to me, you could scroll down like two posts on my blog and find me showing off how some of my music was featured in a doom metal compilation album).
This anon was sent in response to me saying that, while I have problems with the GenAI industry, I think “it’s art theft” is not one of them because (by virtue of being a copyright abolitionist) I think describing any situation where a copy of something is made without affecting the original as “theft” is patently ridiculous. Like, that’s a pretty clear example of how performing enough unconditional hatred of AI art is treated as a signifier of belonging to the Artist™ in-group, and failure to perform it is treated as a sign that you can only possibly be a ignorant and/or malicious Non-Artist.
Copyright is a bad tool but it’s the only one we have right now for ensuring artists get paid. A copyright abolitionist in the current environment is taking an “only rich people should be able to make art full time” stand that I find somewhat disagreeable. Sure there is often beauty in the work of an amateur, but there are things you can only master through a lifetime of work and trained skill.
There’s another thing here that feels like a fundamental unfairness. Generative AI is a tool designed to make money for the companies running it and drive down the price professionals can charge for the categories of work that it generates. If OpenAI scrape my online work without my consent and use it to train their models and then a) people who used to pay me instead pay them to generate art in my style or b) clients use the threat of that to pay me less than I would normally earn then they are benefiting from my labour and I am not. I made the thing. They used my years of work and learning to make money - money they would not earn without my work - and only I lose out as a consequence. That still feels kinda thefty to me.
Copyright fundamentally does not ensure that artists get paid. In fact the way copyright works in actual fact almost without fail serves to deny artists profits while making sure that corporations (who are the ones that hold copyrights most of the time) make money off of the work of artists.
And significantly it’s not the only tool we have for ensuring that artists get paid. There is a tendency to reduce the whole category of “artists” into this image of artisans who create individual pieces on commission, when most artists do rote wage labor (the people who work on animated films are artists). The majority of artists do not get their wages thanks to copyright law, but through labor laws.
So like, not only is copyright a bad tool for ensuring that artists get paid (because in a vast majority of cases it all but ensures that copyrights actually do not get held by artists but by corporations) there are other tools we have for making sure artists do get paid.
Exactly like. The vast majority of people who actually make art as a full time job don’t do it as independent artists, they’re working as writers, animators, illustrators, composers, color artists, background artists, etc etc etc in a variety of media projects like TV shows, videogames, and movies, and the vast majority of them (i.e. those who aren’t big enough industry household names to be able to demand it) do not actually own the copyright to any of the things they create for these projects at the end of the day.
So the assertion that copyright is the “only tool” we have for ensuring that artists get paid is kinda revelatory of a very “petit-bourgeois artisan” conceptualization of the idea of Artist that ends up actually excluding the vast majority of working artists.
Also, no matter how much the situation described sucks, the assertion that it “feels thefty” is one that only makes sense if you subscribe to the mindset that the loss of potential profits that exist only in theory constitutes theft. And that’s a mindset that has led to A LOT of really bad shit.
Yeah, and also the idea that copyright abolition would somehow end up disproportionately benefiting the rich is ludicrous. Like, corporations that make a select few people ludicrous amounts of money are some of the fiercest protectors of copyright. They are not doing so out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want to look out for the interests of poor artists. The rich too have class interests and if copyright abolition were seriously something that would benefit the rich you could bet there would be an international campaign promoted by the richest people alive trying to get governments to overturn copyright law.
I’m referring to the way a lot of people seem to treat “unconditional hatred for Generative AI” as a signifier by which someone reaffirms their belonging or allegiance to the category of Artist (imagined as a special category of people wholly separate from the category of Non-Artist) based on the conception that the only reason why someone might not hate GenAI (or might hate it but think some criticisms of it are unprincipled) is because they 1) aren’t an Artist themselves, and thus 2) they either don’t understand what being an Artist is like or they categorically hate and oppose Artists.
To name a concrete example:
Just a couple weeks ago I got an anon message pretty much along the lines of “I get it, you don’t have a creative bone in your body and have to pretend that art theft is fine because you’re incapable of creating art yourself” (despite pretty clear evidence of me being an Artist™, such as the fact that at the moment that anon was sent to me, you could scroll down like two posts on my blog and find me showing off how some of my music was featured in a doom metal compilation album).
This anon was sent in response to me saying that, while I have problems with the GenAI industry, I think “it’s art theft” is not one of them because (by virtue of being a copyright abolitionist) I think describing any situation where a copy of something is made without affecting the original as “theft” is patently ridiculous. Like, that’s a pretty clear example of how performing enough unconditional hatred of AI art is treated as a signifier of belonging to the Artist™ in-group, and failure to perform it is treated as a sign that you can only possibly be a ignorant and/or malicious Non-Artist.
Copyright is a bad tool but it’s the only one we have right now for ensuring artists get paid. A copyright abolitionist in the current environment is taking an “only rich people should be able to make art full time” stand that I find somewhat disagreeable. Sure there is often beauty in the work of an amateur, but there are things you can only master through a lifetime of work and trained skill.
There’s another thing here that feels like a fundamental unfairness. Generative AI is a tool designed to make money for the companies running it and drive down the price professionals can charge for the categories of work that it generates. If OpenAI scrape my online work without my consent and use it to train their models and then a) people who used to pay me instead pay them to generate art in my style or b) clients use the threat of that to pay me less than I would normally earn then they are benefiting from my labour and I am not. I made the thing. They used my years of work and learning to make money - money they would not earn without my work - and only I lose out as a consequence. That still feels kinda thefty to me.
Copyright fundamentally does not ensure that artists get paid. In fact the way copyright works in actual fact almost without fail serves to deny artists profits while making sure that corporations (who are the ones that hold copyrights most of the time) make money off of the work of artists.
And significantly it’s not the only tool we have for ensuring that artists get paid. There is a tendency to reduce the whole category of “artists” into this image of artisans who create individual pieces on commission, when most artists do rote wage labor (the people who work on animated films are artists). The majority of artists do not get their wages thanks to copyright law, but through labor laws.
So like, not only is copyright a bad tool for ensuring that artists get paid (because in a vast majority of cases it all but ensures that copyrights actually do not get held by artists but by corporations) there are other tools we have for making sure artists do get paid.
Exactly like. The vast majority of people who actually make art as a full time job don’t do it as independent artists, they’re working as writers, animators, illustrators, composers, color artists, background artists, etc etc etc in a variety of media projects like TV shows, videogames, and movies, and the vast majority of them (i.e. those who aren’t big enough industry household names to be able to demand it) do not actually own the copyright to any of the things they create for these projects at the end of the day.
So the assertion that copyright is the “only tool” we have for ensuring that artists get paid is kinda revelatory of a very “petit-bourgeois artisan” conceptualization of the idea of Artist that ends up actually excluding the vast majority of working artists.
Also, no matter how much the situation described sucks, the assertion that it “feels thefty” is one that only makes sense if you subscribe to the mindset that the loss of potential profits that exist only in theory constitutes theft. And that’s a mindset that has led to A LOT of really bad shit.
Yeah, and also the idea that copyright abolition would somehow end up disproportionately benefiting the rich is ludicrous. Like, corporations that make a select few people ludicrous amounts of money are some of the fiercest protectors of copyright. They are not doing so out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want to look out for the interests of poor artists. The rich too have class interests and if copyright abolition were seriously something that would benefit the rich you could bet there would be an international campaign promoted by the richest people alive trying to get governments to overturn copyright law.
The soft eyes! The forward facing ears! The question mark tail! Not to mention the poise and control! This little dude is having a blast and is SO good at it!!
ALT
ALT
