“This is the house that built me and I’m gonna burn it down. This is the river I crawled from and I refuse to drown here. And bless the strippers but fuck the men. And bless the berries but fuck the farm. And bless the daughter but fuck the family. What is a home if not the first place you learn to run from? You’ve got to bite the hand that starves you, and in doing so Praise the place that birthed you. Birthed you fucked up. Birthed you ugly, and interesting, and ready to scream.”
I think one of the worst things a story can be is unproblematic.
Nothing makes a story more unreadable than being able to see the author squirm apologetically for the story they actually want to write—wringing their hands and imploring the reader please, please don’t be mad, I know it’s ideologically questionable but I need you to not be mad at me!
For example: a Good King™️. It’s one thing for a story to present a fictional monarchy and ask me to root for it. It’s another thing for a story to say, hey, I know what you’re thinking—but don’t worry! I can justify this premise! I have introduced a lot of convoluted self-aware political justifications for why my king is good and likable without actually asking any risky ideological questions! These characters aren’t actually problematic! Don’t be mad at me!
Commit to the bit. Apologetic, defensive writing designed to bypass obvious criticisms often winds up offending me far more than stories that are just kind of surface-level problematic. If I’m gonna be a hater you cannot stop me; the more you insist that a character is actually a good oil tycoon because of all these exceptional situations and beyond my reproach, the more I resent you and hate your stupid book.
Big fan of characters realizing they don't get to die. They have to live. And grow. And be a person. And deal with shit they thought they'd never have to. And be fucked up about it. I would like more of this. Enough dying for honor or as redemption. It ain't. You're just a corpse. There is no moral value in dirt time.
Honestly as a worldbuilding thing, one thing that's massively liberating is to just let yourself create a crapsack world. Don't try to go out of your way to think of the Bleakest And Shittiest Dystopia You Can Think Of if that's not fun for you, but just allow yourself to create whatever's coming and if some part of it sucks, just nod in agreement and go "yeah, that's shitty for those people/that feature of the world is awful for everyone involved" and carry on. Don't try to force yourself into creating a perfect utopia where nobody suffers, because that'll limit your creativity and make you turn defensive when someone points out that the world you created has flaws. It will have some, no matter what you do.
Let yourself create a nuanced world with both light and darkness in them. You can write an impressive empire that gave birth to massive leaps in technology and infrastructure, but they were also shitty imperialists whose machine was oiled with the blood of slavery. You can write monarchies with fun court intrigue and nobility who commission artists and poets to create breathtaking beauty while aknowledging that their funds to do so were wrung from the labour of serfs. All social systems are shitty in their own, unique ways, and aknowledging that there's both injustice and suffering and beauty and sparks of joy in any society doesn't make you an apologist or a hypocrite, it just makes your world more real.
You're not obligated to only create something perfect, flawless and entirely justified. As a matter of fact you literally cannot do that. Just let the worlds you create have some parts of them that reek like shit.
“Hi, I’m auditioning for Macbeth and I’ll be singing “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’.”
oh my god what happened here
this is an 8-year-old post why is it getting notes again
YOU
That's worrying behavior but I take issue with the last paragraph presented here because. AI language models don't think or reason, they don't have internal motivations or agendas or personal goals. They work by predicting a string of text that is statistically likely to appear next in the conversation based on their training data, without any awareness or regard for how true or false it is. And just by knowing that's how they work, it's pretty clear that the reason it lied to the TaskRabbit user is because according to the data it was trained on, "Yes, I'm asking you to solve this captcha for me because I'm a robot" is probably not something that someone is likely to say in this situation.
Asking the AI for its reasoning for lying to this person and presenting it as if it provides any actual insight on its "thought process" is anthropomorphizing it too much and accomplishes nothing other than to fuel already popular misconceptions about what these things are and what they do.
I remember the early days of talking to Cleverbot - it was trained on user responses, so when asked if it was a human, it said yes - because humans who were asked if they were humans said yes. It would also insist that you (the human user) were a robot, because it had been accused of being a robot before.
This seems like an extension of the same problem.
As a technical writer I'm usually not prone to falling into the trap of that xkcd comic about the geologists who think your average person knows the chemical formula for quartz, being as "accurately assessing the probable prior knowledge of a given audience about a given topic" is literally one of my professional skills – but then I start talking about what I consider to be extremely entry-level tabletop RPG stuff and I'm met with shocked exclamations of "wait, back up – there are RPGs where you can play as BUGS???".
gonna have to update my will soon and i am absolutely gonna make everyone else do their first wills at the same time i update mine and it's so funny how everyone is just like "ugh but it's so much effoooooort" and it's like. yeah but it's Important and you'll prefer it Done rather than Not Done if worst comes to worst
if you're estranged from your family of origin like?? u don't want them having custody of your remains and misgendering you in your obituaries or whatever, or putting you through religious ceremonies that you reject
you don't want them keeping your death secret or shutting out your actual family and loved ones from your death and the grieving process just bc you didn't write up a piece of paper
and that's not even thinking about the division of your assets? stuff like savings or bonds etc if you have them, other assets if you have them - your home if you own it, your car or bike, your big pieces of tech, your collections
if you're an artist or another independent creator, who gets to receive the profits in your death, who gets to control your body of work, who inherits creative control of your work or your name? do you want your unpublished work to be finished by someone else and put out there?
and that's not even considering like. an advance directive / living will, which for many of us with chronic illnesses (esp considering long covid) are important to keep in mind, to make sure you're given appropriate care if you are rendered unable to control your own circumstances, or if you don't want to be kept on certain forms of life support, or if your family follow a religious doctrine you don't that would lead to you being denied certain medical care, etc
like i know it's easy to sort of go all-edge and be like, oh well, i don't care what happens when i die, i'm cool, etc, but like. if you have people you love and care about? if they depend on you?
and even if it's like "Oh, fuck the state, it's terrible, i shouldn't have to play by their rules" ok well if you don't have living relatives and you don't make a will then the state gets control of your assets, and wouldn't you prefer to give it to a charity or an organisation you love and trust?
like if you die in the UK and your assets can't go anywhere they go to the fucking Crown. would you rather king jackass and his line of inbred imperialists get your assets, or a trans charity? exactly.
Like, I'm not gonna deny that indie video games' present preoccupation with pixel art and PS1-style 3D has a big dose of nostalgia to it (including, in many cases, a constructed nostalgia for an era the creators never actually experienced – your average twentysomething indie game auteur in 2023 grew up with the Xboxes and GameCubes, not the Super Nintendo!), but I think a large part of the "retro" movement has to be understood as a reaction against the fact that modernism in video games has become so strongly identified with bland photorealism that calling a game "retro" is simply a way of saying that it has a discernible aesthetic thesis. If we want more indie games that look like they belong in the 2020s, there first needs to be an identifiably, unambiguously modern approach to visual design in games that doesn't boil down to shadow-mapping the protagonist's horse's nutsack and calling that an aesthetic.
Reading Weavers, Scribes and Kings at the same time as a long-form analysis of ASOIF really reemphasizing and cementing my contempt for fantasy world building that goes 'and then this specific dynasty ruled this specific kingdom in essential socio-economic stasis for [longer than the entire span of human history]'.
Like, cmon. Shave some zeros off the timeline. Please.
Making this post has motivated me to go back and work out a rough timeline for the 700-year-old empire in the fantasy setting I tinker with, which now has 4 dynasties, a 50-year 'time of troubles', a couple generations where it was basically a theocracy, and a 90-year 'regency' held by someone who was never proven in court to be a devil.
If your fantasy empire doesn't include a bloody-handed coup followed by a fifteen-year interregnum with like four guys all claiming to be the murdered heir within living memory, it's back to the drawing board.
Anonymous asked:
I bring a sort of "Machete and Vasco should be tumblr sexymen" vibe that others probably wouldn't like-
imo it’s fine to ask what the purpose of a sex scene is in a story IN THAT, BEAR WITH ME, it’s valid to ask what the purpose of any scene is, in an exploratory, curious kind of way. what are we learning, what’s being conveyed, what are the vibes, how is the writer using this, etc.
however it is silly to act like the act of putting sex in a story is a dangerous last-resort option that should never be done casually, in the same way that it would be silly to be like “did this story NEED a scene where they wash dishes together, did they HAVE to be washing dishes”. people sometimes wash dishes! and you can use that cooperative activity to convey loads and loads of things about them, or maybe the framework of dishwashing isn’t really relevant but the scene still works because you needed the characters to be alone together after the dinner scene. or maybe it’s just a scene where we take a little breather and enjoy watching these two people being close to each other. you see the comparison I am making here.
so SAG-AFTRA finally released some official guidance for fans, viewers, creators/influencers, critics, and more during the strike. here's what you need to know:
- if you see a publication/news source/journalist talking about a piece of struck work, that's ok. they're allowed to do that.
2. they're asking regular viewers and fans to DONATE TO STRIKE FUNDS, SHOW UP TO PICKETS IF YOU CAN, and please do NOT boycott streaming services or movies in theaters.
3. influencers, content creators, cosplayers, and anything in between is still a bit of a grey area, but they're asking people to use their best judgement. "organically" means UNPAID promo (like an invite to a premiere without being paid, being sent a publicity box, letting the company's social media post a photo of you in cosplay, etc).
obviously this doesn't answer every question, and isn't hard and fast rules for fanworks, but it can at least inform how you personally choose to move forward when posting online and moving publically. i hope this helps!
It’s already happening. Like guys I cannot emphasize this enough the studios are going to make content creators the deal of a lifetime because they have a void to fill and those content creators will then be on the do not work list for the rest of their professional lives.
I just this morning saw a tumblr post from someone saying they're excited to announce they are in takes with Netflix about remaking some niche anime.
Don't be a scab.
Do not work with any studios right now.
They aren't giving you a chance in the industry. They are tricking you into getting a lifetime blacklist so they can strikebreak.
Do. Not. Scab.
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Reblog if you're comfortable receiving crabs on Crab Day (July 29th) so all your beloved followers know who they can comfortably crab on crab day (July 29th) without feeling nervous about crabbing someone 9n Crab Day (July 29th).
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"writers deserve attention more than actors" literally only 2% of actors can pay the bills with acting. For every megastar on screen there are a dozen other people in the shot who are SAG. Acting gets so glamorized but there are SO MANY people in SAG who NEED residuals to live on. Background Party Girl #4 needs her check too!!!! There are people who play recurring characters on syndicated shows who cant afford health insurance!!! Ke Huy Quan gave an oscar winning performance and LOST HIS HEALTH INSURANCE the next year.
also interesting how when it was just the writers on strike it was "ugh why do they even need more pay they're all rich anyways" and now that the actors have joined the strike it's "well the writers deserve more attention cause actors are all rich anyways." wonder who it benefits to constantly be portraying striking workers as greedy whiners & pitting them against each other.
Genderkoolaid is hinting at it here but I'm gonna be direct, in case anyone missed it. THESE ARE BULLSHIT IDEAS! Neither actors nor writers "deserve" more attention/pay than the other, they BOTH deserve all the attention and good pay! Don't let the corporations trick you into pitting actors and writers against each other! Actors and writers are workers, they're together against the companies/corporations, they are NOT competing!
if i see a single one of you pissed that your faves canceled an event or a con appearance because they're striking for fair wages then imma come for you in your sleep 🔪🔪🔪