Hey, to you sci-fi/fantasy writers out there (and maybe some others, but this is mainly for things that can’t really be researched irl), if you want to write a character who is a driven, passionate expert on something, don’t write about them rambling indifferently about some boring, mundane part of it. Give them a deep, intense hatred of some oddly specific wow-I-did-not-even-know-that-was-a-thing-and-it-would-have-never-occurred-to-me-that-it’s-a-bad-thing thing they’ll gladly rant about.

 Write a dragon rider who really fucking hates it when a dragon is trained to bow while being reined. A space ship engineer who is pissed off when perfectly good antimatter ship has been adapted to run on neutral matter. A historian who is still not over the massive failures of a general who lost a specific battle 300 years before she was born.

 The guy currently giving us a series of lectures on the restoration of historical buildings really, really hates polymer paint. At the artisan school our stained glass teacher really hated this one specific Belgian artist - we never really figured out what did that guy even do, but he’s been dead for over 200 years and our teacher was glad that at least he’s dead.

 Experts don’t just know things you’ve never thought about. They’ve got strong opinions about it.

This is a great way to not only make your experts more realistic and give them personality and lively rivalries, but a good way to sneak some exposition in. It’s important for your readers to know how the fuel in your spaceship is refined but there’s no way to sneak it in without it sounding like a lecture? Give your fuel tech VERY STRONG OPINIONS on it and have a running gag where any time someone mentions fuel they immediately have to start trying to shut him up.

If you want realistic biologists, let them argue passionately about taxonomic classification. Biologists have OPINIONS about taxonomic classification and discovering alien life is guaranteed to bring even more opinions to the field so

hey fellow biologists, what’s a species? just asking. for reasons.

Ain't those the books by Wildbow

the way characters change their appearance based on their arc in Worm, I'd believe these three pictures depicted one cape's journey

an important addition

creacher

just so yall know

art block is your brain telling you to do studies.

draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.

art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard

think of it as level grinding for your next work.

As a scientific illustrator- this is 100% true and going to review your basics will fix it every goddamn time.  Not only does it keep your skills sharp, when you’re not emotionally invested in the final product of a piece, you relax and your brain makes more/better art juice for you.  So, when you get back to that big/important piece?  You’ll know what to do and how to do it.

Nothing in nature blooms all year round.  Rest, and take care of yourself.

i want someone to put this into writer’s blocks now

Writer’s block means you need to relearn the whole alphabet. idiot.

Less insultingly, try drabbles, the kind where it means 100 words exactly. Try three sentence stories. Heck, try haiku and limericks! Try new writing formats, or coming up with bits and pieces of lore or backstory that won’t necessarily make it onto the final page. Try re-writing the first scene, or any scene, from a different perspective. See what else you can learn about your story or your characters.

As with art block, the trick is to do something you don’t really care about but which will polish your skills without adding to any angst you may be feeling about the work you actually care about.

Sometimes the kind of off-angle wittering away at the story you want to be working on is helpful. Sometimes it isn’t.

When it isn’t, I would suggest doing exactly what the artist advice was: studies!

There are all sorts of writing exercises out there. Google “writing exercises” and you’ll find all sorts of lists. Pick one, and see if it helps! Many of these are the writer’s equivalent of still lifes and practice poses and color studies and what have you.

Some common types of writing exercise that a lot of people find helpful:

Remember, the point of these isn’t to make Great Art. The point is just to write. In the process, you will be practicing writing skills in a low-stakes environment, which will allow your creative parts time to rest and relax and rejuvenate while practicing and developing your craft.

Female scientist everyone should know about.

anyone who says “the bible is clear” about an issue, is 100% of the time wrong. the bible wasnt clear once. the bible couldnt be clear about how to make a table if it came in an ikea box

This is actually supposed to be a feature, not a bug. The Bible is not supposed to be “clear.” It is not supposed to be a textbook. It is not supposed to be taken literally. It is, instead, a library of stories and teachings designed to teach the community of God’s people about who God is, who they are, and where they came from. It’s the equivalent of sitting on the front porch with the family scrapbook with your grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles telling stories and arguing about stuff.

There are very many times when the Bible argues with itself. Not on small issues, either, like “what’s the exact genealogy from Abraham to Moses?” or “how many of each animal was on Noah’s Ark?” (which, by the way, if you read the actual text of Genesis instead of the storybook version, sometimes it says a pair of each animal and in other places it says a pair of every unclean animal and seven of every clean animal). The Bible argues with itself on big issues, too. Like “why do bad things happen?” and “how should we treat outsiders when we are under threat of being wiped out?” and big existential questions like that.

Let’s take theodicy, which is a big fancy term for “why do bad things happen.” Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and most of the earlier writings have a very simple answer for why bad things happen. If it’s a natural disaster or illness, it’s because God is punishing you. If it’s other people hurting you, it’s because they’re wicked (and sooner or later God will punish them). Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.

The book of Job argues with this directly; Job suffers, both from natural disaster and the work of evil humans, and his friends conclude that obviously he’s sinned in some way and is being punished, and therefore he needs to confess and repent so that God will end the punishment. It’s exactly what Deuteronomy and the Psalms would say! You could swap out their words with passages from either book and nobody would notice. Except they’re wrong. The reader knows this. God later confirms it. Job is innocent. At the beginning of the book (in a section very different from the rest of the book, in a section almost certainly added later by a different author), we’re told that Job’s suffering is because the accuser is testing him. At the end of the book, we’re told that the reason for Job’s suffering is beyond human understanding. And God condemns Job’s friends (who are only parroting what Psalms and Deuteronomy would say!) for their words because they are so far off the mark.

Then there’s Ecclesiastes. The writer of Ecclesiastes was fairly nihilistic; he looked around him and he saw it was useless and empty to strive for anything–wealth, power, health, wisdom, pleasure, etc.–because we don’t have control over what happens and there isn’t a reward for being good and there isn’t a punishment for doing evil, things just happen at random a lot of the time. Instead, we should be focused on living in the moment and enjoying what we can in whatever’s going on in our lives, and we should be building positive relationships with friends and family and community. The only thing we can control  is how we interpret and respond to the world around us.

All of these texts were written and edited and collected and used in worship for centuries before they came to be in our final form. They comment on one another, and expect the people reading and listening to them to know the others, to see the places of contradiction and the places of agreement, to see the gaps and the things left out and the complications and the way these texts are fundamentally arguing about this question (and many others). These texts became scripture precisely so that we, too, can join in this three-thousand-year-old debate.

The New Testament, too, gives various answers to the questions of “why do bad things happen.” Some of them are in line with earlier answers from Scripture, some of them are new.

Why do bad things happen? It’s complicated! It’s messy! There is no one simple answer! Because life is big and messy and complicated and can’t be boiled down into one simple answer, and God is big and powerful and God loves us but God is beyond our understanding. That’s the point. The Bible isn’t there to dumb God and the world down to simple, easy, one-size-fits-all answers. The Bible is there to guide the community of faith through dealing with that messy, complicated, contradictory world by sharing how our ancestors in the faith dealt with a world that was just as messy, complicated, and contradictory three thousand years ago as it is today.

The only things the Bible is clear about are small, unimportant things only mentioned once or twice because they didn’t matter much. For anything important, the Bible isn’t clear. It argues with itself. That’s the point.

This is a thing I wish more Christian denominations would actually teach their members. The scope of my experience is limited, so by no means do I have a comprehensive understanding, but I feel like Christian religious education fails when its intended audience doesn’t learn at least the basics methods of studying the bible. (I am aware that many denominations do not strive to achieve this, and don’t want their members to analyse the text, so my use of ‘fail’ is a reflection on how well or not it works for me, not how well they achieve their own goals.)

For context: I grew up roman catholic, and on continental Europe, in a region where the roman catholic church = The Church is an institution that has been the dominant religious framework for centuries. That means I grew up in a religion where this kind of bible study is actively discouraged for almost anybody. Being a good Catholic means adhering to the rules the catechism teaches. The only authority on religious matters is a priest, bishop, cardinal, … and ultimately the pope, who is - in religious matters - infallible. The catechism and hymnbook are more important than the bible.

In my youth I used to attend service a couple of times with a friend of mine who is part of the Vinyard Movement, a neocharismatic evangelical denomination. I did not attend their bible studies though, so I can’t say how they went. But their religious practice was focused on a very small part of the new testament, and I got the impression that they were quite sure that they knew what the bible was teaching, without any question. Their way of doing religion was the right way. My friend did a year of bible study in some Vinyard center - I have yet to ask her if she would tell me about it. (I avoided talking about it with her at the time because back then I generalised my dislike of roman catholic preachings and opposed Christianity in general.)

And I used to go to protestant-lutheran service with another friend of mine. Protestant-lutheran service was the one where hearing the bible meant having it discussed in length by the pastor. My friend explained to me that the sermon is the most important part of protestant-lutheran service. (Her mother was a theology professor specialising in the old testament, so she had a bit of an advantage in that regard.) My other protestant-lutheran friends vaguely know that the bible isn’t to be taken literally but have no interest in examining it further on their own, so I don’t know if their church teaches them how to do it if they wanted to.

Recently I started reading up on the science of religion and on theology - university-level textbooks, because the way my brain works I need to methodically work through a tricky subject, from the abstract to the concrete, in order to be able to find my own position. The introductionary textbook to (christian) theology I used explains that one of the goals of studying theology is religious maturity / responsibility, and that part of the way to achieve this is studying the bible - not just reading the text, but the ability to analyse the text and get through the layers of historical context and possible ambiguity. Because that’s how you get to the actual message. (The author is protestant-lutheran, and it shows.)

It honestly was a revelation for me that there are Christian denominations who do this. Who encourage this. I have a notebook where I put down quotes from the books I read, and my own thoughts on them, and I don’t have it with me right now, but I remember that one revelation I had is that you get close to the core of christian belief when you approach it as a dialogue. So “[The Bible] argues with itself” fits nicely into that. I used to think that only Judaism allows picking the text to pieces. This book I’m reading, and writing down my own thoughts on it, show me that while I’m discontent following fixed rules that in many places seem to go right against the spirit of what I think Christianity should ideally be, it’s well within my right to learn how to enter this dialogue.

I am a Lutheran from the US. Specifically, I’m from the ELCA, the most liberal of the Lutheran denominations in the US. Several of the other Lutheran denominations don’t teach Biblical literalism, but they do teach Biblical inerrancy, which is basically literalism in a different hat. The thing is, whatever your church teaches, a lot of Christian culture in the US (especially as you get into more rural and/or conservative-leaning places) is heavily saturated with literalism. So talking about ways of reading the Bible that aren’t literal gets … fraught.

In seminary, they had us read the graduation speech from a previous president of the seminary from the 1920s. And it was all about how the absolute most crucial thing that they needed to do once they were ordained and serving in congregations, was to teach people not to interpret the Bible literally. And we read this and just sat there, because he was right and you could give the exact same speech to a class of seminary students today, and still be relevant and timely. It was very depressing. In the 90 years since that speech was made, very little progress had been made on the “teach people not to be literalist” front.

I was the ‘good kid’ in church. I was in church and Sunday School every Sunday, I paid attention to the sermon and to my Confirmation classes, I went to Youth Group, and while I learned through that that we didn’t interpret the Bible the same way as the Baptists and Pentecostals and others did, I could not have explained the difference if my life depended on it. Or why it mattered.

But I had a great religion professor in college for an Intro to the Bible class, and that was amazing and transformative, and while I learned a lot the thing I have found most useful was this: every part of the Bible has a truth that it is trying to teach us. Often more than one truth! But at least one. That’s why it’s there. So the most important question to ask when reading any Bible passage is this: what truth(s) is it trying to teach us?

Your words about having been the ‘good kid’ in church in a way reassure me: They remind me that this kind of intense engagement with and historical-critical analysis of the Bible isn’t what most denominations teach to their youth (if any), even if they otherwise practice it. Perhaps because it probably isn’t a thing your usual 9-14 year old kid or even most adults will find helpful. And because it takes knowledge and skill that take years to achieve, after all there’s a reason you need to study to become qualified for teaching religion.

Judging by how my religious friends live their faith, most people won’t have much use for the skill to analyse the Bible like this. My brain seems to be wired differently, but that is not a reflection on the merit and effectiveness of religious education itself, and definitely not on the validity of other people’s way of believing.

I am not sure I understand the concept of ‘truth’ in this context. The teachings of various denominations say that they are the truest of Christians, and 'truth’ in this sense is my immediate understanding of the word: An (alleged) objective truth about the world. This is not a useful way for me to engage with any religion, at all. And I have the impression that you don’t use the word like that here. Would you elaborate a bit what you mean?

Yeah, that’s not how I’m using the word at all.

Think of it this way: English has two words that are related and similar, and yet distinct. Truth, and facts. They are related. I would define them this way: facts are things you can prove in a science lab or a court of law. They are literal, and objectively provable. The truth is the deeper reality, the things under the hood, the meaning of things. Facts are objective. Truth, by its very nature, can’t be objective.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Facts about my mother:

A truth about my mother:

These things are related–you can look at all the facts of our relationship over the years, the stuff I named here plus many more–and deduce the truth. But you can’t prove it in the same way you can prove the facts.

These days, we are trained to think very literally. In school, we learn that authority comes in the form of textbooks, which give us facts we must learn and then put to use. And for most of those facts, there is a black and white, yes-or-no answer. There is only one correct way to spell ‘because.’ You are either 100% correct or 100% wrong, and it is very easy to tell which is which. E always equals MC squared. As you get older, you learn more abstract concepts, but quite often there’s still a right and a wrong answer. Depending on where you go to school and what classes you take and who your teachers are, you may not spend hardly any time grappling with the deeper meaning of life questions, or the things that can’t neatly be divided into right and wrong. We are trained to think literally. We prioritize facts over deeper truths, and when we think about deeper truths, we often treat them like facts, because that’s how we’re trained to think. Authoritative books are like textbooks, right? Therefore, the Bible must be a textbook. Therefore, the truths it teaches are objective, like facts, and not matters of interpretation.

This was not always the case. Most cultures throughout history have prioritized things in the opposite way. Truths have been held more valuable and important than facts. Which is not always healthy or good; but at the same time, neither is taking everything literally. For an example of what “prioritizing truth over facts” looks like, consider the way we do history. Modern historians do research to find facts, collect the ones they think are relevant, and then extrapolate from them to find what they think the truth might be. Pre-Enlightenment historians did the opposite. They believed they knew what the truth was, and then they collected and arranged facts that expressed that truth. Some of them were more willing to fudge things than others (looking at you, Herodotus), but it means that you can’t take them uncritically as 100% factually accurate.

This is the culture that the Bible was written in. They were collecting the stories and teachings and other documents that told the truth as they understood it. Truths about God, and about humanity, and about their history and culture, and about the world. They were not trying to create a textbook; that concept didn’t exist yet. They were not writing fiction as we understand it, but in a straight-up choice between “recording the facts exactly 100% accurately” and “conveying what we believe to be the deeper truth of the matter” they usually chose the latter. Every bit of the Bible was collected and arranged deliberately to convey truths. The stories were handed down orally, and then written down, and then edited, and then copied and recopied, and then selected and arranged, and every step along the way there were deliberate choices made to hone in on the truths they found important.

If you’re looking for factual or historical accuracy, I have bad news for you. Much of the Bible is reasonably factually accurate, but even when that is the case, the facts aren’t the point. The point is to express some deeper truth. Or multiple truths at once! So asking “what truth(s) is this passage trying to express?” is pretty much always a question that will lead to fruitful places, and should always be asked. You may not always be able to answer that question, but it’s good to ask.

Now. The thing is, you do not have to accept that truth. Remember that the Bible argues with itself! You can argue with it too! The truth about pain that the Psalms most often express is that suffering is caused by sin, either our own or others, and that, in general, God punishes bad deeds and rewards good deeds. The truth about pain that Ecclesiastes expresses is that bad things and good things happen at random, and we can’t control it, but we can choose to live good lives and do the right thing anyway. The truth about pain that Job expresses is that the universe is big and we are small, and sometimes the reasons for bad things happening are beyond our comprehension. Which of these are the truth? To what degree and in what situations are they true? This is not something you can objectively prove, and you can’t choose just one and claim that it is the only truth because then you are being unfaithful to other truths that the Bible is also holding.

Now, this does not mean that anything goes. There are some fundamental truths that you must accept to be a Christian, for example; but they are waaaaay fewer than most Christian groups would like to claim. You have to believe that Jesus died for us; what that means and how it works, on the other hand … look, the New Testament has several different answers to what the heck was going on there, and Christians throughout history have come up with even more. The river of Christian belief is wide and deep, with many tributaries. Individual Christian groups will claim that they have the only true interpretation and assert that their interpretation isn’t an interpretation, it’s a fact; but that’s not actually the way it works.

a dog and a canary enter a room

SHIVERS [Trivial: Success] - BEACH EPISODE FOREVER

I like the fight scenes in worm

Facts that adults don’t tell you about bullying

- Communication doesn’t work on bullies. Telling a bully they’re making you feel bad is the wrong way to go. They want to make you feel bad. That’s the point.

- being kind to a bully doesn’t always mean they’ll stop. Sometimes it means they’ll just use your kindness to manipulate you while still continuing to bully you.

- not every bully has a sympathetically tragic home life. Sometimes people are just mean. Sometimes people just get off on hurting others.

- on that note, a tough home life is a reason, not an excuse. You don’t have to put up with bullying because somebody’s life sucks, just like you don’t have to let someone mug you because they’re broke.

- in order to forgive someone, they have to apologize first. If your bully has not apologized to you, you do not owe them anything.

- getting bullied as a kid can still mess you up in adult life. Maybe kids grow out of being bullies, but the marks they left often don’t go away.

- there are ways to get people to stop bullying you, but they almost all involve being mean back.

- as long as parents keep raising shitty bullying kids, there will be bullies. No amount of assemblies and hand-drawn posters will fix the problem. It’s the parents’ fault.

-a lot of bullies dont think of themselves as bullies, either

- bullies do not bully you because they like you

- getting bullied as a kid can even mess you up as a teen

- ignoring does not work. it does not make them go away. it’s a lie told to make kids less “”problematic””

- do not feel bad about fighting back.

- you don’t deserve it

- seriously you fucking don’t

- you don’t have to forgive them even if they do apologize

- you’re allowed to be mad at your classmates who don’t join in but don’t do anything to help you either. You don’t have to defend them just bc they’re “not as bad”.

- that thing they say they’re bullying you for? That’s just an excuse. If you changed that about yourself, they’d find a different reason to bully you. They’re doing it ‘cause they want to.

I owuld like to second that “do not feel bad about fighting back,” point. I’m not a violent person in general, but when I was 14 I decked one of my bullies in the face and gave him a black eye after he hit me in the head with a thick book, and the bullying began to stop after that.

I’d like to amend “you’re allowed to be mad at your classmates who don’t join in but don’t do anything to help you either” with joining in doesn’t always mean doing the same as the bullies, it can mean laughing your plight or telling you they aren’t being serious, and that is just as bad as if they did or said nothing at all.

Talking about the use of violence to solve problems (as in hitting the bully to make them stop) always has to respond to the criticism that “violence doesn’t solve anything!”

And, in an ultimate sense, this is true. Violence will not solve the underlying problem, never has, never will. With bullying specifically, violence will not stop a bully from being a bully. It will not change the social conditions which allow bullying as a common component of how people interact. You cannot cause transformation through violence.

But solving the ultimate problem is not always possible. Transformation is not always possible. To solve the ultimate problem of bullying, for example, you need buy-in from the majority of the community. Not just that bullying in the abstract is bad, but that bullying in all its forms is bad, including when it targets people society doesn’t value or when it’s “funny” (to the people not being bullied) or whatever. And just as you can’t change a bully who doesn’t want to change, you can’t change a community that doesn’t want to change. If people aren’t going to defend the victim and work to change the social conditions that reward bullying … it’s never going to change.

And in that case, while violence isn’t going to solve the ultimate problem of bullying, it will often solve the immediate problem. They probably aren’t going to target you any more.

And if solving the immediate problem is the best you can hope for, by all means, solve the immediate problem.

actually i’m tired of reading good social comics and then the bad guys of the comic (police, nazis, misogynists, politicians) are all fat, with double chins or neckbeards or bald spots or stretch marks or they’re hairy or they have acne etc. and usually they’re the only ones with those features. like??? can we stop equating beauty with morality holy shit?

- Jennifer Coates, I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.

*sweats nervously*

HOLY FUCK THE AMAZON WORKERS WON THEIR UNION VOTE

im running so late to this but holy fucking shit this is historic

last thing - while unions are obviously a collaborative effort and this incredible victory is the result of the hard work and sacrifices of many different people i think it’s absolutely essential to highlight the role of ALU’s founder chris smalls rn

chris was fired by amazon in 2020 for organizing a walk-out in the wake of their absolutely criminal handling of covid protocols in staten island. in a meeting with bezos amazon execs were later caught bragging that he wasnt “smart” or “articulate” enough to organize against them…now he’s helped facilitate the first successful union vote in amazon’s history - eat shit!

👏 👏 👏

“Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” is such a raw line it sounds like it could be from sonic the hedgehog but no it’s from a Shakespearean tragedy

everyone you know is a bird