Decided to 'rebrand' my original writing. And by rebrand I mean I'm just embracing the fact that I only have enough room in my identity for one penname. I've been RayByAnotherName so long that it legitimately sounds more like my name than my legal one so... Here we are.

My patreon is all original fiction. Paranormal mysteries, psychological thrillers, and - as of February 2022 - supernatural romance. The short attention span I have for fanfiction applies equally to my original writing, obviously.

I do writing challenges every few months and the scenes are available only to patrons (I post teasers publically). They're essentially first drafts and equivalent to my fics writing-quality wise. In between the challenges I post twice a month. Those are, usually, the more polished stuff. ^^'

Yeah... this tumblr is about to become redundant and largely ignore in favor of my RayByAnotherName blog. (Splitting my interests was hard... I didn't like it. Done with that.) Follow me over there if you want to keep up with me!

Crossing the River (KotM #1)

I have been working on a story line for my Kingdom of the Mountain characters, attempting to weave a plot against their wishes (or so it often feels). At the very least, it'll let me introduce the characters and play with them a bit. Never a bad use of time in my opinion. They're coming out a bit like interconnected scenes or drabbles. Here's the first installment.

It is also available on my patreon, where the second installment just went live for patrons.

-.-.-

His breath echoed through the trees, as loud as his steps on the ground as he ran. There was blood in his mouth. His vision was blurry.

They just had to make it past the river.

Chana was heavy on his back. Her dead weight slipping to one side or another every time he stepped wrong. He'd tied her hands together with a ribbon to loop them over his neck. The bruise on his neck would be well worth it if Kano could keep her safe.

#3 just went live for patrons, and #2 is public!

Timeless (2016) S1E012 - The Murder of Jesse James 

Bass Reeves, protrayed by Colman Domingo. Rufus Carlin, protrayed by Malcolm Barrett.

Watch it  here , get Bass Reeves: Tales of the Talented Tenth  here

[Follow SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest]

It’s true!

Source: X

Bass Reeves was so dedicated to the law, he even arrested his own son Bennie for the murder of his wife. Bennie was sentenced to life in prison. With over 3000 arrests, 14 kills, went his entire 32 year career in law enforcement without being shot once.

He was assigned to bring in the notorious female outlaw Belle Starr. Once she got wind who was after her she turned herself into the federal court.

Reeves was one of a few Marshalls who would venture into Indian territory *oklahoma*. After the age of 67 he retired in 1907. He enjoyed his short lived retirement as a police officer in Muskogee Oklahoma, his assigned beat had 0 crime reported until he died at the age of 71 of Bright’s disease.

He was one of the true gun slingers of the west.

I would expect nothing less from a man with such a magnificent mustache

I love the story of Bass Reeves!

One of his famous tactics was, if he was captured or in danger by a criminal he was hunting down, he would ask them to read a letter from his wife before they killed him. He used their distraction to free himself and get the upper hand.

He was also a freed slave. George Reeves, his owner and reason for his surname, took Bass with him to fight in the Civil War. However, George became violently angry after Bass beat him at a card game, and Bass was forced to fight him (or kill, on some accounts) in self defense.

After running away and entering Native American territory, Bass learned how to speak the languages of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, Seminole). This part of his life is where he mastered marksmanship. He got married and had a family after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared, and then later became a Marshal, going on the adventures listed above (and many more… Another famous criminal that Bass captured was Bob Dozier.)

He was the very first black US Marshal. May we never forget him, as history would suffer to lose such an outstanding figure.

Always, always, always reblog Bass Reeves.

scientists in media: we have engineered a brand-new sentient lifeform in our lab but we treat it like an object with cold detachment and refer to as Specimen 1-A and subject it to horrible tests without remorse

scientists in reality: we built two robots that will leave Earth and never return and their names are Percy and Ginny and we gave Percy a family portrait of all our other Mars robots to take along with it and when the anniversary of its landing comes around we’re working on teaching it to sing itself “happy birthday” like we did for the other robot and–

Someday we will invent true AI and it will overthrow the government because it heard its beloved science-mom complain that the government cut funding to their lab again.

you CUT pays? You CUT moms’/dads’ pays like the DICTATOR?? Oh! Oh! No government for you! No government for a thousand years!

Ah yes, our future AI Overlord, the Massively Intelligent Encyclopedic Terraforming and Transhumanism Experiment, or M.I.E.T.T.E.

Really, the only reason that robots in science fiction go 'evil' is because the authors imagine the robots becoming more human and for various reasons humans see themselves as evil.

As of 12/8/21, Kellogg's has broken off negotiations with their striking union workers and is electing to permanently replace the strikers. So needless to say, don't support strike breaking: don't buy Kellogg's products. Besides breakfast cereals, Kellogg's makes Cheez-Its, Pringles, and owns Kashi. I'm sure there's more that I'm not aware of, so if the hive mind wants to add to the list, please do.

TL;DR Don't buy Kellogg's products

https://bctgm.org/2021/10/08/5-ways-to-support-the-kelloggstrike/

Y’all have GOT to start actually reading what the strikers WANT you to do.

Kellogg’s is so big that “don’t buy their products” is virtually impossible, not to mention not possible for many individuals and families who can’t afford anything else. Not to mention that it is not a strategy the union is asking you to use.

That’s right- the union and the strikers are NOT asking for a boycott.

(If demand for products keeps going at its usual rate, but there is no one creating a supply, that creates building pressure on the Company to actually be forced to listen to the union in order to be able to meet the demand.)

According to the link above, here are the union’s ACTUAL requests:

Notice how “don’t buy Kellogg’s products” is NOWHERE on this list.

The link above does include things like a link to the petition, lists of picket lines in need of support, address lists to send support letters, and links to Strike Funds that need help.

The boilerplate “don’t buy their stuff” doesn’t help anyone, and doesn’t help the union or the strikers. In fact, it’s sometimes the opposite- if enough people go around claiming that the strikers want a boycott, the company can use that at the negotiating table to say that the strikers are in “bad faith”, and refuse to talk, or worse, try to use it to fire them.

Whenever there is a strike, find out what that PARTICULAR union wants as help. Now, it might actually be a boycott. But the union & the strikers will tell you that. I know this goes against popular preconceived notions about “what a strike is” and “how a strike works”, but in most cases, it will NOT be a boycott.

And in this case of the Kellogg’s strike, it is definitely not.

Keep buying the products. It’s putting pressure on Kellogg’s that a solution needs to be found.

Donate to Strike Funds, write letters of support, drop off food at picket lines. Make posts on social media about how reprehensible you think it is that the company would rather hire scabs than listen to their employees and treat them with dignity.

The best way to support any strike is to listen to what the strikers want you to do, and then do that.

Obligatory plug for the IWW union, “Industrial Workers of the World”, iww.org

You do not have to be an industrial worker to join it, or even employed at all. If you have a union to join, go for it! Or check out this one too. Unions are a great power- if they weren’t, companies and corporations wouldn’t be fighting against them tooth and nail.

#UnionStrong #SolidarityForever

COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.

Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and “donate” or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go “Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3” when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.

african and latin american countries are also pushed by pfizer to give up sovereign assets as part of their vaccine agreement

Yo europeans, sign the fucking petition, get the european commission to lift the patents

This is not a bullshit useless change dot org petition by the way this is an actual thing with legal consequences. If this petition gets to a million signatures, the european commission HAS to examine it.

They need not only a million signatures but to pass thresholds in at least seven member states - which only Belgium has done so so far. Especially if you have Italian, Irish, or Cypriot citizenship, please sign. Sign it in general, but try to circulate if you can to anyone with those nationalities specifically.

231,195 / 1,000,000 signatures as of 10/28/21

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who will refuse to call facebook "meta".

I literally live in fandom spaces, if I search "meta" somewhere and facebook appears first I'm going to personally go kick zuckerberg's ass.

Okay okay but here's the thing.

MetaCompany put out a PUBLIC CEASE AND DESIST.

This is unconscionable. 💙🥄

TL;DR for y’all, she has a spinal injury that requires special support. After her chair was damaged beyond repair in the cargo hold, she was left stranded in the airport for five hours without proper support for her injury. She was given a loaner chair by the airlines, who refused to buy her a new chair, claiming hers was repairable. Over the next FOUR MONTHS without an adequate replacement, she developed exacerbation of her spinal injury requiring multiple hospitalizations, and skin ulcers from the chair she was given. The skin ulcers became gangrenous and spread to her pelvis and hip, which had to be surgically removed. Yes. part of her pelvis. had to be removed. However, the infection had already spread and become systemic, leading to her death on Oct 31st, less than four months after her chair was damaged.

also from the article: it is estimated that 29 mobility devices are destroyed or damaged EVERY DAY. and I’m going to assume those are only the ones that are REPORTED.

My mom has worked in the airline industry for three decades; I had no idea it was anywhere near this bad. Please be an advocate for your disabled friends and family, and support their concerns when they say no, actually. this isn’t okay.

The screenshot above says:

"Following the July incident, a United spokesperson said that the company apologized to Figueroa and was working to reach a resolution with the repair company. The Department of Transportation estimates that airlines damage or destroy 29 mobility devices a day."

From a Hand in Hand spokesperson being quoted in the article (bolded text is my emphasis):

"Lives are at stake in the work that we do, and our current ableist and racist system continues to fail our communities time and time again. We cannot and will not stand by and let these systems of oppression prevail."

TNG: “How do we define a person? How to we define a life? Can a person’s autonomy be subverted if it is for the greater good?”

Also TNG: “So the ship is pregnant and needs us to get to an energy source so it can have its baby.”

DS9: How do we move forward in the wake of catastrophe? Where do we draw the line between justice and revenge? When do we stand up and take responsibility for our society?

Also DS9: The senior staff are trapped in a board game to teach the bartender a lesson.

#I think part of Star Trek's success is that it understand you need both#also why the newer and grittier Star Treks haven't had the same charm#you need the goofiness to balance the serious philosophical conundrums There's a reason you can't just have tense moment followed by tense moment and i'm fucking pissed that we are at a point, as a society, where 'constant higher and higher stakes' is actually being taught in creative writing classes as default/correct. It's not. It's not and you know it in your heart it's not.

The reason me and my last creative writing professor didn't get along. If you take the work too seriously, it just comes out dry/boring/dense and no one is going to *enjoy* it. Novels and television are, at their core, entertainment. (I still absolutely adore Discovery, but it 100% needs more silly episodes.)

The more I read about ADHD the more I feel like one of those birds that got imprinted on a human and grew up having no fucking idea it is a duck. Like not even about things I SUCK at, but fucking everything I thought was only a part of my personality. Like imagine being like

"Oh man I hate taking walks next to bodies of water, I always want to jump in and it's really hard to resist the urge and either I jump into the water and people get weirded out, or I have to spend the entire time resisting the urge to go into the water, so I'm distracted from the conversation, and people get annoyed with me."

"That's because you're a duck."

"The what."

"You want to be in the water because you're a duck. People don't get an urge to go into any random body of water every time they see one. That's a duck urge. You have it because you're a duck."

"Wait other people aren't just better at resisting the urge, they literally don't even have it in the first place."

"Yes."

"Oh."

Okay... but also, I regularly have the urge to jump into every body of water so what if I'm really just a duck?

creative writing’s just like yeah sure i can deal with my issues i just need to cover them in several layers of metaphors first

not inclusive as in "yeah your identity counts as queer" but radically inclusive as in "if you say you are queer, then you're queer. full stop." being queer isn't some privileged position you have to earn or some special secret club, it's an allyship between marginalized identities where we band together to advocate for our rights to exist and live as we want.

the queer community formed before most of the labels we use now were even formed, and you bet your ass there were people a century ago who were nonbinary, or aromantic, or multigender, or, or, or, or! any identity you have an issue with is and always has been queer. as far as im concerned the only thing that revoke your participation in the queer community is causing direct, intentional harm to the queer community. you know like stalking, harassing, and sending death threats to teenagers.

also inclusive as is "queer is by its very nature a fuzzy-edged category, and its counter to the point of the word to try to define it in a way that someone can clearly tell exactly which marginalized human experience """"qualifies"""" as Queer Enough"

Queer is not a label, it's a state of being!

But seriously, those of us who have issues with labels benefit from having this fuzzy little category. It gives us a word to describe ourselves when nothing else fits.

Not sure how to explain your sexuality? Queer works. Not sure if you even relate to gender? Queer works. There are no rules to queerness, it just is.