a list of my top fave fix-its that nobody asked for!
People really think it’s an easy process. It’s hella expensive too
here’s a handy chart if you don’t know how hard this process is
This process is *absolutely* long and arduous, even when the person did nothing remotely “suspicious” or odd.
Born citizens usually don’t know that.
I sure didn’t until I met some people going through it.
It took my dad over 25 years to get legalized. He came here illegally at 23 and he got legalized two years ago at 50 years old. He was fighting tooth and nail to become a citizen for all that time. Some of you fucking gringos need to educate yourself on how fucking hard it is to just exist in this country if you weren’t born here.
The Righy Story at the Right Time
Just a reminder: don’t feel inadequate about the story you’re currently working on! Sometimes we feel unworthy - not skilled or experienced enough, too busy, too unfamiliar with the genre, etc. - to write the story we’re inspired to write. Keep in mind that 1. this story would not have occurred to you if you weren’t meant to have your hands in its production somehow, and 2. even if your progress in the story drops off, if it’s meant to be your story, it won’t just abandon you and give up on you (as long as you don’t give up on it). The WIP I’m currently working on has been in the works for two years: I started writing it and ending up hating it and trashing what I had about two months after starting. However, the idea wouldn’t quit bugging me, so I started over last year and I’m still making continual progress. If you’re meant for that idea and that idea is meant for you, it will stick with you.
Reminding myself of this day in and day out to battle the crippling sense of inadequacy and insecurity over my writing that I am convinced will never develop any higher than it is now. Mediocre at best. But it my best. So I’m sticking with it.
My Chinese Grammar List
- The Auxiliar Verb “要”
- The Averb of Degree “最”
- The Pronoun “每”
- The “的” Phrase
- The Numeral Classifier “一下”
- The Pair of Conjunctions “因为……，所以……”
- The 把 sentence
- The Complement of Result “好”
- The Negative Structure “一……也/都 + 不/没……”
- The Conjunction “那”
- Simple Complements of Direction
- The Successive Occurrence of Two Actions
- The Rhetoric Question “能……吗？”
- Comparison of “还是” and “或者”
- The Structure “又……又……”
- Indicating a Change
- The Structure “越来越 + Adj/Mental V”
- Comparison of “刚” and “刚才”
- To Express a Period of Time
- To Express an Interest
- Comparison of “又” and “再”
- Comparison of “才” and “就”
- Compound Complements of Direction
- The Structure “一边……一边……”
- The Structure “先……，再/又……，然后……”
- Complex Complements of State
- Reduplication of Monosyllabic Adjectives
- Reduplication of Disyllabic Verbs
- The Preposition “关于”
- The “被” Sentence
- (…)
thechocolatebrigade
“Emotional labor is often invisible to men because a lot of it happens out of their sight. Emotional labor is when my friends and I carefully coordinate to make sure that nobody who’s invited to the party has drama with anyone else at the party, and then everyone comes and has a great time and has no idea how much thought went into it. Emotional labor is when I have to cope, again, with the distress I feel at having to clean myself in a dirty bathroom or cook my food in a dirty kitchen because my male roommate didn’t think it was important to clean up his messes. Emotional labor is having to start the 100th conversation with my male roommate about how I need my living space to be cleaner. Emotional labor is reminding my male roommate the next day that he agreed to clean up his mess but still hasn’t. Emotional labor is reassuring him that it’s okay, I’m not mad, I understand that he’s had a very busy stressful week. Emotional labor is not telling him that I’ve had a very busy stressful week, too, and his fucking mess made it even worse. Emotional labor is reassuring my partner over and over that yes, I love him, yes, I find him attractive, yes, I truly want to be with him, because he will not do the work of developing his self-esteem and relies on me to bandage those constantly-reopening wounds. Emotional labor is letting my partner know that I didn’t like what he did sexually last night, because he never asked me first if I wanted to do that. Emotional labor is reassuring him that, no, it’s okay, I’m not mad, I just wanted him to know for next time, yes, of course I love him, no, this doesn’t mean I’m not attracted to him, I’m just not interested in that sort of sex. Emotional labor is not being able to rely on him to reassure me that it’s not my fault that I didn’t like the sex, because this conversation has turned into my reassuring him, again. Emotional labor is when my friend messages me once every few weeks with multiple paragraphs about his life, which I listen to and empathize with. Afterwards, he thanks me for being “such a good listener.” He asks how my life has been, and I say, “Well, not bad, but school has been so stressful lately…” He says, “Oh, that sucks! Well, anyway, I’d better get to bed, but thanks again for listening!” Emotional labor is when my friend messages me and, with no trigger warning and barely any greeting, launches into a story involving self-harm or suicide or something else of that sort because “you know about this stuff.” Emotional labor was almost all of my male friends in high school IMing me to talk about how the girls all go for the assholes. Emotional labor is when my partners decide they don’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, but rather than directly communicating this to me, they start ignoring me or being mean for weeks until I have to ask what’s going on, hear that “I guess I’m just not into you anymore,” and then have to be the one to suggest breaking up. For extra points, then I have to comfort them about the breakup. Emotional labor is setting the same boundary over and over, and every time he says, “I’m sorry, I know you already told me this, I guess I’d just forgotten.” Emotional labor is being asked to completely explain and justify my boundaries. “I mean, that’s totally valid and I will obviously respect that, I just really want to understand, you know?” Emotional labor is hiding the symptoms of mental illness, pretending my tears are from allergies, laughing too loudly at his jokes, not because I’m just in principle unwilling to open up about it, but because I know that he can’t deal with my mental illness and that I’ll just end up having to comfort him because my pain is too much for him to bear. Emotional labor is managing my male partners’ feelings around how often we have sex, and soothing their disappointment when they expected to have sex (even though I never said we would) and then didn’t, and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex this time, and making sure we “at least cuddle a little before bed” even though after all of this, to be quite honest, the last thing I fucking want is to touch him.”
—
Miri,
(via amberying)
I want every man I know to read this and really think about how it might apply to you because if there is one overarching theme among you all it’s that you read this stuff and share it and nod and go “yeah wow men suck” and NEVER THINK THAT IT IS TALKING ABOUT YOU. IT IS.
(via karaokay)
House of M #1 (2005)
written by Brian Michael Bendis art by Olivier Coipel, Tim Townsend, & Frank D'Armata
Repeat after me:
- Joe Biden is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Bernie Sanders is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Beto O’Rourke is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Cory Booker is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Pete Buttigieg is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Julian Castro is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Jay Inslee is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- John Hickenlooper is a good candidate with some negative points. But he’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Elizabeth Warren is a good candidate with some negative points. But she’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Kamala Harris is a good candidate with some negative points. But she’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Any other Democrat running is a good candidate with some negative points. But they’d be infinitely better than Trump.
- Any other Democrat not yet running is a good candidate with some negative points. But they’d be infinitely better than Trump.
There is no perfect politician no matter how much you personally like them and just because they appeal to you more than another candidate does at the moment doesn’t mean that is enough for them to win the Presidency.
The primary process is long. Democratic voters really need to stop aligning with blind loyalty to one person this early and actually keep a halfway open mind to let other candidates make their case.
“They did a thing I don’t like once so I refuse to ever vote for them ever,” is the opposite of helpful.
I’m not sure I’m willing to say Joe Biden is actually any kind of good candidate on his own, but he’s not Trump, so he’s got that going for him which is nice.
Look if Biden won the primary, I would vote for him over Trump. I would. But now is the time we GET to talk about candidates and who is the best to push forward.
Biden also doesn’t exactly fall on this scale like the rest do.
tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese
This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!
Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!
However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).
So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.
If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.) A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.
So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.
If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just… just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.
(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)
One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v.
Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?
Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.
Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:
- Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and I’ll give one specific example of this later on.)
- As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.
- So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. You’ll notice that education is a big one. If you can’t decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that can’t go wrong.
- Unlike in English speaking cultures (and I’m going to limit myself to English because we’re writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of “names” in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you need this tutorial, you don’t know enough to try it.) Congratulations, it is now a name!!
- But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names don’t. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesn’t mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.
- So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!
- Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education you’re valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words about these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan Yu’s “yu” (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protection…
- So when you’re choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that sounds “like a name”; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, here’s my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: 王，李，陈. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so you’re still doing better than they are. High five!
You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.
First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!
Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work… and its prequels… and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)
I had to remove the links from the main post in order for it to show up in tag search, so here are the links to dictionaries and resources as a reblog!
- MDBG an open source dictionary - start here
- Wiktionary don’t knock it til you try it
- iCIBA (they recently changed their user interface and it’s much less English-speaker friendly now but it’s still a great dictionary)
- Pleco (an iOS app, maybe also Android???) contains same open source dictionary as MDBG and also its own proprietary dictionary
- Chinese Etymology
Chinese-speaking fam, your thoughts on this…?
am chinese can confirm chinese naming is a pain in the ass and even for my oc’s i 100% get lazy, pick a somewhat common name, and then pick more Unique characters for it in an attempt to differentiate
this is ofc the equivalent of people trying to name their kids like, a common name but spelling it in a horrifically quirky manner but what can you do really
this is pretty good! uh my family at least is obnoxiously pedantic abt stroke count / elemental affinities of each character / numberology things but it’s not exactly spr accessible to an english-speaking audience and i have never rly cared abt it so. well. speaking as someone who’s literally shuffled thru 3+ chinese names now before settling on one that everyone is Okay with
i think the hardest part honestly is to write a chinese name that doesn’t sound Plain Bad to a chinese-speaking ear but — tbqh there are so many dialects that the whole idea of aesthetically pleasing names will vary dramatically depending on who you’re asking, as will pronunciations (hence why, again, i personally tend to fall back on popular name lists if naming modern charas bc my mandarin ear for these things is pretty bad)
there’s also the challenge of telling whether a character is masculine or feminine which is not always as obvious as it seems — and then you end up seeing charas w some vaguely mismatched names but like, in the ~modern era~ people are a lot more lenient w naming re: traditionally gendered characters/concepts (tho def easier to name a girl a unisex/masculine name than a boy a feminine name) but it’s difficult
history is also a pain — eg. there r cultural revolution era names that rly slap u across the face with PATRIOTISM and RESPECT TROOPS and LOVE THE PARTY (i’m honestly so sorry for anyone who gets stuck with 爱国 as a name) // and similarly there will b very different naming trends depending on era and setting — in modern days for example it’s a lot more common to have all siblings share a first character regardless of gender for example
but.. going back to OP, this is a pretty good guide & the resources suggested r A+, i use them myself
just because I spend some time doing nothing doesn’t mean I’m relaxing. I have not once relaxed
eldritch-crone-deactivated20210
Why is every piece of media now about “surprise! bet you didn’t see that coming” instead of themes, character arcs, internal logic, and consistency in writing?
It’s okay if your audience (especially hardcore fans) predicts your story. It means that they picked up the clues you put in, understood the themes you were trying to convey, empathised with the characters…
How is that a bad thing?
Instead each piece of media feels like it’s written by a marketing team that is looking at the latest statistics for TRP ratings and box-office collections.
Me on Fourth of July like
ifreakinglovemantarays
Anyway, stop spreading white nationalist rhetoric and toxic nationalism thanks
that-deist-dude
Nobody said anything about race. Stop that.
It’s nationalist to state facts now?
How is this toxic?
Show me countries better than the USA.
menalez
pop-titty-epic
I was gonna say aren’t we like #1 in a bunch of bad stats? Like aren’t we the top for rape and abuse?
we are superior in waging wars, exporting and using firearms, and incarcerating the population among a lot of other terrible things. how depressing is patriotism and nationalism?
I remember this epic moment from The Newsroom
Americans just buy into the propaganda they are the greatest country when there is absolutely zero evidence to say so.
robregal
I reblog this post every chance I get.
no offense but… whats the point in saying something rude about someone’s favorite things to their face just bc you don’t personally like it or have the same taste as them… like what do u get out of that interaction other than prove that you can’t respect your friend’s interests
this just in, every member of the fandom brings something new and irreplaceable with them regardless of whether they are a content creator or not. the conversations you have with your fellow fans and the positivity you bring just by sharing the same space is beautiful, and so are you. thank you for existing
i wrote half an essay in 20mins today when it’s not even due for another 4 weeks, reblog this to have a productivity lightning bolt strike you like it did me today
Re: your post about Cherik prompts - If you are up for it, I adore your modern au fics, and would love to see something with perhaps the two of them being exes who can't get over each other? :D :D :D
It’s rather late in coming, I know, and also probably (almost certainly) not what you had in mind. But I started writing, and shmoop appeared. *cringes* Here it is anyway?
–
There will come a day, Charles thinks,when he won’t be hyperaware of Erik whenever they are in the same room. That dayis not today.
He watches as Erik entertains hiscompanion at the bar. She’s very blond, very curvy, impeccably dressed, andseems to be drawing attention of almost every man in the room. She’s clearlyhanging onto Erik’s every word. Erik—Erik looks bored when he’s not carefulenough to hide it. All the signs are there, unfortunately familiar asbreathing. The carefully constructed smile, the unfocused gaze idly wanderingaround, the distracted signs meant to indicate attention. Charles wonders if heshould feel a pang of satisfaction at that, but he doesn’t.
Erik never looked bored when he waswith Charles. Annoyed out of his mind, yes. Frustrated, frequently. And by theend of it, so angry that his entire body was shaking, clinging to the lastvestiges of restraint so as not to erupt in violence. Charles wonders if hewould have taken bored over it after all and if that would have changedanything.
When we firt met Tony Stark over a decade ago now he was the worst version of himself. That that worst version of himself was also monstrously entertaining, largely or entirely thanks to Robert Downey Jr’s swaggering charisma, is by the by. This Tony was wealthy beyond measure, but he was also arrogant, enamoured with nothing more than enhancing his own legend. He worked hard. Played hard. Burned the candle at both ends, and in the middle for good measure.. Heart, or the lack thereof, is such a huge part of who Tony Stark is. Yet he’s also the most self aware Avenger. And most desperate to change, to learn, to grow.
Empire Magazine ( 2019)
Anonymous asked:
do you think there's anything Erik could do that Charles would never forgive him for?
hmmmm this is an interesting question. i think charles could eventually forgive anything erik does to him directly (e.g. leaving him on cuba), but i think if erik ever harmed any of charles’s students or if he’d succeeded in killing raven in dofp, charles would never forgive him. touching charles’s loved ones would definitely be a hard line in the sand, and even if erik had a “good reason” (like he sort of did in dofp), charles wouldn’t ever be able to see past that. but aside from that, i think charles is capable of forgiving erik for just about anything. he loves that man, for better or for worse :’)
you don’t have to cancel everyone the second they misstep or do something dumb but you also DON’T have to defend everything that your fave does. you can say “hey this particular thing sucked” without getting into this all-or-nothing mentality. you are not an extension of the things you like. you can think freely and criticize the things (and people) that you like, and a criticism of something you like is not something that you should take personally or feel the need to correct/defend.
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
—
This is probably the best, non-judgmental description of fan fiction I’ve ever heard of in main stream media. (via concerninghumans)
Source: TIME