as a procrastinating overachiever i feel like i don’t necessarily “half-ass” things, it’s more like a “3/4 ass”. like overall did i do pretty well? yeah. did i reach my maximum potential though? i think the fuck Not.

Misogyny and ageism aside, the message that older women should leave fandom and stick to conservative activities like “knitting and taxes” reveals a major ignorance of the nature of knitters.

Q&A: The Stress Limit

It’s a psychotic break. Everyone has a mental limit to the stress their mind can handle before it becomes too much, and they have a psychological break. This isn’t the fictional “sexy” psychotic break where they turn into some kind of animal. This is just the mind temporarily losing contact with reality. It’s a period of high emotional stress where the mind reaches a limit to what they can handle. In a combat role, the individual can no longer handle what you’re asking them to do. They can still go on with their lives, go home, get treatment, and, possibly, recover. However, they can’t fulfill their combat role anymore. This isn’t the kind of injury you tough your way through, either. The damage is, for the most part, permanent.

From a martial perspective, the psychological break is when a combatant is stressed beyond the limits of what their mind can handle. Whether that is in training or on the battlefield itself. The kinds of abusive training scenarios that many writers envision serves only to hasten this break by layering so much trauma on the trainee so quickly that they’ve no time to adjust to the new stress levels. This is usually because the writer in question has limited experience with any sort of training, much less martial training.

The problem with having a character kill a friend or even just a training partner during training is it’s traumatic. This won’t actually make it easier to kill people you care about less in the long run, especially since killing people you don’t care about is, usually, less traumatic. Your trainee could kill their buddy and be fine, but they could also end up grieving, depressed, guilt stricken, and suffering from PTSD. They might be pushed to the point where they’re no longer suitable for high stress situations. You’re gambling a lot of effort on their mental stability, especially when there are plenty of other methods available to test whether their personality is compatible with the role they will be assigned. (Like the training itself.)

You see, killing someone at the end of your training is not a test so much as its an initiation ritual. If your character succeeds they will be welcomed into a new brotherhood, a graduating class among which all of whom share their experience and their sin. This post-trauma love bombing serves as a means of lowering their stress, and adjusting reality so what they did becomes normative. The kill feels like an accomplishment, paling in comparison to the goal they’ve spent their whole lives working towards. They’re not unique, and they’ve a whole collection of new brothers and sisters who can help them work through it. That’s ultimately what binds them to whatever group or organization they work for, and not the kill itself.

If your character is part of an organization like this, you can guarantee they’ve been mentally worked over and prepared for this point during the course of their training. Morals are fluid, ever shifting, and entirely adjustable. After all, the point of training is to teach your student how to handle more stress and avoid an overload.

Your mental limit isn’t a hard one. In fact, your mental and physical limits can be moved. They’re not static. This is one of the purposes of training, so you build yourself up over time by learning to handle more and more stress. The goal is to prepare the student for the crazy training they’ll see five years down the line by teaching them how to break through the mental barriers they’ve set for themselves on their physical limits.

The mental limit and the mental barriers are in two separate categories. The mental limit is the point their mind can’t go past and that’s much further out than the mental barriers. Mental Barriers can be broken because those are based in what the student believes they can do versus what they actually can. An example of this is that most students in high school, for all their moaning, can actually run a mile. Their bodies can handle that, but they don’t think their bodies can or they don’t want to. Unless they’re part of a sports team or run a mile regularly, most of them will end up walking the minute they’re outside their teacher’s sight.

The good trainers understand the difference between the mental limit and physical limit versus the “I can’t” mental barriers. Over time, you teach a student to push past the barriers they’ve internalized. Those are what they believe is possible for them to do, you move their mental limits and physical limits forward.  This allows you to push them to perform more challenging actions and pursue tougher training. The student learns to discern the difference between discomfort and actual pain, and then they are the ones who are figuring out when enough actually is enough. The elite fighters we talk about are the people who are constantly pushing those barriers forward on their own, they are finding their boundaries and working to break past them. That is the major difference between them and the more average trainees around them.

The crazy training most people imagine is a point we work towards, not where we begin. This isn’t these teachers “going soft” on their students, it’s acknowledging that everyone has limits and we’re going to work them toward that point rather than throw them at it.

If you asked a guy who just signed up to go through Special Forces training of seven days of constant work without  sleep, the vast majority are going to crack. They’re not mentally or physically prepared for it. They could be, though. If you gave them the time and training they needed to get themselves ready.

Like every other type of physical training, martial combat is a staircase. You are climbing toward specific goal points, these points allow you to take on more stress than you did before. This includes tougher training, more dangerous techniques, tougher conditioning, more reps added, more responsibility, and even teaching younger students as a means to improve your skills.

In this way, the stress your mind and body can bear is strengthened. You come out of it a stronger person.

This is especially important to understand when working with children. Children are still developing, their brains are making patterns, and this means they’ve a chance to go much further in what physical stress they can take when they reach adulthood. Properly conditioned with not just faster reflexes but reflexes honed specifically for martial combat. They’ll also be in peak physical condition.

However, the manner in which you could hurry an eighteen to twenty-one year old who signed up for the military through extensive and rigorous training and quickly escalating over a matter of weeks can’t be done with a child of nine. Their minds aren’t developed enough yet to handle that kind of stress, much less the murder party stress some writers imagine.

This is when emotional or psychological trauma comes in. When we reach a point where the mental limit breaks, the trauma endured puts them into a state where they can’t function, at least not in the way you want them to. Everyone has a mental limit for what they can endure and when you push them past it, especially with extreme situations, they break down.

Trauma is the main issue with most fictionally imagined abusive training scenarios. You can’t traumatize people into being better soldiers. Trauma specifically is putting intense pressure on that mental limit, this training is not attempting to forcibly push it forward but actually break it within a short span. The way abusers want to break their victims, so it’ll be easier to make them behave how they want. The problem with this mindset, especially when turning out combatants, is that you need your soldiers to be able to make decisions in the field. Extraordinary skill is all well and good, but that’s all it is. What makes a combatant truly great is their mind, their willpower, and understanding they can push themselves farther than they might ever be made to.

With children and violence, they don’t understand what they’re doing in the moment. The ability isn’t there to process what’s happening. Grief in children is different than with adults, and the true weight often hits as a delayed reaction at some point later in life. So, when you put adults through traumatic events the emotional and psychological bill for it will eventually come due.   With kids, they’re still developing as people. They don’t know what normal is.

You can ask kids to kill people. The problem is they will, eventually, realize what they’ve done and they’re not absolved within their own heads just because they didn’t know what they were doing at the time. That’s a bill coming due, and ultimately will affect the long term health of your fighting force. Worse, you have no idea when or how it will manifest. The goal is to get your trainees through their training without giving them a nervous breakdown.

This is actually even more important with warriors who need to operate anywhere on their own for prolonged periods of time, like special forces, spies, and assassins. They need to be stable enough to do their jobs and what their jobs ask of them, make decisions, plan operations, and act as their own agents where there’s no possibility for backup.

You can have a guy who just does what he’s told as a regular soldier. That’s a good grunt, he’s not going anywhere up the ranks but he’ll serve his purpose and may take on more responsibility if he manages to survive. His job isn’t to do any thinking, but to follow the orders he’s given. The issue is you need your warriors who work in isolation to be able to think. They have to plan, problem solve, and create their own initiative. They don’t sit around waiting for orders. Even when they’re given an assignment, told to go somewhere, and kill someone, they’ve got to do the ground work themselves. This means establishing their cover, do their scouting, build on the information they’ve been given, and perform all other work associated.

You actually have to train them to think. If you never contemplated the idea that your assassin or covert operative as a highly driven and intelligent individual, you probably should consider it. If they’re used to working solo they could break from whatever organization they’re in, provided they’re willing to accept the associated risks. They’d be looking over their shoulder for the rest of their life, but they have all the skills they need to create a false identity and just go teach at a primary school somewhere or work as an office bureaucrat. Lots of spies end up working for corporations as security services. Your hitman easily could land a cushy office job somewhere with a major company cleaning up small problems on their dole. If they want to lay low, they could land a job as a small time bounty hunter hunting down bail jumpers.

Always remember, whenever you’re writing training sequences, these characters have options. Also remember: their teachers know they’re imparting a useful skill set.

For certain personality types, assassination is going to be one of the most stressful kinds of work. Not just as combat work, but getting close to people, earning their trust, and ultimately breaking that trust wears on the mind over time. This is a stressful job with a lot of responsibility where you’re constantly simulating connections that you don’t feel. There’s no reason to jumpstart that stress during their training outside a set of limited and controlled circumstances. It won’t help them do their job. Worse, it could sabotage their development in the end.

When working with training for field operatives or real world combat, trainees are always prepared on the assumption they may die. This is already a fact of life for soldiers throughout history, and the idea they may watch their friends die is going to be a given. This is going to be a major source of trauma. Survival is just as much luck as it is skill. Abusive training methods won’t change that.

The mental limit is when the mind endures so much psychological trauma they have a nervous breakdown. You can’t psychologically scar someone past that damage. People don’t tough their way through it, they can work through it with the aid of therapy but not on the battlefield. On the logistical side, someone who has been mentally compromised to that degree is unlikely to be making sound decisions. That, or the trainee breaks for freedom at first opportunity. This is also a bad thing. They’re taking whatever knowledge your organization gifted them with into the wild.

Again, abusive training is ultimately a form of self-sabotage. This is why smart people don’t do it. The people who are good at combat are ultimately the people who want to be there. Loyal combatants are better combatants. If they’re part of an organization, assassins aren’t just making themselves money. They’re making their organization money.

Always ask: why is my character fighting? Why are they here? What are they getting out of this? Why are they doing this?

If they answer is “they were forced to”, you may want to think on it further. Human beings aren’t automatons who blindly do what they’re told, and anyone who’s been in business for awhile will know incentivized training is more effective than forced. Students work harder when they want to be there.

Why grab kids from nice suburban homes when you can grab runaways and orphans from the gutter instead? They’ve already got the mental outlook you want, no one will miss them, and they’ll be happy to have three square meals a day. Worst case you’ll have to dry out the drug addicts. This was actually the plot of the original La Femme Nikita and the film(s), by the way. The government pulled runaways and drug addicts off the street,  cleaned them up, and taught them to be assassins. No one was going to miss them, and if they died? Well, they link back to no one.

-Michi

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Q&A: The Stress Limit was originally published on How to Fight Write.

there’s a lot of evidence that the iliad and the odyssey were actually composed by a variety of poets through an oral tradition rather than just by one poet, so what if the homeric texts are actually just a very long game of D&D

homer, the dm: okay achilles, agamemnon has just taken away your war prize, what do you want to do achilles’ player: i roll to have a diplomatic conversation with agamemnon achilles’ player: *rolls a 1* homer: you throw the staff of speaking at agamemnon’s face and storm off to sulk with your boyfriend

Homer, the DM: Your beautiful Patroclus is dead. What do you do? Achilles’ player: I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: You can’t fight everyone. How would you even– Achilles’ player: *rolls a 20* I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: *sighs* Fine. You cut a path through the Trojan army, enemy dead strewn in your wake. Achilles’ player: How many? Homer, the DM: …lots. Enough to clog the friggin’ river with bodies. Achilles’ player: I fight the river. Homer, the DM: You. can. not. fight. the. river. Achilles’ player: *reaches for dice*

Homer, the DM: Okay guys, so the war’s over, you had a bunch of losses but you won in the end. Time to go home, let’s roll to see who gets there firs—

Odysseus’s player: I got a critical failure.

Homer: The cyclops asks you who you are. What do you do?

Odysseus’s player: I say, “Who me? I’m nobody.”

Homer: Roll for deception.

Odysseus’s player: I got a natural 20.

Homer: The cyclops now completely believes that your name is Nobody. He shouts for help from the other cyclops but they ignore him because he’s telling them that “Nobody hurt him.”

Odysseus’s player: FUCK yes

“why are you in fandom when you’re 20+”

because we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us. 

So here’s a story. One Fourth of July I was walking down the street and ran into a BNF who I’d met a couple of times at a slash-centric con. It turned out she lived in the same building as one of my boyfriends at the time, which was nearby, so she invited me to stop by. She had a small group of friends there, and one of them was an older woman with short, white hair.

“How old are you?” she asked.

I told her my age, probably about 28 at the time.

“I’ve been reading fanfiction longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.

Here’s another story. A couple of years ago at GeekGirlCon they had an “elders speak” panel. It included some women who had organized Star Trek cons in the 70s and 80s. So, first off, we really have always been here, this is a kind of geekiness that has always belonged to women. And they talked about women doing fandom back then secretly, about having to ask their husbands for money so they could travel to meet other fans. And two of the women on this panel were a couple who’d met each other in fandom.

One of the main reasons I go to slash cons is to connect with my foremothers in fandom. A lot of them aren’t on Tumblr or Twitter, some never even really got into LiveJournal. But they’re still here, doing their thing, having Fourth of July parties and emailing with their friends about fandom. Our elders are our history, our proof that we have always been here, that “media fandom” (fandom of Western TV and movies) is our house that we built with our hands.

respect your fandom mothers and grandmothers you ungrateful little buggers

It’s just hilarious to me that kids on here think that your interests fundamentally change as you get older. Your responsibilities change and, hopefully, you start looking at things and evaluating with more life experience….which, btw, is why a lot of the over 30 people here side eye the shit out of you guys many days. Because lived experience and life experience makes you see things in a different light…even fictional stuff. But you don’t just all of a sudden turn 30 and become this boring person who has no interest anymore in all the nerd things and fandom you liked at 15 or 20 or 25. You are the same person. You still need an outlet for your interests and you still crave those safe spaces to geek out the same way you do as a kid. We’ve always been here. Other women came before us.

FYI In 1993, the most popular Superman website was run by a woman named Zoomway. She was a life long Superman fan who started the site after Lois and Clark hit the air and she had thousands of women (many of whom were older btw) who followed her site. She wasn’t some 20 year old kid. She was a grown woman with life experience decades older than most of you who was writing feminist commentary about Superman and attending fan expos before any of you were born. I was only a kid when I first starting reading her writing and she was the one who introduced me to Superman fandom. She died of cancer a few years ago and her loss was deeply felt.

Women older than you built literally every iconic fandom you post about on here.

I need the community I’ve found within my fandom more now at 43 than I ever needed it at ages 18 or 20. The more life wears on me, the more I live and love and lose, the more I treasure this space of flails and joy and analysis over episode ephemera, shared with a chorus of voices flung far and wide around the world, small sections of which have become friends, shining lights who I look for whenever I log on. 

I joined fandoms when I was 18 and I’ve never looked back.

Been in fandom 20+ years and counting <3

(also, omg ZOOMWAY)

First fandom 40 years ago. Still here. Squee is for life, not just for kids.

Fandom for 23 years, and I still smile at the memory of Zoomway and her absolute awesomeness.

Stumbled on my first Star Wars fanzine about 36-37 years ago.

I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the first time in 1978.

We’ve been here all along and we’re not going anywhere.

I wrote my first Trek fanfic just after ST:TOS premiered. I didn’t even know that fanfic was what I was doing: didn’t even know the genre had a name. Later on, when I was in nursing school, I came to know the women in New York who were in the process of organizing those first Trek conventions of the 70s. I worked some of those cons and made friendships there that last to this day. The people who ran private presses dedicated to K/S slashzines and presided over dealers’ tables piled high with them are now pro writers and editors with worldwide reputations… and they are still fans.

Which is as it should be. Fandom isn’t something you need to grow out of to prove your adulthood (or justify it to others). And it’s their own insecurities that people trying to push that position on others are running from. So fuck that noise. Long-term fannish lives are the original Slow Burn story… and it’s one we’ll still be writing for years to come.

My friend is heavily into the Star Wars fandom and we had a drunken moment where she was admitted in her twenties she was terrified that she was going to lose that passion, that thing that so defined her, and the resolution a bottle of absinthe brought her was she was still the same person she was at 15 - she just had more spending money

then she cackled like a witch in a disney movie and dropped a few hundred on merch on cafepress

she’s a mom with two kids who are being indoctrinated in the ways of the force, and she’s glad that her eldest is now old enough to sit through the movies at the cinema - because her parents wouldn’t take her to the Ewok movie when it aired [she dodged a bullet, have you seen that?]

you don’t grow up, you just get more money to spend, sure she might justify buying that animatronic porg for her little girls, but she’s the same woman who bought the official barbie wonder woman dolls in their boxes for her little girls that she will never let them touch.

Terry Pratchett - The Wee Free Men (via terrypratchettparadise)

You have a thing at 2:00 PM so you set a reminder for 1:00 PM because you don’t want to be late, but you should eat by 12:00 PM. That means you should start preparing food by 11:30 AM, but you want to double check or confirm the appointment before 11:00 AM before everyone goes to lunch. So if you want to finish your other tasks by 10:00 AM, you ought to start at 8:00 AM, which means you’ve got to wake up at 7:30 AM and you may as well get ready to go out then ahead of time, and that’s how something that starts at 2:00 PM effectively starts at 7:30 AM and lasts the entire day.

ME. ME. ME.

This is an important recommendation

By this point I have quite a few followers who are into Star Wars. And quite a few who are into medieval literature.

Allow me to tell you about The Tatooine Cycle, or Star Wars (1977) in the style of a medieval Irish epic, which started life on Twitter in November 2015. The whole thing is on the author’s blog, The Head of Donn Bó.

Some selections:

My favourite thing about it is that Tom O’Donnell (the author) used the name Finn for Luke, on grounds that you wouldn’t find anyone called Luke in Irish mythology. Finn is a calque for Luke: both mean white, and secondarily, pure. Tom did not know at that point that there would be a Finn in Ep VIII.

Cenn Obi recites random and cryptic poetry throughout, it’s glorious. Also glorious: the passage that combines the passing on of the lightsaber and the death of Owen and Beru:

This is an ill omen for the hospitaller. BRILLIANT.

Look, just go and read the post, to find out about the shining eye of Da Thféider that destroys armies in a single glance, and Finn Aiércoisige’s daring efforts to throw a spear through a small window and knock over a cauldron, thus setting on fire the hostel of Da Thféider.

@abadpoetwithdreams I feel like this would be in your interests. 

@meabhair @maawi @obaewankenope @sanerontheinside @lilyrose225writes

@in-a-trans-like-state

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

I seriously love this.

every fall teenage girls are like.. “oh , im gonna enter a place of business and order a product which is offered by that place of business because i like the flavor of it” and honestly? how dare they. that’s so annoying. why can’t they buy the beverage that i, a smart man, would prefer to drink

szechuan sauce frappe bc the cartoon science man like it

I’m WHEEZING

kill the idea that being an adult is horrible

getting old and dying is awful, sure, but before that even happens there’s like a good 50-60 years of your life you’re dismissing that will be spent creating and doing and accomplishing and growing and becoming who you really are

kill the idea that life ends after 30. you’re only just beginning.

Dude. My life didn’t even really BEGIN until I was around 30. It took that long for me to get over all the anxiety and stress and bullshit expectations SHOVED onto me by OTHER PEOPLE enough to where I could actually start discovering who I really am.

You know how people talk about ‘mid life crisis’? Most of the time, THIS is what it is. Finally realizing that all the things you’ve done in your desperate attempt to be a ‘proper adult’ were all things forced upon you by your family/friends/peers. And, most importantly, that you don’t have to listen to them or any of that. That life is yours to discover and learn. Some people are lucky enough to have it before they hit 30. Some people don’t have this epiphany until they’re over 50.

Life doesn’t end at 30. Many times, 30 will be the breaking point. And you’ll finally free yourself of a lot of the crap expectations other people had of you. I was 32 years old when I finally said ‘fuck it’ and bleached the streak in my hair and dyed it in rainbow stripes. It was the first step in a lot of steps that have freed me and left me living life much more the way I always wanted to and I’ve been SO much happier. I’ve been discovering who I really am and it’s -fantastic-.

Being an adult isn’t what you think it is. It’s going to be difficult, yes, but I promise it’s not as bad as it seems. Going through the transition to adult is WAY harder than actually BEING an adult. Take it from an adult who thought she’d never figure her shit out. ♥

I danced around singing, “I’m so glad I’m not in my 20s anymore!” on my 30th birthday.  The less I worry about how I look and who I please the happier and more productive I am.

Dude as someone who’s 27 and got OVER a ton of that shit? Hell yes. This post is amazing.

So apparently the James Cameron’s Avatar sequels are going to focus on the same characters from the first movie, including the ones that died, because the characters are what people remember most about Avatar.  You remember the characters from Avatar, right?  Those lovable characters that were the best part of the movie?  Why, they’re so great and memorable I don’t even feel like I need to name them.

people say the animorphs covers are *creepy* but the actual in book transformations are all like ‘then her face cracked in two, her organs melted, her bones all snapped and reformed backwards, and her fingers and toes fused together. she couldnt cry because her tear ducts didnt fucking exist anymore. everyone looked at the ground so they wouldnt throw up looking at this’

new art challenge: Re-draw Animorphs covers based of the books description.

New art challenge: dONT