a comic about fix-it fanfics

What makes you think we haven't???

(Once. Just once. But it was glorious.)

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS’ legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

resources for staying safe online

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead

the purest form of serotonin is when a cat looks at u and u go like “what?” and it meows at u

like, that is a very unspecific response I still have no idea what you want but I applaud how adorably you meowed all the same, well done

This post led me to reminisce on the nature of cat’s meowing, and I have a funny story

I befriended a feral cat once who had spent her life in the forest without human interaction. I was worried about her because she had a paw damaged from an old injury and was emaciated but obviously nursing kittens that were hidden away somewhere. It took me weeks of putting out food and sitting across the yard every evening for her to trust me even a little and when she decided we were friends and she expected dinner every night she started coming to my door and trying to call for me in the evening, but she didn’t meow. Why would she? Cats only meow naturally as kittens when their vocal chords/ears aren’t fully developed, adult cats communicate with vocalizations that aren’t audible to humans. She probably tried making noises I couldn’t hear to call me but ended up sticking to the one I always responded to- a horrible yowling growl that she had made at me when we first encountered each other in the forest. Except once we were friends she would make this noise while purring and rubbing affectionately against a nearby tree or the porch railing (because she didn’t want to touch me yet). This understandably freaked my family members out but I was touched that she had taken the time to find a way to basically yell FUCK OFF in an affectionate way.

Fast forward to when she finally trusts me enough to bring her hidden kittens out of the forest to me, long story short I gained their trust and put them in this big pen, that I had previously used to keep chickens in, so they’d be safe and to keep her from having another litter. Except she was already secretly pregnant again! (Fix your pets, guys, they make SO many babies) and ended up having her new babies in this pen. I kept my distance, sitting on the outside once they were born until she seemed comfortable enough to let me come inside. The kittens were a bit wild, hissing viscously at me as soon as they opened their eyes, but they warmed up to me. There were four of them and soon they all wanted to be the center of attention during the twice daily play sessions. I’d be playing with one and another would meow insistently behind me and I’d immediately answer them and give them love, teaching them that humans could be friends that answer their needs- making them adoptable once they were weaned. Mama cat (Artie) would just watch me play with them, and I guess she was doing some thinking because one day when they were about a month old I was playing with them and one meowed behind me. I was confused because I hadn’t realized there was a kitten behind me and when I turned, there wasn’t. The only cat there was Artie looking at me really intensely. I turned back around to the kittens and I heard the meow again, I turned back to Artie and responded in the way I always did with the kittens “yes baby?” And she meowed again in an exact imitation of her kittens! After that she would.not.shut.up. It was like she had cracked some kind of code, meowing for attention and snacks and just to say hi. Her two older kittens, the ones she’d had in the forest, had never meowed at me either but started to once they saw how I responded to their mom. and I find it endlessly fascinating because before that it had never occurred to me that cats only meow at humans because they were taught by other cats to keep meowing past kittenhood because that’s the best way to get a human’s attention.

Imagine befriending some weird giant with the wrong number of legs that you met in the forest who seems nice enough but doesn’t seem to be able to hear you, until your friend explains that all they can understand is fuck off! And I’m a baby give me love!

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Sleepy Hollow (TV) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Ichabod Crane/Abbie Mills Characters: Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow), Ichabod Crane Additional Tags: was trying for smut but plot happened, One Shot, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon what is canon, There Is No Canon Only Zuul Summary:

Summertime is daunting enough for an 18th Century man, but there’s nothing like a trip to a beach to hunt down a monster to make everything just that much more complicated.

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:

Always reblog.

Minimum wage is supposed to represent the minimum wage an employed person can live on, not just survive on.

President Roosevelt–under whom the minimum wage was enacted–said, “In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

“By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”

Now, however, the meaning has been perverted to “the minimum employers can get away with paying while maximizing profit.” And that’s disgusting.

The 8 Steps of a CHARACTER ARC

You know that moment as a writer, when you’ve been charging through the story, high on how fantastic it is, and then suddenly…it all STOPS.  The next scene doesn’t form in your head. You’ve got nothing. 

Behind your characters, a string of bright and captivating scenes mark the trail of that rocket of inspiration; ahead of your characters, a foggy expanse, stretching to who-knows-where, a few shapeless blobs that should be scenes floating in the nothingness. The rocket is dead, and not refueling any time soon.

Well, to everybody who’s suffered this, or is currently suffering it, there’s a way to navigate through that fog. A map. Directions and a destination.

Or, more specifically, events that form the underlying structure of the story. 

This post is going to focus on one facet of story structure: character arc. Structure is something people subconsciously recognize and expect, and if the story doesn’t match those expectations, they feel cheated (though usually can’t explain why). Every good story follows a structure. So if you know structure, you’ll always know where to go next, and won’t get lost in the fog. 

So here are the 8 steps of a character arc: 1) Hero: Strength, Weakness, and Need

This happens in the setup of the story, when the main character’s ordinary world is being introduced. First, the main character’s strengths must be displayed; we must be given a reason to like them, or if not exactly “like” them, empathize with them, and be fascinated by them. The reader needs to bond with the character, feel concerned about how it all turns out for them. Or in other words, feel that the main character is worth experiencing the story. There are easy traits that do this: courage, love, humor, being in danger, being unfairly treated, being highly skilled at something, having a powerful noble goal. (Courage is the one they all need. If the character doesn’t have the gumption to actively pursue what they want, they are automatically a background character.) 

After this, still in the beginning of your story, let the character exhibit what needs to change. Show their weaknesses of character and self awareness. And lastly, hint at what they NEED to learn. Sometimes this is even stated to the character, and they don’t understand it, refuse to believe it, or condemn it. Like “A Christmas Carol”, when Scrooge’s nephew says his speech about Christmas and how wonderful it is, and Scrooge replies “Bah Humbug!“ 

2) Desire: This is the moment when the character knows what they need to pursue, in order to obtain what they inwardly want. It is not the inciting incident or catalyst, the event in a story that disrupts the ordinary world and calls the hero on an adventure. This is a separate step entirely, occurring after that catalyst has shattered life as the main character knows it. They believe obtaining this goal will calm whatever inner turmoil or conflict they’re battling. And always, they’re not quite right. Think of Mr Fredricksen: His goal is to get the house – a  symbolic representation of Ellie and the life he shared with her – to Paradise Falls, which he believes will heal his grief and guilt. It won’t. Once he obtains it, the achievement feels hollow. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So on we go! 

3) Plan: Once in Act Two, the character is going to scramble for a plan of action. The inner want has solidified into a tangible goal, but they need a strategy to achieve it. This also spells out for the reader what to expect in that second act.  

4) Conflict: What’s going to try stopping them? A hero with a goal is one thing, but to make it a story we need something that stands in the way. An obstacle. A force of opposition. If we didn’t have obstacles, books would be as interesting as "Harry Potter and the Trip to the Grocery Store.” (Although honestly, I’d probably read that.) After the catalyst has changed everything, after the character crosses the threshold into Act Two, everything from here on out will be laden with conflict. This is usually when enemies, or more accurately forces of opposition, begin to appear. Everything is accumulating to complicate the main character’s pathway to achieving what they want. The forces of opposition come from not only the villains, but from the actions that have to be taken to achieve the desire. Whatever this action is, it’s exactly what the main character is not suited to do, an action that pressures their flaws, exposes them to exactly what they need to become but can’t right now. 

Like Stitch being forced to be the family dog. He’s not suited to this task.

5) Battle: The forces of opposition are amping up, growing stronger, fighting with greater intensity. The main character is taking the punches and working around them, relentlessly plowing forward. Hero and allies are usually punching back too.

6) Midpoint: This is the event where they first encounter what they need to learn, what they need to become. Something happens that forces them to behave in this new, life-saving way. But once they’ve seen it, they don’t know what to do with this knowledge. 

7) Dark Night, Revelation, Choice: This is always the darkest point in the story, where all seems lost, and death – of a literal or spiritual nature – is in the air. And in this moment, something usually happens that makes the main character wake up to what is wrong, and what they need. More often than not, this revelation will arrive from the “love story” or relationship of the plot, and will be the thing that helps them pull themselves out of despair and see the light. And once this is uncovered, once the revelation of the truth about themselves is recognized, they are faced with a choice. Of course, they’ve been faced with choices in every beat of every scene, but this is the big choice that is going to determine if their story has a happy ending or a tragic one. The choice is this: “You are being faced the truth that you need to heal. Are you going to choose what you need, let your old self die, and become someone better?” And always, always, always this is a hard choice. The revelation must be significant to them. And it’s never easy. It can’t be. We don’t write stories about heroes who make easy choices. Villains have it easy. Are you going to adopt this new way of living, adopt this truth, and let your old self die? Or are you going to stay the way you are (which feels safer and is much less challenging) but end up stuck in a sort of living death? Most of the time, of course, they choose the right thing. 

This moment is usually always the saddest scene in the thing. Like this scene with Stitch.

8) New Life: This is their changed life. After experiencing the trials of the story, after realizing what they need and choosing to be reborn, they are going to be different people – and are going to live a different life. This is what follows the statement “And every day after …” What has changed? Show the audience how things are different, how things are better, because they want to see that. This is the resolution, the wrapping up of everything we’ve been through with the main character, and having this in the story is often what gives that feeling of satisfaction after seeing a really well-told story. 

So! To show off how this works, I’ve chosen the character arc of Carl from Up. 

1) Hero: Strengths, Weakness, Need

Strengths: Reasons to like Carl are packed into that heartbreaking opening sequence. By the end of it, we love him, love Ellie, and are crying our eyes out.

Weaknesses: Now Carl is curmudgeonly, grumpy, cold, and won’t pay attention to a living soul. He’s also plagued by grief, regret, guilt, and loneliness. (Which we are all 100% okay with, because we already like him.)

Need: He needs Russel. The statement of what he needs to learn isn’t outright said (as it will be later) but Russel represents it. 

Step Two: The catalyst was when a truck knocked down Ellie’s mailbox, Carl hit a construction worker in the head with his cane, and for this a judge declares him a public menace and orders him to go to Shady Oaks Retirement Village. The DESIRE is this moment. 

Carl escapes in a flying house, thousands of balloons lifting him skyward. He even says the desire of the whole story out loud, “So long boys! I’ll send you a postcard from Paradise Falls!” The tangible goal is “live out the rest of his days in his and Ellie’s house, on the edge of Paradise Falls, South America.” (“It’s like America … but South.”)

Step Three: The plan and the conflict overlap, as they are wont to do. We have a scene where Carl is unfurling sails, setting a compass, and settling back in his chair for a smooth journey. But later on, after some conflict has arrived, we have Russel figuring out how to actually make it there. And after even more conflict has arrived, we have him telling Russel “We’re going to walk to the falls quickly and quietly, with no rap music or flash-dancing.”

Step Four: The moment he settles back into his armchair, high above the city, and here’s a knock on the front door, nothing is going to be easy for Carl. First, we have opposition in the form of Russel. Then we have a storm. Then the house lands miles away from the Falls, so they’ll have to walk it. Then we have Kevin, the giant bird. Then we have Dug. Which means they’re also being chased by a legion of talking dogs. Which brings us to Muntz, the main villain, and Carl’s shadow – the representation of Carl’s flaws, and the consequences of refusing to let go of the past. 

Step Five: This is the trek to the Falls. It’s also the battle with every complication that arises. And it’s also exactly what Carl is not suited to do. He’s a curmudgeonly old guy, bent on living out the rest of his life alone. Well, the story says “Nope, Carl, that’s not how it’s going to be” and promptly gives him a surrogate grandson to take care of, a dog who adores him, and even a giant mythical bird. And he has to lead them all, if he’s going to get to the Falls. 

Step Six: The moment when Russel invades Carl’s heart. Which is what he needs, but he doesn’t understand. (I have the scene beated out in the previous post.)

Step Seven: Finally, he gives in to the worst of himself and chooses his goal of living in his broken house on the edge of Paradise Falls. But somehow this doesn’t feel like victory. He’s still alone, next to Ellie’s empty chair, and she is still beyond his reach. 

He picks up her adventure book, and leafs through the photographs, missing her; he pauses on the page scrawled with the words “Stuff I’m Going To Do”, lets his hand rest on it, grief and regret overwhelming him. He begins to close the book, and the page shifts … revealing the edge of another picture. Surprised, he turns the page. It’s their wedding picture.

Ellie added picture after picture of their happy marriage, the whole wonderful life they shared, all the things she did. And on the bottom of the last page is her last message to him: “Thanks for the adventure! Now go have a new one! Love, Ellie.” Exactly what Carl needs. He doesn’t need to be guilty, he doesn’t need to regret the past. The past was beautiful, and she will never truly leave him. 

Choice: So, Carl can make the choice to throw everything out of the house to go save Russel. 

New Life: Sitting on a curb, eating ice cream with Russel.

In the credits, we see a whole new life – or new adventure – with Carl, Russel, Dug, and even a bunch of new puppies.

So, it’s actually pretty simple. And once again, it’s fun to develop your own stories like this, but it’s surprisingly fun to analyze movies and books with it too. It improves your storytelling ability, I’ve found. Practice makes perfect.

I hope this post helps somebody out. It’ll make the ten times I cried while writing it, while watching scenes from Up, worth it.

If you don't think Fandom Racism has a real world impact

Fandom racism is both overt and covert and has actual real world implications. Not just to the self-esteem and wellbeing of Black actor and fans, but people's finances. If you don't know, now you know. Call it out.

January 20, 2021

I hate that I fully understand this

... And Stay Out!

CACIO E PEPE BAKED GNOCCHI

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Is this how you roll?

Do yourself a favor. Sound up. Enjoy.

I don’t know who these guys are, but I love them.