Tag: links

vastderp:

snuffgrenade:

the–witchmaker:

bogleech:

sixthrock:

sidneyia:

brainstatic:

jonbrnthal:

i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this

I’m the same age as glass ceiling and horndog.

vietnamese pot-bellied pig, crack house, and elephant in the room

I’m the same age as ‘cyberpunk’, ‘nuclear winter’, ‘cell phone’, ‘designer drug’ and a whooole lot of now-common computer terms. i’m old.

I GOT VARROA MITE

ah yes, 1995. the year of “partial-birth abortion,” “date rape drug,” and “complex regional pain syndrome”

‘humblebrag’ ‘selfie’ and ‘dubstep’

post-traumatic stress disorder, yuppie, NIMBY, hip-hop, techno-pop. nice!

The daydream that never stops

jumpingjacktrash:

newvagabond:

This is mostly about maladaptive daydreaming but there’s a part I really want people on this site to pay attention to, particularly young people who are confused about fiction. 

In 2002, an Israeli trauma clinician named Eli Somer noticed that six survivors of abuse in his care had something in common.

To escape their memories and their emotional pain, each would retreat into an elaborate inner fantasy world for up to eight hours at a time.

Some imagined an idealised version of themselves living a perfect life. Others created entire friendships or romantic relationships in their heads. While one man pictured himself fighting in a guerrilla war, another conjured up football and basketball matches in which he displayed his athletic prowess.

Their plotlines often involved themes of captivity, escape and rescue – being chained up in a dungeon, for instance, or leading a prisoners’ revolt.

My mother sent me this article because it reminded her of me. I saw why immediately. Even as early as age 5 I remember having elaborate fantasies about stuff like that. Being captured, escaping, adventures, scary things, torture. My first fanfic was literally about an Oddworld OC being tortured and killed. I was 7 when I wrote it. I talked to my mom a bit how a lot of people like me (abused, disabled, different) absolutely have grown up with fictional characters and stories as our reference for experiences, as the way we can try to make sense of our lives and the things that have happened to us. There’s a reason I feel more at home and with family when watching a favorite animated show with all the characters I love so much than in a big group of my actual family. Through these characters I was able to not only survive everything the real world threw at me, but learn very valuable things about myself, dissect my own experiences and feelings, even if at a younger age I wasn’t aware that that’s what I was doing. That’s the beauty of fictional characters. They really allow us the safety to go scary places with them. Even if that place is morally horrifying. 

A lot of us survivors explore these kinds of themes. Dark things, unpleasant things. 

Just keep that in mind before you get too deep into the purity culture of this site that states that anything dangerous, dark, or twisted being explored in fiction is worthy of, uh, telling that person to kill themselves. 

Most of the time, you’re telling a survivor that it would have been better for them to have died than to have survived their trauma, and that’s really dangerous considering most of us struggle with suicidal ideation in the first place. 

Not all of us like to deny the darkness that we came from. There is nothing wrong with that.

fuck, i spent so much of my childhood daydreaming badass adventures. and yeah, they were bloody and dark as hell.

my first attempt at a novel was about a disabled man named thorn who was imprisoned at the heart of a dystopic city and could act only through computers; he called himself thorn because the people that left him there called him the thorn in their side, and they’d made him forget where he came from, his name and everything. the antagonist and love interest was a woman with several robot prostheses who worked with a rebel group to sabotage the city, not knowing the ‘comptroller’ they hated so much was just as much a prisoner as they were. when she finally stopped trying to kill him and decided to rescue him, he died a few hours later, unable to survive without his machines.

melodramatic, i know, but i was twelve.

looking back now, as an adult, i’m a little disturbed by how lovingly i described the violence. but i needed it, apparently. it made me feel better, going into my dark world and writing about this pale, wormlike man and his sicknesses, and the cruel things he did without understanding them, because he was a great big obvious metaphor for dissociation. and it was cathartic writing the woman – i can’t remember what i named her, something very cyberpunk and edgy i’m sure, like razor or cobalt – just mowing through crowds of company grunts with a bewildering assortment of heavy weapons. i wasn’t even allowed to watch pg-13 movies yet but i sure did like to talk about guts.

it all felt more real than the real world, sometimes, because the real world was where i wore a rigid mask of neurotypicality and gender and so on.

The daydream that never stops

horaetio:

captaincrusher:

xpectopatronm:

horaetio:

fun studying tip: if you’re a procrastinator, play tom jones’s “what’s new pussycat” on repeat while writing your papers and do not turn it off until you are finished, it will motivate you to finish that essay as quickly as possible

make sure to throw one “it’s not unusual” in the middle while u take ur quick snack break

Here you have the Infinite Jukebox that will play an infinite version of What’s new pussycat, randomly jumping through the verses and never getting to the end. 

do you ever regret a post and the hell it creates

egowave:

egowave:

i have this short book called “the cia’s greatest hits” and its like a compilation of a bunch of evil shit the cia has done, 2 pages each per operation and i cant find a pdf anywhere but its worth reading and i wish i could link it bc the cia is fucking vile and they should be more widely hated and more americans should know about all of the disgusting and horrific stuff theyve been responsible for

i still cant find the whole pdf but here is the text version of a lot of the chapters in the book if youre interested. and heres a timeline of atrocities committed by the cia too

Most white people, especially rural white people (I grew up in a town of 2000 in Ohio) don’t have any concrete culture, they don’t have a unique form of pottery, special wedding dresses, a musical style going back 500 years, special rituals and dances to celebrate things. They are completely reliant on corporate culture to provide them with a sense of identity and purpose, they don’t have Hanbok dresses or special flutes native to their peoples, they have Taco Bell, the Steelers, Applebees, deals on make-up at the dollar store, deal on shirts at TJ Maxx. They have thrown away culture for corporate capitalism, they are empty inside, a vacuity of soul, an emptiness that leads to narcissism and extreme justification in the face of all facts. They don’t want to admit, they are ‘hollow’ inside.

Noah Cicero (via pleaseshutthefudgeup)

I don’t necessarily think this is untrue but I don’t know why the target has to be poor people in rural towns. At the very least it is definitely not “especially rural white people”

(via micawindow)

something really bothers me about this reduction of the notion of ‘culture’ to, like, specific artifacts that supposedly express the essence of some monolithic ethnos. ‘this pottery and these dances give me identity and purpose’ sounds more like the words of people clinging to a dying culture as it’s subsumed into the capitalist world-system than the way that culture works outside of that

like, it’s primarily in the retrospective view that these things take on the sort of meaning that i think is being attributed to them here. when you’re an archaeologist digging through successive layers of dirt, you say ‘each one of the cultures that lived here had its own distinct style of pottery’. but for all you know a person actually alive making one of those pots would have just said ‘this is a pot i made and it looks like all the other pots everyone else makes’. nothing distinct about it

there is a point to be made that white americans are primarily passive consumers of their own ‘culture’ rather than active participants in its reproduction, and that that’s probably a problem, but that would require acknowledging that (1) this is true of people in every capitalist country, even in those dark and mystical corners of the world where people still supposedly ‘have culture’, and (2) what’s represented as ‘real culture’ here, bitingly juxtaposed with a list of consumer goods, is in fact nothing more than a different list of consumer goods. hanbok dresses and special flutes can be mediated by capitalist commodity relations in the exact same way the steelers or dollar-store make-up are

(via quoms)

Yeah this shit is a perfect example of an incredibly orientalist framework being masked as resistance to it. Non-white cultures spring from some primordial a historic “spirit” while white culture is grounded in a material history and power relations. If the person that wrote this were to attempt some sort of consistency they would be saying that no culture exists because all culture articles is embedded in history and societal relations (which make something “not-culture” because….?)

Anyway instead of this racist orientalist white person (who provides the *perfect* example of how “white guilt” is not a progressive thing) you should instead check out what Kwame Anthony Appiah has to say about the concept of culture

(via memecucker)

has this person ever been to a homecoming game or a county fair? lord.

(via soyeahso)

Corporations are part of our culture, we just don’t like to admit that. It only seems hollow if you cling to reactionary notions of authenticity.

(via brainstatic)

7 New Writer Mistakes that Make you Vulnerable to Predators

the960writers:

1) Writing-in-a-Garret Syndrome

It seems half the people I meet are “working on a book.” I met one at the supermarket this week. He wanted to tell me about struggling with his opus—at great length. I tried to be polite, but as my bourbon-caramel gelato began to melt, I suggested he join the Nightwriters in San Luis Obispo—an excellent group for writers at all levels. (And you still have time to enter their annual writing contest, The Golden Quill Awards. More info in Opportunity Alerts.)

“Oh no,” supermarket man said. “I’ll never show my book to anybody. They might steal my ideas. They can read it when it’s published.”

And I got a couple of messages this week from writers who had the same reason for not sharing work.  They’ve been told to blog, but fear people will, yup, “steal their ideas.”

These are people writing in a vacuum. They don’t realize that ideas are everywhere, and most writers have more than they can use in a lifetime. These wannabes also don’t  know creative writing needs to be read by dozens of critiquers, beta readers, and editors before it’s ready for publication.
[…]

7 New Writer Mistakes that Make you Vulnerable to Predators

thejovianmute:

rage-quitter:

I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:

Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin. 

Here is a page of medieval weapons.

Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.

Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.

Here are some gemstones.

Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on. 

Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.

Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised. 

Here is every religion in the world. 

Here is every language in the world.

Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.

Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.

Here are poisonous plants.

Here are plants in general.

Feel free to add more to this!

An exceedingly useful list of lists for writers.

slipstreamborne:

slipstreamborne:

I was doing some deep diving in a dissertation/thesis database today and I stumbled across a doctoral dissertation on omegaverse fics and conceptions of the body in fandom.

Wherever you are, doctor, I salute you.

Something Queer in His Make-Up: Genderbending, Omegaverses, and Fandom’s Discontents by Elliot Aaron Director, PhD.

Slightly misremembered the topic (more reproduction and gender roles than just the body in isolation), but it’s 216 pages long, focuses entirely on Sherlock and Hobbit fandoms, and you can read the whole goddamn thing if you scroll down to “files”.