kettlequills

[kettlequills]

not interested in getting involved in the rest of this discussion, for the most part, but to me this is a GREAT piece of advice that many people these days don't seem to be getting or understanding.

not everyone you meet or interact with is your friend, the requirements and expectations for respectful behaviour between friends is not the same as between strangers.

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having death on her knees... crazy stuff only agatha harkness could do

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I personally am a big fan of anytime the franchise shows or hints that Chucky kind of likes Andy or enjoys having him around.

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'wholesome lesbian representation' i like it when the women in my lesbian ships try to kill each other and then fuck nasty about it and then maybe try to kill each other again

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Fiona Dourif, I am a big fan of you!

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More Chucky ladies

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There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

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I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.

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EVERYONE NEEDS TO LOOK AT HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON UNTRAINABLE THE STAGE PLAY RN

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I wish there were medieval fantasy written by people who actually found the medieval period interesting

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By Juan Brufal

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everyone shut the fuck up and look at this snake named barcode

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forcing every character into romance or found family ruins character discussion imo

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Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”

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You know a girl whose going to be uploaded into a computer soon. It's pretty common nowadays, like not so common most people know someone whose had it happen to them, but common enough so that everyone knows about it.

She says she has to do it for her job. Like, it's not required, but every aspect of her job is 100% online so it's just more convenient for her employers that way, making her a lot more enjoyable. Plus not having things like sleep or food to worry about would cut costs a lot. And she might eventually be able to get a new body once she gets promoted a few times.

You feel really sad for her. You know a lot of people who've had to become cyborgs or even full robots for both work and personal reasons. But being fully uploaded into a computer with no way of accessing the offline world is way to drastic a move for most people to go to, even out of desperation. But while she's still here, you try to get to know her, since you won't have her for long.

She seems really nice. Graduated from a top business school, but she seems to actually be pretty class conscious. Mabye she though gaining power in the system would help her help the world, she wanted to work for an eco friendly company but that didn't pan out well.

She's trying to spend her last weeks with a body as best she can. Sometimes that just means hanging out around the city, you try to take her around to places she might enjoy. You grew up here and she didn't so of course you know a lot of really cool places to see. You took her to neighborhoods you love walking around, to little corners you can only see in person, and little shops that can't be replaced by websites. You take her to a meusum, and spend so much time looking at things that hit diffrent when you see them up close, massive radiant paintings, and glistening gems, and alien fossils, all of them soon to be gone to her, when everything is equally far away.

You spend time doing things with her body that she won't be able to soon. She tells you not to feel sad, that she chose this, though she seems a bit sad herself. She savors the sensation of sleep while she still has it. She trys all kinds of food that she won't ever taste soon, she's laughs a bit that there's no use in dieting now. She asks you to cuddle, and you cuddle her, because you know she needs that human touch while she can have it. She asks to have sex, you had to get neutered for your last job so it doesn't normally interest you anymore, but you'll do it for her. She doesn't want to leave this body having never known how it feels and you understand. When she falls asleep in your arms you call her pretty, and hearing that about her face makes her cry.

Eventually it's time for her to go. You give her one last hug, hoping she can carry it as the last thing she feels. You take the train with her to the uploading station. She seems to have regrets, seems to not want to go through with this, but she's committed to it now. You tell her she can still back out, and find another way to live, that it's not to late as long as she's in her body. She tells you to stay strong for her when she's gone.

When she uploads herself she leaves the first pick of parts from her body to you. It was a healthy one, really nice for her age. You take her reproductive organs so you can finally be unnutered again, and take her eyes to cure nearsightedness, and a few muscles to undo chronic pain. It hurts to know you're taking her apart like that, but somebody was going to, and it's not her anymore. At least you'll carry a bit of her now.

Now that she's uploaded you talk to her a lot through social media. She seems like she misses a lot of the world. You try and show her what you can through photos, and talk to her as much as possible. She misses hugs more then anything, and tells you how boring life is without sleep. You wish you could have done more. She wishes she had listened.

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da2 isn't the best dragon age game *because* it's openly a tragedy, but being a tragedy forces a level of narrative coherence that the other games in the series don't have, and *that's* what makes it a better game.

okay, so. dragon age 2 runs on nested foreshadowing and a limited set of themes that almost every character and plot beat fall into: love is not enough, wealth is not enough, power is not enough, good intent is not enough. the problems you run into are structural, rather than individual, and your ability to resolve them as one person is strictly limited. the arishok is a central figure for this, because he prefigures every other tragedy and makes the game's thesis statement as clear as possible. he doesn't want to be in kirkwall, but he is compelled to remain until he gets back what was stolen. he doesn't want to lead a coup attempt, but he is compelled by qunari codes of justice to act. he does not want to die and fail his duty, but but he is compelled to by the other two impossible demands. every tragedy in kirkwall is the result of too many people with wildly different definitions of justice crammed into one place specifically designed to maximize human misery and suffering, and so you get a wonderfully nested narrative onion where each quest reinforces that idea, where there are no good options, just positions you can take — even the affinity system plays into that, where constantly gassing up your friends or constantly pushing them to change are equally correct ways to go, but ones that won't ultimately make a huge difference in their lives or characters, because no matter how much they like you, they're not under your control.

this coherence is even justified by the framing device. of *course* the moral of the game is "insisting on a dogmatic, narrow idea of justice destroys individuals and societies," it's a yarn being spun by varric the con artist to a chantry cop!

neither origins or inquisition play with that sort of narrative complexity. origins is a jaundiced hero's quest, certainly, but it's still basically a hero's quest; inquisition has a number of characters who question what you're doing and why, but the multitude of voices pulls the game in too many potential directions. DA2 was so constrained in its production that it pulled on decidedly ancient theatrical traditions, and it worked so, so well