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book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

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Readers, make sure you have all your favourite Ao3 fics downloaded.

Writers, make sure you have copies of all the fics you have posted on Ao3.

I don’t want to be alarming, but things could get really bad really fast. OTW shared this today on Twitter, and I'm a bit worried about it 😅

Ao3 is a non-profit organisation. If they have to start paying taxes, I have no idea what will happen.

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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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Having never considered the concept of a highschool retelling of the Odyssey until that one post mentioned them in passing, I'd like to give my own pitch: the Odyssey meets Back to the Future meets whodunnit.

Odysseus is the central figure of the story, of course. He is also one of those high school protagonists who is inexplicably surrounded by half a dozen girls, because emphasizing that aspect of the Odyssey is funny to me. There's Penelope, his actual girlfriend; popular girl Circe; poor little rich girl Calypso; freshman Nausicaa; and Athena, who is older and solidly in bro territory with Odysseus, but still adds to the overall effect of him being surrounded by girls. (Is she a goddess? Idk. Probably she has some other kind of power, like riches or genius or both.)

The cast is rounded out by some of his Odyssey crewmen, maybe a few Iliad Greeks, and Telemachus, a new kid at their school who quickly becomes friends with Odysseus. For about half the story, things focus on slice of life, Odysseus's schemes, and the students' various personal problems. Incidents from the Odyssey are nodded toward, but not directly retold.

Then you get the Back to the Future part with the reveal that Telemachus has traveled back in time twenty years, with the help of future Athena, to solve the extremely cold case of his dad's disappearance by investigating his high school life.

Future Athena was only able to discover that someone from his high school circle was involved; in their time, there were just too many roadblocks set up between her and the truth. And she can't get inside access to those events as her adult self. So it's up to Telemachus to get to know his past parents, investigate their friends, and chase down the clues to discovering where his father's been all his life.

...While hopefully not raising the suspicions of his teenaged, but still infamously clever, parents in the process of this totally straightforward and not at all emotionally taxing mission.

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Please note. The orange one is not included because A. He isn’t a billionaire. And B. Calling him obnoxious is too kind for him.

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🖤💐🩷

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Okay but can anyone articulate the mindset that leads older people to feel like they NEED to know people's gender identity all the time? Like what's going on there

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Palpatine’s Journey

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Weatherman discovers his monitor has a touch screen

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me trying to be optimistic and encouraging: you think WE have problems let's talk about the time Athens fucked up so badly they panicked and dismantled their own democracy and realized five minutes later it had been a horrible mistake and dismantled the new system in order to slink back to their democracy

(I actually do find ancient history very soothing, but I do understand that sometimes the connections aren't obvious or. you know. soothing. also I cannot emphasize this enough, classical Athens had so many other problems.)

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I’m so sorry we didn’t learn, George.

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does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

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I just realized something about Estrella the starfish from Crazy ex-girlfriend. When am I gonna shut up about the show that ended in 2019? When I'm dead.

Estrella is a symbol of a transition moment in a character's life. When you have to resolve the last things keeping you in your past and move on.

When we first meet her, she is Heather's. Heather only knows how to be a student and is forced to stop being that and make decisions. She is on the path, but it's still a long way. She doesn't know who she is and what to do. The answer is: go for the promotion, marry Hector, buy a condo, move to another town. After she does all that, after she grows and finds herself in this new better place, she gives Estrella to Rebecca. She doesn't need the starfish anymore, it was the last thing tethering her to her student years. And Rebecca needs it more.

Rebecca at this point is just as lost as Heather used to be. She doesn't think she deserves a love life, she just quit her job of many years for a low profit small business, she still hasn't resolved her mother issues, and her two out of three friends are moving on without her. She is on the path, but it's still a long way. Estrella is the final gift from Heather, the last thing she leaves behind. Because right now, Rebecca needs it. She doesn't know who she is and what to do. The answer is: to stand up to her mother, make peace with Audra, connect with Hebby, try doing theater, and finally start writing songs. After she resolves these issues and finds herself in a better place, she gives Estrella to Josh. She doesn't need the starfish anymore, it was the last thing comforting her that everything is the same. And Josh needs it more.

Josh at this point is very lost. He lives with his ex-girlfriend and ecen tries to win her back yet agaaaain (ugh). He just found out he doesn't know how to be a grown up and how to live alone. He is on this path, but it's still a long way. He doesn't know who he is and what to do. The answer is: to move out from Hector's mom AND Rebbeca, do magic with not popular kids, and find love there.

We don't know what Josh does with Estrella later. My headcanon is, he gives it to Hector's mom. Because that woman has some issues... Maybe then she could stop looking for sons, real of artificial, and just live her life.

The point is, when you are in the beginning of some realizations, when you still have a long way to go, you can always look at previous owners of Estrella, who all used to be in this place too, and who managed to move on. You are not alone, and you will prevail, but you have to start making choices. You can't grasp at the starfish forever. And you are going to screw up on this journey (kill the starfish like 27 times). This is inevitable part of the process. But ultimately you will figure it out and find a way to move on.

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One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

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finished watching SAO Underworld War Part 2

Overall I think they hit the plot beats a lot better than I had anticipated. Was still feeling burned after they rushed the pre-war arc (god I will never live down the fact they made Eugeo T-pose). The composition CGI effects were top notch (esp Gabe's final form, chef's kiss)

but they really just had Eiji show up for a moment, talk shit, have his dead GF give a mini concert, and then get PKed

I can't imagine what a fever dream it must've been to be one of the mob players ported in - don't know the language but see random AI idol show up singing for this nobody

also also kirito you should know better than to spar with the cutting edge robot - what if you break one of her servos, huh? what are you going to do then!?