#I am NOT letting another september pass by without posting this thing!!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rinamars · 1 year

Text

after i shared my erwin fic recs, someone said that they were interested in some levi fic recs as well, sooo here i am! again, i should mention that most of these include explicit content, so read with caution! let us begin

these are titles i've already mentioned in my erwin post, but i OBVIOUSLY have to talk about them again: for the eruri x reader enjoyers, the entire fictional universe created by shinzouing is something that can't be missed (this is a story of the sea, certain obscure things, beyond the sea). peak writing. 10000/10.

again, for the eruri x reader enjoyers, something else i've already mentioned: two lovers by feelingthorny. the pining, silent affection, and body worship her writing contains are simply unmatched!!

(whenever feelingthorny and shinzouing include a "my love(s)" in their writing, especially if spoken by erwin, an angel is born)

how can i write a fic recs post without mentioning something by @riewritten?? i can't!! her delicious fic heap of solace was my introduction to her incredible writing, and oh man, what a wonderful journey it has been

now, i don't do much reading here on tumblr (which is why this post is 99% focused on ao3 fics) but i do know that there are so many gems to be found on here! i'm sure you all know them already, but i'm just going to mention them anyway: @levmada, @anlian-aishang, @jayteacups and @happybird16 are incredible authors, and they'll definitely fill the levi-shaped hole in your heart

back to ao3, feelingthorny has also written another incredible fic, expiring soon. this modern au is over 200k words but it's sooo worth it, it's not slow burn at all but the pining, oh man, the pining! i cried when she released the last chapter, it was a wonderful read

this one is probably the levi fic i'm the most attached to. lessons in patience by almondblossoms1000 was the very first university au i read, and i wasn't expecting to love it so much! i loved it so much, in fact, that it ended up inspiring me to write my own fic (even though it's not a levi fic). it's your tipical slow burn, fake relationship, frenemies (?) to lovers type of thing, and it's sooo enjoyable

another excellent university au is the feeling's mutual by wellitcouldbeworse3! i understand that these au's aren't everyone's cup of tea, but MAN i love them. this one is a proper enemies/academic rivals to lovers slow burn, and yeah, it might be an overdone trope, but do i look like i care? i LOVED it and YOU might, too ;)

third and last university au i'm going to recommend is percolate by heichoe. this one is restricted to ao3 users only, but MAN. personally, requesting an ao3 account just for this one fic would be worth the wait. it's another scrumptious enemies to lovers slow burn with a side of coffee shop au... can't you tell i find these tropes absolutely endearing? READ IT

i remember binging on this one last september in one afternoon, as a treat to myself after passing a scary exam, and i simply couldn't put the phone down: something about us by katonyx is a mix of royal au (reader is a princess, levi is her bodyguard), slow burn (duh) and murder mystery with a well deserved happy ending

high strung by HopelessCaseOfDaydreaming was hot. that's all i'm going to say. h o t

for the category "insanely good fics that made me cry for some reason even though i really really enjoyed them": orange zest and homemade vanilla extract by nylondreams!! it's a modern au, and i feel like this is a pretty accurate depiction of levi's relationship with physical intimacy

i read this ONCE all the way back in september but i still remember this one made me feel so many things. [watch me fall apart, watch me fall apart] by djmarinizela is a slow burn college au. it involves a relationship between a student and her professor, but the rating is green. uh, i think i cried after finishing it (it's a one-shot)

thank you for your attention, and happy reading ;)

(now the last thing missing to complete the trio is an eruri fic recs post, let me know if you want it ok 🤲🏻)

#levi ackerman x reader #levi x reader #levi ackerman x you #??? idk

87 notes · View notes

aroyaltailor · 21 days

Text

semi-hiatus (vent warning)

Currently failing Spanish 102 and things are not getting better. In a move that I'm sure will surprise none of those who follow this blog, I am going to be taking a hiatus from any writing. Yes, another break! Another hiatus, putting off work on this blog and leaving the replies I owe to rot in my drafts. The words simply do not come out of me, and I'm still struggling with perfectionism that blocks any genuine attempts at getting anything done. I basically have to learn the entirety of Spanish, or at least the relevant information for the class, because if I fail I won't be able to graduate this semester.

It's the same damn thing every time. I've submitted a request for the counseling service provided by my college, but they have a two week waiting period due to the huge influx of students needing mental health help these days. I genuinely believe that I've reached a point where I need professional help with my writing, and that I have somekind of OCD that prevents me from simply writing the first draft without needlessly fussing over every word.

I really didn't want to have to make this post. I was holding on to the hope that things would be alright. I was hoping that everything would be okay. That I'd be able to create legitimate routines, learn how to comprehend Spanish, and that I would be able to have the time to sit back and focus and work on building this blog.

The first exam of the class is next Tuesday, September 10th. I won't lie, I'm basically spiraling at this point. Self-care is at a total minimum, and I haven't really been taking care of my health either. I'm not eating much, both out of lack of hunger and the simple fact that my household doesn't have any food available. Today alone, I've been slouched over the table in the upstairs study rooms of my college, staring at this damned screen all day. Suicidal thoughts, a bit of self-harm with a pen, it feels just as bad as organic chemistry. And the genuine possibility that I might be kicked out the house if I fail Spanish 102 isn't helping matters. I don't really have anyone to talk to either, not in-person at least. Not really even online either, but that's probably too jaded for me to say. Doubt anyone will even read this, but that understandable I guess. Everyone has their own problems, so many people do, and they can't pause and stop when they have their own concerns to deal with, especially for someone that hasn't really produced anything.

Let's just say it isn't getting better. It's not. It's getting worse. I can't be on here as much as I want to, and I'm beginning to think that I've been damaged permanently by what happened to me. My dad had lung cancer, I did everything I could, but that's all I can say about it. Even just typing that sentence has me bawling now.

I'll either pass Spanish 102 this semester or I won't. If I don't, I definitely won't take it well. I'm sorry for everything I've said about how I'd made progress, or that I'd be around to do replies only to post nothing at all. I'm not doing well and haven't been for awhile.

Hopefully things will get better. But then again, I've said that before haven't I? Time will tell. I'm sorry to everyone for the times I've wasted their time with starters or replies I haven't responded to yet. Blog isn't even finished yet, but if I pass I'll try. I promise I'll try.

#{ ✎ : ᴏᴏᴄ }

9 notes · View notes

cheesybadgers · 2 years

Text

Narcos Fic Plagiarism

I don't know about any other writers, but I am sick and tired of seeing bits and pieces of my writing scattered through other people's work, especially when a) those people have never once bothered to interact with me or my fics, and b) their works get WAY more engagement than mine.

Below the cut, I've included some examples from the last year, although some are very recent and over the line for me.

I used to just ignore this kind of thing, but with the most recent ones I thought I would reach out privately to the writer and unsurprisingly, they denied all knowledge...and then did the exact same thing in another chapter posted just days later.

I know people can come up with the same ideas independently etc. and that's bound to happen when writing the same characters, but, the examples below go beyond that and there is often a pattern with serial offenders. One-offs can be ignored or passed off as coincidences, but when it's done multiple times? Come on now.

I'm sure this post won't stop those who are still determined to behave this way, although I would really urge you to do some soul searching and ask yourself why you do this, because it's not conducive to your own creativity or growth as a writer, let alone in the spirit of a fan community. But I'm asking you publicly now to PLEASE STOP IT.

I have reported some of these to AO3, but they don't seem to care unless it involves huge chunks of text, or is all copied exactly word for word, even though their website defines plagiarism as:

There's nothing wrong with being inspired by other writers in your fandom and giving them a mention in your fic notes. In fact, that's a good thing! Creatives should be inspired by others, I don't know why so many don't like to admit it. But there is a big difference between that and just taking without credit, and doing it multiple times is going to get you found out.

Mine: Chapter 13 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 16th May 2022):

These are from the same scene involving Steve visiting Javier on the ranch, having drinks together and talking about Steve finding out about Javier/Horacio and whether Javier is going to go back to his job:

Very popular fic involving Javi x OFC (posted 3rd February 2023):

And these are from a scene involving Steve visiting Javi on the ranch, having drinks together and talking about Steve finding out about Javi/OFC and whether Javi is going to go back to his job:

Mine: Chapter 17 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 22nd December 2022):

Same very popular fic involving Javi x OFC as above (posted 26th February 2023):

Mine: Chapter 17 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 22nd December 2022):

Same very popular fic involving Javi x OFC as above (posted 26th February 2023):

Bear in mind as well that this same fic included Día de Muertos from 18th September 2022, i.e. just 3 weeks after I shared a snippet of my fic in the main tags about the same subject. Again, I know I don't own ideas and in isolation, I would have just thought it's a coincidence, but not when combined with everything else here.

I've also got e-mails I've sent to myself (I do that a lot with my drafts) going back to early August 2022 where I was working on this idea (obviously I've erased my e-mail address from these screenshots):

And here's my Goodreads page that shows the date I read the book which inspired me to include Día de Muertos in the first place:

For anyone interested, the book is set in a Texas border town and follows a Mexican-American family. The main character gets married and her father-in-law starts to appear to her every Día de Muertos because he's trying to resolve conflict with his son that he never got to do when he was alive. Given that I was writing about...a Mexican-American from a Texas border town, it felt like perfect research lol.

EDITED TO ADD ANOTHER EXAMPLE:

Mine: Chapter 17 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 22nd December 2022):

Same very popular fic involving Javi x OFC as above (posted 2nd April 2023):

These are older screenshots I've had on my phone so the format is slightly different to the above.

Mine: Chapter 1 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 1st March 2021):

Another Javier x Horacio fic posted on AO3 on 24th February 2022:

Mine: Chapter 1 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 1st March 2021):

The same Javier x Horacio fic as above posted on AO3 on 24th February 2022:

Mine: Chapter 1 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 1st March 2021):

The same Javier x Horacio fic as above posted on AO3 on 24th February 2022:

Mine: Chapter 3 of OHDH - Javier x Horacio (posted 31st March 2021):

The same Javier x Horacio fic as above posted on AO3 on 24th February 2022:

These are just some examples, I know there are more but this post took me long enough as it is lol. I think you get the point anyway.

#Narcos #Narcos fic #Javier Peña #Horacio Carrillo #Pedro Pascal #Maurice Compte #Writing #Fandom #Plagiarism #Fan Fiction #Fan Fic

48 notes · View notes

picnokinesis · 1 month

Note

Hello! I am back with more songs >:)

Caves from the main playlist

Epilogue from the teen playlist

Weave from the anterograde playlist

Heck yes >:D Also loving how, once again, you've picked one song that is like, THE SONG of the playlist, and then another where I'm like 'wait why did I put that one on again....' and then I relisten and I'm like oh. oh yeah.

Caves by Gregory Alan Isakov is one of THE earliest campervan au songs. I discovered it in about June 2020, and immediately wrote a scene for part 9 that has had ripple effects all the way back to part 3. I trust you all remember this part from Chapter 11 of Part 3, when the Doctor looks through the photos that were in the shoebox that Brax gave to her:

Compare this to the lyrics of Caves:

And I used to love caves Stumble out into that big sky Remember that bright hollow moon? Showed our insides on our outsides

This song is all about the Doctor and Koschei's childhood - in fact, the ONLY REASON the cave thing happens in the story is because of this song hahah. But it's also how much things have changed between them - this rift that now exists because of the Doctor's amnesia:

You go ahead There's something I forgot Walk slow and I'll catch up Let's hear the stars do their talking

And also:

Did I hear something break Was that your heart or my heart Like when the Earth shakes Then the silence that follows

The second one in particular is great because of the whole thing with the four taps - which, of course, in campervan au is meant to represent the Doctor's heartbeat and Koschei's together, one after the other. But the first one is almost like, I guess almost post-canon I guess - if these two could actually sit down and talk to each other about everything that happened, everything the Doctor has forgotten, they'd probably be able to reconcile somewhat. But emotions are far too intense for both of them. Koschei, like the Master in the show, has had his sense of identity completely shaken by the Doctor not being defined by him in the same way that he is defined by her. She's everything that he is, and his entire life is defined by her - in many ways literally, since he certainly wouldn't have gone to prison if it hadn't been for her, and even in [redacted] au where that doesn't happen, he still ends up dedicating his entire life to her in other ways. But she doesn't even remember him. (...the silence that follows...)

And then there's this part, which just makes me think of these two kids messing about, causing trouble around Skelmanthorpe, sneaking out to explore caves, and being able to just be with each other, not worrying about all the things that have hurt them and made them who they are, and being simply understood by each other without needing words.

This town closes down same time everyday Put out the smoke in your mind Let's put all these words away Lets put all these words away

Weave by Foxing is, I think, the first song by Foxing that I heard? Which is wild, because I'm obsessed with their later album (aka Draw Down the Moon, aka the most thoschei album of all time). Oh wait no, actually, I think it was possibly a different song on this same album that was recommended by spotify at the bottom of my anterograde au playlist. I remember that I liked the vibes but it didn't quite fit, so I went to listen to the rest of the album to see if there would be anything more suitable - only to find Weave, the first track, was absolutely perfect:

How have I been stuck here for so long?

In anterograde au, the Doctor can't feel time - she can't form new memories, so every day she wakes up, still thinking that it's late September 2018. She's stuck in that time and can't change that fact, and every day that fact becomes more and more disorientating. The more time that passes, the more jarring and obvious the loss of memory is.

Selling out an old soul for sales I am caught up in the guilt Making a living off of drowning Leaves me one step in the wrong Have I been stuck here for so long?

The other problem with her inability to feel time is her ability to heal. In the main au, the Doctor can't move on from what happened to her as a teenager because she doesn't remember it. In anterograde, she remembers it, but can't remember the healing itself. Koschei has a bit of a breakdown about this, when he realises that now she's always going to be trapped in this place of fear and confusion, and never going to be able to escape it. If you remember how much he wanted to save the Doctor from the analysis of the song Delilah, the idea of him failing to save her as a teenager is bad enough, but in this au, not only did he not save her now, she is now trapped in this place for the rest of her life, and that's like...the worst possible outcome, as far as he's concerned. Not only did he not save her, but he never will be able to save her. He can't fix it.

As it turns out, he's somewhat wrong about this. Pretty sure I said this when I was talking about The Funeral, but the Doctor DOES begin to heal, albeit slowly and albeit without her being consciously aware of it. But the brain remembers in other ways, and it's about two or so years in before someone points out that actually, the Doctor is more relaxed around Koschei that it clicks for him.

The winding love of life lost No longer haunted by the thought That every mark I make on emeralds are now One step in the wrong One step in the wrong One step in the wrong I’m alright, it’s time I moved on

Epilogue by The Antlers is a lot haha. I mean, this entire album is a lot, and means so much to campervan au, but this one in particular. I can't actually go too much into this one for the same reasons that I can't pull apart the song Two from the same album, but I'm just going to put these lyrics here and tell you to think about the Doctor's fear of hospitals, the way Koschei so desperately wants to save someone who won't let themselves be saved, the fact that the entire album uses this narrative of a hospice and the relationship between a nurse and a patient as a metaphor for abuse, and how both the Doctor and Koschei are constantly haunted by each other:

In a nightmare I am falling from the ceiling into bed beside you You're asleep I'm screaming, shoving you to try to wake you up And like before You've got no interest in the life you live when you're awake Your dreams still follow storylines Like fictions you would make So I lie down against your back Until we're both back in the hospital But now it's not a cancer ward We're sleeping in the morgue Men and women in blue and white They are singing all around you With heavy shovels holding earth You're being buried to your neck In that hospital bed Being buried quite alive now I'm trying to dig you out But all you want is to be buried there together

Oh, and this bit works for the main au, in the context of Koschei and the Doctor bed-sharing for ages until suddenly they weren't, but really it's for [redacted] because it's painfully accurate:

I've woken up, I'm in our bed But there's no breathing body there beside me Someone must have taken you while I was stuck asleep But I know better as my eyes adjust You've been gone for quite awhile now

ALSO! This part ends up creeping into my writing so much. I actually think it ended up in Ruth's chapter?

But you return to me at night Just when I think I may have fallen asleep Your face is up against mine And I'm too terrified to speak

Yep, it was in Ruth's chapter from Part 6 Chapter 22 (Postscript II) - but I've definitely used this for thoschei too, and I'll bet it's around somewhere in campervan au. It just might be in a scene that's on my excerpts document that never sees the light of day rip. But this album by The Antlers is important to Ruth's backstory too, as well as thoschei's, so the parallel here is very intentional

#taka replies #campervan au #praxeus-13 #anterograde au

2 notes · View notes

noonegetsleftbehind · 2 years

Text

i have always been pretty transparent on here about the things that i am going through and struggling with so...

tldr? i'm going through it and it's made me a little slow and given me no concentration and i feel bad about that, but i am working on it. hang in there with me. i will be on when i can and post when i can. i love you all and i'm sorry for making any of you wait.

to say the year has been rough would be an understatement. don't get me wrong... a lot of GREAT things happened too and i am so grateful for them. nothing is ever perfect and there will always be bad times with the good. that's just life.

it's just been a super whirlwind of WHAT THE FUCK at the end of the year. in september i started getting horrid jaw/face/head pain. it got so bad i wound up in the ER twice for it. they said it was a bad ear infection so antibiotics it was. still didn't stop. they said it was a sinus infection. more antibiotics. went to an ENT and they ordered a CT of my sinuses and told me what i already knew... my nose is fucked up and needs fixed. i have a deviated septum. i've had one like my whole life. it's been over 30 years of me not remembering what it's like to actually be able to breathe, of constant sinus infections and various other complications of not being able to breathe.

flash to being told i have chronic sinusitis and more antibiotics... the pain changes and i think mmmm maybe this is more than just the sinuses.... so i went to the dentist. sure enough all 4 of my wisdom teeth were PISSED. went to an oral surgeon and two of them were badly impacted, one sitting directly on my nerve and one at the time had an active infection. got shit set up to go ahead with surgery.

all of a sudden i feel something familiar and convince myself it's just a uti.... i knew it wasn't. it was bad. my doctor told me to go to the ER so i did. that's when i learned i had 3 kidney stones that were in my ureters that were working on passing and a giant ass 10mm boulder about to drop of out of my one kidney. saw my urologist and got told hey it might take a minute to schedule this surgery, but you need it so if you're in pain go to the ER and make sure you're admitted so they do it as an emergency surgery. welp... pain got bad and i had my first stay in a hospital as i had to wait until the next morning for a surgeon. had all of that removed and a stent put in for 2.5 weeks.

the day after i had to have my stent removed was my surgery for wisdom teeth. apparently 3 of 4 of my teeth were infected and it was a bad fucking time. healed from that. saw my CT results from the sinus scan and hooooo boy is shit fucked in there. got scheduled for another surgery on jan 25th to have my nose fixed and for them to go in and fix my sinuses.

i have 3 doctor's appointments AND a bloodwork appointment on tuesday. another doctor appointment wednesday. a meeting with my lawyer thursday and my pre-op on friday. on jan 19th i have my hearing for disability and i am scared shitless about the whole thing. it's been really really rough and it would be nice if i could finally have something work out in my favor.

i've just been... stressed. stressed and tired and depressed. i am pretty sure the meds i am on are NOT working and to top that off they give me HORRIBLE nausea that i cannot cope with without having anti-nausea meds on hand. i'm talking without that i will projectile vomit about 10 minutes after taking them.

my anxiety is at an all time high. my depression is... about as bad as it's been in about a year and the last time it was bad was not a good time for me. i struggle every day lately to find any semblance of joy in the things i normally love doing like writing etc. it's been... hard. i come here as an escape and to not have that escape just sucks. it sucks and i tend to feel guilty and awful for making people wait and letting people down so to speak. it just adds to my ick.

so this is me laying it all out there. i have a lot going on. my head isn't always in the best of places lately and concentration is so hard for me. when i AM on here it means i am really trying hard to be. hopefully the med situation will get better after tuesday and then i'll need time to adjust to something else.

i'm sorry i'm not fast or on it etc. i wish i was. i really do. i just have a million things going on and my anxiety is constantly coming at me about it which then just triggers my depression among other things.

#|| bsaa file: ooc ||#|| bsaa file: psa ||#tw medical #tw surgery #tw depression

3 notes · View notes

blocksruinedme · 1 year

Note

22. describe your writing process from scratch to finish.

28. handwritten notes or typed notes?

44. any writing advice you want to share?

22) my writing process!

be living my life, possibly babysitting or driving (maybe talking about blorbos)

think "hey what if...."

become possessed

from there it splits Version A - the fastest, and rarest, one

A1. get to my couch (or a different laptop place, or a notebook if desperate)

A2. Frantically let words spill out of me, often wishing my fingers could keep up with my brain. It's sometimes almost painful, needing to get the words out

A3. edit for a variable amount of time an post

My first published mcyt was like this - watched ranchers in the crossover at 11am, ideas marinated all day, came up with "what if tango's the key to fix fwhimmy" walking to my car at 5pm, started writing like 5:15 and published at maybe 1am. almost 5k long. Insane. that was MY EX STOLE MY SOULMATE.. | Empires SMP S2 1.19 (rated T) and I'm told also With Their Knife to His Throat (rated M) but I legit have next to no memories of writing that one, I think it was 48 hours from idea to published (4k).

B - normal version. Note: all of this is interspersed with working on a lot of other stories

B1: Have an idea, probably frantically but maybe it builds

B2: Think about it a lot, maybe ideas in a little notebook if they are coming at the wrong times.

B3: write down bits of prose as they come, do a lot of outline in gdocs.

B4: start writing from the beginning based on outline but also what feels right - in any given moment, i know more about the story than i did when i wrote the outline

B5: if i’m lucky write chronologically and work through the outline and add things. Often a section isn’t coming and i skip ahead. If it’s not happening, it’s not time for it to happen. To write the way I really want to, I need to know how it ends, so I can have the story build.

B6: probably fuss a lot

B7: beg people for help and to tell me it’s okay to publish

B8: stress a lot about if it’s good enough and about minor changes i could make

Optional: B9: put it down for 1-7 months (i just published a fic from january, and two of my bang fics are from september and november)

B10: publish it pretty much the same as it was in B8

(I deleted C by adding B9 but already wrote D)

D: Probably just the once

D1: See a prompt for driving after dark and get unexpectedly interested

D2: write 2k of notes while trying to get another story done

D3: Give myself 6 days to write those 2k of notes and then it’s 20k and my longest fic ever and oops needs a lot of typo fixes: The Key to His Problem (rated E)

The editing etc process:

During every version of this I have a gdoc shared with people and am begging for advice. If i can’t decide on a word when i’m writing and have some flow going, i say “they were all [very] surprised” and leave a comment (or just the brackets) to come back later and fix it. THIS IS MUCH OF HOW I WRITE FAST. The first draft is to get out it out of my head, the second draft is to get it into the reader’s head. SOMETIMES the flow is perfect and i don’t need to do this, but like, idk, 10% of the time?

A lot of the words in [brackets] will wind up staying as is, but it gives me permission to move on without feeling like i’ve settled.

Editing sometimes involves a lot of of editing passes, sometimes just because i want to work on it and don’t want to write. This can mean the early parts get soooo much more love.

Sometimes I print out a fic that has gone through a set of editing and do more on paper. It can be great. I just see the story differently, and it mostly keeps me from adding huge amounts, and i catch errors i didn’t otherwise.

Usually i put up the ao3 draft a few days earlier and start adding tags and putting in my text (which i do in html) to look at it. The title often comes the day i publish, cause i wait till the end.

28. handwritten notes or typed notes?

typed unless i don't have my laptop. I started carrying around a pocket sized notebook in march and i'm onto my second one. I got it in a Japanese stationery store and got hooked, i have this line in many sizes, here's my pocket notebook -https://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-N184A-Twin-Ring-Memo-Pad-A7-Graph/pd/7379 I've written in this baby in the corner of a club cause i had ideas waiting at the bar for a drink.

44. any writing advice you want to share?

You have to get the words out. You have to get the words out. You have to get the words out.

Good words can be, often are, born of less good words.

Don't be afraid of editing! Great fiction generally comes from editing! Put down some fucking words even if you hate them and get to the next part. I do this, I am not preaching advice I don't take. I'll leave a comment sometimes to tell my future self I didn't think they were good words, I just needed them out. It's fine, I survive every single time.

If you don't need to edit, swell! But if you're stuck, just keep writing something -- or if that won't work, or you feel shitty, take a break. Work on another story, do something else, but if you're miserable and slamming your head against the wall, STOP! Don't hurt yourself! Because you shouldn't hurt, and because you'll associate writing more and more with hurt.

Get other people involved. Share snippets with your friends (if you've got an appropriate discord, make a channel for it!) Trade off reading with your writer friends. If you like my writing, know that not a single word I've ever published hasn't been read by multiple other people. My pre-fic writing was generally group works, so that's what feels normal. The idea of publishing with not even anyone to say "Hey Vee, this makes sense in your brain but not mine" is terrifying. You don't need to Have Serious Beta, it can just be cheerleading or really general "point out if anything is a big problem". I found out this week i am a "phenomenal cheerleader" -- your friends, or some kind soul on a discord, don't need to give you literary analysis to say "this part is cool, your fic is good, i hope you publish!"

Fandom is shared joy. Share your joy in every way - cheerleading others, getting other to share joy with you on your works, leave comments, leave kudos, reblog, make happy posts, keep the negativity to smaller spaces, SHARE THE JOY. I've been in fandom legit longer than some of you have been alive and it's always the joy, that's what it always comes back to. Hold onto the joy, that's what will last in your hearts. <3 <3 <3

#answering asks #me #my writing #writing advice #feels presumptuous to tag that but whatever #yes this is a months old ask but as i say i have to wait for the right time #and today's “woke up crying and need a certain kind of distraction”

1 note · View note

silvermillenniumqueenneptune · 1 year

Text

I need some thoughts on a complicated situation with my friends [Please do not reblog or repost, but comments are appreciated]

(Please note: For privacy, nicknames are used. Please do not repost or reblog this anywhere else. I would post this on Reddit but one of the people involved frequents the r/AITA forums, and with everything going on there, I don't feel comfortable. Edit to add: if those on @am-i-the-asshole-official saw my post there, these are the same individuals.)

I (33/F) am a disabled, unemployed woman living with my parents. Because of my disability it is difficult for me to leave the house and I have never had steady employment. In September 2019, when I was 30 years old, I made two online friends who I've posted about on here before. I've called them Nick (32/M) and Mandy (31/F) in previous posts and will continue to do so here. Nick is younger than me by a year, Mandy is younger than me by 2 years, but she claims that she and Nick were schoolmates (He is supposedly Chinese by birth and was held back a year because of learning disabilities and other issues.) In the last couple of years, I've started to suspect that Nick may be lying to keep me as a friend. He has embellished fanciful tales about being personal friends with celebrities, and a number of photos used by him that he claims are family members, friends or even himself, pop up in other places or are identified as stock photos or other people that are not who he claims them to be. [For example, a photo of one of his adoptive daughters is taken from the stock photo website Dreamstime-- it wasn't until I took a close look that I saw the watermarks from the company on the photo.] Mandy is naive enough to believe Nick's every word because she says she knows him personally. I'm questioning a lot of things about the friendship, most recently Nick's job, as he has made claims a few times now that he was fired from a job in tech support for a major computer manufacturing company, only to be rehired, then let go again recently. He now claims that almost immediately after being let go by this company again (a few weeks ago), he now has a job for one of their rivals. Nick is also disabled, with a combination of OCD and reactive attachment disorder. I really want to address these lies but every time I try, there is always a too-convenient answer involved. Worse, Nick either cannot or won't speak to me over voice or video chat without Mandy there, where she claims he has access to her computer and can type messages to me or her on her screen. She's never shown me this as it's happened. What's making me question this now is that I recently checked out a photo that both Nick and Mandy claim is of a mutual friend of theirs who I never met, who passed away when they were in high school. A reverse image search revealed that the image I was shown was a stock photo. Then I started checking out some photos that Nick claimed were of his adopted daughters. One was another stock photo (with the watermark still on the source photo) and one appeared on the blog of a mother to a special needs child who has no apparent ties to Nick or his husband despite claims that the child is his husband's biological daughter. I have no idea how to proceed or process any of this. I've confronted them before, and they always have convenient explanations. We also have another friend (28/F) who believes everything Nick and Mandy say and thinks I should stop pushing for the truth.

#personal post #friend issues #feel free to discuss #do not repost #do not reblog #neurodivergence #lies

1 note · View note

nonbinaryhatboxghost · 2 years

Text

2:33pm. Been a minute. I am still overall doing okay. The Maine trip I mentioned back in September did successfully happen. All of the stuff that was in Maine was great. I got to experience so much New England autumn. Quality time with my dad went well. My Stephen King nerddom was very much indulged. Maybe I’ll post pictures at some point.

The RI part of the visit was not so successful. Seeing my grandparents was great, but being back in the RI house that I lived in for so long was a terrible experience. I don’t think I can ever stay in that house again. Without Jack (my late family cat, he passed away this year at age 19), there’s nothing really there to hide the sad cycle that’s happening in that house.

Work bullshit continues. That is admittedly my norm now.

Personal life stuff is generally going well. My anxiety does continue trying to find ways to ruin it, but I’m doing my best to not let that happen.

I recently did a week and a half of cat-sitting/apartment-sitting for a couple friends. The cat-sitting part went great, she was a sweetheart to me. That definitely helped with the isolation part of the gig. I really didn’t think hard enough about what staying in an apartment without a car and far from my social circle would do to my brain.

I’ve accepted that December holidays no longer make me happy due to many memories of forced interactions and pressure to Do Something & Be Happy. I instead did a couple of low-key things this year that were what I wanted.

I’m feeling a bit off today because I’m doing some mild self-isolation. A friend of mine recently tested positive for COVID and while I have tested negative, and it’s been 5 days since I last saw said friend, I felt like I should be safe and stay in. It’s also cold and I’ve been so mentally exhausted from work that I’ve been using this extended weekend mostly to catch up on sleep and recharge.

But while I have done things like go to a movie theater or sometimes out to eat over the last couple months, I feel like I’m reverting a little bit to lockdown mode. Maybe it’s the rising case numbers, maybe it’s hearing about all the airline shenanigans. Maybe it’s my whole hiding-from-everything instinct that happens when I’m low or upset.

A little while ago, I became very fixated on The Weeknd. There was a live performance of his that I found from 2020. Specifically the November 2020 American Music Awards. LA was still in lockdown. He walks up and down an empty bridge street that is lined with fireworks. At the end, the camera pulls back and up and up as the city is shown behind the bridge, and The Weeknd gets smaller and smaller. Fireworks burst outside of the bridge. I have revisited this performance more times than I can count not just because of the music, but because it captures the specific time and place and feeling of lockdown for me in 2020. The Weeknd sings over and over again “save your tears for another day” as the city behind him is quiet and empty, even though there are still people there trapped inside their homes.

I keep rewatching it. I think it may be because I still feel trapped. Again, I’ve been outside, I’ve interacted with folks. But I still wear a mask at work every day and have just accepted that I’m one of the only people in the office that does that. If I’m invited to a gathering of more than half a dozen people, it is more likely that I won’t go. I left the choir I was a part of because I didn’t feel safe singing inside with a large group of folks without masks. I made the mistake of going to the zoo with a couple friends on the 26th and was completely unprepared for the LARGE number of people and families there, most of whom were unmasked. I was masked the whole time but I still felt unsafe.

Wearing a mask isn’t a problem for me. I just know that I can’t keep cutting myself off and distracting myself with fixations long-term. I need a social or creative outlet again, but I don’t feel safe enough to look for one.

On a petty note, Avatar: The Way of Water is a bad movie. I recommend not giving it money. It has enough.

0 notes

rewordthis · 2 years

Text

I posted 257 times in 2022

That's 219 more posts than 2021!

7 posts created (3%)

➡️ that’s what you get when your pc dies on February and every time you place an order for a new one it takes 1,5 months to find out it’s cancelled… 🙄 7 is a nice number, though. Wish me luck on finally getting a pc in 2023, please!!!

250 posts reblogged (97%)

💜Blogs I reblogged the most💜:

@radiodread

@kinbari14

@3-aem

@kudouusagi

@arinavah

I tagged 234 of my posts in 2022

Only 9% of my posts had no tags

#jujutsu kaisen - 83 posts

#jjk - 81 posts

#gojo satoru - 45 posts

#free! - 40 posts

#itadori yuuji - 39 posts

#fushiguro megumi - 34 posts

#nanami kento - 29 posts

#free! series - 29 posts

#yamazaki sousuke - 29 posts

#nanase haruka - 29 posts

➡️ I see a pattern here… hm 🧐

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#aaaaaaah~ i wanted to whatch them again now that it was re-airing which new visuals before i start the manga but pc be like ☠️ 6months nyaw!

➡️ Pal, there is a mistake in this 🏷️ but I’ll pretend I don’t freak out about it…😬 Kindly replace [which] with [with], ok?

My Top Posts in 2022:

Ok, WHY is tumblr following blogs I don’t even know of???

I’m sorry if you had been unfollowed by me recently, but I never choose to follow your blog in the first place.

Thanks for your understanding…

1 note - Posted April 30, 2022

Free! Birthday Boy

🎉Happy birthday, Sousuke-kun, our champion! 🥇 Congrats! Congrats! Congrats! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

✨ You realised your dream and stood on the highest step of the podium🏆, surrounded by friends! Your unwavering character and kind heart ❤️ will guide you on taller heights for sure!🔝 ✨ Free!💦 may have ended but your story is still ongoing! May you always be strong and victorious in all your endeavours!!! 🔥🔥🔥

Let us meet again in the next fic! 🤗💕

🇯🇵【山崎宗介♍️ ❾/14】🏊🏻‍♂️🫧🫧🫧

2 notes - Posted September 15, 2022

Free! Birthday Boy

Happy birthday, Haruka!🐬

💝 May the water 💦 to always favour you and your friends forever be with you!🫧 🎣 【七瀬遙♋️ ❻/30】🛁

5 notes - Posted July 1, 2022

A Day Like Any Other

Yuuji → Megumi | Sukuna → Megumi

🥛📚

1507 words Itadori Yuuji, Ryomen Sukuna, Fushiguro Megumi SFW

Summary: Until Episode 16

Hello, guys! Missed me? Long time no fic, huh? Well, let me fix this. Although it’s from another fandom yet again, I still hope you’ll like it.😗

Anyways, as the summary says, this doesn’t include manga spoilers, but as I am getting spoiler-ed over on twttr and the net in general, I think I have stepped on some minor(?) things. So, yes, that’s it for foreword. I really hope you’ll N’joy this little something-something.🤗

Three months.

That’s how long it took for Itadori Yuuji’s cosmotheory to turn upside down.

In this short span of time, Yuuji had learnt that monsters are real. They get born from the negative feelings of humanity and hungrily prey and feed off of peoples’ fear, shame, hate, regret…

… blood.

They bring mayhem into the human lives in order to cause enough pain to illicit such emotions, so they can sustain themselves and grow stronger. With each passing day they remain unresolved, they become more dangerous and harder to deal with. Eventually, these voracious spirits — curses as they’re called — will evolve into these walking, talking, intelligent forms of existence that can take more than just the life of a human being.

These curses, savagely devour the very soul of their victim.

But Yuuji has also learnt, that there’s a secret society that has taken upon fighting these nightmarish things. It’s just a handful of humans with abilities that far exceed what once he considered common sense; the jujutsu sorcerers.

These people are just like any other. They laugh, they cry, they resent.

They however, put their lives on the line with every battle they fight, so that the rest of the world will be safe.

They all do it without expecting anything in return or knowing whether they will be able to get back alive and are forced to silently suffer the losses of their friends in this ever waging war.

Yuuji, admires that kind of resolve.

But as long as it goes through his hand, he will never allow a curse to take anyone from him.

That said, in that same time, he’s gotten painfully aware of some things about himself he’d never admit would rather not have known…

For one, he’s still terribly weak. He’s nowhere near as strong as he considered himself to be when facing these abominations.

Then, comes the fact that he’s actually sane enough to be scared of dying, something he hadn’t been expecting to be of much effect on him since he had made his mind about taking responsibility for helping with Sukuna’s containment.

And finally, there’s his shame over being unable to flatly adhere by his ideals, after having already been forced to cross red lines he’d promised himself would never cross.

And that all, circles back to his weakness.

In the end, he’s helplessly mortal…

Only human.

Yuuji has made these mental workouts several times throughout the past two months, and he’s always left feeling unsatisfied with his progress after reflecting on each breakthrough coupled with a new throwback.

Yuuji furrows his brows and squeezes his closed eyes until it’s nothing but complete blackness.

‘It’s irritating.’

When will he finally be able to protect everyone with his own strength?

See the full post

6 notes - Posted August 14, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Gojo-san just checking Nanami out for injuries after getting back from his mission.

Also, “ What is a proper death drawing? I don’t get it!”

18 notes - Posted September 11, 2022

➡️ Why the heck is no.5 a top post???🤣🤣🤣 For no.4-3 I blame YOU, tumblr! I trusted you with my scheduled posts and you were late in posting them! 😤 No.2 was my first JJK post and no.1 is one I’m actually very fond of. 🤗 For the record, I’m super proud of no.2-1 considering how I made them without a pc!!!

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #I got this like in the beginning of the month but whatever #I need to get back to my Free! WIPs and actually finish some oneshots…😮‍💨#do expect delays and more unrelated fandoms though…😗#jjk #free! series

0 notes

death2normalcy · 2 years

Text

Time for another installment of ‘Sam just needs to ramble on about her feelings because she doesn’t have close friends or a therapist to do this with and writing it out like this and posting it for pretty much no one to read helps’. That title is too long, but the point stands.

You do not have to read this. I am simply just randomly typing out these thoughts as they come to me.There probably won’t be any coherency to these, doing it this way just helps me calm down.

This specific one was inspired by a handful of things, the catalyst of which was a tiktok of someone telling me its okay to be sensitive and overwhelmed, which made me cry and send me on a slight spiral.

I was always the sensitive kid. I cried too much, I took everything personally, my cousins (the people I spent the most time with up until probably middle school) didn’t seem to enjoy that part of me too much (or most parts, but my recollection of my childhood is fuzzy at best). My family never seemed to know how to deal with it. I remember one incident where I was at a family reunion and I was crying (I was older, but not graduated from high school. Possibly middle school age? I can’t remember) and was left alone to just cry by myself. No one asked me about it, tried to talk to me.

I think maybe the way I was treated as a child when I was upset or when I was crying strongly shaped how I let people perceive me today when I’m vulnerable. If I even am.

I’ve talked about this one here, briefly, but my dad passed in May of 2016. It devastated me, understandably. But I wouldn’t show people that. I didn’t cry once in the hospital, he was hooked up to the machines for 5 days. I was there every single day. I’m not sure if this is 100% exactly how things progressed, but I think that not being able to just fully feel, and let others see my grief, caused my anger about his death to be amplified and I ended up taking that anger out on other people. Not...aggressively, not even that badly, but noticeably.

Thankfully, I’ve learned to recognize that the anger is occurring, so when my cat died in September, I didn’t let the anger take over.

Unfortunately, what’s ended up happening, is that I now get so uncomfortable and grossed out by anyone seeing me vulnerable in that way, I would rather die.

I haven’t cried in front of anyone in a very long time. I let them see the ‘safe’ vulnerable moments. Stuff that goes with my anxiety, and even that is a watered down version. My anxiety is easy. I can share that and that’s okay. But anything else is unacceptable.

I have also shut down in a way, I’ve become determined to be independent no matter what, to the point that I am desperately in need of help with some things and refuse to ask. I ask for easy things, like stuff at work. Not for financial help when I’m about to have to go without food just to get by because I don’t want to have to put off moving to South Korea for another year.

I can’t be vulnerable with people anymore. Because I was told and shown, from a very young age, that being open and sensitive and emotional was bad, That I was being dramatic. That my feelings were not valid and that I was a crybaby who needed to get over it.

Over and over again.

And honestly? I miss being soft. I miss just...being. But I’ve become so put off by it that the idea of expressing the vulnerability to anyone, ever, makes me want to throw up.

#personal #i never know what to tag these with #this is about being vulnerable and sensitive #i don't even want to talk about how i'm excessively shedding hair and it's thinning drastically and i think it may be from the stress #that losing me cat gave me #but that's a whole other thing #i should also be addressed #that there was also cases of me making friends #and being open with them #and going too far #being too much #and that was on me for sure #because i wasn't used to that kindness #and i overstepped #and started putting all my problems onto them #but i've learned from that #and unfortunately gone too far to the opposite side

0 notes

gdwessel · 2 years

Text

RIP Antonio Inoki (2/20/1943 - 10/1/2022) + Katsuya Kitamura (12/14/1985 - 10/12/2022)

[Hello. It’s been a long while since I posted. So here’s a very long pre-amble to this piece, which seems a little out of date by now, but...:

· I first wrote this the night after Antonio Inoki died. I tried to sell it to various outlets, but nobody bit. FanFyte shut down in September, so I couldn’t sell to them anymore. (If you want to see my complete works for FanFyte, click here.) I’m now doing work for Wrestling Inc., and some of this piece ends up in my debut, where I wrote about Antonio Inoki. I know this is now horribly out of date, but I waited to see if anyone would publish this for coin, and nobody wanted it, so here we are.

· On that note, a lot of things have been changing, on social media and with myself. On the latter note, I am wrapping up the Strong Style Story incarnation of this blog, and by the first weekend of December will be making this my personal blog. Currently gdwessel.com points to a WordPress I haven’t updated since 2016. It will become this place, which will also become gdwessel.tumblr.com . I hit the wall with writing about puroresu exclusively, and frankly, I don’t want to do it for free anymore. I will still write about wrestling here, along with other things. But there are plenty of outlets these days for reporting and news on Japanese wrestling, many of them doing a better and more immediate job than I could have. Thank you for reading me these many years, and I hope you stick around for the transition to my own blog, where I will also be (hopefully) announcing some other writing projects very soon.

Without further ado…]

It was reported [October 1, 2022] that Antonio Inoki, born Kanji Inoki, legally named Muhammad Hussein Inoki following a conversion to Shia Islam in 1990, died of systemic transthyretin amyloidosis at the age of 79.

It’s not going to be easy writing about Antonio Inoki, because, well, he’s Antonio Inoki. He was larger than life and seemed immortal. Quite literally, were it not for the fruits of his labors, I would not be here as a fan of puroresu for as long as I have been, let alone writing this eulogy of sorts. Inoki, as founder of New Japan Pro Wrestling, is of course one of the architects of Japanese pro wrestling as we know it today. But there was a lot more to him than that, and NJPW may not even be the one defining trait of his life and career.

Kanji Inoki was born in 1943, the sixth of seven sons, second youngest of 11 children in all. His family were pretty well off into the post-war years, where the death of Inoki’s father (a businessman and politician) whilst Kanji was five would cascade into hard times for the family, and in 1957, the family (including a grandfather who would pass during the journey) would relocate to Brazil. It was there Inoki excelled in athletics, and was scouted by Rikidozan, the Father Of Puroresu, at age 17 to go back to Japan and wrestle for Rikidozan’s Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance promotion, alongside another athletic prodigy, the former Yomiuri Giants pitcher Shohei “Giant” Baba. Inoki was trained by both Rikidozan and Karl Gotch, with other training under the likes of amateur wrestler Isao Yoshiwara and judoka Kiyotaka Otsubo. This would go on to greatly influence the direction Inoki wanted to take pro wrestling. Inoki and Baba both debuted on the same JWA show, 9/30/1960, making Inoki’s official date of death 62 years and one day after his wrestling debut. Eventually he would take on the name Antonio Inoki, as tribute to his time in Brazil, and to wrestler Antonio Rocca.

Inoki would leave JWA twice during his tenure: once in 1966, after being second in the pecking order to Giant Baba following Rikidozan’s murder in 1963, going to the ultimately failed Tokyo Pro Wrestling company. He would return to JWA in 1967, and was sacked in 1971 for trying to organize a takeover of the promotion. This is what would ultimately lead to the founding of New Japan Pro Wrestling, which ran their first show on 3/6/1972 at Tokyo Ota Ward Gymnasium, Inoki facing off against one of his trainers, Karl Gotch, in the tag-team main event of that show. In his way, Inoki would be an innovator of another hallmark of any Japanese wrestling promotion that has some years on them: the talent exodus to form a new company.

Inoki’s tenure as owner, founder and top star in NJPW is pretty well documented. Legendary feuds with the likes of Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Tiger Jeet Singh, Umanosuke Ueda, Masa Saito, Big Van Vader, Riki Choshu, Tatsumi Fujinami… the list goes on and on. Not to mention, the stars that the NJPW Dojo would produce in time: Keiji Muto / The Great Muta, Masahiro Chono, Shinya Hashimoto, Jushin Thunder Liger, Kensuke Sasaki, Hiroshi Hase, Yuji Nagata, Satoshi Kojima, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Shinsuke Nakamura, Katsuyori Shibata. That list is endless too, even though some wrestlers who were reared in the dojo, for example Minoru Suzuki or Mr. Pogo, would make their names outside of NJPW.

What set Inoki apart from other promoters was his innovation and willingness to try other styles of fighting in a wrestling ring, bringing in non-wrestling combat sports participants to wrestle him (and others) in New Japan. In his own way, Inoki was a founding pioneer in what we now call Mixed Martial-Arts combat, made popular by the likes of Pancrase, Ultimate Fighting Championship and PRIDE. Indeed, Inoki’s “strong style” wrestling was an amalgam of pro wrestling and what was known as catch or shoot wrestling. Several of these “different style fights” ended up in shoots, notoriously against Akram Pahalwan in 1976, and against Croatian/Canadian strongman The Great Antonio on 12/6/1977, repeating a feat that Inoki’s sensei Rikidozan undertook on 6/2/1961 - getting so pissed off against Great Antonio in a match that he started legitimately beating him up.

This commitment to “different style fighting” had its peak in the famous Boxing v. Wrestling match between Inoki and Muhammad Ali on 6/26/1976 at Tokyo Nippon Budokan that ended in a draw, and left Ali with leg injuries as Inoki spent much of the match on the mat kicking at Ali. It did prove Inoki’s concept of different fighting styles in a match could draw, even if we were still over a decade away from the formation of Pancrase and UFC. (The match was also homaged in the movie ROCKY III, with Rocky Balboa taking on Thunderlips, aka Hulk Hogan.) The meeting with Ali would also have a profound effect on Inoki in other ways, which I will relate below.

But as there was a peak, there was also a nadir. Inoki experimented a lot. Not all of it worked. There was the infamous Island Deathmatch against Masa Saito on 10/4/1987, fought on Ganryujima with no audience, and mostly in the dark, that I don’t really recommend. There was a “Nail Floor Deathmatch” (bed of nails match) in February 1978 that I wrote in a piece for FanFyte that sadly didn’t get published before Fanbyte Media shut down FanFyte, maybe I will print that separately here on this dormant blog.

And then there was the 2000s. Well, it would have started in 1997, when Inoki took Olympic champion judoka Naoya Ogawa under his wing to be part of Inoki’s UFO (Universal Fighting-Arts Organization) project that would interact with NJPW, but the peak of “Inokiism” occurred in the 2000s. As MMA was becoming a bigger deal on the world stage, Inoki would bring in more MMA and other martial artists, and indeed have NJPW wrestlers participate in MMA matches outside of NJPW as well. One of the more infamous instances was Yuji Nagata getting completed washed by Mirko Filipovic in 21 seconds at the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye event on 12/31/2001. This was an era that would see the likes of Tadao Yasuda get elevated to IWGP Heavyweight Champion, and also see Shinsuke Nakamura, a prodigy by any stretch, get pushed to the top of NJPW not two years into his career, mostly on the back of successful MMA bouts himself, in deference to whether or not Nakamura was really ready for the top spot in the promotion. It would also see Keiji Muto and Satoshi Kojima, both stars of NJPW, jump ship to All Japan Pro Wrestling in early 2002 in defiance of the MMA direction NJPW was going in, and see Riki Choshu leave after being relieved of his duties as booker, blamed for the departures. Out of respect, we won’t discuss the infamous three-way IWGP title match between Kazuyuki Fujita v. Brock Lesnar v. Masahiro Chono. Let’s just say it was not good, and the fact remains, Inoki sold his shares of NJPW to videogame company Yuke’s not long after that debacle.

There are those who swear by this era of NJPW, and if it works for them, great. Wrestling offers something for everyone. In hindsight, some of it is not as bad as it seemed at the time… but at the time, it seemed pretty bad. Coinciding with a retraction of business in pro wrestling, after its global peak in the late 1990s, it was brave, but it was not great for business, and in fact, nearly cratered NJPW.

Inoki did sell the company in 2005, and afterwards still attempted to push his philosophy in both Inoki Genome Federation (formed 2007) and later in another company called ISM. IGF folded in 2019 (although Inoki had left it by 2017 to his son-in-law, Simon Inoki), and ISM ran a few shows, but was not a regular promotion.

One part of Inoki’s life and career that is not talked about enough is his political career, begun in 1989 when he was voted into the House Of Councillors under his own Sports & Peace Party banner. I mentioned before that Inoki was greatly affected by his meeting with Muhammad Ali. This extended to his political acts. In 1990, mimicking Ali, he went to Iraq to negotiate the release of Japanese nationals being held hostage in the run-up to the first Gulf War. Inoki was able to see 36 Japanese persons released from Iraq; the upshot of this would be Inoki not only running an NJPW event in Baghdad, but also converting to Shia Islam. This was also a very unofficial visit, not sanctioned by the Diet or the government, but it did help Inoki get re-elected in 1992.

What did not help were similar overtures and visits to North Korea, in the interests of creating peace between Japan and North Korea, a very tense relationship there owing to decades, and centuries, of colonialism, extending into the early 20th century. Of course, Rikidozan was also North Korean by birth, so that surely played into Inoki’s desire to see better relations between the two governments. This culminated in the Pyongyang International Sports and Culture Festival for Peace in Pyongyang, on 4/28/1995 & 4/29/1995, a two-day NJPW card with WCW participation that had great attendance (very likely compulsory), and the only meeting ever between Inoki v. Ric Flair, which Inoki, the only wrestler anyone in the crowd had any energy for, won. (This is also known as Collision in Korea – VICE would cover this in the third season of DARK SIDE OF THE RING, and of course I did a very long podcast about this with the hosts of the Days Of Thunder podcast.)

This did not go over very well with the Japanese public, as well as accusations that Inoki and the SPP were taking bribes, and had involvement with the yakuza. Inoki did not get elected to a third term in 1995, and stayed out of politics until running once more in 2013, this time under the Japan Restoration Party banner, which itself would dissolve in 2014, leaving Inoki as an Independent. He continued his unofficial visits to North Korea, still against the wishes of the government, while publicly declaring his desire for relations between the two nations to improve. He would ultimately retire from politics in 2019. Not long after that, due to illnesses and spinal issues, he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

None of which belies the fact that Inoki is very much a cultural icon in Japan. People from all walks of life lined up to get slapped by Inoki, his way of transferring his “fighting spirit” to others. He has been pastiched and referenced in very many comedy programs, dramas, manga and anime. (A personal recommendation – GOLOSSEUM by Yasushi Baba, a glorious insanity featuring A LOT of wrestlers against Vladmir Putin in a SF fighting extravaganza.) His large chin gave him an aura of being larger than life, and if someone is wearing a red scarf, chances are it’s an homage to the man. Even if pro wrestling is no longer the mainstream hit it once was in Japan, he occupies a rarified place in Japanese pop culture.

But as with most icons, in the end, Inoki was a man. As with other iconic cultural touchstones like, say, Stan Lee or David Bowie, real life is more complicated than the legends make them out to be. He did great things, he did not-so-great things. For every Andre the Giant, there was a Great Antonio. Not everything Inoki tried was a hit, but also, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Often, it’s the mistakes that make the successes better. Without the struggles of the company in the mid-2000s, with or without Inoki in charge, you don’t get Hiroshi Tanahashi becoming The Ace. Going to North Korea may have pissed off a lot of people in the government, but mending fences between Japan and the homeland of his beloved mentor was something he was passionate about. Ultimately, that’s what Inoki’s life came down to – his passions. He followed them and tried to make them reality.

Inoki’s life will be celebrated, and his death mourned, all over pro wrestling, all over Japan, all over the world. In a crazy world such as pro wrestling, we will probably never see the likes of him again. He was the right man for the right time, and ran with every idea he had in his head, for good or for ill. He took risks nobody would take today. Ultimately, he changed the world of pro wrestling, and the world of combat sports in general.

Ichi.

Ni.

San.

DA.

Not two full weeks later, Katsuya Kitamura died at the far-too-young age of 36, on 10/12/2022. At this writing, it still has not been determined quite why Kitamura, a massive hulk of a man, suddenly needed to go to hospital, where he passed.

Kitamura burst into the NJPW fan consciousness in 2016, his debut coming at the tender age of 31, in the same dojo class as Tomoyuki Oka (Great O-Khan). He was a champion amateur wrestler, who was banned from the 2012 London Olympiad after failing a doping test. He was big. VERY big. He wanted to emulate Bill Goldberg, using his Jackhammer finish in matches, which culminated in Kitamura winning the 2017 Young Lion Cup.

Following that, Kitamura began a 7-match trial series, which most assumed would be the next step before an excursion to the USA, where he had wanted to wrestle superheavyweights. He never finished the trial, his last trial match coming on 2/10/2018 in a loss to Yuji Nagata. His seventh trial match, against Manabu Nakanishi, never took place as Kitamura had suffered a cerebral concussion, to the extent he would have to retire. During his recovery, Kitamura suffered a scooter accident that crushed one of his legs. He would officially leave New Japan on 1/31/2019.

His post-NJPW career saw him attempt bodybuilding, hosting a YouTube series on the subject. He also took part in his only MMA fight, a submission loss to Bobby Ologun at Rizin 32 on 11/20/2021 in Okinawa.

There’s not as much I can say about Kitamura as I did above about Inoki. Kitamura more represents the potential that was there, rather than accomplishments. He was poised to be a massive star in NJPW, the company was clearly banking on it. He would have brought something to New Japan that was lacking at the time, a native wrestler with such physical presence, that could go pound for pound against the giants that typically only seemed to come from visiting wrestlers.

He never got that far. The only T-shirt of Kitamura produced was a bootleg from The Atomic Elbow fanzine. (Yes, I have it!) He never had his big matches against giant American superheavyweights. All those Could Have Beens…

Ultimately, it’s important to remember, that with both Antonio Inoki, and Katsuya Kitamura, is despite accomplishments, or potential, they were people first and foremost. One was one of the most influential figures ever in professional wrestling. The other never got to make it that far.

Both are missed, in their own ways.

#new japan pro wrestling #NJPW #Antonio Inoki #katsuya kitamura

1 note · View note

reanimatedcourier · 4 years

Text

How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

#fallout 3 #fallout 4 #fallout 76 #fallout new vegas #fallout 1 #fallout 2 #fallout: new vegas #ozhibii'ige

13K notes · View notes

victoria1676 · 2 years

Text

Where have I been?

Hi, Victoria here! ^^

Sorry for not posting or tell anyone of my progress after the news of Technoblade’s passing that also not only made me sad but it also made me toke a two week break from writing. Right now I am back in writing but at the small slow pace as I am trying to world build my story well without rushing it to make it ugly

So far I am definitely gonna think new ways to improve Prologue 3 which is not yet made as I haven't like decided how to start it so I apologize but I will work it on august hopefully however Im sure those who knows what is happening with Genshin.

We got leaks of what Sumeru is like (Rip Primos and wallets to everyone) and Im very excited as everyone who read my main Sagau or Sagau crossover of DSMP/SBI reader Sumeru and Snezahaya are the only ones who are not involved of the Imposter chase which i will try my best to explain why only those two nations did not hunt us down while rest such as Natlan and Fontaine hunted us down when one of them are supposedly could help us but I won't spoil why as I am waiting for Natlan and Fontaine to come so that I can work my way on them without making the characters in those nations look OOC when they are not out yet TwT

And of course the famous teaser that is about the Harbingers reaction to Signora’s death to which I did not expect it revealed all Harbingers and damn I wonder how the main SAGAU writers will write about them especially Regrator who caught my interest with Arlecchino UwU

But uh back in the Topic 😂

So like currently I am suffering a huge skin allergies which is a pain in the neck and I have no idea when it will be gone which is quite sad and annoying as the itchyness is hard to control sometimes TwT But don't worry I am doing okay XD

Although a bit oof a news.

The technolade tribute will have a bit changes as i decided to make it around the imposter au of Sagau but this will be more of Reader and Techno centric so basically more onto the Dream SMP so for those who dont know Dream SMP or never watch but came here for the SAGAU you can read it or not read it since I only made my story just for fun and so far I already have massive ideas for the "Leave me Alone and Let me build my s**t" such as I now decided that there will be like changes since i just edit this today and this draft was like last week XD

And what changes is that Prologue one will have addition of a Torture scene that a friend wanted me to add and I thought it would fit considering I decided to go around my Prologues and Interlude to add the Dark themes since things will go dark and very much have high tension once we get to the main plot of how the story began or rather how Reader felt being chased along with being labeled as an imposter when she is not.

So around August there will be a short (or not short due to my brainstorming and OCD build up whoops 😂😂) Prologue 3.5 or which uh basically is before the actually Prologue 3. What i mean is that 3.5 will mostly be a calm before the storm which will be another short point of view of the characters before Doomsday and I know everyone is not happy when they are waiting for the Doomsday to happen and Ill be honest I myself always is not happy but I have to do it so I can break expectations and also 3.5 will have a Harbingers and you guys will have to figure out who the traitor that spoke to Dainsleif because its gonna be a plot twist when you realize it was not them but another character who I always used my support XD

I wont spoil much but I can say hopefully Prologue 3 Doomsday will be moved on September since I do full chapters once a month due to being busy irl and school. I hope you guys understand especially its not easy to make a huge build up plot with worldbuilding and trying to make the characters in character without making them go OOC.

But yes this month I will do my best to finish the Technoblade tribute with reader and I can say there will be angst, comfort and a bit of a hint of the future chapters of my main story OwO! Despite i am supposed to rest with Allergies I need to make sure you guys will get enough SAGAU x DSMP/SBI reader XD

So I hope you guys understand and Inbox is open for questions which I will answer in my own pace as I am trying to get these allergies healed TwT

So yeah that's all! ^^

#genshin impact self aware #genshin self aware #sagau #genshin sagau #self aware genshin #genshin self aware au #self aware au #genshin impact x dream smp crossover #sagau dsmp reader

30 notes · View notes