#PR Times

[fanaticalthings]

the muskification of twitter except it's lex luthor instead of elon lol

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[uncharted-constellations]

~What i couldve been~

I was just gonna do the adult timeline zelda but im so enchanted by the idea of these two versions of the same character. People always talk about how link would be changed but never zelda.

[inkskinned]

one of the things that's the most fucking frustrating for me about arguing with climate change deniers is the sheer fucking scope of how much it matters. sweating in my father's car, thinking about how it's the "hottest summer so far," every summer. and there's this deep, roiling rage that comes over me, every time.

the stakes are wrong, is the thing. that's part of what makes it not an actual debate: the other side isn't coming to the table with anything to fucking lose.

like okay. i am obviously pro gun control. but there is a basic human part of me that can understand and empathize with someone who says, "i'm worried that would lead to the law-abiding citizens being punished while criminals now essentially have a superpower." i don't agree, but i can tell the stakes for them are also very high.

but let's say the science is wrong and i'm wrong and the visible reality is wrong and every climate disaster refugee is wrong. let's say you're right, humans aren't causing it or it's not happening or whatever else. let's just say that, for fun.

so we spend hundreds of millions of dollars making the earth cleaner, and then it turns out we didn't need to do that. oops! we cleaned the earth. our children grow up with skies full of more butterflies and bees. lawns are taken over with rich local biodiversity. we don't cry over our electric bills anymore. and, if you're staunchly capitalist and i need to speak ROI with you - we've created so many jobs in developing sectors and we have exciting new investment opportunities.

i am reminded of kodak, and how they did not make "the switch" to digital photography; how within 20 years kodak was no longer a household brand. do we, as a nation, feel comfortable watching as the world makes "the switch" while we ride the laurels of oil? this boggles me. i have heard so much propaganda about how america cannot "fall behind" other countries, but in this crucial sector - the one that could actually influence our own monopolies - suddenly we turn the other cheek. but maybe you're right! maybe it will collapse like just another silicone valley dream. but isn't that the crux of capitalism? that some economies will peter out eventually?

but let's say you're right, and i'm wrong, and we stopped fracking for no good reason. that they re-seed quarries. that we tear down unused corporate-owned buildings or at least repurpose them for communities. that we make an effort, and that effort doesn't really help. what happens then? what are the stakes. what have we lost, and what have we gained?

sometimes we take our cars through a car wash and then later, it rains. "oh," we laugh to ourselves. we gripe about it over coffee with our coworkers. what a shame! but we are also aware: the car is cleaner. is that what you are worried about? that you'll make the effort but things will resolve naturally? that it will just be "a waste"?

and what i'm right. what if we're already seeing people lose their houses and their lives. what if it is happening everywhere, not just in coastal towns or equatorial countries you don't care about. what if i'm right and you're wrong but you're yelling and rich and powerful. so we ignore all of the bellwethers and all of the indicators and all of the sirens. what if we say - well, if it happens, it's fate.

nevermind. you wouldn't even wear a mask, anyway. i know what happens when you see disaster. you think the disaster will flinch if you just shout louder. that you can toss enough lives into the storm for the storm to recognize your sacrifice and balk. you argue because it feels good to stand up against "the liberals" even when the situation should not be political. you are busy crying for jesus with a bullhorn while i am trying to usher people into a shelter. you've already locked the doors, even on the church.

the stakes are skewed. you think this is some intellectual "debate" to win, some funny banter. you fuel up your huge unmuddied truck and say suck it to every citizen of that shitbird state california. serves them right for voting blue!

and the rest of us are terrified of the entire fucking environment collapsing.

[yrsonpurpose]

we won't know. but there will be signs. bonus ±

[screwpinecaprice]

Actually cute. Had to do a quick redraw.

Screenshot is from when Jay lit up the Jack-o'-lantern in the living room.

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

I'm sorry but the irony of Nico calling Max unprofessional is sending me so bad like sir there's an entire garage full of people, who were literally in the trenches trying to survive the Brocedes fallout while just doing their jobs, who might have a few things to say about your (& Lewis') level of professionalism at that time 😭✋️

[tea-tuesday]

07/01/2024

a month left and i'm not panicking (i am)...! sorry to juxtapose beautiful flowers with a cursed picture of memorizing crim at like 3 am lmao. hope everyone's having a lovely summer and good luck to those who are also studying over the summer ! summer study squad🌞📚, let's go!!! may we be blessed with good grades, passing scores, and a stress-free autumn🙏

[uldren-sov]

the reality (not the expectation) of what it's like sleeping with Seven Lawless. - Camy Rose ~dated five years ago~

Comm'd the amazing and talented @aevari tysm bestie!! Of yet another meme of my OC Camy and @infamous-if 's most divisive clingy sleeper Seven Lawless

Blank version under the cut!

[laeana]

In this weekend, Lando highlights again why more people have started to dislike him, and not only because it’s a popular thing.

See, there were still a lot of laps after the red flag, there has been other incidents after it as well, there were opportunities to catch up. But he didn’t. It didn’t have to do only with strategy, Lando drove badly today. If we compare it to Max’s drive, Lando did mistakes, went off track, got himself overtaken again and didn’t have the pace.

So after that, you can accept your loss in this weekend gracefully, or act like a brat about it. For example, discrediting the three drivers that climbed on the podium, including your rival in the championship, that never spoke against you despite your first win being gifted through a convenient safety car.

You can say there was luck with it, but in this race and especially in that situation, you create your own luck. Max, Pierre and Esteban bet on a red flag, and got it right. If the others wanted to benefit from it as well, they had to take the risk of counting on it.

Let’s also not forget that other than luck, Max started freaking P17. Esteban and Pierre weren’t P2 and P3 right away either. They had to overtake drivers, survive with their tyres, and keep a good pace without being caught up by other cars. If they truly had only luck, and no talent, the podium probably wouldn’t have been what it was today.

It’s normal to be frustrated after a race that didn’t go the way you hoped, but being a sore loser to the point of discrediting others, is what makes someone dislikable.

I used to be okay with Lando, but the more time pass, the more I found his declarations insensitive, immature and even rude. He’s supposed to be a driver advocating for mental health, but when it was about George and Lewis suffering from heat after a Grand Prix, he was dismissive of it and tried to bring the conversation back to himself.

That kind of behavior, with the constant lack of respect for other f1 drivers, is what made me lose respect in turn for Lando, and no longer wanting to support him. And I know I’m not the only one feeling that way toward him.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[swampthingking]

andrew’s definitely gotten in trouble with his pr manager for tweeting things along the lines of:

“no mania inducing medication will compare to the euphoria i will feel the day donald trump drops dead”

[spacedace]

Continuation/blurb/snippet from this writing prompt.

It took less than a week to get custody of the Fenton children.

Oswald expected that it wouldn’t take long with his connections, but even that turn around is faster than what he expected. He'd anticipated pulling strings, greasing palms, maybe making some threats, but before he can even think of getting things moving to do so the paperwork is signed and a social worker is calling him to sort out the travel arrangements for the kids.

It's all done local, the judge, CPS, the witnesses and lawyers, each and every one calling the town home. Each and every one pushing the case through at a speed that Oswald didn't think was possible even in the most crooked of situations. He smelled conspiracy, but not - surprisingly - a malicious one.

Amity wasn't the smallest place in the world, but it was small enough. And the Fentons were public figures, though not in the way that Jack and Maddie Fenton obviously thought they were. How long had the people of Amity been watching things go wrong for the kids? How long had they been trying - in their own, limited ability - to help? Long enough to get desperate, seemed to be the answer.

The only resistance Oswald can find as he reviewed all the information he could get ahold of, was from the Mayor - Jazz and Danny's godfather, somehow more crooked than even Gotham's elected officials as far as Oswald could tell - and the Dr's. Fenton themselves.

The Mayor was summarily denied any influence of the case by the judge on the grounds of the long standing and publicly recorded ugliness of Master's relationship with Danny - which was something else Oswald was going to have to figure out. Along with all the…ghost stuff.

Oswald wasn't sure what to make of the ghost stuff.

Honestly he was leaving it for his people to figure out and wrangle into a reasonable explanation to report to him later. It was…something, a big something, and not - as he'd originally suspected upon initial cursory research into the town - a tourist gimmick or an overly high meta population. A later problem, provided he had to co tend with it at all once the children were officially in his custody in Gotham.

The biggest issue had been the kid's parents. Or really, the biggest issue had been the shady government agency backing the kids' parents.

The Fentons were the Ghost Investigation Ward's pet mad scientists. Creating weapons and genocidal plans - against ghosts - and generally tormenting the towns' living inhabitants just as much as the undead ones. The GIW had been protecting Jack and Maddie from any repercussions of their recklessness, and were willing to butt in on an unexpected custody battle in order to keep their maniacal golden geese happily working away.

From what Oswald had heard, a representative of the GIW had shown up to convince the judge to dismiss the case, but the judge had been faster. By the time the men in all white appeared - garish and tacky in their ill fitted, bulky suits - it had been too late of course. The judge had apparently anticipated their impending appearance and had made their ruling and had everything filed tidily late the night before. Courts did not typically stay running til three in the morning, but apparently an exception had been made.

There were a great many things wrong with Amity Park - wrong in a lot of ways they were in Gotham, wrong in ways they weren't - but the people that called the place home seemed to have come to a decision on one thing: the Fenton children were not safe, and unknown or not they were trusting Oswald to get them out of there.

It was strange and a little overwhelming, for an entire population that did not know him to see him as some kind of hope. Some kind of hero.

There were many, many things wrong in Amity Park.

He tried to assure himself when everything was said and done and the kids were packed and on their way that it wasn't his problem. He was officially Jazz and Danny's guardian, in a city half a country away that even with his - nominally- cleaned up act he held a great deal of power over. He was nearly untouchable within Gotham's shadow, and no one from some half-mad town was going to be able to do anything to change that.

He made preparations though, just in case. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being stupid. The Bat could use something to chew on that wasn't one of Oswald's entirely legitimate business ventures anyway. An ethically suspect government agency that was likely to come sticking their noses in Gotham's business sooner than later would do just nicely for that, and might even earn him some kind of grace from Gotham's brooding knight without getting him in hot water with any of the city's criminal element.

All that was left at that point was actually meeting the kids in person.

His kids.

He ignored the strange, bittersweet ache that touched his heart at that. It was, after all, entirely a means of improving his reputation in the city. The kids mean an end. He'd take care of him the same he did all his people, but not any more than that.

It was just business.

If he reminded himself enough, it might even be true one day.

He suspected though, as he laid eyes on them for the first time - shadow eyed and leery, haunted in a way that ghosts couldn't manage and looking not much at all like Oswald outside the fear and the pain he did his best to forget from his own upbringing - that the point of not caring had been passed the minute he'd gotten that first call.

*

Apologies if Penguin is out of character, all I know about him is what I vaguely remember from TAS, what I’ve absorbed from fandom and what I tried to put together from a wiki lol.

I did this instead of sleeping last night because I couldn’t get the initial idea out of my head (which slightly defeats the purpose of making it a writing prompt so that I could just read everyone else’s wonderful thoughts and writings on the idea instead of getting side tracked from my other writing projects - again lol - but oh well).

I don’t know if I’ll write anymore, and as with everything else I post this is open for anyone who is interested to run with.

Tag time!

@phoenixdemonqueen @justgray15777 @gin2212 @blankliferain @meira-3919 @lexdamo @hallowsden @derpygirl64 @thewondersoflebanon @amercurio @vythika96 @my-perfect-storybook-love @apointlessbox

[vanhelsingapologist]

Publishing has always been a fucking nightmare, but now it’s a layer of hell. It’s not enough that writers be good at what they do. Writers have to maintain an active social media presence and cultivate a following. Be available.

They have to be conventionally attractive enough to look good enough to see on a screen, aesthetically pleasing, kind, funny, up-to-date on trends, socially aware but not so controversial that they turn off a brand from California from slapping their discount code on a video promoting a book.

They have to do all of this with no media training, with little help from the companies that are supposed to be doing this for them.

Of course, a lot of this isn't possible for say, the 40-something mother of two who teaches English at a school and writes on the side. She’s boxed out of an already complex industry that already has enough walls.

On some level, I think authors have always marketed themselves a little, but we’ve reached such a crazy point where we’re demanding the author become the influencer. Accessibility in publishing has narrowed from an inch to a sliver. And that inch was hard enough to get in as is.

[ari-continues-to-exist]

Pumpkin Rabbit and Witch Sheep wish you a Happy Halloween!!

(Click for better quality)

[slutforpringles]

Every single detail that emerges about this entire situation only continues to make Red Bull look worse and worse 😌😤. But I do really love that last line calling out Horner's complete bullshit story about him backing Daniel throughout the season 💅🏻

via: ‘Told me a year ago’: Red Bull promise proof Ricciardo never stood a chance

[starry-bi-sky]

more clone^2 memes because i think they're funny