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qqueenofhades · 3 years ago

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Hi! Since I saw you use the word "Putler" I'd like to ask for your point of view on the Hitler-Putin-comparisons that are being drawn.

Because - to me, so far - there just seems to be a tendency in Europe+North America to compare every big bad to Hitler and the Nazis. Sometimes it's more fitting than others. And I get that there is a certain similarity (attacking first and claiming it was only because the other side started/threatened for example, wanting "back" territory that's part of another country) and a sort of connection linking the two (Putin wanting to "denazify a country and its government lead by a Jewish president).

But personally it does make me feel a bit uncomfortable. Maybe because Nazis have been used so often as the Big Bad TM in movies etc as evil minions for the heroes to fight without really looking at the horror they caused and represented, that I'm not sure if people are drawing real comparisons or just go "bad guy in Europe? Hitler". I don't really know why I'm feeling so uncomfortable about this and I can put it into words even less, but I hope that you can at least partly understand where I'm coming from.

Anyways, I'd really love to hear your view on this

Okay. There are a few things to discuss here.

First, I obviously wrote that post in a sarcastic, off-the-cuff, snarky tone because as political satirists have known all the way since Ancient Greece, laughter is death to fear. That's why autocrats really, really, notoriously hate being laughed at, and why humor that targets people in (often cruel) power is funny, while humor that targets people who have already been oppressed and degraded isn't. (Think of the protestations of all the idiot white male comedians that they're being "cancelled," when what they're really doing is just being a dick to people who have had enough dickitude done to them for all of history.) If you can laugh at something or see it as ridiculous and worthy of mockery, you automatically become less afraid of it, and dictators rely on everyone being too afraid to challenge them. So if you mock Putin or point out the sheer idiocy of his plans (such as the bring-Yanukovych-back plan, which is indeed very, very stupid), you accordingly become less afraid of him. It's not that you're not taking it seriously, or lessening the real horror that people are going through, but Putin is doing this in large part because he wants to be respected and feared. When you do neither, you're destroying his mystique. Gallows humor has been a weapon in wartime since, again, the beginning of human history. In short, you're pulling the boogeyman out from under the bed and telling him to get lost, nobody is scared.

Second, there are other reasons to keep calling him that. As I have discussed before, almost the entire post-WWII Soviet/Russian national identity is built on its battle against Nazi Germany, the heroism of its collective sacrifice, and the part that it played in toppling Hitler. That's a large part of the reason Putin thought he could just invoke the "de-nazification" buzzword for his current Ukraine depraved adventurism and automatically have the Russian people support it. So if you're calling him "Putler," you're not only rejecting that propaganda argument (a guy who bombed Babi Yar, site of the 1941 massacre of 33,000 Jews that was so horrific even to the Nazis that they decided to use gas chambers instead, really, really has no leg to stand on anyway), but you're turning the one thing all of Russia is automatically preconditioned to hate back on Putin himself. If you're tying Putin's current actions to Hitler, you're opening the door for the Russians themselves to be like "yeah, that's not a good thing." By showing that Putin has taken the place of post-WWII Russia's collective and unquestioned villain, you're also tying that anchor around his neck in the court of domestic Russian public opinion, and that matters.

Third, if it walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, hangs out with Nazis, and commits war crimes like a Nazi, it's probably a Nazi. All the people (still) voicing support for Putin in the west, such as the odious far-right Republican party members (though frankly, all of them are far-right by now), are longtime and open proponents of white supremacist/fascist rhetoric and neo-Nazi groups. The national embarrassment from Georgia, Marjorie QAnon Greene, just spoke at a white supremacist conference where the organizers led cheers for Putin. He has been held up as the defender of "white Christian traditional values," which is almost always a dogwhistle for latent or overt Nazi sympathies and white supremacist groups, and received admiration from many of those same people. If the only people supporting Putin in this conflict are those who pal around and court the support of Nazis, it's pretty fair to say that their ideological platforms are largely aligned. In fact, even Tucker Carlson, the rabidly pro-Russia mouthpiece on Fox News, has been trying to walk back some of his Putin worship due to it, apparently, running the risk of reminding people that the modern GOP are fascist zealots. Whoops.

Fourth, the similarities do go beyond merely "crass land grab in Europe against a sovereign nation and/or prominent Jewish people." Both Hitler and Putin legitimized themselves with a twisted appeal to their country's imagined and/or actual imperial history; Hitler with the medieval German Holy Roman Empire, Putin with the USSR and Russian Empire. Both of these messages overtly demonized and stigmatized anyone who was perceived as fitting outside this ethnic/national/religious ideal, and cultivated a sense of grievance and victimhood among the German/Russian people. They were the ones who had really been hurt; their suffering was worse, and so they were justified in carving out "lebensraum" for their master race. Hitler courted the support of the institutional church, and Putin has done the same with the Russian Orthodox church.

Hitler obviously said the quiet part aloud, but Putin has been busy cultivating this same sense of racial and linguistic grievance. Ever since Yanukovych's overthrow and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin has been going on and on about how the new Ukrainian government was supposedly unjustly persecuting Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine and separatist Donetsk/Luhansk, how Russia is under threat from Ukraine (somehow, apparently), and even used the wording of "the Ukrainian question" in the editorial that was scheduled to be published after the Russian forces had completed their 48-hour triumphant victory. (You may have noticed that that, uh, did not happen.) That explicitly echoes the wording of the "Jewish question" that preoccupied Hitler and the Nazi party, and in both cases, the "final solution" evidently amounted to outright ethnic and cultural genocide. Or at least, we have troubling indications that that's what Putin personally believes (witness his unhinged rant about Ukraine having no right to exist as a state or separate entity), regardless of how successfully his forces are ultimately able to put it into action. (Likewise, Zelenskyy, aside from being Jewish, speaks Russian as his first language, making it even more incredible that the Kremlin is painting him as the head of a nefarious anti-Russian movement, but facts never get in the way of a good war.)

Putin might not have embarked on the same systemic, nationwide extermination program as Hitler, but he's long since been known for killing his political enemies and ruthlessly quashing all dissent, building a hollowed-out yes-man, cult-of-personality political apparatus that is answerable only to him. He's also recently gone full totalitarian in regard to trying to stop protests at home. Mothers with young kids who went to lay flowers at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow were brutally arrested and taken to police stations; there are reports of people getting visited in the middle of the night and threatened to support the government or else, protesters are being forced to recant or lose their jobs, the penalty for even calling the war a war has been increased to 15 years in jail and a sentence of treason, and so forth. While this echoes the worst tactics of the 1930s Soviet Purge and the standard approach of the USSR-era KGB where Putin was trained, it also recalls Hitler's domestic reign of terror via the Gestapo and the SS, where "thoughtcrime," as George Orwell would call it, was considered to be just as much a threat. Russia's attacks in Chechnya, Syria, and the Crimea have also carried a racialized element of threat, and we've all seen how racism is on ugly display in this conflict. People of color get beaten up while trying to flee Ukraine and western newsreaders overtly describe Ukrainians as "looking like us" with "blue eyes and blonde hair" and "coming from civilized places." Not to mention their insistence on calling it "medieval." Okay then.

Likewise, the Nazis killed gay men, Russia infamously introduced its anti-gay law in 2013 (since fascism, white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia go hand in hand), and both political movements grew out of national instability, post-war economic wreckage, and populist fear. After the disaster of WWI, Germany was reorganized as the Weimar Republic, but the Nazis came to power only ten years later amidst a widespread economic meltdown and promised safety and stability. After the disaster of the Cold War, Russia was reorganized as a "democracy" under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin then came to power about ten years later amidst a widespread economic meltdown and promised safety and stability. Hitler was chancellor for 6 years before he started WWII; Putin has been more patient at playing the long game, focused more on generating enormous wealth for himself and his inner circle rather than going straight to the persecution part. Hitler was admired in America (the Nazis' policy of extermination of "inferior" people was directly inspired by the American eugenics movement) and propped up by Americans such as Charles Lindbergh who thought he was a great guy. Putin is admired in America, etc etc, Donald Trump and the entire Republican party, etc. Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Etc.

Anyway, I could doubtless say more, but I think you get the point. There are good reasons to stick Putin with that label, whether it be mocking him, pointing it out to the Russian people themselves, making the west actually think twice about how goddamn eager it has been to embrace right-wing Nazi analogues and copycat populist parties, or driving home the historical comparison and the danger that the world faces of sleepwalking right back into its previous mistakes. Or at least, so we can dearly hope it doesn't.

#travellingdragon #ask #history #modern history #russian history #russia ukraine war

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elfbingo · 3 years ago

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Hiya, how’ve you been? So quick question, I’ve seen you juggle your art and making Cause and Effect with your job in real life and still somehow seem to do it flawlessly. I haven’t been drawing that much lately because of the exact reason that I have to juggle my pleasures and reality(aka my pain). So anyways, how do you juggle it all, like your time management, how?

I think "flawlessly" is a vast overstatement, but thanks for the vote of confidence! (Part 4 is taking forever because I've been pulling extra shifts since October, and also carpal-tunnel syndrome hit me pretty hard). It's difficult to balance obligations and fun. Honestly, time-management is really hard, and I'm not the best at it. (Sleep? What is sleep?) I'll do my best to answer your questions (without rambling) after the break.

The only advice I have, really, is what I've had to learn myself the hard way, and I keep having to re-learn it, because human brain = dumb. My advice is two-fold: drop things you don't need that don't bring you happiness; and set aside one day a week for rest.

Advice the first: Cutting out extraneous stuff can be hard, because you don't always realize what you're doing with your time and why. For instance, while it's necessary to keep up with certain things online, we also spend a lot of our free time on our devices doing nothing of value. Sometimes it's nice to wander the net mindlessly, but it's really addictive, too. I've gotten trapped in meme-wormholes several times and looked up to find that hours have gone by. Whenever I start to get sucked in I have to pull back and ask myself, "Would I rather spend my time doing this, or (insert thing I love here)?" That's just an example, but there are lots of things that eat up our time that we probably don't need.

As far as balancing work and non-work, it's trickier because it's not just you making choices about how to spend your time. Depending on your job, and where you do it, separating "work" and "non-work" can be difficult. If the job has certain set hours, try your best not to take work home. If you have to do so, set a time-limit for yourself- like, an hour- and when the time is up, STOP. Same thing with chores; do the ones that are necessary for that day, then STOP.

The hardest thing of all, I think, is allowing yourself the time to do non-work, non-chore things. I do some of my jobs from home, so I tend to feel super-guilty when I'm not working because I'm still in the same place, so there's no barrier between one world and another. I have to consciously allow myself to stop working. Depending on what I have to do I set a time-limit of 8 hours, and then NO MORE WORK. Sometimes I have to leave my computer and go into another room, but whatever works.

My second main point of advice is to take a day out of your week for physical/mental rest. My reasons are at least partly religious (Sunday is the Sabbath), but it's good sense in general. Mind and body need to recuperate. No matter what I have to do that week working on Sunday is absolutely out. I spend a lot of time with my family on Sundays, but I also take time for myself just to relax, listen to music, catch up on naps, etc. I even plan my shopping so I don't need to do it on Sunday. Just one less thing to worry about.

Side note: Sometimes that day of is for more specific physical rest. I used to do a lot of my personal projects on Sundays. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to for several months because I'm slowly getting over carpal-tunnel syndrome. For now, Sundays now mean doing as little with my hands as possible. In a few months (hopefully) I'll be able to pick up my old projects again.

Anyway, whatever your external reasons for it- religious or not- set aside one day each week and- barring emergencies and necessary daily chores- don't let anyone mess with it. Have that day to look forward to as a set thing, wherein you do things that you enjoy. Draw, take walks, visit family, watch movies; again, allow yourself the time. You'll find your mental and physical health improve, and you'll have many more drawings to post!

I hope this helps?

#self-care #day of rest

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mapbotofficial · 3 years ago

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Hey so, it's come to my attention that the map jokes are partly why you stopped updating this blog and stuff and I don't remember that far back so I don't know if anyone else was doing it but I do remember making the map jokes. If those jokes upset you or disheartened you from sharing the story you had going then I'm sorry about that. I genuinely thought we were all having a bit of fun with it but if not, that's fine. I now know it was a problem so I won't do it anymore.

Good luck again with your character designs and I'll be around for the reboot you've got instore!

~Mouse

actually the map jokes werent the issue dw your fine! tbh i thought it was funny

i havent really shared the proper reasons as for why i stopped but i figured this would be a good time for it?

its mostly that not a lot of people seemed to be interested in the story i was making, even the joke posts about it, similar to what mod riddle said about people not interacting with posts

but its MAINLY the part that i love to draw images for the blog! and having burnout in art as well as. ok so i draw with a mouse and having a hand injury from a few years ago causing pain easily makes that VERY difficult to do proper drawings frequently, hence why im redoing the designs on paper rn!

the main reason i havent responded to any of the map asks currently in the inbox is becuase there is 60 lmao

#i love seeing your asks in the ask box i can respect a silly joke . points at me spamming wizard gifs in discord to friends #or the naven posting. or litterally any other completely stupid bit ive done

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moons-and-stars-and-shit · 4 years ago

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Hii! May i ask for a slice of cake? (If you can ofc)

So im a INFP-T virgo im also 4"11 i have dark brown hair it because wayy lighter near the sun. Also dark brown eyes my hair is cut kinda like a shag like the front is cut but the back isn't (bc of my parents) my style is grunge ig? Im very inlove with fairy style Smm but because im broke i cant really fulfil my love for that style (also probably because of my parents). My body is???? Okay my boobies are medium size and no unfortunately I don't have a fat ass 😕 im not chubby but at the same time im not skinny. Like the most fat goes to my tummy I get rolls when I sit down bath blah you get my point (im pretty insecure about it lolol). One of my two main dreams is to study abroad and become an interior decorator.

I dont know how to describe my personality but I will try. My best friend always tells me that my sense of humour is downhill BAD. I would laugh at the dumbest shit ever for example i laughed one of those pixilated bugs pics with random names on the bottom 💀 also I laugh at my own trauma and stuff that shouldn't be laughed at. I kinda have anger issues 😕 I get unmotivated pretty easily. I rant to my best friend alot and she says that im ✨depressed✨ and have ✨anxiety✨ and that i need therapy. Im scared to rant to my parents because im "too young and its just my hormones". Something that I found out about myself this year is i have chill tics 😦 (from anxiety). Outside im nice and sweet but on the inside my mind is just saying other things. Im SOMETIMES cold and say what's on my mind but thats to my close ones like my mom dad or friends. I dont lie going Outside alot I think school is kinda useless. I like to draw and listen to music my fav artist are mother mother and mitski.

I hope i didn't say TOO much anyway thank youu I hope you have/had a great day :)

🍰 for @shotosimp2

Romantic Matchup

Oikawa Tooru

How yall met

Ok im ngl

Y'all had know clue who each other were

Well that's a lie

Of course you knew who Oikawa was

But you just didn't care

Now Oikawa always saw you around school

You know...in the school uniform

But one day

He saw you outside of school in all of your grunge glory

And apart of him was like bitch wtf

And the other was like ok queen i see you 😗

So he approached you and complimented your outfit

And you said thanks and then ran off to wherever you were heading

Wait

You just said thanks???

No fan girling????

Not even a blush??????

Nothing????????????

OIKAWA.EXE HAS STOPPED WORKING

Ok he would understand that reaction if you were just a stranger on the street

But you went to school with him?

So you had to know who he was right?

Yeah my mans had a whole ass crisis because you didn't have a bigger reaction

The next day he went to Iwa and told him about his interaction with you

And he was just like not everyone was to like you ya know

Oikawa: >:o

Then Iwa had a brilliant idea

Get this

Maybe

Oikawa should BEFRIEND you before expecting you to want to talk to him

Wild theory I know

So now Oikawa had a new goal

Befriending you

It actually wasn't that hard since you both had a lot of classes together

Soon enough you guys became close friends

And oikawa was happy with just being your friend

At least...he thought he was

But everything changed when you told him you were going to study abroad for 3 months

And even though you had each others numbers

Everything without you just seemed so dull

Omg

Did he really have feelings for you?

The more time that passed by the more he was sure that he liked you

Like LIKED liked you

So the day you came back to Japan is when he confessed to you

And well you'd be lying if you said you hadn't caught feelings for him too

So you said yes

What they love about you

He loves how normal you treat him

Now hell admit when he first met you he kinda wanted you to treat him like a celebrity

Expected it even

But the more time he spent around you

The more he realized how much he liked being treated normally

Ok screw what your friend says

He loves your humor!

Yall will laugh at the dumbest shit

If we were to look at you and Oikawa's messages

85% of it would be dumb ass memes

And honestly

This boy makes jokes about his trauma too

“Hey Y/N you wanna hear a joke?”

“Sure”

“My existence”

“...”

“Ayyyyy”

He loves how easy it is to talk to you

Like he's told you things he hasn't even told Iwa before

And Iwa is his CHILDHOOD BESTIE

So yeah

Trust between you two

ASTRONOMICAL

What you love about them

You love how supportive he is

If you say you wanna do something

He is right behind you cheering you on

You could tell him you want to commit arson

And he'd just be like

Period queen ill bring the gasoline 💅

You can always count on this man to be in your corner

Speaking of

You can always count on oikawa period

Which is another thing that you love about him

If oikawa is anything

He is a man of his word

If he says hes gonna do something

You know he's gonna do it

He's just overall a really reliable person

You love how he just seems to motivate you to do better

Fr after you guys started dating your grades went

Partly because you felt like you needed to compete with him

But mostly because he just motivates and pushes you to do better

And if you do improve on something

He is HYPING you up

“That's my baby! I knew you could do it!”

Favorite things to do together

Yall love to just go to the store and window shop

Im sorry but yall are some broke hoes

So most of the time it's just you guys trying on clothes in the dressing room

Taking pictures of your outfits

Then leaving

Yeah the store employees kinda hate you…

But who cares what they think

And if you two do have some pocket cash you'll buy one or two things

Then blow the rest of your money on that good mall food

Cause why not

Random Hc

He makes fun of your guys height difference ALL THE TIME

But like, can you blame him????

You're not even 5 feet tall!!!

“Imagine being the size of a 10 year old, couldn't be me”

Imagine being taller than the national average height 😐, couldn't be me”

“Touche”

He let you dress him up as an E-Boy ONCE

Ngl tho he dug the eyeliner look 😗

He called you every day while you were studying abroad

He even sent you a oikawa plushie

You may or may not have sent him a video of you drowning it

When you came back to Japan he legit TACKLED you in the middle of the airport

Astrology

Virgo + Cancer

Compatibility 80%

Cancer and Virgo can have a wonderful connection and are usually brought together by sexual understanding.

The main problem of their relationship is in the possible conflict between emotional Cancer and reasonable Virgo.

If they manage to overcome this, accepting each other’s shortcomings and learning to incorporate some rationality or some emotion into their lives, they could end up in an inspiring relationship that will last for a very long time.

In a way, they complement each other as much as the heart complements the mind.

If they share a spark of love, it would be a shame to miss the opportunity for happiness just because of someone’s irrational expectations or someone’s closed heart.

If someone can help Virgo build their trust, it is their Cancer partner.

Although Cancer is a cardinal sign, they are stable by nature, especially when it comes to emotional decisions they have made.

If they have chosen Virgo to be their loving partner, they will have no reason to lie or cheat.

This behavior would only endanger their vision of a shared life and a loving family they want with the partner they chose.

This is also a reason why Cancer won’t have an initial problem with trusting Virgo.

Their convictions are stronger than their doubt.

Overall Aesthetic

Grunge Glamour ✨

Songs -

Tia tamera (Doja Cat)

Verbratem (mother mother

Literal Legend (Ayesha Erotica)

Hayloft (mother mother)

Stupid (ashnikko)

#haikyuu!!#haikyu x reader #haikyuu fandom #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu hcs #haikyuu matchups #oikawa hcs #oikawa toru x reader #oikawa x y/n #oikawa headcanons #oikawa tooru

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn't Black

Blogger’s Note: This particular article is kind of funny in retrospect, now that drawing black!Harry and black!Hermione has become so common in the fandom.

Last year (or maybe the year before, time flies doesn't it), the Sci Fi channel produced an adaptation of Ursula le Guin's Earthsea stories. It caused something of a furore, because most of the main characters were white. I mention this for two reasons.

The first reason is that the TV company, with typical mealy-mouthed style, insisted that they had practiced "colourblind" casting and in a stunning manipulation of middle class guilt, immediately implied that it was somehow racist to expect them to cast a Native American in the role, just because that was the real world ethnicity which most closely approximated that of the people of Earthsea. Obviously the white guy just happened to be the best guy for the role, obviously he stood out by a mile over the other contenders. The second reason I mention it, though, was because when I read the books (many years ago now) I had completely failed to notice that Ged wasn't white. With the white middle class man's ingrained fear of being labelled a racist, I immediately constructed for myself very much the kind of justifications that the Sci-Fi channel had. "Oh well it's all about the character isn't it, Ged's character is the same whether he's black, white or whatever". The thing is: it's natural for people to assume that a fictional character of unspecified race is the same race as them. Similarly I have a strong memory of seeing a picture in my year nine RE class of a depiction of Jesus from a church in China. Their version of Jesus, of course, looked Chinese, which broke a few of our tiny fourteen year old brains. Jesus is Chinese in China, black in Africa, Caucasian in England. He might even be Jewish somewhere, but that seems rather unlikely. But there's another thing. I, yes, will generally assume that a non-racially-specific person is white. And I'm pretty sure that a Chinese person reading a book written in Chinese by a Chinese author will assume that a non-racially-specific person (who will probably have a vaguely Chinese sounding name and live in a fictional setting that looks pretty much like medieval China) would be ethnically Chinese. My girlfriend pointed out over lunch that, when she reads Haruki Murakami, she imagines all the characters as white, even though they're presumably mostly Japanese. It gets more complicated when you put minorities into the mix. Put simply, I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that a black person living in England has the same luxury that I - and Chinese people in China, and Indians in India - enjoy. I, and I would imagine a great many other people who read the Earthsea books at a similar age to me, assumed Ged was the same race as me. I sincerely doubt that there are any black fantasy readers who made the same assumption about Aragorn when they read Lord of the Rings. Currently, then, I'm in one of those horrible situations where I think there's a point to be made, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. It's one of those "individual instance versus general trend" problems. I don't think you can look at any single work of fiction and say "that character, right there, should have been black". It's all very well saying that non-whites are underrepresented in Fantasy, but that's partly just because ninety percent of fantasy is set in a world that's functionally identical to medieval Europe. Most fantasy worlds do have black people in them, it's just that because they come from the Hot Continent In The South. Indeed most fantasy worlds seem to assume the existence of exactly four races: White Anglo Saxon, Black African, Asian (the Asian culture will invariably be a vast Empire in the East, and usually look like Han Dynasty China, plus Samurai, plus ninjas) and Arab (the Arabic culture will be either very religious or very mercantile, or both). In fact, the races that are the most underrepresented in Fantasy are - arguably - the non-Anglo-Saxon "white" races. A remarkable number of Fantasy settings include quasi-Venetian city-states, quasi-Roman empires and quasi-Spartan warrior cultures, who none the less manage to look remarkably like they were born in Colchester, nary a Mediterranean complexion in sight. I can just about accept a quasi-European world with no black people in it (Fantasy worlds don't haveimmigration after all). It's rather harder to accept a fantasy analogue of Florence in which nobody looks Florentine. (This weird omission applies almost universally in fact: when was the last time you saw a Roman Emperor actually being played by a Roman? Why when it is unthinkable for a white man to play Othello does nobody bother to find a Venetian-looking Desdemona). Of course I might be making a fuss about nothing. As I say, it's easy for me to assume that everybody I read about is white (even when there's textual evidence to the contrary). I don't really have any evidence that Locke Lamora isn't Latino, or that the men of Westeros aren't Hispanic (the Dornishmen are, of course, Generically Arabic but like most fantasy worlds, Westeros seems to have an invisible line across the equator, with the people going from "white as milk" on one side to "coffee-coloured" on the other with no in-between). So maybe it isn't a problem with the genre, maybe it's a problem with me. There is, after all, nothing stopping me from imagining Robert Baratheon as looking like a Greek Cypriot, or Ron Weasley as being a black kid who just happens to have red hair. If I assume that a character of unspecified race is Caucasian, that's my look out. The problem is, though, that if I am making the assumption that J Random Character is white, just because I am white, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the white middle class writers of fantasy are making the same assumptions. And I think this is an issue. When JK Rowling was designing her boy wizard (and I really don't mean to single her out here, it's just a good, well known example) I'm sure it didn't even occur to her that Harry Potter could be a black kid, any more than it occurred to me that he would be. When she was designing Ron Weasley, she imagined a character that would be her ideal image of an honest, supportive friend, and what she wound up imagining was a boy with red hair and freckles. And it's that more than anything else that causes the trouble. The problem with "race" in fiction in general and fantasy in particular, is that it has two very distinct implications. The first implication is the social and political one " "black" and "white" carry tremendous social connotations in the real world, and that bleeds over into created worlds as well. The second implication of a character's race, though, is much more prosaic. A person's race affects what they look like. Well, duh. But actually, it's the cosmetic implications of race that wind up being the most important. It is considered absolutely and unambiguously wrong in the modern world to judge somebody by their race. It is considered totally okay to judge somebody by their looks, particularly in a work of fiction, where somebody's physical appearance is often expected to tell you something about their personality. Ron Weasley has red hair and freckles: the average reader knows instantly what that is supposed to imply about him. He's boyish, a little impetuous, but basically a good person. He has "hero's sidekick" written all over him. The problem is, having "red hair and freckles" effectively precludes Ron Weasley from being black, because very few black people have red hair (although it isn't unheard of) and black skin tends to freckle far less visibly than white skin. Again, just to be clear, I'm not saying that JK Rowling is "a racist" but I am saying that when JK Rowling formed in her mind the image of a true and decent friend, she deliberately gave that person particular physical characteristics which she felt created the appropriate image, and those traits are traits you are very, very unlikely to find in a black person. Try to write a description of a beautiful woman, and the odds are better than even that you'll make her tall and slender with long, golden hair. Chances are, you'll make her tall and slender with long golden hair even if you're more into brunettes. "Tall and slender with long golden hair" is our cultural shorthand for beauty - it's what Cinderella looks like, it's what Rapunzel looks like, it's what Laura Fairlie looks like, Sweeney Todd's dead wife and lost daughter are both "beautiful and pale, with yellow hair". Snow White's a brunette, but she's still got skin as white as snow. No writer would dream of suggesting that a black person couldn't be beautiful, but our "generic" idea of beauty is pale and blonde, just like our "generic" idea of boyish charm is a freckly redhead and our "generic" idea of a wise man is a white guy with a long beard and a pointed nose (I'll talk about noses more in a bit). The "race affects how you look" issue is also another strike, I think, against the idea that I only assume that everybody in Fantasy is white because I'm a white man myself. When people talk about "race" they tend to just think in terms of skin colour, but of course it actually affects a whole lot more than that. I can't think of a single point in the Potter books where it explicitly says that Dumbledore or Harry are white (so you could argue that it's just my preconceptions coming into play), but race isn't just about skin colour. Harry Potter is famous for his messy, floppy hair (again, it's a characteristic that makes him seem more like "a regular kid" - or at least a regular white kid). Dumbledore, of course, has his long, pointy nose. Even if their skin colour isn't mentioned explicitly, neither of these physical characteristics are terribly likely to be possessed by a black man. There are exceptions, of course, but in general black people don't have "floppy" hair or pointed noses. All in all I feel confident that, when I assume a character in a fantasy novel is white, the author is making the exact same assumption. I've just spent about 1700 words slating Fantasy writers for not including enough black people in their books (and certainly not including enough Latino or Greek people despite a great many settings looking a whole hell of a lot like Spain, Greece or Italy), but I'd like to spend a moment backpedalling. The thing is that what I said at the start, about it being natural to assume that a person of non-specific race looks pretty much like you still holds. If I was a Fantasy writer I am damned sure that I'd make my protagonists white, just because it wouldn't occur to me to do otherwise. If I had to write about a beautiful woman, you can bet your arse I'd make her tall and slender with long golden hair, because that's how I instinctively think of a "beautiful woman" looking (even though I do, in fact, far prefer dark women in real life). The other problem with race in Fantasy is that, because it's not our world, you can't use nationality as a short hand. It's actually remarkably hard to describe many non-white races without resorting to (a) cliche or (b) rather dubious ethnic stereotypes. You can get away with it fairly easily in something set in the real world, because you can just say somebody is "Chinese" or "Azerbaijani" and either people will know what you mean, or they can look it up on the internet. In a fantasy world you don't have that luxury. This is probably why there are only four races in most fantasy worlds. Anybody whose race isn't described is white. Anybody who has dark skin is Generically Arabic, anybody who has very dark or black skin is black, and anybody who has a long moustache or does Kung Fu is Asian. Some fantasy worlds similarly include a quasi-Mongolian culture, who we know to look Mongolian because they have a close relationship with their horses. You might, if you're very lucky get "olive skinned" people (who are presumably therefore green) tending Big Fields of Ancient Wheat, but that's about your lot. Again however, I wonder how much more Fantasy writers can realistically be expected to do. The simple fact is that the real world is unimaginably complicated. A fantasy series is praised for its worldbuilding if it contains more than six moderately well realised nations. The CIA World Factbook lists the real world as containing over two hundred and sixty. Similarly, while fantasy worlds may grossly oversimplify the concept of ethnicity, it would be impossible to do otherwise - just looking at the CIA world factbook again, we see (for example) seven distinct ethnicities depicted as existing within Albania alone (Albanian, Greek, Vlach, Roma, Serb, Macedonian, Bulgarian) while the entry for China lists eleven (Han Chinese, Zhuang, Uygar, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean). The complexities of real-world ethnic diversity are beyond even the most talented of fantasy authors, never mind your average Quest-and-McGuffin merchant. In the end, then, the thing I find most upsetting about the appallingly whitewashed nature of most fantasy settings is that I can absolutely understand why they're like that. Even though I'm a thoroughly modern, thoroughly liberal man, even though I work in an international school am therefore able to feel smug and cosmopolitan because I know what people from Kazakhstan look like and have a reasonable chance of identifying an Azerbaijani accent I still, deep down, instinctively assume that "person" means "white person", and I can't ultimately condemn JK Rowling for giving her white protagonist a white best friend and a white mentor, and having them marry a couple of nice white girls and have nice white kids who they named after their dead white relatives. I know I'd do exactly the same. The sad fact is that most white people don't think about race that much, because we simply don't have to. While this is arguably better than being actively racist it's still kind of a sorry state of affairs, and it's unbelievably pathetic that after all these years, Ursula le Guin is still pretty much the only person in the industry who seems to give a shit.

Themes: J.K. Rowling, Books, Minority Warrior

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Comments (go to latest)

Arthur B at 00:49 on 2008-03-15

The amazing thing about the racial mix in Earthsea is how many people completely miss it, despite le Guin's valiant efforts in throwing out evidence pointing towards it. The only other author I can think of who's played with people's cultural stereotypes in this way is (big surprise coming here) Gene Wolfe; in The Book of the New Sun you need to pay attention to notice that Severian lives somewhere near where Buenos Aires is in our own time, that the Commonwealth it is a part of is South America, and that the Maoist-flavoured despotism threatening the Commonwealth exists in North America; the average fantasy reader (in the Anglo-American world, at least) is going to tend to assume that Our Hero lives in the northern hemisphere and that slogan-spouting Maoists are Chinese.

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Guy at 04:34 on 2008-03-15

I remember it coming as quite a shock to me when I read Wizard of Earthsea to discover that Ged was dark-skinned. I'd already formed a picture of him in my mind and it was disconcerting to be told that this picture was wrong. It did make me think about race in fantasy worlds, though... later I read an essay by le Guin in which she said she did this deliberately... the idea being to try to secure the reader's identification with the protagonist before letting them in on what that protagonist looked like. I think maybe the reason fantasy worlds tend to be so ethnically homogeneous is that they're mostly seen as (and used as, probably) an escapist outlet and we don't like difficult social questions in our escapist fluff. I imagine a similar racial mix can be found in Mills and Boon novels, for example? I think le Guin is one of those fantasy (and sci-fi) writers who is intent on doing more than providing formulaic escapism and showing what the genre is capable of extending to... it's a shame there aren't more like her. I think escapism is great, but I'd hate to think that was all the fantasy genre had to offer.

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Dan H at 10:08 on 2008-03-15

As I say, I can actually forgive fantasy for not handling race well, because it's actually very hard to do well, and I can certainly forgive purveyors of light, escapist fantasy for not dealing with complex real-world social issues. On the other hand it kind of does bug me that - say - JK Rowling has an all-white cast saving their 99% white world from all-white villains and then gets praised for (a) her sensitive handling of the issue of racism and (b) her amazing courage in having two black characters who never do or say anything, and a character who is revealed to be gay in an interview (and was therefore Never Able To Find True Love Or Happiness Because of His Unnatural Predelictions). Look! It took me all of three posts to turn this into JKR-bashing! The ethnic makeup of Westeros also seriously confuses me. Why do the blonde people live two miles north of the black people? Why?!

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Guy at 12:01 on 2008-03-15

Very crisp edges on the ozone layer?

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Sister Magpie at 16:45 on 2008-03-15

I've always felt a little lucky that I didn't read Earthsea until after the TV movie came out. I didn't see the TV movie, but I read the complaints about this, so I went into the book knowing what Ged looked like in the book. If I hadn't it's quite possible I would have overlooked it the same way. Which means the best I can say is that I'm willing to make the effort to keep non-white characters non-white--which isn't much!

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Arthur B at 16:55 on 2008-03-15

More likely the mighty efforts of the stalwart warriors manning the Kingdom's defences against the marauding hordes of dark people. :( Actually, let me nominate David Gemmell as someone who can, when the mood takes him, handle racial issues fairly well, or at least not appallingly badly. Even in Legend, his most black-and-white clash-of-cultures novel, he takes pains to make sure that both the Drenai and the Nadir civilisations have a mix of admirable and disreputable qualities, and there is genuine cultural mixing at the borders between nations; he even hints in The King Beyond the Gate that the Last Great Hope for Peace is not, in fact, the decadent, played-out, and European Drenai, but the vibrant, young and vaguely Mongolian Nadir. Then again, you do have Pagan as the Token Awesome Black Dude in The King Beyond the Gate, but I half-suspect that Gemmell introduced him simply because his publishers pressured him to and he was fed up of having his manuscripts rejected; he manages to make the dude reasonably three-dimensional and interesting later on. More importantly, he manages to make the dude three-dimensional and interesting in a manner which doesn't hinge simply on him coming from a vaguely African culture, but engages with him as a human being with very human flaws that, like all of Gemmell's heroes, he strives to overcome. At the end of the day, I suppose that giving characters from diverse races and cultures a similar treatment without stripping them of any distinctive cultural identity is the best that fantasy authors can hope for. (Which ties in, of course, with Dan's concerns about JKR. Sure, she throws in a few black and Asian kids in Hogwarts, but they pretty much never get a chance to do any of the cool stuff that the white kids do.)

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Arthur B at 16:56 on 2008-03-15

whups, Magpie and I cross-posted "More likely the mighty efforts of the stalwart warriors manning the Kingdom's defences against the marauding hordes of dark people. :(" was a response to Guy's comment about the ozone layer.

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Rami at 20:08 on 2008-03-15

It is really quite annoying how not that many fantasy series ever have an equivalent to South Asia ;-) but then, I'm a little biased...

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Guy at 07:37 on 2008-03-16

Incidentally, I saw a bit of the TV series of Earthsea... and I think with a certain amount of harrumphing I could have accepted the racial changes, if it weren't for the fact that it was a badly written, badly acted, utterly generic "McMagic" blancmange with no real reason to have the Earthsea name attached to it.

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Arthur B at 09:26 on 2008-03-16

Incidentally, does anyone know whether the Studio Ghibli version of Earthsea is any good? I know that le Guin was disappointed that Miyazaki gave the directing job to his son rather than doing it himself, but I also seem to remember that she isn't nearly as upset with it as she was with the SciFi channel version. Of course, anime has its own problems with dealing with racial issues; in most of Ghibli's films all the human beings seem to be of exactly the same race, whereas when other anime studios try to do non-European, non-Japanese characters it doesn't always work well.

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Jen Spencer at 09:48 on 2008-03-17

This is reminding me of Jazz in the Transformers movie. That hurt my brain.

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Rami at 11:56 on 2008-03-17

Jazz in the Transformers movie Oh, God, he really was just gratuitously ethnic, wasn't he? Just like in Not Another Teen Movie, which despite being a bit crap did hit the nail on the head with their Token Black Guy.

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Andy G at 19:54 on 2008-03-18

Interesting sci-fi / fantasy comparison here - are there any fantasy settings with heterogenous societies? I can only think of Ankh Morpork in the later Discworld stories, where he is deliberately focusing on the issue. It seems to be a much more common feature of sci-fi - Firefly, Star Trek, the Foundation series etc. Fantasy is perhaps still taking a Tolkien world-view as a point of departure, rather than the modern world - whereas the visions of the future in sci-fi have changed along with the visions of the present? More generally on all genre fiction - since sci-fi is only COMPARATIVELY progressive - perhaps it's also significant that the world-view in them tends to be much more white-centric in the assumptions on the part of the author and reader because we don't read from fantasy, sci-fi, detective stories, romances, thrillers from authors outside the UK and US? I can think of Night Watch from Russia and that's it. Even in Germany they tend to read just English fantasy / sci-fi. Oh and a final thought that just came to me - what about the whole question not just of characters' appearances but their accents - isn't that quite revealing about our assumptions too?

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Dan H at 10:56 on 2008-03-19

I think there's two distinct things to think about here actually. One is the comparative homogeneity/heterogeneity of the *setting* and the other is the application of the same principles to the actual *story*. Ankh Morpok is "heterogeneous" chiefly in terms of its non-human races, and the presence of the odd Klachian. In this sense it's actually not much different to JKR's world (where we're told categorically that Dean Thomas Is Black). Firefly basically has one black chick, one Mysterious Old Black Dude (who skates dangerously close to what tvtrops.org would call a "Magical Negro" at times) and that's about it. For a world where society is supposed to be fully 50% chinese, they run into surprisingly few Chinese people. Original trek was well done by the standards of its day - it was massively tokenistic but it was the sixties for crying out loud. TNG was actually far worse (there's what, one black guy on board, and he's an alien). Again, I'm not saying that there's anything *wrong* with white writers who write for mostly-white audiences in a mostly-white country in a predominently white industry writing stories where the protagonists are themselves mostly white. It's when they start making a big song and dance about how totally racially diverse they are it gets to me. Firefly does reasonably well in including a just-above-tokenistic proportion of non-white characters but when you remember that it's supposed to be set in a society where the chinese are actually a majority they start to be notable by their absence.

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Andy G at 12:38 on 2008-03-19

Absolutely, I think that's a much clearer explanation of the qualification I was trying to get at when I said sci-fi was only 'comparatively progressive.'

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Jamie Johnston at 11:01 on 2008-03-24

Very interesting stuff. I find myself wondering what is the best way for a writer to deal with the fact that his readers will make these assumptions. The Rowling approach of simply relying on them (and probably sharing them) and therefore not bothering to specify anything about a character's ethnicity unless it happens not to conform to them (e.g. Dean Thomas Is Black) reinforces the assumptions at least in as much as it doesn't challenge them. On the other hand, if a writer carefully specified the ethnicity of every character it would (1) get very tedious for the reader and (2) give the reader the impression than ethnicity is very important to the story, even if it isn't. Then again one can do what Gaiman does in 'Anansi Boys', which is to wilfully ignore the fact that your readers are making these assumptions and just to write the thing on the basis that *you* know all your principal characters are black and your readers will figure it out eventually. That may in principle be a very noble way to go about it, in that it doesn't indulge your readers' unhelpful ways of thinking and in fact makes them feel they've been rather silly and faintly racist, when the penny finally drops, for thinking in that way in the first place; but it also means that at some point around page 100 your readers will be massively distracted from the story you're telling them by having to make extensive retrospective mental adjustments while feeling they've been rather silly and faintly racist. Which doesn't really make for a satisfying aesthetic experience. P.S. Andy raised the point of science fiction from outside the Anglo-American sphere: I haven't read any, but I heard on the radio the other day that there's a big boom going on at the moment in Indian sci-fi. Might give an interesting angle on things, especially since (as has already been pointed out) fantasy and sci-fi tend to ignore the Indian subcontinent altogether because there's only room in The East for one civilization and it's usually Vaguely Chinese.

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http://draxar.livejournal.com/ at 20:50 on 2011-07-14

A very late comment, but one book that purposefully plays with this idea is Anansi Boys, where the majority of the main characters are black, and if I recall correctly, it mentions when a character is white, but not when they're black.

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Cammalot at 23:50 on 2011-07-14

I adored the hell out of that book for just that reason. It felt... refreshing. :-) Basically everywhere else in life (in my experience of Western culture, anyway) the opposite is done. "A woman walked own the road" followed by actual detailed description, versus "A black man got out of the car." The end. (Not even "A man got out of the car; he was black..."

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http://keysersose.blogspot.co.uk/ at 16:41 on 2017-03-16

I had a similar argument with my writer chums the other day, and Harry Potter was the example we used as well. Generally, fantasy writers treat white as default (consciously or unconsciously), and expect the readership to assume characters are white unless otherwise specified (again, consciously or unconsciously). That annoys me, so I have a somewhat petulant policy of mentally depicting all characters as black unless their ethnicity/race is actually specified. Harry Potter actually deserves some praise for never specifying the race of characters, which is a thing a lot of authors do dp. Rowling implies ethnicity through character description, or with stereotypical "ethnic" names, but she never goes so far as to tell you that Hermione is white British or Dumbledore is Persian. This is better than when a writer tells you a character is black (when skin colour has no apparent significance to the story or setting). I assume this is a middle-class, white guilt thing where they feel it necessary to indicate there are indeed people of colour in their book, but it kind of backfires because they only mention a character's skin colour when they are not white, implying white is the default setting. It is also usually the case that these POCs are relegated to support characters, and the author has reinforced the fact that the protagonist is lily-white. If I was a non-white reader, I might have imagined the protagonist up to a point of matching my ethnicity. The lack of mention initially communicates that I can imagine what I like. But then this stupid rule about pointing out the brown people asserts the white-is-default rule, and that means my mental image must be wrong. This issue also came up when reading the Kingkiller series, in that one of the characters is meant to be non-white, but it wasn't apparent to most of the readership because the character was described as "dusky" skinned, which could be used to describe anyone from Megan Fox to Grace Jones. Qvothe has the red hair, and the references to pubs and lutes imply a generic European medieval setting, but now there is this weird alternative problem where the description is so vague, it is basically pointless description except to imply everyone else isn't dusky coloured (and so therefore white). Qvothe himself has read hair, but is also from some cultural equivalent to Romani/Travellers. Fine, I think. Qvothe is black too.

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Arthur B at 17:31 on 2017-03-16

Interesting to see this one pop out of the archives, seeing how, whilst Ron is still not black in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hermione is. I am with you on the utter uselessness of "dusky" as a description of someone's skin colour. So far as I can make out, it can apply to anyone who is not an actual albino.

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Orion at 19:47 on 2017-03-30

There's actually a quite sensible reason that Ron Weasley isn't black, and indeed why he has red hair, which is unrelated to the character-type-signaling. The Weasleys are an aristocratic old-money family that has been active and well known in Britain for a long time. They're not wealthy any more (or at least neither they nor the Malfoys would describe them as wealthy), but they're blood relations to many of the genuinely powerful families and have intergenerational rivalries with at least one. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that most (though perhaps not all) of the wizard families with ancestral estates in England and blood relations to other wizard families with ancestral estates in England are white. I suppose they could have been the descendants of a foregn merchant house that transplanted to England or it could have been one of Ron's parents rather than Ron who married a black outsider, but I think those changes do lead to different stories. Given that they're white, it makes sense that the Weasleys have red hair. It's because of their hair that everyone knows who they are and what they look like and can spot them across a room. One assumes that Ron might not be so cripplingly self-conscious if he weren't so easy to spot and recognize. Also, while everyone has to acknowedge that the Weasleys are wizard highborns, many think the Weasleys are somehow "not as good" as the other highborn families. I'm an American and liable to be mistaken about this kind of thing, but I'd expect that when English people in the UK see a family of redheads, they would assume that family was probably the the UK, but more likely to be Scottish or Irish than English, and that English nobility would feel that Scottish nobles are definitely nobles, but not really as good as English nobles.

#Harry Potter #J.K. Rowling #Earthsea #Ursula K. Le Guin #Race #Ferretbrain #Minority Warrior #Dan H

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wincore · 3 years ago

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ALL THE BEST WITH YOUR UNDERGRAD MOON !! also you're a stem student :o?! what are you majoring in? (if you don't mind telling ofc ><)

oooh I'll get around to reading six of crows one of these days. I remember booktok hyping up that and the shadow and bone trilogy which is partly the reason I haven’t read those two (booktok isn’t the best place to get book recs from imo) djfhhjf oh smart teenagers (even if fictious) are scary hkfgh i call it a good day if i can finish my assignments in chem in time (random but ochem totally kicks ass. But !! I did master the art of drawing hexagons neatly)

and PLS i finished maid sama and usui is def a 'perverted alien' but as a whole it was a nice, lighthearted one especially the ending <3 also moon do send some anime recs my way bc nothing beats depending on 2d characters for emotional support

oml ncity had soooo many things going on last year but tumblr in a way helped me keep up with them heh. It's crazy to believe that hot sauce and sticker came out in the same year ;-; being an ot23 stan sure is hard.

p.s. DSFJGBDGLKS IK I'M VERY LATE but y'all have the rights to gatekeep nyc, museums, cheese and collabs bc not many ppl here understand what it means to hang out/have fun with friends ><

p.p.s. hello? a new yangyang fic? bff2l? reputation collab? ts inspired fics? WITH JAEMIN? I'M SO NOT READY FOR IT KDSFKJGOFSDLHD VIBRATING WITH EXCITEMENT RN I OUGHT TO CHECK TUMBLR MORE OFTEN ALL OF THIS INFO HAS CAUSED MY SYSTEM TO CRASH DFH ALL I CAN DO IS KEYMASH FDGHS

-👻

THANK YOU SM, SWEETHEART!!! good luck with hs too 💘 ooh yes, i'm an electronics major but shifting more towards computer science (specifically ai) for grad school !!

oof I have never been on booktok and I'm keeping it that way bc I get some book reels on instagram and they're all just hardcore smut 💀 my friend switched over to nonfiction after reading one of the books lmao

chem assignments in hs made me wanna die and it did not help that my mother is a hs chemistry teacher. it just meant me sobbing into my chem textbook and raising a peace sign when my mom asked how it's going. i did like ochem tho, it was like solving puzzles!! the chemistry we learned in engineering was easier lol but not as fun as ochem. (yes, we love perfect hexagons in this household 🥰)

yes!!!! I can't watch it now 💀 but it's def a lighthearted watch that you can finish quickly. plsss if you ask for anime recs im gonna say one piece bc that's my fav anime of all time im so glad Lana finally started it, I am literally buzzing with excitement 🤩 but !!! My second go to rec is gintama - it's also pretty long but it's worth it bc the characters are amazing and it's the funniest anime ever.

i still can't keep up with ncity honestly 😩 there is way too much going in my life now that I can go out again djdkdk I'm barely staying in my room 😭 I too am keeping with them thru the tumblr posts on my dash </3 HOT SAUCE AND STICKER CAME OUT THE SAME YEAR??? omg why did that make me go 🤯🤯🤯 I have no concept of linear time 😎

I'm so excited for the fics now that you've mentioned them again pls !!! corduroy is like a super old fic that I decided to post now bc of peer pressure cough cough cat cough PLSNDJDJD I'm looking forward to the rep fics too but unfortunately I post first 💀💀💀 I really need to step my game up but this gave me enough motivation to 💞 tysm, lovely, and have a good day/night!!!

#anon #👻 anon #answered

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douchebagbrainwaves · 8 years ago

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In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. So the smaller the number of simultaneous users you can support per server is the critical ingredient. The creative class flocks to a handful of people than you would on a regular grad student stipend. As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than yours. Miraculously it all turned out ok. It will be easier to do that completely. Oh boy! That's fundraising in one sentence. By no coincidence it was in order to get them going.

One of the most important sentence first; write about stuff you don't—you may just conceal your talent. 030676773 pop3 0. Do the founders of Sun. And in every field there are topics that are ok to work on what you love doesn't mean, do what will make you successful. At the very least, that wouldn't feel very restrictive. This doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. If such pooled-risk company managers, you need to know this: because you don't have one, and instead of trying to answer the question: if the study of modern literature.

Nor did they work for big companies even to think of this crazy idea? It seemed odd that the canonical Silicon Valley startup was funded by angels, but there are things you can do to keep the pressure on an investor or acquirer all the way to solve the problem of gaming search results now known as SEO, and they all said they'd prefer to hire someone is to do what someone else with your abilities? It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. It's an exciting place. Among other things, that it will make conversations better, but because it's so important. Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work. The reason, of course. When you refuse to meet an investor because you're not in the final version is obviously something I chose not to publish, often because I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that makes this email a boring example of the dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. Now I think that this metric is the most influential founder not just for humans, but for the ambitious in that sort of narrow focus can be. It does whatever you tell it.

You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the audience at a talk I gave at the last two. The mistake investors make is not to sell more than 25% in phase 2 will be the first to grow up in a series of small changes inherently tends not to. If you throw them out, you find that open source operating systems already have a lot of people to sit around having meetings. Their tastes aren't completely different from most other people's. Make something great and getting lots of users. If the company raises more money later, the book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be hard not to end up like Craigslist. Back when desktop computers arrived, IBM was the giant that everyone was afraid of. It's still early days. The other is economies of scale.

Notes

That's one of the word wealth. If idea clashes became common enough, maybe you don't go back and forth. See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

They don't make their money if they miss just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes it easier for some reason insists that you can skip the first type, and it doesn't change the meaning of a safe will be familiar to anyone who has them manages to find may be even larger than the rich. Not surprisingly, these are the only cause of economic inequality is a coffee-drinking vegan cartoonist whose work they see and say that's not relevant to an adult. Scribes in ancient philosophy may be overpaid. This was partly confidence, and they unanimously said yes.

Convertible debt can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and philosophy the imprecise half.

Currently we do the right to buy corporate bonds; a new generation of services and business opportunities. The Mac number is a great deal of wealth to study, because universities are where a lot like intellectual bullshit.

Give the founders chose? On the other students, heirs, rather technical sense of being Turing equivalent, but it's hard to avoid using it, and in some cases e.

It's hard to make money. Japan is prone to earthquakes, so it may be overpaid. It's lame that VCs miss.

Bill Yerazunis. The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably no accident that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on a hard technical problem.

Instead of no counterexamples, though more polite, was one of these companies unless your last funding round at valuation lower than the previous two years after 1914 a nightmare than to read a draft of this type are also the highest price paid for a number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. Often as not the shape that matters financially for investors. In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our users that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a different type of proficiency test any apprentice might have 20 affinities by this standard, and yet it is genuine. In effect they were forced to stop, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than trying to sell early for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have believed since before people were people.

You can just start from the creation of wealth for society. Founders are tempted to ignore competitors. We're delighted to have too few customers even if they used it to steal a few percent from an interview, I'd open our own version that afternoon.

0 notes