#should either be easily google-able or my opinion

[blackpearlblast]

hey, if my ask is insensitive or simply too much work/you dont want to give your opinion/energy thats ok, and im sorry for bothering you if it is. ive seen many jewish people say "from the river to the sea" is a dogwhistle/generally antisemitic phrase to use, but you used it in your golem art's text part(incredibly moving text btw.) im asking you bc you mentioned youre jewish and i thought you might have insight or thoughts to give on why you use it/what you think about the first statement about the phrase?

hi, yes, i would be glad to talk about my perspective on this! first of all, i do want to say that i think a lot of palestinian bloggers have already talked about this and their voices will always be what you want to seek out first when educating yourself. however, i do know the crowd of people claiming that "from the river to the sea" is antisemitic/genocidal has been very loud so i understand why you would want to hear a jewish perspective on it too. second, in order to explain why i think "from the river to the sea" is not antisemitic will involve me comparing it to actual antisemitic, nazi slogans and dogwhistles and talking about what they mean. so just a heads up for that before it comes up.

the full phrase is "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free!" i think a lot of times in accusations of antisemitism people leave off the second half of the phrase in order to claim it is calling for something else to happen from river to sea (like the expulsion or execution of all jews.) but that's just like, not, ever, a thing? that is said? you can tell the pieces of the phrase go together because they rhyme and also are said together by palestinians and allies near constantly. it's "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free." and i think all of the fearmongering relies on a good bit of ambiguity beyond that too. "what does a 'free palestine' mean? could it meant they want to throw all the jews into the sea?" - some zionist when i tried to look up the origin of the phrase in case there was anything really important i was missing that i should cover in this. there's like this idea that they can't really be asking for a free palestine, there has to be some kind of catch.

i think it's also important to look at the circumstances that this slogan was born under. the thing about modern day palestine and occupied palestine, on which israel tries to build itself, is that even though spatially the land stretches from river to sea, the people's experience of it does not. because of the apartheid system of checkpoints, ID-based restriction of movement, and blockades (in the case of gaza), there exist great gulfs in the land that are impossible or near impossible for people to cross. there can be a place a couple miles away, that due to lacking the "proper credentials", is more distant for palestinians living under apartheid than perhaps a destination a cross-country trip away would be for you. so i see the call for a free palestine specifically "from river to sea" to remove those gulfs and allow freedom of movement for everyone. i find very little of this has to do with jews, personally. the only connection is that the people who set up and maintain this system of apartheid happened to be jewish. and i hope that we would all agree that resisting one's oppressors- even if those oppressors are also marginalized and oppressed in other ways- is not a bad thing.

but it is true that many white supremacist/antisemitic slogans may focus more on the creation of a (white) nation than actually the jews themselves, since they have already established among themselves that a white nation has to mean no jews. so let's look at some of the more famous nazi rallying cries and how different they are from "from the river to the sea."

the fourteen words are most primarily known to be "we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." wow! i guess we could find some superficial similarities between this and river and the sea, like if we really wanted to stretch it. but personally, there's a ton of alarm bells in my head that this phrase sets off while river to the sea doesn't. the emphasis of "we" and "our" when used in this way really implies an us versus them narrative. and here the ambiguity really is present and malevolent! a "free palestine" is a palestine unrestricted by apartheid and colonialism. a "secure existence" and "future for white children" is uhhh, what does that Mean. like, we Know what that means right. but they aren't saying it. we can very easily find people saying what a free palestine means if we listen to palestinians. please, please listen to palestinians. there are so many people talking about what their idea of a decolonized palestine looks like, but the basics are generally one state, for all people, with equal rights for all, and the ability for those who were expelled from their homes in the nakba and all of the many long years following it, to return.

"blood and soil" is even vaguer. but thankfully(?), nazis were very enthusiastic about explaining what the phrase meant to them. "blood" is the superior aryan bloodlines and eugenic values that they wished to propagate and the "soil" represents the land of germany and the desire to "reject modernity and embrace tradition" by leaving urban life behind and living in the idealized countryside. (see we got a twofer here!) the only possible connection i could make to from the river to the sea here is the emphasis on the land but that on its own doesn't feel significant to me. land and the place where you live is very important to all kinds of humans all over the world. and i think another particular aspect of "blood and soil" is the emphasis of how you are living on the land. it's not just enough to be able to live in your homeland with freedom of movement and the ability not to be killed with impunity by occupying soldiers (lucky you!), you want to live there in a state of racial purity exemplified by eugenic values. in general, in nazi slogans, there is a particular fixation with a society shaped to represent these specific values. the call is not for freedom from repression, from an actual occupying colony, but instead from the considered bad actors and impure values coming from within their society. freedom from having degenerates sullying their perfect aryan nation. there is a plea to be able to get rid of those who do not match their view of a perfect society. the plea for a free palestine is, so much, a plea to be able to keep their family members, their friends, the friendly stranger down the block. that is not a fascist ideology, that is the will to live. and though i am referring to the ideology surrounding "blood and soil" in past tense because i am referencing the coining of the phase, these sentiments and slogans are obviously (and unfortunately) alive and well today. though, there is a particular irony to white american neo-nazis chanting it on stolen land.

"they will not replace us"/"jews will not replace us" refers to the "great replacement" theory, that jews are orchestrating a mass replacement of white people with immigrants (specifically non-white, often muslim immigrants.) i do not think this slogan has even any superficial similarities to from the river to the sea. you could definitely compare this sentiment to israel's attempts to maintain an artificial ethnic majority, since in many ways the potential "solution" to the "great replacement" would also need to involve creating/maintaining an artificial ethnic majority. (this is obviously not saying that israel subscribes to the great replacement theory, but that the tactic of maintaining artificial ethnic majorities is shared between zionism and great replacement theorists, since both ideologies rely on a specific ethnicity being the majority in their country.)

dogwhistles like 88, triple parenthesis, etc. rely on being vague symbols so that only those who know what the symbols stand for know what they mean. (88=HH=heil hitler, the triple parentheses representing the supposed (((echoes))) of jewish influence throughout history.) "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" is a complete phrase that directly names its cause. people who say "free palestine" want you to know they stand with palestine. i guess if you wanted to be going for the most bad faith reading possible you could say "free palestine from what?", to which every palestinian and everyone who has been remotely paying attention to what palestinians are saying would shout: "from apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and currently, very open and deliberate genocide!" like, it is true that if you felt you did not glean every aspect and detail of what the people in the occupied territories are calling for, you would be correct! but they are answering this. they want to talk about it. the reason i do not believe from the river to the sea is genocidal or antisemitic is because i have been reading and listening to what palestinians are saying and none of them have said they want to kill all jews. they do not want genocide, they want to go home! they just want to go home. i don't know most of this was written pretty tongue in cheek because i was talking about nazi slogans and nazis are pathetic and even more pathetic when held up against a movement of people who are legitimately trying to fight against a great wrong that was committed against them, but i just get so sad saying this. they just want to go home. haven't you ever felt that way before?

in the end, words mean things, and even more importantly, the contexts they're said in mean things. and while it's true that antisemites do hide behind dogwhistles and vague statements for plausible deniability, the alternative meaning does have to actually be established somewhere for them to be effective. from the river to the sea lacks an established alternative meaning. fearmongering from people who refuse to listen to what palestinians are actually saying does not make sense to me as legitimate definitions of the phrase.

also!!!! i'm sorry this got so Fucking long, thank you if you actually made it this far! i intentionally used "from the river to the sea" in my artists statement because it frustrates and upsets me so much to see people making such a big fuss about it when actual antisemitism goes unpunished. like a lot of the phrases i talk about here were chanted at the charlottesville neo-nazi march in 2017 and while many people were deeply upset and angry at what happened, the jewish community was not rallied around even Close to as much as it right now. and with joe biden saying "if it weren't for israel, not a single jew in the world would be safe" at a fucking hanukkah celebration i just. i don't know. the push back against "from the river to the sea" has so much to do with backing colonial and imperial interests and so so little to do with our actual safety. the concept of our identities and safety is being weaponized against palestinians, and at the same time makes it harder to identify actual antisemitism. and that hurts.

[fuck-customers]

Why have customers decided that their shopping experience is no longer their own responsibility and they can just have us do literally everything for them?? Like whyyyyy is there not a single molecule of thought or effort put in from their end!!?? Examples:

- Googling the phone number of our store to call and ask what time we open/close (the opening hours are right under the phone number, including clearly labelled public holiday hours)

- Phoning our store or asking in person for information about another store in the chain (their hours, address, stock availability etc.) When they could easily google it or call THAT store

- walking into the store and asking the first person they see for help without even looking around first. Especially when they walk past the thing they're looking for on their way to an employee.

- not being able to find their way with pointing and verbal directions, needing to be walked over to and handed everything even when it's right in front of them and I'm pointing to it. Also the people that ask where the exit is when our store is laid out in a big square with a huge middle walkway and if you keep walking around in either direction you will reach the exit.

- asking questions that have nothing to do with me, information on other stores in the complex, asking for directions, asking touristy questions... Where's a good place to eat around here? How about the dumpster behind the store? fuck off

- wanting to start a new project or hobby and coming in without doing ANY research on it and what they might need to purchase and expecting us to give them a free class like we have the time/training for that sort of thing. YOUTUBE IS FREE. GOOGLE IS FREE. FACEBOOK HOBBY GROUPS ARE FREE. This goes triple for the Cricut ladies, if you are going to drop 300 dollars on a craft machine please learn how to use it. One lady asked me if her cricut could cut a certain cardstock and got mad when I said I'd never used one and she should check the manual

- wanting personal opinions on what to buy. There's a difference between "what are the benefits of buying x over y?" and "which one do you like better?" like for one we sell thousands of different things, I haven't personally used them all and secondly my tastes, opinions and needs for a product could be totally different from yours. So pick the one YOU like plzzz, you're the one paying for it.

- wanting to purchase fabric and not doing their measurements or calculations beforehand. Like babe, only YOU know how much fabric you need. Next time someone asks how much they need to make a dress I'm saying 10 metres because I'm going to assume they're making a ball gown

Anyway, fuck these dumb, lazy sacks of shit, I have no idea how they managed to get this far in life without firing a single neuron.

Posted by admin Rodney.

[acti-veg]

Hey, how do you deal with people who counter your arguments whether abt veganism or climate change with "there is scientific evidence for the opposite," as in they argue that for whatever you say there is evidence to prove otherwise... if I try to explain of course there are companies with vested interest who back those scientific initiatives, they argue the same is true for what I am saying

Evidence speaks for itself, and I don’t claim anything I don’t know I can prove. If my claim is demonstrably true and has a broad scientific consensus, nobody will be able to show me reliable evidence that disproves it.

Ask to see their sources, look at the studies, who funds them, what methods they used, search the study and see if there is already analysis and critique out there, as there often is. On tumblr especially, people post ‘sources’ that don’t even back up what they’re trying to claim. More often than not what they post states the complete opposite, it just had a misleading headline, so just reading the source is usually enough. More often than not they’ve just typed ‘why vegan bad’ into google and copied and pasted the first link.

Also, be open to being wrong. If the evidence really does contradict your opinions, you should change those opinions, there is no shame in being wrong. I have discarded claims I used to uphold because I either now have updated information, or can no longer sufficiently back it up. There are also many claims that I suspect are true, such as animal agriculture being the number one single cause of climate change, but I can’t prove it with a good enough degree of certainty so I just don’t say it, instead I say ‘one of the biggest causes’, which is certainly demonstrably true.

My more general advice would be to get practiced at reading scientific literature, assessing sources and crucially, at staying away from definitive claims if you can’t back it up. You’ll notice I say ‘we think’ or ‘research suggests’ more often than not, unless it’s something I know has a scientific consensus and is realistically not open to challenge.

Thats a good habit to get into, and so is just keeping up to date with current research as much as you’re able to. You don’t need to be reading every study, but most big ones get good coverage you can read about them from secondary sources just fine. Just know that no matter how iron-clad your claim, you’ll still have people throwing counter-sources at you, but it’s usually the same dozen or so debunked studies that you can learn to respond to quite easily.

[lakshmihr1208]

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[mack3030]

Things the Sims 4 Community Can Do About Paywalls...A Post...

[This is going to be a bit long, so you may want to save it and read it when you have time, or just...you know, buckle in.]

I thought I would ring in the new year by talking about something that I feel we as a community need to finally decide on. (It’s been debated since 2017 or so, and it’s now 2021...) I’d like, if possible, to try to suggest some real solutions and choices that we can make that will hopefully create a better and more honest community out of all of us.  Now I would like to start by making some postulates. In geometry, postulates are facts that do not need proven with a mathematical proof. They are assumed to be true. Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers would call these “Self-Evident Truths”. I would like to use these as a bit of a basis for my arguments. 

Truth: The Sims 4 has been enough of a cash cow for EA.  If you buy the base game ($40) plus all expansion packs (40 each x 10) + all game packs (20 each x 9) + all stuff packs (10 each x 17) you would come to a total of seven hundred and 90 dollars ($790) plus tax. This is of course, without sales, bundling, etc, which many people DO take advantage of, but STILL. That is a TON of money for EA’s pockets.  EA makes a majority of its money on the fact that the Sims 4 is an “incomplete game”. It “completes” the game further and further by adding more “expansions” to the game to the point that it seems almost useless to buy the base game alone without adding to it. 

Even with sales and other things, it’s easy to spend over $500 dollars on the sims 4 game + expansions. Still a lot of cash for a game that is years old. This is just money that is spent on the game that goes to EA. This does not account for:  * Money spent to buy a new computer because your old one wouldn’t run the sims.  * Money spent supporting CC artists who have donations open or early access.  * Money spent on access to sites that have ads/paywalls/exclusive sims 4 CC such as Leosims, etc. (Which are the problem, frankly)

We should be able to respect the fact that a majority of us paid a hefty amount for this game. It is unfair, and frankly greedy to REQUIRE people to pay MORE just to unlock or gain access to specific user created content. 

I am not talking about a VOLUNTARY support or donation because they like what you offer. I am talking about FORCING people to pay if they want to ever be able to use the CC or mod you offer. 

Now, the typical defense for this is “Well, I’m an artist! I spend time/effort/etc working hard on these meshes, the code, etc to make this content!”  Which leads me to point #2. 

Truth: Mods, CC, and other content for the Sims 4 are useless without the game. Once they are created/uploaded to the game, all copyright to those objects IMMEDIATELY transfers to EA. 

I teach art in a Missouri public school. Our state standards dictate that when art students are in middle school grades, they have to learn about copyright, fair use, and creative commons. While I am not a copyright lawyer, I have had to learn enough about this subject to teach it. So allow me to break down a few facts about copyright: 

First, when ya make it, ya own it. There’s not a process to apply for a copyright. The moment you create something that is 100% your own work, you hold the copyright to it. 

Second, when you make something that is created based off of or USING someone else’s intellectual property as a reference or resource it is a fan creation. In art, we call this “fanart”. It is not 100% your own work. Someone else’s intellectual property is involved. 

Fan creations always have tread a very thin and shadowy line when it comes to different companies and the legality of them. You can easily search google for various articles explaining it, but to summarize it in a short method: 

Most companies do not actively go after those who create fan creations unless they are making profits that could instead be going to the creators of the intellectual property. If the fan creation is discovered to be making profits and/or taking the intellectual property in a direction the creator does not approve of, they have legal options to pursue (court, cease and desist letters, etc). 

Third, Copyright can be transferred from person to person. In most cases this is done through a written document that both parties sign, however there IS an exception to this that EA uses to allow itself to transfer your copyrights to your content to them: 

EA’s agreement with you is non-exclusive, meaning that the moment you hit “agree” on the sims 4 terms and conditions, you have handed over your rights to any CC you create for the game. 

If you want to maintain full creative rights over the mesh/mods/etc you make then, you have to not make that content for the sims 4 and make your own platform to host it on. This is way easier said than done. 

Truth: There have been various examples in the past of CC creators who have stolen meshes, bases, bits/pieces of work, or “inspiration” for CC from other sites/companies, who have been called on it publicly. 

The most recent event concerning this was drama concerning itsbrandysims and their use of meshes from imvu/secondlife (you can see my opinion on the subject HERE), but there have been other documented cases. Leosims, for example, has been listed as an example of someone taking meshes from secondlife creators and reuploading them (when it was told to me, I was shown THIS thread as evidence). Another well known creator was accused by a former sims 4 cc creator (who now makes content from second life), and was called out in THIS post in 2019. 

The horrible part of this? Many of these creators are charging people (often at not so great rates as well), for STOLEN content. Content they don’t even own, that they ripped from another place. This should not be accepted by a community that loves a game as much as the Sims 4 community.  Truth: EA has provided a way for people to make money while not hiding content behind paywalls entirely, and the INTENT of this was to OFFSET COSTS.  Almost every post about content locked behind paywalls features this post found on the Sims Forum from 2017. In it, SimGuruDrake, who was the community manager at the time (she has since left the Sims 4 team for another job).  Most of you who have seen this discussion topic before know this post by heart, but I’d like to highlight one important aspect of it: 

One thing that is always important about communication is the intent behind it. The intent for people to be allowed to make patreons and allow early access wasn’t so people could just make money for themselves, the idea was to offset costs to buy programs to make the content. For example, a yearly subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (which has photoshop, illustrator, etc) costs a couple hundred dollars US a year. If someone was using photoshop to help them create their CC in addition to blender or other free programs, EA/Maxis wanted to allow the creator to not have to pay for making the CC out of pocket.  Can EA/Maxis control what people spend the money they make off of patreon on? No. But it should be noted that the intent of this action was to help people pay for supplies for their hobby more than to make a business out of it. 

Onto the next truth! Truth: There is an image that disputes this post above, however the authenticity of it and timing of it are very disputed. 

This image is often thrown around by people who lock content behind paywalls, but I would like to take a second and try to provide an honest assessment of it.  First of all, I have a bit of a problem with the fact that the original person who “messaged” SimGuruDrake this question has not been identified. This image was not posted on the tumblr of a CC creator who claimed “Hey I reached out to a sims guru and this is the answer I got!” The main pages that have this image are either tweets from CC creators using it to defend their stance on paywalls (ex: here), or tumblrs/tweets “debunking it” (ex: here, here).  I even reverse image searched this image using google, and another platform and could not figure out where this originated from. Of course, I’m not an expert, but...still. 

The fact that the origin of this picture is unknown casts doubt on it. If it were a well known CC maker who is known for being honest, that’s one thing. But the fact that we don’t exactly know where it came from is suspicious. Because frankly, anyone with some decent editing ability could photoshop this. 

Here’s my imperfect edit, but I’m just a self-taught graphics nerd and I am not as dedicated at faking screenshots as some. (And the crap photo quality didn’t help.) Another common issue is that at the supposed “time” that this question was being asked, some state that SimsGuruDrake had already left the Sims 4 team. I will admit, this photo is within the correct timeline, as SimsGuruDrake did not officially depart the sims 4 team until February 2018. (There is a post on the sims forums that has a timestamp that confirms this.) But, if you were in the process of leaving your job within the next month (as a two week/30 day notice is common when leaving a job), would you REALLY be answering questions in DMs on twitter, or be focusing on packing up, and training your successor?  The last thing that really makes me doubt the validity of this picture is the fact that it’s not really easy to message the sims gurus on Twitter. This appears to be twitter from the screenshot (although there are some things that are a little out of place from the current UI): But when I attempt to direct message a sims guru I get this message: 

I even tried seeing if I could reach out via DM to Drake herself, (who now posts under a different twitter) to see if it was possible: 

Could the policies have changed since 2018? Possibly, but I feel that opening up direct messages is just asking for Sims 4 team members to get angry messages, so this could very well be a long running EA policy. I have also reached out to her via a twitter tag (as of 1/2/21), and will update y’all if I get a reply:

Okay, so now that we’ve gone through all of this, let’s talk about the last truth that’s really important:  Truth: Putting content behind paywalls has generally been considered disgusting by many in the sims 4 community, and TAKES AWAY the choice of people to support CC creators they love/appreciate WILLINGLY.  A few notable posts sharing the disgust with this practice can be found: HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE). And these are just what I can find from a simple precursory search.

Okay, Brainiac. So what can we do to solve this problem? 

Well, there’s a few methods we can employ, and sadly, it’s going to take a bit of a commitment and concentrated effort from the community. 

Step #1: Make the COMMUNITY the VICTIM instead of EA. 

Now when I say this, I don’t mean we’re actually victims, but mean that instead of constantly saying things like “WHEN YOU DO THIS YOU VIOLATE EA’S TOU!”, thus making EA the “victim” of the crime. We change the dialog to saying “When you lock stuff behind paywalls, you cheat the sims 4 community and disrespect their choice to support you or not.”  Because let’s be honest. Maxis/EA really doesn’t give much of a care about if people aren’t following this rule. You can report people to the team, but as far as most people have seen, it doesn’t get anywhere. But if we make it where the community is the party being “wronged” it is much harder for those who have paywalls to not be scared. Because the community, in the end, has to be with them.  DepthofPixels had a really amazing post about this HERE. 

Step 2: Decide to not support anyone who puts their content behind exclusive paywalls and do not hesitate to spread the word about why you choose not to do so. 

By that, I mean

not paying any patreon accounts that don’t offer either their content 100% for free, or offer early access.

And sharing about why you choose to do that on your social media. Something I might suggest would be to make it a bit personal and share something like:

Instead of spending $15 a month to get exclusive content from Leosims (or any other patreon/paywall creator here) I’m spending that $15 supporting creator x, creator y, and creator z, who don’t put their work behind paywalls! 

Link their patrons, share why you like their content, and why you take the stance to make the community better. Make it a positive thing, praising the people who are doing RIGHT by the community. 

Yes, you may not get their content for a while (although there are some different places (

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,

x

) to find them *cough*. But in the end, is it worth supporting someone’s content when they’re treating the community badly? 

Step 3: Report creators who actively steal content from IMVU/secondlife to those respective companies, and all others to EA. (Even though nothing may happen.)

Here’s the deal. When people steal from either of those sites, they are infringing on someone’s copyright, as well as Imvu/secondlife’s copyright as well. It’s not okay, and they should be held accountable for it. Here’s the LINK for submitting a ticket to Secondlife. I haven’t been able to find one for IMVU, but maybe someone else will find one. Let those companies know and allow them to handle those specific creators.  As to the other creators, EA may not handle them at the moment. But IF (and this is a wishful thinking “if”) there were suddenly a flood of messages about certain creators...? I think they might have to pay attention to some of those messages. There is an official report form, but it might even be worth tweeting to SleddingGuruFrost, who is the current community manager asking about their stance on paywalls.  And last but not least: 

Step 4: Make sure that those who are doing the right thing and not putting their work behind paywalls feel appreciated. Show them some love via a tumblr ask, or by tagging them on twitter, or by going up a tier on their patreon (or pledging for the first time). Celebrate these heroes who are creating content and not forcing it on us. 

Us asking for people to give us a choice to support them isn’t being greedy, or disrespecting their time. We just want transparency, and respect from those who create content for the game we love so much versus them treating us like we’re just a source of income. I know it might seem a bit hard to do this for some of you, and for some it may seem like I’m preaching to the choir, but we have to decide where we stand on this issue and stop letting those who abuse this system keep doing it. We can make a difference if we decide as a COMMUNITY to work together.

With commitment,  ~Sunny

[do-a-reference-properly]

AO3′s users alert! Unauthorised fanworks copying

26/09/2019. Important update on this mess: we found a way to delete fanworks via take down request to the hosting provider. Please check it here https://do-a-reference-properly.tumblr.com/post/187926459079/finally-some-good-news

Dear AO3 users,

We would like to bring your attention to an ugly situation with unauthorized copying of works posted on AO3.

A lot of works from AO3 have been copied to fanfics.me (we’ll call this site FFM for brevity’s sake) and are still being copied right now, either:

— automatically by a code specifically created by FFM’s owner for this purpose, or

— by unaware or unscrupulous FFM’s users via semi-automatic method (by inserting a link to a work from AO3 into a web-worm on FFM).

All works from AO3 — with a few exceptions (I’ll elaborate on this below) — can end up on FFM without authors even noticing. Even fanarts or podfics.

FFM doesn't comply with DMCA which means that such reposts endanger fanworks' creators in case the copyright holder demands to delete the fanwork.

Authors of the copied works do not have any control over them; if the work is edited it won’t be updated on FFM until someone manually updates it.

Additionally FFM’s owner makes money out of reposted free fanworks from numerous Google and Yandex ads on each and every FFM’s page by having people go to this site when searching for fics on Google etc. So we recommend using an Ads Blocker when visiting this site in order to prevent the owner from earning more. Ghostery or Adblock Plus work just fine, but you can use any other Ads Blocker that is convenient to you.

Oftentimes FFM even shows up before the original post with the work on Google search results.

The owner’s e-mail: refery@fanfics.ru.

The owner at AO3.

We are trying to bring AO3’s users attention to this situation and help authors with taking their works down from FFM.

 Briefly about the website and its owner

Let me start from the very beginning as it will bring into the light the nature of FFM and give a good example of its owner characteristic behavior.

At first, some person with nickname Refery created FFM as a web archive where authors — mostly from Harry Potter fandom — could publish their fanworks.

Time passed, the site grew and added some features (blogs, pre-moderation and etc.), and all was good and well up till the moment when Refery decided that it would be a great idea to copy to FFM fanworks published on other Russian fanfiction archives — among them from the biggest and most known site ficbook — without asking authors for permission. Even those works that had “Ask me before posting the story somewhere else” mentioned in its text or summary were copied.

For some time nobody noticed, but when finally and inevitably this came out the authors were outraged. It took a lot of time to finally persuade Refery to at least not to copy fanworks bearing a special tag “Уточнять у автора” (Ask the author first).

But after some time Refery — without giving any notice — violated his own promise and resumed copying to FFM fanworks that had the agreed upon tag. The authors complained again, so very reluctantly and after many painful discussions this feature was reinstalled.

So FFM has been notoriously known, mostly amongst Russian fandom, for claims on re-posting fanworks without the consent of the authors.

We're mentioning this situation just to give you a detailed portrait of a person we are dealing with here.

Not only fanworks are copied to this website, but original works, too. Even those which were already published. There were all 7 of Harry Potter novels (both original text and translation), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (translation) and Vorkosigan Saga (translation) available for everybody to read and download. They were taken down only recently due to the attention this whole situation had drawn, but nothing ever goes away once it’s posted online and you can access the proof via Internet Wayback machine. We know for a fact there are other books on FFM and some actions have been taken in this regard, but still it takes time to find published books on this site.

Recently Refery decided that Russian archives are not enough for him and started copying all fanworks into FFM without any permission from the authors from numerous sites, like AO3, fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, fanfiktion.de and likely other web-archives.

Moreover, the authors of these works can not delete their works from FFM and/or manage them. The site is in Russian only and, hence, we strongly believe that non-Russian speaking authors even do not know that their works are reposted somewhere else.

As a Russian fan-community, we have tried to stop such activity of FFM many times; however, we have not been successful in achieving our goal completely. Our most recent achievement is that the FFM’s owner implemented the "Don't copy to another site" tag created specifically for AO3 (here is the link to FFM’s owner post on his personal blog regarding this tag. Please use Ads Blocker!). This tag should be added to each work presented on AO3 in case the author does not want their works to be copied to FFM.

We are of the opinion that no work should be taken without permission in the first place, but this tag is all we’ve got.

Please note that it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

How to prevent copying from AO3

If you check AO3 you may notice that "Don't copy to another site" tag has hugely emerged in the recent weeks, but mostly amongst Russian users and there is a good reason for this: the owner of FFM announced this tag only in Russian and only on his private blog, so naturally there is no way for non-Russian speaking AO3 users to know about this — albeit non-satisfactory — solution.

There are no guaranties that the FFM’s owner won’t change the rules again as has already happened numerous times before (few examples we described above) and that works with this tag won’t be reposted in the future, but for now it’s the only quick and working solution besides making your works visible only to registered users, which is not ideal. 

This situation is highly unpleasant, but we ask you not to delete your works from AO3, because if the work is deleted from AO3 it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM: we won't be able to refresh it manually and remove the text.

Please note that adding this tag won’t work for texts that have already been copied. Only users who have accounts at FFM will be able to delete them. Each work needs to be deleted manually.

However, the Russian fandom — except for the owner of FFM — strongly condemns reposts without the consent of the author, so feel free to contact our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing the links to the works stolen from AO3, so we could delete them for you.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all authors and works manually. So, we contacted AO3’ Technical Team with the aim to bring their attention to this situation and inform about it all AO3 users, and hope that AO3 team will find a general solution to resolve this problem, possibly, in collaboration with the AO3 lawyers.

We are trying to warn as many authors as possible and recently started spreading this information via comments on AO3; but considering the number of works copied to FFM informing all authors will take considerable time, and we can easily miss someone, especially since the copying is still in progress and new works from AO3 are appearing on FFM every day.

Please help us spread the word!

 We tried to make a comprehensive FAQ about this. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!

FAQ

Q: Can I check if my work was copied to FFM?

A: Yes, you can.

FFM makes money on Google and Yandex ads, so we recommend turning on the Ads Blocker of your choice before visiting this site.

Please follow this link, insert the title of your work or your AO3/other web-archive nickname into the field containing the words "insert-title-nickname" and hit "Искать" (Search).

For works rated Mature or Explicit you will be able to see only the caption "Текст произведения доступен только зарегистрированным пользователям старше 18 лет" ("The text of the work is available only to registered users over 18 years old"), but FFM users are able to read and download the story.

Q: My work from AO3 was copied. How can I take it down?

A: First of all add the tag "Don't copy to another site" (without “ “) to the stories you want to be taken down.

Actually we would recommend adding this tag to all the works you don't want to be copied.

Contact one of our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing links to your works or send an e-mail with your deletion request directly to the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. 

There is a third option: to register on FFM and delete the work yourself by hitting the refresh button, but considering that the site is in Russian we do not think it will be very convenient to those who do not speak Russian language.

Q: I got the message that my work has been deleted. How can I check if it is true?

A: You can go to FFM, search for you work, click on its title and scroll down.

After the summary there is a field that should look like this for those fics that have been deleted.

Basically it says that the author of this particular work has forbidden its copying and that only the information on its title, author’s nickname, rating, pairings, summary and the link to original post on AO3 are available. 

For works that are still available on FFM this field looks like this (if the work is open for non-registered users).

Q: My work copied from AO3 was deleted, but FFM still shows some information on it. Can it be deleted?

A: Even though the text of the fic is not going to be on FFM anymore after it has been deleted, the fic's title, author's name, rating, pairings, summary and link to original post on AO3 will remain there.

The deletion of this leftover information can be done only by the site owner himself.

Some Russian authors tried to make him to delete it, but in most cases the FFM’s owner refused them mentioning that publication of such information is in line with fair use concept and doesn’t violate authors’ rights.

We are yet unsure how to delete this leftover information. In case you need it as well, try contacting the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. Maybe e-mails of a large number of authors will work, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee anything. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Q: My work from fanfiction.net/fictionpress.com/fanfiktion.de/other web-archives was copied to FFM. How can I take it down?

A: Unfortunately, there is no possible way for us to delete from FFM the fanworks that are copied from web-archives other then AO3. Only FFM’s owner can delete these works, please try contacting him at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Please do not delete your works from the web-archive it was stolen from, because if the work is deleted it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM.

Also it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

[etherealxgenie]

Why Lila is Marinette’s Own Fault || Miraculous Why?

(Before I begin, note that this is my opinion over the topic and am no way am bashing anyone’s love for the ship and/or character. I respect who and what you like, therefore expect the same courtesy. However, if this is something you cannot handle, please click the back button as this will be a heavily discussed topic. No flames allowed. Other than that, enjoy.)

So usually in the story, there’s always one or two mean girls who is out to get the main character for some kind of superior reasons to justify. And there’s no reason as to why they act this way just for the sake of being mean.

Like the Ashleys from “Recess”, who tend to pick on kids just for the fun of it sometimes or cause they’re popular.

Same can go for Libby from “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” who was out to get something for what she wants or just to be superior to the other kids in school.

For Miraculous, we already have that kind of character, Chloe Bourgeois, who is the daddy’s girl of the Mayor to get what she wants. And until we had some small character development in season two (which season 3 took it away!!), we had no reason feeling sorry for her and she was just for the convenient plot in the social life for Marinette in the series.

And then… there’s Lila.

Before I get into hand in this, let me note that Lila is not a good person at all in the show. She’s a liar, a manipulator and will do whatever she can to get what she wants. She breaks into homes, steals and molests pretty models. She’s been pretty shown to be just selfish without consequences and unless we get a background story of why she acts this way, she has no excuse. Especially when she teams up with hawkdaddy to now have permission to invade and spy on Adrien whenever she wants? Fuck that.

So in Volpina, Lila is introduced as this pathological liar to get attention in season one. She obviously goes for Adrien cause he’s the famous model after all. Reasonable considering as the new person looking for attention, you seek out the most popular/famous person in the school. That would Adrien.

Though considering with her connections, it would’ve been smarter to try and impress Marinette instead if Lila did her research before she came into the scene. But of course, new person so she wouldn’t know, but whatever.

And we can see Lila easily just says things just to get Adrien’s approval and such.

And so, Marinette follows them around (stalking? really?) because Tikki points out Lila has the book Adrien took from his father’s vault and threw it in the trash.

Now the SMART thing to do would’ve been to see how Adrien would handle the situation and wait for him to leave, if to acknowledge Adrien has a mind of his own and knows when to walk away (which he does). Or at the very least, try to distract them as Marinette while Tikki retrieved the book.

But… no. You transform into Ladybug to lash out at a girl PUBLICALLY, for anyone including Adrien to hear, just to embarrass her and call her out on her lying because she… “hates liars”.

Marinette, you fucking lie ALL the time! Most of those times to Adrien! And I’m not just talking about when in regard to being Ladybug, you hypocritical- (groans)

I can list plenty of episodes: Gamer, Aninmaestro, Ikari Gozen and hell, even Reverser counts! If she hadn’t lied about Marc’s book, Nathaniel wouldn’t have torn it! (sighs)

And before you all start jumping at me saying Lila got what she deserves, I only agree partially. Ladybug, as a public figure and heroine, practically the face of Paris, acted irrationally lashing out at a bystander because of lies which were or were not believable. Lila was broadcasting a post or making the news, she was trying (poorly) to impress a boy. Ladybug gave Lila the Regina George treatment.

Yeah, so you caused an akumatized situation and Lila hates your guts. Hell, I would hate you too. That’s like a celebrity jumping at an innocent bystander when they’re whispering to their friend about a rumor that only the two of them were talking about. You can’t jump to try and stop them and should just let it dispel on its own. At that point, Lila had no real power but you just influenced her.

And… oh boy did things get worse because of this.

Look season 3 was trash (except for moments in certain episodes) and I feel talking about the infamous ‘Chameleon’ physically hurts me but… yeah gotta point out a few things. The whole episode was unrealistic, and it was an obvious ploy to be sympathetic to Marinette with Lila back… but… you’re not fooling me.

So, Lila is still on her lying game, being able to fool the students and the staff?! Okay if you believe a student has so many disabilities without any paperwork proof, you can actually get fired for that for fraud. As someone who worked with education before, that’s just pure incompetence.

So yeah, Marinette comes to school seeing the seats changes to accommodate Lila and upright begins to plot to discredit her for her lies. UM… what happened to trying to start over with Lila after failing to do so the first time?

Oh, that’s right. She gets that way (at least partly) because Lila is sitting next to Adrien. I can understand if it was because they rearranged the seating without her say so but let’s face it. Lila sitting next to Adrien was her real trigger.

So since Marinette failed to acknowledge her mistake the first time, she spends all day trying to prove Lila is lying and in return the class is angry at her. Alya even comes to point out that Marinette is jealous of Lila.

And you know what? Alya is right.

Alya knows at least what Marinette is capable of doing so when it comes to Adrien and how far she’s willing to go. Remember that Alya is the one who encouraged her to break into his locker and steal his phone. So of course, she’s worried Marinette is gonna do something to the new girl.

I don’t blame Alya for doing one of the most competent things in the show: Warning Marinette to NOT go off the handle without proof and not make herself look bad in the process.

And because Marinette failed to do so… she made Lila her enemy AGAIN. It was bad enough you had her as your enemy as Ladybug, but now you get to deal with twice the drama!

Your own fucking fault, Marinette.

Also, the advice Adrien gave? I don’t blame for him for it and neither should you. Yes, his advice is not perfect, but with the options he has on his plate, its hard to do something otherwise.

For every encounter Adrien has had with Lila, it ended up with her being akumatized or a disaster no matter how he tried to handle her. We didn’t get to see how he would resolve in Volpina because of Ladybug’s intervention, but he would try at least in Chameleon and try to get her to see she didn’t need to lie and actually tried to befriend her. At this point, Lila was already triggered by Ladybug and Marinette so she just might have to take Adrien by force instead.

At that point, Adrien just wants to stay away and which he was trying to tell Marinette don’t interact with Lila or confront her cause there’s no way to do so at this point. Maybe he was trying to tell her to wait until her rumors got discredited, but he didn’t say it clear enough for her to understand.

And keep in mind, Adrien is a sheltered child with little to zero social skills taught to him by Nathalie and Gabriel. Hell, we don’t know how his childhood was really like even with Emelie around either and Adrien seems more like the pacifist unless he needs to absolutely step in. And he did by cleaning up Marinette’s mess in ‘Ladybug’. So now he’s gotta suffer being around Lila more because of Marinette making Lila her enemy.

But once again, this is bad writing as the writers of the show obviously forgot what it’s like to live in reality. In the real world, Lila would be immediately discredited without any proof the moment she came back. Not to mention, some of the class have their own connections and have more braincells proven in the previous episodes. Google search and such. A 5-year-old wouldn’t believe these lies in these times. Hey, I believe that because I once had a kid in kindergarten during my time as an afterschool art teacher look at one of my books I illustrated before and said they liked the ‘graphics’.

Kids are fucking smarter nowadays than you think.

The only reason anyone would believe Lila’s lies is if she’s magically influenced with some kind of ‘silver tongue’ spell or something and honestly? It looks like that’s the reason.

I dunno if Thomas Astruc or Zag is trying to insult the kids/adults or insult themselves to say Paris people aren’t that smart. If it’s the latter, you should see what you are doing because I don’t want to believe that because that’s disrespectful.

I know it seems I’m trying to stand up for Lila this portion, but I’m just looking things in a  more realistic and logical way. Did Lila take things too far? Yes, waaaayyy too far and should be arrested for it since she works for Hawkmoth. But it could’ve been handled better and that makes Marinette at fault too.

Part of me wonders if she’s done this before because in Zombiezou, she also causes Chloe to ruin her gift for Ms. bustier. If Marinette didn’t antagonize Chloe in the locker in front of the class, maybe she wouldn’t have done anything. Again, I’m not saying Chloe was justified, but if that was the reason, yeah I can see her doing it for payback.

So to all those fics where I’m supposed to be ‘Boo-hoo’ for Marinette because of what Lila did? Fuck you guys because you need to dig deeper into the story to see both sides and not just make it a pity party where Marinette is the innocent victim.

It’s called “Cause and Effect”.

And considering she made Lila her enemy, Marinette is gonna get effected enough because that’s how karma works.

[suometar]

Indeed, we all have faced the issue of non-functional links. It's inconvenient in daily life, but it has more significant concequences than we ever thought of.

This article made me really understand for the first time how valuable printed information actually is and WHY we should get back into printing books as soon as possible.

Because as a ton of information is stored only online and no more in printed format, it is easy to get rid of it just by breaking the link that used to work. This happens in most cases simply by accident. But not always.

Views on this post are based on my experience as a professional web designer since early 2000's.

HOW THIS HAPPENS

URL structures are renewed (and thus broken) usually when a website is renewed or updated to meet modern standards. It is very destructive especially when the whole content management system (CMS) is changed. Usually it means that the whole way the system handles the content changes and with it the url structure.

For example that the old url domain.com/articles might after the update be domain.com/blog instead. When this happens - poof - all your old urls are all gone - even though the content might still exist.

WHY IT IS BAD

What makes url changes bad is that the old urls are still linked to from other websites. Thus all references from outside the website get broken and the information is no longer accessible from outside the website itself. This is unless the website owner makes sure the old urls are redirected to the new ones (when you type domain.com/articles to your browser you're redirected automatically to domain.com/blog)

In most cases the url change is an uninteted consequence the organisation doesn't recognise during the renewal process.

It can also be deliberate. This however isn't always just url changes but something far more malicious.

ONLINE CONTENT AND REMOVAL REQUESTS

The most vunerable content of all is the information that keeps our societies together, allows its development and last but not least allows freedom of thought and speech. These would be for example legal documentation and scientific research and access to information that you can use to educate you and allows you to make educated conclusions of the world.

All of this is mostly influenced by the way we nowadays find it. Come in Google.

Google is deliberately using algorithms that chooses the content you find. In most cases it actually offers you the information that is current and fits your search terms.

Unless the search terms are somehow controversial. Suddenly the given results on the first pages at least are no longer impartial but instead the kind of content Google WANTS you to see. This is directly affected by Google being a business instead of impartial search engine devoted to sharing and finding the information you in fact are looking for.

That is one thing.

But another is that Google is deliberately removing information from its search index (the database they use to crawl and quickly retrieve online content to respond to the search terms). Yes, in most cases this is information that is right to be removed, such as child porn. Unfortunately they also remove content, such as legal and controversial scientific content, based on court orders.

WHY REMOVING INFORMATION BASED ON ANY ORDERS IS BAD

And as we all know, everything that is online can be very easily forged. This opinion post on Washington Post tells about a case where court ordered an online service (Yelp) to remove a business review by a client. Unfortunately the lawsuit was apparently made by someone else than the business itself (though in their name).

While that case is not directly related to Google the Lumen project (which is dedicated in listing of online removal requests) lists several similar requests made directly to Google and to other online services. In 2016 a researcher found out that in fact a large number of the requests were outright Photoshop forgeries.

The online services have a hard time in knowing what is in fact real order and what is not. And THIS is what makes the removal based on requests problematic.

It gives the opportunity to forge a removal order to basically anyone who thinks some information should be removed for ANY reason. Google or Bing don't ask the court directly if the documentation is correct but instead they trust the filer of the request to be honest in their request.

WHY WE SHOULDN'T TRUST SEARCH ENGINES BLINDLY ANYMORE

We trust search engines to give us the correct information. That is basic trust people have developed towards search engines - because they USED TO BE trustworthy. They weren't maximazing profits but instead actually interested in helping information sharing.

Free and unlimited information sharing is the core on which the whole internet was built on.

If anyone can say that this or that content is solely in my opinion bad or unwanted and I want it removed from search engine, this severely disrupts information being freely available to those who seek it.

Thus it crumbles the whole basis of the internet.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO FIND THE INFORMATION YOU ACTUALLY ARE LOOKING FOR

With outdated and broken links:

Most likely the place where the broken link is covers a certain topic. Use the topic and any references you have on that place to the broken link source and search it with a search engine. Most likely the information IS still online - the old links to it just aren't working anymore.

Yes, it takes time and effort. But nothing worth doing is EASY. We just have unfortunately forgotten that.

To find the information you need a trustworthy search engine:

To do the research the most effective thing you can do is to either

Change your primary search engine to an independent and open sourced one - such as DuckDuckGo.com that doesn't decide for you what information you should find, OR

Start comparing the results of both Google AND of an independed search engine, - such as before mentioned - then read the results, and make up your mind about the subject.

As mentioned, none of this ia EASY to do. But we need to take responsibility on how we view the world AND that we stay educated.

WHY WE SHOULD GET BACK TO PRINTING BOOKS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

Printed books have been the way to preserve and relay information throughout generations for thousands of years. The format is superior: as long as it's stored in a dry and cool place and printed/written on proper paper it is usable even after a very long time. To use it doesn't require anything else but the ablity to read the characters and some light to be able to see the text - or images.

But the books aren't valuable as itself unless you find the ones you're seeking for. You need a library system and caretakers for the information - librarians.

Both of these combined you have an equivalent to a search engine - but in physical format. In the format that information has been stored and shared until this day.

When the information is solely online it is constantly vulnerable to significant threats:

losing electricity

losing the links to the content

curation of information flow based on profit calculations

the whims of someone who thinks it's wrong information and shouldn't be available.

Simply a worldwide electricity disruption - caused for example by a powerful emp or a solar flare - can make finding information online impossible and at worst, destroy it.

Yes, printed books can be burned. But when enough books are distributed worldwide the information remains physically somewhere.

And that is where printed books are far superior to anything that is stored online.

The search for the information might be far more difficult with printed books but at least it's always somewhere and at least some of it remains. It is not undestructable but you can always copy them.

Saving the information and stories in physical format has been done since humans developed the skill to relay information by drawing and later by writing. A lot of it all is still available today.

If online sources are destroyed or made impossible to find we have nothing.

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

…

Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

…

What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

…

Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

…

The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.

[hysteriapilled]

- 𝙰 𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙾𝙽 𝙴𝚁𝙴𝙽 𝙹𝙰𝙴𝙶𝙴𝚁'𝚂 𝙲𝙷𝙰𝚁𝚃 𝙱𝙴𝙲𝙰𝚄𝚂𝙴 𝙸 𝙷𝙰𝚅𝙴 𝙽𝙾𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙴𝙻𝚂𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝙳𝙾

Keep in mind that this might be inaccurate considering the information given is not canon, but from google. There will be no house readings since I can't even get a hold of his actual birth time so there is no rising sign (This is Eren's chart and how he would be if he were real, so don't take everything as factual)

𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐒𝐓 𝐎𝐅𝐅

Big 5 Analysis

- SUN IN ARIES. Your sun defines your ego, core identity, your authentic self and in my personal opinion it's not really an important placement in the chart, and more of a title basically. People born into Aries are usually perceived as loud, impulsive, raging and aggressive by others— but they're very caring and protective to the ones they love, though sometimes they sure can have bursts of anger. Eren is stubborn, he can't be chained down and refuses to sit back and watch the people he cares about get tossed around. He is a firm person, quick on his feet and rather very rushing, he's like a puppy excited to get his owner running laps around him, he's hyper and motivating; a natural leader. - MOON IN PISCES. Your moon is your emotional side, how you feel, how you perceive feelings and how you process them. Eren with moon in Pisces is definitely not surprising to me— He is dreamy, intuitive, compassionate and he's either too dependable on others or just an overthinker. Though he may not seem like it Eren is very vulnerable and even prone to getting addicted to substances (alcohol, drugs, bad habits etc.) It's not the best placement in my standpoint, as he can get very affected by his surroundings and others. He can't turn a blind eye and NOT take shit to heart and rather stores it inside and holds onto it. He's very empathetic, he feels people's emotions and feels them well, to the point that he himself experiences what they are going through. - MERCURY IN PISCES. Eren has a LOT of Pisces placements so prepare to see a ton of empathy and psychic abilities in his aspects. Your Mercury is how you think, speak and learn. I sense that Eren has really great vulnerability which might not be a good thing, he trusts people too much and rather relies on them for heaps of things, he can be easily manipulated which is why he should refrain from letting everyone in. On the other hand, he is a very dreamy person and gets lost in his imagination at times. He sees the world in another, imaginative lens, and often could find himself daydreaming randomly. I can see that Eren has a hard time letting go of the past and he can even be linked to people in his life he hadn't seen in years. In terms of rational thinking he isn't the best, as he can't distinguish the logical from the emotional which is definitely something he should work on, he gets often blinded by the illusion of his overwhelming emotions toward others. He can also definitely have an eye to art since his imagination is extravagantly wide.

- VENUS IN TAURUS. Your mercury is your idea of love and how you give it and prefer to receive it— Eren's idea of romance is full of sensuality and gifts, he'll spoil you with his utter loyalty and generally with things too. Devotion is daily, he's extremely honest and would rather die than lie to you. Emphasis on sensuality, Eren craves touch and I could sense that his love language is physical touch, he will shower you with affection and fulfill your needs any time of the day. Taurus in Venus are all about comfort and coziness with their lover, so I can see that Eren loves cuddling, massages, food, sleepovers, intimate little things like that strike a chord in his heart. He can be possessive and jealous of times, he hates change specifically big ones in relationships—He can also take a long time to get to know you and prefers taking things slow and steady rather than rushing into it. I can also feel that he loves hard-workers, people who are dedicated and responsible (that's definitely his type). - MARS IN CAPRICORN. Two words. Goal driven. Your Mars is your approach towards anger and impulses as well as your sexuality aspects. Eren is self-controlled and refuses to take orders from others, he can't be chained down not because he's stubborn, but simply because he can't allow himself to stop. He has a tendency to shut out the world to pursue his objective— he moves forward (not a pun) and is willing to fight against everything and everyone to reach his goal, he isn't petty as he considers little quarrels a waste of time and energy. He likes to focus on the big problem at hand, not how to fight and win the battle but how to prepare for conquering the war once and for all. Eren with this placement knows that he is entitled to earn what he works hard for and will not let anything stop him. Mars signs can also affect appearance so I sense that Eren has very prominent and broad cheekbones, a serious face, and a very stiff, steady voice like he's about to command something. It can also be an intimate, velvety and cold voice and on the topic of intimacy— He usually prefers seeing you face to face and rather dislikes social media flings. He comes with a natural inclination to assume a dominant role in bed and he does what doesn't bother him (kink-wise) His temper is so icy, and he could definitely be on the sadomasochism spectrum. He's very soft in nature so if something was bothering you he'd instantly be turned off. Eren can be aggressive and intense but he may not specifically get off on pain (or he may) more like he finds the idea of being in control a very satisfying idea.

𝐒𝐄��𝐎𝐍𝐃 𝐎𝐅𝐅

2. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune & Pluto Analysis

- JUPITER IN AQUARIUS. Your Jupiter is where you can receive the most luck and love, without you really doing much. It’s where you can catapult to happiness and success through quickest routes possible, within reason. I can tell from previous placements that Eren is a firm believer in standing for what you think is right. He is very opinionated and sometimes a bit too much— Some of his beliefs or theories can be brilliant and genius and others quite nonsensical and implausible, he rushes into throwing the first opinion just for the sake of throwing it first. Any analytical work about objective themes would come easily to him. Passion and enthusiasm will come astonishingly fast too as he can actually stun society with his innate knowledge with complicated subjects. Any scientific, technological, or perhaps just general abstract topics will benefit Eren greatly in subtle and/or unsubtle ways. He takes leaps of faith and believes what his eyes cannot see or what his mind cannot grasp. Simply what makes everything work out so well for him is the open minded love he puts into his theories. Sometimes though, he fears judgement people give to his methods as they are sometimes out of the box and peculiar. Eren would have to let go of his attachment to what other people think about his ways on solving or analyzing. - SATURN IN LIBRA. Your Saturn sign is your life’s obstacles and challenges, the rewards that come with time, and the discipline you need to achieve your goals. To start off with friendships, Eren cares about others and is tireless in serving others—he's also prone to putting others before him (others as in the people he cares about) And supporting his moon and mercury Pisces, he is very artistic and helps civilize those who need the lessons. The companionship he seeks can often give him solace and security, with his comrades support he feels a lot more powerful and in self-control. In relationships though Eren may tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to relationships and is afraid of rejection & may try to shut himself away or run if the going gets tough. He is very drawn to mentor types, and may often be with someone older and wiser. Despite that he still finds a way to assume the dominant role in the relationship due to his cold nature. Eren commits to artful projects, making it possible to live his dreams by seeing them to completion, he finds it very gratifying and has mental discipline when he finds activities that matches his high ideals. His sense of social justice is heightened, that could get him into law, politics and activism—His firm belief in himself also plays a big role in this, his bravery allows himself to sacrifice whatever he has to, to get the job done. Chaos, crassness, and ugliness can cause him a lot of anxiety and fear, and with his persistence to right the wrong he gets really frustrated when people don't have an outlook to life the same as his. I sense that it may be hard for Eren to accept that only he is able to control himself, and it's a hard pill for him to swallow.

- URANUS IN PISCES. As I mentioned before Eren's chart is dominated with Pisces placements, his intuition works at another wavelength than that of the common people, and for this reason, he is in a much deeper connection to the spirit world. He can sense the occult and this acts as a form of guidance for him, an anchor to support his meanderings through life’s challenges. Pair that up with his splendid imagination and innovative spirit, and you get someone who’s afraid of failure even when he’s not doing anything out of the ordinary, the worst thing that could happen to Eren is failing and losing his sense of validation. He’s a negativist ( I can see Eren as a cynical person later on in life, a realist would fit his philosophical belief) but, he should let his intuition and connection to the spirit world heal this part of his, instead of allowing everything to work against him. He won’t let himself be fooled by naïve ideals, even though he likes believing in them. He can be quite realistic and logical when the situation calls for it and that's quite ironic considering he's indulged in his imagination most of the time. - NEPTUNE IN SAGITTARIUS. This is one hell of a placement. Experimentation with different beliefs, spiritual strands, and esoteric-based teachings are all things Eren finds interest in. He cannot deny the divine existence truly and indefinitely to himself- even if he does so to others, there is always the gnawing sense that ‘there is something more,’ and one day he may regret not finding out what that is. His gift is bringing the joy of shared faith and spirituality together, making the sect he resonates with part of his life’s philosophy. We can tell by now that Eren's purpose is seeking truth, absorbing information and looking at the world in a different lens. - PLUTO IN PISCES. Shawty Bae here can also can be more passive aggressive when trying to get what he wants. This means he can be manipulative at times. This is the only time he ever makes a power play. When he is struggling to achieve something for the greater good. (THIS ACTUALLY RESONATES WITH HIS PLAN) But this desire for control is never executed maliciously. He wants things to go his way so he doesn't disappoint those who are counting on him. Eren can be very sensitive, and it’s important to him that he doesn't let anyone down. He so desperately want to help people that he sometimes sacrifices his health and well being, and even somtimes the well being of others just for the outcome to turn out best.

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐋𝐘

3. Chiron (Scar)

- CHIRON IN PISCES. Your Chiron sign in astrology shows where you sustained your deepest wound, your scar— It can never be completely healed, but they can be worked with and transmuted. Eren with Chiron in Pisces, we've already talked about many Pisces qualities in him (empathy, psychic abilities, imagination etc.) But the Chiron has a lot more depth into it, Eren might have a deep fear of being hurt by the universe or the forces at play. He might feel that the world is unfair or merciless and doesn't have his back almost every time. He has a sense of betrayal, and that leads him into cynicism (mentioned before in his Uranus placement) He felt that nobody was there for him when he needed it the most and he also feels a sense of victimization. This placement has a lot to do with the idea of FATE. Even subconsciously Eren feels he was dealt an unfair life, I can also feel that his way of coping is feeling someones grief right alongside them. Sympathyzing is definitely his way of forgetting about his own problems. Even though Eren doesn't exactly victimize himself he still can't understand why the universe is set up this way— he feels that the world isn't fair to him and his loved ones. Although all this scarring shows when he indulges himself in an immense shell of cynicism, then he hops between two places; Not feeling empathy for others since nobody offered empathy to him - or sympathyzing greatly and putting others' needs before his. It is easy for him to shut his feelings out but only with the help of substances which makes him more prone to getting addicted. This placement was created at some point in the past when Eren needed something badly and didn’t get it (sometimes the wound stems from a past life, but this stemmed from his childhood) Maybe it's because he felt insignificant to someone he felt was an idol to him, maybe this figure or idol was never there to nurture him and the probability of him having a lost close one in early childhood days is a very probable cause in how this Chiron stemmed.

BONUS:

- I get massive ISFP vibes from early Eren and INTJ from late him.

- His Venus Taurus makes him very romantic, so I feel like this would be his favorite song to dance to

[thewritershelpers]

Hi! So I'm working on a book set in a country that speaks primarily Spanish, and my characters first language is English. Since I don't speak Spanish, but that's the country's language, how should I go about writing dialogue?

Hi! That’s an interesting question. Will the story only happen in that Spanish-speaking country? What perspective are you writing in, like first person vs third person limited? Those answers might affect how you want to do it

If your character’s first language is English, are they learning Spanish and speak it occasionally, or do they already know Spanish? Because a lot of people who have learned a second language find that they gauge fluency on dreaming/thinking in that second language.

Beyond that, here are some examples of things you could do that come to mind, that I’ve seen across different types of literature:

Italicize

“Hi, how are you today?”

“Oh, muy buen. How are you?”

What that does is emphasize that the words are in a different language. I’ve seen that used both in dialogue and in regular text. For things like proper nouns and other words/ideas/foods that aren’t easily translated, that’s a good and subtle way to go about it.

Italicize but keep it in English

“Your daughter is so beautiful! She must have so many people chasing her.”

“Yes, she is very pretty.”

This one is harder to do well, in my opinion, though I have seen it work. It requires addressing it not in a breaking-the-Fourth-wall kind of way but more so with the perspective/thoughts thing like the character commenting mentally on something that was said in the other language, such as 

“Can we go over to Auntie Laura’s?”

I knew they asked something about their Tia Laura, but beyond that, I had no idea.

A third way, the harder way if you don’t speak the language, is to just write the language out and then “translate it” with your character’s response

“Estoy muy cansada, necesito dormir para manana”

Pau was right in going to bed now, we would need our rest for our early start. 

How much the language-learning plays a role in your story will affect the way you write it, too.

A final option is to not write any dialogue that would be happening in Spanish

That would be a little trickier, I think, to write but would help with the amount of research and language-checking you would need for some of the other options. The reason I think this is feasible, too, is as someone who grew up in a mixed home (Mexican dad, American mom) but didn’t grow up speaking anything other than English, whenever I’m around my cousins and tias/tios, it’s almost easier to tune out the Spanish than to try and pick out what individual words I can understand. I’ve been doing that since I was very young. Some people do better with reading than they do with listening; I do really well when I have body language and IRL context clues.

I was happy to see the smiles on everyone’s faces as they greeted each other, arms wrapping around waists and kisses being pressed on cheeks. I knew that basic greetings were being exchanged amidst the rapid-fire Spanish but didn’t even bother trying to understand. 

I realized that someone had been speaking to me when no one responded to their question, their eyes fixed firmly on mine.

So whatever you end up doing, Anon, answer those top questions first and then play around to find what works best. And don’t trust Google Translate to give you what you need: it won’t be able to help you with any dialect, vernacular, and slang differences let alone the conversational language vs proper/academic. It will never hurt to have a native-Spanish speaker look over it for you either

-S

[escapetoluna]

Writing Sibling Relationships

A sibling relationship is perhaps one of the most complicated things to realistically write about. Your character dynamics and personalities will help determine their relationships but here are some things to consider:

Building their past:

Think about how they were raised. Upbringing plays a large role in impacting a person's character, and it also helps shape relationships with siblings.

Consider their favourite memories. Good memories are important to a person, and people often seek to create new memories similar to the old good ones.  On the other side, also think about their worst memories.

Who was the oldest? Who was the baby? Birth order does have some impact on personality. It also is especially important for the earliest memories.

Think about the roles that they ended up in. Siblings do, to some extent, define themselves by how they are different from each other. They pursue different interests, take on different roles, and explore different identities. These roles can be a source of self-realisation and sometimes frustration. 

Giving siblings personalities:

Choose personality traits for each sibling. Even if the sibling is only a minor character, it's important to know their basic personality.

Think about each character's dreams, hopes, and struggles. What do they want in life? What are their goals? Every character needs something to strive for.

Figure out their insecurities. Everyone feels insecure about different things: skills, personality traits, perceived physical flaws etc.

The siblings in your story might have similar looks, qualities and characteristics. However it’s important to make them their own person too. 

Keep in mind that siblings might have the same habits, sometimes without even realising it. (Personal example- My eldest brother and I do not look the same. He has green eyes, mine are brown. I have dark hair, he’s blonde. Our faces are shaped different. He takes after our mum, I take after our dad. However, we have a lot of the same habits and mannerisms. We both carry ourselves in the same way, we both quirk our eyebrows in the same manner when confused. Little things like that, that when growing up I’ve picked up from him and vice versa.)

Things siblings do: (This is a generalisation)

Siblings know how to push each others buttons.

Usually they spend so much time with each other, they know exactly how to annoy their sibling and the best way to do it.

Whatever annoys your character, his (or her) siblings already know about it. If your character’s siblings decide to get on his nerves, it shouldn’t take them very long.

Most (if not all) siblings make fun of each other to some degree. Usually they are just messing with each other. Depending on the circumstances, the insult may be forgotten almost immediately.

But it’s important to consider how siblings react when someone else is picking on their brother or sister. A lot of siblings will get defensive in this situation.  Unless you have set up a reason otherwise, make sure your siblings know how to tease each other but also how to protect each other.

They rarely call each other “sis” or “bro” unless they’re trying to be annoying. This is seen a lot in films and TV but it’s not common. The occasional greeting like that is fine, but overusing it just sounds strange and unnatural.

Sibling conflict:

Siblings will argue other pretty much anything. Most of the time it’s just to get a reaction. Sometimes one will start an argument just because they’re bored.

The silent treatment! A lot of siblings, particularly children teenagers and young adults will give each other the silent treatment over the pettiest things. But it’s incredibly hard to ignore someone living in the same house as you for a long period of time.

The sibling on the receiving end of the silent treatment will usually do absurd and annoying things to get their brother or sister to speak. 

Common things siblings argue about:

The tv remote

Who is going to use the bathroom first

Someone is taking too long in the bathroom

Who gets to sit in the front seat of the car

Who the favourite is

Estranged siblings:

“Sibling relationships are our longest, but it’s also an accident by birth. There are no guarantees that the siblings will grow up with similar personalities, interests or like each other,”

You should be able to find plenty of conflict amongst brothers and sisters. But most of the time there is a resolution.

If you were to fall out with a friend, you can unfriend them, you can’t un-sister a sister, whether you like it or not you’re stuck with that person in some sense.

However, some siblings do fall out and never speak to each other again. It happens, but if this happens in your story there are a few things to consider: 

When asked about their family will your character acknowledge that they have siblings? Or will they claim to be an only child?

Why did they stop speaking?

Would they reconcile in times of crisis? For example, if a family member died would the siblings put aside their differences to deal with the situation?

Do they tell stories about their childhood that include the sibling? 

It’s important to remember that if someone has a sibling, a lot of their childhood memories and stories from growing up will have some reference or include that sibling. It’s hard to complete cut them out, they will be mentioned at some point. 

Given the entangled, long-lasting bond, what’s the price paid for suspending or ending it? 

Does the sibling have other brothers or sisters whose relationships are satisfying? “

“If they have no contact with a sibling, it’s losing a shared history and there can be a sense of guilt,” 

Or are your character’s relieved? Do they express a sense of relief. 

“Like the end of a marriage, sibling estrangement is always sad, even when it brings relief. It’s not what anyone hoped for, but sometimes it’s the wise and necessary choice.”

Ways of bringing together estranged siblings:

Write compassion between your characters. Show them trying to see things from the sibling’s viewpoint alongside their own.

Have them say what they want from their sibling moving forward. Don’t just have your characters vent all the time. Your reader might grow tired of that.

Confirmation of love and affection:

Are the siblings in your story the type to talk about feelings? Maybe they don’t talk about it but the feeling is still there. Consider showing the depth of their relationship through actions.  

(Personal example - When I was born my brothers were 4 and 6 years older than me. From what my mum has said they were both excited to have another sibling and would fight about who got to hold me first. When we were younger we used to cuddle on the sofa and play together, and frequently said I love you etc,  however as we got older that stopped. I can’t remember the last time I said I love you to either of them, which sounds terrible. But it doesn’t change the fact that I know they love me and that they know I love them, we just show it and say it in different ways.)

Relationships with parents:

How did parents or caregivers react to fights between siblings?

Was there parental favouritism, real or perceived? How did the non-favourite sibling(s) react?

Do your siblings stick together when arguing with their parents?

Would your characters lie in order to prevent their brother or sister being told off by their parents?

Some siblings will join forces to tease their parents. 

What if the siblings don’t have a good relationship with their parents:

If this is the case in your story, research it, google is your friend.

Try and read up on real life experiences.

Consider how the siblings view their parents. Do they stand together with the same opinion or do they have conflicting recollection of events?

Do the parents have a healthy relationship with each other? How has this impacted their children?

Writing siblings who have abusive parents:

If the siblings come from an abusive home, how has this affect their behaviour? 

Do the siblings ever talk about what happened? 

Do they have the share the same experience? Do they ever argue about the situation?

Are they over protective?

Has their own relationship become strained? Have they drifted apart?

Do the siblings ever acknowledge the past? If not, does this cause friction?

Common assumptions about sibling age order:

Oldest child: people pleasing, bossy, organised, punctual, natural leader, controlling, ambitious, expected to uphold family values, caretakers, financially intelligent, responsible

Middle child: flexible, easy going, independent, sometimes feels like life is unfair, sometimes will engage in attention-seeking behaviour, competitive.

Youngest child: silly or funny, risk-taking, creative, sometimes feels inferior, easily bores, friendly, outgoing, idealistic, the baby of the family.

Only child: close to parents, demanding, leaders, spoiled, self-absorbed, private in nature, may relate better to adults to kids their own age, independent, responsible

While these are common assumptions, they are not strictly true and it’s important to consider your characters personality before you apply any of these stereotypes because it may clash with how your character truly is.

Half siblings:

Half-siblings can run along several lines:

They might act like full siblings, depending on how long they’ve known each other.

They may view each other as space takers.

Your characters may feel “eh” about their half- sibling, they could just be someone who is there but they don’t have a relationship with. The half-sibling may even be a complete stranger.

Consider that they might be rivals. Are they friendly rivals or bitter rivals?

Don’t get caught up in trying to build their relationship based on what “should be” in accordance with society. As you establish these characters, let your own imagination lead you to what their relationship is. But remember that their relationship will be impacted on how the parents treat them too.

(@its-the-tear-in-my-heart ​ thanks for asking about sibling relationships. This post is more generalised than your question but I hope it helped in some way.)

[collegecoward]

Hey, so I graduated this past May and since then I've just been working 40 hours a week. I feel like I need to go to college to do something with my life but I feel like theres so much in my way and I havent done anything to even start and I dont have a clue what I'd want to do. I'm so unsure on how to do anything regarding financial aid or even applying to colleges. I'm also worried that it wouldn't work with my schedule for my job. I work 5 days with 2 off days and I'm on evenings so I feel like I wouldn't be able to balance work and school, but I would have to bc I'm my only financial support. Sorry for the dumping my problems, but any advice?

How To Do College 101

Congratulations on your graduation! Working a full-time job after graduation (during a freaking pandemic, no less) is no small feat either, and I applaud you for that, too. Once upon a time, I was like you: I didn’t know anything about college except that I wanted to go, and now I run a blog telling people how to go to college. College might be strange and unfamiliar now, but in time, you will learn how to do it! 

This might be my longest post, so strap in for a fun ride!! My answer comes to you in three parts:

How To Do Community College

How To Do University

How To Do Financial Aid

P.S. I’m going to say this only once, but feel free to ask why: Do not attend a for-profit college. Okay, now onto the basics!

How To Do Community College

I encourage you to read my Ode to Community College. Community colleges are real colleges designed for people who are low on funds, are working or have other responsibilities, don’t know what they want to study yet, and/or don’t know how college works yet.

Step 1: Applying

Community colleges accept anyone who applies, and the application is usually just like filling out a job application, but you will also need to send in your high school transcript, and I recommend sending any test scores. Your college may have you take a placement test to see if you’re ready for college. If you’re not quite ready, they may have you take some pre-college courses in English or math before you officially start a degree program.

Step 2: Choosing a Degree Program

Among other things, community colleges award associate’s degrees, which are essentially the first two years of a bachelor’s degree at a four-year college or university. You’ll take introductory classes like English, math, science, and social sciences, as well as electives (i.e. fun classes). Here’s a list of programs that might be offered at your community college.

Step 3: Taking the Right Classes

Make sure you stick to your college’s degree plan so that you take classes that 1) count toward your associate’s degree and 2) will transfer to a university. Most classes you take for an associate’s degree (AA, AS, or AFA) should transfer to a bachelor’s degree (BA, BS, or BFA) easily enough, but sometimes universities aren’t very transfer-friendly. The best option is to transfer to a university that has a partnership with your community college, which is information you should be able to find on your community college’s website. If your community college doesn’t have any partners, you’ll want to research the transfer policies at the universities you’re interested in and follow their guidelines on what classes to take.

Step 4: Transferring

In your last year of community college, you will apply to a four-year college or university for your bachelor’s degree. You’ll need to pick a major when you apply because for the next two years, that’s what you will be studying. Make sure you tour the university before you attend and get acclimated before your first day! 

How To Do University

Whether or not you attend community college for the first two years or enroll directly into a four-year college or university, you’ll want to understand how to navigate the basics as early as possible.

Step 1: Exploring Your Options

Use my Self-Reflection Toolkit and this quiz from Marquette University to explore potential majors. These are just meant to get you thinking and guide you as you learn more about yourself and your interests. This process will take time to research and figure out, and if you enroll directly into a four-year college you can change your major after you apply. As I mentioned, the first two years are mostly basics and figuring stuff out, so either way you have time. 

I was very bad at choosing colleges to apply to and applied almost at random. I learned a lot from those mistakes, and on my FAQ page you’ll see me trying to impart that wisdom on others. I recommend doing your research, going on virtual tours, and getting used to just looking at college websites, even if you don’t know what you want yet. Start by window shopping for colleges in your state and see what they have to offer you. College Board also has tools for finding a college that fits your needs. It’s worth starting as early as possible, and I know that you can do it. Like I said, I was really bad at it and I still made it through.

Step 2: Applying

Applying to a four-year college will take more steps than a community college application. Many colleges require letters of recommendation, essays, and application fees (look on their websites for fee waivers). More information is on my FAQ page, of course, but be prepared to complete these steps before application deadlines. Each college sets its own deadline, but if you want to go next year, you’ll likely need to apply by January or February. Applying can be daunting, but you will need to do it at some point, even if you go to community college first. 

Step 3: Finding Resources

Access any and all resources your university offers, which will include advising, counseling, career services, and more. The same is true at a community college, but I would argue it’s even more true at a university. You might find out about internships, research opportunities, fun events, and all that stuff that excited you when you saw it on your university’s website! Even if you don’t feel like you need resources, you’re paying for them, so you might as well use them! Often people won’t know how to help you unless you tell them you’re struggling, like how you told me what you’re going through and I wrote a post that’s turning into a short novel! (I’ll be done soon, I promise.)

Step 4: Taking The Right Classes

Just like at a community college, you want to make sure you’re taking classes that count toward your degree and interest you. Make sure you’re following the prescribed degree plan on your university’s website and communicated by your advisor. If you find that you’ve chosen a major that doesn’t fit your interests, make sure you speak with your professors, your advisor, and anyone else whose opinion you trust.

How To Do Financial Aid

Step 1: Understanding The Basics

There are three major types of financial aid: loans (money you have to pay back after you graduate), grants (government money you’re awarded based on your financial need that you don’t have to pay back), and scholarships (money from a college or other source that is awarded for any reason that you don’t have to pay back). Loans might come from the government, your college, or a bank. I recommend borrowing from the federal government because the interest is so low (basically, it’s cheaper to pay off than a bank loan).

Step 2: Filling Out FAFSA

If you want to go to college next fall, or if you just want to do a practice round, fill out FAFSA now. I’m assuming you’re under 24, so you will need your parents’ tax information even if they’re not going to help you pay for college. Filling out FAFSA will never, not ever ever ever require you or your parents to take out any loans. Rather, FAFSA gives you access to any need-based financial aid you might be eligible for, whether that aid comes from the government or not. Loans agreements are a totally separate form, and you can take some loans without your parents’ help. If you’re not eligible for FAFSA, check whether your state or college has its own FAFSA alternative.

Step 3: Reading Your Award Letter

After a college sends an acceptance letter, they will also send a financial aid award letter. The letter will show you how much you’ve been awarded in scholarships and grants and how much you can take out in loans from the federal government or the college itself. You should compare your financial aid amount to the total cost of attendance, will you can find on the college’s financial aid webpage. The total cost of attendance is how much it costs to pay for tuition, fees, housing, and a rough estimate of your other living expenses. Basically, it’s how much it costs to be a student for one year.

As you said, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to work 40 hours while maintaining good grades, so may need to be frugal and creative to fill in any gaps financial aid didn’t cover. Private colleges tend to have a really big “sticker price,” but may offer generous scholarships as discounts, whereas public colleges tend to be cheaper and may have (large and small) scholarships to help you pay.

Step 4: Applying

In addition to the scholarships that you may be automatically awarded if you meet certain criteria, your colleges may also have scholarships that you have to apply for by yourself. This information will be located on a college’s financial aid webpage. There are also scholarships from nonprofit organizations and businesses. Visit my resources page for info, ask people you know if they’re aware of any scholarships, ask your boss and coworkers, and ask Google for “scholarships in [your town].”

Okay, I threw a lot at you, but those are the basics as I see them! You can totally do this. It’s going to be a big learning curve, but the payoffs will be big. And you can always come back here for more advice and reassurance. I’m proud of you already for thinking of your future and doing what you can to support yourself and your learning.

[jcisthebestfightme]

BJYX Food Blog

Ahhhhhh I love food so much!!!! hahahaha So I decided to record down all the times food show how much they love each other. This is mostly just for me. Since this is a “food blog”, instead of “evidence” which you can find elsewhere in other people’s analysis posts, I will instead include yummy photos of food. Will continue to update this list. 

Disclaimer: All fanfiction. 

1) Pancake - I talked about this in detail here. In summary, dd is bragging about how “homey” he is that he can make pancake. The recipe uses butter, something only people that bake in China will have. Gg likes to bake cookies (even sugar-free one, haha gg is more detail-orientated and health conscious than me) and bread. Apparently gg also loves cheese and dd mentioned that his pancake has cheese.

2) Love on the Rocks or Love’s Water - This supper famous drink in China’s Starbucks is actually black currant juice + raspberry juice + black tea. You can make it easily at home (it’s not available in U.S. Starbucks). Because of BJYX, you can order it as “Love’s Water” directly at Starbucks in Chinese (Yes, Starbucks knows about them.) Why is it call Love’s Water? It’s red, the color of love while also sweet and sour. Also, it’s actually gg’s favorite drink at Starbucks. You can often seen him drinking it during the filming of the Untamed. What about dd? It’s been mention by gg that dd only drinks water. However, during Untamed filming, dd can also be seen drinking Love’s Water from Starbucks. Does love change a person’s preference in drinks?

3) Green tea - We��ve all seen the BTS where they share green tea from the same bottle, twice. However, what’s even more interesting is that dd kept the preference of drinking green tea even after filming. Fans have caught dd drinking green tea during ttxs taping and there are pictures of bottle of green tea in his van. He’s also mention liking green tea with dls on ttxs.

4) Hot pot

a. Soup - Gg used to say because he’s from Chongqing, he likes spicy hotpot. However, after 2018, he mentioned that he now like twin-sided pot (half spicy, half not). Is he sharing a pot with someone who doesn’t eat spicy food that much? In clips from early 2018, we see dd not being able to handle spicy food. However, in 2020, we see him ordering a completely spicy soup base (him being the only one out of the 4 people to do so). What changed for both of them?

b. Sauce - In Chongqing where gg is from, you eat hotpot with a spicy oil sauce. Gg used to say that was what he preferred. However, in an interview, he picked sesame sauce over the spicy oil sauce. He also mentions that he loves the sauce with sweet garlic. If you go back to old video of dd, he has always love sesame sauce with garlic. He also mentioned in ttysj earlier this year that he loves hot pot with sesame sauce with sweet garlic. However, in j5, we see him eating his hot pot with spicy oil sauce. What happened? Are they trying to become each other?

Edit - dd was asked recently why he changed from his sesame sauce to spicy oil sauce and he said “I learned it from a friend I met from filming.” And he said it’s because it makes the hot pot less spicy, and most important, the flavor suits him.

c. Dried yamakurage - Ngl, I’ve never heard of this vegetable before today. Many people from different parts of China was in the same boat. Google search told me that it’s a vegetable they like to add in hot pot in Chongqing. Dd mentioned in ttxs that he likes this vegetable. In j5, you can also find this vegetable on the table.

d. “Treasure in the palm” - What is that? Ya, I had no idea either until dd ordered it for his hotpot. (Many other Chinese audience on WB also has never heard of it.) Apparently it’s the ligament in the middle of a chicken’s claw. I did some Google research and it seems like it’s mostly eaten bbq style or stir fry. So I searched “掌中宝” + hotpot and got the result that it’s eaten in hotpot in....drumroll....Chongqing! (Yes, where gg is from.) So ya......

e. Cow stomach - Another thing dd ordered. This time, this is something dd has always like to eat and has said it since 2017. However, it’s gg that mentioned in an interview that he also like to eat this for his hot pot now. Previously, when asked what his favorite hot pot meat is, he said “beef.” Maybe he just suddenly change his mood?

I just found these amazing videos from this Youtube Channel about Szechuan (around the area gg is from) hotpot so check them out for more information.

5) Zongzi - Where gg is from (southern China), we’re use to eating savory Zongzi with meat, peanuts, eggs, etc inside. But where dd is from (northern China), they think zongzi should be sweet with red bean, etc.. During an interview when ask to pick between sweet vs savory zongzi, gg immediately picked savory. However, dd wavered and then picked savory at the end. 

6) Eggplant - Gg said that he eats anything except eggplant because he once threw up when he was younger eating eggplant and it left a trauma on him. Unfortunately for him, the prepared food during CQL had a lot of eggplant because it was in season where they were filming. The actor of LXC during a livestream also mentioned that gg doesn’t like to eat eggplant. Then he followed up by saying that dd loves to eat eggplant. But if you watch ttxs, none of the host ever mentions dd likes eggplant (they constantly mention that he loves cilantro, durian, snail rice noodles, etc.). Also in an episode when there was eggplant, dd didn’t actively try to eat some. So maybe during their filming time, someone doesn’t like to eat eggplant and gave theirs to another person, causing LXC’s confusion?

From my own opinion, I think gg is the type of person that values food a lot. You can see him craving certain food and be very picky about the type of food he likes to eat. He also knows how to cook well so his standard for good food is high. I think dd is the type of person that likes food but isn’t super picky of the type of food he eats, as long as it’s good, he’s happy. So he’s more likely to just enjoy the same food that gg likes because that will make both of them happy. I don’t think either of them purposefully change their food preference for each other but more that your food habit changes naturally when you spend a lot time with another person. 

7. Cough Drop

When watching Street Dancing, there was a clip of all the team leaders sitting down watching and dd pulled out a “candy.” The leader next to him asked him if he was eating candy and he pulled out a pack and shared it with others. He even reached over to make sure he shared his candy with everyone. It was such a cute moment and looked like elementary school children sharing snacks. It’s cute and that’s it, right?

Nope, bxg have to live up to the title of “Detective Conan/Sherlock Holmes”. People start digging through old pictures and found one where they saw the same brand “candy”, which was actually cough drops in gg’s back from several years back. The version dd was eating was a “peach flavor version” meant for children. What was interesting is that he ate the peach version himself but shared a different version with others. This was confirm by the company that made the cough drops. (CPN) It’s possible that he’s savoring the peach ones for himself because gg gave them to him specially.

So gg and dd have the same cough drop. That’s it, right? Nope, more Detective Conan popped out and found several videos of fan-meeting in Thailand when gg was eating a cough drop and dd was coughing. Then gg asked some assistant for the cough drop, yes the same exact brand, and then handed them to dd. You can also see dd have something in this mouth before he went on stage. This tells us that gg has definitely given dd this cough drop before.

But are we sure that the supply of cough drop dd has is from gg? Probably, because of what happen in XGDS. During XGDS, dd was eating a cough drop. Normally, other friends, like the people in street dancing will see that and say, “oh you’re eating a candy?” But when gg saw, he asked “does your throat hurt?” This means that gg knew that dd was eating a cough drop immediately. How would he know that? Unless he’s the one who gave it to him. (This story has more logic and evidence than papers I’ve read in Cell/Nature/Science.)

Fun fact - some fan bought it and said it taste terrible LOL It taste too sweet on the outside and taste like medicine on the inside (which it is technically herbal medicine.) So don’t recommend trying it.

[ds9-mug]

this blog makes me want to see if there are actual mugs like this tbh

Hey anon! Sorry this one took me a little bit to respond to. (And it’ll be long so bear with me if you’d like and ignore if you don’t care!)

So in short, yes! There are mugs like this out there as far as I can tell from my various mug research adventures. Now even though this blog might suggest otherwise, I really am not an expert on mug history. I am merely just an appreciator of them and their colors and forms! (honestly the reason I started this blog haha)

In general, I’ve found that these mugs can be referred to as “no-spill” mugs. Searching this on google will get you a mix of all the mug styles featured in the show. Basically, I think these mugs were designed with a wider base so they wouldn’t tip over as easily during travel (either by boat, car, train, etc.)

Makes sense when you think about space travel but ds9 was a station...(again my confusion about the need for the defiant travel mugs resurfaces)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So if you were looking to get a mug in real life from what I’ve seen you probably have around four options.

1. The little ones with the distinct ds9 style (often light blue in the show) seem to be most often sold as vintage items. They tend to either be referred to as “Feltman Langer” mugs (history on this) or just “no-spill” mugs. A lot of these ones have weird/novelty designs on them since I think they were typically sold as travel souvenirs! A lot of nautical themed ones too. (I’d check sites like EBay and Etsy for these)

Examples:

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2. I’ve seen the larger mugs (often burgundy or dark green in the show) sold as “Hotjo” mugs. These ones are close to the style of mugs in the show but tend to come in brighter colors with plain handles. They seem like the most available type of mug out there but kind of expensive! (At least a little to expensive for me since l’ve seen them cost between $18-30+ dollars plus shipping) Check amazon (yuck) and other sites that might sell mugs secondhand like this.

Examples of these:

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3. Another way I’ve seen the ds9 mugs for sale (although not as common and way more expensive than the first two) are mugs sold as actual ds9 replica mugs. In my opinion this isn’t really necessary since the options I mentioned before seem more achievable. But if you’re really into accuracy and want a mug that looks exactly like one in the show this could be an option for you :)

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4. And the last way I’ve seen people get ds9 mugs in real life is to make them! Some people have amazing skills with pottery and are able to design their own mugs! With this option you probably have the most control over the color and design of your mug so that’s really cool. There are also artists out there that sell mugs they make (like this Etsy artist!).

Example from Etsy artist pagepottery:

I’ve also seen a lot of people 3D print them. I’m not an expert on how that works but it seems like some people have shared the pattern?design? or whatever they use to print them online. Like this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok sorry this was so long but I hope this helps some of you on your journey to getting your own mug! They are out there, you just have to search around a bit haha. Also, I’m not really advocating for any one of these options more than another so....if you want a mug,

🍻✨GET/MAKE YOURSELF A MUG✨🍻

FINALLY, if you do get a mug you should send me a pic/tag me on the post because I want to SEE. I’ve never had a blog where I used the submission box function but this would the best reason for me to learn.

[crystalninjaphoenix]

The Magic Circle

A JSE Fanfic

Hey, who’s excited for my first non-AU piece in a long time? Who’s excited for my first one-shot in like forever? If you’re excited for either of those things, then this is the piece for you :D I took some inspiration from Marvin’s video on Halloween to come up with this. Here, Marvin meets a magic group for the first time. Let’s see what happens :)

It’s a bright summer day outside. The sun is still high in the sky, despite it being almost five o’clock. There are people walking around the city streets, either going somewhere or even just taking a walk. Birds are chirping on top of the power lines and in the trees planted along the sidewalk. And Marvin was locked inside his room trying not to break something in frustration.

“Oh my goooood.” He puts his head down on the desk surface with a bit more force than necessary. It hurts, but he doesn’t mind. “Fuuuuuck offffff.” The desk before him is lit up with a lamp, despite there being sufficient light coming from the window. The lamp shines down on a laptop, open to a Google Docs document, and a leatherbound book, open to blank pages. Marvin drops his pen down on the desk. “Fuck it.” And with that, he pushes his chair back and heads over to the room’s door, unlocking it and heading outside.

He goes down the hall to the stairs, then down to the first floor. For a moment, he stops and blinks. His eyes feel...weird. Well, it makes sense. He’s spent almost all day staring at a computer screen or a blank page. The only time he wasn’t was when he was going to the bathroom. That probably wasn’t good for his eyes.

According to the wall clock in the downstairs hallway, he’s been trying for nearly five hours. That explains why he’s so hungry. Marvin heads into the kitchen and starts looking through the cabinets for something quick but filling.

Someone knocks on the doorframe behind him. Marvin jumps, and spins around. JJ is standing there. He waves. Hello, Marvin. Did you finish?

Marvin snorts and rolls his eyes. “Oh, I wish. I’ve done like...three pages. God. Fuck.”

Oh dear...JJ frowns. What’s wrong?

“I dunno.” Marvin rubs his eyes. “I just keep getting distracted. Opening up YouTube and stuff. God, it’s just so boring. Why do I even need to write it all down in a book? All my spells and shit are saved online.”

Some people are sticklers for tradition, JJ points out. But anyway, maybe you should take a break. You haven’t eaten anything, have you?

“Uh...no. That’s why I’m here.” Marvin resumes rummaging through the cabinets. “Do we have any crisps? I’m thinking of making nachos.”

You’re not just going to eat nachos, you haven’t had anything since you woke up at ten. JJ walks over and slowly pushes the door to the cabinet closed. Here, go sit down in the dining room. I’ll make you something.

“C’mon, JJ, you don’t have to. You were probably doing something else, don’t stop that for me.”

I was going to make dinner anyway, JJ shrugs. I know you don’t eat until later, usually, but please make an exception. You can’t work on that grimoire if you collapse from hunger.

Marvin sighs. “Yeah. Thanks.” He bumps his shoulder against JJ’s—a sign of affection that could easily be mistaken for clumsiness—and heads into the dining room.

He wishes he’d never found out about the greater magical community. Ever since he had, all it meant were problems. He had to learn all about the structure of this community, about how this organization called the ABIM made laws, about how certain spells were supposed to be regulated, about how things like wands, crystal balls, and other magical aides were supposed to be made certain ways. Marvin had always done his own thing. He didn’t exactly think he was the only person in the world with magic—after all, if that was the case, who wrote down all the spells he found online? But it hadn’t exactly registered that they were probably organized somehow, and that he should probably go look for others. Thanks to his total lack of searching for other magicians, the ABIM hadn’t realized he existed until about two months ago.

But now they know. And Marvin has to learn and keep up with a bunch of rules and regulations. The one that’s giving him the most trouble is the existence of a “grimoire.” Apparently, magicians are required to write down all the spells they know, and keep them in one place. And no, the document where Marvin had copy-pasted all the spells he’d found online doesn’t count. So now he’s spent the last week or so struggling to transcribe the online document into the book he’d purchased. Progress is...slow. Marvin just can’t focus on something as unstimulating as copying words down. There’s not even any new information to process.

Luckily, eating dinner helped him get some energy back. But when it’s all said and done, and he pushes away his plate, he’s dreading going back upstairs to try and ultimately fail some more. “Thanks, JJ,” he says.

You already said so, and you’re still welcome, JJ says. Then he pauses. Is there anyone who could help you with this? Other magicians lately?

Marvin groans. “Yeah, I guess I know some, but...I don’t wanna.”

Yes, we know, you’re very stubborn, JJ signs patiently.

“I can figure this out,” Marvin insists. “I can do things on my own!”

Except for making dinner, apparently.

Marvin can’t help but laugh. “Ah, ya got me there.” He sighs, and stares absently out the window. “Look, all the magicians I’ve met so far are part of this government group. And I don’t like them.”

Well, if you ask them for help, perhaps your opinion on that would change, JJ suggests.

“Well I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place if it wasn’t for their stupid fucking law!” Marvin snaps. Then he winces. “Sorry, didn’t mean to yell at you. I’m just...tired.”

JJ nods. Maybe you should stop for the night. It could be easier in the morning.

“Maybe.”

And also, if you keep getting distracted, have you tried putting on music? Or perhaps doing something with your spare hand while you write? That helps me.

“Maybe.” Marvin’s still uncertain.

JJ pushes his chair back and stands up. Also, can you please do the dishes?

“What?! But you cooked!”

Exactly, and we both ate it, so it’s only fair we both do something about it.

“Oh come on, I’m all tired, please?”

JJ merely folds his arms and stares at Marvin.

“Alright, fine,” Marvin relents. “I’ve been sitting all day, might as well do something a bit active.”

Oh thank you! JJ says, beaming.

“Heh, act like you didn’t twist my arm,” Marvin mutters, shaking his head affectionately.

———————

Later that night, Marvin finds he’s having trouble going to sleep. He keeps thinking about JJ’s suggestion, the one about asking other magicians for help. Sure, he isn’t exactly fond of the ABIM magicians he’s met so far. But maybe someone else...then again, perhaps the problem with transcribing his spells is just with him, and not with the actual subject matter.

Still, it can’t hurt to get a second opinion, right? But how to find the magicians?

An idea starts to form in his mind. Marvin gets out of bed and walks over to the desk. His laptop is still set up from that day. He powers it on. The time on the computer clock reads 11:20pm. Wow, he’d only been trying to get to sleep for an hour, he thought it was longer. Anyway, he goes back to the document of his spells, searching through them for one specific spell.

Yes, there it is. The title is “Magic Minds,” a tracking spell he’d recently picked up. It’s supposed to be able to guide a magician to other magicians. Marvin hasn’t used it yet, since he had no real reason to. He didn’t want to run into magicians before, but why not now?

Marvin grabs his phone from where it was charging, and quickly changes out of pajamas and into regular clothes. He pauses, then also grabs his cape from his closet. There’s no real reason to wear it, but it would make him feel a bit better. And with all this, he heads downstairs and outside.

The spell is easy enough to cast. He’s done tracking spells before, and they all require the same basic steps. An incantation or a few gestures, then you follow whatever visual cue the spell uses to find your target.

He turns his wand over in his hands, flicking it upward, downward, side to side. Green sparks left behind by the movements make a cross, +, hovering in the air. Technically he could have used his hands, but he likes the wand. And with the cross sign hovering there, Marvin whispers a word, and blows on the middle of the cross. A wisp of green light dances out from the breath, and hits the cross. From the spot of impact, the cross turns from green to white, and falls down to be horizontal, parallel to the ground. It spins, reorienting itself, then one leg of the cross turns red as the cross settles, pointing somewhere. Marvin heads in that direction.

The cross acts as a compass, pointing in one direction. He hopes it’s not too far away. People would think it’s weird, seeing one guy with a magic compass in a cape wandering around the city at night. But unfortunately, it turns out to be far enough that he regrets not taking the bus. Then he remembers that the buses don’t run this late at night, and regrets not doing this in the daytime. How is he simultaneously the most impulsive and least impulsive person he knows?

He makes his way to a section of the city full of identical, red-bricked terrace houses. The compass starts glowing brighter. That must mean he’s getting closer. Though, looking around and seeing nothing but residential buildings around, he’s not sure he wants to break in to someone’s house. This situation doesn’t exactly call for it. He’ll probably just write down the address.

The compass flickers, drawing him out of his train of thought. It locks onto one direction, flares brightly, and then dies. Marvin growls, frustrated. This isn’t the time for the spell to fail!

“You couldn’t have waited to put it on?”

Marvin jumps a bit at the voice, and ducks into the nearest alley way. He glances around, and sees a pair of people on the other side of the street, walking. Oddly enough, one of them is wearing a black cloak. No...it can’t be this easy...

“Oh, who’s out to see it?” a different voice says. “It’s late.”

“It’s a busy city, you’re just lucky no one’s out in this section,” the first voice snaps.

The pair walks up to one of the houses, standing on the doorstep. They continue to whisper to each other, too quiet for Marvin to hear on the other side of the street. After a while, the door opens, and the two of them disappear inside.

Strange...Marvin walks out of the alleyway, staring at the house on the other side of the street. What’s this all about? He glances around, making sure there are no cars or people coming, then runs across the street, stopping outside the house. He pauses, then glances into the window quickly. The inside doesn’t look any different from an average house, but he’s not sure since he ducks away quickly so nobody inside will notice him. Though strangely, there aren’t any people inside, even though there must have been at least three. He glances back in, just to make sure they aren’t anywhere.

It’s then that he notices something strange. The image through the window is...shimmering. Like a heat wave in the air. But the glass isn’t warped or anything that would cause that effect. On a whim, Marvin presses a finger to the window pane.

And surprisingly, the window appears to shiver. A wave of warm yellow light ripples out from the point of contact, just like water across the surface of a still pond. Slowly, the effect ends, and once it does, Marvin can see people gathered in the living room. And they’re all wearing black cloaks.

What was this? A magic gathering? Marvin’s curiosity grabs a hold of him. He has to get inside. But how?

He gets out his phone, looking through the spells he has gathered again. There should be an invisibility one here somewhere. He hadn’t used it since his days as a stage magician, but he must still have it. Though it takes a while of scrolling, he does eventually find it. It’s just an incantation, but it requires the magician to use absolute focus as long as they want to remain invisible. He always had trouble with that part, which is why he gave up on using it as soon as his career ended. Until now, he thought it was only good for escape tricks.

Scanning the incantation a couple times to make sure he knows it, Marvin takes a deep breath. He puts his phone back, then rings the doorbell and quickly whispers the incantation. A rush of cool flows over him, like suddenly walking out of a heated building into a cold outside, and when he next looks down, he can’t see his own body. He gasps in triumph, but then he sees his body flicker, and returns to concentrating on staying invisible.

The door opens, and a man in a cloak looks around. Marvin ducks past him, and luckily just barely avoids brushing against him. “Hello?” the man calls. A few moments pass, and the man shakes his head and closes the door.

Marvin finds himself standing in a living room, decorated in warm colors. At least ten people are gathered, all wearing black cloaks, though it appears they’re wearing regular street clothes under them. There’s a coffee table in the middle of the room, with a few various desserts lined up on it. A low buzz of chatter fills the air.

“What was it, Callisto?” a woman asks.

The man who opened the door shakes his head. “Nobody was there. Probably some kids’ prank.”

“In the middle of the night?” the woman asks doubtfully.

“You don’t know this neighborhood,” the man—Castillo—grumbles.

“You should have taken the cloak off before answering!” Someone else says.

“Shut up Basil, nobody would’ve cared,” Castillo snaps.

Marvin walks closer into the gathering, trying not to be distracted by the various conversations. It was difficult. Words kept sneaking into his awareness despite his best efforts. No, stay invisible. Stay invisible. Complete focus.

“Why does everyone keep bringing desserts to the meeting?” A woman nearby complains.

“Because it tastes fucking good, duh,” another woman next to her says.

“Can we get started already?” asks a man. “Hey Castillo! Everyone’s here, right? Can we get started?”

“Jeez, who lit the fire under your pants, Leo?” Someone mutters.

“Hey, I’m only pointing out that it’s almost midnight, Lily,” Leo says. “We’re running out of time!”

“Alright, Leo’s right, we’re getting close to the time,” Castillo sighs. “Alright, listen up everyone! We’re heading down to the basement to get started!”

A wave of chatter breaks out, and everyone files out of the room. Marvin rushes to the side in order to avoid anyone bumping into him. He watches silently as they all move into the hall and then down a set of stairs. What are they doing? He hesitates, then follows cautiously. A bunch of people in cloaks heading down to a basement for some sort of ritual? Every movie, book, and game ever says that’s a shady thing and should not be checked out. Yet he’s so curious. Is this what other magicians do?

The staircase isn’t too long, and it opens up into a large, wide room. Marvin was expecting a concrete floor and visible rafters, but it looks more like an entertainment room. The walls were painted a pale yellow, the floor was mostly carpeted, there were sofas and chairs and even one of those huge beanbags. It’s lit up by lightbulbs mounted directly into the ceiling, which makes it look just like any other household room. The only thing different is a square section of dark hardwood floor with a circle drawn on it in, well, what looks like salt. A few tall candles sit around the edges of the circle, in alternating purple and orange colors.

Marvin walks closer to the circle. There are some symbols drawn around its edge, also in salt. He’s surprised to realize he doesn’t recognize any of them. They’re not part of any runes he knows. But he does feel like he’s seen them before, somewhere else. Maybe it’s a different runic alphabet? But what does this mean?

“Hey, did you see that?” someone asks.

“See what?”

“I dunno, I thought...nevermind.”

“C’mon, Morgana.”

“Well, I just thought it looked like a person out of the corner of my eye.”

Marvin inhales sharply and goes back to concentrating on staying invisible. This is the last place he wants that to wear off.

“It’s five minutes to midnight!” Castillo calls. “Everyone in position!”

There’s a bit of awkward shuffling as the group moves to stand around the circle. A few people whisper about watching the edge of the salt to make sure it doesn’t get knocked out of place. “Someone get the lights,” Castillo says.

“Uh, shouldn’t we light the candles first so it’s not dark?” Basil points out.

“Oh, I have a lighter!” Morgana volunteers.

“Oh yeah.” Castillo nods. “Mor, you light the candles. Uh, James, you’re closest to the lights, knock them out, will you?”

“Everyone watch their hems,” Morgana says as she starts going around the edge of the circle and lighting the candles. Once they’re all lit, a man dashes over to the wall and hits the light switch, plunging the room into darkness except for the candlelight.

“Hands, everyone,” Castillo instructs. Everyone grabs their neighbors’ hands, forming a connected circle. “Two minutes to midnight. Time to start. Make sure you chime in at the right time.”

Silence falls. Marvin holds his breath, waiting for something to happen. And soon, the circle starts murmuring. No, it’s not just that, they’re actually chanting, all in a low, quiet voice. More voices join in, and they all get louder. Harmonies break off as different strings of words jump in, until the group is singing, their voices echoing off the walls.

Lines appear on the floor inside the circle. Lines of orange light, each one starting at the feet of one of the magicians, then ending at the feet of another. There were so many, connecting each magician to every other member of the group. The light coming from them grew brighter, and then—

SNAP!

Sparks flew into the air in the center of the circle. Quicker than what should be possible, they grow into a fire, hovering about three feet off the ground. The flames start orange, and then flicker between different colors—red, yellow, green, purple, blue, pink, white, and everything in between. It was as if a firework had gone off in the room, completely contained within a small part of the air. Marvin couldn’t help but gasp. And, as he stared closer into the fire, he realized there weren’t just colors...there were images as well. Shapes of people and objects forming scenes. They pass by too quickly for him to fully make out.

The chanting reaches a crescendo, and the fire breaks down into small balls of flame. Each one shoots toward one of the magicians, disappearing into their chests. For a moment, all the magicians glow with the colors of the fire. And then it fades. The lines on the floor disappear, and the magicians slowly stop their chants.

There’s a brief moment of quiet, like the heavy sort of silence one hears after having finished a good book and absorbing the story it contained. And then: “James, can you get the lights again?”

The man from before walks over to turn on the light switch. Everyone gasps and blinks in the suddenly bright room. Idle chatter starts up.

“Hey wait a minute, who’s that?!”

Marvin gasps as one of the magicians points at him. They all turn to look, and he realizes too late that he’d forgotten to concentrate on the invisibility spell.

“Who are you?!”

“What are you doing here?!”

“How’d you get in?!”

And Marvin panics. He turns and runs up the stairs, hearing the magicians shout behind him. Skipping the last step, he bursts out into the first floor hallway and starts to sprint for the front door.

Someone shouts something, and there’s a burst of red light. Then only blackness.

———————

Marvin only realizes he lost consciousness once he starts regaining it. He groans, feeling a headache spike in his temples, and opens his eyes.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” A man is sitting next to him, wearing a black cloak. It takes Marvin a moment to recognize him as the Castillo guy. But upon recognition, he bolts upright. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down!” Castillo holds his hands up, slightly pushing Marvin back down. “You’re not in any trouble. Persephone hit you with a blackout spell, but she’s sorry about that.” He glares to the side. “Riiight?”

Every other cloaked magician is standing nearby. They’re all back in the living room from before, with Marvin lying on one of the sofas. “Uh, yeah, really sorry,” a woman says. “I freaked out and acted on instinct.”

“How are you feeling?” Castillo asks, turning back to Marvin. “Some people have allergic reactions to blackout spells. Are you having any trouble breathing?”

Marvin doesn’t answer, looking wide-eyed at the people around him. Now that he’s actively facing the prospect of talking to other magicians, his throat has closed up. It’s probably made worse by the fact that he technically broke into their secret meeting.

“Uh, sir?” Castillo reaches out and makes to grab Marvin’s arm.

“Don’t!” Marvin flinches away. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

“Oh, okay, sorry!” Castillo sharply withdraws. “Just wanted to be sure you were breathing.”

“Yeah, well, I’m fine, so don’t touch me,” Marvin grumbles. He shifts awkwardly, glancing around at the others. They’re starting to mutter among themselves. He can’t tell what they’re saying, and that makes him nervous. Are they mad at him? It would be understandable. But he’s terrible with tone of voice, so he can’t even tell, and the uncertainty makes him even more worried.

“I got it, no worries.” Castillo gives a friendly smile, no doubt meant to reassure Marvin. “But you are okay, right?”

“Yeah, fine,” Marvin mutters.

“That’s good,” Castillo nods. “Um...do you mind if I ask how you got here? This house is warded from any teleportations.”

“Yeah, if you guys tell me who you are first,” Marvin countered.

“We’re the Magic Circle, duh,” one of the other magicians says.

“Well I’ve never fucking heard of the Magic Circle, so excuse me for not knowing!” Marvin sits up on the sofa, scooting away from Castillo.

“Huh? Really?” Castillo looks puzzled. “Well, specifically, we’re the Mirygale chapter of the Magic Circle, it’s a nationwide organization.”

“Are you guys like a coven or something?” Marvin asks.

“We’re just a group, man,” another magician says. “We meet up, cast spells together, not that hard to grasp.”

“I’ve never heard of magic groups,” Marvin says warily.

Castillo blinks. “Seriously?”

“Well, I know the ABIM guys,” Marvin admits. “But that’s it.”

“ABIM is different,” Castillo says dismissively. “They’re like a government, and a loose one at that.” He pauses. “Are you...self-taught?”

“Yeah. Why the fuck does that matter?” Marvin demands.

It must have mattered significantly, because a chorus of “ohhhhhh” passed through the group. “Ah, that explains why you don’t know about magic groups,” Castillo says. “You’re a bit old for being self-taught, though. Most magicians from outside a magical family find—”

“—find out about the greater magic community when they’re in college, yeah, I know, I’ve heard that speech before,” Marvin says through clenched teeth. “So I’m a few years late, I was busy. Anyway, what are magic groups? Just like, magicians gathered together? Is that allowed? What do the ABIM think?”

Castillo laughs. “The Magic Circle is much older than the Association, they couldn’t get rid of us if they wanted to.” He shrugs. “Well, magic groups aren’t too hard to figure out. It’s just a bunch of magicians gathered together.” He sweeps his arm around the room. “Spells cast by a group are more powerful than just a single magician alone. We share spells with each other, come to each others’ aid in times of magical crisis, study magic together...they say two heads are better than one, you know? Stronger in numbers.”

Marvin nods slowly. “So...what were you doing in the basement?”

“That? That was a combination divination and prosperity spell,” Castillo explains. “Something like that you can only get in a group. It shows us significant events in the next year, then gives us good luck.”

“Never heard of a good luck spell...” Marvin mutters.

“Well, you’ve been practicing on your own, and doing luck spells on your own is a tricky business,” Castillo says. “So now it’s our turn. How’d you get inside?”

Marvin shifts uncomfortably, then reluctantly explains the whole thing with the Magic Minds spell and the invisibility.

“Ohhh, I know that spell!” One of the magicians says excitedly. “But you’re supposed to include your target’s full name in the incantation, otherwise it’ll just lead you to the nearest magician.”

“Why were you looking for magicians?” Another one asks.

Marvin looks down. Now that the time has come for it, he’s kind of embarrassed. “I dunno, I...sort of wanted help with this grimoire thing. But it’s stupid. Nevermind.”

“Huh? What kind of help?” Castillo asks. “You know the Magic Minds spell and an invisibility spell, you seem pretty knowledgeable.”

Marvin scowls. “Well, apparently, it needs to be in a book, not online at all. Which is fucking dumb. Why do I have to copy it all over?! It’s all already there!”

“Have you tried listening to a podcast while doing it?” One of the magicians suggests. “It gives you something to focus on.”

Castillo chuckles. “Well, if it’s a problem with focus, I don’t know if magicians specifically could help.”

“Shut up,” Marvin mutters. “Maybe there’s a spell to copy it all over for me—”

“If you found one, let me know, will you?” Castillo jokes.

Marvin glares at him, then stands up. “Well, I’m sorry for interrupting your Magic Circle shit, I’ll just go now, because clearly this was a stupid fucking idea—”

“Hey wait!” Castillo stands up as well. “What’s your name, bro?”

“Don’t call me bro!” Marvin growls. “But it’s Marvin. Marvin Moore.”

“Wait holy shit like Marvin the Magnificent?!” A magician says excitedly. Marvin recognizes him as the James one. “You had real magic the whole time?! No wonder people couldn’t figure out your tricks!”

Marvin can’t help but smile proudly at that. “Hell yeah, people loved it.”

“Well, Mr. Moore, you have some powerful magic in you,” Castillo says admirably. “You bypassed all the wards I set up here without even trying.” He walks over to a table with drawers, pulling one open and taking out a pen and notebook. After scribbling something down, he tears out the page, and walks back over to hand it to Marvin. “This is all our information, and my personal phone number. If you ever have a group you want to join, call us, okay?”

“Oh! Do it!” James encourages. “Then we’ll be thirteen, it’ll be the ideal number for most spells! And we’ll have a famous guy in our chapter!”

“Hey, let him make his own decision,” a nearby magician says.

Marvin scans the information from the paper. There could be benefits to joining a magic group...one of which being that he’ll finally have more than five people to talk to. And were these spells cast by groups really more powerful? A familiar feeling starts to grow inside him, a feeling of wanting to know, of wanting to be the best. That feeling led him astray in the past, got him mixed up in branches of magic he probably shouldn’t have been involved in. But if he’s with other people, it’ll be different, right? He hesitates for just one moment longer, then asks, “Hey, so uh, what if I’ve already made my decision?”

———————

The next day, Marvin finds himself sitting at his desk once more, with his laptop and his unfinished grimoire before him. But there were also a couple other things as well. A slim book, its cover decorated with the same sort of symbols he’d seen written in that circle of salt, and a sphere of black crystal. “Consider these your entrance-level gifts,” Castillo had said. “I don’t know how familiar you are with the types of magic the Circle likes to use, so this’ll be your beginner’s course.”

Marvin actually isn’t familiar with these branches of magic at all. And that makes this book all the more fascinating. It contains a guide to the symbols they use, the principles of the magic, and a few basic spells. Interestingly, it seems to be derived from alchemy. Or maybe it is alchemy, Marvin doesn’t know. He’d never had any reason to look up what alchemy was before this.

He sets the book down, taking a moment to pick up his new crystal ball and look it over. He can already think of several uses for this, but that might have to wait until later. For now, he really needs to at least make some progress on the grimoire.

And where better to start than with the new, interesting spells? It’s sure to keep his focus if he’s copying down information he’s never heard before. Marvin puts the crystal ball down and picks up his pen. But before he starts writing, he puts on his headphones. Listening to a podcast, huh? Maybe that will help.

He can feel that something new is in the air. Something is changing. Marvin had never worked with other magicians before. The prospect is both exciting and a little nerve-wracking. But however this ends, he knows now that things will be different from here on, in some way or another. And he’s certainly excited to find out.