#the actual cut is in the middle of the white so everything is properly seperated

[falsesecuritysketches]

💙THE CONNOR STICKERS ARE HERE! 💙

The wait is finally over!! These sticker sheets can be yours! This is my first time opening online orders, so please be gentle with me! 🙏 Shop 🔗 FSSketches.etsy.com

[writtenlegacy]

some WISHLIST PLOTS either just in general or muse specific !! feel free to LIKE  this post if you’re interested in any of these plots && i’ll come message you and we can plot things out :’)) putting it under the cut bc i know this will get ridiculously long.

- 80s movies inspired ( the outsiders, grease, footloose, dirty dancing, etc. )

- Soulmates ( reincarnations, hearing each other through thoughts, countdown makers, black&white/color, feeling each other’s pain, etc. )

- Guardian Angel ( mostly for my angel bby kim dan, but could work for kingsley too since he’s technically an angel )

- DoTS AU ( specifically for donny since he’s a soldier )

- Divergent AU ( i do have a specific verse for clara, but i just need it for all of my muses )

- Mafia AUS ( rival gang leaders, bodyguards from rival gangs, bodyguard & mafia boss/ also bodyguard & mafia boss’ kid, best/friends who end up joining rival gangs, just basically anything and everything -- i do have specific mafia verses for magnus, johnny & hope, maybe klaus too, which i have a high preference for, but open to other muses as well )

- Bodyguards ( basically any of my kids being a bodyguard to your muse, or vice verse just gimme )

- Hogwarts/HP AU ( basically just any of my muses at Hogwarts, more specifically my ocs bc I do have a verse for most of them )

- Modern Au ( for my muses that don’t have a modern canon/timeline and exploring them in a modern world, more specifically for alina, davey, my greek goddesses, moana, rapnunzel, eponine, & fantine )

- Single Parent ( especially for minerva, who is raising her daughter alone after leaving home and having a messy ex-fiance, but can apply to other muses as well )

- Underground Boxer ( i need this for lex pl s, she resorts to it bc she’s really good at it and it earns better money than her gym does and she’s close to losing her place )

- Love Rosie AU ( or basically the classic best friends to lovers trope with angst )

- The Last Five Years AU ( becauase.....angst......applicable for any of my muses tbh, i could always use angst for any of them )

- AU where S4/5 of TO doesn’t exist and Hope doesn’t have to be seperated from her father and Klaus and Hayley get to raise her, but she does end up going to the Salvatore boarding school still just because they’re always Worried about her ( can be for either klaus and hope because i write them both )

- I will scream about Jackson not dying, but AU where he lives and he and Hayley are still married and with Klaus, they all raise Hope and Hayley and Jackson help her understand her werewolf roots as a Cresent Wolf and with her eventual transformation ( i’d love to do this specifcally with jackson against hopes, but also if there are any jackson’s out there, i do wite hope as well )

- Rita having a mentor, obviously aside from whatever she learns at the Salvatore Boarding school, that helps her transition properly into becoming a vampire and learning how to accept her new life

- I don’t write Eponine and Fantine enough, and espeically with Les Mis muses, and I would love to be able to write them within the context of the musical, but also alternative endings for them where neither die and they both live their lives and try to move forward with their circumstances

- I’d love to explore my OCS more, obviously I have their backgrounds fleshed out, but I hardly write them or within their canon context, like Avery as a prince before he becomes a nurse, or Josh before he emancipates himself from his family and starts his own first, or Kelly before her accident, or even post accident struggling with her hearing loss

- I’m pretty sure the Victorious fandom is non-existent, but I’d love to write Jade more with other kids from Hollywoods Arts, or even just other artstic muses in general because I think it’s easier for her to interact with others who are into the same field as her, but also open to outside interactions as well, and also exploring possible romantic relationships with her, because we know how she is when she’s with Beck, but I’d love to see how she is in other types of romantic relationships

- Maya in college??? YES. I need my girl pursing her passions and still love art so much & actually thriving in school and believing in herself and that she can have a future, as well as interacting with others and creating more connections, friends and relationships outside of her small circle of friends she’s had since middle school

- MOANA BEING THE FREAKING CHIEF OF MOTUNUI PL S

- Post S3 where Lu actually goes into the Real World and experiences what it’s like to not have money at her disposal and how she adapts ( which I know she will bc it’s Lu ) and how that changes or shapes her differently than the cushy life she once had attached her family’s wealth and connections

- Also I just need more things with the TO/Legacies Muses with other muses within their canon bc I don’t write them enough tbh

- I’d love to explore my Descendants Muses after graduation, how they adapt to live outside of school and how they shape their futures ( especially for Mal & Jay, bc I love how book 4 ended with both of them and want to explore that more ) but also for my OCS as well ( kai, cami & nereida )

- I’d love to write Bob with other Supers or other Incredible muses, whether it’s the Parrs or anyone else, but also he’s adaptable to Marvel and DC as well which could be fun

[sentiniel-butitgetsworse]

rwde

highly unpolished, awful explanation, but scene-by-scene commentary of unbridled annoyance and rage. read at your own peril.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

so the episode opens with a fight scene. sweet! cool! but its so badly staged, sometimes you have no idea what is happening the first time round. it’s crowded and messy, not a very good look? im talking about grim being hid behind ice while the camera is panning and hitting some trees when we’re literally panning out to show someone else in focus DESPITE THE FACT THEIR MITIGATION SHOULD BE FRONT AND CENTER TO LET US KNOW IT HAPPENED CLEARLY. legit! there’s the one where nora shoots at a grim and the shell explodes into black dust and the grim is gone. did it die? grim dont usually die by fuckin smoke but this one sure fuckin did i guess ‘cause i literally dont know what happened to it? no recoil and fall, just deleted and hid behind some 2d-lookin smoke! sure! why not?!?!!!?

s/o to the white/rose speedy thing that had no reason to be there and yet they did it

---

then there was the “adam ruins everything” segment where he literally just murders? everyone? like i get that its off screen for the younger audiences but also like he fucking murders everyone. literally! did i miss something? is it a good tactic now? did they think it was very villainous of him to murder people??????? god bring me back to the beginning when he actually has a good character reason for why faunus would follow him into revolution because this adam taurus is so bad he’s worth flushing down the drain for.

“tHe BeLlAdOnnA nAme HaS bRoUgHt Me NoThINg BUt gRiEf”

also that opening shot where adam is proud. jfc what? is he even part of salem’s crew anymore? was the Adam short supposed to tell us he isnt? is anyone reviewing this and thinking 100% it’s a good idea?????

wait why is this scene even second? that’s a really awkward position to put it in the whole episode? honestly? like it kinda underlines how awkward a villain adam really is; it has no build up, no reason to be there. sure, the audience is hungry to know what happened to adam, but there’s legitimately no reason to put it as the second scene in the episode, there’s no context??????

callout post for this scene because its literally just voicelines while panning slowly through the bottom floor of the room. and the blood only shows up later??? also is the white fang only comprised of like 7 people now??? isnt it a globally feared organization (ie. isis)????

---

there are two bodyguards for the train. two? two. and for some reason they’re asking for dlc to provide more/personal protection? hello, did i miss something? anyone thought it was a good idea? what class of transportation did they get? if it was dangerous enough that on a train ride they’d need people to guard the journey it wouldn’t even be built there? or what, did they get a max-luxury, train ride with insurance kinda deal? and it had two (2) bodyguards? two (2)!!!!! or was it in the middle of the road??? i may have enough context for the environment but none on economy of this place i swear

“hey ladies we’ll protect you wink” jaune and lie ren literally sitting one (1) feet away not saying anything, could be everyone’s moment to justify “hey we’re literally huntsman despite being kids, we know what we’re doing” but qrow has to step in and apparently his  credentials would ward off some bodyguards???? like “hi yes sorry im the dad of literally 8 kids, i can protect them all” not a convincing argument here bud

illia deserves more time on screen and also closure because neptune fuckin hit on her and that’s obviously enough to change scenes right

also neptune being “you really gonna let her go? l:/” feels like he’s salty instead of wukong tbh; wukong feels/sounds like the literal i can do anything kinda guy -- which he is in mythology and probably in universe (except for intelligence i guess, despite the fact he literally outsmarts his opponents through a lot of his mythos) so i dont mind him being let off the hook, but any hesitation implied during this scene? weak

illia building up to kiss but hugging blake instead, but blake kissing wk on the cheek straight up on camera yo really

---

blake emos in the corner and because its queued up right after the wk/neptune scene its not a far fetch to say she’s emo-ing about wk but turns out its yang? would’ve preferred the setup to be stronger (blake watches yang get on the bed and feels sad/regret, zoom in on yang’s arm to show the audience but not tell them)

i give props to blake being shown “wait leme get that for you” real out the way though, because it underlines properly that blake feels ridiculously bad and wants to do something to make up for yang. good characterization/storytelling!

then they break it w/ like a 30s scene of yang and blake making up almost immediately with a “oh everyone will feel better about it soon :)” BRUH SHE GUILTY BOUT YOUR FUCKIN ARM BITCH CUT BACK TO REALITY DAMN the running away part is sincerely legitimate but also??? blake should be a/ more anxious than that and b/ be more worried about???? yang’s arm??????? for real m8

---

“dont let anyone else die” a/ assumes the bodyguard trying to defend the train literally died and b/ also really fell flat? as a line? get something better...????

genuine dislike for the tactic of qrow fights the Big Boss and everyone gets a handful of weaklings; to stall? possible. but also just feels like a bad tactic overall? also their animations always look like they’re doing an rpg battle; one ability used + animation! then return to original position. that’s a big fallacy of fighting monty oum style and i genuinely hope they recognize it soon

“YOU’RE ATTRACTING THE GRIM TO THE PASSENGERS” ??? i get the part where leading them to the back of the train may help (having them all divided in sections [grim + hunters, passengers, front of train respectively] may help but how does automation attract grim again? like, turrets shooting at them would do so if they’re in range, and they all came from the back so they’d move along towards the middle, but also they wouldn’t continue moving forward? i guess? what im saying is they should really just be around jnxr + oscar instead of way forward in front

when the bodyguard tried to get into the train and barely made it, that SNAP sound was just. raw. i felt that. good! i was very scared/horrified/eager to see if they’d literally break off his arm and he’d just be lying there in a pool of blood or something in shock. he didnt because of aura and i don’t know what to say because a/ it definitely wouldn’t be a bruise and b/ if he had aura and was in the bodyguarding business, wouldn’t he also have a proper semblance to fight off grim most likely? and he aint using it so why he so confident for dlc earlier the heck

bumblebee looks back to the carriage and one lady’s just with her baby like a cheap heartstrings tug

“WHY WON’T YOU TELL US THAT” yang’s line here assumes that they’ve asked about it before and ozpin/oscar refused to answer. i disagree? i think it works better with “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US THAT?” because it definitely was a factor they’d all have to take into account with regards to travelling w/ it in the first place. which they are. tbh yang (and jaune in the op) has every right to be mad at him real talk but also change that line please it bothered me so much

---

blake sees the hooded adam figure and honestly idk what kind of omen that is but it feels/looks weird. another no context scene i guess. tbh id take that one out of this episode entirely and shuffle it next episode probably. (and put the adam ruins everything scene at the back of the episode)

grim stop chasing because tunnel. and then they chase the train through the tunnel really slowly? feels weird but okay i fuckin guess; these are just the things im willing to pass on

ren and jaune look at each other like “lets do it” but why does ren? look up? like there’s no extra effects there, its not visible that he’s trying really hard to extend his semblance out. no cool semblance-using eye powers there. it feels kinda cheap for him to do that w/o any additional highlights that he’s activating his aura? also creepy

OH THERE’S THAT SCENE. yang starts off the Big Fight Montage with grabbing the grimm by its horns and then flips it around. cool move! then she promptly punches it up and closes her eyes. what? tbh that was ridiculously weak after a stupid good setup. budget aside i’d say there was an opportunity for a focused choreograph there; instead of a punch up, use a bullet fire up, keeping the enemy’s front half up in the air for a longer period of time. run under, punch/kick the underbelly, bounce off to the side, bullet fire off the side of the train. 

blake cutting off the tail was a good move. rt studios deciding to change shots when the enemy has the same pose, so that we cut to ruby fighting the same kind of grimm is not. it breaks clarity for the viewers, that’s not how matching cuts should work tbh

these big grimm dying in a couple of hits are also just? kinda weak-feeling. like these characters got stronger from rpg levels, but not from actual combat training and learning to outsmart your enemies, or upgrading your weapons. feels cheap.

ruby bouncing around in attempt to kill these grim is kinda cute? which may be what they were trying to do? but also not well choreographed i guess. it doesn’t flow too well, just bounces in seperate spikes.

when weiss redirects the flying grimm to ruby, it feels like its? not clear what she did. was it a semblance/shield? colour that blue, we know she uses white but white on white doesn’t work out well. ruby’s scythe sinking into the grimm also doesn’t work great because you get confusion when the shot is supposed to show it sink into the grimm, but you cant see the scythe blade sink into it. like you could only get it from context after watching it that she sent the grimm flying by doing the above, but dont recognize the action in the moment.

callout post to yang and blake fuckin shooting at nothing when there’s a clear path/shot to ruby and qrow’s big monster.

fireball just kinda looked cheap. there wasn’t a long breathy build up, and the fireball just feels way too fast (camera or distance?); reasonable that qrow would be hit by it, but cheap-feeling in the sense that it shouldn’t have happened/it felt unfair, that it happened. he should’ve gotten knocked on his ass by power/strength and being caught off guard, and it felt like more like “oh no he got knocked down! D:”

HHHHHH WEISS ICE SKATES TO THE GRIM BUT ITS NOT LIKE YOU PAY ATTENTION BECAUSE SOMETHING ELSE CALLS FOR IT AND THEN SHE LEAPS UP TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE GRIM. SHE’S WHITE, THE BACKGROUND IS WHITE, YOU LOSE SIGHT OF HER, I LEGIT THOUGHT SHE VANISHED BEHIND THE GRIMM BUT IT WOULDNT MAKE SENSE FOR THAT TO HAPPEN. IN THE NEXT SHOT YOU MAY SEE HER AT THE LEFT BUT HER SEMBLANCE IS BLACK TO MAKE HER STAND OUT MORE BUT THEY DIDNT DO THAT FOR THE PREVIOUS SHOT WHY????????

“YANG!” yang promptly bounces off a grimm that isnt shown to have hurt or is dead from the fight and runs off to the bigger grimm as called. understandable, but the other grimm? is just? there? not dead? not doing anything???

also the we need to ground it idea feels really cheap? the grimm isn’t a problem because of its wings, it’s a problem because it’s being dealt with by one (1) person who decides it’s best fighting it on one (1) front vs two on a train. there’s so many ways to tackle this guy! we know qrow’s capable of jumping onto it, but all he’s doing is that, instead of moving to the other side and maybe catching it off guard?????? qrow, fight fucking better.

s/o to qrow/ruby pulling off a move together, cute but also they should’ve been slicing it at different points of the grimm, because they would’ve just died right away if they both went on the same plane? or anywhere near each other? weapons are fucking dangerous we remember right?

GRIMM LAUNCHES A FIREBALL AND IT GOES ON AN UPWARDS TRAJECTORY. IT DOESNT AND INSTEAD GOES IN AN ARC WHEN IT NEVER NEEDED TO. HERE’S HOW YOU COULD DERAIL THE TRAIN. FIREBALL, MOUNTAIN, AVALANCHE/ROCKSLIDE, TRAIN DESTRUCTION. OLD GRANDMA THAT STUMBLES OUT OF THAT/APPEARS BEHIND THE TEAM AFTERWARDS IS MORE IMPRESSIVE FOR HAVING ADAPTED TO THAT FROM INSIDE THE TRAIN THAN TO JUST SIT THERE AND POP OUT LATER LIKE xD lmao wassup yall?

---

yeah thats it and here’d be the adam ruins everything scene right before the opening but we cant get what we want so w/e

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Time To Reform Black America

A big reason why the black communities today are failing to progress and keep up is not because of racism, it is not because ‘the legacy of slavery,’ it’s not because of white people or Donald Trump, it’s because they are brought up as if the year is still 1917 and they can’t let go. It’s a symbol of black empowerment to teach the kids about their history which is great, but it’s also important to seperate history from present day which so many fail to do. Black children are coaxed into watching old newsreels of black civil rights protesters being hosed, beaten, and dragged off to prison. They watch Norman Lear-like sitcoms and get told stories and read accounts of black America before the civil rights movement and the assassination of MLK. Such things would fill any child with horror. Yet you would imagine it would also encourage them to feel grateful and excited to live in times of equal rights and treatment and liberty for all, as it does with any other race or civilization looking back on its tragic and troubling past.

Yet most blacks who do realize this are usually the odd one out among other black Americans. In every race-related debate, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, any of the police shootings, the Million Man March, Ebonics or affirmative action, most blacks start every conversation with fierce conviction that even 150 years after slavery and decades after the Civil Rights Act, the white man’s foot remains pressed upon all black Americans’ necks. Challenging this idea is called racist, we are told to just “shut up and listen.” For most black Americans, the rapid increase of the black middle class, of interracial relationships and marriages, and of blacks in prestigious positions including our President for the past eight years, has no bearing on the real state of black America. Further, they believe, whites’ inability to grasp the unmistakable reality of oppression is itself proof of savage racism, while blacks who question this claim are called self-deluded uncle toms. Individuality is rare in black America. 

Black leaders and movements mouth the ideology of victimhood for political advantage, “Confrontation works,” as Al Sharpton has calculatingly observed. But most rank-and-file exponents of the “racism forever” worldview really mean it. Their conviction rests on several core excuses, carefully passed from person to person, generation to generation at all levels of the black community. These myths and severe distortions of truth are the biggest obstacle to further black progress in today’s America, adding up to a deeply felt cult of victimology that refuses to be held accountable and move on with the times. Some subscribe to it fiercely, most accept it as a valid point of view. The black leaders and the voices of black lives matter, who launches into a tirade about the War on Blacks, receive nodding heads all over as they absorb this indoctrination.

You’d think that a group committed to advancement would find empowerment in fighting new challenges such as the ones plaguing their own communities but instead they focus on challenges that have already been fought and won decades ago or ones that simply do not exist. But many blacks, inevitably, suffer from a classic post-colonial inferiority complex. Like insecure people everywhere, they are driven by a private sense of personal inadequacy to seeing imaginary obstacles to their success supposedly planted by others. Once the 1968 Kerner Commission report fueled that tendency by positing that American racism was an institutional, systemic matter rather than a merely personal one, black leaders and thinkers gripped on tight and black Americans still hold onto this idea as if their lives depend on it being real.

In the grip of this seductive ideology, blacks have made the immobilizing assumption that individual initiative can lead only to failure, with only a few exceptionally lucky exceptions. Yet many groups have triumphed over similar or worse obstacles, including millions of Caribbean and African immigrants in America, from Colin Powell to the thousands of Caribbean children succeeding in precisely the crumbling schools where black American kids fail. Indeed, thinkers such as Thomas Sowell and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom argue that American blacks could have advanced, and were advancing, even without the civil rights legislation of the sixties and the racial preferences of the seventies, since black unemployment was at an all-time low in the mid-sixties, and the black middle class was already growing fast. But these facts can’t outweigh the almost narcotic pleasure that underdoggism provides a race plagued by self-doubt. The victimology cult has in turn engendered a cult of black separatism. Inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960s, which violently rejected whites as terminally evil, today’s separatism, in the same vein, flirts disastrously with the idea that, because white racism ineluctably drives black people outside the bounds of civic virtue, blacks shouldn’t be seriously punished or morally condemned for criminal behavior. If they call their violence a reaction against racism, anything goes, regardless of any other factor such as the truth. The consequences of this are rising all throughout the country today, as they have done in the past and it’s a real concern.

The worst result of black America keeping themselves in a separate realm to its “oppressors,” is the widespread cult of anti-intellectualism. Consider even in middle-class suburbs, increasing numbers of middle-class black students tend to cluster at the bottom of their schools in grades and test scores. Black students whose parents earn $70,000 a year or more make median SAT scores lower than impoverished white students whose parents make $6,000 a year or less, while black students whose parents both have graduate degrees make mean SAT scores lower than white students whose parents only completed high school. Why? All through modern black American culture, even throughout black academia, the belief prevails that learning for learning’s sake is a white affair, spelling properly and talking properly is a white thing and therefore inherently disloyal to a proper black identity. Studying black-related issues is okay, because learning about oneself is authentic. But this impulse also implicitly classifies higher education as irrelevant, which is the direct cause of the underrepresentation of minorities in the hard sciences and other major fields. But hey, it’s okay, affirmative action resolves that, we can just hand out some scholarships and lower the bar to the ground, enforce racial quotas and hey presto, we have equal representation to keep the race baiters happy. 

The sense that the properly “black” person only delves into topics related to himself is also why you can count on one hand the number of books by black Americans that are not on racial topics. The belief that blacks and school don’t go together gained strength in the mid-1960s, when black panther separatists rejected traits associated with whites as alien, and black students, in this spirit, began teasing their fellows who strove to excel in school as “acting white,” a much harsher taunt than merely dismissing them as nerds and this trend has continued well into today. The “acting white” charge, which implies that you think yourself different from and better than your peers, is the prime reason that blacks do poorly in school and why the drop out rates are so high. The gifted black student quickly faces a choice between peer group acceptance and intellectual achievement. Most, out of an utterly human impulse, choose the former. Even if they open themselves to schooling in college or later, their performance all too often permanently suffers from the message they long ago internalized that “the school thing” is an add-on, not a mix-in.

The prevailing orthodoxy lays the blame on other factors, of course, but none of them withstands scrutiny. The fact that the children of working poor immigrants, including Asian and Indian and many other non-whites, who often do well in school and actually do far, far better economically and academically than whites, disproves the claim that their working-class roots deny today’s newly middle-class blacks to teach their children to excel in school. The success of Southeast Asian immigrants’ children particular in the same terrible inner-city schools in which black students fail disproves the Jonathan Kozol gospel that it is the “savage inequality” of school funding that makes black kids fail. Claude Steele at one point made the famous and influential argument that middle-class black students only underachieve in school because fear of confirming the stereotype of black mental inferiority makes them choke up on tests. There may be a grain of truth to this but again, all accountability and blame is shifted onto somebody else while the convenience and safety of victimhood is indulged in. 

Victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community’s response to all race-related issues. The response to affirmative action is a case in point. Blacks see it as a policy that appropriately bends the rules for a group of people who believe are owed something, a notion that today, when middle-class blacks are a massive and thriving group in American society, can only seem plausible through the lens of victimology. The defense of affirmative action on the grounds of “diversity” is an expression of separatism. Since there are not enough black students to be admitted to selective schools on the same merits as the other students, beyond a certain cut-off point blacks are being valued for their skin color rather than their academic accomplishments, everything MLK was against. This is a state of affairs, moreover, that requires a strong dose of anti-intellectualism to accept without discomfort. And the same anti-intellectualism rests content with the flimsy reasoning behind all defenses of affirmative action: that it is immoral for colleges to require a top-quality dossier from the black child of a doctor and a corporate manager simply because he’s black.

Today, these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism and the dysfunctional inner cities, the broken families and black on black crime and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears. In my experience, trying to show many black Americans how mistaken and counterproductive these ideas are is like trying to convince a religious person that God does not exist: the sentiments are beyond the reach of rational, civil discourse and I get that, it’s almost impossible to overcome but just as we reform religions, I think the black narrative is also in much need of reformation as well, it is severely outdated. There was a time when fighting and decrying institutional racism was the main task at hand, and blacks of today’s generation owe gratitude to those who did it, their comfortable and privileged lives would be impossible without the sacrifices and efforts made by everyone who was a part of the revolution. Today, though, these people are well-intentioned relics of another era, an era they in their moment helped us to get past. Our main concern must be with new generations, who can fulfill their potential only in an America where victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism don’t flourish among black Americans. There are two main paths to this goal.

First, it’s time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning “understandable” the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect. Second, it’s time for our selective educational institutions to eliminate affirmative action in admissions. This policy may have been useful in the 1960s in creating a black middle class. Today, however, it can only be classed as discriminatory. To achieve in any endeavor, people need incentives. As long as top colleges exempt black students of all classes from serious competition, their admissions officers shouldn’t wonder why so few black students submit top-class dossiers. Only without such a policy will parents, teachers, and school boards, genuinely alarmed at drop-offs in “diversity” in institutions of higher learning, start to help black children become truly competitive for selective schools. What happened after California ended legalized racial preferences in 1995 is a case in point. Programs exploded throughout the state to prepare minorities to be competitive and to eliminate their financial barriers to college.

Eliminating affirmative action will also help dispel black college students’ resentment-tinged anxiety that their white classmates dismiss them as affirmative action picks. It will promote richer interracial contact among students poised to become the nation’s leaders as they will then all be truly on an equal playing field. The black student who can confidently claim to be on campus for the exact same reasons that white and Asian students are, they would be less likely to feel defensive and indulge in victimhood and less likely to be paranoid about their white classmates being covert racists. I believe the time has come for such changes. Sure, these ideas will be condemned, branded racist and repulsive but I also know it has to be said. There was a crucial and damaging change in black ideology in the mid-1960s which we are at risk of not only repeating but making even worse today. 

Perhaps twenty years from now mainstream black thought won’t be such a taboo and more blacks will stress individual initiative and integration. And perhaps the national media will get on the bandwagon too. Let’s hope by then, we won’t feel that any talk of black personal responsibility needs to be balanced by victimology and blaming others. That’s when we will know that we are past the coded fraud that passes for interracial discourse today and have made the kind of progress that yesterday’s civil rights’ leaders would recognize and applaud.

[theboykingofhell]

9, 15, 16, 18, 26, 31, 32, 34, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51 for TSG, 54 :*

ricky found fucking dead in miami after looking at these PROMPTS,

9. Least favorite trope to write.

what a weirdly phrased question because if i hate it, i ain’t gonna write it... UHH. i really don’t like bringing dead characters back to life???? i don’t like writing scenes for shock horror... well, that’s a lie, i DO like to horrify the reader through my writing, but i don’t want to cheapen the emotional ~journey~ they go through by being like ‘JUST KIDDING! everything actually DOES work out in the end!!’

i have a story where narratively its kind of leading to a place where i have to make a ‘dead’ character come back (chaos actually, since i use her in red’s actual story) and it’s making me so mad like wtf thought we had a deal

15. Where does your inspiration come from?

SONGS... and just insp in general but i get a lot through music and nnnh... there’s just so many good aesthetics and quotes on my dash tbh i’m like constantly and consistently inspired, it’s great

16. Where do you take your motivation from?

imma be honest, the thing that motivates me most sometimes is either reading a rly shitty novel or seeing a shitty show and just getting livid and writing out of spite because THAT DRIVEL WAS PUBLISHED????? MY SHIT IS SO MUCH BETTER WTF... or i think to myself ‘what the fuck, what if i die tomorrow????? with my damn novel unfinished?!?!! HELL NO’... pretty much anything that reminds me that my stuff is Great but no one knows how great it is because it’s not DONE and OUT THERE yet makes me get off my ass

18. What’s your revision or rewriting process like?

depends! for books it mostly just consists of rereading after a long period of ignoring my story and just tweaking lines that seem out of place or that ruin the flow i’m imagining. if i’m rewriting, then i have two word documents out (which the program scrivener makes SO easy god BLESS that program) and just... rewrite it word for word while STARING at the old version. that always makes the prose come out slightly different, it smooths out stuff or lets me cut away or add things i really like and, most importantly, it adds length, which i tend to struggle with a lot because i like just being TO THE POINT

with playwriting though it’s mostly about the format.. i write all plays like i write everything online... in lowercase with little regard to actual grammar. so i gotta actually pretend i give a damn about the english language and format it all properly and add stage directions cuz in a first draft for plays, i always just focus on dialogue and that’s it

26. Standalone or series, and why?

standalones are far more fun and way more satisfying and, quite honestly, require way less fluff. i keep FORGETTING how much fluff is needed in a goddamn novel. MULTIPLE BOOKS OF FLUFF no FUCKING THANKS

31. Hardest character to write.

in the rp: tyler (because he dissociates in a way that literally cuts me off from? any parts of his character? which is like the ESSENCE of his character but it’s VERY unenjoyable to write tbh) and nicki (because i put too much pressure on myself to make her seem a certain way instead of letting it happen naturally)... tbh canon characters and/or characters that are based on people are generally just rly hard sometimes cuz there’s SO MUCH IMAGINED PRESSURE TO MAKE THEM GOOD!!!

in original shit: honestly i’m really tempted to say aaron and that’s just because he’s so... unlikeable to me???? but also i think it’s just because i’ve really only written one scene for him (i always write in order unless a scene is just KICKING MY ASS to write, like this particular scene) and... he seems like a Lot... of annoying bullshit to have to write out lmfao that bitch

32. Easiest character to write.

red because i’ve been writing him for like 7-9 years now, i would hope he’d be easy by now... honestly, really explosive and dramatic characters too like bert or nora come SUPER easy for me, they’re so fun to write (especially dialogue-wise) because they’re very emotional and i can get PARAGRAPHS based on one reaction. characters who try and hide shit from everyone, INCLUDING ME, are so annoying,

34. Handwritten notes or typed notes?

typed because they’re legible,,,,, but then again, my handwritten notes make more sense because they’re kind of fully crafted ideas like ‘***make nisha and aaron meet at 42nd street for transformation chap???’ while a typed note will be like... ‘42nd street+aaron’... what did that mean, ricky-at-5am... why did you do this to us

41. How many stories do you work on at one time?

two... kind of as a minimum, sort of as a maximum... like there’s usually the MAIN story and then there’s something i’m kind of doodling in the side, something that’s just sort of cooking in the backburner that i’m not too serious into the process of it, but it’s goin... i’ve never tried to do 3 stories at a time but i feel like my attention would be too divided and it wouldn’t work

42. How do you figure out your characters looks, personality, etc.

UHH........................................... i’m very fond of faceclaims cuz idk i just kind of... feel how they look... i don’t ever really envision a full person though, i get like traits... i’ll be like... oh she has long black hair and she’s not white and her eyebrows look like this... and then i’ll see a pic of pooja mor and be like THAT’S HER THAT’S EXACTLY IT. idk what it is about eyebrows and why that’s literally always the deciding factor of how a character looks, but there it is

personality just kind of... man, characters just poop out of me, i don’t decide any of this shit wtf jhsfjg

45. Worst piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten.

once someone told me to stop making the boys kiss in the first chapter of my story so i made the boys fuck instead

46. What would your story _______ look like as a tv show or movie?

scrolls WAY up... sees you didn’t add a story as a prompt WELL i’m still riding the tsg train here so

a tsg movie better look like the 90′s, goddamnit.. not like... found footage really, but i want something in the quality to be a little fuzzy and sort of tinted that one kind of grayish brown color i always associate with the 90′s for some reason... like, i can’t stop thinking about all these amber lighting and how dull everything looks, and how higher in quality things look the further and further it goes, like, it’s something i would concentrate a lot on visual cues with because i focus so much of the storytelling of tsg on nisha’s narration. sometimes you don’t know how many days have passed because nisha doesn’t know how many days have passed, if she dissociates, i’d want that shown on camera, if she keeps repeating the same number over and over again, i’d want to watch one little piece of a scene getting repeated again and again. it’d be VERY disorienting as a movie tbh but it’d be fun...

47. Do you start with characters or plot when working on a new story?

characters!!!! plot is such a backburner thing for me, if you have rly great characters, you already have a great plot right there. the plot is just set so i can see how characters react to things, man... 

49. What do you find the hardest to write in a story, the beginning, the middle or the end?

THE MIDDLE, FUCK THE MIDDLE.... endings are literally the easiest thing for me, beginnings similarly so, it’s just getting from that BEAUTIFUL starting scene to that GORGEOUS ending that fucking kills my poor undeserving asshole

51. Describe the aesthetic of your story _______ in 5 sentences or words.

low-res pictures of old cemetaries... that’s five words right there, i’m sorry but the END IS IN SIGHT, I’M ALMOST FREE AND CANT BE BOTHERED

54. Any writing advice you want to share?

can’t stress how useful having an insp blog is... creating a story through the unconscious collection of pictures and quotes that just feel relavant is just SO useful not just when it comes to really constructing a character an an atmosphere to your story, but making a fucking plot????? my tsg blog is like my most perfect insp blog because i got the idea to seperate it by chapters, and i’ve found that i can literally just... go into the chapter tags... and make connections and build on plotlines that i had NO IDEA ABOUT when i made or filled those tags, IT’S REALLY FUN and it keeps me inspired to write