#this is objectively bad advice

[camembri]

usopp is objectively the best strawhat simply because he is the constant unwitting bystander slash victim. I think it's probably because he's easy to talk to (unfortunately). the man will walk into the kitchen for a snack and end up having to listen to three hours of someone's latent homosexual ramblings. whole time he decidedly Did Not Ask. and it's not like he can say anything either. it's like being the beleaguered customer service rep except the customers live in your house and will beat you up if you don't just stick to making vague noises of assent at appropriate times. truly incredible. what a man.

[reel-fear]

Wow, so umm... This looks bad, not only is it inaccurate due to using the wrong ink demon design [unless this is confirmation BATIM Ink Demon has been outright retconned... Which would make me pissed enough to make a new post just about THAT] but from an art standpoint this is just... Confusing and poorly done.

I wouldn't care if this was fanart, of course you should support young, indie artists... But for a Graphic Novel making sure your cover doesn't look like something Butch Hartman shat out in an afternoon is kind of important. Remember they're going to be asking us to give money to them to read this. The artist likely won't see any of that money and neither do the authors most of the time, not to mention this art screams of the artist being underpaid and overworked.

Like they Had to get something on someone's desk and their boss said 'good enough'. A concept Joey Drew Studios is very familiar with considering the allegations of poor working environments that Kindly Beast. Not to mention Mike Mood admitting in a Reddit AMA that they did in fact rush projects like Showdown Bandit. [Which they sold at full price]

He also says they can in fact say no or yes to designs involving their IP. Either Mike or Meatly had to say yes to this cover, according to his own damn words.

And do you really think this company in particular would care enough about its fanbase to not sell them garbage? They have done exactly that on several occasions. It's not like they care particularly about art either, considering their previous use of AI Art. There was no apology or even posts addressing it... Instead, they just rushed out an archives update to their game to get people to stop talking about it... Even forgetting an entire character in it. Again

This company is [or at least SHOULD BE] on thin ice when it comes to being suspected of misleading their fans or rushing out crappy products to them.

So with all that context in mind, I'm gonna talk about why this cover sucks ass.

The light sources are all over the place? Why does it look like someone put maces or knight armor on his shoulders but it's just flesh?? It looks both gross and weird [not in a good way either]

To explain more I'm going on a rant below but sadly this seems to have been confirmed to not just be a rough pass but the final cover and man... I am not excited about this graphic novel just at all. This felt like it really drained any possibility of it turning out good for me and I already had expectations low.

Okay first point, the light sources?? And there is no consistency here with the shadows or lighting, it looks like there's a hundred light sources all at once but none of them are even consistent!

the arrows here represent all the different light sources I can make out and yet the the shadow clearly implies there's only one. I understand wanting to use highlights to give the character a more clear shape but then just give him one or two lights behind him or in front of him? No matter how u follow the light sources, the highlights make no sense and the shadows make even less sense.

Why are the shoulders like that? Like on the legs it's a little understandable, at least those are clearly very heavily affected by perspective, for me I think they are so exaggerated it makes it look like one of the legs is either huge or one is small but that's maybe subjective.

However, the shoulders are unjustifiable, what happened there, what did they do??

I could pick on so much more honestly, how the color choices of piss yellow with no other colors being used, and the harsh pitch black being used for every part of his body is weird. How it looks straight out of Butch Hartman's recent crappy art. But to put bluntly bad start! Also what the HELL is going on with this background??

Seems once again the Bendy team is fine with sending out stuff thinking it's "Good Enough" for Bendy fans and honestly the people trying to tell me to "Be Grateful" for this are just proving that no matter how many times you betray your audience some of em will defend you!

Which is sad tbh. If anything we should be putting MORE pressure on the Bendy team to do better. Cause we deserve better than this, honestly we do. There are amazing artists in the bendy community who could do so much better for a cover. They've employed their fan artists before... Wouldn't it be great to do that for such a lore important book? The book that gives us the identity of one of the main characters in BATIM? The character you spend the entirety of Chapter 4 fighting to save? Not to mention will give several major characters their human designs?

But I guess this is... Good enough...

[fishandshesmygills]

been back in my little earthquakes era lately and it's healing me

[pixlmonkeys]

louie’s notes for the sphere of truth hit too hard sometimes. “I should draw the boss's face on this and roll it far, far away.” i definitely have some people I’d like to do that to COUGH COUGH the priest at my church COUGH COUGH HUH WHO SAID THAT

[futuristicbarbie]

sometimes i think maybe i should cut my hair shorter(like waist length/boob length) so its easier to style and maybe it looksmaxxers me or something, because although long hair down to your butt is pretty (when healthy) its also difficult to style and maybe even drags down and weighs down your face but idk, maybe it looks good on me

[nopoodles]

I saw a post about world building and I didn't want to derail it becauseni don't think they're wrong... I just also don't think their perspective is the end of the story.

To paraphrase: they claimed that you need to know how food production works in your fantastical worlds because otherwise it undermines the entire story and world state. They referenced how Inca people didn't invent the wheel for transport because they lived in places it wouldn't have been useful and how thinking more widely can help make your fantastical world more well rounded.

And, fundamentally, the logic behind these statements is something I can get behind. Thinking more widely can and does make for better worlds and filling in facts or asking these kinds of questions can make for a better story.

But

And this is where I wanted to disagree and what triggered making this whole post

You don't have to.

If you want to make a story (whatever length) where you set it on the backdrop of a comfortably accessible landscape for you/your target audience, there's actually nothing wrong with that.

I know people say lots of things about it, there's lots of criticism levelled at fantastical worlds with no specific and on-page world building. But if you, like me, tend to skip description in books you might be intentionally very light handed with it, in which case there probably isn't space within the narrative to write where the grain comes from or why they have chocolate filled pastry but no coffee. Whether you, personally, know the reason and the logic is almost irrelevant if it never makes it to the page.

And again, it's fine that it might not make it to the page. Not all of your world building has to be on the page. You don't have to please readers who want that, because there are plenty of readers who don't and would actually be out off by that.

All this to say (as usual): take the time to figure out what works for your writing and also for the readers you want to attract. If you're going to use a comp title with heavy world building and not offer the same, you gotta make that clear. But, similarly, if you used my Guardian Cadet Series as a comp and spent pages talking about how the grain production worked, you'd probably end up with some frustrated readers.

[daisywords]

actually my toxic trait is that I've never ever thought that my writing was bad idk what you guys are talking about

[honeyblockm]

1 8 and 21

1: the character everyone gets wrong

i just answered this but yeah it's fundy and ponk. come to think of it possibly also happyduo. the whole eggpire maybe.

8: common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

despite my best efforts i suspect i live in an echochamber but. spaces out for 10 minutes trying to think of common fandom opinions. you know i cannot really think of a take that has not caused awful awful discourse on my dash. i mean i guess re: the attachments advice that phil gave tommy that caused everyone to try to kill each other on my dash: i dont think it's that big of a deal? if phil gave some bad advice? if said advice was even bad in the first place? <didn't get too invested in that discourse

also i don't think las nevadas had to be destroyed for the. waves hand. narrative. or smth. it wasn't like. the root of all cquackity's evil or whatever. and i think it's good and reasonable that the LN arc ends with q deciding to build it back up again. sorry its my girlfriend

21: part of canon you think is overhyped

bedrock bros ^_^

[fox-bright]

hi any life advice for 21yo

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

If you ever get to the point that things are so bleak you can see no other way forward but to die, make any other choice. If that means leaving everything you own and being a beach bum, or quitting your career, or taking up or leaving a religion, or deciding to bicycle across the country, so be it; living means more chances, dying means everything stops and you don't get to see any more interesting things. As you have not yet seen all the things that can interest you, it is better to live.

[biboomerangboi]

More reasons why Zuko being the Firelord is objectively the funniest thing on earth:

HES SEVENTEEN

He hasn’t been civilised in 4 years, his entire teenage experience consists of living on a boat and sleeping rough. The most stable bed he has was probably in Ba Sing Se he probably will just nap anywhere.

He has customer service experience which means he probably uses his customer service voice on his minsters.

Additionally he probably just wanders into to kitchen to get his own snacks and tea because he forgets what servants do.

He probably has no idea why he can’t just chase after an assassin he used to hunt the avatar for Agnis sake why is the captain of the guard demanding he stay in his room he’ll find the guy first (he’s probably right)

Katara probably has a free pass on Eco terrorism because what’s he going to do challenge her, she’ll beat his ass.

If he saw a minster doing something shady he will either invite lady Beifong to detect their BS or commit B&E and look for evidence himself.

He somehow found a baby dragon and raises it.

He will be far to willing to give Kyoshi island anything they want cause he feels bad and Suki scares him.

He randomly insisted on giving some earth kingdom village 100 ostrich horses.

The Avatar will just show up call him Hotman and demand the go on adventures and the Firelord will just dip because he’s been confined to long and has the Zoomies.

He takes far to much advice from Sokka and will genuinely believe if someone doesn’t get Sokkas plans they must be an idiot because Sokka is 16.

Sokka and Zuko also get into a lot of teenage rebellion phases by accident.

Toph just walks in breaks a wall of his palace and demands a field trip that always involves the Firelord having to explain himself to the cops.

He somehow knows every dangerous teen in the world and they all come for tea uninvited.

He has broken into both the NWT and Ba Sing Se.

He has a really well documented facial scar and official portraits but still disappears to be Lee the tea guy like no one knows.

HES SEVENTEEN.

[knxfesck]

If art school is as lame as it is in fanfiction written by art school students I feel very bad for all of you. Personally if someone told me a sketch wasn't art because it didn't meet their standards I'd lose it on the spot

[punkedupclowns]

I KNOW I AM NEW BUT DAMN AINT NO ONE WANT MY MOTHERFUCKIN ADVICE? I GOT GREAT ADVICE. 💪

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano">https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."

The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3637295.html

Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government's feet to the fire.

Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But "vote with your wallet" turns retail therapy into a form of civics.

This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that's always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that's never you. That's why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can't win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots.

You can't recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Practically speaking, you can't even recycle. All those plastics you lovingly washed and sorted ended up in a landfill or floating in the ocean. Plastics recycling is a hoax perpetrated by the petrochemical industry, who knew all along that their products would never be recycled. These despoilers convinced us to view the systemic rot of corporate ecocide as an individual matter, chiding us about "littering" and exhorting us to sort our garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

We are bombarded by real problems that require urgent solutions that can only be resolved through collective action, which we are told is impossible. This is an objectively frightening state of affairs, and it makes people go nuts.

At the start of this century, in the weeks before 9/11, a message-board poster calling himself Gecko45 went Web 1.0 viral by earnestly bullshitting about his job as a mall security guard, doing battle with heavily armed gangs, human traffickers, and ravening monsters. Gecko45's posts were unhinged: he started out seeking advice for doubling up on body-armor to protect him while he deployed his smoke bombs and his partner assembled a high-powered rifle. Though Gecko45 was apparently sincere, he drew tongue-in-cheek replies from the other posters on GlockTalk, who soon dubbed him the "Mall Ninja":

https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

The Mall Ninja professed to patrolling a suburban shopping mall while armed with 15 firearms as he carried out his duties as "Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas." His qualifications? Mastery "of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls."

The Mall Ninja's fantasy of a single brave individual, defending the sleepy populace from violent, armed mobs is instantly recognizable as an ancestor to today's right wing fantasy of America's cities as "no-go zones" filled with "open air drug markets," patrolled by MS-13 and antifa super-soldiers. And while the Mall Ninja drew derision – even from the kinds of people who hang out on a message board called "GlockTalk" – today, his brand of fantasy wins elections.

On Jacobin, Olly Haynes interviews the political writer Richard Seymour about this phenomenon:

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/disaster-nationalism-fantasies-far-right/

Seymour's latest book is Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, an exploration of the strange obsessions of the right with imaginary disasters in the midst of real ones:

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3147-disaster-nationalism

You know these imaginary disasters: "FEMA death camps, 'great replacement theory,' the 'Great Reset,' fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines." As Seymour writes, these conspiracy fantasies are proliferated by authoritarian regimes and their supporters, especially as real disasters rage around them.

For example, during the Oregon wildfires, people who were threatened by blazing forests that hit 800'C refused to evacuate because they'd been convinced that the fires were set by antifa arsonists in a bid to "wipe out white conservative Christians." They barricaded themselves in their fire-threatened homes, brandishing guns and prepping for the antifa mob.

Seymour says that this "disaster nationalism" "processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening." Confronted with the helplessness of a real disaster that can only be solved through the collective action you've been told is both impossible and a Communist plot, you retreat to an individualistic disaster fantasy that you can play an outsized role in. Every crisis – the climate emergency, poverty, a toxic environment – is replaced by "bad people" and you can go get them.

For authoritarian politicians, a world of bad people at the gates who can only be stopped by "the good guys" makes for great politics. It impels proto-fascist movements to electoral victories, all over the world: in the US, of course, but Seymour also analyzes this as the phenomenon behind the electoral victories of authoritarian ethno-nationalists in India, Israel, Brazil, and all over the world.

I find Seymour's analysis bracing and clarifying. It explains the right's tendency to obsess over the imaginary at the expense of the real. Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon's child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement's fixation on "the unborn."

It's not just that these kids don't exist – it's that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump's "kids in cages" family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.

The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving "the unborn" – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the "culture of life" that would rescue hypothetical children.

Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.

Mall Ninja politics are winning.

[rfallfish]

Can we please all agree to stop framing modern trends as objectively good writing advice? I'm not trying to say that there aren't ways to give people pointers on their stories, but just because a style of writing has fallen out of fashion doesn't mean it's bad.

I am primarily referring to people saying antagonists need to be morally gray and to people who say you "shouldn't rhyme poetry" full stop. Sure, modern trends don't align with those things, but are you telling me Sauron isn't a good villain? That Golding's translation of The Metamorphoses is bad?

It's genuinely okay to try to help people with their stories when they ask, but pretending like modern trends are the only things that could possibly work in writing just isn't it.

[pyrodolls]

what if the mk1 men were down bad for you…

upon seeing you walk into the room, johnny cage flexes his muscles ever so slightly and suddenly he’s telling the funniest story in the world to whoever he was already speaking to. he wants to catch your eye and gain your attention so badly. for you, he would make himself look like a fool. only as long as you look his way and give him even a slightest bit of attention, he’s satisfied.

when kuai liang notices you nearby, his entire body feels as if it’s on fire and he immediately worries about his appearance. does he look good? is his hair neatly tied up? he would make an attempt to approach you as soon as he got the chance, and try to strike up a conversation with you. if he didn’t at least say “hi,” he would feel like a fool for missing a great opportunity to engage in a conversation with you.

bi-han pretends he isn’t staring at you every time you’re in a room together. he is the grandmaster of the lin kuei, he must not engage in a romantic relationship. but he can’t help but feel his dark, cold heart light on fire at the sight of you. he yearns to go up to you and say something every time he sees you, but he holds back and settles for just admiring your looks from afar.

tomas vrbada is not afraid of showing his affection towards you. he believes that everyone should make the most of their limited lives, so he is very open about his advances towards you. the problem is, he’s a bit awkward and his efforts come across as more anxious than flirtacious. he would give himself a small pep talk before he talks to you, and he would be full of confidence and hope that the interaction would go well. but he would end up stammering or messing up his words when he speaks to you, and then he would just give up and run away. (he went to johnny for some advice after his mess-up, and it still didn’t work.)

zeffeero doesn’t think of himself as someone deserving of love. when he sees you close by, his heart beats fast and his face feels as if it’s on fire. he knows he has feelings for you, but he resists the urge to make a move. he could if he wanted to. but he doesn’t think he deserves to be joyful and in love after everything he’s done. he just hopes that someday you’ll be happy with someone that deserves you. he desperately wishes it could be him, but the last thing he wants is your sanity or reputation ruined in a relationship with him.

it’s very obvious that syzoth has feelings for you. his tail would sway from side to side, and his eyes would brighten as soon as they fell on you. he listens intently every time you open your mouth, and he never interrupts you when you are speaking. but he doesn’t exactly understand how humans court each other, so he would express his feelings in his own endearing way. for example, he gives you little gifts, similar to offerings. but they’d usually be shiny objects he thought was pretty and it reminded him of you.

raiden is so kind and humble, that he leads you to think his affection is strictly platonic. he’s been staring at you all day? oh, you probably just have something on your face and he’s too nice to let you know. he gave you a gift? he’s so generous, he probably does that with all his friends. no matter what he does to try to hint at his feelings for you, you would assume you weren’t special and he probably does it with everyone else he is acquainted with. he could even confess his love to you and you would just be confused on whether he meant it platonically or romantically.

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Seriously, it's wild that Jorah's mad that Ned even considered slave trading to be a bad thing, that he even cared about "lice-ridden poachers".

Jorah. Mister Mormont, ser. Everyone in Westeros considers slave trading to be a bad thing. It is literally called an abomination by the Faith of the Seven (right along with incest), and by followers of the old gods too. Where the hell did you pick up your morals?

jorah is so insane having beef with ned for charging him with slave trading WHEN HE WAS LITERALLY SLAVE TRADING