Ohh, so I was looking at my storage and found these! I originally shared them on twitter before yeeting the platform. Anyway, feel free to use! Art memes for your oc :D

There's a tweet that's gone viral where a person laments realizing that Star Wars "ripped off" Dune, and how learning all the elements Star Wars took from its inspiration tainted it. And I think it shows how poisonous the emphasis on originality in art can be. Because yes, it's wonderful when art makes something new, but it's also wonderful seeing how art plays on what came before, and the conversations it has with its predecessors.

There's going to be a lot of people talking about how much of an impact Goku from Dragon Ball Z has made on fiction in the wake of Akira Toriyama's recent passing, and all the characters who were inspired by him and his story. But Goku himself is derivative - he's inspired by the Monkey King from Journey to the West, one of the first novels ever written. He's far from the first character inspired by the Monkey King, either, and also far from the last.

None of this makes Goku's impact any less than it is. None of this decreases how Goku's story has inspired countless imitators. Just as Toriyama created a new icon from imitating what he loved about Journey to the West, so did Toriyama inspire countless artists to make their own iconic works with his take on the Monkey King's archetype. Goku is, in many ways, the heir to a legacy that spans back to the 16th century, and likely beyond - because I doubt the original Monkey King was formed in a vacuum.

We're taught to think that originality and imitation are opposites that cannot coexist, but they're not mutually exclusive. One can follow in another's footsteps and still take a new journey with its own unique twists and turns. The great works of art are not spawned in the absence of inspiration - they are in conversation with what came before and what will come after.

So my problem with most ‘get to know your character’ questioneers is that they’re full of questions that just aren’t that important (what color eyes do they have) too hard to answer right away (what is their greatest fear) or are just impossible to answer (what is their favorite movie.)  Like no one has one single favorite movie. And even if they do the answer changes.

If I’m doing this exercise, I want 7-10 questions to get the character feeling real in my head. So I thought I’d share the ones that get me (and my students) good results: 

i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

this is GENUINELY one of the best character development sheets I've ever seen. Cuts right to the core of what you and your readers will glom onto, doesn't waste time on details that don't directly affect the narrative. Stupendous. Effervescent. Finally, some good fucking food

you can instantly make a cool female character if you just take any stereotypically masculine character type and make him a butch lady. easiest trick in the book. you can try this at home

im not talking even about broad scale archetypes like Action Hero. those are cool don't get me wrong but if you take more specific stock characters such as "cartoonish mob boss" or "gentleman detective" or "elderly mad scientist" then you have an instant hit on your hands. lesbians WILL love you forever and you WILL be the most interesting person around

The Welsh Viking is pretty cool! 

He’s going to run 5 kilometres in his viking armour on May 9th to raise money for Stonewall!

Oh my goodness this is getting a lot of notes! Since I see posts on tumblr about how a lot of people seem to think all historians and archaeologists are crusty old bigots I’d just like to add that this guy is an archaeologist. A very vocally anti-racist archaeologist who goes out of his way to be as inclusive as possible to queer people.

Reblogging to watch later!

Always get your historical facts from anti-racist archeologists.

Wait, how’d the run go!?

Oh gosh I forgot to update on that! It went well, he was sore and tired but no injuries, and he raised over 1700 pounds! 

Not to completely derail this post, but I’d also like to recommend Miniminuteman to anyone interested in history and archeology from a non bigoted source. He’s absolutely fantastic, his tiktok is essentially him just debunking bs conspiracy videos and he recently started making a youtube series called Awful Archaeology and there are only three episodes so far but they own my entire heart, it’s great.

Also Bernadette Banner, who is a edwardian/victorian fashion historian who does everything from reconstruction work, educational videos and debunking historical fashion myths, to more fun stuff like rating historical drama costumes or recreating Wheel of Time outfits.

And these are just the two I’m most familiar with right now, there are SO many great historians and archeologists and anthropologists out there who have a passion for their field and want to share that knowledge while ALSO being great, humble people who stand up against bigotry, racism, and all the historical lies that come with. I’m falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of historical content every week, and I’m loving every minute of it.

This post got me to watch Jimmy’s channel, and I ADORE it AND him, and I’m very thankful. 

I also want to recommend Tasting History with Max Miller, who is a food historian and excellent at pointing out when things in the past were racist or classist. He even had a recent Da Vinci video talking about checking sources and the importance of acknowledging when you get information wrong.

Also the Townsends, are reenactors that talk about food and culture and lifestyle of the 16-1700s of the colonial USA. They make a point of bringing in women and people of color regularly to talk about what those days were like for more than just white guys!

HomeTeam History is a Black American man exploring the history of Africa and the African Diaspora. I don’t know whether he’s an academic, but I do know he’s got LOTS of sources (and lots of primary sources) for every video.

SnappyDragon is a Jewish fashion historian who makes gorgeous clothes and also talks a lot about history, Jewish history, and doesn’t shy away from pointing out racism and antisemitism both in history and in modern uses of history.

Cheyney McKnight of Not Your Momma’s History is a living history educator who talks about the lives of Black people in the United States, both enslaved and free.

Yess I absolutely love all of these

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

Worldcat is my bestie and my one true love!! Not only does it tell you what library a book is at, but it also price compares different used book sites against each other for easy view! It's how I got Tarot For the Master for $10!!

not gonna say it again

I think the “slutty men” thing is mostly fun but I also think it’s gonna start setting us back the more I see people act like racial fetishization is fine as long as you’re “objectifying men” while doing it

Love how when I went to look for the Tweet I was thinking of as an example I found it with another Tweet that perfectly sums up the issue:

I think an important instinct you have to build up when you read/watch sci-fi is discerning which things are givens. If Arrival tells you that the alien language is atemporal, it is, that's not a puzzle for you to pick apart, it's a prerequisite to getting the rest of the story. When I talk sci-fi with people who don't consume a lot of it this seems to be a thing they get hung up on.

“But why—“ because it make story go. “But I don’t understand what—“ because that’s how the society works. I told you the important parts, the parts that are relevant to the story. I’m not interested in writing a 200-page speculative history Re the entire course of galactic civilization to explain why it’s rude at dinner time to eat before the ambassador eats. “But I don’t understand how (whatever) works—“ it works because it’s science fiction and that’s how it works. The propulsion systems work because the story requires interstellar travel.

I am more interested in the people and the events and the weird ideas. The weird ideas are just weird ideas, this made up fiction story isn’t a thesis statement predicting why cockroaches will be skilled surgeons 10,000 years in the future.

I think this is really important for writers, too. I know I get hung up on worldbuilding details and it's good to have a reminder that I don't need to reinvent DNA just for an alien to have green skin.

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY

this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)

OH HELLO

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

nautical history friends help

there’s a glass thing aboard wooden whaling ships where it’s like a little crystal they put in the ceiling to let light in belowdecks

what the fuck is it called

it looks kind of like this

???

Deck prism!

#they’re so amazing

YES! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Sure thing! I remember being so surprised at HOW much light they brought into a space, when I first saw them in action.

[ID: photo of closely clustered ship bunks, lit by an overhead prism. /end ID]

The yellow light is artificial but the blue is from the deck prism, on a cloudy day.

A variation of this was also used by european artisans in the form of a water filled glass sphere that focused the surrounding light

WHAT.

are you telling me they made a better skylight before people figured out how to not get scurvy and we don’t have these in LITERALLY EVERY HOUSE now because what the fuck

People joke about how flight is effectively the real life equivalent of the half a-press meme, because One Weird Trick with air pressure allows giant hunks of metal to fly. But refrigeration is an equally absurd physics hack. Like, for all of human history, the only real way to cool something besides just allowing the heat to dissipate naturally was to use apply cold stuff to the hot thing, and have it absorb some of the heat. But cold stuff is, by definition, scarce in hot environments, and is used up by this process. And that was how cooling worked for all of history, until some assholes in the 19th century figured out One Weird Trick with vapor compression that can allow you to generate an unlimited amount of cold stuff (well, limited only by your ability to continuously compress and decompress the refrigerant). Like, fuck off...

Not quite! People have been refrigerating things and even freezing things using simple evaporative cooling for a very long time. Like the Persian cooling towers called Yakchal.

You dump water in a pit in the floor in the winter, and the wind blows over the hole at the top and carries the last heat of the water away so it freezes. Then the yakchal stays cold over the summer so you have ice all year round. Sometimes these things had wind towers installed that could use the wind to freeze water even in the middle of summer.

Then there’s this thing -- 

The Botijo, an old Spanish design that lets enough water bleed through the clay that the wind evaporates it and cools the whole container.

So people have been taking advantage of the wind for a while, and where it works, it works much better than ice, because ice can only get something as cold as itself. If it steals heat from something, it melts in turn. But the wind can carry away as much heat as it wants.

That’s the old cheat code. Refrigerators just automated the process to make it constant and reliable.

How traditional pitchforks were made.

It took 6 years starting from orienting branches

I love this so much

I would very much like to have one of these.

Writers?

If you have a chance, help preserve this nearly forgotten knowledge in your stories somewhere!

Wooden pitchforks are a bit safer than metal ones (little fear of rust causing lockjaw/death if you get poked), and when they’re grown like this, they’re far sturdier in many ways than anything assembled that isn’t metal...and they’re often lighter / better balanced than metal, too!

Looks like he’s all ready for Dr. Frankenstein’s winter crafting results. 

Now this is interesting! *Adding pitchfork tree orchard to possible dnd locations*

tip

go to this website

click the phrase generator and do this

endless supply of dnd spells

Some are more helpful than others, but hey.

Part 2

Spell: (random)