Re: Sick and tired of hearing “source?” or having to explain white privilege and systemic racism? [reformatted]

Hello all! This is a reformatted version of this post originally compiled by randymusprime​.

On Preparing for Arguments… Identifying and Avoiding Logical Fallacies

On White Privilege & Systemic Racism… 7 Facts That Prove White Privilege Exists On Racism and White Privilege The New Jim Crow Where White Privilege Came From White Privilege from Taking Action Against Racism Denying White Privilege White Privilege: An Insidious Virus 1 in 3 Black Males Will Go to Prison in Their Lifetime What is a ‘System of Privilege’? White Privilege 101 Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack 14 Examples of Systemic Racism in the US Criminal Justice System Black Student Graduation Rates Young Black Men and Gun Violence Operation Ghetto Storm Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color in the US Racial Profiling in Vermont DoJ Stats Show Clear Pattern of Racial Profiling OK, fine. Let’s talk about ‘black-on-black’ violence. Why Police So Often See Unarmed Black Men as Threats

On the Difference Between Racism and Prejudice… Toward an Understanding of Prejudice and Racism Ferguson Cops More Inept Than Strategic 10 Simple Ways White People Can Fight Everyday Racism Ferguson’s Massive Cover-Up How Moral Leaders like MLK Approach Neutrality Why It’s So Hard for Victims to See Justice America’s Stop-And-Frisk Policies Proof of Racism Examples of Institutional Racism in the US On Why White People/Americans Are Afraid to Admit Racism Exists… The Racism That Still Plagues America Why We’re Still Unwilling to Admit to Systemic Racism in America Why American Racism is Impossible to Defeat

On Reverse Racism… A Look at the Myth of Reverse Racism Why Reverse Racism Isn’t Real Why There’s No Such Thing as ‘Reverse Racism’ Enjoy my lovelies, and feel free to add to this post or to the original!

- Mod D

Thank. You.

You’re a godsend.

Actually

The question I get the most is how I write characters that feel like real people. 

Generally when I’m designing a human being, I deconstruct them into 7 major categories:

1. Primary Drive: This is generally related to the plot. What are their plot related goals? How are they pulling the plot forward? how do they make decisions? What do they think they’re doing and how do they justify doing it. 2. Fear: First, what is their deep fear? Abandonment? being consumed by power? etc. Second: tiny fears. Spiders. someone licking their neck. Small things that bother them. At least 4. 3. Physical desires. How they feel about touch. What is their perceived sexual/romantic orientation. Do their physical desires match up with their psychological desires.

4. Style of self expression: How they talk. Are they shy? Do they like to joke around and if so, how? Are they anxious or confident internally and how do they express that externally. What do words mean to them? More or less than actions? Does their socioeconomic background affect the way they present themselves socially?  5. How they express affection: Do they express affection through actions or words. Is expressing affection easy for them or not. How quickly do they open up to someone they like. Does their affection match up with their physical desires. how does the way they show their friends that they love them differ from how they show a potential love interest that they love them. is affection something they struggle with?

6. What controls them (what they are weak for): what are they almost entirely helpless against. What is something that influences them regardless of their own moral code. What– if driven to the end of the wire— would they reject sacrificing. What/who would they cut off their own finger for.  What would they kill for, if pushed. What makes them want to curl up and never go outside again from pain. What makes them sink to their knees from weakness or relief. What would make them weep tears of joy regardless where they were and who they were in front of. 

7. WHAT PART OF THEM WILL CHANGE: people develop over time. At least two of the above six categories will be altered by the storyline–either to an extreme or whittled down to nothing. When a person experiences trauma, their primary fear may change, or how they express affection may change, etc. By the time your book is over, they should have developed. And its important to decide which parts of them will be the ones that slowly get altered so you can work on monitoring it as you write. making it congruent with the plot instead of just a reaction to the plot. 

That’s it.

But most of all, you have to treat this like you’re developing a human being. Not a “character” a living breathing person. When you talk, you use their voice. If you want them to say something and it doesn’t seem like (based on the seven characteristics above) that they would say it, what would they say instead?

If they must do something that’s forced by the plot, that they wouldn’t do based on their seven options, they can still do the thing, but how would they feel internally about doing it?

How do their seven characteristics meet/ meld with someone else’s seven and how will they change each other?

Once you can come up with all the answers to all of these questions, you begin to know your character like you’d know one of your friends. When you can place them in any AU and know how they would react.

They start to breathe.

If you are having a bad day, please unmute.

(Huskie puppy doesn’t quite get the howling thing. Sounds like a baby babbling.)

“Banana!”

* day is fixed* 

ok. i super needed this.

THIS. The whole world should watch this.

shout-out to @sexystripedtie for the vacationing team free will idea, and this draw your squad for the wayward daughters frame :)

GETTING A JOB CHEAT SHEET!!

other cheat sheets

horror films for people who don’t like horror films

i’ve been asked this a lot: what horror movies would you recommend to people who try to stay away from the genre in general, for whatever reason? some people don’t enjoy being scared, some people find horror too unrealistic and outlandish, and some people don’t enjoy the repetitive tropes that are admittedly often present in horror films. 

that being said, when i do give people recommendations for horror movies to dip their toe into, they’re often the same ones, or very similar ones. so i’ve gathered them here today, in case my horror loving followers have any friends who ask them the same questions, but aren’t sure of how to answer. 

Q: Why don’t you like horror?

A: “I don’t like jumpscares.” 

Try: 

A: “I can’t stand gore.” 

Try:

A: “I don’t like horror’s cheesy tropes.” 

Try:

A: “I don’t like the way horror treats women.” 

Try:

A: “Horror is too unrealistic.” 

Try:

A: “I’d rather watch something funny.” 

Try:

Great list! I’d like to add:

Honestly this is something I’ve been dealing with for some time. I love horror, but sometimes, horror does not love me. From a young age I was a major scardy-cat, like, even “silly” horror movies would freak me out, give me legit panic attacks at night after I’d seen them. I’ve been working on that, but there’s some horror movies I just plain will never be able to watch. My best advice: reading spoilers online, watching them in daytime, and if at all possible working on set of a few horror movies so you get into the mindset of thinking about HOW they did certain things in the movie, not freaking out about them. There’s some horror movies I can watch now, in theaters even, and go home and not have a panic attack over them. 

I’m not really a horror movie fan because I was very easily scared as a kid (my mum banned me from watching Goosebumps after it gave me nightmares).

However, there is one subgenre of horror films I love and that’s ‘stop motion family horror movies.’ You’d be surprised how many movies fit into that category

And that just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I’m a sucker for them.

I was thinking about this post and I realised I do like the horror genre but – other than stop motion family horror movies – I’m not a fan of horror films. I love creepy short horror stories (though not before bed). I adore Neil Gaiman.

I’m a big fan of audio horror stories and podcasts

Welcome to Night Vale

You learn about the odd American desert town of Night Vale though listening to Cecil, the host of Night Vale’s public radio station. Night Vale is full of the strange and unusual. From strange hooded figures to vague yet menacing government agencies and a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, this town has it all.

It also has one of the best relationships I’ve ever seen in fiction anywhere. From Cecil falling head over heels in love with the beautiful dark skinned, long haired scientist Carlos to them having a long term relationship together and learning to compromise and accept each other’s flaws it’s really just a joy to listen to.

Alice isn’t Dead

A female trucker speaks into her long wave radio as she goes from place to place in her job which she uses as an excuse to search for Alice. Alice was her wife who disappeared without a trace. The trucker tries to find out what happened to Alice, why she left and what she was hiding. However, there are forces that don’t want her to continue her quest.

The thistle man might look human but he isn’t. He can rip you apart and eat you up and that isn’t a metaphor. He’s warned our protagonist to stop her search and he has the power to stop her forever if he wants.

The Black Tapes

A documentary style drama, which will have you forgetting it’s all scripted.

Alex Reagan works for Pacific Northwest, an online radio show. She was doing a program about interesting jobs and the first episode was about ghost hunters. When she met Dr. Richard Strand, a sceptic ghost hunter who’s made it his life’s mission to disprove the supernatural, she thinks they can do at least two episodes on him and his work. We are now on season two.

Richard Strand has hundreds for cases he’s solved to his satisfaction but the black tapes are his unsolved cases. Is there a rational explanation of everything or are sinister forces at work in the world?

efb | questions & answers, #2 (via aesterismos)

Sam and the MoC

So, I’ve seen a bunch of posts/comments suggesting that if Sam had taken the MoC he would have handled it fairly well. Said posts ranged from the amiably cracky “he would just pet ALL THE DOGS” to more moderate and serious suggestions that Sam has his shit together enough that he could probably at least do Cain-in-his-beekeeping-phase.

I don’t believe it, not just the cracky form I’m not supposed to really believe, but the more serious meta. Part of that is a matter of personal literary taste – I don’t care for overly cinnamon roll characters – but most of it is a real inability to suspend disbelief. However you read Sam’s non-reactions on the Watson level, “he really is just that forgiving and zen” does not work for me as a plausible account. 

So at first I was thinking that MoC!Sam might in fact be instantly, shockingly violent, that the Mark would tap into the magma layer of anger of someone whose torturer and rapist has just been living in his bedroom. (While I grant some bad writing there, it’s an extreme example of a very longstanding pattern of Sam underreacting to dealing with beings who have inflicted particular and intimate damage on him, so I’m not prepared to write it off as simply OOC or out-of-’verse.) Part of me does think that the anger HAS to be there.

But … what if it isn’t? What if coping by underreacting really has got so deep into Sam that the reactions are gone, inaccessible even to the hypothetical Mark? That’s actually a more frightening horror possibility to me than psycho!Sam. An inability to register physical pain is a dangerous medical vulnerability; it’s also a horror trope in fictional monsters, the zombie who just keeps on and on no matter how you wound and damage it unless you can get the one killing blow. Losing the ability to experience damage is one route to both living in and becoming a nightmare.

Maybe MoC Sam would be more like soulless!Sam in some ways, just as Sam without his soul was atypical of a condition most of whose victims seem to experience violent, emotional lashing out. Maybe he’d be some kind of zen forgiveness monster, and maybe that would be really fucking terrifying. Maybe I just read too many Victorian novels, but the extremes of awesome!Sam make me afraid not only for but of Sam. So perhaps I actually could buy into the “Mark!Sam would just become the ultimate cinnamon roll” meme after all, just in a “this could be the concept for my horrorbang fic” variant.

There’s also the possibility that Sam would become increasingly violent, but towards himself. 

Sam has darkness inside of him. It would come out somehow, but whether directed at others or self-directed… I could well see it being the latter.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about MoC Sam myself and it’s not like Sam is completely incapable of anger. But like you’ve pointed out, he’s become very limited. He can get angry at an occasional target. For awhile he seemed to really hate Crowley although for some reason, that’s gone now. But if he had the MofC and you got on the extremely short list of entities that Sam allowed himself to hate, I think it could be very bad.

And he seems to sublimate most anger impulses towards atonement. Which could get creepy if he can’t die. What would the Demon of Atonement even be?

Oh god that’s true, he wouldn’t be able to die. A suicidal kamikazi that can’t die could be truly horrible, zombie-like.

I feel very strongly that much of Sam’s outward appearance of calm, collected doesn’t mean he doesn’t have darkness. In fact I think he has a great deal and that’s why he keeps it so calm on the surface. I think he must have some very dark thoughts, which are normally tempered by his morals and ethics. But with those removed, they would come to the surface. I’m sort of of the opinion that in recent seasons those dark thoughts have mostly been self-directed, in the line of suicidal ideation… but I’m sure they could come out in different forms.

When Sam is without Dean, he becomes freaking scary. He sacrifices anyone to his cause, he tortures –and not for emotional outlet, but because it’s expedient. Remember when he manipulated a random man into summoning a demon to make a deal, so he could get access to a demon to find Dean? That was just last season. The man lost his soul. Sam was not soulless. It was a smart, expedient plan. It was also incidentally cruel, even though he didn’t intend for it to go that far, as there was always the risk that it would.

Mark of Cain Dean didn’t actually kill that many people. He had the urge for random explosive violence, and also for other vices like drink, women, partying. He wanted to lose himself in these escapes. In fact Demon Dean was mostly interested in having a good time without care. Mark of Cain! Dean wanted to get out his aggression. I think Mark of Cain!Sam would be more lethal. I think his hit list would be actually focussed, and his actions would be colder and more brutal. He wouldn’t be held back by the morals that keep in him check. More driven to kill those he thinks deserve it, like Cain going down his list, but more… suicidal. And yet he’d just keep living…

I think the mark in Dean fed on anger. I think the mark in Sam would feed on the same thing that fed his demon blood addiction. Namely the feeling that he is a monster.

The mark would turn Sam into the monster he fears he is. It would overrule all his tight control. Because even with his more recent lack of anger, I think Sam has always felt the need to hide what he fears is shameful about himself, to never let himself loose. (NB Sam has always been more wild in bed, imo and from what we’ve seen, because he is so controlled on the surface. he has something to let out). I’m not sure that’s simple anger or something else, but I am sure it’s still there in some form. And while I 100% believe that Sam should not feel shameful about it and doesn’t deserve to feel like he’s wrong/bad/impure/monstrous, I think it’s simplistic to write off the parts of himself that he associates with those feelings. The fact is that he’s not impure, but he’s also not one-dimensional “purity.” He’s human. He’s wrong in thinking that whatever those things are, they make him bad. He’s good. But those things/thoughts/whatever they are/ are still there. I don’t know if I’m explaining this right, because I am so completely against Sam feeling impure and I know how wrong he is in that, but I am also against reducing him to a one-dimensional cinnamon roll (not that he’s not an adorable font of adorablenes. but he’s also so much more than that).

I’m reminded of Sam’s interest in serial killers. I think he would be incredibly dangerous.

Edited to add: I adore this post and I’m just rambling because i enjoy thinking about it.

I think MoC!Dean and demon!Dean (who weren’t entirely the same, though there’s overlap) have somewhat more complicated motivations than either just having a good time or acting out aggression. There is Dean the hedonist, especially in demon!Dean. Dean’s always been a person who can take pleasure in the moment, enjoy a burger, enjoy the sheer adrenaline and skill parts of hunting, enjoy both casual sex and domestic life. It’s one of Dean’s most lovable qualities, that despite everything he’s not without joy, though it does have it’s dark side even in regular Dean: the Dean of Rock and a Hard Place, whose sex positivity crossed over the line into pressuring someone who at that point had made different choices about her relationship to sex. And in the absolute darkest parts of Dean that capacity for pleasure can take the form of sadism, the gleefulness of demon!Dean’s emotional and physical violence against Sam. There’s also a kind of willed immaturity, the drive of the over-responsible child to escape from responsibility and unpleasantness, that manifests in the cut-loose avoidance aspect of demon!Dean, in MoC!Dean’s unwillingness to confront the realities of his situation, and that appears in the parts of regular Dean that slide out of things with a joke: the sexual joke about the Gadreel possession, the “we should get a big-breasted maid” joke, the meaningless apologies joke.

[I’m putting a read more bc this is getting super long]

Keep reading

Sooooo someone should definitely write a fic with Cas getting to have his conversation with Chuck and then we can all just pretend it actually happened. Ya know, treat it like a deleted scene or something. If you write this, lemme know. 

Someone already did! I’m trying to remember the title and who wrote it, but it HAS been written.

FOUND IT!

HERE

YES THIS IS EVERYTHING I NEEDED IN MY LIFE AT THIS MOMENT. THANK YOU FOR FINDING THIS FOR ME. THANK YOU TO THE AUTHOR FOR WRITING IT <2

Geometric Animals 

Manila-based illustrator Kerby Rosanes known as Sketchy Stories has created a new series of sketches combing animals with geometric forms. 

These are so beautiful. I would love to have the wolf one as a tattoo.

Photos Showing That Angle Is Everything.

this is pissing me off

this shit made me mad

Whoa

12:11 am - The Supernatural Color Wheel Supernatural has its own distinctive visual style. This includes a specific palette of colors. Beginning with the Woman in White, it’s become apparent that these colors have been used as something of a visual shorthand to reinforce the impact of the storytelling.

And because I’m obsessive like that, I’ve collected all the information I can find in one place.

If you’d like to read some more about where the thinking about the symbolic use of color in Supernatural came from, here are some good places to start.

bowtrunckle has written about:

Yellow, Pink and White in WIaWSNB

Red Demons and Yellow Psychics Part 1

Red Demons and Yellow Psychics Part 2

sadelyrate has written about:

Blue and Green in the Angel in the House

And that lit a fire under me, and I went on to write about:

Pink, White and Red

Green

Orange

Blue

Eta:

What’s blue and white and red all over? Blue, white and red in Season 4

Credit goes to Oxienesis for the screencap of Solomon’s Key.

Tags: meta colors

random inspiring j2m to remind you — yeah, you over there — that you’re awesome. :> 

i’m back

World Building Resources

World Building Worksheet (Great for Fantasy/Science Fiction)

Forms of Government

Types of Art  - Perhaps the culture you’ve built doesn’t emphasize painting and drawing, but glasswork or sand art as an art form. Be creative.

7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding - What NOT to Do

Cyberpunk Derivatives (Steampunk, Clockpunk, etc.)

Rules of Building Believable Mythology

Fantasy Resources

Medieval Demographics Calculator

Fantasy Calendar Generator - (Can also be used for Sci-Fi)

Social Organization - List of Worldbuilding Questions

Random City Generator

Guide to Fantasy Subgenres

Types of Superpowers (Wiki)

Types of Magic

Magic in Fiction - Wikipedia, discusses ways characters can use magic.

List of Magical Creatures

Creating Fantasy Religions

Science Fiction Resources

Types of Planets

Types of Spaceships

Star System Generator

Creating Believable Aliens

Designing a Hypothetical Alien World

List of Emerging Technologies - Wikipedia

Weapons of the Future

Applications for Artificial Intelligence

Misc.

Things to Remember When Writing Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Types of Fictional Apocalypse

10 Universal Myths of the Ancient World

List of Mythologies

Future Timeline - Predictions technology, natural disasters, etc., for future; organized by year. An easy to use resource.