faggo #1

In little ways, you can stunt your own personal growth. You or a friend may share these habits and not know it.

My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old.  Here’s my impressions so far:

Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal.  Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.

Age 1 - 2: Hates you.  Hates you so much.  You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them.  There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.

Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe.  Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them.  Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.

Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually.  I did not realize kids were this cool.  Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn.  Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”

Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable.  Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other.  At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult.  Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers.  (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)

Na Na Na // My Chemical Romance // Make Room!!!!

This needs to stop.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a story with purpose and meaning, but when you limit yourself to writing a story around those morals, then you restrict what you can write.

Write what you want to write. 

Write stories for fun. 

Write stories with no moral messages and see what meaning other people read into it.

Write a story by focusing on the characters, the plot, the narrative, whatever; just write the story you want to tell, becasue if you limit yourself to writing around that moral message then you lose the possibility to open your text up and create depth to it by having multiple meanings and moral messages, contradictions and ideologies that your readers will hold onto and literature students will gush over.

Laura Bailey herself explained that when she auditioned for the role, she was given no information about what the character looked like. It was only after she was hired and arrived for recording that she was shown concept art and discovered the character was a WOC. She was uncomfortable about the situation.

Meanwhile, Neil Druckmann revealed that they were already working on concept art of the character when they hired Laura Bailey. They finalized the character’s design as a WOC after they’d hired a white voice actress, so that was a conscious decision. He was also very flippant about the situation as a whole.