A CUP OF TEA TO EASE YOUR PAIN

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The ONLY WAY to combat the lack of funding in arts education is for professionals to take a few hours a week to share their skills for FREE, to empower and encourage the next generation of artists. THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR. Here’s 200 tutorials:

op is absolutely right. this is coming from someone who researches and teaches on age and society professionally. modern western society is age-segregated to an unprecedented degree and there is ample evidence that it is absolutely fucking us over. it’s linked to everything from economic hardship to mental health crises.

intergenerational friendships are important. adults who never interact with young people outside of a defined institutional relationship with a built-in power imbalance (like being a parent or teacher) don’t develop the capacity to treat young people as equals, which reinforces patterns of abuse, neglect, social disempowerment, and silencing. young people who lack meaningful connections with adults outside of those same institutions miss out on an incredible source of support and guidance. and everyone misses out on the basic human joy of friendships that could have been really meaningful if we didn’t have this weird, broken ideology that says young people have nothing interesting to say, and no value to adults who don’t either want to raise them or exploit them or both.

Thing is, she’s actually the same age as my biological sister. I never see my bio sister though so I was and still am closer to this friend. But my point is to me there was never anything weird about talking to a person that much older than me as a friends because I was expected to anyway.

It’s just like anything else in this world. There are bad people. There will always be bad people.

Another friend, 42, started out as a tutor and turned into this gay mentor/cheerleader who has always believed and supported me.

After that, I joined another forum, again, made a couple of adult friends, and again, they helped me deal with my crappy life. I left the forum when I was seventeen, but I still remember them, and how much they helped.

When I was 20 – not a teenager anymore, but not quite mentally an adult yet – I joined a roleplaying game where most of the players were 5-20 years older than me, and these days they’re some of my closest friends – hell, I liked one of them so much I married her. Two of them stood with me at my wedding, and several of them came from other states and countries to go to the wedding. 

My best friendships have been largely with people who are older than me. Don’t get me wrong, I met plenty of great people online who were my age (I’m going to her bridesmaid at her wedding this year, and she was the bridesmaid at mine last year), but adult friendships are what kept me sane until I could get tf out away from my parents. I’ve never forgotten, and I try to pay it forward with anyone who’s younger than me and happens to come across my path.

None of her same-age classmates and friends would be able to give her this clarity because none of them had this time distance of the situation. They were all freaking out over their own gpa scores too. An older person’s perspective can be really valuable to a younger person facing some challenges for the first time.

It can be hard to find that balance between a character that is too perfect for readers to love and a character that is too flawed for readers to relate to.

Something I like to remember when thinking of flaws to give characters is that very often, flaws can be positive attributes that are in excess.

(This is related to Aristotle’s Virtues and Doctrine of the Mean.)

FOR INSTANCE,

Courage is a positive trait.

But taken too far? That can lead to rashness, or recklessness, which are negative traits. And without enough courage? The character is meak, fearful and cowardly, which are also negative traits.

Here are some examples to think of for your characters of positive traits taken to the extremes.

Virtue- kindness

Excess-easily taken advantage of

Deficiency- selfishness

-

Virtue- ambition

Excess- greed/avarice

Deficiency- lazy

-

Virtue- honesty

Excess- harshness

Deficiency- secrecy/dishonesty

-

Virue- decisiveness

Excess-impulsiveness

Deficiency-indecision

-

Virtue- passionate

Excess- irritating

Deficiency- apathetic

-

Virtue- strong leadership

Excess- over-controlling

Deficiency- indifferent/passive

1. Why you should

The death is a major plot point

It reveals some shocking plot twist

It supports your themes/what you’re trying to say with your book

Your novel explores the afterlife

You are George R.R Martin and the selling point of your work is that everybody dies

It suits the genre/mood of your novel

2. Why you shouldn’t

The character isn’t serving any purpose (this isn’t the Sims)

You want your readers to be shocked for the sake of being shocked

You want to be edgy

You think your MG story needs more gore

You want to romanticise grieving/loss

3. How you should

This really depends on your genre and target audience

If you’re writing something that isn’t intended to be graphic/traumatic, you can stick to the impact the death has on the other characters. If your novel explores illness, focus on that rather than on the disturbing death scene itself. Perhaps you’re writing a drama/tragic romance - you might want to ease up on the gore here. For these genres, I would suggest focusing on the emotional aspect of the death - the sobbing, the last words, the bright white lights (whatever floats your boat). Think of Mufasa in The Lion King - the actions are suspenseful, but we don’t see him being trampled with his guts spilling everywhere. But it’s still one of the most impactful deaths in fictional history.

If you’re writing in a more mature and gritty genre (like thriller, dark fantasy or crime), you can go all out. If there’s blood and guts, you readers probably want to see it in vivid detail to get their violence fix for the day.

Whichever genre your novel falls into, you should also go with what feels comfortable to you. Even if you’re writing adult dark fantasy, you don’t have to write graphic violence to make a character death impactful.

4. How you shouldn’t

Please don’t let your character have a three-pages-long monologue after they’ve been stabbed in the throat. It’s not realistic and it’s often very boring. Yes, a few well-written last words can have a great impact. Just make sure that your character would realistically be able to speak at that point and that it doesn’t become a cheese fest.

Unless you’re aiming for very dark/nihilistic humour, afford your characters some dignity in the way they kick the bucket. (e.g. don’t use the phrase “kick the bucket”). Having someone slip on a banana peel and then choke on a pretzel is a little ridiculous and will make the entire story seem silly. Once again, this really depends on what you’re going for. If your genre is serious and your character is important and beloved, try for emotion rather than whimsy.

Don’t let your characters die only to be resurrected again and again and again. Look, I love Supernatural (long may they reign), but even I have to admit that the Winchester brothers’ luck with death has become a bit ridiculous. Doing this takes away from the impact of the death - it removes the fear and suspense, and will leave your readers emotionally stunted.

5. Who you shouldn’t

Your only female character in a bid to make the male hero feel something and become a better person

Your only LGBTQIA+ character, who is just too pure to live in this terrible world

Your only character of colour, who dies to save the white hero

Your only disabled character, who can now finally find release from life with disability

The one character who has never experienced a sliver of joy and bears the brunt of the tragedy, right when happiness is finally within their reach

The main character in the middle of the story - unless you have a REALLY good plan for what happens next

If you get punched in the nose your eyes will water, a lot, even if it didn’t really hurt

Your body follows your head, your head gets pushed one way and your body will want to go that way

Getting hit in the stomach isn’t good, it hurts, getting hit in the diaphragm is worse. Causes your lungs to kinda spasm and make it hard to breathe (diaphragm is between stomach and chest)

When fighting a larger person they will have an easier time forcing you back

The jaw is the knockout button. Hit it hard enough and down for the count

Back of the head is very vulnerable, can cause serious damage if hit there

Kidney punches. They hurt. A lot.

People with experience will try to be where they are comfortable. A wrestler will try to get their opponent on the ground, a boxer will stay on their feet, etc.

Easiest counter to a kick is to get closer to whoever is throwing it, then they won’t have enough room for it to be effective

My main tip for any job interview…people are looking for:

1. People who are able to help them solve problems

2. People who are good at understanding what problems people have.

florence welch: probably like 200 BCE celtic queen

keeanu reeves: 1500 renaissance hoe

jeff goldblum: late 1800′s i would guess

harry styles: fairly new immortal, 1970′s 

lorde: 1920′s flapper era

hozier: man who even knows, rough estimate is like, 400 BCE

john mulaney: 1930′s/40′s, still bitter about the great depression probably and if he could put it in a bit with out being #exposed he would

many of Hozier’s songs reference being buried in the earth (In a Week, Work Song), and some are directly inspired by bog bodies (Like Real People Do, Run). two of the most famous Irish bog bodies, Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man, are dated between 392 and 175 BCE, and both are speculated to have been kings ritually sacrificed to the goddess of the land. in Take Me to Church, Hozier demonstrates a willingness to offer sacrifices to a goddess, and in Foreigner’s God, he thinks fondly upon the image of a pre-Christian Ireland (“when the land was God-less and free”). as well, Old Croghan Man is estimated to have been about 6′6, and Hozier is about 6′5. 

the only possible flaw in this theory is that in a Facebook Q&A (here at 5:28), Hozier says that he is over 3000 years old. 400 BCE only puts him at ~2400. it could be that after so many years he’s lost track of how many thousands, but another possibility is that he is more contemporaneous with an older bog body, the Cashel Man, also presumed to be a sacrificed king. that would put him closer to 4000 than 3000, but again, we could forgive an immortal for getting his millenia wrong.

So my first semester of PhD work in a musicology program involved this horrible class with a professor that wanted to suck the life out of all of his students by constantly belittling them. We had to write a short paper each week and present them conference-style and then he would tear us to shreds and do it all over again next week. The purpose of the class was supposedly to have us write papers about materials that hadn’t really been looked at by musicologists yet, and my class had music in advertisements. I was also the only woman in the class and the prof was lowkey sexist so I kept trying to do feminist topics without losing my entire will to live.

So we get to the end of the semester and I am just completely out of fucks, I have one paper left to write and I say fuck it, let’s write about pads and tampons, there must be something there, right? It turns out there IS something to be said there (and this gets back to OP’s question). Early pad and tampon commercials were very similar to each other; basically here’s a product to help you stay clean during your period. But around 1980, suddenly there’s public outcry and panic over tampons due to TSS (Toxic Shock Syndrome). At that point no one really understood how TSS worked but they knew it had to do with tampons. So women freaked out and started switching to pads instead. Now the worst offender, Rely, was taken off the market and other tampon commercials got slapped with little warning signs like “This product could cause TSS” so women bought even fewer tampons. This is when the advertising strategies for the two products changed.

Pad advertisements were now about “cleanliness” and “purity” - they knew you couldn’t get TSS from pads and they were going to emphasize that fact. You’ve got women in white dresses with long hair slowly walking through fields of flowers with pastoral-y flutes in the background. And to fight back, tampon companies take it the complete opposite direction - they ignore TSS entirely and start showing businesswomen running to catch the subway, sporty women riding bikes, basically any sort either high-powered position or active woman showed up in these commercials with contemporary pop-song type music over the top. The clear intention was “yeah we know that these could cause TSS but they’re much better for your mobility, both physically and career-wise.”

I got done giving this paper and I look up to see my four male classmates and one male professor in varying shades of pale-ness and they just all sort of looked at me for a couple minutes without knowing how to respond. It’s one of the proudest moments of my PhD career so far.

And I think it has to do with the fact that the finale betrayed fans badly.

Take Friends for instance. It still is a lasting cultural thing. I think we can all agree now in hindsight, that Ross is an absolute douchecanoe, but at the time, the majority of fans wanted Ross and Rachel to get together because it had been this thing that the show had told us through cues was MEANT to be.

In HIMYM, the entire show was predicated on MEETING the Mother, and we had ruled out that Robin wasn’t the Mother. More than that, they had shown us that Barney and Robin were actually perfect for each other. They had spent episodes and seasons redeeming Barney, and softening Robin and showing us why they were meant to be. And to see BOTH of those relationships forced apart for a series finale that they had written all the way back in season 1 that didn’t make any sense for the story they eventually told, was damning for the show’s legacy in culture.

The last point at which that ending was still viable was at the end of season 5, when Robin and Barney had tried the dating thing and it didn’t work out the first time, when we still didn’t know much about the mother or the circumstances under which Ted met her…Beginning with season six, they started the build up to the titular moment and began reexamining Robin and Barney’s relationship. And it was at this point that the creators should have scrapped their original ending and began planning a new one. Instead, they tried to have their cake and eat it too, allowing the viewers to fall in love with Barney and Robin as a couple and Ted’s relationship with the mother (leaning particularly hard on the latter in the final season after they gave her a face in the season 8 finale), and then try to have their original ending, which no longer worked in any capacity. 

Cold hot chocolate aka chocolate milk

Cold coffee

@faenet event: alternate covers