resplendeo

Get sucked down a rabbit hole on wikipedia for a few hours? Finally have motivation to write? Time slows down to an absolute crawl and gives me the time I need, and then I still haven't spent any time -- plenty of time available for whatever errands or obligations I have.

Mind-numbing wait at the doctor's office or the DMV or waiting for something to download? Takes a couple seconds.

To celebrate the reprinting of our anarchist cookbook Recipes for Disaster, we present a guide to installing unsanctioned mosaics in asphalt streets and parking lots:

http://crimethinc.com/asphaltmosaics

Some people know of these as the mysterious "Toynbee Tiles," the stuff of urban legend. Our researchers cracked the method two decades ago. Ever since then, we have been trying to make these as ubiquitous as spray-paint.

I HIGHLY recommend the whole series but also you can use his library of "leads" to explore the Youtube Recycle Bin yourself and I've done that a lot and it's SO fun

The internet is so vast, much more expansive than algorithms will ever show you. This really reminds me of wandering around randomly on Google Earth. It's possible to experience so much of the world it's kind of mind boggling.

I've been keeping a collection of my favorite youtube recycle bin finds.

this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke

this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.

instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”

of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that

because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job

V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains

It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.

First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.

Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.

And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.

This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.

This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.

But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

In terms of what to do about this:

Begging folks to: 1: Start taking memes seriously, look at where the New Lingo you're getting is coming from online because the answer is almost always either:

Appropriated AAVE, which also serves the far-right agenda in multiple ways. Participating in Digital Blackface and the active destruction of different facets of Black cultural tradition (queer spaces do this SO MUCH. SO MUCH of "gay people talk" is bastardized AAVE and that causes serious harm and erasure of history which is inexplicably linked with histories of resilience and joy and culture making in the face of oppression and enslavement. We owe much of our ability to track what gamergaters are doing At All to the work of Black feminists who paid attention to how the far right started to mimic and impersonate Black women online to seed controversies designed to discredit feminist movements, but I digress (barely))

or

Far right memes designed to push the overton window on acceptable behaviour and things to say more firmly into their wheelhouse. This is something far right governments are both aware of and actively engaging with.

All those Virgin v Chad comics; the incredibly ableist lobotomy reaction images; the resurgence of the R slur; the push of tradwife content and Girl Math and such all either originates back in those cesspits or has been firmly weaponized.

2: Continue to educate yourselves on game development and call for systemic change at shareholder levels. Get loud and write in proper complaints about racist and sexist and ableist design choices. Call for crediting and fair pay for everyone who worked on games, including contracted staff on the other side of the world who provided art assets or quality assurance.

Video games are increasingly recognized world over as one of the most profitable and effective modern shapers of culture. A truly obscene amount of money is constantly changing hands, and where development studios are allowed to form at all impacts what stories are told.

A lot of gamedevs want better than this, but we need audience support and participation. There's huge efforts to unionize the industry - but the same underlying problems are at play in organizing too. Devs, not just white devs in the global north, all over the world need support. Unionization won't fix underlying culture issues, and there's also a lot of people who have no interest in even starting to address those. Please support the Game Devs of Colour expo, look at indie titles, check out independent games journalism efforts who are able to call out the links between the mainstream industry and the numerous active war machines.

Sorry for the huge add-on but as a developer myself I have followed along with this from the start and kept abreast of how the situation has continued to metastasize and develop. It's genuinely so important to talk to kids and young people about this history that's still in motion and provide education on what to look out for, especially if you know any who come from conservative homes. Many of the kids are NOT alright, and they're getting swept up across the world into states of profound alienation and taught to view anyone different than them as less than human.