Cake-chan

2. Yeah, of course your rough draft sucks. It’s supposed to. --> Let it suck. --> You can fix it in edits. 

3. When you’re stressed you aren’t unbiased about your work. --> Don’t judge your work while your are actively working on it. --> Remember to drink water, take your meds/vitamins, eat something, and get sleep. --> Double-check to make sure the restless creative energy is not displaced emotional worries over something else. If it is, displace with intention and let the worries go into your work. You shouldn’t keep stress in your head, put it on a page, or canvas, or in a carving, or a meal, or something. Get it out and let it go.

4. No work is ever wasted. --> All time spent planning and creating is useful in some way.  --> Failure means you tried, which is good. --> Try again. Fail harder. Fail better. --> Keep going until you like what you’re making.

@devils-songbirb asked:  

HI! I really love your advice!! I was wondering how I could write a good villain? I’ve noticed that in most of the stories I write the antagonist always seems to have the same motives and I don’t know how to alter it enough so that it’s different and interesting.

Before we get started, I want to clarify two things:

- Antagonists can be of any moral alignment. They can be also be non-human things, such as monsters, nature, inner demons, etc. The antagonist is simply the primary thing your protagonist fights against.

- For the course of this article I will be talking about villainous antagonists who are human or human-like. You could use most of these tips for villainous protagonists as well.

There are two broad categories of villains: sympathetic and unsympathetic. I’ll talk a little about both, but I primarily write and prefer to see the former, so that will be the focus.

1. The Unsympathetic Villain.

Unsympathetic villains are evil for the sake of evil.

While these villains can be horrifying when done well, they tend to be the least intimidating type of antagonist. The most common mistake is to try to make an unsympathetic villain feel as heinously villainous as possible. 

A villain who oozes darkness and villainy and nothing else will come across like a machine with a program that just reads: Be Evil. The genuine threat of these characters is often lost, because there’s no real life equivalent. In order to pull a villain like this off, the story must either perfectly suspend our disbelief or find a way to connect the villain to an antagonistic force the reader experiences in their own lives. 

Often, the fictional antagonists you’ve sincerely wanted to murder are self-serving, hateful people you’ve met similar, real life versions of before, doing the things those real life versions continually get away with. 

Since I don’t write unsympathetic villains often, I won’t write a more detailed guide on them, but I encourage you to think deeper into why some unsympathetic villains work while others don’t. Consider your favorite unsympathetic villains. How does the story present this villain? When have they drawn up intense emotions in you? Where did these emotions come from, and why?

2. The Sympathetic Villain.

The sympathetic villain is intimidating not because they’re evil, but because they’re both evil and human.

They represent what every one of us could easily become under the right circumstances.

They prove that your hero is not good simply because they fell into that alignment by chance, but rather because they chose it.

They show that a little good and evil exist inside every one of us, and it’s what we decide to act on and what we choose to compromise for which determines who we become.

Generally, they’re more interesting and fleshed out than un-sympathetic villains.

How do we write an interesting, sympathetic villain?

-your set up to the scene you're writing is not working. go back and check it

-you are not in the right POV. think about who would be the most interesting or the most entertaining or the most informative in that scene, depending on what impact you want the scene to have

-you're at the beginning of the chapter and the words aren't coming to you even though you have it planned out already? the solution is simple: you don't like what you have planned out as much as you think you do. do not force it

-solution to a lot of problems comes from a single question I ask myself: Do I choose the kind option, or the mean option? (Your readers will eat up either one)

-You find the dialogue lacking? Act it out

-Your scene feels boring or something just "ain't right" but you can't tell what it is? Try making yourself feel the emotion you want your readers to feel. If you didn't cry while writing a scene meant to make your readers bawl their eyes out, then you might not have connected to your character as well as you wanted to. Put yourself in their shoes, pretend you ARE them.

(And afterwards, please practice putting yourself back in your own shoes and taking care of your mental health. Sometimes the fucked up stuff might get to you. Healthy minds create healthy lives, and in turn, you get to keep creating.)

-Your environment might be bothering you. Take a look around you and see what's nagging you. Is your workspace not clean? Are your notes out of order? A clean/orderly workspace can help you organize your thoughts or get you into a more productive mood. (Trust me, I get it, sometimes it's really hard to keep it tidy.)

-Try white/brown/pink noise. Try listening to music, or to videos that create background noise you feel most productive with.

-Jumping jacks. Squats. Stretches. Wiggle around your room. That one scene in High School Musical where Sharpay and Ryan are warming up. It sounds ridiculous, but this is good for you, your body, and your mind. Release pent up energy, get yourself awake and focused. If you aren't able to do this, try something silly to wake your brain up. Do some puzzles, sing some songs, etc.

-Most importantly:

Did you do your laundry? Did you get enough sun? Did you drink enough water? Did you eat enough today? Did you get your favorite snack? Did you smile? Did you run in your yard like you did as a kid? Did you laugh with your friend? Did you see the way their eyes crinkle when they smile at you? Did you play with your dog? Your cat? Did you look at the flowers in the field near your house? Did you meet someone new? Did you learn something you didn't before? Did you try something you were scared of? Did it go well? Did you enjoy being yourself? Did you explore the world today? Did you live? Did you love? Did you feel? Did you breathe, and relax, and feel that everything is gonna be okay?

@staff turned off replies on their post about AI implementation. They’re dropping this on us, plugging their ears, and looking the other way and we can’t even tell them how we feel. That’s unacceptable.

This is a suggestion box that the Tumblr Staff themselves have set up. Let’s use it.

Tell them exactly how you feel about this new AI generation- its effects on the artist and writer communities, the blatant theft of our hard work and opportunities, the saturation of online feeds with these soulless, misshapen images and unintelligible writing. Express that disappointment, sadness, fear, and anger. They need to know.

And!! I haven’t see anything about using just art and images to train their AI generators. Writing is probably also fair game!! Everyone who posts on this site is affected by this!

Select the category “Feedback” and “New Features” and let the people in charge here know exactly how we feel about being automatically opted in to train AI generators with our creations.

Yes, you are opted into this by default!! If you still need to turn off third party sharing for your blog, Here is a quick guide on how to opt out of training AI with your blog’s creations. It’s just a hidden switch to flip in your Settings menu.

On a Web Browser:

I had some trouble finding this option. My first instinct was to click the settings button on the left, but that's where it is!

First, you'll click the name of your blog on the left sidebar to bring it up on your browser.

Then click "Blog settings" on the right sidebar once your blog is brought up. That's where they're hiding it.

Click "Prevent Third-Party Sharing" under the Visibility section, and bam! You're done.

On Mobile:

Thankfully it's much easier on mobile. Just click the Gear icon on your blog's page, to go to settings.

Scroll all the way down until you see Visibility, then toggle the Prevent third-party sharing option for your blog!!

If you disable this setting on mobile, it automatically synced it to my web browser settings, too. ...But if you use both Web and Mobile, I would still highly recommend double checking that it actually turned off on both!!

Check that it's turned off on your side blogs too! And check your settings every now and then anyway to ensure that it's staying turned off, because if my memory serves right, some other websites will pull some shenanigans on things like this and opt you back in without telling you!

Leave Feedback on New Features at Tumblr Support Here!! Let Staff know however we can that having our content fed to AI at their whim is unacceptable.

And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom:

keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

My writing doesn’t have to be perfect all the time

The dialogue in this scene feels stale (or another adjective), but I can revise that later

The descriptions lack specificity (or another issue), but I can revise that later

The [another specific craft element] isn’t working the way I’d hoped, but I can revise that later

I don’t feel like I can objectively judge my work at this current moment

I’m not happy with my writing right now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll feel this way forever

I’ll reread this writing at a later time and move on for now

This scene isn’t turning out how I’d pictured in my head, but I can accept that for now and tweak it later

I trust myself to edit this in the future

I’m afraid people are going to judge my work, but I’ll accept that I can’t control the reactions of other people—my reaction matters most

This scene/subplot/character/etc is overwhelming me.

I’ll take my time through this scene/chapter/subplot as more time may allow me to immerse more in the draft.

I’ll write this scene/chapter/subplot as quickly as I can—I would like to get through this part ASAP.

It’s okay to make mistakes in my writing.

I’m not feeling very confident in my craft right now, but I know this will pass

This scene might be bad, and that’s okay. Sometimes I write gems, and sometimes my writing needs a bit more work (that’s normal)

This scene relies on [certain skill] that I’m still honing. I understand to get better at something, I have to practice and practicing requires mistakes.

I’m not excited about this scene right now

I had high expectations for this scene, and unfortunately, I don’t feel like I’m hitting them. However, it’s okay for expectations to change.

I’m disappointed with how my writing is turning out. That’s normal, even though it sucks.

I’m going to remind myself what I DO like about my writing because this feels bad, though I know this feeling won’t last forever.

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

1) put that guy into situations

Do you ever want to become a salamander to do this 🤣