Gah, Skittens EVERYWHERE

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

heya!

this right here?

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT REAL.

the "@staff" is just the bio text.

tumblr staff will not contact you through anything other than email or their official accounts, which will all have this badge:

DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THIS OR SIMILAR ACCOUNTS AND ABSOLUTELY DO NOT CLICK ANY LINKS FROM IT.

report and block. i'd also appreciate it if you shared this post, bc that blog was JUST created and was already tagging a LOT of people, and i know not everyone has the scam-sensing instinct, even if this might seem obvious to some.

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

Sometimes the lights we carry to illuminate our way become the new path we can tread.

QUEER IS NOT A SLUR

We reclaimed it way back in the 1980's. It is the accepted term used in academia, in colleges and universities ALL OVER THE PLACE.

They'd go through the tags and search, and just attack anyone who used the word queer -- reblogs, asks, they'd keep repeating what they wanted to sell until people forgot it wasn't the truth. One minute it was "oh we're not saying you can't use it for yourself but you're evil to use it for anyone else" and the next minute it was "how dare you use it for yourself".

That was a coordinated campaign for trans exclusion, a first big step in the extreme transphobia we're dealing with now; it caught bi/pan and aro/ace queers in the crossfire, and that sure wasn't a drawback for its proponents either. They wanted (and still want) only cis, allo, gold star gays and lesbians to be the acceptable not-straights.

(was asked to put my Bluesky thread on tumblr)

Just because of some stuff I saw yesterday: if you are a minor online, please do not openly identify yourself as such. It is not safe, it allows adults who want to interact with minors for bad purposes to know you are one.

There are different, safer ways to accomplish your goals than to do that.

You do not need to identify yourself publicly as a minor online to:

Ask that people respect your boundaries

Not create or interact with adult material

Not be a victim of harassment

Not give away personal information

All these are normal things anyone of any age can do online.

If you are being invited into spaces you don't want to be in as a minor, or which people have asked you not to be in as a minor, decline for any or no reason. If an adult wants to do something with you they should not with a minor, decline for any or no reason. If people do not accept that, they are not people you should be interacting with. Don't pretend to be an adult, just don't say you aren't.

I understand that recently, more people under 18 tend to say that they are under 18 to protect themselves online. People who are not dangerous don't need that information. People who are dangerous will gladly use it because they know you are vulnerable. You are not protecting yourself.

As an adult who doesn't really care to interact with minors, I probably won't interact a lot with you if you are "young." That's not hard to catch from the way people act online. If you are "young" I care about you being safe and not victimized by opportunists, regardless of your birth year.

Protect your identity and safety on the internet, and if you are a person who is vulnerable, be a mysterious figure. Make silly posts. Complain about "people you know." Complain about "living with your parents."

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

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