Zack Gyoko

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?

They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.

i worked at a fancy gourmet coffee shop, but not everyone who came in knew that or cared, so we’d occasionally get ppl who got all their coffee knowledge from starbuckses. starbuckae? starbukakke

anyway sbux has this thing where they’re literally just wrong about what they call some drinks. for example, a cappuccino is traditionally a double shot of espresso with milk foam, like a few sips of drink, but at starbucks the smallest possible “cappuccino” is 8oz and espresso with that much milk? is really just a bastard latte. 

but to explain that to someone who doesnt know better takes time, and there a line forming, and a latte… is close enough to what someone who thinks of a cappuccino as a 16oz drink is expecting. so if someone asked for a “large cappuccino” we were instructed to go “okay :)”, plug in a large latte, and then, before they could see, scroll down to the secret buttons, the forbidden buttons, the deceit buttons, and press the one called “cappuccino”, in “quotes”, which would not only put a cappuccino on their receipt, but would send a message to the barista, across the room, who would then make a latte, see the pink “cappuccino” indicator, and go 

“large cappuccino? :)” 

and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"

and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER

And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?

Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?

Well? What do you think?

there were kids who stayed inside because of the black plague and went on to help cure it.

there were women who sat at home and cleaned the house and dreamt up a world where they could vote and have jobs.

there were kids in the mines who thought up a life outside of it. there were children who hid in annexes and wrote a diary where they prayed for a future without a terrible man in control

there were slaves who wanted freedom so badly and had hope that it would get better

there were gay people who hid in the corners of clubs and fought back for a future where they could walk down the street together

do you know what all of that has in common? they had hope that things would get better and they made that change. they looked at the world in its cruel ways and fought back.

so now, there are kids and teenagers and young adults and new adults who dream of a world so beautiful and the only amazon their grandchildren know is the rainforest

and it is in everything we do that we find this hope. wishing on dandelions, counting the stars, making our own clothes out of crochet or knit or sewing it, watching the sunset, going to the farmer’s market, feeding the birds, planting seeds.

The only Amazon our grandchildren will know is the rainforest. @lesbiangingerjughead

Ink: Diamine Tranquility

He thinks climate change can be lumped in with acid rain and the ozone layer of "things that were overblown and not really important because no one talks about it anymore."

It didn't even occur to him that we actively fixed the problem. Here's the EPA page on acid rainfall.

From the page:

"But!" she said:

People who see a clean, trash-free river are more likely support laws to curb more harmful "systemic" forms of pollution. People who participate in river cleanups take pride in their work--their river!--and become evangelists for protecting it.