If You Know Anyone Who Lives On The North Or South Carolina Coast, Tell Them That If There’s An Evacuation

URGENT

I’m honestly in tears. I am incredibly upset, I am shaking, I am furious. I need this post to reach as many people as possible, because I want everyone to be aware about this and we need to work together to help bring this young girl home safely. I have a lot of followers so I’m hoping this will spread quickly so more people are aware of this.

This is Kennedi High. You may have seen her circling through your dashboard. She’s 16 years old and she has gone missing, and so far everyone has pieced together through her snapchat story that something is really, really wrong. She’s acting funny, and recently her snapchat story has been updated: “I’m with this other man and he telling me I’m never going back home to see my family.” A lot of people think this may be a case of sex trafficking, and it most likely is, and I’m honestly terrified for her. 

She’s originally from Baltimore, MD, though it’s said that she may currently be in the Mountain View California region. Please spread this if you can, reblog any other posts you find about her and get this story out. I’m absolutely sickened and shaken and I just want her to be safe. This is so important to me.

Not to mention, there’s been reports of over 64,000 black girls missing across the United States, and it’s most likely due to sex trafficking. 64,000 black girls. That’s just crazy. This is terrifying and needs more media coverage, this needs to be spread everywhere. We need to protect black girls. They need our help.

If you guys have any more information to add to this post or correct, please please feel free. I’ll try to add any other updates I find on the situation. In the meantime, if you can, please this reblog or any other posts relating to Kennedi and spread the word. Tell everyone about it. This needs everyone’s attention.

I'm hearing a lot of things about how prologues are bad and that you should never put protagonist backstory in the prologue but that causes a problem for me. My character's hatred for the antagonist is explained in the prologue along with the urgency of their rivalry. What should I do?

Take that information and weave it into the story like you would with any backstory info. Unless it’s necessary to explain something that can’t be woven in (like an event that the protag knows nothing about), scrap your prologue.

As storytelling goes, which is more intriguing?

“My sister hates this kid in her class because he teases her best friend and also stole her Fruit Roll-Up, so today during recess she punched him.” 

or 

“My sister punched some kid at recess today.”

The first one tells the whole story in one go and allows for limited response. The second one leaves the listener thinking “Oh my god, why? Tell me more.”

Likewise, the rivalry and the urgency should be included within your story, not wasted in the prologue. The reader doesn’t even know your characters yet to care that they hate each other. If you saw two strangers in the street and someone told you “Oh yeah, they hate each other because of this and that…” you’d be thinking, “That sucks, but like, who are they and why should I care?”

That’s your readers when you try to tell the story before it starts.

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Mad bombers, matchmaking, magic spells—what’s a butler to do?

Meet Bostwick von Dogsbody, a sardonic door-to-door magician, and his white rabbit, Emmaline, who just happens to be a cursed human princess. The two are traveling through the goblin-run continent of Ataxia in search of the legendary Domino of Nonpareil—a mask that allows the wearer to become anything he desires—in order to return Emmaline to normal. Their journey has finally led them to Styx Castle, where they meet Millicent, a human maid who wound up in Styx due to mysterious (and embarrassing) circumstances, and Delilah, a goblin queen with a taste for the chaotic.

But Bostwick’s theft of the Domino does not go unnoticed. To avoid a harsher punishment, he agrees to be Delilah’s butler for a hundred years. Before he can escape the queen’s clutches, he’ll have to face mad bombers, an all-bugbear police force, romantic schemes gone awry, and a mysterious goblin-turned-cat named Sebastian who also has designs on the Domino. And as if that wasn’t enough, he soon learns that Millicent is also a magician—and needs him to teach her!

Read more at rosecorcoranwrites.com

ARE YOUR POSTS NOT SHOWING UP? THIS SHOULD FIX IT:

so as this post says, if you'r finding your blog is all jumbled, old posts popping up to the front, new posts not showing up at all, etc it is because of those posts being flagged and then unflagged. all you have to do is open them to edit and save them again and they’ll go back. 

i just wanted to make this separate post to add that once you do that all your new posts will go back to being visible at the top of your blog as they should be i just did it and now everything’s fine on my blog. 

Hidden landscapes the heatwave is revealing

Imprints of old and ancient settlements not seen in known memory are emerging from the soil as the heat takes its toll on greenery.

Britain’s warm mid-eighties temperatures dredge up old baggage.

So. We have Transformers now. *general background noises of excitement*

Fandom sucks.

More than normal, I mean.

While fandom has always been a little bit crazy, it’s hard to deny that it has gotten exponentially worse in the past few years.

From the simple toxicity in fandom discourse increasing, to death threats made towards creators if they don’t toe the line the fandom wants, to groups of fans creating little brigades to ‘protect’ their fandom (see: harassing anyone they don’t like under the guise of morality), it’s gotten pretty bad.

The question is, why?

Well, if you read that headline up there, you’ll know I’m about to tell you why.

The answer is religion, or specifically, the lack of religion in the lives of millennials and the new generation.

Now, before you close this tab, lemme clarify: this isn’t about how the downswing of religion has corroded the moral fiber, or anything. It’s more interesting than that. And complex.

Religion has a function in society. It serves a purpose. This is true regardless of ones own beliefs. Unlike the existence or non-existence of any sort of supreme deity, the functions of religion have been thoroughly documented and studied. If you want a more thorough breakdown beyond the summary I’m about to give, go read Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

Religion acts as a support system and a shared moral system. As a result, religion is something of a ‘cultural shorthand’. Finding out someone’s religion quickly tells you a great many things about them. This is useful in social interactions, as it quickly tells you who you’re more likely to get along with. To put it in a bit of a primitive way, it makes it easy to find one’s ‘allies’.

If one is Catholic, and meets another Catholic, they instantly know they share a great many beliefs about life, justice, morality and the like. If one is in an entirely new place, finding the local congregation of their own religion is a fast way to build a support network from zero. These are important functions.

And with religion out of vogue, especially among the youth, something had to fulfill that function. It’s important and necessary. One of the things that has usurped this function is incredibly specific political labels. While highly specific terms for one’s political beliefs have always existed, they broke into the mainstream far more than they ever had before in the recent decade. They usurped that function of cultural shorthand, one’s own specific political identifier essentially became a flag one waved while attempting to find like minded people. That’s fine.

What isn’t fine is that fandom has also usurped the function of religion for a large amount of people. Fandom is, frankly, not capable of acting in this manner, and the result is the explosion of atrocious fandoms full of toxicity and at times outright criminality and violence. Most works of fiction have something to say, but few if any present an entire system of morality. Yet despite this, many treat it as such. Therein lies the problem.

Religion inherently has a barrier to entry. It’s (often, not always, it varies by religion) a simple barrier, but a barrier nonetheless. You have to live by the religion’s rules and moral system. In a way, this can be considered payment for the support system the religion offers. If you’re not a believer, you don’t get in. Pretty simple. That’s how it retains it’s usefulness as an identifier. Knowing someone was a Catholic wouldn’t matter if they didn’t have to follow the rules.

(And yes, many religions do charitable work even for those outside their faith, I’m well aware, this is all in the abstract.)

Fandom doesn’t have any such barrier. You like the thing, you’re in. It ultimately has no use whatsoever as a cultural/societal identifier. If you like the same TV show, or anime, or video game as someone else it means….well. Basically nothing. There’s no guarantee you share anything else with them at all.

As a result, people who attempt to use fandom in this way ultimately get a rude awakening, and end up encountering someone they dislike. Or hate, even. And that’s where the problem starts.

The revelation that their fandom do not uniformly believe the same things is not often taken well. Rather than realizing that one’s choice in media is no guarantee of anything else about them, they develop the belief that this person they dislike is not a real fan. They’re fake. They’re seeking to harm the fandom. They’re the enemy. And if it’s the creator? Oh boy, does shit go off then.

Ultimately, these people project their own personal beliefs and morality onto a work of fiction that doesn’t, and never did, support them. They adopt the completely ludicrous expectation that any other fan they meet must be just like them, and believe all the same things as them. Anyone who doesn’t is a real fan, and has to be destroyed. And that person is now a toxic fan, the kind that’ll harass, send death threats, and blackmail or threaten the creators.

And the problem is only going to get worse. Online communication and support is only going to become a bigger and bigger part of people’s lives going forward. That’s why there’s a clear level of escalation in ‘bad’ fandoms. People who are more and more ‘online’ are making up the majority of these fandoms, and lacking any other traditional support network or thing to identify as, become these toxic fans.

So the question becomes; how to fix it?

Well, like any widespread sociological problem, there isn’t an easy answer. Lord knows I’m not smart enough to figure one out.

But most of these people are children.

Adults reading this do have some degree of responsibility to try and guide them into more responsible and healthy behavior, and criticize them when they fall into toxicity. Will all of them listen? Of course not. God knows I never listened to adults when I was a teenager.

But some of them will, and if the toxic cesspool that is modern fandom can be even slightly purified, it’s worth it to try.

Happy 30th Anniversary! This is the linework I did for @rockmiyabideusexmachina and his Mega Man 30th Anniversary collab event. My partner was the inestimable (and inestimably patient) @ingopotato, who did some marvelous color work with the pieces (and helped shore up those positively barren buildings). The premise of the piece is a riff on the aerial chase segments of both Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X8, swapping in the flight crew from classic in for X and company on their air speeders as they hunt down Gigabolt Man’o’War. This was a fun piece for the sheer novelty of some of these character designs and poses -- mostly I draw from other sources of inspiration, so I’m not used to playing with the classic or X characters. Not since a certain Dr. Wily Sand Castle Contest anyway.

Seizure First Aid. 

Learn it. Share it. Know it. Use it.