we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

to be clear since this is making the rounds: she has to be an absolute loser in no way that can be pinned on her gender. no "i'm just a girl tee-hee" stuff. straight up just a loser (nondenominational)

addendum: she must be the most important person in the whole narrative

I decided to sit down and concentrate and properly write the list of rules that qualify a character for this role.

• FIRST LAW: This character must be a woman.
• SECOND LAW: This character must be a loser, but not in a way that can be pinned on her gender. Misogynistic response from the audience does not disqualify the character.
• THIRD LAW: If the audience does not enjoy this character, then it becomes impossible to enjoy the show/film/book/game altogether. It is not possible to ignore this character, for better or for worse.
• FOURTH LAW: The character must make bad decisions, and not just be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control. The character can also be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control, but it has to be primarily her personal choices that deem her a loser.

So many people who claim to care about trans issues will see conservative transphobes rave about "cutting off healthy breast tissue" and "girls mutilating themselves," rage or clown on male pregnancy, constantly share post-op photos of top surgery scars and phallo skin grafts to illicit outrage, transvestigate male celebrities to "prove he's secretly a woman"--and then turn around and declare that the Right forgets that trans men and mascs exist. I'm so tired of it.

Now, can I please have the attention of the class? Today’s assignment… kick some ass!
School of Rock (2003) Dir. Richard Linklater

May I speak candidly?

Since I reblogged that post earlier about folk liking but never reblogging art/writing, I have received a very mixed reaction in my askbox. So I want to ask, with the blessing of anonymity that polls give:

I am genuinely curious!! The like to reblog ratio is utterly diabolical and it's something that creative folks are either A) coming to terms with/powering on despite or B) giving up entirely due to a lack of community so I'm curious to what the reasoning is!!

Timmappanna Betta, Karnataka, IND [5184x3456] [OC] - Author: piperpike

Please call this recession the Trump Slump.

We need to put Trump's name on this.

if ever anything I wrote were to ever go viral, let it be this. Let everyone talk about the Trump Slump. I want to hear this term in the news.

Erskine Falls [oc] [4121 x 6181] - Author: AinsliesEye

UPDATE ON THE TAKEDOWN ACT 4/7/2025

I have been informed that the House is going to have a committee hearing (energy and commerce committee) on the Take It Down Act. This is a bill that Trump has pushed hard to get passed so that he can abuse it and use it to take down social media posts criticizing him. Its another mass censorship tool disguised as "protecting kids".

Fight for the Future has provided both an explanation for why this bill is extremely dangerous, as well as a call script and direct link to your lawmakers! They couldnt make it easier. Its here:

Here is a link to the committee members. It is a full committee hearing.

This is the number for energy and commerce (202) 225-3641 please call their secretary and tell them to spread the message to say no if your rep isn’t on the committee

If you’re not American tell your American friends to call that number

Snowball in Hell, acrylics, 30cmx20cm

I used a random piece of wire to paint the smallest details..!

Once again I´m thinking of Snowball in Hell, one of my favourite paintings ever

by michellelartigue

Steven Universe is interesting to me because it’s got the most extreme dichotomy between ideas that would be better fleshed out in a show for adults, and ideas that are interesting specifically because they’re native to an unironic children’s show.

Can you elaborate on this? It seems interesting.

Sure. This is gonna be a long one.

Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:

First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:

• The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags. 
• The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.
• The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.
• The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.

However.

Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.

• Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.
• Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.
• Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.
• Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.
• And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity.  And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.

Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff. 

(Indeed, I feel like it was a very pointed choice to have this whole OC-friendly gem-with-weapons-and-powers character-design schema and then have huge chunks of the show where the fighting and custom weapons and monster hunting weren’t relevant to what was going on, they lure you in with the promise of a RWBY-style  monster-fighting show and then do mostly slice of life. Very funny trick.)

This made adult fans into crazy people btw.

Brilliant on every level we should get more stuff like this but the price is that anyone older then a preteen watching has a high likelihood of getting fandom brain worms about it.

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.

It never gets old and it always makes me cry.

@ilgalantuomo ❤️

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?

No-Bake Lemon Tart

Recipe source: Simply Bake

This is the backstory for how Gritty adopted a new sidekick, right?

I needed the hi-res of this immediately

https://x.com/NBCSPhilly/status/1111056999821774850

The kid throws down the gloves and Gritty picks him up and carries him off, this is beautiful, thank you for the link.