AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST

anexperimentallife:

luthienne:

i wake up thirsty and i think of palestine. i go to the doctor’s office and i think of palestine. a sign in the corner of the waiting room says ‘this is a place of healing, disruptive behavior will not be tolerated’ and i think of palestine. they probably weren’t thinking of bombs and snipers and mass graves in parking lots. i call my parents and i think of palestine. i drive to the grocery store and i think of palestine. i look at the clear blue sky and i think of palestine. i put the dishes away and i think of palestine. i feed my cat and i think of palestine. i listen to music and i think of palestine. i read poetry and i think of palestine. i text my friends and i think of palestine. i think of palestine and i think of palestine and i think of palestine

elumish:

elumish:

There’s not necessarily a specific piece of writing advice here, but I think that people’s writing is actively improved by the ability to conceptualize of and engage with female characters as equivalent to male characters. This is true across both the media you consume and the writing you do. Women are just people!

Actually to give slightly more specific advice here:

I see this a lot when people write Characters and Female Characters, where woman is clearly An Extra Layer Of Person on top of the neutral concept of Character, or where people write women falling into a category (e.g., mother, sister, relationship cheerleader, rival for romantic affection, catalyst) while writing men as just being people, or where they want to punish female characters, or where they just include one token woman that is clearly just so they can say that they included a woman.

And so when you’re writing, ask yourself:

• Do my characters default to male/do I have to actively make myself write female characters? If so, why?
• Do I have major female characters? Are they written in comparable ways to male characters?
• Do I have background female characters? If so, do they only exist in service roles (e.g., all baristas are female but all coworkers/bosses are male)?
• Does this female character only exist to move the relationship between two male characters along, either by directly encouraging them to get together or by otherwise acting as a catalyst?
• Am I writing this female character doing bad things so I can write her getting her getting her due?
• Would I write a male doing the things that this female character is doing? If not, why not?
• Does this female character only exist to prove that I include female characters, too?
• Do I describe my female characters in gendered negative terms or negative terms most often associated with women (e.g., bitch, slut, gold digger)?
• Am I writing this woman as cartoonishly sexually aggressive or sexually naive? Would I write a male character acting this way?
• Do I write female characters in fulfilling romantic/sexual relationships?
• Do I write female characters as attracted as women or asexual solely to get them out of the way of a romantic relationship between male characters?

melonsap:

melonsap:

I absolutely love that the Pokémon universe is literally tearing itself apart at the seams. Fantastic worldbuilding, A+++

ALT

ALT

A non-exhaustive list:

• Mega Evolution comes from a meteor. The impact of that meteor literally split the dimensions apart and made it canonical that different versions of the same game are parallel dimensions (Alpha Ruby is a different world from Ruby, for instance). This is later confirmed by the presence of Anabel in Sun and Moon, who fell through dimensions from a world without Mega Evolution.
• Speaking of Sun and Moon, wormholes are opening up all over Alola, letting in extradimensional beings that Pokéballs don’t catch properly. There are silver-skinned humans from one of these portals that live in a giant prismatic city.
• Also in Sun/Moon, you can pass through to a mirror world where day is night and night is day. When this happens, you can catch the mirror world version of your box legendary friend.
• There’s a giant space alien in Sword and Shield who’s leaking particles that cause Pokémon to briefly turn massive, which sometimes rearranges their genetic makeup.
• In Scarlet and Violet, reality is splintering. There’s a hole to the future/past that generates paradox Pokémon which are heavily implied to have been materialized out of a researcher’s desire to see them rather than actually from their future/past. The same energy that supposedly made them enables Pokémon to become any type they want and caused a robot to gain human sentience.
• In the hole you find the paradox Pokémon in, you find buried monoliths that nobody knows where they came from. The very material they’re made of is canonically unidentifiable.
• Time and space were briefly unraveled in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum as a maniac tried to overwrite the current world and make a new universe out of it, and in the Platinum universe, this opened a hole to another dimension where a banished god lives. The banished god was pissed off about this and abducted the guy that messed with time and space.
• People sometimes slip through the cracks and become Pokémon in Pokémon-only worlds (the Mystery Dungeon series) or drop through time to different eras (Legends Arceus’s protagonist and Ingo).
• In Mystery Dungeon, time is eroding (Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky), and the world is warping and distorting into areas that scramble themselves every time you enter them and make the inhabitants of those areas agitated and hostile (entire series).

halberdierminister:

oglegoggle:

halberdierminister:

deadpansasser:

halberdierminister:

Look at this cool new t-shirt I made for fans of Abraham Lincoln! I made it on my own time, with my own resources, and without any affiliation to existing public or private institutions concerned with history, education, hospitality, culture or retail. You can find it at my new Threadless shop or directly at bit.ly/imissabe

minim-calibre:

greenheart-anon:

I could watch people cut gemstones for hours.