latitudeslibrary

[latitudeslibrary]

You've heard of the man, the myth, the legend. Now get ready for the woman, the omen, the portent.

[latitudeslibrary]

love like sunlight through the blinds, radiance diffused, spilling through at the edges, glowing red through sleepy eyelids– hints of a whole sky, patient and flooded with dawn.

[latitudeslibrary]

it is actually very common for people to say “there are no innocents on the side of my enemy.” against such an opponent you can theoretically justify anything

[latitudeslibrary]

okay so a ceasefire will happen soon, inshallah, but i just know the second it does, most of y'all will pack it up and go home. the world has proven time and time again that the second the violence "stops", then everyone forgets about us and then we just go back to suffering under the israeli occupation. you guys need to promise us, promise every single palestinian child in the world right now, that you will not stop fighting. that you will continue boycotting, you will continue protesting, you will continue disrupting the world until palestine is free. and then we'll do it again. and again and again and again and again. for sudan, for the congo, for everyone who is suffering right now.

you guys cant keep leaving us and forgetting about us once you've done "your part". it always happens, and we always go back to suffering. you need to stand with us until palestine is completely free. until we have our land back, until we can rebuild our homes, until we can drink clean water and breathe clean air, until our children grow up never having to face a horror like the nakba ever again. you need to stay fighting until we are all free forever.

[latitudeslibrary]

[latitudeslibrary]

  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

[latitudeslibrary]

“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.” “I did,” said Ford. “It is.” “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?” “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.” “You mean they actually vote for the lizards?” “Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.” “But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?” “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (via tardisdelorean)

[latitudeslibrary]

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?, Philip K. Dick (via thesoulofawarrior)

[latitudeslibrary]

Quick And Dirty Tips For Creating Subplots

– Not everyone should love the hero.

– The more antagonists you have the more conflicts you create.

– Real life should happen to the characters, even if they are saving the world they have jobs and responsibilities.

– Give the character interests and friends outside of work.

– Multiple point of views aren’t a bad thing if you know how to juggle them.

– It all needs to come together at the end.

– Not every antagonist needs to be vanquished at the end.

– – Give us more than one character to love– (from Diantha)

— Make each and every character count — (from Diantha)

Stories need subplots. Make sure yours has one.

[latitudeslibrary]

Some Show/Story Pitching tips for young creators.

[latitudeslibrary]

hey folks, I’m gonna introduce you to two very important fandom terms and they are watsonian and doylist 

they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say I’m a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watson’s war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it. 

sherlock explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.

this is very important when we’re discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something like “it’s just because the author wrote it that way,” and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back with “but there’s an in-story reason why that happens!” (that reason being she breathes through her skin).

there’s nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing. 

but it’s very difficult (and imo often useless, though there are exceptions) to try to argue one kind of explanation with the other kind. wetblanketing someone’s headcanon with “or it could just be bad writing” is obnoxious; dismissing someone’s criticism with “but have you considered this in-universe explanation” is ignoring the point of the criticism. understanding where someone is coming from is important when making an argument; acting like your argument is better because you’re being doylist when they’re being watsonian or vice versa is not.

[latitudeslibrary]

It was nothing that the local EMS and fire departments couldn't handle. What rankled them was that they were providing their services for free. The deal negotiated by Amazon and the state had freed the company from paying local property taxes - the taxes that paid for the functions of local government, from schools to the police and fire departments - for fifteen years. The warehouses were in Licking and Franklin Counties, but they weren't really of them. They put many hundreds of cars and trucks onto local roads every day, and they put out emergency calls, but Amazon paid for neither snow plows nor ambulances. The basic social compact applied to others but not to them; in 2017, voters in the area served by West Licking Fire Station 3 would be asked to approve a 5-year, 6.5 million property tax levy to keep the fire department going. They would be making up what the company withheld.

-Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, by Alec MacGillis

[latitudeslibrary]

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

[latitudeslibrary]

[latitudeslibrary]

Anyway, my sister-in-law would like me to remind everyone that speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons (and its multilingual sibling magazine, Samovar) are 100% free to read, are always looking for stories by and about marginalized people (all flavors of queer/non-straight/non-cis and intersex, POC, disabled, etc forever), and pay their authors, artists, and translators professional rates for stories that are available to read for free online. They are especially proud to focus on content about a particular identity whenever bigots get up in arms about their inclusion (or, as was the case with the Sad/Rabid Puppies and the Hugos a few years back, have completely misunderstood what the magazine and its staff stand for).

Thank you, that is all.

[latitudeslibrary]

Why do we even HAVE that lever?

Back in the day, my old gaming group used to play a game called “why do we even have that lever?”. It works like this:

1. Person A describes a puzzle or trap - the sort of bizarre adventurer-shredding contraption you might encounter in the course of an old-school dungeon crawl that makes absolutely no sense if the dungeon in question was ever supposed to be a facility that people actually used.

2. Person B proposes an explanation for what the “trap” in question is really for - i.e., why it’s not a trap at all, but a totally practical feature of whatever sort of place the dungeon originally was.

3. Person B then describes their own trap to keep the game going.

The only hard rule is that the explanation offered in step 2 absolutely can’t be “it’s a puzzle” or “it’s a trap”; you have to propose some pragmatic function that actually makes sense in the context of the dungeon being the ruins of someplace where people lived and worked. The way it currently works can be justified as a consequence of it having malfunctioned or partially fallen apart, but there has to be some plausible purpose it could have originally served.

For example, I might ask:

“Why is there a room where the entire ceiling is a giant magnet?”

… and you might respond:

“It’s a security checkpoint for the armoury of magical weapons that lies beyond. The presence of the magnet means that weapons can only be safely brought in and out of the armoury using special weighted cases, making it very difficult to steal or substitute items.”

“It’s a laboratory formerly used for experiments involving dangerous creatures from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The powerful magnetic field wholly paralyses all but the mightiest earth elementals, allowing them to be studied at one’s leisure.”

“It’s the old Queen’s gaming room. During her reign, a game of strategy involving man-sized stone pieces on a multi-level board had become fashionable. Though most such games required large work crews to move the pieces around, the Queen’s magnetic chamber - in conjunction with large metal bars driven into the core of each piece - allows the pieces to be manipulated by a single person. Many of the pieces still lay scattered about the room, in various states of disrepair.”

Then you’d describe your own trap.

I’ll start us off with a simple (and apropos) one:

Why is there a lever that drops a giant stone block on the person who pulled it?