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Antique Astronomical Engraving of the Solar System and the Zodiac, “Encyclopedia Britannica”, 1797.

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Perfect magnets

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HEY ARTISTS!

Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:

OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–

There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)

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Winning the villain over to your side is a power fantasy.

Like, a really big one, too.

Social emphasis has it that men should value strength, aggression, and violence, and women should value kindness, empathy, and community. But really, anyone who has learned to prefer social success to might/aggression is going to favour a strategy where you can make your enemies into allies of some kind, over one where you just kill them. As a display of dominance, killing is overly simplistic. And it’s also hard to ignore the reality that luck usually has more to do with most fights than actual strength.

So, many people vastly prefer stories where the villains don’t die, but instead, get won over by the hero. It’s also a much more prevalent power fantasy among women than it is among men, because women are often taught that violence on our parts is inherently distasteful and ignoble. If you can’t defeat your enemies by putting a bullet in their heads, then what could be more satisfying than convincing that enemy to come and fight other people on your behalf instead?

This is a major component to why villains end up as popular shipping material. I honestly don’t think it’s the ‘bad boy’ impulse, or some branch of misogyny, or at least, not in a majority of cases. It’s a total and sincere power fantasy. Someone going ‘all I care about is myself and all I want to do is DESTROY THE WORLD MWAHAHAHA’ meeting you and then being like ‘oh no wait I also want to please you and spend time with you and I want that so much that I will now give up those other things’ implies an intoxicating level of charisma.

Of course, like most power fantasies, it pays to tread carefully with it. Because real life rarely accommodates such things, and as with some muscle-bound hero easily lifting a house over his head, being able to take a wholly selfish being and convert them into a devoted companion is… unlikely to happen outside of fiction. For a lot of reasons.

However, I bring it up because I am C O N S T A N T L Y seeing the compulsion to ship characters with villains misattributed to A) agreeing with the villains, B) some form of self-hatred, C) a noble impulse towards compassion and understanding, or D) sheer stupidity, and really… it’s just another power fantasy. Wonder Woman punches a tank. Tony Stark buys an entire island. Storm calls down a lightning strike. Batman outwits all his clever foes. And some seemingly random, ordinary human woman convinces Lex Luthor to chill out and stop trying to kill Superman. It’s all power, displayed in fantastical proportions.

(Which isn’t to say that you have to like it or think that every such relationship is good and healthy, gods no, but once you realize that everyone’s just pretending to be the Superman of relationships, it’s easier to just go ‘oh that’s what you’re after’ and… y’know… fret less.)

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i told ya we’ve canceled discourse n we��ve moved on to homesteading skills

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aww nasa has a page for space technology terms you can use in science fiction

nerds

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Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Demon Seals, originally drafted in the early 16th century (modern English translation and interpretation by Lupus Nensén).

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There’s so little representation for women over like 35 (which is wild, because 35 is fucking young) and even less representation for LBT+ women over 35 (cause every piece of media has us dying at like 19 or some shit).

It makes it hard to envision existing as an adult. I am an adult and sometimes it’s still hard to envision. There’s this idea that our visible aesthetics and flagging and cultural signifiers are things only for young people, but it’s not true. 

Every time I see a woman who is super intentionally and visibly gender nonconforming (in ways that, in straight culture, are associated with teenagers) I get this surge of relief. 

bless butch professors with gray hair. bless queer punk librarians with pink hair. bless older femmes who wear neon eye shadow to their day job. bless the out nonbinary trans woman who moderated a panel at a college and then gave a speech at a leftist protest three days later 

media might try to push the idea that our identities are temporary– that we’ll die young or grow out of them– but it’s not true. We’re here, and we’ve always been here, and we kick ass our whole lives. 

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“what if angels are black holes and halos are just the light warping around them being pulled in by gravity”  // insp.

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Reblog if you have an original story!

I’m not talking about fanfictions or AU’s based off of a video game/comic/TV series, I’m talking about a story with a world and characters that are YOURS and YOURS alone.

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Snowflake Writing Method

i’m currently somewhat working on a webcomic and i thought i’d share what personally i think is the most intuitive guide on how to write a piece of fiction and a lot of you have probably heard before

full article on the snowflake method

STEP 1 ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Write a one-sentence summary of your novel. This sentence could become the hook that will sell your book. A good sentence is shorter rather than longer – ideally fewer than 15 words. It should not contain character names. It is better to say “a mercenary time travelling adventurer” than “Septimus Mason”. This sentence should aim to tie together the big picture of the book with the personal picture of the main character.

STEP 2 ONE PARAGRAPH PLOT

You now need to expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the background, the major disasters, and the ending of the novel.

It is a good idea to think about the a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. If you are approaching publishers you can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Or alternatively if you self-publish this could easily become the back cover blurb. Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences: one sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup, one sentence each for your three disasters, then one more sentence to tell the ending.

STEP 3 DEVELOP CHARACTERS

Plots are all very good but the book is going to need compelling characters. So you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. For each of your major characters, we need this information: -The character’s name -A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline -The character’s goal (what does he/she want?) -The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?) -The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change? -A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline

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youtube Swordman standing up to gender roles

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Author Scott Lynch responds to a critic of the character Zamira Drakasha, a black woman pirate in his fantasy book Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second novel of the Gentleman Bastard series.

The bolded sections represent quotes from the criticism he received. All the z-snaps are in order.

Your characters are unrealistic stereotpyes of political correctness. Is it really necessary for the sake of popular sensibilities to have in a fantasy what we have in the real world? I read fantasy to get away from politically correct cliches. 

God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms.  Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world. It is unrealistic wish fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it! First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time. Second, now you’re pissing me off.  You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I realized this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it.  Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain.  Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes “SBF, 41, nonsmoker, 2 children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder.” You don’t like it? Don’t buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears.  As for the “man’s world” thing, religious sentiments and gender prejudices flow differently in this fictional world. Women are regarded as luckier, better sailors than men. It’s regarded as folly for a ship to put to sea without at least one female officer; there are several all-female naval military traditions dating back centuries, and Drakasha comes from one of them. As for claims to “realism,” your complaint is of a kind with those from bigoted hand-wringers who whine that women can’t possibly fly combat aircraft, command naval vessels, serve in infantry actions, work as firefighters, police officers, etc. despite the fact that they do all of those things– and are, for a certainty, doing them all somewhere at this very minute. Tell me that a fit fortyish woman with 25+ years of experience at sea and several decades of live bladefighting practice under her belt isn’t a threat when she runs across the deck toward you, and I’ll tell you something in return– you’re gonna die of stab wounds. What you’re really complaining about isn’t the fact that my fiction violates some objective “reality,” but rather that it impinges upon your sad, dull little conception of how the world works. I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. I’m not writing history, I’m writing speculative fiction. Nobody’s going to force you to buy it. Conversely, you’re cracked if you think you can persuade me not to write about what amuses and excites me in deference to your vision, because your vision fucking sucks. I do not expect to change your mind but i hope that you will at least consider that I and others will not be buying your work because of these issues. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for years and i know that I speak for a great many people. I hope you might stop to think about the sales you will lose because you want to bring your political corectness and foul language into fantasy. if we wanted those things we could go to the movies. Think about this!  Thank you for your sentiments. I offer you in exchange this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill, suitable for framing.

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The United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.

Keep reading

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Mental Illness in the Horror Genre

Something that pissed me off the other day.

Talking to a guy who knows my parents but doesn’t know me very well, and he tells me that his friend (indeed, a very nice and talented actor) recently put out a horror movie. And I’m interested until I hear the words “So it’s about this guy with OCD…” and at that point my mom and I give each other a sidelong glance.

I say, “I don’t know, because I have OCD and it’s a pretty serious thing for me.”

To which he follows up, “Oh, you don’t have it like this guy! You’re totally functional!”

Okay, dude. Yes, I am standing before you in a fancy club, dressed nice, and looking relatively balanced. But you do not know me. You do not know OCD.

You do not know that I have been non-functional, and that in order to maintain my current balance of sanity, I take daily medication and see a weekly therapist, and I still have downward spirals and panic attacks.

OCD can add to a story, for sure. The Aviator is a great example–albeit, it was on the voyeuristic side, kind of “check out what a weirdo this guy really is”, but his condition was portrayed in a realistic and *sympathetic* manner, because it focused so hard on his anxiety and entrapment.

I don’t need a horror movie about my disorder for a couple reasons. 1. I already live the horror movie that is OCD. 2. Just like people with psychosis, schizophrenia/schizotypal disorders, dissociative identity disorders, and any other number of mental disorder that makes us act in unusual and yes, sometimes frightening ways, I don’t need it to be the hinge for your horror flick, a handy device that makes more people like you scared and misunderstanding of people like me. 3. And for people with the above disorders who may not be diagnosed, they don’t need to be told that they are dangerous monsters and cause them to avoid treatment out of fear. (This goes double for people who experience paranoia or delusions as part of their symptoms.)

This post ended up way longer than I meant, but really, truly, hear me out creators:

MENTAL ILLNESS IS A TRAIT AMONG AN INFINITE VARIETY OF PEOPLE. IT IS NOT A CHARACTER FLAW, AND IT IS DEFINITELY A POOR PLOT DEVICE FOR THE HORROR GENRE. YOU CAN DO BETTER.

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Hi weird question but I thought you'd be the guy to ask, if a dragon was human and wore clothes what do you think they would wear

Thierry Mugler La Chimere Couture Collection A/W 1997-98