Abandonware Should Be Public Domain. Force Companies To Actively Support And Provide Products If They

This is so cool! And it’s already great at giving me ideas for some stories! Thank you so much!

johnny’s gang-misfit

Happy holidays @gatortavern, this is your @pnatsecretsanta gift! I’m so sorry it’s late, I was battling with my laptop every step of the way, but it’s here now! Enjoy!

Last few posts (including this one) aren’t gator-related so they feel a little weird to reblog but hey I need a palate cleanser and maybe this will brings others joy too

when we try to befriend cats we mimic their meows and get down on the ground to their level and try to gently coax them to interact with us right

that horrifying entity mimicking human noises at us maybe just thinks we’re cool and wants to pet us?

How to Do World-Building Research

Whether you’re building a fantasy world from complete scratch, or mentally designing the suburban house your very realistic story will take place in, at a certain point in your writing process you’ll need to plan out your story world. Here are a few world-building research methods to get you started:

Ask Questions

Ask anything and everything you can about your world. Each story will require different lines of inquiry. Listen to your story and follow the questions it seems to want you to investigate. What kind of car did your main character’s grandpa drive? How was the president elected? Why is everyone so obsessed with peanuts? The answers might appear in the story you’ve already written, in your imagination, or you may have to delve deeper into your research to find them.

Draw a Map or Create a Model

Is your story world so complicated it’s making your head spin? Get out paper or other materials and make a visual representation of it. This could mean making a floor plan of your main character’s house, or mapping out an entire town, country, or kingdom. Physically creating your world is research in itself, but it can also guide you to new lines of questioning. You might discover that your story world contains a lot of lakes, or elk, or antiques, which in turn pushes you to research craters, or migratory patterns, or the history of antiques, which then leads you back to questions about meteors, or a lineage of hunters, or a family history of con artists, etc.

Outside Research

You may need to read history books, watch documentaries, conduct interviews, research online, or conduct first-hand research to get your questions answered. If your story takes place in Kansas and you’ve never been there, you could plan a trip, watch movies or read books set in Kansas, or talk to people who have lived there. Remember to record sensory details as well as facts. How does the air feel? What colors are prominent?

Take Notes

No matter what research method you use, take lots of notes. These can be straightforward recordings of the facts, or more creative expressions of what you encounter. Maybe something you stumble across will inspire you to write a poem, make a drawing, take a photo, create a mood board, or outline a new character. Keep in mind that your best ideas might come when you’re not actively researching, so keep a notebook or device nearby to record ideas that pop up when you’re not expecting them.

Use Your Own Experiences, Opinions, Ideas, and Imagination

Research doesn’t just mean looking into what other people say, think, or feel about a time, place, or topic. It can also mean exploring your own thoughts and perceptions! Say you’re researching a story that takes place in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. You’ll want to read history books, conduct interviews, watch films and documentaries, read novels set in that time period, research online, and perhaps even travel. But while you’re doing this, also pay attention to how you think and feel about the information you’re gathering. What details stand out to you? Does something you encounter make you mad? Why? What interests you about this time and place—and what bores you to tears?

When to Stop Researching

Some writers absolutely love story building… to the point that they never want to stop researching and actually write or revise their story! If you notice you’re procrastinating by languishing in the research stage, it’s time to get back to your story. As you return to the writing, you’ll probably find that you need go back to story building, then back to the writing, then to story building again. So don’t be too nervous about putting down your research: You can always go back and revise your world if you need to.

Of course, it’s completely acceptable to be obsessed with story building. All writers have their own attachments—elements of story telling that they love above all others. Some people get obsessed with a character, a plot, a setting, a theme… So if you’re a writer who loves your worlds, don’t be afraid to own it. Lots of amazing writers— especially science fiction and fantasy writers—are known for being huge world building geeks. If that’s what excites you, indulge! Just be aware of when you might be using it as a crutch because you’re nervous about composing or revising your story, and challenge yourself to move on—knowing, of course, that you can always come back to it if you need to.

Hope this helps!

To Write Better Antagonists, Have Them Embody the Protagonist's Struggles

(Spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada, Avatar the Last Airbender, Kung Fu Panda 2, and The Hunger Games triology).

Writing antagonists and villains can be hard, especially if you don't know how to do so.

I think a lot of writers' first impulse is to start off with a placeholder antagonist, only to find that this character ends up falling flat. They finish their story only for readers to find the antagonist is not scary or threatening at all.

Often the default reaction to this is to focus on making the antagonist meaner, badder, or scarier in whatever way they can- or alternatively they introduce a Tragic Backstory to make them seem broken and sympathetic. Often, this ends up having the exact opposite effect. Instead of a compelling and genuinely terrifying villain, the writer ends up with a Big Bad Edge Lord who the reader just straight up does not care about, or actively rolls their eyes at (I'm looking at you, Marvel).

What makes an antagonist or villain intimidating is not the sheer power they hold, but the personal or existential threat they pose to the protagonist. Meaning, their strength as a character comes from how they tie into the themes of the story.

To show what I mean, here's four examples of the thematic roles an antagonist can serve:

1. A Dark Reflection of the Protagonist

The Devil Wears Prada

Miranda Priestly is initially presented as a terrible boss- which she is- but as the movie goes on, we get to see her in a new light. We see her as an bonafide expert in her field, and a professional woman who is incredible at what she does. We even begin to see her personal struggles behind the scenes, where it’s clear her success has come at a huge personal cost. Her marriages fall apart, she spends ever waking moment working, and because she’s a woman in the corporate world, people are constantly trying to tear her down.

The climax of the movie, and the moment that leaves the viewer most disturbed, does not feature Miranda abusing Andy worse than ever before, but praising her. Specifically, she praises her by saying “I see a great deal of myself in you.” Here, we realize that, like Miranda, Andy has put her job and her career before everything else that she cares about, and has been slowly sacrificing everything about herself just to keep it. While Andy's actions are still a far cry from Miranda's sadistic and abusive managerial style, it's similar enough to recognize that if she continues down her path, she will likely end up turning into Miranda.

In the movie's resolution, Andy does not defeat Miranda by impressing her or proving her wrong (she already did that around the half way mark). Instead, she rejects the values and ideals that her toxic workplace has been forcing on her, and chooses to leave it all behind.

2. An Obstacle to the Protagonist's Ideals

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Fire Lord Ozai is a Big Bad Baddie without much depth or redemptive qualities. Normally this makes for a bad antagonist (and it's probably the reason Ozai has very little screen time compared to his children), but in Avatar: The Last Airbender, it works.

Why?

Because his very existence is a threat to Aang's values of nonviolence and forgiveness.

Fire Lord Ozai cannot be reasoned with. He plans to conquer and burn down the world, and for most of the story, it seems that the only way to stop him is to kill him, which goes against everything Aang stands for. Whether or not Aang could beat the Fire Lord was never really in question, at least for any adults watching the show. The real tension of the final season came from whether Aang could defeat the Fire Lord without sacrificing the ideals he inherited from the nomads; i.e. whether he could fulfill the role of the Avatar while remaining true to himself and his culture.

In the end, he manages to find a way: he defeats the Fire Lord not by killing him, but by stripping him of his powers.

3. A Symbol of the Protagonist's Inner Struggle

Kung Fu Panda 2

Kung Fu Panda 2 is about Po's quest for inner peace, and the villain, Lord Shen, symbolizes everything that's standing in his way.

Po and Lord Shen have very different stories that share one thing in common: they both cannot let go of the past. Lord Shen is obsessed with proving his parents wrong and getting vengeance by conquering all of China. Po is struggling to come to terms with the fact that he is adopted and is desperate to figure out who he is and why he ended up left in a box of radishes as a baby.

Lord Shen symbolizes Po's inner struggle in two main ways: one, he was the source of the tragedy that separated him from his parents, and two, he reinforces Po's negative assumptions about himself. When Po realizes that Lord Shen knows about his past and confronts him, Lord Shen immediately tells Po exactly what he's afraid of hearing: that his parents abandoned him because they didn't love him. Po and the Furious Five struggle to beat Shen not because he's powerful, but because Po can't let go of the past, and this causes him to repeatedly freeze up in battle, which Shen uses to his advantage.

Po overcomes Shen when he does the one thing Shen is incapable of: he lets go of the past and finds inner peace. Po comes to terms with his tragic past and recognizes that it does not define him, while Shen holds on to his obsession of defying his fate, which ultimately leads to his downfall.

4. A Representative of a Harsh Reality or a Bigger System

The Hunger Games

We don't really see President Snow do all that much on his own. Most of the direct conflict that Katniss faces, but with his underlings and the larger Capitol government. The few interactions we see between her and President Snow are mainly the two of them talking, and this is where we see the kind of threat he poses.

President Snow never lies to Katniss, not even once, and this is the true genius behind his character. He doesn't have to lie to or deceive Katniss, because the truth is enough to keep her complicit.

Katniss knows that fighting Snow and the Capital will lead to total war and destruction- the kind where there are survivors, but no winners. Snow tells her to imagine thousands upon thousands of her people dead, and that's exactly what happens. The entirety of District 12 gets bombed to ashes, Peeta gets brainwashed and turned into a human weapon, and her sister Prim, the very person she set out to protect at the beginning of the story, dies just before the Capitol's surrender. The districts won, but at a devastating cost.

Even after President Snow is captured and put up for execution, he continues to hurt Katniss by telling her the truth. He tells her that the bombs that killed her sister Prim were not sent by him, but by the people on her side. He brings to her attention that the rebellion she's been fighting for might just implement a regime just as oppressive and brutal as the one they overthrew and he's right.

In the end, Katniss is not the one to kill President Snow. She passes up her one chance to kill him to take down the new threat of President Coin.

“Politicisation of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies. The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of science to aggrandise and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more successful, richer, and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.”

— Kamran Abbasi, Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science

I can’t tell which idea is funnier: 1. that they actually got pictures of them and Jeff way back when as part of a trick, and he didn’t think much of it until now, or 2. Someone in the group is really, really good at photoshop

unanswered paranatural lore:

where did they get the scrapbook. how. theres a photo of jeff and johnny on the back. when did they take that. did they make this ahead of time for this exact situation. i need answers

Visualizations like this are so cool! It's always a blast to see the inner workings of how things like this come to life.

The Structure

South Korean drawing teacher An Jae Hyun (안재현) will clearly show you how to feel and correctly depict the structure of an object. This will help you learn and improve your drawing skills.

just adding that she has very similar, if not the same energy color as the Sphinx of Truth:

Will this mean anything? Probably not, but if Zack’s going the kinda-sleazy-conman-with-a-heart route (or perhaps just the tried and true lovable asshole route), then the interactions between Truth’s power and how Scabs could theoretically sidestep those truth powers activating on her while allowing them to be used on others to the fullest extent...that’d be a rather interesting interaction!

Scabs in this update here to uplifit my spirits, water my crops, and ruin my years-old headcanons about how she might act. Dropkicking my soul into writing that story I’ve had for a while about her. Digging the color of her spectral energy, and I wonder about her backstory.

Right now she’s kinda giving off Kuzco energy (maybe start-to-mid-movie Kuczo?). We’ll see how this progresses.