Greetings from Neverland

lotesseflower:

shadowedhills:

shitifindon:

spaceshipoftheseus:

odditycollector:

I found my favourite del.icio.us explanation:

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta,  who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions.     If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you).    By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

from the guy who runs Pinboard, which took in some number of the fleeing users.

He also gave a talk about what happened when he *succeeded* at getting fandom’s attention during the exodus, which I didn’t see before just now, but its kinda funny to look at normal fandom culture stuff from the POV of an outside observer who didn’t mean to get caught in the middle.

this whole thing is super interesting

oh my god that talk is gold

There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.

The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it. 

(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life - so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)

But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community. 

I’m still haunting the ruins of delicious with my bookmarks all by myself - but the linked talk is genius ++good would read again.

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drgrlfriend:

poyzn:

Pet the catellite for better reception.

Sometimes the internet is just so amazing I can’t stand it.

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lonelyboyinthelab:

[Watch the video here]

look at these cuties haha

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Thank you! I’m so glad to hear it. Making THE ANATOMY OF CURIOSITY was so much fun and it even helped me figure out in better detail how I do what I do.

So this is a great question, and I’ve taught a 2 hour class on it alone and am doing a three day workshop on it in February, but I’m going to try and sum it up. Let’s start with a picture:

This is my story pyramid. When a story is finished this is how world, character, and plot should relate to each other. World is the base, it is the largest part of the story pyramid, and character arises from it. In turn, plot, the smallest tip, arises from world-character.

World is everything outside an individual (and a few things that create individuals): it is all of the environment and culture, from weather and landscape to religion and architecture and technology. Characters cannot be removed from their world, because people are shaped by the world in which they live, whether that world is a small town in Texas or Tattooine. Plot is only conflict between characters, a character and their world, or a character and herself. So plot cannot exist separate from world and character, either.

I usually begin with world when I’m working on a fantasy novel (sometimes years before I write the first word of the draft), but nobody has to do that in order to end up with a pyramid. You can start wherever you start, so long as you keep this shape in mind, and where everything points. When you have a finished product, make sure the plot feels and appears to have grown out of your characters and your characters feel and appear to have grown from the world. To do this, ask yourself plenty of WHY questions. Everything word you put down should be pointing at this shape, even if it’s contemporary. (The only difference between world in contemporary and fantasy is that you don’t have to/get to make up as much in contemporary. Your job is still to reveal your character’s world of weather, religion, cityscape, naming conventions, etc, as those revelations are important to the development of the story.)

This is how I work on what you’re calling “organic.” Organic doesn’t mean the character is born fully formed a la Athena. Even if sometiems that seems to happen, your brain has been working on the patterns of why and who for a while, because that’s what our brains do. “Organic” characters are ALWAYS a construct from the author’s mind. I think in reality and on-the-page, “organic” just means a reader recognizes the answers to WHY without those answers being spelled out. In other words, if a character makes a particular choice, the reader understands her motivation because of how you’ve written the character arising from her world so far.

“Organic” is the clear relationship between character and world.

When it comes to the seeds of a character, to be honest sometimes you just have to choose. You’re the author, so you decide who your character is, either overtly or because you know on some level what you want for your story. You know the kind of story you’re telling, or the kind of emotional arc you want for your character. Pick the best core characteristic for your character to get you there.

There are countless tools for helping discover a character’s seed/core, but I’ve found a few questions to be the most helpful when I’m having trouble:

What does my character want most?

What is she willing to do to get it?

Why does she desire this?

How does/might her desire hurt herself?

How does/might her desire hurt others?

The answers should relate to the character’s unique place in her world, and especially to her over-arching emotional arc.

And finally, remember, while a lot of this is helpful for drafting and the initial stages, 100% of story can be retrofitted during revisions. You can draft freely, with these things in mind, and then go back when you have all the material you need to pull the story and characters and world apart and put them back together in the best shape to tell your story.

IF YOU WANT MORE INSIGHT, I’M TEACHING A 3 DAY WORLD BUILDING WORKSHOP THROUGH MADCAP RETREATS IN MID-FEBRUARY 2017. It will be three glorious days on a perfect winter beach with me and Roshani Chokshi digging in deep to the art and science of world and world revealing, with some hands on exercises and feedback to your personal work if you like. The info will go life on Madcap site very soon. If you want the first chance, sign up for the Madcap newsletter.

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This Is Not Normal:

kittydesade:

azspot:

Using your Presidential transition website to promote your own business properties is not normal.

Calling for millions of federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements apart from standard government forms is not normal.

Blasting journalists with product placements for the labels your child, who is on your transition team, is wearing is not normal.

Having a wide range of senior figures in your own political party distance themselves from your transition team, citing the profound irregularity of it and worrying about future ugliness, is not normal.

Placing your children in charge of your business empire, then placing them on your transition team, then seeking top secret security clearances for them, is not normal. The conflicts of interest that this represents are almost too many to count, but at a basic level: you do not give someone with a financial interest to work against U.S. policy access to sensitive information — at all, ever.

Putting one’s children into senior positions of a government is the behavior of a banana republic, not a constitutional democracy with strong institutions. This is not normal.

For a president who ran on his business acumen to refuse to disclose his taxes to the public, which in turn denies anyone the ability to see if financial conflicts of interest are driving his policy decisions, is not normal.

Asking if he can decline the President’s salary, so as to avoid paying taxes, is not normal.

Owing hundreds of millions of dollars in business debt to a foreign bank and refusing to fully divest yourself from those finances is not normal.

Ascending to the White House while your eldest son, who is also on your transition team, and for whom you also seek a top-secret clearance, seeks out seven-digit business deals in Russia, is not normal. When Russia then names the President elect an “honorary Cossack,” it is not normal.

Asking a hostile foreign intelligence agency to hack into the emails of your opponent in the campaign is not normal. Refusing to comment while they expand those hacks into other institutions is not normal. Watching that same government’s propaganda network dramatically change its tone in order to benefit the incoming president is not normal. That this foreign government is also the subject of numerous investigations into the President elect’s improper business conduct is not normal.

Threatening to cut off Europe from NATO if payment is not received, like a gangster demanding protection money, in a way that benefits said foreign government, is not normal.

Chanting for the summary imprisonment of your political opponent despite repeated conclusions that she has committed no crime is not normal. Refusing to back down from that call to summarily imprison her is not normal. Essentially suggesting a show trial before you’ve even assumed office is not normal.

Hiring an avowed white supremacist and proud antisemite to be the chief of strategy at the White House is not normal. That the new White House chief strategist has bragged, openly, of his desire to destroy the United States is not normal. That the cofounder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center raised money for this is not normal.

Staff participating in authoritarian victim-blaming and antisemitic conspiracism is not normal. Collaborating with cable news channels in that antisemitic conspiracy about protests is not normal.

When one of the new administration’s most senior proxies and spokesmen calmly discusses committing war crimes in the Middle East, it is not normal. When he is shortlisted for the Department of State — despite lobbying for terrorists who killed Americans, despotic regimes in the Middle East, and the tyrannical government of Venezuela — it is not normal.

When that proxy is simply following in the footsteps of the new President-elect, who has called for reinstating torture and summarily executing the families of alleged terrorists, it is not normal.

The leading candidate for the department of education (who himself has no background as an educator or in education policy) openly suggesting to censor speech on universities is not normal. Nominating an oil executive as the Secretary of the Interior is not normal. Nominating a climate change denialist funded by the oil industry to run the EPA is not normal. When the leading candidate for Defense Secretary having a long history of openly racist comments toward his own staff it is not normal.

The FBI intervening decisively in the last week of the election to alter its outcome for one candidate is not normal. But the FBI refusing to address the president elect’s violation of sanctions against a communist country is also not normal.

When a woman accuses a presidential candidate of having raped her as a child, but then refuses to go forward with her allegations because of a barrage of death threats yet still receives almost no media coverage, it is not normal.

It is not normal for a president-elect to have 75 pending lawsuits against him, ranging from business fraud to illegal hiring practices. It is not normal for his lawyers to demand those lawsuits be delayed until after his inauguration for not discernable reason other than to retreat behind the immunity of the office.

Relentlessly attacking the legitimacy of the media (to be distinguished from criticizing media conduct) is not normal. Threatening to sue the media because you don’t like being criticized is not normal.

Being so steeped in the language of fascism that you and and your staff mirror Hitler (“make the trains run on time“), appeasing Hitler (“America First“), or Mussolini (“drain the swamp“) is not normal.

In some countries it’s perfectly normal. I’m going to go with, this is not American. This is not the United States. This is not who we are or want to be.

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the-little-disnerd:

Toni Braxton First African American woman to play Belle on Broadway (1998-1999)

Keke Palmer First African American woman to play Cinderella on Broadway (2014-2015)

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criticalrolesource:

Critical Role Gif Meme - [1/2] NPCs
Lady Kima of Vord 

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pinkwinged:

Jim Hjelm

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donnajosh:

Actress Allison Janney attends the 68th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 18, 2016 in Los Angeles, California.

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