Tumgik
magical-mage-dude ¡ 3 hours
Text
For the last goddamn time...
"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."
That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.
It does NOT mean
That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing
That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)
That you need to kill off characters (??? what)
That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones
That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to
The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.
The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.
Good grief....
20K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 7 hours
Text
Tumblr media
76K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 7 hours
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
76K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 22 hours
Text
source
3K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 2 days
Text
when the objectively bad person has traumatic and honestly reasonable reasons for why theyre like that but it doesnt excuse their actions and only serves to make them more tragic as a character
Tumblr media
30K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 2 days
Text
the most beautiful baby on earth
21K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 2 days
Text
126K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 4 days
Text
USAmericans
Read the Project 2025 manifesto RIGHT NOW
It's MUCH worse than y'all have been hearing
There is so much here you'll have to look at it for yourself, but the climate policy alone is nightmare fuel.
The republican coalition wants to essentially end funding for green energy, dramatically promote and expand fossil fuel industries, and eliminate funding and regulations in all sectors promoting climate change mitigation. Task forces and offices related to clean energy and lowering carbon emissions will be eliminated and replaced with offices for promoting fossil fuels.
Tumblr media
They want to LOG NATIONAL FORESTS TO "THIN" THE TREES TO STOP WILDFIRES.
Tumblr media
THEY WANT TO FORCE OREGON AND CALIFORNIA TO LOG THEIR NATIONAL FORESTS AND TREAT THEM AS FOR TIMBER PRODUCTION
Tumblr media
There are specific provisions in Project 2025 to essentially destroy the Endangered Species Act, causing it to defer to the rights of "economic development" and "private property." The plan includes delisting gray wolves, cutting the budget so that a "triage" system is used to determine which species will get protection, removing funding for research, removing experts and specialists from the decision-making process, and preventing "experimental" populations of animals from being established.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
This is so much worse than I expected it to be and there's much more past that: They want to deregulate pesticides and remove much of the EPA's ability to regulate pollutants as well.
Also included in the manifesto is that we should
withdraw from nuclear weapons nonproliferation agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing
Tumblr media
The manifesto comprehensively outlines the scorched-earth elimination of abortion access, down to ensuring doctors aren't even trained to perform abortions. There are plans in here to disrupt abortion access GLOBALLY, not just domestically.
Not only that,the Republicans plan on reframing family planning programs around "fertility awareness" and "holistic family planning."
Tumblr media
I can't even describe it all. I'm trying to give screenshots of the most important things but there's so much.
The foreign policy is a nightmare. They plan to push fossil fuels onto the Global South and promote the development of fossil fuel industry in the "developing world."
It is aggressive and antagonistic towards other nations, strongly pro-military, proposing that we INCREASE (!!!!!) defense spending, improve public opinion of the military and military recruitment, and increase the power to fund new weapons technology.
Just read the Department of Defense section. It's about greatly increasing and strengthening the military-industrial complex, collaborating more closely with weapons manufacturers, removing regulatory barriers to arming our allies and to inventing new military weapons, and recruiting more people into the military. They include provisions to develop AI technology for surveillance. And of course, continuing to support Israel is in there.
Elsewhere it proposes interfering in foreign countries with creepy pro-USA propaganda campaigns, even establishing international educational programs where faculty have to pledge to promote USA interests.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
There's a line in here about getting rid of PBS because SESAME STREET is LEFTIST for God's sake.
HOW are people claiming democrats have the same policies. I feel like i'm losing my mind.
8K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 5 days
Text
all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria MonĂŠt and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.
306K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 5 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Eeveelutions 2.0!
14K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 5 days
Text
My Biggest and Most Annoying Fictional Horse Pet Peeve
Big Horses are a Very New Thing and they Likely Didn’t Exist in your Historical and/or Fantasy Settings.
You’ve all seen it in every historical piece of media ever produced. Contrary to popular belief, a big black horse with long legs and long flowing mane is not a widespread or even a particularly old type of horse.
Tumblr media
THIS IS NOT A MEDIEVAL THING. THIS IS NOT EVEN A BAROQUE THING. THIS IS A NINETEENTH CENTURY CITY CARRIAGE HORSE.
All the love to fancy Friesian horses, but your Roman general or Medieval country heroine just really couldn’t, wouldn’t, and for the sake of my mental health shouldn’t have ridden one either.
Big warmblood horses are a Western European and British invention that started popping up somewhere around 1700s when agriculture and warfare changed, and when rich folks wanted Bigger Faster Stronger Thinner race horses. The modern warmblood and the big continental draught both had their first real rise to fame in the 1800s when people started driving Fancy Carriages everywhere, and having the Fanciest Carriage started to mean having the Tallest and Thinnest Horses in the town.
Before mechanised weaponry and heavy artillery all horses used to be small and hardy easy-feeders. Kinda like a donkey but easier to steer and with a back that’s not as nasty and straight to sit on.
SOME REAL MEDIEVAL, ROMAN, OTTOMAN, MONGOL, VIKING, GREEK and WHATEVER HISTORICALLY PLAUSIBLE HORSES FOR YOU:
“Primitive”, native breeds all over the globe tend to be only roughly 120-140 cm (12.0 - 13.3 hh) tall at the withers. They all also look a little something like this:
Mongolian native horse (Around 120-130 at the withers, and decendants of the first ever domesticated horses from central Asia. Still virtually unchanged from Chinggis Khan’s cavalry, ancestor to many Chinese, Japanese and Indian horses, and bred for speed racing and surviving outdoors without the help of humans.)
Tumblr media
Carpathian native horse / Romanian and Polish Hucul Pony (Around 120-150 at the withers, first mentioned in writing during the 400s as wild mountain ponies, depicted before that in Trajanian Roman sculptures, used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in the 19th century)
Tumblr media
Middle-Eastern native horse / Caspian Pony (Around 100-130 at the withers, ancestor of the Iranian Asil horse and its decendants, including the famous Arabian and Barb horses, likely been around since Darius I the Great, 5th century BC, and old Persian kings are often depicted riding these midgets)
Tumblr media
Baltic Sea native horse / Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Gotland and Nordland horses (Around 120-150 at the withers, descendant of Mongolian horses, used by viking traders in 700-900 AD and taken to Iceland. Later used by the Swedish cavalry in the 30 years war and by the Finnish army in the Second World War, nowadays harness racing and draught horses)
Tumblr media
Siberian native horse / Yakutian pony (Around 120-140 at the withers, related to Baltic and Mongolian horses and at least as old, as well-adapted to Siberian climate as woolly mammoths once were, the hairiest horse there is, used in draught work and herding)
Tumblr media
Mediterranean native horse / Skyros pony, Sardinian Giara, Monterufolino (Around 100-140 at the Withers, used and bred by ancient Greeks for cavalry use, influenced by African and Eastern breeds, further had its own influence on Celtic breeds via Roman Empire, still used by park ranger officers in Italy)
Tumblr media
British Isles’ native horse / various “Mountain & Moorland” pony breeds (Around 100-150 at the withers, brought over and mixed by Celts, Romans and Vikings, base for almost every modern sport pony and the deserving main pony of all your British Medieval settings. Some populations still live as feral herds in the British countryside, used as war mounts, draught horses, mine pit ponies, hunting help and race horses)
Tumblr media
So hey, now you know!
69K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 5 days
Note
I like One piece for the world building and characters. Yeah the women do look like that but they are genuinely very unique and interesting characters! Not a fan of the later fights because they last a long time, so usually I skip or fast forward. I recommend reading the manga because reading is faster and the anime’s pacing is meh.
as someone who is too put off by the length and also the way the women look, what positive qualities did one piece have?
one piece has a lot of joy and heart in it! i feel like the thing one piece does best and the narrative core of the arcs that i think actually had any real quality to them was about a desire to live in the face of insurmountable challenges. i like that luffy's goal is just to have a fun time with his friends and discover cool pirate stuff, which is what being a cartoon pirate should be about.
43 notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 6 days
Text
When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.
There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.
And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.
And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.
And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.
The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.
7K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 6 days
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Every Webkinz Classic plush stimboard series - Cheeky Cat
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 6  (original inaccesible)/ 7 / 8  (original inaccessible)/ 9
41 notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 6 days
Text
energy policy would be much better if we still had a tradition of animal sacrifice I think. people would be way more chill about nuclear energy if they could see a large and proud bull being ritually sacrificed every month or so at the base of the cooling towers to keep the plant safe
29K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 6 days
Text
I thought I was late to my appointment at the ADHD clinic but the ADHD clinic knows their clients well and the appointment reminded me to be here at 1:30 when my appointment was actually at 2:00.
Me: oh good I'm actually on time! :)
Me, realizing why and being overcome by the mortifying ordeal of being known: >:/
15K notes ¡ View notes
magical-mage-dude ¡ 6 days
Text
TIME SENSITIVE! SHAHED HAS 3 DAYS TO REACH 30K TO EVACUATE HER FAMILY
Shahed Ghazi, primarily sharing her family's fundraiser on Twitter/X, is a Palestinian engineering student under a stressful time crunch -- the owner of the account hosting her campaign has given her 3 MORE DAYS to raise $30,000 CAD before shutting it down. She has raised $22,208 CAD so far, meaning she must raise $7,792 in 72 HOURS! I've seen what we can do when we all work together to show a family how much we care, so please, please, help them reach this amount before time runs out. Give what you are able to help ensure this family's survival, even if it is $5 CAD.
$22,208 CAD/$30,000 CAD.
7K notes ¡ View notes