Patrickarchy

(Source: berniesrevolution, via staticraining)

What can we do? Here’s your answer.

bellecs:

Let me teach you all a bit about your local American government and all of you better listen because I don’t know about you but I refuse to be bullied by anyone. 

All public institutions have bylaws that they must follow. There MUST be public meetings to inform the public of changes that the organization is either considering or approving. During these public meetings you have the RIGHT to be heard and give an opinion. If you do not feel comfortable addressing the board your opinion can be submitted in writing and must be read out loud during the comment time. These comments, if done in mass, will be taken into serious, serious consideration. I have worked now 5 years in the Public Sector and the only people who attend public meetings or give any comments ARE OLD, WHITE AND CONSERVATIVES. I can assure you that the majority of them do not have your interest in mind. And yes, even if you’re under 18 you can comment!!! 

On Public Records: any public organization has to abide by public record laws. (they vary by state, get familiar with your state’s laws: LINK) You can request emails, phones, text messages and calendars of your public officials and/or staff. Hold them accountable. Most public officials are willing to meet with you for 15 minutes if you wish to speak to them in private. If you’re unable to meet with them you can request a phone call or obtain their email. Again, having worked in the public office I can tell you politicians want to make sure their local public is happy so make them work for it.

These institutions are things like police, transportation, counties, state, health department, fire department, Americans with disabilities act. And if you are in any way impacted by any of these organizations (if you live in the USA, you are.) you have a civic responsibility to be informed. On top of that many counties have ADVISORY BOARDS which regular citizens like you and I can apply. There are so many issues in one county that advisory boards are used to inform the politicians of what is going on and yes, you guessed it; old white conservatives are the ones that sit in many of those boards. 

I urge you, I plead with you, when you are done mourning, it’s time to get angry and it’s time to get involved. It’s time you get to know your local laws the way you know the Doctor Who episodes. With this win the Right will be in full swing, happy drunk off their victory, and they will get as involved as they can in the local because they KNOW Trump is not enough to control, he’s going to need footmen/women so we need to get as much ground as we can so we can get through these next four years.

osunlade:

the-movemnt:

Kid Cudi enters rehab for depression, shares beautiful note with fans

Kid Cudi announced Tuesday night that he’s checking himself into rehab to address his “depression and suicidal urges,” as he wrote in an open letter to fans posted to Facebook. 

The letter displays a level of openness and of vulnerability artists rarely offer their fans. Cudi deserves praise for his strength and the light that he’s shining on mental health especially as a black male artist. 

Artists and fans have been sharing tributes to Cudi, with Joe La Puma of Complex posting a heartbreaking yet poignant Vine of the rapper. 

follow @the-movemnt

Praying for him.

(Source: mic.com, via mattfractionblog)

rale:

it’s kinda cool how our generation has created actual tone in the way we write online. like whether we: write properly with perfect grammar, shrthnd everythin, use capitals to emphasise The Point, use extra letters or characters for emotion!!!!!, and much more - it means we can have casual conversations, effectively make jokes using things like sarcasm that’s usually hard to understand without context and much more. this “incorrect English” has really opened avenues of online conversation that isn’t accessible with “correct English” which is pretty interesting

(via calebwidogasts)

nevver:

Chaotic Atmospheres

(Source: chaoticatmospheres.com, via nevver)

"People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via lazypacific)

(via teachingliteracy)

staticraining:

dduane:

winjennster:

majorenglishesquire:

scu11y22:

secondalto:

Anyone have a fic rec?

If you have some fan-tastic fic, we wanna read it!

Um, yeah, NO. Mostly because of this sentence in the terms and conditions:

 Entries become sole property of Sponsor and none will be acknowledged or returned.

I encourage everyone to boost this, please don’t let anyone you know who writes fic to enter this contest.

For my fic writing friends.

It’s incredible that this is a promotion about how Entertainment Weekly has literally zero idea how fanfiction actually works.

“Write us a piece of fanfiction - don’t post it anywhere, so no one knows you wrote it - and we’re going to repost it as some dope hetero 50-Shades sexing, claim all credit and recognition, edit it if we want to, and completely ignore the fact that fanfic, in itself, is not actually okay with most original content holders. LET ALONE profiting off of it. Which is what we’d be doing – selling fucking magazines off the work you gave us for free you absolute sucker. Also here’s a screencap of the greatest example of fanfic bastardization and bullshit profiteering in history thus far.”

Get. Away. From. My. Writers.

Get the fuck away from my writers.

Don’t let your friends do this. Protect fanartists at all costs.

Nope. Nope nope nope. Noping away from this as fast as possible. Fuck you EW.

Somebody at EW is profoundly unclear on the concept. Several somebodies. NUMEROUS somebodies. On numerous counts.

Writers: NEVER give any publisher all rights in your work. NEVER EVER.

(Source: entertainmentweekly)

abigailmarkov:

feministdisney:

seanewilliams:

rosalarian:

boringoldraphael:

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

“This thinking it’s stupid and wrong and self perpetuating unless you actively work against it.” There it is again, the realization of how such biases lurk in our subconscious, in our muscle memory, and getting rid of it is an active, conscious effort. You can’t “just write” because only actively thinking about this stuff stops these biases from happening, and they must be stopped.

Might have reblogged this before, but it always warrants reblogging.

very interesting details.

This.

theblogofeternalstench:

And so they heard that. And that made it into this comic book. So it’s the first time, you know, me figuring out my character’s back story suddenly becomes a comic book, becomes canon.

(via lecterings)

"Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be … it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is."

Beautiful read on what it means to stand at the gates of hope.  (via explore-blog)

(Source: explore-blog, via emerald-city7)

tedystaleva:

x

(via cinemastatic)

(Source: kellymarietran, via morgan-leigh)

(Source: webofstarwars, via lecterings)

7 reasons why solarpunk is the most important speculative fiction movement in the last 20 years

kdhume:

1. It’s hopeful. Solarpunk doesn’t require an apocalypse. It’s a world in which humans haven’t destroyed ourselves and our environment, where we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of ourselves and our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
2. Scientists are heroes again. And not just physicists and astronomers. Knowledge of biology and earth sciences matter, they’re the building blocks for a future on Earth. Scientific literacy isn’t just for academics – it’s part of daily life. People know how the things they use work, and if they don’t, they can access that information. 
3. It’s diverse. Solarpunk is rooted in using the environment, so it looks different in different places. Alternative energy is best when specific to place (I imagine geothermal, wind, tidal, and hydroelectric energy sources are still used in certain places) so no overarching government system is needed. Communities can organize themselves, taking their own location and needs and history into account. Brazilian, Inuit, Egyptian, Pacific Northwest, and New Zealand solarpunk can all look very different, but be unified in resourceful, intentional, low impact living.
4. Individuality still matters. In a post-scarcity society, ingenuity and self-expression are not sacrificed on the altar of survival. With solar power there’s no reason not to go off grid, if that’s what you want to do. Communities can self-organize. You can find a community that suits you, or go live by yourself if that floats your boat.
5. There’s room for spirituality and science to coexist. Solarpunk is rooted in a deep understanding and reverence for natural processes. There’s room for spirituality there, be it pagan, Buddhist, Sufi, Transcendentalism – anything. There’s so much to explore, from nature worship to organized monotheistic religions, and how they interact with solarpunk.
6. It’s beautiful. The most common solarpunk aesthetic is art nouveau, but again there’s room for diversity, incorporating art styles from multiple cultures in respectful, non-appropriative ways. The most important aspect of solarpunk aesthetic is the melding of art and utility. The idea of intentional living is strong in art nouveau, but it’s not the only art movement with that philosophy.
7. We can make it happen. Now. Earthships. Permaculture. Aquaponics. Algae lighting. Compostable products that turn into fields of flowers. Buy Nothing organizations. Tiny, beautiful, efficient homes. Solar power cells you can see through. That’s all happening now. Solarpunk is within our grasp, at least on a personal level. I’m not saying there aren’t still big, ugly infrastructures devoted to unethical consumption, but we can start to tear them down. We can build a solarpunk world with stories and small changes. And small changes lead to big changes. That’s the real beauty of solarpunk. It’s not a post-apocalyptic power fantasy. It’s not a wistful daydream, or an elite future only for physicists. It’s something we can work towards right now. It’s tangible.

(via therealhermione-blog)

nonmono-perspective:

Shoutout to the bisexuals and pansexuals, to the genderqueer and trans folk who will be completely erased from the media’s coverage of the marriage equality decision in the United States, even if it means that you will be able to marry your partner when you couldn’t before. You don’t deserve to be erased from something you want to celebrate.

Shoutout to the folks for whom this decision does basically nothing. Shoutout to the trans women of color who experience incredibly high rates of violence and who will probably face the brunt of the backlash to the decision from straight people. We will not ignore you. We will not silence you. We will not forget you.

The movement for equality is FAR from over. Celebrate if you want to celebrate, but listen to the voices of those who are not celebrating.

(via un-gendered)