bells-n-roses

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what if i *remembers that making suicide jokes is not conducive with my goal of improving the wellbeing of myself and everyone around me* transform into an oyster

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more girls need horns. demon horns, satyr horns, lil antlers, whatever. this post is self-explanatory

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Disney's writer wage-theft is far worse than reported

Back in November, we learned that Disney had pulled a breathtakingly criminal wage-theft manuever on one of science-fiction’s most beloved authors, Allan Dean Foster, an elderly cancer-patient caring for his sick wife.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay

Foster is the bestselling author of some of the most successful movie novelizations ever, from the first STAR WARS novel to ALIENS novels and more. Thanks to Disney’s monopolistic buying spree of companies like Lucas and Fox, they now owned the movies and Foster’s contract.

Here’s where things get criminally weird. Disney argued that when they bought out Lucas, Fox, etc, they acquired their assets, but not their liabilities. In other words, they’d acquired the right to sell Foster’s work, but not the obligation to pay him when they did.

This is not how copyright contracts work, period. If it were, then any publisher with a runaway bestseller novel could incorporate a new company, sell its assets - but not its liabilities - to that company, and stiff the writer.

Both Foster’s agent and the Science Fiction Writers of America tried to negotiate with Disney quietly on this, but they were stonewalled and insulted (Disney insisted that they wouldn’t even *discuss* a deal without first getting nondisclosure agreements from Foster, another unheard-of tactic).

After failing to make progress with private negotiations, they went loudly public, launching the #DisneyMustPay campaign. The good news is, the campaign was successful, and Foster has been paid.

The bad news is that the campaign flushed out *many* writers who are also having their wages stolen by Disney. The company is stalling them, too - refusing to search its records or volunteer info unless the authors can name the specific instances in which they’ve been robbed.

In response, SFWA has joined forces with the Romance Writers of America, the Horror Writers of America, the National Writers Union, Sisters in Crime and the Authors Guild to form a coalition called Writers Must Be Paid.

https://www.writersmustbepaid.org/

They have a form where writers who suspect that Disney has stolen their wages can report it, anonymously:

https://airtable.com/shrE1hJbqMHsjP9Ll

There’s a reason for the anonymity: Disney’s anticompetitive mergers (culminating with the destructive Fox merger) has created a monopoly with vast market-power to destroy creators’ livelihoods by excluding them for speaking out.

The coalition has five modest demands for Disney:

I. Honor contracts now held by Disney and its subsidiaries

II. Provide royalty payments and statements to all affected authors

III. Update their licensing page with an FAQ for writers about how to handle missing royalties

IV. Create a clear, easy-to-find contact person or point for affected authors.

V. Cooperate with author organizations who are providing support to authors and agents.

More broadly, I hope this brings more creative workers into the discussion about competition.

Specifically, “monopsony,” the excessive buying power that happens when a companies dominate access to a market, which allows them to squeeze their suppliers, especially workers.

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Predatory Wasps of the Palisades

Beronica soulmate fic--a home for my own wish fulfillment.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/30285015

#beronica #riverdale #soulmate #fanfiction #wlw #sufjan stevens #veronica lodge #betty cooper #mutual pining #twist

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saccadic

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Don't mind me. I'm just trying to learn German.

Pics: Pinterest

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RULES: Post the last line you wrote from any WIP and tag the same number of people as there are words

TAGGED BY: @dykeactually

WIP NAME: An Orphic Fire

SHIP: An original work, so no one knows them, but their names are Henna and Inanna (Anna, for short)

LAST LINE WRITTEN: “Anna ran her hand along the doors as she passed them, the touch of wood grounding her.”

I don’t actually have 17 mutuals, and the ones I do have have pretty much all already done this, with the exception of the wonderful @deathsbinky :)

Hope you don’t mind that I tagged you, buddy

#wip #original work #tag meme #AOF #thanks for tagging me

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mormon kids under the age of 18 being told their church is a cult

mormons 18-24 after they go through their endowment ceremony and receive their new name and secret clothing and learn the secret handshakes and passwords and realize everyone around them has been secretly doing this the whole time and now theyre going to be sent away from their family for 2 years where they will literally not be allowed to be alone for 1 second of the day except to go to the bathroom and they have no idea how to get out of what they just got into

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So let's talk about the Lost Generation.

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.

Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."

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severing ties and planting new seeds

insta

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So if I posted like an extended summary of the rosella meet cute for my massive poly fic would anyone want to read it?

#yes #this is the effervescent content we deserve

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Captain Jack Harkness

lets make a new trope: gay characters who are actually seemingly impossible to kill to the point that all of their enemies are comically frustrated. functionally immortal gay characters. being gay making you immortal. unkillable gay trope.

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While I agree that Jacob is 100% right, I don’t like the writing choice from SMeyer as it deliberately makes the Cullens and the Wolfpack seem like ‘they’re both in the wrong’. Obviously that’s not true, but by writing both sides with the same kind of insults, she makes it seem as though they’re both equally hateful. Which,, ugh. But what do we really expect from Smeyer?

The cullens are make believe people

The Quiluetes are actual people being demonized as mongrels and dogs

If Jacob wants to use words like parasite, leech, blooducker etc let him do so because that’s what vampires do and vampires never had a race connection

Yes! And honestly? Smyers vampires do have a race connotation. IN the illustrated guide smyer talks about how when someone turns into a vampire, the transformation turns them white. She fought with the director of twilight about allowing Laurent to be played by a black actor, and only added vampires of color into the series in Breaking Dawn, which came out only a few months after the first twilight movie dropped, so you can see the implication there about her argument with Ms Hardwicke making her feel like she had to add vampires of other races and ethnicities to her series. That, combined with the colonizer vibes that the Cullens specifically give off, makes me feel like jacob is 100% in his right to call the vamps whatever he wants to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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can’t stop thinking about the carmilla book 😔