Senseihuy - SenseiHuy

Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:

A currency that isn’t gold-standard/having gold be as valuable as tin

A currency that runs entirely on a perishable resource, like cocoa beans

A clock that isn’t 24-hours

More or less than four seasons/seasons other than the ones we know

Fantastical weather patterns like irregular cloud formations, iridescent rain

Multiple moons/no moon

Planetary rings

A northern lights effect, but near the equator

Roads that aren’t brown or grey/black, like San Juan’s blue bricks

Jewelry beyond precious gems and metals

Marriage signifiers other than wedding bands

The husband taking the wife's name / newlyweds inventing a new surname upon marriage

No concept of virginity or bastardry

More than 2 genders/no concept of gender

Monotheism, but not creationism

Gods that don’t look like people

Domesticated pets that aren’t re-skinned dogs and cats

Some normalized supernatural element that has nothing to do with the plot

Magical communication that isn’t Fantasy Zoom

“Books” that aren’t bound or scrolls

A nonverbal means of communicating, like sign language

A race of people who are obligate carnivores/ vegetarians/ vegans/ pescatarians (not religious, biological imperative)

I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

When writing always remember… a character flaw is only a flaw until becomes useful. 

Is your protagonist manipulative? Well that’s awful… until they manipulate the antagonist into making a decision that saves the lives of their friends. 

Is your protagonist a skeptic? Well that’s not good… until someone tries to lie to them. 

Is your protagonist overprotective? That sucks… until someone they love is in danger. 

Is your protagonist remorseless? Well that makes them pretty unlikeable… until a hard decision has to be made. 

to all my researchers, students and people in general who love learning: if you don't know this already, i'm about to give you a game changer

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)

you get a few free graphs a month before you have to sign up, and i think the free version gives you up to 5 a month. there are paid versions but it really depends how often you need to use this kinda thing.

Theory:

Werewolf as fear is Losing Self-Control, Werewolf as fantasy is Letting Go Of Self-Control.

Vampire as fear is Being Controlled by outside forces, Vampire as fantasy is Having Control over outside forces

Am I getting close to something here

Just in time for Valentine’s Day... 💔 

Ready to break up with Google?

So are we!

We’ve rounded up a bunch of privacy-centric alternatives for everything Google.

Check out the full list over on the blog!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

found these on twitter that might be helpful to all rpers who want to make sure their themes and carrds are accessible to all

The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

Checkmate, nihilism.

From @elmushterri's amazing gunntech au

This is an oc based on how I think many people would respond to how Gunn Tech treats the children and as a contact for Nori to help him and Ninjalinos to escape and to adopt some GunnTech orphans after the story.

Liêm "Liam" Đỗ is a rogue GunnTech Guard and a contact for Nori [(because Nori definitely got inside people)] with a deal to free [his] niece from Gunn Tech. He knew about GunnTech before [his] niece was put into the program but applied as a guard soon after her placement. Unlike his sister, he has a strong moral code and hates GunnTech's schemes. His least favorite moment wa learning of the "culling" room and subsequently why he must play as a pawn for a monster. He often gave candy to the kids at Gunntech but was reprimanded and threatened to stop. He was previously a guard at a mall, medical research center and a school.

I wrote some extra stuff, and drew a design for both the man and his clothes including a GunnTech guard uniform for both the first few seasons and the finale seasons.

Okay, so I try hard to cover global queer history, and this isn't marking a stop to that, but I am aware that most of my audience is American, and I want to address them very directly right now.

Google Removed Pride Month From Its Calendar App, and Stonewall National Monument's "LGBTQ" status was changed to "LGB" on the government website. This is the beginning of the erasure of queer history, not the end. I don't know what the future of the United States looks like, as someone who studies queer history and has done so for many years, I want to share some tools with you.

Now is a good time to prioritize local queer history, Making Gay History is a great project, so is the Digital Transgender Archive, but also check your city and see what resources there are.

Read and buy books about queer history. I have an affiliate list with some of the books I personally recommend.

If you use Google Calendar, repopulate that resource with so much queer history with a free queer history calendar plug-in, it has names from queer history that you can also learn more about for free when they come up. As the author of these articles, feel free to save them, print them off, whatever makes them freely accessible as suppression get's worse.

Use your local library. Email the board about book bans, request banned books, request queer books, and make your voice heard.

Make queer art. Share queer art. Protect queer art. Here is some public-domain queer art to use as you wish.

Keep up with queer news, THEM is a great resource.

All of these tools are currently freely accessible with an internet connection. Queer history is a community responsibility, do your part.

ok, so I’m a lifeguard, trained and certified, all that pizazz.

And I just wanted to clarify something. CPR alone cannot bring someone back. CPR keeps oxygenated blood flowing through the body, prevented the body from shutting down and the person from going brain dead.

In order for your character to ‘jump’ back alive, there needs to be an electric shock, in a modern au that should normally be an AED and a lot of places have that somewhere in the facility somewhere, and in powered universes you can have an electrically powered person do it.

In fact, its almost more angst-filled to have character A doing CPR, knowing that as the time goes by, without an AED, without EMS getting there, the chances of character B coming back and making a full recovery are getting exponentially lower.

Not to mention CPR is VERY tiring, it’s why lifeguards rotate who is doing the compressions, so if its just character A there to do the CPR, describing the burn of their arms, their back, their muscles all while fighting tears is something that would be very compelling for some readers.