Do You Ever Start Bullshitting A Paper, And Then Look Over It Halfway Through And Think, ’…Wait A

I was having writers block and so I took a break and soon enough it was 3 in the morning and I had impulsively sewn together a tiny mouse you’re welcome

reblog if you hate nazis and don’t think they should speak on college campuses

This is a rather personal issue to me. Doctors suggested I had a rare form of brain damage because they couldn't believe a girl could be autistic. It wasn't until multiple MRIS and other scans came back proving it wasn't the case and some other tests that proved that I am in fact autistic.

Expert says many more girls have autism than was thought, and failure to diagnose them can lead to misery

So, basically, what this article is saying is they discovered the way that boys present with autism, went “well that covers 100% of the population surely!” and then didn’t bother figuring out how autism presents in girls.

Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. “Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they’re good, their differences will not be noticed,” he said. “Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script.”

WOW. 

Tony Attwood, founder of the first diagnostic and treatment clinic for children and adults with Asperger’s, and author of The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, agreed with Gould’s estimation of a 2.5:1 ratio of boys to girls. “The bottom line is that we understand far too little about girls with ASDs because we diagnose autism based on a male conceptualisation of the condition. We need a complete paradigm shift,” he said.

WE FIGURED OUT HOW TO DIAGNOSE BOYS AND BECAUSE WE FIGURED THAT WOULD WORK FOR EVERYONE BECAUSE BOYS AND GIRLS ARE SO EXACTLY THE SAME (child psychology would DISAGREE WITH YOU IDIOTS) NOW WE’RE REAL SURPRISED THAT WE FUCKED UP.

This. This is a feminist issue. This is an issue like holy shit there are doctors out there who will deny a female patient who is referred to them because ‘lul girls don’t get austism’. They didn’t think to do any more research because, whatever right? We figured out how to solve the male side of the problem.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

I've been reading Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros, and it's gotten me thinking about how worldbuilding is multilayered, and about how a failure of one layer of the worldbuilding can negatively impact the book, even if the other layers of the worldbuilding work.

I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, so I'm going to talk about it more broadly instead. In my day job, one of the things I do is planning/plan development, and we talk about plans broadly as strategic, operational, and tactical. I think, in many ways, worldbuilding functions the same way.

Strategic worldbuilding, as I think of it, is how the world as a whole works. It's that vampires exist and broadly how vampires exist and interact with the world, unrelated to the characters or (sometimes) to the organizations that the characters are part of. It's the ongoing war between Earth and Mars; it's the fact that every left-handed person woke up with magic 35 years ago; it's Victorian-era London except every twelfth day it rains frogs. It's the world, in the broadest sense.

Operational worldbuilding is the organizations--the stuff that people as a whole are doing/have made within the context of that strategic-level world. For The Hunger Games, I'd probably put the post-apocalyptic nature of the world and even the existence/structure of the districts as the strategic level and the construct of the Hunger Games as the operational level: the post-apocalyptic nature of the world and the districts are the overall world that they live in, and the Hunger Games are the construct that were created as a response.

Tactical worldbuilding is, in my mind, character building--and, specifically, how the characters (especially but not exclusively the main characters) exist within the context of the world. In The Hunger Games, Katniss has experience in hunting, foraging, wilderness survival, etc. because of the context of the world that she grew up in (post-apocalyptic, district structure, Hunger Games, etc.). This sort of worldbuilding, to me, isn't about the personality part of the characterization but about the context of the character.

Each one of these layers can fail independently, even if the other ones succeed. When I think of an operational worldbuilding failure, I think of Divergent, where they took a post-apocalyptic world and set up an orgnaizational structure that didn't make any sense, where people are prescribed to like 6 jobs that don't in any way cover what's required to run a modern civilization--or even to run the society that they're shown as running. The society that they present can't exist as written in the world that they're presented as existing in--or if they can, I never could figure out how when reading the book (or watching the film).

So operational worldbuilding failures can happen when the organizations or societies that are presented don't seem like they could function in the context that they are presented in or when they just don't make any sense for what they are trying to accomplish. If the story can't reasonably answer why is this organization built this way or why do they do what they do then I see it as an organizational worldbuilding failure.

For tactical worldbuilding failures, I think of stories where characters have skillsets that conveniently match up with what they need to solve the problems of the plot but don't actually match their background or experience. If Katniss had been from an urban area and never set foot in a forest, it wouldn't have worked to have her as she was.

In this way (as in planning), the tactical level should align with the operational level which should align with the strategic level--you should be able to trace from one to the next and understand how things exist in the context of each other.

For that reason, strategic worldbuilding failures are the vaguest to explain, but I think of them like this: if it either 1) is so internally inconsistent that it starts to fall apart or 2) leaves the reader going this doesn't make any sense at all then it's probably failed.

Victorian Slang for Steampunk Characters

Whether your character is a thief, sailor, noble, engineer, or average citizen in the 19th century, dialogue can be the quickest (and the funnest!) way to paint their personality and circumstances. 

Here is short list of resources I’ve found to be the most helpful, plus a compilation of 108 Victorian slang terms that happen to be my favorites.

Victorian Slang Resources

Passing English of the Victorian era: a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase (1909) is a book of slang from all levels of society, categorized by origin and dates of use.

Vocabulum, or the Rogue’s Lexicon (1859) is a book of slang published in the Victorian era itself, specializing in the slang of criminals and miscreants of all sorts. 

An online list of 19th century American and Civil War era vocabulary, particularly helpful for military slang and for characters with an American background. 

And a list of equally delightful slang from the Edwardian era, technically not Victorian but with reasonable room for overlap—and besides, who’s going to do as much research as you? 

Now for my favorite slang terms, most of them compiled from Passing English. You’ll find some bias toward a roguish vocabulary, since my steampunk novella Aliferous is centered around air pirates!

108 Victorian Slang Terms

Above-board – Frank, open. From sailors’ lingo. Not between decks or in the hold, but above all the boards in the ship.

Ah, dear me!  – ejaculation of sorrow

Alexandra Limp (approx. 1872) – An affected manner of walking seen for several years amongst women. Said to have been imitated from the temporary mode in which     the then Princess of Wales walked after some trouble with a knee. (See Buxton Limp, Grecian Bend, Roman Fall.)

All his buttons on (approx. 1880 on) – Sharp, alive, active, not to be deceived. He is eighty-three years of age, but as we say hereabouts, has all his buttons on.

All a treat – Perfection of enjoyment, sometimes used satirically to depict mild catastrophe.

All over red (approx. 1840 on) – Dangerous, to be avoided.

Anti-Tox (approx. 1885) – A drug to sober a drunken person. Tox is, of course, the abbreviation of intoxication.

Balloon-juice (1883) – Soda-water; presumably suggested by its gassy nature. It’s as good as a bottle of balloon-juice after a night’s hard boozing.

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i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad

I love this. I want weird creepy architectural arms creeping from the corners of my house.

@bird-lord1993 this is u explaining why my unhinged behavior can be described as “intense”