I Took My Second ADHD Pill A Little Too Late I Guess Because It Was Suddenly 4 Am And I Made This Thing

i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

Copaganda does three main things.

First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.

The evidence shows otherwise.

— Alec Karakatsanis, “Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”” | Jacobin, July 2022

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

I hate when I say things like "oh I want an ipod classic but with bluetooth so I can use wireless headphones" and some peanut comes in and replies with "so a smartphone with spotify?" No. I want a 160GB+ rectangular monstrosity where I can download every version of every song I want to it and it does nothing except play music and I don't need a data connection and don't have to pay a subscription to not have ads and don't have popups suggesting terrible AI playlists all over the menus.

Gimme the clicky wheel and song titles like "My Chemical Romance- The Black Parade- Blood (Bonus Track)- secret track- album rip- high quality"

HEY THIS IS IMPORTANT whats your favorite place to find drawing references?

Where to Watch: Sonic Media

Updated - 01/23/2022

With Sonic getting a resurgence of popularity after the 2020 film, and speculation that the ‘22 tv show might include multiple canons (this is not confirmed!!), I’ve seen several people asking where they can watch certain adaptations, so here’s a handy-dandy list!

Quick rundown of the links: YouTube links will be provided only if they’re full unedited uploads. I recommend WCOStream over the others but I’m including a variety in case some sites are blocked where you are. fmovies specifically has a LOT of popup ads, but if you have a good enough adblocker (I use ublock origin) it shouldn’t bother you.

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (1993)

Also called AoSTH, this is a slapstick comedy show. It focuses much more on humor than “plot” or “internal consistency,” which I think is just neat. It was aired very early on in Sonic history, predating such characters as Amy, Metal Sonic, and Knuckles.

Streaming Services: Hulu

Links: YouTube (+Christmas Special) | WCOStream | tubi (+Christmas Special) | kimcartoon | fmovies

Sonic the Hedgehog (1993-1994)

Commonly known as SatAM, this is an action-adventure show, focusing on Sonic and a mobian resistance trying to defeat Robotnik, who has caused a robot apocalypse. It has a more serious tone than AoSTH, which aired at the same time, and is incredibly story-based.

Streaming Services: PlutoTV, Paramount+

Links: YouTube | WCOStream | kimcartoon | fmovies

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie (1996)

Commonly known as the Sonic OVA, this was a pilot for a potential anime series that never really got off the ground (no pun intended). While still unconnected to Sonic canon, this included Knuckles and Metal Sonic, the latter of whom is animated so cool you guys,,

Was on YouTube but was recently deleted for copyright.

Japanese Links: archive.org {two parter, not subtitled}

English Links: archive.org

Sonic Underground (1999)

Released as a “more marketable” replacement for SatAM, this show features Sonic and his triplet siblings, Sonia and Manic, searching for their lost mother and fighting overlord Robotnik and his cronies with rock-and-roll instruments that shoot lasers. It’s… it didn’t age great, let’s be real, but it’s a nostalgic favorite for a lot of the fanbase.

Streaming Services: Paramount+

Links: YouTube | WCOStream | tubi | kimcartoon | fmovies

Sonic X (2003-2005)

The anime series; the first season is kickstarted by an accidental burst of Chaos Control transporting Sonic and his Gang to another dimension– Earth. Robotnik still wants to conquer this new planet, so Sonic and his friends have adventures trying to stop him. Season Two adapts Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, marking the first animated appearance of Shaodw, and Season Three features new adventures in space that get. Very interesting.

IMPORTANT NOTE– I am including links for both the subtitled version and dubbed version. Note that the dubbed version is a censored version of the show and cuts several important plot/emotional beats because 4kids wanted it to be more “child-friendly.” I recommend the subtitled version, but if you don’t like watching subtitled shows (fair!) I at least recommend watching Episode 68 dubbed, as that was the one that was most screwed over by said censorship. I also recommend ep39 [a lot of jokes got cut] and ep78 [the finale, had the pacing butchered] but 68′s honestly the most censored one lol.

Streaming Services: Hulu [has both japanese and english]

Japanese Links: kissanime | gogoanime

English Links: YouTube | WCOStream | tubi | kimcartoon | fmovies

Sonic Boom (2014-2017)

A sort-of “workplace comedy” and the first CGI Sonic television show. Based  on the spinoff universe of the Sonic Boom games, Team Sonic live on a small island village while fighting Eggman and the occasional other supervillain as part of their job as Designated Heroes. Extremely comedy-focused.

Streaming Services: Hulu

Links: WCOStream | kimcartoon season one and two | fmovies

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

An “origin story” for Sonic, as the blue blur grows up alone and eventually finds himself on an Earth road trip with the “Donut Lord” Tom Wachowski while being pursued by Dr Robotnik, who wants to capture the hedgehog due to a strange power he seems to control. Very cute and fun!

Streaming Services: Epix, Hulu, Paramount+

Links: kimcartoon | fmovies

dealing with the worst case scenario

your condom breaks

you feel a lump on your breast

your friends are ignoring you

you’re stranded on an island 

you got rejected by a crush

you get into a car accident

you got stung by a bee/wasp

you got fired from your job

you’re in an earthquake

your tattoo gets infected

your house is on fire

you’re lost in the woods

you get arrested abroad

you get robbed

your partner cheated on you

you’re on a ship that’s sinking

you fall into ice

you’re stuck in an elevator

you hit a deer with your car

you have food poisoning

your pet passed away

you fall off of a horse

you or your friend has alcohol poisoning

you have toxic shock syndrome

your house has a gas leak

becoming an adult cheat sheet!

learn to coupon

what to do when you can’t afford therapy

cleaning your bathroom

what to do when you can’t pay your bills

stress management

quick fix meals

find out if you’re paying too much for your cell phone bill

resume workshop

organize your closet

how to take care of yourself when you’re sick

what you should bring to a doctor’s appointment

what’s a mortgage?

how to pick a health insurance plan

hotlines list

your first gynecology appointment

what to do if the cops pull you over

things to have in your car in case of emergency

my moving out masterpost

how to make friends as an adult (video)

how to do taxes (video)

recommended reads for surviving adulthood (video)

change a flat tire (video)

how to do laundry (video)

opening a bank account (video)

laundry cheat sheet

recipes masterpost

tricks to help you sleep more

what the fuck should you make for dinner?

where should you go for drinks?

alcohol: know your limits

easy makeup tips

find seat maps for your flight

self-defense tips

prevent hangovers

workout masterpost

how to write a check

career builder

browse careers

birth control information

financial management software & app (free)

my mental health masterpost

my college applications masterpost

how to jumpstart a car

sex ed masterpost

✨️ask game✨️

random emoji-based questions to sate your curiosity

personal

👁 eye colour

🇪🇺 nationality

🏳️‍🌈 sexuality

🏳️‍⚧️ gender identity

🛐 religion

faves

☕️ hot drink

🧃 cold drink

🍜 dish

🍉 fruit

🥦 veggie

🎉 holiday

🎲 game

🏐 sport

🐈‍⬛ animal

🌻 flower

🌦 weather

🌍 place

🚙 means of transport

fandom faves

😇 blorbo

😈 meow meow

👥️ otp

📺 tv show

🎬 movie

📚 book

🎶 musical artist