Tabletdemedium - Ask Devil Medium's Kingdom

ALRIGHT. LISTEN UP.

So recently, I got calls from the phone number, (937) 353-8319. They claim to be a job service, and one of their “employees”, Carrigan, is friends with whoever the call recipient is, and that Carrigan has recommended you for this $15.00/h “job”. I also got a text message from (937) 607-1493, claiming to be Carrigan, and that they need stuff to “win a scholarship”. I do not know anyone by the name of Carrigan and I know very well that this is a very dangerous scam. If you receive a call from a number, and they ask you if you would like a job for $15.00/h, HANG UP IMMEDIATELY. If you accept the “job” offer, and you go in for an interview, they will give you a drugged bottle of water and you will wake up somewhere you don’t want to be. These phone calls & texts are from a human trafficking service, and if you oblige to them, you will be sold to people and you will be raped, no doubt about it. So PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT ANSWER THESE CALLS OR TEXTS. I have listened to the voicemails, and allowed my dad to do the same, and he learned that anyone offering a $15.00/h “job” is a human trafficker. PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST THIS ALL OVER TUMBLR

I've been gone a while and seem to have come back to some grade-SS stupidity. Keep it going!

Please share this! I can’t stress how important this is.

I’m not good at tagging things, add as you see fit.

((Reblogging this so I absolutely cannot lose this advice.))

Quick Tip to Draw Straight Lines & Avoid Shaky Hand Lettering by Sean McCabe

Hey, Turpentine, does your family have any opinions about, ah, you and Varnish? 👀

Turpentine: What would there be to think about with Varnish and I? We just work together, that’s it!

Despite the confidence in his voice, the young bunny continues to fidget.

If "success == pregnancy," then maybe "accidental pregnancy == serendipity?"

Success is like pregnancy. Everybody congratulates you but nobody knows how many times you got fucked to achieve it.

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

reblog if you support muslims

i just. i really need to know right now. there’s so much hate in the world, i need to know who’s safe. also if you can’t reblog this feel free to block me <3 i hope i never interact with you ever in my life

Almost 700 workers (most with families) were just detained by ICE in MS. The raid was a direct result of their women speaking out against sexual abuse. Their children will be trafficked and traumatized. Their sick will go untreated in America’s brutal concentration camps.

  Please donate to the National Freedom for Immigrants bail fund here. 

Please please fight and pray for their safety. If you have nothing to give, at least reblog and spread this.