i really really mean it please write muslim characters, it’s really not that daunting literally all you have to do is throw in a few casual qualities.
have them squint uncertainly at the meat options in a restaurant and ask if there’s pork in the sandwich. have them mention on the phone “oh, i’m gonna stop by the mosque first for prayer but i’ll be there soon.” have your hijabi girls squeal over cute scarves in mall store windows and swoon over sparkly pins. have them kindly reject a glass of water and say “oh, i’m fasting today.”
just don’t make their religion their only defining aspect. like??
for most women, wearing hijab is about as casual as wearing a shirt or pants. give me a badass woman on a mission to save the world just like you’d write literally any other badass woman on a mission to save the world— this one just happens to keep her hair in a headscarf and is careful not to eat certain foods?
and not all muslim women wear scarves, a lot of them just choose not to or they decide not right now but they’ll do it later? like, give me a girl who’s absolutely determined to break a world record and halfway through the story she shows up in a headscarf for the first time and it’s no big deal.
give me a kid who’s on the search for an ancient magical artifact and also they get anxious at some point cause they’re busy but prayer’s gonna start soon and they don’t wanna miss it. have them whip out their phone and search for the nearest mosque. have them find some quiet place to pray alone, like in the corner of a hotel room they just booked while their travel companion’s watching TV with the volume turned down low.
just?? do a bit of research (when are the prayer times, when is ramadan, what are halal foods, mosques in texas, etc.) and write!!! muslim!!! characters!!!
I don’t care what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, I don’t care if Jesus was a hippie or not, I don’t care what Marx prescribed. I can’t take living in a world where we’re all servants of long-dead men. You know what happens if you make a law the Founding Fathers wouldn’t like? Nothing, they’re dead and they’re never coming back. I’m genuinely envious of countries that can just make whatever laws they want without worrying about how 18th century agrarian noblemen would have seen it. Stop arguing that Jesus loved the poor too, what he loved or didn’t love is irrelevant, he doesn’t get a say in any of this. We could have a country that isn’t shackled to these ghosts if we collectively wanted to.
If Asgardians speak English but originate from Scandinavian folklore, then by all rights shouldn’t Thor, Loki, and company sound like they’re from Minnesota?
Oh, ya, m’name’s Loki, and I am burdened with glorious purpose, doncha know.
This would get me to watch all the Thor movies.
Thor: Aww geeze, I’m gonna need ya to hand over that tesseract there ya? Loki: Oh, good ta see ya, too, brother, thanks for askin’ how I was and all there. Thor: Cheese and crackers, does it seem like I’m in the mood for your games there now then yet?
im hurt but at the same time im from minnesota and im dying becuase this is gold
I want to live simply. I want to sit by the window when it rains and read books I’ll never be tested on. I want to paint because I want to, not because I’ve got something to prove. I want to listen to my body, fall asleep when the moon is high and wake up slowly, with no place to rush off to. I want not to be governed by money or clocks or any of the artificial restraints that humanity imposes on itself. I just want to be, boundless and infinite.
The amendment appears on a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. If it remains in the final bill, the amendment would cut 15% of federal adoption funding to states and localities that penalize adoption agencies that refuse to place children in families that conflict with the agency’s “sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions.”
The amendment also bars the federal government from refusing to work with adoption agencies that discriminate.
The vote in the committee was 29-23, along party lines, with Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) the lone Republican to vote against the amendment.
“House Republicans are pandering to their far-right base at the expense of LGBTQ people and children in need of a home,” said Democratic National Committee (DNC) LGBTQ Media Director Lucas Acosta.
“Rather than focusing on empowering families or uniting children with their parents, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee voted to give child welfare agencies a license to discriminate against qualified potential parents.”
Acosta added, “Across the country, LGBTQ candidates are running for office and taking a stand against the Trump-GOP agenda, which seeks to roll back the progress we have made. In November, voters will stand together in the face of this bigotry and hate and elect Democrats up and down the ticket.”
In addition to LGBTQ people and same-sex couples, the amendment would also impact interfaith couples, single parents, married couples in which one prospective parent has previously been divorced, or other qualified parents to whom an agency could have an objection.
It’s a good rule if you have a very stupid audience, and a bad rule in literally every other situation
Introducing a concept and then having that concept pay off later is bad
That sure would be a silly opinion to hold if that was what Chekov’s gun actually was. Fortunately it isn’t!
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.“
Requiring every detail of note in your story play a relevant role in the story, thus depleting it of all atmosphere, decoration, implication, and between-the-lines storytelling, fucking sucks
This is because Chekov’s gun is not a rule for storytelling in general, or for books, it’s advice for stage productions and the use of props in them
Chekov never talked about the “first chapter” he said the “first act”, because he was talking about the theatre, props in a production are eye catching and will distract the audience so they better fucking matter.
If you have a prop gun on the stage, someone better be doing something with it by the end of the play or you’re wasting the stagehands’ time
it’s a good piece of advice regarding not overdecorating your sets in stage shows where that adds significant costs both monetarily and in labor to the production and distracts the audience
it absolutely was never supposed to mean “every trivial detail in a book must absolutely be extremely significant five chapters later”
it’s only a stupid rule if you try to apply advice for stage production to writing novels
Well, that’s a relief.
Hands up if you’ve read Chekovs gun as “Star Trek Chekovs Phaser” for near fifteen years and won’t stop.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
