Hi Charles!

World Building Tips

@reeseweston asked me if I have any tips on world-building, so I thought I’d share them on here in case it’s helpful for anyone else. (You tagged me as @thereisnothingwrongwithbeingmad - this is my writeblr.)

I can only speak for what I personally do and what works for me, but feel free to reblog this and add your own tips and advice from your own experience. So, let’s start by breaking it down into different sections. Before anyone panics - I very rarely fill all of these points out before I get into the story (or even after I finished it), and I don’t think you should either. Just start with the basics - the first two is the one I find most essential - and come back to the list whenever you’re stuck while you’re writing the story, or whenever something pops into your mind that you think would be helpful later.

Geography - To me, this is the most helpful thing to start with. You don’t necessarily have to draw a map, it’s enough if you write down where everything is and what characteristics each place has (dry, humid, forests, deserts, etc.), but you should know where your settings are within the world you created. It doesn’t matter what genre you write in or how big your world is - like, half of my current WIP is going to take place on a ship, but I still have to know where my OCs are going and why. It also gives you an opportunity to name everything, so your characters can actually refer to places by their names.

Political/social structure - Second most important thing when I’m starting a new story. How is your world governed? What is it made up of? Countries? Empires? Kingdoms? Are there governments? Oligarchies? City states? Tribal chiefs? A mixture of things? Is there a religious authority? Multiple religions clashing with each other? Is religion outdated or a central aspect of life? What is people’s relationship to their regional authority? Do they like how things are going? Is there a revolt brewing? Is there slavery? Lower classes? Filthy rich people? Is the state responsible for keeping everyone fed or is it every men for himself? And most importantly - what is your characters’ relationship to the governing authorities? Do they like how things are run? Are they outside of the influence of their government/king/etc.? Or are they in the middle, taking part in every important decision?

Religion/Science - What is the central truth that the inhabitants of your world live by? Is it technology and science that runs everything? Is it magic? Religion? Post-apocalyptic sense of dread and survival instincts? What do people think about the world and why? Do your characters agree with the mainstream? Disagree? If you have a religion, what type of god/gods are there? What are the rituals that need to be observed by people to be considered good citizens? If science is what people trust and believe in, how do they view religious societies outside of their own country/region? Did their beliefs change over time? Why?

Law and Justice - What sort of moral codes do people in your world have? How is murder viewed and punished? Can you get into jail for stealing some food? What sort of disciplinary actions are there to keep people from breaking the law? Who are the people allowed to judge and punish others? Is law to be feared or respected? Do people have a right to a trial when accused? Do the gods decided or do men decide? Humans or other species? Are there death sentences?

Creatures/species/races - is your world inhabited mainly by humans? What sort of species are there other than your average human? Are there fantastical creatures like griffins, dragons, etc? Do they co-exist peacefully? Is one considered inferior to the other (i.e. humans vs other species)?

History - what events in the country/realm/planet’s past have defined their present? Were there wars with others that shaped how they view the world and interact with each other? Did they form alliances with others? Are they a big power or an insignificant political entity? Did religion disappear in favour of science? The other way around?

Culture - what behaviours are seen as normal? Is there a difference between what is expected from men and women? Low and high classes? How do they view art? Is a profession like being a painter or a singer accepted or frowned upon? Do they have an extensive written history? Do they use books for record keeping or entertainment? Do they even have books/ever had books? Do they have time for leisure or is it all business? How many languages are there and is it important to know more than one? What does an educated person behave and look like in your world? How do people dress?

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

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What about the bad things I learned to love?

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Lorenzo!

Still Holding On, Because of You 💙

I never thought I would be in a position where I had to ask for help just to survive. But war does not give you a choice. It takes everything—your home, your family, your future—and leaves you with nothing but grief and uncertainty.

I lost 25 family members. In a single moment, everything changed. My mother, my sisters, my nieces… gone. The house that held our memories, our dreams, was turned to dust. We have been displaced over and over, never knowing where safety is, never knowing what tomorrow will bring.

But I refuse to give up.

Even in this pain, I hold onto the hope that kindness still exists. That people out there, even those I’ve never met, might care enough to help.

💔 We have no home. 💔 No stability, no certainty about tomorrow. 💔 But we still have dreams, and we still believe in hope.

Thanks to the kindness of strangers, we have raised $2,500 so far. It’s a small step in a long journey, but it’s a step forward.

Even $10 can help. If you can’t donate, please reblog this post—it could reach someone who can.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring. Thank you for believing in us. 💙

Chuffed

Donate to Help Mosab saving who's left of his family

My name is Mosab Elderawi, and I am a survivor of the war in Gaza. Life as I knew it has been completely destroyed. I have lost my home, my

Reblog to give the person you reblogged this from motivation to work on their WIPs.

!!PLEASE STOP SCROLLING AND READ THIS!!

There's something called a KOSA Bill in the US. It's a project planning to cut off internet access to ALL CHILDREN WORLDWIDE. This means they are banning Chai/C.AI, Wattpad, AO3, Discord, Tumblr, Tiktok, etc.

To make matters worse, parents will have access to their children's internet activity, meaning chats, websites visited, apps opened, etc. Giving them NO privacy whatsoever. Esp. children who are LGBTQIA+, because in the US, it is deemed "inappropriate".

There is a solution to this, however only to people who have Tiktok, there is a user named omarsbigsister, if you check their profile, you can see in their bio it says "STOP KOSA!! ⬇️⬇️"

Below the text, there's a link. Now before you click on the link, there's a video you need to see, giving you instructions on what to do.

This is the video.

Plz do WHATEVER you can to boost this, tag friends, reblog, share, anything will do.

Tags: @randomweebhub @blankdemslate @raymett @donkeybro @corvid-steven @pookie-pie-12 @ipostmyhyperfixationsnshit @ask-the-anonymous-army @fandomsandwriting1 @myclutteredmess-but-reblogs PLS BOOST!!

May the 10 of Pentacles bless your account with more money than you can spend. 💵✨

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.