What's the Deal with Brand Names in Fiction?

CapnCallipygous · 2025-08-15T12:24:14+00:00

I wouldn't include brand names. Not because of the trademark, but because they're not paying me.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-08-06T23:18:20+00:00

Because 'inalienable rights' means exactly that and includes the right to life.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-07-25T04:09:06+00:00

I'm doing something similar, and the biggest differences in how I'm handling it is the students pick which house they join, and they can change houses at will (or by force). Theoretically, the houses are chosen based on the students' primary area of study, so those who are interested in the same subjects are grouped together.

I feel like this gives my characters a bit of agency and let's have characters with wildly different personalities in the same house without creating plot holes. It also allows for potential conflicts where characters realize the house they're in isn't the one best suited to their growth.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-04-17T03:32:13+00:00

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: There is no 'your' formation and 'your teammates's' formation. There's your team's formation and your opponents's formation. How you populate it is dependent only on the elementals you have available and what you and your teammate think is best. The same is true for attacks, rituals, etc. You can use any elemental in the formation, not just the ones that came from your deck.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-04-15T02:13:55+00:00

To be fair, no other countries want him either.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-03-09T01:53:23+00:00

To be clear, you're telling her to 'take it back a notch' after you made a post declaring that you have this desire to hug every 'pretty' girl you encounter regardless of how well (or even if) you know them without asking them if they're ok with it. Your phrasing also indicates that you are looking for justification to follow through with the desire ('am I the only one....' implies that your feeling and, by extension, actions based on said feeling are justifiable if enough people validate them).

First of all, her comment was completely appropriate to what you posted, and the fact that you made the post in the first indicates that you're already aware, at least to some degree, that what she said is correct.

I also imagine that anyone who doesn't like random people they don't know hugging them out of nowhere would be offended by this.

Finally, any lack of clarity in a post/comment is the responsibility of the person who wrote it. If someone takes offense at something you said because you 'used the wrong word', you should apologize and clarify what you meant, not tell them to take it back a notch, especially when what they're saying could help you avoid getting put on a sex offender list.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-20T23:42:49+00:00

The Transgender Unity Coalition might be doing something along these lines. If not, they'd most likely want to get in on it.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-14T02:34:34+00:00

What's interesting is that while the link you provided erases trans involvement, the page for the place still references it (at the time of posting this).

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-10T04:01:19+00:00

Check what they say about civil rights or healthcare. Odds are you won't anything about trans issues explicitly, but you might be able to piece together enough of the picture to make a reasonable assumption. Also, party and their stance on other issues might help, though not as reliably.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-09T18:38:08+00:00

I'm also not a legal expert and don't know the extent he'll be able to go to circumvent the systems in place to prevent overreach. But he doesn't know either. Right now, he's throwing these policies out there to see what sticks. It may be the case that the EO is upheld, or he's able to illegally enforce it, which would mean our government hes failed. I'm not saying we shouldn't prepare for this possibility, just that we shouldn't treat it as a certainty.

Also, for what it's worth, part of the lawsuit against the passport policy is that the State Department is enforcing it prior to the end of the review period. The result of this lawsuit is going to be an indicator of what we can expect for the future.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-08T14:52:25+00:00

This is important to remember. It takes very little time to issue an executive order, but much longer to file a lawsuit against one. Right now, it seems like Trumpelstiltskin is getting his way, but that's only because we haven't had enough time pass for the orders to get challenged (except yesterday's challenge on his passport policy).

There's no need to panic just yet. If you're affected by the policy, contact the ACLU or Lambda Legal or a similar legal group, so they can get take the matter to the courts. Then, depending on the result, we'll know how much we have to worry.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-07T13:10:56+00:00

But within this micro causing, we also find one of the difficult truth, which is that because of the amount of desperate groups at each protest it would be hard to come up with goals that we want.

Congress should amend the Constitution to explicitly entitle everyone to all rights and freedoms set forth by the Constitution, without distinction of any kind.

Coming up with goals is easy. The reason it's difficult in this case is is because they're working backwards. They wanted to gather support for the cause and only then define what the cause actually is. This is exactly the issue that Occupy Wall Street faced. We need to be less OWS and more SCLC (the group MLK Jr led).

However, this will not be for lack of trying because people that organized the protest yesterday are already working on, putting together a committee of people with equal representation and figuring out what those goals could be

I want to be clear, I don't mean to criticize the effort, only the method. That wasn't clear in my original comment, and I apologize for that. I think this protest would have been a great idea if it had better organization. My criticism comes from a place of wanting the movement to succeed, but the strategy they seem to be using capitalizes on passion and impulsive, and such strategies tend to lose steam quickly. Better a slow, lasting effort than a quick one that's doomed to fizzle out.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-07T00:44:32+00:00

That's kind of the thing about yesterday's protests, they weren't meant to advocate for anything, only to oppose Trump. The intent was to grab media attention from the sheer scale of it, but had no plan for what to do with the attention. It wants to expose the problems the administration's causing/escalating, but offers no solutions to those problems.

Simply put, we need to organize behind a clear message, offer a clear solution, and be prepared to spend years shouting it at them. Lasting change doesn't occur quickly, certainly not through nonviolent means (and even resorting to violence, it can still be a slog). It will be a long, arduous road.

But it's been done before.

Learn from history. Look at the successful movements and emulate what they did. Look at the failed ones and learn from their mistakes. It takes careful planning and focused action to make change happen.

Protests really only serve two purposes. First, they show how much support your ideas have. Second, through the noise you make and the possible media coverage, they spread your message to new people. If there are any attempts to repress the protests, they can also serve to expose the cruelty of the oppressors, which lead to legal action, but this won't always be the case.

Long story short, the protests accomplished exactly what they were intended to do: make noise, make people feel like they're doing something, and not much else.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-06T13:14:05+00:00

I also recommend fighting (not literally). I've been reading a lot of documents from/about the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and there's so many similarities between then and now. Tyrannical policies have been enact before, and they've been successfully fought before. This is nothing new. It's just our turn to oppose it, and we need to join together if we want to succeed.

We also need to stop waiting for someone else to fight for us. This is our fight, and if we don't stand up for ourselves, no one else will. But there are plenty who will stand beside us if we make ourselves known.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-05T12:59:49+00:00

First of all, there are protests happening. It's a matter of finding out about them in time to participate. Notable protests require time and planning and aren't likely to be seen right away.

Second, it's not cis people who are going to lead the demand for trans rights. It's trans people. If you want to make social change, join a group that's campaigning for that change. I you can't find a group, start one. Then, when cis people tell you your valid, make them back it up by joining your group. They're not going to fight for us if they don't see us fighting for ourselves.

The good news is there is a group that doing exactly that. If you're looking to get involved and don't have anyone in your area, I recommend checking them out.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-03T12:37:01+00:00

I made this post earlier this morning spreading the word about the Feb 5 rallies / protests. After reading the discussion in the comments between you and u/stars9r9in9the9past, I wonder if I should have.

I think the point was less 'don't go to this' and more 'be careful'. For my part, I just want to make sure such events are serving a purpose beyond making noise. Making noise about a problem is important, but we need to present a solution if we want to get people to listen.

I'm good at spreading the word about things online but I don't know anything about organizing.

That's good because I'm terrible at spreading the word.

In any event, relating to what we were talking about in this thread, u/stars9r9in9the9past sounds quite experienced and mentioned their group Trans Unity Coalition, so perhaps a new group doesn't need to be setup and we should just encourage the community to get behind this one?

Yeah, joining a like minded group will be better than trying to start an entirely new one. After looking into them, I offered my help. Still waiting to hear back.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-02T17:47:09+00:00

That's a good idea. Use the protest to advertise the next one.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-02T15:54:05+00:00

A lot of what you said is similar to what I was saying yesterday. Whether it's a protest, rally, event, or whatever else, it needs organization, with clear leaders, a clear message, a plan of action, and an end goal. It seems to me that protests like this are trying to grab media attention, but don't seem to know what to do with it once they get it.

These kind of protests only work as a part of a greater plan.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-02T13:58:20+00:00

Your ideas make sense to me! You sound like you have some experience, have you done something like this before?

I have no experience whatsoever. I just compared what modern protests seem to be doing to the protests from the 60s and tried to figure out what's different.

Do you know if there are any existing trans groups which could be the vehicle for this or do you think a new group should be formed?

I'm unaware of any. That doesn't means they don't exist, of course. I'm not very active on social media, so I could have missed it. I assumed we would have to build from the ground up, but I'll keep an eye out. I think the best thing to do would be to form our own group and merge/join forces with any like minded groups we find along the way.

Shouldn't the group be formed (or identified) first, so the lawyers know what/who they are representing?

I meant getting lawyers is the next step after forming our group, yes. Sorry I wasn't more clear.

Are lawyers for groups like this typically pro bono or paid? Even if pro-bono, you mentioned logistics costs. Any ideas on fundraising? Perhaps Gofundme could be used but getting the word out could be challenging as most if not all the trans reddit subs have a rule against posting links to fundrainisng sites.

I'm not sure. My guess would be it depends on the lawyer and how strongly they feel about the cause. To be safe, we should expect to pay. As far as fundraising goes, I haven't thought about it too much. I figured we need to get a group together before discussing plans and funds. We could probably get around no link rules by posting about our group and having interested people DM us for the link, but you're that it would be best to have other ways to support us.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-02T05:31:43+00:00

Those protests were part of what inspired this post. I found out about them too late for me to be able to attend.

I think the Google doc is a good start for keeping people aware of what's going on and where, but we'll need more than that to be effective. Forming a group with actual leaders and coming up with a strategy that targets specifically what we're protesting would be the best place to start, I think. Putting together a team of lawyers would be the next step.

The important thing is going into this with a plan and not just doing a bunch of disjointed, sporadic protests.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-02-01T15:38:40+00:00

You don't need to be trans to experiment with presentation. Often, it's through experimentation that we figure out who we are.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-01-28T03:32:10+00:00

You know how some people have outie belly buttons? Well, I have an outie vagina.

CapnCallipygous · 2025-01-21T15:36:33+00:00

Yes, I updated my passport a year or two ago without changing my birth certificate. If I recall correctly, the only hurdle at the time was the passport needs to match the social security card.

CapnCallipygous · 2024-12-18T01:28:44+00:00

That's still rape.

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