So there are some perks to living in a tourist destination. There are a lot of detractors mostly that you cannot shoot the tourists because you rely on them for your income but you have a semi captive audience with no context for any of the bullshit you spew. You can tell these people anything and they will believe you, the trusted friendly local. Now this is a very much Spider-Man situation where Great Power begets Great Audacity and even worse Responsibility.

My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.

Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.

But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.

So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.

One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.

This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.

But,

He has an audience.

This is the opportunity offered by the universe.

He plays it cool.

He puts on dead pan straight face on and wades up to shore to grab his fish and nod to the tourists. Someone asks something and he assures them this is the standard way to get a quick dinner here. The tour guide has caught up with his group. He looks at my buddy and his fish and the general lack of fishing accoutrement. Without missing a beat, the guide backs up every ounce of bullshit out of my buddys mouth because if there is one true fraternity it is locals bullshitting stupid tourists.

Sashanne with Marcy: our baby girl, precious, beautiful, smart. She did nothing wrong and did everything wrong but we're cool. So cute and talented and clumsy; she's our big lummox. She's independent, but if something happened to her we'll kill everyone in this room and then ourselves. But she's not allowed to cook, and she has to be reminded to eat and shower, like a cat. But we love her❤️💙

Marcanne with Sasha: our protector, our savior, our rock. She's been so busy taking care of us she never allowed to show how hurt she was. She was a control freak but she got better. Pretends to be strong, crude and Independent but she's a big softy inside, and she only show it to us, because she trust us. We want her to be there for us like always but we also want to be there for her! We're all equals... But we let her believe she's the one wearing the pants in the relationship to not hurt her ego. 💙💚

Sasharcy with Anne: SHE'S OUR ANNE, OK?! She's the best thing to ever happen to us, and we don't deserve her and we know it but we try not to show it, so we're a bit clingy but it's not bad. BUT if someone ever as much look at her, they are dead. We can kill them and made them disappear withouth a trace. She make us want to be better, but we would became WORSE just for her. 💚❤️

For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules  — even less of them read it,  and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation:  the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all,  if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court  it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

I know the general consensus is that the yin hufu was actually a problem, either due to the resentment itself and WWX’s control of that resentment, or due to the fact that the sects would have absolutely never let him live so long as he kept it, and ignoring the second one which is more indicative of the hypocrisy of cultivation society, that first bit…

Sometimes, I think about Chenqing. The ghost flute, the Yiling Patriarch’s terrible instrument, spreading death to all who hear it. I think about WWX using it like a melee weapon, plain black bamboo, blocking swords and bludgeoning like something wrought from iron.

I think about the fact that it’s covered in teeth marks. Little baby teeth marks, from little baby Wen Yuan, who would have, in the way of all babies, grabbed that cursed flute without a second of fear and shoved as much of it into his mouth as he could fit before any of the adults had even noticed it was happening. I think about Chenging, the Ghost Flute, iron-hard in battle, lethal even when it’s not being played, soft under the aching gums of a teething child. Letting itself be marked, permanently. Sitting, quiet. Doing no harm.

Wei Wuxian was not called the Yiling Patriarch during the Sunshot Campaign, which the general fandom seems to forget. He was not the Yiling Patriarch when he was mowing down Wen soldiers. He was not the Yiling Patriarch at war, blazing and furious, playing his cursed flute and raising the dead to march. The title, Yiling Patriarch, didn’t come until he and the Wens were hidden away in the burial mounds, gathering around their meager meals every night and sharing bottles of Uncle Four’s wine, trying to coax radishes from grave dirt. A toddler, moving from caretaker to caretaker at his own whim, standing among people who love him, gnawing on a cursed flute because his mouth hurts. Wei Wuxian was the Yiling Patriarch because he was also Xian-gege. One does not exist without the other.

Chenqing means “setting forth one’s thoughts and explaining one’s actions.” It was about clarity, an explanation. “This is me,” said Wei Wuxian. “This is what I stand for. This is who I am. This is what I am capable of, and what I will do.”

War, yes, when the world calls for it. Probably that was all he thought he was saying, at the time. War, and the succinct, complete end of it. Retribution. “You brought this on yourselves.”

But what Wei Wuxian actually ended up saying, what he actually did with that flute and that resentment and that hill filled with corpses, what he said was: “How can I help? What do you need? Are the innocent safe? Are the children cared for? I love you. I love you. I love you.”

I think about the Yin Hufu. I think about the general consensus among the fandom that that resentment, that power, would have been too much even for Wei Wuxian. That it would have hurt him or those around him in ways that even he, with his brilliance, could not foresee and mitigate.

I think about Chenqing, soft under a’Yuan’s tiny teeth.

And I wonder.

Wen Qing

“How did you change into this look? - Really? Have I changed?”

[ID: A gif of Wei Wuxian, looping constantly from his innocent days at Cloud Recesses, in Gusu Lan white and blue, to the Yiling Patriatch looking menacing in black and red, cut together so seamlessly that it looks like the latter is finishing the former’s movement as he cocks his head.]

i love when a character has something terrible happen to them and as a result they see themself as, essentially if not literally, a ghost. and so that means they only can (and have to) do what ghosts do, ie get revenge and then cease to exist. easy as that. but then halfway through this ghost vengeance they realize hey actually i might still be a human person. with human needs. that’s incredibly inconvenient, considering how much i’ve invested in this whole ghost thing

the untamed  →  ladies

Helpful things for action writers to remember

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

How to apply Writing techniques for action scenes:

- Short sentences. Choppy. One action, then another. When there’s a lull in the fight, take a moment, using longer phrases to analyze the situation–then dive back in. Snap, snap, snap. - Same thing with words - short, simple, and strong in the thick of battle. Save the longer syllables for elsewhere. - Characters do not dwell on things when they are in the heat of the moment. They will get punched in the face. Focus on actions, not thoughts. - Go back and cut out as many adverbs as possible. - No seriously, if there’s ever a time to use the strongest verbs in your vocabulary - Bellow, thrash, heave, shriek, snarl, splinter, bolt, hurtle, crumble, shatter, charge, raze - it’s now. - Don’t forget your other senses. People might not even be sure what they saw during a fight, but they always know how they felt. - Taste: Dry mouth, salt from sweat, copper tang from blood, etc - Smell: OP nailed it - Touch: Headache, sore muscles, tense muscles, exhaustion, blood pounding. Bruised knuckles/bowstring fingers. Injuries that ache and pulse, sting and flare white hot with pain. - Pain will stay with a character. Even if it’s minor. - Sound and sight might blur or sharpen depending on the character and their experience/exhaustion. Colors and quick movements will catch the eye. Loud sounds or noises from behind may serve as a fighter’s only alert before an attack. - If something unexpected happens, shifting the character’s whole attention to that thing will shift the Audience’s attention, too. - Aftermath. This is where the details resurface, the characters pick up things they cast aside during the fight, both literally and metaphorically. Fights are chaotic, fast paced, and self-centered. Characters know only their self, their goals, what’s in their way, and the quickest way around those threats. The aftermath is when people can regain their emotions, their relationships, their rationality/introspection, and anything else they couldn’t afford to think or feel while their lives were on the line.

Do everything you can to keep the fight here and now. Maximize the physical, minimize the theoretical. Keep things immediate - no theories or what ifs.

If writing a strategist, who needs to think ahead, try this: keep strategy to before-and-after fights. Lay out plans in calm periods, try to guess what enemies are thinking or what they will do. During combat, however, the character should think about his options, enemies, and terrain in immediate terms; that is, in shapes and direction. (Large enemy rushing me; dive left, circle around / Scaffolding on fire, pool below me / two foes helping each other, separate them.)

Lastly, after writing, read it aloud. Anyplace your tongue catches up on a fast moving scene, edit. Smooth action scenes rarely come on the first try.

The most important lesson is to learn as much as you can so that you can learn where the flexible regions lie in your prose. Exaggeration of action, in all forms of media, requires an understanding of the basis of the action so that it can be taken to logical extremes that your reader can follow.

Summer in the mountains of Peru | maxrivephotography

i just made this for myself, but multiple people have told me they find it really useful so i thought id share it!

every tiktok expert: make short fun videos 9-15 seconds long

me: how about a 2-minute spoken word monolog about unlearning trauma responses?

in case no one told you, or in case you know but you need encouragement taking the next step: it’s never too late to unlearn a law that is now holding you back, it’s never too late to write a new law

Genuinely one of the best things I’ve heard in forever. Not only the content, but the structure of every sentence, the delivery, the pacing, everything is impeccable.

Oh this is so so good.

I am obsessed with this.

So because parkour is such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of these movements that you're taught when you become an instructor plays to a male body's strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc.

She demolishes this course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She doesn't muscle her way up to her over a wall, she just throws a leg up over the wall. She doesn't use upper body strength to do the salmon ladder, she uses her hips!!! And it's fucking incredible.

So many girls and young women walk away from parkour because every movement caters to the strengths of men, because doing what makes sense for their bodies is seen as "bad technique" to be trained away.

If pre-transition me had seen this I would have cried tears of joy.

Family

Eidele Aquibel, Angèle Bright and their daughter Amity (and her beloved gold dragon doll Ba Ba).

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has trouble remembering developmental milestones. I put these together, but can’t take credit for any of the photography. Hope someone finds them helpful!

This is very useful to me i have absolutely no gauge for how old children are and what they can typically do at what ages

I’ve been on Tumblr too long I was definitely expecting this to turn into some existentialist meme

Every writer needs to see this because I’m really tired of otherwise competent novels in which a two year old is like “mother dearest I do believe I am quite frightened” or conversely they’re supposed to be five and going “me hungie!!!”

I went through the pictures expecting there to be a punchline at the end

Seeing how the vast vast vast majority of us are neurodivergent with buy one get three conditions, I don’t expect anyone here to have any genuine gauge on what is supposed to be when.

Be aware however that at THIS series of ages there’s genuinely a huge variation and that’s variation within “normal” (ie not sufficient to identify a disorder or neurodivergence at that stage).

There are three year olds who are still doing a lot of pointing and one word sentences, and three year olds who are having conversations in sentences with subordinate clauses; I’ve cared for both. Human development is very bad at following stable specific year markers.

Like this infographic has utility for those genuinely unfamiliar with the broad pattern! But the range for each is actually pretty varied.

This is a useful more detailed list where the important part is the “watch for” list at the bottom of each age: that’s when you should get in touch with your healthcare providers to see if there’s an illness or other factors, in case your child needs extra help or something is wrong.

(Please note that when I say “Something is wrong” I don’t necessarily mean “neurodivergence” as that falls under “extra support”; developmental delay can ALSO be caused by malnutrition brought on by allergies or gut conditions, or by sleep related disorders, or by infection, or by even scarier actually dangerous for health things. But also yes it DOES matter that you seek appropriate support even if it’s “just” a neurodivergence or cognitive difference bc those kids do in fact need different things in many ways from “standard” child needs.)

Even then, it may be that actually it’s fine and the difference in development will go away bc humans are like that. Also personally I’d seek support if my baby were developing way FASTER - there are times both physical, mental and emotional where something happening too SOON is also a Difficulty (ie the baby i nannied who walked at 8months …. The rest of his manual dexterity/etc did not keep up. So if he lost his balance…. He fell right on his face. Oops. )

but yeah writing wise this is a reasonable guide, and if you want to go too far from it I’d do EXTRA research.

x

Me when he started cutting: oh yeah yeah I’ve seen that in medieval European architecture

Me a minute later: wait

Me thirty seconds later: I have not seen this in medieval–WAIT WHAT THE FUCK THERE AREN’T EVEN ANY JOIN LINES

more substantive thing about Glass Onion and then i think this is all my thoughts: i really liked something i feel was clearly shown in the flashbacks but not outright stated, which was that andi knew damn well miles bron was a dumb huckster.

that's what she wanted him for. she needed that ability to throw himself into his latest shill with total commitment, because of his need to believe in his own hype. the 'reality distortion' of his hard sell.

she knew that to get what she wanted out of life, she needed to harness that confidence of a mediocre white man we all talk about.

that it would open doors that would stay unmoved in the face of all her brilliance, and polish, and perfected rich bitch voice.

there's a lot of these guys out there, and she picked a dumb one because she planned for him to be the front man to her mastermind. (apologies to paul mccartney lol i don't mean to impugn your intelligence.) a smarter man would have had his own plans, would be harder to use as a mouthpiece for her better ones. she would have needed to find an actual partner and not a tool, and she didn't trust like that.

duke wasn't actually wrong to say they were all playing the same shitty game and andi lost. i mean, he was morally wrong but he wasn't incorrect.

like blanc says, she thought that because she was better than bron, because she was the genius and he was the cheap con artist, he wasn't dangerous. and in the end that was where it all fell apart.

okay i guess i lied i wasn't out of thoughts.

so like i said in the tags i really like that it's duke who said it, because duke and andi make a mirrored pair within the Shitheads.

duke--I've been through the tag and noticed a lot of people missed this entirely--duke isn't real.

duke is a man born in probably the late 70s with superhero knuckle tattoos. he's a gaming nerd whose natural genetic predisposition toward being built let him surf the gamergate wave into its current toxic cultural aftermath.

and sure, the persona has become most of his personality, but he pivots away from it easily enough, when it's not useful or fun.

he's genuinely sexist, but in a casual, unexamined way--his misogyny isn't actually emotionally important to him. he doesn't actually have any ideals about society, toxic or not, that he values beyond the advantage espousing them will get him.

he'll apologize to his abusive mother for backtalking and plead with his girlfriend to bounce on the casting couch on his behalf without experiencing any cognitive dissonance, because the MRA thing is just a grift.

and he still knows that about himself.

andi's persona, in contrast, was premeditated and designed with clear eyed intent, with a genuine desire to become what she portrayed, but she wore it very much the same way.

andi was also a shithead, who voluntarily sought out other shitheads. andi didn't stop bron from shilling NFTs to children; she tried to stop him when he was imperiling the company and thus her.

she and helen very much stayed in contact after parting ways, judging by the amount helen knew about the glass onion crew from back in the day despite never having met them, but she found out about Rich Bitch voice by seeing it on TV. andi code-switched with her, the same way Duke drops character with his mom.

they match, opposite examples of sewing yourself into an aspirational skin in order to conform to the unreasonable demands of the world and its hierarchies, and achieve success on its terms.

just like lionel and claire, who aren't trying to pass themselves off as anything but 'competent,' but they know themselves and one another as liars. the politician and the walking talking case of impostor syndrome.

(if they're opposites it's in how the whole world knows lionel is miles bron's creature, while for claire it's a guilty secret.)

whiskey and peg are both the hangers-on of hangers-on, contorting into the shapes required to retain patronage, but whiskey's bland comfort with the mutual exploitation of her relationship and intention to separate herself from duke as soon as he's not useful is in stark contrast to peg's hopeless enmeshment with birdie.

and birdie and bron, of course, are so much alike in the privilege to mostly believe their own exact-opposite yet effectively identical lies, of being too stupid to be culpable and too smart to be wrong.

both of them genuinely expect to always have yet another second chance, another round to try to win, and no true consequences for losing. the parallel drawn out between the 'wait out the media cycle before tweeting another slur' approach to scandal and the throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall-until-you-strike-gold startup bro treadmill is great. like it's right there, but i hadn't thought about it quite like that before.

anyway i like the way these pairs fall together. it gives us multiple angles on each way to live dishonestly, to wear a lie as the self, so no one character becomes the single archetype of any of them. and at the same time the answer to blanc's little salvo early on about how they're all so different is--nah. they're really not different at all.

i just feel like the world would be a safer and kinder place if people in general knew that you can think someone/something is weird or annoying without advocating for the eradication of them. you’re allowed to think smth is weird just don’t get so whipped up about it that you become a fascist damn

Why not make this because I'm just a filthy commie.

My thoughts on Disability (getting paid because you can't hold down a job due to your disability).

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)

Before the capitalists (derogatory) come in my comments "You're just mad because you're too dumb to work so you want free shit." (Because they always do when I post a commie take).

I am disabled, and I have a full time job that pays me quite well (and is very accommodating to my disability). I just don't think people whose disability are more limiting than mine should suffer. Especially because every single disabled person knows that stress exacerbates symptoms.

Like the stress of being forced to live off what is the equivalent $2/hr for full time work, being forced to find a living space that covers that, and trying to find food you're allowed to eat on supplemented income with dietary restrictions (because most disabled people have to eat what most people consider "unhealthy" to manage our disability).

Before capitalists (derogatory) say "Your disability doesn't make you eat unhealthy food". You just want an excuse to eat junk food. People with cystic fibrosis often require calorie counts similar to Olympic athletes because they can't digest food right. People with POTS often require ridiculous sodium intakes to help manage the symptoms of low blood pressure. And people with migraines often need high carb "junk foods" to help manage the low blood flow that comes with a migraine flare-up.

The disabled body is fucking WEIRD and what's healthy to most people isn't necessarily healthy to us, and we've found our ridiculous ways of eating through trial and error to find out what best helps us function. If you don't live in our body, you can't tell us what's good for us.

-fae

Guilty as charged

We're so wacky...

Image description/transcription:

In the center is white text on a black rectangle which reads, "SHOCKING THINGS LIBERALS BELIEVE"

Surrounding this are 12 smaller rectangles in different colors, each with text. They read, starting clockwise from the upper left:

People working 40 hours a week should not live in poverty. CEOs should not receive 3,000 times the pay of their workers Wall Street gangsters should go to prison when they steal. No child should ever have to worry about being shot at school There should no be subsidies for profitable corporations Politicians should not dictate medical decisions for women Everyone should have access to higher education. Healthcare should be given to all, not be a luxury for rich people. Companies should not be permitted to trash the earth for profit. Lobbyists should not be allowed to bribe our representatives Equal rights and equal pay should be the benchmark for all Americans. No one, especially veterans, should be homeless

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