BEN DROWNED @absoluteturnip - Tumblr Blog

Two things absolutely changed my life as a writer. You ready?

One- Your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop. You can edit bad writing. You can't edit a blank page.

And honestly? Defiance is the best writing I've ever done. All because I let my characters be bad and I gave myself the freedom to write it badly.

gendercensus

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It's open until 19th July 2026, and it's open to anyone whose gender(s) (or lack thereof) defy the restrictive binary of male/female.

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pink-doc-martains

Watch Fruits basket guys

lesbianshepard

waaaay back when I was a cashier in retail we would talk about dumb shit while unloading the truck, and we got to the "what would you do in a zombie apocalypse" me and another worker were like yeah we would just die. End it all, we can't fight or run or shit. I refuse to put that much effort into survival.

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

Anyway, random shout out to that guy. You were too kind for retail management, Devin.

lesbianshepard

also afterwards everyone who was talking about their cool bunker fantasies were like "Damn, Devin's right, we should also be considering helping people around us." which is the only recorded instance of a retail shift making people better human beings.

kira-7

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

If you want to spread it elsewhere, here's the official link

arctic-hands

[Video Description: An ad with piano music over it all, showing an elderly woman in her home, knitting, when two younger men walk by her window, which catches her attention. She stares out her window at them as they kiss each other while walking, the old lady staring in disbelief. Cut to the old woman approaching a residence with a broom in hand, staring up at the second floor window where a small rainbow Pride flag is hanging. The old woman stares up at it and mutters "Ridiculo", before getting up on a ladder with her broom to remove the flag. Focus on the flag fluttering to the ground as church bells chime. The scene then cuts to the couple from before, approaching their home with grocery bags in hand before one stops and stares at the second floor, stopping his partner who then drops the groceries as he too stares up. It's then revealed that the small pride flag had been replaced with a gigantic, hand-knit pride flag. It then cuts back to the old woman's home, where a tin of rainbow-colored yarn sits on her table. The hands of the old woman are holding and fondly touching an old black and white photo of two young smiling women, leaning against each other. Cut to the old woman's face as she stares out with a look of happy pride on her face. At the end of the video, the name "Idealista" appears on screen, followed by "buon pride" along with a rainbow. End VD.]

spaceofentropy

One correction:

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

In this case, thankfully, the Strong Opinion™️ is that those two men are ridiculous with their teeny tiny flag for ants.

beezlebutch

"Pride month is over"

WRONG! Your pride month is over! Me and all the other disabled queers are having pride month two: disability edition

jehandant

Reblogging this again bc people in the notes are asking a lot of "Am I included? Am I disabled if I have x?" and I just wanted to add the flag here to show people who the pride month is for.

This is the new flag, the old one was more vivid and in a z shape, but it's been made more neutral to be inclusive of people with seizures or sensory issues.

Each stripe represents a different aspect of disability:

Red: Physical disabilities

Yellow: Cognitive & intellectual disabilities

White: (And this is the key one I think) Invisible AND undiagnosed disabilities

Blue: Mental illnesses

Green: Sensory disabilities

If you're autistic or have ADHD? this is your pride month. If you have a mental illness, it's your pride month. If you're hard of hearing, this is your pride month. If you have an autoimmune disorder, this is your pride month. If you are not diagnosed with anything but you know something is up with you: THIS IS STILL YOUR PRIDE MONTH.

queer-here-and-in-fear

as well, i feel its important to mention the meaning of the grey: its remembrance for those who have been harmed by ableist violence, those who have died to suicide because of disability, and all the disabled people who died to get us where we are.

its for the people who have experienced violence too, because of their disability. who were never palatable to abled society and were harmed or killed for it even.

you are remembered. you are loved <3

power-handmaiden

when I was in high school I had a literature teacher who had a policy of unlimited extra credit. All you had to do was read a book by a notable author (his discretion) and have a little chat with him after school to prove that you read it. No limits, no need for variety (one month I decided I really loved Kurt Vonnegut and just read everything of his I could get my hands on).

Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.

I was thinking about it again today, and only just now realized that he absolutely tricked me into being well-read, while my teenage self thought I was totally getting away with something. THAT MOTHERFUCKER. I hope he's doing well.

jvlianbashir

my friend's discord server has a "proof of touch grass" channel where they post pics of them doing regular activities outdoors/in public. i think many online spaces could benefit from such a thing

weaselle

when i was super depressed - like struggling to eat anything barely able to get out of bed to pee depressed - my good friend asked me every day to send her a picture of me holding a leaf and a picture of a meal i was eating and it helped me significantly

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

which is to say, i agree proof of touch grass is a good idea for online spaces

yadelah

This kinda required my brain a bit

amazoogle

Have and Have Not (2006) Crystal Schenk

chromatographic

look i reblogged this because this piece FUCKS but then

then I looked in the notes and y’know.

some people seems confused.

Why a shopping cart with stained glass?

or This would be cool to shop with

or something about religion and NO

THIS. Is about HOMES.

That style stained glass? Those diamonds? They speak to me, and they say “Townhouse”. and FANCY townhouse, at that. They say “City home, old home, a home that is RICH, a shelter from the storm and a safe place for a family”.

But on! a! shopping cart!

That evokes - to me - Homelessness.

The person on the street who had no other choice but to steal the best cart they could from a store’s corral just to have a way to transport the meager belongings that are all they fucking have in this world. And it’s NOT a home or a safe place or a shelter but it’s all you fucking have!

And this piece goes and puts them fucking together! AND NAMES IT.

Yeah this is fucking ART.

gorgynei

in the age of repression and purity culture, getting more perverted is the only morally correct course of action

gorgynei

#(thousand-yard sex-disinterested aroace stare) cool opinion. love seeing this same sentiment 10000 times a day on this website

im also aroace. being disinterested in sex and romance is still sexual perversion in the eyes of the state. get more perverted in whichever direction fills you with the most joy!!!!!!

meabeck

lauralot89

Grammar tip: If you're unsure whether to use who or whom, reverse the sentence and see which pronoun you use. For we/she/he/they, use "who." For us/her/him/them, use "whom."

Who is going to the party? They are going to the party.

Whom do you like best? I like them best.

poorlittleyaoyao

It’s unfortunate that MDZS isn’t mainstream enough to reference in casual offline conversation, because “this is what killed Nie Mingjue” is thee best possible way to describe an offensively grating piece of music and there is simply no normie equivalent.

mapsontheweb

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

largedad

impossiblepackage

I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.

bisquid

I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

The universe is infinite. So are the stars

bisquid

I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.

5c0l0p3ndr4

this is not a shot from a space telescope overlayed behind a woods, or anything. that’s not the sky as kepler or hubble or james webb see it. that’s the sky from a dark sky park in michigan. that’s the view you are missing out on from right here on earth. that’s the view that has been stolen from you.

mckitterick

I fell in love with the sky as a child growing up in western Minnesota, miles from a small town, near a massive lake and just downhill from an 18-hole golf course - the pure darkness broken only by a single bright light I could escape by hauling my telescope up that hill or into a nearby field

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

that’s what’s been taken from us all

cosmo-the-ethyrian

OH OKAY so actually im fully ugly crying snotty-sobbing about this. what

i-like-reblog-maps

this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you

(full map of ~75k is too much for me to load, but i got to 40k! very laggy, but worth it.)

myfootyrthroat

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

myfootyrthroat

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

official-torfmoor

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

myfootyrthroat

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

myfootyrthroat

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

bees-and-mice-and-frogs-and

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

myfootyrthroat

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

leebrontide

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

toreblogallthethings

Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality

scribeherself

people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.

scribeherself

Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼

kit-screams-into-the-void

statement statement

preserving-tiktok

taraljc

This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.

liminalbeauty

Thank you, adorable scientist, for making people's lives better.

punchspeedchunk

As an Australian, THIS WOMAN IS A FUCKING GODSEND.

weaselle

Californian (sup, fellow desert-havers) i've been using this since i saw it and it works so fucken good dude (i often have to put like 8 dogs in my car, so it's extra important my car isn't attempting to go super-nova when we get in)

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