claimant.

My bones never hardened, but my spirit did. Starling. 1994. Poetry obsessed.

[bitchvirgo]

y’all i got obsessive, ingenious, familiar lmao

[probuccalfat]

every time a young gay person quits smoking or makes the decision that they want to quit, the sun shines on us all with the promise of happiness and beauty.

[dogpuppy]

[lady-of-vitreous-sight]

As a "social group", I think there could be a lot of utility in promoting the value in minor self care tasks more. Not in the stuff that people have built up in their heads as "the thing i can't do" but the really, really little things.

The stuff with low activation cost but that isn't very rewarded so sometimes it's hard to bring yourself to do it.

Like. Bringing one dish to the sink, washing your hands, putting a dish in the dishwasher, cleaning part of the counter, texting a friend you've talked to recently, going outside, hugging someone nearby, refilling your water glass, laying down and closing your eyes for a few minutes, etc.

New ask game: What's one really small thing you did recently to make shit better?

[tlirsgender]

My most socially disabling Too Woke thing is noticing how men won't get the fuck out of your way. Like it doesn't even occur to them that they can move out of your fucking way. I need to start letting them just walk directly into me and pushing their chairs so I can quite literally sit at the table etc. This isn't a metaphor I had that second one happen the other day

[tlirsgender]

I will be at the function where everyone's sitting in a circle and there will be a man sitting directly in front of me for no fucking reason so I'm literally physically kind of pushed off to the side. And I'm expected to not start killing them about it

[rocketbirdie]

and ever since then

[inktho]

READY, STEADY,

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[pensivegladiola]

Don’t make me point to the Omar Sakar poem

[samglyph]

Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama // Wisdom to Heal the Earth by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

at this point i think that, in terms of sci-fi settings, Space Monarchies are kind of boring and overdone. like yes i understand the shock value of like “oh woah that civ has such a brutal and antiquated form of government! even though they have spoce ship!!” but if you’re writing anything longer than like a novella or short story its kind of cheap. like its too easy. its lowest common denominator politics.

like if you want to explore topics like war, racism, genocide, wealth inequality, labor rights, colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, et cetera, you could actually write about literally any of those things in the context of democratic governments, and the government could be for or against any of those things. you could also create any number of strange, idiosyncratic forms of governance.

even monarchies have the potential to be much more interesting than they generally are. like okay “the gleebazoid monarchy has an unbroken chain of succession that stretches back 20,000 years” is generally going to be quite boring as a setting detail. also makes little sense. monarchies are just ruled by the most powerful aristocratic group. if the gleebazoids have 20,000 years of monarchies it should look a lot more like the history of china, where individual dynasties lasted like a few hundred years at most. and some of those dynasties lasted, like, 5 years.

but yeah also “the gleebazoid monarchy was founded by its current ruler who took power in a coup d’etat 5 years ago and nobody in the gleebazoid kingdom is really used to having a monarch quite yet, also the republican gleebazoid government-in-exile still exists and controls like 30% of planet gleebazoid” is much more interesting to me.

on that note whats with all the sci fi settings where every planet has a unified government and language? like yeah i know one of the common sci fi conceits is that they just use “planet” as a stand-in for “country” but that makes no sense to me. like i really think that in a sci fi setting if there is any planet that has a unified world government that should be an outlier not the norm. even if you’re using “planet” as a stand-in for “country,” where the fuck are your minority demographic groups?

btw this last point is extra jarring if they acknowledge that humans still have distinct cultures and languages on earth while all alien species are monocultural monolingual monoliths. like im supposed to accept that earth still has 7,000 languages but the gleebazoids speak ONE language and have ONE set of cultural norms and traditions? on their whole planet? which has a population of 10 billion? it always takes me out of the story. maybe it would be an interesting plot point if it turned out the gleebazoids USED to have 7,000 beautiful and distinct languages and cultures but are on the tail end of like a 500 year process of cultural genocide on the subaltern peoples of planet gleebazoid. you could even point towards the fact that linguistic and cultural development are constant things that you can never fully get rid of and the gleebazoid extra-planetary colonies and space stations are already developing their own dialects and languages.

i wish sci fi authors cared a little more about cultural nuances that make a world feel alive as opposed to like inventing a new type of FTL drive.

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

i think part of the problem is lack of political imagination. perhaps due to, like, lack of knowledge of history or something.

if you can’t conceive of a democratic government doing everything totally legally and by-the-book and still building the death star and blowing up Alderaan then you need to read more history. maybe even read, like, the news. crazy idea i know

[gettingintoknives]

does being misogynistic help you pass as a man better... probably yes in some situations... however and this should be obvious, you still shouldn't do that. hope this helps.

[gettingintoknives]

you might also pass better in some situations if you don’t wash your hands after you piss but this is obviously fucking stupid

[brighthounds]

With the click, the trainer says, "You've done enough good behavior for the moment; now it's my turn to do some good behavior" (e.g., playing with or feeding or releasing you). [...] Alex's definition of clicker training also conveys the two-way nature of the process and the deep and resonating joy that clicker trainers experience. [...] This reciprocal exchange of reinforcement between learner and teacher -- the animal behaving in a way that pleases the trainer, followed by the trainer behaving in a way that pleases the animal, over and over -- is the very definition of a cooperative partnership. The rewards flow in both directions, with each partner taking turns behaving in desirable ways.

-- Plenty in Life Is Free, Kathy Sdao

[tsumugiology]

random question:

what was your first exposure to prev and what made you decide to follow them?

[mortalityplays]

something you learn fast and necessarily when you get into the habit of writing is that you are riddled with blind assumptions, prejudices, unpractised rhetoric and all kinds of unchallenged cicada shell thoughts that were left stuck to your mode of being when bad ideas fled you. most people get to move through the world behind a kind of modesty veil that divides their internal thoughts from their external observations, but you have to take that off when you write. you have to suddenly present the whole world to itself nakedly, without the kindness of someone who can stop you mid-sentence and say "hold on, I know you, you can't possibly mean that". people are often scared to show their work to an editor in case the editor points out what they look like without their modesty veil, but god, christ, hell and heaven, you have to be more afraid of what the whole world of strangers will see if you don't let someone pick the cicada shells off you first.

[mortalityplays]

op is wordy, bloated, stylistically self-conscious. suggest condensing: "an editor is a guy who eats bugs"

[deletingmyself]

(by Seele An)| Hangzhou, China

[claimant]

i really do doubt my migraine diagnosis every time people talk about how they're impossible to push past like i haven't involuntarily cried through them at work without calling out. but they're always like "it makes you a shell of yourself you can barely breathe with them" and like. yeah. but. work keeps being there? and then i'm right back at pressing x to doubt. #justpaintolerancethings

[romehbo]

a misogynistic society is so threatened by the concept of trans women - women that "had the opportunity" to be privileged men and chose not to - that they start making up privileges women have in order to explain why trans women exist. going into womens restrooms isnt a privilege, playing womens sports isnt a privilege, yet they present them as such to try and explain why trans women are women for nefarious reasons. a misogynistic society will never understand that trans women have no ulterior motive for being women