one of the biggest things I can advocate for (in academia, but also just in life) is to build credibility with yourself. Itās easy to fall into the habit of thinking of yourself as someone who does things last minute or who struggles to start tasks. people will tell you that you just need to build different habits, but I know for me at least the idea of āhabitā is sort of abstract and dehumanizing. Credibility is more like āIāve done this before, so I know I can do it, and more importantly I trust myself to do itā. you set an assignment goal for the day and you meet it, and then you feel stronger setting one the next day. You establish a relationship with yourself thatās built on confidence and trust. That in turn starts to erode the barrier of insecurity and perfectionism and makes it easier to start and finish tasks. reframing the narrative as a process of building credibility makes it easier to celebrate each step and recognize how strong your relationship with yourself can become
oh the chronology of my college career. yeah the two music classes two botany classes calculus and a writing intensive course Jesus. Whyād I fucking do that
hi so what if I was a full time enrolled student taking classes at two institutions and had a 30 minute commute and worked for the student government at one campus but also worked a part time job at another campus and also had an arts fellowship but also worked the family farm and took care of my parents and made time for my homework and pets and plants and boyfriend. what then.
The reason it's bad to let an AI write your cover letter for you isn't because it means you're 'lazy' or because the cover letter is a pure expression of the human soul or any bollocks like that it's because you are responsible for the things you say in that cover letter. If those things turn out to be false the AI isn't the one who will end up being fired for it.
As someone who has written hundreds of cover letters, let me let you in on the secrets for how to do it. Writing a cover letter is embarassing, but it's not as hard as it seems. The most important thing to note is that people are purporting to hire you based on your qualifications, not your beautiful prose. A letter is just supposed to draw attention to ways in which you are qualified that your resume might not. And that's the way in which it should be specific to the facts about you and the job in question, and thus not something an AI can be trusted with.
Here's a guide on how to write one. Here's another. Here's one for academia specifically (and if people have more questions about that, I can answer them too - I've read lots of these).
You're probably reaching for AI here because you don't know what to say. These articles will help you figure out what to say. The AI cannot do that, because the AI does not know you. The AI has been trained on a billion cover letters, and most of them will be bad. A good cover letter can't make up for a lack of qualification, but it can make your qualifications more obvious than your resume may show.
Yāknow what? Fuck you. *Plays an acoustic guitar version of your leitmotif to show you still have tenderness and care in your heart, and compassion for others*
No, piss off! *plays your leitmotif with immense reverb and a toned-down synth sound to show that nostalgia can also be about loss of what never truly was, a reflection of a reflection and a false memory of a false memory*
ok, boomer. *plays your leitmotif using discordant synth bass to display your spiral into villainy after you discover that your memories were a fabricated illusion that were created just to keep you complacent, and how that information is destroying you*
How many times do I have to teach you this lesson, old man? *plays your leitmotif in harmony with my own, intensity of both changing as our climactic battleās balance shifts back and forth, eventually leaving only one with long, low pauses to musically represent our mutual struggle to overtake the other, yet not being able to exist in full without them.*
oh, youāre going to regret that! *plays your leitmotif on piano in short, soft notes to show that youāre being worn down, and that your energy is at a low, but with a steadily rising bassline that foreshadows your upcoming second form*
U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.
okay so as much as this post punches above weight on its own i need people to know exactly how many industries in the us are using prison labor, because it is many more than you think:
about 2/3s of prisoners in the united states work and most of those people make nothing for their work. if they make any money it's averaging 52 cents (that's $0.52) per hour and most of the money gets withheld for "room and board, taxes, and court cost" by the prison. some states, including alabama, arkansas, florida, georgia, mississippi, south carolina, and texas, pay nothing. here is a 150 page ACLU report on this that was published in 2022. if you refuse to work you might be sent to solitary or have your parole chances destroyed. there are no labor protections. people get killed. incarcerated people produce billions of dollars a year and almost never get paid.
there are basically three forms of prison labor. the first is labor inside of prisons to keep the prisons running. which means that if they let people out? their admin goes down. which is a reason to not let people out. the second is work release, providing inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations, like poultry plants, cattle and dairy farms, and other agricultural services. (this includes firefighting. incarcerated people are saving your fucking lives for less than five bucks a day.) the third is production of goods for external sale, including farm work, manufacturing, call center, distribution services, and others. and yes, before you ask, this includes immigration detention, which may i remind everyone is made up of civil detainees; immigration violations are not crimes but civil violations and people are trapped and exploited in private prisons and then utilized for profit.
this is legal because of the thirteenth amendment to to the US constitution, which states (and this is a direct quote), that "neither "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states[.]"
colorado banned prison labor five years ago but prisoners say it's still going on as of november 2023. there are other state initiatives trying to get prison labor banned, but when the government literally relies on incarcerated people to keep running, it's an uphill fuckin road.
companies which use prison labor or sell products made by prison labor include:
The problem and practice is so pervasive it is honestly really difficult to boycott and divest from products produced by prison labor. Sometimes we can search and find out if a company uses prison labor, sometimes it just feels unknowable. Sometimes those companies are your only option for internet service.
Companies also love to market a product as "made in America" without clarifying it was made by prison labor. If something says it was made in America but gives zero further details, be very wary of it. Shit that is marketed towards a conservative audience absolutely loves to do this especially.
I'm going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is... really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.
If you ask most English-speaking people (or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it's a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That's certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since... idk elementary school when I learned that, I've learned that that's actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of... dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?
Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!
First of all, Japanese doesn't have syllables! There's a few different names for what phonetic units actually make up the language- In Japanese, they're called "On" (é³), which translates to "sound", although English-language linguists often call it a "mora" (Ī¼), which (quoting from Wikipedia here) "is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable." (x) "Oh" is one syllable, and also one mora, whereas "Oi" has one syllable, but two moras. "Ba" has one mora, "Baa" has two moras, etc. In English, we would say that a haiku is made up of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables in them, 17 syllables total. In Japanese, that would be 17 sounds.
For an example of the difference, the word "haiku", in English, has 2 syllables (hai-ku), but in Japanese, ćÆćć has 3 sounds (ha-i-ku). "Christmas" has 2 syllables, but in Japanese, "ćÆćŖć¹ćć¹" (ku-ri-su-ma-su) is 5 sounds! that's a while line on its own! Sometimes the syllables are the same as the sounds ("sushi" is two syllables, and ćć is two sounds), but sometimes they're very different.
In addition, words in Japanese are frequently longer than their English equivalents. For example, the word "cuckoo" in Japanese is "ć»ćØćØćć" (hototogisu).
Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at how I can use an English to Japanese dictionary (thank you, my mother is proud), but what does any of this matter? So two languages are different. How does that impact our understanding of haiku?
Well, if you think about the fact that Japanese words are frequently longer than English words, AND that Japanese counts sounds and not syllables, you can see how, "based purely on a 17-syllable counting method, a poet writing in English could easily slip in enough words for two haiku in Japaneseā (quote from Grit, Grace, and Gold: Haiku Celebrating the Sports of Summer by Kit Pancoast Nagamura). If you're writing a poem using 17 English syllables, you are writing significantly more content than is in an authentic Japanese haiku.
(Also not all Japanese haiku are 17 sounds at all. It's really more of a guideline.)
Focusing on the 5-7-5 form leads to ignoring other strategies/common conventions of haiku, which personally, I think are more interesting! Two of the big ones are kigo, a season word, and kireji, a cutting word.
Kigo are words/phrases/images associated with a particular season, like snow for winter, or cherry blossoms for spring. In Japan, they actually publish reference books of kigo called saijiki, which is basically like a dictionary or almanac of kigo, describing the meaning, providing a list of related words, and some haiku that use that kigo. Using a a particular kigo both grounds the haiku in a particular time, but also alludes to other haiku that have used the same one.
Kireji is a thing that doesn't easily translate to English, but it's almost like a spoken piece of punctuation, separating the haiku into two parts/images that resonate with and add depth to each other. Some examples of kireji would be "ya", "keri", and "kana." Here's kireji in action in one of the most famous haiku:
å¤ę± ććčé£ć³č¾¼ććę°“ć®é³
(Furu ike yaćkawazu tobikomućmizu no oto)
(The old pond ā
A frog jumps in
The sound of the water.)
You can see the kireji at the end of the first line- å¤ę± ć literally translates to "old pond ya". The "ya" doesn't have linguistic meaning, but it denotes the separation between the two focuses of the haiku. First, we are picturing a pond. It's old, mature. The water is still. And then there's a frog! It's spring and he's fresh and new to the world! He jumps into the pond and goes "splash"! Wowie! When I say "cutting word", instead of say, a knife cutting, I like to imagine a film cut. The camera shows the pond, and then it cuts to the frog who jumps in.
English doesn't really have a version of this, at least not one that's spoken, but in English language haiku, people will frequently use a dash or an ellipses to fill the same role.
Format aside, there are also some conventions of the actual content, too. They frequently focus on nature, and are generally use direct language without metaphor. They use concrete images without judgement or analysis, inviting the reader to step into their shoes and imagine how they'd feel in the situation. It's not about describing how you feel, so much as it's about describing what made you feel.
Now, let's put it all together, looking at a haiku written Yosa Buson around 1760 (translated by Harold G. Henderson)
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel
We've got our kigo with "the piercing chill." We read that, and we imagine it's probably winter. It's cold, and the kind of cold wind that cuts through you. There's our kireji- this translation uses a colon to differentiate our two images: the piercing chill, and the poet stepping on his dead wife's comb. There's no descriptions of what the poet is feeling, but you can imagine stepping into his shoes. You can imagine the pain he's experiencing in that moment on your own.
"But tumblr user corvidcall!" I hear you say, "All the examples you've used so far are Japanese haiku that have been translated! Are you implying that it's impossible for a good haiku to be written in English?" NO!!!!! I love English haiku! Here's a good example, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:
When you read this one, can you imagine being in the poet's place? Do you feel the surprise as the tide comes in? Do you feel the summer-ness of the moment? Haiku are about describing things with the senses, and how you take in the world around you. In a way, it's like the poet is only setting a scene, which you inhabit and fill with meaning based on your own experiences. You and I are imagining different beaches, different waves, different people that make up the "our" it mentioned.
"Do I HAVE to include all these things when I write haiku? If I include all these things, does that mean my haiku will be good?" I mean, I don't know. What colors make up a good painting? What scenes make up a good play? It's a creative medium, and nobody can really tell you you can't experiment with form. Certainly not me! But I think it's important to know what the conventions of the form are, so you can appreciate good examples of it, and so you can know what you're actually experimenting with. And I mean... I'm not the poetry cops. But if you're not interested in engaging with the actual conventions and limitations of the form, then why are you even using that form?
I'll leave you with one more English language haiku, which is probably my favorite haiku ever. It was written by Tom Bierovic, and won first place at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards
a year at most . . .
we pretend to watch
the hummingbirds
Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)
Further reading:
Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka
Haiku: A Whole Lot More Than 5-7-5 by Jack
How to Write a Bad Haiku by KrisL
Haiku Are Not a Joke: A Plea from a Poet Who Has Had It Up to Here by Sandra Simpson
Haiku Checklist by Katherine Raine
If you (like me) want 3rd party candidates to be an actual viable option in USA elections so you no longer have to vote for Democrats OR Republicans as your first and only choice, then what we need is Ranked Choice Voting. In order for that to happen, we as voters have to do two things:
Vote Democrat this fall, because Republicans fucking hate Ranked Choice Voting, and in several Republican-run states they have outlawed it. So if you want it, you have to keep Democrats in power in your state.
Lobby for and then vote for Ranked-choice voting in your state!Many American states have already adopted Ranked Choice voting and several more are set to do so in 2024. The ball is literally already rolling on this, we just need YOU to help it along.
In addition to Ranked Choice Voting we also need redistricting reform, ideally a system that creates a policy "ratchet" that only allows districts to be redrawn to be more representative than they currently are, and forces a redrawing event whenever census data forces them out of alignment. It sounds a little weird, but good redistricting policy will help rid our system of radicals from both sides and drive us towards representative consensus policies.
A policy ratchet would work like this: you come up with two or three metrics. Let's say you choose
Equal population (measured by say, variance of population)
Convexity (measured with an agreed-to definition and resolution)
Efficiency Gap / Wasted Votes
Instead of mandating that each of these numbers meet a specific numeric threshold -- which will result in lawmakers perpetually iterating until they find a map that juuuuust passes the test -- you specify that each map must
Substantially (say, by 5%) improve one metric
Leave the other two metrics no worse than the previous redistricting, with a forgiveable slack of, say, 0.5% decrease.
This is easy to justify. The Founders wanted redistricting to occur to keep our districts representative of the population. So you only allow redistricting when it makes things more representative. Because you only ever allow changes to move in one direction, and you force change when the census causes things to deterioriate, you get a set of districts that are strongly representative.
This eliminates the idea of "safe" districts where a radical candidate from the safe party runs against their party's moderate incumbent from the fringe; since you're always vulnerable to a consensus-builder from the center, radicals are largely evolved out of the process.
(If you are thinking "wait, we can't compromise with Republicans!" remember: those Republicans will fucking disappear in half a generation if this passes. The people who run for office under the GOP will be people with policies that have a chance of winning your vote. Because if they don't, the Democrats and Socialists and Moderates and Greens will trounce them, over and over, until they fucking learn. Likewise the dirtbag far-left whose policies are ideologically pure and completely unworkable.)
Any sentence can be a full paragraph long if u try hard and believe in yourself
Got so caught up in dialogue now idk what anyone is doing w their hands
Got so caught up in an action scene now no one has spoken for 10 pages
Abuse of one metaphor you thought was really good and now canāt stop using
WIPs Georg, who has over 1 million unfinished WIPs, is an outlier adn should n
It really WAS supposed to be a one shot this time (now a 200k word epic)
Abuse of a specific word/descriptor you just happen to like
No beta readers we post our barely edited drafts at 2am like MEN
OP how could you forget ___? (Tags)
All of these exactly 100% equally/show results/Iām bald
Voting ended onMay 30, 2024
Disclaimer these are just a small sampling of some possible writer traits Iāve noticed either in myself or in fics I read. Also consider a rb for sample size !
any time I make a post pointing out that there is no excuse to work for defense contractors I get at least 3 anons like š¤āļø well actually, I am technically one step removed from contributing to the development of the F35 fighter jet
you can see the NIMBY brains melting when First Nations won't fit into their back-to-the-land noble-savage stereotypes
Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And thereās been an extra edge to their critiques thatās gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. Thereās also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitksan reporter Angela Sterritt, āWhen youāre building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, thereās a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.āĀ
The subtext is as unmissable as a skyscraper: Indigenous culture and urban lifeālet alone urban developmentādonāt mix. That response isnāt confined to SenĢĆ”įøµw, either. On Vancouverās west side, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nationsāthrough a joint partnership called MST Development Corp.āare planning a 12-tower development called the Heather Lands. In 2022, city councillor Colleen Hardwick said of that project, āHow do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?ā (Hardwick, it goes without saying, is not Indigenous.) MST is also planning an even bigger development, called IyĢĆ”lmexw in the Squamish language and ŹÉyĢalmÉxŹ·Ā in Halkomelem. Better known as Jericho Lands, it will include 13,000 new homes on a 90-acre site. At a city council meeting this January, a stream of non-Indigenous residents turned up to oppose it. One woman speculated that the late Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George would be outraged at the āmonstrous development on sacred land.āĀ
