"Life needs things to live"

sapphic ace | late 20s | disaster human

[fluffyblue-multifandommess]

oh my GODS

[brittlepredatordemon]

Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

wattpad really gave ao3 a huge free promo with their new policy update that makes things even worse for their users. so to all the people who are now moving to ao3 due to this…

welcome! here are what you need to know about ao3 and how it’s the complete opposite of wattpad

trigger warning for the mention of contents that are allowed on ao3 that can be triggering to some.

ao3 is a non-profit organization. it’s run by fans (people like you and me), for fans.

fans donate to the site on their own free will to keep the site up and running smoothly.

ao3 is not a social media. it is an archive.

ao3 doesn’t have ads. it doesn’t have algorithms. it doesn’t have “going viral.”

everything is endlessly free on ao3. there is no “ao3 premium.” you will never see a single ad on ao3, and you can download as many fics as you want to read offline for free.

ao3 doesn’t have an app. and ao3 doesn’t need an app. any “ao3 apps” you see are third-party apps and are not affiliated with ao3, so be careful giving these shady apps your login infos or other personal information.

ao3 was built with the main purpose to 1.) be completely against censorship and 2.) host fics that are banned on other platforms like wattpad.

the reason ao3 doesn’t have an app is because for it to have its own app, appstore and google play store will have to approve it first. and due to the contents ao3 allow, chances are that it won’t get approved. which is actually a good thing. it doesn’t need an app. it works more than fine without an app.

on ao3, every single thing is allowed as long as it is fanfic or fan work (original works, fan art and video edits count as fan works, but if you want to post a video edits on ao3, you will have to post it elsewhere and then link it back to ao3 — ao3 cannot host video edits on its platform due to copyright issues)

by every single thing that is fanfic, I mean every single thing:

the filthiest smut without plot that is written purely for sexual pleasure is allowed. it has its own canonical tag called “plot what plot, porn without plot.”

fics that focus on non-consensual sexual intercourse are allowed, doesn’t matter if the fics glorify or romanticize the act, doesn’t matter if they’re written as kinks. they have their own canonical tag called “rape/non-con.”

fics about characters who are minors are allowed, even if they’re portrayed in a sexual manner, even if they’re non-consensual sexual intercourse. even if the minor characters are romantically and/or sexually involved with characters who are adults. even if they fics are written in ways that glorify and/or romanticize the thing. they have their own canonical tag called “underage sex.”

fics about incest are allowed. doesn’t matter if they glorify or romanticize the relationship. they have their own canonically tag called “incest.” fun fact: the first ever fic that was posted on ao3 was a fic about an incest ship from supernatural.

fics about self-harm and suicide are allowed. doesn’t matter if they glorify or romanticize the act. they have their own canonical tags called “self-harm” and “suicide” also “suicidal ideation”, “suicide attempt”, “implied/referenced suicide”, etc.

fics about violence and gore are allowed, even if they were written for the sake of shock value. they have their own canonical tag called “violence”, “blood and gore”, “blood and injuries”, etc.

rpf is also allowed. doesn’t matter if the content of the fics are dark and taboo. they’re treated the same way as any other fics.

every single dark and taboo fic you can think of is allowed. and it has its own canonical tag. because it is the main reason why ao3 was created in the first place.

“but what do I do if I don’t wanna see fics about xyz?” you can filter out any specific tag, character and/or pairing you want.

“what do I do if I wanna find fics about xyz?” you can search for any specific tag, character and/or pairing you want.

a lot of ao3 users rely on tags to search for specific tags, pairings, characters they want. they also rely on tags to filter out and exclude specific tags, pairings, and characters that they don’t want to see.

ao3’s tagging system is by far the most efficient one I’ve ever seen.

on ao3, our main principles are “don’t like don’t read” — which means YOU have a responsibility to curate your own internet experience. yes, ao3 allows all kind of messed up fics, but they also allow you the ability to NOT see anything you don’t want to see, by filtering out specific fics, pairings and/or characters.

no. you cannot harass authors who write about things that disgust you. you can and will be reported for harassment, and ao3 takes harassment very seriously. they will not take your side. because fucked up fics are allowed on ao3—fucked up fics are the main reason ao3 was created—whereas harassment is a direct violation of their terms of service.

ao3 is a house of the freaks and the perverts (affectionate). you ARE in the house of the freaks and the perverts. so don’t think about harassing or being rude to the freaks and the perverts who built this anti-censorship house and are kind enough to let you in.

ao3 is proship, profic, and anti-censorship.

any writer can write whatever they want, however they want. the only etiquette is that you tag your stuff properly and accurately

mistagging for visibility is heavily frowned upon here, and it won’t get your works more views. people will either block or report you if you deliberately mistag things with the purpose of getting your fic more views. as I’ve said before, ao3 is an archive. it’s not a social media. it doesn’t have algorithms or going viral.

if you come across a fic that has the tag “creator chose not to use archive warnings” it means the fic may or may not contain topics that can be triggering, but the author won’t tell you what these topics are, or if there are any at all. so proceed at your own risk.

that said, because ao3 is a non-profit site that hosts millions of works about others’ copyrighted characters, you CANNOT link a monetization platform anywhere on ao3, you CANNOT mention any donation, commission—or anything that involves money—anywhere on ao3. no, you cannot imply donation, commission, or anything that involves money either. that is against their terms of service.

and because ao3 is a place for fanworks, the “work section” of your post has to actually be fanwork (fanfic, original work, fan art, link to a video edit count as fanwork). anything that isn’t fanwork is not allowed.

you cannot post something on ao3 that is not fanwork. so no political statement, no call-out post, no “I’m looking for fics about xyz”.

ao3 is anti censorship as long as what your post is actually fanwork and as long as you don’t violate their terms of service that I’ve mentioned above.

ao3 has their own team of lawyers to protect them, their users, and every fanwork that is posted on their platform.

last but not least, don’t write directly onto ao3. write and store your works elsewhere before copy and paste them onto ao3 once they’re ready to post!! because ao3 does NOT autosave drafts for you, you risk losing everything you’ve typed if there’s a glitch, if the site crashes or if your device unexpectedly shuts down for whatever reason.

that’s all for now. have fun and happy writing/reading!

[fluffyblue-multifandommess]

Here are some links that may be useful to understanding how to use ao3, and its policies

Helpful Information for New Users

Content Policy

Terms of Service

Terms of Service FAQ

I also recommend looking up "AO3 TOS spotlight series" - that's a series of posts they made to help users better understand various parts of the TOS, such as the Rating & Warning policies, or the non-Fanwork policies (and many more.)

One important thing to understand is that ao3 is not the lawless lands of social media. Because it is not a social media - it is an archive.

And the archive is very on top of making sure their TOS are respected, and tho it may take them a few days to get to a report, they WILL read user reports and respond appropriately. If you link your ko-fi on your fic, or make a "help me find this fic" post, someone will report you and the archive will take action. (Usually a simple warning + request to remove it, to start.)

[wertfi-penguin]

Maybe the most damming thing about Nolans odyssey is i haven’t seen a single gifset from it

[geekyhistoriansunite]

[ismenes]

you know those studies showing that cursing helps with pain tolerance or whatever. that’s how i feel about making my weird little noises to get through my basic daily activities. sometimes you just have to go hggblaaaah for a minute so you can find the strength within yourself to get up or wash the dishes or send an email. mmmnneh. urgh. the torments are unending but you can always make some little sounds about it.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

[deramin2]

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

The Klamath River Runs Free

[supreme-leader-stoat]

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

[vulturevanity]

I think we need to kill the sentiment that people lose their right to personhood once they do something bad enough

[vulturevanity]

I don't know who needs to hear this but you need to stop dehumanising people even if those people are "abusers" or "creeps" because you need to understand that you are not immune to doing something equally as bad

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

By emotionally classifying people who have done heinous things as subhuman filth incapable of thinking and feeling and acting just like you and me, and by using that emotional dehumanization as a reason to deny those people any compassion or support on a systemic level, you risk becoming blind to abuse/violence perpetrated by someone close to you or even yourself. Because if "abusers don't deserve rights", then you won't ever want to admit or accept that you or a loved one is perpetrating abuse, and that makes stopping the abuse or preventing further abuse much harder. This is how you end up excuaing abusive behaviour on the grounds that, since you don't see someone as a disgusting subhuman pile of garbage therefore they can't possibly be An Abuser, Trademark

[vulturevanity]

And here'a the even harder pill to swallow: since the world isn't split into "abusers" and "good people", in the same way you or someone you love can inflict abuse/violence on others, the people who HAVE inflicted abuse/violence on others can, in fact, change and become better people

There is no bottomless chasm of moral uncleanliness that someone can run off and fall into and get stuck in forever. People can do better. Yes, even those people. You HAVE to accept this. Otherwise not only is there no motivation for anyone to try and do better (which is when people become stuck in a cycle of violence and abuse they don't want to escape), but your idea of a perfect justice system doesn't look any different from Literal Christian Hell. And I HOPE you understand that Literal Christian Hell is, to put it very lightly, not a good justice system.

[trickedsparrow]

Unchecked and fear-driven dehumanization is the brick foundation for fascism.

[lichfucker]

y'all are so lucky I decided to just block this motherfucker instead of going off at 4:30 am because people are misusing alt text again

[lichfucker]

alt text is not the place for paratextual jokes. alt text is not the place for soliloquies and asides and confessions. alt text is not the place for secret tangential conversations between author and reader. alt text is not the place for easter eggs. alt text is not the place for paragraph-long existential rambles that include lines like "did you come to the transcript looking for answers? I don't have any answers" and "I've lost the thread of what's happening in [the image I'm supposed to be describing]."

alt text is an accessibility tool. use it like one.

[plain text: alt text is an accessibility tool. use it like one.]

[gingersnapwolves]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[kaapstadmk]

How steep and how rapid. It's wild.

The only thing I can think of is that it might not have yet been in the public eye and the conservatives had not yet been radicalized.

It's kinda like abortions in the 70s. Most folks were trending in favor of easy access to safe abortions until the political-religious syncretism of the Moral Majority started doing their thing - and this was before culturally Christian conservatives became the trained attack dogs they are today

[two-thirtyy]

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

[taykoutmccleod]

reblog if its friday and you made it

[trixic-frankenman-deactivated20]

[oreramar]

Every time I'm forced by circumstance to hand-sew something, I remember a fairytale I once read. There are lead-up shenanigans as the humble protagonist helps small animals and meets the princess and all that, but in the climax, the princess rigs a contest for her hand by setting her own task: sew her a dress in a single night.

The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.

The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.

I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.

I then ignore that piece of wisdom passed down through who knows how many years and proceed to cut the longest damn length of thread I can manage because I hate tying off beginning or ending knots and I will not subject myself to more of that even if it does mean more tangles along the way.

[polyhexian]

When one of the non augmented humans wants to get mb's attention without putting their feed device on they just say 'ping' out loud. And it works

[polyhexian]

It's on preservation and one of its presaux humans has a cold and is laying facedown on the floor in misery and just says out loud "SecUnit will you order me McDonald's" and when it arrives twenty minutes later just says "thank you" and then the microwave beeps

[hippity-hoppity-brigade]

#they learn several days later theybe been signed up for a seminar on The Pitfalls & Dangers Of Anthropomorphosizing And Normalizing The#Tools Of Surveillance Imposed By Corporation Rim Economic Dominance etc etc#ratthi like ok but the corporate spyware in this case literally IS my friend???#mb: two seminars for you ratthi

@silentwalrus1 your tags have been peer reviewed

[teaboot]

why do you take issue with radical feminism? keeping in mind that it’s distinct from terfism i mean

Patriarchal Misogyny: Men and Women are fundamentally different for reasons beyond one's control, and given this, each end of this strict binary are and should remain beholden to different and distinct presentations and expectations. The two are and should remain physically and socially distinct and defined despite natural expressions which indicate this is an artificial standard imposed by society. Obviously men are just naturally suited to being good leaders and women are naturally suited to be subservient caregivers. At the end of the day, it is every man's responsibility to be a good and fair caretaker to women. This is a traditional position passed down by my noble ancestors and is as such an honorable and chivalrous stance.

Progressive Feminism: Men and Women are two ends of a human spectrum but are not fundamentally different as people. We share the same potential, the same depth, the same capacity for good and evil and kindness and caring and cruelty, with broad enough overlap in physical structure and ability that dividing the two into a strict and disparate binary in all physical arenas makes very little sense. Obviously men and women are raised with seperate roles in our patriarchal society, and men at large are statistically more likely to be aggressive and women are statistically more likely to be the victim of violent and sexual crimes, but this does not reflect a strict rule that can be applied to each individual one encounters nor an immutable fact of character. At the end of the day, each individual has the capacity and responsibility to be a good and fair person. This is a movement which was developed by an oppressed class to obtain normal and unexceptional human rights already afforded to half of our existing society and is therefore a reasonable stance.

Radical Feminism: Men and Women are fundamentally different for reasons beyond one's control, and given this, each end of this strict binary are programmed to think and perform to different and distinct presentations and expectations. The two are physically and socially distinct and defined despite natural expressions which indicate this is an artificial standard imposed by society. Obviously men are wholesale trained and socialized from birth to oppress and prey on women, so it is safe to assume that and transgression is either malicious or an inescapable truth of man's nature. At the end of the day, men as a whole area statistically more likely than women to be physically or sexually violent, and so each individual man is individually more violent or sexually aggressive than any given woman. The definition for "man" and "woman" in this case includes Trans Men and is therefore a ~progressive~ stance.

Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism: Men and Women are fundamentally different for reasons beyond one's control, and given this, each end of this strict binary are programmed to think and perform to different and distinct presentations and expectations. The two are physically and socially distinct and defined despite natural expressions which indicate this is an artificial standard imposed by society. Obviously men are wholesale trained and socialized from birth to oppress and prey on women, so it is safe to assume that and transgression is either malicious or an inescapable truth of man's nature. At the end of the day, men as a whole area statistically more likely than women to be physically or sexually violent, and so each individual man is individually more violent or sexually aggressive than any given woman. The definition of "men" and "women" in this case is determined based on whether or not the individual in question ticks a certain number of boxes on the wild and varied list of primary and secondary physical expressions of human sexual dimorphism, and if you tick too many "man" boxes we add a +12 modifier to your "likelyhood of being a sexual predator in disguise" stat. I am a hero of womynkind

[queer-as-city-folk]

Even in a post-capitalist, post-consumerist world, you still need to produce goods, as a result of this, you need factories because it is more effective to have a few people making a lot of clothes in a factory than every woman being forced to sit down and spin wool all day.

[queer-as-city-folk]

The issue with factories is poor wages, unsafe working conditions and environmental impact, all of which can be fixed through things like regulatory bodies and unions, the issue is not the fact that goods are no longer all made at home

[queer-ragnelle]

Okay we've seen the upper limits of what an astronomical budget for filmmaking can do. Let's cap the budget at $500,000 for a few years and see what film teams forced to get creative and utilize unknown actors produce.

[sunderwight]

One of the things about becoming an adult and understanding where your parents were coming from a lot better, is that sometimes you can also follow that line of thinking back to where the miscommunications happened in the first place and do better with the younger people in your own life.

Like, it can be tempting to just leave it there. You understand now why Mom would get so exasperated with asking you to set the table, it's one little chore to help the whole dinner process run smoothly, especially at those hectic final stages of a family meal where everything is getting ready to serve.

Why didn't you understand this before? Well, because you didn't appreciate the work that was going into dinner. But don't stop there! Why didn't you appreciate it? Obviously you're not just the type to never empathize or get where other people are coming from, or else you wouldn't now be going, gee I understand Mom a lot better.

Stick with it and you might find that the problem was actually that Mom would just bark at you all in the chaos to get that table set, interrupting whatever other thing you were doing. She probably did that because she was distracted by all the other stuff she was doing, but from your own perspective you were just going about your own business and got this job thrust upon you with no warning and not even any politeness, making you sullen and resentful because no one likes to be treated that way.

From your adult perspective you might see where Mom was coming from and understand that she was just harried, but if you combine that with the child's perspective of not being communicated with like a person but instead barked at like a dog, you can go, hm, yes I see. I'll ask my kids to set the table before I'm at the chaotic final stages.

Then when your kids don't set the table because they have "plenty of time" and you end up hollering at them anyway, you can go, y'know, I told you to do this half an hour ago, and when they go yes but I got distracted, you can go this has happened the last twenty times what is going on with you, and they can go I don't know, and you can figure out that they have ADHD symptoms and get them a diagnosis and medication and then realize that actually you also have ADHD symptoms and so, in fact, did Mom, and wow that's an entire family curse you've just sort of unravelled! Good job!

[sturionic]

"Learn the fundamentals first" seems like really sound universal advice, and as a former classical musician, I can vouch for it. You will have a more solid foundation for increasing complexity if you put in the time to study in a structured way. If you don't, you'll have a lot of shit to fix later.

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

You have official permission from your local pretentious classical music snob: fuck the fundamentals. You can always unfuck them later (but only if you want to).