Intolerant Left

a whole-ass queer adult, tabletop gaming enthusiast and creator. TERFS can fuck off (and that includes "gender critical" and other radfem/transmisogynists), as can alt-right/nazis/neonazis/nazi apologists, capitalism apologists, ableists, racists, misogynists - this place isn't for you. In a relationship with the wonderful @banshee-nightmare.

[spicyraeman]

Kai Leng is legit the worst antagonist in the whole mass effect series. Hes not even fun to hate hes just an annoying character with shit boss fights and more plot armor than the goddamn protagonist

[ace-and-ranty]

I gotta say, one of the greatest achievements of my 20s was that I learned (mostly) to differentiate between:

"I truly do not want to go" and

"I'm just feeling the Demand Avoidance, and I will like it once I get there."

[ace-and-ranty]

Well, goodness, this one resonated much more than I was expecting. I mean, I get it. My mind was also blown wide open when I found out "demand avoidance" was a thing that existed, and that I'm not the only weirdo in the world who suddenly wishes it wasn't her birthday after anxiously waiting for her birthday for days.

Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won't be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:

Previous experience. Really no way around it. Now that I hit thirty, I feel like I have done enough things to know, intellectually, from experience, what will feel nice if I overcome the avoidance, and what won't. For example, every time I go to the beach, I wake up early and would rather eat a tire than get off the bed. But I remember that every time I got up and went to the beach, I was glad I did it. So I just get up, feeling like shit, and get ready, feeling like shit, and I get to the beach and magic!! I feel great, I love the beach!! Sometimes you just gotta do it scared feeling kinda like shit.

Am I avoiding the thing or getting to the thing? I have a lot of demand avoidance around just, y'know, getting up, getting ready and going out the door. Universal human experience. If I notice that doing the actual thing (Swim in the pool!) sounds nice, but I'm avoiding having to rally myself to go do that (Fetch swimsuit! Sunscreen! Towel!), then I know it's demand avoidance and I should just fucking go.

Is the thing making me feel excited at all or just anxious? I have had previous occasions when I did the opposite; I convinced myself it was just demand avoidance when I really just. Hated the thing. And wanted to stop. If you feel a mix of excitement and dread, or excitement and anxiety, that might be demand avoidance. But if thinking of doing the thing just makes you feel actively anxious, then yeah. You don't want to do the thing.

Do the thing a little bit. Used often with dishes. I've seen this advice float around Tumblr a lot and it's correct. Commit to doing just a bit of the thing; a little bit of the thing; the smallest bit of the thing you can do. Getting started will make it clear right away if you don't want to do it (and in that case, you have permission to stop), or if you just having trouble getting started.

[rush-the-stars]

am always obsessed when someone says to a character “call off your dog” about another character.

[toolusingmammalgirl]

The Four Sacred Artistic Motives:

-what if this bad thing was good instead

-how about Make-Believe Land can have whatever I want

-would that be fucked up or what

-I think that shit's hot

[moofahdrome]

the most burnt out girl in the world would like to remind you that she's actually really lazy compared to the people around her and she could probably use some extra work to keep her honest

[elumish]

I just saw a post where one of the comments was a woman saying that they don't care about the POV or internal life of female characters in general, and I didn't want to reblog that post because I didn't want to go after that specific person, but I did want to say:

If that is how you feel (regardless of what gender you are), if every time you read a female character (but only a female character) you think, ugh I don't care about them, they're so boring, female characters never have internal lives worth reading about, you need work on that.

I'm serious. Figure out what your hangup is, reevaluate how you're approaching stories, maybe get some therapy or talk to someone about it if you need to, and figure out how to get past your dismissal of female POVs as being worth reaing.

Because whatever problem you have with the internal lives or POVs of female characters, it's an issue you also have with women. It's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from real women that everything you find so dull or shallow or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters is fictionalized--and, it's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from male characters that everything you find so shallow or dull or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters isn't also present in those male characters in some very similar way.

And if your excuse is that men can't write women--read more things written by women. (Some men can write women well, but you should read things written by women anyway.)

Tl;dr: If you find yourself looking at every female character you read, or every Black character, or every disabled character, etc. and thinking that somehow none of them quite live up to the male/white/abled characters that you are used to reading, that's something you need to work on.

[animentality]

[postilionstruckbylightning]

People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).

[thelawfulchaotic]

I... I have coworkers who are from 26 to like. 56. we have work in common?? the work we all do?? together?? commonly? all of us, at all of our ages???

Also I don't care what I have in common. I can strike up a conversation over plenty of shit I don't have in common. That's how you exchange information on topics. Learn To Ask A Question And A Follow-Up Question.

[landofla]

do these people not talk to their family members? I mean my niece and nephew are some of the coolest people out there and they are 30 years younger than me. Do they have nothing in common with their parents or aunts and uncles? My community elders in the fiber community are awesome and I have learned so much from them. And regularly do social things together.

[darlingofdots]

ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.

[poorshadowspaintedqueens]

One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.

[darlingofdots]

I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).

It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.

[zizelle]

ilove homosexuals i  love bisexuals  i love trans !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yayy ayyayy ayy Weare all sooo ocool

[plum-soup]

your silence on fresh basil pesto is deafening.

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[partywithponies]

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

[sisifroggy]

I'm back after hoarding text posts like a little goblin while gathering screenshots from my Origins playthrough

Unhinged Text Posts: Alistair Theirin Edition

[byjove]

what the fuck dude that’s an evil thing for a mushroom to do

[aeoliantectrix]

yeah wait why is it when normal plants are poisonous they just give you heart failure or something but when mushrooms are poisonous they always gotta be some awful SoulsBourne type boss shit

like the one that liquefies your organs inside you

[byjove]

if I remember correctly, there is a mushroom that may be responsible for ALS clusters and another mushroom that can cause you to be depressed for up to 6 months. why do mycotoxins behave like magical curses?

[earhartsease]

do you even have to ask

[serenityquest]

[nessa007]

Ted Lasso + The Wizard of Oz

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge!

X

[the-twitchy-life]

I LOVE THIS GUY.

All those "spend just 35 minutes doing a bunch of really hard exercises and you'll feel great forever!" videos are really discouraging. I usually end up doing like, 2 minutes of some of his while waiting for my shower to heat up, and ykw?

That's 2 minutes more than I would have done otherwise.

[nonbinary-octopus]

oh hey I have a thing like that last one that I like to do sometimes, but I do it lying down in bed. it's a very satisfying pop/shift in my hips/lower back, but doesn't always work. maybe I will try his version and see if it is more effective for me

[eisenkrahe]

[demilypyro]

People act like I'm just being an asshole but man the whole reason I'm so anal about hating gambling mechanics is because I've been down that road and lost a ton of money on games I just stopped playing eventually anyway and it SUCKS and the more you learn about dark pattern design the more you realize that this entire corner of the game industry is just fully focused on screwing vulnerable people out of their money and it's just evil, plain and simple. What do you want from me?? To promote this shit like every other streamer after knowing all that??? I will NOT be complicit in this shit. I'm gonna talk about how bad it is!!! You think that makes me an asshole?????

[esoteric-merit]

one of my friends is a mobile game designer who's worked for big companies before.

One of the things she's told me she's proud of before, was a time when one of the (older) users of the game she was designing discussed her strategy of drinking extra water to wake up early enough to claim her dailies, and how proud she was that she made a game people liked that much.

Even looking her in the eye and asking "getting 60 year olds to disrupt their sleep schedule by pissing themselves makes you proud?" did not get her to hear herself talk.

I think a lot of people don't comprehend the evil of dark patterns. They handwave it all away by "it's personal decisions people make", even while they see the patterns of behaviour they create on the populace. They read falling into those patterns as focus and grindset, if anything. And for a good number of people, pay-to-win is a *positive* thing.

I think if I were tasked with coming up with a way to make a populace depressed, unhealthy, and insomniac, even without getting them to pay me, I'd be heading towards video games stuffed with dark patterns. And such a video game would also produce profit for me, as it happens.

[demilypyro]

I studied game design and nothing disillusioned me like this one time I did an internship at a mobile game company because it was so obvious that the team only cared about how to screw as many people out of their money as possible. The only feedback I ever got for my system designs was "okay but how can we make it more addictive?" or "how can we get them to spend?" and shit like that. Nobody there cared about the game being fun. In their minds, a "good" game was a profitable and addictive one. I haven't been able to see these games the same way ever since. It was one of the big reasons I quit being a game designer. Dark pattern design doesn't happen by accident. They know what they're doing. They want to fuck you over.

[existennialmemes]

Knowingly hijacking someone's reward pathways to weaponize them for profit is unambiguously bad. They are manipulating people on purpose with the sole intent of triggering maladaptive & addictive behaviors. They want you to financially harm yourself to enrich them instead. Being a Hater™ is the obvious moral position here.