Thoroughly Modern Enough

[thevastnessof]

it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, events, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵

[thegeekgene]

Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT

[snarpreplies]

[kingscrown666]

[undeadentropy]

What a highly specific and devastating word

[heateron]

[carys-the-ninth]

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

[steorran]

not interested in getting involved in the rest of this discussion, for the most part, but to me this is a GREAT piece of advice that many people these days don't seem to be getting or understanding.

not everyone you meet or interact with is your friend, the requirements and expectations for respectful behaviour between friends is not the same as between strangers.

[nice-worm-deactivated20200906]

reblog the money pigeon for a financially stable future

[secondlina]

I reblog  the money pigeon because I love him.

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[gudamor]

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

[elancholia]

I think the concept of introversion may have harmed a lot of people, tbh

[elancholia]

It makes it easy to make an identity of being scared. And it's easy to hear a loosely medicalized idea like "I am just fundamentally de-energized by social interaction, unlike other people, who aren't", and then dig in. And really you're just scared.

[thedupshadove]

Opera plot: Local Noble realizes that his affections for Pretty Village Girl have a rival in the form of Honest Laborer. Having read enough romances to know that a girl asked to choose between a rich man and a poor man will always pick the poor man, whereas in a love triangle between two rich men it's anyone's game, he decides that his chief object must be to elevate his rival's wealth and status as quickly as possible. What the Compte de Genre-Savie over here forgot to account for, however, was the overwhelming power of the Pygmalion Effect, and now he has to deal with watching two people he's in love with develop ever-stronger feelings for each other. Eventually all of this resolves via...I don't know.

[queenofattolia]

#first of all: ''comte de genre-savie'' is PERFECT. just great. absolutely no notes.#I would love an opera with this exact plot. bonus points if the comte is genuinely genre savvy#he keeps bringing up opera tropes only for the other characters to look at him like he's insane.#the score is diagetic to him; when he points out reoccurring themes or transitions to minor keys#the other characters ask him what the hell he's talking about. the whole chorus gets together to sing about how#comte de genre-savie is going mad. the comte tries to sneak away and keeps getting pulled back in.#I wonder if you could even push it further - have it so that only the comte can speak or 'hear' spoken words;#all other characters communicate in recitativo secco or formally composed songs#then you can have scenes where the comte is speaking but the other character in the scene can't hear him.#this can be played for laughs (the comte tries to order something from a shopkeeper; the shopkeeper walks away as he's talking)#and for dramatic effect (the Honest Laborer is singing a heartfelt duet with the Pretty Village Girl#and neither of them can hear the comte saying 'I love you' in between their lines)#........I am into this actually. I had to convince myself that this wasn't just cyrano de bergerac but no. it isn't. I'm into it.#upon the stage (via @notbecauseofvictories)

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I read this one story once, no idea what it was called, where there was a girl in love with a poor man who also had a rich suitor. Her father was rich in his own right, and didn't have access to the men's finances but wanted his daughter to marry as rich as possible.

She pointed out to him that it's not always easy to tell how rich people are on a limited timescale; some wealthy people live frugally by choice, and a poor man can borrow a great deal of money to impress a girl's family if he feels like he's being investigated for such a thing. Tracking down their friends and interrogating their social circles would be a faux pas and very time consuming. The best way to tell, she suggested, would be to give both men a massive gift of money and see what changes it made to their lifestyle. Someone who already has lots of money will probably not think that much of the gift and not change much, whereas to a poor man (even one borrowing money to look temporarily better off) it would make a huge difference and the increased standard of living would be clear. That way, he gets a good idea of how wealthy the two suitors are and instead of looking nosy and money-obsessed, he looks incredibly kind and generous.

The father praised this ingenious strategy and gifted both men a huge sum of money. The daughter eloped with her true love the next day, now that they had enough money to start a new life together somewhere else.

[andremichaux]

Smells weird. I beg your pardon? Smells weird. What did you do? Abed, you don't ask someone a question like that. It's not dignified.

COMMUNITY | 3.04, "Remedial Chaos Theory"

Bonus:

[drill-teeth]

Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[mapsontheweb]

Frodo and Sam’s journey if it took place in the United States

[a-book-of-creatures]

Average trip to Florida

[whetstonefires]

we must take the ring to jacksonville

[lemonsharks]

[wazzappp]

Floridor

[your-url-is-problematic]

“THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO JACKSONVILLE!”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY”

[silima]

what a fucking relief to be the one kid in this family without a blue name

[faxcollector]

the great thing about the pitt is that it's a show of infinite nuance where every character has moments in the right and in the wrong and no one is irredeemable but also no one is unassailable. the terrible thing about the pitt is that you have to watch people raised by the bad faith no nuance everything-contains-a-moral-failing social media landscape of the 2020s interact with it and enough of that will make you want to join robby and abbot on the roof

[weirdtranssexual]

genuinely, from the bottom of my heart:

if you can’t read or write 500-1000 words with relative ease you have a serious problem

[weirdtranssexual]

how are all the teenagers who complain about writing 500 words for homework going to get through college without AI

how are you going to function in society if you can’t read 1000 words at a time

[prof-grace-aspen]

This is a FIXABLE problem, by the way!

Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.

That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.

Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.

And easier the next.

And you will naturally find yourself extending how much you read per day.

[weirdtranssexual]

yes! the brain must be exercised like any other part of the body to get stronger! no matter what place you’re at you can do stimulating activities to exercise your brain!

[mageofthemarsh]

The answer to 'how are they going to function' is, and I say this as someone whose mom was a social worker in Appalachia for 20 years: they're going to get scammed. They're going to be victims of fraud, scams, and exploitation, due to their low literacy making them easier targets for others. And then they're going to be unable to read and write well enough to advocate for themselves in a court of law or fight back in any meaningful way.

"I ain't reading that" becomes "I can't read that" which becomes "I didn't read before I signed it because the guy telling me to was convincing and now I don't have anything".

[heywriters]

^^ There is so much profit in exploiting illiteracy and ignorance.

On top of being scammed, receiving accurate medical treatment relies on you knowing how to do your own research, and too many doctors take illiterate patients less seriously.

If you become a victim of a crime or are accused of a crime, you need to be able to read the papers a cop or lawyer puts in front of you. They can happily take advantage of your ignorance if you give them a chance.

This list goes on! Landlords, real estate agents, accountants, car mechanics, bankers, phone companies, customer service, contractors, childcare workers, e.g. any other human you rely on just to live your life will expect you to be literate and capable of making smart decisions. It is not their job to supplement your ignorance. It is not any well-meaning individual's job to make sure you paid attention in the same classes they did. And most of them know this and will not wait for you to figure things out.

It won't be a scam, it will just be business.

[letterboxd-worth-a-damn]