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Yeah look the weird smut comments are totally out of pocket but I really can't get over "im more into dr.seus or self help books lol"
#do you think he's actually read dr. seuss or did he just hear "doctor" before an author's name and decide it sounded smart? (Via @shellys-apprentice)
Oh my god
Imagine your rich dumbass parents got scammed out of a ridiculous amount of money because they believed that determining how a bunch of cells would likely score on an "intelligence" test or which hobbies it would be good at once it's grown into a human child was real and possible, and then they'd hate you for not being be a genius. I think these kids should be legally allowed to kill their parents.
This isn't a 1:1 by any means, but I feel this is a problem with adoption too. I'm an adopted person and was adopted as a baby due to my adoptive parents' fertility problems. There's this assumption that because you "picked" the baby, you get to control the baby to a greater degree than traditional conception (I.e. there was an element of choice with a pre-born child). So when the baby grows up and isn't what the adopters wanted or they want to look into their bio family (like with donor-conceived children looking into their donors) there's a degree of possessiveness and animosity directed at you for seemingly no reason for having complex needs, psychological trauma and curiosity into your biological family.
It's insane these issues aren't talked about more and I feel the adoptee community and the donor-conceived community have a lot to commiserate on together as well as a lot in common. Children aren't extensions of their parents. They're living, breathing human beings with their own wants, needs and desires which cannot be controlled or planned for - and attempting to do so is pure folly which has the potential to cause a breakdown of the relationship between the child and parents.
Hard to describe how I'm feeling about this. I'm horrified, but also I love this thoughtful kitty, she's the best cat in the world, and also I'm fascinated by the thought process. I want to help the humans, let me put the mouse in the human food.
That’s my reaction too. That’s so kind of you miss kitty but aaaaahhh nooo!
She's pulling her weight putting food On The Table and they kick her OUT?!?
Humans are very strange beasts.
Oh!! I reblogged sweet Wendy too fast to read properly!
Foster fail doesn’t mean they sent her back to the shelter it means they refused to give her back.
I don’t want to hear any writing advice from Stephen king not because I think there would be no value in it but because whatever works for Stephen king is between him and god and that demon he made a pact with that lets him write 3000 words in one sitting daily.
Yeah, as a person who often does 3k words in a sitting, frequently for days or weeks in a row, and has never done cocaine.... it's not the cocaine, and it's not a god-given physical trait like being the "hottest friend".
It's practice. Not just practicing writing in general, but intentionally practicing for speed. I have taught writing in formal settings, and the thing that seems to most frequently slow people down is the amount of time they spend tinkering with, worrying about, and sweating over every individual sentence as they write it -- and then they've written 800 words and they're fucking exhausted, because all of that worrying takes a LOT of cognitive energy. Turn your brain off. Practice not caring if it's a perfect sentence because you can fix it later. Just slap some bullshit on the page. Keep your fingers moving.
If you can type 60wpm, and you type without stopping, you'll have 3k in under an hour. Now, realistically, I'm a fast writer, and I do still pause to do a LITTLE tinkering now and then, so I compose at a rate of around 25wpm, even though my top typing speed is around 80wpm. At 25wpm, 3k would take me roughly two hours. Let's round it up to two and a half hours for a couple thinking breaks.
The point is, this is doable. 25wpm for two and a half hours, including some thinking breaks. It's not particularly superhuman, any more than being able to run a mile is superhuman. It just takes intentional training towards a specific goal and prioritizing what you're spending your day on.
When you first start practicing for speed, then yeah, a lot of what you produce is going to be garbage, and step one is to let that be perfectly fucking fine. Your mantra is "It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done" -- it's a lot easier to edit a pile of raw material than to try to get it perfect on the first go. As you practice, you'll get more adept at the writing craft part of it too, so the product will not be garbage stream-of-consciousness anymore. The sentences will start to snap together one after the other like lego bricks.
But you don't get there if you say, "Well, it was just the cocaine" or "This isn't applicable to me because Stephen King is doing a completely different activity." Neither of those things are true. He's a regular human being, and I'm a regular human being, and so are you. Writing fast is a learnable skill, just like being able to run a mile or any equivalent feat of physical exertion. If you don't WANT to learn that sort of skill, you definitely don't have to. But there's a difference between deciding that you don't WANT to learn the skill and reflexively deciding that the skill must be impossible, and when I see people saying "That seems impossible, so there's no point to me even trying," it makes me sad.
Because there's no such thing as impossible. Some things are just Very Tedious.
every time there's another post about how science is malebrained and the superior feminine way of understanding the world is via bullshit woo i like to imagine a 1920s misogynist nodding along thoughtfully whilst stroking his beard
it's crucial that you untie "special interest" from "expertise". "it's true just trust me bro" doesn't have any extra weight when you add "I know because it's my special interest". you are not immune from falling for misinformation, and you are not immune from sharing misinformation. not to mention the fact that "amount of knowledge" isn't even a requirement for something being classified as a special interest lol!
Curating knowledge does not mean you know how to evaluate it. Period.
how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary
something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel
This essay came out a few years back and touches on some of the things you're talking about, it's good.
The funniest thing to me about Kel, and maybe one of the most interesting because of how understated it is, is that Kel becomes a good commander in the end, not by emulating Wyldon who was cold and implacable and insensitive, or by emulating Raoul who mostly only disobeys orders out of principle or because he has an issue with what the order says about his personal relationship with Jon, but by emulating JON.
Kel doesn't even LIKE Jon, she BARELY respects him as a person. He's a good enough ruler that she's willing to fight for him and swear loyalty to him and to at least mostly believe that he wouldn't work with Blayce to make his own killing monsters, but that's as far as it goes for Kel. If he's kind to her, she finds it uncomfortable and almost untrustworthy because she assumes he doesn't care about her and so his kindness and respect towards her must be fake.
But from the outside, as readers, we know just how much Jon fought for Kel. We know how much he does respect her right to be a knight. Jon is the sole reason that Kel DID get the opportunity to prove herself, if he'd capitulated to Wyldon completely, she just wouldn't have ever been allowed to join. Kel doesn't KNOW THAT, obviously, but we do. We know that Jon did everything he could to find a way to convince Wyldon to let Kel become a page. While Wyldon claims later that the reason he chose to let her stay at the end of the probation year was because his better judgment convinced him she'd earned it, I'd be willing to bet that part of that better judgment also included knowing if he couldn't prove to JON that she needed to go, then he'd be in trouble. Kel was training and working in front of plenty of other trainers and teachers who could easily contradict Wyldon's lies if he'd tried it, many of whom are closer to Jon than they are to Wyldon.
Kel's experiences and feelings about that experience are entirely valid, and she doesn't have the knowledge we do about how hard Jon fought for her, so it's not shocking that she's upset with him for a good portion of her series. She never even discovers this truth by the end of her series, even though she does get a lesson from Jon and Thayet (and Raoul to some degree) about how politics and compromises work in order to make changes happen. So her opinion of him by the end is boiled down to the quote from Squire: "good kings weren't always good men." It makes sense for her to think this, but because Kel's knowledge base is so limited (and her worldview so black and white for much of her series), it makes her an EXTREMELY unreliable narrator about this particular issue.
Kel believes that while Jon generally does his duty and keeps the peace, he doesn't actually care all that much about his people as individuals. But in their only meaningful conversation in Squire, Jon is able to point out that he (and Thayet, who is actually equal to Jon in power, something Kel either doesn't know which would be a failure in her education or just tends to ignore so she can focus her ire on Jon) has to make a LOT of compromises in order to get ANYTHING useful done at all. Sometimes, often, it means making deals with people he doesn't like or people he just fundamentally disagrees with, because it's the first step in a multi-step plan to help more people in the long run. He also points out that just throwing his weight and authority around in order to be able to change everything he wants to change immediately regardless of what anyone else thinks about it is a great way to get himself and his family killed. Because even if he had good intentions, that would be tyranny. It does make Kel think a little, but she doesn't tend to like him much still afterwards, her resentment from her page years will always color her opinion of him a little.
However, then she gets to Haven and she's suddenly tossed into a position of leadership over a lot of other people, many of whom disagree with each other or disagree with her or both. And all of the sudden, Kel has to make compromises. She doesn't LIKE the way the sergeants often treat their men, especially the sergeants whose men are convicts, but there's very very little she can do about it without really pissing off those same sergeants and that's not something she can afford to do. There's a moment when Neal starts getting frustrated about the treatment of the convicts and she takes him out to vent to her so he doesn't vent to the sergeants, something that the sergeants would then take out on their men. Kel's reasoning as she does this is that she "preferred to avoid battles with them now so she would have authority with them later if she needed to use it." Later, Kel is talking to Daine and she says "That's all this job is... Trying to please everyone and pleasing no one. And it will only get worse, not better."
Both of these moments showcase Kel choosing to make compromises. She may not like the way the sergeants treat the convicts, but she needs to stay on the sergeants' good sides because she doesn't have enough resources to butt heads with them nor enough authority to just force the issue, and even if she DID, it could cause the sergeants to become troublesome or take out their frustration with her on the men in ways she can't see as well. But staying on the sergeants' good sides might mean letting some of their maltreatment slide if it's not physically harming the convicts. And even setting that aside, she's dealing with nearly 500 refugees eventually, all of which are from different towns in the area and have different needs, not all of which she can accommodate. This requires compromise. Sometimes she can please some of them and not others, but mostly she probably just ends up not pleasing anybody because that's often how compromises WORK.
She never makes the active connection to Jon and his lesson on leadership from Squire while she's in Haven, but that quote up there about how this job (aka being a commander) is all about trying to please everyone and pleasing no one? It sounds a HECK of a lot like "good kings weren't always good men." You can try your best to help others, but often doing the right thing can involve making everyone unhappy. You can't be everybody's friend if you're going to get anything done.
Some of this she might've learned from Raoul's style of command, but Raoul commands a fairly small amount of people (at least in comparison to a King), and so we see him able to be pretty friendly to the people he commands in a way that Jon is perhaps unable to do. And she might believe that she learned some of this from Wyldon, but Wyldon had a tendency to be very unfair and biased due to his raging bigotry and conservative values, as well as the fact that he doesn't actually even LIKE being a training master and that likely impacted the way he treated the pages (he's almost never that kind to the pages, whereas we see him capable of being quite kind with the refugees later, which is where Kel comes to the conclusion that he hadn't enjoyed being a training master).
But Jon makes an entire speech about how he (and Thayet) have been working THEIR ENTIRE REIGN to change laws that help people. He explains how they have to consider the needs of merchants, nobles, farmers, street people, priests/priestesses, and mages. They have to consider not only what these people might need or want, but also what they could do when they feel sufficiently offended and how that could impact not just the royal family or the nobility but the realm as a whole. Jon points out that they HAVE made changes, for the better, and that just because they don't always succeed at everything or because they have to compromise sometimes, doesn't mean they aren't working at making changes or that they don't care about helping people. Not everyone you have power over is going to be your friend, they might not even be someone you like. But if you're going to take on the job of leadership, that's something you have to be willing to accept and work with, which often means making compromises with people whose needs and values are contradictory to your own.
Jon probably knows when he makes the compromise with Wyldon that it will likely impact a lot of people's good opinion of him. Alanna is right there and clearly angry, and we know Thayet doesn't like the decision, either. And it's entirely possible that Jon knows in the moment that Kel herself will put the blame on him because he's the King. But he also knows that if he insists on Kel being allowed to be a page without trying to compromise with Wyldon, Wyldon will quit over it and he'll end up with ten DIFFERENT problems that could cause a lot bigger issues to far more people than just one girl. So he makes the compromise. He sacrifices Alanna and Thayet and even Kel's good opinion of him in order to ensure that Kel gets the opportunity to become a Knight without turning all of his nobles against him which could ultimately lead to a civil war. Is it fair? No, and he knows it. But it's the best option he has in order to get the outcome they all actually want which is just for Kel to have the chance to prove herself.
Kel has to make similar choices once she's finally in a position of leadership of her own. And whether she realizes it or not, without ever even spending more than a few minutes with Jon, she ends up emulating his leadership style more than anybody else's because it WORKS and it works WELL. She'll probably never admit it, she might never even realize it herself, but she's so much more like Jon than any of the other men she sees as role models. And I love that. I love the dramatic irony of that, that the one person Kel only barely respects because of a compromise he made on her behalf that she'll never even know about, is the person Kel ends up most resembling. Jon is the reason she has the opportunity to become the Protector of the Small in the first place, Jon is the person who created that environment that allowed her to nurture those values, and she'll probably never even really be able to acknowledge that, because sometimes that's what being a good leader means.
My least favorite things about anti- UBI discourse is always the techbros whining that "nobody is going to work anymore! People will just watch Netflix all day!" and I have 2 responses:
1) Who the fuck cares. Who the fuck cares what people do with their time! That's kind of the fucking point!
2) People aren't going to stop laboring. Housework (look, it's right there in the word!) will still need to be done. So will maintenance on our homes and personal spaces. Children will still need carers, as will the elderly and disabled. There are millions of examples of ~work~ that we do all the time, uncompensated, that won't suddenly stop because we aren't forced to sell our labor to provide corporation's profits.
I'm not surprised that what is traditionally women's work is invisible to these dipshits, but it never fails to anger me.
Anyway. Join the IWW.
Field studies have been conducted in several countries now, and the result is always the same - people will just flop about for a couple of months to recover from the burnout most people who have a job live with, and then they look for something to do. Some get a job with reduced hours, and some start doing charitable stuff like volunteering in soup kitchens and teaching others to do whatever their particular skill is. They socialize more, they are happier, and on average, people will work more, not less.
But the thing is, employers suddenly have to think about how to make their jobs appealing enough for someone to come and do them! It's hard to find someone to work for you for long hours under horrible conditions, if they can just choose not to; which shows you how voluntary our current system actually is.
I am not going to lie, “People will still have to do dishes and childcare” is a dumb as shit argument for UBI and it needs to leave circulation immediately. I don’t want to attack this specific poster because I see variants of this argument all the time and every single time its just absolute nonsense. And while we’re at it “uwu we’ll all just write books and make art once we have UBI” is just as divorced from reality. I genuinely feel less confident that UBI is feasible because of how many people make such absolute nonsense arguments.
The number of jobs which are truly bullshit and which people can really do without is tiny. The amount of labour it takes to run society is immense, some of it is progressing toward automation… most isn’t. A good fair un-exploitative economic system is still going to be one where the vast majority of healthy, able bodied adults are doing labor above and beyond what it takes to maintain their own little family and living space. Not because starvation is being held over our heads, but because maintaining a good, safe, healthy society takes huge amounts of ongoing labour.
I’m even going to take it a step further and say that while volunteer work is great, and I’m sure that UBI would facilitate more of it, “oh, we’ll just volunteer for everything important in the UBI future” is also horrible argument and frankly, one which facilitates, not reduces, labor abuses. The default state of labour should be paid and volunteer work should be correctly viewed as a gift.
@sleepyowlet has the right of it. UBI isn’t some sort of labor-removing magic wand, that’s a silly fantasy. UBI is a great tool for saving us from labor-exploitation.















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