we used to have normalized whump. remember what they took from you….
back in the day you could write about the most sickeningly vile atrocious war crimes happening to your blorbo and everyone was like. kyaaaaaaaa >w<. they just got it. they understood
If your goals basically amount to “after The Revolution everything will be great because people will all have the Good Ethics and work together in my Perfect System and the Evil People with Bad Morals and Bad Behaviour who are making this world bad will be gone (killed/imprisoned/exiled/all converted to agree with us when they see our Perfect System)” then that’s just fascism. I hate to say it but you’ve put a gay socialist hat on fascism.
The MAGA people are still gonna be around in your Perfect System and a very large proportion of them are still gonna be Like That. We can discourage antisocial behaviour through laws and education and changing cultural norms, but if plans for future society involve [group I’m opposed to] magically not being part of it so the Good People can Do Things Right, well.
✨No Bad Guys Here✨ - how do you want to enforce that.
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I’d forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I’d forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don’t use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it’s ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that’s the moral reason for why you shouldn’t use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don’t actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.
Unfortunately, what I heard was “read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea.”
Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn’t multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.
And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.
I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.
I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.
On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.
It’s been 16 years since I took that test.
I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.
But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.
The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.
I hate to break it to you, but they were right. You really do just have to finish that first draft. It can be a hot mess, but you can’t clean up a room that doesn’t exist
first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line
second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all
third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below
fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?
fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves
sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it
seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him
eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night
ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him
tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk
eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important
twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go
thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme
fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader
fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that
sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why
Teachers when a child shows a single ounce of individuality or creativity:
As a teacher: the big sharpener should have just made her laugh. It’s funny.
But the 70 sharpeners thing is where it gets a bit dicey because yes it was obviously the child joking and having a sharpener collection but on the other you have to think: Why does this child have so many blades on school property?? Obviously you can know the child won’t do anything awful but you don’t know what some other person might do if they get it or if administration that DONT know your child finds it
what nefarious thing is a child going to do with 70 intact sharpeners already at school? sneak into the bathroom where they hid a 2x4 and a tool box to build a macuahuitl?
I’ll probably be buying a switch 2 just cause it’s my job to play games on stream, but I always feel weird about buying these overpriced games that my audience wouldn’t be able to afford.
Maybe I’ll focus more on older and indie games
Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that angle, I suppose.
I will accept this task. I will play the games so you don’t have to.
Still can’t believe the entire campaign relied on people not googling “Tariff” and spending like a minute to read the definiton. “I’m going to introduce tariffs” as a campaign promise is LITERALLY saying “I’m going make the price of things even higher than they already are, for you (usamerican)”
He literally won by telling people to their faces that he’s going to make inflation worse. Joke country.
Xena caused most things. Xena influenced the development of Taoism. Xena gave directions to Joseph and Mary, but she ALSO stopped Abraham from killing Isaac. Xena does ALL THE THINGS.
My fave brand of Chocolate Guy’s acts of Clowning on God is making fruit out of fruit. Not even chocolate, just straight up taking a fruit and using alchemy to make it into Fruit 2.0 as if to prove he’s not playing god anymore, he’s straight up commiting acts of primordial creation. Love that for him.
Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources
Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!
OP I owe you my life
OP you are the greatest person currently in my life. You beautiful, thoughtful creature.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.
as a completely cis dude, I would press this button immediately, without question. There are a lot of things I would do for money, but shit I’d do this for like 20 bucks… maybe less?
She said with all too much confidence
A DAY!?!?!?
no, not even a day. it lasted for all of six hours
It’s not just to have a “do over” that doesn’t involve the original cast, it’s to cut them out of the royalties. Literally the entire point is to make sure all the money made by Harry Potter goes to transphobes or people willing to work with transphobes.
If you watch it, you are supporting bigotry, hate, and oppression. That’s just objective reality. All for a story that you probably have already seen in movie and book form.
“You’d be surprised”, said Xaldien, who just lost four followers and received a lovely “men can’t be raped” anon shortly after reblogging this the first time.
obviously.
just for that. gonna reblog even HARDER
as someone with a brother who is a victim of SA
I’m reblogging.
as someone who knew male victims
i’m reblogging,lets see how many followers i lose,go on,try me
Putting this here.
all you guys better reblog this.
male victim of sexual harassment here (not quite SA but it still fucking sucked) REBLOGGGGGG
Men matter and I will keep screaming that until the last radfem has perished in a gruesome death
One time I brought one of my rocks with me on a plane to touch to calm me down during the flight, but it fell out of my pocket on my way back to the bathroom and then as soon as i realized this they actually announced “did anyone lose…… . A rock” over the loudspeaker system.
When I went up to claim it the plane man, clearly unable to throw off the shackles of his training in the procedure of asking for people’s full names and birthdates when they come to claim wallets, said “wait no, first tell me what color it is so I know it’s really yours”
He seemed to realize this was stupid directly after saying it and kind of smiled like to make it a joke but the joke was on him bc I Described the fucking rock to him for like 30 solid seconds
…anyway. that was an interaction I had once
this is like the only viral post that i dont regret making at ALL
Recently discovered, fully by accident, that the trick to feeling like you have more time in the day is to actually do shit with the time that’s there, which seems fake and wrong and it’s frankly infuriating that it works >:|
This is picking up a bit so I thought I’d mention that, while this trick does work, it is regrettably the hardest fucking thing in the world to do :T
This is how any corporation functions. First, increasing profits is done by attracting more customers. Then, once they have all the customers they’re going to get, increasing profits is done by increasing prices or cutting costs.
There’s another reason: every building they buy or rent is an investment. They want to be able to sell it if that location goes under. And a bland grey building is easier to sell than one that clearly looks like a McDonald’s.
