amyirie

[amyirie]

[amyirie]

resource for procrastination

if you’re anything like me, working on a computer is a dangerous thing. i’ll get distracted by everything - that one email i should respond to, all the pictures of my dog, tumblr, and so on. I recently discovered an amazing resource to stop that.

it’s called writer’s block, and is free to download! 

when you open it, it shows this screen, where you can choose either a time limit or word goal

then when you start, it opens a document that fills the entire screen like this

and you cannot quit the app or open anything else until your word/time quota is filled. i just wrote half of my english speech that i’ve been putting off all morning, and it took only 20 minutes!

so yup, it’s called writer’s block and is free for both mac and windows. enjoy!

[amyirie]

We really are fucked I mean ww3 could break out any day and we’d all be like ”this is so sad alexa play despacito”

[amyirie]

[amyirie]

Canada doesn’t interfere much in the world, it doesn’t elect crazy nationalists, it doesn’t threaten to deport people. It champions multiculturalism and tolerance. Canada is exceptional. It has its problems like all places, but when the world was on fire in 2016, we were fine. We still have systemic issues and need to deal with it, obviously. Me stating that Canada has many good qualities compared to similar nations =/= there isn’t an issue w/ racism towards aboriginals, etc.

There is so much to unpack here.

“Canada doesn’t interfere much in the world”

Except when it’s selling weapons to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. Or when it’s overthrowing democracies in countries like Haiti and Honduras for its own benefit. Or when Canadian-owned companies are wreaking havoc in Latin America by trampling over indigenous rights there (because doing that in Canada isn’t enough for them).

Canada’s abysmal record as an arms dealer

Former Liberal cabinet minister calls for end to Canadian arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Canada admits in court that the armored vehicles it’s selling to Saudi Arabia could be used in the fighting in Yemen

Canada Helped Overthrow Haitian Democracy

Canadian foreign policy sees Latin America as a playground for its most voracious corporations.

Human rights violations at Canadian gold miners’ operations abroad have become harder to ignore, but that’s a strange thing to celebrate

Canadian mining and petroleum companies rank among the most world’s most abusive and destructive.

Left nationalism was always a mirage. Canada is a settler-colonial state with a subjugated indigenous population. The old nationalist narrative is insufficient to deal with an imperialist country that exploits the Global South and participates in military adventurism abroad under NATO and the United Nations.[…]

Toronto-based Barrick Gold is both the world’s largest gold mining company — and its most abusive. In 2011, Human Rights Watch published a report that alleged that Barrick’s security at Papua New Guinea mines committed gang rapes and other violent assaults. In 2015, the company ended up compensating eleven women for the attacks. New rape allegations emerged later that year.

Barrick’s founder and chairman Peter Munk shrugged off his company’s liability, saying, “Gang rape is a cultural habit. Of course, you can’t say that because it’s politically incorrect. It’s outrageous. We have to pretend that everyone’s the same and cultures don’t matter. Unfortunately, it’s not that way.”

Barrick flouts indigenous rights in Latin America, profits from unsafe working conditions from Peru to Russia, and wreaks major environmental damage. Just last month, a Tanzanian inquiry heard that police killed sixty-five people and injured 270 others in the area around Barrick’s North Mara gold mine.Barrick isn’t the only bad apple. Vancouver-based Nevsun Resources was recently sued for allegedly using forced labor in its gold mine in Eritrea. The brutal dictatorship that condoned the practice holds a 40 percent stake in the mine.

Canada Is Not Honduras’ Friend: Coups, Repression and Profits

Historically, the United States has played a very negative role in supporting coups and military regimes and overthrowing governments across the Americas, and some listeners would be very familiar with that story. What people are less familiar with is with the role that Canada plays.

Whereas in the past I would say that Canada often quietly acquiesced to the interventionist role the U.S. has played in the Americas, with the Honduras coup in 2009, Canada played an explicit, front seat role in both legitimizing the coup and then politically and economically supporting the post coup regimes in power since then. As I said, it is a very repressive regime in power in Honduras, profoundly undemocratic, operating with high levels of repression, corruption and impunity.

“It doesn’t elect crazy nationalists”

Except we already elected Stephen Harper three fucking times.

With Anti-Muslim Campaign, Canada Has Its Trump Moment

Veiled Attack: Muslim-bashing is an effective campaign tactic

Goodbye, Harper. Good riddance.

Can Canadian politics get much more warped than what Harper pulled during the 2015 election? Sucking toes for votes with a crack-smoking mayor while touting family values. Trying to drive a wedge between majority and minority Canadians by exploiting the politics of bigotry over issues like the niqab — despite the court rulings against the Conservative position. Vowing to set up a rat line to expose “barbaric practices”, using the unforgettable sales team of Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander.

Stephen Harper was Donald Trump before Trump was Trump, right down to the bigotry, fear-mongering, divisiveness, scapegoating, and profound anti-democratic impulses that had Canada’s entire parliamentary structure tottering, according to experts like Peter Milliken and Robert Marleau.

Canada’s Conservatives vow to create ‘barbaric cultural practices’ hotline

White people don’t have to worry about Canada’s new “report your neighbor” hotline

Also, remember when Stephen Harper decided to use the term “old stock Canadian” in public in the year 2015?? In spite of the fact that that word has some seriously shitty racial connotations attached to it?? And he used that word to justify why he thinks refugees aren’t entitled to univeral healthcare in Canada???

VIDEO: Um, what exactly IS an “old stock Canadian,” Stephen Harper?

“It doesn’t threaten to deport people”

No, we just arrest refugees then detain them indefinitely, and then treat them so poorly when they’re in detention that many of them wind up dying. We also scam our migrant workers and treat them like garbage and then send them packing when we don’t need them anymore.

Canada Border Services Agency must change way it treats migrants: Editorial

Fifteen people have died while in the custody of Canada Border Services Agency since 2000 and in most cases no one knows why. The service needs to be held accountable for the thousands of migrants it detains each year

These borders kill: Canada’s lethal immigration system

Migrants are the only population in Canada that can be administratively detained for long periods of time, or indefinitely, without being charged or convicted of any crime. There were 7,300 people detained in 2013, the most recent data made available by the government.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act gives the CBSA broad powers to detain migrants if they believe they are a flight risk, a danger to public safety, inadmissible to Canada on security grounds, or inadequately identified. The vast majority, 94.2 per cent, are detained on grounds other than posing a security threat.

Since 2012, the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act has “protected” the immigration system by imposing mandatory detention for all migrants designated as “irregular arrivals,” including those as young as 16.  

[…]

In Canada, migrants may be detained indefinitely – unlike in the United States, for example, which imposes a 90-day limit on immigration detention. Out of 585 people in immigration detention in November 2013, 60 had been held for over a year. Some have been jailed for more than 10 years, trapped in the carceral limbo of undeportability.

Incarcerating migrants is inhumane: Goar

Guatemalan workers allegedly swindled out of work permits now face deportation: Migrant workers say they were paid as little as $300 for working 85 hours a week

“It feels like the government just sells you out to a white man.” 

21 arrested for illegally crossing border in Manitoba: RCMP 

An inexcusable travesty: Canada sent a Syrian minor to solitary confinement

“When the world was on fire in 2016, we were fine”

Choosing to remain willfully ignorant wrt Canadian politics and history doesn’t mean we were “fine.” It just means people were purposefully ignorant in favour of promoting a narrative that’s not true.

“Canada is exceptional”

[amyirie]

[amyirie]

I got a freaking slow loris

Reblog if you find this accurate ;) 

[amyirie]

[amyirie]

If you’re accused of being argumentative and defensive, it’s impossible to debate it.

[amyirie]

Are These Filter Words Weakening Your Story?

After putting my writing on hold for several weeks, I decided to jump back in. I expected to find all sorts of problems with my story–inconsistencies in the plot, lack of transitions, poor characterization–the works. But what began to stick out to me was something to which I’d given little thought in writing.

Filter words.

What are Filter Words?

Actually, I didn’t even know these insidious creatures had a name until I started combing the internet for info.

Filter words are those that unnecessarily filter the reader’s experience through a character’s point of view. Dark Angel’s Blog says:

“Filtering” is when you place a character between the detail you want to present and the reader. The term was started by Janet Burroway in her book On Writing.

In terms of example, you should watch out for:

To see

To hear

To think

To touch

To wonder

To realize

To watch

To look

To seem

To feel (or feel like)

Can

To decide

To sound (or sound like)

To know

I’m being honest when I say my manuscript is filled with these words, and the majority of them need to be edited out.

What do Filter Words Look Like?

Let’s imagine a character in your novel is walking down a street during peak hour.

You might, for example, write:

Sarah felt a sinking feeling as she realized she’d forgotten her purse back at the cafe across the street. She saw cars filing past, their bumpers end-to-end. She heard the impatient honk of horns and wondered how she could quickly cross the busy road before someone took off with her bag. But the traffic seemed impenetrable, and she decided to run to the intersection at the end of the block.

Eliminating the bolded words removes the filters that distances us, the readers, from this character’s experience:

Sarah’s stomach sank. Her purse—she’d forgotten it back at the cafe across the street. Cars filed past, their bumpers end-to-end. Horns honked impatiently. Could she make it across the road before someone took off with her bag? She ran past the impenetrable stream of traffic, toward the intersection at the end of the block.

Are Filter Words Ever Acceptable?

Of course, there are usually exceptions to every rule.

Just because filter words tend to be weak doesn’t mean they never have a place in our writing. Sometimes they are helpful and even necessary.

Susan Dennard of Let The Words Flow writes that we should use filter words when they are critical to the meaning of the sentence.

If there’s no better way to phrase something than to use a filter word, then it’s probably okay to do so.

Want to know more?

Read these other helpful articles on filter words and more great writing tips:

Filter Words and Distancing Point of View

The Reasons Editors reject Manuscripts

Filter Those words and Strengthen Your Writing

[amyirie]

God made me unphotogenic to keep me humble and i respect that

[amyirie]

tumblr i am so so high u cant just show me images like this

[amyirie]

Gollum wasn’t driven insane by the ring, he only ate fish for 500 years and had mercury poisoning as well as serious vitamin D deficiency

[amyirie]

The Alberta media is really pressing the idea that a pipeline is the only way to bring back the economy and Trudeau and the BC govt are the enemies. Today melodramatic raisin Bob Layton of Global News called the NDP government "fake, mystical beans" (his metaphor made zero sense) and I just want to bang my head against a wall UGH

~~~~

[amyirie]

that feeling you get when you’re angry

[amyirie]

In my experience managers don’t in the public service are incompetent and don’t care what you’re going through :(

One of my friends and followers (@rozzybox on twitter) has been fired from her job at Citizens and Immigration Canada for publicly speaking out about how her employer (The Government of Canada) has failed to protect her as a survivor of sexual assault.

Link to threads: #1 and #2

You can donate to Roslyn’s crowdfunding page here if you want to help.

[amyirie]

Vintage Girl Scouts of America ‘Brownie’ pocket knife