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[deadespeon]

man, weve gotta find a way to talk about big tobacco from an anticapitalist lens bc i cant stand to watch successive generations get addicted to their bullshit and just keep pretending its normal. i dont think condescending to smokers is productive but theres gotta be some respectful way to say that not paying a signficant portion of ur income to some of the most straightforwardly evil corporations in the world in exchange for addiction and sickness and death should be an obvious goal for anyone who considers themself anticapitalist

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Im all for accommodating people whenever necessary and possible but also some of you have clearly never lived a day in discomfort in your life and have also never been outside in the real world

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I wonder if “we have to torture this special character. in the lab facility. with secret science.” is an interest all 12-year-old children share or were we just the generation exposed to Maximum Ride

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This one time I was watching Red Dead Redemption 2 cutscene clips with my boyfriend, and I can't even recall which scene it was, but I went "hahah that's you" at my boyfriend, and he didn't connect. So I had to clarify, I mean the way the protagonist keeps saying that he's not a good man, he ain't a nice man, and nonetheless almost every time he bumps into a stranger, they'll go "you seem like a nice man. let me tell you my whole fucking life story", and he'll just patiently listen, regardless of whether he has the time or particularly cares.

And my boyfriend looks at me with confusion like "yeah, but that happens to me too, all the time, and I'm not nice."

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I was doom scrolling your page and saw a lot of stuff about Finland

do you live there or were you like born there and moved?? of you have lived in a different place, how different was it?

Oh, I'm a native, born and raised here. The reason I'm seemingly implausibly fluent in english is a combination of random factors, both odd and not that odd. When I was like 3-4 or so, mom put me into an english-speaking daycare for a while so that I could pick up the language properly when she noticed that I was learning to understand english faster than I was learning to read subtitles on TV (unlike in many other countries, finnish TV is never dubbed save for children's cartoons).

Both of my parents needed english for their jobs - my father was an IT wizard and my mother an international sales agent - so they were both fluent and understood just how important knowing the lingua franca du jour is going to be in an increasingly international world. The fact that they were willing to put this much thought into our future wellbeing but I was still bullied at school for being filthy because nobody kept an eye on my hygiene probably illustrates what kind of a odd mish-mash of being neglected, materially spoiled and randomly well-provided for my childhood was.

Then I turned 11 and was allowed to free-roam unsupervised on the internet. This was back when "grammar nazi" was a scalding insult and not a government job title, so whenever I got into arguments on the internet with strangers who had no idea they were arguing with a child, aggressively correcting the opponent's grammar was considered a winning move. My grasp of english grammar rules was honed on the brutal battlefields of obscure 2005-2010 forums with no sympathy for angry teenagers with an undiagnosed Something Wrong With Them.

So I am not "officially" bilingual by many formal parametres since neither of my parents were native speakers, but the same standards also don't recognise "the living room TV" as a parental figure, or consider "feral child abandoned into the wild who was found and raised by a wild pack of internet strangers" a valid backstory.

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whenever I tell someone “I’m tired” and they say “go to sleep” and I say “I’m not that type of tired” and they say “there’s only one type of tired” I always feel amazed. Astounded. How do they not know the different versions of tired.

Physical exhaustion from the chronic illness. Not drowsy, but needs to lay down. Maybe my Hashimoto’s or bad knees or plantar fasciitis is acting up, but either way, I need to relax with an ice pack and a tens unit.

emotional exhaustion. The type of “tired” people mean when they say “I’m sick and tired of x.” I’m so numb and usually I’d be about one minor inconvenience away from snapping but the exhaustion of being alive has gotten so heavy that I don’t even notice inconveniences anymore.

drowsiness. If I’m trying to tell someone I need to sleep, I’ll say “I’m sleepy” or “I want to go to bed.”

unable to process what’s going on but the closest word I can use to describe how I’m feeling is “tired.”

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Listen, I'm having fun playing with the ultra patriotic voice, but after a couple years in blue-collar landscaping jobs, you really do need to phrase things like that.

"I'm pretty sure that fella ain't here legally."

"Well, that ain't your business Chip, it's his."

They hate being preached to. If you pull out words like 'gender wage gap' they'll tell you you're brainwashed by the far left media.

"He's one of them transgenders."

"He got freedoms too, Jimmy."

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So, like, universal basic income.

One of the things I’ve heard people say is how, you know, you need income as a motivation to make people work. And I’ve heard some great arguments against that.

But also.

There are a lot of low-paid jobs that actually make the world a crappier place. Like, if we could just pay everyone in the fast fashion industry to stay home and not go to work, the world would be a much better place. If we paid people enough that they didn’t need to work in factories, then large-scale manufacture of crappy stuff wouldn’t be feasible anymore.

Like, we’re basically in a post-scarcity society. We have more than enough food and clothing for everyone. This manic capitalist mindset where we force people to go to jobs they hate to remove value from the world is insane, right?

And maybe if we instituted this we’d lose fast food corporations and stuff. But I bet they’d be replaced by small restaurants run by people who are passionate about what they do.

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I've already said that my number one piece of writing advice is to read.

But my number two piece of advice is this: be deliberate.

Honestly this would fix so many pieces of bad writing advice. Don't forbid people from doing something, tell them to be conscious and deliberate about it. This could help stop people from falling into common mistakes without limiting their creativity. Black and white imperatives may stop a few annoying beginner habits, but ultimately they will restrict artistic expression.

Instead of "don't use epithets": "Know the effect epithets have and be deliberate about using them." Because yes, beginners often misuse them, but they can be useful when a character's name isn't known or when you want to reduce them to a particular trait they have.

Instead of "don't use 'said'" or "just use 'said'": "Be deliberate about your use of dialogue tags." Because sometimes you'll want "said" which fades into the background nicely, but sometimes you will need a more descriptive alternative to convey what a character is doing.

Instead of "don't use passive voice": "Be deliberate about when you use passive voice." Because using it when it's not needed can detract from your writing, but sometimes it can be useful to change the emphasis of a sentence or to portray a particular state of mind.

Instead of blindly following or ignorantly neglecting the rules of writing, familiarize yourself with them and their consequences so you can choose when and if breaking them would serve what you're trying to get across.

Your writing is yours. Take control of it.

It probably sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here because most of my mutuals are already great writers. But I'm hoping this will make it to the right people.

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I'm coming to realize how vital it is to keep a running list of shit you did in the past few weeks so that you can participate in small talk. It's literally not anything to do with them being interesting at all it's just having Something to say to give people even the barest thing to hold on to. It's so you don't get into the "what have you been up to" "nothing much what about you" "yeah same" trap. Literally just say something.

What have you been up to? Um well it's getting warmer so I've been having to brush my cat every day.

Like no it's not that interesting of a thing to say. But now they can respond to it. They could say, man yeah it really is heating up, I've been trying to think of things to do inside more often. Or, oh you have a cat? What's their name?

Like. It's Something. All you need is Something. And if you're like me and your brain immediately goes blank upon entering small talk then keeping a list will help you remember things to say.

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forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the make up industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. im doing none of that in fact

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where's that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I'd like to submit "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane"

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One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)

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found out today i originally submitted my application for social security disability payments in 2021. it's been 4 years. i've had a diagnosis for schizoaffective bipolar type and a long history of mental health care including numerous psychiatric hospital stays since 2016. the following year i received diagnoses for PTSD and DID. i have an advanced degenerative spine condition that i have care records and MRIs for. i have the "proof" and i've had it for years. what's the fucking hold up, here?

this system is broken and i don't CARE about "weeding out the fakes," this is just intentionally leaving disabled people to die and i'm so, so fucking over it. those "fakes" need to survive, too, and i know how the gov't rationalizes this, but it doesn't mean i'm going to accept it and it doesn't mean i like it. this is just stupid. sure i'll get backpay, but i've needed that money for all 4 years so far i've been waiting. i promise it's way easier to figure out if someone is "faking" a disability than this.

stop leaving disabled people to die on purpose because you view us as worthless because we can't work. nobody fucking cares about your precious workforce or economy. NOBODY cares about how it "hurts" the economy somehow when disabled people make money and stimulate the economy. how is us being able to stimulate the economy again worse than us not being able to buy literally anything? can we talk about how that makes literally no fucking sense?

literally everyone needs to survive. EVERYONE. accept it already. doesn't matter how much you dislike how someone else lives. they need to survive.

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i just saw someone describe a disabled person as "someone with beautiful abilities" i cannot do this anymore

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thank you osha thank you shift limits thank you mandatory breaks thank you overtime pay thank you labour laws thank you workers rights thank you unions thank you protesters thank you advocates thank you workers!!!!!!!

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spin this wheel of all the pokemon. you now have to fight this pokemon. just you and it, bare-knuckle