sandybrett

[sandybrett]

you resisted the forcefemmification beams for too long

Nope. Completely incorrect and wrong.

This is a decision that I made for myself. I made this choice because it's who I want to be. Not because someone else wanted me to for their own pleasure.

[sandybrett]

Rules of time travel:

Reaction will often precede action. What appears to be senseless cruelty in the moment will be justified in some way, at some point. The people killing you have their reasons.

By the time the whole chain of events shows itself it will be too late, time travel or not.

What kills you is not guaranteed to offer you any respite.

The notion of unconditional love will kill you, badly. You do not love me in every universe. I do not love you in every universe. Cherish the exceptions.

Whatever power you gain will not be enough to make you not-hurt, not-scared, not-dying. If you manage to become a shark there are still bigger fish, more sharks. There is still the ocean.

Despite the temporal displacement your actions still have consequences. The people saving you have their reasons.

It is just as unwise to care as it is to stop caring. You will have to choose over and over again anyway.

At some point you will be someone else (action, consequence). This happens to everyone but for you that transformation is unlikely to go by invisible. The future can haunt just as well as any past.

There will never be a perfect point of balance where everything remains the same, but you know that already.

Many people, some of them probably you, will have ideas on the trajectory of you, citing action and reaction, displaced consequences you have to handle now. By the time you see the whole picture it will be too late. You will have to choose anyway.

You will remember things that have never happened. You will be to foreign places that have been or will be or are your home, around strangers who love you but a little to the left, plus-minus a cowboy hat.

You will wake up screaming from the things that killed you but didn't give you respite.

All of these are signs that you are still alive.

[sandybrett]

Actual conversation with my father, many years ago:

Dad: My second grade teacher taught us to pronounce the "wh" sequence as "hw". As in, "hwat" or "hweel." Isn't that absolutely ridiculous? No one pronounces it like that!

Me: Dad, your mother pronounces it like that.

Dad: ...really?

Anyway, here's the Wikipedia entry on the sound in question: Voiceless labial–velar fricative

Hello, I need you to knoe, when i am utterly flabbergasted at my friend's dms, I respond with [Mike Walters] Hwhat. Your podcast has done irreparable damage to my vocabulary

this is just how i say the word what

[sandybrett]

I think the point I've made before about the reductive nature of "ownvoices" is that there are a lot of straight cis people who grew up in religiously conservative families and churches who could more accurately write a story about a lesbian in a strict fundamentalist family undergoing conversion therapy while doing minimal research, than I could as a lesbian who grew up in a liberal family (and in the suburban Midwest, but where socially conservative fundie shit was happening adjacent to me rather than something I was enmeshed in myself). But if each of us wrote that book, only mine would get the "ownvoices" label, and I would also be assumed to be writing about my own life experience automatically unless I clarified that actually, my family was always accepting of gay people, and anyway I didn't realize I was gay nor come out until my 20s.

This is a hypothetical, of course, but not an extreme one. There are books out there where the author technically shares all the relevant marginalized identities with their character, but has had such a different life experience around those identities that what their character is going through is every bit as foreign to them as it would be to someone of another identity. Or for that matter, where marginalized authors are nudged toward writing something that appeals to certain white, cishet, mainstream sensibilities of what a Latino story or a trans story or a Black story should be, that fit into stereotypes, the sort of thing that the movie American Fiction and Percival Everett's book Erasure that it's based on are satirizing. (I'm convinced a combo of both of these happened for instance with Cemetery Boys - so much of that book is playing so hard into what white liberal audiences think is "authentic" Latino identity, I wouldn't be surprised if that was an editor decision to at least some degree.)

On the other hand, then you encounter something like Firekeeper's Daughter that is truly #ownvoices, someone from a marginalized community writing about places and people and cultures they know intimately firsthand, such that it resonates with you if you have even a little bit in common with the characters (as I felt as a white Michigander from the LP reading that book about indigenous people in the UP who were in high school the same time I was). So I think there's a utility to the concept, but I think it needs to be separated from marketing jargon and instead we should ask questions like: Which similarities of experience actually matter the most when doing something like writing fiction? Does it change depending on the type of story, type of characters, type of fiction? If you're doing something that is about creating a broader world to get lost in, giving a strong sense of place and community, might having lived in that world matter more than whether you share specific identities with the main character? Vs. if you're spending a lot of time in the main character's head and not much outside of it, the opposite is true? But the point is, it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, but one you have to take book by book, author by author, or most broadly, genre by genre.

[sandybrett]

Firing the refs doesn’t end the game

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON TOMORROW (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.

Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.

It was about 15 years ago. I was living in London, and my wife's job came with a private health insurance buff that let us use private doctors instead of the NHS. I've had worsening chronic pain my whole life, and I've never found anything that made it better, so I thought, fine, I'll see a fancy specialist. So I started calling around to the quacks of Harley Street, London's elite medical precinct.

Soon, I found myself at the very posh offices of a psychopharmacologist who had good news for me: Opioids are safe! Far safer than we'd ever thought. So safe, in fact, that I should get on opioids right away, and take them every day for the rest of my life. I didn't have to worry about addiction. I'd be fine. He had a whole pile of peer-reviewed journal articles that supported this advice.

I didn't trust the science. I suspected that billionaire-owned pharma companies were engaged in a conspiracy to cook the evidence on the safety and efficacy of their products. I thought that the regulators who were supposed to prevent them from murdering me for money were in on the game – on the take, swapping favors for these companies for a promise of cushy industry jobs after they left the public sector.

I did my own research. I found people online who were citing other research from outside the establishment that confirmed my conspiracy theory. I decided that these strangers on the internet were more trustworthy than the respected, high-impact factor, peer-reviewed, tier-one scientific journals whose pages were full of claims about the safety and efficacy of daily opioid use for chronic pain sufferers like me. I took control over my own health. I didn't fill the Rx for the medicine my doctor had prescribed for me and advised me to start taking immediately. I fired my doctor.

I took these steps despite having no background in pharmacology, addiction studies, or medicine. I was totally unqualified to make that call. I was a science denier – but I was also right.

It probably saved my life.

A decade later, I found myself facing another medical question: should I get a new kind of vaccine, which was claimed to be effective against the covid-19 pandemic? The companies that manufactured that vaccines were part of the same industry that falsified the research on opioids. The regulators that signed off on those vaccines were the same regulators that signed off on opioid safety claims. Neither had ever been forced to reckon with the failures that led to the opioid epidemic. The procedures that allowed that shameful episode were the same, and the structures that allowed the perversion of those procedures were likewise the same. And once again, there was a clamor of dissenting voices from people who distrusted the official medical position on these new pharma products, insisting that they were the creations of pharma billionaires who didn't care if I lived or died, overseen by regulators who were utterly in their pockets.

I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.

This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.

We navigate so many of these life-or-death technical questions every single day:

Is my Boeing plane airworthy?

Are the air traffic controllers adequately trained, staffed and rested?

Is the firmware for my antilock brakes of high quality?

Are the hygiene procedures at this restaurant robust enough to prevent the introduction of life-threatening pathogens and contaminants?

Are the pedagogical theories at my kid's school well-founded, or are do they produce ignoramuses whose only skill is satisfying standardized testing rubrics?

Are the safety standards that specify the joists in my ceiling any good, or am I about to die, buried under tons of rubble?

Every one of these questions is the sort of thing that even highly skilled researchers and experts can – and do – disagree on. Definitively answering just one of these questions might require the equivalent of several PhDs. Realistically, you're not going to be able to personally arrive at a trustworthy answer to all of these, and it's very likely you won't even be able to answer any of them.

That's what experts are for. But that just raises another problem: how do you know which experts you should listen to?

You don't.

You can't. Even experts who mean well and are well-versed in their fields can make mistakes. For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.

But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?

It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties. Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling – why they chose to believe some experts over others.

The transparency obligations on these public servants – whom we call "regulators" – don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.

Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.

The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify. I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I am equipped to look at the process by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house after that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes – it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.

It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism. America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.

It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere. Far more important than what the Republican base believes is how they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment – politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters – have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.

Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide – merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals. To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful – isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.

The twin assault on both the credibility and reliability of expert agencies came to a head with the Loper Bright decision, in which the Supreme Court gutted expert agencies' rulemaking ability, seemingly in the expectation that Congress – overwhelming populated by very old people who trained as lawyers in the previous century – would make fine-grained safety rules covering everything from water to aerospace:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Conspiratorialism is the inevitable outcome of a world in which:

a) You have to resolve complex, life-or-death technical questions which;

b) You are not qualified to answer; and

c) Cannot trust the referees who are supposed to navigate these questions on your behalf.

Conpsiratorialism is only secondarily about what you believe. Mostly, conspiratorialism is about how you arrive at those beliefs. Conspiratorialism isn't a problem of bad facts – it's a problem of bad epistemology.

We live in a true epistemological void, in which the truth is increasingly for sale.

That's the backdrop against which Doge is doing its dirty business. Doge's assault on expert agencies enjoys a depressing degree of popular support, but it's not hard to understand why: so many of our expert agencies have staged high-profile demonstrations of their unfitness, without any consequences, that it's easy to sell the story that these referees were all on the take.

They weren't, of course. Most expert regulators – career civil servants – really care about their jobs. They want to make sure you can survive a trip to the grocery story rather than shitting your guts out with listeria or giardia, that your plane doesn't collide with a military chopper, that your kids graduate school knowing more than how to pass a standardized test. The tragedy is that these honorable, skilled regulators' commitment to your wellbeing isn't enough to produce policies that actually safeguard your wellbeing.

Musk doesn't want to fix the real, urgent problems with America's administrative state: he wants to destroy it. He wants to fire the refs, because once you fire the refs, the game goes on – minus the rules. That's a great way to win support for authoritarian projects: "The state won't take care of you anymore (if it ever did, amirite?), but I will."

So they're firing the refs, and they're transforming the game of "survive until tomorrow" into Calvinball, a "nomic" in which the rules are whatever someone insists they are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Musk and Trump are in for a surprise. They have the mistaken impression that the rules only reined in their billionaire pals and the corporations that produce their wealth. But one of the most consequential effects of these rules is to limit labor activism. The National Labor Relations Act put very strict limits on union organizing and union militancy. Now that Trump has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (by illegally firing a Democratic board member, leaving the board without a quorum), all bets are off:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Trump won office in part by insisting that America's institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn't lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. Trump doesn't want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat Trumpism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming "America was already great":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/12/epistemological-void/#do-your-own-research

[sandybrett]

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.

[sandybrett]

Also

"Oh my god, you are such an incompetent sidekick, you are going to get us both killed."

and

*beautiful arpeggiated synths* "Why did you allow yourself to become possessed by a god, you fool, you absolute walnut."

and

"You will pry my theremin from my cold, dead fingers."

and

"Watch me confuse my dog"

WOE.BEGONE music is like

"I feel like I was born a bad person, I corrupt everything I touch, I am so deeply afraid that if you look at me any closer you'll see I am not worthy of your love even though I worship you and I would do anything for you, I don't understand why you love me but I would lay down my life for you."

and

*funky instrumental music* "I AM NOT A VARMINT" repeated fifty times

and

"I went to the future and I couldn't find you there, everyone forgot you except me, they forgot me too but it's fine, it's fine, it's fine."

and

*sad guitar music* "oooooo I'm a cowboy and I love my boyfriend"

and

"I made friends with a spider :)"

[sandybrett]

...you know what common literary concept *is* kinda linked to white colonial patriarchy? (Which does not mean that it's wrong to use it as inspiration, just that it's important to be able to talk about it critically.)

The Hero's Journey.

I want to study your creative writing teacher under a microscope. First she says every story follows the hero's journey, which made me assume she mostly read simple, commercial fiction. But no, she's a litfic snob who looks down on sci-fi and fantasy. And now this.

I had my writing class again last night!

this time, the focus was on storytelling viewpoint (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person). 3rd person omniscient is basically the story told from the POV of a godly narrator who knows everything and can pop into anyone's head. think 100 years of Solitude, or Dune, or Lord of the Flies.

anyway, our prof said that we couldn't, for instance, used 3rd person omniscient when telling a story about a queer couple in downtown toronto, because this storytelling viewpoint is irrevocably linked to white colonial patriarchy in the same way the swastika is liked to nazi Germany.

I'm an obnoxious contrarian, so I popped up my hand and said "if you have a background in literary studies, you might have that association, but wouldn't a reader not necessarily come at it with that in mind?" because I was thinking, I don't think Gabriel García Márquez was upholding white colonialism in his writing. and she said "sure, but I'm just telling you what the association is."

I did try looking up more info on this after class, and it's entirely possible that I was using the wrong key words, but I couldn't really.....find anything. still very confused.

[sandybrett]

I've said it before and by god I will say it again

self censorship is doing exactly what the fascists want. do not asterisk yourself or use euphemisms (e.g. motherf*cker, unalive, etc) because you believe that you'll get slapped on the wrist by whatever platform you're on

if said platform DOES remove or otherwise penalize you for using words like fuck, kill, suicide, rape, etc, this is not a platform you want to be on. don't put power in the fascist's hands in the name of accumulating likes, upvotes, and shares

[sandybrett]

Oh, dear god(s), please don't let "grape" become an actual synonym for rape. Please don't let grapes, the delicious, nutritious, innocent fruit, become associated with rape.

I'm not triggered by discussions of rape, so I can't really speak to that experience. But based on what I know about euphemism treadmills, I think this is more likely to lead to some people being triggered by the word "grape" in certain contexts, even when it's intended to refer to the fruit, than it is to make discussions of rape any easier.

Just the other day I was thinking about a particular scene in the children's novel The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin. Our protagonist, Mrs. Carillon, has been arrested, and several other characters march on the jail with hand-painted signs that say things like "Free Mrs. Carillon." One character intended to simply paint "Mrs. Carillon" on his sign, but he used a piece of cardboard from a box that had the word "Grape" on it, with the result that the sign ended up saying "Grape Mrs. Carillon." Nine-year-old me thought that was hilarious.

I would like for future generations to be able to enjoy that scene as I did, without their minds immediately jumping to "Rape Mrs. Carillon."

Hi new friends. Please don’t censor words, especially triggering ones. Seeing trigger words written l!ke th!s doesn’t stop them from being triggering.

It just stops Tumblr’s built in filter (see under settings) from working which many of us have in place to protect ourselves.

This has happened to me multiple times this week, and as someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation, has not been great.

You are not on TikTok or Insta, please use the full words so people can protect themselves. Thank you 💖

[sandybrett]

It's funny because for a long time the default advice was the exact opposite of this--that you should never delete or edit a previous sentence while you're writing a first draft, because it's so easy for that to turn in to trying to make the sentence perfect when that's not the point of a first draft.

I suspect it's a matter of finding a balance, and that balance will look different for everyone, and even for the same person at different times or on different projects.

One of the best writing advice I have gotten in all the months I have been writing is "if you can't go anywhere from a sentence, the problem isn't in you, it's in the last sentence." and I'm mad because it works so well and barely anyone talks about it. If you're stuck at a line, go back. Backspace those last two lines and write it from another angle or take it to some other route. You're stuck because you thought up to that exact sentence and nothing after that. Well, delete that sentence, make your brain think because the dead end is gone. It has worked wonders for me for so long it's unreal

[sandybrett]

Yet another way in which they're doing exactly what they accuse the other side of doing. If "people with different genitalia are fundamentally different Types of People and the boundaries between them must never be blurred" isn't a "Gender ideology" I don't know what is.

“Deprogramming” is wild. “To fight cults we will kidnap someone and do all of the worst possible things a cult can do to someone except we’ll concentrate it in a week”

[sandybrett]

I know this seems very obvious but I am just going to subtweet a genre of Tumblr posts by saying that understanding how a system works even if you are opposed to it is a good thing, and in fact, definitely helps you be more effective in opposing it! This often includes understanding the thought process and goals of people who are participating in it even if you disagree with them. This is especially true when even if a system is bad it is serving some necessary load-bearing purposes in people's daily lives which you will have to deal with.

This post is about many things but it is especially about everyone who proudly says they have no understanding of economics.

[sandybrett]

I just listened to the version in my music library, which I downloaded from Soundcloud... and no, it has not always been that loud.

im sorry for bothering you about your music again mr. begone, but there is a strange beep at 1:19 in “true love” on both the bandcamp and spotify tracks, it caught me so off guard both times

just thought you might want to know.

and if it was on purpose, why the frickity frack did you wake me up from a nap?

...has that note always been that loud?

[sandybrett]

I think I read a quote on here from someone observing that even die-hard supporters of (I think?) the Axis powers in World War II seemed apprehensive about actually winning the war, like they had a sense that "fascism could be fought for and died for but not really lived under" or something like that? Does anyone remember the post I'm talking about?

[sandybrett]

I really did not think this plan through when I came up with it as a sleep-deprived college student.

Anyway, I was caller #55. If you know, you know.

I'm starting to have second thoughts about the whole *anonymity* thing.

For those of you who are new here: in 2021 I started getting extremely frustrated with the state of the publishing world. The pressure to market yourself based on your identity. The expectation that you'll amass a bunch of Twitter followers. I had previously dreamed of being a traditionally published author, but I realized I didn't want it under those terms.

So I decided to go completely to the other extreme. While I would have been perfectly comfortable being *open* about my gender and sexuality and race and disability status as long as they didn't come to define my work, I also wanted the stand up for the rights of others to *not* be open about those things. So I would self-publish online as Sandy Brett.

Sandy Brett experiences executive dysfunction and occasionally reblogs advice to fellow writers on how to deal with it. Sandy Brett lives in the northeastern United States. Sandy Brett comes from an upper-middle-class background, which is part of why Sandy can *afford* to opt out of the "please buy my book because I'm [demographic]" game. Aside from that, Sandy Brett has no identity outside of being a writer.

This creates some problems. When I join fandom Discords, I join them as Sandy, because I want to be there under the name I would use to write fanfiction, and I want my fanfiction to be under the same name as my original fiction. But it really limits my ability to form friendships in those spaces if people are comparing their experiences with Example Disorder and taking Hypotheticaline and I'm holding back from contributing.

Furthermore, trying to make friends as Sandy Brett kind of runs counter to my initial plan to be the next Elena Ferrante. An author's work should stand on its own, and they shouldn't have to be actively engaged with their fanbase on social media. There was a time when you could be a bit of a recluse and have a career as a writer, and I think we should go back to that.

But I'm not a recluse. A major introvert, yes. But I enjoy meeting new people, and I even kind of enjoy promoting myself if I'm able to do it on my own terms. And maintaining this level of compartmentalization is starting to frustrate me.

[sandybrett]

One for twelve, as predicted. Oh well, at least I discovered some good music!

These are my predictions for possible title-songs for the next episode, based on my knowledge of Dylan's musical tastes, in roughly descending order of how likely I think they are.

"Burn Them" by Greensky Bluegrass

"Prairie Fire That Wanders About" by Sufjan Stevens

"Fire And The Thud" by Arctic Monkeys

"Lampshades On Fire" by Modest Mouse

"We've Got A Big Mess On Our Hands" by The Academy Is...

"No One Knows My Plan" by They Might Be Giants

"Push Back the Hands" by They Might Be Giants

"The Crows Are Coming For Us" by From First To Last

"A Younger Version Of Myself" by Telefon Tel Aviv

"Fireproof" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

"Drop The Mike" by Weatherbox

"Moments Before The Smashing Of Future Ryan" by Weatherbox

"An Attempt to Tip the Scales" by Bright Eyes

"The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box" by Modest Mouse

"You Give Death a Bad Name" by Sufjan Stevens

"Where Are All the Scientists Now?" by Jukebox the Ghost

"Time Bomb" by The Dismemberment Plan

"Everybody Panic" by Jukebox the Ghost

"Our Life Is Not a Movie, Or Maybe" by Okkervil River

"Your Past Life As a Blast" by Okkervil River

"It's All Part of the Plan" by the Punch Brothers

"That's Physics, Baby" by Pool Kids

"The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" by R.E.M.

"Time Crisis" by Sammus

"Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out of Hand?" by Waylon Jennings

"Bruno is Orange" by Hop Along