toastflower

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someone on AO3 left a comment on an in-progress work of mine which amounted to “I’ve done my best to be patient but you CLEARLY don’t know what you’re doing, this story is full of holes and it seems like you’re just making it up as you go along, time to throw in the towel on this piece of dreck!” and I just

friend. please. there’s better fic out there, and we agree mine isn’t likely to improve. Be kinder to yourself and ✨ give up on me ✨

but also ?? this complaint?? “GRR! Damn your rambling, goofy prose! Curse this inconsistent upload schedule!!” bestie I have bad news for you about several of the other works in this Archive Of Our Own

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Sometimes being in environmental law means that your schedule for the afternoon gets completely thrown because a colleague standing the middle of some woods calls to tell you that there’s gunk in the stream and it smells bad.

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I love articles like this.

The real wisdom of Solomon, however, came from user’s complaints that Skag Gully, one of the game’s earliest areas, had too many eponymous Skags. Players reported that they were running into too many clusters of enemies while moving through the Gully, offering feedback like, “this isn’t fun, this is boring.” Gearbox, as a result, tripled the number of Skags in the area. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t a travel area that had too many enemies getting in the way,” Armstrong said. “It was a combat area.”

The absolute madness to respond to feedback by just doing the opposite, and yet it works!! There's lessons to be learned here.

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reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

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a majority of you know nothing about how porn is made and distributed and the people in power are counting on you not knowing. i’m so tired.

one of the major things they count on you not knowing is that tube sites do not produce even a decimal of the content you consume. tube sites are just video platforms. they are access to content that isn’t put behind a paywall in the first place. mainstream studios that can often do put shortened versions of their films on tube sites for advertisement. these only make up a fraction of the content that people actively consume as well - much more of it is independently created than folks realize.

with pornhub’s model program, a MASSIVE amount of the content there is uploaded consensually by independent performers themselves. we get ad revenue and, as previously stated, it makes for decent advertisement. i believe the other big tube sites have programs that are similar. and yes, we are age verified when we apply to become part of the model program. every single thing we upload has to go through approval before it goes public.

i’m saying this because every single time a porn-related post goes around someone brings up tube sites before anything else, and they often bring up dated or entirely false information. PH and all of the big tube sites used to have MASSIVE issues (that we warned people about back then - nobody listened) with non-consensually uploaded content but they’ve long since had to change their stance on this and become fairly strict. i’m not saying there’s zero content of that nature. it’s just not all that different than any platform that has video content. all of them face issues of copyright and non-consensual media. (and i’d say they enforce their rules arguably better than platforms like say, facebook.)

and that’s not even to mention how it isn’t even a small facet of the industry despite the general public grouping it altogether. you cannot accept any kind of profit on onlyfans, manyvids, apclips, etc unless you go through a process that includes identity verification. you cannot upload any content involving another person besides who you already have paperwork for. that paperwork includes age verification. and while i’m absolutely there are people that find ways around this… that’s literally everywhere lol. in no other industry does that small outlier define the whole practice.

like… ALL of the propaganda, all the proposed legislation against sex work and specifically porn paints the exact opposite picture of what i’m telling you and so many of you are eating it up. they want you to have a visceral reaction so you don’t think critically and now - watching it hurt people outside the porn industry - we’re seeing what that does in the long term.

we have warned you. we will continue to warn you. the choice to stay ignorant is the choice to condemn yourself to a discriminatory society that’ll be overall worse off in the long run. it will run you over the moment it sees you as perverse, too.

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Hi my name is Ozy'mandias, King of Kings and I have two vast and trunkless legs of stone and a frown and wrinkled lip and a lot of people tell me I look like the Younger Memnon (a/n if you don't know who he is get da hell out of here!). I'm a statue but my visage is shattered and lies half sunk on the sand. I’m also a colossal wreck, and I stand in the desert of an antique land where I’ve been for a really long time (I’m ancient). I’m a lifeless thing (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly the passions the sculptor read and stamped on me, which yet survive. I love sculptors and I get all my expressions from there. For example today I was wearing a sneer of cold command and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was standing in the desert. The lone and level sands were boundless and bare, which I was very happy about. A lot of mighty looked upon my works and despaired. I put my middle finger up at them.

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thanks for the comments and asks saying i'm being mean for very mildly saying i don't like when people make social decisions based on horoscopes.

your behavior has made me realize i should be "meaner": horoscopes are fake.

the position of planets and balls of gas did not in any way impact your personality or destiny. it has nothing to do with what kind of people you are compatible with, despite what an app or magazine told you.

i think sincere belief in horoscopes shows a concerning propensity to trust pseudoscience and a susceptibility to confirmation bias.

i'm pretty tired of having to tiptoe around this kind of thing and include disclaimers. if you genuinely think you shouldn't be friends with someone because of the date they came out of a uterus, you're being a clown.

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(cw: sexual assault) the pedophile -as it is understood outside of academic circles- is a mythical creature. the idea that a complete stranger who kidnaps and sexually assaults kids is their biggest threat is absolutely insane; not one case of CSA (child sexual assault) in a hundred looks like that. CSA is committed almost uniformly by adults in a preestablished position of authority (such as family, family friends, clergy, or teachers) and in a way that a victim who doesn't know what sexual assault looks like will be left unsure what happened to them. without knowing concretely how sex and sexuality works, would you be able to tell the difference between molestation and the various other forms of unwanted physical touch and abuse kids are regularly subjected to? would it even seem that different? but parenthood and the submission of youth to adults as institutions are threatened by the reality of CSA. adults need to justify their ownership of children through an imagined outside threat constantly held at bay through their diligence. the truth - that putting yourself in such a position of authority over children directly enables abuse (including sexual abuse) - is thrown aside.

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dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better

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A few years ago while trying to find ways to commit suicide as painlessly as possible, I came across a PDF of Dr. Paul Quinnett's The Forever Decision. Thinking it might go into actual methods of suicide (I read an article once that actually did that and was trying to find it again) I started to read it, and I think I only got about two pages in before I was crying too much to actually see the words.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

It's intentionally legal to copy and redistribute this book to keep it as accessible as possible, and it's very easy to find, but here's a link for it anyways.

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How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox

*deep, calming breath* On the plus side, the steps at that link were very clear and easy to follow.

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Mojo Jojo’s novel is off to a great start

He was as tall as he was tall, and his eyes were the color they were. To describe his hair one would say that he had some. His face had all the features you'd expect, and none of the ones you wouldn't. "There he is," people would often say of him, but only when he was there. And they were right.

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Male writers writing female characters:

“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”

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trying to figure out how jon would realistically relate to his queerness is a bit of a never ending conundrum, because, on the one hand, he's a super emotionally repressed and ashamed person who spends a lot of his arc at turns feverishly adhering to and trying to free himself from a highly gendered performance of class. his instinctive response to feeling vulnerable is to cover up his emotions, deepen his voice, exaggerate his accent, and make it look like he's above all those weak-willed credulous idiots to disguise the fact that he very much feels like a weak-willed credulous idiot. he's so used to ignoring his emotions that he can't even figure out what they are when directly asked by his dearest loved one, and he's got a, shall we say, Bad relationship to his body and his feelings of ownership over it.

on the other hand, he uses terminology like "male presenting" in his own private notes, he exclusively wears his ex gf's clothes for two months without batting an eyelid, he has basically no reaction at all to finding out other people in his social circle are queer, he dgaf about experiencing homophobic microaggressions, and his romantic relationship with a man is potentially the only thing in the entire show that he isn't paranoid about fucking up and losing. to me this paints a picture of a person who has manged to internalize really quite crushing and life-altering queerphobia about everything except, somehow, for his actual queerness. he thinks he's a lily-livered spineless wimp and an inhuman heartless abomination but that has nothing to do with his biromantic asexuality.

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It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles

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Do not think for a moment that this admin is only going after trans folks. They are ultimately going after the whole LGBTQ community. They start small, like getting rid of a hotline option, then go BIG.

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Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating