Macha S. Wicket

Something I love about writing fanfiction is that when canon drops an absolute dungheap of a writing decision, you do not have to just sit there and be disappointed about it. You have a whole world of interesting options.

1) Nothing here is salvageable. This plot point is a trash fire and it’s quickly setting the rest of the franchise ablaze. We as a fandom have elected to ignore it. It did not happen. I will write events as if they continued correctly.

2) Nothing here is salvageable, trashfire, etcetera, but let’s just play in the space for a moment. If we allow that fine, this incredibly stupid thing happened, can we mulch it down and grow something interesting from it? What led to things ending up so off the rails? Where do we go from here? What are the worldbuilding implications? I will dig deeply into this dungheap and make something worthwhile out of it.

3) There is the seed of a really good idea in here. The execution was garbage, but if it had been done differently, with better writing, with better pacing, with more thought and care and tact, it could have been golden. I will redo it, but better.

And there are many interesting combinations of correct/worthwhile/better! I love delving into this in my own writing, and seeing it in other people’s writing, because suddenly your fic is having a conversation with the original work. It’s transformative! It says something about what you personally loved and hated and took away from the story!

So, my spouse has been exploring his gender lately; he also just built himself a new laptop. Today he told me that he in an attempt to process some genderfeels through metaphor, he made a post on a trans forum along the lines of: "I'm a lifelong Windows user and I think I'm pretty good at it. I want to find out what Linux has to offer but I'm afraid I wouldn't be any good at it. And how do you choose the right Linux distro, anyway? Do you have to try them all?"

The responses, he said, were a mix of useful advice about feeling out your gender and useful advice about choosing a Linux distro.

I love trans people so much

Spouse (still he/him for now) recently decided to pick out some more feminine glasses -- he was going for the librarian look, he said. He noted his pick was "subtle enough" he'd "probably" feel comfortable wearing them at work. Of course, he's been wearing his old glasses while waiting for the new ones to be ready.

Well, today these two things happened while he was at work:

I don't usually read coincidences as signs, but,

Update: She really liked Linux

(Also, her name is Eve now)

Oh hello,

Hot tip from your neighbor archivist, there is no greater lie than “don’t worry, I’ll remember”

No. You won’t. Write down who is in that photo. Note the date and event. Put a year on everything.

“But it is -insert person and/or event here- there is no way I will forget!”

1) WRONG. Years get murky, relationships fade, people change, family members look alike (especially when very old or very young)

2) even if you somehow do, the next generation has no idea who what where when or why.

This message brought to you by a very tired archivist who has spent days trying to find and ID 3 photographs at work and also deal with all her grandmother’s photos when her children can’t name their aunts and uncles let alone cousins.

I say this not just as an archivist, but as someone who regularly has to look up when she got married because I can’t remember.

(I got that engraved inside my spouse’s ring for a reason!)

MSR in their first night at a motel [room].

You know that Chris Fleming line that goes "Call yourself a community organizer even though you're not on speaking terms with your roommates"?

I honestly think every leftist who talks about the "revolution" like Christians talk about the rapture needs to spend a year trying to organize their workplace. Anyone who sincerely talks about building a movement so vast and all-encompassing that it overwhelms all existing power structures needs the dose of humility that comes with realizing they can't even build a movement to get people paid better at a badly run AMC Theaters where everyone already hates the manager.

And if you already have an organized workplace, get involved and see and experience the work it takes to make social change! Either you get a slap of humility, or you get skills that will help you in the future, or both.

Yes absolutely!

Like, for context since this has fully broken containment, I actually am part of a union, with a couple different leadership roles in my unit and I'm also involved in doing stuff with my local. And we are always so, so desperate for more people to get involved.

People like to talk about unions as this, like, scary group of hardened activists who are very intimidating and hostile to outsiders --- and maybe that exists somewhere, but in my experience unions are mostly seven overworked, over-caffeinated people (six of them women) who would love nothing more than to add you to three google spreadsheets and the most unhinged Signal group you've ever seen in your life.

Organizing never ends; it doesn't stop once you win your union vote. You constantly have to keep people onboard and engaged.

It's hard, it's frustrating, it's overwhelming, and it's 100% worth it.

@a-method-in-it thank you for this, and for keeping it positive! EVERYONE who advocates for policy changes, or political movements, or 'the revolution' needs to go volunteer with your local political party. Go find your local chapter of Dems or Soc Dems or whatever. Volunteer with them, and see how fucking hard it is to do ANYTHING when you're in a room of people who are all SUPPOSED to agree with each other.

I don't mean this as a discouraging "then you'll get beat down by the system & learn your place, you yappy upstart". I mean it as "then you'll get a better understanding of how to be effective in advocating for change". Getting into tumblr or twitter flame wars over who's the most ideologically pure is one thing, but you need to understand what it's like out here on the streets where you're trying to politely tell a grumpy Cleetus & Joanne how they're being exploited by capitalism, and they just want to know how Jesus fits into all this, and for you to get off their porch.

new person: i’m late to this fandom/ship.. there’s not much point writing fic/making art for it is there?

The Fans:

W̡̨͍̞̯ͬͦͤ̍̽͑̌͠E̼̠̪̩̯͈̩̖̳͛͋ͧͭͪ ̣̣̐̚ͅH̡͇͓̓̈́͛ͨ̏͛ͯŲ͔̙̳͇͔̺͓̲͚̐̇ͯ̃́̈N̛̈͐͗̍҉͕̗̗̠̞̗̠̱Ǧ̵̹̜̪̪̖̫̌ͨ̂̇͂ͬȨ̶̥̻̱̦̤̥̬̬͕ͩͪͤͧ̇͗̿R̵̢̘̘̩̠̜̭̭̯̅ͩ͂͆̉̅̎ͩ͜ͅ ̛̖͎̞̎̂̐͊̿̑ͣ͊̐͜͟F̵̹͈̯̘̣̀̽Ô̲̯͇̪̰̼͕̬͒ͣͪ̎͜R͓͚̱͔͌̍̔͐̓̈̚̕͜ͅ ̺̥͙͐́͟ͅN̲̹̘̤̱̅̊ͨ̀͝E̸̺͉̦̼͇̜͑ͯͭ̀W͈̳͉̘͈͓̅̃͘ ̸̣̜͙͉̀̊ͤ̐͐ͫͣ́͝B̵̨͇͍̟͎̞̦̝̄̎̌L̶̠̲̗̙ͥͮ̚Ŏ̊̋ͬ̉͡͏̞̥̤̫̱̪̝̮O̧̳͇͎͊̆ͭ͗̎ͤD̴̯͔̳̘̘̪̼ͨ̓̆͜ͅ 

*BLEEP*

@ms-demeanor unfortunately this one you gotta use headphones because it is exactly the sound and I think Tiny Bastard will hate this video.

I am so tempted to play it out loud but I'm reblogging it to listen to when she is in another room.

I don’t really Go Here but u can always rely on this man to read a right wing politician’s outfit for filth

I mean. Just devastating 😭

This man has LETHAL comebacks. Idiots keep trying to get one over on him and he has never missed

not an author’s note but it made me stop scrolling and laugh so hard I cried

My grandfather and my godfather (a beloved neighbor and dear family friend) had a long standing bet- for one dollar- about who would die first. Both of them being slightly pessimistic (in the funny way), they both insisted that they themselves would be the first to die. Any time my grandfather had a health scare, he’d gleefully call up my godfather to boast that he’d be passing “any day now” and he was sure to win the bet. It was a big family joke and they were always amiably sparring and comparing notes about who was in worse shape, medically speaking.

When my grandfather was in hospice care dying of liver cancer, my godfather was quite ill also. It took him great effort to make the journey to see his dying friend. As he came into the room, supported by a family member, he shuffled to my grandpa’s bedside and silently handed him a dollar bill. He was ceding his loss of the bet, as they both knew who was going first. My grandpa had been in quite bad shape for a while and was no longer able to speak but let me tell you he snatched that dollar with unexpected strength and literally laughed aloud. He knew exactly what the gesture meant and he couldn’t help but find the humor within the grief. It was the last time any of us heard my grandpa laugh, as he passed shortly after.

When I talk about my appreciation for “dark humor” I’m not so much thinking about edgy jokes, but rather the human instinct to somehow, impossibly, both find and appreciate the absurdity that is so often folded into the profound grief of life and death. When I tell this story I think it kind of perturbs people sometimes, but it’s honestly one of my favorite memories about two men I really deeply admired. I could never hope for anything more than for my loved ones to remember me laughing until the very end, and taking joy in a little joke as one of my final acts.

We lost something as a culture when computers stopped screaming in agony as you connected them to the internet.

You would not have survived the dark ages. A webring would spell great peril. There was no search. And the dark things lurked out in the open in those days.

The computer screamed because it knew.

if it didn't torture a landline phone for the duration of the process, was it really internet?

My dad hit me with the info that there was an option to turn it off... the sound... the whole time. But he didn't want to tell me. Or to stop me from the, presumably character building, ritual of struggling to smother it to death with a pillow at 12:30am so I could be on the Forbidden Web and not wake my parents.

Image of a text that reads: In conversation with some coworkers, today, one of them said that homeless people should have to work for their meals just like the rest of us.

I said, "Okay, I know a man who is homeless. He'd be happy to work. He's got a business degree. He would be happy to come clean your house, do your yard work, or help you with your filing, walk your dogs, babysit your kids, or just about any office job. What time tomorrow should he come see you?"

They all just looked at me.

I said, "Mind you, he's homeless, so he hasn't showered in a while and the only clothes he has are the ones on his back because he lost all his stuff last week when ge got picked up for vagrancy and they wouldn't let him go back for his bag. It would be a few weeks before what you are paying him is enough to get shelter and such."

And still they stared at me.

I finished, "See? It isn't that easy. He can't get a job because he's homeless with no access to hot water or clean clothes. He can't get access to shelter, hot water or clean clothes without a job. You want him to work for his meals? Give him a hand out of the vicious circle. Stop pretending that all he has to do is get a job."

Unhoused people are not intruders into our communities, they are our communities’ failure to take care of their own.

hey, i've been homeless about three times, depending on what you count as homeless. And there is something else very important that people need to realize.

you know those studies that show that if you don't physically touch a human baby it will die even if it has everything else it needs? And the ones that show that as an adult being ignored by everyone around them can drive a person mad?

When you are homeless, no one ever touches you except in an abusive way, and the only people that don't pointedly ignore you are usually treating you negatively.

Being surrounded by people who treat you like a pariah is like a form of mental torture, and it breaks you down mentally.

It only takes a few weeks of that before you are doing things like having imaginary conversations out out loud. Being homeless will take a person with a normal mental deficiency like high stress or mild depression (you know, things you are likely to feel if you become homeless) and it will tank them all the way down into delusional or dissociative etc in a pretty short amount of time.

(incidentally this is why so many homeless people wind up drug addicts. You do ANYthing to escape your situation, and it's not the physical situation you are trying to escape, it's the mental one)

the point is, when you see a homeless person doing something like screaming at an empty park bench, you don't know if they are homeless because they were already crazy, or if being homeless is the thing that drove them crazy.

Every time i see a discussion about homelessness that asks what to do about the mentally ill people on the streets, i never see this point addressed, and it's an important one.

Either way, they need help. You can't just say something like "they should have to work for their dinner"... often that's not even really relevant to the situation. If you help them regain their sanity and stability enough, yeah, a lot of homeless people would actually prefer to work for what they have, be a normal person and live a normal life, but behaving "normal" just isn't possible for most of them in their current state.

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

I think all computers should have cd slots and all phones should have headphone ports send tumble

HOLD THE LINE!! KEEP PUSHING!!!!!

Sorry babes but as someone who lived lug around 500 cds they can die. To me lps are at least pretty and pretentious like a fine wine. Cds have no point

the point is cds are sexy as hell. sorry you dont know what sex is.

visual diagram btw ^

@danepopfrippery

The real point is that you OWN a CD. You do NOT own anything digital you purchase.

Google Play stole hundreds of dollars worth of music I paid them for from me by forcing me to upload it to YouTube Music (or lose it entirely) which is behind a subscription paywall, requiring me now to pay more money every month if I want to listen to MY music I PAID for without constant advertising.

You do not own anything digitally purchased. It can be taken back from you at any time and it is fully legal for big corporations to do so for some reason.

CDs can't be taken from you unless they come into your house or car in person to physically pry them out of your cold dead hands.

That's why the resurgence. As funny as that person's reply to you was, it's not in fact because they look sexy. It's because you actually own them.

Look- CDs are your friend. CD-ROMs and CD drives with the capacity to burn? Are your friends with benefits.

Can anyone teach me how to burn Digital only songs into CDs?

i can ask my dad!! i think you need a certain piece of hardware, but i dont think its difficult!

not rn tho hes asleep

I would love that thank you!!

here you go!!

My contribution to the discussion

My burner in my old desktop works like this:

Empty cd in the slot

Open cd on desktop

Drag music files in

Done

I spent so many hours burning CDs in high school. AND I STILL HAVE THEM. IN A CD FOLDER IN MY CAR. Because sometimes I drive through the mountains and lose cell reception and can no longer stream Spotify over bluetooth.

CDs are useful, my lambs.

Also this whole thread has made me feel Very Over 30.