Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.

Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason.

“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter

why is “everyone deserves to live and get the help they need, even the ones I don’t like” such a controversial statement

Also “fucking up should not be a death sentence.”

You have a lot of potential - but I want to remind you that you are worthy and valuable as you are right now, even if you have yet to get in touch with said potential.

angelica pickles deserved better. her parents failed her so bad to where her only true friend had to help her grow as a person. i used to hate her, know i realize she’s just a sad girl. it’s tragic.

Remember that most people recover from mental illness and that most of them were once convinced that they'd never recover. Being mentally ill fucks with your perspective, but if you look at the facts, most people do recover eventually no matter how hopeless their situation looked while they were really sick. Hold onto that and don't stop fighting.

The creator of what was probably *the* Mary Sue Litmus Test back in the day has disavowed the term/test and doesn’t mince words about why.

I was gonna just talk in the tags but I changed my mind because I have some stuff to say.

This test? The Mary Sue Litmus Test? I used this religiously. I would make a new character and then run them through this like my life depended on it. I was thirteen, and I thought that if my characters were Mary-Sues then no one would take me seriously. I bought totally into the popular idea that any woman who had more than two talents was a Mary-Sue. I was convinced that I was better than those other people who had OC’s that I saw as Mary-Sues. I would look at examples of Mary-Sues and try to avoid them, even if they were characters that I personally loved. I didn’t even need to click that link. I still had it bookmarked in my ‘writing’ bookmark folder from seven years ago.

It drove me to change my first ever OC’s. I was thirteen. Thirteen! I was an 8th grader in middle school utterly terrified of people seeing my sexy demon OC or my pretty immortal OC or my cool freedom fighter OC and the first thing they’d think was that they were too good. The culture around (mostly women) original characters needing to be watered down or having to have the character’s (mostly women’s) skills and talents justified were toxic as hell to me, and I’m sure to others.

Seeing this today was a major blast from the past, and I’m so glad that the creator changed their outlook on this whole thing. I hope that disclaimer will ward off another creative eighth-grader before they get tricked into buying into the shame culture that forms around the creation of original characters.

Keep seeing a few points getting brought up in the notes:

Even the creator knows the quiz is harmful, and so is the idea of a Mary-Sue.

The point is that young creators who want to make powerful, fun, beautiful, and universe-breaking original characters found this quiz and been led to think there’s something wrong with their characters. That there’s something wrong with them for writing it. This is my personal experience. 

And I want to say the experience of being young and writing overpowered characters who are right about everything is a natural process of learning to write. There is nothing wrong with this process. 

As someone who used to write Mary Sue’s….it’s never about the character themselves as much as how the canon characters act around them. If the canon characters are ooc without it being purposeful, then like…that’s just not learning yet how to write character relationships well. There’s nothing wrong with having overpowered characters. Go nuts.

Any criticism that is only or disproportionately leveled at female characters is a sexist criticism and should be re-examined.  I know published male authors who proudly brag about their work being self-insert fiction and get applauded.  I, meanwhile, was afraid to write blondes for years because of the accusations that my MC was just me but better.  This test does 2d10 psychic damage to young creators, and the term should be disavowed.

The postwoman was telling me this morning that our little ritual of morning coffee & gossip might come to an end next year because of new regulations for rural post offices—postmen and women in the countryside are ‘less efficient’ than their colleagues in cities, so they will now have a tracking app on their phone monitoring their whereabouts and how long they spend in each house, and will be penalised (more postboxes added to their shift) if they spend more than X minutes per postbox, because if you have time to chat for 5 minutes you have time to deliver more post, which means employing less people and saving money. The postwoman said “The guidelines only talk in terms of postboxes, 800 postboxes per day, delivering post to postboxes—this whole time I thought I was delivering post to people!… A lot of people are waiting for me outside their door when they hear me arrive, am I supposed to throw the letters at them from behind the wheel and not even leave the car to kiss them hello and ask how they are? It’s not like I stay for an hour.” 

She will also no longer be allowed to do any favours—there are elderly people living in isolated farms around here, and she (and other postmen) often offer to bring some groceries to them (which they don’t buy during their shift) in winter when the roads are bad, or meds from the pharmacy, and starting next year there will be inspectors doing surprise inspections of postmen’s cars to check for anything that is not post, with penalties if they find groceries or other stuff. I couldn’t think of why so she explained gloomily that the post company started a (paid) service to provide this kind of assistance so it is now wrong to offer the same help for free. 

We joked about having secret subversive chats over coffee next year but yeah this is all pretty depressing. She said doing people little favours (like when she offered to ask around in farms to find me some kittens to adopt, and deliver the kittens to me) and exchanging a few words to check on people and their little stories every day is what she loves about her job, and these new rules seem to have been invented specifically to make her hate her job. Capitalism makes for a really joyless, loveless society.

I had to check, but op is from France, just like me.

My guess, the real reason behind this change is not that the Poste doesn’t want postmen and postwomen to talk to people, but that they want people to subscribe to and pay for their special services, especially their senior packs. So, yup, capitalism sucks.

According to some right wing governors, it’s to no longer offer the $300 extra unemployment from the federal government…

They are imbeciles. It’s simple supply and demand: there’s high demand for workers, but not enough supply.

Just pay more, and you’ll get your damn workers.

Can’t wait for Americans to think Europeans stole Eurovision from them

I jumped on the uquiz train! 🌈💕🎉

💕Build a care package and I’ll tell you something people love about you ✨

You're passionate You're fierce about the things you care about. Whether it's something you love or hate, you have an opinion and you're not afraid to share it. You dive head-first on projects and work until you're happy with it.

Stuff kids on tumblr better relearn

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.

5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.

6. Content creators are not your parents and owe you nothing, not even a breakdown on why their content isn’t problematic. You don’t get to demand a dissertation denouncing any and everything unhealthy in a piece you don’t like. Move on.

7. Tagging is a nicety but not an obligation. You can message people, politely, and ask them to tag things, and many people will, but understand that it’s their blog and they aren’t obliged to say yes. Unfollow and block when you need to. Circling back to number 1, you are responsible for curating your own experience.

8. Don’t be a jerk. Remember at the end of the day, there are actual living, breathing people behind each screen name. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face in real life. 

I cannot stress enough how important it is to remember this.

9. Respect others who set boundaries for themselves. Don’t create fake accounts to go around a block. Don’t harass someone who unfollows you. People do not owe you any explanation of why their boundaries are there but you DO owe them the decency of respecting them.

also actually to make another point: get a real life outside of this website. the way this website encourages you to constantly seek out problems with everything and to be in a constant state of wearing yourself down trying to appear as a perfect progressive activist all the time so people don’t “cancel” you isn’t healthy. a lot of the discourse people get into on this website does not exist in the real world. your friends and family are not going to “cancel” you if you don’t parrot back everyone else’s opinions perfectly. you are not obligated to put every single thing you enjoy under a microscope. 

this website really encourages black and white thinking in terms of other people, ourselves, and the things we enjoy, and it’s not healthy. it’s good to be critical and conscious, but not so much so that you tear yourself down for not being perfect and can’t let yourself just have fun and enjoy stuff. 

People often mistake “your feelings are valid” with “your reaction based on your feelings is ok”

Which isn’t the same thing

You’re entitled to how you feel. You’re not entitled to behave however you want based off of those feelings

some people think it’s a one way pass to be a jerk and it’s like….no

Someone told me about the cognitive bias form called “curse of knowledge” the other day and I’m obsessed w/ thinking about it.

The basic premise is that it is “when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.” Or in other words, once you learn something, you can’t at all remember what it was like to not have that knowledge or context anymore. It creates gulfs between people who have different knowledge bases who are communicating.

This has come up for me in life SO MUCH around topics of abuse, boundaries, consent, and relationship dynamics. (All types of relationships, not just romantic.) I’ve read about and studied and dissected these things to death so it’s second nature for me to talk about it. Then, I will think that a friend and I have the same values of what’s abusive or acceptable.......but then later I learn that what they meant is totallyyyyy different than me.

Or when I bump into people who truly think that thin = healthy or who don’t understand what being trans is at even the most basic level. I’m like “Jesus this asshole is hopeless” and I no longer remember what it was like back when I very FIRST learned these concepts.

It’s one thing if someone is willfully ignorant or a proud bigot. But if someone is TRULY learning something new, they need the super super basics patiently available to them so they can get the knowledge you have...and then THAT could become a bridge between you.

This “curse” feels important for me to just bear in mind before I write people off. And to just not assume that someone else and I are talking about the same thing. Maybe it’s a case where they have knowledge I don’t.

Oh shit. I've tried explaining this to people so many times. I genuinely forget that other people don't know the things I know.

One time I was having a lazy argument about evolution with a Jehova's Witness. I just threw out my basic talking points, basically assuming that I was dealing with an educated but stubborn person. Turns out, she had NO IDEA what the actual details of evolution are. She had zero understanding of mutations or even how chromosomes work. Once I backed up and gave her a mini lecture on evolution and she actually understood it, her mind was blown. She ended up having a serious crisis of faith and I still wonder how that went for her in the end.

Since then if someone is arguing a bad point very passionately, I try to figure out where the disconnect in information is. And sometimes I'm the one with wrong information and I learn something new! But when I'm right I try to be more patient and introduce the new information as clearly and neutrally as possible. And you know what? A lot of times it works wonderfully and I have a new ally or friend. Sometimes not, but at that point it isn't on me for just assuming someone has all the information I do when they don't.

Good to know it has a name! And now I need to tell all the people.

Yesss thank you for sharing this example!

Like I get that so often people can be close minded and aren’t actually acting in good faith to listen or be open to changing views at all. But sometimes it’s not that.......there’s actually a serious case of the curse of knowledge. Major knowledge gaps are a challenge but if they can be identified and navigated around, great shit can happen.

This is also tied to why access to education and information is critical.

This is a big issue for me with things I remember learning in school! I tend to just assume that everything I learned in school growing up is common knowledge. But every now and then, someone will say something that proves otherwise, and then I suddenly remember that they grew up in the 60's, or lived in a different area, or didn't take AP Bio, and they literally don't have the knowledge that I'd been assuming throughout the entire conversation.

how to train your dragon (2010) is a perfect film