when you grow up rich you’re kind of by default disconnected from reality. you learn that you can just… make things happen. an expensive education? top-quality healthcare? a fancy seat on the plane? you just wave your credit card in the right direction AND IT HAPPENS. you get your way, every time, immediately, and to your exact specifications. you’re also immune to failure by default because if you fuck something up you can afford to start over, so even if you reach your 70s with a trail of financial disasters behind you, you’re still rich, so they can’t have been that bad. you’re blind to your own incompetence. and you’re inevitably going to end up with very few, if any, genuine friends, especially if you’re inherently a bit of an asshole. instead you’ll be surrounded by people pursuing their own agendas, who will tell you literally anything you want to hear: that you’re a genius, that everyone loves you, that you can successfully accomplish anything you set your mind to. which you totally can, of course, but because of your money, not your personal merit.
trump is not a pathological narcissist with the under-developed mind of a child and a half dozen other mental disorders experts have not yet reached a consensus about. he’s too used to being obscenely rich and likely never had a problem in his life he knew he couldn’t solve by throwing enough money at it. and right now he’s angry that he can’t use that to get his own way anymore.
like, there’s enough stigma around mental illness without talking about it as if it’s the reason a rich entitled fuckhead is going to jump-start the nuclear apocalypse.
He also believes that “master race” bullshit. He thinks rich white people are genetically superior. This is a guy who has literally said he thinks success is genetic. Let’s be really explicit about this, most upperclass white people in the US do believe that bullshit that says they are genetically as well as morally superior to poor people and people of color. Old school eugenics is still the norm among the wealthy in the US. Trump isn’t pushing eugenics by accident, he’s pushing eugenics because it’s what him and his buddies firmly believe.
And using ableism as the basis for attacking him isn’t attacking his views and the ideas they rely on, it’s supporting them.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
Okay so the other day I was taking the trash out and my nail caught on a spider egg sac!
Unfortunately it split open and all the little eggs came tumbling out and luckily landed in a box.
After getting them all in a glass, I was left with several questions, no answers and guilt! But I asked in a few spider groups and got a tutorial on making a spider incubator!
Sooo! We went through a few different stages of mini Orbeez
And by mini I mean REALLY mini!
But finally we started seeing development!
See the little white dot?! That’s a wee lil baby!
Then more started showing up!
Then the day came!! Little legs started showing up!!
And then!!!
Today I just went to look and!!
!!!
MY BABIES ARE HATCHING!
Update
They’re perfect in every way and I love my dumb spider babies.
y’all didn’t even add a tutorial of how to do this so imma put one right here
1. type in cmd.exe into your windows search and right click on Command Promt search result and select “Run as Administator”. 2. Type/Copypase in
net.exe stop “Windows Search” and make sure Windows Search is in quotations. It should then respond saying “The Windows Search service is stopping” and then tell you it’s stopped.
This is only a temp fix though, if you want it switched off permanently then do THIS:
1. Press the Windows key + R at the same time and type in services.msc.
2. Scroll until you find Windows Search and double click it to enter its Properties window.
3. Change the Startup type to Disabled. Apply this change and you can exit out.
VOILA, NO MORE TAKEN UP DISK SPACE
Reblog to save a life
HOLY SHIT IT WORKS
My computer is brand fucking new and I couldn’t figure out WTF its deal was! Thank you!
You’re on a massive spaceship with what’s left of humanity. It’s the only ship, what’s on the ship is all you have. There are no humans left except for the few thousand people on board.
There are a few Star Trek-style replicators throughout the ship. These produce food, clothing, medicine – all material needs. In order to produce enough for everyone to live comfortably, they require a few hundred people to use stationary bikes for a few hours each week to generate the required energy.
Paradise, right? Enough people are more than happy to spend some time helping the community meet its needs, and many just enjoy the exercise, so there shouldn’t be any problem getting those replicators running!
The trouble is, immediately after boarding the ship, a few people camped out by the replicators and claimed them as their own. Using the resources from the replicators, they have bribed some people to guard them and “their” replicator and beat up anyone who tries to use them.
Now that these people have total access to the replicators, they have total power over who gets food, water, medicine, etc. They demand that everyone on the ship use the bikes every day, all day, or they will not be allowed to eat or drink. (The exception is their enforcers, who are rewarded with more resources for keeping the population in line in a variety of ways.)
Overworking everyone else produces enough energy for the replicator-hoggers to live like kings. They order up luxuries for themselves from the replicators, and eat and drink when and whatever they want. They order up food and throw it away when they decide they don’t want it. Huge piles of objects go unused in their quarters.
They make rules for how everyone else on the ship has to live, under threat of violence from their enforcers. People who can’t or won’t spend all day using the bikes are deliberately allowed to die from hunger and thirst, and the resource-hoarders say it’s because life must be earned.
The resource-hoarders allow the ship to fall into disrepair, and even throw wild parties and break things. Engineers beg to be allowed to effect repairs, but the resource-hoarders refuse, even when warned that in a few years the ship will break down completely and no one will survive. They call the engineers liars and conspirators.
And people just… sort of get used to it. They rationalize it, they say that the resource hoarders work hardest of all because they decide who gets what and when. Even though there are thousands more being forced to work than there are resource hoarders or their enforcers, people are afraid, or don’t want to think about it, or they justify it, or they dream of the day when they can work their way up the ranks of the enforcers and hog resources too.
And, I mean, it’s not human nature to hoard resources. Most people share their rations and help each other survive as best they can. It’s literally like eight jerks just camping out by the replicators surrounded by guards they bribe with the fruits of everyone else’s work.
But we let them do it. And the idea that we wouldn’t is considered wacky and fringe.
@funereal-disease asked some people on Facebook what kind of environment they needed from a safe space. I thought the responses were really interesting. It seems like you could break down needs from a safe space into a couple categories:
tone: “I need a space where I won’t be scolded for my anger”/”I need a space where people aren’t acting angrily”; “I need a space where you’re expected to communicate compassionately and patiently”/“I need a space where I won’t be punished for being bitter or impatient or unable to extend the benefit of the doubt”; “I need a space where jokes and flippancy are encouraged”/”I need a space where people take the things we’re discussing seriously”.
content: “I need a space where I don’t have to debate whether I deserve to exist”/”I need a space where I can try to explain and empathize with and inhabit the opinions of my political opponents, even where their beliefs are abhorrent and scary”; “I need a space where people like me are not discussed as scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where I can talk about my scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where my religious beliefs will be respected”/”I need a space where I can complain about the religious beliefs that harmed me without worrying about being respectful”.
social rules: “I need it to be easy to leave”; “I need it to be easy to change your mind”; “I need to know that if I make a mistake someone will talk to me in private instead of calling me out in public”; “I need transparency about moderation and what people get banned or excluded for”; “I need to know that if someone harasses me they will get excluded”.
In other words, needs about how to communicate, what to communicate, and how to handle transgressions.
I would be so delighted if instead of ‘this is a safe space’ posters on doors it became conventional to have signs that said “this is a safe space for emotional expression and venting” or “this is a space where harassment procedures have been refined a lot and work really well” or “this is a space where you can express hurtful and wrong ideas and expect people will try to argue with you but not shame you or attack you or exclude you, with an expectation of confidentiality, and with really emphatic moderation on the ‘not attacking people’ rule”.
I guess it’s a little too big to fit on a sign.
This is interesting! And these various dichotemies sum up a lot of what, I personally, run into as difficult with safe spaces, and interacting with people in SJ communities. Theres a lot of ‘seperated by a common language’ that goes on with some of these concepts and I think a lot of these safe space definition incompatibilities sum up a lot of them.
I’ve got a fair amount of thoughts about this. I think that all of these types of spaces are necessary and that explicitly defining what sort of space something is would be a super great thing.
Possibly-obvious corollary, but I feel like it needs to be made explicit:
If your sign says “This is a safe space” without further elaboration, then once people figure out in practice which of these conflicting needs you’re prioritizing and which you’re kicking to the curb, it’s inevitable that some of them will walk away having been told, “Your needs are not safe, you are not safe, and your idea of what safety entails is dangerous and harmful.”
If your sign says “This is a safe space for [group],” then the same thing will happen, except with the added sting of “You are a danger to the very group you’re a member of, and also you’re doing group membership wrong.”
If you’re asking, “Why can’t we make the entire community/school/world a safe space? You, person in charge of [space that exists for a completely different purpose], how dare you not declare this a safe space, how could you be so heartless?” This is why. This is how. One person’s safety is another person’s misery, repression, or even danger, because people’s needs conflict. Wanting to extend the safe space out to blanket the rest of the world inherently means going from telling people “your needs and way of existing are dangerous” to telling people “the dangerousness of your needs and existence means they’re wrong, and anyone who cares about what really matters should forbid them.”
Also:
When you don’t specify what “safe” means and who/what it’s for, people will try to figure it out. Some of them will come to different conclusions than you expected. Obviously this means false positives–people coming into the safe space thinking they’ll be allowed and supported for something you formed the safe space to get away from. But it also means false negatives–people assuming the thing they need will be rejected and labeled “unsafe,” when really you meant nothing of the sort.
The more aggressive you are about expanding the unspecified “safe space” and conflating “unsafe [for this space]” and “not okay,” the more people will hear that as “the way you are, the things you need, the thoughts you’re burning to express, are bad and dangerous and in a just world you’d either be brought into line or kicked out.” Whether your implicit idea of “unsafe” applies to them or not.
Please consider this next time someone reacts to the idea of blanket “safe spaces” with fear or hostility.
Oh, this clarifies some of my issues with the idea of “Tumblr as a Safe Space (for X)”. The way to create a safe space is define the exact kind of safety you’re creating and how, and then invite people who are both interested in that kind of safety and willing to follow the structure you’ve decided on. You can’t come into an existing space you have no authority over and arbitrarily decide it needs to be a specific kind of safe space, then get angry at anyone who doesn’t agree and toe the line.
Which isn’t to say you ever can’t criticise people for being unsafe. But the standards are different.
If you’re autistic and/or have ADHD like me, I recommend switching to ‘Simple English’ when reading lengthy and complex Wikipedia articles because it makes it so much easier to take in, comprehend, and understand
how to do:
On the sidebar on the left, there’s a list of languages listed in alphabetical order, so you have to scroll down a bit to find ‘Simple English’. But even if you can’t, you can just edit the URL from en.wikipedia.org to simple.wikipedia.org
Here’s an example of the difference between English wiki and Simple English wiki:
English:
Simple English:
[Image 1: A lengthy article about Japan in difficult words, with long paragraphs and no pictures.
Image 2: The article about Japan, only now the text has been compressed into a mere two paragraphs and there are pictures visible on the right (the Japanese flag), as well as a table of contents.]
Holy crap this is actually a life saver
This is important and wonderful. Knowledge should be available to everyone. Not just people with the right brainware or educational background.
I want to talk about some of the people who are not otherkin and how they’ve tried to shape us, and how some of them have done such a good job at it.
This is not just anti otherkin who do this, because keep in mind to be anti is to work against a thing. Sometimes it is ordinary people with no real bone to pick. Sometimes it is people who want to be and pretend to be otherkin.
So often I try to talk to these people who do these things, and they are rarely interested in listening. The ones who do listen and then move on are not who this post is about, and if you are not otherkin but are the sort of person who is open to listening and learning, please know I am not talking about you.
I am talking about the rest and for ease I will just say ‘non-otherkin’.
Please also know that with the exception of anti otherkin I don’t think most people are doing this on purpose/ realize what they are saying.
For a lot of non-otherkin, always they want to be the ones who get to define us, and we don’t say often enough how self entitled and dismissive them doing so is.
I’m rather fed up with that.
They tell us what we are. They try to change the definitions we have made. They tell us we are attention seekers. They tell us we have disorders that we do not have. They tell us we are escapists. They tell us we are liars. They tell us we choose to have these identities and by extension that they know us better than we know ourselves.
They tell us what we want. They tell us we want attention. They tell us we want to be victimized. We tell them no we don’t want that, we want to be left alone, but they do not listen to us.
They tell us what we need. They tell us we need psychiatric help. They tell us we need to grow up. They tell us we need to stop roleplaying. They tell us we need to shut up.
They tell us what words we can use, and what we are allowed to talk about, and what we are allowed to feel. They try to be the ones to define what is possible, what is real, and what isn’t.
If we speak up, if we are fed up, if we are finished with being humiliated and dragged through the mud they try to turn our anger around like we are the ones making the problem.
We are the ones being humiliated and hurt by these people, but often I see they try to make it seem like we are over reacting. Sometimes they have the fucking gall to call us the bullies when we get angry at them for their actions.
They try to misdirect who holds responsibility for their actions and it uncomfortably reminds me of the times in life I have been gaslighted.
Sometimes people will say that all of them have a right to their opinion, and that we should listen to them as if we are in an echo chamber if we don’t listen. Yes, they have a right to their opinion, but they are outside of our experience and by no means of real importance in the discussions about our experiences.
I come from the ‘generation’ that lived on forums and on small message groups. For years we have spoken with one another without outside harassment or criticism born out of ignorance.
There are all these things that are pushed on us now about the kind of people we are, and all these things non-otherkin (in particular anti-otherkin) put forward because the behave like the authority, that never used to exist for us.
Without them we weren’t an echo chamber by any means. Most of you have probably heard from the older crowd that in the past we put emphasis on introspection and thoughtful interactions to a fault. On a big forum there was little an outsider could teach us because we’d already discussed everything imaginable to death. ‘Real’ otherkind, the people who know what otherkinity is and are not embracing willful ignorance are often some of the most thoughtful, open minded, well expressed people you could ever meet.
Non-otherkin have done such a good fucking job at defining us that sometimes I see people new to the otherkind communities believe what non-otherkin have told them and berate each other over. Things that we have done for years, that suddenly we are told is wrong. Being told we cannot talk about dysphoria came from non-otherkin first, but now I see it said in my own community. Being told we cannot talk about phantom limbs came from non-otherkin first.
The list goes on and on. A decade ago that list didn’t exist! We were able to have thoughtful conversations without the overbearing attention of outsiders trying to control how we interact and think.
The worst of these fucking people happily spread misinformation and lies, they degrade us without trouble, they tell us all these things we should do and should need, and they make compilations of writing taken from our personal blogs with the intent to humiliate rather than educate…
Then they tell us they are doing this to help us.
Those assholes are lying. Let them know you know it.
These people (anti otherkin) do not care about us but they try to cast doubt on our judgement. They get a kick out of pissing on others and they try to justify that doing so does not make them trash because we are still socially acceptable to abuse.
It’s not abuse if they just want to help us, right? They really don’t want to help. They just don’t want us to tell them to shut the fuck up, sit down, and swallow the reality that they are assholes going after innocent people. What they really don’t want is for non-otherkin to call them out.
And sometimes they hide behind having compassion for one sort of person. “Look, look!” they shriek, “I support these things, so I’m compassionate as fuck!”
You can have compassion for one thing and then none for another. If a person drags otherkind through the mud, shames them, humiliates them, insists they know us better than we know ourselves, but then they also support other things, don’t let them hide behind those other things!
Those other things do not change the reality that they’ve behaved like abusive assholes with zero self awareness and no desire to take responsibility.
Don’t let them convince you and gaslight you into thinking they are good people in all the facets of their life and you should shut up and listen because any negative reaction you have is an over reaction or a thin skin or feeding the trolls. There is only so much poison any person can be expected to take; it is finite. Don’t let others make you think that you fucking deserve to be humiliated and hurt.
And for the love of fucking god, please understand that just because you shared your writing on a public site, people aren’t entitled to use that to behave like abusive assholes and bullies and humiliate you with it. People who do this are assholes.
A compassionate person does not humiliate others on purpose.
A
compassionate
person does not spread misinformation willingly.
A
compassionate
person does not speak over the voices of a community they are not part of and that they do not understand.
A
compassionate
person listens. A
compassionate
person approaches things with kindness, patience, and respect.
That is what compassion looks like.
Otherkinity, this nonhuman experience, comes from our voices, in our hands, in our own way, and I say this all just so other people who might not have words for this frustration can have a voice.
Mostly this is about anti otherkin, but other non-otherkin can and have done the same things without the same vitriol towards it.
We are not the selfish and entitled people in this situation, when it is people outside the experience on nonhumanity coming in to try to teach us about ourselves.
Non-otherkin, and especially anti-otherkin, are not the ones who define us, but it would be nice if once in a while the non-otherkin who realized this slapped their shitty peers in the face.
queerhomestuck 