Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
There are hundreds of reasons people might ship things, and just because one person’s shipping tastes are “ideal healthy relationship that models good irl relationships” doesn’t mean another person’s tastes can’t be totally different.
talk about this. this is the kind of shit indigenous people and others concerned with the environmental impacts of extractive energy are concerned about.
Your story is 50% reader. It’s that mixture of reader and writer that makes the magic.
Which means your story needs to have holes for the reader to fill in. You need that negative space for the puzzle pieces to fit.
I’m not talking about plot holes, I’m talking about giving one sentence the power of two. A book that means what it says is a mediocre book. A book that means more than what it says is a great book.
Don’t over-develop your characters, having them analyze every feeling, or spelling out what every character in a scene is thinking. Don’t follow up a powerful line with an explanation with what makes that line powerful.
Let your words imply as much as they state.
it can be so so hard sometimes, cuz i gotta remember i can trust my readers
And it can be hard to know WHICH holes to leave. You don’t want to leave any ‘this doesn’t make sense’ holes, but you do want to leave ‘insert your interpretation here’ holes.
this is the most important think I have ever learned about writing
This is my biggest struggle. 75% of my edits are exactly this. It’s such a blurry line (for me) trying to figure where it’s just enough, and where it just gets unclear. I always need a watchful eye when it comes to this.
This is good advice. And if it’s easier for your writing process, you can spell everything out in your rough draft and go back and take a hefty pair of hedge trimmers to it later. Sometimes it helps me to first just spit out everything I’m thinking, even if it’s obvious and uncreative, and then go back and refine it and make it more subtle later. Sort of like sketching for an artist, lots of messy lines that you’ll go back and make beautiful. For others, writing more meticulously and doing the above to begin with is the way to go, and that’s totally cool too. But don’t feel like if your first or second draft hasn’t quite achieved this that you can’t do it at all. Editing is magic.
@missscorp
this is where beta readers come in handy! other perspectives are key when you’re trying to determine cutting quantity without losing quality
I won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best short story for an H. P. Lovecraft /Arthur Conan Doyle mashup fiction, so fanfiction had better be legitimate, because I’m not giving the Hugo back.
Or the 20O5 Locus Award for Best Novelette. I’m not giving that back either.
Ladies, I am holding out my hand. Do you trust me?
I need you to open Google Maps. Locate your nearest mall. Get in your car. Drive to Yankee Candle.
Past the seasonal pumpkin display, near the back of the store, you will find a trash pile Man Candle section. You will see candles called MMM, Bacon!. Riding Mower. Man Town. (I’m not kidding. Man Town.) Stay strong. Not in this section, but likely very near this section, you will find a candle called Mountain Lodge.
Hold this jar in your hands like a talisman. Close your eyes and picture a man.
I want to be clear: I’m not talking about a Hugh Dancy. Or an Andrew Garfield, a Ben Whishaw, even a Tom Hiddleston. This exercise requires someone in the Chris Evans weight class. The Richard Armitage department. Someone with smile lines around his eyes who could chop the cedar for your bower with his own hands, strangle an alpha wolf, carry you home when you sprain your ankle in the woods, bench press your entire body. Picture this man in your mountain home with a full beard, a slightly grimy white henley, a fond half smile he reserves only for you. Now open the lid and smell Mountain Lodge.
Steady yourself on the man candle display. Give yourself a second. No, you’re not wrong. Yes, the Yankee Candle Company has just eliminated the need for men. This medium tumbler Mountain Lodge candle jar is now your boyfriend. The Yankee Candle Company has effectively replaced the need for contact with the male half of our species with a compact and clean-burning candle in a jar.
“Do you like this one?” the cashier asked, ringing me up. “Every man should be required by law to smell like what this candle smells like,” I replied intensely. “That’ll be $12.01,” she said.
MOUNTAIN LODGE
it literally smells like waking up on a cold night to find a bearded richard armitage adding another quilt to the bed before he gets back in and pulls you snugly against his chest
I’m not fucking around I feel like I should be watching chris hemsworth in flannel and suspenders whittling a delicate masterpiece in front of a fireplace rn
All right, Tumblr, I saw this post a few months ago and immediately realized I had to smell this candle. I have never in my life experienced such a burning need (pun intended) to smell what the Yankee Candle website described as a warm aroma of cedarwood and sage, but what Tumblr described as my new boyfriend.
The trouble is that nearest Yankee Candle Company store was a bit of a trek, and my schedule tended to prohibit this olfactory adventure.
So for the last few weeks, as I’d scroll my Tumblr dash and look at images of attractive manly men, I’d sigh and wistfully think, if only I could engage another sense with this image. If only I could I could truly fathom the ideal fragrance of this man.
And then this happened.
And I knew.
I knew whatever was happening, I needed to get to a Yankee Candle Company. The scent of Mountain Lodge would transport me instantly to this scene. The aroma of this infamous candle could make me live out a self-insertion Avengers fanfic.
So I got in my car, made the drive, and located the Yankee Candle Company. The store was crowded with holiday shoppers. My nose was immediately assaulted by hundreds of warring scents.
I battled through the sea of humanity and the Angel Wings-Merry Marshmallow-Magical Frosted Forest assault, buoyed on by my need to understand what Steve Rogers ripping a log in half with his bare hands smelled like.
I waded toward the back of the store, only to discover the man candle section seems to have been discontinued. What was I going to steady myself on, once I found my scented gateway to hanging out with the Avengers on Hawkeye’s farm? I felt lost, adrift, unable to find my bearings amid Soft Blanket-Fluffy Towels-Home Sweet Home.
And then… rising from the “Fresh” display, there it was.
Mountain Lodge.
It was the moment of truth. What would it be like to smell this infamous candle?
I opened the lid. I took a deep breath.
And I giggled.
Ah yes. This was it. This gentle, pleasantly masculine fragrance, in fact, reduced me to what I’d probably do in the actual presence of Chris Evans: giggle like an idiot.
The smell makes me smile, makes me laugh, makes me gently swoon: all reactions that, indeed, can be elicited by an ideal man. I can barely handle the true power of Mountain Lodge.
Several months have passed since this discovery. I have regaled friends with the saga, and after hearing of it, they, too, felt the burning need to smell the candle. One by one, we have all become Mountain Lodge converts.
In times of need, this candle is our refuge. Our group has developed escapist superpowers, infused by the Yankee Candle Company.
What really fucks me up about a 40 hour work week and I’ve tried to explain to people over and over is that like of you do the math you have maybe 3 hours every day to just like. Rest and be with your family. And that’s kind of it
Like the average adult needs about 8 hours of sleep every night, so that cuts your 24 hours to 16 right off the bat.
You’re working for 8 hours, so 8 left.
But you actually work 8 to 5 at most offices, not 9 to 5, and that lunch is basically just long enough to retrieve food and eat. 7.
It took you 20 minutes to shower this morning, 10 to get dressed, and 45 to make a bowl of oatmeal and eat it. We’ll say 15 to get your stuff together and out to your car. 5 and a half.
You get home and have to cook dinner, 30 minutes min for that, probably more like an hour, so somewhere between 5 and 4.5 hrs left. And then you’ve got to eat it, 30 minutes if you’re being healthy about it.
So at best you’ve MAYBE got 4/4.5 hours left every week day and that’s assuming you ran exactly zero errands, didn’t stop by the gym after work, didn’t have to stay late, have a wicked fast transition time between tasks AND a commute of like 5 minutes by car. If you have to go to the store after a quick run at the gym, pick your kids up from soccer across town, and you factor in a 30 minute commute both ways, you’ve got enough free time for like one episode of show Monday through Friday. And weekends have got to be for cleaning the house and going to visit your mom for a few hours.
When do you write, or paint, or read or sew or go on hikes? When do you go on spur of the moment adventures with your wife and try to perfect your grandma’s soda bread? What happens when it rains on Saturday after being sunny all the rest of the week so you can’t go to the zoo that day and you don’t have enough money for the museum? Why are we all just content to postpone our whole lives, put off “happy” and “healthy” for a miniscule amount of extra value we’re producing for someone else?
And it’s also a thing that fascinates me about hustle culture like. When do y'all rest? When do sleep and food happen? How do you make 3 different jobs work without dying?
Idk idk like I said I’m real fucked up about it. It amazes me that more office workers aren’t great big socialists because we have this miserable job where we’re monitored constantly and just have to sit. Still. And maintain focus on ONE THING for EIGHT HOURS in a BORING GRAY ROOM with exactly two short breaks at designated times and I just?? How does that not suck for literally everyone else?? You said yourself, Angie, you’re useless after 3 pm so just?? Organize with me and negotiate for shorter days??? Like you’re literally already only producing 6 hours of value, you don’t need to be sitting there for longer than that.
Anonymous asked: The post about are Jews poc is wrong because America centric terms are useless to describe a very diverse ethnic group that don't fit and pre-exist these notions of racial hierarchy. Antsemitism oppresses Jews on racial-ethnic motivations, and is motivated by white supremacy. Even Jews who benefit from white privilege are conditionally white AT BEST and are hurt by white supremacy in other ways. And people racialized as white in the USA are not racialized thus elsewhere
Would anyone else of Jewish origin like to contribute?
- STM
This is true but I won’t comment
Yea some Jews in America can certainly benefit from white privilege because of how white supremacy operates in the USA. Those benefits don’t give white-passing Jews equal (or, as some people absurdly claim) more privilege than white people—Jews as a whole are still excluded from whiteness & actively harmed by white supremacy based on ethnic/racial anti-Semitism.
Conditional white privilege is afforded to white-passing Jews in a temporal way—as in, if you aren’t too overt about your Jewishness in some social settings, you will be afforded white privilege; however, it can change literally according to the whims of non-Jewish white people, and there’s this consistent point of view that even if the non-Jewish white people let the Jews ‘be’ one of them them temporarily, it’s shaky and you’re expected to deal with the violence, anti-Semitism, and overall any sort of oppressive behavior. If you don’t, white-passing or not, you will be non-white. It’s according to behavior, setting, ‘acting Jewish,’ assimilation of all kinds, etc.
This is me speaking from a point of view of a Jewish family that ranges from white-passing Jews to black Jews. I have seen how conditional white privilege works with Jews, and while it’s much better than how my black Jewish relatives are treated, it doesn’t mean that white-passing Jews get to be automatically aligned with white supremacy and shielded from harm—I still have white-passing cousins who get called Khazarian impostors who are invading the white race (for the record, my white-passing cousins aren’t European, they are West Asian), are called kikes on the regular, and are the targets of violence.
Conditional white privilege for Jews in America is also highly, highly location based. In New York City, someone with stereotypically “Jewish,” often Ashkenazi features will read as white. In backwoods Virginia? Not so much. I read as white if I do my makeup the right way and straighten my hair, and I don’t say anything that makes my Jewishness explicit. As soon as I do so, my reception here in the South changes — I go from educated, articulate woman to A Jew. And that is open season. It means I get asked if my hair hides my horns. It means I get asked if I have a trust fund, or if I got in college/grad school because my parents are donors. (My parents are actually working class, thanks. Not all Sephardim got here early and prospered. Some of us are still dealing with language barriers and being alienated from the dominant Ashkenazi culture that surrounds American Judaism.) I had students in the Midwest come up to me after class and tell me I was the first Jew they’d ever seen and I “didn’t look like” what they thought Jews looked like, because I didn’t have “you know, the big nose.” I’ve had people throw pennies at me. I got the crap beat out of me repeatedly in school because Jews were running the world. I’ve had people track down my information on the internet to send me death threats because Hitler should’ve finished the job. That is not white privilege.
Antisemitism is really complex, but the thing that is critical to remember is that it grew out of the emergent “science” of racism in the 18th and 19th centuries. As white, European men set out to sort the world into tidy taxonomies, people were also sorted. And Jews, as Europe’s long-standing, much maligned social Other, were understood to be something else. Not white. Not Aryan. Not like Western European Christians. And in the moment when race developed, the sense that Jews could never shake their Jewishness, that it was something in their blood, and conversion to Christianity couldn’t fix it, that was when earlier, religious anti-Judaism turned into modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is wholly race and ethnicity based. And while it is mediated by culture in the same way that many forms of racism are, given distinct forms in distinct places and times, it is based on the idea that Jews are biologically “something other,” in the same way that Asians are “something other.”
Jews in the US have only taken on the status of “model minorities” tending into conditional white privilege since the Holocaust. So whenever you want to talk about Jews being white, remember this: it took the attempted genocide of the Jewish population of Europe to give American Jews the ability to not be subjected to quotas in housing, university slots, and to be accepted into American social institutions — if only grudgingly. America was still dealing with accusations of “blood libel” — in which Jews are accused of murdering Christian children to use their blood in festival food, primarily Passover matzah — in the 1920s. This is not the distant past. This is within living memory. But with the Holocaust showing the full end game of antisemitism, Americans recoiled and tried to act as if they weren’t anything like Nazis and American Jews were always flourishing here.
White America pointed to the way assimilated American Jews had prospered and decided that Jews were doing just fine — and then turned our apparent prosperity into a stick to beat other minority groups with. (This is not dissimilar to how the Irish became white, but made complex by the fact that Jews are still, to use a legal sense, a distinct, insular minority.) In order to obtain that conditional whiteness and thereby prosperity and access offered by white America, Jews must assimilate. They must stop observing Judaism in traditional ways and act more like their Christian neighbours. (This is not unlike how German Jews learned to prosper in the 19th century. But given Germany’s history, it is safe to say that trading assimilation for begrudging acceptance is the devil’s bargain.)
What I really want to point out is this: Jewish identity in America is intersectional. In some cases, we benefit from white privilege, or we may be white-passing. However, we are oppressed by Christian privilege, often violently. (FBI hate crime statistics back this up.) It does not matter how observant or not Jews are; we are lumped in a group of “not Christian,” and as a consequence, we are forced to adhere to Christian social scripts, Christian calendars, Christian values if we are to interact with American society at large. (And when we don’t, we’re accused of being clannish or exhibiting cult-like behaviour.) We are expected to smile and give approval to Christians appropriating our culture, rituals, language, and holidays. We are lumped in as an afterthought as the imaginary American “Judeo-Christian” heritage. We are Other, tolerated, objectified, or spoken over on a religious axis. When Jews do not have white/white-passing privilege, we then suffer from more oppression when racial and religious oppression fall down on us. Which makes this complex, and often leads to this tension where those who are not part of the Jewish community see the image of primarily New York Jews, accepted as part of the city’s fabric, and project that Judaism is only oppressed on a religious axis, if it is oppressed at all. But when you are part of the community and have a legacy of oppression, suffering, forced conversion, death marches, assaults, and microaggressions, both for your religious beliefs and for how Jewish or not you look, how white or not you are perceived to be, it is immediately and viscerally apparent how intersectional, conditional, and fraught Jewish identity is in the United States.
We are a contested people, constantly defined by those outside of our communities and expected to accept their definitions in order to access the privilege they offer in return for our docile agreement. We are often model minorities, held up as what other oppressed groups should be like, obscuring our struggles right now for the Holocaust, the one white Americans feel comfortable talking about, talking over, appropriating and fetishizing. So to say that Jews are a religious group, not a category of race or ethnicity, that serves to obscure the intersectionality of our existence in America, and it only contributes to the idea that Jews must be one thing and one thing only in order to be appropriately Jewish in the US — pale skinned, Eastern European, not too religious, and urban. But for the rest of us, out in the parts of the States where none of those things save us from violence, that definition from other oppressed folks does far, far more harm than good.
This is all very true and honestly the idea that Jews ever “pass” as white is more often used against us by goyim to silence us or artificially align us with whiteness, and “privilege” rhetoric is similarly unhelpful. If you frame the conversation as “in what contexts, if any, are particular Jews (and which Jews?) able to access white structures of power?” you’ll not only paint a more accurate picture, but also recognize just how rare, contingent, and precarious it is for any Jew to wield whiteness.
And I’m not saying that all Jews who access whiteness in certain contexts and in certain spaces are self-conscious about it, but many of us are extremely aware of when we do, because our access to whiteness is predicated upon (based in) our distance from Jews and Jewishness as a series of ethnic identifiers.
So yeah all of the above is true and I encourage people to read the whole post because there’s lots of excellent examples and discussions of antisemitism as an ethnic-based structure of violence rooted in white supremacy.
AND a race one since the most affected regions will be
Africa, Asia and Oceania
as a friend pointed out, this headline makes it sound like supply will be dwindling. supply is fine. people will be *priced out*.
this is fucking MURDER.
insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.
insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.
let me reiterate: life without insulin (for Type 1 diabetics in particular) is a slow and painful death sentence. the ability to treat diabetes is a relatively modern phenomenon that has allowed countless people to live full, healthy lives. we should be expanding full covereage and access to insulin to diabetics the world over, and it should be FREE.
“
We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. We envision a world in which communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and where people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive.
What We Do
We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production. We are developing protocols to produce short-acting (lispro) and long-acting (glargine) insulin, working on developing open-hardware equivalents to traditional production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are building capacities for local, small-scale manufacturing.
How Do I Participate?
Our work would not be possible without the support of volunteers, interns, and community advisors. We welcome people of all backgrounds from all over the world to bring their enthusiasm, time, connections, and experiences, both in life and in work. Our volunteers promote us on social media, build equipment, run experiments, write reports and blog posts, facilitate meetings, connect with other organizations and groups, meet with experts in the field, run virtual events, and contribute in designing tools, resources, and methods of all sorts.
Potential Partners
We welcome collaboration with other groups that share our mission―community labs, academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, and NGOs.
Donate
Your donation will help us get closer to our goal. With a healthy financial situation, we can pay for lab supplies, acquire lab equipment, recruit scientists, and pay for consultation fees for regulation and manufacturing experts.”
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.
