I actually really like the thing when you’re starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn’t natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me “every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week.” And I understood.
I don’t think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words “humidity” or “stress”, I managed to string together: “This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me.” And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it’s better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn’t know the spanish word for “hurry”, but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english “I have all the time in the world.”
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn’t expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.
Nah, fam. It’s not about “taking” criticism. It’s about the fact that unless a writer asks for it specifically, it’s a dick thing to do on a website that is rooted in community.
If a writer wants critique they will ask trusted friends or professional associates (in the relevant field). When a writer shares a fic on AO3 it’s not necessarily with the aim of improving their craft (there are better places for that). It’s about sharing joy.
Positive comments enhance that feeling of joy and community. Negative comments do not.
Fic isn’t a product to be evaluated. If it’s not for you, then you can just walk away. 😁
I’m so tired of this discussion - why do all these people think they’re entitled to offer critique on a fic author’s work?
When you get a hand-made gift from someone, do you verbally rip it apart in front of them and point out every flaw or perceived flaw you can find? Congratulations, that person will never put the time, love and effort into making anything for you again, and they may question themselves so much they won’t ever make anything for anyone else again, either. Well done, you’ve now deprived a whole community of art and an artist of their source of joy because you’re an ungrateful walnut who can’t say ‘Thank you’ and appreciate what you got for free.
Your opinion is not universal. Your tastes are not universal. Your preferred style is not universal. Authors can write whatever the fuck they want and unless you specifically commissioned a fic, you get no say in it.
Tl;dnr: If you don’t like a fic or piece of art, hit the back button and keep your mouth shut. If you didn’t like something, it likely wasn’t meant for you and your 'criticism’ is not wanted or helpful. Fandom is about community and lifting each other up, not about you shitting all over another person’s work because you think your opinion matters.
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info
Cory Doctorow has a similar concept of enshitification:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
…
This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
…
Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.
To add to this, I believe Tumblr has evaded some of this because of it having always had a niche audience and an abundance of porn. But the first steps of enshitification on Tumblr are the 2018 porn ban and the release of Tumblr live. Let’s be loyal to the community and not to the platform.
it does feel a little bit like being gaslit that the internet is slowly getting worse in barely perceptible ways- it’s validating to see an article that says, “yes, it’s not that you’re getting old and somehow losing your google proficiency, GOOGLE IS WORSE THAN IT USED TO BE.”
Amazon literally shows you fewer search results if you sort by user reviews instead of “Amazon recommended”, and I remember that it didn’t used to do that
Sounds like it’s time for me to write up
Katherine’s Guide to Making Google, Facebook, and Amazon Work For You
So like. I know this isn’t what the post is about but like. Firefox is *right* there. And it’s free. And you can add a bunch of extensions like *actual adblockers that work.* And scripts that tell corporations trying to collect your data to go fuck themselves, like Privacy Badger and Privacy Possum. And you can import your bookmarks and passwords with *literally* just two clicks of a button so you don’t lose anything.
So like. You don’t *have* to put up with Google. You can, absolutely, just ditch it. Let it rot in peace while you go make your internet experience habitable again.
What is with people who ostensibly use the same Internet I do who seem to believe Firefox, duckduckgo, and adblockers can undo all this shit? Firefox is not magic.
I use Firefox! In fact, I use IceRaven. I grappled with the extensions-to-mobile Collections project mozilla themselves seems to have forgotten to get back at least *some* of the benefits lost from using Kiwi/chrome re-skinned (hey mozilla no rush but you intro’d this years ago and you still have no built in translation). I’ve got the free version of Blokada on my phone. About:config messed with. F-droid. Phone is (well, was -forgot the damage an update can do) rooted. NewPipe instead of Youtube, xmanager for Spotify. Every single day I force myself to use duckduckgo like I don’t know there’s a 70% chance I’ll have to take my ass to google anyway. Miles of extensions just for blocking ads and content farms
NONE OF THESE TACTICS/COMPANIES ARE POWERFUL ENOUGH TO COMPLETELY REVERSE ENSHITTIFICATION.
What is mozilla gonna do about steam pushing connect 3 and hentai games to my recommendations? Why would all of the other search engines be impervious to SEOification? Did Privacy Badger bring porn back to Tumblr? Did you hear about reddit switching to a paid API model, killing staple make-reddit-usable project Pushshift? Hell, remember when AdBlock Plus was the belle of the ball? A Firefox staple? Only to get - you guessed it! Enshittified.
This is my ongoing pet peeve, like is it an ongoing astroturfing campaign? Gaslighting just for fun? do you even use the stuff you recommend? Because I do. I put more effort into curating my Internet than the average guy so I sit here with a bewildered look each time you guys come here and insist an individual downloading a different browser can overcome a hundred different companies conspiring against them. You are literally on the unfixably enshittified website right now. Nothing you download to your pc will undo FOSTA-SESTA
ngl, I’m beginning to take issue with how in conversations about anti-intellectualism almost automatically, the face of girls and women will be slapped on the problem.
Peer Reviewed your tags, OP.
There is so much to unpack here but honestly I have a life to live and manuscripts to turn in, so I’m going to try to keep this short.
I think a lot of the contemporary “anti-intellectualism” movement started as a reaction to the success of media that centered escapism through privileged characters without questioning the power structures that create and sustain that privilege. Particularly when these works are praised with terms like “wholesome” or “clean.”
What it’s become, in a very painful irony, is a thought-terminating cliche. If you and your buddies dismiss a book, a genre, a category, a social media platform as “anti-intellectual”, you don’t have to engage with its creators or audience as equals. This in turn becomes a moral position to justify harassing authors for “ruining literature”, policing what others are reading, dismissing anyone using a specific platform, and, yes, lampshading misogyny under the guise of crusading for the soul of literature.
And this would be easier to ignore if the people doing this weren’t organizing around the need to call others anti-intellectual, or my favorite new buzzword-to-slap-on-anything, incurious. I cannot explain the dissonance of the time I posted “in my opinion, YA does [x] well because of [industry standard]” on twitter and got brigaded by hundreds of people knee-jerk regurgitating the same tired vitriol: YA books are just products, YA authors are ruining literature, anyone who reads YA is mentally impaired, and—you guessed it—YA is “anti-intellectual.”
At no point did anyone stop and say to themselves, gosh, maybe the person who has written, edited, and published multiple books in this specific field might actually have some professional insight that I don’t. They were too busy racing to be seen performing outrage that someone might praise a category they’d deemed anti-intellectual.
And that’s just my personal experience. I am begging folks to actually interrogate this mindset, the reactionary vitriol it’s producing, and the subtler echoes seeping into seemingly neutral rhetoric. I can’t tell you how many ostensibly earnest posts I’ve seen bemoaning how no one is horny in books anymore, how no one is fucked up in books anymore…. when horny, fucked up books are the bread and butter of BookTok, my god. They’re right there! Or posts saying “gosh, well, I just wish these ~people~ would free themselves and apply their analytical skills to real literature,” as if they need to be re-educated and liberated from their own tastes.
Anyway. I have more books to write. Moral of the story is, if you actually give a damn about anti-intellectualism, stop policing what people read, and start fighting book bans. Soapbox concluded.
i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.
Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.
this is GENUINELY one of the best character development sheets I’ve ever seen. Cuts right to the core of what you and your readers will glom onto, doesn’t waste time on details that don’t directly affect the narrative. Stupendous. Effervescent. Finally, some good fucking food
fucking hate it when the stuff everybody says “actually works” does actually work.
hate exercising and realizing i’ve let go of a lot of anxiety and anger because i’ve overturned my fight-or-flight response.
hate eating right and eating enough and eating 3 times a day and realizing i’m less anxious and i have more energy
hate journaling in my stupid notebook with my stupid bic ballpoint and realizing that i’ve actually started healing about something once i’m able to externalize it
hate forgiving myself hate complimenting myself more often hate treating myself with kindness hate taking a gratitude inventory hate having patience hate talking to myself gently
hate turning my little face up to the sun and taking deep breaths and looking at nature and grounding myself and realizing that i feel less burdened and more hopeful, more actually-here, that i am able to see the good sides of myself more clearly, that i am able to see not only how far i have to grow - but also how much growth i have already done & how much of my life i truly fill with light and laughter and love
horrible horrible horrible. hate it but i’m gonna do it tho
whenever you ask your friend who’s really into JRPGs “hey which one do i start with is the newest one fine” they always go “no, what you gotta do is head on over to ebay and look up the entry that completely bombed commercially. You’ll see that it goes for $800. Close ebay. Download an emulator for a console no younger than 17 years old. Download the ROM, and also this laundry list of various tweaks, retextures, and QoL tweaks. Pull up this exact spoiler-free guide put up a decade ago from GameFAQs, and you’ll experience the best game this series has to offer.” Like???
And they’re right
Don’t forget that you specifically want the unlocalised Japanese ROM so that you can apply a fan-made English translation patch published in 1998 by a guy with a dick joke for a screen handle because the official localisation was delayed for 20 years due to licensing issues and totally butchers the script by removing all the late 1990s pop culture references.
idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn’t be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don’t understand why they did it I’m not gonna feel any better
“Sorry for hurting your feelings earlier. I was trying to say x, but I guess it came across wrong. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
or
“Sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t get enough sleep last night so my patience is a little low today.”
is a better apology than
“I want you to know that I am sorry that my actions offended you. I take full accountability for my actions and I am listening and learning. I hear you.”
