Like A Magpie, I Live For Glitter, Not You

We go through a lot of pickles here and this recipe is a good way to use leftover brine.

sometimes people will insist a character is butch/masc and then you look at the character and they’re just fat. or muscular. or black. or indigenous. or some combination of the above.

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be free” men CAN get pregnant and they’re treated worse than women who can get pregnant

oh folks really don't like being asked to consider trans men

@tiramisioux

if I see one more "why age verification is bad" post that doesn't even bother to mention that locking young people out of huge sections of the public sphere - literally the stated goal and primary impact of this shit - is wrong in and of itself I will simply start hitting people with bricks

yes yes biometric data privacy blah blah adults can hypothetically by harmed by this too. what about the immediate and deliberate and not at all hypothetical harm to youth. why are you acting like a potential data leak about what your face looks like, which if it ever happened would at least be generally recognised as a problem, is a more serious issue than cutting millions of people off from information and community and public expression which is happening right now in the open with large scale support

it's got the stench of fucking "banned books week" on it. thousands of adults congratulating themselves for reading books literally no one is trying to stop them from reading while doing nothing to improve access for the young people who are the ones actually having those books made off-limits to them.

every spelunker should go in with a cyanide tooth capsule so if they get stuck they can take the gentle way out instead of being tortured by the earth for 72 hours and then dying anyway

I mean. That obviously wouldn’t work for many reasons, although I do believe if you required spelunkers to wear a suicide bomb to go caving, it would not be a major deterrent.

They'd be pissed off that the belt is too bulky and they can't squeeze through teeny tiny crevices that require you to avoid breathing until you're through or your ribs won't fit

Personally I think we should make all spelunkers wear bulky vests like those people who tie a wooden spoon to a tiny dog's back so it can't slip through the bars of a property fence. Stop 'em from getting in those positions in the first place.

Give us room to grow and see how we flourish.

“Appeal to a wider audience” is corporate lingo for “strip more themes from a piece of media so it’s safer and more sanitized for investors”

I struck a nerve in the billionaire fandom with this one

Okay but this is actually one of the most useful things you learn in creative writing workshops! Namely: Not all of the feedback you get is going to be useful! In fact, most of it isn’t! What you’re looking for are the people who vibe with your work and understand what you’re going for. Those are the people who can help you make your work better! But if you try to please everyone? Then you’re stripping out what makes your story uniquely yours. You’re stripping out what’s going to challenge and resonate with your audience. So don’t ever try to appeal to a wider audience! If you want those diehard fans who are going to follow your catalogue, let your work be weird. Lean into what you love about it. That’s what’s going to stick with your audience at the end of the day.

This is what “write for yourself” actually means. Write for an audience that happens to want exactly what you want, and don’t change or remove or water down things for hypothetical readers who don’t like your writing.

One size fits nobody well.

it sucks that the overwhelming majority of medical messaging around salt/sodium is "evil poisonous substance that you're definitely already eating way too much of," because like. you do still need it. (trust me, as a POTS-haver, I've had to completely rewire my own brain about salt.) and you need more salt when the entire northern hemisphere is hot enough to fry an egg on. ever tried sucking down the recommended 64oz of hydration per day entirely as water, only to find you're peeing constantly without any of the purported benefits of being "hydrated"? assuming you don't have another medical condition that causes frequent urination, your body probably needed more salt/electrolytes to be able to hold onto that water and make use of it. if there was ever a time to keep a sports drink/pedialyte/etc within constant reach, it's when the heat index is 110°F/43°C.

having low or no empathy is a natural state of being. it says nothing about who you are as a person, because how much empathy you are capable of feeling is not related to your personhood. it is not related to the personhood of anyone, as this is a perfectly normal state of being that some people experience. your ability to do good things is the same as someone else who experiences high levels of empathy.