Occupation: complaining

the concept of armand picking up young daniel, passed out and completely fucked up, taking him to a random motel and sitting at the foot of the bed watching him sleep the whole night. god knows how many times he did that. probably hundreds of hours spent in dingy motels just watching him sleep in complete silence.

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

Being a flop changed my life. The world is not my oyster, I am glowing. I walked into a pole this morning. There's very little I wouldn't do for $1,000

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

I've noticed in recent years that, at least within mainstream usamerican culture, the sympathetic petty criminal archetype has largely fallen out of favor. you still have plenty of stories of noble nights, benevolent aristocrats, sympathetic mercenaries, but the idea of a thief with a heart of gold is increasingly rare. often petty criminals are just used as uncomplicated cannon fodder, so the protagonist has something human-shaped that they can kill or mutilate without remorse. you see this with dnd players often. the wicked king or the cruel dragon can be reasoned with, but a highway bandit robbing caravans to eat is perfectly fine to torture to death with sorcery

this is no less common outside of fantasy, either. god knows how many books, films, games, about sympathetic soldiers, police, even mercenaries. sometimes they try to reckon with the inherent violence and cruelty of these careers, but they rarely have the fangs for a message sharper than "sometimes good people have to do bad things." but a thief? a mugger? god forbid, a drug dealer? uncomplicatedly evil vermin, all. again, just used as cannon fodder, purely to provide something human-shaped to hate and brutalize without conscience

there is an obvious racial angle to this, as people grow more leery towards "those people are evil and inhuman because they look different," the message shifts to "those people are evil and inhuman because they are criminals," paired with heavily biased (and significantly more publicized) criminalization of racial minorities to achieve the same goal of publicly condoned repression and violence