is me. is blog.

People in despair are harmless to the status quo

It's important that folks turn out and vote no on it.

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

Will never forget the first writers’ workshop I attended where a story was being “round-robined” (i.e., passed around a circle for critique) and the first person picked up the typed sheaf of paper and said, “Well, this was shit,” and just passed it on to the next person.

Speaking of shit, I kinda lost mine. “Excuse me, what?” I said. “You don’t get to do that!”

The person was astounded, as if I’d somehow just disallowed the law of gravity. “What?” they said, incredulous. And then, “Why not?”

“Because this is critique, not abuse.” (The person in question was fortunately familiar with the Monty Python skit in which this theme comes up. See below.) “You have to say why you think it was shit—meaning, why and how it didn’t work for you. And then you have to say how you would fix that.”

The person’s mouth was literally hanging open at the very idea. It had honestly never occurred to them that a workshop wasn’t just someplace to vent about their own preferences. They started to start to say something to argue with me, and I just took the manuscript away from them and began a critique the way we do it in workshops I’m running. (The simplest form of this is the famous feedback sandwich, though there are many other potential ways to go.)

No work gets out of responsible workshopping/critiquing without having the hood carefully opened to see why the “engine”’s making whatever weird noises it’s making, having them and the machinery examined and diagnosed, and then politely closed up again. For irresponsible criticism—which we refer to around here as the “Rite of Spring” approach, in which abuse is somehow felt to make the writer or the work stronger—I have no damn time at all. Seriously, who made that shit up? Except somebody who doesn’t really care about either the writer or the work, and enjoys others’ suffering.

(mutter) (sigh) …Anyway, check this out. The abuse happens at 0:43. :)

1. The effectiveness of clever on other people is highly contingent on outside factors, over which you have no control and of which you may not have any knowledge; i.e., just because you intended to be clever doesn’t mean you will be perceived as clever, for all sorts of reasons.

And you know why? Because these same policies will also improve life for all Americans, including ... Those People. (insert scary music)

I would like to know why you keep going, and what drives you to keep living. I know there are a lot of reasons to stay alive and enjoy life, I can think of a few that personally resonate with me, but I really want to know what your reasons are

You do not have to comment on this if that's too big of an ask, and I'm very sorry for asking something like this, I really need someone's help, I feel like I don't have much purpose

The first is what my mother once told me offhand, but that lodged between my ribs and stayed there ever since: "you can always die later, but you can't always come back." I was kept alive at least twice by the question "what will I miss if I cannot come back for it?" And in those moments, it was a genuine comfort to me to understand that this all ends anyway at some point, and there's really no sense in going home early, but the question also made me stop and think long enough to find something I didn't want to miss out on because I can't come back to this level once I'm out. At the time, it was any number of things, but largely "I want to go scuba diving on the great barrier reef someday and I can't do that if I'm dead so I guess I'll keep going" (and FYI several years later, I actually made it to Australia from Michigan, USA, and went scuba diving on the great barrier reef, and it was every bit as amazing as I had hoped and it was 110% worth staying for, so feel free to want lofty things).

Today, 20+ years later, I don't have to stop to think that hard anymore, because so many of the seeds I planted between then and now, of things I don't want to miss, are growing beautifully. I have stories I want to finish writing, I have stories I want to finish consuming (reading, viewing, hearing about etc). I have art I want to make and art I want to see, places I still want to visit, events I want to go to, structures and animals I want to see in person. I have animals to take care of - my pets, and also the family of crows in my yard that visits and trades me feathers for leftovers and the woodland creatures (insects, birds, squirrels the groundhog under the mulberry tree, the doe that visits with two fawns in the afternoon, the turkeys that bring their gaggle of poults by in the fall every year) that visit my yard because I have rewilded much of it and take care to help preserve their areas for them - and a partner I promised not to leave. I have friends that I want to see who want to see me, and who might need my help sometime so I can't just abandon them. I have folks online looking forward to seeing the next silly little photo of my birds, and there's no way to know when someone just needs a silly little photo of a bird to remember there are good things in this world worth sticking around for a little longer, so they don't miss the next one.

I want to see Stonehenge in person someday. I want to pet an anteater someday. I want to hold my published book in my hands and cry about it a little. I want to see my nephews and my niece grow up and decide what they want out of life so I can help them get it. I want to see what baby peafowl my birds will make next year. I want to make a wild type celadon coturnix bloodline so I can offer others a clean slate. I want to finish creating the genetics info section of my website so I can share information about peafowl genetics for free and put both middle fingers up at the old white dude gatekeepers who want to keep everyone else dependent on them so they can make $$ off being the only ones who know stuff. I want to see the northern lights in person, up in Alaska or Canada or something where they're more visible. I want to go to the grand canyon. I want to walk in a redwood forest. I want to make a lucky Pokemon trade with my mother so we can get cool shinies.

The thing I've found is that you don't necessarily need a "purpose," to stay. You don't have to be useful, you don't have to have a destiny or a fate or a calling or be needed, and the idea that everyone does was a hindrance in my early life, because I didn't feel like the world needed my presence, or that I was ever going to do enough to fulfill a purpose. Turns out it doesn't matter if the world needs me or doesn't need me, because that's not what it's about for me. Life doesn't have to be about doing anything useful or meaningful in a greater scheme or even lasting, because it's not a job we're doing. There's no requirement for doing an amount of things or doing great things. It's a party we're at, it's an event we're attending, it's a movie we're watching, it is a story we're living. Of course it has an end, but there's simply no sense skipping to it early- we'll miss the good bits in the middle, even if we don't know what those are or will be, yet.

Indeed, they even had CGI animators go and learn stuff about modelling, and model makers learn about CGI animation, so they could collaborate better. They advanced the state of the art in many areas of special effects, while also using some of the oldest, and yet still effective, visual tricks in the book.

They used all of the tricks, in concert, to make those movies look and sound as amazing as they do. And it still holds up today, 20+ years later, because they made sure every tool they had was used to its fullest potential, and that all of the tools worked together. It's a level of care and detail that is rarely seen in filmmaking.

purity culture is more then just thinking sex is bad and evil and gross

purity culture is the belief that you can be corrupted, that there is an level of purity that can be tarnished by thinking or doing something deemed sinful or icky and that once you lose that purity, you are lesser then those who have not been "tainted". it's the belief that seeing, thinking, or doing something inherently nonharmful to others will fundamental change you in a negative way

purity culture is watching gory horror movies and being told that you are disgusting for finding it interesting to watch

purity culture is being told that violence in books, movies, games, etcetera will make you violent

purity culture is being told that wanting to hurt someone makes you bad, darkens your heart, whatever, even if they hurt you first, even if you have no plans to ever act on that desire

purity culture is being told to forgive your abuser, rapist, or even just people who have slighted and hurt you or else you will never fully heal, or that it makes you in someway bad too, or even just as bad as them

purity culture is being told that hating someone is equally to killing them, or wanting to kill them

purity culture is when people have intrusive thoughts that scare and harm them that make you uncomfortable, possibly even triggered, and telling them that they secretly want to do, have, etcetera, those things or else they wouldn't be thinking about it

purity culture is being told not to curse because it makes your mouth filthy, makes your heart filthy, makes you mean and bad and unpleasant

purity culture is being told that jealousy, anger, rage, disgust, and other stigmatized emotions are "bad" or "unhealthy" emotions

purity culture is refusing to let youths or even teenagers read or watch potential upsetting books, shows, movies, games, comics, etcetera out of fear they will act them out, become violent, possessed, unruly, etcetera

purity culture is being told that writing, drawing, or just in general making something dark and uncomfortable makes you gross and evil

purity culture is telling you that you have to portray bad things as bad or else people won't under that it's still bad, that it will normalize this bad thing, that people can be corrupted by it because they can't think for themselves whether this bad thing you portrayed as good is not actually good

purity culture is thinking bad things done for good reasons is just as bad as bad things done for bad reasons, like a mother stealing baby formula to keep her child alive versus someone stealing your pet because they wanted it are equally wrong

purity culture is being told that drinking, smoking, being addicted to drugs, unemployed, homeless, makes you lesser and filthy and corrupts you

purity culture is believing that someone wanting to do something bad, but choosing not to do it because they know it's bad, still makes them bad because they still want to do it

purity culture is thinking people getting tattoos, dying their hair, piercing, wearing make up, getting cosmetic surgeries secretly hate themselves and are disrespecting themselves

purity culture is so much more then just sex. it expands so much further then just christian/religious people and communities

purity culture is doing something bad, and when you try to seek atonement or correct the mistake, that it is unforgivable and will alway be a blight on you, even if others can "learn to look past it"

if you think that someone thinking or do something that does not cause any inherent harm makes them lesser, makes them bad, makes them gross, corrupts them or can lead them to corrupting others, you are pushing purity culture

Using Sacramento as an example, median home price is about $510k, and median household income is about $85,000

That number for Sacramento is 6x, and that's for a middling city with middling employment prospects. So the entire city for almost everyone living there is by definition unaffordable. And that's not as bad as it gets

Let's look at Toronto. Median income is around $91,000, median home price is just over $1,100,000. That's a ratio of 12:1. You would need to be making a quarter of a million dollars just to be able to qualify for a mortgage.

For a home to be affordable, one of two things need to happen: 1) incomes need to rise astronomically overnight or 2) home prices need to crash astronomically overnight

In Sacramento, that means the median income needs to double (to $170k per year), or home prices need to crash by 50%

In Toronto, that means incomes need to quadruple (to $370k per year) or home prices need to crash about 75%