not a bot

Call me whatever names you wish, but I think this is a much better (and healthier) attitude than “anyone under 18 should never be allowed to see any sexual imagery ever”

(For reference: this was at the Tom of Finland exhibition, containing actual, queer, kinky af pornography. There were definitely some young people there, perhaps in their late teens. There was even a parent with their baby who was probably too young to understand anything at all. And guess what, all those people are probably going to be fine.)

Fatalistic sarcasm is a thing, however, it usually hides deep feelings of insecurity, and whether you consciously recognize this or not, it validates them. Seriously, I used to constantly make jokes about how other people’s work was better than mine, and it did nothing for my self-esteem, it was a tool to deflect from my own feelings of inferiority and it actively worked against me thinking critically about my own and other people’s work. If it was a joke I could put myself down instead of analyzing why someone’s work was better and trying to incorporate that into my own

As someone who took creative writing courses I was constantly surrounded by other brilliant people, if I hung my head in shame every time I read something as good or better than mine I never would have lifted it. 

As someone who has watched a lot of writers with very good idea’s crash and burn I mean it when I say you either develop a healthy sense of respect for your own work or you stop writing. 

There’s three things I really wish more people consider

1. Do you think their work is better because it’s a different style, one that you like? There’s an element to ‘the grass is greener on the other side’, I have seen people work in some amazing styles that I wished to god I could replicate, some I managed, some I never did, but there’s nothing wrong with either. having a different style Is Not the same as having a bad style, each has their own strengths and you can admire one without putting yours down

2. Knowing someone who is a better writer is a blessing and if they knew you were using their work to bring yourself down they would not be happy, mooch off that friend, analyze their work, ask them to edit your shit, as long as you’re not annoying them be shameless about it. the best thing creative writing did for me was give me the confidence to ask people to critic my work and shamelessly better each other for that sharing 

…he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. ( LOC )

“Cruel war against human nature itself.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that. Yeah. Thomas Jefferson.

And I think it’s worth mentioning that they’re already using strong language to describe the slavery of the tobacco plantations of the 1770s. They haven’t even seen the full, capitalist horror of what the cotton economy would be. Even before cotton, they knew.

But both the Declaration and later the Constitution were compromises. Slavery was left in because the southern states wouldn’t have signed on otherwise and they needed everyone rowing in the same general direction. A basic pattern — selling out one group to secure another — that continues in politics to this day.