N/A

France, Holland and Germany:

In Venice in particular, the style lingered and became popular to wear during Carnival, or as a way for upper class women to disguise their identity so they could engage in activities that might otherwise be considered improper (gambling, flirting, or just like... going about the city without a proper chaperone) 

an interesting construction note - these masks weren’t tied on. They were made with a bead or button attached inside the mask which was held between the teeth. If a wearer wanted to speak, she would have to remove the mask. 

The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?

That’s it.

So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:

A slow burn

Episodic

Fast-paced

Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot

Opening in medias res without immediate context

Incorporating a large number of subplots

Incorporating very few subplots

Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has

“Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.

The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.

Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.

Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.

Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)

Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?

Doctor Who.

ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…

Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.

Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully

Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week

Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.

How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)

How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)

If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.” 

“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”. 

This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.

“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.

It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less. 

Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate. 

To recap:

Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)

The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.

A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.

A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with. 

(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)

A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.

The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.

NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.

An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!

Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.

The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.

Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.

The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell. 

Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible. 

However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.

Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)

For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!

The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

How can a disease with 1% mortality rate shut down the United States?

Franklin Veaux - updated 6 hours ago, professional writer

There are two problems with this question.

1. It neglects the law of large numbers; and

2. It assumes that one of two things happen: you die or are 100% fine.

The US has a population of 328,200,000. If one percent of the population dies, that’s 3,282,000 people dead.

Three million people dead would monkey wrench the economy no matter what. That more than doubles the number of annual deaths all at once.

The second bit is people keep talking about deaths. Deaths, deaths, deaths. Only one percent die! Just one percent! One is a small number! No big deal, right?

What about the people who survive?

For every one person who dies:

19 more require hospitalization.

18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.

10 will have permanent lung damage.

3 will have strokes.

2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination.

2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function.

So now all of a sudden, that “but it’s only 1% fatal!” becomes:

3,282,000 people dead.

62,385,000 hospitalized.

59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage.

32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage.

9,846,000 people with strokes.

6,564,000 people with muscle weakness.

6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function.

That’s the thing that folks who keep going on about “only 1% dead, what’s the big deal?” don’t get.

How many more people are dying of non-covid illness because they’re either choosing not to get treatment or there aren’t any beds?

How many households are going to lose their primary breadwinner?

How many disabled people are going to lose their caretaker?

How many couples are going to divorce after losing a child?

How many senior citizens are going to have to move to a nursing home after losing their spouse, or their adult child?

And that’s just personal dynamics. Consider the social.

How many kids are going to drop out of high school rather than repeat a year?

How many kids won’t be going to college because they don’t feel safe on campus?

How many students are deciding against nursing school because they figured out long ago that no amount of clapping is worth getting assaulted by a maskless patent’s family demanding horse dewormer?

How many teachers saw parents spitting on their colleagues at PTA meetings and decided this was their last year in the classroom?

This is a good overview of the data that backs up what I've been hearing anecdotally from schools all over the country: that this has been an absolute nightmare for kids. Some other stuff I've heard from schools about behavior problems:

Little kids have been supervised by teenage relatives for so long that they have no idea what kind of language is appropriate for school, or for human society in general and there aren't many existing protocols for how to address a five year old saying racial slurs.

Anti-mask/anti-vax parents have, intentionally or not, taught their children that teachers don't need to be respected and it's really broken classroom management.

It's that it's not possible for just parents to be able to teach kids to behave in large groups of non-family. The reason that so many kids are struggling to solve disagreements or learn to share or get to know other kids on their own is because the kids who have had loving, engaged parents have been used to having parents intervene. One of the things kids are really struggling with is the transition from the little kids who is parented and gets their wants met by someone who loves them in particular to, like, a human being who has to share a public space with a bunch of other human beings without being too annoying or too easily annoyed. They have a harder time building relationships with adults outside family.

And I think this article leans towards the idea that "opening the schools" is just a button that can be pushed as long as you bully teachers unions enough. But that doesn't mean that the COVID disruptions haven't caused serious problems in kids ability to learn to navigate the world as social human beings. And the solution isn't just to somehow "make schools open" but the fact that we can't have any mask or vaccine mandates is a pretty big factor in why schools physically can't open and it's not an okay situation to be in.

Plus, at some point, this will be over and we're going to need to invest as a society in helping kids catch up.

The decline of emotional and social development of children was a problem before covid, and covid has absolutely made it much worse. This isn't every household sure, but way too many parents will just give their toddlers and young children ipads and unsupervised youtube time all day because it's easier than actually parenting their kid. It's the new TV as a babysitter, with much less criteria on what can be shown and a lot more harmful content

It's why youtube is fully of content farms that pump out content made for kids that barely has any substance, because kids will click on it and their parents either don't care or don't even know. Kids are watching surprise egg unboxings instead of sesame street and are being deprived of the content that stimulates their brain and educates them in such an important time of development

There's a video Danny Gonzalez made a long time ago about kid's youtube channels, before comments were disabled on them, and every comment was gibberish and keysmashes because babies were the ones writing. Just hundreds and thousands of comments on these videos written by actual babies

Parents give their kids iPads and hand them over to TV as babysitters why? When did that start? When did kids start getting a lot of their socialization at school and much less of it in the general world?

My grandfather lived on a farm. He had twelve brothers and sisters who made it past birth. He was one of the babies, so he spent most of his time following his older brother Tad around. His father's sisters lived with the family, and there were people up the road that the young kids could go look in on. Cooking for neighbors and sending your kids back and forth or just handing one of the babies off to one of the aunties, as well as the fact that his mother was able to stay home, meant that childcare was split among family, friends and neighbors. (He was also expected to go work in the coal mines when he was old enough and one of his brothers died of pertussis, I'm not glorifying his childhood.)

My father grew up as the first generation after the great post-WWII sundering of the American family unit and the creation of the idea of the "nuclear family." My grandparents moved around a bit for the Navy. When he left the Navy, they were able financially to buy a nice 3BR house on his pension. Dad ranged all over his small town. His mom could still afford to stay home full time, but without the support of aunties, mothers and mothers-in-law, sometimes to get a breath, Grammy just said "oh you can go watch TV."

Both of my parents had to work in order for them to buy the house they wanted in the school district they wanted. I spent more time watching TV in the afternoons than they wanted me to, but when I was young, Dad was at the office and Mom was at class, and when I was older, Dad needed to get this article done and Mom was teaching class. Like many kids of the 80s, I was a "latchkey kid." I was still able to range over a wide area when I wanted to, though, so I didn't spend as much time watching TV or playing on the computer (our shitty Apple IIe knockoff, a Franklin Ace 2000) as kids who didn't live in the ass end of nowhere in a forest. Mom had the same supports as her mother did, which was "not many."

During my childhood and adolescence, the range of kids got smaller. Turning your kids out the door to just go run around (which is actually super important for brain development and health, having time alone with themselves and their peers, without adult supervision) became less and less acceptable. Kids started to go to the mall, which was viewed as better bc there were always adults not far away, and it was a contained environment.

Then I had my daughter in 2000. I'm going to be totally fucking blunt, here: we were poor as fuck bc we made the decision that I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars a month for someone to raise my kid in daycare, but we were lucky even at the time to make that happen. It's nearly impossible to have a parent able to stay at home now unless you're at minimum upper-middle-class. The economic pressures have changed: wages are flat, inflation is ridiculous, you can't do the things you used to do bc there's no money.

It was beautiful but also terrible. My mother was hours away, I had no one to lean on, and my partners worked and dumped the baby on me even when they were home because "childcare is your job". Even when I left them both and got a more supportive partner, we both had to work our asses off once she hit kindergarten. We lived in apartments with high turnover, bc nowadays poor people (generally speaking) move around a lot more than they used to. So we didn't know our neighbors when MK was little, and I had no one I could hand her off to so I could have a minute of peace, or cook dinner safely when i was too exhausted to cook AND entertain the child AND my partner was still working. Did I stick my kid in front of the TV? Yes. Did she get to play with my cellphone even though the only game on my Nokia 3300 was Snake? Yes. Did I have the support I needed from my community? Fuck no! When she was a baby I was so isolated and unsupported that I seriously considered suicide. And that's not unusual.

When she was 8, we were able to get a townhouse in a blue-collar neighborhood with a lot of kids. I was utterly determined to give MK stability: a childhood where we didn't move house a lot, one where she could walk places if she wanted to, and one where there were other kids in the neighborhood. In achieving this, we were extraordinarily lucky, and among our peers, out of the norm. I had a corporate job at the time which I stumbled into bc I'm white and well-spoken and good at sales and could make $60-70k a year without a degree. (Then I got sick and lost that type of job forever, but that's another story.)

My kid had a much smaller range of being able to go rove than I had, but because we were determined and very very lucky, she could still do that. However, the attitude around free-range kids of the variety that my grandfather, father and I had been? That changed, and the kids tended toward staying in one or the other's houses bc that would keep the nosy neighbors from calling the cops about "unsupervised children outdoors." (Yeah, this really happened, and a lot.) And what did they do inside?

Video games, mostly.

Now MK is 21 years old, and I look at the families starting in her generation, and the families I know. The ones who are doing well in this specific sense, with a minimum of screen time, either:

Live near family

Live in a polycule

Have the money to hire someone full time

And if they don't have those things, then even before the pandemic, the answer is "give the baby a fucking iPad so you can fold laundry or take a shit in peace." And that's no different than when I put MK in front of a TV with Ice Age on for the 900th time so I could make lunch or brush my teeth without her literally hanging from me or go shut myself in a closet and breathe for a minute.

In the industrialized world, and especially in the United States, we expect parents to be able to both work FT jobs - and most parents are working 50-60 hours a week or have multiple jobs; keep houses clean enough to be shown on Zoom calls every fucking day; feed, bathe, and help their children with an absolutely monstrous and out-of-scope amount of homework; manage the activities and appointments necessary for a well-rounded child bc "structured activities" have replaced free-range kids, to the detriment of those children; and somehow in the middle of that, find enough time to take a goddamned shit in peace without handing the child some kind of technological distraction for 5 fucking minutes.

Add on top of this the fact that I really wanted MK, I love her to pieces, I think she's the best thing I've ever done with my life, I had 12 miscarriages trying to have another kid (or at least open to it) bc I wanted a big family when I was younger, and I still thought about ending it a couple times when things got really hard, bc I had no support. In a lot of places even when I had her, a lot of people had a lot less choice about that bc the right to family planning is in a very practical sense unattainable to a lot of my peers. Planned Parenthood may do sliding scale but you still have to take a bus into town to get there, which costs time and money you don't have. Abortions took hours of travel that required a car, cost money you didn't have, and local conservatives are still doing their best to make them actually inaccessible and skirt the edges of the law.

So even if we assume all of those children are 100% wanted, some of those children are being had in a situation where they're not economically viable. Quality child care costs thousands a month; an iPad costs like $50 a month on the family plan. Fucking bargain, honestly. Grammy isn't here for them to hand the kid to her for 5 minutes.

We have, as a society, blown apart the family as it used to exist as a support dynamic, done nothing to replace it, placed incredible pressures on parents which did not exist in prior generations and which increase generation upon generation, and then people like you tut tut how we have to blame the parents for this. And really what's usually meant there is "blame the mom," because that's what we always mean when we say "blame the parents, they're failing."

Blaming parents and saying "oh we have to put responsibility on them" is intellectually lazy and requires someone to willfully not look at how the experience of family and child-rearing has changed in the past century. The economic liberation of women didn't lead to true liberation for anyone, because capitalism looked at that and said NOW BOTH OF YOU CAN WORK. This is not an argument for going back to a "traditional" mom-stays-home nuclear family, bc that wasn't traditional and started this whole mess, and also yikes, gendered expectations. Not for nothing but there's a reason why the most stable child-raising situations I'm aware of exist in polycules where gender expectations are torn up and there are 3+ adults raising the kids, or in homes where multiple generations still live under one roof.

It takes more than two people to successfully raise a child, and the US has literally dismantled every support structure that parents had, both family and societal, and then people like you have the fucking gall to say mm well we do have to blame the parents actually like parents these days are somehow just all totally fucking lazy and don't really want to raise their children, they want someone or something else to do it for them, mmhmm, it's all on them, yup, that's the answer.

Like honestly, please do a moment of actual thoughtful inquiry into why your brain instantly went to "blame the mother parents" and get the fuck out of my notes with this sloppy, counterfactual, capitalist-media-driven narrative that absolves society as a whole and bullshit capitalist predation on individuals of the damage they have done and continue to do.

The reason a lot of us build found families is in part bc we are distancing ourselves from toxic family patterns, but also bc there is not an economic or practical way in the modern US as currently set up to have the kind of family support and structure that our grandparents and great-grandparents had. Zoning laws and landlords discriminate against multi-generational households -- bonus round, find a 4 bedroom apartment or house for rent near you. If you can find one at all, tell me how much it costs!

My gripe isn't with the use of these things or going to do something else while your kid uses them, it's when there's no discretion for what the kid watches or does or plays and they end up seriously behind in their mental development

I can see how I really failed to communicate that though, sorry!! I do agree that the concept of a nuclear family is terrible and what caused these problems in the first place

My roommate recently came home pale-faced, like he’d seen a ghost. More like witnessed a massacre. Mass-firings were just done at his company. His job, he’d been assured, was safe. All of his coworkers weren’t so safe, and he had to get texts and phone calls from his work-friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he‘d gone out to have drinks with, learn they were no longer employed. To say he had survivor’s guilt would not be hyperbole.

Was this because the company had fallen on hard times? The pandemic has been rough for a lot of industries. No, actually, the company had turned a very nice profit both last year and previous, even in such a troublesome market.

The problem was, you see, the company’s stock price hadn’t risen quite as high as had been projected. They’d made money, sure. Quite a lot of money, in fact. But too many people had projected, i.e., bet the company would do better.

How did the company offset this “loss”? Easy: fire people. Quickest and easiest way to pad the numbers.

No but you don’t understand stock had fallen a percentage point! There was no other way!

We see it all the time. Hugely successful companies reporting ‘record-breaking’ profits then fire huge segments of their workforce - the very people responsible for those record-breaking profits. Why? The money “saved” on personnel costs can boost the stocks even higher!

If your company is struggling, not turning a profit, losing money, people expect layoffs. But to work hard, be successful, your company churning along strong and healthy, and you still lose your job? For what? Because half a percentage point that was dictated by speculation, guessing, by gambling that things would go up or down a certain amount on a graph of rich-people feelings?

I wonder how next year’s speculations will be affected with the information that the company laid off a lot of the people responsible for last year’s profits? Probably not much because the workers are just the components at the company; it’s the leadership that drives the ship, that makes the successes.Those leaders whose bonuses are coincidentally decided by, among other things, the stock price.

Sure, it might be comforting to look at business decisions as making little to no sense or being the domain of nightmares, but that doesn’t actually arm you with any useful knowledge in this fight. It just teaches you to treat these things like incomprehensible boogeymen.

You *should* be studying economics. And politics. And the labor theory of value. Because…

Capitalism is highly rational, highly biased, and completely amoral.

Human beings love to find optimal solutions to any problem. The problem capitalism is trying to solve is how to accumulate and centralize the most wealth and power. The kind of behavior described above is completely rational if you understand that capitalism is about meeting that requirement for profit and growth.

It doesn’t care about me, it doesn’t care about you; it doesn’t care about anyone. You can’t make a capitalistic system moral because it does not consider moral concerns when trying to optimize for profit. Literally anything you can do that increases profit is encouraged, regardless of what harm it might do.

D tier Villain: Excuse me guard, I would like to make my one phone call, please

S tier Villain: all of that and not one of you managed to spill even a single drop of my blood. Wow. Looks like it's game over heroes

-ringtone goes off-

One second.

Hello? What do you mean you can't hang out tomorrow?

yeah, I'm in jail- uh- so..

You can't be in jail. You have plans

Yeah, I know, but I'm like in jail? so..

Just leave, like, there's nothing stopping you

There's like a lot of things stopping me actually

What could possible be getting in your way

uhm, iron bars, walls, ..guns

Since when are any of those things an obstacle?

Since forever, like...

Dude come on, stop arsing, just get up and leave, it's not that hard

you know your experiences aren't universal, right?

Oh yeah... You want me to come get ya?