Cracker Tin Crafts

Tumblr @staff have been silent about the use of this site by white nationalist bloggers, while numerous other sites (see this post) have made actions to ban nazis/white nationalists/”alt-right”/fascists. Tumblr needs to know their lack of action is unacceptable. I love my tumblr community and want to stay, but if this continues, I will have to considering leaving.

Let’s also let @staff know that as they’re trying to increase advertiser spend, they should be well-aware of most ad tech companies (on the buy and sell side) have explicit rules against hate speech. You can tell Tumblr is aware of this because they’ve doubled-down on trying to locate the NSFW posts (quite badly based on how their technology fails so often) for what I imagine is brand safety for advertisers.

Given groups like Sleeping Giants has been successful in amplifying the voices of users protesting brands appearing on Breitbart, any other platform could be next in having their advertisers signaled with a screenshot of said posts where hate speech is proudly displayed against an ad served… well, you get the drift.

1.) Boycott

micdotcom

the-future-now

the-movemnt

this-is-life-actually

And if you aren’t already aware, they are a shit company that uses its indignant social justice-flavored posts for clicks even as they do things like fire their four-months-pregnant Connections editor the week after her wedding, without warning. AFTER RUNNING A STORY ABOUT HOW THE USA NEEDS BETTER MATERNITY LEAVE/PROTECTIONS.

This, after they DID NOT fire the guy who lied about a death in his family so he could go build a treehouse and blog about it.

Also 99% of their ~top notch news~ is Huffington Post-style aggregation and NOT original reporting.

There’s never a bad time to re-up this post, but today Mic has been Mic’ing around in spectactular fashion.

Today, the founder just laid off half the editorial staff, including the only woman reporter of color in the newsroom.

- Mic is laying off staff as it pivots to video

- Mic Lays Off Dozens Just Weeks After Promising Not To

- Twitter thread by Sarah Amy Harvard, the now ex-only-woman-reporter-of-color

If you have an emergency and have to go to the hospital, you’ll owe the hospital a lot of money. (I got into a car wreck and broke my ankle and my arm. My hospital bill was around $20,000)

You’ll also owe the ambulance provider, if you need one. (My ambulance bill was about $800)

You may get separate bills from the anesthesiologist or surgeon. (My anesthesiologist bill was $1,700)

You may need follow-up appointments. (My orthopedic surgeon billed me for the appointments and his surgery together and it was about $1,000)

You’ve also got to pay for medical equipment you need afterward, like crutches or a walking boot. (Mine cost about $75)

Altogether, I ended up with almost $24,000 in medical debt from one car accident. That’s a really scary number for someone like me who makes $10/hr at a 12 hour a week job.

I got my debt down to $1075 by making some phone calls and submitting some paperwork.

The first thing I did was contact the hospital. They don’t make it easy to find, but many hospitals (perhaps most hospitals?) have financial assistance programs for people who can’t afford medical bills. I don’t make a lot of money, and I have bills to pay, so they were able to help me. I called the billing department and asked if they had any assistance programs for low income people who can’t pay their bills. I had to call multiple times, and I got transferred in circles by people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Finally, I got an appointment with someone in “Eligibility Services” (I don’t know what other hospitals call it, if it’s something different). I had to bring my pay stubs and copies of all of my bills. When I got to the hospital for the appointment, nobody knew what I was talking about so I had to wander a little to find where I needed to go. I spoke with the guy in Eligibility Services, and I waited for a decision on how much of the bill they would forgive. A month later, I got a call telling me it was totally forgiven.

I did the same thing for my ambulance bill and my anesthesiologist, but the process was a LOT easier. I just had to mail some paperwork and it was totally forgiven.

I didn’t bother with the medical equipment suppliers, since the bills came from separate companies and I didn’t feel like going through the process twice for $75. I was assured at the hospital that they had similar programs for debt forgiveness, so I could have probably avoided paying that too.

The only thing I couldn’t get taken care of was the surgeon/follow-up appointment cost, but they were able to put me on a no-interest payment plan.

We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.

The bigger part is schema.

Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.

One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.

If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”

The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”

BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.

Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.

Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.

Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. 

And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.

And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.

But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.

So you see this.

And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)

Do you see what I’m saying?

I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.

And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.

But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.

So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.

It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.

So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.

When all the Sanders Sides are forced to take a photo with the same filter 😂😂

Good thing I didn’t plan on getting any work done this afternoon, because this story is WILD. It’s a dick move to buy your way onto the NYT Bestsellers list, and the whole Goodreads page for the book is clearly bullshit reviews, but the YA community is coming for them.

On my library’s book ordering website (Baker and Taylor) it lists the street date for the book as 8/15/17, but as of today (8/26) it’s still listed as “Not Yet Published” with only 80 reported on order. It’s also listed as “General Adult” and not YA. The summary on B&T is “A young woman with supernatural powers joins a Las Vegas magic show, only to find that falling in love is more dangerous than magick.”

So….

BANANAS.

You need to be a damn good writer to pull it off.

You need to understand the rules of writing before you can break out of the box and look into publishing stories with more malicious subject matters. You need to have a good grasp of the building blocks before you start trying to construct that kind of narrative. Experimentation and exploration only come after you have a deep understanding of how  this all fucking works. You need to have grammar, plotting, dialogue, narrative tricks, characterization…you need to have a great understanding and application of ALL OF THAT before you move onto such sensitive subject matters.

And then, even then, you have to consider a lot of factors. Such as:

What is the purpose of writing this *insert sensitive subject matter*?

What do I hope my readers take away from this?

How does this play into the larger picture of my character’s life?

Is there a different route I can take that would have the same impact?

Can I explore this character without using this kind of subject?

Is this my story to tell?

That last one is especially important, because it highlights the absolute crux of the issue here: people trying to tell stories that aren’t theirs. People relying on abuse and trauma to develop a narrative or a characterization, instead of looking internally for their own stories. People using these highly painful subject matters to write a romance and give characters depth, instead of actually knowing how to do it without the trauma. It’s lazy, it’s insensitive, and it’s perpetuates a vicious cycle of toxicity in media and fan spaces that encourages more and more people to write the same type of content with the same kind of subjects used to fluff up a bare-bones narrative.

Tragedy is a beautiful thing when it’s done right. Done right, it can literally change the entire perspective of a reader who is engaging in the story. We’ve all had books we read or televisions shows we watched that show a tragic narrative that made us rethink how we view the world. But the reason those stories are so good, and the reason why we have such a visceral reaction to them, is because the writer(s) of that story knows what they are doing. They have mastered the building blocks of writing a story, and using that knowledge, have created something that is poignant, heartbreaking, and transfixing. 

Not every writer will be capable of that. As much as I encourage people to write and practice and get better at The Kraft™, some people can only go so far. And that’s wonderful! You don’t need to be the modern Sophocles to write an engaging, enjoyable story! You don’t need to inject needless suffering to make a dynamic story! The world needs nice, dependable, no-frills narratives that we can lose ourselves in, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of by filling that role! 

And understand too, that I’m not saying these sensitive subject matters shouldn’t be written at all! I think they should be, and it’s important that they are. But it needs to be done with sensitivity, with openness, with a deep understanding that as a writer who is publishing stories (fanfic or otherwise), there is a responsibility you’ve put on your shoulders by putting it out there. 

Author’s intent means absolutely nothing if you cannot pull what you’re trying to accomplish off. Realize that while you write yet another abusive/dub-con mlm relationship, that there are real mlm in fandom spaces that have endured this trauma because toxic masculinity extends beyond heterosexual relationships. Or while you write your slavery AU with your brown skinned slave, there are black women in fandom who have to live the generational trauma that slavery and colonization has left on them. And while you’re killing off your female characters or punishing them for having the audacity to act outside of misogynistic constructs, there are women who are beaten and abused and degraded for doing nothing other than saying “This isn’t right.”

So get good, writers. Get really good if you want to ‘experiment’ and ‘explore’ and then publish that work. Get really fucking good, because otherwise, you’re wandering into a new frontier before you could even find your way around the one you’re currently residing in. 

the police department in our state capital was called because a skunk was wandering down main street with its head stuck in a yogurt cup

not wanting to risk getting sprayed, and unsure of how to remove a skunk from a yogurt cup anyway, the police googled “how to get a skunk’s head out of a yogurt cup”

this led them to an article, published by Arizona police in 2015, titled How to Take a Yogurt Cup Off a Skunk’s Head Without Getting Sprayed

using the method outlined in that article, vermont police safely caught the skunk, removed the yogurt cup, and sent the animal on its way

they did this without anybody getting sprayed in the process