Literally the stupidest fuckup you know

The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.

But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.

All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.

The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) - they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.

The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?

Because like, I recently saw Charlotte and Elizabeth contrasted as the former being pragmatic and the latter holding out for a love match, because she's younger and prettier and thinks she can afford it, and that is very much not what's happening.

The Charlotte take is correct, but the Elizabeth is all wrong. Lizzie doesn't insist on a love match. That's serendipitous and rather unexpected. She wants, exactly as Mr. Bennet says, someone she can respect. Contempt won't do. Mr. Bennet puts it in weirdly sexist terms like he's trying to avoid acknowledging what he did to himself by marrying a self-absorbed idiot, but it's still true. That's what Elizabeth is shooting for: a marriage that won't make her unhappy.

She's grown up watching how miserable her parents make one another; she's not willing to sign up for a lifetime of being bitter and lonely in her own home.

I think she is very aware, in refusing Mr. Collins, that it's reasonably unlikely that anyone she actually respects is going to want her, with her few accomplishments and her lack of property. That she is turning down security and the chance keep the house she grew up in, and all she gets in return may be spinsterhood.

But, crucially, she has absolute faith in Jane.

The bit about teaching Jane's daughters to embroider badly? That's a joke, but it's also a serious potential life plan. Jane is the best creature in the world, and a beauty; there's no chance at all she won't get married to someone worthwhile.

(Bingley mucks this up by breaking Jane's heart, but her prospects remain reasonable if their mother would lay off!)

And if Elizabeth can't replicate that feat, then there's also no doubt in her mind that Jane will let her live in her house as a dependent as long as she likes, and never let it be made shameful or awful to be that impoverished spinster aunt. It will be okay never to be married at all, because she has her sister, whom she trusts absolutely to succeed and to protect her.

And if something eventually happens to Jane's family and they can't keep her anymore, she can throw herself upon the mercy of the Gardeners, who have money and like her very much, and are likewise good people. She has a support network--not a perfect or impregnable one, but it exists. It gives her realistic options.

Spinsterhood was a very dangerous choice; there are reasons you would go to considerable lengths not to risk it.

But Elizabeth has Jane, and her pride, and an understanding of what marrying someone who will make you miserable costs.

That's part of the thesis of the book, I would say! Recurring Austen thought. How important it is not to marry someone who will make you, specifically, unhappy.

She would rather be a dependent of people she likes and trusts than of someone she doesn't, even if the latter is formally considered more secure; she would rather live in a happy, reasonable household as an extra than be the mistress of her own home, but that home is full of Mr. Collins and her mother.

This is a calculation she's making consciously! She's not counting on a better marriage coming along. She just feels the most likely bad outcome from refusing Mr. Collins is still much better than the certain outcome of accepting him. Which is being stuck with Mr. Collins forever.

Elizabeth is also being pragmatic. Austen also endorses her choice, for the person she is and the concerns she has. She's just picking different trade-offs than Charlotte.

Elizabeth's flaw is not in her own priorities; she doesn't make a reckless choice and get lucky. But in being unable to accept that Charlotte's are different, and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Charlotte.

Because realistically, when your marriage is your whole family and career forever, and you only get to pick the ones that offer themselves to you, when you are legally bound to the status of dependent, you're always going to be making some trade-offs.

If Jane and Bingley had been married, Jane would have had everything she deserved, and Elizabeth would have been safe.

Better chances of finding someone she wanted, with access to a wider society and Bingley's web of contacts, and free to refuse anyone she didn't, because Bingley is sweet-natured and wealthy and there would have been no obstacle to staying with them as long as she needed to. (Other than his sisters not liking it lmao.)

Mary-Kitty-Lydia would have had better odds of escaping the trap their parents carelessly raised them into, as well. Mrs. Bennet would have had less to be horrible and anxious about. Mr. Collins wouldn't matter anymore. Bingley was literally going to save them all.

And Darcy took that away. Because he thought that they, and Jane by extension, weren't good enough. That Jane wasn't good enough!

He took away Elizabeth's other options and now he says she must endure his proposal? The hypocrisy. The gall.

The same presumption as Collins that of course she would accept, what choice did she have? To ask is to obtain. He has the means of survival in the palm of his hand. What could any woman in her position do, but go along with his life plan?

It's practically economic coercion, if you believe he thought it through, and awful even if you think he didn't. It fits perfectly into her Wickham-sourced understanding of the man, that he throws around his power and takes other people's chances away and assumes everything is his by natural right.

That he's the only person qualified to make choices, and that therefore no one else should.

(And enough of this is accurate that Darcy's mortified regret and determination to work on himself is founded in the reality of his fuckups and bad habits, but enough is wrong for Lizzie to feel bad and be more inclined to forgive him the rest, especially since he's helping and trying to be better. It's an effective romance!)

So yeah I think the the 'how dare he!' at Hunsford after he contributed to getting Bingley away from Jane runs deep, because of the money on the table. Lydia's indiscretion threatens the whole family; Jane's success would have helped them all just as much.

In a way I think, in addition to all the other things that are going on there, Darcy patching over the devastation of the elopement is him paying back the opportunity he carelessly took away because he thought he knew best, before.

You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to [email protected] within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.

Patreon, Squarespace, Gumroad. What do all these online spaces have in common? A monopolizing payment processor. My hand slipped and I contacted the ACLU, the FSC, and the MA Bar Association for legal assistance. If you’ve been fucked over by draconian nsfw bans please join my Mastercard Injury Mailing List.

Has mastercard's no-horny policy destabilized your creative income?

Us too. Let's find an attorney.

This is a confidential mailing list form.

The word "master" has been crossed over in red. At the end there is a QR-code.

It is a warning that there will be no further warnings. That's what it means. It was designed into the structure of AO3's tagging system for a reason. If you only want to read fic with specific, distinct content warnings, you should not read "Chose Not to Warn" fics. Period. If you choose to read them, that is on you.

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here

To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go

On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out

If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.

1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.

This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.

2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.

I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.

3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.

iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.

4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.

MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).

There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.

You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.

I am begging you to read the website URL. It is being run by Republican Senator Thom Tillis. His name is IN THE URL.

He is a senator who violently opposes everything that left-leaning people support. This survey is being done for campaign research so he knows how to pitch his campaign to get people on his side. Filling this out is helping republicans with free campaign research.

I am assuming this is about a post I reblogged like six months ago when I went off on forced technological enshitification and the slow erosion of consumer options. But sure, I'll bite.

Why do I "need" my earbuds to have a wire? I dunno, Anon, maybe I:

Don't want to have to worry about recharging my earbuds.

Don't want my earbuds to be even easier to lose.

Don't want my earbuds to need separate accessories that are as easy to lose as the earbuds.

Prefer to have bluetooth turned off on my devices for security and safety reasons.

Like being able to seamlessly plug my earbuds into my computer, my MP3 player, or any other device with a headphone jack.

Don't want to spend 50 dollars on decent wireless earbuds when I can do all the above things with a pair of solid earbuds that cost me like $12 during the Obama administration.

Don't care about what kinds of headphones or earbuds people wear but don't like what it says about our society when other people apparently care what kind of earbuds I'm wearing so much they have send an Anonymous ask to interrogate me about it.

I don't though!

In the above instance the nerves of my hand/wrist were compressed by bites. In general, avoid joints and their associated tendons and ligaments, because that is where nerves are easiest to compress + damaged ligamenture really hurts and is easy to fuck up itself, too, with too-aggrssive biting in the wrong area.

Shoulders are usually meaty enough to take it without nerve compression, but you should still be careful around the connective tissues there. Do not bite the back of the leg at, just above, or just below the knee, I give 3 inches on either side for safety. Do not bite the wrist or within 3 inches of it. Do not bite the elbow, when you bite the forearm try to have it offset from the visible vascular structures that run through your elbow (bite to the side). Remember that your teeth are sharp and your jaw is powerful and if you tried, you could kill someone with them.

and if you're doing rope bondage then this article from ropestudy goes over where certain nerves are and what to avoid - again, joints are generally a no-go and meatier parts of the body tend to be safer.