Just remember: If all writing fiction ever does is keep you from losing your goddamn mind during this pandemic, it has served you well and needs no other justification for consuming hours upon hours of your time. It does not need to be good. It does not need to be finished. It does not need to get published or praised. It only needs to soothe you, to hold you, to occupy your mind, to amuse you, to tether you to this world, to keep you from going mad, to keep you company, to keep you alive.
Weird peeve time. Calling lab grown gemstones “fake” is stupid because it’s the same shit just not formed naturally. An artificially grown diamond is the same shit as a natural diamond it is the exact same material bro it’s all fuckign carbon
It’s carbon it’s pretty and it didn’t involve slave labor what’s not to love??? Hi I’m having geology opinions tonight apparently. And I’m right
There is so much bullshit in the diamonds industry to be mad about tbh. It also ties into the bullshit of the wedding industry as a whole but we don’t have the time to unpack all that
not even going to lie, the day i learned i could get like 15 lab grown rubies the size of dimes for $20 is the day i spent $20 on rubies, and i have never once said to myself “man, i wish this cost $1,600 and the lives of eight children to produce”
We are a pro-lab-grown mineral blog here, not only is it massively cheaper but massively more ethical as well in many cases.
another very cool lab grown gem is Moissanite. It has a 9.25 on the mohs hardness scale where diamond is a 10. Moissanote also has a 2.69 refractive index in comparison to diamond’s 2.419 and here is the difference
and the best thing about moissanite? It is all lab grown and it costs only a fraction of what diamond costs. So fuck the diamond indsutry and buy lab grown gems which cost significantly less
Also it’s just cool to think of some mad scientist lookin person doing shit against the law of the universe and making pretty gems for you. Like cmon. This shouldnt be allowed probably. But humans really be like on gOD i want some shiny an just started MAKIN em
for years people wanted alchemy, well now we have alchemy and we’re making gemstones out of it and suddenly “it doesn’t count” anymore
Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
“It’s red on the inside?”
Wait, they’ve never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.
“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’t eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
I Spy
So for one of my classes we had to meditate, do some automatic writing, and then pull out eight words that spoke to us and turn it into poetry. Except it doesn’t really have to rhyme, so I guess it’s more like prose. Anyway, I really liked the limitation of this assignment. We were supposed to write eight lines only, with one word in each, but I ended up doing ten. Here it is!
I see you, illuminated
softened, tugged, distorted
Surrounded in haze, I see you.none else.
Your blues only.
Is it not tiring?
To charm into anonymity.
I see you, no loss of respect —and well, I feel you sink.
So come here, then, and allow yourself to be.
As is, and promised no loss,
for what you are, and that only.
It made me pretty sad, actually. I feel like we want to be seen with clarity and generosity, and it’s nerve-wracking to allow that I wrote this with a very motherly ache, like the kind you get when you see a child with a scraped knee and quivering lip. The selfless urge to scoop them up and take away their pain, but you can’t really, and that’s sad as fuck. Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that this is what I desperately want someone to say to me. I just want to be the kid on the sidewalk being told that it’s okay and my pain is heard.
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since Elon musk’s snl skit thing (?) ive been seeing a ton of posts talking about the asperger’s label and how evil it is and i would just like to say
like, there are problems with the label, but I feel weird about throwing around “aspergers was coined by a Nazi!” as the reason it’s bad. It just does not get into any of the reasons why it might be a harmful label and it really makes me uncomfortable because it feels like another “this word is Bad because it’s associated with bad things” argument with no actual substance to it and if you want to help autistic people you have to go deeper than “this word is Bad, this other word is Good,” like please
It’s not common knowledge at all that Hans Asperger was a Nazi, and I can say this because I am autistic, I read Neurotribes a couple years ago, which is 500+ pages and talks extensively about him, and still didn’t come away with that. Which, according to some quick googling, might be because that Asperger’s involvement in the Nazi eugenics program has only been known since 2018? That is from Wikipedia so there’s definitely deeper to delve, but I don’t think it helps anyone to act like anyone who says “Asperger’s” is a eugenicist who is using it as a dogwhistle or something? Like what the fuck.
There are many people who use it because that was their initial diagnosis. (it was mine??) What does it DO for autistic people to label anyone who refers to themselves with the “asperger’s” label as a eugenicist and Nazi. Who does that benefit. Not us.
I have also seen claims that Asperger used the term to “distinguish the autistic children he deemed worth keeping alive” which is just straight up misinformation???? He never used the term “Asperger’s” himself at all. “Asperger’s” was legitimately not a thing until after he was dead.
There’s definitely a problem with how people use “Asperger’s” to distinguish more “Normal/‘High Functioning’” autistic people. It’s an outdated label that has not been in use since 2013. but people are largely not talking thoughtfully about that and instead speaking as if “Asperger’s” is Definitely a Nazi Dogwhistle which is just so wild???
There’s a saying that’s like “assume incompetence before you assume malice” and that definitely applies here. There are many many autistic people who have no idea that using the diagnosis they received when they were diagnosed to refer to themselves is seen as some kind of eugenicist statement??? That makes no sense at all wtf please
Like it really feels like ppl are so fixated on hating Elon musk that they have to read malicious, evil meanings into every word he says and for the love of god accept that every word a person says is not a cue to some kind of master narrative of their secret intentions. We don’t have to fit the fact that he said “asperger’s” into some over-arching schema that confirms that he is a Horrible Person.
I don’t think the man puts that much thought into all the words that he speaks collectively in a day tbh
in general I find the fixation on non-problematic vocabulary at the expense of everything else to be endlessly frustrating! a while back I followed a blog run by an intellectually disabled autistic teenager who was straight up ostracized by the rest of autistic tumblr for describing himself as “severely autistic.” He literally could not post about his experiences without people replying to his posts “correcting” his language and talking down to him about how problematic it was. I don’t want “aspergers” to become the new version of this garbage
If you want to get into it the word “autism” also has stigmatizing and ableist origins. The problem with “aspergers” is not its origins so much as the fact that it draws a fairly arbitrary distinction between two “types” of autistic people, both generally shunned but one viewed as infantile and undeserving of agency or full human dignity, the other viewed as unpleasant and lacking the capacity to care about others but otherwise “normal.”
It is true that having “aspergers” has on some occasions been a sense of pride for those who want to distance themselves from the “more disabled” autistic people, but this is by no means limited to those who use the label “aspergers,” and I would like to remind everyone that neither “aspergers” nor “autism” have ever been particularly complimentary labels in public perception.
“Aspergers” as the Good Autism is far more charitable than actual broadly held opinions about autism in our society, imo. Ableists do not believe there is a truly Good Autism
I actually had no idea the term was coined by a Nazi at all until this SNL episode came out. I honestly don’t really care, for all the reasons that @headspace-hotel listed. However, I thought this part:
There’s definitely a problem with how people use “Asperger’s” to distinguish more “Normal/‘High Functioning’” autistic people. It’s an outdated label that has not been in use since 2013. but people are largely not talking thoughtfully about that and instead speaking as if “Asperger’s” is Definitely a Nazi Dogwhistle which is just so wild???
was interesting. Despite being diagnosed long after it became outdated (October, 2019), I often use it and so does my psychologist. To me, using the term to distinguish between levels of functioning made sense. There’s Aspergers, which is mild autism, and there’s autism, which is bad autism, right?
(obviously not, wait ‘til I finish to get your panties in a bunch)
I think this need to clarify my level of functioning (and now that I think about it, what does “functioning” mean, anyway, that word is probably offensive) is partially because of how autism is discussed or written. There’s an absolute lack of representation beyond some kind of virgin genius who doesn’t wash his hair. I mean, how many autistic characters aren’t Sheldon Cooper reincarnated? Have you seen any that aren’t defined by their autism? Also, are any of those female?
Rarely are we portrayed outside of the selfish neurotypical gaze. They see us as the sum of our flaws: a creepy outlier that makes the main character uncomfortable with their info-dumping. I tend to doubt my own diagnosis in the same way. Instead of thinking about my executive dysfunction, sensory issues, stims, or literally anything else, I focus on my social competence. “Are you really autistic?”, I say to myself, “It’s not like you actually struggle. I mean, you can carry a conversation, right?”
And that could lead to a whole other tangent on how mental illness likes to gaslight you into thinking you’re perfectly normal and okay (a fun realization I came to while stoned off my ass), but I’ll control myself. My point is that we stray from the norm, and this makes people uncomfortable. In turn, the word “autism” gains an ill-informed reputation colored by feeling, rather than fact. And I suppose when I meet someone and say I have Asperger’s, not autism, that’s a defense mechanism. It’s my way of pleading, “look at me for who I am, and not who you’ll think I’ll be. I promise I won’t make you uncomfortable. I know I’m weird, but I’m not that kind of weird, right?”
Edit: Ok, so when I was writing this I had the original post pulled up without the 2nd note added by OP, which talked pretty much about the same thing I did. But I really liked my post so here it is.
pain
Lol I just tabbed out of the post I was writing and lost all of it. I guess I’ll start writing in google docs now
flowers in oregon / may ‘21
taken and edited by me