@mikkeneko I would say I’m glad that the anti ao3 trolling attempt backfired except I’m pretty sure it didn’t
I’ve been watching the escalation of this shit since sometime in the summer and it’s really concerning how easy it is for them to get people talking now
Once upon a time it would have been so laughable to say some of this stuff, no one would even take time to rebutt it
I’m concerned the point IS to keep it top of mind, make people think it’s reasonable to question ao3’s existence
Every time you whack one of these moles they come back with something else, because they are playing straight from the alt right handbook of engagement
Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew
Some male friends of mine were once talking about how useful they’d be in an apocalypse, and I pointed out that as a weaver and sewer and maker of stuff, I’d be pretty damn useful and they tried to tell me they could just loot clothes from WalMart and they’d be fine. As if WalMart has endless supplies without weekly deliveries.
So just last night a friend of mine was talking about who he’d round up in the event of a zombie apocalypse and how I’m his go-to farmer on account of I know how to keep an entire homestead up and running and we’re talking about what kind of resources I’d need to keep a colony of about 50-ish people alive and i bring up what all goes into processing wool for clothing and such and he just kind of stops me like ‘wait, wait, we don’t need to do all of that because we can scavenge for clothes we don’t need to be able to make them’ and i’m just like, ‘dude, that works in the short-term maybe but if this community is going to be sustainable you’ve gotta have people whose job it is to make clothes and blankets and shit’
also cloth rots pretty quickly when left exposed to the elements and after the first few years or so anything we manage to scavenge isn’t going to be wearable anymore and anywho we’ve got to teach the kids everything or they’re not gonna know what to do some decades down the line when everything’s too rusted or rotted out to be of any practical use anymore, etc etc, and he’s reckoning that things like woodworking and smithing and ranching are more important than say, cleaning or cooking or dairying and meanwhile i’m just smh may all the gods have mercy on this poor fool
He also balked when i brought up how to run a laundry and what all was needed to make everyday shit like soap and toothpaste – like dude, you think this is going to be all about hunting and scavenging and being neato manly-man drifters like in the walking dead let me teach you a thing about keeping a village alive and healthy for more than a week man most of it is shit you keep thinking is non-essential on account of it being “women’s work” or “simple chores” that’re actually pretty labor-intensive and take time, training, knowledge, and practice to do successfully, let alone well, and are 100% absolutely necessary work in order for you to have any reasonably good quality of life after the world ends
Men in post apocalyptic worlds: Immortan Joe
Women in post apocalyptic worlds: the Vuvalini
I remember reading an account of one of them many “tune in, turn on, drop out” communes that sprang up during the 60s. All these middle class suburban college kids, ditching society to go live in the wild in their perfect utopias. And how they all failed usually within the first year. Because they didn’t know how to do anything. Like how far away or deep you need to dig a latrine so it doesn’t pollute your water supply. So they were constantly getting sick. And that women constantly pregnant or breast feeding is not actually a good thing for a tiny commune. Because now instead of doing the break breaking labour of sustenance farming the women are all tied up with child care or recovering. And then winter would hit, and they’d have no food because they’d grown stupid things like tomatoes or fruit instead of grains or potatoes.
I get sooooo mad at these post apocalyptic societies that grow fucking lettuce! What the fuck are you doing? That’s not food! It takes so much water to grow! Is highly perishable and cannot be preserved! Rye! Winter wheat! Any type of fucking legume! That’ll get you through a famine!! Fucking lettuce? Imorten Joe, seriously, lettuce? There’s no nutrition there!
I mean, I absolutely share the concern that the structure of our society has become totally untenable. But.
Leaving aside the hazards of doing anything that damages our already flagging infrastructure, having a feasible revolution that leaves you with a place to live afterwards has to follow the same principles as electing a feasible third-party candidate.
Your neighbors have to already know and agree with you, or it won’t work.
I would like these people to go out of their front door and look around and talk to these neighbors. See those American flags on porches? Those are people who are often conservative or “politically moderate”, whatever that means any more. They are invested in going about their daily lives and raising their children.
They will likely oppose revolution and support martial law (under the extant regime) over revolution unless and until they are absolutely assured that this new regime these people are talking about will bring them stability and not harm their kids.
Which means that in order to organize a revolution, an actual revolution and not just a bloody and brief conflict in which a bunch of leftist activists are slaughtered to send a message to anyone else who might want to try it:
(a) it has to actually be stable for people’s kids! Keeping everyday people’s lives running has to be a central strategic focus!
(b) talking to your neighbors and bringing them into the loop has to be a central tactical focus for getting started! A majority of people have to agree with or be willing to go along with what you’re doing!
One of the primary objectives of alt-right astroturfing on fake leftist blogs is to keep leftists from thinking realistically or doing any of the things necessary to succeed.
Y’all wanna start a revolution, get involved with your community. We keep saying it. Go talk to people. Go to the town hall meetings, go to your co-ops and your churches, talk to the people who you don’t think matter. Talk to the moms and dads, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, the 9-5s, the graveyard and swing shifts. Find out what they need. Figure out how to get it for them.
When you have the everyday folk behind your back, you have an army.
Yeah. Violent revolution is almost always an insanely bad idea. We’re a long way from the circumstances where it would be better than “not”.
How to plan a long-term creative project for serial publication:
1. Make a firm decision about how big a single update is going to be, and estimate your sustainable update frequency based on that. This estimate should be based solely on your own demonstrated performance; you may anticipate that future productivity will exceed past productivity, but never make long-range plans on the assumption that future productivity will exceed past productivity. That is called the Planning Fallacy, and it will eat you alive.
2. Estimate how often you’re likely to miss updates. As a rough guideline, if you’re physically and mentally healthy and have no major commitments that would interfere with your ability to work on the project, figure that you’ll miss about 10% of your updates for various reasons. If you have health issues or frequent Real Life commitments, make it 20%. If 20% sounds low to you, you weren’t being honest with yourself about your sustainable update frequency; return to step 1 and re-assess.
3. Figure that you’ve got about two years before you lose interest in the project, gain some new commitment that will preclude continuing to work on it, or your art style evolves enough to make creative continuity impractical. If there’s some upcoming major life change that you’re able to anticipate – like, say, graduating from school – use either two years or that event as your soft deadline, whichever is less.
4. Use the figures from steps 1-3 to estimate how many updates you’re likely to be able to squeeze into this project, and write your outline/script based on that. You don’t need to wrap up every tiny little loose thread by that point, but ideally it needs to reach a point where you could stop and be satisfied with whatever conclusion has been reached. If you get there and you’re still enthusiastic about continuing, fantastic – return to step 1 and re-assess.
So, as a simple example: if you’re planning a webcomic, you figure you can reasonably manage about 1 page a week, and you’ve got a lot going on that’s likely to get in your way, that’s (2 years * 52 weeks/year * 1 update/week * 80% success rate on updates) = around 83 pages to work with, or about the length of a four-issue miniseries. What kind of story can you tell in 80-odd pages?
(Hint: it’s not a story that involves fifty-page combat scenes!)
Tama: gives Luffy a bowl of rice when he needs it instead of eating herself Luffy: showers her starving town in literal mountains of fresh food and water in repayment me: Monkey D. Luffy operates like a fucking fey and for everyone he meets is the random supernatural encounter in a parable about karma starring them. In this essay I will—
strong weirdly rote devotion to wild feasts w/ dancing
follows rigid but alien blue and orange morality
rebalances the scales wherever he goes so most people get exactly what’s coming to them beyond the bounds of reason (when Luffy is not nearby, the One Piece universe very much does not operate like this); most major exceptions: both his sworn brothers, who might be of similar stock and obviously don’t count somehow
on rare occasions spirits people away from their lives on whims
does not always give them back
avoids calling people not among this number their real names
Dole’s required to defend their trademarks or they might lose them. That vaguely threatening letter reads to me as “I have to legally say this but I don’t want to because I’m laughing too hard and they’re actually giving us marketing, but…I have to say it.”
i'll apple your turnover 