ive said it before and i'll say it again but carrying a weapon does not make you safer, it gives the person assaulting you a free weapon. i know we live in a time where fear is profitable and the cute pink stun guns make feminism sexy but they do not work like you think they do.

there is an extremely slim chance you will be able to deploy the pepper spray/taser/gun in a way that does not harm you at all. pepper spray blows back, guns miss, tasers slip. there is a much much larger chance things go poorly and you end up getting hurt worse than originally intended because now your assailant is pissed and more heavily armed.

im not talking out my ass here, i'm a case manager at a homeless shelter for addicts. we have a lot of violent behavior. none of our staff carry any sort of weapons. we are trained to de-escalate or remove ourselves from the situation. i have worked there over two years without being harmed despite intervening in many fights and having weapons pulled on me.

there is safety in numbers. there is safety in well lit streets and staying on your phone and knowing when to scream and run. there is no safety in "personal defense items".

weapons do not make you safe

guns do not make you safe

more people carrying weapons makes more violence

it's an illusion. it's a mental game. a weapon is a safety blanket that will sooner kill you than stop someone else from doing so.

we are also not in PVP grand theft auto. as scary as things seem, humans are not out there re-enacting the purge 24/7. there are lots of people who benefit from you being afraid of everyone you pass on the street. a lot of those people will try to sell you things to keep you safe. don't fall for it.

#i did a self defense class once#and the first day we talked about weapons the instructor went#“you do not want to get into a knife fight! it is really hard to not get stabbed at least a little in a knife fight”#“and if you carry around a knife to protect yourself then Every fight is a knife fight”#and then proceeded to show us how easy it is to lose your grip on a weapon or mishandle it or just not use it well#there was also a lot in that class about Minimum required force and a weapon is never gonna be the minimum

@tabletoptime 's tags

The likelihood of you freezing up completely is very high. Like, you probably are not emotionally prepared for the sheer psychological disconnect that happens INSTANTLY when you are dumped into a fucked up situation. I swooned. Like a fucking Victorian heiress. SWOONED. Five to ten seconds of graying out will let them grab your weapon, because you just dropped it.

It was someone I knew, thank god.

And what if I'd had a weapon, and hadn't swooned, and hadn't known who it was until it was too late? That is UNCOMFORTABLY common, babes. Your bestie with a key and standing permission to come over anytime? Um. They just might really need something. Or you told them to come over and let themselves in next Tuesday, and fucking forgot you said that.

I'm from the South. Emotionally, I love the idea of being armed for my protection in my home. I'm just...not comfortable with the risks of actually doing that.

This may have changed, but the big knife collecting hobby subreddit used to have a section in their FAQ that was like

Q: What knife should I get for self defense?

A: The loser of a knife fight dies in the street. The winner dies in the ambulance.

really hilarious and unsexy when hetero romantasy authors refer to love interests as males and females. you sound like david attenborough narrating a special documentary on two turtles humping in the mud

i don't care if he's the king of the fae. if that man called me a desirable female i'd have him gelded

Wouldn’t leave my mind sorry

THIS IS NOT OKAY HOW DARE YOU

Everyone wanted to be thicc but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wanted the dad bod but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wants fat mommy milkers but nobody wants mommy to be fat. Everyone wants to be a bear but not like, an actual fat bear. You get what i’m saying

Everyone wants the mistique of fatness or use the language of fatness to denote hotness without actually being fat or acknowledging that fat people or fatness can just be hot.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

“I’m having my son in 2 months and I’m jealous of how cute baby girl clothes are” you can put your newborn son in a little strawberry print romper, I swear. he won’t mind. he won’t develop a complex over it, I promise.

It’s so interesting how heavily gendered baby clothes are an extremely modern phenomenon like even in the midcentury period baby clothes were often the same cut and color for baby boys and baby girls but now you can’t put your son in a pink romper and you have to use baby glue to affix a flower to your daughter’s head so everyone knows she’s a little girl.

Return to androgynous baby. Nobody needs to know what that thing has going on except you.

This feels like a good time to post a reminder about the NaNo-inspired spreadsheet I made, based on the old website:

It's available here for download - free if you want, any support is appreciated because it means I can keep making trackers and helps with my website costs, but I know times are tough for a lot of us. I've also put it up on Google Sheets here, but it looks a little different because the fancier chart effects aren't supported. You'll have to download it or make a copy to be able to use it. (Please don't ask me for edit access, that won't work. File > Make a copy, and you'll have it on your own Google Drive.)

I also made this in four other designs, available here. They all come with character and plot development sheets, and pages for novel info, chapters, timeline, etc. And there are versions for every month, so we're not confined to November!

And finally, because I always loved seeing everyone's word counts and accountability really helps me personally, I made a basic spreadsheet that you can use as a group to collectively track word counts or goals. This version's made for up to 8 people. Again you'll have to make a copy in your Drive to use it, and you'll need to give edit access to your whole group as well.

If there's interest, I'll keep making these as well for each new month. I can also expand it or add more columns/features, so feel free to let me know if you're interested and what you'd like to see!

If I could set up a gba emulator on my grandma's comouter at age 12 to play a pokemon emerald randomizer, then you should be able to do that too

Well, go change the timeline so there is a gba emulator that can run pokemon emerald available in 2002 and I'll get right on to that. You should probably also push up the release of pokemon emerald to 2002 while you are at it too.

Otherwise you'll have to wait until I'm older.

I meant you should be able to run a gba emulator right now

I so desperately want to be able to convince Trump supporters with facts and logic and empathy, but it’s so important to remember that their ignorance is INTENTIONAL. my mom didn’t let us watch Sleeping Beauty growing up. I asked her why recently and she said, “it was evil.” when I pointed out other movies had similar themes and depictions of evil, and asked what the difference was, she couldn’t. I pressed one more time and she just said, “it felt evil to me. I didn’t like it”. same thing with dune 2: she said it was “dark”, and I was, “literally, like the movie’s lighting? Or the themes?” and she said “I don’t know” and didn’t want to talk about it more. many conservatives genuinely cannot tell the difference between “I don’t like it” and “this is evil” and they do not care to learn despite many chances

and while I’m at, this can also be true of left-leaning people!!!! please think about things. you are not necessarily smarter than conservatives and you are not immune to propaganda

Forgive me if I'm overstepping but I'd like to expand on your point;

It's important to remember that nobody is immune to propaganda or too smart to be tricked because when we don't remember, we start to let ourselves believe that we are without flaws.

It's the same reason I prefer the "there are no bad people, only bad actions" approach; people who do bad things aren't some different, inhuman kind of monster, they're people. Sons and wives and friends and loved ones. People love them, and maybe they love people, too. It's important to remember that people do bad things, not bad people, because anyone can do bad things.

When we start believing that only bad people do bad things, we in turn believe that good people can't do bad things, and we stop monitoring both ourselves and those around us for bad behavior, to the point of actively ignoring red flags and early signs of a problem to fit that thought pattern.

You are capable of evil just as much as your enemies, and your enemies are capable of good just as much as you are.

hi y’all i just wanted to put you onto this fundraiser for the buffalo nations grasslands alliance. they’re trying to recoup some of the funds for black-footed ferret conservation on tribal grounds that the trump/musk administration has frozen, which is impacting not only the conservation efforts themselves but the livelihoods of the people working on them. the frozen grant is 1.1 million but this fundraiser has a goal of 50,000.

the fundraiser has 24 days left and has only reached 2% of its goal with 11 donations. black-footed ferrets are an endangered lazarus taxon that was thought to be extinct from 1979-1981 before being rediscovered by accident. they’re a miracle of conservation and it would be horrible to lose them for good, not to mention (again) the impact of people working with these animals losing their jobs which is outlined in the fundraiser link. indigenous-led conservation efforts are extremely important for a wide variety of reasons and as someone in the zoology area i feel obligated to share this fundraiser to contribute to those efforts.

i know that things are hard right now and there’s a lot of people and organizations all across the world that need help, so don’t feel pressured BUT if you have extra money and you can contribute to this fundraiser or share it with people who can that would be great.

super cute black-footed ferrets ^

Boosting this here- black footed ferrets are perhaps a little more charismatic than we usually allow here, but they need all the help they can get!

There's this interesting phenomenon where when you're a child, or some other vulnerable minority dependent on a job for shelter, you are actually under duress almost constantly. You can't say "I don't want to work today," you cannot say "I don't want to do the dishes, actually," you cannot choose not to participate. In a lot of cases, the punishment is explicit. Your parents might yell at you. Your boss might fire you. But in other cases, it's implicit. The mood will sour. You lose leeway. People get mad at you. And that creates a really shitty environment where you're constantly being coerced to do things!

And here's the kicker; you're not allowed to acknowledge that. You cannot acknowledge that you are being coerced, you cannot acknowledge that your free will is not being respected, because that's punished too. Your boss insists that you act excited. Your parents punish you for acting surly. You are forced to fake enthusiastic consent, constantly. It's a fucking nightmare. Your hand is being forced, you do not have the option to say "no," and if you ever, for a second, try to acknowledge that, everyone acts like you're the aggressor.

writer survey question time:

inspired by seeing screencaps where the software is offering (terrible) style advice because I haven't used a software that has a grammar checker for my stories in like a decade

if you use multiple applications, pick the one you use most often.

At this point it's kinda evenly split between word/physical notebooks/notepad

I'm purposefully trying to move away from using Google Docs and from Google in general. Been having a good time with Scrivener!

The amount of people using Google Docs is terrifying. It barely functions when you have too many words! It eats things! IT'S GOOGLE.

Some fun (and potentially horrifying, if you know anything about coding) facts about Google docs that I have forcibly discovered via my new job:

1: due to their newest "this is a GREAT IDEA!" idea, Google docs is now actually an Image, not actually text on your screen.

1a: Google docs uses an html element called a Canvas now, which is exactly what it sounds like -- using JavaScript, Google accepts your key presses, cursor movement (for selecting, moving text chunks, etc), and other such interactions, translates those actions into a form the canvas can understand, and then DRAWS THOSE ACTIONS ON THE CANVAS

2: if you're wondering how efficient this actually is, the answer is "not very". Every interaction you make, from clicking to move the cursor, typing a single letter, deleting a single letter, highlighting words... it all triggers code that quickly erases a large chunk of the canvas and then redraws everything previously erased with your new change. Sometimes even just sliding your cursor across the doc is enough to make the JavaScript code erase and rebuild an entire page image. Yes, this happens literally on every keystroke. Yes this is probably part of the reason that Google docs eats things sometimes.

3: yes this is actually Horrible for accessibility needs, because all that text you see on the screen? It's not text. It doesn't exist AS TEXT in any location that external code (or you and I!) can access. Google saves your document as a bunch of text + metadata about that text (and any images, so yes, images being added to a Google doc are being Redrawn On The Canvas) but we can't access that without explicitly getting access to the Google doc API

4: yes this means that screen readers can't actually read anything on Google docs except via the API (which requires a Lot of hoops and is frankly very poorly documented, as many APIs are) or via some. Fascinating code wiggles.

4a: yes I'm aware of this specifically because I needed to get a specific screen reader web extension working with Google docs, and yes I went the route of the fascinating code wiggles because it enabled me to get screen reader support on shared but uneditable documents, which is actually NOT GUARANTEED with any other method of getting access to the text.

5: somewhat unrelated to screen reader accessibility, and much more of a 'huh, weird decision, but I guess I get it', but all those Pages you scroll past in a long document? Google is reusing 4 canvases at most to display that whole document. Depending on your direction of scroll, Google keeps Last Page, The Two Pages Potentially Visible On Screen, and Page After Those Two Pages (so if you're looking at the middle of page 4 of a document, Google has probably got page 3, page 4, page 5 and page 6 loaded on the four available canvases. If you scroll up to the bottom of page three, those loaded pages switch to pages 2, 3, 4, and 5). The canvases are erased and redrawn with the new page as you move, which is why if you fast scroll thru a long document, everything goes WEIRD as gdocs tries desperately to load/erase/load canvases fast enough to keep up.

That bit really doesn't affect too much of my work, it's just a weird aside I found fascinating while I was working on the extension.

6: have you ever felt that the font and font size you're typing with on gdocs doesn't look Quite Right? That's because the canvas interface has it's own specific interpretation of font and font sizes that doesn't always align with browsers or word processors. This is less on google and more just a result of the fact that font and font sizes are not, and have never Been, actually standardized across different programs. Every browser, word processor, browser based word processor, text pad, etc has Literally Their Own Interpretation Of Display. Most of the time you can't see the difference with your eyes, because a lot of these interpretations agree pretty well with each other, but sometimes the difference CAN be spotted, especially if you're opening the same document in multiple places and comparing them.

I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten about, but this is getting long enough, so XD

Okay, I knew Google Docs was bad. But what the fuck.

??!! Seconded. :/

It seems like there should be a non-technologically-complicated, non-monthly-subscription-requiring way to use a computer to Write Words.

Libreoffice is a good one

Dunno if I'm falling victim to Dunning-Kreuger or what but that big screed about all the zany stuff GDocs does internally just sounds like... extremely standard webdev stuff? Reusing a limited number of canvases and doing partial/delta updates on inputs is not some kind of insane Google-specific design choice. Lack of font standardisation is also not specific to Google.

I'm not really sure what's supposed to be taken away from it in terms of criticism because that all seems to make perfect sense for the design space of a browser-based word processing applet hosted on Google's platform.