kidkendoll:

Me: Wow I feel good 

My body dysmorphia: You look like this

welkinalauda:

pyrrhiccomedy:

animate-mush:

amatara:

I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.

What’s the difference?

I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative.  And other things are so close as makes no difference.

Kindness is performative.  Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions.  You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.

Strength is so many things.  It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel.  And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything.  Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy.  Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights.  It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.

Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker.  It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured.  At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made?  And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.

Sociability is also performative.  Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it.  It’s making an effort towards something you value.  So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.  

Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them.  If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing.  It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.

tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.”  A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one

* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains!  Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity.  So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers.  So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is.  The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).

I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go. 

We tend to over-value motive and under-value consequence. 

“I didn’t mean to hurt her!”
And yet, she needs medical attention.

“I barely know her and I don’t want to get up.”
And yet, you took her to the hospital.

Authenticity and purity of intention are often far less useful than dutiful performance of virtue.

heartachedreamboy:

punkrorschach:

heartachedreamboy:

heartachedreamboy:

thetaobella:

heartachedreamboy:

why do they always show cranberries in thos big pits n its implied its wet and possibly swimmable. do cranberries really grow like that. wh

You’ve never heard of The Bog?

th

the what

EACH ADDITION TO THIS POST MAKES MY BLOOD RUN COLD

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

Basically by using big floaty things to round them all up and then scooping them out of the water.

thank u. i hate it a little less but the horrible little man in my head is still screaming “BOG BODY BOG BODY BOG BODY”, but i appreciate the education,

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

scesisonomaton:

lordhellebore:

janusscientes:

“English isn’t my first language” is not a serious excuse!

To all of you fanfic authors, bloggers, artist, to write/make something and then post it means that you are satisfied with the product. Now, to have created a piece that is fully/mostly constructed of text and to not have made the effort to at least get a grammar check is called arrogance. “I don’t care what you think, I wrote it, you read it. Who cares if you’re struggling to get a past every sentence. That’s your own problem!” You’re basically setting yourself up for negative feedback and criticism which, while many don’t bother to give, I would provide without hesitation.

Some say “I don’t need approval.”(which I sincerely don’t believe). Well, then, why are you posting this? Isn’t the whole point sharing something you can enjoy with people?

And then you start getting defensive and angry about it. “Well, English isn’t my first language!” I don’t care! Nobody does! Plus, if you post something online you should anticipate criticism. Great artists, celebrities, and basically everyone, face criticism on a daily basis EVEN WHEN the final product is marvelous.

So, what makes you different?

“English isn’t my first language” is not a serious excuse!

To all of you fanfic authors, bloggers, artist[s:] to write/make something and then post it means that you are satisfied with the product. Now, to have created a piece that is fully/mostly constructed of text and to not have made the effort to at least get a grammar check is called arrogance. [Replacing “to have” and “to not have” with “having” and “not having” would make this much easier to read.] “I don’t care what you think, I wrote it, you read it. Who cares if you’re struggling to get [remove superfluous “a”] past every sentence. That’s your own problem!” You’re basically setting yourself up for negative feedback and criticism[,] which, while many don’t bother to give, [That’s one hell of an awkward construction; consider “while many don’t bother with it” instead.] I would provide without hesitation. [In fact, the best solution would be to put the subclause starting with “which” at the end of the sentence. Otherwise it’s just clunky.][space]Some say[:] “I don’t need approval.”[space]([W]hich I sincerely don’t believe.)[remove incorrectly placed full stop] Well, then, why are you posting this? Isn’t the whole point sharing something you can enjoy with people?[space]And then you start getting defensive and angry about it. “Well, English isn’t my first language!” I don’t care! Nobody does! Plus, if you post something online you should anticipate criticism. Great artists, celebrities, and basically everyone[remove superfluous comma] face criticism on a daily basis EVEN WHEN the final product is marvelous.

Oh man, that’s already a magnificent takedown, but this clown just made me really mad.

English is fucking hard. Your spelling is arbitrary, your tenses don’t make sense, and what the fuck is going on with your prepositions anyway? But you still expect everyone to be perfect at it because it’s a ~global language~ or whatever. Spoiler alert, that’s stupid, you’re just entitled.

When I started out writing in English, I was shit. I can exactly map my skill level from the first time I published on FF.net to when I went to live in England to study writing for three years. Every writer sucks when they start. That’s just a fact. But non-native speakers writing in English are doing the whole thing with both hands tied behind their back, they’re struggling to come up with a way to say what they mean in a language they don’t know that well yet, they’ve got seven different dictionaries open in their browser. They’re frantically checking that they’re using the right names because they read Harry Potter in their own language when they were little and even though they’ve read the original now they’re still calling Rita Skeeter ‘Kimmkorn’ in their head. It’s a goshdarn STRUGGLE.

There’s that horrifying bit just after you start writing in another language where the words don’t work in your own anymore but your English skills haven’t really caught up yet and nothing you’re getting out on the page can do justice to what it felt like in your head. It’s a terrible, awful feeling that you’re not good enough at this and you can’t switch back somehow and you’re stuck in the middle producing stuff that you hate because it’s not right. It’s discouraging as fuck, but so many people stick with writing anyway, because they (we) can’t help it! There’s too many stories to tell, even if right now it feels like they’re kind of shit.

So who the fuck are you to go around preaching your elitist, prescriptivist bullshit at people who are pouring blood, sweat, and tears into their work and getting nothing in return except maybe the hope that someone somewhere gets a little bit of joy out of it?

When I started out, I put disclaimers on my fanfic that English wasn’t my first language, and people were super nice. They told me I was doing a good job, made suggestions on how I could improve, and corrected my idioms without being dicks about it. Because of that, I was brave enough to go to a different country to write and get a degree and keep writing stories for people to maybe enjoy on their lunch break, for free. Do you think your attitude encourages people to keep going and get better?

These people are putting hours of their work on the Internet, for free, literally asking for nothing, hoping that someone maybe has a good time reading it. Nobody is forcing you to read it, but Jeez, shut the fuck up about other people’s ability to write in a second language when you clearly barely have command of your first.

English is really hard. And you know what? I have seen the whole “but English might not be their first language” argument used so many times – but almost never when the writer wasn’t a native speaker of English.

Non-native speakers work really hard, and they don’t always get the weird crazy stuff right, but their writing makes any sense at all. Even if they’re really struggling with the crazy stuff, I can nearly always understand them with very little effort, because whatever rules they’re following, there are rules. Furthermore, the kinds of mistakes they do make are mistakes native speakers almost never make – they’re in the rules that we’re never even conscious of, like the ordering rule for adjectives, which I don’t know but can’t possibly get wrong. And that means that when I read English written by a non-native speaker, I usually don’t even think of it as looking incorrect; I just hear it as translated-sounding.

So, for instance, a Chinese speaker might write (I’ll get this wrong, sorry, I recognize the idiom but can’t reproduce it) “I am having a problem with my computer, the related software can not work.” And I know that “the related” is a translation for the possessive-modifier syllable, which we don’t have, and that “can not work” almost certainly means “sometimes fails to work” rather than “does not ever work”, and it sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

A native speaker might come up with something like “I have software on a computer, and it doesn’t work”, and I genuinely have no idea whether they mean that the software or the computer doesn’t work.

And if I complain about the latter, someone will tell me that English might not be their first language. But so far, every time I’ve been able to find out, it’s turned out that English was their first language, they just weren’t awesome at communicating.

… and note, that is not a moral failing. Communication is hard. Even really experienced writers have trouble with it sometimes. Just be willing to clarify if people are confused, and answer questions, and you should find people really accommodating. We’ve all been there.

frankly, non-native english speakers write with great care and sincerity, in my experience. the sloppy fiction i itch to edit is the stuff written by native speakers who splatter clichés around like toddlers leaving chocolate handprints. which is to say, nothing is ever scattered, but it is scattered ‘with great abandon’. nothing is ever referenced but it is ‘said thing’ or ‘the aforesaid thing’. nothing is avoided but it is avoided ‘in any way shape or form’. this is true not only for fiction set ‘in this day and age’ but in settings ‘since time immemorial’.

people translating from french or polish or chinese don’t hurt my brain with eggcorns like A Doggy Dog World and All Intensive Purposes and things being left In Tact.

people who are thinking hard about english don’t write the kind of egregious twaddle that native speakers dribble out half-asleep and don’t see the problems with.

because we know what we MEANT to write. it’s not our fault if that’s not what you’re reading!

writers, readers, innocent bystanders: stop blaming Dam Furriners for badfic, and start giving your own business that second reread, all right? you sound like a damn idiot trying to make this about Folk What Don’t English Good, when the real folk what don’t english good is us.

apricops:

*centrist voice* So would you stop being friends with someone just because your favorite color is blue and their favorite color is waterboarding innocent people?

thrussy:

Me realizing i wont find a job related to what im studying