stop listening to music and start listening to the sounds of nature. the “eagles?”The “rolling stones?” The “beetles?” Come into the beautiful forest with me and you will find all of those things friend…. I promise….If you just believe<3
In the beautiful forest you will also encounter the “mountain goats” and “corn” and “monkeys” and the “killers” and the-what do you mean what was that last one? Nothing haha don’t worry about it…………… <3
I am once again reminding everyone that the purpose of these bills is to pave the way for requiring government approval ID verification to use the internet
When you ask government to do the jobs parents should be doing, not only will they objectively do a terrible job, they will use the opportunity to take away more of your privacy and infringe further upon your rights.
Mass censorship and surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children” is a tale as old as time, yet people keep falling for it
It’s extremely important that I tell you all that this seal is doing the ‘banana pose,’ something seals do when they are feeling particularly happy and relaxed. This seal, looking directly at the cat, is absolutely overwhelmed with Good Vibes, something we can all related to.
the only issue i have with totk so far is that it is not very dumb-friendly. got to a shrine that honest to god made me go “nintendo i have no clue what the fuck you want from me”
saw this tweet which was the exactly shrine i made this post about. glad we all on the same page
I am thinking about making a passionate defense of the passive voice just to cause trouble on purpose
Look once you learn how to use the passive voice it will become clear to you why I spend half my time deliberately writing in it
Fuck it, let’s talk about it
Warning: Passive voice can be used for evil! Do not do it! Do not write sentences like “The man was shot by police.” No! Do not hide state violence in sentence structure!
You should use active voice when:
1. You introduce new information
2. You take or assign responsibility
Active voice is key for clarity when the sentence doesn’t have anything to refer back to. If you have to put “by (person, organization)” at the end of the sentence, it should have been active voice. Ex:
Our company fucked up the project and we’re sorry
NOT
Regrettably, the project was fucked up by us/on our watch/by one of our teams
But here’s why passive voice is great: because it collapses who did a thing and centers the fact that it happened. When you are referring back to something the parties already agree upon, it puts the result up front.
All project review will be completed by 18 Never 2029.
NOT
Kyle | Mark | us Arch | itects, Jim’s Construction, the Statesonia Department of Endangered Hummingbirds, the Federal Bureau of Staying the Fuck Out of It and like twelve other people will complete their reviews by 18 Never 2029.
No! Bad! The completion of the action matters, not the parties involved. And no, “The parties will complete their reviews” is absolutely not clearer, because it requires the same knowledge.
In fiction, passive vs active refocuses a sentence towards what you want the reader to pay attention to. Active:
A fog covered the city
Passive:
The city was covered by fog
Nothing wrong with either of them. It’s just what you want the reader to think about. Bonus round: the sentence feels more natural if you put the bulk of the description in the second half, so you can add more without making it impossible to follow. Active:
A fog covered the quiet, unsuspecting city as it slept
Passive:
The city was covered by a terrible, choking fog that crept through the silent streets
These are different sentences, but nothing’s wrong with either of them.
Passive voice gets a bad rap largely because even the dumbest professional development expert can ID it fairly regularly. It’s bad when it makes a sentence less clear; it’s good when it makes a sentence clearer. That’s it.
AND it can have immense humoristic potential, for the exact same reason you outlined, because passive voice reads as an attempt to dodge responsibility and misplace blame.
“The man was shot (by police)” and “The project was fucked up by us” are bad in serious contexts and actual writing.
But you can have a lot of fun with things like:
“My boss has been described in impolite terms.”
“Alice’s boss has been described in impolite terms by someone who wishes to remain anonymous.”
“I have been vilified, demonised, slandered, calumnied, scapegoated, lied about, written horrid pamphlets about, unlistened to, and reputationally walked all over.”
“The priceless crown jewels known as The Fanciest Rock Ever, insured for 100,000,000 billions and entrusted in our care by HRM the Queen of Fancyland, were found to have been misplaced this morning and have not been located at this time.”
“He was separated from his head.”
“He found himself divorced from.”
Useful friends in such cases: euphemisms, unexpected verbs, grammatically questionable sentence constructions, and obfuscation of the responsible party when it is glaringly obvious to the audience that there should be one or even who it is, etc., etc.
I fucking hate the tma tme binary. My friend is a perisex cishet woman who often faces transmisogyny due to being gnc (and got attacked in a girl's bathroom because they thought she was a trans woman). I am a trans woman who does not face much tramsmisogyny due to easily passing and just not interacting with many people.
Whenever we bring up how people who aren’t trans women who were AMAB experience transmisogny people always interpet it as like. getting harassed once or twice (which, can still be dangerous! It can take one violent transmisognist to permenantly disable or kill you!) & completely ignore people who experience that regularly throughout their lives, to the point where it actively shapes their lives.
Also like. supposedly tme/tma is meant to avoid using identity labels when talking about oppression. but 1. as you pointed out, it still relies on the foundation of identity to decide whether your experiences with transmisogny count as being affected and 2. most of the time when I see “tma” it’s referring to transfems & “tme” referring to transmascs & sometimes cis women. nonbinary people who were amab are often either seen/treated as"basically cis guys" or “basically transfems/trans women.” like sure tme/tma is “based on affect and not identity” but whether you are affected is based on identity/AGAB. so litcherally what’s the point. also we literally do not do this with any other form of oppression we don’t have “islamophobia affected” vs “islamophobia exempt” & yet we manage to have conversations about islamophobia & it’s victims & perpetrators while also being able to acknowledge non-muslim victims just fine. wild
[Video description: A baby goat jumps onto a stool. It is then tackled down by another baby goat. Two more goats appear and tackle the new goat. This repeats several times. /end description]
if we want to stop the patriarchal concept of surnames being passed down the male line, we have a few options options that i’d be 100% fine with:
children get whichever surname is cooler, to eliminate uncool surnames over the generations
children get whichever surname is rarer, to achieve a utopian future in a few centuries where all surnames are more or less equally common
children’s surnames are randomly generated: say, heads for parent #1’s surname, tails for parent #2’s surname
parents pick the first names first, and then a court decides which surname fits it better. so if a couple named mr. madison and mr. liu want to name their daughter alison, she’ll get the surname liu, because alison madison sounds ridiculous
everyone stops having children right now
6) both parents’ surnames are combined into a new name, in the same vein as portmanteau ship-names
7) We adopt elvish naming customs and have upwards of three names for each individual, none of which are surnames and all of which may be translated to any other language for any reason at any point in our lives. This has no advantages but will really annoy every government on earth and I just think it’d be really funny to watch them figure out the paperwork for that
I once completed a name change for a Miss White, she was getting married to Mr. Black
