My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or “the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
At the end of the day, I think that Snyder was always trying to say that humanity doesn’t deserve Superman, and that Superman sometimes thinks that himself.
While James Gunn is saying that we do. And that Superman WANTS to help. He loves humanity because humanity is all the best parts of him.
Snyder came in with his idea of what he wanted Superman to be. Gunn KNOWS who Superman really IS. And that’s an important distinction.
Why leave this in the tags?? @plsimjustgirl you make a great point!!
some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.
I couldn’t remember the word “doorknob” ten minutes ago.
ok but the onelook thesaurus will save your life, i literally could not live without this website
REBLOG TO SAVE A WRITER’S LIFE
LIFE SAVED
REBLOGGING TO SAVE ANOTHER WRITERS LIFE
I use this every time I sit down to write. It’s the best tool in the world and I would be lost without it!
Current writing advice I’m seeing on TikTok and Insta is telling authors to stop using em dashes in their work because, “AI uses em dashes so people will think you’ve used AI.”
Y'know, the AI that was trained on the stolen work of real authors?
Anyway, I will not be doing that. What I will be doing, however, is adding a note at the start of all my books that no AI was used in the creation of my work because I, the author, did not go to university for four fucking years to study English literature and linguistics only to be told I can’t use proper grammar because someone might think a robot wrote it.
Fucking, insane.
You will have to pry my dashes, and my Oxford commas, and my semi-colons from my cold, dead hands.
My thoughts, feelings, and impulses only exist inside my head, and none of it matters unless I act on it
Nobody can see my thoughts or emotions
The only things anyone can see and judge me on are my actions
There’s no such thing as a thought crime
thank u
You can have harmful beliefs and harmful impulses and harmful urges and not be evil. You can make yourself aware that these things are harmful and take steps to correct yourself and not be evil. You can walk around with the urge to kick puppies all goddamn day and as long as you are capable of redirecting that impulse to something benign then it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how else to say this
Shopping for laptops fucking sucks ‘cause I don’t know shit about computers. I’ve never had a computer with a functional webcam or microphone or the ability to play computer games made later than 2005 or a speaker that could play anything loud enough to hear from more than a foot away. How the hell should I know what I want?!
wow that would be such useful advice if only desktop PCs were small and portable and did not require desk tops on which to place them and I could take them with me when I traveled
I know this is a haha funny post, but for anyone who needs it, here’s a quick-and-dirty of what you’re most likely going to see while shopping for a computer/laptop (w/Examples)!
Cores/Intel Cores (Ex. i3, i5, i9)= Processing Speed= how fast your internet and other programs run. More cores is better.
Hard [Disk] Drive(HDD)/Solid State Drive(SSD) (Ex. 250GB, 480GB, 2TB)= How much you can store on your computer (files and apps and programs). A Terabyte(TB) is 1,000 Gigabytes.
*HDD is cheaper and more storage while SSD is faster, more durable, and uses less energy.
Memory/RAM(Random Access Memory) (Ex. 4GB, 8GB, 16GB) = How many different things your computer can do At The Same Time.
Ex. A computer with 4GB of RAM will probably shit itself if you try to play a game with with the internet open.
Video/Graphics Cards (Ex. NVIDIA, Intel HD Graphics, AMD) = How much visual complexity your computer can handle without throwing a tantrum. Only important if you play video games, do digital art, or watch a lot of movies on your computer. (When you’re watching a video and it pixelates and lags when the action stuff happens, that’s a bad/small graphics card)
Also the “avoid refurbished computers” tip is dead wrong.
‘Refurbished’ means it’s been in a technician’s hands recently and can’t be sold as new. That’s it. That’s all. In the US the FTC makes it illegal to sell something new if it’s been sold to an end user, so by definition a lot of perfect, ready-to-go hardware must be ‘refurbished’ in order to sell it again, no matter the circumstances.
Reasons a machine might be a refurb:
- Customer bought the item, decided they didn’t like the color, and returned it
- Customer bought the item, couldn’t figure out how to turn it on, and returned it
- Retailer opened the box for some reason and lost some of what gets shipped inside (manuals, cables, charger) and returned it
- Company bought 100 computers but went out of business before they could be installed or used
- Customer got a replacement for a damaged computer under warranty, and the manufacturer fixed what was wrong with the old machine and is now selling it as a refurb
I HAVE PERSONALLY WITNESSED ALL OF THESE SCENARIOS
Bottom line: ‘refurbished’ hardware has been repaired, tested, cleaned, and renewed back to original specifications by a trained technician. If anything, it’s probably MORE reliable now that it’s been doubly-tested.
All responsibly refurbished equipment comes with a factory warranty… the only refurbs I would avoid are items sold ‘as-is’ without warranty. That’s dangerous unless you know what you’re doing, like buying stuff for parts.
A lot of my most reliable hardware – servers, laptops, tablets – were bought as refurbished goods at huge savings. When I go shopping for a new thing I always look at the refurbished options first.
tl;dr: Refurbished is great!
This helped me recently and you might need it as well :)
If there is a company going out of business nearby, there is a possibility you can get a commercial grade laptop in perfectly good condition for the same price as a poorer quality consumer grade laptop. You can also find computers on places like fb marketplace that were ‘practice PCs’ - repairs by newer techs who bought as is or for parts computers and repaired them to gain experience.
Obviously completely wipe these and install a fresh image of your preferred operating system to avoid any potential security issues, but it’s one way to get something more for your money.
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He’d spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He’d seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn’t consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to “better” or “more important” things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he’d trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this… and it wasn’t just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
“When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?”
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
“This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you’ll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you’re going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i’m ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress.”
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he’d spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out… The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn’t stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn’t really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I’ve thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Superman losing his composure only when people shrug off the lives of others. Doesn’t matter how well he knows them. Doesn’t matter if they’re even human.
He gets upset at the Justice Gang for brutally killing a rampaging Kaiju and not even attempting to find a way to move it or at least euthanize it more humanely.
The only time he raises his voice during Lois’ interview is when she digs into his interference in geopolitics, because people would have died if he hadn’t acted. The only time he yells at Luthor is when Luthor abducts Krypto. The only time he cries is when Luthor murders someone he barely even knew.
He saves a fucking squirrel for god’s sake. We’re so back.
I think about the tragedy of Primrose Everdeen a lot. And not just the tragedy of her reaping or her death, but rather everything in between.
I think about her sitting at home at 12 years old, glued to a television screen watching her sister suffer, fearing for her life, wondering if she’d ever see her again, and wondering if it’s her fault? If she would have just been a bit braver or stronger then Katniss wouldn’t have volunteered. Thinking about how it should have been her in those games.
I think about her accepting game and money from Gale, feeling bad about burdening him when he has so much to carry already, feeling bad about again being a mouth to feed. She’s wishing she was a bit braver or stronger so she could go into the woods and hunt.
I think about Katniss coming come and Prim being so relieved and happy but then it’s not quite the same sister that comes back. The Katniss that comes back is scared and distant and hurt and she tries to hide it from Prim but it’s no use because Prim’s always been the one in the family to feel when someone is upset. Prim has her own nightmares about the Games but she doesn’t go to Katniss anymore, she doesn’t want to upset her anymore. She can’t be the little girl that crawls into her sister’s bed and asks for a song.
When she thinks Katniss is at least safe and home she watches her get Reaped again. And Prim is still thinking that this wouldn’t be happening if it had been her in that arena the first time. And this time she doesn’t even get to say goodbye. As she watches the rebellion on the TV she continues to grow up, taking care of the wounded back in 12. She’s surrounded by the Capitol’s cruelty both on the screen and in her home.
Then her home, the only one she’s ever known, is gone and she’s in 13. She’s in this strange and foreign place with a sister who is even further gone than before. And now she has to be the strong one who is there for her sister. And then when Katniss goes to fight in the Capitol Prim loses her again. When she sees her face on TV, when she hears that “the Mockingjay is dead”, she thinks she’s lost her for good this time. And she can’t shake the feeling it’s all her fault, it was her name in that bowl after all.
But Prim needs to be braver and stronger now. She needs to do something to help, it’s what Katniss would do. So even though she’s only 13, much too young to be a doctor, she goes to help the wounded in the Capitol. As the parachutes fall from the sky she is reminded again of the arena, only this time she’s in it. It’s like her nightmares but this one she can’t wake from. Maybe it’s fate catching up to her, a fate that’s been chasing her from the moment that slip was drawn.
The only mercy of her death is that she doesn’t see it coming. All she sees is Katniss through the crowd. It isn’t fear she feels in her last moments, it’s relief that Katniss is alive. She dies surrounded by the most familiar feeling, the love of her big sister.
This is why gentle parenting uses natural consequences. My son dropped a plate of strawberries he just sliced. For an adult, the consequences would be to pick up the mess and don’t again. So those are the consequences I gave him. I asked him to pick up the berries which he did. Then I threw them away, and sliced more strawberries.
Children are so capable. We just need to be patient.
It’s because a lot of parents never stop to reflect on the difference between “this is inconvenient/unpleasant for me personally” vs “this is actually bad behavior that will cause my child problems down the line if not corrected”
Which is why I and so many of my peers are/should be in therapy over the fact that we’re terrified to have our needs and mistakes inconvenience others even slightly
(if this resonates with you, I recommend reading up on complex PTSD - I found Pete Walker’s book partially helpful)
