I feel like this tweet matches up well with this one
Use "said" for dialogue unless you are writing a man talking, in which case use "whimpered"
My mother is all into homesteading and off-grid living videos right now. Every time I check up on her, this is what she wants to talk about.
It gives her a sense of peace and purpose I guess. Which is good, she’s been struggling to find that with her injuries and condition. She’s learning skills, and feeling prepared for “the worst”. Like I can’t get her to stop watching conspiracy theory bullshit on YouTube so at least this kind of content alleviates some of the anxiety the other content amplifies, because she feels like she can do something now to secure her safety later.
But to get through these conversations, I have to tell myself— hey, if natural disaster comes our way, some of this might be useful. But I know she’s not just thinking a big storm or natural disaster. She’s preparing for the collapse of society. And I don’t know how to break it to her that we wouldn’t survive that. You can make long lasting candles with crisco? Cool. Where you going to by crisco when society collapses? You’ll stock up now? Ok cool. What will you do when it runs out? Honestly, before it runs out, what will you do when people with guns come to take your various stockpiled supplies?
If we hit a point where society collapses, we’re done for. Food, medicine, etc. we can’t survive without society, without a world where people are working together trying to help each other out.
So, I’ll go through with this shit in the name of natural disaster preparedness, and because it helps her. But that’s as far as I’m willing to put energy into it. I refuse to prepare for, bet on, or hope for the collapse of society. I’d rather spend my energy trying to prevent society collapsing, what little part I can play in that. I’d rather spend my energy supporting people in my community. I’d rather work and build towards a better future, not prepare for the worst.
OP, if your mother is physically able to do the following, I strongly suggest it:
Get her into a fibercraft. Sewing, knit, crochet. Because here’s the thing:
At first, you can pitch it as “we’re all still gonna need clothes and these idiots with their doomsday bunkers can’t even thread a needle.” But after awhile—let this take a bit of time, not so long that she gets bored but long enough that she’s like “I’ve DONE this already”—introduce her to a slightly more advanced concept. She was practicing on circle skirts? Check out how to make darts. Crochet blankets? There are SO MANY cool stitches.
And then when the craft has a decent grip as a hobby….THEN you introduce her to a crafting social group.
One of the best ways to stop people falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole is to make sure they have active and diverse community, and being able to make tangible things has been shown to have a positive influence on mental health. If cost is a concern, I literally have spare crochet hooks I could send you to get her started and all I’d ask for them is cost of postage, which is like. Maybe three bucks. You can even find halfway decent yarn at the dollar store now. It’s not amazingly high quality, but it’s good enough for practice and learning.
I cannot recommend the above enough. My dad is a prepper and was falling in with a militia. Like the white supremacy militias.
So I started casually mentioning i wanted to do Search and Rescue- knowing my father is incredibly competitive and will try and out do me.
I was all "but we can't rely on the government to find people!"
Now he has been on 6 different tours in the US. He is a field commander and the most successful in state history.
He independently made a partnership with a Black and Missing coalition and partners with them on searches for Black Ohio and.
He called me the other day so proud he has " a Trans and a nonbinary whatever that is" on his search team. So is he perfect? No. But now he isn't toting a gun around and threatening people.
He's getting better. Sure he built a secret bunker in the basement. But he's recovered multiple bodies and reunited people with loved ones.
Sure we still can't have a conversation without him divulging into some bigoted speak here and there.
But he's been lead in recovering teens trafficked from our state and successfully recovered them in Georgia in 10 hours.
Sure he isn't perfect. But he didn't fall completely and maybe he will become even better on his own.
The secret is: is they aren't going to become themselves again but you can help them not crumble completely. You can still have your parent even if they are a bit.. ahhhh.... hurtful. But they aren't hurting anyone and that's the important part.
I worked at a community museum run out of a historic freight house, next to the train tracks and historic station and engines and other cars. We hosted model train enthusiasts to set up a display every month. Pretty sure the only NT visitors were the confused people trying to buy train tickets.
Some lady brought her teen semi verbal son in all the time. He'd flap and vocalize and jump up and down. He'd run to the door and watch from the railing rocking back and forth so incredibly excited when we told him the train was on its way (you could hear the whistle as it passed the crossing before ours). He was in fucking love.
Some lady from out of town had the nerve to try and ask me to kick the kid and mom out bc he was disrupting her visit. The look on the mom's face like "oh no, not from here, not from here too" made me so fucking mad. I agreed that someone was disrupting other visitors, and asked the karen to leave. She threw a fit. I was like "You're harassing a regular visitor on the basis of disability. Please leave the premises."
Karen left. I started writing an email explaining to my boss ahead of the inevitable complaint. The mom came up and was like "thank you for making this a place my kid can be happy and himself" and I'm like "ma'am this is a train musuem. If we didn't have autistic visitors we wouldn't have visitors."
Is it just me or has a lot of fandom forgotten what "AU" means? It's short for Alternate Universe. I keep seeing people talking about, like, "fake dating AU" or "only one bed AU." Unless your characters exist in a world where a) beds don't exist or b) beds exist in such abundance there could not POSSIBLY be only one of them, that's not an AU. It's just a regular degular story.
Okay I truly expected this to get like 5 notes, what is happening. Anyway some of these tags are bonkers. "An AU describes anything that doesn't happen in canon" bestie that's what fic is. You're literally describing fanfiction. Is there a huge category of fics that just summarize canon that I'm missing? What on earth is going on.
And for the "what about canon divergence" folks out there:
- Fic where the Avengers are starship pilots or cowboys or, idk, cavemen or something <- THIS IS AN AU
- Fic where Bucky becomes Captain America in the 1940s instead of Steve <- THIS IS ALSO AN AU, just the canon divergence kind
- Fic where Sam and Bucky hook up during or after TFAWS <- not? an AU?? just because they didn't film it???
- "What about if it's an AU where the Avengers are all giant slime creatures AND there's only one bed, that's an Only One Bed AU" bro c'mon.
agreed but this is the funniest possible example you could have used
The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.
official linguistics post
hey can you do me a favor and start that project that you wanted to work on please I am begging you to do the first step
literally only the first step
you only have to do the first step
PLEASE PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU SO MUCH
like if it's an art project open your art software or gather materials
If it requires reaching out to someone just send that email or whatever
If it's writing please make an outline
etc etc you know what the project is please start it please PLEASE
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
ALT
ALT