being a hater and being a troll are different but idk how to articulate the difference
Trolling inherently involves another person. A troll is trying to waste your time and/or generate a reaction. It is entirely cynical.
Hating can be done in private, even monasticslly. But hating at a person is an invitation to banter. The goal is to hit that perfect funny/cutting/true sweet spot, and it’s fun if the target of your hating can return with an equally funny/cutting/true comeback.
“Sabarot de l'Avernière, a prolific author of projects in the early years of the Revolution, saw priests and doctors as the natural heirs of the Church’s two most visible missions—the consolation of souls and the alleviation of pain. So the wealth of the Church, which has been diverted from its original use by the higher clergy, must be confiscated and returned to the nation, which alone knows its own spiritual and material needs. The revenues would be divided equally between the parish clergy and the doctors. Are not doctors the priests of the body? ‘The soul cannot be considered separately from animate bodies, and if the ministers of the Altars are venerated, and receive from the state a reasonable living, those who tend your health should also receive a salary sufficient to feed themselves and to succour you. They are the tutelary genii of the integrity of your faculties and sensations’. The doctor would no longer have to demand a fee from his patient; the treatment of the sick would be free and obligatory—a service that the nation would provide as one of its sacred tasks; the doctor would be no more than the instrument of that service. At the end of his studies, the new doctor would occupy not the post of his choice, but the one that was assigned to him according to the needs and vacancies, throughout the country; when he had gained in experience, he could apply for a more responsible, better-paid job. He would have to give an account to his superiors of his activities and would be held responsible for his mistakes. Having become a public, disinterested, supervised activity, medicine could improve indefinitely; in the alleviation of physical misery, it would be close to the old spiritual vocation of the Church, of which it would be a sort of lay carbon copy. To the army of priests watching over the salvation of souls would correspond that of the doctors who concern themselves with the health of bodies.”
—Michel Foucault, “A Political Consciousness,” The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
Listen, if you want to understand how emanations work, it’s like this:
If you’re an infinite thing like God, and you want to become a finite thing like the world, how do you go from infinite to finite? Answer: emanation.
You know when youre at a wedding, and there’s a big pyramid of wine glasses? And they fill the wine glasses by pouring champagne into the top, so it overflows and then fills all the glasses beneath it? Imagine the wine bottle is infinite. That’s God.
Each of the glasses is called a hypostasis. God can emanate through many hypostases to reach it’s final emanation.
As for how many hypostases there are, and how they’re arranged, that’s the tricky one. Every religion has a different answer, and it’s never simple.
“I’m not skilled at gardening and i don’t have the time/energy to learn, but i really want a pretty garden, so i hired a gardener”
That makes a lot of sense, it’s nice to experience that beauty!
“I love writing music, and I can play a few instruments, but my playing skills don’t cover the breadth or depth of what I want my songs to sound like, and none of my usual partners were available for recording this month, so I hired someone who’s good on sax and another musician who plays an upright bass to help me record my new stuff, and they added a lot of depth to the experience!”
Good call, when you really want the right sound right now it makes sense to bring in people who are available and talented!
“I’m a decent cook and my friends love the food i make, but sometimes I enjoy a really high-quality meal in a carefully curated atmosphere or i don’t want to do dishes, so i go to a restaurant and pay a chef and cooks and waitstaff and dish washers to make me a fantastic meal in a nice setting without any of the chores.”
Of course, we all love a good time without the usual work sometimes!
“I love music and I play the piano really well, but sometimes I want to hear it played by someone who’s really dedicated their career to it, or who plays in a style I’m not experienced with, so I go to a concert and pay a musician for their music, or I buy their albums so I can listen to it at home.”
Yes, getting to experience an expert in their craft is a real treat!
“I’ve been way too busy to take care of myself or my living space lately and it’s been taking a toll on my mental health, so i hired someone to help me tidy up this week and then went to a salon to get spiffed up so I could feel better about myself, and i paid those professionals for their work and education and experience and skill.”
Good on you, self care is so important!
“I’m not very experienced with sex and and would like someone else to show me what it can feel like, or I want to enjoy sex at a time when I don’t have anyone available, or I enjoy sex and am pretty good at it but I want to experience it a dedicated atmosphere with someone who takes it seriously, or I want to see what all is possible when someone is really an expert at it and treats it like a set of skills they’ve spent a long time working to master, or sex makes me feel good and i could really use that good experience in my life right now, so I paid a sex worker to help me achieve that goal.”
…
If you think the last one is somehow fundamentally different from the others, that hiring a professional to provide a service that you want or need for any reason is suddenly immoral because it involves sex, you should probably reflect on why. Because really, at the end of the day, it’s not.
“Sex work is exploitative and i won’t stand for it!!!!! Anyway what do you think of my garden? I just had it redone by a team of undocumented immigrants who worked for a fraction of minimum wage doing backbreaking labor under a landscape company that will turn them in to ICE if they try to find better work or speak out about their conditions or don’t do a good enough job fast enough, so i got a great deal! isn’t that wonderful? Anyway, try this Driscoll's™️ Fruit Salad I got yesterday…”
Also, if you are worried about exploitation in sex work (which we all should be), do some reseach and see if there’s a sex workers union where you live. For example, In Australia we have the Scarlet Alliance:
While not every country is going to have one, if yours does it is a great way to be able to engage with sex workers while also being certain that they have workers rights and protections. This goes for all the other industries as well by the way.
Sometimes sex workers are trafficked, denied human rights, and exploited horrifically, that is true. And that’s why I’m happy that I live in a country where they have a union to protect them. Because those things aren’t unique to sex work, and sex workers deserve the same dignity and protection as all other workers.
One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.
Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”
Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.
person who knows how logistical things works has picked up the cannon, hefted it thoughtfully, and put a single chalk mark precisely on the problem.
The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.
I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.
In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:
My sister’s reaction on my coming out was, “Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I’m taking you clothes shopping tomorrow.”
A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.
Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.
I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women’s tent.
In the women’s bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she’d just used the last of it.
All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn’t started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.
I’ve had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.
guys my friends won’t read my new favorite book in the world because it’s Gross so i am turning to tumblr to tell all of you, very seriously:
please read Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer. if you like history, biology, zoology, immunology, the ecology, or a dozen other things, you will like this book. of you read one book this year it should be this book.
look: most life on earth is, or is intertwined with, a class of creatures no one ever learns anything about, but now you can, and it’s incredibly fucking neat to know.
please read this book and then come talk to me about parasites. i am so serious.
LIKE DID YOU KNOW we probably have different sexes as a way to outfox parasites?? clonal species can’t mutate faster than their attendant parasites and become completely locked together with them generation after generation. sexual reproduction would be a big waste of man meat (an average of half of everything born isn’t going to be producing eggs, so what the fuck) except that the dna shuffle multi-sex species do throws a lot more curveballs. parasites are playing catchup with sexed species, not dancing a perfect waltz.
the reason i’m trans is the reason there are men in the first place: a long time ago some weird little critters had sex to outsmart their parasites, and it worked so good that we’re still having sex today. thanks, parasites!
okay it’s come to my attention that absolutely NONE OF YOU know ANYTHING about how cutie marks work. let me say this simply. a cutie mark isn’t a job being assigned, it’s a special TALENT OR SKILL that the pony enjoys. Most of the time it has a directly transferable job for that skill, like if you enjoy baking and are super good at it WOW! baker. If you are really good at writing and telling stories, author. However, there are some cutie marks that could go multiple ways.
twilight sparkle has exceptional magic ability, so she became a scholar, but she could really do anything that required a good magic skill. same with rainbow dash, her weather controlling job isn’t directly linked to her cutie mark, but it does fit the bill for the job.
i was posed the question of what would a murderer pony’s cutie mark be and wouldn’t everyone know. NO. if somehow murder were to be a special skill, the cutie mark might be something like a knife or a shovel. other ponies might just assume you’re good a cooking or gardening. now with cutie marks like apple jacks, their family has a ‘green thumb’ kind of deal so obviously the cutie mark would be hereditary.
so, the reason i made this post. walter white pony’s cutie mark would NOT be blue crystals. it would be a CHEMISTRY FLASK.
ALT
