Queer and masc, in my 30s, content writer. Trying to learn the banjo (twang!). In love with the woods of New England. Lots of D&D and other tabletop.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The most interesting piece of this for me is that the “gender politics index” is an even stronger predictor of Trumpy support than the “modern sexism index.” The gender politics piece is outrage politics - it’s culture-war, cult of victimhood stuff with minimal substantive claims attached. And that’s what most strongly predicts voting preferences.

    What that means to me is that, as with everything that makes the news coming out of high profile republicans, their positions are utterly cynical and calculated to induce fear-based rage voting, rather than a reflection of a sincerely held set of moral and cultural beliefs.






  • Fantastic reply. Also consider the dramatic and sustained rightward slide of the Overton window over the last 40 years.

    Within right-wing media spaces that window has slid in so far to the right that mentioning vaccines, public housing, or a living wage is seen as outrageous or absurd or communist, and outright white supremacy is a major plank of prominent politicians’ platforms.

    So when someone says “there’s no room to talk about right-wing ideas,” they’re saying “why don’t you all accept an equivalence between radical Christian nationalism and moderate democratic conservatism as they two poles of political debate?”

    And the reality is that “right-wing ideas” in America are mostly fabricated or deeply bigoted. And outside of conservative media environments, they are accurately perceived that way and so are not talked about much.




  • Microsoft Word is a bad piece of software that is poorly designed, laughably unoptimized, and mostly dysfunctional. It’s like a passenger car with seven wheels arranged in an irregular septagon, a 1 gallon gas tank, and a kitchen stool for a seat.

    Also hype clothes are a tremendous waste and reveal the hollowness and meaninglessness that underlies most fashion


  • Hahaha the Oxford comma is also one my my hills…in the other direction. The “and” only removes ambiguity if the list items themselves are single, discrete items without conjunctions, sub-lists, or other complications. That’s why the only major style guide that recommends against the OC is AP, which is intended for print journalism, where the speed-of-reading increase is worth the loss of clarity…because print journalism is written for a 3rd-7th grade reading level and you just don’t need that clarity.

    As soon as you get into complex, technical, or even just grammatically interesting prose, it’s helpful to maintain more rigorous punctuation (esp. comma and semicolon) usage to disambiguate the kinds of series that you’re going to need.

    IMO. Hahaha





  • Thanks for posting this!

    My 2 cents is that as you get more used to ADHD symptoms, you can learn to ride the waves a little bit. The intensity of your interests can be powerful, and you’ll find ways to partly channel it. A few tips:

    • Practice being kind to yourself. Accept that you’ll get derailed, and learn to get back into it.
    • Get used to your patterns. It takes ~20 minutes to get into a task and ~2 minutes to lose focus (less for us, lol), so remember that there is always a 20-minute wall of effort every time you need to get going. That’s the barrier you’ll get better at pushing through as you practice.
    • Build your environment to suit: get rid of clutter (if that bothers you), close doors or wear noise-cancelling headphones if you need quiet (I’ll always love rainymood), you close other apps, leave your phone far away, and turn on self control.
    • Consider multiple media. When I’m stuck it can help to switch from typing to writing, diagramming, or going for a walk and talking aloud, using speech-to-text on my phone.

    Note: I’m a content writer rather than a fiction writer, but there are a lot of overlaps (research, ideation, drafting, revision…). I was diagnosed with ADHD in college ~12 years ago, was on meds for 8, and have been off them for the last 4, which is also roughly the period in which I’ve built a freelance career. My relationship to ADHD has changed dramatically over that time, per the above.