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You can fight AI in indie publishing by leaving reviews.

Seriously.

Ai-generated garbage is flooding the self-publishing market. It works as a numbers game- put out ENOUGH fake crap and eventually someone’s aunt will buy them the ebook as an unwanted gift, and you’ll have made two dollars. This tactic works at SCALE, which means real independent titles are now a needle amongst a haystack of slop.

If you have read a book this year that has less than 5 reviews, your rating is an algorithmic spotlight on that needle.

A one sentence review helps. Really. A star rating helps if you really can’t think of anything to say, but if you can muster up even “I laughed at the part about the tabby cat” you are doing indie authors a favor like you cannot believe.

(Also if you left a review on one of my books this year I am kissing you so softly on your forehead and I adore you)

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im so tired so here's a recap of what trump did today summarized and probably incomplete because we are in super hell:

End birthright citizenship (a.k.a the 14th amendment)

Remove the legal existence of non-binary people

Withdraw from the world health organization

pardon jan 6 people

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Hi new friends. Please don’t censor words, especially triggering ones. Seeing trigger words written l!ke th!s doesn’t stop them from being triggering.

It just stops Tumblr’s built in filter (see under settings) from working which many of us have in place to protect ourselves.

This has happened to me multiple times this week, and as someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation, has not been great.

You are not on TikTok or Insta, please use the full words so people can protect themselves. Thank you 💖

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even in the "we don't care if you're queer, it's fine" threads it's still pretty obvious they actually do care, because half the time the people saying "we don't care, we respect everybody" will follow up with "as long as you don't push it on people or spread propaganda" which is exactly what homophobes say in America and other Western countries.

you're not allowed to say anything to threaten Chinese unity on RedNote but even so, some people still responded to the question "are gay/trans people accepted in China?" with more honest answers of "they'll say they accept you, but only if you're at a distance. if you are in their family then they will reject you" or "they will say they accept trans people, but as soon as you actually post trans content it will get shut down as propaganda."

I've also seen chinese people on bluesky clarifying that the trans community in mainland china is still pretty firmly on twitter, because they kept getting kicked off every china-based app.

non-local marginalized communities having a slightly easier time when they hang out somewhere the local government has no direct control over them doesn't guarantee their local counterparts are having an equally easy time.

If I see one more naive white queer speaking over actual Chinese queers people and proclaiming xiaohongshu/rednote or even China in general is somehow a fucking wonderland incapable of violent bigotry I’m gonna explode

1) a lot of the queer related tags have suddenly become usable again after the great migration

2) the #le tag for lesbians literally comes from the #lesbian and #les tags being banned so to act

3) the welcome you’re receiving by chinese people isn’t what actual Chinese queers have experienced (we experience a bombardment of loud angry homophobes/transphobes every single fucking day) and every single Chinese queer I know has been ranting about this for days. Unfortunately a lot of people are hypocrites who are only nice to the guests in the house

4) not only is this rhetoric of don’t ask don’t tell being the main consensus in China FALSE (I don’t even want to get into the media’s suppression of hate crimes and how many queer activism accounts are being banned left and right), passive queerphobia is still FUCKING QUEERPHOBIA…

The audacity to come into OUR HOUSE and speak over us after 3 days of being pampered on this app just for being western is vile and so fucking demoralising because we’ve been yelling about our condition for so long and you guys would rather not miss out on social media brainrot than to actually apply some nuance for once… you guys wanted to distance from the sinophobic propaganda take of China being unequivocally evil so bad that you’ve swung to the other end

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the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor

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idk where it was but i remember reading an excerpt of something about how child victims of sexual assault often come up with strategies to protect themselves (mentally or physically) as well as protect one another, despite often being depicted as helpless objects that have things done to them with no reaction. & then i think about how widely accepted it was in my middle + high schools that you could not depend on the counselors for jack shit, especially if you were a mentally ill kid. its just aggravating how children are never seen as active subjects. children are seen as deserving of protection, but you are never allowed to help yourself. you must wait for an adult to decide you are worthy of help, and you only get what help they decide you need. in middle school i got in trouble for skipping math class to have panic attacks in the bathroom. no one asked why i had panic attacks, they just reprimanded me for not going to the counselor (they also did not ask why i, a child with social anxiety, felt safer alone than with an adult i did not know or trust). so often i see kids who are struggling with bullying get told "tell an adult!" with 0 acknowledgement of how the adults in their life may be completely unhelpful or actively dangerous, and how kids are often extremely aware of this dynamic. me and my friends were a mentally ill children who were abused but not in the exact ways which are acknowledged as dangerous abuse (and even if they were, many children do not want to risk being put in the system for various reasons) and we had to share knowledge of the adults in our lives to protect ourselves and each other. this is all very rambly but i just hate how children's knowledge and strategies for survival are not recognized. i hate how children have a right to safety but only if its an adult doing the saving- because if they take matters into their own hands they are punished for it. safety, whether intentionally or not, can end up being another way for adults to exert control over children's actions & deny their autonomy because children are still seen as objects to be managed by adults instead of people in their own right

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i think where things went wrong with "normalize" was that it made sense as a request for a new standard of behavior, e.g. "normalize parents allowing their children privacy", "normalize mixed-gender bathrooms", "normalize paying your employees for their commute", and so on. "normalize" in those statements means "this should be the new normal behavior, replacing the old normal behavior" and that's perfectly appropriate usage of the word.

where "normalize" stops making sense is when it's used as a synonym for "destigmatize," as in "normalize mental illness" or "normalize being trans." we are not actually trying to make those things into statistical norms!

"can we normalize-" NO!!!!!! we do not need to expand whats considered normal!!! we need to teach people to stop reacting judgmentally when encountering something new and weird!!!! things dont need to be normal to be respected!!!!!!!!!!

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Hello internet user whose entire concept of feminism comes from tiktok. In front of you are three ancient myths about women. You have five minutes to figure out which one of them was made up in the 1970s. If you choose wrong, you will be ripped to pieces by Maenads.

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Women have more power and agency in Shakespeare’s comedies than in his tragedies, and usually there are more of them with more speaking time, so I’m pretty sure what Shakespeare’s saying is “men ruin everything” because everyone fucking dies when men are in charge but when women are in charge you get married and live happily ever after

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yes!!! as an exr shipper myself, can we please stop giving other people's plotlines to grantaire. if the two of them ever managed to get together it would be so, so much messier and less rational than any of those options

it’s so so funny silly. “grantaire is a working class person who inspires enjolras through new perspectives” so close, that is feuilly. “grantaire is enjolras’s intellectual equal who has complicated and conviction-informed feelings about revolutionary violence and his articulations of these feelings round out and supplement enjolras’s perspective” so close, that is combeferre. “If grantaire had joined in the fighting he would have been super awesome at it and earned enjolras’s respect and admiration” so close‼️‼️ that is MARIUS!!

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mercy seems like a long shot here, so my prayer for inauguration day 2025: may they be incompetent. may they just be really bad at implementation. may their egos choke their effectiveness. may they drown themselves week by week with infighting and selfish posturing. may they be easily distracted. may the very governors and senators and agencies and religious leaders that the new administration expects to be friendly force endless stalemates to preserve their own power. may every delay turn into a three ring blame circus so chaotic that no one remembers what they were doing. may the good and necessary parts of government be too boring to draw attention and keep running quietly in the background. may the next four years be full of sound and fury and signify nothing.

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tiktok stunt haha funny. please talk about the ice raids

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I think the funniest part about the migration from tiktok to rednote is how americans are like "oh my gosh, our government lied to us, you guys are the same as us!" and chinese are like "holy shit, our government didn't lie to us, you really do live like this, i'm so sorry"

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Artist Daniel Rarela creates “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” memes to stop people from whitewashing MLK

follow @the-movemnt

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if focusing on only one task means i stop being able to get anything done at all due to rapidly diminishing dopamine returns, then task switching is, in fact, more efficient than focusing on a single task.

as the saying goes, the best exercise routine is the one you'll actually DO.

Literally every single Neuroscience guy I listen to on audiobooks and podcasts: Multitasking is a lie. You are not more efficient. You're just rapidly switching between tasks and doing all of them slower but your brain is tricking itself into thinking it's more efficient because you get a little dopamine reward when you activate the 'change task' neurons. And you're burning up way more glucose in the process, leaving you more tired with less done. STOP MULTITASKING. JUST DO ONE THING. PLEASE IT'S ONLY WORSENING YOUR ATTENTION SPAN. WE'RE BEGGING YOU, PLEA--

My ADHD: Don't listen to them, babydoll. You are sooooooo efficient and attractive. Whoop. You got an email. Whoop you got a text. Whoop you got a blog ask. WOW look at all the tabs open on this window. Do you even remember what they're all for? Better look through them and close the ones you're not using because you're soooo sexy and efficient. Whoop, email again.