#we get to meet the other co principle

[jealousmartini]

💌 She's an overachiever. "Pressure"? What pressure? ⋆₊˚⊹🔖

«───────── « ⋅ʚ♡ɞ⋅ » ────────»

My second year of college is coming in hot guys. And I'm talking the 3rd of September, in TWO WEEKS TIME HOT.

But you already know your girl has BEEN locked in with her subliminals for the next term, cus I've had a whole thing going on since my first term to my second yk. so come a little closer so I can show yall what my game is on

p.s.a!! I am an animation and games art student, so most to all of my work is research and art based. And when I say most of my work is research based, I mean there is an ungodly amount of writing that is expected from the students and it's not even just the amount it's WHAT you write about that gets you the grade and how well your art conveys your ideas.

Also "Ex." = Example

╰┈➤ " My average college day experience as an art student/loass babe " click here!

«───────── « ⋅ʚ♡ɞ⋅ » ────────»

"What? Like it's hard?" At the top of her class, always ontop of her work, never slacking off, always locking in.

   ── .✦  ┆  𖤐  ┆  ␥ 

|| Perfect focus, super attentive, always pays attention and makes notes. I am never afraid to ask for help or advice and I always receive the answers I need to understand the work; no room for confusion here.

|| Very strong, clear memory, perfect photographic memory.

|| Studies so much, it's my hobby, never underestimates myself or downplays my work, has always prioritised my work and has always understood the importance of doing work at home. Studying has never been a struggle for me because I don't struggle with discipline. I actually find so much fun and enjoyment doing homework. I always feel so productive and proud of myself whilst managing my time and looking at the amount I have done afterwards. Especially with the amount of validation and points I earn from teachers. It is always so satisfying seeing my high grades after a complete project. It's like a treat.

|| Creative genius, always brainstorms with words or loose sketches; not a single idea goes to waste. Research enthusiast, I could never shy away from making a thorough, detailed, and well planned out analysis, moodboard or mindmap. And multiple of them at that. I always know EXACTLY what to write and never wastes precious time and space yapping.

|| The life of an art student is exciting, fulfilling, flourishing, inspiring and strict. In the healthy way of course. My parents and teachers are always understanding of my burnouts and art block which are very rare thank god; and it's a good thing I have my closest friends to comfort me through my work. They are always so supportive, encouraging and honest with me as I am with them. We always travel together to the college (when I don't feel like being alone) and we always travel back home together. I mean we are our own personal friend circle so of course we buy snacks for each other and meet up for lunch; it's not even like we need to worry about price since we have more than enough on us. College is 100 times better when my best friends are with me, everything feels so comfortable with them

|| Perfect, cunty, and ideal artstyles. Always chooses the ones most appropriate for a certain design, and never forgets how to convey a certain look. I know, understand and draw human, animal, vehicle, clothing anatomy and terminology, enviromental composition, colour theory and terminology, the 12 principles of animation, the 7 fundamentals of art (Line, pattern, colour, texture, tone, shape and form), and the fundamentals of character design like the back of my hand

|| I know how to layout a design page appropriately, I always know how to theme and colour co-ordinate. Written placement and art placement are always perfect to the T and nothing looks off. All together, I show off my own unique style of work and impress my teachers of classmates

Ex. Subliminals in my art student playlist

"Over achiever", "Desired art skills", "Desired (college) life"

«───────── « ⋅ʚ♡ɞ⋅ » ────────»

"Ugh she is always doing the most with her work😒-" And she always looks good doing it. She's got the looks and the discipline; she's got it all

   ── .✦  ┆  𖤐  ┆  ␥ 

|| Gorgeous, curly, and ideal (3B to 3C) hair. My hair never gets greasy, dry, breakage, damage, frizz, dandruff, or split ends. My curls are always moisturised, soft, bouncy, and defined. I never experience a bad hair day, and my hair is super easy to manage. Detangling my hair is a breeze, and styling my hair is even easier; every style looks exactly the way I want it and never loses the volume or shape throughout the day.

|| Ideal, fit, slim thick pear. Short shoulders, small ribcage, medium-sized chest, 20 inch waist, wide hips and slight dip, long legs, fat ass but not too fat, chubby but fit thighs, slimmer defined calves and small feet. The perfect pear. And every outfit looks exactly the way I want; I never look awkward but I always look put together and stylish.

|| Craziest face card. Ms. Face economy infact. I have a round heart shaped face with dark brown bambi eyes and long fluttery lashes, a medium straight nose bridge, plump pink "keyhole" lips, and the clearest, softest brown skin ever... Yet I still put make up on- yes I do because it's fun and I like it, so it's always awesome knowing I can do my make up flawlessly and nail my looks perfectly

Ex. Subliminals in my ideal appearance playlist

"3C hair type", "Pear body", "Desired face", "brown caramel skin"

∘₊ ✧───────────────────✧₊∘

I'll probably add smore later :3 k bye

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for kicking my cousin out of our city? Kicking out is a strong term. I didn’t exile her or anything, I just - well, here’s the story from the beginning. My cousin-once-removed G (3263F) and I (2188M) were co-founders and co-rulers of this city. I don’t want to give undue credit to either of us - there were and are many others involved in the founding and governance of the place - but it’s fair to say that we two were the ringleaders. And we made a good team! We’re both very opinionated people, so of course there was sometimes tension, but overall I think our disagreements only made our decision-making stronger. That was until A (ageless, M) showed up. A is one of the lesser primordial beings who helped create the world. Necessary context: not long ago there was a catastrophic war between the most powerful of these beings, who was monstrously evil, and his more benevolent brethren. This war was absolutely necessary, but it did wreak havoc on the natural world. Myself and my cousin G and many others had to flee as refugees. When we founded our city, we wanted it to be a place of recovery from all that loss, somewhere that everyone could come together and flourish. The rulers of A’s people sent him to aid us in that. And his help has been invaluable! He’s shared knowledge that has already bettered our city and its people, and now we’re working on a project together that will let us heal so many of the world’s ancient hurts… but I digress. When A showed up, G took an immediate dislike to him. She has some history with the rulers of his folk, and I suppose that colored her opinion of him, but I’ve never seen that level of hostility from her before. She picked at everything he said, implied that he wasn’t trustworthy, even tried to tell me that we should send him away! She argued that since our people’s king had declined A’s help, we should too - which was ridiculous, our city has always made its own decisions, and anyhow our king hadn’t commanded us to do any such thing! Ordinarily G is very clear-headed and has excellent judgment, but in this case I just couldn’t get across to her that she was being unfair. When I was firm in my support of A, G started trying to drum up public animosity against him. Of course I opposed her, and as A had already made many friends in the city and is an excellent rhetorician to boot, G only succeeded in turning public opinion against herself. At city council meetings she continued to oppose A and his projects, but I stood with A, and the majority of the council followed my lead. G was essentially frozen out of the city’s governance - and I do regret that, truly, but she put herself in that position by refusing to work with me and A! Eventually G took the small faction that agreed with her and left the city. She told me my “doom was on my own head,” which was needlessly hostile, I think. And look, I fully believe that she believes she’s in the right. She’s a very principled person; she wouldn’t do all this for petty reasons. She’s just so wrong about A! I truly can’t think of anything else I could have done, but G’s been a blessing to this city and I’m really unhappy to have been part of the reason it lost her. Was there another way I should have handled this conflict? AITA?

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.3.5 Are there other kinds of anarchist federation?

Yes. Another type of anarchist federation is what we term the

“class struggle” group. Many local anarchist groups in Britain, for example, organise in this fashion. They use the term “class struggle” to indicate that their anarchism is based on collective working class resistance as opposed to reforming capitalism via lifestyle changes and the support of, say, co-operatives (many “class struggle” anarchists do these things, of course, but they are aware that they cannot create an anarchist society by so doing). We follow this use of the term here. And just to stress the point again, our use of “class struggle” to describe this type of anarchist group does not imply that “synthesis” or “Platformist” do not support the class struggle. They do!

This kind of group is half-way between the “synthesis” and the “Platform.” The “class struggle” group agrees with the “synthesis” in so far as it is important to have a diverse viewpoints within a federation and that it would be a mistake to try to impose a common-line on different groups in different circumstances as the Platform does. However, like the “Platform,” the class struggle group recognises that there is little point in creating a forced union between totally different strands of anarchism. Thus the “class struggle” group rejects the idea that individualist or mutualist anarchists should be part of the same organisation as anarchist communists or syndicalists or that anarcho-pacifists should join forces with non-pacifists. Thus the “class struggle” group acknowledges that an organisation which contains viewpoints which are dramatically opposed can lead to pointless debates and paralysis of action due to the impossibilities of overcoming those differences.

Instead, the “class struggle” group agrees a common set of “aims and principles” which are the basic terms of agreement within the federation. If an individual or group does not agree with this statement then they cannot join. If they are members and try to change this statement and cannot get the others to agree its modification, then they are morally bound to leave the organisation. In other words, there is a framework within which individuals and groups apply their own ideas and their interpretation of agreed policies. It means that individuals in a group and the groups within a federation have something to base their local activity on, something which has been agreed collectively. There would be a common thread to activities and a guide to action (particularly in situations were a group or federation meeting cannot be called). In this way individual initiative and co-operation can be reconciled, without hindering either. In addition, the “aims and principles” shows potential members where the anarchist group was coming from.

In this way the “class struggle” group solves one of the key problems with the “synthesis” grouping, namely that any such basic statement of political ideas would be hard to agree and be so watered down as to be almost useless (for example, a federation combining individualist and communist anarchists would find it impossible to agree on such things as the necessity for revolution, communal ownership, and so on). By clearly stating its ideas, the “class struggle” group ensures a common basis for activity and discussion.

Such a federation, like all anarchist groups, would be based upon regular assemblies locally and in frequent regional, national, etc., conferences to continually re-evaluate policies, tactics, strategies and goals. In addition, such meetings prevent power from collecting in the higher administration committees created to co-ordinate activity. The regular conferences aim to create federation policies on specific topics and agree common strategies. Such policies, once agreed, are morally binding on the membership, who can review and revise them as required at a later stage but cannot take action which would hinder their application (they do not have to apply them, if they consider them as a big mistake).

For example, minorities in such a federation can pursue their own policies as long as they clearly state that theirs is a minority position and does not contradict the federation’s aims and principles. In this way the anarchist federation combines united action and dissent, for no general policy will be applicable in all circumstances and it is better for minorities to ignore policies which they know will make even greater problems in their area. As long as their actions and policies do not contradict the federation’s basic political ideas, then diversity is an essential means for ensuring that the best tactic and ideas are be identified.

[ahundredtimesover]

WOOWEEE i’m still processing the new chapter 🥹 i just wanna stress that there’s multiple realities, guys. jk wanting to respect oc by upholding her wishes to grow, but also feeling abandoned by her choices despite him baring his emotions and desire to have her close by. then you have oc feeling the burden of her family ties/debt with the jeon family and wanting to find out who she is away from her current role, but she’s emotionally attached to jk and it’s blurring with her own goals. not only that, we see jk’s codependency on oc and how that could make her feel more chained down. ultimately she’s always needed by someone, but when has she put her needs first?

as mentioned, this is all so deeply rooted. they need to spend time away from each other to grow. jk is probably going to retreat/relapse to his past behaviors or maybe he’ll also be working on himself so that he can be a better partner for oc … my guts say former because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i’m an angst enthusiast.

ALSO i see lots of ppl saying UGH JUST STAY AND DATE, and while yes … this is a fic, this is a slice of life too. yall realize it is super inappropriate to have a secret relationship with your boss? granted all of my bosses have been old balding dudes and not jk, still … it’s the principle 😭 oc and jk having this “separation” period is good (i’m sleeping on the highway) and needed for their character development. i’m sure theyre gunna meet again and the tension is gunna be so high and they will do the boom boom pow💥����😏 without feeling that guilt/weird power dynamic!! 🫶🏼

mimi, you’re so awesome and i love this fic so much. YOUR BRAIN IS SO BEAUTIFUL, MUAH!!!!!!! 💋 you did not disappoint with the make out scene … cuz man if they can get like that on their first kiss … WE ARE NOT READY (i am🤲🏼)!! pls take care of yourself as always and hope you have a lovely day

Hi, anon. I took a break from doing my readings bc this just... this just made me smile and it appeased me (as did a lot of other readers' asks and comments) 🥹🥹 especially considering the other asks claiming how the characters are so dumb and stupid, or that they can just date while OC's in the company or date after she resigns. I would like to copy-paste your first paragraph to everything now hahaha (bc oh god the immense joy of a writer when someone accurately says what I was trying to show is insane and that's what I'm feeling!) 😭😭

Like, you couldn't have said it any better. All those things you mentioned can co-exist, and part of the characters' respective stories is learning that those realities can indeed co-exist. Which is why they're as burdened by their choices as they are (and we'll see more of this in ch12). I'd like for you to park that second paragraph bc... I wrote this entire series with the plan for season 2 so whatever happens at the end of this season, know that more will happen and you kind of raised some points already. 👀👀

And with the boss/asst. thing - YES. The power dynamic goes beyond their roles bc their pasts are intertwined as well. Mr. Ri pointed it out to JK - did he want OC to feel indebted to him, too? There are just so many complications. It's always been about needing to feel free for OC. What that freedom means is something she has yet to explore. Even the question of happiness is something she's figuring out.

BUT THANK YOU, like, really. 🥹🥹 It's always tricky and draining to write super long stories like this bc I need to make sure that the characters and storylines are consistent, and knowing that what I intended comes across (most of the time) is truly worth all the stress of writing this one hahaha I hope you're well and I hope to hear from you and your wonderful mind again! 💕💕💕

[invisibleicewands]

Michael Sheen is electrifying in NHS origin story Nye — theatre review

It will be, says Michael Sheen’s Nye Bevan, eyes blazing, as he steps to the front of the National Theatre’s huge Olivier stage, “the most civilised step this country has ever taken”. He’s talking about the National Health Service, about the great, humanitarian principle of a health service free at the point of delivery, about an institution that remains cherished above all others by the British people. And in Tim Price’s epic new play about the Welsh Labour politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, he’s speaking across the decades to the present day, when the beleaguered NHS lies on its own sickbed, delivering an account of how and why the health service was born and the radical impulse behind it. A mighty, moving and sometimes messy piece of theatre, it’s really, at heart, a state-of-the-nation play. And like Dear England and Standing at the Sky’s Edge before it, Nye (a co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre) seizes this venue’s great potential as a national public forum to frame critical questions about who we are and who we want to be.

It’s also a drama that picks up Bevan’s audacity and runs with it, shrugging off sober realism for a swirling fantasia. Here Bevan, who as secretary of state for health spearheaded the creation of the NHS in 1948, lies dying in one of his own hospitals, his life swimming before him as he drifts in morphine-inflected dreams. He actually died at home, but that poetic licence is part and parcel of this show’s ethos, which bundles up the political fight to launch the NHS with a private reckoning with conscience. So, as Bevan’s wife, MP Jennie Lee, and life-long friend Archie Lush (Roger Evans) sit by his sickbed, we dart with his troubled mind around key moments that have brought him to this point: a classroom rebellion against a teacher caning the young Nye for stammering; an epiphany in a public library when he realises how a wider vocabulary can help him; buccaneering moments as a union rep for miners; parliamentary showdowns; a key wartime exchange with Churchill that makes the firebrand young politician see the point of political compromise. At the centre of it all is his sense of guilt and impotence at his father’s terrible death from pneumoconiosis, which Price sees as a key psychological factor in his determination to establish healthcare accessible to all.

Director Rufus Norris stages all this with wit and drive, using Vicki Mortimer’s canny set design of sliding hospital curtains to send scenes tumbling over one another as they do in dreams. At one point the screens stack up in rows, like benches in the House of Commons; at another, several hospital beds — and their startled occupants — are tipped on their sides to form the tables for a committee meeting. Like a Greek chorus, an ever-busy cast plays patients, politicians, miners, doctors — and, in one memorably moving scene, a crowd of desperate ordinary people importuning Bevan on behalf of their sick relatives. There are casualties to this approach. There’s a tendency to reach for stereotypes and to push political points that don’t need pushing. There’s also so much going on that we don’t get enough of an up-close study of Bevan the man, or of the critical period when the postwar Labour party heaved the welfare state into being. The play is often at its best when it focuses on personal exchanges, particularly between Nye and Jennie — a remarkable politician in her own right, played here with fiery wit by Sharon Small.

But this is, unashamedly, a play about principle, passion and compassion, driven by a fantastic ensemble and an electrifying performance from Sheen. Even in his pink pyjamas, his Bevan has a stature that throws down a gauntlet to today’s politicians across the river Thames.

[allthingslinguistic]

All Things Linguistic - 2022 Highlights

2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post. 

Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of "usual" and 103 languages reading project: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

Return of LingComm Grants

A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching

10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade

6 years of Lingthusiasm

Conferences/Talks

LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist

I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation

I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That's Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication

I was a contestant for the second time in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics

Lingthusiasm

In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it's articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch. 

We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify's top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!

Main episodes from this year

Making speech visible with spectrograms

Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.

Word order, we love 

What it means for a language to be official

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

What we can, must, and should say about modals

Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Various vocal fold vibes

What If Linguistics

The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

Who questions the questions?

Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Bonus Episodes

We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more

Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference

Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics

Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular

What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&

There’s like, so much to like about “like”

Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda

Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science

Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox

Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough

103 ways for kids to learn languages

Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

Selected Tweets

Linguistics Fun

aunt and niece languages

Swedish chef captions

IPA wordle

wordle vs kiki

creative use of emoji and space

resume glottal stop

dialects in a trenchcoat

which of these starter Pokemon is bouba and which is kiki

(for no author would use, because of the known rendolence of onions, onions)

acoustic bike

An extremely charming study by Bill Labov featuring a rabbit named Vincent

Rabbit Meme

Cheering on linguistics effects (Stroup and Kiki/Bouba) in a vote on the cutest scientific effect name

Old English Hrickroll

The word you get assigned with your linguistics degree

Sanskrit two-dimensional alphabet

Cognate Objects

Linguist Meetup in Linguaglossa?

baɪ ði eɪdʒ ʌv θɚti

j- prefixing

"But clerk, I am Bill Labov" (pagliacci meme)

Usual winner

Because Internet Tumblr vernacular

Linguist "Human" Costume

Cursed kiki/bouba

dot ellipsis vs comma ellipsis

intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?

Antipodean linguistic milestone

Selected Blog Posts:

Linguistic Jobs

Online Linguistics Teacher

Impact Lead

Customer Success Manager

Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host

Language Engineer

Data Manager & Digital Archivist

Linguistics fun

xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny

Eeyore Linguistic Facts

Lingthusiasm HQ: Frown Thing!

xkcd is making a vowel hypertrapezoid

Title: Ships and Ice Picks: An Ethnographic Excavation of alt.goncharov

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

[eaglesnick]

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” –John Maynard Keynes

Last year (September 2023) the Labour Party set out its plans to create Great British Energy:

“…a new publicly-owned clean energy company (which will) save £93 billion for UK households”

And more recently,

“Labour will work with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030.” (Labour: 'Make Britain a clean energy superpower’. 2024)

Bravo! Who doesn’t want, cheaper, cleaner energy production and a move away from reliance upon fossil fuels other than the big oil companies? But did you spot the possible contradiction between the two statements?

In the first statement Great British Energy was to be publicly owned and in the second Labour is going to work with “the private sector”.

How will Labour square the circle of private sector involvement coupled to public ownership? Your guess is as good as mine. Here is what the Financial Times had to say:

“Plans are light on detail. But the party has said it wants to co-invest alongside the private sector…The terms at which it will invest are unclear. (FT: 06/07/24)

What we are not going to get is an entirely state-owned energy company like EDF in France which generated 139.7bn euros  in revenue for the French government in 2023.

So before we get too excited we should remember Britain’s railways are organised within a mishmash of private and public ownership, and have been described as “broken" and “no longer fit for purpose”. Is this going to be the case for Great British Energy?

Even if Great British Energy is 100% publicly owned, and the cost of renewable energy is brought down there is still the small problem of how the price of generated electricity is artificially pegged to the cost of gas. Nowhere have I seen Labour promising to fix this unfair practice.

The UK already produces over 41% of its electricity through renewable sources and private companies buy and trade energy at the market price. This market is different to the energy provider market where you and I buy our energy, which is controlled by OFGEM.

The energy generator market operates on the principle of marginal cost pricing which has nothing to do with competition or the cost of renewable generation.  Marginal cost pricing is where ALL units of electricity are sold at the price of the most expensive unit needed to meet demand at a particular moment in time.

The most expensive units of electricity are gas turbine generated. In other words, cheap renewable energy is sold at the same price as that produced by the most expensive gas plants. Until this artificial pricing structure is replaced by something fairer, the price you and I pay for electricity, whether renewable or not, will remain artificially high.

[bg-sparrow]

20 Questions for Fic Writers!

I'm finally getting around to doing this after @professorsaber, @mythical-bookworm, and @daryfromthefuture tagged me! Sorry for the delay (it's been a week)!

Under the cut because it seems I felt the need to write my life story today as it relates to my body of fan work. :)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

I'm currently sitting at 51.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

650,606 (of which 58K are shared with co-authors)

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Predominantly Back to the Future with a lot of Pirates of the Caribbean, Iron Man, and National Treasure in my rearview mirror. I've also contributed one-shots/ small works to 19 other fandoms over the years!

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

What to Expect When She's Expecting - (137) - Iron Man

Where You Were (Time Circuits #3) - (95) - BttF

Where You're Going (Time Circuits #1) - (72) - Bttf

Principles of Compromise - (70) - Pirates of the Caribbean

A Fracture in the Space-time Continuum - (69) - BttF

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Most definitely! I love interacting with the people who have taken the time to read and comment on my work, even if it's a simple thank you!

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Ooo hoo hoo. I might have to poll some people for this one. My first reaction would be There Are No Roads (Time Circuits #2.5), but as the ending is technically an alternate series of events, I'm not sure it counts as an official 'end'. I'm big proud of it, though, because most initial reactions were somewhere along the lines of "oh my GOD." :)

That being the case, Once Upon a Time in the West wins hands down, mostly because I didn't even see the plot twist coming until the fourth chapter of this six-chapter fic! And it delivered an epic sequel!

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Oof. Don't come at me like this; I'm just now realizing how much angst I really write because I've narrowed it down to maybe two of my Ao3 fics? Sheesh.

I'm going to go with the only 5+1 fic I've ever written, The Manner of Giving. It was five times Marty failed at giving Doc a gift, and the one time (the end) is when he succeeded.

Where You Were (Times Circuits #3) also gets a nod because it's the end of my trilogy rewrite, and I like to think I ended it on the happy note everyone deserved.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I've never gotten a scathing flame of a review, thank goodness. I did have someone ask me on FFN once why I was writing an OC for Marty when he had Jennifer in canon, and while it was tempting to just say "don't like, don't read," we ended up exchanging a mature and constructive dialogue and respectfully parted ways.

I also once, long ago, before I ever planned to seriously pursue writing, had one of my fics added to a "Worst of the Worst" fandom collection on FFN. It was a terrible fic written by an inexperienced teenager, but I still find something like that distasteful and uncalled for, mostly because, as the author, I wasn't able to remove my work from the collection. And it's still there. And I'm still mad about it. Oddly, it's ensured I hold myself to a high standard and never put anything out there that could be considered for a "Worst of the Worst" collection again. So, screw that guy, and thank you.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

No. I've never wanted a tell a story where that was essential to the story. Now, I've recently included/ alluded to more mature situations in the last year for the first time in my 20 years of writing to get me out of my comfort zone, but no graphic, extended scenes.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

I have! And the craziest crossover I have is FFHQ. Imagine all the characters in all the fandoms in one giant office park drawing up contracts to appear in fics, meeting with fanfic authors, collaborating on crossovers, etc. It's a lot of paperwork, meaning each character has a secretary. That's a lot of secretaries, so there is a list of "subs" who fill in as floaters when a secretary is out, and this crazy crossover follows three OCs as they bounce around random fandoms each day. This baby is my crackfic, the idea I escaped to in those eight years of depression when I wasn't doing so hot. If you're up for it, I promise it's lots of fun!

Honorable mention goes to the BttF/Elf AU I wrote for our server's Secret Santa exchange last year: Pennies From Heaven.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

*inserts Ben Affleck smoking meme*

Yes. And it's… I'm just very over this form of "flattery".

When I was still in high school, I was writing a pretty successful National Treasure fic when a reader told me they found the story on another site. The person who stole it was writing author notes at the beginning, like "Find out what happens to them next time! I've got great stuff in the works!" I emailed that website, and they kindly took it down and banned that user.

Last year, I had someone on Wattpad steal the Time Circuits Series, rename it the "Flux Capacitor Series", and switched out Emma's name with "Dawn". Two things that had me cackling: When I have Marty call Emma "Em," Marty was calling Dawn "Da," and you could see several places where Emma's name wasn't backspaced all the way out of the text. I confronted the "author", and they wisely took it down, telling me it was just so hard to write it themselves. You bet your ass I have this person still on my alerts list to keep an eye on them, and once a month, I am searching Wattpad for my own fics.

Novel HD/ Novel WW also stole Time Circuts off Wattpad for their website, scrubbed my name from it so that it said it was written by "Anonymous", and put the stories behind paywalls. I caught wind of this about a quarter of the way into the last story and took everything I had off Wattpad. I saved the links but they no longer work, and I can't even access the website anymore. I'm not sure if it's gone or if, because it is a foreign site, they somehow blocked our region from accessing it.

I also had FictionHunt take all of my stuff off FFN! It took several months, but I finally got them to remove my stuff from their site. I might not have minded so much if they had asked me, but that's too hard, I suppose.

There was one website called MovieFanficChains way back in 2005 I gave permission to to host my PotC fics, but aside from FFN and Ao3, that the only place with my permission to have my stuff.

If you see my work elsewhere and it has not been linked back to me, let me know. I'll do the same for you. :)

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I know of.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I've done a few roleplays with @daryfromthefuture, where I wrote for Doc and she wrote for Marty. Our most well-known roleplay-turned-fic would be the 1885 scarlet fever sickfic Lean on Me (When You're Not Strong).

I've also been part of the silly blind writing game in our Discord server aptly named Back to the Future: Discord.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

I don't know. This is hard. I'm a romantic, and I make the excited Andy Dwyer face every time a ship is hinted at. I have so many I love, but the mainstream ones that immediately come to mind are Tony/Pepper (Iron Man), Sherlock/Molly (BBC Sherlock), Jamie/Brienne (Game of Thrones), and Reylo (Star Wars).

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

I wrote a National Treasure story in high school called Another Clue, and it was one of my first real attempts at an OC insert. It did fairly well, given my talents at the time; I incorporated an OC, but I focused on crafting a canon-like treasure hunt more, and a lot of people complimented that.

So I started a sequel, One More Clue. It built a bigger story around the first, highlighting a treasure hunt that required the help of a rival and two friends seemingly trying to out-betray one another. I got about 12 chapters and 69K into One More Clue before life took over. I last updated it on June 1, 2010, and I left it at quite the cliffhanger with Riley turning Ben into the FBI only to learn the FBI guy was working for the rival and UGH, I keep meaning to go back to it. I have all the notes!

The problem is, I would have to rewrite Another Clue at this point because it's a hot high schooler's mess. You could tell as I wrote One More Clue that I was applying what I was learning from my writing classes in college. While Another Clue didn't have that luxury, it showcases some strengths that compelled me to pursue a writing major (AKA I can make a decent history-driven treasure hunt).

So, while I could finish One More Clue if I really wanted to, it would be pointless unless I overhauled Another Clue first. Which I've thought about. Because National Treasure is my guilty pleasure. I'm just fairly certain no one would be around to appreciate it if I put all that work in now. :)

16. What are your writing strengths?

I've consistently been told it's dialogue, and I find myself agreeing with that. The single lines of dialogue that turn a whole story on its head or tell a whole story of their own are what I live for.

This is the DUMBEST example, but there is an episode of Spongebob Squarepants where Mrs. Puff is freaking out because she gave Spongebob his boating license just to finally get him out of her class, and she's spiraling. She arrives at "I'll have to change my name, move to another city, and open another boating school!" or something like that.

And then her voice just goes dead flat and her eyes narrow and she says, "No. Not again."

And I lose it every time! But you know there's a WHOLE story there just by that little bit of dialogue! I love that! And I love implementing it where I can, whether it be in a comedic or dramatic setting.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I'm wordy. When I give myself a word count goal for a project, it inevitably goes over, but it gets shaved down some in editing.

Thankfully, I got a hard lesson in this in one of my college writing classes. I turned in a prose-y poem I was quite proud of, and in the next class, the professor handed out copies to everyone. We proceeded to workshop (i.e. destroy) my work, whittling the word count down by half when it was all said and done. And while I was mortified at the time, I've since thanked my professor a few times for that day. That one lesson lives in my brain every day, and I am right back in that classroom every time I edit a work, trying to figure out what the most succinct wording is, what is un/necessary, and how to play with my line breaks. Criticism is daunting but so, so worth it if you can find the courage to apply it!

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I did this for the first time in Once Upon a Time in the South. I have a headcanon that Buford's baby momma is a Spanish actress at a small theater in Pine City, and he had to get something from her. This woman speaks very little English, and it was a challenge to stay true to that because (a) I don't speak Spanish and (b) my brain just struggles a lot with foreign language translations. Me being me, I wanted the most accurate and realistic translations I could get, ones that didn't sound too formal. Then you add in the fact that it's 1893, so there's a time-period language barrier, too. Ultimately, I'm happy with the end result, but I don't see myself going out of my way to do this again.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Pirates of the Caribbean! What a fantastic playground in which to practice storytelling! What really got me hooked on this "I might try writing for real one day" thing was listening to the writer's commentary on The Curse of the Black Pearl DVD when I was 15.

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio gave excellent insight to this story I was enamored with and how they came up with it! "We had Sparrow and Swann, so we figured we shouldn't give Will a bird name" cracked me up. They covered everything — what challenged them, what rules ("guidelines") they stuck to ("leave the kiss for the end"), stuff like that. But what lit me up was hearing the entire backstory while the credits rolled, about how Barbossa was Jack's first mate until Barbossa committed mutiny and all that jazz. There was so much story to the story! That was a big, big day that influenced me. :)

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

Oh, gosh. This is tough because the favoritism depends on the reason!

I'll forever love Principles of Compromise because after abandoning it several chapters from the end and not touching it for eight years, it was the first story I came back to and finished before returning to the Time Circuits Series. It was the first plot-heavy story with canon characters I attempted and completed (most of my works up until that point had been rewrites or headlined OCs). Finishing it was the stepping stone to all the writing I've since completed (30-some works)!

Favorite all time though? I'm a mom; you can't just ask me to pick a favorite kid, and this is just as mean. :)

(But for real, it's probably a tie between There Are No Roads (Time Circuits #2.5) and Once Upon a Time in the East )

Tagging @retro-hussy, @jowritesfanfiction, @writingwife-83, and anyone else who wants to play!

Thank you so much for tagging me, friends!! I don't know why, but I love doing these! Sorry again it took so long for me to get to. ❤️

[unnatural-transformations]

Types of math joke that exist in the wild:

Puns (i.e. "why was 6 afraid of 7?") [1]

Thinly veiled excuses to demonstrate knowledge that positions the speaker as part of the in-group (i.e. "a comathematician is a comachine for turning cotheorems into ffee") [2]

Combinations of the previous two types (i.e. "what's purple and commutes?") [3]

Jokes about the supposed otherworldliness of mathematicians (i.e. the one about a mathematician, physicist and engineer dealing with a fire in a hotel room) [4]

Jokes about particular mathematicians (i.e. Grothendieck's favorite prime) [5]

Jokes about mathematical conventions (i.e. "Let ϵ < 0") [6]

Jokes about established mathematical facts (i.e. the joke about which of the axiom of choice, the well-ordering principle and Zorn's lemma are "obviously true" and which are "obviously false") [7]

Jokes that, on inspection, turn out to actually be about language or linguistics or something else other than math (i.e. Wittgenstein's "profound philosophical joke") [8]

(There is, in fact, a pretty good case to be made that most of the last few types listed are just special cases of the second type. [9])

Types of math joke that do not seem to exist, in the wild or anywhere else:

Ones that are funny

Footnotes below the cut.

"Because 7 8 9". The words "ate" and "eight" are homonyms. The implication is that 6 fears meeting a similar fate to her fallen comrade 9.

(a) The 20th mathematician Paul Erdős is reported to have said that "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." In Erdős's own case, 'coffee' is perhaps best understood as a euphemism. (b) Category theory is a branch of pure mathematics that studies mathematical structures called categories, defined as abstract collections of objects and directed arrows between those objects satisfying certain simple axioms which are intended to generalize a large number of other structures. Many concepts in category theory have corresponding 'dual' concepts, whose definition we obtain by taking the original definition or theorem and reverseing the direction of all the arrows involved. This new dual concept is often given a name starting with the 'co'- prefix. For example, reversing the arrows in the definition of a 'product' gives the definition of a 'coproduct' while reversing the arrows in the definition of an 'equalizer' gives the definition of a 'coequalizer'. Taking duals again always gets us back to where we started, so for example a 'cocoproduct' would just be an ordinary product. By treating Erdős's original statement as if it were the definition of a mathematician in some category including the objects 'machine', 'coffee' and 'theorems' and "reversing the arrows" (i.e. changing the order of subject and object in the sentence) we obtain the new statement "defining" a comathematician.

"An abelian grape." Named after the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, an abelian group is a particular type of commutative monoid, a mathematical structure comprising a set A containing a distinguished identity element e and an associative, commutative binary operation R on A such that aRe = a for any element a in A. The word "grape" sounds a bit like the word "group".

Briefly: the engineer immediately puts out the fire by dousing it with as much water as possible. The physicist first does some calculations, then puts out the fire with exactly the minimum amount of water required. The mathematician does the same calculations and then, happy to have proved that a solution exists, goes back to bed (after which she presumably perishes in the fire).

The story goes that Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, was once asked by a student to make an example he was giving in a lecture more concrete, rather than working with a generic prime p. Supposedly Grothendieck responded by saying (presumably in French): "very well, let p be equal to 57". Experts in arithmetic may note that 57 has some properties that make it rather unlike most primes: for example, it's a multiple of 19.

By common convention, it is normal for ϵ to denote a small positive quantity, especially in elementary real analysis or topology courses. Math students will therefore get very used to seeing proofs that begin "Let ϵ > 0". From this subversion of expectations emerges humour. (Or not.)

These three results date back to the early 20th century and work being done on the foundation of mathematics. The axiom of choice -- which says, approximately, that given any (potentially infinite) collection of (potentially infinite) sets it is always possible to construct a new set by arbitrarily choosing exactly one element from each of the given sets -- would turn out to be the most controversial of the so called ZFC axioms that were later adopted as the basis of set theory by most mathematicians. It turns out that this axiom is independent of the others: both it and its negation are consistent with remaining ZF axioms. Both the well-ordering principle and Zorn's lemma can be proved if you assume the axiom of choice, and moreover they are equivalent to it: if either one is true then the axiom of choice must also be true. It would therefore be an error to declare one of the three "obviously true" while another was "obviously false": either they are all true or they are all false. (But you can't decide which without choosing a new set of axioms beyond ZFC.)

To begin solving an elementary maths problem in a classroom, a teacher says "Suppose the answer to the question is x". A student raises their hand: "But, sir. What if the answer is not x?" To be fair, Wittgenstein never said it was funny, but he did allegedly think it was clever.

A cynic might make much the same claim about this post, and they'd be right.

[okayto]

Professionalism is hard, particularly when you're new to situations that require it (but age is no certain measure of professionalism, as seen in the many, many Ask A Manager letters about people of all ages). This reply-dominated post has a lot of great advice...as well as some entertaining stories about times people got it wrong:

My company hires their interns at a full time, full benefit job if they work out. Most of our interns don’t know that but it’s true. Some we have failed to hire: –Came in late every day –watched movies at their desk –were heard yelling “Yahtzee!” at their desk –dressed in beach wear (conservative office)

I think the biggest thing that I struggled with was realizing that while I could end up making good friends … that was rare. Like, really rare. Don’t confuse being friendly with getting a friend or a new BFF.

Observe. Lurk. Be quiet and see how a culture works. What is okay behaviour at one place might be highly encouraged or fireable at another. Imagine a workplace sort of like a blog or forum like this one – do you start posting right away or do you read through it, get to know the place, and see what is expected?

Like Alison mentioned, if something seems off or odd to you, ask for the WHY. In the case of the dress code, there were good reasons for the dress code, the interns just weren’t aware of those reasons and didn’t take the time to fund out the why (or didn’t think it mattered once they were told).

Don’t be afraid to ask questions such as, “I don’t know what to do in this situation. Can you guide me?” People are not expecting you to have all the answers – early in your career or ever, really.

People don’t like being put on the spot or called out in meetings — but “Can I have a few minutes of your time later to ask some questions” is something that I truly appreciated from our interns.

They want you to show up when they need someone there, do the tasks that they prioritize, serve their customers, etc. [...] I didn’t realize that the exchange is: my labor for their enterprise in exchange for their money in my bank account. It can take some time to build the “calluses” of working for someone else’s benefit and not your own.

Side note: the biggest thing I learned in front-facing customer service that I still use in my professional career is this: people want to know what you can do for them, not what you can’t.

To repeat a comment I made on a previous post, always observe the golden rule of diplomacy “Before speaking, engage brain!”. Another commenter then expanded on this with the WAIT principle (Why Am I Talking?)…

I’d say a corollary to “Ask questions” is “Let stuff go.” Sometimes you don’t get the answer but you’ve used up enough time on the matter; sometimes also you have to let stuff go because we all have to let stuff, ranging from weird policy to annoying co-workers, go.

Be comfortable saying “I’d like to think about it first. Can I let you know tomorrow?” That gives you time to search boards like this and get advice from others.

Watch what other people are doing. What seems to be the norm. Note that the norm is not always ok. If someone is always cursing up a blue streak and showing up to work in a pink tutu, and no one else is, I wouldn’t suggest cursing in a tutu at work. There might be Reasons.

In terms of when to speak up, my criteria are: Are you the right person to address this? Is this the best time to do so? What can your perspective bring that others’ cant?

Assume that the rules apply to you. Follow the dress code, show up on time, do what you’re supposed to do. If you notice other people are coming in late or not following the dress code, ask if you can do the same (but if the answer is no, accept it and move on).

Never ever ever trust anything you see in movies or tv shows. I cannot think off-hand of any show or movie I’ve seen that depicts people behaving professionally in an office setting. Because behaving professionally is boring, and that doesn’t work well with drama or comedy.

Do not microwave fish or popcorn in the breakroom microwave.

There ARE stupid questions. Anyone who says there aren’t is either stupid or lying. Questions that are stupid are ones that have already been answered but you didn’t read or listen to the presented information the first time, or you were late for the meeting.

Trust me, your manager will be much happier taking 15-20 minutes every few weeks to help you improve, rather than having to explain to the CEO why you reply-alled the yearly holiday party invite with a meme about butt-chugging (true story).

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: The Quillette Editorial Board

Published: Dec 23, 2023

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

In describing his tenure at the SPLC during the early 2000s, Moser argued that the very structure of the organization betrayed its hypocrisy: Here was an entity dedicated to social justice (as we would now call it), yet which was run by an extremely well-paid, almost exclusively white, corps of lawyers, administrators, and fund-raisers who ruled over a mixed-race corps of junior staff. As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

At this point, it should be stressed that there is certainly nothing wrong with the SPLC—or anyone else—campaigning for the legitimate rights of people who are transgender. Such a campaign would be entirely in keeping with the SPLC’s original liberal ethos. Just as no one should be denied, say, an apartment, a marriage license, or the right to vote based on his or her race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, no trans person should be denied these rights and amenities simply because he or she experiences gender dysphoria.

But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

But many of the supposed transphobes targeted by the report aren’t even conservative—let alone members of the religious right. In a multitude of cases, they’re simply parents, therapists, and activists who argue the obvious fact that human sexual biology doesn’t evanesce into rainbow dust the moment that a child—or middle-aged man—asserts that he or she was “born in the wrong body.”

It’s also interesting to note who gets left out of the SPLC’s analysis. The most influential figures leading the backlash against (what some call) “gender ideology” are women such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, both of whom come at the issue from explicitly feminist perspectives. Being successful public figures, neither woman needs a cent from the conservative think tanks that the SPLC presents as being back-office puppet-masters of the alleged anti-trans conspiracy outlined in the CAPTAIN report.

In keeping with the conspiracist motif that runs through the document, the authors have provided spider-web diagrams that set out the connections binding this (apparently) shadowy cabal. In this regard, it seems that Quillette itself served as one of the SPLC’s sources: In a section titled, “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network,” the authors footnote “an August 23, 2023 podcast for Quillette,” wherein

it was revealed that [Colin] Wright is in a relationsihp [sic] with journalist Christina Buttons, who is an advisoary [sic] board member of [the Gender Dysphoria Alliance] with Drs. Lisa Littman and Ray Blanchard, an editoral [sic] board member of Springer’s Archives of Sexual Research [a mistaken reference to the Archives of Sexual Behavior] with J. Michael Bailey. Notably, Buttons and Wright are interviewed by host Jonathan Kay. In addition to hosting Quillette’s podcast, Kay serves on FAIR’s board of advisors.

We’ve chosen to highlight this particular (typo-riddled) text from the report not just because of the absurd suggestion that our publication has enlisted in an imaginary “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” but also because the above-quoted roll call of supposed gender villains illustrates the intellectual dishonesty that suffuses the whole report.

Let’s go through the references one by one, in the order in which they are presented. The Gender Dysphoria Alliance (GDA) is a group led by people who are themselves transgender, and who are “concerned about the direction that gender medicine and activism has taken.” Are we to imagine that its members are directing transphobia—against themselves? Lisa Littman, formerly of Brown University, is a respected academic who’s published a peer-reviewed analysis of Rapid Onset Gender Disorder. Ray Blanchard is a well-known University of Toronto psychiatrist. The Archives of Sexual Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal in sexology. Michael Bailey is a specialist in sexual orientation and gender nonconformity at Northwestern University. Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned. Indeed, the authors explicitly cite the work of one Andrea James, a once-respected arts producer who, as Jesse Singal has documented, now runs a creepy (“stalker” is the word Singal uses) web site called Transgender Map, which lists personal details of anyone whom James deems a gender heretic. When it comes to one-on-one communication, James’ manner of dealing with critics is exemplified by an email sent to bioethicist Alice Dreger, in which James referred to Dreger’s then-five-year-old son as a “womb turd.”

One way to describe the CAPTAIN report is as an SPLC-branded rehash of the information contained on Transgender Map. And one can understand why the authors thought that such a gambit might work. The SPLC already publishes other curated lists of hatemongers—e.g., its “Hatewatch” service, “Hate Map,” and “Intelligence Report.” It wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that this new report might convince readers to treat the listed “Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” acolytes as equally disreputable.

But if that was the authors’ goal, it doesn’t seem to have been achieved. The SPLC report landed with something of a thud—and has attracted little attention on social media except insofar as it was mocked by its intended targets.

This may have something to do with the report’s timing. For several years now, a backlash against this kind of gender agitprop has been building within many of the same liberal and progressive circles that the SPLC has traditionally targeted for donations. The trend is reflected by the rise of such groups as the LGB Alliance, a coalition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who are fed up with the ideological takeover of LGBT groups by a militant subset of trans activists.

The same trend is playing out internationally. While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

These organizations have never been shy about angering conservatives and reactionaries; indeed, they wear such anger as a badge of pride. But their cultish refusal to engage with the reality of biological sex also antagonizes progressive feminists seeking to protect female spaces from biological men, and LGB activists who see the attempted erasure of sex-based attraction as a species of progressive homophobia.

Which is to say that the SPLC’s report seems not only intellectually dishonest, but also self-destructive. While the SPLC leaders who green-lit this project once may have been able to bank on the popularity of pronoun checks and esoteric gender identities among the wealthy white coastal progressives who comprise the bulk of their donors, this is an ideological movement that’s decidedly past its peak. It’s a marketing error that the savvy Dees likely never would have made.

The SPLC obviously does a lot more than lend its name to sloppily edited gender propaganda: A review of its press feed shows that it still has staff working traditional legal beats such as voters’ rights, police accountability, and humane treatment for prisoners. But when an organization publishes misleading materials in regard to one issue, the natural effect is to raise serious questions about the group’s values and credibility more generally—questions that SPLC supporters will want to think about the next time one of the group’s fundraisers hits them up for a donation.

==

This is what institutional capture looks like.

[mytrashcanlife]

As Fire Loves Innocence (Xavier Thorpe x Reader) Pt. 2

Trigger Warning: Mentions of SA and Trauma, Angst, Mentions of underaged drinking. 

Ajax and Xavier walk down the hall to their rooms. Within 24 hours every rumor possible had been circulated about the new girl. This was the only time recent Nevermore history that the rule against co-ed dormitories had been waived for a student. “Dude, you’re rooming with a girl now? How is that allowed?” “Apparently both our parents signed off on it.” “Have you met her?” “My dad said we went to camp together as kids, but I don’t remember her. That was a long time ago and we never kept in touch.” “Well let me know how it goes.” “I will” You turn around as you hear the key in the lock of the room. As the door opens, you’re met with a tall, thin, boy with long hair and a lopsided smile. He closes the door and leans back against it. “So, you’re my new roommate?” “That’s me. I’m Y/N.” “Xavier. Nice to meet you. So…You wanna tell me what happened that was so insane that my dad agreed to this PR nightmare waiting to happen?” “Well, I don’t think it’s that bad.” “I heard you burned a man alive.” “On the court record yes, but that’s not what happened.” “What happened then?” “Not important.” “So, you didn’t kill a man?” “I said I didn’t burn him alive.” “That doesn’t make me feel any better about my chances.” “You’ll be fine. I don’t imagine you would get yourself into that bad a situation. Although if what I heard about last year is true, you should really be more worried about arrows and Nevermore should be more concerned with the behaviors of its teachers rather than its students.” The tension finally breaks as Xavier laughs. “fair enough” “So, what do you do? Do you have visions like your dad?” “Not quite. I sometimes get dreams of premonitions but mostly I just do this” He raises his hand and looks over your shoulder. You look at him confused before you turn around to find the butterflies from a few of his drawing were circling and moving closer until they were above you. “Whoa. That’s amazing.” He waves his hand, and the bugs all return to their respective papers, back the way they were. “It’s nothing impressive. I just make pictures move. I’m getting better at it though.” “it’s cool” “Thank you. What do you do?” Knock knock knock “Xavier? Is your new roommate in there? I’m supposed to give her a tour” Xavier Smiles and rolls his eyes as he opens the door to reveal a short blonde girl, with short hair and color in it. “Y/N this is Enid.” “Hi Enid” “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m in charge of your tour so if you’ll just come with me I’ll show you where all your classes are and all that fun stuff.” The two of you leave and walk out into the main courtyard. “The main four groups are the Scales, Sirens over there.” Enid points to a group of students with the most stunning eyes you had ever seen. “The one closest to the fountain with the short hair is Bianca. She was dating your roommate at one point but they broke up two semesters ago. I think they’re friends-ish now but just a heads up on that dynamic.” “Thanks?” “Next up is the Stoners, Gorgons. They all wear the hats so they don’t accidentally turn everyone to stone. Oh! There’s Ajax! I’ll introduce you. AJAX!” One of the students from the group looks up and waves at Enid. He walks over to the two of you. “Ajax this is Y/N. She’s new.” “Hey! You’re Xavier’s new roommate, right? He’s my best friend.” “Nice to meet you.” “How did you convince the new principle to let you room with him?” “There were no other rooms available, so we had to get written permission from both of our parents.” “That’s crazy though. Xavier’s dad is ridiculously strict.” “The room is almost split down the middle. There’s a big screen I change behind, and there’s all sorts of rules. It’s a whole deal and believe me if I had another option, I would take it.” “Yeah Ajax, nobody wants to live with boys. I have brothers I would know.” “Whatever. Enid if you need me, you know where to find me. See ya later y/n” He runs back over to his friends and Enid turns to you continue the tour. “Next up is the Vampires. We call them the Fangs. They aren’t the most social group though. Finally, we have the furs or the werewolves. AKA yours truly.” “What about those of us with miscellaneous powers?” “You just make friends where you can. Look if you need anything at all ask me. Any friend of Xavier’s is a friend of mine, and if you need to know about anyone ask. I know everything about everyone. Now what’s your class schedule?” You hand her the piece of paper with the schedule on it. He face quickly becomes even more excited. “We have the same classes! And Xavier is them with us so just leave with him in the morning and I’ll tell him to show you where they are.” “Okay sounds good. Thank you, Enid.” “No problem girly. I’ll see you tomorrow” Enid dropped you back off at your dorm so you could unpack, and you mentally prepared yourself for the semester to come.

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.2.3 Are anarchists in favour of organisation?

Yes. Without association, a truly human life is impossible. Liberty cannot exist without society and organisation. As George Barrett pointed out:

“To get the full meaning out of life we must co-operate, and to co-operate we must make agreements with our fellow-men. But to suppose that such agreements mean a limitation of freedom is surely an absurdity; on the contrary, they are the exercise of our freedom. “If we are going to invent a dogma that to make agreements is to damage freedom, then at once freedom becomes tyrannical, for it forbids men to take the most ordinary everyday pleasures. For example, I cannot go for a walk with my friend because it is against the principle of Liberty that I should agree to be at a certain place at a certain time to meet him. I cannot in the least extend my own power beyond myself, because to do so I must co-operate with someone else, and co-operation implies an agreement, and that is against Liberty. It will be seen at once that this argument is absurd. I do not limit my liberty, but simply exercise it, when I agree with my friend to go for a walk. “If, on the other hand, I decide from my superior knowledge that it is good for my friend to take exercise, and therefore I attempt to compel him to go for a walk, then I begin to limit freedom. This is the difference between free agreement and government.” [Objections to Anarchism, pp. 348–9]

As far as organisation goes, anarchists think that “far from creating authority, [it] is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.” [Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 86] Thus anarchists are well aware of the need to organise in a structured and open manner. As Carole Ehrlich points out, while anarchists “aren’t opposed to structure” and simply “want to abolish hierarchical structure” they are “almost always stereotyped as wanting no structure at all.” This is not the case, for “organisations that would build in accountability, diffusion of power among the maximum number of persons, task rotation, skill-sharing, and the spread of information and resources” are based on “good social anarchist principles of organisation!” [“Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism”, Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, p. 47 and p. 46]

The fact that anarchists are in favour of organisation may seem strange at first, but it is understandable. “For those with experience only of authoritarian organisation,” argue two British anarchists, “it appears that organisation can only be totalitarian or democratic, and that those who disbelieve in government must by that token disbelieve in organisation at all. That is not so.” [Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer, The Floodgates of Anarchy, p. 122] In other words, because we live in a society in which virtually all forms of organisation are authoritarian, this makes them appear to be the only kind possible. What is usually not recognised is that this mode of organisation is historically conditioned, arising within a specific kind of society — one whose motive principles are domination and exploitation. According to archaeologists and anthropologists, this kind of society has only existed for about 5,000 years, having appeared with the first primitive states based on conquest and slavery, in which the labour of slaves created a surplus which supported a ruling class.

Prior to that time, for hundreds of thousands of years, human and proto-human societies were what Murray Bookchin calls “organic,” that is, based on co-operative forms of economic activity involving mutual aid, free access to productive resources, and a sharing of the products of communal labour according to need. Although such societies probably had status rankings based on age, there were no hierarchies in the sense of institutionalised dominance-subordination relations enforced by coercive sanctions and resulting in class-stratification involving the economic exploitation of one class by another (see Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom).

It must be emphasised, however, that anarchists do not advocate going “back to the Stone Age.” We merely note that since the hierarchical-authoritarian mode of organisation is a relatively recent development in the course of human social evolution, there is no reason to suppose that it is somehow “fated” to be permanent. We do not think that human beings are genetically “programmed” for authoritarian, competitive, and aggressive behaviour, as there is no credible evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, such behaviour is socially conditioned, or learned, and as such, can be unlearned (see Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression). We are not fatalists or genetic determinists, but believe in free will, which means that people can change the way they do things, including the way they organise society.

And there is no doubt that society needs to be better organised, because presently most of its wealth — which is produced by the majority — and power gets distributed to a small, elite minority at the top of the social pyramid, causing deprivation and suffering for the rest, particularly for those at the bottom. Yet because this elite controls the means of coercion through its control of the state (see section B.2.3), it is able to suppress the majority and ignore its suffering — a phenomenon that occurs on a smaller scale within all hierarchies. Little wonder, then, that people within authoritarian and centralised structures come to hate them as a denial of their freedom. As Alexander Berkman puts it:

“Any one who tells you that Anarchists don’t believe in organisation is talking nonsense. Organisation is everything, and everything is organisation. The whole of life is organisation, conscious or unconscious … But there is organisation and organisation. Capitalist society is so badly organised that its various members suffer: just as when you have a pain in some part of you, your whole body aches and you are ill… , not a single member of the organisation or union may with impunity be discriminated against, suppressed or ignored. To do so would be the same as to ignore an aching tooth: you would be sick all over.” [Op. Cit., p. 198]

Yet this is precisely what happens in capitalist society, with the result that it is, indeed, “sick all over.”

For these reasons, anarchists reject authoritarian forms of organisation and instead support associations based on free agreement. Free agreement is important because, in Berkman’s words, ”[o]nly when each is a free and independent unit, co-operating with others from his own choice because of mutual interests, can the world work successfully and become powerful.” [Op. Cit., p. 199] As we discuss in section A.2.14, anarchists stress that free agreement has to be complemented by direct democracy (or, as it is usually called by anarchists, self-management) within the association itself otherwise “freedom” become little more than picking masters.

Anarchist organisation is based on a massive decentralisation of power back into the hands of the people, i.e. those who are directly affected by the decisions being made. To quote Proudhon:

“Unless democracy is a fraud and the sovereignty of the People a joke, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his [or her] industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory … should act directly and by itself in administering the interests which it includes, and should exercise full sovereignty in relation to them.” [The General Idea of the Revolution, p. 276]

It also implies a need for federalism to co-ordinate joint interests. For anarchism, federalism is the natural complement to self-management. With the abolition of the State, society “can, and must, organise itself in a different fashion, but not from top to bottom … The future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal. Then alone will be realised the true and life-giving order of freedom and the common good, that order which, far from denying, on the contrary affirms and brings into harmony the interests of individuals and of society.” [Bakunin, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 205–6] Because a “truly popular organisation begins … from below” and so “federalism becomes a political institution of Socialism, the free and spontaneous organisation of popular life.” Thus libertarian socialism “is federalistic in character.” [Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, pp. 273–4 and p. 272]

Therefore, anarchist organisation is based on direct democracy (or self-management) and federalism (or confederation). These are the expression and environment of liberty. Direct (or participatory) democracy is essential because liberty and equality imply the need for forums within which people can discuss and debate as equals and which allow for the free exercise of what Murray Bookchin calls “the creative role of dissent.” Federalism is necessary to ensure that common interests are discussed and joint activity organised in a way which reflects the wishes of all those affected by them. To ensure that decisions flow from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down by a few rulers.

Anarchist ideas on libertarian organisation and the need for direct democracy and confederation will be discussed further in sections A.2.9 and A.2.11.

[5sosfanfictioncatalogue]

Power Bottom Ashton Masterlist

baby it's cold outside (ao3) - irwah calum/ashton E, 12k

Summary: “I love you. I love you so much and anytime spent with you is perfect, I don’t care about some spilt wine or a simple dinner or the jetlag.” He takes Calum’s hands in his and kisses them both. “This holiday is going to be amazing because we’re here together, the two of us, on our fifth anniversary, in this magical resort where we first met and I couldn’t be happier. So please, relax, forget about everything and let’s fuck.”

Calum laughs at his boyfriend’s cheekiness, knowing it’s a decoy to distract from the disgustingly corny monologue he just gave.

Or: domestic cashton take on the alps

bombs on monday (ao3) - eerilyirwin luke/ashton, michael/calum, michael/ashton T, 9k

Summary: "bombs are falling on monday morning, you make moments last forever" - monday june 11th, 2017 the day ashton irwin's whole world fell apart

Daddy's Perfect Little Cowboy (ao3) - neonlightafi (orphan_account) luke/ashton M, 448

Summary: A tiny snapshot of Lashton smut.

Daisy (ao3) - boomerluke Luke/Ashton M, 121k

Summary: The last thing Luke expects when he wakes up hungover in the bed of his latest one-night stand is to come face to face with a freaking kid. But there she is all wild curls, thumb-sucking, and nonstop questions. Luke can’t get out of there fast enough.

Ashton isn’t the type to have one-night stands. He’s a parent, after all. It was a mistake, and it won’t happen again. At least that’s what he tells himself when he comes back from his shower to find the naked college kid still in his bed, arguing with Daisy.

They couldn’t be more opposites. At 25, Ashton has the responsibilities of two parents, raising his daughter and trying to pretend like he has everything figured out. At 21, Luke is a self-proclaimed Grindr god who doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself. So why is the universe (with the help of Michael and Crystal) so hell-bent on seeing them together?

For a Good Time, Call (ao3) - xdistorted_cliffordx michael/calum M, 40k

Summary: Michael was looking for a good time, not a relationship.

holding onto you (ao3) - orphan_account luke/ashton N/R, 3k

Summary: He met Ashton - his roommate slash boyfriend on the first day of college, when Luke was just a freshman and Ashton was a sophomore incapable of manoeuvring a large mattress. In other words Ashton had sent Luke and his beloved laptop, tumbling to the floor. Ashton apologised profusely in what Luke guessed to be French, promising to pay for the repairs.

im all dressed up and naked i see what's mine and take it (ao3) - asdflkjhg5sos luke/ashton M, 5k

Summary: luke has a skin condition and he goes to ashton because no one else wants him

In Your Court (ao3) - fivesecondsofmae luke/ashton, michael/calum E, 18k (WIP)

Summary: Luke is one of the best tennis players in the world for his age and when he returns to Ostenburg's Tennis Club for training season with his best friend Calum, he meets a new waiter called Ashton who is so pretty it hurts. Luke loves being in control on the courts and amongst his team, but there's one place where he doesn't love it, and that's in the bedroom. He lusts for Ashton, but soon realises that the man is much more than just something he fancies, he's someone whose beautiful and pained and needs to be loved.

it's cold outside, but i'll make you hot (ao3) - romanticallybroken luke/ashton M, 3k

Summary: Ashton's feeling a little naughty - leads to lazy make-out sessions and some intense lap-dancing.

Le Chatelier’s Principle (ao3) - LyricalPary (hoseoky) luke/ashton, michael/calum E, 54k

Summary: Ever since being promoted to head waiter, Luke had had one problem that came in the form of a six foot, curly-headed, hazel eyed demon. And by demon, he meant his frustratingly stubborn, unfairly attractive co-worker, Ashton Irwin.

Make It Holy, Make It Special, Make It Right (ao3) - fivesecondsofmae michael/ashton E, 3k

Summary: Ashton gets super emotional watching a film and when he thinks about the baby boy in his lap that him and Michael love so much, he can't help but be tearful. Michael comes home from work and does everything he can to make things right for his love. Mashton smut and super fluff.

Paint Me - @daydadahlias (cornflowerblue (daydadahlias)) luke/ashton, michael/crystal E, 17k

Summary:  the one where Luke is an art student practicing realism for a month and Ashton is the nude model in his portrait class.

Tell Me I'm Pretty (ao3) - felixandtae luke/ashton, michael/calum E, 86k (WIP)

Summary: "Wearing skirts and putting make up on doesn't make me a girl. I have a dick and I can very well show you it. Just tell me I'm pretty, Luke."

Ashton likes to wear make up and Luke likes when Ashton wears make up. But, Luke doesn't like Ashton and Ashton doesn't like Luke. So how did they end up fucking in the auditorium every Friday night?

This Night, This High (ao3) - valiantnerd (arareads) calum/ashton E, 5k

Summary: Calum and Ashton make the most of the nights at the cabin.

Where Soul Meets Body (ao3) - LyricalPary luke/ashton E, 6k

Summary: Three years later, Ashton still craves Luke more than the air that he breathes and Luke gets off to being called an Irwin, now that he officially is one.

In other words, the honeymoon phase has only just begun.

[jcmarchi]

Startup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/startup-turns-mining-waste-into-critical-metals-for-the-u-s/

Startup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.

At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also require more exotic metals with unique properties, known as rare earth elements, which are essential for the magnets that go into things like wind turbines and EV motors.

Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.

Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.

Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.

The company, co-founded by MIT alumni, says its pilot production facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, is the only site in the world producing rare earth metals without toxic byproducts or carbon emissions. The process does use electricity, but Phoenix Tailings currently offsets that with renewable energy contracts.

The company expects to produce more than 3,000 tons of the metals by 2026, which would have represented about 7 percent of total U.S. production last year.

Now, with support from the Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is expanding the list of metals it can produce and accelerating plans to build a second production facility.

For the founding team, including MIT graduates Tomás Villalón ’14 and Michelle Chao ’14 along with Nick Myers and Anthony Balladon, the work has implications for geopolitics and the planet.

“Being able to make your own materials domestically means that you’re not at the behest of a foreign monopoly,” Villalón says. “We’re focused on creating critical materials for the next generation of technologies. More broadly, we want to get these materials in ways that are sustainable in the long term.”

Tackling a global problem

Villalón got interested in chemistry and materials science after taking Course 3.091 (Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry) during his first year at MIT. In his senior year, he got a chance to work at Boston Metal, another MIT spinoff that uses an electrochemical process to decarbonize steelmaking at scale. The experience got Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering, thinking about creating more sustainable metallurgical processes.

But it took a chance meeting with Myers at a 2018 Bible study for Villalón to act on the idea.

“We were discussing some of the major problems in the world when we came to the topic of electrification,” Villalón recalls. “It became a discussion about how the U.S. gets its materials and how we should think about electrifying their production. I was finally like, ‘I’ve been working in the space for a decade, let’s go do something about it.’ Nick agreed, but I thought he just wanted to feel good about himself. Then in July, he randomly called me and said, ‘I’ve got [$7,000]. When do we start?’”

Villalón brought in Chao, his former MIT classmate and fellow materials science and engineering major, and Myers brought Balladon, a former co-worker, and the founders started experimenting with new processes for producing rare earth metals.

“We went back to the base principles, the thermodynamics I learned with MIT professors Antoine Allanore and Donald Sadoway, and understanding the kinetics of reactions,” Villalón says. “Classes like Course 3.022 (Microstructural Evolution in Materials) and 3.07 (Introduction to Ceramics) were also really useful. I touched on every aspect I studied at MIT.”

The founders also received guidance from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and went through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. Sadoway served as an advisor for the company.

After drafting one version of their system design, the founders bought an experimental quantity of mining waste, known as red sludge, and set up a prototype reactor in Villalón’s backyard. The founders ended up with a small amount of product, but they had to scramble to borrow the scientific equipment needed to determine what exactly it was. It turned out to be a small amount of rare earth concentrate along with pure iron.

Today, at the company’s refinery in Woburn, Phoenix Tailings puts mining waste rich in rare earth metals into its mixture and heats it to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. When it applies an electric current to the mixture, pure metal collects on an electrode. The process leaves minimal waste behind.

“The key for all of this isn’t just the chemistry, but how everything is linked together, because with rare earths, you have to hit really high purities compared to a conventionally produced metal,” Villalón explains. “As a result, you have to be thinking about the purity of your material the entire way through.”

From rare earths to nickel, magnesium, and more

Villalón says the process is economical compared to conventional production methods, produces no toxic byproducts, and is completely carbon free when renewable energy sources are used for electricity.

The Woburn facility is currently producing several rare earth elements for customers, including neodymium and dysprosium, which are important in magnets. Customers are using the materials for things likewind turbines, electric cars, and defense applications.

The company has also received two grants with the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program totaling more than $2 million. Its 2023 grant supports the development of a system to extract nickel and magnesium from mining waste through a process that uses carbonization and recycled carbon dioxide. Both nickel and magnesium are critical materials for clean energy applications like batteries.

The most recent grant will help the company adapt its process to produce iron from mining waste without emissions or toxic byproducts. Phoenix Tailings says its process is compatible with a wide array of ore types and waste materials, and the company has plenty of material to work with: Mining and processing mineral ores generates about 1.8 billion tons of waste in the U.S. each year.

“We want to take our knowledge from processing the rare earth metals and slowly move it into other segments,” Villalón explains. “We simply have to refine some of these materials here. There’s no way we can’t. So, what does that look like from a regulatory perspective? How do we create approaches that are economical and environmentally compliant not just now, but 30 years from now?”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF PLACE

These quotes about luck are not from founders whose startups failed. The investors would not infrequently collude to push down the valuation. They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. Microsoft would crush them. Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if you made an open-source operating system? I said before, a large random factor in the mathematical sense; see equation above in readability. That's why I write them. America plus tragedy equals the Civil War were. The empirical answer is: no. Actually the best model would be to say that.

Some we helped with technical advice—for whatever people want. If you plan to get rich can do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. This focus on the user. But this can't be an intrinsically European quality; previous generations of Europeans were as ambitious as Americans. 7% of a much larger number. Indeed, one quality all the founders shared this summer was a spirit of independence. When we were in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And indeed, that might be a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea. At a good college you're concentrated together with a lot of ways to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money? No matter how much you're getting done. We felt pretty lame at the time. Co-founders really should be people you already know.

Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing. But every institution was at one point they were a just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few smart friends. That principle, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. The good news is, the highs are also very high. Perhaps the reason more startups per capita happen in the future had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be built out, and that's usually easier with fewer people. If this is a recipe for deadlock, and partly because it tends to create deadlock, and delay is the thing a startup can least afford. A friend of mine started a company in Germany in the early 90s, and was shocked to discover, not something you can do more than anyone expected.

It seems obvious when you put it that way. What if you built a peer-to-peer dating site? The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months. In theory it seemed that the conclusion of a really good job, is a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to say that angel rounds will increasingly take the place of investor-controlled rounds are taking the place of series A rounds, but in other fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change, you'd find plenty of projects isomorphic to this one—and indeed, plenty that were less successful. John McArtyem. Having strings in a language seems to be a situation with measurement and leverage. It certainly is possible for individual programs to be written as thin enough skins that users can see the same program written in two languages, and one that most people never seem to make, but are definitely launched as companies. The only catch is that people were doing it before, just haphazardly on a smaller scale. I'm glad I phrased that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of someone else who's treading water, and that you have so many choices.

That's kind of hard to imagine. I think, is that it has such a core is one of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter: Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is the number of elements, where an element is anything that would be trivially easy to implement. As E. We had a chance to do this well. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the people who need them. What you want to go faster, it's a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now? Hiring too fast is by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own ad copy. We had the opportunity to raise a lot more, than they would if that were their only motivation.

The true test of a language to see if there are any laws regulating businesses, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do in an essay about it. They're the ones in a position of independence, they develop the qualities they need. Once they realized this, they may simply violate it and invite you to sue them. Getting rich means you can stop judging them and yourself by superficial measures, but that they can do it by changing the world. When she turned to see what had happened, she found the steps were all different heights. Another reason people don't work on big things, or split the moral load with collaborators. Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better. They're not what you might think. We were supposed to do for the next couple years, a good idea in the first six months is that it can be wrong, so long as, in the very word thesis. In general, to make great things. The ideas start to get mixed together with the study of ancient texts had such prestige that it does everything with lists. You don't see all the false starts.