(Any/Comrade, Tankie for the unserious)

Marxist-Leninist with Meowist leanings (cat supremacy, but love all animals)

Labor organizer. USian.

Scientist, experience in vaccines/drug delivery/chemistry/analytics/biochemistry/protection of eggs dropped from tall structures

  • 4 Posts
  • 265 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • As someone who meets your criteria, why would I ever put an antenna on my shit again when I can just pirate things or block the ads? An added benefit is that companies think both hurt them as if they are people and subverting their BS fills me with joy.

    Whether the commenters are talking cable or not, both are arguably garbage alternatives to more contemporary methods of streaming media except in special circumstances due to the abundance of cell tower coverage and bandwidth. I wish I could say that radio was not also lumped in with this, but again, 50% of airtime is ads and I find the radio in my car less useful with each passing year.

    You’re allowed to like something and have people younger than you disagree. Fighting and talking down to them isn’t going to change their minds. It’s cool that you still get use out of older technology for free, but not everyone gets the same value from it.

    If anything, don’t blame young people for ruining your technology, blame capitalism for enshittifying it.



  • I’ve been given some books on writing through the years, but never thought much of them. I didn’t read these full articles, but what I saw looked good: Article 1, Article 2 (mostly contains links to other articles on the topic).

    There’s a lot to consume there in terms of writing theory, but one of my favorite exercises is taking a certain writer’s style, identifying some of what is interesting about their style, and applying it to your own writing. The writing needs to be something connected to you and it helps if you can pick a topic that evokes emotion in you, even if it’s otherwise not something you consider to be a notable story. The important part is being able to tap into your own vulnerability because it can help what you put on paper to be genuine. This doesn’t mean everything you ever write needs to be this way, it’s just helpful and a good place to start and learn. It’s the whole idea of “putting your heart and soul or a part of yourself in your writing” but that people sometimes talk about. Once you learn to tap into that and break down the barriers, you can channel yourself into other writing much easier. Writing like you naturally talk can help, but it’s probably bad grammar for writing (except when writing conversations).

    Again, it’s not always easy and I have no clue how much harder this is if you live somewhere without native speakers in the language you are writing, but you need others to read your work. That’s what most writing is for!

    If you end up doing technical writing for science or similar, my best advice is keep the layman in mind. Most science writing is overly clunky and full of jargon and buzzwords that not only drive off the layman, but drive off scientists not in that particular field. It’s stupid and bad writing all to stroke the ego of the writer to get a false sense that they sound smarter. To many, it just makes the writing hard to consume. Technical writing should go into sufficient technical detail while aiming to be as easy to consume as possible, even if you make assumptions that the audience understands a topic. Here is an example of good technical writing.



  • While everything above and reading in particular is good advice, being a good reader doesn’t make you a good writer.

    You must read to learn and then apply those concepts in your own writing. Better yet, have your writing critiqued by a varied audience that includes at least one person with some training in English writing. Universities and libraries often have editors to help with writing or hold writer’s workshops where you can find these people and get help for free.

    To get good at writing, you must write consistently with pointed effort at improvement. This doesn’t start at writing many pieces, but at repeatedly revising a single piece. Even the writing of the most experienced author begins to shine only after polishing. The revision steps are some of the best opportunities to learn and to reach out for advice on how to improve a piece of writing.


  • If you do this, please let us know the outcome!

    If it were me, I’d be starting conversations like, “did you see someone stuck a bunch of communist books in our library? At first I thought about getting rid of them, but I don’t actually know anything about it besides all the cold war propaganda saying communism was bad, so I decided to actually look at what they had to say. Some of it was pretty interesting.”








  • All neutrality is false.

    This is media literacy 101. Once you can get past this, you find that outlets that wear their bias on their sleeves are refreshing over those who feign neutrality. They begin to come.of as aloof and condescending, because that’s exactly what they are. It’s not journalism, it’s theatre. Same thing goes with regurgitating exactly what government spokespersons say: that’s not journalism. Journalism includes investigation and critique. It’s not possible to give an unbiased critique.

    Looking at you NYT, you fucking dumpster fire. I only keep you around because a dumpster fire can provide warmth.

    I read from multiple sources to cross-reference what narratives are being pushed, and I find news outlets who are often labelled “biased” are the ones most likely to just lay everything on the table. They aren’t deliberately trying to direct you into how to think because they assume you agree with them. “This happened and we think it’s bullshit!”

    You’re also more likely to hear about stories that are left out or considered unimportant or are intentionally censored by the mainstream outlets. It’s more often the case that they will censor themselves than the government will directly get involved and this is far less from smaller news groups who don’t worry about being labelled as biased.