100blueberries - You Are Not Alone

Funny to me to think about the whole "oh you say you don't like <insert website> but you'll gladly reblog content FROM <insert website>" as like... trade exports between nations that all a little bit don't like each other.

"Come try these grapes. They're from Tiktok." "OH Tiktok? Wonderful. They grow the best grapes. We just don't have the right terrain for them here." "I agree. Lovely grapes. Wretched country though, I'd never live there." "Oh me neither. They cancel their peasants in the town square. Speaking of, have you seen the new textiles boypussydilf is selling in the town square? Imported from Instagram!" "Oh amazing textiles, Instagram has. Wretched country though." "Absolutely wretched."

When people say "I hate people who walk slow/ use straws/ don't make eye contact/ other thing disabled people do more." then, when told it's often disability related, follow it up with "obviously I wasn't talking about disabled people" I make a mental note they are not safe.

Because the only way this is "obvious" is if you don't think disabled people are people.

The older I get, the more I think the actual wisdom behind the Word of Wisdom wasn't as a health code, even though that's how we've been billing it for decades now. It makes sense as a justification for why not to consume alcohol and tobacco. But that logic doesn't hold for tea and coffee.

I think it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of climate change and the prevention of human exploitation.

How much carbon capturing rainforest land has been destroyed forever for coffee plantations?

How much slave labor, historical and current, has gone into producing tea, hops, and barley?

I descend from a long line of tobacco growers in Virginia. I've seen the records of slave ownership that supported that industry in the American South up until emancipation. There was, and is, a real human cost to producing tobacco, the same as there was with cotton. And it's still happening today all over the world. Tobacco is a global industry that is still relying on slavery to produce profit. The same can be said for many of the ingredients that go into producing the products forbidden by the Word of Wisdom.

If we view the Word of Wisdom through the perspective of preventing human suffering and the proper care of our planet, rather than just as a health law, the rationale behind not consuming alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee is nothing short of pure revelation.

Abstaining from these things isn't just a social marker of religious identity. It's the acknowledgement that there is no ethical way to consume them in markets that use exploitation and abuse to produce profit. And if there is no way to ethically consume them, then it makes sense why the law would be to forgo them entirely.

NON-freaks dni. This is a freaks only zone

The thing about writing is we’re taught to write in a very specific way as children that is deemed as the “correct” way. And it’s so important to have those fundamentals — to know how sentences are constructed and what is proper paragraph structure and to become familiar with grammar. Those are essential building blocks.

But because schools have to focus on essay writing and technicalities and whatever is needed for the latest standardized test, it’s often the only way we learn how to write when there’s so many ways to write. There’s technical writing, journalistic writing but also editorial writing, copywriting, letter writing, free writing … to infinity and beyond.

We often don’t explore creative writing in an academic setting until later in life when we seek it out (or never at all in most cases). And while there’s guides for these looser types of writing, as well, it’s important to know you can just say FUCK ALL and bastardize the rules that were beat into your brain by red pens all your life.

Make up words. A paragraph can be one sentence, one word, or a whole damn monologue. Run-on sentences can be a style choice. Make a chapter one line. Use capitalization however you see fit. Start sentences with conjunctions. Be abstract in imagery. Forget commas exist and keep using ‘and’ instead (<- my favorite). Fragments can be fire. Create your own voice in the remnants of a burned language.

Learning the rules also means knowing how and when to break them. So break them to tell your story the way you want.