Useful Stuff and Miscellanea

How to tape up your hands before a fight

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How to write a fic summary

You can think of it as a checklist:

• Who: Main character(s)
• Why: Character goal or desire (stated)
• Why: Character need (implied)
• When: Inciting Incident
• What: Means (that achieves the goal/need)
• Where: Place A >> Place B
• How: The Plan
• Obstacle(s): antagonist or challenge

For example:

• Who: Bilbo Baggins, a respectable hobbit of Hobbiton
• Why: Treasure, wealth (stated)
• Why: Adventure, self-respect (implied)
• When: After supper
• What: Quest
• Where: Hobbiton >> The Lonely Mountain
• How: A company of dwarves, a wizard, and an ancient map and key
• Main antagonist(s): a dragon

Then you just turn these bullet points into sentences in 100 words or less. Thus:

Bilbo Baggins is a respectable hobbit in Hobbiton, never making any trouble or having any adventures. But when a wizard and a company of dwarves invite themselves to dinner, Bilbo finds himself joining their quest from the shires of Hobbiton to the legendary Lonely Mountain, the home of a long lost treasure, and quite, possibly, a dragon.

 

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If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built. French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s.

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Laundry Detergent

1 cup Washing Soda. This can be made by cooking baking soda on a tray in an oven at 400° for 1 hour.
1 cup Borax (not Boric Acid. Also a different thing.)
½ cup - 1 cup grated bar soap (you can use literally anything. I often use Ivory because it’s easy to get and I find it works well, a lot of people like Fels-Naptha, which is an actual laundry bar. Some people use Dr. Bronner’s. Really does not fucking matter.)
After grating your soap, combine all ingredients. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Use maybe a ¼ cup per load.

Dryer Sheet Replacement

Go to a craft store, find 100% wool yarn balls. If it doesn’t come in a ball, ask an employee to make it into a tight ball for you. Wash in the washing machine to make it felted. Remove from washer, add a few drops of essential oil to the ball, allow to seep in. Dry with clothing. Doesn’t need to be rewashed ever, and if it stops smelling, add few more drops of essential oil. Bam, reusable dryer sheets.

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Ways to Start Living Solarpunk Style

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100 Free Survival Guides

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Dealing with Meltdowns and Panic Attacks

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Ensuring Community Safety: Alternatives to Policing

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In this post-Roe world, I'm just going to leave this reproductive information here in case it should ever be needed by anyone reading this.

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Fact #1:
Laser sights don’t help your aim; they’re highly inaccurate at any range longer than a couple dozen yards and only good for rapid target acquisition.
Fact #2:
Absolutely every precision shooter knows this.
Fact #3:
Almost nobody else knows this because movies have erroneously taught people that snipers paint a red dot on the target’s chest before they shoot them.
Fact #4:
Any nazi who notices a red dot on their chest while giving a speech is going to immediately stop talking and get off the stage, probably while shitting themself.
Fact #5:
Laser pointers are cheap, legal, and easy to conceal, and unless there’s smoke or dust or something in the air, there's no way to know where it’s coming from.

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If I give you an apple and an orange and I tell you to choose, how many choices do you really have?

Two? Nope. You have FIVE, minimum.

• You take the apple
• You take the orange
• You take both
• You take nothing
• You take something else

And this works EVERYWHERE.

“Are you with us or with them?”

• I’m with you!
• I’m with them!
• You both have good points!
• You’re all insane!
• I’m going with that other group over there!

“You need to vote Democrat or Republican!”

• Democrat!
• Republican!
• I switch depending on the leader and the issues!
• I don’t vote!
• I vote for a third-party!

“Are you Christian or Muslim?”

• I’m Christian
• I’m Muslim
• I think God is one and the same and follow good doctrines of both
• I’m atheist
• I’m Jewish

And it’s often more subtle

Like a salesperson handing you two products and pressuring you to buy one of them, making you forget that:

• You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to
• You can leave the store and buy something elsewhere

And sometimes it can be as important as “Are you gay or are you straight?”

• I’m gay
• I’m straight
• I’m both? So bi?
• I like no one, I’m ace.
• I’m anything else, really, this is a spectrum and I define my own orientation.

So remember- If someone if pressuring you to pick between two choices, they’re probably trying to manipulate you by making you forget you also have another three options.

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tools not rules: the importance of critical thinking

More than once, I’ve talked about the negative implications of Evangelical/purity culture logic being uncritically replicated in fandom spaces and left-wing discourse, and have also referenced specific examples of logical overlap this produces re:, in particular, the policing of sexuality. What I don’t think I’ve done before is explain how this happens: how even a well-intentioned person who’s trying to unlearn the toxic systems they grew up with can end up replicating those systems. Even if you didn’t grow up specifically in an Evangelical/purity context, if your home, school, work and/or other social environments have never encouraged or taught you to think critically, then it’s easy to fall into similar traps - so here, hopefully, is a quick explainer on how that works, and (hopefully) how to avoid it in the future.
Put simply: within Evangelism, purity culture and other strict, hierarchical social contexts, an enormous value is placed on rules, and specifically hard rules. There might be a little wiggle-room in some instances, but overwhelmingly, the rules are fixed: once you get taught that something is bad, you’re expected never to question it. Understanding the rules is secondary to obeying them, and oftentimes, asking for a more thorough explanation - no matter how innocently, even if all you’re trying to do is learn - is framed as challenging those rules, and therefore cast as disobedience. And where obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a sin. If someone breaks the rules, it doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. Their explanations or justifications don’t matter, and nor does the context: a rule is a rule, and rulebreakers are Bad.
In this kind of environment, therefore, you absorb three main lessons: one, to obey a rule from the moment you learn it; two, that it’s more important to follow the rules than to understand them; and three, that enforcing the rules means castigating anyone who breaks them. And these lessons go deep: they’re hard to unlearn, especially when you grow up with them through your formative years, because the consequences of breaking them - or even being seen to break them - can be socially catastrophic.
But outside these sorts of strict environments - and, honestly, even within them - that much rigidity isn’t healthy. Life is frequently far more complex and nuanced than hard rules really allow for, particularly when it comes to human psychology and behaviour - and this is where critical thinking comes in. Critical thinking allows us to evaluate the world around us on an ongoing basis: to weigh the merits of different positions; to challenge established rules if we feel they no longer serve us; to decide which new ones to institute in their place; to acknowledge that sometimes, there are no easy answers; to show the working behind our positions, and to assess the logic with which other arguments are presented to us. Critical thinking is how we graduate from a simplistic, black-and-white view of morality to a more nuanced perception of the world - but this is a very hard lesson to learn if, instead of critical thinking, we’re taught instead to put our faith in rules alone.
So: what does it actually look like, when rule-based logic is applied in left-wing spaces? I’ll give you an example:
Sally is new to both social justice and fandom. She grew up in a household that punished her for asking questions, and where she was expected to unquestioningly follow specific hard rules. Now, though, Sally has started to learn a bit more about the world outside her immediate bubble, and is realising not only that the rules she grew up with were toxic, but that she’s absorbed a lot of biases she doesn’t want to have. Sally is keen to improve herself. She wants to be a good person! So Sally joins some internet communities and starts to read up on things. Sally is well-intentioned, but she’s also never learned how to evaluate information before, and she’s certainly never had to consider that two contrasting opinions could be equally valid - how could she have, when she wasn’t allowed to ask questions, and when she was always told there was a singular Right Answer to everything? Her whole framework for learning is to Look For The Rules And Follow Them, and now that she’s learned the old rules were Bad, that means she has to figure out what the Good Rules are.
Sally isn’t aware she’s thinking of it in these terms, but subconsciously, this is how she’s learned to think. So when Sally reads a post explaining how sex work and pornography are inherently misogynistic and demeaning to women, Sally doesn’t consider this as one side of an ongoing argument, but uncritically absorbs this information as a new Rule. She reads about how it’s always bad and appropriative for someone from one culture to wear clothes from another culture, and even though she’s not quite sure of all the ways in which it applies, this becomes a Rule, too. Whatever argument she encounters first that seems reasonable becomes a Rule, and once she has the Rules, there’s no need to challenge them or research them or flesh out her understanding, because that’s never been how Rules work - and because she’s grown up in a context where the foremost way to show that you’re aware of and obeying the Rules is to shame people for breaking them, even though she’s not well-versed in these subjects, Sally begins to weigh in on debates by harshly disagreeing with anyone who offers up counter-opinions. Sometimes her disagreements are couched in borrowed terms, parroting back the logic of the Rules she’s learned, but other times, they’re simply ad hominem attacks, because at home, breaking a Rule makes you a bad person, and as such, Sally has never learned to differentiate between attacking the idea and attacking the person.
And of course, because Sally doesn’t understand the Rules in-depth, it’s harder to explain them to or debate with rulebreakers who’ve come armed with arguments she hasn’t heard before, which makes it easier and less frustrating to just insult them and point out that they ARE rulebreakers - especially if she doesn’t want to admit her confusion or the limitations of her knowledge. Most crucially of all, Sally doesn’t have a viable framework for admitting to fault or ignorance beyond a total groveling apology that doubles as a concession to having been Morally Bad, because that’s what it’s always meant to her to admit you broke a Rule. She has no template for saying, “Huh, I hadn’t considered that,” or “I don’t know enough to contribute here,” or even “I was wrong, thanks for explaining!” So instead, when challenged, Sally remains defensive: she feels guilty about the prospect of being Bad, because she absolutely doesn’t want to be a Bad Person, but she also doesn’t know how to conceptualise goodness outside of obedience. It makes her nervous and unsettled to think that strangers could think of her as a Bad Person when she’s following the Rules, and so she becomes even more aggressive when challenged to compensate, clinging all the more tightly to anyone who agrees with her, yet inevitably ending up hurt when it turns out this person or that who she thought agreed on What The Rules Were suddenly develops a different opinion, or asks a question, or does something else unsettling.
Pushed to this sort of breaking point, some people in Sally’s position go back to the fundamentalism they were raised with, not because they still agree with it, but because the lack of uniform agreement about What The Rules Are makes them feel constantly anxious and attacked, and at least before, they knew how to behave to ensure that everyone around them knew they were Good. Others turn to increasingly niche communities and social groups, constantly on paranoid alert for Deviance From The Rules. But other people eventually have the freeing realisation that the fixation on Rules and Goodness is what’s hurting them, not strangers with different opinions, and they steadily start to do what they wanted to do all along: become happier, kinder and better-informed people who can admit to human failings - including their own - without melting down about it.
THIS is what we mean when we talk about puritan logic being present in fandom and left-wing spaces: the refusal to engage with critical thinking while sticking doggedly to a single, fixed interpretation of How To Be Good. It’s not always about sexuality; it’s just that sexuality, and especially queerness, are topics we’re used to seeing conservatives talk about a certain way, and when those same rhetorical tricks show up in our fandom spaces, we know why they look familiar.
So: how do you break out of rule-based thinking? By being aware of it as a behavioural pattern. By making a conscious effort to accept that differing perspectives can sometimes have equal value, or that, even if a given argument isn’t completely sound, it might still contain a nugget of truth. By trying to be less reactive and more reflective when encountering positions different to your own. By accepting that not every argument is automatically tied to or indicative of a higher moral position: sometimes, we’re just talking about stuff! By remembering that you’re allowed to change your position, or challenge someone else’s, or ask for clarification. By understanding that having a moral code and personal principles isn’t at odds with asking questions, and that it’s possible - even desirable - to update your beliefs when you come to learn more than you did before.
This can be a scary and disquieting process to engage in, and it’s important to be aware of that, because one of the main appeals of rule-based thinking - if not the key appeal - is the comfort of moral certainty it engenders. If the rules are simple and clear, and following them is what makes you a good person, then it’s easy to know if you’re doing the right thing according to that system. It’s much, much harder and frequently more uncomfortable to be uncertain about things: to doubt, not only yourself, but the way you’ve been taught to think. And especially online, where we encounter so many more opinions and people than we might elsewhere, and where we can get dogpiled on by strangers or go viral without meaning to despite our best intentions? The prospect of being deemed Bad is genuinely terrifying. Of course we want to follow the Rules. But that’s the point of critical thinking: to try and understand that rules exist in the first place, not to be immutable and unchanging, but as tools to help us be better - and if a tool becomes defunct or broken, it only makes sense to repair it.
Rigid thinking teaches us to view the world through the lens of rules: to obey first and understand later. Critical thinking teaches us to use ideas, questions, contexts and other bits of information as analytic tools: to put understanding ahead of obedience. So if you want to break out of puritan thinking, whenever you encounter a new piece of information, ask yourself: are you absorbing it as a rule, or as a tool?