#WritersCoffeeClub 12.10 — Is it ethical to base characters on real people? What is the limit?
Yes, absolutely. That's the whole point and there is no other way of writing a compelling character. I will only accept the answer no, if you can tell me how it would be possible to write any character at all.
Cue the #enshittification of DIY electronics.
https://www.theverge.com/news/794452/qualcomm-arduino-acquisition-uno-q
Apparently theres a new wave of people joining mastodon, and with them a new wave of self-appointed cops "welcoming" them with long lists of mostly fictitious "rules" they need to follow.
This is a social media platform, with many different ways to use it. It's fine. Mostly, just try to be decent to other people, just like you should try to be everywhere else.
"Yet this is what money meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the terrifying prospect of one’s sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide occasional sexual services, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been able to protect."
"We just don’t have any idea what a political argument in a Syrian tavern in, say, 750 BC was likely to have been like."
For me, this single point undermines all sociological theorising about historical civilisations. All we have are records written by those who felt inclined to keep records, the religious clerics and governmental bookkeepers. The real life of the real person in the street gets erased and all we have are the ideological convictions of the ruling class. These are not meaningless, but hardly representative of the population as a whole.
I got fed up fighting with LaTeX and started using #printcss via #weasyprint. Highly recommended if you care about typesetting but hate dealing with a klugey clusterfuck of document types and dependencies.
Every once in a while, I hear a small explosion coming from a neighbour's yard down the street. It's happened consistently, but unpredictably, for years. I don't know which house it's coming from, but it never repeats so I can't locate it precisely.
At first, I assumed it was a kid with left over firecrackers from Canada day or something, but my current favourite speculation is that they are using an electric pump to explode old bike inner tubes. I like this much better than the other, much darker idea that they're shooting and eating stray cats.
aboutgrau
Matt Blaze
Hannah Clover