bolido_sentimental
No bio...
User ID: 205
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
I am a native of Tennessee, have lived in Kentucky, and currently live in Ohio. None of these could be described as "blue states." Pretty much everyone that I talk to on a daily basis lives and votes in one of these three states.
For the last three or four months, almost every person I know has been assaulting my ears, unsolicited, with monologues about how Trump is a racist, sexist and fascist, and he must be kept out of the White House. Literally - I'm not saying that as a stock example, I mean that people have actually used those terms, in series, in sentences to describe him and his politics. Additionally, multiple people have told me they wish the would-be assassin's bullets didn't miss their mark. These people include my dad - a blue-collar tradesman; my coworkers, at a blue-collar manufacturing firm; my mom, a retail worker; a close friend of mine who joined the Army; and a guy I know who works in construction. No matter their age, race, or who the winners' policies would be likely to benefit, there is a lockstep consensus, even though these are all people who are the types of people, in the appropriate states, that you'd expect to support Trump. The only exceptions that I personally have are my fiancee and her family, a close friend from church, and an old coworker. All other people are happy to start venting about Trump to me.
(Notably - and this is not meant to be boo outgroup - I never hear anyone talk about how the election outcomes, or the policy outcomes that follow from that, will affect them personally. One guy I work with did at least reference his neighbors who are voting for Trump because they don't want their taxes to go up, which he described as "greed.")
My subjective impression, is that this is primarily caused by the successful capture by liberals of so many institutions, resulting in leftism becoming the "default position" in America. When all the big companies, all the media, and all the artists and musicians push in the same direction, you have to be a serious non-conformist to push the other way; and that is an uncommon trait. With that in mind, I don't know how the Republicans ever win any elections.
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
The community aspect of NaNoWriMo was responsible for some of the best times of my life. I ran my city's NaNoWriMo in 2019, and it was a wonderful experience in every way. We really embraced the core idea of NaNoWriMo as it was originally conceived: ordinary people, getting together to try and exceed our old level of ability, urging each other on to believe that we can do more than we think we can.
So the idea that they would mention "ableism" is very galling, and represents the extent to which the original entity has been skinsuited. Unfortunately, that was in progress for years prior, and 2019 was really the last gasp. In 2020 and 2021, they opted to disallow officially-sanctioned write-ins because of Covid fear - no matter what local regulations said. They also explicitly stated that they wanted more "diverse" people to run the groups in each city, and discourged non-diverse people from applying. And, of course, last year there was the huge grooming scandal. The whole protracted decay of NaNoWriMo, from its apolitical roots in the 2000s, was very blackpilling for me; it directly crystallized for me the idea of, "These are the people who are hostile to you personally, and to what you value most."
Anyway though, just engaging in NaNoWriMo yourself is something I still think is a great idea. For many writers who can't do it as a full-time practice, there's nothing better than simply getting a bunch of words onto the page.
--
As an aside - I've written in this forum before about how, up until a certain point in my life, it was quite common for story ideas to pop into my head at any given time; but this process largely halted a couple of years ago as I entered my 30s. There are a lot of practical life factors in play, but subjectively, it feels as though my head were a radio, and the tuner knob has gotten bumped off of the frequency where all the story ideas are broadcast. Before, I could just hear them, and now I can't. Have you ever felt that way? And did you change anything in your life accordingly?
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
As a rule, if you don’t have preexisting physical health problems and make it through your first year or two(almost all tradesmen have to start on a construction site) then just take care of your body and the work won’t be too tough on it.
Just to supplement this. My dad has worked in a quite physical trade for 40 years now. (He's a glazier.) He has no particular ailments associated with it - he's a good weight, hale and healthy, still very physically capable. He's never been a overeater or a drinker, and I think getting lots of exercise each day has kept his level high. I'll be lucky to be as healthy as he is when I'm in my 60s.
The one problem he has is that he's had multiple melanomas removed, because he did not wear sunscreen at any point in all that time lol. He knows better, he doesn't deny it, but he still doesn't put it on.
bolido_sentimental
6mo ago
Gonna be giving out candy. My neighborhood is full of kids. Something I've noticed: they hardly ever remember to say "trick or treat" these days. Halloween has fallen.
I'm going to Pittsburgh this weekend, mostly for business though. What's the signature food, and where do I get it? Somebody tag the Pittsburgh guy!
Update: I'm in some place called Fiori's Pizzaria currently. This feels very Pittsburghy.
Update 2: I had an Italian hoagie. It was really very good.
I am originally from Tennessee, and UT is the SEC school there; I wonder how similar the experience is. Throughout the state, there is this sort of low-level obsession with UT; when I tell people I'm from Tennessee, even now, they say, "Oh, did you go to UT?" even though I grew up 200 miles away from UT's campus.
Then as now, I was not interested in the "SEC lifestyle." It all sounded like a very poor match for my own personality, and I never even considered going there, though many people from my high school did. I ended up going to a much calmer public university in Tennessee; one which had a Greek life, but where the Greek life was not the center of all social life by any means. There, I was able to just nerd out and focus on academics in relative peace. I made friends and found romantic interests through "normal" channels - through classes, campus clubs, intramural sports etc. After various twists and turns, I am living the normal middle-class lifestyle of a State U grad.
I wonder where I'd go if I'd grown up in similar circumstances in Alabama. Maybe UAB? Or UNA?
I feel like even now, I mix more often with people that, like me, went to places like Northern Alabama, Northern Kentucky, UT-Chattanooga or whatever than I do with Ohio State/Michigan/Alabama/Duke sort of people. I'd be keen to read more about that kind of social sorting. I probably missed out some access to elites, but I don't think I belong in that stratum anyway.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Not especially. I appreciate when our forum members provide these humanizing elements; especially since we have a core of users that has been stable for a long time, it makes me feel like I know them a little bit as people, instead of just as collections of culture war viewpoints.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Ahahaha I'm not there yet if it is. Can't wait lmao.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
I'm not sure about that, honestly. From that specific ATM, I have never withdrawn more than like 80 dollars at a time; though I know it can do more.
I was more weirded out by the way he kept picking the "credit" option. My understanding is that this incurs big fees for people that use a credit card to get cash advances. It made me think that he was using a stolen card. But - I don't know that much about the ins and outs of that, so I might be mistaken.
I am reminded of the posters I used to see in airports and on public transit, that said, "If you see something, say something!" I suppose they were looking out for bomb threats, etc.; but how do I know if the "something" I've seen is pertinent to anything?
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
He was in his 20s.
I didn't look at it from your perspective, but now I'm really starting to see it that way, actually.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
It does. I don't know if he knew that, though.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Yesterday, I stopped by a CVS to use the ATM there.
I ended up stuck behind a man who used the ATM as follows: he inserted a card he had, entered the PIN, and pressed the "Credit" option and withdrew 100 dollars. He then repeated this same process probably 10 or 11 times: using the same card, he did that and withdrew 100 more dollars, over and over again.
Is this is a legitimate thing to do? I can't think of why someone would do that. I got a feeling like it was some kind of fraudulent behavior, but I just don't really know. I guess maybe he didn't know how to use the ATM properly, but that doesn't feel likely to me. He was a younger man in apparent possession of all his mental faculties.
As a secondary question: if you see someone who is definitely using some kind of stolen card, or tampering with an ATM in some way... what do you even do then? Who would you tell? (Assuming you didn't want to just ignore it, which is what I would probably do by default.)
On this forum, I'm less concerned about giving offense, and more concerned that spelling out the N-word will make readers think I'm trying to be "edgy" on purpose; which reduces the odds of their being willing to have a serious discussion with me.
For better or worse, I can't write anything without imagining what it will make the reader think.
Adding a second reply here, because I had an interesting CW-ish experience over the weekend.
One of my church's book clubs read Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman this month, and yesterday we had the discussion at the church. As you can probably imagine, apart from me - a 35-year-old man - the book clubs consists exclusively of women aged 50 to 90.
Anyway, I enjoyed that book immensely. It is the autobiography of a white woman called Mary Hamilton, who lived in the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century; she married a timber man named Frank, and worked ridiculously hard her whole life to keep her family alive and fed, surviving natural disasters and the early deaths of four children. They lived on the very edge of civilization, mostly in wild country, far even from any neighbors. I absolutely couldn't put the book down. Every page brought either a new threat to life, or the practice of a cultural custom that has now just about faded out of memory. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the real business of how the American continent was settled, or in how ordinary people lived outside of cities, just over 100 years ago.
Now, Mary Hamilton does relate a number of encounters with black people. The descendants of slaves, freed some 50 years prior to the story, were building up their own lives in Mississippi and Arkansas, where Mary spends much of the book. She honestly describes black criminals and black nurses, neighbors and scoundrels, men, women and children, young and elderly; she relates good ones and evil ones, she talks about racial conflicts that occasionally would spring up, and she transcibes their patterns of speech as she heard them. She does use the N-word and many variants thereof, but in an entirely natural way that reflects how they were referred to at that time, in that place As far as I could see, Mary Hamilton had no special racial prejudice, but neither was she a particular supporter of black improvement or uplifting. She was simply focused on keeping her family alive.
In the book club, we were asked to give a 1-10 rating of the book. I gave it an honest 10 - too generous perhaps, I admit it's not an utter classic of all-time, but that's how much I enjoyed reading it, definitely. But the woman next to me would go no higher than 6. She said, "Every time [Hamilton] started talking about black people, I cringed. There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that. I don't like to think about that. I loved the hard-working pioneer spirit stuff, but I kept cringing and cringing when she would use the N-word, or write the way they talked where they sound all ignorant."
I said, "I wouldn't say that I found that completely enjoyable, but I felt like reading it enhanced my understanding of life in those days. I wouldn't want those parts to be cut out." She responded that she wouldn't want to recommend the book to black people she knew because of those passages; and that furthermore, she didn't watch the news because she didn't want to know about bad things that are happening.
A lively discussion ensued on this topic generally, and to my surprise I think more of the women had my view, than that of my interlocutor. But still, I had never heard someone express that so directly before: that if it's bad, they don't want to be aware of it; and if it portrays black people badly, they don't want to read it. I have a little bit of sympathy for the first point - the world can produce negativity longer than you can remain sane if you have unlimited empathy, and maybe it's healthier not to dwell on that stuff. For the second, though, I got the sense that she felt it was "punching down" to portray poor blacks as they really lived around 1900; and I just find that nuts. I believe there is a strain in our culture that want to see all minorities as wise and saintly people we should look up to, instead of being complex people, some of whom are smart, some stupid, some evil, some virtuous. It results in a highly inaccurate understanding of the world.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Adding to the pile - please do, it would be awesome.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Currently reading Germinal by Emile Zola.
I love it. I love the subject matter - any story about miners, factory workers, farmers etc. gets me going. And Zola has a great, engaging writing style, full of rich images and sharp emotion.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
live innawoods with your cousins and live off the fatta the land
Just by the by, can you explain why you typed this in this way?
I've seen it on the Internet before, and it looks like it must be a reference to something, but I can't think of what.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Flout, not flaunt.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
I still want to hear someone using the term "far-right" make a distinction between that and just "right."
I got on there recently myself. It made me feel a lot less alone, in that I finally found people who are noticing the same things I notice in the world around me. It also made me realize just how small the Overton window is virtually everywhere else.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Lol, that would be nice. Unfortunately it must be purchased with money.
I keep trying to draw some sort of second-order conclusions from the Haitians eating cats thing. Is it supposed to sway people who were on the fence about border controls? Like, if it is true - then what? I imagine the leftist response to this story being absolutely confirmed would be:
0.) Continue to deny it anyway.
1.) When they have learned our country's norms they'll stop, it's not really their fault.
2.) Even if it's true, it's their culture and we should respect it, not try to change them to be like us.
3.) Either way the good they bring outweighs the bad.
Even my liberal dad admitted, he would feel concern about having 20,000 Haitians added to his community all at once. My impression as a private citizen has been that this reinforces something already true about America: the only way you can control who lives near you is to make more money. You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people. The poor people who were not able to leave Springfield when its industries crashed - they are "suffering what they must."
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
Did you get his book yet? It's a very handsome volume.
bolido_sentimental
7mo ago
I live in a bubble and I don't know what other people do, but to me Substack has brought a real renaissance in self-published long-form articles; the discoverability and follow-ability, and ease of doing these things, is greatly improved from anything else I knew of before.
To give kind of a corny answer to your broader question: I more or less agree that most things have gotten worse, including several things which were really important to me. (The landscape of fiction publishing is a big one.) But it's not entirely a bad thing; to some extent it forces us to define what is important to us and actively fight for it, instead of assuming that a gentle and friendly world will keep providing it without our doing anything. For example the smartphone problem: if you respond to this by intentionally selecting for "people who have fought this off and remained unaddicted" as your friend group, you may end up with a cooler and more resilient friend group than you would have if it had never happened.
TL;DR I agree with you, but let's make the best of it.
LOL
Tbh, it's like I'm the guy in the original post except I really want it to stop.
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