2025-10-26
When you stop translating, extraordinary things happen. Your creative, social, and intellectual bandwidth expands dramatically. The cognitive load of constant performance was enormousâevery conversation where you were editing rather than expressing depleted resources that could be directed toward creation, insight, genuine connection.
You discover your actual audience: not the people who need you to be different, but the ones who recognize themselves in your untranslated truth. This isn't about finding "your tribe"âthat suggests a pre-existing community waiting to be discovered. It's about creating resonance through specificity.
stepfanie tyler, The quiet thrill of not being for everyone: The power of refusing to perform (2025). URL: https://www.badgirlmedia.com/p/the-quiet-thrill-of-not-being-for2025-10-25
The slut is, after all, a fundamentally pro-social archetype. While the term has grown to be broad and welcoming (as Aella made sure to say explicitly, âanyone can be a slutâ), the slut more traditionally represents someone who has had- or at least is perceived to have had- many sexual partners. She is assumed to be sexually open, available, âloose,â which even as an insult implies an undeniably complimentary relaxed quality. The slut enjoys sex, in the normal way that sex is enjoyable.
The pervert, in contrast, is antisocial. His desires are at odds with normative sex and sexuality, often divorced or abstracted from the mechanics of sex and/or hyperfocused in a way that alienates potential partners, if partnership is something the Pervert is interested in at all. Perversion is a curdling; a rancid inversion of something wholesome. The Pervert is sexually obsessed, yes, but impotent either through shame or rebuff.
The slut gives panties away, or shows off the lace in hopes of them peeled off her body. The pervert sneaks into her room at night and steals them.
The slut gives, the pervert takes.
Prosocial/antisocial.
Noelle Perdue, Notes on Feeling Like a Failure at Slutcon (2025). URL: https://noelleperdue.substack.com/p/notes-on-feeling-like-a-failure-at2025-10-21
Following a long period of chronic personal and professional stress, I had retreated to a (metaphoric) cave for a couple of years and simply stopped going to professional conferences and other social/professional venues where I typically met emerging scholars in the field and reconnected with longtime colleagues and friends. And in truth, I didnât write much (at least, not much that I cared about). Then I got a cold email from Robin. I almost never respond to cold emails (and Iâve never taken a cold phone call in my life), but this one was different from the usual sort [...], so I responded. Suffice it to say, Robin got my attention, and kept it, and we began meeting, and talking, and reading together, and not long after, writing together. Thank you, Robin, for waking up my brain again, for being my muse, for knowing exactly how to finish my sentences and for letting me finish yours. Working with you has been like working with my own younger self, if my younger self had known back then what I know now 20 years later, but still had some energy and vitality left in me.
Alicia A. Broderick, The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism Into Big Business (2022).2025-10-21
Friendship is not the warm bath of recognition; it is the safe-cracking of reality. Two idiots put their ears to the vault door of the world and whisper, âOn three.â Click.
The Shadowed Archive, An Existential Guide to: Making Friends (2025). https://theshadowedarchive.substack.com/p/an-existential-guide-to-making-friends2025-10-19
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
âJohn Adams to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780,â Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-03-02-02582025-10-19
âA word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.â This is how Charles Peguy described writing individual words. The same thing is true of chapters and whole books. [...] It seems appropriate to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the long process, either by loaning me an overcoat or by helping me clean up my spilled guts.
Bradford Tuckfield, DIVE INTO ALGORITHMS: A Pythonic Adventure for the Intrepid Beginner (2021)2025-10-17
âHe managed to betray a villain called âthe Betrayerâ, Squire,â Ratface grinned. âYou have to hand it to him: he might have had only one trick but he was great at it.â
I rolled my eyes. âIâd be a little more impressed if heâd ruled longer than a decade. That kind of stupidity is why you donât put the comic relief in charge.â
âYouâve got to respect that kind of an exit, though,â Robber mused. âI mean, poisoning himself and pinning it on over a hundred different people? Man knew how to leave the stage.â
ErraticErrata, A Practical Guide to Evil Book 2, Chapter 1: Supply (2015)2025-10-17
I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.
Aella, The Difficulty in Dating Good Men (2025). https://aella.substack.com/p/the-difficulty-in-dating-good-men2025-10-13
[A]s Oliver Burkeman advises in Meditations for Mortals there is freedom in realizing that you wonât get everything done, that most of your tasks donât matter and you should let them go because youâre never going to do them. Theyâre not valuable enough to bother with.
The problem isnât that you havenât found the right tool to control your tasks, itâs that you think itâs possible to control every task that flows your way.
The reason a new tool, or a new system for that matter, feels so good is that you give up on so many of the tasks that were weighing you down in the old system. You donât move every idea over figuring that youâll come back to them at some point, and then you never come back.
Curtis McHale, Productivity as a Fetish (2025). https://curtismchale.ca/2025/10/11/productivity-as-a-fetish/2025-09-13
The same thing happens when RFK Jr says âwhen I was a kid, no one had autismâ. Which is technically true. But only because the diagnosis of autism wasnât officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1980. Which is after RFK Jr was a kid.
So yes, there was no autism when he was a kid. But itâs not because there was anything special and healthy about being a kid in the 50s and 60s.
Ellie Murray, In my day there was no autism and we walked to school uphill both ways in the snow (2025). URL: https://epiellie.substack.com/p/in-my-day-there-was-no-autism-and2025-09-12
I've worked in spam and abuse at Google, and I have friends who have worked in trust and safety at Meta and Twitter. Anyone who has worked in any spam and abuse role knows that these platforms are under fire and adversarial attack basically all the time. Which makes me think Krugmanâs take is way too simplistic. âEnshittification is their fault. They are doing it on purpose because.â Krugman is definitely pointing to a real phenomenon, and his writing is insightful as usual. But like many of those critical of the modern tech landscape, Krugman only points the cannons of his criticism outward.
Point me to some form of enshittification, and I'll find someone abusing the system that is making it worse for everyone. Honestly, most of the time I can't even blame them. Sure, I'm not personally like trashing my Airbnbs and then suing the host, or whatever. But I share my Netflix password, or use other people's promo codes, or use student discounts when I'm no longer a student. We all have incentives.
theahura, Enshittification is our fault (2025). URL: https://theahura.substack.com/p/enshittification-is-our-fault2025-06-08
The trauma narrative feels like a rejection of the pain, because it's a belief that the pain is somehow not supposed to be there, like it's a foreign invader. I feel uncomfortable treating it like an invader (although I still do it sometimes because of social pressure).
There can be a lot of healing in surrendering the narrative and all the power and authority it gives you. I don't mean that you have to abandon it entirely, it's useful, after all - but evicting it from a place of identity inside yourself is necessary. If your wound is held open by a sense of wrongness, it will never have space to heal.
Aella, The Trauma Narrative (2018). https://aella.substack.com/p/the-trauma-narrative2025-06-05
I feel like Iâm in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. Youâre pouring the most vivid years of someoneâs life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them donât care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.
Aella, Chattel Childhood (2025). https://aella.substack.com/p/chattel-childhood2025-03-30
I'm writing essay after essay in a language that isn't even my native and that I taught myself during the most traumatic yearsof my life. How isn't that amazing?
aurora blythe, the one about getting comfortable being smart again and self-education (2025). URL: https://aurorablythe.substack.com/p/the-one-about-getting-comfortable