i hope youre all lying and hyping your cv/resume’s up
i have never gotten an interview and not been offered a job position after it
I mean lets be honest if everyone else is gassing theirs up like no tomorrow and you’re being as honest as you can who th are the recruitment team going to be more interested in
There’s people working in my banks head office with me WITH MUCH MORE EXPERIENCE than me BUT ARE GETTING PAID LESS
we’re doing the exact same job role
the point I’m trying to make here is if you’ve handled finances for a company you’re now what i would call a treasurer my g, if you’ve done admin work you are now a secretary (or as I’ve put Management secretary)
you help some kid with his homework? you’re a private tutor.
keep your bullets points for the job role as concise and important sounding as possible AND ALWAYS EMPHASIS THAT YOURE A TEAM PLAYER IF YOURE GOING TO WORK IN A TEAM.
go into that interview room and get your story straight the night before and remember that interviews are two way conversatons yes they might be grilling you but at the end of it make sure to grill them BACK. do you have any hesitations about my qualifications? my suitability for the job? any feedback on my cv? how long have you been working at this company? do you like it here? whats the work environment like?
I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS GET THE SAME FEEDBACK WHEN THEY GET BACK IN TOUCH WITH ME
“ive never been asked those questions before” / “you were one of the strongest candidates”
throughout the interview emphasise that youre about progression, that you want more responsibilities than you did at your previous job, tell them the hours here are more suitable for me than my last ones were, AND WHEN IT COMES TO SALARY NEGOTIATION its all about continuity. tell them again that it boils down to progression. make up a reasonable figure for how much you were paid in your last role (do your research for how much the industry youre applying to or the role youre applying for pays, base it on that) tell them you expect more than you were previously paid. do not give them a figure. progression is your primary focus, tell them if youre progressing youre happy. leave it at that.
LIE THROUGH YOUR TEETH AND GET THAT MONEY
I had an interview yesterday, at the place I’ve been temping, where I busted out the “is there anything about my skills or background that makes you concerned about my fit for this job” question for the first time.
Neither of my supervisors had never gotten it before either. They had to think for a while, and then it turned into them telling me how great I am and what they love about me.
This stuff is real. I would also say: none of it is lying. This is taking experience that you normally downplay and write off, and putting it in accurate words they’ll understand.
It’s hacking the capitalist system. Why ISN’T helping a kid with homework “tutoring”, when the only thing missing is a paycheck?
It’s especially important for anyone who isn’t a cis white man, because many of us are so thoroughly trained to feel like we are not good enough.
Privilege tells people they can fake it, and that they’re good enough just as people and can learn the skills on the job. Abuse and oppression tell people they aren’t good enough as people and that even their high skills are probably below average, and that unless they had the specific job title or were using certain skills officially, nobody will think it counts.
The goal is to at least fake the confidence of a privileged person, to give the employer a chance at seeing the skills that you’ve been trained to undervalue.
I think one of the problems which
fanfiction authors face is the fact we are one of you. We are a fan. We love
the work. We recognise the faults. We want to be a part of the community and
contribute.
Because of this, however, there’s this
mentality that fanfiction authors, who do everything without getting paid and
often without recognition, owe it to people to write things the way they want
it to be written.
Don’t like something in a novel? Put it
down. Walk away. That’s it. That’s the end. (I mean, unless the novel turned
into a craze and then it’s okay because you’re supposed to hate things that are
popular, right?)
Don’t like something in a fanfiction? Let’s
tell the author. In detail. Let’s be condescending
about it. Let’s insult them at the same time. After all, they owe us for
reading.
Not updating fast enough? Complain. Updating
too fast? Complain. Don’t get the exact right details? Complain. Omg, there’s
sex/death/murder and I wasn’t warned? Doesn’t matter that fanfiction gets far
more warning than most. Complain anyway. Don’t want to wait until the chapter’s
released which explains it all? Complain. Omg, these two characters are
underage, they shouldn’t even be kissing let alone having adult conversations
about sex. Complain. Loudly. Call the author a paedophile.
Pick up any novel off the shelf and there’s nothing in terms of who the author is
and what work they put into the story. You pick it up, you read. There’s no
notes in the middle to explain something that people might not get. There’s no
notes saying “Hey, this might not be historically/culturally accurate.” There’s no warnings. It’s fiction. People get that things may not
be the same in the real world. Yes, a story is expected to be at least believably
accurate but it doesn’t have to be.
People don’t seem to understand personal
preference vs facts and interpretation vs critique.
By all means, critique a work. People like
to know if they’re getting grammar wrong, or overusing words, or breaking
rules. People need to know hear “hey, PTSD isn’t quite what you think, would
you like to discuss it?” or “That gunshot wound isn’t realistic, I can help”. But
please understand, people who write fanfiction do so for the love of the work.
A lot aren’t professional and they shouldn’t be expected to be. Do we want to improve? Yes, absolutely we do. Offering
guidance and gently nudging is so much better than; “You got this wrong. You’re
terrible. I don’t like it. Die in a fire.”
You wouldn’t say that to a published author. Why say to a fanfiction one?
We are far more approachable than the
average published author and a lot more fragile. We don’t have publishers and
editors backing up our work. We’re unproven and our egos are often not strong. Authors
are given the benefit of doubt until the book is finished. Why can’t fanfiction
authors be given the same benefit?
Also, you don’t know who the author is. They might be a kid. They might be posting their work for the world to see for the first time, for all you know.
I posted my first Star Wars fanfics when I was 12. Luckily, I’m pretty sure people guessed how young I was and were nothing but supportive, and while I stopped writing for a while during my last years of high school, ultimately the feedback I got on my first fics (which, I reiterate, I was 12, no way were they that great) gave me the confidence to continue later on.
My brother also posted his first fanfic, for the Warhammer 40K fandom, at 12. He got flamed and told everything was wrong and he was wrong and he should stop writing forever.
He’s written hundreds and hundreds of pages of fiction, far more than I have, but he doesn’t post them anywhere anymore. He doesn’t let me read them.
Your words will make an impact. Your kindness or cruelty will make a difference to a young author.
When I was younger, I wish someone had told me straight-up that not all adults experience “a calling”. That many of them never find particular purpose in a career. That sometimes, their job is just what pays the bills and they have to seek satisfaction and fulfillment elsewhere.
Because as an adult, this pervasive notion that there exists a perfect path for everyone, that people should love what they do, and that work is meant to function as a vehicle for fulfilling a person’s grand life destiny is not only inaccurate for many of us, it can be toxic.
The ideal is so ingrained that I have to remind myself constantly I’m not a failure because I don’t adore my job, and because I’m not rocking the world with my work. That is okay.
Sometimes, work is just work. There isn’t always a perfect career path, magically waiting to be discovered. There might not be this THING you were born to do. Sometimes, you discover that what you really want to be when you grow up is “paid”.
I adore this trope to death (and you should read the AMAZING
GIFT that was crafted for me by the wonder that is @crossroadswrite. Go read it. It’s
better than anything I could produce). I’m sorry but I’m now going to rant to
you about the thing that I really love about this trope, and that I never read
often enough:
Derek Hale, the werewolf.
(with woves pics, because apparently it’s a tradition when I write now)
In fics, Derek kinda fails at being human. He’s too violent, too silent,
too creepy. And sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s heartbreaking, sometimes it’s
cute. But I don’t often read fic on the fact acknowledging that Derek isn’t
Erica or Scott or Boyd or Isaace. Derek fails at being human because he never was one.
Derek was born a werewolf, grew up with werewolf parents, werewolf
brothers and sisters and uncle and grandparents. He was a baby with fangs, a
kid who fell asleep to stories of little werewolves saving the world, grew up a
teenager fighting with his parents when he had to fake being bad at sports.
And why would the werewolf world have the same social rules as humans? They
have different metabolisms, different hierarchy rules, a different sense of
legacy and territory.
I want to read about a world where a lot of sentences are short and to
the point, because half the information is olfactory. Where you don’t have to
expand on some subjects, because body language is the norm and the way you will
incline your chin, lower your shoulders, raise your eyes will say more than any
words.
I want a world where letting your eyes flash or your fangs drop might
mean threat or sarcasm or honesty depending on your whole body language. Where
jokes are so, so different from human’s because they are based on a lie obvious
to your public in your heartbeat, in a ridiculous contradiction between words
and body posture. Where personal space is not a polite concept, similar to
humans yelling at somebody from the other side of the room, since so much of
the meaning comes with scent and talking a few feet away from somebody forces
him to sniff the air obviously like a pup.
I want werewolf traditions where earth is the more touching gift that
can be given to a potential mate, because it represents territory and pack and
safety. Where flowers are an insult because the scent is often overpowering and
they remind them of wolfsbane.
In their world where bones mends in minutes and pain is a thing that can
be taken away and werewolf walk around with extreme strength, violence is not
frowned upon so much. Pups fight already to the blood, biting by accident with
too sharp fangs. Adults arguing often shove each other roughly. Fighting is
something they learn all their life, just in case, and a part of their life
they are not ashamed of.
And more than all, the werewolf world would be one where touch is a
whole part of communication. Touching strangers is the norm to prove you means
no harm. Keeping your scent to yourself can only mean hidden agenda, and being
afraid of bad actions traced back to you by scentAnd werewolves’ families are packs. So werewolf kids grow up thinking that
touch is something obvious, . something they should never beg or ask permission
for. If you sit somewhere, other will organically accumulate around you. If you
are tired, you can fall asleep on other. Hugs are the norm, kisses too. Pack
will touch all the time for comfort, for love, for pack sent.
So, you know. I miss fics where Derek isn’t so much a fail!wolf as a
perfect werewolf, just evolving in a world where he can’t handle social clues.
Where a few years in school only means that he learned to imitate human attitudes but doesn’t
really understand it, like a second language he can only use clumsily.
Kate the hunter makes so much sense like this. She would have known
everything about werewolf behavior and would have played right into it to
seduce Derek. On the other hand, when we actually see Derek try to seduce a human
in the show, it just so over the top that it looks like he’s trying to imitate
something he saw in a TV show…
So you know. Maybe Derek is not silent, but simply surrounded by people
unable to understand him. He speaks a dead language in this town now. Stiles,
Allison, Lydia are humans. Scott, Erica, Boyd, Jackson, Isaac are humans that just
took on a wolf pelt.
And when Derek jokes, with a terse phrase but a playful raise of his
shoulders, they only hear the terse phrase. When he raises his eyebrows, they
can’t read the meaning in his scent. He’s only raising his eyebrows. When they
fight, they only see the violence, they don’t associate with the way pups play
fight. When he sits somewhere in silence, they will not come naturally to touch
and Derek will not think of asking because they are pack.
So now, let’s come back to the WolfCon trope.
The Hale pack would be so worried because their alpha is kind of a
social failure (in a perfectly adorable way, in Stiles’ opinion) and they can’t
afford to piss off anyone without being erased from the map. And of course they
would put in place so many strategies. Of course Stiles would be Derek’s fake
mate, just to help him socialize and be sure Derek don’t make a fatal social
error that would end in blood. Also, to protect Derek from all these crazy hot
single werewolves that could lust after him. He’s altruistic like that (because
come on. The best thing of this trope is the fake!relationship and the
jealousy)
And then the convention starts and they are all speechless. Because to
them, Derek isn’t different. Maybe looser, smiling a little more. But he still
doesn’t speak a lot, he’s still sarcastic and kind of abrupt.
But somehow werewolves laugh loudly at his jokes that they though were
insults. Scott tries, wincing, to prevent a stranger asking question about the
kamina to throw his elbow on Derek’s shoulder only to find Derek responding
calmly to the stranger. A woman their age comes at Derek and tries to wrestle
him to the ground, eyes flashing and fangs dropped and Stiles has already
stolen a candlestick to club her in the head when he notices that Derek is laughing.
And of course a lot of the werewolves here have known the late Hale and
have heard of the stories coming of the new pack. And old alpha kisses Derek’s
forehead, in the middle on the first meeting. Derek clasps her on the neck,
smiling. And it begins. For hours, Stiles watches grumpily people touching
Derek as they pass, children reaching for his fingers, people caressing his
arms distractedly, brushing their knuckles against his cheeks. And Derek
touches right back.
And then the afternoon they attend the “New pack members class” and they
are finally taught exactly this. What is werewolf culture. How silent
communication works, scent nuances, sensorial sarcasm. How to understand and
use it when you are not in control of your faculties yet or simply human.
And it explains so much.
They finally understand that Derek has basically spend the last years
trying to communicate in broken German with them when he grew up talking English.
So yeah. I want thousands words of happy Derek surrounded by werewolves,
finally free to communicate with other people without always feeling clumsy and
just being a happy werewolf.
And Stile would totally end up drunk in the middle of a circle of werewolves
rubbing his back, whining that he could have touchedfor years, he
could have napped with Derek, he
could have hugged Derekand his bedhair and nobody told him.
(And of course Derek would come save him, alarmed, because Stiles is
pathologically blind to werewolves flirting. As was proven by three years of Derek throwing himself
shamelessly at him.
And drunk Stiles’ body language projects in really human-accented
werewolf-talk his request for a fivesome. Which. No.)
(Next day’s classes are about Werewolf courtship. Stiles creates a
public scene by basically jumping over two other humans to get back at Derek
and yell at him for answers and kisses)
Shipping is an intensely personal thing. Never let anyone make you feel bad for shipping what you ship.
Maybe it’s just for fun, maybe it’s helping you connect to something during a hard time in your life, maybe it’s somehow helping you come to grips with the world.
Support and understanding from loved ones are still so important. It can make a mentally ill person’s life much more bearable. Support systems are very, very necessary.
Your love and support, alone, won’t cure us. Most of us can’t be cured. We can only treat the symptoms of our illnesses with therapy and medication. But your love and support is still an important part of making our lives easier to live. It’s an important part of the process.
it’s 2016, callout culture has gone on for more than long enough now, let it die, it’s time
callout for this post wtf is “callout culture”
callout culture is falling out with someone and digging through their archive to compile a list of things they said five years ago to turn total strangers against them
callout culture is reblogging a callout post for a total stranger made by a total stranger out of a misplaced sense of moral righteousness
callout culture is overusing the word ‘problematic’ to the point where saying something out of ignorance thirty years ago is placed on the same level as assaulting children
callout culture is expecting people to disclose deeply personal information pertaining to their mental health, experience of abuse and other incredibly sensitive subjects before engaging in a discussion with total strangers
callout culture is bombarding people with accusatory messages as soon as a celebrity or tv show they like fucks up, as if it was their fault or they can do anything about it and as if it’s possible for anyone or anything to be perfect enough to be deemed worthy of fandom by those standards
callout culture is refusing to give people room to fuck up and then grow and learn and to acknowledge that people and media mean a lot to people for an enormous variety of reasons and expecting people to be able to (and to want to) just cut all emotional ties they have with something or someone when they fuck up is unreasonable and unrealistic
callout culture is claiming to stand for social justice, but driving young teenagers to the point of suicide because maintaining a sense of ideological purity is seen as preferable to remembering that we all used to be ignorant on various issues and educating those who just didn’t know any better
I get so tired of the way fandoms feel entitled to their writers, sometimes.
By sometimes, I of course mean “always,” but that isn’t the point right now. I am not the point right now. The point is this:
It’s really hard not to consider the majority of your readers as assholes when you’ve got hit figures in the hundreds and comment figures in single digits.
It’s really hard to drum up motivation to keep writing when the only feedback you get is the impossible to gauge kudos.
It’s really hard to share your work with people who look at it and then move on without reacting, especially when you see how the most basic of sketches get ten times the notes your writing does.
It’s really hard to be a fandom writer, unless you’re one of the popular ones – and even then, that comes with its own pitfalls. Sure, you get the higher comment counts, but you also get the anons. And the rude comments.
I don’t understand why-
I don’t like this-
I don’t think you should do that-
Dear Fandom:
You don’t own your writers. Your writers are fans, just like you. Your writers are creators, just like your artists and gifmakers. Your writers are not story-machines, insert coins here to produce words below. Your writers are not automatons who unflinchingly accept your demands and abuse. Your writers are not free of any obligation save for producing stories for your amusement.
Dear Fandom:
Your writers are people. Your writers are artists of a different medium. Your writers deserve as much praise and feedback as your visual artists.
Dear Fandom:
Everyone can write. Not everyone can write well. Help those who can’t to improve. Praise those who can and encourage them to keep going.
Dear Fandom:
It takes less than five minutes to type “This was great, I liked it when she kicked the dude’s teeth in!” and hit Comment
Dear Fandom:
Fic links can be reblogged, too – it’s not just visuals and meta!
Dear Fandom:
You think that the quality of fic is declining in your fandom? Maybe you should look at why that is, instead of complaining that your writers are lazy or careless.
Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
shealwaysreads 