If you love Tree Law, the beloved subreddit is open again. I highly recommend sorting by top/all time.
To clarify after some questions:
(American) Tree Law is very satisfying because the cases often involve someone damaging trees that don’t belong to them, usually for an aesthetic, mercenary, petty, and/or spiteful reason. However, American tree law comes down like a HAMMER on such people, and they will get mighty fines. If the tree dies, in fact, they’ll be on the hook to replace the whole thing, and as it turns out, trees ain’t cheap. As the article above summarizes one incident in Reddit terms:
To rephrase it as an AITA post: am I the asshole if I cut down 32 trees on my neighbor’s property, but instead of just charging me a $32,000 fine, now they’re going to make me build a road and find transplanted, equally mature trees to replant?
Tree Law is perhaps one of the few branches (I didn’t even mean that to be a pun) of American law where self-entitled wrongdoers WILL face consequences. NBC Universal wants to maul a row of city-owned ficus trees to deprive striking workers of shade during a heat wave? Oh boy.
Hey btw, to new writers who want to write angst: Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights.
If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small.
Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go “my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life” isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go “yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it”, and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.
Now, having someone casually think or say shit like “I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time”, and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.
I think the bicycle helmet discourse really just reinforces the idea that people believe that accidents only happen to the stupid and careless, and that people who get hurt somehow deserve it. And since nobody wants to believe themselves to be stupid, or thinks they could be careless or distracted, it's not necessary to take precautions.
And then they take safety advice as an insult because telling someone to be safe is seen as an accusation of being stupid and irresponsible, and not just a value neutral acknowledgement of statistical inevitably. We see it with masks, and seatbelts, and now bicycle helmets because everyone wants to believe they're too clever to get hurt, and too lucky to get hurt badly, until suddenly you're not and you have to resign, in shame, to being one of the people you previously saw as annoying nags, assuming you're even still alive.
What's something that most people love, but you don't?
Pizza
Dogs
Summer
Bread
Going to the movies
Video games
why is “report hate speech” not one of the default options with “report spam” instead of “report sexually explicit material”. i’m not a cop so i don’t care if people post hole & pole but i would love if i didn’t have to explain every time why it’s bad when there are nazis
do you ever sabotage your own free time? like wtf is that about? i want to play this game or read or do something specific but instead i will just stare out the window or scroll mindlessly???
Linen Beach and Picnic Blanket by TheBalticGreen
literally the most normal tag i have seen on this. thank you for simply tagging #dog and not “you must answer his riddles three” or “why the long face” or “he is melting!” etc.
AI isn't a threat to creative professions because it can actually make passable art that humans enjoy (it can't). It's a threat because in a capitalist system, employers would do literally anything to not have to pay humans living wages (or any wages, let's be real).
We've been in a productivity boom for the past 60 years, but the one area where production cannot become more efficient is the arts. It takes the same amount of time to write a novel or compose a symphony now as it did a hundred years ago. That's just the creative process.
AI represents a shortcut to making art that has had executives salivating since LLMs and AI art generators hit the internet. It means more content faster with the benefit of not having to provide salaries, sick days, parental leave, time off, or healthcare. It means not having to deal with unions and labour laws. It means cutting humans out of the most fundamentally human activity we do – making art.
All those headlines and clickbait articles about AI annihilating the human race are a hyperbolic distraction from the actual problem we may soon be facing where people won't have the possibility of supporting themselves making art (not that it's particularly easy to do as it stands).
If making art becomes a luxury only for the affluent, we will stop hearing the voices, stories, and perspectives of marginalized people. And our cultural tapestry will stop being so vibrant, diverse, and vital.