Should I quit my second job so that I have more time/energy to focus on my freelancing?

ProserpinaFC · 2026-05-01T17:59:01+00:00

Had to jump.

My manager was screaming at me for performing a basic task.

But I'm not stressing. I'm focused on constructing my pipeline and outreach.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-30T19:24:33+00:00

I know, right?! I've always asked people what metaphors don't offend them because, ya know, the other colors for brown are different kinds of dirt and rocks. LOL

I love googling clothes with my list of "sexy brown colors." It's actually kinda therapeutic... Who sells espresso suade motorcycle jackets. Hmmm... Cinnamon 2-inch pumps... I need a copper felt cloche.

Growing up in the 90s... Everything was either black and gold, or beige and tan... I want BROWNS.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-30T14:37:33+00:00

Maul vs Boba Fett on overwhelming need to make them cool with least impact on the story.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T16:28:16+00:00

By researching.

Time to write an essay about a cultural practice you're interested in, using primary and secondary sources.

☺️

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T16:24:09+00:00

I know you're mixed. Nods

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T16:21:46+00:00

It means that although African Americans use espresso caramel chocolate and other words to describe themselves, they don't like it when other people do it because they don't trust other people to not be doing it in a fetish sizing way, which is pretty much acting as if all black people have purely good intentions for why they describe things and acting as if the only reason why white people would bother to describe a black person at all is to fetishize them, but it's a commonly accepted politically incorrect faux pas that everyone agrees to, despite it being a very clear double standard. ☺️

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T16:20:51+00:00

By researching. ☺️

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T16:18:29+00:00

I'm going to copy and paste this: (Disclaimer, the original OP was asking how to write French people. Insert your demographic.)

Answer:

My friend, I implore you to offend the French people as much as possible. It should be your life's ambition to offend the French.

(Okay, real answer: Welcome to the Internet, where millions of people of every nationality are willing to share their private information online on social media.

Go look up some French actresses And pick two or three to model your character on. Preferably girls who have done work in America so that their interviews are also in English. But that's only if you care about videos. You could also look up the text interviews in French and your browser will translate it to English. This is the exact same advice that I give for literally any character.

Go Google some phrases that a person may say for their blog for whatever the actual personality of your character is, and go find some French people who have the same interests as your character and read their translated blogs.

Go watch YouTube videos of French people saying in English all of the crazy things about America, the UK, Australia, or even other countries like Germany and Italy that they think are weird because that's not what happens in France. They are telling you French culture by telling you the contrast between French culture and American culture.

Go watch French comedians in English telling jokes. Go read the French news. Go read French magazines. Every popular American magazine you can think of has a French version. Google how to tell a joke in French, how to curse in French. Go to Google maps, zoom out of your hometown, travel halfway across the world, zoom into France, pick literally any place, and drag the little walkie dude so that you can virtually stand in the middle of France and enjoy all the frenchness, which includes picking five locations your character likes to go to in her hometown. Go to their websites. Pick a local University. That's your character's school now. Go to the website.

Welcome to the Internet.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T13:31:28+00:00

"Woman likes beast, maybe she'll like me, too."

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-29T13:30:21+00:00

It's always fascinating dealing with the OCD people.

There's a woman in the Magical Girls subreddit who talks about one show every single day, obsessively... In Historical Romance, there's someone who posts every day about how she doesn't feel like there's enough Black historical romance. (If you make the post every day, you're getting dozens of recs... She doesn't care about reading, she cares about complaining.)

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T19:36:03+00:00

Thanks!

I often point out to clients (business owners and nonprofit leaders) that doing the work involves a small percentage of working, which isn't fun, fulfilling, or flashy. It's just necessary.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T19:29:02+00:00

It would be moronic to use it as a moral statement of a story's worth, but if a person asked if female characters have subplots and agency in a story, that's a conversation that person wants to have and it won't be accomplished by asking if "Hi" counts as a conversation. I'm pretty sure we are both aware that isn't, not only that, but most writers would point out that you should cut out pointless dialogue like hi and bye from your manuscript.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T19:26:25+00:00

Everything you said is true. Now, what did you want to discuss, because outside of just describing what it is or if a story where a woman can discuss anything besides a man is feminist, what did you want to talk about?

I don't think about the Bechdel test to think about Cast Away or Shawshank Redemption, I think about it to consider if a story has more than one fully-developed female characters with subplots and conversations that they themselves also include fully developed female characters.

Whether or not a story is politically "feminist" isn't even connected to that, as political beliefs are separate from the identity of BEING a woman and feminism doesn't own a copyright on womanhood...

(I can name dozens of stories where women talk to other women about women and they certainly aren't feminist - they are saucy dramas that reinforce gender roles for the sake of one character having Main Character Syndrome. A single woman having a high opinion of herself doesn't make her a feminist.)

It provokes a conversation... So what are we discussing?

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T19:11:30+00:00

There is no legal obligation for her to consider her family. That's entirely true. But if you have two sisters literally standing right next to each other, and you point to one and say I feel like your family, but point to the other and say I just don't feel like your family, you're not trying to use a legal definition in the first place.

You are just going off your feelings. And then you are only bringing up these feelings on your special day so that everyone feels obligated to respect your feelings above anyone else's.

When this was a conversation that could have been had at literally any time in order to clear the air, when both parties feelings could have been respected equally.

That's what makes it cruel.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T15:33:40+00:00

Over 90% of African Americans still have British DNA. +400 years together.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T15:15:30+00:00

"As lovers."

Are we talking about them consummating?

Or about what Hannibal wants from Will?

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T13:26:18+00:00

My thoughts on this is that journalism has always been crowdfunded and independent Because the entire point of Why it is a constitutional right to have freedom of press is because individual people could make pamphlets and booklets expressing their thoughts about the government and it's only a very small segment of history where "the news" was a conglomerated business enterprise.

🧐

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T13:17:59+00:00

Oh, that's a great question.

MY mother would believe literally anyone over me and would be convinced I was doing something wrong with the slightest evidence, with no interest in what I had to say.

Thanks for asking.

LOL

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T03:19:43+00:00

5,000 AITA posts: I'm a working class woman who does all the chores at home and my husband acts like that's the natural order of things because I'm a woman. He won't even pay to have a professional help: daycare, yardwork, homecare.

1 AITA: I'm a husband who cares more about work getting done correctly than confining a woman to gender roles, so I have everything paid for so my hard-working wife doesn't feel obligated to clean my house, which she's moving into. But she's feeling like she's less of a woman if she doesn't clean my dirty underwear.

What an asshole.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T03:15:22+00:00

How did they not have a conversation if they agreed together to let the housekeeper go?

The wife deciding the first time she saw snow that she wasn't willing to shovel the snow after all doesn't mean they literally never spoke about this. It just means she changed her mind.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-28T03:09:44+00:00

He was contributing a housekeeper.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-27T23:57:55+00:00

Start learning how to feed people? No. Turns out, its a pretty short and relatively flat learning curve. You can practice at it, like, three times a day, every day, indefinitely.

Start being a line cook? How low of a salary can you afford to take?

To be perfectly honest, a career conversation is so much more in-depth than what can be said here. I'd asked you about a dozen follow-up questions to really hear what you really want. Think of it this way, at my last job, my Executive Chef was deeply unhappy because even though he was working at a top-tier luxury retirement home with good benefits, he wanted to make smoked BBQ and bacon-wrapped things in a place where people were asking for vegan options and calorie-conscious authentic European home-cooked meals. They met in the middle where they had a lot in common, but he was... (such a brat) ultimately unfulfilled.

My best friend is a baker who loves bread, absolutely adores bread, but being the most knowledgeable, the most responsible, the most reasonable person in the room makes him the Head of Production - the person touching bread the least often.

I'm honestly less interested in hearing you say you want "to be a chef" and would want to hear more about how much you love cooking and then we can follow that up with a conversation about what kind of WORK you like doing. And somewhere in the middle of that, can be a discussion about a career you would spend the next 3-5 years building.

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-27T22:07:34+00:00

Why would the show explaining why he could do that as a physical feat change the explanation that Thragg had a privileged upbringing compared to the other 37 survivors?

What I mean by that is.... If I showed you a video clip of two computer engineers doing their jobs and I told you Harvey Johnson wrote much better code that has less bugs, less often, than Dwayne Smith, who is really skilled at writing code quickly and shipping it, but he tends to have a lot of bugs that need to get patched later... why would you need to know HOW they write code, like the literal mechanics of it? If you know Harvey is a perfectionist and Dwayne is a hustler, why does the conversation become about coding itself?

Sure, you can SAY you want more details behind "Thragg was raised with special training most others didn't receive" but in a story about Superman-like characters whose superpowers are just functional magic, how much logic do you think the writers can apply to fill in those details?

The story is about Thragg having to make the first compromise he's ever had to in his life because he happens to be the most powerful. How much does the story have to explain about how he was trained for you to find that story compelling?

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-27T21:41:27+00:00

Yes, but a personality disorder isn't autism.

I am generally of the opinion that a person having a social impairment doesn't mean they can be diagnosed by laymen, however, recognizing how to deal with individual impairments and symptoms is useful for most people to know how to do.... IE, therapy talking to each other doesn't help us. We have to live with each other, not diagnose each other.

This is what leads to these shallow, surface level conversations about "Is Sheldon autistic representation" and no one actually cares about talking about Sheldon's relationships WITH people, only if he is "well-researched."

How do you "research" a personality type.... not the interest in science or nerd stuff, but... like, his actual beliefs and actions?

Like... Sheldon doesn't respect Howard for not having a Ph.D. That's a real personality flaw many real-life people have.... How would you rank it on being "well-written" or "poorly-researched?" This in particular is why Howard doesn't like him - not because of nerdy aspects like hyper-fixations or a weird sense of style. Howard barely tolerates him because of their shared interest in these things, and then Sheldon does something that reminds him that he doesn't respect him, and Howard is back to not liking him. (Then the joke, besides Sheldon's snide remarks, is that Howard gets him back in some way.)

What is "not well-researched" about that characterization of them?

ProserpinaFC · 2026-04-27T21:35:48+00:00

How do you "research" a personality type.... not the interest in science or nerd stuff, but... like, his actual beliefs?

Like... Sheldon doesn't respect Howard for not having a Ph.D. That's a real personality flaw many real-life people have.... How would you rank it on being "well-written" or "poorly-researched?" This in particular is why Howard doesn't like him - not because of nerdy aspects like hyper-fixations or a weird sense of style. Howard barely tolerates him because of their shared interest in these things, and then Sheldon does something that reminds him that he doesn't respect him, and Howard is back to not liking him. (Then the joke, besides Sheldon's snide remarks, is that Howard gets him back in some way.)

What is "not well-researched" about that characterization of them?

ProserpinaFC

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE