mouseonamoose

[mouseonamoose]

How is this a question? He's wearing tight-ass pants and a mesh shirt; he out-disco'd disco; he has two ears and a heart and deeply unresolved questions about his sexual identity. This man has got Dancing Queen tattooed on his soul.

Would Harrier "Harry" Du Bois form Disco Elysium listen to dancing queen by abba

[mouseonamoose]

1920 c. Pals. From America in the 1920s, FB.

[mouseonamoose]

Hey, stop scrolling for a minute. How are you doing? You okay? Come and sit down with me in the kitchen for a bit. It’s a warm day, the radio is playing all the oldies, the door is open and we can hear the birds. I’ll stick the kettle on. Do you take milk? Sugar? I’m baking some bread today, do you want to help? Or you can just sit and keep me company if you like. You can tell me everything that’s been going on. Or you could info dump about your favourite thing or tv show, I’d love to hear about the things you like. Or you can just sit at the table if you want, you could paint or draw or play animal crossing whilst I go about the kitchen and we can pass the time of day in contended quietness. Because you’re safe here. You can stay as long as you like and you can always come back. Everything will be okay, darling, you’ll see.

[mouseonamoose]

thinkin about a baby of my acquaintance & how when her parents are hanging out & chatting, she’ll almost fully participate in the conversation–politely watching who’s talking, saying something approx the same length & tone of what her parents are saying, occasionally using a questioning cadence & looking at someone specific for an answer, laughing when they laugh–doing everything except actually using any recognizable language

[mouseonamoose]

Anyone have any recommendations for a good production of Julius Caesar that's available to watch online?

Two weeks until the Ides of March!

[mouseonamoose]

sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute

[mouseonamoose]

Man and his dog in a Photo Booth at Grand Central Station, 1943

[mouseonamoose]

Elon Musk attacked democracy defender and superstar court lawyer Marc Elias as “undermining civilization,” taunting him by asking if he suffered “generational trauma.”

Elias’s response was brilliant and worth amplifying:

Mr. Musk,

You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.

I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.

I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will.

But this is not the reason I am writing. You don’t know me. You have no idea whether I have suffered trauma and if I have, how it has manifested. And it’s none of your business.

However, I will address your last point about generational trauma. I am Jewish, though many on your site simply call me “a jew.” Honestly, it’s often worse than that, but I’m sure you get the point. There was a time when Twitter would remove antisemitic posts, but under your leadership, tolerating the world’s oldest hatred now seems to be a permissible part of your “free speech” agenda.

Like many Jewish families, mine came to America because of trauma. They were fleeing persecution in the Pale of Settlement — the only area in the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to reside. Even there, life was difficult — often traumatic. My family, like others, lived in a shtetl and was poor. Worse, pogroms were common — violent riots in which Jews were beaten, killed and expelled from their villages.

By the time my family fled, life in the Pale had become all but impossible for Jews. Tsar Nicholas II’s government spread anti-Jewish propaganda that encouraged Russians to attack and steal from Jews in their communities. My great-grandfather was fortunate to leave when he did. Those who stayed faced even worse circumstances when Hitler’s army later invaded.

That is the generational trauma I carry. The trauma of being treated as “other” by countrymen you once thought were your friends. The trauma of being scapegoated by authoritarian leaders. The trauma of fleeing while millions of others were systematically murdered. The trauma of watching powerful men treat it all as a joke — or worse.

As an immigrant yourself, you can no doubt sympathize with what it means to leave behind your country, extended family, friends and neighbors to come to the United States. Of course, you probably had more than 86 rubles in your pocket. You probably didn’t ride for nine days in the bottom of a ship or have your surname changed by immigration officials. Here is the ship manifest showing that my family did. Aron, age three, was my grandfather.

[see image in comments]

As new immigrants, life wasn’t easy. My family lived in cramped housing without hot water. They worked menial jobs — the kind immigrants still perform today.

Some may look down on those immigrants — the ones without fancy degrees — but my family was proud to work and grateful that the United States took them in. They found support within their Jewish community and a political home in the Democratic Party.

I became a lawyer to give back to the country that gave my family a chance. I specialize in representing Democratic campaigns because I believe in the party. I litigate voting rights cases because the right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. I speak out about free and fair elections because they are under threat.

Now let me address the real crux of your post.

You are very rich and very powerful. You have thrown in with Donald Trump. Whether it is because you think you can control him or because you share his authoritarian vision, I do not know. I do not care.

Together, you and he are dismantling our government, undermining the rule of law and harming the most vulnerable in our society. I am just a lawyer. I do not have your wealth or your platform. I do not control the vast power of the federal government, nor do I have millions of adherents at my disposal to harass and intimidate my opponents. I may even carry generational trauma.

But you need to know this about me. I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant.

I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.

I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.

Defiantly,

Marc Elias

[mouseonamoose]

No Amazon. No Walmart. No Target. No Disney. No Google. No Apple. No Visa or Mastercard. And especially no Facebook. I will not be posting on Meta platforms for the next 24 hours in support of the economic blackout.

[mouseonamoose]

Eee! How good to be an exception!

It is interesting, though, isn't it? How hard it is to make fictional therapy enjoyable? This is something I've put some thought into, and I'm curious if my reasoning seems to be on the right track to others.

So, if I may, would you be willing to consider: why is fictional therapy so often so boring?

I think, first, we have to acknowledge that therapy, in itself, is boring. It's meaningful and deep and soul-crushing and soul-enriching in all best ways, but it's not really much fun to watch. Nothing happens in therapy. If you can either read a story about someone battling Godzilla or read a story about that person, after the fact, describing their battle with Godzilla in an intentionally safe and calming environment, it's pretty easy to imagine which one is going to be more interesting, isn't it? Now, sometimes, stories make the therapeutic re-telling function as a vehicle for the original story. But either that makes therapy a mere narrative device which can be easily ignored, or it involves a lot of time spent with the client acting as storyteller. And most people aren't good storytellers, especially when they're describing something traumatic. So, either they'll describe the Godzilla battle in a very uninteresting way (filled with gaps, confusion, ugly sobs, and all the rest), or their retelling will be incredibly out of character. Neither is a good time.

The thing is, in therapy, there's too little conflict. Both participants have agreed on their joint goals, and one of the participants is especially trained to manage conflict in emotionally mature ways.

Of course, not all therapists are actually good at their job. There are plenty of ways to get conflict into a therapy session, if the therapist is bad at it. But then, what's the point? The whole reason you'd throw a character in therapy is to see the therapy process succeed, so using a bad therapist is counterproductive. Also--and maybe this isn't true for everyone, but it's certainly true for me--it's deeply unpleasant to watch ethical lapses. Season 2 of Ted Lasso makes me cringe so hard, I completely stopped with the show.

This is why I think the therapy stories that are successful tend to revolve around the therapist getting sucked into the client's world in some way. The therapist starts out calm, collected, professional (cough), but then slowly unravels given the reality of the client's existence. But there's a catch-22, here: as soon as the therapist starts working to confront the client's reality on her own, it's no longer a therapy story. It's a story about a therapist, which is something different. The client is like the instigating event for the story, rather than the main character. I'm thinking of The Sopranos, here, and how Melfi ended up with a plot-line that was separate from Tony's.

Now, above, I said there isn't much conflict in therapy. That's not actually true. In fact, it's reasonable to understand all therapy through the lens of the interpersonal conflict between therapist and client. The way it's often put: whatever issues the client has outside of therapy will come into the room during therapy as well. Someone with avoidant attachment will be avoidant in therapy; someone with anxiety will be anxious in therapy; etc. But you have to be really careful, because the therapist is trying to avoid being a participant in the client's issues, but instead an observer, guide, confidant, interpreter, and so forth. Again, the nature of (good) therapy undermines the opportunities for (narrative) conflict.

I think this is related to a problem that you'll often see in therapy stories (as opposed to stories about therapists): it is easy for the therapist to feel psychologically empty. It's something I've noticed in therapy fic I've read: we are (ostensibly) put in the therapist's POV, so that we can examine the client's personality from the outside, but the therapist's POV is constructed in a way that emphasizes only the aspects of her personality that are available to the client during session. (When evaluating a therapy story with a therapist POV, it may be worth asking: given what you have been given of the therapist, can you imagine how they'd deal with needing to fart in the middle of a session?)

So, here's a puzzle to writing a therapy story: you need the therapist to be a fleshed out, real person, and yet you're putting her in an environment where her behavior is constricted. A therapy story is built around two people, but where only one of them, by confines of both the genre and setting, is supposed to get attention.

Another puzzle to writing a therapy story: the goal of the story is to get the character to behave out of character. That's what healing is, isn't it? It's learning different habits, experiencing emotions in different ways, managing relationships differently. So, if you're writing a therapy story about an already well-known character, you've put yourself on the tightrope of keeping the character true to self while also intentionally getting them to behave out of character. You have to ask yourself, "What's the in-character way for me to get this character to behave out of character?" And that's not an easy question to answer.

A partial answer is: make it slow. Oh, a therapy fic has to be slow. Slooooowwwwww. And this is another tightrope: maintaining the snail's pace of character development while also not having anything else for the story to focus on other than that character's development.

Is there any upshot to all these ramblings? Say, is there any advice we can give to the writer interested in writing a therapy fic, in light of the above? Probably not. But, just to try, perhaps we can present some following rules of thumb:

--Make sure you know what your therapist is like when they have to fart.

--Find the point of conflict between the therapist and the client, then have the therapist and client team up against that conflict.

--Avoid telling. As much as possible, do not describe the events or conditions that led to the client seeking therapy. Stay in the room, as much as possible.

--If you can only make the story interesting by having your therapist do poorly at her job, make sure this is motivated. As much as possible, make it rhyme with the client's reason for needing therapy in the first place.

Or, at least, I think so. If you've read this much (thank you), do you think I'm on the right track?

I don’t want to read about characters having therapy, I especially don’t want to sit in on their therapy sessions, and I am definitely not putting therapy in anything I write.

[mouseonamoose]

[mouseonamoose]

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

[mouseonamoose]

But god as my witness HE WILL

"He would not fucking say that" but it's "He would not handle someone having a breakdown in front of him like that."

[mouseonamoose]

it's so weird to me that everyone on this website is a human person outside of their weird internet niche so rb this with a random bit of your lore

[mouseonamoose]

Today is a great day to go adopt a kitten without my husband's knowledge. Today is a great day for my husband to come home from work and find we now have a kitten. Nothing bad could come of the surprise-we-have-a-kitten-now plan.

[mouseonamoose]

rb to give your mutuals a silly little paper valentine card and a red heart shaped lollipop 💖

[mouseonamoose]

Just got caught up w/ Sugarpop Psychdrama and omggggg you are so right and a genius and THE PINE SMELL??? HELLO???

Thank-you for sharing your work with the rest of us 🥇🏆🥇

Look, the pine scent isn't a big deal!!! It's just what disinfectant smells like!!! Some guys just really like sports, okay????

I am very glad you're enjoying it. :-)