#UserWorldProblems

[astercontrol]

If KOSA passes

Or if any other form of censorship (there are many in the works!) ever succeeds at stepping in to impede our ability to communicate online:

We have to make plans.

Now, I dunno who'll even see this post. The few followers I have are TRON fans (who despite the fantasy we live in, tend to have realistically dismal views IRL about Disney and the various corporate uses of software).

And this fandom, on average, is pretty tech-savvy. It's where I've encountered the most people under 20 years old who actually know how to use a desktop or laptop computer.

So, if there's any hope for what I'm thinking about, this is prolly a good place to start with it.

(As with all my posts, I encourage reblogging and containment-breaching.)

(Gifs are clips from TRON 1982, mainly the "deleted love scene," from the DVD extras.)

Anyway.

Current society has moved online communication much too far onto major social media sites for my comfort. Whoever you communicate with over the internet, chances are you do it through a service owned by a big company: Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, whatever. Even TikTok (shudder).

These sites, despite their many flaws, can provide experiences that are valuable and hard to get otherwise. And once all your friends are on one site, you can't just leave and stay in touch with them all, not unless they all go the same place. It's easy to see why it's hard to abandon any social media platform.

But a backup plan is important. Because, as we've seen over and over, social media sites can't be relied on. They change their policies suddenly, without good reason-- and are inconsistent, even discriminatory, about enforcing those policies.

If they're funded by ads, the advertisers are their main customers, and your posts are the product. Their goal is that the posts most valuable to the advertisers get seen by people the advertisers consider desirable customers.

Helping you communicate-- making your posts get seen by the people you want to communicate with-- is optional to them.

Not to mention that the whole business model of an ad-funded website is generally unsustainable. Many of these sites are operating at a loss, relying on shareholders in a fragile bubble, doomed to fail soon just from lack of real profit.

And the more restrictions --like KOSA-- that the law puts on freedom of online speech, the likelier they are to go down or just become unusable. Every rule a site is required to follow is another strain on its resources, and most of them are already failing badly at even enforcing their own self-imposed rules.

If we want any control over our continued ability to stay in touch with our online friends-- we need to have a backup plan. Maybe it'll be simple at first, a bare-bones system we cobble together-- but it's gotta be something that will work. For a while at least.

There are lots of really good posts about ways to build your own website, using a service like Neocities. I VERY MUCH recommend learning this skill-- learning to make websites of the very simplest, most stable, glitch-resistant type, made of html pages-- which you can upload to a host while you store backups on your home computer. If you value the writing and art that you put online, this is probably the safest you can keep it.

But that's for making your own creative work public.

As for communicating with others-- for example, receiving and answering other people's comments on your work-- that gets more complex. I personally haven't found it worthwhile to troubleshoot the problems that come with having a system that allows visitors to comment publicly on my website.

But what we do still have-- and likely will for a long time-- is email.

Those of us who came of age before social media's current hold... well, we might take this for granted. Email was the first form of online contact we ever encountered… and thus it can seem to us like the most ordinary, the most boring.

But in the current world, it is a rare and precious thing to find a method of communicating that doesn't require everyone in the chat to be signed on with the same corporation.

Email is, as of now, still perfectly legal-- as much as social media companies have been trying to herd the populace away from it. I'm sure there are other ways to share thoughts online that are not bound by laws. But I am not going to go into that here.

Email service is provided by law-abiding companies, which will comply with subpoenas if law enforcement thinks you are emailing about doing illegal things. So, email is not a surefire way to be safe, if laws become dystopian enough to threaten your freedom to talk about your own life and identity.

But it's safer than posting on a public social media page.

For now.

Email is beautifully decentralized. You can get an email address many different ways-- some reliant on a company like Gmail, others hosted on your own domain. And different people, with all different types of email addresses, hosted in all different ways-- can all communicate together by the same method.

Of course any of these people, individually, can lose their email address for some reason or other, and have to get a new one. But as long as they still know the email addresses of their contacts, they can reconnect and recover from that loss. The structure of a group linked by email is reliant not on a single company-- but on the group itself, the friends you can actually count on.

This is why I am trying to promote the idea of forming email lists, as a backup plan to give people a way to stay in touch as mainstream social media sites prove to be unsustainable.

I'm envisioning a simple system of sending emails to several addresses at once, and making each reply visible to everyone in the chat by using "reply all" (or, if desired, editing the To field to reply to only some).

If enough people get used to using email in this way, it could fill most of the needs met by any other group chat or forum …without depending on a centralized social media company that's taking dystopian measures to try and make the business profitable.

So here are some thoughts about how I personally imagine it could work.

(Feel free to comment and bring up any thoughts I haven't addressed, or suggestions to customize how specific groups could set it up. This is meant as more of a starting point for brainstorming than a catch-all solution.)

As I see it, here are the basics of what you and your friends would each need to start out:

An email address. Any kind, hosted anywhere. You should use a dedicated email account just for this group, one that you do NOT use for other communication. Being in this group will result in things you don't want happening to your main email address-- like getting a TON of email, one for every post and reply. Or someone could get your email address that you really don't want any contact with. Use a burner email account (one that you can easily replace) and change it if needed.

The knowledge of how to "REPLY ALL" in your email. This will be necessary in order to add a comment that everyone in the group can see.

The knowledge of how to EDIT THE "TO" FIELD in your email, and remove addresses from the list of all recipients. This will be necessary if you want to CHANGE WHICH PEOPLE in the group can see your comment.

The knowledge of how to FILTER WORDS in your email. This will be necessary if a topic comes up that you don't want to see any mentions of.

The knowledge of how to BLOCK PEOPLE in your email. This will be very important. If someone joins this email group who you do not want to interact with, it will be up to you to BLOCK them so that you do NOT see their messages. (If they are bad enough to evade the block with multiple burner accounts, that's what you have a burner account for. Change it, and share the new one only with those you trust not to give it to them.)

Every person in the group will be effectively a "moderator" of the group, able to remove people from it by cutting their email addresses out of the "To" field. Members will all have equal "moderator" privileges, each able to tailor the group to their own needs.

This means the group may naturally split, over time, into other groups, each one removing some people and adding others. Some will overlap, some won't. This is good! This is, in my opinion, what online interaction SHOULD be like! There should be MANY groups like this!

In this way, we can keep online discussion alive, no matter WHAT happens to any of the social media websites.

If the dystopia got bad enough to shut down email, we could even continue with postal mail and photocopies, like they did in the days of print-zine fanfiction.

If it looks like the dystopia is gonna come for postal mail too, we'll use the connection we have to preserve whatever contacts we can with people who live near us.

Not saying it's GONNA get that bad. But these steps of preparation are good no matter exactly what kind of bad stuff happens.

As long as some organized form of communication still exists, we'll have a place where it's at least a little safer to be your true self…

to plan events and meetups…

and maybe even activities a little too risque to make the final cut of a 1982 Disney movie.

They're trying to censor us. We want a Free System. So we're gonna fight back.

For the Users. Not the corporations.

Peace out, programs. <3

[astercontrol]

I'm both "no binario" and "no binaria" because I am not masculine-binary and I am also not feminine-binary

[astercontrol]

kinda feel like all social media sites are probably doomed

Because providing a social media site costs money for all the servers and bandwidth... and a social media site doesn't MAKE money, except from advertisers (which is never enough to cover the cost, from what I've heard)

and supposedly most of the actual money is from shareholders who just invest because they hope the value will be higher at some time later on, even if they don't believe the service will ever start making real profit, they just expect more shareholder money to go in, and this will only keep going for as long as people keep doing this

And I guess also there's money from people buying things like extra features and premium accounts

Except that most of us don't want to do that, and we've even got a culture of actively discouraging paying for those things, because we don't want to support the site owners, because they are evil

I mean obviously. they are CEOs of corporations. They are gonna keep doing more and more unethical stuff to try and squeeze money out of the site in as many ways as possible, for as long as it is possible

And of course we know that if they stop being able to make money, they aren't gonna keep running their business at a loss just for the sake of being kind to us

So, I guess we're all just living in the moment and trying not to think about what we'll do when the bubble bursts

And I really really need to work some more on my HTML site and figure out how I'm gonna connect it to others who have HTML sites (90s-era geocities webring style lol) and also set up an email list or whatever

But I am sooooooo tiiiired

[astercontrol]

Now that you mention it, why the heck is Tron a franchise in the first place?

I don't know.

I've talked before about how it's kinda futile to try and theorize why any large organization of people does anything. Especially one like Disney.

I mean, of course the ultimate motive has gotta be profit, and yet the original Tron was, as I understand it, not all that profitable by the standards of Disney's expectations. It was a very un-Disney-like movie, pitched by independent screenwriters, allowed more freedom than most Disney movies ever get... and the fact that it built a truly devoted fan base over the years was a thing Disney had no real control over, which I know they don't like.

I'm sure all subsequent official Tron materials have been attempts to monetize that devoted little fan base, but they've varied a lot in how successful that was.

And I sure don't claim to be an expert on Disney at ALL-- I'd mostly rather not even think about them-- but from what I've heard (especially lately) they are usually very reluctant to take chances on anything that is so hit-and-miss in terms of the chance of monetary success.

(It's why they didn't make Tron 3 a whole bunch of years ago-- there was another movie that flopped and it got them scared about the risk that Tron could flop and so they just froze and did nothing with it for a long ass time.)

I think their decreasing willingness to take chances is definitely hitting the quality of what they do make, although this has been a problem for Disney and to some degree the whole entertainment industry for a long time.

I do not know why they have focused any effort on building the Tron franchise specifically. Maybe it's just a case of "only so many properties that already have fans, and we've already milked the others half to death, so it's either milk Tron or make up something new and omg we can never do that lol"

But again, I'm not saying I know. Not saying they have a cohesive plan of any kind. The workings of corporate motivations are a mystery to me, and probably a mystery to anyone who recognizes true chaos when they see it.

Said it before and I'll say it again. Whether they meant it or not, Disney's had Kevin Flynn as a self-insert character for a long time.

[astercontrol]

On the subject of problematic stories, fanfiction archive policies, and "(x) fans DNI"…

Here's my analysis on… well, how a visceral moral/ethical response can never fully work in tandem with the practical considerations of policy and enforcement.

Yes, there are some stories that I find irredeemable, stories so upsetting that I would genuinely not want the writers of them to ever interact with me. Mostly these are stories about truly horrible acts-- things like rape, child molesting, domestic abuse, racist hate-crimes, genocide--

--and I don't just mean any story that mentions or depicts these acts in any way, because lots of stories can talk about those concepts without making me hate the author or wish the story would disappear.

No, I'm specifically referring to stories that portray these things in a way that strongly suggests the author likes them… a lot, to the point of probably wanting to commit these acts in real life.

And yes, there are some stories that do convey that feeling quite strongly, without much room for other interpretations. I'm not gonna claim that every story has the right to a charitable interpretation. Some people do just… write to express really hateful, toxic thoughts without any redeeming quality about them.

And yes, I do think that there are certain stories that "All Reasonable People" would agree fit in that category.

Not many of them. The vast majority of stories have some room for sympathy. And even for the worst ones, reasonable people can disagree a lot on just what should be done with such stories. But I'd say that for those few, bottom-of-the-barrel worst stories, those same reasonable people would at least be in agreement that the writer is someone they would not want to ever be around, and that the stories do nothing much except spread hate and encourage hurtful ideas.

Practically speaking, though-- just how could you structure the rules and rule-enforcement of a fiction site to exclude those stories specifically?

For instance. Say I'm a site-owner writing my terms of service and trying to make it clear there's no tolerance for rape or abuse, underage sex, racism or sexism or homophobia…

Well, for one thing, there's all the technical detail of how you define every one of those things. And that's its own whole set of challenges, which have been explored in many many other essays. Do stories about sex-pollen or mating cycles count as rape? Can a coffeeshop AU romance between customer and employee ever truly be consensual, with that power dynamic where the employee knows she can get fired if a spurned customer makes a retaliatory complaint to a manager? And how clearly do you have to show characters planning out healthy boundaries to stop BDSM play from being abuse? Is it abusive to ship characters who have had fantasy or sci-fi battles with each other? In a world that has magical beings, robots and clones and space aliens of all kinds, what even counts as a race? And in that same diverse setting, is a character's age defined by number of years, mental maturity level, appearance, or some combination thereof?

It's all been analyzed into oblivion, without ever reaching an overall consensus.

But even on the topics where there is consensus-- even regarding scenarios that that are very obviously rape or abuse or racist violence or child molestation in the consensus of All Reasonable People-- even there, how would I word the policy so I'm not prohibiting critical discussion of those topics?

If I just say, for instance, "stories can't have child sex abuse or racial hate crimes in them" …

...then, I'd be making it technically against the rules to post a story in which, say, a traumatized character talks to a therapist about their childhood experience of being a victim of sexual or racial violence.

And of course I don't want to ban that kind of story! Being free to talk about traumatic experiences is vitally important. Being free to show fictional characters having that kind of talk can also be vitally important.

And, personally, the degree of detail or explicitness also isn't what I'd try and regulate. The gist of the rule I'd want to write would be something along the lines of, "I don't want any stories that show these things and glorify them, eroticize or romanticize them; that portray them in a positive way."

But this rule-- like most definitions and rules, honestly-- cannot be written in a way that inherently, explicitly forbids all the stories I want to keep out, while inherently, explicitly allowing all those I want to allow.

Language simply can't do that.

Apart from rules written in programming language for governing the activities of software, rules never work "inherently" and "explicitly," anyway. They work in conjunction with human rule-enforcers.

The closest I could get to my goal, here, would be to use something like that vaguely written rule, "No stories that glorify, eroticize or romanticize these things," and then have a team of moderators interpret it on a case-by-case basis.

A case-by-case basis is the most high-effort way to enforce anything. But for a LOT of things, it's the only way that comes close to working. Anything that can only be defined as "I know it when I see it!" …has to be regulated by people knowing it when they see it.

And yes, if all those people had the same general common sense that I consider myself to have, and enough time and freedom to exercise it-- yes, I think they would be able to weed out all the stories that "All Reasonable People" would consider so toxic as to have no redeeming value.

But two big problems here:

This would require the moderators to read every story-- or at least to read and make a decision on every story that got enough reports from users who felt it broke the rules. Unless the site was very small, this would be a huge undertaking, requiring many hours of labor from the mods.

Unless the site was very small, they would not be able to do it without also weeding out some stories that do have redeeming value.

Because they would have to draw the line somewhere.

And with a large enough population of site members, a large enough team of moderators, and a large enough volume of stories posted, they could not draw that line consistently.

There would, inevitably, be complaints from all directions-- writers of all walks of life making accusations of bias, citing specific stories that got allowed, and contrasting them to other specific stories that got taken down.

There would be bias. There would be unfairness. It's not avoidable. And no matter who you are and what your tastes in fiction may be, it would, without fail, happen to some things that you think it shouldn't happen to.

Now, depending on your tastes, you may feel this would be a fair tradeoff for a site that successfully kept out most or all of the fiction you consider the worst.

But, so far, that has not been the case with any big fanfiction site.

On every large site that bans certain types of fanfiction identified on a case-by-case basis, there is widespread dissatisfaction with how it is or isn't enforced. It just isn't possible to do that kind of enforcement, on that kind of scale, and keep any large percentage of people satisfied.

Even AO3, which has very few rules of that sort, still gets its share of complaints. It does have some rules-- no monetizing fanfiction, no plagiarism, no doxxing-- and those are, to some degree, things that have to be interpreted and identified on a case-by-case basis by individual volunteer moderators.

And even with these comparatively simple decisions, there is a limit to how much of that they can get done in a day, and how consistent they can be at it… and, therefore, a limit to how much of the userbase they can satisfy.

And if you want to understand why they won't make more rules about the content of the fiction--

--just try to imagine, for a few moments, adding all that, on top of the current enforcement tasks those volunteers already do.

Imagine the logistics of it, the details. The work of reading and categorizing everything that gets reported. The dilemma of where to draw the line in each and every case, without those decisions forming any unfair pattern of inconsistency.

It could be done, maybe.

But it hasn't been done successfully, on that scale, ever.

If you were in their position, would you want to take that risk?

[astercontrol]

I will reblog this thing about LGBTQ rights and "the Hammer Grant"

at my own risk of being hit with... the Ban Hammer that thinks every mention of hammers is a nail

[astercontrol]

how I dress

(like every day. me-reveal behind the cut. yes I made most of those clothes)

[astercontrol]

pattern recognizer: "the twin towers"

me: "what"

pattern recognizer: "the two towers."

me: "which ones."

pattern recognizer: "the 10 towers."

me: "well, that is binary for two, but"

pattern recognizer: "the IO towers."

me: "i do not think any programs would appreciate your visual pun on those letters and numbers, but okay"

pattern recognizer: "...I was thinking of hitting the pentagon"

[astercontrol]

As someone who actually feels a lot of sympathy for children, but used to say "I hate children" far too carelessly, and is learning to cut out those words:

I agree with the recent turn (even in child-free spaces) toward discouraging that kind of statement.

It's not kind, to children or to those who care about them.

And it can muddle your own feelings, too, if you say it enough to internalize it… because often it's not exactly true.

Here are some things that may actually be going through the mind of someone who says that:

"I hate other people's expectation that I ought to give birth to children, or that I ought to do unpaid and coerced labor involved in taking care of their children."

"I hate the memory of what childhood was like for me."

"Seeing children in public, especially when they are being loud or difficult, reminds me of those things, stresses me out, and sets off responses of panic or anger."

In my current opinion, the proper response to this is:

Do one's best to learn coping mechanisms for when one has to be in public around children-- because there is no way to avoid this at all times, or to force parents to "control" their kids at all times.

When needing time away from children to recharge, do so in a space where this can reasonably be done.

I agree there are too few spaces like this. And most of them (like a bar) are places of noise and disruptive behavior… and therefore can set off the same sorts of overwhelmed panic for me that children can.

Honestly, there are too few places in general where an easily-overwhelmed person can find peace. It's why I spend so much time alone at home. And why I prefer to "socialize" in private spaces, like at my home or a friend's home, where I can choose to be there with only people I know and trust... people who I know don't overwhelm me in the ways children do.

More of us should have options like that.

However, none of this will ever make "I hate children" into a helpful statement.

When interacting with the type of people who pressure us about children, though… we have limited options.

If someone is saying "I need you to look after my kids," or even "You ought to become a parent," we can reply:

"Caring for kids stresses me out." (answer: "Join the club. They stress all of us out. You're selfish for refusing to take on your fair share of the stress.")

"Caring for kids brings back traumatic memories of my bad childhood." (answer: "Your childhood can't have been that bad. People with worse childhoods become parents. And if you need something to help you get over those bad memories, why not just do your part to give some kids a better childhood?")

"I am not good at caring for kids." (answer: "That's not true! I know you're a good person! You're sweet and gentle and smart and kind! You'll do fine!" …implication: only an evil person could be actually bad at caring for kids.)

If we want a response that will actually get someone to stop pestering us, it's down to pretty much only two options:

"I literally hate children and feel violent anger and rage upon seeing them." (this will convince the other person that we truly are Evil and Irredeemable, because no good person would ever say this. Thus, we get an exception to their rule that Everyone Should take care of children, because even they can't justify leaving kids in the care of an obvious villain.)

Or:

"I like children TOO MUCH and I'm legally prohibited from going within 300 feet of them." (also untrue, but same deal.)

….I'm unlearning the language of hate. But, by necessity, that also involves cutting out people like that from my entire life. If I had family members who acted this way, it would get more complex.

[astercontrol]

I am fairly sure I saw versions of this meme on 4chan well before 2016

(in fact I know that any versions of it I saw on 4chan were well before 2016 because I stopped ever going on 4chan sometime shortly after Hazukiget in 2006)

(which I do not even know why I'm publicly admitting, because the fact that I ever even knew THAT much about 4Chan is like the worst admission of being at the devil's sacrament)

(especially since the reason I left wasn't even because 4chan was awful. I found the awfulness morbidly fascinating and was kinda addicted. It was because everyone would spam the site trying for a "get" every other week and it would make the site unusable since every post would be pushed off the archive by 300,000 new posts within a minute)

(but I do remember the "intellectual" meme. Though I think back then it was more just rephrasing common sayings in "intellectual" style, rather than also juxtaposing them with the untranslated version)

you: suck my dick me, an intellectual: inhale my richard

[astercontrol]

you all know I'm not really interested in Legacy in anywhere near the depth that I'm interested in '82--

and YET, sometimes, these ideas keep coming to me

An idea in four weird acts:

1.

What if the Sea of Simulation was the same thing to Jordan that Clu was to Flynn.

what if she created it/ copied herself into it

and some version of her consciousness is in it, always working

and its purpose is to help make things

what if all the parts of the Grid that were made with her architectural skills just… appeared by emerging fully formed from the Sea

2.

what if this sentient Sea also, eventually, learned how to make living programs.

And those were the ISOs

like. I've seen theories about how the ISOs may have been like Flynn's children in a sense, because their creation may have somehow… spawned from his human presence on the Grid, or something

but… if the method of their creation also involved Jordan, this deepens that idea even further

(parallel to the River Jordan becomes almost painful…. body of water that has been the source and setting of endless history and life and culture but also endless war and violence. really that is… TOO much for me to even wanna get into. …moving on.)

3.

what if, as the creator of the ISOs, the Sea kept backups of her creations? What if the ISOs can be restored from her?

(If, as implied in the Betrayal comic, Clu poisoned the sea to prevent more ISOs emerging, then this may have harmed Jordan's program and/or the backups it was keeping.)

(But, maybe she has some form of protection. Maybe they're still in there and recoverable, if anyone's looking around after Legacy for ways to rebuild the Grid. We can only speculate!)

4.

As much as "reset buttons" that undo canonical harm are often seen as a lazy way out…

well, I often find them fascinating-- just for the (usually unexplored) ethical implications.

If everything and everyone that Clu destroyed can be brought back… what does this do to his villainhood?

And for this thought experiment, my brain is still stuck partway in the world of Riemann's fic The Five Stages of Rectification… where the premise is that both Clu and Flynn ended up still being alive after reintegration, just with their identities and worldviews very much shattered and needing to figure a whole lot of stuff out.

But whether or not Clu or Flynn still exist and have to live with this new reality-- and whether or not they are feeling remorse and seeking redemption--

the questions still remain deeply troubling, in regard to the atrocities that Clu committed, and the mistakes Flynn made that led to that happening.

if the Sea has backups... does it lessen the harm of what they did?

It may bring back everything they caused to be destroyed.

It doesn't change the intentions behind their actions. Doesn't change that many victims were killed with deliberate cruelty, and with the intention that they stay dead. (Ethical thought experiment: How much do intentions matter in comparison to outcome? Is this different depending on whether the outcome was better or worse than the intentions?)

It doesn't erase the suffering that happened during that destruction. The pain of those who were hurt and killed. The trauma of those who survived them. (Ethical thought experiment: If Clu could erase everyone's memory of the suffering he caused, thus removing the only thing still hurting anyone-- would it make things better, or worse?)

Further ethical thought experiment: How do these questions compare to arguments for why it is wrong to kill people in the real world, even if you believe that there is an afterlife where they will go and be happy forever?

just… a whole complicated MESS of ideas bursting out of this... which I am not even particularly interested in writing fic about, because deep philosophical moral questions are things I want in my fic as a background motif at MOST, and... this would definitely consume the entire theme of any story it got into.

Ah, Disney.

You can give every protagonist a dead mom who's such a non-character that it's easy to headcanon she never really existed.

BUT you cannot stop the fans from making something more out of what you've neglected.

Always.

[astercontrol]

I'm spoonerizing phrases for oral sex and getting mad at myself because "duck my sick" ("get out of the way before I projectile vomit on you") has been stuck in my head much too long when I could have replaced it with "cuck my sock" ("make my sock angry and/or aroused by wearing its assigned partner as part of a new and mismatched set of socks")

whole hilarious x rated sock puppet show could have been happening in my head all this time

[astercontrol]

when I run for office I will be 100% clear, transparent and consistent about whether i have fucked a couch. i will even post video if the american people want it

[astercontrol]

Can confirm

it's like that post about "if you get a working dog and don't give it a job it will give itself a job and that job will be disassembling your couch"

if I did not have creative writing (including a very generous helping of fanfiction and headcanon-building, and an avoirdupois shit ton of puns) the part of my brain now known as the "Pattern Recognizer" would either have discovered a unified theory of everything, or be building a conspiracy-theorist cult by now

I think 90% of conspiracy theorists would be a lot happier if they just bit the bullet and got into creative writing

[astercontrol]

I legitimately wonder who the target audience for TR3N is even supposed to be. It's clear the Tron franchise doesn't have much in the way of mainstream appeal. And none of the actors or narrative elements of the previous films are going to be featured. So, why is Disney bankrolling this thing? Did they just get sick of Leto pestering them and finally agreed to green light the film just to shut him up?

Yeah all of this. I honestly don't know.

I have long ago given up on trying to understand the choices of any large system of human actions (corporation, government, religion, political party, but ESPECIALLY corporation) as if it were a rational entity making choices like a person.

many batshit conspiracy theories stem from sheer desperation to understand just WHY these conglomerate entities choose to do things that, as far as we can see... benefit almost nobody... and don't even benefit the group as a whole, in the long term

but I think their choices are better understood as chaotic clusters of individual choices within them.

a scattered handful of individuals, in a few scattered, momentary, significant positions of power to make choices, each individually make the choice that benefits... them, personally.

their choices add up to... the Entity, as a whole, taking a direction that looks like... utter nonsense, from every perspective imaginable.

It's as if each cell in your body suddenly shifted to the course of action that... could lead to the longest lifespan for it, as an individual cell

many cells would outlive their individual life expectancy, by days or hours or minutes.

But the body as a whole, and every cell in it eventually, would die far too soon

and no one would ask why the body chose to do this. Because, clearly, it had no choice.

...that was much more serious analysis than you probably wanted. But it is 3 am and I have been in solitary covid confinement for a week and my filters for what I will post online are thinning dangerously, like a veil between this and some even more horrible world

tl;dr the actions of large groups of humans are chaos. but especially those who make up something like fucking Disney

[astercontrol]

In regard to that previous reblog-- and other notes in that thread discussing just how much hearing aids actually can or can't do, and vision problems that can't be corrected to 20/20, and other not-correctable disabilities--

...my thoughts are running off now into the fuzzy areas, which are places I... really tend to get uncomfortable.

Especially now, because I'm currently in a fuzzy place myself -- a state of health where I do not know if my impairments can be fully corrected -- and whether or not they can? may depend a lot on things like, will I find a doctor good enough to know what's going on? and, how bad will this new job be for my body?

and it stresses me out a lot to think about how I can't know the answers to any of that right now-- and that's about all I can handle, even without the added stress of trying to determine whether this makes me "legitimately" physically disabled.

Eyesight is only one small part of it. My main worry right now is that I have hardly any sensation or muscle control in my right calf and foot. With good shoes I can walk, without cane or crutches-- pretty far before my limp becomes noticeable-- but it does.

My legs are visibly different sizes, with my left calf taking on all the muscle, while my right is atrophying. And my foot "drops," noticeably, the outer side dragging to the point that I had to learn how to avoid tripping on my own foot. The PT says I'll likely need an orthotic brace called AFO to support it.

He doesn't know the cause. I won't know the cause until at the very least a couple weeks from now, when I get to see the spine specialist who'll look for causes further up in my muscular and nervous system.

I have a new job. It's gonna be mostly at a desk, but since this problem started while I was working a desk job, I wonder if sedentary life makes it worse. I haven't ever been able to drive (that was a different neurological issue in my teens) so I have to walk to work. If I stop being able to walk that far, I won't be able to keep doing this job. But for now I can. For now, for that distance, my walking almost passes as normal.

I don't know how close to normal that orthotic brace will get me. Or whether the exercises the PT is having me do, or anything the spine specialist can do, will restore any of that sensation or muscle. I don't know if there's any kind of correction that's gonna get my leg back into a range comparable to eyes that see 20/20.

And the eyesight part, at the moment, feels pretty much the same to me.

I just got new glasses. They help a lot, but they don't fix my problem focusing on close-up things-- I keep having to take them off and back on when reading, but my eye doctor said I didn't need bifocals, and none of the available prescriptions of reading glasses help either, and it seems to be getting steadily worse.

And I don't know if this is all just something I can get back up to 20/20 by finding a better eye doctor, or by getting better about my reading and screen use habits, or if it's something more serious that is never gonna get better.

And I have no idea if all the data entry im going to do at my new job is going to exacerbate it, or maybe it's just going to get worse for whatever other reason, until I can't get any glasses that'll make it good enough to do a job like that?

I don't know.

I don't want to call my eye problem, or my leg problem, a disability on the level of needing hearing aids or crutches. Because I want to think it can be fixed to the point I can forget about it.

But is "not wanting" a good enough reason to say this doesn't count as disability? Is it just denial?

Which is why I am kind of regretting even reading that previous post I reblogged. Because where even do you draw that line? And that's just for physical disability. I'm not even getting into my neurodivergence, and all the places that fuzzily shades into what's considered normal.

*sigh*