#a rambling i guess

[kovacs-of-courage]

Rings of Pressure--A Stream of Consciousness

I’m half and half on whether I should apologize in advance for this word salad.

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Do you ever have a visual, thought clear as crystal, that won’t leave your head.

And I don’t mean a vested interest in a fictional character or setting, while what I’m about to say has much to do with fictional creations, I mean something that just won’t tear itself from your mind regardless of any joy obtained. The kind of thing that steers into focus like a deer who just can’t stop leaping into headlights.

I’ve decided to make a stream-of-consciousness post about this experience of mine because I hope putting it to paper will help me sleep better at night. Articulating in a fashion comparable to the rambling homeless man at the bus stop might give me ammunition to put it to rest.

Also, to preface the ranting ahead, I don’t really expect anyone to read this and go “Wow, I completely and totally understand what he’s saying, his criss-crossing incoherent rants are entirely grasped!” I’ve spent my whole life, whether due to neurodivergency or my own ineptitude, being told the things I say don’t make sense. The reality of that happening again and again is a fact of life I’ve long come to peace with.

Anyways, onto what I wanted to talk about.

Everyone handles and copes with stress in their own ways, some objectively healthier and saner then others. I grew up in a very stressful, poor environment growing up. The harsher, trigger warning details aside, I ended up as a kid who imagined scenes in my head with my favorite characters to sleep at night. Sometimes things would get bad enough that I’d try to work through them as the characters, or more commonly picture a scenario where the characters were in a situation of equal pressure.

Comics and their heroes were the biggest outlet for this, I remember being miserable and abused and eleven years old thinking of how the constant trainwrecks of humiliation and mental anguish from family and school was like the bizarro over-the-top deathtraps that Batman was put into.

See, in Batman comics and media, there’d be these moments where the World’s Greatest Detective was trapped in truly desperate, unwinnable scenarios. He could have cinderblocks chained to his feet, stuck in a sealed chamber with water rising a dozen feet by the second, motorized sawblades dropping down from the ceiling for good measure--sure to turn him into a crimson stew upon contact.

Or maybe Batman would be hunted down by a legion of heavily armed criminals, his utility belt gone, ribs cracked and energy drained to the final morsel, and the time upon their discovery of his position quickly closing in.

It’d be these impossible situations, often the subject of cliffhangers for the next issue/episode. Makes the viewer think “Wow, there’s no way he can escape this time, I mean how is he going to get himself out of that?”

And then Batman did, everytime.

The comparison to these horrible fictional deathtraps was a morbid connection for my younger self to make, I’m aware, though framing my worst pits of despair in this context gave me some measure of hope. The characters I loved so much could always turn the tables on their foes, change the odds in their favor, and that was enough to keep me from ending myself for several years of my life.

Swear to god that this context is important, it has a point, just bear with me.

As I grew up, I never really let go of that coping mechanism; imagining my old friends of heroes in these nail biting situations, the danger and threats creating an external stress comparable to the sheer internal existential dread and misery I might feel at any moment of the day. It’s the idea that if they can expertly navigate the sawblades, the overlapping fields of deadly gunfire, the many deadly enemies that want them six feet under--then maybe I can navigate my problems too.

I don’t like to talk to people much about my stresses and issues, even close friends, so this coping mechanism fills that void of companionship too in a sense. When I was young, I didn’t have people to talk too about issues without fear of being berated or ruthlessly put down and mocked. I figured that my fictional heroes wouldn’t mock me for these stresses, that while they’d never be real, they could be a vehicle in which I coped with my own torments.

A childish and immature gesture, I’m well aware. I don’t plan on doing anything about it anytime soon.

The most recent of these stress-coping imagined scenes my mind wanders too is related to the hero who’s imagined I hopefully tagged in this text post: Green Lantern.

Green Lantern is a simple character to understand here, I mean how complicated could a guy with a magic green ring get? (The answer to that question is Very, but let’s pretend otherwise)

The basics of GL is that his ring runs on willpower, that he can create anything his mind can conjure when he uses it. So say he creates a wall, if a giant truck runs into that wall, it takes his entire being and mental strength to not only make the wall of light in the first place, but to keep it stable after said truck just crashed head-first into it.

Think of a GL’s willpower as mental stamina, of strength of the spirit made glistening emerald reality.

A Green Lantern’s Ring is referred to as “The strongest weapon in the universe” because it allows the user to create anything as long as the ring is charged and their willpower strong. It can move mountains, construct cities of verdant light, manifest weapons of mass destruction, it’s only limited by the user.

And that’s the interesting, human element. The User.

There are these scenes in Green Lantern Comics and Media where an inconceivably powerful threat, whether that be an act of cosmic nature or a super villain, or even a god, is barelling towards GL. GL, at the end of the day, is a person wielding the magic rings of magic rings--nevertheless, they have to act.

GL realizes that their only hope is to delay, contain, and stall. That the threat pushing to destroy innocents and personally rend them atom from rebellious atom is going to overwhelm whatever moral willpower that can fuel their sparkling fingerwear with. There’s this one scene from a justice league animated film, where the sun is sending out a massive solar flare to earth, capable of burning the planet pole-to-pole as a charred crispy orb.

The JL need time to figure out a solution, so GL comes to back, manifesting this massive wall of viridescent light in a futile, suicidal attempt to buy his comrades more time. The wave of sunfire meets his dam in full force, punching cracks and nestling dents across the construct.

The camera would cut back to GL, sweat trickling down his face, hair matted to forehead, pushing his every iota of mental and physical strength into maintaining this wall against a force that will inevitably overcome it. It shows the wall breaking more so, second by second of the earth’s emerald shield deteriorating as GL pulls forth his entire being into his ring.

Those scenes always struck a chord with me, and I don’t wholly know why. The scene that my mind’s obsession targets, however, is this one, which I saved as a gif.

It’s a simple scene, of GL fighting this thunder god super villain Black Adam(the comic version, not the rock). He creates barrier after barrier to defend himself from a being who’s more living pantheon then mortal man. This almighty bastion of strength and malicious fervor, gunning to kill him.

And again, GL is just a person with the magic ring of magic rings, it’s his inner strength and willpower which defines his survival

You see the shields face, shattering to glass, Black Adam tackling him to the ground. Cracking his human fingers like paperweights, GL on the losing side of this physical struggle. In the end GL loses, he doesn't make it out of this scene alive even. I don't know why my brain fixates on it. I'm constantly stressed, stressed in the backround of my calmest moments. It's a dull kind of stress, a stress that I learned to live with a long time ago. It's the type of numb stress and anxiety that makes you okay with the idea of getting into a car crash, because you won't need to worry about it anymore. When I close my eyes, I think about this scene with GL and Black Adam all the fucking time, it's maddening. It's a short clip from a trailer of a game that no one remembers nor cares about. I sound like a lunatic transmitting my stress and problems through this vehicle. I think of GL creating those barriers, one after another, maybe each is stronger then the last. I think of how what kills him breaks through anyway, I think of the futility of even trying, how the futility is WHY he tries. I think of my own anxieties and fears, that I hate talking about, the idea that I'm going to be on my own handling them like GL is here. I close my eyes and I think of the emerald barriers, failing to stop the threat, that every night I keep making more and every night they keep breaking. That I spend my whole life building walls that my own issues shatter like glass, that the work is meaningless, that my struggles have been this constant mental fight since I could imagination a world outside my continued myopic miseries.

The analogy is insane, the idea of using a magic ring to ward off these issues that, within the structure of this comparison, will be my end regardless, doubly so.

I keep thinking about these rings of stress, of these barriers that keep breaking and being rebuilt. Every day what remains bottled is fought internally throughout the night.

And I always, without fail, lose. I never beat these stresses, these fears, I just keep making more barriers to protect myself. The death trap has morphed into a rigged cage match, the framing turned against me. At the end of it all, I never find out if the thing smashing the barriers does me in, it's just my assumption. I only end up in the cycle of defending myself...from myself.

I'm not looking for advice on how to handle these issues, I don't know what I'm looking for.

[bubblegumbeyotch]

it’s like i fucking need to go somewhere and somewhere is home but my house burned down 6 months ago in the twenty minutes it took me to go to the grocery store and come back and everything was fine when i left and now it’s up in flames and the cat ran but it didn’t come back and i’m still sitting in the same spot i used to where the walls cradled me and i could fall asleep forreal and now there’s no walls and i can’t sleep anymore and when i do i dream the walls and roof and hearth and stupid yellow front door are all still there and when i wake up i cry cry cry cry cry because they’re gone gone gone gone gone and never ever coming back just like the cat

[goldensunset]

[happylandfill23]

i've had this garfield panel saved forever and i even marked in my calendar today as "the monday that wouldn't die" so uh. happy(?) monday the 22nd aka the monday that wouldn't die

[darlingofdots]

the vast majority of fanworks are bad, and that's fine, actually. they are bad for the same reason that the average number of legs for a human person to have is less than two: statistics. like with all endeavours and especially creative ones, most people who write fanfiction or draw art of their favourite characters are bad at it. if you line up all the crochet projects in the world, most of them will be, well, bad. some are bad because they're the first thing a person ever made, or the second or third or tenth, and this kind of thing takes practice. others are bad because the person who made them is just not very good at it. maybe they just learned how to make granny squares and they're perfectly happy to never expand or improve on that. most people who dance or bake or garden or braid hair are not amazing at it! and you'd never go to your kid's dance recital or eat your friend's homemade carrot cake and expect the same experience as you'd have at a professional ballet performance or award-winning bakery. And that's if we assume there is an objective measure of Good Art, which there isn't! Some art is just "bad" because you don't like it!

I think though that specifically with fanfiction, we sometimes forget that when we read a book or watch a movie, dozens of people have looked at it and given feedback and made changes and done quality control before the final product reaches our shelves or screens, and that's not counting the original writer's learning process and past experience. A published book is not anyone's first crochet project, even if it is their debut novel. But with fanfiction, the barrier to entry is so low (on purpose! this is a good thing!) that we do get to see a lot of wonky granny squares, and on sites like AO3 they're sitting on the same shelf as the hand-made silk lace wedding dress and you can't always tell just by looking at it which is which. The consequence of this is that we encounter fic that we think is unpolished, has bad punctuation, is out of character, and we are tempted to think "well, this is awful! how dare this person put this wonky granny square on the same shelf as the lace wedding dress!" But that's not how fandom is supposed to work! That wonky granny square is somebody who is really excited about this TV show they just watched and they are reaching out into the void to share their excitement with you. To scoff at them for not making a lace wedding dress is really, really rude. Even if they did make a lace wedding dress, maybe it's just really not your style, or you think they should have used a different pattern, and it's still their wedding dress. You don't have to wear the dress and you don't have to read the fic.

We all know that there is some fanfic out there that is incredible. I think it's important to talk about that! But the vast majority of people who post their writing online are just sharing their little hobby projects that they make for fun and I also think it's important to remember that.

[secondbeatsongs]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[tina-rocket]

Uh oh it’s the problem women!

[doomdoomofdoom]

Kamala Harris does want "transgender surgery on illegal aliens that are in prison", btw.

So since Trumpists are getting mad enough about the jokes to actually cite their sources, I thought I'd put the source out into my left extremist commie faggot echo chamber, too.

The claim originates from an ACLU questionnaire she filled out for her 2020 presidential candidacy, specifically this section:

She wasn't given a new questionnaire for 2024, and has stated that while her policy on some things may have changed, her values had not. (This most likely means she moved more to the center to appease larger demographics and cut corners to reach compromises. The basic politician stuff.)

It boils down to this: If you're in prison, whether for "illegal" immigration or other crimes, you rely on the state to provide you with necessary amenities, like food and health care. Her argument isn't "hell yeah everyone in prison should get sex changes for free". It's "gender affirming surgery is a necessary medical procedure. If you are in the states care while this becomes necessary, the state should provide it." If you're outraged by your tax money being used on this, consider the massive amount of people being incarcerated in for-profit prisons, on your dime. Then ask yourself if maybe a prison reform might be in order.

Worth noting: In 2015, while Attorney General, Kamala Harris actually argued against providing gender-affirming surgery to an incarcerated trans woman, claiming that HRT and psychotherapy were sufficiently covering her medical needs. She has since obviously changed her stance and assumed responsibility. (I would like to take this moment to remind my fellow left extremist commie faggots that "willingness to learn and rethink your views" is infinitely more valuable than "perfect from the start and unwilling to listen to anyone")

Also found in the source: This image of Kamala Harris participating in the 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade, wearing what I believe to be a sequin rainbow embroidered denim jacket.

I encourage you to read the provided CNN article and the answers to the ACLU questionnaire, as they give great insight into her values.

TLDR: Based.

[expelliarmus]

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[foldingfittedsheets]

Today on Donuts and Dogs we encountered a large dog with a muzzle in a group with a few other dogs on the trail. I didn’t initiate anything but the dog came up and rubbed so aggressively affectionately on us that we had to pet him.

I offered that I’ve seen dogs muzzled to prevent them eating rocks as a roundabout question. His mom sighed and said he has to wear it because otherwise he eats marijuana.

[dj-crack]

You know you fucked up if Among Us is calling you an idiot

[goldensunset]

you! tumblr user!

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[badtzbot]

i have to say the relationship that smoker has with the asl brothers is fucking hilarious. luffy pissed him off so badly one singular time that he followed the guy halfway into the grand line and then also into the new world just to track him down. he had to accept help from his crew in defeating crocodile and luffy did it via becoming a water balloon. and then tashigi, who he's responsible for, cried about it. he hates luffy and luffy calls him smokey and doesn't gaf. ace.... do i even have to say anything. they did it nasty sloppy style. ace annoyed the fuck out of him and you KNOW it. smoker tried to confront him in alabasta and luffy SMASHED ALL THREE OF THEM THROUGH A WALL. and then luffy escaped because ace played diversion! and smoker can't even Actually do anything because ace is a wb pirate and he canNOT afford to anger them. and sabo. i just know when smoker met sabo in movie stampede he was already like fuck me why is the ra here and then sabo was like "luffys my little brother" and smoker just wanted to straight up kill himself. he was like FUCK ME theres ANOTHER ONE OF THEM ????? and then he has to fucking work with the guy for the greater good. again.

and the rest of the family too. he can't even yell at garp because he's one of the few superior officers smoker respects. smoker's life is just a constant aneurysm and you KNOW it's bad when the one he, a marine, has the least beef with is the fucking LEADER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY. smoker i hope your blood pressure goes down because between this and the cigars you're gonna die before you reach 40

[gremlingirlsmell]

trans woman: we should talk about transmisogyny in queer spaces

a dozen he/they's with "terfs fuck off" in bio, who've been waiting for this moment in the limelight for their entire lives: this but trans men. actually this affects trans men more. everyone is affected by transmisogyny. wow why are you dividing the community. we should be kissing and sucking and fucking instead. you're too online, this "discourse" is so online. it's not real. it doesnt exist irl. touch grass. in REAL communities trans women never complain. what, you actually meant irl communities? well I don't believe you, you make this all up. youre erasing us. I'll just willfully misunderstand everything you say in the worst way possible. why do you hate trans men? youre being misandrist. you're such a transradfem. baeddel. feminazi. everyone should know op is a terf and probably also into some problematic stuff. callout post: be aware of op they're a tirf infiltrator seperatist problematic kink haver. reblogs* popular thinkpiece: these transwomen reclaimed a medieval transmisogynistic slur 10 years ago, here is 200 links of terfs and nazis badmouthing them uh i mean sources, i think we should be able to call every transwoman we dont like this slur and also theyre dangerous if they reclaim it again. love trans women before it's too late #transandrophobia