#also give me your strength op i have to send emails and i don’t Want to

[cupidlakes]

Op is acting like george isn't a human who procrastinates like the rest of the world when it comes to doing jobs they find difficult being motivated to do 🥴 (so when he does do it we do praise him a little)

Give me your strength OP

shrug i deleted the post bc it could’ve just been lh the tags just took me aback bc it was in my notifs LMAO like . that one clip of all instances george was literally like “congrats on finishing your work! it feels good doesn’t it” and idg how you can somehow spin it as george preaching against what he practices, being lazy also isn’t the worst thing ever and having struggles w starting stuff isn’t either it’s normal and human and a worse time for some than others (as evidenced if you wanna compare the way dream and george respectively work and get around to editing, george acts like it’s insurmountable while dream can take on 5 more projects sometimes)

i’m biased obviously but i genuinely don’t think george is some bum riding on his current hype he does a lot outside of editing his videos being there for his friends and their content etc. it seems like he helps as much as he receives help and the dteam have kinda built up their platform and branding together like that which is genuinely cool the way they sort eachother out w/ thumbnails coding and ideas, coding which george had a big hand in like idk it’s just nice is his editing procrastination problem a problem? yeah but also he knows it is idt george struts around saying he’s the master of content creation whilst delivering absolutely nothing (this is dipped in some sarcasm bc he doesn’t do nothing) and you don’t have to armchair diagnose or medicalise it to see it is a problem for him and not something he wants to be a problem

+ i give him some leeway apropos to editing bc it’s smth that’s cropped up a lot george even mentioning he confided in quackity abt it recently who said george was borderline in tears and idt being a millionaire or successful absolves him of the worries he has, it probably worsens them bc of the expectations and it says more that he wants to deliver smth high quality over smth timely but not up to the unique standard he and dream have set for themselves there are solutions sure but i give him his own time to work out what he wants to do and it’s clearly hard for him and again you don’t have to armchair diagnose someone to realise smth is a struggle for them regardless of the reasons why as a fan ofc i’d love content as often as possible but i’m also sympathetic

i just say all this bc it’s been weighing on my mind generally too and gets kinda sad to see ppl act like george doesn’t stand on his own as a content creator and takes advantage of his position or Dream “when he could so Easily do this thing” which is evidently not that easy bc if it was he would just do it like i know he would and the way i see it george takes pride in his content and executing it perfectly (watch any stream ever he is FUSSY abt semantics) which takes precedence over consistent uploads and it’s bittersweet sure bc i don’t want him to feel stressed abt it above all and the reason why i think he could benefit with an editor but also i’m not going anywhere just bc of it and i do not think it means george isn’t hardworking

[morlock-holmes]

I never said that I expected you to have *positive* strong opinions about that story :)

2) Damn, what I wrote could be interpreted as tumblr-style not-so-passive aggressiveness, “of course you'd dislike it because it shows how horrible you sound :) ” — it wasn't that, honest.

Oh, no, no, that's okay, I was theatrically overreacting, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.

It turns out that I have a lot to say about this story, it's just all of it is negative.

Here are several billion more words of close reading that you may feel free to skip.

Everybody in the story talks like they're on the internet all the time. Tony Tulathimutte has a relatively good ear for how people talk about this shit on the internet, and I won't lie, one or two passages even moved me, but this is because we are projecting our own knowledge of why people talk like this onto the story, not because Tulathimutte has given any of his characters any real internal life.

The fact that his feminists and Bros are just as much two-dimensional troglodytes as the story's anti-hero doesn't make it better.

Also this character is not an overly scrupulous feminist. The entire first half of the story is meant to be an ironic send-up of the way his feminist pieties contrast with his actual behavior, and I'm surprised people don't see that.

For example:

One classmate junior year had a crush on him, but he wasn’t attracted to her curvaceous body type so felt justified in rejecting her, just as he’d been rejected many times himself.

"Curvaceous" is a euphemism for "Fat". Notice that the first time he rejects someone is given significant time in the story; this character later reappears, complete with eating disorder. The first time someone rejects him is entirely glossed over, with the woman who did it never appearing in the story and the whole thing glossed over and forgotten in a few words.

Wouldn't we expect this character to obsess over those first rejections? To play them over and over in his mind?

This is why I say that, as much as any individual passage might be moving, this character has no real internal life.

Note also that the woman's disquiet about her body is expressed in neutral, sympathetic terms ("eating disorder") and given a sort of origin story: we are told she was fat in high school, was rejected for it, and has since developed an eating disorder.

In contrast, the main character's dislike of his body is expressed in absurd, satirical terms (his obsession with "narrow shoulders") and we are never given any insight into why that became his focus.

Now that he’s self-conscious, he realizes he can’t compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever. 

How did he realize it and when? Has he ever been shamed for his body? Notice that this realization predates his internet radicalization. Why did he fixate on his physical attributes, rather than, say, his economic situation? Tulathimutte shows no indication that the question has even occurred to him.

Nor, for that matter, does Tulathimutte spend much thinking on why feminism in particular appealed to this character.

Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. 

Ah, see, he always viewed feminism instrumentally, never as a serious deep down commitment.

But why did he choose that instrument rather than another?

Again, we won't be shown.

Also, in a different thread @thefeministthrowaway spoke very emotionally about going through high school and even into college terrified that any expression of sexual interest in a woman would constitute a terrible burden on her or even become sexual harassment, and scrupulously avoided it.

Our main character did not go through such a phase; he had, according to the narration, already been rejected several times in High School.

Which leads me to the question of why on Earth this is written in third person. A first person account might allow us to read the narrator as unreliable, reading between the lines to see that what he viewed as a lifetime of rejection was really him blowing a small number of incidents and misunderstandings out of proportion; the third person narration invites us to see it as fundamentally honest and accurate: he has already asked many girls out by the time he leaves high school.

Certainly he asks out several more in college; and rather than the exagerrated fear of imposition we have, he sends several pestering, passive-aggressive emails to a woman who turns him down.

This exact scenario happens four or five more times. 

He's not scrupulously terrified of women; he pursues them to an uncomfortable and borderline stalkerish degree.

Later, he has an exchange about sexual mores with men who are identified not as friends, but "co-workers", and he calls them out for their anti-feminist ways. This is part of a general issue where everyone acts like they're on the internet all the time.

I was once out with a friend of a friend who convinced us to go meet some girls he knew (No shit, part of his pitch was, "They're real dumb") and when we got to the bar they had an elaborate drinking game from their sorority days and part of the mnemonic for the rules was about "bitches."

So, as a brittle feminist, I of course got up and made a big speech about how they shouldn't devalue themselves-

Of course I fucking didn't. I privately thought "that seems like a gross way to think about yourself" while being God damned terrified of what I'd have to do if someone asked me a question about sex during the truth or dare part.

There's no awareness in this story about the difference between real life and internet behavior, or how they modify each other. (The same problem crops up later when QPOC friend calls him out in a way that, if we saw it as a Tumblr anecdote we'd all respond with, "And then everyone got up and applauded")

“Go ahead then,” his coworker smirks, “ask your female friends what they think.”

Bristling, he calls his QPOC agender friend from his college co-op, whom he’s always gotten along well with, in part because he’s never been attracted to them.

It took me a while to twig that QPOC here was assigned female at birth, even though on a second read the juxtaposition is obviously deliberate, but I just can't fathom why our main character appears to have no male, or even AMAB friends. Doesn't that seem utterly bizarre? That he's so self-conscious and self-hating and also totally willing to expose himself and his questions to women and co-workers?

Shouldn't that be explained?

This time she gives him a two-armed shove, sending him to the ground, and instead of yelling, her mouth opens into a smile and she says, “Oh my god are you wearing shoulder pads?”

Tulathimutte knows that sport coats and suit jackets can have shoulder padding, right? Like as a completely normal thing? Why wouldn't our main character wear a suit?

Does Tulathimutte not know about suits?

Anyway... I have trouble placing this story ideologically because the main character is an awful person but his feminist "friends" are gaslighting assholes and I'm really not sure if that part is deliberate or not. They tell him that he should never act like his bro-y co-workers while privately resenting the fact that he doesn't just go ahead and do what it takes to get laid again.

There's also his date with the girl from high school; her neediness and damage turns him off as much as his turns off other people, and also she treats him like shit, but his friends ask why he doesn't see her again.

I have trouble understanding whether we're supposed to see this double standard because, as I said earlier, her damage is comprehensible and sad while his is portrayed as a sort of BOGO deal, where every bad feminist dude has bonus body image issues shrink wrapped to him when he comes out of the factory.

Nothing in this story gives us any sense of why the actions any of the characters take appeal to those characters.

@self-winding I believe it was, said that the main character can't get laid because his try hard feminism is a turn-off and I really hope that's not the point because if it is, Jesus Christ this is just a circa late 2000s Amanda Marcotte style rant about "Nice Guys" that has been sitting in the back of the fridge gathering mold for a decade.

I know I said that I went in wanting to hate it, but I don't want it to be that awful.

[kriscynical]

Post-op Visit Report

I forgot to write about this because things are busy because Christmas.

My post-op appointment was this past Wednesday and even though I was scheduled to see only Dr. Even’s assistant, Ambrosia, I ended up getting to see Dr. Even himself along with his other assistant, Carrie, who had also been with him during my consult visit. 

This got long, but it should be the last really lengthy post I have to make on this subject.

He took a look at my incision and said it looked awesome and that the skin was completely closed, so I could “hot tub it up” if I wanted to, I can submerge it without any problems. I have to wait another three weeks before getting any chiropractic adjustments, though, because things are still healing on the inside. 

I described the issues I’ve been having with my right leg, the numbness, the pain, the improvement I’ve seen concerning the pain, and my ankle swelling up repeatedly. I told him what I suspected was happening and showed him the brace I bought, and he agreed that’s most likely what’s happening in which case the brace is great, thumbs up. Otherwise the numbness and pain are normal and caused by the nerve healing.

I already knew this from my past experience with numbness back in 2009, but he told me it’ll take months for the numbness to go away completely. He said nerves heal themselves at about 1mm per month, so if you have a centimeter of damage it will take roughly 10 months to repair itself. Once the pain goes away completely it’ll mean “the nerve is happy”. He gave me a little more detail of what he saw once he was actually in my back, too.

He said when he lifted the nerve away from the herniation, it was pretty ugly. He demonstrated by rubbing the underside of his index finger, saying “That disc was just rubbing and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing against that nerve, so it was very VERY irritated and so bruised it was black.” so yes it’s going to take quite a while for that to heal. Some people actually have a hole worn through their nerve from herniations and I was lucky because I was apparently pretty damn close to it happening. 

After he informed me that he would be sending a brief report to my primary care physician, Dr. Rodgers, telling him I had X surgery done on X date, X was the reason and X was the outcome, I also told him about what happened with Dr. Rodgers concerning my post-op pain medication. 

I only mentioned it briefly on my blog, but the Cliffnotes version is when I went to put in for my monthly refill on my pain meds Rodgers refused and at first said (via the nurse) that he was never going to fill it again because my records showed that I had gotten it from another provider (”...from a Dr. Even?”) in addition to him. I told the nurse that Dr. Even was a surgeon and I’d been prescribed the medication because I had back surgery so it was a one-time thing, and upon relaying that he relented and said he’d refill it after an additional two week delay (thus leaving me high and dry for two weeks when I was ONE WEEK post-op!). He also lectured me via email about how I wasn’t supposed to get narcotic pain meds from more than one provider at a time because the regulators “frown upon that”, that it was my “responsibility” to inform all of my doctors that I already have a script for narcotics from him, the dosage Dr. Even told me to take exceeded the recommended maximum dosage, etc.

As if I was supposed to magically know all of that. Since I’m a doctor and all.

I had to explain to him that yes, I DID discuss that script with Dr. Even extensively at my surgical consult including what I was taking it for, and that for accepting the post-op script and taking the dosage as prescribed I was just doing what I was told because I assumed a doctor would have a better understanding of all that stuff than I would as a patient. That and, you know... I HAD BACK SURGERY. I kind of needed extra pain medication after that? And I don’t know why he acted like that, anyway. I’ve had that script for 17 years now in one quantity or another and I have never ONCE abused it or tried to double dip. Ever. God forbid I have spinal surgery and expect it to be okay to take pain medication afterwords! 

So I described all of that to Dr. Even and he gave me this look like I had three heads before saying “Ooooookaaaaaay... that’s kind of... weird. I guess instead of the brief I should send him the full op report along with a personal note saying ‘Yeah... so I cut open her back and yanked a piece of her spine out, so I gave her pain medicine’. Come on, seriously?”

I agree, Dr. Even, I agree. It sounds ridiculous to me, too. Apparently I was just supposed to go without because the Texas state legislature “frowns upon that”. Fuck the Texas state legislature. Let them get back surgery and see if they still “frown upon that”.  

Am I bitter about that? Slightly. I have no idea if Rodgers was just having a bad day or what, because his tone took me aback. He’s NEVER talked to me that way, and I’ve been seeing him for almost 20 years. He’s usually a big teddy bear and pretty laid back about pain medication when it comes to patients who take them responsibly like I always have. 

But anyway.

Dr. Even was happy to see that I was doing so well overall, and Carrie said that I looked like a completely different person from the last time she’d seen me. I told him that I was so happy the pain was gone that when I came out of anesthesia I cried. He said that’s why he became a back surgeon, and my mom told him I’d been blessing him just about every day since the surgery. To which he turned to me and said “That’s fantastic! Tell your friends. :D” 

He also asked if I felt like I needed any physical therapy for limb and joint strengthening and I told him no, not really, because while I’ve had the numbness and pain in my leg I haven’t lost any strength or mobility in it. The muscles going up the back of my thigh feel tight, but I’ve been trying to stretch them. He agreed that therapy wasn’t needed, then. My mom asked if walking would be good therapy for it, he said yes, then I told him we were going to WDW next month and he said “Oh yeah, that’ll absolutely be good therapy. That’s a LOT of walking. Just don’t ride Space Mountain, okay?”

Apparently he’s had patients get herniated discs in their necks from that ride. I will never ride it again. lol

After everything was said and done he shook my hand and told me he was happy to have been able to give me relief and fix my back, and that his door was always open if I ever feel the need to come back or if something else happens. Otherwise I don’t need to come back again, have a great Christmas.

I’m sure as hell going to try to.