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cazort · 3 months ago

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Whenever I post about how I am voting for Kamala Harris and think it's important to vote for Democrats, and my post starts blowing up, I get a lot of negative comments from people who claim to be progressive, saying things like "Voting doesn't matter." or" Both parties are the same".

And here's the thing. I always check out these people's blogs.

And you want to know what? I never, not once, have found any of these people posting anything actionable to move beyond the two-party system. None of them mention or talk about ranked choice voting (RCV) or total vote runoff (TVR). None of them talk about the laws and structural factors that keep the two party system in power. None of them even have a candidate that they recommend voting for as a protest vote. None share and link to articles in high-quality media sources that break out of the right-left binary. And the ones that are calling for really radical solutions like revolution, none of them have a constitution, none of them have a proposed tax policy, none of them have a proposition of the way a radically different (such as growth-free) currency system could work.

And here's the thing. I do all of these things. I've been doing it for decades, since before I was even on Tumblr.

I'm not just voting blue. I'm voting blue AND advancing RCV and TVR. I have written pages and pages on tangible tax policy reform, on local zoning reform (I'm active locally pushing for such reform), transportation funding reform (pushing for it for 20+ years now). I've been involved in prison reform and abolition activism at the local and federal level. I even started a community currency 16 years ago.

Listen to me and listen to other people who are doing the work. We are all saying the same thing. Don't listen to these people who aren't doing the work. They claim to be radical but they're not doing anything at all. I don't know if they're real people or not, but they're butting into my posts and they're telling me and other people not to vote because it doesn't make a difference and doesn't do enough, but like...they're not doing anything at all to push society in a good direction, to solve problems, to build a better world. They're just posting negative stuff on some blog and they're not even posting information on their blog that might help tear down the systems they're supposedly opposed to.

I don't trust any of these people and I don't want you to either.

Seriously, if someone is telling you not to vote, telling you that your vote doesn't matter, scrutinize them. Who are they? What are they advocate? If they are telling you not to vote, what do they want you to do?

99% of the time they don't actually encourage you to do anything positive. And I have a sneaking suspicion that these people don't actually want to tear down the systems they are superficially criticizing, they are secretly trying to support them. I suspect that they actually want you to feel negative about voting and disengage. They want you to feel helpless, and to step back from the political system, to step out. They are serving the people who benefit when you don't vote. And that's the far-right authoritarians.

If you, like me, want a better society in a deeply flawed two-party system, you vote for the better of the two parties AND you take other measures too, supporting RCV (which had massive wins in both Maine and Alaska and could be implemented in more states if we work towards it) and TVR (far superior to the IRV used in Maine and Alaska), and researching and talking about issues and getting involved in issues that aren't being discussed. Join the Strong Towns movement and work to move beyond car dependence. Join the movement to expose the injustice of payroll tax and abolish all payroll taxation including FICA and all the smaller ones too and replace them with other taxes such as carbon tax or other, progressive consumption-based taxes. Start thinking critically about currency, maybe read Greco's book "Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender".

I am outside the two party system and have been so my whole life. I am doing the work and have been doing the work for decades now. So listen to me when I tell you to vote blue. Vote not just for Harris but research and look up your house and senate races and your state and local races as well and vote in all of them. It's a small but important step. And don't just stop there, do all of these other things I'm telling you about too. It's a "both...and" scenario.

Don't submit to these people trying to tell you not to vote. Scrutinize them. You will see what they are really about and once you see it you will not be manipulated by them.

#vote blue #vote 2024 #please vote #two party system #revolution

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mariana-oconnor · 2 years ago

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The Red-Headed League Pt 2

until the comical side of the affair so completely overtopped every other consideration that we both burst out into a roar of laughter.

Professional people being professional. Mmhm. You'd think a doctor would be better at keeping a straight face, I'm pretty sure humans have been sticking inappropriate things in inappropriate places since time immemorial. But these two are giggling like school boys. A lovely image, but I'd be a bit mad if they did it to me. I can't blame Mr Wilson for being mad at them.

Finally, I went to the landlord, who is an accountant living on the ground-floor, and I asked him if he could tell me what had become of the Red-headed League. He said that he had never heard of any such body. Then I asked him who Mr Duncan Ross was. He answered that the name was new to him.

Surprising no one at all. I said it in my comments about the first part, but I love how this whole scam has been echoed in heist shows/films right up to modern day. Acquire offices under false pretences, create hype around fake business, use office to make business look legit, pack up shop and leave an empty office behind and no one with any clue what the mark is talking about.

"I went home to Saxe-Coburg Square, and I took the advice of my assistant. But he could not help me in any way. He could only say that if I waited I should hear by post.

I mean, honestly, for someone who is supposedly unassociated with the league in question, that's more than he should be able to say. A more normal response would be 'That's fucking weird, boss. I think it might be a scam.' But clearly Victor is entirely trustworthy, so I shouldn't question him. Totally trustworthy.

On the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some 30 pounds, to say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under the letter A.

I expect that pub quizzes weren't around in 1890, but if they were, Mr Wilson would be an excellent addition to your team.

The internet tells me pub quizzes only date back to the 70s. Which seems late, as I swear my Mum's dad and brothers used to go religiously to their local league when she was young, but maybe I got the timeline on that wrong.

Further investigation has found me to be correct as the very league my family used to frequent is apparently referenced in an article from the early 60s. In fact it quotes someone who absolutely must have known my grandad and might even be in the picture of the quiz team on top of our bookcase.

This tangent has been brought to you by my love of trivia... Pun intended.

Back to the 1890s

"Why did you pick him?"

"Because he was handy and would come cheap."

"At half-wages, in fact."

"Yes."

A lesson that stands to this day: if something seems impossibly good value, it probably is. And if someone is willing to work for less than they're worth, one of you is the bad guy.

"As a rule," said Holmes, "the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify. But I must be prompt over this matter."

This reads like a contradiction, but I'm pretty sure it's true. It's the weird things that make crimes stand out and lead to the people committing them. The crimes that are completely run of the mill, like house burglaries, are one of a thousand almost identical crimes. But if a juggling clown robbed a shoe shop and rode off on a unicycle, that would cut down the suspects drastically.

"To smoke," he answered. "It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes."

Infamous line is infamous. All problems may be measured by how many pipes it takes to solve them. The standard SI unit of mysteriousness, I believe.

"Sarasate plays at the St. James's Hall this afternoon," he remarked. "What do you think, Watson? Could your patients spare you for a few hours?"

"I have nothing to do to-day. My practice is never very absorbing."

Let's hope no one has stuck a candlestick anywhere unmentionable... But seriously, you can just ditch your patients for the day? And I complain about waiting times for the NHS!

Watson is just: 'My bff asked me to play hooky. Lol. Byeee!' and these people are paying him.

"Smart fellow, that," observed Holmes as we walked away. "He is, in my judgment. the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third. I have known something of him before."

Holmes, the man is a terrible con artist. He's the most suspicious and he was so obvious it was embarrassing. And you're putting him right behind you in the list? (I assume Mycroft is number 1)

I guess that being intelligent doesn't mean you have to be good at conning people, but really, he's terrible at it. He couldn't have been more obviously involved if he had a sandwich board on saying 'The red-headed league is a con. Ask me how!'

I know Mr Wilson didn't work it out, but literally everyone else did. I bet that 14 year old child labour maid Mr Wilson hires knows he's a con man and just doesn't care because she's not paid enough to.

"Not him."

"What then?"

"The knees of his trousers."

I have been on this website too long, because my mind absolutely went into the gutter here. Which, incidentally, was also one of the places I thought of his knees being.

"Let us now explore the parts which lie behind it."

Is it a bank? Please be a bank. I honestly can't remember. But I want it to be a bank. Just for that good, old-fashioned bank robbery shenanigans. Although I will accept jewellery shop.

"There is Mortimer's, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane's carriage-building depot."

Oh yeah. Got to love a bank robbery. Classic.

This has been copied so many times in media it's difficult to tell whether contemporary audiences would have been as able to work it out as modern readers. But it's a classic for a reason.

Also worth noticing that there's a Vegetarian restaurant in London in 1890. You'd have been hard pressed to find a vegetarian restaurant in most parts of England in 1990, so that's ahead of its time.

My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes, the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive.

Watson's crush is showing again. 😆

This description keeps going in a further totally heterosexual way. Look, I'm not saying straight guys can't appreciate their bff's 'languid, dreamy eyes', but when directly compared to his descriptions of other characters... This is exceptionally effusive is all I'm saying.

And, I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket.

Must. Not. Make. Joke.

#Letters from Watson #Sherlock Holmes #The Red-Headed League #long post

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schraubd · 1 year ago

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The Debate Link: Origins

This blog is called The Debate Link.

That's no accident.

I started this blog when I was eighteen, just after graduation, when debate was the activity that most defined my high school experience. It was something I did nearly every weekend for four years, travelling all across the country. I was nationally-ranked. I won tournaments at both the local and national level. I wasn't just a "debater". I was, if I do say so myself, a pretty elite debater.

This blog was in many ways a continuation of that experience, and an attempt to fill its void. Its initial tagline was "The arguments, made by and for the debating public." In fact, here's my very first post, from way back in 2004:

Hey everyone! My name is David, and I am an ex-debater from Bethesda MD. My 4 years of debate has given me a healthy appreciation of the issues that concern America, and a desire to share some of the better arguments on some those issues I've come accross during those years. So hopefully, whenever I come up with a good idea (or stumble across someone else's), I'll post it on here.

See you soon,

David

(How adorable was I? Seriously.)

It is impossible to overstate the degree to which high school debate was formative in my life. It taught me how to think. It taught me how to write. It generated friendships that persist to this day. It even, indirectly, made me realize I wanted to be a law professor. There are few facets of David Schraub 2023 that are not in some way traceable to David Schraub, high school debater.

High school debate is having a moment in the news, prompted by this article by James Fishback chronicling an alleged takeover of the events by the radical left. I want to comment on his piece and his allegations, as well as on some commentary given by Kristen Soltis Anderson, who I knew and competed against in my generation of debate.

There are few reasons to read Fishback's account with grains of salt, beyond the obvious fact that he is at the helm of an insurgent competitor to the established National Speech and Debate Association (formerly known as the National Forensics League) and so has a vested incentive in undermining it.

First, whenever I read accounts like this about craziness allegedly afflicting student-centered activities, I always ask myself "what are the students saying?" Do the actual students involved share the perception that high school debate is rotting from the inside out? Or is their view that these accounts are misleading, exaggerated, and not reflective of what's actually happening on the ground? I certainly remember from my student days how frequent it was that I'd read breathless accounts about "what was going on" at my school or in my club or on my campus that bore zero relationship to what I actually saw. Once I was no longer a student, I still tried to remember that experience -- how many times have the "adults" parachuted in to "solve" problems at schools or on campus in cases where the actual putative victims have been screaming "you are not helping!" The older I get, the harder it will be to remember that instinct, but for the moment I can still rage against the dying of the light. And to that end, it is notable that Fishback's post contains very little in the way of contemporary student commentary or support indicating that they share his view about either the gravity or ubiquity of the problems he identifies -- a failure which makes me profoundly skeptical of whether he's accurately describing the underlying reality.

Second, I also remember to beware of apocryphal anecdotes. I doubt there has ever been a generation of debaters that didn't have stories about the lurid, ridiculous, extreme-performative arguments that supposedly were winning rounds left and right. In my generation, I distinctly recall a story circulating about a debater who simply wrote "Rwanda. Rwanda. Rwanda." on the board over and over again in their first speech (on any topic) as some sort of commentary on the moral intolerability of engaging in regular debate in the face of genocide. Trading the story across the lunch table, that debater cleaned up at elite tournaments. In retrospect, I can't say I ever recall actually seeing a round that was anything like that -- and I both witnessed and participated in many elite-level debate rounds. Stories are stories.

All of that said, I can't fully accuse Fishback of nutpicking. The "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" judge that opens his story was a collegiate debate champ, and so can't be dismissed as a complete non-entity. For recent graduates who are looking back on their competition-days, it is very, very easy to miss "having the ball in your hands"; to think on the arguments you would have made now that you're (slightly) older and (arguably) wiser, and live out that saudade for being a competitor by turning the act of judging into "what would I have argued." It's easy, but it's not good, and it takes the event away from the people who are actually competing in it. There's no such thing, in my view, as a debate where only one side is allowed to show up, and judges who functionally make that demand are toxic to the enterprise.

At the same time, the problem in debate of bad judges is an eternal one. And I have sympathy for the NSDA here, because it's actually a really difficult problem to regulate. It's unfeasible for the NSDA at a national level to actually police the judging styles and capacities of hundreds if not thousands of judges at tournaments across the country (which is one reason why the norm has shifted to disclosure -- we can't control if your judge is good, but you can at least know what their paradigm is). And for obvious reasons, the NSDA does not want to open the door to ad hoc challenges of particular judging decisions on general claims of "unfairness" -- that way lies anarchy (particularly when you're dealing with debaters, who always can come up with reasons why their losses are unfair!). In reality, much like Supreme Court ethics rules, there's probably not much that the NSDA can do other than vaguely promote norms of fairness and hope for the best.

Indeed, in many ways the problem with debate judges is not so different than the problem with Article III judges. There's little that's more frustrating than the sense that the judge in front of you has rigid ideological commitments that will prevent them from fairly assessing your arguments no matter what you do. That frustration is multiplied by the fact that, if they do act in that abusive fashion, there's little in the way of recourse -- we can't get rid of bad, biased Article III judges and, practically speaking, we can't get rid of bad, biased debate judges. The same mechanisms that ensure an independent judiciary and facilitate the orderly administration of justice by not allowing every unpopular decision to be second-guessed also provide a near-impenetrable suit of armor for hacks and incompetents alike if they do manage to get through the door. That is, to reiterate, insanely frustrating. But there's no straightforward resolution to it.

The reality is that the political demographics of both the most common participants in debate (publicly-engaged 14-18 year olds) and the most common judges of those debates (publicly-engaged 18-24 year olds) means that debate will almost inevitably slant to the left. Again, that's not something that can easily be fixed short of manually changing people's political opinions. We hold our opinions because we're persuaded by them; so it's inevitable that the arguments we tend to find persuasive are more likely to be the one's resonant with our opinions. That tendency can be checked, but it probably can't be overcome entirely.

But to some extent, the focus on "liberal" versus "conservative" ideas in high school debate to my mind reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what debate is -- and overlooks one of its most valuable features.

It's natural for an outsider to think that high school debate, insofar as it touches on politically salient issues, naturally divides itself into contemporary liberal and conservative divides. If the topic is a resolution on, say, foreign aid, one participant will lay out roughly what you might hear on the subject from a Democratic Senator, the other, from a Republican House member. But, at least when I was competing, this was rarely what happened. Debate tackled issues from a multitude of different perspectives and angles that rarely, if ever, neatly tracked contemporary partisan divisions. Despite the seeming binary imposed by pro/con, affirmative/negative, the lived reality of debate transcended these narrow divisions.

And this is a good thing. The purpose of debate is not to give competitors a working understanding of and fluency in what arguments are currently circulating in the halls of Congress. Debaters are not there to parrot the arguments that one most commonly hears on CNN or Fox News. The purpose of debate is to give competitors the tools to think creatively about their own arguments, to try to make those arguments as strong as possible, and to assess and defend them against any range of potential responses. It is perhaps a sad commentary on politics that a focus on strong arguments means that the resulting product will typically have little bearing on the actual contemporary disputes over liberal versus conservative politics. But that's how it goes. Moreover, it is entirely possible to have a productive, valuable debate round where both competitors basically accept liberal, or conservative, or Marxist priors and then argue "what's the best way of doing X from within that framework?" That sort of debate also teaches people how to critically assess and defend positions, just as effectively as debate rounds that more expressly cut across classic ideological paradigms. It is far too narrow, and constrains the vision of young debaters, to try to limit them to thinking purely within the well-worn grooves of American party politics.

And that brings me, in conclusion, to some of Kristen's comments. Kristen admits that, in contrast to Fishback's presentation, it does not seem like (in her recent experience) conservative ideas have been locked out of high school debate. And even when it comes to the specific conservative bugaboo of the day -- DEI initiatives -- much of the content the NSDA is promoting is entirely reasonable and salutary. Kristen remembers judges criticizing her and other female competitors for their "shrill" or "squeaky" voices; I remember a major tournament official repeatedly and openly -- as in, when making public announcements of awards -- engaging in homophobic taunting of one of my friends (he would repeatedly mispronounce the name of the student -- who was a regular top-tier competitor and absolutely known to the organizer -- so one of the syllables in his name was spoken as "gay", when the syllable in question was pronounced "guy"). If those sorts of practices are being arrested, it's all for the better.

But Kristen is concerned about some of the things that are listed as potential examples of DEI-related debate topics (inside the NSDA website's section on inclusivity). To be clear, it seems evident that the NSDA is suggesting that tournaments include some of these topics as part of the tournament's overall package, not to exclusively draw from them. But within this subcategory, Kristen thinks that the questions possess a liberal slant -- a problem even if (as is naturally the case in a debate context) people will inevitably be encouraged to take both "pro" and "con" positions.

Reading these topics, I understand why they're thought to be coded as liberal. At the same time, for at least a good quotient of them, it makes me sad that they are coded as liberal. Consider the question "Why are there so few startups founders who identify as women in the United States?" On the one hand, I get why this question seems to be "liberal". On the other hand, why is this question coded as liberal? Can it really be the case that conservatives don't have thoughts on this matter -- or at least thoughts they're not embarassed to share? When did conservatives decide that the only thought a conservative is permitted to think on this sort of question is "don't ask it"?

The students who answer this sort of question are not, overwhelmingly, thinking in terms of "how do I slot this in to a liberal or conservative ideological frame." They're going to be thinking practically about what sorts of factors or conditions lead to disproportionately fewer women founding startups. The reason why this codes as liberal, though, is that the very act of thinking through a question like that with any degree of seriousness (i.e., not just smirking "it's because women are for making babies!") has been coded as something that only liberals do. That, to my mind, is tragic -- but that's not a DEI problem or a NSDA problem, that's a conservative problem. Conservatives absolutely should have thoughts on why there are relatively few women founding startups. They also should have thoughts on questions like "How can the federal government do more to promote Latino/a/x entrepreneurship?" and "How can the US government increase participation rates of gender minorities in STEM fields?" These are important social problems which all of us should be tackling. Perhaps those thoughts will be radically different than what liberals have to say. Perhaps they'll be surprisingly resonant (think about cross-ideological coalitions forming around YIMBY zoning reform, or relaxing occupational licensing requirements). But to the extent that even trying to work through "how can we increase the representation of underrepresented minorities" is viewed as an inherently liberal endeavor; well, I think that's a tragedy.

More broadly: the point, again, of high school debate is not to give teenagers the opportunity to parrot the shibboleths of Democratic or Republican talking heads, and so high school debate does not fail when it forces a student to develop thoughts on a question that Democratic or Republican talking heads don't have thoughts on. So ultimately, I think it's a mistake -- and not reflective of high school debate as I remember it -- to ask whether or not students are presenting "liberal" or "conservative" views on a given question. Overwhelmingly, that entire framework is a projection by adults; it is not the approach taken by the competitors, nor should it be. Institutionally-speaking, debate should be about prompting students to think about interesting questions. The answers we get rarely will fully map on to contemporary political factions -- and that's a very good thing.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/mA1eZrO

#conservatives #debate #high school #Liberals

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vinx909 · 5 months ago

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a hero's want vs need. is it good?

so prepare for a ramble and maybe really dumb hot take. is a hero's want vs their need any good? i came to think of this due to discussions of the movie wish which apparently supposedly doesn't have this and it's used as one of the reasons it's bad (which is false btw). and that just made me think: is that bad?

what the fuck are you talking about?

so in stories hero's often have a want and a need. a want is the thing that they are going after. a need is something they often don't know they have. needing to learn to share, to not be a dick, realize what's actually missing in their life.

2. how can this be bad?

arguably all of this can be waved away by saying "that's a bad reading of media", but lets do some readings of a couple pieces of media: belle from beauty and the beast wants more then her simple life, but what she needs it to find someone to love. Judy in Zootopia wants to fight prejudice but needs to confront the prejudice in herself. Elsa in frozen wants to be isolated to keep others safe but needs to learn that love is worth risks. now how could those ideas be bad?

lets start with the weakest: beauty and the beast, possibly skip to the next paragrapth. when you look things up on this you'll find people talk about the beast, not belle. she wants adventure (in the great wide somewhere) but she gets locked in a castle. to me it never felt like she got an adventure or anything. instead she needed to settle down with someone... and that someone didn't respect her, she needed to make that happen. now of course the beast was redeemable. but from beauties perspective did he start out as any worse then gaston? gaston was just a brutish oath, the beast would let her father rot in jail. something gaston would later also do, but again she needed to give a guy who'd do things like lock up her father a chance. but this is more building towards a larger point.

zootopia is a stronger read, stolen from this article: https://www.septembercfawkes.com/2021/02/characters-want-vs-need-explained-4.html now is telling people that they need to confront the prejudice they have a bad thing? of course not. but there's something incredibly insidious to it. it's basically what Jordan Peterson says: clean your room. make it so that you solve the problems you have, not the problems the world has. this is a tool of oppressors. lets say i wanted to be a racist dickwaffle, what would i want the people opposed to racism to do? oppose my racism by fighting me over it, making my racism illegal? or have them interspect and not be racist in their life while leaving me alone to do my racism? the later of course. and needs are internal. so what do wants and needs teach people? that the real problem is always internal. while this is a nice message it's also false. tons of problems aren't internal but external, and teaching people that problems are internal helps those who benefit from the external problems, such as bigots like racists and queerphobes.

the read on frozen in stolen from the same article and so is also strong. combine is with beauty and the beast (or don't, it works on it's own) and what do we see? that hero's don't actually know what they need, that their wants are incorrect and that they need to go through an internal change. don't see the problem? now lets say i watch such movies and am a homophobe... now you see how i can use these ideas against you? you say you want to be together with another man, but what you need is to find the right woman. obvious bigotry, obviously wrong, perfectly in line with screenwriting standards. screenwriting teaches people that they don't know what they need and that what they want is often wrong. this gets even worse if you're trans. if you've ever seen anything from a terf aka a trans exclusionary radical fascist then things like them saying that people need to learn to be comfortable in their bodies and not follow their wants of making themselves comfortable in their own bodies is nothing new. and guess what this is perfectly in line with screenwriting.

3. so are you against wants and needs in characters?

not in absolute terms of course. but lets say every piece of media had messages like beauty and the beast, saying that you should give even horrible people a chance so they can reveal themselves to be good. would that be good? would that be healthy? of course not. i think in that way want vs need can be seen as overused.

4. the owl house

so i want to quickly hit on the owl house with this because i think it's an example of how you can not do it. so lets look at Luz: you can see her as a case of want: don't hurt her mother and so relinquish herself so her mom can be happy. need: open up to her mother so she can be accepted, but this feels more like an arc for her mom then for Luz, or at least heavily shared. it's also not fully true. Luz doesn't want to hide shit, she's very open, and she generally needs to be more open. she wants everything, and she needs to be allowed to want everything so her want disappears. you can almost call it a reverse. she wants everything, but her want is to not want everything, what she needs is to not feel pressured by her surroundings to not want everything. her want is internal, her need is external. this may be why some people have trouble identifying these things in TOH since it likes to turn things around, subvert expectations, which may be deeper then just the world but may even extend to theme and motivation. or i'm just being pretentious about a show i love.

#writing #want vs need #jordan peterson #bigottry #bigottry discussion #homophobia #transphobia #terf #trans exclusionary radical fascist #toh #the owl house #luz noceda

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talenlee · 6 months ago

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Prime Factors

Back in April, I wanted to write an article on my birthday about Prime numbers that segued into talking about Optimus Prime. It didn’t work out, because I got distracted by a dumb number problem. See, I turned a prime number this year! At first I thought I’d do a whole thing about prime numbers and my birthdays only to find that at literally no point in my life have I ever been a prime age in a prime year. This is really obvious when you think about it, because I was born in an odd-numbered year. That means every year where my age was an odd number, that year was an even number, and vice versa. So much for that idea.

But really, you know what the real prime reason for the prime season is? That’s right, it’s really all about him, and what he sacrificed for us:

Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.

It’s supposedly, Optimus Prime’s iconic line, the line that guides his whole persona for the entirety of my life. It is the one iconic home run of the storytelling edifice that is Transformers media and in a collection of several thousand different characters, it’s rare that a single one of them has so excellently been crystallised early. Like, we’re pretty clear on how Bumblebee jams now as a friend to little kids and okay, maybe now I’m just thinking of him as the Bumblebee from Transformers Animated, but we’ve had a few iterations of almost every single character from the franchise.

Almost always, these characters are just endless reinventions on a general vibe. Transformers Prime supposedly made a tragedy of the death of this guy, called Ironhide? Who supposedly mattered? But it was very funny in the context of someone who knows the character as A Present Red Thing In Group Shots. There’s a recurrent joke for years about a confusion back in the day unto now about which of two particular interchangeable idiots were the red one.

Still, Optimus Prime.

We got that guy down pat.

It’s wild to consider that supposedly this is a guy whose whole ouvre is the idea that freedom is a thing that everyone has a right to. What does freedom mean? Freedom in what way? Freedom from what? It’s one of the most hilariously obvious signs of how at its beating heart, Transformers is a corporate product from an industry rooted in 1980s cold war paranoia, that ultimately the reason the whole industry model exists is low oil prices resulting in a boom in plastic toys that then justified their own existence and then from there, latching more and more industries onto the ever-inflating and planet-dooming exercise of oil extraction. We’re going to roast to death thanks to people making a line go up but we are free.

But I get ahead of myself, a little over my cyber-skis as it were because well, okay, if that’s the summary of his personality, if that’s his iconic line, what’s the character attached to it? Well, he’s the main character of Transformers. Whatever kind of story Transformers is, that Transformers is defined by its relationship to Optimus Prime. In the original he’s a stoic, polite dad figure who will always be at the heart of every action, doesn’t delegate because he’s the one person who solves things and people help him. In Beast Wars he’s a guy who is uncertain about his place as a leader doing his best to maintain some control over a group that don’t respect his authority. In Armada, he’s present. In Superlink he’s… probably also present. In the Bayverse, he’s… well, he’s Michael Bay’s idea of a main character, angry, cruel, apathetic to feelings and dismissive of values. And in Transformers Animated – the best Transformers – he’s an uncertain up and comer learning about what it means to be a leader by comparing himself to other leader figures including a terrorist leader.

Hell, in Cyberverse, Optimus Prime is dead.

(It’s not a big deal, Optimus Prime is dead in every universe he’s in, at least at some point)

(Heck, that’s true for every character, in every universe, especially in ours, but the point is that in every story of Transformers at some point, Optimus Prime is cactus. Dude is made to die, because it happened once in the 1980s and the entirety of male media culture these days is the process of reiterating on anything that made any money at all during that period and that’s why we have not one, not two, but three different Karate Kid reboots.)

Optimus Prime is an ad for a toy. What’s more he’s an ad for a toy that’s never been on its own successful for me. I don’t have an Optimus Prime toy and I never have. I’ve never bothered pursuing him and I don’t think of him as important to my collection. He is the Corn Flakes of the Transformers toy collector playspace. There are thousands of him and they aren’t meaningfully different from one another. If there’s any given tie-in with the franchise, chances are good it’s Optimus Prime and chances are good it’s perfectly fine.

He is and has always been important to the story, and indeed, you can tell things about the nature of the series you’re watching (or reading or playing or building commander decks around or… listening to? There are Transformers audio plays, surely), by looking to Optimus Prime. Even Robot Chicken has a clear vision of how Optimus Prime’s presence in the story is a way to express the way that all of the rest of the joke needs to be delivered.

Optimus Prime is the Mario Mario of Transformers; a sort of default main character who I immediately slide off while trying to find more interesting, more specific characters to look at. The most distinctive thing I could find about his character across all incarnations, the first and only thing that made me go: hang on, I wasn’t expecting that, was that he doesn’t like the music of Motley Crue.

And that’s fine.

I mean we can all agree on that right.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Transformers #Media

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anarchy-and-piglins · 13 days ago

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I'm still thinking about this concept, and I have some ideas. You've heard of 'fake dating AU', but have you ever heard of 'fake business partners AU'?

Phil is the oldest (or only?) child of a wealthy family that lives in the countryside. They're high society, upper middle class, and Phil is expected to one day run his father's estate, marry a woman from another rich family, provide some heirs, and all that jazz. I'm thinking the family got rich through generational wealth and owning a factory or two that produces iron or steel items, a booming industry.

Phil finds the idea of running the family business mind-numbingly boring, and the posh countryside lifestyle doesn't appeal to him at all. He wants excitement, exploration, and liveliness! He's interested in archeology, antiques, culture, literature, and the stories he's heard of exotic travels.

As a young adult, he convinces his family to allow him to go to university in London after years of homeschooling by tutors. Then, when he graduates with a degree in history, he hangs around there, using the money his parents send him to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle while looking into opening his own antique shop and collecting items.

That works out for a year or two until his parents finally invite themselves to visit their beloved son in London.

Here's the issue: Phil totally told his parents he was getting a degree in economics or something boring like that and that he hasn't returned home because he's working on investments and stuff, and maybe starting a new manufacturing business. They'll not be very happy when they discover Phil has not been doing any of that.

He decides he'll have to somehow trick his parents into believing he has been actually doing all the things he said he did, otherwise they'll cut him off from the family money and drag him home to sort him out.

So Phil goes to the only person who he thinks can help him. A man named Techno.

Techno is actually from a very poor background (even orphaned perhaps?), but incredibly smart and ambitious. As a child, he started working very hard to save money to take care of himself, combined with perhaps a little bit of petty crime here and there. He fought to get an education, where many teens from his upbringing wouldn't be able to, and then even got into one of the most prestigious universities in London through a smidge of identity fraud and amazing entrance exams that blew the teachers away. He ended up studying history and languages, and is now doing quite well for himself, even if nobody knows exactly where Techno gets his money from.

It seems to be a strange combo of writing articles and thought pieces for The Strand newspaper, guest lecturing in different universities, winning a lot of bets at the gentleman's club, and doing basically 'hired' jobs for random people where he 'solves issues' for them, like muscle for hire but he uses his brain instead basically.

Phil knows vaguely about Techno since they went to the same uni (didn't interact much, there were a lot of rumors about Techno and their peers always looked at him in disdain. Techno is seen as eccentric and strange, and he always keeps to himself), and still vaguely frequenting the same circles (they live in the same area, go to the same club, etc)

So Phil decides to approach Techno and ask him to pretend to be his business partner in this random 'copper manufacturing company' Phil is supposedly persuing, to fool his parents.

Techno is the only person Phil can think of who would be smart enough to pull off the ruse while also having absolutely zero moral problems with scamming a bunch of rich people (in fact, that is Techno's favorite thing to do. Techno has a personal dislike for high society despite having wormed his way into their company pretty much permanently).

For the right price, Techno is more than happy to agree.

(Then, obviously, true friendship happens but shhh)

This probably falls under 'niche AU that's only interesting to me because I'm a history nerd' but I think Techno would slay in a Victorian era AU, he'd be like a historian / scholar who goes to fancy gentlemen clubs to beat everybody at poker

#technoblade #philza #thoughts #I love historical AUs this would be a lot of fun to write

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amarantine-amirite · 1 year ago

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My Heart Will Stop In Joy

I try to get to bed on time. It just never happens. Every time I tell myself I'm going to get to bed at a reasonable hour, stuff happens that pushes it out to unreasonably late. Maybe I should stop kidding myself. The idea of "going to bed at a reasonable hour" is bullshit. There's no "correct" time that you should be in bed.

The theory goes that we can't seem to go to bed as early as we "should" because nighttime is supposedly "our" time of day. We don't have to work. Insurance companies, collection agencies, or other suffocating life businesses won't contact us. The only people who will call us at that time are our friends.

Night time is a release. We can do things we actually want to do. Who would choose to cut that short just to usher in the next morning when our lives are not our own again? Nothing could be more normal than the desire to embrace the one time of day that's genuinely ours.

Tempting as it is to think that, it's also bullshit. This is how people fall into the trap of not sleeping for days on end. Bad things happen when you don't sleep for days on end.

I'm uniquely at risk. My sleep cycles are naturally 10 hours. If I get to bed at 11:30, I'm not gonna be up until 8:30 the next morning. If I know I have something the next day, it is entirely possible for me to miss a sleep cycle

When I don't sleep for days on end, I get headaches that put me off falling asleep and I struggle to remember things. I cope with the headaches better than the memory things. When my memory goes, it falls apart so fast it's not even funny. I lose track of things. I miss details. I have a lot of trouble retaining information long enough to work with it.

The memory problem freaks me out so much. What if I'm stuck in a week-long time loop and don't know it because I don't member anything?

It's hard for somebody with a bad memory to know that they're stuck in a time loop. If you have a good memory, you'll recognize the same day over and over again. If your memory isn't so good, you won't notice. And it's very hard to get out of a time loop once you're stuck.

Everything I've read about getting unstuck from a time loop says that time loops are technically considered time travel because you're moving through a manipulated version of time. In theory, you could solve amnesia with the ability to time travel, but how would you navigate a past you have no reference for?

Every day, I watch people to see what their motivations are. If I know what their motivations are, I hope it'll help me know where to go next. The closer I watch, the more it becomes clear to me that I am, indeed, stuck in a time loop.

Every pass through this loop, I notice something different. I can start to put a pattern together.

It begins on Saturday, we stop in to the pharmacy. My parents remembered this article that they read about how autistic kids are more likely to grind their teeth than average. They bought me a night guard and insisted I wear it to bed. I've never had a problem with grinding my teeth in my sleep, but they made me wear the night guard anyway. "I know, but I read that you did"

By Thursday, We lost the night guard. I'm worried that I'm not allowed to sleep until we get a new one, so I can't get to sleep.

Because I'm the only one up this late, I got strong armed into driving around and picking up food Marissa ordered online. I have to make two stops: the first stop at a restaurant to get a bunless cheeseburger topped with avocado and onions and the second at the grocery store to pick up some chocolate eggs for dessert.

It should be simple. It isn't. The morons at the restaurant won't put the bun on the burger. I tell them Marissa can't have wheat, but they just stare at me with a confused look on their face, looking confused. The guy at the grocery store makes me show ID before I can buy the chocolate eggs. I've never gotten the same explanation for why twice. First, they tell me they can't sell me the chocolate eggs because my parents aren't present, next they say they can't do it because we can't sell junk food to minors on a weekday. The guy ran out of excuses and just accused me of cutting the line in front of a nonexistent pregnant woman.

It's my eighth pass through the loop. While waiting for the loser at the restaurant to hand me a burger with a bun on it despite my saying"no bun," I saw someone peeing on the sidewalk.

I've never seen this before. I couldn't watch, but I couldn't look away. She looked familiar. Hey, I thought to myself, isn't that Helen?

I know that if you mess with something when you go back in time, it will screw up the timeline. If messing up the timeline is what breaks the time loop, then so be it.

"Helen, is that you?" I asked.

Helen turned around and saw me. "You didn't see anything," she hissed. She didn't seem to get that people could, in fact, see her. Neither the bushes in the boulevard nor the yoga mat she held up offered much in the way of coverage.

I couldn't help but blurt out, "What the hell are you doing?"

A mixture of frustration and anger flashed across her glassy-eyed face as she retorted, "I'm about to sick and tired of the shit where you wait in line and there's no toilet, what do you think I'm doing?" she seemed like she had a psychotic break of some kind.

"You can't pee on the sidewalk," I said firmly, feeling the weight of the disapproving stares from those around us. "you have to go in the toilet like everybody else"

And that was when the screaming started. Helen went on a torrent, screaming obscenities that continue to hang in space as a low lying cloud of cuss over Lake Erie. Somewhere in that cloud of cuss words was some mention of uromysitisis poisoning.

She shouted, "which you bitches is with me?!" To nobody's surprise, everybody just blinked and wonder what the hell she's been smoking

Out of nowhere, she started attacking people. She grabbed a random person's cell phone and threw it at somebody. Next, she pushed a man off a bicycle.

I didn't see the fallout with the bicycle. The line moved, and I entered the restaurant. Just as I was about to place the order and explain to the cashier why the burger couldn't have a bun on it, Helen stormed in. She slammed the door into somebody, they fell down. They got up, and then she slammed their fingers in the door.

I didn't get a chance to place the order. The cashier had walked over to Helen and said, "Excuse me, but you can't be in here if you're going to act like this."

Yeah, I thought to myself as Helen threw her shoes at him, that worked. She shoved the guy behind me, who punched her in the mouth in response. She recoiled from the impact and her hand hit the fire alarm.

We evacuated. I saw her make a break for a nearby apartment building. Less than 10 minutes later, I saw her hang her body out a top floor window after she launched a cleaning cart out into the street.

The cleaning cart hit an ambulance. People gasped. I heard a short, stocky, slow witted bald man say "that's got to hurt"

The next morning, I saw a video of what had happened on the news. I don't know if I'm out of the time loop yet, but I might be. I guess I have to wait until Monday to find out

@daily-prompts

#Writing #writers #writers on tumblr #short stories #Prompt 2089

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samueldays · 3 years ago

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The disinformation is coming from inside the house

A while back, disinformation j*rnos made disinformation noises about how much they wanted Elon Musk's money to supposedly fulfill some noble goal, and Elon Musk called their bluff.

The WFP did not describe exactly how $6B would solve world hunger, neither there nor elsewhere.

Now, disinformer Charlotte Alter writes at disinformation outlet TIME Magazine:

They say that something is worth what someone will pay for it. If that’s true, then protecting “free speech,” which Elon Musk has cited as a central reason he agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion this week, may be worth twice as much as solving America’s homelessness problem, and seven times as much as solving world hunger.

If you follow the link from TIME, you will not find a plan to solve world hunger. You will find a disinforming CNN article by Jackie Wattles, where the headline is moving the goalposts and it doesn't get any better in the article:

"Solve" is not the same as "fight". I, too, could "fight" world hunger if you gave me six billion dollars. Please give me six billion dollars.

To recap: CNN claims the UN WFP could "solve" world hunger if it had Musk's money. Musk challenges them to explain how they would "solve" world hunger. The UN WFP issues a plan to "fight" world hunger in response. CNN says here's that plan to "fight" world hunger that Musk wanted. TIME digs it up again to bitch that Musk would not "solve" world hunger.

These two words are different words. They do not mean the same thing. You may think I am belaboring an obvious point, and I agree in principle, but I observe that the j*rnos are mixing up the two words anyway. I do not think the j*rnos are mind-bogglingly retarded. Even if they were mind-bogglingly retarded, they boast of having editors and the like to catch the retardations, so I must conclude that their institutions know better and they're doing it anyway.

In a word, disinformation. In two words, fake news.

If you dig into CNN's link to the UN WFP's plan, it gets ever further from "solving" "world" "hunger". Also, the plan's grown closer to $7B. I quote:

The US$6.6 billion required would help those in most need in the following way: one meal a day, the basic needed to survive – costing US$0.43 per person per day, averaged out across the 43 countries. This would feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine. Below is a snapshot of regions and countries currently most at risk: Global hunger continues to rise at an alarming rate: our latest estimates show that 282.7 million people across 80 countries are experiencing extreme levels of acute hunger.

I think the UN vastly overstates its own impact, and understates how much corruption will eat from their budget. But even if I take their claims at face value, this is a plan to stall regional hunger, not solve world hunger. It is not a lasting solution, and its temporary patch is nowhere close to covering all the hungry people. Also, it does not describe exactly how the money will be spent.

May God strike all these journos dumb for their disinformation.

Secondarily to the disinformation, I want to note how much scumbags like Charlotte Alter are smearing Musk. When Alter says that Musk could have solved world hunger many times over and chose not to, this is a false claim. When people believe that claim, many of them will predictably hate Musk for it. To use a phrase that j*rnos love to rag on, Alter is inciting hatred with her lies.

#all #journalism #journalism delenda est #twitter #bluecheck #factcheck

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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Have your efforts produced any practical results? Have you managed to convince many people?

The irony is that my article that I’m the least satisfied with was the most widely circulated in foreign circles. I literally wrote it on the go, sent it off, and went to enlist in the Territorial Defense Forces. [People] from various countries wrote to me and thanked me for it, not just [people] from the West, [but] from Brazil, Japan, and so on. They said that I helped them understand what’s going on here. Again, because they didn’t trust the mainstream explanation.

But even if other Ukrainian leftists and I had stayed silent, the Western Left still would’ve split over the issue of attitudes towards this war. Therefore, the main thing that we managed to do was reinforce the position of those who immediately took a more adequate stance.

Another thing is that the more pro-Russian segment of the Western Left was silent in the first days of the war. They were shocked by what had happened, because for the three months beforehand they were busy ridiculing U.S. warnings about Russia preparing for war and saying that there would be no war. Now, they’ve reoriented themselves and are once again trying to influence public opinion. It would seem that after what happened people should have understood, but no. So, despite a number of successes, there is also a regression.

How do you assess the efforts of the Russian anti-war opposition?

At the start of the war, many Ukrainians hoped that the Russian anti-war movement would be able to influence things. But then they saw that instead, some [people] began criticizing trends in Ukrainian society. About a month ago, one author complained that Ukrainians were canceling Russian culture and dismantling monuments to Pushkin [Editor’s note: Bilous was referring to this column by Leonid Bershidsky in the Washington Post]. But this is not at all what the Russian intelligentsia should be doing right now. They definitely won’t influence the situation for the better like this. If they have access to Western media, may they better use it to convince the Western public to act more courageously and decisively. When Ukrainians demand weapons, that’s one thing, [our position] is clear, but it’s a completely different matter if opposition Russians do it.

Of course, I understand that such statements can cross out any political prospects in Russia for such people. But after February 24, any prospects for democratization in Russia depend on Russia’s military defeat and how fast it happens. And when Germany was delaying the supply of weapons [to Ukraine] for months, it was the Russians who could have influenced that. I know that some have tried, but it wasn’t enough for Ukrainians. This is definitely more needed than articles about Ukrainians insulting Pushkin. I really don’t like the discourse about how all Russians are supposedly the same, but the fact is that even members of the Russian opposition are showing imperialist tendencies.

Instead of complaining about the consequences of the war, it’s better to try and solve the root problem. Of the entire anti-war movement inside Russia itself, for me the most positive example, free from any imperialist complexes, is the Feminist Anti-war Resistance. On the other hand, I understand that now their activities in Russia aren’t very effective.

At the moment, protests in Russia can only lead to an increase in the number of political prisoners, there will be little benefit from this. Therefore, it’s better for those who are in these specific circumstances to decide how to act. Another thing is the [Russian] anarchists who sabotage the railways. I understand that not everyone will dare to do such acts, but so far this is one of the best ways to hasten the end of this war, because it directly affects Russia’s ability to fight.

It seems to me that many Russians, even the opposition, don’t understand that Ukraine will not capitulate. And the point here isn’t [President Volodymyr Zelensky] — he’s only fulfilling the will of the people on this matter. After what Russia has done, the absolute majority of Ukrainians oppose concessions to Russia. Ukrainians are already preparing to survive this winter without gas and electricity. Everyone understands that the continuation of the war means further losses, but Ukraine is ready to fight until victory.

Russia can’t win and the only reason why this war continues is because some miserable dwarf in a bunker can’t admit that he screwed up when he gave the order to invade Ukraine. When Russia loses, he [Vladimir Putin] will lose power, and through this [the war] he’s delaying that moment and dragging his country into a bigger and bigger hole. But the sooner Russia admits its defeat and withdraws its troops from Ukraine, the better it will be for Russians themselves.

‘Let’s not exaggerate Russian propaganda’s influence’ Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous serves in the Territorial Defense Forces. He’s also fighting the Western Left’s stereotypes about Ukraine.

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dwellordream · 2 years ago

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American Culture of the 1910s: Social Dance

“In June 1913, the waspish and unconventional journalist (and future modernist icon) Djuna Barnes published the vignette ‘You can Tango – a Little – at Arcadia Dance Hall’. It follows the foppish and upper-class Reginald Delancey as he decides to dispel his ennui one evening by indulging his curiosity (and unacknowledged interest in class and ethnic slumming) by following up an advertisement in the paper and visiting the Arcadia dance hall.

A new facility, owned and run in a working-class district by the ‘Social Centers Corporation’, it is committed – as he is informed by the conspicuously Jewish secretary, Sydney S. Cohen – to ‘elevat[ing] the tone of dancing and to plac[ing] the dancehall business on a clean and wholesome basis’. Once there, Reginald is surprised to see dance censors, helping to enforce an atmosphere where dancing a ‘modified’ tango is permitted.

Eager to dance, he inveigles his father’s Irish office boy into providing an introduction to Delia O’Connor, shopgirl at the perfume counter of the Paris department store on Broadway. ‘Everyone had a glorious time,’ and when the dancing is over, Delia reflects on her way home about the ‘real frangipani sort of guy’ she met earlier – while Reggie resolves to become a patron of the Paris. Barnes’s article suggests a good deal about social dance in the 1910s, especially the tone of innocent fun that accompanies much of the writing about it.

It was truly a craze; by the 1910s over five hundred public dance halls were open each evening in the Greater New York area, and the decade saw the construction of several of the dance palaces which became such a feature of 1920s dance – New York’s Grand Central and Roseland Ballroom among them. Many young women in particular became obsessed with dance; a New York entertainment survey of 1911 showed that 96 percent of girls enjoyed dancing, and Barnes’s Delia enthuses that dancing has the movies ‘beaten to a thirty-nine-cent bargain sale on a rainy Monday’.

Moreover, Barnes also hints at some of the sociopolitical forces attending this relatively new form of public leisure. The dance craze was deeply enmeshed with the progressive discourse of moral hygiene which had an especial concern for unescorted young women; but it also evidenced the progressive faith that vice and public health problems in America’s big cities could be solved through systems of physical culture and exercise.

Reggie’s Arcadian adventure also suggests how new cultures of commercial entertainment were encouraged by – but also sustained – new forms of advertising, new magazines, and dancing celebrities who became ‘idols of consumption’ in much the same way as did early film stars. And it suggests how the language and the barriers of class, race, gender and ethnicity were both inescapable in the dance and music of the 1910s, but also open to often titillating and exhilarating redefinition and flexibility.

As was true of films and vaudeville in the 1910s, the class profile of those who attended social dances in commercial entertainments underwent significant change in the decade, a change which led to a big increase in overall participation. Like vaudeville and films, social dancing was a well-established feature of working-class recreation by the 1910s; and the language of respectability was similarly crucial in enticing the middle class to get involved. This applied to both styles and venues.

‘Tough dancing’, or barnyard dancing, had emerged from African American dance styles and the Barbary Coast vice district of San Francisco in the 1900s, and encouraged close proximity between dance partners as well as jerky physical movement supposedly copying the movements of animals (the turkey trot, for example, involved flapping the arms; the grizzly bear involved close hugging).

Middle-class reformers were horrified at the sexual suggestiveness of these dances, which were described as ‘not dancing at all, but a series of indecent antics’ of ‘disreputable origins’, and they were widely banned at prominent middle-class dance venues and hotels. (Woodrow Wilson even cancelled the ball planned for his inauguration in 1913, fearing the scandal that might ensue if preventing these dances proved impossible).

Dance censors, dance manuals and a new set of dance magazines all focused on adapting and ‘refining’ these dances through a discourse of respectability in dancing, one which defined dance’s benefit as healthy exercise and the cultivation of ‘grace’ rather than focusing on its romantic or sexual potentialities.

It was even discussed in the terms of racial–national improvement so common in physical culture; in the words of one booster, regular dances in public schools, properly instructed and chaperoned, would ‘do more good to the race than . . . discussing eugenics or . . . indulging in a flippant study of social economics’. Commercial venues also emerged to cater for a middle- class clientele emerging from a tradition whereby dancing took place primarily in private homes and at society balls.

As Lewis Erenberg discusses, the rise of the cabaret as a middle- class venue in the decade broke down barriers between performers and audience that had structured theatrical and concert hall stages in earlier entertainment cultures; cabarets became a ‘new public environment for the exploration of alternatives to the private character of the nineteenth century’.

Cabarets expanded the spaces they had for exhibition dancers to cater for public dancing; elegant hotels began to hold ‘tea dances’ for afternoon dancing; and there was a boom in dance instruction classes. Attempts to regulate this expansion were also extensive Erenberg observes that middle-class cabaret tables were organised to discourage contacts between unacquainted men and women and, as Kathy Peiss notes, ‘the “couple on a date” became an increasingly important cultural construct for the middle class, since it provided a way to structure potentially promiscuous heterosocial relations at the new resorts’.

Campaigning Progressives in cities across the country helped pass licensing ordinances regulating dance halls and dancing academies. Committees even opened and ran dance halls in some working-class areas, although ‘tough dancing’ – as well as greater freedom in heterosocial contact – persisted in working-class dance culture in the decade, often in defiance of the standards of the more recent uptake of public dance by the middle class.

Peiss’s seminal work in particular has explored how young working women generally enjoyed greater freedoms in how they danced and with whom they danced than did middle- class women of the time, and how they forged a distinctive culture of personal style, qualified sexual freedom and female friendship in public dance. Such a culture is important for understanding that the nature of the ‘new woman’, one of the decade’s most enduring archetypes, did not emerge purely through a ‘trickle down’ model of cultural transmission.

Although critics still tend to define that new woman as primarily a middle-class figure, the cultures of working-class dance demonstrate that working women were also instrumental in redefining the limits and nature of female agency, style and independence in the period. Despite this, the decade’s dancing icons were those who presented dancing to the middle class not just as wholesome, unthreatening, elegant and fun but as articulated to a whole new mode of fashion and social aspiration.”

- Mark Whalan, “Performance and Music.�� in American Culture of the 1910s

#american culture in the 1910s #1910s #edwardian #american #history

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tiktaalic · 3 years ago

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I got a 177. I am an adult. I don't mean to be excruciatingly serious, but what would the benefits be to being diagnosed?

Honestly? I don’t know. I’m also an adult who’s undiagnosed and I havent started the process quite simply because it’s easier to not start it than to start it. I skimmed some articles about whether or not to get diagnosed and a lot of the pros are just like. Have a better understanding of yourself! Which I don’t think I need a tick in my medical record for in order to do yknow. The other “benefits” r supposedly access to resources and a more accurate and helpful way to approach doctor visits n therapy but. I have never worked somewhere that actually had resources that you had to Prove you were autistic/etc to use. N re: doc visits again it’s all comorbidity so I mean. I personally don’t see any benefit in moving a symptom I experience from column A (generalized anxiety diagnosis that is in my medical record) to column B (autism diagnosis) or even to the middle of a column a column b diagram. Like to me personally the problems I experience are best tackled as anxiety problems and I don’t think categorizing them as autism problems would enhance my problem solving of them. To me autism is a helpful catch all for behaviors that aren’t necessarily normal but don’t cause me any real issues. Like yeah I speak in a monotone that makes my sister ask r u mad at me but I mean. That’s not something I’m looking to Solve it’s just an aspect of things I experience that I go #autismoment about

#ask #anonymous #this. doesn’t feel helpful. my b

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5-falsehoods-phonated · 3 years ago

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Out of the House

Series summary: Ever the paranormal enthusiast Remus is excited when he finds an abandoned house creepy enough to have ghosts in it with no chance of being caught trespassing. He quickly finds himself in over his head however when his fantasies come true, fighting to solve a mystery with the only possible outcome being losing someone he comes to love.

Platonic dukexiety focus

This series was created for dukexiety week 2021. I’m posting after but here is the list of prompts!

Chapter 2: I’ll be by Your Side

Chapter Summary: Remus goes back to the house in the hopes of making contact with the entity the resides in it. Unsurprisingly, his attempts are not appreciated.

Pairings: Platonic Dukexiety (Remus & Virgil), background Lociet (Logan x Janus)

Day 1 Prompt: Swapping

Warnings: mild swearing, mild sexual innuendos, injury and violence, distorted text, paranormal events. If there are others please let me know!

WC: 3441

AO3 link

Main masterlist

Remus fumbled for the light as he shot up in bed, bloodshot eyes fighting through the urge to close as he scanned every corner of the suddenly too bright room. This had been the routine every hour on the hour no matter how much he tried to ignore the growing paranoia and simply stay asleep. The task, as it turned out, was much easier said than done when phantom glass still pricked at his skin and echoing screams rang in his ears so loudly tik could hardly sort his own thoughts out if tik could concentrate enough to have any. Finally satisfied that the shadows weren’t hiding anything Remus allowed tiks head to drop into his hands, groaning in frustration and kicking the tangled blankets off his legs. He doubted he’d be able to get any more sleep of any decent quality so tik may as well just get up and get the day started. It would be a long one after all.

The clock on the stove glared a bright 4:30 in his face accusingly as tik went about getting the coffee pot cleaned and set up. Logan always said the way he used it would break it or tik sooner than later but after three years it still worked just fine so he had no problems patting down three cups of bustelo espresso into the filter and letting it run through before pouring the brewed coffee back into the back and allowing it to brew through the grounds a second time, filling the apartment with the scent of strong slightly burned heaven.Too much creamer in a mug the size of a cereal bowl later and he was sat down on the old couch Roman had let him keep when they moved out of their dorm, computer booting up on the table as he absently dug between the cushions for a fidget toy he knew had to be lost someone in the abyss.

Abandoning the fetch quest to bring up google he stared at the screen intently for a few moments tryin to figure out exactly what it was he was trying to figure out. He’d seen the ghost shows, been to scenes, read the spooky and “informative” books- he thought he had known what he would do if he ever actually saw a ghost in real life. Now that he had...obviously tik didn’t know the first thing about anything. It had to be a poltergeist that much tik knew. They were violent and loud and could manipulate their surroundings, even if in all the supposedly real footage he’d ever seen that wasn’t part of a show there had never been anything quite as destructive and hostile as the being in that house.

But it was a starting point and that would have to be enough for now. Maybe tik could just…

Okay well, typing in “poltergeist” yielded nothing but cheesy movies. He already knew what one was so a definition wouldn’t help…maybe “how to calm a poltergeist?”

Poltergeist activity typically starts with minor isolated incidents. Remus snorted as tik reached p to tug on his bandaged ear. Typically yes, but this wasn’t tiks wallet being misplaced every now and again. Clicking off the article he scrolled down a bit until he came to another that sounded a bit more promising. Establishing Contact With the House Entity. A bit more on the nose than he would have thought was necessary but sometimes the more obvious something was the more straightforward information you could find.

While there are many ways to know whether or not there is a presence in your home the first signs usually start out subtle. General uneasiness is among the most commonly reported- as well as a feeling of being watched or perhaps seeing something flicker just outside the limits of your vision- on;y to find as you turn your head that nothing is waiting for you to find. When it comes to feeling safe within your home it’s best to trust your gut when things feel amiss, and trust it as soon as possible no matter how “crazy” you may think the feelings are. Better to accept a spirit or ghost has entered your life and deal with it as soon as possible than to be too late to do anything at all should things take a turn for the worst.

Rolling tiks eyes at the wording, Remus grabbed up his coffee mug only to realize he must have drained it already without realizing, sighing heavily before getting up for a refill. The apartment was quiet and while tik normally didn’t mind it was setting him on edge this morning, the walls seeming to creep closer anytime he wasn't looking and threatening to trap him in a prison with nothing but his thoughts. Thoughts of shadows that caught his ankles and glass filled winds that ripped his face and shredded his eyes so he couldn’t tell what was real or not while the walls pressed his arms painfully against his ribs until they popped like old sticks and his lungs floated like balloons to escape the hell he had created and still the screaming continued to get louder and louder until it deafened him with blood dripped down his neck and nothing but the vibrations against his skin indicated that they were still screaming to get out get out get-

Remus jerked his head up and startled as his phone peeled away from his face and fell to the floor, still vibrating merrily oblivious of his distress. Looking around confused he straightened his back the rest of the way, groaning in pain as tiks spine popped from his bent in half position he’d been holding for god knows how long. Rubbinghis eyes he remembered his phone and snatched it up just as it stopped vibrating, five missed calls and a few texts filling the home screen all from Janus who as far as Remus could tell had gone from scolding him for sleeping in to asking in his sarcastic/worried way if he had died at the house yesterday and if he should check on tiks ghost.

Checking the time revealed it was currently 9:00, which meant that not only was he an hour late for the only class he has that day but that there would honestly be no point in going so he may as well just act sick and hope Janus wouldn’t be suspicious. He last thing he needed or wanted was getting an “I told you so” about how ghost hunting was going to make him sick with stress one day and he needed a proper sleep schedule and no coffee doesn’t count towards daily hydration and stop double brewing it, you’ll die of a heart attack at twenty-five. Pressing tiks lips in a thin line he shot a text apologizing and saying he had over-exerted himself running so much yesterday so he’d stayed home to rest. A bit of a stretch considering he’d been in track for long enough that a couple of full out sprints with obstacles in one day really wouldn’t have done much but Janus didn’t know that....probably.

-----

The most effective way to establish contact would be through something simple. A twist on/off flashlight is a good place to start as long as you’re clear with your intentions. Turn it on and do a wide sweep of the room you suspect the entity is in, stating in a clear voice that “on means yes and off means no”. Ask clear, deliberate questions while paying attention to the flashlight- the simpler the question the easier the entity will find it to respond. Any electrical equipment you can get- voice and EVP recorders, cameras, thermometers, infrared detectors- anything and everything you have at your disposal can and should be used. The more data there is to work with the closer you’ll be to figuring out what you’re dealing with and how to get it to leave.

The rest of the article had devolved into talk about smudging and priests and offerings to get the spirit to move on- none of which Remus would be using unless whatever it was expressed interest in doing so. He just wanted to know what and who it was and maybe figure out why they had stayed so long after the house had emptied. There was a story there, tik knew it, and his curiosity wasn’t about to let it go until he knew as much of it as possible.

He adjusted his motorcycle helmet one last time before stepping into the house and quietly shutting the door behind him. If tik was going to be attacked again tik was going to make damn sure he’d leave with minimal injuries and both of his eyes- he still couldn’t quite shake the nightmare from this morning and for once would rather take the safe route than risk getting blinded by a glass tornado- ignoring the question of how he would even explain that at the hospital. The house was silent and still, no indication that there had ever been anything in it all yesterday save for the scuffed boot marks beside the wall where he had scraped tiks soles against it trying to get away from the stairwell.

Said stairwell was cheerily lit as usual, sunlight streaming through the ruined window and spilling over the steps in a way he’d find ironically funny if his hands weren’t shaking slightly at the mere thought of trying to climb them. Protecting his face from glass wasn’t the only reason he had worn the helmet; he had surmised earlier that the easiest way to communicate with the ghost would be to get to where they hid when they weren’t shooing people out. So tik had to get up the stairs, rickety and falling in and probably going to kill him or not. He’d even dressed light for the occasion hoping the shedded weight would make it easier, trading his usual platforms for worn doc martins with none of the layers of clothing and chains he was known for. A t-shirt, green corduroy jacket and ripped jeans was as far as he went, thanking whatever god there was that Logan and Janus hadn’t seen him as they’d never let tik live it down. He doubted they’d seen him out of his punk-esque style in a decade and he preferred to keep it that way.

Taking a deep breath, tik carefully placed tiks foot on the first step near the wall where he assumed the least amount of damage would be. His foot didn’t break through with his weight like before so, taking it as a good sign, he braced himself against the wall and moved to the second step. Icd shot through tiks veins suddenly as he whipped his head around in search of the eyes he felt raking his back, but of course there was nothing to see. No nails or glass screeching through the air, no shadows dripping from the crevices he could barely make out through the ooze. Just an empty, unassuming house.

Remus tried not to dwell on the fact that in comparison to yesterday the silence left him more unsettled than being attacked would have.

Tik continued on, practically flattening himself against the wall as tik took it one step at a time, wincing as every creak echoed through the silence and only served to further raise the hair along his arms leaving his nerves electrified. Three quarters of the way of the step split down the middle from the wall to the railing, tils heart beating madly against his chest as he waited for it to collapse underneath him and leave him a bloody heap at the bottom. He took his weight off slowly and shifted to the next step up instead which seemed much more stable. Tik was acutely aware it was growing darker, the sun dimming around the edges as shadows began to ooze, so he tried his best to hurry his shimmy as best he could to try and beat the inevitable.

Blatantly ignoring the way his boots kept catching on nothing he finally reached the top step. Sighing in relief and closing his eyes for a second, tik dug the flashlight out of his pocket and stepped forward….only to bump his foot against the bottom step.

“What the fuck?” He was on the first floor again, the sun shining merrily at the top and spilling over the clearly visible stairs. Not a shadow in sight. “Okay, then I won’t blink. Needed the exercise anyway ghostie.”

He went up much faster this time, holding his staring contest with the railing like his life depended on it. As the air grew cold and tiks joints stiff he was starting to think it might. Tripping his way up the stairs as his vision began to tunnel he slammed his foot perhaps a tad more decisely than was appropriate on the top step. Tik grinned and stood up straight, making his way towards the corner to finally see what awaited him down the hall- and smashed his nose into the front door.

Nostrils flaring, Remus spun on his heel and marched his way back to the steps and slammed the flashlight on to shine it up the stairs. Tik took a moment to calm tikself and remember to control tiks volume. Yelling probably wouldn’t be the best tithing to do considering he’d nearly gotten an impromptu piercing yesterday just from sitting down. “Very impressive mind games but Janus could do better in his sleep.”

If the entire house darkening for a few seconds before returning to normal was a response that was probably something Remus should have thought more about before speaking. He leaned against the far wall and started again. “Look, I’ve never seen a ghost before so this is cool and shit but- they’re gonna be tearing this place down soon- I’m not sure they could fix and sell it in the state it’s in. Will you be stuck here when they do?”

The house was deathly silent as he waited, flashlight momentarily forgotten before he nearly dropped it. “Oh right! You have no problems manipulating objects so- on is yes, off is no....or maybe- one blink for yes to for no? I won’t ask anything too complicated I swear-”

Tik was cut off by the tool being ripped from his hands and catapulted into the far wall, bulbs smashing and batteries exploding out from the other end. He watched the plastic case clatter to the ground and roll away past his field of sight. While he wasn’t exactly sure which answer the entity had picked he was pretty sure it translated roughly to “fuck your flashlight.” which while much more impressive than a one word response it was decidedly less helpful.

“Okay! You wanna play it that way?” Deciding to do what he did best and simply not think he took a running start and sprinted up the steps, heedless of the wood crumbling beneath him and the shadows licking desperately at his heels. Turning sharply at the top tik kept running until he reached the very end of the hall, spinning around and holding his arms up in a defensive position, preparing for the worst as logic finally caught up to him.

For a moment nothing happened, a flea could have sneezed and Remus probably would have heard it for all the noise there was in the house. If his idiocy had taught him anything however it was that silence here was rarely ever a good thing.

His heart leapt in his throat as a door slammed against the wall, plaster raining down on the floor while the door slammed back into place looking as if it upset the frame with its force. Further down the hall another door did the same, this time taking an entire section of wall with it as it whipped back into place. The last door slammed with even more force, cracking the door itself in two but failing to swing back immediately. Instead it creaked back and forth slowly, as if undecided whether or not enough destruction had been caused to justify its closing. Remus watched it with wide, bloodshot eyes, pressed as tightly against the wall as he could get with shaking knees and rapid breaths. This had been a mistake. Whether his coming here was to selfishly prove there were such things as ghosts or to actually help he wasn’t sure- but this wasn’t at all what he’d expected or wanted.

Tik locked his eyes on the door which had now stopped creaking, shadows deepening around it as a cluster seemed to form just at hand height, pushing the ruined wood aside as it stepped into the hallway fully. There was nowhere to run from the terrifying entity that stood before him, writhing dimness that put a sickly filter over the light coming in through the dingy window. Tiks breathing picked up as he realized just how screwed tik was with no exit short of trying to bust through the wall and nothing but tiks mouth that had already gotten him into this mess to begin with.

He shrunk back as the form began to move slowly down the hall, a sound registering that sounded like talons scraping against the walls as he frantically looked for what could be making the noise. Whimpering as gouges appeared in the walls sans any talons or weapons to be seen, tik could only press himself back further and hope to god this wasn’t where his stupidity led him. A painful end in an empty house with a ghost that made the walls press in on him and ripped at his arms painfully and pulled every last breath of air from tiks lungs that it could before it decided to run him through-

He gasped as his back suddenly hit the floor, whipped around and thrown a few feet away so that he was facing the wall he had just been cowering against. Eye shapes so blacked they almost glowed purple stared into his own terrified brown ones mere inches away.

“Leave.” Remus felt the word more than he heard it- a deep, rumbling base shaking him to his core as tik struggled to raise up on tiks elbows without bumping “heads” with the ghost. Creaking snapped his attention to the boards in front of his feet as the floor began to ripple and crack beneath him, his scrabbling to gain purchase making it worse as wood chips began to fly up and around him. Splinters ripped at his clothes and tore his face as tik finally just rolled over and kicked off the wall, half sprawling towards the steps as he rolled sloppily to his feet.

“L̴͇͓̦͎͊͊E̵̗̻͉͖̟̿̃̇̐͑͗A̶̛̩̤̖̻͛̌̋̓́̌̚V̷̢̰̎̿͆Ę̵̜͓̩͈̺̜̳̗̪̞̦͔͎̄̈̂̍̐̅̍͌̒̌̕͝!̵͙͖͔̲̹̟̫̣̻͙̤̿̐̊̀͒͜͝!̴̨̨̧̘̇̑̎͐͗͌̑̒͛͊̂̓̓̑̚ͅ”

The voice bounced off the walls and slammed into him, knocking him forward and giving tik just enough time to cover his face before tik was sliding down the stairs on his stomach. Groaning, tks eyes widened as he tried to get up only to find tik couldn’t. His arms throbbed in pain and his hip pulled painfully even as he tried using only one leg to push himself away from the shadows coming down the stairs like an infected flood. “Please-”

“L̶̡̛͙̝̙̥͖̳̮̝͕͍͙͎͖̘̘̽̈́͑͑̇̆͛̀̈́̿͊̔̿̚̚̚͠͝͝Ê̵̡̨̡̧̧̪̗͙̲̗̻͈͓̠̟̞̪͚̰͔̑̏̋̉̊͑̿̈͂̓̓̇̍̀̍̚̕͝ͅA̷͎̯̱̲̤͇͉͍͓̤̦̕͜͝ͅV̶̛̞͛͂̓̅̚͘̚͠E̴̬͕̬̣̟̽̄̽̆́́̋̀̈́̏͋͂͌̑̋́̊͘͝͝!̸̢̛̘̘̝̰̖̼̝͙̖͕̦̹͓͈͉͓̫̰̘͙̾͆̍͆̏̑́͒̿͊͂̈́̈̏͝͠ͅ!̷̨̧̭̪͙͈̫̰͖̻̤̺̝͋̉̐̓͐̾̓̓̏͋͂͜ͅ”

“I can’t!” Remus sobbed as his body was flung like a ragdoll towards the door, limbs splayed out in a way he’d joke about if he wasn’t so afraid he was going to die. Everything in him was screaming to just get up, crawl if he had to but get away, get away, get away-

And then he stood.

His body protested immediately but he hardly registered it in his panic. He hadn’t moved...and it was quiet. Why was it quiet? It shouldn’t be quiet he was going to die and now it was quiet-

“T̵̯̾h̵̳̑i̸̦͂s̶̢͆ ̷̰͌ỉ̶̗s̵̜̾-̸̲͗ ̷͈̈́I̸͔̅'̴͒͜d̷̗͘ ̸̫͊f̵̜̆o̸̡͠r̵̛̼g̸͎̈́o̶̞͊t̸̹͂t̵̺̑ė̵͔ṇ̵̿-”

“Forgotten what?” He mouthed, not a sound escaping from tiks cracked and bloodied lips.

His bruised fists clenched of their own accord and he began to jerkily move towards the door.

“I̷ ̵w̷a̷n̸t̷ ̷y̸o̵u̶ ̸o̷u̵t̶ ̵a̶n̸d̵ ̶I̴ ̵w̶a̸n̵t̴ ̷y̴o̷u̸ ̵f̶a̷r̸ ̶a̴w̵a̸y̷” The voice continued to echo in his head. “I̷ ̷w̷a̵n̸t̸ ̴y̵o̴u̶ ̴o̶u̶t̴ ̷a̶n̵d̵ ̶I̷'̶m̵ ̶n̸o̵t̶ ̴l̶e̴t̶t̶i̷n̴g̴ ̴y̴o̶u̵ ̴g̷o̶ ̸u̷n̷t̶i̸l̴ ̷I̶'̸m̸ ̵s̷u̶r̸e̷ ̸y̶o̴u̴ ̸c̶a̸n̸'̵t̶ ̸c̸o̶m̴e̴ ̵b̴a̴c̴k̸!̸”

A chill ran through him as tik tried desperately to fight but it was no use. Tik slammed through the door into the cool night air, startling him as he wondered just how long he’d been trapped inside the house.

And then his body began to run.

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#false writes #dukexiety #platonic dukexiety #virgil sanders #remus sanders #ghost au #out of the house #ooth #tw violence #tw injury #tw paranormal

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adultingautistic · 4 years ago

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My whole childhood I remember constantly getting in trouble because I “just forgot” to do things that were asked of me. Since adolescence, it’s changed to “why didn’t you do [x supposedly obvious thing]?!” - “I just didn’t think to.” I also forget literally everything now; I’ve developed CPTSD which has made memory a lot worse but still, this is like, wildly unusual. Could this inability to retain tasks or “think” to do things be caused by my autism?

Yes! This is called executive dysfunction. From this article:

Executive Function can be considered the “epi-center” of the brain; it controls the integration of cognitive processes such as planning and prioritizing, accessing working memory, directing attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibiting extraneous ideas, mental flexibility or shifting thoughts, multi-tasking, time management, and initiating and monitoring one’s actions (metacognition). Together, these skills allow all individuals to solve problems, organize a plan of action, and control emotions and behaviors throughout the day.

In other words, it’s not a memory problem, it’s a planning problem.

Here’s an example, that happened to me ALL THE TIME as a kid:

Mom: “I’m going out to run some errands. When I get back I want to see the dishes washed.”

Me: “Okay.”

Mom, two hours later coming home: “Why aren’t these dishes washed?”

Me: “I forgot.”

“I forgot” is the best words I could come up with to describe the situation, but that’s not actually what happened. The real failure was “My brain was unable to plan when to start doing the dishes.”

For a person with executive dysfunction, if you leave out essential details, such as when to do the task, we are doomed to never do it. I fully intended to wash the dishes, just as soon as the TV show I was watching was over- but by the time it was over, the idea of dishes was gone from my mind, never to return.

As an adult, I know this about myself, and so I have learned to accommodate my brain. I know that it will not remember. I can count on it not remembering. And so I must build things around that fact.

So when I must do something, I set alarms on my phone. Your phone is one of the best assistive devices your brain will ever have. I have trained myself, through hard self-disipline, that when a task is given to me, I must set an alarm immediately.

So for example, if I am talking to my mother on the phone and she says “Why don’t you come over on Saturday?” I say “Okay”, and immediately, while still on the phone with her, pull up my calendar, put at 8am on Saturday morning, “Seeing Mom Today” and set an alarm. Then I also set one for the time I have to leave the house.

If I’m cooking and I see I’m low on milk, I set an alarm for two hours from now that says “order groceries” (I order my groceries online). I pick two hours becuase by then I will be finished cooking and eating, and will be free to do the task.

I also use other physical reminders. For example, I bought some cold cuts the other day, and then kept “forgetting” to eat them (I wasn’t forgetting, my brain is unable to plan to eat them, which is executive dysfunction). Instead, I kept eating macaroni and cheese for lunch.

So I took a sticky note, wrote on it the words “EAT TURKEY”, and stuck it on the front box of mac and cheese, then closed the cabinet door. Stickey notes can be very poweful BUT, you have to use them in a way that you only see it WHEN IT’S TIME. Executive dysfunctional brains cannot plan. They can only do it NOW. Literally all tasks are “now or never”. So the sticky note must be in a place and situation where when I see it, I can do it now. Otherwise it is useless.

I also have a pile of objects always blocking the front door. These are items that I need to take somewhere. For example, I got a letter addressed to my mother in the mail. I put it on the floor blocking the door. This is important! I literally cannot leave the house without touching those items, which triggers in my brain “I need to carry these things to my car.”

So I use all of these accommodations, because I have learned that my brain CANNOT plan. It can’t. It never will. Yelling at it is useless, all that does is make me feel bad. Yelling at a fish a lot doesn’t make it climb a tree, because it can’t.

So it’s not your fault that you have executive dysfunction. Accept that you have it, and then begin building around it, to help it, so that you can complete the tasks.

I still never remember anything. Ever. My phone remembers it for me. It just beeps and tells me where to go. But I am in the place I’m supposed to be, at the time I’m supposed to be there! So it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember. Use the tools around you. Use the world to help you.

It’s not your fault that your brain can’t do the thing- but you can still do the thing, if you allow yourself to give your brain the help it needs.

#actuallyautistic #actually autistic #executive dysfunction #planning #organization #ask

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