#for example in my personal experience

[love-strikes-thrice]

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Getting real suspicious about the conflation of fantasy with reality in fandom.

"You must only read good and pure things! Otherwise you're secretly evil (smiley face)" is the song of book burners and history revisionists.

The growing number of fans treating shipping as a sign of moral purity is troubling at best and terrifying at worst.

Never trust someone who tells you to police your thoughts.

Never trust someone who tells you that bad thoughts are the same as bad actions.

And most of all.

Never trust a purity spiral.

Fandom

ID End]

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.

[transexualpirate]

queer people online: transfag too weird. transbian too problematic. cancel lil nas x

queer people irl: i literally don't have a gender but lesbian sounds cool so that's me now. im bi but im feeling gay today. im not a man and i dress femininely but my pronouns are he/him. i am repulsed by the idea of having sex but i constantly make the best dirty jokes you've ever heard

[gailynovelry]

I don’t like getting intense over petty things, but why are people calling large paragraphs “bad formatting” now. It’s just formatting. Sometimes, a larger paragraph serves its text well, and sometimes it doesn’t, and there is a LOT more that goes into making a text block readable than length alone.

Please please please fucking please stop inventing all-encompassing arbitrary rules about what features define “good” art and “bad” art.

[canisalbus]

I've had Ludovicas girlfriend on the brain for months and finally sketched her out. I see her as the opposite to machete in that she has dark colours and softer shapes. Her ears and facefur kinda blend together and she gets big soft browneyes..

.

[smoothie03]

Other version below the cut

@pokenoire 's lgbtq+ headcanons for my childhood OTP gave me some ideas ^^

[wewerebornsextuplets]

everyone should think too deeply about small oc details forever btw. it makes life better

[st-peculiar]

I’ve just had this really specific vision of post canon Doug Eiffel being a mechanic. Maybe even though his memories were drained from him, the movements of repair are still familiar, and I think it would also add something to his characterization once he’s back in earth with the others. I’m gonna think about this some more and come back to this post in a bit

[thepoisonroom]

'I flirted with the idea that instead of being trans that I was just a cross-dresser (a quirk, I thought, that could be quietly folded into an otherwise average life) and that my dysphoria was sexual in nature, and sexual only. And if my feelings were only sexual, then, I wondered, perhaps I wasn’t actually trans.

I had read about a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, by a Northwestern University professor who believed that transwomen who were attracted to women were really confused fetishists, they wanted to be women to satisfy an autogynephilia. And though I first read about this book in the context of its debunkment and disparagement, I thought about the electricity of slipping on those tights, zipping up those boots, and a stream of guilt followed. Maybe this professor was right, and maybe I was only a fetishist. Not trans, just a misguided boy.

About a year later, on the Internet, I come across a transwoman who added a unique message to the crowd refuting this professor. Oh, I wish I remember who this woman was, and I wish even more that I could do better than paraphrase her, but I remember her saying something like this: “Well, of course I feel sexy putting on women’s clothing and having a woman’s body. If you feel comfortable in your body for the first time, won’t that probably mean it’ll be the first time you feel comfortable, too, with delighting in your body as a sexual thing?”'

-Casey Plett, Consciousness

[uncanny-tranny]

In political spheres, I so often want to ask, "is what you're doing 'punching up,' or are they just an easily-available, acceptable target?"

[shmowder]

In case you missed it, Game Rant did an interview with Nikolay Dybowski about Pathologic 3. Here is the link for it.

And here are the bits that stood out the most to me:

Q: The non-linearity of time and how it will be related to the nature of the Town are also core story components. How did this affect design and direction?

A: Connecting non-linear time with a long, narrative-heavy story that involves many characters and cause-and-effect chains would be extremely difficult. We focused on what the player feels in the moment rather than on gathering information in the right order. The latter approach works well in shorter formats like Her Story or 12 Minutes, but in Pathologic, it would be overwhelming.

We wanted players to feel like “everything, everywhere, all at once”—similar to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. Different versions of reality coexist simultaneously, creating a “quantum” feeling for the player. Look at the time travel mechanic as an opportunity to correct mistakes, or even to make deliberate mistakes in order to unlock new paths and ideas. It is like a "sanctioned save scum."

-

Q: Conversely, how will it (Pathologic 3) connect to and consider the events and characters in Pathologic 2?

A: Consider it as two subjective retellings of the same events. This is the same Town, the same twelve days, the same participants and events that occurred in the Haruspex’s story. But this is a different perspective. Like two witnesses recounting the same event in Rashomon, the stories vary greatly, each focusing on different details. Finally, we always give our heroes the right to make honest mistakes, forget, and even lie. Every narrator is an unreliable narrator.

-

Q: How did Pathologic’s previous philosophical explorations help inform or play into the narrative and themes here?

A: Everything we now see as true and valuable, we’ve kept. Everything we’ve outgrown, like childhood clothes, we either reimagined and reinterpreted to give these ideas new meaning, or let go of them. After all, we’ve grown a lot (hopefully, along with the industry). When I first conceived Pathologic, I was 21 and completely alone. Now I’m 47, surrounded by incredibly talented people who enrich this universe as much as I do, and that makes a difference.

We’ve kept the idea of the tragedy of utopian projects. We kept the idea that the plague is a voice of the natural order—one that the thinking human mind cannot accept—and that it has its own truth. We retained the belief that evil cannot be defeated with its own tools or outplayed on its field; yet it can be defeated realistically in a different, orthogonal way. In another dimension.

-

Q: It’s mentioned that the Bachelor is searching for an immortal man in Pathologic 3. Can you say if this is in reference to Mark Immortell?

A: No, there’s no connection between Simon Kain (one of the town’s rulers) and Mark Immortell (the director of the town theater). Mark is a clown. He awkwardly mimics Simon, parodying him, which is why he takes on this pseudonym. He's fully aware that he’s a jester, and the gesture itself is ironic.

-

Q: What do you hope players will take away most from Pathologic 3?

A: The hope that humanity remains a promising and capable species.

-

Also, new game pictures and screenshots dropped:

(some are old ones I forgot to post)

[jacksprostate]

Treatise on why No, the doctor just giving the narrator of Fight Club (full name) his requested sleep medication or sending him to therapy would not have Fixed Him

Firstly, saying giving him the insomnia meds would’ve fixed him ignores the reason he has insomnia in the first place. He is so deeply upset by his place in society that he literally cannot sleep. Drugging him to sleep would not change that. That, of course, is the easy, quick response.

But with regard to therapy? The biggest flaw is that it ignores a central tenet of the book. Part of what tortures the narrator and drives him to invent Tyler is that his feelings about this collective, systemic issue are constantly reduced to a Just Him thing. His seatmates ask what his company is. He’s the only one upset at the office. He gets weird looks if he says the truth of what he does. People will do anything in their power to pretend he is the issue, as an individual, because it is far scarier to consider the full implications of the systemic issues implied by what he is saying. Everyone treats it as if the issue is him, so he goes insane. He does anything to get someone to say, holy shit, that’s fucked up, what you’re a part of is wrong. In an attempt to feel any sort of vague sympathy and catharsis, he goes to support groups to pretend to be dying, because then at least people don’t habitually blame him for his anguish. 

Saying therapy would fix him ignores that his problems are not individual. They are collective. It’s the reason the entire story resonates with people! Something deeply, unignorably wrong with society, where people would rather blame you for bringing it up than try and address it, because it feels impossible. I don’t blame people for this, really, because it IS scary. It’s terrifying to sit and feel like you’ve realized there’s something deeply, deeply wrong, but if you say something, people will get mad at you since it’s so baked into everything around you. Or, even if they agree, it’s easier to deal with the dissonance by pretending it’s individual.

And it’s not like that’s not the purpose therapy and medications largely serve, anyway. Getting into dangerous territory for this website, but ultimately, the reason the narrator was seeking medication was because it’s a bandaid. A very numbing bandaid. For these very large, dissonance causing problems, therapy does very little. Medications do what they always have, and distract you with numbness or side effects. It’s a false solution. He is seeking an individualized false solution because he has been browbeaten with the idea that this is an issue with him alone, when it's plainly clear it's not. 

Don't get me wrong. Obviously he has something wrong with him. But it's a product of his situation. It is a fictional exaggeration of a very real occurrence of mental illness provoked by deep unconscionable dissonance and anguish.  There is a clear correlation between what happens and his mental state and his job and how isolated he is. 

The thing is, even if he were chemically numbed, I do think he would’ve lost it regardless. Many people on meds find they don’t fix things. For reasons I’ll get into, but in this case because even if numbed or distracted, once you’ve learned about deep, far reaching corruption in society, it’s very hard to forget. Especially if, in his case, you literally serve as the acting hand of this particular variety. He’s crawling up the walls. 

So why do people say this?  Well, it's funny I guess. Maybe the first time or whatever. But also, often, they believe it, to a degree. Maybe they've just been told how effective therapy and meds are for mental illness, they believe wholeheartedly in The Disease Model of Mental Illness, maybe they themselves have engaged with either and have considered it successful. Maybe they or someone they know has been 'saved' by such treatments. 

But in all honesty.... What therapy can help with is mentality, it's how you approach problems. For issues on a smaller scale, not meaning they are easier to deal with my any degree, but ones that are not raw and direct from deep awareness of corruption; these are things that can be worked through if you get lucky and get an actually good therapist who helps build up your resiliency. But when your issue is concrete, something large and inescapable? It's useless. At best it can help you develop coping mechanisms, but there is a limit for that. There is a point where that fails. To develop the ability to handle something like this requires intense development of a comfort with ambiguity and dissonance and being isolated and a firm positioning of your purpose and values and and belief in wonder and all the other shit I ramble about. The things that the narrator lacks, which lead him to taking an ineffectual death knell anarchist self-destruction path. Therapy, where the narrator is, full of the knowledge of braces melted to seats and all the people that have to allow this to happen? It fails. 

And meds — meds are a fucking scam. We know the working mechanism of basically none of them, the serotonin receptor model was made up and paid its way into prominence. We have very little evidence they're any better than placebo, and they come with genuinely horrific side effects. Maybe you got lucky. I did, on some meds. On others? I don't remember 2018. The pharmaceutical industry is also known for rampant medical ghostwriting, and for creating 'off-label' uses for drugs that have gained too many protests in their original use, then creating a cult of use to then have 'grassroots' campaigns for it to be made a label use (ie, legitimize their ghostwritten articles with guided anecdotes). 

The DSM itself is basically a marketing segregation plot. It's an attempt to legitimize the disease model by isolating subgroups of symptoms to propose individualized treatments for subgroups that are not necessarily all that separate. But if the groups exist, you can prescribe more and different medications, no? Not to mention, if you use the disease model, you can propose that these diseases are permanent, or permanent until treated, considered more and more severe to offset and justify the horrific side effects of the medications. Do you know why male birth control doesn't really exist? Same reason. They can justify all the horrible side effects for women, because the other option is pregnancy. For men, it's nothing. 

And they're not bothering to invent new drugs without side effects. When they invent new drugs it's just because the last one got too bad of a name, or they can enter a new market. Modern drugs don't work any better than gen1 drugs. They still have horrific side effects. At best, the industry will shit out studies saying the old one was flawed (truth) so they can say this new gen will be better (lie). They're doing it with ssris right now. 

Fundamentally, the single proposed benefit of any of these drugs is that they numb you. To whatever is torturing you. It's harder to be depressed if you can't feel it, or if you just can't muster the same outrage. Of course, there is people who find that numbness to be helpful, or worth it. But often, it's stasis. For the people who have problems that can be worked on, it serves as a stopgap to not actually work on said problems. The natural outcome of the disease model is stagnation for those whose need is to develop skills and resiliency. It keeps them medicalized and dependent on the idea that they're diseased and incapable. Profitable. Stuck in the womb. 

I’ve been there. It’s easier, to wallow, and resist growth because it’s difficult and painful and unfair and cruel and you can think of five billion reasons to justify your languishing. But don’t listen to anyone who tells you you’re just permanently damaged, no matter how nicely they word it, no identity or novel pathologization, no matter how many benefits they promise, especially if they swear up and down some lovely expensive medications with little solid backing and plentiful off-label usage and side effects that’ll kill you. Some days it feels like they want us all stuck in pods, agoraphobic and addicted to the ads they feed us to isolate the markets for the drugs they’ve trained us to beg them to pump us with. Polarization making it as easy as flashing blue light for go, red like for stop, or vice versa. I worry about the kids, for fucks sake. That’s a bit dark and intense, and I apologize. But I want you (generic) to understand, there is a profit motive. Behind everything. And they do not mean well. They do not care about your mental health or your rights or your personhood or your growth. They care about how they can profit off of you.

For those struggling with immovable, society problems, like the narrator grappling with how his job fits into and is accepted by society while his rejection and horror in the face of it does not, it can work about as well as any other drug addiction. Your mileage may vary. From what I've seen, recovering from being on prozac for a long time can be worse than alcohol. They put kids on this shit. They keep campaigning for more. Off label, again. A pharmaceutical company’s favorite thing to do has to be to spread rumors of someone who knows someone who said an off label use of this drug helps with this little understood condition. Or, in the case of mental illness, questionably defined condition. And like, damn, I know I'm posting on the 'medicalization is my identity' website so no one will like all this and has probably stopped reading by now, but yall should be exposed to at least one person who doubts this stuff. Doesn't just trust it. Because I mean, that's the thing right?

It's so big. What would it mean, for this all to be true? Yeah, everyone says pharmaceutical companies are evil and predatory and ghostwriting, but to think about what that really entails. Coming back to the book, everyone knows the car lobby is huge and puts dangerous vehicles through that kill people. What does it mean if the car companies all hire people to calculate the cost of a recall and the cost of lawsuits? No one wants to think about the scale that means for people allowing it or the systems that have to be geared towards money, not safety like they say. Hell, even Chuck misses the beat and has the narrator threaten his boss with the Department of Transportation. And shit, man, if every company is doing this, you think Transportation doesn't know? That they give a fuck? You're better off mailing all the evidence to the news outlets and hoping they only character assassinate you a little bit as they release the news in a way that says it's all the fault of little workers like you, not the whole system. Something something, David McBride, any whistleblower you feel like, etc. 

So I don't blame you, if your reaction is "but but but, that can't be right, people wouldn't do it, they wouldn't allow it" or just an overwhelming feeling of dread that pushes you to deny all of this and avoid thinking about it. Just know, that's in the book. That's all the seatmates on the flights. That's all his fellow officemates. It's easier to pretend, I know.

But think about, how the response fits in with the themes of the book. The story, as a movie too. What drives the narrator’s mental breakdown? How would you handle being in his position? How would you handle being his seatmate? It’s easy to say you’d listen. But have you? Have you had any soul wrenching betrayals of how you thought society worked? How about a betrayal by the thing that promised to be the fix of the first? Can you honestly say you wouldn’t follow that gut instinct, saying follow what everyone says, that person must just be crazy, evil, rude, cruel, whatever it is that means you can set what they said aside?

For a lot of people, they can do that, I guess. Set it aside. Reaching that aforementioned state of managing to cope with the dissonance and ambiguity and despair is very hard. The narrator made the Big Realization, but he couldn’t cope. He self-destructed. Even when people don’t make the big realization consciously, they’re already self-destructing. It’s hard to escape it when it feels easier than continuing anyway. When it feels like the only option,

Would therapy fix the narrator of Fight Club? Would meds fix the narrator of Fight Club? No. He knows too much. All meds will do, by the time he’s in the psych ward, is spiritually neuter him. A silly phrase, but really. Take the wind out of his sails. 

Is he fixed if he doesn’t try to blow up town? If he just shuts up and settles in and stops costing money? If he still can’t cope with the things he’s unearthed? Do you see how this is a commentary in a commentary in a commentary?

Fight Club is an absolutely fascinating story because of this. The fact that it addresses the fallout of knowing. The isolation. The hopelessness. The spiral that results from a lack of hope. This is, I think, what resonates most with people, even if not consciously. Going insane because you’ve discovered something you wish you could unknow. It’s a classic horror story. Should our society be lovecraftian evil? I don’t think so. 

Do I think changing it will be easy? No. Lord knows a lot exists to push people who make these sorts of Realizations towards feelings of individuality and individualized solutions and denial and other distractions and coping methods. And to prevent people who make One realization from expanding on it and considering further ramifications. Fight Club itself gets into this; the isolation of men being a strict part of the role society shapes for their sex leaves them very vulnerable to death fetishes, in a sense, and generally towards self destructive violence. It helps funnel them away from substantial change and towards ineffectual change. Many things, misogyny, racism, serve to keep people isolated from one another, individualized, angry, and impossible to work with. Market segregation; god knows even appealing on those fronts has become such a classic ploy that companies do it now, the US military frames its plundering that way, etc. 

I’ve wandered a bit but ultimately, my point is this: Fight Club is a love letter to the horrors of critical thinking, and the importance of not falling into the trap of self destruction and hopelessness in the face of it. The latter is why Tyler was an anarchoterrorist instead of anything useful. The latter is why it was a death cult. It’s important to work through the horrors of critical thinking so you can do it, and stand on the other side ready to believe in each other. It’s worth it.

[deservedgrace]

one of the more frustrating aspects of ex evangelical/ex cult stuff for me personally is how hard it is to talk about. and part of that is the emotional side of it, yeah it's a shitload of cumulative and compounding trauma and trauma is hard to talk about sometimes. but it's not always hard to talk about, or at least equally hard to talk about, and the thing that's honestly more frustrating to me about that is how... extensive it is, how impossible it is to give an accurate picture of what it was like, especially succinctly. there are so many things that you need context for. there's so much that doesn't really sound that bad unless you have other information. so much was normalized to me that i have a hard time knowing what's actually "normal" and what's "yikes" to other people because i simply don't always have the context for "normal". there's so much that's normalized in society and churches that gets dismissed as "normal" when it really, really shouldn't be. there's so much i just don't remember because it slipped out of my brain the same as "normal" unimportant memories because my brain didn't process it as abuse or traumatic at the time due to that lack of context of what "normal" is; it was normal to me and just what people did and how people acted and what people said. and the thing that happens is all of this compiles into me sounding like i'm exaggerating and whining about a "normal church experience" because it's just so impossible to describe how all-encompassing being in a cult is if you don't have that experience.

[starbuck]

Was thinking earlier about “People are not stupid, Ives.” “Really?” and how Ives’ self-centered misanthropy is so important within the larger thematic context of American Imperialism. Imperialists prioritize their own interests over all others since they believe that those they have deemed “others” are unworthy of human consideration. On an individual level, this comes down to believing that you are better than other people, more worthy of life and happiness. 

This is how Hart ends up working with Ives as a willing coconspirator… Even before Colqhoun’s arrival, Hart clearly looks down on the other residents of Fort Spencer. He describes them so uncharitably to Boyd that it isolates Boyd from everyone before he’s even met them. Hart hates his job and the life he lived that got him there and he copes by believing that he is, at least, a superior type of person to everyone under his command. 

In that way, Hart killing his former comrades in cold blood doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the logical conclusion of his superior, misanthropic perspective pushed to the extreme. He’s better than them, so why SHOULDN’T he kill and eat them? Don’t you understand? You have to KILL! to live! You have to KILL!!!!!!! 

[identitty-dickruption]

the reason it's a bad thing to only talk about a certain group of people when it benefits your argument is that it shows that you don't actually care about us as people. you can bring us up in an argument if the argument calls for it. whatever. but using an entire community as a gotcha and then attacking that same community when they ask for rights and recognition is complete bullshit. you don't get to use us as an argument if you clearly only see us as a thought experiment and nothing more

[angelnumber27]

violently forcing myself to have better days

[yuukei-yikes]

think kagepros ending is so perfect despite the totally insane story pace it holds the entire time. i especially love that they take a character like haruka, a side character whose misery came from not having the possibility of growing old, and make him the character that reflects what being an adult is like. as someone who never revisited kagepro because i never left, it felt a lot like the characters grew up with me sniff sniff especially my ultra faves the yuukei quartet who are rly the ones who end up as sorta adults when its over. its fun bc im a fail adult in my 20s you know. and its like.... whoa somehow my favorite characters are also fail adults now. that's crazy