#i feel like a tool tagging things.

[womensflesh]

12.26

Something inside of me is missing. Last week I fell and impaled myself on the knife in my hand trying to make a meal for myself. I wasn't hungry. I never really am.

It stung and then went numb. I pulled the smiling wound open and the skin and muscle parted as if my body was having a laugh at my expense. I looked inside but saw empty darkness. I reached inside and felt nothing until my hands clasped around my own spinal cord.

I stood in the full length mirror with my favorite shirt split down the middle in tandem with the wound below and shone my phone's flashlight in and saw nothing but the inside of skin. Hollow. I laughed and then I cried. It hurt all the same. I hurt the same way people do and I don't know if that's better or worse. But it hurt all the same and that was concrete proof I am alive, so I enter my kitchen and smear the angry wounds with chili oil until my face feels cold and numb from pain.

"Name five things you can see."

My eyes fix on the eyes examining me. Clipboard in hand but no stereotypical chair to lay back in. Just on the floor with a plush toy thousands of hands, hundreds much smaller than my own, have grappled with during these raw, awful times.

I can tell he's got a brain behind those eyes. I'm not so sure about myself. I have nightmares of popping my skull open like a can of slimy soup and seeing nothing but old clearish stains of some biological fluid on the interior of my skull.

"This isn't helping."

"It's usually very hard at first because our minds wander -"

"I shouldn't be alive," I say, and quickly shut my mouth before I get myself a mandatory hiatus from life for the next 3 days. "I'm missing everything inside of me."

"When did this start?"

I don't know. How am I supposed to know that? I never cut myself open so deep before. I always assumed there'd be meat and organ under the white dermis I spent so many times exposing and rubbing lemon into.

"I ... don't know. I just..."

He consults the omniscient clipboard. Something, some code or some string of red flags catches his eye and his bushy eyebrows furrow. I stare at his thinning hairline.

"...Miss.. Mister -"

"Valentine."

He looks at the chart again and seems to notice the discrepancy.

"Right. Apologies. Mister Valentine, it says here that you've come in to be screened."

I nod. Screened or X-Rayed or something. Maybe they can put me back together.

He consults the paper again and gives me a wry smile. "I see you've struggled with abandonment and loneliness in the past."

Sure, sure. My entrails have been liquefied by all the drugs I took to avoid feeling that grief. (There was none, though, was there? Not outside of my head.)

"We have to accept sometimes that everyone has free will. People will leave us sometimes and all you can do is ..."

I tune him out. My throat hurts and I'm scared because how can I vomit when I have no insides? Is the inside of my throat bleeding?

"... and just focus on cultivating independence and impulse control. If your medication isn't working ..."

No medication will plant a seed of humanity in me. I look down at my hot hands on my lap. Sweaty and sticky. Biologically disposed for my skin cells to try and lock with anyone else's.

"This isn't fucking helping."

My outburst doesn't faze him.

"Valentine, nothing is guaranteed in this world, and..."

I stand up on wobbly legs. My tongue comes out on its own and I heave, white frothy something spilling down my chest and onto my lap. I sob and smear my eyeliner with my bandaged forearm.

"This isn't what I need to fucking hear," I tell the alleged expert, the superior rational, a hysterical testament to what exactly happens to a child who grows up knowing that home may be where the heart is, but he has neither.

I stagger out and don't talk to the receptionist. I cry on the porch and hit my abdomen and feel it give and dip like an empty pillowcase.

None of this is fucking helping.

[umblrspectrum]

still thinking about it so heres a bunch of stuff

[cybertron-after-dark]

Being constantly surrounded by the presence of a loving God sounds great until you realize you never know when his freaky fuckin eyes are gonna show up to check on you.

And man. They do it a LOT.

[archive-z]

rambling abt my notetaking methods as someone with memory problems for @divorceblogger

i am not an organised person by nature, but in my apartment Everything Must Have Its Designated Place, and that place must be the most intuitive place i will look for something — keys Must be hanging by door, bc if i leave my keys literally anywhere else (coat pocket, bag) i will NOT remember and then i will not be able to lock my door & leave for the day. the goal is work with my brain, not against it. things should be in the most intuitive place possible, and if they can’t be, i should “leave a trail of breadcrumbs” in order to help myself find what i KNOW i will forget. this is also a strategy i apply to my world of Concepts and IdeasTM.

previously, i was organising my notes into a google doc where each entry was dedicated to a single book/chapter/essay, with (1) a summary of the text, (2) relevant quotations transcribed & cited, (3) my own thoughts responding to the material, and (4) other works in the bibliography that i should check out.

This presented several problems: google doc quickly became massive an unwieldy for a 2-year research project & v laggy

lots of closely related ideas existed in isolation bc it was organised by-book instead of concept-first

couldn’t remember where to find shite bc i would have to recall the exact book the idea was from to find it (BAD for the “trail of breadcrumbs” approach)

very linear process — read & summarised one text, moved on to the next. not letting ideas “accumulate“ (build upon each other) bc it was difficult to search/constantly have to refresh myself on notes i’d made six months to a year ago

~late 2021 or early 2022, this talk is what rly sold me on adopting obsidian. i started using obsidian as my primary notetaking tool, specifically for its ability to hyperlink between concepts & display those connections in graph view (picture above). it solved the problems above with the added benefits of being Not Google & being able to sync to my phone/ipad/laptop (via icloud).

now my process looks like:

Step One: Read the material in its entirety while highlighting and making notes in the margins

by entirety I mean like full article, full chapter. if it is a full book, this is going to take multiple sittings bc i only have the cognitive stamina to absorb one chapter at a time. trying to push thru mental fatigue will exacerbate memory problems into a self-fulfilling spiral. the highlighting & annotating is absolutely essential bc it lets me talk back to the book while reading, without the cognitive fatigue/loss of momentum of stopping read to type up notes, etc.

Step Two: Go thru the material again from the beginning, this time transcribing important quotations into a note

somehow people have gotten zotero to talk to their obsidian by tbqh i haven’t bothered bc i’m fairly fast at writing my citations, and the plugins rabbit hole seems like a massive upfront time investment to me.

Step Three: talk back to the material, write my own thoughts & summaries, make connections with other works/ideas

having obsidian as this big repository of my thoughts on previous books i’ve read, previous movies I’ve seen, concepts and defintions from essays, etc makes really easy for me to start writing a new note with my thoughts about something and just go “okay, I’ll put this concept in [[ square brackets ]] so it can link to my note with all my info on that subject rather than rooting thru one million notebooks or folders of misc notes and projects to find what I’d already written abt that subject”

Step Four: Break the material into smaller units of information

i breakdown/separate out my note on a single book/essay into several smaller interlinked notes abt the concepts covered. that way the information lives (with correct bibliographical citation) in a note titled with the concept, and then that note can get added to incrementally with each new book read. this allows my notes to be organised concept-first rather than book-first.

this — ESPECIALLY the part where i connect the notes to other notes — is a rly important part of the process bc it is the “leaving myself a trail of breadcrumbs” to be able to remind myself of concepts/ideas/texts i may have already encountered that feature similar ideas. if i am wondering if i’ve previously written anything on “regicide” i can click on the note called “regicide” and discover i’d written abt macbeth AND hamlet but not agamemnon and leave a note saying “come back to this and connect it to yr other ideas abt regicide as a form of [[patricide]] in [[agamemnon]]”.

Step Five: leave yrself “on ramps” to revisit notes as new concepts are added and connected

i can’t remember where i got this advice, but it was when you are writing more than can be achieved in a single sitting, leave yourself an “on ramp” before you finish for the day. like if i am coming back to something, maybe it’s not the next day but a whole week later. it is a lot more helpful if i open up a note i was working on and see “REMEMBER: YOU WANTED TO LOOK UP THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS FOR THREAD AND FATE TO SEE IF THERE IS A CONNECTION”

do not get caught up in “finishing” a note bc notes will be every-accumulating. work on something for as long as it serves you. if the amount of information is overwhelming, it probably needs to be broken down again into smaller concepts that can be hyperlinked together.

i think that covers most of it but i might come back to this later if there’s anything important i’ve forgotten. oh, yeah, also i love Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, but that’s less important if yr note writing a thesis, just trying to track info across many different texts for yr own purposes.

[silverfurioso]

There was an attempt at Madara...

[lemongogo]

why do i love the conflict more than anything else . the misery . the incompatibility that spreads like oil slick . wanting so desperately for resolution that never comes . hmmm

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my least favorite parts of how JRO wrote Optimus is that he wanted so badly to continue his dark and gritty world building making the Autobots problematic, but evidently couldn't reconcile this with Optimus being a Heroic Paragon, so instead he leaned way too hard into "oh Prowl was the one who did this and it was behind Optimus' back" which if anything I think makes Optimus look worse, not better. Because then it's like, okay I know Optimus trusted Prowl a lot as his friend but you CANNOT TELL ME that over the course of 4 million years, Optimus as the leader of the Autobot army who literally would have access to 99.9% of all the records they produce, would never notice or question where some of these odd/inconsistent details were pointing. It just seems really inconsistent with how a real military would actually function, especially regarding Optimus' character, who is incredibly thorough and responsible and wouldn't neglect to keep up with all the details of his army.

Hell, Optimus knows who the Wreckers are and had them on call for tricky operations when he needed them (Stormbringer) so he's literally not at all ignorant of/averse to the use of special wartime units composed of dubious individuals. He's the fucking commander of an entire army, of course he knows that War Is Hell (TM) and no one's hands are clean. That's not even getting into all the stuff he got up to in phase 2/3, I mean everything from the annexation of Earth to OP breaking humans out of prison against Council orders shows that Optimus is no stranger to immoral and/or unlawful means.

It also leads to a lot of annoying fanon where people write Optimus (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) as like some sort of ignorant fool who's unaware of the machinations of his own army or has some sort of naiveté of "b-but we can't use bad tactics against the enemy! I would never condone the use of morally gray means in war!" No, IDW Optimus knows perfectly well all of the bullshit he's enacted/condoned for the sake of trying to win the war. Some stuff is definitely out of character for him and was only machinated because of Prowl, but I think this fandom REALLY underestimates Optimus' personal agency/responsibility as the commander of a whole ass army and ESPECIALLY underestimates Optimus' capacity to condone morally gray Bullshit Of War while still being a good person individually as well as, comparatively, the lesser evil compared to Megatron/the Decepticons.

Anyways what I'm saying is JRO may be a good writer but he's really hesitant to make Optimus morally gray and does some asspulls sometimes to justify most of the bad things the Autobots did as "Optimus just didn't know," and since the majority of the IDW1 fandom only reads JRO's stuff they go running with this premise of ignorant/uninformed Optimus when there's evidence elsewhere in canon to show that Optimus is, in fact, very highly aware of the bullshit he's allowed "for the greater good" and the only stuff he was "unaware of" was the stuff he would literally never agree to the ethics of, like bombing innocent neutrals disguised as Decepticons to get them to join the Autobots.

[sluckythewizard]

adventures from a rly fun magma i got to relaxe in today

[lavenderjewels]

feel so validated it was confirmed gojo killed the higher ups because I loved the page turner shock in chapter 223 of seeing the higher ups slaughtered after Gojo lightly talking to Gakuganji

[nullians]

It’s actually insane how fandom in general has become so scared of making weird and dark and ugly works. Like I look at myself and see how I have also subconsciously adapted this instinct to self censor and make things “marketable” and it’s making me want to crawl out of my skin. I need to get weirder and worse and more off-putting hello

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

Sophie Shepard & Kaidan Alenko (ME1) 1/?

MIRA'S MORE CANON ME1 "After everything that happened with Zaeed, Caleston, and the Villa? I think need to tell you a few things about BAaT." "Well, after everything that happened with Zaeed, Caleston, and the Villa? I think I might owe you an explanation about how I really know Anderson." AKA: Zaeed Massani and the case of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad message ping. :) Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2021)

[coldshrugs]

gpose dump #4: estinio. again.

[moe-broey]

HELP maybe this is influenced by how I'm writing this, or maybe it was supposed to be gleaned from canon and I just. Haven't fully thought about it til now. Haven't Deeply analyzed it beyond the blaring alarm bells that go off when reading this. But. Alfonse's,

Straight into.

This isn't him doubling down. This is him BACKTRACKING. This is him going, "oh fuck I think maybe I came on a little too strong maybe I was a bit too vulnerable and that's really scary. How do I fix this" and he's running through all the dialogue options in his head like Okay. Play it Cool. Keep it Casual. Proclaim your undying loyalty and devotion to your Trusted Partner (person he just told in the beginning of this conversation that he didn't intend to become friends with) by making yourself a blade and shield for them. NAILED IT 👍

[arachnerd-8-legs]

im getting real sick of 'intelligence'

who decided reading books and writing counted as intelligence? who decided that getting high scores on a strict, unfeeling system meant you were better than everybody? who decided that people should be turned into numbers, tie their worth in society into numbers, to compare people on a scale that ultimately does not matter, so that the people who didn't dump everything to perform for it are berated and the people who did end up with nothing?

who decided not reading or writing was a lack of intelligence? who decided that living differently to them was a sign of lower 'societal worth' than those who conformed?

[pixie05love]

no but when u look for those long gut-wrenching fics of ur niche ship, but u only find those 1k fluff or smut fics, and u just accept that nobody cares about ur random ass ship

[m0thlegs]

Me when I’m in a fandom and the shipping discourse begins to overshadow any meaningful discussions about the work itself