#it fucking hurts and plays with my emotions so much

[pommedepersephone]

As a mom with twins, a son and a daughter, I knew to expect to have to defend my daughter against stupid gender shit. I really did not have a concept of how much I would need to defend my son.

The patriarchy does not only hurt women. It hurts men. It hurts EVERYONE no matter their gender identity because it puts people in boxes to make us all easier to control. "Boys will be boys" isn't just used to gaslight girls into accepting bad behavior. It is used to justify harassment of boys who aren't fulfilling gender norms. And, in my experience, it's an excuse for us not engaging with boys and teaching them the emotional intelligence we then bemoan women having to bear the burden of for the men in their lives.

The most obvious and glaring example I can think of is the older female relative, who put intentional effort into encouraging my daughter - telling her that she was strong and smart and could be whatever she wanted. And then mostly just blamed my son for every fight he and his sister had. She was demanding a four year old child be "considerate" of his sister while completely ignoring his feelings herself. And I wish I could say that was one weird isolated example but it wasn't. Similar shit has played out over and over, and it has almost always been with people who would consider themselves progressives or liberals.

I see a lot of people piling on the guy above, but I have SEEN what he is describing with my son already, and he is only eight. I see both of my kids face weird judgement and criticisms for their gender expressions- we are a pretty queer, fuck the binary type family- but my daughter has been more likely to be encouraged and defended than my son for defying gender stereotypes.

So yes, if you want to fight back against extremism, then it requires kindness. Don't confuse this with "being nice" or coddling. But being openly hostile towards men-as-a-monolith is something that I have seen from people I absolutely did not expect and we have to call that shit out when we see it.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[zhuoyichenpretty]

ep 24 commentary (brain fried edition)

my head is a little empty after ep 24 tbh!! brain is not braining after all the zyc hurt no comfort (-:

some scattered thoughts here and there, painstakingly corralled like cats out of my vacuous brain and into a list (spoilers):

ZYZ is really emo this episode poor dude like he is having a hard time keeping it together it seems. Every other word out of his mouth is depressing as shit, which is saying a lot considering how depressing he usually is already (': I kind of wanted this episode to pick his brain more, give him room to emote in the aftermath of all that. But it almost feels like the character refuses to be alone, like he might spiral if he has too much time to get in his own head. I'm still so curious to know, though, what he thinks about the state of their promise in light of how far ZYC went trying to save him. “He has us,” ZYZ said to WX. When the time comes, I wonder how he'll reconcile that with what he’s asked of ZYC.

PSJ and Ying Lei bonding! shenanigans! I did laugh thank you guys. Also, not that the team didn't operate separately before, but I really get a sense of how much ZYC held things together with how apparent his absence is. It's obvs heartwarming seeing how hard everyone is working to save him (PSJ especially for me bc I love their mutual tacit trust and respect and all the ways they're alike and different), but ultimately it's still so angsty (':

Kind of love the couple instances where ZYC has been referred to as fragile/weak/of delicate constitution (depending on how you wanna translate it) like that's a very interesting quality to assign to basically the tank of your team. Even if the comments are made facetiously, it just reminds me of how often we witness his mortality, and of course how everything about the styling, aesthetics, and content of the flashbacks to his childhood reinforce a characterization of vulnerability at the very heart of him. I saw someone mention how the Cloud Light Sword responded to ZYC's tears and to that vulnerability rather than brute strength, and I totally agree. I love how this "fragile" characterization plays into the whole fate weapon deal. ZYC's strength is (imo) unconventional, and it is his sensitivity, his compassion, and his deep capacity to feel that the sword acknowledges, resonates with, and empowers. Almost like it protects his tender heart rather than making it something he needs to overcome to get stronger.

One thing I will never get over is how incredibly they styled TJR as baby!Yichen, adult ZYC, and Bingyi. What do you mean this is all from one drama and not three separate productions. Insane. I'm out of my mind with how gorgeous every change in costuming is.

A tangential note is I've seen people mention (paraphrasing very much here) ZYZ's demon form being nicely subtle in its eerie inhumanity and tbh I have a similar feeling even just about human adult ZYC imo. Especially when his hair is down and he's got that thick eyeliner on and we get a close up of his contacts, if you told me from the start that he's half-demon half-human or something I'd believe it. Along the same vein, baby!Yichen reads completely human to me, and Bingyi of course completely demon. Something something the Cloud Light Sword bridges the gap something. This point is unintelligible and not narratively based but I had to make it because I've been thinking "wow ZYC elven" for days now.

Saw a tag about yuanyi getting us through some dark times but man they are PUTTING me through some dark times rn help?/

Been trying to put off talking about the baby Yichen scenes because wow I cried immediately. Well, no, I was like "yay! I love seeing baby Yichen!" and then they crushed me into demon dust lol. And then WX had to tell that absolutely precious story about when she got sick and ZYZ had to go like "actually ZYC was probably lonely as fuck" and yeah that's fine I didn't need my heart anyway.

Ending on this point so I can put a pretty screencap here: There is so much gravity to just the short scene of Bingyi removing his mask and dropping to his knees with that anguished and fatigued expression. TJR's acting is the gift that keeps on giving (me angst).

so sorry if anything here didn't make sense, i currently have the same thousand-mile-stare as Bingyi the more i think about how this all might end and how long I'm gonna have to wait to find out.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hi! I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on Rebecca and Eric from "Luster" by Raven Leilani. I just reread it recently and yeah, it is incredible (saying this as an almost 23-year-old Black woman that sort of identifies with Edie).

I really enjoy both Rebecca and Eric as characters - and within their separate relationships to Edie. However, it's really hard for me to understand which scenes/instances - besides the obvious humiliation they both participate in in regards to Edie - that show explicitly Rebecca's issues with rage and Eric's more absolute loserish tendencies.

I mean, I'm not completely unaware of the unsavory ways in which they act; not going to list them all out. But some of the reviews - including yours - and even interviews with Raven Leilani that talk more about the characters, don't go as in-depth as I'm looking for. I feel like the ogre reading Joyce :(

[The lines from the book I've been thinking of most often - though not my favorites are Eric saying "I don't think of you as a person at all" and (I'm gonna get the wording kind of wrong, but) "I cry everywhere and often" near the beginning of the book]

I hope this is asking too much. I really enjoyed your review and I'm already kind of looking forward to reading it again because of it <3

hi anon,

well Rebecca, to me, is impossible to read as anything BUT a white woman hitting middle age and realizing that she made all the "right" choices - she has a job that pays well and she married a stable man and together they adopted a child and got a good house in a good (read: white) neighborhood - and still isn't actually happy with her life.

I mean, what does Rebecca actually have going on? she's exercising furious control over her body via furious physical activity because it's one of the only things she can feel in charge of. she pushes the same on her daughter, making a child count calories in a way that's absolutely going to give her a complex. she didn't want the child in the first place; she tells Edie verbatim that she never wanted to be a mother and while I do think she cares about Akila's well-being I think she also knows that she's wildly ill-equipped trying to parent a traumatized Black girl. she's in an "open" marriage that reeks of "we either had to open the marriage or get divorced" that she micromanages from afar so that Eric gets as little freedom as possible with Edie in the early stage of their relationship; Rebecca doesn't actually want Eric to fuck someone else, she wants him to get tired of trying and come back to her.

after the initial humiliation of trapping Edie at their anniversary party Rebecca remains emotionally distant towards her; even after she invites Edie to stay in her house she stays mercurial and her mood is subject to switch on a dime, always falling back into little power plays to remind Edie she's in charge, because Edie is a safer and easier target for Rebecca's pent up frustrations than her husband or daughter. she's exactly warm enough to Edie to make it hurt more when she's callous and mean, which I don't think is strictly intentional (I don't think Rebecca consciously knows what the hell she's trying to get out of their dynamic, either) but is still an extremely shitty way to treat a vulnerable young woman who's currently completely dependent on her for shelter.

arguably the most relaxed we ever see her is when she takes Edie to a mosh pit, because that's one of the only moments of unrestrained emotional authenticity that Rebecca gets to have - and it's wildly outside the norm of her day to day life, something that she's supposed to have left behind when she started dating Eric. Rebecca is so furiously dissatisfied with everything about her life and I frankly think she'd be happier if she disappeared in the night to go be a bartender or a roadie and never saw her husband or daughter again, but she'll never do that because you Can't do that, not if you're a respectable woman trying to cling to the signifiers of success that you worked so hard for.

re: Eric being a loser I really don't know what I need to cite other than him having a wife and a girlfriend and not treating either of them well tbh

[mejomonster]

I hate panic attacks

[osakanone]

I read and agree with 95% of your post.

Prefacing: You're great. You are wonderful, I am now following your very good posts and I am a ball of weird neurotic energy that has to get this off my chest.

Why?

TheHorrors™ as of late have made me need to explain this like five times in four days.

Writing it like this means we can discuss it, i can link a post and people who need to see it can see it and I can get on with my life instead of having a redundant talk.

I might add citations pictures, etc etc later but I've already spent 45 minutes writing and re-writing this and I need to get this out of my system.

Once again, you're great and the fustration inside the response is not directed at you but at the issue itself.

You? Wonderful. Glorious poster. Evil baby. Delightful. Much love. Excellent Blorbo choices.

Issue? Shitty. Fills me with outrage. Paradoxical. MurderDeathKill.

Okay? Okay: rant begin:

The problem is "atomized individualism"...

1) Has a really well known and distorted meaning in libertarian circles you're probably unaware of which says "we're very rational and we never get emotional, and if I've got mine fuck you" coming from John Locke who quietly leaves out the "equality" part. 2) Actually self-defeating and paradoxical (I'll explain this)

Atomism claims everybody is

self-interested, self-sufficient and that altruism (being nice for the sake of being nice) is purely performative -- and that in functinal applied practice, asking for help or having systems to fall back on is inherently not-ok because you're not being the platonic ideal of the atomism (this is actually how familial orders emerge, instead of socialized safety-nets).

The fine text is also supposed to state that every member is equal which kind of contradicts the idea that the individual is pushed first; if you have more resources than others, your ability to execute on your individuality is inherently unequal.

It boils down to "the individual" vs "every individual" which gets very very messy.

It should mean freedom from bad things (over-exposure, abuse, starvation, etc, etc) not freedom to do bad things -- but this is where things start to get dicey.

Individualism claims the individual is the primary source of all value, and that the individual is always rational -- with the applied caviat that if anybody is acting irrationally, they lose their individuality.

You're gonna see a lot of applied caviats. Things which sound good on paper, but play out in really really messy ways in real people as side-effects of value-systems which then become the main goals of said systems when they benefit the people upholding those systems.

Combining atomization and individualism, you get...

"I am entirely rational, I am the only source of value, I am self-sufficient, and I am concerned with myself, and anybody who disagrees with me is irrational, because I am rationality defined"

So to go over the freedom part again:

This plays out as...

"uhhh yeah its a philosophy that means its good for me to not pay my taxes, because taxes are evil because they hurt me personally and specifically as an individual by subtracting my explicit capacity to execute on my self-interest (eg, get thing)"

This the mentality of your Peter Thiels, your Elon Musks, and your Donald Trumps. People who only see the "the divine right of kings" as wrong because they themselves are not the kings.

Wait, this is a lot, how did we get to this???

Their definitions ignore that most social definitions and benefits come from implicit attitudes and behaviors we do unconsciously (since humans spend most of their time running in a kind of autopilot called automaticity).

We learn this implicit automaticity from being raised, cared for, socialized, taught, and forgiven. They are hard to measure with a utility function mathematically, because they're hazy and vague and are often the root of interpretations of words (as we've experienced here, with this very thread).

Explicit attitudes are those which happen at the conscious or aware level: Its when you know you have to do something, or you haven't engrained something so you do it performatively out loud. This is significantly easier to measure with a utility function and is a huge part of how the legal system functions, and why the legal system assumes all actors (people) are rational.

Spoilers: All "rational" decision-making neurologically speaking originates from urges and feelings, and is then packaged and organized into "rationality".

Nobody human is rational; there are only rationalizers. Anybody who claims to be rational and calls anybody else emotional is both lying and projecting. If nobody felt anything, nobody would do anything: That's what depression is, even high functioning depression.

Going further, communication and implicit attitude learning and how explicit attitudes become implicit attitudes is the human skill.

Its why its inherently nonsensical to try and atomize us from eachother. We are all disturbingly susceptible to propaganda.

It isn't our tool-use (corvids molluscs, diatoms and arachnids have us beat there up until the last 80 to 15,000 years when we did metal properly afaik) -- its not our intelligence or short-term-memory (primates have us beat there, as genius level counters, strategizers and selectors): Its communication and sharing out strategies.

This is what we mean when we call humans "social organisms".

Seperating individuals truly leads to brain damage, which we see in those who undergo extended solitary isolation -- and likewise those who are placed into extended sensory deprivation such as white-room torture.

So, returning to our point:

What actually happens to our self-interested agents?

They refuse to concede that they can be irrational (which they scientifically and verifiably are: we are all irrational most of the time running on habit and memory, not pure decision making).

Result?

Self-interested agents who will not concede always compete -- whether towards singular or group-goals, and as resources collapse the group goals become singular goals.

Why?

Conceding that you are capable of irrationality and understanding what this means and the consequences and trusting that you can feel safe doing this requires emotional insight.

To develop emotional insight, you need to be a skilled communicator or have had excellent social training either through direct social contact or secondary social contact (social and cognitive stimulus creating cognitive simulations, aka media you consume).

The venn diagram of properties producing ultra-competitors is...

Dysthymia (being unable to create enjoyment or satisfaction without external validation, such as scoring, numbers or from another perosn)

An insecure/avoidant attachment style (eg, you depend on the numbers system because forming trust is compromised for whatever reason)

This produces an arms-race of ultra-competitors all trying to maximize whatever society sees as the most valuable (eg, money) -- who quickly figure out that the optimal strategy is to limit the number of competitors they have.

They do this by tricking the other members into playing "other games" or to collect "other things" as a distraction to sate them while improving how well they achieve their own goals.

These are your time vampires like the internet, your endless merchandising of ownership/consumer status, your religions to sate existential status needs, your abusive families playing for membership approval status needs, etc.

Rant End.

Okay, so now what?

So I agree with 95% of what you're saying, and I'm a pedantic bitch basically.

I love betraying nation and bloodline. I love rejecting the social order. I love being able to pursue my own goals even when the world around me wants me to adopt theirs instead. I love blasphemy and queerness and getting to choose who my family is.

I love this.

Everything you want is good, but atomized individualism is not the descriptor for those things because pure atomized individual reinvents the problems it seeks to solve for the individual by externalizing them to maximize its own returns.

Its why libertarians always create government again, but with extra steps where they are the leaders, which is apparently fine for some reason.

"I love atomized individualism" is not a statement you can make in a void, especially given current events.

What you mean is

"I love equitable atomacized indivividualism"

And by adding just one word that clarifies your statement and nullifies so many MANY problems, I 100% agree with you.

Okay got that out of my system.

Phew.

May your self-loving-vampire and may all of your self-loving be glorious and your Kohaku pleantiful.

Take care! :3

I love atomized individualism. I love betraying nation and bloodline. I love rejecting the social order. I love being able to pursue my own goals even when the world around me wants me to adopt theirs instead. I love blasphemy and queerness and getting to choose who my family is.

[elegyofthemoon]

well. i finished ch 17 of hi3. but at what cost

[dazais-guardian-angel]

Baizhu’s Room

(note: this was written without any leaked spoilers or lore in mind)

Genshin 3.6 finally gave us access to the back room in Bubu Pharmacy, in anticipation of Baizhu’s upcoming release and story quest. And I have to give all the praise to the designers and developers here, because this small room has some of the best environmental storytelling I’ve seen in a game in a while, with only a few simple details. Today is Baizhu’s birthday, so I wanted to talk about it a little 💚🐍🌿

Nothing in this room is neatly in its place. The chairs aren’t in position, everything on the desk is messy and strewn about, and some of the drawers are left open. There’s a pillow on the desk, as well. Baizhu is quite frail and sickly, so this all paints a picture of him constantly looking for things and working, both as a doctor and frantically on his research into immortality, without having the energy or care to keep everything neat, and probably often falling asleep at his desk out of exhaustion (hence the pillow, though admittedly it could be for Changsheng, but I kind of doubt it).

There’s medicine on the bedside tables, which is probably just as much for Baizhu as it (and all the other medicine in the room) is for his patients. The bedside chair indicates he likely sits with patients there a lot so as to be as comforting as possible, but again, it’s also likely for people like Gui and Qiqi, when Baizhu is the one in bed. The sole small washtub thing stuck in the corner behind the screen... just makes me sad. I don’t know why in particular... it just does.

All of this, combined with the lighting, and the new, unique song, creates a room that manages to feel both warm and welcoming during the day, but solemn, lonely, almost suffocating, and unbearably sad at night, completely befitting the person who practically lives here, and the two very different sides he has. I say “practically”, but we have no indication so far that Baizhu actually does live anywhere else -- with his low energy and poor health, and all those damn steps leading up to the pharmacy, I’m fully convinced now that he does live here full-time, after seeing the state of it, which is... heartbreaking. He puts on a smile for everyone around him who are relying on him to care for them (and he loves his job, he truly does!), but his tiny, cramped patient room seemingly doubles as his living space, and even though Baizhu may lie and try to hide his own suffering... this room itself does not lie, and said suffering is bleeding from every corner here. The music is elegant, gentle, comforting, and soothing, but also delicate, weak, mournful, and again unimaginably lonely...... just like Baizhu. 💔

If you haven’t been here yet in the game, I highly recommend you visit it at least once; the atmosphere is simply unmatched. I can’t wait to see what happens here in Baizhu’s story quest, and how it will wreck our hearts even more 💚💔

[asyipyip]

hold on everyone shut up im getting super emotional about jonathan sims

[comas-are-for-sleeping]

bc it's like. and i was GOING to talk to you about the religion aspect of it because it is also partly a letter to God where i am like bro fuck me why is everything so hard; but also like. u know that already i could talk myself into the ground about that already so like yeah. i never posted this one bc it explicitly mentioned my age in a way that i Do Not have the heard to change and also i am emotionally fragile about it and it was probably one of the last songs i wrote before the one i made for tater last year... and it's SO SAD man. it started out as a poem about me hating summer now and the fact that i hated hating summer now because it used to be my favorite season, but then every single thing that made me love the season got taken away from me--the place i was in when i got to experience it, the people i got to be with, the friends and the family and the spending time with all of those people who were so important to me--and then it kind of slowly turned into me going why is everything that i am fucked up how do you even wait for me when i'm like this why must time pass and why does the hurt only get worse. and there's like no real point to me talking about this song i do not think i am going anywhere with this but it is SO IMPRESSIVE how badly i did not want to listen to it until like. over a year later. and now every time i listen to it it's wild because i always get to have the fun realization that this fits literally any breakdown i could have that would have me listening to sad music like goddamn it is it a versatile little fucker of a song.

but also it is interesting because there are parts in there that i've grown a little about and i can look back and be glad that i have moved on from it. it's like a little marker fr like one day when i'm like fifty i can look back on this song and be like haha fuck you life i won. so i'm kind of just. drifting along waiting for that i think

FJFJRJR ALL OF THIS IS SO REAL DUDE IM

bc literally same omfg DUUDE. *shakes you and then hugs you and then shakes you again*

[lycanthian]

the urge to nick my dads beer is back and stronger than ever

[m-a-d-e-l-e-i-n-e]

Mild Life is Strange spoilers (?)

The majority of Chapter 5 of LIS (besides the very end of course) is what I imagine a bad trip feels like

[reputationgf]

sighs

[siobhanromee]

When you are trying to figure out characterization and then someone suggests an action your character would take.. and you have to go he would not fucking do that.

[noxtivagus]

THE ZACK FAIR BRAINROT IS SO REAL

[snekdood]

i worry a lot about some transfems and its not me trying to be like "im better than you" or some shit its bc some of them remind me of me when i was a kid and new into being considered a girl/woman and being really naive thinking people would treat me better than they would- like i knew people were gonna be shitty but i wasnt prepared for the sheer amount of dehumanization and being reduced to just a sex object... idk... I just want some of you out there to be careful...

[starflared-arrow]

.