#personal schema

[adornesibley]

ANXIETY, PIRACY, AND MAGGIE: A Newsletter

Reading: The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly, How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix, Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

Finished Reading: Nothing this month. Been busy, preoccupied, and possibly burnt out after finishing four books in one month.

Podcast: Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery

Playing: Beat Saber, FitXR, and Pistolwhip (VR workout baby!)

Making: Zines and Doom levels

Writing: Project E

Word Count: 166641

TLDR: Project E milestone achieved! Time anxiety. PIRACY IS IMPORTANT. CY_BORG resistance. Maggie Stiefvater’s Critique Partner Match Up. *Vomits rainbows* ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

NEW THING*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ progress has been made, a short story has been finished, but now it’s being put on the back burner as I’ve started the first full read-through of Project E since completing the first draft. This is such a major milestone. Reading through this mammoth story which has both plagued me and kept me company for so many years has been a really great experience. A lot of the chapters have really landed and felt good. There is always that nagging worry, when writing, that you are just bleeding words and none of it makes sense or it is boring or any number of nasty shit the attic hag (personal schema) wants to say about your hard work. 

I have a couple of fears. One of them is time. It is such a beast, such an eldritch horror. It just keeps tumbling forward, dragging us with it. Sometimes, I feel like I’m running down hill with it, staying upright but mostly just falling forward on purpose. Other times, I feel swept up in it all. As if I’ve been swallowed by a wave and I’m tumbling. Sometimes, it is as though everything is waiting, holding its breath, a gentle monster snoozing. So long is the pause between breaths you fear she may’ve died. Yesterday, I watched Mr Samuel’s Teatime Stories by Yara Asmar. It was unsettling and beautiful and so cosy. I Won’t go into what I think it is about here. Please go watch it.

I want to rant on about something for a bit: I feel very strongly about Piracy when it comes to media and art. I know how devastating it would be to be a small artist, author, game developer, or what have you, and find out that there’s a significant number of folks pirating your media. There will always be people who pirate purely for the thrill of it, but there is a not insignificant number of these people who are too poor to afford much in the way of media. Any media which is pirated for this reason, isn’t lost sales, as the person wouldn’t have been able to support it to begin with. Also, folks who pirate often end up buying media anyway (some using their piracy as a means to test whether something is worth the money) Link to a study from 2015 which discusses this:

The other side of Piracy which I not only understand, but whole-heartedly love is the drive to preserve media. Especially within video games, where a game can be trapped on old hardware that is slowly being lost to bit-rot and failing components. Emulation and things like Archive.org are becoming more and more important as time goes on. As well, we see complete negligence of the art being created the moment it stops making money. Companies abandon their work often in conditions that make it completely impossible to use in the future. 

There is a possible route where we could at least stop companies from doing this to their games, which doesn’t involve piracy or reverse-engineering source code for online servers. Ross Scott from Accursed Farms (who I’ve watched since their Civil Protection days) is organizing a fight against this particular problem:

Speaking of fighting the good fight, I finally got to play CY_BORG with my TTRPG group for the first time! WHAT A RIDE. I think my favorite part of CY_BORG’s setting is that it is cyberpunk, and as such, is just a hellish reflection of the world as we have it today… Which means, as the GM, you can choose to let your players fight against it. I discussed this before, but the lack of hope in the written material of CY_BORG doesn’t need to be the law of your sessions. CY_BORG points out that all “rules” in the book are there to be broken (Besides the one about not being friends with cops or corps) and as such, I feel injecting the ability to properly fight against, tear down, and burn the ashes of the technocratic capitalist overlords is something I will absolutely be doing in future one-shots. Oh, and speaking of piracy, I’m planning on running Pirate Borg this coming month, so wish me luck!

Make yourself a randomized punk here and fight the good fight:

Maggie Stiefvater, author of The Raven Cycle and many other beauties, has a resource for beta readers and critique partners. I finally bit the bullet and joined. I’ve even already had a bite for a potential critique partner! There are many genres and age ranges, there are writers just starting out all the way to agented authors. You can find the Critique Partner Match Up at:

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Sweet mother of god, it’s June already? You know what that means! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 It’s time for RAMP 2024~!

Also it’s pride month~ Be gay, do crimes!

First time remembering to mention that I have a Patreon where I post art, poetry, short stories, and more (as well as these newsletters). Come check it out here:

Support weird. Support artists.

[linguisticillustrations]

The alignment of individual person/number markers used on Yakkha verbs. It took me a little while to work out how to read the table; each square is subdivided into nine smaller squares based on the number of the agent and the patient, with top middle bottom corresponding to singular, dual, and plural agent, and left middle right corresponding to singular, dual, and plural patient, respectively. Grey shading indicates the marker would be used there. In the bottom right table, the dark grey is for =na, and the light grey for =ha.

Source: Schackow, Diana. 2015. A grammar of Yakkha. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 7). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b66.12 https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/66

[bpd-aware]

[buttercupart]

i destroyed the bond of friendship and respect between the only people left who'd even look me in the eye now I laugh and make a fortune off the same ones that I tortured and the world screams; "Kiss me, Son of God"

[terribleoldwhitemen]

I'm 100% sure that at some point during the making of s7, shaun evans and roger allam had a conversation (that I'd kill to have overheard) about how both their characters had extramarital affairs with morally dubious Italian women whom they saw get fatally shot. however I'm absolutely certain this parallel never consciously occurred to russell lewis.

[yfere]

growing up: realizing the ways that you thought you were fucked up are fairly normal and Not As Bad As You Think

.... and realizing that the more concerning thing is the NEW ways you DIDN'T KNOW you were really fucked up

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I feel like the post I just reblogged pointing out the all-or-nothing in how many people interact with their deconstruction of systems of oppression is resonating for me right now with so many different moments in my life where someone decides that because some part of myself has access to some of the levers of control/influence/etc that come with the relationship to power, and decides what that must mean about all the other parts of me that might be explicitly refused access to those same levers.

It has happened in so many spaces/aspects of my life, and it can be so hard to feel safe and seen and trusting of others when that's my chronic relationship to being perceived - half truths and obfuscation.

It doesn't really change regardless of who's doing the assuming either. Like, where they land in relation to systems of power may influence which direction they lean in their assumptions about me, but even that is often inconsistent. Both sides of the equation (those who share my marginalizations and those who exist in spaces of closer proximity to power) will still do it nonetheless.

When I was doing my liminal social identities work in undergrad, this was actually a big part of the conceptualization we explored of traumtic alienation of self as individual from self as collective, and what it can do to people to exist in this liminal relationship with your environment and the people in it. As I'm starting to gather my thoughts about my stress modeling, this conceptualization is bubbling back to the surface. I'm finding myself meandering through it on both a path specifically my own, and in an effort to better understand what other paths may be available to people during their version of the process/experience.

Selfhood is so fragile, and so in need of balance between self-construction and co-construction for us humans, and that gives us so many beautiful, even spiritual, experiences of meaning making and generativity of self. It also createa many pivot points where we may find room in our path for vulnerability or blurring of self. As much as these pivot points can be distressing, I think they also sometimes become our foundations of change/personal evolution, when we find that through the distress of existing in shift, something meaningful is occurring or observable in our experience of self-in-transition.

I think something I've valued especially about my own relationship with self is its transience. It doesn't always end up somewhere I would be happy to sustain, but it always allows me a degree of comfort in complexity that I think has made my body-mind a safer place for me overall.

[traumatizedjaguar]

The weird thing about abusers is they get vengeful over perceived slights that never happened, interpreting your intentions as negative toward them and using other cognitive distortions like black and white thinking to stabilize their delusional belief, and they project onto you without even seemingly realizing it… like each abuser to varying degrees seems to not even be aware of it?? I’ll tell ya, lack of self-awareness on both a human and spiritual level is extremely dangerous…

[kuoringankalmo]

Ugh I'm the worst, I slept in again, why I'm so shit of a person that I can't even keep a simple waking up schedule???

Well you clearly needed the extra rest in the morning, your body keeps a score of the rest it needs. It's good that you try to keep an early schedule on your days off and it clearly helped you wake up earlier! Beating yourself up over nothing is fruitless and now we will make the best of the time we have, by starting with the chores.

-

I was supposed to make a post of examples of the annoying spiral I got myself into but I had to think more of the gentle parenting talk while writing this, I completely forgot my counter points against it

[adornesibley]

I’ve had a thought about Alan Wake

But I want to do two things, preface this by saying I feel that Alan is a self insert for Sam Lake and his creative struggles. However, I see Sam as an incredible and delightful storyteller, and have enjoyed every game he has written for.

And secondly, this

To protect from spoilers though I doubt I’ll be going into much detail.

I have a feeling that Alan was really struggling with the fact that the only thing he’s done with any level of popularity is schlocky pulp fiction. I also feel that he isn’t the only one in the story who sees him this way.

So does the Dark Presence. I think he was picked not because he was the perfect writer, or because Thomas Zane wrote about him, but because he was a writer desperate to write a story that MEANT something, and the Dark Presence could give him that. I think it did so because it felt he was incapable of overcoming it. He just wasn’t GOOD enough.

But thankfully for everyone involved, they were both wrong.

[aashiquidreams]

After a weekend heavy with emotions, I stepped out onto my balcony this evening to admire the enchanting beauty of the full moon. She’s always captivatingly beautiful. I cherish her in all her phases. Much like the moon, I too go through my own phases, and through my love for her, I’ve discovered a deeper love and understanding for myself amidst these changes.

As I gazed at the night sky, I envisioned various versions of myself standing beside me. I cradled my toddler self in my arms, while my childhood self stood to my left and my 16-year-old self to my right. Slightly behind me stood a version of myself from my early twenties. Together, we stood there, bathing in the moonlight, embracing each other, in a moment both comforting and emotionally charged. It felt as though all versions of myself were offering solace, much like I comfort and reassure them in my thoughts, a coping mechanism I learned through schema therapy. It was truly a magical moment.

Besides the fact that it’s a full moon, eclipse season has also commenced. It’s an interesting time astrologically, and I find myself immensely curious about what lies ahead. Emotionally, I’m navigating through a challenging period, yet I hold faith that the paths in this phase of my life will be illuminated, guiding me towards the right direction on this journey of life. I trust that what is meant for me will find its way to me, while what isn’t meant for me will fade into the vastness of the universe’s light.

Aligned with the full moon’s grace, happy full moon! ✨🌕✨

[poorlittleyaoyao]

horrible realization that this fandom……. has made me get what the New Criticism dudebros were talking about (even though I still don’t agree, because viewing any text in a vacuum would make me an extremely bad history major).

[bpd-aware]

[goingtothebes]

If you have enough time in the day to cry so hard you nearly throw up, here’s the demo for Enoch 18:14. I always forget that it’s the thick and tense pauses where you can clearly hear JD trying not to cry that hurt the worst.

[confinesofmy]

woohoo! not only did my laptop come back to life one last time, i looked it up and i did buy a policy and it is still within that policy!! if i play my cards right this could be big. 🥳

[numetaljackdog]

tired of reblogging shit about it let's just come to terms with the fact that lame nerds online were never in a million years going to treat the character of hobie brown with a lick of respect and we should beat them all up for fun