#physh be rambling

[physalian]

Gentle reminder that the “it makes me happy I don’t care if it’s bad” excuse won’t help you in the long run.

Saying this now in the wake of TikTok, to any and all flocking back to it because they miss their comfort nonsense videos and don’t want to think about the big picture.

But it came from having a friend who is an alcoholic who, despite making over 50% more than I do, lives paycheck to paycheck because of their spending habits, alcohol included. Their defense? “It makes me happy and I deserve things that make me happy when my life is terrible.”

What I implore them to hear instead of just criticism: Find something else that makes you happy.

Nobody is a bad person for wanting to escape the shit reality we’ve just run back into like an abusive ex.

But does doomscrolling really make you happy? Does letting the hours burn by watching funny videos make you fulfilled?

You can take baby steps, no need to quit cold turkey. Say, 20 minutes of the time you would spend on TikTok (or wherever you get your fraught escape) go do something else.

Go start a puzzle you’ll never finish. Rearrange your bedroom. Redecorate. Walk around the block. Lie in bed and listen to music. Take a bath. Take a nap. Give your pet some love. Organize a deck of cards by number then by suit and mess it all up again. Play dress-up with the clothes you never get to wear. Watch the rain. Be bored.

Be bored and be okay with your own thoughts and you might surprise yourself.

[physalian]

Honestly because engagement is such a toss up, I have months-old posts collecting dust in drafts because I don’t want to waste them on a random day where they’ll just get lost to the timeline, when I put a lot of effort into them.

Nobody owes me interaction, same with fanfic, it just means I’m less enthusiastic about sharing what I’m working on. As somebody relatively new to social media (had this blog and only this platform for almost 18 months now) it’s kinda hard not taking 0 notes with this many followers personally, or like I’ve done something wrong but nobody wants to tell me.

I’m getting better about it! But quickly growing indifferent to this site. Only so many times you can talk into the void before it loses its charm.

here’s a little comparison for people who say engagement hasn’t gotten that bad and anyone who complains is ungrateful.

these are two posts from my first go round on tumblr circa 2014-2017, my most popular gifset of all time

& a text post

notice how the ratio is about even on likes to reblogs?

here’s from this go around, my most popular gifset

and my most popular fic

do you see how that’s discouraging?

i love being on this site. i love the little community i’ve found and the people who follow me and the mutuals i’ve made friendships with and the mutuals that i’m still getting to know. i love it. but at a certain point it’s hard to justify spending so much time on works that get bad engagement.

reblog, comment, send asks. without them, this site doesn’t work.

[physalian]

Being a writer sucks sometimes because I’ll be watching TV, trying to just relax, and a character will say something and I’ll go “Hm, that was a poor way to give that exposition. I would have done it differently.”

Writer brain don’t clock out.

[physalian]

Saw an argument against a ship for a very popular fandom basically saying: "But L is straight and A is ace!!!!"

... That. That is what fanfic and fanart is for? How have we gone full circle here to defending the sanctity of a straight character's canon straightness? It'd be like screaming that Dean Winchester is straight thus Destiel is toxic. The last 60 years of fandom would love to have a chat with you.

I know the answer is that ship discourse has taken a bizarre turn toward heated arguments over whether or not a ship will become canon instead of how X and Y would be cute together in another life.

Which I think is an unfortunate and unpredictable byproduct of actually having more queer characters in popular media? Like, before, everybody knew there was absolutely zero chance of their wild ships going canon, no matter how much chemistry X and Y have. But now, there's a non-zero chance, because writers recognize that queers exist and just might do it for certain shows.

So the line between fanon and canon, for some shows, has completely blurred and, y'all, it's all made up anyway, why can't we just have fun with it? So long as the writer doesn't retcon A's aceness thanks to squeaky-wheel shippers' demands, and I doubt that the writer will... who cares?

Anyway RadioApple is hot. I'm a sucker for enemies-to-lovers.

And as an ace myself, there's a whole lot you can do with an enemies-to-lovers pairing beyond just smut. Give me a fic of "nobody fucks with you but me" queerplatonic situationship and I'd be all over that like a house on fire.

[physalian]

I just replaced the RAM in my laptop all by myself. I had help picking the right replacements but I got my laptop open and did the swap and it’s working like a champ.

Something uniquely empowering about being able to fix your own stuff. Tech, clothing, appliances, paint, etc. Tutorials are out there.

[physalian]

So… never gone viral before? Does 10k notes in a day count as viral? 21k in a month? No idea that would be the post. And I had to turn off notifications, but I still get the email comments. So every now and then I’ll glance at my phone and see a comment come through and it’ll either miss the point of what I said, argue for argument’s sake, or just be flat-out negative. The only ones I’ve deleted and blocked are spam/bot comments.

And I’m caught between wanting to focus on the overwhelming positivity, because I like seeing people telling stories in the reblogs, I like people sharing their creations, but it is a steep learning curve into telling myself that the negativity isn’t personal, that it’s the vast minority. I want to get to a “well that’s okay everybody has their opinion” place but right now it’s “well fuck you too bud”. I still operate on the “don’t like, don’t interact” mindset, so when I see stuff I don’t agree with I just keep scrolling. Or, I make my own post about it so the OP never has to deal with my contrarian opinion.

I’m sure somebody’s going to tell me “get off the internet if you can’t handle it or grow a thicker skin, snowflake” so… idk. You can’t predict what will be ignored and what will blow up like never before and stressing about the what-if of every single word I post to be extremely careful wasn’t working.

Honestly perfect timing for the hyperfixation keeping me less active on here and distracted. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of attention and I’m not sure I like it.

[physalian]

Story time! A few years ago I was on a cruise doing trivia night and I volunteered to answer one round for my team, and the category was Disney villains—name as many as you can without hesitating or repeating in some amount of minutes.

And I was goin’, I was groovin’, I was winning this thing.

And then this girl drops something like “His Honor and Glory, the Duke of Weselton” with such confidence that I stood there in front of the whole 18+ audience of like 50 people including my family and went:

“….fuck”

And the whole mini auditorium lost their shit.

We still won tho.

[physalian]

I’m somebody who, by and large, does not participate in fandom because trying not to piss somebody off just isn’t worth the effort.

I grew up on PJO, for example, and I have seen just. So many takes. That I have a problem with. Whether it’s superficial shippy posts or bad faith arguments against or for a character, or the declining quality of the series at large in how it panders to these kinds of posts, or from fans who like the Disney show, whatever. Very nitpicky about this series in particular because it means so much to me. To the point where I would absolutely come across as some gatekeepy first-series purist and I own that.

However.

It is a beautiful thing to see something I hate and go: “Huh. You and I would not be friends. Anyway I’mma keep scrolling.”

And I think more people should be able to experience the liberation of “I don’t actually have to be upset by this and furthermore, spend more time stewing in that upset harassing OP about it.”

You should try it, it’s fun.

Even if I see an incendiary post that completely shits all over the story and 99% of other fans would unite in bashing it: bare minimum, I’m giving a troll what they want.

Even if you’re doing it out of some obligation to educate somebody on how wrong they are—how much are you stressing out and upsetting yourself in the process, and why’s it gotta be you bearing that burden? It’s just fiction, it doesn’t matter.

[physalian]

There is an extreme divide between “toxic positivity” and “aggressive kindness” like one minimizes your pain and shames you for feeling it and the other sees your pain and punches it in the face for you.

The difference between “It all works out in the end just be happy and look on the bright side.”

And

“Yeah you can be sad like you can absolutely do that but how about we use this sadness constructively to get you out of this hole? Your sadness don’t control you, babe, I believe in you.”

[physalian]

While I love my various YouTube chefs, there’s a common throughline of content they make that’s like “here’s now to make a healthier [insert fast food item here] at home!”

And, that’s great, I get what they’re going for, but people don’t buy fast food purely to eat unhealthy. We know this is unhealthy. We do it because we either don’t have time or don’t have the motivation to go about prepping all the ingredients, or buying them. I don’t even like most fast-foods and am very frugal with my money, so I end up not eating at all sometimes. My current kitchen is a glorified hotel kitchenette and isn't built for home chefs at all.

All that to say: If you’re like me and you oscillate between “I am cooking every night this week look at me go” and “I haven’t eaten something green since lunch 3 days ago and my dinner was an entire sleeve of Saltines”

Don’t underestimate the power of frozen peas.

No joke. If you’re not allergic to legumes, peas are great. Why? They’re high in protein and unlike other frozen vegetables, their texture doesn’t change much when you cook them, and they don’t have that much flavor, so they go great with a wide variety of seasonings. Broccoli and carrots never have that fresh crunch and corn isn’t super nutritious.

But the best part? They’re so small that if you make a bowl of butter noodles, 3 ingredients (pasta, butter/oil, salt), you can just dump in a ¼ cup of peas at the end and the heat of the noodles will defrost the peas for you. No microwave, no second dish, no worry about overcooking them. Typically, I still microwave mine in the bowl I plan to eat with to save time (and a dish). Heck, you could eat straight out of the pasta pot.

Canned, too, if you’ve got them, but if you’re sodium-conscious, watch out for that.

Too unmotivated to cook?

Buy a box of Minute Rice (or those bags of pre-cooked seasoned rice), toss it in the microwave, add your peas. Or even frozen edamame.

Random box pasta. Add a pad of butter. Then your peas.

Instant mash potatoes. Or a whole baked potato. Add a side of peas.

A sleeve of Saltine crackers. Add a side of peas.

Peas.

A whole bag might cost you anywhere from $0.99 to $2.99. Cheap, versatile, neurodivergent-friendly protein. If you can get up and make it to the kitchen to grab a box of crackers, you can take it 2 steps further to heat yourself some peas.

[physalian]

The 150 Widget Maker (Fuck Corporate America)

I need to vent for a second, m’kay?

Let’s say my job is that I have 8 hours, no lunch, to make 150 widgets. And I’m really, really good at making widgets. I have the system down pat and I’ve personalized my method to make it as efficient as possible for me to make 150 as quickly and accurately as possible.

My job is not “make as many widgets as possible in 8 hours”. It is “you have 8 hours every day to make at least 150 widgets”.

I do not get extra pay for going above 150. My “merit increase” is already lagging severely behind inflation to the point where it’s almost insulting when I get told I get an extra $0.40 like they’re doing me a big favor.

Now, at one point, I did once make over 150 widgets a day, and do OT to make even more widgets.

Then I suffered some burnout and had to reassess my work-life balance. So I cut back, slowly, gradually, to doing the 150, even though the minimum used to be 130, the minimum has increased while the pay has stayed the same.

Thing is.

We all have 8 hours to make 150 widgets. I however, have been caught frontloading my work and having the extra time to myself. Meanwhile my teammates who purposefully build their widgets slowly with weaponized incompetence, spread out their time. If I work, say, straight through super speedy, and make my 150 in 6 hours, that’s a whole 2 hour chunk of me time. My teammates have the exact same aggregate 2 hours, theirs is just spread out in between each widget. Difference is, I physically cannot force myself to be that lazy.

Now, obviously I’m not sitting at the assembly line under the gaze of my supervisor with a book and a coffee for those two hours. I got caught because there’s an invisible little robot in the conveyer belt counting how many times I touch the belt, while the human supervisors are far away in another warehouse.

I thought the robot only had a camera, so to speak, so let’s say I set up a me-shaped cardboard cutout weighted to keep my conveyer belt moving. I thought that was enough. No, I need to make sure the cardboard cutout is slapping the conveyer belt every few seconds and sliding widget pieces around. The existence of the robot does not encourage me to work harder at my job, it encourages me to work harder figuring out how to evade my job.

Could I make more widgets? Well yes. But I’ve learned the hard way that efficient work only gets you more work. Why should it matter how I spend those 2 hours? I know why, but just humor me. If we’re all getting paid for 2 hours of not working, then me lumping it all in at the end should be treated absolutely no differently than the people sabotaging their own output to look incompetent.

Either offer me an incentive, like a living wage, to make more widgets, or punish all of us equally for that downtime and reassess what about the process can be fixed so we maximize our efforts and want to work harder. Which starts with some fucking respect, and not micromanaging us with invisible robots like babies in a crib.

I can either be overworked or underpaid. I cannot tolerate being both.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Fuck Corporate America.

[physalian]

Hot take but I hope someday soon we get to a point where "Character of X minority is in this piece of media so you should watch it and support it!" goes away.

I'm tired of "It's the bi character! Look at their one hint of a line of dialogue!" and "It's the strong female character! Look at her telling the camera how amazing she is!"

Or whoever.

I don't need all the marketing to pander to me and I'm not giving anything a pass just because it happens to represent a group I identify wtih. Give me a well-written and well-acted story, that happens to have strong women, and it'll be a far louder statement than crossing your fingers and hoping by virtue of insisting that you have strong women, you'll break even on your investment.

I want to get to a place where a minority's inclusion, and I am part of several of them, is absolutely nothing special. No "first X in this genre!" As if the act of inclusion itself, regardless of how well it was done or in what capacity, counts.

I mean it is a big achievement for all the actors and actresses who break that ceiling, and they deserve all the elation and pride for doing so. I'm talking about the characters themselves, which tend to stop at "we included them and their chararcterization is simply that they're Minority. Isn't that enough for you? Isn't that what you wanted?"

Instead of "This Lesbian character is so amazing because she's a lesbian" how about "this character is so amazing and she's a lesbian".

I get the need to do it for a little while, I want to someday reach a reality where there is no need for celebration, because there is no longer the perception of a default to diverge from. Personally, I think the marketing celebrating "first X in this genre" only reminds everyone in the first place that what is happening is abnormal.

Don't celebrate the features we cannot change and did not choose, celebrate our actions and what we do with them, as you would a straight cis male character.

[physalian]

So my department at my company does not require us to take lunch breaks. I work 40 hour weeks. I’ve been told this is illegal.

Thing is though, that I have grown so dependent on a perfect 8 hour shift, that the idea of clocking out for any amount of time during those 8 hours stresses me tf out. Every single second I take a lunch for? That’s another miserable second tacked on to the end of my day.

The problem: They have stolen my worktime naps from me. I can nap, but now I have to clock out for them. Before, I couldn’t get caught but my system has broken. So my need for sleep is the unstoppable force up against the immovable object that is my neurodivergent commitment to this exact schedule.

It’s only been 2 shifts of this. My job has already grown exponentially worse.

[physalian]

There’s a strange flip in the perception you get of time you think you have to do things in any given day. I work from home and live alone, and my team doesn’t require me to take a lunch, so it really is only eight hours of my day—no commute, no break in the punch clock—and I write on the side, and it never felt like enough time.

I’d clock out at 3 and be like “well there’s the rest of my evening where does the time go?” Or I’ll write for two hours and look up and it’s dark out and I haven’t eaten dinner, more time wasted, etc.

But I just started this new project, on top of work and on top of writing, and though it literally is eating up more of my time, because my time is scarcer, I’m valuing it that much more and packing that much more into it.

It’s not already 3pm anymore, it’s only 3pm. I’ve got a whole second eight hours until bed time to get shit done and I’m suddenly motivated to use it all.

I think I knew this, in the back of my mind, but I started this undertaking like 4 days ago and it’s already hit.

[physalian]

A character comparison quiz, eh?

Hi, I'm Physh and I approve this message.

Courtesy of: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/characters/

Thanks @positivelyruined for this rabbit hole to fall down :P

[physalian]

Y'all ever heard of "IB"? I'll tell you my tale of woe

So we know the US education system is ass, right? The pressure to get good grades over actually learning anything is detrimental to both learning and the desire to seek knowledge and discover our world.

Well I have a little story, about this exact principle on acid. Idk if anyone on here will ever be in/or is already in something called the “International Baccalaureate” (IB) program. What it is, is an “intensely rigorous” allegedly-standardized method of schooling that’s supposed to be transferrable between countries. Like, if I went to an IB school in America, I could transfer to the equivalent education level in France and not be completely lost. That’s the point.

It's way harder than traditional high school, with zero focus on things like arts and physical education (you know, important shit) and a draconian dedication to STEM… and nothing else.

If it’s not clear, this shit did irreparable damage to my high school career, so this is a warning to anyone considering it: If you are not neurotypical and somebody who’s willing to get hospitalized over how stressed you are (which did happen to a friend of mine) maybe skip the snobbish high school? If you don’t plan on being a lawyer or a doctor, maybe skip this bullshit.

—

So, guess who did not know that they’re neurodivergent back then? Me. Somewhere in the realm of ADHD and Autism, possibly both, who knows? Either way, I’m “high functioning” and you’d never know, or so I’ve been told.

I went to this high school because I wanted to be with all my super smart friends, and bought into the classist bullshit of “traditional high school is for dumb kids” and the whole “honors program” hierarchy—in my middle school, your first year there, you were separated into four groups of students.

Group A was the dumb kids, and everybody knew it. Groups B and C were the average-intelligence kids. Group D were the “honors” kids. First day in 6th grade, you were literally handed a themed t-shirt and compared to every other kid you know and don’t know and implicitly told “you’re not as smart as these kids and we want you to know it”. I was in the B-C group, which absolutely led to “well I’m not smart enough to be in D, but at least I’m not an idiot like A”.

Super healthy shit to teach children.

You did not have classes outside of your group. It wasn’t like elementary school where honors kids split off for a few hours but were still in your class. It was a complete social schism, and you only saw these people during lunch and maybe across the yard in P.E.

Fuck that school.

So anyway, with that damage done, I wanted to go to the fancy high school with all my smart friends, applied, and got in.

When I was younger, I had a massive procrastination problem. The usual stuff, like not starting a project until the night before it was due, forging my parents’ signatures on forms they were supposed to sign as the teacher was collecting them (got super good at that, bet school wishes they hadn’t encouraged it), doing homework in homeroom the morning of, and completely forgetting about readings and such.

Not the case now, but back then it was chronic.

In regular “dumb-dumb” school, one can get away with neglecting a little work.

In IB, if you fuck up in year one, that fuckup will haunt you through your entire high school experience. Everything in IB builds on itself, so if you have a shitty foundation, you are screwed without even realizing it, and there is little fixing it.

IB is also structured irregularly compared to traditional American high school. You only have four “blocks” of classes each day, and they switch off every other day. So I’d have Day 1 on M, W, F one week, and then T R the next week, yada yada, with those blocks lasting 90 minutes. As opposed to the 50-ish minute classes with the same schedule daily.

You would think that this would make it easier, as teachers had more time per period to really dive deep into subject matter without being rushed.

You would be wrong.

IB, like with all American schools, focuses on quantity over quality. Quantity in every facet of schooling. I needed a rolling backpack so I didn’t fuck up my spine hauling around my textbooks because the school didn’t have classroom copies/you needed them every goddamn night for homework and in class. The amount of homework, frequency of tests and quizzes, all that, is increased compared to traditional school.

But my very first class, my 1:1, was Algebra 2. Reader: I am awful at algebra. I cannot learn concepts without being able to ground them in realty. Geometry always came easy to me, because you can see and touch geometry. It has practical uses and follows logic. I can use a formula to measure the volume of a box, or I can bust out the tape measure by hand and get the exact same answer.

Algebra is fictitious, it’s not grounded in the tangibility of geometry, and once we hit stuff like quadratic equations, without being able to understand why I was learning what I was learning and how this all fits in to the greater concept of mathematics and why it matters, I not only checked out, but started to feel very, very stupid.

This was my very first class.

I almost failed Algebra 2. I had gone down to a 33%, because my teacher, for this super smart and super fancy high school, taught the same way every other teacher in that godforsaken place taught: Lecture.

If you do not learn through lecture, you’re fucked at an IB school. If you cannot process and retain information simply because someone tells it to you, you’re fucked. If staring at a 70-slide powerpoint presentation is understimulating, you’re fucked.

This teacher’s personality in particular was absolutely nasty. Haughty as the rest of the school, who made jokes at the idea of returning to the “trads” and the “dumb kids” at regular high school if you dropped out, and we had several who were way smarter than me who left by day 3, who were able to understand that this was not for them, while I stuck it out for 2 years.

I brought that 33% up to a 65% and got my first ever D.

But that first class, opening day of my high school career, left an impression that I carried with me for two whole years: Out of absolute terror of being thought of as “dumb” by leaving all my friends to go to traditional high school, I chose to be the dumbest of the “smart kids” instead of the “smartest” of the “dumb” kids.

And I paid for it.

I spent two whole years completely checked out and unwilling to learn because of this one math teacher on my first day of high school. Once I figured out that this man and this institution did not give a single fuck if I passed and would not change their teaching style at all to accommodate me, I could not be bothered.

I still got decent grades, and I did have classes, like geometry and my second year of English, in which I excelled. I had teachers who cared and loved their jobs, but by and large, I spent two whole years suffering because of the social pressure to pretend to be neurotypical, to learn the “normal” way, to pretend to be the only valid definition of “smart”. I had a Spanish teacher who gave me dresscode 3 days before the end of the school year, right after I failed an oral exam, in the back of the class where everyone could hear us. The entire foreign language department of conservative bitches stared at the girls wearing shorts with far more intensity than they should have.

We had this thing for “volunteer” hours that had three groups: community service, creative hours, and one other thing I can’t remember. I do remember desperately approaching my shit guidance councilor, the sole lady responsible for the entire school’s population of IB kids, asking if I could count my builds in Minecraft as part of my creative hours because I needed a certain number of hours to pass.

She I guess heard “video game” and thought I was slacking off killing mobs, when I played the game for the builds. But “creativity” only counts if it’s what they define as “creativity”.

Every step of the way, this education program demanded more. I got humiliated by multiple teachers in front of multiple classes because I did not understand something and got so upset that I cried, and they refused to explain it in any other way except repeating what they’d already said in lecture. I lived 45 minutes away from this school by bus and my parents couldn't come pick me up or drop me off to use office hours or study groups even if I wanted to, and I sure as hell didn't have a car.

So when I left, to go back to my regional high school for my junior and senior year (after getting gaslit and guilted by my parents for “failing to uphold my commitments”) turns out, I’m not an idiot.

Suddenly, I had teachers who gave a shit. I was turning in assignments on time. I was doing my homework the night it was given. I was starting projects in the very next class. I finally got straight-As. I liked learning again.

Turns out, not every “smart” kid I knew went to IB, they were instead very successfully running my regional high school’s SGA. They were doing just fine in getting into the colleges of their dreams and pursuing STEM. They didn’t need IB one bit.

The only good thing IB gave me was that by the time I got to college, it was a breeze.

All these years later, the thing that sticks with me the most was how much of a sham the whole thing is, and this insidious caste system of perceived intelligence. My super fancy IB school was inside of a larger high school built in a rural area, and put there to make that school look smarter.

So you had this institution not only giving these rural kids an enemy to hate, but reinforcing an idea that they’re not as smart as the special IB kids. And in turn, you’re telling the IB kids “you’re better than your peers, look at how dumb they are”.

While then sacrificing absolutely everything in the name of "quality education". Arts and music, physical exercise and sports, free time outside of school now spent doing homework, free time at all to have a mental break from it, and time to go to clubs and school events. You could take those extra classes, sure, but it cost you in time you needed to do all your other non-negotiable homework. You might graduate and get into Harvard Law, but you might get there with a heart condition from stress that you'll have for the rest of your life. Is that degree worth it?

But also how narrow and antiquated this idea of intelligence and learning is. I’m someone who, by and large, does not need to study, so long as I care about the subject matter.

One time in college, I took astronomy. I love astronomy. I ditched a class once and forgot all about a big unit test we had coming up. I walked into the next class to that test, having prepared nothing, and wrote a note on the top of my test before taking it apologizing to my astronomy professor for the F I was about to get.

I got the highest score in the class (a 92 I think), having only paid attention during lecture, because I cared and I wanted to learn and was able to retain everything only from hearing it, seeing it, and writing it down once. So long as something is grounded in the context of why it matters, one lecture is usually all I need, and I am consistently the fastest test-taker I know.

But back in high school, once the “you are not supposed to be here” baked in and solidified within the first week, that was detrimental for two long and stressful years, and, guess what? I’m not friends with any of those people anymore.

I probably could have done it, but the attitude of that pretentious, bullshit program ruined it. The people who stayed all four years? Some ended up at my college anyway, they just got better scholarships.

So to anyone who’s thinking about IB or knows anyone thinking about it or who is already struggling and suffering: Unless you plan on being a doctor or a lawyer, it’s not worth it, and you aren’t “smarter” just because you can learn one very specific way. I left after two years and never went back.