#physh be rambling

[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’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]

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]

I hate how "I should be mindful of what information I put on the internet" used to come with the response of:

"Indeed you should, intrepid wanderer of the World Wide Web! There are cybercriminals and cyberstalkers out there and what you post is on the Internet forever".

And now it's:

"Pfft, you're not chronically online? I posted my SSN 6 months ago, you digital prude. Look at all my retweets!"

Anyone else remember that old commercial from like 2003 that was this high school girl posting a compromising picture of her to her school's physical bulletin board, and when she panicked because people were laughing she tried to rip it down and another just kept materializing back in place?

There was a line in Euphoria where Zendaya literally went "and don't tell teens they shouldn't send nudes, nudes are the currency of high school" like. No??? I know that show is absolutely not a 2003 PSA but

"Everybody's doing it so I guess it's okay," used to be the weak-ass excuse that got you grounded for a month for drinking at a party.

Not the current currency of the realm.

[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.

[physalian]

Hiiiiiii!! Of course Coldplay is my #1

[physalian]

I think there’s a difference between ignorant and informed “problematic” content. I have a very thick skin for all manner of squicky tropes, but usually I find it in a dead dove fic where the author goes “wouldn’t it be fucked up if…?”

Vs an ignorant author who goes “wouldn’t it be so romantic if…?”

As in, the author knows what they’re writing is triggering and will upset people, reader beware, it’s just for shits and giggles. It’s fun, we’re having a good time, and we all go home knowing the author doesn’t take this seriously.

Or, wow that was horrific and the author and their fans wholeheartedly agrees yeah that was horrific! Wasn’t it great?

Versus an author, usually of original fiction, who does not have the lived experience to understand the ramifications of just what they’re romanticizing. Like, an author who is not a survivor of SA glorifying SA without two shits given to how what they’re saying isn’t inherently sexy.

Or wow that was horrific but the author and their fans going um excuse you, bigot, it was so romantic.

Just. Some self-awareness, maybe? You can indulge yourself while accepting and even embracing that it's a little fucked-up. It's human to be into some fucked-up things.

[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