#the moral of this post is: capitalism is bad and our society is fundamentally broken

[miasanmuller]

When I was younger I used to draw a lot, I even took painting classes when I was like 10 or 11 (with a class of middgle-aged women. It was fun), but I lost that hobby when I hit adulthood. It's been years since I last attempted to draw anything and I hated it. I hate that the capitalist logic of "your hobbies should be profitable, your art should be objectivelly good by the market's standards" has gotten to me. And now even though I want so bad to pick up drawing and painting again, I can't bring myself to it because I feel like it'd be a waste of time because I'd never be good at it. But that shouldn't be the point, people shouldn't seek hobbies to become good at them. The objective should be just to feel good about engaging in it. But I lost that and I have no idea how to get back to that

[timemachineyeah]

One of the things about accessibility that is rough is that it does take labor and money to make things accessible and yet it also should be much more standard. And under capitalism those things compete in the same way that “education should be free” and “teachers should be well paid” compete.

People often say “if you can’t afford to make this accessible, you can’t afford to do it!” with the same moral righteousness and fervor of someone saying “if you can’t afford to pay your workers enough, you can’t afford to do business!” but they are fundamentally different ideas and don’t actually translate.

The truth is, making things accessible should be covered. In the way that anything that costs but makes society better should be covered.

Like, traffic laws are good. And it’s not an entirely bad concept that it’s someone’s job to be on the road making sure everyone is safe.

But the other day my roommate and I saw a reckless and probably impaired driver and could not decide whether to call the cops because he was a black man. We wanted him to get home safe and for everyone else on the road to get home safe. We did not want him to be shot. If we’d known getting everyone home safe was the goal of a traffic cop, we would’ve called them without deliberation. As it was, we just kind of... followed and watched.

Like, my car has a shoddy headlight. It used to go out constantly. Even though I was poor, I spent all kinds of money trying to figure out what was going on. It took years to find what was ultimately a small and easily solved problem with the fitting of my car’s exterior. Being poor, when I got pulled over for a missing headlight, the ticket didn’t help. It didn’t help me. It didn’t help other drivers. It just ate into the small amount of money I had to try to fix the recurring problem.

Imagine, though, if instead of getting a ticket, someone kind would pull you over, let you know your headlight was out, and maybe even replace it there. Imagine if instead of cops we had free AAA for everyone on the road. Imagine if after the third time getting pulled over for a broken headlight, instead of getting a ticket about a failure to cooperate (because I HAD cooperated and fixed the light, it just kept going out again), the publicly funded AAA had a record that they themselves had fixed this light and something else must be wrong, and gave me a subsidy to go fix it.

(Or, imagine if public transport was better and it wouldn’t have barred me from my life to just use that instead of drive).

Folks who sue restaurants for not being accessible are doing the right thing because that’s the society we live in and that’s the recourse that exists and we NEED accessibility to be the standard of doing business. But imagine if instead of getting a fine or getting sued or sending Abuela’s Taco Shop out of business, if instead you could report an accessibility issue at a restaurant or small business and the first people who showed up were licensed contractors there to help figure out the best solution. Imagine if instead of fines we gave grants so that the necessary changes could be made without barring opportunities to open new businesses to only the people with the most excess capital even more.

Someone who makes good tacos shouldn’t have to be an expert in accessible construction to make tacos. Meanwhile someone who wants to eat a taco should be able to without having to navigate a legal minefield and literal barriers. We can’t expect everyone to be experts in everything. We can’t expect everyone to be able to overcome everything.

Putting aside whether it’s fair to ask that someone not post videos unless they can also caption them, Google has more money than anyone. Google could pay people to caption videos, to correct the auto captions, to do the work. They have the resources where some working class folks just recording their cat or whatever might not.

Our punitive system of dealing with problems, telling people they can’t do unless they do more, they’ll face the consequences if they don’t do it right, it doesn’t actually work. It’s not even about whether it’s just or fair, though it’s not that either. But it also doesn’t work. Not unless levied on a massive scale legally against the most powerful. When done to the folks just getting by? It’s just a whirlpool of competing needs. A sham competition created through false scarcity created by those holding the resources that could make our lives better hostage.

What works is to help people make things accessible, to just pay for it, just provide it, just cover it.

I know I say this like it’s easy, when it’s not. It’s a logistical nightmare. But it’s still the right approach. Helping people, even people you think are being negligent, irresponsible, callous, etc. Helping them always helps more than punishing them.

[arlingtonpark]

Harrow the Ninth Act I Thoughts

This is all your fault, @ghostmartyr. If you hadn’t reblogged what seemed like heavy metal boy band fanart, I wouldn’t be in this hole. And for that, I hate you.

So.

When I first encountered the Locked Tomb online, I couldn’t tell if it was a story about edgy, neogothic, teenaged angst, or something better than that.

Turns out, it’s both.

But in a good way.

I love it. It’s great.

It’s unabashed, it’s thoughtful, it’s entertaining, it’s suspenseful.

Gideon the Ninth is finished, and after starting Harrow the Ninth, I decided to blog about it as I go.

I’ll be doing one post for every act of the book. I hope.

Let’s start with our new main character, Harrow. Newly reborn as a god and one of the only survivors of the last book.

So….

Right now, Harrow’s…

Um.

She’s uh…

-gestures at everything-

She’s fucked.

Fucked, broken, in the shit, started godhood on the wrong side of the bed.

200 babies were killed in the name of birthing her. Her parents died in front of her because of what she did. Death has always seemed to follow her, and she carries the burden of all that death.

Harrow despises her existence and wishes she were dead because of the circumstances of her birth, and yet for that very reason she is committed to living, because if she dies, all those sacrifices would be null.

She takes up the duties of governing the Ninth, she applies herself rigorously to mastering necromancy, and when the opportunity arises to become a lyctor, she jumps at it.

Harrow does this because it’s why all those people had to die. She was birthed to carry the Ninth’s legacy; its traditions and obligations and to some extent its very existence.

The twisted nature of the Ninth and her parents is inseparable from that legacy, so in a sense it was that legacy that led to her infanticidal birth, but regardless, this legacy is all she has. It’s all she was ever meant to have. And so she devoted herself to it.  

Now that she’s a lyctor and her house’s future will be guaranteed, but to do it, she had to sacrifice Gideon, whom she loved.

It’s more of the same shit from her perspective: more people dying for her sake. 200 babies die to grant her obscene necromantic talent, her girlfriend dies so she can gain even more power. Harrow doesn’t mean to step on innocent people to get what she wants…but that’s always how it’s turned out for her.

But to add insult to injury, even after all she’s sacrificed, she still didn’t get exactly what she wanted.

Her house will have a future, but she can never return to it. She’s essentially divorced from the only thing that gave her life meaning.

She can never return to her old life; to the extent she saw that as desirable, she can’t have that. Her old life is gone forever.

Something also went wrong with her ascension to godhood. She’s violently sick, mentally unstable, and the powers she should have are…half baked, for lack of a better word.

Nobody said you could get hungover from ascending to godhood. Harrow should sue.

It’s like going in to surgery to remove a tumor and coming out lobotomized.

Is she even immortal?

It all stings of pointlessness. All that effort for nothing.

Worse than that; She lost everything. Her home, her love, her pride and dignity.

Her only purpose in life now is to fight these hell beasts that she’s never heard of before. Happy days ahead, surely.

Oh, and one of the people she’ll have to work with is named Gideon.

Does God hate her?

And then there’s God.

This guy is sus as hell.

He’s gracious and humble. Perpetually calm and soft spoken. Empathetic and understanding. That’s what He’s like in person.

But He’s…maybe the villain? I guess.

God works in mysterious ways, and I have no damn clue what His are, but it’s probably ugly.

Yes, He’s a cordial Dude…but he’s still the God-emperor of a galactic undead empire.

Dude wears a crown made from the bones of dead babies FFS.

Not to be accusatory, but this guy definitely has skeletons in his closet.

-bu-dum-tish-

One of the things that really got my attention while reading this series is how the magic system in this world is depicted. Usually, in fantasy stories, the magic system is depicted as being morally neutral. Good guys use it, bad guys it, but the magic itself just is.

The Locked Tomb Trilogy isn’t like that.

Necromancy is bad. Perverse, even.

All the necromancers are frail and sickly. Practicing it is deleterious on the body. Doing too much too fast with it causes even more pronounced harm. As in, bleeding from your sweat glands.

Necromancy works by manipulating the life force of living beings and, primarily, the death force those being give off when they die.

The forces of nature that necromancy utilizes are (apparently) fundamental to the universe, akin to the laws of nature, but the use of those forces in this way are clearly a perversion.

It’s sort of like a bad tv show, like Sword Art Online. Sure, the things that went into making the show are natural parts of the world, but you just can’t put those things together like that.

John and his empire epitomize that.

All known beings in the universe are fundamentally thalergetic in nature. They are beings who radiate life energy. Except for the planets of the empire. Those planets and the star they orbit are thanergetic in nature.

They literally radiate death. And they are apparently one of a kind in that regard.

John is the first necromancer. John used his newly harnessed powers to “resurrect” multiple planets that had died.

Except he didn’t really resurrect anything, he turned them into an entirely new form of being using his entirely new form of science that uses some kind of mechanism that doesn’t occur naturally.

What I’m getting at here is that everything about John, his power, and his empire is artificial. Man-made. Perhaps even John-made.

We don’t actually know what happened during the Resurrection. What killed off the planets, how John attained his God-like powers, and what life John lived before it.

Oh, yeah, and every planet the empire conquers is systematically killed over generations to fuel their necromancer’s powers.

Every planet God touches literally dies.

One thing I appreciate about this series is how layered the story is.

The Locked Tomb series is a fun, irreverent romp. It’s about allowing the past to rest in peace. It’s also surprisingly political.

The metaphor is pretty blunt: it’s about capitalism. What’s more, the metaphor seems to be from a progressive or maybe even socialist perspective.

Ok, so hear me out on this. This is less fan theory than speculation about the author’s intentions.

The empire is a society built on a system that requires them to move from planet to planet, gradually killing those planets until they have to evacuate and move to a new one.

This process of gradual death takes generations to play out, so apparently they don’t even consider it to be an event that happens.

The heart of this system is necromancy, a perverse science that is ultimately derived from natural phenomena.

This system places the most powerful necromancer atop a literal throne and worships them as God.

God’s disciples are the lyctors, second only to Him in power. They attained that power by a very special process.

The lyctoral process is exploitative. It requires the necromancer to use their cavalier as a sacrifice and to turn their soul into a power source.

The lyctoral process is built around domination. The necromancer, in sacrificing their cavalier, subsumes the cavalier’s soul into their being to gain power.

The lyctoral process is dehumanizing. The cavalier is degraded from a person to a mere battery, but the necromancer is degraded in a way as well. The necromancer can never return to their house, or any of the other houses for that matter. Instead they must fight and die for God in his battle against the Revenant Beasts.

If you’re progressive, this may sound familiar to you.

Relationships of exploitation, domination, and dehumanization. A society built around perversions. That rewards people with talent in those perversions with idolatry. That cold-heartedly and shortsightedly extracts every drop of usable resources from a planet until it is dead, then moves on to the next one.

To a socialist, this may sound a lot like capitalism.

Saying that is already bold enough for me, so I won’t try to argue that it’s a one to one allegory. Necromancy equals the profit motive, lyctors represent the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (So I guess that means the non-lyctor necromancers are the petit bourgeoisie) and the empire is humanity.

You could make a case for it, but the hot takes in this post are already pretty spicy, so…

OMG Mercymorn. XD

Mercymorn is my favorite out of the new characters. She’s a bitch.

Snide, rude, assertive, bitchy, and standoffish. No, it’s not that I want her to step on me, I just can’t get enough of her interactions.

I guess in real life she wouldn’t be fun to be around, but as a character in a book, she steals every scene. Her arrogant and bitchy remarks always make me laugh.

My one wish heading in to Act II: that Mercymorn is in charge of Ianthe’s training.

Just so she can kick her ass for not measuring up to her standards.

[qqueenofhades]

So after the spate of high-profile celebrity suicides recently, and the short-lived discussion of mental health that surrounds them (kind of like the way the gun control debate appears for a week after a mass shooting and then vanishes), I have had some probably disconnected thoughts that I finally felt like putting down somewhere (and honestly, I had most of this post typed up and then tumblr deleted it, so... round two and Fuck You Very Much Tumblr). I briefly thought about putting it on facebook, but a) fuck facebook, I’m barely on it anymore, and b) everyone that I care about is either or also here. So I guess it’s once more using the big blue hellsite as a diary, because I was awake until 1am last night talking to myself about this, and writing is how I work things out.

As ever, please do not feel obliged to read the post or whatever else, especially if you’re uncomfortable with the themes/subjects discussed. Again, it’s essentially for my own benefit and trying to organize things I’ve wanted to say, as a long-term sufferer of depression and anxiety who is also having a really tough time now, and how I see that reflecting on what’s happening both with me and the wider world.

Anyway.

I feel like my main reaction is one of weariness that so much of the response is “get help if you’re struggling! Reach out! Call someone! Things will get better!” Which is... helpful in its way, and I genuinely believe that the people reblogging suicide hotline numbers and “don’t kill yourself” posts and so on really want to help. I am not one to point fingers at anyone who really wants to reach out and do something to make a difference. But that’s also it? We’re barely getting to the place of recognizing depression as a legitimate problem and not stigmatizing people who have it (hah), but to me, it sounds so much like “well, I know you have two broken legs and can’t stand upright, but you should still go walk to the clinic and ask them to help you.” Again. Important. But why is so much of it centered around the assumption that the depression sufferer has the responsibility to go on an individual basis and try therapy or meds or whatever, while the mental health services that even exist are being slashed? While some people seem perfectly happy to talk about how mental health is the problem, and not readily legal assault rifles and a culture of white male entitlement and grievance), and the assumption remains that we can just treat depression on an individual, ad hoc basis, rather than looking at it systematically.

We’ve had a ton of studies and research showing that depression rates are way up, that a lot of people identify as having anxiety and mental issues and are messed up out the wazoo (which frankly, I think most of us are), and then the attendant “everyone’s a snowflake, buck up and take it on the chin!” backlash, because frankly the world is horrible and society sucks. (This opinion is sometimes subject to revision, but still.) Honestly, is this any surprise? When we’re in collapsing late-stage capitalism that has basically utterly fucked everyone born after 1980, we live in this awareness that things are systematically and unbearably evil and oppressive but the vast majority of us have no ability to do anything about that, and birth rates and marriage rates are declining because people (completely understandably) don’t want to bring children into this nightmare of a world and are realizing that traditional ideals of marriage and sexual morality are BS.... I mean, are we surprised that people just don’t want to live in this world anymore? When I find myself worrying about the idea of taking on another student loan (another of the basic commodities that it has become expected that you’ll go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for) and then am like, “well, there’s a less than zero chance that Western civilization collapses in my lifetime/the next ten years, and I’m going to die in debt anyway, so...”, there’s a sense of surreality and almost despondency that we’re able to know more than ever how shitty things are, but again, can’t do anything about it. Again. We can’t fix depression by telling people individually to go try therapy or whatever else. It doesn’t get at the reasons that so many of us just can’t stand the world anymore.

I feel like I’ve settled well on my belief that people, even if often beholden to centuries-old bullshit and tribalism and prejudice, are individually good, often amazingly and soul-sustainingly so (I’m not joking when I say that I would probably be dead by now if not for the kindness of strangers and friends, including many of you who I’ve met here), but society and the overall structure is pretty much rotten. We find ways to manage, to exist, to ameliorate, to distract, and I am honestly delighted for the people who can live more or less happy existences despite everything, have found a way to do that. Again, this isn’t a “don’t go to therapy!!” sort of post, because yes, if you’re depressed, you have to decide whether and how you want to get better. But sometimes you just can’t fucking do that. You just exist this way and you know how it is and it becomes sort of familiar and accounted for. 

I’m lucky to be a mostly high-functioning sufferer, who has lived with long-term and chronic depression and anxiety since at least the age of 18 (and probably, through most of my childhood as well), which has left me latently suicidal, physically fucked up, mentally exhausted, and emotionally isolated for my entire adult life. But I’ve also managed to hold jobs and complete several advanced degrees and get out of bed and put on makeup and keep my commitments and so on and otherwise outwardly resemble a normal person. So I then read posts about people who can’t get out of bed or even brush their teeth, and I start wondering if I “really” have depression or it’s just an excuse or I’m a weak person or just broken somehow else. Which is 0% helpful and is the bad brain talking, as I recognize. Looking at me from the outside, it feels like you wouldn’t guess, which also seems to be a theme with the celebrities who died. They always seemed happy and well put together and confident, until they didn’t. I turn 30 this August, and feel about 800.

And yet. I have made the choice to live, and I have continued to make the choice, and I have learned that I have a lot of strength I didn’t know I did, and I am proud of that. But I also read a post by someone I otherwise admire and whose work I really like, about how you can’t ever have the life you want until you take suicide off the table as an option, as if you can just choose once to live and not think about it again. And I just am like... how? I’ve made it before and I’ll have to do it again, but god, I wish with my entire heart that I could just make it once and not look back. I wish I could ever be confident that I could say without qualification that I want to live more than I want to die. Because well, I DON’T want to die, not really. I find things that make me happy and that give me small joys and distract me and which I enjoy. I still have a lot of things I want to do (even while feeling I won’t get the chance) and feel like it would be stupid to die because my brain doesn’t work. So I’m still here. I’ve never made a serious attempt to kill myself, and I obviously hope that doesn’t change. But it remains in the back of my head, the idea that I just wish I could switch off for five years and come back and find that things have somehow worked out. Which obviously is not the way it works, and you don’t get to temporarily go away. But this world is so hard and so tiring to live in, and sometimes it gets to me.

As for the getting help part -- I’ve been trying to do that myself recently. Go to counselling services and the university support centre and whatever else, even though it causes me anxiety to the point of physically messing me up. It feels like being drunk or hungover or just off balance and unable to see or breathe normally. I convulse in bed at night and wake up just as tired when I went to sleep and just don’t feel like I run correctly. And this is from a relatively high-functioning person who isn’t trying to stop herself (at least currently) from suicide, but just enough to keep her going. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a person depressed to the point of being unable to get out of bed, told to call someone or reach out or whatever else. That’s practically inhumane. We live, for better or worse, in a Western “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” culture that puts the onus on the individual to fix their own problems. When honestly, the collective society that exists right now is a toxic, oppressive, and impossible one that keeps chewing up people from every walk of life and which nobody with the actual ability to do anything about it seems to want to change. Encouraging individuals with depression to seek help is nice, sure. But until something fundamentally and permanently changes in society and how we view our obligations to each other and what we are willing to do to help and to change this culture that tells you you’re responsible for your own illness, people are going to keep dying from depression in droves, and everyone else is just going to figure we’re weak. Or there will be a short-lived mental health awareness campaign, and nice things will be said, and then it will be back to business as usual.  Because man, are we good at burying our heads in the sand for any number of things.

The choice to live doesn’t usually have the luxury of being made once and then never revisited. You have to do it yearly, monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily. And frankly, I don’t blame anyone who feels that the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t really add up to staying here anymore. I’m here certainly in part because of you here on tumblr, who have indirectly (and sometimes directly) saved my life. You have talked with me on text or email or in person for years, have read my fics and thought of things you wanted to tell me and sent me nice messages and otherwise made me feel less invisible. Your kindness has been often what has sustained me, and made me decide that I’d rather be here than anywhere else, and given me what little faith in humanity I have left. And one of the reasons I write all the time (books/fics/asks/metas/papers/theses/projects...etc) is because I literally cannot stand to live in my own head if I don’t. I do love creating things and am happy that people enjoy what I post here, and it’s a major source of pleasure and distraction for me. But I also do it because I will literally cease to function (in what limited capacity I have) if I don’t. I have to do it in order to live with myself and this monster at all, and that is also tiring. 

Overall, we’re all fucked-up people with a very dark sense of humor, whose compassion and conscience is about all we have going for us, and we just have to try to cling together and do for each other what we can. And god, I’m grateful for it. I have a lot of financial terror right now in addition to everything else, and am looking into the aforementioned student loan for short-term stabilizing (limited work rights are a Bitch), and I basically paid my rent last month because of you guys. So yeah, you’ve made the difference for a stranger on the internet being homeless or not, and I have no idea why, but please know that it means more to me than I can ever say, and I hope to give back what I can.

(I also still have a Kofi account, while I’m trying to get things under control here, so... again, entirely up to you.)

I’m not sure how I will make it to December and (supposedly, ha) my PhD graduation, let alone after that. I will probably have to choose to live again several more times between now and then, and then again after that. I hope I can continue to do that. And I hope I can talk to you, both if you need someone to listen and whatever I can do for you by that, and if I do the same.

If you’ve read all the way to the bottom, mazel tov.