#there was this horrible was of course there would be disabled veterans from it

[beastsovrevelation]

Why didn't these clowns have Shax simply call Aziraphale fat. -_-

[mimzy-writing-online]

Hey!! I was wondering if you had any advice for a character concept I've been playing with? :) long story short, my character wasn't born blind, but throughout the story she progressively becomes blind from cataracts- cortical vision impairment to be exact. Is this inherently a bad concept? I really don't want to misrepresent this, and the last thing I want is to make people mad about it. Is there a way I should go about this? Thanks!!

Later message from same Anon: Hey! Just following up on my ask of writing a blind character in the Victorian era- sorry if I missed it

Note: in a message between the first and third, anon added that this story takes place in the Victorian era.

You certainly did not miss it, I’ve just been lazy (struggling) with blog maintenance and have been procrastinating answering several asks.  Historical fiction is out of my area of expertise, so this required more research than general advice.

Also, my first and second attempts at an answer were eaten away by computer/tumblr difficulties, so I had to rewrite a lot.

I think it is a fantastic idea to have your character go blind slowly over time. It is also ambitious, so it is something you need to be careful with, but it’s totally doable.

So the era throws me a little because I’ve never had much practice with historical fiction and history wasn’t a fave subject of mine. Most of my research into blind history has been after World War I, because the sudden surge of blinded veterans changed the course of history for the blind community. This and technology overall led to those huge changes.

So I did a little reading up on the recent evolutions of blindness and the world’s general understanding of it in the 1800s.

Conclusion: society was shit with disability, but I already knew that. There were some remarkable inventions and innovations for blindness in this century, which I will get to later.

 So this post will be: 1. The more personal aspects of going blind over time (instead of all at once) such as acceptance vs denial, life changes, and internalized ableism. 2. Speculating on society’s perception of the blind. 3. Innovations for the blind in that era and what comes after.

 So, part one. The Emotional…

As someone who has slowly lost vision over the course of years and has no idea how far this will progress, I can tell you that it’s an agonizing process of realization, denial, understanding, acceptance, adaption.

Realizing you’re going blind comes in small pieces that eventually add up to become a puzzle. And for this reason, adaption follows a similar pattern.

You identify a problem, feel conflicted about this change, wonder if you should ignore or investigate, and regardless of which path you take, you find a new way to adapt.

I’m going to use an example of my process through this, so you can see the actual thought patterns and how they circle between “this isn’t a problem” – “wait this is a problem” – “no I’m fine!” – “this is a problem.” – “I’m fine, what am I complaining for” – “I made this change and now my life is 100x easier??? Who knew? Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Example from my life: Light is bright. That hurts but I’m fine. I get sunglasses. The pain with bright light is getting worse. Okay, that’s concerning, maybe I should talk to a doctor. Doctor says I’m fine but now I’m thinking I’m not okay. Why are my eyes doing this? Why do I hurt? Oh, and now bright lights at night are becoming a problem, and I get more headaches associated with light. I could wear sunglasses at night and indoors, but society has given me a negative and judgemental opinion of that, so I don’t want to do it. Best friend pushes me to give up on that negative view for the sake of my health. Finally I listen and life feels much better, but I’m still a little uncomfortable with this change. I feel very blind with my sunglasses, but that’s the only way to not feel pain. And now I feel blind when I’m not wearing any light protection, but I’m in pain this way. What’s wrong with me?

And this is just my internal argument with sunglasses and light sensitivity, from age 17-22. On the other side is my struggle with “do I need a cane” from age 21-22, which goes like this-

It’s August and I’m walking through a semi-familiar but gigantic and ridiculously crowded park with a group of friends. It’s bright out and I need to wear my sunglasses. And now I’m realizing there is a dilemma. I can’t see. My sunglasses are too dark to see. But going without is painful and just as bad vision wise. BUT I CAN’T SEE! I’m scared, I’m going to run into someone or something, I’ll get lost or separated from my friends and not be able to find them. I can’t see curbs or pillars or people and the only thing keeping me safe is holding onto K, who knows my current vision situation when no one else does

And I think to myself- this day would be so much easier if I had a cane.

But I haven’t needed one before, and I don’t ‘normally’ need one. Just every time I go outside on a sunny day. I don’t need it all the time, so I can’t have one, I’m fine.

But these things keep happening, where I’m outside and terrified but I think I’m still “sighted” and my only problem is some light sensitivity and not-super-great sunglasses. My glasses let me see 20/20 (or they did, which they did not a year later) so I definitely don’t need a cane at all.

Young past self, you were so wrong. You needed that.

Eventually I had a breaking point when one year later I’m seeing 20/50 with best correction (so, by legal definitions I’m not even visually impaired yet) but I’m terrified of leaving my house and can’t travel alone and am a literal danger to myself because I can’t see and can’t tell people I can’t see because of social anxiety and internalized ableism-

And the breaking point was that I finally got seriously hurt because I was in a situation where I couldn’t see and wasn’t brave enough to ask my current company to be a sighted guide. That’s the day I ordered a cane, and when it came two weeks ago, I finally remembered what it’s like to not be so terrified for my life every time I left my home.

Your character will over time find problems with her daily life that she didn’t have before, and she’ll deal with each one individually, but with all of them will usually be a repeating thought pattern that is unique to her. It depends on her internalized ableism and society’s ableism (and that era is full of it) and accommodations available to them at the time (also not great).

She’ll solve each problem at a different point that may coincide with other problems and yet still seem like entirely separate problems to them. Like how I wouldn’t relate my need for sunglasses and my need for a cane at the same time because they felt like separate battles to me with their own timelines and similar but still different thought processes.

You will have to decide on a case by case basis what accommodations or accessibility she can have at that time.

 Society’s view on blindness:

It’s shit.

It’s not great now, in the world of information available at your fingertips. It’s desperately worse in history.

 (TW: abuse of disabled people mentioned -thoroughly- in the next two paragraphs)

Everyone with a disability was treated like shit. Sensory disabilities (Deaf or Blind or Deafblind people) and mental illness were treated the worst. There is historical religious persecution against them, saying that they were made ill by the devil or a vengeful God. Which lead to abuse. They were seen as helpless or unproductive, defective, and so were treated as burdens upon their family and society. Because of this, abuse from parents and family members was horribly common for disabled people. Disabled people were often left in asylums by their family members because they were seen as a burden, where there was usually still more abuse to come.

There are still children with disabilities who are abused by their parents, families, care givers, or any facility they’ve been placed in. The cases of abuse are less, but by no means over.

 Ableism in general is just rampant and it’s only cured through the distribution of information. Most people (today) have never met a blind person in real life, had a conversation with one. Through the internet they can find information, but in pre-internet and media eras I can’t imagine how much ignorance runs about.

Most people think blindness is something that only happens with old age, birth defects, or tragic accidents. Or that blindness is obvious in a person. Not the case, as we both know, but certainly a cause for many misunderstandings.

 This section is where the development of technology and understanding of blind people begins, but there’s still some ugly history involving abuse of the disabled to come.

Technology and History

 (TW: abuse towards historical disabled people in next paragraph)

In 1785 the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, the world’s very first school for the blind was established in Paris, France. It was opened internationally to children who society had previously deemed unteachable. Valentin Haüy witnessed acts of bullying and cruelty done to blind hospice patients and it inspired him to attempt teaching a blind beggar. He taught the boy to read through raised letters (because Braille was not yet invented). The school he founded could better be described as a trade school, because its primary purpose was to teach work skills like letter press and weaving (going back to Valentin’s childhood, whose family worked as weavers)

Due to criminal activity (he was labeled as a terrorist related to the French Revolution and was a member of the Panthéon Club) he was forced to leave the school in 1802. He later moved to Russia (1806) and began a new school upon the request of Alexander I of Russia.

(TW: child abuse mention in next paragraph)

After his leave, the school had a change in leadership and location, and subsequently quality. Sébastien Guillié became the new director and was later forced to leave because of the inhumane conditions of the facility and welfare of the children. Those children lived in a French Revolution prison that was refurbished as an asylum/school for their education. It was cold and dirty. They were kept in the dark, only allowed to bathe once a month, and poorly fed. This went on until 1821 when he was forced to leave.

Louis Braille (the inventor of Braille) was a student of the school until Guillié’s reign of terror.

The school was later moved to Boulevard des Invalides, and it remains there today. Information with this school is hard for me to access. It doesn’t have the prettiest history, so I can only speculate how much was left out of the books to save the school, and what information I could access is in French.

However, back to Braille.

Braille was invented by Frenchman Louis Braille in 1824. Before his invention, he was taught to read through raised lettering, and he concluded that raised lettering was impractical because-

1.       It is difficult to read, the letters had to be printed in huge font to be fully felt out and printed on thick paper.

2.       Thick paper means higher quality, more expensive. Larger font means more paper is needed for a single text.

3.       This made it inaccessible due to expense and the sheer volume of a text.

4.       If today’s Braille books are hard to access and giant compared to traditional books, I can’t imagine how inaccessible those raised letter books really were

 Five years later The Perkins School for the Blind was founded in America, making education accessible to blind and deafblind children, and this time it focused on reading and mathematics, more education than trade school.

Though it would not have been possible for your character to attend the school herself, it could be possible that she became acquainted with a teacher or former student of either school, who might have passed on some O&M skills to her or some not so pleasant tales.

Side note: the Perkins Brailler (a typewriter machine for Braille) was developed by a wood working teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind ��� in 1951, so not applicable to your character’s time period, but I didn’t know this, so I must info-dump

 This is before the eugenics movement of 20th century America, when the belief that people with “poor breeding” should be prevented from breeding. The eugenics movement targeted not only the disabled, but lower class and people of color.

  The white cane as an accessibility tool was not “discovered” until the 1930’s by Philip Strong, who painted his walking stick white to make himself more visible. This piece of history is a little flimsy in my opinion. Techniques are discovered and lost and rediscovered all the time. You can’t prove he was the first person to “wave a stick” in front of him to find obstacles.

But he is credited for making the white cane something that could be a standard identifier to tell people (moving obstacles) “hey, I’m blind, don’t hit me with your loud vehicle” and made a movement of other people getting white canes to identify themselves.

I very much thank him for it, seeing as I’m so sighted-passing sometimes. If white canes weren’t standard everyone-must-know-what-this-means sort of thing, I think people would just watch me “wave a stick” around and think I’d lost my mind.

(TW: suicide of disabled character mention in next paragraph)

So when you see something like in Downton Abby (season 2) when Thomas and Sybil are trying to teach a blinded soldier how to use a cane to navigate… it could be possible, something that actually occurred to some people then. Although, now that I think about it, that character killed himself by the end of the episode and that still upsets me.

Downton Abby got the period-typical ableism right, I will give them that. Both the internalized ableism as well as how strangers treat you, they got that right. What they did to their disabled characters still bothers me (i.e. death and cure subplots)

(TW has been lifted, you made it past.)

But with World War 1, there was a huge number of blinded veterans entering the world and that did make way for big changes in the world of blindness-

Within a few decades guide dogs were being trained, white canes were becoming a thing, Schools for the Blind were thinking, “hey, maybe we should teach adults these skills too!” and life continued on until it eventually reached out modern world. Which, not applicable to your era, but I think it’s important to know what wasn’t available or common knowledge for your character.

If anyone has other information about historical fiction, the Victorian era, and historical ableism and disability, please feel free to reblog with your input and I’ll reblog it.

As always, this post can be found on my blog through the tags: reference, blind character, historical fiction

[jawnloxk]

“Heroic Origins” Pt. 1 Sherlock Miraculous AU

𝓢𝓾𝓶𝓶𝓪𝓻𝔂: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have been flatmates and best friends for over a year, when they are given a secret identity no one can find out about - not even them.

𝓟𝓪𝓲𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼: Johnlock (John x Sherlock), Mystrade (Mycroft x Greg), Sherlolly (Sherlock x Molly)

𝓦𝓪𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼: Explicit language, mentions of home abuse

𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓹𝓽𝓮𝓻: Chapter 1, "Heroic Origins" Part 1

𝓦𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓼 𝓒𝓸𝓾𝓷���: 2493 words

********************************************

In the year of 2011 Dr John H. Watson had been evacuated from the battlefield in Afghanistan due to a dangerous injury. The fallen soldier had been transported over to London's National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, where he had stayed for a month, under the watchful eye of the best physical therapists. He had learned to walk, talk and eat again but he still lacked sleep. Nightmares had been haunting him every night, keeping him up or waking him up in cold sweat if he had managed to close his eyes for a moment.

In May of 2011 the soldier was transported yet again into a small flat in the suburbs. It wasn't much, just a small bedroom with a window and a desk, even smaller bathroom and an even smaller kitchen place. He didn't need much more than that, but he knew he would have to find himself an actual place to live soon as this wasn't a long-term solution.

You can only imagine his joy when after a nice little meet-up with an old friend, he heard the words "I know somebody who's looking for a flatmate". John wasn't an impulsive person, he was actually very hesitant when it came to meeting new people. But for this man... He was ready to risk it all.

Sherlock Holmes was the sort of man people despised. There were many reasons why but John found three sentimental truths that seemed to be the most important ones. First of all, his intellectual skills were quite mind-blowing. The man was born with an extraordinary talent to read people's whole life story just by looking at them. Second of all, he was painfully honest - which often made him seem like an utter cock. He had no boundaries and couldn't tell polite from cruel. Of course, even if he could, he still wouldn't make much use of it, or so everyone thought. And third of all, Sherlock had an intimidating aura. He was horribly attractive and knew exactly how to take advantage of that. And so he did. John wasn't sure if he was more jealous of his looks or his amazing flirting skills...

Either way, it only took them one evening to get to know each other enough for John to decide he wanted to move in with this man. He provided him with enough adrenaline and dopamine to forget about Afghanistan, about his leg, about his shoulder. Nothing else mattered.

********************************************

"Do you need anything from the store? I'm going shopping!" John called out, rushing out of the kitchen. He had checked every cupboard earlier, making sure to note everything that he would have to provide them with.

"Some biscuits, maybe? And milk" Sherlock responded with a mutter, not looking up from his laptop. To be clear - not quite his laptop. John's. Dr Watson couldn't care less, though.

"Sure. I'll be back soon. Don't start a war?" he joked, grabbing his coat. Sherlock shot him a glare, which softened as soon as he spotted the faintest smile on John's lips. He nodded, looking back down at whatever the hell he was doing, as the shorter man rolled his eyes with a chuckle, jogging down the stairs.

As he walked down the street he still wore a smile on his face. Passing all those little stores on Baker Street, kids running around the square, heading for the park - it all made his heart happy. A few months earlier he didn't believe that he would ever feel that again. Yet there it was..

He frowned as he heard shouting of a different nature - aggressive, offensive. Metal clicking - gun. Off safety.

John's instincts screamed 'check it'. No sane person would go unarmed anywhere near an attacker with a gun, but Dr Watson was nowhere near sane.

The shouting seemed to come from a darkened backstreet. John moved closer to the wall, peeking from around the corner. The attacker was a tall man with black hair. He was standing over another man, curled up on the floor, his clothes torn and dirty. Probably a homeless person. The aggressor held a gun up, pointing it at the other. Only small begs and cries were audible from the mess of a man laying on the concrete. Watson pulled out his phone and texted Detective Inspector Lestrade the name of the street.

"Hey, you! Stop it, now!" he called out, feeling his heart beat faster with anger and confidence. He stepped closer and soon regretted it - the man was so much taller than him. It didn't make him back off, though.

"Who are you?" the man looked up, raising an eyebrow. Must have been a funny view to him, see such a small, innocent looking man standing in front of him.

"I'm Captain John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, three years in Afghanistan, a veteran of Kandahar, Helmand, and Bart's bloody Hospital and I suggest you drop this weapon and leave at once" he answered quickly, his face staying stone cold and emotionless.

The man raised his gun and pointed it at John. Dr Watson didn't flinch. He took another step forward, then another and one more - until he was standing just a few feet away from the other, the gun pressed to his forehead.

"Pull the trigger and there is no going back. The police will be here in less than a minute. And if they find me dead... Well, you know what happens, don't you?" he said calmly, tilting his head a bit. The other gulped quietly but didn't move.

One swift move of John's left elbow and the man's gun was on the ground. And with another one of those moves - so was the attacker himself.

"Watson! Watson? Are you okay?"

John turned around just to see Detective Lestrade running down the path, sirens in the distance slowly becoming louder and louder. 

********************************************

"Are you okay, sir?"

Dr Watson approached a taller man, wrapped up in an orange blanket, sitting on the ground with his head in his lap. He was clearly in shock. John couldn't help but pity him.

The man raised his head. His bloodshot eyes glistened with thankfulness. "Oh, good man you are. Thank you, oh, thank you" he choked out, shaking his head, like if he couldn't express his feelings enough.

"You're welcome. You are no longer in danger, please, try to calm down" John said, kneeling and putting a hand on the man's shoulder. "You will be alright, I guarantee you".

"Why did you help me, good sir? I'm just a crappy junkie, nobody of any importance-" he cried out, before he was silenced by John's scoff.

"No, of course not. Everybody's important. Everybody matters. I believe all of us deserve help, we're all just... People" he smiled softly, his words clearly inspiring the other man. He stared at the soldier for a moment, before blinking a few times and reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a small, black box with red symbols on the lid and looked up at the other again.

"Please, take this as a form of... Gratitude. For all you've done for me today and all you will do for other people in the future" he said, his voice raspy but deeper than before.

John furrowed his brows. "I didn't do it for any kind of-"

"I know. And that's exactly why I want you to have it" he said, a smile lighting up his pale face.

John reached for the box and examined it, before reaching to open it. However, the bloke stopped him. "Open it when you're at home, alone. Please" he instructed quietly. John frowned.

John frowned. Taking a present from ‘a junkie’, which he is obligated to open in private... Sounded suspicious. Sounded risky. Sounded dangerous. He nodded slowly.

"Of course. Thank you."

"No, young man. Thank you"

********************************************

How much time? Fourteen minutes? Getting closer to fifteen. It usually took John nineteen minutes to do his shopping and get back home. Sherlock counted. Every time.

He would always stay at the flat, taking in his moments of silence, using them fully and completely, making sure they weren't wasted. Nineteen minutes of brain-clearing, slowing down and catching up with his furious thought process.

Shouting from outside. Cars screeching. A woman in her early twenties crying. Noise. "Shut up!" he called out, his eyes rolling back as he let out a loud groan of pure discomfort and annoyance.

"Sherlock, sweetheart, I never said anything- Oh! Oh God, look!" Poor Mrs. Hudson's face went pale as she peeked her head through the doorway. Her eyes went wide. Something scary, traumatic, shocking - outside the window. The detective sighed deeply and turned his head.

The sight made him jump up to his feet and grab his coat. He pulled it on, reaching for John's gun from the drawer, before leaving the flat quickly, Mrs. Hudson's cries left behind in the sitting room.

Outside the building was standing a crowd of gapers. Some had their phones out, recording, some were screaming, some were just standing there and doing nothing - gapers.

Baker Street 220, second floor, an opened window. A woman hanging from it. Crying. Her hair a mess. Her shirt loose from... Pulling? Fighting? Looking up at something inside the flat. Aggressor? Home abuse victim then. The girl - not too athletic. Won't hold on too long.

"Did anyone call the police!?" somebody yelled.

"They won't arrive on time, the approximate time for the police's arrival is seven minutes and nineteen seconds" said Sherlock, rather loudly, as he made his way through the crowd "Call the ambulance instead, she might need one".

He began analysing his way up to the woman. Through the flat? Impossible. Aggressor must have still been inside. He couldn't risk taking too much time in the flat, neutralizing the suspect. The possibility of the woman not making it was too high. He looked away. The building was tall, many balconies and windows. He could easily climb up, get the woman down the same way, then go deal with the abuser. He settled on that option.

He pulled his coat off, deciding that it would only make the hike much harder. He threw it over at the closest gawker, before jumping up and gripping one of the barriers. He pulled himself up and jumped down onto the balcony. The woman's cries were now even louder, making Sherlock's heart beat faster with adrenaline. He had to really focus on not smiling. Smiling in a situation like that was definitely not a good idea after all. 

Another swift jump with a pull-up and he was already on the second floor. He could see the woman clearly, feel her fear, hear every single cry coming out of her mouth. The visible and audible panic that needed to be calmed down - or else she would not make it. 

"Hey, don't worry, I'm here now" he said, turning her attention to him. Her eyes widened - panic, but relief. Pupils dilated. Sherlock gave her a warm, soothing smile. "What's your name?"

"Oh God, please help me, please-" she cried out, kicking her legs in the air. She screeched as her hand slipped away, then grabbed onto the window yet again.

"I will, I need you to tell me your name first" he said slowly, reaching out his hand, like if he wanted to say 'stop'.

"Anthea- Please, help me!".

"Okay, Anthea. I need you to stop crying. Calm down, I want you to concentrate all of your strength in your arms. I'm gonna ask you to move closer to me so I can get you down" he instructed her, staring at her with a caring but concerned look in his eyes.

She looked down and squealed, "No, I can't-". 

"Yes, you can, Anthea! I need you to believe me. You can!" he said quickly. "Move closer to me, just a bit. I will help you". 

Anthea gulped, looking up again. She managed to move her fragile hand closer to the right edge of the window. She held onto it tightly, series of small squeals escaping her swollen lips. "Shit- Oh, oh God..."

"Good, come on... Just a little bit closer, you can do it. Look at you, look at how brave you are" Sherlock said softly, giving her another friendly smile. She glanced at him and nodded weakly, trying to move even closer. "Just another inch, come on, Anthea. Just another inch...".

And there it was. The girl managed to pull herself up and to the right again. It was Sherlock's turn to react. He quickly jumped over the barrier, one of his legs staying on the balcony, as he reached out both of his hands. If he grabbed her too slow, they would both fall, his leg wouldn't be able to block such weight. If he did it fast enough, they would both get back onto the balcony. He took a deep breath and counted to three. He wrapped his arms around the girl's waist and gripped her, before pulling back onto the balcony. With a groan from him and a shriek from her, they landed safely on the wooden tiles - Sherlock on his back, Anthea curled up on top of him. Both of them stayed like that, panting.

“It’s all right now... I’ve got you...”.

After less than a minute they both heard sirens - so somebody really called the police...

********************************************

"Anthea Brown. Twenty three. Lives here with her boyfriend. Now, obviously, I don't think that will be the case anymore" Sally Donovan handed the notepad over to Sherlock, eying him carefully. She wasn't too fond of working with him. Clearly.

"Right. Great" he nodded, looking over at the woman, wondering if he should tell Sergeant that he had already known all of that... "Arrest the man, let her stay here - would make sense, don't you think?"

"I know what to do, freak. This is not my first case like this" she scoffed, turning on her heel and walking back to the police car. To write down a report? Most likely.

Sherlock sighed and soon turned around. The crowd was still there, most of them were now focused on him instead of the girl herself. He quickly spotted the man holding his coat and headed over to get it back.

"Congratulations, that was so... Heroic" said the bloke, his eyes glistening with admiration.

"I did what had to be done" Sherlock answered absent-mindedly and grabbed his coat, hanging it over his shoulder as he made his way back to his flat.

As he walked inside, he furrowed his brows. The coffee table, where previously was only his own cup of tea and John's laptop, was now empty - except for a small black box with red, ancient symbols on the lid and a card glued to the side:

'Open when alone and ready. -Master Fu'

[malexfan10]

Malex thoughts

I was watching some old episodes of Dawson's Creek and it made me want to get some thoughts out. I watched a lot of TV shows growing up. For me, the couples I liked were either ones I casually rooted for or on the rare occasion, a couple took me by such surprise that I became extremely emotionally invested. Malex is the latter.

I've been a fan of Captain Swan (OUAT), Stydia (Teen Wolf), Kurt & Blaine (Glee), Buffy & Angel and lots more. The rare pairings I've been completely lost on, I can name on one hand. Pacey & Joey (my first OTP), Chandler & Monica and Malex. I'd say Destiel on Supernatural too but with them, everything is subtext. I don't think the writers will have the guts to go there, not even with the show ending.

With PJ, I love how they started as antagonists, became really great friends, and then fell in love. For me, PJ vs DJ was incomparable. DJ brought out the worst in each other (my opinion) while PJ showed each other what love was supposed to be. The only thing I hated about DC was the constant back & forth between the two pairings. It lasted until the final moment when you realized PJ was endgame (one of my fears for Malex). I hated that but I was a kid so it didn't bother me as much as it would now.

I loved Chandler & Monica because they started out as friends who fell in love, got married and had all the moments in between before adopting a set of twins. I loved their story because it showed their entire journey. True, the show was a comedy but their story didn't end in season 5 when they started dating. Their story just began.

It's hard understanding writers who feel that only the journey matters. Of course it does. The journey is important. It's what makes you root for a couple but the destination and what happens after is important too. It makes you continue rooting for them, seeing all that angst and pain amounting to something substantial in the end.

So as much as I loved PJ, the fact that they kept us guessing until the last 5 minutes before we realized who she chose was too much. The long, drawn out, multi-season, will they/won't they storytelling style is one I'll never be a fan of.

Which leads me to Malex.

They were two broken boys, both brought up under horrible circumstances, who found the missing piece of themselves in each other. When Alex gave Michael a warm and safe place to stay, it was probably the first act of true kindness Michael had ever experienced and it was made by a boy whose pain and suffering mirrored his own. How incredibly heartbreaking but beautiful is that? That initial bond, that "cosmic" connection stood the test of time. Separated for 10 years and it felt like no time had passed at all.

That first moment in the pilot episode outside his Airstream, you could feel the tension. I remember reading interpretations of that scene. People thought Malex were cold and angry with one another "probably over a girl". Are you kidding me? That tension could only be romantic. But that first kiss at the reunion was when I hopped on the Malex Forever train. One stop only. Endgame.

They set them up so amazingly in the first three episodes. The angst was there but you could also feel the deep love between them. They weren't shown as two guys who had a fling back in high school and then crossed paths again 10 years later, said what the hell and hooked up again. No, they were shown as soulmates. Their level of connection even scared and confused them but they both knew it existed. Their love was pure and true and rare.

With all their history and with so many odds already stacked against them, the writers deciding to throw in a triangle just because they could and doing it in such a rushed and messy way really made me scratch my head.

Carina said she loved the triangle on DC. I honestly think she was the only one. That show was incredibly divided, DJ vs PJ. But as much as I hated the constant back and forth, I'll give the DC writers some credit. Joey's feelings for both were fully touched on. I saw her romantic feelings for Pacey more profound and her feelings for Dawson as true friendship (just my opinion), but both sides were shown in depth.

The problem with Roswell? Where did those feelings come from between M&M? They shared a moment when Maria cried and I took that as the start of a wonderful friendship. I was obviously wrong. They hooked up in the desert. OK I hated it but they were two single people and Maria didn't know about Alex so I accepted. All of a sudden, the feelings were real and Maria was conflicted because of how strong her feelings were. Michael chose to be with Maria because he needed something fresh and new and according to the wonderful Vlamis, someone he also had strong feelings for (still hate that last interview LOL).

I understand where Michael was coming from a little better, as much as I hate it and hate how he went about it by leaving Alex just waiting. He'd been through so much trauma and Max and Isobel kept telling him to stop looking to the past (which, really Max? If someone told you that about Liz, would you listen?? But he died so he gets a pass). But as far as Maria's feelings are concerned, I feel like I missed something.

Between episodes 9 and 10, did the M&M feelings bloom overnight from flirty banter to crush to "OMG this is love"? Was their moment in the desert that mind-blowing that the weirdness of episode 11 happened? I don't get it.

The one thing going against M&M is that Malex is overwhelmingly loved and has been embraced by fans and critics alike.

One critic said it best when they reviewed the finale (Vulture).

"I was intrigued by the possibility of Michael/Maria at first, but the love triangle has been so rushed — with so little time spent on Maria’s developing feelings for Michael — that it’s ended up just making her look terrible. We know from Maria’s conversation with Liz that she hasn’t even spoken to Alex about the situation because she feels too guilty, and so having her accept Michael with open arms is such an odd note. Sure, she doesn’t know Alex is waiting for Michael right at the same moment, but she does know that he’s been in love with Michael for a decade."

And therein lies the problem. A lifelong friendship ruined over a guy (unless Carina makes Alex give his blessing next season which would really make me scream) to push forward a pairing that had little development and makes Maria look bad. One side of the triangle is Michael's soulmate and the other side is the friend with sudden feelings. Not the best character development which is sad because we know how awesome Maria can be and as mad as I am with her, her character that I enjoyed until episode 10 and the actress deserve better. But instead of being original, the writers chose the path always taken. They chose to use her as the odd end of a triangle where, unless they want everyone to hate the show, she will likely be the one forced out so Malex can eventually reunite and for what? Drama?

Season 1 started out really strong and it still had a lot of strong moments in the latter episodes (end scene of episode 9 between Malex, Liz & Jenna being kickass in episode 11, all of episode 12 - my fave of the season, Kyle's confrontation with Jesse etc).

But honestly, I feel like the inclusion of this triangle (amongst other reveals like Noah as the 4th alien) somewhat brought the story down. The writing for M&M felt OOC and was messily done.

Only in recent years have LGBT pairings started becoming more mainstream, given better development and importance in the overall story. With Malex, they have the potential of making Michael and Alex one of the greatest love stories on TV. As much as I love the show, I'm not saying Roswell is on the same level as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos etc. But from all the pairings on the show, Malex is the most profound and has the potential to go down as one of the best on TV. To overcome everything they've been through and still choose each other and their love would be the ultimate happy ending because unlike most male/female pairings that go through mostly regular angst, being two males in a small town, Malex have a whole other level of obstacles to face. That doesn't even include their personal history, the fact that Michael is an alien or that Alex's father is the cause of so much pain between them. Or the fact that Alex is a disabled war veteran. I mean, there is so much amazing points to their story. They are the OTP of OTPs.

But so far, it feels like the triangle is the only major roadblock the writers want to concentrate on and that's the biggest mistake of all.

Season 2 hasn't aired yet. We don't know how little (🤞) or how long (😢) M&M will last. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes and hope that Twitter Carina is not the same as Season 2 showrunner Carina.

But for me, Malex will always be each other's endgame. That's what I saw in the first 3 episodes. That's what I saw in the flashbacks. That's what I saw in Caulfield. Try and convince me differently, show. You'll fail.

❤

[nozarashi86]

I'm tired of complete strangers that bully, troll, stalk me accusing me of being a fake veteran. This is my VA card, which shows directly "service connected" as a disabled veteran. . . . . I've redacted the sensitive information such as my ID number, Plan Number and the bar code to protect my Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that could lead to stalkers or identity theft. This is also why I don't use my middle name, for anything, ever, and have used the name Wolf since I left the Army as a means of reinventing myself... . . . . I have physical injuries sustained from training exercises in the Airborne Infantry, and I have "Other Specified Traumatic Stress Disorder" (OSTSD) because I was physically and psychologically abused when in my unit by a small, select number of individuals, and one in particular, over the course of 6 months, for which I was medically and honorably discharged for from the damages it caused. I was not deployed, and never got the chance to, which has led to severe survivors guilt, having lost all my friends in and during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some we're KIA, others took their own lives, others still simply lost their minds. My car is named Nozarashi, because she represents what I have endured, survived, and will grow and heal from. I made a promise to PVT M.J.Deutsch that I would live for the both of us... . . . . I am also a survivor of 9/11, and was at absolute ground zero running for my life when the trade towers fell. I barely escaped with my life. . . . . It has taken me 15 years to come out publicly about this. Maybe now, my mission to build and complete this car, will make more sense to you, along with the name, which means "exposed in the field" and "weather worn, neglected." My mission is to learn to care for myself through learning to care and rebuild something with my own hands, and to learn how to control my fears. I'm learning to race, and learn to be fast, as a means of therapy to move beyond my traumas, both physical and mental. And no one will stand in the way of my mission to grow and heal from the mistakes made of a young 20 year old kid during a horrible conflict. . . . . #Nozarashi86 https://www.instagram.com/p/Byglo8FHIU3/?igshid=1bveihbysprvn

[defendtranswomen]

HI

I am too sick to write this article. The act of writing about my injuries is like performing an interpretative dance after breaking nearly every bone in my body. When I sit down to edit this doc, my head starts aching like a capsule full of some corrosive fluid has dissolved and is leaking its contents. The mental haze builds until it becomes difficult to see the text, to form a thesis, to connect parts. They drop onto the page in fragments. This is the difficulty of writing about brain damage.

The last time I was in the New Inquiry, several years ago, I was being interviewed. I was visibly sick. I was in an abusive “community” that had destroyed my health with regular, sustained emotional abuse and neglect. Sleep-deprived, unable to take care of myself, my body was tearing itself apart. I was suicidal from the abuse, and I had an infected jaw that needed treatment.

Years later, I’m talking to my therapist. I told her, when you have PTSD, everything you make is about PTSD. After a few minutes I slid down and curled up on the couch like the shed husk of a cicada. I go to therapy specifically because of the harassment and ostracism from within my field.

This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash.

This is in defense of the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death, those who came looking for safety and found something worse than anything they’d experienced before.

For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.

I was one of these people.

They controlled my housing and access to nearly every resource. I was sexually harassed, had my bathroom use monitored, my crumbling health ignored or used as a tool of control, was constantly yelled at, and was pressured to hurt other trans people and punished severely when I refused.

The cycle of trans kids being used up and then smeared is a systemic, institutionalized practice. It happens in the shelters, in the radical organizations, in the artistic scenes—everywhere they might have a chance of gaining a foothold. It’s like an abusive foster household that constantly kicks kids out then uses their tears and anger at being raped and abused to justify why they had to be kicked out—look at these problem kids. Look at these problematic kids.

Trans fems are especially vulnerable to abuse for the following reasons:

— A lot of us encounter concepts for the first time and have no idea what is “normal” or not.

— We have nowhere else to go. Abuse thrives on scarcity.

— No one cares what happens to us.

This foster cycle relies on amnesia. A lot of people who enter spaces for the first time don’t know those spaces’ history. They may not know that leaders regularly exploit and make sexual advances on new members, or that those members who resisted are no longer around. Spaces self-select for people who will play the game, until the empathic people have been drained out and the only ones who remain are those who have perfectly identified with the agendas and survival of the Space—the pyramid scheme of believers who bring capital and victims to those on top.

My first puberty was a nightmare—faced with the opportunity to make my second one a healthy, healing experience, I was instead abused and broken. The community practiced compulsory BDSM sexuality, which was deeply inappropriate considering it was one of the only visible spaces for trans people interested in making games. I didn’t need that coercion in my life; I needed safety and mentorship.

I spent those years of my early twenties not making connections or gaining valuable socialization that I had missed in my youth, but being exploited and brainwashed in nightmarish isolation. I was scared away from the “inclusive” coding spaces, the “inclusive” conferences and their orbiting alt events, and everything else that people like to pretend is available for trans fems.

Things escalated at the Allied Media Conference of 2013. Unfortunately I was traveling alone. People from the abusive community overheard me asking about safe-space resources in Oakland and became angry that I was seeking to escape their community. I was intimidated in person by someone who had a great deal of social power over me. I had a panic attack and went to the bathroom to dry heave and cry. Shortly afterward, threatening messages began bombarding my Twitter and my phone, and the community began to develop a coordinated political response to my desire to leave. People suddenly stopped talking to me, and I felt the icy net of isolation drawing tight.

This was the only time a conference responded appropriately. AMC apologized, notified their security team to check up on me, and encouraged me to submit a talk next year. I came back and ran a workshop (with two friends for security) and a small amount of healing was possible.

This reintegration was not made anywhere else. I was excluded from the vast majority of game spaces because of what happened to me. Of course, the multimedia nature of AMC meant it had the least stake in preserving the reputation of games and other things that matter more than people.

When I got back home, I was kicked out of my housing. I later learned that the community had been contacting my landlord for months prior to the actual eviction, as well as spreading rumors throughout my field. These seed rumors are a common tactic in those spaces, cultivating a brittle structure around people that can be shattered when necessary.

Living was my sole attempt at innocence.

ATTACK

One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked.

Anyone else getting that award would have been able to just … get that award. But people like me aren’t allowed to just have careers. Feminist culture saw fit to give a pass to every man and every cis woman who got that award, but when a trans fem from a disadvantaged background stepped up, she somehow happened to be the worst. The culture was fine with me as long as I was window-dressing, but daring to excel got me kneecapped.

They spread rumors that I was sending harassing messages to people, even as the messages streamed one-way toward me. They said I controlled a misogynistic mob and was using it to attack people. (I had never been more alone.) I was called a pedophile, a rapist, an abuser (the typical dog whistles used in feminist spaces to evoke the dangerous tranny stereotype invading ur bathrooms.) Even when the rumors were debunked, even with a history of co-habitating respectfully with partners and a history of being a respectful tenant, the damage was never repaired. The purpose was to keep firing until I was gone, until every possible bad thing had been said about me.

The reputation game was used to paint a vulnerable, isolated trans girl, too scared to leave her room most days, as having power which she did not have—power which my abusers, veterans of queer and artistic scenes with decades of institutional privilege, did have.

It happened without warning or recourse, without a single attempt at conciliation. Multiple times I had noticed tension building and had asked explicitly for mediation. Each time this was refused. When you’re exiling someone for petty political reasons, it works best when they can’t tell their own story. By privately vocalizing concerns that I was being abused, I became a public target—presenting a false chronology to observers.

Previously their ostracism had been silent, made simple by the fact that no one cared about what happened to trans fems who made games. The fact that my games had inadvertently made me visible meant that the attack had to be devastatingly public, my fake crimes commensurate to the amount of disgust required to repel me. This is the danger of the token system—it elevated me to a level of violent politics I was unprepared for.

Very few people want to defend a target of disposability. I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too.

I was threatened into not defending myself, gaslit into silence, told that people knew “things” about me that were never explained. When I asked how I could do accountability, when I said I would do whatever they wanted, they said that I was “incapable” of accountability, that my crime was unknown and my sentence was permanent. That is the point where the body starts to die.

My attackers were expert pathological liars who had been getting away with it for years—entire fictional realities playing out on their social-media accounts like soap opera. Escaping from abuse is the most certain way to become painted as an abuser, and being an abuser is the most sure way to be believed. You know how movies are realer than reality? How the sound effects and physics become so normalized to us that reality seems flat and fake? Talking about abuse is kind of like that. Abusers know what sounds “real.” They are like expert movie-effects artists. Victims are stuck with boring fake reality.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH

Social media is significant to my story because for a long time it was my only outlet as a disabled individual barred from many physical spaces, and a way to express myself artistically when traditional outlets were closed to me. However, it came with its own set of problems.

When I told another trans person that I had been abused, I was told in response that my follower count on Twitter was higher than hers.

I tried talking to people about my poor health, how I needed to withdraw and have space. After unfollowing most people related to games, a subject which was quickly becoming a trigger, I was told that I was “manipulative” for unfollowing, and my following list on Twitter was scrutinized and brought up as evidence that I still followed certain games people and that I was doing this to hurt people.

I was pressured not to post about certain things I cared about (“crystals,” ”slime”) and not to use my favorite emoticons. I was pressured to join in social-media smearings of other trans people (which I frequently rebelled against, to my detriment) and to RT things I didn’t want to RT.

My twitter was incompatible with the rest of the network because I mainly posted poetry-style tweets that had no connection to anything else. I would be accused of subtweeting or encoding hidden messages into my tweets. People would associate random words in my tweets with some random thing going on in their life that I surely must be commenting on.

Social media became a scientific metric for my abusers, a set of numbers and behaviors to obsess over and divine hidden messages. The games network constantly abraded against my nonparticipation—my desire for a safe, therapeutic online space, not a competitive one.

Feminist practice of declaring privilege and marginalization became a way to collect information about victims: Look at someone’s profile bar for their elemental weaknesses. Being frank about my health problems was never an advantage for me in feminist spaces, only something to be used against me. I was an object, an invalid on a bed that could be infinitely manipulated and extruded through social media to fit the agendas of a thousand bored strangers.

The ethereal potential of the net had become rigidly hierarchized and numbered to the point where I could be managed and controlled as efficiently as if I were in 3-D space.

MOBBING

CALL-OUT CULTURE AS RITUAL DISPOSABILITY

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

When I used to curate games, I was approached by people in that abusive community who pressured me not to cover a game by a trans woman. Their reasoning was blatant jealousy, disguised under the thin, nauseating film of pretext that covers nearly everything people say about trans people.

When I rejected their reasoning and covered the game, the targeting reticule of disposability turned toward me. What can we learn from this? Besides “lofty processes in queer/feminist spaces are nearly always about some embarrassingly petty shit,” it’s about the ritual nature of disposability, which has nothing to do with “deserving” it. Disposability has to happen on a regular basis, like forest fires keeping nature in balance.

So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism.

Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.

If a man does something fucked up, all he has to do is apologize, if that, for feminists to re-embrace him. If a trans fem talks about something fucked up that happened to her, she is told to leave and never come back.

MOBBING

A common punishment for infanticide in the Middle Ages was living burial. This was a feminine-coded punishment, often reserved for women, one that allowed execution without having to actually be there at the moment of death. This line of thought pervades feminine punishment to this day.

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat).  Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.

2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.

3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

In ideological spaces, this damage is exacerbated by the fact that the victims are often earnest people who take the ideals to heart and can’t understand why the culture is going contrary to its own messages. They appease, self-incriminate, blame themselves—anything to be a Good Person. They don’t want to fight. Fighting sickens them.

From a report by the Australian House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee: “90 percent of people being bullied make the comment: ‘I just want it to stop.’ They don’t want to go down a formal path, but just want the behaviour to stop.”

Those who participate, even unwittingly, feel compelled to invest in the narrative of victims as monsters in order to protect their self-conception as a good person—group violence creates group culpability. For their ego they trade the career, health, community (and sometimes life) of the victim.

MOBBING AS WITCH HUNTS

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people.

You see this in games and tech spaces where the intense amounts of competition and capital accumulation, both physical and social, are a breeding ground for mobbing. But the popular two-sided discussion of mobbing as carried out in numerous clickbait articles ignores the fact that mobbing goes all the way down—even as white cis women struggle for safety, they participate in the exclusion of others, creating a hierarchy of labor and competition. Because mobbing is a form of capitalist violence, the popular discussion (conducted by those who are intricately entwined with the flow of capital) must omit the nuances of mobbing in favor of a narrative that is about replacing uncool regressive masculine consumerism with liberal feminist consumerism.

When the people who are scapegoated happen to be from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, the culture calls it coincidence, clutching our respectable counterparts to their chest like pearls, a talisman of tokens to ward away reality.

SEXUAL MENACE

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality.

DAMAGE

PTSD AS DISPOSABILITY ALCHEMY

I was, in effect, beaten until I had brain damage, over a long period of time. Unlike some other survivors of trauma, I was unable to heal because I was never separated from the source of the danger. I was never given the chance to vent, to express myself, to tell my side of the story—but I had to keep working, harder than ever, while being constantly exposed to violence.

The pressure on me was not merely to survive but to display no signs of the incredible amounts of damage pouring into me daily. To never display the slightest hint of anger, to never cry, to not argue with people telling me horrible things. Every hint of damage was an excuse to further isolate and demonize me.

The cost of resisting disposability was PTSD. It was catching a lethal amount of negative energy with my body and becoming a poison-processing factory.

My job is wired to give me electric shocks. What do you do when your alternative is homelessness?

“The allostatic load is ‘the wear and tear on the body’ which grows over time when the individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress.”

“Stress hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol in combination with other stress-mediating physiological agents such as increased myocardial workload, decreased smooth muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract, and increased coagulation effects have protective and adaptive benefits in the short term, yet can accelerate pathophysiology when they are overproduced or mismanaged; this kind of stress can cause hypertension and lead to heart disease. Constant or even irregular exposure to these hormones can eventually induce illnesses and weaken the body’s immune system.”

To cover up the abuse and protect the “reputation” of the games industry, it was deemed worthwhile to lower my lifespan, weaken my immune system, and permanently damage my body.

Even if I drink multiple cups of water before bed I wake up with severe dehydration. An interesting side effect of being a trans fem on hormones is that spironolactone (an  antiandrogen) is a diuretic, so the dehydrating effects of stress are added to the dehydration of my gender, tipping it over to agonizing extremes, the unspoken tax of pursuing both gender and a career. The amount of water in my body is political.

I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches.

By the end of the day my neck and left arm are aching from nervous tics.

I forget things rapidly. Triggers leave me exhausted or panicking at inconvenient times, sometimes for days or weeks.

My hair fell out in handfuls. I still have a nervous tic of running my hands through my hair to pull out loose strands.

Having PTSD is like breaking a limb and never being able to rely on it as strongly. The sudden weakness of standing on it wrong, suddenly being unable to hold something, a fatigue and spasm of nerves.

It became difficult to diagnose other medical problems because of the all-consuming nature of the symptoms. It became difficult to talk about what happened to my body in general. When my hairdresser asked, the only way to explain the damage was by saying I had been in a car accident.

Attacks on marginalized artists go beyond merely denying them access to networks; they also damage a person’s faculties of expression.

For a long time, PTSD deprived me of the privilege of being a multitemporal being. The space of time I was able to safely think about shrunk to about a minute. Larger projects, the kind most tied to commercial value and to the media coverage apparatus, were difficult for me due to the traumatic potential of expanding my aperture of time.

The diversity-centric system expects more jobs to fix the problem, ignoring how long we’ve been damaged and made unfit for their jobs. They encourage the Strong Woman stereotype because it means taking the damage onto ourselves. We need more than jobs; we need social reintegration.

COMMUNICATION

INABILITY TO SHARE STIGMA

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon feeling a connection to others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma de-humanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

The worst thing is not having other survivors to commiserate with. I can think of people who went through similar situations and were defended, re-integrated. Their stories are paraded through feminist spaces, saturated through social media, and every time I’m exposed to them, I feel less safe, not more. This enhances my feelings of dehumanization: “Why was I not worth protecting in the exact same situation? I must not be human like them”.

I often have the overwhelming physical sensation of having a dead person in my life, someone as close as an identical twin. The sensation is of me being the only one still alive after a terrible accident, lingering like an unshriven thing. The inability to share stigma is even worse than the original act of violation. The greater part of a wound is its inability to heal.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #1

The typical narrative of abuse on social media doesn’t include the problems of the most vulnerable, like how public verbal harassment may only be an ultimately minor part of a trans fem’s exile.

The most skilled abusers know that a good exile is done with pure silence, through the whisper network, by having the person wake up one day and have every second or third person she knows or who practices her profession block her and/or stop talking to her. No one tells her why. She has to painstakingly talk to every friend, every contact, every person she would normally have a cheerful conversation with. The electric shocks of knowing that every simple human interaction you have with a friend or stranger could turn into a nightmare of victim blaming or worse, a cold iciness where they pretend nothing is wrong. Imagine repeating that experience hundreds and hundreds of times, with no way to end it. After the noise, the long years of silence are what kill us.

The backchannels that should be used to protect people from abusers and rapists are instead used to protect abusers and rapists. Any usefulness these channels have is reserved for Real Women. No one warned me about any of the comically large number of predators in my professions. I was considered unrapeable, unabuseable, not worthy of protection. A trans fem can try to talk about her experiences of abuse for years and have no one listen, but the instant one of her abusers smears her, everyone is alert and awake.

One reason it took me so long to talk about my experiences was that I associated being able to speak against abuse with being an abuser. Because every abuser throughout my life was so good at being believed, I thought that being believed was the exclusive domain of abusers.

This is why my first months in therapy were spent convincing me that I wasn’t a sociopath, crazy, abusive, or any of the other terms I had been brainwashed with. Abusers don’t spend years disabled by those thoughts because they don’t care if they hurt other people.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #2

And when verbal harassment does occur, it’s often cloaked in feminist language, making it impossible to fight.

If they call a woman a bitch, people comprehend that as misogyny. But they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place?

When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist.

TRASH ART

When it was really bad, I wrote: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms. Move a single inch and call it a victory. Mold my sexuality toward immobility. Lie here leaking water from my eyes like a statue covered in melting frost. Zero affect. Build like moss grows. Build like crystals harden. Give up. Make your art the merest displacement of molecules at your slightest quiver. Don’t build in spite of the body and fail on their terms, build with the body. Immaculate is boring and impossible. Health based aesthetic.”

Twine, trashzines made of wadded up torn paper because we don’t have the energy to do binding, street recordings done from our bed where we lie immobilized.

Laziness is not laziness, it is many things: avoiding encountering one’s own body, avoiding triggers, avoiding thinking about the future because it’s proven to be unbearable. Slashing the Gordian Knot isn’t a sign of strength; it’s a sign of exhaustion.

Although I’ve fashioned this reflection in a manner that some may find legible, it is not a fair representation of my sickness. Writing these paragraphs has taken constant doses of medicine, fevered breaks, a few existential timeouts, and a complete neglect of my other responsibilities. When I tried in true form to write – in my realest moments of sickness – all that emerged were endless ellipses and countless semi-coherent revelations.

—Alli Yates

With the trashzine, I tore up the pages because I didn’t have the time or energy to bind them. I put them in ziploc bags—trash binding. In this new form they were resistant to the elements and could go interesting places. I hid one in Oakland under a bridge, and posted coordinates online. Someone found it.

When read, they come out of the bag like my thoughts—fragmented, random, nonlinear. If dropped they become part of the trash.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

COMMUNITY IS DISPOSABILITY

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.

—The Broken Teapot, Anonymous

People crave community so badly that it constitutes a kind of linguistic virus. Everything in this world apparently has a community attached to it, no matter how fragmented or varied the reality is. This feels like both wishful thinking in an extremely lonely world (trans fems often have a community-shaped wound a mile wide) and also the necessary lens to convert everything to profit. Queerness is a marketplace. Alt is a marketplace. Buy my feminist butt plugs.

The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.

—Stephen Murphy

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.

Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death.

CURATING QUEERNESS

An entire industry of curation has sprung up to rigidly and sometimes violently police the hierarchy of who is allowed to express themselves as a trans or queer person. The LGBT and queer spheres find it upon themselves to create compilations of the “best” art by trans people, to define what a trans story is and to omit the rest. Endless projects to curate, list, own, publish, control, but so few to offer support and mentorship.

The stories that reflect poorly on alt culture are buried in favor of utopianism that everyone aspires toward but where few live. People feed desperately on this aspiration, creating the ever more elaborate hollow structures of brittle chitin that comprise feminist/queer culture.

To find the things I wanted in queerness, I had to find those who had been exiled from it, those who the name had been torn from.

COMPLAINT AND PURITY

there is nothing “wrong” with a politics of complaint but there are several risks like developing a dependent relationship with “the enemy” politically neutralizing oneself by dumping all of one’s subversive energies into meaningless channels or reifying one’s powerlessness by identifying with it because it makes one virtuous complaint becomes a form of subcultural capital a way to morally purify oneself —Jackie Wang, the tumblrization of everyday life

Popular feminism encodes pain into its regular complaint/click cycle, keeping everyone on the rim of emotional survival. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity.

Lacking true community, the energy spent is not restored. Those with more stability in their life can keep up the cycle of complaint, and those with lower amounts of energy are filtered out, creating culture that glorifies a “strength” not everyone can access.

There is immense pressure on trans people to engage in this form of complaint if they want access to spaces—but we, with our higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, lifelessness, lovelessness, are the most fragile. We are the glass fems of an already delicate genderscape.

Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.

Deleuze wrote, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

>>

ENDING

People talk about feminism and queerness the way you’d apologize for an abusive relationship.

This isn’t for the people who are benefiting from these spaces and have no reason to change. This is for the people who were exiled, the people essays aren’t supposed to be written for. This is to say, you didn’t deserve that. That even tens or hundreds or thousands of people can be wrong, and they often are, no matter how much our socially constructed brains take that as a message to lie down and die. That nothing is too bad, too ridiculous, too bizarre to be real when it comes to making marginalized people disappear.

Ideology is a sick fetish.

RESISTING DISPOSABILITY

— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time.

— Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life.

— Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock.

— Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal.

— Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion.

— Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied.

— “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder

Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models.

— A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other.

— Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.

DREAM

On January 18, 2015, I woke up from a dream. It was early morning, still dark. I felt very sad that the dream wasn’t real. I wrote it down, like I’ve written down all my dreams for the last eight years.

“She was my abuser. She came to my house on the island. I begged her to stop what she had done, to clear my name. She would not. It had been two years of being abused like a child because of her. I turned to walk deeper into the house. I looked back. She had a knife. She stabbed me. It was the happiest dream of my life. Because finally an abuser had done something to me that people would pay attention to. When I woke up my entire spirit was crushed because I had not been stabbed. I felt the weight of all these years of abuse. I wished so badly I had been stabbed.

I pulled the knife out. I wrestled the knife away. I called my friend to come over and help me.

I walked along the beach of the island and saw for the first time how PTSD had numbed and corroded every perception I’d had since that August, this debilitating disease. I finally felt the brightness of the air in my lungs, the color of the sand and the waves. It was so beautiful. I just wanted to experience all the things that had been stolen from me.”

[philcon-programming]

Philcon 2018 Gaming Suite Programming

Gaming - Suite 923

In addition to open gaming, tournaments and demos in the Promenade area just outside of the Dealer's Room, you can enjoy relaxing and gaming with others in the Philcon Gaming Suite, 923. Assorted board and card game banks are available. Play our games or bring your own favorites and find someone to play along. Hang out, have a snack, play and chat with other gamers. Learn a game, teach a game, share a game. We also have a new space for panels and gaming in The Gallery this year. See your program guide for more information.

General Schedule for 2018:

Friday, 6 pm to 2 am - Open Gaming Saturday, 11 am to 3 pm - Panels, Workshops and Open All Ages Gaming Saturday, 3 pm to 2 am - Open Gaming Sunday, 9 am to 3 pm - Open Gaming * Things are in full swing in planning for Philcon. Here are some of the fun games and events. We are always open to new ideas and your input and involvement is appreciated!

Gaming Suite Meet and Greet Get together with fellow gamers and fans to kick off the weekend. Friday 9 p.m.

Scheduled Games: One Night Ultimate Werewolf+ No moderator, no elimination, ten-minute games. One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a fast game for 3-10 players in which everyone gets a role: One of the dastardly Werewolves, the tricky Troublemaker, the helpful Seer, or one of a dozen different characters, each with a special ability. In the course of a single morning, your village will decide who is a werewolf...because all it takes is killing one werewolf to win! Because One Night Ultimate Werewolf is so fast, fun, and engaging, you'll want to play it again and again, and no two games are ever the same. GM: Tal Alailima Friday and Saturday at 10 p.m.

Cards Against Humanity [18+] Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Each round, one player asks a question from a Black Card, and everyone else answers with their funniest White Card. GM: Ginny Swann Friday and Saturday at 11 p.m.

* SCHEDULED RPGs: (Sign up in the Gaming Suite)

D&D 5th edition RPG The Dragon Turtle Back Zoo (3357)It's the first day of your unpaid internship at the Dragon Turtle Back Zoo, where the curious from every nation come to see the most exotic and dangerous monsters in the world. You hope to parlay this valuable learning experience into a long and distinguished career in cryptozoology (or least some college credit), but first you have to survive your new boss. Adventure for 1st level D&D 5E characters, pre-generated character sheets will be provided.Number of players: 5 (pre-generated characters) DM Aaron Feldman Gaming Suite, Friday 8 p.m.

Golden Templars RPG This is an epic story. You are members of the Golden Templars, a sect within the Knight Templars who receive communion from the Holy Grail which grants them abilities beyond normal men and women. You are tasked with keeping the peace in Jerusalem and protecting the pilgrims who visit it. The feel of the campaign is mainly comic book with some secret history. Check out the Obsidian Portal:

https://golden-templars.obsidianportal.com/

for more information.  Number of players: 6 (pre-generated characters) GM John Swann Gaming Suite, Saturday 8 p.m.

Pathfinder RPG Introductory Session for Pathfinder 1st Edition Learn how to play the exciting Pathfinder 1st edition RPG. Chris Bell, Pathfinder Venture Agent, will run a scenario suited for beginning Pathfinder players. Pre-generated characters will be provided. This introduction to Pathfinder Society organized play will include Pathfinder Society scenario credit for participation. All experience levels welcome, including those new to the Pathfinder Society as well as PFS veterans! Maps, minis, and dice will be provided. Number of players: 2-7 (pre-generated characters)

http://paizo.com/pathfinder/rpg GM Chris Bell The Gallery (first floor), Saturday 8 p.m.

X-Wing Minis GM John Skylar The Gallery (first floor), Saturday 8 P.M.

Post-Apocalyptic Blues: Escapee Blues RPG Fifty years after World War III, pockets of civilization try to flourish in the ruins of the old world. You lived a quiet life in a small farming settlement...until slavers raided your community and took you captive. Separated from your friends and family, you found yourself on a slave transport going to a place called Hopewell in Louisiana. And were it not for the...thing...that attached the transport, you would still be destined for slavery. But now, you and your fellow escapees must transverse the Louisiana swamps and marshes to find civilization, while avoiding the remaining slavers that want to recapture you and that...thing...that is still out there. How long can you last with on just your wits and the limited supplies you can scavenge? Players will be given pre-generated character sheets and will take on the role of an escapee from a slave transport. Uses variant d20 Modern/OGL rules. Players should bring their own dice.Number of players: Up to 8 (pre-generated characters) GM Julie Ann Dawson Gaming Suite, Sunday 11a.m. - 3 p.m. *

PANELS / WORKSHOPS / PLAY AND LEARN SESSIONS:

Video Games and Disability From ADHD and autism to wheelchairs and walkers, video games across platforms offer a unique way to connect people who otherwise would not have an avenue or outlet to reach out to people. How else does the world of digital storytelling open avenues for disabled content creators and consumers?

Workshop: All-Ages Game Design A hands-on, family-friendly workshop. Learn how to put together a game of your own design with your family or friends! A group of people putting together a (simple) game in an hour or two.  

Saturday All Ages Gaming Time (2 Hour - PLAY SESSION) The Gaming Suite is always open to all ages. We do like to offer a time when parents might like to bring the kids in for game time. Are there games you love to play with your kids? Table top gaming is a family experience. Raising a young geek means sharing with them, but as most parents know, finding games that are fun to play together can be challenging. When looking for a family-friendly game, try shorter games that don’t require too much reading, and games that reinforce math and spacial skills. There are also games that can be played by all ages with some modifications to the rules. Games will be available for you to try out with your family: Blokus, Get Bit!, Tsuro, Quick Cups, Roll for it, Panda Head, Face Chase, Flipping Flags, Set Junior, Apples to Apples, Spot it. Want to try an RPG with you kids? We have one called "No Thank You, Evil". Have one you don't see here? Bring it to share.

Tabletop DMing 101 Are you an experienced D&D Player but want to run a campaign for the first time? Not sure where to start in running a Tabletop RPG? Join us for the tips and tricks to help you get started.

SF and Video Games How has Science Fiction been altered and explored in the realm of player-interactive content? What impact did Metroid have on fandom and SF storytelling? What about Mass Effect?

[forsetti]

On The Power of Language: Normalizing White Supremacists

Language is the basis by which humans develop concepts and beliefs.  There is an entire field of study and industry built on this-marketing. Media outlets and political groups spend billions of dollars hoping to capture the right language to persuade people.  Yet, many people seem completely oblivious to the power of language.  Maybe this is why advertising is so effective.

One person who really understood the power of language was George Carlin. On his “Explicit Lyrics” album (yes, I'm old enough to remember and know what an album is,) Carlin talked about how changing how we describe things, changes how we view them: I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.

Conservatives are really good at describing things in ways that hide reality: “Clean Air Act,” “Death Tax,”... they know if they label something a certain way and say it enough, they can alter how the issue is viewed.  They can alter beliefs.  They can turn “shell-shocked” into “post-traumatic distress order.”  FOX News' model is based entirely on this principle and it has helped create a large swath of Americans who believe complete bullshit.

Yet, knowing all this, many people, including progressives, seem unable, unwilling to see how white supremacists are being normalized by many media outlets.  Everyone from Milo to Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the white supremacist next door have been described as something other than what they really are.  They are “provocateurs,” “clean-cut,” “well-dressed, “thought-provoking,”...  No, they aren't!  They are fucking white supremacists and dangerous. Every time these people are described in terms other than racist, bigoted, danger fucks it helps alter reality.

This alteration is done on purpose because for reasons that aren't too difficult to understand, white Americans have always had a hard time grasping and being willing to identify some of their fellow white Americans as deeply horrible people, as racists.  The racists know this and use it to their advantage.  The Lost Cause which allowed the South to completely rewrite their racist history and beliefs which led to their treasonous actions was effective because the rest of white America was more than willing to believe their white Christian brothers and sisters weren't really bad people, evidence to the contrary be damned.

When the Ku Klux Klan came to power in the South and rained terror, death, and destruction on blacks, they were portrayed as “good Christian men,” “pillars of the community,” “good, caring neighbors,”...  These descriptions allowed them to hide their real nature-brutal racists.  

Now we have people in seats of power and influence who believe the same underlying things that led to the Confederacy and the Klan and a lot of white America are falling back on their go-to position of not describing them for who and what they really are.  Every article written about “Joe Nazi” who lives down the street, has a job he's worried about, is married, loves his kids, is concerned for their future... is nothing more than reality Get Out Of Jail Free Card.

Calling someone a horrible person, a bigot, a racist, is never an easy thing to do.  It is more difficult if you are made to feel they are like you.  Just like it is difficult to call your racist grandpa or mom a racist because the relationship you have with them is personal, normalizing white supremacists makes calling them out harder.  If “Joe Nazi” is a lot like you, then you begin to relate, sympathize with him.  If Confederates are “good Christians,” like you, it is easier to relate and sympathize with them.  If the Klan are “outstanding members of the community,” it is easier to relate and sympathize with them.  This is exactly how language works. How we describe things has a direct impact on what we think about them.  Language forms beliefs.  

If an article about “Joe Nazi” spends the majority of the time “normalizing” him and adds a few words at the end about his toxic ideology, what do you think sticks?  There is a reason why drug commercials highlight all the positive aspects upfront and quickly gloss over all the negative side effects.  By addressing the positives first, it forms an initial impression that becomes “reality” that isn't likely to be undone by something negative later.  Every salesperson knows this.  Yet, white America seems unable/unwilling to recognize this is what is going on when it comes to white supremacy even after centuries of evidence to the contrary.

An article about “Joe Nazi” should start with his dangerous ideology, his likely domestic violence history, how he tortured animals in the neighborhood when he was younger, and maybe end with he reads “Goodnight Moon” to his daughter.  Any article or conversation about white supremacists should focus first and foremost on very abnormal beliefs, not their normal behaviors and traits.   These people are dangerous people who believe horrible things who also happen to be your next-door neighbor, school principal, pastor, etc.  They are not your next door neighbor school principal, pastor, etc. who happen to believe horrible things.  If you don't understand the difference between these two descriptions, you are part of the problem.

The first description starts from a premise of normalization and sympathizing.  The latter description starts from a premise of dangerous and disgust.  Under no circumstances should Nazis, white supremacists be viewed as anything but dangerous and with anything but disgust.  I don't care who they are, what job they do, what title they hold, how “loving” a parent/spouse they seem to be.  The toxic nature of white supremacy taints and poisons anything and everything else about someone.  Treating their supremacist beliefs as secondary is whitewashing (pun intended) who they really are.  

White supremacy isn't a peripheral believe or opinion.  It is a core belief that supports major chunks of the rest of a belief system.  It is also a belief that has serious consequences for other people.  In some ways, being a white supremacist is like being an anti-vaxxer. The beliefs you have and the decisions you make will have serious consequences for the whole of society.  Other people's well-being and lives are at risk because of it.  Of course, the big difference between the two beliefs is anti-vaxxers aren't responsible for a Civil War, lynchings, the Holocaust, etc.  

The greatest moral failure in American history was the breakdown of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  After the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans fighting for and against a moral cause where the moral side won, we allowed the losing side to reinvent themselves and continue their immoral behaviors under Jim Crow.  The main reason Reconstruction failed is because too many white Americans were unwilling to put the moral and political hammers down on their racist counterparts.  This failure was the cause behind Jim Crow, segregation, housing discrimination, etc.  It was the root cause behind Nixon's Southern Strategy.  It is the underlying cause behind school of choice and privatizing education.  It is the main force behind modern-day conservative ideology.

Even though there has been significant progress with regard to Civil Rights, the underlying beliefs of the Confederacy (white supremacy) are still alive and thriving in the minds of many white Americans. These alone need to, once and for all, be stamped out.  White supremacy all on its own is horrible and should be stamped out whenever it rears its ugly head.  Nazism is nothing more than white supremacy on evil steroids.  The Confederacy used white supremacy to own other people. Sure, they would beat them but they didn't want to kill them because that was losing an asset.  Nazis used white supremacy to commit mass murder of anyone on their “not like us” list-Jews, Gypsies, gays, the disabled...  

You don't normalize this under any circumstances.  At no point is it okay to say, “Sure Nilo wants to create a white-only state but he is an upstanding businessman who votes in every election and keeps his yard immaculate.”  No!!!  Nilo is a fucking Nazi whose beliefs are dangerous and not tolerated in a multi-cultural democracy.  His white supremacist views cancel out everything else about him that is “normal” in the same way a serial killer's views cancel out everything else they believe and do. “You know, Ted Bundy loved to kill young girls but boy could he put out a dynamite eight-course dinner.”  

If people talked this way about a serial killer, normal people's reaction would be, “What the fuck?!  Who cares about his culinary and hosting abilities?  He believes it is okay to murder people. Seriously, WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK?!!!”  Yet, the New York Times and other media outlets can publish puff pieces about Joe and his Nazi friends, the President of the United States can call torch-wielding Nazis “good people,” he can them in positions of power in his administration... and when those of us know how language is tied to beliefs point it out, many of our fellow white Americans look at us as if we are the problem.  Why?  Because white Americans are reluctant as hell to call other white Americans, “racist,” “bigot,” “Nazi,”...  It is easier to overlook reality and come up with reasons to not call them out for who they are than be honest.  It is easier to normalize them because the reality of who they truly might be too painful to admit.  It is easier to write articles normalizing the Nilos who live among us than it is to denounce them because not enough people want to be the ones who call out grandma's racists comments at the family gathering.  You know what?  Too bad.  Grandma's a fucking racist and we shouldn't want her spreading her toxic attitudes to the younger generations.

One argument I’ve heard from some progressives about why these articles about white supremacists are good is because it informs everyone these people live among us.  All anyone with two working neurons has to do is think about the conversations from Republicans during the last election and now and the fact they voted for a white supremacist to be president who put other white supremacists in positions of power around him.  If you need articles written to convince you people who believe and support horrible ideas live among you, you haven’t paid the slightest attention to the world around you for quite a long time and you probably need remedial classes in logic, civics, and psychology more than an article in the New York Times.

Language forms beliefs.  Nazis, white supremacists, racists, bigots... aren't “normal” people so we need to stop using language and writing articles that normalizes them in any way.  If the first words about these people are something like “horrible,” “dangerous,” “immoral,” “evil,”...then you’re doing it wrong.  To quote John McClane from “Die Hard.”-”If you aren’t part of the solution then you’re part of the problem.  Don’t be part of the fucking problem!”

[sector2020]

Neinstein Personal Injury Attorneys Ontario Canada

Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers, Rose Leto Goes Over Animal Injury Liability. Listen to the podcast or view the video podcast on Vimeo. Rose Leto Talks About Animal Injury Liability video's Podcast Read the Transcript Podcast listed below. That's the most frightening thing on earth. She was really unconscious after it took place and was bleeding, and we were worried that she had actually passed away.

He got her entire head and the vet later said that he was attempting to snap her neck. And now her nearly $3,000 in vet costs are piling up. And lastly, says the other pet has actually caused issues in the neighborhood before. She wishes to hold its owners liable. We've found about 3 or 4 various owners that have had their pet dogs attacked to have seen her pet dog be aggressive.

They stated that they would ask the other dog owner to always utilize a muzzle on their animal. No fines were provided, and no other info was given, mentioning privacy concerns. We can't offer the name, address, or telephone number, no? That's just horrible. So, they're fretted about her making sure it's reasonable for her when literally I have a pet who's now lost her eye.

Leslie has actually worked with a legal representative who states she is entitled to compensation through small claims court. We put the question to a personal injury attorney. If their canine does go on and bite another animal or another individual, then they're accountable under the law for the actions of their pet.

However first, the victim needs to understand how to contact the transgressor. Getting contact info can be tricky and pricey. Now, Leslie with legal charges to contribute to her woes. It's a Personal privacy Act. They can go through liberty of information through the city of Toronto and demand the details.

It just seems fair that the pet dog that was assaulted would have more of the rights, and it just doesn't appear like it's that way right now. Toronto Animal Provider says that you can get in touch with them by calling 311 if your canine has ever assaulted, or go onto their site for a whole list of bylaws and more info about what you're entitled to for the pet dog owner.

At the East little animal shelter in Saphia Khambalia. Contact Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers Neinstein Videos Likewise Offered on Youtube: Neinstein LLP - Toronto Vehicle Accident Lawyers, Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers #neinsteinpersonalinjurylawyers #personalinjurylawyers #neinstein.

Rose Leto is a veteran insurance litigation and personal injury legal representative, and a partner at She has knowledge in injury claims relating to vehicle mishaps, long-term impairment, and slip-and-fall injuries. Rose has argued prior to the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Workplace Security and Insurance Appeals Tribunal, the Crook Injuries Compensation Board, the Social Benefits Tribunal, and the Canada Pension Tribunal.

Rose is fluent in Italian and an active member of the Italian-Canadian neighborhood, an important possession for a personal injury legal representative working in varied downtown Toronto. She is likewise an active individual in a variety of continuing education legal courses and medical education programs. Severe injuries can basically change the quality of an individual's life by causing lasting physical impairment and deep mental and emotional pain.

Rose Leto and the personnel at Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers guide their customers along every action of the course to recovery by helping them access leading medical and rehabilitative care and guaranteeing they receive the optimum possible payment for their injuries. No dollar quantity can make up for disastrous injury or long-lasting special needs, however financial aid can enhance injury victims' lifestyle.

Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers Included on Daytime Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?search=ontario life and activities 08:19 https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/neinsteinpersonalinjurylawyers/Neinstein_Personal_Injury_Lawyers_Featured_on_Daytime_Toronto.mp3?dest-id=1697168 https://ssl-static.libsyn.com/p/assets/6/1/b/2/61b21e60ff26c4b3/neinstein-personal-injury-lawyers.png 2809560403 9941a17c-e404-48b0-8b9d-58d90413bc8a In today's episode of Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers was Included on Daytime Toronto. Listen to the podcast or enjoy the video podcast on Vimeo. Well, I, one of the stats I mentioned earlier in the program was that.

And the data continue about a brain injury and how it affects Jeffrey Neinstein the lives of Canadians and Torontonians of course. So we have actually got an excellent occasion turning up. We're going to inform you about, you can support individuals with brain injuries, uh, the committee member from BIST, Obeya, Mixon and mango Ruth Fernandez, and the chair of best, a charity event.

Good to have you both here. Thanks for having us. Best is brain injury society of Toronto near the other one is the Ontario brain injury association. Exactly what is best. Well, this is a, the local chapter of the Ontario brain injury association. So, uh, there were a number of chapters, 26 chapters all throughout Ontario and the trial chapter.

And help them get integrated back into the community after they have actually received a head injury. And we are a, that was just one statistic I offered. The numbers on. Brain injuries are stunning, right? 18,000 Ontarians were, uh, will suffer a brain injury. Which means, you understand, in one year, every hour six Canadians are afflicted with a brain injury.

Um, it occurs too. You understand, people that we understand, one in 10 individuals that you understand will suffer a brain injury this year. So it's quite, it's a big, big problem in our society and for kids especially, it's so crucial that they use a helmet. We understand when they're practicing sports and that they're taking all preventative measures to be safe.

And regrettably, this is an. They just been started in the last 10 15 years. Um, and it's probably shocked when you hear the numbers and the absence of details people have about head injuries considering all the other fantastic fundraising events that we, uh, see throughout Ontario. And when you see the varieties of head injuries, it's shocking that there is not much http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=ontario life and activities awareness about this disease.

I discover it frequently does. It typically does. You understand, typically clients will present with interaction, um, disabilities. And you know, it's constantly is not always extremely clear if you have a brain injury, so you break an arm, it's, it's clear to see precisely what somebody may be stumbling with their words.

Yeah. You do not often select up on that unless you understand the person for a truly very long time. And you sort of need to look out for state of mind swings and you understand, perhaps they're not interacting correctly and things that you didn't trouble them in the past. Sort of irritating to them now.

And what about kids? If your kid falls off the bike, they brush themselves off, the weeping stops. You think everything's fine, what should we be keeping an eye out for? So difficult to identify brain injuries, specifically in children since they're unable to articulate what they're feeling. Uh, so word, finding issues with sleeping, uh, issues with, um, being able to eat an appetite.

Cause the, the downside is, uh. Is big. And people with brain injuries, it typically takes a, within the very first year is the most productive in getting rehab. So if you don't recognize this within the very first year, you're losing out an ability for your brain, which is a muscle to start restoring itself.

Actually. So the brain can re re regenerating a few of those hurt locations. Absolutely. Definitely. You know, I was a, I was simply at a talk with dr tatter and he says, immediately if you know your kid has had a concussion or he's hit his head, we absolutely know for sure as the fact that it is a brain injury.

Description: Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers podcast is based in Toronto and covers lots of elements of Canadian personal injury law. We discuss the information a personal injury lawyer needs to cover to ensure that people in need of representation and their families receive the payment, care and assistance they are worthy of. Learn how https://adelineadkin.tumblr.com a personal injury attorney acts as an advocate and trusted advisor through the complex legal, medical and insurance coverage problems associated with an individuals healing.

Mar 27, 2020Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers, Rose Leto Discusses Animal Injury Liability. Listen to the podcast or see the video podcast on Vimeo. That's the most terrifying thing on earth. She was really unconscious after it Ontario-Neinstein Medical Malpractice Lawyers.

[the-royal-courier]

A Different Kind of Healing

By Risri Elthron

There are many healing methods in our world, from bandages and doctors to holy or nature magic, to a combination of those treatments. Even shadow magic and, dare I say, blood magic have been known to provide beneficial results to those the Light burns. Many trust only one type of magic or only mundane methods to care for themselves or their loved ones. Others seek any method to heal pain or suffering they are experiencing. It is a personal preference and a right to choose the method and degree of healing you feel comfortable with. I will admit when I began the interview with Miss Sharaliana Shimmerleaf I was shocked. But as I spoke with her I gained insight and as I wrote this interview, I decided there might be someone who will read this and seek out her unusual healing method for something that plagues them.

A Kaldorei from Ashenvale, Miss Shimmerleaf uses a magic that many would see as heresy. “My life was one of quiet study, knowledge collection and calm understanding of the world. That is, until the orcs burned my home to the ground, and captured several of my very young siblings, making them fight for their own twisted amusement.” Her mission now is to see that no one suffers from such cruelty dealt by circumstances, it is why she chose this particular line of study. To help people.

She described her knowledge seeking started early, ancient texts and a master were her aids in learning the controversial art of flesh-shaping. “I am able to practice flesh-shaping because I sought out the knowledge to do so. I event went so far as to befriend one of the mogu. That I live in Northrend, away from people also aids my ability to practice my chosen field of the arcane. When properly used, it is intensely potent for healing injuries, replacing body parts, growing organs in a laboratory, among other wondrous things.”

“Flesh-shaping isn't evil, it isn't particularly dark in nature, that I know of. It's a little gross sometimes, but it is intensely potent, and should be worthy of study in it's own right, and understanding, as I believe it can help so many people recover from otherwise crippling injuries.” Miss Shimmerleaf has healed several in her days of practicing, “I've used flesh-shaping to spare people from death via mortal injuries, I've healed children, adults, the old, the sick, I've also given amputee's their limbs back.” This is what drew my attention to her, I had heard tell of a healer giving a fellow Kaldorei her eyesight back. It turns out Miss Shimmerleaf had used her flesh-shaping to give a new eye to the elf. “I less healed her eye, more replaced it. Her old eye would've taken too long to heal, so I just removed it, and installed a replacement eye I had on my person, in a special alchemical mixture which kept it alive.”

There are downsides, of course, to this type of healing, “Flesh-shaping is the most excruciatingly agonizing thing you can experience in terms of physical pain. However...this agony can be negated entirely by using anima, the reagent needed for all flesh shaping, to disable the body's pain receptors, and essentially numb someone up. Once they're numb, flesh-shaping is entirely painless, you may feel a bit sore afterwards however. Once the receptors come back to full working order.” Side effects have also been known to happen, such as unexpected growths in the healed area.

“I would say, that, thus far, I have seen no evidence in all my years to indicate flesh-shaping is dangerous. I mean sure, if you're a complete idiot who doesn't understand the physiology of your patient, then yes flesh-shaping is horribly dangerous. But, that's the same with herbal tinctures, pharmaceuticals, potions, etc. If you're knowledgeable, and know what you're doing, then flesh-shaping is perfectly safe.” She added, “Just be sure to keep your anima in a cold dark location. Anima get's pissed off if it's left at room temperature for too long, and in bright light. It likes nice dark icy cold holding tanks. Similarly to storing blood, actually.”

Miss Shimmerleaf only wants to help people, those who are in pain and looking for an alternative that will give them a chance at a normal life again. For special cases, she does not even charge. “If it is an amputee, war veteran, or someone in need, it is usually free, I gain much joy from seeing their overjoyed faces as I fix them up, and give them a new lease on life. It makes me happy.”

She was passionate about her practice and while many, myself included, may find what she does somewhat unsettling or worse, the magic does seem another way to gain healing when other options are not working or not possible.

If Miss Shimmerleaf’s method of healing is something you or a loved one might benefit from, you can reach her via post in Stormwind or Darnassus at S. Shimmerleaf  (Sharaliana in game) to discuss if you are a good candidate for this different method of healing.

[antifascistpunisher]

i was just curious as to how you feel about jon bernthal consistently mentioning how important punisher is to cops and the military? not trying to make him out to be ~problematic~ by any means but was just curious on your thoughts

HMMMMMMMMM good question

I can’t speak on the cops bit too much but I do know he talked about wanting to do right by veterans, which is fine by me because even though I hate the military I support veterans because they’ve gotten completely shafted, especially disabled vets. I guarantee if college were free we wouldn’t have as many young people joining, and it’s no coincidence that military recruiters target low-income areas.

As an aside, I kinda don’t get into the tumblr thing of expecting celebrities to be spokes people for the rest of us. They’re isolated from the rest of society in a lot of ways and end up in this artificial bubble that keeps them from really understanding what’s going on with the rest of us. That doesn’t excuse abusive or bad behavior of course and people should be called out on their shit, but I don’t expect any celebrity to have my best interests at heart or to be knowledgeable about how bad shit really is for the rest of us.

 I love Jon as an actor and I hope he doesn’t do anything horrible and at the very least has the sense to say “I don’t know enough about this subject to say anything about it”, but there are no guarantees. I kinda get nervous when people place so much expectations on celebrities to be wonderfully aware and infallible because then they end up being devastated when said celebrity fucks up. I’ve been guilty of that myself so now I’m a bit more tempered in how I see celebs, even ones as seemingly cool as Jon.

It’s important to remember at the end of the day these people are entertainers and a lot of the time are just saying what they think will be agreeable to most people because that’s their job, to be agreeable. And I think he was saying what he thought would be respectful because yeah, the Punisher has become a sort of figurehead among police and the military…unfortunately for the wrong reasons. At the same time, I wonder if he did that because they were expecting some of the backlash we’ve been seeing on twitter of “OMG PUNISHER IS KILLING MILITARY AND COPS FLGFDGFDDF!!!!!! OUTRAGE!!!1″ and because Marvel wants to cover their asses. 

Sorry this answer came out way longer and more rambly than I had hoped for, but that’s what I get for answering asks when tired pffft. One thing for sure is that I am really looking forward to seeing his version of Frank taking out corruption, even if it is making dudebros assmad.

[coldalbion]

Favour of the Gods

So, I wasn’t going to say anything about my recent experiences here, but then I saw all the utter shite @lady-feral has been getting over the last few days, and well, I think it may actually be worth mentioning. As background, I’ve been part of my local Heathen moot since its inception. It’s actually a regional one, meandering gently across the NW of the UK, so that all its members can get to one or two. Its purpose is for Heathens to get together, to chat and get to know each other - just generally be able to spend some time around other Heathens, and exchange knowledge if you’re new. We maintain a Facebook group for comms purposes, so we often get people wanting to join who we haven’t met first and have to make a judgement call based on FB profile. etc. I was recently made a co-mod, because the founder and chief moderator was on holiday. We’re friends, have been for years, and he trusts my judgement. I’m also a cripple - I have Cerebral Palsy, use a wheelchair, and recently had to have half my foot amputated after it ulcerated for Some Reason.

Recently, we had a guy join, and it soon came out that he identified as Folkish.

Now, as a rule, that’s potentially a Red Flag. I say potentially, because sometimes someone doesn’t know it descends from Völkisch and associated movements. Sometimes they are just new, unaware of the toxic stew of racism, nineteenth century Romantic Nationalism, and pseudoscience. Unaware of that word implies, in many quarters. So we have two choices, being as our group requires that:  you respect the right of other group-members to be Heathen, regardless of sexuality, gender, or ethnicity or 'race'.

1. We can instaban  and potentially alienate, isolate, or drive further into the Folkish Realms, someone who might not know what’s dodgy about such things. 

2. We can enquire about this person’s belief, where they’re coming from, and give them enough rope to hang themselves - and in the process, watch for those who might ‘Like’  or post agreement with the ever-present post courting the very thinnest edge of respectability - or even those over it, posted when the mods are busy.

As a rule, we choose 2, for our FB group. It’s better they reveal their colours online than in person. Others might handle such a thing in another way, and that’s fine too. To cut a long story short, this person eventually launched into a classic anti semitic rant, not to mention mention a whole bunch of pseudoscience. (That creaking sound you hear is the sound of someone hanging themselves on the provided rope.)   What has this got to do with the crap @lady-feral is getting? Well, I got a message from said arsehole - changing my message nickname to “Fake Heathen” and then informing me he was glad that the gods “[D]id not favour me in this life :D” I assume he meant this as some sort of You’re not Heathen, because the gods hate you so much they allowed you to be crippled implication? I don’t know - it was confusing, because he’s obviously not read the Havamal, which pretty much suggests it’s better to be crippled, than, y’know, dead.

When you’ve got a combat veteran getting shit for activism from armchair warriors who think War and Warriors are Great, either because she believes in a world where things could be better for minorities and that Fascism and White Supremacy are ridiculous and dangerous and should be resisted, or because she happens to be a woman? (Multiple sources suggest the Allfather was-as-a-woman on various occasions, just fyi.) When you’ve got a disabled person being told the gods did not favour them, despite surviving things that kill thousands every year, having a loving family, partner, and just enough to live comfortably, in a place they own? When that person could have died - and in fact pretty much did, but came the fuck back? You begin to understand that for some of these folks will always  move the goalposts. You will never ever be right, or a proper/real Heathen unless you’re exactly like them. The things about you they dislike, that they are disgusted by so badly that they want you gone unless you fit their cookie cutter mould? If you’re OK, if you gain continued life when you should be dead? That threatens the fact that they’re the favoured ones. If you, the supposedly degenerate, the vile  continue to prosper?  To face your wyrd  head on, and grin and smile, despite its bindings? What would that say about them? It might suggest that they were not supreme, favoured. That their vaunted, non-existent, genetic purity, is not enough?  Because those other-than-them still exist, and despite the attempts to eliminate or cow those folks, we still exist. We remain and that bothers the shit out of them. Because an industrialised war machine couldn’t stop us; it could slaughter thousands, millions of us, even, but still we remain.

Nevertheless, she, and we, persisted. 

And still they beat us, still they try to kill us. Still they surge with the momentary high of destroying the things, the symbols, the people  they hate. “This is our world, our faith, our country.” they proclaim as they kick, they punch, they smash. It makes them to feel good to exert their power, gives them agency, because they feel outnumbered. But the rush fades, the adrenalin drops. They look and see another target, and another and another. So they take a knife, a gun, a bomb and they kill many, knowing they’ll be caught, caged, or more probably killed. They dream, they beg, for their life to be filled with that agency, for their last moments to be making some sort of change.

They don’t want to be their ordinary selves, because their ordinary selves could be run over by a bus. They could die on the toilet for fucks sake, a stroke, an aneurysm, a heart attack. Cheek pressing tile, watching the dark unfurl amidst the pain, wondering what it was all for. Or, perhaps even worse, they could survive the stroke, become crippled, need a wheelchair, require someone to wipe their arse. They could become one of us.

We are a reminder of what could be, what wyrd  might deal them. Might bind them tight as a weaver can. They dream of the onrush, perhaps desire Valhalla, or a martyrs heaven. Because it’s the same impulse that drove the Crusaders, the same that drives Daesh - filled with the rush, Us against Them. And truly, they feel alone, lost without it. 

Of course, a byproduct of such things, of any tight knit group is access to shared resources - the Templars grew rich enough to be a bank, PMC’s profit in warzones the world over and Daesh gains funding from drugs, from selling off stolen antiquities   

Money and power, weapons and land and numbers, exclusion and castigation. All ways to demonstrate agency when others have none, to demonstrate the favour of god(s), the apparent superiority of their group, their Way over another. (Except gods, especially Heathen ones, are notoriously fickle  according to the lore - Odin’s heroes are often deserted mid-battle. One Eye’s spear flies over both sets of combatants, after all. Whatever happens, he wins.)

Both sides, Them, and Us, are defined by the other. Those who claim superiority are constantly measuring themselves against those they deem inferior. Even if they exterminated, removed, or exiled themselves from the realm of their so-called inferiors? Then they would not be superior - merely all there was, to rise or fall on their own merits, their own ability or lack thereof to navigate whatever structures were in place - they would make their own scapegoats, would find others to blame, even within themselves.

Those they hate, fear, are disgusted by, are well used to the limitations, the way wyrd - that weaving of consequence, of action and reaction - might render the path you’re on crooked. Yet still we prosper - still some of us know the onrush of poetry and song, of word from word giving word from us. Some of us are bound noose-tight, the limitations of our life allowing us a joy, a surging fury that infuses everything in our life. Perhaps this a god’s favour? To have joy despite being the the thing that so many fear, despite being the horrible reminder of what may be dealt to us, by a universe that is not, nor will it ever be, ours to control. I know that I cannot control any hate slung my way after this. If and when any comes my way, I’ll shrug. If this gets reblogged, mocked and torn to pieces, so be it. If people choose to do that, if it makes them feel better, so be it. If leaving a reply gives you the rush of a need satisfied, or an urge to troll go for it.  I really have had worse, and I’m still here. If you want to join the myriad people who’ve pointed and laughed, mocked, thrown stones both literal and metaphorical, be aware that this is nothing clever, that you’re not distinguishing yourself from anyone. You’re literally nothing new. I remain. I’m here and now, and the fact is, some of you who hate me for what I am? Some of you may become like me. I look forward to the day when you finally bring yourself to look in the mirror and see me there too, waiting.

[scoutshonor56]

Kakistocracy

In “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” (2004), Trump wrote that others “are surprised by how quickly I make big decisions, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts and not to over-think things.” He added, “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.”

 Well, there you have it folks, Donald Trump in a nutshell.  I distinctly remember that surreal morning of this past November 9, when I awoke to the knowledge that yes, it wasn’t all a horrible dream, this ass-clown is actually going to be elevated to the highest office in the land. This orange-haired bag of bluster and braggadocio was going to become my president.  A scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life” flashed through my head, when a shocked James Stewart first starts to come to grips with his new reality that includes he now lives in a sleazy, flashy town called Pottersville, and no longer Bedford Falls.  Feeling more than a little disorientated, he says to his angel, Clarence, “No, NO… I just got hold of some bad liquor or something…”

 Me? I thought I was experiencing a horrible, nightmarish acid flashback.  See Bob? Mom always said that all those hedonistic days of recreational drug use will catch up to you…

I apologize, as in a recent past blog I said that I was done writing about politics, and Donald Trump in particular; but as we approach his inauguration this Friday, and after observing his behavior over the last week or so, I simply can’t leave this unsaid.  As Popeye used to say, “I’ve had all I can stanz, and I can’t stanz no more!”  The Dude “will not abide.”  If you’ve never seen “The Big Lebowski”, well shame on you, and I’m not even going to explain that last one…

 Yes, after viewing the highlights of his recent press conference – on “The Daily Show” of course, the only context within which I can watch Donald Trump, as he’s best taken with a stiff shot of humor and truth – it’s become obvious that our worst fears are about to unfold.  For those who grasped at that last thin straw of hope that just maybe, once if office we would see a tempering of the man’s style… ah, nope; he’s going to conduct his time as president with the same ego-centric, blunt style that he campaigned with.  For him, the office of the presidency is just a bigger and better reality TV show.

 I thought I could shrug this one off, a four year joke; I’ll just keep my head down, disengage from any discourse or political news, and hopefully, at the least, he won’t set the house on fire and it will provide a hard lesson for America and the GOP party – just ignore him… But I now find that the closer we get to January 20th, the more physically ill I feel.  There is a dark and impending malaise hovering over not just my head, but over our nation.  Like Captain Kirk and the Enterprise, we are about to boldly go where our country has never gone before, led by a man who literally lives in his own reality.  A blustering, pathological liar lacking the least amount of dignity or decorum for the office and position he is about to represent.  A man who lives high above the streets of New York in a pimped-out golden palace that makes the term baroque blush.  Who loves himself so much, he once funneled $20,000 from his own Trump Foundation to pay for a 6ft. painting of himself.  That is, when he wasn’t siphoning off cash from this bogus charity organization – to which he hasn’t contributed a dime since 2008 - to help pay for his legal defense tabs.

 A thin-skinned asshole with the temperament, empathy, and depth of thought of a grade school bully, who over the last year has insulted and mocked (just to name a few) a decorated veteran and former POW (John McCain), a disabled reporter from the NY Times (Serge Kovaleski), the grief-stricken Muslim parents of an American veteran killed over in Iraq by a suicide bomber (Khizr and Ghazala Khan), and now, this past weekend, on the eve of Martin Luther King day no less, he disparages the character and civic patriotism of universally revered Georgia congressman John Lewis, responding to Lewis’s statement that he will be boycotting the inauguration and refuses to accept Trump’s legitimacy as a fairly elected president with the tweet  “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results…Sad!”

 The gall of this man.  The imperial-like hubris!  Let’s clear this one up with a single sentence: Back in the mid 60’s, while Trump was attending his well-heeled schools and busy getting five deferments from serving in Vietnam, John Lewis was putting himself on the front line here in America for civil rights, including the march in Selma, Alabama (known as “Bloody Sunday”) during which he was struck so violently by a state trooper wielding a billy club that his skull was fractured.

 Yeah – “all talk.”  Well, OK, in Trump’s defense, I doubt he even knows the story of John Lewis, and the fact that his latest tweet attack came days before MLK Day probably never even entered his tiny brain, which has severely limited time for facts, or reading, or anything else that doesn’t orbit around his own small universe of self-assured greatness.

 And like the worst of cowards, he picks his fights from afar, using his favorite mode of communication – due to his child-like attention span and stunted verbal prowess – Twitter, 140 characters at a time.  Here’s one for you Don: “YOU SUCK – SO SAD!”  He is offensive and abhorrent to all things civil and good, and his behavior as an example only stokes the fires of divisiveness, xenophobia, and hate. Since his election hate crimes have spiked dramatically, and white supremacist groups have made no secret of their glee over Trump’s victory.

 Returning to his press conference – his first in six months and now almost a misnomer in terms – that night Trevor Noah (on “The Daily Show”) did a zoom-in on a video still from this combative circus sideshow, focusing on the table next to the podium stacked with piles and piles of bloated, paper-stuffed manila folders, supposedly representing the hundreds of business dealings that Trump will now be divesting from and turning over to his sons.  Noah took the liberty to point out the obvious: wait a minute… every sheaf of paper looked brand new, crisp and sharp edged; and even more revealing, out of all those folders NOT ONE of them had any kind of label on them, anywhere.  No dates, no titles, nothing; as clean and untouched looking as the ones on the shelves of your local Office Depot.  Come on… Oh well, what’s a meeting with the press without props, you know?  Any good con man worth his salt knows that!

 To add to the ruse, during a pathetic and ego-stroking attempt to further make his point, Donny also bragged that he recently turned down a multi-billion dollar deal with Dubai(!) – even though of course, he assured us, he is more than capable of running both his business and the country.  As if he could treat global and national politics and diplomacy as a “second job”… Oh yeah, and those tax returns?  According to Don, nobody is interesting in seeing those but the false media and character-smearing reporters, fogettaboutit!

 I’ve got nothing – I’m positively gob-smacked.

 Then the most foreboding moment of all, his coup de grace: angrily and arrogantly refusing to take a question from Jim Acosta, a CNN reporter because "Your organization is terrible... you are fake news!”, before calling on a  reporter  from Breitbart, an unabashed, openly anti-women, anti-semetic, anti-progress, anti-immigrant, and anti-nonwhites news (propaganda) organization formerly run by his newly appointed chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

 Are you ready folks?  First step to a Fascist government?  Delegitimize the press; same result as suppression, just a little slicker – gives Donny sort of that famous, “Hey I’m not saying, I’m just repeating what I heard” buffer that he used so effectively during the primary run to discredit his opponents. Hey, this ain’t China now - I ain’t clamping down on the media - just characterizing it as false and unreliable. Yep, in DT’s world, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth comes only in 140 characters or less.  

 I remember when Stephen Colbert was on Comedy Central with his own show, during the reign of George W, and he came up with the humorous phrase “truthiness”. In other words, if it “felt” true in your gut, well, then it was true, or as good as true.  Trump has swallowed this concept and shit out a twisted, even more effective and simplistic version of this: if you don’t like a fact, simply deny it’s truth.  Earth is round?  No it’s not. 2+2=4?  No it doesn’t.  According to factcheck.org, Trump’s winning percentage of electoral votes - 56.9 percent - was well below the historical average, 70.9 percent.  Further, Trump’s share of electoral votes ranked 44th out of 54 elections going back to 1804.  His take on the election results? “A landslide.”  “One of the biggest Electoral College victories in history!”  

 Donald Trump has literally created a whole new category for the term “liar”.  He lies like most people pick their nose or fart; it’s simply become part of his vernacular.  He can’t even make the distinction anymore between truth and lies, nor does he care.  

 I could go on and on, in particular about his obtuse and bizarre cabinet picks so far - “Hey, Dr. Ben, wake up, you’re on!” - or his shady and questionable bro-mance with Putin, but I’m going to close with this salient point: During yet another contentious and embarrassing appearance on CNN the other day, Donny’s idiot former campaign manager and now senior advisor/spokesperson (go-to spin doctor), Kellyanne Conway, tried to assure us with the ridiculous plea to not judge her boss by “what comes out of his mouth”, but “what’s in his heart.”  Wow – first, what’s in his heart is memories of Russian hookers treating him to a golden shower, and second, NEWS FLASH YOU STUPID BIMBO: in life, what you say matters, it has meaning; and if you’re the president of the United States, what you say affects the lives of millions.

 * Oh yeah, as to my cryptic title: I borrowed it from Paul Krugman’s excellent piece in the NY Times yesterday (which I encourage reading), and yes, kakistocracy is actually a word, I looked it up!  According to the old Merriam-Webster, it means rule by the worst.

[allopropaganda]

In regards to these posts 1  2

As we, hopefully, reach a new era in our history, one where we may talk freely among ourselves and explore new and old ideas. We are at a cusp of growth.

We have dealt with foaming aphobes, we’ve been dealing with them for so long, maybe we forget that there are other levels of violence.

Let me be clear, I have been fighting for a long time. Reactions that spring up in me come from years of “training”, I have a very intuitive grasp of social justice issues and I’ve come to realize/reason that just because something seems obvious to me, can’t make it so for others. I think we need a bit of breakdown to see where the community is becoming ableist, aphobic, and victim blaming, and areas that are going to hurt us in the long run.

So this post is in two parts, because when I said I felt “ganged up on” I meant it in more than one way.

The Personal Attacks.

You make what you believe to be an innocent comment, maybe you make hasty judgements, and in many many ways even I - the CPSTD sonofabitch - must admit, that there would be no way for you to truly know where you’ve misstepped, before you’ve stepped.

Nobody thinks they’re saying something harm/that harmful, and that’s essentially why it’s not up to them to decide they didn’t! (not without real evidence).

*dramatically opens curtains* Come see through my eyes *tinkling music plays*

Firstly, claiming I had reacted aggressively - was majorly aphobic and ableist. For the aphobic part, that may be a little easier to see. My response did not shame someone, believe me I can shame I’m sure you’ve seen it. I did not look to attack them personally, I actually did not attack at all! My response was about the heartache a-specs had to go through, it was about experiences that happened to me. To assert that I was harming them, that mentioning the attacks on me where harming them, the words “that’s messed up” come to mind.

The left hook on this is the implication that showing any emotion and not seeking to soothe the aggravator is aggressive. At no point does an oppressed person have to placate the oppressor - nor does the oppressed person have to coddle and soften words to soothe their feelings. If you spread oppression, even if you didn’t mean to, that is your rightful title! And the world is inundated with people making these  mistakes, the best thing for you to do is own up to them, take responsibility, and seek to rectify! THAT makes you an ally! THAT truly changes the world! And yes, you can definitely spread oppression even if you are in that group, that is exactly how oppressive systems work! They rely on many hands.

Boop down to the abelism which I don’t think you could have possibly recognized even if you DID take a special interest in me, or in C-ptsd, or remember those two things at a time - but this is what happened to me all the same.

C-PTSD Is Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many of you may be familiar with PTSD, that’s what war veterans get diagnosed with all the time. I think we can all remember instances where it’s been depicted of war veterans suddenly going in to “fight mode” when they get triggered. All of the bad instances where they had to survive comes up, boiling hot like a geyser, and the truth is that it’s not always wrong.   That’s me. I don’t know what you may be thinking what fight mode may be like, but fight mode is filled with fear, panic, and anger. I am ready to attack and disable my attacker at all costs. For me, enemies are everywhere, everyone’s motive is suspect, each new thought is a breakdown in my spatial cognition. This is a survival mechanism that is made to protect me.

So what I’m saying is, with all of this running through my veins, clouding my mind, how my brain screamed attack and justified any means of survival, and was actively telling me that not to attack was wrong, I still did not attack. I did a really great job of restraining myself, in the interest of bettering my community, and you…trashed that.

And in regards to claiming my tags were “aggressive”, well like I mentioned above about hostility and all - my tags where about asking if this ask was legit or not. So with CPTSD it is hard to tell when someone is being sincere, or reading any other emotion other than hostility. Let me tell you, I have literally read really nice messages sent to me and couldn’t understand them because I read them in an hostile slant. So that’s why I ASKED, to make up for my disability.

Oh man, which brings up another thing. Gaslighting me. Gaslighting is further explained down the post but in regards to me - My thoughts scatter, and I may read things that just aren’t there. To make up for that I read, reread, think - over think, reduct my think, over think a little more, write out the thinking. There’s a hell of a lot of thinking just to be absolutely sure that I’ve had this down correctly. No offense, but I’m a really smart person, and I am highly intuitive. When I come up with a stance, I have written a book in my head to back me up (see ENTIRE POST). It is so inappropriate to jump in and say “nuh uh”, just because you like the person who said the thing, or is entirely reactionary. I see that as highly disrespectful of my intelligence and trying to take advantage of my cognitive disabilities. Hey, that could be my CPTSD talking, but also you could just not do that, ever. For the record, if I doubt something I ASK, or put it in non-definitive terms. No argument of “nuh uh” is an acceptable retort to what I put into my words.

And to put an extra fine point on it, don’t even try using my disabilities against me to attempt gas lighting me. I specifically take precautions to protect myself from that.

And for icing on the abelism cake - using anger as a reason to dismiss marginalized peoples. No.

I was able to save myself, because I’m pretty kick ass at that. You take this entire post and everything it means, and crunch it into one burst, and shove it in my soul - all of this at once and ongoing. Could you possibly imagine that I would be able to make a coherent argument? I think not. It would have gone on - everyone justifying their actions because “I can’t act right”, but this in turn sparking even more hostility. But I stopped myself, even when I KNEW I was right and you DESERVED to be gotten and I was wrong and dangerous to leave, I knew this in my soul, but I still left because I could take hold of something tiny and believe in it against all odds. To say that this is fair and just to expect other people to do, other victims to do - I could never suggest such a thing. I am just lucky. Respect people’s right to be hurt.

Part Two

In regards to our community, in the new times there will be new prejudices rearing it’s ugly head, it will be subtle, it will be blatant, it will come from our own side.

And you’ve been exposed to blatantly violent aphobes for so long, I know a certain feeling arises in you that you associate with “bad people.” To be sure, assigning labels such as “good” and “bad” person wise is a mistake made time and time again, stretching time and place.

“Nice Guy”*

*The “nice guy” is a phenomenon ever occurring in our society and is not meant as a way to gender anyone - phenomenons have no gender.

What you are teaching yourselves is that no one “nice” should be corrected or called to attention. They should have words minced, you feel like a traitor and mean for suggesting that they might have some aphobic biases. Newsflash, everyone has aphobic biases, we live in an aphobic society!

And to be honest, the “nice guy” rhetoric has been used on just about every abuse victim and should never deign to cross the lips of someone interested in justice. In my mind this is the shock, anger, and call to fight that fills my heart.

But let’s go back. For one, the defense of the “Nice Guy” is often that they didn’t know better, they misspoke, and/or they didn’t really mean that. In all of that - it doesn’t change a thing of what was done. Aphobia doesn’t just stop “because it was a mistake”, it keeps going, it gets picked up. You can’t undo what you’ve done by saying, “not me”! You can only work to erase your actions by having a reaction, you must put forth an effort to rectify your mistake. In fact, raising your hands and declaring no responsibility is dangerously disrespectful.

Next, you cannot say, “they didn’t mean that”, just because you like the person. This is a form of gas lighting. You are taking reality and shouting that it never happened. Gaslighting is abuse.

Here’s the scenario, either A) They typoed something and they said the exact opposite of what they meant. That means they still said it, that means it was still spread. That means it definitely exists and has caused harm. To say it didn’t exist doesn’t help a-specs, to recognize the mistake and take steps to fix it does. Just own up to your mistake and don’t get angry that it upset people and they reacted. Of course they reacted they just got blindsided by aphobic rhetoric, just respect their feelings.

B) They didn’t realize how horrible they sounded, until it was pointed out. This is called “internalized aphobia”, or maybe micro aggressions for allo people. It happens to everyone. That means they still said it, that means it was still spread. That means it definitely exists and has caused harm. To say it didn’t exist doesn’t help a-specs, to recognize the mistake and take steps to fix it does. Just own up to your mistake and don’t get angry that it upset people and they reacted. Of course they reacted they just got blindsided by aphobic rhetoric, just respect their feelings.

C) They really did mean what they said, but are willing to shrink back due to backlash. This has no matter (and no way to determine through isolated incidents) because all you need to do is call out the behavior.

But they were Mean to the Nice Guy  It forever remains a mystery how you can demean someone with a smile on your face, but when the oppressed don’t smile back they are viewed as the hostile ones! I think we’ve covered this time and time again! It really should not be your priority to police the emotions of a harmed oppressed person. People can react hostilely to people because they are using a system of oppression that boosters them up while putting the oppressed down. People have feelings.

The Logical Conclusion to Nice Guy So your first instinct is to not make waves, to be as understanding as possible, you are friendly, you are nice. As long as you Smile you are Nice. You see something that makes you uncomfortable and you let it pass, because we’re all friends! So that something is passed around, it’s multiplied, other people, it becomes established. The implications of why it made you uncomfortable becomes clear as an aphobic notion takes root. What was now one misinformed statement is now a war. WOULD your nice guy, because they are so nice, really want that? Would they really want to harm the a-spec community? If they would, well then they’re not so nice, if they wouldn’t, then in the end you are helping them and yourself out.

[entergamingxp]

Gears Tactics is more Gears of War than you think • Eurogamer.net

You can do the Gears of War slide into cover slam in Gears Tactics, and honestly that would probably have been enough for me to say ‘yes please’ to this spin-off. But the developers at Splash Damage haven’t just plopped slide-to-cover in this top-down, turn-based tactical twist on gaming’s most famous cover shooter. They’ve made it useful.

You see, if you slide into cover in Gears Tactics, your unit gets a little bonus distance. It’s the game’s equivalent of that cover-hugging crouch walk we’re so used to seeing Marcus Fenix, the Cole Train and, more recently, Kait Diaz perform with the camera placed in third-person. And it tells you all you need to know about how Gears Tactics feels to play: yes, it’s Gears of War meets XCOM, but Tactics wants you to keep pushing forward. It wants you to move your units up and get in the face of the Locust. As far as these sorts of XCOM-style turn-based games go, Gears Tactics is relatively fast-paced. Hunkering down and waiting for the Locust to swarm you will do you and your units no good. Best to take the fight to them.

Gears Tactics has genre staples, such as chance to hit, overwatch and actions per turn.

Across the board the mechanics nudge you to go aggressive. Gears Tactics does not play out on a grid. The maps are open, and you can move your units anywhere, which lends movement a fluidity you don’t often get from the genre.

Most turn-based tactical games let each unit move and shoot each turn and that’s about it. Gears Tactics gives each unit three actions per turn by default, and you can use them in any combination: moving, shooting, class skills, whatever. Three actions isn’t the sexiest of features, but it gives you plenty of scope to do some interesting stuff with your units each turn. Strategists should find it liberating.

Interestingly – and in keeping with the game’s more aggressive playstyle – you can use a unit’s secondary weapon (a Snub pistol, for example) to interrupt an enemy’s overwatch, opening up a flanking route that was previously impossible. This Disabling Shot ability is available to every unit, and while it has an eight turn cooldown, it can swing momentum your way.

Oh look, it’s a Brumak.

Gears’ trademark gory executions are in Tactics and yet another example of the game pushing players forward (yes, you can carve a Locust in half with a Lancer). Nail an execution and you’ll buff your entire squad, adding up to three actions across the team. Rolling forward and creating momentum helps you push your turn farther and take down more enemies – and this really is the name of the game.

All this should make Gears Tactics feel a bit faster than your average turn-based tactical game, which makes a lot of sense for a Gears game, I think. The main Gears series is no slouch, of course. It’s an action shooter series known for chucking tonnes of horrible beasts at a small squad of beefy soldiers who must keep on the move – and behind cover – to survive. Gears Tactics does its best to replicate that feel in the turn-based genre, but this is not simply reserved to the combat. You can tell Splash Damage has tried its best to work out how to put as much of what we know and love of the main Gears series into Tactics. A surprising amount has made the cut.

Gears cutscenes, for example, are in – and they look fantastic. Good enough to be in a mainline Gears game, in fact. You get a cutscene before a mission starts and when it ends, and occasionally in the middle. Cutscenes mean story, of course. Gears Tactics is a canonical prequel to the first Gears of War game. It stars a group of soldiers who find themselves in a bad situation against impossible odds – pretty much par for the course in the world of Gears. The protagonist is a rather vanilla-looking COG called Gabe Diaz – Kait Diaz’s father, in fact. He has to track down the Locust mad scientist, a chap called Ukkon, all the while the government kicks off the Hammer of Dawn programme in a desperate last ditch attempt to wipe the Locust out. It doesn’t sound like the greatest story ever told, but Gears fans who fuss over the Carmine family tree will probably get a kick out of it.

The story takes place 12 years before the first Gears of War.

The idea is you gather a group of soldiers as you make your way through the story. You’ll recruit the main characters, of course, but there are plenty of procedurally-generated soldiers to snap up, too – and you can name them. The hope is you’ll grow attached to certain soldiers, and care about their fate in battle. You’ll build a history with your favourites, cheering on their attempts to hit the enemy even when the odds are against them, and crying when they bite the dust. All this will be familiar to anyone who’s played XCOM, but I’m glad it’s in Gears Tactics all the same.

Gears Tactics is a single-player only game (there is no multiplayer of any kind, either co-op or competitive), which I think makes sense for the genre. Firaxis’ XCOM has multiplayer but it’s almost besides the point. Much better to focus on a deep campaign and single-player modes, than to offer a multiplayer no-one cares about.

To that end, complete the Tactics campaign and you unlock extra modes, such as a veteran mode and an Ironman mode, the latter of which makes your choices permanent. Also, Microsoft plans to add challenges and optional objectives to remixed versions of the campaign levels to keep players coming back. There’s no fixed endpoint to the game, I’m told.

It’s expected there will be plenty of progression and collectibles left for players to fuss over once the story is finished, anyway. Each unit has three different armour slots: helmet, torso and legs, and there are loads of armour sets to chase. There are five classes, each with more than 30 unique skills and a signature weapon (Gabe is a support class and so carries a Lancer). That weapon has four slots of its own for mods that change the stats of the weapon and, in some instances, add new skills to the unit. Tactics lets you change the configuration of a weapon – a first for the Gears series. So, for example, you can extend the mag on a Lancer, or change your scope. There’s plenty to work towards when it comes to the units, powerful builds made up of all sorts of armour, skill tree combinations and weapon mods, and plenty of that will be chased post-game.

There are plenty of skills to unlock as you progress through the campaign.

There are loads of cosmetics to unlock, too. I’m shown COGs in all sorts of outlandish colour schemes, with various armour patterns and metals, from beat up to chrome. There’s a whiff of Warhammer 40,000 to the cosmetic customisation on offer. If you want your squad to coordinate when it comes to their armour, you can make that happen.

I am surprised to learn there are no microtransactions in Gears Tactics, given the scope for cosmetics. So, if you want new and extra equipment, you have to go out of your way to open cases dotted about the levels. Some of these will be on your way and relatively easy to find. Others will not, and you’ll need to think about the risk that comes with chasing rewards.

I am also surprised to learn that Gears Tactics launches on PC but not on Xbox One at launch. Gears Tactics is also built from the ground up as a PC game, I’m told, with all the PC graphics options you’d expect. There’s a Tac-Com, off by default, that displays all the numbers and stats you could possibly want on the battlefield. And while an Xbox One version is promised, it’s clear Microsoft is gunning for a PC audience here.

Missions end with big boss fights – just as they do in the main series.

My gameplay demo ends with a fight against a Corpser, Gears’ huge, spider-like monstrosities fans of the series will be familiar with. (In Tactics there’s a boss fight at the end of each act, just as there is in the main Gears series.) This fight works as it should – the Corpser’s legs are rock hard, so you need to wait until it exposes its innards before dealing damage. All the while, Locust units assault you, and Emergence Holes erupt from the ground. How do you deal with an E-Hole in Gears Tactics? Just like you do in the main Gears games: lob a frag grenade in it.

Gears Tactics throws a lot at you, then. But so it should. I don’t want XCOM in a Gears of War skin. I want interesting mechanics and a unique twist. A Gears of War twist. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t look like Gears Tactics is rewriting the turn-based rule book. But it’s doing enough to make me want to give it a shot.

Gears Tactics launches 28th April 2020 on Steam, the Microsoft Store, and Xbox Game Pass for PC.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/gears-tactics-is-more-gears-of-war-than-you-think-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gears-tactics-is-more-gears-of-war-than-you-think-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[it-is-whaat-it-is]

The Future Of Help With Paying Apartment Rent For Free

According to federal housing guidelines, any type of family that places greater than 30% of their income towards lease are "cost strained." This indicates they may have trouble paying for other needs.

She included that there are individuals that spend upwards of 40 or 50% of their earnings on lease. "It leaves them at risk if their car breaks down, or their children obtain unwell.

That held true for Mandy. When they had to get her auto taken care of, she and also her partner had already exhausted their financial savings for their step. Mandy estimates that they were paying close to 50% of their shared revenue towards rental fee.

" We didn't have any kind of savings to draw on," Mandy states, adding that conserving also $20 per income (as Scherler suggests) was exceptionally tough for the pair at the time.

Financial obstacles prevail Only 39% of Americans can pay for a $1,000 monetary emergency situation out of their financial savings, according to a recent survey from Bankrate.

The exact same Bankrate survey found that of those who can not pay for a $1,000 financial emergency out of savings, their remedy is to:

Financing with a charge card (19%). Lower their investing on other points (13%). Borrow loan from friend or family (12%). Obtain a personal lending (5%). There are many reasons that a person might be in need of temporary assistance and also would certainly wish to know how to obtain aid with rent. Volunteers of America (VOA) is a national nonprofit organization that helps individuals discover inexpensive housing, specifically experts, elderly people, family members and individuals with handicaps. VOA has recognized these reasons for the rise in requirement:.

Wages are not increasing at a symmetrical price to the regularly raising residential property values and reduced openings prices. Building worths and also rent out remain to boost at a rate that renters can't keep up with, leading to have problem with paying lease. Progressively long waiting checklists for subsidized real estate. Waitlists of 2-3 years for low-income households as well as songs make paying rental fee in greater rental units more difficult. While the problem may get on the rise, there are methods to increase loan for rent.

How to obtain help with rent. 1. Read your lease. Learn your rights as a renter. Want to see what happens if your repayment is late or if you miss a month, and when eviction procedures would certainly begin.

Typically, it takes 90 days before eviction process begin, Scherler claims, so there is a long time to work with.

" If you miss one lease settlement, however make your adhering to month's repayment, you might not be evicted," Scherler says.

2. Speak to your property manager. They might be willing to function with you if you are a great occupant as well as have a great connection with your proprietor. Ask if they will certainly accept a late repayment or if you can pay your lease in installments.

3. Reach out to nonprofits. When the government can not, nonprofit companies can load the demand for aid. Both Catholic Charities and The Salvation Military may be able to give emergency funds to pay your lease and also utility costs. If you meet their needs for financial aid, get in touch with your neighborhood Redemption Military or Catholic Charities to find out. With The Redemption Army, candidates consult with a caseworker as part of the procedure.

Another choice is calling 2-1-1, a 24-hour helpline carried out by United Manner in which attaches people looking for assistance to sources in their neighborhoods.

Of the 15 million emails and also phone calls asking 2-1-1 for help in 2017, 4.4 million were for real estate as well as utility assistance. That call volume was the highest possible percentage of any category, Scherler claims.

" I assume, sadly, real estate is a tough one," Scherler claims. "That is a big difficulty in a great deal of areas.".

An additional nationwide nonprofit organization that offers assistance is Modest Demands, which supplies gives for a single emergency situation cost.

Individuals have to request a grant with Modest Requirements. If authorized, the not-for-profit posts the give demand on its web site as well as allows donors to review and sustain the give requests that matter most to them. When the company funds a give demand, they remit repayment directly to the supplier displayed in the applicant's documents. Many requests obtain met within 2 weeks, Taylor says, as well as much of the grant applications involve covering living expenses that candidates can not pay for as a result of a temporary economic emergency situation.

4. Look into various other income sources. Ask your friends and family members for a loan or see if you can obtain a payroll advancement from your employer. Some companies might additionally have a challenge fund for staff members.

5. Take into consideration crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a great service. A great way to sharp loved ones to your situation is by beginning a charity event on GoFundMe. They offer totally free fundraising so you reach maintain more of the funds you raise.

6. Rental help for experts. The UNITED STATE Department of Veterans Affairs provides aid for homeless veterans if you're a veteran. Not-for-profit companies like Veterans Inc. may additionally have the ability to assist those who require aid with lease via its real estate program. The federal government has a program to supply financing to create as well as subsidize reduced earnings rental real estate for adults with disabilities if you're handicapped.

7. Federal government aid. The federal government provides only restricted assistance to pay emergency situation lease prices. The federal division of Real estate and also Urban Development offers aid via its housing option vouchers program, but there are commonly long waiting lists, Scherler says.

The government does provide some emergency situation financing. It's usually provided through the state companies, but unless you're facing expulsion, the assistance is hard to obtain.

" You practically need to get to the point of situation before you have the ability to get aid," Scherler says.

A rent situation can indicate a much deeper need. By having a look at the large image when confronted with an one-time, emergency situation cost, individuals can prevent years of economic battle.

For Mandy, her rental fee struggle was an indicator that she and also her partner required more aid to manage than they wanted to admit. They had been taking into consideration getting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (frequently referred to as SNAP), however their monetary situation triggered them to look for aid right now.

" We really felt horrible," Mandy says. "We wanted so badly to be self-dependent, but we simply could not make it function.".

There are a variety of complimentary resources readily available if you are in a circumstance like Mandy's, and lots of continue to supply assistance after the crisis has actually passed.

Volunteers of America has the complying with guidance if you require help paying your lease:.

Take an active duty in developing an activity plan to end your dilemma circumstance with long-lasting as well as temporary options. Avoid overlooking the trouble up until the eleventh hour. Don't panic or make breakout decisions, as there are area resources and also supports in place to obtain you via this scenario. Think about taking cost-free budgeting courses to determine just how to pay your rent, or if you require to discover a more affordable location to live. " If you have this sneaking suspicion that following month you could not make the lease, you require to begin looking today," Taylor says. "It is necessary to be positive and also truly venture out there.".

There's no embarassment in asking for help. No matter if you're requesting help through a not-for-profit company, close friends or family, or crowdfunding, do not really feel self-conscious.

" Everybody falls on tough times," Mandy claims. "It happens to even more of us than individuals recognize.".

If you're battling as well as need to elevate money for rental fee, take a deep breath. Sometimes we all require a little help.

There are many reasons that a person might be in need of short-term aid and also would want to understand just how to get aid with lease. Volunteers of America (VOA) is a national not-for-profit organization that aids individuals discover budget-friendly real estate, specifically experts, senior citizens, households and individuals with impairments. Not-for-profit organizations can fill the demand for aid when the government can not. Nonprofit organizations like Veterans Inc. might additionally be able to help those that need help with rent with its housing program. Often we all require a little aid.