#this is entirely personal and literally just me complaining so i'm gonna stick it under a cut

[byanyan]

me, a 30 y/o who has gradually grown more and more reclusive over the years, unable to hold a job for more than a month and unable to finish any schooling despite many attempts, who struggles immensely with social situations to the point of avoiding everything, has been misdiagnosed w/ bpd in the past, & been in treatment for depression & anxiety for nearly 2 decades atp: so i think i'm autistic

the psychiatrist i only got in to see after suffering a severe mental/emotional breakdown for the second time in my life: ok well most physicians don't do assessments for that anymore, you'd have to go private and pay around $5000 to find out

me: surprisedpikachu.jpg

[maxdurden]

tagged by @deadchannelradio! thanks!! i'll always take the opportunity to talk ad nauseam about music i'm listening to lol

shuffle your on repeat playlist (on spotify) and list the first 10 songs and then tag 10 people

1. Pigs is Pigs by Mannequin Pussy — what an incredible first pull. uhm. sorry for the screamo ass punk music but also consider that i literally JUST saw them in concert and this song goes so hard. it's not sung by their front woman (who totally deserves her flowers), but i LOVE colins' vocals. not a lyric in the song, but what he said at the concert was 'we don't need police, we need community' and fuck yes. this is such a good band if you have an opportunity to see them in concert do it holy fuck they're so good haha 😬👍

2. American Teenager by Ethel Cain — i know exactly two (2) ethel cain songs but this one goes hard what can i say. peak speeding down the highway singing at the top of your lungs music (don't speed, dive safe kids)

3. Control by Mannequin Pussy — it's gonna be a lot of mannequin pussy on here,,,,,,, lmao. this song is great tho!

4. Too Sweet by Hozier — there's probably gonna be a lot of hozier on here too lol. he released new music which always makes me ill, but also unreal unearth unheard has been sooo good for the oc's i've recently been throwing around like ragdolls in my head lol

5. I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy — 'and what if jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?' need i say more? this is maybe one of their best songs lol

6. Smog by Indigo De Souza — everyone go listen to all of indigo de souza's music RIGHT. NOW. thanks :)

7. Clean Slate by The Mountain Goats — this is another band that released a new album recently(ish) and i've just been a bit ill about some of the songs. the trumpets are especially fun in this one lol

8. Ptolemaea by Ethel Cain — okay so stick with me on this one. it's a great song first of all (insane that it's on the same album as american teenager lmao but go off ethel) but i've mostly been listening to it for oc purposes. this oc is kinda a vessel for working through feelings about gods and faith, and the way that both gods and the faithful need each other and shape each other. essentially,,, in a universe where gods are sustained by the faith of their followers, what happens when all but one of their followers is wiped out. in what ways do those two entities change and warp and love and destroy each other. ya know. just coping with senior year of college things tbh. anyway it's a great song :3

9. Apollo by Momma — this song has fun instrumentation, makes brain go brr. also!!! very on theme for the previously mentioned oc and thinking about gods and the weird relationships you can have with them.

10. Same as Cash by The Mountain Goats —IN YOUR CAR WITH YOUR HEAD IN YOUR HANDS AT THE FAR END OF THE WALMART PARKING LOT, TRYING NOT TO BUCKLE UNDER THE STRAIN, STRIKING A BARGAIN WITH THE IMP IN YOUR BRAIN, PREPAIRED TO TAKE ANOTHER KNOCK FOR THE SHORT GANG, BUT YOU CAN ASK ANY VETERAN RUNNING BACK, EVENTUALLY YOUR JOINTS COMPLAIN. this song is so special to me no one will ever understand it like i do (only bitches who have worked long hours at an understaffed walmart during the pandemic while couch surfing bc you just left your shitty home situation will ever understand what john is trying to say here like i do tbh. entirely possible john doesn't even understand it like i do [this is a joke. art is personal and always ripe for meaningful and individual interpretation. pls don't shoot me]). but everyone should listen to it anyway, the violins and piano are so so fun and good

hahaaaa i told you i could talk soo much about the music i like, unfortunately for y'all

@darkravenstag @thrustin-timberlake @mitebitmurderous @johaerys-writes @sabrirene @sarcasticbeanie @seethestarsalittlecloser @sleeperagentclone @notacluedo @alive-ontheinside

(no pressure ofc!!! and if you don't have spotify i say just go hog wild and talk about songs you've been enjoying no one can stop you)

[ming-sik]

@xenodogz ok replying is getting unwieldy im gonna go by your arguments point by point:

we do fundamentally disagree, i think that if someone sees something about "discourse" it is in fact their responsibility to find out what the discourse actually is before posting a long wildly incorrect theory about it being unprompted prejudice. personally if i hear that someone's mad at me i do usually try to find out why before i form my opinion on the situation and i don't think that's too much to ask! if someone can't be bothered to form an informed opinion why bother forming an opinion at all?

you've continued to not respond to the original point of the original discussion: it was literally framed as a test. the reason the screenshot was provided on its own was to test whether or not the reader can recognize this specific red flag by picking up on context clues, which are available in the original post. people don't always have signs on their head that say "i'm going to emotionally exploit you" so it's important to at least be able to recognize that something is suspicious and question a potential partner to make sure you're not putting yourself in a vulnerable position and they're being honest with you. you and a lot of other people failed the test, which doesn't mean you're stupid, but doubling down and blaming the tester for not giving you the answer kinda is. also can you decide if people were just saying The Guy was maybe aromantic OR if nobody was defending him OR if he wasn't relevant at all OR if the situation seemed fine without the context. it kind of seems like whether The Guy was defensible/relevant or not hinges entirely on which option bolsters your individual points. also what do you MEAN the origin of the discourse wasn't relevant. what? of course it's relevant that people originally misinterpreted the situation to use cishet aro dudes as a shield for a misogynist!

"nobody was saying it was arophobic to be upset at the guy" yes they were that was, again, the origin of the discourse. like defending him by saying "well maybe he's just aro and wants to be exclusive fwb for STD safety" w/o mentioning the presenting romantic relationships are more serious and feeling entitled to exclusivity when hes not taking it seriously, and doubling down when the people who recognized the red flags were proven right, is using cishet aro guys as a shield for misogyny which is my sticking point.

how is it not hurting cishet aro guys to, again, be used as a gotcha for people complaining about misogynists? that was the original problem. cishet aro men were not originally being attacked, so by responding to criticism of misogyny with "leave cishet aro guys alone" anyone who came into the discussion without a strong familiarity with the differences between cishet aro guys and misogynists who use 'relationship' as code for 'respect' would get the impression that if That Guy "might be aromantic" that this is standard behavior for cishet aro guys, which i would say is much more damaging than people complaining about that first thing.

yeah i saw the other poll i mentioned it in my first post. as someone who was following the original discussion i maintain that it's extremely bad faith to characterize things as them attacking cishet aro men without the context "after people defended a misogynist because he might be cishet aro".

in general i'm concerned about the current state of discussion in the aro & ace communities due to the same things you're presenting as counterarguments. i dislike seeing the only things in the aro tag being banal positivity or people weighing in on conversations through a game of endless telephone. this climate makes us extremely vulnerable to bad actors who can frame harmful things as an attack on aro people under the knowledge that most people won't challenge that, and forms a loop where people are incentivized not to get better at theory, ultimately making the community a worse place to be in. if the aro community had a healthy discussion scene the original people misinterpreting the situation either would've passed the test because they'd be educated about this type of abuse from the aro position of people who have to deal with potential partners who think no relationship =/= no respect, or would've been in a mindset to re-evaluate when they turned out to have failed to pick up on the signs being discussed. instead a bunch of people willfully misinterpreted an unrelated thing and then the entire aro tag for a week was people furthering the game of telephone. there's a third option beyond "nuclear wasteland of unproductive arguments" and "uncritical refusal to engage with anything except positivity".

in conclusion,

honestly it's just frustrating. you have people finding misogynistic cishet dudes and defending their emotional neglect of their sexual partners because it superficially resembles aromanticism even when the men themselves do not identify as aromantic and are often neglecting their sexual partners specifically because they view a girlfriend as the only type of woman who deserves any type of effort and so if the chick they're fucking isn't their girlfriend they can treat her like dirt. and then when people are rightly like "hey fuck you for defending a misogynist" the same people who claimed the cishet guy who never at any point claimed to be aromantic was aromantic and therefore criticizing his misogyny is arophobia go into the aro tags to despair at how many people HATE aromantics so they can whip a bunch of bystanders into a frenzy because they've heard that people are discrediting aromanticism, and therefore are encouraged to read the original unrelated posts or people getting pissed at someone defending emotional abuse by calling it aromanticism in bad faith or not at all, and so you get a mountain of people theorizing that the attack on cishet aro men was manufactured by TERFs instead of people who think that girls who date guys deserve dudes who don't see them as a freelance contractor they can expect sex from without having to treat them with the bare minimum respect they feel a girlfriend is owed.

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

i'm confused about the JK Rowling thing. I mean surely not every story has to represent everyone right? I get that people are upset with the way she's responding, but why were they attacking her in the first place? Is it because it's so wildly popular that people think it should be more inclusive? I can understand that, but how would she have known that in the beginning? I don't know i guess i'm clouded by my white privilege but i don't quite understand what people want from her at this point.

I know what you mean, anon. Although I’ve been part of the HP fandom on here since I first created my Tumblr account, I don’t consider myself actively involved in it (by which I mean that I avoid current topics/gossip/drama), but for years I’ve been aware of the voices of the fans questioning JKR’s lack of representation in Harry Potter. It’s exploded again recently because of the reveal of Nagini as a person (more specifically, a Korean woman) in the new FBAWTFT film and there’s a post here that you can read that explains that. 

Warning, discussion below on sensitive topics regarding representation of minorities, race/racism, sexuality/homophobia, disability and colonialism. 

Firstly, you are right that no story has to represent everyone, because that would be impossible. The truth of it is that any writer has the agency and choice to write the characters and story they want to. Speaking from a personal perspective as someone that loves to write and is a straight, white girl with no disabilities or part of any minority group (that I’m aware of), it is significantly more challenging to write characters that are from minority groups. The reason for that is because I myself do not identify or fit into any of those labels (I can’t think of a more appropriate word, so I’m gonna stick with labels, forgive me if it’s a poor choice of word), so I don’t completely understand what it is to be gay or black or physically disabled and what if I can’t bring justice to a character that is those things? What if I offend someone that reads it that is gay, black or disabled? And these are the kind of issues that representation can pose for writers. Having said that, all of this can be resolved with one simple word - research. In my case, it’s very different because I only write for fun and recreational purposes (although there’s always a certain level of research that goes into my writing), but for a professional author, they should be working their asses off to do research to ensure they do their characters justice. 

Personally, I think concerns over representation being raised are always valid. We live in a world where there are more voices speaking out against injustices and particularly, injustices that are more subtle or that have been normalised and widely accepted, such as the lack of representation in popular culture. Having said that, I don’t agree with sending hate and/or being violent or aggressive in raising those concerns and at times, I think the HP fandom can be guilty of that. 

As I pointed out to the tags in my post, I really don’t think JKR did anything wrong in not having diverse representation in her books for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is that she simply wrote characters that were relatable to her and that she was in touch with in her daily life. It’s important to bear in mind the context of the time in which she was writing - people, particularly young people, seem to forget how much progress has been made in such a short time and how much more liberal societies (I’m particularly referring to the UK here, since that’s where I live and JKR lives) have become over the last few decades. When I was a child I didn’t know anyone that identified as anything but straight until I was around 19/20 years old and then slowly I had friends and people around me that came out as gay, bi and pan; I didn’t meet anyone that was trans until I was 22 years old; at my school I only knew one child that was physically disabled; at my primary school there was only one child that wasn’t white. 

Obviously I can’t comment on JKR’s personal character since I don’t know her and I don’t follow her or engage with her through social media, but the lack of representation doesn’t immediately mean she’s inherently racist or homophobic or biphobic or erasing any kind of minority group deliberately. She was just writing what she knew. But what I said and you have agreed with is that she hasn’t handled things right. Her reactions to fans complaints have sometimes been childish and the Nagini incident shows that she’s grasping at straws to try and pacify people by providing them with the representation everybody is asking for, but it’s only making things worse for all the reasons the post I linked above explains. 

However, shifting away from the whole JKR drama and reflecting on what you said about white privilege - it’s a topic that I’ve been researching a lot recently for educational purposes (this is really just my opportunity to discuss an area of research I’m thoroughly enjoying and finding fascinating, so I apologise in advance if you don’t care about any of this lmao). I’m currently studying a module at university about Jim Crow in South America which is an exploration of black history in America starting from Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War right up until the 1970s (I think near the end of the module we may even touch upon Black Lives Matter). I’m also researching for my dissertation which is about experiences of African American soldiers in the Vietnam War and what’s fascinating to me through the research I’ve been doing is the construct of race and ‘whiteness’. It’s an issue that’s too complex to explain, and you may not care or be interested, but the short version is that race biologically and scientifically does not exist. There is no biological differences (except external appearances) that separate a black/brown/yellow person from a white person, it has quite literally been constructed by European white colonialists and scientists as a way to suppress people of colour, usually for economic purposes. You might be wondering why this is relevant, but it’s because until about 2-3 years ago, as a white person I had no understanding or knowledge of race and how it impacts people’s entire lives - socially, economically and politically. You’re right that white privilege clouds your judgement, particularly when it comes to issues of race, it clouds the judgement of every white person in the world, but what’s worse is that most white people don’t even recognise that white privilege exists. I see so many white people around me in my daily life and on TV (the most recent example I saw was on Celebrity Big Brother UK, which made me so angry I could create an entirely different post on that) claim “racism doesn’t exist anymore” or “this is a equal society” and it infuriates me beyond belief. White people don’t see racism because they don’t experience it and they’re not living it. 

To finish on a final point that’s relevant to your original ask, at this point you’re right that there’s nothing JKR can do to make fans happy. When a series is as popular as Harry Potter and has such a huge fan-base, there is always going to be someone complaining about some aspect of it. If it wasn’t an issue of under-representation, it would only be something else. Nothing in this world is ever perfect and there’s always room for improvement. Honestly, I think the best thing for JKR to do is leave the Harry Potter universe the hell alone. The series is not without its problems, but generally it’s so well-loved by millions of people globally and the fact that she keeps trying to add/retcon certain aspects of the universe and/or characters is what’s frustrating fans more so than anything else. She should just admit that it doesn’t have the representation it could’ve had, learn from that and in any future projects, she can be more aware to be diverse with the characters she writes. 

[kaorei-endgame]

Have you gotten around to prey? If so, how does it compare to System Shock 2? Never played it, but I'm loving the hell out of Prey, more so than Dishonored or the Bioshock series.

It’s super good! And it hit me at the right time, which means I played it during a mega depresso binge over like three or four days.

It felt to me like this could’ve been a follow-up to System Shock 2 in some alternate universe where Bioshock never happened. Bioshock pared things down way too much for my tastes. This was like a midpoint between System Shock 2 and Dishonored in terms of systems, inventory management, stuff like that. You better believe I got SUPER hype when I killed the first enemy in the demo and found a research item I’d need a skill upgrade to harvest. That’s my bread and butter!

Don’t know exactly how to say this without spoiling it, but the trick they pull in the very beginning hit me like seeing an action movie constructed entirely out of practical effects would in this modern era where everything is CG blood. The tomfoolery with the helicopter ride. Them pulling the rug out from under you, then proceeding to show you how they manufactured the twist entirely in-universe, without, like, map-changing trickery was beyond rad. They could’ve just spoofed the helicopter ride with map changes, but instead you can walk around in the lab where the twist is deployed and see how all the pieces fit together It made me think “oh, they really cared about how tactile feel of this universe.” Essentially, they created a practical magic trick in a medium where it’s 10000% easier just to make literal magic. It spoke volumes about the ethos they were going for, that they worked hard to make all the pieces line up on something that a lot of people wouldn’t really even bother to think about too hard, or even care about if they did.

That’s present everywhere. When you start fighting mind-controlled crew members later in the game, they’re all named NPCs. There’s no like “mind-controlled crew,” it’s “Roger.” If, as I’m now told, we’re calling these games “immersive sims,” then this is about as immersed in one of these games as I’ve been in a long time. The touches are omnipresent, and touches are what make games stick in my mind after I get some time away and the gameplay hooks start to dull. Really early in the game, the first time you run into a stronger enemy than the standard mimics, it’s a spooky ghost monster but the spooky ghost monster is named “Yuki Sato” and later you can go to Yuki Sato’s room and paw through her stuff. The level design is Space Station Bland at points, but I can almost forgive it because they clearly put the effort into creating one big, confined space. Unlike Bioshock, where everything is segregated playpens with no sense of place in the greater world, when you eventually get to go out into space and see how all the pieces fit together, it’s a cool moment of realization that all the pieces really do fit together. That’s a commitment you don’t often see, especially these days. Before like six people told me they’re called Immersive Sims, I would think of games like this as “Dioramas.” They hit the exact right level of craft and verisimilitude to keep me interested. Not too tiny and scripted like a Gears corridor shooter, not too big and procedurally generated gunk like a Far Cry open world. The goldilocks of exploration.

I’m also totally sick of audio logs and want a moratorium on them almost across the board. I’m basically 180 on them and think the whole idea’s stupid because their purpose is to give you something to engage your brain while you’re rooting around trashcans, but practically speaking you have to sit still when you’re listening to them because the human brain actually doesn’t multitask well and it’s stupid to play the odds that you won’t run into a monster or get distracted by a hard to reach bauble and have to listen to the whole thing over again.

…..but the ones here were pretty solid. For one, it felt like they hit more character building notes and far less Expository Worldbuilding Gunk that I tune out on immediately because I know I’m gonna forget it as soon as the game’s over anyway and I’d rather save that brain space for, like, a book. For two… well, I try not to make super declarative statements on this stuff because I don’t feel like it’s 100% my place, but when people were talking up and being excited about the presence of queer relationships in this game, I assumed it was the usual case of having to do a lot of Rounding Up like to, y’know, pretty much always have to do in video games. 

So I was surprised that they gave you a couple fairly fleshed out queer characters whose plot was more than “yea I’m gay, super gay, all-the-time gay wanna fight about it,” was interesting. While I can’t shake the feeling that they gave your character a girlfriend because you could be a guy or a girl and people (especially gamers) are gonna be less gross about–well not less gross about but less angry gross about–lesbians than they are gay dudes, still, having that relationship play a fairly central part in the game beyond “Who You Choose To Bang 2/3rds Of The Way Through A Bioware RPG,” can’t be all bad, even if seeing the practical strings guiding that decision does get you kind of down about the state of things (slash-the-world-at-large).

I was disappointed in that part where you go into the lab and there’s post-it notes that say “not a mimic” on every single flask and coffee mug in the room and they didn’t pull the obvious trick of making one of the “not a mimic” post-its itself a mimic. To me, that seems like an extremely rude missed opportunity.

Really, the primary disappointment was the tech trees. I didn’t find almost any of the powers exciting, and I’m still craving that Shock 2 model of only having 4 super upgrade slots and for the 20-odd powers you could fit in them. Most of those powers were bad or useless, like “get more health from food,” or some crap, but that wasn’t the point! Some of them were cool things like “equip another cybernetic implant,” which were a huge boost. As always, I want far fewer upgrades that have far greater impact on how I act in the world. To an extent, getting mimic abilities did a little of that, but it was mostly for traversal. It’s that Path of Least Resistance thing I sometimes talk about–I didn’t really see much point in spending a bunch of time in the power wheel toggling around between my ability to launch enemies up in the air or mind control them or zap them when the shotgun and recycling grenades could handle almost everything without a fuss.

Likewise, the weapon upgrades were unspeakably dull. I was fine with them going with kind of a low-tech feel for the weapons, kind of like Half-Life, where the best you get is a shotgun and then a couple weird experimental science guns. It fit the theme. But I wish each weapon just had a couple of distinct, substantive upgrades (like I dunno, flaming shotgun shells or shotgun shells that shot alien bees) rather than the usual tepid “+1 to damage” and “+10% reload speed” that you just stack on without thinking about it. I just wish more games took the New Vegas approach of having individual accessories for each gun type, especially since those also applied aesthetic changes.

And the pacing’s weirdly back-loaded. I don’t know if that’s exactly something to complain about, but I played for like 20 hours essentially being alone with no one to talk to, like you do in these games sometimes, and then all of a sudden the next 10-15 hours are stuffed with NPCs and timed sidequests and stuff like that. I would’ve liked that to be spread out a little more just because my personal idiosyncrasies have me playing games like these at 120%++ in the initial hours (picking up every banana peel, reading every log twice, scouring the top of every bookshelf, unlocking every safe) that by the time they gave me more options to interact with the world, I’d burned myself out on most of it. I assume i’m far from the only person that does this, like I assume it’s pretty much the norm for the genre, so I wonder what the thought process was there–if it was anything beyond “we really want to keep the player isolated for as long as possible, because that’s what happens in these games.”

The twist itself, ehhh, you know. Once they hit you with that Trust No One vibe, you know the Trust No One x2 is coming at some point, so my initial guess on the ending right out of the gate was pretty much 80% correct when the credits rolled, but I didn’t feel bad for it. Because, like a magic trick, it’s about “how do all these actions line up??” rather than knowing the end result. Though I do think it was a bad call to give you a Bad End that’s accessible super early in the game and all but spells the final reveal out for you. The core conceit of the narrative (and the choices you make therein) not being based around “morality” but “empathy” hit a major chord with me. Even if I don’t think this is an end-all, be-all story, with video games, you kind of expect Nihilist and at best get Fatalistic. So to have Prey–a game about a Super Science Research Station Where Ethics Are Strictly Optional–poke and prod at compassion, and how it works, left me with a pleasant feeling. 

There’s this part where you go into a guy’s room and he’s got this gigantic, hand-crafted holographic diorama that, if you turn it off, there’s a chest behind it. I think I knew what I had to do to open it (it’s part of a similar secret earlier), but I couldn’t figure out how I had to do it, so I had to sit there and be like “do I wanna break this guy’s art to get his 60 credits or whatever?” And I don’t mean to be all Think Piece-y about it–because obviously I know people in video games are not real people–but I appreciate any time a game activates that fleeting instinct to be kind or preserve in me because I know there’s no permanence to anything I could do. Because like… I know people in books are not real people either, but I also get sad about them sometimes. To that end, recovering the composer’s symphonies was my favorite sidequest.

Prey got me at the right time. It’s got an aight sci-fi story, it’s got some fine trashcans to root around in, but what really invested me in it was the aesthetic choices and the cohesiveness of the world. I’d super ++++++ recommend it for anyone into Dishonored, Deus Ex, any of those games. Dishonored 2 had much better level and encounter design–Prey is a little too much on the Shock-style “random pipe zombie spawns to keep you on your toes at all times”–but the story/acting in it was kinda shit, so maybe it’s a wash. Anyway, if it’s within your budget of time/money, both are Capital G “Great++” games that you should get around to.

Tho I still super miss having to go around to the different science labs to correct the right minerals to research an enemy organ. Make a game where I have to pick up my Pb and Au to get that bonus damage to hybrids in 2017 (or beyond) and I’d be in heaven.