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devastating news for the discourse poster: “media literacy” in the modern age includes the ability to identify which posts are bait

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“google is free” actually now that you can’t turn off ai answers google is 5.6 billion gallons of water.

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something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

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New none pizza left beef just dropped

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Text recounting of the full events below but oh my god please watch this person explain the wildest thing happening to them

[image text]r/trueoffmychest post by CptnSpaceCase

Today my aide cooked what should not be cooked

I have to get this out, because today feels like an actual nightmare I keep expecting to wake up from.

I'm disabled, and need help with stuff around the house. Today was the second day with a new agency and new home health aide, "Tina." I set it up so she would come by in the morning while I'm sleeping (insomnia is killer), and I texted her last night what I would need done today.

One of those things was to roast some precut squash I'd gotten so I could have it with my salads and pasta. I was very clear in my instructions: what it looked like, where it was in the fridge, how to use the oven, how to cook it. I also have a roommate who was up and told her she could ask them for help if she couldn't find anything. Or come get me if truly necessary.

Now, I have three pet ball pythons. They eat rats that I thaw from frozen in the fridge in a reusable plastic bag. Yes, that's where I'm going with this.

Tina couldn't find the squash, and so, obviously, that meant she should roast the first other thing she could see that was technically also encased in plastic, in a completely different area of the fridge. The FUCKING RATS. In butter and salt, in my nice baking dish.

And like, that's insane all on its own, but if you're going to cook any animal, you should at least clean and skin it first, right??? Like, do the crazy, disgusting thing properly so I can respect the effort, instead of sticking them in as is. Fur and guts and all.

And the smell. Good God baby Jesus the SMELL. It woke me up and had me gagging the moment I opened my bedroom door. Definitely not squash. Or food-smelling for that matter. At first I thought the squash had spontaneously rotted overnight and she'd tried to cook it anyway. That would have been slightly less insane and much preferable.

I had to pull it out of her what she was cooking instead when she said she couldn't find it (it was in plain sight), had to open the oven and see my snakes' dinners in place of my own and still couldn't process what the fuck was happening, what I was looking at and smelling. I don't like yelling at people and generally avoid it. Today was a day for exceptions. And at the end of my half-crazed, dissociative rant, I told her to get the whole dish and its contents and herself out of the fucking house. And to not come back.

Suffice to say, I've contacted the agency to report it and am requesting a new aide. Now I'm sitting at a cafe trying to calm down and eat something despite the scent memory that's taken up permanent residence and turning my stomach. The whole house reeks like musty, sewage-dipped pork that had been left out for a whole day before being cooked in rancid oil, and I'm not sure Febreeze is gonna cut it. I don't want to go home. 🫠😭

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I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.

For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.

When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.

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donating my heavily annotated copy of house of leaves to the local library so that the person reading it gets a 5th layer of narrative to be confused by

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everyones a fucking critic

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I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff

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atheist quarterback throws a hail darwin

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There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

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the amongus crewmate really was a gift to humanity. the world had enough crudely drawn dicks on bathroom stall doors we needed another shape to instantly strike annoyance and discomfort in the viewer

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Here's a legal PSA:

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.

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crystal lupa, "spell weaver," 2024, oil and gold foil on linen

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The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“