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This machine kills AI

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crazy that in the 1970s they were like, "fine, women can play sports. but because they're innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less 😊". And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis

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Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?

Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.

What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?

Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!

And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.

This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.

It's working. Keep going.

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Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

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I'd like to add a coping tactic I use, because while treating my depression did a very good job of alleviating anhedonia most of the time, it still shows up now and then, and this is the best way of managing my life around it I've figured out. This shouldn't be taken as a "don't bother seeking treatment, just do this instead", this is an ADDITIONAL coping strategy to add to your toolbox for when you're experiencing active anhedonia and are aware of that fact but aren't able to quickly make it stop.

When anhedonia is kicking my butt and it's impossible to enjoy things, I spend my time (that isn't spent resting or otherwise maintaining my body, because skimping on basic self-care like rest, food, hydration, and hygiene just because you feel like nothing is worth doing right now only leads to feeling worse in the near future) doing mildly annoying, but not difficult, chores.

Difficult tasks can be particularly frustrating when dealing with anhedonia because anhedonia does nothing to blunt negative emotions, only positive ones, so you're dealing with the difficulty in full intensity but lacking the ability to feel satisfaction with your progress or success in completing the task.

Typically-enjoyable activities can feel frustrating as well when the usual feelings of enjoyment fail to manifest.

The thing that doesn't give any additional feelings of frustration is maintenance chores, because doing them feels pretty meh anyway. No one really loves doing the laundry, vacuuming, taking out the trash, scrubbing the toilet, but odds are good you're used to these tasks and don't find them particularly difficult or excessively onerous except when the need to do them impedes you from doing a more-enjoyable activity. So, if you're going to be anhedonic today and unable to enjoy activities like normal, you might as well get the mildly annoying stuff done now so that when your ability to feel enjoyment comes back online, you can go actually enjoy it, free of annoying little maintenance tasks hanging over your head.

It won't make you feel better. There's no magic in a clean toilet that unlocks your ability to feel satisfaction at the accomplishment of a task when your brain is being an asshole about doing the normal satisfaction thing. But it CAN make you feel less despairing, because being unable to enjoy things AND recognizing that you didn't even get anything done today while you weren't enjoying your free time is a double frustration hit, while thinking "well, today was incredibly meh but at least my chores are done for now" is a more-positive mental state. And while doing it, "regular little chore" and "usually-enjoyable relaxation activity" feel nearly exactly the same when anhedonia is flaring up.

A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.

Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.

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The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

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Yaaaaas 😍

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Canon Submissive And Breedable Catboy Ed Teach

One of my favorite things they did in s2 was how they gave us everything we needed to be able to tag fics where Ed is the sweetest sub to ever sub as 100% canon compliant. He was out there wearing a little kitty collar with a bell, asking his captain to give him the mean voice, and swaying his shoulders cutely to indicate he wanted a kiss and make his collar jingle. Obviously everyone can write whatever dynamics speak to them, but that's all canon. No one can ever take that away from us.

#ofmd

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"It hurt to lose to Ronald Reagan. But after the election, I tried to make the transition as smooth as possible. Later, from my experience in trying to brief him on matters of supreme importance, I was very disturbed at his lack of interest. The issues were the 15 or 20 most important subjects that I as President could possibly pass on to him. His only reaction of substance was to express admiration for the political circumstances in South Korea that let President Park close all the colleges and draft all the demonstrators. That was the only issue on which he came alive."

-- Former President Jimmy Carter, on losing the 1980 election and the transition leading to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, interview with TIME Magazine, October 11, 1982.

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A hiker, clearly shaken, enters a remote English village pub, his clothes all torn and he's full of scratches. 

"You won't believe this," he says to the bartender. "I was attacked by a leopard!"

"Really?"

"Yes! A leopard! In England!" The hiker sits down and orders the strongest liquor they've got. "I tried to run, but it was if course much faster than me."

The hiker gets his glass, empties it, and asks for another. "It sent me to the ground with a mighty push from its paws, but weirdly enough it then just gave me a really sad look and left."

"Ah, you met Father Andrews," the bartender says, matter-of-factly.

"What do you mean?" asks the tourist, confused.

"Father Andrews was our priest. A truly kind-hearted man, loved by all. His only goal in life was to serve his congregation as well as he could. So when he one day found a lamp with a genie, his very first wish was to be a loving shepherd to the community."

"That's nice "

"Absolutely, if only he hadn't been so prone to spoonerisms."

#laugh rule

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"ERM you follow this person who interacted with this person who reblogged from this person who is friends wit-"

my sibling in Christ do something productive with your time. draw, jerk off. do SOMETHING!!!

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Keep seeing pronoun positivity posts is about he/they and she/theys. That's cool and all but this one's for the she/hes. If you're a she/he I love you and you can take as much mint as you want from our garden

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It is deeply, deeply beneficial to TERFs if the only characteristic of TERF ideology you will recognize as wrong, harmful, or problematic is "they hate trans women".

TERF ideology is an expansive network of extremely toxic ideas, and the more of them we accept and normalize, the easier it becomes for them to fly under the radar and recruit new TERFs. The closer they get to turning the tide against all trans people, trans women included.

Case in point: In 2014-2015, I fell headlong into radical feminism. I did not know it was called radical feminism at the time, but I also didn't know what was wrong with radical feminism in the first place. I didn't see a problem with it.

I was a year deep into this shit when people I had been following, listening to, and looking up to finally said they didn't think trans women were women. It was only then that I unfollowed those people, specifically; but I continued to follow other TERFs-who-didn't-say-they-were-TERFs. I continued ingesting and spreading their ideas- for years after.

If TERFs "only target trans women" and "only want trans women gone", if that's the one and only problem with their ideology and if that's the only way we'll define them, we will inevitably miss a vast majority of the quiet beliefs that support their much louder hatred of trans women.

As another example: the trans community stood relatively united when TERFs and conservatives targeted our right to use the correct restroom, citing the "dangers" of trans women sharing space with cis women. But when they began targeting Lost Little Girls and Confused Lesbians and trotting detransitioners out to raise a panic about trans men, virtually the only people speaking up about it were other transmascs. Now we see a rash of anti-trans healthcare bills being passed in the US, and they're hurting every single one of us.

When you refuse to call a TERF a TERF just because they didn't specifically say they hate trans women, when you refuse to think critically about a TERF belief just because it's not directly related to trans women, you are actively helping TERFs spread their influence and build credibility.

#'estrogen makes people calm/kind/happy' *bitter laugh in PMDD that was only relieved by progesterone-only BC* #y'all don't wanna know how extremely NOT calm/kind/happy estrogen makes me #to be blunt it makes me a raging asshole and the experience sucks for me even more than it sucks for others who have to be around me #important to remember it does not do this to everyone! But it DOES do this to me personally #(I never got officially diagnosed with PMDD but I know I very much qualified for that diagnosis. I just never pursued it #bc I had good insurance that covered getting an IUD to stop my periods anyway and PP doesn't gatekeep a person's reasons for wanting that #and like. The goal was making the bullshit knock it off. If I could do that with less hassle & fewer appointments so much the better!) #anyway I originally planned to get a combination BC but after a consultation with the PP doc I found out that estrogen treats me SO badly #that I'm medically contraindicated from adding any more of it to my system than my system naturally produces! #and that was without even going into full detail about my PMDD symptoms!

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This might suck to hear, but if you're a people pleaser that is motivated by praise and avoids disagreements, you are easy to manipulate.

When I was in therapy after surviving years of domestic violence, my therapist had to tell me that my personality was primed for abuse and we needed to work on that so I would be better equipped to see the red flags and respond appropriately in the future.

I'm still working on this, and it's been 8 years. If you tell someone how you want to be treated, what behaviors you don't tolerate in your life, what you're looking for in that relationship, and they react negatively, don't compromise yourself. Just move on.

This one's for all the praise-kink girlies: differentiate, self-actualize, stay sexy

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i need people do do me a favor and be absolutely normal about it

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I need to tap a sign that says “Just because you have a lack of experience with the kinky and sensual and thus experience discomfort with it does not make it morally reprehensible, and in acting that way you’re only playing into the hands of people who want to use that as a means by which to decimate queer communities”

It’d be a big sign.