#everyone being recognized as people and having actual positive experiences and legitimately Wanting to interact :(''

[unproduciblesmackdown]

it's not about that you "have" to get to exercise your autonomy. b/c like, yes you do, but not in the way that "if i don't get to do that Now i will explode & evaporate (& die)" which is what people keep leveraging to be like "so you don't have any valid argument for getting to act out your own choices"

therein is another issue of "why do you need a 'valid argument' to get Exceptions as ruled by this person to exist autonomously, unpunished" like why's this person an authority who gets to punish you. nonrhetorically, why do you have to appeal to their maybe possibly deciding to Let you be a person. should you "have" to.

and if you don't get that Permission that you supposedly "have" to get, you also will not immediately explode and die if you do that unpermitted thing, but shocking how "you don't Haaaave to" is only invoked re: things you want to do for yourself, and not what they want you to do for them....because it's Not Really About "Literally literally Haaaaving to"

the alignment between people getting on one for years about asexuality, and while doing so maxing out the saturation on their bullshit on any & everything, b/c you're just getting into anti autonomy, so ofc you're also just stoking & expressing "arguments" against autonomy that are deployed in plenty of other contexts, including against other queer identities....and that particular resonance with biphobia & transphobia, and how either groups are theoretically thwarting the Truest Gays because how will we have a valid argument against the truest cishets agenda if we can't convince them we haaaaaave to be like this instead of that no, we won't explode & die if we have to be repressed or at least closeted another day, and another, and you won't explode after another, either, etc. rather than thee point of "asexuality autonomy = queer autonomy = Your queer autonomy = Anyone's Autonomy" and "why do we 'have' to Convince anyone to go 'oh alriiiight' abt one's choices about how they express their identity, what decisions they make about having sex"....it's about anyone having the power to preclude & restrict others' autonomy & constrain their existence between one kind of more imminent, immediate harm/death & a more drawn out one where you exist as a resource for others' use but at least you aren't Literally dead today. so what if someone's saying "well i don't think your gender/sexuality stuff is Real" so long as they can't get in the way of other people living that out anyways. so what if someone's supposedly like "well, but everyone could be bi" (which they don't. just like ppl were never 'pretending' to be asexual to nefariously stand around in the queer space that never rigorously vetted everyone anyways? Making Up A Guy To Get Mad At) to supposedly argue that if all of you are bi you can just restrict yourself to the Cishet Appearing manifestations (which they don't) where what's that even matter if this [guy to get mad at] can't make that anyone else's problem? if he can, why can he. should he be able to. that's the problem, not "have we all tried the constant biphobia wherein they're always thwarting & sabotaging the rest of us?? like how trans people are keeping us from being legitimate?? with the opportunity for some trans people to also try declaring other noncis people Not Legitimately Trans?? well the cishet agenda loves asexuals, actually, they want everyone to never have sex ever (they don't want that, and that's not what being asexual is)"

using the "you can't Know through Direct Perception or extrasensory phenomena what someone else's Thoughts And Feelings are" both ways; wherein their assertion of their intentions, true or not, gets to be treated as an assertion of Reality, meanwhile b/c Your intentions/thoughts/feelings can't be directly observed, you're just lying or exaggerating or misremembering or failing to Express yourself correctly b/c they would've surely interpreted it correctly otherwise, or [anything else] re: your inner experiences that you can't "prove" are one way or another, so this other person gets to always decide for themself what they must be (why?) and if they just so happen to decide they Must be in alignment with what they want (good) or unacceptably, evilly, incorrectly Against Them, they also get to flex their control over the entire situation via their Authority / control over resources / the person's lack of other options b/c of isolation & that, say, breaking away from a family, job, marriage or just deemed correctly romantic relationship, is punished by the larger system of How Things Are, through a lack of resources that makes you more vulnerable in general as well as vulnerable to further punishment in how you might try to respond to that situation, through the general stance that maintaining cohesion of a Unit like the nuclear family, the "romantic" "man"/"woman" couple, is good, so breaking from it is deviant........anyways it's like. if you're like "well i'm having sex b/c i want to" and someone is like "well i say YOURE LYING" like, what? "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" shit. why should that get to affect things. whether you're like "oh no. what if they could say 'you're lying...b/c how do i knowwww you're not BI. where you could want to have sex with someone BESIDES this one person rn?? or ACE??? if you Don't have sex rn and you Don't explode and die 5 min later we will Know you Could Be Asexual" like, this isn't how it works anyways obviously but theoretically if it did: we would not be like "oh sorry guess that's what matters" unless what mattered was some people's being lower on a hierarchy and at the quite literal disposal of those with more power than them. what would the crisis be of someone going "well i think. every gay person? is bi" or someone going "you've just told me your name is gloria but i think your name is actually tetris...." or "i'm so embarrassed i wish everyone but me was dead" if none of these things can hinder the existence of people having sex w/autonomy for all involved or people getting to tell you their name or all other people being alive

the banger quote on my imdb page was saying "no, i don't 'Have' to, but i'm going to" to an authoritarian in my life, concluding several minutes' "negotiation" of [i 'have' to hang up on this call now b/c the movie i'm standing in this movie theater to see is about to start. no i won't explode and die if i don't. i also won't explode and die if i don't keep "talking" to you (being Talked At / lectured & upbraided from afar)] funny how that works. i also Know this was a checkmate b/c that person gave up on responding (or, technically, switched to The Silent Treatment, which worked even worse via phone than in person) and i did hang up rather than miss the movie i showed up for and then they had to resort to Other Methods: telling someone willing to take on the enabling cop mode that i had Essentially said Go Fuck Yourself. like well that's right, and the fact that it's a "go fuck yourself" to get to say "i am going to end the call b/c i choose to do something else" and then actually do so is a real testament to this relationship. and if one had said "i can't keep talking, i have to go" and someone's like "sldfj you mean thou MAY not keep talking" teehee i don't know, CAN you have the peas????? it's like this obviously doesn't matter. i can choose to do shit and choose to not do shit without exploding and dying right this very second, except for taking 5 sec to eat a deadly bomb with a timer set for 5 sec. This Is Not The Point. why is autonomy off-limits to Anyone.

#authoritarian parent whose silent treatments fail: anti crossdressing household law will get everyone to stop inconveniently Being People #spoilers: i continue to be a real life person; nonbinary; autistic; i continue to not engage in a relationship w/that parent b/c #Their choice was to have that relationship be the authority & the property. so the response to that: not being in that situation. #creating that kind of relationship & then being like ''why don't i get the Benefits of a different kind of relationship that is defined by #everyone being recognized as people and having actual positive experiences and legitimately Wanting to interact :('' #the autonomy to Not do something b/c you don't want to = the autonomy to Totally do something b/c you do want to #hence the idea of the True / Ideal Homosexual being ''but i Must Only have gay sex or i'll explode & die'' vs ''i feel like having gay sex' #yeah we ''could'' all be forced into binary genders & nuclear family units & be miserable & isolated but not literally explode. #but why should we. why would we. why can't we Not do that #hence as well that queer autonomy=everyone's autonomy. ppl who id as cishet? don't need to be Forced into that or into Awful Marriage Asap #but they do if we wanna isolate everyone / eliminate broader social support networks / restrict the autonomy to do anything else #asexuality handshake bisexuality. parallel to aromanticism handshake polyamory #and the backup to ''well but you won't literally die'' is to preclude Choice entirely by diverting the focus from [questioning ur choices] #to [questioning whether you have the capacity to make choices] as an extension. lens on ableism / disability justice is in Everything #not in like a ''huh. who'd've thought that overlapped'' Fun Fact way but in [you don't Understand that issue fully if you don't see ableism #someone's always getting to justify their authority by their Superior Ability vs others' Inferior/Absent Ability #saw that zany ''radical queer theory based on vibes is now that asexuals aren't queer'' streak definitely manifest ableism #a good ol fashioned ''asexuals won't consider What's Wrong With Them / try harder to seek some conversion therapy'' great stuff gang #or even more useless declarations of ''haha but most people Aren't ace. it's not Normal to not want to have sex. checkmate?'' #and what is your conclusion to that logic? ended up in ''ace ppl. are cringe!! & maybe not real!!!'' aaand what do we do with that? #what praytell do you suggest change based on that. how has that exclusionist analysis served queer lives. how is it continuing to do so. #versus like and who cares if everyone Could possibly all be labeled bi if what is In Practice anyways is ppl getting to have sex or Not how #they want to anyways. recognizing that Any trans person's existence is a testament to Everyone's autonomy #any ''threat'' to children is always guaranteed abt the Threat to [parents' control to decide Who & What a child gets to be] #that is; ''protecting'' children is abt the child being the property of parents. gotta protect That by withholding all info about trans ppl #even existing from kids b/c Property can't decide their identities for themselves so Children can't be allowed to either #their even knowing that some people Do get to exist autonomously is; indeed; that ''threat'' to the [child is property] order #and Language as Possibility. it's the 2010s & you can only go ''that's me i'm nonbinary'' when you learn abt the word ''nonbinary'' #even though you can then know you always knew but you didn't have the word so you had to keep on using other; more inaccurate words.... #discovering the tree trunk of [word: Autistic] that roots all these branches of ppl talking abt Experiences & now Realizing Things....

[rpbetter]

Thanks for your thoughts. Nope, I don't have another problem with the psa. It's the subtle word choice pretty much, but nothing else. I don't mind if people use me as a meme farm, so when I see psas like that or comments like that, I get upset because I associate it with people who make other blanket assumptions about all rpers, I have it linked in my head with people going around saying "rp is a hobby not a jobby" and making other assumptions about how all rpers do their thing.

Thank you for answering those questions!

The assumptive quality of the RPC can seriously be annoying as hell, especially if you're in the minority on any particular issue. When that's the case, the PSAs are so rarely geared toward you and any issues you might be experiencing that it's legitimately upsetting. I absolutely feel you on that!

I mean, obviously. Obviously lol I do. It couldn't be much clearer that I have a serious issue with the constant bombardment of PSAs insisting that we normalize shitty behaviors that are the damn norm, that we're all just losers RPing on tumblr so no one should be anxious about anything ever (instead of, you know, maybe trying to legitimately boost people's confidence, radical thought), or that anything that isn't being hostile to oneself is being hostile to everyone else.

I think the issue is that, while there is obviously a majority set of takes/issues/experiences (though, those, too, absolutely can skew toward one's particular RP corner and style), there's no way to address every instance and variable of an issue. Particularly not when anything other one paragraph is too lengthy for a lot of people here to engage with in a meaningful way.

So, I know I have to frequently ask, "is this a legitimate or hostile sort of blank-statement, or is it just addressing the majority experience? If it's the latter, is it genuinely enough of a problem to address?"

Like, did they mean that this is an experience most RPers have, or did they mean this is the only experience/is the correct and only way to do things? And that's not always answerable, of course, but when I feel like it is, it's usually found on OP's blog and RPC itself.

If OP has expressed things that are not the majority experience, expressed that they do not agree with blanket-statements, and doesn't imply with every rule, PSA, point on the DNI, and so on that to approach and proceed with RP in a way they do not is to commit some manner of terrible IRL crime? It's almost certainly that they were just expressing a majority experience and nothing more.

And in this case, yeah, as I'm sure you've noticed from being on the opposite side of this, it is the majority experience. I don't recall ever seeing very many RPers who do not espouse having an issue with having their memes and aesthetics reblogged without some manner of (rules specified if they're not a dick) interaction/relationship with the other mun. (Such as "mutuals are okay to reblog" or "I expect reblog karma and practice it.")

I don't know if there has been an influx of newer RPers or those who have migrated from more relaxed areas of the RPC, but recently, there really has been an increase in at least my corners of muns being used as resource blogs when they do not wish to be. They've all expressed in their rules their particular boundaries for that, have made overall posts politely but firmly asking that people who do not write with them and haven't even read their rules not do this, and have gone directly to the worst offenders to ask them to stop. And it continues to happen. So, I imagine that is why you might be seeing an influx of PSAs about the matter in response.

For anyone watching this conversation that might not understand why some muns are so against this, some reasons are:

clogging up their notifications

the aesthetic was their picture, edit, quote, etc. and not meant to be shared off their blog/only by the partner(s) tagged in it

when you reblog from someone, their URL is obviously attached, spreading them to another dash full of people - they might like you, but not want some of your mutuals following to their blog

their muse doesn't get much interaction, but other muns keep reblogging memes/aesthetics from them when they won't write with them or send anything in

they feel used for the above reason or any variety of other reasons

I'm really sure you know that, Anon, but I think it's important that we all understand where we're coming from because there are so many different preferences and experiences. It's really not good enough to just feel like everyone can do whatever they want, so long as it isn't harassing anyone else/they're being respectful of others. Because can feel that way all we want to while still getting upset when we lack the understanding of preferences that are extremely different, or even in opposition to our own.

We can't effectively respect each other without that sort of understanding of even the things that annoy us, you know? So, I try to promote that understanding and explain things for people who might simply see this on their dash.

Like the "hobby not jobby" thing! I don't get that, I think it has some concerning IRL connotations people are not recognizing, and it's a great way to treat other muns like shit while justifying the behavior. It's in opposition to what I do not because it exists, but rather, because it is weaponized in order to excuse bad behavior and vilify muns who do not engage with the hobby in this way. It doesn't have to exist in hostile opposition to how I enjoy RP, the use of it has made it this way, is what I'm saying.

But I understand where it came from and what it means for the more rational, adult muns here who feel this way. To them, it's just that this is an ultra casual hobby. The way I engage with RP is like a full contact sport lol it requires a lot of effort and engagement, and the effort and engagement is fun. They way they engage with RP is an act of disengaging, it is more like what watching TV is for me - they're just here for some light, quick entertainment.

Understanding this difference is understanding that not everyone who feels so casually about RP is a jackass insisting that everyone else better feel the same way, that their way is the only correct and good way. I'm still not interested in writing with them, it's far too different for that to work out, but it allows for delineating who is enjoyable on my dash/OOC that is into casual RP and who needs to stay behind a block somewhere because they think anyone who has RP as a primary hobby is trying to ruin it for them somehow, attacking them by existing, and the following list of terrible things as a person.

I think that all problems in the RPC could be drastically mitigated by a combination of understanding and mutual respect. People who are alright with others treating them like a meme resource absolutely can and should interact with people who don't feel that way without a problem, for example - all that takes is being aware of your mutual's rules and respecting them.

Damn near 100% of the PSAs out there honestly should not ever have to exist, they come down to the same factors of just exercising some easy respect for each other.

Again, the trouble often comes in at those very differing factors we need to be mindful of. When we feel like the weird one out in the RPC constantly, whether something is actually othering us or not, it starts to feel like it is. We start finding reasons and evidence, and much of the time, at least among those whose first inclination isn't to label OP as various terrible shit as a person, that takes the form of "not everyone."

Well, of course, not everyone! But unfortunately, when we are of the minority opinion/experience, we sometimes have to just realize that very thing. It isn't personal, and that while someone has caused issues coming from this side with that difference, we are not for our mutuals, so this isn't about us. We're actually doing the thing the PSA is speaking of by not pushing our preferences on others. If that PSA is just speaking from a place of the majority experience and nothing more, we're just annoyed with it for that reason and nothing else when it comes right down to it. We're just kind of sick of being in the minority opinion on this issue, and now are geared to feel like we're being hounded by most PSAs.

It's not an easy thing to get over or work with, it's not even something that gets to be faultless, but it definitely makes the experience less irritating when we can get to a point of stepping back and analyzing the situation without those emotions intensely in play. Seriously, if I allowed the issues I have with most PSAs out there to be evident by reblogging them with refutations or anger? That's all I'd spend my time doing, that'd be my hobby and not actual RP...and I'd absolutely be the most hated and blocked mun on tumblr in short order no matter how valid my points were. (And, I think, with good reason, I really do not support reblogging that sort of thing with negative commentary.)

What helps? Make your own positive PSA about your experience! Make one of those "reblog if" posts, I have never seen one that says "reblog if...you are alright with your mutuals reblogging memes and aesthetics from you without reblog karma."

I'm being dead serious, I encourage you to do that! It's great when you're of the minority opinion and do something like that because you can literally see not only that you're not alone at all but also that it's made other people feel seen. If you do that, let me know, I'll reblog it, even.

#answered #anonymous #post and ask replies #mun interaction #reblog etiquette #rp problems #tumblr rpc

[gingermcl]

Raising personal frequency and why it matters.

I am not a love and light person. As in we must be positive all the time and negative feelings can’t exist. No. As someone who can literally feel a persons energy, I will say that negatively charged energy has a heavier feel to it. You literally can feel the density in the air in a room shift when an extremely negative person walks in. There is some truth in all programming. Even in psychological operations like the new age movement. The new cage movement. Earth is a realm of duality; good and bad exist here. In a realm of duality, the goal is balance. One must innerstand darkness does exist in all of us and that is ok! Too many people want to pretend darkness doesn’t exist and by ignoring evil, it grows. Don’t let the darkness control you. Anyone pushing that we have to make the darkness go completely away or that it shouldn’t exist is misinformed and I would be cautious listening to advice from said person. I would be leery of anyone attempting to tell another how to live. Pushing your will on another is the definition of black magic. With anything I ever discuss, if you don’t agree that’s cool. I’m always open to hearing new ideas and perspectives; please don’t approach me in a nasty manner. I won’t engage someone unable to have an calm conversation. Engaging and regularly interacting with negativity or negative people is a good way to lower your own frequency. We often tend to carry a frequency similar to our friends, this is why so many outgrow friends after having a spiritual awakening. We literally outgrow people on an energetic level. 

Raising personal frequency is important. Lower vibrational energies literally cannot affect folks on a higher frequency. I made a conscious effort 7 years ago to change who I was. A girl in a rehab therapy group told me about myself and I did not like what I heard. She said I was one of the most negative people she had ever met and as I began to examine my behaviors and my words, I realized she was right. It took a couple years of conscious effort to change my mindset from negative to positive. I can say today the results have been priceless. I am very appreciative of her giving me a wake up call.

If what we are told is correct and atoms are in fact what compose matter; everything in this universe is sound. Atoms are said to be made of waves and vibrations. At the molecular level atoms don’t actually touch. Atoms get extremely close to one another but they never fully touch. They’re independent energy fields and when densely packed together atoms form matter. Matter is dense....which goes along with my observation of negatively charged energy being heavier. Higher dimensions are said to be heavenly and they also do not have dense physical matter. I’m not entirely certain that physical existence isn’t a prison for the spirit. Our bodies are made of cells, prisoners are put in cells. It is blatantly obvious that those in control of this realm would like humanity on the lowest frequency possible. One intention of mind control programming is to lower the frequency of mankind, keep man in a angry, fearful, depressed, lower vibrational state. It is highly likely there are malevolent beings harvesting humanity’s soul energy. This energy is called loosh. All emotions create loosh; for some reason negative emotions generate more or more desirable energy.

The negative humans and other unseen beings/energies who have been in control of this realm for thousands of years now feed on what is known as loosh. Loosh is the life force energy created by humans when they experience emotions. Low vibrational emotions such as anger, sadness, depression, and even apathy are preferred by these negative energies than the loosh generated by positive emotions. Feeding these malevolent energies is why so much programming is done to divide the people, to make us hate our lives and ourselves, to blame mankind for the evil here, and many other trauma based mind control tactics are in place to keep humanity in a lowered state of existence. There are individuals who feel a deep seeded guilt in the heart just for being born due to this programming! The moon is thought to be emitting a low frequency in order to mind control humanity. Hence why when at full power a.k.a. a full moon humans act crazier and even violent. A full moon is when the Saturn moon matrix broadcasts the strongest signal.

If you are a person who has discovered that evil is running this realm, the best thing you can do is to do the exact opposite of what the controllers want; work on making your life peaceful, exposing the evil, healing your trauma and reprogramming yourself, disengage from the “matrix” every way you can. Be mindful of where you spend money, try not to use money, watch your words, push out negative thoughts, and love yourself. Anyone “awake” should absolutely strive for a higher frequency, honestly everyone should strive for a higher frequency. Existence is much more enjoyable and calmer when you are on a higher frequency. The law of attraction is legitimate. We attract back to us exactly what we put out into this world. Putting out positivity attracts pleasant situations and focusing on negativity creates unpleasantries.

Extremely high and extremely low vibrations do not mix, they tend to separate themselves from one another instead. Society is currently being divided. Those who are fearful are going one way and those of us who want unity are going another. How this ultimately will play out, time will tell.  

Sleep paralysis is potentially based solely on frequency. Sleep paralysis occurs when your frequency is too low. I’ve heard folks say sleep paralysis is necessary for astral projection; that is not true. Sleep paralysis is unnatural and caused by a weapon of some kind. A frequency weapon. Those on a too high frequency cannot be manipulated by such technology.

In my opinion being on a higher frequency is better is because you have access to more spiritual information and any metaphysical ability you possess functions exponentially better on a higher frequency. When my frequency goes too low, certain abilities vanish. Frequency fluctuates regularly. It typically stays in a a range normal for you, but extraordinary events like a crisis or confrontation can dramatically drop one’s frequency; it can take days, weeks, or even months to recover from some circumstances. Recognizing how important frequency is and learning how to raise your frequency are important to spiritual development. When on a higher frequency you have a better connection with your intuition, are less susceptible to mind control programming, and psychic attack.

How to raise frequency.

Meditate regularly - at least three times a week for 15 minutes to start

Spend as much time as possible outside in nature

Daily Grounding/Earthing. Walking barefoot on the earth for 15 minutes every day. Weather permitting.

Positive thoughts, actions, words, and deeds. Developing positive mantras to repeat throughout the day is helpful.

Breath work

Engage in as little conflict and negativity as you can.

Avoid alcohol and prescription drugs.

Don’t be too serious or have too many expectations for this will create resentments. Events will never unfold as we expect them to, people are much better served by going with the flow and observing how events unfold as they happen; don’t anticipate events ahead of them occurring.

Work on conquering fears. Especially the fear of death.

Practice compassion, empathy, and kindness towards everyone. Humans are equal; one isn’t better than another. Our life choices and luck is often the only thing that separates us.

Laugh

Exercise. Make sure you do something you find fun, not something you dread. Any kind of physical activity where one is having fun will raise his vibe. Dancing is a personal favorite.

Take a break from technology

Be mindful of how much time you spend on technology. Put the phone down during dinner or when you should be engaging with the people literally in front of you.

Wear and decorate with crystals. Black tourmaline and obsidian are good for negativity.

Decorate with high vibrational plants jasmine, aloe vera, or a snake plant

Be mindful of what information you watch and listen to. Movies, TV, music, social media, etc. It is best to just turn off the TV for good. Television is a weapon. Be very conscious of what information you allow to enter your mind.

Minimize interaction with toxic people. Keep conversations short, topics shallow, and have an exit plan if at an event where the environment may get unpleasant. For example drive your own car, have a friend or the babysitter call and oops I have to go….boundaries to protect your energy aren’t bad.😉

Thank your food for its life and sustenance prior to consuming it (plant or animal.) Doing this changes the food into higher vibrational intake.

Regularly cleanse negative energy from your personal spaces. Energy cleansing methods are decluttering, letting fresh air and light in, clapping loudly in the corners of a room to move stagnant energy, smudging, epsom salt baths.

Aura cleansing, visualization, cord cutting meditations

The above tips will have a positive effect on your frequency. Remember your thoughts create your reality and you get back what you put out into the universe. If your thoughts are consistently negative be prepared to have negative experiences. If you are hopeful, have faith in your ability to manifest & the universe’s ability to make things happen for you, have generally positive and laid-back nature, you will reap great rewards and experience feelings of happiness, contentment, and abundance.

I feel it is obvious by the state of the world today that humanity has been in a very negative state of mind for quite some time. There are millions of us (if not billions) that are here to change this reality, not to adapt to it. We have been called Starseeds, indigo children, and light workers; regardless of label the intent is the same - to create a positive reality on earth, to rid this place of evil, to liberate humanity from enslavement, and teach them a new way to think. We are here to help humanity realize humans are powerful creator beings and these powers have been stripped away by literal genetic manipulation. It is time for the devolution of mankind to end and for humanity to begin ascending back to the higher dimensional consciousness we once were.

[rai-jin-andro-jin]

Non-Binary Week 2020

Day 2 + 3 because I missed yesterday:

Day 2 (July 13): Coming to terms

This day is for coming out stories and how you realised you were nonbinary.

Like a lot of people, I grew up with the belief that sex and gender were the same thing; there were two genders, and because I was born with female parts, I was completely and undeniably female. And what it meant to be female was just as rigid: gender roles up to the ears determined what I wore, whether I cut my hair, what I said, what I didn’t say, who I hung out with, who my enemies were, who I could trust, what careers I could have, who I could be attracted to, and what I could think about.

When I entered college, I was away from a lot of these forces that policed my life. For the first time, I was asked on a daily basis to think for myself: and I couldn’t just point to another adult, or the Bible, or to anyone else to explain why I lived the way I did. I had to be able to support myself and my stance and my beliefs. When I was asked to do so, I realized I didn’t even agree with half of the beliefs I held; the other half I discovered were rooted in lies and misinformation about other people, specifically minority groups.

So, over my three-year college career, I grew and changed. I came into contact with different ideologies and was allowed to choose for myself what I wanted to believe and why. I shed traditional femininity both slowly & quickly -- I got an undercut in my hair, stopped shaving my body hair, and wore more comfortable/practical clothes (which ended up leaning toward “masculine” in my case). I still identified as female though -- it was my way of defying traditional gender stereotypes and screaming “I’m breaking the rules and I’m still a female -- respect me or step out of my way!”

During my final year of college, I shaved off all of my hair. Also during this time, I started to discover that I was not straight, but in fact attracted to more than one gender. I first identified as bisexual, but over the next couple years came to embrace the label “pansexual” as well, as I found it less limiting and more inclusive from a linguistic perspective (though I myself consider bisexuality and pansexuality to be basically synonymous in my case). Past college, I started to recognize how the world saw me. Not only did I sometimes tread in the butch lesbian sphere, but I also was misgendered as male quite often, especially after my haircut -- an occurance that didn’t bother me, and instead entertained and intrigued me. I wasn’t trying to pass as male, nor was I interested in transition. I didn’t identify with male pronouns, but they didn’t bother me either. I thought these instances were fun and proved that gender was more fluid than most people realized. It gave me a window with which to play with my own gender.

In the next year or two after college, I found more comfort in dressing androgynously. I didn’t try to present as purely masculine or feminine, nor did I try to lean either way. Instead, I strove to view myself as neither. I identified for a while as androgynous, as it felt detached from both sexes and genders. I enjoyed finding clothing that made my gender appear questionable, and I loved to blur the lines of my presentation. I did it because I could, because it felt the most authentic. I felt like I was showing the world who I truly wanted to be, and how I wanted to be treated. I wanted to be free of the confines of what society deemed was male or female, masculine or feminine. I believed and still believe that no one should ever be gendered at all unless they ask to be. I believe that everyone should be able to define who they are to others, and should be fully respected for it. So often, so many of us are given only a few options, if any at all, and told to make do. We are told that if we stray from these norms, we are unattractive, unwanted, and just doing it for attention. But in reality, we just want to be seen and loved for who we are, for who we choose to be.

Non-binaryness seemed foreign to me for a while. Informed by my upbringing and lack of information, I saw the non-binary identity as something I didn’t fit into. I didn’t meet all the requirements in my head -- non-binary people were other people I knew, other people who’s lives and experiences were different and thus more legitimate than mine. Because of that, I hesitated to identify as non-binary for a long time. But then, as I did more research, read more personal accounts and stories, and connected with friends in real life who were queer and non-binary, I felt like I belonged. I realized I was allowed into that unattainable “non-binary club” that I had built up in my head because it actually wasn’t unattainable at all. It was a community full of people with a wide array of experiences. And mine was not an unfamiliar or unwelcome one. I looked upon the word non-binary, and I realized, with utter joy and happiness:

“That’s me!”

Shortly thereafter, I came out to my friends on social media, and then to some of my family. I went from she/her to they/them, and I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed, for the first time ever. I felt supported and validated by my friends, more than I ever thought was possible. It was the greatest feeling to finally find a piece of myself.

Even now as I explore the plethora of non-binary identities, I’m still discovering myself. Non-binary describes me just fine! But if we’re getting specific, I don’t have any ties with gender at all, and I’m actively trying to unlearn my gender conditioning to be the best person I can be. That is why I also identify as agender.

It’s a crazy thing to wrap my head around, even as I’m still overjoyed to have a label that explains me and my existence. But the overwhelming feelings that course through my body are ones of happiness. I have a place in this world, whether I know my name/labels or not. I always have had a place, and I always will. And now more than ever, I fight for my place and protection, as well as others’ whose identities are shunned, their protections & rights denied. I want everyone to experience the joy of belonging, not because they fit a mold, but because they’re happy with their own choices and identity. I hope everyone can experience that fully, in all the ways it can possibly occur, for all identities imagineable.

Day 3 (July 14/International Nonbinary People's Day): Nonbinary Joy

Share all things positive about being nonbinary!

I think these can really apply to any gender, sex, orientation, etc., but these are just catered to my personal experience! I think if I had to name this phenomenon, I would call it “Gender Liberation.” So here’s what it feels like to be liberated from gender and gender expectations:

You can wear whatever the hell you want and watch people get real confused.

You get to use they/them pronouns, or whatever pronouns you want; language no longer ties you down!

You get to call yourself whatever you want! You get to choose your name.

All those horrible expectations that make you uncomfortable? Gone.

You get to connect with other non-binary people and hear about their beautiful experiences.

You get to interact with the queer community, which is a beautiful, accepting, and loving collection of people who defy cultural norms and exist exactly as who they are, unapologetically. They are a wonderful group of people to look up to. Anyone who lives and loves to the fullest without shame is one to look up to.

You get to wear your hair however you want and nobody can tell you otherwise.

You get to think about the world without the shades of a binary lens! Turns out the world is so much more colorful!

You get to have awesome flag colors.

You get to have awesome discussions about gender.

You get to be unapologetically complicated, because everyone is way more complicated than their gender, but now, you actually know that and are allowed to exist that way.

I mean, look at the word “non-binary” and tell me that isn’t just the most freeing thing you’ve ever read. Look at the word “agender” and tell me you didn’t just breathe a sigh of relief. No more fucking stupid-ass rules!

Did I mention that you’re allowed to be fully authentic without judgment? Did I also mention that you can finally unlearn all that self-judgment and internalized gender roles?

Gender is fully opt-in.

Now that you’re liberated from all those awful rules and head-spaces, you can think about more important things, like for example: cute people, your favorite books/shows/movies, yummy food, plants, cats, simple joys, arts and crafts, making friends, falling in love, nature, doggos, the whole earth.

Also, now that you’re liberated, you can help to liberate other people by fighting for their rights, because you know that people like you (and people not like you) are being denied basic human rights every day around the world; now you know about it and you know they deserve better, so you can use your voice to help educate and inspire solidarity and community.

Wow, there’s like so many things you can do and be, and no one can tell you not to anymore. Looks like you’re truly confident and happy with yourself! :) That sounds like autonomy at its best!

What *isn’t* awesome about being non-binary?? Absolutely nothing.

#non-binary week 2020 #non-binary #enbie #enbie pride #day 2 #day 3

[seddm]

One week later

I think that this time, despite the magnitude of what happened in the show, managed to have a mostly non-kneejerk reaction to it, but a week (and a looot of thinking) later, I think I got a better understanding about how and why I feel about this episode, S4 so far, and the show’s future as a whole. Going to make this a bullet-point style list because making a single conversation about all of this would be either too long, or end up feeling disconnected at times anyway. Bad things first, then the good ones to close on a positive note, for a change.

THE BAD

- The thing I always loved the most about this show has been its ability to use individual events and interactions between the characters in almost any given segments, even ones more fillery in nature, as a way to slowly advance the growth of the characters from a pre-established Big Event™ to the next one. This always gave the show an aura of strong continuity despite its storyboard driven and episodic nature, and allowed me to claim that even events clearly facilitated by some sort of plot based compulsion (such as the Truth Cube in Sleepover, or the photo booth in Booth Buddies) were still largely natural, just more flashy ways to push the characters in directions they were already taking.

The first episodes of S4, up to Curse of the Blood Moon, didn’t really do this. They felt heavily more compartmentalized than the usual: S3 ended in an explosive way that seemingly set up all the characters for immediate changes or payoff, but then this current season kinda ignored that. Not completely, because both Moon Remembers and Ransomgram has Marco tell Star things like “rip the bandaid off” and “own up to your mistakes”, which could be clearly applied to the “Tell Tom about the kiss” situation (never mind that she didn’t do that, it was still relevant and her going the wrong way about it was part of the point), but between an increased focus on plot and plot exclusively, and a two parter season premiere that chose to focus exclusively on finding Moon (reasonable decision, really, but it ended up making 40 minutes of show feel a bit empty on the emotions side, in my very subjective opinion), Curse of the Blood Moon seemed to happen a bit out of the blue, especially considering that Star and Marco’s feelings were apparently so strong and so intrusive to justify even Tom being able to see them in the former case, and Eclipsa’s comfort and counseling having been needed multiple times offscreen in the latter. Things that we didn’t see at all in the first 7 episodes, with the exception of Star never reacting to Tom telling her that he knew the kiss with Marco didn’t really mean anything. It’s not a necessarily tragic scenario, especially if the show purposefully wanted to wait for Curse to kick start a new chapter in the shipping of the show, but this bridging between seasons taking one third of the last one felt a bit excessive and largely devoid of sufficient build up to me.

- Kelly / Kellco. Anyone who’s familiar with my blog should know that I always struggle to never insult ships, characters or elements from the show that other people might like. And even now I don’t want to cheapen the value of personal preferences at all, nor tell anyone “No, you can’t ship this!”. But at the same time I have to say that, in the context of the show, these new Kellco developments look (ready to eat back my words in the future, as usual) extremely pointless, and handled badly. Kelly feelings something for Marco, kinda unilaterally liking him, that’s something the fandom has been speculating ever since Lava Lake Beach. They shared an emotional moment over heart break, and then clearly developed a friendship from there, and hanged out more. Kelly’s lines in The Ponyhead Show then confirmed without doubt that she felt something from Marco, but that he seemed to be largely unaware and oblivious about it. Just like you’d expect Marco to be, especially a Marco who spent the previous season focusing on how strong and intrusive his feelings for Star were.

At this point essentially everyone, me included, expected for Kelly’s World to be used as a way to bring up Marco’s unrequited (as far as he knew) feelings once again, to introduce Curse of the Blood Moon. I expected Marco to either go something like “Sorry Kelly but I’m not ready to give up on my feelings for Star” or, at worst, a frustrated Marco who’d have thought and reflected about Kelly’s feelings for him. Instead, out of the extreme blue, we got a Marco who was uncharacteristically all too aware of the situation, going “I don't want these feelings for Star they're getting in the way of other feelings" while being all blushy and then being more than receptive to Kelly’s emotionally confused flirting. Now, if this was reality, there would be absolutely nothing weird in a kid like Marco being dual in his feelings, really liking Star while also being tired about all the pain those feelings have been bringing him for the better part of a year and being receptive to another girl being ready to jump his bones. But this is not reality, and these events absolutely lacked any form of proper build up, they were (wow, I can finally use the word Starco haters have been throwing around for years!) forced. Not entirely, but for a great deal. Jarco had Sleepover and Naysaya providing a strong buildup to the ship revolving around Marco overcoming some personal hurdles; even Tomstar didn’t immediately go for the ship after the well-timed dance in Club Snubbed, but first had Demoncism, giving some sort of basis to the exes getting back together, and Tom and Star had a pre-established relationship and we both knew that Tom still wanted Star, and that Star still had hung up feelings for Tom, if just physical attractions ones (from her behavior in Blood Moon Ball and Mr. Candle Cares, very spread out over the show, I admit). Meanwhile Kellco went from “ok they shared an important moment one season ago and Janna teased Kelly in a holiday special episode but after that their interactions have been nothing but background ones” to “Marco and Kelly lose track of time reading about fighting on a bench, then as the warm hues of the sunset wash over them they fight hand in hand, as one body and one spirit, and the fireworks and music happen and there’s more blushing in a single scene that there has been in the whole show and in all the kisses in it so far”. That’s... very, very, very heavy handed. Very “manipulative”. Especially since Kelly and Marco aren’t even properly together yet I guess, since Marco might have gotten over his feelings for Star (hahaha yeah as if), but as far as we know Kelly still isn’t completely over Tad. So where is this relationship going to go from now? Why does it exist? In what ways it doesn’t shit on what Jarco already taught Marco? How is it going to “end” once Marco inevitably realizes he still feels thing for Star without making Kelly look like a throwaway rag? Obviously I don’t have the arrogance to assume I know how things are going to play out from here on, so who knows, maybe Kellco is going to be part of an important arc, but from where I’m standing, from what I know now, it’s hard not to see it as a hamfisted attempt at going “Haaaa these confused teens, it’s only fair that they get their share of experiences!”. Which is ok, sure, fine, but FICTION ≠ REALITY and things need some kind of build up and reason to happen. If it’s just supposed to be padding to keep the situation in a status quo for a while, “Marco is with Kelly and Tom is with Star and everything is right in the world and they don’t have to think about their feelings anymore” then... bleah.

- This is tangentially connected to both the previous points, and it’s not really THAT bad, just me being a bit nitpicky about a still legitimate direction the show decided to take: by having this constant comparison between THE OTHER SHIPS and STARCO, now stronger than ever after Curse, the former being very casual but also ultimately unrewarding, “we hold hands we blush a little and we are ready to kiss and be a couple”, while the latter being “dozens of life changing events are needed to progress the ship even by little; NOTHING BUT PAIN can ever come out of Starco for the people involved until it’s officially recognized as being completely and utterly full, pure, complete, mature and life lasting love”, can kinda give a wrong message about relationships and teen love, or an annoying one at least. “Hey kids, don't try to actually have fun or be happy with romance, because that's not how True Love™ works. If you actually find it kind of easy to be happy with your significant other, that isn't love!" [quote by @ngame989]. Obviously I’m using a hyperbole for the sake of clarity, and it’s clear that Star and Marco’s relationship is based on finding it easy to have fun together, always. But if we talk strictly about romance and the way the show approaches to it, it’s kinda undeniable that Starco has been nothing but a source of sadness so far, and the only genuine moment of happiness, this one, lasted about three seconds and overlapped with a realization of True Love.

By now I have fully accepted that the show is not going for an early Starco relationship to then show it growing and changing as the two make the first steps together, but that they’re waiting for a “ok we’re both completely sure this is what we want”, and it’s a completely fair direction for the show to take, but it also contributes to this “fetishization” of true love. Still, execution matters way more than the larger brush strokes in this case, so we’ll see.

- The timing. I’m going to talk about why this incoming arc can actually be a very good thing in a moment, but at the same time introducing the idea that the Blood Moon might have forced feelings now, 30% through the last season, when absolutely nothing before that ever referenced of foreshadowed it, and with essentially no references to the Ball throughout the show (last direct one was in Naysaya and it was Tom throwing shade at Marco...), feels kinda jarring to me.

- This is a bit more of a personal note, but not entirely: Star and Marco enter a dance in their memories with the specific goal of “destroying their feelings”. One minute into spending time together having fun without any kind of distraction for the first time in forever, they literally fall in love. Not crush, love. The whole setup of the Severing Stone’s function literally confirms that. What kind of tension can Kellco and Tomstar deliver now that we know that Star and Marco can and will fall in love with each other if given a moment to truly think about nothing but each other and themselves? The endgame was kinda clear before as well, but now it has officially ruined any chance at making other ships feel worthwhile - beyond their value for the growth of the characters involved, obviously. I mean their intrinsic value as a ship / source of romantic drama.

THE GOOD

- Even if I’m not a fan of the timing, I can see a lot of potential in an arc revolving around the question “Are these feelings genuine? Is Marco/Star the person I truly love and want to be with?”. Now, obviously we know that the feeling were genuine and that the Curse didn’t force anything, so it’s not really the answer to the question that matters. What’s important is how they’re going to get to that: by having Star and Marco more or less directly tackle this question in a context where there is apparently no sadness and pain brought from unwanted feelings, some positivity can FINALLY be associated with Starco as a romantic relationship. Obviously we don’t know how things are going to play out now, but if both dorks are now convinced that they are only friends (something that didn’t happen at the same time since early S2) they can enjoy their relationship to its absolute fullest, and see along the way, together this time, that they both want more. I don’t know if one or both of them lied about not having feelings anymore, or if it’s placebo effect, or if the Severing Stone has some lingering after effects. What I know is that these two now feel like they can be completely comfortable around each other once again, while still having all the feelings of friendship that were the base for the romance once already,

and that the last time they had a moment to truly be together with each other and enjoy their feelings to their fullest, they fell in love, like love for real, certified by the Severing Stone taking that moment away as a price.

So yes, we all know the answer to this question already (articulated a bit better by the show’s composer in this post),

- Curse of the Blood Moon as an episode itself is far from being without merits: it opens with a wonderful display of one of the many sides that make Star and Marco’s relationship so adorable, with the duo having a secret cereal date at night without waking up Meteora; shows how in sync and how well they understand each other (yes, this was a set up for the scene but you can’t tell me it’s the curse’s fault, that’s bullshit); it literally had Marco tell us that he likes every single thing about Star and her personality (again, not the curse’s fault. That’s bullshit.), and the dance itself was utterly perfect and pristine and had Starco fun, Starco flirting, and Starco love all happening the moment they could focus on each other and forget about the rest.  Also, while I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Tom having achieved “good boy status” simply by getting slightly better with each episode instead of taking some affirmative action on the nature of his relationship with Star, I don’t mind seeing him helping his friends, at all. Sure, this can contributed to making him feel more “pathetic”, with scenes like the spat on the elevator apparently underlying a lack of compatibility between him and Star compared to her and Marco, as many other scenes before, and that’s the part I don’t particularly enjoy, but the overall journey he went through, that’s good. It should have featured more defining moments of change in my opinion, rather than a simple “little by little always better and gets points for trying”, but it’s still vastly preferable to a world where we can’t get some Tomco bromance moments, and this kind of relaxed situation, as infuriating as it can be at times, could potentially contribute to what I said in the first point, give Star and Marco the chance to understand what they feel for the other in a completely or almost completely positive way.

- This is connected to the first point and not necessarily an objectively good one on its own, more like something that further contributes to feeling like there’s potential for things to develop nicely from her on: the brunt of the romance in Starco fell on Marco for most of S3, at this point Star was less of an active player than him when it came to liking each other. But Star is the Main Main Character, we can’t have that happen. With this new turn of events, with things being “reset” into New Game +, the spotlight moves once again on Star and this time we can finally have the Main Main Character answer the question “do we love each other?”. Obviously Marco is surely going to have a role as well, he’s still a protagonist, but it’s Star’s story before anything else, and this “Free Will and Choices” arc can easily tie Eclipsa / ruling Mewni to Love, and strongly relate to the blonde (ex) princess.

- On the same note of “elements that makes one hopeful about the show’s potential but still don’t really confirm anything about what’s going to happen”, we have this quote from one of Adam’s interviews:

Adam describes Star as someone who is “all over the place” in terms of life as compared to Marco who unlike Star has yet to outwardly reveal his feelings. “But, she’s one of those people who so much stuff is going on for that she doesn’t necessarily, in my opinion, she doesn’t really have time for a romantic relationship. She’s too busy. She’s got a lot of things going on her plate,” he explains. “But, she’s one of those people who, in my opinion–I’m not saying this happens, I’m just saying this is why I like them–I feel like she’s going to be one of those people who is gonna stop one day and have a second to breathe and then dust is gonna settle and she’s gonna look and see through all the settling dust and fog that someone has been there with her the entire time and she’s gonna see Marco,”

and while there’s absolutely no way to confirm this, especially since everything Adam says is always nebulous PR talk that has to be taken with eighty grains of salt, looking at list of episode post-mid season finale suggests that this “dust settling down” might happen sooner than later, the second half(ish) of the season having way more episodes with titles suggesting either Earth things, or a generic downtime for the teens to focus a bit more on their own lives, and a little less of Eclipsa. Obviously there’s still necessarily going to be plot happening, but I can also see how they could be going (strong emphasis on the could) for a journey that allows Starco to finally happen in the series finale in an explosive way, with both Star and Marco being utterly sure that this is what they truly want, and that they love each other, not just like or crush.

Cornonation Doop-Doop / Britta’s Tacos Beach Day / Gone Baby Gone Sad Teen Hotline /  Jannanigans Mama Star /  Ready, Aim, Fire The Right Way /  Here to Help Pizza Party /  The Tavern at the End of the Multiverse Cleaved 

To conclude and sum up, my greatest issues so far are with the way S4 handled romance and relationships in its first 7 episodes, rather than with the new arc Curse of the Blood Moon apparently set out, or with the idea that the show is almost certainly going for series finale Starco (still kinda hoping for just a little something before that though, with the finale being the true celebration of what they have). It’s not the show I’d have liked the most, but it’s still one that has all the potential, so far, to honor the kind of build up Starco had, and the amazing characters Star and Marco are. But this first third personally disappointed me in a number of ways, and it kinda hinders my ability to fully trust this potential to actually become the reality of a good execution. But “hinders” doesn’t mean I completely lost any hope, and there are certainly dozens of ways to properly pull this off. We’ll see.

#star vs the forces of evil #svtfoe #starco #seddm ramblings #svtfoe spoilers

[fasterthanmydemons]

On Pietro’s Emotional Health

Trigger warnings: PTSD, ADHD, Insomia, Fear of Abandonment, Emotional Co-Dependency, and Suicidal Thoughts

Pietro is far more emotionally stable than his sister, Wanda, provided that she is with him and well. Without her, it’s a different story, but as long as they are together, he can be very solid emotionally. And yet, he does have a few things that identify him as someone who has experienced trauma and is trying to cope as best he can. The twins are both wary of doctors after being experimented on, and have not really ever had medical examinations beyond what was performed in that laboratory, so they don’t recognize certain symptoms and diagnosable mental health or physical health issues that they have because they have never been officially diagnosed. So everything I’ll mention here for Pietro is what’s actually going on with him, but he either doesn’t realize it or doesn’t know that it’s part of an illness or coping mechanism.

PTSD – Pietro does have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from two major events in his life, the death of his parents and subsequent prolonged fear of dying himself while waiting with Wanda for the shell to explode in their house, and the conditioning, physical and emotional punishments, and painful experiments he was subjected to in the Hydra laboratory. If he is saved after being shot at the end of Ultron, having been so violently shot multiple times will add to his existing PTSD symptoms. General symptoms of this for him are nightmares, panic attacks, and flashbacks. More specific symptoms include becoming panicky or experiencing a flashback when exposed to very loud noise (especially explosions or things that sound like that, for example fireworks or cars backfiring), having panic attacks if he thinks he will be separated from Wanda long-term or even thinks too long about the possibility of that happening, and flinching or pulling away sharply when people other than Wanda touch him because he subconsciously thinks he’s going to be struck or something else violent, and also when he is not given any warning before being touched because it surprises him in a bad way.

ADHD – Pietro isn’t just a high-energy guy, he actually does have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He has a legitimately tough time concentrating, focusing, sitting still, and remembering things. This is because he has a very short attention span that is not due to his increased metabolism and high-energy personality, but that does fuel and exacerbate it. He is easily distracted and quick to jump to act on something before thinking it through. It is a lot more difficult for Pietro to learn things like mathematics, history, languages, etc. than his sister when doing so from books or in a sit-down classroom setting, which sometimes results in insecurity and confidence issues because he feels he is “stupid,” when really it’s just that he had a hard time concentrating enough to learn certain things. Pietro is as intelligent as Wanda, but he learns better while actively doing things in a hands-on manner or through experience out in the world. For example, he learns languages far better by just being plunged out into a city the main language of which he doesn’t speak, and just interacting with locals and learning as he goes. Trying to learn a language from books is not only maddeningly and frustratingly boring to Pietro, it also doesn’t work very well for him.

He reads extremely fast, but doesn’t always retain what he reads unless he is very interested in the topic. Unless something has a story to it or is so interesting to him that he actually thinks about it instead of just reading through, he often forgets what he reads by the following day or even in a few hours. This isn’t memory loss so much as it is just not retaining the information because he’s scanning it too fast without actually processing it. It is the same with telling him to do things or even giving him information like phone numbers, addresses, names, etc. Unless he writes it down or has some other reason for it being special enough for him to remember, he won’t retain it for very long at all. However, he never forgets a face.

This particular disorder exacerbates some side effects or tendencies, if you will, that result from his mutant condition. As a mutant and with Pietro’s specific genetic/biological differences from average human beings, he already has a compulsion to keep moving, the tendency to fidget or always engage in idle movement such as bouncing his leg or playing with his hands, and he is incredibly impulsive. His ADHD compounds these issues already caused by his mutant condition and while it doesn’t increase his physical need to keep moving just based on his metabolism and his muscles’ needs to stay active, it does make the mental compulsion aspect of it even more pronounced. This can also manifest in Pietro being very impatient, lashing out physically, and jumping to action before using his words.

If he sits or lies still for too long, he will feel restless, eventually to the point of him becoming genuinely upset and jittery. If he is forced into inactivity (e.g. being strapped to a table or something), he will actually experience intense body aches from lactic acid building up in his body and damaging his muscles. His metabolism demands not only that he eat more food and more often than normal people but also that he keep moving on a regular basis. That’s due to his mutant condition and not his ADHD, but because he does have the mental compulsion to move in addition to negative physical side effects if he doesn’t, Pietro often processes the compulsion as his body telling him he needs to move or else. This then results in anxiety if he is prevented from moving as he wishes/needs to.

An exception to his short attention span, lack of focus, and impulsiveness is Wanda. If he is with Wanda, Pietro can remain calm and sit still a lot longer. He can also focus more with her near him. That’s the positive side of it, but the negative side is that in the Hydra lab, the scientists and soldiers quickly learned that if Wanda was harmed as punishment for Pietro not obeying them or focusing on things they wanted him to learn, he would quickly become compliant in order to protect her. That unfortunate abuse proves that he is capable of focusing with great effort when he really needs to, but he cannot keep that up forever. Wanda knows this and accepts her brother as-is, often defending his need to move and his lack of concentration if anyone criticizes him for it. To her, he doesn’t have any disorder, that’s just the way he is, and people should leave him alone about it and stop making him feel ashamed of it.

Insomnia – Pietro does not do well with a schedule that assumes he will sleep 6-8 hours a night. Instead, he does best sleeping 3-4 hours at night and then taking one or two 1-2 hour naps during the day. Sleeping shorter periods of time but more often is better for his body and often helps him avoid things like fatigue and headaches due to lack of R.E.M. sleep and beneficial rest. If he is forced to stick to a schedule that assumes he will sleep for a long amount of time at night, the anxiety of knowing he will inevitably wake up and be bored or lonely in the middle of the night will actually keep him from sleeping at all. Really, in an ideal situation, Pietro prefers to just sleep whenever he is tired. If left completely to his own devices, he would probably sleep 1-2 hours every 6-8 hours, sleeping a total of 3 to 8 hours per day, depending on his activity level. Another source of anxiety and insecurity for him is when people tell him they think he’s lazy because he’s napping so often. If he’s randomly nodding off too often, though, that’s a sign that his current sleep schedule is not working for him at all or that his diet is not adequate for his body’s needs. Pietro needs a lot of calories in terms of fuel, but the type of calories matters. He needs protein for his muscles, healthy sugars, some healthy fats, and the right balance of nutrients. Not having a proper diet will throw his metabolism and therefore the rest of his body out of whack and will interfere with his sleep pattern.

Fear of Abandonment/Separation – Losing almost everyone he’s loved has understandably affected Pietro negatively. His grandparents and parents are all dead, and he almost lost his sister when their house was bombed as well, the way he sees it. Because of this, he has an intense fear of people he’s close to leaving him or dying and ultimately “abandoning” him. He also has a severe almost phobia with regard to being separated from his sister. I’m not talking about for five minutes, although sometimes that can trigger a greater fear that something will happen to her while he isn’t around to protect her, but he is afraid of being separated from her forever, either in death or because someone forcibly separated them. Hydra used separation as a punishment for the twins and an isolation tactic to test them separately and explore the possibility of turning them against themselves. Obviously that didn’t work, but Pietro gets very panicky if it looks like someone might try to separate him from Wanda for abusive or controlling purposes. If someone actually tries to separate them, he is likely to become physically violent in order to prevent this.

Emotional Co-dependency – The Maximoff twins are unusually close. Siblings sometimes are close, and twins perhaps even more so, but the Maximoff twins may seem too close to some onlookers. While their relationship is absolutely not incestuous, the physical affection they show each other and their tendency to stand very close to each other and embrace each other often is sometimes taken as an indication of that. This actually annoys them, to have their affection labeled as incestuous, as they disagree immensely with that label.

There are two reasons why they are closer than normal siblings aside from just the fact that they love each other very much. First, being orphaned at a young age and having no choice but to rely on each other as they tried to survive on the streets fostered a necessary closeness. Sometimes they had to hold each other to keep warm while they slept. Sometimes they had to perform first-aid on each other if they ended up getting wounded or becoming ill. So there was an actual physical survival need for them to be close that then fostered the emotional need and dependency. The other reason is trauma. The more the twins suffered, the more frightened and traumatized they became, the more they looked to each other for comfort. This was partially because they didn’t trust anyone but each other, but also because, having gone through the same painful events in their lives, they each understood what the other was feeling and could empathize very well. Therefore, the twins do have a co-dependent emotional relationship that helps them not only survive but cope with shared trauma.

It is canon in the movies that Wanda can survive without her brother, since she goes on for years after Pietro is killed, but it is also canon that she contemplated suicide after he died by lingering in Sokovia well past the time it was safe to do so. If their situations were reversed and Wanda was killed, there is a very good chance that Pietro would also become suicidal. Emotionally, he would not be able to cope very well with the loss of his sister. Intervention and counseling might save his life, but he would be forever changed, and his mental health would suffer greatly from then onward. Aside from missing her to the point of not knowing what to do with himself, Pietro identifies himself specifically as a twin. That’s a large part of his self-identity, his pride, his personality, etc., and to remove that is to remove much of what makes him him. He would not recover well from that sort of life-changing shock, and to be fair, neither would Wanda, even though the movies basically eliminated any grieving process she might have had.

#{ out of breath } ᵒᵒᶜ #about the muse #pietro maximoff rp #avengers rp #marvel rp #tw: suicidal thoughts #tw: ptsd

[sabbathism]

People don’t like season 2, and here’s what they have to say :

tl;dr: I answer the web’s most vehement complaints about season 2 of American Gods. If you happen to recognize yourself in one of those, then I suggest thinking about it really really hard and, perhaps, giving the show another chance. If you recognize yourself in several of those, please drop the show. It’s not worth wasting your time and especially not ours. (I put a list of helpful cast and production related facts at the end.)

Hi, Nelle here, I’m but a humble fan who wishes to have fun seeing gods bicker and argue among mortals, complete with the craziest of situations, stellar cast and great visuals. And yet I can’t help but hear things when I start browsing this hellsite in quest of juicy fanworks.

Although I’m no Joan Of Arc, I hear voices from above and here’s what I have to shout back (lest I get burned at the stake)  :

“The pacing is all over the place ! It’s too slow !”

Is it tho ? Pacing has been “all over the place” (really meaning: different from what we avid show-viewers are accustomed to) since season 1, we’ve never gotten straight answers out of anything unless we started listening and paying attention to details. 

The book (you know, the source material) has four parts, the fourth serving as an epilogue to the whole story, season 2 is most definitely meant to close part 1 which, allegedly, had the slowest of pace to begin with. And it doesn’t even have half the new narratives the show has been creating. So no, it’s not slow. I promise you things are happening.

“It needs to follow the actual book more !!”

What’s a good adaptation ? Is it something that is 100% truthful to the source, down to every word ? Is it something that should offer something for people who don’t know the source ? Or, on the contrary, be something inseparable from it ?

American Gods as a TV show offers new things for people who have read the book and for those who haven’t, while keeping the beloved moments and aspects from the original material.

Why add or change stuff ? Well because, if you’re a book reader, you get welcomed into the state of existential dread that comes with not knowing what happen next, I promise it’s part of the fun. But also because author Neil Gaiman believes that he can do more, do better, with something that was written 20 years ago and needed the changes in a lot of places. He’s aware that he has, in fact, a show to make, and not a carbon copy of the book, as well as a fanbase that deserves to be challenged and entertained.

“Why taking the focus off Shadow ? He’s barely the protagonist anymore !”

Because there are..... characters ? who are also part of the story ? Like, actual stories need characters ? But alright, I know it can get confusing when you have a lot of those, here’s how you can still tell Shadow is the protagonist : months of advertising and the entirety of season 1 which was spent following Shadow with only minor breaks allowing other characters to breathe. Trust me they need the development too, or then we’ll really have reasons to complain.

You want a narrative focusing solely on staying in Shadow’s head ? Alright. Try the book. But here’s my take on its narrating choice, as a graduate in english literature : it’s boring. To the point where Neil Gaiman himself got sad that he couldn’t follow other characters.

“They’re not giving the POCs enough space ! Where are the coming to america segments ? At least they gave actual insights.”

Out of every piece of fiction, I truly don’t think you want to get angry at American Gods for how much room it’s giving POCs... (a 20% white cast ensemble, POCs and especially WOCs writers and directors on production, ethnically accurate casting and writing, diversity positive messages, etc) Really I’m sure there are many other places in the fictional industry were the question of diversity is more than legitimate. American Gods has yet to be one of them, by far.

As for the Coming To America stuff, well, there’s not that many in the book to begin with. There are a whole bunch for sure, but we’ve got over quite a few of them in season 1. If there’s more believers you want, we’re served with the latest episode 4, with humans worshiping both Old and New, and interacting with gods. I’m sure we can review that point again once the season is over.

“Those white directors don’t even know how to read or write POC characters !”

*cough*

here’s a list of the POC directors and writers on episodes 2 to 5 of season 2 only :

Deborah Chow (director)

Aditi Kapil (writer)

Salli Richardson (director)

Rodney Barnes (writer)

Orlando Jones (writer)

That’s half the entire director-writer team for these episodes, with Neil Gaiman being involved. You’ll have to point out to me exactly what you mean by “not writing right”.

“New Media ? 1. she’s a bitch, 2. her actress is just plain bad, 3. she’s a hurtful stereotype.” 

And here comes perhaps the trickiest one of all... I’m gonna have to bear with you, as much as you’re gonna have to bear with me :

1. Yes. 2. No. 3. Yes, and it’s a problem, but not for the reasons you think.

First of all, and let’s get it out of the way : actor =/= character nor writing. You think the writing is bad and/or that the character is annoying ? Well, it’s certainly not on the actor. You wanna know the actual level of Kahyun Kim’s acting ? Starring in an Alan Cummings play alongside him. We’ve got a lot to discuss but please keep her out of this.

Second, New Media is an absolute bitch of a character. She’s mocking, manipulative, and too ambitious for anyone’s good. A lot of people seem to love her tho and to that I say good ??? I mean, great if you like her, because she’s got as much potential as the rest of these crazy characters, I’m not here to tell you who you should hate and who you should love.

But there’s a problem you shouldn’t ignore, and that its so far she’s not well written. It’s a terrible thing to say in such a show but she’s really not : because we barely see her talking, because we barely got any scene with her (remember what I said about letting character breathe ?), and because what we’ve seen of her so far is the stereotype of the hypersexualized naive asian girl. Complete with tentacle porn scene. (Whether you felt weirded out, amused or utterly disgusted by this is your own valid opinion.)

The character has been officially described as “the goddess of global content”, “a cyberspace chameleon” and “a master of manipulation.” In recent addition to that, actor Bruce Langley (Technical Boy) has said : “New Media’s willing to be perceived as naive because if she’s being underestimated, when she does make her move, you’d never see it coming, but she knows way more than she lets on.” He then goes on to compare her to Gillian Anderson’s Media.

This proves that the way New Media comes off isn’t a problem of intent (the naive part is calculated and they want the character to be duplicitous, falsely seductive), but of handling, and it’s just as bad. Sure, Gillian’s Media also knew more than she let on for about as much screen time -I’m sure New Media will get to her four scenes in one season-, but she had been grounded in the narrative as her own character, she’s had her exposition speech and time. (See her meeting with Shadow in S01E02) We’ve yet to see that much of Kahyun’s New Media.

Because they do not give her what she needs to be more than a two dimensional character, we find ourselves with a shallow character who doesn’t give too many signs of the thought process everyone seemed to have put into crafting her beforehand, including Kahyun’s acting. This is a serious issue that needs to be handled before the season ends, or she will just stand out like a nasty spot in an overall incredible piece of fiction. Hell even Laura (another very unlikable character) manages to be a great addition to the narrative. Come on people.

You can of course argue that they could have gone for another type or personality for her, other than naive and sex-oriented, for a korean actress to play. You’re right, there’s a lot of aspect of social media that could have been put to work, but not only are we gonna need more than two scenes (at least the tentacles aren’t a regular occurrence so far), but it’s just like they could have not made the Technical Boy hang Shadow. 

The New Gods appear as the ‘general bad idea’ we promote through and associate with their element. Mr. World is gonna be the creepy looking government dude, Tech is gonna be the lanky rude geek, they’re gonna be cold, insensitive and selfish. They’re gonna be the things we don’t like. Throughout season 1, Tech Boy was in the same place we find ourselves in with New Media : he was the loud white racist teenager hating on anon on the net, he was unlikable from start to finish, and it’s only once we got inputs from his actor, the writers, and then now that they’re showing more of his story and personality well after season 1 that we see him as the fully complex and interesting character he is.

Let’s all keep our wits about us, not engulf ourselves in blind hate or love, and encourage the writers to prove us all that this character is worth the while like her actress says.

(I still won’t forgive the bitch, but at least she won’t stick out like a sore thumb.)

(if you want Kahyun’s input on her character and experience, here’s a lengthy interview)

"They don't even know how to write their own character, period !"

By all means, tell me your basis of characterization to declare that characters who didn’t even have enough screentime to have much substance in season 1 (except Shadow, but strangely no one complains about him) aren’t written right when their creator is literally hovering over the writers and actors shoulders, because he wants them to be developed and written right.

It’s not Harry Potter, Neil isn’t making up facts about them to make himself look better, maybe accept that the vision you had in your mind wasn’t entirely accurate to the truth of the characters and that’s okay ? You can still write them yourself however you want, tell the stories you want to tell, Neil has made it very clear that he doesn’t consider fan ideas less valuable than his.

“Bryan has such as specific, unique vision ! They’re just trying to copy it and they’re failing.”

Definitely. No really, you’re right, I’m a big fan of Bryan’s work, I lost my mind like everyone else when he said he wasn’t giving up on Hannibal season 4.

But you know who else has a unique vision ? The seven directors who took over (four of those are women) and the show-runner who had already worked with him beforehand. They’re not trying to copy his style, they’re trying to make a smooth transition so fans like you don’t have a hard time mourning the terrible loss of Bryan and Michael. And for every person who noticed the changes, there were just as many who haven’t even paid attention to it.

Concept : some people may watch shows/movies for the story and the characters, not just for who’s behind the camera. (As far as I’m concerned, I actually like the image better. Everything was killer in season 1, and I think it’s even nicer in season 2.)

“Bryan gave us Salim and the Jinn, and now they’re just gonna be cast aside because those directors lack the LGBT+ sensibility Bryan has !”

Alright, yup, sure. As a member of the community myself, I totally recognize that someone who’s also part of it will know firsthand of the subtleties and details to give the best representation possible on screen. The example of Salim and the Jinn is perfectly fine, since the entire segment was indeed beautifully made. But if we cannot allow people from outside to ponder and think about our lives through writing (which is probably the best way for them to start understanding and broadening their mindset), how can we expect wide representation to improve in any meaningful way ? Especially considering that the show has been casting LGBT+ actors, in an environment where the cast is listened to and solicited on their opinions. 

And especially when Bryan was not the one who gave you Salim and the Jinn. (Because I’ve seen people genuinely believe it.) Neil Gaiman did. He wrote a gay muslim couple in his book 20 years ago, way before it was considered a political statement. He’s also the one who gave strict and specific directions as to how these very characters should be handled. Because if he expanded Salim and his fire boyfriend Jinn’s story from a one-shot to a full story integrated into his entire narration, then it’s certainly not to pull a “bury your gays” or make them miserable. No need to be LGBT+ to be a decent writer and human being.

“Production was a mess anyway, I knew it’d turn out like this. It sucks without Bryan.” 

Define “mess”. Because all the incendiary reports we got throughout early production had been utter bullshit.

Showrunners being “fired” ? Bullshit. “Disastrous” organization ? Bullshit. “Screaming matches” between directors and actors ? Bullshit. Actors “refusing” to come back ? Bullshit.

Every report that wasn’t made through direct input of the cast or production team was not only wildly exaggerated, but also fake ? But please, hear it from Neil himself :

It was weirder for me to read some of the stuff online that said, “Oh, my god, American Gods, behind the scenes, is all falling apart.” I was going, “But they just shot four episodes, and everything is fine. They’re doing some re-shoots, but they’re doing less re-shoots than they did in Season 1.” [...]

I was reading Steven Bochco’s biography on the tube, going into work on Good Omens, every morning, and learning about what went down on Hill Street Blues, and then on NYPD Blue. That was worse, by a factor of thousands, than anything that happened on American Gods. A showrunner came, and a showrunner left. That’s not even an unusual thing. [...] The weirdest thing for me was putting out a thing on Twitter on Season 2, and having a bunch of people go, “We thought this was canceled.” No, it’s not canceled. In its own mad way, it’s on schedule.  

(Source)

The show was never in any danger, much less in jeopardy. It's overreactions to false rumors and dramatic assumptions that can kill a show faster than a showrunner leaving. You want to be critical of a production ? Go ahead, and check your sources and facts. Please. I promise most of the time it’s not worth the worry, much less losing all hope.

“Bryan cared, they’re just ruining what he’s built.”

I dare you to watch any cast interview and tell me these people don’t care about the show, and that they do not value the work everyone else (from hair department to makeup artists, producers, writers, directors and costume team) puts into it as well.

I’ve watched my fair share of shows, I’m curious about production and behind-the-scenes material in general, and I’ve never seen a group of people being so genuinely happy and passionate about what they do and create together.

Neil took time out of preparing Good Omens (which he was showrunning himself) to be more active because he knew things would be different between season 1 and 2. Ricky Whittle (Shadow) had his contract reviewed to better accommodate shooting and planning. Orlando Jones (Nancy) contributed to writing episodes (especially regarding Black history and representation) and brought inputs on characterization. Ian Mcshane (Mr. Wednesday) participated in directing when he explicitly said during season 1 that he wasn’t interested in working as a director on this kind of show.

And that’s for the well-known names only. Go on the American Gods hashtag on instagram, you’ll find all the various artists who participated in crafting all the details found in new episodes. They’re out there talking about how excited they were to work on it all, how they did it, the love they have for the show and crew. They’re active and positive in every way you can be, please tell me how much they don’t care.

Production made the choice of taking its time making this season rather than rushing it when it’s been very clear that delaying can cause massive loss of viewers, because they care more about how the show comes out than what people actually think. They took in stride whatever problem a show of this magnitude could naturally encounter (again guys, no disaster happened) and worked to solve it the best way they could because they were perfectly aware that we fans care. And somehow that’s what made some of yall disappointed ??

If you seriously think Bryan (and Michael, some people forget about him smh) cared more about American Gods than these people -when he, in fact, cared just as much-, then by all means, leave right with him.

(Also uhm, idk if you noticed, but they’re both still credited in the fucking opening. Because, you know, they’re going by the bases they’ve settled.)

Some (hopefully) helpful facts :

+ Bryan and Michael weren’t fired, they walked out of the show after mutual understanding with the rest of the production that they weren’t agreeing on budget and realization. They concluded that pushing it would just be harmful to the show.

+ Likewise, Jesse Alexander (second showrunner) wasn’t evicted but stepped out once disagreements rose as to how to handle the end of the season. Again, they found a solution fairly quickly.

+ Gillian Anderson had only signed for season 1. Whether her character will ever be seen again (probably in flashbacks) is entirely up in the air. No promises, no impossibilities.

+ Both Kristin Chenoweth (Ostara) and Chris Obi (Anubis) have not been able to contribute to season 2 due to conflicts in their schedules.

+ Neil Gaiman has been much more involved in the production of season 2 as he had finished shooting Good Omens, something which took up most of his time when season 1 was produced.

+ Taking time producing a show =/= production being a disaster.

+ Always go for the reports/articles involving interviews and/or inputs of the persons actually working on the project (cast members, producers, writers, directors). Those are the most reliable sources you can fight. (Just remember that there’s always a possibility for fake news/drama online !)

#please do message me if you want clarification/to discuss #summary + facts in the tl;dr and at the very end #american gods #starz #freemantle media #american gods season 2 #neil gaiman #bryan fuller #michael green #ricky whittle #new media #gillian anderson #kahyun kim #rant #my writing #bitch this is so long

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 4x02 Heavy Lies the Crown

The season 4 premiere wasn’t that great, but this is much better and much more typical of the overall quality of season 4.

The Polis storyline is, for a change, actually quite good. I’ve always thought that season 4 did a much better job with most Grounder characters than season 3 or even season 2. And the storyline in and in relation to Arkadia is great, with Bellamy, Clarke and Raven having to do make difficult choices. In particular, Bellamy finds himself in the position to make a really tough choice, and the choice he makes really encapsulates his leadership style and worldview.

The title is another literary reference – after Dante and Poe, now it’s Shakespeare – although it is a misquote of the line “Heavy lies the head that wears the crown” from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. They supposedly chose to name it that way because they thought it sounded better – or maybe they just thought that would make it more obvious to the viewers that the theme of the episode was the difficulty of being a leader.

The flashback that opens the episode would have fit better as the opener of 4x01, which was much more about the fallout of the City of Light and people who died because of ALIE. (No surprise, since it was originally meant to be in 4x01.) It’s the introduction of another interesting new Grounder character, Ilian, whose family suffered a really tragic fate – ALIE made Ilian kill them or torture them in order to force his mother to take the chip. Seeing it all happen helps build sympathy for Ilian and makes it easier to understand his later actions. It’s also one of the few times we see Grounder farmers. I like the fact that the show isn’t focusing just on Grounder warriors  anymore and that we get to see more and more of Grounders of different professions and worldviews.

In Polis, the leader who has to make decisions is Roan, who is preparing to meet the challenge of an ambassador of one of the other clans, Rafel, who is trying to use the fact that Roan is still recuperating from his injury and isn’t full strength, Roan is a good character to watch because he’s smart and capable, and morally grey – he isn’t one of the bad guys, but he can be ruthless and sneaky if he has to. The fact that he’s a very different leader from his mother certainly helps. This is emphasized when Echo, who is sparring with him, goes on about how awesome Queen Nia was, in her mind, for being so ruthless and murderous and not giving a damn about anyone other than Azgeda; After being questioned why he decided to accept the Sky people as the 13th clan, Roan finally tells Echo the truth about Praimfaya and that they need Sky people to survive it.

Talking about Roan’s chances in single combat, Octavia says Lexa kicked his ass when he wasn’t wounded, but she doesn’t know that the Nightblood basically gives you superpowers, which is only revealed later during S4

Kane is again the Chancellor – but we don’t learn if another election was held or not. He is mostly acting as a diplomat, however – he’s more of an ambassador, while Clarke pretty much acts like acting Chancellor in Arkadia.

Kane tries to reason with Rafel, and makes the good point that, if they are going to blame Sky people for the City of Light, they should also credit them for destroying it. But don’t expect Rafel to listen to reason. So Octavia eventually solves Roan’s and everyone’s problem by murdering Rafel, which is later portrayed as a heart attack. I should be generally against assassinations and Octavia using violence and murder to solve problems, but, you know what, I liked this solution.

Major development forward for the Kabby relationship: After the kiss last season, there’s a rather steamy, by CW-standards, sex scene and, while there is no “I love you” in so many words, the relationship between Abby and Kane is strongly affirmed. Initially, after their sex scene, we see that Abby used to wear her wedding ring on a necklace. She’s unsure or uncomfortable with putting it on again, as Kane sees it, but Kane tells her Jake is a part of her, But later Kane realizes that she is not wearing it – and they kiss, as Abby has just shown him that she has really moved on from Jake and committed to him.

Abby decides to go back to Arkadia to help Clarke and the rest find a solution for Praimfaya

In Arkadia, Clarke, Raven and Bellamy arguing over what to do; Raven is concerned thatthere are not enough volunteers to repair the ship. She also has insecurities and feel she shouldn’t be main engineer - Sinclair should be, but he is dead, Clarke replies that she’s in a similar position since she’s no Chancellor. However, they’re all basically back to their own season 1 roles, when they were the only ones on the ground and leaders of their people.

One of the most pleasant surprises about season 4 is that it found a purpose for Jaha and started using his character in a much better way, and even managed to make me finally interested and enjoying his character, even though he hasn’t actually changed his personality. This is probably because 1) he is not in position of power now, 2) he wants to and manages to be useful – as an engineer, which is his original profession, and 3) most importantly, he has a number of interesting interactions with the main characters that he didn’t get to interact much before, like Clarke, Bellamy and Raven. In the season when they are faced with particularly difficult leadership choices, which are similar to the situation on the Ark – having to make choices who will live and who will die because it’s impossible to save everyone; having lie to people in order not to cause panic – Jaha is both there to offer his perspective and advice (which may be good or bad), and as a cautionary tale: he is what they all used to hate and what they really don’t want to become, but now they are afraid they may be becoming like him.

The crux of the episode is Bellamy’s mission (with Monty, Harper, Bryan and Miller) to go into the Azgeda territory, to the remains of the Farm Station that Azgeda occupied, and retrieve a hydro generator that would help produce water for the people in Arkadia during the five years of radiation. They start off hoping to get it peacefully, by showing Roan’s seal. They get a hostile reception instead, but eventually the head Azgeda guy agrees to it. However, things change when they learn that the people working at the station are slaves…

…Let’s take a moment to emphasize the fact (for the benefit of all of those who like to portray Sky people/Arkers as the Bad Guys and Grounders as Good Guys, that, in addition to everything else we know Azgeda did under Queen Nia’s rule, like killing Arkers indiscriminately, including children, from the moment they landed, and blowing up a bunch of Arker civilians as a part of a political power play that wasn’t even about them, they also practice slavery, enslaving both Arkers and other Grounders.

…This is a big moment where the group has to decide whether to prioritize getting the hydro generator, or blowing it up to free the slaves. Bryan argues in favor of the latter, especially since he recognized one of the slaves as a friend of his, called Riley. (Now, I know that the fandom likes to make fun of Riley because of the way that this character was made important in spite of never being heard about before, but this is more of a problem in 4x05. I don’t see any problem here – we never saw any of the Farm Station before season 3, either, and we knew very few of the people on the Ark in season 1, and many we knew are dead. And the actor does a good job playing someone who has been traumatized and beaten down by slavery and abuse.) The group split votes – Bryan and Harper for freeing the slaves (Harper compares their fate to her experience of being put in a cage in Mount Weather), Monty and Miller for getting the hydro generator, so Bellamy makes the decision and chooses to free the slaves.

This decision is something I need to talk about a bit more. I love the way season 4 in particular has so many situations where there is no obvious right or wrong choice - neither choice is great and wrong in some way while good in another way, and you can make good arguments for either alternative. This is one such case. Personally, while I understand and respect the position that the hydro generator should have been the priority and slaves ignored, I was happy with Bellamy's decision, was rooting for him to make that choice, and it's what I would probably do. Regardless of how things turn out in the end, I think this is the better principle to live by: "We save who we can save today". (Which also reminds me of the decision Bellamy made in 2x04 – save the person who is in the most immediate danger and need.) There are many leaders in this show, maybe too many, who advocate the Big Picture thinking, which is a legitimate position if moderate, but taken too far, it can lead to (in the name of some hypothetical better future) present oppression, killing the people you're supposed to protect, executions for all sorts of silly reasons as on the Ark, letting innocent people die from enemy bombs, or cold blooded murder of an innocent person for "pragmatic" reasons - as Jaha did in season 2, using the motto "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". I don't trust anyone who uses that motto to justify killing other people rather than sacrificing themselves (which was how that character we all know and love used it in that well known movie that the quote comes from). And I don't fully trust anyone who does things in the name of an abstract notion of "people" or "my people" while not caring enough about individuals that make up that abstract collective

I liked Bellamy’s decision before I knew how things would turn out, and would like it regardless of the eventual consequences. But as it turns, out, if they had saved the hydro generator, it would have been for nothing, since Ilian will blow up Arkadia in a few episodes. This way, those people who had been slaves a couple of months of nice life back with their families.

Another minor in-character moment: when they are about to take the Grounder ex-slaves to their villages, Bellamy is again taking care of a little girl in the group.

Raven is angry over Bellamy’s decision, and Clarke at first seems to disagree, but eventually accepts it, and Bellamy he sticks to it and takes full responsibility. Clarke finally decides to tell people a half-truth: she tells them about Praimfaya, but claims they will be able to save everyone, even though, without the hydro generator, they can only save 100 people there. Raven gets to display my least favorite character trait of hers, getting all judgmental and b1tchy and sarcastically telling Clarke: “Your father would be so proud!” I dunno, Raven, if you think the people should be told the truth, why don’t you simply tell them? No one is stopping you.

Both Raven and Jasper compared Clarke’s decisions to that of Jaha and the rest of the Ark leadership. Except they forgot the minor detail that she hasn’t executed anyone, imprisoned anyone, or sent anyone to die.

Jasper is now in a very different, but still similar mindset from the one from season 3: he has embraced the “Seize the day” approach, and seems very cheerful, having a shower, singing, asking Monty to bring weed, and telling Clarke he doesn’t want them to survive, he wants them to live. But he is like that only because he knows it will all be over in a few months.

The song Jasper plays is “I Don’t like Mondays” by Boomtown Rats, which includes the line “Silicon chip inside her head”…

This is the last episode where Bryan appears, which is a shame, because he was an interesting character, and his and Miller’s relationship actually got some focus and development, unlike Miller’s mostly off-screen later relationship with Jackson. The actor got a role in another show, but instead of getting killed off, he was just written out quietly – he simply never appears after this episode, and we never learn of his fate. The first time I watched this, I didn’t even realize that the argument between him and Nate at the end of this episode was the end of their relationship, so I was later wondering “so where is Bryan?” when Nate and Jackson became a couple out of the blue. Rewatching this, I can see how this was the end of the relationship. I like the fact that Bryan (who, we have it confirmed now, is now the only survivor, aside from Riley, from the initial number of around 160 people who were on the Farm Station when it fell to Earth) refuses to condemn Pike and still feels loyalty to him – because it would be really unrealistic if everyone now had the same opinion about him. Bryan confirms that he basically never stopped supporting Pike, who he felt loyalty to because he saved his life and they spent several months fighting together, and simply chose his boyfriend over him. But I think the main reason why the relationship broke was not just political differences, but because, after Miller didn’t support or understand Bryan’s decision to prioritize freeing the slaves, Bryan felt that Miller doesn’t understand what he went through with the rest of the Farm Station people in those 4 months and the trauma and effect it had on him.

Timeline: It has been 9 days since the season 3 finale, which means it’s about 8-9 days since 4x01.

Body count:

In the flashback (which is technically in the timeline right at the end of season 3 or the beginning of 4x01), Ilian’s father, brother and mother got killed by ALIE-controlled Ilian. Add them to the list of people who died because of ALIE, We don’t see how the father died, but Ilian killed his brother and almost killed himself, and tortured his mother, and she eventually died of injuries.

Rafel, Trishanakru ambassador, killed by Octavia. (Good riddance- he was really annoying. We’ve seen way too many irritating whiny Grounders who rant about how Sky people are to blame for everything. That’s so last two seasons.)

Several Azgeda slavers got killed in the explosion of the hydro generator.

Tybe the head slaver, beaten to death by the freed slaves. Bryan revealed that he was the one who killed Monty’s father, saying he was therefore Monty’s kill, but Monty chose to do justice in a different way, letting the ex-slaves decide Tybe’s fate.

There are some pointers about the number of surviving people – from a list that Clarke made of the number of people that need to be saved. It’s a partial list: we learn that there are about 500 people Arkadia, 4000 in Polis (out of which 400 children), 300 in Tondc, and we see several smaller places with just a few people. Just counting the numbers we see, we get 4877 Grounders  in addition to 500 Arkers (obviously, neither are exact numbers, since the numbers for Polis, Tondc and Arkadia were rounded), but it’s clearly not a full list, as we don’t see the numbers for,  e.g. Boat people, Shallow Valley people, and many other villages and towns, so I don’t know if the numbers of Grounders in this part of Northern American territory is around 5000-6000 or more like 10.000.

Rating: 8.5/10

#the 100 #the 100 rewatch #the 100 4x02 #heavy lies the crown #the 100 season 4 #bellamy blake #clarke griffin #raven reyes #thelonius jaha #roan kom azgeda #roan #octavia blake #ilian kom trishanakru #ilian #jasper jordan #monty green #harper mcintyre #nate miller #bryan x miller #miller v bryan #kabby #marcus kane #abby griffin #abby x kane

[arrowloosed]

tbh meme : every number divided by two

Are aesthetics important to you? If so, why?

Sometimes. I don’t have photoshop, so a lot of PSDs don’t work for me, and I don’t always try to do aesthetics. But I love seeing them on my dash and I’m always in awe of them. I enjoy seeing them more than I enjoy making them because I doubt my own skills basically? And I’m indecisive. 

How do you explain RP to someone in the real world? 

I do not. I’m lucky enough that almost everyone in my life that I consider a friend does RP or has done RP. The few times I’ve lived with roommates ( a couple of years ago ) who didn’t I sort of ... didn’t mean it until I was sure of them, and they already knew what it was. 

Do you prefer writing male or female muses more? 

When I was younger it was female characters, but I get drawn to the character themselves first, I believe. My original characters are mostly female. 

Name any three things about the RPC that bother you. 

I answered this in previous posts, though not exactly this question. 

Have you ever had a bad experience with commissions? Either as someone who buys them or someone who makes them? 

I don’t do either because I’m poor and untalented. 

Have you ever been involved in drama? Do you regret it? 

In 2012 I had a group of close knit friends in a fandom that will remained unnamed but you can probably guess, because it was 2012. There was this entire event in which one of them sent hate to another one of us, and it was very cruel and then after several hours of being upset by this, the person in question was like ‘it’s me and it’s because _____’ which I do believe was to the tune of ‘just because I don’t like you’. I regret not recognizing that the group dynamics there were awful. 

But otherwise? No. I don’t regret reblogging callout posts for legitimate things because there are some truly nasty people in this community. I don’t consider calling out legitimately criminal and harmful behavior as drama. 

Do you believe RP has a positive or negative affect on your life as a person?

Positive, for the most part. I’ve been writing here for so long that I struggle with writing novel things because it’s a different kind of writing, but I enjoy this kind of writing so much. And the friends I’ve made? I wouldn’t trade that for the damn world. 

I’ve answered sixteen. 

-

Have you sent yourself hate on anon? 

I prefer to hate myself in the open. No I’m kidding. I’ve never sent myself anon hate. 

Have you ever felt pressured to write something you weren’t comfortable with?

Yes, but not really since 2012. I’ve been lucky in my recent return to the RPC. 

 What would make you block someone? 

There’s a few things. Thinking it’s okay to write racist characters, homophobic characters, antisemites / first o.rder, h/ydra ... like ... It’s not okay. Do you know how much of that happens in real life? Do you know how much I see and deal with that shit in real life? That my friends do? I don’t want to sit there and see your character be racist because you just like the character or think he has an interesting backstory. I’m going to block it and protect myself. 

Have you ever had someone steal something from you? If so, how did you react? 

Not that I’m aware of, no. 

How do you feel about vague posting? 

It makes me incredibly anxious. 

Do you read someone’s rules before following or interacting?

Always, every single time. 

How do you respond to popular slang used on tumblr? Do you interact with it or use it at all? 

I’m hesitant on this one because I don’t really know what it has to do or has to do with RP? But I try to ... investigate the sources of words, because I don’ want to appropriate something I think is slang but it actually AAVE which isn’t mine to use. If it’s not AAVE or something from a culture / minority that I shouldn’t be using, then sometimes? I speak in memes and vines a lot lmao. 

Have you ever experienced discrimination? 

I hesitate to say yes because there’s so much worse discrimination in real life but ... god people really don’t interact with female OCs, do they. I’ve also been told ( way back in 2012 ) that ‘no one cared about me talking about asexuality and to shut up’. So kind of, but nothing i actually consider a Big Deal. 

Have you ever cried while writing a reply?

Yes. I kind of love it? It’s a good emotional release. it especially happens if I’m listening to the right kind of music. 

What’s one thing that people hate that doesn’t seem to bother you? 

Reblog karma reblog karma reblog karma. Now please note: I always ALWAYS follow it because I know thats something that bothers people. But personally? It bothers me more that people either feel forced to send something in to me just to reblog something from me - if you want to send something in to interact, do. If you don’t, then please don’t. But it also bothers me that people go out of their way to have to reblog from the source? I don’t want to be used like a meme resource - please don’t go through my blog and reblog everything in my meme tag I’m begging you - but if I’ve just put something on the dash, I always feel strange about people purposefully avoiding me to go to the source. I put it on the dash, reblog it if we’re following each other? 

The only time it really bothers me is when it’s an OOC meme? Because I never want someone to feel like they’re forced to interact, but when I reblog an OOC meme and no one sends something in but everyone’s reblogging it from me, that one kind of bugs me the wrong way. This is specifically about the ‘tell me about my portrayal meme’ like it costs nothing to tell someone something nice. Of course I also ... don’t want someone to tell me something just to appease me, so IDK. 

Answered. 

#long post / #voynasoldat

[i-am-the-entertainer]

A Mid-Volume RevieWBY

Let’s be honest. Most of us were holding our breath for the entire hiatus: we’ve been burned before by this show.

RWBY has always been a show with potential, but has been unable to get as big as it wants to be just due to the nature of how it’s made. Rooster Teeth is still an independent production studio, they can only put out so many episodes a year, and for the past two volumes it was just two guys writing basically everything.

It’s also worth pointing out that RWBY wasn’t originally a masterpiece on its own. What made it stand out was a) the fact that the mostly comedy-driven Rooster Teeth was making an original IP and b) the fights. People jumped onto this show because even if the animation quality was subpar, the vocal performances were all over the place, and the writing was slow as hell, there was charm to it, and part of that charm was watching the show gradually improve.

Which is why everything started to feel stagnant when the show stopped improving. Sure, they upgraded to a more professional-looking animation engine, they started hiring more professional voice actors and the original cast’s performances improved with experience, but with the loss of the series’ creator, visionary, and key animator, the ability to have epic fights was lost, as was a major guiding force for where the show could go. Couple that with key missteps in major storytelling in Volume 4 and 5 (including storylines that were just completely dropped or failed to receive any focus) and wildly inconsistent fight quality from chapter to chapter, the show was getting so many things wrong. Yeah, some of the criticism was just unnecessarily toxic, and I recognize the CRWBY’s discomfort at the level of hate they were getting (no one’s forcing you to watch the show, people), but seriously, it got to the point that even some of the show’s more positive fans were calling RWBY out for its problems. These issues were finally acknowledged by the team in a Reddit AMA following the Volume 5 finale, and they promised they would try to fix them. Miles himself posted this:

A couple of us went into this Volume with cautious optimism. While Volume 5 had been a disappointment, some of the new guiding philosophies they were claiming to use to fix RWBY for the next Volume had been used surprisingly successfully for Nomad of Nowhere. Everyone thought that show was going to be another cancelled-after-one-season failure for RT Animations, but surprisingly it turned out to be one of their best shows. If they could create another entirely new world and actually do some really good storytelling, maybe there was hope for RWBY.

If you saw the Volume 6 premiere in theaters like me, you may have watched with baited breath. They felt the need to screen the last hour of Volume 5 first, which just served as a reminder of how disappointing the overall product had been. Then they showed a behind the scenes video where the CRWBY discussed changes to the pipeline: a new co-director for the series, an actual writing team to assist Miles and Kerry, the animators being given more control on certain scenes, etc. etc. Overall, suggesting “We heard you and we’re going to try to improve.”

And then the first episode was shown. And honestly? It was pretty good. Good balance of humor and action while starting up some of the major storylines of the season. The fight scenes were well-choreographed, they’d clearly spent a lot of time working on the episode, they even had time to add little details and quirks to the character. It’s probably one of the best premieres of the entire show: it felt like it was doing a better job of marking a new era for the show than the Volume 4 premiere had been trying to do.

So, let’s assess how things have gone, at least so far.

Focus

This has been the biggest improvement for the show. The big problem in Volume 4 and 5 was having the team split up and attempting to give each their individual focus, while also giving secondary characters basically the same amount of focus, which was waaaay beyond what this kind of show could do. There were simply too many story threads and events going on that made following the show fun to watch––whole storylines would be dropped for several episodes at a time. I mean, the whole reason the Apathy didn’t appear in Volume 4 despite what they’d planned was because there just wasn’t any time to include them. As of now, there are only two major story threads we’ve been concerned with: Team QRWBYOM and Team Melted Ice Cream. A third could be Salem’s faction, but they’ve only had one scene so far: I suspect they’re going to play a more major role in the second half of this volume, though, considering they were waiting for the heroes to reach Argus. A fourth is Adam, but he also has only had one actual scene so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if they pushed him aside for the first half so they could focus on the main characters and he’ll have a bigger role later on.

This renewed focus has allowed us to finally get some proper interaction within the main team, plus actual character development. So, good on that.

Pacing

So much better. Volumes 4 and 5 relied way too much on cliffhangers to get people to come back each episode, instead of relying on a story playing out in single chapters. When I say cliffhangers, I mean cutting off a key story moment in the name of shock or not allowing the episodes to stand on their own. We’ve gotten a lot of episodes with an individual focus where they could potentially stand as an independent episode of the show, even the more arc-like episodes like what happened with Brunswick Farms: "The Coming Storm,” the second episode of that arc, had the Cinder vs. Neo fight that everyone adored and some amazing interactions with Blake and Yang and Weiss and Ruby.

I had a concern that having major revelations/moments in only the first few chapters was going to kill the pacing for the entire volume, and I still kind of have that concern. That said, I am surprised that they’ve kept up the momentum this far into the volume, so I’m cautiously optimistic. With maybe the exception of Chapter 4, each episode had a major story beat that packed a punch the volume needed to keep going.

Tone

This has been another problem for the past two volumes: the show kind of established itself with the anime vibe of visual comedy mixed with legitimate drama, but hasn’t really kept up that momentum volume-to-volume. In the cases of Volumes 4 and 5, they both began with some anime-like humor but failed to use it consistently. These seven chapters, meanwhile, have been pretty consistent in delivering those humorous moments: even Brunswick Farms, the most horror-based arc in the series thus far, has some laugh out loud scenes.

And on that note: the horror elements of the Brunswick Farm arc were really well done. Sure, there was no way anyone was going to die, but that doesn’t really matter (repeat: THAT DOES NOT MATTER, CERTAIN PEOPLE) because a combination of writing, animation, and even sound design made for a couple of episodes that were legitimately terrifying.

Animation

I don’t want to make too many calls on this because I’m not that great at assessing this kind of thing (writing’s more my forte), and @hypeathon writes some really great analyses on the topic, much better than I ever could. But overall I think it’s safe to say the animation quality has really improved. You can really tell with certain episodes that more time was spent to make them look their best, especially Chapter 1, which had these little touches that I wouldn’t have expected at all from the show five years ago. Minus a couple of animation errors here and there, things are looking good. No random teleportation, all the fight scenes we’ve gotten have been sufficiently epic, they’ve been placed at points in the show that satisfy our epic fight cravings, overall, good work. Kind of the payoff to the mention from the premiere documentary that they’re leaving a lot of creative decisions in the hands of the animators, which has overall made a much prettier-looking show.

Character Development

One of the problems of juggling multiple storylines in Volumes 4 and 5 was that we weren’t given a whole lot to work with in terms of character development: a lot of it seemed to just happen offscreen, we weren’t really shown what changed a character from the start of a volume to the end of one. The biggest victims of this problem were the core four, who were often pushed aside in favor of development for side characters. Ruby has been the biggest victim of this problem, with a planned arc about her survivor’s guilt in Volume 4 getting pushed aside to focus on Ren’s story, and only really getting one legit moment of development in Volume 5 in her brief talk with Oscar. Yang’s arc about recovering from the Battle of Beacon was almost non-existent in Volume 4, with only a few drops of it popping up at moments in Volume 5 that didn’t form a cohesive development arc. Blake and Weiss actually had a decent arc, but Weiss wasn’t given a whole lot to do in Volume 5 and then kinda sorta got fridged for an episode or two.

With the characters reunited and a renewed focus on the core team, we’re finally seeing some actual on-screen development. Chapter 5 “The Coming Storm” is the clearest example of that, with the team dealing with the fallout from Jinn’s story in (what appeared to be) a lower-stakes setting. Key moments included Blake and Yang’s interaction, which brought the much-desired angst everyone was waiting for, knowing how betrayed Yang felt when Blake abandoned her at the end of Volume 3. Ruby and Weiss, who were set up from the beginning of the whole show as partners, weren’t really interacting a lot, even when they reunited midway through Volume 5. We get a nice moment of their dynamic while they’re looking for food.

Jaune

Well. That might explain why he’s gone for most of the first half.

(listen rwde, they’re never gonna get rid of him completely. He’s an established character, they can only push him aside for most of the volume, stop chasing your tail and get over it already. If they abruptly killed him I’m sure you’d be celebrating but all of us would be thinking “What...what purpose does that serve to the overall plot?”)

Storytelling

This is probably the best Volume in terms of storytelling. After years of World of Remnants and exposition dumps delivered by characters standing around talking, the philosophy of “Show, don’t tell” finally actually happened on this show. Flashbacks, which didn’t happen much (if at all) before, were finally used, and we ended up with some great material: again, the Grimm Reaper flashback in Chapter 7 continues the volume riding high on good quality fight animation, but also gives us a sense of the world the characters inhabit. More than before, a lot of minor things in this world are implied rather than fed to us, like the danger Silver-Eyed Warriors have to live with, the efforts people will go to to live out normal lives in Grimm-infested territory, etc.

I brought this up earlier, but Chapter 3 “The Lost Fable” was basically to RWBY what “El Rey” was to Nomad of Nowhere: a massive lore-dump that provided some much-needed context to what the heroes were doing, completely changing the stakes of the show up to that point and potentially changing the course of everything for the rest of the season. And we desperately needed that kind of episode, where we were shown instead of told the background of Ozpin and Salem, instead of just blindly thinking “Here’s the good guy and here’s the bad guy.”

And yet if I’m being honest, I can’t say I really liked it. I’m not sure why, maybe I’ve gotten cynical like the rest of the angry commenters on YouTube, it feels a bit like this is happening way too late, like it should not have taken this many years for something like this to be revealed, or there should have been a much better buildup to that reveal. At the same time, I understand that some major events in RWBY’s production (the least of which was the way too large scope of Volume 4 and the biggest of which was the shocking loss of its creator right when the show was about to enter a shift in tone) meant any proper buildup had to be killed in favor of telling cohesive stories volume-to-volume. So yeah, I can’t say I liked that episode individually, but I know the greater purpose it serves to the show so it doesn’t really bother me that much.

Conclusions

I try to be positive with my reviews of RWBY, especially considering how vitriolic reviews of this show can get. That said, this volume’s not perfect. The big criticism I have right now is that this is a show that wants to tell an epic story on a grand scale but can only tell it in fourteen 10-20 minute episodes per season. It doesn’t help that the last two volumes were the attempted execution of that plan, while this one seems to be scaling that back so the show doesn’t lose focus. But that’s just my issue with how the show has tried to established itself in the post-V3 era and how we’re no longer getting that. I think the biggest improvement this show could have would be longer episodes, and I could sacrifice having a volume per year if it meant they could spend more time on the episodes and tell the big story they want to tell. But I know Rooster Teeth can’t function as a production studio while only putting out one volume of RWBY, its flagship show (sorry RvB), every few years. Actually, I suspect that might be the model gen:LOCK is gonna follow, considering the first season alone has taken a year and a half to produce.

At the conclusion of Volume 5 I remarked that even though it was a disappointment, it was an obvious step in the creative direction the show needed to go in. Even if the fight animation was very often subpar and it felt like they were trying to clean things up after Volume 4 got too big to handle, there was a better blend of storytelling and action.

This volume so far has been the payoff. I haven’t felt the urge to seethe through my teeth with disappointment after a single episode this volume: each one was satisfying in its own way, I no longer feel like I have to keep track of 200 different characters and what they’re up to, and I walk away from the fight scenes feeling like something epic actually occurred rather than “Okay, so they punched things defied gravity and that somehow defeated their enemies.”

Yes, there are problems, but the show is showing clear signs of improvement. I think it’s safe to say after seven fairly good episodes that Volume 6 could very well become the best volume of RWBY. Any clear issues with the story and scope for this volume should’ve come up by now, and nothing really comes to mind. As far as I’m concerned, as a serialized TV show RWBY is succeeding. Whether that will all payoff for the final overall volume? Well, we’ll have to wait til the finale airs in February.

#rwby6 #reviewby #rwby #crtq #rwby volume 6

[mbtinsanity-blog]

Alright folks, it's time for a good old-fashion MBTI rant, you ready? OKAY HERE WE GO LET'S GET STARTED

So Vox put out a video who knows how long ago about how the MBTI personality test is pretty much inaccurate half the time, the theory formulators (mother Briggs and daughter Briggs Myers expanding on Carl Jung's ideas) had no formal training in psychology or cognitive behavior, the system doesn't really fit everyone, people shouldn't use the system to gage someone's professional success, and the whole thing is totally useless astrology-esque Forer Effect nonsense and should only be used for entertainment purposes.

Where do I even start here.

So first of all, they're right, your Myers Briggs personality type should absolutely not be an indicator of your professional success or leadership skills, nor should it pigeon-hole you into any particular job or role. Companies that use MBTI this way are companies I'd be skeptical of using sound practices in their organization and categorization of employees.

The thing is, there is waaay more to people than their personality type. Trying to fit someone into a "suitable" role based on the way they think, feel, and take in information is ignoring what people actually want to do or enjoy doing, which is significant data when you're trying to get someone to do a job. Just because you might be really really good at crafting/outfit-making because the way you think and interact with your environment + the culmination of your life experiences has given you the tools you need to be good at it DOES NOT mean you want to start up your own crafting business or that you want to go into fashion. It just doesn't. Yes, that's a real life example for an ENTJ in case anyone was wondering, and that also doesn't mean all ENTJs would be good at crafting or fashion design. Crafting and fashion design are activities that can play to an ENTJ's strengths (like Te, Ni, and Se), but you still need skill, experience, tools, knowledge, and interest to do them.

That said, you CAN use someone's Myers Briggs personality type to predict what they might be good at. I was playing Mario Party with a bunch of new friends and I go in knowing that my Te sucks, I have none of it, but I instantly recognized one of my friends was a Te user when we paired up for a Te-oriented mini game I'd never played before. So what did I do? I instructed him do most of the Te work and we totally owned it! Recognizing what cognitive functions people are good at does help predict what kind of tasks someone might be good (or bad) at, which is useful for anything from knowing your own personal strengths/weaknesses to effectively structuring teamwork. Even so, it's really important to consider what tasks people want to do. I know an ENFJ who is really flippin' good at math, but she also hates it. Her propensity for math might not have anything to do with her type, and her hatred for it isn't an inherent ENFJ quality either, so you can't just say "hm, well because you're an ENFJ, you must be good/terrible at math so you should/shouldn't go into a math-oriented field", we can only guess. Trying it out is really where you get to discover it for yourself! And even if you're terrible at math, that doesn't mean you can't get better at it, practice, and go into a field that uses it. You can do whatever you want to do, regardless of your type.

Once more for the people in the back: YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO, REGARDLESS OF YOUR TYPE

Okay so back to why this Vox video pissed me off. First of all, it implicitly discredits the founders, Briggs and her daughter, by stating they had no background in psychology. What's that smell you say? Why I do declare it's the pungent aroma of logical fallacy Appeal to Authority, or at least it's antithesis. What actually makes a scientist a scientist? Someone who performs GOOD SCIENCE. I cannot tell you how many "scientists" there are out there with degrees in their field of specialty who didn't practice good science. Meanwhile, people without degrees (I dunno like pea-counting geneticist Gregor Mendel and legit so many other major contributors to science without degrees in their field of contribution) who have been taught scientific principles and appropriately used them are way more scientifically legitimate to me. One scientific principle is observation, and when it comes to psychology, observation is especially key! Who cares if Briggs and her daughter didn't have the scientific background, you don't need it to be a good scientist and make legitimate observations. On top of that, they came up with a testable system, which even in fields like biology and chemistry can be challenging to develop, but in psychology it is especially not easy. So trying to discredit people’s science and their systems based on professional qualifications? Yeah no, not having it. Let’s keep going with that train of thought for a sec and touch on their feelings about astrology. Now I’ve always called myself a “sucker” for astrology, acknowledging that the descriptors do tend to be both positive and appealingly general enough to ascribe a feeling of accuracy to your specified type that isn’t based on anything real (i.e. this is the Barnum or Forer Effect). But let’s challenge that for a moment, shall we? Surely from a scientific perspective there’s no way to support astrology as being a legitimate system, right? But the answer is a little more nuanced than “astrology is illegitimate”. Astrology doesn’t have any logical basis for the associations of its types with the alignment of the stars when someone was born, but what it does have is twelve distinct and cohesive personality types.  It is not inconceivable that someone out there observed various people over time and generated 12 different personality types based on the month in which someone was born by recognizing patterns in people and then assigning those patterns to individual personalities. I’m not saying these personalities were formed with “good scientific observation,” but the system isn’t as far-fetched as it might otherwise seem. Even if it’s not a good system, it’s still worth considering seriously as a system before brushing it off as total nonsense as many are inclined to do. To do so without investigation would not, in fact, be considered “good science”. So what about the idea that MBTI doesn’t fit everyone? Well, that’s kind of the point of testing the system, isn’t it? Not everyone has to fit the system for the system to be useful, but also I personally have yet to come across someone who doesn’t possess at least one of the suggested eight cognitive functions. Maybe MBTI doesn’t work the way the system currently says it works, which is why we can modify the system if the system doesn’t hold true. Theories are flexible and subject to change! If the system “doesn’t fit,” maybe it’s not a good system or maybe that’s okay and it’s still useful. Myers Briggs has wider applications than pure entertainment, and suggesting otherwise is being narrow-minded to the scope of the system. MBTI gives us a way to talk about human cognitive processes in an accessible way.  Being able to describe some of the reasons why people get along or don’t get along and how you can improve relationships is 200% useful information that we should not just discard as flimsy entertainment.  Even if a system seems ridiculous, take it seriously and then explain your reasons for why it isn’t cohesive. Be better, Vox. Be better.

#rant #personal rant #that video made me so mad #psychology #mbti #myers briggs #systems #astrology

[rpbetter]

Today I learned a popular vent blog is repressing submissions about the drama with the now defunct resource blog. They probably have a relationship to the resource blog admin, or they are the admin. I know two people who sent submissions that were not published, but new submissions they made after were. The admin is silent after inquiries about it. They are ignoring everyone who tries to talk about it. It is so hard to find a place in the rpc that is transparent right now, a place that does not censor people who need to get things off their chest. Of all places that should keep their bias in check. It should not be a vent blog. That is one of the last places people go when they can not confide in their rp partners, or people in real life. Sometimes just having a vent post published can be everything. It is more silencing than people think.

Okay, I do know what you're talking about. I've said in the past that I specifically look around the RPC to gauge a rounder set of experiences, problems, etc. That blog is such a place that I have visited in the past to do so, and I have both noticed and been told what you're telling me now. I will admit, because I do believe in honesty here as a part of transparency one should strive to uphold off of their RP and personal blogs, that I have held exactly these suspicions since the blog choose to "handle" recent events the way they did. That is why I was paying attention to the disparity in both original submissions published and the responses to them.

What I have seen is a little uncomfortable feeling. It isn't just The Topic itself, it's also anything relating too closely to that mun's repeatedly expressed positions on things as well. Well, you know, a frightening number of people do feel the same way, do engage in those behaviors, so I am willing to believe that I am merely seeing shit where it doesn't exist. I am, after all, just a person, doing what people do, being fallible. I'm not acting on any information that anyone else out there isn't privy to, I also want t be clear about that. It's the opposite of my interest to withhold information, make it up, or inflame the situation.

Like everyone else in the RPC right now, it's incredibly difficult to not be suspicious. So many really ugly things were revealed and transpired, it was like every three hours there was something horrifying and new going on. And the way that it was left off, with the meme blog mun and with that vent blog just served to chafe those feelings for many.

So, again, while I am not trying to give this all a spritzer of gasoline, and neither am I acting on any knowledge none of you have, I've had suspicions since the time that vent blog decided that it was fully appropriate to refuse action for what went on that there was a bit of a personal connection going on. When your blog has established that it will mass-block people for far less, but suddenly, over this, it's a useless effort not going to help anyone? I'm sorry, that's suspicious to me. If nothing else, it was incredibly shitty to tell muns who were targetted because of interactions on their blog to just get over it and be adults when the adult thing is to approach the mods (hello, it does stand for moderator) with concerns, and this is a serious concern.

One that has done exactly as you say - effectively shut down venting and communication on that blog. I love that the direction is constantly to take things to the comments lmao gee, I wonder why no one is willing to openly comment anymore? Total mystery! Could it be that even you feel you can handle potential harassment, you don't want to endanger anyone else who might not be able to? Possibly.

Venting has a negative connotation here anyway, that doesn't help. Months before this all happened, I was seeing an increasing number of people equating such blogs to burnbooks, or at best, "childish echo chambers."

However, venting on one's own blog is not alright either. We're not supposed to have a visible problem with anyone or anything they're doing, ever. It's supposed to work out every time like this: you approach the person(s) causing you this problem and discuss it maturely with them in private, the issue is resolved, and everyone goes off into the sunset crapping rainbows. Double ones, even.

The problem is...it doesn't work out like that very often. That isn't to say it shouldn't be your first action, it should. Sometimes, especially if you've been both lucky and extremely careful about your writing partners, you'll be wonderfully surprised and it'll be a great conversation that helps both muns. So much of the time though, it instigates a fight because everyone is automatically defensive as hell, or one or both muns are so afraid of that happening that they'll refuse to have a meaningful confrontation (confrontation is not always negative, we need to stop viewing it that way). One or both say whatever is necessary to smooth over the problem, while they change nothing at all, making the feelings of anger so much worse.

And maybe, this problem isn't that big of a deal, one needs to work themselves up into addressing it, or they've cause to actually fear the other mun's response to them.

So, they have three options, and none of them is alright with the RPC:

vent to a friend - this is unacceptable because it is always seen as talking shit behind another mun's back, bringing drama to others, and trying to force people to take sides, no matter how much none of these may be the case and hold a lot of variables depending on the type of venting and the relationship of the muns involved

vent/vague on the dash - not always the same thing, not always occurring at the same time, and not always invalid either, but always viewed as incredibly malicious and wrong. Even if the result was either getting the friend who wouldn't stop refusing to engage to have a meaningful conversation with you or finding a new partner because someone else has been experiencing it too, you know you're not going to do this to each other, and a mutual you've been ignoring is now a valued partner

vent on a vent blog - seen as even worse than venting on one's blog in some corners because it's a more open to visit place, it's just stirring up drama and fights, this makes everyone feel vagued about and suspicions and accusations of being mentioned/mentioning someone run wild. Everyone wants a drama-free dash, no one wants to allow anyone a better place to do it

Venting is important. I think it is necessary to maintaining a less explosive environment. It's called "venting" for a reason!

Maybe it is the most ridiculous complaint in history, but those things do build. And build. And build. Until they blow up all over in someone's face, it might even be someone totally innocent who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time with exactly the worst coincidental words spoken to you. These places allow for people to get it out without hurting anyone's feelings or starting a massive argument when it wasn't even anything that serious. They offer, or used to, different perspectives that let muns feel seen while helping them to decide whether they are just blowing things out of proportion, misunderstanding/potentially unaware of another aspect, or even in a worse situation than they were allowing themselves to be aware of with a harmful relationship.

It goes beyond just venting when there are conversations going on about the topics! Sometimes, people just need to feel like they're not so isolated. Sometimes, they legitimately lack the tools and perspectives to approach a problem more directly or successfully. And yes, sometimes, they even need to see that this is kind of shitty of them and they should reevaluate.

Vent blogs are difficult to manage.

We all have biases, and when it comes to more personal situations we can recognize or see ourselves within, that is never more likely to become a point of extra difficulty to keep in check. This is actually why I left that vent blog the first time around, there was way too much bias being expressed with a mod taking it upon themselves to opine on submissions, fight with people about them, and refuse to post them while vaguing about them. Among other, increasingly perturbing behaviors I had no desire to keep seeing daily on my dash.

When you decide to create or accept a position moderating such a blog, you have to know that you will be thus challenged. Someone is going to vent about someone you'll recognize, a situation you feel passionately about, or say something in a vent that upsets you. You have got to remain visibly impartial. Go on and vent about it yourself to friends, write a post on your personal, do whatever the hell you need to in order to not be visibly biased and acting upon that bias.

I see blogs like this, as well as other places of moderation, often becoming incensed and offering the angry justification that "mods are people." Yes, I should hope you are! No one is saying you must be an impossibly perfect person without opinions, biases, or mistakes. We are holding you to a higher standard of you deal with these things out in the open where you hold this position, yes. That's literally what your job is, my friends. Go off about it, feel your feelings, even cultivate a block list from that blog! But you don't show it, you don't ever make people feel worse when the point of your blog is to allow them a voice.

The only time you need to give a personal opinion is when it is requested or you need to express that a submission was declined/comment had to be moderated due to you exercising your judgment that it violated the rules.

This is supposed to be a safe place for muns to anonymously let it out of their systems and discuss these topics. Not a place where they'll feel exposed, judged by the mods themselves, and denied a voice because of a mod's biases being exercised.

And I'm extremely sorry that people are being made to feel this way, all over again in some cases, because someone cannot handle the position they took up. I'm sorry for the whole community who has lost an important outlet. I wish that I could recommend another place for people to go that might provide a better experience, but as yet, I do not. Hopefully, that'll be changing in the near-enough future, but for right now...all of the vent blogs I was familiar with have long since closed down.

If anyone has any currently running vent blog suggestions, I'd love to know about them and share them! Please, they do have to be legitimate vent blogs. I'm not going to recommend here that might be too close to actually being burnbook-like, deals in publishing URLs, and so on. If you want to engage with that, it's absolutely your choice, but it's not something I want to give certified approval to on this blog, and I hope you understand why. If they're legitimately anonymous, safer places serving as vent blogs, let me know so I can check them out for a few days and publish your ask!

It wasn't my intention with this blog, though I did offer that a couple of times just to get people talking about problems important to them in the past, but if you want to vent here, I'll do my best to publish them (unless you request otherwise) in a relatively timely fashion.

I'm just not a proper vent blog, and people should be aware of that! I do offer opinions on those matters. It's more in line with the point of this blog to do so - I want to be able to give some point of assistance in publishing them. I cannot promise, therefore, to be impartial, but I can promise to not judge you or ignore what you send because I don't agree, am tired of it, etc.

I'd just ask that, once again, everyone realize that sending hateful messages to me isn't going to result in me being nice to you in return. If you've a complaint to lodge, lodge it respectfully if you desire to be treated that way yourself. This blog will publish anon hate, that doesn't mean I'm going to be nice when you send it. Anything else, however, I will genuinely try to offer you the opportunity to be seen and heard, some advice, experiences I might have had with a similar issue, and to approach it fairly.

Sorry that everyone is going through a hard time, that it just doesn't seem to stop, and probably will not for some time now. Thank you for sending this, I hope it made you feel a little better! That has been, and will continue to be, my objective in publishing asks relating to this matter - I just want everyone to feel like they have some agency and respect somewhere, that they're being seen, and that they have the support of others in the community.

#answered #anonymous #vent blogs #tumblr rpc #drama cw

[semi-anonyme]

Let’s Talk About Alcohol

Gear up baby, this is a long and very personal post but I think it can help people and certainly it feels very cathartic to write.

Last night, I drank my last alcohol for a while, at least until my birthday in 2 months (more on that later). I’ve been declaring some intention to abstain from alcohol for a while now, but I think I’ve learned enough about myself during this past few months that this declaration now is clearer and more intentional. I’m going to write about it now because putting things into words is my therapeutic and ritualistic way of putting something behind me.

I think a big issue with substance abuse is being okay knowing that you have had legitimately good experiences that could not be replicated while sober. The part of me that strives to be mature and clearheaded wants to say:

every great experience I've had under the influence could have been replicated with a sober mind, I don’t need drugs

But the private voice in the back of my head says:

damn, those times were so fun. God do I really have to punish myself by going stone sober?

These two states, how I want to feel about my usage vs how I actually feel about my usage, create other feelings of shame and apprehension. I'm ashamed that I feel this way because I don't want the stigma of someone who is out of control but I also have no desire to stop because in my head the experience of the drug is irreplaceable.

An example I'm thinking of right now is going out to dance. When I'm a little faded on the dance floor, I usually have a big ass smile on my face and I vibe, man, I vibe. And there are times where I'm in the zone, I'll have people coming up to me -- including really beautiful women -- who just want to dance with me, know me.

As someone who spends so much time in solitude, it feels good and validating as a single man who also desires intimacy. There's something about knowing my energy was attractive that just feels good.

Same thing with sitting at a bar just drinking. I'd just be at a place having an IPA or a negroni after work, maybe some live jazz in the East Village. I'd enter with a lot on my mind and feel closed off. A drink or two in I'd start having a conversation with a woman sitting near me. Everything that flows out of me is just funny and real. The thoughts in my head I had deemed too shameful to reveal in my sober mind are expressed without inhibition. I am a poet. There's nothing to hide, this is real, and my inner life flows out of me as naturally as rivers flow downstream. I feel validated. Yes, I am a misunderstood martyr. Yes, I am a tragic anti-hero. Yes, these feelings I've been hiding are universal, why should I feel so ashamed? This is great. I love this.

I wake up the next day, maybe with a headache and a phone number or an instagram follow, but I know that I have no intention of actually knowing these people. Because who I was last night and who I am now are two different people. The shame is still there, it just got a little room to breathe.

Isn't that what we're always looking for? Just some room to breathe?

There's an overall theme in these two examples. On times I've been out drinking, there's this feeling of openness, human connection, and courage. In many ways, it's like wearing a mask and adopting a new identity. This character is full of joie de vivre, this character is an open book, this character is at peace with himself, this character is easily excitable, this character has an attractive energy and feels himself to be attractive. This character accepts his flaws, and knows that his humanity is precisely what makes him easy to connect with.

I remember one time I was talking to my therapist about drinking. I told her of all the times I had out, dancing, all the connections I made, all the memories I had. She looked at me and very non-judgmentally said, "it seems that alcohol has really given you a lot in your life". I agreed. She said, "you know, the alcohol is not really the problem - the alcohol is a proxy for something else, which is the relationship you have to yourself".

That kind of blew my mind. It made sense even initially, but over the past year it has become more concrete, and is the lens through which I view compulsive behavior. I’ll explain what she means more if you don’t quite get it.

If you notice how I laid out this "character" that I adopt, the space between who I am and this character is bridged -- or related -- by alcohol. In my daily life, I want to be more open, want to be quick to laugh, want to be quick witted and outside of my head more. I want to have that beautiful attractive energy I that I envy in some people. The alcohol gives me a lot of that -- but at a price.

I've talked with friends about their compulsive behaviors, read anonymous confessions on reddit, read about celebrities opening up about their addictions, and when you get into the why of when these people find themselves acting out their compulsive behavior, it really boils down to this:

I feel something that I do not want to feel -->    I do a thing to escape this feeling -->        that feeling goes away (but only temporarily)

A great example is when I listened to Kid Cudi on the Joe Rogan Experience talk about his addiction to cocaine. Note that this interview was in 2014 and he wasn't actually clean yet, so he was talking about a problem he was still privately battling. If you go to the 1:30 mark, he talks about his "trifecta" -- do cocaine before breakfast, drink a beer, smoke some weed. This allowed him to go out into the streets and interact with fans who would inevitably stop him and want to talk. Without it, he felt he couldn't.

What it did for me, it completely numbed me, I didn’t care about anything, I was a robot. But being so numb, it allowed me to meet my fans and be out in the streets, so in a twisted way, it did a positive thing for me and that’s why I didn’t see it as an issue

Like damn, today I went out in Soho and I was just high fiving fans and shit. It was the most amazing experience, something that I never get a chance to feel because I’m just like such a recluse and I was just weirded out when people recognized me and I just didn’t want to go anywhere

Kid Cudi needed his "trifecta" to get through that, but ultimately, a personality built off of drug use is obviously unsustainable. Again:

I feel something that I do not want to feel -->    I do a thing to escape this feeling -->        that feeling goes away (but only temporarily)

But that's the thing though. You don't know you have a problem until you're knee deep in it because the initial benefits of the drug use are so obviously good and pivotal to functioning.

Last year, I read this book The Lost Weekend -- it's about an alcoholic who goes on a five day bender that almost kills him. While I am not an alcoholic, it was amazing and terrifying to see how much of the character I identified with in his first two days of drinking. I wrote earlier how I now have a lens through which to view addiction ("alcohol is the proxy for your relationship to yourself") and this lens allowed me to see the main character, Don Birnam, for who he was and who he wanted to be and how he used alcohol to try and bridge the gap.

He was a failed writer who used alcohol to escape into fantasies of how his life should have turned out. There's this scene in day 2 of his bender where he's listening to a recording of a pianist and he talks about how his greatest fantasy is to have a piano recital at Carnegie Hall, a sold out show, and play beautiful piano pieces by his favorite composers. Everyone would adore him and his work.

While under the influence, he has these moments of clarity where he knows what he wants and feels committed to doing it. But as the booze wears off so does the satisfaction he has achieved in his fantasies, and he chases these fleeting feelings with more booze. After waking up, shaking, the only thing he can do to smother his feelings of shame and try to re-capture that sliver of optimism he felt is to drink even more. Therein lies the cycle of abuse.

This book was written in 1944 but it floors me how universally it portrays the mindset of drinking, and the slippery slope that the road takes. When it was published, a famous screenwriter named Herman Mankiewicz (an alcoholic who wrote Citizen Kane among many other great screenplays), having seen himself in the character of Don Birnam, attempted suicide. I was curious what more contemporary takeaways were. I can't find the source, but the one that stuck with me is when someone wrote, "The Lost Weekend made me realize that I thought that I was better than other people in my drinking, but in the end it's drinking, it's all the same".

Is it too embarrassing for me to admit that I totally get that?

I mentioned that substances are a poor substitute for the feelings we are attempting to bolster, and this is something I learned the hard way. I've had more than a few dozen conversations in my life with strangers that I felt were incredibly deep and meaningful, where I thought maybe, "oh this is someone I want to know in my everyday life". But of all those conversations, I think I may have had 3 people who are still in my life in any way today. And that's because the people you meet while out at bars are all wearing their own masks and good relationships aren't built on the basis of one strong connection alone.

Relationships, like all things worth building, take time.

I’m not an alcoholic, but maybe we should also get rid of that term?

There’s an article I read about a problem drinker who stopped calling herself an alcoholic and it struck a chord with me. I do not fit the profile of an alcoholic (and I guess the DSM 5 has revised the issue of problem drinking as Alcohol Use Disorder), but it has been obvious to me that something was not right with my alcohol use and I didn't feel completely in control of my actions. In fact, it was after waking up with a bad hangover on a Saturday last March that I decided to see a therapist.

I can't find it now, but there was an article I read when I was searching "how much is too much alcohol consumption". In this article, a psychologist said something along the lines of:

We used to give specific guidelines like 5 drinks is too much for a man, 3 drinks is too much for a woman. But there are people who drink more than these guidelines and live perfectly normal lives, and people who drink less and it's problematic. The amount you're drinking isn't as important as why you're drinking

I mentioned at the beginning of this entry that last night would be my last bits of alcohol for a while. If you had to guess, for me to make that type of declaration, how much do you think I drank?

The answer? (3) 16 oz beers over the course of about 5 hours. I like the taste of really boozy beers so these definitely weren't Tecates (the beers were 7.0%, 8.5% and 8% respectively) but still if you were to take that number and ask any random drinker whether that was too much they'd say, "what? c'mon, live a little".

This is the importance of self-knowledge though. Listen to yourself. Our intuition is pretty good at knowing when something is wrong.

So, what next?

I highly doubt I will be alcohol free for the rest of my life.

My self-awareness has always been a mixed bag of tricks but in identifying the root causes of my problem drinking (who I want to be vs who I actually am) plus my belief in my ability to change will allow me to get through this just fine.

I imagine being basically like Anthony Bourdain (RIP, sweet prince), who had a heroin addiction when he was younger but was able to travel and go drinking in his later years because he was no longer the person who did that.

I wrote a lot just now about this character that I don when I’m drinking who is open, friendly, confident, quick to laugh, sure of himself, easily excitable. These aren't just things I aspire to be but things I believe myself to be at my core, hidden underneath a layer of self-consciousness and useless thoughts that have no bearing in reality. When alcohol allows me to cut through that layer, it's not like I'm withdrawing from a bank account that's not mine; I'm reaching into a store of reserves that are in my name, just kind of hard to get to. I'm putting in the work now to streamline access to this core self, if this metaphor holds up

Earlier in the year, I mentioned my drinking guidelines as:

Vacations. Celebrations. Dates.

Vacations are a given, I never have a problem drinking while I'm on vacation. Celebrations mean big ones, basically, my birthday or my closest friends' birthdays or if my company gets acquired, or something. My plan is to do a deep dive for an extended period while working on my goals and designing the life I want to live. Like most people, drinking alcohol started as this social thing I did, which I wasn't doing unless I was with friends, and ended up becoming this thing that I used to avoid dealing with uncomfortable feelings I had about myself, feelings that only intensified the later I got into my 20s.

One reason why problematic drinking was able to go on for an extended amount of time -- hangovers and bad quality sleep and all -- was that I really didn't have anything else to look forward to. I could do my work fine so that was taken care of, but nothing actually excited me in my life. My goals in life became these checkboxes on a list of things that I thought might make me feel good but I was becoming less certain about that.

But after really examining my values in life, what I want to do, who I want to become, who I have to become in order to achieve these goals, I do have things that I'm excited to wake up and do now. And ultimately that's the only way to replace negative behaviors -- whether it's drinking, drugs, reckless sex, or procrastination. You have to identify why you do what you do and find suitable substitutes that give you the same benefits. Falling asleep at 3:30am after drinking 5 IPAs and watching 3.5 hours of K-Dramas doesn't have the same appeal to it like it did a couple of months ago.

Another reason why this has gone on pretty long is that when I think of myself in the future, I have an image in my head that constantly crosses my mind:

I'm living in New York or Paris or Tbilisi, a big city, you know. I have a beautiful apartment. It's Sunday at 2:00pm and I'm finishing up my first session of work and could use a break. I hit up a group of close friends and we decide to go to the neighborhood bar, have a beer, talk about what's happening in our lives, or do a post-game analysis of last night's shenanigans. We laugh, do that quality friend time, build memories and strengthen our connection.

But after babysitting a beer or two it is now the evening, and I want to make sure I have enough energy and focus -- either for a second session of work or just so I can relax at home just reading a book or watching a movie or spending quality time with my girlfriend/wife.

That sounds cute, right? Doesn't that sound beautiful?

Every time I’ve thought of abstaining from drinking, that image plays in my head and I think, “do I really need to stop? Can’t I just moderate? Like in that image?” Now I know from experience that asking yourself that question is a huge red flag.

Last week, I laid out some of my one year goals:

(1) to create a social media website (2) drop weight and attain a lean, muscular, model-esque physique (3) learn how to rap, develop a flow, and release some rap songs on SoundCloud

One thing I know about pursuing these things is that the process will become satisfying in and of itself. And when that satisfaction really sets in and the dopamine machine of my life is on autopilot, when I'm just really excited to wake up and work on programming this new feature before work, when I'm really excited to get my pull-ups in because my lats are starting to look really good and my body is just getting more tight and angular, when I'm excited to work on my rhymes because I have a few clever wordplays I want to drop, that's when I know, okay, I can have a couple of drinks with friends. Because by that point, the relationship with myself will have been repaired, and I'll have something to look forward to, and I won't look at myself as being this person who needs to avoid things or prop up my self-esteem, you know.

I have more to say (when do I not? I swear I can’t shut the fuck up) but I'll leave it at that for now.

I can’t believe you read this all.

I love you. I love you all.

#self #text post #alcohol #alcoholism #alcohol abuse #drinking #anxiety #depression #compulsive behavior

[thelastmemeera]

On Property and Other Lies

The best tool anyone can ever use to gain power over you is controlling what information you do and don’t have access to; telling someone the right series of lies can be more effective at getting someone to do what you want than holding a gun to their head. You can observe this principle at work on every level of human social interaction: for example, consider how many classic symptoms of an abusive relationship are just ways of controlling the victim’s internal narrative (and I’m referring to any kind of abusive relationship, not just romantic ones). Isolating the victim from friends and family is a way of removing any competing sources of information that might contradict the abuser’s story. Techniques like gaslighting, belittlement, emotional manipulation etc. are ways of getting the victim to doubt their own judgement and lived experience, leaving the abuser as the only one left to dictate fact and fiction as they see fit. Why do so many people stay in abusive relationships? Often, it’s because they’ve been tricked into believing that they aren’t really being abused.

Likewise, the same idea applies to groups of people up to and including entire societies. Inundate your victims with lies, and even more importantly, limit their access to ideas that contradict what you want them to believe. Use every opportunity to muddy the waters, discredit your ideological opponents, prevent people from being able to meaningfully educate themselves. If you can trick people into believing they aren’t being abused, you can make them willing participants in their own subjugation – control the cultural narrative, control the nation.

Example – for hundreds upon hundreds of years, feudalism and similar socioeconomic systems dominated large portions of the world. I’ll roughly approximate the feudalist narrative as follows:

While there exists a significant wealth gap between the peasantry and the nobility, there are a lot of good reasons why this system is in place. First of all, peasants should obviously have to pay rent in goods and/or labor to their lord, because the peasants are living and farming on said lord’s property. The nobility has clearly earned their position, considering that their land holdings have belonged to the family for generations, they’re the only ones remotely qualified to do the very difficult job of governing and managing a manor, and they have the endorsement of both the king and the church. In fact, many serfs have voluntarily entered into servitude, because the agreement is beneficial for everyone involved – the serf gives fealty, while the lord provides protection, justice, and land. Although it’s true that some lords are cruel or exploitative sometimes, even then the peasantry is still better off with the opportunity to serve a lord, because otherwise they would be homeless, starving vagrants. In any case, it’s hypocritical to denounce feudalism while benefitting from the all the prosperity that feudalism has provided for you. Feudalism has given you a roof over your head, land to farm, peace, infrastructure, protection from roving bandits – even if the system isn’t completely perfect, without it we would have nothing but war and famine. Truly, we already live in the best of all possible worlds.

Even if the feudal peasants were to rebel and successfully depose their lord, without a radical shift in thinking they would simply end up with a new lord in place, and nothing about society would be meaningfully different at the end of the day. And who could blame them? It’s highly unlikely that uneducated peasants would be familiar with ideas like egalitarianism and democracy – that information had been withheld from them. For the first four thousand or so years of human civilization, the world was almost entirely ruled by oligarchs and kings. Until very recently in history, democracies were few and far between, and arguably tended to end in disaster. The peasantry can’t topple feudalism and replace it with democracy, because you can’t fight for something you don’t understand and have never heard of. Wealth, weapons, armies – these things make it difficult to challenge your rule. Making it so your victims can’t even conceive of an alternative makes it impossible.

Hence, the greatest weapon of the modern ruling class is to make the public believe that there can be no viable alternative to capitalism. More so – to control access to information such that the average person lacks the conceptual framework necessary to even properly imagine an alternative to capitalism. Why else would they so consistently and deliberately try to obscure and misrepresent leftist ideas? The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t have the foggiest idea what words like “socialism” and “communism” actually mean. They either vaguely envision socialism as a system that in reality would better be described as state capitalism, or worse, know absolutely nothing about socialism other than the connotation that it’s “bad.” Basically, my point is that there are two ways to lie to someone: it’s powerful to convince someone to explicitly believe your ideas (“Capitalism is definitely the best economic system”), but it’s more powerful to get someone to implicitly believe your ideas (“I’ve never really thought about economic systems as a concept, the way things are now in our society just seems like it’s natural and inevitable”).

So this brings us to what I would argue is capitalism’s most fundamental lie: property. One of the biggest hurdles facing the left as a movement is that most westerners tend to believe that property is something that exists in the abstract – the same way that seasons and planetary orbits exist – rather than recognizing it as the social construct that it is. This is implicit belief at work; property is a complex, nuanced concept, but hardly anyone ever stops and considers what it actually means. This is deliberate. If the ruling class can get you to accept their interpretation of property without thinking about it, they’ve already won.

So what is property? If you look in a dictionary, it’ll usually give you meaningless, circular definitions: property is “that which you possess,” to possess is “to have as property.” To understand ownership, let’s start by eliminating what it isn’t. It’s not merely “that which you are associated with”: you’re probably associated with your family members, but you certainly don’t own them. It’s not “that which you have created”: in modern society most things people own they didn’t make, and often they don’t own things they did make. It’s not “that which you have access to”: this idea is closer, but it’s still not what property is. If you can swim in the ocean, does that mean you own the ocean? If a friend lets you borrow their car, does that mean you own the car? No. What property really is, I would argue, is “that which you can prevent others from accessing.”

Therefore, property is wholly and inherently about the politics of exclusion. When you say “I own this thing,” what you’re really saying is “I have the right to prevent other people from using this thing.” This is important to understand, because most people implicitly think of it backwards – that is, they think “owned-ness” is some sort of objective attribute an object can have, the same way it might have mass or electric charge. And because said object has the attribute of being owned by a person, that person then has the right to dictate its use. In reality, if you have the power to decide who gets to use an object, then said object is by definition your property.

Having an explicit rather than implicit understanding of property makes a lot of things clear that would otherwise be obscured. For example, any property dispute is just an argument over who should and shouldn’t be prevented from accessing a given resource. So when you say “It might seem unfair that a small handful of billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 3.6 billion people, but you can’t just take it from them, it’s their property,” what you’re really saying is “I believe a large portion of the world’s total wealth should be barred from everybody except a small handful of billionaires, for reasons I have yet to specify.” Here’s a “radical” suggestion that I think should be obvious in this light: the onus should be on the property claimant to justify why everyone else shouldn’t have access to a given resource, rather than on the public to justify why they should. This isn’t to say that everyone should constantly have access to everything with no boundaries, but simply that an individual should have to have a legitimate reason to claim the right of sole access to something i.e. ownership.

The point is, claiming “other people can’t have this thing because it’s my property” is a circular argument; it’s designed to distract you from the question of why the claimant has been granted this power in the first place. When it comes to the ruling class, the real answer is more often than not “this is my property because the socioeconomic system we set up specifically to benefit ourselves says so.” For example, what real claim does a landlord have to extract rent from a tenant? The landlord generally doesn’t live on the property, they probably didn’t build the housing structure (and they almost certainly didn’t build it singlehandedly), and oftentimes they barely even keep the place maintained. The land itself was there a million years before they were born, and assuming it doesn’t sink into the ocean, it’ll be there a million years after they’re dead. The only thing that actually gives them rights to the land is a piece of paper in a registry somewhere that says it belongs to them, and a government that backs that piece of paper with armed force. The term landlord isn’t an accident, it’s a holdover from feudalism – rent is theft.

To put it all more simply, the ruling class has done a great job of concealing the extent to which they’re abusing you. The first step toward meaningful change is to stop thinking on their terms.

#property #socialism #communism #leftism #capitalism #wealth inequality

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Facts on How to Successfully Come Close to the Most Beautiful Women

For nearly 300 years, when a fresh face on community exhibits a strange feel, he is quickly sent out of the town, cussed at, as well as called rude names, and that is to put it gently. In a culture where virtually everyone understands their neighbors, this can produce major effects. Fast ahead today, fulfilling people is a whole lot easier. Mankind, as a whole, is a lot friendlier towards strangers. Nonetheless, regular people, especially gorgeous-looking females, still reveal these types of very outdated impatient tendencies. Due to these habits, raising a 5-hundred-lb weights is much easier than totally talking to the female you fancy, if you don't trust the things you are engaging in. So just how do you function around this and make certain the centuries-old racist side of females does not surface when you interact with all of them? Simple: Always be pleasant Providing a warm ambiance across is the initial and essential step in the direction of completely mingling and also being approved by a stranger, and this also means that girl on the fitness center, the hot babe you just spotted on the tavern last night, and your list keeps growing. You may feel hesitant to take on a warm and friendly feel next to appealing women. Besides, does not it sound like you are exposing yourself to that agonizing rejection from your woman? You might move to being mindful, examining the waters and waiting for the thumbs-up to transform just before you bring the interaction a little further. But learn this: unless the woman you are coming close to as well as trying to talk to has taken a severe makeover, she has actually collected a great deal of information about us individuals, men that approach her just about every waking second of her adult life. Your sweetheart will promptly perceive your cautiousness as a sign of being worried and affirmation-pursuing. And men who send this buzz are placed right into the 'not-worth-my-time' niche. However, the instant you offer a cozy and polite vibe from the beginning, this lady considers you as a confident guy, one who's enjoying the time of his life and will certainly continue to do so regardless whether she's around or not. People who are releasing this feeling come from the eye-catching as well as attractive group.

And Imake certain that is the place where you wish to be! However, what if I offer a mood overly secure? Very good question, but the response is simple: you would be hard pressed ahead off too pleasant. Ponder over it, not one person acts relaxed and genuinely polite to other people these days. People are unconcerned, they are tentative as well as avoids commitment in their friendships. This gives you an exceptional option to be 2 steps ahead of pretty much every individual in the place that desires to obtain her cell phone number. Choose to be inviting and you are likely to win a female over. Each time you socialize with a female, it must think just as if the sunrays is glowing down on her. The minute you move your focus away, it would certainly feel chilly and shadowy. She will certainly soon be struggling for your time! An attractive lady is not the only lady that deserves your interest. Indicate to her that you like and approve various other individuals. That is certainly a huge ingredient of feeling desirable. Welcome absolutely everybody with charm. Embrace as well as praise men or women before her. She will soon discover that you are really positive and pleasant, and also it's not simply a mask you're putting up to get speaking as well as grab her phone number. But, be advised: do not go the other way around. That's getting along and nice in the path of everybody you talk with, except her. A wrong choice like this will be glaringly evident! It basically works in high school. Nevertheless, when dealing with a beautiful person that has lots of experience in this male-female game, she'll believe you are daunted by her. In case you don't understand, that suggests unpleasant! Loosen up, formulating pleasant results from individuals just isn't the end result of a long and drawn out endeavor. There is absolutely nothing great in regards to being rejected. Given that the anxiety of rejection is one of the human fundamental worries. And the appropriate method to conquer it is to approve you hesitate of being disregarded. Just understand it from the start. Then, conduct an analysis of exactly what you feel when you believe regarding being rejected. So why should your wooing be refuted? By objectively looking at on your own, you will recognize that the majority of your minuses are simply fruits of your creative imagination. Be aware that denial takes place to everyone. Understand it as component of the pick up game! Spoken communication is possibly the best human ability and your success with ladies solely depends upon how good you may promote discussions. Despite the virus of emancipation overcoming the world, a lot of ladies need males to be leaders in relationships. It means you must be qualified not only of performing yet of chatting to your probable companion too. Extend your skills to question meaningful questions, tell amazing anecdotes, as well as select words fitting various contexts! One of the greatest blunders made by young (and also fully grown) males is acting to be someone they aren't. It's natural that when you meet a woman of your desire, you wish to thrill her in all feasible ways. Nevertheless, you don't need to be remarkable in order to attract women, nobody is ideal, neither are you. Regular people become luring not simply because they do not have any downsides but since they're positive as well as have a sense of function. Just work with your inadequate areas You will certainly never grow as an individual if you emphasize all the very same stuff. Your self-confidence advances in direct relation to your capabilities. Find out brand-new things, use up new tasks, and also broaden your ring of knowledge. Get ready for obstacles in the end. Women love secure and also practical men. So to attract any amount of females as viable, strengthen your disposition. Always be quick, nice, as well as lovely when talking with pretty ladies, and people as a whole. Approaching the lady of your desires can seem like strolling through a minefield. You assume she's the one and also intend to do anything to have her on your side, but you're not sure how to approach her. A single wrong motion and you would have gotten rid of the gold chance of making her like you. Lots of men would conveniently acknowledge that coming close to a female they wish to have is completely distinct from fulfilling a female for a laid-back romantic date. The uneasiness, the hesitation, the fear, the unpredictability, all of these are legitimate. If you want to approach the lady of your dreams, adopt most of these suggestions to show you how to win her passionate heart.

#relaciones amorosas