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bestnoncannonship · 3 years

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I'm drowning in the gender sandbox guys.

I am agender. At least....I think I am. It's the closest to what I'm feeling. In that I really do not have an attachment to any gender and cannot conceive how people identify with a gender. Like....they just FEEL a gender? All the time? No matter what they look like and what they're wearing they FEEL a gender?? Whaaaa??? Sounds hella fake but okay.

And now I'm gonna talk about that and my experience for a while, in a series of ways that's probably gonna get the gender and sexuality neo-puritans to come yell at me for not being ritually pure enough in the way I talk but.....I'm talking from my own brain, baby. This is the toolkit I'm packing right now and the world I live in and I just need to spit it out. Maybe see if it resonates with people who know more than me. I don't know. Help.

I didn't question being a woman for the longest time. I grew up in a rural area culturally dominated by "Christians" (Not Catholics. I was Catholic. That comes with a whole different set of religious traumas pre-installed. I mean the ScAaRy protestent and nondenom Christians.) You didn't question anything. Not an adults orders. Not authority. Certainly not straightness. Gender was biological. I'd never heard of a trans person. There were rumors of Gays™. For most of my life it was just "Gender is the meat suit you got stuck with, right? I got stuck with this meat suit so it's my gender, I guess." And when I finally left the middle-o-nowhere for Le Citè and I met some (mostly bianary) trans people I was like "OH! OKAY!! Having strong feelings about being in the wrong meat suit can make a gender!" And the non bianaries that I met were still playing on that bianary scale. The "bit of boths" and the "different genders for different days" varieties. They has strange attachments to genders. And the whole retoric of "Questioning your gender and feeling things about you gender is the indicator that you might be trans!!" Just furthered my feeling that I must just be female by default cause like.....I didn't question anything. I didn't think about gender. I had a COMPLETE lack of feelings about gender whatsoever and that was normal, right?? Just meat suit gender. I certainly didn't have a strong feeling about wanting to be the opposite: *gag* a man?? A straight white man? Nope! I have no desire to be a bianary man and frankly I find 99 percent of men and male culture traumatic. So I must just be meat-suit gender.

And yes, I wanted to scrape my breasts and hips and thighs off with a cheese grater. But I wrote that off as a symptom of having started putting a finger down my throat after meals when I was 6 and having a family that forced hour upon hour exercise with their thighs and tummies wrapped in saran wrap and sang "I don't love her! She's too fat for me!" to a literal toddler and put that same toddler in oversized clothes to hide the healthy baby squish that toddlers HAVE. OF COURSE I wanted to die when my breasts grew in and my hips and thighs filled out. They were evil fat deposits. And they meant nothing but unwanted attention from yucky men. (Lesbianism to be discovered some 15 years later. My comphets we're almost as bad as my compgenders.) It had nothing to do with gender. Gender is just the meat suit ....and I already hated the meat suit by the time I had breast buds, they just enhanced a disgust that I thought was normal by then. Everyone kind of hates their meat suit, right?? Yes I wanted to look like men sometimes.....but they were skinny heroin chic men. I also wanted to look like kate moss. I wanted to look like a sideways door but my family is Italian and we have hips and thighs. It's just the meat suit I was assigned. Just have to learn to deal with it and dress it in the way that it looks most socially acceptable and get on with life. And my meat suit had a very gendered look, even in the deepest throws of my illness. "All woman." "The curves of a real woman." So that was just the hand I was dealt. Like having a hard to match foundation undertone. You don't gotta like it, it's just reality. Yes, I wanted to wear nothing but waistcoats and gay vampire clothes but they weren't cut for my body type so *shrug*.

Did I start to have way too much fun cosplaying and embodying male characters? Yes. But that was just identifying with characters. I'd always identified with characters. Did I still distinctly identify with the character's gender, even when I femmed the costume to avoid the hellish pain of binding? Yes. Did it make me feel weird when people referred to my Thor as a woman, even though it was technically a femme? Yes. But that was just feminism. Heroes don't need to be called girl heroes. No gender issues here!! Besides it's not weird in fandom circles to stongly identify with people across gender lines. The fact that I found the gendernope option if there was one available in the fandom and *attached* was surely just coincidental. Right??

Did I absolutely loose my mcfreaking mind when the gyno started talking about having to take my uterus away because the amount of blood it was loosing was doing irreparable harm to my body? Yes. My gender is my meat suit. When you take it away....what am I???? A *gag* man??? Nothing at all?? Am I still even human?? If I am not *gag* male and you take away the female part of the meat suit am I an aphid? A plant? A chair? But I was comforted by a chorus of voices saying "No!! You're a WOMAN. Infertility doesn't make you not a woman! You still have a woman's body!! Because you're a woman!!! Just look at you in your skirts and with your long hair!! You're a woman!!!" So.....still a woman, I guess. Because I still LOOKED like one. Gender = the PRESENTATION of the meat suit. That made sense. The structure of my meat suit made me limited to woman-presentation. So I was woman.

Then, it was the stupidest thing, I was talking to the other half of my life on the 4/5 train on the way to a friend's house about HER issues with gender presentation and the amount of attention to detail it takes to be socially acceptable as female and she said "You just know you're a girl. Like if they just picked you up and put you in a robot body you'd be a girl?" And I was like "......no? I'd be a robot?????" "But you'd still feel like a girl???" "No.....I'd feel like a ROBOT." "BUT you'd still like hear she/her and identify with those???" "No. I'd probably identify more with It/it's because that's what I'd be. A ROBOT!" And she's like "But what if your brain got transplanted into a boy body???" "Then I'd be a boy." "But what would you feel like?" "A BOY?" "Okay but what if you had a very neutral body with like no genitals? What would you feel like then??" "I mean....then it would depend on how I'm dressed. I'd feel like what I was dressed like." And we went around like this till she surmised that my entire relationship to gender was basically "You are what you look like." Which is apparently NOT how people relate to their own gender. They "feel" it somehow?? (I genuinely thought "FEELING" like a gender was what made trans people.) I feel nothing. I identify with a lot of things and ZERO of them are a gender. I thought that was normal. I thought that was the default. Apparently it's not. And then if you ask me what I want to be.....I can't answer. I really don't want to be a gender. I guess I want to be able to put different genders on at my will, like outfits, for societal convenience. But I don't "identify" with any of them. Hell, I have sweaters I identify with more than any particular gender. But there aren't really systems in place for describing and portraying that.

Gender.exe was not installed.

I did a lot of research. Agender felt closest. I actually felt closest to a Good Omens meme about Aziraphale describing his gender as "No, thank you!" That's what I feel like. But all the agender folks were vibing that moment. So I joined 'em. I am aware that puts me under the trans umbrella, but I don't really identify with that word. I don't feel like there's any transition. Any changing. Can't change what was never there. Also I feel like it's for people who....CAN present as their gender. I would be seen as an invader in those spaces. Its not bad enough to justify being in those spaces. I can live with being gendered. I just don't have one.

In the society we live in one cannot present as "not a gender". Someone with MY body definitely cannot present as "not a gender". The clothes that they make in size "giant human with planet tits" are agressively gendered. And even in a binder.....they're still REALLY there. (Yes, a reduction is desirable but I don't have reduction money.....and you can't reduce the fact that I'm the bowl shaped robust extreme female hipbone they use in Forensic Anthropology textbooks.) It is what it is. My body will always be perceived the way it's perceived. And frankly a lot of what we perceive as genderless is just "skinny body in masc style with short hair and makeup". That's not really want I want. I don't want to cut off my hair. It's my one really good feature and I've worked hard to grow out these Valkyrie worthy lengths. Mens clothes are so limiting. And there are no gender: no thank you clothes. (One well meaning friend kept trying to send me "genderless" clothes......but it was all rail thin afabs in mens clothes with short hair and heavy makeup. That's not looking genderless. That's just being skinny.) Gender no thank you presentation is very tied to short hair and thin bodies. So I've accepted that I don't get to play in the gender sandbox outside of the privacy of my own mind. It's a societal flaw. But whatever.

But pronouns are starting to really bother me. Everyone is so into them and identifying with them. And like.....I don't get it. I don't get the joy. I don't think I've found the one. Like.....I'm used to she. I will always be read as she. I will always be Miss and Ma'am in stores and restraunts. So I just kind of roll with it. I don't hate it. I don't like it. It's just a thing that I have to have to exist in society. Like a social security number. I actually think I identify with my social security number more. There's no point in making myself uncomfortable with something that's just going to be a part of my life. And I don't want to be the kind of person who expects people to address me by a pronoun they can't see and aren't used to. It's too much to ask of the average citizen of a gendered society to go through that much gender theory for just me. So "she" is an inevitable part of my life. And He....well ......I don't hate it. I dont like it. It's just there. I certainly don't get called it. And I'm not capable of presenting it well enough for this to be relevant. Now they......fuck I HATE they. I hate that it's the acceptable pronoun for anyone not bianary male or female. It just rubs me the wrong way. When people refer to me as they, I feel like they're referring to me and the host of mental illnesses I carry around and you don't have permission to address those troops thank you very much. They causes a genuine squick. But it's kinda the only widely acceptable option. I kinda like "it". I VIBE with it. It feels good. Unfortunately the people in my life have a certain reluctance about calling me it as they believe that happy vibe around a traditionally dehumanizing pronoun may be a trauma symptom. They might be right so I'm tabling "it" till I find a good therapist. Also...I cannot ask strangers to call me it. I don't have the confidence it takes to explain why and I frankly don't want to be faced with the criticism and questions I would face because I am unable to make my body be perceived as Nonbinary. I don't have the confidence or conviction to face that every day forever. Ditto neopronouns. I also haven't found one that I vibe with at all yet.

And queer labels get harder when you pull away from gender entirely. Like ... I am a Lesbian. I am solely attracted to women. But now I'm getting a lot of "You can't be a lesbian if you don't have a gender!!!" And like ...can I??? I like being a lesbian. It feels right. It conveys what I want it to convey. I like the exclusion of men entirely, after being taught to structure my life around men. I have a kinship with womanhood. It's where I was raised. It's how people see me. I just don't identify with it. It's not how I see myself. I guess that can kind of exclude me from the label? All of our terms are defined by being attracted to "your own gender" or "the opposite gender" or "both your own gender and other genders" and like ... I don't have a gender. And the opposite of nothing is....?? Fuck if I know? So what term am I allowed to use? I love queer for exactly this reason. But it just doesn't have the same clarity that lesbian does.

So I'm just kind of in a hole rn. Grappling with the fact that I really don't have a gender in a gendered world, and dealing with the fact that so much of our understanding and acceptance of gender is about presentation, a door closed to my body. I don't have the confidence or the spoons or the knowledge or the experience to fight this fight. The path of least resistance is sticking my head back into the sand and going with straightforward womanhood....but now it feels like I'm lying. I feel like an intruder in woman's spaces. And I can't go in men's spaces, they see me as....well...a woman. Lesser.

Someone out there who's better at the genders please help.

#agender #gender crisis #gender identity #gender problems #pronouns #nonbinary #enby #nb #non bianry #agender lesbian #nonbinary lesbian

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painted-crow · 4 years

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Snake vs Bird secondary?

This is a submission, so it's formatted a little differently. My line notes will look like this. Let me know if this is hard to read for anyone. -Paint

Just to get it out of the way, I'm a snake primary.

Secondaries:

The ones I'm not:

-I think badger secondary skillset is kind of cool, but rather than something that comes naturally it's something I'll occasionally make the conscious decisions to use, and the *value* set that goes with it is not me at all (use all the shortcuts! Minimize hard work as much as possible! Flit from project to project!)

Yep, not you. Cool beans. Might be a performance since you do turn it on? Up to you whether you care about that.

- occasionally, when trapped with no way out, I'll do a lion style "charge in". It feels like the desperate act of a feral animal, not my natural preferred style. Can't manage to make anything else work, charge in, worse thing that happens is we all die. Also re lion I do occasionally consciously fake it, like, I used to have a reputation as the blunt one who couldn't lie and despite being perfectly fine with lying I'd lean into it, having people think you don't lie is handy. I used to be the person appointed by unspoken group consensus to say the things that needed to be said but weren't socially acceptable, that kind of thing. But I'm not a lion primary (I honestly tend to feel slightly queasy reading lion descriptions, although I do have lions I admire)

Oh gosh, this bit is so Snakey. It's SO SNAKEY. Lol

(On the second pass, it almost seems like you're seeing others' opinions of you as a resource you can use...)

So now... Snake vs Bird secondary:

* I can't tell what the system is even talking about when it talks about collecting information because its useful or not. No, I don't waste my time on totally useless trivia.

It's less that you'd seek out random trivia, and more that some of your interests are maybe not super practical.

I was really into natural planted aquariums for a few years, and I thought they were really cool as an exercise in botany, chemistry, biology, aesthetics, and building a tiny ecosystem.

Is this knowledge ever going to be useful? Well, no, definitely not maybe some of the stuff I learned about what plants look like with various nutritional deficiencies...

Some Birds will focus entirely on their more impractical interests, others won't have any and their skills will all seem kind of utilitarian--but they will have picked them up out of interest, even if they really value their utility. I know a lot about computers and programming, and I picked that up partly because it's so useful, but I couldn't have gotten as far with it as I have if it didn't interest me.

On the other hand, I learn languages for fun, even if I don't have anyone around to use them on. Languages are just inherently useful. And I'm a writer, so like, pretty much everything is useful eventually, right?

I'm a writer too so I know what you're talking about, and this is a more solid justification than the example I gave above, but uh... this is a real good blanket rationalization xD

I read as much history as I can because it all goes into a big subconscious churn to make me have a better understanding of human nature.

This is very Birdy. I do something similar, but it's more psychology focused.

Does knowing why I pursue knowledge make it a model?

Nah. Knowing why they value something would just make a Bird value it more. Also, we're really likely to analyze why we like stuff, because analysis is kind of our jam.

If so, that's so deeply strange to me I guess I'm not a bird?

Right now I'm thinking you're a Snake with a strong Bird model. You seem reluctant to identify with it, whereas the Snakey traits you talked about in your "I'm not a Lion" section, you described with a kind of trickstery playfulness and I think you see them as more "you." With Bird you're almost defensive, like you're trying to assure me you're not boring and stuffy xD

But your Bird model seems strong. I think you'd be able to rely on it if your Snake ever Burned. That's a good thing.

* I never know what to answer on the "going in with plans" question of the quiz. I always have a few plans in advance, and they always have several blank spots marked "adjust based on what's happening". I can't imagine not having plans, it gives me anxiety, I can't imagine being too rigid about the plans, it gives me anxiety.

Yep, this still vibes as Snake with strong Bird model.

* I like to research and prepare in advance as much as possible. I was researching college majors when I was 12. I read all the choosing your career books, spent summers interning, and interviewed people about their jobs so I could feel safe choosing. I spent three years reading books and listening to podcasts about parenting before having my first kid so I'd know what I was doing (similarly, I spent years before marriage reading marriage therapy books and relationship skill books).

Oh hell, just @ me next time. This is more full of Bird shit than the windshield of a car that's been parked under a tree for the last 3 years.

And then, after doing as much research as possible, there's ALWAYS the moment when you have to say "screw it" and jump in blind as a bat anyway. That's just life. It's completely impossible in the actual moment to follow a plan, the plan always disintegrates at first contact with the "enemy" (but the process of making the plan, backup plan, and additional backup plan is important.)

There's that Snake again. I really wish I could do this. It'd be super useful.

It's starting to sound like your Snake is supporting your Bird rather than the other way around, which is surprising me. I was expecting you to start convincing me you were a Snake around about now, but you're doubling down on the Bird.

* there's a distinct feeling of 'turning on' my hyperawareness of my surroundings and ability to respond. Like, let's say I drift through life *highly* distracted by what's going on in my head.

Moooood.

But if I'm at a job interview, or giving a speech, or having an important social interaction, there's this sort of clear quiet feeling where I'm just trying to sense the room and respond on instinct. It sure feels like this might be what snake descriptions are describing, but it's only on sometimes.

That's how models work, or how they can work. I can see why you're confused.

* honestly reading snake description feels vaguely "aspirational" rather than "yeah, that's me" because I simply don't have confidence that I'm THAT good at grabbing opportunities or responding to chances. In the moment I can fatally hesitate for the crucial two seconds...

Also a model thing. You value it over your actual secondary, which explains why you want to identify with it more. I do this with my Badger model sometimes.

Actually, thinking about it, I essentially feel split. I feel I am both. I feel like my brain can be in plan mode or response mode. It cannot do both simultaneously, I need both modes, and I have no idea how I'm supposed to figure out which is one is my "type" ie more essentially "me". Response mode is more "natural", ie instinctive, when in use. Planning mode comes more easily, feels more comfortable, but of course that's because the inherent nature of planning mode is to happen in the safe spots, you don't plan mid-interview because that's when you're in "danger" and need to "respond".

You're taking your Bird for granted. A lot of people find planning REALLY stressful, and actually feel more comfortable in the moment. Or they like the slight feeling of danger.

Our society holds Bird up as "this is what intelligence looks like" and tells us we should all be that way. (It does this with Badger a lot too.) The result is that people who are good at it don't realize that it's not universal--and they think that seeing it as something particular to them is arrogant.

Effectively, it becomes invisible. We take it for granted and identify it by its weird quirks rather than its actual structure, which we've been taught is something everyone should be able to use easily.

Improvisational secondaries are going to feel more instinctive, almost by definition.

I don't know, I'm beginning to feel like I fundamentally don't grok either one or both of these secondaries and hence am so confused..

I think you're using Snake to support your Bird more than the other way around. You're more comfortable with Bird, and it's most of what you've focused on in writing this. So, after reading all of this, I think you're a Bird with a loud Snake model.

But if that doesn't jam well with you, you could just say "I have two secondaries." Traditional? No. But go ahead. If you feel like that's the truest description of you, then it probably is. Labels describe, they don't define. If it changes later, that's okay too.

Thanks for your question!

#sortinghatchats #ravenclaw secondary #slytherin secondary #shc models #submissions #sorting yourself #paint speaks #slytherin secondary model #submission

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citialiin · 4 years

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ZIGGY ✰ STARDUST

i jacked this from @cardinalrot. thank you dad. tagging: @gothsic ; @blossomingbeelzebug ; @betelguide ; @thatcertainnight ; @prophesyed ; you, specifically, reading this.

𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐬

FULL NAME. [ redacted ] * NICKNAME. ziggy GENDER. agender (he/him or they/them) / typically presents as a “man” for simplicity’s sake and also because he doesn’t care enough to think about it for more than 4 seconds HEIGHT. 5′10″ AGE. 26 (earth years) ZODIAC. ??? (he wasn’t born under our stars ... so .......) SPOKEN LANGUAGES. any/all (he doesn’t really know them, though, he uses an internal translator)

𝐩𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬

HAIR COLOR. bright red, seemingly unnatural -- but it’s natural EYE COLOR. left pale blue, right black SKIN TONE. very, very, very pale BODY TYPE. skinny. very skinny/slender/svelte. willowy and tall and bony. good for looking waifish on magazine covers but bad for lifting even vaguely heavy objects. VOICE. posh, nasally, low, the slightest bit condescending. speaks with an english accent despite not being english, let alone human. drawls his vowels and enunciates his letters. his voice is strangely clear and bright when he sings, unlike his somewhat unpleasant speaking tone, and he tends to sing in higher pitches than his speaking voice. DOMINANT HAND. ambidextrous -- but he can only play the guitar left handed POSTURE. very straight and proper, holds his head high and his shoulders square. uncertain if it’s height alone or if he really is looking down upon you. SCARS. small incision in the back of his neck where the translator was placed. barely there and usually covered by a collar or his hair, anyways. TATTOOS. none BIRTHMARKS. a large yellow disc on his forehead, rimmed with a slightly darker yellow/bronze with the slightest hint of a chromatic shift affect due to reflecting/light catching pigment in skin cells. this isn’t unique to him, however, as every member of his race has it. has the tiniest hint of a freckle above his lip, on the left side, and he hates it and wishes he could nuke it off his face. both of these are usually covered, anyways. MOST NOTICEABLE FEATURE(S). the circular mark, his unusual eyes, his sharp features, his bright hair. everything about him is weird and outlandish and strange, but it helps him maintain a striking, marketable image.

𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐝

PLACE OF BIRTH. far away. HOMETOWN. faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar away. SIBLINGS. [ grabs the steering wheel and veers straight into worldbuilding headcanon territory ] the society he comes from is no longer sexually dimorphic and typically doesn’t reproduce the natural way. having evolved far beyond such icky things, they use genetic samples from large swaths of the population to make consistent batches of new individuals -- the genetic samples are screened for defects and aberrations and sort of tossed together into a genome salad, and out comes however many individuals they need to fill in gaps in the population. there’s a lot of consistency in his species due to this: everyone has reddish hair, everyone has heterochromia, everyone is about the same height, etc. so technically, he’s related to everyone in his “batch.” PARENTS. he wouldn’t ever know -- a lot of people, probably

𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞

OCCUPATION. rockstar -- cultural icon -- celebrity -- musician -- singer -- model -- jerk CURRENT RESIDENCE. london, LA, NYC, but he’s constantly moving and tours quite often CLOSE FRIENDS. few and far in between -- he’s friends with his drummer who is named priscilla but usually goes by the stage name WEIRD, as well as siddharth, his bassist, who goes by sid in his personal life but GILLY on stage. they were the first two humans to encounter him and taught him everything he knows, from how to tie his shoes (aliens wear boots, and you should know this) to the C major scale -- because they are among the few humans who know his secret, he views them as his closest and dearest friends. his stardom isolates him from them, just a little -- he likes the spotlight but they don’t mind just being “the drummer” and “the bassist.” they don’t quite have the star power that he does. his manager -- tama ahinariki, some guy from new zealand who seemed to bumble his way into becoming in charge of one of the most successful musicians of the decade -- also knows he’s an alien, but they tend to be more business partners than close friends. tama is more interested in the money side of things whereas priscilla and sid are only interested in the music. ziggy has stock in the music, money, and his personal brand.

via rp, he’s made some friends with other characters! a few. very few. RELATIONSHIP STATUS. single -- he intends to stay that way. he gets all the action he could ever need from his legion of devoted fans and groupies. even in situations where he’s romantically involved and emotionally invested, he would never consider himself exclusive or monogamous. a lot of tabloids make rumors that he’s involved with cardinal copia, fellow rock icon, but he tends to be sneaky at hiding any time they spent together. it’s hard to keep things private when you’re both massively popular public figures, though. he goes out of his way to be sure no one knows about his predilection for spending time with thomas, because the last thing an awkward alien in disguise needs is a lot of public attention because people think you’re dating a celebrity (who they don’t know is also an alien). he hangs around annie a lot, too, but this is extra extra under wraps, because annie has a stalker named jonathan who may or may not go apeshit and try to tear his head off or something if he finds out. FINANCIAL STATUS. filthy rich. should be guillotined. DRIVER’S LICENSE. doesn’t have one. he has some paperwork, somewhere, with a “real” name and all that, but he has no idea where it is and lets his manager deal with that stuff. CRIMINAL RECORD. none ! clean slate. that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do illegal things, though. he just doesn’t get caught. VICES. smoking, drinking, la cocaina, sex, impulsive spendng, rockstar stuff.

𝐬𝐞𝐱 & 𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞

SEXUAL ORIENTATION. bisexual. PREFERRED SEXUAL ROLE. submissive | dominant | switch | top | bottom | verse. this doesn’t really come up in rp because i dont write nsfw. the way i view it is that he’s lazy and would rather you take care of him than the other way around LIBIDO. pretty high, but it’s difficult for him to have as much sex as he might prefer because, uh, he has, uh, alien..............parts...........and stuff ..... like ....... some parts down there look different ....... so he’s stuck having sex with usually in the dark, under sheets, and he has to zip his pants up really quick afterwards. maybe it’s a little bit hilarious and i just think it’s funny idk LOVE LANGUAGE. selflessness (which is big, for him, king of all douchebags and lord selfish dickhead the third), rambling to you about his day, physical affection, gifts, letting you see him without make up, opening up to you about his life before earth. he might play you music, sing to you or write you songs if he’s feeling particularly sappy. this is stuff reserved for people that he finds himself incredibly romantically/emotionally attached to, though, not the people he has one night stands with. and he almost never forms any sort of lasting attachment to the people he sleeps with casually. RELATIONSHIP TENDENCIES. he tends to fall for people who challenge him in some way, who aren’t easily beguiled by his status and physical looks, but who aren’t outright mean to him. that being said, he is very vain, and he loves being showered in compliments, praise or attention. he matches well with people who can put up with his antics and moodiness and odd behavior. he likes the idea of being someone’s muse or someone’s idol, so he finds himself drawn to other creative types. he has the most intimate/special connections with other nonhuman beings, especially other aliens, cuz he feels like they Get him and he wouldn’t be really giving himself in his fullest form if he had to still play pretend that he was a human being. for whatever reason he goes apeshit for goth guys/dudes with black hair who wear a lot of black. he really doesn’t like people who are too much like him, because HE’S HIM, and you’re YOU, and he really wants it to stay that way. GET OUT OF MY DRESSING ROOM

𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐨𝐮𝐬

CHARACTER’S THEME SONG. there’s a whole album about him .......... theres a song called “ziggy stardust” ....... HOBBIES TO PASS TIME. singing, music, writing -- he lives for that shid. he likes art in all forms, so he reads, watches movies, looks at paintings -- he has a lot of human culture to catch up on, and he loves all of it, from any time period and any culture. he also likes buying things, shopping, looking nice, gossip. he tends to be a party animal (party alien?) and often indulges in more hedonistic fun. LEFT OR RIGHT BRAINED. his brain is not structured like a human brain. also, head empty. no thoughts. FEARS. being perceived as ugly or untalented, being outed as an alien, being rejected for being an alien, becoming a nobody, losing his social status, becoming a conformist, becoming “outdated” or “uncool” SELF CONFIDENCE LEVEL. somehow sky high and on the floor at the same time. he usually thinks he can do anything and he’s pretty perfect, but that may just be from a solid few years of repeating that to himself and empty praise given by people who are just crazy obsessed with him -- he built his confidence level on a very shaky foundation, so it’s easy to start making him doubt himself and panic if you know what to criticize him on VULNERABILITIES. a lot of things, and im sick of typing

* pay me 100000 USD to unlock my LEVEL 20 ZIGGY STARDUST LORE pack now with NAMING/TITLE INFORMATION, HOME PLANET CLIMATE/WEATHER PATTERNS and PAST OCCUPATION/EDUCATION information. includes a piece of gum i found on the floor.

#ooc #meme #I'm so close 2 being done with finals just like one more week i turn in terrible project after terrible project #i am typing this as i wait for a group member to send me the first five pages of our cumulative 10 page essay. i hate him. i hate him.#why is he taking so long. i need to write this thing.#but after that i will go back to what i need to do ...#i run this account like a shitty ship careening into rocks #but i will go down with it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#KEEP YOUR 'LECTRIC EYE ON ME ; queue

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probably-voldemort · 5 years

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Would you mind telling us a bit about studying linguistics? Like what do you like most/least about it? What do kind of classes do you have? What jobs can you have after? I‘m just totally clueless about what to do after finishing school this year and trying to figure out what i could like... I‘m sorry to bother you, feel free to ignore if you don‘t know how to/ want to answer or take your time answering 🙈

Yeah for sure!

(below the line cause this got kinda long lol)

So at my uni you can get either a diploma in applied linguistics, a bachelor of arts in linguistics, or a bachelor of science in linguistics. The courses you’d take for each different path are different, and I can only really speak for the bachelor of science, since that’s the one I’m doing.

So I needed basic first year science courses (a couple of bio, physics, math, maybe others I’m not 100% sure and I was a science major first year so like I definitely ended up with some sciency courses I don’t actually need for the degree) and then after that it’s basically a lot of linguistics and psychology courses.

From your ask, I’m guessing you’re graduating high school? Sorry if that ends up not being accurate but that’s what I’m going with for this answer.

So if you think you could be interested in linguistics, I would definitely recommend taking a first year linguistics course as an elective before completely setting yourself up on the path. First year is pretty basic stuff and pretty general (you learn about sentence structures and what the phonetic alphabet is and how to use it and all the other basics you’d need to know for future courses). While I personally thought it was super interesting and ended up switching my major to it, there were definitely people in my class who were not into it at all and thought it was dumb. So like basically what I’m saying is make sure you’re actually into the topic before setting yourself up to get a degree in it.

After that, classes on straight up linguistics are either in phonetics, phonology, morphology, or syntax. Phonetics and phonology are speech sounds and how they work like physically and within a language and between languages and all that fun stuff. Morphology is how words work and you learn about like affixes and compounding and that kind of thing. Syntax is like sentence structure and that kind of thing and is the bane of my existence because it’s generally really prescriptive and that’s not my thing.

So you take a bunch of classes like that, and generally they’re pretty cool. You can also take classes in like second language acquisition and child language acquisition and sociolinguistics (how language works pertaining to society) and pretty much any other area you can possibly think of.

Some linguistics degrees also make you take a second language to a certain level. The applied and BA make you do that here but the BSc doesn’t. I don’t know why. I’ve taken a lot of ASL courses, though, and some Italian because like I like languages and think they’re cool. As you can probably tell by the fact that I’m majoring in linguistics.

Also, linguistics is more focused on how languages work than actually learning languages yourself (first question you get asked every single time you say you’re a ling major: how many languages do you speak? like…no). Like you can definitely take a lot of languages if you want to and that’ll just help you with being a linguist generally but like I have profs who only speak English and they’re still highly respected in the field.

And then for my degree there’s also a lot of psych courses. As someone not super into psych, that’s tough, but like it is what it is and there are definitely psych courses I do enjoy and like learning the psychology behind speech and everything is important so like I’ll make it.

My least favourite thing about studying linguistics is the amount of research courses you have to do, at least at my uni. I can 100% say that I do not want to go into research. I have never wanted to go into research. And yet every semester I have at least one course focused on either ling or psych research. It’s rough. But there are definitely a ton of research opportunities in linguistics since it’s still a relatively recent branch of science so like if you’re into research and enjoy linguistics this is definitely somewhere you can do that.

I also really don’t like syntax classes, as I already mentioned. So in ling there’s like prescriptivism and descriptivism (both of which may be spelled wrong cause they’ve got a red underline here and I’m too lazy to look up the proper spelling but whatevs). Prescriptivism is like there is a right way to use language and that is the only way language should be used, while descriptivism is like well no like language is made up and our rules are made up and like as long as I can understand you congrats you’re using language right (obviously this doesn’t apply to a language you don’t know but like within a language). Me (and most linguists, as far as I can tell) are a lot closer to the descriptivist end. Your grandma who gets upset when you don’t say something a certain way would be at the prescriptivist end.

Syntax from what I’ve seen is generally pretty prescriptivist, because it focuses more on writing (I think. I only took like two pretty low level syntax courses because they were required and then was like nope we’re done here so like take all this with a grain of salt) and even though writing is made up there is a general stigma around it and there being a proper way to make your sentences and everything. So yeah. But I mean if that’s your thing don’t let me talk you out of doing syntax.

My favourite area would definitely be sociolinguistics in general. It looks at how languages work with regards to society and like different accents and dialects and basically just from that you can see it’s super descriptivist. Like no dialect or accent is inherently better than another. It’s really cool. I’ve taken classes on like language evolution and variation within communities and it’s honestly just a cool time. Definitely recommend looking into that.

I also really liked my courses on child language acquisition. Kids are just super cool and we got to watch a lot of videos of babies learning to talk and it was a super fun time.

So jobs. I’m gonna link you to this list which I haven’t read through entirely but just looked up for you.

You can go into speech language pathology or audiology. SLPs work with kids who are having trouble learning to speak properly (if you got speech therapy as a kid you saw an SLP). They also work with adults who have had a stroke or a brain injury or some other aspect that’s made it so they need help with their speech. There are definitely other areas, too, but if I get into a masters program I’d want to work with kids so like I don’t really know the other areas. Oh yeah, this is an area I’m thinking of going into.

Audiologists work on the hearing end of things. If you need a hearing aid or a cochlear implant or anything like that, this is where you’d go. I don’t know too much about audiology, but what I’ve heard is pretty cool.

Other areas: teaching your native language as a second language (I’ve got a friend who’s family is from Korea and her plan is to move there after and teach English classes), alternative and augmentative communications (ie working to develop software or non-electronic things for people to use when they can’t use speech), AI developers (if you want your robot to talk, better hire a linguist to help you out), interpreters and translators, you can work in like movies or tv helping coach people on their accents if that’s your thing (personally I think this is super cool but like I have no idea how to get into it), or developing fake languages (like in Lord of the Rings or Arrival. You need to understand how languages work in order for your made up one to be believable), you can work in publishing, and, like I already mentioned, there are a lot of research opportunities if research is your thing.

There’s a lot of types of jobs with a linguistic degree. A lot of them also require a masters, though, so like you might be in for a lot of schooling there.

Personally, I’ve been thinking of applying for the SLP masters programs. Not 100% set on that as a career. I also think working in publishing would be cool (especially as someone who is also a writer lol) and like I said being an accent coach for tv and movies would be super cool but I have zero idea how you’d go about doing that.

Yeah! Definitely hit me up again if you want more info. Hopefully this was helpful, and I wish you the best of luck in figuring out what you want to do!!

#linguistics

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT TIMES

Maybe it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user. Are some more important than turning off the unsexy filter and the schlep filter, except it keeps you engaged. I because you could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it. My guess is that these multiples aren't even constant. And moreover has advanced views, for 2004, on founders retaining control of their companies. Err on the side of generosity. And often these gaps won't seem to be any good. Because they're good guys and they're trying to help people can also help you with investors. Microsoft. We were supposed to read novels and write essays about them. Why isn't it? This is what you end up with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared?

You probably do need to be a bigger danger than eating too little. Their stock price has been flat for years. The disadvantage of believing that all programming languages are equivalent is that it's not true. So there's another difference between essays and the things one has to write in high school. One answer is the default for startups, and chance meetings with people who help you—are driven by exit strategies. By the second conference, what Web 2. A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. The most amusing thing written during this period, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is, I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so. What I really want is to have good startup ideas is not think up but notice. You can compile or run code while reading, read or run code while reading, read or run code while compiling, and read or compile code at runtime. Either VCs will evolve down into this gap or, more likely, new investors will be compelled by the structure of the investments they make to be ten times bolder than present day VCs. At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl.

The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish one another's papers. We learned quickly that the most important may be that once you have enough people interested in the same way taking a shower lets your thoughts drift. The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy. One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic strategy, you could instead spend making it better. You may dispute either of the premises, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do is somewhere between a river and a roman road-builder. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. This varies from field to field in the arts, but most of them don't.

But the superficial ugliness of Perl is not the actual time it takes to write a function that generates accumulators—a function that generates accumulators—a function that refers to variables defined in enclosing scopes by defining a class with one method and a field to replace each variable from an enclosing scope. Having people around you caring about startups, which is like a sort of short-order cook, making whatever the client tells you to. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean. It cost $2800, so the only people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place, and then all your victims escape. This problem afflicts not just every era, but in distinct elements. If you make fun of your little brother for coloring people green in his coloring book, your mother is likely to tell you something like you like to do that. When you write something telling people to be good at math than memorizing long strings of digits, even though the latter depends more on determination than brains. The only style worth having is the one you can't help. He responded so eagerly that for about half a second I found myself considering doing it.

Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. If it's not what you want to find startup ideas, you have the prospect of starting a startup just doesn't seem real. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. At least, it did when people wrote about it online. A good way to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you. If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of startup people around you.

A few days ago. Just build things. Audiences like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected. I could have thought of that. But something seems to come with practice. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot.

It's hard to guess what the future will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions. I've seen so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers usually end up doing better. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that people can't find you. But vice versa as well. What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible? Good design is often slightly funny. And so good writers just you wait and see who's still in print in 300 years are less likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? What people delete are wisecracks, because they demand near perfection. So if you start trading derivatives, you can fix it yourself.

VCs are money managers. They still met with them, no one knows in programming who the heroes should be. VCs aren't interested in such small deals. Ideas 8 and 9 together mean that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken.1 In the mid twentieth century there was a fast path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? Number 6 is starting to appear in the mainstream. Even good founders can be in denial about this.2 They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. They didn't have ads for over a year. Google has as big a problem as they might think.

Notes

Founders weren't celebrated in the long term than one who shouldn't? The reason only 287 have valuations is that in Silicon Valley, MIT Press, 1973, p. When we work with the idea of happiness from many older societies. You end up making something that would help Web-based software will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up.

Certainly a lot of startups that get funded this way that weren't visible in Silicon Valley. They may not be formally definable, but since it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that get funded this way, I was writing this, I asked some founders who'd taken series A from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. Note: This is almost always bullshit.

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supernoondles · 3 years

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2020

A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.

There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.

Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!

From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.

The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.

I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.

The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.

The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.

Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.

In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.

In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.

In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.

In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.

Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.

#noon's shitty end of the year summary posts #my last post on this blog was my 2019 post lmao

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almasidaliano · 3 years

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Plot Twist: IT IS A RACE THING

let's rip the bandaid off. it's a race thing. "oh no racism isn't an issue" shut the fuck up. seriously, im disappointed in my people so i'm going to address yall first. my melanated Kings and Queens; darlings what are yall doing? Why are we still taking this? Why are we subjecting ourselves to this kind of disrespect?

are we really just going to sit here and let history repeat itself? going to watch them shackle and kill us all again? what are you afraid of? our ancestors were scared. they were strong in their own way, we are stronger. they kept our culture alive, our roots. they sacrifice their freedom for ours, and look at this. look at us. playing into their game, letting them run the show. have we forgotten about the 1960s? when the civil rights movements picked up? yall forget Martin, Malcolm, Rosa?

if you are African American, meaning black (yes you mixed mfs are black, you can try to tread on the fence but im sorry to tell you, the day will come when you have to pick a side and what's worse is no matter what you pick the world already decided for you.) and born in america; your ancestors are slaves. you can't tell me, your blood, your heritage, your lineage doesn't deserve defending, protection.

we have a constitution. this doctrine is the "LAW OF THE LAND" (still we have individual state laws, hmm). in this document, the rights of people of color, and women were added into the admendments. people of color had to take citizenship tests, though they were never taught to read, and english wasn't even their first language. then there was the segregation. if you skin is pigmented, you are treated differently.

low income areas, "ghettos/hood" areas were designed for the communities to run like crabs in a bucket. they require dependency or rebellion. they isolated and rationed resources, discriminated and interfered with job security, then blamed the citizens of the community for their failures. provided the bare minimum (a bar they set) and do you know why the hate continued? because still we rose.

understand this : WE; ALL PEOPLE, ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARE EQUAL, HOWEVER WE ARE NOT THE SAME.

this is why the problem started. human were created in "Gods image" (any god you believe in we will indulge the religious conversation later.) layman's terms? we are all gods.

we are not the same kind of gods though. like ying and yang right? so there is light and dark. society told us we should be afraid of the dark, that bad things happen in the dark, that monsters hide there. what's funny is that life teaches us the opposite; teaches us that monsters can dress nice and wear smiles too. there's the story of Lucifer right? Lucifer is not the Devil. the Devil in my opinion is the "God" of evil. like there is good energy and there is bad energy. the universe is made up of both. so boom right? Lucifer was right hand to God and got big headed wanted to be him couldn't boom gets casted out takes a third of angels and boom hell and allat right? so let's just break it down for a second.

alright so first, B I B L E: basic instructions before leaving earth. the Bible is written in code, one, and two it is allegorical. (all melanated people truly do need to crack open a book and get to reading.) Jesus (Yahshua) is melanated, wooly hair bronze skin? come on now. so the idea they are selling is this all power white man is saving us all. truthfully, who cares what he look like if he's here to save our souls? you would think that would be the thought process, however; for some people the truth does not get them what they want so they opt against it. Good and light became associated with white. "wear all white when you feeling godly" its supposed to holy and clean right? pale faces became the face of faith. hasn't anyone realized how blinding light is? the closer you look the less you see. they guide your focus. the stars light the night sky yet we have all of this light pollution, it is simply a means of distraction. the wind talks, did you know that? the trees whisper. nature is beautiful and most of the world will never know.

they divided us by color. our skin isn't even black, however because they are pale, pasty, white; they made us their opposite. even in their classification of us they revealed the truth. you see, white is the absence of all color. it is empty. whereas, black is compromised of every color.

did you know there are two types of humans? yes seriously. homo sapiens and neanderthals. fun fact: neanderthals are structured more chimp like. homo sapiens were living in Africa albinism was prominent so there were a lot of melanated people without melanin, getting skin cancer and dying. neanderthals came about when homo sapiens migrated to Europe and Eurasia. they mated and began creating all the many races and ethnicities we have today.

melanated people are built structurally different than white people. we are naturally stronger, faster, thicker, humane, etc than they are. this is where the hate comes from.

"jealousy is just love and hate at the same time. - aubrey" pride and envy are dangerous things. when trying to compete, they were met with failure and it manifested hate instead of motivation. look at america. it is built entirely on the ideas of others, the hardwork and manual labor of others. those leading our country have done nothing for us. they simply continue taking all the credit.

white people left Britain, and called it "fleeing from religious persecution". the truth is they were fleeing from classism. they were in their element and they were minnows and not sharks. they decided to find a new pond to swim in. they did just that. the Natives were abused, and disregarded. they pretended to be civil and took damn near everything from them, all of their legacies and memories, their safety.

white people are lazy and greedy. this is why there are so many dividing markers in our life, labels, roles. there is a grave lack of family values for them. there is this morphed idea that the world is here for them, like we are all here to aid them. they reek of entitlement. like success, joy, love and prosperity are guaranteed to them just because. it is not on them all. just like melanated people can't help their environment, neither can they. the rude awakening always comes once you become unsheltered from actuality.

the cards are stacked against us from the jump. due to our enivornments, children grow up in broken homes, homeless, or jumping from home to home. single parents run themselves ragged, over stressed. children end up in the streets trying to take some of the weight off of their parents. the world just see thugs and gangsters though. menaces to society. when the real menace is society.

still we rise. still we smile. still we laugh and we love. and its so disheartening, that those are the things festering their hatred for us. no one is perfect. no one is the worst thing they have ever done either. growth is constant.

all we have to do is decide to be ourselves. decide to impact the world the best way YOU know how. white people have talents, a multitude of gifts. instead of trying to get rid of everyone else's imagination, what about losing the fear and choosing to dream yourself? and maybe asking for help, should you need it.

who you are, is who you've always been. i mean, the you, you were before the world told you who you had to be. who you are, has and will never be dependent on anything out of your control. people use the wrong things to assess the quality of a person. things like religious views, political views, music preference, sexuality. things that do not have shit to do with you. its all more division markers.

trust yourself. fuck what society says. what does society actually know? only what they are told. think about this: pyschological control is basically brainwashing. so boom. then you got your mind, your heart and your gut. that would be logic, emotion, and intuition. your emotion and your intuition are in the same section of your body. your brain however, is all isolated while being the storage container for everything you see experience etc in life. your brain is what gets conditioned. all the preconceived notions you have about things came from somewhere. where? we know what we know because they told us. how do we know its true? the thing about logic is, it makes sense. so when your mind isn't making sense yet your heart and gut in agreement, listen to yourself. they tell you think before you speak because their conditioned processor is in your head. always follow your heart.

people on both sides still to this day suggest segregation. like folks really do not believe we can cohabitate in a productive civil mutually benefical and prosperous way and that without segregation, civil war and/or genocide is in the future. here's the thing. they had every opportunity, to ship folks back, or even kick us out. now folks could just start up and leaving, yet we don't. we tuck our tails and put up with it. why? i think its due to fear of being a foreigner in your true motherland. fear of not being accepted there either. i also think it's due to the way our ancestors were treated; how they allowed themselves to be treated.

so look: i'm a mutt. both sides of the feud, so i can formulate a well rounded argument; however i am black. when the world sees me and when i see me too. i am black and proud, in a world hell bent on making me believe my genes deem me inferior or unworthy to anyone. i say that to say, nothing will change until we stop fighting each other and start fighting for one another. they misused and abused us. chained and locked us away like animals. beat us like animals. and before they started more actively and carelessly attacking us out loud again, they got smart. gave us rights, gave us "homes" "communities" we were grateful. for this illusion of freedom. we must get uncomfortable with this false freedom. they treated us like animals, then tried to make us the villians, fearful we would retaliate, when all we ever wanted to do was live, joyously in harmony.

they cannot stop hating us, because we will never hate them. its a losing battle for them. still, if we don't stand up and fight we will lose in the end. fear and trauma also sparks compliance in them. bears are not violent creatures. but you don't poke a bear you know? melanated people are bears. currently acting like bears at the zoo. how long are we going to let them poke the bear?

melanated people need to unite. Dr. King tried peace and it worked for a little bit. it was a bandaid fix. now it's time to try Malcolm's approach.

Thanks for listening. -Almasi.

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jam2289 · 5 years

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I Went to a Writing Group Today - June 12th, 2019

I was not feeling it today. I had a tense political meeting on Monday that I gave a speech at, and I sat in this uncomfortable plastic chair for the meeting holding a lot of tension in my body. That threw off my spine. I went in for an extra adjustment the next day and it wouldn't adjust properly. If my cervical spine is out of place for too long it causes issues with my brainstem, and will start effecting my ability to cognitively function, which is just starting to happen now (it doesn't take long). And, I've been too busy to properly rest like this particular body design needs. So, I wasn't feeling it today, but I went to the writing group and had fun anyway.

Analiese came up with a prompt that included an educational piece. Here's the beginning of it.

- - - - - - -

Conflict

In every story, there has to be a problem. The main character has to be challenged in some way or the story will go nowhere. There are four basic conflicts to look for that may face the main character:

Man versus man

Man versus nature

Man versus himself

Man versus society

- - - - - - -

Two clarifications: 1) there are sometimes more categories than this, these are the four most consistent and that's why she chose just these four, and 2) "man" in this case really means any sentient being, so it can be a woman, or an alien, or a monster. (She also had explanations of each category, but I'm not going to include those here.)

I wanted to do something a bit odd, that's kind of the point of the group for me, to experiment and have fun. I also wanted to do a piece with one character. I'm amazed by things like "Cast Away" where Tom Hanks is by himself for most of the movie and it's still dynamic. Notice that all of the most important things are still about relationships. Notice that, it's huge.

I messed up the spelling for the creature that I refer to here. My story is monster versus artificial nature/technology (and self). I intended to refer to golems, the creature from Jewish folklore, but I mixed the spelling with a completely different creature from "Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien. Alas, I shall keep the spelling (I did make two other minor spelling corrections though).

- - - - - - -

The darn thing wouldn't budge, it wouldn't even wiggle. Human tools of all sorts had annoyed Golgama for the last 600 years, but keys were the worst.

Golums were originally designed as blunt instruments of labor. Golgama had carried stones during his first century of existence, there was always a stone wall that needed to be built. Perfect work for a golum, and for Golgama especially. He was made out of magical clay for Pete's sake, he was meant to be out of doors, doing stuff, not trying to turn a key to get into a building.

Golgama pulled the key out and looked at it. It looked the same as it had before. He put it back in the lock and pressed, but it didn't move. He pressed the other way, no movement. He tried to tilt it up and down a little bit. It had a little play in it, it was an old lock, and an old key.

Maybe if he tilted it up, kept the pressure on and turned. Nope.

Maybe if he tilted it down - and then it happened. Golgama had heard of it before, but he had never experienced it. He wasn't prepared for the shock of standing in front of a locked door that you need in and holding half of a key.

What do you even do in this situation?

Three steps in front of him there was a shovel, a shovel that he had been told to get. An order that he was compelled to follow by the commandments included in the scroll that had laid in his head from the time he had been baked.

Golgama reached out to the handle and grabbed hold. He hadn't been commanded to break into the shed, but in his last 10 years of employment on the grounds he had never been told not to either.

The commandments were supposed to eliminate this type of problem, but they had never really worked.

- - - - - - -

So, one of the first things that starts to decline when my spine and brainstem are out of wack is my ability to orient in and organize larger structured ideas, like writing a story. That's why this didn't really come together. The ideas wouldn't generate in my brain like they normally would, so I just stumbled forward with my partially performing brain. The mind is the operation of the brain, it's important to remember that the ability to think is generated by an organ (yes, I already understand it's a lot more complex than that and involves significantly more).

I finished with just enough time to read through it once before the writing session ended. I had Golgama going into an office instead of a "building" at first. Then, somehow that morphed into a shed with a shovel. That's just bad selection on my part. I should have done something with an office, that would be better. Like sending the golum to collect legal papers off an office desk or something, that would work. Then there should be a time limit to apply pressure or something. Even now, after having hours to think about it, the idea just won't form in my mind. Hopefully I will sleep extra tonight and my adjustment will go well tomorrow. Then, I'll recover over the next few days and be charging forward again. The issue is that I have every day full, there is no time to take off, which is fine, I'll manage it.

One woman mentioned the golems from Terry Pratchett's "Discworld", which is also what I think of when I think of golems.

There were, of course, many interesting takes. I really liked one that was this guy mulling over his struggle about going to Catholic Mass because of a variety of issues. It was great. And there was this one about twins, where one might have been a vampire and one a werewolf. It was crazy, in the good way.

I'm not going to lie, something like this is a bit depressing. It's great that I still did it, and it's great that it's an okay idea, and it came out decent, but it's depressing because if my brain was functioning a bit better it would have been so significantly better. I can't not make that comparison.

(Other odd notes: the picture is of a kid that I teach online who's from China. That's a creature that he invented that eats dead people. Also, I used "effecting" in the first paragraph of this article where most people would use "affecting." I intend to do that because I disagree with how the ivory tower teaches that.)

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

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32flavasshoetique · 4 years

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Grounds You Need To Definitely Use Lubricant While Having Sex

Intercourse are great. So can be slide and glide. Shout-out to whichever wizard first recognized lubricant could merge the 2 for the many amazing way. “Lubricant is actually really an enjoyable topic,” Alyssa Dweck, M.D., associate medical teacher of obstetrics at Mount Sinai class of medication and co-author of V is actually for pussy, informs SELF. “I’m happy the forbidden of chatting as it used to be. about any of it isn’t because strong”

The forbidden she actually is mentioning to is caused by the stigma that often appear along side utilizing lube, as if you’re maybe maybe not literally or mentally enthusiastic about what is planning to drop. The fact is that even although you’re insanely switched on and would please prefer to have intercourse with this particular individual forever and actually amen, lubricant can make the experience still more fun. Rather than which means you’re “less of a lady” for dipping a bottom genitals into that share, it indicates you are motivated adequate to possess finest energy during sex feasible. Right right Here, reasoned explanations why you really need to please need lubricant once you desire while having sex.

“a female’s normal oiling is oftentimes a sign of arousal, the same manner erections were for males,” states Dweck. Just how your system will make it result try fairly cool. “During intimate pleasure, the blood vessels dilate so a lot a lot more flow that is blood into the vaginal region,” states Dweck. That blood dash encourages numerous glands that are vaginal mucous tissues to exude liquids which make gender convenient and much more satisfying both for public included.

Do not check this out in the event that you dislike with the time that is incredible sleep.

Parallels even though you are fired up, often it will require awhile for you to obtain from the page that is same your brain. That is entirely regular, so that it does not mean a unmarried bad most important factor of your, exactly how gorgeous you might be, or the appeal to whomever you’re sex with. “It is in contrast to a light change you become on / off,” claims Dweck. ” The nature that is physiological of ways normally it takes a while to become obviously lubricated.” That is why foreplay is oftentimes these an essential part of sex—it offers you time for you heated the engine up, as they say.

Often you are damp adequate to have time that is great you feel changing it. “Some ladies make use of a store-bought lube simply because they have actually problems with genital dryness, but some different ladies make use of lube only for a sensation that is new gender,” Sari Locker, Ph.D., sex teacher at Columbia institution and composer of The Complete Idiot’s help guide to eye-popping gender, informs PERSONAL.

That is why foreplay is normally such an part that is important of offers

There are many different the explanation why you might feel just like the pussy is not lubricating by itself sufficient. “a great amount of females has highest want, nevertheless they you shouldn’t lubricate whenever they would like for their cycle that is menstrual, or medicines,” states Locker. The capsule can reduce oiling as it alters the levels of estrogen to curb ovulation. “When that you do not ovulate, you exude reduced cervical mucous,” claims Dweck, which explains why menopausal as well as your pattern can impact lubrication nicely. She additionally notes that lots of sensitivity treatments operate by constricting the arteries, generally there’s much less of this genital that is necessary movement that issues into just exactly just how damp you can get. Luckily for us, utilizing lube tends to make like that reduced of a problem.

Fretting about their genitals are also dry to own sex that is good more or less going to backfire. ” utilizing a store-bought lube might help overcome anxiousness you’ve got about this,” states Locker. “with all the included lube, you’ll take enjoyment in the pleasure of entrance, along with your attention will soon be at convenience, also.” Plus, she contributes, your lover will end up being much less stressed about damaging you, which can be constantly great.

A good small little bit of lubricant may be adequate to enable you to get going. You will probably realize that you get more turned on, and your body handles the rest as you continue. “Thrusting could be more safe and enjoyable because of this,” says Dweck.

Once you accept the reality that lubricant can raise your own sex-life, putting it on is similar to clinging a “we have been going to use a severely fun time” signal above the figures. “Some lady get a hold of getting lubrication to their spouse or their unique companion placing it on it can raise her sexual enjoy,” states Dweck. It may be a way that is good create foreplay much more inventive, that may additionally create that area of the activity keep going longer. Win-win.

As soon as you accept the known proven fact that lubricant can enhance their love life

No reason to merely put it to use with another individual! Lubricant may be perfect for solamente gender. “Chances are you’ll desire version during self pleasure, specially if it is their just intimate socket,” states Locker. “Some girls attempt heating or tingling lubricant, and even put it to use with adult sex toys for masturbatory species,” she claims. generate like a scientist that is sexual test to your own center’s material.

Whether you are thinking about anal that is trying or currently have but desire so it can have another get, lubricant are an excellent element of which makes it profitable rather than terrifying. “The anal area will not self-lubricate how a pussy really does. For just about any rectal gamble or anal intercourse, lube is advised for satisfaction and safety,” states Locker.

In a variety of ways, he developed the video game, which confuses men and women even today. He recomguysds people to allow her people too miss them—but not much, while suggesting people to help make their own men jealous on occasion, to make sure they just do not develop lax nor idle. Into the room, Ovid details exactly exactly what type females should need, never to just optimize delight on their own, but in addition to really make it more enjoyable to your man’s look. Within one feel, he relocated from the notion of females as possession—as these people were equivalent users within the online game of love—while having said that, strengthening manipulative strategies keeping one’s fan consistently on their particular feet.

Though their words never ever smashed into vulgarity, it had been very direct within the information, and also in a question of poor time, triggered their exile by Augustus, who was simply however coping with the headlines of their daughter’s copulations.

Martial

Much like more psychological signals, surprise is based on the area between objectives and real life. Marcus Valerius Martialis, or Martial, was obviously a poet that is roman basic millennium, who was simply produced popular by their 12 e-books of epigrams. For this Martial’s epigrams are shocking due to their obscene, and oftentimes graphic, language day. If hardly anything otherwise, their unique vulgarity sheds light from the form of perform posted during the time.

Epigrams 7and 80 of publication III communicate vulgarity inside a structure that is distinct. Throughout these epigrams, insults were initially geared towards the subjects’ fictional character and are usually subsequently rerouted by insulting issues’ intimate “short-cummings.” In Epigram 79, Martial starts by announcing:

“Sertorius completes absolutely nothing, and starts every thing. As he fornicates, we don’t guess he completes.” Martial’s razor- razor- razor- sharp terms pivot this insult considerably pointedly at Sertorius’s intimate incapability. Also, Epigram 80 presents their topic with an even more common observance accompanied by a hyper-sexualized observance.

Apicius’s ability at dental sex.

“You talk of no body, Apicius, communicate sick mature porn site of no person, however rumor claims you have got a wicked language.” The latter angles the reader to the true central insult: Apicius’s skill at oral sex while the former could pose as a general remark to Apicius’s soft-spoken character. right Here, “evil” is much more most likely a phrase for “wild,” indicating that Apicius’s language trigger their partner that is sexual to regulation and tthe guyrefore he is skillful at providing mind. The direct quality for this code shows the amount of endurance classic society got during the time relating to intercourse.

Emma Marie are really a pupil, professional photographer, tourist, and licensed freediver.

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trippinglynet · 4 years

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Go Fun Burn Man | Joab Jackson & Michelle Gienow

What happens when the artistically inclined build a temporary city in the desert? You get 14 radio stations, two newspapers, and not enough water.

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1998: "So basically, they're fucked."

The DJ's publicly broadcast profanity is the first act of civil disobedience we experience at Burning Man 1998. In fact, it is the first sign that we have arrived at all. It's 6 P.M. and we're five miles out of Black Rock City, the name given the community set up by and for this ad hoc assemblage of artists, thrill seekers, and various unclassifiable Pagan types.

The "fucked," the DJ explains, are a couple who had bicycled the 130 miles to the Burning Man festival from Reno, Nev., carrying with them only basic on-the-road supplies. They made it OK, but the car that was to follow with their food, water, and sun block for the festival broke down. They need anything and everything, the DJ says.

The Black Rock desert is no place to hang without water-the Burning Man Website urges festival goers to bring one or two gallons per person per day. And the festival site is no vacation park with a water source and a store. The thousands who come (the anticipated '98 crowd turned out to be 15,000) are expected to bring everything they need, including entertainment. At Burning Man, according to the Black Rock Gazette, the festival's daily news-sheet, "survival is an option."

We pay our entry fee ($100 apiece for myself, City Paper contributing photographer Michelle Gienow, her husband Dave Israel, and City Paper cartoonist Tim Krieder) and enter the Black Rock realm. We are part of the evil media, the people Burning Man's organizers are always complaining about. The press, the Burning people contend, misses the point of the festival, coverage of which usually consists of reporters and photographers parachuting in, grabbing a few freak shots, and taking off. "A lot of what passes for journalistic objectivity," festival co founder Larry Harvey says in the Burning Man press kit, "is actually professional alienation."

Perhaps. Then again, maybe there isn't a point to miss. Maybe the TV glare just lays bare the pretensions of grown adults escaping adulthood for a few days. But how could we tell? Harvey urges reporters to arrive early, "to immerse themselves in the story." This was precisely our plan.

Black Rock City is laid out in a semicircle, complete with streets and street signs. In the middle is a space that is largely unoccupied, save for the Burning Man himself-a 50-foot wooden effigy atop a U-shaped support, which will be ritualistically set ablaze at festival's end. The whole setup is wedged in a valley, with mountains reaching up on both sides.

The greeter at the gate tells us the neighborhood to the right is fairly quiet; the one to the left is a bit closer to the action. We go left, staking out a spot on Third Street and Atlantic Avenue. The cracked earth is arid and flat, with nary a plant anywhere. We're on a former lake bed, called "the Playa." And there is dust, a gritty dust that seeps into everything.

We pull in next to a camp which is behind a Ryder truck. Its occupants, Dave and Randy, welcome us to the neighborhood. We jokingly ask about the school system. "Well, we're not crazy about the local education system," Dave says. "But you will get schooled here!"

We set up our camp until it is too dark to continue, and then begin to explore. By day Black Rock City looks like some sort of refugee village, all windblown tents and scattered possessions, but at night the blemishes are hidden. There are 423 registered camps this year and scads of unregistered ones, each with a different theme. In a 1996 Wired magazine article ( "Greetings From Burning Man!"), writer Bruce Sterling described the festival as the Internet made physical. I haven't really gotten what he meant until we walk around at night. Each of these camps is like a Web page, each with a different underlying concept or way of luring you in. (Also like the Internet, getting from one place to another proves to be a difficult, time-consuming task-we are always sidelined by one diversion or another.)

We start on the main road down the north side of Black Rock and encounter the Chapel of the Burning Book--one of the more elaborate exhibits, a towering temple of glass, illuminated so it can be seen from the entire Playa. A few feet down we walk through the Human Wash, a tactile walk-through structure that resembles a car wash but is person-sized (designed by Anthony Bondi, as I later found out). We brush through swatches of fur, rubber balls, and paint brushes. It is quite the sensual experience-so much so that the guy watching over it won't answer any questions, but simply pushes people through and, I suppose, lets the contraption do the talking. "Is it better if I take off my shirt?" Push. "Do we go in sideways?" Push. "What's the name of this?" Push. We also stop by the Mir space-station camp and get free samples of vodka and Tang.

Literally every few yards we encounter something new. We see a guy in a red sequined dress and a woman with breasts painted as headlights. Neither seems out of place. Someone walks by pulling a wagon fitted with a homemade boombox blaring a loop of someone singing part of the song "Moving Around" over and over again. "I'm trying to put people in a trance," he says. We stop by a pavilion set up like a bar where, the barkeep tells us, everything is bartered. And he does mean everything-alcohol, drugs, sex.

"It's like if society were run by artists," Dave Israel observes. "Everything would be great for a week or so, then we'd all die from lack of food and water."

Maybe. But looking over the rugged construction of the Taj Mahal and some of the other camps, it's clear these aren't effete New York artists out here, but the more rugged San Francisco stock. These are artists who sculpt their visions with blow torches.

Thursday, Sept. 3: It's hot. The morning chill around here burns off by 9 A.M. You're left with 90-degree mornings and 100-plus afternoons. Playa heat is not like humid, in-your-face Baltimore heat. It's dry heat, which makes it seem more bearable but is perhaps more insidious because it zaps your energy. The Burning Man Web site's "Survival Guide" advises drinking at least a gallon of water a day.

That afternoon Michelle and I venture over to the Black Rock Gazette. If we're to immerse ourselves in Burning Man, to actually participate, we figure, we'll contribute the best way we know how-through journalism. Well, that's not entirely true-I just want e-mail access, and Michelle needs to recharge her camera batteries-and we figure both can be had over at the Gazette trailer, which has electricity. Publisher Stewart Mangrum, desperate for copy and sensing fresh blood, hands us assignments due that afternoon.

My job is to report on the tiki-torch controversy. Earlier in the week the Black Rock Rangers-Burning Man's cadre of security and medical volunteers-banned the use of tiki torches, which are popular on the Playa, after one camp caught fire from a tiki flame and burned down. There was a fair amount of resistance; a Tiki Liberation Front had formed and sent a proclamation to the Gazette. I am to tour the camp to get the freak-on-the-street response.

It's funny, I muse to Mangrum when I return to the trailer to file my story. Here I am, in a place where I can do virtually anything I want, reinvent myself in any way I wish, and what do I do? The same thing I do at home-write stories. So much for letting my alter ego run free.

I return home from the Gazette about 8 P.M., utterly exhausted. Walking around in the afternoon heat just drained me, and by nightfall I am nearly comatose. I already feel a little burned out on Burning Man. Black Rock City is somewhat like a Busch Gardens-style theme park: The first day is wonderful, but the longer you stay, the more everything sours.

Cruising around that night, we pass the carnival tent, where two jugglers toss around brown balls they claim are feces, inspiring clever audience responses: "Oh shit!" "That's some good shit!" And so on. A few doors down, a photographer is shooting someone with a bowling ball on her head. We tour Bianca's Smut Shack , which is notorious from its Web site; in the flesh, it strikes me as a typical nightclub, albeit one offering toasted-cheese sandwiches, Altoids, and live soft-core sex scenes (two men straddling a woman and licking her neck in front of about 30 onlookers). I'm beginning to suspect that Burning Man's chief product is bad performance art.

I manage to avoid having my brain sucked into submission by the gigantic, cylindrical, pulsating light machine, although others are apparently not so lucky. Housed under a canopy at the city's south end, the machine resembles something out of Tron and attracts a carpet of young hippies, who stare zombie-like into its strobing center. I sit down to rest and wait for Michelle, Dave, and Tim to get bored with this spectacle.

Observing the circle of blank-faced attendees, Tim recalls a comment Stanley Kubrick made about psychedelic drugs. The trouble with hallucinogenics, Kubrick more or less said, is that people taking them can't distinguish an interesting idea from one that just seems interesting.

Friday, Sept. 4: While we were sleeping, an RV hauling a trailer brimming with sound equipment parks in what was our front yard. I think: Just what we need next door, an all-night rave. My head hurts.

This is not the first threat of neighborhood noise. Yesterday afternoon some guy, camping in a black Chevy van down the road, decided to share his budding electric-guitar skills with the whole block, via a portable amp. The sound of bar-chords filled the day. There is a mantra of Burning Man, a rule that ensures a quality experience for all: Don't interfere with anyone else's "experience," Give everyone the space to enjoy themselves in whatever off-the-wall way that they see fit. I understand this precept, but I still was sorely tempted to interfere with his.

In the afternoon, Tim and I decide to test the barter system. No commercial booths are allowed at Burning Man (with the exception of ice sales and the festival's own coffee bar). Michelle gives us a list of sundries to fetch: a lemon, glue, some other stuff.

Whatever his talents as a cartoonist, Tim is a mite rusty as a pitchman. Not that I'm much help. Riding around on bikes, we stop at a camp dedicated to great Finks in history ("Like Barton?" Tim asks. No, like Richard Nixon and Linda Tripp), a couple of S&M; camps, and the Piñata Fuckers Camp, the Web site for which brazenly promised piñata-human interaction but, disappointingly, which offers piñata-to-piñata couplings.

Tim's approach to this whole bartering thing is simple. He offers chapbooks of his comic strip The Pain-When Will It End? for free. That is his entire approach. Understandably most people as yet unfamiliar with his comedic talents are reluctant to part with any valuables in return. While we are tanked on the psychic joy of spreading laughter across the Playa, we don't reap much in return--a few stickers, an application of suntan lotion on our backs, a beer or two at a place that is giving beer away anyway.

At night we go foraging again. At one spot in Black Rock's "neighBARhood" district, Tim asks for a beer and is asked in return, "What do you have to barter?" They are short on the usuals: cigarettes, water, ice (water value-added). Tim self-effacingly replies that he has some humorous drawings in his satchel. The bartender is studying a Pain book with a sort of frownish expression when I finally get fed up and jump in into the transaction. You see, I work at an office where I tend to overhear a lot of sales talk and, for better or worse, I've become familiar with "the hard sell."

"These aren't merely any drawings," I pipe up. "My friend here is modest. They are quite good. In fact, they are printed in a newspaper back east, and most certainly will provide you with many hours of fun."

"Well worth the price of beer," Tim adds.

Caught up in the enthusiasm of our pitch--or just wanting us to shut up--the barkeeps not only give us each a beer but provide refills.

Two lessons here: Even in a communal culture, it is the capitalistic tools that garner the frothy cool ones. And in more than one society, it's the content providers who get the short end of the bartering stick. We got what we wanted, but it took a lot of work.

That evening, we were invited to a chili dinner at Spock Mountain Research Labs. I’ve been trading e-mails with members of this particular clan for awhile, but had never met face-to-face before. It was at an post-dinner jam that I learn perhaps the coolest thing about Burning Man: It’s not the exhibits that make this event. It’s the interactions between people. The often-spontaneous, frequently strange interactions that just could not happen anywhere else on the planet.

Spock Mountain Research Labs, which is a few blocks east of own camp, is run by members of a San Francisco-based 'zine/mailing list called Pigdog. The wood facade, tin overhang, and front porch of this structure looks just like some shack you might imagine lost in the West Virginia mountains. But it is no mere hillbilly shack, they tell me, but a research lab as well. I never quite get why they would build a hillbilly shack research lab, even after listening to the audiotape tour they provide me. The Pigdoggers are of little help; they keep saying it has something to do with "beverage science and leisure technology." When we show up, they’re mostly wearing white lab coats emblazoned with an image of Mr. Spock's head over the three-ring biochemical-hazard symbol.

Dave brought his guitar, figuring to provide entertainment as a sort of repayment for all this good chili. After dinner is finished and the whiskey is passed around, Pigdogger David Cassel pulls out his Casio keyboard, and he and our Dave plays "Honky Tonk Women." People start singing along. Then the two play "The Weight." Soon all of us on the Spock Mountain porch are singing so loudly, so boisterously and so damn drunkenly ("Take a weight off Mamaaaaa!!"), that passers-by are now stopping to view the spectacle.

See More of Pigdog's Burning Man Photos!

Read Pigdog's 1997 Burning Man Travelogue!

Dave slides into a lively bluegrass instrumental, and a guy no one here knows, but who is wearing his own raggedy hillbilly-like hat, jumps on the porch and yells, "That sounds like jigging music!" and commences to jig. I watch in amazement, digging the thematic coincidence, not suspecting it could get any weirder. It does. Dave stops playing for a second and slams his bottle of Jack Daniels on the wood floor. "Anyone who jigs must drink from the bottle," he demands. A cadre of cross-dressers come walking down the dusty road, glittered out to the hilt. When they get to the porch they assemble together and start line-dancing. This bizarre mix goes on for awhile, and at the exact point when the combined excitement of hillbilly jamming, jigging strangers, and synchronized cross-dressers ebbs, a funk wagon—I swear there’s no other way to describe this thing—comes bouncing out from the darkness. It's decorated as a gigantic ghetto blaster, complete with booming speakers. As it is pulled along by two minions, a DJ sits at the helm, spinning irrestible dance music. A little disco ball, hanging from the cart, spins away. (We find out later funk wagon attendees were our neighbors—the one with the RV.) The cart pauses in front of the shack and almost everyone here— hillbillies, cross-dressers, Spock Mountaineers—shake our booties in mad abandon.

It is a moment of almost unbelievable serendipity. Where else in the world would you be at a research lab enjoying jig music accompanied by cross-dressers that dissolves into an instant house party? Dave, who is getting good at coming up with ways to describe Burning Man, thinks of another: It's all the best parties you've ever been to, all 10 feet away from each other.

Saturday, Sept. 5: On an afternoon photographic mission, Michelle is issued a citation by the fashion police for wearing Tevas. I, with my T-shirt bearing the name of an international banking firm and my sideways I'LL PUSH MY FORD BEFORE I DRIVE A CHEVY cap, am beyond the law. Anything goes here, but you must be stylish in your madness.

We stop at Body Boutique, where people can be sprayed with different colors (made from food coloring). It is run by Guido Venturini, who works as an architect the rest of the year. "It's an experiment for a new world," Venturini tells me in a thick Italian accent.

"I always was one color and I only wanted to be another," a blue-soaked Darby Crouch offers.

The sky starts to darken. A dust storm is approaching, but I really must stop by the ominous Nebulous Entity, which has been haunting everyone for an entire week. How to describe this thing? It has five wheels and a sort of twisted, knotty, trunklike base from which a tangle of white metal branches stretches 40 feet skyward. Some branches bud Ken-doll legs, or Pez dispensers. Fiber-optic lines run through the whole thing. Most of the week it has been regurgitating, quite loudly, dissonant noises or obscure pop ditties. I run into the guy who rigged the sound component, a wiry and somewhat haggard-looking young sound scientist named Aaron Wolf Baum. Inside of the mobile creation is a computer with 500 samples of commercials, jingles, TV theme songs, and other aural pop-culture flotsam. As if that isn't enough, there is a microphone people can yell into; the voices are recorded by the computer and added to the random pattern of samples and mixes.

"This is an experiment on an enormous scale," Baum says of Burning Man. "It allows artists to work on very large pieces, and make them very conceptual." The Nebulous Entity is Baum's statement on how we can get caught up in and obsessed by technology. The next day I would understand what he meant.

At 3 P.M. the dark, bilious clouds are approaching at a frighteningly fast clip, so I make my way back to camp. Our setup consists of two tents and a common "shade area," a tarp stretched from Tim's Cherokee over to an open-air tent. It works well enough until the dust storm. Dave directs us each to stand by a pole and make sure our temporary structures don't take off. As the wind and dust roar around us, the pavilion of a neighboring camp blows over and begins journeying westward.

Not everyone is concerned about the storm. At the camp in front of us, as the winds whip around her and her group's tent, a naked woman (I later find out her name is Evelyn) stands and dons a black bustier and striped knee-high stockings. As this scene unfolds, another woman approaches and asks if we know an Alan. She explains that he is her soul mate, as gleaned from a camp that is doing personals. Apparently he lives on our block. We pass around the Alan info sheet the woman obtained from the personals tent, but no bells ring.

Meanwhile the winds subside just enough for the one-chord space-rock band the next block over, which we met earlier in the festival, to start jamming. There is an endless whooping and cheering by people from all over. A mobile living room rides through, with people lounging on its zebra-striped chairs listening to Dick Dale tunes. If the apocalypse ever does strike, we humans will have a great soundtrack for it.

Sunday, Sept. 6: This afternoon I am dead. I sit beneath our tarp to cool off, too tired to move but too hot to sleep. I am sure I've suffered some kind of heat stroke but am too beat down to make it to the medical center. Finally I decide to strike out and seek water of some sort.

I amble down to the Free Mass Shower, a mud pit with a shower head. There is no showering going on, and the guy who seems to be in charge is having a discussion with three bike-riding officials from Washoe County's District Health Department. The shower guy is wearing one of those silly hard hats with two can holders and a straw. But this isn't just some funny-hat-wearing frat boy talking to R. Jeanne Rucker, the official in charge of the Washoe County posse, but a lawyer who appears to know his way around dealing with government officials.

"So you want me to shut this site down. Is that correct?" Beer-Can Mike (as Rucker calls him) asks.

"Yes."

"A lot of people will be disappointed. They are enjoying this."

The trouble, Rucker explains to me, is that the shower uses unpotable water, which could have all sorts of bacteria and thus could cause all sorts of disease, including dysentery. Festivalgoers would likely assume the water is safe, and there are no signs or warnings to the contrary. If people are aware the water isn't drinkable, there wouldn't be a problem.

"So let me get this straight," Mike says. "I let the water drain in the mud and people play in the mud, then that would be OK, but I can't have it hit people first before it hits the ground."

"That's correct."

Water has been a major issue here. The One Tree-a treelike metal sculpture that spews water and is widely used for showers-was closed earlier in the week because it recycled its supply of water, unbeknownst to the people who showered under it. One reliable source is the water truck that comes around once a day, usually in the morning. It drives up one street and down another, wetting the roads to keep the dust down. It didn't take long for people to realize that by following along behind the truck, they can get a good shower. It's even got warm water, having just come from the nearby hot springs.

Depending on which block you catch the thing in, you can find very good company indeed. But after a few days at Burning Man, nudity becomes virtually unnoticeable. I thought being in the presence of more nakedness than I'd ever seen would be odd. How would I talk to some bare-naked sweet young thing? After a few days the answer was obvious: the same way I would speak with her were she wearing clothes. Thus the sight of a bevy of unclothed, laughing, hot-spring-soaked beauties running alongside me to get doused by a water truck is one of those things I didn't really notice and probably won't remember fondly for the rest of my life.

I return to camp at about 4 P.M. The neighbor who lives alone in a pup tent and was painted red when we first saw him is home. This is rare-each morning he bolts from his tent and is not seen again. One day he came back to shave off all of his hair, but that was one of the few times we saw him.

I amble over to chat. His name is Ted Dewberry and he is encrusted in mud. He took a Greyhound bus in from his home in Minneapolis to Reno, from which he planned to bike to Gerlach, the town just outside of the festival site. Near the end of his bike trip he became exhausted and ended up hitchhiking the rest of the way. Still, he arrived nine days before the start of the festival proper. "I was here before anyone," he boasts.

A professional photographer, Dewberry learned of Burning Man from the Internet. What struck him were the images from the festival: "I never seen anything like that before. I just came knowing it would be something completely different." He rubs mud off of a bandage on the top of his head.

"How does your head feel, Ted?" someone from the next camp asks.

"Better than sex," he replies.

"I've been able to do things I've never done before," Dewberry continues. "That in itself is worth it. You don't have to worry about your reputation-what other people here are thinking.

"I just worry what it will be like when I return," he muses, "whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum in the real world."

As night falls-the final night-we feel it's come none too soon. Michelle says she can't take another day, and I can't either. My thighs are chapped, my feet are covered in blisters, and I am dehydrated and in dire need of a long, long, sleep and a shower.

And, I realize, I have failed utterly in my task. There is so much I didn't have time to explore: the Temple of Atonement's Slave Auction, the Radio-Control Demolition Derby, the parade of topless lesbian bicyclists. And there is so much I did experience but don't have the space here to explain: the body boutique; the collection of oil barrels, car doors, ladders, poles, crowbars, air-vent shafts left out for anyone to drum upon. There are a thousand stories in Black Rock City and even Larry Harvey doesn't know them all. The crowd runs the gamut from teenage boys here for the endless parade of tits and drugs to serious artists redefining their worlds. And the only thing that would really bring them together would be the burning of the Man.

On Sunday night Deadheads, Pagans, Goths, Elvis imitators, the cross-dressed, and the undressed all stream down the lantern-lit aisle rambling across the desert toward the Man. Ted is there, painted white, and so is Evelyn, wearing black. Drummers drum. Two gypsies dance lustily atop a golden calf. "Burn the freak, burn the freak," one person yells. "Burn the motherfucker down," shouts another.

The Man is outfitted in purple and red neon. When the mass of people congeals, someone comes out with a torch, and runs it tantalizingly along the soon-to-be Burning Man's legs. A second person comes out and is set on fire in some sort of ritual dance.

Suddenly the Man is burning. I hear later that the flaming guy lit the Burning Man too early, accidentally brushing against the effigy's leg and igniting it; the organizers had little choice but to let him burn then and there, cutting short the ritual buildup. No matter. People are ready for fire.

As the man burns, a tremendous volley of fireworks is loosed from his figure. The desert night is illuminated with a fierce brightness.

It takes only a few more minutes for the figure to collapse into a big, burning pile of rubble. A circle forms around the remains. The Black Rock Rangers keep pushing the crowd away from the fire, but individuals break free and dance up to the flames. Everyone is packed together, flesh and sweat mingling. One woman with a man bowed before her is houting, "I need some room, please give me some room." She takes an eye dropper and carefully squeezes a drop of something into the man's eye. "Anyone else want to be dosed?" she shouts.

A few feet away, an ambulance is ready to haul off the first of a handful of people who've overdosed. (Over the course of the week, the Washoe County Sheriff's Department reports more than 10 drug overdoses, several of which require air evacuation). A guy with a video camera stands behind two emergency medical technicians trying to revive the patients, capturing it all on tape.

Pushed by volunteers, the Nebulous Entity trucks up to the Man, turns around, and, Pied Piper-like, heads back out into the desert, taking with it a stream of followers as it spews out fragments of noise and children's songs: "I am a truck/ a great big truck!" It is truly frightening.

But the fire's primal quality keeps most people nearby. One man dances so close that his latex pants start melting. Ignoring the Rangers' attempts to stop her, Evelyn circles the fire in her bare feet, sometimes walking on hot embers.

What did all of this mean? I have no idea. I walked around the fire asking the people staring into the flames why it was so damn important to burn the Man.

"I really don't know."

"People like to destroy things," one annoyed woman answered curtly.

"It's all about what burns inside you. Like the man's arm fell off, but he kept up, he kept dancing even though he was burning up inside. It's all about dealing with what burns you up."

"It's a Wiccan ceremony. The burning of the man was an offering to the gods for a successful harvest. That's what we're doing, looking for a successful harvest in this changing of seasons."

There's also a lot of talk about throwing things into the fire-burning your fear, as it were. I toss in the T-shirt I'd been wearing all day, the one with the logo of the international banking firm, the credit-card division of which I owed a considerable amount of money (and which advanced much of the cash I used for this trip). I did not feel cleansed, however. I felt cold. Not only was I still in debt, I didn't even have a shirt to wear.

Monday, Sept.7: 6 A.M. I'm leaving the Playa early to catch a flight home. The festival volunteers have their work cut out for them cleaning up the mess left behind in what would turn out to be knee-deep mush created by several days of rain. This morning, though, the sun is appearing and the week-long tribal din has finally subsided. I turn on Radio Free Burning Man. Even the DJ sounds tired and solitary, his commentary punctuated by stretches of dead air.

Burning Man '98: The best party of my entire life, yes, but anything more? What did five days of cooperation and creativity really trump over a lifetime of consumption and passivity? How, exactly, will the harvest be? I certainly will take some creativity back with me, along with the Playa dust caked on all of my belongings. But, like the dust, the influence will probably wash off fairly quickly.

Read Other Burning Man Stories!

But maybe, even after five days of immersion, I'm just the one who doesn't get it. That's the trouble with these kinds of gatherings: It's always hard to distinguish real significance from what only appears significant. Maybe that feeling is the point. In the final analysis, you get out of Burning Man only what you put into it. Which, of course, means everything, and nothing.

"Hope you had a good burn," the DJ says.

#1998 #1998 Burn #Burning Man 1998

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jeremystrele · 5 years

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The Australian Film Tackling The Greatest Issue Of Our Time

Sustainability

by Elle Murrell

Damon Gameau spoke to more than 50 different scientists, academics and economists from around the world to get an idea of what we could do, what the psychology was, and what solutions existed. Photo – Courtesy of Madman Entertainment.

‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’ – Buckminster Fuller’s quote inspired the film. Photo – Courtesy of Madman Entertainment.

The documentary is structured as a visual letter to Damon’s four-year-old daughter. Photo – Kate Nutt.

Earlier this week I waited in our local cinema. It was a little emptier than usual on cheap-night (thanks GoT), and as the first trailer began to roll, polished, futuristic-yet-familiar scenes captivated the audience. A camera panned over cityscapes of lush rooftop gardens before encircling forests of gigantic wind turbines. A voice over started, and I was a little taken aback to hear the narrator’s Australian accent.

It was Damon Gameau. The film director and actor – you may have seen his acclaimed That Sugar Film; he is kind of our answer to Morgan Spurlock – has just released his latest project. Neither overloading with complex science nor paralysing with fear, 2040 trades in hope.

The film sees Damon embark on a global journey to hear from experts, innovators, change-makers, and schools of kids who, along with his own young daughter, will inherit the world we leave behind.

Damon shared more about his documentary, a vision board for how we can all regenerate the Earth for future generations…

Was there a moment, person or place that inspired you to make this film, and approach our climate emergency in the way you have?

It was probably a discussion with the environmental psychologist Dr. Renee Lertzman. She really helped me to understand some of the neuroscience around how we respond to information that is overwhelming or comes attached with any fear or anxiety – which as we know is pretty much the only narrative we really hear around climate and the future. So she talked about how limiting that can be, in terms of how that activates our brain and shuts down parts where we do think creatively and problem-solve.

That was a huge moment for me to think, ‘Right, maybe there is a way of trying to communicate this circumstance in a more motivating way’.

Your 2014 documentary, ‘The Sugar Film’ tackled healthy eating. Have you long been keen to explore an environmental issue?

I have always been interested in environmental issues but have struggled with how to connect with them because they are so dire and negative.

I guess having a daughter really made me think about the power of imagery. I think we are often guided by images in society and the ones that concern our future are almost entirely catastrophic and even that extends to films. Hollywood films often show a future that is really uninhabitable in some cases there is very little nature and we are all living in really desolate environments. I just thought it was important to have an intervention and throw up some alternatives and say, ‘You know what, it doesn’t have to be like that. There are opportunities to create a really vibrant and rich future, with a lot more nature being incorporated into our cities and our surrounds’. It’s kind of who we are as people, it’s how we have evolved. In fact, there is terrific research showing the healing aspect of being in nature and doctors in Scotland are even prescribing it to their patients!

What can people expect from the film?

We’ve done 45 Q&As around the country and found that people feel this overwhelming sense of hope again and relief. I have been getting lots of hugs after the screenings because, I think, people are feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the state of the planet, and rightly so – you know we do need to also allow ourselves to feel that emotion and feel how upsetting it can be sometimes.

But people need to also see that there are others who care deeply about this issue and that there are solutions that exist. We actually have everything we need right now to deal with all these problems. We just need motivation for people to get involved. I think we are more prone to be motivated when we are given a goal to strive for, or a more hopeful future. That’s sort of how we are wired.

I’ve called it ‘fact-based dreaming’ before; it is a vision of the future, but there is nothing that is made up. Everything I show my daughter exists now, it’s just an extrapolation of that into the future. There might be another tonne of solutions that pop up, there will be in the next 20 years, but what we have right now should be really encouraging to people.

Yes, it is a hopeful vision, and it portrays a much different future, but only based on what we already have. I think is an important way to ground the film so it doesn’t feel too utopian or fanciful. I’m not making anything up.

presenting the future is a huge undertaking. What’s been most challenging for you and your team?

[laughs] Probably trying to decide what to leave out there were so many innovations and solutions that we discovered! How do you condense that into a story that is both entertaining and informative in 90 minutes? You can overload people with wall-to-wall facts, but it’s about getting that balance between the head: the information but also the heart: the storytelling and emotional journey. How do we connect people to this issue – whether it’s their children’s future, the food we’re eating, or the air we are breathing?

And also there is just an infinite number of future outcomes, possibilities, or opinions. So ultimately I kept coming back to my vision and was guided by all of the children we consulted – more than 100 from all around the world. Just distilling all the information and their answers was probably the biggest challenge.

It must have also been technologically difficult to portray your vision visually?

We had a brilliant designer, Luke Bubb and he and I worked really closely; we had some fantastic late-night chats about certain visions of the future and what that might look like. Then there was our visual effects team, Cumulus VFX. An Australian company, their office is run entirely on renewables, so all the visual effects in the film were made by the energy of the sun!

There were about 20 VFX specialists, most under the age of 25. To see them come in every day to contribute to what their future might look like, what their dreams are, was a really wonderful exercise and very collaborative process.

Which side of the road driverless cars will pull over on? Where would the door be? What kind of trees would you have in the rooftop garden in a certain city and what foods could grow there best? All those little questions were really fun to explore.

Looking back over the more than three years you’ve been working on this film, project, movement (!), what stands out to you the most?

So far, it’s been the response we’re getting from kids. They’ve been asking the best questions at the screening Q&As – I’ve done a school visit in every town and city we’ve been to, and to just see how engaged they are with this topic and how passionate they are. The language they use, how articulate they are, how eloquent their questions are they really know what’s going on better than most adults.

That gives me enormous hope, they really are on a mission these kids. We’ve just got to make sure we nurture them, really support that passion and do whatever we can to get involved and help make it happen.

You’ve just wrapped up an Australian tour of the film and ON Thursday it was released across the country, did you consider the Federal Election in your timeline?

Yes, we talked a lot about when to release the film, whether before or after would be best, with a range of different groups.

We felt that no matter the outcome of the election, no party was going to come in and wave a magic wand and make this all happen. It’s still going to take an enormous effort from the grassroots, the passionate people that are trying to make a change. This is how it has happened historically, we’ve taught the leaders how to lead on these types of issues, whether that’s been the abolition of slavery, the suffragettes getting women the vote, decriminalizing inter-racial marriage. These things have only come about because of small groups of passionate individuals who keep making their voices heard until eventually, the system changes.

I think more than ever the election results, for the people that really care about the environment and climate issues, is a galvanising moment to say, ‘Look, we’ve actually got to work even harder, come together, even more, collaborate where we might have operated differently and independently before, and make our voice even louder’.

What comes next?

When we first began, we did eight months of research where I spoke to about 50 different scientists and academics and economists from around the world to get an idea of what we could do, what the psychology was, what solutions existed. And Dr. Renee Lertzman really changed and motivated me to tell a solutions-focused story because that is really important. She is really big on saying, ‘You know, we need to all own this problem we are in and make sure people are emotional about it and are able to convey their feelings and not deny what is going on.’ But at the same time we need to also restore that other part of the balance which is to say there are other things that we can do and let’s start motivating people with goals of what we can achieve.

We have a website: Whatsyour2040.com where you can go on and create your own climate plan. You fill out some questions about what your interest are, what kind of person you are and it will give you several things that you can get on with right now on your own, in your community, or at school. We’ve teamed up with more the 50 international organisations and there are options from helping to launch the first seaweed platform of the coast of Tasmania, helping farmers by paying them to put carbon back in the soil, or mentoring online if that’s what you want to do. For teachers, there are 35 free lesson plans for grade five-to-10. So there are a number of opportunities to really step up and join the regeneration effort.

This weekend, May 25th and 26th, at Palace Cinemas across Australia, school-aged children attending with an adult (1:1) can get gain free-entry to watch 2040.

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emlydunstan · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

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alexdmorgan30 · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

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pitz182 · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

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