Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.
"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.
"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.
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Here’s the thing with people shipping Alastor, I could not care less about who people ship Alastor with or whether they ship him at all, what I do care about though is people making him allo.
This is one of the few cannon ace (possibly aro) characters out there and he can 100% be shipped in verity of ways without ignoring he is ace or aroace.
Make him aroace but still platonicly obsessed with Lucifer or Vox.
Make him sex repulsed or indifferent it doesn’t really matter (I could 100% see him having sex with someone for entertainment purposes just like I can see him being sex repulsed).
Even make him Demi/grey-ace if you must show him reciprocating sexual attraction.
Bonus points if he’s aro and you play around with platonic relationships/QPRs.
I know at the end of the day he is a fictional character and people will do what they want, but please listen to aro/ace fans when we ask you not completely ignore his sexuality when there are so many ways you can still play around with his characterization without disrespecting one of the few cannon ace characters to exist in TV.
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Wait. Hold on. I just finished my second watch of season two and I have a theory…
I think Aziraphale knew he fucked up before he ever got on that elevator.
HEAR ME OUT!
I think the moment that he heard that his big project would be the Second Coming, he instantly realized Crowley was right. As soon as the Metatron mentions the Second Coming, Aziraphale looks directly to Crowley with what I think is very-well-concealed panic. I don’t think that was a wistful gaze at what-might’ve-been. I think that was an instinctive entreaty for help from the person he trusts most in the world, followed by the immediate realization that he can’t ask for Crowley for help without letting the Metatron know something’s wrong.
Because Aziraphale KNOWS that the Second Coming is just a different flavor of Armageddon, it’s literally the rapture. There’s no planet where our boy has changed so much that he’d be willing to bring about the end of humanity, and the fact that he didn’t object to the idea instantly is important. To me, it means that Aziraphale must’ve made a split-second decision to play along. He didn’t have time to tell Crowley what was wrong, and even if he could’ve, he didn’t have enough information to put a stop to it.
Basically, I think that in the moments after the Metatron mentioned the Second Coming Aziraphale realized several things in quick succession
Crowley was right.
He and Crowley were going to have to save the world again.
If they were going to stop another apocalypse, they needed to know what they were up against.
The only way to know was to have a man on the inside.
There wasn’t time to tell Crowley any of it.
Now the question is, how does Aziraphale let Crowley know what’s going on?? Because he can’t stop Armageddon 2 (Electric Bugaloo) by himself.
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what i love about the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi of it all is that...it's not just that he's famous and therefore widely recognizable wherever he goes. like yes that is very funny because he was an exorcist before he became a famous actor, which means he CHOSE, on purpose, a day job that would make it harder to hide his double life/secret identity from the hordes of his adoring public, but it's more than that. it's not just that he's famous, it's that he's famous specifically for being an ACTOR, aka a person whose job it is to dissimulate, to make believe, to inhabit roles and emotions other than his own. like he decided he was going to become as visible as possible (which again was literally not necessary! he could have gone into any other career for his day job!!) but in such a way that everyone would see him but no one would see him - they would just see his various made-up personas, including the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi persona. i can't decide if he's a genius or if he just made so many absurd decisions that they canceled each other out and circled back around to working out. he's either playing 9-dimensional chess or he's eating the pieces. too soon to say.
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i KNOW i said i'd draw putt putt branch but i cant control the vibe and the vibe rn is feral clay
he vaguely remembers floyd. vaguely. he knows floyd was...there. at some point when his mind was whole. but he cant see where he'd be. a lot of his past memories were pushed away to make room for survival instinct, so his memories mostly consist of good ones with (Sp)Bruce and the night he left, the argument with JD mostly
floyd's kinda be pushed to the back of his mind, so its like meeting someone new. Clay smells death on him. Decay. But he stands and talks like a living creature.
Floyd confuses Clay. He calls him Pink. He'll remember his name eventually.
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