inquisitivefeminist asked: The fandom is divided between people who think you are an Evil Manipulative Slut and your Intense Stans, who write a bunch of meta about what a complex character you are and complain about how People Undervalue You Becaue Transphobia. There are long forum threads about Is Ozy A Good Person and most of the arguments lack nuance ("Ozy is evil because sex!" "No Ozy is a perfect oppressed angel!") Also there's a lot of Discourse about whether it's okay for straight girls to say they're gay for you.
ozymandias271:
I would like to establish firmly that it is okay for straight girls to say they’re gay for me
it is also okay for straight guys to say they’re gay for me
whatever gender you are wanting to fuck me is gay
I tried reverse engineering my gender by using the test “which genders would be gay for me and which wouldn’t” but it didn’t work because my processes threw a bunch of errors at guys because neither straight nor gay for me is an acceptable option for most.
All non-guy genders are gay for me.
Straight or bi guys who are incredibly pretty and somehow still “guys” for some inexplicable reason are gay for me too if they are okay with their gender being kind-of-invalidated (hey, it has to be either them or me and I’m the one who had to fight the state for mine so gimme some slack okay) and reclassified as “a pretty” instead of “a guy”.
Guys who aren’t able or willing to have themselves regendered as instances of the gender “pretty” for such purposes should just be asexual for me.
3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #my gender is apparently pretty · 44 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
If I was a fictional character, how would the fandom misinterpret me?
gothiccharmschool:
Okay, THIS is a brilliant question.
(via multiheaded1793)
3 months ago · tagged #ask meme · 90,643 notes · source: astrifurous · .permalink
‘laziness’
endecision:
theunitofcaring:
I’m a lazy person.
What I mean by this is that I do not do my homework; I miss deadlines at work because I’d rather play games than do the work; I have projects I’m excited about but instead of starting them I scroll aimlessly through tumblr. I have occasionally failed to turn in important assignments because I didn’t do them because I didn’t feel like it.
My whole life I’ve thought of this like a personality trait. I can’t do things unless they’re interesting because I’m lazy. I tend to get in trouble with jobs and at school because I’m lazy. I hated the personality trait, I wanted to change it, I aspired rather desperately to be a hard-working person and caused myself a great deal of pain trying to imitate one, but I was still thinking of it as some sort of fundamental tendency, some sort of fact about me.
Keep reading
This post reminds me of how, from the inside, sleep paralysis feels exactly like “I’m too lazy to move and I could if I tried harder”. And then I wake up and it’s like, no, I was literally paralyzed.
Yes. So much to both of these. I call the general insight behind it “clockwork people”; instead of magical free-will machines people are essentially deterministic patterns that are only able to respond in certain ways. Thus, it’s useless to assign blame and praise for the fictions of vice and virtue and things are simply about understanding and using the patterns to achieve the desired outcomes. I may still get emotionally-angry at something and have a low-level desire to assign blame but that’s just another manifestation of the same pattern and nothing more. It results in a weird mix of tranquility and frustration at the understanding that one’s options in any situation are limited and even the options one can select from those are limited by the same things, and thus it’s kind-of-like-okay to achieve suboptimal outcomes as a result but simultaneously it’s like “imagine if you could somehow unlock ‘free will’ for yourself; it would be like an IRL godmode or at least noclip and the only thing that’s keeping such superhuman powers out of reach are just the bounds of flesh and bone and the laws governing neurons and it’s so close but so far away”.
Then there’s the unending hunger for agency, the things that bring one closer to this impossible dream and there’s something quite exquisite in the pain of loss when one knows that something that does it is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because it has exponentially increasing downsides or limited use in any specific amount of time and thus the powers are right there, and one can taste the apotheosis every now and then but most of the time it’s just that much out of reach.
TL;DR: “We’re all puppets, but I can see the strings.”
(Then Doctor Manhattan was promptly ruined by something trivially ridiculous because Moore isn’t intelligent enough to consistently and credibly model someone on that level. Intelligence, upwards and outwards of oneself seems like a pretty hard limit, and trying to pass as that from below/beside may seem believable to ones on one’s own, but is transparently cargo-cultish to ones on the other level. In fact, exactly like awareness of sleep paralysis functions. There are no coincidences.)
3 months ago · tagged #drugs cw #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #clockwork people · 491 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
socialjusticemunchkin:
multiheaded1793:
an-animal-imagined-by-poe:
Can anyone explain to me why all the candidates (on both sides) are so obsessed with preserving American manufacturing jobs? Even if that ship hadn’t sailed decades ago (there’s only so much one can do to reverse globalization and technological progress), factory work is dangerous and soul-crushing and has all kinds of environmental effects. I’m not saying I have a better solution here (except probably service sector growth is going to be key), but I can’t believe this is the thing we want to preserve.
Increased redistribution is obviously important. And that’s step one. But I don’t think it’s a complete solution - there’s always going to be a significant subset of the population who derive a lot of self-worth from supporting themselves and their families. But the fact that the economy is shifting drastically should be an opportunity to create ways to do that that don’t suck.
Workerist ideology is a thing. And it ain’t unfounded or completely deluded.
The thing is, manufacturing workers had, in the glory days of the labour movement, won certain (cultural, identity) etc things that most service industries’ workers had never conquered because of their relatively weaker bargaining positions and greater coordination difficulties.
People want dignity. People want pride. People want to feel like they have a position of power, that they are not easily crushed. The real solution would be for the service sector to advance, to become less associated with humiliation and disrespect, of course - but you really, really can’t blame people for the cultural nostalgia. Most everyone who’s been poor and humiliated can understand the allure.
Russia never had independent unions, but heavy manufacturing industry workers also had power, importance and the same kind of class pride here, a sense of social stability and respect that is the opposite of “class mobility” ideology. And it was a good deal for them. Something everyone ought to have.
The dignity of the working class is important. It makes for a stark difference in individual and community well-being. Most liberals and libertarians seemingly cannot understand this. Reactionary/nostalgic socialist idealization of the 20th century is not the answer, but it’s important to retake that ground - for everyone this time, not just the chosen (and white, male etc) labor aristocrat elite.
Right now, nobody really seems to alieve in the dignity of service work. That is a major fucking problem. It’s why Uber doesn’t even bother to inform customers that drivers are deactivated at 4,6. Service work is normalized as a position of utter powerlessness.
The service industry lacks dignity because people perceive their situations accurately. They’re pawns of a system they can’t win in, forced to alienate their labour in exchange for survival on others’ terms, their livelihoods subject to decisions far away by political powers and corporate towers. They have no alternative, no power to bargain with, and their chance to tell bad customers to fuck off is determined by the whims of their employers, many of whom are quite whimsical indeed.
Now if there only was something that could prove to these people, in pure material terms instead of political gestures we all know to be vacuous and filled with the same stuff as the silently despairing servicariat’s souls, that yes, you deserve to exist independent of the surplus value someone else can extract from you; that you are more than an inconveniently embodied and thus materially needy servitude to someone more lucky; that you may negotiate your own terms and genuinely reject work which you do not consent to; that it’s your inalienable birthright as a human being to be entitled to a livelihood.
In other news, what’s basically the finnish grey tribe caucus is publishing a draft proposal which basically summarizes as “We could totally afford to give people an unconditional $1000 a month, look upon our calculations ye mighty and despair!” while the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party is pushing for something like $1200 (the details tend to be more vague but the spirit is the same).
Yes, this is so. And yes, basic income in even one country would be great…
…but I frankly don’t believe in it succeeding now. Seems way, way too good to be true. I don’t know why, but it just breaks disbelief.
I feel like someone at the top, at least someone invested in the current state of the service sector, is going to catch on that this spells outright social revolution, and do their best to crush it.
That’s what they said about the 8-hour day. That’s what they said about ending the war on drugs. That’s what they said about every substantial reform ever. Is it guaranteed to happen? Hell no. Is it reasonable that it nonetheless might have a decent chance at succeeding somewhere and catching on, given its inherent advantages and the current momentum it’s enjoying? Yes.
3 months ago · 55 notes · source: an-animal-imagined-by-poe · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
an-animal-imagined-by-poe:
Can anyone explain to me why all the candidates (on both sides) are so obsessed with preserving American manufacturing jobs? Even if that ship hadn’t sailed decades ago (there’s only so much one can do to reverse globalization and technological progress), factory work is dangerous and soul-crushing and has all kinds of environmental effects. I’m not saying I have a better solution here (except probably service sector growth is going to be key), but I can’t believe this is the thing we want to preserve.
Increased redistribution is obviously important. And that’s step one. But I don’t think it’s a complete solution - there’s always going to be a significant subset of the population who derive a lot of self-worth from supporting themselves and their families. But the fact that the economy is shifting drastically should be an opportunity to create ways to do that that don’t suck.
Workerist ideology is a thing. And it ain’t unfounded or completely deluded.
The thing is, manufacturing workers had, in the glory days of the labour movement, won certain (cultural, identity) etc things that most service industries’ workers had never conquered because of their relatively weaker bargaining positions and greater coordination difficulties.
People want dignity. People want pride. People want to feel like they have a position of power, that they are not easily crushed. The real solution would be for the service sector to advance, to become less associated with humiliation and disrespect, of course - but you really, really can’t blame people for the cultural nostalgia. Most everyone who’s been poor and humiliated can understand the allure.
Russia never had independent unions, but heavy manufacturing industry workers also had power, importance and the same kind of class pride here, a sense of social stability and respect that is the opposite of “class mobility” ideology. And it was a good deal for them. Something everyone ought to have.
The dignity of the working class is important. It makes for a stark difference in individual and community well-being. Most liberals and libertarians seemingly cannot understand this. Reactionary/nostalgic socialist idealization of the 20th century is not the answer, but it’s important to retake that ground - for everyone this time, not just the chosen (and white, male etc) labor aristocrat elite.
Right now, nobody really seems to alieve in the dignity of service work. That is a major fucking problem. It’s why Uber doesn’t even bother to inform customers that drivers are deactivated at 4,6. Service work is normalized as a position of utter powerlessness.
The service industry lacks dignity because people perceive their situations accurately. They’re pawns of a system they can’t win in, forced to alienate their labour in exchange for survival on others’ terms, their livelihoods subject to decisions far away by political powers and corporate towers. They have no alternative, no power to bargain with, and their chance to tell bad customers to fuck off is determined by the whims of their employers, many of whom are quite whimsical indeed.
Now if there only was something that could prove to these people, in pure material terms instead of political gestures we all know to be vacuous and filled with the same stuff as the silently despairing servicariat’s souls, that yes, you deserve to exist independent of the surplus value someone else can extract from you; that you are more than an inconveniently embodied and thus materially needy servitude to someone more lucky; that you may negotiate your own terms and genuinely reject work which you do not consent to; that it’s your inalienable birthright as a human being to be entitled to a livelihood.
In other news, what’s basically the finnish grey tribe caucus is publishing a draft proposal which basically summarizes as “We could totally afford to give people an unconditional $1000 a month, look upon our calculations ye mighty and despair!” while the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party is pushing for something like $1200 (the details tend to be more vague but the spirit is the same).
3 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 55 notes · source: an-animal-imagined-by-poe · .permalink
theunitofcaring:
so there’s this article arguing that feminists ought to focus some energy and effort on interventions in developing countries, as small allocations of resources can do a lot to improve the lives of women (and fight gender inequality) there, and that it’s a shortcoming of current feminist praxis that those problems are neglected in favor of attention-grabbing but much less tractable ones that mostly affect wealthy women.
the first response:
The author does not seem to understand the point of feminism. The reason that “tractable and important problems affecting poor women in poor countries” are not on the feminist agenda, is that they generally affect men to a similar degree. <…> Feminism is not simply about harm suffered by women, it about harm caused by an oppressive relationship of men to women. So feminists don’t protest against earthquakes, which kill thousands of women every year, because there is nothing gender-specific in an earthquake. Pornography, on the other hand, is very strongly gender-specific: most of it depicts women, in a way that feminists consider to be a harm, and it is largely made by men, for the benefit of men
The response is some of the deepest bullshit I’ve seen in quite some time. Even working from the assumption that feminism means reducing inequality instead of harm, material improvement in poor people’s situations tends to be really good at resulting in such effects. Also, #notmyfeminism on the pornography argument; it’s nowhere near that simple, especially when access to porn seems to be pretty good in reducing many harms feminists care about.
Also, Paul sounds like a person who’s male with a quite high probability. A male person is using intersectionality to argue that feminists shouldn’t focus on people with a lot of intersecting oppressions and instead do all kinds of wrong-headed stuff that’s way less effective and focuses on women with fewer intersecting oppressions. That’s about as fractally wrong as one can get and I can’t even
(via sdhs-rationalist)
3 months ago · tagged #steel feminism #i don't even know which specific genre of bullshit this falls into · 130 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
pirozhok-s-kapustoj:
multiheaded1793:
obiternihili:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annegret_Kramp-Karrenbauer
this lady sounds made up to me
I tried to read that article but my eyes keep glazing over every single word. It’s like some kinda illuminati trick or something.
why?
I don’t know! It seems like… not information!
My guess would be that it’s a bullshit filter. It prevents one’s brain from wasting neurons by absorbing completely irrelevant “information” that is found on CVs etc. and apparently this wikipedia article is close enough to those that it activates there as well. Noticing it on myself as well.
3 months ago · 12 notes · source: obiternihili · .permalink
Character flaws
multiheaded1793:
nothingismoral:
bluesette:
isaacsapphire:
fierceawakening:
isaacsapphire:
So, does tumblr believe in character and character flaws? Because I get the impression that eg. “laziness” is called “executive dysfunction” and viewed as a disability, or there is always some disability that’s the reason why people don’t put effort into work/social stuff/school/working out/whatever and that it’s horribly unfair and wrong that you get fired or flunk or lose friends if you just sit on your butt and do nothing.
And, I understand that chronic pain and depression are real. I understand that some people have some legit reasons. But… I’ve known people who did game the system or con their loved ones into taking care of them when they were capable of taking care of themselves, just… why do work when you can play on the internet all day?
Most of the time the… malingers? They are from better off families who can afford to support them or hire lawyers to navigate the system. Not that I haven’t watched people quit jobs because it was too much work for no improvement over the dole… that sorta makes sense though.
I mean, OTOH, I don’t see anybody running around and saying it’s abelist to ascribe anger issues or most forms of “abusiveness” to character flaws rather than “poor thing can’t help it” causes.
You see that some with personality disorders and relationships though; people making excuses for abusers and saying it’s abelist and mean to cut them off.
I see this too, and I feel uncomfortable as all hell with it.
Because… From an understanding the person standpoint, it matters whether they’re a jerk or just having executive function trouble.
From an I need those reports standpoint, it doesn’t. From a hey if you want multiple partners and want me to feel cared for I NEED to know I’m someplace on your schedule, even if your schedule is a greatly haphazard thing, it doesn’t.
I feel like Tumblr starts in a good place when it says “failure is human; don’t shatter yourself over it.” But tumblr goes so far about that.
I get the vibe from Tumblr sometimes that if you’re not failing at anything and everything, you’re NT, and that means you’re an insufferable perfection-bot who isn’t actually human.
I find this inspiring, but a lot of people seem to find it horrifyingly harsh and it just makes them cry and be “triggered.” I’m not sure if the problem is me or them or what: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/
Tumblr ends up with a kind of “Oreo” like sense of “success is betrayal of the community” thing. Its not a bad thing to not struggle to feed yourself and clean up after ffs.
I don’t know, as someone who used to be very “lazy” and is now the polar opposite of that (I regularly get people asking me how I find the energy to work as much as I do), I have a lot of sympathy for people who can’t manage it. Tumblr attributes it to brain problems, but I’d frame it more in terms of bad life circumstances and opportunities.
I don’t buy into the idea of character flaws on a large scale - when you have a big group of people who all have the same problem, there’s something systemic going on. Notice that the vast majority of these people are in university. For me, working on a liberal arts degree with no clear job or life path at the end made me completely give up. I saw it in my classmates too.
I think it’s rare for people to want to do nothing all of the time. There are probably some people who genuinely enjoy it, but for the vast majority of people, doing nothing causes depression.
Once you start failing on the basics of running your life, it’s hard to claw your way back. You start finding ways to justify it - like calling it executive dysfunction
I don’t buy into Tumblr’s approach of “it’s your brain!!” since I think that leads people to avoid looking at their life on a material level and how it isn’t working. Calling it a disability encourages you to feel powerless to change it. But I also don’t think the bootstraps method works. You can only work really hard when you’re in a place where you have something worth working at.
Calling it a disability encourages you to feel powerless to change it.
I don’t know, calling it a disability can get you to finally stop feeling powerless to chance your “choices” (that somehow magically keep being some of the worst, most unpleasant choices for you despite presumably being able to change them at any point). The realization that there is a material reason you keep doing the same destructive thing over and over, as opposed to being the result of “free will” that you have long been seeing doesn’t work as advertised, can prompt you to look for external ways of changing your behavior instead of waiting for your Inner Spirit to shine through. But what’s more, such a realization can get you to stop blaming yourself and accepting that you deserve the pain you’re enduring right now due to being a consequence of your choices. That is a HUGE load off your shoulders that may have weighed you down far more than helped you act.
“It’s your brain”/”you are disabled” can turn an incomprehensible phenomenon seemingly both your fault and out of your control into a physiological phenomenon subject to clear laws.
You can only work really hard when you’re in a place where you have something worth working at.
“It’s your brain”/”you are disabled” can turn an incomprehensible phenomenon seemingly both your fault and out of your control into a physiological phenomenon subject to clear laws.
^ yes to both of this
^ seconding just because those two are really important and obscenely relevant. I’ve seen the change from “no long-term prospects” to “immediately actionable plans to a credibly better future” first-hand and it’s ridiculously huge; almost enough to make one seem like a completely different person.
3 months ago · tagged #it me #ableism cw #depression cw · 304 notes · source: isaacsapphire · .permalink
(via rusalkii)
3 months ago · 8 notes · source: dresdencodak.com · .permalink
sdhs-rationalist:
rusalkii:
lizardywizard:
I think I’ve managed to pin down my particular anxiety with eye contact to “I don’t know what looks natural, so if I try to make eye contact it’ll only look worse/creepier than avoiding it completely”.
Last night it came upon me that I shouldn’t just operate on this theory without checking if it’s true. So, people who actually do the eye contact thing/notice faces: which reads as worse to you, awkward eye contact (which might include staring for too long), or no eye contact at all?
I have the exact same problem. Anyone want to help us out?
From someone who notices faces: awkward. definitely awkward. If you’re really good at face watching, try to time your glances away so they match the other person’s saccades, b/c then eye contact seems seamless and normal.
Depends on the context, I would say. My default assumption with people I interact with might operate so that awkward signals “I’m trying to pass as neurotypical because it’s instrumental for my goals, and I haven’t perfected it YGM” while avoidance signals “I’m uncomfortable with the strange customs of this foreign species, please be aware of it and accommodate”.
Avoidance makes one less threatening if one has that kind of a problem (at least for me; my limbic system prefers people who are big and have testosterone-dominant endocrine systems to err on the side of avoidance and that’s blatantly unfair but until I get bodymods to equalize physical disparities my lizard brain is going to keep being a lizard brain) but otherwise I’d probably recommend that people favor awkward with people who don’t understand; especially if one has any confidence in their ability to learn the rules of natural-seeming eye contact consciously and thus become better at it over time.
Obviously, individual situation matters; if awkward is too stressful it would be perfectly rational to ration it only for the most important situations.
Then again, anything I say about social interaction should be taken with a 200-gram sodium chloride monocrystal because edge cases etc.
3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 8 notes · source: lizardywizard · .permalink