For Life - Tumblr Posts
Ultimately the debate over changing the minds of our oppressors with angry words versus kind words is meaningless because it rests on the assumption that people in power will be swayed by words at all. In reality, people who have power over you have limitless ways of tuning you out or reinterpreting your words to death. It’s often the case that they won’t actually hear you unless there are material consequences for not doing so.
Every single time I see a take that amounts to "if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X" I'm reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to "be orphans" escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.
And this girl's mom comes in, hears what we're playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it's because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.
First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.
Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says "pretend you're dead, and I have to -" Whatever it is. Some adult task she's assigned herself.
And it's just so transparently obvious that she's practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn't have to do scary hard things alone.
It's a natural coping mechanism. She's self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn't there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She's also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.
Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.
My daughter does not want me dead. And I don't want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.
Wonder how this pairs with people who have ADHD using sugar to self-medicate dopamine. Is it ‘sugar rush’ kicking in or is it dopamine production dropping back to ‘regular’ (aka not enough) levels? Correlation is not causation. But also, our minds are designed to find patterns even if it’s the *wrong* one.
i learned that sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. This myth is based on a single 1978 study; no subsequent study has shown a relationship (x)
i know hearing people on this website love to pass around those posts with links to free sign language lessons but you know you need to actually put effort into learning about Deaf culture, too, right?
Resources on the Affects of Porn
Why consuming porn is an escalating behavior
How porn affects sexual taste
How porn changes the brain
Porn is changing for the worst - and fast.
How porn fuels sex trafficking
How porn warps ideas about sex
Porn leads to violence
The “industry” is fucked
True accounts via ex-”performers” of the brutality
Isolation post-porn
Why women get into porn and how it’s not a free choice
Popular male performers are known to rape/abuse on screen
Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:
Replacing a HDD with an SSD
Adding RAM
Graphics cards if you're nasty
Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)
Customizing what runs on startup for your computer
Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:
Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin
adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading
Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too
Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:
Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.
Correcting disk utilization errors
Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:
Clearing cache and cookies on your browser
Restarting the computer
Changing your screen resolution
Uninstalling unused browser extensions
Things that do not actually make your computer faster:
Deleting files
Registry cleaners
Defragging your drive
Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.
This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.
“Nobody will love you unless you love yourself” (my fears whisper)
“Because when I love myself I will allow others the opportunity to love me too” (my courage consoles)
On of the less intuitive things about love, I've found, of any kind, is the importance of needing things.
I didn't realize it until recently, but I've always seen love as something requiring sacrifice, selflessness, patience, and generosity- to ask for nothing is to be the best person I can be, small and quiet and never in the way, always happy and helpful, self-sufficient and present when desired.
It's only as an adult, now, that I'm beginning to see the selfishness of wanting nothing.
I cut my friend's hair in my kitchen the other day. They wanted a trim and I had the skills, so I offered, and was genuinely excited when they stopped hesitating over "bothering me" and took me up on it. It was a peaceful afternoon, and we had tea and chatted for an hour or more.
My brother and I shared popcorn at the movies a while ago. When I came time to pay, I pulled my card out like a wild western sheriff and slapped it on the machine before he could fight me for it first. The satisfaction was delightful.
Someone called me crying on the phone the other day. Kept apologizing for disturbing me at work, talking about how they were bothering me on my lunch break. I was telling the truth when I told them that really, I was flattered and honored and relieved, knowing that if they were hurting I would know, that I didn't have to worry in silence. It felt good to hear them slowly come down, and to know that they knew it would be better soon, and to hear them laugh wetly on the other end. We're getting together for a visit next week.
It's hard to need things, if you've trained yourself not to. It's hard to want things, when you don't know how to want anymore. Trusting people is difficult, and so is relying on them, but I don't know where I'd be without the people who rely on me.
I've heard a lot of people say, "Nobody will love you unless you love yourself". I've had a lot of thoughts about it. It's not right, but it's not wrong, either, I think.
"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... I've always taken that to mean, "You will not be lovable until you develop a positive view of yourself as a person".
Now, I think it's sort of inside-out.
"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... because nobody can show their love to you in a way that you can accept until you treat yourself kindly, and learn what you need, and what you want, and how to ask for it, and then give that vulnerability away.
Love, for me, is someone I ask for a ride to the airport. Whether they end up doing this or not is irrelevant.
It's not needy, or selfish, or taking up energy. It's giving the gift of being wanted, and needed, and thought of. It's giving someone the security of being part of someone's life.
Thoughts that are mutual between cats and their people:
Yeah you're cute when you sleep but you didn't let me sleep either so I'm going to annoy you now because I'm bored. Hahah get poked, sleepy idiot.
How do you not comprehend this when I am literally staring at you. Like I understand that your brain can't understand things this nuanced but come on, how do you not get this.
I don't know if you know that what I am currently doing is an expression of affection, but that won't stop me. Knowing that I showed you that I love you is enough.
I heard a crinkly material and the sound of you chewing so I have to know what's in your mouth RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
I can't communicate with you and you can't communicate with me, so I'm just copying the tone of the sound you're making in hopes that you understand that I try.
You are doing activities beyond my comprehension, and I find this fascinating. I will never understand what the fuck you are trying to achieve here, but I am intrigued nonetheless.
Hey are you ok, you haven't done your weird thing in a while. Yeah I don't get why you do that but I know you do that when you're ok.
Me, flossing terribly: Are my teeth clean now? Am I flossing?
"adults trying to stay "hip" and keep up with youth culture and being years late is so cringey"
adult secret: its all intentional. nothing will prepare you for how fun it is to watch a teenagers face as you dab at them. i will floss when they least expect it and I will love every second of their horror.
"Don't just throw ripped jeans away, you can repair them using these 10 cute Visible Mending techniques!!" unfortunately my friend the first point of failure for every single pair of jeans i have owned in my life has been the Crotch and Ass. Knees: fine, cuffs: fine; but 3 years in, and all that stands between the world and my astronaut-patterned taint is 0.5µm of denim worn so thin that every squat threatens to tear it to shreds like wet toilet paper. If the Tiktok craft community could figure out a way to resurrect jeans afflicted in such a way that doesn't involve adding a whole ass buttpatch like some sort of inverse assless chaps situation then that'd be great
I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence
Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.
Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.
In response to Slate's article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.
You can see them trying out lifts in this video.
The rest is on Instagram here:
[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly. There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl. The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like: “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.” You live with this child, but you don’t know it. You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas. Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
/end id]
nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well
enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.
It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar
Tiffany couldn't quite work out how Miss Level got paid. Certainly the basket she carried filled up more than it emptied. They'd walk past a cottage and a woman would come scurrying out with a fresh-baked loaf or a jar of pickles, even though Miss Level hadn't stopped there. But they'd spend an hour somewhere else, stitching up the leg of a farmer who'd been careless with an axe, and get a cup of tea and a stale biscuit.
It didn't seem fair.
“Oh, it evens out,” said Miss Level, as they walked on through the woods.
“You do what you can. People give what they can, when they can. Old Slapwick there, with the leg, he's as mean as a cat, but there'll be a big cut of beef on my doorstep before the week's end, you can bet on it. His wife will see to it. And pretty soon people will be killing their pigs for the winter, and I'll get more brawn, ham, bacon and sausages turning up than a family could eat in a year.”
“You do? What do you do with all that food?”
“Store it,” said Miss Level.
“But you-”
“I store it in other people. It's amazing what you can store in other people.” Miss Level laughed at Tiffany's expression. “I mean, I take what I don't need round to those who don't have a pig, or who're going through a bad patch, or who don't have anyone to remember them.”
“But that means they'll owe you a favour!”
“Right! And so it just keeps on going round. It all works out.”
“I bet some people are too mean to pay-”
“Not pay,” said Miss Level, severely. “A witch never expects payment and never asks for it and just hopes she never needs to. But, sadly, you are right.”
“And then what happens?"
“What do you mean?”
“You stop helping them, do you?”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Level, genuinely shocked. “You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant. Everyone's poor round here. If I don't help them, who will?”
"A Hat full of Sky" - Terry Pratchett
One day, I'll have kids, and my kids are going to want to go on the internet. And this is what I'll tell them:
The internet is like Fairyland. It is a wondrous place, a place of many marvels and many opportunities.
It is also a dangerous place, with strange rules that often seem arbitrary — to navigate it, you have to learn its fairy-logic, and learn to speak its language.
It is a place of tests and trials — the folk can be cruel, pointlessly so, just because it amuses them. It's often not personal, even if it seems like it is. The worst are the Trolls, but they will lose power if you don't engage with them.
It is a place of illusion and lies. Everyone wears a mask, and not all the masked people are actually people. Don't believe everything you see or hear, for illusions are everywhere.
Time moves differently there. Entire days can go by, seemingly in an instant.
Do not accept anything you're offered, and be very careful to whom you tell your True Name.
I know it's no longer a novel observation how the entire internet is enshittified now but it's still shocking that so many of the things we depend on had such a sudden and marked decline in quality.
Google results are mostly ads. Facebook is 90% ads, 10% domestic terrorists. Twitter is... well, not Twitter and it's only good for Nazis to yell at each other in the hopes they make .0004 cents per tweet. Instagram is ads. TikTok is misinformation central. YouTube serves forty-seven ads per second of videos watched.
Every news article is behind a paywall, and some of them are just AI-text garbled from someone else's much better article, also behind a paywall.
AI art has made it impossible to find images you want. It's also exploded the use and potential use of misinformation. Your data is now being fed to generative AIs to make cheap slop that only makes information harder to find and source.
Everyone wants you using their app instead of a web browser so that you aren't allowed to block the 3,487 ads per page that have to load.
Amazon is full of fake or low-quality dupes of the things you actually want to buy. Netflix and other streaming services are raising prices, cutting available shows, and erasing the existence of shows in order to avoid paying writers. Art hosting sites such as DeviantArt allow your work to be scraped for NFTs and generative AI without your consent or any form of compensation. Spotify has demonetized over 80% of their tracks and pays the rest astoudingly low, worse than the other streaming services which also underpay.
Everything is a subscription service which means not only are you paying for the same product in perpetuity but you never technically own any tool you use and your right to use it can be revoked at any time. Everything has to be a "smart" product so when the business inevitably folds and/or the servers shut down, your product no longer works. Hope it's not something you need!
Every company no longer accepts phone calls but routes you through a series of automated messages until finally dumping you off to an overworked and underpaid person who has no power to help you. Speaking of phones, you can't use them for calls. There are so many robocallers and scams that no one in their right mind picks up the phone anymore. Texts are going the same way. No one wants to dig through 100 scam messages to find the one from the person they actually want to talk to.
It's all just the inevitable end result of capitalism. It doesn't have to be this way. But there needs to be regulation, and fast, or the "Dead Internet Theory" will no longer be a fringe theory.
BRO STAPHHHHH
During the Covid-19 pandemic, a Mexican actor secretly signed with Marvel Studios to play the role of Namor the Sub-Mariner. In Marvel’s comic book universe, Namor is the arrogant, ferocious ruler of the underwater kingdom Atlantis. He rises to the surface in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Tenoch Huerta for Inverse
Source