Jonomancer

[accordion-druid]

Anyway I had a really productive talk with my therapist on Friday about what starts my doom-spiralling and what helps me break out of my doom-spiralling. I want to put it in writing, in case I really need it over the next few days.

We figured out two really useful things: One is about how I typically get into a doom-spiral, so I can try to avoid that, and the other is about how I can more reliably get out of it.

The doom spiral starts with consuming news, obviously. But more specifically it starts when I'm working really hard. I'll be in a headspace of: "got a ton of deadlines this week, need to focus on work to the exclusion of all else, so i'm not gonna let myself do anything fun this week". But then i need a distraction and some part of my brain goes "reading news, that's NOT fun, so it's OK to do now". This is very silly: reading news is just as much not-work as taking a walk in the park, playing a song, or watching a cartoon. But somehow reading news feels less like "not-work".

The combination of "reading news" with "no fun" (with "staying up late trying to get work done") tends to be what triggers a doom spiral that lasts a couple of days.

So step 1 is avoid news, duh. But I think even better is trying to train myself to, if I really need a break from work, to step AWAY from the computer and practice accordion or paint something or sweep the pinecones off the back deck. Anything but reading news.

The second thing is what tends to snap me out of the doom spiral.

This sounds dumb, but: playing a video game. Preferably a really hard one: the object is not to relax or distract myself but rather to occupy my whole brain temporarily. That's the crux of it. Taking a walk in the woods or playing with my child is relaxing and distracting but it doesn't occupy my whole brain. I am capable of continuing to run doomsday scenarios in part of my brain while I'm taking a walk or while I'm at the playground with my kid. My therapist identified correctly that I'm someone who needs a lot of constant brain stimulation or I freak out. The good thing about video games is that by forcing me to focus my whole brain on a solvable problem that's right in front of me, it helps me get back the feeling of having agency which is sorely lacking during a doom spiral.

After the therapeutic video game session: reading about history. I've noticed that reading history has frequently gotten me out of the doom spiral, because it gives me a different kind of perspective. It de-emphasizes the present insolvable problem in favor of thinking about problems that have already "wow things were even worse in the past and we not only survived but built a better world"

After the history book: find somebody I know and help them with an individual-human-scale problem. Something where I can take that feeling of agency and apply it to something that is within my power to affect and that pertains to an individual concrete human right in front of me, instead of millions of theoretical strangers.

[accordion-druid]

I can't even count how many sleepless nights I've spent envisioning election 2022. Ever since the end of election 2020, I've seen election 2022 as the inevitable next step in the inevitable fascist takeover. Thinking about it sends me into a downward depression spiral. I become unable to function; I lie awake all night for multiple nights in a row feeling nauseous and shivering in terror. It's a spiral because the worse I feel about the news, the more compelled I feel to keep consuming more news, which makes me feel even worse; it's something about the stimulation of that information intake, something about the reward cycle of "we're doomed" confirmation bias feeding on itself.

The feeling of inevitability is so strong in my mind that it's like it's already happened, the world has already ended, and my life in the present is just like a dream or a memory or a fictional story; ghostly and unreal, making it impossible to care about anything. I wonder if I'll feel even worse after tonight's election results, or if I've already been through so much dread and mourning that there's not anything else to feel.

(Part of the problem is that I don't really have an outlet to talk about this stuff with: In front of my child I'm always pretending everything is fine, at work I'm trying to project optimism for my team, while staying professionally apolitical; and at hobby meetups I don't wanna ruin everybody's mood by bringing up doomsday prepping. My spouse can tell when I'm thinking about doom, but I don't want to tell her the details of what I'm thinking because it freaks her out. Tumblr could be an outlet for it? That's what I'm trying now, anyway.)

When I'm in doom-spiral mode it becomes sort of impossible to care about my own actual literal real life. Sometimes people will try to cheer me up by like asking "How will this affect you personally?" (sometimes with a subtext of "you're a rich white cis guy, you will be fine"). This does not make me feel better, it makes me feel guilty. (More importantly I have a lot of friends who are trans, poor, jewish, various combinations, who will not be fine.)

Or, people try to cheer me up by saying like "you can't do anything about it so why make yourself sick worrying about stuff you can't affect?". Which, yeah, is reasonable. But I also think that people caring only about their own selfish interests is exactly why the world is in such a sorry state; and if i can't do anything about it, what good am I?

The thing is, I don't primarily experience politics through the lens of how it will affect me personally. I experience it through how it makes the world worse for millions of vulnerable people. This is why I feel just as bad about authoritarians coming to power, and about their crimes against humanity, whether it's happening in China, Russia, Brazil, India, Italy… wherever.

Most people have a built-in cognitive bias where they care more about one individual they're close to than they care about a million people on the other side of the world. But logically, I should care a million times more about the million people than I do about myself. Over many years I have sort of tried to eliminate that cognitive bias from myself so i can think objectively; my reward is being paralyzed with horror and unable to function. Maybe that cognitive bias is there for good reason, and I removed a load-bearing support from my brain. My own personal life is pretty good, but feels completely irrelevant in scale. I'm like "Who cares what happens to That Guy?" (gesturing at myself).

The only times I feel good and can function is when I put geopolitics out of my head and focus on my life: what I can do for my job, my family, my hobbies etc. This makes me feel guilty, too: focusing on my own personal life feels like a form of escapism. It feels fictional: Completely insubstantial compared to the reality of the fascist republican takeover and related global breakdown. But also, as mentally healthy people keep trying to explain to me, focusing on my own life is literally all I can do; I'm just a person, I can't singlehandedly save the world no matter how much I feel morally obligated to do the literally impossible.

There are good days, days where I refocus on my own life, drag myself out of depression, and do things that make me feel accomplished. The question is how to reliably generate this, how to get from doom-spiral mode back into caring-about-my-life mode. In doom-spiral mode it's hard to get past "cleaning the living room floor won't fix the world so it's pointless". But logically, me being a wreck curled up on the floor in the fetal position doesn't help anybody; in a choice between the world being doomed and me being miserable, and the world being doomed and me being if-not-happy-at-least-functional, then functional is preferable. Even if it does give me survivor's guilt. Besides, I'm gonna need all the mental health i can muster if i need to like get my family out of the country in a hurry during the 2nd trump administration.

[accordion-druid]

Here we go, it's the day I've been dreading for the last 2 years: the day republicans will most likely retake congress and, more importantly, put enough Qanon supporters / election deniers / trump cultists into state election infrastructure to fatally undermine the fairness of elections from here on out, ushering in permanent Republican minority rule; future historians will probably look at 2014 as the beginning of the end, and 2022 as the last gasp of democracy in America.

Just to put a falsifiable prediction out there: My under/over is that republicans gain 3 senate seats and 25 house seats, and that 10 state election infrastructures are fucked up by cultists. I hope I'm wrong!

My therapist says I need to practice giving the "hopeful scenario" part of my brain as much exercise as the "doom scenario" part of my brain, so... I guess there does exist a mathematical chance that the polls are as wrong as they were for the abortion amendment in Kansas, that there's a lot of people under the polling radar motivated by the end of Roe v Wade to come out, and that we hold the Senate. And I suppose there's a chance that the various criminal investigations into Trump actually cause him to face a consequence for his actions for the first time in his life, which could fatally split the Republican Party before 2024. I guess that's the hope.

Anyway after I post this I'm going to block Tumblr and news sites for the next few days and try to focus on living my own life, as much as I can. At least I won't be bombarded with texts and emails begging for donations 24/7 after today.

[yamino]

[yamino]

Have another fake preview…

[yamino]

You guys are just encouraging me with these notes. 👀

[yamino]

I promised Twitter that if my tweet about this gets 300 retweets I’ll post another fake page. 👀

[yamino]

[accordion-druid]

Was struggling to stay awake during a meeting with my CEO today because I barely slept last night because I was having too many feels about my gay pirate blorbos

[accordion-druid]

In 2020 I created an original Lego model of the entire Kingdom of Hyrule from Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In this video I give you a tour. Please enjoy.

[accordion-druid]

I used to be pro-life.

Back when I was, like, 10-12 years old, and I thought being pro-life was the position that was obviously philosophically consistent with pacifism, vegetarianism, and being against the death penalty: i.e. don't kill or inflict suffering on any living thing. Being innocent of the adult world, I thought "just don't have sex unless you're ready to have a kid" was a reasonable rule for everyone to follow. Simple!

Later I learned that:

Humans are gonna have sex regardless; telling them to stop is never gonna work.

The only thing that reduces the number of abortions in practice is to make sex ed and contraception universally available.

Contraception sometimes fails.

Rape is -- horrifyingly -- way more prevalent than I thought. (Along with situations that are maybe-not-exactly-legally-rape-but-not-exactly-chosen-out-of-complete-freedom-either.)

And most importantly I realized that: When you ban something, it doesn't just go away. When you ban something, you are authorizing the government to use deadly force to arrest and imprison people. Innocent people are wrongly convicted (or tricked into plea-bargaining) and deprived of their freedom. People who have served their time remain unemployable for life with a conviction on their record. The government's excuses to surveil, harass, and intimidate everyone increases.

Lots of things might be "bad" -- drugs, prosititution, gambling, going unvaccinated during a pandemic -- but the harm caused by the government imprisoning people for the thing is worse than the harm caused by the thing. And it doesn't even work! Prohibition didn't eliminate alcohol, the drug war didn't eliminate drugs, banning prostitution didn't eliminate that.

So the foundation of my political philosophy is that even if you think something is bad, you usually don't want the government arresting people for it. The threshold for getting the government involved should be very, very high. Lots of bad things are beneath that threshold.

In particular, the evidence of history shows that banning abortion doesn't get rid of abortion; it only gets rid of safe, sanitary, legal abortion. What happens instead is unsafe, unsanitary back-alley abortion. The political coalition pushing to ban abortion does not seem particularly concerned with this fact, even though they understand the identical logic that banning guns doesn't actually remove guns from the streets (if not literally the same people, they're at least allies with those who understand that).

In fact, strangely enough, the political coalition pushing to ban abortion is the same political coalition that doesn't want sex ed and contraception to be universally available. Even though those are the things that reduce the rate of abortion. From this I can only deduce that (…how do I put this politely…) reducing the number of abortions that take place is not their main goal.

Later, my spouse and I started trying to have a baby, and I learned two more facts:

Miscarriages are incredibly common. Way more common than you might think, since they're largely taboo to talk about. While not directly relevant to the legal question, learning this fact does change the way you think about pregnancy: to know that even couples who want a baby sometimes have go through 2 or 3 miscarriages before succeeding. If you believe in God puts a soul in a zygote at the moment of conception, you have to confront the fact that God kills half of them before they're born. God himself is the world's biggest abortionist. If you believe fetuses have human rights, you must confront the fact that the womb has always been a killing field, even without human intervention.

Pregnancy is incredibly hard on the body, childbirth even more so. Humans are not an animal that can gestate young and give birth casually. It's not an "inconvenience", it's a life-threatening and crippling condition for 9 months followed by an excruciating trauma that not everyone will survive.

If you've been through that, or seen somebody you love go through that, it changes how you think about it. It's not an abstract philosophical issue. You start to understand why some have always been willing to take the risk of the dangerous back-alley abortion. It made me feel viscerally that if anyone's going to embark on something this taxing to their body, there has to be a cancel button. There has to be an escape hatch.

If you think abortion should only be legal in the case of a life-threatening condition, well, pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. If you believe that it's sometimes regretably necessary to kill in self-defense, well, sometimes abortion is self-defense.

I don't know if this will change anybody else's mind, but this is what changed mine.

[uncleromeo]

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

[binghsien]

lrb i am increasingly just telling people who profess to having no internal sense of gender and never had had one and find the idea of having one kinda alienating “you’re agender.”

technically what i should be saying is “you might be agender, maybe explore that?” but there are like a billion cis people and a million trans people telling them “if you don’t care about your gender at all that means you’re cis” which it absolutely does not so i feel the need to be a counter-weight.

if you are one of those billion cis people or million trans people: please stop saying that “not caring about your gender means you’re cis.” particularly when someone says “but i’ve never really had a sense of gender.”

not having an internal sense of gender does not mean that you are cis. it has never meant that you are cis! cis people care a lot about their gender! not caring about your gender means (very likely) that you are agender.

you don’t have to do anything with that information. it doesn’t compel you to start using specific pronouns or identifying in specific ways or joining specific support groups or communities. what it means is those things are there if you need them. what it means is you’re more like us than you are like them.

[accordion-druid]

I've never had an internal sense of gender and I don't even know what that would feel like. I'm basically "gender is fake". So this might be me? IDK

[accordion-druid]

I read some Trans Disk Horse that really annoyed me so I wanted to say:

I actually don't care whether you were "really always a [gender] on the inside" or whether your experience was your sense of gender changing. I don't care whether you felt dysphoria and transitioning was the way to treat it, or whether you just like being [gender] better.

People have different internal experiences and personal narratives and I might not understand all of them, but I can give people basic respect regardless. Because my support for trans people is not based on them being born a certain way, or experiencing dysphoria, or on scientific evidence supporting "brain sex different from body sex" theory. My support for trans people is unconditional because it is based on the bedrock of

personal bodily autonomy

namely: whatever you do with your own body, that isn't hurting other people, is your business!

We have a thing where "they can't help it, they were born that way" is part of the narrative framework that seemed to be most successful in arguing for LGBT+ rights. I remember arguing with my mom in the early 2000s, who thought that gay people shouldn't have equality because "being gay is a choice". And not coincidentally, "born that way" is also the narrative framework most likely to get health insurance to pay for transition. (No shame in doing whatever you gotta do to get health insurance to pay for your transition!) But in a just world, the test wouldn't be "is it a choice or were they born this way" the test would be "is this hurting anybody?" if not then it's none of your business, because

personal bodily autonomy!

Thought experiment: In a future where advances in medical tech made it easy to switch your physical sex (that would be awesome), if some people decided to switch back and forth twice a week just for kicks, would you support their right to do that? I would! Because personal bodily autonomy!

[accordion-druid]

Yesterday I learned how to read guitar tabs, even though I don't play guitar, in order to figure out how to convert them to normal sheet music. This is because normal sheet music notation for the Stairway solo apparently doesn't exist on the internet (Grandma's published sheet music skips the solo) but I found a guitar tabs version on YouTube, so I did the math, typed it into MuseScore and now I can print it out and learn it on accordion.

(given this solo's legendary status I was expecting it to be... hard? But it's just some eighth-note noodling on an A-minor pentatonic scale over a 3-chord vamp with the occasional bendy note! It's a good solo but I've played video game music that's way trickier)

[accordion-druid]

I have the day off because my company started making Juneteenth a company holiday since 2020. One hand: good! The end of slavery is something that should absolutely be celebrated! But on the other hand, it feels very performative. Like "We are supporting the Black struggle for liberation by letting ourselves (a company with zero back people in it) take a day off". It's a little... :-/. Hiring more black people (more than zero) would do more concrete good than any amount of symbolic stuff.

[accordion-druid]

We should start calling robots that don't turn into anything "cis-formers"

CISFORMERRRRS!

EXACTLY WHAT MEETS THE EYE!!

[probablyasocialecologist]

The crypto market is spectacularly collapsing

Many major cryptocurrencies have fallen by up to a quarter of their value over the past day

Crypto crash: Bitcoin falls below $24k and ether tumbles

Cryptocurrencies descended further into the red today as bitcoin crashed below $24,000 to its lowest level since December 2020.

Crypto lender Celsius halts withdrawals due to ‘extreme market conditions’

Transfers also ‘paused’ between Celsius accounts as value of digital asset market slips below $1tn

Binance ‘pauses’ Bitcoin withdrawals amid market collapse

Markets in chaos as Bitcoin falls to its lowest level since December 2020

[ms-demeanor]

June 13th 2022

[accordion-druid]

[accordion-druid]

We were going through my late grandmother's things and planning the memorial service, and my aunt was urging me to choose something of grandma's to keep, and I didn't really want anything until we got to grandma's box of sheet music, which she used to practice on her piano all the time.

My aunt handed me a piece of sheet music and said "This was her favorite! You should keep it" and we agreed it would be very meaningful if I learned to play my grandmother's favorite song from her own sheet music and then performed it at her memorial service.

two things:

I play the accordion

the song is Stairway to Heaven

so it sounds like a joke but I'm learning Stairway to Heaven on the accordion for my dead grandma.

I just spent most of the evening practicing it. I'm not a big Zep fan and I've always thought Stairway was overrated ("best rock song of all time"? pffft it's not even the best song on that album) but overrated doesn't mean bad.

I'm getting more appreciation for it now that I'm playing it: the haunting intro melody is nicely baroque (if you played it on a harpsichord in between some Bach pieces it would not stick out) there are some really nice chord changes (that Dsus4! I love suspended chords!) and the post-solo hard rock part is really good.

The problem remains that it has way too many verses of interchangeable pseudo-deep lyrics with little musical development before you get to the solo. I heard that even the singer of Led Zeppelin had a really hard time remembering what order the lyrics were supposed to go in. Had to have somebody standing off stage holding cue cards to remind him what comes after "a bustle in your hedgerow"

anyway I gotta learn the solo next. it's not printed in Grandma's sheet music, but YouTube has thousands of Very Serious Guitar Guys with beards and glasses promising to teach you the Stairway solo CORRECTLY with a vaguely threatening subtext that you better not mess up this sacred piece of rock history... so I'll be fine

[ladyshinga]

[ladyshinga]

[zoobus]

Well guess what

[accordion-druid]

Reblogging for that amazing art. Click through and read it! The art is so good! It works weirdly well as a manga!

Reading it is reminding me that once upon a time, my very Christian friend was very surprised to find out that I, an avowed atheist, liked the Chronicles of Narnia

And I do! (Well I love 6 out of 7 of them, guess which one I hate)

because 1. I am capable of enjoying works even if I don't agree with the author about everything, and

2. C.S. Lewis was far too strange, unique, and thoughtful of a person to write straight-up propaganda. Even when he TRIED to write propaganda, his weird personality shone through and he created interesting stories that could be enjoyed by non-Christians as well

[star-trek-dumb-comics]

Lost DS9 season 8 episode plot : Quark becomes a rainbow capitalist

[star-trek-dumb-comics]

Y’all 😔