Acting NT

The Trender System: Two adults in a trenchcoat pretending to be a child They / them

[metapianycist]

i support the radical idea that the ICD and DSM don't determine what communities i belong to

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

Not to be a 90s kid on main, but lately I’ve been questioning how much of my “Nostalgia” for older things is actually just… recognizing how many older things were actually better in some fashion. 

In particular the fact that I recently started using an old Atari computer from the 80s as my main music-composing computer really got me thinking - since I have no nostalgia for this computer whatsoever. Yet it literally has superior MIDI tracking speeds in comparison to modern computers. 

So much discussion of Nostalgia basically focuses on media. And you might make an argument for like hand-drawn cartoons, or video games actually being a complete package rather than an incremental DLC pipeline. However it’s hard to say those things are like… actually “Better” since there is so much subjectivity. 

Going back to audio tech, it just blows my mind that we went from an era of a single machine with a large number of functions - and now we are in an era where every function is sold in it’s own $500 box. 

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

I still think a lot about your post about how using the CD-drive or DVD-drive of a computer, or waiting for something to load, changes the physical experience of computing in a way that reminds you of your body; whereas nowadays, everything is digital, nothing takes you out of the digital zone.

Plug-in headphones is another example of a perfectly excellent, multi-use technology which has somehow been superseded by something worse.

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

I still think that the current trend for websites to have infinite scrolling is actually one of the worst developments to come out of recent years - specifically when we consider the cognitive effects on the user. It is one of the most stark examples of a development intended to put the audience into a lull of endless content consumption - to maximize their time on your website without realizing that they are necessarily being manipulated into the fact. 

At least having to click “Next Page” has a small sliver of physical engagement to break up the flow and the potential to restore awareness toward your computing habits. However it’s hard to prove that inconvenience is actually “Good” for you, since it goes against the desired outcome of maximum user-interface desires within capitalism. 

[kubo]

when aang is happy: air nomad

when aang is in the avatar state: air verymad

[bl00dlagoon]

It’s so fucking infuriatingly frustrating that so many of ao3′s userbase is so adamant that ao3 is nonprofit even though it’s owned by a corporation so that shit is a fucking lie in of itself, like. They invest in stocks and constantly people try and push this stupid as fuck idea that there’s no ads!! :)) it’s free!! when it’s been in beta for literal fucking years with one of the worst filtration and blocking systems I’ve seen to date and rampant disgusting nsfw that’s unregulated and crops up to previews for themes anyways so why do we constantly have to have mile long posts defending such a fundamentally bad website from it’s core instead of actually thinking critically for once I fucking hate all of you.

[troyspace-deactivated20241010]

Normally I ignore this stuff, but the insinuation that AO3 is secretly some manipulative scheme to enrich people is just blatantly false.

so many of ao3′s userbase is so adamant that ao3 is nonprofit 

Yeah because it is. Look up the Organization for Transformative Works in the IRS database of tax exempt organizations, or GuideStar’s non-profit report listing. EIN 38-3765024, BRIDGE Number 5584273916.

Let’s check out their Form 990 and see how much they paid their staffers:

And it’s a whooping $0.00.

They invest in stocks

Oh heaven forbid. It’s pretty standard for any moderately-sized nonprofit to make conservative investments, so that their reserves do more than simply accrue interest in a bank account. Nobody is taking a vacation to Comoros on that money.

“Once nonprofits get larger, however, some are able to start thinking for the future. Taking money and putting it toward longer-term goals like capital spending or a permanent endowment requires prudent investment. In order to take initial seed money and grow it into a substantial nest egg for use toward those longer-term charitable purposes, nonprofits are allowed to invest in stocks, bonds, funds, and other typical investments.”

https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/can-a-nonprofit-organization-invest-in-stock.aspx

it’s owned by a corporation

Yes, AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which is indeed incorporated. Again, pretty standard for a charity. Let’s review the OTW’s Certificate of Incorporation:

it’s been in beta for literal fucking years

Finally… who cares? Gmail was in beta for five years, and that was with all the resources of Google behind it and 100 million people already using it.

“the label is just a way for Google to signal users that they’re still tweaking the e-mail service and adding new features”

Same thing for AO3. The reason AO3 is in beta is because it doesn’t have a finalized codebase and it’s too unstable to make an API out of. They could put out a post tomorrow saying ‘we’re out of beta’ and nobody would bat an eye. The website isn’t perfect, but it’s more than functional. And yes, there are a lot of features that can’t be added without overtaxing the existing hardware resources, so why not try a GreasyFork userscript?

tl;dr - I have to write this every year, but AO3 is still not a scam. It is a non-profit. None of the staffers even get paid. It exists solely for a charitable purpose, a purpose which has been acknowledged and validated by the Internal Revenue Service.

[ruffboi-mags]

Also like. The tagging/filtering system is so robust? There are a bunch of professional archives and databases who WISH they had a system like AO3.

[inkinhart]

rampant disgusting nsfw that’s unregulated

Way to bury the lede there, op. If you hate AO3 because they won’t implement the exact “regulations” that you think are acceptable, just. Say that. We all know that’s why you actually hate AO3, so why bother with any of the other nonsense?

[void-milf]

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

[void-milf]

the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity.  make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged.  and strike. attack.

[37womenwieldingknives]

YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that

[afraidofamericans]

This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data

[queeranarchism]

Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.

[anarchopuppy]

Ooh I know this one!

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

@afraidofamericans

[vethyourhalflingmother]

my biology professor has such a chaotic energy about him, last week i went to his office hours and somehow we ended up on the topic of gay marriage:

he said that when he lived in texas they changed the law to define marriage as “between a man and a woman in a house of religious worship with the intention to have children” so he filed his taxes as single and when they called him up like “you filed married last year” he was like “you changed the law, i was married by a judge in a courthouse and i have no intention of having kids” and they told him “you know who that law was for” and i guess he hung up on them and did not, in fact, pay taxes as a married man that year

[fromwolfsandgods]

Chaotic good

[swordshapedleaves]

NO! This is Lawful Good! He is following the LAW! Chaotic doesn't just mean cheeky!

[dragkingandreweldritch]

this is like how Sweden stopped classifying homosexuality as an illness because people started a campaign of calling in gay to work

malicious compliance is one of the best tools in the arsenal of civil rights activism

[mud-foot-deactivated20170823]

i made a guide for ppl

[psychiatricsurvivorpositivity]

For survivors of psychiatric violence:

Your trauma is real.  

I believe you.

You didn’t deserve to be abused.

You didn’t provoke it.

[madness-narrative]

“I’ll say it loud and I’ll say it clear. I am not mentally ill, never was, never have been, never will be. I am a survivor of abuse and I believe that I have had a perfectly natural human reaction to terrible experiences. And to frame my responses as illness, I think, is offensive. And I think we spend far too long talking about what’s going on in people’s brains, and not enough time talking about what’s happened in people’s lives.”

— Jacqui Dillon, The Personal is Political

[madness-narrative]

“The problem here is not with the fifth edition of the DSM, the problem is with the idea behind the DSM. The idea behind the DSM is that the old wine of human suffering (you can read read that w(h)ine with and without the h) can be poured into the new skin of medical technology. It’s a very interesting idea that we could take the suffering that we all experience, some of us more than others, and turn it into disease in the way we normally think of disease. The problem with it has been that it turns out that our minds are different in some way from our bodies. […] So again you have a wonderland quality about it where they are creating drugs for diseases that don’t really exist and guess what, they don’t really work very well. […] Psychiatry is a discipline that exists in perpetual crisis, which is really interesting if you think about it… […] It’s a bacterialogical model applied to the brain which is the most complex object in the universe…The idea that mental illness is just another medical problem, it has not been proved yet, this is really important to understand—psychiatry has yet to show that it’s understanding of mental illness as brain disorder works. […] There is not enough understanding of the power of a book like that. So what they have is a book that they don’t believe in that then becomes the basis of their authority. To me, that’s as cynical as it gets. […] The DSM is a response to the psychiatrists perception that everybody who objects to their profession is against them. We in the lay community call that paranoia. […] The definition of a disease that we all work with and that has caused all of this mischief in the DSM is that disease is a form of suffering that’s caused by a biochemical pathogen; the germ theory. We know that’s not really true.”

— Gary Greenberg, author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry at Powell’s Bookstore with Will Hall

[madness-narrative]

“As a person who has experienced involuntary commitments, seclusion, restraints, forced medication, and intentional humiliation as part of my “mental health” treatment, I am still working through the severe and persistent effects of force and coercion. Being in circumstances in which I had no voice and in which I was not treated as a human being with viable thoughts and legitimate feelings hurt something in me, damaged my ability to feel safe and made me compliant in relationships for fear of punishment.”

— Faith Rhyne, Trigger Warning: Why Is It So Hard to Think About Torture?

[madness-narrative]

“We are the ones who call for an absolute ban on forced psychiatry. We are the ones who say, it is torture if it happens without the person’s own free and fully informed consent – that force is not only whether they hold you down and inject you but also what the neuroleptic does to you inside your brain and mind, even if you took it in your hand and put in your own mouth because you knew what would happen if you didn’t.”

— Tina Minkowitz, We Name It as Torture

[warmshrine-deactivated20230929]

Me: *Is mentally ill* 

The mental health system: definitely what you need is some new and different abuse 

[psychiatricsurvivorpositivity]

“There’s no such thing as hurting someone for their own good. There’s only hurting someone for your own good.”

—

Kate Bornstein

When you deprive people of basic human rights, submit them to torture, and abuse, Don’t allow them to move about freely (detain them without trial for no crime), take away their dignity, their bodily integrity, their ability to remain in their homes, to connect with the people they love, to choose how they spend their days: when psychiatric “treatment” is coercive, it often results in trauma, and harm. There are non coercive, non violent, respectful, dignified, effective ways to help people dealing with extreme emotional states or altered states of consciousness. There is no such thing as being hurt for your own good.

(via dreamsandzines)

[curiitis]

mad *clap emoji* pride *clap emoji*

a list-rant

1. there is not enough discussion of the benefits, nay, the necessity of mad pride + criticism of a compulsory medical model of madness on social media

2. there is not enough discussion of the place of people who have/could be diagnosed with what the medical community calls eating disorders in mad pride + how to approach such experiences outside the medical model

3. there is not enough camaraderie + discourse between mad pride + disability pride + their combined power to eat away pillars of capitalism so that this motherfucker will burn to the ground faster than it already is

4. i’m sick of being told that my suffering is pathological because it is not a pathology to experience psychological, emotional, or mental suffering under capitalism. full stop. capitalism is unsustainable therefore it is not a sign of illness not to be able to sustainably function within it. full stop.

5. it blows my mind that people still need suffering +/or extreme psychic/emotional states to be validated by a medical doctor as something outside our control in order to cease shaming + discriminating against people who are suffering +/or experiencing extreme psychic/emotional states. people only let gay people be gay if it was considered an illness for a while, too. you still have to get a diagnosis for a trans person to get care. it’s insulting to think that something is only valid if you “can’t help it”. how about we don’t shame difference? WOW

6. BTW criticism of the medical model does not negate, erase, or criticize biological sources or influences on madness, nor does it negate or erase the autonomous choice to imbibe pharmaceuticals or other chemicals in order to ease suffering or struggle. it opens up space for autonomous choice + diversity of frameworks without shame.

7. the autonomy of mad people living mad lives is inherently anti-capitalist + a source of radical praxis

8. mad pride is not ~*~romanticizing mental illness~*~. mad pride with a diagnosis of an eating disorder is not ~*~pro-ana or pro-mia~*~. the fact that y’all are so terrified of crazy + suffering people finding value, worth, + beauty in their lived experience is terrifying. let people beautify their lives. let people take up their own space on social media. if you don’t like how they do it, don’t follow them.

9. the fact that we’re working so hard to convince people who suffer that they’re not suffering enough if they can find value + sources of pride in their existence + experiences unless those aspects of their existence or experiences are normative is damaging ablist bullshit

10. as a psychiatric survivor, i’m not talking out of my ass. i have a stake in this.

thanks 4 coming 2 my ted talk

[0ntheplusside]

[lisathewife101]

This is important

[audrey-hepbae]

If you put a fat girl who exercises next to a skinny girl who’s on meth they’ll say the skinny one is healthiest

[vulcanette-deactivated20260506]

This tiktoker shared some simple ASL for people to know to help deaf/hoh people communicate their needs while everyone is wearing masks !