Spiral Of Happiness

[bbbunnygutsss]

*sighs dejectedly* okayyy you got me, I care *smashes head into nearest wall with such force my skull is crushed like a beer can*

[closet-keys]

I don't know how to address this properly because I feel like every time I write about it I get the same misunderstandings from every direction.

the thing happening right now (at the very least in the US and UK) is that trans youth are actively and systemically losing access to healthcare. this has been gradually escalating since the start of the pandemic, and more young people lose healthcare every single year.

when I talk about this I tend to get two responses

"why do trans adults want to expand these experimental treatments to children who can't consent"

"providers offering care to trans adults is a step in the right direction, even if they aren't offering it to trans youth. the perfect is the enemy of the good. we can't fight our allies."

do you see how both the overtly transphobic version and the nominally "pro-trans" version replicate the same misinformation?

this is not a question of "should we expand access to trans youth?" trans youth have had access to medical transition care for a long time. what is happening is the care they already had access to is being made inaccessible and then criminalized systematically.

am I making sense? places refusing to offer care to trans youth are not "a step in the right direction" because that implies that the trend is expanding access that "begins" with trans adults and innately will gradually encompass young people. that is not the case. this is not a hypothetical thing that we can all have different theoretical opinions on. what is happening is the systematic revoking of healthcare.

the further this progresses, the more healthcare is restricted for more demographics. that's how this works. healthcare is being restricted across the board as part of the broader eugenics project. abortion is being restricted. vaccines are becoming more expensive. insurance companies are denying more treatments to disabled people. anti-fatness is surging. ableism is surging. there are active campaigns to get people to mistrust the very idea of healthcare in favor of "wellness" grifts. no one wears N-95 masks. this is the trend. it's been the trend.

I don't know how to communicate that we are not at an early step in a progressive trajectory, we are mid-stage in a eugenic order. please understand what I'm saying.

[theinturnetexplorer]

I can honestly say i’ve never seen a more entertaining ladle.

[beaft]

i am not a psychiatrist but i do find it really weird how autism checklists are so often focused on "outward" signs of autism rather than what is going on internally. i don't know how to explain it but "do you make eye contact with other people" feels like a much less relevant question than "how does it feel when you have to make eye contact with other people?"

[beaft]

while i'm here, the other one that always pisses me off is "do you interpret idioms literally, for example 'bull in a china shop'?"

well, no, obviously. i know what "bull in a china shop" means because that is a popular phrase with a clearly defined meaning. and if i hadn't heard it before, then i would still not interpret it literally, because it has the cadence of an idiom and i would probably be able to work out from context what it meant. what is the point of this question

[beaft]

third and final complaint: "are you good at noticing subtext?"

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

and he laid a hand on my shoulder and was like, look dude i'm gonna be straight up here. i am subtle with you constantly and you simply do not notice <3

[beaft]

@luckyybones hope you don't mind me screenshotting but you are actually so correct

[queerofthedagger]

okay let's actually do this properly

Where do you write your fics/stories

Word

Google Docs

Scrivener

LibreOffice

Obsidian/Notion

ProtonDocs

Notes App

Directly into AO3

Ellipsus

Handwriting

Other (explain in tags?)

Remaining time: 4 days 8 hours

[ellipsus-writes]

Uh WOWOWOW we're at #2?! (guys we can't let Google win 😬)

[kittydesade]

4 The Words

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Give me less "being kind requires zero effort" and more "being kind is worth the effort it takes."

[impossiblepackage]

being kind often does take effort. but not being a dick doesn’t take any effort at all.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Actually for some people it does and part of my point was that those people deserve to have their efforts acknowledged and respected when they put in the work needed to treat others right even though it doesn't come easily or naturally to them

[methademic]

it looks like you might've misread what they said? they said that being kind often does take effort, not that it doesn't

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

But they also said that "not being a dick doesn't take any effort at all" which is what I'm arguing with

[kakyoinryoko]

i think if you showed minecraft or fortnite to a little medieval peasant boy he would probably start writing parodies of church hymns. it’s human nature

[kakyoinryoko]

this has rendered me speechless

[toroidalearthtruther]

there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between microwave oven manufacturers and the producers of microwave meals over whether the customer should know the wattage of their microwave or if such details should be abstracted away from them

[toroidalearthtruther]

the microwave rice demands 800 watts of power for 2 minutes, but all the microwave can offer me three settings: one low, one high, and one somewhere in the middle. I turn it to the one in the middle as I happen to know 800W is the average power of most microwaves. the light comes on and the bag of rice starts slowly turning, but rather than hearing the usual rumble of the microwave, I instead start hearing short snippets of conversation - words snatched from the ether. the lights flicker and a chill runs up my spine. the voices remind me of those "spirit boxes" ghost hunters use. I double check the setting on the microwave. "ah," I say, remembering that I had set it to medium,

[rlyehtaxidermist]

"Mario Mario" is an anachronism. He and his brother were only ever referred to by mononyms in their lifetime, like most residents of the Mushroom Kingdom at the time - multi-part names were typically reserved for members of the Toadstool dynasty, and even these were more like titles or Roman cognomina than what we would call a surname today. His putative ennoblement as founder of the "House of Mario" came centuries later as the collapsing feudal order sought additional sources of legitimacy

[prokopetz]

#mushroom kingdom folklore says that he sleeps beneath a warp pipe to arise in the time of the kingdom's greatest need #he's definitely shown up a few times but it's hard to tell if he has risen from the dead or is just in the middle of some time travel shit #historians hate him.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

While the historical evidence for Mario having a younger brother is quite concrete, the name of said brother is less certain. "Luigi" is generally held to originate with a separate figure from a series of chthonic myths, who originally served as a sort of psychopomp charged with capturing spirits that escaped the underworld. The strongest case for a contemporary figure named Luigi comes from the Waffle Kingdom sagas; however, this Luigi's brother is a gladiator named Gonzales.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.

The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".

(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)

The later emergence of "Waluigi" is an ironic recombination of two figures from the same historical source, and may have originated as a farce parodying the Mario stories. (The name "Waluigi" is also conflated with the early Norman figure Varr Yngwi, who is generally credited with the invention of tennis.)

[specialagentartemis]

Character has a PhD: they’re really smart and knowledgable about their field!

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both

Character has 4+ PhDs: if they aren’t an undercover vampire or something then no they don’t lol

[prokopetz]

Alternatively: this character is some kind of rock star celebrity in their field and has a bunch of honorary degrees from several different institutions, and also this story takes place before most universities adopted a separate postnominal for honorary doctorates specifically to avoid this sort of confusion.

[koffeeartist]

[s-t-a-r-c-o]

im reading discworld and im on the third book and i only just realized they arent arranged like this

[weremustelidae]

[Image Description: A drawing of the Discworld, depicting the four elephants stacked on top of one another rather than in a circle. End Image Description.]

[chiisana-lion]

volume 18 horikashi booklet cover being a throwback to chapter 16's chapter cover from over a decade ago tsubaki izumi is out for my life

[chiisana-lion]

going through tsubaki sensei's twt and i cannot stress enough how much i need whatever the hell this official merch is

[hemipenal-system]

playing a game where i put my entire music library on shuffle and see how long it takes to name 25 songs correctly. if you guess and fuck up you just skip to the next one but if you can't even guess you get a 3 second penalty. my current best time is 7:01 bc i keep getting songs with fucked up long intros and i encourage you to try to beat me

[dragoness-witch]

i think i am cooked. i might stand a chance at naming 25 artists/albums though

[hemipenal-system]

yours is definitely worse than mine lol. the issue i'm having is a lot of mine aren't in english so i don't actually know the titles because i can't read cyrillic or japanese lol. there is also a significant amount of library music and film scores, and getting 4 or 5 of those is a death sentence for the run

[punchy4real]

LETTING THE DAYS GO BY

[aspirationalbrand]

amazing things happening in late series columbo episodes