NEW YORKERS! Catch me TONIGHT at The Strand with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir for a PEN World Voices panel called “Techidemic.”
If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:
While there have been some instances in which this was true, it is far more often the case that there are blindingly obvious answers to tech problems, which our lawmakers and regulators ignore, amidst a rising chorus of warnings about the dire consequences of failing to act.
Take the new Maryland bill that (supposedly) outlaws surveillance pricing: this bill is, frankly, a terribly drafted piece of shit. Worse: it's a terribly drafted piece of shit bill that fails to resolve a serious and urgent problem. Even worse: the lawmakers who drafted this piece of shit bill and Maryland Governor Wes Moore were all loudly and repeatedly warned about the problems of this bill, and they did nothing and now the people of Maryland are fucked.
So what is surveillance pricing, why is it so dangerous, and what's wrong with Maryland's Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act?
Surveillance pricing is when a company spies on you ("surveillance") and uses the resulting dossier to raise its prices to the maximum it calculates you will be willing to pay ("pricing"). With surveillance pricing, a retailer reaches into your bank account and devalues your dollars. If you pay $2 for an apple at the grocery store and the same store only charges me $1 for that apple, then that grocer is telling you that your dollars are worth half as much as mine:
There's a kind of economics brainworm that makes some economists looooove surveillance pricing. They will insist that this is an "efficient" way to price goods, and claim that surveillance pricing isn't just a way to raise prices on people who are willing to pay more, it's a way to lower prices for people who are willing to pay less.
What you're supposed to infer from this is that people who can afford more will end up paying more, while people who can afford less will pay less. It's pitched as the Robin Hood of pricing policies, gouging the rich to finance discounts for the poor. But in practice, that's not at all how surveillance pricing works. Instead, surveillance pricing is most often used to levy a "desperation premium" on people who have fewer choices and less leverage.
For example, there's a McDonald's investments portfolio company called Plexure that supplies surveillance pricing tools to fast food restaurants. Plexure advertises its ability to use surveillance data to find out when a customer has just gotten a paycheck so that vendors can increase the price of their usual breakfast sandwich order. This isn't aimed at wealthy people – it's explicitly designed to target people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
Surveillance pricing is also used to determine how much you get paid; when that happens, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination." Gig platforms like Uber use surveillance data about their drivers to predict which workers are most desperate, and those drivers are offered less money per mile and per hour, because a desperate worker will take whatever is on offer. Gig work apps for health-care do the same thing to nurses:
Indeed, surveillance pricing represents a kind of cod-Marxism. Instead of "from each to their own ability, to each according to their need," the "efficient" surveillance pricing motto is, "from each according to their desperation, to each according to our power":
Surveillance pricing is anything but efficient. Because surveillance pricing is a transfer from consumers to investors, it has the net effect of reducing consumption overall. If your grocer can screw you out of an extra $50/month on your household food bill, that's $50/month you can't spend on a babysitter, a movie, or a couple of nice books for your kid. The American economy runs on consumption, and the American consumer has less discretionary income than they've had in generations. Anything that reduces consumption is a drag on the whole economy.
Surveillance pricing is rampant and getting worse all the time. During the Biden administration the FTC held hearings on the practice and developed a detailed, eye-watering record of all the ways that surveillance, combined with digital platforms that can alter prices for every visit by every customer, has resulted in a massive transfer from working people to wealthy investors:
Unfortunately – and predictably – Trump's new FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, killed off that action, replacing it with an initiative that encouraged FTC officials to anonymously rat each other out for being too "woke":
He did this even as a whole bunch of surveillance pricing companies were blitzing their clients with messages about the surveillance pricing possibilities created by Trump's tariffs, which would condition buyers to expect higher prices, creating opportunities to smuggle in surveillance-priced premiums:
It's only gotten worse since. Back in January, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company had a new plan to make AI profitable: they would supply surveillance prices for sellers who used Google's advertising services. After all, Google spies on more people, more comprehensively, than anyone except Meta and the NSA, and Google has an advanced ad-targeting network and a giant AI arm. Put these three facts together and Google can offer merchants the ability to target you for ads and prices that are calculated, to the penny, to be the most you would be willing to pay:
All this – rampant, desperation-based price-gouging; federal inaction; a risk to the whole economy – is the backdrop for Maryland's new anti-surveillance pricing bill, which Governor Wes Moore has been trumpeting as the nation's first state bill banning surveillance pricing. This would be very cool – if it was real. But – as the American Economic Liberties Project's Pat Garofalo writes for the Economic Populist – the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act is so badly drafted that it will have essentially no impact on surveillance pricing. It's positively riddled with loopholes:
The first problem with this bill is its scope: it only regulates surveillance pricing for groceries. It has nothing to say about the use of surveillance data to reprice car rentals, apartments, healthcare, taxi rides, quick-service food, or the thousand other areas where surveillance pricing is already rampant. Worse: it is silent on algorithmic wage discrimination: the use of surveillance data to reprice your wages, penalizing workers for being poor by making them even poorer.
Now, helping people with their grocery bills isn't nothing. However, even within that very narrow scope, this bill is a disaster. As Garofalo points out, the bill's first glaring loophole here is how it permits surveillance pricing if a purchaser "consents." This is quite a loophole! After all, we live in an era in which "consent" consists of clicking "I agree" when presented with a gigantic list of terms and conditions, which you cannot negotiate, which are subject to change without notice, and which are so long that it would take 26 hours to review all the "agreements" you "consent" to in any given 24-hour day.
So if the company that you use to book your pet's veterinary check-ups is owned by the same company that provides your grocer with its surveillance pricing tools, you might "consent" to having that company jack you on every bag of groceries just by clicking "I agree" when your cat needs a vet appointment.
The bill also exempts "promotional offers" and "temporary discounts," suggesting that it was drafted by someone who has never encountered a merchant whose retail premises are always plastered with signs trumpeting the fact that every price in the shop is both "temporary" (ACT NOW!) and "promotional" (SALE! SALE! SALE!). Since the bill doesn't define either of these words, it effectively grants every grocer in the state an easy way to evade the law entirely.
Finally, the bill exempts two exceptionally scammy tactics that are already the major vehicle for surveillance price-based gouging: loyalty cards and subscription-based pricing.
But even if you are ripped off by a grocer who can't be bothered to call the scam a "sale" or a "temporary offer," who can't be bothered to dress it up as a "loyalty perk" or a "subscription price," you still can't get justice. That's because the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act excludes the "private right of action," which means that you can't sue a grocer who rips you off. All this bill lets you do is petition the state Attorney General's office to sue the grocer on your behalf, and if the AG doesn't think you deserve justice, you're shit out of luck. And the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act pre-empts other rights in Maryland's existing Consumer Protection Act, meaning that it actually gives Marylanders fewer rights than they had a month ago, before it was signed into law.
Legislation this bad doesn't happen by accident. The omissions and defects in this law aren't there because "technology moves so fast that lawmakers can't make sense of it." This is the result of lobbyists and sellout politicians conspiring to rip off the public, and of a governor who decided to ignore the warnings about the bill in order to get a chance to grandstand on Bill Maher while doing nothing to help Marylanders:
From nurses' wages to your payday breakfast sandwich, surveillance pricing is everywhere, especially in groceries. Every time you use Instacart to shop at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market, you might be getting ripped off for as much as 23% of the total price:
This isn't some silly-season fake controversy. It's an existential crisis for America's cash-strapped, heavily indebted households, whose lives have been made immeasurably worse by the inflation from Trump's Strait of Epstein disaster. Maryland had the chance to do something to help these people and instead they squandered it, selling out to lobbyists for companies whose bottom line depends on draining the bank accounts of the most desperate people in the state.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
midsummer: if the feudal strictness of your home kingdom can’t give you what you want, try going on an adventure guided by magical supernatural beings
macbeth: but not like that
hamlet: if you’re in a duplicitous violent world, your king and your peers and your girlfriend may lie to you, so only follow the advice of your steadfast best friend
othello: but not like that
as you like it: if you undergo a misfortune that causes you to hate your life in your city, give yourself a makeover and run away to the woods
timon of athens: but not like that
two gents: if you’re in love in italy, you can quickly and easily communicate important information via the verona postal service
I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.
An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.
Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?
Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.
I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.
Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.
I think the rub here with the term "collaborative storytelling" is that it's coming across at odd angles. Like you said, almost everything can lead to a story. And there are multiple people there inputting into the machine and so clearly it's collaboration. But the same can be said of nearly anything, let alone just games.
What a TTRPG is for is, as what amounts to an analog computer, to take a series of inputs and give you an output combined with imaginative interpretations and creative narrative decisions in order to create the emergent property that is roleplay. In much the same that you can roleplay someone specific in a video game, games with immersive sim properties are much better at it because they give you the tools by which to more deeply express the internal agency you're applying to the game world. And even then you will be constrained by the game and its intents if what you are attempting to roleplay is not supported by the game. Deus Ex is much more conducive to roleplay than, say, DOOM. But even then Deus Ex still expects you to be Some Guy Caught Up In Conspiracy Nonsense. Meanwhile horizontal growth games like Ultima Online allow you to express a wide variety of permutations, the only game where my favorite class fantasy can be "real estate scammer" and the game and the way both the world and other players interact with it supports this.
The important part about the commentary on ANIM's discussion of collaborative storytelling, which describes a specific attitude about how those stories are produced and not about their presence, is thus:
In a game where the primary analog input-output is the emergent property of semi-randomized mechanical interactions, it is very difficult to even attempt to generate the storybeats of, say, Lord of the Rings naturalistically. So you come expecting that every game produces A Fantasy Novel sort of storytelling and not something more in line with the often chaotic, often hamfisted, and meandering storytelling of, say, a weekly print comic that might have a roadmap or be partially planned but often just kind of jams in whatever needs to happen to keep things moving and ramp the drama. And even that isn't an adequate equivalent to this, as a comic can still successfully have internal rules like "The MC and his crush are not allowed to die", a thing which a ttrpg which has a mechanic about death can only do by rewriting the rules, one of the principal complaints in the entire essay.
In order to create the kind of fantasy novel-esque story structure, an enormous amount of effort must go into bending, warping, and changing the rules so much that what you get at the end is at best a facsimile of the thing you went in to create, and if the efforts prove fruitless this is not the fault of either the game or of the expectations put on it to demand those efforts, but of the GM who failed to produce a game design degree via first principles.
And so the way that DnD is treated is often more like modding Deus Ex so that there is either no way to fail or die regardless of which path you take or else to mod it so that there is only one preconceived path which the game must take. When it became an increasing norm of the culture of play to demand that the GM ask permission for characters to be killed (a mechanic which the game has specific rules for for which there are not alternatives) rather than accepting that death is something both mechanically implemented and a story beat which will be generated by the semi-random output of the machine, enormous pressure came down to completely rework the machine from the ground up rather than exit the walled garden and engage with a machine which does not produce outputs which the players do not desire.
The purpose of a machine is what it does, and what this machine does in its design does not produce conventional satisfying, novel-like stories. It creates a lot of emergent situations which must be handled, for good or ill, by semi-random, dice based mechanics. Unfortunately, people believe that that is not the purpose of the machine in spite of all evidence from the text due to their folkloric understanding of it and so view it as broken and anyone not able to fix it as having failed.
I think my biggest problem with the arguments A.N.I.M & simpleimple brought up here is how they are simultaneously too specific and too general.
You're talking about really broad stuff like people's expectations of games, wider trends in the TTRPG culture of play while arguing that those are mostly happening because people miunderstand the rules?
You seperate the text of the game from the folkloric understanding of the game.
The text is not the game.
What is happening during play is the game, which is heavily influenced by the folklore.
People can play this game very differently depending on experience and preferences with TTRPGs or games IN GENERAL.
Can you Imagine walking up to a group of people having fun and going "Pals, you are doing this all wrong, you could be having so much MORE fun" is madness to me ... MADNESS.
Im sorry but I feel like these arguments are really a gross misunderstanding on what playing TTRPGs is about for most people.
If you wanna try out different TTRPGs on the regular you need people in your group that find that exciting!
I dont wanna be antagonistic, I just feel these arguments are going nowhere really.
NOW if you wanna talk about how capitalism is turning TTRPGs into a commodity to own instead of play I am ALL EARS and sopping wet with guilt!
The folkloric understanding of what TTRPGs are and what they are supposed to do has, especially in the specific context of D&D and other very traditional challenge-focused RPGs, largely emerged from a culture of play that treats the text of these games as incidental. These games do exist as texts as well and when the culture of play around these games exists largely as divorced from these texts and it is effortless to also demonstrate that playing these games while adhering to the text does not result in gameplay that is inherently undesirable, it is in fact good to remind people that these texts should not be treated as incidental.
In fact, to your capitalism point, the ones who have the most to gain from an understanding of tabletop RPGs as just a set of folklore and vibes where the text doesn't matter are, in fact, the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Arguably a very large part of the marketing (not just from WotC but also from the industry that has sprung up around D&D) of D&D the game relies on the notion that D&D is good for collaborative storytelling (something it, as a text, doesn't actually primarily support) and that the rules ultimately don't matter. And when the rules of a game can be reduced to nothing but a set of vibes that are completely divorced from the game as a text this in fact mostly benefits the game that has already captured a large part of the hobby and industry.
And I don't think this should be taken to some extreme like "by actually taking RPG rules as texts worth engaging with instead of just sets of vibes that may or may not result in good gameplay you are actually doing an epic anti-capitalism," but tabletop RPGs do exist as books with rules not as an accident.
And to quote a much more eloquent person than I, the designer of Cairn: "Playing rules-as-written isn't obedience. It's literacy."
Nerds love taxonomy; it gives order to the world, and provides a meaningful sense of control. Of course, it's all an illusion. At best taxon
This also applies to analyzing games and the cultures of play surrounding them. For a culture of play that treats the text as secondary or incidental to gameplay and where the desired gameplay is actually orthogonal to the text, saying that the culture of play would actually benefit from engaging with the text as is or engaging with a different game altogether is the most charitable interpretation of what is going on.
The question I'm always asking myself is, what IS the ttrpg that would match the folkloric gameplay of d&d. What is the game all those people actually want to be playing - because I think the desired gameplay DOES converge on something
I think some of the better designed PBTA games mostly fit this bill off the top of my head, but then again now that I say that, I realize they would have to read the rules of those games to play them right, and the rules often have a lot of serious effects on the story and characters, which these kinds of players don't like under any circumstances.
What might fit this idea is something that has, like, a lot of established options, enough to build a sorta intricate character sheet, but then hardly any rules at all for in-session gameplay. Like, "so-and-so can throw fireballs" but the game has no rules for what that actually does or how powerful it is vs certain monsters and armors and stuff, effectively becoming freeform RP with a GM and extremely, extremely light scaffolding. There are TTRPGs that work sorta like this, but I couldn't name them at this time off the top of my head.
I remember seeing Quest advertised as trying to fill this gap of "the game that people who don't actually want to play D&D actually want to be playing". It's rules-light, doesn't have stats, all rolls are an unmodified d20 with degrees of success, but it also has classes with a fairly extensive list of abilities that are nevertheless not that crunchy.
it's actually so crazy how much the simpsons would fucking suck if it didn't have any of the simpsons characters. just a bunch of shots of empty houses and streets for half an hour while nothing happens. that would be so badddd lol
yeah that tends to happen when you remove characters from media. without characters its all just background. i guess movies set in scenic locations would still land as kinda nature docs but even then
Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:
Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.
Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.
Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.
Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.
"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.
AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".
Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.
Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.
Hasbro has indeed spent the last several years pushing back against dragonfucking jokes so hard that that they've gone as far as to revise some of the setting lore to imply that dragons don't even fuck each other, but they haven't yet had the guts to pull the trigger on taking the option of literal dragon ancestry off the table for sorcerers.
(The 5.5E writeup for dragon-blooded sorcerers does list "making a bargain" with a dragon above the actual-ancestry option, though, which is funny as hell. Yeah, I'll bet it was a mutually beneficial exchange!)
I beg my kidnappers for a phone, swearing not to make any calls or texts, and they stare over my shoulder, holding a gun to my head as I use my newly-freed hand to post, "So do like, dudes just buy ropes and baklavas from the same store or what lmfao like a specialty Crime Store"
One of the kidnappers says "balaclavas" but it's muffled under the fabric. I ask them to repeat and they do, their voice raspy from disuse. "You wrote baklava, that's a pastry." The other kidnapper goes "stfu" and then after a pause goes "Why would you buy from a crime store"
I didn't wanna say this but now that someone's left this kind of comment I have to be honest: Everyone else's tags are funny but this is the only person who understood my vision for this scenario
A grand fantasy city-state that has developed a consistent, uniform system of "best by"-dates, not just for food safety reasons and to reduce food waste, but to also significantly reduce crime and conflict between residents. The matter at hand is goblins.
Goblin residents of the city are legal citizens with equal rights just the same as everyone else, but their natural lifestyle differs dramatically from the rest of the peoples living in the city. They are scavengers by nature, having no problems with eating carrion, overripe fruits and plants, and building everything they own from things that other races throw away as junk and trash. As the city produces plenty of waste that goblins would love to take and the city is glad to be rid of, any well-organised city is not just a paradise for goblins, but welcomes them with open arms. They save the city a fortune in waste disposal costs.
Problems mainly arise by differing ideas of what counts as "discarded". Goblins are unfairly labelled as thieves, when they are merely opportunistic and optimistic by nature, and will interpret any unclear situation to their own benefit, and will argue "how was I supposed to know that you still wanted it?" over things that looked lovely and were left unattended. And while yoinked items of clothing and other tools are easily returned or financially reimbursed (paying for what they already took is the only use that goblins have for money, which they do not steal), but foodstuff is gone faster than you can blink.
So, the city needed to determine laws for how to define and clearly label when consumable goods are no longer fit to most peoples' consumption, both to help people keep track on how old their groceries are, and also to mark them for goblins. So even though the food that's past the date on it can still be good to eat, it might also be gone by the next time you reach for it.
One of the big things I struggle with functions-wise is getting stuck in what I call optimization loops. Where there's several tasks that need doing, and some would be optimized by having another task done first, but it can't be shaken out into a clear executable task list.
Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.
It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!
It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.
Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.
Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.
And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.
That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.
So, ok, it is a little bit about perfectionism. But perfectionism that comes from a slightly sideways place: the desperation to avoid creating problems in the future, to the point where instead you create problems now.
hope this is okay to reblog - those optimization loops are absolutely my most disabling exec dysfn issue, too, and i often have to remind myself of this comic--ESPECIALLY "get rid of secret rules." that's been the most helpful piece of advice for me, personally, largely because it puts into words even the idea that there might be secret rules i don't even notice i'm following. now that it's something i even think to check with myself, it has become so so so much easier to realize that i can just Stop Doing That.
it's so important to have people in your life who understand, because people without executive dysfunction solve 99% of these problems unconsciously and automatically, only with particularly difficult problems will they need to break out the type of manual "thinking about it" that we use constantly, every day. That manual "thinking about it"? We're compensating for the fact that our executive function center doesn't work by using a different part of our brain entirely (the language center, usually) that is far more energy hungry. It's mentally exhausting. That's one reason we rely on routine and external structure so much. And it's legitimately difficult to conceptualize of for most people whose brains do it automatically. You can see your legs, you know what your legs do, so you mostly know what it would mean for someone to have a broken leg. You cannot see the different parts of your brain. The average neurotypical has no idea what would mean for their executive functions to be broken. The idea that I am stuck "thinking about" whether or not to brush my teeth right now would be difficult for them to even imagine, that "decision" happens in the background like breathing, so it's often difficult for them to believe. Other explanations (like not caring) seem so much more likely because... that's what it would mean if they were doing that. For normal people, there is no such thing as "I genuinely want to, I am putting my full self behind trying to, there's nothing physically stopping me, and I can't stand up and brush my teeth. Sure, I've done it almost every day of my life, but suddenly it's as if I don't know how."
here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to pornbots catfishing using the same stolen photos from the same trans woman on the same trending tags page
remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags
here's tumblr staff stating that making death threats towards trans women isn't a violation of the ToS or user guidelines
type of shit you can just say to trans women on this website. same person btw
here's tumblr staff terminating me for appealing the explicit flag on a post immediately before accepting said appeal and then terminating my already terminated blog to change the termination reason to something i can't appeal when I appealed the termination for explicit content
here's tumblr staff doing the exact same thing a second time
here's tumblr staff flagging SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOGS of a year old post with 15,000 notes as sexually explicit despite it not actually showing anything
here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOG of a post with gifs of two fully nude people fucking center frame being flagged as sexually explicit and the same gifs in the trending tags thumbnails
here's tumblr letting people blaze sissy hypno captions even though anything actually mentioning trans women gets denied
here's tumblr giving my original blog of 13 years a special kind of mature flag that automatically marked every single post i made as mature content separate from the actual content label
here's one of the pictures of the PMMM gachapon toys from the photoset of them that someone reported as CSAM that tumblr terminated me for - one of the two surviving images from it, from back when they actually bothered to moderate posts instead of just hitting the nuke button without looking
here's tumblr instantly denying my appeal for these terminations before I even get the email where they assure me they will carefully review it
here's tumblr terminating me 5 times in the weeks it took them to remove a burner blog and a single post encouraging people to mass report me and harass me forever over completely fabricated claims
here's tumblr flagging my already mature-flagged blog as mature out of the blue 15 minutes before dropping the age verification shit
and here's the episode of the anime that I posted a screencap from that they flagged as sexually explicit, denied my appeal on twice, and then marked my blog mature the first time for posting - available for viewing on youtube with a TV-14 age rating
