Books and Berries

On storytelling: books, collaborative, fairy tales, mysteries, how-to, and such and so on and what have you Call me Bee or Berry or whatever! Pronouns are also whatever

[kosmogrl]

[fairyw1ngs]

i love sleeping i love being unconscious

[slow-drowned-angels]

“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.

[barnables]

When you “do it scared” eventually you’re supposed to be less scared, eventually doing it scared is supposed to teach you the worst won’t happen, or it won’t be as bad as you think it is, or that the best outcomes are worth it, or you’re more capable than you thought you were. If you do it scared over and over and you’re still scared and you’re always scared, maybe it was never about pushing yourself, maybe something bigger is going on and what you really need is to be kind to yourself while you figure out what that is.

[ethanmaldridge]

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

[borealing]

news about pcos today

‘Unprecedented’ global effort gives new name to polycystic ovary syndrome – and new hope to millions of women

Decades-long campaign powered by patient perspectives results in switch from PCOS – a name that caused confusion and undue suffering – to PM

a health policy paper has been published saying the name is officially updated to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS)

polyendocrine= multiple endocrine factors

metabolic = affecting/affected by metabolism

ovarian = from the ovaries

essentially, instead of using the symptomatic term (many people with PMOS do not develop cysts) the new term widens the diagnostic area and makes it easier to diagnose, treat, and do research on people with PMOS (even atypical types, such as no cysts).

it may seem like a waste of time to change a name instead of focusing on research, but for a lot of medical professionals a name can be associated with a hard set collection of symptoms, so the name needs to change to acknowledge that the disorder is not well understood and has a broader, subtler, and often missed set of symptoms. for example ADD is considered an antiquated/unused term, and now comes under the ADHD umbrella. in healthcare names and terminology changes all the time, and this is a positive change. your local healthcare professional may not know about this unless theyre really up on the news though!

in case you want to read about the name change process that was published in the Lancet (one of the most impactful and well respected medical journals):

Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process

Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the

[booksandberries]

i need to finish this project and then put the blorbo in the torture machine

[booksandberries]

it's a good thing summer vacation is coming up because i need to crash out so so so bad

[notahorseindisguise]

WOAH just saw spiderman eating pizza on a roof

[notahorseindisguise]

oh shit he ate the whole thing . he just like me frfr

[notahorseindisguise]

spiderman just left the pizza box on the roof but then came back a minute later and clearly felt bad for littering so now hes swinging through downtown holding an empty pizza box

[notahorseindisguise]

hes hit a street light

[notahorseindisguise]

he's swinging away now clearly very embarrassed and he thinks nobody saw it. i saw you spiderman

[nycswebhead]

fuck

[booksandberries]

so so mad i SWEAR i saw a post about how to make nice powerpoint presentations and i didn't save it because what am i an office worker? no. i'm a STUDENT who got assigned a PRESENTATION and i DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE GOOGLE SLIDES

[wetchickenbreast]

having a mutual who’s a good artist literally feels like beyonce saw me at a supermarket and decided to make me her best friend

[lastoneout]

The thing they don't tell you about dealing with ADHD is that sometimes when you really, really don't want to do something you absolutely need to do your brain will suddenly lift the barriers stopping you from cleaning or doing other chores you've been struggling to finish, and so you have to run around stopping yourself from doing all the dishes or laundry or deep cleaning the bathroom despite needing to because you do not have time for that right now, you absolutely have to do this other task, and the whole time it feels awful because you've needed to do all the rest of that too for a while and you couldn't, but you can now—only no, you can't—and yeah you can come back to all that after you do your thing you don't wanna do, but then you'll be back in "I can't do this" mode because you don't have another task to avoid, so you just have to accept it and it sucks.

Brought to you by me not wanting to make phone calls so badly I had to actively stop myself from doing like seven other chores, which felt like being hunted for sport.

[electrifiedmaelstrompower]

i hate that i understand this

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[wizardarchetypes]

(guy who isnt beating the ocd voice) i know! maybe if i spend all night ruminating on something i feel guilty about until i’ve considered it from every possible angle and made myself physically ill, then i can finally forgive myself and i’ll feel better! 99% of morally abhorrent people stop self punishing right before they’re Absolved

[wizardarchetypes]

hi this tag is making me insane. OCD treatment and recovery are notoriously difficult because you have to give up all of your comforts and accommodations you've created, to actually lay the beast bare. i often say "the only way out of OCD is through" but i think this tag is far more evocative of what it actually feels like to find the strength within you to face recovery.

[librarycards]

i went to eating enough food world and they're excited to meet you. keep eating lots of meals and snacks and take my hand! we can go there.

[yorgen-sh]

The Chinese shoe manufacturer decided to demonstrate the indestructibility of their shoes

[scarlettohairdye]

And also the indestructibility of that woman's ankles