darkhaired whiteboy

buy my ttrpgs, boy (they're free) https://dtsfp.itch.io/

[oneheadtoanother]

[noonesgaylikegatson]

Artist: Naughtie_Nine

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

[sunspotpony]

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

[stjohnstarling]

Who wants to get fucked up on the green neolithic slime that makes you hallucinate to death?

[ringneckedpheasant]

learned today that one of the hosts of a podcast I occasionally listen to was in the epstein files because of an incident wherein she was being sexually harassed/abused by a man who worked in her field -> she created a google doc for other women in said field to anonymously submit the names of men who had harassed/abused them -> one of these men sued for her for defamation even though she didn’t know him & didn’t even know who his victim was -> he couldn’t afford lawyers & reached out to epstein for funding -> epstein gave it to him -> after 5 years she was forced into a settlement & had to pay him over $100k. the way these predatory men find solidarity with each other is so so so profoundly evil

[glorious-spoon]

spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.

anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.

[athousandgateaux]

Even though it was like 2 of the worst years of my life, I do sometimes miss my MA program because it involved being surrounded by the most bat-shit insane continental philosophy and critical theory wonks you could possibly imagine. Literally everyone else I've met in academia has been a normie by comparison. It's all so fucking boring.

[athousandgateaux]

On the first day of the first class of my program, the prof assigned us to read the entirety of both Spinoza's Ethics and Tractatus. I busted my ass for like a week before classes started to get through them both so I'd be prepared for class. Then, on the first day of class, the prof showed up 20 minutes late, said: Sorry, I forgot to read the texts so we won't be talking about them, ans then went on a 45 minute tangent about the adult ballet class he's been taking over the summer.

[athousandgateaux]

One of the PhD students in my cohort legitimately had a psychotic break in class one day while he was giving a presentation and started going on a wild rambling rant about Bataille and Jupiter/Zeus getting fucked in the ass, and we all just sat and listened because no one could tell if it was supposed to be part of the presentation or not. He dropped out shortly after and went to live in Montreal where he became a professional power-lifter.

[athousandgateaux]

There were grad students in my program who were doing some The Secret History shit in real life, except they were doing it in the shitty rustbelt of Southern Ontario instead of a quaint New England town, and it was less "dark academia" and more dropping acid around a tire fire every weekend because there was nothing else to do.

[athousandgateaux]

Another time, a different PhD student was supposed to lead a seminar on political interiority and the phenomenology of Edith Stein and instead stayed up the entire night before, fucked up on adderall and cheap beer, and wrote a 2 hour presentation on a minor strand of Italian Marxism instead.

[athousandgateaux]

My closest friend in the program was a gutterpunk from Milwaukee who was actively trying to overcome a heroine addiction and using the PhD program as a "life scam" to get some free money and lodging instead of going into rehab. He smoked a frankly ridiculous amount of pot from the moment he woke up to til the moment he went to sleep, every day, and legitimately read like 5-10 books a day of the densest philosophy you've ever seen. He also essentially had a photographic memory for that shit and would accurately rattle off quotes and page numbers of things he'd read years ago. He was one of the smartest people I've ever met, and after finishing his PhD in 3 years instead of 4, he went back to Milwaukee to live in a squat with like 10 of his other gutterpunk friends. When I caught up with him a couple years later, he was working as a dishwasher at a shitty restaurant. When all the other line cooks and dishwashers found out he had his PhD, they started calling him Dr. Dishwater.

[athousandgateaux]

There was another PhD student who we called the "Yacht Club Communist" because he would wear boat shoes and tailored dress shirts to class, talk about the most esoteric Marxist shit, berate us for not having solidarity with the Third World, and then go yell at the old ladies making $7.50 an hour at the Tim Hortons on campus for getting his coffee order wrong. His parents were like millionaire real estate developers in North Vancouver or something, and when I ran into him later he was living in a condo in Yaletown that they'd bought him and complaining about there being too many homeless people in his neighborhood.

[athousandgateaux]

My crustpunk friend's roommate was an Adorno scholar and a pretentious music guy. One night we dragged him out to a show being put on by the local queer arts collective. Boy Pussy was playing and we had a great night until the walk home when Adorno-boy kept trying to tell us that that wasn't real electronic music, that we needed to listen to blah blah blah instead, and on and on, until I told him he was being a homophobic shit and that I'd kick his ass if he didn't shut up. We never really talked after that.

[athousandgateaux]

One of the profs in my department grew up in Italy in the 60s and 70s and was part of the operaismo and autonomismo movements as a teenager, and he still knew all those guys (which was how I ended up getting drunk with Bifo Berardi and a bunch of other grad students when he brought Bifo to come speak at our school). One time, that prof told us a story about a dinner party he'd been at with Antonio Negri, where Negri got angry and threw the host's cat so hard against a wall that the cat died.

[athousandgateaux]

Another friend's roommate worked on the "ocular-centrism" of Western philosophy. He never wore shoes, even in winter. He would walk through 6 inch deep snow when it was like -20C out to go to the corner store and by his daily Pepsi and Doritos, completely barefoot. He wouldn't even wear shoes to class.

[athousandgateaux]

There was a PhD student in my second year there who told me that she was queer (despite being cis and very conventionally heteronormative) because she was single, and single people are less privileged in our society than coupled people. She was also a hard-core second wave feminist who loved Andrea Dworkin and didn't believe that trans people existed. She was homeschooled in rural Michigan before coming to university and had written her MA thesis on a single footnote from Capital.

[athousandgateaux]

There was a another prof in the department who had a kind of cult of personality on campus and a reputation for his combative and macho-istic teaching style. I met him several times, and every time he met me, he would shake my hand really aggressively and tell me who he was, as if we'd never met before. Then he would completely ignore me. A few years after I graduated, he was forced to retire because he had been sexually involved with a number of his grad students.

[athousandgateaux]

I need to stress that all of these are 100% real things that happened during my MA program and that they don't even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of bullshit that were going on.

[athousandgateaux]

Dr. Dishwater was a vegan and got very irate one time when I told him "the world is your oyster" because he didn't eat oysters. So I had to start saying "the world is your everything bagel". But he was also confused by everything bagels because they clearly didn't contain everything in the universe. (This was 2013/2014, so long pre-EEAAO)

[athousandgateaux]

Dr. Dishwater was also the realest anarchist I ever met. When he moved from Milwaukee to [redacted] for our program, the only thing he brought with him was: his cat (who he claimed was on a lifelong mission to assassinate Phil Collins) and his books/zine collection. When he was crossing the border into Ontario, Border Security flagged him and searched through all his books. Despite having zines on how to create improvised explosive devices and destroy critical infrastructure, the only thing they confiscated was his copy of The Coming Insurrection. (Again, this was like 2013).

[athousandgateaux]

There was another PhD student who had been in the program for like 10 years and just kept putting off working on his dissertation. He would show up to the department every day at like 7:30 AM and hang out in the grad student office playing candy crush and farmville on one of the office computers until like midnight. Then he'd go out and get falling down drunk at the grad club, sleep a couple hours, and come back and do the exact same thing the next day.

[athousandgateaux]

The most normal person in the department was this guy who was like cherubicly baby faced in appearance and always wore the most bland Target-commercial clothes imaginable. He never drank, was super kind and friendly to everyone, showed up to all his classes and any social activities that were happening, and did a lot of mentoring with the newer students. He was genuinely well liked by everyone. He was also obsessed with Clive Barker and was writing his dissertation on the erotics of pain through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari or some shit.

[athousandgateaux]

My supervisor had a habit of exclusively calling thinkers by diminutive versions of their first names (Mikey for Michel Foucault, Freddy for Nietzsche, Judy for Judith Butler, Petey for Pierre Bourdieu, etc., etc.) to the point that now I can't think of them any other way.

[athousandgateaux]

He also had a bona fide, true blue Hegelian in the department who we used to torture with pointless questions about negating the negation just to watch him get riled up.

[athousandgateaux]

Brian Massumi and Erin Manning were visiting scholars to my department the year before I started my MA program and apparently were paid like a million dollars to set up trampolines on campus and give grad students object lessons in affect theory.

[athousandgateaux]

I still have an irrational hatred of Simon Critchley after he was a dick to me, personally, at a meet-and-greet event for grad students when he was an invited speaker.

[athousandgateaux]

I learned recently that one of the people who was in my program back in 2013 is still giving the exact same boring ass talk he would give on Catherine Malibou at conferences and shit to this day.

[athousandgateaux]

I was not witness to this, but learned from a friend after I'd left the program, that there is a prof in the department who is famous for having a choreographed dance for when he teaches Heidegger that he claims will help students remember the difference between the ontic and the ontological.

[jeffreycombspinealgland]

Today in Bologna two Italian policemen killed Abderrahim Fakir, a 43 year old man who was pepper sprayed, beaten up, tied and then suffocated to death. First responders on the scene just watched without intervening as he asked for help.

This is a tragedy.

Italy actively, shamelessly encourages and executes violence and murder of non white people.

The country needs to burn.

[fancy-strawberry-beard]

Fakir Abderrahim morto ammanettato a Bologna: iscritti poliziotti e sanitari per omicidio colposo

Primo caso di applicazione del nuovo "Registro Mod. 45 bis" per gli agenti intervenuti  

Video of Moroccan man dying while pinned down by police sparks anger in Italy:

[ueberdemnebelmeer]

Perché gli agenti coinvolti nella morte di Abderrahim Fakir a Bologna non sono indagati

La procura ha applicato una nuova norma introdotta dal governo con un recente “decreto sicurezza”

Man’s death during police arrest in Italy leads to street protests

ROME, July 20 (Reuters) - A man in the northern Italian city of Bologna died while being held to the ground by police trying to arrest him,

[badassdemonsword-deactivated202]

Crazy book i read

[eggcup-deactivated20180129]

that thing about how removing the middle 2 panels of a cad comic makes it funnier is true 

[zonecassette]

holy shit

[severalowls]

I can’t even imagine what meaningless filler went into panels 2-3.

[newtypenea]

oh my god these are actually funny

[baishujinkou]

[moonkitty]

this is 100% true and once you remove the horrible filler bullshit its comedy gold

[squirrelly-13]

ended up finding a few more because im bored

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.

[cutecipher]

On the prisoners point:

Prisoners in the U.S. are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

In a sweeping two-year investigation, The Associated Press found goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from F

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20251124

[cosmicretreat]

State of Wyoming Hereford - CF Payne (2025)

[juniper776]

if you tell a trans woman she is "enforcing passing culture" by wanting to pass and expressing it i honestly hope nothing good happens in your life ever after that

[foxxxighost]

Crazy that once I'm passing and starting to feel good about myself, fake allies are trying to tell me that being bricked tf out is actually the best.

[kayla-denker]

This is why I'll never shut up about the part of Whipping Girl where Serano says we gotta stop calling it "passing." It pretty directly accuses us of 'hiding' or 'fooling people into thinking we're women.' We aren't "passing as women," we are women, we're being correctly gendered as women. When people deride us for "passing", they're blatantly saying that they don't think we're women. Afterall, nobody says cis women "pass as women" when they're correctly gendered as women.

[ilovedthestars]

"how do you feel about labels as a queer person?"

[prole-log]

[stuckinapril]

They weren’t lying when they said that as an adult you have to fight for your life to practice your hobbies

[stuckinapril]

They also weren’t lying when they said that when you fail to do so your soul shrivels up inside your body and dies

[spiralstaircased]

My number one game recommendation would actually be Tetris ....give it a try some time you might like it ... Open your mind explore new concepts ... A shape fits together and you never thought it would ... You wouldn't think a T could spin but you'd be wrong . And that beautiful blue piece, is basically, the original wife of gaming