Three Goblin Art
noise dept.
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

JVL
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Today's Document
RMH

Kaledo Art

shark vs the universe
One Nice Bug Per Day

oozey mess

titsay
Monterey Bay Aquarium

izzy's playlists!

Product Placement
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
taylor price
No title available

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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@falling-alice
which heart did you get when you liked this post?
rainbow flag
lesbian flag
gay flag
bisexual flag
pansexual flag
asexual flag
aromantic flag
transgender flag
non binary flag
intersex flag
literally my dad
this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.
hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.
my partner said something that kinda rocked my world
He’s a baby
june vision board
Neurodivergent Magic To Make An Item Disappear:
Pick up the item
Hold the item securely in your hands
Get distracted by something
The item is no longer detectable on this plane of existence
There is no reversal spell. The item will never be seen again.
Springing off of my addiction post once more, I am also skeptical at best of 12-step programs, because their framework has just never remotely aligned with my actual experience.
The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.
But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.
Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.
And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.
Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.
And that just hasn’t been true for me.
I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.
I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.
I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.
I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”
So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.
What does make sense, looking back, is context.
When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.
When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.
That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.
But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.
When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.
I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.
For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.
What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.
Rat Park, people. Stop forgetting about Rat Park.
“addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait... Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.
I have helped change more individual behavior by changing the environment around them than I have by working on their behavior.
From my own experience with addiction, trauma, coping, and identity, the scarier underlying pattern isn't "situation equals x so solution equals y", its "feelings equal subset a [too intense for me to cope with], so solution equals subset b [behavior that removes me from feelings]
I was medicated outside of my ability to consent as a child, so my brain began to associate "drug" [set containing pill, Adderall, stimulant] with "coping" [set containing managing behaviors and emotions, feeling less bad]
As an adult, weed and alcohol became readily available, and mitigated the stress of being horribly maladapted to adulthood very easily. Drug equals coping.
I graduated to much more dangerous drugs (psychedelics, ecstasy, cocaine, meth), and the base framework didn't change. Drug equaled coping, and because more drugs brought more problems, coping became paradoxically noncomputational.
Post prison, I've developed (wholly by necessity) a better sense of how to cope with life. Is it perfect? Fuck no. During the week, I drink after work, because work is exhausting and super stressful. However, because I'm better at managing the things that cause me to drink, better at coping, the drinking is enough. I understand how much it costs me, and I mitigate it based on how good it feels against how good not being in prison and having control of my life feels.
If I stopped, I'd miss it. My brain would Do The Thing where everything sucks for a while. I'd need to find a new shortcut for coping. But for me at least, it's not one of those addictions that's tearing my life apart.
I think addiction is a highly nuanced concept, and should only be the umbrella under which we begin to have conversations about individual experiences and needs. There is no one solution. Sometimes there's not even a problem.
I'd say it's worth it to differentiate addiction from substance dependence. To me, addiction primarily means clinical addiction. It's not just substance dependence - it's permanent brain damage caused by either substance abuse or other factors, like genetic or environmental causes. I am diagnosed with addiction, I completed a 2-year addiction therapy, I'm doing a 12-step program, and I don't think I'll ever feel free from it. I'm now in my 5th year of abstinence and I'm doing really great - I have more friends IRL than I ever had, I'm doing stuff I always wanted to do, my transition goes along smoothly, I love myself like I never have before, and my environment is practically perfect now - and yet I still crave my substances, even though it has been five years without them and my life is so much better without them.
And it didn't even begin with substances. It's more like substances filled a slot in my brain that was already there since my shitty childhood. And that slot is still there, waiting for me to give in, to choose it instead of my emotions.
My therapists always said that addiction is not about substances at all but about an impairment in emotion processing. And about isolation. And it really resonates with me, because my recovery is all about learning how to feel and process emotions and how to connect with other people. But even though I'm now miles away from that emotional prison I once inhabited, I still think about locking myself in it. I don't think it'll ever go away.
Bookriot 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors Bookriot 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors
ok let's do another one! this time we have Bookriot's 100 sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors.
just to pre-empt a few possible objections to the list, it was published in 2016 and:
JK Rowling's public transphobia downward spiral began in 2018.
All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells) was published in 2017 and Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) was published in 2019.
The Fifth Season (NK Jemisin) was published in 2015 & given that the editor included a different NK Jemisin I presume Fifth Season simply hadn't hit all-time classic status yet.
The editor stated upfront that they included 1 book per author.
I have no idea what We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson) is doing there given that it categorically is not SFF.
How many of Bookriot's 100 sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors have you read?
0-10
11-20
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-60
61-70
71-80
81-90
91-100
Some personal recommendations to add onto this list, if you want more authors that aren't listed here:
A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason. Readers in the Le Guin-Leckie continuum will find a lot to enjoy in Arnason's work, like this dual narrative about an inhabitant of a planet entering its Iron Age making first contact with an anthropologist from a socialist Earth.
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott. Pitch-perfect '90s cyberpunk about the breakup of a lesbian relationship where one hacker continues to live on the margins of cybercrime while her ex goes corporate.
The Mount by Carol Emshwiller. A goofy but sincere story from the perspective of a man who's been raised to be ridden like a horse by the small alien race that's taken over Earth.
The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard. A twist on the Holmes/Watson dynamic of solving mysteries in a culturally Vietnamese space empire, where in this case the Watson's a traumatized sentient spaceship.
The Killing Gift by Bari Wood. If Shirley Jackson made that list, Wood deserves to be here as well. A underrated horror gem about a woman whose social and economic privilege shields her from the consequences of her disquieting supernatural abilities.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker Martin. Another great horror title that explores a what-if premise that could be a huge fumble in the wrong hands - "what if anyone with too much testosterone is vulnerable to a monstrous transformation at the hands of a plague" - and makes it an invigorating, gut-wrenching touchdown.
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh. Surprised there's no Cherryh on this list, since she's very prolific and there are a lot of fun entry points. I recommend this one if you like reading about complex relationship dynamics on a terraforming planet, and characters thrust into some of the most existentially horrifying conundrums I've ever read.
The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente. A really refreshing post-apocalyptic novel with a Voltaire-like flavor. Can't wait to find more from Valente, who thankfully has plenty of short stories to explore.