Not a teenage vigilante working for Leverage (yet)

Our system is named Leverage tho | Ship and Let Ship | Scary activist faggot | it/he | Disabled but undiagnosed | ✡️

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

immediately skeptical. everyone knows that the food has to be shit.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

freddy’s is gross and sticky and grimy. they leave food lying out at room temperature for hours only to microwave it and sell it as fresh.

there needs to be a subtle but unmistakable and unplaceable scent the second you walk in there.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

i’ve decided i’m gonna go when they announce its closure. it’ll be at its best when it’s all falling apart

[laculturefrancaisecest]

la culture française c’est atteindre un niveau de rage indescriptible contre l’administration à chaque fois que tu dois leur demander quelque chose parce qu’il y a au moins 6 formulaire à remplir, 18 justificatifs à fournir et 100 jours ouvrés à attendre avant de recevoir une réponse qui est juste « demande invalide » sans qu’ils te disent que tu as mal fait

C'est tellement juste. Rien à ajouter.

[skipppppy]

I have approximately 500 something hours in BG3 now and am certifiably autistic about it what do you MEAN there’s a dwarf chef npc in the brothel named Sauceman Chorizo. Sauceman Chorizo. And he turns you down because he’s gay. How have I never seen anybody bring him up. This man should be more revered than Withers. There should be a fully modded companion storyline for him. His existence embodies the true spirit of DnD. I love you Sauceman Chorizo. The world will know your name

[txttletale]

the british media are vicious jackals; in any world with a semblance of justice all of the hack rags that hounded jason arday to suicide would be closed down and their owners jailed

[lupismaris]

Do it scared but please don't do it hungry. Please don't do it dehydrated. It's gonna make it so much scarier. Please.

[dykieran]

actually i do want more female characters who've experienced rape i just don't want men to ever write them ever again and i want all fandoms to stfu about it forever. not by ignoring it i mean stop acting like a female character experiencing something incredibly common for women to go through is inherently bad writing i hate you all so muchhhhh

[dykieran]

idk i make this post every few months worded differently but I'm just so so sick of the popular opinion seeming to be that a character i like experiencing trauma i relate to is taboo and gross and fetishising. idk maybe some people just want to tell a story about a thing that happens to people. a lot. im going to start whining that any character with a dead parent is romanticising grief and wank off material for grief fetishists

[dykieran]

also interesting that male characters with sexual trauma are almost always lauded as Progressive examples of Good Writing but you can't even point out the obvious signs that a female character in the exact same media has gone through the same thing without people crawling over each other to explain to you that actually that's shallow shock value writing so we should ignore it. because obviously a woman's trauma is only there for men to jerk off to and men's trauma is Real and worth exploring

[headspace-hotel]

what does this shit even mean...

[headspace-hotel]

Like how do I know if something is affecting my "performance." How do I know what kind of discomfort is "mild" and what is "severe." genuinely it makes no sense.

[headspace-hotel]

"very distressed, can't concentrate" at 8 and "worst fear you can imagine" at 10 is an INSANE jump.

I don't think the people that write these bullshit scales have any experience with the upper end of the scale. It doesn't really scale numerically cause you can be partially "shut down" or numb or kind of detached from the situation once you get to middle-high levels of distress.

And the idea of trying to imagine in your head how distressing something would be makes no sense to me.

Like if I tried to put "getting a blood test" on this scale, I wouldn't know where to put it. If I try to imagine doing it, I can't imagine the distress or what it would be like.

[brisingr-sword]

the scale is very much about whether someone can be a “functioning” member of society when experiencing it. the top is so crunched because like, capitalism doesn’t care what differing levels of anxiety correlates to being unproductive, they just care about fixing or socially erasing the unproductive. but that doesn’t help the experiences of mentally or chronically ill people to actually be seen and helped

[headspace-hotel]

Yeah. It's all about "functioning" and the thing is, you can lock down really hard into survival mode and continue to "function" through very, very extreme levels of distress, to the point where you can do what's expected of you while being not super aware of your surroundings

[headspace-hotel]

waitwaitwait theres an XKCD for this

[carabbydae]

so I can perhaps shed some light on the insane jump between 8 and 10, but it won't actually make it make more sense. 10 is actually not meant to be "worst pain you can IMAGINE" but "the worst pain you personally have ever felt." I saw a clip from a podcast where women and men were discussing the pain scale, and all the women interpreted the pain scale as 10 being the worst pain POSSIBLE, like for the women a 10 was what they imagined burning alive would feel like, so the women, when asked to rate their pain in medical settings throughout their lives, had all asked themselves something like "is this as painful as burning alive would be??? I don't think so, so my ovarian cyst rupturing must be about a 6 or 7, because it really fucking hurts but I don't have to scream right now."

The men in the conversation were really confused by this, because all of them treated 10 on the pain scale as the worst pain that THEY PERSONALLY had ever experienced. So like one person's 10 might be getting a really painful steroid shot, another person's 10 might be breaking their leg in a car accident, or getting horrible strep throat. So any time they had been experiencing pain that was worse than anything they'd had before, they called it a 10 every time, and apparently THAT'S THE INTENDED USE OF THE PAIN SCALE.

The women in the conversation were like "????? Why would the pain scale be based on personal experience and not on the absolute most pain a human can experience ??????" and the men were like "????? How would I know what worse pain than I've ever personally been in would feel like, I've never experienced it ?????"

So the top isn't actually meant to be crunched, it's based on the assumption that the worst pain most people have experienced is like a broken bone, or wrecking their bike and getting terrible road rash, and then anything worse than that is beyond the pain scale. But if you don't EXPLAIN the pain scale to people, then people rating their pain based on all of human experience, vs those rating their pain based on their own personal experience, are going to get treated very differently, because if you're the first one, then even pain that has you vomiting and barely able to speak won't get rated a 10, and if you're the second one if you're in the hospital for pain at all you're probably calling it a 10.

[headspace-hotel]

Okay, to be completely fair, the specific chart at the top of the post does say "highest fear/anxiety/discomfort that you have ever felt" and it was another chart I was looking at that said "imagine."

Reading comprehension ghoul comes for us all.

However, even with restricting it to "highest fear/anxiety/discomfort that I have ever felt," it's still a massive jump. In fact, I think "highest fear/anxiety/discomfort that I have ever felt" might be higher than "highest fear/anxiety discomfort that I can imagine" because I know that I can't remember what the worst fear I've ever felt actually felt like.

I distinctly remember when I was about 15, I realized that I'd lost the ability to reconstruct in my mind what the panic attacks I'd had when I was 10-11 felt like. I just knew they were much, much worse than my mind could access then.

In my worst one, I believed I was going to die, or rather that I was trapped between imminent death and something worse than death that I wasn't able to think of (going to hospital), and my dad was threatening to take me to the hospital "where they'll stick a bunch of needles in you" I think he was frustrated because I had been in this state of panic for hours. Anyway, at some point I just lay down in my bed and accepted I was going to die.

I've had experiences of extreme fear since then, but they aren't really comparable to each other, because it stops being described by a linear "severity." More recent experiences were...different.

[carabbydae]

outsider perspective, it seems like you've experienced pretty clear 10s a bunch of times. Like if you've blocked out past experiences of emotional pain and distress due to trauma those were probably 10s, and even if they were probably worse than more recent experiences those more recent experiences are still 10s. Like the 10 on these scales from a mental health practitioner's perspective means "this is very fucking bad and something has to be done to help this person right the fuck now with no delay" and it sounds like you have been there Many Times

[headspace-hotel]

Right.

But this makes it very difficult to figure out what an 8 is supposed to be.

If I calibrate the scale according to what my 10 is, a 2 (20% of the way to a 10) doesn't intuitively feel like it should match "minimal anxiety/distress."

It seems that the implicit definition of a 10 is something beyond your limits of coping, but that leads to questions "What are limits" and "What is coping."

IMO dissociation/shutdown being a coping mechanism that kicks in eventually throws this off completely, because you can be in extreme distress without "feeling" any of it right now.

It significantly complicates my situation that I absorbed many years worth of very bad Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques that impaired my ability to cognitively acknowledge my distress. Because of the technique of "correcting" anxious thought patterns, I would be in great distress and think I wasn't in distress because i automatically changed my thoughts about my distress.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety holds that your perceptions of distress are fundamentally inaccurate, and makes you change your thoughts about the distress, which supposedly should reduce the distress.

However, the effect on me was to make me unable to recognize when I was in distress.

[tpwrtrmnky]

the real answer to almost every "does [identity A] belong in [identity B] spaces" question is actually just "these spaces are informal social groups and if you're cool you can hang, don't worry about it"

[tpwrtrmnky]

You can be Homer Simpson at the lesbian bar. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

[lizardlicks]

not without those fire exits I'm not. have fun in your death trap, ladies

[mrsandman42069]

[fvckw4d]

And btw when you are talking about feminism and someone brings up trans men and you say things like "now we're still talking about men" or "'this is a distraction from the issue", youre making a very clear statement that trans men dont have a place in feminism. That talking about transphobia is not compatible with talking about feminism. That the only reason you talk about trans women in feminism is because they're women and not because you see autonomy over your gender or sex and the protection of trans people as important to feminism.

[butch-king-frankenstein]

obviously it's stupid and exhausting when people try and argue that you can never try to help someone figure out they're trans because of the "egg prime directive", but I do agree with them on one principle, which is that trying to tell somebody else what they are is just kind of rude? like, if I had a male friend who was suffering for reasons that were clearly related to gender, I think it would be incomprehensibly cruel of me not to tell him "there are other options for you, you can always live your live in a way that makes you happier, you should give some thought as to what that would look like," but I would never tell him "You Are A Trans Woman"--not because I hate trans women and want to keep them closeted, but because it would be presumptuous of me to assign him a particular identity based on my own assumptions, no matter what those assumptions are

[butch-king-frankenstein]

...and also because there are things you're allowed to be other than a Man or a Woman but I guess we're not allowed to talk about that anymore

[noelle-ism]

This works on the herculean assumption (some would say almost strawwom- sorry, strawman-esque assumption, dont wanna assume) that:

A. A majority of trans women are going up to people and telling them "You're actually a woman, you just don't know it yet", and

B. Those trans women are the only one doing such things

Which is funny because if you think about it for a second... like. No. It's blatantly the exact opposite.

I'd say most trans women (and trans people in eneral) are experts on knowing not to seriously tell people what gender they are - they had to deal with that bullshit all their life!

But I guess you'd have to know or interact with trans women - or, indeed, trans people in general - to be aware of that, so.

[butch-king-frankenstein]

I am a transfem nonbinary person. Once I started publicly presenting and identifying that way, the most common invalidators of my identity have been, by a wide margin, trans women who think that I'm Actually A Woman and that one day I'll have the courage to accept that. These experiences have been hurtful to me, even though I'm aware that those women were well-intentioned. It would be nice if people could stop trying to tell me that my lived experiences are fake, though

[mikumiotics]

So are you just like, not counting all the transphobic pushback from cis people invalidating your identity, or do you really live in some kind of utopian community where everyone is super accepting and accomodating of transfem non-binary people? Except for those stupid trans women of course.

[butch-king-frankenstein]

There's certainly a lot more trans women than cis people invalidating my identity at this exact moment in time, for sure

[mikumiotics]

???? How am I invalidating your identity? I'm saying your experience, of having trans women being the main perpetrators of harassment/invalidation regarding your gender, is so far from the norm and so completely novel that extrapolating anything about "trans women making egg jokes" from it is a bad idea.

[butch-king-frankenstein]

I think that if you spoke to more transfem nonbinary people who aren't interested in aligning with womanhood, they'd tell you the same thing I'm telling you. And I think they'd also acknowledge that being forced into one of the Man/Woman boxes by some dipshit cis person has a different feel to it than being told by someone in your own community that they understand your identity and experiences more than you do. We don't expect cis people to know better than that.

[transgender-dumpster-princess]

For me a big part of “sex work is work” is that sex work should be socially viewed as totally legitimate work. I should be able to put sex work on my resume. I should be able to lean on the skills and knowledge I gain in this field and have that experience be respected. Right now I have a gap in my resume. But I’m also consistently doing advertising, social media management, inventory, merchandising, customer service, upselling!!! I’m working self directed, I’m solely responsible for every aspect of my business. I deserve respect, fuck.

[aropride]

12 years old: i was so cringe when i was nine, i'm super mature now though

15 years old: i was so cringe when i was twelve, i'm super mature now though. i'm a totally different person. i'm basically an adult

18 years old: i was so. (trying to be nicer to myself) fifteen. when i was fifteen. i wasn't an adult even a little back then. i'm an adult now though of course

21 years old: i was so newborn fawn taking its first steps when i was 18. i wasn't an adult at 18 i'm barely even an adult now tbh

23 years old: i was so. hey wait the others have all gone up in increments of three why'd it change

23 years old: because i'm still 23 so i can't speak to that experience yet

23 years old: do you think anything will magically change in the next few months to the point where you can't possibly imagine how you'll feel at 24

23 years old: i mean you never know. anything can happen. they're letting people born in 2002 turn 24, for instance

the mold spores in my house speaking to me telepathically: yeah that's perfect now hit post

[race-bait]

Most Black folks in the US have a deeply painful racial story having to do with interactions with white "friends," including me.

I had a unique experience of going to very diverse schools my entire life, but my family moved out to a mostly white suburb when I was around 11 or 12 years old. So I had friends of all kinds of different backgrounds at school, but my neighborhood friends were almost entirely white. Which was mostly fine as a kid. I even had two of these friends as groomsmen in my wedding.

Things changed shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin. This is when I started getting more vocal online about racism, anti-Blackness, and the injustices I was observing and grieving throughout the country. It didn't take long at all for the friends from this group to go from uncomfortable, to combative, and then to all blocking me on social media. Once I started talking about race too much, they abandoned me by walking out of my life, which was incredibly painful. These were all very nice, generous, and kind people in every other context of their lives. But something about their racial identity development caused them to turn on me immediately once my voice around race became uncomfortable for them.

Those experiences, along with countless others I've had in my life from white peers, white educators, white store employees, and more, have taught me to be very careful about trusting white folks. Because I have been burned in so many ways in my life.

The key to not unintentionally becoming like this, so wrapped up in your subconscious programming of whiteness and white supremacy that you actively hurt people of color, is to do your inner identity work.

[yookay-times]

[clevery-guyy]

[thoughtcascades]

not to be dramatic but i need a nap, a hug, 20k in cash, and to disappear for 3 months

[our-queer-experience]

“hahaha the power of fandoms” they almost had to destroy bronze age remains instead because you people can’t grow up and let a mediocre child’s series go

[our-queer-experience]

harry potter fans are some of the most obnoxious people on planet earth who refuse to believe they have any control over the real world, which is why instead of joining activist groups they just infantilize themselves online while contributing to the destruction of trans people’s lives in the uk and almost bulldozing real pieces of history because of a made up grave for a slave who’s species supposedly loved slavery