Marble system/mostly Lucy, 28, transfem, Mix of specific genders and attractions across different members of the system. This description is a courtesy, we don't owe anyone information about ourselves.
walter: that's awesome Skyler I'm glad we decided to have an open marriage so you can find comfort in other people while I focus on my thriving meth business. say hi to Ted for me
not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally
big fan of characters who have it all under control when theyre put in situations but no idea how to be like a regular guy doing regular stuff when all is said and done.
Adult children of addicts. I had a two-panel comic about the League of Adult Superhero Children of Addicts where they’re all laying around their secret base or failing at simple tasks until the crisis alert comes on and they’re all suddenly hyper-capable heroes again
there is strong evidence to suggest, and I certainly believe, that c-ptsd causes an adaptation to long term, ongoing stress by compensating with chronic cortisol underproduction, leading to an endocrine disorder where you're only getting enough stress hormones to be functional when your house is burning down. this is why a lot of us only feel normal, or good even, when dealing with some sort of emergency.
the problem with looking for this function of the endocrine system in the scientific literature is that PTSD and CPTSD still arent reliably clinically separated even though they have very different symptomology, and people with one-time-incident PTSD don't tend to show the endocrine damage. so studies on "people with PTSD and their cortisol levels" show inconsistent results.
this study from 2018 notes that the cortisol in female subjects and subjects who had PTSD from sexual and domestic assaul--two groups whose PTSD is almost always C-PTSD rather than short term, like natural disaster or combat trauma--was significantly lower than in combat veterans, illustrating my point without apparently knowing or speculating on the reason behind it.
this is an extremely useful adaptation because it restores stress hormone homeostasis (balance) to a person who is trapped in a nightmare situation. the problem is that it also causes you to start feeling "worse" as soon as you are no longer in a crisis. this can cause malfunctions of your "gut check" processes because sometimes, for some people, you feel better when you're actively in danger, a thing thats been observed by researchers and emergency workers who work with domestic violence situations and adult victims of childhood trauma for a century, and makes a lot of the "trust your body" type advice actively counterproductive.
minor effects include reinforcing the ADHD tendency to leave everything until the last minute because you know and have learned you literally cannot do it unless it's an emergency, but it also creates people like my aunt who very observably creates emergencies for herself through various little choices like intentionally ignoring her check engine light because she has been so dysfunctional for so long that she can't operate at all unless she's trying to outrun falling dominoes.
anyway I think low dose corticosteroid treatment will probably be officially discovered as a treatment for C-PTSD within the next five years and be clinically applied at some point after that. one of the discouraging things about this process is that the endocrine system doesn't seem to adapt to relative safety very quickly or at all for many people, including myself. either it's impossible for the affected person to achieve the level of security required to actually readjust and small stressors keep signaling to the body to maintain the incorrect stress responses (common for people who are stuck in poverty by disability or mental illness), or theyre like my aunt and either consciously or unconsciously maintain their own emergencies to stay on an even keel.
cortisol is also necessary for trauma recovery. there have been studies where patients in the ER who were dosed with additional cortisol following traumatic incidents like fires and car wrecks were less likely to develop PTSD in the following months than the control subjects. if you're constantly dealing with emergencies without an emergency-level cortisol dump, yeah sure you'll be very calm and functional during the emergency for everyone, but maybe you're not getting enough cortisol to avoid developing even more PTSD, and certainly not enough to control the related inflammatory processes. this could be contributing to the increased incidence of inflammatory chronic illness in C-PTSD patients.
Discussion of more or less cortisol in C-PTSD and PTSD might be hard to follow if you're not a big nerd but here's a passage from this 2024 paper that sort of outlines the issues:
Cortisol findings in PTSD are not as clear cut as they may appear at first glance. As nicely reviewed in (Sbisa et al., 2023), which discussed 17 studies reporting cortisol findings, alterations in cortisol and HPA activity have been reported, but directionality of these alterations is not clear cut. 9 of these studies showed decreased cortisol in PTSD, 6 showed no significant difference, 1 showed elevated cortisol, and 1 showed mixed results when compared to controls (Sbisa et al., 2023).
For example, one study showed decreased cortisol predicted PTSD symptom severity at 6 weeks and 6 months post trauma (Mouthaan et al., 2014). Conversely, Walsh and colleagues found elevated cortisol measured within 72 h of rape correlated with increased PTSD symptoms at a 6 week follow up, but only in those without a prior history of assault (Walsh et al., 2013). It is important to note that those with a prior history of assault had lower cortisol at the 72-h mark when compared to those without a history of prior assault (Walsh et al., 2013). Thus, many studies on cortisol in PTSD have conflicting results.
so as a good illustration of the problems happening in research with this issue right now, the researchers are aware that "PTSD" as a blanket diagnosis is an issue but still don't seem to be separating patient groups into "people who got PTSD from a single incident of trauma or a limited traumatic exposure to unusual circumstances (regular PTSD, like combat or natural disaster survivors)" vs "people who got PTSD from twenty years of consistent abuse in a dysfunctional household or were in an abusive relationship for long enough that it became normalized (C-PTSD)". the phrase I emphasized in the quoted passage notes that a history of trauma predicts lower cortisol levels in the patients. it was observed that most people who had been traumatized before responded with low cortisol to new trauma, in other words. people who were having their first traumatic experience had high cortisol. this makes sense if you think of the body responding to trauma as either "what the fuck is going on" vs "ah lads not again".
but even though this paper came out in 2024 it doesn't use the term "C-PTSD". even though researchers in general are aware of C-PTSD, it doesn't seem to have become formally accepted into research frameworks yet so you have a million papers going "a lot of these trauma victims have low cortisol but others have high cortisol, what gives", which is very frustrating, but I'm not a researcher and I know there are various institutional processes and rules that make stuff like this happen. all patients with post traumatic syndromes are still being treated as if combat trauma in military personnel and a domestic violence survivor should have exactly the same symptoms and exactly the same response to treatment, which isn't the case. eventually this will get figured out but right now it is confusing the issue whenever you try to look up research about it.
anyway this is yet another reason all the Tiktok wellness shit about "decreasing cortisol" and using "stress hormones" as a bogeyman is complete bullshit. many, maybe most people who are trying to recover from trauma need MORE "stress hormones", not less
me personally, I have found that just becoming aware that this was happening to me was very helpful. if I know I am enjoying a crisis situation and feel healthier specifically because something is going wrong in my brain, and not because it is objectively good to be in crisis, or objectively good and correct to be abused or exploited, that's a useful calibration for me. it allows me to explain my seemingly contradictory feelings and also to understand that the usual "trust your body" advice is completely useless to me and can be safely ignored. actually I did listen to my body, and my body is telling me to run into the nearest burning building so I can feel normal for once.
the ability to handle emergencies calmly and with superhuman focus is a skill that is extremely useful to everyone involved in the emergency. I owe it my life, and other people probably also owe my dysfunctional HPA axis their life. this is kind of a bummer but does neatly illustrate how humans function as a group of contributing individuals to overall survival, and how adaptations like this not only benefit the victim but also the people around them as they are able to cooly organize a crisis or not panic when life threatening emergencies occur. kind of neat to think about
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
honestly tho if joanne eats it in the next five to ten years the cultural reaction is going to be insufferable. everyone who has barely been able to hide their rabid obsession with the racist dogshit books is going to go “oh cool i can openly be into h*rry p*tter again” and any criticism of this stance will become grounds for mass harassment.
so i’m gonna put it out there ahead of time.
hp should be eradicated from cultural significance forever. everything that woman has done completely tarnishes whatever legacy may exist for them and the tangible damage she has done to trans people both legally and in cultural discussions enormously outweighs whatever joy the books might have personally given someone. we are not waiting for her to no longer profit from the ip or for her direct ability to cause harm to cease. that shit is done forever. if you go back to openly celebrating those works, you have less moral backbone than pudding.
I was gonna say something about maybe in 50 years I'll let ya'll talk about hp with the same kind of disclaimers and awareness reasonable people talk about Lovecraft's works. "she was a horrifically bigoted person and it shows in her works if you pay attention, but she did play a role in popularizing a genre so we should analyze the genre tropes and how they trace back"
But honestly I get suspicious of anyone who gets a little to eager talking about Lovecraft and that prick at lived and died in relative obscurity, the amount of fame and influence Rowling has had and thus the suffering her hatred has caused is magnitudes greater than lovecraft so take how carful you should be when dealing with the writings of racist who died a nobody almost a hundred years ago and consider how strongly that applies here if you really think you have something to say about the wizard school books
I can't believe we live in a world where there's an AI company unironically called "Palantir," and it isn't a parody. It's a real thing. I remember seeing a picture of an advertisement on here and thinking, "This HAS to be a joke. This is too on-the-nose to be real. They wouldn't honestly name an AI company Palantir, after the Seeing Stones from Lord of the Rings that are supposed to offer knowledge, but famously also might be feeding you misinformation from evil sources because 'we do not know who else may be watching.'" But then here I am listening to the BBC News discussing why the CEO of Palantir just published a Manifesto that sounds like it was written by a supervillain.
I could list off moments throughout my life that have gradually pushed me further and further left, but genuinely it does come back to that qoute "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people." like that really is the core of it.
I don't even mean empathy gods know I have very little of that, I'm rarely ever truly bothered or upset by the atrocities of the world but I still would rather strive for a world where such suffering doesn't happen.
I've never read Homestuck but there's a type of media that I call "a Homestuck" and I think it's a useful categorization. The main criteria are:
long enough that the time investment is a serious barrier to entry
irrevocably changes your personality
brings something genuinely unique to the table. there is no real substitute for reading/playing/watching it in its entirety
Fate/Stay Night is a Homestuck. Worm is a Homestuck. When They Cry is a Homestuck.
Undertale has cultural impact similar to a Homestuck at first glance, but the fact that it's a pretty short and accessible game means that you don't get the particular mix of sunk cost fallacy and an intimate experience with a piece of media that results in you needing to connect with others who have already put in the time investment. You can buy your friends Undertale and expect them to play it if they're not too busy; telling a friend to read Homestuck is giving them a quest that, if accepted, will spark an odyssey. to read someone's Homestuck is an act of love without true equivalent.
This would make one piece a homestuck, and as a one piece fan dating two homestuck fans that feels regrettably accurate based on mutual bewilderment of trying to explain lore to each other.
"Parasocial" getting collapsed into "thinks the e-celeb is your personal friend" is understandable given how common that particular version of it is, but there are definitely a lot of subtle and really common ways to be parasocial out there that go unnoticed while doing harm, such as looking at the theming of someone's online presence and assuming they must be Like That offline too.
Gotta always keep in mind that chances are the blog that only posts about Pokemon or whatever is run by a person who has a bunch of different interests offline and just uses the blog as their designated outlet for that one interest.
You look at a blog that's just endless posts about Pikachu, and conclude that the person running it is Obsessed With Pikachu.
The person running the blog logs on for half an hour sometimes, queues up a bunch of Pikachu posts, and then logs off. Doesn't even think about Pikachu outside that half hour.
You're not demonstrating the social skills you think you are when you come into the notes declaring that you're unable to imagine someone adapting their behavior to the social context of Being On Tumblr btw
You're actually demonstrating a very "the teacher lives at school" understanding of posts on the internet
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