i've spent 10+ years in therapy and still there's this ever-present fear or tension or stress during every single social interaction, i'm convinced the only way to get rid of it is with EMDR
it's like the inverse of a trauma response. or a trauma response but positive. mania?
i've called this state "being Eshen" for lack of a better way of describing it.
maybe i shouldn't interrogate my emotions so much. just let it be.
but... i want to feel like this more. this feels like the most true, real, raw version of myself.
how do i "Be Myself"?
Eshen please help me. Frank please help Eshen.
maybe it isn't fair to expect so much of you but you're the smartest one here and the only one that seems to understand what's going on. please help me Frank i love you.
From the UGLY DEATH Collector's Edition USB Drive (Which you can still purchase on adarook.com in limited supply)
"i wrote this song in june of 2018 just after i'd moved across the country from vancouver to montreal, shortly before i settled in toronto. i had almost no money and i'd had to get rid of most of my belongings and mail the rest of them to montreal after getting scammed by a moving company, and i was living in the kitchen of the only friend i had in montreal at the time, with a couple cardboard boxes as my desk set up next to the fridge. i finished "shed blood" living there and wrote this song and "bloom" by black dresses about some of the things i was feeling at the time.
right before moving, all my vancouver roommates had moved out at the same time, so i'd decided to just move to the east coast on a whim to make it easier to work on new black dresses material, since WASTEISOLATION had been doing well online since its release that april. i was feeling kind of unstoppable from pulling off such a big move on such short notice, though a lot of scary things also happened around this time, so it was kind of a whirlwind of really chaotic emotions. some of the strongest positive and negative feelings i'd ever felt all kind of hit me at once around this time and i think these lyrics kind of reflect that - i wanted to run with the chaos and use it as best i could, leverage it, become this weird cringey feminine night creature lol. i feel p distanced from that vibe now but at the time it was really important to me and i'm glad to have artifacts that represent it. kind of macy rodman by way of HEALTH "DEATH MAGIC" or something. tangentially, i think i sketched out the instrumental for black dresses "in my mouth" around this time too, which was directly inspired by macy rodman's "she will be a relic one day".
i still kind of prefer some of the lyrics to this version and wish i hadn't toned them down for the final one, even though i think they ended up more polished in the end. this song was kind of the start of me trying to be more confrontational in my solo work so it felt appropriate to rework it as the closer for UGLY DEATH, kind of summing up and reflecting on a lot of the growth i'd experienced in the 4 years between the demo and the final version coming out, as well as a lot of the themes on the rest of the album.
the original song didnt really have a name and was just titled "wants.mp3". early on i pitched it as a black dresses song but it didn't end up working out, i think partly because it was already pretty complete and there wasn't much room for additional collaboration. the vibe also just wasn't quite in line with the band's 2019/late 2018 era in hindsight."
Hello! I'm sorry if this is worded weirdly but, On your site i only seen pictures taken specifically of the merch itself for Ada Rooks album and what interests me is the art on it, i was curious whenever you still had the original pieces for it.
The full album art is on my pic page, but maybe you mean the side images for the cassette tape?
Let's Talk About Security Culture: Why Keeping Secrets is Cool and Sexy
It's a natural impulse -- if you love crime -- to want to talk about how great it is. And if you hate America, it's only natural to want to share your dreams for its future with the rest of tumblr dot com. It can feel brave and transgressive. And there is a drive to share your soul with the world at the heart of social media. Surely I should be posting the most concrete implications of my politics, right? This is the poster's curse.
Security Culture refers to a set of "best practices" developed over the past several decades, largely (in a US context) coming out of radical environmental groups as they faced intense state repression, infiltration and entrapment. If you're not familiar, there's some fascinating crimethinc write ups to give you a window into that world:
A security culture is a set of customs shared by a community whose members may be targeted by the government, designed to minimize risk. Hav
For as long as anyone can remember, the FBI has infiltrated radical communities in hopes of framing people on criminal charges. This has int
Much of it boils down to: don't talk about crimes, past or forthcoming with people who don't need to know about them, and be mindful of the possibility of surveillance and infiltration. And, we can support each other as a community in minimizing risks, with an eye towards enabling bold action rather than getting bogged down in fears and anxieties. The guidelines that make sense for AG-based trouble-makers are different from the guidelines that make sense for posters, but plenty of common principles apply. To speak briefly to our position here as posters:
First, it bears saying that long term anonymity is extremely nearly impossible to maintain. Unless you've never accessed Tumblr without a vpn, and avoided connections with other ppl who can be associated with you/your location, and never shared pictures without scrubbing metadata, and a bunch of other 100% consistent steps, it's trivial for the state to know who you are.
Second, just because something isn't actively being prosecuted now doesn't mean it can't be prosecuted later. The priorities of the state change and a shift in power towards the right or a growth in radical action from the left can suddenly make it a priority to destroy anarchist networks or just find a few ppl to prosecute as examples (who probably weren't that plugged into larger networks before getting arrested. Advocating for specific anti-government crimes or declarations of intent to commit such crimes are likely prosecutable even if charges don't stick they're an easy vector for legal harassment.
Third, it's worth thinking about heat as separate from prosecutability. There are modes of engagement that may not be directly criminalized but signal that you are someone worth watching. Some people choose to be public in ways that make heat unavoidable. But it's worth noting that heat isn't strictly individualized, that it persists over time but also is going to shrink over time.
It's easy on here, ime, to see yourself as a proud member of the crime fandom but not much of a content creator. And it's easy to feel like you've generated an amount of heat where you're locked into that role. But heat you generated 10 years ago is probably pretty well gone. Heat you generated 5 years ago has faded substantially. It's worth thinking about how the world might shift in the coming years and what doors you want to keep open.
The non-individualized nature of heat also means that leaning into the spiciest of anti-state positions will make it a bad idea for people who are acting out those positions end up tied to you. Loudly talking about how "more people should be doing [X/Y/Z]" unfortunately sets you up to remain distant from people who might be doing or thinking about doing such things.
Which brings me back to: keeping secrets is sexy. Not spelling everything out builds intrigue. You can lay out a theoretical position and leave working out the practical implications of that as an exercise for the reader. There's value in opacity. The poster's curse and the drive to confess are extremely convenient for the state, but we can resist them. We can hold dreams in our hearts that we refuse to offer up to the posting spectacle.
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