The Works

[ilya-rozanovs]

[incorrectfalloutboyquotes]

Fall Out Boy as John Mulaney Quotes

[fandomsandfangirlsandfeelsohmy]

honestly why does Mr. Darcy, a man from the late 1700s and early 1800s, understand that an independent female is an awesome thing more than people from 2017? also he respects her decision to reject him?

[kaldannan]

Because a woman wrote him.

[iraffiruse]

[endangered-justice-seeker]

this is so important

[stopwhitepeopleforever]

Casual reminder I’m still talking my shit just on another platform! Happy Holidays!

[afrodesiacworldwide]

Wow

[ojalla]

she’s back and she’s better

[sauvamente]

Ayyye she out here

[4lung]

JEEZ THIS KID RIPS

[mews]

website | patreon

[thegiftedoneishere]

It’s bigger than football...he’s bigger than football.

[lovesxars-blog]

✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊

[melinda-january]

👏👏👏👏👏👏

[lavitabella87]

I’m reblogging this every time I see it. 

[onlyblackgirl]

white people are so pressed he got this cover

[theeefoxxx]

This man is everything!

[bitchwhoyoukiddin]

Side note read other places: He wouldn’t wear anything in this shoot that wasn’t designed by a black person or a woman.

[hubblegleeflower]

Like really, what a goddamn role model. From every angle.

[leander-ligo]

I changed my Grindr profile pic to a selfie I took with my brother’s bearded dragon and it led to possibly the best conversation I’ve ever had on Grindr

[jewishpangolin]

This is the purest thing

[aurevoir-mes-amis-deactivated20]

[rhyse]

When I was at the lowest spot in my depression I locked myself in my bedroom for three days and lied to everyone I knew. I called in sick to work. I told my mom I was seeing a doctor. I told my friends I was busy. I had successfully fooled everyone who loved me that I was making healthy changes and getting better. I wasn’t, but it was so much easier to hide and pretend that I was than to actually go outside and do something. 

Depression is weird. I feel like a lot of people think depression means being sad and crying all the time but it’s the exact opposite. Depression, for me at least, was the complete and utter lack of emotion. I was so apathetic to everything that I couldn’t care if I wanted to. Sometimes I would work myself up to tears by thinking about how fucking miserable and pathetic I was, but almost as quickly as they came I was back to “what’s the point?”

Same with happiness. I could watch the cutest cat video on the whole internet and I would smile and laugh and the alarm in my brain would start screaming KITTEN ALERT EVERYBODY FREAK OUT

but as soon as it was over the power would go out and the little workers inside my head would take a vacation to the brain of someone who could sustain an emotion for longer than the average youtube video.

So there I am, laying in bed, my entire body recoiling in horror at the pitiful excuse of the mind that it’s been permanently tethered to. I start to wonder if things will ever change or if I’ll just be like this forever. I become vaguely suicidal. I don’t really want to end my life, but I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of me suddenly ceasing to exist. So I hide in bed all day, every day, for as long as I can manage.

I wait for something. Anything. A satellite to fall through my roof and crush me in my sleep. An earthquake to part my street from the avenue that crosses it and swallow my house to the middle of Earth’s giant rumbly belly. A friend to kick down my door and drag me to the hospital or mental institution or maybe a secret underground lab where the government keeps people who don’t have feelings anymore. 

Fortunately, none of that happens. 

My friends eventually catch on to my shenanigans and despite their best efforts, are useless. They would try to get me out of the house almost daily but I would make up some bullshit excuse to get out of it.

Eventually, they stop trying to help me, and even though they weren’t successful before, their lack of empathy becomes my new favorite excuse.

It wasn’t their fault, of course. It was mine. They had done everything they could and I was not ready or able or willing to cooperate. Did I understand that at the time? No fucking way. Why I would take responsibility for my problems when I could just blame them on someone else?

In the early stages of my depression I would sometimes compare my affliction to The World’s Worst Roller Coaster!™

I knew that eventually I would get to the top, the ride being so emotionally exhausting that I would simply be ‘okay’ enough to not throw myself over the railing and ruin some random passerby’s day. I would instead begin the long and weary trek down the 312 steps towards sanity. 

But I never reached the top.

In fact, my ascent to the peak of the coaster was so slow that renovations had already begun and construction on the rest of the track had started while I was still onboard. Nobody cared to notify me or maybe slam the big red button that says “HEY THERE’S SOME ASSHOLE STILL ON THE RIDE!”

As my depression continued, The World’s Worst Roller Coaster!™ slowly began to morph into an episode of The World’s Deadliest Train Crashes!®.

My train car began to pick up speed along the newly appointed rails. I passed through tunnels and forests and cold mountain ranges but no cities or towns or warm inviting parties filled with people I wanted to see or be around. My train was on a journey to God knows where, but it was going too fast for me to hop off or for anyone to hop on and help me. 

I tried to make the best of my train ride by keeping myself busy (in my own solitary one-person train car, of course) but it only made me more lonely and depressed. No matter how many video games, books, movies, or internet memes I devoured I still couldn’t feel like I was doing anything right.

Eventually I realized my train wasn’t taking me anywhere good. 

I knew I still had plenty of time before I needed to start worrying, but it was hard for me to accept the fact that the light at the end of my tunnel was actually a fallen-apart rickety wooden bridge over a 200 foot drop into freezing polar bear infested waters. I figured I would just hold on as tight as I could and pray I would survive the fiery plunge off the bridge and that maybe, just maybe, someone would pull my shivering body out of the ice-water. 

You see, I had no desire to change anything. I was ready to ride my stupid train right to my death. I just didn’t care enough to save myself.

While riding my train, I spoke to a friend. She told me that I was running out of track and that she was afraid. She began to cry and told me that she wanted nothing more than for me to get off the train. She wanted me to fix my stupid brain and convince the little workers to ditch their vacation plans and come back home. She wanted me to watch cat videos that would make me laugh so hard my eyes would roll back into my head and my spine would constrict into the letter R. She wanted me to get back to blogging the way I had in the past and use it to build a name, and possibly a career, for myself. She wanted me to find love in someone who loved me back, rather than the useless people I had spent the last year chasing to no avail. She wanted the best for me. She wanted me to be good. She offered to do anything she could to make me that way.

This person had so much love for me that she was willing to do anything to help me.

I snapped.

I realized I wasn’t ready to let go. 

I began to cry. I began to cry in a way that I hadn’t cried in months. I felt genuine emotion and I wanted to keep feeling it. I used to hate crying, but after weeks and months of indifference and pure concentrated lethargy, the tears felt like the best thing ever. Each salty glob was a sigh of relief. All the emotions I had repressed were leaking down my face and I didn’t know if I should smile or laugh or sob loudly. So I did all three.

I stood up in my train car and leaned over the side. I could see the bridge out at the end and I knew it was now or never. I closed my eyes and jumped feet first.

I did it! I got off the train! I didn’t explode into tiny little pieces and get devoured by polar bears! I ran back to my friend and I thanked her for saving me. 

“I didn’t do anything, Rhyse. You made the decision. You got off the train.”

I was aware that I wasn’t right the whole time, but I was perfectly content to just ride it out, even though I knew it wasn’t going to end well. I had spent so long not feeling anything that I believed the first active choice I had made was all due to someone else. But it was me all along. I had made the first step to getting better.

Now I have a long walk back to civilization. My path won’t be easy. It will be a slow and arduous journey peppered with therapists, medication, and return-to-work forms, but I am ready to try, and that’s already an enormous development from the way I’ve been.

I know it’s probably weird to be reading this on my blog, especially considering this is about as much an actual ‘blog’ as cheese slices are actual cheese, but I felt it was extremely important to share my story with people who might be going through the same thing. 

I am not cured of my depression and I won’t pretend that I’m perfectly okay now, but I am ready to start getting better. Knowing you’re not alone is huge. Depression weakens people by isolating them from the ones they love. Know this, if you are feeling like I felt, you are not alone. Reach out to the people who surround you, you never know who will be there to catch you.

[breakingugly]

I’ve never had something convey what depression is like more clearly than this

[stability]

[wilwheaton]

“You have the burden of proof backwards when you insist that other people need to prove you wrong. You made the claim, therefore you are responsible for providing evidence to support the claim. No one is obligated to discredit the claim or take it seriously until you have provided evidence.”

[denisvileneuve]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: adulthood, a saga.

[wizzardhat]

these ads are pure fucking gold i haven’t stopped laughing for at least 7 minutes

[pr1nceshawn]

Clever Illustrations by Nacho Diaz

[fugayyyku]

This was all very cute except the fucking ice melting on earth in the hour glass it’s completely chilling and we’re all going to die

[did-you-know]

In 2010, famous stoner Cheech Marin beat Anderson Cooper (Yale graduate) and Aisha Tyler (Dartmouth graduate) at Celebrity Jeopardy. He won with a score of $10,200, while the other two tied for 2nd with $0. 

“He not only beat me, he crushed me.” ~Cooper

Source

[thatadult]

The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…

[kaylapocalypse-deactivated20201]

My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”

[redmagus77]

“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.” http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.

But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.

[14kgoldupgraded]

“But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.”

[feminismandmedia]

@half-crazedauthor

[grison-in-labs]

It is worth noting that, in fact, the BBC replicated this experiment in 2001 with very different results. Instead of recruiting volunteers for a psychological study of prison life, they advertised the experiment: 

“It asked ‘Do you really know yourself’ and asked for men to take part in a social science experiment to be shown on TV. It warned that the research would be a challenge and involve ‘hardship, hunger, solitude, anger’.

In the case of the BBC Prison Experiment, the mock prison did not devolve into the torturous, abusive hellishness of the Stanford Prison Experiment–even though the experimenters very deliberately attempted to create conditions that would destroy cohesion among the prisoners and encourage authoritarian behavior from the guards. Prisoners were told that they might be able to be promoted to guardhood in an effort to keep them divided, shaved upon entry to the prison, and the guards were encouraged to create the rules of the prison and enforce them in any way they saw fit. 

It’s important to note that one of the very first things the experimenters noted was that the guards were, at the very outset, uneasy about the status differences between themselves and the prisoners and conscious of their power. 

Because food–both quantity and quality–were very salient and powerful status treatment differences in the prison, there was almost immediately a showdown over food. (Prisoners were fed much, much smaller and worse-tasting food than the guards, and indeed prisoners were made to serve the guards their meals and watch them eat in part so everyone would be aware of these status issues.) 

The guards almost immediately felt guilty and attempted to share their sausages with the prisoners by giving them the guards’ leftovers… and the prisoners immediately go “not until we consult with the other prisoners,” and then collectively decide to refuse absolutely to take small rewards from guards in lieu of the right to good food. 

Guards tried repeatedly throughout the study to get prisoners to see them as basically equal, bar the circumstances of their current positions; prisoners instead repeatedly pointed out the actual circumstances of their current situation placed them at very different power levels indeed and insisted that guards actually change the system in order to make the conditions fair and equal. In general, prisoners quickly and collectively exploited the guards’ shame at the unequal conditions in order to receive fair treatment. 

At this point, out of curiosity, the experimenters introduced a new prisoner into the system, one who had been trained as a trades unionist… 

….and this unionist prisoner quickly chose to approach a disaffected guard, empathize with his unhappiness, and turn the blame for the situation at the unequal and unfair conditions set in the prison. Those conditions, of course, were set not by the guards–they were set by the experimenters. The very first thing, then, that this unionist does is build bridges to unify all the people in the prison. 

Prisoners steal the guards’ keys; guards choose instead of “cracking down” or punishing the prisoners to ask politely for the prisoners to help them find the keys, and cheerfully accept them when provided. This gives prisoners leverage for a negotiation, which is then deftly picked up by the experienced negotiator (although not without some pushback from another charismatic and decisive prisoner). 

Here’s what the negotiator had to say:

Negotiations begin. pDM outlines the forum proposal. One of the Guards points out that the Prisoners are asking to be rewarded for stealing the keys. pDM responds by outlining a stark choice. Certainly the Guards can refuse to accept his plan, but the alternative is a return to conflict: “It’ll not be the keys tomorrow, it’ll be something else. It’s a game. All I’m saying is that there is a way to resolve that game”.

pDM is confident. He knows he speaks for the Prisoners. The Guards, even in their own mess, are despondent. They know that they can’t handle the Prisoners. And so they accept the new order. Even if they have given up much of their power, at least this system might work and offer them some respite:

gTM: I’m in high spirits after that. gBG: It actually went alright. This geezer is alright. We can all deal          with him.

At this point, experimenters withdrew the negotiator to see what would happen to the egalitarian vision he set out. As it turned out, the prisoners peacefully overthrew the rule of guards (by, effectively, mounting a sitdown protest in the guard’s sanctuary) and decided instead to organize an egalitarian commune for the remainder of the experiment. 

so OP’s really not that far off the mark! 

[wetwareproblem]

So literally the only thing the Stanford experiment proved is “all cops are bastards,” and the followup demonstrated that, in the absence of bastards, socialism works?

[wilwheaton]

I know you saw this wall of text and scrolled right past it, but I’m sharing it because this is so interesting and raises issues that we don’t think about enough. A lot of you are the same age as my kids, and you’re going to be in charge of the world that I’m an old man in, and I really hope you’ll study and learn from things like this. So what I’m saying is, I know it’s a long read, but go read it, anyway. You’ll gain emotional and intellectual experience points.