Where did I see this again?

What started out as a place for me to put things is maybe becoming a place where I can try to say things. Asexual, quoiromantic (I think?), polyamorous, cis woman, kinky, socially anxious, neuroatypical in ways I'm still working out, theist, social justice. I have a lot of thoughts. Someday, I want to be brave enough to put voice to them. Until then, step by step and stone by stone. My best to everyone on their own journeys. [At the moment, this has kind of mostly become my blog to interact with rationalists. Um, I guess that's a thing then.] I totally like talking to people and people who might want to message me are encouraged to totally do so! “aliens who are forbidden to make contact with me and ascertain my preferences, please do not do anything to me, including things you’re very confident I would prefer”

[femmenietzsche]

Really wish there were more groups of sexual weirdos large enough to have a serious, sustained, visible presence as IRL communities, like furries or BDSM

[femmenietzsche]

a-k-a-l–t-y-n said: Foot fetisihists are almost as big

I’m sure there are more foot fetishists than furries, but they lack some essential ingredient to turn themselves into a community. I think feet are just too simple to become a lifestyle. Whereas with furries or kinksters, you can act out scenes, write stories, draw imaginative art, make the whole thing a real part of your identity. You can do that with feet, but only to a much lesser extent.

Also foot fetishists are one of the most gender imbalanced groups out there, which no doubt makes it even harder, since what would a bunch of (mostly) straight male foot fetishists get out of hanging out with each other?

[notebookundermydesk]

This is interesting, because there’s definitely more communities than that - 

off the top of my head there’s erotic hypnosis, ageplay (lots of nonsexual in here but to my knowledge the two tend to go to the same conventions and all), I think tickling fetish, and I don’t know if feederism has its own convention(s) atm but there’s definitely a community thing going on.

So the other bit is ‘visible’, which makes me wonder what the ingredient for that is.

(Also in my experience a lot of things that might otherwise be off on their own are currently being a part of the BDSM community moreso - the ones I listed definitely also cross into that too, to varying amounts, though also have their own stuff.)

Possibly that’s part of the reason, where for purposes of publicness it makes sense to a lot of people to just throw in with the BDSM community, since a lot of people are going to put ‘weird sex people’ in the same category anyway and there you have more pre-established stuff?

[etirabys]

I want there to be zero stigma about any sex stuff where all parties are consenting, but I admit this has a specific known cost in that I and other people who get off on fantasizing about & doing stigmatized stuff will run out of shameful things to kink on, and as society marches forward I want it to do a little plastic party horn dirge for us 

[etirabys]

argumate replied to your post: I want there to be zero stigma about any sex stuff…

fantasizing about noncon obviously, or just imagine stigmas for stuff that everyone is actually fine with

I feel like the latter doesn’t really work – it takes a lot of work to trick your brain into thinking something is badwrong without external social feedback.

The nice future should have sex stigma resorts where both attendees and hired actors pretend [thing] is shameful and have disgust reactions to it, and then you and your partner/s sneak around and get the illicit thrill of doing something forbidden.

Now I’m imagining trad reservations that reluctantly make money by taking in shame tourists who pay to be in an environment where people actually think incest etc is gross. It’s so much more convincing than a resort where you know they’re acting out the disgust reactions! Being exposed to a genuine taboo enhances the shame/fear thrill! the tourists shell out a lot of cash for this

[notebookundermydesk]

The resorts thing is an *amazing* idea, but also if you don't mind it this is totally a use case for hypnosis!

Like resorts this also has the feature that you can customize your stigmas better. With real stigmas you can really only work with the ones (and the framework) your society has, which might not suit you. If you get to pick them you can do so much more variety! Would you like to use stigmas of different historical society? Would you like to worldbuild your own society and then use their stigmas? you can!

...come to think if future develops some various tech this might also be a field where the experience can be improved.

[thatsbelievable]

Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and say to yourself, “In an alternate timeline, I’m probably the pilot of a werewolf robot, fighting crime on the moon.”

[notebookundermydesk]

Barbie® Rainbow Cove™ 7 Doll Gift Set | DPY37 | Barbie

Check out the Barbie® Rainbow Cove™ 7 Doll Gift Set (DPY37) at the official Barbie website. Explore the world of Barbie now!

brain: hey look, amenta dolls

[notebookundermydesk]

In which it took talking to my partner to make me notice that ‘sorting out stuff about where I want to in fact donate' is a prerequisite to the ‘how do I in fact donate’ problem, and not just like, another-question-also-happening like my brain had been categorizing it.

[honnibri]

Digital paintings.

[lokidokeyartichoki]

I found a company called “Frantic Meerkat” who makes journals whose sole purpose is to call me out

[hellenhighwater]

This is by the Mincing Mockingbird guy (of “I’d sell you to satan for one corn chip” and “The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math” fame) and you can buy them here

https://www.mincingmockingbird.com/collections/frantic-meerkat

[thought-i-to-myself]

Thirsty™️ Ann Walker

[programmerhumour]

break;

[mentalisttraceur]

Responding to things with ridicule and no substance is harmful for the world, because anyone can respond with ridicule no matter how wrong or right they are.

The more we treat ridicule as a socially acceptable response, the more advantage we give to bad ideas over good ones.

[signed-me-again]

And yet, “you’ve disrespected my existence so no I will not respect your opinion” is an important, even necessary, response to give over and over again to people who have espoused genocidal views.

[notebookundermydesk]

Also, anyone can in fact respond with anything. Or rather - people who are good at responding certain ways can respond those way to anything. Some people are good at rhetoric, some people are good at powerful passionate appeals, some people are good at sounding right and reasonable and convincing (unfortunately one category of people who often are good at this is in fact ‘abusers’). 

That doesn’t make them righter, and only permitting those kind of responses just advantages whoever happens to be good at those things, and disadvantages whoever needs other kinds of responses to push back against bad ideas. (And will in fact totally advantage bad ideas over good ones if people with bad ideas already have some advantage in that area for whatever reason).

The important question tends to be what the ridicule is rooted in, but the same is true for rhetoric and the like. Like, ridicule that boils down to ‘those people are Weird haha’ is a problem, but rhetoric that boils down to ‘Weird people are dangerous/should have less rights than Normal people/etc’ isn’t *less* of a problem (and in fact there’s harm it’s way better suited to doing).

(Things go a bit differently for arguments over facts, but in a sense that’s just another thing other things can be rooted in, and very few arguments are purely about facts anyway.)

[apprenticebard]

i keep wanting to write glowfic fanfic but can you IMAGINE how hard it would be to sort on ao3

[apprenticebard]

‘technically this is me shipping an AU version of duane from unsounded, interpreted specifically to match the character interpretation of my friend who plays duane sometimes (even though their interpretation is not exactly my own), with an AU version of an OC from an rp set on an uncontacted fan planet in the star trek universe, but in this one they’re living in an AU version of the republic of gilead from the handmaid’s tale, based on my other friend’s take in which gilead is still terrible but less dumb’

at this point i don’t even know what a canon is

[notebookundermydesk]

Glowfic has an ao3 fandom tag now! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Glowfic%20and%20Related%20Works

[notebookundermydesk]

Sometimes you can really use stopgaps to stop enough gaps that people can solve their remaining problems.

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/177496965776/is-it-ok-for-me-to-work-in-an-ineffective

[notebookundermydesk]

do you ever worry that your sad mixed-caste characters who didn't feel like they fit into their caste (e.g. askingalright) play into negative tropes and stereotypes surrounding mixed-race people?

Could you elaborate on that?

The answer to your direct question is ‘no that question never came to my mind’, but I’m not sure what more specifically you might be referring to?

(Also, did you possibly confuse my character with someone else? askingalright totally likes being green; peers and society weren’t always great and she’s had some other internal stuff, but she definitely does. And she isn’t particularly sad?)

I’m also a second generation immigrant, myself, so I think if anything I may have drawn a bit on that?

…Also I’m going to note that while to be clear I’m not mixed race and can’t speak to that, as a more general thing, while there’s definitely many tropes that are a problem, ‘plays into stereotypes’ is a statement I’d often be wary of? There’s definitely real problems it can point to, but it can also involve a kind of victim responsibling in some cases, or be used to attack portrayals of things that are in fact real and good to portray. And also it’s important to recognize differences between like, bad gross-stereotype stuff in media and properly recognizing-people-as-people representation of things that are totally real.

(To go with a possibly less charged example and a group I’m part of - ‘Russians drink vodka all the time’ is shallow-stereotype type thing (I feel like I’m lacking words here), but there’s totally real stuff about alcohol and Russian culture and history and stuff, and having characters drawing on that very valid and the opposite of a bad thing.)

[theunitofcaring]

restorative things

There are a bunch of people for whom bubble baths, scented candles, and chocolate is self-care. 

There are a bunch of people for whom early-morning yoga, vegetable smoothies, and aggressively minimalist redecorating is self-care.

There are a bunch of people for whom playing with kids is self-care, and a bunch of people for whom dressing up and going to a fancy restaurant where no kids are allowed is self-care, and a bunch of people for whom sleeping in late is self-care and a bunch of people for whom getting up early is self-care. 

Lately I’ve been moving from ‘yeah, humans are vast and varied’ to a sense that there’s a similar underlying thing in all of these cases.

I think something tends to be more restorative - to be an activity that leaves you more energized than you started it, more okay than when you started it - the more of these criteria it meets:

- restorative things are often things you associate with being prioritized, valued and valuable. This is why some people find chores restorative - it hits ‘valued and valuable’f or them - while other people find them draining - their association with doing chores is being incapable or not-good-enough or ordered-around,

- restorative things are usually things that don’t draw on the resources you feel constrained on - if you’re tired from being on your feet all day, running sure won’t do it, and if you’re lonely and isolated then bubble baths probably won’t help. Dong stuff that causes you anxiety won’t often be restorative.

- restorative things tend to fit into your understanding of what a good life for you looks like. early-morning yoga works for people who find it empowering to think of themselves as someone who does early-morning yoga. prayer and attending religious services tends to work for people who are like ‘my best self attends religious services’ and not so well for people ho are like ‘ugh I’m supposed to do that’ or ‘doing that just reminds me how much I disagree with my community about what my best self looks like’

- restorative things are pleasant in their own right. It’s astonishing how often this one gets passed-over. If you do not enjoy something - if the experience of doing it isn’t a good experience - then it’s really unlikely to be restorative. Making yourself do yoga when you find every minute awful will not be restorative. It might sometimes be valuable but it won’t be restorative. (Things that are unpleasant to start, but pleasant and rewarding once you’re doing them, can be restorative).

I think there are a couple takeaways from this framework. One is hopefully to make it easier to identify things that’ll be restorative for you. The second is that people attach a lot of moral valence to which activities other people find restorative - accusing people of being consumerist or selfish or lazy or privileged - and I’m hoping that there might be less of it if people are aware that the things that work for them won’t work for everyone. (Related to that,of course privilege plays a role in which things you experience as making you valued and valuable, and which things you conceive of as being part of your good life. So it’s a terrible idea to try to impose one version of ‘self-care’, like employers signing employees up for exercise programs in the name of self-care; people of a different class background get particularly screwed by this.)

[notebookundermydesk]

“to be an activity that leaves you more energized than you started it, more okay than when you started it” oh, ooh, useful definition thing!

And “if the experience of doing it isn’t a good experience” hm, so *not synonymous* with ‘is a good experience’, it’s like - something can be a good experience and not this thing. (Not that I thought otherwise but - helps me actually understand better, to hear explicitly and said etc.)

...now I’m trying to figure out if I’m like, actually missing this somehow, or some adjacent thing, or? In that - it’s not ringing bells as much as it seems it would be if I had a ‘oh yeah that thing’. (I mean, there’s many things I like! But as noted this is different...)

[theunitofcaring]

Does your employer know about your disabilities? How do you handle them in your workplace?

My boss knows, mostly through a coincidence- Scott linked my post about trying to get ADHD meds in his post about the prescription of ADHD meds, and my boss reads Scott’s blog. (I have given Scott permission to link my posts and was fine with this series of events). He let me know during our next meeting that Workplace is happy with my work and that he’s learned a lot about how to set yourself up to be able to accomplish stuff by running a startup and would love to be a resource for me if I’d like that. He’s been a fantastic resource.

The most important accommodation I have at Workplace, though, isn’t something I have because they know I’m disabled, it’s just something I have because Workplace is a healthy environment - it’s that, generally, people respond to problems with ‘how do we set things up so this doesn’t happen’ instead of ‘why did you do that’. 

For example, it used to be that an important part of my work would load in preview mode but not save, and therefore that on two different occasions I submitted work with that part missing. This was my fault, and I expected someone to say ‘be more careful’, but instead my boss’s immediate reaction was ‘that shouldn’t load in preview mode unless it’s saved’. Which made perfect sense in hindsight - that’s actually hard to prevent on my end, and easy to prevent with a software fix - but it just hadn’t occurred to me at all that my difficulty attending to this specific detail would best be fixed by making it easier than by telling me to be more careful. 

For another example, I care a lot about getting to work earlier than I’m managing right now, and I’m prioritizing it in my self-improvement stuff at the moment. But no one at work has pressured me about it, and in fact they make a point of not scheduling me for meetings early in the mornings. I think everyone’ll be glad when I get things straightened out, but they haven’t tried to accomplish that by ratcheting up the stakes for it. I was just kind of - used to people who were disappointed with you handling that by making it costlier to disappoint them, and it turns out I’m better at fixing my life when people aren’t doing that, who’d’ve guessed. 

[notebookundermydesk]

(I’ve been struggling with this a lot*, because like - my boss has actually been being pretty great, and there’s been some good management stuff and good management stuff is awesome and really good for me.

But there’s always like, this line, where beyond the line I feel like no, I can’t say that part. Which kind of impedes stuff. But like - a lot of people have a line at which they’ll say ‘ok that’s just not a real problem’ or ‘well you should just deal with that’. And presumably there’s lines about like - when I need something they can’t really give me, or can’t do things at which point I’m not useful enough, in general my costs exceed my potential benefits, etc.

And if I say a thing I can’t take it back, can’t go back to not-really-managing-well-but-something the same way, even if it turns out to have in fact been better not to say. (And then on my end I’m still figuring things out, and it’s all mixed up with internalized ableism etc, so I don’t even feel like I can say things with confidence etc.)

*I also have a weird thing going on re people knowing, because I am closeted about being disabled at work, but also I figure people know something’s up because I keep asking for weird things, but also the thing causing that is a different thing than the one causing most of the actual work relevant stuff.)

[drethelin]

Lifehack: there is no universal lifehack.

The reason you will find people who swear by every possible diet, who say any given productivity tool saved their career, or each and every anti depressant saved their life is that people vary a ton. People vary in psychology and biology. People differ in how much money they have, in what kind of social life, even things that might seem trivial like the layout of someone’s house can be a relevant variable. People’s goals, options, and obstacles are all different, sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtly.

The only diet advice or lifehack I can give to everyone is this: try things. Experiment with your environment and with yourself. Iterate. Whether you need keto to help you lose weight or GOMAD to help you put it on, whether you will benefit from to-do lists or pomodoros or what, the one thing you can be certain of is NOT trying anything new probably won’t help you solve a long term problem you have. People can tell you what worked for them, but they can’t tell you what will work for you. Only your own time and testing can.

[notebookundermydesk]

And, well, not everyone can do the latter? Or, people might need particular resources etc to be able to do the latter, and not have them. 

[consumptive-sphinx]

minific prompt: Mairon/Maitimo 

under the cut is starvation, discussion of major character death, and way too much fluff considering the characters and point in the timeline. 

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