Idealistic Dreamer

Just your typical fangirl and pretentious writer (She/her). Will take requests, but I can't promise I'll complete them all.  Occasionally posts tagged nsfw.

[fagstaynight]

some people on the internet have only been on here for five minutes

[cowboyspones]

i will never get over this one i’m afraid

[penny-anna]

over and over again it comes down to the fact that fanfiction is most people's only exposure to amateur writing

[penny-anna]

'so there's this website where literally anyone can post fiction they've written whenever they want and - get this! - a lot of it is bad' yeah no shit. what would you expect?

[penny-anna]

Relatedly:

A lot of fanfiction is specifically a type of amateur fiction that's shooting for maximum emotional gratification. 'i want these two characters to fuck nasty' 'i want this character to have a big ugly cry about their feelings' 'i want this character to get their legs broken' that sort of thing.

This approach is not inherent to fanfiction and it's not unique to fanfiction. There's whole communities of people out there writing original fiction that's aiming for exactly the same level of gratification. Most people are simply never exposed to it.

[pcktknife]

creative droughts are so embarrassing yeah sorry man I forgot my shapes and colors

[thinkspam]

[mythopoetry]

the stupidest thing about mental illness is the short half life of reassurances. like yes I know you reminded me yesterday that I'm not secretly toxic waste that everybody wants rid of but that was like 18 hours ago and I forgor

[resumbrarum]

I was talking with my therapist about this post this morning, and she helped me realize that just seeing this post is helping me manage this unwanted thought pattern.

When I think back to my youth, and about how the group I hung out with as a teenager felt to me like they mostly kept me around as the butt of the joke, as someone to make fun of, it's easy for me to assume that that formative social interaction a) actually happened the way I remember it, and b) provided an experiential basis for a belief that I'm "secretly toxic waste that everybody wants rid of".

But seeing this post -- and seeing that tens of thousands of people have agreed with the sentiment -- has led me to the realization (which my therapist agrees with) that this is just a common thought pattern among people with social trauma. And if it's a common post-traumatic thought pattern, then I don't have to accept that it's true; it is extremely unlikely that we are all secretly toxic waste and that nobody really wants us around (in fact, it's far more likely that that's not true of any of us). And that gives me grounds* to look twice at that thought pattern and discard it when it comes up.

* It doesn't always work, but at least now I have a better chance.

[solradguy]

Gallery illustration featured in Heavy Metal (Fall 1997), 20 Year Special. Art by Oscar Chichoni

[lysimachias]

idk man I'm so against a YGODM anime remake. they'd 100% allow more violence, but i'd wager significantly less gay goth shit. Like Atem would be allowed to set people on fire onscreen but they wouldn't let him do it in leather bants, yk??

[lysimachias]

i think what's often missing in discussions about YGO dub, sub, anime vs. manga, remakes, etc. etc. is the actual context that YGO arrived in. YGO/Sailor Moon/Pokemon/DBZ and that cohort were "the first animes" for an entire generation. obviously not the first animes ever translated or imported! but the first exposure many westerners had to anime in general

we have absolutely no analogue for that with modern anime! we didn't have crunchyroll, we didn't have huge centralized fandom spaces like we do today (this is literally pre-twitter). we will never again see that level of market & cultural dominance for a given cohort of animes. we simply can't, in a globalized world with so much on-demand media availability

also, crucially, no one had any fucking clue what they were doing. & that includes the entertainment companies handling localization and distribution

that "we have no clue what we're doing but we suddenly have a fuckoff massive IP on our hands and very little competition" is in large part responsible for the decisions made about how to adapt, translate & localize YGO, & what got to fly under the radar (often bc the suits in charge just. did not know jack shit about what "the radar" even was yet)

this also can never happen again! distributors know what to do with anime now, and as such are making much more careful and measured decisions about localization. this is good in some ways (we've moved past the need for jelly donuts) and kinda sucks shit in other ways ("the radar" is much more defined and sophisticated now)

like we just can't have a "manga-accurate remake" because YGO became a massive IP in conditions that simply no longer exist. now it is a massive established decades-old IP with a lucratively popular TCG and merchandising engine behind it, and decisions about the franchise are made with those things in mind. it's an artifact of its time in a really interesting way

[lysimachias]

thinking about this again today but like, also fondly musing on how completely unaware of each other the different corners of the ygo fandom are, and what "massive IP" really means in this context

The anime/manga fans are by and large unaware of the yumeshipping/oshikatsu side of the fandom who are unaware of the reddit powerscaling guys. Everyone's aware of the TCG bros, but most of the TCG bros engage only with the TCG and have no clue there are shippers out there at all;

And each corner assumes they're the dominant merchandising target cohort! If you asked an animanga fan what they think a YGODM remake would be, they'd be going off what's popular in the animanga fandom, completely unaware that they're competing with what would test well with oshikatsu and also guys whose entire YGO experience is rewatching YGOTAS episodes and having pages-long debates on reddit about whether Dark Magician could beat Charizard in battle

[kuttithevangu]

the new fantasy genre, popehunk, encompasses all books in which historical figures responsible for real atrocities are presented as sexy and potentially suffering from a cute lil' anxiety disorder

[transfaguette]

what i’ve learned in my life is if someone is treating you poorly and youre asking yourself “what magic words can I use to make this person treat me with basic respect,” those words don’t exist and they never will.

[memecxllector-blog]

Send me a ♫ + a character’s name and I will respond with a song that reminds me of them. Send a ♫ + a ship and I will do the same.

[steelplatedhearts]

it’s simple: when I like an adaptation, everyone complaining about changes to the text is a whiny baby who needs to get over themselves and accept that sometimes you have to change the story to enrich the experience/work within the medium. when I don’t like an adaptation, it’s because nobody else understands the core themes of the original work and would be better off just creating a story independent of what they’re trying to adapt.

[lttleghost]

similarly to how you can say "penis" or "vagina" instead of "male/female genitals" you can also say "testosterone/estrogen dominant endocrine system" instead of "male/female endocrine system" wow. amazing, we don't have to misgender trans ppl who aren't going to or haven't yet medically transitioned when we refer to hormones its just that easy

[maybetwice]

"eldritch horror" implies the existence of other unexplored genres, such eldritch coming-of-age, eldritch comedy, and eldritch romance.

[ellielol]

i'm still mad they killed E3. if they're gonna release a string of commercials the least they could do to get me to watch is to perform a self-humiliation ritual of their c-suite executives on stage try to seem cool. They don't even wear gamer T-shirt and blazer anymore.

[horizontalfall]

“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”

— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman

[nij15]

[headspace-hotel]

I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.

It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.

Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.

It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.

In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.

Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.

I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.

I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?

I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."

[fluffyhummel]

ive been wondering when id have my bananas arent supposed to be spicy moment but i cannot fucking believe this

what do you mean breathing exercises arent supposed to make you feel out of breath???? what???

also why the fuck did i need to be told the feel better exercise is supposed to make me. feel better? what went wrong here. genuinely asking.

jesus. what a revelation.

[texasdreamer01]

Reading everything above, I am having... several questions. Mostly about how exactly breathing techniques are taught, and also how these instructions are interpreted.

There's a few reasons why breath control is considered a gold standard in calming people down: 1) requires no additional tools or outside intervention, 2) a practice prevalent in many cultures and thus something most patients are already familiar with the idea, and 3) a solidly-proven and well-researched quickest method to regain homeostasis.

It is not supposed to make you feel worse, emotionally or physically, because it's acting directly upon your nervous system to change feedback patterns - I'm going to link as reference the following Wikipedia articles for anyone to read at their leisure:

Conscious breathing

Control of ventilation

Hyperventilation syndrome

I have no idea what anyone is telling a patient to make this literally painful for them, but you're supposed to slowly ease into a completely controlled state of breathing - not a single person is able to go from panicking to calm by ordering themselves to do so, regardless of general mental health. If that were the case then it would not be a state of panic.

Secondly, sometimes therapists are far too by the book, and I'm not sure if it's been recommending to purposefully tense your muscles from head to toe before attempting to regulate your breathing. This helps some people but does not help others; try it out and see if it helps you, because then at least you'll know.

The reason why yoga class was helping to make it click is because regulating your breathing is often done in conjunction with regulated movement, i.e. martial arts. (Yoga is a type of martial arts, for clarification.) The entire point of martial arts is to have good command over one's body, so at least a good third of it is learning exactly that before you get to any of the stereotypical martial part of martial arts.

[headspace-hotel]

See, this is more of the stuff I've always been told and never understood. I "get" the physiological basis of how it "should" work, but the way it feels in my body is distressing.

okay. pausing in typing this to sit up straight and do the breathing exercise thing for a few cycles so I can vividly describe what happens.

Breathing in deeply feels like I'm filling up my lungs too much, like I'm trying to engage the wall of my abdomen to get my breath to deepen but it feels wrong. I'm trying to feel that expansion in my stomach, but it just does not feel right. Sometimes there's a "locking up" that happens in my shoulders here.

Holding my breath is just against what my body instinctively wants to do. I feel myself tense up trying to stop from breathing out too soon, and sometimes there's this kind of locking-up feeling in my throat and it's like I almost swallow air trying to stop the exhale from happening. I keep accidentally skipping the hold breath part because the urge to exhale is too strong.

Breathing out for longer than my inhale makes me feel like I'm just trying to wheeze air out of my already airless lungs at the tail end of the breath, which also tenses up my body. It feels wrong to try to empty out all the air from my lungs to that extent, and there's kind of a "gulping" feeling or a spasm in my throat. Like I'm trying to actually flatten all the air out of my chest.

Then of course it seems like the problem is I need to exhale more slowly, but trying to control the length of my breaths more consciously makes the muscles of my back, stomach, ribs etc. lock up because I'm trying to stop it from going too fast and my whole body tenses.

Like, at every part it feels like I'm fighting and wrestling with my body against what it wants to do, and it increases more and more because it feels like I'm not even absorbing oxygen from my breath, like my brain has this panicked feeling of "not enough air" and I have this increasing, reflex-like urge to gasp that I also have to fight against.

Jesus Christ, I only did this for like 3 cycles for the purpose of this post and my neck already hurts.

[texasdreamer01]

I appreciate you taking the time to duplicate the steps you've been taught, and to describe the effects - please take care of yourself!

You're not required to do a longer exhale, if I'm being really honest - the goal is to extend the length of your inhales (and not even necessarily breathing deeply, just regularly and more smoothly).

Speaking partly from research and partly from personal experience, you can experiment a bit and see what helps you best. Some inhale-hold-exhale patterns that I've seen helping people are 7-5-4 (i.e. seven seconds inhale, five seconds hold, four seconds exhale), or 4-5-4, or similar ratios.

Personally, sometimes doing a long exhale as a start is often more helpful, because it's a good way to trick the brain, but any method works so long as you're slowly increasing how long it takes you to inhale (this is the main part of it). However long that takes you to accomplish, that's how long it takes.

If it hurts to immediately do a large inhale, then uh. Don't do that? You don't have to? If someone's telling you to, they might be more concerned with following their education than looking at the person in front of them.

One thing I would say is that you don't have to correspondingly increase how long you hold your breath with how long it takes you to inhale. A rhythm of, for example, 2-1-3 can be good to start off with, but only if you find it helpful.

Additionally, sometimes squeezing something in time with your breathing will be a better assist than counting - can be your own shirt, or pants, or someone's hand, anything at all that encourages your brain to focus on something other than your breathing (this is one of the reasons why yoga is so popular). Stress balls, fidgeting toys, necklaces, etc, are also helpful but sometimes completely overlooked by people like therapists.

[headspace-hotel]

Huh. I thought the exhale being the longest part was supposed to be what was important.

It doesn't hurt to do a large inhale, it just feels weird and wrong. The hurting comes in as I struggle more and more to breathe slowly enough and my body tenses up.

The pattern I learned was 6 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale. When I learned about "box breathing" it was 4-4-4. There isn't much consistently. Box breathing feels really bad to me too though.

So, I'm hearing that people count out seconds in a certain pattern. I'm also hearing that you're supposed to slowly lengthen your breaths more and more. If that were the case, the cycles would get longer, right? So counting would only make it confusing? It seems really hard to mentally keep track of 3 different counters as they increment upwards.

I guess I'm overthinking this. But like, how do I know if I'm doing it "correctly" would be my question.

[the-shade-system]

I'm gonna be 100% real with you, breathing exercises straight up do not work for everyone, and with the descriptions you've given about how your body reacts, I doubt that they'll be helpful for you in general.

For context, hi, we're actively studying psychology, specifically because we intend to go into psychiatry. This is very much within our area of expertise.

Breathing exercises are something of an exploit in your autonomic nervous system. You're effectively attempting to forcibly tell your body that things are okay by forcing your breathing to mimic how it would be if things were okay. For a large chunk of people, doing that works just fine, because their autonomic nervous system doesn't FIGHT THEM at every step of the process.

From the descriptions you've given, I would take a guess in saying that your autonomic nervous system is more active/resistant to conscious influence than most people, which means that techniques based on effectively Forging Signals like this just. Will not work for you.

[headspace-hotel]

...hmmm

I mean yeah it does feel like my body is struggling against me the entire time...

[what-even-is-thiss]

This might not help you but in case it does, what works for me is not counting seconds but just focusing on making sure I’m not doing shallow breathing and hyperventilating. Counting stresses me out about doing it right so just slowing down for a second and making sure I’m getting proper lungfuls of air and not starving myself of oxygen is a lot more helpful for me.

When my anxiety disorders were less controlled than they are now I used to hyperventilate so much that when I took a moment to breathe properly I got dizzy from actually getting a proper amount of oxygen because my body had adapted to running on low oxygen and that also freaked me out at first.