#batbetbitbotbut

[copperbadge]

I think you mentioned going back through your entire blog to check things over, how's that going and what's the process been like? Any forgotten memories or unexpected feelings along the way?

Oh sure -- it's slow going because it's low priority, so some weeks I don't do much of it, but currently I'm in June of 2020 so I'm catching up.

It helps that I post way less now than I used to, and also that I now reply to comments in the comments rather than in new posts. Most of what I'm doing is skimming for things I either should delete or want to make sure get archived (essays, story ideas, etc) so I skip past a lot of the old "reply to comments" posts but there's still a lot to skim through.

And sometimes I get distracted re-reading my old stuff :) If you see me reblogging myself these days it's usually because I found an old gem from five or six years ago and think it would be fun to reintroduce it. Not even always my stuff, though usually, but old memes and Tumblr injokes and similar.

I'm trying to add tags to a few specific things, as well -- things I want to make sure I keep, like things I would be mad about if Tumblr suddenly vanished, are all tagged "archive". There are some posts from before my ADHD diagnosis that are so obviously about living with undiagnosed ADHD that I've started adding my "sam has adhd" tag to those as well, since that will be a nice library of resources.

I don't so much get unexpected feelings from old posts, although the six months I just got through, January to June 2020, were a trip to read as I dealt personally with my TBI and we all dealt collectively with the pandemic. I suspect I have SDAM, a condition where emotion is uncoupled from autobiographical memory, which is common in people with aphantasia. It means that even if I'm rereading moments from my life where I was full of strong feelings, I don't re-feel those strong feelings now. I might have new feelings about those events, and sometimes I do (mostly cringe for stuff I said that I regret now), but it's pretty rare.

I'm looking forward to catching up to present day and going back through the Archive tag; I feel like there's possibly a book of essays in it somewhere, or at least a whole new wing of my website.

Anyway, there's a little over 2000 days to go! If I can keep up my pace of roughly 10 days per day, five days a week, it should only be about another year, accounting for vacations and such.

[specialagentartemis]

I'm pleased for you but Platform Decay isn't out in England for another month and I am MAD ABOUT IT 😭

Boooooo there should not be different release dates for different countries ESPECIALLY when it’s not like translation time needs to be taken into account :((( abolish borders :((((

[tiuhtaviuhta]

Hello! I'm nosey, what language is your username in and what does it mean?

Hi! It's Finnish but also kinda nonsense - Tiuhta is a Finnish word for cross or lease in weaving. Rhymed with viuhta (that doesn't mean anything by itself), the name is kinda like these Moomin characters Tiuhti and Viuhti (Tofslan and Vifslan) , who were inspired by Tove Janssons' relationship with Viveca Bandler and also were some of my favourite characters growing up :)

Honestly, I'm surprised no-ones asked before! I always welcome noseyness <3

[fourteen--steps]

Would you like to elaborate on the experience of shock collar jenga (it sounds EXCELLENT)

Ok so this happened a couple years ago, so the exact rules are a bit fuzzy? Anyway, to preface things, this took place at a large kink community event. Which I hope gives you an idea of the sort of people playing. I was there by myself and pulling off my patented "stand around nervously in a corner" technique, when a couple of people waved me over and asked if I wanted to play shock collar jenga. And I mean, as a socially awkward masochist I obviously said yes.

The group was split into pairs, each with one person wearing a shock collar and one with the remote (with consent explicitly obtained from everyone involved! That's important! Every shock was optional, you were free to decline or stop at any time).

Each block in the jenga set had been labeled with A Consequence. Something like "3 seconds at level 2" or "person to your left gets 1 shock at level 6." The remotes worked on a basic 1-10 strength system for the most part, although one pair had brought their own which went to like 20?? Anyway, you would pull out your piece, suffer your Consequence zap, and attempt to put it back. Occasionally both at the same time if the person with your remote was feeling particularly evil :p

It was just fun! There was much laughing and yelping and general fucking with each other. 10/10 would play again.

[scribefindegil]

question, why does a filk song pack more emotion and story and tearjerking into 4 minutes than a movie does in 2 hours

Magic probably!

Songs are just! Really powerful! To be less facetious, a lot of good songs have such a concentrated intensity that you can’t get in movies or other longer-form works--not because those are bad, but because trying to keep up that level of intensity for a longer period would be overwhelming and stop working and you’d just check out.

And songs get to you on so many levels! The lyrics and the melody and the instrumentation can each be powerful on their own, but when you combine them sometimes it just overwhelms you! I think a lot about the effect that a musical setting has on a really good poem; Hymn to Breaking Strain hits hard as a poem, but the song is just a one-hit KO straight to my heart!

The level of emotional catharsis a song can have is just . . . really overwhelming at times. I’m really weird because generally I HATE tragic stories but I absolutely eat up standalone sad songs. Give me every single setting about how your true-love’s ship has been lost at sea and I will listen to it on repeat and bawl my eyes out over how it takes the universal human experience of grief and pares it down into a bright shining blade and eviscerates me with it! No other form of media conveys things in such a concentrated form! It’s great! I love it!

[star-anise]

Hi! I have a question for you that might bring Discourse and I'm sorry. But your perspective is valuable to me so I'm asking anyway and I welcome your best guesses about an answer. Question: WHY is transmedicalism a thing? WHY are so many trans people (and in particular, young binary trans men) transmeds? How did this viewpoint evolve over the past few years -- it doesn't feel very old? Has it been influenced by other shittinesses like radfem shit and fandom anti shit?

I am not an expert in trans intracommunity issues, so there are probably tons of people way more knowledgeable than me.

Tumblr keeps recommending me transmed blogs, so I keep reading them. There are a surprising number that are like “Transmeds and tucutes both have a nice day! You’re both valid but different!” and I was doing the upside-down-owl face of total confusion. It looked like?? It seemed like a community that interpreted “gender dysphoria” to mean not “unease and distress when misgendered” but simply “desire to fully medically transition”, so it made sense to them that “transmed” meant people who wanted medical treatment, and “not transmed” meant people who considered themselves trans but didn’t want to medically transition. 

Which is not?? My experience of non-transmed trans people??? My experience of non-transmeds is that their understandings of “gender dysphoria” tend to lean more heavily on the “distress and impairment” part of the definition. But I’m just going on observation and other peoples’ accounts of themselves, so I’m not best-equipped to speak to that.

My experience with Generation Z transmeds is that many of them don’t even really get why people perceive them as being so hostile. Some do, but others seem genuinely confused that they’re being accused of attacking other trans people. And from what I can see, they find the DSM Gender Dysphoria diagnosis very comfortable and validating. It makes sense! They have a brain disorder! It’s all very validating. It’s like being told you’re not a sack of shit, you have depression; you’re not lazy, you have ADHD; you’re not unlovable, you have Autism; you’re not bad at being a person, you have PTSD. This thing makes sense and surely your parents would understand it if a psychologist or doctor explained it to them!

Do I think there’s a generational component to it? Eh, maybe. Maybe coming of age, or at least joining the LGBTQ+ community, after gay marriage was legalized might reduce peoples’ awareness of how much our survival as a community depends on strength in numbers and mutual defense. If somebody remembers how the DSM treated Homosexuality back in the day, the might be less likely to wholeheartedly trust it now.

I do think this is another one of those situations where the only people having active discussions about this on social media are the fringe dissidents--because the rest of us all agree with each other--so when someone new shows up and looks for their people on social media, they just find the fringe dissidents.

But eh, I’m not totally sure it could all be prevented by better education. There are a lot of really influential adult transmeds out there. I think Kat Blaque has some really good insights into the transmed mindset; her contention is that it’s basically borne out of being in a phase in your transition where you’re desperate for cis validation, and you’d rather have acceptance for being Good Enough than acceptance based on the fundamental acceptance of all people and genders as valid. 

Kind of like women whose self-respect is very based on being emotionally collected, independent, levelheaded, and sexually conservative, so they can’t be called a crazy clingy tramp. It takes more self-confidence to defend everybody’s right to be a crazy clingy tramp. (The Slutwalk era feels like a very long time ago, even though it was only 2011. I feel like you’d never get away with it now)

[astriiformes]

uhh, hi, your quote in tags "life is real! life is earnest! and the grave is not its goal; "dust thou art, to dust returnest," was not spoken of the soul" was DAYS AGO and it has absolutely stuck with me, constantly. today I looked up the poem it's from and it hit something deep inside. it is the opposite of any sad poem I ever could read. thank you so much!

Longfellow is my absolute favorite poet, there are a good number of his poems that have resounded really strongly with me over the years. If you liked that one, I think you might also enjoy The Rainy Day and The Light of Stars (among others). There’s just such a joyful defiance to a lot of his works that I really relate to and that means a lot to me. Plus his meter and rhythm are just.... fantastic.

That said, A Psalm of Life is still my very favorite of his poems, and I love hearing you get enthusiastic about it as well. There’s just something really special to me about the combination of the general sentiment and the specific notion mentioned therein that the works and lives of others can serve as an inspiration -- it’s always felt a little bit like he was talking directly to me with his words, even though I imagine his commentary about “footprints on the sands of time” was just as much about the people who had inspired him and not the people he might inspire himself in the future! I just think that’s such a neat feature of what was already such a good poem.

[kawuli]

potatoes in your hunger games world. y/n? impact?

so my hunger games world is based on a very industrialized large-scale agriculture, there are no smallholder farmers anymore. Potatoes are useful as a high-yielding crop but they’re not going to change any power dynamics.

Canon splits farming into District 9: Grain and District 11: Agriculture, which is ...weird, but I think D9 got shoved in after the books were written because there’s almost no mention of it either in the books or the movies. The way I do it is to put large-scale mechanized agriculture in D9, and fruits and vegetables that require more specialized equipement and/or hand-labor in D11.

Potatoes are kind of an in-between crop, but I’d probably put them in D9? partly because they’d probably be harder to grow in a hot humid climate like the southeast US. Unlike maize and wheat, I think they’d be concentrated in specific areas, with full-time crews that don’t move around much. That’s also how I see rice and cotton working too, as well as probably a few other minor field crops. Getting a job in those areas is a reward for good, loyal workers, usually middle-aged or older, because you don’t have to keep moving around and camping outside half the year.

additional ramble no one asked for: wheat is planted to red clover or some other forage crop at least once in 3 years for extra animal feed. Maize is rotated with soy or another legume -- pinto beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc. Probably everyone on a crew’s planting and harvest path grow the same legume in a given year, so you don’t have to swap out equipment. And there’s probably less variety in food crops and grains than we have. You’d have a few specialized crops just for the Capitol or just for feeding into the magic food machines growing in small areas, probably in D11, but the districts eat what the Capitol gives them, and dietary diversity is uh not a priority