Daemones et Dulcia

Uh, hi. I’m Vy. Once game tester, then text editor, forever loser-nerd. I draw sometimes.

[vyraxhaalas]

The first Legendary Pictures Dune movie: Alright, sure. I can see they changed a few things, but that was relatively close to the book.

The second Legendary Pictures Dune movie: Oh no. Oh, Dune, baby, what have they done to you?

[mortalityplays]

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was one of the best works of sci-fi of our generation and one of the best works of transgender fiction ever written, and there are world renowned authors who still have successful careers after they publicly assassinated the nascent woman who wrote it. I don't think they should ever know peace.

[mortalityplays]

Isabel Fall is the patron saint of works unwritten and art unmade by a culture that cannot tolerate trans women

[mortalityplays]

I think this constantly and then I get angry for thinking it, because trans women should not have to be martyrs or saints to animate our politics and our art. that work should have been her debut, not her epitaph. I should be moved by her career, not her absence. I could spit.

[mortalityplays]

read it again

[xx-k1tsun3-k1d-xx]

very telling that even if you’re not allowed to view content related to self harm/suicide/eating disorders due to not giving up your ID on the uk internet you will still be shown relentless ads for weight loss drugs and fad diets showing unrealistic/AI generated bodies and unhealthy methods and time frames for weight loss that can only be achieved by starvation. oh and also so so many gambling ads. relentless ads for gacha and gambling services. almost like it’s not actually about protecting kids at all or something

[tetitasdelimon]

top 5 horror movies

-having a job

-not having a job

-applying for jobs

-the job market

-the concept of working my whole life

[swiftrunnerfelidae]

"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.

[64mpg]

i was sent as a test to see if a doomed person could undoom themselves out of sheer will

[coffee-khaleesi-deactivated2020]

When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:

“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”

Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either. 

[bogfox]

Op I’d like to thank you for sharing this. Ever since the first time I’ve read it I’ve held it in my mind and it really has helped me to be kinder to others and to myself.

[de-activated-offical]

I need to do this. (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't d

[contemptible-scoundrel]

dude he's a pro and he's dating a noob, it's a problematic skill gap, it's not a healthy pwnage dynamic

[quasi-normalcy]

I kind of wish that the polarities of violence and sex in popular culture were reversed. Like, I wish that writers and filmmakers needed to justify up the wazoo their decisions to show a murder on screen when "they could have just done it tastefully in shadow or something," but no one even batted an eye at a sex scene. I kind of wish that erotic video games were the norm but FPSs were a considered a weird and loser-ish thing to play.

[quasi-normalcy]

I mean, I really wish that you didn't have to justify either, but it bugs me that, of the two, killing is the one that you can use in wholesome family friendly entertainment but fucking is the one that you forever need to shield your children from even knowing about.

[quasi-normalcy]

I don't think that this difference is innocent, either. Like, I think that sexual repression is a good means of control whereas the state always needs an army of young men who are willing to kill people.

[brainrotdotorg]

listen. I understand if you dont want to see sex in a movie. But im begging you to think about how the prevalence of murder and acts of harm being portrayed in media vs. the censorship and hush-hush nature behind sex affects our relationships with it.

think about what this post is saying about the normalization of violence and demonization of eroticism. How sexual repression and the indulgence of violence lets a society be guided in a certain direction.

If you dont want to see a sex scene in a movie, thats fine. But this isnt about personal preferences. This is about how culture is shaped by what we choose to show. For the love of god.

[cumaeansibyl]

I am a horror movie fan who loves gore and violence and murder, you know, a sicko, and I also think it is extremely weird and unsettling that violence is so much more accepted in media than sex. Compare the kind of violent content you can put in a PG-13 movie with the kind of sexual content allowed. It's fucked up!

Obviously I don't want anyone taking away my horror movies and replacing them with softcore porn or anything, that's not the point. Just... maybe we should be less worried about kids seeing a depiction of consensual sex and more worried about stuff like, idk, being taught that incredibly bloody revenge is a normal way to respond to being harmed, or that the right way to handle criminals is to explode them, or some of the things I think might do more lasting harm than the simple fact of violent imagery.

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

There was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Back in the... late 90s? I think? That featured a lesbian kiss. This being two or three decades ago now, they received many letters of complaint, a number of them claiming it meant the show was no longer Family-Friendly.

One of the writers responded to one of those letter, asking if it would have been more appropriate for the women to shoot each other with a phaser. He was answered in the affirmative, and his response was that if the person felt it was better for his children to see an act of violence than an act of affection, he might want to reconsider his definition of family-friendly.

[kyraneko]

Another consequence of the demonization and marginalization of sex is that you get people like that one screenshotted commenter above who "don't see the use" mostly because the only media sex they're ever allowed to encounter is prurient pornography-for-pornography's-sake sex removed from all connection with storytelling because it's for an audience who are only in it to get off, and connecting it to story or to larger themes is a waste of production value.

Sex can be an amazing storytelling tool: it can explore characters' relationships to each other, to their bodies, to their history, to their culture, to their fears and anxieties and hopes and longings---it's really, really great means for diving into the complexities of a character, which is what good writing does.

It's just that people aren't familiar with what it can do, because they rarely if ever see it done, because most stories perforce focus on the social mechanics and thematic importance of violence.

[niqvassieart]

A little tiny microscopic dragon, rotifers passing by.

I've spent a lot of time peering down a microscope in the last few years, enjoying taking inspiration from the real tiny organisms to make one of my own.

[quietwingsinthesky]

one more thing. if a character ascends to godhood/divinity/some form of power that makes them practically omnipotent and no longer human. and they had a partner before that who didn’t rise with them. you are legally required to make that situation as terrifying as it would rightly be. it’s bad enough to get the attention of a god. it is ruinous to be loved by one. that is not the person you knew anymore. that is something that never has to let you leave, or have secrets, or disobey it. it will fix every problem you so much as glance at, and it will shower you in grace and gifts until you drown, and it will make you a holy artifact in its own story. you have to understand, it doesn’t remember how horrible death is, so it strikes you to cinders like a snide comment and brings you back with an apology it needs you to accept. that is how it’s going to love you forever, because it might not be inclined to let you die.

[enki2]

[ivy-michaels]

the way teenagers are treated these days is wild. when i was a teenager we were all watching porn, jerking off, and going to horror movies with 3000 gallons of blood. Nowadays they make kids get a permission slip to watch anything darker than Barney the Dinosaur. Insane.

[ivy-michaels]

Every year we infantilize teenagers more and more and act surprised when they grow up to be terrified, angry, emotionally stunted adults.

[genderkoolaid]

& then for some reason people fixate more on "ugh these teenagers just want to be treated like babies!!! teenagers are to blame for the rise in puritanism!!!!!" than how this is a very obvious example of ageism and the increased control over a socially vulnerable and exploited group

[absolxguardian]

I think a commonly overlooked part of this coddling is that it teaches kids and teenagers to be afraid of things they don't need to be afraid of, which is exactly how they end up as "puriteens". I remember as a child being terrified to change the channel on the tv because I had ended up with the impression that seeing even seconds of an R rated movie or tv show would give me nightmares. And then as a tween every time I saw swearing I felt sick to my stomach because I had been taught such a thing is bad and harmful. I think I would have suffered less if I hadn't been raised with everyone around me acting like mature media was so bad. By the time I was a teenager I had figured out this was bunk, but understandably a lot of people don't. By making this whole system worse and stronger you have teens who have been told that seeing explicit or dark media Will Harm Them, and so they act in ways that would be appropriate if it really was the info-hazard it's implied to be.

[headspace-hotel]

^^ never heard anybody specifically talk about this but yeah. parents acting like sexual or any "dark" content in a story or show was going to put bad things in my head that were going to be there permanently just gave me a deeply distressing sort of contamination anxiety

[annabelle--cane]

one of The Many problems with how the general public conceptualizes addiction and recovery is that "rock bottom" makes a really good narrative beat, it's a nice and dramatic second act low point in your classic three act structure to give a character something to make them reevaluate and get their life in order, and the human brain sure likes holding on to Fun Narratives, so even well-intentioned people who don't consider themselves to believe in punitive measures get it stuck into their heads that thee way that people get sober is by experiencing some kind of reckoning of harsh consequences (losing a job or home, overdosing, being rejected by loved ones, getting desperate and feeling driven to do something really awful to keep using, etc). when, if you think about it for like two seconds, basically no one in the world is going to juuust about survive their own personal worst case scenario and think "wow, now would be a really great time to give up my only coping mechanism and voluntarily induce a medical emergency for the next several weeks," that kind of thing is far more likely to just immediately make everything Much worse.

[annabelle--cane]

I once saw a parenting blog or something that was written with a very earnest and measured tone seriously give the advice "if your teen is struggling with addiction and won't respond to anything you do then your best move would be to kick them out and cut them off so they run out of other options more quickly" and I just sat there in a kind of mute horror for a few minutes afterwards. like. no that's actually how you kill people. if a child is already in the midst of a mental health crisis, and you then deliberately engineer the situation to give them a second crisis, that is how you kill someone. I cannot stress this enough.

[annabelle--cane]

basically:

To expect an addict to give up her drug is like asking the average person to imagine living without all his social skills, support networks, emotional stability, and sense of physical and psychological comfort. Those are the qualities that drugs, in their illusory and evanescent way, give the addict. People like Serena and Celia and the others whose portraits have appeared in this book perceive their drugs as their “rock and salvation.” Thus, for all the valid reasons we have for wanting the addict to “just say no,” we first need to offer her something to which she can say “yes.” We must provide that island of relief. We have to demonstrate that esteem, acceptance, love, and humane interaction are realities in this world, contrary to what the addict has learned all his life. It is impossible to create that island for people unless they can feel secure that their substance dependency will be satisfied as long as they need it.

gabor maté, "chapter 27: toward an enlightened social policy on drugs," in the realm of hungry ghosts

[butt-berry]

Your Pokedex ran into a problem and needs to restart

[elbiotipo]

Just got off a whole day on a bus to check the world's most beautiful pictures of the Moon and Trump threatening genocide upon a whole civilization

[elbiotipo]

oh carlitos we're really in it now