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adult | he/him rating this blog M for Mature

[disabilityreminders]

There is a kind of grief that comes with constantly having to decide whether something is worth the energy it will cost you.

I think a lot of disabled people carry that grief quietly.

[starryk1sses]

I hate delayed amnesia so much. I’ll go through a whole day thinking I’m “fine” and fully present, and then hours later it hits me like—wait… I don’t remember anything from today. It feels like my whole day just slips through my fingers.

I’d like to think I’m staying relatively co-conscious with our other alters/fragments, but then once they leave, I lose nearly—if not all—of the memory afterward. It’s so disorienting.

[mariahburgos2]

[systemprojects]

System App - PluralSpace

Not to be confused with Plural Space, which is a different project.

A system app created by Drex!

PluralSpace has customizable member profiles, with front tracking and custom statuses. Alongside the ability to register a profile as a fronting status, create relationships between members, and view them on a relationship map!

The app also features journal entries, poll creation, an inner system chat, and in-depth analytics on your system, from fronting frequency to journal entries and poll responses!

If you would like to support PluralSpace, you can access the alpha website here. To learn more information, or follow updates, you can read through their website, share feedback on their dedicated page, follow their twitter, or join their discord (18+)!

[picatchu]

outfit for when you have an unimaginable amount of misunderstandings every day

[alteredpanel]

the first funeral

[transiting]

don’t make other people’s decisions for them. apply for the job you don’t think you’ll get. let them decide if you have the skills they’re looking for. tell that person you like them even though you think they’re out of your league. let them decide if they like you. stop trying to predict and control everything. bring what you have to the table. let the rest go.

[andantegrazioso-deactivated2018]

Confidence is not ‘they will like me’, it is ‘I’ll be fine, or even better off, if they don’t’.

[cutecipher]

peoples desire to not see people irl who they deem ugly is a fascist impulse.

[cutecipher]

people are allowed to exist without being attractive to you.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

😞 there were literally laws designed to prevent disabled people from appearing in public called "ugly laws" or "unsightly beggar ordinances" btw

[snow-nose]

a note, if that's ok, because people bring these ordinances up all the time, which i do also do and it is important to do so, but homeless people are so often left out of the discussion when they are the main topic

i've been reading the ugly laws by susan schweik, which is a free ebook in multiple places, and i really recommend it. it talks about the ableist, classist, and racist foundations of the ugly laws, and how they were used to enact ableism, classism, racism, and misogyny, and reinforce white supremacist beauty, gender, social, and moral standards. they stood alongside laws against crossdressing, for instance

but the ugly laws were actually more complicated than "they would arrest people for being visibly disabled". they were an excuse to remove homeless people from the streets, especially homeless people who either were visibly disabled/visibly different or who "claimed to be", and i put "claimed to be" in quotation marks because the people who wanted them off the streets more often didn't believe they were really disabled, however, some homeless people really did fake disability for money, and those people still didn't deserve to be arrested or demonized for it. other ways they justified pulling homeless people from the streets, besides sowing doubt and suspicion, were that they would argue that they were doing it for their own good, "taking care of them", or later that they were doing it for the good of the middle class, abled public; "they're all deceitful, violent criminals with bad intentions"

so while visibly disabled and visibly different people who weren't homeless and couldn't hide their disability would be subjected to them too, visibly disabled/visibly different homeless people were the primary target. they didn't expand to visibly disabled and visibly different people at large until later, and specifically in the context of freak shows. they didn't want people being exposed to disability in what was, for that time, a more positive light. you, as an abled person, could show people that their children would be born disabled if they didn't brush their teeth, or display a disabled, visibly different child as an interesting medical subject, but you couldn't, as a disabled person, display yourself and then solicit money for it either

also, most importantly in my opinion, ugly ordinances were spearheaded and pushed by one christian organization who were viciously against people giving financial aid to the homeless, and saw disabled and homeless people as gene pool pollution. they were white supremacist eugenics enthusiasts who encouraged states to pick up ugly ordinances, and even sent them after specific homeless people. there was even an ugly law that targeted just one man, a homeless, visibly disabled black man named william jasper franklin

i just want to provide more context

[psychoticallytrans]

When do callouts work?

Callout posts and harassment campaigns are a cornerstone of how Tumblr moderates itself. This is in good part because the moderation Tumblr actually does ranges from useless to targeted at minorities. If you feel that someone has done something wrong, the only guaranteed way to get results is to do something yourself.

It is very easy to get them rolling. Tumblr’s format rewards spreading information and is great at preserving it. When it comes to art, memes, and writing, this is fantastic for creators. When it comes to callout posts, it means that they’ll be around for months, if not years. Anger, as many social media algorithms have found, is great for engagement.

Even if the purpose is strictly to inform, the problem is the number of people who see it. There are going to be people who are going to look at the information and go “This person needs to be punished, and nobody is going to do it. So, I’m going to be cruel to them.” This is partly because of Tumblr’s known poor moderation. It’s also because a good number of people see causing harm to someone who hurt others as just, and therefore causing that harm as righteous.

Even if you agree with that view of justice, there’s a big issue here. That issue is that the vast majority of callouts are going to result in the person being called out being hurt far beyond what they actually did. Even that assumes that they hurt anyone in the first place, which is not always the case.

So, if things are that lopsided, no callout posts, right? Just block and move on in order to minimize harm.

Not quite. There is one narrow and rare category where I would say they are actually important.

Serial abusers who are actively trawling for victims are the exception that proves the rule. Callouts that show that this person is not safe and that you should watch out for them can actively work as harm prevention.

But like I said, that’s a rare and narrow case. I have seen maybe five callout posts out of hundreds, thousands if you count individual accounts on mass blocklists, that actually fall into that category. Those don’t work because they cause harassment campaigns. They work because their value as a warning exceeds the risk to the person targeted.

That’s it.

Unless something fits that narrow and rare category? Don’t make it, don’t spread it. Even in that category, don’t harass them, because that drives remaking faster and allows them to access new unaware victims. The best way to minimize harm is to avoid causing or inciting it wherever possible.

[bottom-growth]

the problem with having an exception to the rule is that it incentivizes people to (knowingly or unknowingly) force their situation to fit the exception. people escalate, trying to paint their enemies as serial abusers who really deserve it this time, for sure. mostly this manifests as finding a bunch of small things their target did, and painting them as a related pattern of abuse. if you have a hammer (callout post) everything looks like a nail (serial abuser who deserves to be ostracized).

this is the origin of cancelling/callouts, and has always been how they have operated.

[psychoticallytrans]

This is true. You do have to view them with skepticism and look for what actual proof exists that this person is a danger to other people. Like I said, very, very few callouts actually meet the bar. I include the exception in good part because incorrect blanket statements tend to lead people to dismiss a chunk of information as a whole.

[worldwidewet]

I'd argue that it doesn't work in the cases of serial abusers either, because it actively funnels people their way and invites cognitive dissonance and an us vs. them mentality.

I have seen people who both get more stuck with their abusers because they end up having to defend both themself and the abuser from cruel "vigilantes" and having this prove to them that when the abuser tells them the world wants to hurt them, that is true, and, people who end up seeking an abuser out because they felt bad for them or thought they deserved someone in their camp or even because they had low self worth and wanted someone to hurt/punish them (self sabotaging by seeking out a known abuser)

I don't think I have actually seen an accurate callout where this did not happen.

It is also less prone to working on genuinely powerful people who have more opportunities to do harm.

So, yeah, my opinion is that we can't use this exception to the rule because it is not going to work either. Legislation to protect victims of online abuse is probably a better route to go, but it also takes hard work over long time with imperfect results.

Protecting victims and giving people resources to take care of themselves and get out, on top of dismantling hirrarchies and power structures, often works a lot better than attempts to get rid of individual abusers.

[psychoticallytrans]

Emotional pain management is a skill that is extremely important and usually untaught. Kids are supposed to pick it up on their own, generally. Many parents even think that leaving kids to work through emotional pain on their own is the way to teach them.

This generally does not lead to the development of healthy methods for working with emotional pain, for the same reasons that children don’t generally know how to do first aid if you just leave them with an injury: they don’t have enough information to do that.

Emotional pain can include grief, heartbreak, and anxiety, but it also includes things people are less willing to name because they sound like moral failings instead of pain: envy, anger, and regret. Those often end up mentally relabeled as “hurt” because being hurt has no moral weight. This obscures what’s going on and makes it harder to figure out what to do. Bad managing of emotional pain leads to increased emotional pain, especially stress, frustration, and shame.

This is a system that I use that makes it easier for me to manage emotional pain. Feel free to take whatever parts of it are useful for you.

Step 1: What caused the feeling?

Figuring out why you’re upset is often easier than figuring out how you’re upset, and can help you to figure out what feelings you have about it. For instance, if the cause was in the past, then anxiety is less likely. If you know the feeling but not the cause, it can be useful to switch the order of this step and step 2.

Let’s say that I’m really upset and it’s really unclear to me how I'm upset. two questions I find useful are:

Am I upset because of something that happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future? Am I upset because of a system, an event, an ongoing situation, or a person?

Let’s say for the sake of the example that I’m upset because a stranger made a passing cruel comment about my appearance. It happened in the past, and was because of a person. This helps to build the foundation for the next steps.

A common and false assumption is that the amount of emotion you’re feeling and the seriousness of the event should match up. This is untrue. Sometimes you have no real reaction to serious trauma. Sometimes you implode because you lost your shoe. It’s not useful to you to think about how much emotion you “should” have about something.

Step 2: What is the feeling?

The event was a person being cruel to me about my appearance. Knowing that can help me to narrow it down, but the answer may not be the one that seems to “make sense” for what happened. Instead, it’s one that makes sense for who you are, what you’ve experienced, and how you react.

Since they’re a stranger, it’s not betrayal. There could be rejection, but I’m not sure since I didn’t care about them before they were cruel. It’s definitely not shame- I know that’s incorrect as soon as I consider it because it’s just, wrong.

Instead, it ends up being a mixture of loneliness and frustration. Loneliness, because to me it feels more alone for someone to be cruel than to not interact with them at all, and frustration, because I am struggling with understanding why they did it.

Step 3: Is this within my control?

If what upset you was beyond your control, it’s time to take care of yourself, because the only thing you can change here is how you feel. Changing that feeling isn’t a matter of willpower. Instead, identifying the feeling informs how you take care of yourself to make that feeling lessen or go away.

I can’t control what strangers say to me. Since the appearance comment made me feel lonely and frustrated, I should address those directly. For me personally, finding someone to hang out with and to vent to about it, going for some exercise in a group, or chilling with a pet would all work. I really recommend writing down what works for you for different emotional pains, so that you’re not trying to solve what to do when you’re in emotional pain.

If it is in your control, then it’s time for Step 4: What’s between me and this being solved?

Let’s say that instead of a stranger making the comment, it was the first thing that popped up when I looked at myself in the mirror. That’s in my control. So why did it happen?

Sometimes the answer is that you hadn’t thought of it because this is the first time this has happened. Sometimes it’s that you never found the time. Sometimes it’s because you forgot. All of these are solvable. Perhaps I saw someone who looked similar get spoken to with the same cruelty, and I need to unpack that.

The tricky part here is that almost everyone has been taught that if something is in your control, and the barriers are solvable, then you should have done it already- causing shame to either show up or pile on, making the pain worse.

If shame shows up for you, the best thing you can do is put it in the queue. It’s an emotional pain that will need to be managed, but it’s not the one you’re working on right now. If you let shame derail you from figuring out your barriers, then you will struggle to reach any solutions. You cannot solve a problem you do not understand.

Sometimes the answer reveals a deeper problem. Maybe the person I heard say that is my main support, and their negative comments are affecting my emotional health, but I can’t afford to not have them.

Sometimes the barrier is that you don’t have money. That you don’t live in a safe location. That you’re too worn out to do anything. Problems that are either beyond your control, or need to be solved before you can even begin to address the problem that directly upset you. Whatever the root cause may be, not knowing it leads to frustration and shame, as you try to wrestle with something you can't do yet, or with the wrong problem entirely.

Trying to treat something you can change as something you can’t leads to frustration with the problem cropping up repeatedly. Trying to treat something you can’t change as something that you can is a recipe for shame. In both cases, stress piles on because you are using the wrong tool.

This is what works for me. If you don't have a method, I encourage you to try it out and see what works for you.

[houndmother]

honestly the word microagression is like

[houndmother]

so like, my brother used to be really against the phrase trigger warning, in a very like 4 chan kind of way (well actually he was on 8chan but thats. neither here nor there) and then one day i stopped him and i took 45 seconds to explain what a trigger warning actually is and he was like Oh… well that sounds like a good thing……  and I feel like the same thing happens to micro aggression a lot where it’s like. People react to what they think it means based on vibes and have this rly bad reaction bc like. theyre like oh it was a microaggression? youre mad at a paper cut? youre mad someone didnt say thank you? like they assume its the same as like. being passive aggressive. or whatever. rather than understanding it as what it is which is. you know. the constant sandpapering of daily life as a marginalized person

[worldwidewet]

PTSD-nightmares suck they leave you with this visceral sense of usafety and even unreality and you have to conciously remind yourself of the difference between something being true right now in the present and having been safer to assume in the past and you feel angry the entire time because it feels like you're stripping yourself of your most important defences when you're taking good care of your balanced adult life. I just want to kill everything in this world with fire but noo I am "mature" now I do things like reality checking and wiseminding ugh I even took my anxiety medication because the plan was to sleep in today until the appointment but I hate the feeling of falling asleep I hate dreaming I hate waking up I'm not even sure if I like being well-rested because the sensation of my body breaking internally from lack of sleep is weirdly familiar and comforting. But I am unfortunately going to be ok later and have balanced out to a more neutral state with nuanced opinions so whatever. "Goodnight" I guess.

[sk7r99]

your mouth is clean — his mouth is dirty

quick sketch inspired by manga reigen and mob's blank stares/resting faces, my smoking session and mccafferty's song "prolly"

original sketchbook version + digital sketch

[lumikat]

[torstherapy]

[project-platyplural]

Project PlatyPlural: Recruitment (Again)

Posting here on tumblr to hopefully get more people on Project PlatyPlural. Especially since we had to unfortunately remove two people from the project due to a few disagreements on how things are going to work.

Previous posts (from Reddit) asking for people to work on the project, for context: post one, post two, post three. I also posted on tumblr a bit ago!

In this post, I will share details about what we're planning. I won't go into extensive detail because all of this is subject to change during development (not to mention that there's so many things we're planning, it would take forever to list them all and especially in detail), but I will give you the general gist/very condensed version.

Additionally, as a heads up, we have decided that this project will start with an offline app first, and then we will later down the line add online functionality primarily relying on syncing, and we're also hoping to have a website (which will be made around the time we're working on online stuff).

Basic Layout & Some Features:

The Dashboard

This will be the page where everything is accessed, and the first page you will load into when opening the website/app.

Stuff that will be on the dashboard:

System Stuff:

Where you will be able to access your system profile, your members list, member profiles, member relationships, etc. You will be able to make groups and sub-groups for both members and member relationships.

Messaging:

While the app is in the offline-only stage of life, only the system chat(s) will be functional. We have no timeline as of yet how long it will take before we're able to start setting up online functionality (it will depend on funds we get from donations).

When we have online stuff set up, you will have the ability to send friends DMs (no group messaging), as well as send positive messages to friends (whether an entire system or an individual member) via message boxes accessible on system/member profiles, and these messages can be posted publicly (meaning that the receiver's friends can see it) and pinned.

The receiver will have the option of making the message anon or not. When typing and sending a message to any message box, the message box will have a note that explains that messages sent to these boxes can be public and off-anon, so that way senders can decide what they should include.

There will be a report system in place in order to ensure the safety of users.

Options:

The ability to import and export. I cannot guarantee this will be set up before SP's servers shut down, so it would be best to export and save your SP json files ahead of time or put down your information elsewhere to be safe.

Ideally, we would like to have both an SP API token import ability, and also the ability to import json files.

There will also be extensive options for accessibility and customization. Things like pre-set (with varying levels of contrast) and the ability to make custom themes, being able to pick different fonts, etc.

There will also be an area where you can delete your account. The ability to password protect this to prevent an unauthorized person (aka someone not in your system) from deleting your account is being considered.

There will also be a button to go to the website in which we will be accepting donations at some point (possibly Ko-Fi or another website).

TOS & Privacy Policy:

Where the TOS and Privacy Policy can be easily re-read. We are also considering having a pop up when first opening the website/app that lets you read and agree to the terms of service.

END OF LAYOUT & FEATURES LIST

There will likely be things we add that aren't even on this list because there is a lot that's going into this and a lot of things we need to account for or didn't think of.

Anyway, onto people we need for the project.

Please know this project is not for profit, and will be made up of volunteers. We cannot compensate you financially for your work.

Please also only apply if you are bodily 18+.

Additionally, please keep in mind and respect that we will NOT be accepting genAI in any part of the process. Do not test me on this.

People with experience managing the development/post-development of a website/app. I am struggling a bit to get the ball rolling with this project.

If you apply for this position, you will be given a temporary Trial Assistant Manager position so I can determine if you're a good fit to be in a more permanent position or not. If you pass, you will get the Assistant Manager position. There may be one or two additional managers as well, if you work well together. A max of 3.

My requirements are going to be the following: respect the no genAI rule (if you can't respect that rule, you know where the door is), respect that we will be financing this via donations (do not push freemium talk on me. Do not.), and please only be applying if you have some past experience managing the development/post-development of a website/app. If these requirements are not acceptable to you, don't apply.

2. Backend and frontend/UI devs and designers

3. Someone who knows their way around law and can read legalese (this way we can write a TOS and Privacy Policy)

4. Moderators for when the online features of the website/app are up and running (bc of the social features discussed above)

5. User/tech support

7. Translators so the website/app can be used in different languages. The closer you are to being fluent in a language, the better. You can comment if you know only one language other than English or multiple, as long as you have a decent level of skill. We will at some point need to translate things like TOS and Privacy Policy, so please keep that in mind.

8. Someone(s) willing to set up donations and manage finances when the time comes. Please DO NOT take initiative to do this right away, WAIT until we give you the go ahead. We want to wait until we have something presentable for people before we start asking for money.

Additional things:

This website/app is intended for all systems of all origins.

We (our system) do not feel comfortable anymore with the idea of opening a public discord server for the website/app. That is too "up close and personal" for us for a multitude of reasons and so we're going to make social media accounts on platforms like tumblr (which we have as you can tell) and Bluesky.

I may answer some questions that may be posted in the comments (not all of them because I have a very limited social battery and/or I may not have an answer for you yet)

If you have any ideas feel free to share (please note that there is no guarantee your idea will make it into the final product).

Also should have written this down in the previous tumblr post (in my defense I wasn't all there when I wrote it lmao):

If you want to apply, please do one of the following: comment on this post or reblog, DM me, or send me an ask. For all three, describe your relevant skill(s). I can then send you a DM with an invite to the Discord server. When I DM you, please tell me your discord username or display name so I know who you are.

I will refrain from posting this recruitment promo again for a couple days to prevent tumblr from getting mad at me (I'd like to NOT be caught in the spam filter, thank you very much /lh)

[404sysnotfound]

Hey just so you know: stalking, doxxing, bullying, harassing, and being an asshole to app devs is why they keep quitting. Behavior like that is why we can’t have accessibility apps. Stop spreading rumors, stop trying to “expose everyone” and let them make their fucking app in peace. You don’t have to like every dev or agree with everything they’ve done and said, but if you want this trend of devs quitting to stop, you need to stop being shit to them.

For those of you being kind and patient, this isn’t about you. This is about the subsection of absolute MANIACS in the community who couldn’t shut up if their lives depended on it. This shit is their fault.