#discursive

[utterly-disappointed]

wrote this for my english class, thought I'd share here too

“Rewinding the Past, Pausing the Present”

There’s a box in my room, hidden in the back of my wardrobe. It’s not special to anyone else, just stuffed with paper scraps and polaroids and birthday cards I never threw out. But sometimes, when the world feels too loud or the future too uncertain, I open that box and sift through the pieces like they’re relics. It’s my time machine—cheap, chaotic, and oddly comforting.

Nostalgia’s like that. A comfort. A soft landing. For me, it’s the feeling of biting into a Milo ice cream on a 32-degree January afternoon. It’s hearing “Lush Life” by Zara Larson and being seven again, dancing barefoot on the verandah with Mum. It’s those primary school notebooks filled with bad cursive and overly enthusiastic exclamation marks. Nostalgia wraps around me like the hoodie I stole from my older brother—too big, too worn, but warm all the same.

But lately, I’ve been wondering: what if that warmth is a bit deceptive?

We’re told that looking back is sweet, even wise. That remembering “the good old days” helps us appreciate the present. And sometimes, it does. But I’ve started noticing how easily nostalgia can become a trapdoor—one that opens beneath you when life gets too complicated, dropping you into a version of the past that’s rosier than it actually was.

I’ve seen it in my own family. My dad still tells stories about how great Australia was when he moved here as a kid. It’s not just about the beaches or meat pies; it’s about a version of life that he’s convinced was simpler, better, purer. But was it? Or is he just editing out the messy bits?

Even I’ve caught myself editing.

I remember Year 7 as a blur of bubble tea and lunchtime gossip, but I’ve somehow managed to forget the panic of trying to find someone to sit with on the first day. I remember sleepovers with my best friend, but conveniently forget the argument that ended our friendship in Year 11. Nostalgia isn’t memory. It’s memory with makeup on.

And sometimes, it stops us from moving forward.

I know people my age who say things like “I wish I could go back to primary school” or “life was so much better before COVID.” And sure, I get it. Life did feel simpler when the worst thing was forgetting your library book. But we can’t rewind. 

I reckon there’s a tension in nostalgia. On one hand, it helps us make sense of who we are. On the other, it can freeze us in a moment that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like looking at an old photo and refusing to acknowledge that the person in it has grown up.

Music gets this, like in Lorde’s Ribs, there’s that lyric: “It feels so scary getting old.” It’s haunting, right? Like we’re already mourning moments while we’re still in them. Nostalgia can do that. It pulls us out of the present before we’ve had the chance to live in it.

So where does that leave me?

I still open the box. I still flick through the old birthday cards. I still listen to songs that remind me of last summer and cry when I hear my Year 6 graduation song. But I also try to remind myself that I’m not meant to stay there. That nostalgia is a visitor, not a roommate.

Maybe it’s about balance.

Maybe nostalgia is a gift—so long as we don’t let it become an anchor. Maybe it’s okay to remember the smell of your Year 3 classroom and the way your mum used to braid your hair before school, so long as you don’t spend so much time looking back that you forget to see what’s in front of you.

Because the future is coming, whether we’re ready or not. And if we spend all our time rewinding, we’ll never get to hit play.

p.s @brokebackpatroh told me to post this

[differentnighttale]

The Problem with Swifties ;An in-depth essay on Taylor Swift and her Toxic Fandom. An extensive essay.

Swifties are the diehard fans of Taylor Swift for decades since her award and exploded with numerous songs and singles, but Swifties have a history of pushing people back from the Fandom and making people dislike Taylor herself.

  Last year ,a Charlie XCX fan tweeted a photo of himself with a sign about Swifties.Yes,he shouldn't have written such a sign, but did he deserve to be dox online? No,hell no. They found where he lived, his school. And his country of origin that's not okay and he was a teenager. That was extreme backlash from swifties who called themselves powerful and not to be messed with. We could agree that the guy is wrong and doxxing is worse.

  In late 2024, David Gohl's daughter tweeted about Taylor's plane use, and then swifties attacked her with threats about 🪦and 🍇 threats and even homophobic remarks about them all because someone criticized Taylor's private plane us age ?That's not okay just because she's critiquing a celebrity is not a bad thing and you should be up and arms over someone who doesn't know you exist. Toxic swifties are of course ruining a Fandom due to extremeness of the fans.

Everyone knows the term girl's girl and how the term has been revamped for the worst, or it varies on certain community you orbit. Girls girls mean a girl who uplifts girls, supports them with hobbies, earning from them, feeling joy from them and is positive and does not put girls down for what they like and over a boy but a pick me girl is a girl who's the exact opposite: Doesn't support girls, looks down on them, not positive ,puts them down and wants male attention. Why did I bring this up? Cause there's a discourse around it :Every time I see a video with Swifties on Taylor Swift and girls are commenting on not liking them. The first thing people say is that their pick Mes. This throws me into the roof, the wall and whatever. It pisses me off.One: I am defending their actions but highlighting on it. Sure, most people who comment are pick me and others are just haters who live to hate but that's not always the case. Most people are tired of Swifties, over hearing Taylor Swift and all the drama and the extermity of them which puts people off which is valid. But some of their reasoning's Swifties not the commentors is that their doing it for male attention, hating her cause wll everyone hates her and that their pick mes who ecomposes all what I said initially. Girls can have different tastes and interests, girls are not a monolith, not liking femimine thing and stuff doesn't make you a pick me, you are only a pick me when you put other girls down.

This is slight diversion from the outline that I planned, and I am going to dip my toes it.Some examples on why a girl might be put off by the fandom or being a pick me: Some fans get hella defensive when you say you aren't interested ,lose their minds or say you aren't into her new music or she's not your type of artist which is 💯💯valid. Others say that you must hate woman, not saying is a stretch or false because of the type of hate she gets, Taylor but still that's very wild to tell other women which is very sexist and a gross generalsation.Again ,to the obsessive fans,doxxers and overall immature girls. And make er their whole personality. Stop celeb worship. Most hate Taylor herself for only speaking on politics when ia convenient, flying numerous times on her jet and how her fandom babies her like Shes a grown woman, not a baby.To "White" feminism to the Swifties literally baby. To Asylums like that's all sorts of messed up and even Romanizing about the 1800s, if you know the meme. You know it.

Well anyways this is FAR too long, and I stand by my points. I would post the last and final part when I'm ready.

Happy reading.

[saphosticated]

The discursive essay.

I announce it to the class like some foul beast that lurks in the peeling paint on our classroom rafters. Feet shuffle. Eyes avert. But I still start my usual spiel.

The discursive essay is the best type of writing that I will be allowed to teach you during the entire HSC. But, I won’t give you a scaffold. I won’t give you letters like PEEL or PETAL or TEEL to clutch like a life-raft. Instead I will give you freedom.

Sure, you’ll have a prompt. But you can interpret it any way that you want. You can use any techniques. You can discuss anything that interests you. You can have an entire paragraph made up of rhetorical questions and still get a band 6. (Trust me, I’ve seen it)

You can write imaginatively, add in some poetry. Experiment with spacing. Use your punctuation for effect. If you want to write about anxiety (or maybe you’re just overthinking it. Again) you certainly can.

It’s your opportunity to throw away the rules and use your voice. Make allusions to the things you know. The things you care about. Link them to your studies. Make me want to keep reading.

Were Machiavelli’s observations of Florentine society and politics decidedly Lady Whistledown’ish. Maybe you want to see if your reader can decipher the difference between a Taylor Swift lyric and a Shakespeare quote.

Make links between your texts and current events. Maybe it is stupid that you sit in a classroom while the person next to you complains that we have no air conditioning so they won’t do their work, but children are being bombed in Gaza and their schools are now empty mouths in the ground and empty mouths not being fed because of the blockade.

Maybe we taught you too well to follow the rules.

To use your scaffolds.

To tie together your five paragraph essays with overly crafted thesis statements.

To use connectives for your ideas

To analyse the techniques.

To repeat what you’ve been taught.

So much that freedom feels overwhelming. It feels dangerous. This unknown text-type that lurks in the shadows and does not get the love it deserves.

But,

Once you start looking. It’s everywhere. It’s the opinion editorial, it’s the recent personal essay written by Lizzo and published on Tumblr (Go read it, it’s fantastic), it’s blog posts, and travel guides and anywhere that someone is sharing their ideas and their story however they want without trying to persuade you.

It’s the antithesis to AI. It’s the combinations and connections and personal style and voice that only you have. It’s uniquely human, and like the dragon in Shrek. You do not need to be afraid of it.

[artisan-antibiotics]

A Masochist’s Approach to Positive Psychology 

tw mention of $u!c!de, BD$M/k!nk ramblings.

disclaimer: I have dyslexia so if you find a spelling mistake hold ya fucking breath.

In this discursive I'll be rambling on about pain versus pleasure, what is happiness, and what is wellbeing. These thoughts are an analysis of a paper I used as research for an essay required for a psychology class at my university. To start off I'd like to give some background on what positive psychology is, and why I'm studying. It has a rather unique position in psychology, in that it focuses on the well being of an individual in a way that essentially uses positive emotions, happiness and enrichment of life to alleviate more negative emotions, unlike traditional clinical psychology that fully acknowledges mental illness/presence of symptoms and explores ways to treat those.

The approach to positive psychology that my class is taking is Martin Seligman's PERMA model, the acronym standing for the believed five elements to flourishing as a human being in the modern era: 

Positive emotion

Engagement

Relationships

Meaning

Achievement 

I will be touching on all of these areas but mainly exploring the second element: Engagement and flow. 

Now for the juice. The paper is “Orientations To Happiness and Life Satisfaction: the Full Life versus the Empty Life” published in 2005 and written by Christopher Peterson, nansook park and our positive psychology boi as mentioned above with PERMA, Martin Seligman. I'd like to start of and say how classist the title seems at first glance, “the full life vs the empty one” I believe most of these wellbeing aspects can only be reached by those in places of privilege, those without any severe trauma, strong social connections and relationships, white people, you get the idea. It seems to me like a simple degradation and negative look at those who cannot reach this ideal of a happy life, as described by these elements. Even while looking at journals and accessible websites for “pop-wellbeing” pictures of mostly white, middle to upper-class families such as the one I've included here are used.

I feel like the more I go into studying this emerging field of psychology the more I get filled with this annoyance that psychology is so heavily biased on “W.E.I.R.D” populations. (“W.E.I.R.D” being a term used primarily in social psychology and stands for white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, and is used to describe the 80% of people who make up our history of psychological research samples, while that specific demographic only makes up 12% of our global population). MY POINT IS that positive psychology is made for a small population, and if it makes you want to seethe, you have every right to, as it probably wasn't made for you, and verges so close to the toxic positivity line every time. My reason for writing about this subject is because I feel there is much to gain by thinking about some of the themes of what pleasure and happiness even is, using the concepts in positive psychology as a bounce off, and also because I feel like if I don't have somewhere to write my thoughts down I feel I may explode.

So it starts off with the abstract, where we learn that the research is to explore and analyse findings from surveys done by 845 adults through the internet, measuring life satisfaction through three different ways the authors of the paper saw that we can be happy. 

Through pleasure

Through engagement

Through meaning 

Though these have barely no description, and I feel like they have multiple overlapping meanings, I will take them out of consequence with the study and give them meaning because I like to be thorough (unlike most arbitrary nonsense that lots of people write in the name of philosophy and psychology) 

Pleasure is the physical and emotional sensations that fill us with our own unique way we experience bliss. Pleasure can give our lives meaning, and pleasure can be the subject of engagement and flow. I would like to point out that pleasure can be experienced alone, or with others, and can be sexual, but is oftentimes not. Just in the same way that kink and BDSM is experienced in a similar way, and I feel is the perfect representation of sensation, both physical and emotional, in that its balenced in the range of ways that people can experience pleasure, when humans arent forced to adhere to social norms. 

Engagement is to do with the mind and its capacity, flow will be referred to alot and that is when all of the mind is filled with one subject, or activity so that all that our limited-capacitied-brains can comprehend on the conscious level is that activity or subject. Time is blurred. 

Meaning can lead me to multiple trains of thought, and as someone who is still young and dosnt have a strong understanding of their own meaning of life, it's hard to pinpoint. But I will describe it as a sort of drive, a colourfull array of experiences and emotions that are inherently attached to a personal arsenal of values, those labled and unlabeled. 

The paper claims that those with low scores on these three areas of life have a low life satisfaction. And I agree with this much more than the later described PERMA model from 2011, particularly because I think it carries less popular wellbeing bullshit and caters to a much larger variety of human experience. We reach the introduction, where I encounter historical mentions to positive psychology, and the statement “the doctrine of hedonism – maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain – was articulatd thousands of years ago by Aristuppus (435–366 BCE) who championed immediate sensory gratification (Watson, 1895)”. My original thoughts on this were annoyance, because as a complex masochist the notion that pleasure is the ultimate good and pain is the ultimate evil, does not describe my experience. I grew up always in a certain amount of pain either physical or emotional, taught to be by my parents, other family members, chronic illnesses and compounding trauma from every year of my life, I have a different baseline, and many others will agree with me in their own cases. I have recently moved out of home and socially transitioned, been able to build stronger relationships and this has had a profound positive effect on my levels of pain. Yes, a little while ago I attempt suicide but this is because I am still dealing with all of my first 18 years of life’s thought patterns and redundant self-esteem. Pain has become my home, well was always my home, it was what lulled me to sleep. What woke me up in the morning, followed me to parties and the bathroom, overseas and in the wilderness, however, now as I’ve moved out I have more space and time to explore my masochist side, I feel empowered by the fact I can return to that home of pain on my own terms, and slowly replace emotional pain with short term physical pain that I can determine what it feel like, and how long it resides for. 

This possibly introduces a new concept which came to me in a second reading of this paper: true pain and pain for pleasure. I seek out pain so I can heal, feel pleasure, feel vulnerable with another person (which is a very new thing for me) and also, with all background aside, have fun with sensation as pain is another way to stimulate the body and feel, when applied in the right way. It's possible when Aristuppus mentions pain, that he thinks of true pain, ugly pain, uncontroled pain, which for me is life-limiting, rather than enriching. Positive psychology fails to explore this side, and by my own acknolegemnt to this concept I feel I extend the positive assets that positive psychology can have, and its poential to a much larger range of people. 

HEDONISM VS EUDEMONIA 

Hedonism is described as pleasure being the ultimate for wellbeing and happiness, while Aristotle’s Eudemonia- being true to one’s inner demon - is described as the use of one's virtues, to cultivate them and live in accordance with them, but I feel this to be unnecessary as I dont understand why someone would actively want to live in defiance to their own values (I understand maybe many are pushed to or not able to). If I didnt live to what makes me happy I feel like I would tear off my skin, and I see this in the way I rebel to the social and power structures that oppress my values and my happiness, and when I do feel oppressed, I do feel true pain, and I do feel like tearing my skin off. I guess I want to point out that philosophers have some good ideas, and they have some bad ones. It's ok to be in conflict with ideas. Eudemonia was a way to express the desire and need for living according to your own values, and body, how it feels and thinks, how respecting yourself is key, and we can do away with Aristotle’s idea that the meaning of pleasure is too vulgar. Also the statement “the pursuit of a meaningful life is widely endorsed as a way to achieve satisfaction: ‘Be all that you can be, and Make a difference.’’ sounds way too religious and can touch on some religious trauma for some as there are two levels, first being looking at pure values of an individual and supporting them to promote wellbeing, and second using a higher authority to make people believe all their problems will go away if they help other people. I do believe (and it's supported by evidence) that the vast majority of people are happier if they express gratitude and make a difference in this world, but I feel like it's a theme that is not on the same level as the ones core to this discussion. 

Because of this discussion, the thought of hedonism vs eudemonia is irrelevant because the bits I feel that matter that is pleasure and self-fulfilment are interchangeable, overlapping and at core express the same sentiment. 

Waterman’s studies of Eudemonia in 1993 provoked the authors of this paper to state “Flow is not the same as sensual pleasure… flow is nonemotional and arguably nonconscious” which I feel is just so highly untrue. My personal experience with flow is that there is an extreme emotional drive, passion, intense focus driven By emotion, or that flow where emotion is so all consuming and overloading that the subject of flow is emotion. Flow is reached from anger, love, curiosity just a few that come to mind, I would describe these emotions as passionate emotions. And yes, they are all consuming most of the time. I started writing this discursive at 1:30 pm and it is now 5pm. I have not taken a single break, I would describe this as flow, driven by emotion, one that is hard to describe, a carnal need to express my ideas. Anger? A bit, love? A bit… a beautiful explosion of passion. Flow is certainly achieved by sensual pleasure, more often in bdsm scenarios often described by subspace, domspace, but is not limited to these specific experiences and labels. As flow is a state of a subject taking up all capacities of the mind, for a submissive bound by rope this is special by the sensations of rope marking them, and of the vulnerability, engulfing their soul. Or for a service dominant partner, being so Intune to the sub’s feelings, their own feelings, the rope in their hand is all there is in the moment, hours can go by and they are untouched by the outside world. Because of these examples I find that  “People may describe flow as enjoyable, but this is an after-the fact summary judgment; ‘‘joy’’ is not immediately present during the activity itself… At least at any given point in time, flow and pleasure may even be incompatible” as a statement is entirely untrue, at least for me, and many others. 

So there you have it, my rambles for positive psychology. If you didn't understand a single thing, that's ok I have a habit of not making much sense, this isn't going to be graded by a teacher so you can suck my dick. I hope I've left you with things to ponder.

The paper:

(if you don't have a university or other log DM me and ill tell you how you can access it)

Peterson, C., Park, N., and Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: the full life versus the empty life. J. Happiness Stud. 6, 25–41. doi: 10.1007/s10902-004-1278-z

[manwalksintobar]

THE KAFKA VIRUS VERSES: THURSDAY // Terrance Hayes

July 2020

The madness of each ordinary day versus the language of someone raised by history versus someone raised by a virgin. I’m mostly interested in the devil's story

because know there's some devil in me. I still live like someone somewhere will clean the vents of my home anatomy, but I am the only person who lives here.

According to Memphis Slim what looks like singing has its roots in slaves’ casting shade on oppressors, a cotton field of them stooped weeping jeremiads of sweat. Marlon Brando's snake-

skin jacket in The Fugitive Kind cursed Marlon Brando's leather jacket in The Wild One so that Brando himself became a black person on opposite sides of a mirror calling the other Demon.

I am a man named your father's name or I am the heroin flower vendor vending stolen flowers in the park. I am Ambrose Black-Blake, the Butcher,

Or Ebenezer Nebuchadnezzar, the Lying King. Or a man who thinks winning is the whole point of everything while losing only highlights loss.

I am known, when entangled in great and minor trouble, to berate my own damn self. You find every kind of human being human in every way every day.

If you are the only person to observe a particular trait in yourself, how trustworthy is the observation? People who have been loved poorly may or may not be cursed

to love poorly. You know how you don't know how to describe your own face without looking in the mirror? You know how you never can tell a curse from a bad day?

That intermittent chirping coming from somewhere in the house is a smoke alarm's dying battery not a mine canary. Growing is never not a part of being grown. Most

big decisions are made without me and you every day too. I'm just so accustomed to adjusting to everything. How often must I tell you I was born to a sixteen-year-old black girl who

had three siblings with different fathers in the projects of South Carolina in 1971, after a neighbor raped her? If there is no solution,

a problem is not a real problem by definition. When my mother's grand- mother was alive, she lived on the dark potions of a beautician

with a mouth full of hairpins, and an enchanted freehand above the minds of ladies looking to feel more lovely beneath their lovers' hands.

Like her ambidextrous skinny silver scissors refining and lining the edges of her extra-fine extra magic touch, my hands were made for beautiful things.

[ceescedasticity]

I saw another post today which seemed to assume "expensive wireless earbuds" and "no headphones at all" were the only options in public and

Do people not know about these?

Getting rid of headphone jacks is total garbage but they do make earbuds that hook into your phone's charging/data port.

[ardentpoop]

yeah ok. patriarch says what 👂

[muxas-world2]

The jurnalist saying he would feed of the “younger blood”…

[grandwitchbird]

Excerpt:

“The death of the author means we do not seek to “resolve” art through its creators. At the end of the day, the death of the author is about the consumer of the art. It’s about the consumption of art without ever stopping to ask the author what they want or what they wanted, at least not directly. The reader can ask themselves what they think the author may have intended, but such a reading or interpretation is still rigorously based on the art itself.”

—

The death of the author isn’t about ‘headcanon’. It’s not about eradicating authorial craft and labor. It’s about interrogating a text for what it is. It’s about resisting the parasocial drive to seek validation from artists. It’s about thwarting censorship and moralization. It’s about interrogating our own interpretive role. It’s meant to get us closer to the text itself while recognizing all the impediments in the way of any kind of ‘pure’ reading.

In a way, the death of the author leads inevitably to the death of the audience. We are not entitled to a position of authority just because we’ve dethroned the author. This is about centering the art itself and asking more intelligent and creative questions about that art.

[velvetvexations]

"You don't need forcefem it came free with living in a fucking misogynistic society!!! Society is feminizing by nature! It's why male celebrities can wear dresses and heels and everyone applauds and celebrates them! It's why Asian men and trans men are gatekept from masculinity!!! No one is going around forcing women not to shave or making them cut their hair short!"

^^ I can also assume my personal experiences are universal and then make things up about it and accidentally forget that people trans in the opposite direction of me exist. Diversity win: your local Chinese transmasc is about to fucking lose it

(in case it's not 100% clear. this is exclusively satire and no one should actually think these things because it does erase the experiences of trans women which is fucked up. Shout out trans women for being cool and awesome)

lmao

[bogusfilth]

academics will be like "marxism eurocentrically assumes that the peasantry will just be dispossessed and proletarianized!" and you're like damn that's terrible! how is the peasantry these days? and they've been dispossessed and proletarianized.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

It is based of Alexander Siddig to be "not entirely straight" but ngl every time that interview goes around it does make me feel some kind of way about how it is near-impossible to say anything about Bashir as a character even in mainstream venues without it being made about That Ship. And I love the ship! I'm investing my Long WIP energy in the ship! But god, there's so much more you could say about the character. Literally so much about DS9's entire premise, and the way it's testing and probing at Star Trek's optimism, is explored through Bashir (and frankly that's what his dynamic with Garak should have been about as well). His character is very important to the narrative in ways that have nothing to do with the institution of Big Garashir.

[myconetted]

sorry i'm mad but like. moral purity and deontology piss me off so much lmao

by virtue of living and buying in america, you are contributing to the genocide. opting out of the voting process doesn't make you any less complicit. it does not reduce your moral fucking taint. you will never be clean. get over it and do everything in your power to make the world better

[imninahchan]

top únicas coisas que eu gostei na abertura breguíssima: gays na ponte e menage na biblioteca, AYA NAKAMURA, sangue dos aristocratas e a beyoncé cruzando o tietê no cavalo.

[flateric420]

discussing claudias last name...

we know that armand calls her 'claudia de lioncourt', and I've seen people tag claudia de lioncourt and claudia de pointe du lac

i personally am heavy on the 'claudia de lioncourt'

her personality in general is closer to lestats, with the drinking of human blood, wanting a companion, her powerful mind and ambitions, but this isn't all

this is more predominant in the movie than the show, but claudia also dresses very flamboyant as her mind ages, reflecting lestat, lestat dresses in navys and elegance, while louis is very earthy - there is literally a dress that kirsten dunst's claudia wears in the movie, which is a gorgeous dress can i add, that is an identical navy blue to half of lestats outfits

going back to the show, we see both her and lestat rebelling against the great laws, they both have a love for theatre

and of course, people can have the one parents last name and be more like the other, but with claudia not having a distinct last name and the discussion of which of her fathers last name she would genuinely have...

no matter how much claudia would want to disagree with it, she is so much more like lestat than louis its ironic, and she would definitely be claudia de lioncourt

(i also think louis should be louis de lioncourt because they're husbands)

[ceescedasticity]

Proposed term of condemnation/derogation: DRIRAH.

Divorced from Reality

Impervious to Reason

Actively Harmful

Because I think we do need a word for this behavior that doesn't also refer to mental illness or suggest people being DRIRAH can't help themselves when I'm pretty sure many of them could.