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Nietzsche believed that you’ve gotta be able to think about suicide before you can move beyond wanting to kill yourself because only once you’ve accepted it as an option can you make the choice not to do it, and the alternative, to deny the urge and ignore it, would inevitably cause you to cave to the unaddressed desire you have for it.

And the dude was right. 

The rogue’s gallery of psych students and junior practitioners on this hellsite have hijacked my post about not being mean to yourself to explain to people how actually what I’m talking about is cognitive-behavioral therapy, and how it involves disciplining yourself to never talk negatively about yourself and how it’s important to check with a therapist that you’re doing it correctly, and like, this is why I don’t trust and can’t stand these people.

Being your own friend is a holistic process, there aren’t exercises you can do or therapy methods you can apply, which is why most people relapse almost immediately after stopping CBT or DBT, because they haven’t actually made any progress in how they look out for themselves, they were merely thrust into a disciplinary regimen where they are taught to engage in habits which their therapist then holds them accountable to, and so, without that therapist, they fall apart again.

Not being mean to yourself doesn’t mean censoring self-deprecating humor, it doesn’t mean snapping a rubber band on your wrist when you have a negative thought, it means taking time to sit down and think about yourself as if you were another person, to really take stock of who you are from as objective a perspective as you can muster, and if you really want to grow, realizing that this person you see can’t grow if the person closest to them, which is you, spends all their time berating them and making them feel like shit.

Being friends with yourself is not a series of therapeutic exercises, it’s challenging yourself to evaluate why you’re a dick to yourself in a way you aren’t to other people, or maybe you are a dick to other people, and maybe you want to be a dick to yourself, which is goofy as fuck, but if you’re still suffering, maybe ask yourself why the fuck you want to be such a dick, the answers may surprise you.

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cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

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taco bell takes all those crunchwrap pictures with 40x the amount of ground beef that they will regularly allow, not permitting more than a fucking teaspoon of their meat slurry to put used per dish, and then have the unmitigated gall to tell me its worth ten dollars.

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If you fucks actually go through with not voting on your next USA president elections and subsequently lead Trump to power again.

Yes. Yes I'm going to blame every single American for that. Collective responsibility and all that jazz.

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Man but the notes on that post really are just tumblr showing they have no idea how anything works.

"report to your local animal abuse people not to cops" local animal abuse people would be animal control. Animal control officers are cops.

"rabies is treatable if you go to the doctor right after the bite" rabies is PREVENTABLE, not treatable. There is no cure for rabies. If you suspect you came into contact with a rabid animal, you need to get a series of rabies vaccinations to prevent the virus from taking over your body. This is not a treatment and it only works if you go right away. If you show any symptoms of rabies it is too late.

"rabies is fatal in animals but treatable in humans" rabies has a 100% fatality rate and is not considered a survivable disease at this point in time. If you contract rabies YOU WILL DIE. The "treatment" in humans is called the Milwaukee Protocol, only 14% of people survive it, and it leaves you with massive brain damage and effectively turns you into a vegetable. You do not return to a normal life afterwards. Very few people who have undergone this process are capable of doing more than laying in a hospital bed and eating and breathing through tubes. To my knowledge only one person was able to live a semi-normal life after years and years of ongoing therapy and was not expected to have made it even through her first year after treatment.

I cannot stress enough how rabies is unlike any other disease you may be thinking of. It's required on a federal level in this country to vaccinate pretty much any domestic animal that comes into contact with wildlife for one reason and one reason only: it is not considered possible to cure rabies and the spread of disease would threaten all mammalian life including our own if allowed to continue to propagate.

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i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

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What about video record your answers to interview questions? Does that count as a photo? Cause that just happened to me.

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People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

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in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

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A phenomenal article.

Hi everyone: I've written a long deep-dive on the present state of the McMansion, from farmhouse chic to imminent environmental collapse. If you've been seeing an inordinate number of big ugly houses pop up in your neighborhood, you are not alone!

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pre-recession, post-taste

Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That's why I've gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.

Our present house is ostensibly "French Provincial" in style, which is McMansion for "Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano". It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.

Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity's sake, I'll only provide two of them.

With regards to the second sitting room, I'm really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.

Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.

Here's the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America's most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!

Okay I really don't understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?

Here's a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)

Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn't. I wish I couldn't read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.

When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.

Anyway, let's see what the rear of this house has to offer.

The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?

Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

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I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

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These regulations were written in blood

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So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.