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HEH. LONGFIC MORE LIKE. ITS DONEFIC. UH. ITS FINISHED NOW HOLY SHIT THIS TOOK FOREVER (COVERED IN BLOOD)

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After two decades of work, including monitoring by scientists, a captive breeding program run by inmates at a local women's prison, and habitat conservation by the Nisqually Tribe, the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly seems to be improving and even doing better than expected.

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Two nameless ocs I havent posted alot abt but they have a story. Think like the plot of an isekai but with lesbians

[Image ID: A digital drawing of 2 women. The woman on the left has dark brown skin, a slim build, a short black afro, and a gap in her front two teeth. She wears a white collar shirt. She smiles. The woman on the right had light brown skin, a medium build, and shoulder length brown locs with light cyan tips. She wears a blue head scarf over her hair, a gold septum ring, and a white tank top. She has a stern expression. End ID.]

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Sami went to this place today to bring some flour for his large family who are suffering like many people in Gaza. Sami is putting himself in danger in order to feed his family. He could have bought flour, but there is no source of income for him and his family because of the lack of life and the complete destruction of the infrastructure. Even baby milk is only available at very high prices. Netanyahu says all the people of Gaza must be killed. Even the children must be killed in his view because they were born there. Donate anything to Sami's family, anything that saves their lives.

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Highkey obsessed with this thumbnail I found last night so I had to redraw it

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Full respect to the deltarune transfem headcanons like I 100% see them too but I do take issue with people saying the only reading for the stuff the characters experience is transfem when much of it can be (and I'd argue explicitly is) racial. Its a story about a ethnic minority child being raised by parents who, despite their best efforts can't understand them. Changing their name after adopting a child from a different ethnicity is so common. Susie being treated like a threat and a problem child even tho she hasn't actually done anything looks almost exactly like my childhood. Idk its probably cause this is the 80% white website but its so much the experience of being a poc in a white neighborhood that I'm shocked more people arent talking about it

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gonna be a hater for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you HATED like viscerally hated like 1/2 star on letterboxd HATED

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NEW RESOURCE DROPPED

REPURPOSING THE SIDEBLOG TIME

this is a Writing Advice For Disabilities Sideblog Now. because if I'm going to have the disorder I might as well do something with it. if you want a general sensitivity reader or somebody to ask questions about these things than Look No Further !! actually Do look further I encourage research but you can Start Here if you want

I am OPEN to asks !! not taking DMs unwarranted in advance, not risking it

———

— Things I Have Experience In And Can Help With. Heh

– psychotic disorders (complicated)

– OSDDID (my experience specifically falls in with DID but general system representation is something I care a LOT about)

– endometriosis (ow)

– fainting disorders or fainting as an experience (I'm really good at it)

– I can talk about tics on their own but not a tic disorder as I don't have one

– general disability representation; intersectional elements related to being multiply disabled or trans (can NOT speak on the experiences of a disabled person of color, I HIGHLY recommend (RESPECTFULLY!!) reaching out to someone with that experience instead of me if that's what you need help with)

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hey! i can answer this!

basically, most if not all gaza fundraising was happening on gofundme simply due to name recognition and brand trust. however, gofundme quickly proved itself to be actively complicit in the genocide through its targeting of palestinian fundraisers for deletion and suppression.

my own friend siraj lost over $27,000 he had painstakingly raised over several months when gofundme arbitrarily declared his previously verified fundraiser fraudulent. he instantly lost access to food and housing for his entire family and has not been able to regain that progress since.

by contrast, chuffed has basically never given gaza fundraisers any problems. it actively promotes palestine-related fundraisers on its front page.

chuffed has also been used by the sameer project, crips for esims for gaza, and other palestine orgs for over a year now. after a particularly bad wave of deletions (of which siraj was a victim) people began migrating their fundraisers to chuffed, and it's become the go-to host site for new crowdfunding campaigns.

so if you see a fundraiser on chuffed, that's why!

my friend siraj has since moved his fundraiser to chuffed. if you got something out of this post, please consider donating to him. he needs ~150 euros to afford food for his family.

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Having OSDD and playing STP and seeing how other people interpret the voices is crazy. Mostly because I attribute all the Voices as just being smaller parts of the Whole (You, the player) so it’s harder to take their flaws seriously when it’s like. Yeah but I’m not like that and I don’t wanna do that, ur just a thought bro.

Like L + Ratio imagine not being the guy in control of the body today, ANYWAYS-

(Mini ramble undercut!!)

It what makes certain routes like the Spectre so fun when she joins the mess and is like “??? Is it always this loud” because like yeah. Being apart of a system in real life is really just fine tuning the noise and making your own choices, especially since the voices are usually shown at face value and when you dig deeper they all usually want the same thing: To survive.

And when you realize that it’s easier to take agency of the control you Do have as the player and therefore the vessel. They each have their own different ways and thoughts of surviving but ultimately they either just want to survive or they want to survive and end the pain of the cycle they’re forced through.

They’re just thoughts, just voices, brought forth from trauma and trying to escape, give them grace.

All this to say, being apart of a system and playing a game that involves multiple voices is really just like playing a real life simulator and is probably why I have such an easy time playing and understanding the characters in the game

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Writing a Schizophrenic Character: Everything But Hallucinations

Plain text: Writing a Schizophrenic character: Everything But Hallucinations

Hey! Mod Bert here. 

So: you’ve decided to write a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (there are other disorders on the schizophrenia spectrum but I will be focusing on these for today)

You’ve done it, you have their hallucinations and maybe even delusions picked out. Maybe they are one of many who experience auditory hallucinations or maybe they also have visual hallucinations or a combination. Maybe they have olfactory hallucinations as well. They may have persecutory delusions or delusions of reference or something like Cotard’s delusion or clinical lycanthropy. Awesome, you’ve done it!

What, I hear you say? What do you mean that’s only 2 of the 5 components needed to be diagnosed with schizophrenia? What do you mean, you don’t need to hallucinate at all to be schizophrenic?

What Goes Into a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

Plain Text: What goes into a diagnosis of schizophrenia

Not a lot of people realize there’s more to schizophrenia and schizoaffective than just hallucinations or delusions. There are 5 diagnostic criterias that are needed for schizophrenia, and only 2 of the 5 are needed for a month, with larger symptoms happening for six months or more. Let’s get into it.

Delusions

Hallucinations

Disorganized speech or thinking*

Disorganized or unusual motor behavior (catatonia)*

Negative symptoms (avolition, anhedonia, flat affect)*

I’m going to focus on disorganized speech/thinking, catatonia, and negative symptoms.

Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Plain Text: Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Schizophrenia and related disorders are often called “thought disorders” for a reason. Speech and thinking can be extremely affected, and for people like me this can be one of the first and most striking examples of an episode coming. Some people will always have disorganized symptoms that will flare during episodes. A myth is that schizophrenia can be indistinguishable with medicine: most people will have some level of symptoms even during moments of peace or “remission”. More on remission later. 

So, disorganized speech. Some examples are: word salad (schizoaphasia), thought blocking, poverty of speech (alogia), pressurized speech, clanging, and echolalia.

Word salad: a combination of words that do not make sense together. Often called schizoaphasia for its similarity to jargon in Wernicke’s aphasia, this is instead a disconnection with the brain and not due to damage to the language part of the brain.

(Example: the salad would be yellow in the fat cow).

Thought blocking: A severe loss of thought, often paired with connecting two trains of thought that are not connected

(Example: I went to the………Do you like grapes?)

Poverty of speech: A lack of organic responses to speech or organically speaking, it can be severe enough that a person only responds to questions or in one word responses. Can also happen in severe depression.

(Example: Person A: Did you do anything fun today?

Person B: Yes.

Person A: Oh, what did you do?

Person B: Store

Person A: How was it?

Person B: Fun)

Pressurized speech: A sort of frenzied way of speaking associated with psychosis or mania.

Clanging: Connecting phrases together because of what they sound like instead of meaning

(Example: I went bent tent rent).

Echolalia: Repeating word’s and phrases. Commonly also associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

(Example: Person A: I went to the store.

Person B: To the store.)

These are not the only examples but they are some ones I thought I'd highlight, either because they’re well known or I have experience with them, or because they’re famously thought of with other disorders as well and I wanted to point out how things overlap.

Personal experience: I had severe alogia for the duration of my last and worst episode. People thought I was mad at them because of the clipped way I spoke and the lack of really speaking. It got me in a lot of trouble. I didn’t realize what I was saying was different or weird (I have the least insight when it comes to my speaking patterns affected by my schizoaffective, meaning I can’t hear any difference and all of this is from repeated conversations with my mom, who was my caretaker for a bit and knows the most about my speech and what it means). The best solution was talking with people and being honest and educating myself and others. I don’t know about others, but I couldn’t have used AAC at that time.

Catatonia

Plain text: Catatonia

Fun fact: catatonia means unusual motor behaviors! Any unusual motor behaviors mean catatonia. This includes what we think of when we think of catatonia in schizophrenia (inability to move) as well as the opposite (being unable to stop moving) as well as strange movements and ways of holding and moving the body! Catatonia in the DSM-5 includes 3 or more of these 12 behaviors:

-Agitation unrelated to external stimuli

-Catalepsy

-Echolalia

-Echopraxia

-Grimacing

-Mannerism

-Mutism

-Negativism

-Posturing

-Stereotypy

-Stupor

-waxy flexibility

I have some experiences with catatonia-like symptoms but since they were never identified as such I’ll skip those for now. I will say that catatonia is a symptom that can happen in many disorders besides schizophrenia as well.

Negative Symptoms! Yay!

Plain text: negative symptoms! Yay!

So a positive symptom (Hallucinations or delusions) are symptoms that add something to reality or a person. Negative symptoms are symptoms that take away. There are 5 A’s:

-Alogia (Again, poverty of speech, our favorite)

-Avolition (Lack of energy and motivation)

-Affect (Blunted affect, or a flat way of speaking)

-Anhedonia (Lack of pleasure in things that used to bring you pleasure, often thought of with depression)

-Asociality (Lack of interest in social events and relationships)

There are also often cognitive changes including thinking and memory, information recall, understanding, and acquisition, and so forth. 

Schizophrenia and schizoaffective often (but not always) happen with what’s called a prodromal period. This period can be months to years (mine was a little less than a year) and mainly consists of negative symptoms. Slowly, positive symptoms are added. There are thought to be stages to schizophrenia including prodrome, active phases, and remission.

I’ll talk about that a little for a second because I’m currently in remission and no one knows what that means. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective depressive type in January 2021. As of February 2024, I no longer qualified to be rediagnosed because my symptoms were strongly under control and no longer severe enough to qualify for a diagnosis. They also didn’t distress me or impact my daily life severely. Day to day now I still have mild symptoms and take my antipsychotics (trying to go off them have made it clear that I still have some symptoms I choose to keep medicating) but I haven’t had a delusion in 2 years and been hospitalized in 3. There’s always a possibility of another episode but I work with my team to keep myself one step ahead if that happens.

What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Plain Text: What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Alright the writing advice part. What do I want from a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective (which is schizophrenia plus either depression or bipolar). 

-Characters with caregivers.

-Characters using coping strategies (recording hallucinations to tell if theyre hallucinations, taking medication, having service animals that greet people so they know if they’re a hallucination, using aids for the cognitive symptoms like sticky notes and organizational tools)

-Characters who know other characters with their disorder, either online or in support group or through running in similar circles

-Characters having autonomy

-Characters who aren’t the killer or horror victim. I know it’s cool to have the schizophrenic protagonist in horror, and I love horror, but I don’t want to read about the horror being symptoms the whole time

-Characters who are in magical scenarios, who are in fantasy and sci-fi. The schizophrenic princess and the schizoaffective robot technician aboard the spaceship.

-Medication and hospitalization treated casually. Sometimes we need higher care. That’s morally neutral

-Characters with negative symptoms and speech symptoms.

-Characters with catatonia! 

-Characters with other disorders as well

-characters with side effects from medicine treated casually

-Characters with cognitive symptoms

Thank you for reading this incredibly long thing! Happy writing!

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Sinking Town

[ID: Animated video of Deltarune characters to the song Sinking Town by Yoeko Kurahashi. It is in a paper craft/puppet show style. It starts with theater curtains being pulled to the sides to reveal a paper doll of the vessel falling. Inbetween every scene, a curtain is lowered and raised. Then Kris sits under the tree with the Forgotten Man while FRIEND sits in the tree above them, smiling and swishing its tail. Then we see Kris's face and they have an unreadable nuetral expression. A fabric red heart, a paper cutout of the phone, and a glass suncatcher in the shape of the Delta Rune fall into view and are held by strings. Next we see Ralsei, Susie, and Noelle in their dark world appearance travelling happily through the Field of Pink and Gold. Butterflies flutter around them. Next we see Kris getting swarmed by the butterflies and they fall to their knees like Everyman in Reaper Bird's attack from Undertale. Then we see Kris being knighted by the Roaring Knight. Bubbles envelop the screen and we see Dess sinking into water. Lastly, we see Ralsei in a tower in Castle Town looking worringly out the window torwards the sky, hands clasped. The theater curtains are closed over the screen. End ID.]

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“We need more complex female characters”

YALL COULDNT HANDLE HER

It’s crazy that her character flaw is thinking that if she ever expresses a negative emotion everyone will dislike her and yall immediately proved her right. Goddamn.

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reject the western gaze!

mutual aid means no hierarchy between givers and receivers

a new mutual aid org, Bridge of Solidarity, has been established in the gaza strip by 17 year old poet yazan mohammed in response to the exploitative practices conducted by some charities and encouraged by the existing charity-based model of fundraising for gaza. according to BoS: "the western attention economy and pity economy plays a large role in who lives or dies in gaza." essentially, people need to make themselves marketable in order to receive lifesaving aid; people who are not marketable die. yazan himself wrote about the damage this can do to one's self image, which you can read here.

after trying for a year to respect his own privacy, my friend siraj was also pressured into posting images of his son's emaciated body in order to gain sympathy from westerners.

we cannot keep forcing people to do this anymore.

here's a declaration of their values from bridge of solidarity's most recent post:

Our organization is against the Western gaze. We refuse to humiliate people. We refuse to force people to take photos. We refuse to force people to take photos with our flyer or logo. People will receive aid freely without being forced to pose. We will respect people's privacy completely. Our principles include autonomy, dignity, sovereignty, mutual respect, and mutual aid.

this org will prioritize giving aid to people without phones or social media, who do not speak english, and who do not have outside support or living parents. these are the people who are not palatable to westerners but who deserve to live with as much dignity as everyone else

as of five days ago, BoS are working on a water truck delivery