#I'm aware it's probably trite and generic

[dreamerwriternstargazer]

Soooooo..... this is the piece I submitted for my assignment and uh idk it actually meant something to me how weird XD so I'm posting it on here because before everything else this blog was supposed to be a place for me to take my first steps as a writer and that still applies; this is my little journal ^_^ my commonplace notebook, or rather an extension of it (since I do also have a journal with me all the time anyway ^_^)

The extract is fairly short, we had a word limit of 900 words and of course I hit exactly 900 + 10%, also in case you didn't see my previous posts yes this will have emotional scenes and references to sexual assault, rape and abduction, not very long but the small sections are graphic. Read at your own discretion

I stared in disbelief at the table before me. There was a big bouquet of pink and purple flowers in the middle, flanked by two trays of some multicoloured, vomit-like casserole from which wisps of sickeningly vegetable scented steam rose up. The dining places were set, one, two, three, with a small bunch of flowers tied with a ribbon on the middle of one of the plates.  

The plate is set at the head of the table. Guest of honour. 

“What... what is this?”  

“We... we thought you might want a nice meal your first day home,” Mum says nervously, hovering beside me. “I baked a vegetable lasagna, your favourite remember?”  

I frown, tugging at the soft, fluffy sleeves of my lilac dressing gown. I haven’t taken it off since I left the hospital. “I don’t remember. I’m more used to frozen pizzas and tv.” 

“We also thought the flowers were a nice touch, you liked the colours when you were little,” Dad said brightly, pulling out the chair with one hand and taking one of mine to lead me to it. As though I needed help sitting.  

All I do is sit. All I have done is sit for the past 9 years, except for when it was lying down. Or kneeling.  

I slip my hand away and drop my gaze to the floor, tugging my fluffy hood over my head. “Can’t we just eat in front of the TV? I always ate in front of the TV with him.” 

Mum sighs, it’s the shaky watery sigh, and I want to hit myself, and her.  

No, don’t, that’s mum, she’s trying, she’s trying...  

“April, the doctor said it would be better if we stayed away from the habits that you had when you were... away,” Dad says gently. 

“Kidnapped you mean.”  

He winces. “Please, can we not talk about it like that?” 

“Like what? That’s what it was, I was kidnapped. That’s true, isn’t it?” 

“We’re trying to move on,” Mum whispers. 

“By making me food I don’t even remember? Put flowers in front of me like it’s a celebration? How does not talking about it make us move on, you just want to pretend like it didn’t happen.” I can hear Mum start to breathe shallowly and fast, and I see Dad’s grey slippers shuffle across the floor as he goes over to comfort her. Her. Not me.  

“April, look up,” he says firmly. I don’t want to, so I pull my hood down further, focusing my eyes on the pattern of white stars on the inside. “April please, we’re doing our best. Can you please look at us?”  

“Your best got me kidnapped.”  

I hear Mum cry out at that. A small wail. 

Idiot, you made Mum cry, she made you dinner and you made her cry. Just hang yourself already. 

“That’s enough, you may have gone through... everything you have but that is no excuse to treat us like this.” 

“Like what? You’re not the ones who got taken, you didn’t get raped every day, you didn’t get touched and licked and beaten black and blue, everything I’ve gone through.” I hate myself more with each word that falls out of my mouth, but I can’t stop, it’s overflowing from my head and spilling from my lips. “You aren’t the ones who got stuck in hospital after finally escaping, on the verge of dying. You aren’t the ones who are 20 years old, a full-fledged adult, with no choices, no life, no friends, and people you don’t know deciding everything, including your food like you’re still a baby, for you.” I don’t wait to hear their

reply, Mum’s sobbing too much and I turn and run, my fists balled up against the sides of my head as I slam down my feet on each step to my bedroom, trying to release my thunderstorm to drown out her misery.  

************ 

In my room it’s easier to calm down, I can wrap myself up in the purple blankets on my bed and hide away from the world. This time I don’t want the comfort of wrapping myself up though.  

I keep feeling this pain in my chest when I think about Mum crying, my heart caught in a beartrap and its cold, metal jaws snap round my heart, shocking and stabbing me all at once. I hit my head every time it happens, trying to distract myself from it, and because I deserve it. I don’t know how to not make her cry.  I don’t know how to tell her how I feel... and not make her cry.  

Knock knock. “April? It’s Mum, can I please come in?”  

I stop hitting the sides of my head, surprised by how calm she sounds. “Yes.” 

The door swings open as I resume rocking and hitting my head and I hear her gasp softly. I’ve never done this in front of her but this time I can’t stop. “Sweetie, can you look at me for a second?” She sounds so soft and kind.  

When I don’t look up, she kneels next to me and looks up at my face, and her face makes the bear-trap pain worse, her eyes all soft and worried. “I’m sorry for making you feel uncomfortable, okay? And trying to baby you... I’m trying to take care of you and I’m... not very good.”  

“You’re good.” 

“What?” She looks confused.  

“You’re good, you’re a good mum.” I’ve stopped rocking, and I’ve dropped my hands down to hold one of hers. “You’re not... bad. I’m... I just need you to listen to me?” The bear-trap starts to relax and loosen as I dare to look at her face. Her eyes are glassy again but she’s smiling, holding my hand tightly.  

“Thank you.”  

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Too Like the Lightning, part of the Terra Ignota series, by Ada Palmer. I generally try to be a lot nicer about books written by living authors, on the off chance that they read what I'm saying. For example, I tried not to be very mean about the Baru Cormorant series, which I thought was pretty bad but had some strong points I could highlight, but I was perfectly willing to go in on Madame Bovary. All I can say is, I tried. You see, Too Like the Lightning is straight up terrible, and it is basically impossible to find anything nice to say about it at all.

Too Like the Lightning is an unbelievably stupid book. Now, I don't require total scientific fidelity from my science fiction, not unless the author signals I should. But I do think authors should be at least broadly aware of what laws they are breaking to get what they want, and Palmer very clearly isn't. Basically everyone has the predictive/prescient powers of Dune characters through mathematical oracles, despite this being provably impossible. Everyone travels in cheap supersonic private jets that probably also have VTOL capability, which are powered by Fucking Magic presumably, the author sure as hell doesn't seem to care. This wouldn't be as annoying if the book didn't spend so much time musing on the deep sociological effects of the FM-powered aircars, while entirely forgetting that evidently both Fucking Magic and oracles apparently exist and should probably affect society in some way also. There's also more minor points. At one point, the first of the aircars is analogized to the Nina and Pinta and Apollo XI, all of which were notable exploration vessels, not technical breakthroughs. The appropriate comparisons would be to something like the Kitty Hawk Flyer or Stephenson's Rocket or some of the Trevithick machines. Sure, it's a minor error, but for a novel this pretentious, all errors are serious. There is no appreciable narrative reason for this error either. If the book were edited, perhaps someone would have noticed.

The ideological and historiographical (more on this later) background is also just kind of dumb. The book is trying to make some tedious liberal points and also say that we need to have very serious discussions about like sexism and racism or whatever. What the content of these discussions is supposed to be is extremely unclear, and as far as I can tell simply the existence of them will basically fix things on its own because discussion is magic and leads to Truth and such, except, of course, when the narrative needs for it not to. Also destroying a book is kind of like killing a person, and other trite garbage. Anyway, where the book actually ends up is in my opinion quite far from the apparent intent, but unfortunately not in a very interesting way. Suffice to say, if I wanted to read kinda racist gender-normative rapey fiction with clockwork twists scattered around, where all the characters are secretly serial killers (notably Mycroft and the Saneer-Weeksbooths) because that makes them edgier or something I guess, I suspect I could still do a whole lot better than Too Like the Lightning, for example by reading self-insert Wattpad romance novels about pop stars, or werewolf erotica, or self-insert Wattpad erotica about werewolf pop stars. The incest is boring as hell and cowardly, too. It's a book that's trying to shock you, but the author doesn't know how to actually do that because, again, just not very good at writing at all. It doesn't help that the pacing is so horrible that none of the shocking twists actually land, especially since absolutely nothing keeps actually happening. Sure, Too Like the Lightning is the way it is for a reason, but so is the werewolf erotica, and helping other people jack off is a far more noble pursuit than jacking yourself off.

If the book is so stupid, why do a lot of fairly intelligent people seem to like it so much? Well, a lot of those people are Rationalists it seems (or close enough to it), and Rationalists have insanely bad taste in fiction for some reason. Actually Rationalists have insanely bad taste generally speaking but it's especially marked in fiction. And it's obvious why Rationalists would like the book, it treats intelligence as a comic book superpower the way they do, there's group homes and libertarianism and all sorts of other stuff they like. But there's a more fundamental feature that I think a certain kind of nerd loves about Too Like the Lightning. It's the omnipresent didactic tone, just like with Baru Cormorant, though here it's somehow even more obtrusive. Some people evidently like it when the author has a character read an encyclopedia entry for a paragraph or two for no particular reason, or pointedly make and then exhaustively explain a reference. I suspect it's because if they knew the reference, they feel like very clever students who read ahead, and if they didn't know the reference they feel like they are learning. I think it might be a form of high school nostalgia, the nerd version of student athletes unable to move on. Which is normal I suppose, I still think about doing amateur theater after all, but it does seem kind of embarrassing. To me, at least, the didactic tone always feels insulting regardless of if I knew the reference or not.

This insistence on transforming most of the characters into condescending lecture or encyclopedia entry delivery mechanisms understandably has serious consequences for the readability of the novel itself. It is impossible to believe that any of the supposed 10 billion people in the Hives that we barely ever see any actual traces of are actually persons in the eyes of the author or the narrative. Nor are most of the several dozen very important characters we do meet, to be fair. There is a single character, Eureka, who reaches the dizzying heights of "is an actual character" and she barely shows up. Thisbe is the only other one under consideration, but, eh, nah. Everyone else is functionally just a rhetorical device, because outside of the exposition most of the novel is poorly stylized as philosophical dialogue in Enlightenment style.

According to the Author's Note, Palmer sincerely wants to be participating in the Great Conversation. Now, this is a lost cause from the start. You cannot engage in a conversation by just parroting the words of others, and if you don't have any ideas of your own (and it is quite reasonable not to, there are so many people and so few ideas to be had), then a bare minimum would be the ability to rephrase or synthesize them. Now, maybe Palmer can do this, in lectures to students. Or maybe not, I have known instructors like that too (especially in history, lately). All I know is that Too Like the Lightning is no thoughts, all cliches. But if there were original ideas, the framing device would interfere anyway. You fundamentally cannot participate in a conversation while maintaining plausible deniability for everything by hiding behind your fictional characters, as Palmer does with Mycroft. Whenever I object to, well, more or less any feature of the novel, its fans can always say that actually I just haven't been paying enough attention to the unreliability of the narrator. This objection tends to be either false or irrelevant, but it's a pain in the ass to prove, and the only reason it is possible in the first place is that the author is actively refusing to stake out a position to be held to.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's out of cowardice. Palmer seems to have noticed that the tradition of the conte philosophique and the genres that take off of it includes a lot of different styles and narrative devices, and has ultimately decided to use most of them, invariably quite poorly. I've read conte philosophique, and it does not read like conte philosophique, sorry, the writing is all so painfully 21st century. Ironically, the one major device for philosophical stories I can think of that was not used, the travelogue, is the one I think is clearly most appropriate to the sort of worldbuilding-based speculative fiction Palmer is engaging in here, both from a practical and a historical perspective. The eclectic stylistic muddle makes the novel much longer without giving it any additional depth, the styles do not complement each other, and also the author very obviously does not have the skill required to pull any of it off. Authors, unless exceptionally competent, should pick at most one gimmick per work. Might not have helped here, but it's good practice either way.

One of the techniques that gets talked about with regards to the book is the unreliable narrator, probably because the device is referenced in the book right at the start. In fact, contrary to what people insist, it is not really present in the sense I would understand it, of a narrator styled as deliberately deceiving the audience in order to promote his own agenda. Since the narrator of Too Like the Lightning, like basically every other character in the novel, evidently only actually has an agenda or motive as an informed attribute, there is no way for the reader to reason their way to the implied meta-narrative of what "actually happened", because I'm pretty sure that meta-narrative doesn't actually exist. As far as I can tell, the only actual function of the extremely tedious and obtrusive in-universe narrator is to justify telling the exposition in a particular twist-preserving order, which, again, is not what the unreliable narrator is.

The novel really does consist almost exclusively of dry narration and loredumps. Nothing ever happens in this miserable 460 page slog. I really mean this, nothing actually happens and nobody really does anything except flit around irrelevantly at supersonic speeds. A bunch of characters talk to each other, or talk at each other, or read the encyclopedia at each other. But it turns out none of that actually matters, because enough of the characters are basically omniscient (except for all the stuff they can't know otherwise the story falls apart, even though there's no conceivable way they wouldn't know) that there is no appreciable difference between characters talking at each other and thinking at each other, which they also spend way too much time doing. None of the dialogue serves to develop the characters, because, as discussed earlier, there aren't any. None of the dialogue serves to establish the plot or stakes, because the plot gets retconned every other chapter with yet another tedious twist so there's no real point in following the intrigue, which I'm pretty sure consists mostly of plot holes by the end anyway. Worst of all, a consistent pattern in these retcons is that it becomes clearer and clearer that an alarming number of the conversations in this book are actually functionally just a guy talking to himself.

It kind of makes sense that the novel is more or less entirely people talking to each other (well that and poorly done metatextual horseshit) because it turns out the novel endirses a fundamental theory of historical change consisting entirely of people talking to each other, specifically, a variation on Great Man Theory that says change happens because the most important members of the very real and existing natural aristocracy get into a room together in order to figure out what's going to happen next by finding the smartest bestest boy from among them all and all just doing what he says, and then maybe some other stuff that doesn't matter happens after who cares, all of the actual persons have made their decisions. History of ideas people are basically all wacky, but this seems extreme even for them, so I sure hope Palmer isn't actually teaching anything like this. In addition to being based on a variant of it, Too Like the Lightning references and then explains its own reference to Great Man Theory, and naturally has its own Great Man in the narrative itself, the guy talking to himself from the last paragraph, and boy is he unbearable.

The guy in question, Y.U.D.D. MASON, is genuinely in the running for the most insufferable character ever written. I wouldn't mind him being written like a particularly annoying teenager with delusions of grandeur who has evidently somehow read both far too much and far too little philosophy so much if the novel did not take every single opportunity to make it absolutely unquestionable that this horrid little git is in fact an unparalleled superhuman intellect omniscient oracle capable of outright mind control through speech alone. And no, that's not a unreliable narrator thing. My understanding is that somehow this gets much worse over the course of the rest of the books, which I will not read because frankly 460 pages was an unreasonable test of my patience and commitment to reviewing everything I read and finishing everything I review. Apparently at the end he starts a civil war and becomes God-Emperor of Humanity or whatever, who even cares.

Look, a persistent obsession with Mars, nonsensical car-based revolutionizing of transportation, references to De Sade, excessive confidence in mathematical oracles, these are not the preoccupations of a serious thinker, these are the preoccupations of Elon Musk. Musk really is a convenient example of the sort of Great Man that actually exists by contrast to the ones you get in fiction and in Carlyle. Richest man on the planet, widely acknowledged power behind the throne of the most powerful state out there, owner of what was once (you know, before he bought it) regarded as the online public square, AI magnate, rocketman, surely here we have the Great Man of our time? Except, wait, we know him. We know him from his irrepressible habit of Posting, his now decades of pathetic self-promotion, his desperate need to turn himself into a living meme to get the attention he never got from his father, and which he in turn will not give to his two dozen kids. He is a massive loser whose aesthetic interests consist of the most accessible symbols of coolness and futurism that he can find, up to and including the glyph 'X' and memes that got old over a decade ago. What does it say about Too Like the Lightning that half of its aesthetic language is not only shared with this fucking loser, but is even projected out to the 26th century? Nothing good, that's for sure.

It is my opinion that novels should be edited. Unfortunately publishers do not seem to agree. Editing could never have made this book good, but it might at least have informed the publishers of the scale of mistake they were in the course of making. This novel was a lost cause the moment it was accepted for publication, which happened by a mechanism I am still quite unable to explain. The Author's Note does contain a very helpful list of the extraordinarily many collaborators allegedly responsible, of whom I would pick out for particular discredit the editorial decision-makers and the peers who apparently encouraged the creation of the work. That this book was written was a mistake, that it was published was a travesty, that it got sequels is an absurdity. The existence of Too Like the Lightning is an enormous embarrassment to the entire genre of Science Fiction, whose reputation was frankly already quite bad for very good reasons. Anyway, I'm never going to read Worm that's for damn sure.

This novel made me afraid to write my own intended stories, for fear that they will end up like this. Ordinarily, this is where I mention what kinds of person might enjoy the novel, recommend it to someone even if I did not like it myself. Frankly, I think I have provided enough information for people to figure out whether or not they would like it, but I have to confess that I do not think anyone should read this book, including the ones who would enjoy it. It's not for moral reasons or anything, I just think the book is that bad.

[bonzos-number-1-fan]

TMAGP 34 Thoughts: Burying the Hatchet

This is a very exposition heavy episode but it's not a lot of new information IMO. I think most of the big stuff here is more confirmation of what I would call, potentially arrogantly, obviously inferable information. Which isn't a bad thing but as you're all probably very aware by now I don't really retread the explicit stuff in these. So we'll see what I've got to say.

And, yes, I did forget what day it was on Thursday and then procrastinate this until now. Blame the Spiral. Tomorrow's post will probably be on time.

Spoilers for TMA , and TMAGP episode 34 below the cut.

Okay, so, as I've mentioned, this is all quite explicit. Sam's in TMA London and it's all spooky still. I do love how over everything Georgie is, and it's nice to see her fearlessness expressed as apathy and annoyance. Even with all the blatant info dumping there are a couple of interesting things to pick out from this whole section though. Part of London, presumably the part that was around the Magnus Institute/Panopticon, didn't revert to its pre-Change state but the interesting bit is other parts of the world didn't either. Obviously the Institute, being the epicentre of the Eye's power on Earth, makes sense but what other places didn't change back? Did every Fear have a location like the Panopticon and those all remained? Is it about the domains of powerful avatars? It doesn't seem like the creatures in the London Exclusion Zone are particularly related to the Eye, so is that true of every location still affected? Or is the Square Mile unique in this respect because of the Eye's central position for the Change? A lot of things going on there. I'm not sure any of that will come up to be honest, I think most of that is probably irrelevant, but it's got a lot of world building potential.

The other thing to note is them being called "wardens". The major organisation people would think of for civil defence in the UK would be either the Civil Defence Service (1935–1945) or the Civil Defence Corps (1949–1968). The Civil Defence Service started its life as the Air Raid Precautions Department and then later created the Air Raid Wardens' Service. These wardens were largely responsible for making sure communities were doing what they were meant to as to not get bombed to shit. As the nature of civil service in the UK evolved both during and after the war so did the role of the wardens but it was generally about community organisation and leadership, recon, and reporting. Captain isn't a rank of Warden in any incarnation as far as I'm aware, but the UK also doesn't really have current civil defence either. Which is interesting in so far as the implication that the UK government is treating it like war. At least in the primeline, in TMAGP's time it seems a lot more clandestine than that.

The section with Georgie and Dave I don't have much to add to. It's all something we've seen with [Error] before and in the interest of getting this post done I'm not going to talk out my ass like I might usually do.

Sam and Georgie do some more exposition. Honestly, this is mostly just a last season recap and I've talked about all that before. Obviously Georgie is worried this is John, and I've seen a lot of people wanting it to be, but I think that would probably be the worst thing they could do here. Especially with Chester in the mix doing the whole "John is a monster" thing and having John be all monster feels a little trite to me. I'm fairly sure they're not doing that in either case. Especially when they've cast Beth Eyre as [Error] already, the bait and switch there would feel sorta shitty IMO.

The Gardener's statement was really well done. I know the TMA season 5 statements are contentious but I think there are some incredible bits of short form fiction in there. This one is no different and I think builds upon season 5 wonderfully by subverting the expectations those statements built. In TMA season 5 the statements were pretty aggressively about their Fear. It wasn't often, if at all, that the listener was ever in suspense about what the Fear at play was. This statement initially seems no different. Starts off very Buried but is very clearly a Slaughter domain by the end of it and it's a really interesting one too. Very boiled down to the basic aspects of the Fear. Good stuff, well written, well acted, no notes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Incident/CAT#R#DPHW Master Sheet and Terminology Sheet

DPHW Theory: N/A

CAT# Theory: XXXX, I guess? CATXXXX is actually pretty interesting in that it's basically the only way you can wrongly X out that string. The dates got the correct number of Xs for the maximum length a date can be in the DMYYYY format. CATXXXX doesn't match the maximum length, nor any reasonable combination. It's pretty much the most wrong thing they could've written. Which does, obviously, mean it was directly aimed at me and written out of spite.

R# Theory: N/A

Header talk: ERROR (Unknown Source) is probably the single most interesting heading we've ever seen. Back in the TMAGP universe we've seen that Freddie has no problems with filing incident reports that [Error] has collected. In TMA there was some implication that the audience was the Eye only to then subvert that expectation. The current implication is that our PoV is that of Freddie and this reinforces that, it got a fucked filing but did get a filing, but I do wonder if this is laying the ground work for that sort of twist. It also raises the question about what makes this incident different to any of the others. The obvious reason is that the Gardener is from another dimension but [Error] doesn't seem to be operating any differently. So either the Mechanisms are quite different or is the experience. TMAGP's universe never has a Change, as far as we know, and so hasn't had domains and as such there wouldn't be anything to file this under assuming Freddie can accurately do that. The link between Freddie and [Error]/her tapes, is also interesting too. Is this unique to [Error] or can Freddie do this to anything that's connected via a tear? If it's unique to [Error] is that because of JMJs connection to the Eye, and [Error's] status as an Archivist, or is there something else at play? Like I said, more interesting than Building (Angry).

[deyaviews]

Five Years of Tabletop RPGs

A little over 5 years ago, I started the One Shot Club server on Discord. It's an international place (has to be, I'm Dutch and knew few Dutch TTRPG fans) where people talk about and play tabletop RPGs. I had played D&D for 11 years, starting with 3.5, but only that year--2018--did I play a session of Blades in the Dark and then decided I wanted more.

Here is that story, of how I made more.

That July, I graduated from university with a Bachelor in Game Design & Production. (I was good at it! I still love the work I did in narrative design, mission design, quest design, and some level design. But that's a story for another time.) The day after graduation, I posted in various places about wanting to start an open table game, where I would run multiple sessions a week at EU-friendly times, of a game about teenage superheroes called Masks: A New Generation.

Because nobody ever gave it a name that other people agreed on, I kept just referring to it as "the big team" until it became "The Big Team" and it was official in everyone's hearts.

That game has now been going for 5 years as of tomorrow, July 8th, 2023.

Play and Introspection

I have played in very few long-running campaigns--I usually GM and while I love it, I kinda am wishing I could be a player in some regular campaign with people I love to be around--which also means that most of the characters stand out so much more to me. Many of them are a bit of a power fantasy, because the games lend themselves for that. But in Masks? In Big Team? Despite being about superheroes, despite easily providing me with a lot of great power fantasy moments, at the heart it's never been about the power fantasy for me.

It's been about introspection through play, in a very much "play to find out kind of way". It is trite and all too common to say that playing TTRPGs is like therapy, but it is certainly a journey of self-discovery.

Through Gwen, the daughter of Arthurian knight Lancelot du Lac, I expressed a lot of latent rage and letting go of it, in becoming more comfortable with taking charge, in exploring art forms I have interest in but no skill, and ultimately also expressing myself more as a trans person.

Through Anaya, a fish-girl princess, I had a journey about being on the autism spectrum and aspects of sexuality that I don't often touch on.

Through EliZe, an eldritch horror god turned trans girl, I tried to face my fears and have become more aware of their root causes and thinking of how to healthily address them irl, as well as embracing and being comfortable with openly expressing myself as a trans person online.

Through Greta, a wrestler and aspiring indie film director, I've explored my body issues not directly related to gender dysphoria (I am fat, will probably always be fat, but that doesn't mean I'm unhealthy, and that she--and I--are still beautiful and cool. The art others have made have absolutely been especially wonderful too!) and also exploring other art forms adjacent to mine, indirectly thinking about where to take mine.

Past, Present and Future

At this point, 5 years later, I have gotten onto a 2-year wait list to see a psychologist for gender dysphoria, took 3 years, went through the whole thing, and am waiting on a call tomorrow (on the anniversary of Big Team, my first non-D&D campaign) to see when I can meet with an endocrinologist. I am getting ready to get a referral to a therapist to deal with my fears and anxieties. I have been forced out of one home, nearly out of another, narrowly saved by my dad and now have been living independently for over a year. I am on my fifth job since I graduated, but for the first time I've got one where I'm not unhappy with the work itself, it's (nearly) full time and it's more than minimum wage. I've got local friends and online friends that I talk to regularly and who mean so much to me.

In those 5 years, I have fallen, but I've gotten up again. I'm not where I thought I would be 5 years ago. In some ways I certainly am not where I would have wanted to be. But I look around me at my situation and think "this is not so bad". I look around me at the people who have chosen to spend time with me and think "I love my life, actually".

I look forward to what the coming year will bring.

Thank you all for reading, and have a great Dey.

[everythingismadeofchaos]

I'm imagining a confrontation between a queer person and a hetero person where the hetero person Is arguing (loudly) that they don't know what that means! do you this or that? have you this or that? do you like this or that?, and the queer person is saying none of your damn business with a lot of attitude and like yes, that is obviously the correct answer, there's no question, because that's obviously just a rude question. But the asker knows that it's rude. Even really crappy people know it's a rude question and they ask anyway.

So there's this little mechanism of unfamiliarity and morbid curiosity. Or maybe even closeted genuine curiosity. So they're being pushed past that rudeness threshold just as they see it a tiny little bit, because temporarily their curiosity overrides their common decency. And the truth is the way this is usually done in a sort of conspiratorial tone, a shift in the conversation style ("You can tell me, sug!"), this kind of momentary more intimate interaction would excuse that in most places; generally speaking people who are conversing are somewhere close to equal, so they read the social cues the same way. But unfortunately every non-binary person has been badgered with those questions for as long as they care to remember, and so to them it's a different kind of game; it's a long-term stamina frustration game, not an interactive human conversational game, and every human being has a breaking point, there's no shame in that.

Eventually they passed that breaking point if they didn't start out past it already. So they snap at the other person, or break, and give the other person some grief, and it just is this automatic ratcheting mechanism that continues to make the two sides more antagonistic to each other. And it would be cliche to say "the answer is better communication and understanding", and that seems trite, but in this situation literally the problem would have been solved by either side having a little more self-awareness and mindfulness. So the queer person could take a breath and realize that this person is just doing this for the first time, and then understand that unfortunately the chore has fallen to them, be really decent about it, and take the person aside and answer all of their rude questions carefully and with a constant mind to kindness directed toward other interactions down the road. Between this person and other people, I mean.

So the end result of that would be the straight person learning and understanding and having their questions answered, so they would become sort of defused; they would be less prone to outbursts in the future. The queer person would have sort of educated and enlightened the straight person out of the sort of negative position they were in. And this also has the side benefit that in the long-term many fewer people are going to do this because all of these straight people will have gained this understanding, have it bestowed upon them; the big moment really only needs to happen once and then they never have to have that annoying encounter again. So the return to the queer person is that, if everybody does this, over time straight people would just be nicer and more understanding. The chore of explaining this to people would be complete. The problem is it would take a sacrifice on the queer side of the equation their time, energy and understanding.

Now on the other hand, If the straight person could have the same self-consciousness and understanding as I just described, what would happen is they wouldn't ask the question because it's a rude and probably a stupid question. Instead, they would just either wait for it to soak into their brains by osmosis from the popular culture or they could just get around to looking it up on Google like a reasonable adult who has an honest question, maybe watch YouTube videos of real people calmly explaining the answer, maybe even interact with people who put themselves on forums and places to explain these questions and are doing it voluntarily and because they want to ... like, some humans are just chatty bastards. Ergo, Wikipedia. [Oh by the way I just had this cracking idea for a wiki that I bet a lot of Tumblr people would love. It would be a big hit here. Unfortunately it doesn't do anything for the gay people or Gaza or Ukraine or anything, but it does something for book people and I have met a lot of them on here. I've got to figure it out some more and then I'm going to probably post it on my YouTube channel which I'm eventually going to start.]

I really hope I didn't offend anybody. I'm just trying to think my way through problems. I'm afraid I like it here but I don't feel secure enough in knowing what's rude and what's not to say so if I offended anybody I apologize and if you let me know I'll see if I can figure out how to fix it. On the other hand, if this helps anybody, well then it was worthwhile, and that's why I'm posting it, so I kind of felt like it was worth the risk.

[voluptuarian]

I don't mind a good feminist interpretation of something-- I mind characters hyper aware (often wildly anachronistically so) of and bitter about patriarchy, who spend the entire story crying about it, and yet have their lives entirely dictated by it regardless, even when that is the Opposite of how the historic reality would have been-- that's pointless to me.

With folklore and myth it's worse because there's no need to be accurate, there are unicorns and gods and prophecies, and yet the heroine Must be bound by patriarchy, specifically as envisioned by modern authors. A particular book I was thinking of when I wrote this was Jennifer Saint's Ariadne, which somehow takes the story of a powerful woman, a king's daughter and probably a priestess, whose active decisions motivate the majority of the myth's action, and who ends up a freaking goddess in most versions, and somehow turned her story into a "she been done wrong" yarn with a passive heroine manipulated by men despite constantly complaining about it. Even playing the "historical accuracy" card (which isn't something a myth would need to be concerned about) the little we know of Minoan Crete implies unusual freedom and power for women, especially in religion. At the very least Saint could have given us an empowered Ariadne brought low by more patriarchal customs, represented through Theseus, but she decides instead on this trite crap.

It's like you can either have the hyper-aware-of-patriarchy heroine who makes her own decisions by rejecting femininity completely (and often deriding other women) and somehow is able to live as some kind of emancipated life no longer barred by patriarchal reality, or the hyper-aware-of-patriarchy heroine who complains bitterly about how bad she has it and how all her problems are somehow because of patriarchy (also often while deriding other women) and then does little to protect herself from it, neither of which is a genuine feeling or generally accurate situation, and are both boring as hell to read-- the earlier type dominated the stories of my childhood and teens, and now the second seems to be the most popular, and either way I find them awful wastes of story potential. In Jennifer Saint's case I'm particularly annoyed, since she's studied classics and should know better.

I find retellings of mythology and folklore that do nothing new with the material except have the heroine cry about how bad patriarchy is all the time hopelessly depressing and a waste of potential. What’s the point of focusing on female lack of agency and male dominance if that’s what you have determining your heroine’s entire story line anyway?

[painted-crow]

How does someone unburn? At first I thought I was a double Hufflepuff but after looking back at how I acted before I was harshly bullied in high school, I've figured out I'm a badly burned double Gryffindor with a Hufflepuff model and a really unhealthy Ravenclaw model that I use to cope with my ADHD. Do I just need to work on my self-confidence somehow?

I'll give some general advice, then try to take a shot at helping your specific situation. I'm not, like, an expert at this though, so I'm relying on my own and my friends' experiences to inform this.

The things I'm about to describe are really difficult and my description of them is going to sound pat and simplistic. Sorry about that. I'm not trying to minimize the struggle that's involved here, it's just that giving general advice for something this deeply personal is always going to sound kind of trite.

1. Get out of toxic situations and relationships, as much as possible.

Of course this is easier said than done, but it's really really important. If you can't leave the situation or relationship entirely, which would be best, try to work on setting healthy boundaries--as much as is safe for your particular situation. Don't put yourself in danger if you're reliant on someone abusive.

Related: try your best to replace these relationships with ones involving people who aren't shitty. Isolation is generally not good, and you want to avoid slipping back into shitty relationships out of loneliness.

I'm not talking specifically about romantic relationships, btw, just the people you surround yourself with in general.

2. Be patient with yourself.

Give yourself space to be wrong and suck at things. That's called recovery, and the less you can beat yourself up about needing to take time and space to recover, the easier it'll be. Trust that the people who love you don't consider you a burden.

3. Talk things out with someone non-judgmental.

Using your primary as it un-burns can feel really weird. You might feel guilty or uncertain. Sometimes, talking to someone else just to check that the decision you feel is right (but are conflicted about) isn't totally off the deep end can be really helpful. Choose the person wisely, though.

4. Do things that make you feel like yourself.

Don't apologize for taking the "easy" or "lazy" or "impractical" way to solve a problem, especially a low-stakes one. In context of an unburning secondary, that's probably your real secondary you're feeling weird about using.

Maybe take up a hobby that lets you play with your unburning secondary in a low-stakes situation. If you use Lion secondary to experiment in the kitchen, the worst thing that can happen is you ruin a little food and feed the neighborhood raccoon--it's not the end of the world and you can do better next time :)

Now, for your specifics...

If you're out of high school--hooray! You're out of the toxic environment. The thing you need to be careful about is making sure you don't subconsciously seek out similar environments in work or college because they feel familiar.

Also try to challenge the assumption that those around you are just the same as the bullies you left behind--it's very easy to still feel defensive after people were shitholes to you for that long. (I got bullied too.)

If you're not out of high school yet, try to set boundaries for yourself about what deserves your emotional and physical energy. If the only things asking for your attention are destructive, find something that isn't. I picked up writing fantasy novels, which I recommend because you're able to craft your own self-indulgent escapism and it's free and you don't even have to show it to anybody.

If you're in university in the US (and probably a bunch of other places, but I don’t know specifics about them) then you almost certainly have access to free therapy/counseling through your university. Take advantage of that. Don't feel bad about dumping your therapist if you can tell the relationship isn't working, either--I've had a couple of laughably bad therapists, but I've also seen some pretty good ones. And no, your experience isn't "too insignificant" or whatever to see a therapist--if you want to or feel like it could help, you should.

Since you bring up unhealthy model(s), I wonder if I should mention the 4F responses as something to be aware of. We can become over-reliant on one of the four (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) after long-term shitty situations. Unhealthy Hufflepuffs and fawn responders have some overlap. Same with unhealthy Ravenclaw secondaries and flight responders. This may or may not apply to you specifically but it's worth investigating.

Here's a very well-written, accessible explanation of the 4F responses, and here's the detail-rich academic version.

Anyway, back to your Houses. The more you can use your unburning Houses in light, low-stakes situations where failure isn't costly, the better. Play with them as much as you can, basically. Try to not get too upset when they fail; you're relearning them and they'll get better. If you think you're shitty at using them, try to be okay with that and be patient. Try not to dismiss them as not valuable or practical; lots of people use the different Houses to great effect.

Uhhhh so this is just a brain dump of different advice, and I have no idea if any of this is helpful. Anyone else want to weigh in?

[alarajrogers]

So, ok, I was not a metal fan in the 80s. I was of course aware of Twisted Sister and "We're Not Gonna Take It", but I deliberately avoided paying any attention to it.

Based on this I just went and read the lyrics, and...

That Republican dude had to have been smoking the good stuff. There is nothing in that song you can interpret as defending conservative American values.

"We've got the right to choose, and There ain't no way we'll lose it This is our life, this is our song We'll fight the powers that be, just Don't pick on our destiny, 'cause You don't know us, you don't belong"

There's generally one thing that "the right to choose" means in public discourse, and it's not a conservative value. Also, in the 80's, "the powers that be" were Ronald Reagan and his cabinet. The 80's was very, very conservative. Protests songs from the 80s are therefore pretty much always left wing.

"Your life is trite and jaded Boring and confiscated If that's your best, your best won't do"

This reminds me of the line from Jefferson Airplane's "Crown of Creation":

"Soon you'll attain the stability you strive for In the only way that it's granted In a place among the fossils of our time"

References to the enemy being "boring", "trite", "fossilized", refusing to change, etc... those are elements of leftist protest songs. Right wing protests are mostly about "you told me this traditional thing I'm doing is bad, but it's not, and I'm gonna kick your ass about it."

Honestly, Republicans have to make up an affinity with protest songs that are protesting them (every single thing Rage Against The Machine ever did, this song, probably a fuckton of others), because there's very little right-wing protest music out there, due to the fact that being openly racist and anti-semitic in your music has never sold well despite the number of racist and anti-semitic people out there. What there is is country, a small quantity of death metal with deliberate Nazi references, maybe a small quantity of skinhead punk, and nowadays I'd bet there's more because instead of having to broadcast it on the radio, where it would scare off advertisers, it can be sold directly to white supremacists.

Almost any protest song that is widely and publicly known is left wing. Protest songs are written to appeal to young people, because, with some exceptions, old people don't buy new music. Young people are traditionally much more progressive than older people, and the status quo, that young people want to rebel against, is usually conservative. There's a movement among conservatives now to rebrand themselves as victims because no one wants to listen to their bullshit, and I expect some amount of protest music is coming out of that, but it's not hitting the general airwaves. Possibly because everyone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool right winger knows that that's bullshit.