#The Radicalization Process

[annasofthe11thdimension]

Pictured: Loop being extremely normal as they lay in their shallow (homemade) grave as they meditate on existence and also if they have annoyed the Researcher enough THIS time for her to murder them and bury them alive.

(Spoilers - they did not annoy her even CLOSE to that much.)

And there is the required reverse image of Odile arriving - she's had a LONG day (i.e. previous loop), and due to this it will take ten minutes before she even acknowledges the shallow grave Loop is laying in, as she was distracted complaining about what Siffrin just did to annoy her.

----

I'd say there's context for all of that, because like...there IS context? Here's the link to the series of fics that HAS that context even! But also...even with context...can't say that it's going to make any of this less weird.

Mostly Odile is looping because due to Loop's wish the universe got rewritten to make Siffrin's repression and emotional issues (the ones bad enough to get him stuck in a time loop in the game) 'someone else's' problem...or at least that's Loop's best theory atm!

Regardless, context or not, I'm quite happy with how the pics came out, and figured I might as well post them here too.

[tomlivingspace]

just wanna say your fernsong takes are so refreshing bc this fandom is extremely childish and misognystic and u arent allowed to hate male characters unless theyre comically evil ♥️ nice to see another lesbian who doesnt care for chars like fernsong

i think its normal considering the fandom is full of kids/people who primarily read warrior cats, so nuanced characters isn't something theyre really used to, haha. and because there are so many books and so many characters, a lot of people forget every character's actions that may make them more nuanced.

like for example. i absolutely DESPISE the fandom's perception of leafpool . her personality is primarily as she appears in the first book of tnp and then being a sadsack about giving her kittens away, when in reality leafpool is extremely impulsive, often selfish and judgemental, and quick to anger. despite her regretting giving her children away, her interactions with said children half of the time are her having virtually no patience for their questions and mistakes. but i guess as a reaction to the amount of hate leafpool got in earlier fandom times, people have to portray her as absolutely flawless and unwittingly manipulated by starclan instead of a very flawed character, because her being flawed wouldn't make her sympathetic to them.

it's a double standard of course, because characters like crowfeather and hawkfrost are still extremely popular despite the fact the former abuses his child and the latter abuses his sister and grooms ivypool. but no one blinks an eye because theyre male characters and its understood that you can like them because they're "nuanced", but at the same time people understand if you DONT like them because theyre flawed. so the problem with my fernsong portrayal is that in canon he's virtually flawless and i've added flaws to make him more interesting which some people view as an attack. plus i think some warrior cats fans view traditional femininity with virtual divinity? so the fact a MAN has two lines in canon that imply he could be traditionally feminine???

anyway most importantly you aren't a warrior cats fan if you don't take any criticism of your fave as seriously as if someone was bullying a real living person.

[eatanorange]

Can I share a fear rq? can I share a fear with y'all? Can I tell you what I witness and what it manifests in to? Will it manifest the entity looming in the darkest parts of my head? Will you blame me for going insane or will you find some sort of sick, disorienting beauty in my destruction, in my fusing with said entity? Will I still be alone then? Will I be known, then? Will it sicken you to see how full of love I am and how colored by distrust it is? Will you look away when the hand you reach for turns to a blade and cuts yours off, or will you pull back too? Did you already have that prosthetic, there? Is that what you call self preservation?

[lazyyogi]

Hey there!

I enjoy reading this blog. Could you help me find resources or how to just practice loving detachment in relationships. I find uncertainty unbearable and I know it's something that I have to accept and learn. Acceptance, instability, uncertainty is extremely extremely hard for me to deal with. Could you help?

Most people would blame their partner for not making them feel secure enough. You didn't. 

By recognizing the real location of the problem—inside you—you’ve already positioned yourself to actually do something about it. Even better, you haven’t made it part of your identity or regard it as just "how I am." You acknowledge the difficulty yet also see it's workable.

So I just want to highlight something you might have overlooked: You’ve already taken some of the hardest, most crucial steps. The kind that most people never even reach.  You've taken responsibility.

Now, what's the real issue? It's not what you may think...

You’re not suffering from uncertainty. You’re suffering from your demand for certainty.

You haven't yet found a sense of rootedness independent of external circumstances, so unconsciously you're seeking stability through your relationship. Interestingly, there's wisdom in this intuition, but ignorance misdirects it.

The source of genuine rootedness (peace) is also the source of genuine love. However, this source isn't the object of your love, although we frequently confuse the two. Love originates where it is experienced: within yourself.

Fortunately, you are not the first person to struggle with this problem. There are multiple pathways left by those who have worked through similar circumstances, and there are methods and techniques available to assist you.

Here are a few books I recommend to help you along the way.

First book: The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron. This is a short book but can be very difficult to read. Not because it is complex but because it is uncomfortable. The book will draw your attention towards all the parts of yourself that make you cringe, that you have tried to ignore. And it will help you to be free despite all of that.

Second book: I would recommend a book by Judith Blackstone, as her teachings will anchor these insights into tangible, embodied experiences. Two of her books come to mind--Belonging Here and Trauma and the Unbound Body. I think either could be helpful, or any of her books really. Take a look and see which speaks to you.

Third book: I always recommend this one because I think it just does a fantastic job of introducing the overall View of Reality in a relatable and discernible manner. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I listed this third because I think it would be a nice addition after already reading the first two.

Lastly, some parting advice:

The way forward will be an ongoing practice and process.

Over and over again you will have to choose between comfort and freedom. So long as you choose freedom more often than you choose comfort, you will continue to progress in freeing yourself. 

Learn to recognize discomfort as a signal for where inner work awaits.

Your immediate next step is learning how to stay. Our instinct when facing uncertainty or insecurity is to grasp for certainty and stability—often in confused and unhelpful ways. Before becoming free from these struggles, you must first learn to stay present with them. Only then will you truly see them clearly.

May you be free, my friend.

Much love.

LY

[idkwhatimdoingbutslay]

HASHTAG CAITLYN KIRAMMAN SHUT THE HELL UP CHALLEN-

Oh… oh, nvm

[modelsof-color]

when it comes to self love , we know it's all about making decisions , decisions that will hurt us because at first it feels like we're " betraying" old convictions .

it's important to be aware of it , on emotional and mental level , aware of these decisions haunting us until the day it won't anymore , and awareness is half of the battle

[sundaywithshadow]

22 - Radical Highway

[becoming-with]

My biggest problem with the concept of autism is that it's ontologically dehumanising, and that it normalises behaviours that are harmful from a social perspective. It makes sense that under neoliberalism with little infrastructure to deal with problems at the broader social and material levels that they are instantiated in, the methodology of treating autism as an individually-situated "mental health condition" (or I suppose as a way-of-being in the best manifestation of this approach, though I challenge that this is ever how it is being truly conceptualised and suppported as) is a popular and maybe the only *immediate* way to respond in any sort of supportive manner.

But, as someone who's struggled deeply with other people my whole life and has always had a host of complicated behaviour that has been pegged as typically or potentially auitistic since being very young, I just cannot accept that the phenomena that produces this behaviour in individuals can be reduced to a label like this. The idea that an individual subject 1. exists and 2. can be socially defective is a distortion inherent to the illness of the colonial technofascism of modern day liberalism. Systems of thought that seek to categorise beings and assign value to them in regards to how well they support said system is a broken epistemology, and many people believe this already on the left but at the same time will still choose to deploy, or even self identify with the labels produced by this system, other examples being concepts like "Clinical Depression" or "Anxiety Disorders". Of course, people exhibit the emotional states of depression and anxiety, but can we really honestly say that these states are causally limited to their individual subject? Why would someone NOT be depressed and anxious about the conditions they find themselves in? I don't think I need to repeat the basic premise of the anti-psych response to the concept of mental illness that folks like Mark Fisher and many others like Foucault and D&G etc. have explored at length, but I think if you are looking at this world with any degree of honesty and criticism you'll find it hard to say that it is full of negative stimuli, and that it is rational to respond to this negative stimuli with worry and despair. The ruling powers that want to preserve these terrible power structures built these modes of categorisation and we have to see outside of them.

When you think about what composes autism, often understood as a failure to socially develop or an attachment to behaviours that are not aligned with the greater social body, might it not occur to think about what social conditions would create this state in an individual?

idk, I never intended to write an essay here but I'd just like anyone who identifies with the concept of autism or is happy applying that label without nuance to others to think about the experiencing subject as being in a world and not a self, in a personal history, an intergenerational history, a socio-political history. When we use the word trauma, and we study the causes of trauma we discover a spider web of causal relations, and these complex causes have extremely complex effects. It's kind of hard to create individual examples, these things are so expansive and interrelated, but I'll maybe try sum up a simple equation to start to poke at all this in a more complex and material manner:

What happens when someone experiences social and material deprivation from a young age, what happens when a person is raised by someone who was raised by someone who was raised by someone who was raised in social material deprivation? When for hundreds and hundreds of years each parents generation has had a fundamental aspect of human social organisation increasingly torn from them (and more recently being torn from the world itself as another supportive body of resources both material and social!) What happens when a person grows up with their behaviour constantly being repressed, cut off from wholistic interpersonal support (think parents working for much of their children's day, and then the rigid and authoritative social structure of the school)?

You might want to say that many seem to adapt to this lifestyle in this world well enough and end up well-adjusted, but is that true at all? It absolutely fucking isn't. Again, I think the real state of the society we developed in is increasingly revealed to newer generations, and we have a responsibility to interrogate all of it and not just what makes us comfortable. The people who are well adapted to this world are practicing mental gymnastics, or worse are knowingly dominating others and shutting their feelings off to participate in the competition with others and destruction of everythign around them. The world we're in is the disease and pathologising the reactions of those sensitive to it has got the causal analysis upside down.

The incredibly varied and inexplicably grouped concept of autism, or "neurotypicality" by those who have accepted the narrative of politically reformed psychiatry is just a natural reaction to the intellectual and sense experience of this society. It is multifaceted and inconsistent because the deprivations are broad, many and complex, and "treating" the "symptoms" is only possible by designing society differently.

[aeolianblues]

pop stars aren't born in the 70s anymore like they used to be. These days they're born in a year uncomfortably close to my own which makes me clutch my chest and cry out

[radioregine]

thinking about how a few years ago, i was recommended for this conservative political office job around here that would've paid life-changing salary to me but i was & still am too principled to accept something like that. wasn't just 'oh my boss is a repub but the job has nothing to do w his beliefs' i wouldve been voluntarily contributing to local campaign material and that flies in the face of everything i strive towards ...

[runawaymun]

the whole tiktok ban situation is super crunchy and I'm conflicted. Because on the one hand...it does feel startlingly close to a kind of censorship and I think the whole 'chinese government links' thing is pure scaremongering. But on the other hand I genuinely think that tiktok has accelerated the rate of enshittification of so, so many things. Like it has been a net harm in basically everything. Even the publishing industry is suffering now. As someone who wants to get novels published, the entire state of the publishing industry catering to tiktok and the quality of even bookbinding rapidly deteriorating in the past couple of years, I've been reconsidering and thinking about simply setting up a website/archive to self publish my work.

So...I don't know. It's not as if other social media sites (X, Facebook, etc.) haven't done harm, and it's not like huge media giants like Google haven't caused possibly irreparable damage to how things work now, but...I just distinctly remember a pre-tiktok, pre-covid world and things legitimately weren't as bad online then as they are now. Tiktok actually feels uniquely bad. The change happened so rapidly, too. At what point do we decide that a product causes enough visible harm that it needs to be removed? Because that's what tiktok is, at the end of the day. It's a product. We don't have the same clear measurement as we do with, say, lead paint on children's toys, but idk idk idk...

[dark-skin-fem]

https://youtu.be/_hts4MGL6uk?si=tG2qKLvSACDy_YdM

I wanted your opinion on this because you're a black woman and will probably understand this more than me

Also, I'm gonna give a little bit of my opinion, women need more support in families. They need support from their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brother, sisters, friends just anyone they know. Women with kids get so much put on them and it's unfair that everything is put on them

Hi, thanks for the ask!

This took me a long time to answer because I spent quite some time thinking about this, because frankly I'm not certain what thoughts you want from me, but I'll try.

First of all, I should say I'm not a black American. I'm Nigerian, and the man in the video seems at some points to be talking from a black American perspective. Nevertheless, I do have opinions.

Women do need support from families, yes. But more than that, women need to rely less on men when it comes to childrearing, not more. That may seem contradictory, but let me explain.

One of the problems I have with mainstream feminism is that it encourages the idea that there's nothing wrong with doing certain things that put you at higher risk of being hurt or let down, because men should be better people. Indeed, men shouldn't be as awful as they are, but also we can't force them to be better. When they decide to act out, there's very little we can do to prevent that.

Knowing that, why would I have kids I don't want because of a man? Okay, say I figure out I don't want them after I have one. Why would I have more? Barring instances of abuse, where the woman is put in more danger by trying to leave, why would I stick around and keep having those damn kids?

I've always been an advocate for women having children when they want, how they want, that they can support themselves. Married or single, I don't believe a woman should ever factor a man into her childrearing plans, except the conception. He can pitch in, and if he's in your life and home, he should be pitching in. But I believe that when a woman has a child, she should have considered what her life would be like if she does it on her own. She should consider what it would be like if that man dies, leaves, becomes abusive, loses his job, starts drinking, goes insane. And she should only have a child if she believes that she'd be able and happy to raise that child in any circumstance no matter what the man does. If he stays perfect, helpful and involved, she wins. If he behaves like men typically do, she loses very little.

The first video where the man was filming and mocking his partner for crying because she didn't want their 2 kids and was pregnant with a third was sad to watch, but he said something. He said "we're not doing no abortion", implying that an abortion was an option. Why then would she sit down and tell that man that she was pregnant, but also didn't want it? The correct thing to do was to pop down to the clinic and get that baby out.

Yes women deserve more help from their families, especially the fathers of those children. But when that help isn't coming, what can we do? We can't sit around and cry and wail about it. We can't force them to give us what we deserve. We need to do something, anything we can. And sometimes that's an abortion.

TL;DR: Women think about men too damn much. Think less about that man's feelings and think more about abortions, your own life and your own freedom.

[drawingrosesonneptune]

levels practice WIP where the saturation tried to kill me on multiple occasions.

[itspileofgoodthings]

I assigned reading homework for the weekend and was hit by this wave of irritation with the implicit lying that goes on where they act like they’ll read the homework but they never actually do and so I called them on it and started teasing them and of course they laughed but then I was like “you know my secret dream is that you go home and you walk in the door and someone wants to do something fun with you or you get a text but you hold up your hand and say ‘no no, I have to read ten pages of Beowulf’ and then you sit down and do it” and they scream-laughed at the idea but I like to think it at least presented it to their minds as a possibility

[crimeronan]

thinking about princess AU amity falling asleep around hunter and luz & hunter watching over her with the same attentiveness that he always does luz bc he takes being entrusted with a sleeping person Very Seriously, even if he's pretending she's his mortal enemy, & then amity waking up later and stretching and wonderingly being like Wow. i slept. SO well. is this what being a royal is like????? you just sleep Knowing nobody's gonna try to stab you???? that must be INCREDIBLE.

[little-triboulet]

and of course it goes without saying i need to become a shapeless formless mirage of a blob to truly be able to explore my gender identity