#emotion control

[un-interneted]

Dearest sutli bomb ke bachhe BHAI PADNA SHURU KAR

[nothingofvaluewaslost]

STORY: The Screw

A short science fiction story. A near future where you can get an implant that allows you to switch on happiness, completely detached from your actual situation.

No objectionable content.

If you enjoyed it, please visit my Patreon.

The Screw, by Christina Nordlander

After cleaning the cleared-out flat I turned off the remote control.

I went one last round to see whether there was anything left for me to bring. The flat was white and deserted and felt like something new, as if I were moving in rather than out. I looked around the bedroom and the kitchenette and waited for some kind of emotional reaction.

There was nothing left to pack. I'd saved the files from Vision Publishing, and the memory stick with the books I hadn't had time to read was lying on the night-table in the new house. I opened the bag to check that the music player was still there. The remote, knurled steel, poked out of its own pocket. I gave in to the impulse of pulling it up to check if the light was on, and put it back.

“Yes, you definitely have the kind of talent we need for our script room, Lotte,” the HR manager had said in Vision's office high above the street. “I'm sure you understand that there's a lot of competition for places, here in the creative sector. Otherwise we'd have been happy to hire you a long time ago.”

The landing was quiet around me as I walked to the lift.

The train to Silveryd took more than an hour. How could it bore me, now that I was on my way to my new house? I was wearing the suit I'd worn at the call centre, synthetic and pinstriped. The trousers got slippery with sweat as soon as I’d got inside the warmth of the compartment. One bra strap was too loose, and after a while I got an ache in my shoulder from angling it to stop it sliding off.

I turned on my phone and read the latest episode of Arioso, but it had been so long since I'd read it that I had a hard time following the story without going back to previous chapters. After a few minutes I set the visor to transparent and looked down on forested slopes and the glimmer of streams below the railway bridge. The new passengers getting on might have seen my suit and taken me for some young corporate high roller.

In my memory, the new house had had a tendency to get as large as the villas I used to see in Djursholm when I was a kid, white-painted palaces with gardens sloping towards the sky-blue lake and gates as powerful as those of prisons. Naturally that wasn't true, but it was a detached house in a garden big enough that you could walk all the way around, with a low evergreen hedge facing the neighbours' identical houses and identical gardens.

I hadn't been there long when my phone rang. I turned on the visor and saw Evandros, in his loose suit-jacket that always looked dusty, in the blinding sunlight of the garden. I went out on the short porch.

“You want to come in?” I said. “Afraid I've got nothing to offer, except tea.”

Evandros remained where he was.

“Nah, I just wanted to see that everything went according to plan.”

He poked in the smooth lawn with the toe of his shoe. On the other side of the houses was a deserted playground in lacquered steel, then the empty plane of fields stretching to the empty plane of sky.

“You could plant some trees here,” he said. “An apple tree, perhaps, or a pear tree. Depends on which you like most, I guess. You could make jam.”

I stepped down on the lawn. When I was close to him, his clothes smelled of outdoors, the countryside.

“Yeah, that's probably what they said at Vision: 'We're gonna have to hire Thomasson as a scriptwriter, so she gets to make pear jam.”

Evandros laughed.

“You'll just have to put the screw on if you hate it that much. Then you'll have jam when you turn it back off.”

I shook my head. Now I was aware of the surgery scar, even though everything must have healed up many years ago: the skin and the bone, the brain hemispheres that they had separated gently around the hypothalamus. For a while after the operation – ten years ago, I'd been eighteen – I'd used to lean my head slowly to check whether it felt any heavier from the weight of metal inside.

“I don't need to have the screw on, any more. I've gotten out of the call centre, now I don't need it to be happy.”

Evandros slapped my shoulder-blade.

“You're living the dream, Lotte! What, you mean you'll never turn it on? Not even if you have to sit at the office eight hours straight writing some bloody romance novel about some teen girl who has to choose between the bad boy and the boy next door... I don't know what it's like being a writer.”

“I can't know that.” I sat down on the step. The key card in my pocket jabbed into my thigh. I went on:

“But if it's just a bit of boredom I guess I can take it. I mean, we made it through school without having the screw.”

“Sometimes I wonder how.”

He switched on the visor and squinted when it reflected the sunlight in his eyes.

“Okay, I think I'd better get going. Unless you need my help unpacking your stuff.”

“I'll be fine, but it's appreciated.”

He turned on the garden path and shouted:

“But give me a ring if you're going to plant anything!”

He leapt across the low fence and out on the road where the asphalt sparkled with road-crystals from last winter. There had been a time when I'd wondered whether I was starting to fall in love with him, but it had sunk away. Now I had a house that was big enough for two people: if that had been how I felt, I could have asked him to stay.

The thing that turned my pulse up when he was around wasn't arousal: it was how much more alive than I he seemed. Energetic? Maybe complete. He liked his teaching job. There were probably classes that made him switch on the remote in his pocket, but on average he must have spent many fewer hours screwed on.

“Before you decide whether you want the implant, we need to give you a bit of information,” the doctor had said. “You've seen people use their remote controls, most likely, and your teachers have probably told you about the implant, but there are a few misconceptions about how it affects the brain. I want to get to grips with those as quickly as possible.”

I was eighteen, still not used to signing documents without having to ask a parent to cosign.

“The implant is about the size of a pea. It is placed here, on the hypothalamus. The remote controls it via a radio transmitter.” She put a remote up on the desk with a heavy thud. “The remote is imprinted on you. No-one else can turn your implant on or off.”

She let me try. When nothing happened she pressed the button herself, and the light blinked red and went out. She looked up at me under her thick iron-grey fringe.

“When the implant is on, it generates a weak electric current that stimulates the hypothalamus,” she said, poking the illustrations. “That causes it to in turn activate the pituitary gland, down here, and release a steady stream of endorphins that induce feelings of happiness. The implant has two settings, one normal and one slightly stronger. The higher setting switches off automatically after two hours and cannot be switched on again until twelve hours have passed. Now we get to the misconceptions I mentioned. Neither of the settings is strong enough to affect the carrier's perceptions or judgement... you can have the implant activated while driving a car, or carrying out any other activities.”

“So it's not intoxication,” I said. “You just feel happy?”

The doctor gave a sharp nod.

“Neither can you hack it to a higher setting. It cannot be used as a stimulant. It doesn't cause any sexual stimulation... that's another misconception we hear from some young people. Not all, naturally.”

She paused.

“The operation is completely safe. There is no difference to when you had your phone implanted. If you change your mind at any point we can take it out again.” She rested her elbows on the yellow-varnished desk. “But we will only operate if you are a hundred percent sure that you want it.”

Up until the last few months, I hadn't thought about it enough to want anything. The screw was one of the things that came with hitting eighteen, like graduation and being able to drive. Perhaps it was more of a symbol than anything useful.

My classmate Zuleima had said that she was never going to get it put in. “No foreign objects are going into my body,” she'd said. She seemed to think it was no different to being on heroin. Perhaps she hadn't had enough information.

Zuleima and I had lost contact after we left secondary school, but a few months later the writer Nora Blomberg, famous for her criticism of the screw, had been arrested for possession of Yellow Light. It had been easy to joke about: the hypocrisy of writing articles about the screw being unnatural stimulation while you were so leant on Yellow Light that you wouldn't sleep for a month. It might not have been a very edifying feeling.

Personally, I thought Zuleima had a point, but mum had been cleaning at her factory since before I was born, and the first decade she hadn't had a screw. The woman who'd been her supervisor had had permanent blotches on her hands where the bleach had burnt her, like in The Help.

I got to put my chin in a cold hollow in the counter in the operation room, and they injected topical anaesthetic and shaved lines in my scalp. I was already too anaesthetised to feel the shaver, but a black down of hair fell on the metal in front of me.

As a writer I worked hybrid. When the writers had to meet for discussion, my editor, Eva Gårding, sent a summons the evening before. I had set up an office in a room next to my bedroom: white, not much bigger than a closet, but with a large window out on the gardens. If I needed to discuss anything with Eva or the other writers, we’d run it by the phone.

They'd set me to work on an episode of a serial novel called Whispers. It was the kind of plot I liked, a thriller about a man who discovers inexplicable messages on his phone that are trying to control him, but it was someone else's story. I hadn't made any of these characters; I didn't know whether I was allowed to develop them. Eva had sent me a list of the core elements of the season. They'd already planned it out. If I wrote out some character or moved the action to a different setting, someone else would have to undo those changes.

During the conferences I mostly sat silent. If I spoke, it was to agree. I felt like the youngest person there, a slim intern, and yet there were probably several who were younger than I and didn't have a problem putting themselves forward.

I had wanted to go walking between the suburban houses and the hedges to get more of an idea about the area, but by the time the working day finished it was too dark to see much. In the evenings I used to sit in the living-room between the unopened crates and consume as much fiction as I could, serial novels and films on the visor, to get fuel for the inspiration and learn how the plots were constructed. Someone who walked past outside might see the golden light in the window and be jealous.

Before I got the job at Ventor, I sent my profile to all companies that needed office personnel. Ventor was a casino company, and when they replied to my application I remembered a dream where I was working in a dusky arcade. When I woke up, the happiness from the dream was still there.

They hadn't told me that I was going to work in a call centre. My job was to sit with an old-fashioned microphone clipped to the side of my face and call people to ask whether they were interested in Ventor's subscriptions, and thank them so that they could hear that I was smiling. I made between twenty and forty calls a day, and at twelve o'clock I switched from “good morning, I'm calling from Ventor” to “good afternoon, I'm calling from Ventor”. Four hours a day I could have the screw switched off.

The woman at the counter next to mine was named Amalia and had done an engineering degree. One Friday afternoon when we were low on calls she flipped the microphone away from her mouth to put on black lip-colour.

“I'm dancing tonight,” she said by way of explanation, flipping the microphone back.

“Hm, hope you'll have a good time,” I said. “Me, I'm not really the clubbing kind of person.”

“Oh, not that kind of dancing,” Amalia said. “This is to make money. I wouldn't be able to make the rent otherwise.”

My gaze sank to the carpet. The centre was always clean and cool from the fans.

“You like it?” was the only thing I could think of saying.

When I looked up, Amalia smiled, just a quick muscle tension. The lip-colour had hardened and made her mouth into a glossy jewel. She took out a case of gold-coloured eyelid decorations and closed one eye at a time while putting them on.

“I mean, I need to be screwed on while I'm doing it,” she said. “But it's an okay profit for a night.”

It was Saturday two weeks after I'd moved to Silveryd that I noticed what I was missing.

I had done all the things I'd been looking forward to while I was sitting in the study: gone for a walk down to the clean desert of the motorway and the redbrick mall, watched The New Man on the visor, cooked a steak of Happy Cow with pepper sauce for lunch. I could watch something or call Evandros or Layal. I had almost forty hours to go until I had to clock in at Vision's homepage. It felt like I was just trying to waste them.

I had a bottle of vodka in the fridge. I pulled it out, but if I started drinking now it would just be for the intoxication. Hadn't I stopped using the screw because I didn't want to drug myself every day?

It was the screw, wasn't it?

I went out on the steps. The air here smelled different to the city; you could smell the mud and the moisture in the blades of grass.

It wasn't an addiction. I couldn't even remember where I'd put the remote. I was going to go back inside and spend the rest of the day with other things without feeling any impulse to take it out. The only thing that had happened was that all tastes and smells had become a little blander, and the sunshine a little bleaker.

Perhaps I deserved this. If I hadn't been using the screw so often during these years, I wouldn't have ruined my reactions. Those thoughts might have been part of the sickness in my mind, but they didn't disappear because I realised that.

As soon as I'd moved out to the suburb I was going to turn off the screw. That was what I'd been looking forward to, the last few days at Ventor. The villa owners behind the gates with security guards could be screwed off 24/7.

I pulled on my shoes and went out. The wind was chilly through my sweater and the sun glittered low over the fields.

I missed the call centre.

THE END

[lettuccine]

pov: you play poker game with marcille

[inkskinned]

what is with men being mad any time a woman raises her voice where did that even come from. someone posted a video of a small electrical explosion, and the top comment was of course the woman screams. the second comment is women try not to scream challenge, level impossible. i had to go back and watch the video again. there is, somewhat fainty, a little gasp emitted off-camera, more of a yelp than a scream. it is mostly lost in the crack of the explosion. afterwards, you hear her voice, shaken, say, are you okay?

i am helping one of my friends train her voice pitch lower, because she wants to be taken seriously at work. she and i do each other's nails and talk about gender roles; and how - due to our appearance - neither of us have ever been able to be "hysterical" in public. we both appear young and sweet and feminine. she is cisgender, and cannot use her natural voice in her profession because people keep saying she appears to be "vapid". we both try to figure out if our purposeful voice lowering is technically sexist. is it promoting something when you are a victim to it?

a storm almost sends a pole through a car window. in the dashcam, you can hear the woman passenger say her partner's name twice, crying out in alarm. she sounds terrified. in the comments, she is lambasted for her lack of calm. how is that even fucking helping?

in high school, i taught myself to have a lower voice. i had been recorded when i was genuinely (and righteously) upset; and i hated how my voice sounded on the phone speakers when it was played back. i was defending my mom, and my voice cracked with emotion. it meant i was no longer winning the argument: i was just shrieking about it.

girls meet each other after a long summer and let out a little joyful scream. this usually stops around 12-14, because people will not tolerate this display of affection (as it has the effect of being passingly annoying). something about the fact that little girls can't ever even be annoying. we are trained to examine each part of our lives (even joy) for anything that could make us upsetting and disgusting. they act like teenage girls are breaking into houses and shrieking you awake at 3 in the morning. speaking as a public school educator: trust me, it's not that bad, you can just roll your eyes and move on. it does not compare to the ways boys end up being annoying: slurs in graffiti, purposefully mocking your body, following you after you said no. you know, just boy things.

there's another video of a man who is not allowed to yell in the house, so he snaps his fingers when he's excited about soccer. the comments are full of angry men, talking about how their brother is unfairly caged. let him express himself and this is terrible to do to someone. eventually the couple has to address it in a second video: they are married with a newborn baby. he was trying not to wake the infant up. there is no comment on the fact women are not allowed to yell indoors. or the fact that it could have been really alarming or triggering for his wife. sometimes i wonder if straight men even like women, if they even enjoy being in relationships with them.

for the longest time, i hated roller coasters because it always felt inappropriate and uncomfortable for me to scream. one of my friends called me on it, said it was unusual i'm so unwilling. i had to go to my therapist about it. i don't like to scream because i was not raised in a safe situation, and raising my voice would have brought unsafe attention towards me. even when i am supposed to scream, it feels shameful, guilty. i was not treated kindly, so i lack a basic form of self-protection. this is not a natural response. it is not good that in a situation of high adrenaline - i shut up about it.

something very bad is happening, i think. in between all the beauty standards and the stuff i've already discussed - this one feels new and cruel in a way i can't quite express. yes, it's scary and silencing. but there's something about how direct it is - that so many men agree with the sentiment that women should never yell, even in an emergency - it feels different.

is the word shriek gendered automatically? how about shrill or screech? in self defense class, one of the first things they tell you is to yell, as loud and as shrilly as you can. they say it will feel rude. most women will not do this. you need to practice overcoming the social pressure and just scream.

most women do not cry out, even when it's bad. we do not report it. we walk faster. we do not make a scene. what would be the point of doing anything else? no matter what we do, we don't get taken seriously. it is a joke to them. an instagram caption punchline. we have to present ourselves as silent, beautiful, captivating - "valuable."

a woman is outside watching her kids when someone throws a firecracker at them. she screams and runs towards her children. in the comments, grown men flock together in the thousands: god. women are so annoying.

[medium-sized-hope]

when I'm angry I torture and kill scum bags in my head. it doesn't calm me or make me feel better but I do it 😁

[the-joy-of-knowledge]

Common Sense for women in their 20s

Define your raison d'être

Journal regularly, in fact daily

Figure out the right hairstyle for you

Buy clothes that fit your body type

Learn to do you own makeup if you'd like to wear it

Observe, observe, observe

Try to participate in the society

Know that not everything is within your control

Do not live in fantasy or fear, they are distractions

Read books

Learn to form you own opinion

Do not force friendships

Do not stress the small stuff

Spend time getting to know your self

Know women's history & History and use it to your advantage

Have some intellectual rigor

Create your own community

Find a third space

Take your vitamins

Your wellbeing and wellness should be your priority

Have role models for every area of your life

Have discretion

Do not be quick to anger

Have mentors and be a mentor to others

Your social skills will take you far

Be responsible, the world is not so forgiving to women

Know when to stand out

Know when to fit in

Curate your life to fit your goals and desires

Understand strategy and how best to use it to your advantage

Get acquainted with what maks the world go round

You have to climb socially

You need allies in areas where you want to win

Be kind

Be content with what you have, otherwise you will pay the price

[enactoflife123]

I was just reprimanded by one of my professors. The old me will definitely think it's bad and feel all agitated and emotional. Because really, it's a small matter that she keeps rambling about aloud to the whole class. And so, I just treated it as a small matter.

My friends are like ☹️ "Are you okay?" My question is why am I not okay? It's just a small matter and the prof kept emphasizing that she's not targeting me. Just reminding everyone in the class. Even if the prof didn't say that, I would still be nonchalant about it. Cause why does it matter? I don't think I made a huge mistake. The teacher just don't want me to repeat that again. So sure, I won't.

But comparing my action and emotion today to back then, I feel a tiny inny bit sense of accomplishment.

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.

-Mark Manson

[criticalsyourroles]

now i've watched a fair amount of d&d i've started to pick up on the differences between dm style i think

like brennan IS all the bad guys. every game he dms is brennan vs the players. he makes npcs and battles that make his friends throw things at him and he smirks the whole time. he makes them tell him their worst fears and then he makes them do it. and it's awful and amazing and really funny

matt IS exandria. his characters and battles never feel written or constructed, they just feel like things that already existed in the world. it's all about verisimilitude with him, and he's amazing at it. he tends to fade into the background and let the players react to the story and it makes everything he does incredibly cinematic

aabria dms like she's just another player at the table reacting to the story, right up until someone gets lulled into a false sense of security and tries to fool around and THEN she throws a curveball by making them deal with the consequences of their choices. she's like oh you think that's funny?? then i'm about to be hilarious, bitch. and she keeps getting away with it bc she's just that good!

basically, brennan's an evil bastard, matt's the world, and aabria's the queen of consequences

or:

brennan - fuck

matt - around

aabria - find out

[bixels]

Posting a sneak-peak of this now because I'm about to be In The Shit school workload-wise, so this'll take me a while to finish.

Doing some character design exploration/expression sheets for Celestia and Luna. Figuring out Celestia's weird ass anatomy while I'm at it.

[free-my-mindd]

Control your emotions. React less.

[un-interneted]

Introduction post

Hello everyone

My name is Tejas V Kris.

This is the one blog where I post the hard parts of my life. Be warned I will post self hate stuff.

Anyhow I hope you have a nice day

[littl3-val3ntine]

i love the naked time because it implies spock is a sad drunk. the first thing bro does without inhibitions is cry a little. maybe have a breakdown, as a reward. and then a homoerotic kissy feely fistfight with the boys

[buggachat]

(random s5 finale musings) tbh I don't think Marinette chose to keep The Secrets™ from Adrien because Gabriel asked her to. I feel like Marinette keeping secrets like that is so consistent with her character; she hates giving people bad news, she hates rocking the boat, she hates upsetting people, she always chooses to keep any 'controversial' information to herself for as long as she can get away with (examples: bubbler scarf, telling Queen Bee she was benched, confessing to Adrien, warning Chat Noir about Scarabella or Rena Furtive, never told Chat Noir about Chat Blanc, etc) that I just totally believe she would've done it either way. She was even already having nightmares about Adrien hating her for finding out she defeated his father, so I feel like Gabriel's request was moreso giving her a go-ahead than it was a primary deciding factor, yknow?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bare skin, bare feelings.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[nickeeree]

i met a slugpup in Rubicon during my second Saint playthrough

i don't have a -slightest- idea how this is possible but i think we were both equally horrified by the fact

named him Surv because how the fuck did you get here little man you're not supposed to be here

[dclovesdanny]

DcxDp prompt

Dead tired 3/3

Tim introduces the Batfamily to his very-human-boyfriend! Nothing suspicious here! Not at all!

After his boyfriend‘s apartment gets destroyed in a rogue attack, the two of them end up living in Drake Manor. Due to Alfred, they come over very often and interact with the rest of the family all the time. Which means everyone has noticed how different Danny is.

(In which everyone believes Danny isn’t human but has differing theories on what he is, Tim enjoys causing chaos, Danny is oblivious, and Alfred is silently encouraging said chaos)