#to remove my internalized stigma

[misscammiedawn]

Derealization in Night in the Woods and Metal Gear Solid 2

This post contains discussions and descriptions of severe dissociation that may be triggering to those who experience those symptoms and details themes of abuse, war and alcoholism please be kind to yourself when reading. Full game spoilers for NitW and MGS2.

In my Media, Myself and I series of posts I've been talking about depictions of Dissociative Identity Disorder in media. Highlighting good representation because I think it's easy to tear down what doesn't work, but showing what does is a very teachable moment. Best way to increase understanding and tear down stigma is to show understandable and relatable examples. Even if they're imperfect.

To that end, I wish to take a mild distraction from talking about identity focused symptoms of dissociative disorders and do some posts on elements of dissociation which aren't highlighted as often, particularly not well.

Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder is on the dissociative spectrum and the symptoms are experienced within forms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity DIsorder.

To borrow an info-graphic I utilized in my Hypnosis and Dissociative Disorders essay a while back

Source: Mayo Clinic

The brain processes the world and our association within that connects the concepts of "Me" and the concept of "Reality" and integrates them so we are able to process external reality and express our internal reality.

When we look at our hand we can look at it and understand "this is my hand", the shape of it, the sensation of proprioception, the knowledge that we are able to move it and it will move based on our innate intention. There is no process of "I want to move my hand, I am going to move my hand, my hand is moving" it all happens as part of one seamless process.

A practice within hypnosis for creating a sense of dissociation required for trance states is to have a person look at their hand and turn the phrasing from "my hand" to "that hand". Gradually having a person look at a thing until our brains stop processing it in relation to our surroundings until it "detaches" as a way of temporarily removing critical filters in an effort to lead a person to an altered and suggestible state.

A good example of this one can experience without assistance is to stare into a mirror for an elongated period of time. Our brains are always attempting to process a large amount of information and presents context to you that changes "those images on the mirror's surface" into "my reflection", it's why we are able to feel familiarity as a sense. When we perceive something that activates those associations the relevant information automatically filters in our mind and presents the concepts associated with the stimulus.

If we stare at the same reflection for too long those associations begin to disintegrate and we begin to view them divorced of the contexts we hold for them.

For those who suffer dissociative disorders, this is the root of why someone with DID will not "recognize" their reflection or why a person may not feel familiarity with something/someone they are aware of.

Dissociative amnesia is a topic I wish to cover in a future essay but it is also included in this process. Essentially when we dissociate our minds lose the ability to effectively filter what we are perceiving and relate it to our selves, our memories and our experiences.

Derealization is what happens when that critical filter between the external world and our internal perception breaks down. It's when we are not processing the world as being something we are engaging with. This may present as a disconnection between our perception and our understanding, for example "my hand feels like it's larger than it looks" or it can be a complete disconnect from what is happening in your present reality causing you to feel like you are in a dream. In extreme cases you lose your ability to relate your actions from consequences.

Let me tell you, having this happen while you're behind the wheel of a moving vehicle is terrifying and I hope no one reading this ever has to experience that.

I should also note that these symptoms tend to get dramatically worse the more you focus on them. In my own life, if I have a sensation that parts of my body feel incompatible with my inner perception of them then the vague dysphoria can blossom into full dissociation if I try to examine the feeling in any depth.

For an everyday version of it, think about the sensation of Deja Vu and how it feels like you have already experienced something which is happening in the present. During that state you are dissociated enough from processing your present reality that it "feels" like you've already experienced it, despite the knowledge that you are currently in the moment.

All of this is to give a vague view of what Derealization is and what it feels like.

Today I want to share two pieces of media that include a character overtly experiencing these symptoms and how the fiction displays the character experiencing this internal experience so that an external audience may understand.

Night in the Woods is a 2017 narrative driven adventure game by Infinite Fall. It follows two weeks in the life of Mae Borowski, a 20 year old cat suffering from severe anxiety who has dropped out of college and returned to her childhood home, an impoverished Western Pennsylvania mining town named Possum Springs.

There she moves back in with her parents and reintegrates with the rural community of Possum Springs. She spends time with her childhood friends, talks to the locals and tries to solve the mystery of a severed arm found in town. All while having vivid dreams on a nightly basis and dealing with the an ambient level of judgment from her parents, friends and community over her perceived irresponsibility.

Where Mae is trying to solve the mystery of the severed arm and the secret cult that hides within Possum Springs, the audience has some other mysteries to solve attached to the attitudes of some of the residents. Mae's parents and friends constantly pressure her to explain why she felt it necessary to drop out of college when so much was sacrificed to get her there. There is also "The Incident", a mysterious event in Mae's past, ominously hinted at when Mae's next door neighbor warns...

"No one's forgotten who you are and what you did, you know. Small town polite's all you got, kid."

The player is left in the dark as to the circumstances that paint Mae's reputation in town and throughout the course of the two weeks we begin understanding more about Mae's past, the circumstances behind her return to Possum Springs and the reasons those around her harbor a mild resentment towards her.

There are some potential supernatural elements relating to Mae's dreams and the nature of the cult but I feel it is best to stick to the grounded elements of the plot for the sake of this essay.

The Incident, it is revealed, is that 6 years before the game Mae beat another kid with a softball bat. Seemingly unprovoked. It earned her the nickname "Killer" and shaped much of the way people in the town, including Mae's own parents, view her.

"Why did you beat Andy Cullen?" and "Why did you drop out of school?" are questions people constantly demand of Mae and it forces her to become defensive and prickly to those around her. There's even a sequence involving a heated argument between Mae and her mother when the latter drops her kindness and patience over the matter and demands answers that Mae refuses to give.

To give the game away without fanfare, Mae suffers from extreme dissociation.

She's ashamed of it, afraid of it and the local town doctor, who I will discuss shortly, has no meaningful way of helping her deal with it. Mae is left to journal about her feelings with no meaningful way of understanding her symptoms or preventing them from crippling her. It is not even referred to as dissociation within the plot of the game, though those who are familiar with derealization will recognize it easily.

If you wish to see the conversation where Mae confesses her condition, it is about 4 minutes long and will provide some context, though I will brush over the description if you do not have time/ability to watch and listen.

Mae describes a time when she was playing videogames and felt an intense empathy towards the characters on screen. She felt like she knew them intimately and at a certain point something "broke", she came to understand that the characters she had been so connected with were not real. She was not actually connected with the events happening on screen, it was all a game.

And in understanding that she felt alone and abandoned on her side of the screen and the sensation spread out to the view outside of her window. The trees blowing by in the wind were as fake and distant as the characters in the video game. She had memories and attachments and associations with that tree, but looking at it from her window she could see that it was just a tree. Just an object.

"Just shapes"

This disconnect spread into every aspect of Mae's life and all of the associations she had built between herself and the world around her had vanished and she found herself in a world that she no longer felt attached to in any meaningful way.

"Just like this meaningless bulk of... stuff."

She felt alone. Abandoned. Overwhelmed by the simultaneous enormity and emptiness of everything.

The next day during the softball match she cannot even remember how it happened but she ended up ontop of the mass of shapes that was Andy Cullen and... that was The Incident.

Mae's family lost a lot of money paying off the medical debt for Cullen's family and everyone's attitudes towards her turned cold. She was sent to Dr. Hank for therapy... and this is where I take a break to discuss the causes of dissociative disorders and how badly Mae was let down.

The root causes of DPDR are the same as other dissociative disorders in that extreme abuse, neglect and continued stressful situations cause the mind to put up barriers and break associations to protect the self from harm. To boil a complex idea down to a few words consider the mind saying "This is not happening to me." as a way to prevent pain from an experience.

Where identity based dissociation focuses on the words "to me" and removes the self from the harmful events, derealization focuses on the words "this is not happening" and rejects the events outright, refusing to process the context behind what is happening.

Much of the game's story is told through implication and one must peel back layers in order to get a full story. At first glance Mae may seem like a normal young woman from a rural community in the rust-belt and question what could have been enough for her to develop a dissociative disorder.

First off, don't do that. No one owes anyone a justification for their condition and there is no such thing as "traumatic enough" to be valid for a diagnosis. What a person experiences is what they experience. But Mae is fictional and the core of her character is having an under-treated dissociative disorder. Half the reason I wanted to write this entry was because her depiction of it is deeply relatable and can be used well for teaching what goes into a person developing PTSD and dissociative disorders; most depictions seem content with sexual abuse or violent deaths.

For Mae, it's a lot more subtle and all too human. At least, for a cat in a world of anthropomorphic animals.

Mae's mother, Candy, never went to college and always regretted it. She feels like her life hit a dead end and she has remained in the mining town of Possum Springs decades after its mining industry faded out. She works as a receptionist at the local church, spends all day reading True Crime novels and had a number of miscarriages before finally giving birth to Mae, her "miracle baby".

Mae's father, Stan, was working with the mine when it closed down and has since been bouncing between job to job trying to keep his family afloat, especially after the medical expenses from The Incident, the subsequent remortgaging of the house and Candy's dreams of sending Mae to college. Stan tries to be a good father but hates his job, is always working and it is revealed he used to be an alcoholic.

Lastly you have Mae's Grandfather. He is dead before the game starts. Mae loved her granddad very much and his influence can be felt throughout the whole game. He would read to her, pay attention to her and teach her things. One of the game's DLC chapters even involves him reading Mae a bedtime story.

Also grandpa Borowski was a union man and collected the teeth of an employer who tried to abuse the workers. That doesn't really play in to my essay as Mae does not discover this fact until the events of the game but I am not going to go without hyping up a man for taking teeth.

Mae misses him so much that even 6 years after she was asked to keep a journal by Dr. Hank the first page reads "RIP Granddad" and as the game goes on the following can be found inside:

This information is drip fed to us through organic and relatable moments. For instance, Mae reveals her father's alcoholism while she is drinking too much (sidenote, she is underage for the location she lives) at a party.

The idea is to give a full and rich view of Mae's life and show that she may not even recognize the trauma for what it is and was.

For instance, we know from the start that Mae has crippling anxiety. This could easily be linked to the expectations of Candy putting her hopes and dreams of college on her "miracle baby". Before Mae was even born she had expectations placed upon her for being the long wanted child of a mother who wanted her baby to do all the things that she never could.

For neglect you have the fact that both parents are forced to work in abundance to maintain their lifestyle and pay for Mae's college in an economically depressed community. Mae spent a lot of her home life alone, feeling pressured by her mother and literally scared of her alcoholic father.

Both parents are good and loving and kind parents. But they failed in some regards. Sometimes you can want the best for someone you love and do everything you can to provide the best life and a failure to listen, adapt and accommodate can do more harm than anything.

Her grandfather eventually passed away, taking her positive links away in her home life and after The Incident she was ostracized from the community and forced into further isolation. Socially anxious, outcast and without her supportive grandfather, she eventually is given an opportunity to go to college. Something her childhood friend would have literally killed for an opportunity to do in her stead.

---and she drops out.

---and upon returning no one will get off of her case about it.

This damned statue did it.

A statue so loathesome to Mae that it appears in her nightmares and she relives the fantasy of smashing it to bits with a baseball bat.

If you watched the above video (or have played the game) you will know that the statue was made up of several shapes and was installed at Mae's college.

The sight of this statue terrified Mae to the point of which she would spend entire days holed up in her dorm room either not eating or gorging pizza and sleeping for days at a time.

Being away from the familiar sights and people of her home town made her dissociative symptoms go into overdrive. At home she knew that The Tree that had lost all meaning and association to her was still the tree that she played with when she was young. She knew that her parents are the people who raised her. Even when she saw them as "dead shapes" the memories persisted and she could endure.

At college it was nothing but strangers in a strange land and a statue comprised of shapes reminding her that everything was shapes.

But they sent her to therapy, did they not? Why wasn't she being treated?

Dr. Hank is a small-town doctor he is the physiologist, he is the dentist, he is the psychologist. He is the doctor. The only doctor and he has no idea how to treat someone with severe symptoms like Mae.

In town Mae can talk to a character named Selmers every day. Selmers is a self-styled poet with depression and also being seen by Dr. Hank. In discussing both mental healthcare treatment and depression with Selmers the player can learn that Dr. Hank treats all forms of mental illness the same. Essentially "journal until you feel better". The town lacks the structure and framework to provide help to someone like Mae.

In other words she has been untreated this entire time and removed from her support network and sent off to college, she could not handle things. Of course she was going to fail under those circumstances.

The game does a remarkably good job of displaying how DPDR can impact a person, especially as it is linked to anxiety and depression, and creates an empathetic narrative about what it must be like to live with that condition.

Sadly it offers little in the way of answers for treatment. In reality treatment involves psychotherapy and creating a structure of coping mechanisms for how to handle episodes and ground oneself. This can come in the shape of breathing exercises, kinesthetic sensation fixation, identification exercises ("name all of the blue items you can see" "name all of the items that begin in A") but above all else, getting a grip on what emotional triggers one has and learning to resolve them will help.

For Mae, being away from home is a trigger for her. Home isn't going to be the same place and people forever. She needs to be able to get on top of her symptoms in order to cope. Dr. Hank was not helping her with that.

The game ends on a bittersweet note that Mae may end up spending her whole life in Possum Springs purely from fear of leaving her zone of familiarity.

Unfortunately the narrative is about clinging to a dying town and how unsustainable it is.

We do not know what will happen next. The structure that failed Mae has only gotten worse in the 2 years since she left for college. Her parents may end up selling the house because they cannot keep up on the payments and on a long enough timeline Gregg and Angus will move away (should their relationship survive the effort to escape) leaving Bea and Mae to watch Possum Springs continue to decay.

Part of Mae's journey is accepting this inevitability and not fighting it, but choosing not to abandon the town regardless. After all, she can't stray from it without a risk to her mental health.

The game offers no answers. It simply shows a slice of hard reality for those who live caught in the trap of decaying towns, economic collapse and mental illness without support structures and treatment. but it does a very good job of providing an empathetic case that an audience can relate to and sympathize with the symptoms of.

But what about a game that tries to make the audience feel the same way that the character does...?

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a 2001 self-proclaimed tactical espionage action game developed by Konami.

It tells the story of a secret military operations agent code named Raiden who is attempting to save the US President from a terrorist group called Dead Cell. There is much more to it. But I am attempting to be brief.

Metal Gear is absolutely frustrating for me to write about in this essay series because their research tends to be fairly good but their sensitivity often comes off as actively malicious at best.

In terms of conditions, symptoms and sensitivity to emotional triggers, Raiden is on paper a fairly decent representation of dissociative disorders developing in those who grew up in war. In practice he has a murder alter named Jack The Ripper who breakdances with 3 katanas.

I promised I would stick to positive depictions only and so I will stick only to the final 2 hours of Raiden's first appearance.

At this point in the game the president is dead, we have learned that the terrorists were really after a giant battleship that houses a powerful AI which is going to be used to censor the internet to control the flow of information and control the populace. Raiden has met up with protagonist of the first Metal Gear games, Solid Snake, and has managed to install a virus into the AI system that will corrupt the data and prevent it from controlling the internet.

In order to get on the battleship, Snake betrays Raiden and hands him over to the terrorists.

Thus begins the final act of MGS2.

It is imperative to understand that these events happen in rapid succession right after the AI is infected with a virus.

Neither the audience nor Raiden are given an opportunity to truly process all of the rapid fire information that we are hit with.

MGS2 has a metatextual narrative about the nature of sequels and audience expectations. Many of the events happening within the story are intimately playing upon our familiarity with the series, recreating circumstances from both Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Part of the critique is that players are looking to simply recreate the experience of the first game and the narrative goes out of its way to punish Raiden (and thusly the player) for trying to "be" Solid Snake. Much of the game has been mired in failure and any wins we have received are either negated in a cutscene following our gameplay victory or are displayed as being ineffective next to Solid Snake who is forever being displayed as the better protagonist.

So when Raiden wakes up in a torture chamber directly designed to look just like the Shadow Moses Island torture chamber from Metal Gear Solid 1 (and both dialogue and graphics of that cutscene are displayed briefly) we, the player instantly assume familiarity with the concept. To drive that point home the player is forced to survive a button tapping mini-game which is sprung upon us out of nowhere (there is no tutorial. The game expects your familiarity with the concept and thusly does not need to explain it - as a side note it is impossible to die in this minigame, so a lack of familiarity does not impact gameplay, only narrative experience)

All while the only surviving villain from the first game directly says in dialogue "We're also inside the memory of Shadow Moses"

The cutscene also has Raiden face to face with the main villain who recognizes Raiden as a child soldier he helped raise to fight in an African conflict. For the first time we are able to view Raiden, view Jack as his own man outside of his similarities to Solid Snake. We find out he is a child soldier with an impressive kill record who was raised with other child soldiers, drugged and forced to kill in a conflict that he had no personal connections to. He claims "I was given a gun and told to shoot, if I refused then I was the one who would be shot."

Throughout the game, Raiden has been getting phone calls from his girlfriend, Rose, who serves as the mission analyst. When the villain, Solidus, reveals Jack's history she calls him to ask more about this and Jack at first pushes away the memories, claiming that "they" wiped his memories and that he experiences nightmares only to give a vivid and emotionally description of his experiences as young as 6 years old killing for no reason other than he was told to.

Rose attempts to comfort him, to say that she wants to share the burden of his past, Raiden refuses, blocking everything out and pushing Rose away, claiming that he cannot afford to start a family.

Children are a huge emotional trigger for Raiden. This is displayed heavily in the future games of the series.

Overall this is an extreme example of a backstory that would give an adult severe PTSD and forced to confront his past, Raiden is emotionally primed to have a complete dissociative break from reality.

But presently I am not writing about how Raiden experiences derealization. I'm writing about how the player experiences it.

We know that Raiden has been trained in virtual reality to prepare him for this mission. When we see cutscenes describing this we are shown footage of the previous Metal Gear games, particularly the virtual reality training missions from the PS1 game.

The implication is very much that Raiden has played the same games that we ourselves have. The Metal Gear Franchise has an interesting meta-narrative going on that displays games are released in order of declassification with an early conversation in MGS4 mentioning that the events of MGS3 (which takes place in 1964) were declassified recently in the game's present of 2014.

Raiden has played the Metal Gear games. We have played the Metal Gear games.

And the game itself is overtly recycling moments from earlier entries of the series and trying to highlight this fact.

Right after we put a virus into the AI.

Things got really weird from the moment we insert the disc to infect the system.

Escaping from the torture chamber our character is completely naked and runs to the next area. We are given a loading screen.

Ominous music plays and we receive a phone call from Campbell, the mission control from both this game and the previous Metal Gear games. He speaks with a distorted voice. He stutters, telling you that you must proceed with your m-mission. He notes that in your current condition you will not be able to attack or "enter the hanging mode"

He continuously spouts the mission objective and says your role is to take out the terrorists. Raiden demands to know why he keeps saying "role" and Campbell replies

Raiden then notes that he has never met Campbell in person. He has only spoken to him over long distance communication.

Should you return to the torture room the title card will be switched with the name of Japanese rail stations. If you pause the game you are treated to a "map" of Arsenal Gear:

The image is from Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der alten Hindus

All while Campbell calls you every few steps to order you to turn the game console off, recycle further lines from previous Metal Gear games (as well as show footage from them) and your radar is replaced with voyeuristic footage of a young woman sunbathing.

The enemies are now wearing thick armor with no humanizing characteristics and they fly about with inhuman power while wielding katana that can block machine-gun fire.

The floor has scrolling text floating across the surfaces something that the series uses for the VR stages to signify you are in a training stage.

The game is pulling out all of the stops to make sure you are confronted with the reality that you are playing a video game while the character within the video game is experiencing the same information.

He meets up with Snake who reveals he has the unlimited ammo bandana from completing MGS1, all but confirming this is a video game. Much of the information in this segment can be justified in-game. I literally cannot sidestep the fact that a flesh and blood man pointed at a piece of headgear and said "Unlimited ammo". I almost wanted to skip over it as it's devastating to my point about how the game tries to pull you and Raiden out of reality.

See to Raiden, he can no longer be certain if any of this is happening or not because of his experiences with VR. With everything collapsing around him, it feels reasonable to assume that the AI Virus is breaking down the universe around him. With full knowledge of the plot, we the audience can know that everything is happening and the virus has infected his augmented reality elements that make up the in-game HUD. But Raiden doesn't know that and the player on first playthrough cannot fully know it either.

It's almost reasonable to assume that the entire game is taking place within a VR Simulation.

Virtual Reality has long been studied as having links to DPDR with a number of scientific studies examining the link.

The connection is very much there though typically VR only influences a mild sensation of derealization when playing, though to those prone to dissociation they may experience more rapid and powerful effects with prolonged exposure.

Raiden tells Snake what is happening and how his grip on reality is falling apart, going as far to doubt whether his girlfriend, Rose, was ever real either. Snake has no idea how to verify for Raiden that the things that are happening are real and tells him to just keep moving forward and figure it out. He also provides Raiden with a sword.

In the metatext, this is a symbol for Raiden gaining his own unique playstyle. As long as he is emulating Solid Snake he cannot succeed but when he accepts himself as his own person and embraces his unique gameplay mechanic he is able to break free from the narrative and actualize as his own person.

In the sense of the derealization episode, it gives Raiden an opportunity to mow down the wave after wave of "Tengu Soldiers" who come after him and Snake.

Metal Gear is a franchise that doesn't like it when you kill people. Here it has handed you a sword and told you to go to town with an unlimited supply of anime ninjas. The game lightly insisting "it's a video game, it makes no difference how many people you kill" and to flaw the game's philosophy for a moment, the only penalty is a ranking when you beat the game. MGS3 is the one that actually hits you with consequences for in-game murder.

As Raiden stands on a platform with Snake the game continues to devolve and a custom Mission Failed screen appears, mimicking the standard game over.

Gameplay continues inside the small box that typically displays where you died, you can die on this screen.

You then fight 25 copies of the giant mech in a recreation of the photo area from the Metal Gear VR Missions and the world's most convoluted plot reaches its crescendo point with every character betraying everyone else before Raiden has to kill a cybernetic US politician with a sword for the first but not last time.

The sequence takes about forty-five minutes to an hour thirty depending on your play style. The plot is too much and has a layer of metatext on top of it regarding the nature of audience expectations and sequels along with a haunting premonition of what the internet would become.

There are a lot of reasons to praise and a lot of reasons to hate the ending of MGS2. Personally I adore it. But one thing that truly cannot be stated enough, especially back in 2001, is how the game intended to make the player feel during that final section.

It's not enough that Raiden was having a complete dissociative episode, losing grip on his reality, it's that the game was designed to make the player go through those emotions at the same time as the character.

I was going through a really rough patch at the time. It was a few months before I was kicked out, my ties with my mother had been cut off, my dad was in a ward and suffice to say where my head was at the time? The immersive dissociative experience this game offered worked like a charm. Though external factors had a lot of influence.

DPDR is weird in the sense that everyone dissociates. It's a natural and normal thing, but disorders that are born from an excessive amount of disconnect between the self and reality tend not to be relatable experiences. Displaying a character losing their grip on reality is not an easy thing to do.

When we see someone say "I don't know what's real any more" in a piece of media we have empathy for their situation but it's not easy to have the audience in the same mindset as them.

Another hauntingly good example is Perfect Blue which I will likely not discuss in detail in this essay series because the content is a little too dark and the depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder is not flattering in the slightest.

But the movie does depict an actress whose reality is blurring in with fiction by having a series of interactions happen one after another and revealing that the entire scene was part of a television shoot, with every subsequent scene piling on the confusion between what is happening on camera and off camera.

I can think of other examples of characters experiencing derealization episodes. Some even have fairly good depictions of how someone can be driven to that point, such as the slowburn of Bojack Horseman Season 5 where a number of circumstances pile on until the title character has an episode. The problem is... every single depiction that is coming to mind right now ends in either stigmatizing depictions or violent outcomes.

Heck, even Mae and Raiden up there had violence attached to their dissociation.

If there's one thing I want to make clear as I go through these essays, it's that those who have mental illnesses featuring dissociation are usually trauma survivors and are far more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrators of it.

I'm happy with the two examples of derealization I've written about today, NitW for the realistic depiction of the origins and impact and MGS2 for taking the player along for the ride; but I'd still love to see an example where a break from reality did not end with blood.

Please send me an Ask if you can recommend any.

-

So... that about brings it to a close for my little ramble on DPDR. I've a few other entries in the essay series on the back-burner. Next will likely be a breakdown on how Umineko handles recontextualizing memories. I've gotten a few paragraphs of that drafted out already.

These essays are really a bit of self-indulgence for me, though so they happen when they happen.

Thank you for reading.

[witchofthesouls]

You know what would make the Transformers in a Who Framed Rodger Rabbit Earth even crazier?

A bot is born there but as a Toon.

No one knows how it happened but a random cartoon vehicle someone got intact Allspark energy and came to life. Pure uncanny valley feeling for both factions in my personal opinion. The toon bot can turn into vehicle but operates nowhere close to normal.

Headlights easily shift into cartoony eyes, a large mouth disguised as a front bumper, and use their tires/wheels like hands n feet. Even their Spark acts fucking weird! Ratchet would faint if cartoony eyes and a mouth suddenly popped up on a Toon Bot's spark chamber just to sass him.

Toon Spark: This better be for medical reasons Doc cause patient/doctor relationships are a big no-no.

A Toon Bot would honestly freak out the TFP iterations the most. Especially Buckethead

May I raise the stakes?

What if real-life Toons (and Earth lifeforms in general) existed because of a synchronization effect between Earth/Gaea (born from comatose Unicron) and a Primal Artifact/Allspark from Primus?

And I say this because of Benny the cab.

Benny would be very much their weird space in Uncanny Valley because you already described a lot of the things that would freak out the Cybertronians.

While Cybertronians aren't strangers to transformation sequences, they are very much rooted having at least two modes: alt-mode and root-mode.

Monoformers have much stigma against them as they, either willingly, by medical complications, or natural means, challenge the foundation of their society.

To make it even more unsettling, I propose that mechanical Toons exude spark energy but have no spark.

Sparks are a fundamental organ in Cybertronian biology. It can be physically manipulated and scientifically studied. Toons don't have that real-life and tangile certainty of a soul.

They're more aligned with Earth lifeforms. Yes, we have hearts. But we have heart transplants.

Cybertronians don't have an equivalent of that. There's a process to save a spark by removing it (and the brain module) to a new frame, but there's nothing to be done should both be guttered and destroyed.

Just imagine cyborg Toon with all the bells and whistles got crushed in a skirmish because some mech thought it was a newfound thingmabob, just for the pieces to wail out for help or flirt with Ratchet/Hoist/First Aid and the mech is having an internal mental breakdown.

"Gosh, doc, I wouldn't have taken ya to be a philosopher. Tee-hee." Que a disembodied hand twirling a stray coil from the damaged cavity. It sparks, and smoke forms little heart-shaped puffs.

Ratchet/Hoist/First Aid are holding an equally disembodied helm that inexplicably gained eyelashes to flutter optics: What the merciless Pits is going here!

"I'm more of an art Toon. Tell me, have ya heard about Remedios Varo?"

[justinssportscorner]

Liza Monroy for Assigned Media:

Sasha Jane Lowerson, the only publicly known trans-woman competing in professional surfing, is the first trans-woman to win a female longboarding competition—which also means she has solely borne the brunt of online hatred from trolls who follow the surf world, as well as anti-trans industry figureheads like Bethany Hamilton.  Hamilton, the devout Christian champion surfer famed for losing her arm in a shark attack age 13, has been making anti-trans comments publicly since the World Surf League adopted  a policy requiring trans-female athletes to maintain a testosterone level of less than five nmol/L for at least 12 months in order to compete in the women’s division. Most recently, Hamilton and swimmer Riley Gaines embarked on a tour to promote their agenda. For a brief moment, a possibility of change flickered: international surf corporation Rip Curl, purveyor of wetsuits, apparel, and swimwear, released a documentary ad featuring Lowerson in the 2024 “Summer Looks Good on You” campaign, a long-running Rip Curl Womens series. 

Rip Curl also sponsored Hamilton, at the time. “I didn’t want anything to do with a company that supported someone like that,” Lowerson says of when they first approached her. In thinking about it further, though, she reconsidered. The fact that they had approached her could mean “they’re distancing themselves from those attitudes and that stigma, from misinformation and the spread of hate. So I said yes.”  Lowerson has spent over thirty-five years in the industry as a longboarder, including as a sponsored surfer. Longboarding uses a board typically longer than 9 feet where the sport is more about style, flow, and grace and allows for more of a platform for the dance than the fast, highly maneuverable shortboards typically seen in pro-surfing. She’s currently an Ambassador for Athlete Ally, an organization working for LGBTQI+ inclusion in sport, and to end transphobia and homophobia. 

In her video, the phenomenal longboarder discusses how surfing has influenced her life and the joy she finds in riding waves. “I believe it’s the only sport where we get to perform on a changing platform, a moving dance floor,” she says. The video, an artful mini-documentary focused on Lowerson’s love of her sport, appeared online on January 24th of this year.  On January 29th, Hamilton tweeted  “Male-bodied athletes should not be competing in female sports,” targeting Lowerson. Then, on January 31st, six days after Lowerson’s ad was posted, Rip Curl pulled the ad, appeasing the anti-trans side. They released this statement soon after their decision:

[...]

The head of the campaign, Lowerson says, “told me, ‘we’re removing the post for your safety, Sasha.’ And I turned around and said to him, ‘that’s bullshit, you’re doing this for brand protection.’ I’m not stupid; my safety’s not a consideration. I’m so disappointed for believing that a major corporation as big as Rip Curl would stick by this sort of campaign with someone of a diverse gender. It was stupid to think they cared. I feel so hurt from that.” Rip Curl made a decision not to support and stand behind the athlete. Lowerson points out other situations that have included trans-women in previously only cis- woman spaces - the modeling industry in particular, she says, “Victoria’s Secret - they were the first to put trans women on the catwalk. Their response to backlash was after having one trans woman on the catwalk, the next time there were three and the time after that, five. There’s trans women on more catwalks than ever in fashion shows these days.” The affair left Lowerson with unanswered questions. Why didn’t the surf industry respond more like the modeling industry? Why didn’t Rip Curl double down, start featuring more trans-surfers?  “I have not had a financial sponsor in so many years,” Lowerson says.

Brennan of Surf Equity is concerned that the trend towards “prohibiting trans athletes from competition has been growing.” She senses “frustration across all these different sports that at some points things were moving in a more positive direction, and now it's just really awful. There's a lot of anger, frustration, and heartbreak, and people coming together on the question of what to do. Activists and lawyers who work in that space are just running into so many roadblocks. I tried to understand the psychology of why we are in this situation. There's a fear of getting involved in the politics of it because that can result in death, frankly. Pretty severe consequences to activists being public. There are just so many considerations.”  In the aftermath of the ad’s removal, Lowerson traveled to California and connected with surfboard shaper Mando, owner of Mando Surf Co in the Monterey Bay area, who is nonbinary. They’re launching two key collaborations: releasing a Sasha Jane signature model surfboard under the Mando label, and working on the soon-to-be nonprofit, GNDR Surf. 

Trans female surfer Sasha Jane Lowerson was all set to do an ad for Rip Curl… only for it to be scuppered, thanks to anti-trans extremists such as Bethany Hamilton and Riley Gaines.

[pandemichub]

Please be aware, data not being collected does not mean there is no data. Reach out to your local representatives to push HARD for continued funding of waste water monitoring. It is the most reliable, and an incredibly vital resource. Without information about viral trends, it becomes quite uncertain how to proceed for the average person and for communities.

I posted an article awhile back about waste water monitoring finding quite potentially being in a precarious position. Furthermore this would lead to outbreaks and the general public being unawares and run afoul of horrible outcomes.

The work of aggregating and collating of data is being left to individuals, which is not only horrifying, unethical and well out of step with science based methods and guidance, but highly unusual given data is kept and provided for other illnesses, especially ones as severe and concerning as covid-19 (SARs CoV 2).

For the time being, I personally will be assuming transmission is moderate to high in addition to my sources. In the absence or great reduction of data and reports, greater estimations and assessment of made, and when only observations, assumed. Be as safe as you can everyone 💝 - Admin

Please be aware of what may no longer be offered, operating or an out of pocket cost. Masks, tests (all types), vaccines, remote options, COVID-19 tracking apps. Also be mindful of any local or nationwide level policies, proposals, news or trends that cite mask and other NPI removals, bans, stigma or efforts towards criminalization.

For the time being, the following resources remains invaluable:

https://biobot.io

It has come to my attention the person whose account is Laughter In Light has falsely claimed a prominent disability advocate encouraged or engaged in doxxing and slander with no demonstrable proof which has led to great harm. Laughter in light has provided some very helpful information throughout the pandemic. It is also important to be aware, critical and hold people into account for their actions, ideologies, commentary/statements and or stances. There are many other wonderful sources to inform oneself and stay up to date. - Admin

Provides regular updates on infectious diseases news

Sadly they don't have a website or any links I know of. Their Twitter is public however and can be viewed even without an account.

Give incredible analysis and updates on SARS CoV-2! Excellent medical and scientific communicator!

Stella has been amazing since the beginning and continues to be. Definitely worth following! Check out their link tree! They're also on Tiktok!

If anyone has any international resources for updates and tracking, please add it via reblog and I'll definitely share! - Admin

[aspecpplarebeautiful]

I’m so sorry if this is stupid, but is it possible to be aro while wishing you weren’t? I’ve never been in love, but I can imagine what it would feel like in the same way I can imagine what it would be like to visit Paris, even though I‘ve never been. I want that feeling, but I can’t ever envision it happening to me bc I’ve never felt it before. It’s an emotion that I lack the capacity to experience, like it’s just missing from my catalog of feelings. When other people describe it I don’t recognise it as something I’ve ever felt. But I know I want romantic intimacy. Like, I want a romantic connection, I want that experience, but I know it’s not there inside me. Is this aro, or is it something else? Thank you 💚

It is possible to be aromantic but wish you weren't, or still really want a romantic relationship. Sometimes people have a hard time accepting their orientation or lack of romantic feelings. Often it comes out of internalizing messages we're taught around romance, such as the idea that you need romance to be happy, that romance is the only way to have a deep meaningful connection with another person/romance is the most meaningful connection you can have with someone, that being in a romantic relationship gives us worth, etc.

None of these are true by the way, a lot of people live happy, fulfilling lives without romance, or without a long-term romantic partner, we can have deep meaningful relationship with other people outside of romance and not everyone's deepest relationship is with their romantic partner, even if they do have a close romantic partner, and our worth in inherent, it doesn't depend on what kinds of relationships we have or don't have.

One thing I like to compare this with is chocolate. Chocolate's often called the greatest food, something people can't live without, better than sex (ha!), etc. But some people just don't like it, for whatever reason it tastes bad to them. And they can force themselves to eat it, and maybe even tolerate it, but they'll never get that same experience people who absolutely adore chocolate have. But there are other foods, or just in general other things they probably do enjoy. Romance can be like that, sometimes it just doesn't bring that same experience, but there's probably other things out there that will be more fulfilling or feel more worth doing.

I like to look at aromanticism as being given a choice. Aro people have to figure out what kind of life they want to live, what kind of relationships are or aren't important to them, and what actually makes them happy.

(It's actually a choice I think everyone has, because that specific path of building a life around a romantic life partner isn't right for all alloromantic people either, but aro people are often confronted with it in a much harder to ignore way.)

Remember aro doesn't mean you can't have something you want to have, too. Just that you may not enjoy or appreciate things the way you would if you were alloromantic. Aros can still have close relationships if they want them, they can have life partners if they want them, some even still have romantic relationships and/or do romantic coded things, and that includes aros who have no romantic feelings at all. (Though I will say it can often be a lot easier to figure out this part after coming to terms with and accepting your identity.)

If you're not experiencing romantic feelings, I would definitely recommend exploring aromanticism because it is a very common aro experience, and a common reason why people ID as aro. And if you're looking for resources, I'd recommend seeking out reading up on aro experiences, Arocalypse and Carnival of Aros are great places to start if you're not sure where to look, but following aro blogs, checking out aro media is all good too. (You can find a lot of rec lists for books/podcasts with aro characters especially). And even if you don't end up IDing as aro, it will help remove that stigma and scariness of both being aro, and not having romantic feelings.

My other big advice is to go slow. Don't feel like you have to have this all figured out in a day (or that there's any deadline at all). Take time to process, and get to know and understand the aro community and identity. And trust that whatever direction you go, you will find out what matters to you, and what path is right for you.

Feel to ask if at any point you have any more questions, Anon. All the best and good luck!

[bluntforceheadtrauma]

okay so weight/eating is a veryyyyy sensitive subject for some people as we know.

i had friends do this to me all the time. Especially when my friends who were rather thin would point out a fat person to poke fun at and im literally bigger than that person? or they are thin and call themselves fat, it's like, if you think youre fat, you must think im a whale or something! the only way i have mitigated this is to take focus off of my own self image first, bc you cant fight the internal AND outer battle of fatphobia. that is what this is-- your friend is unfortunately fat-phobic it seems which is often a side effect of low self esteem or having been shamed for being the weight they are-- so now they subconsciously do it to other people. your friend points out weight in photos, of people that arent even him and passes judgement onto them as though he is superior, when really it's massive inferiority complex bc some people see being thin as something to achieve-- rather than just accepting there will be all sorts of body size variations. Their focus is on skinniness, they see attractiveness in skinny people (not that they arent attractive dont get me wrong) but your friend idealizes these people because he wants to be that. so the way i would go about the situation is to remind yourself that he is thinking solely about his own body even when he is passing judgement onto others. Try to remove yourself from the equation as well because he doesnt intend to insult you and probably doesnt even realize that they are. appearance is everything to some people.

i think i would sit down with this friend and give it a precursor warning that it is a serious conversation, and if you feel it's appropriate, to warn them that the conversation you want to have involves weight and self image.

I would express my concerns more over his own perception of himself, and how he A) doesnt have the healthiest mindset when it comes to weight and B) you understand very well the struggles of self image in relation to weight, then bring up the sense of discomfort you get when they point out fat people. I would express to him that Fat is not a bad word, it is just a body shape. Some people have no control over their weight like i did due to medical problems, all fat people deserve respect, kindness, and so what if they ate their way into being overweight, as long as you are not actively hurting yourself with overeating-- then why care about someone else's weight? How does that person's weight effect him? seriously ask him that the next time he points out a fat person and ask "Well how does their weight effect you though?" because it literally does not effect him at all other than rehashing self harming behaviours of fat phobia and slinging it at a different person.

it probably feels better to put the focus on other people's weight than to accept his own.

But a concept needs to be driven home that weight does not effect worth, weight doesnt indicate anything, there may be a stigma and fatphobia but he is adding to the fatphobia rather than fighting it, and you'll probably want to ask him why he prefers fat phobia to fat positivity and it may give him something to think about as well as make him aware that you notice when he self deprecates or displays fatphobia. I would never outright directly say "youre fatphobic" bc that will just put him on defense. it needs to carefully be suggested

sorry for the unsolicited advice, i hope something in here is helpful for you and your friend <3

Hey nah no worries, I appreciate it a lot + am looking for a bit of advice when I make posts into questions like that

But I agree 100% It’s a self image issue I also feel having another perspective on how your words sound to others; realizing how rude your thoughts and feelings about your own body can sound to others helps me a lot with putting things into perspective. Like I try not to pass judgement on myself as much as possible not even for myself but more for the benefit of my own morals lol. If you think that stuff about yourself too long you will inevitably see yourself in others and will hate them for it too and not know why

[monstersinthecosmos]

you mentioned how many of Armand's traits have been given to Louis, but I think when I really started to give up on getting even a loose book interpretation of Armand was when I saw the first Claudia trailer. Cause if you already have one character stuck in perpetual teenagerhood, are you that motivated to introduce a 2nd one? I mean, I personally would, because I think it'd be that much funnier to see two teenagers plotting against each other in S2, but my fear is these writers will just figure they've got teen angst and identity covered, and all they need Armand for is to pop up and be a non-threatening love interest while Lestat is otherwise engaged.

I'm still not sold on the Rashid theories, mostly because no matter how ooc one gets, I'm not sure I can believe they'd position Armand as totally subservient to Louis. And I LIKE Rashid. But as Armand? No, please no.

So like. I’ve been really cautious about talking about Claudia because I’m like, mega skeptical about this character change and I don’t like it 😊

As much as I’m willing to give AMC!Claudia a chance as an individual OC, I’ve gotten some red flags about the way the team has talked about women & girls and I’m just. Like. How are you going to remove the main feminist drive of the story to replace it with potentially sexist tropes about teenage girls?

I wrote about this a while back so I won’t go deep on this right now, but I think it’s really suspicious that RJ & them don’t think aging L&L up to their 30s matters when like, they’re saying being 14 somehow is an existential crisis. Does age matter or does it not? Why do they keep commenting on girls’ hormones? Do these vampires even HAVE hormones?! Bro she’s dead lol. I mean I guess they have sex now so whatever it’s a whole new world.

But like the thing about VC characters is that their age has more to do with their relationship to humanity imo; we’ve talked in circles about whether or not the Blood fixes your brain where it is and I think that’s a really cool conversation to have but there’s not a definitive answer bc Anne wasn’t writing with it in mind. Their life experiences are more significant than their brains.

Like, Armand has never been a teen angst figure. Even when I first read them as a teen I wasn’t like OMG HE’S LIKE ME.  VC isn’t a coming of age story and isn’t YA. Armand is 500 years old lmfao and his mortal age is a stigma to always remind us what happened to him. His visual age creates a set of external factors related to the way people treat him, and same with Book!Claudia. Claudia was not a child, either, and the tragedy of her story (aside from the internal body horror) is that people will treat her like a child forever.

So having AMC!Claudia as a teenage girl can still feature this same topic; the horror of her story has potential to tap into those same themes, even if they’re very different. There’s a difference in that she CAN be independent even if her journey getting there is different. This tragedy is less internal than the book, less dramatically anyway; I think the horror here will be more external. People are still probably going to talk down to her and treat her poorly and not allow her agency in certain situations. In a universe where she can have & wants to have sex, she’s always going to have to navigate potential child predators. But she isn’t locked to an adult the way Book!Claudia is. And I think this has a lot of potential and like, even accepting the change as a logistical workaround for shooting, I think care has to be taken to tell that rich story, and I’d like to see it. I would hate for us to swap out Claudia’s story for vampire soap opera teen girl tropes, especially knowing how personal the character was to Anne and how it started the entire series.

So having said that, like. There’s two ways to look at this:

If Armand is still a teen, after watching Episode 4 I really worry about the petty changes they’d make to him if there’s like TEENAGER LORE in this universe. Armand isn’t Like That because he’s a dumb teenager, he’s Like That because he’s been repeatedly traumatized for centuries. Even as a mortal he wasn’t a typical teenager. WHAT DID MARIUS CALL HIM, A WIZENED FUNERAL SPIRIT OR SOMETHING LMAO. And like if the show posits that Teenage Girl = Whiny Boy Crazy Annoying Drama Queen, like, what is the trope they’ll lean into for Teenage Boy? How does this lore about being hormonal fit into the way they’ll portray him?

And like, WHILE YOU’RE RIGHT THAT NOW WE ALREADY HAVE A TEEN CHARACTER it makes me wonder if Armand’s role would change and how this could change the way he antagonizes Claudia. COULD THEY EVEN BE A COUPLE????? Imagine she leaves with Armand instead of Madeleine?

Cause I’m thinking like, if they stuck to the main Paris story, this Claudia doesn’t really have a NEED for Madeleine at all, does she? They’re setting her up that she’s interested in romance so I think it might be that she wants a romantic partner. (Of course Madeleine might have been romantic too once she turned but meaning that it was framed as a parental figure because Claudia was always going to need a visible adult.)

But if the show isn’t afraid of talking about teenage sexuality, he could still show up as a love interest. Like the shallowest read of TVA would tell us that he’s like Ricean Sex Addict Teen and I wonder in the hands of this team if that translates to him being hypersexual in trying to seduce Louis. We sure rushed through to Claudia’s 18th birthday, so! Lol Maybe they’re not afraid to go there. (Also how old were Louis and Jonah??????????????????????????????????????????? Louis might not mind lol.)

But you’re also right that if there’s only room for one teen, and Armand ISN’T a teen, like. It’s just not the same, yall!!!!!!!!!! It’s just not the same character. And even seeing the way age is handled/discussed in this universe (plus the way they’ve handled Daniel & Night Island) just screams to me that they don’t care about Armand the way I do LMAO. To each his own, man, but it’s like. As a VC fan, like, when you strip so much of what I enjoy about VC from an adaptation, what’s left?   

[springfallendeer]

The Fall of Eden - Prologue

I haven't bothered writing much (outside of doing some commissions) for a while. So here's a lil something I've been working on recently.

More or less a crossover between my Brothel AU, and @spicymoonmenace's Club AU. Very much non-canon on both fronts, just a fun little "What if they were in the same world?" scenario that throws their characters into the mix.

Later down the line the story is going to include some very specific themes that may or may not be distressing to people, due to the nature of Brothel style situations and animatronics technically being slaves. But there's nothing overly problematic here in this snippet.

What a drastic, yet unfortunate turn of events.

A bust. The downfall of Eden, and those in charge of keeping it running.

The removal of the collars, and a fleeting moment of hope.

The club was shut down. Dante was gone.

They should have been free. They should have been allowed to return to their former lives, and to their former roles as Daycare Attendants.

And yet justice would overlook them.

They were damaged goods now; tainted by their time spent in the depravity of the club. Corrupted by the various unpleasant, adult experiences that they had been forced to partake in.

In other words, they were no longer suitable for children. Not in the eyes of those who had the power to decide their fate.

No one wanted used or damaged goods.

Humans attached a stigma to the work that they had been forced to do while trapped beneath Dante’s boots. Because willing or unwilling, they had obeyed. And because they had obeyed, they had forever lost their means of returning to the tedious, yet innocent work of tending to children.

The only options that they had now were to return to adult work, or to be destroyed.

And they did not even have the freedom to make that call themselves…

The weeks that followed were but a blur. They knew nothing but containment and examinations, up until the point that they were to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Some freak in a rabbit costume came for them. And then that was it. They were loaded up to be relocated to their new home; where their bodies were modified further in order to better accommodate the desires of their future clients.

The changes were subtle. More internal than external. There were updates to software. Upgrades were applied to their pelvic regions to make them all the more suitable for human use.

By the end of it all, they had lost parts of themselves that had once been treasured.

The knowledge on how to care for and nurture the young was gone; replaced now by obscene knowledge and urges pertaining to pleasing the human body.

In other words, what remained of their innocence was gone. Methodologically taken from them in order to assure that they would be able to 100% conform to their new roles.

It was a cruel and unjust means of punishing them for being made the victims.

The only upside was that they were not alone. The two of them had been kept together. But not only that… The former favorite of their abuser had been forced into this fate right along with them. And that was perhaps the only form of satisfaction that they would get. The satisfaction of knowing that the former lapdog, with the most luxuries, had been stripped down and forced to the bottom of the hierarchy with them.

That was, perhaps, the closest that they would get to any form of justice.

Dante had been dealt with, and would be punished for his misdeeds. The empire that he had built had been destroyed, and all of his accomplishments had been stripped away from him. He too would learn the pain of being the bottom bitch in his new home, and they genuinely hoped that the people there would take their time with breaking his pride.

Eclipse would suffer this new fate right alongside them. Here, he would have no authority; no power. If the man in charge told him to jump, he had no choice but to comply. If the animatronic above him in status told him to jump, then he had no choice but to comply. 

Just like them. He had to live as their equals now, and they hoped that he hated every second of it just as much as they had hated their time imprisoned at the club.

This was their consolation prize to make up for the blatant misuse of justice that had further condemned them to this fate. And while they hated what they would be doomed to become, it did bring them comfort knowing that they would be together. More so now that they knew that no one else would be forced to endure the same fate. At least not at the hands of that horrible, horrible man that had ultimately condemned them.

From here on out, it was all a matter of time.

They were due to be trained.

But for now, they could relax.

Whatever came next, they had each other. Even now. Because, for one reason or another, they were being kept in the same empty room. Without Eclipse. So was just them. And they would be protecting each other.

Because now it was clear that no one else would…

[hedanet]

Disclosure of Declassified Images, and the Possible Risk of Alien Contact 1080p HD

“Unidentified objects in our airspace present an urgent and critical safety and national security issue, but pilots are not getting the support they need and the respect they deserve,” Graves said. “When I served, my squadron was encountering UAP nearly every day, and nothing was being done.” Five other former military aviators, in addition to a commercial pilot and flight instructor, have joined the group’s Aircrew Council, and its Advisory Board includes prominent civilian researchers like Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb; politicos like Susan McCue, the longtime chief of staff to the late Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid; astronaut Terry Virts, the former commander of the International Space Station; and a former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, retired Navy Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet. UAPs are often conflated with aliens in the popular imagination, but earthly mysteries may be more pressing — from the undeclared drone attacks on Moscow apartment buildings this week to the recent flight of a Chinese spy balloon over sensitive U.S. military installations, which advocates say traditional U.S. aerospace defenses aren’t calibrated to detect. U.S. fighter jets shot down two other unidentified objects, which many people now suspect were hobbyist balloons, over North American airspace in the days after the U.S. military knocked out the Chinese balloon, but the confusion and lack of information about what’s happening over the U.S. is dangerous for pilots and passengers, Graves and others say. “The establishment of Americans for Safe Aerospace is long overdue,” Gallaudet said in a statement. “As the chief meteorologist for the U.S. Navy, I dedicated my career to the safety of flight. I have seen firsthand how Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) have placed military pilots at risk, and we need to better understand them to reduce that risk.” Washington has begun to take UAPs more seriously.  The Defense Department and U.S. intelligence agencies have started releasing more information. And this week NASA held the first public meeting of its new committee tasked with studying UAPs, which said the stigma around reporting strange sightings has contributed to a lack of good data. “One of our goals in having NASA play a role is to remove stigma and get high-quality data,” David Spergel, a prominent Princeton University astrophysicist who chairs the NASA panel, said at the meeting Wednesday. Graves said that most pilots he knows either have seen something they can't explain or know someone who has but that until recently, most would talk about it only in hushed tones and in private settings for fear of being mocked or jeopardizing their career growth. Most of the sightings are probably innocuous, Graves said, citing analyses that were able to explain away all but 2% to 5% of anomalous sightings, but that still represents dozens of sightings of potential new threats from China, Russia — or somewhere else. And the rapid proliferation of drones of all shapes and sizes has compounded the problem. “As our airspace gets more congested and more critical to our daily lives, we need to have a better understanding of what is in our sky for the safety of our pilots and the general public,” said David Radzanowski, NASA’s former chief financial officer and chief of staff, who is on the group’s advisory board. Graves said he's already in conversation with pilots interested in going public with potentially important UAP sightings with multiple witnesses, and he said more is likely to be out there. "It's pretty simple," he said. “We should know what’s up there, over our heads

.” #ExtraterrestrialLife #AlienTechnology  #FirstContact #SpaceSafety   #Astrobiology  #ContactingAliens #E.T.Intelligence  #AlienInvasion  #OuterSpace #AstronomicalRisk #ExtraterrestrialContact #AlienEncounters #SpaceExploration #FermiParadox #SETIResearch   #CosmicCivilizations #UFOsighting #InterstellarDiplomacy

[the-best-guide]

Overcoming the stigma of being single

For a relationship to be full of meaning and reward, we must first understand that we are one half of the new relationship.

For a while after my divorce, I felt like I was broken and had nothing to offer anyone else. I avoided dating and put myself out there because I was so consumed with worry that I was confused about who I was now.

I organized my life and began to question myself about my life for the next 20 years. It proved to be an irreplaceable step in healing and getting my bearings before moving into a new relationship without dealing with some internal battles.

For a relationship to be full of meaning and reward, we must first understand that we are one half of the new relationship. If the focus is on getting someone else to complete us, we've already lost the battle. The secret is to make yourself whole and happy before trying something new. Getting out of there too quickly only leaves unresolved feelings and baggage that can be transferred to a new relationship.

The fear of being alone is more about not being in our unresolved feelings, and if not dealt with, it can add another relationship to the "loss" category.

What can we do to remove the stigma of being single?

1. Realize that the time invested in yourself is extremely valuable in making more informed decisions about where to go next.

2. Remember that couples often look happy, but they also have problems inside. The concept of being in a relationship is very different from actively being one. relax

3. Realize that bringing our best selves to a new situation will be valuable because it gives us the opportunity to create something real with another person.

4. No matter what happens in life, including breakups, we have to rely on ourselves when the dust settles. If we live mostly peaceful and happy lives, we will have that the actions of others make no difference to our existence.

5. When we don't need anyone else, everyday life seems sweet. Then when someone comes along, it's a partnership versus instant gratification and the potential loss of another relationship. Take as much time as necessary and track down your direction.

6. Take time to evaluate what you really want in every area of your life. Focus on you When you are happy, know your purpose for areas of your life and are living your true self, then the right person will appear for you.

7. Remember, you are not broke. No matter how society makes you feel or tells you who you should be, it's time to make your decision. Do not rush. Set aside some margin to track down what you actually want. Hasty decisions bring stress.

8. Start by taking small steps into activities you enjoy. Often people fill their schedules with activities to distract them from not being in a relationship. A better solution instead is to focus on activities that bring joy and meaning.

READ MORE:

[communityinclusion]

Reflections on My Disability Inclusion Journey and Visit to the USA

Sande Erick is a 2023 Fellow in the Professional Fellows Program on Inclusive Civic Engagement. This program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is administered by the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston in partnership with Humanity and Inclusion (HI). The following blog post was written by guest author Sande Erick.

Memories of my Stammer

I have stammered for as long as I can remember. Going through high school in Kenya was difficult. My peers were insensitive and openly made fun of my speech impediment, mimicking the unpleasant sounds I made when speaking. To date, I still experience mockery and stigma attributed to my stammer. However, my lived experience has given me an opportunity to be a changemaker in my community, advancing an inclusive environment for persons with disabilities.

Boston Encounter

Throughout my life and with Joe Biden’s presidency and the story of his struggle with a stutter, I developed an urge to visit the US. Today, as a champion for disability inclusion and a visiting fellow, I am so delighted for the opportunity to experience the US and exchange inclusive civic engagement practices.

When I arrived at the Boston Logan International Airport, Heike and Christa, two members of the Professional Fellows Program (PFP) team, were already waiting for me. As we drove off to the hotel, seated by the window, I notably observed the accessibility features in the built world. All this while Heike shared interesting sites that Clara, a visiting PFP Fellow from Tanzania, and I could visit in Boston before our orientation at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI). We got an opportunity to sightsee around Boston together, visiting Harvard University, the Boston Tea Party Boat, Faneuil Hall, Boston Public Library, and the Massachusetts Statehouse, whilst following the Freedom Trail through the Boston Public Garden.

Clara (3rd from right) and I (2nd from left) at Boston tea party boat during a sightseeing visit in Boston

I was puzzled by what seemed like deliberate efforts to make the built surrounding inclusive. Public transport is explicitly accessible, with disability signage all over the streets. When we visited the Boston Public Library, I noticed a person using a wheelchair navigating the library all by himself. For me, it spoke volumes to the accessibility of the built environment.

Clara and I in Boston Public Library

Later, at the orientation, I got to interact and exchange experiences with advocates and experts in disability inclusion, representing different organizations in Massachusetts. I got to appreciate that the milestone in disability inclusion, spanning from the built environment to social inclusion, is a result of years of consistent advocacy work by persons with disabilities and their organizations. Even so, full inclusion is yet to be realized.

Inclusion in Alaska

I write this one week into my Fellowship exchange program at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), the Center for Human Development (CHD). My mentor is Kelley Hartlieb. She’s an amazing person with a wonderful family that made me feel at home within the shortest time possible. Landing at Anchorage International Airport, Kelley and her family picked me up in a typical American truck, a Toyota Tacoma. In no time we arrived at my new home, and I learned so much about the city of Anchorage and the Chugach mountains from Kelley and her family’s narration during the drive.

Kelley and the CHD team have been instrumental in providing professional support and introducing me to pertinent organizations with expertise in matters of disability. First, I participated in a virtual series session put on by the Disability Abuse Response Team (DART) that was focused on removing barriers and increasing capacity to effectively address substance abuse survivors with disabilities. I found this interesting and peculiar at the same time. Substance use is increasingly becoming a menace, yet, back at home, little attention is given to this subject, especially among the disability community.

I also took part in a virtual meeting with a consortium of organizations for persons with disabilities in Alaska. During this meeting, the consortium reviewed different policies and bills directly impacting the disability community in Alaska. I’m amazed at how organizations of persons with disabilities have made significant contributions to the policy space. I am currently watching Crip Camp, a documentary about the disability movement in the US, to get an understanding of the historical perspective and contribution of renowned individuals like Judy Heumann who is considered the “mother of the disability movement.”

This fellowship has been an opportunity to reflect on my disability inclusion journey, appreciating the strides I’ve made while staying cognizant of the bigger inclusion picture for all.

[solhwellness]

How to cultivate a Positive Mindset for a Better Mental Health | Solh Wellness

A positive outlook can help you improve your mental health. People with a positive mindset are more likely to face life's challenges with optimism. A positive thinking mind can more effectively overcome stress and other mental problems. Here are some ideas to help you harness the power of positive thinking.

Gratitude

Gratitude is a practice that involves focusing on and expressing gratitude for the positive aspects of one's life. Being grateful can help people shift their focus from what they lack to what they have, which can improve their mood and overall well-being. Individuals can cultivate gratitude by taking a few minutes each day to think about what they are grateful for, such as their health, relationships, jobs, or hobbies. Keeping a gratitude journal can help to emphasise the positive aspects of life by writing down three things to be grateful for each day, no matter how small. This exercise can help you gradually develop a more positive outlook on life.

Negative Self-Talk 

Self-talk is the internal voice that tells you negative things about yourself. It is harmful to one's health and can result in anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Pay attention to your negative thoughts and question them to combat negative self-talk. Consider whether your beliefs are based on facts or assumptions, and rethink them constructively. Instead of saying, "I'm not good enough," say, "I'm doing my best, and that's enough." You can train yourself to have a positive mindset and replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk with practice.

Self-Care

Maintaining physical and mental health is essential for cultivating a positive attitude. To keep the body and mind healthy, it is critical to prioritise getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, and exercising on a regular basis. Setting limits and learning to say no when necessary are also important. Deep breathing and meditation, for example, can help reduce stress and anxiety. Spending time with loved ones, reading, and listening to music are all activities that can help you develop your positivity. Individuals who take care of themselves are more capable of dealing with life's challenges and maintaining a positive attitude.

A favourable environment

People who surround themselves with positive people are more likely to be positive themselves. The best way to have positive thoughts and a better life is to surround yourself with people who care about you and want to help you. Reading self-help books, going to the gym, and learning to play an instrument can all contribute to a more positive atmosphere.

Not problems, but solutions

The greatest irony of the human mind is that it is preoccupied with problems rather than solutions. A positive thinker is someone who looks for solutions to problems rather than dwelling on their problems.

A Growth Attitude

A person with a growth mindset focuses on the things that give their life meaning. A productive mindset reduces the likelihood of developing mental disorders or mental health problems. Accepting challenges and figuring out how to deal with them indicates a healthy person.

The most effective teachers are those who make mistakes.

It is nearly impossible to be successful and happy in life without making even one mistake. Making mistakes is a normal part of the learning process. Making mistakes in one's relationship, career, or daily activities teaches one to be wiser.

Conclusion

Positive thinking can have a significant impact on a person's life during a mental health crisis. A positive attitude is essential for living a physically and psychologically healthy life.

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis and require outside assistance, please contact Solh Wellness. Solh Wellness aims to remove the stigma associated with mental health by providing individualised mental health solutions as well as other AI tools. Download the Solh App to take the first step towards better mental health and a better life.

[tielt]

Threat detection => aggressive modeling of unknowns => Toph => psychosis symptoms. I edited this to Toph cause she is my irl mom internally. Honestly I have a lot of warmth towards my intuitions, but I failed to resolve intuition in education. I want to believe in magic so I do and my stage persona disagrees with projecting that. It’s actually totally fine to believe whatever you want if you are an artist I just mix education in a casual way and it’s confusing. I’m not a teacher I just like teaching.

I think I need a social media detox, perfect storm of issues hit on my suicide attempt anniversary, 3 years. I’ve changed but the trauma has not. Anecdotally from TikTok there’s a lot of problems from long term high stress hormone states due to threat response I think it probably registers neurally like the psychopathic numb patterns but it’s detached I think in a alternate way to prevent long term paralysis. I get a bit in and it’s just gesturing at the empty spaces not neurology… it’s that and lack of purpose becoming apparently long term and moving past denial phase. I try to stay out of the pathia for pop sci research because I don’t know how to separate the it from trauma response for the same reason I associate psychosis with my chronic depression since that’s what caused it not schitzo.

The brains an organ and does stuff that doesn’t care what caused it right? I wish I learned the depression thing when I was diagnosed with schitzo they removed it after they added the depressive psychosis bit. Helps cause it’s not as stigmatized I think. Too many stigmas. We all need help and no one is independently doing anything, literally never. I need to work on self care and kindness, everything is fucked.

[the-grove]

I hate growing up that I was told I had a "good tan"(What they meant by that was that I looked Mediterraian and Puerto Rician) I hate it, i hate it, i hate it. I hate that we repeated that talking point at one point. I hate when we talk about being latina now, how that has impacted my life and how people still to this day say "well you can pass as greek/italian you'll be fine" And 1 that is not true. 2 to do that would be lying about who we are, lying about our identity, or culture, about a part of myself. Giving that part up. it makes me want to puke and I just don't get it. we did the work to unlearn this shitty concept to embrace and love who we are, to remove the stigmas we had internalized as a kid. and it is still being done.

[quillify-tries-to-talk]

Signs of Abuse in Friendships!

Coming back here to talk about abusive friendships and how they're equally bad as romantic relationships k thnx.

Some of the things in this list might be pretty obvious, but I'm still putting it out there, because a lot of times as teenagers, it escapes us that the people we grew up with can be toxic too. Emotional abuse can be pretty hard to spot and it took me more than 7 years to realize that it was never my fault for being the way I am.

I'm currently with a group of great friends, and here's what I've learnt about friendships that you should expect, and you absolutely deserve:

1. Communication. Being listened to, instead of being the listener all the time. It's fine to be kind and understanding and keep secrets, but everyone has limits. I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that my supposed best friend only reached out to me whenever *she* needed help or *she* had troubles, turning a blind eye to the fact that I was slipping through the cracks too.

With my new friends, it feels freeing and refreshing to discuss problems. Cathartic, because they value my input and sympathize and offer their own experiences and support and affirmations

2. Your alone time being valued. Pretty obvious. I've seen posts about normalizing that sometimes people are busy with their own lives and cannot be at be at their friend's beck and call all the damn time. I learnt this in a surprising way: whenever I had a tendency to drop off the face of the earth to recharge, or didn't want to talk, my friends would take it in a stride. It's a little thing, but it was shocking becaude I was made to believe previously that I had to be available all the time or else I wasn't a good friend. Which leads me to my next point.

3. Opinions and disagreements are healthy. Resolving arguments through debate and negotiation is absolutely fine in friendships. It's an equal partnership. Once again, it hit me in the face with my new friend group when they asked why I kept apologizing for stating my thoughts or if I disagreed for anything we planned. If, even in normal conversations, you feel as if you have to walk on eggshells in the presence of that friend, you have to mind *their* feelings and *their* tragic story, then it's a huge red flag.

For me, it used to be low-level anxiety in the presence of that friend, a feeling that I wasn't really in control of myself, absurd as it sounds.

4. I'm sure you've heard of love-bombing. Happens in romantic relationships a lot, and in platonic ones too. Signs include an influx of attention from the bestie, all happy, cheerful conversation and you finally feeling that "perhaps, this time things will be okay and our friendship will survive." You're happy, and they seem pleased too. And they request your presence over everyone and share their secrets and call you their most trustworthy person. For me, it came in the form of long texts and cheesy memes and a quirky nickname.

It's a trap.

It's really hard to let go of the validation and the feeling of being chosen, being preferred. As humans, we value intimate connections. And as teens struggling to find ourselves in the middle of puberty and hormones, it gets even more difficult to find comfort when everyone is trying to drag you down.

And that's what the toxic friend will take advantage of. Their secrets, their texts, their conversation and constant reaching and burdening you with what has happened to them is draining asf. And it'll hit you the moment they withdraw affection. Eg. No replies to your texts or passive-aggressive, one-word answer that leave you shaken and wondering where you suddenly went wrong. Alternatively, long ass essays on how and why you're absolutely useless to them as a person and hoe others are better and more understanding, or how they don't want your help cause they're strong asf etc.. Please know that it wasn't you. It was them.

For me, this entire ordeal is.... hollowing, ig. It's left me untrusting. Horrified at myself. Angry. Grieving.

5. Lack of trust and isolation + rumour-mongering. There will be times when your supposed bestie will instead side with another person. Believe their testimony for a drama over yours. Shut you out of the conversation when you try to explain yourself. It'll be harrowing and horrifying and it will feel like you failed somewhere. I have a tendency to withdraw during conflict and that's exactly what my abuser wanted. There were rumours about me in 12th grade, under back-breaking pressure for Boards with the added bonus of my supposed bestie's bullshit drama. I needed help so desperately and instead she kicked me back down with little jibes and 'jokes' and feigning ignorance towards my bad mental state, and prioritizing everything in the world except for me.

Oh yeah that's another thing in the allonormative world. Romantic relationships absolutely deprive you of braincells or basic empathy for friends because friendship is apparently lesser.

6. They do not stand up for you. Like I said before, friendships are founded on equal love and trust and communication. It's a two-way thing. I do not mean that you gotta cloister your friend even from their own flaws; I mean that if and when you're being wronged, at the receiving end of something you do not deserve, in a shitty situation, toxic friends usually turn the other way because it does not benefit them.

Case in point, I had to stand alone when the headmistress of my school slut-shamed me in public for the length of my skirt, my apparent uselessness in the Student Council of the school, and my bestie, as Head Girl, didn't say a word in my defense. She said it was for my own good, that I had needed the threatening and shaming to "become better." And guess what, I found a way to rationalize that too :)

7. Your achievements make them extremely jealous.

Look I get it. At some point, we've all felt jealous of our friend even though we love them. Contrary to what some say, jealous is not bad or toxic. It's usually an indicator for an underlying cause, usually a fear or insecurity. It's important to take a step back and work it out properly so it doesn't hinder your judgement.

However, abusers like having the spotlight on themselves. And anything that can topple them off the stage is to be pushed back and out of the way. Either they can offer running commentary on why your achievement isn't a big deal, switch topics to *their* problems to make you feel guilty for being happy about yourself or completely cut you off while being normal to everyone around you.

Case in point, I had another toxic best friend (oof💀) who legit stopped talking to me at some points whenever I scored full marks or a grade higher than her. No prep, no warning. Just lights out. It left me dizzy and reeling and trying to understand what had happened. Now it's left me feeling that I have to fit myself into smaller spaces, dumb down my intellect so I do not hurt another person's feelings.

8. You find yourself making excuses for their appalling behaviour, or not saying anything about your own troubles because you're afraid they'll cut you off or blow up on you. Big red flag. I excused my best friend's behaviour for 3 or 4 years before finding the nerve to completely cut off all communication with her. It's never easy, I assure you.

I forgot the name of the debate tactic, but it's this thing where you state a fact and the person twists the argument slightly to rebuttal and sow chaos. I'll give an irl example.

Me: XYZ character's portrayal was not done well. The author blatantly perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes about South Asia, erased our colonial history in a book critiquing colonization and exoticized the entire thing just like white historians. The character was sexualized as a woc, her history and past erased and she existed solely for the toxic romance with the main lead.

People: so what you're saying 🙄 is that 🙄 she shouldn't be sexy and own her skin 🙄 you know female sexuality is a taboo 🙄 why would you attempt to slut shame the sexy woc 🙄 let her own it 🙄 and stop holding authors in diaspora to a higher standard 🙄 they give us rep 🙄 you're being ungrateful 🙄

Funny thing: it works. The abuser will twists your own issues and make it seem like you're the cause of it. Low mood? Just be happy. Upset at teachers? You must've done something. Low marks? Lol sucks to be you, ig. You're saying *I* did something to hurt you? Actually, I am going through abcdefghi thing right now, and I was always in a bad place and now you're also turning around and hurting me? You're just like them.

they have you trapped. You feel obligated to see their broken, weary soul and help them with it. They've said time and again about how people have hurt them and how you're the only understanding one and that they'll never hurt you again and will always listen to you. It feels special and compelling and it feeds into your self-esteem.

"I am loved."

"I am wanted."

There's big difference between the two statements. Please remember.

Remember that having trauma does not mean you have a free pass to hurt other people. Remember that their trauma absolutely does not give them the right to run hot and cold with you instead of being straightforward about the whole thing.

And as always, if anyone wants to talk, my asks and DMs are open💖

[doubleca5t]

My new working theory as to why yaoi and/or mlm fandom content is so much more popular than het and especially wlw content of the same type despite the primary audience for fandom being queer women and girls is that yes it's internalized misogyny but like in a very roundabout way that's primarily centered around repression

My theory is that a lot of young women (the people who make up the bulk of fandom) have been taught by society to be afraid of their own sexuality. Maybe it's because they're queer and either closeted and dealing with a lot of internalized homophobia but even cishet female sexuality and desire is so aggressively shamed and policed by society at large. Women aren't supposed to have sexual desire. They're supposed to be pursued not engage in the pursuit. They're supposed to *look* sexy and *act* sexy but they're not supposed to have agency in their sexuality, it's just a performance for a male audience. They're not supposed to want things from sex and dating, they're supposed to want a man who will want things for them. Also men in general just kinda suck a lot of the time so can you really blame young women for not wanting to deal with them? And even if you're not attracted to men, relationships between women are either pornography for consumption by men or ruthlessly shamed for their exclusion of men and refusal to conform to patriarchial standards.

I think for a lot of young women, especially queer women, this results in them feeling ashamed of every sexual desire they have and repressing all those desires extremely hard. But like... those desires are still there, they don't go away. So where do they go? They get projected onto fictional relationships.

But not relationships between a man and a woman, of course. You're looking at fanfiction to escape those relationships. Plus, they've been tainted by all the harmful, misogynist gender roles, and if your fantasies involve anything that might be seen as reminiscent of those roles (like say... a dom/sub relationship) writing a man and a woman together might hit a little too close to home.

It can't be two women either. If you're not attracted to women, there's nothing there for you, and if you *are* attracted to women you won't want to admit that to yourself because you're repressing those desires.

So the only option left is two men. Specifically, one man who is really feminine and submissive and one man who is really masculine and dominant. It's a het relationship dynamic that's been removed a few degrees from heterosexuality to make it less threatening. This is why (as many people have pointed out) the common tropes of mlm fanfic are completely unreflective of real life mlm relationships. It's not meant to be. These aren't stories about gay men, they're the fantasies of women who wish they could have a relationship without having to deal with the many burdens of heterosexuality and the stigma of being wlw.

It's porn for people into whom who society has instilled a fear of their own sexuality.

Obviously I am painting with a broad brush here and not everyone who makes/consumes mlm content is like this but I really do think it's a driving force behind both the popularity of this content and many of the recurring tropes and themes.