zeroar - Tumblr blog

[zeroar]

It seems to me that humans tend to jockey for dominance, then they end up forming gangs called families, companies, religions, states, etc., all of which are fundamentally representative of gangsterism—the best description of that I've come across being from Barrigton Moore, Jr.: "a form of self-help which victimizes others."

If it's for survival, even if it's for justice and equity, gangsterism or jingoism can be argued in favor of. Yet, as soon as the scales tip past leveling and equity to committing injustice, hoarding, and greed, it becomes something which should be alien to humankind. Or at least, I'd like that to be alien to humankind.

And, even when it is for protecting victimized and oppressed groups, they're usually being victimized by another group, another "gang". The victimizing part isn't a requirement for a group of humans yet as soon as the advantage comes to a group they almost immediately attack others in the name of shoring up their defenses, their "risks". People like to say there are no victimless crimes, but there are also no perpeptrator-less crimes. If one is under a boot, another is wearing the boot.

I'm not saying this criticism as castigation. It's an attempt to work out why I feel so hopeless when I think of human history, human civilization, and why I despair when I wonder if there is ever going to be a better future or if it will just always be more of the same.

Are humans ever going to be united or is the best we can hope for some houses of cards built on a foundation of vendettas over atrocities, real and imagined, misplaced or not, ongoing and ancient.

I've researched a lot into the process of dehumanization. It's a harrowing topic to read, let alone see in the world. Every in-group, every gang, feels that pressure of us versus them, and that feeling is even encouraged. It's not just friendly competition even when it's between children. The takers and the taken-from.

It is so much easier to dehumanize when it is a group outside your own. Almost as though every group of humans considers their group as the real humans while the rest are merely background, even before they need to justify a reason to attack.

I don't have an answer. I don't even know what to hope for. I've been taken from. I benefit from others being taken from. I've probably taken. I've given freely and there are times I've been in need where I was given what I needed and other times where I wasn't.

Is it just the human condition? Human nature? Is there no hope?

I don't understand most of the hierarchical loyalties that humans possess, but I do understand being identified as lesser and the fear, uncertainty, and insecurity that can bring. I understand wanting to be on the "winning side", at least to avoid being on the "losing side". I don't understand most identities individuals choose to care about (such as geographical birthplace/residence, sport teams, religions, ethnicities/family history, to name a few) but I understand a lot of people care about those things. Yet I cannot bring myself to understand how one can care so much about their identity in a subgroup as to not only victimize others but to do it outside of direct threats.

Giving your group the advantage? Unfair but OK, I can understand wanting security. Attacking and putting down the other group when you're doing fine? Is the idea that if you don't constantly expend energy to put down others that the first chance they get you'll be the victim?

Do they just feel threatened all the time?

...

Though I dont have hope for a better future on the species-level, I do acknowledge that progress can be made in other ways. And setbacks are arguably even easier than the status quo and need to be protected against as well. So I will never advocate not trying to make the world better and I will never advocate giving up.

I only worry that humankind cannot be better as a species. That "self-help through victimization" is both human nature and inevitable in any group larger than the individual. Even when it's not eat or be eaten, but eat everything while others starve.

[zeroar]

I believe I wrote this in reference to "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", but honestly, there are many privileged cis white men in classic sci-fi so 🤷🏻‍♀️

Me, reading a classic scifi story: Wow, after all the synopses of this story I've read and all the cultural osmosis I've absorbed of it over the years, I always assumed the computer was the bad guy... Turns out it was the author all along.

[zeroar]

Lost muses

I submit “Bandmates” as a ship name for Freddie and Grace

[zeroar]

Freddie is the person Grace would end up with if Stray Gods wasn't a choice based game. Here's why:

Frace are paralleled with Asterion/Hecate. Both are best friends that fall in love. Freddie and Grace sing during Asterion/Hecate's love song. If you choose Freddie to help Asterion she alludes to being in love with Grace

If you don't choose the heart options for Apollo, Pan and Persephone you don't get a heart choice in the confession scene. But if you don't choose the heart options for Freddie you do get a heart choice in her confession scene.

If you flirt with all of them and choose one of the others in the confession scene, you can still choose Freddie. But if you choose Freddie then try to choose one of the others it won't work. So Freddie's romance overrides the other romances.

If you don't flirt with Freddie, Grace will still look at Freddie like she's in love with her through out the game. If you flirt with Freddie, Grace does the same thing.

The romantic love between Frace is mentioned in the second song, I Can Teach You.

[zeroar]

So brainspotting is pretty flipping rough – Session 01

First session today. Afterwards, I felt like how they describe the marathon that is a karuta tournament in Chihayafuru. Need to plan to bring sugar or chocolate from now on for aftercare recovery. It was very similar to how the aftermath of a meltdown feels sometimes for me (I'm also autistic).

If you don't know what it is, brainspotting is a PTSD treatment that apparently developed from EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—that was described to me as a less-intense process than that. The tentative plan is to start with this and eventually move to full EMDR if needed.

It doesn't have the literature behind it yet that EMDR has, but I can verify that, anecdotally, it definitely does something. Can't say what that something is just yet and the overanalyzing, hypervigilant, raised on "mind over matter"–Me feels somewhat miffed that it is addressing the physiology of my trauma instead of just "figuring out the answer" ... though I suppose if an answer could have been figured out by now...

It was also slow and had a painful (for me) lack of stimulation ... presumably by design.

Anyway, I don't want to get hopeful, and I'm also scared that addressing my trauma this way (if it works) will set me up for more trauma ... though it's not like my current state of constant danger / runaway autonomic response is doing me much good, if any.

Oh, since this is my first post on the topic, I'll describe what my treatment was like from my POV and understanding. The basic idea seems to be that when recalling memories there is a connection between specific "spots" our eyes move to and spots in our brain. So the process starts with recalling trauma/uncomfortable memories, focus in on the tension and feeling in the body as a gauge, and then follow a pointer with my eyes, using the feeling in the body to find a location where the tension is strongest. Some purportedly calming meditative music track starts playing while staring at the spot/point where the tension is.

I was advised to let my mind wander while staring, but I don't know if the idea is to disassociate that "brain spot" from the trauma by having wandering thoughts or if it was some allistic (non-autistic) idea of "wandering" and it didn't matter what I thought of while staring or what. I had a very difficult time maintaining my sight on the spot, partially due to having a lazy eye and also because my thoughts were "wandering" to the memory of trauma. I kept having to close my eyes and refocus on the point and every time was like pushing into the tension. I stared at the spot for ten minutes in silence (well, music was playing), then my therapist moved the pointer to a different spot and I stared there for some additional amount of time.

The amount of relief I felt, both mentally and physically, from staring at a different spot was unexpected. It was so distinct from being in the tension spot. That was when I was like, oh, this is definitely something.

Then I went back to staring at the tension spot. I think for another ten minutes. Then coming out of that spot, finally, following the pointer down and closing my eyes and having my eyes closed while focusing on breathing for a few minutes. I thought I was going to fall straight asleep at that point and I honestly might have dozed off briefly.

Afterwards, I was unsteady, mentally exhausted, and physically drained. I probably shouldn't have driven as quickly as I did and in hindsight I feel like I should have done some sort of physical activity to reconnect my brain with my body (such as a walk around the block or something).

It seems like the idea is the brain silos those memories with those spots, but again, I dont know if the idea is to reinforce the silo or to break down the wall of it. I anticipate the ideal solution is probably different for different people and maybe even for different memories of trauma for the same person. There's so much people just don't know about the brain.

My layperson intuition is it seems like the idea is to trigger the trauma physiologically, then mentally go elsewhere while maintaining the physical connection to the trauma. From this, it seems like EMDR would be the reverse? I.e., mentally trigger the trauma while physically going elsewhere (at least via vision).

I need to clarify what having my thoughts wander means next time. Although, it's possible that the right answer isn't known because it's too nebulous/vague at this point in the research.

I know everytime I closed my eyes to refocus on that spot it brought me back though. If you want my mind to wander I need to look around. We weren't even doing any of what I consider my more major traumatic events, today.

My thoughts just kept going back to things like my childhood pair(?) of footie pajamas that child-Me could wear to be covered from neck to toe. I wondered why child-Me kept so still and quiet, being afraid to breathe while lying there. Remembered being scolded for having my eyes open and not going to sleep.

... it was a lot.

I've mostly been in bed since getting home. I'm still pretty drained. If it was colder I'd be under my weighted blanket. My therapist advised that I'd be drained and said to not feel like I have to push through it. But it was just staring and thinking.

I will add that it didn't feel like ruminating because I couldn't escape inside my head. It had a bit of that circularity or being penned in like ruminating sometimes feels like, but having to stare at the same point was like poking at a wound more than racing in a panic or working myself up.

So yeah, thanks for reading. I'll keep writing as I go but I think that's good for today. It's just the first week for me here.

[zeroar]

Literally me when I hear Felicia Day is playing a Greek god girlboss in your video game and she's not a romanceable option:

[zeroar]

Fawn reaction...

pre-2020: Could only say no under very specific criteria where both the criteria and my inability to say no was unknown to me. Got myself into many bad situations.

2020: Realized I couldn't say no even when I wanted to say no and started trying to figure out what the heck that was about.

2020-2022: Afraid to be alone with almost everyone in the entire world (even not counting the global pandemic at the time, though that sure didn't help).

2023: ... I was going to try to write some "progress has been made" update here but honestly I may just have given up on being alone with other people at this point lol

Like, my autonomic nervous system is activated pretty much at all times in the presence of other people (or just being aware other people exist nearby); with strangers like when I'm getting groceries it's usually flight/freeze/flood, but as soon as conversation enters the mix I do not feel safe with my reactions/responses to others.

So that's fun. /sarcasm

[zeroar]

I was writing an emotional retrospective analyzing past suicidality and then followed the ADHD rabbit warren a couple places to the point of searching an old favorite OTP gay ship on here and that brought me enough joy to sustain me for at least a few hours more without feeling the need to delve too deep.

[zeroar]

(Posting from mobile so not sure if this will be formatted as I wish...)

Three things to add to this video. Biphobia/bi-erasure, an answer to the question asked, and ableism.

One: "non-practicing bisexual" is probably supposed to mean a bisexual person who appears to be in a heterosexual relationship. But the words make it sound like the times in-between orgies (you need at least two other people of different genders to be a "practicing bisexual", right?). Regardless, bisexual people are bisexual. Calling them non-practicing is absurd especially when they are literally in a relationship with someone. If they were overly chaste or something, maybe it would make sense for that. When we are in a relationship with people who appear to be the same gender, we're called gay and when we are in a relationship with people who appear to be a different gender we are called straight, but both are "practicing" our sexuality.

Two, and it's a two-part answer: autigender is the idea that the gender of an autistic person is colored by being autistic. It can mean different things for different people but generally we present our gender as we see ourselves or we don't particularly feel attached to our gender as an aspect of ourselves. This is strongly related to why we are more likely to be queer and trans than other neurotypes. This means that being with a cis, male, autistic person can be drastically different from being with a cis, male, allistic person (and similarly for cis, female persons). At the very least, autistic men should be less likely to suffer from machismo and overtly posture like allistic men do. (On the other hand, we are more likely to be narcissists so even if autistic persons aren't as likely to be overtly posturing about how big or tight their genitals are and all that entails, we may still be vainglorious in other ways).

The second part of the answer as to why the meme seems relatable is recalling again that we are more likely to be queer than allistic persons. Further, cis, female autistic persons are more likely to be undiagnosed. So it's very likely for a bisexual person to fall for an autistic person of a different gender because it's more likely that bisexual persons are autistic and we get along better with the same neurotype. (Scientifically, the defining characteristic of autism is traditionally our social difficulties, but these are not only less of a problem when people of the same neurotype are interacting, autistic people have less miscommunication between ourselves than allistic folks do between themselves).

Third: there are a couple subversive ableist things mentioned in the video. I imagine they are not deliberate which is one reason why I am talking about them, to inform others to be on the lookout and try to be better.

"touch of the 'tism" is extremely ableist in maybe not so obvious ways. In the video, it seems to be a way to say "autism, but not the bad kind". In other words, it's the latest iteration of "Asperger's" or "high-functioning" or whatever other nightmare we've come up with to say the same thing.

You cannot separate autism from the autistic person. We're more likely to be introspective and think deeply, more likely to be repeatedly reminded of the every day lies and betrayals allistic folk not only don't mind but don't even notice. We're more likely to have extra sensory needs and a host of concomitant conditions.

The desire for an autistic person without extra needs is understandable in that if you can find a partner (no matter their neurotype) without extra needs then... they... need less.

Didn't intend that to be a tautology, but I wanted to explicitly state that on its face, it makes sense. That is, everything else being equal, your partner having more desirable qualities and less undesirable qualities makes sense? However, being able to pick and choose partners like they're models of a phone seems pretty removed from reality to me and is one of those thought experiments that doesn't survive reality, but the commodification of love is not one I've ever particularly understood. People listing down qualities like "they have to be brunette with big boobs and a thick dick" makes me question how other folks ever enter into any meaningful relationship or if other people even experience love as it is written about in stories and how I perceive myself experiencing it.

But this is reality, and when it comes down to listing out what you look for in a partner, "being autistic but having no drawbacks from being autistic" is not just unsettling, it's fetishization. (The things I described above are fetishization as well by the way—or is fetishism the more appropriate word?— it's not limited to things like race and neurotype)

I've forgotten the exact words of the video, but "men with just a touch of the 'tism are so nice!" sounds a lot like, "Autistic people are so good at math" and "bisexual people are so sexual" and all these other "positive" 'isms.

I'm an autistic person who is considered good at math, but loads of us are rubbish at it. Conversely, I'm a bisexual person but I am also on the asexual spectrum so if you're unicorn hunting I'm probably not what you're looking for.

The classic quote in the Autism community goes something like, "high-functioning means your needs get ignored, low-functioning means your abilities do."

I'm not saying you cannot prefer autistic people over allistic people. We tend to have a lot of positive qualities. But talking about us like our autism makes us more attractive while casually excluding any autistic person who would be too undesirable by somehow ranking how much autism we have is weird and pretty similar to what that nazi Asperger did, sending the undesirable autistics to be killed in gas chambers while saying the desirable ones have qualities that can benefit the nation.

To be clear what I'm saying, autistic people who appear to be only "slightly autistic" (whatever that means) can usually maintain a public front or façade and, if they're diagnosed and actively working on masking, might have a lot of accommodations and practices that helps them maintain that façade for their own safety. The closer you become to an autistic person, the safer they might feel around you to the point they relax some of those guards and appear more obviously autistic. That's a good thing! It takes so much energy to mask that it regularly drives persons from marginalized groups into burnout.

Closing notes...

Just a reminder: the video person is symptomatic of our society and is probably not aware how deeply unsettling fetishizing autism is. Additionally, autistic people are more likely to be queer than allistic people, so there's a reasonable chance the person is autistic themselves, especially if they find themselves more attracted to autistic persons than allistic persons. Please don't attack the person for their unknowing ableism. TikTok doesn't have the character limit to help me talk to them and the video seems to be pretty large in views so it seems extremely unlikely positive change could come by addressing them directly from a random internet person.

I obviously can't control how you react to another person and I'm not asking you to be inauthentic. I am only asking that you consider intent and harm caused. I'm using the video as a presentation slide to talk about a societal problem, not as an effigy or piñata, and definitely not as a scapegoat. If you found that video via my post, then please don't attack another person in retaliation because of it.

Also, I know some autistic people defend "touch of the 'tism" and use it themselves. You can probably guess, yes, I consider this internalized ableism along the same lines as Aspie-supremacy and clinging to being "high-functioning". Being autistic is not inherently a bad thing. The issue more often than not is how society views and interacts with us.

[zeroar]

So I watched this video...

And the essayist suggests a major part of it is due to the fairly positive representation of a queer couple in Sailor Moon in the form of Sailors Uranus and Neptune. (That's only part of it, very good video, I just want to write out my thoughts in a word-vomit style while drinking some coffee so here we are)...

I think it's a little more than that though. Now, I'm fond of being overly reductive sometimes and saying something like "Sailor Moon made me gay" (and I'm using "gay" in its umbrella queer sense here).

But, whether someone can be turned gay aside (which, for the record, I come down somewhere around they basically can't unless they're bisexual), it wasn't the positive representation of Uranus and Neptune that did it. It was Season 1 of Sailor Moon.

It wasn't just a positive queer relationship in whatever season Uranus and Neptune came in (they were portrayed as cousins so until I went to the Internet to learn the truth there was nothing there for me even ignoring it was a later season), and it wasn't even the bisexual wonder girl that is Usagi/Serena who freely adored and went lovestruck over competent and beautiful women. With Mamoru/Darien kidnapped/brainwashed for half the first season anyway (and also inexplicably much older than he was in the manga), the relationship between her and Rei was so much more interesting and one where the characters could actually speak to each other, but it wasn't even thinking that Serena should be with Raye...

Aside: if you don't think Usagi is bi then I don't know what to tell you. Yes, Mamoru is her true love or whatever, but the girl's main characteristic is how freely and deeply she loves. She was interested in Sailor V way before she was interested in Tuxedo Kamen / Tuxedo Mask. (I'm half-joking because there's no explicit canonization of Usagi being bi—AFAIK—but I really cannot imagine her being any other way. I just see her as a bi girl in a heterosexual relationship).

Even beyond all that, the series Sailor Moon was possibly the first series I saw which treated women/girls as people and portrayed women favorably, let alone portrayed queer relationships and queer characters favorably (which was not done in the original American edit of the first season).

The women of Sailor Moon could be boy-crazy and ditzy, but they could also be heroic and self-sacrificing, studious, strong, smart, cool, collected... and yes, they were all beautiful. Even Zoisite—who I only later found out was a man—was gorgeous.

Sailor Moon loves women, and there's not much gayer than loving women.

Specifically, in the society of toxic masculinity / hegemonic masculinity / "the patriarchy", valuing women as people goes directly against how women get portrayed. It's not that valuing women is inherently anti-cishet, it's that the concept of being cis and heterosexual itself has gotten wrapped up in the toxicity so anything that rejects that norm is gay.

I'm not saying anything new here, though academic sources tend to default to "queer" instead of "gay", so I'll switch to that umbrella term now.

Valuing women as people is queer in the same way that the Addams Family is queer. Morticia and Gomez's relationship is a queer relationship in that it is a rejection of the patriarchy and a rejection of the cishet norms of hating your spouse and treating them as a burden you're saddled with.

There's a common sentiment in analyzing cishet men's relationships with women of saying something along the lines of, "do straight guys even like women? You guys can be gay. You don't have to pursue women romantically if you don't like them" and beyond what individual cis and heterosexual men may think about women, it is 100% true that the patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity don't like women.

At least part of the fear of "AI" is that hegemonic masculinity would lead to a conclusion of rejecting women in favor of love-bots. This only makes sense if the people doing the rejecting don't actually like women and just see them as objects, but that's what hegemonic masculinity teaches.

So yes, whether you're a cis man or something else entirely, loving women is queer. And Sailor Moon loves women.

It probably doesn't stand up to modern sensibilities, but my pre-teen mind only ever saw how incredible it was to be a bishoujo senshi when I was watching. The "camera" definitely highlighted how beautiful the women were (especially in their transformation scenes) but it only ever felt glorifying and exultant, and it did not feel exploitative or creepy.

With the exception of comic characters (Melvin/Umino, Chad/Yuichiro, Rei's grandfather, etc.), ALL of the characters were slender and long-limbed. That came off as simply the style of the show and not something about sexualizing the characters. Loads of issues with the lack of body diversity, but it was always so firmly celebrating these characters (who were all women/girls).

And, loving women is queer.

I honestly don't know how I would have turned out without having Sailor Moon in my life. Especially, so many incredible fanfiction stories that were even better than the series (though loads of exploitative and misogynistic ones too, which was always such a shock to stumble across).

Growing up in the 1990s, I was in social settings where the default was to be openly derisive and misogynistic towards women. (It's probably still broadly that way, I just am able to curate who I'm around now in a way you can't growing up). But having the example of positive women character representations (and also seeing how pretty people can be, both inside and out) was such a solace to child-Me. I'm grateful for having that representation even if it wasn't the queer representation I needed, it was the positive women representation I was desperate for back then.

Anyway, as much as I love the idea of Rei/Usagi, my favorite stories kept Usagi with Mamoru and had Rei with Minako. I get that Minako gets characterized as a Usagi clone/replacement (which is ironic), so it may seem that I'm just filling in, but in-text, Usagi and Mamoru are basically always together / in love with each other romantically and I never really questioned that so seeing so many incredible Reinako stories made that couple pretty solid in my head. I'm honestly not opposed to Usagi being in a poly relationship, but those fanfiction stories tended to be more lemons than character exploration.

TL;DR: Why are magical girls so gay? Because they portray women positively and that's extremely, extremely gay (in the sense that it is aligned against hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchy).

[zeroar]

A hard truth for millennials:

We need to include the century when writing about decades. It's the 1990s, not the 90s.

[zeroar]

It gets worse when they try to emphasize the words and then get mad at the counterexamples because they're edge cases or extremely unlikely. Like, why are you emphasizing the one word that makes your statement impossible to defend???

For the record, I have come to accept using "literally" as something like, "I felt so much that it seemed like that happened or it may as well have happened."

E.g., "I literally died" meaning "I continued living but the sequence of events that I experienced made my figurative heart and—if it exists—soul believe I died and I am only standing here in front of you today through some trick of physiology."

The evolution of using that word for emphasis makes sense, especially considering how much we overused the word "really" in the 1990s.

But using "always" to mean "usually" or "probably" is beyond the pale for me.

As an autistic person and a recovering mathematician (/j), I find the colloquial English usage of words like "always" and "never" to nearly always be triggering.

[zeroar]

As an autistic person and a recovering mathematician (/j), I find the colloquial English usage of words like "always" and "never" to nearly always be triggering.

[zeroar]

Framing mental health through the lens of illness and only when it hinders you beyond what you can mask is medicalism. They have a word, "subclinical" which basically means, "oh, you, for sure, totes have this but you're getting by, so, you know, continue floundering. Once you start drowning we can consider helping with a 3-6 month waiting list."

I'm having to take a mental health course for work and every time it defines mental illness it always includes "impairment of work performance," (they, without fail, always put work performance first on the list) "relationships, or participating in usual activities" and I really feel like we're not going to get anywhere with mental health awareness if we keep obstinately refusing to acknowledge the importance of people's internal realities and experiences - you know, the actual mental health part

When you tell people the important thing is not how they feel, but how they externally function, they will bury their feelings and focus on appearing outwardly mentally healthy until they destroy themselves from the inside out

Mental health isn't important because it makes people more productive. It's important because people deserve to live happy and fulfilled lives. Telling people that their happiness is only relevant insofar as it impacts their productivity is so harmful

[zeroar]

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of free resources for different sign languages:

American Sign Language (ASL)

Australian Sign Language (Auslan)

Black American Sign Language (BASL)

British Sign Language (BSL)

Chinese Sign Language (CSL)

Emirati Sign Language (ESL)

French Sign Language (LSF)

Indian Sign Language (ISL)

International Sign Language (IS)

Irish Sign Language (ISL)

Japanese Sign Language (JSL)

Mexican Sign Language (LSM)

Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL)

Ukrainian Sign Language (USL)

Please feel free to add on if you know of others, be it more resource for one of the sign languages above, or resources for learning any of the other 300 plus sign languages.

[zeroar]

Brennan Lee Mulligan, one of the best D&D game masters around. Anyway, one of my least favorite things he does...

When he uses "incredible" or "unbelieveable" or "amazing" etc. as a filler word. Like, it's actually very credible and believable and using it like that sticks in my head and lessens the times it is said authentically.

[zeroar]

I think my most controversial SF&F take is feeling betrayed by Robin Hobb and George Martin to the point that I will never read another one of their books.

George Martin released half a book as a whole book and promised the other half for the next year (it took several years). Meanwhile, Robin Hobb completely reset all the character relationship progress she painfully teased out in one book within a single chapter of the sequel.