Gimme your dopamine

it’s been said before but director’s cut, twenty-five-episode-minimum edition of the terror when

I got a party banter between Bellara and Taash about how the Lords of Fortune steal elven artifacts. And then Taash clarifies later that they have a Dalish expert on the team so they can check to make sure the Lords don't sell something culturally important and instead return it to the elves.

Like. I get it. You want the Lords to be fun swashbuckler Disney pirates and Robin Hoods instead of actual pirates who steal and plunder. Because we're only now in Western society realizing that stealing from indigenous groups is, uh, bad. But like. Writing really uninteresting factions for your "dark" fantasy (tho lbr Dragon Age hasn't been dark fantasy since DA2) isn't gonna solve real-world neo-colonialism, ya know? The Lords not stealing priceless elven artifacts and returning them to the elves doesn't signal to me that the Lords are total rascally good guys, it signals to me that BioWare itself is trying really hard to seem morally conscious. "See? We know stealing from other cultures is bad!!!"

And man. Not to be a "political correctness has poisoned media" grifter on main (tbh it's less political correctness itself and more the commodification of real-world activism) but I couldn't help but imagine how this convo would've played out in earlier games, potentially even Inquisition.

You could've so EASILY made this interesting while giving the Lords and Taash and Bellara a lot more depth, while also making it clear that stealing from indigenous groups is wrong.

Just have the Lords, yeah, actually sell those artifacts. But also establish that the Lords take in and help elves from all walks of life. That they free slaves, or collaborate with alienages. Then you could have Taash defend the practice by saying to Bellara that little orphaned elf kids being sold as slaves probably don't give a flying fuck about some artifacts they're never gonna see, but the money from selling those artifacts goes to buying them food. And have Bellara fire back that preserving elven culture is also part of its survival, and that there are Dalish clans that would be willing to pay for them or offer something in return. Or have her say that the Lords are doing charity for the sake of recruitment rather than actual altruism. And then Taash responds that those high and mighty Dalish elves don't do shit to help abandoned city elves, just because those aren't part of their correct elven subculture, and they care more about reclaiming old glory than helping the people that exist here and now.

Then you could have side missions or at least codex entries that describe maybe some Lord recruit being conflicted about what they're doing. Maybe a few of them are collaborating to hijack a deal or steal back an artifact. Have implications that some high-ranking Lords are, in fact, using those artifacts for their own gain, despite claiming otherwise. Have some Lords genuinely trying to help, and believing that gold and trinkets don't matter as much as people's lives, so they sell them in exchange for safety for refugees or slaves or some other helpless group.

But no. Instead it's "hey do you steal from my people?" "nah lmao we have a cultural advisor don't even worry about it" "oh wow so cool and woke of you!" And then that's it. No need for any further discussion. No conflict and no complexity. No bad actors and moral quandaries.

Weh.

I had a vision. They're sister albums to me

My increasingly preferred interpretation of the SCP Foundation is the version invoked by SCP-173- the fluorescent-lit bureaucracy housing or monitoring a few hundred distinctly impossible objects, entities or locations; contained and corralled less out of some sweeping ideological mandate about the veil of secrecy and more for the practical reason that they have no goddamn idea what these things can do or how they'll react to any given stimuli. Largely (though not totally) divorced from extant folklore and conspiracy culture in favor of a unique pantheon of weirdos that don't fit an obvious schema. Terse, clinical documentation that nonetheless clearly implies a discovery process only a little to the left of a bunch of nervous nerds poking at something with a long stick to see what happens. Don't get me wrong, I love the modern foundation. I love Eigenweapons, I love Akiva Radiation and tactical theology, I love the sprawling supernatural subcultures and the nine different equally-extant eschatologies that are slugging it out. But after a certain number of articles predicated on entire secret fields of academia or postmodern articles about "what even is an anomaly, man," you become increasingly aware of the ways in which you're looking at least three really cool settings that don't necessarily play nice with each other thematically. There Is No Canon yadda yadda

"its the holiday season approaching❣️🎄❄️"

WRONG. its peglarmitage's raw and nasty midnight hookup on a beach in trinidad anniversary and then it's immediately the john torrington coughing himself to death in hms terror's sickbay ice mummification anniversary. and then you get a couple days to recover and then it's the john hartnell also coughing himself to death in hms erebus' sickbay ice mummification anniversary. get with the times fr 🙄

the fact that irving/tozer even exists as a ship is so funny to me. they don't even share a scene. not one dang screenshot of them together. all we have is 'careful with that; it belongs to lieutenant irving' and tozer looking genuinely distressed when he realises that hickey did actually shank irving. and that's enough for us to run with. is there anything else? no. does it matter? nah. love is stored in the borrowed telescope.

Vampire amoeba

I looked at the reblogs and died laughing

Me sucking the life out of the party

@bogleech

*ripping up planks from the ship of theseus* im doomed to question permanence of identity, im not doomed to question permanence of identity, im doomed to question permanence of identity,

The solution is to have no identity to be permanently installed in the first place < terrible advice do not follow

Ugh how dare people presume “carnal” has to do with sex like if I want something carnally I don’t want to fuck it. I want to devour it with my fucking teeth as I go at it like a wild beast, and with a sense of love, rip it to shreds as I drip with blood, you know, like a god.

Made the mistake of bringing up that needing glasses is a disability on tiktok and people got real mad.

“You can fix it with glasses” yeah, cuz they’re a disability aid? But like, I still have to pay 160 bucks to use my own fucking eyes?

Like, by definition, if your eyes do not work without aid, you have a disability to see.

Having a disability doesn’t automatically put you in what people consider the “disabled” category, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is in fact, a disability.

Thank you to the person who brought this post back into my notifs because I just recently got a new pair of glasses!

And it only cost me $305!! What a steal!! A perfectly acceptable price to pay to be able to properly function in society! (Internal screaming)

Please always remember that glasses are a disability aid. Some of us literally cannot function without them.

Extremely good addition

When I talk about how important it is to remember that glasses are a disability aid, it's not because I want to put people with glasses at the forefront of disability justice, nor am I requiring everyone with glasses to identify as disabled

But the fact that it's so controversial to say that people with glasses are disabled is kind of why it's important to remember that glasses are a disability aid... Because the only reason this factual statement gets any pushback at all is specifically because glasses are so normalized.

And the reality is - all disability aids should be normalized. They should be easy to obtain. They should be remembered and designed around.

It's really not that difficult. We've done it with glasses. Let's keep going.

Signal boost

tumblr please stop telling me to wd40 a mouse

it's really hard to post about this without sounding like im raining on everyone's parade because at the end of the day people having fun is very important to me and I hate feeling like I'm trying to dictate how people engage with art but I will admit that it is a little tiring when you get into a piece of art with so much to say and with so much depth to be explored and like the majority of the fan content is like jokes ... like and I'm not saying there should be LESS jokes that's not it at all. I think they're funny and I love interacting with them I do just also wish that to counter balance the humor there was also like an equally thriving sense of genuine enjoyment and scrutiny of the art itself for what it is... and like I knowww it's out there and I'm just not seeing it somehow but it is also very true that there simply is less of that than there are jokes and shitposts which makes the tags difficult to navigate and by extension I end up feeling like I'm an idiot for treating this art with the seriousness that it deserves. like I feel dumb for posting meta and character analysis because the overwhelmingly popular way of engaging with this fandom is to like make a joke about it. and again I want to clarify that my opinion isn't that the jokes aren't funny or that there need to be less of them or really that anyone needs to change what they're doing in any way I just don't know how else to express this frustration I've been developing with fandom within the last few years. maybe it's that getting older is making me more averse to immaturity but I don't even think that's it because I'm plenty immature and I love immature humor. I don't know I just wish people weren't constantly so irreverent and that we could care about things but we can't because appreciation is vulnerable and vulnerability is worse than death

I love seeing those posts where people are like “if you have headmates or whatever you should be on meds because that’s not okay” posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there’s some magical pill out there that will ‘cure’ anything they don’t consider ‘normal.’ Meanwhile, in the land of reality, my shrink thinks it’s pretty healthy that I’m finally getting to know my headmates, and has no intention of putting me on magic pills, because as long as I’m not hurting myself or anyone else, who cares what neurotypicals think is ‘normal?’ Actually, let’s be real: who cares what neurotypicals think at all?

It is not a magic pill, it is called “Therapy” and you can even do it in groups!

i… literally mention my therapist… right there… in the original post…

did you not actually read this… do you honestly believe telling someone who has already admitted to being in therapy… to go to therapy… is a “gotcha” moment???

Okay, so there’s a relevant quote from Slatestar Codex here. (The link is to the source; attribution is a Thing.)

It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you. And if your therapist can’t do that, you need to find a new therapist.

For some people, having headmates and/or alters is a debilitating condition. They’re losing large amounts of time, having trouble going to work and/or school, or hurting themselves or other people. In that case, they probably do need help, but I think most people who are getting fucked up by their headmates that badly are willing to seek out help on their own anyway.

Other people who have headmates and/or alters find it to be a neutral thing, or even a positive thing. 

Have you ever been in a roommate situation where different people do different chores, because, (say) Kate loves to do the dishes, but can’t stand to vaccuum, and Toby’s the exact opposite? If Kate and Toby are headmates, they can wind up doing the same kind of thing. Headmates can also comfort you when you’re sad, remind you that your depressive or intrusive thoughts are not true, or help you deal with difficult people. 

So, if you’re in that kind of situation, where your headmates are helping you to be more functional than you’d otherwise be? A good therapist is going to treat it like the hair dryer on the front seat of your car. 

Sure, it is a Weird Thing. It makes you look a bit eccentric, and it’s not normal. But if having headmates keeps you from having repeated nervous breakdowns, helps you hold down your job, or makes it so that you can deal with your abusers? Then it’s a win, and a good therapist won’t try to ‘fix’ that. 

It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you.

As an addition to this post, neurotypicals just assume that all medications work, and that everyone responds the same to medicine. It can sometimes take someone months to find a medication that works for them, and even then the side affects from medication can often times be worse than the benefits. For example, I took a medication for my anxiety that while it did help the physical symptoms of my anxiety, and occasionally lowered it, it made me so depressed I was close to killing myself. 

And even if you do find a medication that might work, it can still take weeks for the medication to kick in. 

Medication can help a lot of people, and for some people medication is the right option. But for some people it is not the right option, and it is not some magical “fix all” solution. 

While I was working in the local hospital a few months back, part of the training included a dementia awareness course, and one of the stories I thought was very telling regarded a woman who had kept stealing towels from others in her residential home and leaving them to soak in her sink. After talking to her and her family, they found out she used to make a living doing laundry when she was much younger, so the residential home invested in one of those old washboard-and-bucket setups for her, and would leave some clothes by it in her room for her. The stealing stopped, and she became much more lively and talkative now that she had something to do that felt familiar to her.

With disabilities and mental illnesses, the reality of it is that many of them won’t go away, not with medicine or therapy or wishful thinking. Treatments are there to manage the conditions. And if the condition is being managed in a way that doesn’t cause harm to the person with that condition or their friends and family, then why should anyone look down on that management?

This just tells me what I’ve known all my life; neurotypicals don’t often care about mentally ill/cognitively disabled people living to their fullest, they just want them out of the way. Out of sight and out of mind. Sure, a person with headmates who deals with them healthily might be living to their fullest and without repression or discomfort, but then neurotypicals would have to suffer them. Stimming might help a dyspraxic or autistic person express themselves and soothe anxiety, but its annoying and embarassing! And we can’t have that can we?

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton: “Treatment” isn’t a penalty cage you put crazy people in until they’re not crazy anymore

Also, you know who is most likely to need therapy for having headmates? People who have been told that having headmates is bad. People who have had to suffer through years or decades of parents, teachers and bad therapists using punitive or otherwise abusive tactics to try to make them normal, to make them feel guilty any time they’re not normal.

So much therapy - the good kind of therapy that focuses on your quality of life - is about unlearning all the shame and bullshit that the neurotypical world has put on the non-normative.

Vampire amoeba

I looked at the reblogs and died laughing

Me sucking the life out of the party

@bogleech

So I think I'm back for real this time, and it's because we somehow live in a world where there's a SHIPWRECK CANNIBALISM MUSICAL ON BROADWAY?!?! Which I had the deep delight of seeing recently.

If you enjoyed The Terror (2018) you will LOVE Swept Away: A New Musical Tale, I swear.

What can I do to consume this cannibalism musical?

Learn more about the production here! Or read this excellent Vogue article.

If you live in or near New York City, you’re in luck! The show is currently in previews, about to open for real later this month.

If alas New York City is not in your future, you can still listen to the original recordings of the musical's songs here and the new official recordings of three select songs here. You can also join me in begging for a full Broadway Cast Recording!

Malevolent Foods

Extremely good paragraph from an article exploring the concept of sentience in invertebrates