Due to a dog photo, I was able to confirm someone I follow on insta is NOT the same person as a fandom friend I follow here. I think the insta person IS a fandom person from some point, but it's not on her insta if it is. Just her pyramid scheme shit. Which is why I was worried it was the other person I was thinking of.

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

Death to all israeli occupation soldiers. They are responsible for the bomb that tears a child's body in half. They are responsible for the destruction of the entire gaza landscape. They are responsible for the orphaned children for the disabled children. They are responsible for every parents tears. They are responsible for making hospitals battle grounds. They are responsible for the starvation and for the disease. There is no sympathy for people who commit these acts of absolute inhumanity. Netanyahu cannot do anything without willing happy murderers and an apathetic and hateful society. And worst some fucking zionist will screenshot this and talk about how "u need to have sympathy for iof bc they're drafted" they are the reason I see the limbs of my people all over the ground like torn pieces of clay.

yeah sure therapy is nice but teen soukoku is faster and a lot cheaper

Some people have never heard of solidarity and that is just so sad

Thinking about the whole "cishet aromantic men" thing and I just think it kind of sucks that we see the words 'cishet' and 'men' and think "aha, there's someone who has absolutely nothing in common with us and it's us VS them" and it gets paired up with the shallow perception of aromanticism as just not wanting to date and staying single. I don't think alloromantic people can really understand what it actually feels like to be aromantic and just how alienating it can be sometimes.

So who is this hypothetical cishet aromantic man that we're so upset about? I mean labels aside he is a person with his own thoughts, feelings, goals, interests and perspective. And despite being cisgender and heterosexual, he is still outside of the norm because he is aromantic. This hypothetical person has probably wondered "why don't I feel the same way everyone else does?" He probably looked around to pick someone to have a crush on. He probably watched a movie or read a book with a love story in it and didn't think people actually felt those things. He probably feels guilty about wanting sex but not wanting the romance part of it. He probably wondered why he can't find the right person. And when he learned that he was aromantic he probably felt alone. He probably feels rejected by heteronormative society because he can't fall in love with the women he has sex with and feels rejected by the lgbtq+ community because he still wants to have sex with women.

Again, this is a hypothetical person. I don't know any cishet aromantic men personally. Probably because a lot of them either don't know what 'aromantic' even means or they know what it means but don't know it's what they are, or they know and they don't feel like they can be open about it. And all this aside, if anyone has any example of these big scary cishet aromantic men inserting themselves into queer spaces and causing problems, I would love to hear it because as far as I know this isn't a real problem

❌ Ned Fulmer was fired for cheating

✔️ Ned Fulmer was fired for tarnishing his own brand, and becoming a liability to the company.

the thing i love about the new backstory for aziraphale and crowley's first meeting is how it makes EVERYTHING about how aziraphale deals with him make so much sense. like, he meets this angel building nebulae, and he's beautiful and silly and full of joy, and he loves these galaxies he's making, they're not even born yet and he loves them, and aziraphale's the one who tells him that they're never going to become, that this beautiful thing he made is just set-dressing for god's toybox. aziraphale is the one who (however inadvertently) sows that first seed of doubt. aziraphale is the one who punctures that joy.

and yeah, of course crowley would have found out eventually. and of course he would have asked questions and aired his doubts. crowley has always been crowley. but i think aziraphale would have carried that kernel of guilt for a long, long time

and then millennia later he meets the demon that angel became, and he's guarded and prickly and suspicious and so carefully, secretly kind, still so clearly the same person, deep down, even as he insists that the angel you knew is not me while he saves goats and children and wayward angels and protests unjust punishments and introduces aziraphale to earthly pleasures for no reason other than to give him the joy of them

he's still, deep down, a good person. he shouldn't have been cast out. he didn't deserve that. the injustice of it must have rankled aziraphale for centuries

and now - now, after all this time, aziraphale can fix it. he can undo the injustice. he can give heaven back to crowley, the way he's always deserved it

and crowley says no.

I started playing the stupid mobile game

tbh I think people deeply misunderstand the dynamic between harrow and ortus. imagine ur thirty years old working a minimum wage job and living in ur moms basement. ur manager is an overacheiving high schooler who knows the employee handbook by heart. like she will garnish ur wages if u don't upsell vigorously enough but also she needs a ride home because her learners permit says she's not allowed to drive past 8 pm. ortus nigenad is victim of the alienation of labor, send tweet.

Man sometimes I think about Dora and like yeah she's a fictional person and not real but Jesus christ imagine dating a guy and he's literally the worst like just absolutely terrible and he doesn't let you be A Real Person and you finally leave and he makes you into a cudgel to beat himself with in his horrible brain and then ALSO YOU GET USED AS A METAPHOR FOR THE VIOLENCE OF LIBERALISM IN A VIDEO GAME ABOUT HIM ????? AND THE NARRATIVE CONTINUES TO NOT LET YOU BE A REAL PERSON EVER

WERE THERE NO GRAVES IN EGYPT

i feel like this is a hot take, but it's clear to me that so much of ianthe's outward projection of superiority is a deeply ingrained — really, formative — sense of inadequacy. it's to prove to everyone, even the people who were supposed to love her, who were supposed to inherently value her, that she does actually have value — in fact, she has the most value because look at what she can DO!

and i don't even think she's entirely internalized that, but that kind of projection kind of falls apart if you show even a moment of self-doubt

and i know ianthe isn’t supposed to be sympathetic here, or at least i’m assuming she’s not to most people, but can you imagine the body horror of being inextricably tied to and irrevocably altered by the guy you grew up with and didn’t even really like and who didn’t like you either (but who served you because that was his Role, and, who, even though you’ll never admit it, you maybe even cared about a bit because at a certain point that’s kind of unavoidable - i know she tried to convince palamedes she didn’t, but she is a known liar prone to sentimentality), but it was fine because you knew you were better than him, too?

except now you're not exactly, not entirely better than him, because he's not just fueling you, you didn't get to just use him to become someone who matters. instead, he's part of you, and you still don't matter?

like from what she says about her parents' reaction to the canaan house aftermath, even that part didn't work. she didn't earn mommy and daddy's validation, admiration, anything

and she's running his empire, but she's still third place to surrogate daddy, too. if she even places!

ianthe naberius is very much the consequences of her own actions, i’m not going full apologia here, just imagining being in that position and. goddamn

Very random question but do you have any ASOIAF theories about who hired the Catspaw?

it is unambiguously joffrey. tyrion figures it out the morning of the purple wedding. I think any other answer is both actively contradicted by the text and robbing it of so so much thematic depth.

it’s one of the most illuminating moments about him as a character- the catspaw WASN’T some political move on the part of the lannisters to silence a witness. it was a little boy’s attempt to impress his insecure and violent open wound of a person father after he heard him say that bran was better off dead rather than living disabled. joffrey is a child and he is also this amalgamation of every act of violence robert and tywin and jaime and cersei and tyrion and society as a whole ever did to him or anyone else. it’s all so horrific.

There's a weirdly poignant sort of... metaphysical tragedy in the fact that pain, which evolved as a helpful signal to alert us when bad things might be happening to us, grew into becoming... well, basically the Bad Thing. To the point where by universal consensus the very worst thing you can do to a being like us is torture them (i.e. trigger the warning signal as strongly as possible while perhaps deliberately avoiding causing "actual" harm). And there are tons of illnesses and injuries and disabilities that massively impact people's quality of life, ranging from annoying to depressing to driving people to suicide, basically purely because they're very physically painful, while the underlying bodily dysfunction that the pain is supposedly "warning" of is either relatively minor or literally non-existent.

The capacity to feel pain is a good and important thing, some people lack it and that's generally awful for them, only in a universe unrecognizably different from ours could we ever do without it. But isn't it awful to think how if only there was somebody up there to adjust the settings for us, they'd probably only have to tweak them the tiniest bit to keep 99.99% of the benefits while saving us from all the most extreme miseries forever?

The mechanism didn't have to be perfect for natural selection's purposes, it had to be good enough that the average individual in the average situation would be motivated to stay more or less out of trouble. Measured by the metrics nature was working towards, she could afford to be a little slapdash with the exact implementation, and she was. In doing so she opened the door to infinities of evil and suffering that wouldn't otherwise be conceivable. All this only had one chance to happen, and it happened that way. There's nobody to be mad at--I'm mad about it, though.

I don't do Warhammer, but as a Gundam fan, I feel a strong sense of solidarity with another model-heavy fandom that attracts incel losers who only care about the military aesthetics

actually let me add to this whole "sims 5 is going to be free" (+ microtransactions) because it is particularly disgusting with their recent history: Their rebranding is specifically and increasingly trying to appeal to children.

The way they dressed their presenter during the stream was specifically done to seem more relatable to children.

The way they already dumbed down Sims 4 is to specifically appeal to children. They even lowered the age rating.

Making Sims 5 free will make it incredibly easy for kids to get the base game (especially if it comes out on mobile) and once they have access to it, they'll pester their parents to buy microtransaction bullshit.

I am not usually one who goes for "omg they are targeting your children"-hysteria, but this one is so on the nose, it's really astonishing. They should be ashamed.