i love* when chronic pain flares up SUPER fucking bad for no discernible reason, completely canceling all plans and hopes i had for the day

*fucking loathe w my entire existence

Okay but yin yu needs a raise this yin yu is overworked that. Where is the Ling wen needs a raise content

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one of my major problems with my job is that I get sososo tired of trying to figure out how to interact with people in a way that is honest, productive, but also doesn't bruise anyone's egos, and I can feel myself getting worse at it as time goes on and it's genuinely what drains me and stresses me out the most by far

Me @ Netflix if they cut Foxglove and Hazel or A Game of You or yassify any of the girls

literally just saw some radfem bullshit on my dash, & then when I went to their blog to block them not only was it full of anti-trans half arguments & accusations of other people being childish, but one of the very first posts was about how a certain show would be better if one of the main characters was a young woman instead of an old man because they "don't like old people"

I am TIRED of hearing the whole "there is NO reason a paragraph shouldn't be more than four lines" writing critique. If Ursula Le Guin can write an asshole psychiatrist monologuing for a page and a half straight, it is FINE, actually.

You can have characters monologue, you can have a long bit of description, you can give exposition in chunks—the issue is when there's no PURPOSE to it and it's treated as a prerequisite dump of information rather than a curated telling.

As long as you're making choices about language and what is being conveyed so that it's relevant and matches the style, it's fine.

mothers be like *projects insecurities onto daughters/afab children*

like, they'll be like "you should start wearing eyeliner and mascara and some concealer for your eye bags, you inherited my tired droopy eyes" "sorry you had to get my flat chest" "be careful, you don't wanna end up fat like me"

and you'll be like *is 15 years old*

[cw: anti-NPD ableism, fictional child death, gore.]

you know. i can't believe it didn't quite click for me until now, but i knew there was a piece of the ableism puzzle missing with ivan, and i just realized that along with the audhd/dyslexia stuff he is a really violently hateful depiction of NPD.

pwNPD are all evil, stupid abusers who will only ever accomplish anything by riding others' coattails; anyone who believes they have worth or deserve love only thinks that because they're fooling themselves and denying reality, at the expense of the reasonable people who actually deserve the love and approval they're hogging; it's funny, satisfying, and their just deserts to take them down a peg by intentionally insulting and humiliating them; and you should cheer for their gruesome, frankly dehumanizing deaths. very awesome and cool

im thinking abt zero constructs again and i think its tough to really communicate the Vibe i want it to have but also i maybe never talked about it super in depth?

but anyway as a thesis statement it's mostly about how much faith you put into the evidence of your senses, and also the intrinsic gulf of understanding between all people. there's a fundamental youness to every person that never quite gets communicated through interactions. and then imagine the youness was erased from reality entirely, and then something else came in, a blank slate, unmolded clay, and tried to reconstruct the you out of the them; out of what everyone else thinks that person was like.

say the slate can perceive those thoughts and those preconceptions perfectly. could they be a perfect you even just from an external pov? how many people could they convince that they were the one they were replacing? because they can perfectly mimic what the other expects them to be like—but that's regardless of whether or not that perception is correct. they have no idea if that conversation partner misperceives them, is overlaying their own biases or malformed beliefs onto the personal idea of them.

so that's dusk and helic. continually-updating copies of deleted people, trying to convince society at large that they haven't changed at all.

meanwhile they're cooking in these bad templates, all these people who half-know them or don't know them at all, immediately judging them based on a scarce glance. meanwhile that snap judgement becomes a part of them because they're such well-polished prisms, they're made to be mirrors.

and then barry and emmet show up, and after months-to-years of these bad copies, they're faced with the two people who know their original basis better than anyone in all the world. and oh god, oh fuck, they had it all wrong. they've got to scramble in the milliseconds they're given to try and throw up a better front; how was dusk supposed to guess how much dawn liked touch, that it would be immediately and distressingly wrong for her to not tackle-hug her friend after so much time apart? how was helic supposed to intuit that it wasn't just a resting face, ingo never really smiled, but his subtle-shift version of a 'smile' was immediately recognizable to his loved ones anyway? they didn't know, they were perfect mirrors but they didn't ever really know—

...on the other end of this, though. the b-side and the first thesis. you thought you lost the most important person in the world and now they're standing in front of you again, and you, right now, gun to your head, say that they're not real. it's not even a matter of wanting, this isn't about pretending to themselves because they want it to be true. it's just that—it's been a while, they've gone through so much, and so much more importantly, what if you're wrong? are you willing to gamble on the chance that you've just told the real them you've changed so much that i don't even recognize you as yourself anymore?

but more generally "i think they've been replaced by a construct" is a completely bonkers thing to say about someone unprompted. if we're talking snap judgements then humans really prefer it when things go how they expect. it makes way more sense for the thing that walks like dawn and talks like dawn to actually be dawn, ditto with ingo. so then the question becomes, once they get cozy with that assumption, how much doubt does it take to make that mental jump? how high do you need to stack the differences before it tips?

on both sides it's about believing one thing, without even really having to think about it because duh, of course, and then the slow realization creeps up on you from behind, that the entire time, you've been horribly wrong.

Friend: Hey, how was it?

Me: Oh, it wasn't too bad at all! *proceeds to tell you the worst fucking thing you've ever heard*

@mondscheinprinzessin

LAURA LAURA LAURA

.... I might need to revise my meme. I haven't even slept yet but all this song makes me want to do is... idk, get better? Rob a bank and be able to pay for therapy and go get better? Get better and go to their concert and dance and sing along to the "oh damn it will get better even if I have to claw my way to it with my bare hands" song?

that section of the secret history where richard tries out a vermont winter in unsafe housing and turns into a heat scavenger while gradually descending on-page into a hypothermic fugue state except it’s literally just me trying to survive in my office now that they’ve turned the air conditioning on

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cried for twenty minutes in front of the stove waiting for my grilled cheese to cook except i didn't add enough butter and it turned out so mid i could sob again, honestly

I'm gonna screaaaam why are my work schedules like this

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