What Fools These Mortals Be

"neurotypicals have this special way of saying 'okay' that makes you feel like shit after infodumping your special interest" anyone can do that actually

in fact i have had this happen to me multiple times from other autistic people sometimes someone just doesn't realize they sound bored. or aren't as good at hiding that they Are bored lmao people aren't always gonna jive with your special interest and it may not really interest them like hate to break it to you but that isn't a personal attack on you

like i offhand can think of my coworker who also has adhd who says "yeah" in this way when i'm talking that makes it sound like she does not give a single fuck, and she's admitted that she sometimes zones out when other people are talking (i do this too) even if she's interested and trying to listen. and sometimes when She's talking i just start getting bored/losing energy and start trying to find ways to back out of the conversation like that's just how things are sometimes

so seeing posts like that are really annoying lol like yeah it really fucking sucks when it feels like you've bored someone while talking about something you love! however not only does it not automatically mean they're an ~evil neurotypical but also i'm sure most of the people reblogging that post would never acknowledge that they've very likely been the "...okay" person more than once

Does Percy like his job? 

Of course. 

Well, mostly. 

Kind of. 

See, the thing is…

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a movie first and foremost about the destruction of minority neighborhoods and public transit by the American car industry. After that, it's a technological milestone. And then it's about cartoons

I genuinely don't think I'm ever gonna get over how perfect these descriptions of the Intrepid Heroes from the Rolling Stones article are

90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister

"What were you like before taking the meds tho"

Two weeks ago I was posting about eating cake frosting for dinner.

I feel like it's worth mentioning that being on The Wrong Meds can indeed do the 90s movie thing to you.

Like, if you go on meds and that happens, it's not because whatever's going on with you is jut Too Severe or that you're doomed or only people with Other Illnesses get to have meds that make them feel actually good and you have to settle for "miserable but somehow so hollow I no longer care about the misery" and be grateful you're no longer actively suicidal or whatever.

If that shit happens to you, tell your fucking doctor. And if your doctor doesn't take you seriously, or acts like That's Just How Being On Meds Is, ditch them! Find a new doctor!! Because that is NOT how being on meds is supposed to work! That means the meds are not working correctly!!

Reblogging to agree and say that what was happening to me was (and to an extent still is) severe and was the result of manifold health problems and has taken the better part of a year to effectively treat. I did not expect medication to be this effective. But it is. So if you think that you are untreatable, get a second opinion.

there is a single pill i can take to immediately live a day as the best version of myself-- not a superhero, not a perfect genius, but a good dude who can read and write and do the dishes. im optimistic and coherent and can plan for the future. i write novels and walk the dog and remember to shower and brush my teeth.

if i don't take this pill i spend the day as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything im unable to be.

this pill is incredibly difficult to obtain a steady monthly supply of because when normal people take it they have a little more fun at parties.

Counterpoint: At least if I spend the remainder of my natural life as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything I'm unable to be... at least I'll know I'm me, not a fake version of myself created by medication. Nor do I have to worry about regressing if I run out, the repeat prescription doesn't come in time etc.

Not dissing OP's choice to take advantage of the meds, but they're not for me.

Hey, so, this is kind of the attitude that made me afraid to take meds that I really benefit from: the idea that who you are on medication is somehow "not really you."

The person I was when I was very depressed did not feel like the real me. That was a version of me that was very ill. The "real me" is the me that is able to dance at stoplights and make art and enjoy food and laugh at jokes. And for now, I need pharmaceutical help to get back there.

The assistance that medication provides doesn't make me any less The Real Me than wearing glasses or taking painkillers. Depression is a physical illness. If you try medication and you don't like the way it makes you feel, then it's not a good medication for you. But you do get to choose, and I'm glad I have the opportunity to choose to actually be myself again.

I also want to say something about “authenticity,” I.e. as someone said upthread, “at least I know I’m me” with their baked-in idea that “there is a real self and unreal self” and that the “real” self is superior.

But I suspect that people who are struggling with that sort of thing are also struggling with things like depression, and a key thing about those struggles is that they destroy your good judgment. So this isn’t a go at anyone personally, and is behind a cut.

The hairstylist ate this season

god scrolling through some terf hot takes before I take them is always so soothing... this grown ass adult is out here fully admitting that it makes them actively angry to think about someone licking a foot but somehow the foot licker is the weirdo. girl simply stop thinking about it. this is of course calming because it makes me feel extremely normal and well-adjusted comparatively.

Obligatory if intrusive thoughts like these are a problem you may want to look into anxiety meds or find coping mechanisms. It's definitely better than harassing people online and thinking really hard about kinks that gross you out.

I hope this comes off as polite as possible, intrusive thoughts are not things people actually believe! Terfs are not getting intrusive thoughts, they are just very upset about other people's sexual preferences and genitalia because they are assholes

i'm going to need people without OCD to please shut the fuck up and stop trying to use it as some excuse for being genuinely bigoted i'm SO tired

I'm really sorry, that isn't what I meant at all. I have vivid intrusive thoughts which used to be much worse. All I meant was that if you're getting angry because you can't stop yourself from thinking about something that disgusts you, that might be an intrusive thought. Of course it's not an excuse to harass people online.

hey so i appreciate that your heart is in the right place but i think that it ultimately does more harm to offer up "intrusive thoughts" or "moral OCD" as an explanation for someone's behavior than to tell them its bigoted or lame or whatever.

it's part of a larger trend I've noticed of wanting to pathologize away asshole behavior rather than call a spade a spade. If we're being so honest with ourselves, the vast vast majority of people saying shit like "thinking about people licking toes makes me actively mad" don't have OCD, or ADHD, or autism, or anxiety, or whatever we're saying it is this week. Making any of those things into the "says bigoted shit online" disorder fucking sucks for people who have these conditions and don't say racist or otherwise bigoted shit

"Making a better burger is literally so simple, I don't know why McDonald's doesn't do it this way. First we're going to begin by craft dry-aging this A5 wagyu beef with the sho-shu-ryuba technique that I learned at a restaurant you're only allowed to work at if your parents are bluelinked on wikipedia..."

This post continues to occasionally strike a nerve in the trust fund baby influencer fandom.

the thing about CC is that she did plagiarize. she was found guilty of plagiarism and banned from fanfiction dot net! she plagiarized pamela dean, among others, and lied about it repeatedly! it happened! and regardless of whatever else she writes, regardless of whether the publishing industry and her fans trust her not to do it again, regardless of how many times her wikipedia page gets scrubbed clean, that will always have happened! so it is not in fact cruel gossip, but a factually true statement, to say that she plagiarized and i'm not interested in supporting her or giving her the benefit of the doubt because she plagiarized and lied about it repeatedly! fuck!

what really incenses me about cassandra clare — and forgive me for bringing this up again, but i don't think i've articulated this point yet — is not that i believe she is currently plagiarizing. any accusations i've seen about recent work seem to me to be superficial. but even if one could prove that she never plagiarized again once she started publishing, it wouldn't matter to me, because she chose to capitalize on her fandom history. while trying to distance herself from what she did, she made a brand out of the fanfic pen name "cassandra clare" and continues to profit off the reputation and fanbase that she amassed while she was, provably, a plagiarist.

you don't get to do that and bury the things that made you famous. as an individual, as a human being, she is capable of change and any other good qualities you may want to ascribe. but she built her career on lies. professionally, i don't understand why she gets to move on.

the worst part for me--worse than building her career on plagiarism--is that her career was also built on a truly reprehensible level of harassment. she told her followers to help get her unbanned from FFN (as if that would ever happen) and they spent months harassing the site owner and several abuse team members. one of them, after enduring extensive abuse, ended up in the hospital.

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

she has the career she has now because of her harassment of fandom as much as the plagiarism.

receipts

fanlore article

Quick percabeth I did on my new Wacom ✨

I am fucking BEGGING people to stop treating the EOs like they’re foregone conclusions because they aren’t but they fucking WILL be if people keep quote tweeting news articles and adding quotes from fucking handmaids tale!!!!!!!!! like ENOUGH of that garbage!!!!!!!!! because like I get it!!!!!! it sucks!!!!!!! It’s scary!!!!!!! It’s all extremely bad!!!!!!!!! It’s illegal and unconstitutional and racist and transphobic and xenophobic and dangerous to national security and dehumanizing and deeply deeply cruel and all the rest of it!!!!! but you need to NAME it as that and then FIGHT back against it!!!!!! And I’m SO TIRED of people saying “well we can’t, what do we even dooooooooo, it’s too haaaaaaaaaaaard” like idk, lots of things bitch!!!!!! Are there grassroots organizations in your community? Are there protests happening? Can you write your reps? Do you have money to donate anywhere? Are there places that support vulnerable communities where you can volunteer? Get the fuck out there and find a place where you can help, and if you’re not going to do that then you quite literally need to shut your fucking mouth about how we’re all doomed because although you may be happy to seal your own casket I will not be joining in, thanks!!!!!! Like GODDAMN!!!!!!!!!!

like I have straight up seen people say shit like “I can’t believe the department of education is gone 😢” and MEAN IT!!!!!!!! when it is NOT!!!!!!! it DECIDEDLY is not!!!!!!!!! AND IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE!!!!!!!

(like even putting aside that it’s actually a very unpopular position, only congress can get rid of it and that would require a supermajority aka multiple democrats would have to vote in favor, which will almost certainly not happen, and I can already hear some of y’all jamokes being like “he’s just going to do whatever he wants, you’re sooooooo dumb to think anyone can stop him, you’re so naive, democracy is dead” and like I MEAN YEAH IF WE ACT THAT WAY IT SURE AS FUCK MAKES IT MUCH EASIER FOR HIM TO DO THOSE THINGS.)

to use an example from history: like do you genuinely think the Act Up movement really thought Reagan was going to change his position on AIDS???? I doubt it!!!!!! They stood up and took action and took to the streets and made themselves seen and heard to make it that much fucking harder for people to look away from what was happening

AND AGAIN i can hear some of y’all about to be like “okay but lots of people DIED during the AIDS crisis you know, and so many people won’t survive this too!!!!!” as if that’s a reason to not fight, as if accepting defeat is somehow noble, as if the greatest way to honor people who’ve died at the hands of tyranny isn’t fighting back relentlessly against that tyranny, battered and bruised and spitting blood onto the ground and still standing back up for more

This is the exact way should all be responding, like we’re mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. As people have pointed out in the notes, a major pillar of fascism is obedience in advance. Do not fucking let them do what they’re trying to do without fighting tooth and nail against it

the thing that drives me up the wall about “anti/proship” discourse is that it frames grooming as like, primarily an ideological practice in which the threat is that kids will “think adult/minor relationships are morally ok”. which sure maybe that happens idfk but the thing is that grooming is in practical almost entirely divorced from ideology and is so much more about individual exceptionalism… which I think is especially true for fandom-aged demographics! these aren’t kids who are just freshly learning the basics of right and wrong, most of them probably already generally know what pedophilia is and think it’s bad, it’s just that they’re also particularly susceptible to individualized attention that makes them feel uniquely special and mature.

like. I don’t know. it’s just incredibly frustrating to see people continually talking about CSA like it only happens because the perpetrators and victims believe pedophilia is morally permissible rather than because they think that their own personal circumstances exonerate them and make it uniquely acceptable and not harmful.

it is overwhelmingly my experience that kids and teens who met and then “dated” adult partners struggle to think of themselves as victims of CSA because for whatever reason it just didn’t count—not when it was them. they were too precocious, they had too much agency, their abuser didn’t mean any harm, and what would have been a terrible criminal travesty if it had happened to anyone else was just a weird but understandable fluke situation that they brought upon themselves.

If you’re keeping count, that’s four Starship explosions out of eight attempts—an impressive failure rate.

Elon’s philosophy seems to be the same for everything: blow it up, waste billions, and call it innovation.

More percabeth cuz I love them very much

(I literally have a backlog of art and I’m now spamming my account…….)

Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight

I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever

But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”

This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it

And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit

So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too

Coming back to say that while a lot of the responses to this post have been mainly positive, some folks have an attitude that it should be something that my friend— or any cis, straight man —should just be able to get over, because fuck ‘em, that’s why, because they’re in a queer space and they should shut up and accept it, because you suffer as a queer person and they should have to suffer too— regardless of whether or not this specific person has done anything to wrong you

I’m gonna say this point blank— you’re a tar pit if you think this way

Your suffering does not make you special, you are not granted brand new permissions to be belligerent and cruel because you have been treated poorly, straight people aren’t an oppressed class, no, but they’re people who are entitled to the same amount of basic decency that you, yourself, are entitled to

It feels good when you’ve been treated like shit to then go forward and treat other people like shit. That’s what you’re admitting. Does it make you feel good to do harm? Are you proud of that? Are you comfortable with being that kind of person? Because I dunno about the rest of you— but I realized I wasn’t, and it turns out it’s pretty fucking easy to change

there’s a decent amt of neurologists who’ve called the sleep schedules we’re obligated to be on despite flagrant conflict with our natural circadian rhythms “borderline torture” and the work hours we’re expected to put in despite the fact that the average person can only maintain maximal efficiency and focus for 3 hours at a time “nearly inhumane” and i think about that a lot

my voice is in my sword