theemomarshmallow

[theemomarshmallow]

”if you detransition your body will be ruined by masculinization. you will be ugly and mannish(the worst thing a woman can be) and should hate yourself. its damaging” i dont think you guys actually like detransitioners all that much

[theemomarshmallow]

It’s important to know who we are and what we do in no-win scenarios. There’s no cheating the Kobayashi Maru here.

"the correct answer to the trolley problem is to reject its premise" That's explicitly not an answer. If you are the agent in the trolley problem, and you say "I reject the premise", the people still die. It is a made up scenario, yes. It was made specifically to illustrate in a real-world situation where you have limited influence and none of your options are perfect. There are many problems in the real world that you cannot solve by pulling a lever. However, you also cannot solve them by doing nothing. And unlike the trolley problem, you can't just "reject the premise" and exit the scenario. The consequences still happen.

The point is to demonstrate your ethical reasoning. Nobody wants to accept the premise, we want to revise the scenario, or exit the situation, or just find the trick answer that solves everything perfectly, and ultimately, many people decide not to pull the lever. Why? Because it feels worse to take action in a shitty situation than to do nothing and pretend that you never had any influence to begin with.

Except, even if you do nothing, you are still just as complicit in the consequences as if you had pulled the lever. The point is that inaction feels like an inherently neutral choice, even when its consequences are demonstrably worse. The point is that there is no solution where you don't have someone's blood on your hands. Yes it sucks. Yes you want to reject the scenario. That's supposed to happen, you're supposed to feel that conflict, that's part of the test. What we're looking to find out is what you do with that conflict. Do you prioritize emotional comfort or external action?

Maybe one day we'll have built a future where nobody has to confront that sort of problem, but right now, those problems are real and numerous, because whether you accept it or not we were born into a world where people already built massive systems of cruelty, and we all have very limited influence over them. Obviously we don't want these systems to exist. Obviously it won't be solved by a single decision. But if you want to dismantle them you have to actually do something when you have the chance. If you wait around for the Perfect Choice That Fixes Everything, you will die waiting. You can't fix everything all at once. And doing nothing only makes things worse. So do what you can.

[theemomarshmallow]

goodnight everyone (:

do your daily click

spreadsheet of families in Gaza you can help today

donate to:

Buy an e-sim

Help diabetics in Gaza

The PCRF

Anera

UNRWA

Taawon

Help Gaza Children

Sudan Tarada Initiative

Help a Sudanese family escape conflict

Darfur Women Action

Ramadan for Sudan

Period products in Sudan

Sudan Emergency Appeal

[theemomarshmallow]

Janeway is already struggling with her mental state in Concerning Flight –

JANEWAY: You're giving up. Again. Your beautiful painting of the Adoration, the great bronze horse in Milan, the Battle of Anghiari. Unfinished, all of them. You were going to publish your notebooks. You never did. You have given up, abandoned your most important works. Why?

She probes Da Vinci intently, trying to figure out why he would abandon all that's important to him and the things he's tried to achieve. Why throw away everything that's gotten him up to this point?

The real question is why would she care so much? She is too invested in his answer, and she's really accusing him of the things she fears she'll do. She fears she'll give up because she's already descending into the depressive episode we see culminate in Night. "You've given up. Abandoned your most important works. Why?" She's not asking him that question; she's asking for herself.

Janeway is struggling to hold on and she's looking for strength anywhere she can find it, even if it is in the comfort of a Renaissance holodeck program. What's especially telling is she only does this when she's alone with Da Vinci because the second Voyager needs attention, she's back to being captain. Given some space, though, she's ruminating in isolation and blame

[theemomarshmallow]

when christian artists change the line in hallelujah from “maybe there’s a God above” to “I know that there’s a God above” >:c

[theemomarshmallow]

As cliché as it may be you really are not alone in this world, friend 💛

[theemomarshmallow]

Fucking lovely.

Don Wilson:

"I have noticed a significant increase in general laxity about PPE since COVID masking has been dropped. A significant % of OR staff (esp anesthesia & RTs) not bothering to mask inside actual OR even when sterile fields are open & set up.

Nurses inside OR generally much more consistent (they directly handle & set up sterile equipment).

I’ve seen unmasked anesthesiologists & RTs for emergency CS & gyne cases… I don’t get it. We mask to prevent contamination of open surgical wounds. Just because COVID mask mandates are over doesn’t mean INSIDE an operating room is a mask free zone.

Used to be that it was unthinkable to be unmasked inside an active OR. Even in the hallways during active OR time. It’s a sad commentary on the impact of the antimask stupidity spilling over to areas where it can impact quality & safety of the patient care environment.

I’m just one person who chooses to be fastidious about masking inside the hospital, I can’t take on the entire system. But it’s discouraging to see & I wonder how many patients go on to have nosocomial surgical infections because of relaxed cultures around masking now."

https://x.com/heiltsuk_paleo/status/1780326358314614784

[theemomarshmallow]

Happiness advice is hard to compose, since we're all born with different brains, producing different chemicals in different quantities at different levels of efficiency.

"Try regular exercise!" chirrups an influencer whose brain has never known a day of depression in its squiggly grey life.

But I do think I've noticed behaviours that poison joy, and I haven't ever heard it as advice. My theory: bullying is bad for your happiness.

Of the four types of bullying, three of them - intimidation, humiliation and harassment - are usually committed by insecure people, trying to make themselves feel more powerful by taking that power from another.

(The fourth type of bullying is exclusion, and I have no citations for any of this, since it's just a bunch of stuff I reckon. I do think I'm right though, for what it's worth.)

The least happy comedians I've met are the ones who smoke weed in their flats while watching and scoffing at clips of their rivals. Their enemies. Their friends.

I'm slightly transfixed by the story of a relatively well-known comedian who became obsessed with the Instagram stories of an amateur comic. The established comic would watch the videos, share them with friends, play them at parties - mocking the comic's lack of self-awareness.

This newer comedian wasn't internet famous or anything. Just a guy starting out, trying his hand.

To operate like this, you must believe that some people have value, and others do not. Once you've decided this, how can you expect your brain to permanently accept that you're one of the worthy? You can make yourself feel powerful in the short term by humiliating another. But in the long term, you curate a worldview where a person's eccentricities are a reason they deserve to suffer.

Good luck enjoying what you see in the mirror.

[theemomarshmallow]

maybe it's just because i spend my time scrounging around libraries and itch.io and such but i'm often bewildered whenever people talk about everything becoming the same or death of art or everyone being afraid to Get Weird with It. i promise people are still out there getting weird with it. the hegemonic mainstream art remains hegemonic and mainstream like usual. counterculture remains counterculture. as usual. interesting and somewhat off-putting zines cost a little more but the cost of living is pretty high right now, and i don't particularly mind giving an independent artist a few more bucks for their work

[theemomarshmallow]

Me trying to work up the courage to say hi to the neighbors 😭

I am being put into a position where "doing it scared" is my only option grgrgrrgrgr

#like why can’t I Just Do It #and not be horribly anxious of being rejected #so far it seems like there’s not many others if any like me here #and I want to build community #fuckin’ hell I’m terrified

[theemomarshmallow]

So the destruction of the Institute of Sexology is in a lot of people's minds right now, which is fantastic. In a world where more and more books are being banned, thinking and talking about the extremes of this behavior is absolutely necessary. But I would really like to talk about some actionable steps you can take right now to preserve and uplift queer voices.

Request queer books from your local library (here is a massive list of queer books, it is an affiliate link).

Look into indie queer books that are coming out, the publishing industry is messy at the best times, and we are not in the best of times. I follow Queer Book Box to keep updated on recent indie releases, they are also just an all-around great project.

Do some research and see if there is a queer bookstore near you, and support it if you can.

If reading is a part of your social media presence, it might be worth seeing if you can/want to participate in Trans Rights Readathon.

Buy queer books (see massive list above).

Show up to local meetings/elections.

Email your representative to talk about your concerns if queer book banning is happening in your area.

Support queer projects running right now, I may be biased but Making Queer History is worth checking out, and so is Queer Nature and LGBTQ Reads, but also look local. See what is in your area and see what they need.

Follow and uplift queer projects on social media.

Learn and share queer history.

If you create art and are queer, keep doing that, please do not give up or hide away.

Queer history is being made right now. People are going to look at how we as a community responded to our voices being silenced, and I hope this helps you decide how you want to be a part of that story.

[theemomarshmallow]

All of this 💔

a bottom-tier autistic experience is being told throughout your entire childhood that you are just an overthinker when it comes to social situations and later finding out that your friends did, in fact, hate being around you and tried to communicate that through weird little hints

#actually autistic #neurodivergent #autistic things #autistic adult #my worst fears have been realized #i should trust my instincts sometimes #autism #asd #autistic #autistic community

[theemomarshmallow]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[theemomarshmallow]

MY MAN ED BALLS!!

Wait… Isn’t Ed Balls day coming up? ED BALLS DAY, I HAVE TO GET READY TO CELEBRATE 

[theemomarshmallow]

I’m going to unlearn shame *bursts into tears and beats my head against a brick wall*

[theemomarshmallow]

the purest form of serotonin is when a cat looks at u and u go like “what?” and it meows at u

[theemomarshmallow]

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It’s what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, “hey, wouldn’t that be fucked up? Wild, right?”

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I’m not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don’t think I can’t handle it, I don’t watch it. It’s that simple.