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OR Another perspective on separating the art from the artist.

Story time. I needed a haircut and shop from the neighborhood is good enough for me. The guy that runs it always had a extreme way of thinking, bordering dangerous territory, but a nice person that argues using what they know and listens. Until today, when I realized he just needed to talk to someone much worse to bring out all the bigotry inside of him. So he’s transphobic, homophobic and doesn’t support neurodivergent diagnosis. He’s a feminist, which the other client wasn’t, so it was horribly funny watching him trying to convince someone that women weren’t better off dealing with reusable diapers. It was bad. I considered leaving, but staying was a last kindness to someone that never treated me poorly, but that I can’t support anymore. He even apologized for the conversation, certainly unaware that his other client wasn’t the most awful for me.

Lately, I have been torturing myself by following the allegations against Neil Gaiman. I honestly don’t know the reason I’m doing that, but I am. I was quick to drop him as a choice in entertainment, specially because the parts he corroborate are already bad enough. Then, as usual, there’s the argument of separating the art from the artist. I have my issues with that, but today I found a new point of view with my experience. (not really, but a new way to demonstrate it)

I needed a haircut. I just shave my head, so it’s quite simple. Doing it at home during the pandemic was bad. Finding someone else to do it at a reasonable price and be completely satisfied will take some tries, again. It doesn’t have to be him. There are options. The next one might be secretly worse, might be the same or, with all the luck, someone better. At the end of the day, I don’t want to ever have to sit and listen to that kind of conversation because it’s simply convenient and because my leaving will not change anything.

This is mostly me venting. It drained me more than I thought it would. I'll probably not answer any comment so soon. I don't have the strength to spellcheck what I just wrote to tell the truth.

Instead of focusing of creating good algorithms to push certain content to users why don't we focus on creating a good map that allows users to find the kind of content they want more easily?

I found this website that created a map of reddit with different countries for different topics and I thought it would translate to lemmy because instances sort of do this already really well.

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

alt-text for thumbnail: text saying “apolitical friends don’t exist” next to the progress flag on a 2d digital art wooden background

finished 40th book for the year (The Displacements - Bruce Holsinger); we move ever onwards

I wasn't expecting anything Earth-shattering coming out of this given that everyone at Fox News was salivating for fresh meat. Problem is, not having a straight answer for anything now becomes the narrative.

This was not a great look for either of them (as little time as Walz got).

If you haven't seen it, links below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The article states that these horrendous, disgusting infractions of health regulations have been documented out for at least the previous year, but given their severity, I’d imagine it’s always been this way at Boar’s Head production facilities. (Seemingly without any meaningful accountability from regulators.)

I’m going to cook my deli meats from now on, no matter where they come from.

closing in on my 40th book of the year; this should optimistically be read sometime next week

I'm comparatively old. I was raised in a household that viewed news as the highest calling.

Net result is I watched, at 5, Geraldine Ferraro's speech at the 1984 DNC. She had far more energy than Mondale, and my takeaway was if I could vote, it would be for her. I told my parents as much, and we had a fucking picture of Thatcher in the office.

That was my dad's call, as somehow a believer in Reagan. Mom told me we weren't ready yet, but I would see a woman elected president in my lifetime.

That was 40 years ago. Hillary couldn't get there, but with so much baggage that you want a private jet, scarcely surprising.

What I see today is not that. I didn't really expect this to be "biracial woman of colour," but we are finally exhausted of Trump's artless self-dealing, and we have zero interest in playing that movie again.

I've previously expressed not being thrilled with Harris, but she's grown on me.

This is where we finally get out of the dark ages and recognise that a woman can run the goddamn country. This is different. It's rather crazy to me that no one in my lifetime has run on joy. We keep plumbing the depths of society and wonder how we don't move forward.

No politician has ever been perfect. I'd argue Biden gets close for seeing the writing on the wall and accepting he can't win again. Giving us this.

Harris is also not perfect, but she is right for the era.

I watched her acceptance speech and felt 5 again. With hope for the future.

What happens past Nov. 5 is going to be interesting, but I think the felon will lose and fight it tooth and nail. He's literally running again to avoid prison. That's not who we are. We cannot reward this.

There was a post on the local subreddit that Texas is now in play. Holy shit, do you have to fuck up royally to have that be a thing. Florida is in play. North Carolina is in play. Forget all the swing states, we have an election on our hands.

There's plenty of time before then, and, as someone who ran a newsroom for the first time in 2000, that's worrisome. But if we can finally break out of this pattern, I welcome it.

We are about to see the U.S. cast off the chains and see the GOP for the cult of personality it is. They have no policy we want. I won't go much past that, as it's clear they're unaware of what "soul searching" looks like.

But I have hope for the first time since 2008. I hope it's not misplaced.

starting on 2 books this week (The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability and Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934); optimistically i'll get both of these done in the next day or two

alt-text: [yellow text saying "different pronouns in different spaces" next to the queer anarchist flag and on a 2d digital art wooden background]

Pushing yourself doesn't always make you stronger, for many people it can do the opposite. Harm and challenge is not an inherent good. There is the common saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that applies to rest too.

This can be seen clearly in many of the different things we do while resting, like organizing the spaces we live in. In the moment it might be much faster to look through that mess instead of cleaning it up, but eventually it will cost far more time overall. If we are living paycheck to paycheck though, we might not be able to sacrifice that time.

This is a perfect argument against things like wages in any system though. I know many people say we need “incentives to work” or to “give resources to groups that do the most work, so that they can do more”, but that is by far the wrong way to look at it. Convincing someone to work too hard now can cause them to do less in the future, no matter how many incentives and threats you add. Rewarding people for doing more in the moment just means you are systematically rewarding people who just look through that mess more, instead of those that clean it up. If you do that enough, give them the energy to expand and make more of that form of organization enough, eventually you won’t achieve anything but collapse.

Without time to rest we will achieve nothing, and punishing people for resting will only be counter-productive.

Metrics from a distant observer will never replace the workers there in the moment.

I am looking for anarchist streamers to talk/interact with. Sadly most I know are shit and do stuff like use ableist language all the time, I was hoping to find some here.

Any of yall know of any good ones or are one yourself?

I really tried to ignore it and let it go as just another passing trend. It’s not my language, not my culture and not my battleground, but it’s hard. It hurt me seeing it slowly spreading and getting bigger. What made me decide to vent was reading someone talk about their struggles and seeing a familiar sentence that might be familiar to all: “I was a weird child”.

Being weird is not usually a problem, the issue usually is people being incapable to accept what they consider weird. Different is not wrong, queer is not wrong, expressing yourself and living the only way you know when it’s not hurting anyone around you is definitely not wrong, even if it doesn’t conform with society.

All these horrible people hate being called weird because it’s what they having been calling us the whole time, but in more specific ways. I feel using it as a slur now just reinforces the negative connotations and validate their view.

Update: semantic satiation to the rescue. Weird became a meme and a trend everyone wanted to take part and use regardless of it making sense.

Intro

For reasons this subject has recently become very relevant to me. I would like to discuss the nature of parental abuse through the lens of Dnd so that… our dnd games will be more realistic and emotionally cathartic. It's a pretty thin veil over what I'm actually talking about so those unfamiliar with Dnd will find this perfectly understandable. As your cptsd buddy who gets it, this is your literal trigger warning before choosing to continue and I don’t want to hear any crap about it from anyone who doesn’t know why it’s necessary to include this sentence. Without further ado, these are my tips and guidelines for understanding how to run a player character who has an evil-aligned parent who left them with cptsd:

Terms

Abuse, neglect, and exploitation are the tools of evil-aligned parents, but there are differences in manifestation of these tools whether the parent is chaotic evil, a demon, or lawful evil, a devil. The evil carried out by demon or devil parents has similar effects on the victim (feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, unresolved latent rage, depression, unrelenting stress, suicidality, etc.).

• Abuse is inappropriate treatment of an individual. It includes physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse.

• Neglect is the refusal or failure of a caregiver to provide for the needs of a child or vulnerable adult.

• Exploitation is taking improper advantage of an individual. It can involve finances, material, labor or activity.

Demon Parents

The destruction of the demon parent is obvious to most people and this is the kind of parent who is commonly described as a “monster.” The demon parent behaves like an unpredictable greedy animal who takes what they wish from their family as they please, including the satisfaction of their suffering. They disregard all ethics and morality in the pursuit of physical pleasure that they can never quite satisfy. The anger of feeling this lacking is relieved by using family members for target practice. Everyone in the family is consciously afraid of the demon parent because the demon parent will do whatever they want to vulnerable people to fulfill their sick desires without reservations or justification. The needs of others can not be conceived of by individuals depraved in this way and they use threats to coerce others into behaviors which benefit the demon. Demon parents, when discovered, receive deserved universal condemnation and in many cases criminal punishment.

• Abuse: Physically harm family members at any time for any reason.

• Neglect: Family focused on keeping demon parent placid, wouldn’t dream of provoking the demon-parent with expressions of need.

• Exploitation: Demon parent makes demands and use violence or the threat of violence to coerce their victims into performing services for them.

Devil Parents

Devil parents are most interested in conducting their evil within the bounds of established rules or through the arbitrary interpretation of those sometimes recently invented rules. Although their methods are different than the demon parent’s, the desire to exert control and be served is the same regardless of the kind of evil methods the parents employ. While demon parents’ chaotic nature prevents them from fully integrating into society or holding any kind of wealth or power therein, devil parents are experts in manipulation and exploitation who often find themselves in positions of leadership in society, equipping them with servants to use against their victims. They can convince a person who they are abusing and exploiting to be thankful for being tolerated. Their specialty is for their victims and onlookers to view their abuse as fair, justified, or mundane because individual incidents appear, especially to the victim, to be non-abuse as the abuse isn’t demonic in nature. The devil makes their victims feel indebted to them so that they continue to serve. Family members are used up until they are totally consumed, which frustrates the devil parent because they demand to be served regardless of the mental or physical condition of their victims, so they shame their victims to work through any amount of pain or disability. Their victims, conditioned by their own parent to believe that this is a natural parent-child relationship, is ashamed of the anger and frustration they feel and learn to suppress their ideas, their desires, and their emotions because all could be used as tools by the devil parent to demean and shame. Devil parents, when discovered, become attractive to potential victims and repulsive but acceptable to most healthy people who do not understand the nature of psychological torment as they have never experienced it, who don’t believe in psychology altogether, or are themselves openly practicing devil-parents as the techniques of devil parents are often celebrated in conservative circles. Shame and plausible deniability keeps victims from admitting that they could have been abused.

• Abuse: Devil parent will systematically deconstruct the egos of their victims so that they believe they are less than human therefore needing to work to earn their place in the family which is framed as a refuge from a society which is even less accepting (which appears to the victim to be true because cptsd victims of any kind of evil-aligned parent were deprived of the skills they needed to be taught to have healthy relationships of any kind). They will punish failure and accept any amount of success neutrally as if it were the minimum possible standard. Demean and shame family members to enforce hierarchy that children exist to serve their parents and be thankful their parents allow them to live. Anything to shatter confidence and self-respect is on the table unless some rule forbids it.

• Neglect: React to expressions of need or emotions with shaming and condemnation. Make victims feel embarrassed for having physical and emotional needs from their parent. Criticize the lacking nature of the child’s self-taught attempts to take care of themselves so that they feel incompetent and worthless. Ignore health problems caused by neglect, convince victims they are not having health problems since they weren’t neglected. Tell the victim they are not experiencing the emotions they are experiencing and by faking them are not living up to their obligations to the devil parent. Children of devil parents view death as a welcome retirement from the required service of their devil parent’s domain which would be selfish to indulge in while the parent “needs them”, and feel guilty for wanting to die despite having a such an extraordinary and “loving” devil-parent.

• Exploitation: The Devil’s primary purpose is to enthrall their victims, family and beyond. They believe others to be opportunities or obstacles. They will use systemic psychological torment techniques (which they likely learned from their own devil parents and chose to perpetuate) to make their victims feel that their only purpose is to serve the devil parent and be ashamed by any thought that is not oriented to benefiting the devil parent.

Neutrally Evil Parents

It is also possible for a parent to be aligned neutral-evil and have a mix of the above distinguishing characteristics, as a parent my PC is familiar with. The neutral evil parent is a resentful ticking timebomb who will perform their evil lawfully when calm and chaotically when enraged.

Roll a d4

• Evens the neutral evil parent is calm and practices evil lawfully, use devil guidelines.

• Odds the neutral evil parent is enraged and practices evil chaotically, use demon guidelines.

PC Background Skills

PCs with cptsd, while debuffed from a panicked and disorderly survival mind, do have some unique abilities. PCs with Cptsd have an inflated perception skill because for their own safety they learned to never stop scanning their environment for potential threats ever. They tend to be excellent at identifying others by the sound of their footsteps and are themselves gifted at stealth and deception. They have skill in insight due to constantly monitoring the emotional state of the evil parent so they can hide when they identify the evil parent is becoming dangerous. PCs may have some skill in nature, survival, and medicine due to the practical experience of having to figure out how to care for themselves as children.

Depending on the nature of the abuse and the personality of the Player character, the PC could attain the Narcissist or Sociopath attributes. Unlimited ego from oneself and a disregard for all others may allow one to survive a chaotic and deprived environment, however applying this solution will shift the PC's alignment to evil.

Conclusion

Hopefully someone will get some use out of this… for their Dnd game. For anyone who has a player character who feels nothing but pain and knows their loving parents are related to that somehow but feel too guilty to explore that emotion, have your player character explore and radically accept the validity of that emotion in a controlled environment. The character will feel more acute emotional pain than they ever had before because it had accumulated over a lifetime and the body keeps the score, but the character will feel some relief from the constant ambient pain which had to be suppressed before. When they accept their own emotions and their own inherent worth, they can re-contextualize their experiences, learn the skills they were deprived of, and go on to lead a happy and fulfilling life at any age. That’s what I’m hoping for my PC. I'd like to hear from anyone who has a personal interest in this topic. For characterization purposes, do you think a PC in these circumstances might forgive their evil parent since they came from an evil background they are incapable of overcoming or condemn their evil parent for never being critical about how their behavior affects themselves and others in their entire life?

I made a mistake in my dates and so I have a few chapters to edit and upload and I have work tomorrow morning. Gonna be rough.

So, to make myself feel better, what are you time crunching this week?

I am a Kagi user and have been for 7 months now. I signed up for the 300 searches per month plan because I felt like that would fit me well enough and it turns out I average 87 searches per month. That's a lot lower than I thought it would be by quite a bit.

it has been unusually hot in our apartment this week and most of the past three days have been spent mitigating that

currently working on reading quite a voluminous book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1095838.Others

I'm OK with Harris. Not thrilled, but OK.

It would have been nice to get Warren. Sanders has the same age issue (though is still mentally there in interviews) as Biden, and that window has closed. So many people at the federal level have clung to their positions for so long, it feels like as a country, we wouldn't be familiar with people in the primes of their life actually running the show.

At 45, I shouldn't still be waiting for my generation to have any level of power. AARP is coming for me in 10 years.

I've been trying to clean for a week, yesterday and today I've spent actually making some headway. My grandma is coming to town so I'm trying to spruce up the place! Not very exciting for the fleeting weekends of the summer, so I thought I'd live vicariously through you all!

P.S. you can't clean without music: Sorry for the YouTube link but I've been unable to use the alternatives recently

I just noticed this come into existence, and I don't know if it will take off, but I figure it can't hurt to let people know and give it a chance.

Here's the beehaw view: https://beehaw.org/post/15083973

P.S. I don't have an account there, but I like their "Bot Art".

My friend wants to punch their aggressor, so they tell me. They think about running into him on the street and punching him on the face. Between the two of us, I’m definitely the pacifist and I would always want a world without violent solutions, but, in this case, I wholeheartedly support their desire to simply punch him in the face.

You see, they ended up hurting themselves days after their incident, weeks later they got the courage to finally look for legal counsel, then their family withdrew support for the supposed well-being of not my friend. To make matters worse, the same night the little bit of power my friend could’ve had was denied, they had an encounter with their aggressor. They didn’t punch his face, they left for home shaking.

Should I tell my friend to not think about punching their aggressor’s face? Should I deny them their small coping mechanism? I’m the pacifist, but my fantasies would not be of simply punching him in the face. I would go low, very low, lower than him, in creative and cruel ways that make me actually sick by just considering them in passage, but that wouldn’t be more terrible than the actual reality so many people have to endure because of people like him.

Stop judging the words of those suffering under the boot when that’s the only power they really have, their only solace. We are mostly not David, we are Don Quixote.

Hello. So, since 2022 I visited several Mastodon servers or created an account on them, and I somehow feel uncomfortable on all of them. Either they're filled with activism / politics, which I don't give a fck about, or they're filled with people from the US or people who cares more about US than about their own countries (admins included), and I'm tired of that sht.

I was looking for international Mastodon servers with the less amount of Usonian shenanigans, but it's impossible to do that kind of search, and I don't know any other fediverse place to hang out as a non-Usonian person. Any recommendation?

we recently watched maxxxine, which i thought was a good ending to that trilogy. (x and pearl are the other two.) in a violent nature was another one i enjoyed, even if it was a bit slow... perhaps intentionally.

we're watching longlegs tomorrow, which is supposed to be very unsettling (my favorite kind of movie). beetlejuice beetlejuice is coming out later this year, and with tim burton directing and a lot of the original cast returning, i think it's going to be decent!

if you hadn't already guessed, my favorite genre is horror. ;)