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My life is just sad obsessions and art block

@imperialcrystalgirl

God dammit not again

I see Hollywood is now very into the idea of buying something once and then owning it forever and being able to make infinite copies. Which. Isn’t quite the message they imparted upon me in my childhood. In the spirit of their own long-held stance:

Squidward only ever makes artwork based off his visage, it's all very surface level and lacks any emotional depth

Squidward should start making artwork based on how Squidward feels and not how Squidward looks yknow? I feel like he's experimented plenty with self portraits, but none of them really say much about Squidward as a person yknow

got drunk last night and got really emotional over Squidward's potential and how much he holds himself back

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we could go back to telegraphs instead of social media. send your mutuals unspeakable strings of morse code at 4:30am

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.- …. …. …. …. …. / ..-. . .-.. .-.. / -.. --- .-- -. / .- -. -.. / -… .-. --- -.- . / -- -.-- / .--. . -. .. - … / - --- -.. .- -.-- / -.-- . --- .-- -.-. …. / --- ..- -.-. …. / -.-- --- ..- -.-. …. -.-.-- -.-.-- -.-.-- -.-.-- / … . -. - / ..-. .-. --- -- / -- -.-- / - . .-.. . --. .-. .- .--. ….

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personally i prefer semaphore

so prefacing this with the fact that I know that the fun is sorta taken out of this by me translating, but not everyone will have the energy to look it up themselves, so I figured I'd help out.

Morse code: AEEEEE FELL DOWN AND TROKE MY PENIT TODAY YEOWCE OUCH YOUCH!!!! SENT FROM MY TELEGRAPH

Semaphore: NO NOT YOUR PENITS

Oh my god Wisconsin's governor just used a line item veto to secure school funding increases every year through 2425. He struck out a line so it now reads "through the 2023-2425 school year". He's allowed to do this lol

Coastal Dems: now we can't go too far now haha, we can't. We've got to be reasonable, you know, also eight of us might defect to the Republicans if you're mean to us

Midwest Dems in control of no legislative bodies:

i love blackout poetry

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I’m pretty sure that as far as “infuriating helmets you’d hate to see before you get stabbed” go, this one is definitely up there

Up there, yes, but is it really quite all the way at the top?

why the fuck weren’t any of these in dark souls

do they mean nothing to you

as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine

sorry. only semi-related but i simply wasn't ready for "the sun is a distant gorilla". thank you NASA

your favorite youtubers and content creators are about to be offered some tantalizing tv/streaming deals so we're all about to find out who the real working class allys are

someone's gonna get cancelled doing this and they're gonna cry crocodile tears over how difficult it is to make a living as a content creator and i'm telling you right now we are NOT going to buy it, got it? scabs deserve no sympathy

It is hard making a living being a quote unquote "content creator" still not an excuse to be a scab

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This.

Trying to make a living from YouTube is like constantly running along the edge of a knife in clogs, it is incredibly stressful, it is mentally destructive and you do a truly obscene amount of work for genuinely very little compensation relative to the hours put in.

A big one-time payout from a streaming deal from some desperate studio jackoff could be life-changing, but it does not come for fucking free. The money they are offering you is money they have ripped directly from the hands and mouths of other creatives.

If you saw someone rip food out of someone else's hands and then offer it to you, you wouldn't fucking take it, would you? If you have a shred of decency you'll tell the guy to give the fucking food back and go get fucked. And if you were the one getting food ripped out of your hands, you'd reasonably expect the people around you to have that same solidarity with you and not accept it.

The industry will try to abstract this as much as possible - they're doing it in the press right now, "oh it's just a bunch of rich, selfish Hollywood elites making a play for more money!" is EXPLICITLY an attempt to get you to see the union members as something other than your fellow workers - and they'll try to pull shit like "oh the strike has nothing to do with you, you're not a member of the union and you won't see the benefits so why should you sacrifice this opportunity for them" and so on.

They're trying to make the issue more distant and abstract, to alienate you from your fellow human beings. And in response we must make it closer and more concrete.

The money they offer to a scab is taken from the hands of a union member. They are offering you a union member's student loan payments, their rent, their food budget, their kids' college funds.

Do not take it. It is not and can never be worth it.

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i desperately need like a canopy bed or a tent bed or an in-wall bed or something i need to be tucked in i need to be protected from the elements i need to be in a little hole in a den in a nest im just a prey animal trying to get by

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do you get it or do you not know anything

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call out post now

so while i was writing the book, i became violently suicidal.

this was mostly due to the fact that i had a very bad reaction to some meds and my brain stopped producing any serotonin. also i was in the last semester of grad school where it's actually illegal to feel anything but dread. so it wasn't going well.

somewhere in the fog of it i became aware i needed help. nobody was taking clients or my insurance. i didn't want to do inpatient care - it wasn't right for my needs. there's not really an "in between" stage between "inpatient" and "no care," but i was trying to do the right thing. i was trying to activate the chain of command that was my emergency plan. i knew i needed help now.

i used betterhelp.

i know, i know. i'm a straight-A student and so smart and so clever, how could i ever use something so blatantly bad. to be honest with you, i didn't feel particularly keen on it from the getgo - things that seem too good to be true usually are. also, if something online is free, the price is usually your privacy.

the thing is that there was kind of a global pandemic happening at the time and i worked 5 jobs alongside of being a fulltime student and also like writing a book on the side. it is a miracle that i even thought about getting help. i would love to tell you i had the mental wherewithal to like, process whether this was the right choice for me. mostly i was desperate. i was so suicidal that i was trying to find a reason to stay inside of fortune cookies. i was the kind of suicidal that looks like splatterpaint. i hadn't been that bad in an entire decade.

they took my data. i gave them it freely. somewhere out there, they have a dossier on me. on everything i survived. my story in little datapoints, scattergraphed beautifully.

the first woman told me that really i should be grateful, because (and this is a direct quote): "at least you're not anne frank." i said that i felt that statement was antisemitic, as anne frank's life and experience shouldn't be compared to like, a nonbinary lesbian in western massachusetts. the therapist said that i should try to use lucid dreaming to try to picture myself in an actually scary situation, like running from nazis.

i applied for another therapist. i was willing to accept the possibility that there was a bad apple in the bunch. the next therapist and i even laughed about how inappropriate that statement was. and then, in our next session: the new therapist said if i was struggling with body image issues, i should just work harder on my appearance. she spent 3 sessions in a row talking about how she was grieving, and made me memorize facts about her grandmother so "she can live on through my clients."

i am a three's-a-charm kind of person. okay, so what if the last person made me uncomfortable. i figured it was just a misunderstanding of priorities - she had felt she was sharing with me, i had felt like i had to take care of her. i applied for another therapist.

the last woman asked me to help her pray. she bowed her head. i stared at her, frozen, while she said: lord, i beg you: cure her. take the pain of being gay away from her.

i spent somewhere between 2.5 and 3 months on betterhelp. in that whole time, i was not getting the professional help i so desperately needed, even though i was fucking trying.

in the end, i survived this because i finally could get off the meds that were literally killing me. a request for a real therapist finally went through. i survived because my friends saved my life. because nick let me sob myself dry in his arms. because maddie took the razors out of my room when i asked them to. because grace slept over in my bed for like 3 weeks in a row since nobody trusted me not to hurt myself when i was alone. i survived because i got fucking lucky. because even when i was desperately suicidal, i was too old and too self-aware to take "you need to be prettier" as good advice.

the thing is that there's a 19 year old me who isn't like that. who would have heard "just think about how grateful you should be" and said - oh, i see. i would have assumed that is what it means to be in therapy: the same thing my abusers used to tell me. that i am just pretending and lazy. that i am ugly and unworthy.

betterhelp positioned itself to take advantage of an incredibly vulnerable community. it preys on desperation. it knows it is serving people who are not doing well mentally. it saw that there is a huge need for real, immediate, compassionate mental health care: and then it fucking takes your money and privacy.

i still get their ads on instagram. last night i watched as a woman in a pool pretends to talk to a different woman. they discuss her anxiety.

there's a 19 year old version of me, and she didn't survive this. she was too tired, and drowning. i almost fucking died. this thing almost fucking killed me.

in the ad, the woman playing the therapist takes a note on a clipboard and then nods once, sagely.

i have to admit it's a pretty scene. the steam and light coming off the pool water lands on the actresses. like this, it almost looks baptismal, holy.

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whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions

Meanwhile every time I watch a video clearly made by one guy in his living room and it has complete descriptive subtitles, I feel more love in me than I can contain.

I cannot BELIEVE you guys actually signing up to netflix just because account sharing was banned. You need to learn about cool websites with many beautiful women who would love you message you and send you downloadable files.

“oh they’re not taking away chronological dashboard, well everything’s okay then” they also said in the post they’re making reblogs collapsed (like comments on twitter) so you won’t see the full conversation in a post. they also won’t get rid of tumblr live despite it being an annoying and cancerous data-miner that isn’t legal in much of the world. they won’t even let you opt out of tumblr live for more than seven days. they implemented a terrible photo viewer that mimics tiktok and makes it so you can’t zoom in on images. they took away the ability to view prev tags. they’re making it so you have to sign in with your email to view almost any thing on tumblr. they’ve already made it so you have to sign in to send asks, even on anon. they’re slowly phasing out custom blog themes.

the things that make tumblr at all usable and favored by us– the older web blog features, the anonymity– that is still being taken away. it HAS been being taken away for some time now. i am urging you people to reveiwbomb the tumblr app. force them to acknowledge that users do not like these changes.