The ugliest part about trauma triggered by non-physical abuse is how keeps itself going.
If you’ve been emotionally abused, you start to numb yourself because not feeling anything is the only way to avoid it. Additionally, your trauma tricks you to see emotions as a weakness. Because otherwise, your only coping skill would be gone.
If you’ve been psychologically abused, you either start to justify it by lowering your self-esteem or you build up an unhealthy amount of it to wear as an amour. Additionally, you either think you’re not good enough to deserve anyone’s attention or you’re too good for anyone’s attention because that’s the only way you can integrate your experience.
Trauma is ugly. It tricks you to make false and extreme assumptions about yourself and life in general. And it forces you to keep them up because otherwise your experiences might strain you or break you more than they already did. Trauma protects you. It gives you a false sense of safety because it was the only thing that you could do back then to save (a bit of) yourself.
But honestly, as a cptsd survivor, let me tell you…
Don’t listen to your trauma.
Don’t listen to that voice which tells you emotions are a weakness and kindness is dumb.
Don’t listen to that voice which tells you that you either have to be better or worse then everybody else because otherwise you wouldn’t have had to endure what you did.
Because it’s just not true.
Emotions aren’t a weakness. Yes, they hurt you. And they always will. But they will also offer you so many good things which are completely worth it.
The warm feeling after being kind to someone else. The stolen moment in the morning when the sun is rising and you know that today will be a beautiful day. The happiness of listening to your favorite song…
These are all emotions that trauma is often shutting off, too.
Emotional abuse doesn’t happen because your emotions make you weak. People don’t pick you because they see your emotions as a weakness but rather because they are unable to deal with their own negative emotions by themselves. Abusing you is to them the same thing that numbness is to you – a way to deal with the bad things that happened to them.
And you don’t desrve to be miserable just because other people are. You deserve all the good things emotions can bring.
And I know that your trauma voice is telling you that it’s too dangerous. That feelings are a nuisance. That you’re somehow better than others for not feeling anything because it makes you more rational.
But that’s not true. It’s simply your trauma voice. That part of you which is still so afraid of being hurt and abused again.
But there are other ways to prevent that than being numb. You can learn how to keep these people away from yourself. You can learn how to recognise who treats you and your emotions with respect and who only views them as a tool for themselves to feel better. And you deserve it.
Psychological abuse isn’t an indicator of your worth. It’s nothing but a thing other people operationalize again to feel better about themselves or cope with something they can’t handle. It’s a mirror of the abusers worries, insecurities and weaknesses.
And honestly, believe me when I say that you’re more than that. That your self worth is not, like your trauma voice probably tells you, depended on the actions of your abuser. Because again. That voice is only trying to protect you. It’s nothing but your fear of being treated like that again which turns into an expectation. Because after all – that’s again your trauma voice – it’s better to be afraid and avoid something then to risk being hurt again.
But that’s also not true. The same thing that protects you is now holding you back. It prevents you from trusting others, from getting close to them. And you don’t deserve to spend a life in isolation just because you’re afraid that something will happen which might never happen again.
There’s also a different way. You can again learn how to recognise people who want to abuse you like that. You can learn how to spot people who lift themselves up by putting others down. And instead of avoiding everybody else, of doubting that you’re good enough… You can just avoid those who want you to have this wrong believe because it gives them some sense of worth.
(This whole post is based on my own experience and observations. Only parts of it are based on factual scientific knowledge. If you don’t agree with something, feel free to comment but have in mind that this is my personal experience I’m talking about which I in no way claim to be universal.)
LMAOOO. All right Ima try and explain this succinctly as possible. Basically this random-ass ‘young adult’ book, ‘Handbook for Mortals,’ hit the NYT Bestseller List on the #1 Spot for the Hardcover Young Adult Category this morning. Only problem is that literally NO ONE had ever heard of this book before, like nada marketing, publicity, etc. Zilch. It was supposedly published by a company, GeekNation who only announced their publishing arm back in July.
To hit the Bestseller list, the book would have had to sold at least 5,000~ copies within the first week, but a few people were quick to point out a major discrepancy where the book was literally out of stock everywhere in all major retailers, like legit you couldn’t find it on B&N, Amazon, and so on.
YA Twitter basically crowd-sourced an investigation where a few anonymous booksellers revealed that they had gotten calls first asking if they were NYT-reporting bookstores, and then received bulk orders of the book but not caring when the books arrived. Soooo essentially what happened was that this book scammed it’s way on to the top of the NYT Bestseller List by figuring out which bookstores reported sales to the NYT (to determine what hits the bestsellers list, the NYT’s methodology takes a sample from various bookstores, and this supposedly changes every week). They then ordered thousands of copies of the book from those stores and only those stores – and by doing so, this was all a scheme in the hopes of driving the book to the top of the bestseller list.
The main impetus for hitting the bestseller list was for getting a better chance to have a movie adaptation of the book made with a label like ‘#1 NYT Bestselling Book!’ which would have made it more appealing to potential investors. Butttt all of this was discovered and the NYT sent out a revision where they removed the book on the list a few hours ago.
Someone also compared an excerpt of the book to an excerpt from ‘My Immortal,’ so now there’s a conspiracy theory that the author, Lani Sarem, is actually the author behind that fanfic. She’s also a former music manager who worked with bands like Blues Traveler, and the official Blues Traveler account weighed in and claimed that she was fired for ‘pulling these kind of stunts.’
This doesn’t even cover half the craziness. Some of my other favorite parts:
– The cover wasn’t even revealed until the beginning of August
– The ONLY chatter on Twitter before this was a little blog tour they’d put together, but nothing else
– The distribution company behind this is the same people who distributed Milo Yadablahblah
– Whoever was behind this knew August was the best time to push a book onto the list (as opposed to September, which is bananas)
– Whoever was behind this knew the EXACTLY how many books to order form each store (the number that alerts NYT to start giving you a hard time is like 80 books at indies, so they went around and ordered 79 each.)
– But they were dumb enough to wildly over-order (they ordered over 18,000, over double what it would’ve taken)
– Also dumb enough to straight-up tell the booksellers “This is for an event but it’s okay if it doesn’t arrive”
– The book only has ONE blurb. One.
– No trade reviews. No blurbs from other authors within the community
– The ONE blurb is from an “international bestselling author”
– No. She’s a self-pub romance author who’s besties with LS
– You find all that out in the foreword (who puts a foreword on a YA novel???)
– Also the main character is 25 and there isn’t a single teen in this supposed YA novel
– Also also the cover may have been plagiarized
– Also also also the book knocked The Hate U Give to #2 and Everything, Everything off the list entirely, so people were maaaaaaaad
– And finally, when confronted with all this, the author tried to pull a “#KeepYAKind uwu” in her response to PW.
no man, the the BEST part was the imdb page, which was all set up and ready to go for the movie based on the NYT best-selling book! and who was set to play the lady lead in this movie? THE AUTHOR.
it’s like she said, ok, how can i become a movie star? i know, i’ll write a shitty YA book and get my friends to scam it onto the bestseller list so the movie’s basically a done deal! starring ME! what could possibly go wrong??
Ok, well, really they only have 3 different The Mask Animated Series tapes, but why do they have so many copies? Who donated these and why did they have them? Oh, fuck, now I have a lot of Mask tapes…
69 Mask tapes to be exact. They were all unopened. I don’t even have a VCR. Even if I did, I wouldn’t need to buy every copy they had. Why did I do this? Well, let’s get them out and play with them…
This is not very much fun.
Every tape comes with the most incredible coupon. Some tapes actually came with two, so thank you very much, packaging errors.
The true bummer here is that these coupons expired 20 years ago. The $3 refund does not appear to be worth the effort and I wonder if anyone ever bothered. You had to buy 4 Totino’s pizzas, pizza rolls, or hearty pockets between 10/24/95 and 5/31/96, include the upc from the packages, the receipts from when you purchased those awful food products with the awful food products circled, this coupon, the proof of purchase tab from the Mask box and the receipt from when you purchased the tape during the previously mentioned dates. If anyone did this for $3, I would like to hear from you. Print out this post, take a picture of you eating the printout instead of a Totino’s party pizza, pizza rolls, or hearty pocket, and email it to me with a short story describing how you spent your hard earned $3. Anyway, I guess I’ll epoxy the tapes together and start coating them in resin.
Yes, and do something with those stupid coupons.
TOTINO’S PIZZA ROLLS SMMOKIN’! Now do it several times.
I can’t just throw away the boxes either. That would be terribly wasteful.
Surprisingly, I had more than enough tapes to do what I wanted to do, but the boxes came up short, so the other side of this had to be a little different.
I suppose this is good, because one day I might want to know what I’m missing out on, having ruined nearly all of the precious tapes. I can just look at this side and read what the episodes were about. I think I watched some of this cartoon when I was a kid. I fucking loved the movie when it came out, so I’m pretty sure I watched this show. Anyway, what’s next?
Oh. I guess I’m really bad at taking pictures of the process. It’s a bookcase. There was only one tape I didn’t have to open.
Maybe I’ll get a VCR one day so I can watch this tape.
There’s just one more thing.
Bookcases are usually just so damn boring.
Now I need Dark Horse to print some nice Library Editions of The Mask, because the out of print Omnibuses are Fuck That expensive online. Maybe if I hadn’t spent so much money on old tapes, epoxy, resin, glue, and christmas lights, I could buy one or two of the omnibuses in questionable condition, but then where would I put the books? I now have the perfect place to put as many Library Editions as it takes. Get on it, Dark Horse.
if this face invokes a mixture of primal fear, intrigue, and nostalgia for you then you were truly around for the golden era of gw2:
a lot of folkz are saying “wtf is this” so i will explain
if you were on tarnished coast before megaservers were a thing, there was this special welcome greeter waiting for you in the heart of the mists and his name was goo goo gaa gaa
he was a max height max build human with This array of facial features and the tiniest head possible and he was 99% OF THE TIME. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. just afking by the heart of the mists entrance portal right there to greet you
this caused a frenzy on TC. he became a meme! everybody loved our server regular, goo goo gaa gaa!
and so he Spread
other people started making similar alts either to AFK with the head boss himself or in his absence so as to ensure no one’s day was left without the presence of a goo goo gaa gaa or associate. people started to make other “meme shock” characters as well as you can see from this sylvari here. here’s goo goo gaa gaa with another server regular, Skinned Clown, who i’m pretty sure still actively plays the game:
also, while alts made by other people were in abundance, it’s worth nothing that the real live goo goo gaa gaa was not just a singular throwaway alt. the person who made him was dedicated. like, reALLY, REALLY DEDICATED:
you could occasionally see them out levelling their various goo goo gaa gaa troupe alts or afking in lions arch or whatever which was INFINITELY scarier and more jarring than witnessing them in the heart of the mists as goo goo gaa gaa was a walking liminal space and the mists were the only context in which he felt normal. i have friends who will literally tell stories about the actually terrifying times they saw this guy somewhere that WASNT the pvp lobby and the way they speak of it is with reverence for this legend
i don’t really know Where Are They Now? and whether they still play the game or not but on my closing note here i really wanna emphasize how prevalent and legendary this dude is. like this person afked on this alt constantly in the mists for what im pretty sure was MONTHS. TC was both beside themselves but also incredibly used to his presence. every time any of my friends entered the mists i’d hear via guild chat “yep, there he is again”. goo goo gaa gaa predated megaservers, the wardrobe, edge of the mists, and instanced living stories. he thrived during the time of pvp skins and transmutation stones and gw2 having an actual roleplay community. we joke about like, horses or bugged things being gw2 cryptids but goo goo gaa gaa is the one, true, original alpha cryptid of gw2 and absolutely always will be.
Concept: an RPG setting where the ruling class consists of talking spiders with a penchant for fancy hats. Not anthropomorphic spiders – just regular-looking spiders, about the size of a largeish dog, that are sapient and capable of speech. The setting isn’t a horrifying arachnid dystopia or anything; it’s actually a fairly conventional high fantasy milieu, except that all the royals, most of the hereditary nobility, and a fair chunk of the gentry are spiders, with all the cultural strangeness that implies.
(Stairs are considered lower class – the spiders climb, of course – so wealthy humans build multi-level dwellings with no stairs and develop their free-climbing skills in order to imitate their eight-legged neighbours. The spiders, for their part, pointedly ignore the handholds cunningly disguised as decorative moulding, because it’s rude to draw attention to a person’s disability.)
But what about the servants? How does the human maid get upstairs to dust Lord Huntsman’s rooms?
Two options:
1. The servants’ passage have stairs, obviously – but of course, no gentleman would be caught dead rubbing shoulders with the help.
2. The setting has made great strides in folding-ladder technology. (Just don’t leave one sitting out in plain view – so déclassé!)
So my understanding of medieval history and society isn’t the best, BUT to my knowledge, feudalism and the social hierarchy of the time was at least partially an answer to the question of how to fund, maintain, and equip heavy cavalry. (And heavy infantry, and castles,and share power..). Okay, it’s way more complicated than that, but the interesting thing for us about the spider upper class is
1. Did (at least some of) the spider nobility historically fight as knights and ride horses?
OR
2. Was the development of spider nobility due to some other useful development, militarily, socially, ect.?
As fun as it is to imagine spiders riding around horses it seems a bit impractical? At least in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a spider holding a lance like a knight. But maybe they’re really good scouts. Spiders are probably naturally attuned to defending, if not managing, a castle, as it’s all one big death trap. So it’s not impossible that they have a similar role to human nobility.
I guess it also depends on what species of spiders we’re talking about, but that could lead to some regional/national flavor. Why people lead by bird-eating spiders developed differently than say black widows, or jumping spiders, will be the subject of historians and sociologists, even pop books such as Guns, Germs, and Silk.
That’s an excellent question, and one I’m going to toss back to the crowd as a prompt: how did spiders end up dominating the ranks of nobility in this setting?
There was very little central authority among the humans as in the not too distant past a great empire had fallen leaving the largest human nations as petty kingdoms.
The spider take over however was not by force but was economic. Spider silk is incredibly strong. Cloth woven from it is as strong as a Kevlar vest. Once the most intelligent spiders noticed how useful the silk was to humans it wasn’t long before they began to sell it. Spider armor and ropes dominated the markets allowing the spiders to transition to other goods, notably arms.
By this point high ranking and rich spiders were entering the human nobility. Some were gifted titles in return for service, others simply bought their way in. After this it would only take a couple generations for the spiders to begin consolidating new spider centric Kingdoms.
Of course it was not the great noble spiders that were making silk for the market. That “honor” belonged to the spider commoners, who before the adoption of human hierarchy served because they were smaller than the soon to be nobles and did not want to be eaten.
I think this one is my favourite because it posits a hierarchy among the spiders themselves. Historically, hunting was often a privilege reserved for the nobility (hence the development of “heroic poacher” myths in the mould of Robin Hood et al.); here, that practice is reflected in the non-web-building hunting spiders lording over their web-building subordinates. Presumably webs function as an analogue for argriculture in this scenario, with web-building serfs tending their hunting masters’ “crops”. Many high fantasy settings feature giant, non-sapient insects – perhaps the weavers raise them as livestock? What would a spider noble’s hunting preserve look like?
(I’m picturing differences in fashions as well. The “noble” hunting spiders would be as described above; the weaving spiders, conversely, would on average be about the size of a hefty housecat – with adorably squeaky voices to boot – and, rather than the high, stiff hats of the nobility, would favour soft cloth and knit caps in a variety of patterns. Can you picture a housecat-size orb weaver spider sporting a beanie or a cabbie hat?)
Now here’s a fun one: if there are spider commoners, how did the respective species’ social classes integrate – or not, as the case may be – following the spider nobility’s economic takeover of the human petty states?
I don’t know but all I can think of now is the idea of spider commoners starting a revolution to seize the means of production…because they are the means of production. If that doesn’t already upset the idea of the huntsmen spiders being in charge in the first place.
An important rule of RPG setting design: if there’s a class revolution in the offing, position your timelines such that it doesn’t boil over into open war until after the player characters have had a chance to get invested. If at all possible, arrange matters in play so the inciting incident can somehow be their fault.
(Honestly, if you’re not interested in affording your players the opportunity to be personally responsible for kicking off the Arachno-Communist Revolution, what are you even doing here?)
I’m fan art-ing someone’s basic concept for an RPG.
“I say Mr. Weaver, you are terribly behind quota this month.”
When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.
There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.
But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.
You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.
It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”
Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.
Still call it out and question it ….
Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change.
The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.
If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.
I was awful as well, and change was a long and hard process for me. I was able to do it only because the people around me gave me the opportunity to grow and learn from my mistakes, without giving up on me or berating me more harshly than I deserved. My extreme hatred towards purity culture comes from knowing how the people involved in it would have treated me during that process of growth, or more frighteningly, how I’d probably be treated now if my past was more publicly accessible.
i'm very gay. i'd like a few dollars. 