They're coping well, I see

A lot of Gaylor theories rested on pointing out inconsistencies between Taylor's lyrics and the public narrative about her romantic life, and it turns out a lot of the things they flagged WERE indeed hiding something - only that something was Matty Healy, not homosexuality. One of the plot twists of all time

self induced fetal alcohol syndrome

Average Breton reaction to finding an elder scroll

i normally put shit in tags but the way people are acting in the notes of this post are fucking weird. this is what weight loss does. this is not ozempic specific, and the same doctors that are calling this "ozempic face" have readily admitted that this is a normal feature of weight loss. calling someone an inhuman looking freak because they're experiencing the normal changes of major weight loss is fucking weird and cruel, and its not going to hurt the celebs who are taking this drug for aesthetic reasons - its only going to hurt the people around you who are dealing with their own body image issues y'all can have conversations about how awful it is that people feel pressured to take a drug like this to be treated better. y'all can talk about how shameful it is that this lifesaving medicine is being used for aesthetic purposes instead. but calling people ghouls for going through the changes that even non-drug assisted weight loss causes? please develop some compassion

"self-induced fetal alcohol syndrome" fuck you by the way, go back to 2011 /b/ with that shit

taylor swift’s work wouldn’t be nearly as insufferable if she wasn’t constantly trying to present herself as some sort of tortured underdog. like, okay, she has endured hardships, and a lot of people, especially white men, are shitty towards her for purely misogynistic reasons. that sucks, i agree. but she’s never been an underdog before. she was born to well-off parents who did everything they could to start her music career when she was barely even a teenager, an opportunity that lots of people would kill for. now she’s extremely famous and wealthy, and everything she releases is destined to sell millions of copies and receive glowing reviews in nearly every publication. she is not an underdog, and i have trouble believing she’s particularly “tortured.” she’s not even an alcoholic, despite claiming to be one on the opening track of her new album! people like to defend her lyrics by saying she’s just playing a character, which i don’t believe for a second, but even if she was, i don’t think i want to listen to someone like swift play the character of a tortured underdog, not when there’s so many musicians out there who are actually tortured underdogs. it comes across as hollow. “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” sung by one of the wealthiest, most famous, most critically acclaimed musicians in the world, who was born to loving parents who personally helped her start her career, who once said she’d never been to therapy because she “just feels very sane.” if you’re going to play a character, maybe pick one who we’re not supposed to pity.

She’s talking directly to her crazy investment banker dad who bulldozed her path to fame with these quotes, if she’s revealing anything about herself of substance at all like that. But I don’t know that she is.

It feels to me like she's been trying to square the circle of having a virtually frictionless path to the pinnacle of white suburban femininity in a society ruled by the protestant work ethic that insists that power and wealth are a marker of hard work, so being a billionaire means she *must* have worked and grinded and suffered, "right"? Except she didn't, and has very little if any in the way of life experience relatable to anyone who's ever faced genuine adversity, so the whole "tortured poet" thing comes off as insincere and unrelatable to most people.

I mean also so much of her fans' admiration is based on this idea that she's "just like them" and has faced adversity and overcome it which means they can too. Which is actually fine and positive except in this specific case where it's just risible.

But she has to keep it up because those fans aren't really gonna go for it if she's honest about how everything's lined up perfectly in her life and now she's on top of the world.

My ideal aesthetic is what I'm calling "sexy tomboy". That is to say, I am 100% femme through and through, but I want to look like what a straight man's idea of a "masculine woman" is. I wanna be masc in the way that LaCroix is fruit flavored, just a little extra something to make things a little more interesting

This you?

I don't think I'll ever recover from this one

It's not always necessary to use a thermonuclear bomb on an individual person, but it can be very funny under the right circumstances.

A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.

Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.

A couple notes that I forgot when I originally posted this:

It's also a common symptom of schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, but often doesn't respond to antipsychotics. In addition, in schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, anhedonia generally tends to "come and go", as opposed to depressive disorders, where when untreated, it often doesn't let up for months or years. This can make it more difficult to spot and treat than in depressive disorders.

ADHD can also have "come and go" anhedonia as a symptom, and ADHD medication has mixed results with alleviating it.

An early warning sign is if you've tried the "enrichment in your enclosure" by rolling out something new and fun or something you rarely do that generally brings you joy, and the result is an emotional reaction you can describe as "null".

By the way, being able to enjoy things doesn't mean you don't have depression. Atypical depression has the following characteristics:

Whereas typical melancholic depression looks more like:

"Atypical" doesn't mean it's rare, by the way, just that the other kind was defined first. It shows up in conjunction with anxiety disorders a lot, and bipolar depressive episodes often look more atypical than melancholic.

Just wanted to let people know because if you're here thinking "I'm not depressed, I feel like shit all the time but I can still enjoy things," that might not be the case!

Let's Talk About Missing Persons

So, I've seen this post circulating last week, and a few others like it in the past year. I think this probably needs to be discussed every few years, and it feels like time.

First, a few caveats: there are reports on the post that Abby has been located and is fine, so no need to reblog and also that's great news, I'm very happy she is safe. Second, I did not especially doubt the veracity of the post, so I'm not impugning the people who made and posted it, but I also declined to reblog it for reasons I'll get into. Third, I know that especially in marginalized communities it can be dangerous to involve the police, and that Missing White Woman Syndrome means it can be difficult to get media coverage. I understand why Abby's community may have chosen to search for her in the way they did.

However, for everyone's safety, I do not link any missing persons post that requires you to contact an individual to report the missing person's whereabouts. If the poster doesn't ask you to contact the police or a known missing persons organization, I won't do it.

This is for the safety of the missing person.

When you see a post with someone's photo, name, and last known whereabouts, and you are asked to contact an individual -- a family member, partner, friend, etc -- what you are being asked to do is report on the whereabouts of one person you don't know to another person you don't know. You don't know that the person you're talking to isn't an abusive partner or parent, a stalker, or a person who means them material harm. One of the Insta accounts in the missing image doesn't appear to exist, and another has no bio and very little captioning on their images. I couldn't verify that Abby even knew these people.

Again: when I looked at the image, it looked sincere to me. I didn't doubt those people were earnestly searching for a friend they were worried about. But also, an abuser doesn't look like an abuser until they do. So I don't make exceptions, because a missing person is missing but a victim outed to their abuser has strong odds of being murdered. The most dangerous time in the life of an abused person is when they are leaving their abuser. Even if a victim simply logs on to say "Hey, I'm fine, these people mean me harm" the abuser has now flushed them out of hiding, and manipulated them into making a public statement.

If you can't verify positively that the person searching does not mean the missing person harm, you should not be circulating a post, full stop. At the very least, if the community doesn't wish for the help of the police (understandable) or can't get the help of an organization or community (frequent), the missing persons poster should advise you to speak to the missing person, not the searcher, and notify them they're being sought, as long as it's safe for both you and them to do so.

This isn't intuitive. We want to help, and search posters like that tug on the heartstrings. We know that when the police get involved even in something this innocuous, it can be perilous for everyone. But in situations where someone is so vulnerable, we have to concern ourselves first with harm reduction, which in this case means not spreading someone's photo with a stranger's contact information on it.

I'm glad Abby was found and is fine and that her searchers were in earnest. But that will not always be the case, and it's important to remember that.

mfers will say "im against book banning in schools and libraries!" and then turn around and say ao3 needs to be censored

The people arguing to ban and/or remove content from Ao3 are completely and utterly convinced that censorship is different when they do it.

hi person with a brain here, if you paid attention to the news you'd see there's a correlation between books that get banned and the specific subject matter they tackle usually topics involving racism, sexism, sexual education and queer/trans narratives. this is for the express purpose of keeping children ignorant in order to indoctrinate them with right wing conservative ideologies and is not comparable to people saying that smut fiction of child actors should not exist.

The people arguing to ban and/or remove content from Ao3 are completely and utterly convinced that censorship is different when they do it.

Okay but smut of child actors shouldn't exist??? Like that's true. Where are you living that people should be allowed to make porographic content of children???

People should be allowed to write whatever they want. This is freedom of speech.

By the way, I've yet to see proof that "smutty RPF of child actors" is remotely common or easy to find on AO3, or at all popular, as opposed to being the hobby of like three or four creepy dudes who are the only people giving each other kudos. My answer about banning it wouldn't change even if it were more common, but as it is I think y'all are being disingenuous by bringing it up at every opportunity like it's as common as reader inserts or coffee shop AUs.

You think you can force everyone to agree that those fics should be censored, but you can't. Because censorship isn't different when you do it.

My good sir I had a mortgage before any of those characters were published 💀

I know who exactly three of these people are. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Herald of Valdemar.

I wanted to be Menolly with her entire Faire of fire lizards.

I wanted to be a Starfleet officer.

Nita Callahan

The animorphs desperately needed me on the team.

I was several different characters in different eras of Pern.

i was just trying to join the Baby-Sitter's Club.

Carrie White

mfers will say "im against book banning in schools and libraries!" and then turn around and say ao3 needs to be censored

The people arguing to ban and/or remove content from Ao3 are completely and utterly convinced that censorship is different when they do it.

hi person with a brain here, if you paid attention to the news you'd see there's a correlation between books that get banned and the specific subject matter they tackle usually topics involving racism, sexism, sexual education and queer/trans narratives. this is for the express purpose of keeping children ignorant in order to indoctrinate them with right wing conservative ideologies and is not comparable to people saying that smut fiction of child actors should not exist.

The people arguing to ban and/or remove content from Ao3 are completely and utterly convinced that censorship is different when they do it.

From The Adventures of Nip and Tuck: Just Cats. By Elizabeth Francis and illustrated by Barbara Roe Hicklin, 1959.

Oh here she comes

Watch out boys she's the albatross

The Twilight Zone - Season 2 Episode 18 (1961) “The Odyssey of Flight 33”

Astrology's weird bc if you've only ever had fun with it and come across someone w seething hatred for it you're understandably like, what the fuck is this person's problem? But also if you've seen someone take it Too Far, any mention of it understandably becomes a red flag

Like imagine if you really liked Pokemon and you're like, "I really don't see why people would hate this unless they're just assholes for no reason?" Like it's a totally normal opinion opinion to have. But also imagine if you took a quiz and learned you were a Bug type and people stopped talking to you because they were like "It's in your nature to be emotionally manipulative." It would also be totally normal to be like "Oh okay fuck Pokemon fans then."

Now you may be like, "But the latter situation doesn't happen!" and that tells me you are fortunate because you have not dealt with the worst that the west coast of America has to offer

All this is to say, I too was once a "Let people have fun" person, and then I met gay people from Portland and now I am not that person

Horniness is not intrinsically less pure than any other human motivation

"He only made this art because he was horny!" ...Yeah, and? You only made a sandwich because you were hungry.