@22degreehalo / 22degreehalo.tumblr.com
long distance mutuals <- used to be in the same fandom together and have both moved on to other fandoms but stay mutuals and wave at each other when passing by (scrolling on dash) and catch up when we can (liking each others posts)
Gaslighting isn’t the same as lying.
Gaslighting also isn’t lying a lot, or lying and deflecting the lying by shaming the victim for not believing the lie.
Gaslighting is a long con. It is a practice of ongoing emotional/mental abuse, that doesn’t just involve lying, but manipulating or altering someone’s reality in order to make them question both the truth, and more importantly, question their own mental and cognitive wellbeing.
The reason that it’s called gaslighting is because the tactic was demonstrated in a 1944 film called “Gaslight” starring Ingrid Bergman. In the film, Bergman‘s character’s husband tries to make her have a mental breakdown.
It goes well beyond just lying. Gaslighting is a setup to make the victim so confused that they’re unable to trust themselves and their own perceptions of the world around them or even themselves.
It’s beyond time to stop calling run of the mill dishonesty gaslighting.
I want to offer some perspective here.
To start with: Hi! I am a victim of actual gaslighting! No, I will not share details of how, because I don't owe any of you details of my past abuse! :D
The key factor in all of this, and what I feel people miss (OP also goes into it but I want to re-stress it because y'all still don't seem to get it):
Gaslighting makes you question reality.
It makes you mistrust your own perception on a fundamental level.
Not just "oh I can't trust this person's recounting of events" or the usual day-to-day unreliability of human memory. It changes the way you think. It changes the way you interact with the world and your own mind.
lying is a breach of trust and still a very serious issue to deal with. If you've been lied to, that sucks and I'm sorry, but it's a shitty situation all its own and you do not need to justify being pissed by twisting it into something so much worse. You don't need to be a victim of The Worst Thing for your anger and hurt to be valid. All gaslighting is lying but not all lying is gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a form of torture that uses constant, deliberate lies and deceptions to break someone's mind. I have been a decade and change in starting to recover. I do not know if I ever fully can. It is such a violent, destructive process and I'm begging all of you to recognise the harm you do when you equate it to common lying.
Thank you OP for giving the history and highlighting this. I just feel passionately and had the spoons to offer my personal perspective.
Another point that may affect definitions...
The husband in the movie didn't really believe any of the things he was saying. He knew the lights were flickering and she didn't steal any of that. And none of those lies, in themselves, were the *point.* He lied about facts he knew to be true specifically to *make her think she was crazy.*
Arguably, if a person/organisation/government/whatever truly believes what they're saying, even if it seems straightforwardly ludicrous, it's not gaslighting: they're just being obstinate, if not wilfully ignorant. Likewise, refusing to believe someone's lived experiences isn't inherently gaslighting: they probably just think you're intentionally lying to them.
But it foes further. If the lies themselves are the point, you could argue that that's not really gaslighting, either. When a company continually insists that, idk, its products never malfunction, while it might make you feel a bit crazy that they're telling you the thing you're seeing with your very eyes is impossible, that's not *why* they're saying it. It's just maybe a convenient side-effect.
Gaslighting, as an abuse tactic, is an *active attempt to distort the reality of a person* by lying about little, independently unnecessary things. It is a deliberate, controlled attack delivered over a prolonged period of time. The primary if not sole intention is to weaken and harm the victim, not merely to save face or muddy waters among a greater public.
I've said 'arguably' a lot, so: yeah, I might be narrowing the focus a bit too much. The effects of the above actions can be every bit as damaging as intentional gaslighting. But I think there is some value in separating out its meaning within a domestic abuse context.
There are currently ~2300 works in AO3 tagged with "Created Using Generative AI"
I'll be upfront with my opinion, which mirrors my opinion in regards to my field: using AI will only hasten your own obsolescence. The point of fanfiction is not to crank out fics, but rather to enjoy the hobby and communities of writing and fandom.
To steal something I saw elsewhere: Why would I bother to read something nobody could be bothered to write?
in general, I would expect AI-generated fanfic to be bad at being a fanfic. text-to-image has a lot of value in letting people create things they couldn't otherwise, but text-to-text has much less opportunity for that
that said, if I got a compelling recommendation, I'm not opposed to the idea. maybe it's got entertaining weirdness like a lot of older AIs, maybe it's an interesting insight into the workings of the AI or patterns it found in relevant works, maybe it has some other kind of appeal
I certainly don't think it's anyone's place to tell others what they should seek to get out of fandom. if someone's just trying to fill their page with whatever an AI spits out, yeah, that's probably not going to benefit anyone. but if someone asks an AI to tell them some stories, reads through them, picks ones they like, and decides to share them with others... hey, why not?
also, a reminder: if you want people to apply a tag when it's warranted, you need to not harass them for using that tag
I've fiddled around with some AI generators, and my general experience is that, yeah: generated fanfic is quite bad. It's very generic and OOC, doesn't really have a 'point' to reach (being more just a sequence of events), and doesn't get very creative with the wordings.
But the process of trying it has still been interesting! AI is a toy, and experimenting with it can create fascinating results. For example, AI generators that respond to your writing with a line or two work a bit like randomised prompts to me: a twist of something unexpected for you to roll with and 'yes, and' or alternatively regenerate, rewrite, or just revert.
Sometimes, in all this, it's spat up stuff that I kinda wanted to share. If something like that made me laugh... why shouldn't I share it? It's probably more creative than the stuff that gets posted here to Incorrect Quotes blogs, much of which is literally randomised.
I also think the whole 'if nobody bothered to write it' quip doesn't really work. A lot of AI affictionados put *heaps* of effort into refining and tweaking their generator. While I'm no programmer, I've had best results with character.ai, where people can and do pick precisely what to feed into the generator and test it, marking responses up and down to guide it. I did as such with one particular character I like, and when it started getting more in-character (and funny!)... I was proud! I'd worked on something and made it better! And because of all that, I had some genuinely funny conversations with it. They're not very fanfictiony since they're text roleplay style and usually involve me as a self-insert talking to them... but don't people rightly post roleplays and self-insert fics to Ao3?
Personally, I write fanfiction for fun, for the challenge, and for the expression. I got to do all of that in different degrees in fine-tuning the character.ai bot, albeit not to the same extent as writing fic. But I'm not worried about 'hasten[ing] my obsolescence.' I do not believe the mentality of humankind to seek connection through art will chance so easily, and given the uncountable multitudes of ways humans have found to create or see meaning in human creations, I just don't believe that one could ever truly *obsolete* another.
It'd sorta make me sad if far fewer people became interested in reading fanfic... but it's FANFIC. By definition it is most interesting only to people familiar with canon!!! I am already deliberately and consciously obsoleting myself!!! In decades on I can only imagine I'll still be writing fanfic, and if there's any great obstacle to my finding a willing audience, it's almost certainly going to be my brain getting nostalgically stuck on some old and obscure fandom that merely a handful of people on earth have ever cared about, not the existence of some other way of creating stories.
maybe I just. shouldn't even try to read femslash. lmfao.
I wonder what it's like to truly love something and not have to either a) constantly performatively express your shame and guilt about liking it online, or b) never mention it IRL because it's weird nerd shit that'd be off-putting and get you bullied over offline.
I guess Star Trek was the most recent one like that for me...? And I still enjoy it. But my special interest is long over. It's just a good show that I like in a nerdy way. And I still couldn't share that with any of my family since they have/had no interest and kinda made fun of me a bit for it. (also that was like. 2010 lmfaoooo)
It's just. nice when you can have good feelings and feel fulfilled and like life is worth living over something. and that's just okay. you can just say it. and be happy that you feel that way.
I wish so fucking much I had just enjoyed LOTR when I read it. I've tried so so so many times to get into the fandom and I just can't.
me when I got the Harry Potter autism instead of the LOTR autism ig.
I know I'm being stupid I just wish there were more posts about what JKR's up to (god that holocaust revisionism stuff was just. especially despicable) that doesn't try to throw in these completely unnecessary cheap jabs about 'oooh look at meeee, I never liked Harry potter which makes me sooo much smarter than all you guys as 8-year-olds lololol'
It literally just has nothing to do with what she's doing now whatsoever, and it pushes this association that people who hate her think her books sucked (and thus the opposite, that if you liked her books it means you think she's a-okay), all while promoting that awful assumption that only bad people can make bad creative works, or that a good creative work couldn't come from a bad person. It's just stupid and unhelpful in every way and I hate it.
And like fwiw I do in fact fully understand that not hating HP means that I'm a terrible fucking person who is just rotted in some way deep inside because if I felt emotions like a good and functioning person I would. There's something wrong and harmful about me and I should rightly not have any contact with other queer people because my very presence is hurtful and cruel and disturbing.
I mean, I'm aro/ace. So that was all true since the day I was born. Harry Potter didn't change that. It's just the evidence of my true nature, the source behind my feelings, that I needed to realise that all the people who acted on me based on that - all the other girls who hated me in primary school, all the people I've worked with who were burdened and diminished by my proximity - were right.
I'll say it as many times as it needs to be said. There is absolutely miniscule actual harm that comes from engaging with Harry Potter in 2024. JK Rowling does not need money. Anything sent her way is less than a rounding error. And the book series was literally EVERYWHERE in the 90s and 2000s. Like it or not, it DID impact a whole generation of people - pretending that never happened is completely absurd, if not outright irresponsible. It happened. It's just a fact. Harry Potter is mainstream. There is nothing that can be done to 'promote' it. It's already there.
What all this obsession with HP on tumblr is about? An easy way to smugly define Good People from Bad People. Because if you *really* cared about trans people enough, you'd hate everything associated with Harry Potter. Regardless of how much you adored it when you were 8 and went to Harry Potter parties with your family all dressed up quoting book lines at one another in your most precious childhood memories because for once your special interest actually aligned with the people closest to you. No, all those positive associations should have been deleted instantly. If you *cared enough*, it would just *happen*.
Which is why a whole slew of people who previously had earnestly reblogged posts about Moral OCD and how bad tumblr can be about it were suddenly cackling about how buying Hogwarts Legacy was comparable to *refusing to throw The One Ring into Mordor, starting a war that would kill millions.* And how donating to a pro-trans charity (an act that would have VASTLY more impact than aforementioned rounding error) is comparable to 'donating to a pro-elf charity' in the wake of that.
Because tumblr doesn't actually give a shit about autistics or OCD sufferers. When we complain about stuff that they also dislike, they proudly reblog that and rage in the notes about how selfish and cruel and Individualist those other people on tumblr are!!! But the *second* they get to paint themselves as the ones with '''''good thoughts and feelings'''''' they take it, and make up posts about how HP likers 'believe they're the main character and everything should revolve around them.'
Is it actually about whether something causes harm? Or is it about dividing the world into Inherently Good People and Inherently Bad People? Is it actually about doing real good for the community and making the world a better place? Or is it about shaming people with the Wrong Emotions until they fucking hate themselves and spend hours upon hours ruminating on end trying to change themselves because their inability to let go of positive Harry Potter feelings is OBVIOUSLY evidence of a truly inescapably evil and cruel and wretched identity that the world would be better off without?
Which is it, actually? When it actually feels a little bit good to feel like you're on the Right Side of all of this, for once?
Seriously, the people who try to direct people away from writing about Harry Potter by suggesting other modern 'progressive' witchy/magical books are just. Out of touch with reality.
Imagine telling someone 'uhhhhh sorry, but that city you grew up in is committing some pretty serious crimes right now... 😬 instead, why not write about this city in Greece instead? It has a similar climate but is super queer-friendly!! 😊'
(And, yes: Harry Potter is inextricable from my childhood. I am autistic. This is the autism website. Amazingly, special interests are not just ordinary throwaway hobbies, and the term actually means something relevant to neurodivergent people.)
JK Rowling has used her billionaire legal team to silence a Jewish woman for telling the truth about her contempt for trans victims of the Holocaust.
Scotland’s network of “freedom of speech” organisations, as per usual, have nothing to say about the use of wealth to gag critics of the wealthy.
However fast they race to condemn the LGBT+ community for saying the names of those who harm us. Statements at the ready to insist that transphobes no one wants to work with anymore must be given every possible opportunity to gain from their bigotry.
But it's not the billionaires who are being silenced, as our media breathlessly echo their every hateful proclamation.
It's journalists and activists forced to publicly humiliate themselves under the weight and the threat of billionaire legal teams or be driven into destitution.
We deserve better. Freedom of speech needs to mean something
The Streisand Effect strikes
This will swiftly become one of the primary things JK Rowling is remembered for. Trying to erase crimes of the Holocaust against trans people and then silencing Jewish journalists for calling her out.
With your help we can make sure JK Rowling is known as a Holocaust denier first, author of mediocre children's books second
Also worth noting, from the Buzzfeed article on this
Holocaust denier first, transphobe second, racist third, twitter bully fourth... let's push the children's books as far down the list as we can.
Literally what even does it matter whether her books were good or not? If someone (me!) thinks the books were good (as they were a life-defining Special Interest in my childhood), am I not still capable of hating her as a holocaust-denying TERF?
the homestucks could not fight they snapped the stick before making a dent in the piñata
poetic
the inability to destroy the green sun is a canon event
I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.
You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.
But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.
So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".
But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).
Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.
Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.
"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.
So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?
The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).
In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.
And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)
This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.
The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).
This one is just confusing.
The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...
And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).
This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.
Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.
References
Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.
McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.
Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.
This is the hot tumblr discourse that I’m here for.
Ok maybe I'm going crazy here but,, do "can-opener" and Chaenophryne look kinda similar to anyone else? like for such a seemingly random common name I could conceivably believe that Chaenophryne could go through several layers of mispronunciation and come out as "can-opener"?
is it possible McAllister just picked an English word that sounds vaguely similar?
this is how it feels being in a small fandom
i stopped the dental technician while he was applying fluoride to ask what the fuck the flavour was supposed to be. And he was like oh I was wondering that too. It says it's walterberry.
this is a way better model... you'll still get transphobic & intersexist drs of course but i prefer this to male / female or even having separate questions for gender & sex.
[we can't see the full form, but i'd suggest having a "something else" option and dominant hormone question too.]
as a cis woman who's had a hysterectomy and partial oophorectomy, this would be helpful for me, too! it'd be pointless to try to diagnose me for disorders that affect organs I don't have anymore, after all.
being inclusive helps us ALL. 💖
