eli | 25 | they/them/theirs ❤︎ @inigio
hi! i’m eli!
★ i made that one modern au cask of amontillado post
★ i also made that one mcr/fob/patd/d&p audio mashup post
★
i create audio fiction at Aster Podcasting Network @asterpodcastingnetwork
★ and i specifically produce Under the Electric Stars, a cyberpunk adventure fiction @undertheelectricstarspodcast
★
check out my about for more!
ocd is not fucking destigmatized
"intrusive thought" gets thrown around by assholes talking about putting strainers on their heads or stepping on a leaf who in the next sentence will say "if your thoughts are about actually hurting people they should put you in a psych ward". compulsions and rituals get seen as proof you're "crazy". ocd insight CAN be delusional, even. pocd and sexual ocd is especially demonized, though even something as "harmless" (to others. not *us*) as contamination OCD is still mocked, belittled, and seen as a sign something is fundamentally wrong with you. I have seen people twice my age advocate for violence against anyone who thinks the way I've been forced by my mental illness to think since i was 6, maybe 7 years old.
OCD is not destigmatized.
spotted lanternflies, Lycorma delicatula. an infamous invasive in my area, but I’ve come to enjoy these clumsy little freaks more than I ever thought I would.
people are oddly obsessed with destroying them still, although the effect of killing them by hand or even with pesticides is negligible on the now-well-established populations. this is more of a “stop the spread” problem than it is “get rid of established populations,” and it’s people who don’t usually see these who should be on the highest alert for them. still, it’s interesting how their conspicuity, diurnality, and generally slow speed has made them the perfect thing for humans to kill thoughtlessly while other pests stay hidden, like emerald ash borers, or are undeservedly beloved, like honeybees, most of the eastern mantises, and feral cats.
the kill-on-sight campaigns area little depressing to me, especially when directed towards children —sure, they teach invasive species awareness, but really it’s just feeding an ugly desire to kill little animals. not going to ask you to not control them if they’re causing damage to your plants, but the weird bloodthirsty attitude towards Lycorma and declarations of their “evil” nature don’t seem terribly productive. they are as blameless as any invasive species. even when invasives must be killed by the individual (works for some species, not all!), there is still room to act thoughtfully and not demonize an animal for being an animal.
so personally, I let the lanternflies chill—for the most part, they feed on invasive weeds and nonnative ornamental plants, so they’re not much of a concern to me or my garden. whatever proper control methods (parasitoids, pathogens?) get developed probably won’t eliminate all of them, too, so big dumb fulgorids are probably a permanent fixture here. ah, I still feed them to mantises, but the only ones big enough are also invasive…
here’s one all tender and pale after molting. I’d like to find a teneral adult this year, which must be stunning
a good post on the topic of killing invasive species by @bowelfly :
Just a guy and his lap spider
Hey my sister's favorite bookstore burned down on the 4th of July and they lost their entire inventory. The place is owned by a really sweet Asian lady in Chinatown and they hosted all sorts of really good and fun events. She asked me to pass this on and forward it if anyone is willing to pitch in to help restore it ^^
No pressure regardless, but felt I'd pass it on cause damn that's so unfortunate.
I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of "people also watched" and "for you" into the results. That's not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
"I despise your wretched little games" perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!
Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.
Jenny Adams ‘92
It's Wet Beast Wednesday
baristhyena-deactivated20230510
cmon kid... we've gotta go save Wet Beast Wednesday.... TWO!
Symphony of Seven Souls is an incredibly beautiful PS1 styled first person horror game where you play a violin to recruit lost souls into your unholy orchestra!
"Think of the two major possibilities here: Either the studios owe untold millions to their talents and paying it out will decimate their stock prices, or they owe so little because there really is no money in streaming and the bubble of their entire 21st century business model will burst in spectacular fashion. And make no mistake: this is a bubble. This is the inevitable climax of a stockholder-driven hunger for infinite growth, despite the fact that, by design, such a thing cannot and should not exist. The infection of Wall Street has overwhelmed the entertainment industry beyond repair, leading to cultural vandals like David Zaslav to be appointed with the callous duty of strip-mining decades’ of artistic beauty for pennies of tax write-offs. The past and future are frivolous in comparison to the short-term demands that the line keep going up."
i've noticed that, in discussions of how to handle grevious harm and abuse at a community level, victims of harm who want to preserve their relationships with perpetrators to some degree are... discarded?
there's an automatic assumption in left and abolitionist circles that all victims of harm either currently hate and want to cut off the perpetrators of that harm, or are temporarily confused due to being emotionally victimized and dependent on the perpetrators but will eventually come around to wanting to cut them out of their lives.
and i do think we need to provide unilateral structural support for people who want to entirely remove perpetrators of harm from their lives--there's already many legal and financial barriers to that in the case of legally recognized family members, and many other barriers in the forms of financial and housing entanglements, and those require work and support to untangle and remove as barriers on a broad, societal level. simultaneously, though, i don't think it's necessary to discard victims with other relationships to perpetrators in the process, nor to dismiss them as not capable of having that autonomy, nor to pathologize their decisions.
i've found that often in left and abolitionist circles, if someone wants to maintain a relationship with someone who's deeply harmed them, there's suddenly just... a total lack of community support, and even a tendency to lump them in with the perpetrator of harm and implicitly frame them as not being a ~real~ victim, or at the very least one who is suspect because they must have agreed with the premise of the harm or thought it was excusable in some way. and like... socially ostracizing victims is socially ostracizing victims regardless of why you're doing it!
and there's a tendency to reach a social consensus somewhere along the lines of like... "i'll help you, but only if it doesn't help the person who harmed you/is harming you." which is all well and good until you realize that shuts down the very possibility of external supports in healing the relationship in question and preventing further harm/abuse. it implicitly places the full responsibility of supporting the perpetrator's journey to accountability and improving their actions on the victim, which i shouldn't need to say is both unhealthy and doomed to fail. furthermore, it places the victim in a vulnerable place socially--if they live with the perpetrator, can they ask for rental support or help with groceries, or will that be seen as helping the perpetrator? if the perpetrator has some sort of health crisis, can the victim reach out for support through it (housecleaning, cooking, medical bills), or are they on their own because they chose to maintain this relationship?
thinking about how many of my friends were able to reconcile with abusive parents as adults, due to the shift in power dynamics, and were actually able to hold their parents accountable for their past actions and demand change that has actually progressed and improved their relationship... and thinking about how many of them are implicitly treated like helpless idiots that cannot be trusted to make their own life decisions because of this, by people who are supposed to be in community with them and talk a big game about restorative justice and abolition.
