(no subject)

When I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, I went to a child psychiatrist. He had this game wired up to me that he said was reading how calm I was. If I got wound up, the little spaceship would hang back and I couldn’t collect items. If I was calm, it would zoom forward and I could get a high score. Every time I saw a big collectible and wanted it, I would get excited and wouldn’t be able to get it.

I tried just closing my eyes and ignoring the game, and got a high score without trying. What this taught me was that the game was stupid and pointless. But I think what I was supposed to learn was not to get excited even when my eyes were open and I was concentrating on the game. And in retrospect, wasn’t that fucked-up lesson to teach a child? “Just don’t feel emotions anymore”?

A thought on the new Texas abortion law

I once played this godawful cyberpunk game where one of the subplots is bigotry against furries. The best part of the game is the dialogue tree with an anti-furry activist. He's quite specific about how he has nothing against people who become furries for medical reasons, and only opposes people who become furries as a lifestyle choice. Then you get him talking about what he’s actually doing, and it’s stuff like allowing landlords to refuse to rent to furries. He doesn’t address, and doesn’t seem to particularly care about, how some random landlord would know the difference between a medical furry and a lifestyle furry. He just takes it for granted that anyone who would end up homeless deserves it.

If I understand Legal Eagle’s video correctly, the law is supposed to allow for abortion if the mother’s life is in danger. But it allows suits from people who would have no idea whether the mother’s life is in danger or not. You’re probably not going to have enough money to fight it, and even if you win and prove your life is in danger, you’re not going to get your attorney’s fees back. And of course, there’s the question of how long you have to wait to resolve the damn court case while hoping you don’t bleed out and die. It seemed like the people who created the law didn’t bother to think about that, and just assumed anyone who would be affected by the law is a “dirty slut” or whatever the fuck.

(no subject)

Hot take: Marichat is the het version of those “light feminine and dark feminine” anime girl ships.

(no subject)

I was going to argue that psychiatry has cults in a way other medical disciplines don’t, because it’s easy to tell what a broken bone looks like and straighten it, but it’s harder to tell what a broken mind looks like. You get these psychiatrists who try to “fix” other people even when the thing they want to change wasn’t a problem in the first place. Then I realized the non-psychiatric version of this is the cult of You Just Need to Lose Weight.

(no subject)

Okay, but what if you DO examine the problematic tropes you’re using? Is the dove pining for the fjords?