“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era.
“I’d like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”
I had the exact same experience the second time I looked at this picture as the first time. I was looking like “what is this green line? Like suddenly everything is OK? It’s not. Racists are still trying to push us back to 1619. Nothing has been fixed. We still need to fight. Hard!
I wish Americans fucked with more foreign music. You don’t have to know the language to appreciate a good record. Folks in other countries listen to our music and don’t speak a lick of english. Music needs no translator
you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).
I personally found myself loving 1970s Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire!
Also 1920s and 1970s Japan for sure! Cambodian music:
spectacular. Love Armenia and Mali as well. I’ve been told 70s Germany is weird and 30s
Algeria is cool but I haven’t gotten around to those yet.
Italy’s 1960s is bomb ofc but I’m biased ;)
Learning how to manage my adhd symptoms without relying on anxiety has been so difficult even with medication actually but I think I’ve figured out that like. You’ve gotta let yourself be slow sometimes. Sprinting isn’t really a sustainable way to go through life.
It’s easier to start earlier on something when you give yourself permission to not finish it all at once and to let yourself do things in the order that makes sense for you.
Combining adhd with anxiety and a societal desire for efficiency can make you put things off because you don’t wanna do that all at once but you also wanna get it done Right Now
But it’s like. Let yourself work for 20 minutes and then take a nap and a little walk and then return to it after dinner. A little bit of slow living is fine, actually. You won’t die if you don’t finish the whole thing in one sitting.
Living with adhd doesn’t mean making yourself more like people without adhd. It means working with yourself. Letting yourself shake your hands and vibrate your knee. Looking out the window with your coffee and breathing slowly even when you have work to do. Working in the middle of the night. Putting things where you’ll remember them and not where it’s most “logical” to put them. Getting in both your overstimulation listening to ten pieces of media at once time and your blankly staring at the wall time. Learning how to account for your bad memory and planning ahead for it.
You can’t brute force your way into being neurotypical. You can’t run in a river. It’s never gonna happen. Neurotypicals are running on a gravel road. You’re not. You never will be. You can’t run. You can however build a boat and not listen to the little voice in your head that says you should be running.
I used to think that too. However it turned out that what was stopping me from coming back to it later was the stress. The evil wall that stopped me from coming back to the thing turned out to be made of stress and societal expectations. Allowing yourself time to rest and get other things done can make it easier to do things in small pieces.
And I mean actual rest. Not putting it off while stressing out the entire time about how you’re not doing it. Which is hard to achieve. I know from experience. It is possible though. You need to learn how to work with yourself and actually rest. Not sit there stressing about how much you’re not doing.
Some people might think I’m an optimist but I’m not. I’m a realist that’s going to try to increase the good things in this world if it kills me.
I want to severely push back on the idea that cynicism is any more realistic than optimism. There are good things in the world and there are bad things in the world. Totally ignoring one or the other doesn’t make you more correct.
You also have the power in your individual life to crowbar the long arc of the universe towards justice. Don’t just expect that things will be bad or good. Start yanking. Beat the darkness back with a stick, dammit.
I hope you don’t mind me jumping in here, but I wanted to add that this outlook is very much backed up by the peer reviewed research.
Jamil Zaki is one of the biggest researchers in this area. He describes both pessimism and blind optimism as flawed viewpoints that demonstrably obscure how we see the world.
Research shows that even though our society tends to view a cynical viewpoint as smarter or even more moral, cynical people are worse at problem solving and cognitive tasks, worse at telling whether someone is lying, have measurably worse physical and mental well being, and are less likely to vote, protest, volunteer or otherwise take steps to make the world better.
Instead Jamil Zaki advocates for “hopeful skepticism”.
Skeptical in the sense that you evaluate people and events from a neutral place based on evidence and personal experience, not on fitting them into an assumed narrative of “people always bad, things will always inevitably get worse” or “people always good, things will always inevitably get better”.
Hopeful in the sense of knowing it is possible to make things better than they are now, curious to see possible paths to a better world, and understanding that we all have agency to move the needle in a better direction.
Social media and mainstream news do not provide a hopeful skeptic perspective–they are almost always a barrage of pessimism. This is on top of the already formidable human negativity bias. Most of us have to go looking for sources of positive news and intentionally shift our focus to see the good in other people to balance out the negativity.
If anyone is curious to learn more about this, episodes S9E11-S9E14 of The Happiness Lab podcast are free and do a really good job of covering this research. Jamil Zaki also has a whole book about it called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
Well I certainly didn’t expect to illicit so many questions when I reblogged this post and added some tags about jumping spider content online.
Firstly, let me say there’s nothing wrong with keeping jumping spiders as pets. I have one myself. She’s a captive bred regal jumping spider. She’s currently a bit over two years old. I’ve had other jumping spiders as well, but they passed of old age and in one instance, a failed molt, which is fairly common.
Before and after getting pet jumpers, I joined some jumper groups, read a lot of care guides, and watched a slew of videos about keeping them.
It became obvious pretty quickly that apparently due to their cute fuzzy appearance, large round eyes, and intelligent behavior, people (owners, admirers, and popular content creators) assign human and mammal emotions and behaviors to them, often to their detriment.
I personally believe bugs are complex creatures that can be intelligent and have emotions, but that those emotions and behaviors are NOT analogous to human or mammal behavior and ignoring their natural needs and behaviors means you’re likely not providing proper care for them.
This is mainly about handling. Bugs don’t want to be handled. They get nothing positive out of it emotionally. They don’t want to be pet or cuddle with you. They don’t want to hang out with you. You’re a big scary predator, and it likely wants to get away from you. Forcing handling can stress, injure, or kill them. That’s why I tagged the post (linked above) “your spider is not a cat.” It doesn’t seek affection from you.
I can’t tell you how many posts or videos I saw where people were super upset because they let their jumper out of its enclosure to handle it and it either escaped and got lost or they somehow crushed it and killed or injured it badly. I’ve also seen people chasing their jumper around its enclosure trying to grab it or get it to jump onto their hand when it’s clearly just trying to hide.
As an example, a very common thing I’ve seen in videos about jumpers is
people saying when they lift their front legs at you and jump or climb
onto you/your hands it’s because they “want uppies” and want to be pet
and be close to you. This is a wild misreading of behavior. Sometimes
raising the front legs is a defensive display, trying to make itself
look larger to scare away a threat. Other times, they’re waving their
legs around to sense and feel their environment, or preparing to jump
onto something. They are arboreal, and their natural behavior is to find
a high vantage point, so climbing onto the big thing (you) nearby is
normal. It’s not because it seeks your affection.
Certainly if you DO handle them frequently they can get used to it, and it becomes less stressful for them. But in my opinion the dangers outweigh any positives, and I don’t handle mine. These are wild animals that have not been domesticated, even when captive bred. If you want to give them enrichment, and you should, offer them prey to chase or interesting things to explore in a larger enclosure. For those that do still handle them, I’d encourage you to watch their behavior closely and read the spidery cues they’re giving you rather than assuming they’re feeling what a cute little mammal might be feeling in the same scenario.
I could go on with specifics about certain videos, but I wasn’t planning on writing a huge post and this is already long. Also I’m sure many people would disagree with me about some things I’ve said, and I’m not going to argue about anything. This is just how I feel based on what I’ve seen of online jumping spider content, and it’s why I no longer interact with most of it.
ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself
So as it turns out your sense of self doesnt exist in a vacuum. You gotta actually use it and bounce it off of other people like echolocation to see where you are as a person and shit. So if you dont regularly interact with other people the echoes just get weaker and weaker and before you know it your personality is a blurry fucked up fog clone of its former self. which it sucks because this makes it really hard to interact with people again but yknow
“Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well…human beings.”
Terry Pratchett, “Men At Arms”
One thing I’ve gotten a lot better at due to long and unpleasant experience is Going Outside even when I don’t have a Reason for it.
Unemployed stint? Go Outside. Sick? Go Outside. Etc.
Because even 5 minutes Outside helps me remember that there is an Outside. When I don’t Go Outside (ideally once per day minimum), my world shrinks to the house, then the areas I actually use, then my bedroom, then my bed, then me.
If you’ve got clinical depression especially, try to find time to Go Outside. I’ve got some potted plants out back this year - gotta water em! The porch of the new place is actually pretty nice - morning coffee when the weather isn’t abominable counts as Going Outside. I try to go to the library every weekend, take a walk, etc. etc. etc.
If you can Go Outside I highly recommend Going Outside especially when you don’t have an external reason to do so. Make a reason - whether it’s bird watching or a potted plant or just checking out the neighborhood, you will definitely feel less awful if you can make 5 minutes a day Go Outside Time.
A few years ago while trying to find ways to commit suicide as painlessly as possible, I came across a PDF of Dr. Paul Quinnett’s The Forever Decision. Thinking it might go into actual methods of suicide (I read an article once that actually did that and was trying to find it again) I started to read it, and I think I only got about two pages in before I was crying too much to actually see the words.
I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I’m feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.
All the book really does is [I’m pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I’ve read no more than 5 pages] “discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help.”
But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I’m compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it’s saved my life at least a few times now.
It’s intentionally legal to copy and redistribute this book to keep it as accessible as possible, and it’s very easy to find, but here’s a link for it anyways.
LAST MINUTE ARTFIGHT PAGE DECOR FOR THE PROCRASTINATOR
Is it mere hours before artfight and your page is still boring as FUCKK?? Needn’t worry. I’ll link a bunch of stuff so you have ZERO excuse for your page to be dry come ArtFight 2025!
i really do believe that the answer to a lot of people’s self hatred is not to try and reassure them that they are wonderful and okay and enough, but instead to remind them theyre a completely unremarkable regular ass person who is not the center of the universe or especially important so why would they expect themselves to be some superhuman savior. like there really is a kernel of out of control self importance at the heart of thinking youre an evil lazy piece of shit. because why would you expect you be anything but just like some guy. if you wouldnt expect the guy who works at the vape shop or your mailman or whatever to be able to do something then why would you expect yourself to? youre just some random ass person. its fine
