mental radio

chaumas-deactivated20240115:

chaumas-deactivated20240115:

chaumas-deactivated20240115:

it’s frustrating when you’re talking about an inherently oppressive institution that dehumanizes everyone who is subjected to it and someone is like “it’s especially bad for those it is incorrectly applied to!” as though being the intended victim of an injustice makes it less of a tragedy

been thinking about this lately after some discussions about historical marriage where people have chimed in about how extra awful it would have been for trans men forced into The Wife Role because of dysphoria. which like. yeah. but the thing about The Wife Role in the context of not having civil rights and being the property of a husband is that it is inherently dysphoria-inducing to anyone who identifies as a human being instead of an object.

[opens notes] Jesus CHRIST you people are fucking hopeless I have no fucking words

WOMEN ARE PEOPLE!!!!! ohhh my god WOMEN ARE PEOPLE what is WRONG WITH YOUUUUUU

Anonymous asked: Excuse me, I'm sorry for asking...but I just really need to know because I'm so confused. It seemed like so many people were doing witchcraft to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. How did he still become president when all that magick was being used against him? How can we believe in magic when it didn't work?

da-at-ass:

panthermodern23:

stguillotineandtheredmass:

da-at-ass:

upthewitchypunx:

I also have a theory that, on top of all this, master manipulators are also able to take all the things directed at them and convert it with misdirection or use it for their own gain.

The sad fact also is, many curses I saw posted were to make him suffer, to ruin his life. He was planning not to win the presidency, he had a reality show lined up and he was planning to bank on losing. He wants to be a celebrity, he doesn’t know what it takes to be president, he doesn’t want to be held accountable by the public. And so far he’s making a real shit show of it. Being President could quite possibly ruin his life IN THE LONG RUN.

Witchcraft needs to be strategic or you get results like this. But a lot of people were just aiming curses in a raw angry way without thinking strategically about what the results would bring. That is my theory, it’s not a very happy one but it fits observations.

I don’t think it’s possible to publicly coordinate witchcraft in a subtle tactical manner on social media tbh.

Also something to think about, there has been coordinated “meme magic” from alt right /pol/ users since the start of the election.

This is a really interesting and terrifying article about it:

phoenix-fire-witchcraft:

This is interesting because I just spoke with a friend about this the other day.

So I won’t go into too much detail. But here’s the basic idea. The friend I spoke to said that public figures are very hard to influence, because there are so many people already trying. He was right. It’s like trying to use magic to win the lottery. You can do it, but there are going to be thousands doing the same thing, essentially negating the effects. Further, there will still be millions of other praying, hoping, putting it out in the universe, or whatever else. It was the same with Trump’s campaign. That’s a lot of influence that’s being worked. But let’s look at something else.

Donald Trump made a great number of mistakes, and that’s putting it lightly. Things happened during his campaign that have never happened before, and at a very high rate. The mocking of the reporter comes to mind, as well as the mic picking up his sexual assault statement. His manner of speaking is certainly….obtuse to say the least, but even then these seem like grievous mistakes to make. And there were a very large number of these mistakes. This is just my thought on this, but I believe it’s because of the amount of magic thrown his way. I believe our witchcraft, brujería, santería, vodou, and everything else worked…but in a way we didn’t intend.

The things that happened to this asshole were, at least in some way, influenced by us. But the problem is that he has followers who would love him if he killed their children in front of them. He has followers who would support him if he implemented policies forcing the first-born male child if every family be slaughtered. There is little to nothing this man could do that would ever sway his supporters from his side. And because none of the instances that occurred were as bad as the examples given, his supporters only became more enthused. Here was a man who validated all their prejudice, their fears, and made them feel like they could do no wrong; a man who made them feel as if they were truly better than their fellow humans because they supported him.

Our magic worked on the man. It did not work on the masses, and that was the problem. Our magic only helped enraptured them more. It worked. But not in the way we wanted. And as much as that sucks, as frustrating and as astonishingly scary as it is, it still worked. Magic is not always predictable, even to the most seasoned practitioners, but it works. Don’t forget that.

This group largely identifies with the so-called “alt right”, a white nationalist group, and believes the frog, named Pepe, is imbued with a magical power to bring Trump into office—as long as devotees plaster the frog’s image everywhere, like a flyer for takeout food.

“I’ve been observing [this phenomena] first hand for quite some time now,” Ferréol told me. “And I’m fascinated at the way internet folklore is turning into something new—not exactly activism, not exactly religion, but something close to a new form of magic and animism in an era when communities have transformed into tribes. And they are savage, creative and, as we now know, really powerful,” he added, referring to the online communities where Pepe is literally considered a god.

Ferréol is detailing what he calls “memetic warfare.” The technique involves charging a symbol, which will then act as a proxy for a clandestine plan. In occult tradition, this is known as chaos magic. The image could be something as abstract as a hieroglyphic doodle, which a group decides will bring them, say, jobs or food or spouses. The image just has to be widely seen, even subliminally, so that it can seed the minds of the larger population and bring about real world results. (If you think this sounds a bit like hypnotism, you’re right.)

…

The rabbit hole goes deeper. Pepe’s followers look for synchronicity everywhere, building up a mythos from something that began as an innocuous cartoon character. This is the power of meta-history. When residents on notorious image-based online bulletin board 4chan dug up an Egyptian frog god named Kek, they learned he was a disruptive deity that shakes up basic etiquette and assumptions. Thus they reasoned: Pepe is just a modern day Kek, and both of these frog gods are like the iconoclastic Trump.

I know this sounds completely absurd but that’s magic for you. While we were aiming sigils, curses, ect. at Trump, the alt-right on Reddit was creating a memetic avatar of the ancient Egyptian god Kek out of Pepe the frog to ensure Trump’s victory. And unlike our sporadic and isolated witchcraft, the alt-right had a unified magical glyph of Pepe to imbue their maleficent intent unanimously. Meme magic is real and it’s fucking terrifying. As ridiculous as it sounds, leftist occultists can no longer afford to ignore the magical possibilities of memes.

This post has so many good points, and, I wonder, does anyone out there want to start talking about how we can start organizing? Anyone wanna start talking ideals on how to use some of these techniques for our own purpose? I’d love to continue this dialog…..

I‘m interested in organizing and unifying and these are my ideas/advice on the subject:

So #1 is: pop culture magic is a tag here on tumblr, and you definitely want to look at it for meme magic. Also I’m syaing this not because @teriel is my friend but because his book is super relevant here: Pop Culture Magic 2.0 is a really good introduction to using all number of pop culture magic things to your advantage, and I think a lot of what he says about logo-based magic can apply here, as well as the stuff on the power of sheer popularity. He has experience with chaos magic and so writes from that. So if you want a good in-depth explanation of the powers at play there, it’s a book you might want to read.

I’m a Discordian and so I recognize these techniques of shaking things up to some extent, and I also know there are a lot of neo-nazi magicians and occultists out there. I do think that they are better at organizing because they are more ready to sacrifice individual caveats about principles in exchange for power and strategy through allegiance. I find that’s the case with the entire Right end of politics tbh, fascist or not.

So I’d say, if people want to get tactical and coordinated, you’ll have to think about that, because that sort of collaboration can make a lot of people mildly unhappy to be able to accomplish a greater goal. Also, you will have to think: what is the goal? Because their goal is: “bring in a disrupter to shake things up; we know we can thrive in chaos.” That’s an actual, concrete goal. Whereas a goal like “make them not win” isn’t a goal per se, it brings nothing specific into manifestation. And I think this is why we have often lacked coordination: on the progressive end, people are in plenty of disagreement over what the goal is or what the first goal should be. It’s understandable because we are allied together from many different communities and necessities, what the Right calls “special interests” but what is actually “what a diverse group of people looks like.” White nationalists can be united in being white, and most often straight and cis, and furthering the goals of white people.

What are we united by? Not wanting to die. Other than all being attacked by the same group, it’s hard to say there’s any one reason why we’ve picked “this side.” I like to think we all have higher ideals such as equality and justice and the right to live and be happy, but sometimes even that is assuming too much, and even if it is assuming just the right amount, I know that those broad ideals look different to every one of us.

So how do we pick a coordinated symbol of unity for our ideals? Stuff’s already been floated in the mundane world, such as the safety pin, which tbh I wanted to start making into more of a magical thing to defend it against being co-opted by fascists and neo-nazis. On my blog I started making the tag “magical safety pin project” to put any sort of magical defense and aid for people who will be targeted by this neo-nazi alliance, basically giving it more oomph and extending the reach of the symbol. I don’t know if people want to go with that because I’ve seen plenty of rapid and almost automatic backlash against any use of the symbol only a few days after it was first suggested.

But what people who want to unify and ally for a greater magical effect will need to realize is: no symbol is perfect. They settled on Pepe the fucking Frog and it goddamn worked. You take the symbol, you own it, you own it so hard that anyone who tries to take it from you gets their hands burnt. You don’t just let go as soon as there is a problem or difficulty–you work the difficulties out and you admit the world is complicated and you do the work to make it stretch to fill the need you want. You stay alert to really obvious attempts to subvert you or distract the conversation or to co-opt things. (Remember Occupy Wall Street? Not very good at spotting infiltrators and purposeful troublemakers. Can we do better?) Since we’re having this conversation in public on tumblr, there’s gonna be lots of opportunity for opposition to subvert this early on. The neo-nazis tend to have other places to discuss things as well so that they can close ranks and coordinate. Can we do that? How do we make sure it’s open and accessible to the people who need access? Neo-nazis don’t need to worry about those sorts of things but we do; if we don’t make it accessible and intersectional we’ve already subverted our cause. So, that’s all hazards to keep in mind.

Overall our symbol will be our identity. When someone tries to mar it, we don’t let them. When someone within the community needs it to bend or change to work for them, we find a way to make it work, which means it has to be flexible enough to accommodate for that. Once you have a good symbol it drives a lot of things. They have the advantage in that they took something already popular in the greater consciousness as a really well-known meme so they got a lot of gestalt energy just from that. I think the safety pin lacks that; it’d be nice to have something from an inclusive popular culture that’s not completely nailed down by the kind of copyright/trademark/licensing that would cause corporations to immediately subvert its use. (As an example, members of Anonymous back in 2008 when they were protesting the Church of Scientology took on the V for Vendetta mask to good effect, though by now it’s mutated into a more generic symbol for hackers and subversives. If they’d tried something more likely to be litigated over, like the Superman symbol, it might have not gone so well.) So what is that thing? What is that symbol? I’m throwing the question out there to see if anyone has an idea.

There’s also the idea of a family of symbols to use instead of just the one, but I very much suggest there being a central one to anchor things, and it being something relevant and recognizable immediately today by many people and used throughout society pervasively so it’s constantly being charged. I want to see what the crowd comes up with. Maybe someone’s already replied to this thread with it.

So that’s my advice/guidance on united magic for the progressive cause of… well, again, what have we settled on? I think everyone can agree on defense of the oppressed, alleviating suffering, and equal empowerment for all in a way that centers and facilitates a full and happy life? That’s my suggestion, and what I try to work toward in my own doings. That centers a goal as opposed to centering just pulling us back up to baseline: Equal empowerment, full and happy lives. Someone find the symbol.

dirtyflowerchild:

honeyyvanille:

Sometimes you need to remind yourself that you were the one who carried you through the heartache. You are the one who sits with the cold body on the shower floor, and picks it up. You are the one who feeds it, who clothes it, who tucks it into bed, and you should be proud of that. Having the strength to take care of yourself when everyone around you is trying to bleed you dry, that is the strongest thing in the universe.

I’m so proud of you

tumblrfolk, we are so much more skilled than we think

vrabia:

prairie-grass:

a-spoon-is-born:

intrikate88:

elodieunderglass:

one thing I want to say today relates to my current job. (As you guys know, I’ve left off working in science labs to work an office job in sci comm. My role is kind of … nebulous and involves a lot of “oh, Elodie can help you with that, she does weird stuff. Train Elodie on that.”)

Because it’s an office job, the mentality is for everyone to present their workflows as incredibly difficult and skilled, requiring a lot of training and experience to do properly. Which is fair enough! These skills are difficult!

“Elodie, today we are going to train you to use… A HIGHLY COMPLICATED AND DIFFICULT WEBSITE INTERFACE. You will need to take a lot of notes and pay careful attention, because it is extremely advanced. ARE YOU READY”

“… This is Wordpress.”

“…No it isn’t! it says something different at the top. And it’s very complicated, it’s not something you can just know already.”

“Nah son, don’t worry, it’s Wordpress. I mean, God knows I don’t blog much, but I can manage me a bit of Wordpress, it’s cool.”

“No. You can’t. Don’t worry, it’s very difficult. Now sit still and be trained on how to upload a photo to Wordpress.”

“All right.”

—-

“Elodie, do you think that you can MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA? It is INCREDIBLY HARD and may involve THE HASHTAGS”

“… I think I’ll manage.”

—-

“Elodie, can you put a HYPERLINK in a thing? Think about it before you answer.”

“Is it like a BBCode kind of thing, with the boxy bracket things, or do you want it in HTML, with like angley bracket things?”

“It is a button that you press that says HYPERLINK.”

“I can do this thing for you.”

—-

“Elodie, can you write a punchy summary that will make people want to click on a special link that says “read more” to read all of the text?“

“Probably?”

—-

“Elodie, this is how to use TAGS on CONTENT. TAGS on CONTENT are important because - because of THINGS. Things that are too arcane and mysterious for anyone below the level of Manager to know.”

“Cool, I can tag stuff for you.”

—-

“Elodie, this is obviously a ridiculous question, but can you edit videos?”

“Not very well, and only if you want to make it look like there is sexual tension between characters from different forms of visual media, or perhaps to make a trailer for a fanfiction? Which is not necessarily a good use of my time and I’m not sure why I felt it was so cool to do to begin with…”

“What?”

“Actually, upon further reflection: no. No. Nope. I can’t edit videos. They’re completely beyond me. Not in my wheelhouse. Hate videos. Hate them. No innate skill whatsoever.”

“That’s what we thought”

—-

“Elodie?! You can use PHOTOSHOP?!”

“Yeah, I mean, I usually just use Pixlr. It’s free, it’s online, it’s powerful, you don’t have to download anything…”

“but you are not a GRAPHIC DESIGNER!!”

“Er… no.”

“Next you’ll be telling us you can MAKE AN ANIMATED PICTURE.”

“I mean, I haven’t really done a lot of it since Livejournal, and they weren’t that good anyway, but yeah… I can do you reaction images.”

“THAT IS WITCHCRAFT”

“Yes. Definitely.”

—-

What I’m trying to say is: a lot of people talk a lot of crap about what we Millenials do on the Internet, because there is NO CAPITALISTIC VALUE in the screwing around we do with our friends. “Ughh why are you ALWAYS on the computer?” our parents whined.

“How did you make the text go all slanty like that?” our bosses wonder.

We have decades of experience in Photoshop. We know how to communicate; we can make people across the planet care about our problems. We know how to edit media to make two characters look like they’re having the sexual tensions. We can make people read our posts, follow us, share our content. We run and manage our own websites - and make them pretty. We moderate conversations, enforce commenting policies, manage compromises, lead battles, encourage peace, defend ourselves from attack, inspire others, and foster incredible levels of communication.

We produce our art. We advertise our art. We engage with others through our art. We accept constructive criticism and dismiss destructive trolling of our art. We improve our art. Our art gets better.

We narrate our stories.

All by ourselves. Our pretty blog backgrounds, custom-edited themes, tasteful graphics, punchy content, clever gifs, our snappy putdowns and smart-ass text posts, even our familiarity with fonts and composition - all of these skills we’ve casually accumulated for fun/approval are MINDBLOWING LEVELS OF COMPETENCE IN THE WORKFORCE.

When these skills are sold to you - when they’re packaged and marketed, and when you pay to consume them and have the Elders rate you on them - they are incredibly valuable. They are Media and Communications degrees. They are marketing internships. They are leadership workshops. They are graphics design modules. They are web design courses. They are programming courses. We are good at this shit; we have it nailed down.

You can’t put “fandom” or “blogging” on your CV, but you deserve to. You should get this credit. You should claim this power and authority.

Claim these skills. They are valuable. They are important.

Everything you have ever done is a part of your powerful makings.

I want to second what elodieunderglass has to say here, because it’s so true. You want to buff up your resume or your LinkedIn page? 

-if you know enough html to do <i>this is italic text</i>, then you understand HTML and can pretty much call yourself a Junior Developer

-if you ever wanted to customize your LJ or tumblr and copied someone’s CSS code and then went in and tweaked font color and added your own header image? You understand CSS and again, you can put Junior Developer in your LinkedIn title. 

-if you can use twitter and tumblr and put hashtags and regular tags on stuff, you’re a Social Media Manager. If you can get people to follow you and comment back, you have Demonstrated Social Media Efficacy.

-if you can use Photoshop (or Pixlr!) to make five million pictures of Natalie Dormer really pretty, you are a Photo Editor. 

-if you can migrate some of your Photoshop skills to InDesign, you are a Production Editor with demonstrable skills in Layout For Print Publications

-if you want to look even more impressive and pick up an easy job that mostly involves googling bits of code to copy and fuck around with, go play on CodeAcademy and get yourself qualified in not just HTML and CSS, but also JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and others. Again, this makes you a Software/Applications Developer.

The only reason you’re given the impression that these are jobs for really smart brogrammers with masters degrees in computer science is because scary jargon keeps people out. Look stuff up, and you’ll find out you already know a ton of this material. I promise you, you’re more qualified for tech/developer jobs than a lot of the people actually working at firms that focus on those kind of jobs. 

^

Often in my job people ask me if I can do something, and if I respond with, ‘No, but I’m sure I could find out how,’ they look at me like my head just rotated 360 degrees. One thing about being on the internet in this age is that you have experienced how you can just google something and you’ll probably find a youtube tutorial.

Don’t know how to use the Puppetwarp in Photoshop? *20 minutes later and some cursing included* Okay, now I do.

Don’t know how to knit? *ten minutes later* totes pro.

A lot of people bag our generation but there’s so much to be said for the sheer amount of information we’re used to absorbing and parsing. Don’t underestimate that, either!

OK entry-level kids, listen. ‘I don’t know how to do this but just give me 20 minutes’ is probably the most important, career-advancing thing you can say at your workplace because not only does it show that you’re adaptable and proactive and any number of dumb buzzwords that happen to be popular in The Industry these days. BUT If you build up on it over time, it will also pretty much make you indispensable, which is so important in an unstable job market. 

Consider this: unless you get a job with a super-successful startup where your boss is like 25, chances are you’re going to land in company where the higher-ups are in their 40s-50s, thus belonging to that particular generation that habitually puts down millenials for having No Experience of Real Life. Except in a workplace environment this means they expect that they have to train you on every single little thing, aka waste time and resources on you, aka see you as a soooort of useful nuisance who’s there to do the little menial jobs no one else wants to do. This is where the last to come first to go thing comes from really.

What your crusty 50+ y/o bosses don’t realize is that ‘being on the computer’ all day, you inherently develop a thing called rapid skill acquisition. Yeah, it sounds fancy (so fancy you can put it in your CV) but most of the time, as the previous comments point out, it just involves Google and YT tutorials. You’ll be surprised how many highbrow professionals don’t actually do this, b/c they reached the top and feel like they have a secure position and basically fall so behind on things that a 20 y/o intern can out-skill them, or quickly learn to out-skill them any day of the week. Most likely they’re not aware of this. And no, it’s not as out there as it sounds. Consider you’re talking to people who think you need training to use Wordpress. Imagine what telling them you can use a blogging platform to create an easy to update professional looking website for fucking free will do to them. Imagine telling them you can make gorgeous graphics from scratch, update the company logo or design some rad business cards. THERE IS SO MUCH YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT THEY DON’T KNOW CAN BE DONE. 

A couple of years ago I interned for a research centre where I did this all the time. Three weeks in they called me to sign an employment contract that tripled my pay and I got to go everywhere with them and meet important people in my field, it was great. My 23 y/o brother, who doesn’t have a single solitary hour of formal training in PR/marketing or IT in his degree, interned as marketing assistant for a small IT company and was so quick to catch on that they hired him after the internship and by the end of the year he’d already helped increase their turnover. Eight months, unpaid internship included, and he made them more money! That kid is never going to get fired!

Also learn some programming/web design. Seriously. I see these self-taught 16 y/o kids making gorgeous Tumblr themes from scratch and I’m like. You are al fucking wizards. Not even out of highschool yet and you’re pretty much set up for a job that potentially pays in the 6 digits. 

You are smart and you are creative and you are amazing! You need to be brave and confident and capitalize on that because you’ve got what it takes and more. Fuck the jargon, you’ve got the skills.