I gotta say, one of the greatest achievements of my 20s was that I learned (mostly) to differentiate between:

"I truly do not want to go" and

"I'm just feeling the Demand Avoidance, and I will like it once I get there."

Well, goodness, this one resonated much more than I was expecting. I mean, I get it. My mind was also blown wide open when I found out "demand avoidance" was a thing that existed, and that I'm not the only weirdo in the world who suddenly wishes it wasn't her birthday after anxiously waiting for her birthday for days.

Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won't be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:

Social Justice Calvinism

By popular request, and explanation of the term “Social Justice Calvinism”

Social Justice Calvinism, like regular Calvinism, revolves around the idea that human society is so steeped in sin that, not only is it inherently irredeemable, but almost everyone involved is essentially damned (to hell, in the case of real Calvinism, to … I dunno being bad, I guess, in the case of Social Justice Calvinism).

Similarly to real Calvinism, Social Justice Calvinism allows for a small, elect group of people who are miraculously able to rise above the morass of evil that is human society (in real Calvinism this is due to G-d’s will, in Social Justice Calvinism, this comes as a result of their overwhelming moral superiority).

As in real Calvinism, nobody knows who the elect of Social Justice Calvinism are, but they are identified by certain signs (in the case of real Calvinism these signs include prosperity, in Social Justice Calvinism, these signs are things like using trigger warnings or sharing photo sets of queer people of color).

Like real Calvinists, Social Justice Calvinists tend to shun and loudly denounce much of the society that they see as inherently corrupt so as to demonstrate (as much to themselves as to everyone else) that they are likely to be members of the elect. However, because membership in the elect is impossible to determine, a Social Justice Calvinists are often wracked by guilt and anxiety as to whether or not they are actually members of the elect.

Finally, and most importantly, much of Social Justice Calvinism’s appeal comes from its goal of challenging a corrupt and oppressive power structure, and its hints of moral clarity. Social Justice Calvinism so especially frustrating because the things that are being fought for are so important (see I’m one of the elect). As with salvation and prosperity in real Calvinism, many of the signs of goals and signs of the Social Justice Calvinist elect are actually quite desirable, but unfortunately they come at the price of believing that nearly everyone, up to and including you, is damned.

… this is actually a really fascinating way of putting it.

theyre in a polycule

reminded me of soil composition chart

a handy pocket guide to all things

love that stars are 100% divine but 0% machine

does this suggest they're gods?

Cream of Justice Soup - Tasty!

new shirt! (thanks bb) under new red "neon LED" staircase lighting

Okay, so the more I look at this the weirder it seems.

The image of the girl is clearly computer-generated – there's weird artifacts where the shadows should be. (And the colors are slightly too desaturated for real skin.) The text overlay, though, seems pretty realistic.

I'm not sure why they chose to have the text be a bunch of upper-case letters. They almost look like a transliteration from a foreign subtitle.

Why is the soup in the girl's hand pumpkin soup? Why are there two kinds of soup in the way there are?

Wait a second, why is the girl wearing pants? Surely a robot doesn't need to wear pants. Or a shirt! Or a bra!

It almost seems like they modeled the girl from a 3D scan of a real human, and then wrote the name of the soup on the scan – but writing of all things would be unlikely, given the weird lettering. (And who would use all-caps for something like this? Even if you're talking about soup or something, lowercase letters are much more natural.)

I'm leaning toward "this is a screenshot of a youtube video" but I can't tell for sure.

awwww, Frank, you're doing great buddy

As a writer, I find this utterly reprehensible. I am spiritually disgusted.

As a grifter, I think this is incredibly fucking hilarious

No, actually it's just hilarious. Rolling Stone--fucking Rolling Stone--is flaunting Yog's Law and becoming just blatantly, openly predatory, but also they're preying on people who tbh need to be robbed.

With periodicals, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become whatever the fuck this is

Yog's Law?

"Money should flow toward the author."

Getting published is a big huge deal that a lot of writers are desperate for the prestige of, and there are a lot of publications that take advantage of that. But, as a writer, you are a skilled professional making a valuable commodity that markets are trying to make a buck of off; so if you're paying money to your publisher instead of the other way around, you're getting fucked.

It's like paying your boss for permission to clock in.

Ah alright, makes sense. Yea honestly this feels like border line wage theft? Like not literally but definitely in the same family of shitty corporate behavior.

Nah, it's not like wage theft, it just straight-up is wage theft.

Not to be completely predictable, but this seems like a great time to remind everybody about the Freelance Journalist's Union! =D

https://freelancejournalistsunion.org/

another possible aspect is that they're desperate for advertising money, and this is essentially what these "influencers" are doing: paying to advertise their ideas or whatever

not that they're guaranteeing readers, because most people will just glance off whatever weird garbage these people are writing

unless it's worth reading, in which case the magazine wins on both sides - pleasing both advertiser and reader - and that's better than crappy pop up ads for whatever advertisers are shoving at us these days

it's kinda clever, because no serious author or journalist would pay their publisher, especially that much... unless they're so rich that $2000 is nothing to them

in other words, Rolling Stone is robbing the rich to support what has been a storied magazine title, so I'm... hmmmmm

Zuko is Autistic

Since I made a post a while ago claiming that Zuko was autistic, some people have been asking for the “proof.” It seems fitting for me to provide said proof now, since it’s autism acceptance month. I’m going to try to be as comprehensive as I can, but if anyone has anything to add, feel free to do so! That said, please do not come on here to tell me that Zuko is not autistic. This is my headcanon, and these are all the things about Zuko that I relate to as an autistic person. 

Alright, buckle up, kids, because Zuko is autistic af and I’m coming with all the receipts - and there are a lot of them.

Let’s start from the beginning. A lot of austistic people develop tactics early on that help us to ‘pass’ as allistic. When unsure of how to act in certain social situations, Zuko tends to mirror Azula. When he was younger, he was shown copying her sense of humor. 

He threw a rock at a baby turtle duck and laughed, saying that this is how Azula feeds turtle ducks. Because Azula thought it was funny, he assumed his mom would think it was funny, too. It wasn’t until Ursa asked, “Why would you do that?” that Zuko even considered it might not be universally funny. 

Zuko is shown laughing at things Azula thinks are funny more than once as a child. If Azula is not laughing directly at Zuko, he usually joins in on the laughter, even if he doesn’t understand the joke. 

Another time Zuko tried to copy Azula was after she demonstrated her skills to their grandfather, Fire Lord Azulon. Zuko immediately attempted to demonstrate his own skills, even though he was not prepared. 

Another thing that some autistic people struggle with is fine motor skills. When Zuko tried to prove to his grandfather that he was as skilled as Azula, he tripped both times he attempted to fire bend. He has obviously improved since that moment, but it took him a long time to do that. 

“You have yet to master your basics. Drill it again.”

Zuko was at sea for three years with Iroh, seemingly doing nothing but training to get strong enough to capture the avatar. After three years, he was still working on his basics, as Iroh points out. Other benders have been shown to become masters much quicker than Zuko. Katara became a waterbending master after one episode. Aang mastered all four elements in the span of about a year. By the age of 12, Toph was already an earthbending master, and she taught herself. Zuko has had to work a lot harder than them to properly control his fine motor skills. It isn’t until he’s mastered his basics that he is able to progress as a bender. 

Since Ozai was obviously not the most supportive parent, Zuko may have had to figure out other ways to hide his autism. 

Another tactic he used was to practice social interactions before they happened. In this scene, he is shown giving a practice performance to a frog:

“The thing is, I have a lot of fire bending experience, and I’m considered to be pretty good at it. Well, you’ve seen me. You know, when I was attacking you?” 

Obviously, this practice session was necessary, because Zuko said plenty of things here that could have easily further escalated the situation. 

Even while using tools like mirroring or practicing social interaction, we all have moments where things might just feel a little off to allistic people. 

Empathy

A lot of autistic people feel empathy differently than allistic people. Some of us might not feel empathy, some might experience hyper empathy, and some might just have a hard time expressing empathy. I suspect Zuko is leaning towards low empathy, or has trouble expressing empathy. 

Exhibit A: 

“My first girlfriend turned into the moon.”

“That’s rough, buddy.” 

Notice how Zuko found it easier to talk about himself. He answered Sokka’s questions about Mai, and the conversation was moving along smoothly. It wasn’t until Sokka shared personal information about himself that Zuko seemed to be out of words. 

Exhibit B:

Toph just told Zuko that her parents gave her everything she ever asked for, but not the one thing she really wanted: their love. 

Zuko spends half of this conversation looking the other way. When he does look at her, notice his expression. He probably has no idea why she is telling him this, so he doesn’t know how to respond. And on top of that, he was under the impression that they were supposed to be looking for Aang. 

A lot of autistic people have what you might call a one track mind (which I’ll get more into later). It’s hard for us to switch focus from one thing to another. 

Toph wanted to partner with Zuko because she wanted a life changing field trip, but Zuko just wanted to find Aang. He was able to have ‘life changing field trips’ with Aang, Katara, and Sokka because he was actively focused on helping them with their specific problems. He had time to mentally prepare to help them. There was careful planning involved in each of those missions. He can’t help Toph in this moment, because her problem is conflicting with the problem they already have: finding Aang.

In both of the examples above, Zuko acknowledges the hardships that Sokka and Toph went through. “That’s rough buddy” and “I know you had a rough childhood.” This may be his way of trying to show compassion, even though it might come across as cold. 

Zuko takes things at face value

Catching things like sarcasm, body language, metaphors, and ‘reading between the lines’ can be difficult for autistic people. This also gives us a reputation for being gullible, because it can be difficult to tell when someone is lying without being able to read the cues. 

The first and most obvious example of this is what Zuko’s entire arc revolves around: 

Capturing the Avatar

Ozai had just fought his own son, a 13 year old, in an Agni Kai. He burned Zuko’s face, intentionally causing permanent damage, and then banished him. All of this because Zuko spoke out of turn. At the time that Zuko was banished, the Avatar hadn’t been spotted for over 100 years. 

Knowing all of that, it seems likely to me that Ozai was being cruel and sarcastic when he said that Zuko could come back after capturing the Avatar. It would be like saying “when pigs fly,” since at that point the Avatar was thought to have been gone forever. 

Iroh, of course, knows this. That’s why in the beginning of the series, he kept reminding Zuko that the Avatar had not been seen in 100 years. He didn’t want Zuko to get his hopes up. Zuko, however, spends every minute for three years training to fight the avatar, and the second he sees something out of the ordinary, he automatically assumes that it is the the avatar’s doing. It’s kind of a miracle that he was right.

Capturing the Avatar = restoring honor. This is an example of both taking what his father told him as fact, and seeing things as black and white, which is also commonly associated with autism. Ozai told Zuko that capturing the avatar would restore his honor, so Zuko became obsessed with finding and capturing Aang. He truly believed that doing so was the only way to restore his honor and return home. It took Zuko years to realize that he could restore his honor in a different way than what his father told him. 

He automatically believes Azula when she says he can come home

“Father regrets?”

It had been three years since he’d seen Azula, and he immediately took what she said at face value. He is excited to be going home, and he is frustrated with Iroh for being skeptical. When Iroh points out that he has never known Ozai to regret anything, Zuko says “did you even listen to Azula?” 

Zuko takes what Azula says as fact, just like he has always done. This is why, as a child, he had to constantly tell himself, “Azula always lies,” because she probably had a habit of fooling Zuko. But now that it has been so long, without the constant reminder that Azula always lies, she takes advantage of the fact that Zuko trusts her so easily, and he falls for her lies once again.

He doesn’t catch on to Jin’s body language

In the episode ‘The Tales of Ba Sing Se,’ Zuko meets a girl named Jin. He immediately is threatened by her, because she keeps looking at him (eye contact is another thing that can be a challenge for autistic people). He assumes she knows they are fire nation. Despite the fact that he has seen her constantly smiling at him, he is completely surprised when he finds out she has a crush on him.

When Jin asks Zuko on a date, he shows up looking like this:

I think most people would catch on that this is Not A Good Look. But when Jin messes up his hair, Zuko gets frustrated. He says, “It took my uncle ten minutes to do my hair!” 

So, Iroh told him this was a good hairstyle, and Zuko trusts Iroh, so he took his word as truth, and went along with it. 

Later on in the date, Jin tries to kiss Zuko. Just before their lips touch, he holds a coupon in front of her face, exclaiming that he brought her a gift.

Zuko likes Jin. He risked a lot to light up the fountain for her. We know he wanted to kiss her, because when she kissed him later, he let her, and he even kissed her back for a moment before he bolted. But in this moment here, he missed the signs that said she was about to kiss him (the hand holding, Jin closing her eyes, leaning forward, etc), so he moved the conversation along in a way that he felt was natural, by giving her a gift. 

He doesn’t realize that Sokka and Suki want time alone

Zuko runs into Suki when he’s about to go into Sokka’s tent. She’s clearly embarrassed, but Zuko doesn’t catch on.

“Sorry, do you need to talk to Sokka, too?”

Suki says no, so Zuko enters Sokka’s tent, to find Sokka like this:

There are roses everywhere, candles are lit, Sokka’s hair is down, he’s posing. Sokka was waiting for Suki to arrive, not Zuko. 

But Zuko doesn’t catch on to that, either, so he sits right down and asks Sokka for advice, totally oblivious to what was supposed to be going down. 

He can’t explain what is ‘off’ about Azula

A lot of autistic people have trouble recognizing patterns. Zuko has known Azula his whole life. He knows what her hair usually looks like. He knows what her makeup usually looks like. She doesn’t usually have dark circles under her eyes. She usually has better posture. I could go on. 

Azula challenged Zuko to an Agni Kai looking like this:

“I can’t explain it, but there’s something off about her.”

This is something I struggle with, too. If my mom dyes her hair, I can tell something is different, but it may take me a few days to figure out exactly what has changed. I think this is what was going on with Zuko here. He knows something is up, but he can’t immediately recognize that Azula has cut her own hair poorly, or that her makeup is different because she did it herself, or that she has dark circles under her eyes, or weird posture, etc. 

Sensory issues 

Sensory issues are also associated with autism. This can manifest in sensory overload and strong reactions to physical contact, among other things.

One way I’ve learned to avoid or come down from sensory overload is to self-isolate and meditate, which is something Zuko does very often. This can also be a way to recharge spoons or mentally prepare for something that might be exhausting.  

This explains why Zuko would react so strongly when someone interrupts his alone time. He needs that time to prepare for every other moment in the day. When this time is interrupted, he lashes out, and has trouble containing his emotions.

Physical contact

Zuko doesn’t always seem to know how to react to physical contact and affection. He reacts negatively if he isn’t prepared, or if he isn’t comfortable with the person. Even if he genuinely likes the person who is touching him (Jin, Iroh, Toph, Katara, etc), he still doesn’t seem to know what to do. 

If Zuko is comfortable with the person who hugs him, he allows them to do so, but he still almost always looks flustered. He doesn’t always hug back, and when he does, it sometimes takes him a moment to process that he’s being hugged before he is able to return the gesture.

Difficulty Changing Plans

As I mentioned before, autistic people sometimes have a one-track mind. We may have difficulty changing plans, and may tend to see things as black and white, with no gray areas. All of these things describe Zuko to a T. 

Zuko tends to get frustrated over any change of plans, but there’s one example I’d like to focus on.

Let’s talk about that angst coma. You know, that time Zuko got physically ill after he did something that completely altered the course of his life? 

That’s the one. The thing is, change is hard. And it can be especially hard for autistic people. Zuko spent the last few years working towards one thing, and one thing only: capturing the avatar. Then, in one day, everything changed. He made a decision to free Appa, which was completely counter to what he has been working towards this entire time. 

I’ve had “angst comas” before, and I know other autistic people who have had similar experiences. Sometimes you really do just need a few days in bed to recuperate and adjust to big changes. 

some side notes that are worth mentioning:

In conclusion Zuko is autistic af. I rest my case.

This is tumblr, not school, but I’d like to award this essay with an A+.

— Stephanie Ericsson (via quotemadness)

ways bisexuals communicate

wait a minute

I mean, I'm compelled to share for the image alone

but if you'd like to read the full article: X

dont you just love capitalism..  

Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die

my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb.  Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through an intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me.  The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions. 

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student.  She developed this in her product design class.  And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars. 

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33

Okay, so I actually know Anna. She is my classmate and my friend, and I know this project quite well. And I could not have put the above statement any better.

Here’s the thing guys, bumblebees are endangered, but they have a very important roll in our ecosystem. While we are doing everything we can to stabalize the bee populations, we also have to make sure that an important job is being done in our ecosystem. This drone was a conceptual way to aid that as we work to stabalize bee populations.

I have never been so mad at Tumblr before. This is a huge accomplishment for a student, let alone a female in our male dominated industry. Stop shitting on everything, it doesn’t make you cool. Oh and actually read into things before you go tearing them apart.

^^^^word

*edit* 3/26/18 @thetrippytrip identified as being funded by russian propagandists

I FUCKIN KNEW THIS POST WAS BULLSHIT ANTI-SCIENCE CYNICISM

the preponderance of movies with cops as the main characters where their bosses turn out to be corrupt and then get arrested by the Good Guy Cops who are the REAL cops isn’t a fuckin accident tbh its straight up propaganda distracting from the very real fact that the problem is not “bad cops”, the problem is cops in general and as an institution

Are you saying that an institution meant to prevent/protect against criminals is a bad thing? I understand that it can be corrupt/that power can be abused but I don’t see the idea of police as bad. Or am I misunderstanding you?

police aren’t intended to protect anyone but the law

like for instance, the police force in the US was created originally to capture runaway slaves, and it hasn’t changed much since

Most european police forces came out of state suppresion of industrial disputes.

And the majority of private eyes were used as strikebreakers

I mean, not only were Pinkertons strikebreakers, they formed the basis for the FBI afterwards. So domestic intelligence is in the same boat.

The New Jersey state police (among others) in the early 1900s modeled their uniform on the uniforms of police forces in Europe specifically to invoke fear in European immigrants, who at the time were heavily targeted by police for their associations with radical labor and communism.

The London River Police is widely recognized as one of the first public municipal police forces, and it was created to protect the private property of wealthy sugar merchants from labourers collecting traditional compensation through “sampling” or “lumping”. The “wages” of the labourers were so low that they could barely feed their families, and thus police force was set up to ensure that they didn’t “take any more than they were owed”, even though there had been an unspoken understanding that these practices were PART of their income for generations. When caught “stealing”, these labourers were now often transported to the penal colony at Botony Bay. “The Law” is all about criminalizing poverty to protect the profits of the rich, my friends. 

- Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century has a chapter that focuses specifically on this topic. x

- Learning about Jeremy Bentham and the development of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 is also helpful for further developing our understanding of how poverty became associating with moral failure/laziness. x

Sure, keep this “Cops are bad mentality” when you are being attacked or robbed by someone. I wonder how that will end for you.

Because it’s a great sign of admiration when someone who is supposed to serve and protect will blatantly leave you to die because you posted some anti police shit on Tumblr. Way to completely prove our point.

Additionally, “calling the cops” when someone is attacking you or has robbed you is statistically very unlikely to do anything.  The vast majority of robbery cases go unsolved and unpunished, and if someone attacks you calling the police doesn’t stop or undo that, it just means they may face legal punishment and you may have someone to make a civil case against if your injuries are severe.  Assuming the cops can successfully find the attacker, when they usually can’t.  The vast majority of these cases go unsolved.  Police departments are wildly inefficient at everything except for crowd control, and are actually less efficient at solving most crimes than the small localized sheriff’s departments they replaced.  They have been for years, and the money we spend on them would prevent a lot more crime if it were instead spent on social programs and welfare programs. It’s almost as if the point of the police *isn’t to protect people* and is instead *to keep people in their place.*

It’s no mistake that the major city police forces in America started to appear as labor disputes became more and more frequent.

Can we also talk about how the police have been on the opposite side of every labor fight in then past century and now the police union wields more power than most other unions in the country. They use that power to protect the shitty cops caught being shitty.

Cops are the ultimate scabs.

Indie bookstores on the rise [2013]

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