Cashier: Are you military?

Me: No.

It comes back to something I know I’ve discussed before- how we “other” people who do horrific things in order to secure ourselves in the knowledge that neither we nor anyone we care about could ever do such a thing. If we assume that only designated Bad People do Bad Things, then we are blind to the idea that people we are close to might be doing or have done something truly terrible. This is not saying that TERFs are not bad people. It is saying that designating a bad behavior specifically to TERFs may blind you to seeing it in people who aren’t TERFs.

I can’t stress this enough. I wish I could get through to everyone I know. If you try to organise and be productive with every minute of your day, eventually, your body will pull the rug out from under you in a dramatic fashion, and you may end up being able to do very little at all, in a world that has no sympathy for people who need to rest.

So rest now. And work on making sure the people around you know it’s OK to rest.

And don’t feel guilty for resting. Practice telling yourself that rest - quality rest, where you’re not stressing about something you feel you ought to be doing - is actually a productive thing to do for your body.

You are an animal. You need to respect that animal’s needs. That includes laying about doing nothing as much as it does enrichment and running about.

Even your fucking computer gets overheated and slow if you don’t allow it to shut down and update sometimes (which is actually a lot of what sleep does for humans, btw). You eve notice how sometimes your browser just crashes sometimes because you have too many tabs open, or one of the tabs is causing the whole machine to run slowly?

So don’t tell yourself you want to work like a machine because guess what? Machines fucking fall over all the time if you overload them, try to do too many things at once, or don’t let them rest.

for your wellness, you will make

time for your illness.

Posted without commentary:

On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commenters—Lauren’s close friends—had positive things to say. But soon strangers—among whom the video was less well received—began commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. “Girl he ain’t loyal.” “Red flag! He didn’t get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.” “Bro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.”

As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, à la “The Dress.” I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTok’s latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Lauren’s video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.

While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me—people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.” During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”

At times, the investigation even transcended the digital world—for instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, “Even if this guy turned off his phone, he can’t escape the couch guy notifications,” a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didn’t), a comment suggested that they “secretly see who’s coming and going from his place”—and received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the “frenzy … frantically trying to determine the identity” of the “mystery man” behind the meme, the Post asked, “Will the real ‘couch guy’ please stand up?” Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.

Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a “body language expert” who concluded that my accusers “might be onto something,” since the “angle of [my] knees signals disinterest” and my “hands hint that [I’m] defensive.” This tabloid body language analysis—something typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listers—made me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.

Mercifully, my memedom has died down—interest in the Google search term “Couch Guy” peaked on Oct. 5—and I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather—as tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggested—the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.

The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the app’s algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slate’s ICYMI podcast noted how her “For You page just decided I simply needed to see” TikTok users’ Gabby Petito videos “over and over again.” It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of “Couch Guy TikTok.” One user despairingly reported seeing “five tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.” (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guy’s omnipresence more than myself.)

The most recent target of the app’s emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The video’s virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the video’s apparent “bad vibes”—at which point I got a dreadful sense of déjà vu. As Prater’s video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: “It was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.”

Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.

Tiktok might be a uniquely brain dampening, mob enhancing platform by design but don't get it twisted; harassment campaigns built on nothing but a vague sense of distrust and gleeful sadism/schadenfreude for strangers happen here constantly.

There have been multiple incidences where online "sleuths" mistakenly identified somebody as a perpetrator of some sort of hate crime or assault, which resulted in vitriolic harassment campaigns and defamation against a totally unwitting party:

After the Capitol attack on January 6th, a Chicago Firefighter called Quintavalle was misidentified by internet sleuths as one of the rioters, due to the fact that the rioter in the photo was wearing a "CFD" hat. Quintavalle was in Chicago on the day of the attack, hosting a small celebration for his wife's birthday. The actual rioter was later identified as Robert Sanford, a retired firefighter—not from the Chicago—but from Chester, Pennsylvania. Sanford was later charged for throwing a fire extinguisher at a Capitol guard.

When a video went viral of a racist Karen falsely accusing a Black teenager of stealing her phone in New York City, several women were misidentified as the culprit, just because they slightly resembled the guilty party. The woman in the video was later identified as Miya Ponsetto, who later appeared in court on hate crime charges.

After a cyclist rammed several young girls with his bike for putting up posters in support of George Floyd, wannabe detectives doxxed a man called Peter Weinberg, based on public data from the app he used to track his bike rides. The only problem? The police had given the wrong date for the incident on their Twitter feed. Weinberg hadn't been cycling the day of the incident, and he had no idea why strangers were suddenly sending him threatening messages and telling him they were going to get him fired from his job for being a racist child abuser. The perpetrator of the assault was eventually identified as Anthony Brennan III, who was charged with three counts of second-degree assault.

In all of these incidences, people decided their righteous outrage exempted them from fact-checking, resulting in the defamation and harassment of innocent people. Which... is that not one of our primary reasons for wanting to defund police? Because they believe they should be able to harass or attack anybody they feel might be guilty with total impunity, regardless of evidence or forethought?

Like, don't get me wrong—I'm very glad the actual perpetrators were eventually identified and charged! But naming anybody who you think might be guilty without fact-checking can be disastrous, and eventually it's going to get somebody killed or drive them to self-harm. False accusations do real damage, and there's absolutely no justice in naming the wrong person for a crime they didn't commit.

Like @zoobus above said: "If you think you're exempt from mob mentality because your mob only has good people in it, you have likely forgotten your victims, if you even understood that's what they were. The article is talking about you too."

If a tree falls in the forest / And no one is around to hear it / What grows in the debris? - Triptych monotype print series

Monotype prints are individually painted onto flat plexiglass, and cannot be copied or recreated the way traditional prints are. They're considered "painter's prints"; the style is experimental and fluid, but the layering quality inherent to printmaking allows for some really interesting results!

I used pictures of my own top surgery results for this piece, overlaid with paintings of nursery logs.