Effective ✶ Nancy

well idk if anybody's doing that, and i want that good good data, so survey be upon ye:

I HAVE FOUND MY FAVOURITE POST ON THE INTERNET

Gonna take this moment to once again promote I Need An A:

Elevated Access:

Scarleteen:

really good tiktok

Transcript:

Good because you still have to go to work. No we're not paying you extra. Yes we're doubling grocery prices. No you don't qualify for disability. Or healthcare. Or a home.

Look, if you get bitten, you can stay home for one day, I guess 😒, but then you need to come in early. We're really short staffed at the moment, despite our company's profits being higher than ever. In fact we may be laying some of you off next month. You don't mind working off the clock right?

Also you look silly with that protective gear. We're gonna harass you for it, not like institutionally but just socially. Who cares if a zombie attacks you? Who cares if we invite them into the building? You don't need to defend yourself, you're just overreacting. If you get bitten just tell everyone the festering bite mark is from a different animal, that's what we all do.

And hey, don't worry so much. It's endemic, which means we don't have to keep track of how many people are dying from it anymore. Just look at those numbers! It's only killed 2,000 people in America this week! That's basically nobody! We're back to normal!

If everything starts tasting like rotting meat for the rest of your life, it's probably something else. If you experience brain fog or you forget things constantly or you're tired all the time after even minor physical activity, it's just because you're lazy. Yes every other virus you ever get will also be increasingly worse but that's just a coincidence. Those viruses just happen to be exponentially worse now.

Plus, those few weeks during the lockdown were terrible for my mental health. I just can't keep living like that, so we have to go back to normal life, which now involves people biting each other and twitching uncontrollably and rotting visibly.

So: the work of macrodata refinement is in creating the personas or splinters associated with each severed identity. In making sure that the traumas associated with one's severed experience can't bleed out into the outie persona or other severed identities (because trauma isn't simply a matter of memory but of physical, autonomic responses). That's why refinement involves identifying and corralling "scary" numbers - it's about ring-fencing those negative experiences in a way that isolates them only to one persona. And it's why there's a refiner observing the severed floor - because either Ms. Casey, or (more likely, given that the refiner is credited as "Mark watcher") Mark still need to be refined and to have their negative emotions, such as Mark's grief, filed away.

So Cold Harbor is yet another severed persona, and presumably the reason that Mark is the only person who can complete it is that he knows Gemma best and is able to perform the minute adjustments that lead to whatever it is that Lumon wants her to become. Which still leaves the question of what makes this persona different than the others, but I think there's a clue in both the "Mark watcher" credit and in the fact that Dr. Mauer is told that once Cold Harbor is complete, he won't see Gemma again. I think despite what Mark believes, severance isn't actually eliminating his grief for Gemma. There's a refiner working on him and corralling those feelings away so he doesn't experience them. What Cold Harbor is intended to do is produce permanent severance, a complete disconnect from unwanted feelings - in this case, presumably, Gemma's love and longing for Mark - that doesn't require nonstop maintenance.

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know.