Musings of a Faerie Doll

- Touch things all the time

- Want to eat all the time

- Chatty when it wants silence

- Look at it creepily when nothing is going on

- Break things and make messes

- Injure themselves in dumb ways

- sleep too much

- no regard for safety

Apparently you can do a saliva test kit at home:

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

It is *possible* to sew over pins.

Here are the risks:

The needle will hit the pins and degrade much faster. You can mitigate the risk of breakage by changing your needle more often. (About every 2-3 hours of sewing instead of the usual 8 hours. Yes, you're supposed to change your needles.)

The pins can be pushed through the hole in the needle plate by the needle, and then get stuck inside the machine in Bad Places. To reduce this risk, use longer, stronger needles, and try to keep track. If you notice that you have fewer needles than when you started, open up the machine and clear them out!

Some machines won't feed the needles through. If this is the case, don't see over pins.

Now, I actually hate to pin, so I was delighted to discover the Quilting Clips; they're far superior to pins! Plus they're easy to remove as you sew, and if you're using a larger seam allowance they can stay in the fabric while you sew past them.

Note: I cleaned a friends machine once and I went to her with a box of debris from inside the machine. There were colorful plastic beads with a hole that didn't go all the way through, and a whole lot of what looked like half of a staple; v-shaped metal pieces.

They were pins. Pins that had been shoved down into the hole in the plate, and then a bunch of these bits were mashed into the gears of the machine.

My best friend:

O-okay, let’s get into this, shall we?

*grumbling* Would you rather work for Lex Luthor or the Joker- *shouting* Lex Luthor, by like, a fucking mile!

Yes, yes, working for Lex Luthor is basically like being an Amazon employee that makes weapons of mass destruction, which is bad. Lex is like Donald Trump mixed with Mark Zuckerberg mixed with Jeffrey fucking Bezos, it’s not a great mix. He does not treat his henchmen well. Their lives still suck, and they are probably monitored on how long they take piss breaks for.

But let’s analyze what working for Lex Luthor is like versus the fucking Joker. With Lex you probably get a dental plan, a health plan, a paycheck, and the guy that you’re fighting really cares about human life. Superman will hit you just long enough to knock you out, so you’re not a treat, so he can stop the problem.

If you work for the Joker, your payment is you’re not fucking dead. You say one wrong thing? Bang. You don’t laugh at his jokes? Bang! You do laugh at his jokes? Bang! You think Joker gives a fuck about a henchman?

Who’s Lex Luthor’s right-hand-man? It’s a woman, you sexist, her name is Mercy, she’s awesome. Who’s Joker’s right-hand-man? Bob? Nah, he’s dead. Harley? Tried to kill her multiple times. Slappy? Who the fuck is Slappy?

The best case scenario of working for the Joker is that you fight the fucking Batman! And that presents its own fucking list of problems. If you stop Superman as a Lex Luthor henchman, Lex’ll be pissed, but he’ll be at least happy that Superman was caught. If you stop Batman as a Joker henchman, you better have a fucking coffin picked out yesterday.

This isn’t a fun hypothetical question, this is a screening technique that the doctors at Arkham use to determine your mental health! There is a right and a wrong answer to this question, and the correct one is Lex fucking Luthor. Thank you for coming to my fucking Ted Talk, have a nice day.

I'm mad because no one ever talked or explained to me about safety and how that feels or considered "feeling safe" to be a goal, and as a result all I could imagine "getting better" to be like was somehow dissociating or ignoring my fear more.

I feel that the most productive way forward on Medical Fear is getting more chill with needles in the context of like blood draws and IVs and stuff

this is because an IV is used to sedate/knock unconscious, and if I could be knocked unconscious without intense apprehension of that process itself, it would be immensely reassuring that some medical exams/procedures would at least theoretically be possible for me due to the option of being sedated/unconscious

I used to be very fearful of needles in vaccines, I am not anymore due to engineering several experiences to be as "safe-feeling" as possible. First was choosing to go to the pharmacy at the grocery store instead of the doctors' office because being in a doctor's office was so stressful in itself, whereas the grocery store was a familiar place with positive things in it (ice cream). Also, people at the pharmacy are very nice and polite and professional.

I also brought my best friend with me the first time, I think I was 21 then. I don't think the reason it helped was having him there, but rather that I was capable of taking an action to make the experience better, instead of the previous idea of the "badness" of the experience being fundamentally unchangeable and something I have to "just get through."

I think I would still have a strong negative reaction if I was to see the needle before the vaccine, but I always say specifically that I don't want to see it at all and "I am going to cover my eyes now." Most of the things that help seem to be related to the ability to take action of my own volition and to have agency over the interaction.

I can contrast this with an experience 3 years earlier (when I was 18) which I tried to make a positive experience but it was not effective. I think I initially came away with the impression that I had created a positive experience for myself, because it was more positive than before, but it did not reduce my fear at all. This was when I got vaccines as part of a doctor's appointment.

I mainly remember that the vaccines were extremely fucking painful, so painful it was difficult to tolerate the pain, and I'm certain this was because my muscles were incredibly tense. Subsequent experiences (with several different types of vaccines; I got my Covid, HPV vaccines and started getting yearly flu vaccines, plus tetanus booster) have not been like that at all: when there is pain at all it is like being pinched for a brief second or slightly poked with a very sharp pencil.

But after the experience when I was 18 there was new apprehension added to my fear because it had hurt so badly. I had already been in a doctor's office for over an hour, in the waiting room in a horrible state of dread and then getting vitals taken and all of that, which had given the tension time to build up in my body, which had made my muscles tense and made the vaccines physically very painful.

I didn't experience much reduction of my fear after this, whereas I did experience reduction of fear when I tried making a "safe" experience at the pharmacy.

I don't know how to apply this learning to the IV/blood draw type of needles. I know my fear comes from specific traumatic experiences I can remember, on top of the generalized fear of medical professionals having access to my body.

But now that "feeling safe" is something I can comprehend or imagine as possible, it doesn't feel completely unsolvable.

I know when I was 17 or 18 or so I discussed the possibility of doing exposure therapy for my "needle phobia" (that's what I thought it was; the other aspects of my medical fear I had forced out of my consciousness because I couldn't cope with it) but even just talking about it made me so uncomfortable that I never went through with it.

I think I feel more apprehension at the prospect of talking to a therapist about needles than I do about looking at pictures of needles or something like that...actually the thing I would be apprehensive about might be having a therapist there at all.

The concept of exposure therapy in the sense of "creating positive experiences to counteract the negative ones" appeals to me, but I can't get the revulsion out of my head for the Idea Of Exposure Therapy, since the way it was always presented to me was "progressively increase the level of scariness of the thing while using coping skills to reduce your anxiety," which in hindsight probably freaked me out for the reason that none of the coping skills I had been taught ever worked (especially not breathing exercises, fuck breathing exercises), and I had no idea that they weren't working because I couldn't imagine feeling less terrified, only being functional vs. not functional.

@magemulberry okay I think there must be something to the Deer Hitler Method because back at the beginning of covid there were several tiktoks or short videos about the Covid vaccine that I think might have helped me to relax my feelings about vaccines

Specifically there was one where a dude got all 5 types of covid vaccines and it gave him superpowers which he used for evil. This one was also good for non-scary vaccine imagery because the shot was represented by the guy being poked with a pen XD

I think the reason this one specifically was helpful is that it was playfully imagining something outside my overwhelmingly coercion-irradiated experience of medical things. The guy in the skit was getting the vaccine because he had an absurd and funny ulterior motive.

I can at least identify some things that DON'T work. I know that for me, distraction is worse than useless.

Is it even POSSIBLE to distract me from something happening in my body? The idea that doing another activity or taking in another stimulus will make a body experience I'm already incredibly mentally honed in on less intense or less salient makes no sense at all to me. "scary" stimuli are automatically prioritized in terms of salience, so like, what is distraction supposed to so.

It is possible this is an autism thing, and/or an inherent thing about me. I had a conversation with some people about it and they described being able to put themselves mentally "elsewhere" during an uncomfortable or nerve-wracking body experience, like mildly dissociating from the body and shifting focus to something in the mind to lower the intensity of the body experience.

I don't think I have the ability to do this. I've never experienced this.

(During my traumatizing blood draw I had music to play during the procedure, and I remember pulling up the track I wanted to play, but I only realized afterward that the music had never actually started playing. I don't think the music would have helped much; the thought of having music playing during something stressful makes me feel more stressed.)

But the original idea is very close to what you're describing; micro-dosing on exposure to the terrifying thing in a way that is at your pace, under your control.

So like, if I was terrified by dogs, I could make an arrangement with a dog owner to meet the dog under very carefully controlled circumstances. So I could maybe even start by going to the place where the dog will be, without the dog. Then with a toy dog. Then, when I'm ready I can meet the dog, while being free to exit the room or ask for the dog to be removed. I might even get to where I carefully interact with the dog, if that's my intention.

So yeah, taking the experience out of a medical context may help. Maybe being in a non medical room with a person who has the equipment but no medical exam or procedure will happen, to start. Maybe add in a positive interaction; in the room, tools are there, someone gives you ice cream.

Or, maybe carefully planned encounters with people that you know, wearing a lab coat first. Just, like, going to someone's house to play Uno and everyone wears scrubs or lab coats.

Too many people think exposure therapy is "Being forced to experience the bad thing" and it's not true; it's choosing how and when and how much exposure you will be getting. I'm no therapist, but it kind of sounds like the lack of control, agency, and consent is the bigger issue here.

Rehearsing can help, especially if you have the power to say, "Nope. This is not good. I'm going to leave now."

And practice saying that, too. You are allowed to leave. You are allowed to say "No."