Fractal Workshop

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

And people refuse to look at the infighting and question who set up the argument?

The source of organized opposition to trans rights in the USA can be whittled down to less than a hundred people. It’s the same names in the same orgs writing the same papers, petitioning government representatives. The same handful pushing for conflict.

We have one guy who said out loud that he had put his media power to focus the entire culture war on CRT and we watched it work. We watched everyone get focused in on something that wasn’t even being taught in public schools because it’s a uni level topic.

Who’s starting the fight?

Who’s telling you that this person doesn’t belong under the umbrella?

Who’s telling you to kick your siblings out?

Who’s telling you to gatekeep and exclude when we’re all under fire internationally?

Where did the story start?

Who benefits?

I spoke to researchers in multiple countries for this piece and all of them agreed that anti-trans activists were becoming increasingly comfortable with presenting their arguments in a white supremacist framework, presenting transition care as an attack on white fertility and white birth rates specifically. Sometimes, this is subtle: Irreversible Damage, a 2020 book in which author Abigail Shrier portrays youth transition as an imminent threat to the fertility of “our daughters,” infamously uses a cover illustration of a young white girl with her uterus scooped out of her body. At the extremes, things get more overt. Alix Aharon, the “GenderMapper” organizer who has led the charge against Planned Parenthood as the “apex of the trans lobby,” also insists transition is only a threat to white children; “Black youth are not transitioning,” she writes.  This obsessive focus on white fertility is of a piece with fascist propaganda about being overrun or replaced by people of colour. “There is a growing body of propaganda about ‘white genocide,’” says Mallory Moore of the U.K.-based Trans Safety Network. “We queer and trans people, and feminists for that matter, are refusing to do our national duty to breed.”  Schevers says that the conspiratorial thinking that dominates TERF circles easily extends to incorporate other civil rights movements—whereas trans people might be framed as a plan to weaken the white race through “sexual degeneracy,” movements like Black Lives Matter are suspected of being unwitting tools of the trans.  “They’re talking about Black Lives Matter [being] co-opted by the trans lobby,” she says. “Again, it’s very similar to Nazi propaganda. ‘This Jewish elite has captured this Black civil rights movement and it’s actually just an attack on white people.’”  At this point, “transphobia” no longer seems like an adequate description of the problem. “Transphobia” implies hating trans people. Believing that the existence of trans people is a Jewish plot to destroy the white race by lowering white AFAB people’s fertility is, to be crude, a whole new level of fucked up.   Yet these ideas are reaching the mainstream, laundered through a sympathetic commentariat that scrubs off their far-right associations. For instance, as researcher Christa Peterson has documented, Helen Joyce’s recent book Trans repeats Bilek’s “Jewish billionaires” theory without citing her by name. Joyce was then reviewed by anti-trans commentator Jesse Singal in the New York Times,and Singal—while calling Joyce’s book “an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight”—neglected to mention Jewish billionaires at all. Dig two inches down, and you’ll find the Nazis, but on the surface, it looks like reasonable “debate.” 

Nice summary of the people involved in the anti-trans political push in the US:

The biggest voice back in 2021 to put Critical Race Theory in the news was a man named Christopher Rufo.

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

Parable of the Polygons - an interactive experiment that shows how tiny individual biases can collectively cause segregation on a massive scale.

To Build a Better Ballot - an interactive experiment that shows the alternatives to the voting systems we currently use and how they can be more representative and democratic, along with their faults.

Coming Out Simulator - a short interactive story/novel about coming out, based off of Case’s own experiences. Not one I’ve played myself but still one I can recommend.

Loopy - a very simple but useful tool to show how systems interact with each other and how things can self-propagate.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

A.I. photos are flooding social media and contributing to an Internet where we can't believe what we see. Spotting A.I. 📷s is an important media literacy skill.

None of us have time to research every image we see. We just need people to notice BEFORE THEY LIKE OR SHARE that an image might be fake. If unsure, check it or don't share.

Like nothing is worse for me as an adult than the entirely unwarranted and unwanted sense of fear or scandalization from perfectly common stuff. And I don’t blame some wonderful TV show for using the word “fuck” or showing a nipple. My responses to those things are entirely constructed and cultural, and those shows are often doing me a kindness by giving me a context in which to safely re-examine them and my relationship to them.

[@dontbopthebunny reply: Will you give another example of what you mean, please?]

I can do my best. I don't know if you are just looking for simple examples. I don't think this is a simple one-to-one direct causation thing, where there are simple rules you can make for what is or isn't appropriate to discuss with kids when and if you follow them your kid will grow up mentally healthy and if you don't you've traumatized them forever.

But, for example, when I was in sixth grade I had a friend for the first half of the schoolyear who was in trouble.

I don't even remember her last name at this point, and I was an incredibly sheltered eleven-year-old. So I genuinely cannot tell you what was going on. I can tell you something wasn't right. Something with an older boyfriend and her divorced parents and stepdad? Something awful that I did not understand and did not know how to communicate.

Something she didn't tell a lot of people about, because it was a secret.

And I can't tell you how it ends. I don't know what happened to her. She disappeared from school after winter break and never came back.

I can tell you that on the two occasions I tried to talk to adults about it during our friendship, their first instinct was to protect me at the exclusion of her. The reaction was very much one of, whatever she is telling you, you shouldn't be learning about that, and it doesn't sound safe for you to be her friend, and I don't know if she's a good influence, and I am scared for you - the one who isn't being abused and is so sheltered she doesn't know how to recognize even the most basic signs about her friend. I'm not even sure they recognized this was probably some kind of abuse situation.

All they heard was an eleven-year old bringing up topics that sound like they might have something to do with sex or drugs and that's inappropriate. You're too young for that, and your friends are too, so if they are talking about it they are bad friends.

But here's the thing! Not only was she in more danger because of adults felt more inclined to protect this wealthier girl from a stable family at this other girl's expense, I was in more danger too! I had no idea how to even think of what she told me. I barely understood sex existed. And my understanding of dangerous adults was entirely based around relatively useless Stranger Danger training. Because adults felt inclined to warn me of the relatively unlikely danger of some random person asking me into a van, but not the much more likely and actively present danger of possibly my friend's parents being sexual predators or abusers of some kind.

If I hadn't been made to feel like I was maybe inviting Satan into my life by even knowing what sex was, maybe I could've better understood what my friend was trying to tell me. Maybe I could've better asked for help. And if the adult community around me had been more focused on listening to children and less on "protecting" them, maybe they could've actually protected someone.

My genuine feeling is that if a kid is old enough to ask, they are old enough to be given an honest answer (at a level they can understand). Even if the answer is sad, scary, or even traumatizing. I think it's fine to say, "the answer is scary, would you like to know, or would you just like to know Mom has it handled and it will be okay?" - and if the kid insists on knowing, try to tell them in safe and nonjudgmental environment.

We actually put children at an incredible disadvantage by labeling them "innocent and pure". Children, thank goodness, are no such thing. Children are feral little creatures who were born to survive. When I worked in daycare the kids favorite game was eating babies - they would stick dolls in the toy oven and microwave, they would SET IMAGINARY TABLES AND HAVE IMAGINARY FEASTS with an infant doll as the main entree. They thought this was hilarious.

You are not going to be able to keep trauma from your children. You are not going to be able to keep your children from trauma. You can only choose how much support you give them through trauma.

I also feel like sometimes we generate trauma by trying to separate ourselves, our society, and our children from their fleshy mortal reality. Even secular people in America like to conceptualize a person as having a kind of True Moral self, the SuperEgo is the Ideal You, that you must strive for. The "temptations" of the flesh as things to be overcome. Hunger, violent urges, lust, illness. These are external forces acting on us, not regular features of being human. Not just, like, things. That we feel. That are normal. That, yes, we need to deal with and not turn into problems for other people, but are not themselves things we need to be "protected" from experiencing or knowing about or talking about.

But the hide and deny and lie and "protect" version of teaching kids about these concepts - like foreign invaders instead of native features - hurts kids. If your kid is not supposed to know things they know, not be curious about things they are curious about, not think the things they think or feel the things they feel, they are going to be traumatized by their own normal thoughts and feelings. You generated the trauma where there was none.

All you're doing by telling your kid that Fido moved to a nice farm upstate where he's happy is arresting their development, denying them the chance to learn how to conceptualize the world as it is, and how to manage and care for themselves in it.

Kids are violent. They bite and push and shove. Kids are sexual. Sometimes infants get boners. (I have seen a one-year-old's boner while changing a diaper! It's awkward!!!! It's so awkward!!! But it shouldn't be, because it's natural and it's not sexual in the way adults are sexual. At that age, you ignore it. No need to give a one year old a shame complex). Sometimes toddlers masturbate! And that's a normal thing for them to do! They need to be taught manners about it, but they aren't doing anything wrong. Kids can experience loss and trauma. They get in car accidents, their friends can get cancer, they will experience bad things that are too big for them to deal with.

This isn't me saying "So go out and expose your three year old to the most fucked up shit you can think of." Do not do that. Please still monitor what they're watching, please watch how you talk around them, please still carefully introduce them to ideas at a level they can understand.

This is me saying, I think most of the push to "protect" kids is based around what adults wish wasn't true for them, as if pretending and wishing can somehow make it so for the next generation. If I never tell my kid about abuse, they will get to live in a world where abuse doesn't exist. But that's not what happens! Now they just live in a world where abuse exists and they can't recognize it and are ashamed to ask for help!

And this kind of fragile insulated approach to child-rearing is also just, like, incredibly classist and white. It's not about protecting everyone's sense of safety. No one cared about protecting Ruby Bridges, but now white parents panic about teaching their kids her name. White parents pull their kids out from learning about The Holocaust and slavery. They use the idea of protecting their kids from topics are "scary" or "upsetting" as a way to protect their child's, and so their own, sense of privilege and entitlement. They aren't worried about their kids. They are worried about themselves.

And ironically these kind of guarded tower approaches to childcare can actually create trauma out of the innocuous. Not all discomfort is equal. Yeah, it'll probably be a bit awkward for everyone when your kid asks where babies come from, but that's certainly going to be less traumatic than them learning when they're fifteen and pregnant.

"Protect the children" is far too often a dogwhistle that means anything from

1) I want to be able to control my children through shame

2) I want to be able to plug my ears and ignore systemic injustice

3) I want to oppress this group of people and can exploit the idea of children to do so

4) I want to protect myself from my children's judgment

5) I myself have not healthily come to terms with the ideas and realities I am now expected to guide my children through, and I do not want to work on myself

Taking care of children is obviously a hugely important thing to do. And we're only just figuring out what is and isn't good for them. We are so new to actually learning the best practices for raising safe and healthy kids.

IDK. If you're going to study how to rear healthy human children, I think you first need to acknowledge what a human is, and accept that with compassion and understanding. And a human is a hungry, sometimes horny, complex social animal, mortal and flesh as all animals are.

• AIs have already been scraping data from sites for free for years

• Companies got pissed at this a little too late and are now trying to put it behind a paywall by offering things like data packs in paid partnerships

• Your data wasn't safe before or now

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.