Goblin Door

Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can't stop it. And you can't stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.

You need to remember the next part: you don't have to stop it by yourself.

I'm picturing a community space where initial posters ask for game recommendations based on specific criteria (those RPG bingo cards I saw a bunch of people fill out last month would be perfect examples!) and other people respond with games fitting those criteria - their own projects, or other people's. No need to prevent promo spam other than generally making sure recommendations fit the criteria, because everything need to be in direct response to a request.

I know that I'd feel more comfortable promoting somewhere that actively encouraged it - hopefully softening that "shilling your wares" feeling - and I'd be more likely to pay attention to other people's promotion when I'm actively searching for a specific kind of game than when I randomly scroll past an ad post.

I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are

Not deterred by the closed door

Working as a group

Protecting their identities

Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction

Getting away at the end

what do I mean by this? here's an example. when my surgery is delayed multiple times, I spend a little time looking up (there is only one surgeon in the entire area who will perform this surgery on trans people, so every trans person's surgical timeline is bottle-necked and delayed by months every time he goes to a conference or takes a vacation or experiences an injury. in other words, if I was cis, I would not encounter this difficulty in accessing surgery). and then I spend time looking down (due to nonstop harassment and legal threats, this practice now only treats adults and will no longer perform surgeries on minors. in other words, my access to surgery is predicated on adult privilege I have at the direct expense of trans youth's lack of access).

Kids

*clap*

Deserve

*clap*

Better

*clap*

Books

*clap*

That don't

*clap*

Talk down

*clap*

To them

I recently gave opposition testimony against HB 249 here in Ohio: the odious bill that intends to effectively ban drag and gender-nonconforming expression which it labels “obscene” in order to “protect the children.” Note that there is not a single case of a child actually being harmed from any of this.

Oh, and one of the sponsors of the bill had been charged with indecent solicitation of a minor… and still sat on the judiciary committee.

Before that, I was giving testimony against another bill that bars minors from accessing gender affirming healthcare. Again, to “protect” them. Even when all the evidence shows that this kind of legislation drastically increases suicide risks and directly harms the children it’s supposed to “protect.”

It could not be clearer that right-wing lawmakers right now are either using “think of the children!” as a cudgel to beat people they don’t like into submission, or they are actively trying to harm children under the guise of protecting them.

You might be aware of Louis Wain. If not by name then by his art. He's the artist behind that series of cat drawings that slowly became more and more abstract and bizarre.

This series of paintings of cats are often labelled as a visual representation of Wain's deteriorating mental illness and schizophrenia. Even more so often labelled as "a tragic display of a painter's failing battle with schizophrenia."

The paintings look like this and were painted around the very early 1900s.

Ok got all that?

So here's the thing.

Although Wain did suffer from a mental illness that was strong enough for him to be institutionalized, his mental illness was never diagnosed with clear certainty. Although "Schizophrenia" is so heavily applied to him based purely on how his series of paintings LOOK, despite actual specialists widely disputing this. On top of this, although he did paint the kaleidoscope cat portraits during this time, it was not the only things he painted, and he was quite capable of painting "normal" pictures of cats.

The Kaleidoscope Cat portraits are more images of him experimenting with colour and shapes, something the Smithsonian themselves state on their website.

Wain had actually made his entire living painting whimsical images of cats, often for product adverts, before he was incarcerated and was actually a very beloved artist at the time. When his friends learned of his incarceration, they started a collection of donation money to help transfer Wain to the Bethlam Royal Hospital instead, one of the best mental health facilities of the time. Even the Prime Minster of the time donated, and they raised a large amount of money across England to help him.

4 years later, Wain drew this as his final image which he released publicly

I knew all about "the Schizophrenic cat Guy" but he had always been presented to me as some tragic case of an artist going mad and his skills and work unraveling as he went insane.