The General Font of Madness

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I want a movie that starts with a Friday the 13th knockoff premise - a hulking undead murderer rises from the grave to terrorize some college kids. But, through a series of slapstick shenanigans, he keeps getting disarmed while going for the kill, and the incredibly drunk coeds he's trying to menace are so hammered that they end up embracing him and bringing him along on their various 80's teenage dramedy hijinks. Cars are raced, parties are crashed, and this hulking murder monster is stumbling along without a clue as to what he can do while everyone drags him into more and more comedic goofball stunts. And every time he thinks he can find a weapon and start killing, some dumb bullshit pratfall occurs and leaves him disarmed again.

And, not to crib too much from the wizard novels I've written, I think to give the plot structure we should exploit the fact that these Jason Voorhees-type slashers often have abusive parents in their backstory, because hey, guess what the protagonists of 80's teenage dramedies also have? Imagine the poor lumbering brute stomping into a college library just to see his would-be victims crying their eyes out as they Breakfast Club monologue about their home lives, and he has a full on Grinch moment as he realizes that maybe he and these sex-crazed teens... aren't so different after all.

But if I WAS, I think I might write a story where a thin red-haired Caucasian mother sacrifices herself to protect her child from an unnatural and predatory fringe outsider incapable of experiencing real human feelings like love and hope and desire for peace in a better world who seeks solely to transform his body into something unnatural and conquer the natural world by force, fully ignoring the actual and tangible real-world problems that also exist in the story like poverty, child abuse, racism, and slavery

they don't know how to read and this makes them mean and dumb. also even though their meanness and dumbness are the result of poor education, they are still personal character flaws that deserve to be mocked.

they are responsible for wide scale censorship in schools and on social media. because, as we all know, children are famously politically powerful, never want to see horny or edgy content, and love it when books are banned in their school libraries.

they love to spread misinformation around so they can all armchair diagnose each other and act like they have learning disabilities in order to excuse their laziness about doing school work. obviously they are all liars and just need to just get their acts together and grow up instead of shirking responsibility for their actions like this.

they are uniquely cruel in comparison to past generations, and this is because of Phone. and also TikTok. no one has ever been cruel like this before.

I didn't go through the bureaucratic process of changing my Norwegian personal ID number, which encodes gender in it, because having an odd number there made me feel bad.

I did it because for someone with my name and outward appearance, having "man" on my IDs reveals private medical information to everyone who sees the document, information that they aren't entitled to know, which they might act on in deeply undesirable ways.

Taking HRT also isn't something I'm doing to be affirmed, it's something I'm doing because the biological processes signaled by having high levels of estrogen and low levels of testosterone are both something I want, and something that helps my overall well-being and functioning in daily life. Material, real, physiological effects that are well understood, easy to look up, and not about some vague sense that putting estrogen in my bloodstream is a badge of validity handed out by the doctor.

Like at some point I just want to ask these people if they actually believe trans people exist or if they just feel obligated to humor the idea to be nice. Have they actually understood that there are people walking around today with the full effects of transition care already sorted? Have they comprehended that the surgeries exist beyond the occasional picture of someone who's still in recovery?

Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

To avoid more punishment, the child sits still and is quiet. But they have to actively remind themself constantly to sit still and be quiet.

The teacher sees the child sitting still and being quiet. The teacher treats this as the baseline.

Since the child is putting a lot of effort into sitting still and being quiet, doing so distracts from paying attention to what the teacher is teaching. The child then is punished for not paying attention.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.