Trying to get better

Hey kids! Do you want to participate in the advancement of Earth’s destruction? Do you want to generate 40 years worth of electricity emissions with one click of a button? Tumblr is now allowing you to make your very own NFTs and participate in a solipsistic pyramid scheme where artists don’t own their art anymore and every transaction personally stabs Gaia in the face! But Uneryx, what the fuck’s an NFT and what’s that hav to do with Tumblcryptids? Glad you asked! Imagine that you printed out a jpeg and stapled it to a dollar bill.  Now imagine that, instead of a print out of a jpeg, it was actually a sticky note that said where the jpeg was located on your hard drive and you stapled THAT to a dollar bill.

That’s what an NFT is - a digital container file attached to cryptocurrency (specifically, an ethereium token) that gives the buyer “ownership” of an image file. Except not really because what buyers actually own is a container file with the image’s URL inside of it. 

Oh, and the act of minting an NFT causes astronomical environmental damage because the emissions required to generate cryptocurrency are ridiculously high. 

ALSO! Artists don’t retain any ownership of their work once it’s been NFT’d. And you don’t have to prove that you’re the original artist to make an NFT. Hell, you can screenshot someone’s twitter post and make THAT an NFT. So, on top of the pyramid scheme aspect of it and the acceleration of climate change, we can add art theft to the toxic, shitty culture around fake online trading cards. So what’s this got to do wtih the Tumblcryptids?

A few things.

First of all, this site loves to bag on about normalizing bad behaviors. Well guess what, this is absolutely normalizng something awful. By making an april fool’s joke about something this harmful, Tumblr staff is basically turning something that will destroy our planet into a fucking joke. It’s not a joke.

Secondly, there is no opting in or transparency. There’s just a FUN SPLASHY BANNER that catches your eye, and oh, it makes a cute little blob based on your interests with a funny name! 

Nowhere until after you’ve sumibtted the post to your blog does it say the word “NFT”.

Eating while on shift is not permitted, staff are told. “If the system detects no keyboard stroke and mouse click, it will show you as idle for that particular duration, and it will be reported to your supervisor. So please avoid hampering your productivity.”

A training video about the webcam system, seen by the Guardian, says it “monitors and tracks real-time employee behaviour and detects any violations to pre-set business rules, and sends real-time alerts to managers to take corrective actions immediately”.

Step 1: Open Notepad.

Step 2: Copy the following text, line for line, omitting only the --- that caps either end of it. --- Dim objResult Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Do While True   objResult = objShell.sendkeys("{NUMLOCK}{NUMLOCK}")   Wscript.Sleep (6000) Loop --- Step 3: Save this as whatever.vbs, put it somewhere you can access easily, and double click it when you start your computer.

What does this do?

“How can I prevent my patients from lying or withholding information?” Wrong question. 

“How do I signal to my patients that they can trust me with sensitive information?” Right question.

And like most right questions, it has thousands of different answers for different people. You throw out thousands of signals in a single session that you’re not even aware of. While it’s not feasible to be constantly aware of the subtext of every gesture you make, as a therapist you should probably already know that many of your patients are hyper-vigilant to signs of social danger. Especially teenager and child patients. Especially patients from bad or abusive backgrounds. Especially patients who have previous negative experiences with other therapists.

You may think it’s not fair that a good therapist will inherit the emotional baggage left by a bad therapist, and it isn’t. But I promise you that it’s miles and miles more unfair to open up to a therapist, just like everyone tells you to, and have that thrown back in your face. I can tell you, because I’ve attended at least five different health-care professionals, and only the most recent two were unambiguously positive experiences. 

The bottom line is: if you want your patients to trust you, you have to prove to them that you are willing to earn their trust, and sometimes you have to earn that trust over and over again. And that trust is going to look different for each patient and their unique circumstances. This is part of the buy-in of working in a therapeutic profession. If you’re in school to become a psychologist or social worker, think about that now, rather than later.

What a strange duck pond

*cooking meals* this doesn’t feel better

*exercising* this doesn’t feel better

*making art* this doesn’t feel better

*cleaning the apartment* this doesn’t feel better

*somewhere months or years down the line*