Angry Badger Behind the Wheel

And abusive shit can be a lot of things. It can be a bigoted boss that resents their very presence at work. It can be a romantic partner that speaks only in violence and control. It can be a family member that refuses to acknowledge boundaries and feels entitled to their everything.

Abuse has a multitude of shapes and it takes a lot of courage for someone who is enduring it, to not only acknowledge it for what it is, but to reach out and TELL someone. They might not even be at the stage where they're asking for help, they just want someone to look at their reality, the true reality of it, and acknowledge that... yeah that's abuse.

And if you, yourself, have never experienced abuse - first of all, I am so glad, genuinely, that you've been blessed with such good luck - you might find the next steps in your friend's process to be deeply upsetting. Annoying, even. Because you say "yes, that's abuse" and they reply "okay" and then immediately go back to it. Even after you helpfully point out that they need to get the fuck out of there.

They keep going back.

And you're going to look at their actions and the conversations you've had and you're going to come to the conclusion that they're enabling the abuse. That they are actively participating in it, by not getting out as soon as they recognized the abuse for what it was.

And you're going to look at your friend and feel the urge to tell them that they need to stop "tolerating" it, because they have agency and they're clearly partaking in the abuse, by consistently coming back. Your friend might have even shared with you that the abusive situation has forced them to act in ways that, to your discerning eye, sound abusive themselves, which combined with their refusal to drop everything and go, means you might end up tempted to label your friend as a toxic person inherently, and decide to end the friendship entirely.

I am here looking at you in the eye to tell you all of that is the devil talking.

All of it.

While I understand the temptation to give "agency back" to survivors of abuse, no victim of abuse is ever complicit/enabling/participant in their abuse. Because they didn't choose to be abused. They didn't sign up for it. They didn't cause it. If you're wondering, we have a name for this urge people keep failing to repress, no matter how unsightly it is whenever they express it: blaming the victim.

So don't do that.

But also don't just tell a victim of abuse that they should leave and then be exasperated when they don't do so immediately. Do you understand what it means to leave? I suspect you don't.

Go check out HealingByTheNumebrs on Youtube, here on a very convenient playlist for you. Dr. Ruth chronicles HER own escape out of a 10 year abusive marriage. She talks about WHY she decides to leave, and then goes day by day on a 7 month journey to put together a reenactment of her escape plan.

It should help you understand why "just leave!" is not helpful. It's not even advice. It's borderline cruel, even. Are YOU offering to help them along with your loud proclamations that they should go? Are you opening your home to them, to have a place to GO? Are you offering to pay for costs?

Telling someone to leave is easy, particularly when you're not offering to help someone figure out how.

So please. PLEASE. If someone confides in you, do not listen to the devil, listen to your friend. Actually listen to them. And the be a fucking friend, and honor the trust placed in you by not being a fucking repugnant shitstain that betrays that trust immediately and starts parroting the devil's bullshit.

Don't get me wrong: I investigate warnings, and I act on them if they're true and relevant. But callout posts are, on a very fundamental level, not about what people say they're about. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they're made for one or more of the following reasons:

OP didn't like the subject to begin with (often for bigoted reasons), and they wanted a reason, and a following, to justify and validate that.

OP wanted to gain popularity, so they made themselves look like either a victim, a hero, or both.

OP wanted to claim victim status in a private falling-out in order to preserve good standing with their own friends/their community.

OP didn't like what the subject was saying, and wanted to silence them (often for bigoted reasons).

OP genuinely just wants "revenge" on the subject, or otherwise wants to ruin their reputation and have them sent harassment.

Again, there are exceptions: there are "callouts" that just unravel a subject's lies, or point out problems in already public actions. If OP is claiming to have been personally victimized in a legitimately serious way, and especially one that indicates the subject might be a danger to others, I'm definitely more willing to believe it- one obvious example being sexual violence.

But oftentimes, callouts are incredibly personal, misleading, emotionally manipulative, blatantly untrue, or all of the above.

This person came to me on anon; I have absolutely no way of knowing what their motives are or how trustworthy they are. There is no credibility or accountability here.

And I did read the post. Lo and behold, it's riddled with emotionally manipulative language, false accusations, and the biggest reaches I've ever seen:

"DON'T READ THIS CALLOUT, IT'S SO TRIGGERING TO EVERYONE, JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. But the proof is here if you REALLY don't believe me"

"Proof" is a scarce handful of screenshots taken out of context that contain emotionally evocative language, but do not support the accusations at all.

Some accusations are genuinely just weird logic leaps with no support, others are matters of personal opinion obviously driven by bigoted motives.

OP themselves expresses very publicly that they believe people who are marginalized in the ways the subject are, who speak on that marginalization, should be silenced.

I try to assume good faith here, and I want to believe this anon was just guilt-tripped and manipulated by the post in question. I don't hold any ill will here.

But anon, I want you to ask yourself:

Are the accusations you're making something you have personally investigated and found to be true?

Does this person deserve the harassment and ostracization they will likely receive as a result of your accusations?

Will you hold yourself accountable for the damage you've caused if you're wrong?

I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.

Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.

The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.

I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Sapient distant descendants of rats, known as packers, living on Earth millions of years after the extinction of humans, began to develop mathematics using cognitive mechanisms never intended for such tasks. Due to an evolutionary quirk, multiplication came more naturally to them than addition, and their mathematics reflects this.

Packers write numbers as shapes, with each number having a corresponding number of corners.

And they write large numbers as nested shapes. The number inside is multiplied by the number outside.

Examples of some numbers:

Packers haven't invented 0 yet. They haven't even invented 1! In fact, they don’t need the concept of "one" much in their system. There's no need to say "I ate one fish" when they can simply say "I ate fish".

Packers can't yet write large prime numbers, like 101 or 10,501, because they would have to draw a huge shape to represent them! Even writing 17 or 19 would be quite difficult if they only used convex shapes.

So packers use non-convex shapes too!

Many years later, some packer noticed that large prime numbers look suspiciously symmetric.

So this packer improved the notation system and made it clearer.

Later, another packer simplified this system even more, deciding that there was no point in writing the same shapes twice.

This packer was the first in their culture to declare that "a dot isolated from a number" should also be considered a number. The packer called this dot "the wonderful number that's less than two".

Many years later, another packer made an important innovation: the "dot isolation" could be repeated multiple times as long as the result remained odd. When the result became even, it could undergo a "two isolation" (division by two). The final result will be a series of dots and twos.

This invention led to the creation of a binary system based on one and two, which had a significant impact on the technological advancement of packers.

The comic "the book written by tiny paws" talks about all of this in more detail. There will be mistakes, debates, the invention of rational, irrational, multivariate numbers, and some other stuff. Some stuff will be very much like human math, and some will be different. After all, math is still math, only the point of view has changed.

we had a whole chart. a plan for how every bloom would be used. i burned that too.

investigation, cut short

Collateral damage, just

two way street has a toll now

you quantified loyalty

basal desire for more

only ever desire?

we had a whole chart. a plan for how every bloom would be used. i burned that too.

two way street has a toll now

you quantified loyalty