There Was a Girl

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Average tgirl watching tv shows from the 2000s: Why are there so many tranny jokes?

Average tgirl living in the 1990s: Why are all my friends dying of AIDs?

Average tgirl living in the 1950s: Boy howdy! They sure are driving me far out into the middle of nowhere! They must have a great surprise waiting for me!

Children die, death/murder is not an adult topic.

The Troubled Teen Industry exists, child trafficking is not an adult topic.

Children get raped, sexual assault is not an adult topic.

Children have alcoholic parents, addiction is not an adult topic.

Children get beat to the point of hospitalization at school, that level of violence is not an adult topic.

The problem wasn’t what I had access to. It was that I didn’t have access to a safe adult I could actually talk to; someone I could trust to help me without immediately cutting me off from everything and everyone. I remember getting messages from strangers on Skype. I didn’t even respond. But when my parents found out, they banned me from using it entirely. That meant losing most of my contact with friends outside of school. So what did I do? I went behind their backs. And once I was hiding, I couldn’t tell them when something actually dangerous was happening, like when I started being groomed. By the time things escalated, I was already alone with it.

I think about an episode of Scared Straight where a girl was dragged through a prison because she’d been talking to adult men online. She wasn’t doing that because she was reckless or malicious; she was lonely. Her parents weren’t present, she was being bullied at school, and these men gave her attention, told her she was pretty, told her she mattered. She was already being harmed. And the adults in her life responded by terrorizing her. Humiliating her. Calling her a slut. Telling her she deserved it. Breaking her to pieces.

What lesson does that actually teach? Not “this is dangerous, come to us.” It teaches: If you get hurt, we will hurt you more. Do you really think that makes her stop, or does it just make the predators look safer by comparison? They might as well have driven her straight into the jaws of those predators with torches and pitchforks. Because when every path back to safety is lined with punishment, kids don’t run away from danger. They run deeper into it.

If you want kids to be safe, stop treating them like problems to control and start treating them like people worth protecting. Stop ripping away their autonomy the second they make a mistake or encounter something risky. Stop teaching them that honesty will cost them everything.

Imagine. My every word, sealing your mind inside of a plastic cage, as your mouth is reduced with every breath, eyes becoming wide and static, leaving you as a lifeless and empty thing. A simulacrum of life, an reflection of a reflection.

Oh I'm sure some of you out there enjoy your dollification with those vapid smiles. Those poses. Making you sculpted into a specific form. Imbued with purpose and made to be appealing. Isn't it nice to know you no longer have agency in appearing pretty and being treasured and adored. A good dolly is to be prized and treasured and kept and adored.

No.

That's not what you get.

Funko is not there to be adored. Funko is not there to be prettily positioned or shaped. It is not a window to an animated smile or an empty and vacant expression showing how objectified you have become.

Objectification is too desirable, too precious, too valuable for what I shall do to you.

A Funko isn't owned to be coveted and adored. It's owned to be owned. It's a cheap piece of plastic that says "I own this", "this is mine" this is a meaningless Thing that I do not interact with. That contains no life, no animation, no soul, no love.

It is a token of possession. Empty beyond empty. Not drained of life and granted allure in that which it lacks; it is so lacking that it could never be mistaken for ever having been associated with life and form and function and affection.

Let me drain you so fully of vitality that you become less than an object, less than trash. You can pity trash. You can imbue meaning into an object. You can project on to those things.

I'm going to hypnotize you and transform you into something so devoid of value, meaning and emotion that you're just a meaningless shape.

Like this take may sound woke and seem to make sense to you, but apply any critical thinking and you'll realize this puts you in the same camp as the homophobes, transphobes, and all other bigots.

You don't get to police what other consenting adults do in their bedrooms. You don't get to make people feel ashamed of how they get off. No one does. No matter how much you dislike it. No matter how justified you feel about it. Those folks who want to genocide us for being queer and trans feel just as justified, they feel just as much that it makes sense, they feel just as much that it is their right to take their personal discomfort out on people who are different from them. Which is all this is just with a progressive veneer.

So much horrendous mid century sexism, other isms, and patriarchal psychiatry… so many scene ideas.

I’m very fond of the passage about hypnosis helping “swishy-swashy mixed-up sexlings who dabble in homosexuality, lesbianism, or are held captive by obsessions with various other unnatural sexual inclinations” (yes, save us from those, hypnosis!) And all the stuff about it curing frigidity, the horrendous construct that was applied to women who were not attracted to their lunkish husbands or couldn’t come from their clitoris-ignorant sex acts. Then there’s:

in some embarrassing cases, [Freud’s] female patients became so deeply attached to him during hypnosis that they would get up from the couch with some raging animal urges for the spade-bearded little Viennese doctor, himself!

But you have to flip to page 47 for the juicier, more made-up parts about Hollywood hypnosis sex parties:

There are even examples in our own country, particularly in the wild West Coast set, where it has become fashionable to hold Hypnosis Parties. There, reliable insiders have revealed, a group will get together for an evening of what they describe as “fun,” under the direction of some utterly unscrupulous amateur hypnotist who takes payment for his services ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. Whoever arranges these parties is always careful to invite a number of pretty, passion-ripe young starlets who are always making the party rounds in the hope that their “contacts” will turn up with a connection to a fat movie or TV part. These girls are inevitably called on to volunteer as “subjects” for the sinister hypnotist. Eager to make friends, and seldom very bright anyway, the girls usually comply. Of course, they have no idea of what is in store for them under the trance and MOST BELIEVE THE MYTH THAT THEY CANNOT BE MADE TO DO ANYTHING AGAINST THEIR MORAL CODES. What happens, of course, is fantastic. The usual line is to tell a hypnotized girl that she is posing for a photographer from one of those sexy men’s magazines and that everything is completely private. The girl then proceeds to disrobe, completely unaware of the hungry eyes watching every slip up — or down. From there, the suggestions grow bolder and bolder, and if the entranced girl does not capitulate freely under the hypnotist’s suggestion, she’s too far gone to stop what is happening anyway. It borders on rape in the mind of anybody who knows the full story, but to the sicknik, sexed-up minds of the Hollywood crowd, it’s all in a night’s fun! And what can the girl do about it after she comes out of the trance and finds that she may have been violated by some predatory, girl-greedy guy, or guys, in the crowd? Nothing! After all, it was her “own free will” that got her into the mess—or, at least, that’s the myth people believe. And it’s another fact that once a person has come under the spell of a hypnotist, there is no resisting the second time, or the third, or fourth. In fact, it keeps getting easier, until the hypnotist can control the subject with just a snap of his fingers. Think how dangerous that could be for a girl who thought she was just going along for a little party fun! It is one of the reasons why the scientific world keeps quiet about its progress with the mystifying mumbo-jumbo of hypnosis, now proving so valuable in painless childbirth, dentistry and even surgery. And it is one of the things that should make YOU extremely cautious of hypnotism and of any amateurs dabbling in the dark corners of the mind. A hypnotic trance may feel like heaven—but really be opening the door to a personal HADES!

On This Day In Homestuck:

March 18th, 2012