Lucid Moon

Example date range: November 30 2019 - March 31 2020

(Sorted the list and then took the screenshot. Truncated to just the start because wow I can't take a screenshot that big.)

like, if you're bored today, and not doing anything,

I know how much you love reblogging posts and then never looking at them ever again. I get it, I really do. but PLEASE

just open one of these links and explore a bit if you're interested

Scratch - great coding program for learning the basics, but so good you can make a video game with it

Codecademy - learn any coding language with lessons

Neocities - literally make a website

And then you spend an entire day bashing your head against trying to get some asshole's[1] incredibly specific environment up and running so you can actually test and iterate on this bugfix - and then continuously get stuck on shitty programmer-brained tools, and give up because fuck it it's not worth the effort.

[1] Not really an asshole. They made a cool tool I really appreciate. I just hate the whole dev setup.

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.

I remember sitting at the table with my family, eating dinner as a child. I’d try to eat, because of course I was hungry. But sometimes the flavor or texture was so repugnant that it moved into a category of Not Food.

“Two more bites before you can leave the table.”

“I can’t,” I’d say, trying to explain the impossibility.

But because I was a child they heard, “I won’t,” and made me sit at the table. I’d sit in dull agonized silence, bored and hungry for hours until bedtime when they’d give up. I’d hate myself for not eating and my parents for forcing me to sit there. The few forcefeeding moments ended in vomit.

They’d say, “If you don’t eat this you can’t eat a snack later,” and I moved past trying to communicate my discomfort into accepting that I’d just be hungry.

That state of affairs didn’t last, because my parents realized nothing could force me to eat so they catered to my palate, worrying they’d starve me. But the message stuck. If you can’t do anything about a situation, just accept the suffering.

A few years later my mother called me off the playground to ask, “Are you limping?”

I shrugged. My feet had hurt for a long time, but that was just the way things were now. My mom pulled my socks and shoes off and gasped. The soles of my feet were covered in huge painful planters warts.

“Why didn’t you say anything?!” She demanded but I could only shrug at her. I’d learned a long time ago that saying things about my discomfort didn’t matter, so now I had no words. Sometimes things hurt and sometimes they don’t. I simply accepted and did my best.

Now as an adult trying to learn to improve my own conditions can be hard. If I make food that I can’t eat I’ll force myself to sit at the counter still, full of guilt and self loathing, trying to will myself to eat it.

At first I needed my betrothed to gently take it away to present me with something I could eat. Now on my own I can usually admit that it’s not happening before too long and get something else, but I still feel guilty.

Laying in bed at night waiting for my betrothed to finish getting ready I let out a huge sigh of relief when they turned the lights off.

“Why didn’t you turn them off if they bothered you?” they asked the first time it happened.

“I didn’t even know it was bothering me until it was gone.”

The reason I flagged it framing it as a loss is that what matters to most companies is money. If you can flag a bigoted practice as something that will lose customers, clients, or get them a lawsuit, that is significantly more likely to get taken care of quickly than trying to appeal to their better nature. I could have flagged it as "Hey, this is going to make our client really upset if they hear it.", which was my actual motivation for flagging it, but if I had, then it probably would have been taken care of in a few days or even weeks, not hours.

- Invocation Array

This is very abstract, metaphor. Try songs like The Polymorphic Code ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/the-polymorphic-code ) and The Feral Strain ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/the-feral-strain ), or maybe Shift The Fields ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/shift-the-fields ) or Protocol ( https://invocationarray.bandcamp.com/track/protocol ).

- The Luna Sequence: (No relation)

All instrumental, give This Is Bloodlust ( https://thelunasequence.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-bloodlust ) a try.

If you're chill with MLP inspired music, there's a few options ranging from the aggressive Destabilize sequence ( part one: https://princewhateverer.bandcamp.com/track/destabilize-ft-cgscrambles-brittney-ackerman ) to the contemplative Imperfection ( https://poniesatdawn.bandcamp.com/track/imperfection )

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

So go nuts with your protest votes in the primaries! That’s probably a fine idea! Make Biden squirm. But when November rolls around, if it’s Guy Who Violates Some Rights against Guy Who Violates All The Rights, choose the lesser of two evils. You do not get to pick Morally Correct Option 3, because our political system is as broken as our healthcare system. The time knife, we’ve all seen it, etc. I’ve been watching and enraged by US complicity in genocide and various other massacres since before most of you were born. It’s not new news, and there are strategies for addressing it, none of which you are implementing.

And in the meantime, between right now and November, do something NOT online. Posting a bunch for your followers who probably already agree with you does not help. Tumblr is not algorithmically driven. You are not reaching a new audience. You are activating that good old amygdala and the fight or flight hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which can make you FEEL like you’re accomplishing something, but you’re not. You’re not even successfully insulting me, because I’m blocking before I get to the end of the first sentence in most cases. Or you’re picking ENTIRELY the wrong insults, like “dumbass” or “genocide apologist,” when if you put two minutes into researching my insecurities you could at LEAST deliver a much more devastating blow. Have some pride in your useless work. Call me a clown? I sincerely thought about going to clown school and joining the circus.

You cannot decide that feeling something counts as activism. It doesn’t. That’s how you end up with white women derailing discussions of racism to focus on themselves by weeping about kids in cages. You need to DO something with your feelings, and in many cases that something is neither satisfying nor glamorous. “Collect signatures for a petition” or “Write letters to the editor of my local paper” feels a lot less dramatic than “write a very angry blog post about this,” but they have more tangible and concrete impacts.

Do something that has a realistic chance of affecting the situation at hand. Preaching to the choir does not. We can strengthen each other’s resolve, but that needs to then help us to go out and take actions, however small and mundane and unsatisfying, that can move the needle a microscopic amount in favor of justice.

Going back to the start, I'm reminded of a similar lesson I had as a child: "You can do anything you want to do. As long as you accept the consequences of that."

"Wow I can [action]?" "Yes, but [consequences]." "Oh. (thinks for a bit) What if I [other action]?" "Yeah, then you'll get [other consequences]." "But what if I want to [action] without [consequences]?" "Well you could try combining with [other action], but the reason those [consequences] will happen is because {something about society having rules against similar things and trying to build habits in me as growing up so I don't get the really negative societally-enforced consequences}." "Huh."

And this is like. "Consequences" has a negative valence, but it's just "things that happened because actions I took".

(Personal background: I've been mugged several times, only once have I actually lost any significant amount of value in possessions on my person. USA Northeast and Northwest coasts).

Someone is pointing a gun at me and demands my money, what are my options? Broadly: capitulate, attempt violence, attempt flight, attempt dialogue, freeze.

Let's go in reverse order there. What happens if I:

Freeze?

Well, the person with a gun probably has a range of temperaments from insistent to panicked, continued freezing will lead to verbal escalation to violence. Depending on how committed they are, they'll have an unloaded gun (don't ever rely on this, but in one of my cases it was, and I learned this after the fact), a loaded gun and no desire to use it, a twitchy trigger finger with poor trigger discipline and maybe I'm already dead by the time I'm thinking this far through. Not ideal. I don't want these consequences.

Attempt dialogue?

This really really really depends on the personality and demeanor of the person on the other end of the gun. With shotgunning and decent cold reading, there's a possibility to position yourself as someone sympathetic and caring for their situation. Open ears and a fast mouth are valuable here. Be aware of body language and use that to help spoken words craft a narrative with the person pointing a gun. If it's not collaborative there's massive increased risk of pushback from them, and that pushback will probably come in the form of violence. Use soft capitulations to follow through. Offer alternatives. Time, an ear to listen, etc. If they start negotiating or asking questions, they're hooked. If they stay firm to "your wallet or your life", well, now we're back at the start of the decision tree but with "dialogue" scratched out.

Dialogue: difficult, not ideal, probably worth trying?

Attempt fight/flight?

(Bundling these together because they share a lot of informational questions.)

Well, how fast can I go? How far away are they? How far am I to anywhere safe? Where would I run to? What time is it? Do they look focused, calm, and collected, or jittery and anxious? What's their physical condition? Do I have an (improvised?) weapon in reach before starting to move? What's the size difference between us? What do the surrounding environment and sight lines look like? Is there anyone with me who will get left behind if I run? If there's someone with me, are we on the same wavelength about actions? Can I see if my assailant has their finger on the trigger?

(Asking the location-based questions and keeping stock of my own ability to act when out and about is just second nature by now. Good to keep in practice.)

Depending on all of these, running is possibly a survivable option for most people. I, unfortunately, have Undiagnosable Body Hurting Disease, and can't run for more than ~30 feet anymore. That's probably optimistic. If you're really close to someone holding a gun at you and their finger isn't on the trigger there might be a very slim chance of surviving trying to disarm them before they can take the third of a second to react. Don't rely on it. If they're pointing the gun at your face (likely, this is probably most effective intimidation with a gun) they need just the slightest bit of readiness to end your life there.

Fight/Flight: High chance of death. I don't want to pick these.

Capitulate

Will probably Just Survive if do this. Biggest margins of personal safety, but at the cost of some cash and lost credit cards that you can call the bank the next day and be like "hey I got robbed at XX:YY last night and my cards were stolen, please cancel them."

.....

Wow! It sure seems like Capitulation is the only thing to do! I'm so glad I accepted the consequences and it is now my personal responsibility for getting robb- no. Shut the fuck up.

That was a forced encounter. "Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose." Life sucks like that. Take it up with a god, if you believe in one. If you see one tell him he's a fucking shitbag.

The encounter has ended, and I'm assuming I'm still alive. There are a few possible outcomes: I can have all of my shit stolen, I can spend an hour and a small chunk of cash to listen to the person who was going to mug me, I can be in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, I can be scared shitless that I managed to survive running away from this, etc.

Now I have choices. Do I?

Use my knowledge of what this person looked like to dox them, catch them alone and return violence?

Get back to my car and try to find and chase them down and run them over?

Call the cops and file a police report?

Go on with my life?

Buy a weapon?

Improvise a weapon?

Get their contact details so we can have lunch and commiserate about The Horrors?

Well the first two have significant challenges with them, but assuming they go as written there, now I'm potentially dealing with criminal consequences or a suspect or something. Not ideal. Maybe a subtle violence?

Call the cops? That's extremely cursed. Either they'll be useless and probably mock me(very likely) for daring to think a mugging is worth their time or they'll go out and kill someone as a result of this.

Weapons are great! If you're getting the drop on someone else. But also: The winner of a knife fight dies on the way to the hospital. More than half of all gun deaths are suicides. Don't rely on a weapon unless you train religiously with it and have it accessible within less than a second at all times. But back to the gun suicide statistics: If I brought one into my house there's much too high of a risk that one of my partners would die either by suicide or accidentally discharge. I'm not accepting those consequences so I'm taking that risk.

Get their contact details and buddy up? Hmm, how well did the dialogue go?

Of course, you could just go about your life and pretend like nothing happened. Did you try to talk your way out? Maybe they now consider you their last lifeline, consciously or not. But if you disappear, they're back in the same spot they were... just now.. why would they trust someone who tried to talk to them?

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(If the "threaten to shoot me if I don't give my wallet was a metaphor (e.g. for domestic abuse), then these responses convert well to that. I endorse people killing their abusers. I recommend methods that don't blatantly trace back to the abusee.)

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People are going to do things. Good things. Bad things. Weird things. Regardless of if you act(and remember that inaction is action), people bounce around like ping-ponging dominoes. When an action is taken, it affects others. Others might not necessarily change, but this new input does affect them. How do you want others to move? What would cause them to move that way? What else would happen as a result of that? And the knock-on effects?