I haunt the screens

It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.

Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.

1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.

2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?

3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?

4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”

5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.

My sister lies ten feet away. Still. She lies still. Clad in a dress that she would have torn off within moments had she but the grace to sit back up out of that coffin one last time. She hated dresses. She hated churches more.

"Piety and nonces", She'd huff to me when we were dragged there as children by our zealous grandmother. We listened through the prayers, mouthed the lyrics of All Star to the hymns, and pretended to choke on the body of Christ. She's 19 years old. She’ll always be 19. The youngest out of three. I am the middle child, and my brother has deigned to not attend. I and some 20 relatives, and 30 hangers on, bore witness to the blithe speech my parents so proudly gave about their youngest daughter.

“Our youngest.” That’s what my mother had chirped when my father trailed off. “Thank you for coming to say goodbye to our youngest”. He’d finished.

My little sister died. That sentence floats through my head without end, fogging my senses. I finger the collar of my jacket, feeling the cool leather give against my steady pressure. I hated suits. I stand up from the front pew, earning the mutterings of one of my aunts as my shaved head turns to look upon the gathering. Expensive clothes, glossy and muted, strangers’ faces staring back.

My legs moved without thinking, crossing over to the open casket. I’d seen her when I’d arrived, fresh from the road. Her features were thin, her skin waxy and pale, it looked as though she had a fever, yet she was cold to touch. The lips pursed and grey. That face used to bring me to tears with laughter.

An overdose. That was what killed my little sister.

I stepped to the lectern to the side of my sister. I looked up at those strangers who looked back at me. My parent’s eulogy still lies neatly spread on the light wood.

It’s blank.

I let my hand rest on the lecterns slope, feeling the paper crinkle in my callused hand. Where before a fog held me, a quiet cold came. It travelled from the nape of my neck to the tail of my spine. It sat in my stomach and pulled at the corner of my lips. I felt the blood drain from my face, a certainty building in my mind. From the corner of my eye, my reflection stood in the shine of the casket door.

I look like her when I’m angry.

“My little sister is dead.” My words come out hoarse, hanging in the air. I cleared my throat, trying again; “My little sister died of an overdose. Her name is-was Julie.” My gaze roved around before settling upon the pair in the very front row. My parents. I felt a bitter grin pry at my face as the words began to tumble from me.

“Julie was the only one in my family who could make me laugh. Julie was the person who could make me cry too. Julie could really sing. She hit every note on Bohemian Rhapsody. Julie could talk and talk and TALK. But Julie’s parents couldn’t stand it. Why couldn’t Julie just be quiet. Why won’t this 11-year-old shut up. So Julie’s mother had the bright idea to give Julie some of her pills. Julie got real quiet after that.” The smugness had fallen away from my mother then, her back ramrod straight, my father’s eyes boring into me, his hands clasped in front.

“Julie would cry for hours when I went away. Julie would rush to meet me when I came back. Julie would call me at midnight to say that she missed me. I got a job, not well paid, but enough to save. I was going to come get Julie. I needed one more month. To feed and clothe my little sister. ONE MORE MONTH!” I yelled at the congregation, spittle flying with my words. “One more month and I could have sent Julie to rehab. Julie could sing and I could listen.” Tears blurred my vision. “I’m done.” I stepped down from the lectern, my riding boots thumping on the polished hardwood floor.

I walked down that aisle, not daring to look back at that damned box. As I made my way down the steps of the church to the carpark outside, the clipping of heels and brogue’d feet hurried closer. I turned, feeling the blood pumping through my temples and a hard pain burning behind my eyes.

“Jessica,” my father reached for me, his face reddened, my mother beside him flinty eyed. “What the hell was that.” He hissed through gritted teeth. His left hand grasped me in a vice like grip as he tried to pull me closer.

I bared my teeth, wrenching my right arm from him as my left reached back into my waistband. “It’s Jessy” I barked, my left arm gliding fluidly from under my jacket to press the barrel of my Beretta 92 hard into his temple.

He froze eyes wide and mouth slightly agape. My mother beside him gasped. I looked at my father. My face hot, but my grip steady on the gun. I thumbed off the safety.

“My. Name. Is. Jessy.” Each word punctuated with a harder push into my father’s temple. He raised his hands shakily, bottom lip trembling. The hubbub from inside the church reached my ears, drawing closer by the moment.

“Julie knew that,” I said, lowering the gun to my side. I grimaced and backed down the stairs. Only turning my back to them at the bottom and heading to my bike. I thumbed on the safety and stuffed it back into my waistband. I picked up my helmet from where it sat hooked on the handlebars, my fingers working deftly on the straps. My gloves gave reassuring weight to my hands as I straddled my bike. Looking back at the church, a flow of cashmere and silk hurried from those yawning doors to waiting cars.

I knocked the kickstand and gunned my engine.

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread. 

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI. 

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual. 

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online. 

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.  

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

Then somewhere halfway through the story it turns out that in this setting, people aren't named immediately after being born. This is a semi-realistic-gritty fantasy setting, after all. Due to the somewhat high infant mortality, to at least somewhat soften the blow of potentially losing a child, babies just aren't named before the parents are pretty confident that the kid is going to survive. The naming ceremony is where a baby is officially aknowledged as an entire individual, a member of the family and a legally existing person, instead of just a gurgling extension of the mother who may or may not disappear from this world. And that timespan between birth and being named is - depending on the situation and the family - somewhere between 1-4 years.

There are some important distinctions, but nothing that makes me feel better about the situation.

1. At its height, Henry Ford’s publication, “The Dearborn Independent,” had a circulation of 900,000. The largest circulation in America at the time was 950,000.

While it was certainly influential, it wasn’t unmatched. In comparison to Musk’s 140 million followers, Ford reached a relatively small number of people.

2. Ford marketed explicit antisemitism, which eventually led to the downfall of his publication — you’ve probably heard of “The international Jew” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

However, as with most antisemites (on both the right and the left), Musk hides behind the thin veil of dog whistles and oversights, leaving a layer of barely-plausible deniability.

3. Ford was eventually forced to publicly apologize after he made the mistake of attacking Jewish attorney Aaron Sapiro for more than a year, until Sapiro eventually sued Ford for libel (i.e. he fucked around and found out lol). Ford eventually lost the case and was forced to publicly apologize (his apology was written by associates and his signature on it was reportedly forged). The magazine was shut down soon afterwards.

While I can’t predict the future, something tells me Musk’s obfuscations and the current political climate will allow him to continue to operate with impunity. Dancing around the issue allows at the very least for greater longevity of your bigotry (say it with your chest you coward).

Despite everything, Ford was able to secure his position in history, albeit with some, um, unfortunate footnotes and the occasional caveat being mentioned.*

All in all, this feels very similar to Trump copying David Duke’s run for the Louisiana legislature, but that’s a story for a different day.

* some additional footnotes and caveats:

- Hitler quoted Ford in his infamous book

- Ford was a notorious union buster

- Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, the highest honor a foreigner could receive from Nazi Germany, with personal congratulations from Hitler

- After issuing the aforementioned “public apology” in 1927, Ford said that he would like restart the publication of “The International Jew.” In 1940. 13 years later.

- It’s just my personal opinion, but we probably shouldn’t honor literal nazis, but whatever

- To this day, no one at my synagogue will buy a ford car. I don’t know if this is the norm in other places, but I imagine that it’s not uncommon.

In the beginning when Mr. Incredible says, “Go home, Buddy. I work alone.” He’s holding up Bomb Voyage

In Syndrome’s flashback, he’s looking down on him, no bad guy in sight

oh 

In the flashback, it’s a different scenario completely!! The lighting is all focused on Bob as if he’s under a spotlight and it is only the two of them. Bob’s pose here is also ridiculously condescending. He has his hands on his hips like a superhero and is looking down at Buddy with contempt and scorn. In addition, when he turns to leave, he dismissively waves his hand as if saying “Get out of here.”

It’s also interesting to note Buddy’s position here. His arms are extended either in worship or as an expression of all he has to offer in this relationship. He sees himself as a victim because he thinks he gave all of himself to Mr Incredible, just got him to reject him.

It’s also amazing to me how much Buddy’s suit is a reflection of himself. Everything from the black and white color scheme representing his black and white way of thinking, to the huge S because here only thinks of himself.

That makes two things abundantly clear:

Bob doesn’t have an aversion to working with other people. Remember when he runs into Elastigirl earlier in the day? She reminds him not to “forget”, and he promises he won’t. They were standing over a thief they ended up accidentally nabbing together, or so we thought. They bantered back and forth about working alone, yet they nabbed that thief so seamlessly, you’d think they’d done it before. Then you find out later, Elastigirl is the woman at the altar. Making it clear that they had to have worked together, very frequently, enough to end up trusting each other to the point that they revealed their secret identities and had a romantic relationship outside of Super work, culminating in literally marrying each other. Bob is more than fine with a partner because he married his.

The other is that, Bob is trying to protect Helen. She may be more than capable of handling herself, as she flirtatiously reminds Bob on the rooftop just hours before their nuptials. But the one thing that’s priceless to the Supers are their secret identities. With Syndrome following Bob begging to partner with him, it puts Helen in danger. A fanatical fan like that can end up possessive, meaning once Syndrome discovers her, could see her as a direct threat stealing “his” position working with Bob. And because he obviously has a knack for following people undetected (he was right on Bob’s heels all over a huge metropolitan city for literal hours), he could very well stalk Helen, discover her secret identity and expose her in order to eliminate her, putting her directly in danger. Bob isn’t an idiot, he knows working with this kid doesn’t just put this child in danger, but also his own wife and their identities. It’s better to say he works alone and let this kid down as gently as possible, hoping to finally shake him off for good so he can work in safety and peace.

- The reason Syndrome found all the other supers first (including Frozone) was because Bob kept getting fired from his jobs, forcing the government to wipe his existence from multiple companies and forcing his family to move each time that happened. He unintentionally saved his family by forcing them to relocate so often.

- Two of the biggest differences between the two versions of “go home, Buddy” is the focus, and length. In Mr Incredible’s version, “Go Home, Buddy” is a midpoint, a random event that just happened to stick because it was weirdly specific, and it was right before the important parts. The attempted suicide, train crash, and wedding are much more important because those were more important to Mr Incredible (since the first two ended the superhero movement, and the last was his wedding). Buddy, on the other hand, only flashes back to “Go home, Buddy”. Which is weird because Buddy almost died later that night from a bomb on his cape, and he almost killed dozens of people on a train by dropping a bomb on them, and because of that, he was indirectly responsible for the death of supers. All three of those things should be much more important to Buddy, but it’s a sign of his psychosis that the one thing he remembers is not Mr Incredible saving his life, or his life being in danger, but instead Mr Incredible rejecting him. Buddy was unstable, and an extremely unreliable narrator who edited out massive chunks of his own story to better justify his hero syndrome.

- Also, on a more sobering note, some have brought up how Incredibles 2 seems a step down from Incredibles 1, and while that’s arguable, there’s some related bits in there I’d like to mention. You know how there were a slew of superhero’s in the movie for when they made superhero-ing legal again?

Notice anything funny about that lineup? Anything at all? Okay, here’s a hint then. How many of these heroes were working before heroes got banned? How many of these new heroes are from Mr Incredible’s era?

Answer: None.

Frozone, Elastigirl, and Mr Incredible are the only ones who were active before the ban, or more specifically, were left from those active before the ban.

Think about it, Elastigirl was on the news basically continuously, there was a UN declaration on supers, any super left who had even been five degrees of separation away from Elastigirl back in their heyday would’ve come up to talk to her and her movement. But when Elastigirl was brought in to meet other supers, she didn’t know any of them.

And it’s not like she and Bob were loners who never interacted with anyone, look at their wedding day, it’s packed to the gills with capes (and possibly some secret identities too):

So…what happened?

Syndrome happened. This isn’t just some serial killer picking people at random, Syndrome systematically wiped out an entire community of people, arguably, an entire generation of supers, since Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack seem to be the only kid-supers in existence.

That’s why Elastigirl is so emotional when she’s introduced to these new supers, she thought her people, barring her family and Frozone, were wiped out by Syndrome. And in a way…they were.

Nobody’s left from her era of superheroics. None of her old friends survived. It’s just her, Bob, and Frozone left out of what was once a thriving, vibrant community. All those bright lights snuffed out because some kid couldn’t handle being rejected but his hero.

- Honestly, this allegory kind of brings to mind the AIDS crisis and the gay community. A “syndrome” almost specifically targeting a subset of the population with a flair for dramatic outfits and superheroics, picking off members one by one until the population is decimated. The members of the community have to intervene themselves to slow/stop this “syndrome” because the government, which was supposed to protect them, is unaware of, or is blatantly ignoring the crisis until it starts hurting the “normal” community. Because of this “syndrome” there’s just this gap in this community, where an entire generation is just…missing…with the few survivors having to counsel the new, untouched generation, and helping them achieve widespread support and acceptance they could only dream of.

- Side note: I just realized something. Take a look at Syndrome’s kill list:

And take a look at that wedding shot again.

Anyone look familiar?

If it’s to hard to tell, at least four of the people Syndrome killed were at Bob’s wedding.

Mr Incredible wasn’t watching supers getting killed, he was watching his friends getting killed. People he trusted enough to share his secret identity with people he trusted enough to share his wife’s secret identity with. Hell, our poor boy Gazerbeam got a front row seat with Edna and their NSA agent that’s usually reserved for family only.

And that’s bad enough, but something else occurred to me, Bob and Helen clearly haven’t been keeping in close contact with their superheroic friends, Bob asks Frozone if he’s been keeping in contact with Gazerbeam, implying they haven’t talked in a while.

Additionally, Bob’s life, and the superhero community’s life, went tits up basically immediately after his wedding night. So if there was any point for them to stop talking with other supers, it’d be then.

So what does that mean?

It means, in all likelihood that when Mr Incredible looked at that list of dead friends and superheroes, he realized with growing horror that, his wedding?

The happiest point of his life?