Kris

Times of the Day

There's a video of yours that I can't find at the moment, it might've been a Q&A, but in it you said something to the effect of "shame is a widely useless emotion" and I found it really helpful at the time what you said. Would you mind expounding on that sentiment, if it is one you still hold, that I and others might have it for reference in times where it is needed?

Oh sure, ask the guy with ADHD to remember anything he's said! Ableist!

(this is a joke. I am joking about my disability.)

What I mean when I say something like that, though, is that I believe that shame is an extremely limited instrument. The only thing it is really good at is causing a kind of mental pain that prevents you from repeating a behaviour.

This is useful for some things—one should generally feel ashamed of harming other people, for example. But the trouble with shame is that, once it has provided the pain of itself, it doesn't really have anything else to offer.

If you harm someone and you feel ashamed of it, while that feeling is appropriate, the shame doesn't really offer you any useful way to address the harm you have done. At most, shame has a tendency to prompt us to seek punishment for our misdeeds (or, more commonly, prompt us to hide our misdeeds for fear of punishment), but there is nothing in that emotion that offers a way to make actual amends, limit or undo your harm, or even learn to do better in the future. All the feeling tells you is "THAT WAS BAD AND YOU ARE BAD BECAUSE YOU DID IT!", which, even if it is accurate, is not constructive or especially useful. Making amends, addressing your harm and learning to do better, these things all require many different tools and feelings, like empathy and care and responsibility and self-respect. Shame alone teaches you almost nothing.

Thus, shame is an absolutely dogshit motivator for getting in shape or taking care of your health, for example. If the reason you are exercising or eating better is because you feel intense shame about your weight or your body shape, then 1) exercising is going to be absolutely miserable because all you are doing is running away from a horrible painful feeling you can't deal with and 2) any "failure" to exercise (skipping a day, being too tired, not doing enough reps, not hitting step counts, whatever) becomes yet another source of shame which just makes you feel even more miserable, and the cycle compounds.

Compare and contrast with exercising out of an earnest love for your body, and a desire to nurture and strengthen it, out of curiosity to find out how you can change it or the desire to learn a new physical skill or sport, or just out of a neutral, practical acceptance that you have some condition or need that requires exercise as part of the treatment.

Shame is similarly absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel shitfucking garbage at motivating people to express themselves. Shame will drive you away from art, away from poetry, away from literature and song and, oh my god, especially from dance. It will drive you away from anything that requires you to in any way make yourself vulnerable, because the fear of shame and the pain that comes with it makes vulnerability even more terrifying.

Shame, generally, is a feeling that wants you to shrink into yourself and disappear forever. It's a feeling that wants you to be less in the world.

Shame has a place and a use, it exists in us for several evolutionary reasons, same as anything, it has a function in our social structures. But it is a limited instrument. It is good for a very, very small number of things, and when it is misapplied to almost literally anything else, all it does it make everything worse and everyone more miserable.

I’m gonna go back to walking on soft grass after this!

Only one person has bought my Anti-Fascist BL sticker, meanwhile the Anti-Fascist Yuri sticker was a hot seller. 🤔

Unless a lot of fujoshis prove me wrong (by buying some stickers), I'll be forced to assume that BL lovers are more fascist than yuri fans. 😢 Don't let me down, fujos...

At least hit the shiny repost button if you're going to do nothing else. This should not stand.

People get very mad for a few days and then roll over and accept the change to the enclosure. This is what they are betting on. They have had meetings about this.

but then Christianity found out about it and were like “Fucking???? outside of marriage????? NO NO NO!!!” and decided it was a horrible terrible bad unlucky day and you need to be super careful of everything you do in case you die or some shit.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

Video games kinda suck at designing female heroes

In 2002, the photographer Howard Schatz published a photo collection called "Athlete" featuring pictures of, well, various top athletes from every sport and genre. These are some of the women he photographed, and the thing I want you to do in your head is compare the variety of humans that you're seeing here to the variety of humans you see in the cast list of your favourite video games.

These women are all in peak human condition for their fields - if you wanted to design a character who is tough and strong, these are the kinds of bodies you should look to for reference on what that looks like. You tell me how many video games or comics or movies or anime create their characters with even this limited variety in shape and size.