It's waiting to see what it will become

Tunneling upward out of the darkness where they had lain in wait for 13 years, the latest brood of Disney child stars reportedly emerged from the ground Monday, filling the air with their mindless droning.

Thousands of spunky young actors, part of the child performer population known as Brood D, were spotted bursting out of the soil en masse within the 51-acre Walt Disney Studios campus, where they wriggled through the grass on their bellies in search of a vertical surface to climb up and cling to. Earsplitting screeches were heard as the child stars frantically delivered lines from yet-to-exist scripts about surfers who were secretly werewolves, preteen mayors who could speak to animals, and triplets separated at birth and suddenly reunited at the same hip-hop boarding school.

To conjure the image of this child self, that hurt little girl, and hear her voice - it's easier than you might think now. I can take her tiny hands in our own, our other parts, older siblings to guide her and protect her and wipe away her tears. We can make her smile and show her she's loved. She never has to grow up, because we can do that for her; all she needs to do is be herself, to be a kid.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway. In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.

Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.

This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.

Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.

If this seems harsh: There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour. Over fifty people lost their homes. Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.

The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this

-And there is! It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)

The substance I was addicted to was heroin. While I was actively addicted, it absolutely came before everything else. My life shrank around it. I kept using despite very real, very obvious negative consequences. If you’re looking for something that fits the “compulsion + harm + loss of control” model, that was it.

But what’s always sat strangely with me is what happened when that context changed.

Once my abusive relationship ended and I was no longer in an environment where it was readily available, it was shockingly easy to stop. I’m not saying it was physically comfortable. My body was pretty pissed off for a while. But psychologically, it just didn’t have the same hold anymore. I wasn’t spending my days white-knuckling cravings or constantly thinking about it. It dropped out of my life in a way that, according to the 12-step model, is not really supposed to happen.

And that’s where my issue with that framework starts.

Because 12-step ideology tends to assume that if you have ever had that kind of relationship with one substance, it reveals something fundamental and permanent about you. That you now have a generalized “addictive nature” that will attach itself to other substances or behaviors if you’re not constantly managing it. That you are, in some essential way, always on the verge of transferring that pattern onto something else.

And that just hasn’t been true for me.

I was a near-daily cannabis user for years. When it started consistently making me feel physically uncomfortable instead of good, I stopped. No drawn-out battle, no existential crisis, just “this isn’t giving me what I liked about it anymore” and I moved on.

I drink occasionally, in social or celebratory contexts, and I genuinely find alcohol kind of boring outside of that. It doesn’t have much pull for me.

I tried gambling once, got annoyed at how tedious and overstimulating it felt, and left the casino in under an hour. I have not felt remotely compelled to revisit that experience.

I use the internet a lot, and I play a handful of video games, but I can also go on a camping trip with no signal and be completely fine, unless you want to try and find something pathological about nature photography, in which case you can blow it out your ass. If anything, I generally enjoy the change of pace. There’s no sense of panic or withdrawal or “I need to get back to my computer/consoles immediately.”

So when I hear the idea that addiction is this broad, transferable trait that will latch onto anything with quick reward or low friction, I just don’t see it reflected in my own life.

What does make sense, looking back, is context.

When I was using heroin, I was in an abusive relationship. My environment was unstable, stressful, and honestly pretty bleak. The substance didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It fit into a specific set of conditions where it functioned as relief, escape, and regulation.

When those conditions changed, the behavior changed with them.

That doesn’t mean there was no dependency. There obviously was. It doesn’t mean there were no consequences. There very much were. My grades suffered. I dropped out of college. I lost my apartment because staying out of withdrawal and numbing out from the abuse felt more important than paying rent.

But it does suggest that what we call “addiction” might not always be this permanent, identity-level trait that needs to be managed forever. Sometimes it looks a lot more like a relationship between a person, a substance, and a specific environment.

When that’s the case, then a framework that assumes universality - “if this happened once, it will always be waiting to happen again, with anything” - is going to miss a lot of variation.

I’m not saying 12-step programs can’t help people. Clearly they can, or they likely wouldn’t exist in the way they do. But I do think they’re often treated as the model of addiction rather than a model that fits some people and not others, and when your experience doesn’t match that model, many people who swear by them will assume that you are misunderstanding yourself, in denial, or “not taking it seriously enough.” This paternalistic attitude only serves to make me even more skeptical of the framework.

For me, what mattered wasn’t declaring myself permanently “addictive” or treating every pleasurable behavior as a potential threat.

What mattered was getting out of the environment where that pattern made sense in the first place.

Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.

I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.

The process is actually quite sophisticated, and requires the presence of a full-grown goth to trigger it. A pupal-stage proto-goth, at this point completely indistinguishable from any other small human child, only needs to encounter a mature specimen once - and while the initial imprinting that ensues will only take seconds, the incubation period often takes more than a decade, even several.

The first visible step of the transformation is triggered when the dormant goth suddenly gains awareness that they have free will and can do whatever they want with their appearance. While the progress may be gradual, or seem like the transformation happened all at once overnight, the initial seed was planted years ago. And now, in full bloom, a fully-fledged mature adult goth may finally be happy.

Main recommendations: Season the dough AND season the filling. Also, make smaller loafs, about the size of a spatula head, for easy flipping!

Here’s how they look! Recipe below (doubled bc I have a big family).

Loaded Potato Loafs

Poke holes in and boil 6 large potatoes until soft

Peel potatoes (do this after boiling to retain nutrients and get the texture needed for the dough)

Mash into a smooth puree

Add 4 tablespoons of melted butter

Add 10 tablespoons of flour

Add a bit of pepper and a good amount of garlic salt

Mix until it forms a soft dough

Lay out plastic wrap and grease with a little oil

Place 1/8 of the dough into the plastic wrap and flatten it into a round shape

Add shredded cheese, shredded chicken, bacon bits, more garlic salt, chives, and Italian seasoning.

Grab the plastic wrap and use it to fold each edge of the dough over, starting with parallel ends. Make sure the dough is sealed all over and doesn’t break. It should be about the size of a spatula head for easy flipping.

Airfry two at a time. Fry one side at 450 degrees for 7 minutes

Flip with spatula and airfry other side for another 7 minutes

Couple of notes:

Season the shit outta this thang

Like it’s actually fucking crazy that neither cook in the video mentions seasoning 🤨

Don’t overstuff with fillings if you’re frying in oil bc it might lose structural integrity and fall apart on the flip

I filled mine with just cheese and hot dog bits (it’s what was immediately available and I’m lazy) and topped it with some ketchup + mustard to go with the hot dog theme

It was bomb as fuck chef kiss 😚👌💋

there is no conclusive evidence that the feminizing effects of injectable E are preferable to those of oral E, but injectable is safer long-term (years-long), so eventually switch to injectable. its cheaper also.

use a good anti-androgen. spiro will make you piss and pissed, because it sucks. take bica 50mg or cypro 12.5mg.

take your prog. take 200mg. if youre putting it in your mouth, take more until youre emotional but stable. if youre putting it in your butt - PUTT IT IN YOUR BUTT - take more, but less than you would if it were in your mouth.

work out. work your ass, your thighs, your abs. get sweaty. the more growth hormones you can get through your body, the more effectively your estrogen will feminize you (this includes your tits).

eat more. eat at least 25% more than your maintenance. eat lots of protein, but also lots of fat. your ass and tits will thank you very jiggly.