My Postillion Has Been Struck By Lightning
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while cleaning today I found a box of old documents and photographs that included several baby pictures of my partner. I set them aside because they were adorable and thought about putting one in my wallet but then I got hit by a vision of tumblr or reddit discourse about how that must be a red flag and super creepy.
wow I tried to google to see if there were Reddit or quora debates and the ai called me a criminal
Hey op, I have actual insight sourced from a Reddit reading YouTube/twitch channel (bysarby/sarbyy/ben sarbacher if interested). He talked about this issue on a live the other day and the overwhelming majority of people in chat said it was creepy to keep baby pictures of your partner in your wallet, the context was about doing that when you get upset with your partner, but I think the majority thought it was creepy in general
Please do not
Hope this helps!!
you’re telling me I should not keep a photo of my partner in my wallet because the chat of some YouTuber said it was creepy?
It’s a pretty levelheaded group, they do opinions and advice in response to aita posts and such, a decent amount being from personal experience, and it’s very much not the standard that that initial description brings to mind.
I know it’s a bit outta pocket, but I promise it’s genuinely a good community.
I think it’s so interesting how like pedophilia discourse has drifted so far away from the subject of child abuse and towards this concept of abstracted Ickiness in which concepts like “harm to children” need not apply.
I’m not really making an argument around pedophilia, sorry if that wasn’t clear, the discussion on the live was surrounding domestic abuse issues (using a picture of your wife as a little girl to help you picture them as a child to avoid screaming at them), and infantilization. The consensus was that it was creepy due to the fact that generally people keep pictures of their children as children, and pictures of their partner as an adult.
I do agree with your sentiment of discussion around CSA and CSAM being so censored that it is conflated with the ick factor. It definitely makes logical discussion a lot more difficult to engage in, especially when you don’t know if the other person is arguing in good faith or not.
I’m not accusing you of any of this or anything else, I’m just stating second hand information that is relevant to your original question.
Well I think that if you have anger management issues and you avoid taking them out on your wife and screaming at her by looking at a picture of her as a child that’s actually a very healthy and responsible management technique that many therapists would recommend. It is a lot creepier to scream at your wife.
Anyway I have a much more reliable and level-headed source for whether it’s creepy to keep a picture of my partner in my wallet. That source is lying beside me laughing incredulously at this discussion and encouraging me to keep the photo in my wallet because it’s cute and sweet. It would be much creepier to defer to YouTube chat opinions over my partner’s.
I am some random nobody connected to you only by the ethereal threads of the internet, so there is of course no reason you should listen to me, but: good on you. Your partner is okay with it, which means you have gotten the sole relevant other opinion on this. Also, for what it’s worth, it makes sense to me to want to connect in some way with the person your partner was before you met them.
I’m not surprised some people out there think it’s creepy (though I strongly disagree). I’m not even objecting to their holding that opinion even though, again, it’s not one I would hold. But this concept that you should defer to this consortium of strangers, who apparently come highly reviewed by another stranger, because of some nebulous group-think ick factor, is bizarre to me. “I wanted to do something that my partner and I both thought was sweet but a Youtube panel said no.”
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to be clear virtue signaling is bad when you only care about the signal and not the virtue. if someone advertised themself as a person who cares about protecting kittens from the torment nexus for the social benefit of appearing like a caring person, but doesn’t actually do anything to protect kittens from the torment nexus or even actively assists in feeding kittens to the torment nexus, that is bad. but if a person says “I want to protect kittens from the torment nexus” and actually does do that then that’s not bad. it’s not “virtue signaling” if they actually practice that virtue and it’s a good virtue to practice. why in the world would you get mad at people for being nice and being open about being nice.
ironically, if you think that the reason virtue signaling is bad is because people shouldn’t be open or advertise their moral positions (whether that’s “because that should just be assumed!” or whatever other reason), you are actually doing the exact same thing that makes virtue signaling harmful. your sense of ethics is focused on the aesthetics and performances of moral stances far more than their actual impact on the world, which makes your morality very shallow and prone to distraction. there is no cheat code to being a good person!
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Strawed berries. Pined apples. Barned anas.
You guys really will reblog anything.
Graped fruits.
Watered melons. Rasped berries.
Starred fruit. Pumped kins. Rooted begas.
Manned gos.
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On the subject of liminal spaces.
When I was a kid, somewhere between six and nine I think, I knocked myself out falling off a (tiny) wall. I hit a rock with my head on the way down and was out for some indeterminate but likely small amount of time. Probably only seconds, if that, judging by the lack of panic around me.
The only reason I remember it is because I remember seeing something while I was out. I don’t know if you dream, as such, when you’re knocked out, or if it was some sort of hallucination, but I remember it pretty vividly. I’ve dreamed of the same place again quite a few times in the years since, but that was the first time I remember seeing it.
It was a train station. An infinite, endless train station. You know when you have island platforms between two rail lines? That, but forever. Lines and platforms running parallel to each other, over and over and over again, far past what the eye could see. You could go along the platforms forever in two directions, or over the footbridges between them forever in the other two directions.
It was underground. In some vast, infinite cave, full of a sort of warm brown light. Every so often, on some of the platforms, you could see iron spiral staircases, the same style as the footbridges, rising up towards the ceiling, though you couldn’t see where they ended.
There were trains on the lines. Every gap between platforms had an up line and a down line, one train heading one way and the other heading the other. The trains were all brown too, full of yellow light. So you could travel. You go could on foot, along the platforms or over the bridges, or you could take the trains, travel fast and long along one platform.
And it was infinite. I really need to emphasise that it was endless. There were no cavern walls. There was no visible ceiling. You could ride those trains or walk those platforms or cross those bridges forever. There was no end. That was it, that was the world. An endless series of lines and platforms stretching for eternity.
But it wasn’t empty. This was … this was a dream, something like a dream, it had that sort of nonsensical physicality you get in dreams? Where spaces don’t work quite right. The platforms weren’t empty, they had stuff on them. But the stuff was a bit nonsensical.
There was a disassembled hotel on one of them. Like, the carpets for the halls, and the bottom foot of the walls, and all the furniture in the open, unwalled spaces of the ‘rooms’? This ran for, I don’t know, a stretch of one platform before fading away so something else could pop up later on. Another platform had a vending machine arcade on it. One of them had half a laundrette. One of them had a collection of bus stop benches. There were all these little islands of … of scenery, like, pieces of places? Plopped down randomly on a train platform.
And the places had people in them. Every piece of a place had its own little community in it. All the trains had people on them. The place was full of people.
Not all of this was from that first dream/hallucination. Like I said, I’ve been back to this place a lot of times since then. I think the original vision was mostly just the platforms and the trains? My brain has been embroidering the concept a LOT while I’m asleep since then. I’ve been wandering all over this endless space at night. Because it’s, it’s not a nightmare, it’s beautiful. It’s so weird and wonderful. An endless place to explore.
You can walk the platforms, see whatever new and bizarre piece of scenery you’ll stumble across. You can climb the bridges to get a sort of an overview of the local environs, see if there’s anything interesting that catches your eye. You can ride the trains, sleep to the endless rhythm of the wheels. It is … It’s a bit riskier riding the trains, if you’ve gotten attached to any particular place, because the trains take you a long way, and there’s always the worry that you won’t know precisely how far you’d need to go back. Because it’s all … It’s all kind of the same. Always different, but all somewhat the same. You could get lost so easily.
And in some ways I think that’s the point. This place, this dream I’ve been having for years since I skulled myself on a rock as a kid, is the essence of a liminal place. It is transient. Both infinite and ephemeral. A place where you are always moving. Sure, you might stop for a time. Join one of the island communities in whatever odd fragment of a location, half a bar or a hotel or a laundrette or a bus stop, they’ve gathered in, but you’re supposed to be moving. You cross another bridge. You get on another train. You wander along the platform to the next spark of yellow light and strange shape that catches your eye. It’s a place of endless sameness and infinite variety. A place where you’re always moving, but never getting anywhere. A place that exists just to be. No purpose, no jobs, no destinations, no meaning. Just … wandering. Forever. Among the halfway things. Among the halfway people.
Liminal. The endless in-between.
I don’t think this place is anything real, like I don’t think I had a vision or anything, I don’t think I got knocked out and briefly went to purgatory or anything. I think my brain just really likes moving, the sensation of moving, and threw up a phantom infinity of that sensation when it found itself abruptly discommoded. And then liked that phantom so much that it’s spent some decades revisiting it. I always enjoy these dreams so much.
There is something soothing about the liminal sometimes. You don’t have to be any one thing or the other, you don’t have to go any particular place, you can just … exist. In between. Drift unmoored, and just see what you find.
Of course it works better in a dream world where you can’t do things like starve or freeze to death, and where islands of vending machines or half a hotel complete with beds just appears around you, no logistics required. But, you know. Liminal doesn’t have to be a horror. There’s a kind of a comfort to it. To the warmth and the transience and the anonymity. To the rhythm of the wheels, and the knowledge that whatever happens, you can just move on.
Sometimes you don’t need a destination. You just need the means to go. You know?
Anyway. I do enjoy my dreams. And it’s nice, sometimes, in the in-between.
I had a dream once that I was on a train, talking to the other people on there, and I slowly realised this was the afterlife. We had all finished our lives and were on our way somewhere else. Someone hadn’t figured it out yet and we were all going to play it cool and let them realise it in their own time. We made stops along the way, picking people up and dropping them off. At one stop we had this big feast outdoors with some other people who were already there (I don’t know if they lived there or had arrived there on a different train) and the guy who hadn’t realised it was the afterlife before had figured it out now, and he’d fallen for one of the people here at the feast and decided to stay here. The rest of us were going to continue on the train and see where it took us next. It was one of the nicest dreams I ever had.
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I do wonder what Trump supporters think of Qatar getting an airbase in Idaho. Are they locked in fully supportive of it? I haven’t seen any spin so far.
Apparently there has been significant backlash from MAGA types, including Laura Loomer.
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screaming
idk how true this is but
so honestly? maybe
Reckon we can get them to re-release ‘Tron: Ares’ in a few months?
(via anais-ninja-bitch)
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the way people used to use tone tags in 2020 makes me laugh in retrospect because in what world would you need to tag “good morning” as nonsexual. hi friend! /gen /pos /srs /nsx /hello /smiling /happy
something sinister is going down in the nearest beautiful mountain stream
not to be That Person but male-bodied people experience morning wood on the regular so why would this be surprising.
Saying ‘good morning’ to a person is already a bit in the queerplatonic zone (if you said ‘good morning’ to every single person you were ‘merely friends’ with, you’d have like a dozen different threads going on- it denotes a special place in your sphere) and since a lot of people conflate emotional closeness with romance and ergo sex, this makes perfect sense as a clarification
esp if the two people in question were queer, esp bi or pan
this is the FUNNIEST fucking website what is wrong with y'all lmao
Oh this post
You can tell people like this only have very limited interactions with people. Like, I’m not usually the type to text early in the morning but I absolutely would NOT assume that someone saying good morning had either a romantic or sexual intent behind it
But EVEN IF a sexual or romantic thought prompts one to say good morning, or hello, or anything like that, the recipient is SOOOOOO not entitled to know what kind of thought prompted a kind greeting lmao
People really are trying to reinvent new things to feel guilty about huh
I’m just thinking of the scene in ‘The Hobbit’ where Bilbo says “good morning” to Gandalf (who is, as far as he knows, a complete stranger because *good morning is the archetypal thing you say to a stranger*) and Gandalf is imagining all the things Bilbo could mean by these words. And now I’m thinking of him adding, “Or do you mean by ‘good morning’ that you want to raw me right here in the Shire?”
(via princessparadoxical)
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our new job launched its mandatory ai transcription program designed to streamline our workflow and not only does it melt down the moment it has to transcribe non-white customers but it keeps hallucinating the existence of a mysterious boy named dorian who shows up in every third call summary
caller got into a car accident on their way to work? their nonexistant son dorian was hurt. got kicked out of a bar and broke their ankle? their son dorian was the one who broke it. i now spend more time having to de-dorian the call summary than if i had just written it myself. really funny. we’re required to use this now
The Picture of Dorian GrAI
Does Dorian have a cousin called Throckmorton?
