sadmac356

@sadmac356

  • they/them

Gay badgercat who practically lives on bad puns and cursed computing. Fluent in typo

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sadmac356
@sadmac356
pervocracy
@pervocracy
pervocracy
@pervocracy

I'm reading back through my old chosts and it's interesting to see where I was a year ago compared to now. I think I'm doing okay. I'm not doing as well as my highest and most unrealistic hopes but I am definitely doing so much better.

I think the main thing is that I finally quit the political-trainwreck-gazing fandom. "Hey, did you hear there's a bunch of conservatives who believe that..." Yeah! I'm sure there are! Okay! Thanks for the FYI! Maybe tomorrow we can trade pictures of roadkill or sewer blockages, too!

I will probably always find some guilty pleasure in finding ideas so bad that we can all pat ourselves on the back for not believing them, but it's no longer a major part of every day, and when I do it's more likely to be something merely silly than something personally threatening, and I am vastly healthier for it.

pervocracy
@pervocracy

Thinking about this more and it's not just direct exposure to the haters that I'm getting away from, but also the kind of "leftism" that's all about the purity/contamination of your personal consumption. Which I've long been critical of, but it would still get to me subliminally. John Lennon Beat His Wife Guy moved into my brain and wanted me to do a little background check on everyone and everything I interacted with. Is the developer of this game a pro-lifer? Is the owner of this store a climate denier? Where does the singer of this song stand on trans rights? Okay, how about the drummer on this song?

And, like, okay, you don't want to materially support evil, but when it gets down to the fractional cents or the "technically the algorithmic boost from me clicking could lead to them receiving fractional cents more"... the entire effort-reward calculus here could be entirely wiped out by a single modestly sized check to a reputable legal aid organization. Blah blah it doesn't literally cancel out, but when the sin you're "canceling out" is microscopic it might as well. And that will save you hours of your life plus that weird contaminated feeling you get when you learn the bassist has problematic beliefs but you've already listened to the song.

(I hope other people know what I mean by this contaminated feeling. it's not just guilt, it's, like, feeling corrupted by the fact that I was in contact with a Problematic Element. I do not consciously endorse this feeling and I very much do not recommend cultivating it.)

Anyway, the recovery process for this mentality is disturbingly much of... well, a literal recovery process... but oh my god I'm so much further along in it than I was a year ago.

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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

here-and-anon
@here-and-anon

Yeah, I can't lie, I've been enjoying your posts way more since you stopped staring so hard into the abyss. Mice are cute! And have zero opinions about anticelebrities!

EDIT: Also my big "I need OUT of the moral contamination hellsphere" was when multiple friendships ended explosively because of fanfiction.

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here-and-anon
@here-and-anon

:3 Ooh, such good miceys, good miceys get treats!

(Also, is there a way to like. Tell someone responded to a comment? Is there an inbox somewhere? Do I have to manually check every post I commented in to see if people responded? I mean, I can do it, but that's kinda old school even by my standards...)

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here-and-anon
@here-and-anon

Wait, THAT'S what that random yellow oval is? It doesn't show up as a bell for me at all! I wondered what the hell that oval was!

...clicking the oval doesn't bring me to the page. Okay, right click, get the link, manually input it...

Ah, okay, took a minute but it loaded! Thanks Cliff!

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here-and-anon
@here-and-anon

One, yes. The other... I'm not even sure what really happened there. They were having pretty bad things happen in real life, it was in the early stages of the pandemic, they seemed new to antiracism and just... kinda got REALLY zealous about it really quickly, kinda the way some people went HARDCORE into birding and sourdough at that time.

I think they were kinda hurling themselves into it to feel a sense of control and power over a really shitty situation, but it ended up destroying my friendship with them. (Because one of MY coping mechanisms during the pandemic was to write stupid fluffy romance stories to get breaks from 2020, and having to treat every single one as a Huge Anti-Oppression Political Statement that required sensitivity reading broke me creatively for years. Anti-oppression politics is my LITERAL job, I need to have shit in my life that ISN'T that, and I was unable to explain that to my friend without it being turned into a sign of racism. And when I finally called them in on an ableism thing, they just... never spoke to me again. I was kinda relieved, honestly.)

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sadmac356
@sadmac356

Yeah I feel ya there. Like, one of my coping mechanisms is hurt/comfort and some of the related tags, and seeing how vicious people got over shipping (going so far as calling people abuse apologists for liking the "wrong" ones or the "right" ones depicted in the "wrong" way)…hello creative slump because I figured it was a matter of time before they found the niche I'm in and came after that

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here-and-anon
@here-and-anon

YES THAT. It's like, let me just write my crossover queer supervillainous ladies smooching, let me have this, I swear I will go back to Very Noble Activity in a second, just LET ME MAKE THEM KISS.

I only broke out of that mindset by being like, "Okay, but for real, what material, quantifiable harm is this doing?" and slowly bootstrapping myself out of the weird moral purity hole.

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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

I think a thing that also helped in a dark way, with the John Lennon effect, is how utterly hypocritical literally everyone is about it.

Once you realize that everyone has their blind spots, and these constant hunts for Thing Bad are more about arbitrary post-hoc justifications, it becomes easier to stop giving a fuck and focus on shit that really matters.

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glacial
@glacial

...this actually helped me. Specifically the song example - there's one specific one I loved where, yeah, one of the band members did some extremely horrible shit, but he's not getting out of prison for it until 2040-something. How much benefit can he possibly get from me streaming it? How much good can I do by finding a relevant charity and giving them some money?

So anyway, once my next paycheck clears, a charity is getting ~$70, and the guy who's in prison is still not going to be getting anything out of me listening to his song.

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lookaloona
@lookaloona

I had a little vent post a while back where I stated that it's a comfort that my bad actions do not automatically undo my good ones, and I am trying to unlearn leftist purity culture because it only operates on the idea that good actions do not automatically undo bad ones (if good ever undoes bad at all.) It's a Tetris perspective of moral worth where your fuckups build up and your successes go unacknowledged because that's what you're supposed to be doing in an eternal effort to reach the default clean state. This is, incidentally, much like the Christian conception of sin I grew up learning, and that constant moral self-monitoring is damaging no matter what words the voice in your head is speaking.

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sadmac356
@sadmac356

Yeah at that point it's just, "hi yes my only safe hobbies are knitting iff I raise the sheep myself. Oh, and maybe I spice things up every now and then and go watch paint dry or grass grow."

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