Latest Posts by drowningworms - Page 2

Psych wards are psychotic and evil

By the way, friends, if you ever have a mental breakdown or are suicidal or anything like that don't go to the emergency room. The following is not just one bad hospital. It's basically all of them. I've talked to other people in other parts of the country.

I had a massive breakdown summer of 2023 from a new anti-anxiety med and a lot of stress. We called for an ambulance and got 4 cops instead. And I got a nice strapped down ride to the ER. To be fair, I was not in my right mind at the time and was unpredictable.

But it wasn't fair.

ER psych wards are straight out of 1923.

They use hours of stress positions and cold to torture the inmates into "submission" ("coercive measures"). And it doesn't matter if you are already submissive. I was obviously in control of myself by then and fully cooperative. The bastards wanted their fun anyway. After the hours of stress positions, they continue to keep "patients" unsettled with over medication of "anti-psychotics", verbally shame them from being sick, and keep them in a constant state of anxiety and discomfort after they have "coerced" them into submission while way too many heavily armed cops roam around doing their own bullying. All the time denying them obviously needed medical care including simple first aid. The "nurses" and "doctors" themselves have lost their empathy and replaced it with sadism. And they ruin the good hearts the younger ones to be just like them.

I didn't hear a single compassionate word given to anyone.

There are not private rooms. It is a open, tiled area buried in the basement behind many doors and guards and closed to visitors with a bathroom and guardhouse in the center with a few alcoves and no doors. While I was strapped down for hours with my arm cranked behind my head, with my shirt pulled up for cold torture, and the cuffs tightened and biting into my wrists (but they could still shove two fingers into my flesh and squeeze them in there so it was "legal") the other inmates were just wandering around me and I was utterly vulnerable should one of them decide to do anything to me. People are all dressed in paper gowns and sitting on hospital beds, wall benches, and wandering to pass the time.

I have so many stories just from 18 hours of being in there witnessing the worse psychological and physical tortures they were doing to the people they knew had nobody. It was a constant provocation of the most vulnerable people in the hospital in order to excuse more "coercive measures".

I watched them kill an old woman's dog.

It was going to be 115F that day. So early in the morning around 5am she started asking for her phone to call her brother to go get her dog out of her trailer and save it from heat death. They told her she could use their phone. But she didn't know the number (who knows anyone's number anymore?) She asked for her cell phone in her belongings right behind them and they said they would get it and then they strung her along till 3 in the afternoon, making her beg and plead and be oh so polite so she wouldn't end up on a bed with her arm cranked behind her head for being too loud or give them an excuse to simply straight up tell her no for being too "disrespectful."

They were petty too, loudly telling people breakfast was on it's way 3-4 hours before they knew breakfast would get there just to make people feel hungry and get them anxious and waiting assuming it was coming any minute now. As the staff kept reminding us breakfast would be here any minute every few minutes.

And they take away even the ability to escape by suicide. An escape so many would surely make if they could. I doubt Hell would be much worse. The only reason I got out so "soon" was I had an advocate (spouse) trying to bring me home. To be fair people are sent there for being "suicidal". But I don't see how it could do anything but hasten their descent towards taking their own life.

They, like prisons, don't help anyone. It's just for storage and terror. And it caused me trauma that continues to give me flashbacks months later. I'm not sure what state I would be in now without a loving family and a spouse who loves compassionately and deeply to heal me. Or my long-time counselor. Or my chickens. I held my little bunny for hours as my little angry little tribble did his best to comfort me. I slept with terrible dreams for nearly 48 straight. I couldn't even eat for a week. It feels even now like it set me back a year in my recovery from the pit I only recently crawled out of.

I think the second worst thing was the insanity of it all. Why hurt people who are already hurting so much? I get the whole Nietzsche thing is in play. So fucking what? It's still insane.

The worst thing was meeting a young resident doctor who was obviously gay and Latino. He knew what it was like to be oppressed. I could still hear some basic goodness in his voice. But he was already cold and compassionless. They were ruining his good heart just as they had done to so many others. And he will become twice as much a son of hell and traumatize thousands more over his long life.

And I know that is only a snapshot of the evil in our empire.

Rabbits manage their predators

We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increased survival to adulthood in response to the abundance of food. Eventually the lynx outpace the rabbits and eat all the available rabbits and starve themselves to death back down to numbers that can survive on the number of available rabbits at which point the hares, being R strategists can reproduce faster than K strategist lynx and the whole cycle starts over again.

It's used as a classic example in ecology courses of predators preventing prey populations from overwhelming a landscape. And we see it as a cautionary tale about the need for good stewardship of resources and need for population control to prevent the suffering of boom and bust cycles.

That story is not quite accurate. The people who came up with that interpretation where all children of privilege and identified with the predators. It wasn't until more scientists from indigenous and lower-class groups began to make up the ranks that we questioned that story.

The hares are actively starving out their predators through solidarity.

When stress levels build up in hares from constantly being hunted and close escapes, this changes their reproductive system to have much smaller litters. Even when stressed individuals mate with outside hares, they have small litters and males somehow induce their unstressed mate to produce smaller litters even if she would otherwise have produced a large litter.

The entire population of hares effectively withholds their bodies from the predators by not reproducing beyond just enough to keep the species alive while laying low for long enough to starve the majority of their predators to death and force them to have smaller litters in response.

It seems to me there is a lesson in there for us in the midst of Capitalism. Stop having kids and starve the system of labor.

Then let the invisible hand of supply and demand do its magic to raise wages and reduce housing prices.

You can't afford to strike. They might fire you if you slow down too much (I still think a national slowdown is a safe bet). But they can't do jack to you for not breeding (yet).

So focus on your career and having fun and living a life of service to make a better future.

We should call bird poop fewmets because birds are dinosaurs and that's basically a dragon.

I want to encourage the streamers who are putting in the work playing and reviewing half-assed terrible games for half-assed terrible video game companies. I know you hate those games you have to hype up and pretend to be scared by stupid jump scares. I know you have to write your own dialogue because there is nothing interesting or fun or cool about most of those awful "games". And you are probably doing it just to put food on the table or get your channel started.

But here's the thing. Your audience doesn't care. Your audience is children. And they just like to watch you have fun and to live vicariously through you. You are the cool people they look up to and the entertainers who make them laugh.

My kiddo is chronically ill and basically bed ridden. She watches so many of those videos and laughs and smiles along with you. Those videos make up a huge portion of the life she lives through her phone much of the day. And significantly contribute to her quality of life.

That's right. Your minor channel makes her life better and all your viewers' lives better. It might not cure cancer. It might not feel like success. It might have felt like shit work at the time. But you are creating something that brightens a lot of kids days, and that is not worthless in this world we share.

Friends of ours lost their 22yo son to suicide recently. He was struggling, but kept the depth of it hidden. There are no words of comfort to give, only grieving alongside those who have lost one that they love.

A good friend pointed out that in the midst of this weeping, while it does not diminish the grief, perhaps something good might come out in that those who are similarly struggling with thoughts of suicide might get some perspective that their lives matter beyond the tiny world mental illness traps you in. Your life matters and is worth living.

Our brains are a precariously balanced mix of meat, electricity, and chemicals. Sometimes because of our experiences and/or biology our brains begin to lie to us. It withholds joy and pleasure. "It’s like trying to laugh at a joke that isn’t funny. Trying to smile for a photo you don’t want to be in. It’s like waking up in the morning and hating that you actually woke up. It feels like someone is just draining the energy out of you all the time, every moment you are awake." Doing anything requires immense willpower. Just plain old staying alive becomes a conscious choice made over and over again. You are just so tired and everything is just too much to deal with. The constant state of suffering leads one to try various ways to feel something positive, feel anything, or just escape the emptiness. It's why depressed people try so hard to bring joy to others and help others- they want to prevent others from suffering too and it allows them to feel some happiness vicariously.

The inevitable diminishing returns on the attempts to feel better, feel anything, or just escape eventually lead to the conclusion that there is only one way out of this hell. And depression shrinks our awareness of our own meaningfulness and inner world. The void is all we can perceive. The knowledge that we are loved, cared for, or important is lost. We can sincerely believe that our loss will not so drastically affect our loved ones and escape through death is a viable option.

These are all false of course. Falsehoods our sick brain tells us with honesty, because suicide is quite reasonable given what we are perceiving.

If you are feeling like you don't want to be here, wishing you would not wake up, desiring an accident, imagining about killing yourself, drugging yourself into oblivion, or seriously thinking about if or how you might kill yourself, you need to talk to someone. I got lucky. Someone who loves me more than I love myself saw me spiraling into self-destruction and made me get help and continues to support me in spite of myself. I spent years where my full-time job was not research or teaching, but just keeping myself alive. It's still my job now and then. But the difference now is that after many years of therapy and prescriptions I know that feeling is temporary and false.

I'm sorry it hurts so much right now. When you have some distance from these feelings (I hope that you will give yourself the chance to), I hope you can see that your life is worthwhile and important because you are.

But the only way out is through and that requires talking. I hope you have people nearby who love you you can talk to. If you do, talk to them. If you don't, this will be harder. Either way, you should also get into counseling. A good counselor will help you find ways to survive, build better mental pathways, & develop tools for processing emotions.

Brutal honesty- American mental health treatment system is shit and difficult to navigate. We have far too few professionals in many areas and online is often the only option. But you are a fighter. Look at you all alive and shit when depression has been trying to kill you 24-7. Live a little bit longer. You can do it. And if you are going to live a little bit longer, counseling can help you live it a little bit better.

I think tumblr should be able to show you how many people have blocked you. Like not names or anything, just a rough number showing how many people have you on their blocklist. I want to know my hater stats.

shoutout to my best buddy in highschool who once told me "you speak like how tumblr users write their textposts" and i was mortified for a second but then realization hit me and i rebutted with "wait how do YOU know how tumblr users write their textposts???" and we were both like

All the beetles I vivisected for calcium imaging are waiting for me. Mostly and they are pissed off it was for nothing because we couldn't get the Ca imaging to work on them.

I know my hell will be filled with the bugs I accidentally killed so that I can pay back for my sins and once I have finally be crushed by all, Satan will carry me out on piece of paper underneath a cup.

Sometimes it feels like everyone around me is speaking in a secret language and I'm the only one who doesn't know it.

star wars: prequels incorrect quotes (2/?)

insp

Why the Northern Fremen don't believe in the Prophecy

The reason is just an incredibly simple, sociological reason. What do they keep pointing out about Arrakis? That the south is harsh and uninhabitable... to outworlders. We know this harsh environment increases religious fervour to bolster survival, but what does this mean for the north? Why did they lose their faith?

The settler's cities, Arrakeen and Carthag, are situated in the north. The Harkonnens don't believe the south is habitable so they only mine spice in the north. Their brutal suppression of the Fremen are only in the north.

So imagine you are one of the Northern Fremen. You know there's a prophecy about the Lisan al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer World that would save your people. But here are these outworlders, who rampage your planet, who enslave and brutalize your people, who only see Arrakis as a resource, and its inhabitants as a means to an end, or "rats" that are in the way of their bottom line. Rats to be exterminated. Seeing all of this, of course you would start to doubt the prophecy. If this is how real outworlders are, why would the Lisan al-Gaib be any different from them?

And this is why Chani and the other Northern Fremen stop believing. They see through its manipulation of the Fremen. But they also understand that if the Fremen band together and fight back, they can win battles on their own. The Southern Fremen don't see any of this, because they're essentially protected from the violence of the colonizers by the dust storms near the equator. They might hear stories about the Harkonnens, but that wouldn't shake their faith in the Lisan al-Gaib. They are willing to simply wait for the "right" kind of outworlder, which does come along in the form of Paul and Jessica.

I think this is a really clever explanation of this divide in the thinking of the Northern and Southern Fremen, which is also related to the idea of how the environment that people grow up in shape their beliefs and their culture. Even though this is a departure from the first novel, this change is still true to the spirit of Frank Herbert's Dune.

None you you ever heard of wearing bows in your hair?

Hunting bows do not belong with the hair accesories

Insect Dreams

I picked Gregor Samsa as the bug transformation reference for a reason besides recognizability: in Kafka's Metamorphosis, the bug transformation is pretty clearly a metaphor for disability and/or mental illness. My experience being queer and my experiences with mental illness and ADHD aren't just similar, they overlap so much that they are inseparable to me, and they've effected me my whole life. Thus a Gregor who was always a bug.

When I hear the coffee grinder

Robert Bly, from Poems on the Underground

much to think about

I actually went to Gobblers Knob in Punxsutawney and was close enough to see the no shadow for myself before the drunk guys in top hats told us what they saw.

I experienced the whole frigid, boring, tedious, painful, boring, long, standing room only for 6 hours of physical hell, low rent, cheapass, tacky, corny, tawdry, obnoxious, fucking dry event for you.

It involved security pat downs for liquor on every man woman and child to keep out liquor. Weed was illegal by community consent thanks to Reagan. It was 10 degrees and dark in the dead of a Pennsylvania Winter. And there was absolutely no entertainment for hours till it got daylight. Then this local DJ comes on to entertain the out of towners. He's horrible.

Remember that we are the cash cow for this little group of local good old boys and their buddies. And for the entire town. And they treat us like shit. Just penned us up and hit us for cash money at every turn. This was 1998, so that wasn't unusual everyone outside major businesses required cash. I'm dead sure they have those little credit card scanners everywhere now. They milked us for everything they could think of.

And it was so fucking cold. You don't understand cold until you know standing huddled still in the dark cold. Most people never really experience cold. Insulation is really fucking good now. I overpaid so much when goose down jackets got sorta affordable. They were like miracles to me. I would have given anything for such a miraculous jacket then. I had to make do with layers of insulated flannels and long underwear. I did have true winter underwear from my Boy Scout days so I was a good bit less cold than my buddies who didn't know how to layer.

Most people only experience shoveling snow cold. Maybe skiing cold. A few hunting cold. (Real damn cold) And a mighty few who have lived in it for days just sitting around camping in tents with nice sleeping bags and a big fire to warm us. In teens or subzero temps. I have. You have to dig deep and layer well. And just accept being cold every single minute of your life outside of your sleeping bag.

So we were doing hunter cold. This was Western Pennsylvania. Everyone knew how to do hunter cold. My buddies were all suburban kids. I told them how to dress. A few listened.

3+ hours of my best friends in the world talking shit to AC/DC and Ace of Base or whatever was the thing.

That night we started at like 3am and drove a few hours of dark Pennsylvania highway. Just darkness, trees, and sky. I can't remember if the stars were out. Something about those Appalachian Forest highways just are monotonous in a weird way.

Those road trips are always fun. I strongly suggest. Even if you have to brave the Appalachian Static.

Anyway we arrive at Punxsutawney. It is in the middle of nowhere. Just another isolated abandoned steel town. They have a bit of a real downtown that most of these towns utterly lack. Often it's a gas station and a Dollar General and a bunch of run down houses with a school 40 minutes away it shares with the other rundown towns.

But Punxsutawney has a nice little town of happy people because of Phil and our fascination with this thing.

So of course there is not parking for 30,000 people. In a town of 5,000. So they rope off some field frozen solid and park us all charging Disney parking fees.

They subcontract school buses to haul people from the parking lot to the main event. The bus drivers are the first line of defense against alcohol and drugs.

Security is the second. Compete with pat downs and local cops along with PA Troopers with drug dogs and quotas to meet. No spoiling the fun with chemical enhancement!

Then you walk for fucking ever. Slowly. Going to the Knob.

It is deadly cold. And it begins to dawn on you what you are in for in this grassy pen with nothing but a porta potty or two for entertainment.

Look at all that fun!

This was before phones people. My friends and I were super studious and none of us owned any kind of video game. No handheld games. Maybe you thought to bring a newspaper or book. I think I brought a book. I'm sure at least one of them brought engineering notes to study. Most just talk and bitch about the cold.

Cold in the dark is different from cold in the light. It is so much deeper without the solar radiation slightly warming your surface and your spirits.

Then the dawn brings light and a little warmth and hope.

Then the dawn brings the DJ.

Small town DJs are interesting critters. They are small town famous and often they are unique personalities that can be really entertaining. At least between songs and commercials. Some of them are pretty amazing like Nipsey, Jen, and Earl in Harrisburg/Hershey/Lancaster/Lebanon area back when it was even more podunk backwater.

It was 1998 and this guy showed up.

So this small town guy is used to entertaining local venues with his shtick that everyone knows and loves with his slightly out of date look and inside local jokes.

Today he has 2 hours of just him on a stage in front of 30,000 pissed off college students who were expecting a lot more entertainment and maybe some food or drinks and tired & grumpy rural folk hoping to get in a little fun and excitement before going to work. At least half the crowd had found a way to sneak in a flask or something. So people were unruly.

And we just watch the poor guy spend 2 hours fighting for his life up there feeling bad for him trying to entertain us while hosting his fun little morning show for his listeners who are probably loving it all.

He got heckled. Badly. This was 25 years ago and we weren't very nice.

After 2 hours of this entertainment. The main event started.

My heroes arrived on the scene.

They have been partying all night long. In a nice warm place with warm food, comfy chairs/couches, running water, and a ton of alcohol. They are all drunk as skunks. The all come up on stage, wave and whip up the crowd, pull out their buddy, give him some scritches and lift him up to the crowd like he's the new Lion King, and then examine his shadow, make their proclamation, smile and wave, go back to their party, and count their money.

This is the highlight of the entire event. The peak of excitement. The best it got for the whole day.

Then they shoved the DJ back on stage, the national media and anyone with connections left, and the rest of us were kept penned up for another hour or 2 till it was our turn to take a school bus back to our frozen car, a 3+ hour drive through winter highways to get back in time for afternoon classes.

It was so much fun.

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

😭😭

you should be listening to old ass music

this is the best tweet i've ever seen bar none

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.

NeSpoon is a Polish artist, born in Warsaw, who mixes the delicacy of lace with the roughness and freedom of urban art

Why do you hate straight people

heres my paypal

i’ll answer your question when i recieve payment :) thank you so much!

On of the less intuitive things about love, I've found, of any kind, is the importance of needing things.

I didn't realize it until recently, but I've always seen love as something requiring sacrifice, selflessness, patience, and generosity- to ask for nothing is to be the best person I can be, small and quiet and never in the way, always happy and helpful, self-sufficient and present when desired.

It's only as an adult, now, that I'm beginning to see the selfishness of wanting nothing.

I cut my friend's hair in my kitchen the other day. They wanted a trim and I had the skills, so I offered, and was genuinely excited when they stopped hesitating over "bothering me" and took me up on it. It was a peaceful afternoon, and we had tea and chatted for an hour or more.

My brother and I shared popcorn at the movies a while ago. When I came time to pay, I pulled my card out like a wild western sheriff and slapped it on the machine before he could fight me for it first. The satisfaction was delightful.

Someone called me crying on the phone the other day. Kept apologizing for disturbing me at work, talking about how they were bothering me on my lunch break. I was telling the truth when I told them that really, I was flattered and honored and relieved, knowing that if they were hurting I would know, that I didn't have to worry in silence. It felt good to hear them slowly come down, and to know that they knew it would be better soon, and to hear them laugh wetly on the other end. We're getting together for a visit next week.

It's hard to need things, if you've trained yourself not to. It's hard to want things, when you don't know how to want anymore. Trusting people is difficult, and so is relying on them, but I don't know where I'd be without the people who rely on me.

I've heard a lot of people say, "Nobody will love you unless you love yourself". I've had a lot of thoughts about it. It's not right, but it's not wrong, either, I think.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... I've always taken that to mean, "You will not be lovable until you develop a positive view of yourself as a person".

Now, I think it's sort of inside-out.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... because nobody can show their love to you in a way that you can accept until you treat yourself kindly, and learn what you need, and what you want, and how to ask for it, and then give that vulnerability away.

Love, for me, is someone I ask for a ride to the airport. Whether they end up doing this or not is irrelevant.

It's not needy, or selfish, or taking up energy. It's giving the gift of being wanted, and needed, and thought of. It's giving someone the security of being part of someone's life.