Really Cool Style :)

i think part of what bothers me (among many other things) about the dilution of punk on here lately is that it erases so many other subcultures.

like, a lot of people on here seem so desperate to label themselves and anything they like as punk despite it not having any relation to punk music or aesthetics (which, yes, is necessary to associate something with a music-based subculture), because they're hoping to get non-conformist brownie points on the non-conformist website. and if you really are non-conforming to a great deal of present social norms, that's great, but that doesn't mean you're punk, because punk doesn't have a monopoly on non-conforming.

the term you are looking for is counterculture, and there are many of them. there were many of them before punk, and there have been many of them since punk.

what do you think hippies were/are? why do you think conservatives hated them so much? are you gonna call hippies punk too? what about rap, hip hop, reggae? disagreeing with the status quo is not purely a punk thing, and we are doing so many countercultures a great disservice by pretending like anything that disagrees with something is punk.

it's not just musical subcultures either. many of us are already part of a non-conformist counterculture simply by partaking in queer culture. if you don't like punk music and styles, you aren't punk, but that's fine. calm down. take this coming from a punk as myself: if we have the same political goals, but you don't like my weird crusty bands, you are not punk, and i will still be delighted to throw bricks with you.

There's a lot of stuff that counts as dystopian about modern society, but one of the smaller yet insidious things I've noticed recently is the rise of companies whose entire marketing strategy is to convince you you're a burden to your friends and families.

I'm talking about that one dog watching/walking service that has a whole commercial implying that your family members secretly hate you for asking them to watch your dog to the point it counts as a modern social faux pas.

And there's this moving service commercial that I think someone else referenced in a big tweet that says something along the line of "Real adults don't ask their friends to help them move."

Like fuck that, man. You're supposed to want to watch your friends' pets, and you're supposed to want to help your friends move, and you're supposed to cook for people when they're sick, and you're supposed to show up to check on friends you haven't heard from in awhile, and you're supposed to remember your friend needs a large frying pan when you find one cheap at the thrift store and bring it to them.

One of the reasons the younger generations are so miserable and lonely is because the rise of technology and the concurrent pushing of this rhetoric that all effort is a major inconvenience, and asking someone to put in effort for you therefore makes you an inconvenience has conditioned them not to seek community.

And because they've never experienced it, they don't know that's what's missing. It's a vicious cycle because when you're depressed from lack of community, finding the energy to put in effort for other people is a lot harder than getting quick dopamine hits from scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. Then you encounter the further issue that our media glorifies romantic love to the exclusion of all else, so most of the young people I know who are lonely jump to "Well I just need a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner," and that sets up rough relationships because one person is expected to fill the void of a dozen or more friends and neighbors.

So please believe me: If you're lonely, try volunteering somewhere in the community. Try going to events around your interests. Try talking to local shop owners. Bake something and surprise a friend with it. Search for nearby clubs or intramural sports teams. There are companies literally capitalizing on subtlely encouraging you NOT to do these things. We've reached the point where helping your friend move is an anticapitalist act.

Medium

Autistic “Memory-Foaming”

Why the difficulty (and sometimes inability) to self-advocate is so common to the autistic experience… and why it’s so insidious.

During a writing workshop I took this past year, I was reading a submission from someone in the group, and the following passage hit me like a brick: “I learned the things most people don’t have to know, too, how to shut down my brain and just perform the motions when needed. I made myself into the perfect parallel, not a mirror but foam. Folding in when he needed to push down, anticipating his next move, and absorbing it in kind. I became resigned to his every need, trying to never let him get ahead of my mental preparation.” — Lizzie McCord I unpacked this with my partner, and then with my therapist, and the concept of social memory-foaming formed. Here’s my attempt at a formal definition: Memory-foaming is the process of losing, giving up, or having trouble forming a sense of self-identity, self-advocacy and self-determination in social situations, and molding oneself to someone else or to a situation. It often involves excessively conceding, bending, conforming and acquiescing to someone, either actively or passively, either as a reaction to specific feedback, or in anticipation of a certain response. It often involves making yourself as small, as accommodating, and/or as agreeable as possible, to the point of self-neglect and self-alienation. Memory-foaming is different from people-pleasing in its process of self-unknowing, and in its process of identity-anchoring to someone or something else. It involves actually taking the shape of whatever or whoever you come into contact with, and being an adaptable, soft, malleable cast, often in order to fit in, gain acceptance or maintain connection. In relationships, memory-foaming is different from compromise, generosity, accommodation, and balanced self-sacrifice mainly because of its characteristic ignorance or un-awareness of self, and the resulting extreme deference to someone else by default.  It often involves the actual adoption and internalization of someone else’s perceptions and desires, and therefore often involves not knowing the difference between “mine” and “theirs.” As a result, just like real memory foam, it takes a long time afterwards to understand what was “me” and what was “them.” Sometimes, that understanding never comes.

Wow. This was a fantastic read. I think Lizzie McCord & Attlee Hall's "memory foaming" metaphor describes a psychological experience common to Autistics far better than "people pleasing", "codependency" or even "fawning" ever did.

I think the bicycle helmet discourse really just reinforces the idea that people believe that accidents only happen to the stupid and careless, and that people who get hurt somehow deserve it. And since nobody wants to believe themselves to be stupid, or thinks they could be careless or distracted, it's not necessary to take precautions.

And then they take safety advice as an insult because telling someone to be safe is seen as an accusation of being stupid and irresponsible, and not just a value neutral acknowledgement of statistical inevitably. We see it with masks, and seatbelts, and now bicycle helmets because everyone wants to believe they're too clever to get hurt, and too lucky to get hurt badly, until suddenly you're not and you have to resign, in shame, to being one of the people you previously saw as annoying nags, assuming you're even still alive.

Every now and then I remember that Malbolge exists and I get to spend the better part of an hour cry-laughing at the world’s worst programming language

already starting off strong, but it gets worse

Wow! Sounds easy and intuitive to use! What’s the “crazy operation” you ask? We’ll get to that later. For now let’s see what a program in this language looks like :)

Thanks! I hate it!

it’s so difficult to work with that the first program was written by another brute force search program

mmmmm delicious base-3 arithmetic, what could go wrong? (For reference, that means this program forgoes the usual “0/1″ values of binary code in favor of a much more fun “0/1/2″ set of values)

ah.

Here’s how the language actually figures out what to do. It’s got 8 “simple” commands that can be executed easily by *checks notes* running the code itself through the modulo operation and taking the result.

As a bonus, on top of all that every single character in your code will now alter what every single other character does. So I hope you’re alright with cracking a cipher every time you add a new letter to your program!

oh god oh fuck.

behold, Malbolge’s primary arithmetic operation and what you’ll be using for most of your math while programming with it :)

This looks specifically designed to be the least logical math operation you could make, and knowing what the rest of Malbolge is I’d wager that’s precisely what happened. I never want to ever use this and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge

Anyways here’s the wiki page if you wanna read through it more deeply, I’m gonna sit here holding in my laughter staring at the hello world program again.

it fucking sucks how you can do all the therapy and self healing in the world and you still have to wake up living under a capitalist death cult that's killed community and crushes your soul

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

Bionicle Anomalocaris V.2

POV: mister Devon Price, PhD, telling me that I am right about everything

Source: Unmasking Autism, discovering the new faces of neurodiversity