pete said he’s gay above the belt. in the mid noughties. you remember y2k fashion right? i know i do, it regularly gives me nightmares ten years later. you remember where the waistbands actually were? i’ll give you a hint - at least two miles south of the actual waist
so if you’re gay above the belt in 2005, you might as well just say you’re gay
The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply.
significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly.because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.
that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).
the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with thisworld and thesecharacters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start "rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.
Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail.
PSA - Delete any asks you receive about “joyofsatan.org!”
We’ve been through the “Gold Star Lesbian” spam asks, as well as the amegaotaku/rekka007 ones, and it seems that the new copypasta spam ask everyone is receiving is one where people are asked what they think of Joyofsatan.org, claiming them to be “the largest Satanist organization in the world.”
These asks are mostly sent to users who frequently talk about the occult and/or witchcraft, feminist bloggers, and Jewish users, with the message slightly altered for each person it’s sent to. Here are the two most common variations of the ask:
“What do you think of Joyofsatan.org? They claim to follow the Pagan Goddess Lilith/Lalitha, they’re pro-choice and they’re the largest Satanist group in the world.” <- This one also occasionally includes “they support women’s rights” after “they’re pro-choice.” This also seems to be the most commonly sent ask.
“What do you think of Joyofsatan.org? They claim to follow the Sumerian God Enki-Satan and they’ve become the largest Satanist group in the world.”
Although these asks are usually sent on anon, they’re also sent by the burner account 88643468, presumably to bypass anyone who has anon asks turned off, so I suggest blocking that account, especially if you have anon asks turned off.
Now, the reason you should delete these asks, instead of engaging, is because the Joy of Satan Ministries in question is a Neo-Nazi group, as detailed on the Wikipedia page I just linked, and these asks appear to be a recruiting tactic, going by the types of users most commonly spammed with the asks, and how the asks are re-worded depending on who they’re sent to; instead of a singular copypasta that gets sent to everyone, it’s variations of the copypasta that are each targeted towards a different demographic.
The people sending these asks want you and your followers to go to the Joy of Satan website, so that it gains more traffic and, of course, to suck people into their white supremacist cult.
So please, please, don’t engage, just delete the asks and block the 88643468 account, and if someone you follow answers one of these asks, urge them to delete their post and to block the 88643468 account for extra measure. Right now is also a good time to disable anonymous asks, or even take it a step further and only allow asks from people you follow, just in case 88643468 isn’t the only burner account.
Please share this.
I did some digging on tumblr and found some people who received this ask and, not knowing JOS’s theology and reputation, genuinely became interested in knowing more about them.
This is a real and present threat. Please be careful folks and do some diligent research.
[“Sometimes it’s a curse, and sometimes it’s a blessing,” said Greg Siegle, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies the brains of C-PTSD patients, and he told me that my suspicions were right—there were many ways in which C-PTSD could be considered an actual asset. “I call them superpowers,” he told me. “So many of what we call psychopathologies are actually skills and capabilities gone awry.”
Much of my research had stated that people with PTSD had shrunken prefrontal cortices—that experiencing triggers often shut down the logical centers of our brains and left us irrational and incapable of complex thought. But Siegle told me he’d discovered that research to be flawed. He’d found that for many people with complex PTSD, the exact opposite was happening. In moments of intense stress and trauma, our prefrontal cortices were actually far more active.
Normally, if you’re facing a threat, your body immediately reacts to it. Your heart starts pumping blood. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. This is all in service of getting blood to your legs so you can run the hell away from it. On top of this, you feel your heart beating faster. You recognize that you’re freaking out. That makes you even more anxious, and your heart beats even faster.
But Siegle told me, “As far as we can tell with complex PTSD, in really stressful situations, you’ve got this coping skill that allows the prefrontal cortex to just shut off some of our evolutionary freak-out mechanisms and instead have high levels of prefrontal activity. So our bodies stop reacting.”
In other words, in some moments of intense stress, we are super-duper good at dissociation. Our hearts don’t pump as hard. Our brains cut themselves off from our bodies, so we don’t really have that feedback loop of getting anxious about getting anxious. Instead, our prefrontal cortices blink online—we become hyperrational. Super focused. Calm.
Siegle explained it this way: “If running away has never been an option for you, you have to be cunning and do other things. So it’s like, this is time to bring all of our resources online, because we’re going to survive this.”
People with C-PTSD might have an outsized, gnarly freak-out about a cockroach in the house or a flash of anger on someone’s face. But in times of real danger—when someone furious is coming toward us with an actual machete in their hand, ready to kill—we face the problem head-on, while everyone else is cowering. A lot of the time, we’re the ones getting shit done.”]
Stephanie Foo, from What My Bones Know: Healing From Complex Trauma
Michelle Goldberg has a very insightful column in the New York Times about antisemitism. It begins by talking about the rapid acceleration of antisemitism that paralleled the rise of Trumpism. Certainly, we are seeing a resurgence of far-right antisemitism (and increasingly, the “far-” is redundant). But even after Trump left office, antisemitic activity has continued to surge. And the most striking thing about this pattern is not its political character, but rather how apolitical it is.
[F]or a huge number of antisemitic episodes, the political motive, if there is one, is illegible. According to Greenblatt, more than 80 percent of the incidents documented in the A.D.L. report “cannot be attributed to any specific extremist group or movement.” Much of the threat to Jews in America seems to come less from a distinct, particular ideology than from the broader cultural breakdown that’s leading to an increase in all manner of antisocial behavior, including shootings, airplane altercations, reckless driving and fights in school.
It is weirdly tempting to think antisemitism is “about” Jews in some meaningful, if mutated, fashion, such that changing something about Jews – how Jews talk are or talked about, how Jews behave or are perceived to behave, how Jews are viewed or where Jews are positioned in society – will alter patterns of antisemitism. The vast majority of counterantisemitism initiatives focus on some version of this approach, thinking – reasonably – that antisemitism is about Jews
But as Goldberg points out – and this resonates with my own observation – antisemitism often is associated with more inchoate frustration and social malaise. Antisemitism follows things like erosion of trust in social institutions, growth in conspiratorial thinking, widespread financial insecurity, and so on. Such developments are not “about” Jews; no amount of Holocaust education or anti-BDS campaigning or interfaith Seders will change them. And yet they probably play a more direct role in the rise of antisemitism than any Jewish-specific factor one could name.
Even apolitical antisemitism has a political connection, albeit an indirect one. “Post-truth” politics, the decay in an epistemically healthy environment, the rise of viral social media practices which create all sorts of terrible bad coherences, gravely accelerate the rise of “apolitical” antisemitism; in this, it is not an accident that the current surge began with and tracks closely the rise of Trumpism (nor is it coincidental that it’s leftward manifestations follow closely similar post-truth post-trust ideologies like tankie-ism). But it suggests that wrestling back down antisemitism paradoxically will have little to do with a distinctively Jewish politics. Antisemitism is a symptom of a larger disease, a disease that ultimately is not really about Jews in any specific sense. One will not ameliorate the symptom without addressing that disease.
