The other thing about rage as an addiction is that it likes to cloak itself in feelings of righteousness. Like, yeah, there’s the stereotypical white male gamebro who needs to invent/buy into elaborate conspiracy theories about how Cultural Marxist SJWs are trying to replace the white race by doing an all-female Ghostbusters remake or whatever in order to justify the amount of time and energy that they put into hating it; or the Twitter dogpiler who needs to conflate “having bad opinions about cartoon series” with “being a pedophile” so that they don’t feel like a bully; but there’s also self-abusing by looking up hateful, bigoted opinions that pertain specifically to people like you so that you can sputter and rage and feel attacked and reinforce your sense of identity because look at the assholes who are attacking you!
What you need is a sort of cutoff frequency in your own brain; just little voice that says, “That’s irrelevant; move on.”
I also think that you can’t underestimate the value of rage as a sort of community building exercise. It neatly divides the world into an in-group of righteous folks just like you who are just minding their own business and an out-group of evil villains who are trying to destroy you / the things that you love for nefarious purposes. In an era when communities of all kinds have eroded away under neoliberal atomization, even this illusory, self-destructive feeling of Belonging can be intoxicating.
theres never any horny posts about women because people are so afraid to objectify women but IM not. thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs thighs biting them thihgs in my mouth biting thighs thighs in my teeth biting thighs womens thighs womens thighs in skirts womens thighs with tights thighs on women
That thing people do with female characters where they like, in their attempts to compensate for the unfairly negative way that female characters are often treated by fandoms they end up overshooting and just making them Too Good and flawless and endlessly caring and loving and patient and incapable of doing or being wrong and just removing everything that’s distinctive about the character, making her completely flat & forgettable & uninteresting, because they don’t want to say anything about her or depict her doing anything that might possibly be interpreted negatively.
#someone in the notes is like ‘once they say she’s the only one with braincells it’s all over’ so real (via @oodlyenough )
One of the most important survival skills as an adult is internalising the idea that other people being rude or dismissive towards you for no apparent reason, is most often a reflection of their problems (shitty attitude, bad day, work stress, family stress) and usually has nothing to do with you.
had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it’s back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:
12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it’s configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you’ll have to go elsewhere for those.
printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don’t work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you’re trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the “element zapper” (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you’re browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you’re just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it’ll revert everything back to its original state.
fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft’s restrictions. haven’t used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft’s 451 error but it seems to do the trick.
archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)
and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.
Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!
The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.
This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.
The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.
You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.
If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!
I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.
If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!
*currently suffering from a horrible migraine. Tries this*
