amnesia cw

AVOID THE WINDOWS 10 OCTOBER 2018 UPDATE OR RISK LOSING ALL OF YOUR PERSONAL FILES

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

mamoru:

Posted Oct 5th, 2018

Many users are reporting massive data loss following the October 2018 Windows 10 update. Personal files are being deleted and hard drives are being corrupted in addition to several performance glitches. Users who have received the update are reporting all of their personal files such as documents, music, pictures, and videos being deleted following the update.

Some people have lost hundreds of gigabytes of data. These files are completely disappearing following the update – they do not wind up in the recycle bin, they are completely gone. Other users are reporting their entire hard drives or SSDs becoming corrupted, making rollback and recovery of said deleted files impossible.

In addition to the file deletion, devices with 6th generation Intel processors and newer are reporting awful battery life and CPU usage following the update.

Long story short, hold off on the October 2018 update for now. There are too many glitches and way too much to lose. If you attempt it,

BACK UP ALL OF YOUR FILES FIRST.

More information:

Digital Trends

Forbes

Cnet

ZDnet

Again?! Jesus fuckwaffles, I still haven’t gotten back on Win10 after the April update bricked my laptop…

Tags:

#PSA #I recommend keeping backups just in general #but now would be an especially good time #and even with a full backup this would still be a huge pain to deal with #(I haven’t booted up my Win10 partition lately so I haven’t encountered any of this myself) #amnesia cw

Anonymous asked: Have you joined pillowfort? Why or why not?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

lavender-sprinkles:

I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).

Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:

  • If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
  • The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
  • A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
  • A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for. 
  • They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
  • They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
  • Posts in chronological order like they should be!
  • A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
  • A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
  • The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.

So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.

If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.

If you like everything that you’ve read about Pillowfort.io, please pledge to their Kickstarter. Even $5 can help and it will get you a registration link to get on Pillowfort yourself if the Kickstarter gets fully funded.

If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can. 

This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!

 

Um.

Look, I understand why people would think having veto power over your OPs is a good thing, but also I really don’t want a site where bits and pieces of *my blog* are rotting out of existence because the thread originators unilaterally decided to delete them. Especially if–and I can’t find anything in the site’s about section that says for sure whether or not they do this, but it seems like the most obvious way to handle it–deactivating your account deletes all of your posts. You ever look at a years-old section of someone’s Tumblr and see how many of the OPs are deactivated? I want my blog to be an archive, not just an ephemeral stream†.

And I don’t want comments to be sequestered away within their associated posts, so that it’s not a standard action to say “hey, Brin often has interesting things to say and good taste in things to say them about, I want to be shown every thread where she comments”.

(having the *option* to make a particular comment sequestered rather than shown to your followers is good (perhaps a more robust version of the Tumblr “reply” function), but it should not be the default)

(likewise, occasionally you want a post to be sequestered, and I do agree that a better version of Tumblr would have a friends-locking system)

Pillowfort doesn’t have the best parts of Tumblr. It has the parts of LiveJournal that make LJ inferior to Tumblr, the parts that exalt posters over commenters, force you to make primarily OPs or be a second-class citizen.

(And, as I was saying the last time somebody tried a (somewhat more literal) marriage of Tumblr and Dreamwidth††, the whole reason I’m able to make Tumblr OPs is because I know my OPs are just one aspect of my blog and don’t have to stand alone.)

Each blog being a combined feed of the user’s posts and comments *is* what makes Tumblr great, and no “”new and improved”” Tumblr-inspired social-media site is ever going to have a hope of attracting me and others like me until they understand that.

—

†And yes, I *have* taken steps to ensure my blog archive outlives Tumblr itself.

††Notice how the OP on that post deactivated two years ago? And I’m still able to show you what my comment was?

Tags:

#reply via reblog #<– my favourite thing about having a Tumblr #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #amnesia cw #discourse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Pillowfort

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

nonomella:

Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me

 

cthullhu:

Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age

 

whatthecurtains:

“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”

-Neil Gaiman on Coraline

 

greenbryn:

@nightlovechild

 

lierdumoa:

This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”

 

redgrieve:

Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much

 

12drakon:

An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.

 

gokuma:

Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning

 

rosymamacita:

i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.

 

jewishdragon:

Also, in an interview, he said that Coraline was partially based on a story his not yet 6 year old daughter would tell him 

SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?

GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.

 

somewhereinmalta:

It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.

 

maryellencarter:

Sometimes. Other times you have small anxious children who really, really don’t want anything upsetting or traumatic in their stories. Those do exist; I was one. The whole thing about “children don’t want soft stories, children want gore and horror and decapitated barbies” may apply to a majority of children, but not all of them. :P

#i also went hoppity-skip of my own volition   #i am not and was not a Real Child   #still kind of sensitive about that   #i was easily frightened and easily traumatized   #and the only people who seem to acknowledge that possibility at all   #are like Think Of The Children conservative activists and helicopter parents   #idk if i have a point here   #i just get a little tetchy about Real Children

—

Oh god, same.

The person right before you in the chain says “The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong”, and while there’s a important harm *reduction* in that, also very important is “so they need a universe where things *aren’t* threatening for a change”.

This world is one *so* thoroughly threatening that even its *sitcoms* contain shapeshifting monsters that camouflage themselves as normal parts of the environment, and plagues that drive you insane and which can infect you through a phone call. A world where cars have stickers constantly reminding you of the terrible things that can happen to you in them, and every grocery store has a random chance of triggering you, re-rolled every four minutes (and you don’t have enough autonomy to even *attempt* to do anything to counteract it).

Why the fuck *wouldn’t* you want a break from that hellscape?

I did read Coraline as a kid, and I don’t think I found it *especially* horrifying, but “not especially horrifying” is *not* *saying* much at that age.

(I continue to be very glad that I did not read Animorphs.)

—

(Although, re: decapitated Barbies specifically, I *did* play barber-surgeon† with my stuffed animals. This somehow did not stop me from being what I think was the expected level of horrified by those bits of Toy Story; it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realised I was Sid.)

—

There’s *some* ways in which I rolled with it more as a kid (for example, my inclination towards fluff is actually *stronger* now), but I think that’s…sort of a learned-helplessness kind of thing? When horror is everywhere, there’s nothing you can do *but* take it.

(related: the thing where younger!me was into (what I would now recognise as) erotic horror because *that was all there was*; my tastes shifted heavily towards fluffy consentful stuff pretty much as soon as there was fluffy consentful stuff to be had)

—

I wonder if this relates to the assumption between adults that everyone’s masochistic.

—

†I don’t think I ever actually called it that, but I figure that term gives you a good idea of the sort of things involved.

Tags:

#the last time I walked into a grocery store and they started playing That Song #I walked right back out and listened to Florence and the Machine on my smartphone while I waited for them to be done #(and it *still* sucked just not as much) #ten-year-old me did not have that option #reply via reblog #long post #amnesia cw #ageism #nsfw text? #death mention #illness mention #my childhood

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

While I’ve completed the move to the new laptop [link], it’s occurred to me that my on-site Tumblr drafts folder is also not included in my backups, and I should probably clear *these* drafts out too.

Tumblr doesn’t seem to provide information on when a draft was made, but this one was already pretty old when I mentioned it in June 2017 [link]. It also pre-dates my switch from italics to asterisks to denote emphasis: I have edited its word-emphasis method to help the emphasis show up more reliably.

(This post is not entirely unrelated to my previous post [link], which is what reminded me to do this now.)

—

I was sick, and it was the middle of the night, and earlier I’d been having problems where my brain would skip straight to dreaming while neglecting to fall asleep first. (It is a strange and unpleasant experience to dream non-lucidly despite also being aware of one’s body lying on one’s bed. Especially if one is having a nightmare about alien invasions.)

I knew I was going to sleep terribly, one way or another, but I was determined to lie there until morning and hopefully get a bit of restorative unconsciousness here and there. (Sometimes I get to bed a bit late, but if it is Designated Sleeping Time *and* I have already gone to bed, by god I will lie there as long as it takes (or until 8 AM or so, whichever comes first). I do not give up on bedtime.)

A couple hours in, I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t mine.

I was 14, so by this point I’d already read a bunch of neurodiversity stuff on multiplicity. I was in a lucid period and knew she was *probably* a transient hallucination, but the possibility that she might not be didn’t freak me out.

I calmly explained to her that while I was not *inherently* averse to considering her a real person, given the circumstances I was understandably reluctant to assume sapience, and she would probably do the same in my place. I told her that if she were still there when I was fully awake I would provisionally accept her personhood, and if she stuck around even after I’d recovered from my illness we’d start hashing out plans for co-existence. In the meantime, real or not I could use the company. Any ideas for a conversational topic?

She ignored me, and continued complaining about having to share the pain of my ear infection. Shortly after, she was gone.

(Okay, this next bit may require some context. My thoughts often take the form of dialogues, which seems to be fairly common. People vary in the level of independence of these “conversational partners”, but I am pretty far towards the singlet end of the spectrum, and perceive myself as consciously controlling both halves.)

So a couple hours after that, around dawn, I was thinking (like you do), in dialogue form (like you do), and…not all at once, but gradually, I realised: I didn’t know what he was going to say.

And he said “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? Is this what it’s like, being alive? Is this how you feel all the time? So *vibrant*?”

He said he knew it probably wouldn’t last long, and that while he *liked* being this way, it wouldn’t be *so* bad to go back to being a mere part of me. It wasn’t like it was dying or anything, just…he wished we could at least merge *properly*. He was sad that I wouldn’t remember this conversation from his perspective, that this part of him, this interesting experience, would just *vanish*.

(He wondered if he would get it back if I hallucinated him again in some future illness, if other hallucinatory hims would have continuity with this one. It hasn’t happened again, so we haven’t found out.)

He was, at least, better company than the complaining woman.

Tags:

#whether he was actually sapient during that conversation I don’t know #I expect the woman wasn’t but he was more responsive and *much* more introspective #in which Brin somehow manages to be among the most singlet people she knows #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #illness tw #death tw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Part 2 of draft-clearing: another CORDYCEPS-related draft. This one is dated September 15th, 2016.

—

Did you know there’s a Greek alphabet song? {{this was marked as “insert a link here”, but the Youtube URL of the particular version past!me was thinking of was not included}}

I didn’t know for *sure* there was until today, but last night it occurred to me that it was *plausible* that one might exist, and if so it would be pretty helpful in making sure I knew the names of all the Greek letters and learning what order they go in.

Why did I want to learn the Greek letters, you might ask? Well.

So, I read CORDYCEPS [link], yeah? And my brain was like “Hey look, a new skin for our recurring amnesia nightmares [link]!”

And the thing is, my subconscious has been fairly insistent† that my INO is the Greek alphabet. This is weird because I *don’t have the ordering of the Greek alphabet memorised*. I mean, I know the order of the first five letters because of Brave New World, but after that, ???

So now I’m actually learning the order of the Greek alphabet *just so that this will stop bugging me*.

(…thank you @itsbenedict? I guess? For…inspiring me to learn?)

†If by “fairly insistent” you mean “both of the two times it’s come up”.

Tags:

#I never did *completely* memorise the ordering #but I’m much further along than five now #might finish it at some point #oh look an original post #cordyceps tcftog #amnesia cw

With Beautiful Reluctance

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

warp6:

“I trust your Garden was willing to die…I do not think that mine was—it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star—”

—Letter written by Emily Dickinson, 1880 

tumblr_inline_onejbbd3jx1tgagzo_540

They do not know who they are or where they come from. They do not know how they came to be here, in this overgrown garden with its crumbling observatory. They do not even know their own name. But a series of alarming discoveries–a child’s abandoned toys, a woman’s frantic recording, a smoking ruin–sends them on a desperate quest to unravel the mystery of what happened here, the fate of these vanished people, and the truth of their own identity.

Read on AO3 (In Progress):

Chapter 1: The Observatory
Chapter 2: The Ruin
Chapter 3: The Forest

Gen / Kathryn Janeway, Other(s)
/ Mystery, Character Study, Unreality, Suspense, Found Family

 

warp6:

Chapter 4: The Green
Chapter 5: The Desert

 

warp6:

Chapter 6: The City
Chapter 7: The Train

 

warp6:

Chapter 8: The Cove
Chapter 9: The Ring

 

warp6:

Chapter 10: The Theatre
Chapter 11: The Starship

 

warp6:

Chapter 12: The Inferno

 

warp6:

Chapter 13: The Grey
Chapter 14: The End
Chapter 15: The Stars
Epilogue

Added tags: Action/Adventure, Injury, Psychological Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, relationships, Introspection, Angst with a Happy Ending

 

cosmic-llin:

Folks, I’m not kidding when I say this is one of the best fics I’ve ever read. I can’t even explain why it’s so amazing without spoiling it because discovering what it’s about as you go is one of its many joys, but please take my word for it that it’s just REALLY GOOD and if you love Kathryn Janeway then you should read it. (Note the content warnings as you go, though.)

Tags:

#Star Trek #Voyager #fanfic #recs #amnesia cw #I read this recently #it was amazing #and it felt…extremely Voyager #like if it weren’t for how logistically difficult it would be #to do something that spends this much time inside a character’s head in video format #I could absolutely see this as an episode

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

I’ve been doing archiving again today, downloading local copies of things that previously existed (in versions accessible to me) only on the Internet.

The thing about archiving is that it *hurts*. Not having done it–the moment when you want to remind yourself how something went and find it isn’t there to tell you, will never be there again–hurts a lot more, so I keep doing this. My past is valuable to me and I want to keep hold of it, have it available, and yet it always hurts to immerse myself in it.

(Today I’m saving works of fiction, works I think I would miss if their links rotted. (Some of them have already rotted. Most were salvageable through the Internet Archive. But only most.) I didn’t think that would hurt, but it turns out that it does, that they evoke the time periods I read them in.)

I know a lot of people hate their past selves, for their ignorance and foolishness. I think this is another version of that impulse, but I don’t hate past-me.

I don’t hate *her*. I hate the people who did this to her.

I think that’s a lot of the problem. I think maybe a lot of the pain of archiving isn’t inherent to the task in general, but because most of the stuff I’m archiving–this project and previous projects–is from around my late teens, give or take, and I was in a lot of pain then. A lot of it I hardly acknowledged at the time, or if I acknowledged it I shrugged and figured that was just how things were.

Maybe it’s good for me to immerse myself in the past, sometimes, if only to show myself how far I’ve come.

aaaaaaaahhhhh

I have reached a series that–while it has many good parts, and I still have plans to finish reading it someday–also brings up a whole lot of baggage

and a large part of the baggage is feeling like I’m not allowed to complain about it

aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

#I can’t even really get angry at anyone involved, #the worst part is knowing they weren’t even wrong to do it, #knowing I really *didn’t* deserve consideration,

no, you know what? that’s not quite true

yeah, I didn’t deserve *full* consideration, and yeah even if they’d done everything right I’d probably still have felt subjectively (unreasonably) betrayed, but I deserved more consideration than I got

everyone deserved it

because you know what? even if they didn’t recognise it as erotic, even if they didn’t even recognise it as *trance*, they still sprung a “““vicarious relaxation exercise””” on people without content warnings

honestly in some ways that’s *worse* for other people than it is for me, *I* realised what they were doing three paragraphs in, most people straight up *don’t have* “this story is attempting to hypnotise the reader” alarms in their brain and so it couldn’t have set those alarms off

Tags:

#oh look an original post #vagueblogging #rants #amnesia cw? #(for first post in chain) #I have seen stories with content warnings that look like the warning labels on *drugs* #”may cause drowsiness. do not drive or operate heavy machinery until you know how this product will affect you” #and yes they weren’t familiar with any standard etiquette regarding may-induce-trance warnings but they could have said *something* #sexuality and lack thereof

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been doing archiving again today, downloading local copies of things that previously existed (in versions accessible to me) only on the Internet.

The thing about archiving is that it *hurts*. Not having done it–the moment when you want to remind yourself how something went and find it isn’t there to tell you, will never be there again–hurts a lot more, so I keep doing this. My past is valuable to me and I want to keep hold of it, have it available, and yet it always hurts to immerse myself in it.

(Today I’m saving works of fiction, works I think I would miss if their links rotted. (Some of them have already rotted. Most were salvageable through the Internet Archive. But only most.) I didn’t think that would hurt, but it turns out that it does, that they evoke the time periods I read them in.)

I know a lot of people hate their past selves, for their ignorance and foolishness. I think this is another version of that impulse, but I don’t hate past-me.

I don’t hate *her*. I hate the people who did this to her.

I think that’s a lot of the problem. I think maybe a lot of the pain of archiving isn’t inherent to the task in general, but because most of the stuff I’m archiving–this project and previous projects–is from around my late teens, give or take, and I was in a lot of pain then. A lot of it I hardly acknowledged at the time, or if I acknowledged it I shrugged and figured that was just how things were.

Maybe it’s good for me to immerse myself in the past, sometimes, if only to show myself how far I’ve come.

Tags:

#our roads may be golden or broken or lost #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #((and can’t be added at the end because there are more than 20 tags so category tags won’t register there)) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #I’m not even sure how long it’s been since the last time I cried #months and months I think #I’m not crying now I’m just saying I cry a *lot* less than I did then #(crying frequency is often a helpful guide to my current sanity levels if I find I’m having trouble telling from the inside) #((bear in mind I don’t experience estrogen’s effects on crying)) #((it’s not cathartic it’s not helpful and if things are going at all well it’s *not* frequent)) #I should probably stop for the day #I hate to leave tasks like these half-completed #but I’ve been neglecting my other daily tasks today and they need tending to as well #(I wonder whether I still have further to go) #(if late-twenties!me will look back at some background pain I’m so accustomed to as to hardly notice) #(and flinch) #(and pity me) #(and be grateful not to suffer like that anymore) #((my bet is on something finance-related)) #((I am aware of certain echoes between this post and two posts ago)) #((I maintain that accepting my lot is better than impotent anger at it)) #((but I acknowledge that having a lot that does not tempt anyone towards impotent anger at it would be better still)) #(((though I would like to point out that a lot of past-me’s pain was caused by feeling obligated to cultivate anger)))

{{next post in sequence, branch 1}}

{{next post in sequence, branch 2}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

So because of Reasons (I maybe shouldn’t go into much detail publicly, but it involves a side gig), I have been exposed to a lot of romance novels (often erotic, though not always) over the last few months, and it has been an Experience.

1. Did you know that in mainstream fiction circles, “MC” stands for “motorcycle club” rather than “mind control”? Because I did not know that, and I did a hell of a double-take when I first saw an “MC romance”.

2. Relatedly (or I guess *not* relatedly, if you are someone who looks at “MC fiction” and thinks “motorcycle club”), I did not expect memory play to be so popular. I mean, they put a different spin on it, of course, but still. Quite a few people in these have glorious sex with their true loves and then later wind up mind-wiped (I think usually by Fiction Head Trauma) and the true love has to Remind them *nudgewink*. And that’s not even counting other variations on the theme.

3. Wow, is a lot of this stuff dark. And even when it’s not dark, it’s often embarrassment-squicky, or people are doing something ~taboo~ and worrying about getting caught. It seems like even people who aren’t *specifically* marketing to taboo fetishists casually assume that something being taboo is a point in its favour, sexiness-wise (why would worry be sexy?). (And apparently breath play? Although that might have just been one person. But she seemed to think her audience would agree, without having selected her audience for hypoxyphilics beforehand.)

4. Overall, when I see stuff about what’s up in popular erotica, I am left with a sense of “wait, *these* are supposed to be the normal vanilla people? they’re *way* more out-there than I am.” (Also, that a lot of the problems† that I thought were specific to primarily-non-con-oriented kinks (or even specific to hypnosis, like memory play) are apparently happening all over. Not that I was expecting *this* porn to appeal to me anyway, but still, I feel some solidarity with the people who *would* like this stuff if only it were fluffier. Though there’s still *some* fluff out there, of course (just as there is here).)

Did something happen to, like, the sexual Overton window while I wasn’t looking? Is it subcultural effects–but I would expect subcultural effects to work in the *opposite* direction if anything. Or outgroup bias: everyone thinks the [people who are only into central examples of sex]†† are Over There in Normal Land, and that it’s just their own circle that’s kinky? Maybe the central-example-of-sex people just don’t read much erotica, even mainstream stuff? Maybe things were *always* like this and I’m just naive? (I think I have vaguely heard that taboos-are-sexy was always like that, though I don’t understand why.)

—

†I am using “problem” in the subjective sense here, to mean “trends that make porn less suited to my tastes”.

††I am no longer confident in my sense of what “vanilla” means, so I’m trying to avoid it here.

Tags:

#??? #sexuality and lack thereof #oh look an original post #amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unknought:

I’m lying in the dark and something like oblivion starts to flood my mind. Am I falling asleep? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know. For all the thousands of times I’ve fallen asleep, I can’t remember a single one. I don’t know what it feels like to stop being conscious. If I am in fact falling asleep right now, I realize, then what I’m experiencing in this moment will be gone from my mind when I wake up.

A tiny part of my mind panics: I don’t want to be erased! I don’t want to die! I’m jolted back to full consciousness. I lie still for a while, my thoughts slow, my mind starts to fill with something thick and sluggish and quiet, a part of me panics again. Not most of me; I know that I need to sleep. But enough of me to manage a veto, or at least a filibuster.

In the morning I wake up. I remember the cycle of drifting off towards probably-sleep and being repeatedly pulled back by a tiny fear of oblivion. I don’t remember how it ended.

Saaaaame.

(My feelings about this are so complicated and connected to so much other stuff in my head that it’s hard to really express them properly/coherently. And it might be TMI anyway.)

(I get the impression from reading about other people’s experiences that there’s quite a range of hypnagogic recall ability, and I’m towards the worse end of the scale. TBH, #1 quality-of-life tweak I would make to the human brain is improved hypnagogic recall. Since there are already people who have it, it’s clearly possible to set up a brain that way.)

Tags:

#obligate dozing fetishism + poor hypnagogic recall + psychological Issues regarding memory and existence = cruel joke of Nature #(of course it’s bedtime now isn’t it) #(I suppose I shall go nobly sacrifice very-near-future!me for a better-rested tomorrow) #(like every goddamn night) #reply via reblog #amnesia cw #death tw #infohazards #(you can really see the mishmash of grandfathered blacklist-tag formats on posts like this) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me