considering changing my url. my current one is an inside lotr joke with my old friends and I just feel like I’ve outgrown it at this point. at the same time, people know me by it and I’m a little sentimental about it. I don’t really want to move blogs though cuz I’ve had this one for so long and I’ve grown as a person w/ it.
The new Audible Harry Potter series is bad in uncomplicated, straightforward ways.
It is bad because it supports a woman who is actively funding groups that are seeking to deprive trans people of their rights in the UK and especially Scotland, where I live, where people inside the government are quietly remarking that they are struggling to fight against the groups she funds, as she has more money than God. Any money made from this new audio adaptation goes directly to funding these groups and these cases.
It is also bad because commissioning such an expansive series with such a well-known cast (Riz Ahmed?! Come on man) has eaten up the majority of Audible’s commissioning budget. In the UK, the only people commissioning audio drama are the BBC (separate conversation) and Audible, and this new Harry Potter series has hoovered up resources that could have otherwise gone to new stories, new voices and money to creators that aren’t actively trying to erase trans people.
I am angry at anyone who signed up to star in this, I am angry at the production companies that took on this commission, I am angry that this series continues to have a stranglehold on the UK media landscape despite all that its creator has done.
It is bad for trans people, it is bad for audio drama, it is bad for anyone working in media in the UK right now.
Do not listen to it
Yeah I think that the conversation about how bad this has been for audio drama in specific is something that people don’t realise, and that *also* harms trans people and other marginalised people trying to make art. At the moment, it’s difficult to make a career in the arts whatever medium you’re trying to work in, especially if any parts of your identity are marginalised. Audio drama in its current iteration is such a young industry with so few funding streams that to see one almost completely disappear up the arse of a project it seems nobody was really asking for is really frustrating.
What we’ve gotta understand is that “the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults” and “the modern Internet is abolishing space for children” are compatible phenomena. Neither group is being favoured: the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults (i.e., because grown-up topics aren’t advertiser friendly) and the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for children (i.e., because online communities which consist principally of people who have no money are hard to sell things to). The Internet that contemporary corporate interests are trying to build isn’t a space for anyone – it’s the digital equivalent of an Ikea showroom.
Like, when I say that the greater part of contemporary social media is fundamentally hostile to human life, I’m not indulging in hyperbole or constructing an ironic metaphor. I mean that 100% literally.
For those of you with android devices, you can use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) standalone app control program to get rid of all the bloatware, data mining, and AI crap - no coding needed!
It’s so crazy that suicide prevention is just people going awwww don’t!! Awwww come on noooooooooo stopppppp
One of the best ones I saw was a thing noting that every single one of the few survivors of suicide jumps off of the Golden Gate Bridge realized, on the way down, that the problems they were killing themselves over actually were fixable or could be worked through…except for the now - extremely unfixable - problem of gravity.
Went to the Holocaust Museum in DC once. There was a video interview of an Auschwitz survivor who said he and some other prisoners stayed up all night with a man who wanted to kill himself. The man didn’t kill himself and survived to liberation.
In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”
Hearing that from a guy who survived the Holocaust rewired my brain a little bit.
I think something a lot of people don’t understand is that depression is not suicidality, and suicidality is not depression.
People can, and are, depressed without being suicidal, and sometimes suicidality peaks as people are emerging from depression.
Suicidality is a wave, and the trick is to allow that wave to crest and subside WITHOUT acting on it.
Whatever it takes to ride it out. For some people that’s distraction, like watching television. For others it’s calling a friend – not to talk about the suicidality, but just to talk. For others it could be as simple as going to sit in a coffee shop or library, because the presence of other people is a huge diminisher of suicide risk.
That’s what suicide safety planning is about. It’s like having any other type of emergency plan, like a plan for fire or evacuation. It’s making a plan when you are in the frame of mind to do so, so that you can just DO the plan without having to think about it when the occasion arises.
When you’re in the midst of suicidal ideation, or even intent, you’re not in a problem-solving mood. So knowing past!you, with the help of a therapist hopefully, came up with the plan and all you have to do is follow up until the wave crests and subsides, is what allows you to see another day.
pro censorship people are always like “actually I’m living proof that books can be really harmful to kids! when I was a child I read a book that upset me and of course I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they would throw rocks at me whenever I confessed to reading anything but the Bible, so as you can see, that book was the source of my trauma and warped ideas about right and wrong”
also I’m sorry but I fundamentally cannot agree that “preserving innocence” in the form of ignorance of bad things is a desirable or even attainable goal for child rearing. the Siddhartha approach just isn’t realistic for a human being living in the world, you know? your kids are going to learn about the cruelties of the world sooner or later. of course a book may be upsetting or disturbing and haunt them. but let’s be real—“read about it in a book” is one of the safest ways to encounter them.
I know I come across as a huge bitch when I say this but I have very low tolerance for people talking about how they were “traumatized” by the contents of a book. were you? were you really? or were you upset and disturbed by the concepts you encountered in a book that your next door neighbor experienced first hand? cry me a river, but while you were reading a book your classmate was getting beaten or raped at home or tortured in an institution, your neighbor was watching his dad getting tazed by cops or administering narcan to his mother, your playmate from that time at the fair was getting deported to be shot at or starve or imprisoned in a detention center and forced to sleep in her own filth… because these things happen to people! To children exactly like you but for some unlucky stroke of fate! If you didn’t read about it in a book, you’d hear about it somewhere else. On the school bus, maybe, from Natalie telling you about how her dad used to get her drunk and touch her. Or maybe at the grocery store, witnessing an ICE raid or a homeless man get his teeth kicked in. Or maybe walking into a dentist’s office and watching some news anchor explaining how it’s actually fine to drop a bomb on relief workers, or about how many tweens the President may have molested and if we should care, or if that teenager who just got shot for carrying a grocery bag wrong had it coming, or or or or—
Anyway. It sucks to read books that you weren’t psychologically ready for but it’s hardly a moral crisis. I promise I’m empathetic to the distress of children encountering concepts in books that frighten or disturb them but I cannot get behind the idea that preserving the untainted naivety of middle class white children children about the things that can do and are happening to their peers is some all-important priority deserving laws about it.
ICE is attacking immigrants for now, but their goal is to subjugate all of us. Fighting for our neighbors today is a way of fighting for ourselves tomorrow.
Map the infrastructure that ICE depends on. Publicize their vulnerabilities. Popularize simple, reproducible ways to impose consequences every time that ICE inflicts harm on a community. Don’t just react to their attacks—choose the time and place of confrontations. Take the initiative.
“If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
"If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
-James Baldwin, writing to Angela Davis while she was in captivity, November 19, 1970