“If I can’t do X then I don’t deserve to do Y” is a mindset we need to kill. Otherwise mentally ill and disabled people will continue to punish themselves for struggles outside their control. You deserve to have fun playing your favorite video game even if you are unable to go to work. You deserve to enjoy watching your favorite show even if you couldn’t do homework first. You deserve a piece of pie even if you didn’t go to the gym. Actually, you deserve to have as much fun as you possibly can even if you can’t work or study at all! And especially if you’re disabled mentally or physically, you gotta actively challenge this idea that joy, fun, rest and relaxation is something you have to earn. Don’t deny yourself harmless joy just because you can’t always live up to society’s demands and expectations.
I used to make myself do x amount of work before I was allowed to get up for anything. Not even to pee or eat/drink. Don’t do that to yourself guys.
Oh God I struggle with this a LOT. less so now that I’ve been working on it in therapy for oh 5 years but yeah. Damn.
It was always easy to tell other people they deserved fun and happiness no matter their inability to work but to tell myself??? That’s taken a lot of practice to let go of the guilt.
January 2021: This cover is bad (like so many Star Trek books for some reason), but The Lives of Dax is a rad anthology. It’s fans-only for sure and the insight into each of Dax’s lives is a cool idea.
S.D. Perry knocked her two stories out of the park. (“Rad” and “cool” surely capture the essence of these authors’ work.)
February 2021: Left Hand of Destiny is an epic on the scale of Lord of the Rings featuring Martok, my favorite Klingon (sorry, Worf). For that reason alone it’s worth reading, but the authors do good work in further poking the bear that is Klingon politics.
April 2021: And A Stitch in Time is a Godfather-like exploration of the devout man’s fall from grace. It removes the vale that is central to Garak but it’s worth exploring after watching the TV show.
July 2021: Taking a side road through short fiction (my favorite trips) with Prophecy and Change. I like that these books open the tracks for more philosophical and metaphysical exploration of these characters.
January 2022: The Avatar duology from S.D. Perry is phenomenal! I love the focus on Kira as commander of the station and that Bajoran faith and religion continue to play a vital role.
As a post-war trauma narrative, it’s also fascinating to see them deal with their feelings in the aftermath.
March 2022: Millennium:
The Fall of Terok Nor – Classic setting aboard DS9, I’m with you.
The War of the Prophets – Holy shit, that’s dark.
Inferno – Fun time travel shenanigans. Wraps up too neatly after traumatic events but these characters do have to get back to season 6 of the show.
June 2022: This cover for a collection of short stories makes me deeply uncomfortable. Beyond that, I really have to look at the publication year of 2004 to try and understand why they thought this would be a good idea. It may be intriguing to see what various characters were doing during the Dominion War arc of Deep Space Nine, but this book’s jingoism is rough.
August 2022: The Nexus is a fascinating artifact of 90s Star Trek, written by actors of a TV show and performed as their characters from that show, but not official in any way. But I liked it, a kind of resolution to unresolved moments from the TV show.
August 2022: A neat little adventure, although it’s part of a series and many characters lack development that I’m sure is doled out over the course of several of these short novels. Focusing on a crew of mostly engineers gives this that lower decks vibe, a definite plus.
me when we start eating billionaires and i have to kill gomez addams
Gomez and Morticia, telling us where they store the spare guillotines so we can go after Jeff Bezos after we finish with them.
Look, I know we don’t want to admit that our heroes can be flawed, but this isn’t just people baselessly picking a rich person and saying they’re a billionaire.
Don’t hold back. Gomez will respect the revolutionary fire burning in your heart!
The Addams would bring the guillotines for the other billionaires, give away literally all their money and then still ASK for executions because it’s been so long since they had a good beheading in the family
honestly, you’d break his heart if you said you WEREN’T planning on sticking his head in a guillotine. morticia, too. they’d be upset at the special treatment, too, but mostly they really want to be executed gruesomely as they stare lovingly into each other’s eyes as their heads are separated from their bodies, and we need to respect that.
These policies can help to improve the mental health of students
If the point is for the children to learn, then why wouldn’t you give them as many chances as it takes? What is the benefit of telling a child “you failed and that’s the end of it”?
I’m 25, and in my trade school, our tests aren’t judgement, they’re testing to see what we’ve retained, and identify what we’re missing.
If I weld a joint, and the CWI comes up behind me with a radiographic test for it and finds that I just laid hot metal on cold metal or it looks like a sponge inside, you know what’s gonna happen? You think they’re gonna give me a low score and tell me to move on? Fuck no. They’re gonna hand me a grinder and tell me to take it out and put it in right.
When there’s actual work to be done, we don’t leave it at the first attempt if that attempt was shit. We don’t leave a trail of “what’s done is done.” If it takes you four attempts, that’s what it takes, and next time it’ll take fewer because you learned how to do it right after the third time.
School, as it’s set up, with unforgiving deadlines and single attempt high stakes tests are building a shitty work ethic. It says “I tried once, and that’s all you’re getting.” It sets you up to leave a trail of cut losses and barely or unfinished projects as you scramble to get something, anything, turned in before the deadline.
ALT
