The wire coral crab (Xenocarcinus tuberculatus), also known as the xeno crab, is a species of crustacean endemic to the
Indo-West Pacific.
Xeno crabs grip tenaciously to whip corals with their long legs. A master of mimicking its host, the coloration of its body and appendages matches that of the coral. It can also induce the host’s polyps to “grow” from its carapace, thereby adding to its camouflage.
if you see someone active on social media or something, and you message them, and they don’t reply, they don’t have to. just because they are awake and alive does not mean they have to engage with you whenever you want them to. you are not entitled to someone else’s time.
in the past, an abuser would see me post online and then hound me on aim until i answered. i felt like i had to hide. they also lived in my building and would pound on my door if they saw me online and i wasn’t responding to them. i had to completely ditch a screenname, lie about having skype, and turn off my phone to hide. if i saw they were online i couldn’t post on facebook or interact with anyone without them demanding to interact with me. the only legitimate excuse not to talk to them was being asleep. in their eyes, if i were really their friend, i would always want to engage no matter what, even if i had a migraine or work to do or wasn’t feeling very social. it didn’t matter.
please do not do this. if someone doesn’t write you back, don’t guilt them about where they are or what they’re doing. if you see someone posting on tumblr or facebook and they aren’t signed into aim or google or skype or whatever, that’s their business. if they are signed on but don’t write you back, it’s okay. sometimes people can’t talk to everyone all the time every time. some people can only talk to one person at a time without getting overloaded. some people are signed on in case someone needs to contact them with something important and not to be social. they’re not always hiding from you, and you shouldn’t make them feel like they HAVE to hide from you.
this is probably jumbled and i’m probably missing a lot here, but pressuring people to always be available to you every hour of the day and always answer the phone or text or chat or pm or whatever…if you require that of someone, you might need to take a step back.
Reminder: There are also actual reasons that some of us may have serious trouble responding to messages at all. And it’s unlikely to be about you unless you are acting like that.
I really don’t want to come across as some kind of antisocial asshole, but notifications popping up still freak me out every time. It goes way beyond “I don’t like IMs”. Seeing that it’s from someone I would want to talk to if I weren’t having a PTSD reaction doesn’t actually make it easier to respond, unfortunately.
No worries for anyone who hasn’t been aware of the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable talking about it. And I feel bad about just leaving people hanging.
Y’all know I research the far-right, and whenever you start lurking around their trenches for very long you realize they have the idea that Europe is on the brink of war right now- that there’s violent racial tensions boiling just below the surface, that there are constant migrant attacks and that all it’s going to take is one major incident to spark a race war. That can be disproved from afar, of course, but actually having travelled (Western) Europe this past month, I’ve gotten the chance to see first hand that that’s just a total fabrication. Not to say that there aren’t racialized attacks in Europe, especially against immigrants and refugees, but it isn’t really reflected in the public atmosphere much at all. Hijabi women are just riding the metro to take their kids to school today, Muslim men are running a halal butchery, and black men are just out for a night with their friends. The integration seems pretty seamless on a surface level. Contra the culture clash narrative, this trip has pretty dramatically bolstered my belief in multiculturalism
I had the same experience! In particular, Berlin is safe at night, it was common to see hijab-wearing women out and about with non-hijab wearing friends and non-hijab wearing kids and teens, everyone was gearing up for Pride which they correctly anticipated would be supported and peaceful and prone to problems like ‘corporate cluelessness’ and ‘liberal infighting’ rather than ‘violent backlash’, there were people off all races and backgrounds working all kinds of jobs.
It’s funny because if you’d asked me ‘do you believe the alt-right narrative about western Europe I’d have said ‘of course not’ but I think on some level I was expecting it to be rooted in something – some social and commercial segregation of new immigrants, maybe, or hostility, or homelessness. Nope.
(The point is not that there is no discrimination or hardship or isolation or terror happening in Europe, obviously. The point is that there is a broad and peaceful public sphere where it’s not on the radar and where integrated people are living happy, integrated lives. I imagine white supremacists are inclined to downplay this because the call to expel them is much crueler when understood to mean ripping people out of happy lives in a welcoming multicultural country.)
Just reminded of this random (American) comment troll I dealt with a few years back on G+, who felt a need to chime in with some nonsequitur about how I need to go to Muslim-controlled Europe and see what life is like there.
Dude, I’ve been living right on the edge of one of those supposed European “No-Go Zones” for over a decade. Haven’t had any particularly unpleasant interactions with Scary Foreigners just going about their business. I really cannot say the same about xenophobes like him 😐
(I’m also way more concerned about living in a borough where UKIP was doing so well, beyond the personal level. But I don’t need to get started on that right now.)
This topic came up a while back, with some interesting discussion then–so, of course I can’t find a link just now. But, I really do find it disturbing how many of the far-right want to believe that the situation in Europe is somehow that terrible. Even if they’ve been encouraged to distrust established media reporting, it’s not exactly hard to check up on if they were not gaining more benefit from the bizarre fictional version(s).
You certainly do get enough homegrown bigots who are convinced they’re oppressed and under some kind of direct threat, just from seeing those Scary Foreigners going about their business while Offensively Foreign. Besides that being where their North American counterparts are getting first-hand accounts, I have to suspect that if they did climb on a plane? They might be likely to interpret what they’re seeing in similar ways, because that is what they want to see. That’s one of the most frustrating parts to me. How do you even counter that effectively? No clue.
While much of the West started paying serious attention to the refugee crisis in 2015, it’s been an ongoing issue for decades, with Europe becoming the place where people from across the Middle East and Northern Africa flee in the homes of finding sanctuary. The sheer volume of refugees has increased radically in the last year thanks to troubling and escalating political trends, but let’s not…
The issue here, though, isn’t that refugees are creating political pressure and pushing Europe to the right as people react to those who are seeking shelter. The problem is that right wing politicians who have been patiently lining up the dominos for decades are seeing an opening through xenophobia, especially Islamophobia, and they’re taking advantage of it to push their agendas…
Refugees never had a chance in Europe, and now, they’re becoming the sacrificial lambs of a right that isn’t just hoping to exclude refugees. It’s also hoping to roll back social policies ranging from open borders to healthcare to measures to improve diverse representations in government. And the same phenomenon is playing out in the United States, where many extremists are taking lessons from Europe’s playbook to slowly but steadily build a case against refugees, and to use it to take down other rights as well. We are living in an era where it is considered not just acceptable but necessary to discriminate against those most in need.
Today, it’s refugees being used as a fig leaf for promoting and successfully pushing through horrific social policies. And we should be rising in defense of refugees, because dehumanising people is wrong. But tomorrow, it’s going to be other vulnerable social groups as well — the same ones the right has been attacking all along, now made even easier to attack by the fact that attacks on refugees will strip social protections away.
The latest joint awesomeness: getting up feeling like somebody took a hammer to the outside knob on one ankle!
(Woken up by it sometimes, but I haven’t been sleeping well with pain in general. This particular thing has only been a problem for less than a week, though. I got maybe 5 hours before it woke me up today and I couldn’t get back to sleep.)
I also didn’t register doing anything in particular to it–which may not mean much, as klutzy as I am. No visible bruising or swelling to help explain it, though. I have whacked it against things a couple of times since it started acting up, but not that hard. And I mostly even noticed doing that because the knob was already sore, and jfc why can’t I be more careful.
I don’t think it’s a neuropathy thing, since it really doesn’t feel like any nerve pain I’ve run into. And the regular pain meds do calm it down some, unlike any other nerve pain IME. I’ve been failing at trying to stay off the ankle more, but it does calm down some eventually during the day. Definitely feels like a variation on the good old “slept on it wrong” phenomenon. Never had this specific issue before, though.
Best guess after looking into it a little? May well be tendinitis aggravated by something I’m doing while I’m asleep. As much as I used to get any kind of bendy joint problem blamed on tendinitis if they couldn’t immediately figure out what was going on. So, I hesitate to assume anything is coming from tendinitis. *wry smile*
Really doesn’t feel like any normal-for-me subluxation, and that’s the main explanation I can find for sharp unexplained pain right over the knob. Yay wonky soft tissue, in general 😒
So, I’m tempted to try bracing it before bed, and hope that might keep the ankle from doing stupid shit. Rather than making things worse, which is always a possibility too with Ridiculous Joint Tricks.
With all the heat Anita Sarkeesian gets for her Tropes series, you’d think it was a new topic, but Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert had a discussion on a similar theme when they were talking about the influx of slasher movies on their show in 1980.
i love this except for the “now i make people listen” conclusion, as if that’s all it takes. sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, they don’t listen.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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