I Need Everyone To Read My All Time Favorite Letterboxd Review

Listen, I know we're all exhausted, but we gotta get better about adding image descriptions to disability related stuff. Everyone should be IDing everything anyways, but there's a particularly cruel irony in disability related stuff not being accessible to folks with low/no vision.

when it comes to disco elysium, one of my favourite things within the game is the usage of lungs as a motif of love and the representation of this through dolores dei. it’s an incredible way of showing it, as when you love someone or something it almost seems to sustain you, becomes the air that you breathe.

however, another thing i noticed is that an overwhelming majority of the characters smoke. smoking is famously damaging to your health, more specifically to your lungs - almost like smoking is a metaphor for the way these characters show their relationships with others.

some prime examples are:

• harry du bois, who smoked heavily before losing his memory (and after, depending on player choice), a clear instance because of dora and her effect on his life and relationships for years after she left

• the smoker on the balcony, who is never seen without a cigarette, and is in an unloving sexual relationship with someone who can never understand him or truly know him at all

• klaasje amandou, who is also never seen without a cigarette, believes that she is at fault for all of her relationships collapsing and has a skewed view on what it means to love

however, my favourite example is, of course, kim kitsuragi. yes, he smokes as he enjoys the control he has over his addiction and the “cool factor” it gives him is satisfying, but i think there’s a more specific reason there - kim is so repressed that he consistently walls himself off from relationships.

kim himself says that he smokes one a day as he goes over his notes. to me, this says that he is causing minor, daily damage to his interpersonal relationships that builds up more and more over time. the fact that he does it specifically when going over notes says a lot to me too - that his work is what he’s using to push others away.

he does break this one a day rule, however - in the ending where the player chooses not to recruit kim. harry leaves kim behind. they shake hands, and as soon as harry turns away, kim lights a cigarette, a visual representation of the damage caused by another partnership cut short.

devotion

you can win at anime girl gachas by uninstalling them and just reblogging art of them having sex for the rest of time

imagine if doorways grew back like scabbed over with fresh drywall and you had to keep carving them back out with a jabsaw to keep the doorway clear etc

Electrochemistry - Honourably done. You have given up some of your own blood -- for theirs.

My current favorite album is ‘God, Forgive These Bastards: Songs From The Forgotten Life Of Henry Turner’ by the Taxpayers. It fucks in every single way I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe it

it bothers me that you often don't really hear about people having a "favorite album" the way they might have a favorite movie or favorite video game

I have a stupid rare blood disorder and I relate to this cat on a DEEPLY LITERAL level.

For background, I have Hereditary Hemochromatosis; which isn’t particularly rare. A lot of older adults discover they have it when it starts damaging their liver.

Basically, over simplified, you eat things, and absorb iron into your body. Yummy! Good for you! However, my body cannot get RID of iron, and absorbs more iron from the things I consume. Which means I have Too Much Iron. It’s dumb and painful (in a lot of weird ways???).

My liver damage started when I was 14. That is about the most abnormal thing that I could’ve possibly happened to me. There is one singular doctor in my entire state that’s had another juvenile HH patient, and he’d only ever met one (besides me). That’s STUPID. I genuinely cannot convey to you how fucked up and strange that is. I physically should not have been alive along enough to accumulate enough iron to make my organs upset. There’s definitely factors that made it worse, but to this day no one knows how or why I got enough iron that it was having profoundly negative effects.

I’ve been weird and fucked up my entire life and when I was 10~ish a doctor prescribed me iron supplements to see if I’d be, for simplicities sake, less fucked up. She did this without checking my iron levels, or doing any lab work. Anemia is common, some of my symptoms can look similar— Im also autistic and fucking love chewing on ice. That’s a stereotypical sign of anemia— so she just gave me iron and shooed me away. Unsurprisingly, I got worse relatively quickly (again, remember that most people don’t have issues with HH until they’re over 50). I stopped taking the iron supplements pretty fast, but that 4 years was the sharpest and most miserable decline of my life.

I picked up a LOT of weird, shitty, presumably unhealthy habits around then. At that point I still wasn’t diagnosed, and no one knew why I was so goddamn sick; but relevant to this post, I got a CRAZY caffeine addiction. A truly shocking level of caffeine intake. I mean, the amount and potency of what I was drinking meant that most doctors from that point on brushed off my medical issues as being a Freak with too much caffeine and told me to drink water and cut that out. Following medical advice had always made me feel Worse.

You will Never Guess what inhibits iron absorption.

Caffeine. Or, more specifically polyphenols, but the distinction doesn’t actually matter in this.

ALSO, related: You know how we all make fun of 17th century doctors for their obsessions with fluids and bloodletting.

Do you want to know the treatment for iron overload? They fucking took my blood. They just drained that shit and I FELT BETTER. The one treatment that’s pretty notoriously dunked on and made fun of for its lack of benefits. They just took my blood Out of my body, once a week, until I ran out of iron and just had normal blood. Therapeutic phlebotomies. That’s STUPID. It’s a stupid way for my body to work and it PISSES ME OFF!!!

Also final unrelated note, the doctor that discovered my iron overload was my PSYCHIATRIST— Hemochromatosis can cause/exacerbate symptoms similar to bipolar disorder, which I was in treatment for— and she was the ONLY DAMN PERSON to do her due diligence with ordering a full panel of labs, and discovering my iron was DANGEROUSLY HIGH. I owe her my fucking life. Not once did she do her job as my actual psychiatrist and spent 99% of our visits navigating the hospital system and finding specialists for me.

Sometimes I think a lot about my mom's cat

My mom's cat is a common domestic shorthair we found on the side of the road as a kitten

Regular cat, not a maine coon or one of those massive breeds. His mom was smaller than a loaf of bread

But in a sort of a Clifford The Big Red Dog situation, he grew super fast, and really really big, and took a super long time to stop growing

Worried that she was overfeeding him, she eased back his portions, but he stayed a massive round baby

When he started having kidney problems, she took him to the vet.

The vet took a look at him and said, "holy fuck, what are you feeding him", checked the nutritional listings on his chow, and told her "Yeah, maybe he's reacting badly to the amount of grain in this, try a meatier diet"

So my mom wound up special-ordering this specific high-protein prescription cat food made of like. Kangaroo meat or some shit that cost like sixty bucks a bag

And, as typical act two in an episode of House, he somehow got worse on the fancy specialized stuff that was supposed to be Primo Athlete Olympic Feline Blend

Like. WAY worse. His guts were inflamed and his kidneys were shutting down and he was all sore and HE WAS STILL HUGE, just miserable and sad

So shetook him back to the vet, where they had to help him pee (he was apparently close to bursting and had some kind of blockage too) and went "Yeah no this is NOT normal and we don't know what's going on, we're gonna do some tests but in the meantime you should go back to what he was eating before, at least that wasn't actively killing him" so she did

And he still wasn't great, but he also improved

And so they take his blood and do an ultrasound and a couple g's later she gets a call back like "this is gonna sound crazy, but we want you to put him on a low-meat diet. Just the least amount of protein and iron and shit. We need you to find the grainiest, filler-iest dollar tree kibble available and give him some of that bad bad shit"

And my mother is a woman of science. So she did

And he GOT BETTER

His energy picked back up, inflammation went down, he started drinking normally again, got back to pissing like a fuckin champion

And so it turns out that out of all the random ass freeway bonus cats we possibly could have scooped out of a ditch, WE got the one-in-a-million freak of nature with a SPECIFIC genetic defect that means a paleo protein free range diet is essentially poison and he THRIVES on cheap ass garbage

Like. He medically NEEDS junk food

I dont really understand how that works, but i cant argue with results.

If we had four of him, they'd outweigh my mom. And he's FINE

Also blind, but that's unrelated

Im not using him as a symbol or a metaphor or anything. I just keep catching myself thinking about my mom's Big Fucking Cat