I saw “the main character performs on a strip pole while drunk” and didn’t need to see the rest of the post to know exactly which show they were talking about.
“you’ll never amount to- well, i’m doing alright, i guess.”
ever heard the phrase “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”? that applies not to just to others but to yourself as well. it’s better to think neutrally or not at all than negatively. and once you’ve got into the habit of that, it’s much easier to move to uplifting yourself!
this is EXTREMELY hard to do when you hate yourself.
Cause it’s like, there’s these two separate people in my head and one of then hates the other SOMUCH that given the chance, it would kill the other, literally murder it
but it can’t
so it just HAS to say as many bad things as it can cause it’s the only outlet
I see where you’re coming from, but it is extremely hard.
Of course it’s hard.
If it was easy we wouldn’t need to do it.
If it was easy we wouldn’t be giving people tips on how to do it.
If it was easy we wouldn’t be struggling with the monsters in our minds, day in and day out.
Why wouldn’t it be hard?
That’s WHY we have to try. That’s WHY we have to keep fighting. That’s WHY you keep pushing and working with it. Because if you do, it gets a little easier. If you do, you path the way for your future self, if you do, you start to see why we have to do it.
Of course it’s hard.
Do you know how long I’ve hated myself? Do you know how hard it was to start doing this? Do you know how hard it was to put down the knife and the pills and pick up the phone, pick up my soul, three separate times in six years? Do you know how many more times I had to lock myself away to try and fight off the demons and the monsters?
Of course it’s fucking hard. But that’s not a reason to give up. That’s the reason to keep fighting.
If it wasn’t hard, we wouldn’t be ill.
If it wasn’t hard, we wouldn’t be tired.
If it wasn’t hard, we’d all do it.
But hard isn’t an excuse. It isn’t a reason.
It’s why we have to try.
I hated myself for twenty fucking years. I am finally starting to like myself. I’m finally starting to be able to pick up myself and go “no, this isn’t a big deal, I can keep going.”
So of course I see where you’re coming from – you’re coming from where I was, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five, six, seven, eight years ago.
And that’s why I reblogged this. That’s why I believe in this. Because honestly? No matter how much that little voice says “you’re worthless”, you can keep saying “i’m all right, i guess.” and eventually, that starts to work. And it can take months, it can take years, but fucking hell it works. Because you find these teeny tiny reasons to live, to find worth, to enjoy yourself.
You find reasons to breathe and reasons to get the rest of the help you need.
Of course it’s hard.
If it was easy, it wouldn’t be calling “battling mental illness”, after all.
This is Canfeza, one of your many consorts/wives in a mobile game called Game of Sultans. I think she’s the worst of the lot just because of her dress + pose (there are some other consorts that have questionable outfits but at least their bodies don’t look off-kilter).
“…
and then rotate to remove my torso and find the treasure hidden within!”
Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.
Another AWESOME book about WWII Deception Units is Secret Soldiers by Philip Gerard.
DarkestElemental616 