F/A

Has anyone ever actually finished a stick of lip balm or do they just despawn after a certain amount of time

Say what you will about the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire, 'a feudal army marching through the countryside doesn't become any less horrific, abuse-filled and starvation-causing for the local peasantry just because they're the Good Guys' is really a point that like 90% of epic fantasy that's trying have any sort of serious/coherent morality could stand to learn.

Been (slowly) reading the Wolf series and recently re-read the Witcher series, both of which shined a light on that exact topic. Both had commanders go "we want the local peasantry to like us and not be mad we're marching through their farms so no raping or pillaging and try to stay on the roads" and their soldiers went "okay got it boss" and then proceeded to completely terrorize the local peasantry. Often to their downfall because it makes it really easy to get the local peasantry to say "hey actually fuck these guys even if they're technically on our side" when The Good Guys are acting like your typical army doing Army Things.

As much as I do love stories like LOTR where The Good Guys Would Never and anyone that does is Actually Secretly A Bad Guy, the former is definitely more realistic.

(Image ID: tags from user doberbutts that read: the difference is Tolkien was a soldier and sapkoswi watched his country put itself back together after a fascist steamrolled it. Tolkien says war is horrible but the good and moral and just soldiers would never do such a thing. Sapkowski says war is horrible and there is no such thing as a good and moral and just soldier. End image ID.)

Lmk if you want me to delete your tags, but I thought they were too good to pass by.

I also think this lines up with something I saw another user post recently along the lines of how lotr is a response to the cultural paradigm after the Great War, but asoiaf is a response to the paradigm of the Vietnam War, hence the tone difference. Mesh that with the Tolkien’s identity as a soldier, vs the (for good reason) anti war movement of grrm’s generation, and yup. (Someone left a similar comment in the notes too)

Oh no you can keep those up I'm flattered.

Witcher/Sapkowski to add to that is WWII, he was born in 1948 and so would have grown up watching a fractured country try to rebuild... well, damn near everything. In his books it's very clear that really it doesn't matter what army it is, militaries are not good things and war is hellish and horrific no matter whose "side" you're on or what morals you claim to espouse.

LOTR/Tolkien is all the Great War, where war is shocking and terrible and filled with dread and dispair and the lives lost are too many to count and each of them tragic and avoidable. But, also, the Good Guys Would Never, only Bad Guys do things like that. And maybe Tolkien's specific troupe was made up of Good Guys Who Would Never. Who knows.

ASOIAF/GRRM and the Vietnam War and being an objector while living in a country in a war that he hates the very principal of... yeah, of course, that's why all the people making military decisions are written to be Like That, and all the soldiers are also written Like That. War is a terrible and grotesque thing. It makes people into monsters. It encourages the very worst in a human being. If you think your Good Guy Army isn't performing war crimes casually as they march where they need to go, you're an idiot and you practically deserve to be war crimed.

All three are anti-war statements made in reaction to the aftermath of various wars. Unfortunately pop media focuses on the cool battle scenes and not on the "war is bad and should be avoided as much as possible" message surrounding them.

Tolkien's war also offered a lot fewer opportunities to despoil parts of the countryside that weren't the exact bit you were trapped in as it became a slice of hell. Like. In comparison.

But also the lotr setup is genuinely better for Good Guys Would Never (in the opposite direction from wwi lol) than the scenarios grrm and sapkowski are designing, because the good guy armies are literally at home for most of the story--the closest to heroic 'away' armies we really see are the Rohirrim a-horse making double time cross-country to the place next door, the small band of Rangers going south if you want to call that an army, and the various technically-volunteer citizen levies of Gondor coming to relieve Minas Tirith, some of them upriver by pirate ship at the last minute.

And then the feint to the gates of Mordor but there's nothing left to despoil along that route by then, the orcs just came through. A lot of the route isn't even inhabited normally.

This is a short-term deployment over territory you are actively defending, as warrior-aristocrats and citizen-soldiers of the place being defended, and everyone spends all these mobilizations in a hurry to get someplace to defend it. That's not a recipe for the kind of pillaging you see in with a professional army occupying territory, or moving over hostile territory needing to supplement your supply lines.

You don't have the motive and you don't have the time, and you don't have the degree of alienation from your surroundings that makes pillage endemic in early-modern armies of the kind the Witcher is explicitly depicting and asoiaf trends toward.

Sure he's still idealizing a good bit, but not as far as the contrast suggests because it's a different psychological and economic situation.

Whether the warrior-aristocracy and guards of Gondor and so forth tend to abuse their power over the public on an everyday basis is another realm of issue and tone, but it's mostly separate from the cost of waging war.

Additionally-

In LOTR, the thing you are alienated from is your enemy. And that’s what I think Tolkien got out of the Great War; a war of powerful machines and people trying to kill you who you never see. You never talk; you never make strange eye contact when they die, or step on them, or _anything_. And they chose this; they chose these weapons, and these terms. LOTR is borderline lovecraftian, in that the bad guys are incomprehensible and even more strangely, appear to have made allies of people you might have otherwise found comprehensible (the southrons, etc).

Fun fact! The Great War was the first war in europe where, in order to actually move forward in battles, you could not stand next to your fellows and walk, or run, in formation, to the other guys. You didn’t line up and shoot. Not that we really understood that at first. The war started with machine guns killing tens of thousands of scared men who just wanted to keep their Sam, next to them, from dying.

So the escapism in LOTR says “let’s imagine that way- the old way, where the curtain wall isn’t just pounded to rubble by artillery miles away, where a dwarf and an elf standing side by side didn’t just make dwarf-elf-mud-stew but actually matters. It would be better, if it were like that. It would be a nice escape.”

and also,

“But the hero doesn’t win the war by being brave. The hero wins by being good at hiding and wanting to go home very badly.”

Which is, you know. The only kind of person who actually came home from the Great War. A hobbits instincts are to avoid being seen, and stay in cover. Thousands of Aragons and Boromirs and Eowyns died bravely, and died quickly. Only the hobbits ever came home.

Everything noted above re Tolkien is true, and also! And I realize this is a thing only nerds of the Deep Tolkien Lore will know -

Gondor and especially Aragorn are descended from the Numenoreans, aka the absolute fucking definition of Might Makes Right: they were an imperial, colonial entity who eventually bought fully into what Sauron was selling, and tried to wage war on Valinor and the Valar because they wanted immortality instead of just really really long lifespans compared to the rest of the Edain. Aragorn comes from the line that didn't do that, that didn't think this was a Great Idea, but that does not in any way mean that his ancestors were exempt from the effects of a culture that did prize imperial ambitions. Especially since, you know, they were in fact part of the ruling class of Numenor.

They are explicitly an example of what happens when a culture founded on noble ideals falls to their absolute worst motives and pretends they're doing it for your own good. The Valar sank Numenor into the ocean.

And! Aragorn was fostered by the brother of the first king of Numenor! You can bet your ASS that Elrond taught him all about how noble ideals and Believing You're A Good Guy isn't nearly enough to be a good ruler, not just through history lessons but through how he ruled Imladris. So like: take that kind of guy and put him in charge of an army and watch him work super hard to keep morale up without letting them pillage and rape. Is it a fantasy? Yep. But it's one that Tolkien laid the groundwork for very carefully.

ETA: I'm adding this up at the top: I just realized how cranky I am for unrelated reasons, so while I'm not gonna delete this, I am owning my upfront exasperation. I will also note that in this one I'm also actually refraining from going into all the ways that GRRM's portrayal (I don't know the second one so cannot comment much) has so many structural problems that boil down to "okay sure civil wars are bad, brutal and horrifying but also not EXACTLY like that and also your worldbuilding is TERRIBLE and BROKEN and you don't understand ANYTHING" that do in fact affect an attempt to compare his war portrayals to anyone else's for "realistic" effect, because this post is already too long.

Also blame @lireavue as she EXPLICITLY point this post out to me. XP

:facehands: Y'all.

These are not small or fussy details, including the last one. So let's start with that one.

Armies are comprised of people. You know. Human beings. People with individual stories and backstories, and everything else, just like you.

One of the biggest factors of soldier misbehaviour in these situations is whether they are at home, or somewhere else. Universally, in The Lord of the Rings, combat for "the Good Guys" happens in two (2) contexts:

OR,

Subsequent to this, they march again over the homes of a good half of them, which are again empty of people because this area has been evacuated, into enemy territory, where there are no homes or civilians.

Like literally, guys: there isn't, actually, a point where a huge feudal army marches through inhabited fucking countryside in this story except for when they're the army of the dead who are absolutely at Aragorn's command. The only times armies fuckin' march here is either a) through their own personal territory, or b) through EMPTY land.

It's actually heavily implied that historically, when these kinds of limited conditions did not apply (cough cough Numenor, cough cough Sea Kings Gondor, cough cough Arnor's civil war) that this was not, in fact, necessarily the case; that in those cases wars did get QUITE ugly. These are also alluded to in the traditional ways of mediaeval chronicles, which is to say briefly and glancingly.

I also realize that it's really popular to think of the historical elite as Horrific Monsters Who Care Nothing For Human Life and it's not even wrong all the time, but the reality is that especially at the levels described in, say, Rohan, there is a hard limit to how much of a shit you can be to your underlings that is predicated on a) the need for labour in agriculture and pastoral work (you literally can't be so shitty to your peasants that they leave you, because you DON'T have a big labour surplus), and b) the fact that you live there.

As agricultural surplus got bigger, and so did cities and society and so on, bluntly the elite in feudal societies got more and more alienated from the people who actually lived on the land they controlled. That's not how Rohan is set up; and Gondor's model is actually completely different and only recently/peripherally "feudal" - the existence of feudal lords controlling a significant chunk of the army in Gondor is a sign of its decline, not its natural state, and Denethor rules very much as a city-state, which is a very different setup.

("Feudal" actually means things, my guys. It refers to a specific relationship of vassal to liege that is predicated on land grants for military service and is not hugely easy to integrate with cities.)

So. That's ONE of the biggest predictors of soldierly misconduct: whether they've got someone they don't view as Properly a Person to commit misconduct on.

The second one is discipline, and that's going to heavily be a factor of morale and the things that support morale: food, water, rest, lack of deeply punishing casualties, a charismatic leader to believe in and, critically, competent people in the roles we assign the titles of "junior officer" and "NCOs" (which may be whatever the hell you want to call them - at SOME point, people who fulfill these roles will show up).

Believe it or not, there have in fact been times when local support for large and even feudal armies was quite high in a warfare context! These times share very consistent features: they were almost always local armies defending against external incursion; they were almost always well-supported and themselves felt a sense of investment and protection for the area and people they were deployed in; and finally, they appear to have been well-run by effective commanders and subcommanders in whom the soldiers had a lot of faith.

(Do incidents of specific, individual misconduct still happen? Sure, the same as crimes get committed by your neighbour. When you have people around each other in large groups, you eventually get Crimes, at least if any given person thinks they can get away with it. But in terms of systemic widespread misconduct as a facet of people existing in the space, not so much.)

So what are the things that fuck this up?

Mercenaries are there to get paid. Some can be quite professional, but most people who want to get paid for killing other people Just Because are gonna be really close to that edge of the human psyche that finds ways to justify anything it wants. That means they're going to have to have immediately compelling reasons not to mistreat the local population who are, after all, strangers and to whom they have no attachment.

(Want to have some fun, there's some interesting stuff we're piecing together through a lot of archeology and study about the transition of some of the larger vikingr armies that then deliberately made the transition to local landowners. Some of them were horrifying; some of them appear to have picked it up well and transitioned pretty easily; but it's still a TRANSITION, because now instead of stealing what they want and leaving, they have an opportunity for significant wealth and prestige . . . . but it requires. staying here. and having the farmers not try to run away, or poison their food. It requires making social alliances and integrating, because they don't have ENOUGH people to just come in, colonize, and wipe out the natives.)

A professional army isn't doomed to be an abusive mess, but if you don't make sure that the soldiers still feel a part of the local landscape, society and population, don't feel integrated and ownership of it, you're taking a much bigger risk.

There are of course varying degrees of conscription, and not ALL of them produce intense and hateful alienation towards anyone except the people that directly protect you/etc, but an awful lot of them do, especially if something like a civil war has been going on a long time.

That kind of conscript is already hurting and traumatized and scared out of their mind; they don't want to be here, and they don't want to do this, and they are highly likely to decide Fuck This I'm Out For Myself and just go with whatever follows that creed.

However, all of these still need, you know, the presence of a civilian population for the soldiers to do anything to a civilian population.

Which is lacking from anywhere armies went in the armies part of LotR.

Now! You know what kind of WAR highly predisposes soldierly misconduct on all sides*? That's right! Civil war!

Civil war here is slightly broad as well: I absolutely am counting, for instance, the 100 Years War in France as that, because that war is honestly a war between formerly-French nobility and French nobility for continental territory. That war forged concepts of Frenchness and Englishness that were very opposed to one another on a large scale, over the ensuing centuries, but that's what we call a retcon.

(*take it as read that "invasion" encourages misconduct on the invading side.)

Civil war is particularly ugly because of the sense of betrayal. And the longer it goes on, the more ugly and complex and strung out loyalties can get, and the more vengeful retaliation for perceived betrayals can get.

Another thing civil war tends to do is fuck up the economics of the country, by which I mean the ability for everyone to get their basic needs met. That's when you get a hard line competition between civilians and soldiers for food and water and so on, which is another thing likely to lead to soldierly misconduct.

These conditions apply heavily to what GRRM is trying to invoke in ASoIaF. All of these wars are civil wars, and they're civil wars happening less than a full lifetime since the last civil war, and they're happening when the country can't afford a civil war and when, in theory, the nobility do have a choice about the matter.

He also specifically chose a "time period" (that is, model of aristocracy etc) to copy, very imperfectly, when a huge number of OTHER social factors (including a change in agriculture, in real history) had increasingly led to the alienation of the wealthy from the land they actually owned, even at an immediate level - a period where it was deeply possible you'd never even SEEN your overlord in your life, as opposed to him living in that castle up the hill there. This alienation works both ways: it makes the powerful more willing to spend lives, and it makes the powerless less willing to give any real loyalty, which leads to the powerless acting in their own interests more, which leads to the powerful trusting them less, which leads to the powerful being more coercive . . . .and we get readily down to soldierly misconduct because nobody's bothering to stop it.

By the time there's a clear external enemy the landscape is completely different and also the writers are off the edge of the map for the show.

Finally: y'all have some oddly rose-coloured glasses about WWI. It was really, really not just a war of trenches and soldiers.

The German occupation of Northern France and that general area was brutal and horrific, and there is zero reason to expect that this would have been restricted to that area; it was in fact a war of invasion between Germany and France, and while a certain thread of history likes to act like everyone bumbled into the war and All Are Guilty, nah, actually, Germany was the one that invaded, and invaded with the intent to occupy.

They also repeatedly committed mass civilian killings during the initial invasion. There was a turn against the overuse of this as propaganda, which took what was already bad enough and turned it into cartoonish absurdity (babies on bayonets, that kind of thing) but they still killed Belgian and French civilians in mass executions for essentially the temerity of resisting the invasion. And the Eastern Front was such a horror show of mutual atrocities that you can't even pin it down to one side or the other, because it actually moved across territories, back and forth, so that everyone was at some point invading someone else, at least briefly.

For Tolkien this was not history; this was current affairs, as was his active resistance of the pro-patria-mori ethos of the time. When he did finally get sent to the front he didn't want to be there.

The subtext of Lord of the Rings isn't that war is sometimes good - it is that sometimes your choice is war or annihilation. The closest you get to "sometimes war is moral and good" comes from the Rohirrim and from Boromir - and in both cases it is explicitly represented as a way in which they are morally immature, culturally immature, a way in which Boromir is actually a lesser man than his younger brother, and a way in which the culture of the Rohirrim is more "primitive"* than that of Gondor or potentially even that of the Shire.

(*now you can sure as heck query the hell out of some aspects of that attitude in the text! But it's still what's there.)

But the text also engages in the context and reality which is that cultures that are continually faced with war or danger or threat that requires response of arms? Those cultures will start valuing and valourizing the ability to make war, and perceive that ability as the profoundest part of strength. That stories of great battles and struggles and strife and so on are stirring and uplifting and even while that is the case it does not mean you actually want a war, that anything about this is actually fun or okay. (But it might help you get through the one you have no choice about. Which is still not necessarily the greatest thing but here we are in Arda Marred, the Fallen World, and we do what we can.)

People often skip "The Scouring of the Shire" because it can feel very pasted on yaye. But there is a fundamental core argument that happens in it between Frodo and Meriadoc: Frodo is absolutely, emphatically insistent that he does not want anyone killed. He doesn't want even any of the invading "ruffians" killed and he is absolutely emphatically sure that the worst fucking thing that could ever, ever happen would be a hobbit killing a hobbit, even if that hobbit is aligned to the ruffians. But also he doesn't even want to kill the ruffians. That doing this will stain the Shire, will cross a line that is a kind of horror.

And Meriadoc points out that acting shocked and sad will not in fact get rid of the ruffians. Sure, fine, we'll try to scare them off if possible but the likelihood is that we're going to hit a point where they turn and fight and then our option is going to be kill or let them win.

And the war ends - really ends - with a murder and an execution on his doorstep, things he tried desperately in both cases to stop, and is it a surprise that Frodo can't actually stay there anymore?

Also here let's have a quote:

Frodo had been in the battle, but he had not drawn sword and his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.

That is: Frodo's task in the Battle of Bywater was to prevent his neighbours - hobbits, the peaceloving agrarian hippy children - from committing war crimes on unarmed prisoners.

It's almost like Tolkien knew exactly what happens, even to "good guys", when shit gets bad.

It is true that Tolkien and the later writers are writing about different kinds of war. But that different "kind" is actually literally what caused the war and thus what the wars circumstances were, rather than merely an ethos towards war. GRRM also explicitly chose a civil war context, and he also chose a specific time-period model (as he understood it, which is not well) to imitate - and he chose it not because it was "accurate" but because he wanted to tell a certain kind of Dark Story. Fair play to him; but that doesn't make his portrayal of war across the board accurate, nor does it mean all contexts of war and armies and their interactions are the same.

It is also true, as always seems to be, that people often mistake their memory of what they felt when they read The Lord of the Rings for what is actually on the page.

Me after commiting a minor mistake

barbie official: we’re gonna put all our movies on youtube for free!

youtube, still selling their movies: huh? what’d they say they were going to do?

here’s a link to a playlist since everyone’s a fan of this post

WHAT

it’s real😭😭😭😭😭😭

Here’s a working link as of February 2nd 2022

and a working link

This link is the official channel, where while there is no playlist, it should hopefully be easy for enough to navigate and it works as of April 14th, 2024

@ladye-zelda I know you like the Barbie movies so here you go

FUCK YES. BARBIE FOR EVERYONE

It should be a human right to come and go from your place of residence no matter who actually owns it. Under all circumstances. I hope Columbia is buried in scorn and ruined by scandal. I hope every student can eventually sue.

I also wish every one of these ugly pigs would die but that's less realistic.

This feels like a violation of the 3rd amendment..

#Happy Labor Day to Shrek I guess

A STREAKER CUT THE ACTUAL CONTESTANT OFF AND BLEW THROUGH IT LIKE HE’S SONIC THE FUCKING HEDGEHOG WHAT THE FUCK

power move

aerodynamic

guy who didn’t realize this was his last day in the timeloop

I’m sorry this is a hilarious prank and dude is very impressive but I’m running away with “dude who doesn’t realize he’s in the last day of the time loop” and using it every time someone pulls some wild-ass shit like this.

I love when guinea pigs Explore. yes yes go little guy go. make silly noises and sniff around. hell yeah.

I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.

They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.

So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"

I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.

6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"

Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"

People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.

This is horrifying because ADHD is not just some personality disorder. And even if it were, that shit is also hard to manage

ADHD is categorized as a DEVELOPMENTAL disability. Literally your brain develops abnormally compared to the rest of the population. Your brain is different (divergent) from the rest of the population. And so in order to navigate a world that is NOT made for you, you genuinely need an accommodation that can alter your brain's state to "normal" or "typical" brain state. How do you do that? MEDICINE. we use medicine to alter NeuroDIVERGENT brains to survive in a NeuroTYPICAL world. SSRIs, mood stabilizers, etc. If you come for ADHD medication, it's the start of re -stigmatizing mental health diagnoses that also utilize medication. And likely the return of institutionalizing people.

watch the WHOLE video

okay yes i violated lab safety protocol i get that but did i at least look cute while doing it???

Every single one of my Gen z research assistants.

Abby. For God's sake, CROP TOPS AND 1N HCl DO NOT GO TOGETHER.

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:

BOOOOOST

Seattle has joined them:

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it...

Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen

This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic

Hey so I use a black and white CRT to visualize analog infrared microscopy. Because I use it to record electrical activity from live neurons. This post answered my question about why I get so much electrical noise in my amplification system when the CRT is turned on and why it goes away when I turn it off during the physiology recordings.

‘redditors need to know this’, ‘twitterinas need to know that’… no. you need to know one thing and that is that you are not allowed to complain about werewolf fuckers. this is the werewolf fucking website. grow up and go fuck a werewolf.

What does this gif have to do with werewolves?

if you have to ask you’re not ready

can you explain? i don’t get it

This is like someone just informed the newcomers about the devils sacrament taking place every full moon and the devil itself popped up asking “what sacrament?” with a cheshire grin.

fixed it

life actually gets better when you leave the house consistently btw like im serious

if you don't know where to go, just wander! go to the store and don't buy anything, go to the library just to sit and do whatever you were going to do at home, go to a park and just walk around/sit outside for a bit (weather permitting, of course)

just put some headphones in and walk around the block a couple times if you really have nothing else to do, just getting a bit of air and change of scenery is so good for you

me the first few weeks of forcing myself to go on daily walks (it gets better tho)

i really need tumblr to learn the concept of “if you physically cannot do this then this post is not talking about you” because jesus christ.

@a-spectacular-pigeon you get it.

In the most recent season of queer eye, they specifically talk about this issue in particular. A hero of theirs says he doesn't leave the house much because of the inaccessible entry where he's living. They toured accessible apartment buildings with him and paid for a year's rent so he could have that increase in quality of life.

Leaving your house is good for you. When you can't, due to mobility or health barriers or safety concerns (living in the hood or a warzone, for example) your mental, physical, social, and financial health all suffer. We came from social nomads. We yearn to to be outside.