Until The Perfect Title Comes to Me...

Jonathan is NOT trapped in a time loop Jonathan is trapped with a toddler who keeps asking him to tell about the time mama and dada killed a vampire with his uncles (and aunt).

Thinking about a certain scene in Dungeon Meshi that completely encapsulates the Autistic experience of making friends as an adult and how hard it is to try and navigate it without ending up getting hurt.

Like IDK about y'all, but this is a common problem ALOT of Autistic Adults face when trying to make friends with other people, because unlike children who aren't good at keeping their opinions to themselves, Adults ARE. In society, we're even encouraged to "keep the peace" "be polite" and etc, which commonly leads to awful scenarios as shown above when Laois finds out his buddy has come to resent who Laois is without actually telling him. All too often the friends that we love to hang out with, people that we're so happy to spend time with, don't feel the same way and in many cases, come to blame us for our social cues or lack thereof.

And when/if we do eventually find out how our friend feels, Dungeon Meshi hits us with another painful panel of how that usually ends up playing out.

It's hard for Adults with Autism to make friends, and even harder to maintain them because alot of the ways Neurotypicals tell other Neurotypicals that they don't like a certain behavior is by quietly disengaging. Whether that involves having one sentence answers, going quiet, or having a certain tone in their voice, all those things signal annoyance or disapproval, but for the Neurodivergents, those subtle cues are completely missed.

And yet when we inevitably discover we DID do something, it is natural to ask "well why didn't you tell me?" because in our minds, it should've been the next step in the equation. However for the Neurotypicals, that's NOT something to bring up. Its important to be SUBTLE about the issue at hand and rely on signals to tell the other person. Blame is placed on us for not noticing the "obvious" signs of disapproval rather than the idea of talking it out as such things are uncomfortable and harder to do. Alot of the time what ends up happening is resentment due to the idea that it was "obvious" and the fact one didn't notice indicates a deliberate ignorance rather than a complete unawareness. It ends up calling into question our quality as a person and our sincerity. We get called "fake" or "malicious" or even "stupid" for failing social cues rather than questioning the decision to be indirect and vague.

For a manga about exploring the dungeon, it seems that the artist would rather explore very real and prevalent dynamics in society with the adventuring premise as a backdrop. I felt VERY seen in these panels, and many others, because it happens so suddenly and dare I say it, plainly. There's no dramatic build-up or spectacle made and in essence, it just Happens.

I think that's what makes the scene hit even harder. It seemingly comes out of nowhere for Laois, like how it always comes out of nowhere for alot of people, and it's never a dramatic twist either. It's always mundane and hurtful. A sudden unforeseen bump in the road that ends up calling into question one's entire friendship with someone and consequent other friendships. It asks "what if other friends feel the same. What if the people that I really like actually hate me and I don't know it?" Or at least that's what I came away with after reading the chapter. I've been where Laois was and the only reason I'm not there now is because I lost the naivete I had and doubt everyone else's sincerity.

This part was honestly really painful. I have lost so many friendships where to this day, I have no idea why or what I did. No one ever told me; I was just supposed to know. But I didn't! I still don't! I've just ended up concluding I can't make or keep friends.

And I notice that when I say or type anything, I soften the language, often more than once. I apologize for speaking at all. I reflexively cringe in advance, in hopes that people won't get mad and stop talking to me. Which is probably annoying, too, but...?

alright actually i was dismissing this because i dont really keep up with celebrity beef so most of it goes over my head but after listening kendrick did just release the most scathing diss track in rap history (not an exaggeration, i am speaking entirely non-hyperbolically when i say this).

and, to be clear since kendrick has released several diss tracks in a row over the course of the past few days, i am referring to Meet the Grahams, a song not directed at drake, but is instead Kendrick speaking slowly, softly, and sadly towards Drake's family members over a somber piano about how him being a terrible person has fucked up their lives while also revealing some incredibly direct and personal sexual misconduct allegations in the portion addressed to his mother, Sandra.

this is, like, historically important to rap music and it's kind of astonishing.

update:

i think it's important to recognize Meet the Grahams not as a piece of a dunking campaign, but as a sincerely heartbreaking and terrifyingly stark glimpse into the life of someone who has had predatory, vile behaviors enabled and had enough power to ignore anyone trying to get to him. i don't know that i'm capable of putting it into words, but this one feels a bit too important and sincere to treat as a "drake's funeral" anthem, even in an ironic tone.

that is reserved for the OTHER diss track that he released in the SAME DAY which has a much bouncier and "point and laugh" tone, which will have you going "OOOOOOOOOH MY GOOOOOOOOOD" in the first 90 seconds, regardless of whether or not you know anything about the beef.

that's this one:

okay FINAL thing i'll say on this:

i think it's extraordinarily impressive how sophisticated Kendrick's execution of this PITCH PERFECT social execution has been, and i don't even think it's over. to quote youtuber and rapper Scru Face Jean here, "[Kendrick is] making it too culturally cool to not like Drake right now," and like. i guess all this is to say, i think it's important to emphasize how major this accomplishment is on a, like, societal level.

to put it into perspective, i saw somebody comment "the beef has finally breached containment" in the tags, and i think that an excellent visual metaphor for what Kendrick's done is, very simply, ripples in the water. to emphasize his point, using his long experience in battle rap and his generational mind for putting societal issues into art (they're going to be talking about him for decades after he's dead, he's that kind of important), he crafted a split multimedia diss LP with such precision that it's created an explosion across mainstreams of media.

he reached into the brain of the zeitgeist and rewrote Drake's public image into exactly what he wanted it to be. even if it's all game (im pretty sure it's definitely not, but if it is) it's GOOD FUCKING GAME.

alright drake lets hear your next song bud :)

as much as i want to continue talking about rap beef, i do not think it is my destiny to be a music blogger. but i will say that Drake's a fucking moron for making his primary attack angle "you're only calling me a pedophile because you were molested as a kid" and then used 10 bars to say "i dont think kids are sexy!!!" in different ways.

Guys if I'm posting about a webcomic I'm almost always tagging the title and almost always you can just google "[title] webcomic" and it'll be the first result.... do they not teach kids how to use google in school anymore?

Oh I don't like that at all.

2 things happened in 2015. Google figured out they could create a whole generation of dependent customers by practically giving Chromebooks away to schools, and Apple released the iPad Pro in response to the Microsoft Surface hybrid tablet/laptop line, and began aggressively marketing iPads as a replacement for computers altogether. So at a time when a lot of people my age might have received a first laptop or gotten some bare minimum experience with Windows through school computers, kids are instead given a mobile device designed to be as frictionless as possible even if it denies the user any advanced learning opportunities, and shitty laptops which can literally ONLY browse the web. This combined with the attitude among gen x/boomers that since Millenials more or less figured out technology on their own, any kid could. We now have a wave of college students who have no tech literacy, but have convinced themselves they naturally understand computers because they have frictionless experiences on devices literally designed to hide their own folder structures to remove friction. So they know nothing but are too stubborn to learn.

A lot of these kids/young adults also do not have the tech skepticism basically anyone 25 or older might have, and do not understand the issues or flaws with things like crypto/NFTs, even if they know it's not "cool" to be into, or with ChatGPT. There's a viral post that goes around on here every once in a while that is basically a story of a professor having students generate a report in ChatGPT and then "grade" it, and basically all the students were floored by how often it just made shit up.

this shit didn't just happen. Apple and Google treated the next generation as a whole as a line item, all to undercut a competitor and make people completely dependent on them for new devices and repairs.

A reminder that as with the USA, a conservative genocidal government does not mean a conservative genocidal people. Israel contains people who want to harm Palestinians and people who are against what their government is doing.

A government does not speak for everyone. A government does not always even speak for the majority.

Please remember and internalize this.

imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc

now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.

now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.

it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.

the wendys bags on the floor of my car are sprouting all kinds of beautiful life that flutter aroubd me and sing like birds and monkeys

holy shit

this was so huge. the alien he’s arguing with uses standard pro-life arguments that you still hear today. he literally talks about all life being sacred (even though his plan to deal with overpopulation is to kill people with meningitis). and this aired only 4 years after contraception was legalized in the united states. in context this is actually even more pro-contraception than it appears in these caps. 

compelled yesterday to make a zine about a lifetime of being a contrarian little shit sketched left-handed and inked right (ow)

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

relevant everywhere tbh

Bothersome beast, comforting friend

the phrase “earn a living” is so vile and disgusting and evil

hating furries is just a silencer on the gun that is hating on lgbt+ tbh

NO need to leave this in the tags go off

Okay let me try this one again. The Trolley Problem sets up a scenario that sucks to be in. You either kill one guy, or you kill five guys. Nobody likes these options. We all don't want this be happening. That's kind of the point. It's a moral quandary. It's supposed to feel bad.

Now, according to a recent post floating around on tumblr, choosing either of the two options demonstrates "learned helplessness" and makes you a neolib sheep. The only correct answer, the post states, is to reject the question altogether. (Or to change the parameters of the question to include an option that saves everyone, thus eliminating the moral quandary.)

It sounds nice, doesn't it? Fuck this bad situation, we control our imaginations, so let's imagine a situation that doesn't suck. Hah! Bet you didn't think of that!

Here's the problem. Even though I think most situations generally have at least one solution that is both Feasible and Not Terrible, I have to admit that there are some situations (as in, not zero of them) where all the feasible options are unpleasant. This is a natural consequence of living in a world where A Lot Of Things Suck.

But if shitty situations do exist, even if it's super super rare, then it's not unreasonable to ask, "How should we make decisions when we find ourselves in a shitty situation?"

This is the beginning premise of the Trolley Problem. It says, "Hey what if you were in an unambiguously shitty situation? There are many shitty situations, so let's imagine one that is contrived enough to get everyone on the same page regardless of political affiliation, AND really emphasizes the key parts that I want to discuss."

Tumblr says "let me stop you right there. What if instead...we imagined a different scenario that wasn't as shitty?"

Well, okay, but then we're not talking about the same thing anymore. That doesn't actually count as an answer to the problem, you're just changing the subject to a completely different thing.

Tumblr goes on to say, "Exactly. That's the only thing you should ever do when confronted with an ethical quandary. Frankly the fact that you are willing to even consider a scenario that sucks suggests that you are fundamentally incapable of considering less shitty scenarios."

I just want to say I think that's bullshit. I don't think every problem is a trolley problem, but I do think that some problems are a trolley problem. And I think that those problems are worth discussing, even though they don't feel good. The trolley problem exists as a framework to discuss those problems.

Maybe our aversion to difficult decisions has an impact on our ethical reasoning, and maybe we should actually question how our ethical standards hold up under the weight of that aversion. So maybe moral quandaries like the trolley problem are worth discussing. And if you don't want to engage with the quandary, then don't - you don't have to concoct a whole essay about how the quandary is inherently morally bad.

It's possible that what you really want to say is that it sucks when people treat certain situations as trolley problems, when those specific situations actually do contain unambiguously feasible and unambiguously perfect solutions. I would agree with that.

But like. Let's not pretend that you can reduce all of ethics down to unchallenging black and white moralism.

Frankly, I think the impulse OP is describing feeds into the human tendency to deny the harm caused by one's actions. i.e. if there's no such thing as a trolley problem in real life, and there's always a way make a Better Choice, then if you do choose a less-than-ideal action that's clearly a moral failure on your part, and therefore the action I took must be the Ideal Choice That Doesn't Hurt Anyone who matters, and if you're suggesting otherwise then you must be deflecting from your culpability in Something because why else would you disagree with the Ideal Course Of Action?

Gonna take this one even a little further, because the point of the trolley problem is something that gets glossed over waaay too often.

Because even if there were never any situations in the world that were really like that, the trolley problem is still useful, because it's getting at something below just, "What would you do here?"

The important part of the trolley problem comes after answering that question. And it is the question, "Why would you choose that?"

It's asking about our ethical principles. It's like a science experiment in which we've tried to isolate as many variables as possible. "Why did you do that? In this situation, where the stakes and outcomes are clear and the choice and its results are simple, by what reasoning did you make that choice?"

And we can get a lot of information from people based on that answer. For instance:

And from this point we can start cuddling with the scenario, adjusting variables, to test the principle.

Do we want our ethical principles to say that it's ok to prefer the life of your own loved one to those of five strangers? If so, how do we logically build that into our ethics in a way that won't go too far towards allowing people to ignore the needs of others in favor of those closer to them?

Does it matter how directly we feel responsible for the results of our actions? If instead of pulling a lever, you were standing next to someone large enough that they would stop the trolley if they were run over, would you push them onto the tracks? What's different about this than pulling the lever?

And the POINT of all this is to help us work out some set of guidelines that we can apply in less dire circumstances. Or to figure out how we, as a society, ought to be allocating resources when there aren't enough. Or to decide who to vote for when you hate everyone on the ballot.

And of course once we get to the real world, situations get more complicated. We have to take more variables into account. We usually have more than two options.

But if we don't have some set of sound principles to work on, we're gonna be making all our moral judgments off of a collection of received rules and gut vibes. And if there's one thing anyone who actually thinks much about ethics agrees on, it's that that is a Bad way to make decisions.

I am begging everybody, fucking begging them, to slow the fuck down and fucking look things up. Right now, there are a lot of people who are making money off of creating headlines that are meant to make you mad, and it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.

If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!

"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?

These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.

The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.

And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.

You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.

Please. For the sake of the people around you who have to patiently explain to you that you've gotten fucking bamboozled again by propaganda if for no other reason. We're all very tired of you thinking that leftists can't be propagandized.

literally saw someone reblog a suspiciously contextless tweet screenshot with no commentary; went to check the OP's blog, and realized the OP was a dead ringer for a planted election influencer blog. I KNOW it sucks but you HAVE to learn to give biden the benefit of the doubt and ask "in what context might he have said that? do i know what specific situation this was in reply to, or am i making assumptions about what he means? how likely is it biden did xyz instead of someone else in the federal government? when's the last time i actually checked what policies biden has enacted while in office?" people are lying to you and trying to trick you to get trump back in office, it is NECESSARY to ask yourself if there are malicious motives behind literally anything negative you see about biden at this point

95% of the time when i see leftists ragging on biden it is literally a failure to check themselves on the above questions. he is not a particularly loud president, and prefers to do shit and then move on to the next thing that gets done - a LOT of quotes from him are prompted by reporters needling him for reactions to very specific things, and if you're only ever looking at those quotes out of context and never checking the context of what he was asked, if he had additional context said before or after the quote, or if he's been doing things he's not been quoted on, you are going to be incredibly uninformed.

you do not have to like someone to stay informed on what theyre actually doing and saying. it is actually BETTER to be informed, because then you can ACCURATELY make cases against the person or fight against things theyre doing that you don't like. but if you don't keep informed, you are fencing with ghosts. no one wins in ghost fencing.