“Hello from my house” - Alaa Shahwan from Gaza

The moment you decide that horrific violence is okay if it's aimed at Bad Guys™, you immediately have an incentive to categorize all of your "enemies" as Bad Guys™ in order to justify violence to them. They are not people anymore, they aren't complex and diverse human beings with their own motivations and lives and desires, they are the Bad Guys™ and everything done to them (no matter how horrific or indefensible in any other situation) is okay because it's for a Good Cause™.

The only way to not fall into that sort of mindset is to just not let yourself create exceptions for your basic morals. And that isn't EASY, you have to correct yourself constantly and break away from people and blogs and new sources and the like that push dehumanizing and violent narratives, but it's the only way to approach sensitive and important topics with kindness and compassion rather than hate and anger.

and even uniquely evil people cannot be allowed to ruin it for everyone

Regardless of how this ceasefire proposal agreement is going to go, I have to say that it is mind blowing how Israel had spent billions of dollars on weapons and propaganda with the aim of destroying the Palestinian spirit. Yet, looking at my TV screen now and seeing how the people of Gaza are full of hope, dancing and chanting in anticipation of a ceasefire, really shows how Israel continues to fail miserably. This shows us all that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Israel can do that would actually break the will of Palestinians, ever.

ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.

"someone who really has pOCD would be disgusted and horrified at their intrusive thoughts" or maybe i'm in therapy & am going by the books, being radically ambivalent to my intrusive thoughts instead of wasting energy mentally washing my paws of sin. i'm not going to perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.

also like... something something, being afraid of healing because you're afraid of letting go of the stability of misery, letting go of the narrative you made up to feel worthy of attention, letting go of your "sympathy cred," this narrative has probably killed a few ppl.

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

here are my policy focuses:

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

what is really more embarrassing, wearing a fursuit and pretending to be an animal or wearing clothes and pretending not to be

I apologize for calling Macklemore cringe

On Jean Vicquemare and Crypto-fascism

Disco Elysium has some very obvious examples of fascism, with the Racist Lorry Driver, Measurehead, and René. Those are all people who you can clock as fascists within a minute of talking to them. But there’s characters like Gary. Crypto-fascists. Lena and Morell, who spend their time in the company of nationalists. Who imply races are less than human like it’s a good thing. Nostalgists. Fascists who don’t say it. Like Jean Vicquemare.

Establishing context

First off, in order to better showcase my point, I’ll explain the idea of Harry being a one-to-one metaphor for Revachol to those who might not be familiar with it. Harry embodies the voice of La Revacholiere. The city of Revachol, quite literally, speaks to him via Shivers. There are countless times where the dialogue links Harry and Revachol together, and the plot of the game seems to mirror the history of the city exactly. Harry comes back from his amnesia and loss of his ex, just like how Revachol had to be rebuilt when the Coalition cleared out after the revolution. As an extension of this, Dolores Dei/Dora can be read as a metaphor for the Moralintern, but that’s a post for another time. (Excerpts below.)

The Guillaume le Million thought solution also directly offers up Harry (drug addicted, auto-erotic asphyxiation, ‘warning’… it’s intended to be read like that, right?) as a comparison to Revachol (and le Million, of course);

Along with that, nearly all dialogue from Shivers clues us in on Harry’s uncanny, downright *supra-natural* connection to the city. There’s more I could add to prove this, but again, there’s a time and a place. Harry is Revachol.

Understanding ‘Revacholian Nationhood’

Fascism. Traditionalism. Nationalism. Whatever you decide to call it, it is a reactionary ideology defined by being in opposition to the present. The present is currently moralist, leaning on ultraliberal. If you play a fascist route, you decide you need to turn back the wheels of time. During each political vision quest, you’re led by one of your skills. Fascism’s is lead by Endurance (FYS). Out of all skill categories, your Physique is frequently the most fascist. We frequently see how physique as a whole factors into fascism, from Measurehead’s build and “cranial perfection”, Coach Physical Instrument telling you to suck in your gut, along with pages upon pages about wömen and what they want in men…

… and what they don’t. Women don’t want fascists. So we use dogwhistles. We pick up saying “Al Gul”. We have “bröderbunds”.

When we ask Jean:

He replies:

And he brushes it off, never to be mentioned again.

Fascism hurts Harry. It hurts Revachol. Internalizing Revacholian Nationhood will cause you to lose 1 Morale every time you say a fascist thing. All the fascists we talk to certainly aren’t happy. The culmination of the fascist vision quest, leads to you facing yourself in the mirror, and having this conversation.

Revachol. It’s all shit. And Revachol’s son, Harry ‘shitkid’ Du Bois, is there to rub that in with his failure. A past that he will never remember and never get back, no matter what Jean does.

Conclusion

Jean is physically fit, something fascism places importance on.

Fascism makes people depressed. It wears them down. We don’t see a single hopeful fascist.

He’s not a liberal.

He’s not a communist, and finds the idea of capitalism fucking Harry over so laughable he nearly takes it as a joke.

And is absolutely not a leftist, considering how he talks about Trant, who isn’t even a communist.

And Harry can say something similar…

But only if his highest political values are Revacholian Nationhood or Ultraliberal.

Ok wait let her speak

Please give evidence beyond “I hate them” or “I like sleeping in” or “I have to get up early”, none of which is actual evidence

Signed

an actual morning person

Night person who needs to see a doctor/get your car worked on/go to the bank/buy groceries, etc? You're gonna have to sacrifice sleep for it. Because for some reason it was decided that most places of business should open in the morning and close in the evening. Fewer and fewer places are 24/7. Wanna go for a nice stroll in the park? Tough shit, they close at sundown. Hell, want to just go for a walk in general? Fair chance of being harassed by the cops because being out and about in the dark is "suspicious" behavior. Want something that's not fast food and don't want to/can't cook for yourself? Best we can do is a diner like Denny's or IHOP. Got a loved one in the hospital you want to visit between work and sleep? Either gotta get up early or stay up late to meet visiting hours.

And let's not forget, no matter how little you actually sleep and how much you actually get done, if you're not awake during certain hours it means you're a lazy good-for-nothing. Express a desire for more places open 24/7? Selfish and entitled. Complain about how noisy your neighbors are during your sleep hours? Well you can't expect the world to tiptoe around you. But also you'd better keep it down at night because other people are sleeping!

But don't worry! There are plenty of guides on how to "fix" your sleep schedule out there! You just have to follow a strict, often disruptive routine that you can never stray from even a little or else you'll fall back to your natural sleep schedule lazy, undisciplined ways.

And at that, good luck finding a job that doesn't expect you to be in by 9 AM at the latest. Which means getting up at 7:30 AM at the latest, earlier if you have a commute. Which means getting to bed at 11:30 PM at the latest.

Which means night owls have a straight choice between self-employment/freelance work, with all its insecurities, or constant self-torture. (Oh yeah, sleep deprivation does count as torture, per the UN.)

“Umm it will actually be very difficult for universities to divest from israel and arms manufacturers without tuition skyrocketing 🤓☝🏼” why is the financial stability of a college (and the economy at large, especially in the us) so reliant on what amounts to war profiteering to begin with? Why is that an inevitability that we’re supposed to accept?

Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.

i must stress that he's never seen the original comic. My mother simply showed him the shorthand symbol and he memorized it. As far as he is aware this is just a fucking hieroglyph that deals instant psychic damage to everyone under the age of 30

like as a feminist and an asexual if you ever imply that not having sex / not having "enough" of it is a conservative or reactionary trait I will be running you over with a bus pronto

you do not need to have sex ever. if you don't want to then you can just not do it. you don't need to have sex in order to mature as a person. you don't need to have sex to prove that you don't think it's immoral. you don't need to have sex to be a good partner. you don't need to have sex to be physically and/or mentally healthy. all of these goals can be achieved by hundreds of means other than sex. you can chose to do it for any reason you want, but you can also chose not to do it for any reason you want, including just not really feeling like it at any given time in any situation. the only thing not having sex says about your life and character is that you decided not to have sex. you can really really just not do it and that will be 1000x better for you in every conceivable way than making yourself do it when you don't want to.

Namari Dungeonmeshi

Thinking about how shitty Jean would be with kids. I feel like him and Harry both talk to kids like adults, but where Harry talks to them like people with opinions, Jean will beef with a 6 year old because they can't open a peanut butter jar. Jean will play Sorry! with a child and he will be out for blood the entire time. He stole mustard from a homeless man I just know he'd be playing basketball and get dunk after dunk on an unsuspecting teenager just to feel the thrill of victory. Cuno is his enemy and I think it'd be really funny to put him in charge of training him

always sunny episode where it is revealed that charlie can hear the voice of philadelphia the same way harry hears la revacholiere

la philadelphiere

[Text ID: I'VE SEEN YOU, I'VE SEEN YOU! I'VE SEEN YOU WITH FRANK -- AND I'VE SEEN YOU WITHOUT FRANK. I'VE SEEN YOU ON THE CORNER BY THE WAWA. End ID]