jesterbots

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[jesterbots]

[jesterbots]

A lot of leftist accounts are suspiciously quiet on the section 504 lawsuit, proposed medicaid cuts, and the "make America healthy again" executive order.

I know other leftists are not the enemy but if we don't have able bodied allies and general population support, there's no hope of pushing back against these ableist policies. These big accounts ignoring a massive minority at risk is scary. The current admin is the problem but there's no hope of a solution without allyship.

We need visibility. We need allies.

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You can be talking to someone and she'll be like, "Oh I made a silly mistake. Women don't deserve voting rights teehee." And you'll be like, "What." And she'll be like, "Oh I'm sorry! That must sound so bad out of context. No it's this Tiktok meme where, if you're a girl and you do something dumb, you say 'Women don't deserve voting rights teehee.'"

And you'll be like, "That sounds bad." And she'll be like, "No no. It's totally not that bad. It's just a meme. Men say it too. Like if a man does something silly he'll be like, 'I am like those women who do not deserve to vote.'" And you'll be like, "Does that make it better?" And she'll be like, "Well there was one guy who tried to make 'Men shouldn't vote' a popular meme. But it never caught on and also he got yelled at a lot."

And then you drop it there because like, you're harshing the vibe.

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huge shoutout to everyone who started their blog when they were teenagers and now they are in their 20s and 30s

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Boyfriends are kinda evil for not letting you watch them poop

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i think what bothers me about a lot of "girl power" narratives is that they function on the implicit idea on the idea that women can become worthy of respect. and i happen to think that really caring about women means believing they already are worthy of respect. that historical seamstresses and soccer moms and forgotten sisters and sweet polite little girls and someone's weird grandma matter just as much as the warriors and politicians, even if they, personally, never accomplish anything "cool."

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HRT takes U out of HURT 👍

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christians waiting for the second coming of christ is so funny like he wouldnt send your devilish asses to hell and beyond

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Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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Saw someone say happiness is a construct and like. Sorry man thats chemicals

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It's weird this isn't talked about more, but Elon basically kidnapped his son. He used his lawyers to near bankrupt Grimes in her custody battle and it's unclear if she has any access to her son at this point.

Grimes can be an unsympathetic figure at times, but this is just awful. Especially since it seems Elon is using this young boy as an anti-assassination tactic.

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Something interesting about the way Toby Fox writes his more obscure alternate paths is the way he assumes a lot about what the player knows. Snowgrave and the No Mercy route share commonality not only in their grim tone but also in the way they forego establishing things that act as payoffs later. It’s interesting because his approach isn’t really to ignore a traditional 3 act structure so much as it is slicing and splicing it.

“It’s a beautiful day outside” is a parallel to a line that doesn’t even appear directly within the narrative of No Mercy and so the warping of it from Asgore’s “Perfect weather for a game of catch.” into Sans’ “Should be burning in hell.” doesn’t even necessarily exist to a hypothetical player who did No Mercy before anything else. Snowgrave doesn’t even show you Spamton until the very end, until then he’s just a dumpster with a weird speech impediment. A lot of the big payoffs and crazy twists are, at least contained within their own runs, not even really established at all. It’s as if the story started in act 2 and just assumed you knew what was going on, and yet this works.

One could argue that Undertale DOES in fact have a 3 act structure, but that each act is a full 3 act narrative within itself, because of the nature of what a “save” or a “run” means in the story. The average player’s act 1 might be a neutral run, or even several neutral runs. Within this “act”, they are introduced to and acquire an understanding of the meta rules behind the otherwise seemingly traditional concept of the save file, as well as how the choice to fight or act does very much affect the narrative. Act 2 would likely be a pacifist run, an application of all this knowledge to try and score the best, “true” ending, after being unsatisfied with the neutral runs’ bittersweet farewell phone calls and lackluster “roll credits” vibe.

This would make act 3, obviously, No Mercy. No Mercy does not establish certain things because Toby Fox knows, or at least very much expects, that you already know what’s happening, what you’re doing, and why. I feel like the way the post-pacifist True Reset is presented almost frames it as some kind of tantalizing, selfish indulgence. Coupled with the way you’re only really given a brief glimpse into the new lives of all these characters and this world you just spent all that time falling in love with, it really feels like the intent was to make the player want to have another go. To see more, whatever they can get. I feel like it really sets you up for going for No Mercy.

To return to where I was going with this, I think No Mercy’s “payoffs” are so impactful in spite of their lack of self-contained setup, because everything from all your other runs “comes together” by kind of not coming together at all. The fact that it entirely removes certain memorable moments that appear in literally any other run regardless of what you might do is something I see as a final, ultimate way to cash out on that overarching theme of the importance of your choices. You’ve stopped exploring the world and are now exhausting it. The narrative shifts from the characters (due in no small part to your systemic “removal” of them) and focuses more on you.

Nobody’s bringing up Asgore throughout your entire journey, or warning you about Undyne. These things don’t get setup not only because of the fact that in-universe anyone who might have been there to spout that exposition is actively fleeing from you, but also because the game KNOWS the only reason you got here is because you’ve seen it before, that you know this world and it’s characters so well that all that’s left for you to see is their total destruction. The story you chose was to destroy it, to forcibly remove the actors and be left with an empty stage. No Mercy doesn’t have nearly as much of a second act as other runs. Snowdin is almost typical, there’s still some skeleton antics, albeit interrupted, and Waterfall still sees you encountering Undyne and is otherwise pretty characteristically quiet, but once you reach Hotland and The CORE, nothing really happens there anymore. You pretty much skip straight from the midpoint to the climax and there wasn’t even really a first act. You’ve almost literally slashed right through the story, and I think that in and of itself is a huge story moment.

To reiterate, in allowing you to completely restructure the story, Undertale’s No Mercy route drives home the weight of your choices in an extremely unique way. The fact that it is assumed that the player knows certain things about the world and they are treated as such almost feels like being called out. Like Toby Fox is saying “So THIS is what you wanted to do after putting in all that effort to help all of them? I KNOW you already got the best ending, was that not enough for you? Couldn’t you have just let them be?” It is a truly masterful approach; upturning traditional narrative structure and using it as leverage for a theme and uniquely memorable moments that simply would not hold the same weight if presented in any other way.