#Complicated Illusions

[tobiasdrake]

My understanding of evil, age 0-10: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

My understanding of evil, in my teens: You can't really boil things down to good and evil. People are complicated. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and someone who seems evil to you is actually doing their best from their own perspective. If you could walk a mile in their shoes, you'd understand. There is no such thing as evil.

My understanding of evil, in my twenties: Look, it's basically just tribalism. We are all necessarily thrust into competition with one another. There are always going to be winners and losers. Whining about evil is just being upset that you lost the game.

My understanding of evil, in my thirties: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

[annespooky]

NME | 17 août 2021

Manic Street Preachers : “On s’est guidés dans l’oubli” Nicky Wire et James Dean Bradfield disent à Andrew Trendell comment leur rejet des dissensions a façonné leur glacial et personnel 14ème album, The Ultra Vivid Lament. Continue reading Untitled

[melancholyflower]

NME | 17 août 2021

Manic Street Preachers : “On s’est guidés dans l’oubli” Nicky Wire et James Dean Bradfield disent à Andrew Trendell comment leur rejet des dissensions a façonné leur glacial et personnel 14ème album, The Ultra Vivid Lament. Continue reading Untitled

[lu-sn]

in kpts, almost everyone in the mafia is trapped there. a good half of them clearly want out.

porsche vehemently doesn't even want in. he resists to the best of his ability, and even once he's in, he still dreams of that bar on the beach. chay would drop the mafia in a heartbeat, if he felt that it was possible. kim's already got one foot out the door. kinn wishes he could have even half of what kim has, but he's been thoroughly convinced he's never allowed to have it.

so despite all these characters who would love to be let loose, who would kill for a chance at true freedom — would run off into the sunset and never look back — it's interesting that the narrative gives the slightest promise of freedom to the two characters who didn't know it was possible, who never even thought to dream of it. vegas and pete do not understand the value of what they've been handed.

will they ever understand? will they ever see that freedom as a gift instead of a curse?

[aroanthy]

i love how fraught and complicated discourse around various utena characters ‘dying’ is when anthy is literally stabbed to death eternally by a million swords imbued with human hatred. and then utena gets stabbed to death by them also. like. ‘death’ is incredibly interesting in rgu because most of the time it’s this ambiguous figurative thing that has interesting implications re: ohtori as a closed-off world one can escape. we are all trapped in our coffins. mamiya is the only named character with a grave. nemuro memorial hall functions as one all the same. ruka is implied to have died in the hospital— was he dead all along? who was the boy we saw for these two episodes? is this dead boy the same boy, or is this just another coincidence from the shadow girls, cutting like a knife? it’s heavily implied that akio and anthy murder kanae by poisoning her, adding to the previous implication that they were poisoning mr ohtori too, but there are no perceptible consequences of this. kanae’s absence is not felt. she’s fed an apple slice. what happens to the bodies? we know what happened to the 100 boys, but what about everyone else? and so on and so forth. ‘death’ is a tricky thing in utena, i think it’s constantly functioning on figurative and literal levels in very different ways for very different purposes. dios died. dios was dying. dios didn’t die. he grew up. etc etc

[spitblaze]

I'm not a psychologist or a politician or anything approaching an expert about literally anything except a few specific video games but I feel like so many people wouldn't be agonizing over the moral implications of one (1) vote if we as the less-than-uppest-of-upper-crust had the ability to meaningfully affect change in ways other than 'spend money/do not spend money, vote for the red or blue tie'

[funnykinky]

[cypheragent]

i think to claim US citizens are privileged over those in the global south is almost always but not inherently true. whenever this subject comes up the first thing i think about is the fucking abysmal conditions on many reservations, of the fact that native people in this country still live under occupation, are citizens of their own nations but forced to be US citizens as well, under which they are gravely oppressed and their cultures and sovereignty threatened. one could argue that these are unique cases, if even willing to concede at all the extent of native oppression in this country. but to me, as a native, these individuals and experiences are not simply an afterthought. as i said, they come to my mind immediately. the fact that most people do not even consider them at all in these discussions only proves my point about how utterly fucking dire the oppression of this country's indigenous population is. we, especially those of us who struggle the most, are forgotten and erased constantly.

when some people are only US citizens by force, when they are among the indigenous population and live under occupation, i simply could not agree that these individuals benefit from that oppression. how could they? occupation is not a privilege. tell me, are you aware at all what the conditions are like on many reservations in this country? i'd also like to emphasize that native genocide is an ongoing project. it has not ended. it continues to this day.

[bedlamsbard]

the 2010 film Centurion is deeply frustrating to me because it desperately wants to be about the Varian Disaster, every single beat in this movie would fit near-perfectly for the Varian Disaster, you could relocate this film temporally and geographically to Germania and not change literally anything except some of the names, and yet because Hollywood considers Britannia way sexier and more exotic than Germania it is set in Britain. this movie should be about the Varian Disaster! in every way but geographically including the drawback of the frontiers this movie is about the Varian Disaster! and yet. it is not about the Varian Disaster.

(the movie itself is fine. like, it's Agricola slander and Tacitus is rolling over in his grave, but my tolerance for historical inaccuracy is pretty high these days. don't go out of your way to watch it, but like, it's fine. if I had a nickel for every time Olga Kurylenko has played a Roman-hating British woman warrior I'd have two nickels, which is not a lot but it's weird it's happened twice etc.)

[kingofdinosaurs]

i think a lot about how mohg and morgott's great runes are found together...

[recurring-polynya]

please enjoy this hot take my husband dropped on me at lunchtime today:

you know, the one thing Aizen never did was try to convince everyone that someone else had secret total hypnosis powers that they were hiding as something else. Like, "You all thought Captain Hitsugaya had ice powers, but he is, in fact, casting illusions on you as we speak." That would have been so on brand for him and also hilarious.

[firesofdainix]

My paranoia and anxiety is making me believe that the "Sun is abusive to his planets" fanon take came from me and my fics

[tatersgonnatate]

Is gender even a thing anymore or like... we're done with that nonsense yeah?

[dumblr]

I don't want love I can't afford.

[red-hot-moon]

My most boomer opinion is that I hate that almost all daily online services require me to sign in with my smartphone. My smartphone is currently broken so I can't even sign into my bank account or my e-mail.

My second most boomer opinion is that I fucking hate that opening devices and replacing the battery so they can go on working for another few years is considered fucking illegal by most companies.

I don't consider doing everything online and/or with my smartphone convenient at all, because when it gets stolen or broken, you're basically handicapped. I don't want to have to make an account to find out where the mail service has delivered my package! I don't want to have to sign in with my e-mail to be able to open a locker at a concert hall! I don't want to have to get a new phone every two years! I don't want to have to go online to turn on my tv! I want off this ride!!!

[lover-of-mine]

I hope I'm not just a gifmaker to you but also someone who made you think the two firefighter dudes were actually together for a while there.