#I can't access most of my stuff and I feel further and further trapped on my bed. like I always was after that day

[david-watts]

local man greatly upset by change in how to operate the television and programme availability that comes with it

[bookishjules]

i'm gonna say something that might upset some people but i also feel like i'm in a unique position to say it so..

i was raised in a pretty conservative christian household in rural america. and when it came time for me to register to vote in 2015, i did so as a republican. i voted in the primaries in 2016 very much in the hopes that trump would not become the republican candidate. but then he did. and when november came, i was torn. i didn't feel like my candidate represented the republican party as i had come to understand it growing up, but for the financial policies i had been taught to value and for the sake of pushing the government red after eight years of obama, i voted for trump.

and i regretted it almost immediately. (and i have never once voted red since)

the regret was a gut feeling. but it was also a result of how much i saw and learned in the aftermath of that election that i was blind to beforehand. stuff that i didn't even know i didn't know kind of thing. i was at a college in the south and involved in a church there and had a decent mix of voices around me, but where i learned the most? was here. on tumblr.

here's the thing. if i hadn't had access to the voices on here revealing aspects of life and politics i was previously unaware of? if i hadn't been presented with articles and statistics that my right-leaning family wouldn't have entertained? idk if i would have come to my senses as early as i did. and if, in fact, people knew what my vote had been and blocked me for it? if there had been posts going around telling me to go fuck myself and unfollow them.. it probably would have built back up the walls against liberal policies that i had been slowly tearing down since becoming more cognizant of the social and political sphere.

now i'm not saying anyone has a responsibility to teach anyone anything, or even to entertain interactions. i know that we're angry and hurt and we need to prioritize our safety and sanity. but. i do think, especially with how echochamber-y certain online spaces have become, that even just allowing the space for bridges to be built could prove invaluable moving forward.

again, i'm not saying that you need to remain friends or even keep up any relationship with people who voted for trump. and i'm not saying you don't have every right to block maga fanatics. what i'm saying is that there could very well be people (young people esp who may not fully understand the implications of their choice or why the left may hold more merit than they were brought up to believe) who are willing to listen and learn if given the opportunity. and leaving them to rot with the worst of them won't do anything but bolster the right and continue eroding the ever-widening canyon between us. a bleak prospect when you consider that we will have another election in four years and that the right will only become more extreme in that time.

ftr.. please feel free to ignore me if you need to. like i said, your safety and sanity takes precedent. it's just been such a common trend i've seen on both instagram and here and i can't help but think about how closing the door could mean trapping the people who have the potential to grow from the choice they made on election day with that vote and the people who have the potential to drag them further down.

[morlock-holmes]

The people you’re arguing with re: pre-modern quality of life, are all broadly rationalist-adjacent, and are therefore deeply committed to arch-Whig-History and will never concede that anything was better for anyone ever before this exact moment in time.

for what it’s worth, I get your point - comparative social status is really great, and people who had a lot of it might’ve been very unwilling to give it up in order to certain material benefits of industrial society.

For a total no-brainer post-industrial example - anyone who’d trade being a trust fund playboy in the early 20th century for being a lower income wage worker today is a fool. There is no way you could legitimately argue that the internet is better than a life of relative leisure, high status, and wealth.

the further back you go, the trickier the argument gets, due to things like antibiotics, motorized transport, etc all being pretty handy, but I absolutely would go to bat that the median Regency English gentry or noble had a better quality of life than the median lower income American, in many respects.

go back to the Iron Age, gets a little trickier, but idk, I might still say that a high status Viking leader had a better life than I do, but it’s a smaller chunk of society the further back you go. Wealthy Romans seemed to be having a pretty decent time, tbh

I do think I’m more sensitive to relative status than some people. That said, I also think a lot of the Whig History fans I’ve known were part of the current socioeconomic top 10% and just didn’t realize how much it sucks to not have that status. Especially looking at a guy like John Green going in on it, like yeah John, of course you don’t rate being nationally known and respected for making a living pursuing your life’s passion, you’re doing that now

Well, I have another side to things, though you get most of it.

I mean, I don't want to overestimate wealth here. Part of my point is *also* that, assuming what we read of Diogenes is true, he was probably more fulfilled as a human being than Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is the world's richest man in the safest and most technologically advanced time in human history while Diogenes lived in a god damn jug.

Like, people who idealize or become nostalgic about the past are very, very often asking,

"Why do I feel so [angry/tired/hopeless/trapped] despite the fact that I have easy access to [insert material comfort here]"

And the response is very often to say, "Because you are fundamentally irrational. [Insert material comfort here] is actually the most important advancement in all of human history."

Like, in that conversation one person says,

"You live better than anybody in pre-industrial times."

And when I say, "Well, I don't know, Leonard Da Vinci and Gengis Khan seemed like they did okay"

A second person comes along to say,

"Well, those are inherently scarce positional goods, you can't expect social advances to make those more prevalent, what modernity actually gives us is travel, a library, a well-stocked sewing room, a hundred paintings you painted yourself"

And when I say, "Yeah I don't have that stuff either" a third person says,

"Yeah, obviously you can't expect to get that stuff, modernity gives you flush toilets, iPads and childhood vaccines."

And first of all yeah, I know, I said that, and second:

*Boy* have these rose-y eyed optimists spent a *lot* of time telling me what sorts of human pleasures I really ought to stop expecting to have more of.

I mean "wasn't stillborn" is quite literally the *absolute bare minimum* that a person can expect out of life.

Remember how in the 50s some kid would hate peas, and his parents would force him to eat them and if he complained they'd say, "You ought to be grateful for those peas, there are starving children in Africa"?

Turns out that "You'd better learn to be thankful for this because it's all you're gonna get and you could have it a lot worse" isn't actually optimistic or empowering.

And that sentiment lurks just below the surface of a lot of these odes to modernity.

PS - If you asked that pea hating child whether he would want to trade places with that starving African child he might well say, "Well, at least *he* isn't being forced to eat these awful peas!" and I think there is some justice to that response even if it doesn't represent a literal desire to experience a famine.

[burgerpocalypse]

I've been trying to run through some free games I got from the Epic game store, specifically Grand Theft Auto V, Creature in the Well, and most recently Night in the Woods. I quit GTAV about 60% of the way because it sucked, and I can't beat the last area of Creature, so that leaves me to talk a little about NitW and the emotional turmoil it gave me.

Upfront, I'm not interested in games with heavy emphasis on story, least of all visual novels or whatever you want to call this game. However, I've heard mostly positive things about Night in the Woods here and there for the better part of the previous decade. That and the fact I got it for $0 convinced me to finally try it out.

Night in the Woods is an adventure focused on exploration and character drama. Mae Borowski, the protagonist, is a college dropout that just moved back to her Rust Belt hometown for mysterious reasons, and becomes entangled in suspicious happenings. The player will traverse the aged suburban sprawl and rural outskirts of Possum Springs, conversing with family, friends, strangers, and everyone else, uncovering secrets and opening wounds along the way.

Seeing as how Night in the Woods is primarily a story, I'll mostly be discussing that, so look out for spoilers, yo.

After spending two years away, Mae attempts to reconnect with her previously closest friends Bea (an idealist goth whomst had considerable familial and financial responsibility thrust upon her at a young age), Gregg (an anarchist punk with bipolar tendencies), and Angus (an incredibly nice man). Mae pushes the story forward by hanging out with Bea and Gregg, and sometimes Angus. This will often involve going to social outings, running errands, committing crimes, and so on.

Other than her friends, Mae will also have opportunities to interact with her parents, various citizens, and vagrants. whom provide flavor and history to the world while also bringing some of Mae's muddled past to light. The player will traverse environments through walking and jumping around, with the occasional platforming feat required to progress or access certain areas. Occasionally, you'll be presented with small minigames, like a Guitar Hero-clone or red light/green light shoplifting, and a game-within-a-game dungeon crawler that pissed me off to no end. While most activities in the town are benign, certain important events will move the day along and lock you out of further exploration.

Early on, Mae's group stumbles upon a discarded arm and some cryptic dialogue from a few characters. After each day, Mae experiences strange dream sequences that involve platforming segments and surreal representations of her friends and the town. Several hours of gameplay later, Mae witnesses a kidnapping on Halloween by what appears to be a ghost.

In the midst of all this, Mae hangs out with her friends and discovers what they've been up to in her absence. Bea runs the family business for her father, who broke down after her mom died, putting them in dire financial straits and preventing Bea from leaving Possum Springs; she bears resentment towards Mae, since she dropped out of college and came home for no apparent reason while also not maturing at all. Gregg is aimless, sporadic, and uninhibited, while his boyfriend Angus is neat, tidy, and overly helpful. Their relationship appears strong, and they are planning to move to a new city together, though Bea is convinced it won't last.

Mae does her best to strengthen bonds while suffering from a variety of stressors, like her family's money troubles, her self-destructive tendencies and dissociative episodes, and ominous celestial beings invading her mind. This sometimes leads to inadvertent and painful social situations, especially with Bea.

Mae attempts to investigate the supposedly supernatural happenings with the help of Bea, Gregg, and Angus, while her mental health steadily declines. Eventually, the group travels deep into the woods (at night) and stumble into a cult, after which Mae suffers a great fall and enters a coma. After waking up, Mae then attempts to confront the cult head-on, though her friends arrive to help. They enter a cave, find the cult again, discover the eldritch horror they serve and explore her personal connection to it, accidentally cause a cave-in and trap the cultists, escape the cave, and try to make sense of what happened after the fact.

Now, don't get me wrong. I rather enjoyed Night in the Wood's story. I really liked all the characters. I loved the dialogue. Even the platforming and various minigames were fine, if simplistic and occasionally annoying. The structure of this paragraph seems as though it's leading towards a big 'but'. I just wanted to say that I really liked the game, even though I don't generally enjoy video game stories, and especially not video games primarily about a story. Though I'm not from a run-down midwestern town, and obviously don't have the same sort of personal relationships she does, Mae's emotional strife and insecurities really resonated with me. Her personal thoughts and reactions often made me just stop and think about the many mistakes I've made with the people I care about and all the relationships I've ruined.

However, if the plot wanted to spend so much time on Mae and her friends, it should have been about Mae and her friends. Conversely, if it wanted to be about a spooky cult in a small town, it should have spent much more time on a spooky cult in a small town. The plot is torn between two diametrically opposed focuses, those being Mae's struggles to maintain relationships and her dealing with suspicious supernatural occurrences in Possum Springs. So much time passes before anything really happens with the cult and cosmic horror that I feel some people might even forget there is a cult and cosmic horror, and Mae isn't just experiencing a psychotic break for no reason.

In the end, the cult goes unresolved, and it's unclear what the relationship is with the residents of Possum Springs, or what its powers even are. I don't need the game to explain every aspect in detail, but no one appears to be affected by the existence of the cult and its god other than Mae. My brain was going into overdrive looking for clues, making patterns, identifying red herrings, anything that might help me understand the mystery, when in reality there was no mystery to understand.

There is also a severe lack of actual choice or decision making in terms of dialogue, and a distinct absence of any real challenge in gameplay. I definitely felt that this story could have been more efficiently told if it were in a book, usually after spending a few minutes walking around trying to find something important and

It doesn't help that I sometimes accidentally skipped certain segments, since it's not always explicitly clear if an action will push the day forward and lock me in. I even completely missed a third of the investigations since I chose to check out the historical society building with Gregg second when the game expected me to do it last. This sort of problem led to me giving up completely on other story-focus games like Kentucky Route Zero since I constantly skipped and missed chunks of stuff or did things out of the intended order and ruined the flow of events.

Now this has obviously gotten a little too long, so I'll just wrap it up by saying that Night in the Woods is great and I recommend it. It made me feel feelings, deep feelings, like I was moments away from crying on more than one occasion.

Thanks for reading. I have a lot on my mind because of this game, so I hope it was worth your time.

[spiritpriestess]

🔮 What do you need to release? 🔮

Hi sunshines ☀

Today's pick a card reading is all about what you need to release and let go of.

If you're new to pick a card readings, basically you just have to choose a pile out of the three and then scroll down to the description. The important thing is to pick with your intuition and not your eyes.

Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes and ask yourself

'What do I need to release and let go of?'

Open your eyes and see which pile you're most drawn to. It can be the one your eyes first landed on, or it can be one you can't look away from. You may even hear a number or get a certain feeling when you look at the right pile. You can also choose based on the crystals if that's more helpful. In order they are sunstone, rhodochrosite and malachite.

So without further ado, let's see what these cards have for us today 🕊️💖🔮☀️

🕯️🔮☁️☀️🌻🕊️⚓🌫️⚓🕊️🌻☀️☁️🔮🕯️

Group 1

So the first interesting thing is that I don't do reversals with my Lunasol tarot but this card jumped out and landed on my desk face down, fully in reverse, so I was like, okay I get it 😂

So upright, the five of wands means a sort of conflict, could be with other people or an inner conflict as well. In reverse, I feel like this says that it's time to give up that meaningless fight or conflict you might have with someone else, or within yourself. The Kuan Yin card under it confirms this as well, the message is 'Release judgements about yourself and others, and focus on the love and light that is within everyone'

For some of you, this could mean that you're conflict avoidant but it's time to face stuff that's really bothering you, and again, could be with someone else, but for most of you I feel like this talks about an inner conflict and you might not even be fully aware of it. It's time to look within and at ourselves, as the Self Reflection card shows, but do that with compassion and understanding. The outer world is a reflection of our inner world, and so if this conflict is with someone else, that's also why self reflection is needed, so you realize what it is that's inside you that you manifest in your relationship, or that gets mirrored back at you.

So you need to release judgement, resistance to conflict or a conflict if there is one an the fear of the unexpected, as the reversed card shows. How this can apply, if there's a situation where you don't know the outcome and it's making your anxious, then this conflict can be about a situation and your judgement about it. For example, you got an opportunity to do something you've dreamed about, or haven't done yet, but you don't know how it'll go, it's out of your comfort zone and you got anxious and started piling up these reasons why it could go wrong, meaning, you created judgements about it. But the LoA applies here as well (and well, everywhere), if you focus on all the reasons something can go wrong, rest assured, you'll create one of those circumstances. So as Kuan Yin says, 'Release judgements about yourself and others, and focus on the love and light that is within everyone' (or everything). Where your attention goes, energy flows. Focus on the positive and good things about someone, yourself or a situation and it'll multiply, giving you more of those things.

This is all I'm getting, I hope it resonated with you, please let me know what you think 💖 ✨ 🔮 ☀️

Group 2

So while I was shuffling and asking the question, i heard 'fear of attachments' and it never happened before, that I heard a message so clearly especially for a pick a card reading and I really feel like this is the theme of this reading.

So with the ten of wands, it's about burden, taking on more than you can bear but not asking for help. The Page on the other hand is a positive, hopeful card, bringing good news. So there might be something, an idea, a project or a relationship that's on the horizon and part of you wants to start, but the other part of you is scared of the burdens it can bring, and again, the attachments. Part of you wants to be free, even though this new something can be beneficial and fulfilling to you.

Then we have the Ostara card, 'It is the perfect time for you to start new projects, access new ideas, and give birth to new conditions', so again, something new is about to, or have already entered or started in your life but you're afraid of pursuing it.

And then we have Surrender in reverse, which strengthens the meaning of the ten of wands card, you're afraid, or taking on and carrying all that burden, whatever they may be and are afraid to let them go and to surrender. I don't know what this new thing in your life is, but I'm feeling positive vibes from it, whatever it is, you need it and it's for your highest good. Release your worries and anxieties and resistance. Don't be afraid of surrendering. Let things flow and go with it. Ask for help of you need it. And to those it applies to, release the fear of attachment. Ask yourself why you're afraid of it. Notice what comes up and how many of those things are just worries created by past experiences or social conditioning. Then work on releasing them because they don't serve you and in life, we always get what we subconsciously believe in. If you believe this new project or relationship will only give you burdens and worries, then that's what you'll manifest. But you can change your mindset anytime and look at things in a more optimistic, trusting way. And with this new thing, you don't need to be afraid, this is something that's gonna help you and you just need to surrender and allow life to work its magic.

I hope this helps and resonated with you, please let me know what you think 🔮☀️🕊️

Group 3

So the eight of swords means being blinded by your own thoughts, a prisoner in your own mind. As bad this may sound, you're there willingly, no one is forcing you to be there and as you can see on the card, there's a ladder leading down from that prison, you can easily untie your hands and just leave.

Then we have two oracle cards that both deal with going outside so this signifies that meaning, get out of your head

'You have been indoors too long. Go outside and get some fresh air'

'Spend time near water, such as a lake, river, or the ocean, to recharge your batteries'

So some of you might feel like you're trapped, going in circles and you don't seem to achieve much and you keep repeating the same mistakes. The way to solve this is to get out of your head (and possibly your room as well). You can, and probably should, actually go out in nature, wherever it is, it can be a forest if there's one near you, or to a body of water as the Sulis card suggests, but if nothing else, a nearby park or just a walk around the block is still enough. Do some walking meditation, notice the things you see, hear, feel, smell or even taste. Just focus on the outside world for a while.

Then we have the Wisdom card and how it's laid down and the girl is waving at the person on the tarot card, to me this means that you don't find wisdom if you're trapped in your own mind. Of course when we want answers, and in general, it's advised to look within as we know everything we need to know, but there's a difference between looking within objectively and with an open mind, and staying too much in our heads, clouded by doubts and fears.

And so if there's something you've been trying to get an answer to, this is telling you that you won't find it there but if you get out of your head, get some fresh air and come back to the situation some time later. Like how artists stand back every once in a while to look at their painting from another perspective to notice any mistakes.

The Beginning card is in reverse, but the first message I'm getting is from how the cards are spread, again, and it's like, wisdom girl is waving at you to go outside, because your new beginning, what you've been searching for waits for you outside. Step out of your comfort zone. You've been in your own prison for too long, it's time to release your fear and this way of living and step into your new beginning. Spirit/The Universe is telling you to go outside, observe the outer world and nature and try to find your answer there. Don't be afraid of change as change is always needed for us to grow and learn and it doesn't have to mean anything bad, it's only the labels we give to these things.

So, whatever it is that's keeping you stuck, try to release that. If it's mental, just don't even think about it, get dressed and go out. What I mean by this, if you wanted to draw but felt really demotivated, if you just started gathering your supplies, sat down at your desk, searched for some reference if needed, chances are, you'll continue with that task because you already got so far. So that's what I mean by 'don't think about it'.

For some of you though, this can simply mean that you've been indoors too long and you need some fresh air and some interaction with the outer world. Or if you have any resistance to going outside, then that's what you need to release.

I almost forgot but we have a 2 and a 22 on these cards as well. 2s mean balance, harmony, partnerships, maintaining a positive outlook, seeing the bigger picture (get out of your head) and it tells you to pay attention to your thoughts. Not on a way that you get obsessed with them and re enter that prison, but to become aware of your repeating thoughts and how they affect you. Release the thoughts that are limiting and keeping you stuck and think more abundantly and positively. Obviously we'll still feel sad or angry from time to time, and we should feel those emotions, but we should always strive for balance. After we have felt what we needed to, we need to let it go and not dwell on it.

I hoped this resonated with you, please let me know what you think 💖🔮☀️🕊️