#and fucking ''does the divide really seem that vast anymore

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

i was going to make a different post but actually now i just want to talk about how fucking insane part 9 was. like, emotionally. that was when you could tell those two were doomed to be each others' missing puzzle pieces forever i think

[plasticnightmaredoll]

So, the "Justice League" finally got its own movie, eh? Oh, that thing from 2017 was just trash. It's gone. We don't need to look at it anymore.

But in all seriousness, it's great people called out for the Zack Snyder cut of the movie and actually got it! And, yes, it is a vast improvement over the Joss Whedon cut.

Now, my feelings about the DCEU have been pretty divided:

I actually did enjoy "Man of Steel" and found Superman to be relatable and likable for once (I'm not a Superman fan and don't come for me)

"Wonder Woman" was very entertaining and easily the best entry for me in the movie series so far.

"Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" was a hot mess. Lots of good ideas but it was executed poorly. It felt kind of cheesy at times, especially that whole "Save Martha" thing. Jesse Eisenburg is not a convincing Lex Luthor. Ben Affleck is not a good actor and is a terrible Batman/Bruce Wayne. He's not as bad as George Clooney, but he's not much better either.

"Wonder Woman 1984" was a massive glow-down. Poor quality writing, Maxwell Lord was a weak villain, Cheetah was laughable, and the ending was so goddamn corny! Not to mention, it took ages for anything interesting to happen, and what was the deal with Steve Trevor possessing another dude's body? I mean...what?

Haven't seen "Suicide Squad" in its entirety but I do know and have seen enough to decide that it's a huge misstep. Haven't seen "Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)" either but I have some interest in it so perhaps someday.

Haven't watched "Aquaman" but probably will eventually but I'm just not very motivated to see it. I like Jason Mamoa as Aquaman/Arthur Curry, but...I don't know. The trailers didn't really grab my attention.

The 2017 Joss Whedon version of "Justice League" was terrible -- worse than "Batman v Superman," worse than "Wonder Woman 1984." I thought the movie moved too quickly, lacked proper character development, and had some bad CGI (I mean, Mustache Gate, am I right?)

Onto the Synder Cut for "Justice League!" Spoilers ahead, of course:

These are really a collection of thoughts, opinions, and observations I had while watching the movie. I have only seen the 2017 film once and honestly don't want to watch it ever again, not even to "refresh my memory" of some details.

Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf was such a pitiful villain in the Whedon Cut. The CGI for him was terrible, and he looked like some weird dude in armor. His personality and motives were paper thin as well. He was a throw-away, token villain, and the only things memorable about him was his name and voice.

In the Snyder Cut, not only was Steppenwolf's CGI much more refined, his character design was imposing. His armor seemed to be alive, too, always shifting slightly, this way and that, which was an impressive sight. His motives, while nothing too deep or extraordinary, gave him a little more depth: he pissed off Darkseid and had to make up for it, and was clearly afraid of what could happen to him if he failed.

The name and voice obviously were still memorable but combined with the other improvements to his character, they were icing on the cake.

That being said, I don't think Steppenwolf is as intriguing or even remotely sympathetic as Loki and Thanos in the MCU.

Darkseid

Was Darkseid even mentioned in the Whedon cut? I can't remember and I don't want to watch that shitty movie again just to find out. However, I don't recall Darkseid making an appearance or even being spoken of in the 2017 version. Now, I haven't read DC (or Marvel) comics, so I don't know a lot about the guy, but he is supposedly one of the more iconic villains.

His motives are pretty simple, though: command and conquer. There isn't a lot of depth so far in the movies but he does pose a much larger threat than Steppenwolf did. You could tell Steppenwolf was intimidated by Darkseid, who was about as cold and menacing as they come. He's a complete villain in that regard, having no emotions and only seeking power for himself.

He looked great in the Snyder Cut. He was actually really fucking scary-looking. He made the beefcake Steppenwolf look like a puppy.

I'm glad that Darkseid made an appearance, even if he didn't fight the Justice League. It alludes to a much broader story, as well as foreshadows an epic boss fight down the line -- assuming the Snyder Cut is popular enough to convince the studios to make a direct sequel and not just abandon things in favor of some sort of soft reboot.

Superman/Clark Kent/Henry Cavill/Mustache Gate

Let's get this out of the way: Henry Cavill is hot af.

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, hooray for Snyder for getting rid of those nasty reshoot scenes involving Henry's CGI'd mouth! Can't say I missed them, you know? I mean, in the 2017 Whedon Cut, you could always spot reshoot scenes based on whether or not Henry's mouth looked normal and totally strange.

I think the 2017 movie had Superman grab Batman by the neck and ask, "Tell me: Do you bleed?" I'm relieved that was removed from the Synder Cut because it added too much of an evil tone to Superman, and we could clearly tell he was most upset with Batman upon being revived.

One massive problem with the 2017 movie was that it made every member of the Justice League look like bumbling idiots without Superman's help. It was downright embarrassing and unrealistic. I mean, you're telling me that Wonder Woman, a goddess, can't take on Steppenwolf? Or Victor Stone, a cyborg with incredible abilities? Making Superman key to winning isn't the problem, it's how it was done in the 2017 movie. He's already OP but that shouldn't mean his comrades have to be useless in comparison.

Superman was allowed to be OP in the Snyder Cut without making his team look incompetent. Like in the Avengers movies, everyone in the Justice League had a purpose and all of them worked together to defeat Steppenwolf. Superman obviously was key to winning, but, again, it wasn't like he was the only capable one during the battle.

I did like the black suit. It's kind of ominous but also very cool at the same time. But is it also foreshadowing something? I don't know...I haven't read the comics so I really don't have any idea lol.

Batman/Bruce Wayne/Batfleck

One glaring issue I still have is Ben Affleck is a mediocre actor at best and he's a terrible Bruce Wayne/Batman. I mean, they couldn't have found anyone else? Someone with, like, good acting abilities?

Martian Manhunter

This whole time -- THIS WHOLE GOTDAMM TIME -- Martian Manhunter was hiding in plain sight! General Swanwick, who I remember from "Man of Steel," IS Martian Manhunter. I didn't see that coming. I mean, I knew Martian Manhunter would appear in the Snyder Cut but I didn't know he'd have an alternate identity, let alone that of an existing character in the DCEU.

As much as I did like seeing him, I am glad he didn't play a big part because the movie already has plenty of characters as is, and introducing yet another one could have slowed things down and taken away from developing the plot.

The Runtime/Pacing

I mentioned already that the Whedon Cut felt rushed and needed much more time to develop its characters and plot. While I had doubts about whether or not making "Justice League" four hours long would be a good idea, it turns out that it was just what the story needed.

Character development was actually existent, and Cyborg/Victor Stone received a detailed backstory, and Flash/Barry Allen got some extra tidbits added to his character's story/background as well.

I actually thought Victor was a fascinating (if a bit tragic) character in the Whedon cut and was disappointed that he just sort of, like, popped up and fought alongside the other Justice League members with the tiniest amount of depth.

Despite an epic 4-hour runtime, it didn't feel slow, nor did it feel like any scenes were "filler." Every scene had a purpose and kept the story moving at a steady, comprehensible pace. It felt more like a 2.5-3 hour movie, honestly, which is a feat since pacing can often be one of a film's biggest issues ("Avengers: Endgame" also accomplished this feat with its 3-hour runtime feeling more like 2-2.5 hours but with no negative side effects of that). Breaking the movie into chapters, including an epilogue was a tad strange because it's not a very common thing, but I think it helped break up the epic 4 hours into separate, manageable but still cohesive pieces. Also, they helped easily transition from one portion to the next smoothly without any awkward cuts.

The Flash/Barry Allen/Ezra Miller

Barry still amused me in the Whedon Cut. He brought some good-natured humor and charm to the movie, preventing it from being too brooding and intense.

I think Ezra is a talented actor and does well in the Barry Allen role but he is, unfortunately, a problematic person. I mean, if he gets recast, he gets recast but hopefully, they pick someone else who has some acting abilities worth noting (i.e. Not a Ben Affleck type of actor)

The Final Battle

It was a huge improvement over the 2017 cut, as everyone was key to winning the final battle, not just Superman. It is meant to be a team of costumed heroes defeating a villain, not just one OP member of the team outdoing everyone else.

That being said, I felt that the final battle was a little bit anti-climatic. I don't know what it was but I just thought that it would be longer? I expected more to happen? More fighting? Not sure how to describe it, but I do feel like it wasn't as impressive as it could have been.

The Epilogue

A dystopian future involving an evil Superman and Joker somehow working WITH Batman was just...crazy. I mean, evil Superman, I can believe, but Joker and Batman working together (even reluctantly) is quite a sight.

Based on what I've been reading, this nightmare Bruce has could be setting up not one but two sequels for "Justice League." I would like to see how things will play out even if things get kind of dark. I'm getting the impression that Darkseid will kill Lois Lane, thus breaking Superman emotionally and making him compliant. That is unless Bruce intervenes in this timeline and prevents that from happening...but at the expense of his own life. Oh dear...

I definitely enjoyed the Zack Snyder version of "Justice League," and would definitely watch it again and again and again. I already have forgotten the majority of the Whedon Cut, and after seeing Synder's version, I think the 2017 movie will be rendered null and void. I hope it is just expelled from the DCEU canon entirely. That, and we get the "Justice League" sequels, preferably from Zack Snyder (Say what you want but I think he is a pretty good director for the most part and seems to really care about this work).

I honestly want to see a fight between the Justice League and Darkseid because I think that's what we're trying to build up to, and seeing as how Darkseid is one of the legendary villains in the DC comics, I would be extremely disappointed if this doesn't come to pass.

Also, as much as I like Batman/Bruce Wayne, seeing him sacrifice himself to save the team, including Lois and thus Superman's sanity, would be something else. It would bring everyone even closer together, for one, and I think that the negativity shared between Batman and Superman in the past would be completely forgiven. I'm not saying there isn't forgiveness now, but dying to save Superman's wife would change everything....if that makes sense? Does it make sense? I'm terrible at explaining my thoughts sometimes.

[popculturebuffet]

Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Restrospective: The Raider of the Copper Hill! “You Got Rich Son”

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to my retrospective of the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck! It’s been far too long, almost three months since we last checked in with Scrooge and frankly I feel i’ve been spacing these entries out too much for this one and for the retrospectives that aren’t paid for in general. So expect at least one McDuck adventure a month till I finish, possibly two when I can swing it like this month. 

Now i’m done beating myself up, when we last left off a younger more naive, more optimistic and less experienced Scooge took up a career as a cowboy for  Cattle Baron, gained his first sidekick in the form of his Horse Hortense, and took out some cattle thieves with the help of Teddy Fucking Roosevelt. 

This chapter marks the end of the story’s first act. The first act is about a younger and far nicer Scrooge: still onrey and still a cheapskate, but still a good kid and far more outwardly friendly and welcoming, a far cry from the bitter untrusting man we come to know. This chapter is one of the reasons why, as Scrooge learns a hard lesson about wealth and success, the sacrifices one needs to make for family and about sticking your hand in a lightbulb while it’s plugged in. So join me under the cut as Scrooge meets another valuable mentor, one of his greatest enemies, and about 50 feet of barbed wire. 

We begin with the end of Scrooge’s time as a ranch hand and cowpunch. With homesteaders moving in and dividing up the land, Murdo simply dosen’t have the space for cattle baroning anymore and has to let Scrooge go and head back to texas. We do get a great bit of Scrooge wrapped in barbed wire, having gone to cut some down so Murdo could move the herd out. 

So with his Job done and parting on good terms with his old boss, Scrooge sets up his own homestead on some land near the Anaconda Silver Mine, trying to make it as a prospector, starting on the path that would eventually lead him to riches.. in about a decade and a half.

 So Scrooge bemoans his rotten luck over Dinner with a stranger, Marcus Daly owner of said mine... who just.. randomly sat down to have dinner with a 17 year old. 

Marcus belays his own woes: While Scrooge has failed at what he tried to do, having gotten into both steamboating and cattle punching too late to go anywhere with either, Daly has a silver mine that’s full of copper: decent amoutns of it but still not what his investors wanted. 

Both however find their fortunes reverse in an instant in the weirdest way possible. The light goes out at their table and Scrooge tries to adjust it only to electcute himself. To his shock...

He finds out it’s running on electricty, which is starting to become widespread.. and requires vast amounts of copper wiring. Scrooge is back in the game but finds trouble getting equipment as the local seller naturally is a jackass who jacks up the price. Scrooge instead sells the gold teeth his dad gave him to the nearest gentleman after talking him into it. . And i’ts not even the weirdest transaction i’ve seen this week. 

For the record those weird things are the guy on the left’s skinflakes, his power is to make naked golems of himself out of his dandruff and skin flakes and what have you, while the guy on the right is paying for a mutant with a star for a head. So yeah a scottish cowboy selling his ancestor’s dentures to pay for mining gear is refelshingly tame after all of this. 

So we get the comic equivleant of a montage as Scrooge starts his work at prospecting, making a portable homesteader shack as a miner owns any land he lives on, and moving around to try and find it, but he runs into a problem: with his last two careers he had mentors to help him learn what to do: Pothole taught him riverboating and Murdo helped him learn to ride the trails. Here he has no one and while you can self teach a lot of things prospecting isn’t one of them. 

He end sup finding one though as a rich gentleman asking about the mine happens to wander by: Howard D. Rockerduck. If that names sounds familiar it should as he’s indeed the father of exactly who your thinking of and we meet a young 10 or so year old john who asks him to stop dealing with a grubby workman. We also find out whose responsible for him turning out ot be such a piece of work as his mother’s response to his father telling him “I used to be a grubby workman is well... word’s cant’ do this amount of classist bulslhit justice. 

Seriously his unnamed wife is so odious it hurts. And how the fuck did an honest, kind man like Howard end up with this bitch? It’ sbaffled me every time i’ve read this: did he marry for money? is he a gold digger? go down gold dig get down? Is she just THAT good in bed? Did he just make a horrible mistake one night? Did she lie to him about who she was? Was she replaced by a skrull? I have questions no duck comic has properly explained.. and if they have please tell me.  Also it does tickle me we’re getting a bit with a duck named howard though sadly he wears a top hat instead of a nice little bowler. And if you don’t know who howard the duck is.. shame on you. And if you’ve seen the movie.. my deepest sympathies. 

While Howard laments wanting to horsewhip his son, this was a century ago with change mind you standards were different and also John sucks. Howard crticizes Scrooge’s techqniue after introducing himself, and Scrooge and him get into a bit of a tizzy, with Howard offering to teach him for two cents.. but the hostility quickly desolves hours later as Scrooge realizes Howard was right and he’d been doing things completely wrong and the thrill of hard honest work again has washed away any ego driven competiviness. 

I”ll get more into Howard in a second but he does eventually strike copper, and while the vein is full it’s also thin. But Howard has one final trick and takes Scroogey for an ore test. I tried to find more on this but just found a lot of ways to do it yourself and what not. I”m now really intrigued how they did this and found the content of minerals. I know it’s a dull subject but i’m curious how they did it with the technology of the time. Did they just use acids like I found? If so how’d they get them? I do say this is one of the great qualities of Rosa’s works: he makes you want to learn more about history. I looked up more about TR after the last chapter and now I want to know how the hell metallurgy worked in the late 1800′s. 

We then get an intresting interacton as Scrooge.. warmly greets the townsfolk and vice versa.. yes the same Scrooge who as an adult would be introduced proclaming...

Is warm, optimistic and wholeheartedly belieives...

As you can probably tell by Howard’s reaction and what Scrooge becomes.. this story’s all about shattering that notion and is the first of two to shatter the poor kid’s trust in people and make him into the bitter old sod we know. 

The sample comes back 55% positive... which leaves Howard rushing to get Scrooge to a court house. As it turns out there’s an old, very real for the time, mining law called the Law of Apex: whoever owns the land closest to where an ore vein is on the surface owns the whole thing... so legally Scrogoe owns the ENTIRE ANACONDA COPPER MINE, which at this point as detailed in the time skip has gone from struggling to utterly thriving and sucessful. Whoever owns the land at the time the Judge rules it gets the mine.. and Scrooge’s friends, who seconds ago were concerned about him being dragged into court.. are now all scrambling to take his fortune, something Howard dosen’t seem at all suprised about. 

But while this may be a kinder, more naive Scrooge McDuck, it’s still SCROOGE MCDUCK. His response is to cut a nearbye power wire and swing it tarzan style over to hortense and ride her back ahead of the mob... with the electric wire slapping her rear and causing her to go extra fast.. and also quit. So Scrooge stands alone but manages to take out some of the ruffians with his shack while John and the Judge rush to the site. As for Scrooge well... you want to see what a McDuck family beserker rage against an ENTIRE angry mob of opportunistic assholes look like? 

And this isn’t even the most badass thing Scrooge will do this series. Or even in the next few issues. That’s how awesome this series is: fighting an angry mob SOLO with simply his pure rage and whatever he can grab and throw. And he WINS. He’s exausted and passes out, falling out of the sky on his final opponent.. but he took out what was at the LEAST 50 men, and ONLY passed out because one of them threw dynamite in his out house.. and even THAT didn’t kill him or put him out, simply casuing him to land on said dynamite throwing idiot and wins. 

We find out Rockerduck actually was one of the mine’s owners but helped Scrooge anyway: he has more than enough money and all it’s going to do in the end is go to a greedy brat. Marcus Daly shows up and while he’ll get the law overturned eventually, he still has to shut down while that happens and finds the right officials to bribe. And this is the 1800s... you gotta go by train to do your bribes. You can’t just do that shit over email and hidden bank accounts. Daly offers him 10,000.. but given what Scrooge could earn even before he got his mine back, Scrooge turns it down. 

However this victory is bittersweet as Scrooge warmly greets his friends.. only for one to cuss him out and the other to tell him to get loss. We then get one of my faviorite exchanges in this story.

This whole Panel is a masterwork. The sheer INNOCENCE on Scrooge’s face, almost looking like Donald, desperately wondering what he did, when as Howard points out.. he did nothing wrong. He simply got successful and they resent him for it. 

This has been a hard paragraph for me to write as I want to tread carefully. People do have good reasons to scorn the rich or celebrtiies sometimes. Some rich people or those in the media are genuinely terrible. Jeff Bezos, Tucker Carlson, Mel Gibson, Louie CK, Joss Whedon and even someone as low on the totem pole as Doug Walker is odious. And of course we all can think of one odious example of rich bastard i’d rather not think of, especially when thinking of John D Rockerduck and what he’l lbecome as an adult that i’m not giving a pleasure of the name drop but came to mind. 

But even for good people becoming succesful puts up a barrier between you and other people: Fans of yours will admire you or write fanfic or what have about you without even knowing you, i’ve been on that side, and some people will hate you just because without valid reason, especially in this day and age. Success breeds resentment and even people you trusted and loved can sometimes turn on you. It’s the double eged sword of achieving your dreams: You get what you wanted but you often loose what you had. 

And it was no diffrent two centuries ago, with Scrooge’s friends only being friendly as long as it suited them, turning on him first to steal his chance at glory and then to scorn him for daring to achieve it. Some people.. are only there for you as long as your not above them. And sometimes you can be happy. Look at Tom Hanks, who has a lovely family and a long and storied career. Or Linkara, a youtuber who has been at this for over a decade, has tons of fans, a loving wife with her own succesful channel, and just recently got contacted by his childhood heroes. You CAN be happy and successful.. it’s just very hard to make it that far. 

One of the central points of life and times is that’s often not the case: You can get what you want but it comes at a cost. And it’s how you pay that price that will determine how happy you are. Another central point intertwined with it is it’s not the journey but the destination, and i’ts how Scrooge takes that journey that ultimately leads him where he ends up good and bad. And we get an all to telling all too foreboding hint in how he takes everyone he knew for at least a year turning on him overnight. 

When faced with his first real loss on this Journey that wasn’t material.. he dosen’t care. He has his money and riches and that’s enough. And as we’ll see that attitude will cost him greatly. Howard is irate for a moment, hoping he wasn’t wrong in trusting Scrooge.. and indeed, for now, turns out to have placed his faith in the right person as Scrooge gets a telegram: his family needs him. And while he could stay, turn his back on them, and earn MILLIONS.. he tells Howard  to tell the owner he’s taking the deal. For now when given the choice between his family and his fortune, SCrooge will choose them. Sadly.. that won’t hold true forever. 

With this being the end of his time in the story, as he has a still insufferable John buy him a horsewhip for horrific but darkly funny reasons, as John brags about how rich his father is not realizing he’s buying his own whupping tool, i’d like to touch on Howard D Rockerduck and how amazing he is. Rosa managed to pack a throughly interesting, throughly engaging character into only 8 pages. While Rockerduck DID show up earlier in of ducks dimes and destinys, he wasn’t really fleshed out or named and only showed up for one page so still 9 pages total. 

But in those we see a kind and noble man whose easily what Scrooge COULD have been, kind, noble, generous, hardworking and willing to give up money to help people. He’s a good man.. but even he’s seen the sacrifice Money brings. He’s clearly lost friends, lost a sense of peace, and married the wrong Woman, whose poisoned his children into a spoiled brat who will only grown into an even more spoield adult in both continuities.. if raised quite a bit earlier in the 2017 cartoon as he was made scrooge’s contemporary there rather than a child, but semeantics. Point is Howard hismelf isn’t wholly satisfied with his success.. and that’s what he and Scrooge will forever have in common, with Scrooge, likely as a result of meeting the Rockerducks, fearing an indadiquate inheritor and someone squandering what he worked hard for. Though his reasons for not taking up a wife as we’ll see eventually, if outside the main 12 part story but I intend to cover the subchapters in their own time, aren’t entirely motivated by avoiding goldigging but a broken hard and his own stubborness. 

For now though we bid Howard and america adue. Scrooge however for once ends an occupation with less bitterness. Unlike his last two ventures where he made it out with only enough to get to the next one here he made it out ahead: he now has a decent suit, likely bought for him by Howard given he hasn’t cashed the check yet, I know this as it’s a major plot point for next time, 10,000 dollars.. and experince. He may of not gotten all the money he was due on this venture, but he learned more valuable skills and he feels with a land like america, the next opportunity to earn some dough is just waiting for him to get back. And as the chapter ends he muses that maybe the country could use a symbol of this countries boundless opportunity...

Final Thoughts for the Raider of the Copper Hill:

This chapter is one of my favorites. It’s nicely paced, something Rosa himself admits was often a struggle as he had to cover years at a time, has a wonderful new mentor for Scrooge, and sets up a lot of the tragedy to come in the last act beautifully. It’s a nice closer for our first act, showing Scrooge has come out of his first trip to america wiser, more experinced and more hopeful, but at heart still the same kind and noble kid he left Glasgow as. The next act is about the change of that boy into a man, how he will finally find his fortune after some more adventures.. and how the last viestges of his kindess and optimisim towards others die at the hands of a certain fake scotish gentleman. 

Next Life And Times: As is tradition for this series act openers, Scrooge returns home.. and just in time to get his castle back, fight a duel and go to heaven and back. So an average McDuck tuesday then. 

If you liked this review follow for more. And if you liked it a lot join my patreon so I can keep making these and hit my stretch goals. Even at just the 2 dollar level you get access to my discord and your pick of shorts whenever I do a series of them and with Goofy and Donald’s birthdays being the next ones to be celebrated you can’t pick a better time. patreon.com/popculturebuffet See you at the next rainbow. 

[skzss]

Walk with me

Member: Any? Written with Lee Minho in mind but it’s never specified so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ x reader

Warnings: Car crashes, death, slight claustrophobia, slight nyctophobia (fear of darkness)

Genre: Angst

Word count: 1997

Description: You don’t know at all what happens after death but at least there’s someone there to guide you.

Author’s notes: I had an existential crisis thinking about my life and what it would mean if I died right now and then I got to thinking about how reapers are much kinder than we think they are. After all, they guide us through to the other side, wherever that is, so we’re never alone. 

You knew this day was coming. 

After all, everyone dies someday. Some go easier than others but everyone goes someday. 

You had hoped, in vain, that you would die a little softer and a little gentler than you did. But you don’t get to choose these things. You remember screaming, hearing squealing wheels and smelling burning leather. You remember feeling very hot then very cold. You remember flashing lights before your consciousness dripped away. 

“Hey.” You feel someone shaking you. “Wake up already.” 

Huh? Aren’t you supposed to be dead? That car hit right against your passenger side door, there’s no way you’re not dead right? You crack open an eye and it’s dark. Definitely not the hospital then because those places are always the worst sort of fluorescent yellow light. It doesn’t smell like any kind of hospital either. The air is rich with decay and you wrinkle your nose at it. The voice you heard scoffs, mutters a “typical human”. You look up and you blink, once, twice. 

A hooded figure towers over you. A reaper holding a stereotypical scythe, though this one seems impatient. They nudge you again with their foot, sighing. “Not very fast are you.” 

“I just died, can’t you give me some slack?!” You grumble as you sit up, surveying your surroundings. You don’t see the crash anymore, or your body, though that’s for the better. You might be mangled up by now and you definitely don’t want to see that. 

“No, I’ve got other souls to see too. Let’s go.” The figure doesn’t even bother offering you a hand, instead immediately striding off. You scramble to your feet and dart to their side. It’s much too dark for you to find your way without them. Way to where you’re not even sure but you sure as hell don’t want to be left behind here. They set a breakneck pace and you struggle a bit to keep up. Even if you’re a spirit now, a soul or whatever, you still aren’t very fast. Apparently your dead lungs still transmit signals to your dead brain to slow down. You couldn’t exactly wheeze but your ghost got as close to that as possible. Sparing you a glance, the reaper slows down marginally and you manage to catch up. 

“So,” you huff, “where am I going?” You weren’t a bad person. You weren’t necessarily good either. Everyday, you just lived your life, with some care for the world around you and some care for yourself. Whenever you could you’d use recycled materials or avoid printing excess pages, but you didn’t stop using plastic entirely or give up your air conditioner either. The best you could hope for was probably something akin to purgatory, where you’d be neither heralded nor hurt. 

“You’ll see,” they say. You frown. First of all, cryptic as fuck. Secondly, why do they sound so annoyed? If anything, shouldn’t you be annoyed at dying? You grumble under your breath but they don’t seem to care at all. 

For a while it’s quiet. There’s no sounds, even from your plodding footsteps. You don’t feel any  more tired than you did when you first started. Perhaps you could walk infinity without feeling tired. The figure next to you glides along, ever forward without taking any turns. Though could they even take turns in this vast, endless darkness? 

Your mind wanders back to your life, or rather who’s left alive. You hope someone will take care of your cat. She does get rather hissy when she isn’t fed on time. Someone will probably tell your parents. Your heart clenches. Your mom will probably collapse on the spot in shock while your dad silently holds her, hands gripped tight around her arms. They’ll ask to see your body maybe. They’ll definitely cry. You send a quiet apology for dying so soon. Your friends, they’ll know too sooner or later. You apologize to them too even though they’ll never hear. Hopefully they’ll divide your belongings among themselves without too much fuss. Your mom will want some of it but the vast majority of your stuff will go somewhere else. 

“Will you stop,” a voice snarls. You snap your head up to look at the figure who’s gripping their scythe so tight it’s turning their knuckles white. Now that you’re looking at them properly, they kind of look like a regular person. You can’t see under the hood exactly but their hand isn’t skeletal at all. Their fingers twitch on the pole. “You’re thinking too loud.” 

You stop. “You can hear that?” 

They groan and stop as well, a few feet ahead of you. “Sort of. It’s not the exact thought if that’s what you’re worried about.” 

Your face scrunches up. “What does that mean? You’re sensing auras or something?”

They snort. “Sure, auras. Feelings. Whatever you want to call it.” 

Ugh, just what you needed. A nosy reaper to take you into the void. You start walking again, standing next to them and waiting for them to continue onward. They seem to look you up and down before doing so. 

“So what am I supposed to do while we walk? Does this ever end or am I stuck strolling around with you?” You sigh, throwing your hands up in the air. 

“As if. I told you, I’ve got other souls to see too.” 

“So then when-” you start but they silence you with a flick of their wrist. 

“You will know when we get there.” 

Again, cryptic and unhelpful but you sigh and allow the silence to fall again. If you’re not going to get answers out of this guy then why bother? But since you can’t dwell in your thoughts too long, you don’t know what to do. What were you doing before the crash? Singing? Probably. You love music, so much that you were constantly listening to it. Even in your sleep! Perhaps the only moments of silence in your life were when you were taking exams for school. 

What was the last song you were playing? Hopefully something good. Your playlists weren’t exactly filtered through so some of the songs were from before your music tastes changed. You hear a defeated sigh. “You were listening to Teenager. GOT7.” Well, you muse, at least it was a good song. 

You wonder how much long you’ll be walking but apparently the answer was not long at all. The pure black melts into a gloomy grey so you can see a little better. The reaper holds an arm out in front of you, making you stop in front of what seems to be nothing truthfully. But you can sense something from the space in front of you and well, your guide should definitely know what’s going on. 

“Wait here.” They push you back just a bit before stepping forward and- You blink. They’re gone, utterly vanished into that pale light. If you squint just a little harder, you can see the barest outline of a doorway. 

Left out there by yourself, it’s… Eerie. It may not be pitch black anymore but even in the dim light, you feel uneasy. Your skin crawls because it’s too quiet. There’s not a sound at all, nothing to indicate that this space even really exists. Or that you exist. That reaper had really put you at ease, hadn’t they? Walking by your side, a presence to shield you from some of the suffocating clutches of the vast void. You regret being a little impatient with them now, even as you hope to whatever deity listens that they’ll be back soon. Something tells you that you don’t want to be left here, alone, for any reason at all. You can’t help pacing around a little, thumb coming up to your mouth. Bad habits don’t die apparently. 

Your throat feels tight and it’s hard to breathe and everything feels smaller even though it’s just a great empty nothing and and and-

“Quit that.” You jerk your head up to see the reaper. Even from their voice they sound agitated but when you look up, you actually. Woah. 

He’s really cute. His lips are drawn in a tight line and his forehead is wrinkled as he stares down at you. Wait, since when were you on the floor, crumpled up like this? You jump up, a little unsteady. Fuck that’s embarrassing. Anyways, back to the cute guy who’s apparently been walking by your side the whole time. 

“Come on.” 

The door materializes, heavy and dark wood. It looks as ominous as you would expect but there’s also comfort in seeing something so real. You attempt to take a step forward but your legs give out. Now of all times, you think as you collapse. The guy sucks in a breath and darts forward to catch you even a little, his hand gripping your arm tight. “Sorry,” you mumble, your other hand firm on the ground. “Sorry, I’ll get up, I-” 

Your brain races to recap this whole situation. You’re dead. You died and you left everyone you loved behind and you never did anything meaningful with your stupid life and you, you, you-

You’re crying. You’re crying and your tears are warm. Some part of you thought they’d be cold. But they’re warm, down your cheeks and your chin and your nose. Your hands tremble even as they fly to your face and touch the tracks carved. Your chest heaves and you cry awfully human like for a ghost. 

Since when were you cradled in his chest? Since when had he set you down and pulled you quietly, gently into his arms? Since when had he begun to sing, a melody so soft it breaks your heart? He rocks you right there on the floor, surrounded by terrible gloom. He’s awfully warm for a reaper.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, again and again and again. Your face is pressed right into his robe and he’s shifted to stroking your head, tangling and detangling his fingers from your hair. “I’m sorry.” 

He clicks his tongue. “This is why you’re all so troublesome.” But he still keeps stroking, steadily draining away your desolation. 

You’ve never really given thought to reapers. They’re caricatures of Halloween and death and usually overly sinister to the point of being ridiculously goofy. But this one isn’t like that. He’s not just a skeleton dressed in a scary robe, using his scythe to tear down lives. He didn’t make you die. All he did was wake you up and walk with you through what could’ve been years of darkness. You grip his robes and look up. You probably look like shit honestly, with puffy red eyes and red cheeks. He looks down to meet you with a slight curve to his lips. “You’ve stopped crying.” Ah, how beautiful he is like this. 

You swallow. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, it was to be expected. You didn’t die very nicely. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t break halfway through.” He stands and offers you his hand. You take it with more strength than you thought you had. “Now, are you ready to go?” He gestures to the door. It creaks open but you can’t see what’s beyond. 

But you are, strangely, ready. Did you leave behind everything you had? All your regrets and sadness, there on the floor in his arms? Just what kind of magic did he cast on you? 

You take a deep breath and step forward until you’re just before the door. He’s held onto your hands this whole time and some part of you expected him to continue through the door. But he lets your hand float out of his own as you pass through. You whip around and manage to catch one last glimpse. 

Oh, how sad he looks, with his kind smile and crying eyes. It was a blessing to have him by your side as you went, wasn’t it? You muster up everything you have to shout.

“Thank you!”

[cats-moss-gays]

@terflies

You’ve been all over my posts so I’m just going to consolidate into this one. I’m tired of scrolling past your long and quite frankly boring responses. This post will be divided into sections. If you’re going to respond please say something interesting. However I doubt either of us will ever change the other’s mind. These are kind of like closing statements and I doubt I’ll make anymore major responses because I’m trying to stay focused on offline things.

1. Unanswered Questions

There are some questions and statements in my reblogs that you conveniently ignored.

Definition of a woman? You responded with some generic bs that very clearly isn’t an answer. I’ll be more specific, what should the dictionary definition be? Any ideas?

If I don’t feel like a woman am I allowed to identify as one? You said you weren’t going to humour this question but it is applicable to me and many other gc women. I definitely don’t have any internal feeling of womanhood, or any gender. Does this mean I have to be agender? Is the female gender label restricted to a certain feeling? Or is there absolutely nothing that women have in common?

What is the feeling of womanhood? You kind of answered this but I have a follow up question. You say the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being perceived as a woman. If I feel indifferent to this does it mean I’m not a woman? Additionally, many women feel uncomfortable with being perceived as a woman because of the misogyny associated with the label, does this make them men?

2. Inaccurate Statements and Lies

I don’t believe any “TRAs” define women by gender roles

You may not but there are many who do. It’s also important to point out how deeply ingrained gender roles are in society; you can’t stop them by just saying your choices exist in a vacuum. I’m sure you think I’m just making this up for fun, so here are some examples ;)  x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

So this whole…thing is dishonest from the start. Gender does not replace sex.

In another post you said that laws should be based on gender instead of sex. So which is it, either gender isn’t replacing sex or it is. When feminists talk about sex based oppression they’re called terfs. When gay people say their attraction is based on sex they’re called transphobic. When people were saying that only females get cervical cancer, they were called violent transphobes. Gender is absolutely attempting to replace sex as the basis of legal protections, safe spaces, political movements, etc. Two of the top post on my blog are more extreme example of this. x - x

BONUS: You’re saying TERF rhetoric

3. The “Questions” Post

You seem very confused about how to define biological sex and to some extent I understand that but you have to stop playing dumb. There must be some way that doctors are able to identify the sex of a fetus before it’s even born in the vast majority of cases, right? And before you try to say I’m just ignoring the existence of intersex people or trying to deny science, I’ll point out that I have watched and read a lot of “sex is a spectrum” stuff. I understand that DSDs exist and that biology is complicated. Our disagreement is mostly not over the facts but over how to define them. I know that however I explain it you’ll pretend you don’t understand it, so instead I’ll just link you to some other sources that explain it more in depth. x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

A third sex—and many creatures have more than two—does not necessarily mean a third gamete. Mostly this question is a childish distraction, but if you were to use a strict, gamete-based definition of sex the answer would be “none”.

So all infertile people are a third sex? To be female you have to be able to bear children? And you call me regressive, yikes. This can be debunked with the same sources from above but I wanted to feature it in my post because I want people to know that you think there’s a third sex.

I made a quick little chart to compare all the things gender has been compared to! The difference is that while many are socially defined, gender is socially constructed. If someone never interacted with other humans, they would still have a skin color, have or not have specific abilities, have a sexual orientation, and be male or female. They would not have an observable gender identity.

1 - You refuse to humor my questions about being a woman who doesn’t feel like one, however this is not in bad faith; I do want to know what you think. Many gc/radfems, including myself, and many women in general do not have a specific feeling of gender. This is especially true for gnc women, who often feel a disconnect from the feminine gender role and subsequently, the feminine gender. The solution is to realize that there are no standards to conform to to be a woman, no clothes or interests or feelings, just the biological reality one is born with.

2 - You say “the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being called a woman” but what does that mean? It’s circular reasoning, a fallacy called begging the question. How do you know you are a woman? If I gave up being a terf on tumblr, how would you advise that I identify if I don’t think I feel like a woman? My current plan was to just pick the mogai flag with the prettiest colors, but I’m thinking maybe there’s more to it than that...

3 - See my explanation above. Sex is comparable to race or disability or sexuality; gender is not.

4 - You say genders are social classes. If they are indeed social classes, they are unnecessary ones that reinforce oppression. They are undefinable when not based on biological sex or gender roles. The other example of classes I can think of is wealth. Wealth classes have obvious divisions, you can’t just identify into more money. Gender has nothing that is shared by every woman, man, or nonbinary, so you can just identify in and out of classes. Additionally, if there are like 100 genders, are there 100 classes? 

4. The “Biological” Sex Post

Gender does not replace sex

Then why are TRAs trying to say sexuality, legal protections, bathrooms, spaces, political movements, etc should be based on gender instead of sex? You keep contradicting yourself; you should talk to your fellow trans activists because many would disagree. Also see my response in part two.

A number of points here aren’t factually wrong but simple (*simply) irrelevant

So you would agree that biological sex is important and that it is relevant to many conversations? Then why were people getting mad about this?

Or this?

On to the specific examples. This post is long enough already and I’m not going to spoon feed basic biology to you because you’ll probably just ignore it. I referenced a variety of sources earlier. I’ll just reference Invisible Women since it’s an amazing book.

1. This first point is, appropriately enough, true in isolation; it just doesn’t support Paradox Institute’s argument. Listing it leads the audience to believe that truth is on their side, but PI do nothing at all to justify that.

So nothing here is true? They’re just lying? Here are their sources btw.

2. Generally irrelevant, but not entirely biologically accurate, either. It isn’t that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are categories intrinsic to nature that produce small, motile and large, immotile gametes respectively; ‘male’ and ‘female’ are labels we assign (generally, but not always) according to gamete size.

So it’s not relevant that one sex has the ability to carry children or menstruation or get an abortion? It’s not like there’s any issues women face specifically for that, right? So we assign the labels male and female to gametes. If you want to play semantics, sure, we created the words, but the gametes themselves already existed. Not really sure what you’re trying to say here other than disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and moving some words around. Are you implying that the categorizations of gametes are subjective? Are you saying there’s a spectrum of gametes?? Are eggs just big sperm and sperm just small eggs??? Genuinely have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to prove here.

3. Whatever your opinion of evolutionary psychology, this does not preclude gender. (On the contrary, we ought to include gender in our understanding of cultural development with respect to sex.)

The only gender in history was gender roles, and both were tied to sex in most cases. Sex absolutely came before gender and is more integral to our existence. In any time before the last few decades, gender and sex were basically synonyms.

4. Entirely a straw argument. And, to the contrary, precision greater than two sex categories would be beneficial (i.e. specific sex characteristics, history, endocrinology etc.).

Obviously doctors don’t just diagnose based on sex, they factor in medical history and other traits. Precision is irrelevant because it still focuses on sex not gender. If it’s “entirely a straw argument” why did someone else reblog your response with this?

Speaking as a member of a medical family, the medical one fucking OFFENDS me.

Blood type HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. Or biological sex! Both are totally irrelevant! And medication dosage is determined by AGE and SIZE. A 25-year-old 160-pound person with a penis needs the exact same dose as a 25-year-old 160-pound person with a vagina. In fact, possibly LESS of a dose, if the person with a penis is 5’10” and the person with a vagina is 5’5”. (The taller person may be underweight.)

This is just. UGH. I could scream.

@prismatic-bell​ this is one of the funniest and dumbest replies I’ve ever gotten. First of all “member of a medical family” tf is that lmao. This reminds me of that post where the “medical worker” tra turned out to be a garbage collector guy. I have no idea why you brought up blood type when it is literally never mentioned in the original post. Strawman much? Fucking obviously blood type isn’t affected by sex, and you’re completely missing the point if you think gender has anything to do with this. Medication dosage is decided by age and size, yes, but also biological sex. This is like basic medical science, dumbass. Mandatory reading from Invisible Women as punishment for your stupidity crimes:

People called her a terf for this :)

5. How sports are best divided is a far broader question than this point implies. We could, for example, segregate sports by relevant physical attributes (as is already the case in some sports) rather than by sex or gender. This point also presupposes (but does not justify) that a woman having an advantage in women’s sports by dint of being trans is significantly greater than an advantage any woman might have by dint of her natural attributes (which, empirically, she does not) and hence would be unfair. That said, enforcement of “female” sports is already marred by racism and perisexism.

You agree sex and gender are different, yes? So then why should males be in female sports? You’re trying to distract me with that stuff about physical performance and whatever. Focus on the question at hand, should males be allowed into female sports? We cannot eradicate sex-segregated sports because female athletes will be even more systematically disadvantaged. If you were truly a feminist you’d understand that female sports are the result of the movement you claim to support. More Invisible Women facts plus some interesting info about the plough hypothesis:

6. Simply untrue. Excluding trans women from statistics about women on the basis that doing so would affect those statistics is arbitrary at best. Those statistics may change, but that does not mean they are unsuitable or inappropriate. The exclusion of any subset of women can be justified in exactly the same way.

Nope! Stop trying to use women of color and intersex women as justifications for why we should let men pretend to be women. You’ve seen the hundreds of receipts of trans women committing all sorts of male violence. Has anyone found anywhere near a comparable number of trans men doing similar things? They have not, even though if trans men were truly men they would be much more violent.

7. The majority of single-sex spaces are, functionally, just as much single-gender (owing to the traditional equivalence of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and to the majority of the population being cis. Trans people have been using spaces appropriate to their gender for decades, whereas concerns about them doing so are based on speculation and hypotheticals rather than fact. (Aided, as with a lot of bigotry, by bad and manipulated statistics.)

I’ve spoken about my opinions on the bathroom debate before. If a passing trans person uses the bathroom of their choice I don’t really care, but there have already been many examples of men making women uncomfortable in their bathrooms, or worse. Making all bathrooms gender neutral is by far the worst idea, but unfortunately that seems to be where we’re headed. More Invisible Women, just for fun:

8. This is the worst red herring, exploiting violent misogyny for the sake of argument. It is another straw argument, too, since—even ignoring trans-positive feminism in practice and assuming trans people act only in self-interest—trans people are concerned with addressing such injustice.

Sure, many trans people are supportive of feminism. But we can’t effectively dismantle the patriarchy if we can’t accurately describe the (sex-based) oppression involved. Women are routinely silenced when talking about our biology, even when there is no “transphobic” language involved. “Trans-positive feminism” also often reinforces misogyny by supporting sex work and porn, and by shutting down analysis of things like femininity and makeup because “some women like it.” See also from trans activists: misogyny racism homophobia + lesbophobia

9. Similar to (7) there is no consistent distinction between sex and gender across law. Even so, this is another red herring as it is possible to recognise both sex and gender in laws and policies. Some laws already do (at least functionally, if not explicitly).

You can deny it but the TRA train is leaving without you and they’ve been clear about their goals. As you’ve seen in this post, gender is intended to replace sex. Those who bring up sex-based issues are silenced as “terfs” who deserve the hatred thrown at them.

Sorry for making such a long post but I was on a roll so I just kept writing. I don’t expect @terflies​ to respond to all of this but I wanted an excuse to make some sort of masterpost that links to a lot of my other posts and can be used in the future. Online school is going pretty well and I’m trying to start some doing some hobbies that are better than tumblr blogging.

[ilikebirdsig]

Honestly, I feel really stuck with Endeavor at the moment. And I just wanna talk about it for a bit because talking is the #1 way to sort out my thoughts most of the time.

My position, for clarity, is that I’m someone who’s dealt with (and still deals with) emotional abuse from a parent, and I’m not yet in a position to forgive that parent because the abuse is still ongoing and I haven’t had the benefit of distance.

At first, the redemption arc left a really bad taste in my mouth, but it also left me feeling a similar kind of torn. Because on the one hand, seeing Shouto’s reaction, that visible relief when he realised Endeavor was okay, made me feel sick. But after giving it a bit of thought (very little, actually), I couldn’t look at that and claim that I wouldn’t be the exact same in his position. Because familial relationships are so complicated and convuluted and the reason abuse from someone you care about is so difficult to handle is because they’re someone you care about, and that’s why it takes such a hold on you. If my parent were in a similar situation, I wouldn’t actively hope for their death. Obviously. The vast majority of people wouldn’t.

The most recent chapter, 192, has still left me feeling slightly hecked about all of this, because I can’t relate to Shouto’s displayed willingness to possibly forgive Enji in the future, but I also understand it. He’s separated Endeavor and Enji, and possibly in doing so, has separated the parts of his father he still admires and cares for from the parts that hurt him. I haven’t been able to do that, not yet. Shouto’s distance, being that he isn’t living under that roof anymore, is probably a factor playing into his ability to have done that.

But honestly I relate more to Natsuo’s reaction. Shouto’s also the youngest sibling and that definitely plays a part, but I’m a middle child of four and that probably has a hand in connecting me more to Natsuo, as well. I’d like to see more of him because I felt some difficult catharsis from that scene.

But, and after that serious note, this sounds totally stupid as I write it down instead of keeping it in my head, I really really like the Hawks/Endeavor dynamic. It’s entertaining, plain and simple, and I like the way that it acts as a means of revealing Hawks’ character. I really want to delve into the way the fandom is going to portray that in fanworks, because I’m a sucker for good characterisation. But it was just now, as I saw someone talking about a potential EndHawks AU, and I thought, oh, that would be fun to write, that I caught myself and honestly, I can taste bile in the back of my throat. Because I know I couldn’t separate Endeavor from Enji in order to do that, and the more the Hawks/Endeavor dynamic is explored in canon, the more that divide is going to be tested.

Because I think for me to ever truly feel safe to delve into EndHawks stuff without it being to my emotional detriment, it’d have to be established in canon that Hawks finds out about Enji’s history and that he reacts to that, that he gets the chance to know the bad of the person he admires and has this rapport with. Or it’d take an incredibly talented and thorough writer to provide that in fanfic. Because in its current state, that is a major, gaping hole in EndHawks being something I can sincerely enjoy, fun dynamic or no.

It’s so much fun to watch it play out but it just reminds me of the comedown as an abuse victim, after you have some genuinely good moment with your abuser, until your rational brain turns back on and reminds you that the person in front of you is the same person who’s hurt you so much. Who’s left you with lasting character flaws that you have to grapple with every day.

But the way the manga has laid it out, I just don’t know where Horikoshi is going to take it. Because over on one side, you have Shouto, splitting Endeavor from Enji seemingly entirely. Then you have Natsuo, with blatant refusal to acknowledge that his father is both a hero and an abuser, separate from one another--because a parent is supposed to be a child’s hero, according to convention. And then you have Hawks, who’s obviously grown up admiring Endeavor to his core, but who doesn’t even know there’s a persona to separate from the hero he holds up.

I don’t know if Horikoshi can juggle such a complex narrative. I think it’s more likely that Hawks never finds out, because that would require having three major opposing emotional views, and juggling those in the context of a shounen manga seems unlikely. Because this isn’t an abuse story. This is Midoriya’s story. There’s only so much time he can spend diverting from that main focus.

Anyway, I think these rambles did help me expel some of the pent-up helpless confusion I was feeling.

As always, I’m just going to hope that Horikoshi can tie up the loose ends he’s creating. He hasn’t fully disappointed me yet, and I have faith in him as a storyteller. Benefit of the doubt is my preference for these things.

(And even if he does something I dislike, what the fuck is the use of a death threat, or even taking it up with him at all? Fandoms are stupid sometimes.)

[sexy-cheese]

Rick and Morty Season 3 Episode 6

episode breakdown....and by breakdown I mean me....im breaking down...into sobs and endless sadness and bitter impatient tears....its me. im broken down Stage 1: we see a combination of enlightened rick (er) and toxic rick (tr) trying to get through the trauma of whatever it is they have just survived. Tr would most likely start rampaging, cursing, breaking shit, and trying to kill off anyone around him in a homicidal blur until he calmed down, however er is probably in there wondering why they even did the stupid thing in the first place. Its not their place to meddle. They are an all powerful super being with highly superior intelligence, so why do they feel this horror and trauma for such a worthless gain? Together they neutralize into a 'drink until the pain is gone mentality' henceforth leading to our rick's alcoholism and ideology of the just 'dont think about it' mindset this is the rick we know. The push everything aside, drink, and dont think Stage 2: Tr separates. If you notice, the very first thing he screams when he wakes up is "morty", because naturally it is the first thing on his mind. He frantically searches for him and then calls him a worthless piece of shit, continuously bringing up how stupid and useless he is. This comes from his severe fear of detachment from morty if he were ever to become overly confident and decide he doesnt need his grandpas cool adventures or life style anymore. If a morty gets too confident, he leaves his rick and becomes a sociopath. Normal rick can relatively keep the urge to bring morty's confidence down under control, but tr impulsively spews it out, so damn afriad that morty will wake up and realize he doesnt need him at any moment. He constantly has to cry out and tell him that they need each other, in his own toxic way. Calling him 'a piece of shit' is basically begging him 'dont leave me' he has to make him think he needs him. got it? lets move to the next step of stage 2 tr constantly says things like "im a god" "im above this" "everyone around me is garbage" "you think normal people can do this?" so obliviously this is his narcissism and entitlement, but digging deeper it is also his sense of inner insecurity. now, you may say 'WHAAAT RENATA HOW CAN DAT BEEE?" well lemme splain. basically rick knows how smart he is, he knows how powerful he is, and he knows all the stuff he could do with this power and intelligence....but that's the thing, he really doesnt know all the stuff he could be doing, because he doesnt do it. running around in the toxic can, you can see him panicking, frantically working and running to make stuff and do things. He knows how great he is, but he has no idea how to use it or what he should be doing with it. Think about it, when someone tells you "ayy, your the smartest being in the multiverse and could probably cure the world of every sickness"....wouldn't YOU be a little overwhelmed? He has so much to live up to (an impossible amount) that he hides behind the idea that he doesn't care about any of it. He cant use his power to save the universe, so instead he claims he doesnt care about it. but deep down he feels bad, because he feels like everyone expects him to do something, when in reality theres way too much to do so, to sum up, Toxic Rick is made up of multiple other different things than just narcissism and selfishness and rage...just like toxic morty, he is also his burning insecurity in the fact that hes just a normal man, who happens to be the only person who could ever hope to save the universe....and yet he has no idea how to do it Stage 3: meet enlightened rick. You're thinking, "oh, so THIS is the side of rick that actually COULD save the universe if he wanted because he IS confident enough in his abilities, right?" well the answer is no. this rick doesnt have a flipping clue either. how would he? there is no possible way to save every single multiverse, but unlike tr, instead of letting it consume him in misdirected guilt and insecurity, he instead has (healthily) let it go. Hence the name, he is now 'enlightened' from the worlds problems because he has thoroughly let go of his human need to be the hero and instead surpassed it all in the 'i need not meddle' mentality. BUT. you might ask, "well renaaaatttaaa then why isnt this rick super healthy? why isnt he perfect? why does he seem so interested in getting his other half back?" welll my little reader I have some thoughts. Thought 1) er has no humanity, attachment, purpose, selfworth, or cosmic opinion in himself, the human race, or the universe. why? because he has officially decided that its all pointless anyway and most importantly (big dividing factor here) he is OK WITH THAT. he has accepted the fact that he has surpassed human attachment because he has accessed infinite realities and multiverses to the point where nothing he thought had meaning does anymore. To become fully enlightened, he has let go all of his family, emotions, and self doubts because frankly, he just doesnt give a damn. But in a healthy way? Hes just let it all go, unlike tr who insists he 'doesnt give a fuck' when in fact, he does give millions and trillions of fucks and it eats him alive with each passing day. thoughts 2) so why does er work to get the phone to connect and work at getting his other half back? well he says it right there in the episode when he and confident morty are sitting in the parking lot at school. He says "im accountable to my toxins, right?" he wants to rejoin because he knows that tr has all his intelligence, all his power, and all his guilt wrapped up into a big toxic package. What does this mean? Hes FUCKING DANGEROUS. thats what it means. er is so enlightened, that he knows letting tr do his worst will mean the end of the world. now, for a little while in the episode, he tries to reason with himself and say that he shouldnt meddle in this either, because why is tr any better or worse than he is? but eventually he realizes the truth that tr left unchecked, is bad news for everyone and not worth lying idly back to watch the universe(s) burn. Because yeah...they would all burn Stage 4: now lets watch these two adorable little super humans interact. tr sums it up perfectly when he says "this is the part of your pussy grandpa that keeps it real".....yup. Thats pretty much the whole concept. If youve been paying attention, youve probably already figured out that er isnt exactly as healthy as he thinks he is. The truh of the matter is just sitting back with your thub up your ass like "oh theres no hope in solving ALL the probems, so let me just not interfere at all" is a pretty effed up way to think. Without tr, he probably wouldnt do anything but stay at home with his family and like, build toys electric toys for kids or something. He wouldnt DO anything extraordinary for fear of messing up the fragile stuff of the universe. Tr reminds him what a waste it would be to live a normal life and ignore their vast power. however, tr doesnt know how to use it either, so hence, the fighting breaks out. basically, they just have no idea how to use there god-like intelligence, and it gets ugly for both. even er says 'that stuff is a part of us and we need to put it back.' he knows that in sense he needs it, otherwise his power will be wasted buuuttt.......tr doesnt feel the same way. tr believes that without er, he could possibly become a real man. a real human. a real person who maybe actually cared about things and didnt feel so 'above' everything and so detatched. like a god among people who couldnt really connect with anyone. he doesnt want to go back to that lonely life of being the only one in his realm. this is why he keeps trying to destroy him while er just wants to recombine. Honestly, er is in the right here, (obviously) because he can see the big picture of how they need each other. Also, fun snidbit, tr is clearly the fighter of the two....clearly....and the sexy maker too apparently.....hehe....good to know good to know.....ahem.....anywaaayyyyy but.....looky here.... here I bring you.... Stage 5:tr doesnt give a shit. he doesnt give a fuck, he doesnt give a....oh,....Beth's here?..... he....leaves. immediately. so, here is where we see tr's true weakness, and what er truly hates about himself. He can't even bring himself to be around Beth or put her in any sort of harms way, so he leaves the very second she walks in the door. what does this mean? it is tr, er, and our rick's one true weakness. Truth is, he really cant be fully enlightened and reach his maximum potential, because of his human attachment to his family. Tr probably feels so guilty about leaving Beth (even though it was probably his idea because he was terrified of hurting her) that he cant even stand to look at her. he leaves immediately even though he was technically winning. plain as day, he admits his own true weakness, he just cares too much about his family to ever become truly godlike and reach his full enlightened potential. tr is human, er is the god. but er can see enough of himself to acknowledge that he needs his human self to be a fully functional human being. to truly be...rick. Stage 6 (almost done) and here it is....the moment er truly finally actually comes to terms with the fact that his 'version' of 'health' was actually just what he thought was his true potential. But alas, because the machine choses your version of health based on what YOU think is healthy, this is the issue he realizes. he didnt become healthy, he became his full potential, minus the pain and limits of human emotion. but the truth is, a full, enlightened, god-like potential is kinda useless without compassion and empathy...isnt it? I mean, if you have the power to save, but you just dont care....then whats the point? He realizes that essentially a god that does nothing is no god at all, and even if tr is a toxic, guilty, confused, miserable man too overwhelmed by his own potential to actually fufill it, he will accomplish more than er ever will just because of that energetic will to survive and just flipping DO SOMETHING. he literally realizes in this one moment that he would probably never accomplish anything like this, not without that crazy, overwhelming, miserably human passion that tr harbors in his soul for his shitty life and shitty decisions. and this is when he knows that they have to reunite, just for the sake of not wasting his life. Stage 7: (my personal favorite) ah yes.....the climax of the story. where it all becomes clear. something I havent touched on yet (which i bet you thought i forgot about....you lil scamp) is why tr is trying to make the whole world toxic. Why? simple. he has mistaken his toxic qualities for his humaness. (which in a way is true, but he also got a bunch of bad shit that er probably spends most of his energy keeping on the down low) and so in tr's mind, he isn't 'toxifying' the world, he releasing people's true emotions and true selves. he releasing the raw humanness inside them so they dont have to deal with their superegos always judging them and telling them how to live. he is the id, in a way, freeing all the other id's from their superegos so the world can be a genuine, purely human world. However, obviously, without superego the people are monsters, hence the carnage of the toxified people. to him, this is his way of saving the human world by bringing out their true human nature. unfortunately true human nature is primal and disgusting, but shh.....dont tell him that.....poor innocent bean....look how proud he is.... so proud..... ahem....anyway back to the climax. so now er shows up again and starts talking, lets analyyyyze. first off, er has learned something very important.....its tr's one weakness that he displayed when best walked in, hes afraid of losing/hurting his family. So of course, he targets toxic morty. and er knows this because he doesnt care about morty WHY WOULD HE? there are millions and trillions of mortys. it is beneath his highly superior brain to care, but tr sees the little picture, and in the moment, he needs morty to support him. He needs to latch onto him. he needs the human comfort. he doesnt want to admit that, but he needs it more than anything else in his life. in fact, he needs it so much, he doesnt even think er has the balls to do it, because he thinks he needs it too....but thats just it....he doesnt. and he knows he doesnt need that human connection, which is why he knows he needs his other half back to need it for him and here we have the moment that literally made tears come..... "irrational attachments"......that line just really hurt me bro.....it hurt me good.....it got me right in the soul....yikes. too real. *sniffle* anyway, back to er's rant. he basically sums it up by saying "you are literally incapable of seeing the bigger picture" hence tr's irrational love and dependency for his family, even though er and tr both know there are infinite sanchez families with infinite different fates that they have no way in saving or interfering in any way, tr still for some reason feels emotion towards a morty that really isnt even THE REAL morty. but think about this....its the most insecure morty, right? the one that is the most insecure, helpless morty of them all....its the one that needs him the most. the one that is least likely to ever leave him....*more sniffles* so of course he cares about him. I mean....we've seen what morty is like without him.... i think rick put it best when he called him 'a tiny american psycho'.....which I mean, he would be, right? hes related to rick afterall. with just enough jerry to keep him insecure. at least jerry was good for one thing. and soooo....thats the wayyyyy the news goes. At the very end we see a reunited rick. he even says 'master of both worlds'...meaning he is once again human and god. id and superego, making one highly functioning ego. the rick we know and love. a beautiful mess. so the meaning my friends.....you really shouldnt hate the bad pats of yourself, because at the end of the day, its kind of what makes you....human. wow....this got really freaking long, and I didnt even get into my whole theory about our morty being evil eyepatch morty. (remember in evil eyepatch morty episode where rick says "a confident morty is bad news, ill tell you when youre older".....well I think we know what that means now) yikes....and i thought rick was a handful when he was cocky. so there you have it. Our bread and butter, our saint and sinner, our sexy grandpa and teenage rocker.....our super genius space alcoholic. our rick sanchez. a beautiful chaotic mess.  wubba lubba dub dub bitches.

[cwdcshows]

Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Four

And we're back.  What does it say about a group of tv shows you watch when you don't miss them when they're not playing for four glorious weeks; and you're actually kind of reluctant to get back into it? I also find it hilarious that a major event like Crisis concluded nearly 24 hours ago and no one on here has posted anything about it.  I haven't even accidentally come across any spoilers; no major exclamations of "Arrowverse forever changed by Crisis on Infinite Earths!" or "What does X plot development mean for the future of DC/CW Shows?". Meanwhile when Doctor Who premiered two weeks ago and in the 24-36 hours it took for me get around to watching that, I came across half a dozen posts on Facebook and videos on youtube that, without explicitly saying so, made it clear that (****Spoiler*****) the Master was back and who he was.(****Spoiler*****) That to me, I think, is a spoiler unto itself, after a fashion; the fact that there was no major, earth(s) shattering outcome to Crisis to report or for people to comment on really sets the bar for my expectations going in this and that I doubt anything of consequence is going to come out of the last two episodes.  Which I'm not even going to watch back to back, because I honestly don't feel like it.  I'm going to try to get to the last one sometime later today, but definitely not right after part four; baring some improbable cliffhanger that's just too good not to see how it concludes. So here we go....

Okay, so they're combining the Monitor's origin story with the Maltusian Krona from the comics.  I can dig it, actually.   For those who don't know, in the comics, the ancient people of Maltus were one of the first advanced, sentient lifeforms to spring up in the universe.  One of their scientists, Krona, was obsessed with studying the dawn of time and witnessing how the universe was formed; in spite of legends that attempting to do so would be catastrophic.  His experiments caused time to fracture at the dawn of time, creating the multiverse; where there was originally supposed to only be a single universe. A segment of the Maltusians, I believe at least partly driven by a sense of responsibility to the universe for this incident, would evolve to become the Guardians of the universe, who would go on to eventually form the Green Lantern Corp. Conversely, in the comic the Monitor was basically just some random entity that somehow evolved on the moon of Maltus or Oa; I kind of forget why and don't feel like looking it up.  But he was just some super, lone naked dude, hanging out on this moon and came to learn about his doppelganger in the Anti-Monitor universe.  Somehow they battled across the divide between dimensions and the fight forced them both into a state of suspended animation; until Parriah's experiments awoken the Anti-monitor (if I'm not mistaken, as a result of accidentally destroying his own universe, which somehow fed power to the Anti-monitor; and gave AM the idea to destroy the other universes in the multiverse). While Krona is conventionally a villain, all in all this works well; merging Krona with the Monitor.  Especially since there's still an antagonist element with the Anti-Monitor. Hmmm.... I can't help but wonder if they intentionally lit this scene so that Mar Novu's wife would be cast in a blue light that makes it look like she has blue skin, reminiscent of the blue skin Maltusians have (eventually anyway). I'll admit, this opening sequence isn't bad.  The appearance at the end of the Anti-Monitor felt a little hokey, but if they can keep the momentum of the first few minutes going, they might pull it off. Okay, so I'm pretty sure Ryan Choi didn't have a beard in the last episode, which I'm taking to suggest they've been stuck at Vanishing Point for a while; and the main thing I have to say is, i would have given just about anything is they just had all of the "Paragons" have beards.  Ryan, Lex, J'Onnn Kara, Kate, Sara.  Just like, fuck it, it's been a month and we've all got beards. I laughed a little about Ryan writing that "the Paragon of Destiny doesn't even believe in tomorrow anymore." and it's like, you know.... you are at the end of time, so......🤷‍♂️ Wait, so when Lex replaced Superman, somehow part of Superman's cape got left behind; and Kara randomly walks around with it from time to time? "There is not there out there anymore..."  You know, that's actually a good point.  Vanishing Point is at the end of time for "Earth" 1; or rather the universe that Earth 1 resides in.... which was destroyed... the entire universe..... from beginning to end....So how the fuck is there still a Vanishing Point?   I mean, I know that it was, originally, like a time-frozen base hovering at the instant before the end of time, but in this scenario the Time Masters who maintained all of this tech and the base are gone, the base itself is in ruins; what's keep it....preserved or whatever?  For that matter, how is there even enough air, water or food to sustain anyone there for any length of time? Man, Barry just keeps bouncing off of walls, doesn't he? 

Hey, look at that, it's all of Oliver's greatest hits.... 😁 "Why would you make me re-live all of that?" Even Oliver Queen lost interest in re-watching the vast majority of Arrow.... Gee, I wonder why Oliver's talking all funny... I bet it's nothing. The reveal of Oliver to the "Paragons" would have been a lot more worthy of rally music they're playing under this scene, if they hadn't fucking just shown us him getting ready to go and meet with them.... "I am Oliver Queen, but I'm also something more...." Come on, you've been unintentionally building to this moment of actually making the whole "something else" line an actually important part of the show and you're going pull you're punches now? As has been brought up with the past installments, the whole Oliver becomes the Spectre thing is fine, but honestly, in typical Arrow fashion the execution is seriously wanting.  They could have spent the first fucking 7 or 8 episodes doing a proper build up to that.  Defy all expectations by killing off Oliver during the very first episode of the season, maybe right in the opening, and make it seem like his journey over the next couple of episodes was about him and his friends trying to bring him back to life; weaving in the retrospective element, only to subvert it with the reveal of him becoming the Spectre instead. Maybe throw in one last heroic act, where Oliver has the chance to go back, but sacrifices that opportunity to give someone else he meets along the way the chance to be brought back instead - fuck, maybe Mia.  Either she dies or gets wrapped up in a bid to bring Oliver back to life, only for her life to jeopardized; where if Oliver didn't give her his chance for life, she'd not make it back.  Then Corrigan shows up. Anyway.... Barry asking Oliver for a speedforce boost came off a lot more like a drug addict begging for a fix. So is Ryan's grand plan on Maltus to locate Mar is to...find the central bureaucracy....?

Where's J'Onn's brother when we need him?

Sigh.....

So they didn't really have any idea what to do with the group of "Paragons" who weren't going to Maltus, or how to make their part of the mission challenging during this installment; so they're going to pad part of four of a five-fucking-part crossover with some bullshit tangent of Barry randomly needing to connect with his memories to find the others?  Why can't Oliver (or should it be "Olivre" now?  I'm going to start calling him Olivre.)  Why can't Olivre keep all them together in the same memory or whatever fuckery he's doing?  Why does he have to rely on fucking Barry to make sure they don't all fall out of....Olivre? Why can't he help Barry find them without being cryptic?  Why do they even time for this?? Does Barry still have to look for Oliver?  And what about Kate?  They only met her one other time before all of this shit went down.  Either that's the only place Oliver would tuck her away, or Barry has no chance of finding her. Sigh....DCEU Flash....cool..... 🙄 I mean, I am kind of surprised they were a) even allowed to do this level of crossover, or b) that they managed to film it without anyone leaking it.  And I did kind of see some hints over the last 24 hours, but I kind of dismissed the likelihood that this version of the Flash would appear.  I keep wanting to calling "Mecha-Flash," because his suit looks more machine based than anything else. What DOES this mean?  The whole premise that Olivre just laid out to him was that this was......him, Olivre, basically, and/or the speedforce and that he was hiding the others....inside himself or whatever, inside memories to protect them.  That wasn't a memory, so now they're not only padding this installment with filler, they're just throwing in random shit for the hell of it. How does an ordinary human walking - not even running, it seems - at average speed, manage to give a Super the slip?  I mean, when Supergirl immediately found him, it didn't seem like much of a surprise, because with all her heightened senses it shouldn't have taken any effort to track him down, but by that same token he shouldn't have even gotten more than a few feet before she noticed. For that matter, and not like it's ever stopped them anyhow, but should Kara even have her powers on this alien planet that may or may not be orbiting a yellow sun? Alright, so lets give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume the "upgrades" Lex gave himself is how he managed to give Kara and Ryan the slip in the first place. So Olivre stuck Kate in just some random old memory from his life; so how the fuck is Barry supposed to locate her?  Especially since it's from a memory of Olivre's that Barry wasn't part of.....? Aaaaaaand the memory of Olivre is consciously aware of the likes of the Paragons floating around inside him, but doesn't know who they are or why they're there? Jesus, did the writers decide to try acid before they wrote this shit? I almost asked if that was memory Kara, but it has to be, since actual Kara is on another planet.  Which again, planet Maltus was in Universe 1, ostenstibly, which now gone, past, present and future..... How is Ryan not more injured by whatever blast Lex hit him with; you know, being nothing more than a flimsy, fragile human and all? "You left your family because someone you never even met told you you were needed" Did he though?  It's been a month, so I don't really remember the point where he was actually on board with all of this shit, but I do remember that when they first told him about the Crisis and asked him to come with them, all he wanted to do was to get back to his family.  Which is understandable. And seeing as how they spent weeks at Vanishing Point, how is it that they're only just revisiting this whole "are you sure you got the right person" thing now? Is this supposed to be their way of doing the whole sub-storyline in the comics, where Barry pops up randomly at different points in the past, trying to warn people about the impending Crisis; when he was running around the Anti-Monitor's antimatter cannon to destroy it, just before his death?  Because this is super convoluted. Wait, so Barry was tasked with just finding Olivre?  All while it was Olivre who told him what he had to do.... what the fuck is happening in this fucking episode?  It started out halfway descent; and now I have no fucking clue what is going on.  But it's pissing me off, because they're wasting a lot of time on this bullshit. This scene of Barry finding out about Olivre's deal is so fucking weird.  The way they shot it without either of them in the same frame makes it seem so disconnected. I kind of appreciate Lex's annoyed confusion that Mar somehow mistakes Lex's voice for that of his wife's.   I had to think for a second why Not-Diggle didn't recognize Barry, before remembering when Sara's death would have aligned with The Flash; and was confusing it with Laurel's death, when they definitely would have known who Barry or the Flash was. I forget though, was that scene before Barry's arrival with Jon talking to Laurel about taking up Sara's mantle one that originally happened on the show?  I swear that was a slow build up after Sara's death. Sans the blood, I've always loved how Caity Lotz looks in that original Canary costume.   I'll never understand why they tried to fix what wasn't broken. "When we were attacked...." "By the Anti-Monitor...." "Doesn't even sound like an actual name...." 🤣 Okay, that was good. How the fuck did Barry track down J'Onn during a memory he wasn't around for, let alone Kate? So first some random bald dude breaks into his lab and manages to talk some sense into him; albeit without offering any great proof that he is who he claims to be, much less prove he can actually help, but hey, he at least had the courtesy of walking through the door like a normal person.  Then someone else bursts in, tearing the door off its hinges or whatever and starts issuing threats to the (shorter) bald guy and some other random hairy dude behind her asks Mar to leave the room with him and..... he just does.... yeah, okay.  I mean, just the fact that they've gone back in time however many million years or whatever, let alone to another fucking planet without any need to address how or why Mar can understand any of them, it's pretty much just a free for all. Oh, okay; so now that Barry's side adventure has been neatly wrapped up, I guess it's time to pick up the kids from the daycare on Maltus, without so much as stopping to actually check and make sure that they completed the task they set out to do. So what, the Anti-Monitor's argument is that there are an infinite number of Monitors to do what the one Monitor they just convinced to give up on his experiment doesn't do?  And yet, by all indication, there was only the one Monitor who took his trip in the first place; otherwise there'd be an infinite fucking number of Mars who originally popped up in the antimatter universe to start with.  And I'm pretty sure that given those odds, the Anti-Monitor would have been screwed. The plan is to use the Paragons to...fan the flames to rebirth the universe or whatever, but one of the Paragons is missing and replaced by Lex; which unless by replacing Superman's name with his own somehow made Lex into the Paragon that Superman is supposed to be, their one man down of who they need. Wait, I've seen this fight sequence somewhere before......🤔

"You have failed this universe." 😐 "We focus.  A singular, laser like focus." I feel like I'm about see another familiar scene...

Somehow I just knew that the thing they were going to have to do would involve them just standing around looking serious and thinking hard.  I'm surprised they didn't just go full out Peter Pan and ask the audience to clap real hard to bring the universe back to life. This is some serious bullshit that they aren't even going to try and bring Brandon's Superman back for this climactic moment...and it's done.   Yeah, that might actually be the definition of anti-climax.  I mean, I know there's still somehow a whole fucking episode left this shit-fuckery, but man, I'm pretty sure they have to think hard to take a dump in the morning.  Jesus Christ. Yeah, right, I'm totally going to believe or care that they're suggesting that Olivre is going to die, again. So let see here, they literally killed and resurrected Olivre once within this cross-over, there's still one more episode left to this crossover; and there's still two episodes left to fucking Arrow.  So, no, not buying this.  I'm sure as hell not buying that they're going to kill Oliver fucking Queen twice without including Diggle.

[fapangel]

November Fourth. Antifa and BLM take up arms. The problem is too massive for even the FBI to handle, and several states descend into civil war (coastal Cali, cities of Chicago and Detroit, etc.). Geopolitical response?

Antifa and BLM combined might manage to take over a single apartment block. The Illinois Nazis can barely muster enough people to occupy a single fucking gazebo. What worries me with things like “CalExit” and such aren’t the relative handful of thugs - the FBI has taken down cartels with more hardware, willpower and killers then they have combined, after all - but rather the cultural forces that allowed them to rise. The thing that really caught my attention during the last brouhaha in Berkeley was the “normal people” in the crowd shouting “thank you!” at the antifa thugs, as claimed by the left-wing’s own propaganda outlets. (Source from a distinctly different viewpoint saying the same thing.) And we cannot dismiss the significance of California’s legislature’s “resistance,” which has signed a unilateral treaty with a foreign state, (a direct violation of the Constitution,) has passed multiple “travel bans” in an attempt to punish select other US states who’s policies they dislike, and have openly flaunted Federal immigration law by making it illegal for local law enforcement - state-wide - to even co-operate with Federal authorities in certain ways. 

California is acting like they’re an independent state, to be blunt - and I’ve heard more than a little arrogance coming from Californians. They’re the “sixth largest economy in the world all on their own,” and even their state legislators have been arguing that they pay more into Federal coffers via taxes than they get back, so if they did go their own way, they’d be just fine. 

There’s rural areas in California, yes - but the laws of the state are completely dictated by the far-left-wing urban centers - and the differences between these areas couldn’t be starker. Just ask anyone who’s actually went to California and compared/contrasted the fabulously wealthy urban centers, with their thriving tech and entertainment industries, and the rural areas, where people are struggling to make ends meet. Or consider this article. Or this piece, run by fucking NEWSWEEK, of all places! Or this article, that describes how the urban/rural inequality divide is nowhere worse than in California. Or consider how rural California is plagued by lawlessness and criminal activity so unchecked that most rural Californians can’t trust their own mailbox anymore, and must pick up correspondence at the Post Office directly, and vast volumes of trash are dumped on their property daily, with the authorities unwilling - or unable - to stop it. People in rural California are either fleeing to the coast - and if they can’t afford that, as many cannot, they flee East.

This isn’t an isolated example - it’s happening all across the country, and it’s getting worse, as this Stanford study shows. Our ideological and class divides are driving geographic divides; a closed feedback loop that is widening the gulf between one half of the nation and the other. This is a large source of the “smug liberal” phenomena; there’s an America that’s wealthy, deeply involved with a thriving and growing information economy that can afford to pour millions of dollars into kickstarting fucking Wi-Fi enabled juicers, and utterly confident about their future. Politics to them aren’t a matter of life-and-death, of immediate employment opportunities, or something that will significantly determine their future prospects. Politics to them is a social affair, a clique, an in-club, an opportunity to showcase their moral superiority in much the same way the rural South’s elite social circles revolved around church-related events and showcasing their superior piety. Is it any wonder then that they regard the rural people, who’s troubles are alien and opaque to them, with sneering mocking disdain at best, and outright, frothing hatred at worst? 

Read those last two articles I linked. I mean it. Read those, and then look me in the eye and tell me there isn’t a civil war brewing in this country. 

And know that I’m not beating up on the clannish mean lefties and ignoring the right-wing’s equally rigid hatred of the “city dwellers.” As the New Yorker’s review of “Hillbilly Elegy” points out, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: 

It’s one thing to criticize a culture. It’s another to see that the culture being criticized is formed partly in response to other cultures, and that those cultures are, in turn, worth criticizing. This is why explaining human behavior is so difficult: the buck never stops. The explanations don’t come to an obvious, final resting place.

There’s blame enough to go around, for sure. I beat up on the left wing because they currently control the broadcast media, the print media, the vast majority of the information/tech industry (silicon valley, for instance,) and Hollywood - in addition to the major urban centers, which often dictate the politics of an entire state that’s overwhelmingly rural outside of the suburban sprawl (witness Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan.) California exemplifies this effect due to its sheer size, and that’s why we’re seeing things coming unglued there, first. 

The people with the power to influence our opinion and thought en-masse, the people with deep pocketbooks for political fundraising and the people in charge of the most important sector of the American economy are telling rural/conservative dwellers to go to hell, and to take their concerns and complaints with them.  

Antifa and the Illinois nazis are just the beginning - the symptom, not the disease. And because of that, they’re only going to persist, and the problem’s only going to get worse. Some nations see low-level, constant violence for years or even decades before things really erupt - but the drawn-out smoldering claims plenty of lives before then, and is not easily extinguished. The seeds of the American Civil War were visible at the nation’s founding over a hundred years prior, with that silly “3/5ths of a person” thing - representing the South’s fears of total political disenfranchisement that would be realized when Lincoln (an abolitionist) was elected without bothering to get on the ballot in a single southern state. It wasn’t oppression or abuse that drove the Revolutionary War, remember - it was disenfranchisement. No taxation without representation. 

Now we have a situation where rural conservatives are being disenfranchised and suffering, materially and greatly and for the second or third generation in most places. And the backlash has been a long time coming -the Tea Party was the first rumbling, and Trump is just the first significant salvo. Not for nothing does he leap feet-first into stuff like the NFL protests - as a commentator on Twitter put it, Trump is providing “culture-war covering fire.” 

That’s where we’re at - not political strife, but cultural war. We are, in every way you care to name, a nation divided - and while the people predicting the Third Coming of Xenu, riding the dark moon Nibiru literally next Wednesday are the same chemtrail-cataloging kooks they’ve always been, it doesn’t mean that any discussion of this national malaise on sub-decade timescales is foolish. It’s one thing to observe that this divide is extant, steep, and growing - but it’s quite another to see a GQ.com article calling you and everyone you know, live and work with a fucking evil racist who doesn’t deserve a voice in the nation they live in. When a Presidential election can trigger over a week of constant street protests, demonstrations and riots, America looks less like America and more like those third-world countries we see on TV where every election is occasioned with screaming mobs in the streets that seem to have more say on the actual results of the election than the votes do. 

It’s not going to happen tomorrow. We have “time.” But when you consider how steep the divide is, how relentless the momentum, and the speed with which things are deteriorating, you’d be foolish not to be scared.

All in all, I doubt it can be stopped at this point. The forces in play are too vast for any dialogue to really penetrate - Scott Adams was absolutely correct when he said we’re living in two complete realities, closed-loops with their own vast contexts and truths, and never the twain shall meet. 

But until the eleventh hour, all we can really do is try. 

[serpent-energy]

My Immediate, Bewildered, Emotionally Charged: Post-Election 2016 REACTION (through quite expressive language)

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Post-Election Feelings; Who is Needy?

Can We Divide The Greedy?

Written by Sean Kadagian

Scattered, yet Organized

Hollow, yet always,

is there a prize.

--

This massive, omnipotent, and the great: Economic Wheel--which I capitalize by the way due to its obvious and vast, and clearly apparent greatness-- in which America has created, ever and perpetually being moved in every direction, visible in waves with its motion being dictated by this invisible hand that feeds on pettiness, classism, and greed--its movement has been rapid and inconsistent and now the country divides. We stand, we move, in divided patterns. Static interrupted vibrations to feel across the lands.

Protests in masses of White because the "minorities" know there's no use and worse has happened to them so the whining Whites march in anger because their apparent, and only other possible, savior, Hillary Clinton-- the rigid, two-faced, emmy-award-winning politician who lost to none other but a reality-TV star with one of the weirdest haircuts and owner of the strangest most ridiculous faces to have ever been politically behold. Which would you want? I'd rather a blind date show up and see what they got.

Is this the best America has to offer? Some people say it is. That they grew up in American families, being taught at a young age American values and what to aspire to. But it isn't. It's not the best we got and to think so is naive and ignorant. We have better. But the money isn't in better. At least it wasn't during this political race and the multiple comical debates that so many people had to watch as the dutiful and informed Americans they are. And we were all left with the most appaulling two options in history.

Bullying and ripping on eachother is what America saw their two presidential candidates doing on stage for hours when we were supposed to get down to what's going on in our country. I, for one, am a recovering heroin junky, addict, whatever--among (of course) many many other things. It's been a little over a year since I've been off the junk, but I lost five years of my life to it including multiple overdoses. During the presidential race, I maybe heard mention of it...I don't know, I can probably count it on one hand. And I'd really have to think about it and if they even mentioned it five, loud and clear times.

And I'm not being selfish. It's an epidemic. Each candidate coined it this actual term unveiling the gravity of the situation. Even the current and momentarily remaining president, Barrack Obama said this probably the clearest and most seemingly heartfelt. He sure he is good at what he does though...Who knows if it really is a concern of his, or the others that can really, actually change the current status-quo pertaining to the epidemic. But, and again, like I already said, I can count on one hand how many times it's been mentioned in combination of all three people.

Addicts are dying to a drug many do not fear anymore because once painkillers (opiates and opioids) began becoming more regulated, and OxyContin went off the market not too long after it got sued for originally and initially stating that their drug, which is essentially so close to the feeling of heroin that many call it "pharmaceutical heroin", is not addictive. They got sued hundreds of millions of dollars. Did they care? Of course not. They must be showering in their hundred dollar bills daily. Profiting off the deaths and terrible addictions to what many people originally addicted to Oxys and other painkillers switched to, and with little fear, like I had--heroin.

My greatest problem, which also inludes a kind of question, is I want to know exactly how Wall Street is proffiting off the opium being manufactured to heroin and many millions of pharmaceutical opioids and opiates, sent across seas from Afghanistan (mainly), as well as Mexico? How much are they proffiting and do they feel any remorse or guilt? Or is money really the most addictive and destructive creation man ever gave birth to? I blame money. But I also blame the psychopaths and sociopaths walking around Wall Street proffiting off screwing so many people over.

I still struggle with temptations, because, as we all know, heroin is heroin. And heroin always fixes things. Temporarily of course, but it also grabs you by the crotch after that first shot.

Do they want a youth dying out to an epidemic the government is literally completely to fault here? Sure, some doctors were crooked and would take certain favors in order to write out extra scripts to people, as Florida became known as not too many years ago, the Pill Mill.

It's known. So sure, it's an epidemic. But what do we do?

Do we revert to things like eastern philosophical approaches like meditation, finding our true selves and some peace within, as well as the practice of mindfulness? It's an idea. It's a start. It's an approach. And it's being done with some success. But when an ex junky is truly uncomfortable, out comes the voice tempting one to reach for the syringe one more time. Just to feel okay.

Or is the reason because our society doesn't offer much hope to our youth as they grow to teenagers and struggle with their identities and existential questions, like Do I fit into this society? And then into their early twenties...

With so much competition...With such an overwhelming number in our nation's populus...it sure gets a little bit crowded and just a tad overwhelming up in here...

When a friend wants you to try something saying it makes you feel better and you already don't feel comfortable in your own skin, what is your first instinct? I was a curious cat. And boy did it help. And then ruin...everything. The amount of tears and worry my family had gone through during my days of active addiction is heart-breaking.

And now...

Now, readjusting and re-entering a society that was already one that angered me before my addiction because of its size, intimidation in the amount of people doing what I wish to do...I feel like I lost out on years of learning. And although I'm not particularly an unintelligent person, I have lost years of chances to learn and harnass life skills which I lack and am only now learning

This entry of feelings through words was, at first thought, going to be about the nation and its clear divide because of the election results. But instead I brought up a problem that I went through and am still dealing with, because my learning takes place almost everyday. And this is happening in every single state of our great goddamn America.

--

Donald Trump said a lot of words. A lot of things he wants to not exist anymore. One of which, is the drugs that come through the border like it's water through a siv. He wants that to be eliminated. So many things, to me, it seems he doesn't understand. Although I do, and seemingly always get the feeling that he just says things for shock value and for votes...also for division and exitement. We must remember, he was a reality television star, as I mentioned somewhere in the beginning. He's a show-man who, out of mass division and disagreement and lack of seeing things through one lense instead of way-too-many, became the elected president to take office in January.

He talked about rebuilding America's infrastructure. That's a thought. His 100 Day Plan sounds completely naive and unreachable. I don't know what will happen...but as I merely mentioned one problem pertaining to the heroin epidemic, though a terribly horrific, and worst of all-- realistic problem--other problems such as the now-clearer-than-ever: systemic racism that is evident where minorities live and where and how whites live.

Yes our country is still segregated, and if you don't think so, just take a walk around some inner cities and then take a drive through a suburbia where upper-middle-class whites live. It's just a visual. Most of the time, visuals don't lie. They just tell. The actual blunt truth in so many ways is hard to accept at one's core and then still walk around with a kind of lightness and have empathy for all of mankind. I certainly don't. Though I am moreso than not, a highly sympathetic and understanding, and (well, I'd like to think so) a person than tries to embody and radiate kindness and benevolence.

Working like ants in a farm and buzzing bees to their flowers and back to their nest for more and more honey. How much money can we stack before we can say we've done it?We've reached the final level and now we can explore this world for what it really is, and not what the American media and national blue-tube shining artificial light and colors and loud dialogues demeaning other people, all trying to one up eachother--tells you.

I wish to lift you up.

I see colors, sure. The color of one's skin I am speaking of now, of course . But I know, as it is a fact, that we are all human beings. Really...period. One species. The only difference between I, a considered white person, and another person with black skin (just for this example), is our backgrounds and where we came from. Which is vast. Sure. But my background and where I came from can vary greatly from just another white person's. To have this in the forefront's of our collective conscience is important. To blame, maybe, just the American government. The whole lot. Maybe, no definitely, the god damn mother fucking media. God, it's really starting to just sound like a dirty, scummy word. "Telling you the truth, but of course, only how we see it!" Should be most of their slogans with a white man's face smiling a fake-white, fake-inviting smile.

Usually I get along with all different colors, ethnicities, races, and hopefully the aliens that I'm  waiting for to come down and show me something exciting and meaningful.

What I'm trying to say is, as long as you wish and remain aware of the energy and vibrations (vibes) you are giving off to others, more often than not, the reaction from the opposite person you are interacting with will be that of, nothing more, than a human. True humanness is openness, benevolence, a hint of curiosity, and hopefully a sure feeling of kindness.

If my openness and kindness in turn breaks through the possible shell that another person had to create as a protection to the brutalities and hard-to-handle emotions that any pill could barely touch....if I can break through that wall--a wall in which we all have in one form or another...it's just adaptation to our surroundings...But yes! If I can break that wall, there is nothing like your good vibes being reciprocated with enthusiasm and comfort by the opposite person.

"Come play over here, man. What's your name by the way?" he said with some excitement and curiosity.

"I'm Sean. You follow the Knicks?" I replied with a kind of joy resulting from the clear fact that I'd just broken through a seemingly hard-shelled-wearing human being.

Another human being's shell they created over time for safety to outside stimuli eventually becomes one of familiarity, therefore, comfortability. We like what we know. To open up and break that kind of shield from the discovered dangers of the world, it's a scary process. Makes me wonder why something like romance isn't being preached and put on a pedastal for being one of the most wonderful things in the world anymore.

My journey is to become naked. Metaphorically of course. I can get literally naked anytime I want... Anyway, point is, my aim--my long, elongated aim--is to shed myself and rid myself of my hardened and old and, in spots, witheringshell. Like a turtle that just needs to get out. Maybe then they could run fast. Maybe then I'd be laughing last.

All I know is that I blame Society. There. I said it. Well, typed it.

I blame Society.

Oh, how you raised me!

The fear and the letdown from childhood to the years of my confusing teens.

Excitement to letdown. My creative creations and of how they lay around in the thousands all around my entire life. Poetry. Short stories. Writings, songs, broken instruments, and instruments needing tuning.

So I hope.

I hope because wishing is childish. Look at what happened to my Santa Clause. Sure I don't blame my parents, but maybe Society could've dropped that fairytale decades ago...start raising some realists instead of people still believing that that Utopia we've all daydreamed and drempt of at one point or another throughout our lives still could happen if only people just tried a little harder. Perfection is a myth, yet we are driven, and we are driven, and we are set to be constantly driven, and I think sooner or later we'll be driving straight into these god damn brick walls like drunken fools. Just right into them. Fucking....

Crash.

--

So crash the Market! Erase those irritating, really, meaningless and useless numbers and abbreviations rolling by constantly at the bottom of the screen. Maybe some sexy french girl speaking in english with her seductive accent in a smokey, breathey voice will tell us: "A new era is coming. We must, and we are now starting, as you see: completely eliminate all that is meaningless, useless, loveless...drenched with countless people trying to get one up on eachother...forever attempting this endless climb up a ladder wrongly labeled success...Paradise is in meditation in the most basic form of the word. You now must become aware of your surroundings, your body, others, and how you act towards and around others. Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

If I truly heard something like this I wouldn't give a shit what hi-tech anarchist group hacked the whole thing and gave and laid out this kick-ass short and sexy interrupted speech. I'd be psyched. Ecstatic probably. Do you think you would you agree with enthusiasm as well? Also, maybe, with a kind of exhaustion and some word like finally banging around the outer-layers of your mind?

Are you waiting for something to be done to change these ways that really are so immature and beneath our growth--and when bringing up how long humans have been on this planet, and more specifically pertaining to us: how long America has been a nation--don't you think we should be a little further a long than we are? Just a tad? Not technologically. Referring to products and all the useless fun stuff that's sold in our country while other human beings across seas are starving to death every few seconds....I'm reffering to all that....we're good on that part. So good it's sickening. The fact is: so much of what is in our country is outdated and must be updated with not profit in mind, but of betterment for the entire country. Until a movement in government begins and makes any progress regardless of how slow it is, it's clear that all the fun -isms will remain engrained into our country's way of life. Classism and racism am I hinting towards especially. Sexism...that's a whole 'nother horse. I'll just leave that over here for now...

And Art is scattered in the airs of the internet and searching for reads, views, likes, acceptance, appreciation, and of course, somebody saying: A job well done Bucko. Do you like my face? Maybe soon they'll have reconstructive facial surgery for people just simply discontent with the appearance of their own face, disregarding any actual injury.

But that's how bad power--and the lack thereof--can make somebody. In this instance I am pertaining this reference to the many people in power truly, actually dictating how the millions inside their nation lives. Okay, maybe not dictating because what they're really doing is merely perpetuating a system that's been in place for almost close to a century now. The only positive I see with Donald Trump becoming president and taking office in January of 2017 (what a laugh even writing that out) is that there's no doubt he will create much needed tension and create an exciting kind of friction within the government, and congress. Tell you what, I'll be watching the news everyday once he's president. I can't imagine a more hysterical and perfect man to run the country. He's the epitome of our country really if you think about it. In two big ways. Self-absorbed, pretends to be somebody he's not. I'm not even sure who or what the guy is really about...besides himself I mean. I'm no doctor or nothin', but if I were, I think it'd be a safe to assume that our soon-to-be president Donald Trump might just be a sociopath. Sure is a funny one though. As long as you don't take this thing too seriously that is.

How much more self-absorbed do you think we can really become as a nation? The media, the just so awesome five-minute long commercials on TVwhile I'm just trying to watch Old School and let my brain melt a little bit (meanwhile I'm being told if only only ONLY I had some odd-word for a pillow that I'd dream of the most beautifully seductively enticing naked women in HD, or something better than HD they were saying...I don't know...they're really all just words to me)--and the many billboards throughout the cities and highways all across the country. Yes, you, whoever is reading these lonely, probably overly-extended words trying too hard to get you to understand that...never mind...the writer is of no importance here....I am only, and innocently, wondering, how often do you feel less than because of how often one in America is told by these things (the media, comwmercials, billboards, filtered news stations) that without many certain products, their attraction to the rest of mankind...to the rest of humanity, is nil to lesss than. Hideous. Prozac nation, right?

If one were to think abstractly for a second, yet with a simple lense on, that all humans need is sleep, food, and sex, then one can let go of all the materialistic American bullshit and maybe go on a hike and close your eyes in the sun and tell yourself as long as I can neutralize all the hectic westernized false-needs by false-claims like a burn on one's skin with the right ointment, you must tell yourself that it's okay. That once that thought--that it's okay--makes its way to the very depths of your mind and becomes, in the future, part of your foundational structure in your consciousness and even subconscious, then you will find contentment. Then you will know what peace is. It's transcendental. It's transformational. It's enlightening. To grab, grab, grab, or just lazily watch what's on TV, the individual is feeding their psyche too much negative stimulation. It creates a path for us of shallowness unless we question what is and wha is being presented by the millions and zillions. I believe Trump as President may actually spark this to happen more across the seas of people in the country. I don't believe the average American accepts everything that funny man with a sick hairdoe says. When one disagrees with something, it's either because they have the actual knowledge and know it to be false, or they just feel it deep at their core that they're getting jerked around--then they either wonder why and search for the truth, or if their an apathetic old bloke, they do what apathetic people do: they don't care.

So I ask only you: How much more can they make us American people feel less than whole and perfect, even in our imperfections? You know most none of the crap being advertised to "better our hollow and meaningless lives" is something your average--or any-- actually needs?

You ever think they'll let us be? My creativity is dwindling and I've been forgetting to read. A real statistic for no one to see. Is that how you might possibly feel? Hold on, I have another thought. I'll be right back. Just wait on the dot.

--

Of that which I disagree and don't approve of, I find a deep-seeded kind of resentment inside of me...sometimes lazily and apathetically it lives, and sometimes quite dramatically, and at times seemingly tragically-- it screams. All aimed towards the terribly angering act and overall facade that our government puts on and wears like a designer robe, exposing some terrible truths sporadically, but then tying the belt around the waist and once again recoiling into itself to hide all the things that normal citizens "just wouldn't understand" (in a demeaning voice just like how it'd sound).

I also blame quite seriously and heavily our American society as a whole--if you couldn't already strongly tell.

Yes. Fact.

And this was just a quick entry into a computer that actually baffles me most of the time in all my honesty to give, which brings in itself a kind of embarassment and slight shame that I, a "first-world", white American male of 24 years old, am quite technologically retarded pertaining to all the new phones and new computers that put out their new updates and (at times, so they hope) aesthetically more pleasing devices. It's all just confusing to the point of pointlessness. Settle down guys. Maybe go work on the holograum idea or something or other boys. All these contraptions being manipulated and sold to thinking they are far more superior to the prior device that came out only six or so goddamned prior to this one! At second thought...I don't believe I should feel any type of less for not staying up to date on the countless updates these corporate devices keep putting out. Instead I just don't buy into every new... New, if that makes any sense. I used to like shiny Pokemon cards when I was a kid. But I'm not a kid anymore. I'm fine with what I got. So move on with your whole "You are less if you do not buy and consume and become our latest piece of trash truly pointless product". Because if you have the last couple, I'd skip the next few.

See, I'm not here to prove much more than a feeling of frustration and confusion through language and hopefully some interesting clarity. Okay, now flash back to me talking about my not so bright days of breathing my old, wretched Junky air. I lost five years to my heroin addiction, and even had to be revived once. Basically, and I'll say it again for reiiteration, I lost out on learning the ways and tricks to this world and this cunningly, and oh so deceiving: Planet Earth while most others not sticking needles in their bodies advanced and adapted as they did. All I'm saying is I'm trying in a country that seems to be breaking stalemate and coming out of the closet a little bit in terms of all the skeletons that are just standing there like zombies, now with the doors open, we see them, but my wonder is Now what?

So,

If America is the captain of this planet, and does influence through numerous, simply countless things such as (the easy and known ones:) music, movies, our media, and especially pertaining to what we allow other nations to know, and more specifically: what we allow other nations as well as our own to think...

Oh yes, so if we are the Influence...the ones to Look At when the shit hits the fan...if we are the preached endlessly to be Saviors of this world... Then we must start looking within our own country. We must start looking at the faces of the youth. Ages eighteen to twenty five or something or other. Interview. Ask questions. The right Questions. I can gaurantee all the debates on police brutality and the past killings and (most-likely) future killings to come, as well as the sexy topic of "Gun Control", will be idiotically debated back and forth by people that either know the massive amount of stupidity behind their claims, or we just allow dumbasses for average Americans--many of whom pick a news channel and stay with it and either agree, disagree, get mad at, or fall apathetically into a depression about--those Americans are listening to humans much less than a real...

Human...

Being.

It's all choice.

And many are content with the ladder floating around somewhere inside their noggins, aiming to take that next step towards (corporate) ascension and please the God that will be pleased with their job.

And then there are the thinkers. The searchers. The creative types. Could be left brains, or might be right brain people. I forget. Who cares anyway?

Thing is, the disconnection from those many Americans who come back from a shitty day of work doing something they hate, turn on the news and the perfectly blushed faces with too white of teeth--and they are arguing at random how the whites of the middle class and lower are being forgotten and how it became that way and why they are dissatisfied with their lives, and the person that flicks this on...it only heavily and seriously validates his feelings. So why wouldn't this person eventually vote for someone like Donald Trump? The liar, actor, masoginist, childish man with an odd bleached yellow hair cap...the man who spoke to struggling whites of that calibar during his stops in American towns and cities for talks. That's only one reason some voted for Trump. Not that I can sit here all day and just name the many reasons people voted for him besides discontentment, which branches out to many theories.

As I mentioned, segregation by race, and by class, which, and without any kind of humor, seems to mainly (and not-so-curiously) be those of color: black, brown, whatever...if you're not pure, we won't give you different bathrooms, but your living conditions are going to be shit and your schools are going to be and going to remain a joke offering that close to non-existent chance to excel and go to college and see what one of your stature can make of yourself....No. Most end up in jail from selling drugs, getting caught with drugs, trying to make it in the Hip-Hop scene here in America, or practice practice practice the game of basketball till one can shoot with their eyes closed. Stephen Curry is now the bar that has been raised and set and idolized and instead of philosophers or lawyers or other people with like-jobs, most blacks, and even hispanics, have idols that are more often than not, sports players, and/or rappers. A philosopher or lawyer or doctor won't lay out a possible path for success in packed living conditions and the only dreams seemingly possible is sports or music because of the many that have made it of their "color". How so insanely petty when I type the word out...color. Well, many of them aim for those goals. Is that odd? It's logical. I get it. And most of the time, as I said, me, the one writing all this rubbish out, is a (technically) man with white skin...I'm White...it's how we currently label eachother. It makes sense, again, yes, sure-- but it separates.

Will we ever just look at eachother as human beings?

Is kindness looked at as a weakness and is hardness a characteristic of the stereotypical Male in America? Do many wish to hold onto that coldness and hectic spiraling thoughts that must fester inside their being and psyche?

I gave it up. I had to. I still judge at times. Hopefully judge is the wrong word for it. I don't know. All I know is that when I go into Manhattan I see so many people trying to be people. Wearing designer clothes and big, you know, those too-big kinds of arrogant looking sunglasses? I see girls looking at me in my peripherals and when I look they quickly look away. I question why a lot. And also wonder if the beautiful girls I see in the city that I wish I could just take and bring into my life and see what might happen, if they really have an interesting personality and possibly even a fascinating past..but most I just walk past and see in incriments of five seconds or less and then they're gone.

We're all trying to be somebody during one's years in the 20s. I'm twenty-four and I probably wear a new mask every couple weeks. Maybe less. Sometimes it's every other day.

Who should I be today?

If I pretend everything will be just dandy will it snow so we can build snowmen together with bundles of joy in our hearts?! Oh, and bring a carrot for the nose!

I just want to grow. Grow inside a society that constantly feels too hard for me.

I have things to say.

And I love making strangers smile.

I think if you can make another person smile or laugh throughout your day then you made a positive contribution to mankind and just made their day a little more worth while.

It's a tough life. Of that is for sure.

But it's the ride and the waves!

Still learning to behave.

Oh, and you think Osama was really hiding in a cave....?

Words to dissect,

I think I'll go give this brain a rest before Trump comes out and builds us all Trump Tents instead of my cozy, cozy bed....

So Good Rest for now,

my friend of only friends...

For it's always the beginning.

And then it's the end.

oh yes, and we work!

as busy ants and busy bees pollinating their flowers for their honey-comb hives on the trees.

for peace

one day,

We will find it

And if not all of us before I close my eyes for my final time here,

Then I will leave blessed.

Blessed to have known that such a life of Duality exists,

for if one does not know the lower, darker vibrating energies that cause fear and discomfort-- then one will never know the pure beauty, joy, and ecstasy of life;

I'm in love with the Yins and the Yangs.

So just hold me close, for my bed is only so big.

Now I'm thinking of something of greatnes and purpose.

Oh yes, in my heart of only one hearts...I know

I will find you.

Oh yes, here I come

And if this does anything for your comfort due to all my prior words trying to make sense of a confusing American time, I'll say it, for it is nothing less than the truth

Yes I promise,

that one day in the future,

nearing the end

we'll all just float away....you and me, together, all of us

Like all the atoms and tiny molecules that we all are

We will cease to be

and just

disappear

in mid-air

Evaporate,

The Final Scare.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

#most powerful force in the universe?? is this one (1) perfectly human little girl?? perhaps??#< prev tag#Y E S#please do more poetic waxing i am Listening very closely#and yeah absolutely agree with everything#i dont think the bleedthrough whatever it is can affect them too much#but its absolutely possible thats something in the background they are constantly dealing with#tbh the bois are either a super good or a total disaster and bleedthrough could be useful in both cases lol#ALSO ALSO#i wonder if dealing with this secondhand but Intense grief ever since gaining consciousness mellowed out the entity when the bois met#early episodes entity is pretty melancholic and philosophical those fall into the Sad TM category feelings generally#you know what i need a meme#faroe changed john truthers unite

#somewhat less related but the main hook that caught me in the show besides the premise is music#and like one of the main songs of the show is madness and its associated with the king plus the king himself seems to fancy artists#SO SO#what if#johns god shard power is actually pulling out faroe's song out of arthur's mind and john is literally hearing it just as the audience is#we all know thats the tune of arthur's soul is it too far-fetched a god of art and madness would be attuned to it#i wonder if that tune was...excuse me. drowned so deep down below an ocean of rage that yellow couldn't hear it#right before arthur played it on that piano and then that train hit yellow all at once and he lashed out because of that intense pain#cause honestly yellow swallowed quite a lot of revelations much better than you would expect i always found it weird he raged so suddenly#what can i ever only ramble in tags xD#i love throwing psychic damage around at mutuals

YEAH YEAH like. yeah i don't think necessarily the bleedthrough is the direct cause of anything, but i DO think it adds to a lot of things. just like, a factor hovering around in the background enhancing whatever blowout fight and/or declaration of unending devotion they're doing today. i also think that maybe john has gotten like... more distinct from arthur's emotions over time, potentially? like maybe as he finds his own humanity he has a better basis to keep his footing and not just get swept along with his host, which is really more of an extension of him learning how to process emotions in general i guess, i'm getting distracted. what was i talking about

OH YEAH AND YELLOW. fuck, yeah yellow... if there IS anything to the idea of faroe's memory affecting john on a more fundamental level, then god, yeah, of course that same like, templating?? would fuck with yellow, like. when john met arthur he was mostly confused and scared abt the general situation he found himself in, he was barely even given time to process parker's death let alone react to it. but compared to when yellow met arthur?? he was at a fucking Low Point. grieving and angry and suffering and ready to fucking die, god that would be fucking poison in an emotional link with a being who's new to humanity and already feeling lost and defensive. no wonder they ended up hating each other, that was a fucking death spiral from day 1.

gald you're enjoying the psychic damage)))

tbh John is not Exactly comparable to Gilgamesh, cause he has Dark World Amnesia TM or whatever, but everything else tracks with him

p.s. also I believe this change-inspired-by-grief only really solidified after Faroe's story was revealed. It forced John to reconcile the fact that he can feel such deep and heavy emotion not only with Arthur (or Lily), but also someone he never even met. Every other sympathy he displayed was passing or surface level, which is a very good start of course, but I don't think it was enough to convince John to change so thoroughly as he had to.

(I'm a secondhand Faroe grief for John enthusiast)

(wrt this post)

YEAH GOD YEAH like it’s not an exact 1:1 (i def don’t think john is nearly as much of an asshole as Gilgamesh even at the start, he’s more just… clumsy?? emotionally?? idk how to phrase it) but it’s more abt this Being that was once so far above humanity, choosing to “lower” himself to that level and in doing so experiencing both the heights and depths of human emotion. “irreversibly changed by friendship and love and loss and regret” indeed…

anyway this is tangential to your point but is there any emotional exchange btwn these two that can’t be enhanced by that implied empathic bleedthrough. I do not think so. bc like, speaking of grief. if john gets any of arthur’s emotions then he kind of can’t avoid this one, right. it’s always always there, from the fucking moment they meet, before he even knows who or where he is he knows that melody and john can feel it when he plays, that love with nowhere to go. it’s a heartbeat underscoring their whole journey. her song her name her memory burning so bright that fucking elder gods can’t take it away from him. how could john Not feel at least some of that, right. before he knows anything else abt humanity, before his name, before the lake or the hospital or any of it, he knows the taste of arthur’s love, and his grief.

…was this just an excuse for me to wax poetic abt the importance of faroe’s song. maybe. but anyway I think there is a STRONG argument to be made that she is the single most important character in the whole show. like she drives so fucking much of it. none of it could have happened without her on SO many levels I could talk abt it forever

[neon-serpent-llc]

Here’s to 365 days of polygonal worlds, shot point-blank at our grey matter, some catching fire, others fizzling to the void! It must be that oh-so-pointless time to give out video game awards! For the third year running I present a cheeky list of spills and chills like no other (spoiler: Overwatch wins nothing). Anyway, blahblahblah, here's the awards already:

Game I Forgot Existed Until I Looked Up "Game Releases of 2016" Award

Quantum Break

Like previous winners Watch Dogs, and Evolve, this is a shining example of a game that simply vanished after it was released. Probably took hundreds of Artists four years to make, and then *poof* gone overnight. But alas, most games do, eh? Was the TV show any good?

Best Case for Virtual Tourism Award

The Division

Say what you will about the game itself, but this lovely facsimile of NYC is killer. And super accurate. If it weren't for all the invincible, hoodie-wearing street thugs it would be a pleasure to cruise this digital remake of my favorite city.

Genius or Madness Award

Zero Time Dilemma

A game that walks the line perfectly between the two. So clever, and yet maybe too clever? The twists are ridiculous when they work and outrageous when they don’t. Even so, its sheer confidence of going eight steps beyond everyone else, narrative-wise, is so refreshing. Truly a piece of Art that only works in the video game medium. Speaking of Art...

Most Unplayable Work of Art Award

The Witness

Conceptually, The Witness is flawless. Especially once you've seen the "real" ending, that perfectly frames the point of the whole experience (I watched it on YouTube). Unfortunately, to get that real ending is a monumentally painstaking chore. But, this isn't "difficult" Art in the sense that its meaning is opaque or it’ll challenge your worldview. Its simply that I have zero patience for puzzle games. If The Witness is an encapsulation of what it means to be Johnathan Blow, then it's clear that he and I couldn't be more different. And that's why it works as Art.

Don't Want to Be the Guy That Says, "I Told You So," but.... I Told You So Award

No Man's Sky

Even with its countless features, the spiritually-similar Spore got boring fast. How, then, was this bare-bones knock-off, No Man's Sky, going to keep people interested? And that was with the assumption that it would at least look nice. However, it absolutely did not. The novelty of seeing procedurally generated ANYTHING gets old fast, and it's made far worse when you're presented with a never ending stream of ugly, barren planets made of mud and more mud. Next year’s winner: Star Citizen?

Biggest Social Phenomenon Since the Wii Award

Pokemon Go

It didn't last long, but for a month this summer, everyone was out hunting in the parks of the world. Sure, we still mostly ignored each other, but there was a touch of bizarre camaraderie knowing we were all playing the same giant meta game. Like the Wii before it, it was a game-related subject you could talk to ANYBODY about, and they'd not only know what you meant, but have an opinion on the matter. How often does that happen? How odd was it to see a fifty year old business man asking where the nearest Clefairy could be found?

Welcome to the 90s Loading Time Award

Deus Ex Mankind Divided

I think I spent more time riding the subway in this game than I have in real life.

You Don't Know Your Audience Award

Metroid Prime Federation Force

As a new Nintendo IP this would have got tons of attention. Who doesn't like crazy new Nintendo ideas? But as a Metroid game it could only possibly get bad press. Why play as Samus when you can play as more-generic-than-Master-Chief, chibi space marines instead? A top tier faux pas.

They Finally Got it Right Award

Dragonball Xenoverse 2

After decades of awkward DragonBall games, they finally hit the sweet spot for over-the-top action with fun controls and interesting content (granted, I never played the first Xenoverse). In the year of Street Fighter 5, who would have thought I'd prefer the new DragonBall fighting game?

Well Deserved Retirement Award

Dark Souls 3

Still fun despite almost no alterations in what is clearly a formula now, but I'm glad this is the last hurrah, at least for a while. As I said when Dark Souls 2 came out, the magic is less pronounced with each additional entry. None will have that Demon's Souls impact anymore. But when it returns in 5 to 10 years, it'll be nostalgic to see the old tricks in action again.

Everyone's An Asshole Award

Dishonored 2

At least that's what the talking Heart makes it seem like. Half the populace has secretly killed their husband/wife, whereas the other half have burned down orphanages or something.

Late to the Party Award

Steins;Gate

Another game I played years after release. And damn it's good. Far more novel than game, but I don't mind for a story of this quality. Why wasn't I reading this earlier? Haven't got to Steins;Gate 0 yet, but I'm working on it.

Xenogears Disk 2 Award

Final Fantasy XV

Like Metal Gear Solid V last year, another all-around excellent game that suddenly sprints to the end, jumping vast stretches of story in an instant, clashing hard with the slow burn style of storytelling established before that. Much like Xenogears of yore, this is a game that tried to be far bigger than time/budget allowed.

Honestly, I wish these overly-epic games would get chopped in two, a la Kill Bill. At the point where the story would start getting rushed, end part one. Just end it. Then let its sales fund part two, the remainder of the story. Then again, you run the risk of a Too Human situation where you announce a trilogy and then don't sell enough to finish it. But honestly, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear would handily sell enough. I’m sure they’ll make a FFXV-2, but at best it’ll attempt to reassemble the pieces of its predecessors fractured ending.

Didn't Burn the House Down Award

Uncharted 4

The writers said the ending would "burn the house down" in terms of closure. But it didn't, at all, even slightly. Uncharted 5 could EASILY be made based off this exact ending, with no retcons and no changes to the game’s formula. They'd just have to make Drake constantly say, "I'm too old for this shit!!"

It Shouldn't Work, But it Soooo Does Award

Dragon Quest Builders

I don't like Minecraft. As a professional level designer, I find Minecraft‘s game building tools too crude to enjoy using at length (what a snob, eh?). And I don't like Dragon Quest. Too much grind, not enough story. Too simple. But for some reason when you combine the two it's fucking great! Dragon Quest adds the personality, charm, and flavor Minecraft was sorely lacking while also bringing enough story and tangible goals to make the building feel like a game and not like a chore. Plus, the game’s worlds are fairly handcrafted and feature proper level/zone design, which is greatly appreciated. The surprise hit of the year.

Best Game Industry Trend of the Year

Virtual Reality

I'm glad we're all working on it seriously now. Sure, the current headsets are uncomfortable as fuck, (can’t emphasize this enough), but its a step towards sunglasses-size VR in about ten years or so. Plus, by then everyone will be over their VR sickness so we won’t have to keep watering down the experiences we create. It’ll be sweet!

Worst Game Industry Trend of the Year

Infinite Sales

Between Steam, Good Old Games, Humble Bundle, Greenman Gaming, PSN Store, etc there is always a massive, store-wide sale going on somewhere. Wait a year and any game you want will be a mere $10. Why buy an unknown indie game when you can get a supremely polished, lengthy triple-A game for the same price? Indie developers basically need to charge $1 to get anyone's attention. Or make their game free *cough* ULTRAWORLD.

Best Game Awards of the Year

Obvious

Worst Game Awards of the Year

The Game Awards

A transparently corporate affair, the winners have all be carefully selected based on what needs to sell at Xmas. Companies won't even show up if one of their high profile games doesn't get an award. Even setting those complaints aside, it's hard to get interested or excited about a 2016 award show that happens with over a month of 2016 left; when wonderful games like The Last Guardian haven’t even been released yet. Speaking of which...

Game (Experience) of the Year

The Last Guardian

There's a layer of disconnect between the player and Last Guardian. The boy, Trico, and the camera all seem to disobey the player constantly. Many marked this as a flaw, but I think it's 100% intentional and part of why the game is so cohesive, thematically. For me, there's an added sense of surrealism when things are out of control. The chaos of physics interactions seem like they shouldn't work, yet suddenly you've made it to the next section of the castle. Did you really play that last section, or merely guide the chaos? Since you’re playing as a helpless child, lost in towering labyrinthine passageways, this obtuse disconnect feels entirely appropriate.

I feel it's intentional because Fumito Ueda and his team have managed to capture this sense of surreal play for three games in a row. Everyone manages to get to the end despite the feeling of disconnect. Trico is so aloof, yet will always get you where you need to go. Eventually. If everything functioned 100% predictably, God-of-War-precise, it would be FAR less memorable...as an experience. You, like the boy, legitimately struggle to escape the castle. Who has the guts to purposely make their controls imprecise to service the game, and theme, as a whole? It's amazing. A true work of Art. Game of the Year.

Non-Game of the Year

ULTRAWORLD EXODUS

The expansion and finale to whatever the hell this thing is. I liked it, but I think I'm literally the only one.

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So that's the year, says I. Looking over my list, its clear I didn't play many indie games, even though I complained about people not buying indie games (which is bad Karma for me, but I'll live). As always, if you disagree: good. All awards are pointless, just fluff opinions with a bow on top. Your awards are as good as mine, good as the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, etc etc forever. Til next year!

2015 Awards 2014 Awards

[nubsmusings]

How to Save the World?

I know pretty hefty topic to tackle especially while high, and even worse than that I'm not qualified in the slightest in any way shape or form. But it also seems arrogant to assume that my thoughts couldn't help at all. Especially if my questions bring about someone who is qualified to come and talk about the pros and cons of said idea or, if even the idea in a whole is mostly wrong while having a single grain of flour to the cake that is utopia then isn't it worth it? Hmmmm Conundrum for another time perhaps. Where to start.... I suppose we can start with getting the numbers needed to change the world. It's rather daunting isn't it? The amount of people that support one side or another of the political line of division? But what if their numbers aren't actually that large they're just out there stating their points more frequently and much much louder. I'd say the real divide is between the people that think they're right (for clarification these are the out spoken followers of politics) and the people that are silently struggling minding their own business most probably agreeing that the problems that are most prevalent aren't even problems to worry about in this point in time. So what would happen if all of those people started from one side of their content and went to the other gathering in the largest protest in human history. Could that have the desired solution? All politicians would be in quite the bind at that point, wouldn't they? How hard would the worlds economy crash if let's say half of our estimated 7 billion humans stopped working and stood in front of government buildings in peaceful protest. Protest. When this topic is brought up you get a lot of dejected people saying it doesn't work. But why protesting has plenty of evidence to point to it having at the least some success rate. What if the problem isn't they're not working but that they have kept up with he size of population. If the size of the population increases then that would mean that what's missing isn't that their being done but that there aren't large enough numbers. If this is the case then we just need to convince more people to take the plunge. Media. This is a tough one. I'd say the biggest problem here is our gullibility as humans. It's so easy to not worry yourself on the issues out of your control and focus on your wealth, health, attractiveness, whether you're neighbors are suspicious or not, who the real cause of your problems are but being sure that you aren't looking at the top but the bottom. One of my favorite things to do in high school was mental guessing games. The easiest way to win is before you even start lead the conversation in a specific direction. Like talk about tacos if it's Tuesday then 30 mins later say hey let me guess what you're thinking about, ponder real hard for a second then say tacos odds are really high that that's going to be the case because you put the thought there. So what would the results be if your news station of choice started talking about an act of violence in a poor neighborhood and then later said that parents or concerned people should check for suspicious behavior? Would it perhaps be that they would consider poorer people being the problem to be suspicious about and then that would lead you down the train of thought thinking about what all poor people have in common. Would it then be safe to say that we've put too much trust in people that don't really need training in all of the possible issues that they would be reporting on. How if the world is united into a single unified species would we establish a working economy especially since each's countries money is worth something different? Maybe the solution is in the destruction of "Money." Before we had coins or bills we made trades between things that we owned obviously this is a flawed system now because each thing has a different value between whom you're trading with. Put simply supply and demand. Perhaps our economies are already broken? I found it really interesting that I never once had to take an economy class in high school in fact I didn't even get a real government class. That's rather weird isn't it that my mandatory level of education needed to enter the work force and become a gear in the giant machine that is society. Does this mean that I don't need to know about how the "Most Important Thing" in the world is made? How about the fact that the vast majority of people were highly encouraged and even offered incentives to switch to having their check quick deposited to their bank accounts. Maybe the Economy is already broken and their only solution was to change the tracking of money to digital. (an easily falsified way of transmitting data) But if that's the case what could have killed the economy we ask? My theory is that the top one percent has accumulated so much wealth through hording and just average business profits increase. But why do these people need and make more money than they could spend in 5 lifetimes of heavy spending? Maybe for the utopias economy we can use the digital system for the benefit of all not just for politicians to launder money under the nose of the IRS. What if all basic survival is given to all humans no matter what? And if you want more than just the basics (let's assume the Food, Clothing, and Shelter) then you provide something to society either getting jobs making selling whatever will give you I don't know what to call it but let's say credits. Doesn't seem to bad if all humans are one than all products made are made for all. Shelter is easy we could utilize the land we do have much better than we do, need proof Skyscrapers. Food is another easy one. Did you know in america the government pays farmers to dump product. Bet if the homeless and unemployed get the stuff we throw away they might actually be able to get a job and they won't be that poor again. Clothes are super easy basic clothes just need to be able to keep you warm for the weather you're in, so it should be more than fine to give them clothes that meet those requirements. They don't even have to look that good if you need your ego stroked. Medicine is a super easy solution if we assume all humans deserve to live if we can save them, then we save them. We assign money values based on people making profits and how effective the medicine is. This means if we keep going down the road we're going and do discover a cure to something like the cold or cancer than the only people that will be cured are those that can afford it and you damn well better believe that means everyone would be willing to give everything they own if they're dying. Racism is something that I really don't understand, how it's able to exist in this generation in the first place. I can hop on skype discord team speak and millions of other apps to call up people on the other side of the world. And yet we refuse to see how this can bring peace. We are connected to the entire world and yet we still believe all the Hatedia. (Hate Media) There's also another excellent point to be made about this, Children Don't hate race Fuck they don't even see it. So if we're not born with hate than I bet you we can cure it. I'm sure most of you have heard of the term first world problems or the Elderly Eloquently put it as "The problem with Kids Today." Makes it sound like your problems aren't even worthy of being considered problems. But why should we be ashamed of the problems we're facing today that we aren't facing like in olden times? Are we weaker than we were back then? Should our problems not even be considered problems because the people who came before use can't understand them. If we went back in time to when our grandparents were kids would their grandparents say that their problems aren't as bad. Isn't it a good thing that we've solved the elders' problems from their youth? Don't we, as living and Dying creatures create offspring so that the world and problems from before can be solved and therefore allow human life to continue? So what's really the problem? Could it be that the generations that came before us also flawed and outdated as if they're an older version of the Iphone? If that's the case why are we letting them decide their voice is only a fraction. How about the fact that our systems haven't evolved with the times? Could that be the biggest problem to face? Religion is a tough topic for me, I'm really conflicted you see. Organized religion has the bad tendencies to fall victim to a single voice being the voice of the mob. But at the same time religion is a good way to bring calmness and clarity to the mind so that we as humans can find the right path to walk on for the good of humanity as a whole. Religion is also a large contributor and cause of war, either because one side hates the religion and wage ware to end it, Hitler is the example here. However the Christian church was the reason for so much devastation on the holy land with their crusades to steal wealth these should also be consider as terrible and devastating as what Hitler did but they're not which is weird. I'd say in a perfect society there wouldn't be the need for religion other than as ideas and theory about the afterlife not really needing anymore since all people are already doing their best to make the world better for all. But what if our lives as they are right now aren't just a test? What if we go through experiencing different kinds of life every time and each one is heaven or hell to the last. How do we go about life at that point? And if that's the case is life worth living? Maybe we shouldn't question why we're here but spend our lives living as a declaration of our existence and therefore finding the meaning in our lives? So how do we get all of these things solved or even tackle them? I wish I knew the exact answer. But I bet if we took the time to Understand people as people, we might come close. Now understandings a tricky thing if you truly follow this path than that means that you wouldn't seek revenge if someone murdered your family. You would seek justice and in order to find it you'd need to not be mad long enough to find our and put yourself in the thought process of feeling the same emotions they just said they felt. Rather hard isn't it? But if somethings easy is it really worth doing? Could we come together as a people and say Fuck the past all our ancestors did shit we frown upon now that we're "better" people than they are. But if we're better why are we holding their grudges? If me as a white male had Ancestors that had slaves and it so happened that a person I met and tried to befriend had ancestors that were slaves to my ancestors.... Am I allowed to be their friend? Are they allowed to be mine? Is it fair to abandon all of that prior info and judge each other based on each others character? I'd say so I'd rather now about them and their tendencies than the shame I'd feel from my family. So what sides going to be the first to bend and wave all prior transgressions and focus on what's happening now? Who's the bigger person and who's not a person at all? What's the point of life and why live it? How do you live in a world that's littered the ground beneath your feet with eggshells? Do we continue to live as if we are the center of our universe? Or are we each our own independent planets rotating in unison with the other one's floating around us to create a universe larger and more beautiful than anything that could be made as a singular unit? What if we are as insignificant as the ants underneath our boots, resulting in the universe being it's own living life form that needs us as a part for balance like the blood cells in our own body? What if God and the Universe are one and we're actually just a piece of God?

[theliterateape]

(micro) Chips On The Shoulders of the Collective and The Increasing Problem of the Moral High Ground

by Don Hall

I’m on the Blue Line, heading downtown to get to Millennium Park. I’m tired — it’s been a long week so far — so I’m standing amongst the other commuters, my shades still on, staring blankly toward the floor. I’m not really focusing on anything at all and I’m sort of just drifting into my brain when I hear:

“They’re legs.”

Not assuming it is directed at me, I stay focused on nothing in particular.

“Hey! They’re legs! Surely you’ve seen legs before! Stop staring at me, you creep!”

I look up and she is directing it at me.

Maybe 25 years old, wearing a skirt, and she has come to the conclusion that I was giving her the once over or the long stare at her uncovered gams. I’m caught slightly off guard (and I’m fucking tired) so I mumble, “…No. Sorry. Uhm, I wasn’t…”

“Do you know what it’s like to be a woman on the train? Do you even care?”

She goes into a tirade about being harassed every day by assholes like me. For 20 minutes she drones on and on about her level of discomfort and the toxic masculinity she has to endure. Because I’ve decided to just stay quiet — I could never even come close to explaining that I wasn’t even aware of her until she started barking at me let alone convince her otherwise — she gets angrier. I turn away. 

“I’m talking to you! Don’t turn away from me!”

I turn back around to face her. “Don’t LOOK at me!” she yells. She’s now yelling. 

According to her, this is yet one more brick in her #MeToo shithouse. She calls me a stalker. She calls me predatory.

The people in the closest range are all looking into their phones as if the fucking secret recipe to Popeye’s Chicken lies within and then it’s my stop. I walk past her without saying a word and head to the street.

I get it. We’re in what we call a “corrective phase” in society. The pendulum has been stuck in the Male Gaze is Normal and Women are Fodder for the Dick for so goddamned long that we are pushing things hard to the other side. While tired and kind of checked out on the ‘L’ I’m not dense. I’m also not one of those unicorns out there who miraculously changes his behavior because I was barked at about it on a train.

On that note, I’d love for anyone reading this who is one of those unicorns to chime in and tell me how and why because I legitimately don’t know how that works for someone.

From a recent Faceborg thread:

“Republicans are going to mop the floor with us if this keeps up... valuing anger-release over effectiveness & impact is toxic.”

“Right, right, it will be our fault. Your somewhat lazily-constructed, blanket statement encouraging us all to be quiet yet somehow effective little mice, betrays your desire to cower in the corner when they finally come to knock at *your* door looking to take your last crumble of cheese.”

“Anger is like fire - we can use it to burn ourselves, or we can use it to build. Stuff like this puts it in the wrong place & doesn’t work, so it’s a question of valuing real impact vs. cathartic screeching. I prefer effectiveness.There’s a huge space between hysteria & silence.”

“Couldn't agree less with you, sir. Unfortunately I don't have the time this afternoon to give you the history lesson you seem to so dearly need. The answer is to be loud about EVERYTHING. Until he is gone, and his swine fucking base sobers up. 

Yes, be effective, but as soon as Tyranny reveals itself, there is no more discussion. Only resistance, and only at the top of your lungs. Trump has an end goal; your quiet efforts of compromise and bargaining are not only pointless, they serve him, as they divide us. There is no passive resistance to Tyranny.”

“Do what feels good or do what works - your call. And I’m happy to hear what you have to say at pretty much any time, as long as it’s well-reasoned. Even if I disagree with ideas, they can still be valuable, so feel free to write yours down at some point - I’d be curious.”

“Also, if you keep talking out your ass, I am going to embarrass you here, because people like you, that clearly don't know what the fuck they are talking about, yet act like they do, really, really get on my bad side. You clearly know nothing, or refuse to understand, the mechanics of Fascism and Tyranny. Your uneducated opinion on what our course of action should be, offered in vague platitudes I might add, are what will get us all killed.”

“hahaha ok, will do. As long as it’s not all nazi hitler nazi, it’s cool. Some hitler, ok, but maybe a Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or something else thrown in there.”

“You're a monster, sir. Also, my apologies ahead of time, for what I may or may not say further on down this rabbit hole of a thread.”

The whole thread (rabbit hole, indeed) was like this. It reminded me of when liberals go to Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin lectures to ask him a question as a "gotcha" and look stupid for trying because, of course, stridency in the face of calm looks stupid.

Yes, she has a valid point that is worthy of a genuine conversation but she looks like a complete asshole in her angry attempt to school him. What I'm wondering is why? Why confront him at all? It isn't like her refusal to stop talking at him is going to change his mind. It isn't as if the women chanting is going to shut him up. What's the goal? What's the strategy?

The simple answer is that there isn't a strategy. It's moral posturing and wasted energy. It's an attempt to confront someone on the opposite ideological side of the questions and goad them into admitting some sort of hypocrisy. It's people barking "you lie" at President Obama in hopes that the moment will become a rally cry. It's someone throwing a shoe at George W. Bush. It's theater without a goal. It's a photo op in a YouTube world.

I remember the eighties. I mean, that decade was my Coming of Age time so I hope I still remember them.

One aspect of the eighties and specific to Wichita, KS, was Operation Rescue. As far as I can surmise, it is an extremely rare thing for a mentally stable human to wake up and shout out “Abortion is AWESOME!” The best we can do is to say abortion is a sometimes necessary thing and should be a right for women to utilize but, even then, I can’t imagine anyone adding it to their Disneyland trip as a lark. “Honey! Let’s go to Space Mountain and then go get that abortion — if we time it right, we’ll catch the fireworks!”

The thing is, Operation Rescue (with the help of the Ultimate Warrior in creating Moral Distinctions, the Church) decided that abortion was murder in the eighties in Wichita, KS.  And they protested. And when that didn’t do the trick, they stood outside of clinics and screamed at people. And failing to effect the kind of change they sought, some took to shooting and blowing up doctors.

Can you blame them? Once you’ve assigned a legal activity as a morally reprehensible crime you don’t have a lot of wiggle room in terms of context. If you saw a government gunning down second graders like they were taking out the trash, you might protest, then scream, then get some guns and TNT.

From their ideological zealotry, that’s what they saw.

As we’ve seen, you really can’t reason or compromise with a zealot convinced they are on the moral high ground. It’s almost impossible.

From a note to a professor friend of mine:

“I felt the words you used to address me was infantilizing and I want to express my discomfort of you labeling me a “young lady” thus shaming me in front of my classmates.”

What fresh hell…?

How does someone navigate this? In order to avoid any sort of offense, the ability to read minds is required. I'm of a type of white, heterosexual male who is not looking to run around and offend random strangers in normal discourse. Yes, I believe that offense is subjective and I've spent time creating art designed to shake that tree a bit. That said, I'm not the kind of person who engages in shock value tactics (anymore) or shaming individuals because I believe shame to be a pernicious societal tool that mostly suppresses the bad shit rather than providing a pathway to change.

Catcalling guys are idiots. Stalkers and sexual predators are criminals. The 50-something professor who refers to a 20-something woman in his class as "young lady" isn't either. Infantilization is the process of assuming people are too fragile and inexperienced to handle anything but the least of what society has to offer. So, who, in this case is infantilizing her?

It is a failure of strategy.

#MeToo, that vast and disembodied and ongoing protest march, has been subject to similar dynamics: the big tent, flinging its flaps ever wider; the entropic impulse as both a matter of promise and a matter of peril. Does being about everything, though, mean that the movement runs the risk of being about nothing? Has #MeToo, reconfigured as a broad attempt to rectify a broad host of wrongs, lost the plot? Has it dilated to its detriment?

Tarana Burke says, emphatically, yes. At the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Burke pointed back to Milano’s October tweet—which was not, Burke noted, about pay equity, or representation in the workplace, or power dynamics in a misogynistic culture … but about sexual violence, full stop. “Part of the challenge that we have right now,” Burke said, “is everybody trying to couch everything under #MeToo.”

SOURCE

It's as if, anytime there is a large gathering of eyeballs or people in the name of any progressive cause, everyone must have some equal time and must try to shift the focus to them. It is both narcissism and desperation to be heard. #MeToo was about victims of sexual violence until it became about Hollywood actors until it became about black women in Hollywood until it became about equal pay until it became about being offended at a teacher referring to someone as "young lady."

Moral high ground and the assignation of labels like “monster,” “human garbage,” and, with the court of public opinion’s scorched earth approach, “racist,” “Nazi,” and “misogynist,” it all starts to feel strangely like religious fervor and more in tune with Operation Rescue than Civil Rights protestors. A witch hunt, at it's core, was about scaring the shit out of anyone who decided to live a different way from the norm and was ultimately about establishing an agreed upon morality. The Puritans believed that by singling out and "trying" women who didn't fit their moral narrative (and the trial killed the innocent ones) the rest of the flock would fall in line.

The McCarthy Anti-Communist hearings were the same. Any affiliation and any lack of sincere and enthusiastic repudiation was met by wholesale destruction. And protests without strategy don't effect these sorts of cyclical trends.

Conservative witch hunts are well documented against drug users, women, gays, transgender persons, blacks, pretty much anyone not in the white male club. These witch hunts are almost always marked by the moral righteous inherent in the hunt and the moral depravity of those being hunted. As they try to weed out (and scare the shit out of) their targets, others with less patience and less to lose take up the cause and, like the extremes of Operation Rescue, turn to violence.

The protests of old that were most effective (or effective at all, arguably) were non-violent and strategic. In a time when we equate hateful words as real violence, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner in that there is no longer the possibility of non-violent protest. If calling our opponents names is violence, society is as blocked a a colon filled with cheddar cheese.

When everyone is scrambling to claim the moral high ground, there is none left to claim because morality, in order to exist, has to be founded on common understandings of behavior. We don't have that anymore.

“There is no passive resistance to Tyranny.”

So many assumptions made in seven words. That avoiding a moral argument, reasoning with those on the sidelines of the process and resisting by example rather than reaction is passive. That a legally elected asshole who has a very different worldview than you is a tyrant. That his actions will inevitably lead to Nazism. That tyranny only comes in one form. That by labeling something tyrannical makes it so and the need to demonstrate the aspects of tyranny is erased by the charge.

It makes sense, though. In the most Operation Rescue sense, if you have decided that Trump is Hitler and distrust the rest of the country so completely to not see it, of course it makes perfect sense. I mean, if you throw them in the well and they float, they’re guilty, right?

Ask a strident anti-abortion activist to defend their position. If you don’t immediately agree that it is murder, the sparks of obstinence fly, the labels of “evil” and “monster” are thrown out and the barking becomes indecipherable. 

“Let's be clear: "Innocent until proven guilty" is for a court of law to decide, if that's where this story eventually goes. The court of public opinion operates under no such constraints, and in the post-Harvey Weinstein days of 2018 we believe the accuser.”

https://mashable.com/2018/06/16/chris-hardwick-nerd-culture-conversation/#PWbjglPnJmqq

Seriously?

The internet is an extraordinary tool. It has provided us with almost limitless communicating possibilities. I can see what friends thousands of miles away are up to and call my mother face to face. We can promote our ideas to more humans in one message than at any time in history. Can you imagine what havoc would have wreaked if Faceborg had been around in the eighties in Wichita, KS? Holy fuck!

I believe we need both the Malcoms and The Martins, the Magnetos and the Professor Xs. It’s just that right now, this magnificent technology has given the truly hysterical and morally righteous a louder megaphone than ever in history. It’s difficult to hear anything else when 10% of the population is screaming their own version of bloody murder and condemnation and it's 5% of morally outraged Trump Supporters vs 5% of morally outraged Identity Politicians leaving the rest of us to run, covering our ears.

The democracy is in rough shape but it is far from over, broken, or destroyed by a single president. Our flailing about is due to the fact that those who do not believe the way we do control all three arms of the federal government and protests aren't doing anything to stop it. Like Operation Rescue, we are doubling down on escalation and it will not go well for us.

Speaking again of Operation Rescue, once it became apparent to them that their protests were wholly ineffective, they changed their strategy. They started running anti-abortion candidates for local office, then state office, then Congress. And, what do you know? Not only have many states placed unconstitutional barriers to abortion over the past ten years but it looks like they're going to get Roe v. Wade overturned.

I’m on the Blue line. Headed to the park. I’m wide awake and in a great mood. I see across from me a genuinely beautiful woman. I take a look — not a stare but a healthy look. She sees me looking and she smiles.