#and it was relatively affordable for what it was

[sterpernie]

Probably no one will read this, but I hope someone will. To my fellow Americans, it is absolutely fair to cut people off for beliefs you disagree with and may one day lead to you suffering harm, but if you have someone you love with these beliefs that you are thinking about cutting out of your life, please consider a few things first.

1. We are living in echo chambers, repeating our beliefs back at us. If we don't interact with people who believe differently, how are they ever going to hear a different perspective that is not completely twisted by the media they consume?

2. They often don't understand what they are asking for. There is a sizeable minority (1/3 of Americans per the NYT) that do not know Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are the same thing. They want to repeal Obamacare but keep the ACA. People want tariffs not realizing that they aren't the same as sanctions. They don't realize that China is not going to be paying the tariffs, they will. China is not going to eat the costs of the taxes (tariffs) levied against them for exporting to the US, China will just raise the prices of their goods and probably levy tariffs against US exports to China in retaliation like they did during Trump's last term, resulting in everything getting more expensive. It it pretty striking to look at the education demographics of who voted what party.

3. They don't get the whole story. There was an immigration bill that would give the Republicans basically everything they wanted in regard to the border. Trump killed it because he wanted immigration to remain an issue for him to run on. My dad, who listens exclusively to right wing media, heard nothing about it. He was shocked it didn't pass when he was told. When he hears about Palestinians, he only hears about them referred to as terrorists and Hamas, attacking Israel unprovoked. He has never heard about the Nakbas or about how terrible the conditions were in Gaza even prior to October 7th.

4. A scary amount of Americans have no damn clue how the US government works. They think, abortion protections were repealed under democrats, so it's their fault despite the extensive groundwork laid by Republicans ever since Roe v Wade was initially decided in the 1970s culminating in a Republican supermajority on the Supreme court that actually overturned the ruling. They think, why am I paying taxes to forgive someone else's student debt when I didn't go to college/payed off my college loans/worked my butt off for scholarships/made sacrifices so I could afford college/etc, not realizing that the debt forgiveness is really just making sure the programs that were already in place are actually implemented instead of allowing the loan servicers to continue milking these people for cash long after their debt should have been forgiven. They think the economy and how good/bad it's doing is solely up to the President despite the fact that the purse strings are held by Congress and the Federal Reserve, which controls interest rates, is an independent body not controlled by the President.

5. For the immigrants, they don't realize that all immigrants are persona non grata, not just people who came to the US illegally. My immigrant mother told me she votes for Trump because he's "gonna stop all the immigrants who are coming to take our jobs", not realizing that despite her naturalized citizenship, she will always be seen as one of those immigrants she talks about. She doesn't realize when he talks about chain migration, he's talking about the system she took advantage of to bring multiple members of her family to the US and allowed them much better quality of life than the relatives still in her home country. She thinks, because she lives in a large urban coastal area, that all parts of the US are just as accepting.

If you have a loved one with whom your only problem is politics (not abuse of any kind, but someone you love and care for), please consider staying in their lives. I am not saying make friends with people to try and change their beliefs, I am saying give your loved one a face to put to the "radical libs".

when people are like “oh so you’re just gonna judge someone for their political beliefs?” yes actually. I think someone’s values and opinions is a pretty reasonable thing to judge them for.

[hemipenal-system]

In a world where werewolves exist and are normal members of society, a major goal of the labor movement is probably paid time off for werewolves during the full moon: wealthy werewolves or those with salaried jobs and an allotment of vacation time can afford to take the time off, working class werewolves can’t afford to and so they have to try to do their jobs while shifted. When the werewolf unions finally achieve this goal (perhaps by massive strikes shutting down some of the more werewolf-dominated sectors of the economy such as astronomy and heavy manual labor), it probably has economic ramifications since there’s a lot of jobs just not getting done during the full moon. Possibly some people even try to become werewolves just to get the time off.

…and now I’ve committed the cardinal sin of horny worldbuilding: trying to make it make sense.

i imagine the werewolves actually get their PTO relatively easily just on account of how werewolves are scary as shit. like yeah with human protestors in the streets you can just call the cops or whatever but what do you do when the protestors are strong enough to flip cop cars by hand and basically entirely immune to most conventional weapons? you shoot rubber bullets at them and they're just gonna brush it off and then yeet a manhole cover at your head at mach fuck you

you ever had a group of 6 nine foot tall beasts show up to your house at 10 pm while you're in the pool with your wife and delicately remove all the exterior doors from your house with their construction tools because you keep sabotaging their unions? what are you gonna do, stop them? no you aren't. you're not gonna say SHIT to a werewolf with a sledgehammer. you're just gonna let them take your doors off and then let the union meet the next day

as for after the PTO, i like to think werewolves with decent control over their urges and decent enough jobs to justify going would just go in and get really good overtime pay, especially ones who work with people. it's kinda heartwarming to go to the store and get fitted for a suit or have your ice cream made by a dapper lil wolf i think

[lynxindisguise]

Obviously Project 2025 and the attack on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community is absolutely horrifying and very much real, no matter how much Trump has tried to distance himself from it.

But I want to talk about what's in the Republican Party's actual plan, because these are probably the things that will happen first, and it may also be helpful in terms of speaking to conservative relatives (especially the ones who are not fully gone far-right MAGA worshippers and are, instead, confused as to why everyone is so upset) about what exactly they voted for.

Mass deportations. This is the main platform he ran on. On a human level, this is horrifying, and it's going to cause unthinkable and unconscionable suffering. Maybe it'd be helpful to discuss how immigrants (including privileged white legal immigrants) pay taxes, can't vote, don't have access to benefits, and cannot risk committing even minor crimes for fear of deportation. Maybe it wouldn't. So. On an inhuman level, this is very expensive and a massive waste of resources. If you can't get people to give a shit about other human beings, you can at the very least ask how these deportations are not going to detract resources and attention away from the 'American needs' they keep harping on about.

Getting rid of all environmental regulations and AI regulations and amping up use of coal and oil. This is devastating for the entire world in the fight against climate change. I think this is how Trump means to reduce inflation, though his entire 'reduce taxes and reduce inflation' plan is so incredibly vague. At best, it's more trickle down theory bullshit.

Reducing American involvement in foreign conflicts. This sounds really great, actually. And yet. No foreign conflicts are specified—except for strengthening support to Israel. So. It would seem that the US is becoming even more involved in genocide, and most likely less involved in aiding Ukraine.

Improving the American education system. Hilariously, Trump's solution to a failing education system is to get rid of the Department of Education and leave everything up to the states? When you read on, it becomes clear that this is so schools can teach exclusively American history—and a very specific, propagandized version of it at that.

He mentions wanting to build a DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD around the US? Why is no one talking about this? This is formally written down. What the fuck does that mean?

He also talks about REDUCING censorship and protecting freedom of speech. In the coming years, I would ask your conservative relatives to hold him to that.

They also promised affordable housing, college, and healthcare. There's no plan for how the fuck they're going to do this while decreasing taxes, but I'd tell your conservative relatives to hold him to that as well.

The whole plan is here if you feel like reading the word 'great' 800 times. If you don't want propaganized idiots telling you you've fallen for the 'leftist propaganda,' come armed with indisputable facts of what the Republican Party has said they will do.

[cloudxgears]

I feel like what people don't get about Vi being so affronted by Jinx compared to Powder, going as far as to say "You're not my sister, you killed her," and trying to sacrifice Jinx at the alter to her idea of Powder, is that she spent all that time in prison with Powder being the only thing she had to hold on to.

Vi's confirmed backstory is that she had two goals in Stillwater: beat up and basically vigilante attack all inmates with association to Silco, and get back to Powder one day to look after her. When you're forced to endure a harsh environment and don't have any way out of your situation in sight for a very long time, possibly ever, you fixate hard on specific goals. You develop a really deep sacred core to your identity and beliefs so you don't go insane.

Vi's identity was 1) Take revenge on Silco for killing Vander and 2) Look after Powder, as were his dying words. And then she gets out and Silco is instantly dead and it turns out Powder is a young woman called Jinx now who doesn't really need looking after anymore.

Frequent beatings, fighting every day, surviving isolation, solitary confinement, surviving Stillwater — her fantasy of Powder and getting back to her was what she stayed alive for, that was her goal, and she had this fixed idea of her in her head this whole time because that's what she needed. She needed a constant. It would be a bit like Powder being her God at that point. It was shared by the creators that "Powder" was the name she called out to like a prayer and begged for after beatings when she was bloody and in pain and at her lowest.

But then she's broken out of that fantasy and realises, wait, this is a grown young woman with her own shit going on, completely different from the comparatively simpler and sweeter little girl she was when they were separated. She got to have the powder blue tearful reunion she'd been dreaming of for years with that idea of her for only five minutes, before she got to see the new side of Jinx and that hope of simplicity and comfort was dashed, snatched away in an instant, like sustenance finally being waved in your face after years of starvation before being plucked right back again. It would be a bit like being thrown into a void. It would be like having your god cruelly ripped away from you.

She's like wait my little sister doesn't actually exist anymore (because that's how ageing works lol) but of course Vi never thought that far ahead because you can't afford to think about the future or its potential challenges on that level when your every day for 7 years is a battle. Vi is basically having one long internal panic attack over going from the small, gruelling but relatively predictable world of prison to all these massive changes.

So now it's like, what do I do with myself now? Who is my sister now when there is almost nothing in her that I can identify as safe and familiar? These big new questions and challenges that Vi was not ready for and does not currently have the capacity to deal with.

People underestimate how much Vi actually needs to act out. She was the parentified child, and then she had to grow up way too fast, survived solitary confinement and prison life and generally growing up in an environment very different to the outside world. She's gonna be fucked up. In a way, Arc1 is like Vi throwing a total tantrum because fuck i've just come out of 7 years of hell and you were supposed to be different and now what? Now what?

Going from a fixed idea in her head for 7 years of sweet Powder, the girl who relied on her and needed her, to the reality of someone as unpredictable and independent as Jinx would be so jarring. Vi has no comfort to hold on to, she's confused and reeling, thrown out there and forced to catch up with this new world that went on without her, a world that Jinx is adapted to but she is not.

Of course she falls back hard on Caitlyn and the enforcer thing. What else do you think she has to do with herself? You know what it's like to grow up in imprisonment for 7 years and get out with literally nothing but the clothes on your back? You will be surprised what you will cling to hard when you have no other direction, nothing, and no one.

I think people expect Vi to be this great responsible moral figure because that's her cover poster, that's what she's grown up knowing she's supposed to be. But you actually think you get to have strong desires when you come from literally nothing, and then the only thing you had left is taken from you too? Of course she was going to follow along with Caitlyn, she needed someone (a motherly figure, which is why we all know Caitlyn looks deliberately like her mother) to lead her in this crazy new world, she needed someone to tell her what to do. Of course she was going to become an enforcer if it was an occupation, something to throw herself into to distract from the fact that she has nothing now.

I'm really liking Vi's development because it shows at a certain point self-preservation and personal needs do become stronger than even family or loved ones. At a certain point of true desperation the things that are supposed to matter stop mattering and all you can focus on is I Need This until you have what you need. Vi is in a state of desperation. Her need for stability and a realm she could excel and be valued in when the Lanes don't belong to her anymore becomes stronger than the uniform her parents' killer was wearing, and her selfish need for her comforting dream of Powder is stronger than her capacity to adapt to this stranger, Jinx. She needs someone to finally care for her instead, but she won't get it, so in Arc2 she will sink a while before she'll swim.

More than anything Vi just needs to feel safe, needs a purpose, and needs someone to lead her (or to learn to lead herself when she's ready. But she isn't yet. Maybe arc3 who knows.)

And then god, the end of Arc1 when Caitlyn abandons her too. She's lost her god, her family, all sense of familiarity, and we get to see her as the blubbering baby she is inside for the first time. So good~

That's not to say Vi isn't crazy strong or capable of being responsible again or that she won't climb out of this eventually but she needs to fall for now, and her story on a human level is a lot more selfish (the way most people's are when it comes down to it tbh).

[aidontdraw]

I think we need to cut Naruto some slack when it comes to him perpetuating the system he grew up in. Naruto shows the most realistic way of dismantling a system in fiction. It's not a Dystopain YA Novel where after the hero kills the bad dictator everything magically gets better. It's a complex series that shows the harsh realities of systems like this.

One thing we have to remember when considering Naruto being the Hokage, is that while he is "perpetuating the cycle" of hatred, it's still the best option. Naruto is actively dismantling the shinobi system as Hokage. By maintaining peace with the other villages, the shinobi system is dying, and we know this from the final chapter.

Tenten can not make a profit selling ninja tools. With the symbolism we get throguh out the series that ninja are tools of war. We're bassicly being told there is no need for shinobi any more.

Naruto can not break the Cycle of Hatred with violence, if that worked, the cycle would have been over centuries ago. The same way Rome was not built in a day, it wasn't destroyed in a day either. You can not destroy a system quickly, especially since this violence is their primary source of income. They need to slowly transition these ninja into other job fields. Otherwise, you just get the Akatsuki again.

I think we forget, Naruto technically grew up in a time of peace. The Thrid Shinobi war ended a year before he was born, and all the villages chose to do a disarmament. However, that just created more problems. With out a steady streem income coming in, villages had to go to extreme measures. Some where on the break of failing, and all of their people literally dying.

Powerful shinobi, like Zabuza & all the members of the Akatsuki didn't have any income from their villages coming in. So Zabuza had to work with the Demon Brothers in order to put food on his plate. Like yeah, we could argue that he could have just gotten a job at non-Ninja McDonald's. But he's essentially a war veteran at age 15, with no other marketable skills than war. His best option for money was to use his skills to further captalisim.

The Akatsuki was able to rise in power because the villages could no longer afford to raise the type of Ninja required for certain missions any more. It became cheeper and more effective to hire the Akatsuki than to hire ninja from a village.

80,000 shinobi fought in the Fourth Ninja War, 10,000 died, that leaves us with roughly 70,000. That's just ninja from the Five Great Villages, there are ninja from other villages. This means if Ninjas as an occupation were to magically end that's at least 70,000 people who need to find new jobs, not including all of the industries who create the tools to support the military complex. This sudden ending could cause a massive issue toppling economy. And, boo-hoo the economy, except that's how people gain the resources they require to live.

In Gaara's book, we read that Suna doesn't even have adequate maternity wings in their hospital and their people struggle to eat after the Fourth Shinobi War. We are forced to sit with the reality of what a failing system actually means to its people. Because of how isolated Suna is we can only assume it gets worse. I'm suprised they even exist in Boruto with how bad we're told it is.

Then we have to consider the cultural loss. These people will lose their connection to their culture. Techniques will have no more use to be passed down. Yes, these techniques are murder, but they are still thousand year old traditions that will no longer exist. Which is sad.

Theres also the potential of more genocide, it's what happened after the Thrid Shinobi War. Essentially, the clans realized they wernt getting paid by the villages any more and started gaining outside power again. Because the village system was only 50ish years old at that point, it was relatively easy. Unfortunately it put a target on their backs, and they were genocided. So that's another fear you have to work with with dismantling this system. Some people like the system and want it to continue, so they can make money to live.

In Boruto, we see they aren't even having kids at replacement levels. Each character, besides Naruto, bassicly has one kid. If we think about Sasukes goal to revitalize his clan, how's he going to do that with only one child. What we can assume is, they know the systems dying, so they aren't bothering to make enough kids to fill that system.

Naruto is dismantling the system, it just takes time and has a lot of moving parts. He's only been Hokage for 3-5 years at the start of Boruto. It's barely long enough to make any significant change.

Naruto is also only 33. That is incredibly young. Like insany young. Like he's not even old enough to be president of the United States of America young. So he had a long road ahead of him to make the changes he wanted to see in the world.

Thinking about Naruto

The day you realize Naruto and all his friends are child soldiers being raised by child soldiers— you aren’t watching the same show twice anymore. The cycle of violence never ends because you raise child soldiers to forfeit their humanity in a nationalist society.

Don’t get me wrong— as Naruto gets older and understands more— he is able to break pieces of that cycle. He never escapes it though.

Naruto was a leader amongst his peers because he didn’t comply with apathy. Naruto let his empathy guide him throughout the world. In the society he lives in— empathy is a radical concept.

When you really think about the values the shinobi world drills into their citizens: unemotional, lethal force, and nationalism— Naruto’s desire to see others and understand them is defiant of those values.

Naruto’s capacity and willingness to see others as individuals first and strive to understand, and then see them as from another nation second separates him from the rest. Naruto’s empathy and love for humanity gives him the ability for open dialogue with people he thought of as enemies (Zabuza, Haku, Nagato, Gaara). He is able to cry for his enemies ( again— zabuza, haku, gaara, and sasuke). He is has the capacity for forgiveness and growth. Through these radical (in this society) concepts of empathy, understanding, forgiveness— Naruto changed people for the better. He changed his nation for the better.

He never breaks free though. Naruto becomes the hokage and continues the cycle. His village still raises child soldiers (in less harsh values)— he promotes incorporating empathy and extending your understanding outside of your own nation. The violence still continues. He still facilitates a violence society in raising these child soldiers— he is not the only one— gaara and the other kages are right along with him.

The show feels very different when you realize that Kakashi was a victim of a system that raised victims of a system— that went on to raise more victims of a system. The show feels different. Suddenly it’s not just a shonen battle anime with bright colors and cool concepts. It becomes thought provoking and reflects realities of a society and continuous cycles. Brilliant writing. Dark and layered undertones.

[idolsgf]

we found a place we really like but of course an offer has already been put in 😖

[eliounora]

saw a video claiming that having two cars makes one upper middle class and a bundle of thoughts occurred to me that I'm struggling to word elegantly but it's something about how people can't tell between middle class and the upper middle class and the rich, and therefore don't realise just how rich actual filthy rich people are and how poor actual poor people are. also something about poverty being deemed a virtue, which makes it harder for people to recognise and especially admit their own privilege and luck, resulting in well-off people insisting they are poor and middle class people getting called rich for arbitrary things.

[clonehub]

kinda interested in theorizing how the court system in the republic works. specifically coruscant bc imagine if with a trillion people on the planet the trial and appeal system is absolute shit

[figs-oliomedley]

I was completely normal about him from day one

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[deus-ex-mona]

series i’m gatekeeping from my family vs series i’m ✨ok✨ with my family knowing i’m into:

[izzyspussy]

i think a lot of people have never been in a truly desperate situation but think they have, and this causes them to pass really harsh judgment on people who made bad choices when either irrational or having no good choices to pick instead, and i really wish people could get some fucking self-perception and work on their compassion skills and not fucking do that as much anymore

[astriiformes]

.

[here-there-were-dragons]

as a general rule, on average, if americans consistently complain about a food being conceptually weird, gross, and scary, then it probably tastes amazing. or at least inoffensive.

this is because in my experience americans for the most part (give or take a few exceptions by region) think eating literally anything other than beef, chicken, bread, eggs, peanut butter jelly sandwitches, ketchup, and disgusting cloyingly artificial brown sludge soda is insurmountably weird, gross, and scary.

[avatarthelastairgender]

i went to aberdeen today and bought an embarrassingly expensive sweater and some boba milk tea. not to be anti communist but i fucking love malls. i'm so mallpilled. i love to just exist in a mall

[satellitesunset]

why is it that one time I try a perfume that I end up hating it lasts 8+ hours.