#but that's mostly bc i want more people to find it

[dirtypuzzle]

well, i hate to be the one to say it, but they burnt their political capital on something that was both incredibly necessary and unbelievably insufficient, further entangling american healthcare into unprecedented levels of tomfuckery. if you actually go digging into the myriad ways our healthcare systems is fucked, i don’t even think M4A would fix it without the kind of backend policywork that a) makes terrible campaign copy, and b) is really fucking hard to get right.

like. M4A is the end goal, in that i think single payer is the most likely thing to work once we get there, but getting from A to B isn’t just difficult, it’s fighting against all tenets of systemic and bureaucratic inertia in ways few people are really appreciating. if we were to slap M4A on this steaming pile of horseshit, it would probably fail hard, and then we’d be even farther away from decent healthcare.

the ACA is very similar. it did some of the backend work that nobody ever wants to explain or talk about, and no matter how good a tourniquet, those aren’t meant to stay on longterm. the ACA’s requirement that insurers spend 80-85% of every dollar on medical payouts, for example, while intended nobly, ended up incentivizing providers to jack up prices and insurers to allow it bc 15% of a big number is still more than 15% of a smaller number. most providers, especially hospitals, don’t even know what their prices should be, that’s how skewed it is, and they have no incentive to find out. hospital costs jumped 159% between 1997 and 2012. i don’t have the numbers off hand, but i’m sure even post-COVID costs have fucking skyrocketed.

the fight i’ve been fighting, and mostly losing, is convincing people to see both the macro and the micro, the newtonian politics and the quantum. you’re fighting on two fronts, and as with any war on two fronts, you can lose by losing either, but you can’t win without winning both.

you’re fighting a global wave of fascism, which is aided by wealth inequality not seen in centuries but whose bigotry becomes self-sustaining and which cannot be only solved by improving material conditions. you’re also fighting the corruptive force of late-stage capitalism, whose biggest players have incentive to fuel right-wing extremism and whose influence taints most aspects of society’s mainstay institutions.

on one side, the rhetorical fight to convince the populace to support you while protecting vulnerable populations and containing the spread of fascism. on the other, unknotting decades of bad policy, republican sabotage, and bad law—what to keep, what to throw out, and what to rewrite to be more tailored or targeted.

you have to be right, and you have to sell it; you have to be looking at the big picture, but that can’t come at the cost of day-to-day governance and politicking.

which is mostly moot now anyway bc trump won. we’re gonna be in survival mode for the forseeable future. but let it be said that leftists fight on one front, and liberals fight the other, but they rarely coordinate; both have sabotaged efforts to coordinate in the past, the macron situation in france being the most recent. of course, liberals in power aren’t the same as the liberal populace, but i think i’ve gotten off-topic enough on this post already.

I have more than one person in the notes of my post saying they did not in fact know that the ACA stopped insurance companies from being able to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition in case you were wondering where we're at. People don't know the ACA and Obamacare are the same thing, they don't know it's why they have healthcare, they don't even know what it does. How do you even deal with that?

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 12/24/2024

pair of portentous tuesdayposts: this one is christmas eve and the next one is new year's eve

trying something new with the reading section, where i list off a bunch of books i bounced off and briefly explain why. let me know if this is interesting, or if it's more interesting when i finish a book i sort of enjoyed and really dissect what didn't work for me like with that annoying evil wizard book a couple weeks ago.

listening

the true champ of the past few weeks has been friends at the table's (an actual play podcast about critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends) horror/weird west season Sangfielle, and i know i have listened to about sixty hours of it bc i have played about sixty hours of stardew valley. i am currently on ep 49, one before the last finale episode, and it feels like it is wrapping up in a very rushed and weird way? maybe i will feel differently after listening to the six coda episodes wrapping up everyones' characters?

the song of the week is fleet foxes’ white winter hymnal, which is morbidly festive without being strictly christmas-y and is not salting the open emotional wound within my chest that is The Holiday Season. album released 2008. christ im old

-

reading

the concept of this gag award is EXTREMELY funny to me. i wish the EFF sent them a little physical trophy. perhaps a challenge coin.

bounced off a lot of stuff. the six larger books and the far top right are all from my absolute favorite thrift store with the worst vibes, who regularly has a 8/$1 media sale bc they actually want to be more of a kitchen goods and home decor thrift store and don't really want to constantly be overflowing with records no one buys. yet here they are.

i really do need to find a good indie used bookstore around here that will take books and give me back slightly more in store credit than in cash. bc i would like to fill some missing chunks of trilogies/fill out the star wars shelves a little more. but every time i have gone to half price books i have had an unpleasant time.

lumberjanes/bravest warrior/adventure time were not making me feel nostalgic and in fact made me quite sad instead (more in a memento mori way than in subject matter) so they're going to a friend's kid

glad i looked up Heartthrob (despite the really good premise of woman haunted by her heart donor) on my library's comic app bc the third one seems to mostly take place in a mental hospital which is really never a vibe i want

GRIFTER has art i don't love and a bland storyline about an ex-marine who is the saddest boy in the world and can also detect literal space aliens living among us. no thank you

tangle's game has a close-call near-sexual assault in the first chapter. no thank you! cool dystopic social credit score premise but no thanks!

gil's all fright diner is about the king of vampires and the duke of werewolves but they're hicks. the narrator hates that they're dumb hicks. did not jive with the authorial voice on this one

i bought Two Tickets to Tangiers in high school bc it looked cool and have only cracked it open now, almost fifteen years later. fifteen year old kay did not yet have the context clues from the cover that it would be a very racist travelogue

i need to stop trying agatha christie. i am never going to like agatha christie

-

watching

somehow i have seen the first tinker bell fairies movie three times this week bc that's all my bestie's toddlers want to watch. a really stupidly stacked cast??? how did all these people have free time in 2008???

-

playing

finished the community center in summer 2 of stardew valley (wildly popular and very intense farming sim) and would have finished it in winter 1 if not for the FUCKING pufferfish. i hate fishing minigames and i especially hate the fishing minigame in stardew so i am excited to leave it the fuck alone for a while.

my cauliflower got stupid mchugelarge?? i do not know why they did that. also a meteor fell on my farm and gave me a bunch of really valuable ore, just like real life meteors.

i do kind of regret picking the beach farm bc so much of my day is spent watering, but i am trying to lean harder into animal products and being more of a fun silly flower farm instead of the intense agriculture i find myself doing. i have the greenhouse, i have a small patch of sprinklerable land, i will simply make sure to buy some of every seed each season and if i really need something i will toss it in the greenhouse.

-

making

people are being very gracious about their mediocre colored pencil portraits. most of my gift budget this year was two flat rate boxes to my siblings. silly little pet portraits are very cost effective if you already have art supplies, nice paper, gumption, and very cheap small frames.

[glimmerspirals]

belos headcanons part 2 bc i still can't bring myself to draw

he looks good on paintings and reasonably fine on video, but you will NEVER find a photo of him that doesn't look like cryptid footage.

huge gossiper

can be sneaky as hell when he wants to. loves appearing in random places and scaring people when bored.

the only things he'd been eating for the past few decades are palismen and boiling isles' equivalent of energy drinks

there was a period where he was obsessed with finding an angel after learning that all of humanity's mythical creatures come from the demon realm. also a bit of faith crisis

may or may not have had an encounter with the demon hunters while in his cursed form

no one can understand his handwriting except collector and kikimora. hunter gets some of it, but mostly relies on context n other stuff

high pain tolerance

do NOT give him spicy food, he'll explode

intentionally nerfed the oracle coven, banning and restricting use of many spells, so his plans wouldn't be found out.

not a fan of bright lights. prefers having torches as main source of light in his castle. for a more menacing atmosphere, obviously.

I do think that while belos believes he's superior to witches he considers himself lower than a human for being 'tainted' w magic n other sinful practices. He also believed that destroying the boiling isles would make up for that, but since he failed...

he would be good at programming

belos be like 'there's nothing wrong with me, it's just the curse' and the curse is also an undiagnosed mental illness

seems like the type to randomly drop an insane story from his past and never elaborate

goes limp whenever he's picked up. he never stopped doing this since childhood. hobody knows, however, since, you know. emperor and stuff.

ugly crier

[thenighttimeparadise]

The fact for most people, having acrylic nails, wearing make up, doing your hair, doing skin care, wearing skirts/dresses, wearing heels, ect. is considered feminine and things women biologically want/need to do or should do because it's "feminine" is crazy to me.

Let's unpack this.

So... acrylic nails. Putting shit on your nails to make them longer/ more colourful. Why might this be seen as "feminine"? Females usually have longer, thinner fingers, which longer nail help make the appearance of, women usually biologically have longer nails like they have longer hair, and they're expected to care more about their appearance. Why don't these things actually explain this phenomenon? Long fingers could be considered attractive for both men and women, they are attractive for women mainly because they look dainty and bc subconsciously society want women to spend more time on their looks so when you see a women with longer, painted nails it looks right bc she spent time and money to be feminine and to look "right" (society wants women to suffer, whether you admit it or not, the idea of femininity is to hate yourself quietly, I can expand on that if you'd like). Also, while females have longer nails and hair biologically (on average and on a pretty small amount) men also biologically grow hair and nails. Like, men used to have shoulder length hair and women had hair to their waist. The fact men have shorter hair now is bc of the army. Fight me on this. If this was according to biology it would masculine to have hair to your shoulders or lower back and somewhat longer nails, but it's not. My point here isn't to say that it's untrue that female biologically have longer hair and nails, but that these standards can change according to socialization, and we did change them for men, so much so that we won't consider some biologically masculine stuff masculine. Bc it's mostly socialization. The idea that women are the prettier sex, even as an empowering thing, is simply incorrect, and I do want y'all to understand that if we wanted to decide males are the beautiful sex we could change that in our minds in like one generation.

The wearing heels/dresses/skirts is just pure bullshit, forgive me for the way I'm wording this but these are pieces of a fabric, and while one can argue dresses and skirts could feminine to accentuate the "female silhouette" as in making the body look more curvy, I want to remind you that you're very subjective and what you're attracted to and what you find beauty in is about 76% due to socialization. I promise you if you were born 100 years ago you'd have different opinions about what is and isn't attractive. Sure some stuff will remain, like being hygienic, having clear skin and straight teeth and not being overly obese or thin, since these things are just signs of being unhealthy (even though some people don't care about these things I just mean generally speaking in the way our body and brain processes things), so many other things you might think are attractive for you bc of biology, such as facial features, height, body type (you can be as fertile without having small waist as someone with tiny waist, it's about having breasts and body hair [signs of fertility and sexual maturity] And while both of those aren't sexual [while breasts are a sign of fertility that doesn't mean they're inherently sexual just like beards are a sign of sexual maturity but they aren't inherently sexual] Yk what that raises the question of what is inherently sexual and I have an answer, tell me/write an ask about it if you wanna know but ANYWAY beauty changes over the years so being an hourglass figure isn't necessarily the 'objectively' most attractive a women can look.

[frostedpuffs]

does anyone else ever feel like they never Fit In fandom spaces like. sure i create stuff SOMETIMES but i feel like such an outsider in the fandom and idk why asdkfsakdf

[ganondoodle]

sometimes i wish i was one of those artist that make people go "this is a PAINTING???" or "with WHAT programm/medium???" but its just not what i can do or find fun :/

[i-bring-crack]

A–Aventio TGCF idea?? Wherein Civil God Veritas Ratio meets the infamous Ghost King Aventurine during his first mission cuz cuz like— The "live for me" paralels?!? The one who has all the luck partner as well?!? The villain who was actually not the Villain this whole time!?!? The loving humanity a little too much it causes their downfall !?!?!?

Rant AU in the tags proceed with caution

[tuesdayscanons]

Every now and then, I think about The Simpsons RPC and how there's an occasionally a spike of Simpsons muses that inevitably crumbles away and leaves me waiting for the next short lived Simpsons RPC Renaissance

[puppyeared]

if escape rooms as team building exercises became popular im not sure if id be more excited or terrified

[knifekris]

every day i struggle to make choices

[banished-away]

Started Neverwinter and damn, drizzt is quite the dick to dahlia without even realizing it

[icewindandboringhorror]

Everytime I face a new character limit on a website that didn't have them before/used to have really long ones... AUGHHhhh the modern social media world was not made for people like me (lovers of details, rambling, elaboration, thorough explanation, and nuance)

[13eyond13]

.

[spaghett-onaplate]

sixth day at my new school and i didn't sit alone at lunch today 🥳🥳

[yourcomputerr]

how do you even text people

[fromevertonow]

I’m so sorry to capitalism but ever since I started my studies in literature I have had an intellectual awakening and have become such a hater to over-the-counter storytelling.