#hard to overstate how bizarre that was

[kazieka]

made a voluntary phone call for the first time since I was 15 today boys !!!

[anghraine]

ngl I always find it wild to see Star Wars stuff that's like "if you think about it in terms of realistic statistics/science then..." about almost any aspect of it.

I mean, what about the Star Wars films gives the impression that this universe abides by realistic statistics, or realistic anything else? SW is broadly a fantasy epic projected onto an IMAX screen with a space background painted on it. Yeah, the planets and moons in the films almost always have improbably limited biomes and two major locations max, because narratively these locations are usually just fantasy city-states with space aesthetics.

Starships travel at the speed of plot and we simply jump past the amount of time that presumably is passing, and sort of imply the passage of that time through shifts in the character dynamics. But this passage of time cannot be analyzed with any kind of consistency because the only logic governing it is the pace of the story.

Just how long did it take the Empire to send a full contingent of forces to Dantooine, search the entire planet, find the Rebel base, and then report back to Tarkin between one scene and another? No one says and no one appears to care. How long did it take Han and Leia to reach Bespin and what exactly went on between them while Luke was, in the same time frame, going through a protracted training over multiple days at an absolute minimum? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How do giant space worms survive inside asteroids that somehow have an Earth-approximate gravitational field and I guess an atmosphere? Shhhh don't think about it. The point of the sequence is not "how does the giant space worm subsist off this random asteroid and how does it breathe and how does gravity work in this context, seriously" but that the giant worm sequence is fucking sick.

There's probably some after the fact EU justification invented by people who had nothing to do with the original writing of the space worm (or perhaps there are several mutually incompatible explanations) and I am profoundly disinterested in them. Nothing could make this even slightly realistic and it was never intended to be. Star Wars sings space shanties at scientific/mathematical realism as it sails past on a completely different ship going in the exact opposite direction.

And I do mean "sails" because while astronomy might tell us that space is unfamiliar and wild on a level we as Earthbound lifeforms can barely comprehend, Star Wars understands that space is basically an ocean, yet with stars and cool but survivable planets in it, or sometimes it's air but combined with a super cool space background so you can have early 20th century aerial combat that would make no sense in actual space conditions and doesn't need to.

"If you consider relativity, then just running the Empire would be..." General relativity does not govern the galaxy far, far away. Space magic does. I'm not sure there are even time zones.

[honeylover]

mm.. freaking out rn why am I so awake to sensation. The rain is going to make me cry lowkey

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jill Filipovic:

I hope that you were not, like me, required to watch Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night (and into Friday morning), and were instead doing something more enjoyable: Going out with friends, sleeping soundly, driving hot fireplace pokers into your eyes, literally anything. The former president rambled on for more than 90 minutes in a speech that was incoherent, wildly digressive, and often bizarre without being at all entertaining. Anyone who managed to stay awake for the whole speech could only draw one conclusion: This is not a well man, and this is not a man fit for the presidency.

Donald Trump has never been a coherent or linear speaker, and during his 2016 campaign there was much speculation about how mental acuity and cognitive health, not to mention the smattering of personality disorders he appears to live with. But then he won, and he held office for four years, and when he ran again in 2020 his flaws were familiar and so didn’t garner as many headlines — “Donald Trump still an unhinged maniac” wasn’t exactly new, and so it didn’t make the news. But now we’ve had a four-year-old break from Trumpism, and when the former president reemerged on stage at the RNC, he exhibited all of his previous flaws, plus a marked decline: He was slower, even less coherent, less connected to the crowd, less tethered to reality. It’s hard to overstate just how bad his speech was. If Joe Biden gave a speech that colossally disjointed and tortuously boring, the headlines tomorrow morning would all be about just how severely he has deteriorated — and how Democrats are crazy for running him. Trump is an elderly man in decline. He has always been a narcissist, the kind of guy who will ramble on and on because no one in his life has ever told him no.

[...] Those same Americans, though, have heard this song-and-dance before. The same way that Trump’s insanity doesn’t garner headlines because it’s old news, Trump himself may be less magnetic because it’s also familiar — and now aped by so many Republican politicians. All of this is to say that Trump is far from invincible. He is, by any reasonable measure, a weak candidate. His RNC speech made clear just how weak he is — and how much weaker he has gotten since 2020. And with the right candidate opposing him, Democrats can make clear just how mentally unfit he is to run the country. Trump is surrounded by yes men in a movement more akin to a cult than anything else. These people will stand by him. They will deny the obvious reality in front of their faces. That can be beneficial: They can flood social media with heavily-edited videos and insist that their invented narrative is the truth; that may persuade some voters.

Donald Trump’s overly long nomination acceptance address at the RNC in Milwaukee was one of the worst of all-time, and it was an incoherent mess of lies.

[sonofthesaiyans]

Happy Birthday, Sasha Braus 🎂....Happy Birthday to the gal who deserves the world... 🌎 👑

A very special day dedicated to a very special girl. One of the Scouts' greatest and bravest, and one of the most special girls in all of anime.

Sasha Braus is truly one in a million, and it's hard to overstate how much I love and admire her as a character. The warmth and heart she brought to the series is something that simply cannot be replaced......she's the jack of all trades from whom there is so much to be appreciated, from all she gave and all she could have been.

Sasha is more than just an awkward country girl with hyperactive appetite, she is perhaps one of the most resilient and courageous warriors in the Scout Regiment. Sasha answered to the call of duty when everyone else would have said she was out of her depth, and in doing so she found a greater purpose to which she always gave her all. Sasha could be clumsy, unpredictable, impulsive, and eccentric.....But she always fought with her heart, and it was in those moments where all was at stake that she put her seemingly endless energy and bizarre ways to good use, all to give her friends a fighting chance. Sasha always fights for the greater good, without any thought of herself or of anybody else's agenda. Sasha remains perhaps the most incorruptible Scout as she always fights for what's right. Her instincts have always told her to run when faced with the Titans, but instead she always moves forward and headlong in the face of danger for the sake of the team.

Indeed, the journey here has always been about "moving forward", as best demonstrated by Eren. However, it was Sasha who lived up to that mantra better than Eren Yeager ever could. He lost sight of the greater good and came to focus only on his own selfish vision for humanity. Sasha instead only grew stronger the harder she pushed on. She never lost sight of where she came from and what she fought for, or what she believed in. It didn't matter how much bigger and more complicated the world became, Sasha rolled with the punches and continued to stand tall while the others too often lost themselves in the face of their changing reality.

Sasha was a great source of balance and reassurance not just for her squad, but for us as well. She reminds us what it means to be human, and her smile, her kindness, her humor, and loyalty are things Attack on Titan simply could not survive without.

Even with the presence of Hange and Historia, or even Petra, even with the strength of characters like Levi, Mikasa and Jean, Sasha complemented all of them in a way that no one else could.

In many ways, Sasha shines above most of her main circle, she developed in one season in a way few others did across all four seasons. Even without the unique power of the Ackermans, she easily could have rivaled Mikasa as the main heroine. Sasha's profound sense of justice and devotion to those she cares about, and to those she has never before met, those are the makings of a true Scout.

Sasha Braus really rose to the occasion in a way far too often overlooked, and Hajime Isayama remains unworthy of her. Sasha really should have been one of the heroes in the Battle of Heaven and Earth, and the story needed her presence to balance out against the sheer insanity of the final act.

There is no Attack on Titan without Sasha. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin may have been the focus of the show; Sasha Braus was its heart and soul.

And Hajime Isayama can never take that away. He must restore what rightfully belongs to Attack on Titan and to its fans.

We owe so much to Sasha. She is still an integral part of Attack on Titan, and she deserved so much better. She still had so much more to give. That's nothing new coming from me.....But one only has to look for themselves and realize there's so much more to Sasha than meets the eye. She was the glue that held the 104th together. The glue that held Attack on Titan together.

So let there be lots of love, meat and potatoes, and cake for AOT's best girl tonight.

Sasha Braus, you may love food, but the love so many of us have for you...... You're everything we could have ever hoped you to be. ❤️

Happy Birthday to the girl who gave her heart. And won over ours. ⚔️ 🥔 ❤️ 🥔 ⚔️

There's no Attack on Titan without you, Sasha. I hope one day you come back to us. You'll always have a place in my heart. We love you, Sasha.

[siren-nate]

Metroid Dread review

I've now played through Dread twice, on both Normal and Hard difficulty. I'm probably gonna take a crack at Dread difficulty just for fun but I doubt I'll get far, the furthest I'll probably make it is Escue. So, I think I can pretty confidently gather my thoughts on it and review it unbiased.

From a gameplay standpoint... yeah, this is the best 2D Metroid. No surprises there. It's the most recent, so it has the most quality of life improvements. I think it's a bit unfair to say that too loudly because all prior 2D Metroids offer experiences that Dread doesn't, and the only game anywhere near to it in modernity is Samus Returns.

What I find interesting is that a lot of clever additions are very similar to ideas that the Prime series had, the chief among them being Storm Missile. It's a thing with Metroid games that by the time you have over a hundred missiles, every new pack you pick up feels like just a drop in the bucket, especially in Fusion where super missiles are a straight upgrade to all missiles rather than a separate weapon. Prime fixed this issue with the addition of Charge Combos. What are you gonna use all these hundreds of missiles on? Expensive specialty weapons that deal a LOT of damage in exchange for guzzling down your missiles much faster than normal use, that's what.

Dread has basically the exact same concept in the Storm Missile. It's the boss-melter of the game, you will use it on every single tough enemy or boss fight after you get it, especially since it pierces electrical shields when most of your arsenal doesn't. The trade-off is that one full use of it costs fifteen missiles and the actual damage-per-missile is much lower than Super or Ice missiles, so it's trading efficiency for raw DPS. It's a very good addition to the formula that kind of reimagines the whole Missile/Super Missile dichotomy in the earlier games.

Aside from that, though, most of the new additions are a bit underwhelming. A lot of them are just new midgrades between the start and established upgrades - the Spin Boost is a one-time Space Jump, the Diffusion Beam has been reimagined as a weaker Wave Beam, etc. I don't hate these, since they do mean that Dread has the longest and most involved journey towards getting stronger, and you really start to feel it. It's especially noticeable when you finish the game once and start again.

But in terms of actual fully new stuff, the only things that really come to mind are the Storm Missile, the Flash Shift, and the Cross Bomb, and... nobody gives a shit about the Cross Bomb. You use it to get like three items in the entire game and you get it about a stone's throw from the final boss, which is bizarre when it's really not that special or combat-useful (Unless you're a cracked-out speedrunner since rapidly laying them can do more damage than beam spam against the final boss).

On top of that, even Metroid staples from prior games in the series are hit or miss. Ice Missiles have been relegated to basically just doing slightly more damage than Super Missiles and opening up some enemies for an easy one-hit-kill follow-up by parrying them to shatter them. You never use it to ascend frozen enemies; the closest thing to it is when you freeze temporary platforms so they last longer under your feet, which is basically only used in a single room in the game. It's not a huge deal, but it just feels like such a disservice; the Ice Beam in the very first Metroid was one of the most novel and interesting ideas it had by letting you turn obstacles into something useful for vertical traversal. It's been a mainstay in every single 2D game even after being swapped over to missiles rather than a beam weapon, and here it's just flat-out not a factor in the game that ends the overarching Metroid and X-parasites plot started all the way back in the first game.

One thing I am not disappointed in however is the Speed Booster and Shinespark. I don't think I can overstate how much I love them in this game; you can slide, you can walljump to instantly go the other direction while keeping your speed, you can walljump multiple times consecutively to ascend without needing to store your Shinespark and then Space Jump upwards- combine it with Flash Shift, which is a fantastic addition to your movement kit, and Metroid Dread has breathtaking levels of schmovement that make me feel like a fucking ninja.

Going back to what I talked about before, the unique experience that this game offers is the EMMIs, and... yeah, they really are the identity of this game. They're pretty well-utilized, but I have multiple big gripes with them. For starters, the number of them feels... fake. There's seven of them, right? Except, actually, there's six, because the last one gets killed in a cutscene. Of those six EMMIs, three of them are basically tutorials; the first one can't climb, the second one can't go through small spaces, so it takes until the third one before you finally get to a fully-functioning baseline one. But it's alright, because that still means there's three EMMIs with unique abilities... two of whom inexplicably shut off their unique abilities for the final confrontations with them.

On top of that, I absolutely HATE the parry system for EMMIs. For those who don't know, their parry timing is 1) completely randomized, 2) frame-perfect, and 3) impossible to see coming. What I mean by that last one is, you cannot see the tell and then parry, even if you're a supercomputer; you have to anticipate it. Any one of these things would be difficult to deal with. Any two of these things would be extremely difficult - but I still wouldn't mind it because EMMIs are supposed to be the most dangerous thing in the game and parrying is an absolute last resort. But all three means it is literally just pure fucking luck whether you manage to parry an EMMI. You can't anticipate it because it's random, you can't react fast enough to parry after you see the flash, and the ungodly levels of precision required means there's absolutely no wiggle room. It's a complete roll of the dice. I'm not mad that it's too difficult, I'm mad because why even give me the option at all if it's an utter RNG check? Why not just have the EMMI kill me when it catches me and send me back?

But my biggest issue with the EMMIs is that the level design of their zones isn't always great. Dread has a big issue with linearity at times where what seems like multiple paths is really just a long hallway with a lot of locked doors that you're going to open in a very specific order, and it's at it most grating with the EMMI zones. Running from them is at its best when you have multiple routes to take, scrambling and doubling back while the killer robot is steadily chasing you down trying to flank you and find your position. That's exhilarating and fun. But there are a few occasions where the game basically locks you in a hallway with the EMMI between you and the exit, and trying to figure out how the fuck to get around it without touching it so you can progress becomes a lot more frustrating than exhilarating because there's literally no room for error.

This is compounded by how the Phantom Cloak is an utterly worthless upgrade in every way that should never have been added to the game. You never know where an EMMI is unless it's near enough to you to be a major threat, so you have no idea when you should use this thing to avoid detection - if it's close enough that you know for certain, it's already detected you and the cloak isn't useful anymore.

Like, which would you rather do: sprint and Flash Shift and Grapple Beam through the zone as quickly as possible, doing your best to stay out of its line of sight so the doors don't lock, OR use the thing that grinds your movement speed to a halt in exchange for five free seconds of not being detected, and then either turns off or starts draining your health so you can get instakilled by the first enemy you run into after escaping the zone? The Phantom Cloak only becomes more superfluous when you reach the final EMMI, which can detect you no matter where you are on the map - there's absolutely no point in putting the cloak up to build some distance, because no amount of distance will keep it from getting on your tail again.

I think what would have made the EMMIs better is if there were no locked doors or upgrade-checks in their zones. It's just you, a maze, and a killer robot somewhere inside, and you have to go through there if you want to make progress by reaching other areas that the zone connects to. To add to that, don't even tell me when it's hearing me, or nearby on the minimap. I want to have no idea if it's following me or not other than the sound of its movements getting steadily louder. I want that absolutely terrifying uncertainty.

That's about all I have to say on the gameplay front. When reviewing something, I like to try to condense my critique into one highest praise and one lowest criticism. The highest praise for Dread would basically just be "This is the most modern 2D Metroid game, of course it's going to be the most fun to play because it has the least irritations", even if I think the EMMIs needed more work. My lowest criticism would be... God, like, most things about the story?

Nintendo doesn't tend to tell complex stories with their big franchises. Metroid is the big exception. Yes, even if the 2D games never get as complex as the Prime games because the Prime games have the luxury of scanning lore, the last four games have set up as many interesting pieces as they've closed the book on, and Fusion ESPECIALLY left some intrigue with there being corruption in the Federation and the existential threat of the X-parasites. Dread... never talks about the corruption in the Federation. It's literally not even addressed. I don't give a shit if this was a mistranslation of the original Japanese in Fusion saying that it was a specific "splinter", that's just throwing away free intrigue in your plot and it's a massive waste.

Raven Beak is the weakest Metroid villain, full-stop. His entire motivation is "I am a warlord who wants to clone Metroids to conquer the universe", which means he's effectively just Mother Brain with a new coat of paint slapped on top and without even the interesting jealous characterization she gets in the Zero Mission manga. Yes, he slaughtered his own kind, and even fed traitors of his own clan to a monster in a ritualistic execution, but making a villain ruthless does not automatically make them interesting. It doesn't even automatically make them intimidating; Raven Beak spends the entire story talking himself up and sucking his own dick, then gets merc'd in the same game he debuts in after beating Samus twice exclusively by teleporting to grab her in cutscenes.

Introducing the Mawkin as a distinct faction from the Thoha was a mistake because it completely robs the idea of an evil Chozo of any weight. Oh, yeah, these are the bad Chozo who just care about war and conquering and physical prowess. All of those other Chozo are still saints who just made a mistake when they created the Metroids, don't worry.

Everything about Raven Beak is missed potential. An evil Chozo who takes Samus's ideology of "peace will come to the galaxy only when evil is vanquished" to the extreme? Who wants to see the legacy of the Chozo's projects like Metroids preserved, rather than eradicated and forgotten? Who creates the monster that is his undoing by allowing Samus to live and grow her Metroid powers, exactly as Ridley not finishing the job on K2-L eventually resulted in Samus killing him? There are so many interesting things you could do with Raven Beak, and Metroid Dread does none of them. He's just The Remorseless Guy Who Wants To Conquer. It's a crying fucking shame.

Even aside from him, the game introduces a friendly Chozo - a living, breathing member of the people who raised Samus and molded her into the hero she is and have been the linchpin of the entire greater universe of the franchise - so that he can dump exposition for one cutscene and then immediately be killed off. I timed it: Quiet Robe got to be a part of the Metroid canon for four minutes and forty-five seconds before he was killed. It's hilarious how clumsy and forced it is.

And this isn't even getting into the bottomless well of plot holes and unanswered questions in the game's story that piss me off more the more I think of them.

How did Kraid get to ZDR? If you're going to give us fanservice this loud and blatant, fucking explain how it happened. Are you telling me that - for SOME reason - the Mawkin showed up on Zebes during Samus's final mission there, captured Kraid, left without taking any of the Metroids just laying around, and then locked him up in their basement? Why???

Why do the X-infected Chozo soldiers still seem to be following Raven Beak's command? This one's not concretely spelled out, but the final, gold one seems to be specifically acting to guard Raven Beak. Either that or it's just a coincidence that the strongest one is right before the final boss fight with him.

Why doesn't Samus just continue shooting Raven Beak when he lifts her up by the neck? I get that the Metroid powers are talked up as the deadliest and most dangerous ability Samus has ever wielded, and maybe she didn't want to risk using them unless she could get him by the head, so grabbing his arm was out of the question. But if he's out of her reach, she still has a perfectly good arm cannon that she used for both confrontations she had with him. I'm already suspending my disbelief for the sake of him being able to choke her to death through a suit of powered armor, game - can you just have him grab her arm cannon with the same hand to pin it to her side, or something?

Why didn't the X leave ZDR when they had the chance? The entire impetus of the ending of Fusion is Samus realizing that "X-parasite with the knowledge of a pilot" + "Working starship to escape" = the end of galactic civilization as the X spread from planet to planet faster than she can contain them. Quiet Robe outright states that every single Mawkin Chozo was infected - even if they were ALL contained to Elun, are you telling me NONE of them were pilots despite traveling to and from SR388? Is Raven Beak the only pilot in the entire Mawkin civilization? We see ships in the background of Hanubia, like, at least four or five of them. Why didn't the X leave when they had the chance if their only instinct is to spread and grow their numbers?

Follow-up: Where did those ships go during the escape sequence? Were they all destroyed when shit started blowing up? If not, and the X fled the exploding planet when they had the chance, how the hell is the next game going to happen with only one Samus and 4-5 ships full of X beginning their spread to different planets? Exactly how dangerous do you want me to think the X are, Metroid? Is them getting loose a doomsday scenario for the entire galaxy or not? Make up your fucking mind!

In summary - the plot of this game is a bottomless well of missed potential. My friend Lilith has told me all about better ideas where instead of Samus gaining her power-ups from EMMIs, she fights other non-infected Mawkin who are still loyal to Raven Beak and using their own Chozo power suits, which would have been incredibly fucking sick. Samus being forced to grapple with the fact that evil really is everywhere in the galaxy, even in the Chozo who played a part in raising her? Fighting this shadow of herself, this monster she could become if she goes off the deep end in her desire to bring peace to the galaxy by fighting the battles civilians shouldn't have to?

But even putting aside how these base elements could have been used better, what we did get is riddled with plot holes and an incredibly inconsistent overall threat level regarding the X-parasites. There are good elements to the story, don't get me wrong, but it's 90% flash and 10% substance. Yes, it's cool that Samus gets Metroid powers when everyone and their grandmother wanted that to happen since the end of Fusion, and the sheer cinematic scale of the Metroid Suit is unbelievably kickass - but it has no weight without a villain that I can get invested in stopping. And I don't accept "No Metroid villain has been that deep" as an excuse, because A) like I said, Mother Brain and Ridley got some pretty interesting characterization in the manga, and B) that doesn't mean things can't improve. Dread improved a lot, but it didn't improve the story.

[tobyisave]

ask dump #3!

rch

Yes and no! Holetta Baby is a character song for a story I wrote in high school with some friends I've since fallen out of touch with --- because of that (esp. since some of the characters were based on ourselves), and because it's frankly bizarre, I don't know if I'll ever share too much about it.

All you really need to know is that it's from the perspective of a man whose wife flew away as he gradually realizes that she's never coming back. IIRC she was just fleeing for a while because their love was forbidden, hence "Loving you's so good I fear it's wrong." In reality, she got trapped on an island somewhere and he was too heartbroken to consider the possibility that she might need rescuing.

Thank you!!! I really can't overstate how happy I am that Townsend resonates with other people who have intrusive thoughts. It's something I still have trouble talking about but she's been a good outlet for that. Also quite happy that the angst is hitting right ehehe

art

Honestly no, I have so much trouble with that too OTL. Occasionally I use the warp tool on a sketch to help put an interesting line of action before I actually do lineart? I recently started experimenting with drawing in fisheye perspective too, and that definitely shakes things up.

Thank you so much!!

I almost always draw in Procreate (with an iPad + apple pen). I have 2 sets of favorite brushes on there - these are what I usually use:

6B Pencil (found in the "sketching" category). I use this for EVERYTHING from lines to rendering.

Studio Pen ("inking")

Medium Hard Airbrush aka the most generic brush on earth

Inka ("inking")

Spectra ("painting") - annoying because it can alter colors by pressure though

Then I have this set I call 'ink kit' which I use when I want to change things up without actually switching mediums lol

Blackburn ("drawing") - Really thick brush that makes me think a little harder about lines. I also have a duplicate modified to make it a little smoother and smaller & I switch between those two when doing lineart on these pieces

Gesinski Ink ("inking") - one of those pens that's flat so it's really thin or wide depending on the angle

Oil Paint ("painting")

Watercolor ("painting") -- just for coloring stuff in when it doesn't have to be precise

Also these niche uses:

Driven Snow ("elements") for freckles

Nikko Rull ("painting") for skin texture

adamandi

It was just a fairly thick curling iron (curled upwards all over my head) and then a lot of hairspray. If I remember correctly, the first night it was done by our costume designer Hahnji Jang (@/hahnjij on insta!) and then I did it myself the rest of the nights. It was definitely their idea at least - my hair is naturally pretty flat and up til then I assumed Vincent's would be too, lol.

No idea where the bag (or really any of it) is from, sorry. I really liked walking around in his swooshy jacket, and I ended up buying it afterwards. As far as normal people clothes I would actually wear, I really really liked his pants, which I was unfortunately not able to keep.

There actually exists in my mind a completely different "biblically accurate Vincent," which is the Vincent I had been picturing all the way up until the actual performances. I always pictured him with long black hair and freckles, and I considered drawing on freckles for the show because of that.

[lifesver]

sometimes i think about how like. unbelievable it seems that the family could get away with all that they do for as long as they do, and especially what happens assuming there are survivors out of the game’s friend group (lol lmao our delusions). but also like, it was the 70s which was such a bizarre and fucked up time for the rise of violent crime anyway. you had these prolific horrific serial killers because your ~average middle-class north american family just had no concept that these sorts of people were out there, let alone prowling their neighbourhoods. people hardly locked their doors, and had no reason to feel like they needed to. like it cannot be overstated how not ready anyone was to be dealing with these kinds of cases. as a result there was also just a lot of terrible non-thorough policework. a lot of cold cases, because like. fr there was a time when you couldn’t report a literal child missing until 72 hours had passed. and if you were a young person at all, it was super likely you got written off as a runaway without any real investigation occurring. no cell phones, no tracking, no cctv, no digital papertrails to prove otherwise.

and then you factor in the idea of the sawyers having local connections, if you factor in the hewitts, who literally have planted themselves in law enforcement. like yeah no shit. you have corrupt and/or inexperienced detectivework, especially with the kinds of things the friends would have reported after surviving the house. a lot of it would have sounded too outlandish to even believe. and then, back then there was such a limitation to the kinds of evidence you could use, it might have been hard to get the family on anything anyway, even if they did get close enough.

so it’s like, no wonder they call off maria’s search that quickly. it’s no wonder in nosy/dusk/cc verses it’s so easy for her, and for leland, to fall to the wayside, to be forgotten, as cold cases, among just an influx of missing persons cases and limited law enforcement infrastructure to handle them.

idk it’s interesting to think about the space slasher movies take up, as a reflection of the times they were made.

[waterloggedsoliloquy]

i think being a (neurodivergent) himejoshi warrior also puts me in this weird spot where i need significantly less visual signifiers that a couple is together to consider them canon. it feels like most people really dont call a couple canon unless they kiss on-screen (or "screen") which is weird bc even in the most normative depiction of romance i can think of, a kiss is usually the cumulative moment of all the romance that has come before, not the starting point. and as someone whos neurodivergent and stone, i feel like its very reductive to say that the only way a ship can possibly be canon is if the characters adhere to a very specific model of overt expression. a lot of people do not have normative romantic behavior. i do not have normative romantic behavior. my characters dont have normative romantic behavior. they shouldnt be made to change that. i really really dislike narratives where a character w nonnormative affection gets into a relationship that "heals" the way they love and makes them able to perform romance "correctly" as if trauma gets in the way between them and makeouts. as if makeouts and affectionate words and Providing For The Homestead arent optional and if youre loved enough youll learn to enjoy it. well heres the news. some people will always be weird and understated or overstated or bizarre or unintuitive with how they show love and it wont be because they didnt try hard enough.

[strangenewfriends]

"WHAT IS GOING on here? Why are idiot fans throwing stuff during live shows? It’s reached a crisis point in the past couple weeks—a disturbing and loathsome epidemic of fan aggression against performers. On Wednesday, Kelsea Ballerini got hit in the face when a concertgoer threw a bracelet at her—just the latest case of a female artist assaulted in the middle of a show. Why is this happening, and how do we stop it? 

Ballerini was in Boise, Idaho, doing her country-pop hit “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Too),” when the bracelet came out of nowhere and hit her face, right near her left eye. She left the stage, but then returned to finish her show. “Can we talk about what just happened?” she said, in admirably clear terms. “Don’t throw things, you know? I just always want shows of mine—every show, for every artist—but I’m in control of this one. I just want it to be a safe place for everyone. Can you help me do that tonight?”

It’s not an isolated case. Bebe Rexha needed three stitches after she got hit by a thrown iPhone at a NYC rooftop show on June 18, and posted a photo of her frighteningly bruised and bandaged face. The alleged assailant, a 27-year-old man, told police, “I was trying to see if I could hit her with the phone at the end of the show because it would be funny.” He also helpfully explained, “It’s a TikTok trend.” Oh. 

Two days later, Ava Max was assaulted by a man who crashed the stage at an L.A. show and slapped her in the face. She posted, “He slapped me so hard that he scratched the inside of my eye.” A couple days later, in London’s Hyde Park, Pink got interrupted mid-song by someone throwing a bag of their dead mother’s ashes. A true pro, Pink asked, “Is this your mom?” Then she put down the bag and said, “I don’t know how I feel about this.” 

It can’t be overstated how much this sucks. Miley Cyrus recently declared she doesn’t feel safe doing arena shows anymore. As she explained, “There’s no connection. There’s no safety.”

Ballerini posted an update to her Instagram Story on Thursday, saying, “hi. i’m fine. someone threw a bracelet, it hit me in the eye, and it more so just scared me than hurt me. we all have triggers and layers of fears way deeper than what is shown, and that’s why i walked offstage to calm down and make sure myself, band and crew, and the crowd all felt safe.”

How did we get here? These are important artists with things to say and music to make. It’s not their job to explain why idiots shouldn’t throw things at them onstage. But it’s simpler than that—they’re human beings. What these incidents have in common is a bizarre lack of respect, a main-character neediness for attention, a child’s ignorance of boundaries. This isn’t fan enthusiasm going overboard—this is hostility disguised as fandom. 

So: it’s weird that this needs to be said, but don’t throw things at the artist, mmmmkay? No matter how soft and fluffy it seems. A cute li’l stuffed animal turns into a weapon if it hits somebody, as happened to Lady Gaga in Toronto last fall. A bracelet can do serious damage. Somebody threw a lollipop at David Bowie in 2004, in Norway, and almost blinded him. A lollipop. Nobody wants concerts to turn into airport-security hellholes with body-cavity searches. Your elderly loved ones do not need the aggravation of amending their wills to say, “BTW, after I die, if it ever seems like a cool idea to bombard a hard-working music legend with the remains of my incinerated corpse, switch to decaf and think again.”

Why now? So much of it comes down to the pandemic. People got out of practice at going to shows, so they forgot how to be audiences. Or else they just started their concertgoing years now, without having learned from being part of an experienced audience. But in 18 months of isolation, the whole fan culture around live music shut down—the traditions, the habits, the manners, the codes of honor, the spirit of “act like you’ve been there before.” It was a disastrous loss for music and the community around it. When live music returned, some fans were desperate to get back into the action, but without remembering the details of how to handle themselves in an IRL crowd. That’s how you get a grown adult boasting he threw a piece of metal at a celebrity to join a “TikTok trend.”

But this wave of fan aggression evokes those horror stories from the Seventies, like the notorious 1971 incident when a London concertgoer pushed Frank Zappa off the stage, putting him in a wheelchair and nearly breaking his neck. Or when “some stupid with a flare gun” burned down the Montreux Casino, inspiring Deep Purple to write “Smoke on the Water.” (Respect to the late great Funky Claude, who ran back into the burning building to pull kids out.) Over time, audiences gradually learned how to be cool in a concert crowd, until the coronvirus. So there’s a lot of Some Stupid going around.

There’s always been a certain etiquette for live music. It’s taken a beating in the social-media age, as more people treat the live show as a backdrop to stage click-chasing viral stunts.

But it’s unquestionably gotten worse post-pandemic. Last summer, Kid Cudi walked out on the Rolling Loud festival in Miami. “I will fucking leave,” he warned the crowd. “If I get hit with one more fucking thing—if I see one more fucking thing on this fucking stage, I’m leaving. Don’t fuck with me.” Someone then hit him with a water bottle—and bragged about it on Twitter, because of course he did.  

Tyler the Creator issued a public plea last year for concertgoers to stop throwing things. “I don’t understand the logic of throwing your shit up here,” Tyler ranted mid-show. “Not only for safety reasons, but bro, I don’t want your shit. I don’t want it. Like, I’m not even being funny. Every show someone throws something up here, and I don’t understand the logic. Why do you think I want your shit? Then if I slip and break my foot? Stop throwing that fucking shit up here, bro!” He went on to say, “Fucking dick-fuck.”

But that message was evidently too subtle for some folks. Steve Lacy stopped a New Orleans show in October when somebody hit him in the leg with a camera. Lacy said, “Don’t throw shit on my fucking stage,” then smashed the camera and left. Rosalia got hit in the face with a bouquet of roses, in San Diego. “Please don’t throw things on the stage,” she tweeted (in Spanish). “And if you’re such motomamis that you throw them anyway, throw them on the opposite side from where I am.” Harry Styles, whose live vibe is the essence of generosity and openness, has gotten his boundaries invaded by Skittles-tossers and chicken-nugget-hurlers. Nobody could blame him for being less than okay with it. 

There’s always been a tradition of acts who encourage fans to throw their bras, panties, or flowers. That’s just consensual show-biz. A Tom Jones concert wasn’t complete without tipsy ladies pelting him with their hotel room keys. When a fan threw a bat onstage, Ozzy Osbourne assumed it was a rubber toy, so he playfully took a bite—then became the first rock star ever rushed to the ER for rabies shots after a dose of batflesh. Punk rockers often thrived on the dust-ups. At the Sex Pistols’ famous final gig, Greil Marcus reported that the band got hit with “ice, cups, shoes, coins, pins and probably rocks.” Johnny Rotten complained, “There’s not enough presents. You’ll have to throw up better things that.” Immediately, someone threw a rolled-up umbrella. Johnny replied, “That’ll do.”

But during the pandemic, for many fans, their primary source of human contact was social media, where there is no perk for non-asshole behavior and nothing but rewards for finding novel ways to be a dick. There are so many incentives to create a viral moment, so it seems acceptable to interrupt a show to make strangers notice you. Throwing your phone at something to get its attention—you wouldn’t do that to a squirrel, much less a human, so why would anyone do it to an artist they’ve paid money to see? But social-media culture breeds a new kind of fan mentality defined by parasocial resentment, where fandoms feel so possessive about their faves, they get outraged when their fave doesn’t live up to their demands. It takes a toll on simple human empathy. Our whole culture picked up so many toxic habits it will take years to unlearn.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Almost exactly two years ago, I saw a symbolic return for live music when Madison Square Garden reopened with a super-emotional Foo Fighters show. It felt like all of us in the room were figuring out from scratch how to be fans again. I described it at the time as an “invitation to start remembering how to celebrate together.” Needless to say, the return of live music turned out to be a lot messier than that—lots of stops and starts, lots of conflict and controversy, lots of fear and grief and anger. 

But this is the first summer when it’s felt like live shows are really back. My music summer began a month ago with Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour. I saw The Cure and Dead & Company on back-to-back nights, two tribal gatherings that felt like the most uplifting kind of communal devotion. In the past couple weeks, I’ve seen loads of brilliant punk rock (Protomartyr, Wednesday, the Dolly Spartans, the So So Glos, Bar Italia), comeback gigs from old-school heroes (The Feelies, Love and Rockets), and a Beatles tribute band, the Fab Faux (damn fine “Martha My Dear”). It’s time travel, hitting so many different eras of my life as a music fan—past, present, and future. I’ve been trading stories with friends having similar epiphanies this month at Joni Mitchell or DJ Premier or LCD Soundsystem. We were all hungrier for this than we even realized. 

The mass rapture of the live show—it’s a fragile temporary community that comes together for a night. Whether it’s in a sleazy bar or a basement or a stadium, it’s a place we go so we can experience those raptures in the dark with strangers, to be part of a story that doesn’t happen when we’re listening by ourselves. But those moments don’t happen without a certain level of mutual trust and respect. And they can’t even begin when the performer can’t trust the audience. We’re all in the crowd for the same reason—to create that space where this rapture can happen. But it’s not something the artists or the industry can conjure up on our behalf. It’s on us to be an audience that the performer can believe in. That’s really where the music begins."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

It was certainly the longest and the least tethered to reality -- and showed that Trump, an elderly man in decline, is unfit for the presidency.

JILL FILIPOVIC

JUL 19, 2024

I hope that you were not, like me, required to watch Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night (and into Friday morning), and were instead doing something more enjoyable: Going out with friends, sleeping soundly, driving hot fireplace pokers into your eyes, literally anything. The former president rambled on for more than 90 minutes in a speech that was incoherent, wildly digressive, and often bizarre without being at all entertaining.

Anyone who managed to stay awake for the whole speech could only draw one conclusion: This is not a well man, and this is not a man fit for the presidency.Subscribe

Donald Trump has never been a coherent or linear speaker, and during his 2016 campaign there was much speculation about how mental acuity and cognitive health, not to mention the smattering of personality disorders he appears to live with. But then he won, and he held office for four years, and when he ran again in 2020 his flaws were familiar and so didn’t garner as many headlines — “Donald Trump still an unhinged maniac” wasn’t exactly new, and so it didn’t make the news.

But now we’ve had a four-year-old break from Trumpism, and when the former president reemerged on stage at the RNC, he exhibited all of his previous flaws, plus a marked decline: He was slower, even less coherent, less connected to the crowd, less tethered to reality. It’s hard to overstate just how bad his speech was. If Joe Biden gave a speech that colossally disjointed and tortuously boring, the headlines tomorrow morning would all be about just how severely he has deteriorated — and how Democrats are crazy for running him.

Trump is an elderly man in decline. He has always been a narcissist, the kind of guy who will ramble on and on because no one in his life has ever told him no. Eight years ago he made clear he was living in his own reality, and has long put forward his own facts and his own version of the truth, all of which is pretty well divorced from the reality in which the rest of us live. This in and of itself should be disqualifying. For most Republicans, though, it was not. Eight years ago, Trump was exciting. He stuck it to the establishment. He was actually very funny (I know someone will get mad at me for saying that, but the guy — and especially his crude insults — is not exactly crafting sophisticated comedy, but he is funny). He was, as has been observed many times over, the Id of conservative America, willing to cast “compassionate conservatism” aside for something more muscular and aggressive. He gave an angry, coarse base permission to hate immigrants, hate feminists, hate racial justice activists, hate the coastal elite (except for Trump himself), hate all of the people who don’t look like them or think like them and who had in recent decades challenged their position at the top of the social and economic hierarchies. At the time, this was all very fresh and new. To people like me, it was shocking and appalling. But a lot of American voters do not see the world the way I do.

Those same Americans, though, have heard this song-and-dance before. The same way that Trump’s insanity doesn’t garner headlines because it’s old news, Trump himself may be less magnetic because it’s also familiar — and now aped by so many Republican politicians.

All of this is to say that Trump is far from invincible. He is, by any reasonable measure, a weak candidate. His RNC speech made clear just how weak he is — and how much weaker he has gotten since 2020. And with the right candidate opposing him, Democrats can make clear just how mentally unfit he is to run the country.

Trump is surrounded by yes men in a movement more akin to a cult than anything else. These people will stand by him. They will deny the obvious reality in front of their faces. That can be beneficial: They can flood social media with heavily-edited videos and insist that their invented narrative is the truth; that may persuade some voters.

But Democrats’ broader (although far from universal) refusal to deny the reality in front of them is a strength, too. It means Democrats can pivot and adjust. This, in the worst-case scenario, can result in chaos. But it can also mean getting off of a path that only leads us over an obvious cliff. Elections are not won only by turning out the most engaged and dedicated portion of your base. Right now, I fear that’s what both parties are banking on: Republicans are hoping MAGA loyalists will propel a clearly declining candidate across the finish line, while Democrats are hoping their voters see that the stakes are high enough that they would vote for the corpse of FDR over Donald Trump.

Trump’s biggest fans are also either delusional or dishonest, and I doubt they will admit that his speech was an abject disaster. But the rest of us should say exactly what we see: A man who is simply not cognitively, emotionally, or temperamentally equipped to sit in the Oval Office.

xx Jill

[theculturedmarxist]

It’s very hard to make sense of what Yevgeny Prigozhin thought he was accomplishing with his increasingly erratic behavior, particularly his attacks against senior members of the Russian military like defense chief Sergey Shoigu, where he’s gone from having an arguable basis for his complaints (it did look bad for Russia to pull out of Kharkiv and Kherson even though it was doctrinally sound and preserved Russian lives and materiel) to publishing complete fabrications to try to undermine leaders who controlled most of his resources.

What is even more bizarre is that Putin tolerated this public attack on the bona fides of the regular forces, for what has now been shown to be too long.

To give a very brief and hopefully not oversimplified recap of immediate events, Prigozhin accused the Russian regular forces of killing a lot of Wagner troops. He provided some film that didn’t even amount to evidence in terms of what it showed and even that was quickly dissected on social media as an obvious fake, as recapped even on Russian TV.

Prigozhin then announced his forces (at most 25,000, recall with limited supplies and materiel) were marching on Rostov, which is not only where a military base is located but also a center for conducting Ukraine combat operations. Prigozhin claimed to have taken control. The Western media is dignifying those statements but Twitter is casting a lot of doubt:

The multi-author Rybar blog also raised doubts as to what actually was afoot:

In other words, when you look at what Prigozhin has done, which so far has a high bluster-to-action ratio, it looks like weird form of hostage-taking, perhaps over-relying on the idea that because of his stature and having some men around him, Russian forces won’t engage with him because it will make the bad optics worse and probably kill some people, potentially including civilians.

However, recall also the West has been talking ad nauseam about an uprising versus Putin. So whether by action or design, Prigozhin’s move will serve as a trigger for Ukraine sleeper cells in Russia to swing into action. And again, Rybar suggested the Russian security forces had been put on alert for that type of operation BEFORE the Prigozhin gambit:

This gives the essence:

Or even shorter:

Now even if this rebellion is as weak as the tweets above suggest, it still makes for great bad press in the rest of the world, undermining Russia’s efforts to win friends and influence countries.

To keep this post from getting overlong relative to the high dynamism of current events, please see Simplicius the Thinker who catalogues in detail how Prigozhin’s recent rants about betrayal and battlefield failures are utter fabrications. Prigozhin has been so visibly overstating and more recently just making up “failures; that some Russia experts like Mark Sleboda were convinced that this was a big psyops to make Ukraine and the Collective West think Russia was weaker and more divided than it is so as to encourage them to continue to do stupid things like doggedly hold on to positions and even attack Russian lines. And that might even have been the earlier plan but then Prigozhin got the bit in his teeth.

Keep in mind that per Prigozhin, what he is attempting to do narrowly is not a coup. He’s not trying to overthrow Putin (or arguably not at this juncture). He is trying to get major changes in Russian military leadership to among other things advance his position and prevent Wagner from being integrated into the regular Russian force. The deadline for signing new contracts is July 1 and Prigozhin has refused to go along. But as far as Putin is concerned, destabilizing the military during a war might as well be a coup since it jeopardizes Russia, not just him.

And one has to wonder about his conduct in light of this RT story from last month, on the rumors circulating that Prigozhin was in contact with the Ukraine secret service, which was never really denied. Key section from Here are the Zelensky ‘treason’ quotes the Washington Post deleted:

WaPo: The documents indicate that GUR, your intelligence directorate, has back-channel contact with Evgeny Prigozhin that you were aware of, including meeting with Evgeny Prigozhin and GUR officers. Is that true? Zelensky: This is a matter of [military] intelligence. Do you want me to be convicted of state treason? And so, it’s very interesting, if someone is saying that you have documents, or if someone from our government is speaking about the activities of our intelligence, I would also like to ask you a question: With which sources from Ukraine do you have contact? Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country. Which Ukrainians are you talking to? WaPo: I talked to officials in government, but these documents are not from Ukraine, they are from… Zelensky: It doesn’t matter where the documents are from. The question is with which Ukrainian official did you talk?… WaPo: And I can read you what information exactly there is about Prigozhin and the GUR. On February 13, Kirill Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, informed you about a Russian plan to destabilize Moldova with two former Wagner associates. Budanov informed you that he viewed the Russian scheme as a way to incriminate Prigozhin because “we have dealings” with him. You instructed Budanov to inform Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Budanov told you that the GUR had informed Prigozhin that he would be labeled a traitor who has been working with Ukraine. The document also says that Budanov expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the GUR and meetings with GUR officers in Africa…

Yours truly is not able to unpack this. Reading the entire section, it appears Zelensky was upset that the Post had this information and didn’t try denying its accuracy, and the Post patter made it seem likely these were among the 300 Discord leak documents the Post said it saw, curiously of which not all that many got beyond the Post. However, one might surmise that Prigozhin was trying to be a double agent and it had become way too public.

Again one wonders why Putin waited too long to act. Perhaps he and the military leadership viewed Prigozhin as a self-limiting problem, dependent on Russian logistics and so not capable of much independent action. But not much is far from “not any”. And they did nothing to check his outbursts or try to limit his reach. Maybe they thought his open warfare with and denigration of the regularly military (which BTW is very well paid, hence the continuing high number of enlistments) would unify them. That might be accurate, but if Prigozhin had not been authorized to engage in a monster psy-op, which he decided to repurpose late in them, how could they not see he was becoming wildly unhinged?

Even though Russia had the Chechens and the Donbass militias take the brunt of clearing Mariupol, so they are not the only forces Russia has for close quarters operations, it appears Wagner had a contract for Bakhmut (their lock on that gig was weird) and then that became the focus of Operation Meat Grinder. Prigozhin despite giving lip service to Surovkin, who I have read was the mastermind, was unhappy with the grinding and the resulting high cost to his men and had wanted to move faster. This may account for his regular lashing out at the leadership.

So it was impractical to displace Prigozhin during the Bakhmut operation. Putin may have delegated the leashing and collaring of Prigozhin to senior military and intel officers who overestimated their ability to contain him. Perhaps we’ll find out how this cockup happened. But per above, there will be a press tendency to depict the actions of Ukraine sleeper cells, which were already underway, to Russians. It will also be hard to pick that apart.

The fresh updates indicate that some of what is happening is more psychological than real. From the latest Rybar update:

But there are also reports of private jets departing Moscow and some more serious looking action:

Nevertheless, Simplicius the Thinker’s warning of last night still seems largely operative:

The thing is, despite the actual criminal proceedings being set in motion and various Russian regions going on heightened alert, as of this writing there is no proof at all that Prigozhin is actually marching any “column” of Wagner troops to Rostov or anywhere else. One would think the claimed 50km long column would be visible and documented from a variety of sources at this point.

Ultimately Prigozhin can’t go any distance. But a crazy guy in a mall with a machine gun and a belt of ammo can do a lot of local damage and create considerable trauma before he is subdued.

[problemama]

Welcome to the rubbish bin I'm Xo, like "SHo" or XOXO Any pronouns are fine 18+ . maybe will draw something on occasion

TW: CSA mention, Proshipping topics

My experience as a "proship" minor.

You know, when I was a 10 year old and first made an account on MySpace behind my parents back, I did so with this understanding that I was ultimately entering a space that was not made with my needs in mind.

By this point in my life I already had my experience with csa (long before I had any internet access) so I already had my own guard up and it's kinda bizarre to see how so many minors today just have... ZERO idea how to navigate the internet with the same saftey that i had figured out at 10. I think its because adults to bother teaching them how anymore. Back then, I was encouraged to never give out my real name or age to people, and while I could make friends with people online, I should still approach every relationship with caution and awareness. People can lie about their own age and intentions, liberal use of blocking was very much my best tool for personal safety.

However, I was also a pretty troubled kid as far as sexuality goes... my family wasn't exactly open to talking about any sexual topics with me after my assault. They would honestly rather I repressed it. Not exactly a healthy solution. It pushed me to actively seek out nsfw content online but seeing real people engage in it made me super uncomfortable and going onto porn sites made me feel unsafe. You know what didn't do that? Fiction. Art and Writing. Fiction with characters I was attached to and knew about.

This ultimately meant a lot of characters that were my age. And it was mainly cartoon characters. Your Kim Possibles, Jenny Wakemens and the sort. Kim/Shego shipping was a HUGE help for comic to terms with my identity as a lesbian and yeah, it's likely got a significant age gap to it that people today would consider "proship" (the term didn't really exist back then) I can't overstate how glad I am that people weren't so vocal about shaming those kinds of ships at the time because it was legitimately my own sexual outlet. I didn't have the experience to write a good sex scene myself so reading about it in comics and fics was the next best thing, otherwise I worry I mightve put myself in ACTUAL danger by pursuing the experience irl.

I think we forget the ultimate use of fiction as a tool for exploring both ourselves and the world in the safest way. We are drawn to dark fictional content like murder and horror for the same reasons another person might be drawn to sex and the taboo and trying so hard to repress those will just harm the people who benefit from it. (I.e. the 10 year old abuse survivor in need of an outlet)

I do mean it when I say I sympathize with antis/anti-proship folk. Their end goal is just to encourage safer spaces for minors online, but that's not something you get through full on censorship and policing adult spaces and social media. It's by spreading awareness. Teaching them the warning signs of a predator, telling them to make an alias and avoid private dms with adults/people you don't know, watch for adults who overstep their boundaries and address it when you see it. Proship people should also be doubly-aware of how those in their own circle behave, as much as you might hate it- minors WILL find their way in and they could be some of the most vulnerable people. If I had it my way, it would be mandatory lesson in grade school but sadly, it's not.

I won't expect to convince anyone that they're approaching the issue wrong but I hope you can keep this one perspective in mind at the very least.

[dreamingrobots]

1, 3, & 24 for the book asks !

1. How many books did you read this year?

i read 30 books!! pretty proud of that 💪

3. What were your top five books of the year?

-The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin (super compelling fantasy dystopia)

-Translation State by Ann Leckie (exploring a bizarre alien culture)

-Flux by Jinwoo Chong (fever dream of corporate trauma)

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (along with the sequels; i can’t overstate how huge these books are to me and my view of ecology)

-The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (baby’s first introduction to anarchism)

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

i have such a hard time “officially” DNFing anything but a couple that i started this year (or previous years 🫣) and haven’t picked back up yet:

-The Old Woman With The Knife by Gu Byeong-mo (i liked the intro to this but my library loan ran out and the hold for it is soooo long)

-Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (started this years ago- really interesting topic about neanderthals but the writing is so dense i can’t stay focused on it)

-The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis (i tried to make this my 10-minutes-before-bed book but that’s so difficult)

-The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (again, started this years ago and picked it back up this year but it’s been very slow progress)

[trustcrush]

F1 2017 forums

F1 2017 forums drivers#

F1 2017 forums driver#

F1 2017 forums free#

I am a little worried that he might struggle to find his feet at Mercedes, particularly if Hamilton is motivated this year. Ive always liked Bottas, and it's good to see him in a top car.

F1 2017 forums driver#

Hamilton/Bottas and Alonso/Vandoorne - which junior driver is going to push their senior harder?

F1 2017 forums free#

I heard that the Toro Rosso are going to have a light blue Red Bull Sugar Free colour scheme.Īnyway. So at this stage, I'm quite happy to talk about paint jobs. I don't feel I can comment on a car's likely performance by looking at what probably isn't the real thing anyway. No one, including the teams, has any real idea how good their cars are.

F1 2017 forums drivers#

It would appear that it won't matter if the undoubted talent of one of the best drivers of the modern era is scrapping with the rats and mice at the blunt end of the grid as long as the car is painted in a pretty colour. There's very little mention of the revised driver lineup, the supposed performance improvement from the heavily revised Honda power unit, or whether McLaren might possibly come up with a decent chassis and aero package. On the matter of McLaren, most of the column inches generated by the new car concentrate on the colour of the paintwork. So there's an aerodynamic advantage, which means that everybody will have them. Briefly, that area is largely unrestricted by the regulations and the fin contributes to straightening the airflow to the rear wing, and directs more air to the wing when the car is in yaw, i.e. I'm led to believe that the Mercedes will have a full-size fin when it emerges from the garage in Barcelona on Monday. The Mercedes don't have the big wing thing I hope it's not a sign of things to come!! More car launches will follow in the next few days and next week the track at Barcelona will be awash with Flo-vis paint as the teams try to figure out the real-world aerodynamics of the new cars. I doubt that the guys at Brixworth have been idle over the winter, though. The abandonment of the token system was intended to allow the engine suppliers to get on terms with Mercedes and reduce their advantage. Renault will launch their car today, and it will be interesting to see whether they have reconfigured their power unit along the lines of Mercedes, given that they will also power Red Bull (badged as TAG Heuer) and Toro Rosso. I suspect that Mercedes may have contributed in order to secure the seat for Pascal Wehrlein (who will miss the first pre-season test next week, having injured his neck in that rather bizarre incident during the Race of Champions), and Ericsson brings some money, but 2017 will be a long year for Sauber, who will be using 2016 Ferrari power units. Hards are probably the best example because more often than not you could do your best lap time of the race in the last lap with 50-60% worn hard tyres.It's a shame that sponsorship is notable only by its absence on the new Sauber. And that's mainly because the lap time doesn't change enough at the end of the stint. I personally think this is a good change because as for my online league, fewer stops is most of the time the faster way. You'll be struggling with oversteer more at the end of stints. It will probably be a big topic in the beta later this year. This has been redefined with making F1 2017. assists OFF have been mixed upĬodemasters themselves have mentioned that assists were too easy which generated a scenario where "decent" pad-players were too good compared to a player with a wheel. Really welcoming change because slipstream certainly was (and is) OP in F1 2016.ĥ) Assists vs. Hard to go to detail but one of the things that I was missing in F1 2016 was that you couldn't always feel that you were losing the back-end which made driving more cautious. Did they make a huge impact? Not so much.Īs the grip is higher and the cars are going more of the time full-throttle, this should be a thing and it seems like it is. And before anyone comments, yes, mechanical failures were there in F1 2016. If any of you have other possible options, please mention them. Only thing that comes to my mind is mechanical failures. I was worried at this point but then Ben mentions that "there are methods in which it discourages you of doing that and I can't talk about those yet". It would be a welcoming detail in F1 2017.īen talks that you can switch down the gears a lot faster than in F1 2016 (10:20 in the video). Tracks were smooth whether it was a new track or a old track which hasn't got a new surface in years. This has been a big issue in earlier F1 games because tracks didn't have a characteristic feel to them. Russia is smooth as it should be as a rather-new track but tracks like Spain and Brazil have more bumps on them. Tiametmarduk) mentions multiple times that the track surfaces are more detailed in F1 2017.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Democrats can pass the reconciliation today (sorta)

This week, millions are playing Congressional Kremlinology, guessing whether House/Senate Dems have the votes for the $3.5T reconciliation package, playing Fantasy Football Sophie’s Choice to cut programs if corporate Dems whittle it down.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/building-back-america/infrastructure-summer-sophies-choice-of-the-reconciliation-bill/

But as Harold Meyerson writes for The American Prospect, there’s a high-stakes, high-risk gambit that would let the willing, principled Democrats pass the whole package — simply cut the programs’ funding to four years, rather than a decade.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/building-back-america/how-democrats-can-pass-entire-reconciliation-bill/

That reduces the package’s bill to a level that can be covered with agreed-upon “payfors” (these are the self-inflicted, nonsensical budget-balancing measures Dems insist upon, as though the US could run out of the dollars it creates by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet).

Passing this short-term version of reconciliation would give us four years of “affordable child care, universal pre-K, Medicare coverage of vision and hearing and dental care, paid sick leave, child tax credits, tuition-free community college, significant climate mitigation.”

Which is, you know, a lot. But it’s also a lot to lose, because even if this works, it would all be up for grabs in four short years, at which point a different Congress could let the whole thing fail just by doing nothing.

It’s a bet — a bet that, while people won’t punish politicians who fail to deliver on this stuff, they will absolutely destroy any politician that tries to take it away once they have it. That proposition has been received American political wisdom for generations.

It’s why the GOP went so hard after Clintoncare in the nineties: as neocon archvillain Bill Kristol wrote to Republican lawmakers in 1993, if Americans got decent, reliable heathcare, it would be political suicide to take it away from them.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-1993-kristol-memo-on-defeating-health-care-reform

There’s even a name for this, the endowment effect: “people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect#cite_note-Roeckelein2006-2

In experiments, the sums people offer to buy something are lower than the sums they demand to sell it — the mere fact of owning something makes it feel more valuable. Political strategists extrapolate from this and conclude that well-run public services can’t be cut.

In support of this, consider the story of the angry right-wing voters, who, during the Obamacare debate, told politicians to “keep government out of my Medicare.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/08/help-slate-track-the-medicare-isn-t-government-meme.html

Thus the wager: if Dems pass the full package, funded for a mere 4 years, that will be enough time for the endowment effect to kick in and even the most reckless, sadistic Republican Congress of the future won’t dare to touch it.

There are problems with this bet, though. The endowment effect may not be as politically salient as politicians believe. Certainly, at least some of the alleged Tea Party government-out-of-Medicare stories are overstated — or worse, crude hoaxes.

https://www.zebrafactcheck.com/tea-party-folks-think-the-government-should-keep-its-hands-off-medicare/

Even if the endowment effect applies to politics, voters will only punish politicians for dismantling GOOD programs. If the Dems lose the legislature in 2022, the GOP could sabotage these programs to make them easy to kill.

That’s hardly a reach for the Government-Is-Bad-At-Everything-Party, who’ve made an art out of governing badly, then seeking re-election while pointing out that their theories about state incompetence were proven by their own misrule.

That’s not all: a four-year funding horizon may not be enough time to stand up the programs, thanks to the bizarre centrist love-affair with foot-dragging and slow rollouts that solve today’s urgent problems in a seven or ten or twenty years.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#luxury-bones

If all that a four-year funding guarantee gets us is preliminary work — rather than tangible benefits to voters’ quality of life — there will be no endowment effect, and no reason for a future Congress to fear electoral penalties for dismantling them.

All that said, I think this is still an exciting idea. Medicare was rolled out in less than a year, back in 1965. If limiting the funding guarantee frees progressives from having to compromise with bribe-taking corporate Dems, they might be able to do the same.

And, as Meyerson points out, there’s precedent for this strategy working. When FDR was rolling out the New Deal, he took money from long-term projects (dams, bridges, etc) and spent it on quick-hit programs like roads and post-offices.

By employing “millions of Americans in a matter of weeks,” FDR won “vast public support for his New Deal.”

Getting the reconciliation programs running now isn’t just good politics — it’s good, period. America can’t wait for infrastructure, care, health and climate action.

We should have been dealing with this stuff for decades. The best time to start in on them would have been, oh, say, 1990.

The second best time?

Right.

Fucking.

Now.