#is scepticism getting to me

[khaotunq]

[ Blow out the candle before it burns our place down. ] Khaotung Thanawat as Bison (The Heart Killers, 2024-2025)

Bonus: happy comic sans polystyrene birthday Bison~

[sssunflowersmiles]

By the way the idea that someone's body is none of your business includes things like their nails cause why am I seeing people shit talk Oscar's nails AGAIN when he's spoken about why he keeps them long?? And it's not up to you to judge?? Leave drivers bodies alone challenge x

[rackartyg]

in therapy today i just talked about the dark urge and astarion and my therapist was elated about it. it was fantastic. “wow you’ve really been using this story and those characters to process things. that’s amazing!”

the era of being ashamed of my interests is over. it’s apparently Cool and Healthy to use fiction to cope. i wish i could tell fifteen year old me about this it would blow her mind

[one-unabashed-fish-less]

i'm still omw in terms of accepting my body (as you do yk we're getting there) BUT. one thing that gives me the BIGGEST god complex? my bush and happy trail. sorry but i will be brandishing it around as much as i can. as a matter of fact i'm being deadly serious when i say that after shower i spend some time looking at it specifically because it gets all nice and curly and shiny and soft. my armpit hair comes in close second. you cannot convince me that looking at it and thinking of sweat and getting hot and heavy and smells and all that is not hot

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."

[true-blue-sonic]

I imagine Espio messes up a recipe but Silver eats it anyway and thinks it's fine (he's eaten worse)

I get the feeling Silver would quite like cooking and baking, but just not in moments wherein he is busy or on a mission. And since that is often, I figure he'll just throw whatever he can together and eats that, if he gets that far in the first place. Thus, he'll probably have consumed a whole matter of things that were... unique in their combination, haha. But I think he really does not care so much about it! Food is food and time wasted is time wasted. So when Espio comes in with a recipe that's not exactly what he had desired, Silver will just down it with little complaint. And I figure he'll be happy to help out later and see if they can make it better together <3

[batsplat]

you don’t need to answer top2 if you wish but how do you think the championship standings will look like next year? besides the obvious stuff, i’m v excited to see what diggia has in store + bezz going up against martin + acosta (and ktm as a whole really) + the rookies!!

now see usually i'm a coward with this stuff and wait until pre-season's done to do predictions for the season, both championship order and rider market. this approach is a good idea because you're like 5% less likely to end up with egg on your face, just a bit more data to go off for both individual riders and - more importantly - broader manufacturer trends. i also usually don't post these predictions on the internet, which helps with the egg on face situation. i'm not sure predictions this far out are particularly useful because like. how would i know what aprilia's doing this winter. this is basically complete guesswork. but also it's funny being publicly wrong about things, so i'm not going to overthink this and just give you a championship order based on nothing but vibes, hope, and a dream

marc

pecco

pedro

jorge

diggia

binder

vinales

a. marquez

morbs

fabio

bastianini

bez

aldeguer

zarco

rinsy

oliveira

r. fern

mir

ogura

marini

miller

chantra

i did this in two minutes and i don't like it!! the main one that i don't feel GREAT about is bez, i thought the vibes were pretty good from his first test and it feels like i've stranded one aprilia in a completely different bit of the field to all the others. idk i think it's just that i see everything after the top two as quite congested and there were a bunch of people where i wasn't quite sure i could justify ranking them lower in my head - and admittedly some insane hopium where yamaha is concerned (listen, they can't be THIS shit forever, they just can't). (and hey, there's always a chance i'm actually being too pessimistic, and that midfield being kinda mid will get yamaha back in the mix!!) so that's how bez ended up slipping down quite far. the other problem is the ktm situation... the moment i commit to pedro at pee three i am apparently predicting that ktm has a remotely workable bike for this year despite *gestures*, which then means that i suddenly have three highly rated riders i can't be putting miles and miles away. and for that matter, bastianini having a mildly meh catalunya test (i automatically wrote valencia test lol) isn't really justification to put him four places behind vinales. but we move. 8-9 is a concession to the idea that the gp25 doesn't seem to be as radical a transformation as gp23 -> gp24 and year old bike this time will suit the michelin rear better - at which point a. marquez being a reasonably reliable performer and morbidelli being used to the machinery do come into play. i am actually an aldeguer hopeful (still, barely) but also idk man, i think if that bit of the ranking is congested then he could easily drop down quite a few places and i also think he could struggle quite badly especially early on. nothing ogura has done this season justifies me putting him fifteen places behind the lead aprilia, and yet idk who i'd bump for him. i think fourth for jorge is kind of pushing it and i could also foresee a season where... well, he's got his title now, he's not going to be fighting for the title this season, so he can go back to his high risk high reward ways of just trying to go for the win whenever possible even when the bike isn't QUITE there and as a result regularly binning it. but also idk who i'd want to bump ahead of him!! i think jorge has shown this season he CAN be an extremely reliable points scorer and he also ultimately i reckon he has more raw pace *even on limited machinery* than some of these other names so. idk. i think diggia will have a good season but fifth in the championship is already A Big Step for him and with that kind of injury, also no guarantee he'll be 100%. ultimately the problem is that i'm kinda not really particularly high on the stonks of any non-ducati manufacturer, but also the ducati rider field is SO depleted that i kinda feel like surely some riders can sneak through to take some spots in the chasm of ability that comes after marc/pecco. you can tell i rate zarco and do not rate fernandez and also think honda will just like... never get better ig? anyway i didn't actually switch a single position from when i quickly did this in two minutes and now i'm just over-justifying unknowable predictions so let's leave it at that, happy holidays lads

[soviet-siscon]

i wish my mum wasn't so weird about me specifically. like it'd be one thing if she was like that to everyone but it's genuinely awful how she sometimes treats me like I'm her dodgy son she can't trust. (while also being her daughter she can expect chores from way more than my brothers). i wish we had some solidarity or something and she wasn't so fucking weird to me :(

[mossistyping]

haha. lmao even

[sskk-manifesto]

!

[if-i-could-fly-h0me]

Arthur lifting Mordred up in his arms like a proud father isn't talked about enough

[the-hero-obviously]

Hat Kid really wants me to get roblox what is that

[queerstudiesnatural]

i am in such a bad mood everything pisses me off i've been grumbling and groaning and complaining about everything since yesterday, i just want everything to stop, i want to sleep, and i want to feel better

[franeridan]

I'm sorry I'm lowkey losing my mind but i just read someone say something along the lines of i haven't gotten to law yet but I'm starting to wonder if people don't ship him with luffy just to stick someone with luffy that's not zoro and I just, oh, oh, I wish I could be there to see them actually reach law, that's going to be. beautiful. I wonder if they'll feel my same extreme delighted bewilderment in realizing that luffy just has a thing for grumpy silly swordsmen, apparently

[stonedsoul]

in retrospect it makes so much sense that i would be a lil uzi vert fan idk why it took me so long to start getting into their stuff properly

[maryasmorevna]

SO close to strangling my dad for what he's saying about berluconi... what a deeply ignorant little man he is at heart