#no fucking comment required

[kannawandering]

been reading the novel beyond what's publicly available uhhh well I'm not here anymore but spoilers chapter 1030? 1031? I don't remember. idk spoilers spoilers.

I thought about it since like I read chapters about Kishiar's bday but 1st TL Katchian was low-key funny... I'm so sorry wdym he made Yuder kill Kishiar right before his bday js so he keeps the “people with the Duke Peletta title don't live past 30” streak 😭😭😭

[skitskatdacat63]

I'm not built for watching movies w straight dudes cause I can't say the things I want to say like, "James Bond would benefit from puppy play," "He should seduce a man next," "If I made a Bond film, I'd have him infiltrate a bdsm club as a sub" etc etc.

[soggy-fishsticks]

guys ive been drawing so much lately I've been starting to actually hate it 🙁

[thousandyearphantombunker]

[rosinasnoot]

Walter White and Capitalism

I'm almost to the end of Breaking Bad and it's curious from a scientific perspective to see how greed fuels Walter's actions. Anything, and I mean anything, goes, so long as it ultimately gets him more money. The money doesn't have any external value at this point—he could cash out right now, put his earnings into the stock market or whatever, and he and his whole family could live comfortably off of the interest. Ostensibly, that's the kind of security he got into the meth business to achieve.

He wants money for its own sake. It's all a game to him and by god, he's going to win. The people who die, lose. It's of course bad to take a competitor out of the game without cause, that would be cheating and Walter's not going to cheat. If he doesn't earn the money fairly, he doesn't win, so cheating is out of the question. But a competitor who tries to take him out of the game has broken the rules and that makes them fair game. A reasonable sacrifice. The DEA and other law enforcement (if they knew everything he'd done, anyway) would remove him from the game, so he has to avoid them and distract them. Losing by death and losing by prison are effectively the same thing in his mind. It's all part of the game. Walter's no quitter. He quit the game once and look where that got him. No, he's in it for good this time.

The problem with Walter's method, using his own logic, is that he never sets a win condition. $5 million isn't enough if he could have $300 million. $300 million wouldn't be enough if he could get a billion. So he can play the game, and he can avoid losing, but he's never actually going to win. He's stuck.

However, I'm not going to call this state of affairs tragic, because I fucking hate Walter White and he dug this grave himself. I sincerely hope he dies in the hole he's digging. Tragedies involve rooting for the main character in spite of everything, and this is not that kind of story.

Anyway, Walter (I will grudgingly admit) is a pretty smart guy. So it's very interesting to me how big a blind spot he has around his greed. See, he assumes that every other person he's ever met and will meet is also equally motivated by greed and the desire to win at capitalism. I suspect that he's managed to hold this opinion for so long because he knows that he's smart, so he assumes that most people are too stupid to see how they could get closer to winning the game. This includes Mike and Jesse, two inarguably intelligent men; one who's learned over long experience how to stay in the game (because he realized early on that the goal of the game isn't winning, it's not losing), and one who is motivated by morals but is willing to achieve financial security by cooking meth.

Walter doesn't have friends. People like to talk about how the game Monopoly is a quick way to ruin friendships. Monopoly simulates capitalism at a small scale in a couple of hours. It's meant to be unfair, and you can build alliances but you ultimately win by screwing everyone else over. Walter is playing capitalism, and it's the same thing. He might feel a little bit of loyalty toward Jesse, and I'm sure a part of him still loves his family (he is human, after all), but his first and most important goal is to win the game. His family is his team, and they all win or lose together, so they're fine. But Jesse? Jesse is only around as long as he's contributing to Walter's ability to win the game. Walter will stab him in the back in a second if it's profitable enough, and whatever he thinks Jesse would actually do, Jesse's smartest move in the game would be to screw him over right back. So if he does betray Jesse, it's fair. It's not what Jesse would have done, but it's what he should have done and that's close enough. See the logic? Anything Walter would do is fair because he's making the best decisions to win capitalism (and he's a smart guy, so he can feel pretty confident that he is actually making the best decisions), so everything he does that hurts someone else is what they should've done to him if they had the chance, so it's basically what they would've done, so it's fair.

This whole mindset is why Walter gets so upset when Jesse has his umpteenth moral dilemma about what they're doing. Jesse doesn't understand that causing other people to permanently lose the game (killing children) is all part of it. It's not against the rules, you just have to be careful how you do it so the Law doesn't come after you. If you can get away with it it's often the best thing to do. And they CAN get away with it, so trivial things like morals shouldn't stop them from making the perfectly reasonable (dare I say, optimal) decision to remove a threat to them winning the game. Since everyone else is also playing the game (again, Walter's blind spot), they knew what they were signing up for. So it's fair, see?

From an antropological perspective this is a fascinating insight into the minds of people who are rich-rich. Considering how few people get to be rich-rich (let's arbitrarily say that I'm talking about people with more than $100 million in any form) and how many human rights violations have to do with people who are winning at capitalism, it seems likely that a lot of those people have the Walter White mindset of "this is a game and I'm winning and if other people lose it's because they're not good enough at it to win."

Ordinary people would then be clamoring for regulations simply because they're jealous that they're losing the game, so they want to make it harder to win. Human rights violations are an acceptable sacrifice if they increase profits by enough to offset any costs. Taking away things like DEI is a good way to both reduce legitimate competition and to stop the undeserving from cheating—a win-win if you're already winning. Taxes are the government trying to make it harder to win; tax evasion (especially the technically legal kind) is what you do if you're good enough at the game to know or find out how. The game isn't fair and it isn't supposed to be.

Among many problems with this worldview is that most of the people who are winning are convinced that it's because they deserve it. They were good at the game and they did everything right so of COURSE they're winning! Much like the gambling addict who won a little bit right at the beginning and is now thousands in debt, they mistake dumb luck for skill. They think that the people who win the game earn it, and to some extent that's true but it also involves a whole lot of luck.

I wanted to write out this character analysis of Walter fucking White because this worldview is fundamentally incompatible with my own. I can't understand how anyone could actually think this way (though I can't deny the evidence that many people do), so I'm trying to get a decent cognitive grasp on what this worldview entails. But let's be real here for a second. We don't get to live our all-too-brief lives on this beautiful planet just for the purpose of winning at fucking capitalism. I mean, look at Elon Musk. By all reasonable metrics he's won the game, and since he's forced just about everyone to know about him, he is popularly disliked. He's won and he has no one to share his victory with (which is one of the things he wants most) because a core tenet of the game he decided to play is "screw everyone else over to win." Lo and behold, he won and therefore screwed everyone else over in the process and, surprise surprise, most people don't like being screwed over and therefore don't like him.

Capitalism is a game that everybody loses.

[canarypost]

ubguys i ffu king love rick n morty

[goryhorroor]

this all was in response to me jokingly saying “bring back the transatlantic accent,” after watching a b&w movie. calling people anti-intellectual because they use tumblr as an outlet to just say random stuff and comment on movies, is as rude as it comes. never did I resort to insults to respond to this person’s comment. and I will call you out since you wanted to be rude as fuck about it and then block me.

[tantumuna]

what's crazy to me is multiple times i've received encouragement to start drawing again, even when i mention that the only reason i've considered drawing again is as a desperate ploy for attention

but whenever i talk about my writing i either get ignored or told to "write for yourself"

like just tell me you don't value writing as an art form. it'll be easier than having to dance through whatever the fuck this is

[autisticlee]

no one knows just how hard I work at things. how I have to work 1000000x more than the average person to compensate for being autistic and adhd and probably other things i'm working out with therapist, and having a sort of physical disability i've not received any help or treatment for. everyone assumes I don't try or give up too soon. they think I just started, need more practice. they think I expect everything handed to me immediately with no work or effort and don't acknowledge the multiple years i've put into things. they think I have no right to be upset about still failing to get where I want even after working my entire life to get there, while watching people around me surpass even my meager goals within a fraction of the time and work i've out into the same thing. constantly getting surpassed by everyone around me who seem to barely do any work to get there compared to me. it's all handed to them and falls into their lap so easily. all because they don't have the extra obstacles to overcome and work around that I do. while they go from point A to Z immediately with no major stops in between, I have to go through every single letter and then some, often getting sent back to the start. but it's always *my* fault, according to everyone. it's not the fault of those around me who ignore me, don't support me, don't help me, don't believe in me, etc. it's my fault they don't do those things. because doing the work of 10 people in one isn't enough, just because it's me. and not reaching Z as fast as everyone else means I don't deserve any of the support or help or anything else and means i'm not trying hard enough. it doesn't matter that I *need* to work harder than 100 "normal" people combined to get even half the result! Just because I can't reach what they do means i'm not trying hard enough! ugh.

[neechees]

For your blocklists on someone defending Gaiman. between him being a zionist, defending cp, being an appropriative hack, & transmisogynist, there's plenty of reasons to dislike this fucking dude.

[tonystarkfucksaround]

It's freaking ridiculous that nowadays I need energy to simply go through my likes on here

I'd go on like rampage, thinking, oh, well, I'd sort it all out later, and then that later never comes, or I'd get another like rampage, and now I'm trying to figure out where my last reblogged post was on the likes page and I've been scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and it's probably been five minutes at most, but even my resolve to fill up my queue has burnt out by now.

It's a disaster!

[rotisseries]

you would think going on a fic to comment "hey can you please update your OTHER FIC i just love it so much" with no acknowledgement of the fic you're actually commenting on, AND THEN when the author explains, far more kindly than you deserve, that this is not polite, and then when someone else ALSO tells you point blank that it's rude, you double down and go "well I just wanted to let them know I like the other fic I didn't know if they were checking comments :/ I'm not going to comment anymore though the author is always "rude" on her tumblr to people "kindly" (🙄) asking if she's still continuing the fic. which makes me sad :///" you would think. this would all commonly be understood as an asshole move. and yet. and. yet. people will do this and wholeheartedly believe they're getting unfairly dogged on

[skitskatdacat63]

I looked forward in a fic I'm reading bcs the authors note was like "it feels bittersweet to finish this fic off" and the last chapter is titled "a year later" I DONT WANNNAAAAAAA STOP WHAT HAPPENS THAT REQUIRES A YEAR LATER UPDATE

[bloodanddiscoballs]

Kim is a,fascist

are you stupid

[goldenhour-s]

the way i wish my game was in english so i could do cute gameplay posts using its notifications etc. 💔