#not to overstate my case but

[egophiliac]

i don't think u need to worry about poppy ikemen anymore, new ride kamens character is kr kamui who is our lord and savior dan kuroto

DAN THE DANGEROUS ZOMBIE MAN!!!!!! I was SO excited when I saw the reveal, he is absolutely the funniest possible character choice hands-down. oh my god. I'm so glad he made it into this game.

also Kamui just looks incredible. instant favorite. this is the kind of man I can picture standing naked on a cliffside and screaming at everyone about his imminent ascension towards godhood. he is the incarnation of that one iconic Gina Linetti scene.

[lucyfrankenstein]

beloved lucy are you going to see mcr

had to wait because ihave genuinely the worst luck in the entire world its a curse so i make my friend who has the best luck in the entire world buy my concert tickets for me. BUT YESSSSSSS IM BACKKKKKKKKKK IN THE FUCKING BUILDING!!!!

[sun-marie]

i keep seeing ppl say stuff like "finally a DA game I won't have to mod just to get good hair" and I feel like a werido bc i will def still be trying to mod their hairstyles bc modding is fun 😶

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

feeling weird mixed feelings atm and I can't really logic them away, ig? on the one hand I'm completely apathetic about it. on the other hand there's a part of me that's absolutely horrified that I could do something like that. the fact that it's still a consistent low-level pain the whole time also doesn't help. anyway those kinds of thoughts are then making me want to harm again to cope with them but also a) it's manageable and b) I currently have a deep horror of self-inflicted pain after the last few days apparently.

[kandicon]

Avatar of the Web who keeps getting mistaken for an avatar of the Stranger because nobody cares to understand the nuance between marionettes and mannequins.

[tastymelonfarm]

if I think about katniss and peeta too long my vision starts to look like when you take damage in a cod game

[currentlyonstandbi]

shout out to kip williams for posting a shot from one of my favourite scenes in STC's Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (even if it is a little blurry)

this takes place towards the end of Jekyll's recount of his earlier debaucherous outings into London's night-life as Hyde. Most of the recollection is told by way of the screens, but right at the end, Matt and Ewen return to stage dressed in the feather hat and skirt ensemble and break out into an impromptu can-can dance while Infernal Gallop by Offenbach plays. Meanwhile, the screens played a loop of several different costume changes for the two of them - second from the right is as The Cowardly Lion and Dorothy from Wizard of Oz; the one directly behind Matt was what I could only describe as a very Mardi Gras-esque devil costume

[bidaubadeadieu]

Hard disagree. People of any age can have just as complex inner lives as when they were young, because they're still people. If you look at life as having some people who are just NPCs, background extras, I think that's maybe an empathy problem. Show me a person that doesn't grieve, that has never moved cities or changed jobs, that doesn't have birthdays or a favorite band. If you don't feel that the story of your life is not interesting or exciting, that's something that can be within your power to change. You can just want a sandwich, or some other simple pleasure, and that doesn't have to be part of a story you tell yourself about your own declining relevance.

where's that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I'd like to submit "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane"

[fallintomyeyes]

me and my ex (who i fully lost my mind over during the pandemic years) are talking again and i’m struck by the fact that he keeps giving me the ick and how if i did not already know him i would’ve ghosted him like three times already before setting up this meetup

[drdemonprince]

The conversations about accountability & apologies that we've been having in social justice circles these last few years have basically trained everybody to fawn.

We've been telling people that if they are accused of any wrongdoing or of hurting anybody's feelings, it is their obligation to apologize immediately, and never to hedge, disagree, or to explain their rationale what they've done.

In their apology, we expect them to articulate every single thing that they have done that was damaging in the strongest language possible and to declare outright that they have harmed someone, often multiple groups of people, even if they are not sure of the impact (or could not even possibly be sure).

If a person's apology is anything but immediate and entirely self-excoriating, we accuse the person of downplaying the damage they have done, failing to be accountable, and manipulating others.

In this way, we've made it impossible for a person to ever take their own side lest that be taken itself as a form of wrongdoing. We have trained our fellow social-justice-minded people to believe that if they do anything but worsen the case against themselves, they are being irresponsible.

I say we, in all of this, because I have partaken in all of this rhetoric, made these kinds of criticism, given accused people this type of advice.

And I have followed it myself, often to a damaging effect.

I have taken responsibility for problems in which I truly did not believe I played a part, I've overstated the damage that I've done so as not to risk understating it, I've ascribed malice to my intentions when I knew it wasn't there, I've agreed with people's most negative, bad-faith narratives about conflicts involving me that they were not even present for, offered up information about myself that was not a third party's business in the name of transparency, apologized for things I haven't done -- and in doing all of this, I have denied my loved ones the opportunity to really hear me about what I was going through and my motivations when I was in conflict with them, things that any true friend or close associate would obviously want to hear about if they cared about me.

This aim of giving the perfect apology and taking perfect accountability has been nothing but an isolating force in my life, because it has barred me from openly entering into necessary conflict with people when our needs were incompatible or they had hurt me just as much as I'd hurt them. The fear of being a manipulative, unaccountable DARVO-er has led me to roll onto my back and expose my belly, falling over myself with panicked apologies and the most unflattering information possible cast in the least explicable light, almost outright begging for others to become angrier at me and believing that it was only way I could ever possibly be accepted back.

We've drilled into people that the way to be good and responsible is to allow people to view us as negatively as possible, to even arm others with information that will confirm that point of view, and to never insert our own perspective or needs on the matter at all.

And yeah, there are a lot of shitty people out there who dodge accountability easily because their power ensconces them from any consequences. but the primary problem with that was never that they wrote a shitty notesapp apology that used the unforgivable phrase "I am sorry if you felt XYZ." The real problem was that there was no community that held enough influence to hold them to account, and for their victims there weren't ever adequate supports or protections.

instead of addressing any of that in a remotely systematic way, we have taken to picking apart every accused person's every word and deed for evidence of inner moral failure and created a culture in which we think we can determine a person's safety by how artfully they put words together when they are under threat. and what do you know, plenty of bad faith actors and conflict avoidant cowards and people who just dont understand what they are even being accused of can do that just fine.

[electricpurrs]

HIII COMMISSION ME PLEASE

making yet another post because i haven't been able to get anything in the past 13 days and i just really, really want to keep making sales if i want to live without constant worry.

story is the same as always, i live with my single mom and my two siblings, i'm unemployed, ko-fi/commissions are my only source of income, i need to help myself and my family.

as an extra, my younger brother's laptop broke, so i'm buying him a new computer. that's going to cost me R$200 every month, on top of all my usual spendings. i really want to be able to do this, because my brother matters a lot to me.

that all said, i'm linking my ko-fi commissions here! i got a special $10 tier for simple doodle comms in case you dont have a lot of money, but i do nicer icons and fullbodies too!

but really anything helps, i can't overstate how anything i get from ko-fi makes my life infinitely easier. thank you for listening, and please share if you can!

[pon2354]

People who piss themselves because they like how it feels are 1,000,000 times more valuable to our communities than anyone that votes conservative.

Furries, arguably the internet's first punching bag, are some of the most important IT people in the world. Most furries have accomplished more than your average conservative.

And let's not forget, every single queer or kinky person is by definition happier than conservatives because they have a sex life they actually find fun. Even sex-repulsed aces have more fun, because they have their ideal sex life: none.

We need kink at pride because “kink” isn’t just kink. “Kink” is:

That boy wearing jeans that are too tight

Your neighbors and their “friend” that lives with them

Having a beard and wearing a skirt

Wearing any kind of choker

Literally anything else they decide goes against the “norm”, and it can be literally anything. That is why we need kink at pride.

[g-n-c-quoi]

the anti-endo side of the internet is rotting my brain by the second what are you people DOING

this is a little bit about the new octocon app but just in general-

speaking as a medically recognized (not diagnosed for safety reasons but doctors are aware) P-DID system, i cannot believe i have to say this, but endogenic systems are entirely unharmful and you look ridiculous trying to pretend they do

“DID/OSDD/etc is a trauma disorder!!” you would be hard pressed to find an endogenic system actually claiming to have those disorders. the vast majority of them have self described as non-disordered

“you can’t be a system without trauma!!” do we know that for a fact? dissociative disorder research is so full of stigma and misinformation that it’s mind boggling, do you honestly trust the dsm-5 to have literally every example of being a system ever written down verbatim?

also systems can be intentionally created for spiritual or personal reasons, please google search tulpamancy

also also it’s incredibly weird and potentially dangerous in some cases to demand proof that someone has experienced life altering brain damaging trauma before you can respect them as who they say they are

“they’re stealing resources!” literally what resources. therapy? they’re stealing therapy? please be serious.

w/ regards to pk/sp and octocon- what tangible harm is it doing to you for someone who calls themselves an endo system to use the same app as you. answer quickly.

i don’t even particularly care that much about this, i’ve largely stopped talking about being a system online because of how mind numbingly absurd the community is, i just cannot overstate how little this discourse matters

if someone is earnestly and intentionally faking being a system then the consequences of that behavior that turn up in their social life will be more than enough without you ridiculing them relentlessly for something that most of the time has little if any material impact

you’re just diet fakeclaiming please find something else to do with your time than bothering people who aren’t bothering you

[kryaaas]

a weird thing about Jean people rarely talk about is that the bitch just sometimes lies lol

there is his "no one is married in Revachol" line (while there are several married couples in the game and jean literally stands right next to the married woman at that moment)

But such occurance isnt not an only one. There several instances where Jean overstates the issue or omits the truth

anothee infamous example of this is in the timeline where kim got shot and jean claims: "kitsuragi is barely clinging to his life!!" despite the fact that jean had visisted kim in the hospital before knows that his condition is stable. To continue putting blame on harry for kim getting shot he also conviently does not mention the fact that kim was upset at JEAN and not harry

anothing thing I found is that jean tells different things depending on how harry responds

If harry is evasive with his answer:

YOU - "I thought the killer would be underwater. He wasn't."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Ha-ha-ha, ho-ho-ho." He grabs his stomach in mirthless laughter. "Underwater killer. So funny, Harry. Thank you for fucking me."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Thank you for destroying 45,000 reál of police property that's coming out of *my* payslip. You know that, right? You're gonna get fired. And I'm gonna pay till I die..."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "It doesn't matter." He exhales to calm his breathing. "Your badge, Harry. Show me your badge."

But If Harry is truthful its:

YOU - "I drove it into the ocean when I was drunk."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "So *refreshing*. He just admits it. Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for destroying 45,000 reál of police property that's coming out of *everyone's* payslip."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "It doesn't matter." He exhales to calm his breathing. "Your badge, Harry. Show me your badge."

Jean choses to emphasises different things depending on circumstances.

Harry's evasive answer gets Jean annoyed so he is emphasizing *his* suffering and harry being *fired* to make him feel additional guilt.

In the second case Harry tells the truth so Jean is more reasonable. Now its *everyones* payslip. He still wants Harry to feel guilt but now its a lot less drastic.

There is also a line when jean claims that "harry is the reason why we have to take sensitivity trainings" and like.im sorry but this is such a fucking bullcrap. harry is the main reason?? really? what about mack and chester? lets be honest the reason why they are taking these trainings is because cops in their precinct are fucking assholes including jean

TL:DR jean is very very very emotionally-charged unreliable narrator. jean's lying (or exaggerating the truth, if we are being nice) is a pattern and not just isolated occurances

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[mayasaura]

Yeah! What's so interesting about, like, emphasis of interpretation is that this is exactly the quote I was thinking of, too! I find the aspect of John as "someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch" and is "struggling not to" fall back on familiar hierarchies and failing at it to be an incredibly interesting part of his character that often gets brushed over with "he represents the patriarchy/is a misogynist, no further questions". And that's really the tl;dr version of everything I was objecting to in my original post.

While I'm not sure I personally entirely vibe with necromancers as a metaphor for gender, it's a legit lens of interpretation with meat on its bones and a solid basis in the text. That's not what I was referring to when I said there was no evidence of gender roles or male primogeniture. I was talking about gender in the modern misogyny and sexism sense. The kind of prejudice that easily could have been but apparently wasn't inherited through John from our society today. Identifying as or being assigned as a girl or a woman in the Nine Houses has no relation to one's ability to inherit, wealth and power are not and don't appear to have ever been passed along the male line, and there's never really been much indication that one's career prospects or even access to hobbies (such as the Nine Houses have them) are effected. Having a new axis of oppression that in many ways mirrors sexism is a juicy source for commentary and analysis, but it isn't literally the same thing as having sexism. Conflating the two into one topic seems like an unnecessary source of confusion.

So this bit isn't entirely related to the misogyny thing—though I do see and concede your point about religion and patriarchal structure—but I need to explain that as a non-Catholic (and indeed non-Christian) reader, I kinda don't default to center the Catholic perspective. I wasn't talking or thinking at all about any of that, because it doesn't really register to me and frankly I don't understand it on the personal level many people seem to. The themes are intentionally there, of course, and important to the people who do click with it. How John's personal relationship with Christianity helped form the religion of the Nine Houses, and what the author might be saying on both a meta level and a literal textual level about Catholicism (and gender in Catholicism) with how that's depicted are valuable things to explore and I hope you continue to go hog wild on them

There's a fascinating double standard in a lot of the analysis of John's influence on the Nine Houses' society. Like, the role of cavaliers, the widespead commodificiation of the remains of the dead, these are all faults the Nine Houses have inherited directly from him. Fair enough. But the lack of gendered roles, the complete lack of male primogeniture, homophobia, or patriarchal family structures, these of course have nothing to do with John, who is definitely a misogynist