#or really politics in general

[askchilchuck]

Do you support Kamala?

No idea who that is.

[michaelgovehateblog]

Just going to take a moment before I let myself start despairing the new government, to realise that holy shit. The conservatives have actually lost in a major major way. After 14 years they're actually gone. I was 8 when they came into power, most of my life, and definitely all of my life where I've been politically aware, has been under Tory rule. They're out and that's a victory

[lully-jo]

I wonder how many people really love and relate to Alisaie because they too were the girl who struggled to understand how folks around her could act like suffering and selfishness and hivemind behavior was normal and their softness was called a weakness and so they built up an abrasive exterior to force people to take them seriously and now they don't know how to be vulnerable without feeling embarrassed or cringe even though they still feel things so deeply it's almost suffocating...

[maingh0st]

i know i'm not the first to say this, but the acolyte's cancellation has confirmed how tired i am of disney's decision-making when it comes to their content. i know nostalgia is the easiest way to a big payout, but we can only take so many spinoffs before the universe starts to feel too small. but then fresh content—content that's building on the canon by looking to old star wars lore while asking new questions—fizzles out.

it's the sequel trilogy all over again. we're promised something new, something that actually expands the canon rather than just recycling it, even bringing in concepts from legends, and then the rug is ripped out from underneath us & we're punished for ever caring about any of it. silly babygirl! palpatine was always the big bad (don't worry about the fact that this is thematically nonsense and not foreshadowed in any way), and rey isn't a nobody ("your parents sold you because they loved you"), and this isn't a story about how the force transcends human categories and dynasties (represented by a grey jedi force dyad between a legacy skywalker and a nobody orphan from a backwater planet, fulfilling not only balance between light and dark but also transcending the old to become something new). silly idiot!!! rey's a palpatine by birth and a skywalker by self-adoption and god forbid she create her own identity outside of these names our fans recognize. watch as she stands alone on a sand planet that has no personal significance to her, ending her arc almost exactly as she began. but look!! two suns! neat

i don't even know if fanservice is the right word. at a certain point, it just starts to feel like they're quaking in their boots at the thought of doing anything new. i had my gripes with some of the choices in the acolyte, but at least it was unique. it explored a new era and asked questions that star wars has only ever flirted with. like: what happens to the children who are uprooted from their homes at such a young age, yet can't find their place in the jedi order? how does one survive in a supposedly honorable system that nevertheless relies on the repression of some of humanity's most fundamental emotions? is it possible that an organization dictating exactly how one ought to interact with the very life force of the universe... could perhaps be faulty and shortsighted? what happens when the ways of that order clash with other cultures and worldviews? (spoilers: space colonialism). and that's not even to mention the ideas they play with re: the force itself (vergences! plagueis! force witches!)

i know not everyone loved the show, but a lot of people really did care about it. a lot of people, like me, were excited to see these new questions being raised. but forget it—the disney gods have decreed that it didn't hit some magical threshold of streaming hours or reach a "broad enough" audience in the two months it's been out. but don't worry guys. turn your brains off and tune in for the next spinoff 2 chewy 2 bacca

[batwynn]

If anyone’s wondering what the rural side of a purple USA state is looking like right now, here’s a sample:

80% of the roads are almost completely impassible around the entire state. Massive holes destroying cars. Newly paved roads destroyed in 3 months. We barely had money for cheap patches last year, we are likely not going to have any money for roads and bridges at all this year. Both roads that lead to where I live have collapsing culverts under the roads because they installed plastic ones instead of metal, meaning in DAYS myself, 20+ households, and 5+ farms will not be able to get in and out of our homes. And yet, not a single person out here other than me will complain or say anything to get it fixed because they’re full of complex guilt over voting for this to happen to all of us. My emails and calls to the office of two people that manage this area have been ignored. They’re too busy trying to move the gigantic chunks of ice that flooded several roads from the river flooding severely this year. No, climate change didn’t cause this how dare you even bring that up when people are dealing with results of *climate change?!*

We are getting punished, as a state, because our governor chose to follow the rule of state-controlled law about trans people participating in sports and that made somebody angwy. Most people around here have decided any harm caused by this are trans people’s faults and there has been an even sharper rise in aggression at even the hint of gender-nonconformity. Yes, even the dog’s genders are more intensely defined right now.

Everyone is angry. Every single person. People who wanted this are angry, but can’t even begin to face why. A lot of people who didn’t vote for this are too scared to say anything because most of us are in very real danger. We are so fucking angry, though. If you’re a visible minority and/or wear a mask, the MAGA will unleash their displaced rage on you every opportunity they can get. The people who can afford to be vocal about it are also in danger. Power keg doesn’t even begin to describe it.

60% of people visiting this area were Canadians crossing the border to shop and idk hang out I guess? I have not seen a single Canadian license plate in almost a month now. The hotels are all weirdly open for booking all year when they’re usually booked up. People here are upping their advertising for off-roading, fishing, camping, etc. No, they haven’t figured it out yet.

There’s been a sharp rise of domestic violence, violent interactions on the road, and drug use has spiked. Everyone’s very angry at a few drug users who are living in extreme poverty in town when half their household is using alcohol or other drugs to deal with their daily lives as well. Again, a lot of misplaced anger, yelling at the suffering as though they caused it all.

A loooot of local people just got cut off from contact from their not-asshole families for the first time ever, so you hear a lot of ‘we used to be able to stick together as a country’ and ‘we shouldn’t let things divide us’. No, they won’t say what divided them from their families because they’re still pretending they didn’t do anything wrong even when it’s starting to actually affect their daily lives negatively.

Some of the farmers have been pretty quiet about their politics since somebody cut all of their incoming money. I’ve looked into some of the local farm’s records in the past and know for a fact that their more shady-ish practices got them more money from the government than they got from actually selling food. Billions more. Now nothing. So very quiet.

A weird, sharp turn against the cops has happened ever since people finally saw baby’s first corruption. Billions of dollars for cops that was supposed to go towards something, and has just sort of… vanished for four years now. People started admitting they didn’t vote for it to go to them, so how did it get passed? They’re all very close to Getting It but they still thinks the cops will fuck them save them from the Transes so they can’t get over that hump yet.

There are a select few who are the most normal Joes you’ve ever seen going about their lives very happily and averagely because literally none of this has affected them yet and yes, they’re all younger cishet white men. (I guess they don’t eat eggs?)

Eggs. Rages about eggs. Egg orgies at the chicken people’s houses. So much cash in hand for eggs. People who didn’t even like eggs are all about buying the cheapest from the most backyard-est chickens. People buying chickens who couldn’t raise a chia pet. None of them even aknowledge the bird flu, but they sure have a lot to say about not vaccinating their chickens.

Raw milk. Orgies at the dairy. So much cash in hand for raw milk. People who are lactose intolerant buying it by the bucketload because not only is it ‘free of *insert random thing they’re afraid of here*’ but also ‘*more misinformation*’ and ‘lactose intolerant people can drink it because it’s *insert some random Christian phrasing about purity*’

No sharp rise in church going. Churches have actually closed. The religion has twisted itself too far away from even that.

The dollar (1.50) store is packed. Still no acknowledgement of why we’re all so poor that we’re all getting our groceries here together, because that would admit to a systematic problem. The food there is getting shadier and shadier. We’re all just sort of waiting for the day some bacteria or random rat shit dropped in from the factory kills us from our $1.50 mystery meat frozen meal.

Isolation for queer people—especially trans people—has quadrupled. We aren’t even looking at one another in the stores anymore. No silent looks of acknowledgement or knowing smiles. We pretend we didn’t clock each other at all now. Everyone is cishet/binary passing as much as we can. The tension and fear is very high.

No one, apparently, remembers the caterpillars that destroyed all the trees last year, or the fact that we were warned it would happen again this year 10x worse. Or the fact that scientists said the trees can only handle so many years without fucking leaves. They’re going to die in droves if this keeps happening. It’s literally been completely forgotten by everyone. If you bring it up they stare at you blankly.

The local younger generation are more nihilistic and risk taking than ever. They keep dying while driving 108mph, or from overdoses. They’re angry and scared and genuinly suicidal. The kids aren’t, in fact, alright.

80% of the people you meet around town have been day drinking at the local bowling alley. Yes, they’re all drinking and driving. No, the billionaire cops are not even present on the roads.

Ticks. More ticks than ever before. No, do not even mention climate change this just mysteriously happened.

Surprisingly (I joke), there has a rise in even more mediocre white men in jobs they’re not qualified for as a lot of the older generation are retiring after one too many injuries on the job. You cannot, for the life of you, find a plumber within a 200mile distance that will actually show up and do the job correctly, nevermind well. One guy had this area covered for 50 something years before and apparently was the last person to know how to do their job. Now it’s daily posts on facebook of people looking for a plumber, 20 year old dude ‘master plumbers’ saying they’ll fix it, then the OP posting again looking for a plumber and maybe a priest a week later.

Did I mention how incredibly angry everyone is?

[oh-no-its-bird]

When Ichigo was born, multiple people lost bets about her gender— including one Hatake Haruka, who'd been positive she'd be a girl (and placed good money on it)

When Ichigo came out as trans, Haruka was among those really fucking excited about it SOLEY because this now meant people owed her hella money, and she aimed to collect

[vinyls-and-valentines]

I do think that a good chunk of killjoys are long-time sufferers of "if I don't make art I'll die" disease, but also I think amongst that demographic there's and even more niche, more annoying sub-demographic made up of people who treat art as solely a political statement and constantly get in shit with other crews/runners over disregarding Zone common sense or coming up with the most batshit insane and specific unwritten rules no one can really be assed to understand or even take the time of day to consider

[adhdo5]

I was prompted to post these a bit ago bc of my madness posting abt the Xiyao laundry audioextra upload someone posted like last week and I think there is really a lot there in the Xiyao laundry thing in general (hashtag release the Yunping tapes) and not all of it is smth I see ~talked abt as much as I think it deserves SO . Collected thoughts on Xiyao laundry

OK so like Yeah they're cute. I absolutely get why people's primary reaction to this is that it's cute and I think this is not even wrong. The politics of uselessness r complicated and I Will be returning to this but a legitimate angle of this is that LXC, who has spent his life largely defined by the fact that he pretty much excels at everything expected of him, has nothing expected of him and gets to be incompetent at something he ~feels obligated to do and have that not actually be a fail state, still get offered the same kindness regardless of his ability to be exceedingly capable/responsible etc.; meanwhile MY, who historically has had pretty much no one ever gaf about whether he's struggling or overworked or generally about him as a person (and the audiodrama extra version even has a bit where MY's coworkers are shit talking him including talking abt how he's probably not even actually doing any work), has someone earnestly caring about that, if ineffectually, and materially recognizing his workload as important and effortful and trying to help him with it. That is I think legitimately kind of sweet! Especially if one interprets the "he didn't even know who I was" line as true and as in the audiodrama extra this is set b4 MY figures it out! They appreciate each other in ways they don't usually get to be appreciated and it's nontransactional in this way and ;x;

HOWEVER. #Nuance. There's Other Angles.

I've talked abt this before inc on my blog but I do kind of never get tired of thinking abt it: there's a reason LXC is incapable of doing laundry and it's not just inexperience it's that he is physically incapable of the task bc of his cultivator strength!!!!! And the disparity of cultivation level is explicitly a class thing w/ JGY wrt 3zun especially!!! No matter his intention Zewu-jun CANNOT SULLY HIS HANDS WITH THE TASK bangs my head against a wall. It's such an innocuous detail yet it captures how from even this early on in their relationship and in this context it's not ignorable how much LXC is in fact a nobleman where JGY is not and this is a literal physical difference and it's in his very flesh and it has explicitly destructive results. See again vampire AU posting

And going off that it's notable how this does in fact also end up creating more work and while MY doesn't begrudge that in the moment and it's pettier here and arguably inextricable with the first point (LXC is not only incapable here he's actively bad at something, he actively makes smth worse and he's forgiven for it and that's genuinely kind of nice) it's it's also worth noting more grimly given how their relationship ends. It's not just destructive it's destructive to MY specifically

And on the notes of "inextricable from first point but also tragic" – it's sweet tht LXC gets no external consequences for this (yet lol) but is that really something he can Accept. It is an arguably underexamined element of Sunshot Xiyao how fucking miserable LXC is; he might be in an environment where this isn't fucking him up but he did bring his complexes here and you don't suddenly know how to accept that kind of grace yknow – and, and this is tangentially related to the stuff I was posting earlier today, this is one of the first of several kinds of vulnerability that LXC's almost only able to experience with MY/JGY. Considering how much that's arguably a running theme for them and considering where that leads that's also quite Foreshadowing Dismal!!

This is an audio drama exclusive but the way in the audiodrama extra ver that MY realizes who LXC is here and then ~lies about it is also crunchy as helllllll

AND between the coworkers thing in the audiodrama extra and the added scenes in the donghua and this and the notion in general (which comes from MXTX's post) that it's important they do the laundry themselves bc the robes would give LXC away it's a highlight of how genuinely precarious this is for MY which is another thing that both makes it more sweet and more. Despair.

It's just so lovely how it is both indicative of how genuinely good they are to and for each other, the ways in which they're meaningfully and significantly compassionate and helpful to one another, and also of the ways in which their situation here is precarious and high-stress and dangerous as fuck, AND also the ways in which they hurt each other so so bad, and how all of those things are largely different facets of the same qualities and the same significances. And That's My Post. Stream Apple Pie by the Scary Jokes

[gailynovelry]

Thinking a little bit about that one "I'm an English major and a professional as opposed to you amateurs" anon. Gonna roast 'em a little bit, but with the intention of addressing a thing we've had in mind for a while.

Real talk, coming from someone who WAS an English major; majoring in English is not necessarily a guarantee that someone is a good writer. For one, you can be bad at your major, full stop. For another, it's not even a guarantee that someone identifies as a writer to begin with. English as a major is pretty broad, and it covers reading too, among other things. There's library science, analytical academia, historical preservation & interpretation (MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS HELL YES), editing, nonfiction trades (often crosses over with STEM majors), marketing (crosses over with business majors), and also book design and typography (<3 <3 <3 our favorite, crosses over with art majors).

Someone can major in English and take a specific minor with the goal of falling into a trade that is not writing literary fiction. In fact, we would argue that most people who get something useful out of their major are the ones that do that.

It's also worth noting that it's possible to be an English major focused on "lowbrow" fiction. There are people who major in English and use the experience towards the end of writing erotica. There are people who major in English with the intent to write genre fiction. There are people who major in English to study the history and social context of fanfiction.

These things are, in fact, worthy fields of study! The realm of the "amateur" is the realm where a lot of cultural conversations and innovations happen!

Expecting English as a major to be a tract specifically for producing acclaimed literary fictionists is not realistic, not how the discipline typically works, and it's certainly not a thing you can use to hold over other writers' heads. It is perfectly possible for people to write good things (professional-grade things even) without ever touching a college course.

I sat through so much bad writing in college. Technically bad, thematically bad, gramatically bad. And I routinely bump into non-graduate authors who write texts, formal and informal alike, that blow my own writing clean out of the water with their quality.

In short, dismissing other people in your general field as "amateurs" who are beneath you is an incredibly unprofessional thing to do.

[junglejim4322]

As a USamerican I can tell you every place I’ve lived the one constant is I’ve known so many people who dream of getting out and moving away to some magical place that’ll fix all their problems only to find out if you manage to move almost everything is exactly the same because there’s no running away from racism and homophobia etc and all of these places are relatively the same in that how good your experience is really is just based off of how much money and resources you have at your disposal

[tanadrin]

"Zero-sum game" anon returning. I am surprisingly capable of maintaining optimism of the will, but ONLY as long as I stay away from the news or even other people liable to be upset by it. This unfortunately includes not only everyone I care about personally, but quite a few of the larger communities committed to organizing against those who would harm them. Advice to "try to change the subject or else walk away" works mainly for the former, and in any case is much harder to do when it's your own life at stake too.

Last month, you covered a related phenomenon in an excellent musing about the dangers of conflating identity with suffering. "Everyone secretly hates me and is out to destroy me" is terrible enough as a self-concept, but as a rallying point has even more potential for harm. This is where I think an element of peer pressure comes into doomerism: If catastrophizing is part of what holds a group together, then non-participation becomes a perceived threat to unity no matter what the rationale. Never mind that I want to avoid a mental breakdown from dwelling on all the reasons bigots want me dead; plenty of loud doomer activists from multiple demographics would still declare me as evil as a bigot myself for this "crime" of wanting to turn away from our shared pain.

In theory, balanced ways must exist between obliviousness and burnout. In practice, I feel disloyal to anyone I share even the remotest crumb of kinship with for even daring to consider such a thing. And yes, I do realize now how that might be actually be part of the problem.

yeah i'm sympathetic to the whole "sometimes binging news coverage is a huge fucking bummer that drags me down" thing; and there's not actually any inherent virtue to Bearing Witness to the Horrors, especially if you find that shit demotivational. and if people want to make Bearing Witness to the Horrors, or even worse, Being Victim to the Horrors, the non-negotiable determinative element of a shared group identity, the thing you must do to prove your trust and virtue to others, run the fuck away!

people who demand you make misery central to your identity or your worldview aren't just wrong, they are dangerous. they are emotional vampires. they are interpersonal varelse. many people acquire social antibodies against that sort of thing as they mature, but not everybody, and sometimes these kinds of people will try to leverage the mechanisms of shared identity or in-group language to sink their metaphorical fangs into your metaphorical jugular. so for those people that need it, i am giving you explicit permission to tell people like that to Fuck Off. you don't need to give them the benefit of the doubt--it doesn't matter whether they do it on purpose or not. you don't need to feel sorry for them--they will feel plenty sorry for themselves. you don't need to try to help them--they do not want your help. just tell them to fuck off. then ignore them forever. you're allowed!

[lesbianralzarek]

wondering if the "young witch looking for her neighbors lost cat in the alps" meme is actually well-known, or if i just see it a lot because its popular with my disco elysium mutuals. girls love data

for reference:

[the-girl-with-too-many-ideas]

You know, from the perspective of the SVSSS world, Shen Yuan and the system would be regarded as Lovecraftian horrors if you think about it.

[tinystepsforward]

"vote blue no matter who" cunts are the most aggravating americans to me bc they can't say it with their whole chest. they're intellectualising moral cowardice instead of feeling and processing their complicity or shame so they can do anything at all that's remotely effective.

like oh if i'm not loyal to this party that is notably sliding further and further into murdering people in other nations and deporting people from yours then The Evil Fascism will happen. and if you ever try to have a conversation w them it's all "what am i supposed to do, give up my personal gay rights? live like people in those other countries?" those countries? the countries your blue government is personally sending bombs to murder children in? those ones? you think you have the moral high ground here when you value your comfort over other people's lives?

vote for whoever you want and especially pay attention to the politics you can actually shift at a local level and to what's going on in your local criminal justice system, which is the testing ground for the brutality that keeps growing. you gotta actually fucking decide that shit isn't okay and that you're going to do something about it or you don't get to be fucking sanctimonious about it at people getting killed by your country's weapons who don't have a goddamn vote. and you certainly don't get to white tears about it at them either

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Hey hi hello to any fellow Brits reading this.

You probably know we have a general election coming up, which by the way, make sure you're registered to vote and have the qualifying photo ID.

And hey maybe you're a fence-sitter who doesn't want to vote for Labour for whatever reason.

Well, this post is giving you a reason to vote for Labour (or any party other than Tory if the candidate actually has a chance to win the seat).

You might have noticed that a lot of local and city councils have either gone bankrupt recently or are teetering on the edge, and that officially, it's the councils themselves that have been blamed, and uh yeah, that's horseshit.

The majority of a local council's funding comes from core grants given out by Westminster.

There's actually a limit on funding that local councils can raise via taxes, and like a whole lot of issues in the UK, that comes down to Margaret fucking Thatcher. It's also thanks to her that local councils don't have as much power over the local area as you'd ideally want them to.

(That's been eased a little since, but if a local council ain't got the money, they can't exercise that power.)

Suffice to say, local councils are very much dependent on funding from the central government.

And as you might imagine, 14 years of Tory government has just made it worse. From 2010 to 2020, that funding was cut by 40%.

Wanna know why hundreds of libraries have closed down? Or why public services like bin collections are almost entirely ran by corporations? Or why bin collections are now once a fortnight rather than once a week? Or why council houses haven't been built? Or why public toilets are being closed? Or why you have to Tokyo Drift on the drive to work because it's been 2 years and no one's done shit about that goddamn pothole? Or why parks seem to now be maintained by Big Foot and by the way Big Foot has also declared bankruptcy? Or why local arts have had their budget of 17 paperclips and a whistle reduced down to 10 paperclips and no whistle? Or why your local museum is effectively a mausoleum?

It is all down to this.

Your local council runs on a shoestring budget because Tory rule has deprived local councils of the funding that they need.

If the Tories win in July, this problem is just gonna get worse and worse and worse.

More councils are going to go bankrupt; more public services are going to be cut or underfunded; more vulnerable kids are going to fall through the cracks; more local services will be privatised; more pressing issues will be ignored because there's no money left over to fix it.

You might not like the current Labour party, but hi hello welcome to harm reduction politics. Maybe a Labour government won't fix this, but another 5 years of Tory rule is going to break this country.

So for god's sake, get over yourself and your leftist purity bullshit, and just fucking vote for Labour as a vote against the Tories.

[Information for this post comes from this video by Tom Nicholas]

[not-sure-what-im-feeling]

Reminder that I fucking hate generative AI and if you like it, use it, or support it, you can go fuck off