#people are so vile about this its absurd

[demitsorou]

if I see you excessively hating on the new Yareli deluxe skin or saying it doesn't fit her I will block you; nobody's forcing you to buy it or use it, there will be more deluxe skins for her in the future, calm down.

[caughtthedarkness93]

Not to do more Furiosaposting (and SPOILERS AHEAD), but a couple more things I noticed on a second viewing:

• I think Dementus is being honest about how he lost his family when Furiosa confronts him about it, and that's a big point the film is making. Furiosa isn't like Dementus when she finally chases him down. But she recognizes that she could become like him - a vile, cruel warlord who uses his own pain as an excuse to run roughshod all over the wasteland, smashing everything in her path, using her pain as an excuse to take from others. By that point, she's already a part of Immortan Joe's war machine. She is already complicit. And he does say to her that killing him won't give her what she wants. She resists the idea, but ultimately, it sure seems like she realizes he's right. And ultimately, that leads to her big choice - make a positive change rather than simply trying to hurt the people who hurt you. Granted, she still does do plenty of hurting the people who hurt her (Nice face you got there, Joe, be a shame if something happened to it). But the big, real legacy she builds is taking the Citadel in the name of a greater cause than fueling Immortan's cult of cruelty.

• Praetorian Jack is also complicit, honestly. And it's something he seems to recognize. He outright says that he's looking for a righteous cause. There's a lot we don't know about this man. He tells us very little of his history, nor do we know why he chooses to ride for Immortan Joe. But we do know that after meeting Furiosa, he wants to do everything in his power to help her. She becomes his righteous cause. So the whole film, Furiosa is kind of pulled between those two directions - Dementus, and Jack. Do you defeat the pain you carry by throwing it back to the people who gave it to you? Or do you seek a righteous cause to build it into something positive?

• Perhaps one of my biggest takeaways is related to Jack's death. It's not until Dementus kills Jack that Furiosa gets really set on revenge. Like she clearly loathes Dementus before that. Her first time meeting him as an adult, she goes straight for her gun. The camera highlights their relationship a lot, and I'm pretty sure her vengeful drive towards him has its own musical motif - listen for that driving, distorted noise that you hear sometimes. But revenge doesn't become her biggest driver until after Jack dies. Even as she feels clear hate and rage towards this man, she's still set on getting home all that time. But when Jack dies, she goes out of her way to try to kill him. And, relatedly, when Jack dies, she loses the arm that has her star map tattoo on it. So to put it another way, when she chooses to commit to vengeance, she loses her way.

• We need to consider perspective and narrator here, as this isn't like Fury Road where it's from the point of view of Max, who was directly there. Because this film's opening shot isn't of Furiosa. It's of another character - it's of the History Man. The first line belongs to him - "As the world falls around us. How must we brave it's cruelties?" The closing narration is his as well. Something that sticks in my head more and more is Dementus' ultimate fate. What gets me about it is that it feels implausible. Not only for Furiosa as a character, but for the way the series usually handles injuries. So George Miller was a paramedic before he was a filmmaker. In fact, his work as a paramedic is what partly inspired the first Mad Max film and what funded it. And in these films, Miller has put his medical knowledge to use. The characters' injuries are usually handled in a realistic way, with a few flights of fancy for people to make it through frankly absurd car wrecks. You see this especially in Fury Road, which takes the time to establish that Max is a universal donor twice so it makes sense to have him give a blood transfusion to Furiosa at the end. It talks about the ultimate effects of her collapsed lung and how to treat it. The injuries in these films feel realistic in a way movie wounds often don't. Dementus' final fate does feel a little complicatedly cruel for someone as pragmatic as Furiosa, but what really gets me is how medically implausible it is. We're supposed to believe that Dementus has been stuck in the citadel with a peach tree growing out of him for five years without dying? I...kinda don't. Why does this matter? I think it signals that aspects of the story fall to unreliable narration. These films are campfire stories from a world that fell and rose again. Always have been. But this one has a more direct narrator. The History Man is telling this story. It is filtered through his perspective.

• And that adds another layer to things, considering Furiosa and the History Man's backgrounds. We see the History Man, we see a guy who is clearly horrified by Dementus' actions. When Furiosa's mom is getting executed, he cries. He tells Furiosa that she needs to make herself indispensable - likely because he feels that it's the best way to protect her. But he still does Dementus' bidding, often without question or argument. In a word, the thing that ultimately separates the History Man from Furiosa is that where he was complicit until the very end, Furiosa chose to rebel.

• And I guess if I had to boil it all down, I think there's a great big takeaway from this film. Don't seek hope. Become hope.

Man, I love this movie.

[oldguardleatherdog]

I am being smeared as a "predatory transphobe" to hundreds of thousands of people by Rainbow Passage, a so-called "trans rescue" nonprofit that's covering up its safety failures and misconduct by attacking me and placing my family in danger. Deliberately.

There's a headline I'll bet you never thought you'd see on this blog, and you can be sure I never expected to write it, but here we are. I want you to hear about it from me first before the smear campaign against me poisons your feed.

Regular readers know that I've been fighting for LGBTQ+ civil rights for nearly 40 years, with an emphasis on mobilizing against the "trans panic" sweeping America the past two years, the horrific laws already in place, and the stark plans for eradication laid out in Project 2025. The notion that I'm "transphobic" in any way is absurd. But -

Three weeks ago, YouTube streamer trolls went to the Rainbow Passage website - their unsecured, login-free website - looking for dirt that could bring their operations to a halt. They found my picture and bio listed as a director for the organization.

That was all they needed, and in short order I was the star of several full-length videos and livestreams featuring breathless, jeering takes on my kink life, my history, my family, my age, my AIDS, my September 11th survival (suddenly I was "running the organization" and "hosting 9/11 reenactment roleplays!"), my looks, my unsuitability to be involved with a trans rescue organization, and everything you can imagine a middle-school playground would highlight. At this writing, I've been held out for ridicule, harassment, and threats ("it's time for this dogfucker to be euthanized") to a quarter-million people and counting.

Why?

Because Rainbow Passage failed to implement even the most basic security on that website, despite my multiple warnings in board meetings that this scenario was likely to happen and that we were prime targets for this kind of abuse.

To be honest, everything that the streamers made fun of me for has been said and done to me a thousand times a year for the past 30 years. Heard it all before, nothing new, just the same old "lookit the AIDS-ridden perv faggot old man pretending to be a dog, hurr durr hurr durr!". All those hours of video and they couldn't come up with anything new? These people need better writers.

Here's the issue: Two of the leaders of this sad and tiresome brigade (one named "Blowcockx" or something equally clever, the other one is discussed below) seized on a recent exchange I had with a group of leftist "Trans For Trump" (yep, you read that right) that was mobbing me on Bluesky for objecting when someone referred to Biden as "Genocide Joe". These people were vile and vicious, saying that my gender was "shit beard" and lobbing remarks and insults at me that would make a MAGA blush.

One of the Bluesky mob (who may or may not have been transgender) said, "Prove you're an activist," to which I countered, "Okay, prove you're trans." (Screenshots of my three additional replies referencing "fake trans" to their accusations of my being a "fake activist" and other vomitous epithets, along with screenshots of the posts to which I was replying, can be found after the jump.)

During the mob attack on me and Rainbow Passage. a disgruntled former member of the Rainbow Passage community - a 20-year-old trans girl who had first warned me about the YouTube hijacking and who leaked my personal identifying information and private chats with her to the Twitter trolls and worse - went to Clearsky and harvested my replies without the posts I was replying to, leaked them to the YouTube streamers and Twitter trolls, along with selected portions of our lengthy private chat from Discord, then threatened Rainbow Passage with another attack if they didn't "denounce" me and my replies to the disgusting attacks on me by the Trans Trumpers of Bluesky.

To prove her point, this young trans woman and her girlfriend started a thread about me on Kiwi Farms, where I was the featured post for about a week, and told Rainbow Passage that the same would happen to them - and worse, including the revocation of their nonprofit status with the IRS and the end of their ability to raise funds - if they didn't publicly condemn me for my Bluesky attack replies.

And what did the oh-so-courageous chairwoman and board members who "cared so much" about me, do in response to those threats?

They caved. They capitulated. They allowed a troubled individual with an axe to grind and her little gang of fake-outraged trans shitposters to dictate their handling of a serious and sensitive matter where a former director of the organization and his family were in active danger and under siege. These people, who claim to have the bravery to "rescue" endangered trans people from Texas and Florida, folded like a cheap tissue-paper prom dress, revealing their utter lack of integrity, ethics, or courage.

The statement Rainbow Passage put out, which at this writing has been seen by at least 60,000 people on Twitter alone, is filled with false accusations about my attitude toward the transgender members of the LGBTQ+ community, outright lies about my character and conduct, weirdly characterizes me as a predatory stalker, and warns the general public that I am a bad, bad person who should be avoided and shunned as unfit for decent people in a civilized society. They provide ZERO evidence to support any of their claims against me, their accusations and assertions about me, or their characterization of me as "transphobic."

From my statement below: "Rainbow Passage knew that issuing this statement would intensify the threats, harassment, and stalking of me and my family. They issued it anyway. This statement is a willful and malicious act of violence.

"Rainbow Passage caused a queer elder with AIDS to be featured on a website known for harassing LGBTQ+ people to death and driving them from their homes, while smearing him to hundreds of thousands of people and inciting attacks on him and his family - but they want you to trust them to keep our most vulnerable members safe from harm."

If Rainbow Passage can't and won't protect their own staff (and volunteers, and clients) from harmful exposure to malicious attackers online and IRL, and shifts blame for their failures and lapses of care onto the staff members while caving to threats from random kids, how can they be trusted to keep the most vulnerable members of this community safe from harm during one of their "rescue" missions? If something goes wrong and that client ends up in jail, will Rainbow Passage blame the client for that outcome the same way they're blaming me for their colossal failure to keep their own people safe?

Rainbow Passage's rank AIDSphobia, their calculated smear of a four-decade veteran LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activist, their capitulation to threats from an under-21 trans Kiwi Farms shitposter with an axe to grind, and their hateful, craven, deliberate act of putting my family and me in physical danger, show them to be not only a collection of unwise and uncaring individuals who have abused me and betrayed my trust: The current chairwoman, board, and staff of Rainbow Passage are manifestly and utterly unfit to run this organization. They are not capable of keeping our most vulnerable members out of harm's way, they should not be regarded as worthy of our trust in any way, personally or professionally, and the organization needs to be stripped of its nonprofit status and must cease operations so that a new LGBTQ+ and trans rescue group can quickly be established and get to work.

[Alt text and screenshots follow after the jump.]

STATEMENT OF ANIMAL J. SMITH REGARDING THE RAINBOW PASSAGE SMEAR CAMPAIGN

These allegations are false. Rainbow Passage is deliberately and maliciously spreading lies about me to hundreds of thousands of people on this and other platforms in a calculated smear campaign to cover up their reckless disregard for the safety of their vulnerable clients and their failure to protect them. To date, they have provided no explanation or evidence of "transphobic rhetoric and behavior" on my part. They failed to protect me, a former director of the organization, from sustained and brutal online harassment, threats, doxing, and stalking that began more than three weeks ago and continues unabated with the active encouragement of chair Amy Nicole Check and the members of the board, putting me and my family in danger of being driven from our home and causing major distress and disruption to our lives and health.

On Saturday, April 13th, I received word that the Rainbow Passage website had been targeted by YouTube streamers who had seen a rival say good things about the organization and went to the website to find information that would "expose" Rainbow Passage. The trolls found my name and photograph, then went into my public-facing social media and began streaming about me and my life and work.

In several lengthy videos and livestreams, the YouTube trolls held me and my family up for sustained public ridicule, humiliation, and targeted harassment, spreading to more than a quarter-million people details about my personal life, my sex life, my family, my being a survivor of September 11th, the fact that I have AIDS, and every other aspect of my life and history that they could harvest. Although my social media is largely public by design, the contents were never intended to be stolen and distributed to thousands in a malicious manner designed to damage me.

The only reason I was targeted and humiliated in this way is that I was a director for Rainbow Passage and was discovered when the organization's unsecured, login-free website was targeted - a scenario I had warned them about on multiple occasions. Despite my warnings, no security measures were ever implemented. On Monday, April 15th, I resigned my position due to Check's exploding at me in an unprovoked torrent of verbal abuse during a call that afternoon.

My work as an LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activist over the past 38 years (including ACT/UP, Queer Nation SF, AIDS quarantine initiatives, medical cannabis, marriage equality, and prisoners with AIDS) is well known and has always included advocacy for the transgender community. In fact, I have prioritized trans rights activism in response to the rising tide of hatred toward transgender Americans, and I have received support from people in the transgender community who know me and have seen me in action as an activist and a friend.

After an initial offer of help that wouldn't come for a full week, I said that my family and I were in immediate danger, that this was happening solely because I was part of their organization, and that their security failure was to blame. They then instantly denied any responsibility, blamed me for the situation, and withdrew their offer of help. I have been told that they are aware of the ongoing harassment and cyberbullying being directed at my family and me. They knew that this statement would intensify the threats, harassment, and stalking of me and my family. They issued it anyway. This statement is a willful and malicious act of violence.

Rainbow Passage was threatened by the leaders of these attacks that if they did not "denounce" me they would face the loss of their tax-exempt status and worse. As part of the threat, I was featured on the front page of the notorious Kiwi Farms website, a 4chan-like forum known for driving their LGBTQ+ targets into hiding and to suicide.

Rainbow Passage caused a queer elder with AIDS to be featured on a website known for harassing LGBTQ+ people to death and driving them from their homes, while smearing him to hundreds of thousands of people and inciting attacks on him and his family - but they want you to trust them to keep our most vulnerable members safe from harm.

These liars want you to believe the fiction that a four-decade LGBTQ+ activist is a predatory transphobe. They think you'll fall for the stories they're telling and approve of the damage they're causing. What nerve. Their contempt for me - and for you - has no place in our community or in our lives.

- Animal J. Smith, April 25, 2024

[personificationofcreativeblock]

I've seen a lot of people talking about the Minecraft movie recently, so I decided to do my input too.

The basic Minecraft prelude is that the main character wakes up completely alone in a world with monsters and has to learn how to survive on their own. Honestly, this is just the perfect scenario for one of the best horror movies that could be produced this year, instead of that terrible scenario with a jumanji ahh atmosphere.

Over the years, many Minecraft fans or just people that had at least a bit of overall knowledge about the game have pointed out how Minecraft would be such a great/is a horror game. Many players have stated that they feel like they're being watched when playing Minecraft alone, and I'm not even talking about Herobrine, just the game's overall atmosphere. Minecraft is known for making you feel alone and vulnerable, in a world you don't know the limits of nor what you can find on said limits.

And don't even get me started on the monsters. Have you seem them?? Like

Obviously, some of the designs could use some improvement, but wouldn't these be horrifying sights to see at night in a place where you are completely alone and vulnerable?

Not only that, but what about the villagers? I like to imagine that in the world of Minecraft, the villagers don't even speak the main character's (aka the player's) language, being only able to make incomprehensible noises that you aren't able to decipher. They live in that universe since they were born, and see all of the absurdity of that place as something completely normal. Zombies? Oh, they're fine, they come here from time to time. Stay at home at night and you'll be fine. Unexistent gravity? Wait, what do you mean by gravity? Pillagers? Stay out of their way and you'll be fine.

All that while the main character questions their own sanity and tries to survive in a new world full of foreign dangers to them, the only fellow humans being people that don't seem to even be able to think for themselves. I can totally see them losing their sanity little by little while sucumbbing to the vile world around them that apparently really doesn't wants them there.

And in case they decided to insert the Herobrine, thinks would get even scarier. Imagine not only living in such a horrifying world, but also knowing there's someone or something watching you at all times, being completely aware of every single one of your movements, every step, every breath you take, and as if that wasn't already bad enough, that creature has your exact appearance, with the exception of its eyes being completely blank and having a white void where its pupils should be.

Do you. Do you see the vision.

(also sorry for any grammar mistakes, English is not my first language)

[siphersaysstuff]

so I was musing in chat about the silliness of the BAH GAWD THAT'S STEVE AUSTIN'S MUSIC gimmick in pro wrassling, how the mechanics of it make zero sense (are they sending text messages to the sound booth? Are there people paid simply to see if a wrassler is approaching the ring and they text the sound booth? Do the wrasslers just manifest music all on their own?) and yet, and yet, it is such a fucking great gimmick and an unbelievable hype-producer that it took me until... today to even realize how little "real world" sense it made, that it slid right into the absurd hyper-reality of kayfabe so neatly, so cleanly, that not only did I never question it, I NEVER WANT IT EXPLAINED. That would be the one of the worst things wrassling could self-inflict on itself.

And then I was introduced to possibly one of the best examples of this fantastic stupidity and amazingly wonderful unreality... AEW's "Timeless" Toni Storm.

motha

fuckin

silent film star character gimmick

in 20fuckin23

I ain't gonna pretend pro wrasslin' hasn't been... problematic, to put it way too politely, the 90s were especially dire, XTREMEly dire, really vile shit, but like

When it lets loose, when it doesn't get all self-important and up its own testosterone-tightened ass, when it embraces the unreality and plays to those strengths to just have fun of these cartoon characters of human beings walloping each other in this bizarre pocket universe where our laws, be they scientific or societal, do not apply...

Wrasslin' can be really good.

[ethernetmeep]

attended graduation. surprisingly cried less than i was anticipating, at least during the event. cried a bit afterwards, mix of realization & fear of not being able to get home safely. i did, luckily… my mother eventually came. wore a suit & tie, specifically the tie my friend gifted to me. heated up like a car in front of the sun. brought a drink since i knew if i didnt id maybe faint because of heat exhaustion. more likely nausea.

sat with an acquaintance, rambled to her. felt sick during most of the ceremony. almost puked, uh… three times. nerves hit like a brick wall. literally. nauseous because of nervousness. wanted to yell & holler but i dont have the voice for that. simple quiet ‘yay’ syllables had to suffice. brought sheldon & wiffle & chiquitito. gave chiquitito a bath before i left. got ready an hour or so early. sat outside & looked at birds in the meantime

in an ideal world i am very smart & funny & talented & talk to everyone & perfect. in an ideal world i dont get so worried my body physically shuts down. in an ideal world, i would be able to say something as simple as, “oh my gosh, i’m so happy for you! take care!” without bile festering. i try to live in this ideal world, try to be the best i can, but ive learned this is really really hard for me to do because frankly i am quite stupid. i know this is a haha funny joke 70% of the time but if i actually start gagging on nothing i know it’s probably a bad sign and i should stop overworking myself lest i actually do puke. it would not be very appealing to throw up in front of a plethora of my peers & their families. god…..

don’t even.. don’t.

[head in hands]

fine. FOR THE SAKE OF JOURNALISM! nothing else.

“I FUCKING— I HATE THEM. SO MUCH. I’M SORRY, I KNOW THATS MEAN—“

mother & other party member: “ITS NOT MEAN.”

[still reeling from remnants of stomach acid (as i did not eat anything in the morning when i took my meds which probably doesnt help this, although i didnt wanna eat then puke up whatever food it was i ate there either)] “I’M JUST— UGH! I’M SO FUCKING, I’M SO MAD.”

snippet of conversation. back seat with extra space just because. emotional & still nauseous. almost cry on the way home because of these weird things called human emotions, tears only well up; don’t actually fall. ramble to a man who knows a lot of people. miscellaneous conversations follow, like the one where i ask him if he can do anything about my favorite teacher being laid off. he says he’ll try. he…. how do i say this… knows… many individuals…. hes nice, slowly grown more used to his presence. i think if i cried with tears and snot long enough he’d be able to do many things, which is crazy & absurd but genuinely accurate. scarily accurate.

home, sitting outside & watching birds feed from the bird feeder. emptied it while i was gone. northern flicker, blue jay, blue-capped chickadee, common grackle, tufted titmouse… a wide variety. sprinkle some seeds on the ground for both squirrels & robins since they seem to not use the bird feeder much. robin right in front of me now, actually [was when i was typing this sentence]

i only made one note / doodle in my notebook during the event, but with words written & context applied its maybe better i don’t share it. saying…. heated words….. from a person that dislikes being rude unless someone is genuinely vile, is not as vague as one thinks they are. still, its pretty funny to imagine me being violent… slap thing was genuinely the first time i ever put my hands on someone like that

anyway, now theres three grackles near my bird feeder. two underneath. they’re so cute its almost upsetting, except its not. its quite nice to feel less alone

something something hi there something something oh hey i said everything now. i should probably lay down before my stomach gets worse

really happy i went, though. wouldn’t miss it for the world

[biboocat]

Vladimir Nabokov’s Brutally Honest Opinions on 63 of the “Greatest” Writers to Ever Write (1973). I got this from a literature FB group; I can’t verify its authenticity. Even if the source is authentic, it seems to me a very subjective exercise, so take it in that spirit.

Auden, W. H. Not familiar with his poetry, but his translations contain deplorable blunders.

Austen, Jane. Great.

Balzac, Honoré de. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes.

Barbusse, Henri. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.

Beckett, Samuel. Author of lovely novellas and wretched plays.

Bergson, Henri. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.

Borges, Jorge Luis. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. A man of infinite talent.

Brecht, Bertolt. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

Brooke, Rupert. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, but no longer.

Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.

Carroll, Lewis. Have always been fond of him. One would like to have filmed his picnics. The greatest children's story writer of all time.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. A cruel and crude old book.

Cheever, John. “The Country Husband.” A particular favorite. Satisfying coherence.

Chekhov, Anton. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Talent, but not genius. Love him dearly, but cannot rationalize that feeling.

Chesterton, G. K. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14, but no longer. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.

Conrad, Joseph. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.

Dreiser, Theodore. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity.

Eliot, T. S. Not quite first-rate.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. His poetry is delightful.

Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

Flaubert, Gustave. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15.

Forster, E. M. Only read one of his novels (possibly A Passage to India?) and disliked it.

Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.

García Lorca, Federico. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.

Gogol, Nikolai. Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable. Loathe his moralistic slant, am depressed and puzzled by his inability to describe young women, deplore his obsession with religion.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. A splendid writer.

Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad. Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls. The Killers. Delightful, highly artistic. Admirable. The Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful. The description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination is superb.

Housman, A. E. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.

James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius.

Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius.

I. Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision.

II. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book.

III. Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.

Keats, John. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter.

Kipling, Rudyard. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.

Lawrence, D. H. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Execrable.

Lowell, Robert. Not a good translator. A greater offender than Auden.

Mandelshtam, Osip. A wonderful poet, the greatest in Soviet Russia. His poems are admirable specimens of the human mind at its deepest and highest. Not as good as Blok. His tragic fate makes his poetry seem greater than it actually is.

Mann, Thomas. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.

Maupassant, Guy de. Certainly not a genius.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Certainly not a genius.

Melville, Herman. Love him. One would like to have filmed him at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.

Marx, Karl. Loathe him.

Milton, John. A genius.

Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist. Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences.

Pirandello, Luigi. Never cared for him.

Plato. Not particularly fond of him.

Poe, Edgar Allan. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. One would like to have filmed his wedding.

Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud.

Proust, Marcel. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. In Search of Lost Time. The first half is the fourth-greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose.

Pushkin, Alexander. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. A genius.

Rimbaud, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Great. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Magnificently poetical and original.

Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus.

Shakespeare, William. Read complete works between 14 and 15. One would like to have filmed him in the role of the King's Ghost. His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius.

Sterne, Laurence. Love him.

Tolstoy, Leo. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius.

I. Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature.

II. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina.

III. War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome messages, didactic interludes, artificial coincidences. Uncritical of its historical sources.

Turgenev, Ivan. Talent, but not genius.

Updike, John. By far one of the finest artists in recent years. Like so many of his stories that it is difficult to choose one.

Wells, H. G. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. A great artist, my favorite writer when I was a boy. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, but his romances and fantasies are superb. A far greater artist than Conrad. A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration.

Wilde, Oscar. Rank moralist and didacticist. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.

Wolfe, Thomas. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.

https://twitter.com/Essayful/status/1729559047102153008?

[thcaellis]

𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘.                𝐃𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐄𝐑.          𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒. THEA ELLIS BARLOW.     /   THIRTY THREE.     /    SANTA MONICA, CA.

TLDR;

Thea is the oldest daughter of billionaire hospitality heir Edward Barlow. She hates him, wants nothing to do with him nor does she have any association with the Barlow family anymore, hence the name change from her given last name to her middle name. 

Her two younger sisters, Brie and Cass, are the only people from her father’s side that she’s stayed in contact with over the years and she loves them fiercely. She would do anything for either of them, despite the fact that she doesn’t always think they make the right decisions.

She began acting at age 12 in a sitcom series for a few years, then later dropped out of school to become a serious actor. She mostly did pretentious indie films and one YA action movie that really gave her a name in the industry, and she eventually won her first and only Academy Award at age 22 for her performance in a biopic. She’s been nominated one other time, but did not win, and mostly has been doing lesser known films before taking the lead role in a critically-acclaimed HBO series that recently released its first season.

She was married once about 10 years ago to a man who was pretty chummy with some of the most vile execs in the industry and when he passed away in a car accident, they all slandered her in the press. 

Rumors that she had him killed, that she’s been linked to the illuminati, that she has a cow tongue, and a million other absurd things about Thea’s life and most of her relationships have run through trashy tabloids. She does have a lot of die hard fans, but she has never had a great public image or reputation, mostly due to the fact that she has no problem speaking up when Arrogant Men™ on set try it with her.

Because of this, she mostly keeps to herself. None of the rumors about her have been particularly career ending (most of them are so ridiculous that no one really believes them, they just think she’s a terrible person and a wackjob). She likes to keep her private life private and is rarely seen in public.

She’s a nice lady tho!!!! Just very quiet and mostly chill, but she will talk to a fan for hours if she connects with them over something as small as having their favorite local coffee shop in common or as deep as them both losing a parent. She has a lot of grace despite being trashed consistently in the press but she can be standoffish at first, as she finds it hard to trust new people.

[chiefatticcreator]

The "three morality frames" problem, or why 40k's imperium will never be the "most cruel, bloody regime imagineable"

Thinking about Xenos and hwo they get nowhere near as much representation and importance as the imperium, i started to ponder the state of the 40k universe, and came away with this conclusion. While it's nothing new, I tried to format it.

So, we often have the question asked, both in-lore and out, "is the imperium right/justified/good?" And while the answer is "it depends on what the current writer thinks", the actual answer is slightly more layered, depending on the frame of reference one uses:

Frame of morality 1: Our real-world morality and history:

In our current morality system, murder is (nearly always) wrong, judging someone for their religion is generally frowned upon, as are wars of expansions (and wars in general are seldom looked upon approvingly), treating workers badly is not approved of, and close-mindedness is regarded as a great flaw. Furthermore, if we look at the real-life inspirations for the imperium of man, we can see that fascists regimes are never really succesful in the long term. Their hierachies are riddled with corruption and infighting to the point that that they are wholly inefficients, miss crucial details, waste a lot of ressources into pointless projects... they are extremely cruel, pointlessly so, and they eventually crumble. Likewise, regimes that are wholly dedicated to an individual (such as alexander the great) will completely collapse once said individual dies, since there is no appointed successor, or the succesor is contested, and the regime will cease to exist within a handful of generations of the figurehead disappearing. Likewise, regimes obsessed with (religious or genetic) "purity" will self-destruct from infighting, as once the first obvious "impure" are dealt with, a new group will be designated as a target, then a new one, with the in-group shrinking more and more as the definition of what's "pure" will constantly change (for a reverse of this, Irish immigrants were originally not considered "white" in america). In the real world, "survival of the fittest" is an absurd concept, and things like Catachan will only result in malnourished, farmished, feral humans.

tl; dr: In our world, the Imperium is not only completely evil and deserves to be exterminated, but it also wouldn't last long even if left to its own devices

Frame of morality 2: 40k's morality

While in the real world, religious intolerance is wrong, in 40k there are religions of evil who only seek to destroy the world. In the real world, discriminating based on physical appearance is dumb and bad. In 40k, genestealer cultists do look different and are infilitrating society to disrupt it and bring ruin to it. To us, throwing children at the wolves only result in dead kids. In 40k, Catachan does produce extremely strong and competent Guardsmen, amongst the most badass normal humans in the galaxy. On 21st's century Earth, religious fanaticism is only used by people who want to discrimate against others. In 40k, religious faith in the Emperor does give you supernatural powers, protect from demons, banish them, and grant miracles. To our modern societies, child soldiers aren't effective soldiers, and only a move done by the desperate and/or particularly vile ones. In 40k, taking prebuescent children, shoving half a dozen different organs in them and brainwashing them does give you the most badass soldiers the galaxy has ever seen. Xenophobia is unjustified to us, but in 40k Eldars do have their own interest before mankind's, Orks only exists to inflict pain and death on mankind, so do tyranids, and Dark Eldars will horrifically torture anyone they capture. Close-mindedness is wrong, but in the grimdark future of the 42nd millenium, any dangerous knowledge can and will corrupt you into a raving lunatic seeking to bring the imperium to ruins. In 40k, having so many organisation compete with each other and separated helps prevent another Heresy and is a safeguard against a single individual gaining too much power.

tl; dr: By 40k's standard, the imperium is right to do what they do, as they have lasted for more than ten thousand years with such tactics and organisation. Any flaw of fascist regimes is given a justification and a handwave as to why they are acceptable (in broad strokes at least) for the Imperium.

Frame of morality 3: Warhammer 40 000 is a product by the Games Workshop company, and the Imperium is the most popular faction.

Imperium figures sell, and their aesthetic is a big reason as to why. Therefore, no matter how pretty is the statement GW makes supporting frame 1, even if the "logical" thing would be to stop making Imperium-favoured media, Games Workshop will never do so. While Guilliman may protest that "only the fittest deserve to live" is dumb and awful, Catachan will never be terraformed into a habitable world, nor will Krieg ever fully recover, since the backstories and aesthetics of these world are popular. No matter how evil and incompetent the Imperium should be, our viewpoints characters will awlays be Dantes, or Gaunts, or Cains, or Guillimans. That is to say, characters that are oddly tolerant and reasonable compared to the standard dogma of the imperium, since if these products want to sell, the readers need characters they can root for and want to see more of.

tl; dr: No matter how much we want GW to put more emphasis on xenos, or to emphasize how evil the imperium is, GW will never do so, since these would reduce their profits. We will never see a mainline imperium character say that women don't deserve rights, or that left-handed people should be shot on sight since it'sa clear sign of a chaos mutation, etc...

[nonamem9]

tanay rizal trip thing from 3 weeks ago (rough details sorry) (bad storytelling)

monday and tuesday

resort is called Martessem

went to tanay (duh) on the days where my sister has to go to school since its schools days but she didnt due to no one taking care of her (awesome schedule)

throughout the whole 2 days, me and my cousin played chess on his tablet as we wait for the meals (best idea honestly), he checkmated 3 times, a stalemate, and i only won once on chess960 without knowing, we all individually chose our own dishes, me and my sister chose the meals as a duo

our room is G1, cousins' at G2

on the 1st day we ate the meals on the restaurant in the resort, both dinner and lunch

the time we ate our lunch is at 3PM due to travel time since us at antipolo are gonna ride at the van my tita was at, she's at taguig. i forgot what we ate.

looked at the view and i saw the clearest rainbow ive ever seen, and technically my first rainbow i saw since on other times i wasnt paying attention or see it clearly

this might've the mighest place i've been in since flying an airplay several years ago back when i was a toddler, the clouds are nearer to my reach

i put out the laptop and its overheating as fuck on sleep mode, draining the battery that i charged to max for nothing, had to force turn off since its lagging as fuck.

in the back balcony with myself, my sister, and my male cousin, said cousin is talking about his preference for shitting out water since its more comfortable in great length and detail, we lost our shit laughing at such absurd, disgusting and vile conversation topic. we've struggled to argue against it due to how hard we're laughing, can't barely hold it in. me and my sister jokingly called this the poopshitters podcast.

i tried booting in my laptop and connect to the wifi, you must put in the token password (lasts for 1 day) via the pop out website for this hotspot (if thats the right term), they gave a lot of these password tokens when we first arrive to the room. hopped on discord and told (i think) the spica discord that im here in tanay (doxxed)

laptop is lowbat so i get my charger and try to connect to the wall outlets, the thing is that there is no 3 holed wall outlet, no 3 prongs, we didn't brought an adapter because who the fuck does that while traveling, so i had to accept that i cant use this laptop again throughout the day.

at night my tita's employees/friends came in to my surprise and they bought in cup noodles, ate the mildly spicy one as my sort of mini dinner

i struggled to sleep my ass and move a lot, producing squeaky bed sounds as i roll, to much to the elder's dismay

2nd day we woke up

chess and chess960

ate breakfast at the resort's restaurant, i think i chose bacsilog/baksilog?

i found out that all of this was for my tita's daughter's brithday

resort people did the happy birthday thing, they drizzled chocolate and spell out "happy birthday!" on one of their plates

back to room interacting and such, apparently according to my mother, during night someone knocked on the balcony door and she checked and no one is there.

traveled to a restaurant that has a minigolf thing, a massive swimming pool, two of them this did not became our lunch destination since they said "the kids cant rallt do things here" (??? we never really did anything at the future two restaurants) so we went back to the van and traveled again

i ate shrimp sinigang and garlic rice for lunch in the a new restaurant by the mountainside (the one with a video that i posted)

back to our units at G1 & G2, oh yeah and G3 since the one that arrived at day 1 nighttime, recorded the "M" pool video

back to the van traveling

tempura for dinner, my first time eating it, dipped in sauces and such.

our family got home a day earlier while the rest will continue until wednesday, my sister got sick and nose snotty hence we go home.

while on our way home us and the van driver are mesmerized by the 5 motorcycle and approximately 7 people gang/riders where they guy at the front does the turn signals and the rest of the group who're in a line formation follow. i joked about our van driver being hypnotized by it and forgetting about the part where we go home and instead chasing them. lmao

in the entire 2 days at the traveling by van part, we shuffled seat to seat, from the furhtst of backs, the middle row, and in my case, got the front seat (i called shotgun, dibs on that [what am i even saying??]). saw the beautiful views that didn't bore us, didnt took photos though so there's that.

yeah i think thats all of it about the tanay trip

its 2:27 AM now, january 31 as i finishing writing this feeling thirsty.

[patrickmckinney]

Prev said something about how much we have to watch dukat torment kira and sisko is fucked up, which like, yeah, it is. But also, its so good.

Like aside from being someone who loves watching my blorbos get put through the ringer and come out bloodied but defiant, still swinging--dukat is fundamentally space hitler. And he's written/portrayed/acted in a way where he is often charming, unthreatening, or at least a bit ridiculous. Aside from the moments he breaks that mask (which he then dons again long enough to put the viewer at ease repeatedly), it is honestly easy to forget that he is not only a vile, creepy, rapey, genocidal megalomaniac, but also, and I cannot stress this enough--Space Hitler. He is the textbook facist.

But while sometimes we as the watcher roll our eyes at his bravado and absurdity, and get lulled into security when he occasionally allies with our buddies, Kira and Sisko never forget what and who he is. They never let us really forget. They demonstrate that the only acceptable approach to Dukat and his facism is extreme prejudice. While they can't, for various reasonable plot reasons, just punch him in his (extremely punchable) face every time, both of them never once let Dukat get away with his smiling facade. Not even for a second.

And he haaaaates that. These are, probably for the first time in his life, people he can't manipulate, con, charm, threaten, bully, or exile into participating in his worldview. Which is, of course, why he becomes increasingly obsessed with both of them--trying to force Kira to love him, and Sisko to be just like him. Because their unwavering hatred and disdain for all he is and will be does not mesh with his unhinged racist self-absorbed world view. And he absolutely cannot deal. Its fundamentally what sends him off the deep end eventually, especially joined with that same rejection of his world by Ziyal (and the lack of opportunity to undo that moment after she dies).

But getting to watch both of them (and especially Kira, who I adore always for getting to be both butch and femme, soft and also unapologetically sharp tongued and full of rage onscreen in a way women rarely get to be) fearlessly spit in Dukat's smarmy face (metaphorically and otherwise) over and over again brings me such joy.

Such a fundamental part of DS9 is exploring where the moral line is when a utopia has to go to war and break its values to protect those same values (for varying definitions of utopia, which the show also explores). And although there are places where the moral line gets greyed out, wibbly, or even crossed in ways that feel necessary if awful, Kira and Sisko keep us rooted in the truth that Dukat's smiling facism is never palatable or acceptable, or even ignorable. It must always be rejected, even when you're trapped, tired, exhausted, forced to live under its heel. You still have to say no whenever and however you possibly can.

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - S5E19 Ties of Blood and Water

[lady-wildflower]

So, I'm not USAmerican. I'm a random kiwi, ie I'm from Aotearoa New Zealand. But USAmerican politics affect the world, and so against our will one must pay attention to it. Your election will decide the stability of huge parts of the world and the lives of a lot of people.

Right now, your election hasn't been called. People are talking about a red mirage leading to a blue resurgence, and gods I hope that happens, for the sake of the people of the States and the entire world. But even if it does, this being the map of your results at 8:15pm NZDT, is absurd.

This sort of thing is why I've always been bemused and frowny whenever your (barely) progressive figures insist of Donald Trump's behaviour "this is not America," or the like. It's something that seriously bothers me about USAmerican politics.

Sorry, but yes it is. It's been patently obvious from an outside viewpoint for a very long time that the United States are not a beacon of progressiveness like some of your leaders would like to think. The United States are a haven of bigotry, prejudice, and mean-spiritedness. At this point, sixty-eight million USAmericans would rather vote for a convicted criminal, liable sex pest, and traitor who entered politics by promoting racist conspiracy theories than a politically qualified and basically progressive prosecutor who is also a black woman.

In the United States, bigoted, sexist, vindictive, small-minded violent fascism is so far leading against the most mild of progressive leaders. It has a real likelihood of winning.

Oh, and while I've been writing this the AP just called Pennsylvania for Trump. So now that picture above is already out of date, now Trump would seem to have 267 Electoral College votes.

Even if Kamala wins thanks to the last minute wave of Democratic votes in slower-counted population centres, this is how close your politics are. This is how much the United States can teeter. USAmerica as a whole needs to stop sticking its head in the sands and reckon with the fact that a vast amount of its population is either unbothered by, or outright supportive of, fascism, treason, vile sexism, white supremacy, rape culture, violent racism, and authoritarianism.

The United States on the whole are not better than this. Stop blithely pretending they are. It's days like this that make clear how nauseatingly self-deceiving statements like 'this is not America' are. You guys have a long way before saying that is anything but dangerous ignorance of the reality of how far you have left to go.

[thejesusmaninred]

"The Spittle." Mark 7: 31-37.

Jesus continues to evangelize about the possibilities of a Jewish-Greco-Roman culture, a product of a real modern world. At the time this Gospel was written however, an upstart was sneaking up on Him, a vile thing called the Early Church, and we know how that turned out. We are still living with it.

But at the time, there was the possibility the rubbish Saul of Tarsus and the state were peddling might be overcome. This is why Saint Mark says "Jesus left the Vicinity" to hunt for fertile fish in the Sea of Galillee, "the region of the cylinder" (the Torah) wherein was found the Decapolis, people familiar with the Ten Decrees. About all of this Jesus says we must speak "plainly". Imagine that!

Jesus Heals a Deaf and Mute Man

31 Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis.[h] 32 There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.

33 After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. 

34 He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). 35 At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.

36 Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. 37 People were overwhelmed with amazement. “He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 31-32: They begged Jesus to place His hand. They wanted to know more about the Maha Shabbat, the Passover.

The Number is 11161, יאאוא‎‎‎, wow.

"The particle ו (waw) is the most occurring verbal unit in the Bible. Its name means peg or hook and its shape resembles one, and its job is to tie words, statements and sentences together."

v. 33. He spit. The Number is 7043, עדג, edg, "A fish that is caught with a spear." Jesus went to the Sidon to find people who were familiar with the Law after his discussion with the Amphora. The Passover was a mere 35 years old at this point, and not widspread in a Romanized world, so he spat when he spoke about it, meaning he unrolled the cylinder:

"Together with the preposition ανα (ana), meaning on or upon: the verb αναπτυσσω (anaptusso), meaning to un-fold or rather un-roll (Luke 4:17 only). Note that Luke's use of this and the previous word suggest a similarity between the two lips of a mouth and the two rolls of a book scroll: when unrolled, the mouth speaks, but when rolled back up, the mouth closes and the audience chews."

v. 34-35: His tongue was loosened. The Number is 9044, ץד‎, "The party aspect."

Compare to the absurd and oppressive material found in the Epistles of "Saint Paul":

"Paul writes, 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36, as in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

From 1 Timothy 2:

11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet.

And then there is Paul's famous injunction against women even being seen:

1 Timothy 2:9: Women should dress modestly and appropriately, avoiding elaborate hairstyles, gold, pearls, or expensive clothing. 

1 Corinthians 11:2-16: Paul addresses women in the Corinthian church who were not wearing head coverings while praying or prophesying. Paul affirms the cultural practice of women wearing head coverings as a symbol of submission to their husbands. He also says that women should consider what their appearance implies about their relationship with God. 

Finally there are his famous words about gays and lesbians whom he says should suffer capital punishment in Romans 1.

Christ said nothing about these things, and we know He began His ministry in the household of a gay couple, Simon and Andrew. None of the female heads of household in the Torah were told to be silent nor to cover their hair or be submission to men.

The stark contrasts between the treatment of men, women and gays between the Epistles and the actual Gospels was heralded by John the Baptist as the Good News and indeed, it was.

Except Saul of Tarsus was a heretic and a piece of shit. Read on, how Jesus says He plans to change the directions on everything that freak Saul told people about being Jewish:

v. 36-37: He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. The Number is 13343, יג‎גדג‎ ‎, yagad, "to bind."

"Possibly related to or derived from the verb יחד (yahad) is the noun, adjective and adverb אחד ('ehad), generally meaning one. It should be noted that the Hebrew language of the Bible doesn't make use of numerical digits, and deploys words for amounts with the same poetic lack of precision that gives any word its true charge. Our word occurs 960 times in the Old Testament and "stresses unity while recognizing diversity within that oneness," in the words of HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament.

Our word may simply mean one (Genesis 27:38, Joshua 23:10, Malachi 2:10) or once (2 Kings 6:10, Psalm 62:12), or a certain one (1 Samuel 1:1), or only (1 Kings 4:19), or first (Genesis 1:5). But it also expresses a oneness of obvious multiple elements: of the joined curtains of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:6), of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:24), of peoples (Genesis 34:16).

The "one" language spoken until the tower of Babel collapsed was not a common tongue (because the languages had already diverged; Genesis 10:5, 10:20, 10:31) but rather a unity of the human condition. The famous phrase "YHWH is God; YHWH is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4, also see Zechariah 14:9) may not necessarily defend the monotheistic dogma, but rather be like the phrase "God is love" (1 John 4:8) which reflects inter-human behavior (John 17:22-23, Acts 2:46, Romans 15:5, Ephesians 4:3)."

Who doesn't want to be invited to a party where people are having fun? If you know of one and can bring a guest, I'm free.

[sera-cb]

It doesn't boggle the mind that much, honestly. In truth, it really aptly demonstrates how the right co-opts language and ideas and insecurities to drag people into their bullshit.

GamerGate took off because of misogyny and confirmation bias masked under the guise of concerns over ethical journalism in games media.

To be clear, games "journalism" has always been a hive of corrupt publisher influence and control. Reviewers have almost always had to kotow to publisher interests or risk being blacklisted and losing the early access to new releases they depend on to be relevant. The biggest physical gaming publication in the country, Game Informer, primarily exists to sell more games for its parent company, Gamestop. The journalistic ethics in this field have never been great, and continue not to be. It warrants genuine concern.

And that's all it took; they took that seed of genuine concern, redirected it into vitriol towards a subject that would already appeal to the kind of person vulnerable to conservative indoctrination ("us vs. them," blatant sexism, and the fear of an exclusive group and sense of identity being threatened by normalization, AKA "'Gamer' MEANS something!!!"), and used that and the general channer culture to push a right-wing agenda.

Breitbart in particular was all over this, most notably in the now-irrelevant editorialist shitlord Milo Yiannopoulos, who pivoted his efforts hard into pandering and indoctrinating a bunch of misguided young men with his content.

This escalated, again off of seeds of genuine concern. Worries about games being censored in localization were extremely easy to associate with some vile "left-wing" agenda. The most common alterations to Japanese games are sexual content; certain character interactions, the amount of skin exposed on characters, how they're depicted, or even just characters' ages are routinely altered to be more acceptable to an American audience, and (arguably more importantly) the ESRB. A lot of angry weeb gamers were looking for something to blame that wasn't their own creeping normalized pedophilia and misogyny (there's that word again!), and that was easy for interested parties to skew into "the puritanical Left wants to take sex away," regardless of that being, like, the literal opposite of reality. Actual cases of games being barred from sale in certain regions or removed from storefronts under pressure from, say, the Chinese government? That was much less relevant to them. Their attention was on protecting "vagina bones."

And that's easy to get away with, because once you're in these spaces, they start selling you on the idea that right-wing sources are the only ones telling you the truth. Fox News does this all the time. This is what they're doing by referring to their competition as the "mainstream media," effectively pushing that same "us vs. them" narrative. Once you're in that spiral, in that manufactured space of trust and distrust, you'll readily align with whatever the "good guys" are selling you, and distrust anything at all said by their detractors.

Gamers were easy. They'd wrapped their entire identity into a product they consumed. That identity's status as an identity at all was, to them, under threat, and so cemented into their worldview that they genuinely came to believe that "gamers" were a group that could be legitimately oppressed. Their social graces were exactly what you'd expect of the kind of people you'd encounter on XBox Live, and the absurdity that their brainwashers pushed them towards was so easy to make fun of that a lot of us actively pushed them further into an insular in-group by mocking this shit, because how the fuck can you not? It was all abjectly stupid... unless you bought into the shit.

Further, their language started going mainstream. To this day, if you were subject to Gators' lingo, or god forbid if you were one of their targets, you're going to be uncomfortable on Twitch. The "kek"s, the Pepe memes, "based," and even just someone calling themselves a "gamer" can all trigger a defensive response. Not only did the right cement an in-group, they cemented an out-group, and curated dogwhistles that make the average person think you're loco for being uncomfortable around. They made it harder for anyone to trust anyone online, which, incidentally, is part of how you create alienated, vulnerable people, who are easier to indoctrinate.

It sucks, and the worst part is it was extremely easy to see happening, but a lot of people get immediately defensive and incredulous when you bring up GG and its utilization as a pipeline to drag a new generation into the then-blossoming Alt-Right. A lot of people blocked it out for their own mental health, and folks from both sides roll their eyes whenever it's brought up, but it's objectively relevant to the discussion or what the fuck even happened to get us here.

We "lost" the capital-G Gamers to the right because of anime tiddies and a deep-rooted desire to blame anything but themselves for the industry's problems. We lost them to the alt-right because of a few select figureheads seizing onto that and exploiting these kids' insecurities to edge them down an abyss, and imo it would be a grave mistake to not learn from that.

(via 9go43ci9ynta1.jpg (JPEG Image, 529 × 767 pixels))

[concupiscience]

In the Soviet past, which has permeated our present and continues to flow into it, there was a lot of black tragedy. There are many worthy of fond memory. But too much in Soviet reality is described by the offensive definition of “something wrong.” Something always didn't work out. "Bad luck." Every now and then some misfortunes happened.

Sometimes the reasons are clear: “It’s not a pipe, it’s the whole system that needs to be changed.” Explaining the social evil that did not want to disappear from socialist society, the Soviets for decades blamed “remnants of the old.” This planted a fantastic seditious thought in some people: what if the revolution had been organized earlier, would they have put an end to the remnants? But the arch-Soviet Robert Rozhdestvensky, without fully understanding what he said, gave birth to a wonderful pun: “Vestiges of the new.”

In the bloodily enraged post-war USSR, for the majority of Russian people (including big bosses), the main thing was right and good things. “I love you, life, and I want you to become better” - what is there to doubt? But for every “better” thing that, at the cost of hard work, beautified Soviet life, for some reason we had to pay for it with a new “worse” one, which even rabid Sovietists admit.

Sometimes one can suspect the intervention of some external force in Soviet bad luck - after all, Soviet true believers are sure that “Gorbachev and Yakovlev were recruited,” and they are increasingly convinced that the Soviet leadership of the first two decades consisted entirely of traitors.

However, the devil knows where the petty unluckiness comes from, the vile inconsistency seems to be the generic curse of our entire Soviet existence, multiplying its annoying incompetence. (Will you say that it has not been Soviet for a long time? Why are they threatening us with distant “de-Sovietization” - and many are afraid?). It is possible to explain why plan A does not work, what is to blame for the failure of plan B - but then why is there no luck?

From a Christian point of view, everything is clear: people rejected God, began to worship creatures instead of the Creator, excommunicated themselves from the sacraments and prayer, subjected the Church to monstrous persecution and became mired in the sins of Cain and Ham. Such a society of apostates and cursed people cannot be prosperous, even if the children in it are “taught good things” (fanatics, too, as a rule, teach children good things). People have implanted their own immunity, damaged their kidneys, torn off their skin - where does health come from?

However, many people today, even if they call themselves Orthodox, have no desire to follow the letter of the Christian faith or even know it. They broadly admit the existence of certain supermundane forces that do not get too involved in earthly affairs and certainly do not reward “everyone according to his deeds” - at least, strictly. Many agnostics and atheists, despite their statements about the absurdity and excess of religion, in fact attribute almost or outright supernatural qualities to various subjects of psychology or sociology, not unlike the pagans. So let's look at the Soviet case from a non-religious point of view, but from the vaguest mystical one.

For example, having barely admitted the concept of karma, it is natural to assume that the bestial Soviet attitude towards abortion ruined this very karma for the entire country, like no other Soviet murder. However, it is precisely among those who operate with this concept that for some reason there are in abundance supporters of the slogan “My body is my business!”

Or here’s a plot for a short story (or a big novel). It is difficult to deny that in Russian villages (as in any other) the traditions of witchcraft were passed on from generation to generation. There lived sorcerers - people who, by all accounts, knew how to deal with spirits and had a lifelong and hereditary connection to them. They treated sorcerers differently, but they recognized something real and dangerous about them. In the lives of ordinary peasants (as those who are not fans of Christianity like to point out), Orthodoxy and millennia-old beliefs and rituals that existed not for show collaborated in relations with other worlds. Soviet history smashed the church into rubble and ground the village into rubble.

And what was supposed to happen when, from the Orthodox point of view, the Orthodox people turned away from the faith and lost the protection of the heavenly powers, and when, from the occult point of view, the traditions of dealing with spirits and witchcraft were broken?

In the fantasies of today's homemade occultists, spirits are like Wolands, providing services to people who are admitted to their illustrious club. According to the village superstition, devils (a pre-Christian word) are simple beasts, sort of banderlogs, who amuse themselves by causing confusion, confusion, quarrels, and can simply throw them off from a height, push them off the road, or tear apart a person who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. . Many observant Christians, including experienced clergy, find this profane opinion reasonable.

In the 60-80s, sorcerers and sorceresses, who had been involved in their work even before collectivization, passed away. In villages that were depopulated (in every sense) many of them had no successors. Others conveyed something that it would be better for an outsider not to know about, to city dwellers who did not understand anything at all or who became too highly opinionated of themselves after receiving the “grandmother’s gift.” Many spirits, accustomed to “working with people,” literally broke loose and went wild.

Despite the post-Stalin softening of morals and improvement of life, the long-suffering RSFSR broke records for unmotivated murders, accidents, and mental disorders. This was explained by high alcoholism, low everyday culture, ordeals endured, and psyche-breaking unpleasantness. But when you analyze, in all their abundance, the misfortunes of those years and right up to the present day, everything comes to mind: shouldn’t we introduce an additional explanation: “the devil has beguiled”, “the devils have saddled.”

And after 15-20 years of timid Christian revival, many social horrors began to dry out: Russians kill less and are killed less, violent madmen have become less noticeable. Undoubtedly, this can be explained by everyday civilization, a certain familiarity with life, the healing of the brokenness of the 90s, the distancing of the dirty sides of the Soviet past, and very specific initiatives from above and below. But all this does not deny the mystical explanation, but only agrees with it: the devils are really afraid of incense, a believer (all other things being equal) is protected from random evil better than an unbeliever, the prayer of even the “small flock” protects society as a whole.

Let's look from the other side. What did Marxism promise? Truly the end of the world. We can recall one well-known joke, lying on the surface, but not noticed by everyone, “on the verge of a foul.” Ostap Bender (on the eve of the nightmare of the first five-year plan) promises to create a “new earth and new heavens” with the help of “chess thought” alone (and the fashion for Marxism and the fashion for chess at the beginning of the century were comparable). The self-proclaimed Grandmaster (that is, the false messiah) proposes to give the center of the new universe the name “Four Horses Club”[1]. For many, many who fell under the four horses of real-Marxism, the last times have truly come.

However, it would be a sin not to admit: the Soviet Union is not only what Lenin and Stalin did, but also the good aspiration of millions of people to live a normal life. Why can’t we agree with those who, even admitting that the Bolsheviks “got a mess somewhere,” believe that we need to act “the Chinese way,” abandoning the Soviet cult of revolution and leaders?

There are several arguments in favor of the inadmissibility of this, and I have already listed them in the text “This is not the time for reconciliation and agreement .” But let’s look at the problem from not even a Christian perspective (“You can’t pray for King Herod” – and especially not  for King Herod), but somewhere at the intersection of mysticism and psychology, which is fashionable today.

In the post-Stalin USSR, which hid Stalin away, Lenin became an absolute deity. Of course, this was not the real Lenin, an evil doctrinaire with “the face of the Kyrgyz-Kaisak steppe,” but a mocking good-natured man with a textbook gloss. Soft-hearted regretters of late Soviet life will probably agree with this (there are fewer and fewer of them; Bolshevik bloodthirstiness is in fashion - for now in words). But let’s think: who, out of the kindest feelings or as a diversion, did even the best people of the Soviet Union worship? A total loser. Lenin's murder was not discussed, but his works and deeds were studied.

The history of Lenin in power is a history of complete failure. The world revolution did not happen. Well-fed “statesmen” today telling how “the Bolsheviks seized power” and “assembled an empire”, for the most part simply do not know what, why, how and with what immediate results the Leninist government did, not to mention the lower demons it unleashed.

The country fell from crisis into boiling hell in six months. Okay, civil war - the world turned out to be more disastrous. For the sake of salvation from hunger and cold, we had to return from the declared and butt-established socialism to the beggarly surrogate of capitalism. Lenin fell from the blow when a mixture of pathological optimism and cynicism did not save him from realizing the fact: on one sixth of the Earth a Pyrrhic victory was won. He died long and terribly. The students interrupted each other. “Golden hands - whatever you touch, it’s all in pieces!” If you call failure a victory and punish any disagreement, you can get a great many people who consider the loser a winner. But the sediment will remain and sting. Greatness is shaky, built on the cult of cosmic proportions of a loser.

The Soviet cults of first Chekists and heroes of the civil war are cults of people who not only did terrible things, but also ended ingloriously. Frunze and Kotovsky were killed, apparently, by their own people; even if Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky died a natural death, they were lucky, unlike their neighboring Dzerzhinsky residents. And even their cults were supported as plugs, checks, covering other images, which even Soviet science fiction writers could not have presented beautifully.

And you can praise the achievements of Soviet and non-Soviet socialism as much as you like, but only a person very far from communist ideology will not agree that Lenin and his followers promised something completely different, that the Soviet state had other goals than what they achieved, and that communism, in any case, case, as a continuation of Lenin's policy, will never come.

This is what can be said about the “positive charge” of even a relatively decent version of Soviet ideology. Leninism is a cult of failure, of Antifortune.

Of course, stubborn (not from a good life) Soviets have long proposed to separate the failed (initially!) Leninism from “all the good” that happened at different stages of Soviet socialism. Most Soviets remembered that the modest joys of socialism (“Thank you for being alive!”) were the real Soviet idea, and Leninism was something like a religion, which, as they know, is “the opium of the people,” but “teaches morality and spirituality.” " Like, we are no longer so Soviet as to consider religion a total evil, but we are quite sure, in a Soviet way, that this is all untrue.

This is where the line is drawn between an economic attitude towards goods, respect for people and cult. The cult of Soviet socialism is the worship not of the benefits common to the twentieth century, but of the way to obtain these benefits - the idea of ​​​​selling the real past, present and future for stew and the promise of a bright future. That’s when the hope for a bright future turned into the lot of completely insane people, all that was left of the entire “red project” was a stew full of rubbish, nasty and insanely expensive.

Even a relatively decent version of sub-Soviet loyalism and post-Soviet Sovietophilia is a cult of agreement with the irreversibility of following a deliberately false path, with poverty and stupidity, from which the Soviet Union perished.

When your entire life is permeated by the worship of failure and dearly paid deception, is it possible to achieve anything worthwhile? It is precisely from the Soviet, crudely materialistic point of view that it is quite possible: “They don’t believe in whatever nonsense, but they live.” (Although the first rule of Sovietness is not to recognize the cynicism of Sovietness). If we even admit the importance of the subconscious, the costs become obvious. If, in addition, we assume that “thought is material” (and everything that can be meant by this), the picture becomes even clearer.

Finally, we can admit a completely sad idea: there are certain entities that literally feed on worship and repay for it. And if this is the worship of grief and misfortune, then it is unlikely that the reward will be happiness.

These entities can increase appetite. And those who feed them also develop spiritually. Towards a mutually agreeable direction. For example, they need to somehow rationalize Soviet existence from the position of Soviet cults. If we take a closer look at the work of the Soviet comprachicos, without Soviet crooked glasses, we will find that it was a long-term murder of a complex and promising society and the transformation of a hero who was just coming into power into a funny freak with a murky future.

It is possible to consider such obvious evil as a good only by exalting to the utmost that same rudeness and curse. From justification through the enumeration of benefits, Sovietism turns into an intoxication with nihilism, social and national, and outright murder:

"Russians are dirty savages"

“Russians who have achieved something deserve to die”

“ours killed, destroyed and took away correctly, but not enough.”

Before our eyes, the apology for the Soviet deputies literally comes down to this.

The cult of Soviet misfortune is turning into a cult of Soviet villainy. The carriers of the Soviet brain virus increasingly want to be scum, rather than idiots. However, this does not stop them from being terpilas and food for parasites.

You say there is nothing like that? But why do so many people behave as if this exists?

[iron-cutting-meteor-sword]

I’d decided ever since I first got into Lupin that I was going the completionist route and consuming all the media from it that I could find, but there are some bits that I am dreading going into lol. Despite this I am determined to find something useful and or enjoyable about each Lupin thing I find, because there’s always something you can pick out from them and because to me that’s a fun way of gathering little bits of info and meta on the series and characters, and seeing how they interact or oppose each other. This isn’t to say I’ll ignore the shitty stuff that’s waiting there, but I’m also not going to be writing a post about every bit of awful shit and how I disagree with it for every post I talk about appreciating something, because I trust we all understand and agree that that is clearly not what anyone worthwhile likes or approves of about the series. I may even consider making a meta post talking about the worst recurring themes and content that has stuck around in the franchise over hundreds of different development teams due to negative influence from the various different and levels of cultures involved as well as time period, lack of gender diversity, and internalized bigotry; but also discuss how the series has worked towards visibility on certain issues like queer men in media and even more recently touching on the short hand Fujiko had been drawn for so many years by her getting an entire series for herself written by a woman, and how there is clearly a wide array of people that have touched the foundations of the franchise to make it what it is and how these positives and the negatives sometimes intersect on their way to the surface. It’s such a nuanced subject though and I really don’t want to make a post about that just on the fly. Not to mention I’m certainly not the authority on all the subjects that would need to be covered for such an analysis and I’ve certainly not “arrived” in any sort of way in terms of progressive understanding and analysis of themes and narratives in media, but maybe one day I can start a decent and good faith discussion about the different views on consuming media like Lupin the Third that is so chock full of content that should be left in the past and rightly criticized. Tangent aside, the point is I may talk about or reblog posts about or from some of the less popular installments of the Lupin franchise, and talk about some of the stuff I liked and disliked. Its my opinion that there’s something to be gleaned from each piece of Lupin media, and it all constitutes the giant tower of content that makes the series, even the foundation, the original manga. Despite all of its massive, massive problems, and like it or not, the manga is the reason the anime exists, and it’s history and influence on the series (and the history and influence on the manga itself) can’t just be thrown aside or ignored, as it still influences the series to this day! I think by the logic that is is the foundation of the franchise, there’s clearly something informative to rip from the pages. You just have to join the queue of people waiting to piss on Monkey Punch’s little clown grave after you read it.