#recriminations

[howifeltabouthim]

Then why did you leave me? . . . If I'm so vulnerable, if you knew it'd go wrong, why the fuck would you let that happen to me?

Eliza Clark, from Boy Parts

[immaculatasknight]

Circular firing squad

[tiarnanabhfainni]

i loved the part of the book where piranesi resolves to take better care of himself while he's rediscovering his own history. he just has so much compassion for himself! the journal upsets him so he takes a week off and does things he enjoys and then he settles into a safe place when he wants to tackle the subject again. and he doesn't believe The Other when he's told about his amnesia! he values his own insights and his own knowledge of the House even when fucking ketterley is actively trying to undermine his sense of self. piranesi's gentle treatment of himself and the person he used to be is genuinely so moving.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Dems and their issues aside, Harris had 100 days to make all magic happen. She gets no blame. I don't know what anyone expected, but what she delivered was a near miracle. Imagine of the Dems had gotten their shit together a year earlier or two.

The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case, sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out.

The best moment of the Harris campaign was the very beginning, when she got a chance to embody the collective sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s decision to bow out, and to offer something new. From there, it was all downhill. She and those around her seemed to think that purely superficial changes would prove sufficient. Harris pointedly refused to offer any criticism of the incumbent administration, or even suggest any way in which she differed from it. Whenever prompted on this score, she simply reiterated that she was not the same person as Joe Biden (or Donald Trump). Her surrogates and supporters often reacted with contempt, scorn, and even racism toward those who thought it fair to ask for something more. In this fashion, she squandered the wide lead she had opened in the summer. Although food insecurity and poverty—especially child poverty—had increased significantly after the expiration of pandemic relief measures, and inflation had outpaced earnings for tens of millions of Americans, Harris eventually settled into a campaign roadshow of billionaires, celebrities, and neocon Republican defectors, advocating for an ill-defined status quo. It was a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s “America is already great”: tone-deaf, incompetently targeted at a nonexistent moderate Republican voter, and often expressly hostile toward part of its own nominal base.

As of the present count, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, suggesting he was far from unbeatable. But Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent.

In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

[prolibytherium]

Beautiful friendship

[spending-life-pretending]

no bc when you stop and think about the full implications of fitz and the fool calling each other “beloved” you do have to go a little crazy. it’s required. because what do you mean that 6 sentences after fitz thinks, “being fitz had never been that enticing an existence” the fool summons him back to himself by calling him “beloved” and renewing their bond. what do you mean fitz refers to this as “burning my identity into me.” what do you mean “the word echoed through me, rebounded me from my fraying edges, found and bound me.” what do you mean. are you not going insane.

[rickybaby]

If at some point we all succumb For goodness sake, let us be young 'Cause time gets harder to outrun And I'm nobody, I'm not done

— Wetsuit, The Vaccines

[autumnhobbit]

hghhgggg

[deimcs]

I have to admit, the media literacy abilities I see some people displaying all around social media when it comes to Baldur’s Gate 3 is so irrevocably in the negatives it’s almost jarring.

[genderfluid-druid]

it sucks but you gotta try. it sucks but you gotta try. it sucks but you gotta try.

[howifeltabouthim]

'You've never loved me. All I am to you is a man who flatters you and pleases you in bed.'

Anna Biller, from Bluebeard's Castle

[milfglupshitto]

You and I, we're not tied to the ground

Not falling, but rising, like rolling around

Eyes closed above the rooftops

Eyes closed, we're gonna spin through the stars

“You and Me���, Dave Matthews Band

so psyched to share this piece I commissioned from the wonderful @aspic31 ! your incredible work really brought this Vah’nya design to life in a way no description could do justice, and hopefully this rarest of pairs will get a little more attention.

Vah’nya’s animated appearance is based loosely on my dream cast for her voice actor, Ayo Edebiri! She’s fantastically talented and I think she would play really well against Tiya Sircar’s Sabine (and I would love to get Miss Ayo “adult yoda is fucking busted” Edebiri in Star Wars, somehow).

[chocolatepot]

I've been so stressed today and yesterday that my whole body hurts. 😩 Not even over anything special, half of it is just my brain telling me things are going to go badly down the line, probably. Hurts so much I might take a covid test just in case.

[the-sacred-now]

I go through life thinking I've got the moral scrupulosity under control--then one thing changes (cooking habits) I say "Ohhh I'm using more cleaning supplies these days, this is terrible, if only I weren't cooking more often, with so many more ingredients, I wouldn't be cleaning so much. So much rinsing things between steps. Washing out more pots and pans than ever. Aluminum foil usage going up, paper towel usage increasing..."

And I have to take myself by the shoulders and say, listen. Babe. I don't know how else to say this.

Making and eating better meals is a good thing.

[penultimate-step]

...the minor pain noticing a typo in your post after you've already reblogged it so you have to delete, edit and re-reblog....

[euelios]

bro how do you fuck up a soup