#recriminations

[howifeltabouthim]

. . . sullen and solitary and furious at everything, himself especially.

John Banville, from Snow

[peace-hunter]

Idk if you've read deceptibee before but if you have,how would the primes react while Op and Megs are fighting over custody of bee and Dent his shoulder,I can imagine alpha trion giving Op a long aft speech of why he's a terrible friend

actually, i think OP is quite good at telling himself what a terrible friend he is. a bit too good if you ask any of his siblings.

it is another of the very few things the primes refuse to accept optimus' opinion on

haunted au

[peigslayers]

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?

[taliesinman]

everytime someone fetishizes rochu instead of making it the most dramatic thing of all time an angel loses its wings. how can you talk about rochu without talking about first contact during the imperial era. how can you talk about them and not go through how their dynamic during the century of humiliation suddenly changed in the 1920s. how can you talk about them without talking about comintern business and switching support between the kmt and the cpc. how can you talk about them without talking ww2. how can you talk about them without the short honeymoon phase after liberation in 1949. HOW CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THEM WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT. the drama. the politics. the historical intrigue. and you're telling me people ship rochu because "small delicate asian boy x big strong slavic man uwu" ? come on

[codename-adler]

the voices- they tell me ✨psu foxes shit✨

-> Neil

[wordsandrobots]

OK but serious talk. I need you all to understand that when I get around to writing it, the next (and hopefully trilogy-ending) Ride/Gaelio fic is going to involve locking them and Julieta in a confined space so they can all be mortified with each other, because then I get to call it and this inadvertent sub-series 'Primary Colours'.

No, I will not be swayed from this joke and none of you can stop me.

(The present conundrum is how and if to structure it so I can maintain the current level of smut while including the metric tonne of plot required to justify sticking these characters in a jar and shaking.)

(This is not going to turn poly, by the way. I have no idea what the end result is going to be, exactly, but it won't be that.)

(Well, I mean, it's going to be a mess.)

(An aromantic, a bi disaster and a demi-sexual walk on to a launch -)

(Well, run on to a launch. Did I mention that this is five years down the line from WoSH and everything is on fire?)

(Assassins! Trade wars! Awkward sleep-overs!)

(But mainly just an excuse to make everyone regret their life choices for the audience's amusement.)

[chiropteracupola]

fear and doubt dot jpeg

[howifeltabouthim]

They locked stares then, Tya and Relos Var, and something passed between them. Tya looked at him the way one might look at a person once loved, someone who had hurt them deeply: with regret and sadness and no small measure of hate. They were not friends, but maybe they had been once. Maybe even more than that.

Jenn Lyons, from The Ruin of Kings

[dead-generations]

I really want to just say how fucking bizarre it is that a notorious cult which has been explicitly and ruthlessly opposed to voting and democracy has, at the 11th hour, started a nation wide coordinated campaign to boost the LNP. And it is centered around the phrase "Make Australia Smile Again."

And they are just like, pretending they arent doing that, with the worst lying I think I have seen since andrew's "i cant sweat"

[autumnhobbit]

hghhgggg

[herbofgraceandpeace]

Prayer request: a dear friend of mine has received all rejections minus one waitlist for her graduate school applications, and she’s extremely discouraged and not sure what to do next. She poured a tremendous amount of work and money into prepping for the application cycle all this last year as well as the actual applications and auditions, and it seems like it hasn’t paid off. She’s not sure what the Lord is doing and why her attempts to pursue her passion and her calling aren’t going the way she needs them to. Prayers appreciated for God’s comfort, peace, and direction in her life, and that her waitlist spot opens up!

[grimauxiliatrixofficial]

Dumb gay Ex venting post!

Don't read if you don't wanna. Or do. It's really personal and we're terrified of opening up, we need to work on it. Gonna be a slightly long one.

We had a breakdown. A really bad one. Sam had destroyed the last piece of our already 99% destroyed night lords army. It had been destroyed all at once not a week or two before. Just as when we found that army destroyed, he dismissed our feelings with a "you'll fix it." Attitude. We freaked. Said mean things. Because in a house of 90% Sam property, Mall stuff was the only stuff that got destroyed like this. On. A. Daily. Basis. A fact that has curiously stopped now that he and his ilk are gone.

Anyway we freak and grab some luggage and move out. For a night. We got some support from our shockingly ready to help family (we had gone no contact 2 years earlier as our sister has aspersed our name to the entire family, claiming that we hither kid. This fact is important later as it informs how little we enjoy having our name spoken in gossip)

His friend Rowan swoops in to save the day! Telling us how awful we've treated sam! How we should just drink ourself to death and leave them out of it!

It set us off, the Alcoholic Indian stereotype that we've had thrown in our face time after time. We'd had people telling us as a CHILD that we would grow up to be an alcoholic since we're indian! Naturally we flipped. We had choice words that do NOT GET SHARED BETWEEN FRIENDS!(They had said more that needed addressing but the mocking to call us a reactionary tiktok catholic can wait cause it was a lil funny) It horrified us.

The terror and rage of being told such things by, not merely a friend or comrade, but by our COMPANION. A comrade we trusted with our life, our back, our shoulder in battle at times!

We knew it was WRONG when we were doing and saying it, not because they didn't deserve to be flayed Alive for what they said, but because they would turn that terror and sorrow into further ammunition for them to use against us. We knew they would.

By this point now, sam had locked us out of our OWN ROOM to sleep with another woman(hi xev) and we flipped. Not wanting to play the part of his cuckold wife any longer, we sent him away, at first for distance to figure our shit out apart.

While he was gone we asked him to get Rowan to apologize, instead he spent MONTHS defending them. Going to such lengths as to not only state that "they're ALSO hurting right now:(" (hurting about allll the awful things we said, which in turn posthoc justified the racist thing that they said!), but also he heard them out as they recounted the one time that we had "thrown the race card around casually."

Even AFTER disproving to our ex that we WEREN'T in fact "throwing the race card around to win arguments" (already a really fucking racist thing to say), Rowan STILL refused to budge, certain in their rightness. Sam for his part kept recounting how HURT their feelings were, that their hurt mattered more than mine. They just needed time!

They still haven't spoken to us once, stolidly refusing to face what they've said and done, certain they did the right thing.

White leftism looks like this, shrewd political tiptoeing followed by a ghosting.

Worse yet is that our ex kept going! He kept going back to his friends to gossip and collect new "charges" against us! Kept returning to accuse and recount what his friends and he had come up with!

-We treated sam like a literal dog in public! Calling and whistling for him, humiliating him!(we were trying to catch a literal dog. We were calling to him, then called to the little dog again.)

-We threw the race card around because once time when we were drunk we called Sam a racist!(at that point we had stopped talking about ojibwe culture with Samuel because he had, on three marked occasions, interrupted some innocuous ojibwe fairy tale to chime in the REAL INFORMED SCIENCE FACTS that PROVED THE OJIBWE STORIES WERE WRONG! We were drunk and pissed off about it still, months later.)

-We were stealing him away from his social life! Isolating him!(quite early on in our relationship we had devised a system that would allow for weekend days to be Our days together, to do chores and shopping and project work together. Since we work opposite shifts, day and night. We devised the system and he stuck loyally to Our Days and willfully made the decision to decline social event after social event ON OUR BEHALF, then came back round to try and blame US for those times. Those times when he "could have been doing something better than rotting in the house we bought together." )

He took these talking points and not only shoved them OUR way, but also dragged them into our couples counseling, where he recounted them as fact! Just as he recounted them amongst his gossips as fact, turning our former friends against us further.

Don't tell him that though, to imply that his opinions were affected by his friends would rob him of agency. These were just false thoughts that he came up with and recounted as factual to his friends who then all got even further in the "fuck mal" corner! This is better in his mind for... some reason, AND NOT something he should have to apologize for! It was just a moment of weakness!(A moment that lasted for MONTHS, months of returning to his gossips and running our name through the mud, like our sister did.)

We spiraled. Furthering our own deepening well of hate and terror that they could do this to us, we tormented him. Tormented by speaking his worst fears and insecurities to him via message board. We needed him to bleed by our words. Then we devolved. God did we devolve. There's so much we plum don't remember and will be going to great lengths to. It's mostly in text format in one way or another but deleted. Hopefully it comes back as our long term memory takes hold.

We acknowledge that there were times during our relationship when he had ignored us on an Our day, we didn't handle it well. Once, we freaked, got drunk, and got pissed that he had decided to spend one of Our days fucking someone else. Yelling and howling because we felt we were being cheated on.

He coerced us into opening the relationship during the literal lowest point in our life, our sister had just left on a sour note and we would have said ANYTHING to keep him. We feared he would leave if we said no, and he truly truly would have, he told us so. He would have left and we knew it. So we said yes, open our relationship. We spent the last days in this relationship unfulfilled and mocked by his boyfriend who stated that he had "won a competition he didnt know he was playing in" against us.

We didn't want it, and we put ourself through hoop and trapeze to reform ourself into something we thought was something he would love. We just made a parody of ourself. We're done with that.

We made what coping cries for help we could without coming right out and saying that we were unhappy. We didn't communicate it well. Not merely offhand comments about how little we care for his boyfriend, but how little we cared for this system. How jealous we were. He didn't care to notice though. He was getting what he wanted.

And look. We were right. All talking about what an evil awful scary abusive monster his ex was. How brave and great he was to grant that psycho as much GRACE as he did. What a good boy he is.

It's unjust and makes us sick to our stomach. They haven't spoken to us once in months, as stated. Ostracized in full from. Not just a friend group, but an entire support system. Rug pulled right out because one guy needed as many pets and "good boy!"s from as many approving mouths as he could. He didn't care that he was cashing in the "love of his life" to get them.

Anyway then when we wanted to change locks so we would have less fucking psycho thoughts about him(he kept sneaking around our house while we were gone and it was seriously triggering us and it setting off serious alarm bells, we would see him in places, and rowan. We will not be elaborating. We will be taking meds for it soon.), he threatened to have the police barge in and TAKE what was his. Which was like 90% of the furniture.

This is what happens when a white leftist is hurt. They fucking go down this route. So certain that giving up on their own ideals to trade in for a LITTLE security for their personal property. Nevermind just.... asking to fucking come in one day and be amicable about moving their shit out. No! Drop your years of "fuckcops" attitude to have the psycho Indian dragged off to jail(we would have been. This is not a debatable fact we would either have gone to jail or been shot stone dead.)

White leftism is a performative joke.

I don't know. It just needed recounting. We're missing details. There's more for sure, more were ashamed of and don't recount even to ourself. We will.

God willing we will fucking get past this all. It's over. It's done. He hates us and we hate him now.

[chocolatepot]

The real neverending nightmare is the way my "people do not develop 'porn addictions' from just watching or reading porn" replies on a post promoting jorkin it as self-care continue to get the actual stupidest responses. I try not to doom about how we are not making it out alive because people don't read or whatever but for fuck's sake, so many idiots on this site are evangelical Christians in all but name

[genderfluid-druid]

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

[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).