#we got milquetoast

[lovelyrotter]

we get the constant urge to just design random characters for like no reason so we can hoard them for potential future ttrpg pcs and we have wayyyy too many tiefling ideas. way too many. but tiefling names are way too fun to think about

[blunderpuff]

disgusted and frustrated and disgusted again with all the non-USA Jews on instagram who are both sides-ing the shit out the us election and leaning heavily into "don't vote democrat"

YOU ARE SO FUCKING STUPID AND SELF-CENTERED AND DID I MENTION STUPID AND PRIVILEGED AND ALSO STUPID!

[moderatetoaboveaverage]

.

[inflammatory]

Also while im being a jackass braggart online can i say as a surfer on the asian in asia education system ocean i cant find it in myself to be impressed by US high school successes in the slightest what do you mean your trigonometry teacher. They make one guy for every math subdivision? Its trig the whole class???? Do you also have a specific calculus teacher???? Whats your next period?? history of monarch butterflies?

Wait heres the famous primary school leaving exam question from here. Im not 12 years old anymore so im too fking stupid to get it right without thinking really hard. But theyre really so wicked to these 12 year old children over here theyre like freaking evil wizards setting ghastly puzzles for those who might wish to escape the evil lair of primary six. And every time the little kids are like dodging and weaving around the fireballs getting thrown at them. They parkour around these questions within minutes. And then they grow up go to progressively more advanced tuition centres turn 17 and then kill themselves

[floral-hex]

Haven’t been sleeping well because, and this is the stupidest reason, I’m so full of damnable longing. All I do is yearn and pine and want.

[sextions]

i hate car based infrastructure so badly it’s insane

[dcggone]

i think ill taking an office position at this philosophy club i joined at school. i say that knowing the workload ive already taken on is daunting and a wee bit scary

[slushi-chan]

The umbilical cord Frank Sunderland keeps in his room would be a better protagonist with more personality than Henry he’s so fucking bland

[catboybiologist]

Yay I'm going to get all Political and angry again.

So pretty much every trans American is probably aware of the Sarah McBride situation at this point, but here's the bullet point summary if needed for anyone else:

Sarah McBride gets elected to the House as the first transgender member of Congress in US history.

Republicans predictably flip their shit. They pass internal rules of conduct that prohibit trans people from using bathrooms of their gender and stating that bathroom use is defined by AGAB. It obviously singles out McBride, but I believe there are trans staffers that are also affected.

McBride issues a statement that she will abide by these rules, and pretty much only use the bathroom directly associated with her physical office. She issues a statement saying she "wasn't elected for bathrooms" and will instead fight in issues that matter, with a milquetoast criticism of Republicans for wasting time on this.

Many trans Americans are predictably scared and disappointed by this, especially because this internal house rule is being used as a blueprint for more extensive laws, including a likely ban on trans people in gendered bathrooms in all federal land and buildings (including, notably for me, national parks. Which breaks my heart, but that's a different rant.)

There's been a lot of disappointment and criticism of McBride over this. The general leftist reaction has been criticism. There's lots of people that have expressed disappointment or rage, including Erin Reed, and also more "personality" type people like Vaush and Jessie Gender.

Now.

I'm disappointed too.

But. And please keep reading before chewing me out for being an apologist.

I think we can all understand that McBride is in an impossible situation. If she fights this too hard, then it vindicates the Republican rhetoric that Dems are crazy trans obsessed leftists. But there's a fear that this will only lead to more infringements of rights for trans people. McBride is completely stuck, and is a junior, freshly elected member of Congress who is trying to figure out how to make her voice the most effective.

I am so, so fucking tired of rights being ceded one by one. So I'm disappointed. But yeah, I understand McBride's statement.

But there's just one tiny. Eeny weeny. Minor. Itty Bitty question having over all of this. Just one little concern.

Where.

The fuck.

Are the rest of the Democrats?!?!?!?

There is a PAINFULLY fucking easy solution to all of this. McBride needs backing, solidarity, and other people to speak for her. If she's worried about her voice being effective, and being branded as the crazy trans representative, then step the fucking up, you spineless liberal slimebags.

AOC is the only one that I know of that has expressed any real opposition or anger. Her statements are getting aaallll the airtime.

But the real story is McBride's sentiment being echoed amongst the entire party. This is absolutely some kind of official platform. The fucking grumbling, milquetoast finger waving and "well I don't like this, but there's nothing to be done! Anyways"

Of fucking course minorites are abandoning the left. The message they're sending is "we'll abandon you with the most pathetic of excuses. We don't give a shit." Trimming groups out of their support one by one.

McBride is doing the impossible calculus of trying to be the most effective on the house floor. It's an insane task for a trans woman. And yeah, she got it wrong this time. But where the fuck is the anger for her cis colleagues? Why the fuck aren't people angry and terrified for everyone that let this shit happen?

As much as people love the narrative of the line wolf resistor, resistance takes coordination, effort, and solidarity. Without that, what would McBride raising opposition even be? One representative against the hundreds of others.

And yeah, of course I didn't expect any better from the Democratic party. But you should be disappointed and mad at your representative, not just McBride.

[may-maple-blog]

so alluria and the garchomp guy's garchomp got along well. it's really rare, but sometimes when breeding pokémon you'll get offspring that share the father's species. we found this guy's egg with the rest of the feebas.

this little guy isn't a hybrid, but he does have some milotic traits from alluria--most notably his soft, brightly colored scales! i really hope he keeps them if he evolves.

this guy still needs a name!

thank you to my friends @milquetoast-appreciator and @certified-togekiss-enjoyer for helping me get a new friend!

[tanadrin]

RE "revolutionary leftists are revolutionary because they know they can't win electorally."

It astounds me a little that there are leftists who think that a communist revolution is more likely to work than, like, fifty years of community-building and electoral politics. Sewer socialism, union activism, and other boring activities have brought much more success in the U.S. than agitation for a revolution.

What I mean is, setting aside the moral concerns (violence is bad, even when it's necessary, and if there are practical alternatives then we should pursue them), I am not a revolutionary leftist because I think we would lose a revolution. For one thing, there is a considerable right-wing element in the country that is much better prepared for this kind of thing, and I think that the majority of the institutions in the U.S. would pick fascism over communism if they had to choose, but also, prolonged violent action is ripe for breeding authoritarianism.

Goatse is concerned that "the party" might "abandon or neglect its primary ends," but what is leftism if it is not, at bottom, an attempt to improve the living conditions of all people, et cetera et cetera? To the extent that social democratic parties successfully pursue this end to some degree, they're better than than an ostensible communist party that talks the talk but commits human rights abuses. And, more than the fact that U.S. leftism has some pretty fierce opposition that would probably fare better if The Revolution happened tomorrow, I think that, even in winning, we would lose, because what came out the other end would look a lot more like Stalinism.

I think one thing the hardcore revolutionaries in OECD countries don't realize is that the reason they can't marshal support for their revolutions is that the socialists won most of the issues that were salient in the early 20th century--workers got more rights, better pay, unions were legalized, etc., etc. But it didn't take restructuring the whole political economy to do it, which is immensely frustrating if you believe that any society without your ideal political economy is inherently immoral and impure, so in order to justify an explicitly communist platform you have to rhetorically isolate it from the filthy libs and feckless demsocs who it turns out have been pretty effective within the arena of electoral politics in which supposedly nothing can ever get done, and treat them as of a piece with the out-and-out fascists and royalist autocrats of the 1920s and 30s.

Which, you know. Is not persuasive to most people! Most people understand intuitively the vast gulf between the SPD and the Nazis; they see that, milquetoast and compromising though they may be, the center-left can deliver substantive policy improvements without the upheaval of a civil war or political purges, and this is attractive to people who are not of a millenarian or left-authoritarian personality.

Which isn't to say that communists don't often make important points! It sucks having to fight a constant rearguard action against the interests of capital rolling back the social improvements of the 20th century, and it sucks that liberal governments in Europe and North America have historically been quite happy to bankroll and logistically support fascists and tyrants in the third world against communist movements (which invariably only exist as communist movements because these same fascists and tyrants have crushed more compromising movements and only the most militant organizations have managed to survive).

But I agree with you: communists also talk a big game about how liberalism is the real fascism (what's that line from Disco Elysium I see quoted everywhere about how everybody is secretly a fascist except the other communists, who are liberals?), while also being awful at democracy. Suppressing dissent because your small clique of political elites is the only legitimate expression of the people's will (which you know, because you have declared it to be so) really is some rank bullshit. A system with competitive elections is still, well, a system with competitive elections, even if those elections are structurally biased in certain ways; all the bloviating that attempts to justify communist authoritarianism cannot really obscure the fact that authoritarian systems are cruel and brittle, regardless of the ideology being served.

[sillimancer]

it's the villagers. the villagers didn't really get any quality-of-life updates or new features like other elements in the game (e.g. the camera, decorating your house). I kind of expected that, as the rest of the games got more advanced, the villager AI would too. maybe there would be a more robust friendship mechanic that would influence the likelihood of a villager deciding to move out. maybe the villagers could interact with each other more and do things like complain about the neighbors they don't like, making villager compatibility a factor in how you decorate your island. there could have been more little side quests, like getting signatures for petitions, or planting certain flowers around a villager's house. now that there's a cooking mechanic, there could have been a monthly potluck event where you like, spend the week before finding out what everyone wants to bring and gifting them the ingredients they need.

but we didn't get any of that. the NH villagers are basically just walking and talking decorations now. they do have new little behaviors, like doing their little hobbies or sitting down, but they don't have anything to do with you. they're animatronics acting out cuteness. they don't even have all that many new lines; you can cycle through everything a villager is going to potentially say to you pretty quickly if you talk to them every day (which the game encourages and rewards, implying they wouldn't want you to get bored with it, so this move is particularly baffling to me).

and we players treat them like decoration too. there are basically two reasons to covet a particular villager: sentimentality and looks. they're funko pops. they're funko pops and they could've been so much more and frankly I'm disappointed!

wait hold up I think I just finally figured out why I don't like animal crossing new horizons

[nothorses]

May I ask why you think Biden stepping down and Kamala being the candidate to be 'good news'? I'm still voting for whoever the Democratic candidate is ofc, but I worry this move threw away the average swingvoter who may have been swayed towards voting blue. I don't see how anyone who may have been okay voting for Biden by virtue of him being an old white dude is gonna be as nice towards a brown woman. I mean, people were too sexist for Hillary, the most milquetoast white woman imaginable. I'd really like to hear your perspective.

Biden has been polling like shit for months, and basically fucking everyone has been calling for him to step out of the race for a while now. It's been the opinion of political experts that he doesn't have much of a shot in this election for a variety of reasons. The vast majority of his own base is incredibly dissatisfied with his stance on Palestine (an understatement), and numbers have been reflecting that he was going to be running against some truly miserable odds because of that.

It is genuinely the best option for him to step out of the race. Literally just about anyone else has a much better shot at winning than Biden did. Kamala included! There was a press conference a while back where someone actually asked him if he'd step down if Kamala polled better, and he said he wouldn't. Which is extremely worrying, because it demonstrates that he may have been prioritizing his own personal ego over the importance of keeping Republicans out of office this election.

I don't like Biden, and I really didn't like his odds in this race. Nobody else did, either. The fact that Obama came out and said Biden needs to step down is indication enough that this happened because the situation is really that dire; you have to remember that Democrats are all about Doing Things By The Book, especially in the last 8-ish years when it's been useful for them to be Rule Followers in contrast to the tantrum-throwing chaos machines that Republicans have been. If there was even a sliver of hope for Biden to stay in the race after being chosen in the sad sham that the primaries were this election cycle, they would have kept pushing just to stay within the bounds of convention.

I was ready to push for Biden regardless, because keeping Republicans out of office is priority #1. But I've been saying for a while now that he needs to drop out (just... not on Tumblr, where the dominant conversation is "does voting for a flawed political pawn make you personally responsible for everything they ever do, or should we abstain and let the fascists hijack our government and kickstart several new genocides for the sake of personal moral purity" and I don't think that kind of nuance would be well-received).

I use my grandparents as a litmus test in a lot of this stuff, because they are very much the Typical Liberal Democrats, and their opinions on these things tend to fall in line with the majority of voting Democrats. They absolutely loved Biden in 2020, long before he was chosen as the candidate. They don't anymore. Seeing them lose any and all enthusiasm for voting for this corpse of a man was evidence enough to me that we needed someone else. Ideally someone people can get excited about, because I think folks have mostly lost the perspective we had in 2020 when Trump's nightmarish presidency was fresh in everyone's minds, and served as motivation enough to get to the fucking polls- regardless of who the Dem pick actually was.

From what I understand, Kamala is actually polling better than anyone else right now. I have my fears about voters' racism and misogyny too, but if she's doing well in the polls, I wonder if maybe there's some other factors counteracting that. She's also got name recognition, and the general impression of Being Qualified (because she's been VP already, like Biden was), and Being Likeable (because she comes with the general positive associations of the largely successful Biden presidency, without any baggage of perceived responsibility that Biden himself carries- like Biden did with Obama). She's been flying under the radar while still reaping the benefits of positive associations, and people know who she is. That feels like a good combination, but I don't know enough, and I haven't read enough into it to make any decently educated guesses.

That said, I don't really know as much about who the other potential candidates might be, either. I've heard Pete Buttigieg's name tossed around, but nobody liked his ass back in 2020 and idk if that's actually changed at all. I just know that every politically-knowledgeable/politically-active leftist whose opinion I've heard on the topic has been citing Biden dropping out as the literal only hope for a non-Republican to win this election, and I'm really fucking excited to see that come to fruition. I just hope the Dems pick someone who really does have a good shot.

As a sidenote, I also really hope this marks a shift in how they make decisions, too. It's become increasingly obvious how out-of-touch Democrats are with their voters, and Biden 2024 was just the latest and greatest indicator of exactly how bad that's gotten. The fact that the party has been able to make such an unconventional decision in response to what their voters actually want gives me a little bit of hope that we might be able to influence more change with them going forward than we have been.

[noneedtofearorhope]

if libs think trump is bad, just wait til the next republican primaries when the democrats find someone even worse and do everything they can again to get them to be the candidate they face off with some milquetoast candidate that doesn't inspire anyone that they put forth as their own.

and then, of course, when that republican is up for reelection, the dems will try to 'split the difference' and become even more fascistic themselves. to 'court the swing voters'. all the while these same libs with memories worse than goldfish won't remember all this, the responsibility that the dems had in creating a terrible situation, and think it's only natural for the dems to try and court fascist voters, and that leftists just gotta 'plug our nose and vote' for the people who got us into such a mess in the first place. because if we dont, democracy is dead and we all die, apparently. which is definitely how a democracy works in the first place. definitely.

[tinystepsforward]

i've still been keeping tabs on what's happening at automattic. a couple of things i've observed:

toni schneider (who is a man btw), the interim ceo, has been quite open with staff in ways that mean they generally seem relieved to have him leading the company for now. i've heard people speak optimistically about him from all parts of the spectrum (by which i mean: staff who are trans tumblr users right through to staff who are "anti-woke" or whatever and were absolutely intolerable to work with as a trans person), which seems like... a good sign? maybe.

this relative transparency includes things like weekly updates from an executive level, as well as openly saying that he did have to directly speak to matt and encourage him to, you know, stop posting.

matt is back to his usual milquetoast blogging, and replied to someone on mastodon about the AI issue saying he'd comment on it when he's back in may, so whatever toni said to him seems to have worked for him keeping out of it for now.

people have no idea what it's gonna look like when matt's back.

the best case scenario is that schneider manages to create a significant enough boost in morale and productivity that "it'd be nice if we just kept him" becomes a sentiment that isn't held just by the rank and file. i don't know how likely that is, but there's a sense of cautious hope and of making the most of this reprieve from matt's increasingly erratic decisions no matter what.

the tumblr staff statement was approved by schneider and hr, so i am also hopeful they won't face repercussions. what they said might seem pretty mild from the outside, or carefully worded, but it's pretty clear to me and to most people who've worked at companies like this that it's a pretty bold one.

i'll quote a friend:

keep reminding the more histrionic elements out there that: 1. there really are trans people, INCLUDING TRANS WOMEN, in the fight here. 2. we don't have nearly the power they seem to think we do. 3. we're fighting anyway. was the statement we wrote enough? fuck no. does it fix everything? fuck no. but we literally called out the CEO, and got the greenlight for it from the interim CEO. i don't know where this will end, but that's not nothing.

i'm not sure automattic deserves the immense honor of having this many of its brave, dedicated trans staff put effort into trying to make it better. but it has them, and it would be wise to do its best to keep them. so many of us — even me, even now — believe in the ideals that drew us to the work automattic does, and hope that it can return to them. we will see!

other things i want to say:

the wellbeing of my friends on staff is my priority. i am interested primarily in their safety, and won't pressure them to give me goss. the ways i've spoken publicly are already pretty scary to people who might worry about retaliation against them just for being known to be my friend.

this is a regular personal blog. i'll keep updating if there's shit to update about, but i also don't work at automattic any more (thank fuck, again), have a life, and am not interested in declaring matt my specific nemesis or otherwise acting purely out of spite.

some of youse really deeply do not understand companies, the internet, generative ai, or pretty much anything else i've said. that's okay — big tech in particular is fucked up on purpose bc it benefits those in power to have it be incomprehensible! but maybe it's not a great position from which to get mad at me specifically or at staff for idk not personally assassinating matt.

got tired of blocking transphobes so i've turned anons off. i'll probably flick them back on eventually.

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

the implications this bears upon pete and his life are kind of staggering tbh. like when exactly did he, as a real life human being, realize that a classless/moneyless society is utopia? sometime during/after infinity on high, based on the timeline of the book? part of me believes that this is a vindication/beliefset he's been interested in/following at least somewhat since fairly early on in his life given his more overtly held political stances in the hardcore scene in the '90s/'00s. and another good question that is asked here, does he truly believe in socialism as a realistic applied possibility, or, as the book might or might not suggest by its ending, that absolution of class/wealth is only truly achievable through death?

'gray' is a story of two star-crossed lovers who were *largely being torn apart by the oppressive capitalist society of american culture and the cure to this was them being freed from their worldly 'responsibilities' by death.

i'm always struck by how open-ended the ending is on whether or not the narrator merely hallucinates re-uniting with Her or actually does die in that tour bus bunk and walk off into the 'sunrise' (the specification of 'sunrise' (the dawning of a new day, a new beginning) vs. the traditional 'walking off into the sunset' (symbolizing closure, an ending) is even more striking and supportive of this reading) of the afterlife with Her.

*asterisk here because i am well aware that there is a lot more to the evil machinations of capitalist society than just the baseline of the economy and careers. lol. it permeates/corrupts all facets of life under it.

one of the things that is encouraged under capitalism, for example, is misogyny/the patriarchy. which is another thing largely at fault for the failures of the main relationship in 'gray' and i am not trying to undermine that fact.