#when is it my turn to have good luck

[venusandsaturnsrings]

> get heart broken in a brief gay romance

> come down with vicious sinus infection

> start uni classes

> ex bf threatens to travel across the country and assault me

> car completely breaks down and has to get crushed

can whichever one of you that put a curse on me for not posting undo it, i’m working on drafts and a sunday cannibalism concept ｡ﾟ(ﾟ´Д｀ﾟ)ﾟ｡

[nonstandardrepertoire]

as a Jewish transsexual, the Jewish ethno-nationalist¹ sales pitch has always left me cold.² over and over again, i've heard people plugging the State of Israel offer some form of the following: "history teaches that we can never fully trust non-Jews with political power to protect Jews; the only way to make sure Jewish people are always safe is to create and maintain a state where Jewish people have the political power, so we can look out for ourselves"

but the thing is, the worst transphobic harassment i've experienced in my life has come from Jews. i don't think this says anything about the relative transphobia of Jews vs non-Jews, anymore than the fact that most of my birthday presents come from New Yorkers says anything about the relative generosity of Californians, but still. the people who followed me out of the subway filming me while yelling transphobic abuse were Jewish. two of the most relentless boosters of the current wave of transphobia in the US — Ben Shapiro and Chaya Raichik — are Jewish. i should be safe in a state run by such people?

and the obvious response is to say that, well, this is about keeping me safe as a Jew, not necessarily as an anything else. it's a bulwark against anti-Jewish violence, not every other -ism under the sun.³ but the thing is, i'm not a potato-head person. you can't just snap off the trans part of me and the Jewish part of me and say the latter part is safe even when the first isn't. i'm 100% Jewish and 100% trans; if i'm not safe as a transsexual, i'm not safe as a Jew. and if i'm going to be having to fight transphobia anyway, what difference does it make if the people passing bills stripping my rights are Jews or not?⁴

if you really lean into the logic at play here — "no one outside a vulnerable demographic can be trusted to care about people in that demographic" — it's easy to wind up in absurdity. because if i can't trust goyim to have my back as a Jew and also can't trust cis people to have my back as a transsexual, perhaps i need a state run by and for Jewish transsexuals. but wait! white Jewish transsexuals are certainly regularly horrible to, eg, Black Jewish transsexuals, so we probably shouldn't be in the same state together, to say nothing of separating out the poor, the disabled, those without college degrees . . . and before you know it, you're committed to the idea that the only just world is one where we're each a state unto ourselves, perfectly safe in absolute isolation from one another — no society, no coming together across difference to lighten the burden of living, just infinite atomization, the perfect unending unwinnable war of all against all

and this, i think, reveals the fundamental futility of the project. as a transsexual, i don't think my safety will ultimately come from removing myself from people not like me. safety, i think, comes not from cutting ties, but from building them. i will only really be safe in a society that accepts difference, multiplicity, strangeness, variety. i will only be truly safe in a society where we come together — across the gulfs that separate us — to take care of one another

i think there are illuminating parallels with feminist/lesbian separatism here. in its most extreme versions, such separatism abandons the demand that women be safe around men and instead attempts the task of building a space without men for women to inhabit. similarly, it seems to me that Jewish ethno-nationalism abandons the demand that Jewish people be safe around goyim and instead attempts to build a space without goyim for Jewish people to inhabit.⁵ i think Jews can and must be safe among goyim. i think women can and must be safe among men. i think trans people can and must be safe among cis people. that is the kind of world i am committed to fighting for, not one where we give in to fear and retreat into gardens walled by suspicion and hostility⁶

i'm not going to pretend that that's an easy world to build.⁷ i'm not going to pretend i can point to a bunch of stable, just, pluralistic societies and go "eh, just do what they did!" (altho there's no shortage of societies i can point to that went the "this place is for us and only us" route and wound up producing dystopian nightmares⁸). i'm not even going to pretend that i think building a just world from where we are now is inevitable, or even that i always think it is possible. there are days it is very hard to believe. but i always think it's worth striving for. if a just world that guarantees a good life to all isn't worth striving for, what is? if we are to suffer defeat, let it be a slow defeat, a long defeat, a fighting defeat. i am not willing to give up on my neighbors. i am not willing to abandon the charge of seeking the good for those not like me. i am not willing to abandon the hope that will seek the good for me despite my strangeness to them. and i reject any philosophy or politics that asks me to do so

_________________________________________________

¹i'm using "Jewish ethno-nationalist" here because i think it's been subject to less semantic dilution than "Zionist", and i want to avoid semantic arguments here as much as possible. whatever prescriptivist arguments you want to marshal that this or that term should mean X, i think it's clear that the descriptivist ship has long since set sail when it comes to "Zionism". (when pushed for specifics, i've seen self-professed Zionists and anti-Zionists outline essentially identical political programs, which certainly makes it seem to me that these terms are of minimal utility at best)

²obviously, what's happening on the ground is very bad. but critiquing what's happening on the ground often runs into severe questions of evidential reliability and can also leave the impression that Jewish ethno-nationalism is a good idea implemented badly, which is why i want to take aim at this level here

³given the European origins of this movement in its modern incarnation, i think it's unsurprising who gets imagined as "just a Jew" and not any other marked category. and from there, i think it's also unsurprising (if depressing) how various Jews who do exist in other marked categories have been and are treated by the "Jewish State" — the promised safety turns out to be predicated on all the usual axes of whiteness, wealth, ability, and so on

⁴indeed, i have often found that groups predicated on the idea that "we're all in alignment here" are often much more resistant to acknowledging members' various bigotries than groups not predicated on that assumption

⁵and, similarly, this attempt to cleave the world along one axis of hierarchy invariably reveals the inadequacy of one-identity-only frameworks for tackling the full complexity of the world. among other things, feminist/lesbian separatism has come under sustained critique from Black feminists like Barbara Smith for sundering ties of solidarity that are critical for fighting racism. victimhood and oppression are not fixed, ontological states, but fluid, shifting, contextual relationships. we cannot undo the snarlingly intertwined systems of oppression by replicating them in miniature

⁶the fear is certainly a real emotion; it is one i have felt at times myself. sometimes it is even based on an accurate perception of the world! but also: sometimes not. my fear of kitchen knives spontaneously levitating and flying around the room certainly feels real to me, but it's not a thing that can actually happen. one of the really hard things to do in the world, i've found, is parsing out the fears that are just feelings i'm having from the fears that tell me actual actionable information about the world and then striking a livable balance between reasonable precaution and paranoia. precautions against danger often come with their own set of risks: locking a door to keep out potential thieves ups the odds of being trapped in a building fire; using a different complex password for every site raises the risk of forgetting one and having a critical account shut down; the medications that drastically cut the frequency of debilitating migraines can raise the likelihood of other adverse health effects. more broadly, viewing neighbors with suspicion, fear, and distrust has a corrosive effect on the social fabric, and makes it harder to structure society to make sure everyone has food, clothes, housing, healthcare — all the things a society is supposed to do. (it's hard to convince people to take care of people they're afraid of, especially if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they will have to give up something they care about (usually money, but also convenience, prestige, power) for that to happen.) and that corrosive effect can get very extreme — when fascism wants to recruit you to its cause, the sales pitch is usually less "hey, do you want to unleash horrific violence against those folks over there?" and more "hey, aren't you tired of being ~afraid~? don't you want to feel ~safe~? isn't it about time you had all the wealth, respect, and power that's rightfully yours and that's been kept from you for so long?". fear isn't the only way that horrors get unleashed, but it's a very potent one. (i don't think there's a formula for striking the right balance here. as with so many balancing acts, too much comes down to context and the specifics of all those involved, not least because the scale and nature of threats can vary so wildly. i believe that everyone deserves to be safe (insofar as any of us mostly hairless apes clinging to a thin crust of dirt on an iron ball whirling thru the cosmic void around a sphere of nuclear fire can be safe from loss, grief, accident, disaster, or misfortune...), but being and feeling are different matters, and pursuing the feeling of safety without limit can easily lead to logics of annihilation.) (and indeed, i am not the first to be struck by the fact that in many ways it is in the interests of the State of Israel, as a state, if Jews feel unsafe in the rest of the world, because that feeling of unsafety is so easily leveraged to both increase political support for the State of Israel and encourage Jewish people to leave the Diaspora and move to the State of Israel. which, unnervingly, is where you sometimes find the State of Israel and its agents taking the position that Jews don't belong anywhere that isn't the immediate environs of Jerusalem, a position that is ultimately indistinguishable from any number of dime-store Judeophobias)

⁷indeed, i think this is one of many places where it's easier to identify the problem than it is to solve it. many middle schoolers can explain the problem of Fermat's Last Theorem; barely a handful of professional mathematicians in the world could explain the proof. my cat can figure out how to break a vase even tho he can't reliably find a toy he's just been playing with when he's sitting directly on top of it (it's fine, he doesn't follow me on here, i can say that about him); in some cases, a skilled artisan can repair the vase so it functions again; no one in the world can turn back time so that the vase was never broken to begin with. it's easy to invent chessboard solutions to entrenched societal conflicts — move this border here, enact this constitution there, change this societal attitude for all involved, and hey presto!, utopia. but the world is not a game of chess. education, advocacy, activism, political organization, even wildcat direct action — these are all slow, effortful, uncertain processes, and everyone with a different vision of the future is also exercising their agency to change the course of events. i think societies are easy to break and hard to repair. in many cases, i don't really know how we go from here, the real world as it actually is with all its shattered bones and aching wounds and long-festering resentments, to there, a world of true justice. but i think it's worth trying. i think it's worth imagining. i hope you do too

⁸like, idk what even to say if "Germany for the Germans" doesn't set off alarm bells. even if they raised up a brand new continent from the ocean floor, i still think i'd be wary of the political project of building a ~Jewish state for the Jews~. i don't trust nationalism of any flavor. i think the Diasporic notion of feeling kinship with and responsibility for people all around the world regardless of borders, flags, kings, bureaucracies is beautiful and worth cherishing and protecting. i don't dream of finally being on top of the hierarchy; i dream of there not being a hierarchy to begin with

[aortaobservatory]

From one Seer of Heart to another, I'd like to ask, have you ever read Dewdrop's Classpecting Brochure? It kinda cracked my brain open like an egg, and I think it's the best resource for classpecting out there right now, especially as applied to real people. It looks like most of it would fit well with your own theories, too.

(at time of writing this, the most recent version is draft 18)

No, I can't say I have, though it sounds very interesting! (The post with the link to the brochure, for anyone interested). A cursory glance at the document has yielded enough material to pique my interest, but I'll have to return to it when I've actually finished analyzing and fleshing out my own takes on all 144 classpects. It appears to be almost 200 pages long, and I have an extremely bad case of ADHD.

On another, slightly unrelated note, I'd like to say that I am intentionally avoiding reading over the analyses of others; I'd like to get my own takes put to word first. (Or at least, that's my logical excuse. My emotional excuse is that, as a Seer, I'm just very attached to my own analyses and the work I put into them, and I tend to be critical of others' perfectly reasonable work for no reason. Which I'm realizing is a very in-character "Seer of Heart" type of response to have. Fuck.)

[gibbearish]

ive seen ppl saying smth in the wider plagiarism discussion to the tune of "don't worry anxious people, it's impossible to accidentally plagiarize!" and i feel like that lacks a lot of nuance that anxious brains like mine latch on to to just dismiss the possibility outright, as well as a lack of life experiences fueling it.

it is possible to "accidentally plagiarize" in that you can read something, forget about it, then a while later have your brain spit the ideas back out without telling where it got them. so of course you just assume they're yours and share them as such, because That's Where Most Of The Thoughts In Your Head Come From! and it both is and isn't plagiarism, you weren't /intending/ to pass someone's else's work off as your own, i'd even say in a way you were just as much a victim of misinformation as your audience. but you very much so did still resuse the work of someone else, even if you don't remember it.

but in my experience, this kind of thing also happens to a lot of people. you tell a friend a joke then wake up in a cold sweat two days later realizing the reason they didnt laugh was because they'd told you that joke a month ago. you reply to a friend's text and after sending you realized you ended it with the same exact phrase as theirs. you're writing edgy poetry and write a line you really like only to see it in a text post two days later saying youve already liked the post. like, it happens. so if it DOES happens and you're just honest and explain, people will understand. something like "oh shit im sorry, i totally have read that, i mustve forgotten and only remembered bits and pieces and just thought they were mine. thank you for letting me know and for the source" works wonders.

people know you can forget things. people won't automatically doubt your apology just because all true plagiarists say it was accidental. HOPEFULLY people can understand the nuance between a genuine remorseful explanation, and a thief who hoped no one would find out scrambling for excuses for why they did it. and those who can't, that's a them problem, not a you problem, you've taken responsibility for your actions as much as you can. they think the answer is simple, that the only thing stopping you from saying "yes i did it on purpose, i knew the whole time and deliberately copied them" is shame/inability to admit to your actions. but sometimes things AREN'T that simple, so imo ppl who are shitty to you for not following the script they made up for you in their head should be ignored

[elftwink]

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

[sauntering-down]

tomorrow at five is - hopefully please god let it be - my last dentist appointment for a while, since i'm supposed to get the temp crowns replaced with the permanent ones. we've hit the point where my anxiety fucking skyrockets as soon as i step in that place so uhhhh good luck me...

[nin-deer]

Day 1 baby!!!!!!

I'm a little rusty w my art so I just went w the first idea that came to my mind lmao

ID under the cut!

[ID: a drawing of natsume sitting on top of a roof, gazing into the sky. In the background, a crescent moon can be seen, youkai flying through the night below it. Towards the bottom, mountains and a forest can be seen in the background.]

[seventh-district]

it’s the last Sunday before Sunday’s banner ends so i suppose it’s about time for me to finally boot up HSR and pull him home… wish me luck

[incendiorum]

I realize I'm not really here anyway but I'm gonna really not be here until about the third week of december.

[not-actually-human]

me when my favorite song by an artist is the unreleased one she wrote the day before i saw her in concert and who hasnt had a concert since and i have half of it recorded on my phone but its not enough

[racke7]

For anyone wondering about my life.

My car is still mine (and will remain so for the foreseeable future), and it's got new brakes+suspension and also (as of today) entirely new winter-tires.

Basically, my car didn't pass the inspection (that sucks), but I have a reputable mechanics down the street and they were able to fix-and-inspect it for 4k sek.

Considering that I'd been nightmare-scenario-ing the situation as possibly costing like half the value of the car? This was fantastic news.

In order to celebrate this fantastic financial news, I finally went and impulse-bought FF14.

So. Yesterday I spent all day trying to get that fucking mess of a game to work (why do I need two accounts, SE? Why can't I change the country after creating an account, SE? Why are you like this, SE?).

Then I realized that in order to properly play the game I needed 98gb of harddrive-space and that's not something that I have on my SSD. But hey, it managed to install just fine on my HDD? So it's probably fine-...

Why is it taking me a minute to load into any teleport-location? What the fuck.

Okay. Whatever. Maybe that won't be so terrible-... Wait, this means that it's going to do that for basically every dungeon-duty ever, doesn't it? Oh my god. This is hell.

Looking into it, I realized that my computer could theoretically handle a new internal SSD, if I just gave up on the 1TB HDD. This is a lot of space to give up, so obviously it would need to be a 1TB SSD, and that costs-... surprisingly affordable? Cool.

And it's being sold in a store in the nearby city. And they allow people to pre-order it. So I did, and immediately started transferring the files on the HDD to an external-drive for the temporary switcheroo.

Today, I got ready to drive into town to buy this SSD, and remembered that I had some other things I should probably buy whilst I'm out there. And then I looked out the window and realized that there'd been frost last night.

Frost that lingered into 10AM. Yeah. Definitely time for winter-tires. But, thankfully, the workshop that switches those tires? Basically next door to where I wanted to go anyway. Jackpot.

So I rolled the winter-tires out of storage, and shoved them in the car. And off I went.

And then I got there and the guy who would check the tires before they changed them? (The fact that this guy exists is why I'm willing to spend 500sek on having them do all of the physical work for me. Lazy, yes. But also safer.)

Anyway, this guy? He explained that my tires were made in 2014, and rubber gets really fucking shit at being rubber even after five years. So, yeah.

(My dad had something similar happen to him a few winters back, and mom basically refused to let him drive that car until he got better tires, because that's incredibly unsafe.)

But why should I believe this guy? Well, see, I remember a certain near-accident I had last winter. Where I tried to brake and just kept sliding.

(This basically scared me off from driving during winter for several weeks. It was not fun.)

Guess what happens when rubber-tires get "hard like plastic" when driving on ice? They slide.

So, I'm entirely willing to believe him (the guy I got the tires from was a car salesman, doubts were inevitable). And when asked for a price, it's 6k sek "new and mounted".

Could I have gone looking for used-tires? Maybe. But it would've probably taken me long enough that I'd need my shitty winter-tires in order to drive out to buy them, and then I'd need to have those be changed out for these new ones (1k sek).

So, if I found someone willing to sell them for 500sek/tire? It would still cost me 3k sek. So, half the price, for worse tires (and I don't even know if I'd be able to judge what amounts to "good tires" so I might get scammed outright), at some unknown future date (no idea how long it might take me to find any in the area).

And that's assuming that that's actually what they'd sell them for, because it's entirely possible that this unknown person might try to ask for 1k/tire. And then I'd only save 1k sek. For a massive undertaking, with more stress, and a worse end-result.

Or I could pay them up-front, and have the problem just... go away.

(The voice of my mother in my head popping up to say "do NOT drive with UNSAFE tires YOU COULD DIE", was also a factor.)

So, my car ended up costing me 10k sek this week. Not happy about that. Very relieved to hear that the reason I nearly had that accident was likely more because I had terrible fucking tires than because I "wasn't paying enough attention".

Also. My SSD-drive appears to work perfectly from installation, so that's fantastic. And depending on how fast it is in practice, I might move Skyrim over to it too (so that C:/ doesn't have any games).

But yeah. That's been my financial adventures today.

[franeridan]

mihoyo really will be like here is this whole cast of characters dozens upon dozens a good bunch of which especially strong and useful you can have whichever you want as long as you roll for them and I'll really be like thanks I think I'll fixate on that one free to play dude you dropped in my hands at the very beginning of the game every single time

[knocking-on-peoples-non-doors]

may 6th, 2024

[orcelito]

Actually we r at 6 months now without any major deaths in my life, which is great! That's the longest I've gone without any major deaths since last May! The second longest was 4 months between July and November last year. Wow !

[gu6chan]

perhaps as a ploy to become the world's most dedicated drakengard 3 hater, perhaps to strengthen my spite-based narrative design, perhaps even out of sheer desperation for drakengard content..... ive finally decided to do the unthinkable and holy shit i didn't even know it was possible but how is this even worse than i thought

[mutalune]

really wish there was a tag that separated “I’m having Big Angry and/or Angsty Opinions about Star Wars” from “I’m goofing off with Star Wars I’m playing in the sandbox none of this is real so yes I will make my blorbo and this random glub shitto go on an adventure that makes no logical sense” posts because there’s too much of the former and not enough of the latter for my current mental state