#you have made a game world that RUNS ON THE LOGIC OF RACISTS AND BIGOTS

[1411411989]

dragon age is so funny because you can feel the games, especially after 2, struggling to be like "only modern multicultural liberal attitudes can point the way forward to a society that is healed, peaceful, and advances the dignity and welfare of all people" and it's like, okay, but you guys made the game where the different races all have literally different origins.

"racism is bad. most of our villains are racial supremacists of one type or another. also, humans and elves and dwarves and qunari are biologically, metaphysically, and ontologically distinct. racial intermixing literally reduces the number of elves and threatens elvish society and heritage in the long run. qunari are implied to be the way they are in part because of genetic engineering." like do you guys fucking hear yourselves? you made a racist game, dipshits. it's wholly unsurprising that veilguard relegates a lot of its coverage of race to small bits of the banter and the codex, because engaging in good faith with race in the dragon age setting without accidentally saying something racist is hard. because they baked the racism into the worldbuilding.

and that's before we even get to the genetic determinism nightmare that is magic in thedas

[meyerlansky]

from reading the P1 dialogue trees, P1 daniil is often more approachable, pompous but well-meaning, definitely in the haruspex run where he and artemy are basically colleagues for much of the outbreak, but he becomes bitter and vindictive especially after learning his lab has been destroyed, entertains thoughts of suicide, and is swayed by the kains and their schemes. there's still good in him but I feel he undergoes negative character development

that makes sense, and don't get me wrong, i love me some negative character development, but most of the comments i see about p1!daniil are that he's "the most villainous of the healers," which just... does not square with my read of p2!daniil AT ALL. as a Consummate Villain Liker i like to think i know from villains and p2!daniil just ain't it. he cares too much, he's too invested in making sure a town he could just fuckin' leave doesn't completely succumb to a disease with [as far as he knows] a 100% mortality rate.

it also doesn't help that p1!daniil, from what i can tell, is... actively racist. from jump. in a way p2!daniil never matches, not even at his most fed-up and angry. p2!daniil doesn't get backpats for Not Being A Bigoted Asshole, but it IS imo a big difference in how their characterizations play out—every other conversation p1!daniil has with artemy in the haruspex route is "savage" this, "prehistoric" that, whereas p2!daniil is interested in learning the kin's language [i've already publicly lost my shit about the convo with the clerk in marble nest so i won't do a repeat performance of that now :P] and from what i can remember doesn't ever give artemy shit for using the tinctures or talking about the plague in the context of the lines instead of using more western methods/terminology. not to make excuses for him or anything, p2!daniil absolutely says some elitist city-slicker-who's-never-seen-a-cow-in-his-life bullshit, but a. his bitching is nowhere near as racialized as p1!daniil's casual comments, and b. most of his frustration is explicitly aimed at the town leaders, not the townspeople or the kin.

which i think is the other element of p1!daniil that doesn't sync up with p2!daniil for me; p1!daniil gets sucked into the kains' bullshit and never really breaks out of it, but p2!daniil was arguably never sucked in in the first place. everyone else makes a big deal about how he's ingratiated himself to the kains, but he doesn't even mention them in the first few conversations you can have with him, he's shit-talking them to artemy by day 5, and he's pissed with the town leaders for not running things better in the conversation about grace and the mass graves. marble nest drives it home with the georgiy conversation, but he's not as taken in by the kains' ideals or interested in their power beyond what it does for him to be associated with the kains, and specifically what that association does for him to be able to contain the plague. there's a practicality to p2!daniil that i don't get from p1!daniil—artemy's little thought blurb on day 11 is like "dankovsky doesn't know how the world works" but i think p2!daniil is a little less naive than p1!daniil wrt People In Power caring about his work. it extends to aglaya, too, p1!daniil makes a big deal about how he was ~betrayed and ~lied to, and that's why she should die so the polyhedron can live, but p2!daniil knows his head is on her chopping block from the start. i didn't get the sense at all from his dialogue in the shelter that spiting aglaya had anything to do with his desire to save the polyhedron, whereas that's the main reason he gives in p1 in the cathedral. p2!daniil comes pre-disillusioned, i think. he's still ultimately an idealist, but he even distances himself from utopianism a little bit in the day 2 town hall convo. he's less vindictive when things go badly for him than p1!daniil is, and i think that has to do with being less hopeful [and therefore harder to disappoint] in the first place.

we'll see what they do with p2 bachelor route, but me personally, i don't want them to go the route they seem to have gone with his p1 ending, where his decision to save the polyhedron seems like it's partially, but significantly, motivated by spite towards the people he's been working for nearly two weeks to save. i would like to see the endings go into his grief over thanatica's destruction, which seemed the biggest motivating factor in his fixation on the polyhedron to me—with thanatica and all his research destroyed, all he has to materially support the idea that death can be defeated is the successful use of the polyhedron, the cathedral, and the crucible as vessels for people's souls after the death of the body. i've made the comparison before, but as much as peter frames the polyhedron as his daughter, i think thanatica is that for daniil, and it absolutely makes logical sense to me that he'd fixate on the polyhedron as an expression of thanatica's ideals after being told that the research he's worked on for YEARS was destroyed as soon as he wasn't around tokeep it safe. so i'd like to see the endings of bachelor route grapple with the same kinds of past/future questions artemy's endings do, but for daniil the polyhedron's survival is keeping a tight grip on the past even if it's not the healthiest thing, and letting it be destroyed and letting the town survive instead [a town that he should have absolutley no attachment to, except that he's poured eleven days of effort into saving it] representing moving forward after a heavy loss. i'm not holding my breath, but i think it would fit p2!daniil better than "the polyhedron lives, an entire town of people die, daniil fucks back off to the capital," a la p1, would.

[that's my thinking for a bachelor that DOESN'T get the doll reveal, at least. a daniil who knows he's a character in a game, who finds out all his achievements are backstory and none of them belong to him, who finds out the people writing his story don't even like him and want him to fail for their amusement.......... that's a daniil i can see getting spiteful.]

[blessuswithblogs]

Katsura Hashino is a Big Fat Creep and Other Observations

(for the record all uses of the word “queer” in this post are meant in the academic sense as shorthand for a wide umbrella group of gender and sexual minorities and not as a slur i hope that is evident from my past history and status as Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls but let it never be said i don’t cover my ass)

A few weeks ago, Catherine: Full Body Edition or whatever gross subtitle it got was released. Catherine has had a very checkered history as one of those games that is just kind of slimy, though it has endured with a cult following and a surprisingly successful competitive community by way of the game's multiplayer mode where you compete to see who can climb The Dream Sex Tower the best. Honestly, I don't know that much about Catherine because it is difficult to think of a game that repulses me more on a visceral level, but I want to do my due diligence and not talk out my ass. One of Catherine's initial claims to fame was that it was by Atlus Japan, specifically the same people who made the much beloved Persona games. This is evident in the game's art, music, overall style of delivery, and being basically hate speech.

The original Catherine was a greasy, misogynistic mess with some really vile politics about trans people in particular. Deadnaming your own fictional character in the credits is some next level petty malice. Full Body returns with, stupendously, a double down on this ideology that is actually kind of comical in how convoluted it gets in trying to decry the Degenerate Queer Lifestyle. The game adds a scene with Rin, who is apparently a gay crossdresser from space(???????), getting slapped away and running away crying from their love interest after he learns The Terrible Truth. In another game, with a different writing team, this could have been a teachable moment about the destructive consequences of taking too narrow a view of human sexuality and gender expression, but as it stands it's just another tiresome example of Trans Panic with a sheepish admonishment from the other characters that gosh maybe slapping their hand away was a mean thing to do.

So we're already firing on all cylinders here, but the best is yet to come. The bulk of the outcry comes from the addition of a weird "true ending" cutscene where Catherine, who is also from space, goes back in time to make everybody's life better. Or something. This is already pretty stupid on the face of it because its Fucking Time Travel Out of Nowhere, but the scene then depicts a pre-transition Erica, the game's trans character who got deadnamed in the credits the last time. There has been a lot of exceptionally tedious discussion about exactly when this scene takes place in the game's chronology and what it means for Erica, and some brain geniuses have tied their thinkmeats into pretzel shapes to prove definitively that all this means is that she delayed her transition in this Better Timeline, that might not actually be better, because Catherine is weird and selfish, maybe. And. Fine. Sure. Okay. Let's accept that for now. Given the game's previous track record, and continuing insistence on using Erica's pretransition name in the credits even in the rerelease, it is meanspirited at best to show her before her transition at all (many real life trans people would be utterly mortified for such a thing to happen to them) and overall just in poor taste and pretty lousy writing at that because it's so unclear what any of this actually means. Since the game has not yet received an official english localization, the context of this scene is to begin with muddled by amateur translators on the internet all with slightly conflicting interpretations of the scene. It's a fucking mess, by and large.

So I would disagree that this is a fake controversy manufactured by those damnable essjaydubyas. Even with the most charitable interpretation possible, it's still just really sketchy and gross. Erica's english voice actress, who seems to be very fond of the character, has been vocal about her dissatisfaction with the new scenes on twitter and has recently come out to say that the localization team is going to try and take some steps to make things less blatantly hateful. Between this and Jennifer Hale's recent tweet about it being time to grab our pitchforks in response to Activision-Blizzard's mass layoffs, I'm starting to think that voice actresses are pretty cool. I mean honestly I always thought that but we're getting off topic. One of the top competitive Catherine players, who was by all accounts really hyped for the release of Full Body, just straight up said on twitter that he was quitting the game because he couldn't support something like that in good conscience. I don't know if he's remained consistent on this position since, but it was a bold statement, to say the least.

Now, whenever an incident like this happens, the inevitable string of More-Progressive-Than-Thou white boys who watched an anime once and thought the bouncing titties were a little much appears to start pontificating about the cause of such untoward elements in media. And it's basically all just a bunch of Orientalist bullshit. Every time. For whatever reason, people still really love to be racist towards Japanese people because it's still sort of socially acceptable when couched in the language of "oh japan!!! ecks dee" and so the neverending procession of softboi neckbeards declared with confidence that Atlus's continual inclusion of Actual Hate Speech towards LGBTQ+ people was the result of the inscrutable Japanese Mind and its Mysterious, Antiquated Culture. Many mentions of the philosophy of Wa, wherein the nail that stands out gets pounded down, and lots of very lovely psuedointellectual claptrap. Evidently, people just seem to think that queer people don't live in Japan, or that they don't fight just as hard as we do for equal rights and protections under the law. They do live there, and they do fight as hard as we do. Obviously. You fucking imbeciles.

In their quest to clearly illustrate their moral and intellectual superiority to the backward, collectivist Asiatic Peoples, these highly reasonable and enlightened manboys forsook a very important logical principle: Occam's Razor. Sure, you could blame jApAnEsE cUlTuRe for Atlus's impropieties and just conveniently ignore all of the fantastic queer media it has produced in recent years like My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Horou Muskou, Nier Automata, etc. Or you could go for the simpler and more logically consistent option: Katsura Hashino is a big fat creep. Who is Hashino, you ask? He is the director of every Persona game since 3, as well as Catherine, and all of these games' gross shit and self-contradictory themes of self-acceptance and rebellion against an unust society (unless you're gay, ew) can probably be traced to him and his gaggle of accomplices. In addition to the fact that Atlus games not by Hashino's team tend to just. not have these problems to nearly as large a degree or even at all, Hashino himself has gone on record saying some really kind of hilariously backwards shit. Most infamously, when asked why in Persona 3 literally all of your social links with girls ended up with Hot Makeout Sessions regardless of like. Previously Committed to Relationships. Hashino simply said he couldn't imagine friendships between boys and girls. So that's where his brain is at. Since subsequent games in the series graciously allowed the player the option to not be a Huge Cheating Bastard, one can assume either his moral development has progressed past early puberty or somebody on the team convinced him this wasn't actually a normal thing to think. Given the man's output, I would say it's probably the latter.

It is because of this man's decisions and behavior that so many people are simply unwilling to give Full Body the benefit of the doubt. The game's director is, quite simply, a well known louse, and not in the endearing, Roger Smith way. Once again, it requires far fewer leaps in logic to assume that Hashino is just being a bigoted creep again than to go through some fuckin galaxy brain Kingdom Hearts-esque dot-connecting to justify it as just a LITTLE BIT bigoted not REALLY SUPER bigoted, or simply blaming the whole ordeal on some strange ineffable property of the Japanese Character. He's a gremlin! An overgrown manchild with a warped view of human interaction and society put in charge of games about exploring those concepts for.... reasons. My bet is that his dad knew somebody and then Persona 3 was successful enough for the rest of Atlus to just go "alright fine let him do it while we do mainline games". Unfortunately, Persona became so popular that the mainline games sort of switched places and became side-projects, at least in the eyes of the Western consumer base (which let's be real is the only perspective that any of these Serious Online Commentators even pretend to care about).

So I would once again caution everyone against just assuming that Japan is some sort of quaint anachronistic country of weird gameshows and backwards social mores. This is both a gross oversimplification of an entire culture and the struggles of their own subgroups and minorities and simply a grand display of lacking self-awareness. Like have you fucking seen the guys in the White House? The preposterous media that gets routinely greenlit on prime time TV, theaters, and digitally? Don't make me laugh. The West has no claim to any sort of progressive superiority to anybody else. The white cishet bubble of comfortable middle class affluence might distort what you see of the rest of the world, but believe me: we got problems too. Big ones. Even the presupposed bastions of Demsoc Virtue like Sweden have an awful track record of discrimination and eugenics. But Dazzlyn that's different, you cry! All of these groups and forces don't represent the entirety of Western culture! Yes. Exactly. Oppression is not culturally bound like cuisine or art. It is a nasty, universal thing that worms its way into everything, and it will use any excuse it can find to murder and exploit. It's against Christian values! It represents a genetic defect that must be purged! It's ostentatious and immature! The list goes on. And every time you giggle and go "oh those silly japanese" you're just being another expression of the same vile ideas.

I'm going to relate some of my own personal experiences, because as a noted Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls, I feel like maybe I have some authority on the matter? Just a little? Enough that if I make a well reasoned argument it can't be dismissed out of hand? Let's hope. So, what's the gayest game I've ever played? Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Look yeah I know I'm talking about it again but come back this is important. Final Fantasy is a series that has had a lot of LGBTQ+ undertones pretty much since forever, and while they have largely been in keeping with the times in terms of tact and representation (the Crossdressing Cloud debacle is a deeply bizarre, uncomfortable sequence in a lot of ways but there's also some genuine Good Gay Shit in 7 like Cloud's surprisingly cute and genuine date with Barret. I think. It's... it's been a while.), by God, it was at least there, and 13 had honest to god Lesbians, Harold in Fang and Vanille. I don't want to say it has pedigree, but the series has dabbled. XIV continues on the tradition with a vibrant world that's actually got a lot of characters and NPCs that are just incidentally there and kind of gay. The adventurer couple that befriended the Tonberries in Wanderer's Palace, a vendor that appeared in the Rising cosplaying as Minfilia at her wife's behest, a miqote lady bathing in the oasis that lets on she wouldn't mind having cute girls stare at her instead of grabby boys, every horny Elezen in Ishgard, Samson and Guydelot (shoutouts to Lulumi Lumi), and probably more that I've missed. More than that, though, is that because FFXIV is an MMO, it is by necessity a social space, and in my experience it has been one that has gone out of its way to be inclusive to everybody, from the GMs handling reports of abusive behavior right up to the top decision makers who made same sex player marriages a thing just immediately on its implementation and letting boys wear the gold saucer bunny costume too (albeit after quite a bit of pleading). The game's got a huge queer community of which I am kind of part of sort of. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. Hell, they've recently partnered with a pride group in Australia to have an FFXIV float in a parade. I usually turn my nose up at such things as meaningless corporate grandstanding, but it does seem to be more meaningful than two boy pastas getting married or rainbow colored oreos because like. Cheesy as it sounds, it's more than just a brand to a lot of people, it's a place, sometimes the only place, they can go to feel safe and accepted in a community. Having official, vocal support from the dev team means genuinely a lot, I think.

Now, there is one quality about this game of which I am speaking that might strike you as noteworthy: it is Japanese. It's made by Japanese people, in Japan, under a Japanese company. A middle aged Japanese man goes up on stage in Gunbreaker cosplay to speak in Japanese about the upcoming expansion, while a meme obsessed gremlin translates for him. It's not perfect, there are problems, etcetera, why do I even need to qualify that in 2019, when everything sucks, god. But it's better than most things. I hope that it serves as an example to people that even in the supposedly regressive countries of the world, queer communities are still living, fighting, and sometimes even being heard, and that the only thing you're enriching by dismissing them wholesale as socially backwards is your own internet penis. And nobody fucking cares about that you simpleton. I expect 5.0 to be gayer than ever before because they're taming up with Yoko Taro to do a Nier themed raid and by the 12 Warrior of Light Dazzyn Reed is going to kiss 2B or an equivalent model right on the robot lips.

[figjelly]

Comics, Pornography, and Communication: also, a discussion of why *Men* suck.

First, notice how I typed out *Men* up there. It is capitalized. There are asterisks around the word. I don’t describe myself as a “social justice warrior” because the label, to me, signifies lip service, mob mentality, and a lack of critical thinking. Second, notice how I qualified that definition with “to me.” It’s subjective. It’s about my experience with the term and the people who’ve I encountered who use it as an identity. Do I think social justice is bad? No. Do I think wanting social justice, equity, and all those buzz words is wrong? Nope. But do I think the world is mostly grey areas? Heck golly gosh, I do.

*Men* (to me) is meant to signify major societal trends, norms, and expectations that are grounded in patriarchal, misogynistic, and ableist rules, environments, and scripts that are written for *Men,* by *Men,* between *Men,* and with *Men.* *Men* are those who think the world works a certain way, so suck it up because that’s just the way the world is. *Men* (In. My. Experience.) have zero interest in critical thinking unless it is done so in a way that benefits them and other Men. Often times, *Men* engage in the lowest threshold of critical thinking or want to employ rhetorical techniques/classical logic to whatever is being discussed. *Men* is not limited to cis-men. This is important but not relevant to the following discussion. I’M ONLY GOING TO BE DISCUSSING AMERICAN COMICS. YES, I KNOW THE FIRST RECORDED SUPERHERO COMIC WAS MADE IN THE 1800s SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE. So, let me tell you that this entire position that I’m about to present is NOT about:

1. The history, merit, or discussion of why Comix (different from comics, for historical reasons) is important. Underground Comix is important for many reasons. There have been dissertations written on the subject. I’m not about to do that here. 2. Whether or not the goal of satire was/is achieved with Underground Comix. 3. Whether Underground Comix is “problematic.” I.e. was/is it sexist, ableist, racist, bigoted, and whatever other problems they could have. Again, another dissertation topic. Again, again, aaaagain: this is about my individual experience working in a comic book shop. Don’t act like I’m drafting a treatise on some objective truth that’s floating aimlessly around in a vacuum. Go watch Netflix. Eat pizza. This isn’t that deep. It’s me griping about things from a particular point of view. Some background: I’ve worked at a comic book shop in a small, midwestern city for almost five years now. The shop has been here going on over 20+ years. It’s the only game in town when it comes to comic books. Historically, this wasn’t the case but other shops didn’t adapt so, uh, they died off. Comics is a strange business to be in because while it is technically a bookshop, the industry came from a place of fun and general absurdity that was meant to be throwaway material for kids (especially the target market, young boys) to waste money on (hence, why Golden Age stuff, any of it really, is usually worth a little something--the newsprint wasn’t meant to be durable, so kids would throw them away, use it for drawing paper, etc.). Comics had been around before the Golden Age, but yanno, it’s called a Golden Age for a reason--it is the era in which comics became introduced as “suitable” for mainstream consumer consumption. I mean, we could argue on other reasons but that’s neither here nor there. Comic books, graphic novels, and comic strip utilize sequential art. Sequential art is a specialized term. Within the definition itself, the requirement of narrative is implicitly built into the term. There is no room for debate here. If a story is not being told, a body of work can be classified as art but it is not sequential. Art can tell a story, sure, but a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn’t a square. I run into a wide variety of people because of the strangeness of the product we sell. We’ve got readers (like myself), we’ve got collectors, we’ve got beginner readers, we’ve got artists (like me), we’ve got writers (like me), and we’ve got people who “haven’t been to a comic store in ages and, boy!, is it sure different than when I was young!” And, yes, we have the certified perverts. Once, I found out one of our customers was a registered child sex offender. I politely told my boss that if the person in question wasn’t banned from the store, I was quitting. As with all stores, as times change, so does business practice. One must adapt to the changes that are happening around them or they have to have a big enough, steady clientele to support them. This comic book shop, in particular, did not and does not have a large enough, regular clientele base that spends enough money for us to keep doing things the way it always had been. These are just facts. In the past, this store was ran in such a way that it was a dying business but the current owner would put their own money into it in order to keep it afloat. At that time, the store allowed some subscribers (note: to my knowledge, all cis-gender men) to order exclusively from publishers like Boundless Comics (publisher who specializes in “sexy, cool comics for adults”) with no advance payment. Which means if they never came to pick up their stuff, we were stuck with the responsibility to sell it because, well, we already paid for it. I don’t think I have to make a Venn diagram to convince anyone that the overlap between deadbeats (for our subscription service--basically, we never heard from someone ever again) and these men was pretty much two circles just a bit off-center from one another. These were not comics we could put out to be sold because they never would be. In over 20 years, our numbers have shown that Adult/XXX/Mature comics don’t sell well off the rack regularly. We do have one or two customers back from Ye Olden Days who still have subscriptions to mature comics, but they never look around. They never try out something new. They buy the comics they ordered because they wouldn’t get them any other way. Both of them are strongly against buying things on the internet, so my guess is we’re they’re only option. I wasn’t around during the time in which “boxes were kept under the counter” for “special comics.” Today: About a month ago, an older man (because all of the customers who ask for the “boxes under the counter” are older) came into the store. He looked around. He came up to the counter and asked me where the Underground Comix were. I showed him where we kept our collection of Underground Comix. He said that wasn’t what he was looking for. Did we have the “boxes under the counter.” Now, understand, I’ve been told about all of this because we don’t have it anymore but I needed to know the store’s history. Fair. I told him that we do not and have not in many years. But, when people ask me for Those Boxes, I know what they’re asking for. Not all of it was satirical Underground Comix. So, they usually stumble when I tell them that, no we don’t. This guy stumbled. I could assume a number of reasons as to why he did so, but it really doesn’t do any good. So, I try to ask a number of questions to find something else they might like to try. The conversation goes like this: Me: Are you looking for a comic or graphic novel with explicit sexual content? Him: Yes. Me: Okay, I can definitely suggest Saga and Sex Criminals.

At this point, I pull out the first trades of both and show the explicit sexual content in both. I mention the art, the story, and the writing. Sequential art is divided into four elements: design, drawing, caricature, and writing. Design, drawing, and writing are usually the most salient elements to a lay reader. Caricature has a lot to do with symbolic representation--how does one exaggerate an element of X in order to represent X? But some people lay people are interested in this element because of the comical effect it can play in a comic story. Him: No. Not like that. Me: What is missing from this then? Him: Something more adult. Me: Would you like explicit sexual content with more graphic violence? Him: Yeah, that sounds about right. Me: Okay, I’ve got Crossed.

!WARNING WARNING WARNING! THE LINK I’VE PROVIDED IS TO THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE WHICH IS ABOUT THE TAMEST RESOURCE FOR WHAT CROSSED IS THAT I KNOW OF. DO NOT LOOK INTO THIS COMIC IF EXTREME VIOLENCE, GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT, INCEST, BESTIALITY, RAPE, BLASPHEMY OF RELIGIONS, AND A WHOLE HOST OF OTHER THINGS REMOTELY BOTHER YOU. NOT EVEN TRIGGER--REMOTELY. BOTHER. So, yeah, I feel like I’d picked out a good contender considering. Him: No. Not like this. But, hey, wanna know something about Crossed? Everybody is a target for wanton humiliation, suffering, and all sorts of horrible things! Is this something I’m praising? No. It’s just a fact of the comic. And an important fact to know when guy says to me: Him: Well, the old Underground Comix I used to read were more sophisticated with the satire, like the sex in it was about humor with having sex with women. Me: So, you’re looking for comics about humorous sexual encounters that are also explicit? And as I start suggesting comics, he interrupted. Him: No, not like that. More like... *he pulls out a Robert Crumb collection we have and thumbs through it* that. The funny stuff, yanno? The picture in question (I won’t link it, because it is upsetting, as will be my description of it) is just in Crumb’s style--pretty distinctive--and it’s one panel of a skinny, naked man with a sizeable erection. He’s bent over backwards, his hips bent such that his back is practically parallel with the floor of the drawing and his erection (which, if I recall correctly is something like 1/5-1/6 of the height of the page) is pretty close to perpendicular with the floor. One of his hands is wrapped around a nude woman’s throat, the drawing exaggerating the woman’s body parts as if she were being squeezed through tube--the head is ballooned and her neck stretches out to her shoulders. her arms are ramrod straight leading down to outstretched hands. Her legs are equally straightened, bent ninety degrees at the hips. There are motion lines to indicate that the man is forcibly shoving the woman onto his dick over and over again. By her throat. He’s got a pretty happy expression. She does not. Please, read the part where I explain what this thing I’m writing is NOT. Because it is a grey area if you know enough about history and context. Divorced of context, it’s pretty disgusting. I’ll just say that outright. So, if we use the four elements of sequential art to think about what story is being told and how it’s being told, there are things I can understand. The design is good (lots of sharp angles). The caricature is good (Crumb is great with exaggerated forms, whether I like his style or not is irrelevant). The drawing is in Crumb’s style which I can understand why people like his art. So, that leaves the writing. It is wordless but there’s still a story being told. Me and this guy were have a disconnect about what kind of story he wanted to read. Cut to today, about a month after this. It seemed like he hadn’t internalized anything we’d gone over because he had similar questions. At one point, he finally picked up a book and bought it. Which led me to writing this humongous post for the last four hours (it’s been busy today!). Because the guy wasn’t asking for pornography. I’ve definitely straight up told people before we don’t sell pornographic material here. Besides, how we define porn depends on the era. To me, I define it as material that was created with the intention to arouse, stimulate, and to be used as an aid for sexual activity AND someone wants to consume it for said purposes. But, that’s not a definition that would fit all pornographic material. The guy was (again, my perspective. Why I have to keep saying that is important here in a moment) asking for satirical material where misogyny was humorous. Now, if you were to ask him to communicate what he wanted, I guess good luck on getting that answer. I’ve tried. I don’t think he could, to be quite honest because that’s how *Men* are (hey! I used it again). This guy is a *Man* and his answers to me when I probe are, “How it used to be, just how things are,” and the like. The comic book industry is usually fraught with the same problems regular prose books are, the big topics being censorship and purity politics. It’s not as bad as, let’s say, the 1960s and 1970s but there are still problems. Even books for readers of all ages come under scrutiny and are banned from some libraries and schools (Raina Telgemeier’s Drama, for example). To censor any material is a very murky grey area for me. To say that someone cannot create material because it contains material that I am not comfortable with is even murkier because, usually, I’m presented with these hypotheticals in the form of loaded questions (”So, have you stopped bad habit X?” which doesn’t allow me to engage in how I qualify my own habits); complex questions (”What is the legal age of consent to sexual activity?” assumes a LOT of things about legality, age of consent, consent, and sexual activity without consideration to context, to say the least); false dilemmas, suggestive questions, leading questions, and... *takes a deep breath* *exhales* Listen, there’s just a lot of things that make a lot of issues super murky and grey for me. That’s not to say I don’t have opinions and personal/societal biases that sway me toward one end or the other of a polemic (I’m human. We all do it).

When I say, “I hate *Men,*” it is hatred directed towards the skewed power dynamics and socialization that I’m cemented into (through no consent or fault of my own), that allows a *Man* to think (without a second thought) about showing someone the picture I described and not worrying about what he’s communicating. About what the comic is communicating. Let’s pretend that he knows the historical context and importance of Underground Comix. How does he know that I know those things? I mean, I do, but this guy doesn’t know that. “But, Ash!” you argue. “You literally asked him to show you an example!” My friend, there’s no shortage of Underground Comix either from Crumb himself or in similar style that showcases supposedly satirical humor where “battle of the sexes” comes into play. To show someone that image with no knowledge of what the other person knows is a little dicey imho But it sucks! I have to be okay with him showing me that! I asked for an example and I got it. In his mind, it was a smooth communicative exchange. Request for information? Information given! Because of *Men,* I have to watch the way I approach wanting to talk about this subject because I might become “emotional” or I might be accused of, gasp, showing bias! (Newsflash: we’re humans. WE ALL HAVE BIASES. If you aren’t willing to talk about and challenge them then THAT’S a problem. Another story for another day, I digress). And it’s a shame because I know this *Man* isn’t wanting to consume stories where rape is funny because he’s interested in engaging with content that is historically important but because it was created in the context of some socially-acceptable horrible crap there’s some interesting discussion to be had. No, my bet is the thought process looks like: “Heh. Yeah, I know that feeling. Sometimes you just want to have a girl ride you but she just doesn’t know how to slam that pussy down right, so you gotta help her!” “lol yeah sometimes you just wish pussy would magically work your dick into oblivion without you having to worry about the woman that’s attached to it! am I right, y’all?” laugh out loud satire right there someone give me my own netflix show (watch someone take this section out of context sigh) And, honestly, I don’t know where I’m going with this. I didn’t have a thesis or anything. Just me rambling. RIP moblrs

[tumblunni]

Also yeah while im on the subject

I really hate fantasy settings where magic is limited by biological sex. Because usually its used to enforce some sort of stupid gender stereotype that the writer believes is "biologically innate" rather than predjudice, by making up a world where it actually is biologically innate. Or its like "oh but women cant do those jobs" but again, a made up excuse for it to be LITERALLY TRUE. And usually they either dont even touch on the subject of trans and gay people (since it often conflates heterosexuality with gender...) or else it actually does bring it up and just creates a cavalcade of even more everything-ism...

Like i mean i love the game Jade Coccoon and considering it came out in the early 2000s i can understand it being more sexist, and its supossed to be a dark game anyway and a lot of the societal structures in Syrus Village are meant to be wrong and evil even if the characters act like its the way the world should be. The villain of the game is basically the toxic atmosphere of your shitty town and their paranoia of things they don't understand. Tho that means the player kinda has no motivation to finish it cos the main conflict is also saving those same villagers from dying and theyre all fucks. Anyway i'm going offtopic! What i mena is that i dont think it was a particularly sexist example of the inexplicable gender segregated magic trope. But just cos its a fave game of mine im gonna pick it to talk about anyway. Hope i dont sound too negative on it, cos seriously i love it loads!

Ok so to use Jade Cocoon as an example, here its a thing that only men can be cocoon masters and only women can be nagi. Tho it also gets a bit complicated because nagi is also an ethnicity as well? Its kinda like being romani, they're a race of displaced people who travel the world giving their magical services to other countries while searching for their lost homeland, which you end up finding at the end of the game. So yeah its extra weird cos male children of the nagi race are born with no powers whatsoever and cant even become cocoon masters, yet they get the ruling position in this homeland place? Like thats a better metaphor for how christian societies work, honestly!

Anyway im going offtopic again!

Basically, cocoon master = adventurer dude who catches monsters, nagi = magician who purifies those monsters so you can use them in battle. So when you catch stuff it becomes an inventory item rather than being able to use it on your team right away. And also nagi women can fuse monsters together to make super badass new ones and basically the gameplay system works really well to make you believe your wife is absolutely necessary to your quest and you would die without her, even if she cant fight. And honestly its actually kinda romantic! I just wish it wasnt presented as this weird sacred heterosexuality arranged marriage nonsense where all women are physically unable to go to a dungeon and all men are physically unable to not fight every day. Or at least thats how the powers work and if you try and step out of that role you fuckin die. Like it would be romantic to have a couple of a battle partner and a supporter magician if they actually chose it, yknow?

And whats annoying is that they actually do bring up the subject of people defying gender roles and canonically state that you not omly die but bring a curse upon everyone and are hated forever. They dont mention trans or gay people, instead the excuse is that a man loved his wife so much that he tried to learn nagi magic to lift the burden from her. Cos oh yeaj women get 'punished' by god for doing this magic?? Cursed tattoos all over their body the more they use it, and everyone hates them and eventually they turn into a fairy and forget they were ever human. And in the japanese version you can actually fight other nagi women who met this fate, theyre just another monster that you can fight and capture. They were censored in english cos they looked like really racist stereotypes of black women! Ugh! So yeah anyway nice straight husband is punished by the magic straightness enforcing rules of the universe for loving his straight wife too much. So what is the even point? If a man tries to use nagi magic it creates the "black cocoon" of cursed doomness and blah. Literal punishment for not conforming to gender. Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

Anyway this setting always made me wonder about all the stuff it just glosses over with this implication that every one of these relationships worked out fine. Like even before we rub lgbtq topics all over a retro videogame, there's a lot of logical holes! Like seriously how many of these arranged marriages ended up loveless or abusive? How many women just didnt want to stay confined to one room forever and not even have anyone look at them because their magic markings are shameful yet its also shameful not to want to do it?? How many men were terrified of going out on this advebture fighting literal demigods sent by heaven to punish humans? How many of them just had no ability to fight and died immediately because of shitty traditions, while perfectly qualified women had to sit there and watch it happen? What if there werent enough straight men and women of the same age and people were forced into gross pedophilic shit or other horror scenarios just cos there has to be this one magical straight couple or the village dies? Whenever theres this stupid gender magic its ALWAYS portrayed as idyllic and never failing ever, unless *gasp* people dont follow the gendrules...

And then SERIOUSLY do no queer people exist in this universe?? Man i'd be so interested in their stories! I actually had an oc idea of a self insert version of me as a travelling merchant. Because maybe what if nonbinary people could do both sides of the magic at once and thus adventure alone without being tied to a village's straight marriage system? So i'd just go around purifying monsters and then be a place you could buy new and rare mons from other villages without having to catch them. Maybe an easier way to get the super rare drop fusion materials for tiger pattern and stuff? And like seriously itd be good to have a character to talk to who agrees that your village is made of assholes. I cant say its bad writing cos it was clearly intentional, but they shoulda at least put a bit more incentive to keep playing even if you didnt care about these people. Also it would help plug the plothole of how a village even survives if it doesnt have the required people to form this magical straight marriage. Have some mysterious enby avengers who travel all across the world and save everyone regardless of country! All we ask is you buy some of our lovely souveniers! Maybe a pet patalchu for your family? Seripusly why dont they ever show anyone using the purified monsters for anything other than fighting the unpurified ones? You'd think they'd be really useful in repairing the village and guarding the walls and like..regular industrial jobs. Help the place actually advance and not have to live day to day on scraps,bickering amoungst themselves as the monsters grow ever closer to breaking through. Hell, you could even have them help spin the cocoons for other monsters! If this magic only depends on having a dick or not, then cant we just dress up some animals in the magic straight marriage outfits? XD

And like aaaa man im getting so emotional just imagining a trans woman who's constabtly told she will literally bring about the apocolypse if she tries to fill the female role in this ritual. And then one day she tries to spin the magic silk and she thinks she's committing the ultimate sin and they were all right. But the magic responds to her touch, and she makes a spell more beautiful than any other woman in the village! It would probably be harder for a trans man cos the magic doesnt have so much of an immediate proof like that. Just going out and winning a fight with a monster can be called "dumb luck", and knowing these assholes they'd probably keep calling it dumb luck even after the thousandth time you save their life!

And man, i wonder how gay relationships would work in such an annoyingly strict system of enforced heterosexuality? Would it be like the magic isnt REALLY gender locked at all, and it can just be any couple with either partner taking either role? Or would it be that it is one magic per gender but the bigoted villagers were wrong about it being impossible to do things without both? Like maybe when you're going into battle alone as a single cocoon master you cant fight without catching other monsters. But when two cocoon masters love each other their magic is amplified and they become able to like.. I dunno.. Imbue each other with elemental strength so they can fight the monsters hand to hand? Cos really the elemental system is the only reason you cant do a no monsters run of the game as it is. Maybe since they cant purify monsters but they can still catch them, they equip the monsters as sort of a power rangers transformation? Or socket them like materia on their weapons? Or just if the world was less segregated into tiny sexist racist villages they could simply buy the purification coccoons from another local nagi, and villages without a coccoon master could buy the services of travelling ones. Oh, and maybe two nagi lesbians could be even more badass! Cos if they can only purify and not fight, maybe their double purification is so strong that they can just straight up walk into the forest and monsters don't attack them. They dont even need to do the full spell, they can calm a beastie's rage just by holding out their hand and patting it on the head. So they coukd be infinately more effective and not have to just tenporarily clear single travelling routes of a few monsters, but actually work towards slowly purifying the entire forest and creating a peaceful land again. Tho i mean the game did have a unique atmosphere with the whole 'no hope of ever beating them' aspect. It was unique to see a society formed around the idea of never going into forests or you Die. But magical lesbians and their family of a million pet dragons is honestly better!

And uhhhh ive gone all offtopic now and i camt stop thinking about how much i love magical lesbians with a million pet dragons

The End

[strangcrdoctor]

∞Guardians commentary time, because I was honestly too wiped out to get to it last night but I’m still very up for it now. 

1. So here’s my question about the opening sequence on Morag. If Ronan had hired the people that faced off with Quill in the opening sequence on Morag, was it just the case that Ronan’s men arrived 2.5 minutes too late, like Peter arrived just early enough to beat out Yondu? Because initially my impression was that they were indigenous and guarding it, but I know now that not to be the case because Korath is very much a devotee of Ronan, etc. But even if it is the case that Peter beat Ronan’s people, holy timing Batman. Seriously kudos to Quill for being even if incidentally two steps ahead of even Ronan’s game. 2. Okay one, Nova Prime Irani Rael is a hot piece and two she definitely deserves to be the girlfriend of General Leia Organa you can disagree with me but that makes you a suspect human being. Anyway, Rael making the diplomatic call to the Kree to denounce Ronan was not out of bounds for normal statecraft. Especially with a new and tenuous alliance, she’s not only right in calling bullshit that the Kree empire has said nothing to denounce Ronan, but she’s also right in advising they make a statement to stabilize their early peace because early peace is amazingly fragile. But like way to not maintain an alliance at all Kree Empire. You suck. 3. The actual diversity of felons on the Kyln is pretty neat, I’m not going to lie. Not just interspecies representation but also body type representation. There’s big very obviously non-straight criminals. There’s cool as shit looking alien species. There’s chubby feminine looking criminals! Tell me who they are Marvel! Tell me. 4. Now that Thanos’ real character has been revealed in the course of IW it is no damn wonder why Thanos thought of Ronan as a petulant child. Granted, Thanos’ logic is worse in that it is slightly better, but by comparison Thanos is an overly dire pragmatist were Ronan is very much just a racist bigot with a power complex. Thanos predictably find’s Ronan’s racial shortsightedness pithy, and I really have zero doubt that if Ronan had actually gone to piss on Thanos’ front lawn he would not have lasted long. 5. On the other hand, really Thanos. #1 piece of advice in the universe is don’t torture and dismantle women and then trust them to be complicit. You will die. 6. If anyone doesn’t feel pelvic sorcery during a close listening to Fooled Around & Fell In Love they are definitely soulless. 7. I also really really want to know what the hell they were drinking on Knowhere that got Rocket and Drax drunk (I mean who knows they might both be lightweights but I doubt it.), because Stephen wants some. 8. I’ll come right out and say it it’s a fucking shame that Tivan’s collection gets blown to hell. Not because Tivan isn’t twisted as hell keeping live specimens and slaves to himself, but more on the “holy crap what cool stuff just got destroyed that the universe will never see again” kind of way. It’s like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, only somehow worse. 9. The nods given to Thor: The Dark World and The Avengers are of course interesting given there’s a Dark Elf and a Chitauri, but I’m super curious about what made those particular specimens of each special enough for Tivan to keep them. Tivan deals with the depths and breadths of the universe coming in and out of Knowhere, and he doesn’t just snag one item from every species or race he comes across. So was there something interesting in particular about that Dark Elf and that Chitauri? Was the Chitauri one of the only remaining survivors after the nuclear explosion? Was the Dark Elf one of Malekith’s higher ups? I’m just curious about them, and curious about Tivan’s reasoning for keeping them. 10. Okay but adding to this whole Tivan’s collection tangent, Cosmo the Space dog cracks me up and not just because it’s funny for Tivan to have a doggie cosmonaut in his collection. Cosmo is a legit character in the Guardians comics, and he’s head of security on Knowhere and telepathic. So even if Tivan is keeping him in his collection or is just trying to keep him out of the way for something, just imagine what it’s like having an angry Russian dog thinking at you all the time because you’re getting in the way of him doing his job. 11. Slightly different bend on the Tivan train, but Carina legitimately just heard Tivan talk about how the stone was capable of destroying even a whole group of people who tried to wield it, and she was still willing to take the risk of being incinerated rather than living with her current conditions. Carina wasn’t resolutely making the hero play - she was making a suicide play knowing full well it would end that way if the hero play didn’t work. 12. When Yondu states that Peter doesn’t give a rip about Terra like. Dude. How many fucking references in this movie has he made to Terran culture? Music and movies and art and holy shit would you look at that, he sure as hell talks like a more culturally integrated human than anything else you twat waffle. Great way to piss him off though and get him to play it your way, which granted is what I think Yondu was probably doing the whole time but still. You don’t look at this boy who idolizes Footloose and knows who Jackson Pollock is and tell him he doesn’t care about Earth. Caring about Footloose and Jackson Pollock at all is a labor of love. 13. Speaking of Yondu, how the fuck is that the jewel frog bauble considered by anyone to be worth of the “high end” community? On top of it just hurting me, it does really raise the question of how is trite crap like that so valuable? Does it have some vector of worth and rarity because its origins are weird, obscure, or finite? Are the gems magical artifacts of some kind? Are the wealthy in space that mother-fucking self-ironic? Because if they are I want to know them. 14. Peter Quill, everyone, who makes a dick message to garner trust 15. Not for the first for for the last time will I say this, but Ravager tech is impressive. And I am amazingly intrigued at how Ravagers got such good technology and resources on their hands. True, they steal things and make money off of trades and pilfering. But that isn’t the only way to acquire goods and it’s not the only thing a viable pirating economic model can survive off of. Half the reason the Ravagers succeed is because they run like a business, have clientele, and are clientele for certain sects, right? So what kind of powerful connections do they have that allow them their advanced fleets? That’s the kind of shit I want to know about. 16. Also what the hell are Ronan’s pilots with the weird glowy psychic spheres on the Dark Aster? Is the Dark Aster itself Kree technology, or something Ronan got from Thanos who appropriated it from some other world he’s conquered? Because we know so little about the Kree in the MCU it’s hard to say, but I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the Kree ever do become a part of canon so we can have more data with which to make a comparison. 17. Guardians does a pretty good job of taking at least some time to portray how terrible aerial dogfighting is on a mass scale because honestly it’s a bloody nightmare. It’s pictured so often and so carelessly in film that it’s not something we often think about, and the only movie I’ve ever seen that addresses how it feels in human terms is Dunkirk, but the intensity and messiness of it in Guardians is still pretty realistic and I give it props for that. 18. It occurs to me that maybe the younger, post-GOTG Groot is so bitter and antisocial for a while because of how giving the elder Groot was, and the seedling felt the sacrifice and his existence was under-appreciated? It was just a thought that crossed my mind. 19. Also Ronan you twat. “Engage Immolation Initiative” is just Big Mean & Fancy for “light ‘em up fuckers,” don’t pretend you’re any cooler than anyone else. 20. I really really appreciate the design that went into the Xandarian cityscape as a fully intergalactic multicultural society that shows it even in the way the city and buildings are assembled. The city isn’t uniform like a lot of science-fiction cities are - it’s got texture. Different sectors have different styles of buildings and different architecture. Like a real metropolitan area, it’s a patchwork of influences and it’s very well done. 21. Kudos to Rocket for identifying that ground-to-air is a super viable defense strategy. One thing that people tend to forget about ground-to-air is that aside from clouds, there’s no obstacles behind which to hide in the sky, so while ground defense might seem clumsy at times, air offense is hugely precarious because there is absolutely no defense mechanism against any attack except maneuvering, and when a defense is fully able to target that weakness it’s pretty damn effective. 22. It’s interesting to me how well superhero movies integrate climaxes within battle sequences? Some people might call it lazy but I call it interesting when when defense lines break, plans fail, and when teams encounter interference to push the plot forward. Plot movement in Marvel movies curry a lot of momentum from these events, but actually they’re pretty interesting replications of how modern society has been built on the results of such events within our own history. History has been moved by these exact same sorts of events, which is why they make sense to us in storytelling. 23. Peter protecting Groot from Rocket’s crash into the into the Dark Aster? Golden. And then Peter immediately going to Rocket from the wreckage? Stellar. Peter Quill you are a gem. 24. I will never forgive Marvel for hurting me as bad with “We are Groot” as Warner Brothers did with “Suuuuuperman” in Iron Giant. Stop giving Vin Diesel more opportunities to rip my heart out of my chest, please. 25. My mom and my uncle, her brother, both adored the entire GOTG soundtrack so much and it brought them so much joy watching it together that it got me into Motown. Even though it was oblique and dorky, Marvel did something amazing with this movie and gave my parents a piece of their own youth back, while giving me a chance to share in their knowledge and experience. It’s stuck with me ever since, especially because fundamentally that experience is the reason I got into Motown music, which I now adore with all my heart.

Alright, done with that. These are... just getting longer and longer I’m sorry guys no one should have ever allowed me to do this. Oh well. Too late to stop me now. Captain America: The Winter Solider is up next, and oh the pain.∞

[jswdmb1]

Old Man

“Old man

take a look at my life 

I'm a lot like you”

- Neil Young

I seemingly have no skin in this dumb “OK boomer” thing, but I would argue that I have the most right to be offended by this generational nonsense. You see, no one has bothered to ask my opinion even though I, as a proud member of Gen X, am in the current position of what I like to call generation stuck in the middle. It’s like being on a bus in between two screaming lunatics who don’t even notice that I am there. Yet, no one is better equipped to help referee this dispute other than us in Gen X since we are the only ones who have actually talked among all of the current generations.  If you talk to anyone from Gen X, I think most would tell you that we are actually OK being left alone.  I mean, since we are the parents of Gen Z, bosses of Millennials, and the adult children of boomers, they all need us way more than we need any of them.  Now, I’m not trying to start a fight here, my point is that every generation thinks theirs is the best when it’s always somewhere in the middle.  Since middle is my game now, I am here to present the pros and cons of all our current generations:

The Greatest Generation: born before 1946

Pros:  Sadly, this generation is leaving us more and more each day, and we need them more then ever.  For me, this is the generation of my grandparents that was born in the 20′s and 30′s, lived through a depression and a world war, and then did their best to raise the next generation in a way that allowed them to succeed without ever having to go through what they did ever again.  Their bravery and willingness to sacrifice were at levels we will never see again.  We need to take as much advantage as possible of those that remain to gather whatever wisdom we can from them that can be applied to the troubles we face today and moving forward.  We cannot also forget to thank them for everything we have and generations of the future will have because of their efforts.

Cons: The greatest title unfortunately comes with an asterisk.  While this country fought oversees against bigotry, hatred and oppression so that all could live freely, many Americans were not so fortunate back home.  People were excluded from the “American Dream” based on race, ethnicity, gender and/or sexual orientation.  Often, this exclusion was carried out in brutal ways designed to oppress individuals of their rights not just as Americans but as human beings.  I am certainly not suggesting that every member of this generation is a racist or intolerant, but the significant pain caused in this country during the time that this generation was in full power cannot be ignored.

The Baby Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964

Pros: The contributions that the boomers have made to our world are almost immeasurable.  Where would we be without the technological advances that came along in the 70s, 80s, & 90s that set the stage for the world as we know it today.  Boomers were on the cutting edge of social change as well demanding the generation ahead of them include all Americans in the nation as full and equal members.  My parents were on the edge of the boomer generation, but I consider them a part of it and I identify now what they went through as a “sandwich” generation during the 70s and 80s.  People make fun of it now, but those days had a lot of stresses and pressures.  I would love to see how today’s world would react to the inflation and real unemployment of the late 70s or early 80s.  What would you do if gas prices doubled tomorrow?  They also took care of parents with many less resources and much poorer health than our older generation has now.  They were truly instrumental in the massive transition this country made to get us where we are at this point, and that should not be forgotten especially as many like my dad are leaving us far too soon.

Cons: Boomers made a lot of mistakes.  Even as kids, we knew it and wondered what exactly were they thinking sometimes.  Personally, I don’t fault the boomers for all the choices they made nor do I think that all our current problems are squarely on them.  What I think irks the younger generations is their general unwillingness to concede that they made mistakes which prevented them from learning how to help fix the messes they made.  Our president is a perfect example with this, and he is just a reflection of the group that was largely responsible for electing him.  The other issue with Boomers is that they refuse to step aside and give up the notion that this world is theirs forever.  The most ridiculous thing I heard with this OK Boomer thing was that is was bigoted and would hurt the prospects of many boomers who plan to be around for a lot longer (living off of Medicaid and Social Security we can’t afford, but I digress).  Boomers just can’t get that it is not all about them anymore.  Remember though, that they were initially part of the “Me” generation in the 70′s so we can’t be surprised by their behavior.  The problem now is that their unwillingness to cede power is hurting us.  That is why I think their should be an age cap on running for political office of any kind of 65 years old.  Agism you say?  I guess maybe, but I call it self protectionism.  It’s the same logic that sets floors to the age limits to prevent people from being too young to hold such important responsibilities.  I say, if you are between 25 and 65, you can be in politics, and after that step aside and let the generation who has everything at stake drive for a while.  

Gen X - born between 1965 and 1980

Pros: It’s hard to point to exactly what we in this generation have done so far, but I think as the current “sandwich” generation, we are doing our best to advance the concepts of inclusiveness and awareness of our impact on this Earth to the generations below us that we are either mentoring or raising.  I don’t think history is going to look back at us as the “greatest” and we don’t have the same flair as the boomers did, but I think we will be remembered as the generation that quietly did our part to set the table for those coming up behind us to be successful.  I also think many in our generation will gladly step aside much sooner than the boomers to let those we have nurtured take over.  I envision being the generation that really provides the mentoring and support needed to hopefully get us to the point where hope is restored in our younger generations.  Maybe the best thing we bring to the table is empathy and we can use that to bridge between a generation that seems to have lacked it and ones coming up that crave it.

Cons: Our cons are the same as our pros.  We have been too benign and let the boomers get away with far too much when we had a chance to stop some of the nonsense they are spewing now.  Protests and social activism were unheard of when I was in college in the early 90s and our focus was too much on being good students to get good jobs to become good corporate citizens when we needed to move out of our comfort zone more.  I also think we are the generation who is to be blamed most for the current state of the climate.  We are the main generation fueling the economy right now and have been for the past decade or so, yet we have not made the changes or demands to turn ourselves towards green practices.  The barriers to green technology have come down greatly during this time period and we have been slow to adapt.  We also didn’t put pressure on those above us when we were younger and science presented evidence that our earth was being destroyed, which they dismissed.  That goes way back and we were asleep at the wheel on what arguably is the most important issue facing us today.  That may stain our generation in a way that can never be repaired.

And the rest... - born after 1980 -

I know there are distinct generations within this group, but as an old fogey I get to lump them all together because those damn kids are all the same to me!  Besides, kids don’t use Facebook or read long-form essays on Tumblr so they’ll never see this anyway.  And, I’m not doing pros and cons for them because everyone gets the same grade in the post Gen-X generation: “meets expectations”.  That last part isn’t a joke as if I were evaluating the generations behind me that is the grade that I would give them.  I think they are doing a good job so far, but their immaturity and lack of experience holds them back from being great.  I actually see many of them fitting more into an “exceeds expectations” category if they continue with their true embrace of inclusion of all people and their commitment to the environment.  It is also a very service oriented generation, and I would argue far less materialistic than generations before them going back to the boomers.  They need to work on communication skills for sure and definitely need to learn how to develop a bit of a thicker skin, but I see a lot of hope in this group.  I am particularly excited to see them start taking control in politics and I hope it is sooner than later.  We cannot afford to wait for their innovation as our future lies in the balance with little hope if the status quo stays in place.  Let’s face it, whether I believe any of this or not, don’t we have to?  I mean if this is a horse race, I’m certainly putting my money on these kids to get the job done over anyone else.

And, I guess that’s the conclusion that I have come to as I reflect on this particular essay.  It’s that the youngest generation is always the most important as they have the most promise as well as the most at stake.  At the age of 47, I don’t plan to sit on the sidelines or not help out, but I can acknowledge that even at that relatively young age the spotlight is no longer on me.  Whether it be my music, or education, or technology skills (or lack there of), my opinions and tastes don’t matter anymore.  The other day, someone gave me an “OK Boomer” in jest and at first I took offense.  Mostly because I am not that old, but it initially stung to hear it directed at me even as a joke.  I soon realized though, that it is just that - a joke and that brings me to the best thing I think Gen X has going for it - our sense of humor.  So, if I have any advice for the Gen Zs or whatever they are called and the Boomers is to work together and laugh while you do it.  And quit yelling over Gen X while you fight.  I’m trying to watch Seinfeld reruns.

Cheers,

Jim

[flauntpage]

Taking on the “Stick to Sports” Myth

Note: Kevin wrote about this topic on Tuesday from a media/fan standpoint. Tim approaches it from another angle.

On Saturday night, Washington Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly skated toward the penalty box after a brief scrap with Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Connor Murphy. By NHL standards, it wasn’t a particularly strange scene. Smith-Pelly’s team was getting hammered by a score of 7-1, and T.J. Oshie, one of the Caps’ star players, had just absorbed a hit from Murphy. Given the circumstances of the game, retribution was required. This is how the justice system in the NHL works:

Once Smith-Pelly entered the sin bin, he was greeted with chants of “basketball, basketball, basketball!” by a small group of Blackhawks fans sitting nearby. It doesn’t take much of a logical leap to understand the implication of the taunt.

Smith-Pelly confronted the four fans, who were ejected from the game by security. The incident occurred in the middle of Black History Month and during the NHL’s “Hockey is for Everyone” campaign. In a postgame interview, Smith-Pelly lamented the continued presence of these racially-charged jeers decades after the integration of the game.

Smith-Pelly’s unpleasant interaction in Chicago called to mind other episodes of racism that made news in the hockey world in the past. Most Flyers fans will recall the banana that was thrown at Wayne Simmonds during an exhibition game in Canada in 2011. After scoring a game-winning and series-clinching goal against the Boston Bruins in the 2012 playoffs, Joel Ward was subjected to a nasty avalanche of negative, racist tweets from disgruntled Bruins fans. During a preseason interview in which he openly contemplated kneeling during the national anthem, Ward asserted that he has dealt with racism daily during his hockey career.

The Smith-Pelly incident made for an interesting juxtaposition with a segment that aired on Fox News last week. In a clip that became a major discussion point during NBA All-Star Weekend, political commentator Laura Ingraham attacked LeBron James for what she characterized as his “barely intelligible” criticism of President Trump.

“Must they run their mouths like that?” Ingraham wondered rhetorically, with the wistful tone an elderly bigot might take when recalling the “good old days” when black folks knew their place and shut the hell up.

Ingraham concluded her remarks by spitting the dog whistle out of her mouth and demanding that James and Kevin Durant “shut up and dribble.” In another time, we might have questioned why a Dartmouth alumna and a coastal elite was speaking so poorly of an Ohio high school graduate who capitalized on his talents and turned his name into a lucrative brand. However, such a perspective is no longer politically expedient:

'Shut up and dribble' — Fox News's Laura Ingraham to LeBron and Kevin Durant after their criticism of President Trump pic.twitter.com/0BlokQDIIl

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 16, 2018

But let’s leave politics out of this space. There’s no need to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ingraham fervently supported a presidential candidate in 2016 who, prior to being elected for anything, routinely criticized politicians for various perceived indiscretions or poor decisions; who, despite Americans re-electing President Obama as their “coach” in 2012, called the process a “travesty” and demanded a “march on Washington;” who made a political career out of doubting the legitimacy of President Obama’s place of birth and his academic credentials; and who throughout his own tenure as president has lobbed “barely intelligible” and “ungrammatical” criticisms at his opponents on Twitter.

No, we don’t want to explore this stuff. It would be an exercise in what Ingraham and her elite Ivy League friends would call a tu quoque logical fallacy. If you’re not familiar with this term, there’s no need to look it up; just imagine any argument you’ve ever seen on social media.

Besides, we talk about sports on this website. And, as we all know, sports and politics mix like oil and water.

At least that’s the message many of us are sending to any athlete who dares migrate from the playing field to the political arena. Sports serve as our refuge from the troubles of the world; we watch because we want to get away from frustrating political debates conducted by intractable pundits who seem to bicker about the same topics every day. We’re tired of the noise, of listening to it all. We just want to relax and watch a game.

It’s a fair point of view to hold, albeit a bit selfish. After all, athletes do not enjoy the benefits of escapism that we derive from sporting events. Smith-Pelly’s experience over the weekend reinforces the notion that players are not inoculated from the problems of the real world just because they don a uniform.

We also expect our athletes to be role models. We applaud when Chris Long donates his entire salary to fund scholarships, or when Malcolm Jenkins engages in his various endeavors to serve impoverished communities. When athletes fall from the pedestals we build for them, as Jahlil Okafor did several times during his short tenure with the 76ers, we blast the news on the Internet and on the front pages of the sports section of the newspaper.

We shuttle athletes into a pseudo-minor league system in which they represent a college or university in exchange for a free education. Yet when they employ this education to speak about the state of affairs between minority communities and police officers instead of how to beat a blitz, we get angry or annoyed.

We compel them to stand for a rendition of the national anthem before they go to work. We ask them to attend a ceremonial event at the White House when they win a championship. If they do anything to deviate from the script or otherwise ruin our made-for-TV patriotic rituals, we tell them derisively to “stick to sports.” Ingraham, or someone of her ilk, will exploit any instance of an athlete stepping out of his lane as more fuel for the perpetual outrage machine that powers our politics.

Instead of worrying about athletes getting too political, we should question why politics increasingly resembles sports. Turn on any cable news station at any time of day and notice how political discussions have devolved into something you might hear on sports talk radio or see on First Take. The issues of the day are debated with the same contrived intensity that colors a professional wrestling feud. It must be cathartic to watch someone with whom you disagree be “owned”or “destroyed” by a well-crafted talking point during a shout fest, but it’s certainly not productive.

The very people who claim to be in the business of informing us are too busy trying to entertain us. And that’s a much bigger problem than an entertainer trying to inform us.

Taking on the “Stick to Sports” Myth published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[thetwitchreport-blog]

Why I believe that all terrorist attacks in the last 20 years are a false flag upon the west.

The West and its Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has been meddling in the middle east for around about a century now. You can argue that it has been since the crusades but that would just lead to digression. I want to concentrate on what the MIC of the modern era, leading in to the information era, has done and are continuing to do.

The MIC is made from a blend of government institutions and the NGOs (Non-Government Organisations) that supply the arms for the worlds militaries. This system ensures that going to war lines the pockets for the fat cats that run these institutions. So, there was and still is a vested interest in controlling the popular opinion.

After World War 1 it was clear that technology was on a very steep progression curve and along with it was the dawn of psychological warfare. This is clear when, during the peace talks in France after WW1, the president of the United States Woodrow Wilson took Edward Bernays with him for the entire duration. Bernays, the nephew to the Austrian neurologist, and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, was a pioneer in public relations. He later went on to write the book ‘Propaganda’, which is still used today by military forces all over the planet. Before this point, propaganda was only used during war time, but Bernays wanted to use propaganda to sway people’s opinions during times of peace as well.

We are now about a decade into the Information Era. Let that sink in for a second……….. This is the beginning of a new era. The internet has changed the game completely in nearly every facet of life from ordering food to communication, shopping, exercise, manufacturing, production and most of all, warfare! The internet is connecting more and more people globally and we can freely exchange immense amounts of information amongst ourselves. Humanity has never had a time in its history where these amounts information can be accessed so easily and freely. The only thing that is remotely comparable to it in history is the great Library of Alexandria, and you had to be a special breed of human to have access to that amount knowledge in those days. You couldn’t just roll in off the street with your library card and check out the great works of Socrates for a couple of weeks and get clued up on modern western philosophy at the time. You had to be an esteemed member of society, as information, knowledge and wisdom was considered a dangerous tool in the wrong hands.

Now we have access to all this information and we struggle to process it all in a coherent manner. This, mixed with the barrage of psychological warfare from the MIC makes it very hard to determine what is really going on in the world.

The west has spent the last 30 years destabilising the middle east for various reasons. For years, the MIC has shoved down our collective throats via the mainstream media (MSM) that our forces are over there to stop inhumane dictators or weapons of mass destruction. I do not doubt any of these reasons to be true at all. In fact, I think we are over there for all the above reasons, and reasons the power structures don’t want us to know about. If you have a stake in the MIC, you would be welcoming as many reasons to go war as possible. Wars create guns, ammo and equipment contracts for the MIC!

Decades of war and destabilisation have created a vast amount of collateral damage. Cities have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives completely devastated from these conflicts. It has led to a massive refugee problem which ultimately pulls on the heart strings of any empathetic individual.

Everyone knows that sending more troops to the middle east is only going to exacerbate the situation further. It was only after a gas attack in Syria in the summer of 2013 that the UK stood up for the first time in around 80 years and said we are not following the USA/UN in to another middle eastern conflict. This, in my opinion, is the result of the information we have access to via the internet. Judging from this historical event it seems that the public can no longer be convinced that violence puts an end to violence. Therefore, the MIC needed to step up their game. If the MIC cannot gain contracts from wars overseas, then they will turn inwards and look towards our homelands for contracts. And so, the rise of the Police State! It is clearly evident when you look at the military gear the police are equipped with these days. The local bobby on the beat is now equipped with an extensive amount of weaponry from pepper spray to tasers, video cameras, stab vests etc. This is not even taking in to account the military style vehicles they have at their disposal which is quite frankly, terrifying!

I am a 33 year old man living in the south of England, in a relatively quiet seaside town. I feel that trust in our government is practically non-existent from the local people of my generation, as well as the majority of older and younger generations. Ask the next 5 people you see if they trust their current government and any other government that is to potentially be elected in the next decade. I would imagine that at the least 4 out of 5 people will say they have zero trust. So, put yourself in the position on a refugee who has had their life turned upside down and thrown in to the cement mixer for most of their existence. If western natives feel resentment for our current power structure, what do you think people from the middle east think about us?

This is where I think the conspiracy lies…….I think the MIC knows what they are doing. They pushed the forming of the European union to gain control of European nations’ borders. They know that as a world society we are not falling for their lies about weapons of mass destruction and any other bullshit excuse that they may use to encourage us to accept more wars. Instead they are opening the borders and letting in the people who have been obliterated by the onslaught over the years. Of course they hate the fundamental structure of our society! If the tables were reversed we would all feel the same. The continuous need for military tools and weaponry suits the MIC just fine.

Knowing this, it would be absolute insanity to assume there will not be lone wolf and extremist groups operating independently in amongst the refugee population. It’s evident that this is the source of most of the attacks in Europe over the last few years. Pointing out the common denominator in these attacks as being radical Islamists does not make you a racist or a bigot or any other of these lovely exhausted buzz words people use nowadays. Pointing out the truth is not always easy. Telling your wife she doesn’t look good in the outfit she is wearing is always going to end in a hard time. Jumping down somebody’s throat and calling them a nazi or a fascist for pointing out that these attacks are coming from the same people, from the same area of the world is just illogical. It’s a low resolution way of thinking and I am proud that here in the west we have such a thing as free speech. It enables us to communicate freely, and openly discuss sensitive subjects. Real progress has always followed free and open, unhindered conversation.

 I personally believe the MIC are the real war mongers of this world and they are playing the masses against each other, whilst simultaneously dismantling middle eastern and western societies. Classic divide and conquer! It is akin to how the Spanish conquered the Incas with only minimal amount of troops (mostly cavalry). In short, they played Inca tribes against one another, gradually reducing their overall numbers down to a manageable size to attack on their own. The concept of divide and conquer was first discussed in Sun Tzu’s book The Art Of War, which I encourage everybody to read at some point. They have turned their propaganda and psychological warfare inwards on the west. This is an attempt to enable the continuation of the MIC, and if that means smashing western ideals up against middle eastern ideals to create scenarios where the MIC is needed, then that is what they will do. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette! It will continue for as long as money can manipulate politicians. It will continue if people don’t get on board with the era of information. It will continue if people just look at the internet as a place where you can show pictures of your cat in a box or what you had for lunch, instead of extracting the valuable information you need to make a coherent analysis of the geopolitical spectrum. The internet is the greatest tool humans have ever created and I advise you to make use of it whilst it is still open and free.

So, I believe that the MIC has committed a false flag attack upon the world to further their agenda in population control, which in turn continues the production of arms and the printing of fiat currency. The attack has been going on for years, and it will continue unless we start being true to ourselves and stop with this knee jerk reaction to just call people names for having a different point of view. Critical thinking, truth and logic need to stand tall above emotions.

[portlandbycalifornia]

My Perfect Match

Portland OkCupid profiles that I have matched with an average rate of 85% copied verbatim (spelling mistakes and all) and complied to create the ultimate dream man.   

My Self-Summary

Vegan INTP bike nerd. I consistently test on either side of INFJ/INTJ.  Very into self-improvement, various energy healing modalities, healthy living, escaping the matrix, etc.   I Love to go to festivals. Fire dancing is my favorite hobby but crafting my wearable leather art is my passion. I take care of my body. I am attracted to women that take care of their mind, body and soul. Non-monogamy is a gift that my partner and I have given each other.

I smile and encourage others in passing. I am going through a period of transformation, renewal, and brutal honesty. Finding wisdom in deeper levels and adopting a fresh perspective on my relationship with the world. I savor genuine human connection and I am resourced and ready to face whatever comes in its way.  I have a vision and I need you and your vision. I need the vision to come down and be embodied here in community. I love the transformation and creating something beautiful and lasting.

I am a highly sensitive person, with extreme shifts between introvert and extrovert, who feels emotions on a grand scale and often cannot hide this with masks, barriers, or boundaries. I am a glorious mess with a lot of love to give, digging deep to find that love for myself which will provide the foundation from which I will seek balance in all that I give – to myself and to others.

I just want to let you know my hair is to my butt so if that is not your thing or you judge a book by the cover pass me by.

Let's play together!

What I’m Doing With My Life

Unraveling the mysteries of the universe.  Daydreaming about getting out in the woods for a week.  After ending a long term relationship last year I devoted most of my spare time to internal examination.

I have passed through eleven years of severe mental health issues that have put my life and the pursuit of my dreams and happiness on hold. I submitted to the Western Idea of Medicine – to only soothe the symptoms, and not address the root cause.

I raise happy animals and plants to feed wise and caring people. I am spreading love, happiness, and joy wherever I go. It's who I am and a big part of what I bring to this world. Learning is a hobby as well as my vocation

I'm into tribal dancing. I pray when I dancing. I do ancient dancing sacred to Mayan and Aztec. I can make shoes. I can fix cars. I garden. I'm kind of everything as I age. I see so much wisdom I have and knowledge in the seen and unseen. Being on here discredits my karma and manifestation abilities. I'm not part of sex positive not will I club up for love. I'm very serious I might add. I'm the real deal. I know medicine well. Even Latin. I'm not some rich kid. I'm actually poverty

I am wearing a couple kilts in my pictures. I enjoy wearing them, I am getting more in touch with my Irish heritage. Yes, in two of them, I am also wearing tights. They are tights for men, but still tights. They are comfortable, and nice to wear. More and more men are beginning to realize what woman have known for a very long time. Leggings, tights (and even bodysuits) are really very comfortable.

I am living everyday striving to become my most authentic self by practicing AHO. I am currently in the midst of a revolution. It is beautiful and it is heartbreaking. It is inspiring and it is painful. It is passionate and it is overwhelming. It is full of challenges, ideas, roadblocks, breakthroughs, breakdowns, searching, yearning, learning how to take care of myself for the first time ever, and attempting to find community, my own family or tribe where I can continue this journey surrounded by support and love and possibility and responsibility. The past year has been surreal and fascinating.

I run. I hide. I fall into deep pockets of introspection and isolation. I get foggy and lose track of time, and it is difficult to focus on anything that doesn't feed into this ancient evil of helplessness, hopelessness, agony, and suffering.  I work at festivals like the Oregon Country Fair, Pacific Fire Gathering to name a couple.

What I am Looking For

What I am looking for? First of all, I am not a bigot, or racist, or anything, but I prefer to date within my race. Please. Also, I DO judge you by your profile pic. Shallow?...no. I just am more likely to click on your photo if you are smiling, or you have made it a point to look like you are enjoying yourself. Has nothing to do with how attractive you are. Some pictures....they could double as county jail in-processing pictures. SMILE Fer fuk sakes!!

I find that SOME of the ladies who write that they don't want to see pictures of a mans junk, who are here for a serious intentions, and not here for a quick fling are quite often the same ones who have their camera half way down their shirt, showing me how large their cleavage is, how big their breasts are etc....Frankly, I really don't want to be seeing how big your chest is, anymore than you want to be seeing my junk.

I prefer to look for someone who already has children or willing/interested in adoption, (for that is the ULTIMATE show of love) If you have kids, the younger they are better. Because yes, I want to experience all that being a father brings. Being up 2 hours after I went to sleep to change a diaper, or woo them back to sleep, or holding them after a scary dream. I yearn for the days of showing them how to do things like holding a bat catching a ball, tying their shoes, going to games, and recitals, and yes....even going so far as to play dress up. (Yes, I am cool with that, you should be too).

I believe we transfer energy by who we hang with. So No Burners please. Your weird and high. Not my kind of people.

I’m Really Good At

Getting present via: breath, tapping cortices, lips & tail (energy points), mindfulness, adrenaline, focused effort, etc. Falling apart and putting myself back together again.  Spinning fire for the masses, helping others, loving you, expanding my consciousness and all I set my mind to. I’m REALLY good at talking.

The first things people usually notice about me

Perhaps it's that I emanate a god-like quality of peace, love, and understanding to everyone around me, also my eyes. Bonus points if you find something else to compliment first.

Favorite Books, Movies, Shows, Music, and Food

Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski Immediatism by Hakim Bey Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment by Lex Hixon Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu Theory of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg

I don’t own a tv.  You shouldn’t either.

Lately I've been listening to Beats Antique, String Cheese Incident, Job To Do, Bassnectar and Blue Lotus. Music is whatever can get me moving, enrich my soul, make me cry, reminds me of something special. Right now I'm listening to a lot of 5 finger death Punch and Tool repetition, polyrhythms, heaviness, swing, bass, texture, sweetness, darkness, contrast, ambience. My own music has been an attempt to reconcile my love of the traditions springing forth from dub reggae and gay disco.

Heathy food is a big part of my life. I am a big juicer and my superfood bullet is the best purchase ever.

Six(teen) Things I Could Never Do Without

Music

Intellectual stimulation

Physical stimulation

My bike

Reflection

All my special people

Reclaiming my power to create change

Rest Laughter (especially that of children) Tears Artistic expression Human connection Surrender

Festival season

Passport

Sex

I Spend A Lot Of Time Thinking About

How to get the perfect balance in my life between all my conflicting goals and desires. Discovering how to leave a positive impact on humanity, loving life and those in it, entrepreneurial activities (in conscious business), etc.

Where I should ride on my weekend. Road or mountain bike? Probably mountain bike, but which trail and how far am I willing to drive this weekend? Should I camp somewhere?

Doing what I'm here to do, and helping others get on their journey to do the same. I've been feeling more & more tuned in to the fact that we're all perfect the way we are, going through what we're going through (we each have our own reality that may or may not make sense to each person), and could all use reminders to dial in to our divine selves even more in each moment. How can we live & be more authentic in every moment, while turning up the volume on who we really are and what we're really passionate about?

On A Typical Friday Night I am

I am into spontaneity and flow. Making homemade cashew ice "cream".Making rhythmically driven noise (pretty & noisy types). Working on a deep poem. Practicing dancing or doing Danza.

The Most Private Thing I’m Willing To Admit

I tend to Meow a lot. Usually out loud, and sometimes at inappropriate moments.

You Should Message Me If

You appreciate being present and want to discover someone to share memorable moments with. You are truly open to an abundance of possibilities. You've got more passion/drive in life than most.  You choose to live life the way that makes sense to you (rather than following everything as pre-described). You've explored enough about yourself to deeply know you. You actually know the world we live in, and you're still in gratitude to be here in this time! You'd love someone to learn, grow, & live passionately with. You get that logic has its limits. You get the gist of me and my energy from this, even though there's SOOO much more to me (I am a Libra)! ;)

You work to be kind to yourself and others. You can manage your expectations and can trust me to manage mine. You don't hide from your despair and you know joy. You are strong at the broken places.  

If your profile is real and you live near or in Portland. I am very busy and do not have time for games

I will NOT meet expectations of masculine behavior. I am strictly sexually submissive. You will have to pursue me and make me feel desired.