need-a-new-reality

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not to be a nerd but it’s so crazy how he (Bernini) really did that from cold hard stone……. truly a spectacle, truly breathtaking, an honor to behold

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not to be a killjoy but it's still crazy to me that it's considered mean to be like "maybe you should read / play / watch the source material before creating fanworks and diving into the fandom" bc every time i see somebody going "i havent played disco elysium or know anything about it tbh but uwu here's harry and kim kissing" idk maybe you should engage with it. maybe you should play the anti-capitalist surrealist game where you investigate the murder of a mercenary who led the gang rape of a foreign girl and process that for a bit? and then you can do cutesy mlm or whatever idc. but like at the absolute bare minimum you should understand what the source material involves otherwise we get the phenomenon of people joining a dragon age server and wanting content warnings for like, mage racism. like it's fine to ship and transform the genre into whatever but if you arent comfortable with discussions of the actual source content itself then maybe the fandom isnt for you and a different one is. peace and love.

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the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

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someone explain the jewish holidays to me like i'm 5 years old

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lol I thought this was gonna be about the Government defunding OSHA.

So there you are, number one employee at your company, team lead, bringing in more profit by yourself than the rest of the employees combined and everyone knows it. And then one day, against the advice of all the other team leads, the CEO violates a safety measure, and yeah, people start dying.

Everyone knows it's the CEO's fault. Everyone knows how to fix it. But the CEO does nothing, digs his head in the sand, and pretends like shit is normal. And people are dying.

So you, young hotshot that you are, call an all hands meeting and get a specialist to explain what the problem is. It's easily solved, but it will cost money, and that money is going to have to come from the CEO.

The CEO throws a shitfit. He doesn't want to solve the problem. He doesn't want to admit under overwhelming evidence that it's his fault. But he agrees to do so under one condition--he's not paying to fix it--you are. He's taking your bonus and you can get fucked. As it turns out, the CEO thinks you fucking suck.

Not a single one of your colleagues protests on your behalf, probably because they know that if they speak up, he'll just take their bonuses, too.

So what do you do? Do you continue working for Mr. "idc if my employees die as long as I get mine?" Do you quit? Do you take the wealth you've accumulated working for this guy and go home? Do you stab the worst boss you've ever had in front of every other employee at the company?

Anyway that's book 1 of the Iliad

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Do you know what’s also an annoying as a casual player?The most beautiful cards are usually trash, while the stupid or ugly looking NFT looking art work ends up being devastatingly broken.

Fallen angel: Beautiful card with artwork that should be hanging up in a museum comes with a rainbow foil, limited edition. Basically useless in any real deck.

Flea Circus: Poorly drawn picture of a cockroach (not even a flea WTF) wearing a top hat. Basically an automatic win if used correctly, banned from most tournaments.

before i started playing magic i made a post about how as an outside observer the most broken cards are never one of the ultra-scary dragons with an epithet like 'crusher of souls' and always some obtuse utility card called something like 'wiggle warp'. And now every time i try to have fun playing standard i am terrorized by Up the Fucking Beanstalk

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soon may the wellerman come, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

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When you get rejected by Pixar by Felipe Hansen

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And later on you discover that they didn’t find the cookie on the ground, they actually stole the cookie from a poor home baker.

They insist they did not steal the cookie, even though they were caught on camera stealing the cookie.

Honestly I can tell you finding out art was made by AI really does immediately, legitimately sour it for me, like people will trot this out as a Gotcha for anti-AI people but it's just making it clear they don't consider art to be the conversation that it is lol. It's similar to the way Harry Potter immediately soured for me because engaging with it while knowing the kind of heart Rowling is writing from changes the way the work feels; there isn't any moralizing or whatever that I have to do, it's easy to drop it because it's rotted in my hands.

"Oh but you LIKED this song before, nothing changed!" The conversational partner did. A very large portion of what is interesting to me about art is thinking of why the creator chose that instrumentation, or what made them want to make the thing in the first place. Finding out I've been talking to a wall completely removes an entire third of the force that art is to me, and I can't argue that anything about art or its consumption is Objectively Correct but I can argue it's fucking boring lmao

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I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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I think that the reason that the Icarus myth is so poetic is because it’s talking about teenagers/young adults. One of the morals of the fable is no matter how much you warn a teenager/young adult. They don’t have the experience to know better, and will always reach for the sun.

On the contrary, the Titans submersible was about adults who should’ve known better but had convinced themselves that having enough money freed them from experiencing consequences.

Icarus didn’t understand the consequences.

Titan believed that consequences didn’t affect them.

I still think about the Titan submersible sometimes. it's such a poetic modern example of hubris. like Icarus if Icarus was an absolute shithead.

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Our Lover (Ao3) is away at war (down for maintenance) and We don't know when they'll return (it's scheduled for about 3 hours)

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in my head the star wars equivalent of tswift is some human woman named tay’lor spiff or something and her stans are losing their minds over theories that she’s secretly a jedi singing about the horrors of war, even though she’s from a neutral system that hasn’t seen so much as a moral panic in 50 years