pucktrinksy

[pucktrinksy]

[pucktrinksy]

does anyone have that quote that goes something like 'white germans under the nazis lived just fine as long as they were loyal to the state, gave their children to the army, and paid their taxes, and in this sense many americans would be comfortable living under fascism' trying to find who said it but google is giving me jack shit

[pucktrinksy]

"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

[pucktrinksy]

Thinking a lot recently about the constant comparison of Oblivion to Skyrim, particularly claims that Oblivion is superior in every way strictly by virtue of quest length and the greater grandiosity of the organizations in Oblivion, and I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually going on with Tamriel during the time period of Skyrim. Even though it's like...one of the core concepts of the main storyline.

Putting most of this under a cut for length, but I just...I think people misunderstand what's going on here. This is not a "One Game Good Other Game Bad" post, it's an analysis of a major, key difference in story basis between the two that I think gets lost in the (frankly asinine) argument about which is superior.

See, everything in Skyrim sucks. Every organization you can align yourself with is falling apart. Literally every single one.

That's the point.

To summarize:

The Companions (equivalent to the Fighters' Guild) are about a dozen strong, literally cursed, and their most beloved leader gets murdered very early in the storyline.

The College of Winterhold (equivalent to the Mages' Guild, not to the Arcane University) has seemingly only been saved from collapsing into the sea because a master of Restoration fused himself with the structure itself when the Sea of Ghosts tried to tear it down a little under a century ago and his presence is constantly physically "healing" the foundation.

The Thieves' Guild has lost the favor of every possible patron deity, having been outright cursed by Nocturnal after one of her Nightingales murdered another and stole the gift she offers her champion, while the boon that the organization's founder claimed from her in ages past (the cowl) is missing.

The Dark Brotherhood has been all but completely dismantled, the Night Mother's tomb in Bravil having been raided and struggling to persist without a Listener for over a decade; the bodies of the Night Mother's children have been lost and she's essentially being smuggled from region to region in an attempt to find a safe place to continue operations.

The Empire itself has been kneecapped, forced into a traumatic treaty by a fascist regime determined to strike the beliefs and culture of anyone not Altmer off the face of the planet; the Thalmor have gone so far as to torture and radicalize the figurehead leader of the Nords in order to use their own nationalism and superiority against the Empire, sparking a civil war that will further weaken the Empire and allow the Aldmerri Dominion to destroy it wholecloth.

This extends out into the rest of the world, too! We have confirmed existence of Hist-deaf Argonians. The Dunmer are floundering to recover after the quadruple-whammy that is the fall of the Triumverate, the destruction of Vivec City when Baar Dau finally made impact, the Red Year, and the Argonian uprising. The Bosmer are literally endangered due to habitat loss following a super-isolationist cultural shift due to wars with the Khajiit and Altmer. The Void Nights were devastating to Khajiit culture and population in ways that have yet to be fully explained.

The world is falling apart. Everything is dying.

And then Alduin shows up.

We all kind of talk about Alduin carrying on as World-Eater through the course of the Skyrim storyline like it's him being a piece of shit, since he'd started it ages ago and was just displaced in time to land on the Last Dragonborn's head in the Fourth Era, but I don't think that's the case.

Based on the state of things, I think Alduin arrived right on time. I think it's the end of the world. The only reason he "should" be stopped is because the Last Dragonborn has the capacity to stop the world from ending in a more down-to-earth sense than just defeating Alduin: they can't save everyone, but they can "fix" every single organization that's holding "the world" together.

They can align with the Imperials and keep the civil war from further crippling them, keeping the Empire from being too weak to push back against the Aldmerri Dominion.

They can save the College of Winterhold, the only group in the right place at the right time to stop the Eye of Magnus from opening, and in doing so make sure that the Psijics are able to put it somewhere nobody else can find it.

They can lead the Companions, cure the curse for those members who don't want to run with Hircine after death, which bolsters their spirits enough to keep doing what they can even when everyone else is trying to kill each other. A single neutral martial force in the middle of a civil war.

They can regain Nocturnal's trust for the Thieves' Guild, restore the Nightingales, and in doing so they can return the luck that was stolen from them as punishment for Mercer Frey's transgression. They can even reclaim the Crown of Barenziah and award the guild with a paragon to increase their newly-regained luck.

They can hear the Night Mother, becoming Listener for the Dark Brotherhood to restore the balancing force of Sithis in the world, purify the most broken Sanctuary the Brotherhood has ever had, and finish a story set into motion way back in the Third Era—Emperor Titus Mede II is murdered under the order of a Motierre, a descendant of a mark the Brotherhood specifically kept from dying during the Oblivion Crisis.

The Last Dragonborn can't do anything outside Skyrim—there's nothing they can do for the Argonians or the Bosmer or the Khajiit, and they can only do very little for the Dunmer via work in Solstheim—but they can work with every single guild or guild-adjacent group, strengthening the Empire to stand against the biggest threat to Tamrielic culture since the First Era, and in doing so they can make it so the world isn't ready for Alduin to eat it.

The Hero of Kvatch exists when Tamriel, and presumably Nirn as a whole is in the prime of its life, that's what makes the Oblivion Crisis such a big deal. This is a world that isn't ready to give up, it still has the strength to fight, it just needs someone standing at the head to direct it. The Last Dragonborn comes into the story when everything is falling apart and nothing really feels worthwhile, when it's hard to see why the world is worth saving. They have the chance to prove that there's still some life left here, that the world isn't too far gone to save—Alduin arrived right on time, it's the Last Dragonborn's job to change that.

I can see how coming from Oblivion to Skyrim would feel disappointing and hollow, but I'm pretty sure that's literally the point of the story.

Oblivion tells you the world is worth saving because it's got so much left to live for, even with the odds stacked so high against it. Skyrim asks you whether a world that's dying is still a world worth saving, and it's up to you to prove that it is.

[pucktrinksy]

very funny to me when people act like animal farm and 1984 are revolutionary anti government texts that the Powers That Be dont want you to read when they have literally been a part of every standard middle/highschool english lit cirriculum in the usa and beyond for decades. precisely because theyre such convenient primers to propagandize that Commies = Bad. the government is quite literally making kids read them

[pucktrinksy]

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

[pucktrinksy]

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

[pucktrinksy]

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

[pucktrinksy]

[pucktrinksy]

Me: I'm going to look at horse forums, I bet the drama there is so funny

Me after 4 hours of horse forums: Damn....those people really love and care about their horses...

[pucktrinksy]

Trying to read bisexual male representation into older American media is kind of a complicated proposition because there was a long stretch where, as long as a male character was textually attracted to women, any expressions of attraction toward men were automatically assumed to be jokes in poor taste, so you could get away with male supporting characters – and occasionally even protagonists – whose bisexuality was just barely subtext, as long as you played it off as them having a weird sense of humour.

Then quite suddenly (and I want to say it happened in the early 1980s, though I can’t strongly substantiate that), that stopped being acceptable all at once, and those types of characters basically dropped off the face of the planet for about two decades.

Am I totally out to lunch here, or did something happen circa 1983 to account for that?

(To anticipate the obvious response, yes, I’m aware of when the AIDS crisis happened, but I suspect ascribing it solely to that is reductive – the period when you could get away with ironically bisexual dudes in popular media was pretty lengthy, and spanned decades when mlm were even more strongly stigmatised than they were at the height of the AIDS crisis.)

[pucktrinksy]

T-minus 10 until Elon unironically retweets something like this.

the alleged shooter was known to play a game about assassinating a powerful figure by jumping over him and touching an axe that made the bridge underneath disappear, dropping the victim into a pool of lava

[pucktrinksy]

[pucktrinksy]

Ahhhh I have so much cool new shit to listen to now!

bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

[pucktrinksy]

I too have questions about the goose.

[pucktrinksy]

Things we already know about the UHC shooter, mostly from his social media:

- He has a bachelor’s and Master’s in computer science from an Ivy League school.

- He has read several books on chronic back pain.

- His profile banner includes a photo of an x-ray for back surgery. (Spinal fusion I believe.)

- Based on messages from his family, he dropped off the map a few months ago and they’ve been worried about him.

- His political beliefs are a bit all over the map; without doing a deep-dive my take is a pretty average centrist tech bro who’s read too much evopsych.

I’m a bit worried that, as the left is so fond of doing, people will turn on him immediately for that last part. Let’s not do that! Can we agree not to do that? Because here’s the important thing:

He’s a victim of the system, just like we all are. The system pushed him past his limits, and he lashed out at it. The details of his political leanings don’t actually matter - what matters is that you don’t have to be a radical leftist to lash out at a health insurance company. That’s shows how bad things are broken, that a guy who seems fairly privileged in most respects, with no strong political motive, could be beaten down and broken to the point of doing this. He has two Ivy League computer science degrees and yet had nothing left to lose.

This is a class war that doesn’t differentiate between the working class, middle class, even upper middle class. We’re all dog food for the 1% to chew up and spit out. Even if he turned out to be hardcore right wing, in this one single issue we’re united with him.

Everyone’s been talking about how this guy has seen insane levels of support across the political spectrum - which means nobody should be shocked that he could have come from any spot on that spectrum. I’m hoping the fact that he doesn’t seem super far left or right politically will make it easier to keep that unity, but the left just looooves our purity tests. Let’s maybe not this time.

[pucktrinksy]

As more news about that guy who shot that other guy breaks, please do keep in mind that cops always lie. Please do keep in mind that any information given to the press by law enforcement cannot be considered in any way reliable until it's been corroborated.