#but it's not a moral act either way.

[burins]

I know this is the Take Personal Responsibility for Systemic Issues website, but I keep seeing weirdly guilt trippy posts about libraries and ebook licenses, which are a labyrinth from hell and not actually something you personally need to feel guilty about. here are a few facts about ebook licenses you may not know:

in Libby/Overdrive, which currently operates in most US public libraries, ebook licenses vary widely in how much they cost and what their terms are. some ebooks get charged per use, some have a set number of uses before the license runs out, and others have a period of time they're good for (usually 1-2 years) with unlimited checkouts during that period before they expire. these terms are set by the publisher and can also vary from book to book (for instance, a publisher might offer two types of licenses for a book, and we might buy one copy of a book with a set number of uses we want to have but know won't move as much, and another copy with a one year unlimited license for a new bestseller we know will be really moving this year.)

you as a patron have NO way of knowing which is which.

ebook licenses are very expensive compared to physical books! on average they run about 60 bucks a pop, where the same physical book would cost us $10-15 and last us five to ten years (or much longer, if it's a hardcover that doesn't get read a lot.)

if your library uses Hoopla instead, those are all pay per use, which is why many libraries cap checkouts at anywhere between 2-10 per month.

however.

this doesn't mean you shouldn't use ebooks. this doesn't mean you should feel guilty about checking things out! we buy ebook licenses for people to use them, because we know that ebook formats are easier for a lot of people (more accessible, more convenient, easier for people with schedules that don't let them get into the library.) these are resources the library buys for you. this is why we exist. you don't need to feel guilty about using them!

things that are responsible for libraries being underfunded and having to stretch their resources:

government priorities and systemic underfunding of social services that don't turn a profit and aren't easily quantified

our society's failure to value learning and pleasure reading for their own sake

predatory ebook licensing models

things that are not responsible for libraries being underfunded:

individual patron behavior

I promise promise promise that your personal library use is not making or breaking your library's budget. your local politicians are doing that. capitalism is doing that. you are fine.

(if you want to help your local library, the number one thing you can do is to advocate for us! talk to your city or county government about how much you like the library. or call or write emails or letters. advocate for us locally. make sure your state reps know how important the library is to you. there are local advocacy groups in pretty much every state pushing for library priorities. or just ask your local librarian. we like to answer questions!

also, if you're in Massachusetts, bill h3239 would make a huge difference in letting us negotiate ebook prices more fairly. tell your rep to vote for it!)

[jahiera]

pondering on a meta diving into Gale's abstract brand of selflessness (willingness to go away to a corner of the world to die so that none of the faceless masses will be harmed by his mistake) vs his personal selfishness (willingness to stick by tav despite being repulsed by tiefling camp murder + general vocal approval or interest in accumulating more power) and Gale's status as someone who is good aligned but generally ineffectual at enforcing actual good (the way that wyll or karlach will actually leave the party) which is fascinating for a fairly good-aligned person. just love when the Good Guy is actually kind of fucking weird. edit: tumblr cut off my tags Okay. and how all of this ties back in an interesting way to his relationship and power imbalance with mystra. he was wronged, deeply, but he also desires still that ... status / closeness to divinity in some way, by her influence. Gale thinks that he would be a better god simply by virtue of his mortality but he cannot escape the appeal of holding himself apart from others and being more than, greater than, something closer to godliness and thus inherently removed from mortal values and standards of right and wrong, which the gods themselves don't adhere to in the same way.

[thedreadvampy]

legitimately insane how to some people, "we should wipe out this ethnic group that we've violently constrained to a ghetto because they're just genetically more violent and dangerous" is a reasonable and justifiable statement but it's Nazi Rhetoric to say something like, "it's bad that Israeli civilians are being killed but acknowledging that as tragic includes acknowledging that the almost daily state-sanctioned murder of civilians by the Israeli government is also tragic and unacceptable"

btw guys speaking of Nazi shit - can we check in, alongside what's been done to Palestinians in the last 75 years, what's the Israeli government's take on the Azerbaijani government's newest round of ethnic cleansing of Armenians? oh are the Israeli government's actions maybe not determined by Jewish identity, but by a commitment to colonial supremacy which puts them on the same page as other violently genocidal states like Azerbaijan, the US, and the UK? god can you Even Imagine?

(framing speaking against Israeli war crimes as inherently antisemitic requires understanding the Israeli state as representing all Jewish people, when it doesn't even represent all Israelis.

framing Israeli war crimes as synonymous with Jewish identity is pretty fucked up if we're being honest. I don't think that controlling water and power and movement for a captive population and shooting children dead for throwing stones is an inherent value of Judaism, any more than I think the torture carried out at Guantanamo Bay is an inherent value of Christianity - in both cases they're atrocities carried out by a far right genocidal government using religious identity as a shield.

Calling statements like "Israel is committing genocide against the people it's displaced" inherently antisemitic is doing more to further the idea that all Jewish people are associated with Israel than saying "the Israeli government is doing war crimes," which is a statement of fact about a country that exists and does war crimes. Is criticism of Israel as a nation often used as cover for antisemitism? Absolutely. Does that mean the Israeli government isn't doing literal war crimes repeatedly, on record, while talking publicly about scrubbing an ethnic group off the map? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well in the last 48 hours they've definitely cut off water and power to almost 600,000 civilians and allegedly used white phosphorus against civilians so in an extremely factual and unambiguous way yeah man those are Literal War Crimes whoever does them.)

[gxlden-angels]

do you have any thoughts on the story of abraham and isaac? my parents talk about it and praise abraham for being willing to kill his son which..... scares me to say the least, and i'd love to hear your perspective as someone who seems more well-adjusted

Where I am now, it disgusts me more than anything. The interpretation of "I'm willing to sacrifice your life if I was told to" feels like the step before "I put you into this world and I can take you out of it." It's entitlement to a child, who is an independent individual, just because they are dependent on you for survival. I prefer the interpretation of understanding the actions you're taking and the reasons why (like how there's multiple religions that don't eat pork because it was so unsafe to eat at the time), especially if it's at someone else's expense.

Where I was in the thick of it all, it gave me morbid comfort that scares me now. I had fantasies of being a martyr for the church and the idea of being the next Isaac was just so appealing. Being a hand-selected sacrifice chosen by the Good Lord Himself? Sign me the fuck up, babey!

I think if I admitted that to my family, they'd be horrified.

It's another one of those stories or beliefs where I think the majority of christians just regurgitate what they've heard. It's a point of pride and devotion, but there's no personal reflection or cross-cultural awareness of it. Lean not unto your own understanding and whatnot. It's the potential that scares me the most, like the Quiverfull movement with the Duggars or Turpins. I'm sure there's stories now, but I can't remember them off the top of my head

(Also I will be telling my therapist someone on Tumblr called me "more well-adjusted" thank you anon)

[shopcat]

omfg people really need to calm the fuck down about people disliking some characters like it's not always a deep seated prejudice or an inability to empathise it's because we are human beings with our own experiences and normal biases and fictional characters are not real and it doesn't matter if you don't like them for pretty much any reason at all and doesn't make you suddenly x just because the character is y it just means you don't like them. obviously other indications of actual prejudice or a repeated pattern mean something else entirely but you can just dislike a character because get this they're a character and not a real person. you can dislike real people too even it's almost like we've got free will. please oh please can we get out of the torture chamber together.

[brittlebutch]

Desperately trying to make sense of Alex's motivations in Season Two and you know, I do eventually have to wonder if maybe Alex wasn't actually lying in the majority of those tapes.

Like, we tend to assume that Alex's motivations have been a consistent throughline since the college years, but do we actually know that that's the case? Do we know for sure that Alex was acting in deliberate, calculated ways in 2006; or could it be that he's telling the Truth on those olds tapes when he says he's blacking out and can't remember what's happening to anyone? After all, if we're assuming that Season 2 Alex's motivations are the exact same as his motives in Season 3, then it doesn't make any sense at all that he spend months working with Jay to try to find Amy; Season 3 Alex would have attempted to kill Jay like, on sight just to get things over with as quickly as possible and contain the spread of contamination as best as he could.

But, maybe, if Alex really had been separated from Amy after the events of the 04-04-10 tape, and if he really doesn't know where she is, then maybe that could make things start to make more sense. Maybe he really had been watching Jay's channel, and seeing Jay start going through the same things he went through in college without things devolving into violence and disappearances, and wondered if things maybe could play out differently this time. Maybe he really did send that tape to Jay to ask him for help, maybe he really was just trying to find Amy.

But then, instead of actually being helpful, Jay makes it extremely clear that he's a lot more interested in stalking Alex than he is in finding Amy. Alex asked for help, and instead there's a bunch of masked dudes on Jay's heels that keep attacking him, Jay is breaking into his house, stealing his things, leading the Operator right to him all over again, keeps trying to get other people (namely: Jessica -- if Alex is being honest when he says that his call reassuring her that Amy had been found was an effort to make Sure she stayed away from everything that was happening) involved; and instead of anything getting better, instead of anyone finding Amy, things are just getting worse all over again.

It's not until after the incident at the tunnel that things seem to start rapidly devolving. Rather than a calculated attempt to finally follow through with his need to curb the spread of contamination, this is very clearly an outburst of rage and terror. Alex's "I told you not to follow me" line in conjunction with Jay speculating that Alex didn't know who that guy was, to me, pretty firmly seems to speak to Alex having mistaken that stranger for Jay. From his point of view, Alex knows that Jay and totheark know where he live, have broken in before, he suspects that Jay stole a key to make it easier to get into his house, and he's been followed on the daily for months -- Alex is sitting at the tunnel because he doesn't know where else he can go without being constantly surveilled, hunted, and assaulted. And instead of getting a moment by himself to breathe, Jay followed him out there all over again (it feels like Alex looks directly at the camera in Jay's footage of him from this day; he knew for a fact that Jay was there), and then to make matters worse now 'Jay' won't even keep his distance anymore.

So Alex lashes out. And it's not until afterwards that he looks down and finally recognizes that this wasn't Jay -- it was someone completely innocent. Things have finally reached the low point he was at in college all over again; maybe even worse this time. If Alex doesn't remember attacking anyone in college, but he was at least partially conscious of it this time, then things have reached an entirely new rock bottom, they've reached an absolute point of no return.

He has no idea what happened to Amy, and he's spent months trying to find her with no hint of where she could be; he doesn't know where Jay actually is or what additional trouble he could be causing at this point; he does know that now innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire (in regards to the stranger in the tunnel, and also Jessica now that Jay has her phone number, and the untold number of people Jay got involved when he started posting videos to the Marble Hornets channel); things are spiraling out of control and there's no one left to ask for help. The situation isn't getting better, it's getting worse; things aren't getting easier to handle, they're just getting more out of hand; the negative impact is spreading and who knows how much further it can still go?

So, Alex decides to go scorched earth. He disfigures the body with the rock either to hide evidence or to make sure the guy would actually stay dead and not just get back up to start his own cycle of contamination in a few years. He tries to give Jay one last chance to back off, and Jay instead admits he's been talking to Jessica, acts obstinate and lies about not having Alex's spare key, and then breaks into Alex's house a second time (minimum). If Alex doesn't stop him now, who will? Alex met with Jay planning to kill the others, and then himself, so he could put a stop to this once and for all and keep things from getting any worse than they already were.

Maybe it makes a lot more sense if, rather than being a strangely incomprehensible detour on what should have been a straight path, the events of Season Two were the breaking point that put Alex on that path to begin with.

[shiraishi-kanade]

Guys. Guys I think in our search for a dad figure in media we all forgot that Ken has like. Never been that great to begin with.

Like he's not evil he's not a bad father nor he is a bad person and he definitely does have good intentions. However if you don't think letting a distressed teen vent to you in despair while you secretly put him on a phone with his partner who you know he has mixed feelings about & just broke up with when you're in a position of trust isn't even a little bit shitty and sus think again.

[ricoka]

sometimes I wish you could post an opinion on a fandom blog without inviting a whole witch hunt or being accused of causing drama but alas

[fizzingwizard]

"My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly. The consequence of this, upon a mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced as Mrs. Brandon’s, was but too natural. She resigned herself at first to all the misery of her situation; and happy had it been if she had not lived to overcome those regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned. But can we wonder that, with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her[...] she should fall?" - Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

[asteralien]

you know the personality type thing was overdone and annoying but at least when we had mbti stuff, y’all understood that people having vastly different emotional reactions to things was normal and okay and good, instead of acting like we all have to be happy whimsical hope-drenched silly little bunnies all the time or else we’re not good people.

[archiephd]

man if you're voting for biden just to vote against trump, just say that. we have got to get over this harm reduction shit when what we really mean is harm reduced for us, me, mr american and literally nobody else on this bitch of an earth. if the only and most emphasized thing we do to reduce the harm our president and their platform does to the living is vote, we are reducing nothing. for anyone or ourselves, because voting alone doesn't challenge the trajectory of anything. it buys 4 more years before we have to do it all again, if that. thinking this way is what promises having to think this way again, and again, and again and again. in 2024, who american leftists vote for 1 day of the year matters little compared to what we do the other 364.

[shiroselia]

Friendly reminder because I’ve seen it happen before and we all should not be eager to sweep this shit under the rug just because it MIGHT (Keyword Might) end alright

If Helena (and any of the other people affected by what is almost certainly budget cuts, which is why I doubt this might actually end as well as we want it to) gets rehired, that does Not erase the fact that we have yet to hear anything official from SSE other than the fucking instagram comment that doesn’t count, because it Shouldn’t, about this situation, and that they have completely skrewed over people with the way they’ve been assumedly handled it from what we as outsiders can puzzle together, and that even if this might end up being overturned because SSE got direct confirmation that people want to spend their money on them (keyphrase Spend Money) it does not erase their actions and it doesn’t erase the shitty business principals we’re currently seeing

All of the people affected deserve better than this absolute flipflop bullshit, and we as consumers deserve an official proper announcement

[lazer-cannon-deth-sentence]

I just wanna see myself as a person worth saving tbh tbh

[adachiame]

The Village and Oni Killer Bloodline

There was once long long ago, humans who could face oni and monsters without a shred of fear. This hearkens back to the well known stories involving oni slaying known and written about. The Tale of Minamoto Yorimitsu and their 4 Heavenly Retainers, one of which is synonymous to slaying oni, Watanabe no Tsuna.

Now where were these renowned in monster killing clans? Some could say that their oni slaying was folk tale, but this was very much fact. Then where were their bloodline? Hunted down to extinction? Simply dying out? No it was something more human in occurrence, envy, fear, resentment was the end of the once proud clans like Minamoto and Watanabe. Weak people fear those that are extraordinarily strong and thus will want to remove them from the world.

The Watanabe Clan was scattered just like the Minamoto Clan. Most scattering into obscurity and blending with the rest. Save a certain grouping of the clan, who knew that the world needed someone like Watanabe no Tsuna, aware of demons that still plagued the land.

Thus began a painstakingly long effort to create a Watanabe no Tsuna of the new era. They had oni repelling wards, scent masking, and the like to conceal their village from detection from oni. They located a cave early on and built a shrine there, and began cultivating a flower there near the beginning of the village's inception.

The Violet Spider Lily, said to have had a hand in creating the monster slaying bloodline amongst the village. However this was only partially true, because back then, humanity was a lot hardier in those times, humans in the current era could not handle the properties, carrying a steep mortality rate and not knowing the exact refining method of the drug back then. However the mortality rate was lower in young children, especially those that were coming of age.

So began the long tradition of young boys who were coming of age, to be taken to the shrine that housed both the flowers, and Watanabe no Tsuna's meiko, the Onikiri.

Over time the hilt of the blade had degraded to nothing but the blade and it's tsuba, the blade itself rusted over the centuries but carried a certain ominous presence that never has deteriorated, where those that locked gaze on the blade, their blood ran cold and the passed down instruction to never allow blood to touch the blade.

When the young boys would arrive here, they would be told that they were carrying out a great honor. Unfortunately the truth was much darker, few would be unaffected by the flower and return back to the village with small celebration.

Most however would end up comatose due to flower, however death seemed to be something that came much later, as their bodies seemed slowdown dramatically, their pulse slowed to an almost standstill, their bodies grew colder due to slowed blood flow, their breaths slowed to almost seem like they had stopped breathing, when in reality, it was much more drawn out(like say over the course of a half and hour) and subtle.

This meant that most needed to be kept watch over, their aging also slowing dramatically. Some would wake up a year or few later, only having aged fully a second or so with heightened physical traits but nothing amazing. The rest however save one exception, would end up passing away in their comas, something that was kept hidden from the children. They were buried in the furthest depths of the cave behind the shrine.

The sole exception had been a young boy 85 years ago, he had survived the treatment longer than any other. His body maybe having aged maybe a few years since then. He was well taken care of over the decades, that snow white hair was rather beautiful to see and comb through... However whether he lived or died was ultimately relied solely on him, so all the caretakers in the shrine could do was wait and check his breathing to make sure he was still alive.

[rapha-reads]

My mother cheating on my father with a guy 30 years younger than her and when we tell her it's disgusting and unacceptable she tries to justify herself like "Oh, this is so Christian moral and catechism puritanism from you" and "This is the patriarchy that's talking".

.... Are... Are you trying to justify your CHEATING on your husband since 1990 on feminism and freedom? ABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT, YOU WILL. She thinks she's not in the wrong because, what, fuck her Christian education and she's a woman, she can do anything she wants ? Is she FUCKING KIDDING ME???

YOU CHEATED, YOU ARE CHEATING, YOU'VE BEEN CHEATING FOR MONTHS, YOU FUCKING JERK.

You hurt your husband, you threw him out of the house, you hurt your children, you think you can come back to my father's village? Your youngest daughter is TWELVE, and you're hurting her so much she's bottling everything in so well she could win an Oscar already, AND YOU THINK EVERYTHING IS OKAY AND YOU HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING WRONG OR MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE ?

What sort of fucked up imaginary world are you living in that cheating is acceptable. For heaven's sake. She had the galls to tell me "adultery is banal, it's ordinary, everybody is doing it, it's not serious; don't be so dramatic". *screams* Hi, hey, if everybody is jumping off the bridge, are you going to jump too? Have you not PAID ATTENTION? Wars, murders, catastrophes have been done because of CHEATING, it is not a MODEL, it's a warning!!! Wtf, wtf, WTF.

I'm tired, I'm so tired. I have a thesis to write and I can't bring myself to work because my mother is throwing away all her life, acting in a shameful and unacceptable way, and disrespecting her family. My grandfather and my uncle and aunts aren't aware yet, but when they learn, oh boy, they might jump in a plane for Morocco to go yell at her.

Anyway. I'm having a real bad time these days and my only solace, my only salvation, are my sisters and my brother.