#can't think shit outside of the reactionary

[nibelmundo]

Et puis préserver mes brouillons... enfin brouillons. .. mieux ! des rendus... rendus émotifs ! ... déjà en presque formes venues ... des dix vingt mille heures de travail. Que c’est des mises à jour . Ça se débrousse comme le temple d’Angkor. C’est de l’acharnement de terrassier... de terrassier d’ondes... tout petit trait de scalpel près, le temple fripe, effrite, s’efface. Vous attrapez plus rien, rien vient... C’est la magie. La plume est un scalpel de mage... de mage en terrasse... Tout est enfoui dans l’atmosphère... Faut fouiller plan par plan... souffler, oh si doucement que le sable envole... C’est horrible, n’est-ce pas, c’est horrible ... je veux dire de délicatesse d’effleurement... C’est un travail de fée c’est tout, où l’homme périt damné, perd l’âme, la bonne gentillesse, la bite, tout. .. tourne chiffe, lavette à songe, épuisée loque, hagard terrassier, titubeur de mirage à l’autre, brandit sa pauvre ardoise de tête, qu’il a vu des plans, la comète, passée de cent millions d’années... qu’il a dit qu’il a l’étincelle, du météore enfoui devant que la lune naisse. Oh ! c’est du tourment pas dicible ...

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Maudits Soupirs pour une autre fois

[blazehedgehog]

You hear about what's going on with Sam Procrastinates? What do you think of that?

I caught a whiff of it today, yeah. I'm sort of glad I'm mostly outside of that circle of influence. I know of a lot of those people, but I do not know them personally. I probably run my mouth on here too much and too freely for some of those types.

Especially seeing Sam get out there in front and be like "whoa whoa whoa whoa I'm trying to protect my business by distancing myself from leakers and bad actors" -- like, maybe I don't have the full context here, but trying to divorce yourself from leakers is a bit weird to me?

Keep in mind I'm coming at this from the perspective of being on Sonic Retro during the massive Sonic 4 leak, which lead Sega to partner with Sonic Retro. Some of the inroads paved during that partnership almost certainly lead to us getting Sonic Mania, given there are future Sonic Mania staff thanked in the credits for Sonic 4 Episode 2.

Like, I get trying to keep your nose clean. I try to do that, too. People get on my case for being spooked by emulation in my "Definitive Way to Play" videos, but people who really, actually know me, know that I've never had a problem with emulation ever in my entire life. Up until Tristan started buying me games to review for TSSZ, emulation was literally all I had. I could not afford games on my own, and I basically still can't. (I'm counting on next month's Twitch payout to cover my pre-order for Shadow Generations)

All of that is me trying to keep my nose clean. I've seen channels get shut down for talking too openly about emulation (particularly with setup tutorials), and even Discord servers are not as private as people think they are. The hammer can and will drop, and I'd rather my financial livelihood not be under it.

So I will never tell people to "just emulate it" in my videos and I have a rule against linking piracy material in my Discord. If you like me, and like my work, that's the way it's gotta be to protect that kind of stuff.

But that's on video. What I do in my personal life has no baring on that. I endeavor to capture all my footage from real consoles but I'm also living in a cramped little bedroom with maybe ten square feet of floor space right now, so I'm not digging out my Wii or my Saturn or my PS2 every time I have to capture footage of something. I emulate it.

I'm getting off topic. Shutting people out of your life because they don't align with your business is a bit extreme, to me. But again, I don't know the relationship there. At least in the clips Sam uses, he never seems very happy to have Shanny around, even though it's clear Shanny can and continued to join Sam's discord calls. I guess I just don't have any friends like that -- I either have personal friends, or... well, I just don't have very many "business friends." (Which depending on your view point, is or isn't a problem and one of the reasons my channel growth can be so sluggish)

So, like, whatever. Again, I dunno how a lot of that stuff goes. Ultimately, I guess I don't blame Sam for protecting his business, because again, I protect my business too, and it's clear Sam is more successful than I am.

I will say this, though, and I am about to step neck deep in the shit: I have never liked that Jaden Sonic Show dude. There was a time...

...Let's see... I had to dig around in Discord because I was so put off by this guy's videos I straight up erased them from my Youtube History, so this is the only way I even know I watched them:

I watched two or three of his videos around this time and this dude's tendency to just make stuff up, believe in bad sources, and push the worst rumors was infuriating. I would say it's not a stretch to claim he is eroding the overall intelligence of the Sonic fandom with his sensationalist, reactionary, straight up false information. He reminds me of the way I used to think about the game industry when I was 13, which is to say: deeply, deeply, deeply incorrect.

This is where I was going to pivot and say, "and he makes more money than Sam and I combined," because he has 150k+ subscribers. But according to SocialBlade, that doesn't seem to be true. Despite having 3x as many subs as Sam, SocialBlade claims The Sonic Show seems to make less than Sam Procrastinates.

I guess there are benefits to keeping your nose clean.

(And given I have a Youtube channel of my own, I have a vague idea how accurate these numbers are -- which is to say: I am not making $122 a month from Youtube, but I wish I was. I also understand why Sam is so protective of his channel's earnings, too)

Anyway, all of this to say, Sam seems in the right here. I do get a whiff of, like, the puritan Japanese Idol culture from some of this, where if you're a J-Idol you can't be caught drinking, or smoking, or even swearing. You have to maintain total purity or else you fall victim to a witch hunt, and there's a weird amount of finger pointing going on here that I don't know if it was deserved. Sam shouldn't have even needed to make a video like this, but like I said, that Sonic Show guy kind of seems like a vulture.

I would not put stock in what that dude has to say.

[anarchywoofwoof]

internet leftists are incredible. the moment someone who is fully and completely aligned with their world view even remotely tries to step outside of the mandated moral line of thinking, you lose your shit.

there is a reason some of you are painted as emotional reactionaries. and that's coming from someone who has advocated for some pretty wild and radical shit. you have no room or capacity for anyone who doesn't 100% align with your way of thinking. not even that. you can't tolerate the idea that anyone doesn't meet your moral standard.

sorry to lash out, but some of you need to go to fucking bed already. it's been a long weekend of making sure everyone knows you have the moral high ground. one day you won't be in your early 20s trying to prove to the world who you are and people's opinions on the internet won't incise you so terribly.

[canmom]

Feel free to ignore considering it’s a very messy topic. Why do you think SFF communities (especially book communities) attracts so many bad faith actors?

my apologies anon, I took a minute to answer this one.

I think the most parsimonious answer is that they don't, especially, it's just that bad faith actors are basically everywhere. like, is it really true that there are more bad faith actors in SFF than in say, music? film? 'literary' fiction, or other genres like crime or erotica? i think if I was as immersed in any of those worlds as I am in SFF, I'd know about just as many stories of petty cruelty, exploitation, bizarre dramas...

still, some speculations about factors playing into it, that aren't necessarily specific to sci-fi.

the thing about SFF is that it's a subculture, and one that's pretty niche. not quite as niche as like, BASE jumping or something lol - most bookshops around here will have an SFF shelf, and obviously SFF films and games are almost as mainstream as entertainment gets - but for dedicated sci-fi fans it's seen as a sort of refuge of 'people like them' (generally some variety of autistic nerd archetype), and there is a lot of anxiety that comes with maintaining that.

this sort of attitude is commonly associated with the old guard of reactionary fandom - the infamous Puppies - but I think by now we've seen that the current overtly queer/progressive/whatever you wanna call it generation is just as capable of lashing out at perceived intruders. (for an obvious example, this kind of sentiment was a major factor in the Isabel Fall incident.)

besides that, what are people fighting for anyway? what are the 'stakes' of scifi/fantasy fandom? intuitively, they're tiny. but...

within any niche subculture, it is possible to achieve a certain degree of fame and influence. if you can play the rhetorical game, you can establish yourself as a microcelebrity/tastemaker, promote your friends and make a show of casting out the enemies, and set up the rules of the discourse... in your small bubble. until sooner or later the wind changes and you get knocked off the pedestal, anyway. so part of it is just people wanting to rule an insular little fiefdom.

but then there's also like... 'being an author'. SFF lit is not especially popular these days. you can't really make a living from short stories anymore (too few magazines that pay, too hard to get in, too little reward). however, if you get very, very lucky, make the right connections (probably at Clarion), you might just be able to get some novels published, and maaaybe they will find an audience and earn out their advances... and if everything goes perfectly, you might just manage to make a reasonable middle class sort of income.

and that's not nothing! especially if other forms of work are inaccessible. i have a friend whose circumstances were changed very dramatically when they got a big advance on their novel. but ultimately I don't think it's about that, nobody would sensibly try to become an author for the money, it's an obviously terrible gamble.

however, within the subculture, being a published author is a still big deal. it's a sense that you've 'made it', people will look up to you, or resent you if they don't feel you deserve it. there is a strong divide between 'authors' and 'fans' that structures interactions between the two. I don't get the impression that this is actually very fun for the authors, but it's easy to see that from outside and think "I wish I was worthy of that kind of respect too".

much the same applies in other fields - for example animation. maybe it pays shit and demand insane hours with zero job security... but for the fans, you come to have immense admiration for the 'real animators' and want to feel you could be their equal one day. and people are willing to sacrifice a lot for the sake of that idea of accomplishment, even if it's still very unlikely.

so with all that in mind... science fiction authors are usually science fiction fans. there's not really any other reason you'd write it lmao. so could speculate that for the ones who have 'made it', the situation is still precarious, or seems like it. there's little guarantee you'll get published again if a book doesn't sell. and you depend on a good reputation to stay in the game. so you have a bit of power (enough to go to your head) and fear of losing that power and sense of accomplishment... that's probably sufficient to motivate a whole lot of horrendous behaviour that would seem incomprehensible from outside.

none of this is really specific to science fiction/fantasy. but then I don't think SFF is really all that unique.

[xxxpu55yslay3rxxx]

Here's the promised rationalism post. This ones gonna be more about the modern community, which I'll classify as LessWrong and diaspora types.

First I'll start off with the criticisms of the criticisms of the rationalist community on tumblr. In other words, I'm 'shitting' on the people talking 'shit'.

Focusing on tumblr cause it's my only exposure to that community, even indirect. Anyways let's start:

Rationalists (rats) are seen as a lame nerd community and certain parts of tumblr are dicks to anyone lame

Tumblr has a culture which users are very defensive about. Rats have a habit of criticizing. Therefore tumblr will start criticizing rats as the former really don't like their shit being exposed

This last one is rare. Some people don't like rats here because they think rats don't engage in real philosophy. Reasonable criticism but I find it annoying. If you talk about how you get your philosophy from actual books but don't wanna help people getting into it, then that's just shitty bragging.

I'm not saying criticisms can't be valid, it's just that a lot of people think they're criticizing legitimately when in reality it's usually for the above shitty reasons. At least that's what it seems to me.

Now before anyone criticizes me, I will point out the negative parts of the community too. This is gonna be more about the rat community as a whole (LW, EA and the like).

Let's see:

Apparently one of the criticisms is that the rat community from the beginning had a huge boys club bias. In fact, the majority demographic was WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Now I can't really confirm that but I do see traces of that.

This one's more solid. The other criticism is that some rat communities promote reactionary ideas. This seems more plausible as there are many rats who merge rationalism with right wing ideals.

Mind you this is criticism of online rat communities as a whole. On tumblr I noticed things are more diverse and not clean cut so this doesn't necessarily apply. That doesn't mean there aren't right rats here, just saying the community dynamics are different here.

Disclaimers:

I barely knew what a rationalist was except for this past month or so. Therefore I'm making this commentary as an outsider.

I don't give a shit about AGI risk and I find it one of the weirder things to be included in the rationalist community.

I'll make a short post about actual rationalist philosophy after this one. Mind you it's gonna be very personal and will include how I feel about it rather than some serious analysis. Bear with me, I just got familiar with that philosophy this year

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Yes public spaces are a problem and why we have pride pedo parades and summer of george riots in the first place. The problem is we wont get real privatization where I cant physically remove all the scum of the earth from my own neighborhood without the police and progressive courts running cover for them and encouraging anarcho tyranny to continue. Also does vulgar media include all the cultural marxism thats brainwashing minors into chopping off their wieners and breasts and become lifetime big pharma addicts because tiktok said so

I keep being told to return and post on tumblr again but time and time again i find tired, boring shit like this in my inbox - however, partly because i entertain it. I wonder if this is just the post-modern, angry audience I cultivated from maintaining a boring reactionary umbrage outlet here in 2011-2016. "real privatization" "cultural marxism" "anarcho tyranny" what do these things even mean outside the context of partisan meme warfare less retarded reactionaries injected into an abortive discourse over a decade ago, still phoned in by aging ancap anons such as yourself.

Do any of you even read books or take in art? Let alone, make anything? or do you react to the same petty culture war shit and play videogames. Do you ever grow and evolve? I don't mean like, become a commie faggot or what5ever, but like even intellectually explore what goes into some of these insipid buzzphrases like "anarcho tyranny" out of some curiosity to even try and better understand and critique these things in a way that doesnt mystify what they are.

With twitter dying at the hands of a megalomaniac intent on making that platform into something like a crypto exchange/everything depot idk what to do with my time. Is anything intellectually stimulating ever happening on here. Like I can't be bothered with arguing shit like your anon ask anymore because its the purview of 20-somethings. I exhausted the limit of achieving understanding by bashing skulls with other illiterates several years ago. Where is the jouissance in that?

Anyway

Recently started reading some of the novels of Albert Camus. The stranger is wild because its a pieds-noir attempt to write in an "american style" so its like, abrupt, to-the-point sentence structure. I find myself inspired by this literary gimmick or at least endeared to the manner one outside america attempts to reproduce an american perspective. This is what I was thinking of moments before idly opening this inbox and sighing at your ask

[runthepockets]

I don't like bitching about queer spaces as often as I do, but I also don't feel as if I really have a choice. Like no one is thinking of the straight black working class trans guy who wants a transgender girlfriend and to fulfill the role of fatherhood. No one is thinking about the guy who grew up idolizing Rob Dyrdek or Tom Hardy, no one is thinking about the guy in a house show basement starting mosh pits because he's so angry and dejected about every aspect of his life, no one is thinking about the guys who're in jail for fighting or guys who live in the gym or the guys who get bullied and harrassed or anything. People just kinda wanna mold trans guys into whatever makes them most comfortable at any given time, and that usually boils down to skinny hairless white dudes in porn or being dress up dolls and accessories and I respect myself too much to let those be my only options.

The queer community just has never been there when I needed it, so I don't consider myself apart of it. Many call me self hating for this but I disagree. No one in their right mind abides by any routine or community that doesn't serve them and that's all this is for me. People will push me out and alienate me and tell me "just go hang out in the straight world" and then shit and piss and cry and throw up when I actually do end up doing such things. Like y'all had your chance and you fumbled every opportunity, I just can't bring myself to care about anything queer outside of protecting the marginalized from reactionaries and fascists, and that's my choice. I'm a grown man and I can do as I please.

[fierceawakening]

Agreed with what you reblogged about how "JKR was radicalized over time" isn't meant to absolve her transphobia or anything. It reminds me of how some people have been weirdly resistant to the idea that the far right is radicalizing directionless young men. No, the point isn't "those poor Nazis deserve your personal kindness and bear no responsibility for their actions," it's (to quote Cartman's impression of Edward James Olmos) "how do I reach these kids?" Specifically so they're less likely to get sucked into reactionary bullshit in the first place?

Yeah. Also like even with "the poor Nazi"... yeah, that person probably IS miserable? It doesn't magically make being a Nazi all right to say "hm, I bet that person's life sucks in ways my life as a white person with friends of all different religions, sexualities, ethnicities, and cultures does not suck?" I get to learn neat things and have people like me. Nazi bro not so much.

And that actually does seem like it's likely the case with JKR. She does NOT sound happy. She sounds like someone desperately clinging tighter and tighter to her TERF social circle because (she thinks) it's all she has and the idea of lacking a social support system at all is terrifying.

(Cos she doesn't realize that... while a lot of us would mistrust her, a lot of people would take "you know, I got tired of my TERF friends being so mean. Never mind that, what do you transcultists really think?" as a blessing and welcome her. When you're in a cult you can't imagine that most Outsiders don't actually hate you, they hate the dumb shit you said.)

[paleoleigh]

hello, what would you say to someone who very much thinks about stepping away from the renewal movement bc our fandom keeps being associated with slavery, racism and zionism? and people just take it at word value and feel morally better that they don't consume that media taika did while probably watching 1665 tv shows from disney and mcu. i do not care to be associated with zionists and racists and be told i ship slave owners, but everyone outside of fandom seems to have made up their mids and i don't need my tweet in supoort of a silly tv show i love to be used in some ofmd guys are dicks bullying campaign

Oh boy. I don't typically delve into this because I'm cautious about saying the right/wrong thing and being misconstrued. But I'll do my best*. Let's break this down:

Slavery - I understand people are uncomfortable with the show depicting characters based on real life pirates who were connected to slavery in the 1700s, and that is incredibly valid. If someone doesn't want to interact with the show because of that, that's fine! It's great! However, the show basically takes the idea of these pirates and makes them into entirely new characters which never themselves touch on the idea of slavery. The show depicts itself as pretty anti-slavery given the immediate violence that occurs against people who are racist to the non-white characters (Officer Whatever getting knifed after calling Frenchie slave, Abshir and the servants helping burn down the French ship and leaving happily with money after one of them called them "my Africans", which, yes EW, but was very pointedly saying he was wrong). I will also say to the slavery point that kids play pirates/love pirate stuff, people don't tell them not to because the real Blackbeard was involved in that? Idk, please take my opinion here with a grain of salt (and I'm very willing to be wrong on this) but it seems a bit...reactionary to say the show is pro-slavery.

Same goes for racism - MOST of the actors and characters are not white in this show, and that I think is portrayed very well through many different backgrounds. And as I just mentioned, every time a character is racist, they almost immediately get their comeuppance. Stede never treats any of his crew in any way which is racist, and the one time he and Pete are racist towards the Indigenous tribe, they're called out on it explicitly and never do that again.

Zionism....sigh. This is unfortunately a loaded argument these days. Yes, Taika signed a letter that said "give the hostages back". Taika is also half-Jewish and describes himself as a Jewish Polynesian man. At the time the letter was making the rounds, October 7th had just happened, and a very real, terrible kidnapping/murder of roughly 1,000 people happened, which is shocking and terrible to see as a Jewish person. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Of course that does not excuse the >20,000 Palestinians who have been killed. Absolutely not.

Taika also gets a lot of unnecessary shit because people just don't like him and want to find some moral high ground to stand on and berate fans of his work with. I'm Taika neutral, but the more hate he gets the more I'm willing to back him because it's waaaaay disproportionate to anything he actually says. Plus, many, MANY actors on the show are openly pro-Palestine, and those people are close with Taika (see: Vico), so I'm very against the idea that OFMD is zionist? At least, I don't see how it can be any worse than any other piece of media those screaming about hating OFMD watch.

So, ending my ramble....I say do it anyway. You can't please everyone. People on the internet are mean. You don't know them, and they don't know you. They probably haven't seen the show and are dogpiling, because that's what people on the internet do. In addition, the renew as a crew movement has raised money for Palestine and for other charities close to the shows themes - LGBTQ+ youth and rights and amputees come to mind from what I've seen over the past few days. All extra money from the renewal campaign is going to charity. Everyone I know who donated and emails Zaslav and Co are also active in the campaign for a ceasefire, calling reps and MPs, being loud on other sources.

I'm sorry if this didn't make much sense and if anything I said was wrong. Again, very willing to listen and dialouge on any of it. As always, my DMs are open.

*Please note that I am a white American who lives in Canada and was raised Catholic (although in a very Jewish area with many Jewish friends so I do have a lot of background on Judaism, but again am not Jewish so), therefore I don't want to speak over anyone more qualified on any of these matters.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary17

9/21-22/2023

a pleasing series of numbers above. i'm chilling and listening to kreayshawn.

recently i saw a guy say kreayshawn is like super embarrassing. that's so lame, she's so dope to me. that guy just can't #gohard i guess. it was just funny seeing him articulate that, it's really an opinion that can't actually bother me that much cuz it's like, whatever.

i did 3 songs today. not 5 but today was heavy on trying to improve guitar sounds in one song, and 2 songs that basically sound good already i think, just getting them a bit clearer. so that's like, 21/25, i think. i don't know if i'll finish up by tomorrow or slow a bit, i shouldn't introduce that possibility but these upcoming songs are definitely the ones which are the most different, i think, but they might also need a ton of work because they aren't intensive on a sound that's complex like the guitar synths, which still elude me somewhat when it comes to getting riffs that sound like, idk, orchid/jerome's dream and so on out. i think some of the older super fucked up high gain ones might be good but they have a feeling of cheapness, i could possibly get them more articulate with all that distortion still with these new mixing tools though, and get them sparkling right. the sounds i'm going after are cheap anyways, or are pretty simple as far as getting them from a guitar (a lot of these guys had amp distortion only i think) so it's just about getting things to not sound, i dunno, wrong is the only way to put it. i could go do that, maybe, but i have brian eno on now (third uncle).

last night i did go look at stuff on flickr, not too much for collages but some funny photos of people.

i need to find more photos people took of awful maggots and grubs and things.

other news is that i'm thinking about the youtube trend, not trend, it's i guess taken its place as a genre, fully, the videos of people basically discussing lolcows and just any person really, explaining everything to you, everything wrong they did and how crazy they went and how funny (in some cases) the tragedy of someone basically reaching a point in their life that they will never be okay again is, and how these get millions of views. the people who make these videos are basically in the grip of this terrible need to always say that they're just being neutral and not trying to peddle any ideology, theirs or any other, just trying to present the story. they keep a tight mouth about what they do believe, but i get distinct senses about where they are. it's basically terrifying to me that this stuff reaches huge amounts of people and that sort of blindness to what ideology even is, how it works, and how it is spread. the idea that you can be without ideology/that you aren't complicit in its spread (especially in that sphere) is basically part of the ideology, a reactionary turn against the idea of thinking about why you want to tell a story in the first place, what that person's life is being made to mean by the telling of the story (almost always these people are examples of what should elicit total disgust, people fashioned into caricatures through harassment and so on, or people discovered for the purposes of carrying around and saying: be aware, we share our world with this, be vigilant and attack). the fear of being taken as saying anything, adherence to an outward friendliness and simply being someone who wants to tell 'strange' stories about people who only just happen to represent some kind of failure to the vast majority of everyone on earth, and told from the position of not being involved, a real outsider passing on something that resembles a folk-legend of some terrible figure, it's weird. i am basically lying in wait/terror of the reactionary turn among the people younger than me obsessed with that kind of shit, when it becomes evident to them that these things were saying something, and that they think it's good.

plenty of nazis will tell you how important 'lolcow' culture is to them.

anyways, an ugly topic to be certain, but it's weird to see how popular that shit is on yt. i should think it over more, there's probably more to it, how the videos are structured/edited. there's potential for a more whole kind of analysis of this. but it's an evolution of the classical kind of sideshow horror thing.

maybe i am just overthinking it on some level though. surely not even 10% of these people are going to internalize this in a violent way. just the normal way where they find some people gently disgusting and keep it hemmed in, behind their lips forever.

this stuff really shouldn't matter.

it's crazy how many people are into this stuff though. i wonder if i count, i used to read about all this as a kid on ed. after a certain point i quit giving a shit.

i like regular gossip, about people i know, in real life.

it's crazy to hear, from gossip, about people who are really quite awful, and evil, and then you see them, regular as anything else, and knowing that they did something unforgivable, and that they don't care at all.

i'm just going to listen to jerome's dream and think about guitars instead of continuing these trains of thought. i'm sure they will return. everything comes back in my head.

ohwell oh well.

byebye!!

[red-talisman]

Okay jc is the baby of the family, but not really. Nhs and lwj have really spoiled baby brothers attitude, but jc has an elder brother complex in my opinion and this makes me insane. I don't know if it's because he is the sect heir or because of his family dynamics. But these are my thoughts, yours?

With the understanding that I can only speak to CQL (the novel wasn't to my taste, personally, so I didn't get far in it) I am FASCINATED by your idea because I have a very different interpretation of my own!

For context, I lack the relevant cultural elements, so I don't think I can comment knowledgeably on some things? But I, who has some very similar personality traits to JC, am the youngest of 4 in a family dynamic that's similar enough to the Jiangs that, more than once, I had to pause CQL and touch some grass outside. 😅

Personally, I read JC as the Quintessential Youngest Child (TM) in the sense that, like:

He kinda takes his older siblings' support for granted, which is a) common for younger siblings, who have never known life without siblings, and b) JC's strongest and most immediate form of emotional support (since he probably can't/won't connect much with the other disciples and his relationships with his parents are rather fraught). It also means that where he might be more suspicious of other people, he often doesn't even question his own siblings (read: WWX) even when faced with evidence that maybe he should. It's a specific kind of naivete that I expect to see more often from younger siblings who have internalized an "us vs. the world" kind of dynamic.

Which also means that we youngest sibs can be ABSOLUTE DISASTERS when we lose that support, or think we've lost it. (JC being a little bitch during Lan indoctrination was a mirror of me when one of my older sisters started dating boys, how dare she have a life of her own that didn't involve me in every aspect!!! Clearly this means I have to be a passive-aggressive bitch about it!!!!!)

The jealousy, born from insecurity, of seeing older siblings be more liked/talented/etc than you, which you're too young to understand is the result of differences in age and maturity with the accompanying personal growth. No, it's clearly because You Suck.

....and then compound that inferiority complex with the pressure of being The Heir. In my family, I was the child of both parents while my siblings are half-sibs via my father; my mother was not unlike Yu Ziyuan in terms of her Expectations For Me, but my Jiang Fengmian-esque father favored his eldest son. So you push yourself to overachievement and hold yourself to an impossible standard to Prove You Matter As A Person. But JC, who is an accomplished cultivator in his own right (e.g. he developed his golden core a year early!), is in the shadow of a brother who's a legit genius, so what efforts might have 'worked' in other families won't work here. ('Worked' is in scare quotes because this isn't a healthy perspective to have, obvs.)

And when you're the baby sib, you're never not the baby sib, and damn but this can give you such a complex lmao. I don't know how many times I've had to remind my siblings and surviving parent that I'm an adult, I've been an adult for a long time actually, I'm allowed to make decisions about my own life, and I am in fact capable of saying Grown Up Things. It's infuriating! But when you get angry about it, it's just a sign of your immaturity! So then you're labeled as too sensitive, too reactionary, can't you just calm down... Look, at the risk of self-projecting too much, I'm just gonna say that I don't always like JC or agree with his decisions, but holy shit does his character land on some real personal places for me lol. ANYWAY, WWX's refusal to tell JC about the golden core exchange sounds to me, as a baby sib who clearly overidentifies with JC, like, "I don't trust you to make the right decision for yourself, so I have to do it for you, even though we've survived enough things by now for you to have proved yourself an adult capable of making your own choices." But the golden core thing is enough of A Thing to unpack that I'm just gonna leave it there with the clarification that this isn't actually meant to be a value judgment on WWX's action either way.

Also, 'mixed households' in regards to children who are adopted vs. blood-related can have some super complicated emotional dynamics, but this point starts getting into some cultural stuff that I don't feel I understand well enough to try digging into, especially with how horribly messy Anglophone fandom has been regarding the nature of WWX's place within the Jiang family.

SO YEAH ANON that's kinda the main points of my take on why JC Is Family Baby Whether He Likes It Or Not and some of why WWX Has Permanent Big Brother Disease lmao. I try to stay grounded in what I think I see actually on the screen and how it impacts the characters, but of course it's inevitably informed by my own experiences, for better or worse.

But that doesn't mean your take isn't just as valid or maybe is even based on the same points, I could totally see that happening depending on what you mean by 'elder brother complex.' ヽ(✿ﾟ▽ﾟ)ノ

[thedreadvampy]

American leftists are so fucking optimistic about the state of European politics they're always like AND EUROPE ALREADY HAS ALL THESE RAD DEMSOC POLICIES and I'm like hmmmmm. does it though? I mean France is good at striking and a lot of northern European countries have genuinely ok labour laws but also. waves hands. no recognised national government on this continent is Doing Socialism and a bunch of them are Doing Fascism Again. like lads I know American lawmakers have never heard of the concept of minimum wage or nationalised anything but also. set your sights higher.

and ps similarly lately I keep seeing ppl outside the UK be like "everywhere is awful for trans people. except Scotland thanks Scotland." Scotland is only good in comparison to England on trans shit and even then like the reason this is even a conversation we're having is bc Scottish civil society has been the nexus of TERF bullshit in the UK for like 10 years now.

and the gender recognition reform bill is only an improvement on the gender recognition act that brings it within sight of the legal gender change legislation that's been in place for years in many other European countries - the reform is to make the Outdated Legislation Slightly Less Bad. bc British gender recognition certificates currently require either a formal dysphoria diagnosis from within the UK or you to jump through a bunch of hoops including surgery, 6+ years social transition and, for some reason, for you to have been married by 2014. and you have to get 2 medical opinions to count as a diagnosis. and one has to come from a gender clinic. and waitlists for gender clinics are currently so long that even in good areas patients are waiting 2-3 years for their FIRST APPOINTMENT. my housemate has her first appointment in March and she's been on the list since early 2020, and honestly compared to a lot of areas that's pretty good.

terfism is so fucking rampant here. that's connected to why this is such a Thing, bc you can't breathe the word trans in Scottish media or public facing work without the TERFs and reactionary transphobes descending. and I do not think that's representative of the Scottish public and I do think it's good that the Scottish Government have made moves to address the issue instead of appeasing or ignoring transphobes, but it's so fucking weird to see people talking about Scotland as a beacon of trans welfare when like. have you been here? have you seen the state of Scottish media and Scottish trans healthcare? Like????

[with-the-flickers-of-light]

a response to the new yorker article.

The New Yorker released an article about Matty Healy, and, well, there's some questionable shit to dive into.

Here's a link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/who-is-matty-healy

And we'll dive into some quotes beneath the cut.

"I'm sorry if you're living and you're seventeen." -- Matty Healy

I'm not 17 anymore, but I do belong to the general demographic he's getting at, so. Thank you for your condolences. I too hate existence, thanks.

"Now, as Healy sees things, the average seventeen-year-old is worried about melting ice caps, or the failures of capitalism, or how easy it is to say the wrong thing. The future holds little imagined promise, and, to cope, teens are indulging in reactionary conservatism or the oppression Olympics, the world and their identities distorted by social media." -- Jia Tolentino

Yes, I'm worried about melting ice caps and the failures of capitalism. I don't think I'm as worried about "how easy it is to say the wrong thing". Mostly, what I'm worried about there is how to be aware enough that I don't hurt people. I'm not worried about accidentally slipping and saying something offensive; I'm worried about rooting out my prejudices. I'm not worried about being politically correct; I'm worried about having enough knowledge and understanding to make the right decisions.

(Also I have social anxiety, so fine, I worry about saying the wrong thing. Like, for example, I worry about whether I said "thank you" an appropriate amount to the food service worker. Or, what if I slip up and order the wrong food because I panicked. You know.)

Regarding the so-called "oppression Olympics" -- please don't tell me this is another case of someone ragging on intersectionality because they don't think systemic racism exists or something like that. While I can't speak for everyone, I can speak for myself: I know what minorities I belong to, yes, but I also recognize that I have an immense amount of privilege. And I know many other people in my demographic who feel the same.

"Healy said the band had asked Styles to come. 'He gave us a hard no,' he added, laughing. 'He’s afraid that he would have to say something.' Healy found it annoying that, at a certain level of fame, celebrities can cultivate liberal auras while avoiding the risk of taking real political stands. (Swift, I thought, but didn’t say, seemed to be excepted from his critique.)" -- Jia Tolentino, on Swift's feature at The 1975 concert

This is just... interesting. Not sure what to say about it, but it's interesting.

“Before, I always debased myself when I became sincere. I’d be sincere, and then I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m only joking,’ or ‘Oh, I pissed myself,’ or something else unglamorous to negate how much I just let you in.” -- Matty Healy

First, I do believe people should be able to express themselves sincerely, without needing to put up walls and saying they're joking to protect themselves from backlash. That's like, in general, though. If the things you're sincere about are racist/misogynist/etc. then society reserves the right to call you out.

Because I don't think I have to tell you how this sounds when he's also justified offensive remarks my claiming it's just a bit, that he's only joking.

“I think Matty is a deeply sincere person, who can, at different points, be misunderstood because of how much he enjoys a bit. If you don’t know him, if you don’t get him, because you’re not really tuned in to the work, you might assume a cynicism that is literally not there.” -- Jack Antonoff

Well, see, here's the thing: if you enjoy your "bit" of being an asshole, then you enjoy being an asshole. And if your enjoyment of being an asshole makes you constantly act like an asshole, then congratulations, you're an asshole.

“We used to expect our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders, and now we expect them to be liberal academics.” -- Matty Healy

As I have said in the past, I really don't expect celebrities to be activists, or as Healy puts it, "liberal academics". I don't expect celebrities to become involved in politics or in political issues. But when a celebrity involves themselves -- either by claiming to be an activist or by acting in a way that is harmful -- then yeah, I do expect them to do something about it.

“I’m more interested in actually being wrong, and people seeing that, and knowing what’s right because of it.” -- Matty Healy

... I'm sorry, what? You've decided to... be wrong, so that people would... see that... and realize how shitty it is... so that they know how to be good? Is that the argument here?

Anyways, if I'm interpreting that correctly, I'm not sure why he would be upset about fans being fucking pissed about his statements. Because, like, isn't that the point? If his point was to make us angry about the wrongs in the world by embodying the wrongs in the world... then he's trying to make us angry. And if that's the case, he shouldn't be upset about our anger. (See later quotes.)

"I asked him about the podcast. He’d been doing so much promo, he told me, that he wanted to do something that felt more like simply talking with his friends. But, of course, he had done this all in public, on mike. Had he baited his fans on purpose? 'A little bit,' [Healy] said." -- Jia Tolentino

The implication, I think, of "something [...] more like [...] talking with his friends" is that this is what he sounds like when he's not playing PR. When he's not bothering to filter himself. And that's not a good look, because it's damn near outright saying "all the decent stuff I say for promo, is just promo; the real me is the one who derides minorities".

Again with the "baiting fans". Once again: whether or not it's meant to be bait, if it was hurtful, then it was hurtful. I swear, this is like arguing with people who think girls should let themselves be bullied because it's actually just how boys show they like girls.

“But it doesn’t actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.” -- Matty Healy

First of all, why the boyfriend? He's implying it's a bunch of straight women or gay men that are overly sensitive to his remarks, which is not cool, and reinforces stereotypes of "femininity is hysterical hypersensitivity". But whatever, I'm not really hurt about that, just a bit annoyed.

(Or, OR, maybe it's because no one with a boyfriend would be upset? Maybe he thinks having a boyfriend precludes you from being upset about things?)

Anyways, the reason I ask about the boyfriend thing is because I don't have a boyfriend, but actually, I... was sitting at home, slumped over my computer, when my roommate came to bother me about dinner, and then we had a long talk about how I was feeling kinda messed up because of the Healy Situation. So. Uh. It does happen, thanks. And to populations other than the one with boyfriends.

“If it does, you’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.” -- Matty Healy

What's funny to me here is that he's not just calling the people actively calling him out "deluded" or "a liar". He's saying that anyone upset about his comments are deluded or lying. He is very purposefully saying that his comments could not POSSIBLY have been offensive. Not just not-cancel-worthy -- but completely and utterly innocent.

Anyways, I am kind of offended at being called delusional over being hurt. Now I'm doubly-hurt, so congrats. I think that makes me doubly-delusional as well. Does that make me not delusional? Does delusional cancel out delusional? I have so many questions.

You don't get to decide whether your offensive remarks are hurtful, m-kay? If you don't want people to be hurt, you can control that by not being offensive. But once those words are out -- once you've done something offensive -- you no longer get to control whether or not you've said something offensive. That's up to the audience. And if the audience is hurt, then congrats, you've said something hurtful.

The only thing I lied about was that this blog would be inactive. (I mean, I did say "unless the situation changes", but realistically, the situation was "he's an asshole" when I said that and the situation is still "he's an asshole".) And to be clear, I did mean that, and I do mean that -- I come onto this account whenever I encounter a stupid headline, reblog a few posts, and maybe make a statement of my own. Thanks for making a liar of me by continuing to make fucked up headlines, I don't appreciate it.

Also, seems a lot like he's admitting that he did, indeed, do a bad thing? So... again, why are you minimizing people's upset by calling them delusional or liars, when by your own admission, they are seeing "a bad thing over there"?

And again, he's saying that he wants the reaction. He wants to provoke us. He wants to show us that bad. And yet, when we react in a way that is reasonable for being provokes with shit, he has to resort to calling us "mental".

“I want to be known for what I do. But now fame is about being known for who you are. And people are complicated. If people are going to make me this famous, I’m going to make people work for it.” -- Matty Healy

Again, this seems like a green light to criticize. He's basically saying "I'm being an asshole because I want to tempt fate into cancelling me". So. Again: why is his defense against criticism basically "you're delusional"?

“This is about you, you know who you are, I love you.” -- Matty Healy / Taylor Swift

IDK I have nothing really to say here I just think it's funny that Taylor mouthed it before "cardigan", a song where Betty mourns that James was a cheating jackass.

I know apparently Betty and James get together after "cardigan" and "betty", but the foreword to folklore also describes imagery of "a cardigan that still bears the scent of loss twenty years later", so sounds like they still didn't get their happily ever after. Also, the apology in "betty" is actually such a bad apology -- he calls her friends stupid ("in front of all your stupid friends"), puts the onus on her to carry on the relationship as if nothing has happened ("will you have me? will you love me?"), and is even expecting her to live up to wild expectations ("will it be just like I dreamed it?"). Also, I swear, the whole song is him blaming other people ("I hate the crowds, you know that / plus I saw you dance with him", "she pulled up like a figment of my worst intentions"). AND the absolute asshattery necessary to "[sleep] next to her but [dream] of you all summer long". God. Pisses me off.

Also also adding the line "sensual politics" as a phrase to describe an era can be forgiven since folklore directly follows Lover but still... a reminder that activism should not just be an aesthetic or an era.

.

.

.

Ending off with a personal note, I am officially holding out zero (0) hope for Healy. And my hopes for Swift are dwindling fast.

[synthwwavve]

i don't have any bo hcs myself (at least not yet) and i enjoy your hcs!! someone i used to follow on twt portrayed her as a traumatized person who would be a good person if not for everything that happened. and i always kind of rocked with it bc i haven't seen tcw (i have seen rebels) but i like your take on her better. i think it makes more sense with mando culture as well. Mandalorians are nothing if not Absolutely Completely Committed to their understanding of the creed. so while yes Bo went through some fucked up shit that def affected her I can't see her being any other way

Omg thank you!! Seriously this means so much to me and makes me so happy ^^

But yes I totally agree, I'm glad that was your takeaway from my headcanons because that's exactly how I view her background and who she is as a person, and I wasn't sure if I fully communicated what I was trying to say!

I feel like she's definitely a case where maybe tragic things happened to her that messed her up/contributed to the path she ended up on, but not in the sense that she was a victim of circumstance completely at the mercy of outside forces. (I feel like I bitch about this constantly but that characterization of her just doesn't interest me.) I feel like she absolutely chose/voluntarily carried out most of the negative or destructive views she held or acts she committed.

I headcanon her situation as being a case of how a fairly privileged person can end up radicalized into an extreme ideology based on their reaction to mostly perceived/exaggerated slights or oppression, and through being socially isolated except for seeking out interaction only w. other people who share their extreme views, as we see often on the internet today.

Not that (imo in my headcanons) the newmandos did nothing wrong or were entirely on the right side of history, but my point being their wrongs were probably so much worse to someone with a reactionary worldview. Also I HC for Bo specifically a lot of her hate was initially rooted in dysfunction with her sister, a lot of which is tbh vindictive and one-sided on her side towards Satine.

All in all yes, my reading of her is a person who experienced traumas that contributed to, but didn't cause, her to turn to extremist nationalism or to generally be hostile, low-empathy, prejudiced, machiavellian etc etc. It's just her personality and who she is. And if you have spent five seconds on my blog you know I absolutely mean all of those things affectionately because she's so interesting to me and the fact that she's kind of a bastard is what makes her interesting imo!!

Anyway thanks again for the ask and I'm glad you enjoyed my headcanons, believe me I'm always happy to talk about them lol

[littleeyesofpallas]

i wanted to give some kind of context but that ballooned into a massive rant all its own so fuck it, we go in cold...

No wait... one important bit of context, or thisll make me look bad in a different way than the one I'm okay with: I regular-ish-ly go on stints of diving thru porn blogs' liked and followed and reblogged posts and similar-to-recs to just report and block. 99% of the time it's provoked when a bot tries to follow me.

Not a question I'm expecting anyone to answer for e, but just why the fuck are weird ass racist race fetishists Like That™? The like truly deranged mental gymnastics and, what is clearly what they think is some kind of 5D chess game they're playing with <????> where they can't just be normal about interracial sex as a concept, and can't just jerk off to their shit taste in porn, they have to incorporate some kind of elaborate fantasy about being accelerationists of an impending race war, but like... also they're clearly getting off to it?

Like, it's always clearly fake accounts --"fake" in that they loudly announce that they're run by either a black guy or a white woman or some sort of white liberal cuckold, when they're very clearly not-- that, are both painfully cringe-inducingly transparent in that farce, but also are clearly made to look like they think they're some kind of psyop, when they're clearly just actually jerking off to the porn they're aggregating.

But moreover, the very apparent dedication to this nonsense shadowboxing game they're playing with themselves(?) is made clear by the fact that they don't actually fit the same M.O. as other porn bots (even the otherwise politically charged ones) because those bots are all very noticeably lazier. They're always situated as this halfassed networks of less than a dozen blogs all just circulating the same shit from one another, and even then the porn they're stealing off of, i dunno OF or something... are all also equally repetitive between other networks of bots all reblogging and reposting from the same generic database of crap.

But these deranged racefetishists show remarkable dedication to producing "new"/"original" content and recycling shockingly little. Even if most of it is low effort low quality photo edits of putting gross racist slogans onto shirts or panties, or fake tattoos(you know the one) or just throwing text over normal porn they stole, or more recently ai generate art of racebaiting nonsense because they can't find anything real they can desperately attempt to distort into whatever fantasy scenario they're trying to imagine...

And as I sit here on a slow day at work, blocking and reporting dozens of accounts, I have to wonder... why? Surely there must be alternatives, right? This can't be the only thing they do/get off to? Surely there must be easier ways to get off? I know some people with more mundanely hyper specific fetishes do tend to get off to those fetishes almost exclusively to the exclusion of just generic/vanilla stuff. but like is that even possible at this level of psychological complex? because this is the equivalent of having to recite the national anthem AND do a little arts and crafts project EVERYTIME or you can't finish in terms of involvement and just utterly pointless specificity.

And all for what? They aren't actually tricking anyone, right? There's not some kind of proportional/correlating scene of people out there having bought into this apparent propaganda and adopting a reactionary attitude to it, it's entirely the other way around, it's clearly the pornbots that are the reactionary factor. And that's all very clearly apparent in that the rhetoric and the content they're fixated on pretending to hate while getting off to just straight up doesn't exist outside of the deranged porn bubble they've created.

Man, i dunno where i was going with this... notably I'm neither white nor black so I'm not even directly affected by any of this bullshit one way or the other, but that's all the more reason it taking up space on the internet and being in my way as i try to have a normal round of pornbot blocking is such an obnoxious pain in the ass. Like, I'd almost take regular racism over this convolutedly overinvolved, yet totally halfhassed attempt at what i have to assume they think is some kind of clever and insidious falseflag operation they've cooked up.

White people stop trying to make your boring ass kink into some kind of national security risk challenge (impossible)

[ladygoofball]

It's been a while since I posted my own art here, huh? I'm trying to draft and complete these in physical format first before finishing it off digitally and so far I'm not loving the process but I'm definitely Trying.

This was a scene that really happened to me while I was meditating under blooming crab apple trees, a little butterfly landed on the pouch I carry around my neck to store crystals and pictures that make me feel better and then flew away into the afternoon.

On a personal note:

Been tripping over a lot of fake reactionary content here lately, so I'll need to go back into pseudo-hiding to keep recovering from all of the shit that I unearthed in the beginning of the year here with my own past traumas and stuff. It is really hard to focus on character building and DnD/BG3 stuff when your brain is as soft as a ripened peach tbh.

Media literacy comes first, mental health comes second, community building and repairs come third, and then I have to figure out if I can keep my animals or not by the end of next month. Oh, and job searching. Can't forget about the Grind.

Jealous of this unemployment psychiatric episode yet? I knew it, it's so attractive from the outside looking in /joking

I just feel a lot of old creeping eyes on me and need to keep myself guarded more than usual. It's been really taxing and I hope that something gives soon because God is it exhausting to try to network with media professionals when you're not doing well enough to even sit on a bus without getting a blistering headache. I have had a lot of support to push me into a better direction, but I stick to the same old ones I have tried and tested because of how difficult it is to do literally anything else right now. I've been noticing who gets deeply enraged at my position in my career path right now because they were working to bring me back to reality and I kept "refusing offers".

For the record: I have not received offers to be part of any production in the past couple months, so what is there to "refuse"?

I just made a YouTube series in my senior year of college that I have honestly not even looked at or been able to access that account (besides on Facebook) for years, I want to get back to making that kind of media literacy video essay content without the stupid barriers that were imposed while I was in college but it is...not something that I can do without figuring out funding for things first. I have been trying to bring myself back to it and post about my progress on tiktok but I'm also...not in a place to re-run any kind of hustle like that without a regular ass income.

It is difficult to get back to content creation and filming and being in front of cameras without a proper self care routine to refuel my own reserves before over extending my talents and abilities to other people. If you're in the same boat as a small/independent film maker I tip my cap to your efforts.

Ending on a positive self note: I am a bit impressed that my own conscious understanding has the ability to discern when energy vampires are waiting in the wings to get a piece of what keeps me going in my day-to-day life. That's about all I've gained since March though, in all honesty. I may appear to be easily manipulated by "people smarter than me", but that is always going to be a front for me to get the information I need to make an informed decision on how I move forward with my life.