#or quickly to communicate

[sassysnowperson]

Hey Southern California Drivers.

(sits down) (pats the couch next to me) Come on bud, you're not in trouble, I just need to talk to you for a second.

Dealing with a lot of rain, huh? It's scary! I'm scared too. The roads aren't built for this kind of rain, drainage is terrible, there's going to be flooding. And you're not used to it, and that makes it scarier.

That means you're going slower! No, that's good, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about. Make sure faster drivers can pass you, you're going to add to make people angry if you're going slow in the fast lane, but I think you know that already, you did a good job today with that. You should go as fast as you feel comfortable, and it's good that it's slower than normal, since you're going to be reacting to circumstances that are new.

Now...here's the important thing...*that doesn't mean you should turn your hazard lights on*. I know, you want to be more visible, and you don't want people to ram into you from behind. But if you have your headlights on, your taillights already do a good job of that. Turning on your hazard lights and leaving them on make it harder to see a couple things. Me and other drivers have a harder time knowing that you're breaking, and it's harder to know when you're changing lanes. That makes it *more likely* that I run into you. And neither of us want that.

This is a lot, and I hope you can get off the road and safe soon. It's better to wait out the storm inside.

But please, while you're out there, don't use your hazards all the time while driving in the rain.

[gunpowdercarousel]

I don't need therapy I need rabid gay people freaking out in my inbox

[bugsinapocket]

Redscape community are you here

[lucabyte]

Taking pride in One's own appearance.

[aalexan]

no shade at all to my fellow radfems and you guys can believe whatever about if chappell roan is actually a lesbian or not but I can’t really understand the amount of people willing to mindlessly shit on her…like yeah maybe she’s male centred. maybe she’s actually bisexual and not really lesbian. but I can never bring myself to say such hateful things about a woman who hasn’t really done anything truly awful because I know the normalized misogyny and patriarchal double standards that actually fuel those words. famous woman are already treated so awfully, if you hate chappell and disagree with her male centred attitude, just choose to ignore her - at least for the sake of discouraging misogynistic hate campaigns that all young famous women receive.

[srnileforme]

THAMEPO + HANDS

THAMEPO (2024-2025)

[passiberri]

🎙️🎶 I uploaded the poses, for anybody who wants them! Download here ♡

[blorbologist]

"It's like I'm a bad omen." "I'm willing to take that chance"

And they'll just be a fling for now and he KISSES HER FOREHEAD "AS YOU LIKE" AND SHE LOOKS SO GUILTY (about asking for that much??? about not being able to give him more??????)

[blighted-lights]

staring dead-eyed into the distance as if witnessing some unseen tragedy. au where ravage was in the mines pre-war and met megatron before meeting soundwave. what if. what if ravage was with megatron from the start. what if.

this is the only thing i'm gonna be thinking about for the next few days sorry (more thoughts in tags)

[arthursfuckinghat]

Sometimes I think a lot about Arthur's old journal, the one he had prior to the game's events that got burned in a fire, and how Arthur went a long time without a replacement.

He wrote that he missed writing and drawing, more than he thought he would.

The journal is a wonderful tool that allows us see through Arthur's eyes and how he deals with things, it's one of his healthiest coping mechanisms, so it makes me wonder what those journal-less months were really like for Arthur.

Whatever and wherever the fire was, the time spent up north in the Grizzlies and travelling down from it, Dutch nearly buying some land but getting spooked by the law, new people joining them, and then the gang spending months in the wilderness before moving to Blackwater - it all sounded like a hectic time. But he never wrote about how he felt, he just wrote about what had happened.

Yet, he said he missed writing and drawing. He missed it. He had the itch to write and draw for ages, but he couldn't.

Maybe he struggled with the chaos of those few months without a journal to empty his frustrations and thoughts into, maybe he saw so many things he wanted to draw and it aggravated him that he couldn't, maybe he was slightly more irritable than usual with everything that had pent up and having no means to release it, and so on.

I just think about it a lot.

Especially if you took the journal out of the main game, you'd be taking out a huge portion of the story and the insights we have into who Arthur is as a person too. It's impossible for Arthur to not write in the journal, even if you never open it. It's a vital tool that helps define him and show us how he moves through the world, how he copes with the world.

So if Arthur had his journal taken away by a fire all those months ago and went a long time without, what would he have been like?

[waywardstation]

APOLOGIES FOR DISAPPEARING RIGHT AFTER THE SEXYMAN POLLS POSTS I got very sick once again ^^;

BUT I have stuff to post!! I have a project participation announcement, and I have asks/messages to get to, and art and fics to post too. Thank you for your patience as I start things up again ^^

[marinsdoodles]

John is a great dad

also posted on youtube lol

[woolying]

COUNTDOWN TO LAST TETRO PINK FRIDAY!!

yanagi and watari!!!! i will miss u both dearly kisses them on the forehead

gonna try to doodle the students everyday until then (i havent planned for this at all... i only came up with this idea this morning... hopefully i last until then)

[quillthrillswriting]

no love story trope will ever hit quite as hard as "two traumatized teens (often) with unique abilities who are forced to save the world each help the other shoulder the burden of their respective destinies and slowly become each others safe places as they shift from friends to something more."

[does-it-introject]

not a poll but have any yes’s ever won that you know of?

I don't typically answer asks but I really want to answer this. As of right now, there's is 226 polls on this blog.

Of these 226... a solid amount of ONE! (1) time we had yes win.

That poll being the "Original Characters" poll.

There are some that were close, but there's only one solid win.

Edit: Correction! Two Polls had YES win. The Pokémon poll as well (thank you to the commenter and the three people in asks who pointed this out!)

[katherinakaina]

I also need to add a bit of context to your very short bit about Zizians, @strange-aeons .

TLDR: Ziz left the rationalist community 6 years ago and even at the time she wasn’t liked there, the fact she managed to exploit. Her actions directly contradict both hpmor and what CFAR was doing and teaching. Her other affiliations that are no less relevant include being an anarchist and a vegan. You are not immune to cults just because you are not into any particular weird internet subculture.

Cults form from niche subcultures, that’s true enough. But any subculture can form a cult because any culture, even the mainstream one, contains some ideas that can be twisted to an insane degree. And any ideology, even the most niche and scary one, can be approached casually and sceptically. What is actually needed to create a cult is not a special ideology but a cult leader and vulnerable people to follow them. That is the main uniting quality between all cults. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with a certain music band or a certain fantasy book forum is an exercise in motivated reasoning. You will always end up finding something that's wrong.

The rationalist community was trying to prevent the formation of a cult as best as they could. Partly that’s the reason why people like Ziz and others with bad and unpopular takes were often tolerated longer than necessary. To encourage criticism and prevent getting stuck in a positive feedback loop. Because it’s not a high control group! You cannot be simultaneously mad that people are allowed to talk about wacky ideas on forums and also that the group is supposedly very rigid and controlled. Apparently, they could use some control. Not like it would actually stop an aspiring cult leader from recruiting, they’d just go some other place.

Zizians were not mostly trans by accident (what are the chances?). Ziz was recruiting the most vulnerable people who related to her and were willing to trust her (also because there’s a lot of trans women in the community, like a lot). She used their very real and grounded experience of discrimination to convince them that her not being liked is not due to her takes being bad but because she’s trans.

And she had a lot of takes, some of them not being popular enough you actually complained about. You criticised LessWrong for being too pro-capitalist for your taste and then started talking about the Really Bad rationalists and THEY ARE LEFTISTS killing landlords and cops.

Now if we are talking about ideologies that devalue human life, how about some that require actual Class War (guess what people do in wars) or violent mass uprisings? Or some that require assassinations of certain select individuals? How come you hear that there are people on forums discussing the ethics of murdering those directly responsible for destroying our planet and you, as a leftist, do not immediately recognize yourself in it? Nothing discussed on LessWrong is more violent than a communist revolution or even the killing of Brian Thompson.

Why being into rationality at some point and reading hpmor is the only thing you told about Ziz? I think I know why. All the right wingers really leaned into the whole ‘trans vegan cult’ thing. That is not a good look for our side, is it? How amazing would it be to find a scapegoat. Who cares about those AI safety freaks anyway? They are all cishet men anyway! All cishet men who somehow have an offshoot of violent vegan queers, that certainly adds up.

Ziz being a radical vegan* (another niche subculture) corresponds to her actions way better than anything that's discussed on LessWrong or happened in hpmor. In fact, there’s an exact scene you probably skipped. Harry is on a very important and dangerous mission with Quirrell and at some point he is told to hide while Quirrell duels a cop guard at magical Guantanamo Bay – a total pig and an absolute scum who Ziz would kill without a second thought. Harry does share her sentiment, he fucking hates Azkaban. But when Quirrell tries to kill the evil torture cop Harry instinctively protects him jeopardizing the entire mission. And it’s not a random scene. It starts the entire disillusionment spiral where Harry realizes his beloved groomer professor might be a bad guy. Murder of a bystander whose only crime is being a product of his society is not something Harry can tolerate. He does end up decapitating a bunch of actual death eaters in the very end (the bit you probably did read) to save his own life and defeat Voldemort and even then he regrets it and apologizes for it (despite it being the right thing to do and not even comparable to a random cop). There’s an entire scene where Harry bonds with Draco over their mother’s deaths where he expresses that every death is a tragedy, even deaths of very bad people (like Voldemort).

Not to mention the entire immortalism theme (did you skip the entire third book?). One cannot read hpmor and walk away thinking human life is worthless or only super geniuses deserve to live. Timeless decision theory leading to murdering people is not in there**, nothing in the fic even suggests such a conclusion. More about how you got most things wrong about hpmor here.

Let’s face it, those were a bunch of sleep deprived vulnerable people high on all sorts of radical ideas, who were kicked out of every decent movement and that’s why they slipped into a cult.

Any subculture can become a cult. If you ever read a boring preachy fanfic or ever went to a physical meeting with internet weirdos. If you ever felt rejected by mainstream society and went looking for ‘like-minded people’, for a ‘found family’, for a ‘place where you belong’. You are not safe. Touching grass from time to time is not enough. You have to never leave the pastures to be highly immune to cults. And that ain’t you, my friend. That’s none of us.

Previous post about rationalist community.

* Ever heard ‘veganism is the moral baseline’ (sometimes minimum or imperative)? That’s not a slander, it’s a commonplace argument and an actual slogan.

** The only use of timeless decision theory in hpmor is about being able to reliably cooperate with other well meaning people, not about killing anyone.