#the road to hell is paved with good intentions

[idol--hands]

Data: “It feels…familiar. Like something…I might have made. In a dream.”

[brainicusrotticus]

technically i played my first run of iwatex more than a year and a half ago. i focused heavily on exploration, managed to cure the shimmer and stop the famine without realizing it was possible to fail at those, and became a gardener with sym and dys.

but i remembered very little when i finally came back to the game (i remembered tammy dying, the gardeners, and the helios arriving, but that’s about it), so i decided to completely wipe my data and start fresh.

my new first run was… tragic. obviously tammy and hal died because it was a first run. i mostly did exploration. i went out and explored the month that tonin died, saw the fight, didn’t have the stats to try to save him so i ran for help, and then held his hands while he died, thinking i was tammy.

i stopped exploring for a while after that, and zeroed in on xenobotany again. i’d already done a little bit, and ended up creating the native hybrid right around the time i turned 13.

…which is also when sol’s mom pulls out the “you’re not doing enough” talk (possibly just if your rebellion is on the higher side? but mine has never not been, so i don’t know). which happened to be the event that triggered right after i made the native hybrid. so i was pissed that i’d just achieved a scientific marvel as a prepubescent child, only to be told i needed to try harder.

so i chose every angry option that presented itself. i despised her after that. i feel so strongly about it that i made it a foundational event to my view of my doctor!sol.

i stopped researching xenobotany, and started focusing on engineering instead. leaned back into exploration, too. until the famine got bad. i thought working on xenobotany might help things, make more plants and solve the problem long term.

…but it didn’t. and fluorescent died. which made feelings… complicated.

i leaned fully into engineering and exploration. managed to get to the ridges before ever fully exploring the valley. made efforts to befriend tangent, too. learned that the shimmer cure might be in the valley, but it wasn’t pollen yet so i wasn’t thinking super hard on it. helped her with some other stuff, too.

eventually, a pollen season hit and i remembered the cure. i went out exploring in the valley, but misremembered where the big event for it was and ended up using most of my stress getting to the wrong spot. i had to go back, relax for mid-pollen, and then went back out in late pollen.

i did manage to get to the glade, get what i needed, and get out. went back to the colony, last missing piece for the shimmer cure in hand.

and walked right into the story event where the shimmer finally kills geranium.

…i helped cure it the very next month. i, as a player, felt so… numb and useless about it. at this point i’d failed to save tonin, flulu, and geranium. not just failed, but tried and failed. tried so very hard.

i threw myself entirely into my relationship with tang. we started dating. i focused back on engineering because i didn’t know what else to do.

i found out what tang was working on. had been working on, for years. what i’d been helping her with, unknowingly.

i could tell she felt conflicted. that this was something she felt she had to do, but something she didn’t want to do.

i told her… i supported her.

i thought it was the first step. that if i let her know that i support her (not her project, but her), then she would know, when i told her it needed to stop, that i wasn’t mad at her. she wouldn’t have to defend herself. that she could lean on the parts of her screaming that this was wrong, and i’d support her in following the path to undoing what she had almost done.

that wasn’t a choice i was given. i just couldn’t read the writing on the walls.

i hoped the chance would come up with time passing. but it didn’t.

i decided i had to tell someone else. the only person i could think of who would be against it, and who could do something about it.

i told dys.

and he just… told me it wasn’t a serious threat. that the gardeners could handle it. i wasn’t close enough with him to make him take me seriously.

he left during the next glow.

i tried exploring again, hoping i might find something out there that would let me stop this. i broke up with tang, because i realized i couldn’t talk her out of it. i’d damned us both with that one choice.

in the end, there was nothing i could do. tangent’s cure came to pass.

i just imagine all those years sol spent sitting in the helios. thinking on the course of their life.

how they chose to run and get help instead of fighting to protect tonin. and he died because of it.

how they chose to try and focus on breeding new plants for the famine instead of working the fields. and fluorescent died because of it.

how they took one wrong turn in the valley of vertigo, delaying curing the shimmer by two months. and geranium died because of it.

how they said one wrong thing, thinking it was a path to redemption. and because of that, cal, and instance died.

…a planet died.

i know how it ends in the story. emerging more than a decade later. surviving, because that’s what humanity does.

but in my heart, it ends differently. sol refuses to stay in the helios. a season after the quarantine starts, they just leave. they venture out into the plagued wilderness to try and save something. some small bit of vertumna. something that can be regrown, like it was thousands of years ago.

…but they die with the rest of it.

[paleolithique]

Senate Democrats’ response to the Tea Party flip was essentially to Old Yeller the rules of the Senate throughout Obama’s second term. You could argue it was a ‘road to hell paved with good intentions’ or maybe just simple frustration at not being able to get anything done. In doing so they perfectly teed themselves up to FAFO in 2016 and beyond.

I hate to use a conservative Republican’s speech to back this up but sometimes digging up primary sources from the early 2010s is stupid hard and also unfortunately, Roberts (R-Kan) (speech hyperlinked above.) was just plain right here. It’s a direct line from this decision to where we are now.

I think the federalizing of desired outcomes really started with the Tea Party congressional flip in 2010, where legislative expectation was neutralized and continued for the remainder of Obama’s presidency, and so a lot of progressives and leftists got used to policy by executive order and policy by judicial decision and figured it could continue, which warped expectations as to what could be done by the President, and which helped encourage a disinterest in state and local action and involvement, and it only metastasized under Trump because Trump seemed to be able to have so much power and authority (partly because he had a Congress where the majority agreed with him for part of his Presidency, partly because he was able to undo a lot of shit by executive order because said shit was established or expanded by executive order which is why you DON’T WANT GOVERNMENT BY EXECUTIVE ORDER, and partly because Republicans are fundamentally a destructive entity and it’s easier to destroy rather than create or establish) and which led to a weird idea that this is the new normal.

[howifeltabouthim]

Also, although I was innocent of any wish to hurt you, I have seen enough of human nature to know that we do not always forgive those who, however inadvertently, have been the means of wounding us.

L. P. Hartley, from My Fellow Devils

[snicker-doodles]

you watched ep 17 and thought, yeah, that’s like zhao yuanzhou at his lowest huh? poor thing have suffered, can’t be any worse than that right?

then you watched ep 19

[eddeearts]

As everyone knows the best time to finally have the motivation+/inspiration to do art is always when your mom has gotten home and has (well deserved) dibs on her ipad of course

anyways here is what I made in FireAlpaca with my mouse: "Chosen / Cursed / Second Chance"

[grrlmusic]

Vegyn - The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

[gale-gentlepenguin]

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

It’s a quote I often rolled my eyes at. The common interpretation is that good intentions, when acted upon, may have unintended consequences.

But I recently had a thought. Something I think makes more sense.

Those who believe their cause is good will justify their actions no matter how evil those actions are.

That is something that has been done throughout history. I’m seeing it even now.

A side will do unspeakable evil to their enemies because they believe they are “in the right”, or “We are the good guys”.

It’s easy to point out the evil when it’s your enemies and those you disagree with, but the hardest part is looking at one’s own side, one’s own actions and seeing the truth.

If one wants to be morally right, they must do what is right. Do not use a good cause to try to justify evil. For you are only staining the good cause with the blood of vile action.

I can’t think of anything more vile than committing acts of evil and acting as if it’s good.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

[evilhorse]

Always thinking they’re paving it with good intentions…

(Cable #4)

[2nd-book-of-lamentations]

Dirges of the Damned

XIII

The road to Hell's mention Is paved with good intention So forget intention

Which those bricks we built Our palaces of guilt So forget intention

Intention is used to excuse Genocide and abuse So forget intention

Injury to the rabbit Needs no more than habit So forget intention

[finelinens1994]

it's pretty fucking insane how so many humans will use anything to justify their hatred for a group of people. kids books about puberty exist? better harass some random unrelated trans people about it. israel exists? better harass some random unrelated jewish people about it. covid happens? better harass some random east asian people about it. like, you don't actually think do you? do you just live your life being fecklessly led around from hot take to hot take by your emotions, learned biases, and baser instincts? with no logic or reasoning at all? do you actually have any genuine beliefs? or are your morals and actions held up by a foundation made of loose hay, vulnerable to even the smallest gust of wind? how do you sleep at night knowing the foundation of your mind is so fragile?

[t1red-gastr0p0d]

Screaming and crying and throwing up in my Laboratory in Fallen London as I furiously try to research to get an impossible theorem.

I've already surpassed Mr. Pages in wordology and taxonoectomy and I am no closer to the end.

Currently hoarding unwise ideas so that I will have a huge burst of research and then go mad/die.

Just as the Founding Fathers intended...

(Pls send help I have run out of darjeeling and the students in my lab are threatening to have me drawn and quartered)

[howifeltabouthim]

But fathers cast a long shadow. Some outrun it, but others get caught, and then they act out their father's sins over and over, like mummers in a play, even when they have the best of intentions.

Lev Grossman, from The Bright Sword

[my-ugly-organs]

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[khr-guilded-cage]

The worse kind of villains are the ones with 'good intentions'