#value inversion

[bsahely]

The Problem Isn’t You — It’s the System: An LVOA Reflection on Personal Blame and Systemic Injustice | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] Modern systems of power have mastered a subtle but devastating psychological sleight of hand: they tell people that their suffering is a result of personal failure rather than systemic design. This narrative — the myth of meritocracy — serves to neutralize dissent, isolate the suffering, and uphold life-disabling structures under the guise of fairness. Kasper…

[xxplastic-cubexx]

i’m so glad you brought up that bit in excalibur where magneto’s ideal prison is him getting to be a husband and father again, because it’s so relevant to the idea that the house of m reality isn’t actually everyone’s ideal life, but just wanda’s idea of what everyone’s ideal life would be. all the time i see x-fans condemn magneto for house of m because his ideal world is him becoming exactly like his oppressors, but house of m isn’t actually the life magnus wants! any time magnus gets to become a political leader, he hates it. he hated ruling genosha. he hated ruling krakoa. deep down, he doesn’t want to be superior. he just wants to live in peace with the family he lost.

also, shoutout to magda and anya, who never get to be anything other than magneto’s women in refrigerators. i wish they got to be more important than that. i love it every time we see them in comics, but it’s so rare. and shoutout to magda in particular since she’s been almost completely erased from the narrative by the maximoff retcon. really hope we get a reveal that natalya maximoff was magda all along when we inevitably make wanda and pietro magneto’s mutant children again.

i honestly didnt know excalibur was a predecessor to HoM when i heard about both runs so when i saw that set of panels for the first time it really had me reconsider HoM and the 'ideal reality' bit, im surprised i dont see it mentioned more often

i really wish there were more appearances of mags, magda, and anya; if there are stories focused on them i barely see them talked about... ive heard magda is mags' best-written partner from some but i also very rarely see stories that feature her directly named, so i never get to see her beyond the few fleeting instances i just so happen to catch her. id very much like to see more of her and mags' domestic life....

i think if we find out that natalya was magda all along i'll howl: this family really Can get more complicated contrary to popular belief 💀

[akkivee]

this is kinda a continuation of this post talking about how well kuukou knows his loved ones that he’s able to find them wherever they are, but one of kuukou’s arcs comes to an end here and in the movie where it’s not just how well kuukou knows them, it’s jyushi and hitoya taking comfort in kuukou staying who he is as they know him and it’s also ichiro in the movie giving his brothers an entire monologue about the kuukou he knows lol

still???? it’s interesting that rarely anyone looks for kuukou, it’s always shakku looking for kuukou (and always finds him, an indicator for how well he knows his own son) so when we got that jyushi hitoya dt, circular labyrinth, it’s jyushi looking for kuukou and jyushi was unable find him, indicating he doesn’t know kuukou as well as he might think 🤔

[lightdancer1]

One of the bits I'm really enjoying with In the Company of Witches and Slayers:

The Tara Maclay of this AU does duplicate a few of Willow's canonical notes, namely the equivalent of Something Blue, and resurrecting Willow in the same way that canon Willow resurrected Buffy. I also, like in my other works, use the gift that Amber Benson left of the evil Tara with Andrei Kurgan's grimoire but in a way more like what canon thought it did but didn't quite.

Instead of the magic addiction thing Tara goes on the same power trip I treat canon Willow's Dark Willow phase as and from her POV she's a victim of physical abuse who gains the power to actually hurt Glory instead of being hurt by her (there's a bit of a theme that the two villains that hurt her worst in this canon actually vehemently dislike her AU counterpart because she actually literally hurt them and made them feel it). As with canon Willow her worst traits are the results of Black magic corrupting her and less as addiction and more like the One Ring.

This AU's Dark Willow, by contrast, is a long-standing problem of suppressed rage and a combination of multiple hits with a trauma nailbat for someone with reality warping powers which is an explosive combination....and in each case the idea that there ever really WAS a Dark Willow or a Dark Tara is rejected by both Willow and Tara for very similar reasons but staunchly believed by their friends.

And since it's an unreliable narrator effect here each is equally right and wrong. Black magic really is innately corrupting because it grants the power to twist reality on a whim without any concern for the consequences and as power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Does this have the equivalent effect of DID or Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk?

At least in my stories at a Doylist level, no, but in that Watsonian level the contrast between a very powerful sorcerer in full 'My Precious' mode with the One Ring and their ordinary selves is so much like it that people without the arcane knowledge to understand it can be easily forgiven for believing that's what they're seeing.

It's also that good old fashioned Scooby double standard, too. Amy Madison in particular is 'Willow if reality handed her only the bad cards and none of the good ones'. This AU's Willow recognizes that and has sympathy for her within limits and keeps trying to appeal to her good side, which is a note missed with the canon Willow where they just forgot that Amy was one of her closest friends who turned to evil. And until the Twilight war Amy is seen in-universe through Willow's eyes but after it she's seen through the eyes of other characters and she's a murderous evil witch who tries to wield human sacrifice, blood magic, and is every bit as power hungry, petty, and jealous as her canon counterpart.

Equally since this AU's Willow is invincible unless she's facing foes capable of using her weaknesses (which naturally I tend to do precisely to add creative tension) her standards of threats are skewed and what to her is a nuisance is an existential threat to everyone else. Amy and Tara, unlike in other cases, are by no means weak, they are exceptionally powerful. Since Willow is the most powerful being in the *universe*, mystically, everyone else is second rate. Second rate to the most powerful being in the infinite expanse of a single universe allows massive amounts of leg room and Tara is the second most powerful sorceress in the entire setting and Amy the third.

And Amy, if she's not facing Willow or Faith with a friendly weapon that nullifies magic like the Scythe or Olaf's Hammer, is a murderously creative juggernaut who can and does steamroll multiple enemies at once with trivial ease. This is for the villains is Buffy on hard mode, the villains that last are more badass than their canon counterparts by default.

And where canon only hinted at the worst things Willow did indirectly and in a way where people can ignore it, which was IMO one of the most foolish things it did, because if you're going to go there, go all the way or not at all, this show makes it explicit and in a way that parallels Faith and Tara just as canon pairs Faith and Willow.

And just as with canon Willow these particular aspects are explicitly a case of 'Dark Side brain rot' and very directly NOT what the actual Tara would do, and it's one of the things that haunts her most. Where canon Willow never really had to face the consequences of her actions due to the bullet (and that too is one of the best reasons for the Tara resurrection storyline) , this AU's Tara very much does face them and grows into fully being the person she could have been. Much like how canon Tara made major mistakes and was the rare Buffyverse character allowed to actually grow and become wiser from them.

This is also why a couple of my other AUs hinge on 'Willow looks into the future, sees her canon path, goes 'Hell no' and rejects it and it turns out that rejecting it works but there are some steep prices for trying'. Essentially when the characters look at canon Season 6 they balk and go 'gross, no thank you' but this setting being what it is, it fucks them up with a different nailbat because it's the Whedonverse and his characters only get yea tier nice things.

[icharchivist]

I guess there's poetry to Lucilius being this desirable while also being the most aroace person to ever exist (in my HC anyway. Just like Lucifer is the most gay and Belial is the most bi. You understand)

Like. It does not benefit.him. all these people drooling over him and he just wants to dissect people in peace. Who are all these people in his dms. Leave him alone

GOD yeah.

Like i definitely fully read Lucilius as AroAce but the fact he's the most desired man of the franchise he's in really just doesn't help for that. He's so AroAce that the one person who loves him the most is the most Hyper-sexual Hyper-romantic person of the whole skies. Poor man.

Like i do feel bad for him!!! Mofo just want to be left alone and do his experiments in peace!! bodies should just be for science!!! why the fuck do you want to insert a dick in a body when you can insert a scalpel!!!

it's hysterical. It's poetic in a sense of just how much of this saga is built on looking for the love of an absent God and how much Lucilius himself stands as this unloving figure in general.

But it's a trip. I do feel bad for Lucilius in this situation like come on. Let a man just rest. and commit his own type of atrocities. god forbid an aroace do anything.

[endawna]

the pc letting volo do ‘surgery’ on their eye would ALSO have to occur during one of pax’s death naps because other wise he’d use volo as a chew toy like

[bsahely]

The Forbidden Fruits of Peace: Why Health, Harmony, and Unity Threaten the Logic of Empire | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] This white paper, The Forbidden Fruits of Peace, presents a provocative and compassionate analysis of why the most life-affirming conditions — peace, health, harmony, and unity — are often treated as systemic threats in the current world order. It reveals that our dominant institutions are shaped not to protect or promote these values, but to suppress them,…

[phantomrose96]

Concept I've been stewing on for a while here. I've got a name for it now and I'm calling it the Shot Dog Factor. It's a numerical value, assignable to any internet post, which represents the average number of engagements it needs to reach before someone comes along acting like this post shot their dog.

And for the sake of High Number = More Danger, which feels like the intuitive and sensible read, let's call it the inverse. As in the chance that any given interaction results in a Shot Dog response.

"Hee hee haa haa" type of silly shitpost? Low Shot Dog Factor. Largely safe. A genuine political opinion? Critically high Shot Dog Factor. Guaranteed to elicit such a response if it breaks containment.

As a result of this phenomenon, you see phrasings and circumventions added specifically to lower the Shot Dog factor. Every "now I know this doesn't apply to EVERYONE'S specific situation, but I just think--" about something where the non-specificity was obvious, but OP needed to add that disclaimer to avoid the Shot Dog from someone who thinks it needs to apply to them.

And another--perhaps the most--critical thing to understand about the Shot Dog factor is that 0 is not a valid value. There's a discontinuation at 0. And as such, the Shot Dog limit, as engagement goes to infinity is, in fact, 100%. Any and every post you have ever made, given enough containment breaching, WILL piss someone off in wild ways. You can lower the Shot Dog factor but it is never 0. Sometimes when a post of yours escapes containment, you must simply sit back and accept this reality.

[fellator]

#fun reblogging this from ben specifically. it's like playing bingo <3#but this is all very normal stuff i feel like my freak went undetected

and yet you got a much higher score than me 👀since your score goes down the more you check 👀

im a curious fellow and so very intellectually interested in everything sex related 😔 it's my curse 😔 every once in a while I think of something and im like 🤔🤔 could there be anything. and really often there is. then I open many tabs and click many tags and learn so much about things that don't matter (except that they do. so much. to me). and the more I see the more possibilities I'm aware of and so far I don't think I'm anywhere close to exhausting them

the interest isn't purely intellectual but it's like half the reason. the other half is that extending the knowledge I also extend the menu 👀🤭

but also you wrote like 40% of that stuff I really don't know how you got a score so high 🧐

[cosmik-homo]

Also besides The Future slapping dasterdly its also obviously kinda a Master song

[audarcy]

Me in the shower thinking about my wife: i think one of the big reasons why het culture "wifey/hubby" "his/hers" "tiaras/mustaches" matching sets shit bothers me so much (other than the reductive binarism of it all) is that it reveals the thought process driving heteropatriarchy propaganda wherein ideal love is a product of inversion; two puzzle pieces that fit together but are separate and made functional solely by the utility of their differences. Heteropatriarchal love retroactively redefines a person as a half of a whole, their functions and idiosyncrasies only valuable when curtailed by another's. But more than that, heteropatriarchal love is so divided. My "hers" towel and your "his." Married on a friday because saturdays are for the boys. Your woodsmoke-scented deodorant and my lavender. We cant possibly hope to understand each other and that's what lends our partnership value, somehow. But the love i cherish--the love that nurtures me--is inextricability. Not the teeth of your personality spinning the cogs of mine but the blend and blur of our edges together. The further in the tide rolls the better. The love that nurtures me is accepting everything about you into my life even if i dont feel the same way about it that you do. Its a becoming. Becoming you, becoming myself, becoming us, again and again. There are no puzzle pieces to snap together, and im no more or less of anything with or without you. But no matter what happens i carry you with me now. Even in the small ways like how we wear each others jackets and deodorant and hats. I wear your mannerisms, and your jokes. I have your interests. You have my music taste. We subsume and consume one another. We explore each other by exploring ourselves and vice versa. The process of loving you is a mapping of a vast expanse and it is the creation itself of that expanse, ad infinitum. Loving you is a fluidity of the self. I try out new ways of living through you. I see through your eyes. My life doubles by virture of sharing it with you. We finish each others sentences and joke that were the same person but its truer than we have the language to describe. My selfhood blurs into yours; Im not half of a whole, but together we are a whole. You could draw a straight line from one end of me to the other end of you, no breaks. And why shouldnt we travel that line? Step inside my head and get comfy. Mi casa es su casa. Youre me and im you.

What comes out of my mouth when she walks into the room: id let you wear my skin if i could

[peeterjoot]

Book update. Now includes recent work on best fit solutions.

  I’ve added a few new pages in the linear systems solution portion of my book, Geometric Algebra for Electrical Engineers.  This now includes the best fit content that was covered in my recent video and blog post on approximate solutions to linear systems. The geometry that is associated with a Moore-Penrose or SVD-based pseudoinverse is not terribly obvious, and this result, providing the same…

[mystacoceti]

"practice talking about things you like in your target language" is perfectly good advice only when I talk about things I like I barely form coherent sentences even in my native language

[twoa-plus]

dipper & mabel aren’t 1:1 parallels of stan & ford - sure, it might be easier to spot similarities between dipper & ford and mabel & stan, but there are some really important traits that dipper & stan / mabel & ford share

one of the biggest ones for me that i wish people talked about more is their inherent attitudes towards trust

ford is not a naturally paranoid person, doesn’t have much experience with other people, and is a really bad judge of character. that’s a big part of why he was so easy for bill to manipulate - bill could just show up and be like “i’m a muse !!” and ford would believe him, because that’s the type of person he is. i don’t think he ever actually got better at figuring out who’s trustworthy and who’s not, either - “trust no one” is just an inverse of “trust everyone” born of trauma

mabel is, in practice, the same way. i can’t really give a particular reason that ford is so trusting - it just seems to be part of his personality - but for her it’s that she sees the best in everyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done

stan & dipper are the opposite. they’re both inherently distrustful of other people. again, they have different personalities and different reasons for this - stan is a professional conman and is fully prepared for anyone he speaks to to be the same way, while dipper is more like “what if they’re actually 4,000 termites in human clothes” - but the end result is the same. they’re significantly less likely to take things at face value than their twins

anyways in relativity falls mabel should be the one who built the portal i said what i said

[transmutationisms]

I love your takes, but I feel super, super lost with what you were trying to say about the natalism one. I feel like you're saying that there is no contradiction on wanting more babies, a higher population number and punishing mothers, but can you elaborate on that a bit more, because it does seems contradictory. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to understand it better.

alright there's a perennial debate (on here but also in a wider cultural sense) that goes on where people start noticing that some of the ways in which we socially and economically de/value children, parenthood, and specifically motherhood are internally contradictory. how can it be that there is immense social and economic pressure to heterosexually partner and reproduce, and yet most public and social infrastructure is also profoundly hostile to children and their guardians? why is it that this person couldn't find a doctor to perform a voluntary hysterectomy because their bodily preferences were subordinated to the medical valorisation of their fertility, and yet this other person was forcibly sterilised or coerced into using contraception because the prospect of them reproducing is framed as socially destabilising and degenerative? how are 'family values' touted by politicians who openly and explicitly also hate real existing families? do they want people to have more children or fewer? is it more counterculture and rebellious to have children or to not have children? to have sex or to not have sex? to partner off? to be polyam or monogamous?

the answer broadly speaking is that the oppositions people see here are only surface-level. the bourgeois state's interest is in biopower, and this produces competing demands: for some people to partner off and reproduce, and for others to be exterminated. the valorisation of the white middle-class nuclear family is the same as the devalorisation of its negations: racialised people, disabled people, family arrangements other than nuclear and heterosexual, etc. you can't understand the demand that people reproduce if you don't understand it is necessarily also accompanied by the demand that other people don't. these aren't actually contradictory once you understand that what the bourgeois state wants has nothing to do with your individual behaviours and everything to do with how many 'desirable' bodies it has at its disposal. that economic consideration is what creates both the natalist policy meant to encourage [some people's] reproduction, and the exterminatory policy meant to suppress and eradicate [other people's] reproduction.

usually this kind of conversation very quickly devolves into a privilege framework argument, where people are trying to find some kind of social hierarchy that is hegemonically applied top-down and that rewards, universally, certain behaviour choices over others. again, the "people who marry and reproduce are privileged and socially rewarded over me #childfree" versus "actually some people still have to fight tooth and nail to even get medical support / approval to have children, let alone actually get access to the kind of economic and social support necessary to raise them" debate. it's smoke and mirrors because there is no universal privileging of the choice to have children or not have children. what there is, is a privileging of certain people on the basis of the economic assessment of them as biological assets, and the inverse (and mutually constitutive) devaluations of everyone else. really over-discussed examples here but to give them anyway: this is why, for example, french natalist policy and the USA's constant efforts to strip back welfare-net policies in order to harm (primarily) black families are both arising from the same basic impulses of two imperialist nation-states. obviously there are different histories and contextual factors that have resulted in france and the US trying to skin the same cat in different ways. but what they share is an underlying interest in trying to shore up their population in both size and 'fitness', understood here in its full racialised and eugenic meaning.

[onrtrp]

in middle school i heard about the thing where if you bore an appropriately-sized hole into a warm melon you can fuck it with your penis and it allegedly feels just like flesh. was too nervous about my folks finding out to ever actually try it but i thought about it a lot, i was obsessed with the idea, to the point that sometimes when jacking off i would vividly imagine myself thrusting in and out of a cantaloupe instead of using my hand... which is a thing that happens a lot, isnt it, the instrumental substitutes in for the terminal, the ground shifts beneath your feet, you'd better watch out. but watch out for what, exactly, it's all sorta arbitrary isn't it? typically you take Choice as an axiom and prove Tychonoff as a theorem but you may just as well do the inverse, assume Tychonoff and prove Choice. which of these equivalent axiomatizations do you use, where do your values crystalize, which is the base and which the ædifice, who's to say, who's to say? i could now as an adult very easily fuck a cantaloupe if i wanted but i havent, what does that say about me?