#while claiming he doesn't care and it's actually just objectively true <- lying

[sainteclectic]

heart: kiki. you'd think he'd be bouba but no, deep down he is kiki

mind: bouba but refuses to admit this out of a bizarre sense of pride

soul: kiki. I don't have to justify this choice he's kiki

whole: bouba and I REALLY don't need to justify this one he's the Most bouba

[thiscityneedslessfog]

I wanted to talk about Marie and her relationship with fate and connection.

Marie is “not of man,” meaning, she isn’t human. She doesn’t know what she is, and her Social Link is trying to help her gain a “self.” This goes haywire once she realizes what she actually is—a deity. And believes she has to die in order for the world to be saved, calling herself a “being destined for nonexistence.” Though, she doesn’t totally realize the extent of what she is yet.

When Marie realizes what she is, she actively pushes the Investigation Team away, and desperately denies herself her attachments to the Investigation Team. She believes she’s damned to die, as that’s what she’s been told her purpose is. Her denial is to the point that it corrupts the items of the Investigation Team. The weapons they wield drain their SP, and they have no items beyond what’s in the Hollow Forest. The reason she denies it so hard is because she’s in part terrified of harming the Investigation Team when the fog takes over her psyche.

Also, look at the statues around her dungeon. These are haniwa. If you don’t know what haniwa are, they’re little clay sculptures, often put around a grave, especially in the Kofun era. Here they’re basically meant to guard Marie’s grave, which the Hollow Forest itself. As she’s meant to die by absorbing the fog. Though, that's not their only purpose here--they're meant to be a source of comfort for her as she passes away. In Fumio Miki's book Haniwa: The clay sculpture of Protohistoric Japan, this is on pages 18-19:

[T]he Haniwa seem to reflect a much more human relationship between the upper and lower strata of early society [compared to that of China]. It is difficult to imagine anything but genuine love and affection for their departed rulers on the part of the artisans responsible for some of the best Haniwa figures. Without these qualities, the notably human and often even warmly lifelike sculpture of much of the Haniwa repertory would be virtually unthinkable. The same holds true for the Haniwa replicas of inanimate objects; not fear and servility but only the warm human desire to provide the departed with the best possible reproductions of the objects he used and loved while still alive can account for the care and affection evidently lavished upon their production.

But look at her dungeon. There are more than just haniwa. There are fragments of Inaba everywhere within the dungeon. Such as the sign of Souzai Daigaku, the steak skewer place you visit in her Rank 1, just casually lying around.

It's of Inaba, and a bunch of things she remembers from her time in Inaba. There are two meanings to the presence of the fragmented but recognizable pieces of Inaba in her dungeon: one, to show that she's lying later on when she claims she hates the Investigation Team and wishes she never met them, proving it's just her way of trying to help them because she genuinely believes she cannot get out of her situation. Two, to show that she doesn't want to die. She loves and adores Inaba, and wants the chance to make any memories she can--she loved living with the Investigation Team, and truly does want to continue. And she’s panicking when they finally confront her, because she genuinely believes this is the only way to save everyone. But she resents it. She’s terrified of and hates the idea of fate and how it can bind her. She makes it abundantly clear she doesn’t want to die at all, fighting off tears as she tries to comfort herself and fails, then cursing her situation.

She makes it abundantly clear she believes there's no way to fix the situation for herself, telling the IT it's impossible to save her. But the Investigation Team proves that she isn’t fated to die at all, because when they ask if there’s any other way, she does explain one, but says it’s risky. She chooses to make a gamble and trust the Investigation Team to literally break fate.

And you know how she learns fate doesn’t exist? Because the plan works. She straight up survives and she just wrecked the idea that she was destined for nonexistence. Much to her own shock and even just incredulously asking why the hell the Investigation Team would do that, claiming they wouldn’t get anything out of saving her too, forgetting the simple truth that they love her and that they got her out of saving her.

And afterwards, she helps Yu fight her other self, Izanami. And Izanami in a sense perpetuates fate as well, because she believed the person who won the battle between "Despair, Emptiness, and Hope" was the Midnight Channel Killer, Adachi. Who had this to say about fate, firmly believing in it:

But Marie's learned that isn't true. And furthermore, I made another writeup about Marie and Izanami’s potential dynamic—it was in part speculation, but we know Marie is Izanami. Specifically, she’s the part that loved humanity as she granted their desires.

I believe Izanami casting Marie away with that magic comb, and the scene where Izanami expresses disdain for Marie, are representations of Izanami throwing away her trust in humanity, as trust is required in order for love to be healthy. Trust and connection changed the course of Marie’s life from being destined to die to having no destiny and being free to live as she wanted, leaving her no longer bound by fate. But Izanami hasn’t learned this yet and won’t until the Investigation Team prove it to her face. I like this because Naoto’s words before the fight against Adachi are correct—you can’t do everything alone, and pushing people away will only hurt you—if Marie succeeded in pushing the Investigation Team away, she would have died. But she chose to trust them instead and have faith in them so that she could live alongside the world, and live however she likes.

[xenodile]

Bad news everyone, I might potentially be homeless!

Long story short, around the start of this year, my dad's mental state took a pretty bad turn. I don't know the exact cause, if he's suffering from mental illness, or he's just given up all pretense of being a decent person, but he's more or less made it impossible to live with him.

It started with him coming home early from work and throwing an actual screaming tantrum, saying he can't live with the tension in the house between me and him, because I confessed in October of last year that I delayed coming out as trans because I was afraid of how he would react and what he would do to me. When I explained the laundry list of reasons why I didn't trust or feel safe around him, this made him angrier, denying did anything wrong, blaming me for feeling the wrong way, and demanding I forgive him for the things he didn't do that made my childhood utterly miserable. He essentially gave me an ultimatum of just..."letting go" of all my childhood trauma and giving him no accountability, or being kicked out because he "doesn't deserve" to be held responsible for his actions.

The situation was eventually deescalated, but tension remained in the house, and before long, started to be redirected at my mom. Over the past year, my dad grew increasingly hostile and confrontational about the most trivial things. Berating my mom and calling her names when she didn't drop everything to do what he wanted, calling the police saying that he was in danger after he started a fight that escalated into him screaming, even being in a room with him was stressful because he would all but invent reasons to start shouting.

On top of that, he had begun to actively lie to me and my mom, or perhaps he always lied and we only now caught it. Agreements that only he was privy to, misrepresenting events to pain himself as a victim, claims of who said what that were completely baseless and easily proven wrong, secret stashes of booze after he promised not to drink all year, all in addition to willful emotional manipulation and intimidation tactics. It has reached the point where my mom and I can no longer tell if he's out of touch with reality and thinks what he's saying is true, or if he's willfully malicious and knowingly lying. He's broken all trust either of us ever had in him.

Through it all, my mom and I have tried to urge him whenever we can to seek counseling or psychiatric help because his behavior is unusual and frightening, but he has rebuffed us at every turn, growing increasingly paranoid and hurling accusations at anyone and everyone that doesn't immediately take "his side".

There was no end to it. Every other week was another incident. He'd take my car and my dog hostage because he "didn't feel safe at home" after provoking and yelling at my mom. Any disagreement was turned into a fight. At one point he even threatened suicide when my mom wouldn't get a plane with him to Hawaii.

Things came to a head last week, where after learning that my mom took his name off the title of her car to make sure he didn't sell it out from under her like he did to another family car earlier that year, he got black out drunk and started tearing apart their shared bedroom. He barricaded the door shut and threw heavy objects at the door when my mom knocked to see if he was alright before going unresponsive.

My mom called 911 because she worried he'd hurt himself, and they had to break the door down to reach him. They found him passed out on the floor and barely able to walk after how much he'd had to drink from his secret stash, got him into a gurney and wheeled him out. From here things are a bit more fuzzy, as my mom and I were told he was being taken to a local hospital for care, but learned the next day he'd been transferred to a mental care facility that was two hours drive away after he got physically combative with medical staff.

He was put on a psychiatric hold while he was looked over and made sure he was not an immediate threat to himself or others, and was away for about six days. Yesterday he came home, and talked up how much he wanted to change and wanted to be better, but before 12 hours had passed he was right back to harassing my mom non-stop.

So my mom and I have left the house. We're currently at a motel for a few days while we file the paperwork to get a restraining order and try to figure out where we go from here because it is impossible to live with him. He's paranoid and either delusion or plain old hateful, and we cannot stay under the same roof as him any more.

So that's where I am now. Unsure of how or where things will go. Ideally, my mom and I can get back into our house and my dad can get the help he needs, but it's hard to say at this point.

Safe to say, I won't be streaming in the near future, as my equipment is all back home and I don't wanna try going off my laptop using public wifi. For now, I would ask you keep me in your thoughts, and if there's any advice or recommendations for how to proceed in this situation, I would be happy to hear them.

[eisforeidolon]

Yes, when the actors are doing cons (or interviews), it's a performance and so they may very well exaggerate or even lie. The problem is that some people in fandom - definitely hellers, but not just them - will take that and run with it to the point of 'everything I want to believe is true and everything I don't is a lie!'.

Of course there are some things we can't know how true or not they are, but the reasonable way to evaluate has nothing to do with personal biases and making up justifications why an actor is only being 100% truthful when they say the things you like. There are a number of questions we can ask to more objectively consider the relative truth value of a statement.

Let's take Misha's claim that RC's song Watching Over Me is about Castiel as our obvious example.

First question is, "What was literally said?" Fandom tends to share their interpretations of what was said instead of facts, so the first check is to see what literally came out the actor's mouth. He did more or less say that, but he claimed Jensen told him one of the album's songs was about Castiel but he had no idea which one. It was fans who filled in the blank of what song it supposedly was. It's also reasonable to consider that Steve talked in a stream about writing most of that song and referred to something else as the inspiration.

Second question is, "Does it make sense given what we otherwise know?" While songs about fiction are sometimes a thing, does it sound reasonable Jensen would write not a song about some other media he's a fan of, not a song about his own character or the show as a whole, but a song about Castiel? Considering how he actually talks about Castiel in the show as a sometimes brother sometimes tool side character outside the main focus of Sam and Dean? Considering his visible annoyance when shippers try to make everything he says about Castiel and their ship, and how he has explicitly stated multiple times he did not play into that and doesn't see it as part of Dean's story? Does it make any sense that if there was a song about Castiel, Misha wouldn't know or care which one? No, it makes no sense outside of heller fantasies that Jensen is an obsessed teenage fan girl in lurve with Misha just like them.

Third question, "How generally reliable has the source been on the past, and what would they get out of lying?" When we tell a story, details can get mixed up in but if there's underlying truth there, the fundamental point of the story isn't going to change and other involved people will agree as to its general truth. Sometimes fans want to quibble over and dissect minor discrepancies when they want to find quote unquote lies, but with Misha? That's not really a factor, because he will completely change his story from con to con and he will frequently be contradicted by other involved parties. Examples: When he both said he knew and didn't know he was coming back in season seven. When he claimed Jimmy was going to be at the Roadhouse in the original finale script as a fakeout that Castiel was there, then changed to it being actually Castiel there for a reunion. When he said Jensen and the writers were playing into D/C back in the earlier seasons and Jensen and Singer both said that was bullshit. What would he get out of lying? The vast majority of his fanbase have made it clear they only care about him and Castiel in regards to shipping him with Jensen/Dean, and they will blindly believe whatever validates that and get mad at everyone else for what he's told them is totes true. It's happened over and over for years. So Misha is grossly unreliable, has a history of dishonest pandering on this subject in particular, and definitely has reason to lie and think he'll get away with it.

[mellometal]

Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.

(Please tell me at least one of you got that reference.)

Anyways, jokes aside, the slaughtering of Dhar Mann’s videos is back and running! I’M BACK. Sorry for the long wait. I’ve had a lot of personal stuff going on, which I’ve been very transparent about and I wasn’t in the right headspace to tear apart Dhar Mann’s videos due to that. 

Y’all are in for a real treat today. Why? Because I’m tearing apart TWO of his videos in ONE post! They’re all the same premise, basically. Both of these videos are about people scamming others out of their money by faking injuries and disabilities! Ain’t that nifty? /s

Both of these videos have these things in common: insurance fraud, scamming people, and faking injuries and disabilities. Obviously, we all know those things are extremely fucked up.

For anyone who’s not aware, Dhar Mann has actually committed fraud in the past that he pleaded no contest to in 2014. Fucking shocker, I know. He’s such a kind soul, right? How could he do something so EVIIILLL? /s

He’s actually never served jail time, let alone was ever arrested, for the five felony counts related to a scheme to defraud the City (Oakland, California) by submitting false claims and receipts in order to receive redevelopment grant money. Those were all from the shit he did back in 2008 and 2009! He stole THOUSANDS of dollars from the city when he was an entrepreneur in the medical marijuana business! Dhar Mann served five years of probation. They let him off easy. Why? Oh, because his parents are super rich too and they paid to get him out of serving a jail sentence. 

In 2018, he made a blog post on entrepreneur.com about his “big mistakes costing him everything”. IT’S SO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME. JUST THE WAY HE PUT IT IS HILARIOUSLY BAD AND I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING. Like, BRUH. The fuck did you think was gonna happen? He wrote it out like he was a kid who got in trouble with his parents for not eating his vegetables and had to write out a whole fucking essay as to why it’s important to eat your veggies. It’s THAT bad.

ETA: Here's the link to the article. It's so bad it's funny.

Will there be any response from me? Unfortunately, not this time. These videos are too poorly made for me to make comments about. It wouldn’t be worth it at this point because Dhar Mann has his head up his own ass and won’t listen to the real people he’s actually hurting with his videos. It's obvious they're bad.

It's obvious that insurance fraud is a serious crime. Faking being disabled is disgusting. By faking disabilities, it makes it THAT much harder for disabled people to be taken seriously. It’s sickening.

Onto the first video I want to talk about. This first one has a man who fakes being disabled and fakes injuries all for monetary compensation, a lawyer who encourages her client to do this serious crime, a judge who’s EXTREMELY unprofessional, a few owners of small stores who are the victims of the crime that is injury fraud, and an undercover FBI agent.

Committing insurance fraud can usually end up with a prison sentence of up to five years per false claim (like what this man and his lawyer did in the video), but it can reach up to twenty years. There’s also a penalty that can be up to $250,000 per incident. It’s no joke. (Kids, don't do this, please.)

The first video starts off in a court room. The “victim” (the plaintiff) gives the store owner (the defendant) a piece of his mind, then the guy’s lawyer does the same thing. Hey, as a lawyer, you should know better. That’s extremely unprofessional. The store owner is obviously distraught. He's remorseful. He feels horrible about someone getting hurt in HIS shop, but he’s determined to fight his case. He didn’t do anything wrong.

The judge tells everyone to rise, then says everyone can sit down in an unprofessional way. He tells the plaintiff to tell their side of the story. The lawyer tells the judge that her client tried to grab onto one of the hand bars in the disabled bathroom stall, found that it wasn’t installed properly, and he fell. The store owner interjects and tries to tell the judge that what they were saying wasn’t true...without saying that he objects. The judge gets angry with the store owner...which again, is unprofessional.

The lawyer shows the judge the photos she took as evidence. (I'll get to why these claims are absolute bullshit.) After that, the judge finally tells the store owner to tell his side of the story.

The store owner is adamant about installing the hand bars in the disabled bathroom stall properly, he genuinely had no idea how that even happened, and he's still remorseful. The judge ruled in favor of the "victim", asks for the store owner to pay out $25,000, and court was dismissed.

The lawyer and the "victim" are seen gloating about being successful in pulling off another scheme. The "victim" tells his lawyer that he needed to get out of the wheelchair. His lawyer denies this by saying that she doesn't want to get exposed.

They then go to another independent business to pull off the SAME scam. They do this at a small boutique. The store owner goes around to catch them in the action when he bumps into an undercover FBI agent. The FBI agent asks him what he was doing, and he tells the agent that he’s trying to gather evidence. The agent understands and goes on his merry way.

We see the lawyer going into the dressing room while the “victim” is browsing around for a dress shirt to try on. She goes in with the screwdriver, unscrews the hand bars in the dressing room, then comes back out. The “victim” asks one of the store clerks if he could try on a shirt he picked out, so he goes back there, and he “falls” in the dressing room. LIKE HOW HE “FELL” IN THE DISABLED BATHROOM STALL AT ANOTHER STORE.

What makes these claims absolute bullshit is the fact that the lawyer carried around a screwdriver to uninstall the hand bars to make her client "fall" (she had it sticking out of her suit jacket). Plus, if a disabled person were to actually fall from improperly installed hand bars in the disabled bathroom stall, the holes in the wall wouldn't look clean WHATSOEVER. The screws would not come out clean like if you were to unscrew them out of a wall. Part of the wall and the screws would most likely be ripped out and the disabled person would be SERIOUSLY hurt (depending on the person). Like, you'd have to go to the hospital, most likely. The way that the "victim" "fell" was like he practiced it, like how you would in theatre. (I've practiced how to "fall" safely when I was in theatre for scenes where you have to faint or pass out. There's a trick to doing that without hurting yourself. Theatre kids, you know what I'm talking about.) He was still in the fetal position in his chair on his left side. He had NO injuries whatsoever.

His lawyer JUST so happened to be there! Convenient timing! She introduces herself (even though they clearly know each other already) and tells the people working in the store that she’ll be seeing them in court for their “negligence”. The store clerks have no idea what she’s even talking about and they’re understandably afraid. I don’t think the owner of that boutique was there at the time. (Don’t they have security cameras all over the store? I would think they'd catch onto what the lawyer did in one of the dressing rooms if they did.)

They pull off this scam, they're seen LAUGHING about fucking scamming people and committing a SERIOUS CRIME, and the store owner from earlier catches them when the "victim" gives the wheelchair back to his lawyer. They take the store owner's camera, taunt him, and then the lawyer EATS the SD card! They go off into the sunset, laughing like your stereotypical mean girls in Beverly Hills.

They go back to court, where the store owner is still trying to defend himself. The judge isn't budging at first, the lawyer is acting like the store owner is lying (he isn’t), and the store owner is trying to tell the judge exactly what happened. He’s almost ordered to pay out $25,000, which would mean that he’d have to close down his store to even come up with that kind of money. That stops when the undercover FBI agent goes right into the courtroom to give the judge evidence to prove that the store owner is innocent. Apparently this guy has been investigating these two people for a while and was waiting to catch them. It ends with the lawyer AND the "victim" being arrested and the store owner is proven innocent. He never ends up having to pay the $25,000.

Hey, Dhar Mann. I have a few questions for you.:

Are you projecting? Because you did commit five counts of fraud. You pulling the same shit again? Just curious.

When you add in BIPOC and AAPI characters, why do you have to ALWAYS have to write them as either the victims, the heroes, or you write them to be absolutely awful people? This is ESPECIALLY the case with Black and Hispanic people in your videos. You ALWAYS write these two groups like this mainly, and I don't understand why. The racial aggression in your videos isn't cute. Knock it the fuck off. Why not just write them as normal people, WHICH IS WHAT THEY ARE?

Is your concern for small business owners genuine? Do you actually care about small businesses? Or did you just add them into this video for brownie points to feed the gross excuse for a savior complex you have?

The second video I want to talk about is pretty much the same thing, except this involves a couple and they don't fake disabilities! They do fake being/getting injured though. I’ll call the guy with the nice car “Nice Guy” and the scammers “Scammer 1″ and “Scammer 2″. They don’t have any names, unfortunately.

It starts off with Nice Guy backing out of a parking lot when Scammer 1 "falls" behind the car and yelps out in pain. Nice Guy gets out of the car to see what happened and he’s freaking out because he thinks he just hit someone by trying to back out of a parking lot. He wants to make sure that Scammer 1 is okay.

Scammer 2 runs over to her boyfriend to see that he “fell” behind the car, berates Nice Guy, Scammer 1 is crying out in “pain”, and Nice Guy is trying to come up with a solution. He gives the two scammers $600 and they go on their way. Scammer 2 tells her boyfriend that he put on a great performance. Little did they know that Nice Guy heard everything they said.

But wait, kids! There’s more! It’s fuckin’ wacky!

They go to a little convenience store, Scammer 1 pulls out a water bottle out of one of the fridges that he didn’t pay for, and pours some all over the floor. Scammer 2 happens to walk in, "slip" on the spilled water, and land directly onto her back. The store clerk there goes over to see what happened, Scammer 1 introduces himself as a personal injury lawyer to Scammer 2, and they try to get monetary compensation from the store clerk. Little do they know that Nice Guy was watching them the whole time!

He caught them on camera trying to pull off a scam, he called the cops, and we never see Scammer 1 and Scammer 2 ever again!

Why is it that there were no security cameras in your store the first time around, but they were CONVENIENTLY THERE this time, Nice Guy? You could've proven your case and won the first time!

My thoughts on these videos? Super boring. Ableist as hell. Super unrealistic. They're so poorly made that I didn't even want to make a comment on either of them!

It looks obvious that he's projecting, but I don't know. What do y'all think?