#yes I'm actively being a bad person

[slightly-warmer-hibiscus-tea]

Do you have any other social media besides Tumblr?

Yes I do!

Do I use them?

No I don't!

Lol umm... I'm kind of only active on Tumblr right now, and I'm thinking of moving all my activity here soon. I like the atmosphere on here more and it reminds me of my old main platform on Artfol... very cozy vibes. I mainly posted OC content so it's a bit different compared to here, you can find me on Instagram, and from there you can probably find my other old acc.... it's a bunch of old art and failed dreams... it's stinky and cringe... but it exists ( ´Д` )

Also once I make another Tumblr page I'll make sure to drop the name

[beanghostprincess]

A bit tired of people complaining about Sanji's principle of "not hitting women" being misogynistic when it has been clearly stated multiple times that he does not choose it and it's heavily tied to his trauma and admiration for his dad and respect for women and definitely not from seeing women as somehow weaker than him

[erabundus]

HAPPY BLOG ANNIVERSARY!

it's  officially  midnight  here,  which  means  i'm  allowed  to  post  this!  so ...  happy  one  year  anniversary  of  enduring  the  plague  of  avalon  upon  your  dashboards!  alternatively,  thank  you  so  much  for  giving  me  a  place  to  babble  about  my  #1  favorite  comfort  character  who  has  experienced  zero  comfort.  (  i  swear  i  am  being  SO  NORMAL  about  this.  yes i did literally buy  cake  and  party  hats.  )  whether  we  speak  on  the  daily,  you've  just  gotten  here  or  anywhere  in  between,  i  want  to  extend  my  sincerest  gratitude  for  being  on  this  absolutely  wild  ride  of  a  blog  with  me.  there's  been  ups  and  downs,  but  ultimately  i  feel  like  my  passion  for  writing  has  been  ignited  stronger  than  it's  ever  been  before.  i  am  still  always  so  excited  whenever  i  get  the  chance  to  log  on  here  and  create  stories  with  all  of  you  —  and  i  wouldn't  have  that  opportunity  if  it  wasn't  for  this little  corner  of  the  internet  you've  helped  make truly special.

there  are  so  many  of  you  i  feel  lucky  to  have  met.  (  and  so  many  i  would  love  to  get  to  know  better,  too!  )  i  hope  we  can  continue  writing  together  for  many  more  anniversaries  to  come.  and  if  the  day  ever  comes  that  they  finally  pull  the  plug  on  this  cockroach  of  a  hellsite,  i'll  forever remember  this  community  as  the  rpc  that  got me to  laugh  at  petrichor.

have  a  wonderful  day  /  night!  i'm  sharing  the  cake  with  everyone  in  spirit.

[shopcat]

also by that definition this site itself is "media consumption" which creates a funny world where you're mad ppl do media consumption on the media consumption site that is itself media consumption by your own words. Okayyyy

[treeshrine]

gonna be real bud if your fic relies so heavily on intense triggering themes and shock value that you're averse to putting warnings on it to "maintain surprise" and "avoid spoilers", then you act like you did nothing wrong when people are upset that you didn't make any effort to turn them away and allow them to protect themselves, while also telling them it's their fault that they read something that upset them when they could have never known it contained specific things that will upset them, i think you are a tar pit

[racke7]

Me vs FF14 part... 2?

It's taken me pretty much three full days of running from cutscene to cutscene. But I've finally reached Heavensward.

And like... on some level? I'm kind of offended?

Like, a part of me genuinely wants to replay the entire game from the start "as something else" (different main-class, different race, different starting-area, whichever), because the dungeon-queuing system is actually really fun when you start to Understand it.

As in, FF14 has somehow made an MMO that has almost eliminated the feeling that it is a level-grind? Partially? It's turned the whole thing into a surprisingly comfortable level of (limited, but genuine) social interaction.

To the point where even someone who isn't obsessively grind-focused like me, can genuinely enjoy themselves. Just queuing up for dungeons, Hunting some bounties, and-...

And then FF14 has so many fucking quests that it literally chokes the life out of the gameplay.

As an example, one of their biggest dungeon-draws (bcs high rewards) is a quest that almost everyone hates playing. Because doing that dungeon means watching literally eighteen minutes of unskippable cutscenes.

And that's with them having reduced the amount of cutscenes in that dungeon, because the players complained so much about them.

Like... I'd be perfectly happy replaying the game from the start with a different character, even knowing that leveling isn't some kind of pain-free thing. But the thought of having to restart the fucking Main-Quest? Of having to spend literal days just running back-and-forth to cutscenes?

I'm currently feeling a bit burned-out as a result of the binge I went on to get here, but I'm pretty damn sure that I wouldn't replay this fucking thing even if you paid me for it.

(And, of course, Heavensward also has a Main-Quest continuation that you have to follow. And now I'm not even allowed to fly everywhere to cut down on the "running back-and-forth"-part of my complaints. Not until they arbitrarily allow me to discover flight for the new areas, by going through even more of the Main-Quest.)

(Not to mention that now I have to go back and do even more Class-quests, with their own cutscenes, in order to unlock a bunch of skills.)

(I'm very fond of the "the church is evil because it doesn't let you fuck dragons"-meme, and I'm very much seeing it. But like... come the fuck on. Why is this MMO a feature-length movie-series? Why can't I just play the game and have fun?)

[aftermathing]

.

[navree]

"you can't put alicent in a mother's day asoiaf comp because she's not a good mother and that's okay :)" but you have no problem with cersei fucking lannister in it when half her affc chapters are just about how abysmally she fails as a mother to her children so i think you're just a cunt

[nondivisable]

I need to say something and I need y'all to be calm

if it isn't actively bad or harmful, no representation should be called "too simple" or "too surface level"

I have a whole argument for this about the barbie movie but today I wanna talk about a show called "the babysitters club" on Netflix

(obligatory disclaimer that I watched only two episodes of this show so if it's super problematic I'm sorry) (yes. I know it's based on a book, this is about the show)

this is a silly 8+ show that my 9 year old sister is watching and it manages to tackle so many complex topics in such an easy way. basic premise is these 13 year old girls have a babysitting agency.

in one episode, a girl babysits this transfem kid. the approach is super simple, with the kid saying stuff like "oh no, those are my old boy clothes, these are my girl clothes". they have to go to the doctor and everyone is calling the kid by her dead name and using he/him and this 13 year old snaps at like a group of doctors and they all listen to her. it's pure fantasy and any person versed in trans theory would point out a bunch of mistakes.

but after watching this episode, my little sister started switching to my name instead of my dead name and intercalating he/him pronouns when talking about me.

one of the 13 years old is a diabetic and sometimes her whole personality is taken over by that. but she has this episode where she pushes herself to her limit and passes out and talks about being in a coma for a while because of not recognizing the limits of her disability.

and this allowed my 9 year old sister to understand me better when I say "I really want to play with you but right now my body physically can't do that" (I'm disabled). she has even asked me why I'm pushing myself, why I'm not using my crutches when I complain about pain.

my mom is 50 years old and watching this show with my sister. she said the episode about the diabetic girl helped her understand me and my disability better. she grew up disabled as well, but she was taught to shut up and power through.

yes, silly simple representation can annoy you if you've read thousands of pages about queer liberation or disability radical thought, but sometimes things are not for you.

[cuntwrap--supreme]

My initial goal for this month was one mile per day, which quickly morphed to 50 miles for the month, which I'm thinking could pretty easily turn into 100 miles for the month now so long as I do at least 3.3 miles per day the rest of February.

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[baekuras]

also today post shower i feel a need to make a callout against my coworker/s because

This is what they think my hair looks like w/out brushing

and this is what it actually looks like w/out being brushed

[elodieunderglass]

On the topic of the monarchist animals I'm just really curious. What makes the winnie pooh real animals bourgeois? It's not like they own much more than the others. Do they just have bourgeois energy?

(In reference to my addition on this post; https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/748488762087047168/hold-on-lets-do-this-properly-paddington)

In the post I state that none of the stuffed/toy animals in the Winnie the Pooh series are monarchists, but that the real animals are bourgeoisie. Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but it’s still politically interesting to me because nobody ever reads Winnie the Pooh as an actual book. They just draw depressed Disney Eeyore and think they’ve done something.

Owl and Rabbit are real wild animals that live in the Hundred Acre Wood. The other characters in the story are Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals.

The “real” animals (reasonably) consider themselves to be separate from the stuffed ones, but where it becomes unreasonable is how they assume superiority and how they use this to exert authority.

(A charming response about how the stuffed animals view this: Piglet points out that Rabbit is both clever and Has Brain, and Pooh replies that this is why Rabbit “doesn’t understand anything.”)

Owl is characterised by being a bit of a fraud. The stuffed animals respect him for his presumed education and literacy, but even a preschooler understands that Owl can’t actually read. he actively deceives the other characters in order to maintain a higher social status over them. (Actually, Rabbit’s the most literate character in the Wood.) Owl gains relatively little advantage from this status, apart from his belief that he is superior and the pleasure in everyone deferring to him. A notable theme throughout the written series involves characters approaching Owl for advice, based on his self-made reputation of being wise and thoughtful, and him giving explicitly bad advice, rather than admit that he has no idea how to help. Also, they forcibly give him someone else’s house, in such a way that the actual possessor of the house (Piglet) feels he can’t speak up. Pooh immediately offers to Piglet that he move in with him, which even as a kid felt like an incredibly unsatisfactory solution to having the shyest character’s actual house given away to the character who casually lies about everything just to feel superior.

Rabbit is a grown-ass adult real wild animal. He is the social leader of a massively large family and an extended group of hangers-on (he has fifteen or seventeen close relatives, and the extended Friends-and-Relations are a sort of army); he is the only actually literate person in the narrative, so it is understandable that he feels this (although he also believes Owl can read.) literacy and Brain are considered very important in the Wood.

Rabbit believes in his own superiority and believes himself to serve as a sort of cadet to Christopher Robin. In the series Christopher Robin is the ultimate judge, and a kindly ruler; Rabbit positions himself constantly at Christopher Robin’s right hand and wants to be his enforcer. Christopher Robin, who is five and a fairly distracted God, does not really enforce anything. This does not stop Rabbit from trying to organise the entire Wood. It’s frequently mentioned that Rabbit wants to feel important, he wants to be the Boss. A beautiful, beautiful commentary on his character is when he wakes up feeling “important, as if everything depending on him… it was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody said “Yes Rabbit” and “No Rabbit” and waited until he had told them.” Fantastic!

However, we can see where this leads him. In the first book Rabbit is shown being hostile and actively anti-foreign in his approach to other people. When kanga and roo arrive in the forest - sanctioned by Christopher Robin who has received new toys - Rabbit instantly says they have to get rid of them. Like there is NO friendship in Rabbit’s heart here. There is no “god has placed a new friend in the wood so we have to get on with it.”

Rabbit’s anti-immigration stances are funny, and in-character, and shown by the narrative to be wrong and unfair. But they’re pretty unleashed.

His plan is to kidnap the baby and hold it hostage until the mother agrees to “leave the forest forever and never return.”

This is not a normal response to a new character. It is in fact fucking unhinged. Coming from the most normal-adult real animal in the story, it comes out of nowhere. “We have to eliminate them instantly. Take the baby hostage, blackmail the parent and deport them” Rabbit these are war crimes.

Anyway it’s all very heartwarming as Rabbit learns that he likes Baby Roo. (Their relationship grows warmer as Baby Roo says “yes rabbit” and “no rabbit” better than anyone else.) We never really learn why Rabbit is so violently anti-immigration that he instantly jumps to doing crimes, but it’s possible that he doesn’t like the threat to the status quo. Baby Roo, by deferring politely, thus turns out to be a valuable social inferior for Rabbit’s power base.

But in the next book we also get another new character introduction: Tigger. rabbit does not like tigger. In fact, he stops visiting Roo because Tigger lives with them. Rabbit, frustrated by Tigger’s bounciness, also decides to deliberately trick and bully Tigger in order to make him “small and sorry.” The fact that this comically backfires on Rabbit is part of the Pooh-lore storytelling style, of course, but it’s still something obvious even to the preschool audience - that isn’t how you treat your friends.

In conclusion, due to their hoarding of (social) capital and behaviors that prop up an unjustly unequal social system, I think the real animals in Winnie the Pooh are a bit bougie.

[chaostudee]

my woman part two, lando norris

summary : y/n spends the summer break with her two favourite people but summer always has to come to an end. warnings : none a/n : tysm for all the love on part one, here is the highly requested part two xx

y/nusername summer with my love

liked by landonorris, alexsaintmleux, georgerussell and 4,118,910 others.

user119 omg the bump im sobbing 😭

f1fan my fav family

alexsaintmleux literally glowing

y/nusername 💋

landonorris i don't want this summer to end

carmenmundt can't wait to see you <3

y/nusername literally can't wait to see you again eeek

y/nmyfave i can't believe that they are acc going to be parents soon, literally felt like yesterday when they announced their engagement 🫠

y/nusername

》 landonorris god you are so beautiful

》 y/nusername such a simp 🤭 》 landonorris only for you

》 user11 dress from where???

》 f1fan i think its zara but i'm not sure

》 carmenmundt is that my cardigan i see 👀

》 y/nusername my fashion icon

landonorris the summer break of dreams.

liked by y/nusername, oscarpiastri, charlesleclerc and 5,910,901 others.

y/nusername yes he did ask me to play mermaids with him

landonorris yk u wanted to ;)

f1fan normally summer break is hell but my parents being active makes up for it

user9201 he's so cutsie like look at that smile

y/nlover y/n one chance plssss

charlesleclerc inside he's still a child

oscarpiastri i can confirm this ☝️

carmenmundt reunited with bestie @y/nusername

liked by georgerussell, landonorris and y/nusername and 230,001 others.

y/nusername my fav person

landonorris um excuse me tffff

georgerussell ❤️

f1fan underrated duo imo !

user102 imagine being friends with them 😩

landonorris back to the track 🏎

》 user929 stop no more y/n and lando content kill me now

》 f1fan he looks miserable

y/nusername

landonorris good result, good food, good weekend.

liked by maxverstappen, charlesleclerc and oscarpiastri and 6,334,906 others.

f1lover his smileeee im blushing

user929 the curls are curling

oscarpiastri he did in fact try to fit all those waffles in his mouth all at once

charlesleclerc 💀

f1wagupdates bros majestic

carmenmundt

liked by landonorris, georgerussell, oscarpiastri and 590,820 others.

landonorris george's face is such a jumpscare

charlesleclerc fr

f1_619 queen of the paddock

user929 stop i miss y/n so bad

f1lover BEST WAG AND BEST COUPLE ARGUE WITH THE WALL

georgerussell i love you

landonorris had to dnf on the last lap, but oscar on the podium so great job team 💪 hopefully next week is better.

liked by mclaren, oscarpiastri and charlesleclerc and 4,220,790 others.

f1fan it's okay pookie we still love you

oscarpiastri sorry mate but if u want we can co own my trophy

landonorris um yesss

f1lover mclaren screwed him over again

user528 girl what-

y/nusername baby girl is here (evelyn norris) and we couldn't be happier. we both love you so much already and can't wait for the rest of our lives with you.

liked by landonorris, georgerussell, carmenmundt and 8,910,517 others.

landonorris our baby girl 🫶

carmenmundt my bsf is officially a mommy

georgerussell congrats you guys !!

user7282 yes i sobbed when i saw this post and what about it?

oscarpiastri real

lewishamilton big congratulations to you both ❤️

f1wagupdates sobbing

fernandoalonso wow i feel old

f1lover im calling it first she will be the star of the paddock

taglist ⭑.ᐟ

@lottalove4evelyn

@sweetestgirlintown111

@hadidsworld

@mxryxmfooty

[buddhistmusings]

Every time I post something referencing the very real humanitarian crisis in Palestine, my "for you" page changes and becomes filled with recommended posts that contain the most vile antisemitic shit.

It makes me so sad, because it reminds me of what an awful job that a movement that was supposed to be about advocating for Palestinian lives has done with boundary maintenance. It is so compromised that social media algorithms don't appear able to differentiate between advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and antisemitic content. The crossover between the two has become enough that a user who engages with content of one kind is recommended content of another. People who are not educated on antisemitism and the covert symbolism it uses might not recognize it right away, so we are seeing an entire group of people, convinced that they are participating in a civil rights advocacy movement also being indoctrinated into a separate hate movement, under the impression that these two movements are the same.

With such poor boundaries being maintained between these two ideally separate movements, and such overlap growing, how long can I honestly maintain that these are two separate movements?

Meanwhile, innocent Palestinians are being bombed, children are starving, far-right governments on both sides of the conflict are gloating in the support they get from American conservatives and leftists respectively, and functionally, I hear nobody advocating for peace anymore, only the destruction of their enemies. Palestinians are being so incredibly demeaned, by both the people who want to destroy them and their sovereignty, and the people who claim to be supportive of them.

Sane, rational people who are advocating for peaceful solutions are disregarded and voices on the fringe are centered. People are witnessing what they interpret as a genocide unfolding and in response are advocating for a counter-genocide. Can they not see how this actively impedes the peace process? They give legitimacy to (false) far-right Israeli nationalist claims of Palestinian statehood as an inherent danger to the safety of the Jewish people, and demean the Palestinian people by suggesting that what they want is revenge and not to live their lives in peace. They've made questions about the legitimacy of Hamas, an evil terrorist organization, central to the movement, instead of what should be the priority, that innocent people are suffering and that this is unacceptable. They have redefined and reappropriated Jewish words to use as antisemitic slurs and convinced their audience that using these slurs is not antisemitism.

Meanwhile, capitalizing on the above mentioned antisemitism, those who want to harm the Palestinian people, deny them statehood, are using the words and actions of these activists as ideological ammunition to fire up their anti-Palestinian base. Donald Trump literally called Joe Biden a Palestinian at the presidential debate as a slur. Republicans are using the word "Palestinian" as a slur. Netanyahu (possibly one of the worst people involved in this entire situation), in his speech to congress, was able to point to the very real antisemitic actions of activists to further cement support for him personally. By the way, saying how antisemitic activists harm Palestinians shouldn't have to be the rhetorical point we resort to. The fact that antisemitism hurts Jewish people is enough to make it a bad thing and is enough to make us avoid doing it, right?

I'm tired of turning in one direction and saying "You should NEVER say something like that about Palestinians" and then turning in the other and saying "You should NEVER say something like that about Jews". It should not have to be said that condemning the very existence of one of two ethnic groups in their shared homeland is unacceptable, and yes, it is their shared homeland, because they both live there and are both from there. It should not have to be said that you should understand what a word means before using it to insult people. Here I am in fact talking about the word Zionist, because that is a family of various movements, some of which are worthy of condemnation, but frankly, the basic premise of Zionism does not demean or degrade Palestinians at all, because it simply is the belief that Jewish people have the right to return to and form communities in their homeland.

I'm kind of opening myself up to get a lot of criticism here, but I wanted to get these thoughts out, because I have been finding them enormously frustrating. My heart breaks for all the innocent Palestinians who are suffering and have a lackluster movement advocating on their behalf, and my heart breaks for all the Jewish people who have lost friends to antisemitic conspiracy. My heart breaks for the victims of 10/7 and their families, as well as the Jewish community who was interrupted in the mourning of their losses. My heart breaks for all of the Palestinians who have lost friends and family in the subsequent destruction in Gaza and the immense violence and famine we are seeing.

Please root your activism in peace and compassion, not hatred and destruction. Please think before you speak about entire groups of people. Learn about what words mean before you use them to condemn others. Learn about Jewish people, Palestinian people, their lives, their cultures, and why they both feel such a strong connection to the land. Make this about healing, love, and reconciliation, and not about being right.

[foone]

AAA games? Pfft. Indie games? Double pfft.

I only play games from the alternate history where Hillary Clinton was elected in 2008 and banned all video games. You can only imagine how weird their underground gaming scene is. People like to call unlicensed games "bootlegs" but they've got actual bootlegged games! I've played games about helping your grandmother in hospice care realize she's a lesbian by reading Sappho to her, at 2am in a speakeasy in Baltimore. The cops raided it the next night, hundreds of Gamers were arrested. They posted pictures all over Friendster of the Baltimore PD destroying the arcades with axes.

I nearly got busted once because I was imaging old disks from a 386 and someone tipped off the gaming cops that there was a copy of Commander Keen in there. I had to prove that I didn't know it, I was imaging the disks blind and then indexing them later, and I would of course turn over any contraband to the proper authorities.

I was already on a watch list because I'd been known to have some gamedev-related activities pre-ban. They can't arrest me for making games back in 2007 when it was still legal, but they do want to keep an eye on me since I have the skills to break the law.

Anyway that universe's bootlegs are mainly PC games. Can't really have console games if there hasn't been a console release since the Wii/PS3/360 era. At one point Nintendo threatened to release the Wii SDK so game devs in the US could make unlicensed games, but that didn't happen as there were quickly no functional Wiis left in the US, except for very rare holdouts that never move. PC games are easy to distribute samizdat and hide on a USB stick or CD-R labeled "nickelback".

Japan's games industry is still going, so the later Nintendo and Sony consoles still exist, but Microsoft got out of the business of course. They sold the franchise to Sega who were hoping to release the 360 successor (the Xbox One in our universe) as the Sega Phoenix but it never materialized, either through their own financial incompetence or because of pressure from the US. There's a lot of international treaties that the US has pushed "and this aid only goes through if you ban games" clauses into. That would have been an official UN resolution if the USSR hadn't vetoed it. For once, thank God for the security council, eh?

I mainly get my gaming news through Japanese gaming sites (through a set of VPNs, since they're blocked at the border firewall), and some tor onion site run by a weird guy in Minnesota who is obsessed with documenting all the underground US games.

There's a lot being worked on, but it's always a tricky trade off. Too much attention and the police might be able to track down the creators, and it's basically impossible to fund underground games, as the VISA/PayPal etc funds get seized immediately. There's a whole task force for that.

Anyway one of the weirdest differences between our two time lines is that they've gone back and edited out gaming from a bunch of movies. Those that they can, of course. War games was just banned because they couldn't remove the tic tac toe ending. The Net just removed the scene at the beginning where she's playing Wolfenstein 3D, by recording some new screen footage and a new voice over. She's fixing a spreadsheet in the new edition.

(Yes, I've seen The Net from this alternate timeline. On Laserdisc, of course. I'm just that kind of person!)

They even edited Star Wars. You know that scene where R2-D2 is playing holochess with Chewie? They edited it to be a board game instead of holograms, because that made it too "video gamey".

Technically it's not illegal to show gaming in a movie, but it needs to be an 18+ film and you have to show the deleterious effects of gaming and/or the gamesters coming to a bad end.

This has affected films less than you'd think, to be honest. They were never great about showing video games even before they banned them.

Anyway, go have fun playing your AAA games with hundred-million-dollar budgets. I only play indie games made by people under a constant threat of arrest for their art.